A LIFE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BY THE SAME AUTHOR GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURT. SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN STAGE. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND. SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.— A LECTURE. THE PLACE OF ENGLISH LITERATTIRE IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY.— AN LVAUGTTRAL LECTURE. INTRODUCTION TO FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS OP THE SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO AND OF THE FIRST EDITIONS OP SHAKESPEARE'S POEMS AND PERICLES. INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF ELIZABETHAN SONNETS. INTRODUCTION TO THE CHRONICLE HISTORY OP KING LEIR. GENERAL INTRODUCTION WITH ANNOTATIONS TO THE OAXTON EDITION OF THE COMPLETE WORKS OP WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. frcnn iJu U n^tuAtm/ pai/ifina new in Uu 'JhaAcffiearc c iu/ncria^ yal^erv at c'trtLtmrr -on -. Xcvru A LIFE OP WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BY SIR SIDNEY LEE WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES NEW EDITION, REWRITTEN AND ENLARGED LONDON SMITH, ELDER & CO. 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1915 lAll rights reserved] Printed Xovemher 1898 {First Edition). Beprinted December 189S {Second Edition) ; December 1898 {Third Edition) ; February 1S99 {Fourth Edition). [Hampstead Edition, February 1904.1 April 1905 {Fifth Edition). June 1908 {Sixth Edition). November 1915 {New Edition, rewritten and enlarged). Illustrated Library Edition: Printed December 1S99; newly revised May 1908. Shakespeare's Life a:s*d Work. Being an abridgment, chiefly for the use of Student-^, of ' A Life of William Shakespeare.' October 1900 ; New and Revised Edition June 1907 / New Edition, rewritten and enlarged, 1916. iUSTVTRSFFY OF CALrF0R.\X4 SANTA BARBARA IX PIA^I MEM0RIA3I This King Shakespeare does he not shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs ; indestructible ; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever ? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from Xew York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, EngUsh men and women are, they 'will say to one another, ' Yes, this Shakespeare is ours ; we produced him, we ppeak and think by him ; we are of one blood and kind with him.' (Thomas Carlyle : Heroes and Hero- Worship [1841] : Thi Hero as Poet.) PREFACE The biography of Shakespeare, which I originally pub- lished seventeen years ago, is here re-issued in a new shape. The whole has been drastically revised and greatly enlarged. Recent Shakespearean research has proved un- expectedly fruitful. My endeavour has been to present in a just perspective all the trustworthy and relevant information about Shakespeare's life and work which has become available up to the present time. My obligations to fellow-workers in the Shakespearean field are numerous, and I have done my best to acknowledge them fully in my text and notes. The new documentary evidence, which scholars have lately discovered touching the intricate stage history of Shakespeare's era, has proved of especial service, and I have also greatly benefited by the ingenious learning which has been recently brought to bear on vexed questions of Shakespearean bibliography. Much of the fresh Shakespearean knowledge which my personal researches have yielded during the past few years has aheady been pubhshed in various places elsewhere, and whatever in my recent pubhcations has seemed to me of pertinence to my present scheme I have here co-ordinated as succinctly as possible with the rest of my material. Some additional information which I derived while this volume was in course of preparation chiefly from Ehzabethan and Jaco- bean archives at Stratford-on-Avon and from the wills at Somerset House of Shakespeare's Stratford friends, few of which appear to have been consulted before, now sees the hght for the first time.^ In the result I think 1 My transcripts of the wills of William Combe the elder (d. 1611), and of his nephews Thomas Combe (d. 1GU9) and John Combe viii WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE that I may claim to have rendered an account of Shake- speare's career which is more comprehensive at any rate than any which has been offered the public previously. It is with peculiar pleasure that I acknowledge the assistance rendered me, while these pages have been passing through the press, by M. Seymour de Ricci, a soldier and scholar of French nationahty who is now- serving as an interpreter with our army in Flanders. M. de Ricci has in the intervals of active warfare sent me from the front entirely on his own initiative numerous sug- gestive comments which he had previous^ made from time to time on an earlier edition of my Life of Shakespeare. The conditions in which M. de Ricci has aided me pointedly illustrate the completeness of the intellectual sympathy which now unites the French and English nations. My gratitude is also due to ]\Ir. F. C. WeJlstood, M.A. Oxford, secretary and librarian to the Trustees of Shakespeare's Birthplace and deputy- keeper of the Records of the Stratford Corporation, for the assiduity and ability with which he has searched in my behalf the collections of documents in his keeping. Finally I have to thank my secretary, ]\Ir. W. B. Owen, M.A. Cambridge, for the zealous service he has continuously rendered me through- out the laborious composition of the work. My sister, Miss Ehzabeth Lee, has shared with IMr. Owen the tasks of reading the proofs and of compiling the Index. Sidney Lee. London, October 15, 1915. {d. 1614), have enabled me to correct the many errors which figure in all earlier accounts of Shakespeare's relations with the Combe family. Similarly the will of the Southwark tomb -maker, Garret John- son the elder, has helped me, in conjunction with documents belong- ing to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, to throw new light on the history of Shakespeare's monument in Stratford-upon-Avon Church and to solve some puzzles of old standing in regard to it. With the assent of the Tinistees and Guardians of Shakespeare's Birthplace I purpose depositing in their library at Stratford, for the use of students, copies of aU the fresh original material which I have gathered together in the interests of this volume. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION [1898] This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which I contri- buted last year to the fifty-first volume of the ' Dictionary of National Biography.' But the changes and additions which the article has undergone during my revision of it for separate publication are so numerous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an independent venture. In its general aims, however, the present life of Shake- speare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are in- herent in the scheme of the ' Dictionary of National Biography.* I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist's personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit. I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master's career. I have avoided merely aesthetic criticism. My estimates of the value of Shakespeare's plays and poems are intended solely to fulfil the obligation that lies on the biographer of indicating succinctly the character of the successive labours which were woven into the texture of his hero's hfe. .^Esthetic studies of Shakespeare abound, and to increase their number is a work of supererogation. But Shakespearean literature, as far as it is known to me, stiU lacks a book that shall supply within a brief compass an exhaustive and well-arranged statement of the facts of Shakespeare's career, achievement, and reputation, that shall reduce conjecture to the smallest dimensions consistent with coherence, and shall give verifiable references to all the original sources of information. After studying Elizabethan literature, history, and bibliography for more than eighteen years, I believed that I might, without exposing myself to a charge of presumption, attempt something in the way of filling this gap, and that I might be able to supply. X WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE at least tentatively, a guide-book to Shakespeare's life and work that should be, within its limits, complete and trustworthy. How far my belief was justified the readers of this volume will decide. I cannot promise my readers any startling revelations. But my researches have enabled me to remove some ambiguities which puzzled my predecessors, and to throw hght on one or two topics that have hitherto obscured the course of Shakespeare's career. Particulars that have not been before incorporated in Shakespeare's biography will be found in my treatment of the following subjects : the conditions under which ' Love's Labour's Lost ' and ' The Mer- chant of Venice ' were written ; the references in Shakespeare's plays to his native town and county ; his father's apphcations to the Heralds' College for coat-armour; his relations with Ben Jonson and the boy-actors in 1601 ; the favour extended to his work by James I and his Court ; the circumstances which led to the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the dramatist's portraits. I have somewhat expanded the notices of Shakespeare's financial afl^airs which have already appeared in the article in the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' and a few new facts will be found in my revised estimate of the poet's pecuniary position. In my treatment of the sonnets I have pursued what I believe to be an original line of investigation. The strictly autobiographical interpretation that critics have of late placed on these poems com- pelled me, as Shakespeare's biographer, to submit them to a very narrow scrutiny. My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, but I have felt bound, out of respect to ■RTiters from whose %aews I dissent, to give in detail the evidence on which I base my judgment. Matthew Arnold sagaciously laid down the maxim that ' the criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and artistic ^ purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result.' It is criticism inspired by this Uberahsing principle that is especially appHcable to the vast sonnet-literature which was produced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is criticism of the type that Arnold recommended that can alone lead to any accurate and profitable conclusion respecting the intention of the vast sonnet-literature of the EUzabethan era. In accordance with Arnold's suggestion, I have studied Shakespeare's sormets compara- tively with those in vogue in England, France, and Italy at the time he wrote. I have endeavoured to learn the view that was ^ Arnold wrote ' spiritual,' but the change of epithet is needful to render the dictum thoroughly pertinent to the topic under consideration. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xi taken of such literary endeavours by contemporary critics and readers throughout Europe. My researches have covered a very small portion of the wide field. But I have gone far enough, I think, to justify the conviction that Shakespeare's collection of sonnets has no reasonable title to be regarded as a personal or autobiographical narrative. In the Appendix (Sections m. and iv.) I have supplied a memoir of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, and an account of the Earl's relations with the contemporary world of letters. Apart from Southampton's association with the sonnets, he promoted Shakespeare's welfare at an early stage of the dramatist's career, and I can quote the authority of Malone, who appended a sketch of Southampton's history to his biography of Shakespeare (in the ' Variorum ' edition of 1821), for treating a knowledge of Southamp- ton's Ufe as essential to a full knowledge of Shakespeare's. I have also printed in the Appendix a detailed statement of the precise circumstances under which Shakespeare's sonnets were published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 (Section v.), and a review of the facts that seem to me to confute the popular theory that Shakespeare was a friend and protege of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who has been put forward quite unwarrantably as the hero of the sonnets (Sections vi., vn., vin.).^ I have also included in the Appendix (Sections ix. and x.) a survey of the voluminous sonnet- literature of the Elizabethan poets between 1591 and 1597, with which Shakespeare's sonnetteering efforts were very closely allied, as well as a bibliographical note on a corresponding feature of French and ItaUan hterature between 1550 and 1600. Since the pubUcation of the article on Shakespeare in the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' I have received from correspon- dents many criticisms and suggestions which have enabled me to correct some errors. But a few of my correspondents have exhibited so ingenuous a faith in those forged documents relating to Shake- speare and forged references to his works, which were promulgated chiefly by John Payne Collier more than half a century ago, that I have attached a list of the misleading records to my chapter on ' The Sources of Biographical Information ' in the Appendix (Section i.). I believe the List to be fuller than any to be met with elsewhere. ^ I have already published portions of the papers on Shakespeare's relations with the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton in the Fort- nightly Review (for February of this year) and in the Cornhill Magazine (for April of this year), and I have to thank the proprietors of those periodicals for permission to reproduce my material in this volume. xii WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE The six illustrations which appear in this volume have been chosen on grounds of practical utihty rather than of artistic merit. My reasons for selecting as the frontispiece the newly discovered ' Droeshout ' painting of Shakespeare (now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon) can be gathered from the history of the painting and of its discovery which I give on pages 530-2. I have to thank Mr. Edgar Flower and the other members of the Coxmcil of the Shakespeare INIemorial at Stratford for per- mission to reproduce the pictiu'e. The portrait of Southampton in early life is now at Welbeck Abbey, and the Duke of Portland not only permitted the portrait to be engraved for this volume but lent me the negative from which the plate has been prepared. The Committee of the Garrick Club gave permission to photograph the interesting bust of Shakespeare in their possession,^ but, owing to the fact that it is moulded in black terra-cotta, no satisfactory negative could be obtained ; the engraving I have used is from a photograph of a white plaster cast of the origmal bust, now in the Memorial Gallery at Stratford. The five autographs of Shake- speare's signature — all that exist of unquestioned authenticity — appear in the three remaining plates. The three signatures on the will have been photographed from the original document at Somerset House by permission of Sir Francis Jeune, President of the Probate Court ; the autograph on the deed of purchase by Shakespeare in 1613 of the house in Blackfriars has been photo- graphed from the original document in the Guildhall Library by pel-mission of the Library Committee of the City of London ; and the autograph on the deed of mortgage relating to the same property, also dated in 1613, has been photographed from the original document in the British Museum by permission of the Trustees. Shakespeare's coat-of-arms and motto, which are stamped on the cover of this volume, are copied from the trickings in the margin of the draft-grants of arms now in the Heralds' College. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts has kindly given me ample oppor- tunities of examining the two pecuUarly interesting and valuable copies of the First Foho ' in her possession. Sir. Richard Savage, of Stratford-on-Avon, the Secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, and Mr. W. Salt Brassington, the Librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford, have courteously rephed to the many inquiries that I have addressed to them verbally or by letter. Mr. Lionel Cust, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, has helped me to ^ For an account of its history see pp. 538-9. - See pp. 564-5 and 568. PREFACE TO THE FIEST EDITION xiii estimate the authenticity of Shakespeare's portraits. I have also benefited, while the work has been passing through the press, by the valuable suggestions of my friends the Rev. H. C. Beeching and Mr. W. J. Craig, and I have to thank Mr. Thomas Seccombe for the zealous aid he has rendered me while correcting the final proofs. October 12, 1898. CONTENTS In Piam Memoriani Preface Preface to the Fii-st Edition. (1898) . . . . PAKENTAGE AND BIRTH Distribution of the name of Shakespeare The poet's ancestry . The poet's father settles in Stratford- on-Avon John Shakespeare in municipal office The poet's mother 156^, April. The poet's birth and baptism . Shakespeare's birth- place History of the Pre- mises, 1670-1847 . Theii" present uses 10 CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE The plague of 1564 . 12 1575 Queen Elizabeth at The father as alder- Ke nil worth 25 man and bailiff 12 1577 ^\'ithdrawal from Brothers and sisters . 13 school . 25 The father's 6nancial 1582, Dec. The poet's mar- difficulties 14 riage . 26 1571-7 Shakespeare's school . 15 Richard Hathaway of Shakespeare's curricu- Shottery 26 lum ... 16 Anne Hathaway 26 Shakespeare's learning 18 Anne Hathaway 's cot- The poet's classical tage 27 equipment 19 The bond against im- The influence of Ovid 20 pediments 27 The use of transla- 1583, 3Iay. Birth of a tions 21 daughter 29 The English Bible 22 Formal betrothal pro- Shakespeare and the bably dispensed with 30 Bible . 23 The disputed marriage Youthful r&creation 24 license . 30 XVI WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE III THE FAREWELL TO STKATFOKD PAGE Husband and wife . 32 Poaching at Charlecote 34 Unwarranted doubts of the tradition . . 34 PAGE Justice Shallow . 35 1585 The flight from Strat- ford . . . 36 IV THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 15S6 The journey to Loudon Alternative routes Stratford settlers in London Richard Field . 37 39 40 41 Field and Shakespeare Shakespeare's alleged legal experience The literary habit of legal phraseology . 43 44 SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS Early theatrical em- ployment . . 45 The plaj-er's license . 47 The acting companies 48 The great patrons . 49 The companies of boys 50 The fortunes of Lord Leicester's company 51 The King's servants . 54 Shakespeare's company 54 His ties with the Lord Chamberlain's men . 55 VI ON THE LONDON STAGE ' The Theatre,' the The structural plan . 72 first playhouse in The stage . 73 England 57 Costume . 76 ' The Curtain ' . 58 Absence of women Shakespeare at the actors . 77 ' Rose ' 60 Pi-o\ancial tours 80 The founding of the Scottish tours . 83 'Globe,' 1599 62 English actors on the The Blackfriars . 63 Continent 84 The ' private ' play- Shakespeare's alleged house . 66 travels in Italy 86 Performances at Court 66 Shakespeare's roles 87 Methods of presen- tation in public theatres 71 CONTENTS xvii VII FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS PAGE PAGE Pre-Elizabethan drama 90 His borrowed plots . 98 The birth of Eliza- The revision of plays . 99 bethan drama 91 Chronology of the plpys 99 Amorphous develop- Metrical tests 100 ments . 93 The use of prose 101 Chronicle plays . 94 1591 Lovp's Labour's Lout . 102 A period of purgation 94 1591 Tvx> Gentlemen of Shakespeare's debt to VeroTta . 106 fellow-workers 95 1592 Co'/Tiedij of Errors lOS The actor-dramatist . 96 1592 Borneo and Juliet 109 Shakespeare's dramatic work 97 VIII PBOOBESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 Shakespeare as adapter The plague of 1593 . 128 of others' plays 114 1593 Titus Andronicus 128 1592, Sept. Greene's "^attack Publication of Titus . 130 on Shakespeare 115 1594, August. The Merchani Chettle's apology 117 of Venice 131 Shakespeare's contri- Shylock and Roderigo bution to the First Lopez . 133 Part of Henry VI . 118 Last acknowledgments First editions of the to Marlowe 134 Second and Third Publication of The Parts of Henry VI . 118 Merchant of Venice 135 Shakespeare's coad- 1594 King John 136 jutors . 121 1594, Dec. 28. Comedy of Marlowe's influence . 122 Errors in Gray's Inn 1593 Richard III 122 HaU 137 Publication of Richard Early plays doubtfully III . . . 123 assigned to Shake- 1593 Richard II 124 speare . 138 Publication of Richard Ardttn of Fever sham II . . . 126 (1592) . 138 Shakespeare and the Edward III 139 censor . 126 IX THE FIRST APPEAL. TO THE BEADING PUBLIC 1593, April. Publication of Venus and Adonis, 1593 . . .141 First letter to the Earl of Southampton . 141 ' The first heir of niy invention ' . . 142 The debt to 0\nd . 143 Influence of Lodge . 144 1594, May. Lucrece . . 145 xvm WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE First edition of 1594 Sources of the story . Second letter tothe Earl of Southampton Enthusiastic reception PAGE 146 146 147 PAGE of the two poems . 148 Barnfield's tribute . 149 Shakespeare and Spenser . . .150 Patrons at Court . 152 THE SONNETS AND THEIK LITERAKT HISTORY The vogue of the Eliza- bethan sonnet Shakespeare's first ex- periments 1594 Majority of Shake- speare's sonnets com- posed in 1594 Their literary value . Circulation in manu- script Their piratical publi- cation in 1609 A Lover's Complaint . Thomas Thorpe and ' IVIr. W. H.' . The form of Shake- speare's sonnets Want of continuity . The two ' groups ' Main topics of the first ' group ' 152 154 155 157 158 159 160 161 164 165 165 166 Main topics of the second ' group ' . 167 Lack of genuine senti- ment in Elizabethan sonnets . . . 168 Their dependence on French and Italian models . . .169 Sonnetteers' admis- sions of insincerity . 172 Contemporary censure of sonnetteers' false sentiment . .174 ' Gulling sonnets ' .174 Shakespeare's scornful allusion to sonnets in his plaj's . .175 The conventional pro- fessions of sincerity 176 XI THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS Slender autobiographi- cal element in Shake- speare's sonnets . 177 The imitative element 178 The Ulusion of auto- biographic confes- sions . . 178 Shakespeare's Platonic conceptions . . 179 The debt to Ovid's cosmic theory . 180 Shakespeare's borrowed physiography. . 181 Other philosophic con- ceits . . .182 Amorous conceits . 183 The theme of 'un- thrifty loveliness ' . 185 Shakespeare's claims of immortality for his sonnets . .186 Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman . . .189 The praise of ' black- ness ' . . . 1 90 The sonnets of vitu- peration . .192 Jodelle's ' Contr' Amours ' . .193 Gabriel Harvey's ' Amorous Odious Sonnet' . 194 The convention of ' the '5^ dark lady ' . .194 CONTENTS XIX XII THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON Biographic fact in the PAGE The conflict of love and PAGE ' dedicatory ' aon- friendship 215 uets 196 Boccaccio's treatment The Earl of Southamp- of the theme . 215 ton the poet's sole Palamon and Arcite . 216 patron . 197 Tito and Gesippo 216 I. Tho ' dedicatory ' Lyly's Euphues and sonnets . 197 Philautus 217 Rivals in Southamp- Clement Marot's testi- ton's favour . 200 mony 218 Shakespeare's fear of The crisis of the 2'uo rival poet 201 Gentlemen 218 Barnabe Barnes pro- The likelihood of a per- bably the rival 201 sonal experience 218 Other theories as to External evidence 219 the rival's identity . 203 Willobie his Avisa 219 II. Sonnets ot friend- Direct references to ship 205 Southampton in the Classical traditions of sonnets of friendship 222 friendship 205 His youthfulness 223 Figurative language of The evidence of por- love 207 traits 224 Gabriel Harvey Sonnet cvii the last of ' courts ' Sir Philip the series 226 Sidney . 208 Allusion to Elizabeth's Shakespeare's assur- death 227 ances of affection . 210 Allusions to Southamp- Tasso and the Duke of ton's release from Ferrara . 211 prison . 228 Jodelle's sonnets to his Summary of conclu- patron . 212 sions respecting the III. The sonnets of ' Sonnets ' 229 intrigue 214 XIII THE DEVELOPMENT OP DRAMATIC POWER 1594-5 Midsummer Night's Dream . The Sources 1596 AlVs Well that Ends Well . The heroine Helena . The puzzle of the style 234 1595 The Taming of the Shrew . . . 235 The underplot . 236 232 Stratford allusions in 232 the Induction 236 Wincot 237 234 1597 Henry IV . 239 234 The historical incident 239 234 More Stratford me- mories . 240 XX WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE PAGE Iving Henry IV and his foils . . .241 Falstaff . . .241 The first protest . 242 FalstaS and Oldcastle 244 Falstaff's personality . 245 1597 The Merry Wives ' oj Windsor Falstafi and Queen Elizabeth The plot . The text of The Merry Wives . 1598 Henry V . The text . Popularity of the topic 251 The choruses . . 251 The soldiers in the cast 252 Shakespeare and the Earl of Essex Essex and the rebellion of 1601 The Globe and Essex's rebellion Shakespeare's popu- laritj' and influence 255 The Mermaid meetings 257 1598 Meres's eulogy . . 258 246 246 247 248 250 250 253 253 254 PAGE The growing ' worship ' of Shakespeare as dramatist . . 259 Publishers' unprin- cipled use of Shake- speare's name . 260 False ascriptions of plays in his lifetime. 260 A Yorkshire Tragedy . 262 False ascriptions after his death . . 262 The Merry Devill of Edmonton . . 264 Mvcedorus . . 265 Faire Em . . . 266 1599 The Passionate Pilgrim 267 The third edition, 1612 268 Thomas Heywood's protest in Shake- speare's name . 269 1600 The Plioenix and the Turtle . . .270 Sir John Salisbury's patronage of poets . 270 Robert Chester's work 271 Shakespeare and his fellow-contributors . 272 XIV THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE Shakespeare's resi- dences in London . 274 His fiscal obligation . 274 In South wark . .275 A lodger in Silver Street, Cheapside, 1604 . . .276 Shakespeare's practical temperament . 278 His father's difficulties 279 His wife's debt . . 280 1596 Death of his only son . 281 1596-9 Shakespeare and the Heralds' College . 281 The draft 'Coat' of 1596 . . .282 The exemplification of 1599 . . ,283 Other actors' heraldic pretensions . . 285 Contemporary critic- ism of ShaKcspeare's arms . . 286 1597, May 4. Purchase of New Place . . 288 Shakespeare and his fellow-townsmen in 1508 . . .290 1598 Richard Quiney's mis- sion to London . 292 Local appeals for aid . 294 1598, Oct 25. Richard Quiney's letter to Shakespeare . . 294 CONTENTS XXI XV SHAKESPEARE S FINANCIAL BESOUECES Financial position be- fore 1599 Dramatists' fees until 1599 . Affluence of actors Fees for Court perform- ances ShaK.espeare's average income before 1599 . SiiaJtespeare's share in the Globe theatre from 1599 As a lessee of the site . As an actor shareholder 302 The history of Shake- speare's shares, 1 599- 1616 . Shakespeare's share in the Blackfriars from 1608 . The takings at the Globe, 1599-1613 . 307 296 296 298 299 300 300 301 304 306 PAGE The takings at the Blackfriars from 1608 . . .309 The pecuniary profits of Shakebpeare's theatrical shares . 310 Shareholders' lawsuits 311 Increased fees from the Court under James I 313 Salary as actor . .314 Later income as drama- tist . . .315 Shakespeare's final income . . .315 1601-8 Domestic incident . 316 1001-10 Formation of the estate at Stratford 317 The Stratford tithes . 320 Recovery of small debts . . .321 XVI MATUBITY OF GENIUS 1599 1599 1600 Literary work in 1599 324 Much Ado about Nothing . . 325 The Italian source . 325 Shakespeare's embel- lishments . . 326 As You Like It . . 326 The original characters 327 Twelfth Night The performance in Middle Temple Hall, Feb. 2, 1602 . The Italian plot ' GU Ingannati ' of Siena Bandello's ' Niouola ' . The new dramatis per- ■tonce The publication of the romantic trilogy 328 329 329 330 331 332 332 1600 Julius Ccesar . . 333 Popularity of the theme 334 The debt to Plutarch . 335 Shakespeare's and other plays about Caesar . . .336 Shakespeare's political insight . . . 336 His conception of Cffisar . . .337 A rival piece . . 337 The Lord Mayor and the theatres . . 338 1600, June 22. The Privy Council Order . 339 1601 The strife between adult and boy actors 341 Shakespeare on the winter season 1600-1 342 c 2 iryn WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE 1632 PAGE The actors' share in Jonson's literary controversies, 1598- 1601 Histriomastix, 1598 . Every man out of his Humour, 1599 Cynthia's Bevels Jack Drum's Enter tainment, 1600 Poetaster, 1601 . Dekker's Satiromas tix, 1601 The end of the drama tists' war Shakespeare and the ' poetomachia ' Shakespeare's refer- ences to the struggle 349 His disinterested atti- tude VirgU in Jonson's Poetaster The Pet urn from Parnassus, 1601 Shakespeare's alleged ' purge ' Hamlet The Danish legend 343 344 344 345 345 346 347 348 348 350 351 352 353 354 355 1603 PAGE The old plaA' . . 356 Kyd's authorship . 357 Revivals of the old piece . . . 357 The reception of Shake- speare's tragedy . 358 Gabriel Harvey's com- ment . . . 359 Anthony Scoloker's notice . . . 360 The problem of publi- cation . . . 361 The I'lrst Quarto, 1603 362 Shakespeare's first rough draft . .363 The Second Quarto, 1604 . . .364 The First Folio version 365 Permanent popularity of Hamlef . . 366 Troilus and Cressida . 367 The publication of 1609 368 The First Folio version 369 Treatment of the theme 370 Source of the plot . 370 Shakespeare's accep- tance of a mediaeval tradition . . 371 XVII THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I Last performances be- fore Queen Elizabeth 374 1603, March 24. Shakespeare and the Queen's death . . 375 James I's accession . 377 1603, May 19. The royal patent to Shake- speare's company . 377 Shakespeare as groom of the chamber . 377 1603, Dec. 2. At Wilton . 379 1603^, Christmas. At Hampton Court . 380 1604, March 15. The royal progress through London . .381 1604, Aug. 9-28. The actors at Somerset House . 382 Revival of Love's Labour's Lost . . 385 1604-5 Shakespeare's plays at Court . . 385 XVIII THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 1 604 Othello (Nov. ) and Mea- sure for 3Ieasure(Dec.) 387 Their performances at Court . . .387 Publication of Othello . 389 Cinthio's novels . 389 Shakespeare and the Italian tale of Othello 390 1606 1607 1608 CONTENTS PAGE Artistic unity of the tragedy 391 The theme ot Pleasure for Measure . 391 1608 Cinthio's tale 391 Shakespeare's varia- tions 392 Macbeth . 394 The legend in Holin- shed 394 The appeal to James I 395 The scenic elaboration 395 The chief characters . 396 1608 Exceptional features . 390 Signs of other pens 397 King Lear. 397 The Quarto of 1608 . 398 Holinshed and the story of Lear . 399 The old play 400 Shakespeare's innova- 1609 tions 401 The greatness of King Lear 401 Timon oj Athens 402 Timon and Plutarch . 402 XXUl The episode of Alci- biades . . .403 The divided authorship 403 Pericles . . . 404 The original legend of Pericles . . 405 Incoherences of the piece . . . 406 The issues in quarto . 408 Shakespeare's share . 407 George Wilkins's novel of Pericles . . 408 Antony and Cleopatra . 409 Plutarch's Life of Antony . . 409 Shakespeare's debt to Plutarch . . 410 Shakespeare's re-crea- tion of the story . 411 The style of the piece 412 Coriolanus . . 413 The fidelity to Plutarch 413 The chief characters of the tragedy . .415 The political crisis of the play . . 415 XIX THE LATEST PLAYS Shakespeare's ' tragic period,' 1600-9 . 417 Popularity of tragedy 418 Shakespeare's return to romance . . 418 The second romantic trilogy and the First Folio . . .421 Performances of the three latest plays during 1611 , .421 1610 The triple plot of Cym- beline . . . 423 Construction and cha- racterisation . . 424 1611 The Winters Tale . 425 The debt to Greene's novel . . . 425 Shakespeare's innova- tions . , . 426 The freshness of tone . 427 1611 The Tempest . . 428 The sources of the fable 428 The shipwreck . . 430 The significance of Cali- ban .. . 431 Shakespeare and the American native . 432 Caliban's god Setebos 433 Caliban's distorted shape . . . 434 The Tempest at Court . 434 The vogue of the play 435 Fanciful interpreta- tions of The Tempest 436 Shakespeare's relations with John Fletcher 437 The lost play of Gar- denia . . . 438 The Two Noble Kins- men . . . 439 The plot . . .440 Shakespeare's alleged share . . . 441 XXIV WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PA^GB Henry VIII . . 442 Previous plays oa the topic . . . 442 All is true . . . 443 Holinshed's story . 443 Constructive defects in the play . . 443 The scenic elaboration 445 The divided author- ship . . . 445 PAGE Shakespeare's share , 446 Wolsey's farewell speech . . . 446 1313, June 29. The burning of the Globe . '. 447 Ben Jonson on the disaster . . 449 The rebuilding of the Globe . . .449 XX THE CLOSE OF LIFE 1611 Retirement to Strat- ford . . .450 Continued interest in London theatres . 451 Visits to the Crown Inn at Oxford . 451 The christening of Sir William D'Avenant 452 Relations with actor friends Shakespeare and Bui-- bage 1613 The Earl of Rutland's ' impresa ' The sixth Earl of Rut- land 1613 Shakespeare's purchase of a house in Black- friars 1615 Shakespeare's 1 itigation over the Blackfriars property 1611 Shakespeare and the Stratford highways 462 Domestic incident . 462 Marriage of Susanna Shakespeare, 1607 Marriage of Judith Shakespeare, 1616 Growth of Puritanism at Stratford . Thefireof 1614 . Shakespeare's social circle at Stratford Sir Henry Rainsford at Clifford Chambers 468 Thomas Combe of the College . . .469 453 454 455 456 459 460 463 464 465 466 467 John Combe of Strat- ford Combe's legacy to Shakespeare . Combe's tomb . Combe's epitaph 1614, Oct. The threatened enclosure The town council's resistance The appeal to Shake- speare . 1614, Oct. 28. Shakespeare's agreement with the Combes' agent 1614, Dec. 23. The Town Council's letter to Shakespeare . 1615, Sept. Shakespeare's statement Triumph of the towns- men, 1618 Francis CoUins and Shakespeare's will . 1616, Feb.-March. Domestic affairs . 1616, March 25. The signing of Shakespeare's will The five witnesses 1616, April 23. Shakespeare's death 1616, April 25. Shake- speare's burial The minatory inscrip- tion on the tomb- stone The will . 470 471 472 472 474 475 477 478 478 480 481 482 482 484 484 485 485 486 487 CONTENTS PAGE The religious exordium 487 Bequest to his wife . 488 His heiress . . 489 Legacies to friends . 490 Thomas Russell, Esq. 492 The bequests to the actors . . . 492 Overseers and execu- tors . . .493 Shakespeare's theatri- cal shares . . 493 The estates of contem- porary actors The Stratford monu- ment Its design The inscription . Shakespeare and West minster Abbey Shakespeare's per sonal character PAGE 495 496 498 499 500 502 XXI SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS Shakespeare's brothers 505 Shakesyteare's widow . 506 Mistress Judith Quiney (1585- 10(52) . . 506 m. -John Hall . . 507 Mrs. Susanna Hall (1583-1649) . . 508 Johp Hall's notebooks 510 The will of Mrs. Hall's son-in-law, Thomas Nash . . .511 Mrs. Hall's death .512 The last descendant . 513 Lady Bernard's will . 514 The final fortunes of Shakespeare's estate 514 The demolition of New Place, 1759 . . 516 The public purchase of New Place estate . 516 XXII AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMOBIALS The relics of Shake- speare's handwriting 518 The six signatures, 1612-6 . . .519 Doubtful signatures . 520 His mode of writing . 521 Spelling of the poet's name . . . 522 The autograph spell- ings . . .522 Autographs in the will 523 ' Shakespeare ' the accepted form . 523 Shakespeare's portraits 524 The Stratford monu- ment . . . 524 Dugdale's sketch . 524 Vertue's engraving, 17L^5 . . .525 The repairs of 1748 . 526 The ' Stratford ' por- trait . . .527 Droeshout's engraving 528 The first state . . 529 The original source of Broeshout's work . 530 The ' Flower ' or ' Droeshout ' portrait 530 The ' Ely House ' por- trait . . . 532 Lord Clarendon's pic- ture . . . 533 Later portraits . . 533 The ' Chandos ' portrait 534 The ' Janssen ' portrait 536 The ' Felton ' portrait 537 The ' Soest ' portrait . 538 Miniatures . . 538 The Garrick Club bust 539 Alleged death-mask , 540 Sculptured memorials in public places . 541 The Stratford me- morials . . . 542 XXVI WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE XXIII QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 1623 PAGE Early issues of the narrative poems . 5i4 Posthumous issues of the poems . . 544 The Passionate Pilgrim 545 The Sonnets . . 546 The Poems of 1640 . 546 Quartos of the plays in the poet's lifetime . The managers' objec- tions to their issue . The source of the 'copy' . The various lifetime editions The four unquestioned quartos of 1619 The five suspected quartos of 1619 The charge against Pavier . The posthumous issue of Othello The chief collections of quartos The scarcity of the quartos The First Folio . Editors, printers, and publishers The license of Nov. 8, 1623 . . .553 548 548 549 550 550 551 551 552 552 553 554 554 PAGE The order of the plays 557 The actors' addresses . 558 Their alleged author- ship by Ben Jonson . 558 Editorial professions . 659 The source of the ' copy ' . . . 559 The textual value of the newly printed plays . . .531 The eight neglected quartos . .561 The eight reprinted quartos . . 562 The typography . 533 Irregular copies . 564 The Sheldon copy . 534 Jaggard's presentation copy of the First FoUo . . .566 The Turbutt copy . 538 Estimated number of extant copies . 568 Continental copies . 569 Pecuniary value of the First Folio . . 569 1632 The Second Folio . 570 1663-4 The Third Folio .571 1685 The Fourth Folio . 572 XXIV THE EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER Perplexities of the early texts . . 573 Eighteenth - century editors . . . 573 Nicholas Rowe (1674- 1718) . . .574 Alexander Pope (1688- 1744) . . .575 Lewis Theobald (1688- 1744) . . .576 Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677-1746) . . 578 Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) . . 579 Dr. Johnson '(1709- 1784) . . .580 Edward Capell (1713- 1781) . . .580 George Steevens (1736- 1800) . . .681 Edmund Malone (1741- 1812) . . .582 ' Variorum ' editions . 583 The new ' Variorum ' . 684 CONTENTS XXVll Nineteenth - century editors . . . 584 Alexander Dyce (1798- 1869) . . . 5S5 Howard Staunton (1810-1874) . . 585 PAGE Nikolaus Delius (1813- 1888) . . .585 The Cambridge edition (1863-6) . . 585 Other nineteenth-cen- tury or twentieth- century editions . 586 XXV SHAKESPEARE'S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA Shakespeare and the classicists . .588 Ben Jonson's tribute, 1623 . . .539 The eulogies of 1632 . 589 Admirers in Charles I's reign . . 590 Critics of the Restora- tion . . .592 Dryden's verdict . 593 Shakespeare's fashion- able vogue . . 593 The Restoration adap- ter's . . . 594 The ' revised ' versions, 1662-80 , . 593 Shakespearean criti- cism from 1702 on- wards . . . 597 The growth of critical insight . . .598 The modern schools of criticism . . 598 The new aesthetic school . . .599 Shakespeare publishing Bocieties . . 600 Shakespeare's fame at Stratford-on-Avon . 600 Garrick at Stratford . 601 ' The Stratford Jubilee,' 1769 . . .601 On the English stage . 602 The first appearance of actresses in Shake- spearean parts . 602 David Garrick (1717- 1779) . .603 Jolm Philip Kemble (1757-1823) . . 601 Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) . 605 Edmund Kean (1787- 1833) . . .605 William Charles Mac- ready (1793-1873) . 606 Recent re\nvals . . 606 The spectacular setting of Shakespearean drama . . .608 Shakespeare in English music and art . 609 Shakespeare in America 610 XXVI Shakespeare's foreign vogue In Germany . . 612 Early German Shake- speareana . .613 Lessing's tribute, 1759 614 Growth of study and enthusiasm . . 615 Schlegel's trar slation . 615 Modern German writers on Shakespeare . 617 On the German stage . 618 Shakespearean German music . . . 620 In France . . 620 Voltaire's estimate . 621 Voltaire's opponents . 621 The first French trans- lations . . .622 French cntics' gradual emancipation from Voltairean influence 623 On the French stage . 625 In Italy . . .626 Shakespeare and the Romantic pioneers . 626 XXVlli WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE PAGE PAGE Italian translations . 627 1 The Russian Roman- In Spain . . 627 tic movement and In Holland . 628 Shakespeare . 630 In Denmark . 628 Tolstoy's attack, 1906 631 In Sweden. . 629 In Poland . 631 In Russia . . 629 Polish translations 632 ' In Hungary 633 In other countries 633 XXVII GENERAL ESTIMATE Shakespeare's ■work Shakespeare's recep- and the bioj jraphic tive faculty 636 facts . 634 General estimate of The impersonal aspect his genius 637 of his art . 634 His final achievement 637 Domestic and 'oreign Its universal recogni- influences anc affini- tion 638 ties . 635 APPENDIX THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE Contemporary records abundant . . 641 First efforts in bio- graphy . . .641 Biographers of the nineteenth century . 642 Stratford topography . 643 Specialised studies in biography . . 644 Aids to study of plots and texts . . 644 Concordances . . 645 Bibliographies . . 645 Critical studies . . 645 Shakespearean forgeries 646 George Steevens's ' G. Peel ' fabrication (1763) . . .646 John Jordan (1746- 1809) . . .647 The Ireland forgeries (1796) . . .647 Forgeries promulgated by Collier and others (1835-1849) . . 648 Falsely suspected docu- ments . . . 650 II THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY Perversity of the con- troversy . .651 Chief exponents of the Baconian and scep- tical theory . .651 Its vogue in America . 652 The Baconians' pleas . 653 Sir Tobie Matthew's letter of 1621 . . 654 The legal sceptics . 655 CONTENTS XXIX III THE YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON Southampton and His reluctance to Shakespeare . 657 marry . 660 Parentage. 657 Intrigue with Eliza- Oct. 6. Southampton's beth Vernon . 661 birth . 658 1598 Southampton's mar- Education. 658 riage 661 Recognition of South- 1601- -3 His imprisonment 662 ampton's youthful Later career 662 beauty . 659 1624, Nov. 10. His death . 663 IV THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON References in his letters to poems and plays. 664 His love of the theatre 665 Poetic adulation . 666 1593 Barnabe Barnes's son- net .. . 666 Tom Nashe's addresses 666 1595 Gervase Markham's sonnet . . . 668 1598 Florio's address . 669 1625 Thomas Heywood's tribute . . .669 The congratulations of the poets in 1603 . 669 Elegies on Southamp- ton .. . 671 THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND MR. W. H. The publication of the Sonnets in 1609 , 672 Publishers' dedications 673 Thorpe's early life . 674 His ownership of the manuscript of Mar- lowe's Lucan . . 675 His dedicatory address to Edward Blount in 1600 . . 675 Character of his busi- ness . . . 676 Shakespeare's suffer- ings at publishers' hands , . .677 The use of initials in dedications of Eliza- bethan and Jacobean books . . .678 Frequency of wishes for ' happiness ' and ' eternity ' in dedi- catory greetings . 679 Five dedications by Thorpe . . .681 ' W. H.' signs dedica- tion of Southwell's poems in 1606 . 681 ' W. H.' and I\Ir. William Hall . . 683 ' The ouiie begetter ' means ' only pro- curer' . . .683 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE VI ' MR. WILLIAM HERBERT ' Origin of the notion that 'air. W. H.' stands for ' Mr. William Herbert ' . 686 The Earl of Pembroke known only as Lord Herbert in youth . Thorpe's mode of ad- dressing the Earl of Pembroke 687 688 VII SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE Shakespeare with the acting company at Wilton in 1603 . 691 The dedication of the First FoUo in 1623 . 692 No suggestion in the Sonnets of the youth's identity with Pembroke . 693 Aubrey's ignorance of any relation between Shakespeare and Pembroke . . 694 VIII THE ' WILL SONNETS Elizabethan meanings of ' will' . . 695 Shakespeare's uses of the word . .696 Shakespeare's puns on the word . . 697 Arbitrary and irregular use of italics by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers . 698 The conceits of Sonnets cxxxv-vi interpreted 699 Sonnet cxxxv . . 700 Sonnet cxxxvi . .701 Sonnet cxxxiv . . 703 Meaning of Sonnet cxliii . . . 704 rx THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1597 159: 1557 Wyatt's and Surrey's sonnets published . 705 1582 Watson's Centurie of Loue . . .706 1591 Sidney's Astrophd and Stella . . .706 I. Collected sonnets of feigned love . . 707 Daniel's Delia . . 707 Fame of Daniel's son- nets . . . 708 1592 Constable's Diana . 709 1593 Barnes's sonnets . 709 1593 Watson's Tears of Fancie . . .710 1593 Fletcher's Licia . 710 CONTENTS xxxi PAGE PAGE 1593 Lodge's Phillis . . 710 1597 Robert Tofte's Laura . 714 1594 Drayton's Idea . . 711 Sir William Alexander's 1594 Percy's Codia . . 712 Aurora . . . 715 1594 Zepheria . . 712 Sir Fulke Greville's 1595 Barnfield's sonnets to Ccelica . . . 715 GanjTnede . 712 Estimate of number of 1595 Spenser's Amoretti . 712 love sonnets issued 1595 Emaricdulfe . 713 between 1591 and 1595 Sir John Davies's 1597 . . .715 Chllinge Sonnets . 713 II. Sonnets to patrons, 1596 Linche's Diella . . 714 1591-7 . . .716 1596 Griffin's Fidessa . 714 III. Sonnets on philo- 1596 Thomas Campion . 714 sophy and religion . 717 1596 William Smith's Chloris 714 X BIBLIOGBAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE, 1553-1600 Ronsard (1524-1585) and ' La Pleiado ' . 718 The Italian sonnettcers of the sixteenth century . .718 Desportes (1546-1606) 719 Chief collections of French sonnets pub- lished between 1550 and 1584 . . 719 Minor collections of French sonnets pub- lished between 1553 and 1605 . . 720 Index . 721 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Frontispiece From the ' Droeshout ' or ' Flower ' painting, now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery, Stratford-on-Avon. HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, Thikd Eael of Southampton, as a young man . . .To face p. 225 From the painting at Welbeck Abbey. SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to his deposition in the suit brought by stephen Bellott against his fathek-in-law Christopher MONTJDY IN the CoURT OF REQUESTS, DATED May II, 1612 On page 519 From the originai document now preserved in the Public Record Office, London. SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to THE PURCHASE-DEED OF A HOUSE IN BlaCKFRIARS, DATED March 10, 1612-3 To face p. i59 From the original document now preserved in the Guildhall Library, London. SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to a MORTGAOE-DEED relating to the HOUSE PURCHASED BY HIM IN BlACKFRIARS, DATED March 11, 1612-3 „ 460 From the original document now preserved in the British Museum. THREE AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURES severally WRITTEN BY SHAKESPEARE ON THE THREE SHEETS OF HIS WILL ....... „ 487 From the original document at Somerset House, London. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ,,539 From a plaster-cast of the terra-cotta bust now in the possession of the Garrick Club. CONTEMPORARY INSCRIPTION in Jaggaed's PRESENTATION COPY OF THE FiEST FoLio . . On page 566 Now belonging to Mr. Coningsby Sibthorp. xxxiii WILLIAM SHAKE SPEAEE PARENTAGE AND BIRTH Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was borne through the Middle Ages by residents in very many parts Distribu- °^ England — at Penrith in Cumberland, at tion of Kirkland and Doncaster in Yorkshire, as well e name. ^ -^ nearly all the midland counties. The surname had originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear. ^ Its first recorded holder is William Shakespeare or ' Sakspere,' who was convicted of robbery and hanged in 1 248 ^ ; he belonged to Clapton, a hamlet in the hundred of Kiftergate, Glouces- tershire (about seven miles south of Stratford-on-Avon). The second recorded holder of the surname is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at ' Freyndon,' perhaps Frittenden, Kent.' Tlie great mediaeval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shake- speares in the fifteenth century.* In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more fre- quently in Warwickshire than elsewhere. The archives of no fewer than twenty-four towns and villages there contain ' Camden, Remaines, ed. 1605, p. Ill ; Verstegan, Eestitviion, 1605, p. 294 ; see p. 150 infra. ' Assize rolls for Gloucestershire, 32 Henr}"^ III, roll 274. •'' Plac. Cor: 7 Edw. I, Kane. ; cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser. xi. 122. * Cf. Register of the Guild at Knowle, ed. Bickley, 1894. 1 B 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by Shakespeare famiUes in the seventeenth century. Among them all WiUiam was a common Christian name. At Rowington, twelve miles to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of the most prolific Shakespeare famihes of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no fewer than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called WiUiam. At least one other William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington. As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous contemporaries who were identically named.i Shakespeare's ancestry cannot be defined with absolute certainty. The poet's father, when applying for a grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grandfather The poet's (Shakespeare's great-grandfather) received for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII. ^ No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious. But there is a probability that the poet came of good yeoman stock, and that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners.' Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley CHnton in Warwickshire in 1389, seems to have been great-grand- father of one Richard Shakespeare who during the first thirty-four years (at least) of the sixteenth century held neighbouring land at Wroxall, some ten miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Another Richard Shakespeare who is ^ See for ' other William Shakespeares ' Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment, 1914, pp. 91-104. * See p. 282 infra. ^ Cf. The Times, October 14, 1895 ; Notes and Queries, 8th aer. viL 501 ; Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Family, 1901, pp. 35-49. PAEENTAGE AND BIRTH 3 conjectured to have been nearly akin to the Wroxall family was settled in 1535 as a farmer at Snitterfield, a village six miles south of Wroxall and four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon.^ It is probable that he was the poet's grandfather. In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden ; he died at the close of 1560, and on February 10 of the next year letters of ad- ministration of his goods, chattels, and debts were issued by the Probate Court at Worcester to his son John, who was there described as a farmer or husbandman [agricola) of Snitterfield. The estate was valued at 35^ 175.2 Besides the son John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly had a son Henry ; while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage is undetermined, may have been a third son. The son Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he engage^ in farming with gradually diminishing success ; he died in very embarrassed circumstances in December 1596.2 John, the son who administered Richard's estate, was in all likelihood the poet's father. About 1551 John Shakespeare left the village of Snitter- field, which was his birthplace, to seek a career in the 1 Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, ii. 207, and J. W. Ryland, Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor, Wartvick- shire, 1903, passim. 2 The purchasing power of money may bo reckoned in the middle of the sixteenth century eight times what it is now, and in the later years of the century \\hen prices rapidly rose, five times. In comparing sums of money mentioned in the text with modern currency, they should be multiplied by eight if they belong to j^ears up to 15G0, and by five if they belong to subsequent years. (See p. 29G n. 1 infra.) The letters of administration in regard to Richard Shakespeare's estate^ which are in the district registry of the Probate Court at Worcester, were printed in full by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Shakespeare's Tours (privately issued 1887), pp. 44-5, and again in J. W. Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage, pp. 25&-60. They do not appear in any edition of Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines. ' Henry Shakespeare, the dramatist's uncle, was buried at Snitter- field on Dec. 29, 1590, leaving no surviving issue. His widow Margaret was buried at Snitterfield six weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1596-7. Cf. Mrs. Stopes'a Shakespeare's Environment, 1914, pp. 66 seq. B 2 / 4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE neighbouring borough of Stratford-on-Avon, then a well- to-do market town of some two thousand inhabitants.^ In the middle of the sixteenth century the main fatherTetties industries of Stratford were the weaving of in Stratford- -^yool into cloth or yarn and the making of on- Avon. i n i ' malt. Some substantial fortunes were made out of deaUngs in wool, and on June 28, 1553, a charter of incorporation (or of self-government) rewarded the general advance of prosperity. Some fifty-seven years later, on July 23, 1610, the municipal privileges and franchises were confirmed anew by James I. Meanwhile, however, fortune proved fickle. As Queen Elizabeth's reign drew to a close, although the population was estimated to increase by half as much again, the manufacturing acti- vities and the earnings of commerce and labour dechned. The local trade tended to confine itself to the retail distri- bution of imported manufactures or agricultural produce. There were many seasons of scarcity and frequent losses by disastrous fires. Yet municipal life remained busy and the richer to's^iisfolk and neighbouring landowners did what they could to hghten the borough's burden of mis- fortunes.2 In the middle years of the century there was every promise of a prosperous career for an enterprising immi- grant from a neighbouring village who was provided with a small capital. John Shakespeare arrived in Stratford on 1 In 1547 the communicants residing in the main thoroughfares were reckoned at 1500 ; in 1562 the population would seem to have numbered as many as 2000. About 1598 the corporation when peti- tioning for an alteration of their charter reckoned the Imuseholders at 1500 ' at the least ' — a figure which would suggest a population of near 5000 ; but there was a possible endeavour here to magnify the importance of the place. (See Whehr 3ISS., Shakespeare's Birth- place, i. f. 72.) According to a census of April 19, 1765, the population only numbered 2287. The census of 1911 gives the figure 8532. » In 1590 the bailiff and burgesses complained that the town ' had fallen much into decay for want of such trade as heretofore they had bv clothincr and making of yam.' The decline seems to have made steadv progress through Shakespeare's lifetime, and in 1615 it was stated that ' no clothes or stuffs M-ere made at Stratford but were bought at London or elsewhere.' (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 554-55.) PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 5 the eve of its incorporation, and he at once set up as a trader in all manner of agricultural produce and in many articles which were manufactured out of it. Corn, wool, malt, meat, skins, and leather were among the commodities in which he dealt. Documents of a somewhat later date often describe him as a glover. Aubrey, Shakespeare's first biographer, reported the tradition that he was a butcher. But though both designations doubtless indi- cated important branches of his business, neither can be regarded as disclosing its full extent. The bulk of his varied stock-in-trade came from the land which his family farmed at Snitterfield and in which he enjoj'ed some interest. As long as liis father Hved he seems to have been a frequent visitor to Snitterfield, and until the date of his father's death in 1560 legal documents desig- nated him a farmer or ' husbandman ' of that place. But it was with Stratford-on-Avon that his life was mainly identified. In April 1552 John Shakespeare was hving in Henley Street at Stratford, a thoroughfare leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden. He is first men- Shakespeare tioned in the borough records as paying in that in muni- month a fine of twelvepence for having a apal office. ,. , , du-t-heap m front of his house. His frequent appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was a keen man of business. For some seven and twenty years his mercantile progress knew no check and liis local influence grew steadily. In October 1556 he pur- chased two freehold tenements at Stratford — one, with a garden, in Henley Street (it adjoins that now known as the poet's birthplace), and the other in Greenhill Street with a garden and croft. Thenceforth he played a prominent part in municipal affairs under the con- stitution which the charter of 1553 brought into being. In 1557 he was chosen an ale-taster, whose duty it was to test the quality of malt Uquors and bread. 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPBAEE About the same time he was elected a burgess or town councillor, and in September 1558, and again on October 6, 1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables by a vote of the jury of the court-leet. Twice — in 1559 and 1561 — he was chosen one of the affeerors — officers appointed to determine the fines for those offences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which no express penalties were prescribed by statute. In 1561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the borough, an office of financial responsibihty which he held for two years. He deUvered his second statement of accounts to the corporation in January 1564. When attesting documents he, like many of liis educated neigh- j hours, made his mark, and there is no unquestioned 1 specimen of his handwriting in the Stratford archives ; but his financial aptitude and ready command of figures satisfactorily relieve him of the imputation of ilhteracy. The municipal accounts, which were checked by talhes and counters, were audited by him after he ceased to be cham- berlain, and he more than once advanced small sums of money to the corporation. He was reputed to be a man of cheerful temperament, one of ' a merry cheek,' who dared crack a jest at any time.^ With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of The poet's assured fortune — Mary, youngest daughter of mother. Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the parish of Aston Cantlow, three miles from Stratford. 1 Archdeacon Thomas Plume (1630-1704) bequeathed to his native town of Maldon in Essex, -nith books and other papers, a MS. collection of contemporary hearsay anecdotes which he compiled about 1656. Of the dramatist the archdeacon there v,-TOte that he ' was a glover's son ' and that ' S[i]r John Mennes saw once his old f[athe]r in h[is] shop — a merry cheeked old man th[a]t s[ai]d " Will was a g[oo]d Hon[est] FeUow, but he darest h[ave] crackt a jeast w[i]th him at any time." ' (Communicated by the Rev. AndreM" Clark, D.D., rector of Great Leighs, Chelmsford.) Plume was probably repeating gossip which he derived from Sir John Mennes, the versifier and admiral of Charles I's reign, who was only two years old when Shakespeare's father died in 1601, and could not therefore have himself conversed with the elder Shake- speare. No other Sir John Meimes is discoverable. PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 7 The chief branch of the Arden family was settled at Parkhall, in the parish of Curdworth, near Birmingham, and it ranked with the most influential of the county. Robert Arden, a progenitor of that branch, was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 (16 Hen. VI), and this sheriff's direct descendant, Edward Arden, who was himself high sheriff of Warwickshhe in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged compUcity in a Roman CathoUc plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. John Shake- speare's wife belonged to a humbler branch of the family, ! and there is no trustworthy evidence to determine the exact degree of kinship between the two branches. Her grand- father, Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitterfield, which passed, with other property, to her father Robert ; John Shakespeare's father, Richard, was one of this Robert Arden's Snitterfield tenants. By his first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had seven daiighters, of whom all but two married ; John Shakespeare's wife seems to have been the youngest. Robert Arden's second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of John Hill {d. 1545), a substantial fai'mer of Bearley, survived him ; by her he had no issue. When he died at the end of 1556, he owned a farmhouse and many acres at Wilm- cote, besides some hundred acres at Snitterfield, with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants. The post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on December 9, 1556, shows that he had hved in comfort ; his house was adorned by as many as eleven ' painted cloths,' which then did duty for tapestries among the middle class. ^ The exordium of his will, which w£is drawn up on November 24, 1556, and proved on December 16 following, indicates that he was an observant CathoUc. For his two youngest • ' Painted cloths ' were broad strips of canvas on which figures from the Bible or from classical mythology were, with appropriate mottoes, crudely painted in tempera. Cf. 1 Henry IV, TV. ii. 25, ' as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth.' Shakespeare lays stress on the embellishment of the mottoes in Lucrece, 245 : Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw Shall by a painted doth be kept in awe. 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE daughters, Alice and Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them his executors. Mary received not only 61. 13s. 4c?. in money, but the fee-simple of his chief property at Wilmcote, consisting of a house with some fifty acres of land, — an estate which was known as Asbies. She also acquired, under an earUer settlement, an interest in two messuages at Snitterfield.^ But, although she was well provided with worldly goods, there is no sure evidence that she could -wTite ; several extant documents bear her mark, and no autograph signature is extant. John Shakespeare's marriage with Mary Arden doubtless took place at Aston Cantlow, the parish church of Wilm- cote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church registers begin at a later date). On September 15, 1558, their first child, a daughter, Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford. A second child, another daughter, Margaret, was baptised on December 2, 1562 ; but both these children died in infancy. The poet Wihiam, the first son and third child, was born on April 22 or 23, 1564. The later day was the day of his death,' and it is generally accepted birth and as his bu'thday. There is no positive evidence baptism. ^^^ ^-^^ subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that he was baptised on April 26, and it was a common practice at the time to baptise a child three days after birth. The baptismal entry runs ' Gulielmus fihus Johannis Shakspere.' ^ Some doubt has been raised as to the ordinarily accepted scene of the dramatist's birth. Of two adjoining houses now forming a detached building on the north side of Henley Street and known as Shakespeare's House or Shake- 1 HaUiwell-PhiUipps, ii. 179. ' The vicar, who performed the christening ceremony, was John Bretchgirdle, M. A. He had been aiDpoiuted on Feb. 27, 1559-60, and was buried in Stratford church on June 21, 1565. The (broken) bowl of the old font of Stratford church is still preserved there (Bloom's Stratford- wpon-Avon Church, 1902, pp. 101-2). The existing vellum parish register of this period is a transcript of the original ' paper book ' ; it was made before 1600, in accordance with an order of Convocation of Oct. 25, 1597, by Richard Byfield, who was vicar for some ten years from 1596. PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 9 speare's Birthplace, both belonged to the dramatist's father for many years and were combined by him to serve at once as private residence and as shop or warehouse. speare's The tenement to the east he purchased in irt pace. 1555^ }j^^ there is no documentary evidence that he o\\Tied the house to the west before 1575. Yet this western house has been long kno^^■n as the poet's birthplace, and a room on the first floor has been claimed for two centuries and more as that in which he was born. It may well be that John Shakespeare occupied the two houses jointly in 1564 (the year of the poet's birth), although he only purchased the western building eleven years later. The double residence became Shakespeare's property on his father's death in 1601, but the dramatist never resided there after his boyhood. His mother inhabited the premises until her death in 1608, and his sister IVIrs. Joan Hart and her family dwelt there with her. Mrs. Hart was still living there in 1616 when Shakespeare died, and he left his sister a life interest in the two houses at a nominal rent of one shilhng. On Mrs. Hart's death tliirty years later, the ownership of the property passed to the poet's elder daughter, Mrs. Hall, and on her death in 1649 to the poet's only granddaughter and last surviving descendant, Lad}'' Bernard.^ By her will in 1670 Lady Bernard made the buildings over to Thomas Hart, the dramatist's grand- nephew, then the head of the family which supplied an uninterrupted succession of occupiers for the best part of two centuries. Early in Mi-s. Joan Hart's occupancy of the ' Birth- place ' she restored the houses to their original state of History of ^^^^ Separate dwellings. While retaining the the premises western portion for her ouii use, she sublet the eastern half to a tenant who converted it into an inn. It was known at Gist as the ' Maidenhead ' and afterwards as the ' Swan and Maidenhead.' The premises remained subdivided thus for some two hundred years, 1 See p. 514 infra. 10 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and the inn enjoyed a continuous existence until 1846. Thomas Hart's kinsmen, to whom the ownership of both eastern and western tenements meanwhile descended, con- tinued to confine their residence to the western house as long as the property remained in their hands. The tradition which identified that tenement with the scene of the dramatist's birth gathered substance from its intimate association with his surviving kindred through some ten generations. During the eighteenth century the western house was a popular showplace and the Harts de- rived a substantial emolument from the visits of admirers of Shakespeare. In 1806 the surviving representatives of the Harts at Stratford abandoned the family home and the whole property was sold for 230Z. to one Thomas Court, the tenant of the eastern house which still did duty as the ' Swan and Maidenhead ' inn. Thereupon Court turned the western house into a butcher's shop.^ On the death of his ■widow in 1846 the whole of the premises were put up for auction in London, and on September 16, 1847, they were . purchased for 3000Z. on behalf of subscribers present to a pubhc fund. Adjoining buildings were *^^^^" soon demoUshed so as to isolate the property, and after extensive restoration on the fines of the earUest accessible pictorial and other evidence, the two houses were reconverted into a single detached domicile for the purposes of public exhibition ; the western house (the 1 In 1834 a writer in the Tewkesbury Magazine described ' Shake- speare's House ' thus : ' The house m which Shakespeare's father lived, and in which he was born, is now divided into two — the northern [i.e. western] half being, or having lately been, a butcher's shop — and the southern [i.e. eastern] half, consisting of a respectable public-house, bearing the sign of the Swan and Maidenhead.' (French's Shake- speareaim Oenealogica, p. 409.) The wife of John Hart (1753-1800) of ' the Birthplace,' son of Thomas Hart (1729-1793), belonged to Tewkes- bury and their son William Shakespeare Hart (1778-1834) settled here. The latter wrote of ' the Birthplace ' in 1810 : ' My grandfather [Thomas Hart] used to obtain a great deal of money by shewing the premises to strangers who used to visit them.' (Shakespeare's Birthplace, Saunders MS. 1191, p. 63.) PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 11 * birthplace ') was left unfurnished, and the eastern house (the ' inn ') was fitted up as a museum and library. Much of the Elizabethan timber and stonework survives in the double structure, but a cellar under the ' birthplace ' is the only portion which remains as it was at the date of the poet's birth.^ The buildings were vested under a deed of trust in the corporation of Stratford in 1866. In 1891 an Act of Parliament (54 & 55 Vict. cap. iii.) transferred the property in behalf of the nation to an independent body of trustees, consisting of ten hfe-trustees, together with a number of ex-officio trustees, who are representative of the authorities of the county of Warwickshire and of the town of Stratford. ' Cf. documents and sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99. The earliest extant view of the Birthplace buildings is a dravs-ing by Richard Greene (1716-1793), a well-known Lichfield antiquary, which was engraved for the Gentleman's Magazine, July 17G9. Richard Greene's brother, Joseph (1712-1790), was long headmaster of Stratford Grammar School. In 1788 Colonel Philip De la Motto, an archaeologist, of Batsford, Gloucestershire, made an etching of the Birthplace premises, which closely resembles Greene's drawing ; the coloaers original copper- plate is now preserved in the Birthplace. The restoration of the Birthplace in 1847 accurately conformed to the view of 1769. II CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE In July 1564, when William was three months old, the plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford. One in every seven of the inhabitants perished. The plague Xwice in his mature years — in 1593 and 1603 — of 1564. -^ the dramatist was to witness in London more fatal visitations of the pestilence ; but his native place was spared any experience which compared with the calamitous epidemic of his infancy.^ He and his family were unharmed, and his father liberally contributed to the rehef of his stricken neighbours, hundreds of whom were rendered destitute. Fortime still favoured the elder Shakespeare. On July 4, 1565, he reached the dignity of an alderman. From 1567 onwards he was accorded in the corpora- as alderman tion archives the honourable prefix of 'Mr.'* and bailiff. ^^ Mchaelmas 1568 he attained the highest office in the corporation gift, that of baihff, and during his year of office the corporation for the first time enter- 1 An epidemic of exceptional intensity visited London from August to December 1563, and several country to^^■ns were infected somewhat sporadically in the follo-ning spring. Leicester, Lichfield, and Canterbury seem with Stratford-on-Avon to have been the chief suiierei-s in the provinces. (Creighton, Epidemics in Britain, i. 309.) * According to Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England, 1594, ' Master is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen.' Cf. Merchant of Venice, n. ii. 45 seq., where Launcelot Gobbo, on being called Master Launcelot, persistently disclaims the dignity. ' ]S!o master, sir [he protests], but a poor man's son.' The dramatist reached the like titular dignity comparatively early (see p. 293). 12 CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND ]\IAERIAGE 13 tained actors at Stratford. The Queen's Company and the Earl of Worcester's Company each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome, and gave a per- formance in the Guildhall before the council.^ On September 5, 1571, he was chief alderman, a post which he retained till September 30 the following year. In 1573 Alexander Webbe, a farmer of Snitterfield, and the husband of his wife's sister Margaret, made him overseer of his will of which Henry Shakespeare, his brother, was executor. In 1575 the dramatist's father added substantially to his real estate by purchasing two houses in Stratford ; one of them, the traditional ' birthplace ' in Henley Street, adjoined the tenement acquired nineteen years before. In 1576 Alderman Shakespeare contributed twelve- pence to the beadle's salary. But after Michaelmas 1572 he' took a less active part in municipal affairs, and he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings. Signs were gradually apparent that Jolin Shakespeare's luck had turned. In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the weekly sum of fourpence for the rehef of the poor, or his contribution ' towards the furniture of three pikemen, two billmen, and one archer ' who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county. Meanwhile his family was increasing. Four children besides the poet — three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 13, 1566), Richard (baptised March 11, 1573-4), and Edmund * The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare , Puritan and Recusant, 1897, weakly argued that John Shakespeare was a puritan from the fact that the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571), while he held office as chamber- lain or chief alderman. These decrees were mere acts of conformity with the new ecclesiastical law. John Shakesjteare's encouragement of actors is conclusive proof that he was no puritan. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to GuUlim's Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat- armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arma. (Cf. infra, pp. 281 seq.) 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (baptised May 3, 1580), with a daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569) — reached maturity, A daughter Ann was baptised on September 28, 1571, and was buried Brothers ^^^ April 4, 1579. To meet his growing Ha- and sisters. ,,, , , ri- biHties, the father borrowed money from his wife's kinsfolk, and he and his wife mortgaged, on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for 40Z. to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on- the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden. Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the ' rents and profits ' of the estate. Asbies was thereby ahenated for ever. Next year, on October 15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum of 40?., his wife's property at Snitterfield.^ John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiha- tion of having parted, although as he hoped only tem- porarily, with his wife's property of Asbies, and ^^her's ill the autumn of 1580 he offered to pay off financial ^j^e mortgage ; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none. The negotiation, which was the beginning of much Htigation, thus proved abortive.^ Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was em- barrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint. Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which process could be levied.^ On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman's 1 The sum is stated to be 41. in one document (Halliwell-Pliillipps, ii. 176) and 40Z. in another {ib. p. 179) ; the latter is the correct sum. 2 Edmund Lambert died on March 1, 1586-7, in possession of Asbies. Fresh legal proceedings were thereupon initiated by John Shakespeare to recover the property from Edmund Lambert's heir, John Lambert. The litigation went on intermittently through the next twelve years, but the dramatist's family obtained no satisfaction. Cf. Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment, pp. 37 seq. » Halliwell-PhiUipps, ii. 238. The Henley Street property was apparently treated as immune from distraint. CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND ^URRIAGE 15 gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council mee tings. 1 HappUy John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons. They were entitled to free Shake- tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, speare's which had been refashioned bj' Edward VI in 1553 out of a fifteenth century foundation. An unprecedented zeal for education was a prominent cha- racteristic of Tudor England, and there was scarcely an Enghsh town wliich did not witness the estabhshment in the sixteenth century of a well-equipped pubhc school. ^ Stratford shared with the rest of the country the general respect for literary studj'. Secular hterature as Avell as theology found its way into the parsonages, and libraries adorned the great houses of the neighbourhood.^ The townsmen of Stratford gave many proofs of pride in the municipal school wliich offered them a taste of academic culture. There John Shakespeare's eldest son WiUiam ^ The embarrassmenta of Shakespeare's father have been at timea assigned in error to another John Shakespeare of Stratford. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man, married there on Nov. 25, 1584, and •was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the ofiSce of Master of the Shoemakers' Company in 1592 — a certain sign of pecuniary stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 1.37-4(1). * Before the reign of the first Tudor sovereign Henry VII England could boast of no more than 16 grammar schools, i.e. public schools, unconnected with the monasteries. Sixteen were founded in addition in difierent towns during Henry VLTs reign, 63 during Henry \TII'3 reign, 50 during Edward VI's reign, 19 during Queen Mary's reign, 138 during Queen Elizabeth's reign, and S3 during James I's reign. ' The post-mortem inventory of the goods of John Marshall, curate of Bishopton, a hamlet of Stratford, enumerates 170 separate books, including Ovid's Tristia, Erasmus's CoUoquia, Ascham's Scholemaster, Virgil, Aristotle's Problemes, Cicero's Epistles, besides much contro- versial divinity, scriptural commentaries and educational manuals. See Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment (pp. 57-t)l). Sir George Carew (afterwards Earl of Totnes), of Clopton House, Stratford, pur- chased for his library there on its publication in 1598 John Florio's Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English Dictionary ; this volume is now in the Shakespeare Birthplace Library. (See Catalogue, No. 161.) 16 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE probably made his entry in 1571, when Walter Roche, B.A., was retiring from the mastership in favour of Simon Hunt, B.A. Hunt seems to have been succeeded in 1577 by one Thomas Jenkins, whose place was taken in 1579 by John Cotton ' late ' of London.^ Roche, Hunt and Cotton were all graduates of Oxford ; Roche would appear to have held a Lancashire fellowship at his college, Corpus Christi, and to have left the Stratford School to become rector of the neighbouring church of Clifford Chambers. The schoolmasters owed their appointment to the town council, but a teacher's license from the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) was a needful credential. As was customary in provincial schools, the poet learned to write the ' Old English ' character, which resembles g that still in vogue in Germany. He was never speare's taught the Italian script, which was winning curncu um. .^^ ^^^ ^^ cultured society, and is now uni- versal among EngUshmen. Until his death Shakespeare's ' Old EngHsh ' handwriting testified to his provincial education.^ The general instruction was conveyed in Latin. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through Latin conversation books like the ' Sententiae Pueriles,' and the standard elementary Latin grammar of William Lily (first highmaster of St. Paul's School), to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace, Some current Latin literature was in common use in the lower forms. The Latin eclogues of the popular Renaissance poet, Baptista Mantuanus, were usually pre- ferred to Virgil's for beginners ; they were somewhat crudely modelled in a post-classical idiom on Virgil's pastorals, but were reckoned ' both for style and matter very f amihar and grateful to children and therefore read in most schools.'^ 1 Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage, p. 108. * See pp. 519 seq. infra. 3 Cf. Charles Hoole's New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School (published 1660, WTitten 1640). Evidence abounds of the popu- larity of Mantuanus's work, which Shakespeare quotes in the original CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND ]MAERIAGE 17 The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils ; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama. ^ in Love's Labour's Lost (see p. 19 n. 1). Urayton, a Warwickshire boj', records (Of Poets and Poesy) that his tutor First read to me honest Hantaan, Then Virgil's Eclogues. So Thomas Lodge (Defence of Poetry, 1579) : ' Jliserable were our state if our 5-ounG!lings [-wantedj the -wTytings of Mantuan.' Dr. Johnson notes that Mantuan was read in some English schools down to the beginning of the eighteenth century (Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, iu. 317). Mantuanus's Eclogues have been fully and admirably edited by Dr. W. P. Mustard, Baltimore, 1911. ^ Jam(?3 Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a Greed el Latini, edition. I believe Lowell's parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents — proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare's part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin ui its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes ^\ith the same commonplace argument as that with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra are the lines 1171-3 : @vf)rov iTf(pvKas irarpos, 'HKfKTpa, eres. T. N. 1682 ' The identity of • W Hall ' and ' T. N.' has not been satisfactorily establLshcd. The authenticity of the Shakespeare sicnature is ably maintained by Dr. F. A. Leo in Jahrbuch dfr ^ Deutschen Shakespeare-G&seUschaft, vol. xvi. (1880), pp. 367-75 (^rith photographic illustrations). 22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE alone accounts for Shakespeare's designation of his fairy queen as Titania, a word of great beauty Avhich he first intro- duced into EngHsh poetry. There is no ground for ranking the dramatist with classical scholars or for questioning his liberal use of translations. A lack of exact scholar- ship fully accounts for the ' small Latin and less Greek ' with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson. But Aubrey's report that ' he understood Latin pretty well ' is incontestable. The original speech of Ovid and Seneca lay well within his mental grasp. Shakespeare's knowledge of French — the language of Ronsard and Montaigne — at least equalled his knowledge of Latin. In 'Henry V the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate, if not idiomatic. There is, too, no reason to doubt that the dramatist possessed sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of an Italian poem by Ariosto or Tasso or of a novel by Boccaccio or Bandello.^ Hamlet knew that the story of Gonzago was ' extant, and \vritten in very choice Italian ' (in. ii. 256). The books in the English tongue which were accessible to Shakespeare in his schooldays, whether few or many, included the English Bible, which helped to English mould liis budding thought and expression. Bible. iji^^.Q versions were generally available in his boyhood — the Genevan version, which was first issued in a 1 Cf. Spencer Baj-nes, ' What Shakespeare learnt at School,' in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq. Henry Ram-say, one of the panegyrists of Ben Jonson, in the collection of elegies entitled Jon- somis Virbhis (1637), wrote of Jonson : That Latin he reduced, and could command That which your Shakespeare scarce could understand. Ramsay here merely echoes Jonson's familiar remarks on Shakespeare's ' small Latin.' No greater significance attaches to Jasper Majnie's vague assurance in his elegj' on Jonson (also in Jonsonus Virbius) that Jonson's native genius was such that he Without Latin helps had been as rare As Beaumont, Fletcher, or as Shakespeare were. The conjunction of Shakespeare with Beaumont and Fletcher, who were well versed in the classics, proves the futility of Mayne's rhapsody. CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND ^URRIAGE 23 complete form in 1560, and the Bishops' re\'ision of 1568, which the Authorised Version of 1611 closety followed and superseded. The Bishops' Bible was authorised for use in churches. The Genevan version, which was commonly found in schools and middle-class households, was clearly the text with which youthful Shakespeare was chiefly familiar.^ References to scriptural characters and incidents are not conspicuous in Shakespeare's plays, but, such as they „. , are, they are drawn from all parts of the Shakespeare -r,., , , . aad Bible, and indicate a general acquaintance the Bible. ^.^j^ ^j^g naiTative of both Old and New Testa- ments. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases ^vith far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes' in biblical history. Elizabethan English was saturated with scriptural expressions. Many enjoyed colloquial currency, and others, which were more re- condite, were liberally scattered through Hohnshed's ' Chronicles ' and secular works whence the dramatist drew his plots. Yet there is a savour of early study about his normal use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history. His scriptural reminiscences bear trace of the assimilative or receptive tendency of an alert youthful mind. It is futile to urge that his knowledge of the Bible was mainly the fruit of close and continuous apphcation in adult hfe.^ 1 When Shy lock speaks of ' your prophet the Nazarite ' (Merchant of Venice, i. iii. 31), and when Prince Henry speaks of ' a good amend- ment of life ' (1 Hen. IV. I. ii. 106), both the italicised expressions come from the Genevan version of the Bible, and are replaced by different expressions in other English versions, by the Nazarene in the first case, and by repentance in the second. Similar illustrations abound. 2 Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which Shakespeare ma}' have been indebted to the Bible. But the bishop's deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare's adult pietj' seem strained. The Rev. Thomas Carter's Shakespeare and Holy Scripture (1905) is open to much the same exceptions as the bishop's volume, but no Shakespearean student mil fail to derive profit from examining hia exhaustive collection of parallel passages. 24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Games flourished among Elizabethan boys, and Shake- speare shows acquaintance in his writings with childish pastimes, Hke ' the whipping of tops,' ' hide Youthful g^j^(j seek,' ' more sacks to the mill,' ' push recreation. . -^ pin,' and nine men s moms. Tourmg players visited Stratford from time to time during Shakespeare's schooldays, and it was a habit of Elizabethan parents in provincial towns to take their children with them to local performances of stage plays.^ The actors made, as we have seen, their first appearance at Stratford in 1568, while Shakespeare's father was bailiff. The experiment was repeated almost annually by various companies between the dramatist's ninth and twenty-first years.^ Dramatic entertainments may well have ranked among Shakespeare's juvenile amusements. There were, too, cognate diversions in the neighbourhood of Stratford in which the boy may have shared. In July 1575, when Shakespeare had reached the age of eleven. Queen Eliza- beth made a progress through Warwickshire on a visit 1 One R. Willis, who was senior to Shakespeare by a j'ear, tells how his father took him as a child to see a travelling company's rendering of a piece called The Cradle of Security in his native to\\-n of Gloucester. ' At such a play my father tooke me vnih him, and made mee stand betweene his leggs as he sate upon one of the benches, where wee saw and heard very well ' — R. Willis's Mount Tabor or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner, published in the yeare of his Age 75, Anno Dom. 1G39, pp. 110-3 ; cf. Malone'a Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 28-30. * In 1573 Stratford was visited by the Earl of Leicester's men ; in 1576 by the Earl of War-nack's and the Earl of Worcester's men; in 1577 by the Earl of Leicester's and the Earl of Worcester's men ; in 1579 by the Lord Strange's and the Countess of Essex's men ; in 1580 by the Earl of Derby's players ; in 1581 by the Earl of Worcester's and Lord Berkeley's players ; in 1582 by the Earl of Worcester's players ; in 1583 by Lord Berkeley's and Lord Chandos's players ; in 1584 by players under the respective patronage of the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Essex, and in 1586 bj' an unnamed company. As many as five companies — the Queen's, the Earl of Essex's, the Earl of Leicester's, Lord Stafford's and another company — visited the town in 1587 (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 150-1). Mr. F. C. Wellstood, the secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, has kindly prepared for me a full transcript of all the references to actors in the Chamberlain's accounts in the Stratford-on-Avon archives. CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND M.'^RRIAGB 25 to her favourite, the Eai'l of Leicester, at his castle of Kenilworth. References have been justly detected in Oberon's vision in Shakespeare's ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' (n. i. 148-68) to the fantastic pageants, masques, and fireworks -n-ith which the queen was entertained in Kenilworth Park during her stay. Two full and graphic descriptions \vhieh were pubUshed in 1576 in pamphlet form, might have given Shakespeare his knowledge of the varied programme.^ But Leicester's residence was only fifteen miles from Stratford, and the country people came in large numbers to witness the open-air festi\4ties. It is reasonable to assume that some of the spectators were from Stratford and that they included the elder Shakespeare and his son. In any case Shakespeare's opportunities of recreation, whether within or Anthout Stratford, saw some restriction as his schooldays drew to an end. His father's Sfchod. financial difficulties grew steadily, and they caused the boy's removal from school at an unusually early age. Probably in 1577, when he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes. ' I have been told hereto- fore,' wrote Aubrey, ' by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised liis father's trade,' which, according to the A\Titer, was that of a butcher. It is possible that John's ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business. His son may have been formally apprenticed to him. An early Strat- y ford tradition describes him as ' apprenticed to a butcher.' ^ j ' ^Vhen he kill'd a calf,' Aubrey adds less con^^ncingly, ' he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.' 1 See p. 232 i>if a. • Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (published in 1838). 26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when Httle more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was The poet's ^7 ^^ means calculated to lighten his father's marriage. anxieties. He married. His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years. Rowe states that she ' was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.' On September 1, 1581, Richard Hathaway, 'husband- man ' of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Strat- „. , , ford, made his will, which was proved on Hathaway July 9, 1582, and is now preserved at Somer- ^^^' set House. His house and land, ' two and a half virgates,' had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances. His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of the eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned. Six other children — three sons and three daughters — received sums of money ; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were each allotted 61. I3s. 4:d., ' to be paid at the day of her marriage,' a phrase common in wills of Anne the period. Anne and Agnes were in the Hathaway, sixteenth century alternative speUings of the same Christian name ; and there is Uttle doubt that the daughter ' Agnes ' of Richard Hathaway's will became, within a few months of Richard Hathaway's death, Shakespeare's wife.^ ^ Thomas Whittington, a shepherd in the service of the Hathaways at Shottery, makes in his will dated 1602 mention of Mrs. Anne Shake- speare, Mrs. Joan Hatha wa}' [the mother], John Hathaway and WiUiam HathaM^ay [the brothers] in such close collocation as to dissipate all doubt that Shakespeare's wiie was a daughter of the Shottery household (see p. 280 infra). LongfeUow, the American poet (in his Poems of Places, 1877, vol. ii. p. 198), rashly accepting a persistent popular fallacj-, assigned to Shakespeare a valueless love poem entitled 'Anne Hatha waj-,' which is in four stanzas with the weak punning refrain ' She hath a way, Anne Hathaway.' The verses are by Charles Dibdin, the eighteenth- century song-writeri and appear in the chief collected editions of his CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 27 The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hatha- way's cottage, and reached from Stratford by field-paths, ^^^^ undoubtedly once formed part of Richard Hathaway's Hathaway's farmhouse, and, despite numerous age. alterations and renovations, still preserves the main features of a thatched farmhouse of the Ehzabethan period.^ The house remained in the Hathaway family till 1838, although the male line became extinct in 1746. It was purchased in behalf of the public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892. No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare's marriage survives. Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject. A local tradition, which seems to have come into being during the nineteenth century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish registers now exist. But one important piece of docu- mentary evidence directly bearing on the poet's matri- monial venture is accessible. In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, responsible 'husbandmen of Stratford,' ^ bound themselves in the bishop's consistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of 40/. to free songs, as well as in his novel Hannah Hemt ; or the Female Crusoe, 1796. Dibdin helped Garrick to organise the Stratford jubilee of 1769, and the poem may date from that year. * John Hathaway, a direct descendant of Richard (father of Shake- speare's ^\-ife) and owner of the house at the end of the seventeenth century, commemorated some repairs bj- inserting a stone in one of the chimney stacks which is still conspicuously inscribed ' I. H. 1697.' John Hathaway's reparations were clearly superficial. * Both Fulk Sandells and John Richardson were men of substance and local repute. Richardson was buried at Stratford on Sept. 19, 1594, and Sandells, who was many j-ears his junior, on Oct. 14, 1624. Sandells, who attested the post-mortem inventories of the property of several neighbours, helped to appraise the estate of Richardson, his fellow- bondsman, on November 4, 1594. {Stratford Records, Miscell. Doc. vol. v. 32.) 28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment — ' by reason of any precontract ' [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity — be subsequently disclosed to a-'^st^ imperil the validity of the marriage, then in con- impedi- templation, of William Shakespeare with Anne merits. , Hathaway. On the assumption that no such impediment was known to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her ' friends,' the marriage might proceed ' vnth once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.' Bonds of similar purport, although differing in signifi- cant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century. They were obtainable on the pay- ment of a fee to the bishop's commissary, and had the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while pro- tecting the clergy from the consequences of anj'' possible breach of canonical law. But they were not common, and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble position in life of Amie Hathaway and 3'"oung Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by ' thiice asking of the banns.' More- over, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare's marriage differs in important respects from that commonly adopted.^ In other extant examples it is usually provided that the marriage shaU not take place without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and bridegroom. In the case of the marriage of an ' infant ' bridegroom the formal consent of his parents was essential to strictly regular procedure, though clergymen might be found who were willing to shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run the risk of solemnising the marriage of an ' infant ' without inquiry as to the parents' consent. The clergyman who * These conclusions are drawn from an examination of lilce documents in the Worcester diocesan registry. . Jlany formal declarations of consent on the part of parents to their children's marriages are also extant there among the sixteenth-centurj^' archives. CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND JVIARRIAGE 29 united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway was obviously of this easy temper. Despite the circumstance that Shakespeare's bride was of full age and he himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shakespeare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the bride's ' friends,' and ignored the bridegroom's parents altogether. Nor was this the only irregularity in the document. In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the bridegroom's father figures as one of the two sureties, and is mentioned fii'st of the two. Had the usual form been foDowed, Shake- speare's father would have been the chief party to the transaction in behalf of his ' infant ' son. But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells and Richard- son, were farmers of Shottery, the bride's native place. Sandells was a ' supervisor ' of the wiU of the bride's father, who there describes him as ' my trustie friende and neighbour.' The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare's marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady's family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend's daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place, without the consent of the bridegi'oom's parents — it may be without their knowledge — soon after the signing of the deed. The scene of the ceremony was clearly outside the bounds of Stratford parish — in an unidentified church of the Worcester diocese, the register of which is lost. Within six months of the marriage bond — in May daiighter^ 1583 — a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in the name of Susanna at Strat- ford parish church on the 26th. Shakespeare's apologists have endeavoured to show that the pubUc betrothal or formal ' troth-pUght ' which was at the time a common prelude to a wedding carried 30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE with, it all the privileges of marriage. But neither Shakespeare's detailed description of a betrothal ^ nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support. Moreover, P ^ the circumstances of the case render it highly betrothal improbable that Shakespeare and his bride dispensed submitted to the formal preliminaries of a be- with. trothal. In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom's parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage. A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet's matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his , identity with one ' William Shakespeare,' to marriage whom, according to an entry in the Bishop license. ^£ \yorcester's register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day lejore the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne ^Vhateley of Temple Grafton. The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare's wife was AVhateley is quite untenable, and it seems unsafe to assume that the bishop's clerk, Avhen making a note of the grant of the license in his register, erred so extensively as to Avrite ' Anne Wliateley of Temple Grafton ' for ' Anne Hathaway 1 Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. II. 100-4 : A contract of eternal bond of love, Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands, Attested by the holy close of lips, Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings ; And all the ceremony of this compact Seal'd in my [i.e. the priest's] function by my testimony. In Measure for Measure Claudio's o&nce is intimacy with the Lady Juliet after the contract of betrothal and before the formality of marriage (cf. act I. sc. ii. 1. 155, act rv. sc. i. 1. 73). In As You Like It, m. ii. 333 seq., Rosalmd points out that the interval between the contract and the marriage ceremony, although it might be no more than a week, did not allow connubial intimacy : ' Marry, Time trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is Bolemnised. If the interim be but a sennight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven years.' CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 31 of Shottery.' ^ The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubt- less another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester. Had a Hcense for the poet's marriage been secured on November 27, it is unhkely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ' against impediments,' the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preHminary to the grant of a license but was super- erogatory after the grant was made. ^ Inaccuracies in the surnames are not uncommon in the Bishop of Worcester's register of licenses for the period (e.g. Baker for Barbar, Darby for Bradeley, Edgock for Elcock). But no mistake so thorough- going as in the Shakespeare entry has been discovered. Mr. J. W. Gray, in his Shakespeare s Marriage (1905), learnedly argues for the clerk's error in copying, and deems the Shakespeare-Whateley license to be the authorisation for the marriage of the dramatist with Anne Hatha wa J'. He also claims that marriage by license ^\•as essential at certain seasons of the ecclesiastical j-ear during which marriage by banns was prohibited by old canonical regulations. The Shakespeare-Whateley license (of November 27) might on this showing have been obtained with a Adew to eluding the delay which one of the close seasonal — from Advent Sunday (November 27-December 3) to eight days after Epiphany (i.e. January 14) — interposed to marriage by banns. But it is questionable whether the seasonal prohibitions were strictly enforced at the end of the sixteenth century, when marriage licenses were limited by episcopal rule to persons of substantial estate. In the year 1592 out of thirteen marriages (by banns) celebrated at the parish church of Stratford, as many as three, the parties to all of which were of humble rank, took place in the forbidden month of December. There £"116 means of determining who Anne AMiateley of Temple Grafton precisely was. No registers of the parish for the period are extant. A WTiateley family resided in Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple Grafton was connected with it. It is undoubtedly a strange coincidence that two persons, both named William Shakespeare, should on two successive days not only be arranging with the Bishop of Worcester's oificial to marry, but should be involving thetoselves, whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of con- temporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne ^Vhateley was licensed to marry \\ as probably of the superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. Ill THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD Anne Hathaway's greater buiden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy and^e ^-ugury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare's dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis Mith which he insists that a woman should take in marriage an ' elder than herseK,' ^ and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ' barren hate, sour-ey'd disdain, and discord,' suggests a personal interpretation.^ To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet's case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of hfe in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties ^^dth impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith) ; both were baptised on February 2, and were named after their father's friends, Hamnet Sadler, and Judith, Sadler's wife. Hamnet Sadler, a prosperous tradesman whose brother John was twice bailiff, continued a friend for life, rendering Shakespeare the last service of witnessing his will. The dramatist's firstborn child Susanna was a year and nine 1 Twelfth Night, act n. sc. iv. 1. 29 : Let still the woman take An elder than herself ; so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart. * Tempest, act iv. sc. i. 11. 15-22 : If thou dost break her virgin knot before AH sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be minister' d, No sweet aspersion shaU the heavens let fall To make this contract grow ; but barren hate, Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew The tmion of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. 3J THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 33 months old, when the twins were christened, Shakespeare had no more children, and all the evidence points to the conclusion, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that he fixed his abode in London in the course of 1586. Although he was never wholly- estranged from his family, he seems to have seen little of -wife or children for some eleven years. Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596 — an interval which syn- chronises with his first literary triumphs — there is only one shadoAvy mention of his name in Stratford records. On March 1, 1586-7, there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare's name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund's son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the Wilm- cote estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying 20/. But the deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the transaction.^ Shakespeare's early literary work proves that while in the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs. All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless as a youth practised many field sports. Sympathetic references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and anghng abound in his early plays and poems. ^ There is small doubt, too, that his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits. Some practical knowledge of the art of poaching seems to be attested by Shakespeare's early lines : What ! hast not thou full often struck a doe And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose ? Titu^ Andronicus, n. i. 92-3. 1 Hallhvell-Phillipps, ii 11-13. * Cf. EUacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883 ; J. E. Harting, Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare's knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his entertaining and at the same time scholarly Diary of Master William Silence : a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport, 1897 (new edition, 1907). Q 34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of Shakespeare's long severance from his native place. ' He had,' uTote the biographer Rowe in 1709, ' by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and, amongst them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-steahng, engaged him \^dth them more than once in robbing a park that belonged at to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford, ar eco e. -^qj. ^j^ig j^g ^3,5 prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely ; and, in order to revenge that iU-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obhged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter liimseK in London.' The inde- pendent testimony of Archdeacon Richard Da vies, who was vicar of Sapperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare was ' much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particu- larly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.' The law of Shake- speare's day (5 EUz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done. The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was ^°" , , an extensive game-preserver, and o'mied at doubts Charlecote a warren in which a few harts or tradition. does doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supphed in his ' Views on the War^^ickshire Avon,' 1795, an engrav- ing of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily im- THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 35 prisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare's ' deer-barn,' but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention.* The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive. No authenticity can be allowed the wortliless stanza beginning 'A parhament member, a justice of peace,' which was represented to be Shake- speare's on the authority of Thomas Jones, an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703, aged upwards of ninety.^ > But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakespearean drama. Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of Shallow ^^® owner of Charlecote. According to Arch- deacon Da vies of Sapperton, Shakespeare's ' revenge was so great that ' he caricatured Lucy as ' Justice Clodpate,' who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as ' a great man,' and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy's name, ' three louses rampant for his arms.' Justice Shallow, Davies's ' Justice Clodpate.' came to birth in the ' Second Part of Henry IV ' (1597), and he is represented in the opening scene of ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate. ' Three luces hauriant argent ' were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys. A ' luce ' was a full-grown pike, and the meaning of the word fully explains Falstaff's con- temptuous mention of the garrulous country justice as ^ Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Deerstealer, 1862 ; Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 123. * Copies of the lines which were said to have been taken do^\'n from the old man's lips belonged to both Edward Capell and William Oldys (cf. Yeoweirs Memoir of Oldys, 1862, p. 44). A long amplification, clearly of later date, is in Malone, Variorum, ii. 138, 563. D 2 36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' the old 'pihe ' (' 2 Henry IV,' m. ii. 323).i The temptation punningly to confuse ' luce ' and ' louse ' was irresistible, and the dramatist's prolonged reference in the ' Merry Wives ' to the ' dozen white luces ' on Justice Shallow's ' old coat ' fully establishes Shallow's identity with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. The poaching episode is best assigned to the year 1585, but it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing .. from Lucy's persecution, immediately sought from an asylum in London. WiUiam Beeston, a Stratford. geventeenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ' in his younger years,' and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village. The suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, a band of youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name and county .^ The knowledge of a soldier's life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he MTote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the direct evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising hfe under almost every aspect by force of his imagination. ^ It is curious to note that WiUiam Lucy (1594—1677), grandson of Shakespeare's Sir Thomas Lucy, who became Bishop of St. David's, adopted the pseudonym of William Pike in his two volumes (1657-8) of hostile ' observations ' on Hobbes's Leviathan. ^ Cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 16 seq. Sir Philip Sidney, writing from Utrecht on March 24, 1585-6, to his father-in-law. Sir Francis Walsingham, mentioned ' I wrote to yow a letter by Will, my lord of Lester's jesting plaier ' (Lodge's Portraits, ii. 176). The messenger was the well-kno^\^l actor WiU Kempe, and not, as has been rashly suggested, Shakespeare. IV THE MIGRATION TO LONDON Amid the clouds which gathered about him in his native place during 1585, Shakespeare's hopes turned towards London, where high-spirited youths of the day ^'^Lond^"^^ were wont to seek their fortune from all parts of the country. It was doubtless in the early summer of 1586 that Shakespeare first traversed the road to the capital. There was much intercourse at the time between London and Stratford-on-Avon. Tradesmen of the town paid the great city repeated visits on legal or other business ; many of their sons swelled the ranks of the apprentices ; a few were students at the Inns of Court. ^ ^ Three students of the Middle Temple towards the end of the sixteenth century were natives of Stratford, viz. William, second son of John Combe, admitted on October 19, 1571 ; Richard, second son of Michard Woodward (born on March 11, 1576-9), on November 25, 1597 ; and William, son and heir of Thomas Combe, and grandnephow of his elder namesake, on October 7, 1602 (Middle Temple Records, i. 181, 380, 425). For names of Stratford apprentices in the publishing trade of London see p. 40 ». 2 infra. There is a remarkable recorded instance of a Stratford bo}' going on his ovm account and unbefriended to London to seek mercantile employment and making for himself a fortune and high position in trade there. The lad, named John Sadler, belonged to Shakespeare's social circle at Stratford. Bom there on February 24, 1586-7, the son of John Sadler, a substantial townsman who was twice bailiff in 1599 and 1612, and nephew of the dramatist's friend Hamnet Sadler, the youth, early in the seventeenth century, in order to escape a marriage for which he had a distaste, suddenly (according to hia daughter's subsequent testimony) ' joined himself to the carrier [on a good horse which was supplied him by his friends] and came to London, where he had never been before, and sold his horse in Smithfield ; and having no acquaintance in London to recommend or assist him, he went from street to street and house to house, asking if they wanted an apprentice, 37 38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE A packhorse carrier, bearing his load in panniers, made the journey at regular intervals, and a solitary traveller on horseback was wont to seek the carrier's protection and society.^ Horses could be hired at cheap rates. But walking was the common mode of travel for men of small means, and Shakespeare's first journey to London may well have been made on foot.^ and though he met with many discouraging scorns and a thousand denials, he went till he light on Mr. Brooksbank, a grocer in Bucklers- bury.' The story of Sadler's journey to London and his first emplo3^ment there is told in his daughter's autobiography, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, late wife of A[iitony'\ W\alker^ D.D. (1690). Sadler's fortunes in London progressed uninterruptedly. He became one of the chief grocers or druggists of the day, and left a large estate, including property in Virginia, on his death in 1658. His shop was at the Red Lion in Bucklers bury — the chief trading quarter for men of his occupation. Shakespeare in Merry \Vives, m. iii. 62, writes of fops m ho smelt ' like Bucklersburj^ m simple time ' — a reference to the dried herbs ^\•hich the grocers stocked in their shops there. A Stratford neighbour, Richard Quiney, Sadler's jimior by eight months, became his partner, and married his sister (on August 27, 1618) ; Quiney died in 1655. Sadler and Quiney jointly presented to the Corporation of Stratford on August 22, 1632, ' two faj're gilte maces,' which are still in use (cf. French's Shakespeareana Genealogica, pp. 560 seq.), and they also together made over to the town a sum of 150Z. ' to be lent out, the increase [i.e. interest] to be given the poor of the borough for ever ' (WTieler's History of Strafford, p. 88). Shakespeare was on intimate terms with both the Sadler and Quiney families. Richard Quiney's father (of the same names) was a correspond- ent of the dramatist (see p. 294 infra), and liis brother Thomas married the dramatist's younger daughter, Judith (see p. 464 infra). ^ Shakespeare graphically portrays packhorse carriers of the time in 1 Henry IV. n. i. 1 seq. 2 Stage coaches were unknown before the middle of the seventeenth century, although at a little earlier date carriers from the large towns began to employ wagons for the accommodation of passengers as well as merchandise. Elizabethan men of letters were usually good pedes- trians. In 1570 Richard Hooker, the eminent theologian, journeyed as an undergraduate on foot from Oxford to Exeter, his native place. Izaak Walton, Hooker's biographer, suggests that, for scholars, walking ' was then either more in fashion, or want of money or their humility made it so.' On the road Hooker \'isited at Salisbury Bishop Jewel, who lent him a walking staff M-ith Mhich the bishop ' professed he had travelled through many parts of Germany ' (Walton's Lives, ed. Bullen, p. 173). Later in the century John Stow, the antiquary, travelled through the country ' on foot ' to make researches in the cathedral towns (Stow's Annals, 1615, cd. Howes). In 1609 Thomas Coryat claimed to have walked in five months 1975 miles on the continent of Europe. In 1618 THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 39 There were two main routes by which London was approached from Stratford, one passing through Oxford and High Wycombe, and the other through ^ut^s^'^^^ Banbury and Aylesbury.^ The distance either way was some 120 miles. Tradition points to the Oxford and High Wycombe road as Shakespeare's favoured thoroughfare. The seventeenth-century anti- quary, Aubrey, asserts on good authority that at Grendon Underwood, a village near Oxford, ' he happened to take the humour of the constable in "IMidsummer Night's Dream " ' — by which the writer meant, we may suppose, ' Much Ado about Nothing.' There were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself. But a specially blustering specimen of the class may have arrested Shakespeare's attention while he was moving about the Oxfordshire countryside. The Crown Inn (for- merly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of the dramatist's favourite resting places on his journeys to and from the metropohs. With the Oxford innkeeper John Davenant and with his family Shakespeare formed a close intimacy. In 1605 he stood godfather to the son WiUiam who subsequently as Sir William D'Avenant enjoyed the reputation of a popular playv\Tight.2 The two roads which were at the traveller's choice between Stratford and London became one within twelve miles of the city's walls. All Stratford wayfarers met at Uxbridge, thenceforth to follow a single path. Much desolate country intervened between Uxbridge and their destination. The most conspicuous landmark was ' the triple tree ' of Tyburn (near the present Marble Arch) — the triangular gallows where London's felons met their doom. The long Uxbridge Road (a portion of which is now christened Oxford Street) knew few habitations until Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson walked from London to Edinburgh and much of the way back. In the same year John Taylor, the water- poet, also walked independently from London to Edinburgh, and thence to Braemar (see his Pennyles Pilgrimage, 1618). 1 Cf. J. W. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1-24. * See p. 451 infra. 40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the detached village of St. Giles came in view. Beyond St. Giles, the posts and chains of Holborn Bars marked (like Temple Bar in the Strand) London's extramural or suburban limit, but the full tide of city Ufe was first joined at the archway of Newgate. It was there that Shakespeare caught his first glimpse of the goal of his youthful ambition.^ The population of London nearly doubled during the dramatist's lifetime, rising from 100,000 at the beginning of Queen Ehzabeth's reign to 200,000 in the s^Wrs^^ course of her successor's. On all sides the capital was spreading beyond its old decaj'ing walls, so as to provide homes for rural immigrants. Already in 1586 there were in London settlers from Stratford to offer Shakespeare a welcome. It is specially worthy of note that shortly before his arrival three young men had come thence to be bound apprentice to London printers, a comparatively new occupation with which the development of literature was closely allied. With one of these men, Richard Field, Shakespeare was soon in close relations, and was receiving from him useful aid and encouragement. 2 ^ The traveller on horseback by either route spent two nights on the road and reached Uxbridge on the third day. The pedestrian would spend three nights, arri\-iag at Uxbridge on the fourth day. Several ' bills of charges ' incurred by citizens of Stratford in riding to and from London during Shakespeare's early days are extant among the Elizabethan manuscripts at Shakespeare's Birthplace. The Banbury route was rather more frequented than the Oxford Road ; it seems to have been richer in village inns. Among the smaller places on this route at ^^•hich the Stratford traveller's foimd good accommodation were Stratton Audley, Chenies, Wendover, and Amersham (see Mr. Richard Savage's ' Abstracts from Stratford Travellers' Accounts ' in Athenceum, September 5, 1908). * Of the two other stationers' apprentices from Stratford, Roger, son of John Locke, glover, of Stratford-on-Avon, was apprenticed on August 2-1, 1577, for ten years to William Pickering (Arber, Transcripts of Registers of the Statioiiers' Company, ii. 80), and Allan, son of Thomas Orrian, tailor, of Stratford, was bound apprentice on March 25, 1585, for seven years to Thomas Fowkes (ibid. ii. 132). Nothing further seems kno\vn of Roger Locke. Allan Orrian was made free of the Stationers' Company on October 16, 1598 (ibid. ii. 722). No information is accessible regarding his precise work as stationer, but he was prosper- THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 41 Field's London career offers illuminating parallels with that of Shakespeare at many practical points. Born at Stratford in the same year as the dramatist, Field^'^ he was a son of Henry Field, a fairly pros- perous tanner, A\ho was a near neighbour of Shakespeare's father. The elder Field died in 1592, when the poet's father, in accordance with custom, attested ' a trew and perfecte inventory ' of his goods and chattels. On September 25, 1579, at the usual age of fifteen, Richard was apprenticed to a London printer and sta- tioner of repute, George Bishop, but it was arranged five weeks later that he should serve the first six years of his articles with a more interesting member of the printing fraternity, Thomas Vautrollier, a Frenchman of %vide sym- pathies and independent views. VautroUier had come to London as a Huguenot refugee and had estabhshed his position there by pubhshing in 1579 Sir Thomas North's renowned translation of ' Plutarch's Lives ' — a book in 'S 'f^/ which Shakespeare was before long to be well versed. V J'^Mr^ . /ff^ When the dramatist reached London, VautroUier was ^^^x^^Lf A Edinburgh in' temporary retirement owing to threats of ^, / '>*-. ^»*^ prosecution for printing a book by the Itahan sceptic A'v^ /■ Giordano Bruno. His Stratford apprentice benefited by 4; i • / his misfortune. With the aid of his master's mfe. Field .* carried on the business in VautrplhQr's absence, and thence- *^ engaged at one time or another in professional practice. The conclusion is draAVTi from fallacious premises. The poet's legal knowledge is a mingled skein of accuracy and inaccuracy, and the errors are far too numerous and important to justify on sober inquiry the plea of technical experience. No judicious reader of ' The Merchant of Venice ' or ' Measure for Measure ' can fail to detect a radical unsoundness in Shakespeare's interpretation alike of elementary legal principles and of legal procedure. Moreover the legal terms which Shakespeare favoured were common forms of speech among contemporary men of letters and are not pecuhar to his hterary or poetic vocabulary. Legal phraseology in Shakespeare's vein Avas AAidely distributed over the dramatic and poetic literature 1 Lord Campbell, who greatly exaggerated Shakespeare's legal know- ledge in hi3 Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements (1859), was the first \\Titer to insist on Shakespeare's personal connection \nth the law. Many subsequent A\Titers have been misled by Lord Campbell's book (see Appendix n). The true state of the case is presented by Charles Allen in his Notes on the Bacon Shakespeare Question (Boston, 1900, pp. 22 seq.) and by Mr. J. JI. Robertson in his Baconian Heresy (1913, pp. 31 seq.). Mr. Allen's chapter (ch. Aai) on ' Bad Law in Shakespeare ' is esjjecially noteworthy. Of the modish affectation of legal terminology by con- temporary poets some instances are given below in Bamabe Barnes's Sonnets, 1593, and in the collection of sonnets called Zepheria, 1594 (see Appendix ix). 44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of his day. Spenser in his ' Faerie Queene ' makes as free as Shakespeare %yith strange and recondite technical terms of law. The dramatists Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Webster use legal words and phrases and describe legal processes with all the great dramatist's frequency and facility, and on the whole with fewer blunders.^ It is beyond question that aU these writers lacked a legal training. Elizabethan authors' common habit of legal phraseology is indeed attributable to causes in habit o?^^ wliich professional experience finds no place. legal Throughout the period of Shakespeare's work- phraseology. . ° ^ • 1 • 4. mg career, there was an active social intercourse between men of letters and young lawyers, and the poets and dramatists caught some accents of their legal com- panions' talk. Litigation at the same time engaged in an unprecedented degree the interests of the middle classes among Ehzabeth's and James I's subjects. Shakespeare's father and his neighbours were personally involved in endless lawsuits the terminology of wliich became house- hold words among them. Shakespeare's Hberal employ- ment of law terms is merely a sign on the one hand of his habitual readiness to identify himself with popular literary fashions of the day, and, on the other hand, of his general quickness of apprehension, which assimilated suggestion from every phase of the life that was passing around him. It may be safely accepted that from his first arrival in London until his final departure Shake- speare's mental energy was absorbed by his poetic and dramatic ambitions. He had no time to devote to a tech- nical or professional training in another sphere of activity. ^ When in AWs Well Bertram is oidered under compulsion by the long his guardian to wed Helena, Shakespeare ignores the perfectly good plea of ' disparagement ' which was always available to protect a ward of rank from forced marriage ^^•ith a plebeian. Ben Jonson proved to be more alive to Bertram's legal privilege. In his Bartholomew Fair (act m. sc. i.) Grace Wellborn, a female ward who is on the point of being married by her guardian against her will, is appropriately advised to have recourse to the legal ' de\'ice of disparagement.' For Webster's liberal use of law terms see an interesting paper ' Webster and the Law : a Parallel,' by L. J. Sturge in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1906, xlii. 148-57. SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS Tradition and commonsense alike point to the stage as an early scene of Shakespeare's occvipation in London. ^ , The poet Sir William D'Avenant, who was Early ^ theatrical , ten years old when Shakespeare died and was emp oymen . ^^ eager collector of Shakespearean gossip, is credited with the story that the dramatist was originally employed at ' the playhouse ' in ' taking care of the gentlemen's horses who came to the play,' and that he so prospered in this humble vocation as to organise a horse- tending service of ' Shakespeare's boys.' The pedigree of the storA' is fully recorded. D'Avenant confided the tale to Thomas Betterton, the great actor of the Restora- tion, who shared Sir William's zeal for amassing Shake- spearean lore. By Betterton the legend was handed on to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, who told it to Pope. But neither Rowe nor Pope pubhshed it. The report was first committed to print avowedly on D'Avenant's and Betterton's authority in Theopliilus Gibber's ' Lives of the Poets ' (i. 130) which were pubUshed in 1753.1 Only two regular theatres (' The Theatre ' and the ' Curtain ') were working in London at the date of Shakespeare's arrival. Both were situate outside the city walls, beyond Bishopsgate ; fields lay around them, and they were often reached on horseback by visitors. * Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, they were written by Robert Shiels, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson, and other hack-writerg under Gibber's editorial direction. 45 46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE According to the Elizabethan poet Sir John Davies, in his ' Epigrammes,' No. 7 (1598), the well-to-do citizen habi- tually rode ' into the fields ' when he Avas bent on playgoing.^ The OA\Tier of ' The Theatre,' James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield. There is no inherent improbability in the main drift of D'Avenant's strange tale, which Dr. Johnson fathered in his edition of Shakespeare in 1765. No doubt is permissible that Shakespeare was speedily offered employment inside the playhouse. According to Rowe's vague statement, ' he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.' WilUam Castle, ^ parish clerk of Stratford through great part of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telhng visitors that the dramatist entered the playhouse as ' a servitor.' In 1780 Malone recorded a stage tradition ' that his first oifice in the theatre was that of prompter's atten- dant,' or call boy. Evidence abounds to show that his intellectual capacity and the amiabihty with which he turned to account his versatile powers were soon recognised, and that his promotion to more dignified employment was rapid. Shakespeare's earhest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon ecHpsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor's profession till near the end of his fife. The pro- fession, when Shakespeare joined it, was in its infancy, but while he was a boy Parhament had made it on easy conditions a lawful and an honourable calling. By an Act of Parliament of 1571 (14 Ehz. cap. 2) which was 1 So, too, Thomas Dekker in his Gids Hornbook, 1609 (ch. v. * How a young Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary '), describes how French lacqueys and Irish footboys were wont to wait ' with their masters' hobby horses' outside the doors of ordinaries for the gentlemen ' to ride to the new play ; that's the rendezvous, thither they are galloped in post.' Only playhouses north of the Thames were thus reached. To theatres south of the river the usual approach was by boat. * Castle's family was of old standing at Stratford, where he was bom on July 19, 1614, and died in 1701 ; see Dowdall's letter, p. 640 injra. SHAKESPEAKE AND THE ACTORS 47 re-enacted in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4) an obligation was im- posed on players of procuring a license for the exercise of ^, their function from a peer of the realm or ' other The ^ player's honourable personage of greater degree.' In the absence of such credential they were pronounced to be of the status of rogues, vagabonds, or sturdy beggars, and to be liable to humiliating punishments ; but the license gave them the unquestioned rank of respectable citizens. Elizabethan peers liberally exercised their licensing powers, and the Queen gave her subjects' activity much practical encouragement. The services of hcensed players were con- stantly requisitioned by the Court to provide dramatic entertainment there. Those who wished to become actors found indeed little difficulty in obtaining a statutory Ucense under thx? hand and seal of persons in high station, who enrolled them by virtue of a formal fiction among their ' servants,' became surety for their behaviour, and relieved them of all risk of derogatory usage. ^ An earty statute of King James's reign (1 Jac. cap. 7) sought in 1603 to check an admitted abuse wherebj' the idle parasites of a mag- nate's household were wont to plead his ' Ucense ' by way of exemption from the penalties of vagrancy or disorder. But the new statute failed seriously to menace the actors' 1 The condition? attaching in Shakespeare's time to the grant of an actor's license may be deduced from the earliest known document relating to the matter. In 1572 six ' players,' who claimed to be among the Earl of Leicester's retainers, appealed to the Earl in view of the new statute of the previous year ' to rete}Tie us at this present as your houshold Servaunts and daj'lic wajters, not that we meane to crave any further stipend or benefite at your Lordshippes handes but our Lyverios as we have had, and also your honors License to certifye that we are your houshold Servaunts \\hen we shall have occasion to tra- vayle amongst our frendes ' (printed from the Marquis of Bath's MSS., in Malone Soc. Coll. i. 348-9). The licensed actor's certificate was an important asset ; towards the end of Shakespeare's life there are a few cases of fraudulent sale by a holder to an unauthorised person or of distribution of forged duplicates by an unprincipled actor who aimed at forming a company of his owti. But the regulation of the profession was soon strict enough to guard against any widespread abuse (Dr. C. W. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. 385, and Murray, English Dramatic Companies, ii. 320, 343 seq.) 48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE privileges.^ Private persons may have proved less ready, in view of the greater stringency of the law, to exercise the right of Ucensing players, but there was a compensating extension of the range of the royal patronage. The new King excelled his predecessor in enthusiasm for the drama. He acknowledged by letters patent the fuU corporate rights of the leading company, and other companies of repute were soon admitted under like formalities into the ' service ' of his Queen and of his two elder sons, as well as of his daughter and son-in-law. The actor's calling escaped challenge of legality, nor did it suffer legal dis- paragement, at any period of Shakespeare's epoch.^ From the middle years of the sixteenth century many hundreds of men received licenses to act from noblemen and other persons of social position, and the Ucensees The acting formed themselves into companies of players which enjoyed under the statute of 1571 the standing of lawful corporations. Fully a hundred peers and knights during Shakespeare's youth bestowed the requisite legal recognition on bands of actors who were each known as the patron's ' men ' or ' servants ' and wore his ' livery ' with his badge on their sleeves. The fortunes of these companies varied. Lack of public favour led to financial difficulty and to periodic suspension 1 Under this new statute proceedings were sanctioned against suspected rogues or vagrants notwithstanding any ' authority ' which should be ' given or made by any baron of this realm or any other honourable personage of greater degree unto any other person or persons.' The clauses which provided ' houses of correction ' for ^the punishment of vagrants were separately re-enacted in a stronger form six years later (7 Jac. cap. 4) ; all reference to magnates' licensed ' servants ' was there omitted. « Shakespeare's acquaintance, Thomas HeyTvood, the well-known actor and dramatist, in his Apology for Actors, 1612, asserts of the actors' profession (Sh. Soc. p. 4) : ' It hath beene esteemed by the best and greatest. To omit all the noble patrons of the former world, I need alledge no more then the royall and princely services in which we now live.' Towards the end of his tract Heywood after describing the estimation in which actors were held abroad adds (p. 60) : ' But in no coimtry they are of that eminence that ours are : so our most royall and ever renouned soveraigne hath licenced us in London : so did hia predecessor, the thrice vertuoua virgin, Queene Elizabeth.' SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 49 of their careers, or even to complete disbandment. Many companies confined their energies to the provinces or they only visited the capital on rare occasions in order to perform at Court at the summons of the Sovereign, who wished to pay a compliment to their titled master. Yet there were powerful influences making for perma- nence in the infant profession, and when Shakespeare arrived in London there were at work there at least seven companies, whose activities, in spite of vicissi- tudes, were continuous during a long course of years. The leading companies each consisted on the average of some twelve active members, the majority of whom were men, and the rest youths or boys, for no women found admission to the actors' ranks and the boys filled the female parts.^ Now and then two companies would com- bine, or a prosperous company would absorb an unsuc- cessful one, or an individual actor would transfer his services from one company to another ; but the great companies formed as a rule independent and organic units, and the personal constitution only saw the gradual changes which the passage of years made inevitable. Shakespeare, like most of the notable actors of the epoch, remained through his working days faithful to the same set of colleagues. 2 Of the well-established companies of licensed actors which enjoyed a reputation in London and the provinces The great when Shakespeare left his native place, three patrons. were under the respective patronage of the Earls of Leicester, of Pembroke,^ and of Worcester, while ^ As many as twenty-six actors are named in the full list of members of Shakespeare's company which is prefixed to the First FoUo of 1623, but at that date ten of these were dead, and three or four others had retired from active work. * The best account of the history and organisation of the com- panies is given in John Tucker Murray's English Dramatic Companies, 1558-1642, 2 vols. London, 1910. Fleay's History of the Stage, which also collects valuable information on the theme, is full of conjectural assertion, much of which Mr. Murray corrects. » This theatrical patron was Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pem- broke, the father of William Herbert, the third Earl, who is well E so WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE a fourth ' served ' the Lord Admiral Lord Charles Howard of Efi&ngham. These patrons or licensers were all peers of prominence at Queen EUzabeth's Court, and a noted band of actors bore one or other of their names.^ The fifth association of players which enjoyed general repute derived its Ucense from Queen Ehzabeth and was called the Queen's company. ^ This troop of actors was first formed in 1583 of twelve leading players who were drawn from other companies. After being ' sworn the Queen's servants ' they 'were allowed wages and liveries as grooms of the chamber.' ^ The company's career, in spite of its auspicious inauguration, was chequered; it ceased to perform at Court after 1591 and was irregular in its appearances at the London theatres after 1594 ; but it was exceptionally active on provincial tours until the Queen's death. In the absence of women actors the histrionic vocation was deemed especially well adapted to the capacity of „, boys, and two additional companies, which companies were formed exclusively of boy actors, were °-^^' in the enjoyment of hcenses from the Crown. They were recruited from the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Chapel Royal. The youthful performers, whose dramatic programmes resembled those of their seniors, acquired much popularity and proved formidable known to Shakespearean students (see infra, pp. 163, 687-94). The Pembroke company broke up on the second Earl's death on January 19, 1600-1, and it was not till some years after Shakespeare's death that an Earl of Pembroke again fathered a company of players. ^ The companies of the Earls of Sussex and of Oxford should not be reckoned among the cliief companies ; they very rarely gave public performances in London ; nor in the country were they continuously employed. The Earl of Oxford's company, which was constituted mainly of boys, occupied the first Blackfriars theatre in 1582-4, but was only seen publicly again in London in the two years 1587 and 1602 ; in the latter year it disappeared altogether. ^ A body of men was known uninterruptedly by the title of the Queen's Players from the opening years of Henry VIII's reign ; but no marked prestige attached to the designation until the formation of the new Queen's company of 1583. ^ Stow's Chronicle, ed. Howes {sub anno 1583). SHAKESPEAKE AND THE ACTORS 51 competitors with the men. The rivahy knew little pause during Shakespeare's professional life. The adult companies changed their name when a new patron succeeded on the death or the retirement of his predecessor. Alterations of the companies' of Lord titles were consequently frequent, and introduce Leicester's some perplexity in the history of their several careers. But there is good reason to beheve that the band of players which first fired Shakespeare's histrionic ambitions was the one which long enjoyed the patronage of Queen EUzabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester, and subsequently under a variety of designations filled the paramount place in the theatrical annals of the era. At the opening of Queen Ehzabeth's reign, the Earl of Leicester, who was known as Lord Robert Dudley before the creation of the earldom in 1564, numbered among his retainers men who provided the household with rough dramatic or musical entertainment. Early in 1572 six of these men api^lied to the Earl for a license in conformity with the statute of 1571, and thus the earliest company of licensed players was created.^ The histrionic organisa- tion made rapid progress. In 1574 Lord Leicester's com- pany which then consisted of no more than five players inaugurated another precedent by receiving the grant of a patent of incorporation under the priv3'' seal. Two years later James Burbage, whose name heads the list of Lord Leicester's ' men ' in the primordial charters of the stage, built in the near neighbourhood of London the first English playhouse, which was known as ' The Theatre.' The com- pany's numbers grew quickly and in spite of secessions which temporarily deprived them both of their home at ' The Theatre ' and of the services of James Burbage, Lord Leicester's players long maintained a coherent organisation. They acted for the last time at Court on Dec. 27, 1586,^ but ^ See p. 47 n. I. The names run, James Burbage, John Perkin, John Laneham, William Johnson, Robert Wilson and Thomas Clarke. Thomas Clarke's name was omitted from the patent of 1574. * Cf. E. K. Chambers's ' Court Performances before Queen Eliza- beth ' in Modern Language Review, vol. ii. p. 9. s 2 52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE were busy in the provinces until their great patron's death on September 4, 1588. Then with Httle delay the more prominent members joined forces with a less conspicuous troop of actors who were under the patronage of a highly cultured nobleman Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, son and heir of the fourth Earl of Derby. Lord Leicester's company was merged in that of Lord Strange to whose literary sympathies the poet Edmund Spenser bore witness, and when the new patron's father died on September 25, 1593, the company again changed its title to that of the Earl of Derby's servants. The new Earl lived less than seven months longer, dying on Apiil 16, 1594,^ and, though for the following month the company christened itself after his widow 'the Countess of Derby's players,' it found in June a more influential and more constant patron in Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, who held (from 1585) the office of Lord Chamberlain. Lord Hunsdon had already interested himself modestly in theatrical affairs. For some twelve previous years his protection was extended to players of humble fame, some of whom were mere acrobats.^ The Earl of Sussex, too, Hunsdon's predecessor in the post of Lord Cham- ' berlain (1572-1583), had at an even earlier period lent his name to a small company of actors, and, while their patron held office at Court, Lord Sussex's men occasionally ^ The 5th Earl of Derby was celebrated under the name ' Amyntas ' in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again (c. 1594). His brother and successor, William Stanley, 6th Earl, on succeeding to the earldom appears to have taken under his protection a few actors, but his company won no repute and its operations which lasted from 1594 to 1607 were confined to the provinces. Like many other noblemen, the sixth Earl I of Derby was deeply interested in the drama and would seem to have essayed playwriting. See p. 232 infra. * During 1584 an uimamed person vaguely described as ' owner ' of ' The Theatre ' claimed that he was under Lord Hunsdon's protection. The reference is probably to one John Hyde to whom the building was then mortgaged by James Burbage rather than to Burbage himself. Lord Hunsdon'p men were probably performing at the house in the absence of Leicester's company. Cf. Malone Society's Collections, vol. i. p. 166; Dr. C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre (Nebraska Uni- versity Studies), 1913, p. 12 ; Murray, English Dramatic Comjianies, i. 10. SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 53 adopted the alternative title of the Lord Chamberlain's servants.^ But the association of the Lord Chamberlain with the stage acquired genuine importance in theatrical history only in 1594 when Lord Hunsdon re-created his company by enrolUng with a few older dependents the men who had won their professional spurs as successive retainers of the Earls of Leicester and Derby. James Burbage now rejoined old associates, while his son Richard, who, unlike his father, had worked with Lord Derby's men, shed all the radiance of his matured genius on the Lord Chamberlain's new and far-famed organisation. ^ The subsequent stages in the company's pedigree are readily traced. There were no further graftings or reconstitution. When the Lord Chamberlain died on July 23, 1596, his son and heir, George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, accepted his histrionic responsibilities, and he, after a brief inter- val, himself became Lord Chamberlain (in March 1597). On February 19, 1597-8, the Privy Council bore witness to the growing repute of ' The Lord Chamberlain's men ' by making the amiouncement (which proved complimentary rather than operative) that that company and the Lord Admiral's company were the only two bands of players whose license strictly entitled them to perform plays any- where about London or before Her Majesty's Court.^ The company underwent no further change of name until the * Malone Society's Collections, vol. i. pp. 36-7 ; Malone'a Variorum Shakespeare (1821), iii. 406. * Besides Richard Burbage the following actors, according to extant lists of the two companies, passed in 1594 from the service of the Earl of Derby (formerly Lord Strange) to that of the Lord Cham- berlain (Lord Hunsdon), viz. : William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, Harry Condell, Will Sly, Richard Cowley, John Duke, Christopher Beeston. Save the two last, all these actors are named in the First Folio among ' the prin- cipal actors ' in Shakespeare's plays ; they follow immediately Shake- speare and Richard Burbage who head the First Folio list. William Kemp, Thomas Pope, and George Bryan were at an earlier period prominent among Lord Leicester's servants. The continuity of the company's personnel through jill the changes of patronage is well attested. (Fleay's History of the Stage, pp. 82-85, 135, 189.) ' Acts of the Privy Council, new series, vol. xxviii. 1597-1598 (1904), p. 327 ; see p. 339 itifra. 54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. A more signal recognition awaited it when Kling James ascended the throne in 1603. jj^g The new King took the company into his own King's patronage, and it became known as ' The King's ' or ' His Majesty's ' players. Thus advanced in titular dignity, the company remained true to its well- seasoned traditions during the rest of Shakespeare's career and through the generation beyond. There is little doubt that at an early period Shakespeare joined this eminent company of actors which in due time won the favour of King James. From 1592, speare's some six years after the dramatist's arrival in company. London, until the close of his professional career more than twenty years later, such an association is well attested. But the precise date and circumstance of his enrolment and his initial promotions are matters of con- jecture. Most of his colleagues of later hfe opened their histrionic careers in Lord Leicester's professional service, and there is plausible ground for inferring that Shakespeare from the first trod in their footsteps. ^ But direct informa- tion is lacking. Lord Leicester, who owned the manor of Kenilworth, was a Warwickshire magnate, and his players twice visited Stratford in Shakespeare's boyhood, for the first time in 1573 and for the second in 1577. Shakespeare may well have cherished hopes of admission to Lord Leicester's company in early youth. A third visit was paid by Leicester's company or its leading members to Shake- speare's native town in 1587, a year in which as many as four other companies also brought Stratford within the range of their provincial activities. But by that date the ^ Richard Burbage and John Heminges, leading actors of the com- pany while it was known successively as Lord^ Derby's and the Lord Chamberlain's 'men,' were close friends of Shakespeare from early years, but the common assumption that they were natives of Stratford is erroneous. Richard Burbage was probably born in Shoreditch (London) and John Heminges at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Green, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull theatre until his death in 1612, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that deserve attention. Shakespeare is not known to have been associated with him in any way. SHAKESPEAEE AND THE ACTORS 55 dramatist, according to tradition, was already in London. Lord Leicester's ' servants ' gave a farewell performance at Court at Christmas 1586,^ and early in L587 the greater number of them left London for a prolonged country tour. James Burbage had temporarily seceded and was managing ' The Theatre ' in other interests and with the aid of a few only of his former colleagues. The legend which connects Shakespeare's earliest theatrical experience ex- clusively with Burbage's playhouse therefore presumes that he associated himself near the outset of his career with a small contingent of Lord Leicester's ' servants ' and did not share the adventures of the main body. Shakespeare's later theatrical fortunes are on record. In 1589, after Lord Leicester's death, his company was reorganised, and it regained under the aegis of Lord Strange its London prestige. With Lord Strange's men Shake- speare was closely associated as dramatic author. He helped in the authorship of the First Part of ' Henry VI,' with which Lord Strange's men scored a triumphant success early in 1592. When in 1594 that company (then renamed the Earl of Derby's men) was merged in the far-famed Lord Chamberlain's company, Shakespeare is proclaimed by con- temporary official documents to have been one of its fore- most members. In December of that year he witVfhe joined its two leaders, Richard Burbage the Lord Cham- tragedian and William Kemp the comedian, in ^er^ain s ^^,^ performances at Court.^ He was prominent in the counsels of the Lord Chamberlain's servants through 1598 and was recognised as one of their chieftains in 1603. Four of the leading members of the Lord Chamberlain's company — Richard Burbage, John ^ Lord Leicester's men are included among the players whose activities in London dviring Shakespeare's first winter there (1586-7) are thus described in an unsigned letter to Sir Francis Walsingham under date Jan. 25, 1586-7 : ' Every day in the weeke the playeres billes are sett upp in sondry places of the cittie, some in the name of her Majesties menne, some the Earle of Leic : some the E. of Oxfordes, the Lo. Admyralles, and dyvers others, so that when the belles tole to the lectoures, the trumpettes sounde to the stages.' (Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 286; Halliwell-Phillipps, Illustrations, 1874, p. 108.) » See p. 87. 56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Heminges, Henry Condell and Augustine Phillips, all of whom worked together under Lord Strange (Earl of Derby) — were among his lifelong friends. Similarly under this company's auspices, almost all of Shakespeare's thirty- seven plays were presented to the public .^ Only two of the dramas claimed for him — ' Titus Andronicus ' and ' The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke,' a first draft of ' 3 Henry VI ' — are positively known to have been per- formed by other bands of players. The 'True Tragedie' was, according to the title-page of the pubhshed version of 1595, ' sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke his servants,' while ' Titus Andronicus ' is stated on the title-page of the first edition of 1594 to have been ' plaide ' not only by the company of ' the Right Honourable the Earle of Derbie,' but in addition by the servants of both ' the Earle of Pembroke and Earle of Sussex.' ^ Shakespeare was responsible for fragments only of these two pieces, and the main authors would seem to have been attached to other companies, which, after having originally produced them, transferred them to Shakespeare's colleagues. It is alone with the com- pany which began its career under the protection of Lord Leicester and ended it under royal patronage that Shake- speare's dramatic activities were conspicuously or durably identified. ^ On the title-pages of thirteen plays which were published (in quarto) in the poet's lifetime it was stated that they had been acted by this com- pany under one or other of its four successive designations (the Earl of Derby's, the Lord Chamberlain's, Lord Hunsdon's, or the King's ser- vants). The First FoUo of 1623, which collected all Shakespeare's plaj'S, was put together by his feUow-actors Heminges and Condell, who claimed ownership in them as having been written for their company. * The second edition of Titus Andronicus (1600) adds ' the Lord Chamberlain's servants ' ; but the Earl of Derby and the Lord Cham- berlain were, as we have seen, successive patrons of Shakespeare's company. Lord Pembroke's servants in 1593-4 were in financial straits, and sold some of their plays to Shakespeare's and other com- panies. Titu^ was produced as a ' new play ' by Lord Sussex's men at the Rose theatre on January 23, 1593-4 (cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 78, 105) ; it may have been sold to them by the Pembroke pompany after an abortive attempt at representation. VI ON THE LONDON STAGE ' The Theatre,' the playhouse at Shoreditch, where Shake- speare is credibly reported to have gained his first experience _, , , of the stagre, was a timber structure Avhich had 1 he rirst ^ playhouse been erected in 1576. Its builder and proprietor m ngan .^ James Burbage, an original member of Lord Leicester's company, was at one time a humble carpenter and joiner, and he carried out his great design on borrowed capital. The site, which had once formed part of the precincts of the Benedictine priory (or convent) of Holy- well, lay outside the city's north-eastern boundaries, and within the jurisdiction not of the Lord Mayor and City Council which viewed the nascent drama with puritanic disfavour, but of the justices of the peace for Middlesex, who had not committed themselves to an attitude of hostility. The building stood a few feet to the east of the thoroughfare now named Curtain Road, Shoreditch, and near at hand was the open tract of land variously known as Finsbury Fields and INIoorfields.^ ' The Theatre ' was the first house erected in England to serve a theatrical purpose. Previously plays had been publicly performed in innyards or (outside London) in Guildhalls. More select representa- tions were given in the halls of royal palaces, of noblemen's ^ The precise site of ' The Theatre ' has been latel}' determiaed by Mr. W. W. Braines, a principal oflScer of the London County Council. (See London County Council — Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London — Part xliii. Holywell Priory and the site of The Theatre, Shoreditch, 1915.) Mr. Braines corrects errors on the subject for which Hedliwell-Phillipps' (OuiZinea, i. 351) was responsible. 57 58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE mansions and of the Inns of Court. Throughout Shake- speare's career all such places continued to serve theatrical uses. Drama never ceased altogether in his time to haunt inn-yards and the other makeshift scenes of its infancy to which the pubhc at large were admitted on payment ; there was a growth, too, in the practice of presenting plays before invited guests in great halls of private ownership. But James Burbage's primal endeavour to give the drama a home of its own quickly bore abundant fruit. Puritan- ism launched vain invectives against Burbage's ' ungodly edifice ' as a menace to public morality. City Councillors at the instigation of Puritan preachers made futile endeav- ours to close its doors. Burbage's innovation promised the developing drama an advantage which was appreciated by the upper classes and by the mass of the people outside the Puritan influence. The growth of the seed which he sowed was little hindered by the clamour of an unsym- pathetic piety. The habit of playgoing spread rapidly, and the older and more promiscuous arrangements for popular dramatic recreation gradually yielded to the formidable competition which flowed from the energy of Burbage and his disciples. James Burbage, in spite of a long series of pecuniary embarrassments, remained manager and owner of ' The Theatre ' for nearly twenty-one years. Shortly '^^® . , after the building was opened, in 1576, there came into being in its near neighbourhood a second London playhouse, the ' Curtain,' ^ also within a short distance of Finsbury Fields or Moorfields, and near the present Curtain Road,Shoreditch, which preserves its name. The two playhouses proved friendly rivals, and for a few years (1585-1592) James Burbage of ' The Theatre ' shared in the management of the younger house at the same time as he controlled the older. Towards the close of the century Shakespeare spent at least one season at ^ The name was derived from an adjacent ' curtain ' or outer wall of an obsolete fortification abutting on the old London Wall. ON THE LONDON STAGE 59 the Curtain.^ But between 1586 and 1600 there arose in the environs of London six new theatres in addition to ' The Theatre ' and the ' Curtain,' and within the city walls the courtyards of the larger inns served with a new vigour theatrical purposes. Actors thus enjoyed a fau'ly wide choice of professional homes when the dramatist's career was in full flight.^ When Shakespeare and his colleagues first came under the protection of Lord Strange, they were faithful to * The Theatre ' save for an occasional performance in the inn-yard of the ' Crosske\'-s ' in Gracechurch Street,^ but 1 After 1600 the vogue of the ' Curtain ' declined. No reference to the ' Curtain ' playhouse has been found later than 1627. • The chief of the Elizabethan playhouses apart from ' The Theatre ' and the ' Curtain ' were the Newington Butts (erected before 15S6) ; the Rose on the Bankside (erected about 1587 and reconstructed in 1592) ; the Swan also on the Bankside (erected in 1595) ; the Globe also on the Bankside (erected out of the dismantled fabric of ' The Theatre ' in 1599) ; the Fortune in Golden Lane without Cripplegate (modelled on the Globe in 1600) ; and the Red Bull in St. John's Street, Clerkenwell (built about 1600). Besides these edifices which were unroofed there were two smaller theatres of a more luxurious and secluded type — ' Paul's ' and ' Blackfriars ' — which were known as ' private ' houses (see p. 66 infra). At the same time there were several inns, in the quadrangular j-ards or courts of which plays con- tinued to be acted from time to time in Shakespeare's early years ; these were the Bel Sauvage in Ludgate Hill, the Bell and the Crosskeys both in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate, and the Boar's Head in Eastcheap. During the latter part of Shakespeare's life only one addition was made to the public theatres, viz. the Hope in 1613 on the site of the demolished Paris Garden, in Southwark, but two new ' private ' theatres were constructed — the Whitefriars, adjoining Dorset Gardens, Fleet Street (built before 1608), and the Cockpit, after- wards rechristened the Phoenix (built about 1610), the first playhouse in Drury Lane. See Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, 1904 ; W. J. Lawrence's The Elizabethan Playhouse and other Studies. 2nd ser. p. 237 ; James Greenstreet's ' lawsuit about the Whitefriars Theatre in 1609 ' in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1887-92, pp. 269 seq. ; and Dr. Wallace's Three London Theatres of Shakespeare's Time, in Nebraska University Studies, 1909, ix. pp. 287 seq., his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (1597-1603), 1908, and his paper 'The Swan Theatre and the Earl of Pembroke's Servants ' in Englische Studien (1910-1) xliii. 350 seq. 8 Hazlitt's English Drama, 1869, pp. 34-5. 60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE there soon followed a prolonged season at a playhouse called the ' Rose,' which Philip Henslowe, the speculative g, , theatrical manager, had lately reconstructed on at the the Bankside, South wark. It was the earliest playhouse in a district which was soon to be specially identified with the drama. Lord Strange's men began work at the ' Rose ' on February 19, 1591-2. At the date of their occupation of this theatre, Shakespeare's company temporarily alhed itself with the Lord Admiral's men, which was its chief rival among the companies of the day. The Lord Admiral's players numbered the great actor Edward AUeyn among them.i Alleyn now for a few months took the direction at the ' Rose ' of the combined companies, but the two bodies soon parted, and no later opportunity was offered Shakespeare of enjoying profes- sional relations with Alleyn. The ' Rose ' theatre was the first scene of Shakespeare's pronounced successes alike as actor and dramatist. Subsequently, during the theatrical season of 1594, Shakespeare and his company, now known as the Lord Chamberlain's men, divided their energies between the stage of another youthful theatre at Newington Butts and the older-fashioned innyard of the ' Crosskeys.' The next three years were chiefly spent in their early Shoreditch home ' The Theatre,' which had been occupied in their absence by other companies. But during 1598, owing to ' The Theatre's ' structural decay and to the manager Burbage's difficulties with his creditors and with the ground landlord, the company found a brief asylum in the neigh- bouring ' Curtain,' in which more than one fellow-actor of the dramatist acquired a proprietary interest.^ There ' Romeo and Juhet ' was revived with applause.^ This was ^ Alleyn and the Lord Admiral's men had previously worked for a time with James Bm'bage at ' The Theatre,' and Alleyn 's company joined the older Lord Chamberlain's company in a performance at Court, January 6, 1585-6. {YLalMweWs Illustratioi^s. 31.) * See Thomas Pope's and John Underwood's wills in Collier's Lives of the Actors, pp. 127, 230. * Marston's Scourge of Villanie, 1598, Satyre 10. ON THE LONDON STAGE 61 Shakespeare's last experience for some twelve years of a playhouse on the north side of the Thames. The theatrical quarter of London was rapidly shifting from the north to the south of the river. At the close of 1598 the primal Enghsh playhouse ' The Theatre ' underwent a drastic metamorphosis in which the dramatist played a foremost part. James Burbage, the owner and builder of the veteran house, died on February 2, 1596-7, and the control of the property passed to his widow and his two sons Cuthbert and the actor Richard. The latter, Shakespeare's life-long friend, was nearing the zenith of his renown. The twenty-one years' lease of the land in Shoreditch ran out on April 13 following and the landlord was reluctant to grant the Burbages a renewal of the tenancy.^ Prolonged negotia- tion failed to yield a settlement. Thereupon Cuthbert Burbage, the elder son and heir, in conjunction with his younger brother Richard, took the heroic resolve of de- moUshing the building and transferring it bodily to ground to be rented across the Thames. Shakespeare and four other members of the company, Augustine Philhps, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and WiUiam Kemp, were taken by the Burbages into their counsel. The seven men proceeded jointly to lease for a term of thirty-one years a site on the Bankside in Southwark. The fabric of ' The Theatre ' was accordingly torn down in defiance of the landlord during the last days of December 1598 and the timber materials were re-erected, with liberal reinforcements, on ^ James Burbage, throughout his tenure of ' The Theatre,' was involved in very compUcated Utigation arising out of the terms of the original lease of the ground and of the conditions in which money was invested in the venture by various relatives and others. The numerous legal papers are in the Public Record Office. A few were found there and were printed by J. P. CoUior in his Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (1846), pp. 7 seq., and these reappear with substantial additions in HalliweU-PhiUipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (i. 357 seq.). Dr. Wallace's researches have yielded a mass of supplementary documents which were previously unknown, and he has printed the whole in The First London Theatre, Materials for a History, Nebraska University Studies, 1913. 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE the new site between January and May 1599.^ The trans- planted building was christened ' The Globe,' and it quickly entered on an era of prosperity which was founding of without precedent in theatrical annals. ' The the Globe, Glory of the Bank [i.e. the Bankside],' as Ben Jonson called ' The Globe,' was, like ' The Theatre,' mainly constructed of wood. A portion only was roofed, and that was covered with thatch. The exterior, according to the only extant contemporary view, was cir- cular, and resembled a magnified martello tower.^ In the opening chorus of ' Henry V ' Shakespeare would seem to have written of the theatre as ' this cockpit ' (line 11), and 'this wooden O' (line 13), and to have likened its walls to a girdle about the stage (Une 19).^ Legal instruments credited Shakespeare Avith playing a principal role in the many complex transactions of which the ' Globe ' theatre was the fruit.* 1 Giles Allen, the ground landlord of ' The Theatre,' brought an action against Peter Street, the carpenter who superintended the removal of the fabric to South wark, but after a long litigation the plaintiff was nonsuited. * See Hondius's View of London 1610 in HaUiweU-Phillipps's Out- lines, i. 182. The original theatre was burnt down on June 29, 1613, and was rebuilt ' in a far fairer manner than before ' (see pp. 447-9 infra). Visscher, in his well-known View of London 1616, depicts the new structure as of octagonal or polygonal shape. The new building was demolished on April 16, 1644, and the site occupied by small tenements. * The prologue to The Merry Devil of Edmonton acted at the Globe before 1607 has the line : We ring this round with our invoking spells. * See p. 301 infra. The Globe theatre abutted on Maid Lane (now known as Park Street), a modest thoroughfare in Southwark running some way behind Bankside on the river bank and parallel with it. There is difficulty in determining whether the theatre stood on the north or the south side of the roadway, the north side backing on to Bankside and the south side stretching landwards. At a short distance to the south of Maid Lane there long ran a passage (now closed) which was christened after the theatre Globe Alley. A commemorative tablet was placed in 1909 on the south side of the street on the outer wall of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins's brewer}', which formerly belonged to Hemy Thrale, Dr. Johnson's friend, and has for 150 years been locally identified with the site of the theatre. The southern site is indeed powerfully supported by a mass of legal evidence, by plans ON THE LONDON STAGE 63 With yet another memorable London theatre — the Blackfriars — Shakespeare's fortunes were intimately bound up, though only through the closing years of his Blackfriars. Professional hfe. The precise circumstances and duration of his connexion with this playhouse have often been misrepresented. Li origin the Blackfriars was only a little younger than ' The Theatre,' but it differed widely in structure and saw many changes of fortune in the course of years. As early as 1578 a spacious suite of rooms in a dwelling-house within the precincts of the dissolved monastery of Blackfriars was converted into a theatre of modest appointment. For six years the Black- friars playhouse enjoyed a prosperous career. But its doors were closed in 1584, and for some dozen years the building resumed its former status of a private dwelling. In 1596 James Burbage, the founder of ' The Theatre,' ambitious to extend his theatrical enterprise in spite of the atten- dant anxieties, bought for 600Z. the premises which had given Blackfriars a fleeting theatrical fame, together with adjacent property, and at a large outlay fashioned his pur- chase afresh into a playhouse on an exceptionally luxurious and maps, and by local tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies. (See Dr. William Martin's exhaustive and fully illustrated paper on ' The Site of the Globe Playhouse ' in Surrey ArchcBological Collections, vol. xxiii. (1910), pp. 148-202.) But it must be admitted that Dr. Wallace brought to light in 1909 a legal document in the theatrical lawsuit, Osteler v. Heminges, 1616 (Pro Ck)ram Rege 1454, 13 Jac. 1, Hil. m. 692), which, according to the ob\'ious interpretation of the words, allots the theatre to the north side of Maid Lane (see 'Shakespeare in London,' The Times, October 2 and 4, 1909). Further evidence (dating between 1593 and 1606), which was adduced by Dr. Wallace in 1914 from the Records of the Sewers Commissioners, shows that the owners of the playhouse owned property on the north side even if the theatre were on the south side (see The Times, April 30, 1914), while Visscher's panoramic map of London 1616 alone of maps of the time would appear to place the theatre on the north side. It seems barely possible to reconcile the conflicting evidence. The controversy has lately been continued in Notes and Queries (11th series, xi. and xii.) chiefly by Mr. George Hubbard, who champions anew the northern site, and by Dr. Martin who strongly supports afresh the southern site. 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE plan.i It was no more than half the size of the Globe, but was its superior in comfort and equipment. Unhappily the new scheme met an unexpected check. The neighbours protested against the restoration of the Blackfriars stage, and its re-opening was postponed. The adventurous owner died amid the controversy (on February 2, 1596-7), bequeathing his remodelled theatre to his son Richard Burbage. Richard dechned for the time personal charge of his father's scheme, and he arranged for the occupa- tion of the Blackfriars by the efficient company of young actors kno^\'n as the Children of the Chapel Royal,^ On September 21, 1600, he formally leased the house for twenty-one years to Henry Evans who was the Children's manager. For the next five seasons the Children's per- formances at Blackfriars rivalled in popularity those at the Globe itself. Queen EUzabeth proved an active patron 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, in his Outlines i. 299), printed the deed of the transfer of the Blackfriars property to James Burbage on Feb. 4, 1595-6 (cf. Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. 60-9). Much further light on the history of the Blackfriars theatre has been shed by the documents discovered by Prof. Albert Feuillerat and cited in his ' The Origin of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Theatre : Recent Discovery of Documents,' in the SJiaJcespeare Jahrbuch, vol. xlviii. (1912) pp. 81-102, and in his ' Blackfriars Records ' in Malone Society's Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. (1913). Dr. Wallace also brought together much documentary material in his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597-1603 (1908), and in his ' Shake- speare in London ' {The Tiines, Oct. 2 and 4, 1909). The Blackfriars theatre was on the site of The Times publishing office off Queen Victoria Street. Its memory survives in the passage called Playhouse Yard, which adjoins The Times premises. * Evans was lessee and general manager of the theatre and instructed the Children in acting. Nathaniel Giles, a competent musical composer, who became ' Master of the Children of the Chapel ' under a patent dated July 15, 1597, was their music master. (Fleaj^, Hist, of Stage, 126 seq.) When, at IVIichaelmas 1600, Evans took, in ' confederacy ' with Giles, a lease of the Blackfriars theatre from Burbage for twenty-one years at an annual rental of iOl. in the interest of the Children's performances the building was described in the instrument as ' then or late ' in Evans's ' tenure or occupation.' These words are quite capable of the inter- pretation that the ' Children ' were working at the Blackfriars under Giles and Evans some years before Evans took his long lease (but cf. E. K. ChambeiB in Mod. Laibg. Rev. iv. 156). ON THE LONDON STAGE 65 of the boys of the Blackfriars, inviting them to perform at Court twice in the winters of 1601 and of 1602.1 When James I ascended the throne they were admitted to the service of Queen Anne of Denmark and rechristened ' Children of the Queen's Revels ' (Jan. 13, 1603-4). But the youthful actors were of insolent demeanour and often produced plays which offended the Court's pohtical sus- ceptibilities.- In 1605 the company was peremptorily dissolved by order of the Privy Council. Evans's lease of the theatre was unexpired but no rent was forthcoming, and Richard Burbage as owner recovered possession on August 9, 1608.^ After an interval, in January 1610, the great actor assumed full control of his father's chequered venture, and Shakespeare thenceforth figured prominently in its affairs. Thus for the last six years of the dra- matist's hfe his company maintained two London play- houses, the Blackfriars as well as the Globe. The summer 1 Murray, i. 335 ; E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Rev. ii. 12. Sir Dudley Caileton, the Court gossip, wrote on Dec. 29, 1601, that the Queen dined that day privately at my Lord Chamberlain's {i.e. Lord Hunsdon's). He adds ' I came even now from the Blackfriars where I saw her at the plaj* with all her candidae audit) ices.^ (Cal. State Papers Doin. 1601-3, p. 136 ; Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, p. 95.) The last words have been assumed to mean that the Queen visited the Blackfriars theatre. There is no other instance of her appear- ance in a playhouse. The house of the Queen's host, Lord Hunsdon, lay in the precincts of Blackfriars and the reference is probably to a dramatic entertainment which he provided for his royal guest under his own roof. A theatrical performance after dinner was not uncommon at Hunsdon House. On March 6, 1599-1600, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon ' feasted ' the Flemish envoy Verreiken ' and there in the aftemoone his Plaiers acted before [his guest] Sir John Oldcastell to his great contentment ' (Sydney Papers, ii. 175). Queen Henrietta Maria seems to be the first English Sovereign of whose visit to a theatre there is no question. Her presence in the Blackfriars theatre on May 13, 1634, is fully attested {Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 167). » See p. 306 infra. ^ The ' Children ' were rehabilitated in 1608, and Burbage allowed them to act at the Blackfriars theatre at intervals till January 4. 1609-10. Beaumont and Fletcher's Scornful Lady was the last piece which they produced there. They then removed to the Whitefriars tlieatre. Two years later they were dissolved altogether, the chief members of the troop being drafted into adult companies. 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE season was spent on the Bankside and the winter at Blackfriars.^ The divergences in the structure of the two houses rendered their usage appropriate at different seasons of the year. A ' pubhc ' or ' common ' theatre like the • private ' Globe had no roof over the arena. The Black- p ay ouse. fj-jars, which was loiown as a ' private ' theatre, better observed conditions of privacy or seclusion in the auditorium, and made fuller provision for the comfort of the spectators. It was as well roofed as a private residence and it was Hghted hy candles. ^ At the private theatre properties, costumes, and music were more elabo- rately contrived than at the public theatre. But the same dramatic fare was furnished at both kinds of playhouse. Each filled an identical part in the drama's literary history. It was not only to the London pubhc which frequented the theatres that the dramatic profession of the Shake- spearean epoch addressed its efforts. Beyond ances at the theatres lay a superior domain in which "^ ■ the professional actor of Shakespeare's day con- stantly practised his art with conspicuous advantage both to his reputation and to his purse. Every winter and occasionally at other seasons of the year the well-estab- lished companies gave, at the royal palaces which ringed London, dramatic performances in the presence of the Sovereign and the Court. The pieces acted at Elizabeth's ^ This arrangement continued long after Shakespeare's death — until Sept. 2, 1642, when all theatres -were closed by order of the Long Parlia- ment. The Blackfriars was pulled down on August 5, 1655, and, as in the case of the Globe theatre which was demolished eleven years earlier, tenements were erected on its site. 2 The ' private ' type of theatre, to which the Blackfriars gave assured vogue, was inaugurated in a playhouse which was formed in 1581 out of the singing school at St. Paul's Cathedral near the Con- vocation House for the acting company of the cathedral choristers ; this building was commonly called ' Paul's.' Its theatrical use by St. Paul's boys was suspended between 1590 and 1600 and finaJly ceased in 1606 when the manager of the rival company of the ' chapel ' boys at the Blackfriars bribed the manager of the St. Paul's company to close his doors. Cf. E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Bcvkw, 1909, p. 153 seq. ON THE LONDON STAGE 67 Court were officially classified as 'morals, pastorals, stories, histories, tragedies, comedies, interludes, inventions, and antic plays.' During Shakespeare's youth, masques or pageants in which scenic device, music, dancing, and cos- tume overshadowed the spoken word, filled a large place in the royal programme. Such performances were never excluded from the Court festivities, and in the reign of King James I were often undertaken by amateurs, who were drawn from the courtiers, both men and women. But full-fledged stage plays which were only capable of professional presentation signally encroached on spec- tacular entertainment. Throughout Shakespeare's career the chief companies made a steadily increasing contri- bution to the recreations of the palace, and the largest share of > the coveted work fell in his later years to the dramatist and his colleagues. The boy companies were always encouraged by the Sovereign, and they long vied with their seniors in supplying the histrionic demands of ro3'alty. But Shakespeare's company ultimately out- stripped at Court the popularity even of the boys. The theatrical season at Court invariably opened on the day after Christmas, St. Stephen's Day (Dec. 26), and performances were usually continued on the succeeding St. John's Day (Dec. 27), on Innocents' Day (Dec. 28), on the next Sunday, and on Twelfth Night (Jan. 6). The dramatic celebrations were sometimes resumed on Candle- mas day (Feb. 2), and always on Shrove Sunday or Shrove Tuesday. Under King James, Hallowmas (Nov. 1) and additional days in November and at Shrove-tide were also similarly distinguished, and at other periods of the year, when royal hospitaUties were extended to eminent foreign guests, a dramatic entertainment by pro- fessional players was commonly provided. A different play was staged at each performance, so that in some years there were produced at Court as many as twenty- three separate pieces. The dramas which the Sovereign witnessed were seldom written for the occasion. They had already won the public ear in the theatre. A special F 2 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE prologue and epilogue were usually prepared for the per- formances at Court, but in other respects the royal pro- ductions were faithful to the popular fare. The Court therefore enjoyed ample opportunity of familiarising itself with the public taste. Queen EHzabeth sojourned by turns at her many palaces about London. Christmas was variously spent at Hampton Court, Whitehall, Windsor, and Greenwich. At other seasons she occupied royal residences, which have long since vanished, at Nonsuch, near Cheam, and at Richmond, Surrey. James I acquired an additional resi- dence in Theobalds Palace at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. To all these places, from time to time, Shakespeare and his fellow-players were warmly welcomed. A temporary stage was set up for their use in the great hall of each royal dwelHng, and numerous artificers, painters, carpenters, wiredrawers, armourers, cutlers, plumbers, tailors, feather- makers were enlisted by the royal officers in the service of the drama. Scenerj^ properties and costume were of rich and elaborate design, and the common notion that austere simplicity was an universal characteristic of dramatic production through Shakespeare's lifetime needs some radical modification, if due consideration be paid to the scenic methods which were habitual at Court. Spectacular embellishments characterised the performances of the regular drama no less than of masques and pageants. Painted canvas scenery was a common feature of all Court theatricals. The scenery was constructed on the multiple or simultaneous principle which prevailed at the time in France and Italy and rendered superfluous change in the course of the performance. The various scenic backgrounds which the story of the play prescribed formed compart- ments (technically known as ' houses ' or ' mansions ') which were linked together so as to present to the audience an unbroken semicircle. The actors moved about the stage from compartment to compartment or from ' house ' to ' house ' as the development of the play required. This ' multiple setting ' was invariably employed during ON THE LONDON STAGE 69 Elizabeth's reign in the production at Court not merely of pageants or spectacles, but of the regular drama.^ In the reign of King James the scenic machinery at Court rapidly developed at the hands of Inigo Jones, the great architect, and separate set scenes with devices for their rapid change came to replace the old methods of simul- taneous multiplicity. The costume too, at any rate in the production of masques, ultimately satisfied every call of archaeological or historical as well as of artistic propriety. The performances at Court always took place by night, and great attention was bestowed on the lighting of the royal hall by means of candles and torches. The emolu- ments which were appointed for the players' labours at Court were substantial.- For nearly twenty years Shake- speare aijd his intimate associates took a constant part in dramatic representations which were rendered in these favoured conditions.^ 1 That scenic elaboration on the * house ' system, to which painted canvas scenery was essential, accompanied dramatic entertainments of all kinds at Queen Elizabeth's Court is clearly proved by the extant records of tho Master of the Revels Office (Feuillerat's Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs, p. 66 n. ). Sir Thomas Benger, Master of the Revels at the opening of tho Queen's reign, gave, according to the documentary evidence, orders which his successors repeated ' for tho apparelling, disgyzinge, ffurnishing, fitting, garnishing & orderly setting foorthe of men, woomcn and children : in sundry Tragedies, playes, maskes and sportes, with thcier apte howses of paynted canvas & properties incident suche as mighte most Ij^ely expresse the effect of the histories plaied, &c.' (Feuillerat's Documents etc., 129). Elsewhere the evidence attests that ' six playes . . . were l3-kewise throwghly apparelled, & furniture, ffitted and garnished necessarely, & answerable to tho matter, person and parte to be played : having also apt howses : made of canvasse, fframed, ffashioned & paynted accordingly, as mighte best serve thcier severall purposes. Together with sundry properties incident, ffashioned, paynted, garnished, and bestowed as the partyes them selves required and needed ' {ibid. 145). In 1573 405. was paid 'for canvas for the howses made for the players' {ibid. 221) and in 1574-5 SI. 15s. for canvas ' imployed upon the houses and properties made for the players ' {ibid. 243). - See pp. 299, 313 infra. 3 The activities of the players at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I are very amply attested. For the official organisation of the court performances and expenditure on the scenic arrangement during Queen Elizabeth's reign, see E. K. Chambers, Xotes on the History of the Bevels Office under the Tudors, 1906, and Feuillerat's Documents relating to the 70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE The royal example of requisitioning select performances of plaj'^s by professional actors at holiday seasons was followed intermittently bj^ noblemen and by the benchers of the Inns of Court.^ Of the welcome which Avas accorded to travelhng companies at private mansions Shakespeare offers a graphic picture in ' The Taming of the Shrew ' and in ' Hamlet.' In both pieces he laid under contribution his personal experience. Evidence, moreover, is at hand Office of the Bevels in the Time of Elizabeth in Bang's Materialien, Bd. xxi (Louvain, 1908) and in Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs et la mise en seine a. la cour d; Elizabeth (Louvain, 1910). Court performances were formally registered in three independent repertories of original official documents, viz. : 1. The Treasurer of the Chamber's Original Accounts (of which abstracts were entered in the Declared Accounts of the Audit Office, such abstracts being duplicated in the Rolls of the Pipe Office) ; 2. The Acts of The Privy Council ; and 3. The ' original accounts ' or office books of the Masters of the Revelt.. The entries in the three series of records foUow different formulae, and the information which is given in one series supplements that given in the others. Only the Declared Accounts which abstract the Original Accounts and are dupli- cated in the Pipe Rolls, are now extant in a complete state. The bulk of aU these records are preserved at the Public Record Office, but some frag- ments have drifted into the British Museum {Harl. MSS. 1641, 1642, and 1644) and into the Bodleian Library (Bawl. MSS. A 239 and 240). A selection of the accessible data down to 1585 was first printed in George Chalmers's An Apology for Believers, 1797, p. 394 seq., and this was reprinted with important additions in Malone's Varioruin Sliakespeare, 1821, iii. 360-409, 423-9, 445-50. Peter Cunningham, in his Extracts from the Bevels at Court in iJie Beigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James the First (Shakespeare Society, 1842), confined his researches to the extant portions of the Treasurer of tlie Chamber's Original Accounts, and to the Master of the Revels' Office Books, between 1560 and 1619. Dr. C. W. Wallace, in The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare, BerUn, 1912, pp. 199-225, prints most of the relevant documents in the Record Office respecting Court performances between 1558 and 1585. ]\Ir. E. K. Chambers, in his ' Court Performances before Queen Elizabeth ' {Mod. Lang. Beview, 1907, pp. 1-13) and in his ' Court Performances under James I ' {ib. 1909, pp. 153-66) valuably supplements the informa- tion whicli is printed elsewhere, from the Declared Accounts and the Pipe Rolls between 1558 and 1616. ^ Dramatic performances which were more or less elaborately staged were usually provided for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth and James I on their visits to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But the pieces were commonly written specially by graduates for the occasion, and were acted by amateur students. ON THE LONDON STAGE 71 to show that his ' Comedy of Errors ' was acted before benchers, students, and their guests (on Innocents' Day, Dec. 28, 1594) in the hall of Gray's Inn, and his ' TweKth Night ' in that of the Middle Temple on Candlemas Day, February 2, 1601-2. In such environment the manner of presentation was identical with that which was adopted at the Court. Methods of representation in the theatres of Shake- speare's day, whether of the public or private type, had little in common with the complex splendours presentation in vogue at Court. Yet the crudity of the in public equipment which is usually imputed to the Elizabethan theatre has been much exagger- ated. It was only in its first infancy that the Eliza- bethau' stage showed that poverty of scenic machinery which has been erroneously assigned to it through the whole of the Shakespearean era. The rude traditions of the inn-yard, the earliest public home of the drama, were not eliminated quickly, and there was never any attempt to emulate the luxurious Court fashions, but there were many indications during the poet's lifetime of a steady development of scenic or spectacular appliances in pro- fessional quarters. The ' private ' playhouse of which the Blackfriars was the most successful example mauily differed from the ' public ' theatre in the enhanced com- fort which it assured the playgoer, and in the more select audience which the slightly higher prices of ad- mission encouraged. The substantial roof covering all parts of the house gave the ' private ' theatre an ad- vantage over the ' public ' theatre, the area of which was open to the sky, and the innovation of artificial lighting proved a complementary attraction. The scenic apparatus and accessories of the ' private ' theatre may have been more abundant and more refined than in the ' pubHc ' theatre. But there was no variation in principle and it was for the public theatres that most of Shakespeare's work as both actor and dramatist vras done. In the result the scenic standards vvith which he was familiar outside 72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE the precincts of the Court fell far short of the elabora- tion which flourished there, but they ultimately satisfied the more modest calls of scenic illusion. Scenic spectacle invaded the regular playhouse at a much later date. In the Shakespearean theatre the equipment and machinery were always simple enough to throw on the actor a heavier responsibihty than any which his successors knew. The dramatic effect owed almost everything to his intonation and gesture. The available evidence credits Ehzabethan representations with making a profound impression on the audience. The fact bears signal tribate to the histrionic efficiency of the profession when it counted Shakespeare among its members. The Elizabethan pubHc theatres were usually of octa- gonal or circular shape. In their leading features they followed an uniform structural plan, but there structural were many variations in detail, which perplex ^ ^^' counsel. The area or pit was at the disposition of the ' groundlings ' who crowded round three sides of the projecting stage. Their part of the building which was open to the sky was without seats. The charge for admis- sion there was one penny. Beneath a narrow circular roof of thatch three galleries, a development of the balconies of the quadrangular innyards, encircled the auditorium ; the two lower ones were partly divided into boxes or rooms while the uppermost gallery was unpartitioned. The cost of entry to the galleries ranged from twopence in the highest tier to half a crown in the lowest. Seats or cushions were to be hired at a small additional fee. Foreign visitors to the Globe were emphatic in acknowledgment that from all parts of the house there was a full view of the stage.^ A small section of the audience was also ac- commodated in some theatres in less convenient quarters. ^ A foreign visitor's manuscript diary, now in the Vatican, describes a visit to the Globe on Monday, Julj' 3, 1600. His words ran ' Audivimus Comoediam AngHcam ; theatrum ad morem antiquorum Romanorum constructum ex lignis, ita formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores commodissime singula videre possint.' {The Times, Apiil 4, 1914.) ON THE LONDON STAGE 73 In many houses visitors were allowed to occupy seats on the stage.^ Sometimes expensive ' rooms ' or ' boxes ' were provided in an elevated gallery overlooking the back of the stage. It has been estimated that the Globe theatre held some 1200 spectators, and the Blackfriars half that number.^ The stage was a rough development of the old im- provised raised platform of the inn-yard. It ran far into the auditorium so that the actors often spoke TllG St3.S€ in the centre of the house, with the audience of the arena well-nigh encirchng them. There was no front ^ Cf. Thomas Dekker, Gids Hornbook, 1609, chap. vi. (' How a Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse') : ' Whether therefore the gatherers [i.e. the money- takers] of the pubHque or private playhouses etand to receive the afternoones rent, let our Gallant (having paid it) presently advance himselfe up to the Throne of the stage on the very Rushes where the Comedy is to dance . . : ; . By sitting on the stage you may have a good stool for sixpence.' * Cf. C. W. Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597- 1603, 1908, pp. 49 seq. The chief pieces of documentary evidence as to the internal structure of the Elizabethan theatres are the detailed building contracts for the erection of the Fortune theatre in 1600 after the plan of the Globe and of the Hope theatre in 1613 after the plan of the Swan. Both are at Dulwich and were first printed by Malone (Variorum, iii. 338 seq.) and more recently in Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, pp. 4 seq. and 19 seq. A Dutchman John De Witt visiting London in 1596 made a drawing of the interior of the Swan theatre, a copy of which is extant in the library at Utrecht. A short description in Latin is appended. De Witt's sketch is of great interest, not merely from its size and completeness, but as being the only strictly con- temporary picture of the interior of a sixteenth-century playhouse which has yet come to light. At the same time it is difficult to reconcile De Witt's sketch with the other extant information. He may have depended on memory for his detail. His statement that the Swan theatre held 3000 persons ' in sediUbus ' {i.e. in the seated galleries apart from the arena) would seem to be an exaggeration (see Zur Kenntniss der Alt- englischen Biihnc von Karl Theodor Gacdertz. Mit der ersten authent- ischen innern Ansicht des Schwan-Theaters in London, Bremen, 1888). Three later pictorial representations of a seventeenth-century stage are known ; all are of small size and they differ in detaU from De Witt and from one another ; they appear respectively on the title-pages of William Alabaster's Roxana (1632), of Nathaniel Richards's Tragedy of MessaUina (1640), and of The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1672). The last is described as the stage of the Red Bull theatre. The theatres shown on the two other seventeenth-century engravings are not named 74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE curtain or proscenium arch. The wall which closed the stage at the rear had two short and slightly projecting wings, each of which was pierced by a door opening sideways on the boards while a third door in the back wall directly faced the auditorium. Through one or other of the three doors the actors made their entrances and exits and thence they marched to the front of the platform. Impinging on the backward limit of the stage was the ' tiring house ' ('mimorum aedes ') which was commonly of two stories. There the actors had their dressing-rooms. From the first story above the central stage door there usually pro- jected a narrow balcony forming an elevated or upper stage overhanging the back of the great platform and leaving the two side doors free. From this balcony the actors spoke (' aloft ' or ' above ') when occasion required it to those below. From such an elevation Juliet addressed Romeo in the balcony scene, and the citizens of Angers (in ' King John ') or of Harfleur (in ' Hemy V ') held colloquy from their ramparts with the English besiegers. At times room was also found in tlie balcony for musicians or indeed for a Hmited number of spectators. From the fore- edge of the balcony there hung sUding ' arras ' curtains, technically known as ' traverses.' The background, which these curtains formed when they were dra'mi together, gave the stage one of its most distinctive features. The recess beyond the ' traverses ' served, when they were drawn back, as an interior which stage dnections often designated as ' Avithin.' It was in this fashion that a cave, an arbour, or a bedchamber was commonly presented. In ' Romeo and Juhet ' (v. iii.) the space exposed to view behind the curtains was the tomb of the Capulets ; in ' Timon of Athens ' and in ' Cymbehne ' it formed a cave ; in ' The Tempest ' it was Prospero's cell. ^ 1 Mucli special study has been bestowed of late years by students in England, America, France, and Germany on the shape and appoint- ments of the Elizabethan stage as well as on the methods of Elizabethan representation. The variations in practice at different theatres have occasioned controversy. The minute detail which recent writers have recovered from contemporary documents or from printed literature ON THE LONDON STAGE 75 A slanting canopy of thatch was fixed high above the stage ; technically known as ' the shadow ' or ' the heavens,' it protected the actors from the elements, to which the spectators in the arena were exposed. Tapestry hangings were suspended from this covering, at some height from the stage, but well within view of the audience. When tragedies were performed, the hangings were of black. ' Hung be the heavens with black ' — the opening words of the First Part of ' Henry VI ' — had in theatrical termino- logy a technical significance.^ The platform stage was fitted with trap-doors from which ghosts and spirits ascended or descended. Thunder was simulated and guns were fired from apartments in the ' tiring house ' behind or above the stage. It was at a performance of ' Henry VIII ' ' that certain cannons being shot o£E at the King's entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light on the thatch ' of the stage roof, ' and so caused a fire which demolished the theatre.' ^ The set scenery or ' painted canvas ' which was familiar at Court was unknown to the Elizabethan theatre ; but there were abundant endeavours to supplement the scenic illusion of the ' traverses ' by a lavish use of properties. Rocks, tombs, and trees (made of canvas and pasteboard), thrones, tables, chairs, and beds were among a hundred far exceeds that wMch their predecessors accumulated. Yet the earlier researches of Malone, J. P. Collier and F. G. Fleay illuminated most of the broad issues and remain of value, in spite of some errors which later writers have corrected. Perhaps the most important of the numerous recent expositions of the structure and methods of the Elizabethan theatre are G. F. Reynolds's Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging, Chicago, 1905 ; William Creizenach's Die Schauspiele der Englischen Komodianten, Berlin and Stuttgart (n.d.) ; Richard Wegener's Die Biihneneinrichiung dcs Shakespeareschen Theaters nach der zeitgenossischen Dramen-, Halle, 1907 ; Dr. Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, Nebraska, 190S ; Sir. William Archer's article ' The Elizabethan Stage ' in the Quarterly Review, 1908 ; Victor E. Albright's The ShaJcesperian Stage, New York, 1909 ; and Mr. W.^ J. Lawrence's The Elizabethan Playhouse and other Studies, two series, 1912-13. 1 Cf. ' Black stage for tragedies and murders fell.' Lvcrece, 1. 760. * See p. ii'i infra. 76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE articles which were in constant request. The name of the place in which the author located his scene was often inscribed on a board exhibited on the stage, or was placarded above one or other of the side-doorways of entry and exit. Sir Phihp Sidney, in the pre-Shakespearean days of the EUzabethan theatre, made merry over the embarrassments which the spectators suffered by such notifications of dramatic topography. He condoled, too, with the playgoer whose imagination was left to create on the bare platform a garden, a rocky coast, and a battle-field in quick succes- sion.^ But the use ahke of properties and of the inner curtains greatly facilitated scenic illusion on the public stage after Sidney's time, and although his criticism never lost all its point, it is not literally applicable to the theatrical production of Shakespeare's prime. - Costume on the EUzabethan and Jacobean stages was somewhat in advance of the scenic standards. There was always opportunity for the exercise of artistic ingenuity in the case of fanciful characters hke 'Rumour painted full of tongues ' in the Second Part of ' Henry IV,' or ' certain reapers properly habited ' in the masque of ' The Tempest.' But the actors in normal roles wore the ordinary costumes of the day without precise reference to the period or place of action. Ancient Greeks and Romans were attired in doublet and hose or, if they were soldiers, in Tudor armour. ^ Sidney's Apology for Pocirie, ed. by E. S. Shuckburgh, p. 52. '^ Only after the Restoration in 1660 did the public theatres adopt the curtain in front of the stage and the changeable scenic cloth at the back. Both devices were employed in dramatic performances at James I's court. The crudity of the scenic apparatus on the popular stage in James I and Charles I's reign has been unduly emphasised. Richard Flecknoe in his Short Discourse of the English Stage published in 1664 generalised rather too sweepingly when he WTote ' The theatres of former times had no other scenes or decorations of the stage, but only old tapestry and the stage strewd with rushes.' (Hazhtt, English Drama, Documents and Treatises, p. 280.) On the other hand tapestry hangings, if the illustrations in Rowe's edition of Shakespeare (1709) are to be trusted, still occasionally formed in the early eighteenth century the stage background of Shakespearean productions, in spite of the almost universal adoption of painted scenic cloths. ON THE LONDON STAGE 77 The contents of the theatrical wardrobe were often of rich material and in the height of current fashion. Many- foreign visitors to London recorded in their diaries their admiration of the splendour of the leading actors' costume.^ False hair and beards, crowns and sceptres, mitres and croziers, armour, helmets, shields, vizors, and weapons of war, hoods, bands, and cassocks, were freely employed to indicate differences of age, rank, or profession. Towards the close of Shakespeare's career, plays on English history were elaborately ' costumed.' In the summer of 1613 'Henry VIII' 'was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the stage ; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidei^ed coats, and the Uke.' ^ A very notable distinction between EHzabethan and modern modes of theatrical representations was the complete absence of women actors from the Absence ^ of women Elizabethan stage. All female roles were, until actors. ^j^^ Restoration, assumed in public theatres by men or boys. Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women's parts when he makes Rosalind say laugliingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to ' As You Like It ' ' // / were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me.' Similarly, in 'Antony and Cleopatra' (v. ii. 216-220), Cleopatra on her downfall laments the quick comedians Eytemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness. Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks. In ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' Flute is bidden (i. ii. 52) 1 German writers seem to have measured fine costume by the stand- ards of magnificence which they reckoned characteristic of English actors. Well-dressed Germans were said to ' strut along like the English comedians in the theatres ' (J. 0. Variscus, Ethjwgraphia Mundi, pars iv, Geldtldage, IMagdeburg, 1614, p. 472, cited in Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, p. cxxxvi). 2 See p. 445 injra. ^ . 78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE by Quince play Thisbe ' in a mask ' because he has a beard coming. It is clear that durmg Shakespeare's professional career boys or young men rendered female roles eSectively and without serious injury to the dramatist's conceptions. Although age was always telling on masculine proficiency in women's parts and it was never easy to conceal the inherent incongruity of the habit, the prejudice against the presence of women on the public stage faded slowly. It did not receive its death-blow till December 8, 1660, when at a new theatre in Clare Market a prologue announced the first appearance of women on the stage and intimated that the role of Desdemona was no longer to be entrusted to a petticoated page.^ Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning of the performance. The trumpeter was stationed within a lofty open turret overlooldng the stage. No programmes were distributed among the audience. The name of the day's play was placarded beforehand on posts in the street. Such advertisements were called ' the players' bills,' ^ See p. 602 infra. The prologue, which was by the hack poet Thomas Jordan, sufficiently exposed the demerits of the old custom : I come unknown to any of the rest, To tell you news : I saw the lady drest : The woman plays to-day ; mistake me not, No man in gown, or page in petticoat. In this reforming age We have intents to civilize the stage. Our women are defective and so siz'd You'd think they were some of the guard disguis'd. For to speak trath, men act, that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen ; With bone so large, and nerve so incompliant. When you call Desdemona, enter Giant. The ancient practice of entrusting women's parts to men survived in the theatres of Rome tiU the end of the eighteenth century, and Goethe who was there in 1786 and 1787 describes the highly favourable impres- sion which that histrionic method left on him, and seeks somewhat paradoxically to justify it as satisfying the aesthetic aims of imitation {Travels in Italy, Bohn's Libr. 1885, pp. 567-571). On the other hand, Montesquieu reports on his visit to England in 1730 how he heard Lord Chesterfield explain to Queen Caroline that the regrettable absence of women from the Elizabethan stage accounted for the coarseness and inadequacy of Shakespeare's female characterisation (Montesquieu, (Euvres Completes, ed. Laboulaye, 1879, vii. 484). ON THE LONDON STAGE 79 and a similar ' bill ' was paraded on the stage at the opening of the performance. Musical diversion was pro- vided on a more or less ample scale. A band of musicians stood either on the stage or in a neighbouring box or ' room.' They not merely accompanied incidental songs or dances, and sounded drum and trumpet in mihtary episodes, but they provided instrumental interludes between the acts.^ The scenes of each act would seem to have follov/ed one another without any longer pause than was required by the exits and entries of the actors. The absence of a front curtain might well leave an audience in some uncertainty as to the point at which a scene or act ended. In blank verse dramas a rhyming couplet at the end of a scene often gave the needful cue, or the last speaker openly stated that he and the other actors were withdrawing.^ In Shakespeare's early days the public theatres were open on Sundays as well as on week-days ; but the Puritan outcry gradually forced the actors to leave the stage un- tenanted on the Lord's Day. In the later years of Queen Ehzabeth's reign, Smiday performances were forbidden by the Privy Council on pain of imprisonment, but it was only during her successor's reign that they ceased altogether ; they were not forbidden by statute till 1628 (3 Car. I, c. 1) and the example of the Court which favoured dramatic entertainment on the Sabbath always challenged the popular religious scruple. More effective and more embarrassing to the players was the Privy Council's ^ See G. H. Cowling, Music on the Sluzkespeareun Stage, Cambridge, 1913 ; and W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, 1st ser. 1912, ch. iv. * For example, in Shakespeare's Tempest the last words of nearly every scene are to such effect; of. 'Come, follow' (i. ii.), 'Go safely on ' (n. i.), ' Follow, I pray you ' (iii. iii.), and ' Follow and do me service ' (iv. i.). Similarly in tragedies the closing words of the text often categorically direct the removal of the dead heroes ; cf . Hamlet, V. iii. 393, ' Take up the bodies,' and Coriolanus, v. vi. 148, ' Take him [i.e. the dead hero] up.' Hotspur, when slain, in 1 Henry 7 F, is carried off on FalstafE's back. 80 WILLIAIM SHAKESPEARE prohibition of performances during the season of Lent, and ' likewise at such time and times as any extraordinary sickness or infection of disease shall appear to be in or about the city.' ^ The announcement of thirty deaths a week of the plague was held to warrant the closing of the theatres until the rate of mortahty fell below that figure. 2 At the public theatres the performances usually began at two o'clock in the winter and three o'clock in the summer and they lasted from two to three hours. ^ No artificial light was admitted, unless the text of the play prescribed the use of a lantern or a candle on the stage. However important the difl'erence between the organi- sation of the pubhc theatres in Shakespeare's day and our own, many professional customs which Tour^^'^^^^ fell within his experience still survive without much change. The practice of touring in the provinces was followed in Queen EUzabeth's and James I's reigns with a frequency which subsequent ages scarcely excelled. The chief actors rode on horseback, while their properties were carried in wagons. The less prosperous companies which were colloquially distinguished by the epithet ' strolUng ' avoided London altogether and only sought the suffrages of provincial audiences. But no ^ Cf. Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent, vol. xxx. 1599- 1600, p. 397 ; see Earle's Microcosmographie sxiii. (' A Player ') : 'Lent is more damage to liim [i.e. the player] than the butcher ' (the sale of meat being forbidden during Lent). ^ See Privy Council Warrant, April 9, 1604, in Hendowe Papers, ed. Greg, 1907, p. 61 ; and cf. ]\Iiddleton's Your Five Gallants, licensed March 22, 1608 : ' 'Tis e'en as uncertain as playing, now up and now down ; for if the bill do rise to above thirty, here's no place for players.' The prohibiting rate of mortality was raised to 40 in 1620. ^ When the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon petitioned the Lord Mayor on Oct. 8, 1594, to permit Shakespeare's companj' to perform during the winter at the ' Crosskeys ' in Gracechurch Street, it was stated that the performances would ' begin at two and have done betweene f ower and five ' (Halhwell's Illustrations, 32). For acting purposes the author's text was often drastically abbreviated, so as to bring the performance within the two hours limit which Shakespeare twice lightly mentions — in prologues to Borneo and Juliet (line 12) and to Henry VIII (line 13). ON THE LONDON STAGE 81 companies with headquarters in London remained there through the summer or autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could safely reckon on at least one visit of actors from the capital between May and October. The compulsory closing of the London theatres during the ever-recurrent outbreaks of plague or lack of sufficient theatrical accommodation in the capital at times drove thriving London actors into the provinces at other seasons than summer and autumn. Now and then the London companies were on tour in mid-winter. Many records of the Elizabethan actors' provincial visits figure in municipal archives of the period. The local records have not yet been quite exhaustively searched but the numerous entries which have come to hght attest the wide range of the players' circuits. Shakespeare's com- pany, whose experience is typical of that of the other London companies of the time, performed in thirty-one towns outside the metropohs during the twenty-seven years between 1587 and 1614, and the separate visits reached, as far as is known, a total of eighty. The itine- rary varied in duration and direction from year to year. Li 1593 Shakespeare and his fellow-players were seen at eight provincial cities and in 1606 at six. They would appear to have contented themselves with a single visit in 1590 (to Faversham), in 1591 (to Cambridge), in 1602 (to Ipswich), and in 1611 (to Shrewsbury). Their route never took them far north ; they never passed beyond York, which they visited twice. But in all parts of the southern half of the kingdom they were more or less famihar figures. To each of the cities Coventry and Oxford they paid eight visits and to Bath six. To Marlborough, Shrewsbury and Dover they went five times, and to Cam- bridge four times. Gloucester, Leicester, Ipswich and Maidstone come next in the provincial scale of favour with three visits apiece. Apparently Southampton, Chester, Nottingham, Folkestone, Exeter, Hythe, Saffron Walden, Rye, Plymouth, and Chelmsford did not invite the companj^'s return after a first experience, nor did G 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Canterbury, Bristol, Barnstaple, Norwich, York, New Romney, Faversham, and Winchester after a second.^ Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his Sonnets have been reasonably interpreted 1 In English Dramatic Companies 1558-1642 (1910) llr. J. Tucker Murray has careful!}', though not exhaustively, investigated the actors' tours of the period. His work supersedes, however, HalliweU-PhilLipps's Visits of Shakespeare's Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England (privately printed, 1887). Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors mentions performances by unidentified companies at Lynn in Norfolk and at Penin in Cornwall. These are not noticed by ]\Ir. Murray, who also overlooks visits of Shakespeare's company to O.xford and Maidstone in 1593, to Cambridge in 1594, and to Notting- ham in 1(315. (See F. S. Boas's University Drama, p. 226, and his * Hamlet in Oxford,' Fortnightly Review, Aitgust 1913 ; Cooper's Annals of Cambridge, ii. 538 ; Nottingham Records, iv. 328, and Maidstone Chamberlains' Accounts, MS. notes kindly communicated by Miss Katharine Martin. ) The following seems to have been the itinerary of Shakespeare's company year by year while he was asso- ciated with it : 1587 Dover, Canterbury, Oxford, Marlborough, Southamp- ton, Exeter, Bath, Glou- cester, Stratford-on-Avon, Lathom House, Lanes., Coventry (twice), Leices- ter, Maidstone, and Norwich. 1588 Dover, Plymouth, Bath, Gloucester, York, Coven- try, Norwich, Ipswich, Cambridge. 1590 Faversham. 1591 Cambridge. 1592 Canterbury, Bath, Glou- cester, and Coventry. 1593 Chelmsford, Bristol, Bath, Shrewsbury, Chester, York, Maidstone and Oxford. 1594 Coventry, Cambridga, Leicester, Winchester, Marlborough. 1597 Faversham, Rye, Dover, Marlborough, Bristol, Bath. 1602 Ipswich. 1603 Shrewsbury, Coventry. 1604 Bath, Oxford, Mortlake. 1605 Barnstaple, Oxford. 1606 Marlborough, Oxford, Leicester, SafEron Walden, Dover, Maidstone. 1607 Barnstaple, Oxford, Cam- bridge. 1608 Marlborough, Coventry. 1609 Ipswich, Hythe, New Romney. 1610 Dover, Oxford, Shrewsbury. 1611 Shrewsbury. 1612 New Romney, Winchester. 1613 Folkestone, Oxford, Shrews- bury. 1614 Coventry. 1615 Nottingham. ON THE LONDON STAGE 83 as reminiscences of early acting tours. It is clear that he had ample opportunities of first-hand observation of his native land. But it has often been argued Scottish thsit his journeys passed beyond the Umits of England. It has been repeatedly urged that Shakespeare's company visited Scotland and that he went with it.^ In November 1599 EngHsh actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin Slater,^ and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the King.^ Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earUer. Shakespeare's company never included Martin Slater. Fletcher repeated the Scottish visit in October 1601.* There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shake- speare's company. In like manner, Shakespeare's accurate reference in ' Macbeth ' to the ' nimble ' but ' sweet ' 1 Cf. Knight'3 Life of Shakespeare (1843), p. 41 ; Flcay, Stage, pp. 135-6. ^ Martin Slater (often known as Martin) was both an actor and a dramatist. From 1594 to 1597 he was a member of the Admiral's Company, and was subsequently from 1605 to 1625 manager of a sub- sidiary travelling company, under the patronage of Queen Anno. Cf. Dr. Wallace in Englische Studien, xUii. 383. ^ The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The English agent, George Nicholson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote : ' The four Sessions of this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletcher and Mertyn [i.e. JIartyn], with their company), and not knowing the King's ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted (that) their flocks (were) to forebear and not to come to or haunt profane games, sports, or plays.' Thereupon the King summoned the Sessions before him in Council and threatened them with the fuU rigour of the law. Obdurate at first, the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their hostile references to the actors. Finally, Nicholson adds, ' The King this day by proclamation with sound of trumpet hath commanded the players liberty to play, and forbidden their hinder or impeachment therein.' (MS. State Papers Dom. Scotland, P.R.O. vol. Isv. No. 64.) * Fleay, Stage, pp. 126-44. On returning to England Fletcher seems to have given a performance at Ipswich on May 30, 1602, and to have irresponsibly called himself and Ms companions ' His Majesty's Players.' Cf. Murray's English Dramatic Companies, i. 104 n. G 2 81 WILLIMl SHAKESPEARE climate of Inverness ^ and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience ; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable inter- course with Scotsmen in London and at the theatres after James I's accession. A few English actors in Shakespeare's day combined from time to time to make professional tours through foreign lands, where Court society invariably actors gave them a hospitable reception. In Den- on the mark, Germanv, Austria, Holland, and France Continent. ' , . ^ many cu'amatic periormances were given at royal palaces or in pubhc places by Enghsh actors between 1580 and 1630. The foreign programmes included tragedies or comedies which had proved their popularity on the London stage, together with more or less extemporised interludes of boisterous farce. Some of Shakespeare's plays found early admission to the foreign repertories. At the outset the Enghsh language was alone employed, although in Germany a native comedian was commonly associated with the English players and he spoke his part in his own tongue. At a later period the English actors in Germany ventured on crude German translations of their repertory .^ German-speaking audiences proved the 1 Cf. Duncan's speech (on arriving at Macbeth's castle of Inverness) : This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itseli Unto our gentle senses. Banquo. This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By lus lov'd mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here. (' Macbeth,' I. vi. 1-6.) 2 There vras published in 1620 si7ie loco (apparently at Leipzig) a volume entitled Engelische Comcdien vnd Tragedien containing German reudenngs of ten Enghsh plays and five interludes which had been lately acted by English companies in Germany. The collection included crude versions of TiiuS Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. A second edition appeared in 1624 and a second volume (' ander thcil ') — Engelische Comodien — followed in 163 J suppljaug eight fui'ther plays, none of which can be identified with extant English pieces. In the ON THE LONDON STAGE 85 most enthusiastic of all foreign clients, and the towns most frequently visited were Frankfort-on-the-Main, Strassburg, Nuremberg, Cassel, and Augsburg. Before Shakespeare's hfe ended, Enghsh actors had gone on professional missions in German-speaking countries as far east as Konigsberg and Ortelsburg and as far south as Munich and Graz.i That Shakespeare joined any of these foreign expedi- tions is improbable. Few actors of repute at home took part in them ; the majority of the foreign performers never reached the first rank. Many hsts of those who joined in the tours are extant, and Shakespeare's name appears in none of them. It would seem, moreover, that only on two occasions, and both before Shakespeare joined the theatrical profession, did members of his own company visit the Continent. ^ library at Dresden is a rough German translation in manusciipt of the first quarto of Havilet (' Der bestrafte Brudermord '), wliich is clearly of very early origin. Early German manuscript renderings of The Taming of the Shrew and Borneo and Juliet are also extant. (Cf. Cohn'a Shakespeare in Germany, 1865.) 1 Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors, 1612 (Shakespeare Soc. 1841), mentions how in former years Lord Leicester's company of English comedians was entertained at the court of Denmark (p. 40), how at Amsterdam EngUsh actors had lately performed before the burghers and the chief inhabitants (p. oS), and how at the time of writing the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Cardinal at Bruxelles each had in their pay a company of English comedians (p. 60). Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865 ; E. Herz's Englische Sckauspicler und englisches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutschland, Hamburg, 1903 ; H. Maas's ' Aussere Geschichte der Englischen Theatertruppen in dem Zeitraum von 1559 bis 1642 ' (Bang's Materialien, vol. xix. Louvain, 1907) ; J. Bolte's ' Englische Komo- dianten in Diinemark und Schweden ' {Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiv. p. 99, 1883) ; and liis ' Englische Komodianten in Miinster und Ulm ' (ibid. xxxvi. p. 273, 1900) ; K. Trautmann's ' Englische Komodianten in Niirnberg, 1593-1648 ' {Archiv, vols. xiv. and xv.) ; Meissner, Die englischen Comodianten zur Zeit Shakespeare's in Oesterreich, Vienna, 1884 ; Jon Stefansson on ' Shakespeare at Elsinore ' in Contemporary Revieio, Jan. 1896 ; and M. Jusserand's Shakespeare in France, 1899, pp. cO seq. ^ In 1585 and 1586 a detachment of Lord Leicester's servants made tours through Germany, which were extended to the Danish Court at Elsinore. The leader was the comic actor, William Kemp, who was subsequently to become for a time a prominent colleague of Shake- 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the Continent of Europe in either a private or a professional capacity. He repeatedly ridicules ^^d^iM^^^ the craze for foreign travel.^ To Italy, it is true, and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and JMilan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment. But his Italian scenes lack the intimate detail which would attest a first-hand experience of the country. The presence of barges on the waterways of northern Italy was common enough partially to justifj^ the voyage of Valentine by ' ship ' from Verona to Milan ('Two Gent.' i. i. 71). But Prospero's embarkation in ' The Tempest ' on an ocean ship at the gates of INIilan (i. ii. 129-144) renders it difficult to assume that the dramatist gathered his Italian knowledge from personal observation. ^ He doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled friends or to books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitaUsing. The publisher Chettle wrote in 1592 that Shakespeare was ' exelent in the quaUtie ^ he professes,' and the old speare. In the closing j^ears of the sixteenth century the Earl of Worcester's company chiefly supplied the English actors M'ho under- took expeditions on the European Continent. The Englishmen who won foreign histrionic fame early in the seventeenth century were rarely known at home. ^ a. As You Like It, rv. i. 22 seq. (Rosalind log.), ' Farewell, Monsieur Traveller : look you lisp and wear strange suits ; disable all the benefits of your own country ; be out of love with your nativity and almost cliide God for making you that countenance you are ; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.' * Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq. Dr. Gregor Sarrazin in a series of well-informed papers generally entitled Neue italienische Skizzen zu Shakespeare (in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1895, 1900, 1903, 1906), argues in favour of Shakespeare's personal experience of Italian travel, and his view is ably supported by Sir Edward SuUivan in ' Shakespeare and the Waterways of North Italy ' in Nineteenth Century, 1908, ii. 215 seq. But the absence of any direct confirmation of an Italian visit leaves Dr. Sarrazin's and Sir Edward's arguments very shadowy. 2 ' QuaUty ' in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the actor's ' profession.' ON THE LONDON STAGE 87 actor William Beeston asserted in the next century that Shakespeare ' did act exceedingly well.' ^ But the roles Shake- ^ which he distinguished himself are imper- speare's fectly recorded. Few surviving documents refer specifically to performances by him. At ChrLstmas 1594 he joined the popular actors Wilham Kemp, the chief comedian of the day, who had lately created Peter in ' Romeo and JuUet,' and Richard Bur- bage, the greatest tragic actor, who had lately created Richard III, in ' two several comedies or interludes' which were acted on St. Stephen's Day and on Innocents' Day (December 26 and 28) at Greenwich Palace before the Queen. The three players received in accordance with the accepted tariff ' xiijZi. vJ5. viijrf. and by waye of her Majesties reward xjli. xiijs. iiijrf. in all xxli.' 2 Neither plays nor parts are mentioned. Shakespeare's name stands first on the Mst of those who took part in 1598 in the original production by the Lord Chamberlain's servants, apparently at ' The Curtain,' of Ben Jonson's earUest and best-knowm comedy ' Every Man in his Humour.' Five years later, in 1603, a second play by Ben Jonson, his tragedy of ' Sejanus,' was first produced at the ' Globe ' by Shakespeare's company, then known as the King's servants. Shakespeare was again one of the interpreters. In the original cast of this play the actors' names are arranged in two columns, and Shake- speare's name heads the second column, standing parallel ^ Aubrey's Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226. * The entry figures in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Royal Chamber (Pipe Office Declared Accounts, vol. 542, fol. 207b, Public Record Office) which are the chief available records of the acting companies ' performances at Court. Mention is sometimes made of the plays produced, but the parts assumed by professional actors at Court are never stated. It is very rare, as in the present instance, to find the actors in the royal presence noticed individually. No name is usually found save that of the manager or assistant-manager to whom the royal fee was paid. (Cf. Halliwell-PhiUipps, i. 121 ; Mrs. Stopes in Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschajt, 1896, ?x^i. 182 seq.) 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE with Burbage's, which heads the first.^ The lists of actors in Ben Jonson's plays fail to state the character allotted to each actor ; but it is reasonably claimed that in ' Every Man in his Humour ' Shakespeare filled the role of ' Kno'well an old gentleman.' ^ John Davies of Hereford noted that he ' played some kingly parts in sport.' ^ One of Shakespeare's younger brothers, pre- sumably Gilbert, often came (wrote Oldys) to London in his younger days to see his brother act in his own plays ; and in his old age, and with faihng memory, he recalled his brother's performance of Adam in ' As You Like It ' when the dramatist ' wore a long beard.' * Rowe, Shake- speare's first biographer, identified only one of Shakespeare's parts — ' the Ghost in his own " Hamlet." ' He declared his assumption of that character to be ' the top of his performance.' Until the close of Shakespeare's career his company was frequently summoned to act at Court, and it is clear that he regularly accompanied them. The plays which he and his colleagues produced before his sovereign in his lifetime included his own pieces ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' The Comedy of Errors,' ' The Merchant of Venice,' ' 1 Henry IV,' ' The Merry Wives of Windsor,' ' Henry V,' ' Much Ado about Nothing,' ' Othello,' ' Measure for Measure,' 'King Lear,' 'A Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest.' It may be presumed that in all these dramas some role was allotted him. In the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare's ' Works ' his name heads the prefatory list ' of the principall actors in all these playes.' That Shakespeare chafed under some of the conditions ^ The date of the first performance with the lists of the original actors of Ben Jonaon's Every Man in his Humour and of his Sejanus is given in Jonson's works, 1616, fol. The first quarto editions of Every Man in his Humour (1598) and of Sejanus (1605) omit these particulars. * In the first edition Jonson gave his characters Italian names and old Kno'well was there called Lorenzo di Pazzi senior. * Scourge of Folly, 1610, epigr. 159. * James YeoweU'a Memoir of WiUiam Oldys (1862), p. 40: cf. p. 462 infra. ON THE LONDON STAGE 89 of the actor's calling is commonly inferred from the ' Sonnets.' There he reproaches himself with becoming ' a motley to the view ' (ex. 2), and chides fortune for having provided for his hvelihood nothing better than pubhc means that public manners breed, whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5). If such regrets are to be literally or personally interpreted, they only reflected an evanescent mood. His interest in whatever touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active. All the technicalities of the theatre were familiar to him. He was a keen critic of actors' elocution, and in ' Hamlet ' shrewdly denounced their common failings, while he clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improvement. As a shareholder in the two chief playhouses of his time,^ he long studied at close quarters the practical organi- sation of theatrical effort. His highest ambitions lay, it is true, elsewhere than in acting or theatrical manage- ment, and at an early period of his histrionic career he undertook, with triumphant success, the labours of a playwright. It was in dramatic poetry that his genius found its goal. But he pursued the profession of an actor and fulfilled all the obhgations of a theatrical shareholder loyally and uninterruptedly until very near the date of his death. ^ Seo p. 300 seq. infra. VII FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS The English drama as an artistic or poetic branch of literature developed with magical rapidity. It had not passed the stage of infancy when Shakespeare Elizabethan left Stratford-on-Avon for London, and within drama. three decades the unmatched strength of its maturity was spent. The Middle Ages were fertile in ' miracles ' and ' mysteries ' which were embryonic dramati- sations of the Scriptural narrative or legends of Saints. Late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century there flourished ' morahties ' or moral plays where alle- gorical figures interpreted more or less dramatically the significance of virtues or vices. But these rudimentary efforts lacked the sustained plot, the portrayal of cha- racter, the distinctive expression and the other genuine elements of dramatic art. No very material change was effected in the middle of the sixteenth century by the current vogue of the interlude — an offshoot of the moraUty. There the allegorical machinery of the morality was super- seded by meagre sketches of men and women, presenting in a crude dramatic fashion and without the figurative intention of the morality a more or less farcical anecdote of social life. The drama to which Shakespeare devoted his genius owed no substantial debt to any of these dramatic experiments, and all were nearing extinction when he came of age. Such opportunities as he enjoyed of observing them in boyhood left small impression on his dramatic work.^ ^ Miracle and mystery plays' were occasionally performed in pro- vincial places till the close of the sixteenth century. The Warwick- shire town of Coventry remained an active centre for this shape of 90 FIRST DEAMATIC EFFORTS 91 Although in its development EUzabethan drama assimi- lated an abundance of the national spirit, it can claim no The birth of ^^^^^^^7 English parentage. It traces its origin EUzabethan to the regular tragedy and comedy of classical ^™^' invention wliich flourished at Athens and bred imitation at Rome. Elizabethan drama openly acknow- ledged its descent from Plautus and Seneca, types re- spectively of dramatic levity and dramatic seriousness, to which, according to Polonius, all drama, as he knew it, finally conformed. ^ An English adaptation of a comedy by Plautus and an Enghsh tragedy on the Senecan model begot the Enghsh strain of drama which Shakespeare glorified. The schoolmaster Nicholas Udall's farcical ' Ralph Rpister Doister ' (1540), a free Enghsh version of the Plautine comedy of ' Miles Gloriosus,' and the first attempt of two young barristers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, to give Senecan tragedy an Enghsh dress in their play of ' Gorboduc ' (1561) are the starting-points of dramatic art in this country. The primal English comedy, which was in doggerel rhyme, was acted at Eton College, and the primal Enghsh tragedy, which was in blank verse, was produced in the Hall of the Middle Temple. It was in cultured circles that the new and fruitful dramatic movement drew its first breath. In the immediate succession of Elizabethan drama the foreign mould remained undisguised. During 1566 the examples set by ' Ralph Roister Doister ' and ' Gorboduc ' were followed in a second comedy and a second tragedy, both from the pen of George Gascoigne, who, after education di-amatic energy until about lolo. At York, at Newcastle, at Chester, at Beverley, the representation of ' miracles ' or * mysteries ' continued some years longer (E. K. Chambers, Medieval Stage; Pollard, English Miracle Plays, 1909 ed.. p. lix). But the sacred drama, in spite of some endeavours to continue its life, was reckoned by the Elizabethans a relic of the past. The morality play with its ethical scheme of personification, and the ' interlude ' with its crude farcical situations, were of later birth than the miracle or mystery, and although they were shorter-lived, absorbed much literary industry through the first stages of Shakespeare's career. * Hamlet, n. ii. 39.5—6. 92 WILLIAM SHAIvESPEAEE at Cambridge, became a member of parliament and subse- quently engaged in military service abroad ; both pieces were produced in the Hall of Gray's Inn. Gascoigne's comedy, the ' Supposes,' which was in prose and developed a slender romantic intrigue, was a translation from the Itahan of Ariosto, whose dramatic work was itself of classical inspiration. Gascoigne's tragedy of ' Jocasta,' which like ' Gorboduc ' was in blank verse, betrayed more directly its classical afi&nities. It was an adaptation from the ' Phoenissae ' of Euripides, and was scarcely the less faithful to its statuesque original because the English adapter depended on an intermediary Itahan version bj- the well-known Lodovico Dolce. Subsequent dramatic experiments in England showed impatience of classical models in spite of the parental debt. The history of the nascent EUzabethan drama indeed shows the rapid ehmination or drastic modification of many of the classical elements and their supersession by unprecedented features making for hfe and hberty in obedience to national sentiment. The fetters of the classical laws of unity — the triple unity of action, place, and time — were soon loosened or abandoned. The classical chorus was discarded or was reduced to the sHm propor- tions of a prologue or epilogue. Monologue was driven from its post of vantage. The violent action, which was relegated by classical drama to the descriptive speeches of messengers, was now first physically presented on the stage. There was a fusing of comedy and tragedy — the two main branches of drama which, according to classical critics, were mutually exclusive. A new element of romance or sentiment was admitted into both branches and there ultimately emerged a new middle type of romantic drama. In all Ehzabethan drama, save a sparse and fastidious fragment which sought the select sufifrages of classical scholars, the divergences between classical and English methods grew very wide. But the literary traces of a classical origin were never wholly obliterated at any stage in the growth of the Elizabethan theatre. FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 93 During Shakespeare's youth literary drama in England was struggling to rid itself of classical restraint, but it gave in the process no promise of the harvest which his genius was to reap. During the first eighteen years of Shake- speare's life (1564-1582) there Avas no want of Avorkers in drama of the new pattern. But their literary powers were modest, and they obeyed the call of an uncultured public taste. They suffered coarse buffooneries and blood-curdling Amorphous sensations to deform the classical principles develop- which gave them their cue. The audience not merely applauded tragedy of blood or comedy of horseplay, but they encouraged the incongruous com- bination in one piece of the two kinds of crudity. Sir PhiUp Sidney accused the first Elizabethan dramatists of linking hornpipes with funerals. Even Gascoigne yielded to the temptation of concocting a ' tragicall comedie.' Shakespeare subsequently flung scorn on the unregenerate predilection for ' very tragical mirth.' ^ Yet the primordial incoherence did not deter him from yoking together comedy and tragedy within the confines of a single play. But he, more fortunate than his tutors, managed, while he defied classical law, to reconcile the revolutionary policy with the essential conditions of dramatic art. Another method of broadening the bases of drama was essayed in this early epoch. History was enlisted in the service of the theatre. There, too, the first results were ^ Theseus, when he reads the title of Bottom's play : A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And tiis love Thisbe : very tragical mirth. adds the comment Merry and tragical I tedious and brief I That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord ? Mids. Night's Dream, v. i. 57-60. A typical early tragicomedy by Thomas Freston was entitled ' A lamentable tragedy, mixed full of pleasant mirth conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Persia ' (15(59). FalstafE, when seeking to express himself grandiloquently, refers mockingly to the hero of this piece : ' I must speak it in passion and I will do it in King Cambyses' vein,' 1 Henry I V, n. iv. 370. 94 WILLIMI SHAI^ESPEARE halting. The ' chronicle plays ' were mere pageants or processions of ill-connected episodes, chiefly of English his- tory, in which drums and trumpets and the clatter Plays'^*^^^ of swords and cannon largely did duty for dramatic speech or action. Here again Shakes- peare accepted new methods and proved by his example how genius might evoke order out of disorder and supplant violence by power. The English stage of Shakespeare's boyhood knew nothing of poetr}^ of coherent plot, of graphic characterisation, of the obhgation of restraint. It was his glory to give such elements of drama an abidmg place of predominance. In his early manhood — after 1582 — gleams of reform lightened the dramatic horizon and helped him to his goal, A period of purgation set in. At length the purgation" ^^^ forms of drama attracted the literary and poetic aspiration of men who had received at the universities sound classical trainmg. From 1582 onwards John Lyly, an Oxford graduate, was framing fantastic comedies with lyric interludes out of stories of the Greek mythology, and his plays, which were capably interpreted by boy actors, won the special favour of Queen Ehzabeth and her Court. Soon afterwards George Peele, another Oxford graduate, sought among other dramatic endeavours to fashion a play to some dramatic purpose out of the historic career of Edward I. Robert Greene, a Cambridge graduate, after an industrious career as a writer of prose romances, dramatised a few romantic tales, and he brought hterary sentiment to qualify the prevailing crudity. Thomas Kyd, who knew Latin and modern languages, though he enjoyed no academic training, slightly tempered the blood-curdling incident of tragedy by interpolating romance, but he owed his vast popu- larity to extravagantly sensational situations and ' the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse.' Finally another graduate of Cambridge, Christopher Marlowe, signally challenged the faltering standard of popular tragedy, and in his stirring drama of ' Tamburlaine ' FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 95 (1588) first proved beyond question that the EngHsh language was capable of genuine tragic elevation. It was when the first reformers of the crude infant drama, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe, were busy Shake- ^yith. their experiments that Shakespeare joined speare's the ranks of English dramatists. As he set out fellow- on his road he profited by the lessons which these workers. men were teaching. Kyd and Greene left more or less definite impression on all Shakespeare's early efforts. But Lyly in comedy and Marlowe in tragedy may be reckoned the masters to whom he stood in the relation of disciple on the threshold of his career. With Marlowe there is evidence that he was for a brief season a working partner, Shakespeare shared with other men of genius that receptivity of mind which impelled them to assimilate much of the intellectual energy of their contemporaries.^ It was not only from the current drama of his youth that his mind sought some of its sustenance. The poetic fer- tility of his epoch outside the drama is barely rivalled in literary history, and thence he caught abundant suggestion. The lyric and narrative verse of Thomas Watson, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Sir Phihp Sidney, and Thomas Lodge, were among the rills which fed the mighty river of his lyric invention. But in all directions he rapidly bettered the instruction of fellow- workers. Much of their work was unvalued ore, which he absorbed and transmuted into gold in the process. By the magic of his genius EngHsh drama was finally lifted to heights above the reach of any forerunner or contemporary. No Ehzabethan actor achieved as a dramatist a position which was comparable with Shakespeare's. But in his 1 Ruskin forcibly defines the receptivity of genius in the following sentences : ' The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided ; and, if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under con- tribution by the men of most original power, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it.' — Modern Painters, iii. 362 (Appendix). 96 WILLIM! SHAKESPEAEE practice of combining the work of a play-wright with the functions of a player, and later of a theatrical share- holder, there was nothing uncommon. The dr£unTust. occupation of dramatist grew slowly into a professional calling. The development was a natural sequel of the organisation of actors on profes- sional lines. To each licensed company there came to be attached two or three dramatic writers whose services often, but not invariably, were exclusively engaged. In many instances an acting member of the corporation undertook to satisfy a part, at any rate, of his colleagues' dramatic needs, George Peele, who was busy in the field of drama before Shakespeare entered it, was faithful to the double role of actor and dramatist through the greater part of his career. The first association of the dramatist Ben Jonson with the theatre was in an actor's capacity. Probably the most instructive parallel that could be dra\\Ti be- tween the experiences of Shakespeare and those of a con- temporary is offered by the biography of Thomas Hey- wood, the most voluminous play\^^right of the era, whom Charles Lamb generously dubbed ' a sort of prose Shake- speare.' There is ample evidence of the two men's personal acquaintance. For many years before 1600 HeyAvood served the Admiral's company as both actor and dramatist. In 1600 he transferred himself to the Earl of Worcester's company, Avliich on James I's accession was taken into the patronage of the royal consort Queen Anne of Denmark. UntU her death in 1619 he worked indefatigably in that company's interest. He ultimately claimed to have had a hand in the wTiting of more than 220 plays, although his literary labours were by no means confined to drama. In his elaborate 'Apology for Actors ' (1612) he professed pride in his actor's vocation, from which, despite his other employments, be never dissociated himself.^ 1 See pp. 112 n. 3, 268-S, 694. Numerous other instances could be given of the pursuit of the theatrical profession by men of letters. When Shakespeare first reached I.ondon, Robert Wilson was at once a leading di-amatist and a leading actor. (See p. 132 ?!. 1.) The poet FIKST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 97 In all external regards Shakespeare's experience can be matched by that of his comrades. The outward features of his career as dramatist, no less than as actor, were cast in the current mould. In his prolific industry, in his habit of seeking his fable in pre-existing literature, in his co-opera- tion with other pens, in his avowals of deference to popular taste, he faithfully followed the common paths. It was solely in the supreme quality of his poetic and dramatic achievement that he parted company with his fellows. The whole of Shakespeare's dramatic work was pro- bably begun and ended within two decades (1591-1611) between his twenty-seventh and forty-seventh speare's year. If the works traditionally assigned to wodc^^'^ him include some contributions from other pens, > he was perhaps responsible, on the other hand, for portions of a few plays that are traditionally claimed for others. When the account is balanced Shakespeare must be credited with the production, during these twenty years, of a yearly average of two plays, nearly all of which belong to the supreme rank of literature. Three volumes of poems must be added to the total. Ben Jonson was often told by the players that ' whatsoever he penned he never blotted [i.e. erased] a line.' The editors of the First Folio attested that ' what he thought he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' Signs of hasty workmanship are not Michael Drayton devoted much time to drama and was a leading share- holder in the Whitefriars theatre and in that capacity was involved in much litigatiem (New Shuk. Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. iii. pp. 269 seq.). WiUiam Rowley, an industrious playwright with whom there is reason for believing that Shakespeare collaborated in the romantic drama of Pericles, long pursued simultaneously the histrionic and dramatic vocations. The most popular impersonator of youthful roles in Shake- speare's day, Nathaniel Field, made almost equal reputation in the two crafts ; while another boy actor, William Barkstead, co-operated in drama with John Marston and wrote narrative poems in the manner of Shakespeare, on whose ' art and wit ' he bestowed a poetic crown of laurel. Cf. Barkstead's Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis (1607): His gong waa worthie merrit {Shakespeare hee) : Lawrell is due to him, his art and wit Hath purchas'd it. H 98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE lacking, but they are few when it is considered how rapidly his numerous compositions came from his pen, and in the aggregate they are unimportant. By borrowing his plots in conformity with the general custom he to some extent economised his energy. The range of literature which he studied in his borrowed search for tales whereon to build his dramas P^°^^ was wide. Not only did he consult chronicles of English history (chiefly Ralph Hohnshed's) on which he based his Enghsh historical plays, but he was well read in the romances of Italy (mainly in French or Enghsh trans- lations), in the biographies of Plutarch, and in the romances and plays of English contemporaries. His Roman plays of ' Julius Caesar,' ' Antony and Cleopatra,' and ' Corio- lanus ' closely follow the narratives of the Greek biographer in the masculine English rendering of Sir Thomas North. Romances by his contemporaries, Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, suggested the fables respectively of ' As You Like It ' and ' The Winter's Tale.' ' All's Well that Ends Well ' and ' Cymbeline ' largely rest on foundations laid by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Novels by the sixteenth-century Italian, Bandello, are the ultimate sources of the stories of ' Romeo and Juliet,' ' Much Ado about Nothing,' and ' Twelfth Night.' The tales of ' Othello ' and ' Measure for Measure ' are traceable to an Italian novelist of his own era, Giraldi Cinthio. Belle- forest's ' Histoires Tragiques,' a popular collection of French versions of the Italian romances of Bandello, was often in Shakespeare's hands. In treating of King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and Hamlet, he worked over ground which fellow-dramatists had first fertilised. Most of the fables which he borrowed he transformed, and it -v^as not probably with any conscious object of conserving his strength that he systematically levied loans on popular current literature. In his untiring assimilation of others' labours he showed something of the practical tempera- ment which is traceable in the conduct of the affairs of his FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 99 later life. It was doubtless with the calculated aim of ministering to the public taste that he unceasingly adapted, as his genius dictated, themes which had aheady, in the hands of inferior authors or playwrights, proved capable of arresting public attention. The professional dramatists sold their plays outright to the acting companies with which they were associated, and they retained no legal interest in them after the manuscript had passed into the hands of the theatrical manager.^ It was not unusual for the manager to invite extensive revision of a play at the hands of others than its author before it was produced on the stage, and again _, whenever it was revived. Shakespeare gained revision much early experience as a dramatist by revising o p ays. . ^j, rcMTiting behind the scenes plays that had become the property of his manager. It is possible that some of his labours in this direction remain unidentified. In a few cases his alterations were possibly slight, but as a rule his fund of originality was too abimdant to restrict him, when working as an adapter, to the task of mere recension, and the results of most of his known labours in that capacity are entitled to rank among original compositions. The determination of the exact order in which Shake- speare's plays wei-e %\Titten dej)ends largely on conjecture. External evidence is accessible in only* a few Chronology '' of the cases, and, although always worthy of the ^ ^^^" utmost consideration, is not invariably con- clusive. The date of pubhcation rarely indicates the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty-seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were published in his hfetime, and it is questionable whether any were ^ One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two companies. ' Ask the Queen's players,' his accuser bade him in Cuthbert Cony -Catcher's Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, ' if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about 11.], and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral's men for as many more.' H-2 100 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE published under his supervision.^ But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity ; as his powers gradually matured he depicted hfe in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly insight the subtle gradations of human sentiment and the mysterious workings of human passion. Comedy and tragedy are gradually blended ; and his work finally developed a pathos such as could only come of ripe experi- ence. Similarly the metre undergoes emancipation from the hampering restraints of fixed rule and becomes test"^^ flexible enough to respond to every phase of human feeUng. In the blank verse of the early plays a pause is strictly observed at the close of almost every line, and rhyming couplets are frequent. Gradually 1 The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of the theatre, and Shakespeare would seem to have had no direct responsibility for the publication of his plays. Professional opinion condemned such playwrights as sought ' a double sale of their labours, first to the stage and after to the press ' (Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, 1638. Address to Reader). A very small proportion of plaj's acted in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I — some 600 out of a total of 3000 — consequently reached the printing press, and the bulk of them is now lost. In 1633 HejTTOod wrote of 'some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print ' (Eyiglish Traveller pref.). But, in the absence of any law of copyright, publishers often contrived to defy the wishes of the author or owner of manuscripts. The poet and satirist George Wither, in his The Schollefs Purgatory (1625), which is the classical indictment of publishers of Shakespeare's day, charged them with habitually taking ' uppon them to publish bookes contrived altered and mangled at their owne pleasures mithout consent of the writers . . . and all for their owne private lucre.' Many copies of a popular play were made for the actors or their patrons, and if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher's hands, it was issued without any endeavour to obtain either author's or manager's sanction. It was no uncommon practice, moreover, for a visitor to the theatre to take down a popular piece surreptitiously in shorthand (see p. 112 n. 2 infra), and to dispose to a publisher of his unauthorised transcript, which was usually confused and only partially coherent. For fuller discussion of the conditions in which Shakespeare's plays saw the light see bibliography, pp. 548 seq. infra. FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 101 the poet overrides such artificial restrictions ; rhyme largely disappears ; the pause is varied indefinitely ; iambic feet are replaced by trochees ; lines occasionally lack the ortho- dox number of feet ; extra syllables are, contrary to strict metrical law, introduced at the end of lines, and at times in the middle ; the last word of the line is often a weak and unemphatic conjunction or preposition.^ In his early work Shakespeare was chary of prose, of prose. ^^^ employed verse in scenes to which prose was better adapted. As his experience grew he invariably clothed in prose the voice of broad humour or low comedy, the speech of mobs, clowns and fools, and the famiUar and intimate conversation of women .^ ^ W. S.^ Walker in his Shakespeare's Versification, 185-4, and Charles Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare's Versification at different Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. Dr. Ingram's paper on ' The Weak Endings ' in i^ew Sfiakspere Society's Transactions (1874), vol. i. is of great value. Mr. Fleay's metrical tables, which first appeared in the same Society's Transactions (1874), and were re-issued by Dr. Furnivall in a eomewhat revised form in his introduction to his Leopold Skakspere and elsewhere, give all the information possible. * In Italy prose was the generally accepted instrument of the comedy of the Renaissance from an early period of the sixteenth century. This usage soon spread to France and somewhat later grew familiar in Elizabethan England. In 1566 Gascoigne rendered into English prose 6li Suppositi, Ariosto's Italian prose comedy, and most of Lyly'a ' Court Comedies ' were wholly in prose. In his first experiment in comedy. Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare, apparently under the influence of foreign example, makes a liberal employment of prose, more than a third of the whole eschews verse. But in all other plays of early date Shakespeare uses prose sparingly ; in two pieces, Richard II and King John, he avoids it altogether. In his mature work he first uses it on a large scale in the two parts of Henry IV, and it abounds in Henry V and in the three romantic comedies Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Much Ado. The Merry Wives is almost entirely in prose, and there is a substantial amount in Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. In the great tragedies Julius CcBsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Othello, there is comparatively little prose. In Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Winter's Tale, the ratio of prose to verse again mounts high, but it falls perceptibly in Cymbeline and The Tempest. In the aggregate Shakespeare's prose writing is of substantial amount ; fully a fourth part of his extant work takes that shape. 102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE To the latest plays fantastic and punning conceits which abound in early work are for the most part denied ad- mission. But, while Shakespeare's achievement from the beginning to the end of his career o£fers clearer evidence than that of any other \^Titer of genius of the steady and orderly growth of his poetic faculty, some allowance must be made for ebb and flow in the current of his artistic progress. Early work occasionally anticipates features that become habitual to late work, and late work at times embodies traits that are mainly identified with early work. No exclusive reliance in determining the precise chronology can be placed on the merely mechanical tests afforded by tables of metrical statistics. The chronological order can only be deduced with any confidence from a consideration of all the internal characteristics as well as the known external history of each j)lay. The premisses are often vague and conflicting, and no chronology hitherto suggested receives at all points universal assent. There is no external evidence to prove that any piece in which Shakespeare had a hand was produced before the spring of 1592. No play by him was published before y 1597, and none bore his name on the title-page till 1598. /y4 But his first essays have been with confidence allotted to 1591. To ' Love's Labour's Lost ' may reason- Love S 1. • f 11 Labour's ably be assigned priority in pomt of tune of aU Shakespeare's dramatic productions. In 1598 an amorous poet, writing in a melancholy mood, recorded a performance of the piece which he had witnessed long before.^ Internal evidence, which alone offers any precise clue, proves that it was an early effort. But the general treatment suggests that the author had already hved long enough in London to profit by study of a current mode of 1 Loves Labor Lost, I once did see a Play Ycleped so , so called to my paine . . . To 3very one (saue me) twas Comicall, Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall. Each Actor plaid in cunning wise his part, But chiefly Those entrapt in Cupids snare. R[obert] T[ofte], Alba, 1598 (in Qrosart's reprint 1880, p. 106). FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 103 light comedy which was winning a fashionable vogue, while much of the subject-matter proves that he had aheady enjoyed extended opportunities of surveying London life and manners, such as were hardly open to him in the very first years of his settlement in the metropolis. ' Love's Labour's Lost ' embodies keen observation of contem- porary Ufe in many ranks of society, both in town and country, while the speeches of the hero Biron clothe much sound philosophy in masterly rhetoric often charged with poetic fervour. Its slender plot stands almost alone among Shakespeare's plots in that it is not known to have been borrowed, and it stands quite alone in its sustained travesty of familiar traits and incidents of current social and political life. The names of the chief characters are drawn from the leaders in the civil war in France, which was in progress between 1589 and 1594, and was anxiously watched by the English pubUc.^ Contemporary projects of ^ The hero is the ICing of Navarre, in whose domimona the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous sup- porters of the real King of Navarre (Biron's later career subsequently foimed the subject of a, double tragedy by Chapman, The Conspiracie and Tragedie of CJuirles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, which was pro- duced in 1608). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love's Labour's Lost is a common anglicised version of that Due de Maine or Mayenne whose name w as so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affair's in connection with Navarre's movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of aFrench ambassador who was long popiilar in London ; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Loie's Labour's Lost was written. In Chapman's An Humourous Day's Mirth, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare's play, suggests much punning on the word ' mote.' As late as 1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, wrote : Ho Ood I Ho God I thus did I revel it Wlien Monsieur Motte lay here ambasiador. Armado, ' the fantastical Spaniard ' who haunts Navarre's Court, and is dubbed by another courtier ' a phantasm, a Monarcho,' is a caricature of a half-crazed Spaniard known as ' fantastical Monarcho ' who for many years hung about Elizabeth's Court, and was under the delusion that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death 104 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE academies for disciplining young men ; modes of speech and dress current in fashionable circles ; recent attempts on the part of EUzabeth's government to negotiate with the Tsar of Russia ; the inefficiency of rural constables and the pedantry of vUlage schoolmasters and curates are all satirised with good humour. Holofernes, Shakespeare's Latinising pedagogue, is nearly akin to a stock character of the sixteenth-century comedy of France and Italy which was just obtaining an English vogue. In 'Love's Labour's Lost,' moreover, the dramatist assimilates some new notes which Elizabethan comedy owed to the ingenuity of John Lyly, an active man of letters during most of Shakespeare's life. Lyly secured his first fame as early as 1580 by the publication of his didactic romance of ' Euphues,' which brought into fashion a mannered prose of strained antitheses and affected conceits.^ But hardly less originality was displayed by the writer in a series of eight comedies which came from his pen between 1580 and 1592, and were enthusiastically Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantastkall Monarcho's Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman's Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene {Love's Labour s Lost, v. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess's lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception by ladies of Ehzabeth's Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife for the Tsar among the ladies of the English nobility (cf. Horsey's Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc). For further indications of topics of the day treated in the play, see ' A New Study of " Love's Labour's Lost," ' by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. Oct. 1880 ; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 154 n. 2). ^ In later life Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly's Euphues Polonius's advice to Laertes ; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in 1 Henry I V, n. iv. 445 : ' For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.' Cf. Lyly's Works, ed. R. W. Bond (1902), i. 164-75. FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 105 welcomed at Queen Elizabeth's Court, where they were rendered by the boy companies under the royal patronage.^ Lyly adapted to the stage themes of Greek mythology from the pages of Lucian, Apuleius, or Ovid, mingling with his classical fables scenes of low comedy which smacks of Plautus. The language is usually euphuistic. In only one play, ' The Woman in the Moone,' does he attempt blank verse ; elsewhere his dramatic vehicle is exclusively prose. The most notable characteristics of Lyly's dramatic work are brisk artificial dialogues which glow with repartee and word-play, and musically turned lyrics. Such features were directly reflected in Shakespeare's first essay in comedy. Many scenes and characters in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' were obviously inspired by Lyly. Sir Tophas, ' a foolish braggart ' in Lyly's play of ' Endimion,' was the father of Shakespeare's character of Armado, while Armado's page-boy. Moth, is as fihally related to Sir Tophas's page-boy, Epiton. The verbal encounters of Sir Tophas and Epiton in Lyly's ' Endimion ' practi- cally reappear in the dialogues of Armado and Moth in Shakespeare's ' Love's Labour's Lost.' Probably it was in conformity with Lyly's practice that Shakespeare denied the ornament of verse to fully a third part of ' Love's Labour's Lost,' while in introducing lyrics into his play Shakespeare again accepted Lyly's guidance. Shakespeare had at command from his early days a fuller- blooded humanity than that which lay within Lyly's range. But Lyly's influence long persisted in Shakespearean comedy. It is clearly visible in the succeeding plays of ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona ' and ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' ^ The titles of Lyly's chief comedies are (with dates of first publica- tion) : Alexander and Campaspe, 1584 ; Sapho and Phao, 1584 ; Endimion, 1591 ; Gallathea, 1592 ; Mydas, 1592 ; Mother Bombie, 1594; The Woman in the Moone (in blank verse), 1597 ; Love's Meta- morphosis, 1601. The first sis pieces were issued together in 1632 as ' Six Courte Comedies . . . Written by the only rare poet of that time, the wittie, comicall, facetiously quicke and unparalleled John LUly, Master of Arts.' 106 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's ' Love's Labour's Lost ' was revised in 1597, probably for a Christmas performance at Court. Tppleasant conceited comedie called Loues labors lost ' f^ 2i ^^^ ^'■'^^ published next year ' as it was presented before her Highness this last Cnristmas.' The publisher was Cuthbert Burbie, a liveryman of the Stationers' Company with a shop in Conihill adjoining the Royal Exchange.^ On the title-page, which described the piece as ' newly corrected and augmented,' Shakespeare's name ('By W. Shake- spere ') first appeared in print as that of author of a play. No license for the pubHcation figures in the Stationers' Company's Register.^ The manuscript which the printer followed seems to have been legibly written, but it did not present the author's final corrections. Here and there the published text of ' Love's Labour's Lost ' admits passages in two forms — the unrevised original draft and the revised version. The copyist failed to delete many unrevised lines, and his neglect, which the press-corrector did not repair, has left Shakespeare's first and second thoughts side by side. A graphic illustration is thus afforded of the flowing current of Shakespeare's art.^ Less gaiety characterised another comedy of the same date. ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' for the most part a lyrical romance of love and friendship, Gentlemen reflects something of Lyly's influence in both o erona. .^^ sentimental and its comic vein, but the construction echoes more distinctly notes coming from the South of Europe — from Italy and Spain. The perplexed fortunes of the two pairs of youthful lovers and the masculine disguise of one of the heroines are reminiscent of Italian or Spanish ingenuity. Shakespeare ^ The printer was William White, of Cow Lane, near the Holborn Conduit. * Love's Labour's Lost was first mentioned in the Stationers' Register on Jan. 22, 1606-7, when the publisher Burbie transferred his right in the piece to Nicholas Ling, who made the title over to another stationer John Smethwick on Nov. 19, 1607. No quarto of the play was published by Smethwick till 1631. 3 Cf. Love's Labour's Lost, iv. iii. 11. 299-301 and 320-333; ib. 11. 302-304 and 350-353 ; v. ii. 11. 827-832 and 847-881. FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 107 had clearly studied ' The pleasaunt and fine conceited Comedie of Two Italian Gentlemen,' a crude comedy of double intrigue penned in undramatic rhyme, which was issued anonymously in London in 1584, and was adapted from a somewhat coarse Italian piece of European repute.^ The eager pursuit by Shakespeare's JuHa in a man's dis- guise of her wayward lover Proteus suggests, at the same time, indebtedness to the Spanish story of 'The Shepardess Felismena,' who endeavoured to conceal her sex in the pursuit of her fickle lover Don Felix. The tale of FeUsmena forms part of the Spanish pastoral romance ' Diana,' by George de Montemayor, which long enjoyed popularity in England.^ The ' History of Felix and Philomena,' a lost piece which was acted at Court in 1584, was apparently a first attempt to dramatise Montemayor's story, and it may have given Shakespeare one of his cues.^ 1 Fidele and Fortunio, The Two Italian Gentlemen, which was edited for the Malone Society by W. W. Greg in 1910, is of uncertain author- ship. Collier ascribed it to Anthony Munday, but some passages seem to have come from the youthful pen of George Chapman (see England's Parnassus, ed. by Charles Crawford, 1913, pp. 517 seq. ; Malone Soc. Collections, 1909, vol. i. pp. 218 seq.). The ItaUan original called II Fedele was by Luigi Pasqualigo, and was printed at Venice in 1576. A French version, Le Fiddle, by Pierre de Larivey, a popular French dramatist, appeared in 1579, and near the same date a Latin rendering was under- taken by the English classicist, Abraham Fraunce. Fraunce's work was first printed from the manuscript at Penshurst by Prof. G. C. Moore Smith in Bang's Materialien, Band XIV., Louvain, 1906, under the title Victoria, the name of the heroine. * No complete English translation of Montemayor's romance was published before that of Bartholomew Yonge in 1598, but a manuscript version by Thomas Wilson, which was dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, in 1596, possibly circulated earlier (Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 18638)» ' Some verses from Diana were translated by Sir Philip Sidney and were printed with his poems as early as 1591. Other current Italian fiction, which also anticipated the masculine disguise of Shakespeare's Julia, was likewise accessible in an English garb. The industrious soldier- author Barnabe Riche drew a cognate story (' Apolonius and Silla ') from an Italian source, Giraldi Cinthio's Htcatommithi, 1565, pt. 1, 15th day. Novel 8. Riche's story is the second tale in his ' Farewell to Militarie Profession conteining verie pleasaunt discourses fit for a peace- able tyme,' 1581. A more famous Italian novelist, Bandello, had 108 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Many of Lyly's idiosyncrasies readily adapted them- selves to the treatment of the foreign fable. Trifling and irritating conceits abound and tend to an atmosphere of artificiality ; but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed — the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men — overflow with a farcical drollery which improves on Lyly's verbal smartness. The ' Two Gentlemen ' was not pub- lished in Shakespeare's lifetime ; it first appeared in the FoUo of 1623, after having, in aU probabihty, undergone some revision.^ Shakespeare next tried his hand, in the ' Comedy of Errors' (commonly known at the time as 'Errors'), at boisterous farce. The comic gusto is very shghtly of En-ors ' relieved by romantic or poetic speech, but a fine note of sober and restrained comedy is struck in the scene where the abbess rebukes the shrewish wife Adriana for her persecution of her husband (v. i.). 'The Comedy of Errors,' like the 'Two Gentlemen,' was first published in 1623. Again, too, as in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' allusion was made to the civil war in France. France was described as ' making war against her heir ' (m. ii. 125) — an allusion which assigns the composition of the piece to 1591. Shakespeare's farce, which is by far the shortest of all his dramas, may have been founded on a plaj^ no longer extant, called ' The Historie of Error,' acted in 1576 at Hampton Court. In theme Shakespeare's piece resembles the ' Menaechmi ' of Plautus, and treats of mistakes of identity arising from the likeness of twin- born children, although Shakespeare adds to Plautus 's single pair of identical twins a second couple of serving- men. The scene in Shakespeare's play (act iii. sc. i.) in which Antipholus of Ephesus is shut out of his own house, previously employed the like theme of a girl in man's disguise to more satisfying purpose in his Novelle (155i ; Pt. II. Novel 36). Under Bandello's guidance Shakespeare treated the topic again and with finer insight in Twelfth Night, his masterpiece of romantic comedy (see p. 328 infra). 1 Fleay, Life, pp. 188 seq. FIKST DKAMATIC EFFORTS 109 while his indistinguishable brother is entertained at dinner within by his wife who mistakes him for her husband, recalls an episode in the ' Amphitruo ' of Plautus. Shakespeare doubtless had direct recourse to Plautus as well as to the old play. He had read the Latin dramatist at school. There is only a bare possibility that he had had an opportunity of reading Plautus in English when ' The Comedy of Errors ' wa« written in 1591. The earliest translation of the ' Mensechmi ' was not licensed for publication before June 10, 1594, and was not published until the following year. No translation of any other play of Plautus appeared in print before. On the other hand, it was stated in the pre- face to this first published translation of the ' Mensechmi ' that the translator, W. W., doubtless William Warner, a veteran of the Elizabethan world of letters, had some time previously ' Englished ' that and ' divers ' others of Plautus's comedies, and had circulated them in manuscript ' for the use of and delight of his private friends, who, in Plautus's own words, are not able to understand them.' Each of these three plays — ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and ' The Comedy of Errors ' , — gave promise of a dramatic capacity out of the and common way ; yet none can be with certainty •^ ^ ■ pronounced to be bej^ond the ability of other men. It was not until he produced ' Romeo and Juliet,' his first tragedy, that Shakespeare proved himself the possessor of a poetic instinct and a dramatic insight of unprece- dented quality. Signs of study of the contemporary native drama and of other home-born literature are not wanting in this triumph of distinctive genius. To Marlowe, Shake- speare's only English predecessor in poetic and passionate tragedy, some rhetorical circumlocutions and much metrical dexterity are undisguised debts. But the pathos which gave ' Romeo and Juliet ' its nobility lay beyond Marlowe's dramatic scope or sympathy. Where Shake- speare, in his early efforts, manipulated themes of closer affinity with those of Marlowe, the influence of the master penetrates deeper. In ' Romeo and Juliet ' Shakespeare 110 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE turned to rare account a tragic romance of Italian origin which was ab-eady popular in English versions and was an accepted theme of drama throughout Western Europe .1 Arthur Broke, who in 1562 rendered the story into EngUsh verse from a French rendering of Bandello's standard ItaUan narrative, mentions in his ' Address to the Reader ' that he had seen ' the same argument lately set forth on stage with more commendation ' than he could ' look for,' but no tangible English proof of this statement has yet come to light. A second author, William Painter, greatly extended the EngUsh vogue of the legend by pubhsliing in 1567, in his anthology of fiction called ' The Palace of Pleasure,' a prose paraphrase of the same French version as Broke employed. Shakespeare followed Broke's verse more closely than Painter's prose, although he studied both. At the same time he impregnated the familiar story with a wholly original poetic fervour, and relieved the tragic intensity by developing the humour of JMercutio, and by investing with an entirely new and comic significance ^ The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance of Anthia and Abrocomas by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century, seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio, ' the Neapolitan Boccaccio,' in his Novdlino (No. xxxiii. : cf. W. G. Waters's translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel. La Giulieita, 1535, and by Bandello in his Novelle, 1554, pt. ii. No. ix. Bandello's version became classical ; it was translated into French in the Histoires Tragiques of Fran'fois de Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. The English writers Broke and Painter are both disciples of Boaistuau. Near the same time that Shakespeare was writing Borneo and Juliet, the Italian story was dramatised, chiefly with Bandello's help, by Italian, French, and Spanish writers. The blind dramatist Luigi Groto published at Venice in 1583 La Hadriana. tragedia nova, which tells of Romeo and Juliet under other names and closely anticipates many passages of Shakespeare's play. (Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Soc, pp. xxi seq.) Meanwhile a French version (now lost) of Bandello's Borneo and Juliet, by Come de la Gambe, called ' Chateauvieux,' a professional actor and groom of the chamber to Henri III, was performed at the French Court in 1580. (See the present writer's French Benaissance in England, 1910, pp. 439-440.) Subsequently Lope do Vega dramatised the tale in his Spanish play called Castdvines y Monteses (i.e. Capultes and Montagus). FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 111 the character of the Narse.^ Dryden was of opinion that, ' in his Mercutio, Shakespeare showed the best of his skill' as a delineator of 'gentlemen,' and the critic, who was writing in 1672, imputed to the dramatist the remark 'that he was forced to kill him [MercutioJ in the third act to prevent being killed by him.' 2 The subordinate comic character of Peter, the Nurse's serving-man, enjoyed the advantage of being interpreted on the production of the piece by WilUam Kemp, a leading comedian of the day.^ Yet it is the characterisation of hero and heroine on which the poet focussed his strength. The ecstasj' of youthful passion is portrayed by Shakespeare in language of the highest lyric beauty, and although he often yields to the current predilection for quibbles and conceits, ' Romeo and Juliet,' as a tragic poem on the theme of love, has no rival in any literature. If the Nurse's remark, ' 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years ' (i. iii. 23), be taken literally, the composition of the play must at least have been begun in 1591, for no earthquake in the sixteenth century occurred in England after 1580. A few parallel- isms with Daniel's ' Complainte of Rosamond ' suggest that Shakespeare' read that poem before completing his play. Daniel's work was published in 1592. and it is probable that Shakespeare finished his piece early that year. The popularity of the tragedy was unquestioned from the first, For an analysis of Lope's play, which ends happily, see Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xxi. 451-60. Lope's play appeared in an inaccurate English translation in 1770, and was rendered literally by Mr. F. W. Cosens in a privately printed volume in 1869. ^ Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society. * Dryden's Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, i. 174. Drj'den continued his comments thus on Shakespeare's alleged confession : ' But, for my part, I cannot find he [Mercutio] was so dangerous a person : I see nothing in him but what was so exceedingly harmless, that he might have Lived to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any man.' ^ By a copyist's error Kemp's name la substituted for Peter's in the second and third quartos of the play (iv. v. 100). A like error of tran- scription in the text of Much Ado about Nothing (Act n. Sc. ii.) establishes the fact that Kemp subsequently created the part of Dogberry. 112 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE and young lovers were for a generation commonly credited with speaking ' naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.'' ^ The tragedy underwent some revision after its first production.2 The earhest edition appeared in 1597 anonymously and surreptitiously. The title-page ran : ' An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and luHet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid pub- liquely by the right honourable the L[ord] of Hunsdon his seruants.' The printer and publisher, John Danter, a very notorious trader in books, of Hosier Lane, near Holborn Conduit, had acquired an unauthorised transcript which had doubtless been prepared from a shorthand report.^ The reporter filled gaps in his imperfect notes * Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), Satyre 10. 2 Cf . Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society ; Fleay, Life, pp. 191 seq. * Danter first obtained notoriety in 1593 as the publisher of Thomas Nashe's scurrilous attacks on the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey. Subsequently he enjoyed the unique distinction among Elizabethan stationers of being introduced under his own name in the dramatis personce of an acted play of the period. ' Danter the printer ' figured as a trafficker in the licentious products of academic youth in the academic play of The Returne from Parjiassus. act i. sc. iii. (1600 ?). Besides Borneo a7id Juliet, Danter published Titus Andronicus (early in 159-4; see p. 1.30). He died in 1597 or 1598. The evil practice of pubUshing crude shorthand reports of plays, from which Shakespeare was to suffer frequently, is capable of much independent illustration. The dramatist Thomas Heywood, who began his long career as dramatist before 1600, complained that some of his pieces accidentally fell into the printer's hands, and then ' so corrupt and mangled, copied only by the ear, that I have been as unable to know them as ashamed to challenge them ' (Rape of Lucrece, 1638, address). Similarly Hey^vood included in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 1637 (pp. 248-9) a prologue for the revival of an old play of his concerning Queen EUzabeth, called ' If you know not me, you know nobody,' which he had lately revised for acting purposes. Nathaniel Butter had pubHshed the first and second editions of the piece in 1605 and 1608, and Thomas Pavier the third in 1610. In a prose note preceding the new prologue the author denounced the printed edition as ' the most corrupted copy, which was published without his consent.' In the prologue itself, Heywood declared that the piece had on its original production on the stage pleased the audience : So much that some by stenography drew The plot, put it in print, scarce one word true. Sermons and lectures were frequently described on their title-page as FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 113 with unwieldy descriptive stage directions of his own devising. A second quarto — ' The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, newly corrected, augmented, and amended ; As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted by the right honourable the Lord Chamber- laine his Seruants ' — was published, from an authentic stage version, in 1599, by a stationer of higher reputation, Cuthbert Burble of Cornhill.^ In Burble's edition the tragedy first took coherent shape. Ten years later a re- print of Burble's quarto introduced further improvements (' as it hath been sundrie times publiquely acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants at the Globe'), and that volume, which twice re-appeared in quarto — without date and in 1637 — was the basis of the standard text of the First Foho. The prolonged series of quarto editions show that ' Romeo and Juliet ' fully retained its popularity through- out Shakespeare's generation. ' taken by characterie ' (cf. Stephen Egerton's Lecture 1598, and Sermons of Henry Smith, 1590 and 1591). The popular system of Elizabethan shorthand was that devised by Timothy Bright in his Characterie : An arte of shorte scripte, and secrete writiivj by character, 1588. In 1590 Peter Bales devoted the opening section of his Writing Schoolmaster to the ' Arte of Brachygraphy.' In 1612 Sir George Buc, in his Third Vniversilie of England (appended to Stow'a Chronicle), wrote of ' the much-to-be-regarded Art of Brachy- graphy' (chap, xxxix.), that it 'is an art newly discovered or newly recovered, and is of very good and necessary use, being well and honestly exercised, for, by the meanes and helpe thereof, they which know it can readily take a Sermon, Oration, Play, or any long speech, as they are spoke, dictated, acted, and uttered in the instant.' ^ This quarto was printed for Burbie by Thomas Creede at the Katharine Wheel in Thames Street. Burbie had a year earher issued the quarto of Love's Labour's Lost. He had no other association with Shakespeare's work. The Stationers' Company's Register contains no license for the issue of either Banter's or Burble's quarto of Rojneo and Juliet. The earliest mention of the piece in the Stationers' Register is under date January 22, 1606-7, when Burbie assigned his rights in that tragedy, as well as in Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew, to the stationer Nicholas Ling ; but Ling transferred his title on November 19, 1607, to John Smethwick, who was responsible for the third quarto of Romeo and Juliet of 1609. VIII PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 Three pieces with which Shakespeare's early activities were associated reveal him as an adapter of plays by other hands. Though they lack the interest attaching as adap'feT^ to his unaided work, they throw invaluable hght of others' qjj some of his early methods of composition plays. . "^ ^ and on his early relations with other dramatists. Proofs are offered of Shakespeare's personal co-operation with his great forerunner Marlowe, and the manner of influence which Marlowe's example exerted on him is precisely indicated. Shakespeare, moreover, now experi- mented for the first time with the dramatisation of his country's history. That special branch of drama was rousing immense enthusiasm in Elizabethan audiences, and Shakespeare's first venture into the historical field enjoyed a Hberal share of the popular applause. On March 3, 1591-2, 'Henry VI,' described as a 'new' or reconstructed piece, was acted at the Rose theatre . by Lord Strange's men. It was no doubt the Henry VI. play subsequently known as Shakespeare's ' The First Part of Henry VI,' which presented the war in France and the factious quarrels of the nobility at home from the funeral of King Henry V (in 1422) to the humili- ating treaty of marriage between his degenerate son. King Henry VI, with Margaret of Anjou (in 1445). On its production the piece, owing to its martial note, won a popular triumph, and the unusual number of fifteen performances followed within the year.^ ' How would it ^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 13 et passim ; ii. 152, 338. The last recorded performance was on Jan. 31, 1592-3. 114 PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 115 have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French),' wrote Thomas Nashe, the satiric pamphleteer, in his ' Pierce Pennilesse ' (1592, licensed August 8), with reference to the striking scenes of Talbot's death (act iv. sc. vi. and viii.), ' to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the tea res of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding ! ' There is no categorical record of the production of a second piece in continuation of the theme, but indirect evidence plainly attests that such a play was quickly staged. A third piece, treating of the concluding incidents of Henry VI's reign, attracted much attention in the theatre early in the autumn of the same year (1592). The applause attending the completion of this historical trilogy caused bewilderment in the theatrical profession. Older dramatists awoke to the fact that their popularity was endangered by a young stranger who had set up his tent in their midst, and was challenging the supremacy of the camp. A rancorous protest was uttered without delay. Late in the summer of 1592 Robert Greene lay, after a reckless life, on a pauper's deathbed. His last hours were spent in preparing for the press a miscellany of euphuistic fiction which he entitled ' Greens SS'^ Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentaunce.' Towards the close the sardonic author introduced a letter addressed to ' those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plays.' Here he warned three nameless Hterary friends who may best be identified with Peele, Marlowe, and Nashe, against putting faith in actors whom he defined as ' buck- ram gentlemen, painted monsters, puppets who speak from our mouths, antics garnished in our colours.' Such men were especially charged with defying their just obli- gations to dramatic authors. But Greene's venom was chiefly excited by a single member of the acting fraternity. I 2 116 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEB ' There is,' he continued, ' an upstart Crow, beautified with cur feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you ; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his owne conceit, the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. . . . Never more acquaint [those apes] with your admired inventions, for it is pittie men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.' The ' only Shake-scene ' is a punning attack on Shakespeare. The tirade is an explosion of resentment on the part of a disappointed senior dramatist at the energy of a young actor — the theatre's factotum — in trespassing on the play- writer's domain. The ' upstart crow ' had revised the dramatic work of his seniors without adequate acknow- ledgment but with such masterly effect as to imperil their future hold on the esteem of manager and playgoer. When Greene mockingly cites as a specimen of his ' only Shake- scene's ' capacity the line ' Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide ' he travesties the words ' Oh Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide ' ^ from the third piece in the trilogy of Shakespeare's ' Henry VI ' (i. iv. 137). It may be inferred that Greene was especially angered by Shakespeare's revision of this piece in devising which he originally had a part.2 The sour critic died on September 3, 1592, as soon as he laid down his splenetic pen. But Shakespeare's amiability of character and versatile ambition had already won him admirers, and his success excited the sympathetic regard ^ These words which figme in one of the most spirited outbursts in the play — the Duke of York's savage denunciation of Queen Margaret — were first printed in 1595 in the earliest known draft of the drama The True Tragedie of the Duke of York (see p. 119 infra). * Greene's complaint that he was robbed of his due fame by literary plagiaries, among whom he gave Shakespeare the first place, was emphatically repeated by an admiring elegist : Greene gane the ground to all that wrote vpon him. yay more the men that so eclipst his fame Purloynde his Plumes ; can they deny the same ? {Greenes Funeralls, by R. B. 1594, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1911, Sonnet IX.) PROGRESS AS PLAYAVRIGHT, 1591-1594 117 of colleagues more kindly than Greene. At any rate the dying man had clearly miscalculated Marlowe's sentiment. Marlowe was already working with Shakespeare, apofogy^ and showed readiness to continue the partner- ship. In December 1592, moreover, Greene's publisher, Henry Chettle, who was himself about to turn dramatist, prefixed an apology for Greene's attack on the young actor to his ' Kind Hartes Dreame,' a tract describing contemporary phases of social life. He re- proached himself with failing to soften Greene's phraseology before committing it to the press. ' I am as sory,' Chettle wrote, ' as if the original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have scene his [i.e. Shakespeare's] demeanour no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides dhvers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.' It is obvious that Shake- speare at the date of Chettle's apology was winning a high reputation alike as actor, man, and writer. The first of the three plays dealing with the reign of ' Henry VI ' was originally published in 1 623, in the collected edition of Shakespeare's works. The actor-editors of the First Folio here accepted a veteran stage tradition of its authorship. The second and third plaj's were previously to the publication of the First Folio each printed thrice in quarto volumes in a form very different from that which they assumed long after when they followed the first part in the Folio. Two editions of the second and third parts of ' Henry VI ' came forth without any author's name ; but the third separate issue boldly ascribed both to Shake- speare's pen. The attribution has justification but needs qualifying. Criticism has proved beyond doubt that in the three parts of ' Henry VI ' Shakespeare with varying energy revised and expanded other men's work. In the first part there may be small trace of his pen, but in the second and third evidence of his handiwork abounds. At the most generous computation no more than 300 out of the 2600 lines of the ' First Part ' bear the impress 118 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of Shakespeare's style. It may be doubted whether he can be safely credited with aught beyond the scene in the Temple Gardens, where white and red roses Shake- speare's are plucked as emblems by the rival political to^Th'e^Fir^t Parties (act ii. sc. iv.), and Talbot's speeches on Part of ^ the battlefield (act iv. sc. v.-vii.), to the enthu- ^^^ ' siastic reception of which on the stage Nashe bears witness. It may be, however, that the dying speech of Mortimer (act ii. sc. v.) and the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk (act V. sc. iii.) also bear marks of Shakespeare's vivid power. The lifeless beat of the verse and the crudity of the language conclusively deprive Shakespeare of all responsibility for the brutal scenes travestying the story of Joan of Arc which the author of the first part of 'Henry VI' somewhat slavishly drew from Holinshed. The classical allusions throughout the piece are far more numerous and recondite than Shakespea.re was in the habit of employing. Holinshed's ' Chronicle ' supplies the historical basis for all the pieces, but the playwright defies historic chronology in the ' First Part ' with a callous freedom exceeding anything in Shakespeare's fuUy accredited history work. The second part of Henry VI's reign, which carried on the story from the coronation of Queen Margaret to the initial campaign of the Wars of the Roses, First editions -yj^as firs' published anonymously in 1594 from and Third a rough stage copy by Thomas Millington, a item °vi • stationer of Cornhill, A license for the pub- lication was granted him on March 12, 1593-4, and the volume, which was printed by Thomas Creede of Thames Street, bore on its title-page the rambling descrip- tion ' The first part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster with the death of the good Duke Humphrey : and the banishment and death of the Duke of Sufl^olk, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade ; and the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the crowne.' PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 119 The third part of Henry VI's reign, which continues the tale to the sovereign's final dethronement and death, was first printed under a different designation with greater care next year by Peter Short of Bread Street Hill, and was published, as in the case of its predecessor, by Milling- ton. This quarto bore the title ' The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke his seruants.' ^ The first part of the trilogy had been acted by Lord Strange's company with which Shakespeare was associated, and the interpretation of the third and last instalment by Lord Pembroke's men was only a temporary deviation, from normal practice. In their earliest extant shape, the two continuations of the First Part of ' Henry VI '— ' The Contention ' and ' The True Tragedie ' — show liberal traces of Shakespeare's revising pen. The foundations were clearly laid through- out by another hand, but Shakespeare is responsible for much of the superstructure. The humours of Jack Cade in ' The Contention ' can owe their savour to him alone. Queen Margaret's simple words in ' The True Tragedie,' 1 Millington reissued both The Contention and The True Tragedie in 1600, the former being then printed for him by Valentine Simmes (or Sims), the latter by William White. On April 19, 1602, Millington made over to another publisher, Thomas Pavier, his interest in ' The first and second parts of Henry the vj^^ ii bookes ' (Arber, iii. 304). This entry would seem at a first glance to imply that the first as well as the second part of Shakespeare's Henry VI were prepared for separate publication in 1602, but no extant edition of any part of Henry VI belongs to that year. It is more probable that Pavier's reference is to The Contention and The True Tragedie — early drafts respectively of Parts II and III of Henry VI. Pavier, to whom Millington assigned the two parts of Henry the vf* in 1602, published a new edition of The Contention with The True Tragedie in 1619, when the title-page bore the words ' newly corrected and enlarged. Written by Wilb'am Shake-speare, Gent.' This is the earliest attribution of the two plays to Shakespeare, but Pavier the publisher, although he had some warrant in tliis case, is rarely a trustworthy witness, for he had little scruple in attaching Shakespeare's name to plays by other pens (see p. 262 infra). 120 WILLIAM SHAKESPBAKE when in the ecstasy of grief she cries out to the murderers of her son ' You have no children,' have a poignancy of which few but Shakespeare had the secret. Twice in later plays did he repeat the same passionate rebuke in cognate circumstances.^ Shakespeare may be absolved of all responsibility for the original drafts of the three pieces. Those drafts have not survived. It was in revised versions that the plays were put on the stage in 1592, and the text of the second and third parts which the actors then presented is extant in the printed editions of ' The Contention ' and ' The True Tragedie.' But much further recon- struction engaged Shakespeare's energy before he left the theme. With a view to a subsequent revival, Shake- speare's services were enlisted in a fresh recension, at any rate of the second and third parts, involving a great expansion. ' The Contention ' was thoroughly overhauled, and was converted into what was entitled in the Folio ' The Second Part of Henry VI.' There more than 500 lines keep their old form ; 840 lines are more or less altered ; some 700 of the earlier lines are dropped altogether, and are replaced bj^ 1700 new lines. ' The True Tragedie,' which became ' The Third Part of Henry VI ' of the Folio, was less drastically handled ; no part of the old piece is here abandoned ; some 1000 lines are retained unaltered, and some 900 are recast. But 1000 fresh lines make their appearance. Each of the Folio pieces is longer than its forerunner by at least a third. The 2000 lines of the old pieces grow into the 3000 of the new.^ Of the two successive revisions of the primal ' Henry VI ' in which Shakespeare had a hand the first may be dated in 1592 and the second in 1593. That Shakespeare in both revisions shared the work with another is clear from the internal evidence, and the identity of his coadjutor may be ^ Cf. Constance's bitter cry to the papal legate in King John : ' He talks to me that never had a son ' (iii. iv. 91) ; and Macduff's reproach ' He has no children ' (Macbeth, iv. iii. 216). * Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 235 seq. ; Trans. New Skakespcre Soc, 1876, pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee ; Swinburne, Stud>/, pp. 51 seq. PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 121 inferred with reasonable confidence. The theory that Robert Greene, with George Peele's co-operation, produced the original draft of the three parts of ' Henry VI,' speare's which Shakespeare twice helped to recast, can coa jutors. q^q^q accouut for Greene's indignant denuncia- tion of Shakespeare as ' an upstart crow, beautified with the feathers ' of himself and his fellow-dramatists. Greene and Peele were classical scholars to whom there would come naturally such unfamiUar classical allusions as figure in all the pieces. The lack of historic sense which is characteristic of Greene's romantic tendencies may well account for the historical errors which set ' The First Part of Henry VI ' in a special category of ineptitude. Peele elsewhere, in his dramatic presentation of the career of Edward L, libels, under the sway of anti-Spanish prejudice, the memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile ; he would have found nothing uncongenial in the work of vilifying Joan of Arc. Signs are not wanting that it was Marlowe, the greatest of his predecessors, whom Shakespeare joined in the first revision -w hich brought to birth ' The Conten- tion ' and ' The True Tragedie.' There the fine writing, the over-elaboration of commonplace ideas, the tendency to rant in language of some dignity, are sure indications of Marlowe's hand. In the second and last recension there are also occasional signs of Marlowe's handiwork,^ * Few will question that among the new lines in the ' Second Part ' Marlowe is responsible for such as these (iv. i. 1-4) : The gaudy blabbing and remorseful day Is crept into the bosom of the sea. And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades That drag the tragic melancholy night. When, in the ' Third Part,' the Duke of York's son Richard per- suaded his father to aim at the throne it is unthinkable that any other pen than Marlowe's converted the bare lines of the old piece, Then, noble father, resolve yourselfe. And once more claime the crowne, into the touching but strained eloquence of the new piece (i. ii. 28-31) : Father, do but think How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown : Within whose circuit is Elysium, And all that poets feign of bliss and joy. 122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE but most of the new passages are indubitably from Shakespeare's pen. Marlowe's assistance at the final stage was fragmentary. It is probable that he began together with Shakespeare the last revision, but that his task was interrupted by his premature death. The lion's share of the closing phase of the work fell to his younger coadjutor. Marlowe, who alone of Shakespeare's contemporaries can be credited with exerting on his efforts in tragedy a really substantial influence, met his death on Mue^ce'.^ June 1, 1593, in a drunken brawl at Deptford. He died at the zenith of his fame, and the esteem which his lurid tragedies enjoyed in his lifetime at the playhouse survived his violent end. ' Tamburlaine,' ' The Jew of Malta,' 'Dr. Faustus,' and ' Edward II' were among the best applauded productions through the year 1594. Shakespeare's next two tragedies, ' Richard III ' and ' Richard II,' again pursued historical themes ; a httle later the tragic story of Shylock the Jew was enshrined in his comedy of ' The Merchant of Venice.' In all three pieces Shakespeare plainly disclosed a conscious and a prudent resolve to follow in the footsteps of the dead Marlowe. In ' Richard III ' Shakespeare, working singlehanded , takes up the history of England at the precise point where Marlowe and he, working in partnership, left it ^Richard ^ ^j^g ^j^-j.^ p^j.^ Qf . jjgjjj.y yj , rj.^^ murder of King Henry closes the old piece ; his funeral opens the new ; and the historic episodes are carried on- wards, until the Wars of the Roses are finally ended by Richard's death on Bosworth Field. Richard's career was already famiHar to dramatists, but Shakespeare found all his material in the ' Chronicle ' of Holinshed. ' Ricardus Tertius,' a Latin piece of Senecan temper by Dr. Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, Cambridge, had been in favour with academic audiences since 1579, when it was {^^^y first acted by students at St. John's College, Cambridge.^ ^ See F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 1914, pp. Ill seq. PKOGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 123 About 1591 ' The True Tragedie of Richard 111,' a crude piece in English of the chronicle type by some unknown pen, was produced at a London theatre, and it issued from the press in 1594. Shakespeare's play bears httle resemblance to either of its forerunners. The occasional similarities which have been noted seem due to the wTiters' common dependence on the same historic authority.^ Throughout Shakespeare's drama the effort to emulate Marlowe is un- mistakable. The tragedy is, says Swinburne, ' as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, though never so inflated in expression, as Marlowe's "Tambur- laine " itself.' In thought and melody Marlowe is for the most part outdistanced, yet the note of lyric exaltation is often caught from his hps. As in his tragic efforts, the interest centres in a colossal type of hero. Richard's boundless egoism and intellectual cunning overshadow all else. Shakespeare's characterisation of the King betrayed a subtlety beyond Marlowe's reach. But it was the tur- bulent incident in his predecessor's vein which chiefly assured the popularity of the piece. Burbage's stirring impersonation of the hero was the earliest of his many original interpretations of Shakespeare's characters to excite public enthusiasm. His vigorous enunciation of Richard Ill's cry ' A horse, a horse ! my kingdom for a horse ! ' gave the words proverbial currency.^ It was not until ' Richard III ' had exhausted its first welcome on the stage that an attempt was made to pubHsh „ . ,. . the piece. A quarto edition ' as it hath beene Publication f ,,,-ryii it.it t of • Richard lately actcd by the Right honourable the Lord ^^^■' Chamberlaine his seruants,' appeared in 1597. That year proved of importance in the history of Shake- speare's fame and of the publication of his work. In 1597 there also came from the press the crude version of ' Romeo ^ See G. B. Churchill, Richard III up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 1900. * Cf. Richard Corbet's Iter Boreale written about 1618, where it is said of an innkeeper at Bosworth who acted as the author's guide to the local battlefield : For when he would have said King Richard died And called ' A horse, a horse I ' he Burbage cried. 124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE and Juliet ' and the first issue of ' Richard II,' the play which Shakespeare wrote immediately after ' Richard III.' But the text of the early editions of ' Richard III ' did the drama scant justice. The Quarto followed a copy which had been severely abbreviated for stage purposes. The First FoUo adopted another version which, though more complete, omits some necessary passages of the earlier text. A combination of the Quarto and the Folio versions is needful to a full comprehension of Shakespeare's effort. None the less the original edition of the play was, despite its defects, warmly received, and before the First Folio was published in 1623 as many as six re-issues of the defective quarto were in circulation, very slightly varying one from another .^ The composition of ' Richard II ' seems to have followed that of ' Richard III ' without delay. The piece was probably written very early in 1593. Once '^Richard again Shakespeare presents an historic figure who had already received dramatic attention. Richard II was a chief character in a brief dramatic sketch of Wat Tyler's rebelUon (in 1381), which was composed in 1587 and was published anonj^mously in 1593 as 'The Life and Death of Jack Straw.' The King's troubled career up to his delusive triumph over his enemies in 1397 was ako the theme of a longer piece by another anonymous * Andrew Wise, who occupied the shop at the sign of the Angel in St. Paul's Churchyard for the ten years that he was in trade (1593- 1603), was the first publisher of Richard III. He secured licenses for the publication of Richard II and Richard III on August 29 and October 20, 1597, respectively. Both volumes were printed for Wise by Valentine Simmes (or Sims), whose printing office was at the White Swan, at the foot of Adling Hill, near Baynard's Castle. Second editions of each were issued hy Wise in 1598 ; Richard II was again printed by Simmes, but the second quarto of Richard III was printed by Thomas Creede at the Katharine Wheel in Thames Street. In 1602 Creede printed for Wise a third edition of Richard III which was described without due warrant as ' newly augmented.' On June 25, 1603, Wise made over his interest in both Richard II and Richard III to Matthew Lawe of St. Paul's Churchyard, who reissued Richard III in 1605, 1612, 1622, and 1629, and Richard II in 1608 and 1615. PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 125 hand.^ But Shakespeare owed little to the labours of his predecessors. He confined his attention to the two latest years and the death of the King and ignored the earlier crises of his reign which had alone been dramatised previously, ' Richard II ' is a more penetrating study of historic character and a more concentrated portrayal of historic action than Shakespeare had yet essayed. There is a greater restraint, a freer flow of dramatic poetry. But again there is a clear echo of Marlowe's ' mighty line,' albeit in the subdued tone of its latest phase. Shakespeare in ' Richard II ' pursued the chastened path of placidity on which Marlowe entered in ' Edward II,' the last piece to engage his pen. Both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's heroes were cast by history in the same degenerate mould, and Shakespeare's piece stands to that of Marlowe in much the relation of son to father. Shake- speare traces the development of a seK-indulgent tempera- ment under stress of misfortune far more subtly than his predecessor. He endows his King Richard in his fall with an imaginative charm, of which Marlowe's King Edward shows only incipient traces. Yet Marlowe's inspiration nowhere altogether fails his great disciple. Shakespeare again drew the facts from Holinshed, but his embellish- ments are more numerous than in ' Richard III ' ; they include the magnificent eulogy of England which is set in the mouth of John of Gaunt. The speech indicates for the time the high-water mark of dramatic eloquence on the Elizabethan stage, and illustrates 1 The old play of Richard II, which closes with the murder of the King's uncle Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1397, survives in MS. in the British Museum (MS. Egerton 1994). It was first printed in an edition of eleven copies by Halliwell in 1870, and for a second time in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch for 1900, edited by Dr. Wolfgang Keller. The piece is a good specimen of the commonplace dramatic work of the day. Its composition may be referred to the year 1591. A second (lost) piece of somewhat later date, again dealing exclusively with the early part of Richard's II's reign, which Shake- speare's play ignores, was witnessed at the Globe theatre on April 30, 1611, by Simon Forman, who has left a description of the chief incidents (New Shakapere Soc. Trans. 1875-6, pp. 415-6). 126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE the spirited patriotism which animated Shakespeare's interpretation of English history. As in the first and third parts of ' Henry VI,' prose is avoided throughout, and gardeners and attendants speak in verse like their betters, a sure sign of Shakespeare's youthful hand. The printers of the quarto edition of ' Richard II,' which first appeared in 1597, had access to what was p ... . in the main a satisfactory manuscript. Two of ' Richard reprints followed in Shakespeare's lifetime, and the editors of the First Folio were content to adopt as their own the text of the third quarto. The choice was prudent. From the first two quartos, in spite of their general merits, an important passage was omitted, and the omission was not repaired until the issue of the third in 1608 when the title-page announced that the piece was reprinted ' with new additions of the ParUament sceane and the deposing of King Richard, as it hath been lately acted by the Kinge's Maiesties seruantes at the Globe.' The cause of this temporary mutilation of the text demands some inquiry, for it illustrates a common peril of literature of the time, which Shakespeare here encountered for the first, but, as it proved, the only time. Since the infancy of the drama a royal proclamation had prohibited playwrights from touching ' matters of „, , religion or governance of the estate of the Shakespeare ° ® and the common weal,' ^ and on November 12, 1589, when Shakespeare was embarking on his career, the Privy Council reiterated the prohibition, and created precise machinery for its enforcement. All plays were to be hcensed by three persons, one to be nominated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the second by the Lord Mayor, and the third by the Master of the Revels. Again there was a warning against unseemly reference to matters ' of divinity and state.' This regulation of 1589 remained ^ The proclamation was originally promulgated on May 16, 1559, long before the ilrama had any settled habitation or literary coherence. Mayors of cities, lords lieutenants of counties, and justices of the peace were directed to inhibit within their jurisdictions the performance of stage plays tending to heresy or sedition (Collier's History, i. 168-9). PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 127 in force through Shakespeare's working days with two slight quaUfications. In the first place the Master of the Revels — an officer of the Royal household — came to per- form the Ucensing duties singlehanded, and in the second place ParUament strengthened the licenser's hand by con- stituting impiety on the stage a penal offence.^ In the course of the poet's hfetime fellow-dramatists not infrequently fell under the hcenser's lash on charges of theological or pohtical comment, and their offence was purged by imprisonment or fine. Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Thomas Nashe were among the playwrights who were at one time or another suspected of covert censure of Government or Church and suffered in consequence more or less condign panishment. There was a nervous tendency on the part of the authorities to scent mischief where none was intended. Yet, in spite of official sensitiveness and some vexatious molestation of authors, literature on and off the stage enjoyed in practice a large measure of liberty. The allegation in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' (Ixvi. 9) that 'art' was 'tonguetied by authority ' is the casual expres- sion of a pessimistic mood, and has no precise bearing on Shakespeare's personal experience. Amid the whole range of his work there is only a single passage which, as far as is known, evoked official censure. The licenser's veto only fell upon 165 lines in Shakespeare's play of ' Richard II.' When that drama was produced, the scene of the King's deposition in Westminster Hall was robbed of the fine episode where the conquered hero, summoned to hear his doom, makes his great speeches of sub- mission (iv. i. 154-318). It is curious to note that a cognate incident in Marlowe's ' Edward II ' (act v. sc. i.) escaped rebuke and figured without abridgment in the printed version of 1594. But Richard II 's fate always roused in Queen Ehzabeth an especially active sense of dread. Her fears were not whoUy caprice, for a few years later — early in 1601 — disaffected subjects cited Richard II's fortunes as an argument for rebeUion, and the rebel ^ A statute of 1605 (3 Jac. I, cap. 21) rendered players liable to a fine of ten pounds for ' profanely abusing the name of God ' on the stage. 128 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE leaders caused Shakespeare's piece to be revived at the Globe theatre with the avowed object of fanning a revolutionary flame.^ The hcenser of ' Richard II ' had some just ground for his endeavour to concihate royal anxieties. Even so, he did his spiriting gently ; he sanctioned the scenes portraying the monarch's arrest and his murder in Pomfret Castle, and his knife only fell on the King's voluntary surrender of his crown. The pro- hibition, moreover, was not lasting. The censored lines were restored to the issue of 1608 when James I was King. Shakespeare's interpretation of historic incident was invari- ably independent and sought the truth. It does honour to himself and to the government of the country that at no other point in his work did he encounter oflScial reprimand. Through the last nme months of 1593, from April to December, the London theatres were closed, owing to the virulence of the plague. The outbreak excelled of^iSQ^^^"^ in severity any of London's recent experiences, and although there were many recurrences of the pestilence before Shakespeare's career ended, only once — in 1603 — were the terrors of 1593 surpassed. In 1593 the deaths from the plague reached a total of 15,000 for the city and suburbs, one in 15 of the population ; the victims included the Lord Mayor of London and four alder- men. Not merely was pubhc recreation forbidden until the peril passed, but contrary to precedent, no Bartholomew Fair was held in Smithfield.^ Deprived of the opportunity of exercising their craft in the capital, the players travelled in the country, visiting among other places Bristol, Chester, Shrewsbury, Chelmsford, and York. There is small reason to question that Shakespeare accompanied his colleagues on their long tour. But, wherever he sojourned while the plague held London in its grip, his pen was busily employed, and before the close of the next year — 1594 — he had given marvellous proof of his rapid and versatile industry. ^ See p. 254 infra. 2 Stow's Annals, p. 766 ; Creighton's Epidemics in Britain, i. 253-4 ; Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 74 n. PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 129 It was early in that year (1594) that there was both acted and pubhshed 'Titus Andronicus,' a bloodstained tragedy which plainly savoured of an earher epoch Andronicus.' although it was described as 'new.' The piece was in his own lifetime claimed for Shakespeare without qualification. Francis Meres, Shakespeare's ad- miring critic of 1598, numbered it among his fully accredited works, and it was admitted to the First FoHo. But Edward Ravenscroft, a minor dramatist of Charles II's time, who prepared a new version of the piece in 1678, wrote of it : 'I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his [i.e. Shakespeare's] but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters.' Ravenscroft's assertion deserves acceptance. The sanguinary tragedy presents a fictitious episode illus- trative of the degeneracy of Imperial Rome. The hero is a mythical Roman general, who gives and receives blows of nauseating ferocity. The victims of the tragic story are not merely killed but savagely mutilated. Crime succeeds crime at an ever- quickening pace. The repulsive plot and the recondite classical allusions differentiate it from Shake- speare's acknowledged work. Yet the offensive situations are often powerfully contrived and there are Unes of artistic force and even of beauty. Shakespeare's hand is only visible in detached embelhshments. The play was in all probabiUty A\Titten originally in 1591 by Thomas Kyd, Mdth some aid, it may be, from Greene or Peele, and it was on its revival in 1594 that Shakespeare improved it here and there.^ A lost piece of like character called ' Titus and Vespasian ' was played by Lord Strange's men on April 11, 1591.'^ 'Titus Andronicus' may well have ^ Mr. J. M. Robertson, in his Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus ? (1905), ably questions Shakespeare's responsibility at any point. 2 Cf. Henslo'.ve, ed. Greg, i. 14 seq. ; 11. 155 and 159-162. A German play called Tito Andronico, which presents with broad divergences the same theme as the Shakespearean piece, was acted by English players in Germany and was published in 1620. There Vespasianus, who is absent from the Shakespearean Titus, figures among the dramatis K 130 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE been a drastic adaptation of this piece which was de- signed, with some help from Shakespeare, to prolong public interest in a profitably sensational theme. Ben Jonson credits ' Titus Andronicus ' with a popularity equalling Kyd's lurid ' Spanish Tragedy. ' It was favourably known abroad as well as at home. The Shakespearean ' Titus Andi'onicus ' was acted at the Rose theatre by the Earl of Sussex's men on January 23, 1593-4, when it was described as a ' new ' piece ; of"''Titus°" y®* ^^^^ company's hold on it was fleeting ; it was immediately afterwards acted by Shake- speare's company, w^hile the Earl of Pembroke's men also claimed a share of the early representations. The title-page of the first edition of 1594 describes it as having been performed by the Earl of Derby's servants (one of the successive titles of Shakespeare's company), as well as by those of the Earls of Pembroke and Sussex. In the title-page of the second edition of 1600, to these three noblemen's names was added that of the Lord Cham- berlain, who was the Earl of Derby's successor in the patronage of Shakespeare's company. \ATiatever the circumstances in which other companies presented the piece, it w^as more closely identified with Shakespeare's colleagues than with any other band of players. John Danter, the printer, of Hosier Lane, who produced the first (imperfect) quarto of ' Romeo and Juhet,' received a license to publish the piece on February 6, 1593^. His edition soon appeared, being published jointly by Edward WTiite, whose shop ' at the little North doore of Paules ' bore, as the title-page stated, ' the sign of the Gun,' and by Thomas IVIillington, the publisher of ' The First Contention ' and ' The True Tragedie ' (early drafts of personcB. The German piece is doubtless a rendering of the old English play Titus and Vespasian, no text of which survives in the original language. (See Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 155 scq.) Two Dutch versions of Titus and Vespasian were made early in the seventeenth centurj-. Of these the later, which alone is extant, was first printed in 1642 (see a paper by H. de W. Fuller in Modern Language Association of America PnbUcations, 190J, ix. p. 1). PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 131 the Second and Third Parts of ' Henry VI '), whose shop, unmentioned in the ' Titus ' title-page, was in Comhill.i A second edition of ' Titus ' was published solely by Edward White in 1600.^ This edition was printed by James Roberts, of the Barbican, who was printer and pubUsher of ' the players' bills ' or placards of the theatrical per- formances which were displayed on posts in the street.^ Roberts was in a favourable position to rcaUse how strongly ' Titus Andronicus ' gripped average theatrical taste. On any showing the distasteful fable of ' Titus Andronicus ' engaged Uttle of Shakespeare's attention. All , „j^ his strength was soon absorbed by the composi- Merchant tion of ' The Merchant of Venice,' a comedy, in ^^^ ^- , which two romantic love stories are magically blended with a theme of tragic import. The plot is a child of mingled parentage. For the main thread Shakespeare had direct recourse to a book in a foreign tongue — to ' II Pecorone,' a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Eiorentino, of which there was no English translation.'* There a Jewdsh creditor demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, and the latter is rescued through the advocacy of ' the lady of Belmont,' who is wife of the debtor's friend. ^ Only one copy of this quarto is known. Its existence was noticed by Langbaine in 1691, but no copy was found to confirm Langbaine's statement until January 1905, when an exemplar was discovered among the books of a Swedish gentleman of Scottish descent, named Robson, who resided at Lund (cf. Athenaum, Jan. 21, 1905). The quarto was promptly purchased by an American collector, Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, for 2000Z. - Some years later — in 1611 — Edward White published a reprint of his second edition, which was reproduced in the First Folio. The First Folio version adds a short scene (act ni. sc. ii.), which had not been in print before. * This oflBce Roberts purchased in 1594 of John Charlewood, and held it till 1615, when he sold it to William Jaggard. See p. 555 infra. * Cf. W. G. Waters's translation of II Pecorone, pp. 44-60 (fourth day, novel 1). The Italian collection was not published till 1558, and the story followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but the original, K 2 132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The management of the plot in the Itahan novel is closely followed by Shakespeare. A similar story of a Jew and his debtor's friend is very barely outlined in a popular medi- seval collection of anecdotes called ' Gesta Romanorum,' while a tale of the testing of a lover's character by offer of a choice of three caskets of gold, silver, and lead, which Shakespeare combined in ' The Merchant ' with the legend of the Jew's loan, is told independently (and with variations from the Shakespearean form) in another por- tion of the ' Gesta.' But Shakespeare's ' Merchant ' owes important debts to other than Italian or Latin sources. He caught hints after his wont from one or more than one old English play. Stephen Gosson, the sour censor of the infant drama in England, described in his ' Schoole of Abuse ' (1579) a lost play called ' the Jew . , . showne at the Bull [inn] . . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of usurers.' The writer excepts this piece from the censure which he flings on well-nigh all other English plays. Gosson's descrip- tion suggests that the two stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined in drama before Shake- speare's epoch. The scenes in Shakespeare's play in which Antonio negotiates with Shy lock are roughly anticipated, too, by dialogues between a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor in the extant play of ' The Three Ladies of London ' by R[obert] W[ilson], which was printed in 1584.1 There the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the lines : Signor Mercatore, why do you not pay me ? Think you I will bs mocked in this sort ? This three times j'ou have flouted me — it seems you make thereat a sport. Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently, Or by mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee. 1 The author Robert Wilson was, like Shakespeare himself, well known both as player and playwright. The London historian Stow credited him with ' a quick delicate refined extemporal wit.' He made a reputation by his improvisations. In his Three Ladies of London, as in the other plays assigned to him, allegorical characters (in the vein of the morality) join concrete men and women in the dramatis personce. PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 133 Subsequently, when the judge is passing judgment in favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts : Stay there, most puissant judge. Signer Mercatore, consider what you do. Pay me the principal, as for the interest I forgive it you. Such phrases are plainly echoed by Shakespeare.^ Above all is it of interest to note that Shakespeare in ' The Merchant of Venice ' shows the last indisputable and material trace of his discipleship to Marlowe, and Rode- Although the dehcate comedy which lightens ngo Lopez. ^^^ gerious interest of Shakespeare's play sets it in a wholly different category from that of Marlowe's ' Jew of Malta,' the humanised portrait of the Jew Shylock embodies reminiscences of Marlowe's caricature present- ment of the Jew Barabas, while Marlowe's Jewess Abigail is step-sister to Shakespeare's Jewess Jessica, But everywhere Shakespeare outpaced his master, and the inspiration that he drew from Marlowe in the ' Merchant ' goes Uttle beyond the general conception of the Jewish figures. Marlowe's Jewish hero, although he is described as a victim of persecution, tyjiifies a savage greed of gold, which draws him into every manner of criminal extrava- gance. Shakespeare's Jew, despite his mercenary instinct, is a penetrating and tolerant interpretation of racial characteristics which are degraded by an antipathetic environment. Doubtless the popular interest aroused by the trial in February 1594 and the execution in June of the Queen's Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez, incited Shakespeare to a subtler study of Jewish character than had been essayed before.^ It is Shylock (not the merchant ^ In The Orator (a series of imaginary declamations, which Anthony Munday translated from the French and published in 1596) the speech of a Jew who claims a poimd of flesh of a Christian debtor and the reply of the debtor bear a further resemblance to Shylock's and Antonio's passages at arms. The first part of the Orator appeared in French in 1571, and the whole in 1581. It is unsafe to infer that the Merchant of Venice must have been written after 1596, the date of the issue of the first English version of the Orator. Shakespeare was quite capable of consulting the book in the original language. * Lopez was the Earl of Leicester's physician before 1586, and the Queen's chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with 134 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Antonio) who is the hero of the play, and the main interest culminates in the Jew's trial and discomfiture. That solemn scene trembles on the brink of tragedy. Very bold is the transition to the gently poetic and humorous incidents of the concluding act, where Portia and her waiting-maid in masculine disguise lightly banter their husbands Bassanio and Gratiano on their apparent fickle- ness. The change of tone attests a mastery of stage craft ; yet the interest of the play, while it is sustained to the end, is, after Shylock's final exit, pitched in a lower key. A piece called ' The Venesyon Comedy ' which the Lord Admiral's men produced at the Rose theatre on August 25, 1594, and performed twelve times within the following nine months,^ was presumed hy Malone to be an early version of ' The Merchant of Venice.' The identification is very doubtful, but the ' Merchant's ' afiinity acknow- with Marlowe's work, and the metrical features ledgments which resemble those of the 'Two Gentlemen,' to Marlowe. . suggest that the date of first composition was scarcely later than 1594. ' The Merchant ' is the latest friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II's perse- cution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial and execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time. That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on Roderigo Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography ; ' The Original of Shylock,' by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. February 1880 ; Dr. H. Graetz, Shylock in den Sagen in den Dramen und in der Geschichte, Krotoschm, 1880 ; New Shakespere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158-92 ; ' The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,' by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in English Historical Review (189-4), iv. 440 seq. 1 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 19, ii. 167 and 170. PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 135 play in which Marlowe's sponsorship is^a living inspiration. Shakespeare's subsequent allusions to his association with Marlowe sound like fading reminiscences of the past. In ' As You Like It ' (in. v. 80) he parenthetically and vaguely commemorated his acquaintance with the elder dramatist by apostrophising him in the lines : Dead Shepherd ! now I find thy saw of might : ' Who ever loved that loved not at first sight ? ' The ' saw ' is a quotation from Marlowe's poem ' Hero and Leander ' (line 76) . In ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' (m. i. 17-21) Shakespeare places on the lips of Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, confused snatches of verse from Marlowe's charming lyric, ' Come live with me and be my love.' The echoes of his master's voice have lost their distinctness. On July 17, 1598, several years after its production on the stage, the well-established ' stationer ' James _ ^,. ^. Roberts, who printed the second edition of Publication ' ^ , ,. on i of ' The ' Titus Andronicus ' and other of Shakespeare s Merchant." pia,ys, secured a license from the Stationers' Company for the publication of 'The Merchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce.' But to the license there was attached the unusual condition that neither Roberts nor ' any other whatsoever ' should print the piece before the Lord Chamberlain gave his assent to the publication.^ More than two years elapsed after the grant of the original license before ' The Merchant ' actually issued from the press. ' By consent of Master Roberts ' ^ Arber, Stationers' Registers, iii. 122. Apparently the players were endeavouring to persuade their patron the Lord Chamberlain to exert his influence against the unauthorised publication of plays. On June 1, 1599, the wardens of the Stationers' Company, by order of the Arch- bishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, gave the drastic direction ' That noe playes be printed excepte they bee allowed by sucho as haue aucthorytie.' The prohibition would seem to have resulted in a temporary suspension of the issue of plays which were in the repertory of Shakespeare's company ; but the old irregular conditions were resumed in the autumn of 1600, and they experienced no further check in Shakespeare's era. 136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE a second license was granted on October 28, 1600, to another stationer, Thomas Heyes (or Haies), and when the year 1600 was closing Heyes published the first edition which Roberts printed for him. Heyes's text, which was more satisfactory than was customary, was in due time transferred to the First Foho.^ To the year 1594 must be assigned one more historical piece, ' King John.' Like the First and Third Parts of ' King ' Henry VI ' and ' Richard II ' the play altogether John.' eschews prose. Strained conceits and rhetorical extravagances which tend to rant and bombast are clear proofs of early composition. x\gain the theme had already attracted dramatic effort. Very early in Queen Elizabeth's reign. Bishop Bale, a fanatical protestant controversialist, had produced a crude piece called ' King Jolian,' which presented from an ultra-protestant point of view the story of that King's struggle with Rome for the most part allegorically, after the manner of the morahty. There is no evidence that Shakespeare knew anything of Bale's work, which remained in manuscript until 1838. More pertinent is the cii-cumstance that in 1591 there was published anonymously a rough piece in two parts entitled ' The Troublesome Raigne of King John.' A preUminary ' Address to the Gentlemen Readers ' reminds them of the good reception which they lately gave to the Scythian Tamburlaine. This reference to Marlowe's tragedy pomts to the model which the unknown author set before himself. ^ The imprint of the first quarto of The Merchant runs : ' At London, Printed by I[ames] R[oberts] for Thomas Heyes and are to be sold in Paiiles Church-yard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon. 1600.' Cf. Arber, Transcript, iii. 175. Heyes attaclied pecuniary value to his pub- lishing rights in The Merchant of Venice. On July 8, 1619, his son, Laurence, as heir to his father, paid a fee to the Stationers' Company on their granting him a formal recognition of his exclusive interest in the publication (Arber, iii. 651). There is ground for treating another early quarto of The Mere-hard which bears the imprint ' Printed by J. Roberta 1600 ' as a revised but unauthorised and misdated reprint of Heyes's quarto which William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts's press, printed for Thomas Pavier, an unprincipled stationer, in 1619 (see Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq., and p. 561 infra). PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 137 There is no other ground for associating Marlowe's name with the old play, which lacks any sign of genuine power. Yet the old piece deserves grateful mention, for it suppHed Shakespeare with all his material for his new ' history.' In ' King John ' he worked without disguise over a pre- decessor's play, and sought no other authority. Every episode and every character are anticipated in the previous piece. Like his guide, Shakespeare embraces the whole sixteen years of King John's reign, yet spends no word on the chief pohtical event — the signing of Magna Carta. But into the adaptation Shakespeare flung all his energy, and the theme grew under his hand into great tragedy. It is not only that the chief characters are endowed with new life and glow with dramatic fire, but the narrow polemical -and mahgnant censure of Rome and Spain which disfigures the earlier play is for tlie most part ehminated. The old ribald scene designed to expose the debaucheries of the monks of Swinstead Abbey is expunged by Shakesjieare, and he pays little heed to the legend of the monk's poisoning of King John, which fills a large place on the old canvas. The three chief characters — the mean and cruel king, the noble-hearted and despe- rately wronged Constance, and the soldierly humourist, Faulconbridge — are recreated by Shakespeare's pen, and are portrayed with the same sureness of touch that marks in Shylock his rapidly maturing strength. The scene in which the gentle boy Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered his eyes to be put out is as affecting as any passage in tragic literature. The older plaj^wright's lifeless presentation of the incident gives a fair measure of his ineptitude. Shakespeare's ' King John ' was not printed till 1623, but an unprincipled and ill-advised endeavour was made meanwhile to steal a march on the reading pubhc. In 1611 the old piece was reissued as ' written by W. Sh.' In 1622 the pubhsher went a step further in his career of fraud and on the title-page of a new edition declared its author to be ' W. Shake- speare.' 138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare's early farce, ' The Comedy of Errors,' gave him a passing notoriety that he could well have spared. The of Errors ' piece was played (apparently by professional ^ ^uK\ actors) on the evening of Innocents' Day (December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn, before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and their friends. There was some disturbance during the evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, who, dissatis- fied with the accommodation a£forded them, retired in dudgeon. ' So that night,' a contemporary chronicler states, ' was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called the " Night of Errors." '^ Shakespeare was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present. On the morrow a commis- sion of oyer and terminer inquired into the causes of the tumult, which was mysteriously attributed to a sorcerer having ' foisted a company of base and common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of errors and con- fusions.' Fruitful as were these early years, there are critics who would enlarge by conjecture the range of Shakespeare's accredited activities. Two plaj'^s of uncertain doubduirv^ authorship attracted pubUc attention during assigned to the period under review (1591-4) — ' Arden of speare. Feversham ' ^ and ' Edward III.' ^ Shake- speare's hand has been traced in both, mainly on the ground that their dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant. There is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare's authorship in either case. ' Arden of Feversham ' dramatises with intensity * Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manu- script. A second performance of The Comedy 0/ Errors was given at Gray's Inn Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, lS9o. ^ Licensed for publication April 3, 1592, and published in 1592. * Licensed for publication December 1, 1595, and published in 1596. PROGEESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 139 and insight a sordid murder of a husband by a wife which was perpetrated at Favershani on February 15, 1550-1, and was fully reported by Holinshed and more pt^ersham.' briefly by Stow. The subject in its reahstic veracity is of a different type from any which Shakespeare is known to have treated, and although the play may be, as Swinburne insists, ' a young man's work,' it bears no relation either in topic or style to the work on which young Shakespeare was engaged at a date so early as 1591 or 1592. The character of the murderess (Arden's wife Alice) is finely touched, but her brutal instincts strike a jarring note which conflicts with the Shakespearean spirit of tragic art.^ ' Edward III ' is a play in Marlowe's vein, and has been assigned to Shakespeare with greater confidence on even more shadowy grounds. The competent ^Edward Shakespearean critic Edward Capell reprinted it in his ' Prolusions ' in 1760, and described it as ' thought to be writ by Shakespeare.' A century later Tennyson accepted with some quahfication the attribution, which Swinburne, on the other hand, warmly contested. The piece is a curious medley of history and romance. Its main theme, confusedly drawn from Holinshed, presents Edward Ill's wars in France, with the battles of Crecy and Poitiers and the capture of Calais, but the close of act I. and the whole of act ii. di*amatise an unhistoric tale of dishonourable love which the Italian novehst Bandello told of an unnamed King of England who sought to defile ' the Countess of Salisbury,' the wife of a courtier. Bandello's fiction was rendered into English in Painter's ' Palace of Pleasure,' and the author of ' Edward III ' unwarrantably put the tale of ilHcit love to the discredit of his hero. Many speeches scattered through the drama and ^ In 1770 the critic Edward Jacob, in his edition of Arden of Fevers- ham, first assigned Arden to Shakespeare, claiming it to be ' his earliest dramatic work.' Swinburne supported the theory, which is generally discredited. The piece would seem to be by some unidentified disciple of Kyd (cf. Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, p. Ixxxix). 140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the whole scene (act ii. sc. ii.), in which the Countess of Sahsbury repulses the advances of Edward III, show the hand of a master. The Countess's language, which breathes a splendid romantic energj^, has chiefly led critics to credit Shakespeare with responsibility for the piece. But there is even in the style of these contri- butions much to dissociate them from the acknowledged work of Shakespeare, and to justify their ascription to some less gifted disciple of Marlowe.^ A line in act n. sc. i. (■ Lihes that fester smell far worse than weeds ') reappears in Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' (xciv. line 14),- and there are other expressions in those poems, which seem to reflect phrases in the play of ' Edward III.' It was contrary to Shakespeare's practice literally to plagiarise himself. \A'liether the dramatist borrowed from a manu- script copy of the ' Sonnets ' or the somietteer borrowed from the drama are questions which are easier to ask than to answer.^ ^ Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare, pp. 231-274. - See p. loS infra. ^ For other plays of somewhat later date which have been falsely assigned to Shakespeare, see pp. 260 seq. infra. IX THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC Dttring the busy years (1591-4) that witnessed his first pro- nounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came before the pubhc in yet another literary capacity, of ' Venus On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, the printer, and Adonis,\ ^^Jjq ^yg^g j^g fellow-townsman, obtained a hcense 1593. ' for the publication of ' Venus and Adonis,' Shakespeare's metrical version of a classical tale of love. The manuscript was set up at Field's press at Blackfriars, A/ and the book was published in accordance with the common contemporary division of labour by the stationer John Harrison, whose shop was at the sign of the ^Miite Grey- hound in St. Paul's Churchj^ard. No author's name figured on the title-page, but Shakespeare appended his full signa- ture to the dedication, which he addressed in conventional terms to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. The Earl, who was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the handsomest man at Court, with a pronounced dis- position to gallantry. He had vast possessions, was well educated, loved literature, and through life extended to men of letters a generous patronage.^ ' I know to the Earl uot how I shall offend,' Shakespeare now aLpton^' wrote to him in a style flavoured by Euphuism, ' in dedicating my unpoUshed lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden ; only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly ^ See Appendix, sections iii. and iv. 141 142 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather ; and never after ear [i.e. plough] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart's content ; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world's hopeful expectation.' The subscription ran ' Your Honour's in all duty, Wilham Shakespeare.' The writer's mention of the work as ' the fii'st heir of my invention ' impUes that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare undertook 'The first ^ , • i .. i -r, ^ .1 heir of my any of his dramatic work. i5ut there is reason invention.' ^^ beheve that the first draft lay in the author's desk through four or five summers and underwent some retouching before it emerged from the press in its final shape. Shakespeare, with his gigantic powers of work, could apparently count on ' idle hours ' even in the well-filled days which saw the completion of the four original plays — ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' ' Comedy of Errors,' and ' Romeo and Jufiet ' — as well as the revision of the three parts of ' Henry VI ' and ' Titus Andronicus,' while ' Richard III ' and ' Richard II ' were in course of drafting. Marlowe's example may here as elsewhere have stimulated Shakespeare's energy ; for at that writer's death (June 1, 1593) he left unfinished a poetic rendering of another amorous tale of classic breed — the story of Hero and Leander by the Greek poet Musaeus.^ 1 Marlowe's Hero and Leander was posthumously licensed for the press on September 28, 1593, some months after Venus and Adonis ; but it was not published till 1598, in a volume to which George Chapman contributed a continuation completing the work. About 1596 Richard Carew in a letter on the ' Excellencie of the English tongue ' linked Shakespeare's poem with Marlowe's ' fragment,' and credited them jointly with the literary merit of Catullus (Camden's Remaines, 1614, p. 43). FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 143 Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis ' is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness ; but it is imbued with a juv'enile tone of license, which harmonises with its pretension of youthful origin. The irrelevant details, the many figures drawn from the sounds and sights of rural or domestic life, confirm the impression of adolescence, although the graphic justness of observation and the rich harmonies of language anticipate the touch of maturity, and traces abound of wide reading in both classical and recent domestic Hterature. The topic was one which was likely to appeal to a young patron hke Southampton, whose culture did not discourage lascivious tastes. The poem offers signal proof of Shakespeare's early devotion to Ovid. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto : Vilia miretur vulgus ; mihi flavnia Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. The lines come from the Roman poet's ' Amores,' and, in his choice of the couplet, Shakespeare again showed loyalty to Marlowe's example.^ The legend of Venus and Adonis was sung by Theocritus and Bion, the pastoral poets of to Ovfd.* Sicily ; but Shakespeare made its acquaintance in the brief version which figures in a work by Ovid which is of greater note than his ' Amores ' — in 1 The motto is taken from 0\'id's Amores, liber i. elegy xv. 11. 35-6. Portions of the Amores or Elegies of Love were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date, probably about 1597, in Epigrammes and Elegies by I[ohn] D[avies] and Qhris- topher] M[arlowe]. Marlowe, whose version circulated in manuscript in the eight years' interval, rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus : Let base conceited wits admire vile things, Fair PhcEbus lead me to the Muses' springs I This poem of Ovid's Amores was popular with other Elizabethans. Ben Jonson placed another version of it on the lips of a character called Ovid in his play of the Poetaster (1602). Jonson presents Shake- speare's motto in the awkward garb : Kneele hindes to trash : me let^bright Phoebus swell, With cups full flowing from the Muses' well. 144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE his 'Metamorphoses' (Book X. 520-560; 707-738). Not that Shakespeare was a slavish borrower. On Ovid's narrative of the Adonic fable he embroidered reminiscences of two independent episodes in the same treasury of mytho- logy^, viz. the wooing of the reluctant Hermaphroditus by the maiden Salmacis (Book IV) and the hunting of the Calydonian boar (Book VIII). Again, however helpful Ovid's work proved to Shakespeare, ' the first heir ' of his invention found supplementary inspiration elsewhere. The Roman poet had given the myth a European vogue. Echoes of it are heard in the pages of Dante and Chaucer, and before Shakespeare wrote it was developed by poets of the Renaissance in sixteenth-century Italy and France. In the year of Shakespeare's birth Ronsard, the chieftain of contemporary French poetry, versified the tale of Venus and Adonis with pathetic charm, ^ and during Shakespeare's boyhood many fellow-countrymen emulated the Continental example. Spenser, Robert Greene, and Marlowe bore occasional witness in verse to of Lodge. ^^^® myth's fascination, while Thomas Lodge described in detail Adonis's death and Venus's grief in prefatory stanzas before his ' Scillaes Metamor- phosis : Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus ' (pubHshed in 1589). Lodge's main theme was a different fable, drawn from the same rich mine of Ovid. His effort is the most notable pre-Shakespearean experiment in the acchmatisation of Ovid's ' Metamorphoses ' in Enghsh verse. Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis ' is in the direct succession of both Continental and Ehzabethan culture, which was always loyal to classical tradition. His metre is the best proof of his susceptibility to current vogue. He employed the sixain or six-line stanza rhjTning ababcc, which is the commonest of all forms of narrative verse in both English and French poetry of the sixteenth century. Spenser had proved the stanza's capacity in his 1 See French Renaissance in England, 220. FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 145 ' Astrophel,' an elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, while Thomas Lodge had showoi its adaptability to epic purpose in that Ovidian poem of ' Scillaes Metamorphosis ' which treats in part of Shakespeare's theme. On metrical as well as on critical grounds Lodge should be credited with helping efficiently to mould Shakespeare's first narrative poem.^ A year after the issue of ' Venus and Adonis,' in 1594, Shakespeare published another poem in hke vein, which told the tragic tale of Lucrece, the accepted * Lucrece.* pattern of conjugal fidehty alike through classical times and the Middle Ages. The tone is graver than that of its predecessor, and the poet's reading had clearly taken a wider range. Moral reflections abound, and there is some advance in metrical dexterity and verbal harmony. But there is less freshness in the imagery and at times the language tends to bombast. Long digres- sions interrupt the flow of the narrative. The heroine's allegorical addresses to ' Opportunity Time's servant ' and to ' Time the lackey of Eternity ' occupy 133 lines (869-1001), while the spirited description of a picture of the siege of Troy is prolonged through 202 lines (1368-1569), nearly a ninth part of the whole poem. The metre is changed. The six-Kne stanza of ' Venus ' is replaced by a ^ Shakespeare's Vemis and Adonis and Lodge's Scillaes MetamoT' phosis, by James P. Reardon, in ' Shakespeare Society's Papers,' iii. 143-6. Cf. Lodge's description of Venus's discovery of the wounded Adonis : Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere, Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke, Her sighs and then her lookes and hearie cheere, Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke : How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, As if the boy were then but new a-dying. In the minute description in Shakespeare's poem of the chase of the hare (11. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the Ode de la Chase (on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his (Euvres et Meslanges Poetiques, 1574. For fuller illustration of Shake- speare's sources and analogues of the poem, and of its general literary history and bibliography, see the present writer's introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the first quarto edition of Venus and Adonis ( 1593), Clarendon Press, 1905. 146 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE seven-line stanza which Chaucer often employed in the identical form ababbcc. The stanza was again common among EHzabethan poets. Prosodists christened it ' rhyme royal ' and regarded it as peculiarly well adapted to any ' historical or grave ' theme. The second poem was entered in the ' Stationers' Registers ' on May 9, 1594, under the title of ' A Booke intitled the Ravj^shement of Lucrece,' and edition was pubhshed m the same year under the title 1594- q£ < Lucrece.' As in the case of 'Venus and Adonis,' it was printed by Shakespeare's fellow- townsman Richard Field. But the copyright was vested in John Harrison, who pubhshed and sold it at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Churchyard. He was a prominent figure in the book-trade of the day, being twice Master of the Stationers' Company, and shortly after publishing Shakespeare's second poem he acquired of Field the copjo-ight, in addition, of the dramatist's first poem, of which he Avas already the publisher, Lucrece's story, which flourished in classical Hterature, was absorbed by mediaeval poetry, and hke the tale of Venus and Adonis was subsequently endowed ?hrstor>°^ with new Hfe by the Hterary e£fort of the Euro- pean Renaissance. There are signs that Shake- speare sought hints at many hands. The classical version of Ovid's ' Fasti ' (ii. 721-852) gave him a primary clue. But at the same time he seems to have assimilated sugges- tion from Livy's version of the fable in his ' History of Rome ' (Bk. I. ch. 57-59), which William Painter para- phrased in Enghsh in the ' Palace of Pleasure.' Admirable help was also available in Chaucer's ' Legend of Good Women ' (lines 1680-1885), where the fifth section deals with Lucretia's pathetic fortunes, and Bandello had developed the theme in an Italian novel. Again, as in ' Venus and Adonis,' there are subsidiary indications in phrase, episode, and sentiment of Shakespeare's debt to contemporary Enghsh poetry. The accents of Shakespeare's ' Lucrece ' often echo those of Daniel's poetic ' Complaint FIKST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 147 of Rosamond' (King Henry II's mistress), which, with its seven-hne stanza (1592), stood to 'Lucrece' in even closer relation than Lodge's ' SciUa,' with its six-line stanza, to ' Venus and Adonis.' The piteous accents of Shake- speare's heroine are those of Daniel's heroine purified and glorified.^ Lucrece's apostrophe to Time (Unes 939 seq.) suggests indebtedness to two other English poets, Thomas Watson in ' Hecatompathia,' 1582 (Sonnets xlvii and Ixxvii), and Giles Fletcher in ' Licia,' 1593 (Sonnet xxviii). Fletcher anticipated at many points Shakespeare's cata- logue of Time's varied activities.^ The curious appeal of Lucrece to personified ' Opportunity ' (lines 869 seq.) appears to be his unaided invention. Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to the Eari of Southampton, the patron of his first, but his language displays greater warmth of feeling, feuer to Shakespeare now addressed the young Earl in Lord South- terms of devoted friendship, which were not un- common at the time in communications between patrons and poets, but they suggest here that Shakespeare's relations with the brilhant young nobleman had grown closer since he dedicated ' Venus and Adonis ' to him in more formal style a year before. ' The love I dedicate to your lordship,' Shakespeare wrote in the opening pages ^ Rosamond, in Daniel's poem, muses thus when King Henry chal- lenges her honour : But what ? he is my King and may constraine me ; Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed. The "World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me, I shall be judg'd his Love and so be shamed ; We see the faire condemn' d that never gamed. And if I yeeld, 'tis honourable shame. If not, I live disgrac'd, yet thought the same. " The general conception of Time's action can of course be traced very far back in poetry. Watson acknowledged that his lines were borrowed from the Italian Serafino, and Fletcher imitated the Neapolitan Latinist Angerianus ; while both Serafino and Angerianus owed much to Ovid's pathetic lament in Tristia (iv. 6, 1-10). That Shakespeare knew Watson's chain of reflections seems proved by his verbatim quotation of one link in Much Ado about Nothing (i. i. 271) : 'In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.' There are plain indications in Shakespeare's Sonnets that Fletcher's Licia was familiar to him. L 2 148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of ' Lucrece,' ' is without end, whereof this pamphlet with- out beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance- What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater ; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordshii? ; to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.' The subscription runs ' Your Lordship's in all duty, William Shakespeare.' ^ In these poems Shakespeare made his earhest appeal to the world of readers. The London playgoer already knew his name as that of a promising actor reception of and a successful playwright. But when ' Venus the two g^mj Adonis ' appeared in 1593, no word of poems. ^^ his dramatic composition had seen the hght of the printing press. Early in the following year, a month or two before the publication of ' Lucrece,' there were issued the plays of ' Titus Andronicus ' and the first part of th( ' Contention ' (the early draft of the Second Part of 'Henry VI'), to both of which Shakespeare had lent a revising hand. But so far, his original dramas had escaped the attention of traders in books. His early plays brought him at the outset no reputation as a man of letters. It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, but in the restricted role of versifier of classical fables famihar to all cultured Europe, that he first impressed studious contemporaries with the fact of his mighty genius. The reading pubhc welcomed his poetic tales with unquahfied enthusiasm. The sweetness of the verse, the poetic flow of the narrative, and the graphic imagery discountenanced censure of the hcentious treatment of the themes even on the part of the seiiously mmded. Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulogies in which they ^ For fuller illustration of the poem's literary history and biblio- graphy, see the present writer's introduction to the facsimile repro- duction of the First Quarto edition of Imcrece (1594), Clarendon Press. 1905. FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 149 proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus. ' Lucrece,' wrote Michael Drayton in his ' Legend of Matilda ' (1594), was 'revived to live another age.' A year later William Covell, a Cambridge Fellow, in his ' Polimanteia,' gave 'ail praise' to 'sweet Shakespeare' for his 'Lucrecia.'^ In 1598 Richard Bamfield, a poet of some lyric power, sums up the general estimate of the two works thus : And Shakespeare thou, -nhose hony-flowing Vaine, Barnfield's (Pleasing the World) thy Praises doth obtaine ; tribute. Whose Venius, and whose Lucrece (sweete and chaste). Thy Name in fames immortall Booke have plac't. Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever : Well may the Bodye dj-c, but Fame dies never.* In the same year the rigorous critic and scholar, Gabriel Harvey, distinguished between the respective impressions which the two poems made on the pubUc. Harvey re- ported that ' the younger sort take much delight ' in ' Venus and Adonis,' while 'Lucrece' pleased 'the wiser sort.'^ A poetaster John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to ' honey-tongued Shakespeare ' in his ' Epigramms ' (1599), eulogised the poems indiscriminately as an unmatchable achievement, while making vaguer and less articulate mention of the plays ' Romeo ' and ' Richard ' and ' more whose names I know not.' Printers and pubhshers of both poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. No fewer than six editions of ' Venus ' appeared between 1592 and 1602 ; a seventh followed in 1617, and a 1 In a copj^ supposed to be unique of this work, formerh^ the property of Prof. Dowden, the author gives his name at the foot of the dedication to the Earl of Essex as ' W. Covell.' (See Dowden's Sale Catalogue, Hodgson and Co., London, Dec. 16, 191.3,'p. 40.) Covell was a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge. (See Diet. Nat. Biog.) In all other known copies of the Polimanteia the author's signature appears as 'W. C — initials which have been wrongly identified with those of William Clerke, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. ^ Barnfield's Poems in Divers Humours. 1589, ' A Remembrance of some English Poets.' ' Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. Moore Smith, 1913 ; see p. 360. 150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE twelfth in 1636. ' Lucrece ' achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare's death, and an eighth edition in 1655.^ There is a hkehhood, too, that Edmund Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare's poetic contemporaries, was first „, , drawTi by the poems into the ranks of Shake- Shakespeare , -, and speare s admirers. Among the ten contempo- penser. ^^^ poets whom Spenser saluted mostly under fanciful names in his ' Colin Clouts come home againe ' (completed in 1594) ,2 it is hardly doubtful that he greeted Shakespeare under the name of ' Action ' — a famihar Greek proper name derived from deros, an eagle. Spenser wrote : And there, though last not least is Aetion ; A gentler Shepheard maj' no where be found, Whose muse, full of high thought's invention. Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound. The last line alludes to Shakespeare's surname, and adum- brates the later tribute paid by the dramatist's friend, Ben Jonson, to his ' true-filed lines,' which had the power of ' a lance as brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.' ^ We y /j^-^^^l assume that the admiration of Spenser for Shake- ^f^*-'*^'^ speare was reciprocal. At any rate Shakespeare paid w^ 5'^^Spenser the comphment of making reference to his ' Teares ^"^'^"'-f fT.o M.iooc, ' ni^Qn i-r. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' jT/iyoi the Muses' (1591) in ^/^'^•(v. i. 52-3). ti4fcs**^ d(i4:^ "^^^ thrice three Muses, mourning for the death ^/> t. ^"/^/i ^^ learning, late deceased in beggary, '' is chere paraded as the theme of one of the dramatic enter- tainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate Theseus's ^ See pp. 544-5 infra. ^ Cf. Malone's Variorum, ii. 224—279, ^^•here an able attempt is made to identify all the writers noticed by Spenser, e.g. Thomas Churchyard (' Harpalus '), Abraham Fraunce (' Corydon '), Arthur Gorges {' Alcyon '), George Peele {' Palin '), Thomas Lodge (' Alcon '), Arthur Golding (' Palemon '), and the fifth Earl of Derby (' Amyntas '), the patron of Shakespeare's company of actors. Spenser mentions Alabaster and Daniel \vithout disguise. ^ Similarly Fuller, in his Worthies, likens Shakespeare to ' Martial in the warlike sound of his surname.' FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 151 marriage. In Spenser's ' Teares of the Muses ' each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on the literary and dramatic effort of the age. Shakespeare's Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the frank but not unkindly comment : That is some satire keen and critical. Not sorting with a nuptial ceremonj'. But it may be safely denied that Spenser in the same "^ ^J^ poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made ^jV^'^ Thalia deplore the recent death of ' our pleasant Willy.' i ^rh'*^ i <•*- The name Willy was frequently used in contemporary ^*y^^** literature as a term of famiharity without relation to the 'fi 'hVf * baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Phihp Sidney was addressed as ' Willy ' by some of his elegists. A comic' actor, ' dead of late ' in a hteral sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss Enghsh comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian Richard Tarleton.^ Similarly the ' gentle spirit ' who is described by Spenser in a still later stanza as sitting ' in idle cell ' rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be more reasonably identified with Shakespeare.^ 1 All these and all that els the Comlck Stage With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced. By which mans life in his ILkest image Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . . And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate, With kindly counter under mimick shade. Our pleasant Willy, ah I is dead of late ; With whom all joy and jolly meriment Is also deaded and in doloar drent (11. 199-210). * A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand •was discovered by Halliwell-PMllipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser's Vi'orks (cf. Outlines, ii. 394—5). ■* But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen Large streames of honnie and sweete nectar flowe. Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe. Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (\\. 217-22). 152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaming personal esteem in a circle more exclusive than that of actors, men of letters, or the general reading public. His genius and ' civil demeanour ' of which Chettle wrote in 1592 arrested the notice not only of the brilliant Earl of Southampton but of other exalted patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with Burbage and Kemp, the two most famous actors of the day, during the Christmas season of 1594 was possibly due in part to the at^Court personal interest which he had excited among satelhtes of royalty. Queen Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. Every year his company contributed to her Christmas festivities. The revised version of ' Love's Labour's Lost ' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, Avho came into being a little later. Under Queen Elizabeth's successor Shakespeare greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of King James I. Wlien Jonson in his elegy on Shakespeare wrote of Those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James, he was mindful of the many representations of Shake- speare's plays which glorified the river palaces of \^liitehall, Windsor, Richmond, and Greenwich during the last decade of the great Queen's reign. X THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women of the Court that most of his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France of the°^^ the practice of writing and circulating series of Elizabethan sonnets inscribed to great personages flourished continuously through the greater part of tht sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade ol that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets entitled ' Astrophel and Stella ' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidne^'^'s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere.^ Men and women of the cultivated EUzabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets or in short series their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of long sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his * Section rs. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597. 153 154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to court a patron's ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary Uterary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height. The dramatist lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Ten times he wove the quatorzain into his early dramatic verse. sp^are's Seven examples figure in ' Love's Labour's first ex- Lost,' probably his earliest play ^ ; both the periments. ^ • t t * i r choruses in Romeo and Juliet ' (before acts i. and II.) are couched in sonnet form ; and a letter of the heroine Helena in ' All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of early composition, takes the same shape (ni. iv. 4-17). It has, moreover, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ' Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's ' Second Frutes,' a series of Itahan-English dialogues for students. ^ 1 Love's Labours Lost, i. i. 80-93, 163-176 ; iv. ii. 109-122 ; iii. 26- 39, 60-73 ; v. ii. 343-56 ; 402-15. 2 Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed ' Phaeton to his friend Florio,' runs : Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase, How fit a rival art thou of the Spring 1 For when eacli branch hath left his flourishing, And green-locked Summer's shady pleasures cease ; She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace, And spends her franchise on each living thing : The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing. Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. So when that all our English Wits lay dead, (Except the laurel that is ever green) Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread. And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. Such fruits, such flow'rets of moraUty, Were ne'er before brought out of Italy. John Florio (1553 7-1625), at first a teacher of Italian at Oxford and later well known in London as a lexicographer and translator, was a [-protege of the Earl of Southampton, whose ' pay and patronage ' he LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 155 But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman's patronage for his earliest publication, ' Venus of Shake- and Adonis,' that he turned to sonnetteering speare's ^^ ^1^^ regular plan, outside dramatic compo- composed sition. One hundred and fifty-four sonnets m 1594- survive apart from his plays, and there are signs that a large part of the collection was inaugurated while the two narrative poems were under way during 1593 and 1594 — his thirtieth and thirty-first years. Occasional reference in the sonnets to the writer's growing age was a conventional device — traceable to Petrarch— of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation. ^ In matter and in manner the acknowledged in 1598 when dedicating to him his Worlde of Wordea. He was afterwards a beneficiary of the Earl of Pembroke. His circle of acquaintance included the leading men of letters of the day. Shake- speare doubtless knew Florio first as Southampton's j/roUge. He quotes his fine translation of Montaigne's Essays in The Tempest; see p. 431. Although the fact of Shakespeare's acquaintance with Florio is not open to question, it is responsible for at least one mistaken inference. Farmer and Warburton argue that Sliakespoaro ridiculed Florio in Holofcrncs in Loves Labour's Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio's bombastic prefaces to his Worlde of Wordes and his translation of Montaigne's Essays (1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion Florio wTites more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he boars no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster. ^ Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets : My glass shall not persuade mo I am old (xiii. 1). But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity (bdi. 9-10). That time of year thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (Ixxiii. 1-2). My days are past the best (cxxsviii. G). Daniel in Delia (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old, exclaimed : My years draw on my everlasting night, . . . My days are done. Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom he addressed his Affectionate Shepherd and a sequence of sonnets in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23) : Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs. My wrinkled skin, deep furrows In my face. 156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE greater number of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not yet middle-aged. Language and imagery closely connect the sonnets with the poetic and dramatic work which is known to have engaged Shakespeare's early pen. The phraseology which is matched in plays of a later period is smaller in extent than that which finds a parallel in the narrative poems of 1593 and 1594, or in the plays of similar date. Shake- peare's earliest comedy, ' Love's Labour's Lost,' seems to offer a longer list of parallel passages than any other of his works. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts from time to time and at irregular intervals during the closing years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, although only once — in the epilogue of ' Henry V,' which was penned in 1599 — did he introduce the sonnet-form into his maturer dramatic verse. Sonnet cvii., in which reference is made to Queen Elizabeth's death, may be fairly regarded as one of the latest acts of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height. Similarly Drayton in a sonnet {Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he was barely thirty-one, wrote : Looldng into the glas? of my youth's miseries, I see the ugly face of my deformed cares With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs ; and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how Age rules my lines with wTinkles in my face. All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton followed the Italian master's words more closely than their contempo- raries. Cf. Petrarch's Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet Ixxxi. (to Laura after death) ; the latter begins : Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speelio, L'animo stance e la cangiata scorza B la scemata mia destrezza e forza : Non ti nasconder piil : tu se' pur veglio. {i.e. ' My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me : " It cannot longer be hidden from you, you are old." ') LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 157 In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and medi- Their tative energy that are hardly to be matched literary elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeUng, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in ' Venus and Adonis ' or in ' Lucrece,' although traces of their intensity appear in occasional utterances of Shakespeare's Roman heroine. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed less to the accession of power that comes with increase of years than to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language. In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets ; he circulated „. , ^. them in manuscript.^ But their reputation grew, Circulation _ ^ ^ . . in manu- and public interest was aroused in them in ^"^^ ■ spite of his unreadiness to give them publicity. The mellifluous verse of Richard Barnfield, which was printed in 1594 and 1595, assimilated many touches 1 The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long cir- culated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare's at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in manuscript, Sidney's Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely ' spread abroad in written copies,' and had ' gathered much corruption by ill writers ' (i.e. copyists). Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume which he entitled Diana. This was an authorised publioation. But 158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE from Shakespeare's sonnets as well as from his narrative poems. A line from one sonnet : Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14) ^ and a phrase ' scarlet ornaments ' (for ' Hps ') from another (cxlii. 6) were both repeated in the anonymous play of ' Edward III,' which was pubUshed in 1596 and probably written before 1595. Francis Meres, the critic, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare's 'sugred^ sonnets among his private friends,' and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems.^ William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable's knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands ; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title oi Diana, which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix ix. for further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating litera- ture in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney's father-in- law. Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected manuscript copies of the then unprinted Arcadia were ' so common. ' In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell's Mary Magdale7i's Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work had long flown about ' fast and false.' Nashe, in the preface to his Terrors of ike Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend had ' wrested ' from him, had ' progressed [without his authority] from one scrivener's shop to another, and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e. shop-signs], like a pair of indentures.' Thorpe's bookselling friend, Edward Blount, gathered together, without the author's aid, the scattered essays by John Earle, and he published them in 1628 under the title of Micro-cosmographie, frankly describing them as ' many sundry dispersed transcripts, some very imperfect and surreptitious.' 1 Cf. Sonnet Ixix. 12 : To thy fair flower add the rani smell of weeds. ^ For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shake- speare's work, see p. 259 note 1. ^ Meres's words run : ' As the soule of Ewphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras : So the sweete wittie soule of Oind Hves in melli- fluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.' LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 159 the poetic miscellany which he deceptively entitled ' The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare.' At length, in 1609, a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets was surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, piratical was a camp-follower of the regular publishing publication army. He was professionally engaged in pro- curing for pubhcation literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors' control ; for the law then ignored any natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any Hterary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the author's wishes. Thorpe's career as a procurer of neglected ' copy ' had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earUest hit by bringing to light Marlowe's translation of the ' First Book of Lucan.' On May 20, 1609, he obtained a Hcense for the pubhcation of ' Shakespeare's Sonnets,' and this tradesman-like form of title figured not only on the ' Stationers' Company's Registers,' but on the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld, whose press was at the White Horse in Fleet Lane, Old Bailey, to print the work, and two booksellers, William Aspley of the Parrot in St. Paul's Churchyard and John Wright of Christ Church Gate near Newgate, to distribute the volume to the public. On half the edition Aspley's name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June,^ and the owner of the ' copy ' left the pubHc under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his OAvn pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher's (instead of from the author's) hand was, unless the substitution was specifically accounted ^ The actor AllejTi paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf. Warner's Dulwich MSS. p. 92). The symbol ' 5'^ ' [i.e. fivepence) is also inscribed in contemporary handwriting on the title-page of the copy of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. 160 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no part in the publication. Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were pubHshed in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contem- porary condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any responsibility for the pubHcation of Thorpe's collection of his sonnets in 1609. With charac- teristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas entitled ' A Lover's Complaint, by • A Lover's William Shake-speare,' in which a girl laments Complaint.' her betrayal by a deceitful youth. The title is common in Elizabethan poetry, and although the metre of the Shakespearean ' Lover's Complaint ' is that of ' Lucrece,' it has no other affinity with Shakespeare's poetic style. Its vein of pathos is unknown to the ' Sonnets.' Throughout, the language is strained and the imagery far-fetched. Many awkward words appear in its hnes for the first and only time, and their inven- tion seems due to the author's imperfect command of the available poetic vocabulary. Shakespeare's respon- sibihty for ' A Lover's Complamt ' may well be ques- tioned.^ A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe's preface and his part in the pubUcation has encouraged many critics in a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare's poems, ^ ^ Of. the present writer's introduction to the facsimile of the Sonnets, Clarendon Press, 1905, pp. 49-50, and, especially. Prof. J. W. MackaU's essay on A Lover's Complaint in Engl. Association Essays and Studies, vol. iii. 1912. After a careful critical study of the poem Prof. Mackail questions Shakespeare's responsibility. He suggests less convincingly that the rival poet of the Sonnets ma}' be the author. 2 The present writer has pubhshed much supplementary illustration of the sonnets and their history in the Introduction to the Clarendon Press's facsimile reproduction of the first edition of the Sonnets (1905) LITERAEY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 161 and has caused them to be accorded a place in his bio- graphy to which they have small title. Thorpe's dedi- cation was couched in the bombastic language Thorpe which was habitual to him. He advertised '^r W H • Shakespeare as ' our ever-hving poet.' As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself, in mercantile phraseology of the day, ' the well- wishing adventurer in setting forth,' and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture a partner in the speculation, ' Mr. W. H.' In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished ' JNIr. W. H.' ' all happiness ' and ' eternity,' such eternity as Shake- speare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe's ' First Book of Lucan ' in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. ' W. H.' was doubtless in a hke position.^ When Thorpe dubbed ' Mr. W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, in the footnotes to the Sonnets in the Caxton Shakespeare (1909), vol. xix., and in The French Renaissance in England, 1910, pp. 266 seq. The chief recent separate editions of the Sonnets with critical apparatus are those of Gerald Massey (1872, reissued 1888), Edward Dowden(1875, reissued 1896), Thomas Tyler (1890), George Wyndham (1898), Samuel Butler (1899), and Dean Beeching (1904). Butler and Dean Beeching argue that the sonnets were addressed to an unknown youth of no high birth, who was the private friend, and not the patron, of the poet. Massey identifies the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. Tyler accepts the identi- fication with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, ilr. C. M. Walsh, in Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets (1908), includes the sonnets from the plays, holds aloof from the conflicting theories of solution, arranges the poems in a new order on internal evidence only, and adds new and useful illustrations from classical sources. ^ * W. H.' is best identified with a stationer's assistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring ' copy.' In 1606 ' W. H.' won a conspicuous success in that direction, and con- ducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year ' W. H.' announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem — A Foure-fould Meditation — by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed ' W. H.') vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove (see Appendix v.) 162 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,' he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the publishing fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare's sonnets and to make possible its surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave the procurer's initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends. Thorpe's ally was not a man of such general reputation as to render it likely that the printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers. It has been assumed that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ' JVIr. W. H.,' a young nobleman, to whom (it is argued) the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare. But this assumption ignores the elementary principles of pub- lishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined.^ There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe's methods of business. His choice of patron for this, as for all his volumes, was dictated by his mercantile interests. He was under no induce- ment and in no position to take into consideration cir- cumstances touching Shakespeare's private affairs. The ^ It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets cxxxv.-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of the sonnets bore his own Christian name of Will (see for a full examina- tion of these sonnets Appendix viii.) Further, it has been fantastically suggested that the friend's surname was Hughes, because of a pun supposed to lurk in the line (xx. 7) describing the youth (in the original text) as ' A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling ' (i.e. a man in hue, or complexion,who exerts, by virtue of his fascination, control or influence over the hues or complexion of all he meets). Three other applications to the youth of the ordinary word ' hue ' (cf. ' your sweet hue,' civ. 11) are capriciously held to corroborate the theory. On such grounds a few critics have claimed that the friend's name was William Hughes. No known contemporary of that name, either in age or position in life, bears any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shake- speare in his Sonnets (cf. Notes and Queries, 5th ser. v. 443). LITERAEY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 163 poet, through all but the earhest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impass- able barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued his ques- tionable calling. It was outside Thorpe's aim to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with a cryptic significance. No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials ' IVIr. W. H.' Shake- speare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been asserted) with Wilham (Herbert), third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth.^ But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his hfe by the symbols ' Mr. W. H.' In 1609 the Earl of Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there shoM^ed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his tradesmanhke temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servihty. Any further consideration of Thorpe's address to 'Mr. W. H.' belongs to the biographies of Thorpe and his friend ; it hes outside the scope of Shakespeare's biography .2 Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' ignore the somewhat complex 1 See Appendix vi. ' Mr. William Herbert,' and vn. ' Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke.' ^ The full results of my researches into Thorpe's history, his methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix v. ' The True History of Thomas Thorpe and " Mr. W. H." ' M 2 164 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE scheme of metre adopted by Petrarch whom the Eliza- bethan sonnetteers, hke the French and Itahan sonnet- teers of the sixteenth century, recognised of Shake- to be in most respects their master. The Frm^t^ foreign Avriters strictly divided their poems into an octave and a sestet, and they subdivided each octave into two quatrains, and each sestet into two tercets {abba, abba, cde, cde). The rhymes of the regular foreign pattern are so repeated as never to exceed a total of five, and a couplet at the close is sternly avoided. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by his contemporaries, Shake- peare's sonnets aim at far greater metrical simpHcity than the Itahan or the French. They consist of three deca- syllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet ; the quatrains rhyme alternately, and independently of one another ; the number of different rhyming syllables reach a total of seven {abab cdcd efef gg)} A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Itahan sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more. 1 The metrical structure of the foui'teea-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Byrne in English (published in Gascoigne's Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus : ' Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.' In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney's collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. Spenser interlaces his rhymes more subtly than Shakespeare ; but he is faithful to the closing couplet. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare's sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines ; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines in rhj^med couplets (cf. Lodge's Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) ; and a third (cxlv. ) is in octosyllabics. But it is doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to the collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics : see p. 1(36, note 1. LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 165 The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets thus has the aspect of a series of detached poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-hne stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe's edition opens the volume. It is unHkely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. y^g^nt of Endeavours have been made to detect in continuity, the original arrangement of the poems a connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted.^ It is usual to divide the sonnets The two ^^^^ ^^^'o groups, and to represent that all those ' groups.' numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and aU those numbered cxxvii.-cUv. were addressed to a woman. This division cannot be Hterally justified. In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the mascuhne pronoun or some other unequivocal sign ; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the addressee's sex. Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (Ixvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or ' benefit of ill ' (cxix.) The twelve- lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first ' group,' does httle more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy who is warned that he must, in due course, succumb to Time's ^ If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare's sonnets were applied to the booksellers' miscellany of sonnets called Diana (1594), that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made to reveal the sequence of an individual lover's moods quite as readily, and, if no external bibliographical evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as Thorpe's collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan sonnets, despite their varying poetic value, are not merely substantially in the like metre, but are pitched i : what sounds superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression of homogeneity. 166 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE inexorable law of death.^ And there is no valid objec- tion to the assumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf, xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second ' group ' (cxxvii- cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compli- ment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, Hke Lyly's song of ' Cupid and Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cHii. and chv. soHloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid's fire.^ The choice and succession of topics in each ' group ' give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first ' group ' the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the topics of poet's appeal to a young man to marry so the first ^]^a^^ j^jg youth and beauty may survive in ' group. ■' J J children. There is almost a contradiction in terms between the poet's handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immor- talising his friend's youth and accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. Iv. Lx. Ixiii. Ixxiv. Ixxxi. ci. cvii.) These assurances alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet's affections (cf. xxi. hi, Ixviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf . xlviii. 1. cxiii.) ^ Shakespeare merely warns his ' lovely boy ' that, though he be now the ' minion ' of Nature's ' pleasure,' he will not succeed in defying Time's inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid as ' blind hitting boy,' as in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.) Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton's sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville's collection entitled Ccelica (cf. Ixxxiv., beginning ' Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth '). A similar theme to that of Shakespeare's Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song ' Love is ever djdng,' in his tragedy of The Broken Heart, 1633. ^ See p. 183, note 2. LITERAEY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 167 There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xHii. Ixi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences ; he has sought and won the favour of the poet's mistress in the poet's absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xhi. Ixix. xcv.-xcvi.) In Sonnet Ixx. the young man whom the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience : And thou present'st a pure unstained prime. Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of , young days, [Either not assail'd, or victor being charg'd ! At times melancholy overwhelms the writer : he despairs of the cprruptions of the age (Ixvi.), reproaches liimself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his pro- fession of acting (ex. cxi.), and foretells his approaching death (Ixxi.-lxxiv.) Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet's verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.) But in one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for be- stowing his patronage on rival poets (Ixxviii.-lxxxvi.) In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.) In two sonnets of the second ' group ' (cxxvii. cUv.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve topks of sonnets he hotly denounces his ' dark ' mistress the second fQj, j^gj. proud disdain of his affection, and for ' group. her manifold infidehties with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first ' group ' the poet rebukes a woman for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.) Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant comphments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.), or hghtly quibbles on his name of ' WiU ' 168 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (cxxx.-vi.) — the word ' will ' being capable of many meanings in Elizabethan Enghsh. In tone and subject- matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ' group ' lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow. It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe's arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and pubhshers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the fight. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640 — thirty-one years after their first appearance — they were presented in a completely different order.^ The short descriptive titles which Avere then suppHed to single sonnets or to short unbroken sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein. In whatever order Shakespeare's sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can only be genuine accepted with many qualifications. The fact ^"EUza^* that they create in many minds the illusion bethan of a Series of earnest personal confessions does not justify their treatment by the bio- grapher as self-evident excerpts from the poet's auto- biography. Shakespeare's mind was dominated and engrossed by genius for drama, and his supreme mastery of dramatic power renders it unlikely that any production of his pen should present an unquaHfied piece of auto- biography. The emotion of the sonnets may on a 'priori grounds well owe much to that dramatic instinct which reproduced intuitively in the plays the subtlest thought and feefing of which man's mind is capable. In his drama Shakespeare acknowledged that ' the truest poetry is the most feigning.' The exclusive embodiment in verse ^ See p. 546 injra. LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 169 of mere private introspection was barely known to his era, and in this phrase the dramatist paid an exphcit tribute to the potency in poetic Hterature of artistic impulse and control contrasted with the impotency of personal sensation, which is scarcely capable of discipline. To few of the sonnets can a controlhng artistic impulse be denied by criticism. To pronounce them, alone of his extant work, wholly free of that ' feigning,' which he identified with ' the truest poetry,' is almost tantamount to denying his authorship of them, and to dismissing them from the Shakespearean canon. In spite of their poetic superiority to those of his contemporaries, Shakespeare's sonnets cannot be dis- sociated from the class of poetic endeavour with which they werp identified in Shakespeare's own time. Eliza- bethan sonnets of all degrees of merit were commonly the artificial products of the poet's fancy. A strain of per- sonal emotion is discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences ; but autobiogra- phical confessions were not the stuff of which the EHza- bethan sonnet was made. The typical collection of Ehza- bethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative or assimilative studies. Echoes of the French or of the ItaUan sonnetteers, with their Platonic ideaHsm, are usually the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical quality pecuHar to themselves. Daniel's fine sonnet (xlix.) on ' Care-charmer sleep,' although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Bracli ^ apostrophising ' le Their de- sommeil chasse-soin ' (in the collection entitled pendence ^ on French ' Les Amours d'Aymee '), or the sonnet of models^ ^^ PhiHppe Desportes invoking ' Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit soHtaire ' (in the collection entitled ' Amours d'Hippolyte '). But, throughout EUza- bethan sonnet Hterature, the heavy debt to classical Italian ^ 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, (Euvres Poetiques, edited by Eeinhold Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60. 170 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE and French effort is unmistakable.^ Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his hterary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of ' an Enghsh Petrarch ' — the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an EngHsh sonnetteer.^ Thomas Watson in 1582, in his collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled "EKATOMnA©IA, or A Passionate Century of Love,' prefaced each poem, which ^ See Appendices ix. and s. Of the vastness of the debt that the Elizabethan sonnet owed to foreign poets, a fuller estimate is given by the present writer in his preface to Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), in the revised edition of Arber's English Garner. ^ Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch's sonnets (' Petrarch's invention is pure love itself ; Petrarch's elocution pure beauty itself '), justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground that ' all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized ; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.' Both French and English son- netteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Petrarch's sormets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay's Les Amours, ed. Becq de Fouquieres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel's Delia, Sonnet xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions Ixxxviii.) in Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura, beginning ' S' amor non e, che dunque e quel ch' i' sento ? ' with a rendering of it into French like that of De Baif in his Amours de Francine (ed. Becq de Fouquieres, p. 121), beginning ' Si ce n'est pas Amour, que sent donques mou coeur ? ' or with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in his Passionate Century, No. v., beginning ' If 't bee not love I feele, what is it then ? ' Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the earliest eflorts of Surrey and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the skill of the early and late soimetteers in rendering the Italian master. Petrarch's sonnet In vita di M. Laura (No. Ixxx. or Ixxxi., beginning ' Cesare, poi che '1 traditor d' Egitto ') was independently translated both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 66), and by Francis Davison in his Poetical Rhapsody (1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch's Bonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii., beginning 'Pommi ove '1 Sol uccide i fiori e r erba ') was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf. Puttenham's Arte oj English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 231) and by Drummond of Haw- thornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221). LITERAEY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 171 he termed a ' passion,' with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one ' passion ' was ' wholly translated out of Petrarch ' ; that in another passion ' he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard ' ; while ' the sense or matter of " a third " was taken out of Serafino in his " Stram- botti." ' In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his foreign original, and frequently appended a quota- tion.^ Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled ' Idea,' declared that it was ' a fault too common in this latter time ' ' to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch's pen.' ^ Lodge did not acknowledge his many Uteral borrowings from Ronsard and Ariosto, but he made a plain profession of indebted- ness to Desportes when he wrote : ' Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Phihppe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand.' ^ j ^ Eight of Watson's sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch ; twelve are from Serafino dell' Aquila (1466- 1500) ; four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ronsard ; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548) ; two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514 ?- 1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (//. 1548), and iEneas Sylvius ; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, ApoUonius of Rhodes (author of the epic Argonautica) ; oi (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, Valerius Flaccus ; or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516) ; or (among other modern French- men) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus. * No importance can be attached to Drayton's pretensions to greater originality than his rivals. The very line in which he makes the claim (' I am no pick-purse of another's wit ') is a verbatim quotation from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney {Astrophel and Stella, Ixxiv. 8), and is originally fi-om an epigram of Persius. ^ Lodge's Margarite, p. 79. See Appendix ix. for the text of Desportes's sonnet {Diane, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge's translation in Phillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Desportes — in his romance of Rosalind (Hunterian Society's reprint, p. 74), and in his volume of poems called Scillaes Metamorphosis (p. 44). Many sonnets in Lodge's Phillis are rendered with equal literalness from Ronsard, Ariosto, Paschale, and others. 172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Dr. Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called ' Licia ' (1593) simulated the varjdng moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all written in ' imitation of the best Latin poets and others,' Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by Wilham Drummond of Haw- thornden have been traced to their sources not merely in the Italian sonnets of Petrarch, and the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro, but in the French verse of Ronsard, of his colleagues of the Pleiade, and of their half-forgotten disciples.^ The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Seve ^ in christening his collection ' Deha ' ; Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ' Diana ' ; while Drayton not only appHed to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ' Amours,' but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux,^ although it was employed by other French contemporaries. With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the pubhc that ' no inward touch ' was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as [Men] that do dictionary's method bring Into their rhymes running in rattling rows ; [Men] that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing. Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments. But ' even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,' wrote Gabriel Harvey * See Drummond's Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses' Library, 1894, i. 207 seq. ; and The Poetical Works of William Drummond, ed. L. E. Kastner (Manchester University Press). 1913, 2 vols. ^ Seve's Delie was first published at Lyons in 1544. ^ Pontoux's Uldee was published at Lyons in 1579, just after the author's death. LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 173 in ' Pierces Supererogation ' in 1593, ' are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.' Drayton's sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare's in quality than those admission^ oi any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the of insin- readers of his collection entitled ' Idea ' ^ (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere. ' In all humours sportively he ranged,' he declared. Dr. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ' Licia, or Poems of Love,' with the warning, ' Now in that I have wTitten love sonnets, if any man measure my afiFection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way ... a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to the plough, or of \\itches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.' ^ The dissemination of false or artificial sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of ' the pangs of despised love ' or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of con- temporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic ^ In two of liis century of sonnets (Nos. xdii. and xxiv. in the 1594 edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton asserts that his ' fair Idea ' embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his acquaintance (see p. 4fi8 infra), and he repeats the statement in two other short poems ; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in the 1594 edition. Some, when in rhyme they of their loves do tell, . . . Only I call [i.e. I call only] on my divine Idea. Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in addressing sonnets to ' L'Idee,' left the reader in no doubt of his intent by concluding one poem thus : L4, 6 mon ame, au plus hault ciel guid^e Tu y pourras recognoistre I'ld^e De la beaut6 qu'en ce monde j'adore. (Du BeUay's Olive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.) ^ Ben Jonson, echoing without acknowledgment an Italian critic's epigram (cf. Athenceum, July 9, 1904), told Drummond of Hawthornden that ' he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short ' (Jonson's Conversations, p. 4), 174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE protests from the most respected writers of the day. In early Hfe Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conven- porary tional sonnet-sequence in his ' Amorous Odious censure Sonnet intituled The Student's Loove or 01 sonnet- teers' false Hatrid.' ^ Chapman in 1595, in a series of sen imen . gQj^j^g^g entitled ' A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,' appealed to his Uterary comrades to abandon ' the painted cabinet ' of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton's ' Idea ') he inveighed against the ' bastard sonnets ' which ' base rhymers ' ' daily ' begot ' to their own shames and poetry's disgrace.' In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he ' Gulling wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen Sonnets.' series of nine ' gulling sonnets ' or parodies of the conventional efforts.^ Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies's condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled con- ceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth ' gulling sonnet,' in which he ridicules the apphcation of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare's legal phraseology in his Sonnets Ixxxvii. and cxxiv. ^ ; while Davies's Sonnet ix., beginning : To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe, must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., beginning : Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage, &c.* ^ See p. 194 infra. ^ They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society in 1873 in his edition of ' the Dr. Farmer MS.,' a sixteenth and seven- teenth century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester, pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems in his edition of Sir John Davies's Works, 1876, ii. 53-62. ^ Davies's Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix ix.^p. 713 infra. * See p. 198 infra. LITEKAKY HISTOEY OF THE SONNETS 175 Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays, speare's ' Tush, none but minstrels Hke of sonneting,' allusions to ^xclaims Biron in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' sonnets in (iv. iii. 158). In 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona ' (iii. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke : You must lay lime to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets whose composed rimes Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . . Say that upon the altar of her beauty You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart. Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respect- fully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo : ' Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in : Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen- wench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.'^ In later plays Shake- speare's disdain of the sonnet is equally pronounced. In ' Henry V ' (iii. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks : ' I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus : " Wonder of nature ! " ' The Duke of Orleans re- torts : ' I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.' The Dauphin repUes : ' Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser ; for my horse is my mistress.' In ' Much Ado about Nothing ' (v. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero's waiting- woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ' write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.' Benedick jestingly promises one ' in so high a style that no man hving shall come over it.' Subsequently (v. iv. 87) Benedick is con- victed, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ' a halting sonnet of his own pure brain ' in praise of Beatrice. The claim of Sidney, Drayton, and others that their efforts were free of the fantastic insincerities of fellow- 1 Borneo and Juliet, n. iv. 41-4. 176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE practitioners was repeated by Shakespeare. More than once in his sonnets Shakespeare declares that liis verse is innocent of the ' strained touches ' of rhetoric ^^^^^sPeare (l^xxii. 10), of the 'proud' and 'false corn- conventional pares' (xxi. and cxxx.), of the 'newfound of^skfcerity. methods ' and ' compounds strange ' (Ixxvi, 4) — which he imputes to the sonnetteering work of contemporaries.^ Yet Shakespeare modestly ad- mits elsewhere (Ixxvi. 6) that he keeps ' invention in a noted weed ' {i.e. he is faithful to the normal style). Shake- speare's protestations of veracity are not always distin- guishable from the like assurances of other Ehzabethan sonnetteers. ^ Cf. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet iii., where the poet aflBrms that his sole inspiration is his beloved's natural bea,uty. Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine . . . Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old. Or with strange similes enrich each line . . . Phrases and problems from my reach do grow. . . . XI THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare's sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions 7 than those of any contemporary, but when Slender auto- ,, i i i r .1 i biographi- allowance has been made for the current con- cai element^ ventions of Ehzabethan sonnetteering, as well in Shake- ° speare's as for Shakespeare's unapproached affluence in Sonne s. dramatic instinct and invention — an affluence which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of human emotion — the autobiographic element, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the collection of Shake- speare's sonnets is studied comparatively with the many thousand poems of cognate theme and form that the printing-presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare's performances prove to be little more than trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the poetic effort of his own or of past ages at home and abroad. Francis Meres, the critic of 1598, adduced not merely Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis ' and his ' Lucrece ' but also ' his sugared sonnets ' as evidence that ' the sweet witty soul of Ovid hves in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.'' Much of the poet's thought in the sonnets bears obvious trace of Ovidian inspiration. But Ovid was only one of many nurturing forces. Echoes of Plato's ethereal message filled the air of Ehza- bethan poetry. Plato, Ovid, Petrarch, Ronsard, and 177 N 178 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Desportes (among foreign authors of earlier time), Sidney, Watson, Constable, and Daniel (among native contempo- ~, raries) seem to have quickened Shakespeare's imitative sonnetteering energy in much the same fashion as historical writings, romances or plays of older and contemporary date ministered to his dramatic activities. Of Petrarch's and Ronsard's sonnets scores were accessible to Shakespeare in EngUsh renderings, but there are signs that to Ronsard and to some of Ronsard's fellow-countrymen Shakespeare's debt was often as direct as to tutors of his own race. Adapted or imitated ideas or conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare's collection. The transference is usually manipulated with consummate skill. Shakespeare invariably gives more than he receives, yet his primal indebtedness is rarely in doubt. It is just to interpret somewhat hterally Shake- speare's own modest criticism of his sonnets (Ixxvi. 11-12) : So all my best ia dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent. The imitative or assimilative element in Shakespeare's ' sugared sonnets ' is large enough to refute the assertion that in them as a whole he sought to ' unlock of auldWb-^ ^is heart.' ^ Few of the poems have an indis- graphic putable right to be regarded as untutored confessions. ^i ^-, -., ° cries of the soul. It is true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a con- vincing illusion of autobiographic confessions. But the energetic lines in which the poet appears to reveal his inmost introspections are often adaptations of the less forcible and less coherent utterances of contemporary poets, and the ethical or emotional themes are common 1 W ordsw orth in his sonnet on The Sonnet (1827) claimed that ' With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart ' — a judgment which Robert Browning, no mean psychologist or literary scholar, strenuously attacked iiTtTie two poems At tJie Mermaid and House (1876). Browning cited in the latter poem Wordsworth's assertion, adding the gloss : ' Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! ' THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 179 to almost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets.^ Shake- speare's noble sonnet on the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force and insight a stereotyped topic of sonnetteers, and it may have owed its immediate cue to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet on ' Desire.' 2 Plato's ethereal conception of beauty which Petrarch first wove into the sonnet web became under the in- fluence of the metaphysical speculation of the spe^are's Renaissance a dominant element of the love Platonic poetrv of sixteenth century Italy and France, conceptions. ^ j In Shakespeare's England, Spenser was Plato's chief poetic apostle. But Shakespeare often caught in his sonnets the Platonic note with equal subtlety. Plato's disciples greatly elaborated their master's conception of earthly beauty as a reflection or ' shadow ' of a heavenly essence or ' pattern ' which, though immaterial, was the only true and perfect ' substance.' Platonic or neo-Platonic 1 The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix. : What potioas have I drunk of Siren tears, Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within, adopts expressions in Bamabe Barnes's sonnet (No. xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a • siren,' that poet incoherently ejaculates : From my love's limbeck \sc. have I] still [di]stilled tears ! Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch's sonnets. Tasso in Scella delle Rime, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning ■ Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso ' ) which adumbrates Shakespeare's Sonnets xxix. ( When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes ') and Ixvi. (' Tired with all these, for restful death I cry '). Drummond of Hawthomden translated Tasso's sonnet in his sormet (part i. No. xxxiii.) ; while Drummond's Sonnets xxv. (' What cruel star into this world was brought ') and xxxii. (' If crost with all mishaps be my poor life 'j are pitched in the identical key. ^ Sidney's Certain Sonnets (No. xiii.) appended to Astrophel and Stella in the edition of 1598. In Eraaricdulje : Sonnets ivritten by E. C. 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning ' lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,' even more closely resembles Shakespeare's sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.'s rare volume is reprinted in the Lamport Garland (Roxburghe Club), 1881. N 2 180 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' ideas ' are the source of Shakespeare's metaphysical questionings (Sonnet Hii. 1-4) : What is your substance, whereof are you made That millions of strange shadows on you tend ? Since every one hath, every one, one shade. And you, but one, can every shadow lend.^ Again, when Shakespeare identifies truth with beauty 2 and represents both entities as independent of matter or time, he is proving his loyalty to the mystical creed of the Graeco-Italian Renaissance, which Keats subsequently summarised in the familiar lines : Beauty is truth, truth beauty ; that is all Ye know on earth, and aU ye need to know. Shakespeare's favourite classical poem, Ovid's ' Meta- morphoses,' which he and his generation knew well in Golding's EngHsh version, is directly responsible to Ovfd's for a more tangible thread of philosophical cosmic speculation which, after the manner of other theory. ^ contemporary poets, Shakespeare also wove dispersedly into the texture of his sonnets.^ In varied periphrases he confesses to a fear that ' nothing ' is ' new ' ; that ' that which is hath been before ' ; that Time, being in a perpetual state of ' revolution,' is for ever reproducing natural phenomena in a regular rotation ; that the most impressive efforts of Time, which the un- tutored mind regards as ' novel ' or ' strange,' ' are but dressings of a former sight,' merely the rehabihtations of a past experience, which fades only to repeat itself at some future epoch. ^ The main philosophic conceits of the Sonnets are easily traced to their sources. See J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Pce.try (New York, 1903) ; George Wyndliam, The Poems of Shakespeare (London, 1898), p. cxxii seq. ; Lilian Winstanley, Introduction to Spenser's Foure Hymnes (Cambridge, 1907). 2 Cf. ' Thy end is truth and beauty's doom and date ' (Sonnet xiv. 4). ' Both truth and beauty on my love depend ' (ci. 3) ; cf. liv. 1, 2. ^ The debt of Shakespeare's sonnets to Ovid's Metamor phases has been worked out in detail by the present ^vriter in an article in the Quarterly Review, April 1909. THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 181 The metaphysical argument has only a misty relevance to the poet's plea of everlasting love for his friend. The poet fears that Nature's rotatory processes rob his passion of the stamp of originahty. The reahty and individuality of passionate experience appear to be prejudiced by the classical doctrine of universal ' revolution.' With no very coherent logic he seeks refuge from his depression in an arbitrary claim on behalf of his friend and himself to personal exemption from Nature's and Time's universal law which presumes an endless recurrence of ' growth ' and ' waning.' It is from the last book of Ovid's ' Metamorphoses ' that Shakespeare borrows his cosmic theory which, echoing Golding's precise phrase, he defines in one place spe^are's '^^ ' ^^^ conceit of this inconstant stay ' ^ (xv. 9), borrowed and whicli he christens elsewhere ' nature's graphy. changing course' (xviii. 8), 'revolution' (hx. 12), 'interchange of state' (Ixiv. 9), and 'the course of altering things ' (cxv. 8). But even more notable is Shakespeare's literal conveyance from Ovid or from Ovid's English translator of the Latin writer's physio- graphic illustrations of the working of the alleged rotatory law. Ovid's graphic appeal to the witness of the sea wave's motion — As every wave drives others forth, and that that comes behind Both thrusteth and is thrust himself ; even so the times by kind Do fly and follow both at once and evermore renew — is loyally adopted by Shakespeare in the fine fines : Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore. So do our minutes hasten to their end ; Each changing place with that which goes before. In sequent toil all forwards do contend.^-Sonnet Ix. 1-4. Similarly Shakespeare reproduces Ovid's vivid de- scriptions of the encroachments of land on sea and sea 1 Golding, Ovid's Elizabethan translator, when he writes of the Ovidian theory of Nature's unending rotation, repeatedly employs a negative periphrasis, of which the word ' stay ' is the central feature. Thus he asserts that ' in all the world there is not that that standeth at a stay,' and that 'our bodies' and 'the elements never stand at stay.' 182 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE on land which the Latin poet adduces from professedly personal observation as further evidence of matter's endless rotations. Golding's lines run : Even so have places oftentimes exchanged their estate, For / have seen it sea which was substantial ground alate : Again where sea was, / have seen the same become dry land. This passage becomes, under Shakespeare's hand : When / have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil ■nin of the watery main Increasing store with loss, and loss with store ; When / have seen such interchange of state. — (Sonnet Ixiv.) Shakespeare has no scruple in claiming to ' have seen ' with his own eyes the phenomena of Ovid's narration. He presents Ovid's doctrine less confidently than the Latin writer. In Sonnet lix. he wonders whether ' five hundred courses of the sun ' result in progress or in retro- gression, or whether they merely bring things back to the precise point of departure (11. 13-14). Yet, despite his hesitation to identify himself categorically with the doc- trine of 'revolution,' the fabric of his speculation is Ovid's gift. In the same Ovidian quarry Shakespeare may have found another pseudo-scientific theory on which he ^^, meditates in the Sonnets— xliv. and xlv. — the other philosophic notion that man is an amalgam of the four conceits. elements — earth, water, air, and fire ; but that superstition was already a veteran theme of the sonnetteers at home and abroad, and was accessible to him in many places outside Ovid's pages.^ In Sonnet cvi. he argues that the splendid praises of beauty which had been devised by poets of the past anticipated the eulogies which his own idol inspired : So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring ; And, for they look'd but with divining eyes. They had not skill enough your worth to sing. ^ Cf. Spenser, Iv. ; Barnes's Parthenophe and Parthenophil, Ixxvii. ; Fulke Greville's Ccclica, No. vii. THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 183 The conceit, which has Platonic or neo-Platonic afl&nities, may well be accounted another gloss on Ovid's cosmic philosophy. But Henry Constable, an English sonnetteer, who wrote directly under continental guidance, would here seem to have given Shakespeare an immediate cue : Miracle of the world, I never will deny That former poets praise the beauty of their days ; But all these beauties tvere but figures of thy praise. And all those poets did of thee but prophesy.^ Another of Shakespeare's philosophic fancies — the nimble triumphs of thought over space (xliv. 7-8) — is clothed in language which was habitual to Tasso, Ronsard, and their followers.^ The simpler conceits wherewith Shakespeare illustrates love's working under the influence of spring or summer, Amorous night or sleep, often appear to echo in deepened conceits. notes Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baif, and Des- portes, or English disciples of the Italian and French masters.^ In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops the ^ In his Miscellaneous Sonnets (No. vii.) written about 1590 (see Hazlitt's edition, 1859, p. 27) — not in his Diana. Constable significantly headed his sonnet : ' To his Mistrisse, upon occasion of a Petrarch he gave her, showing her the reason why the Italian commentators dissent so much in the exposition thereof.' ^ Cf. Ronsard's Amours, i. clxviii. (' Ce fol penser, pour s'envoler trop haut ') ; Du Bellay's Olive, xliii. (' Penser volage, et leger comme vent ') ; Amadis Jamyn, Sonnet xxi. (' Penser, qui peux en un moment grande erre courir ') ; and Tasso's Rime (1583, Venice, i. p. 33) (' Come s' human pensier di giunger tenta Al luogo '). ^ Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of the poet's love (cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets xcviii. xcix.) play variations on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch's well-known sonnet xlii., ' In morte di M. Laura,' beginning : Zefiro torna e '1 bel tempo rimena, E i fiori e 1' erbe, sua dolce famiglia, B garrir Progne e pianger Filomena, E primavera Candida e vermiglia. Ridono i prati, e '1 ciel si rasserena ; Giove s' allegra di mirar sua figlia ; L'aria e 1' acqua e la terra 6 d' amor piena ; Ogni animal d' amar si riconsiglla. • Ma per me, lasso, tomano i piu gravi Sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c. See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthornden in Sonnets, pt. ii. No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer 184 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE old-fashioned fancy to which Ronsard gave a new lease of life — that his love's portrait is painted on his heart ; and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard's phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of ' tables,' is ' character 'd ' in his brain. ^ Again Constable may be credited with suggesting Shakespeare's Sonnet xcix., where the flowers are re- proached with stealing their charms from the features of the poet's love. Constable had published in 1592 an identically turned compliment in honour of his poetic mistress Diana (Sonnet xvii.) Two years later Drayton issued a sonnet in which he fancied that his ' fair Muse ' added one more to ' the old nine.' Shakespeare adopted the conceit (xxxviii. 9-10) : Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth Than those old nine, which rhymers invocate.'^ In two or three instances Shakespeare engaged in the literary exercise of oifering alternative renderings of the same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases twice over — appropriating many of Watson's words — the unexhilarating notion that eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the greater influence abound in French and English (cf. Becq de Fouquieres' (Euvres choisies de J. -A. de Baif, passim, and (Euvres choisies des Coiitemporains de Ronsard, p. 108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamj-n) et passim). For descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard's Amours (livre i. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii. ; Odes, livre iv. No. iv., and his Odes Eetranchees in (Euvres, edited bj' Blanche main, ii. 392-4). Cf. Barnes's Parthenophe and Parthenophil, Ixxxiii. cv. ^ Cf. Ronsard's Amours, livre i. clxxviii. ; Sonnets pour Astree, vi. The latter opens : II ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes Pour Tous graver que celles de mon coeur Ou de sa main Amour, nostre Tainqueur, Vous a grav^e et vos graces parfaites. ^ See Drayton's Ideas Mirrovr, 1594, Amour 8. Drayton represents that his ladylove adds one to the nine angels and the nine worthies as well as to the nine muses. Sir John Davies severely castigated this extravagance in his Epigram In Decium. Cf. Jonson's Conversations with Drummond (Shakespeare Soc, p. 15). THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 185 on lovers.^ In the concluding sonnets, cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek Anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers.^ Two themes of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets,' both of which, in spite of their different calibre, touch rather more practical issues than any which have yet been cited — the duty of marriage on the one hand and the immortality of poetry on the other — present with exceptional coherence definite phases of contemporary sentiment. The seventeen open- Th th ^^S sonnets, in which the poet urges a youth of ' unthrifty to marry and to bequeath his beauty to ve mess. posterity, repeat the plea of ' unthrifty love- hness,' which is one of the commonplaces of Renais- sance poetry.^ As a rule the appeal is addressed by ^ A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare's Sonnet xxiv. Ronsard's Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet Iv. or Ixiii. (' Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core ') is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a com- panion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson's Tears of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resembles Shakespeare's pair) ; Draj'ton's Idea, xxxiii. ; Barnes's Parthenophe and Parthenophil, xx., and Constable's Diana, vi. 7. ^ The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in Selecta Epigrammala, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love's torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borro^\ed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher's Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet's Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ' she touched the water and it burnt with Love,' but also Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss Which all diseases quickly can remove. Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. states not merely that the ' cool well ' into which Cupid's torch had fallen ' from Love's fire took heat perpetual,' but also that it grew ' a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.' * The common conceit may owe something to Ovid's popular Ars Amatoria where appear the lines : Carpite florem Qui, nisi carptus erit, turpiter ipse cadet, (iii. 79-80). Erasmus presents the argument in full in his Colloquy ' Proci et Puellae.' 186 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE earlier poets to a woman. Yet in Guarini's world-famous pastoral drama of ' Pastor Fido ' (1585) a j^oung man, Silvio, who is the hero of the poem, receives the warning of Shakespeare's sonnets, while in Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arcadia' (Book iii.) in one place a young man and in another a young woman are severally reminded that their beauty, which will perish unless it be reproduced, lays them under the obligation of marr^dng. Italian and French sonnetteers developed the conceit on lines which Shake- speare varied little.^ Nor did Shakespeare show in the sonnets his first familiarity with the widespread theme. Thrice in his ' Venus and Adonis ' does Venus fervently urge on Adonis the duty of propagating his charm (cf . lines 129-132, 162-174, 751-768), and a fair maiden is admonished of the Uke duty in ' Romeo and Juliet ' (i. i. 218-228) .2 It is abundantly proved that a gentle modesty was an abiding note of Shakespeare's character. In the numerous sonnets in which he boasted that his speare's verse was so certain of immortality that it was im^r- capable of immortalising the person to whom taiity for it was addressed, the poet therefore gave his sonnets. . , • j.- j.i a. t j. ^ • voice to no conviction that was peculiar to his mental constitution. He was merely proving his supreme mastery of a theme which Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe.^ Sir Philip Sidney, in his ' Apologie for Poetrie ' (1595), wrote that it was the common habit of and Sir Thomas Wyatt notices it in his poem " That the season of enjoy- ment is short.' ^ See French Renaissance in England, pp. 268-9. 2 Cf. also All '5 Well, i. i. 136, and Twelfth Night, i. v. 273-5, where the topic is treated more cursorily. Shakespeare abandons the conceit in his later work. ^ In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar's Olympian Odes, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk's Poetce Lyrici Graci. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, De Senectute, c. 207 ; in Virgil's Georgics, ui. 9 ; in Propertius, iii. 1 ; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. But it is the versions of Horace {Odes, iii. 30) and of Ovid {Metamorphoses^ xv. 871 seq.) which the poets of the six- THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 187 poets ' to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses.'^ ' Men of great calling,' Nashe declared in his ' Pierce Pennilesse,' 1593, ' take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets. '^ In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ' eternising ' faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic. Spenser wrote of his mistress in his ' Amoretti ' (1595, Sonnet Ixxv.) : My verse your virtues rare shall eternize. And in the heavens write your glorious name.^ teenth century adapted most often. In French and English literature numerous traces survive of Horace's far-famed ode (ill. 30) : Bxegi monumentum aere perennius Eegalique situ pyramidiun altius, Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis Annorum series, et fuga temporum. as well as of the lines which end Ovid's Metamorphoses (xv. 871-9) ; Jamque opus exegi, quod nee Jovis ira nee ignes, Nee poterit ferrum, nee edas abolere vetustas. Cum Tolet ilia dies, quae nil nisi corporis hujus Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat a'ri ; Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly, although Du Bellay popularised Ovid's lines in an avoMed translation, and also in an original poem, ' De rimmortalite des poetes,' which gave the boast an exceptionally buoj'ant expression. Ronsard's odes and sonnets promise immortalitj' to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard's Ode (livre i. No. vii.) ' Au Seigneur Carna valet ' illustrate his habitual treatment of the theme : C'est un travail de bon-heur Les neuf divines pucelles Chanter les hommes louables, Gardent ta gloire chez elles ; Et leur bastir un honneur Et mon luth, qu'ell'ont fait estre Seul vainqueur des ans muables. De leurs secrets le grand prestre, Le marbre ou I'airain vestu Par cest hymne solennel D'un labeur vif par I'enclume Respandra dessus ta race N'animent tant la vertu Je ne s<;ay quoy de sa grace Que les Muses par la plume. ... Qui te doit faire etemel. {(Euvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.) 1 Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62. - Shakespeare Soc. p. 93. ^ Spenser, when commemorating the death of the Earl of Warwick in the Ruines of Time (c. 1591), assured the Earl's widowed Countess, Thy Lord shall never die the whiles this verse Shall live, and surely it shall live for ever : For ever it shall live, and shall rehearse His worthie praise, and vertues dying never. Though death his soul doo from his body sever ; And thou thyself herein shalt also Uve : Such grace the heavens doo to my verses give. 188 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration. Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ' my immortal song ' (' Idea,' vi. 14) and ' my world-out-wearing rhymes ' (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such lines as : While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (' Idea,' xliv. 1). Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (ib. xliv. 11). My name shall mount unto eternity {ib. xliv. 14). All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 14). Daniel was no less expHcit : This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9). Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed, Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10). These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect That fortify thy name against old age ; And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect Against the dark and time's consuming rage (ib. 1. 9-12). Shakespeare, in his references to his ' eternal Unes ' (xviii. 12) and in the assurances he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel's exact phrase, his 'monument' (Ixxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommo- dating himself to the prevailing taste. Amid the oblivion of the day of doom Shakespeare foretells that his friend shall in these black lines be seen. And they shall live, and he in them still green (Sonnet Ixiii. 13-14). ' Your monument ' (the poet continues) ' shall be my gentle verse. Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread . . . You still shall live, — such virtue hath my pen (Sonnet ixxxi. 9-10, 13). Characteristically in Sonnet Iv. Shakespeare invested the conventional vaunt with a splendour that was hardly approached by any other poet : Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broDs root out the work of masonry. Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 189 Very impressively does Shakespeare subscribe to a leading tenet of the creed of all Renaissance poetry.^ The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a woman. In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), in'sonnets where he quibbles over the fact of the identity addressed of his own name of Will with a lady's ' will ' to a woman. (the synonym in Elizabethan Enghsh of both 'lust' and 'obstinacy'), he derisively challenges com- parison with wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his dis- dainful mistress's ' wills,' and had turned the word ' grace ' to the same punning account as Shakespeare turned the word ' will.' 2 Similarly in Sonnet cxxx., beginning — My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ; Coral is far more red than her lips' red . . . If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,^ ^ See also Shakespeare's Sonnets xix. lir. Ix. Ixv. and cvii. In the three quotations in the text Shakespeare catches very nearly Ronsard's notes : Donne moy I'encre et le papier aussi, En cent papiers tesmoins de mon souci Je veiix tracer la peine que j'endure : En cent papiers plus durs que diamant, A fin qu'un jour nostre race future Juge du mal que je soufEre eu aimant. (Amours, 1. cicxiil. (Euvres, i. 109.) Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur Au moins tant que vivront les plumes et le livre. {Sonnets pour Eelene, n. ii.) Plus dur que far j'ay fini mon ouvrage, Que I'an, dispos i demener les pas, Que I'eau, le vent ou le brulant orage, L'injuriant, ne ru'ront point i^ bas. Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespas M'assoupira d'un somme dur, i I'heure, Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n'ira pas, Restant de luy la part meilleure. . . . Sus donque, Muse, emporte au ciel la gloire Que j'ay gaign6e, armonijant la victoire Dont k bon droit je me voy jouissant. . . . (Odes, livre v. No. xxxii. ' A sa Muse.) In Sonnet Ixxii. in Amours (livre i.), Ron.sard declares that his mistress's name Viotorieux des peuples et des rois S'en voleroit sus I'aile de ma ryme. 2 See Appendix viii., ' The Will Sonnets,' for the interpretation of Shakespeare's conceit and like efforts of Barnes. .3 Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers' affected vocabuUry. Cf. Daniel's Delia, 1591, No. xxvi.. 190 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE the poet satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses' features. It was not the only time that Shake- speare deprecated the sonnetteers' practice of comparing features of women's beauty to ' earth and sea's rich gems ' (xxi. 5-6) .1 In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare graciously notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for praise of features of that hue over those of the fair hue 'blackness. ^j^jqI^ was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He commends the ' dark lady ' for refusing to practise those arts by which other women of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature .2 In his praise of ' blackness ' or a dark complexion Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' (iv. iii. 241-7), ' And golden hair may change to silver wire ' ; Lodge's Phillis, 1595, 'Made blush the beauties of her curled wire '; Barnes's Parthenophil, sonnet xlviii., ' Her hairs no grace of golden wires want.' For the habitual comparison of lips to coral cf. ' Coral-coloured lips ' (Zepheria, 1594, No. xxiii.) ; 'No coral is her lip' (Lodge's Phillis, 1595, No. viii.) ' Ce beau coral ' are the opening words of Ronsard's Amours, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable to women's features. Remy Belleau, one of Ronsard's poetic colleagues, treated that comparative study most comprehensively in Les Amours et nouveaux escJianges des pierres precieuses, vertus et proprietez d'icelles which was first published at Paris in 1576. In A Lover's Complaint, lines 280-1, the writer betrays knowledge of such stramed imagery when he mentions : deep-brained sonnets that did amplify Each stone's dear nature, worth and quality. ^ Here Spenser in his Amoreifi, No. ix., gives Shakespeare a very direct cue, as may be seen when Spenser's cited sonnet is read alongside of Shakespeare's sonnet xxi. * Cf. Sonnet Ixviii. 3-7. Desportes had previously protested with equal warmth against the artificial disguises — ^false hair and cosmetics — of ladies' toilets : Ceste vive couleur, qui raTit et qui blesse Les esprits des amans, de la feinte abusez, Ce n'est que blanc d'Espagne, [i.e. a cosmetic] et ces cheveux frisez Ne sont pas ses cheveux : c'est une fausse tresse. (' Diverses Amours,' Sonnet xxix. in CEuvret, ed. Michiels, p. 398.) THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 191 where the heroine Rosaline is described as ' black as ebony,' with ' brows decked in black,' and in ' mourning ' for her fashionable sisters' indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet. ' No face is fair that is not full so black,' exclaims Rosaline's lover. But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare's praise of ' blackness ' claim the merit of being his own invention. The conceit is familiar to the French sonnetteers.^ Sir PhiUp Sidney, in Sonnet vii. of his ' Astrophel and Stella,' had anticipated its employment in England. The ' beams ' of the eyes of Sidney's mistress were ' wrapt in colour black ' and wore ' this mourning weed,' so That whereas black seems beaut3'^'s contrary, She even in black doth make all beauties flow.* To his praise of ' blackness ' in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit.^ Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart. Twice, in much the same language as had already served a hke purpose 1 Cf. La modeste Venus, la honteuse et la sage, Estoit par les anciens toute peinte de noir . . . Noire est la Verite cachee en un nuage. (Amadis Jamyn, (Euvres, i. p. 129, No. icv.) ^ Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet ; while Sidney's further conceit that the lady's eyes are in ' this mourning weed ' in order ' to honour all their deaths who for her bleed ' is reproduced in Shakespeare's Sonnets cxxxii. — one of the two under consideration — where he tells his mistress that her eyes ' have put on black ' to become ' loving mourners ' of him who is denied her love. 3 O paradox 1 Black as the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night. (Love's Labour's Lost, IV. iii. 254-5.) To look like her are chimney-sweepers black, And since her time are colliers counted bright. And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack. Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (ii. 266-9). 192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in the play, does he mock his ' dark lady ' with this calumniating interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes. The two sonnets, in which this sardonic view of ' blackness ' is developed, form part of a series of twelve, which belongs to a special category of sonnet- sonnets teering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons of vitu- ^\^Q sugared sentiment which characterises most peration. ° of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets. He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman whom he represents as disdaining his advances. She is as ' black as heU,' as ' dark as night,' and with ' so foul a face ' was ' the bay where aU men ride.' The genuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but in Shakespeare's sonnets of vituperation, despite their dramatic intensity, there is a declamatory parade of figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned. Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren. Among Shakespeare's Enghsh contem- poraries Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female ' tyrant,' a ' Medusa,' a ' rock.' ' Women ' (Barnes laments) ' are by nature proud as devils.' On the European continent the method of vituperation was long practised systematically. Ronsard's sonnets celebrated in Shakespeare's manner a ' fierce tigress,' a ' murderess,' a ' Medusa.' Another French sonnetteer Claude de Pontoux broadened the formula in a sonnet addressed to his mistress which opened : Affamee Meduse, enragee Gorgonne, Horrible, espouvantable, et felonne tigresse, Cruelle et rigoureuse, allechante et traistresse, Meschante abominable, et sanglante Bellonne.^ A third French sonnetteer, of Ronsard's school, Etienne Jodelle, designed in 1570 a collection of as many as three ^ De Pontoux's Uldee (sonnet ccviii.), a sequence of 288 sonnets published in 1579. THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 193 hundred vituperative sonnets which he inscribed to ' hate of a woman,' and he appropriately entitled them ' Contr' . , ,, , Amours ' in distinction from ' Amours,' the Jodelle s ' Contr' term appued to sonnets in the honeyed vein. Amours. Only Seven of Jodelle's ' Contr' Amours ' are extant. In one the poet forestalls Shakespeare's con- fession of remorse for having lauded the black hair and complexion of his mistress.^ But at all points there is complete identity of tone between Jodelle's and Shake- speare's vituperative efforts. The artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers of all lands sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they exhausted their faculty of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France. In Shakespeare's ^ No. vii. of Jodelle's Contr^ Amour 3 runs thus : Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dor6 Ces cheueux noirs dignes d'vne Meduse ? Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m'amuse, Ay-ie de lis et roses colore ? Combien ce front de rides labour^ Ay-ie applani ? et quel a fait ma Muse Le gros sourcil, ou foUe elle s'abuse, Ayant sur luy Tare d'Ajnour figurfe ? Quel ay-ie fait son oeil se renfonpant ? Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant ? Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles? Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps ? Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts, Viuoit heureui de mes peines morteUes. (Jodelle's (Euvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.) With this should be compared Shakespeare's Sonnets cxxxvii. cxlviii. and cl. In No. vi. of his Contr' Amours Jodelle, after reproaching his ' traitres vers ' with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, concludes : Ja si long temps faisant d'un Diable vn Ange Vous m'ouurez I'oeil en I'iniuste louange, Et m'aueuglez en I'iniuste tourment. With this should be compared Shakespeare's Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10 : And whether that my angel be tum'd fiend Suspect I may, yet not directly tell. A conventional sonnet of extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthornden translated from Marino [Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond's collec- tion of ' sugared ' sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv. : Drummond's Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217). o 194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE early life the convention was wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in ' An Amorous Odious Sonnet in- tituled The Student's Loove or Hatrid, or Gabriel both or neither, or what shall please the Harvey s ' ^ 'Amorous looving or hating reader, either in sport or Sonnet.' earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed.' ^ After extoUing the beauty and virtue of his mistress above that of Aretino's Angelica, Petrarch's Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as ' a serpent in brood,' ' a poisonous toad,' ' a heart of marble,' and ' a stony mind as passionless as a block.' Finally he tells her, If ever there were she-devils incarnate They are altogether in thee incorporate. The ' dark lady ' of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' may in her main lineaments be justly ranked with the sonnetteer's well-seasoned type of feminine vention of obduracy. It is quite possible that Shake- I ^^^ ,^^^ speare may have met in real life a dark- complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands. But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of the ' dark lady ' in the sonnets. The woman acquires more distinctive features in the dozen sonnets scattered through the collection which reveal her in a treacherous act of intrigue with the poet's friend. At certain points in the series of sonnets she becomes the centre of a conflict between the competing calls of love and friendship. Though the part which is there imputed to her lies outside the sonnetteer's ordinary conventions, the role is a traditional one among heroines of Italian ate romance. It cannot have lain beyond the scope of Shakespeare's dramatic invention to vary his portrayal of the sonnetteer's conventional type of ^ The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey's Letter-book (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43). THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 195 feminine obduracy by drawing a fresh romantic interest from a different branch of Hterature.^ She has been compared, not very appositely, with Shakespeare's splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of ' Antony and Cleo- patra.' From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both. There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare's personal environment the original of the ' dark lady ' of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt. ^ The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the ' dark lady,' and that the ' dark lady ' is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are shadowy conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was the protege of Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was pro- bably acquainted \\ith his patron's mistress. See Appendix vii. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the dis- dainful mistress had ' robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents ' (cxlii. 8) and ' in act her bed-vow broke ' (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely. XII THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shake- speare's sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the circumstances in his external life that attended their composition. If few can be safely regarded as autobio- graphic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron's literary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be en- Biographic titled ' dedicatory ' sonnets, are addressed to the • dedi- One who is declared without much periphrasis sonnets. ^^ ^® ^ patron of the poet's verse (Nos. xxiii. xxvi. xxxii. xxxvii. xxxviii. Ixix. Ixxvii.- Ixxxvi. c. ci. ciii. cvi.) In one of these — Sonnet Ixxviii. — Shakespeare asserted : So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse And found such fair assistance in my verse As every alien pen hath got my use And under thee their poesy disperse. Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem. Shakespeare's biographer is under an obhgation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are indicated so explicitly. The problem 196 PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 197 presented by the patron is simple. Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one : Sing [sc. Muse !] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem, And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8). For to no other pass my verses tend Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12). The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare who is known The Earl ^^ biographical research. No contemporary of South- document or tradition gives any hint that the the poet's dramatist was the friend or dependent of any sole patron. Q^jjgj. j^g-n of rank. His close intimacy with the Earl is attested under his own hand in the dedi- catory epistles of his ' Venus and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece,' which were penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. A trustworthy tradition corroborates that testimony. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first ade- quate biographer, ' there is one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted : that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to, A bounty very great and very rare at any time.' There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the ' dedicatory ' poet's patron. Three of the twenty ' dedi- sonnets. catory ' sonnets merely translate into the language of poetry ' the dedicated words which writers use ' (Ixxxii. 3), the accepted expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces ' Lucrece.' That epistle, which opens with the sentence ' The love 198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE I dedicate to your lordship is without end,'^ is finely paraphrased in Sonnet xxvi. : Lord of my love, to whom in va Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written ambassage. To witness duty, not to show my wit : Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it. But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it ; Till whatsoever star that guides my moving. Points on me graciously with fair aspect. And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving To show me worthy of thy sweet respect : Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ; Till then not show my head where thou may'st prove me.- The ' Lucrece ' epistle's intimation that the patron's love alone gives value to the poet's ' untutored lines ' is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression : If thou survive my well-contented day. When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover, And shalt by fortune once more re-survey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover. Compare them with the bettering of the time. And though they be outstripp'd by every pen, Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme. Exceeded by the height of happier men. 0, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought : ^ The whole epistle is quoted on pp. 147-8 supra. For comment on the use of ' lover ' and ' love ' in Elizabethan English as synonyms for ' friend ' and ' friendship,' see p. 205 7i. I, * There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ' gulling ' sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to anyone. To love my lord I do knight's service owe, And therefore now he hath my wit in ward ; But while it [i.e. the poet's wit] is in his tuition so Methinks he doth intreat [i.e. treat] it passing hard . . . But why should love after minority (When I have passed the one and twentieth year) Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty, And make it still the yoke of wardship bear ? I fear he [i.«. my lord] hath another title [i.e. right to my wit] got And holds my wit now for an idiot. PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 199 ' Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age, A dearer birth than this his love had brought, To march in ranks of better equipage ^ ; Bat since he died, and poets better prove. Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.' A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii. : How can my Muse want subject to invent. While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse ? give thyself the thanks, if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight ; For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee. When thou thyself dost give invention light 7 Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth * Than those old nine which rhymers invocate ; And V he that calls on thee, let him bring forth Eternal numbers to outlive long date. If my slight Muse do please these curious days. The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise. The central conceit here so finely developed — that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protegees verse because he inspires it — belongs to the most con- ventional schemes of dedicatory adulation. When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled ' Deha ' to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. Daniel wrote : Great patroness of these my humble rhymes. Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . . leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . . Whereof the travail I may challenge mine. But yet the glory, madam, must be thine. ' Thomas Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston's Pigmalion's Image, published in 1598, where ' stanzas ' are said to ' march rich bedight in warlike equipage.' The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan hterature long before Marston employed it. Nashe, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, which was pubUshed in 1589, wrote that the works of the poet Watson ' march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.' (Cf. Peele's Works, ed. Bullen, ii. 236.) * Cf. Draj'ton's .Zdeas Mirrovr 1594, Amour 8. 200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Elsewhere in the sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the ' Lucrece ' epistle. R-epeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is ' part in all ' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the sonnets with such expressions as these : [I] by a part of all thy glory live (xxxvii. 12) ; Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2) ; My spirit is thine, the better part of me (Ixxiv. 8) ; while ' the love without end ' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as ' eternal love ' (cviii. 9) and a devotion ' what shall have no end ' (ex. 9). The identification of the rival poets whose ' richly compiled ' ' comments ' of his patron's ' praise ' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difiicult in- in^^^outh- quiry than the identification of the patron. amptoa's The rival poets with their ' precious phrase by all the Muses filed ' (Ixxxv. 4) are to be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men. In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters.^ Thomas Nashe justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his ' Life of Jack Wilton ' in 1594, as ' a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' Nashe addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, j^earnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardty less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly John Florio, the Earl's ItaHan tutor, who is to be reckoned among Shake- ^ See Appendix iv. for a fuU account of Southampton's relations with Nashe and other men of letters. PATEONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHMIPTON 201 speare's literary acquaintances,^ wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his ' Worlde of Wordes ' (an Italian-English dictionary), ' as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.' Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protege of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially Sh k dangerous rival, as an ' able ' and a ' better ' speare's ' spirit,' ' a worthier pen,' a vessel ' of tall arrival building and of goodly pride,' compared with poet. whom he was himself ' a worthless boat.' He detected a touch of magic in the man's writing. His ' spirit,' Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been ' by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch,' and ' an affable familiar ghost ' nightly gulled him with in- telligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by ' the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse ' sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (Ixxxvi.) There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare's laudation of ' the other poet's ' powers. He was presumably a new-comer in the Uterary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. ' Elo- quence and courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, ' are ever bountiful in the amphfying vein ' ; and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification with Barnes^ the Oxford scholar Barnabe Barnes, a youthful probably panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific the nval. x o» ^ ■, ■, . sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collec- tion of sonnets, ' Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with ^ See p. 154, note 2. 202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593 ; and his second, ' A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many- crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at least one first-rate sonnet (No. Ixvi. ' Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode ? '). The veteran Thomas Churchyard called Barnes ' Petrarch's scholar ' ; the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him ' go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,' and ' be the gallant poet, like Spenser ' ; the fine poet Campion judged his verse to be ' heady and strong.' In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the ' vir- tuous ' Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were ' the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,' and that his sole ambition was ' by flight to rise ' to a height worthy of his patron's ' virtues.' Shakespeare sor- rowfully pointed out in Sonnet Ixxviii. that his lord's eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing, And heavy ignorance aloft to fly. Have added feathers to the learned's wing, And given grace a double majesty ; while in the following sonnet he asserted that the ' worthier pen ' of his dreaded rival when lending his patron ' virtue ' was guilty of plagiarism, for he ' stole that word ' from his patron's ' behaviour.' The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's ' gracious eyes ' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron's ' virtue ' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet Ixxxv. Shake- speare declares that he cries '"Amen" to every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.' Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard's practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies the word to his poems of PATRONAGE OF EAEL OF SOUTHAMPTON 203 love.^ When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet Ixxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron — My saucy bark, inferior far to his . . . Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat, — he seems to write with an eye on Barnes's identical choice of metaphor : My fancy's ship tossed here and there by these [sc. sorrow's floods] Still floats in danger ranging to and fro. How fears my thoughts' swift pinnace thine hard rock ! * Get vase Markham, an industrious man of letters, is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the Other potent influence of his patron's ' eyes,' which, theories ^e says, crown ' the most victorious pen ' — rival's a possible reference to Shakespeare. Nashe's identity. poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusi- astic, and are of a finer literary temper than Markham's. But Shakespeare's description of his rival's literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nashe than the verse of their fellow-aspirant Barnes. Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival's genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shake- speare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman, the dramatist and classical translator, than by that of any other contem- porary poet. But Chapman produced no conspicuously ' great verse ' until he began his rendering of Homer in 1598 ; and although in 1610 to a complete edition of his translation he appended a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in cold terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies * Cf. Parthenophil, Madrigal i. line 12 ; Sonnet xvii. line 9. The French usage of applying the term ' hymne ' to secular lyrics was un- common in England, although Chapman styles each section of his poem The Shadow of Night (1594) 'a hymn' and Michael Drayton contributed ' hymns ' to his Harmonie of the Church (1591). * Farllienophil, Sonnet xci. 204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE that he had previously no close relations.^ The poet Drayton, and the dramatists Ben Jonson and Marston, have also been identified by various critics with ' the rival poet,' but none of these shared Southampton's ^ Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chapman's claim to be the rival poet. Professor Minto in his Charac- teristics of English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by ' spirits ' — ' his compeers by night ' — as well as by ' an affable famiUar ghost ' which gulled him with inteUigence at night (Ixxxvi. 5 seq.) Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some lines by Chapman in his Shadow of Night (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have ' drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,' and in another place sportively invited ' nimble and aspiring wits ' to join him in consecrating their endeavours to ' sacred night.' There is no connection between Shakespeare's theory of the supernatural and noctiu-nal sources of his rival's influence and Chapman's trite allusion to the current faith in the power of ' nightly familiars ' over men's minds and lives, or Chapman's invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. Nashe in his prose tract called independently The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of ' famihars ' more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe's translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that ' this spirit [i.e. Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul's] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a familiar of your own.' On the strength of these quota- tions, and accepting Professor Minto's line of argument, Nashe, Thorpe, or Blount, whose ' famihar ' is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. A second argument in Chapman's favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of the Iliads (1611) denounces without mentioning any name 'a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detrac- tion.' It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets ; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments ' detraction.' There is small ground for identifying Chapman's ' windsucker ' with Shakespeare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). Mr. Arthur Acheson in Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (1903) adopts Prof. Minto's theory of Chapman's identity with the rival poet, arguing on fantastic grounds that Shakespeare and Chapman were at lifelong feud, and that Shakespeare not only attacked his adversary in the sonnets but held him up to ridicule as Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 205 bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare applies to his rival's verse specially applicable to the productions of any of them. Many besides the ' dedicatory ' sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the II Th poet avows ' love,' in the Ehzabethan sense of Sonnets of friendship.^ Although no specific reference is »p- made outside the twenty ' dedicatory ' sonnets to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the inference that the greater number of the sonnets of devoted ' love ' also have Southampton for their subject. Classical study is mainly responsible in the era of the Renaissance for the exalted conception of friendship which placed it in the world of literature on CI sssic^l traditions ^^^ level of love. The elevated estimate was °*. largely bred in Renaissance poetry of the traditions attaching to such twin heroes of antiquity as Py lades and Orestes, Theseus and Pirithous, Laelius and Scipio, To this classical catalogue Boccaccio, amplifying the classical legend, added in the fourteenth century the new examples of Palamon and Arcite and of Tito and Gesippo, and the latter pair of heroic friends fully shared in Shakespeare's epoch the literary vogue of their forerunners. It was to well-seasoned classical influence that poetry of the sixteenth century owed ^ ' Lover ' and ' friend ' were interchangeable terms in Elizabethan English. Cf. p. 193 note 1. Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ' Romans, countrymen, and lovers,' and subsequently describes Julius Caesar as ' my best lover ' {Julius Ccesar, m. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ' the bosom lover of my lord ' {Merchant of Venice, ni. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent's ' ever true lover ' ; and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was ' in love ' with him. The word ' love ' was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nashe, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to Southampton, calls him ' a dear lover ... of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' (See p. 2iJU aupra.) 206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the tendency to identify the ideals of friendship and love.^ At the same time it is important to recognise that in EUzabethan as in all Renaissance literature — more especially in sonnets — the word ' love ' together with all the common terms of endearment was freely employed in a conventional or figurative fashion, which deprives the expressions of much of the emotional force attaching to them in ordinary speech. That the whole language of love was applied by Eliza- bethan poets to their more or less professional intercourse with those who appreciated and encouraged their literary ^ Records of friendship in Elizabethan literature invariably acknow- ledged the classical debt. Edmund Spenser, when describing the perfect quality of friendship, cites as his witnesses : great Hercules, and Hylhis dear ; True .Touathan, and David trusty tried ; Stout Theseus, and Pirithous his fear ; Pylades and Orestes by his side ; Mild Titus, and Gesippus without pride ; Damon and Pythias, whom death could not sever. {Faerie Queene, Bk. iv. Canto x. st. 27.) Lyly, in his romance of Euphues, makes his hero Euphues address his friend Philautus thus (cd. Arber, p. 49) : ' Assure yourself that Damon to his Pythias, Pilades to his Orestes, Tytus to his Gysippus, Thesius to his Pirothus, Scipio to his Lselius, was never founde more faithfull, then Euphues will bee to Philautu3.' The story of Damon and Pythias formed the subject of a popular Elizabethan tragicomedy by Richard Edwardes (1570). Shakespeare pays a tribute to the current vogue of this classical legend when he makes Hamlet call his devoted friend Horatio ' Damon dear ' (Hamlet, in. ii. 284). Cicero's treatise De Amicitia which was inspired by the ideal relations subsisting between Scipio and Lalius was very familiar to Elizabethan men of letters in both the Latin original and English translations, and that volume helped to keep aUve the classical example. Montaigne echoed the classical strain in his essay ' On Friendship ' which finely describes his affection for Etienne de la Boetie and their perfect community of spirit. It may be worth noticing that Bacon, while in his essay ' On Friendship ' he pays a fine tribute to the senti- ment, takes an unamiable view of it in a second essay ' On Followers and Friends,' where he scornfully treats friends as merely interested and self-seeking dependents and frankly disparages the noble classical conception. The concluding words of Bacon's second essay are significant : ' There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one the other." PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 207 activities is convincingly illustrated by the mass of verse which was addressed to the greatest of all patrons of Elizabethan poetry — the Queen. The poets Figurative , , r i i -i language who Sought her favour not merely commended ° °^®" the beauty of her mind and body with the semblance of amorous ecstasy ; they carried their pro- testations of ' love ' to the extreme limits of realism ; they seasoned their notes of adoration with reproaches of inconstancy and infidelity, which they clothed in peculiarly intimate phraseology. Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Barufield, and Sir John Davies were among many of Shakespeare's contemporaries who wrote of their sovereign with a warmth that would mislead any reader who ignores the current conventions of the amorous vocabulary.^ ^ Here aro somo of the lines in which Spenser angled for Queen Elizabeth's professional protection (' Colin Clouts come home againe,* c. 169i): To her my thoughts I daily dedicate, To her my heart I nightly martyrize ; To her my love I lowly do prostrate, To her my life I wholly sacrifice : My thought, my heart, my love, my life is ihe. Sir Walter Raleigh similarly celebrated his devotion to the Queen in a poem called ' Cynthia ' of which only a fragment survives. The tone of such portion as is extant is that of unrestrainable passion. At one point the poet reflects how ■ that the eyes of my mind held her beams In every part transferred by love's swift thought ; Far off or near, in waking or in dreams. Imagination strong their lustre brought. Such force her angelic appearance had To master distance, time or cruelty. The passionate illusion could hardly be produced with more vivid effect than in a succeeding stanza from the pen of Raleigh in the capacity of literary suitor : The thoughts of past times, like flames of hell. Kindled afresh within my memory The many dear achievements that befell In those prime years and infancy of love. See ' Cynthia,' a fragment, in Poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 38. Richard Barnfield, in his like-named poem of Cynthia, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cyutliia, also extravagantly described 208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE It was in the rhapsodical accents of Spenser and Raleigh that Elizabethan poets habitually sought, not the Queen's countenance only, but that of her courtiers. Great lords and great ladies alike were repeatedly assured by poetic clients of the infatuation which came of their mental and physical charms. The fashionable tendency to clothe love and friendship in the same literary garb eUminated all distinction between the phrases Gabriel Qf affection which were addressed to patrons Harvey ■"■ ' courts ' and those which were addressed to patronesses. Sidnev!.^'^ Nashe, a typical EHzabethan, bore graphic witness to the poetic practice when in 1595 he described how Gabriel Harvey, who religiously observed the professional ritual, ' courted ' his patron Sir Phihp Sidney with every extravagance of amorous language.^ the Queen's beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Da vies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty -six years old, thus : Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit You give such lively life, such quickening power, Such sweet celestial influences to it As keeps it still in youth's immortal flower . . . O many, many years may you remain A happy angel to this happy land. {Nosce Teipsum, dedication.) Davies published in the same year twenty-six Hymnes of Astrea on Elizabeth's beauty and graces ; each poem forms an acrostic on the words ' Elizabetha Regina,' and the language of love is simulated on almost every page. ^ Nashe wrote of Harvey : ' I have perused vearses of his, written vnder his owne hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he were another Cyparissus or Ganimede : the last Gordian true loues knot or knitting up of them is this : — Sum iecur, ex quo te primom, Sydneie, vidi; Os oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur. All liver am /, Sidney, since I saw thee ; My mouth, eyes, rule it and to loue doth draw mee.' Have with you to Saffron Walden in Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, iii. 92. Cf. Shakespeare's comment on a love sonnet in Love's Labour's Lost (iv. iii. 74 seq.) : This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity, A green goose a goddess ; pure, pure idolatry. God amend us, God amend 1 we are much out of the way.' Throughout Evirope sonnets or poems addressed to patronesses display identical characteristics with those that were addressed to patrons. One series of Michael Angelo's impassioned sonnets was addressed to PATKONAGE OF EAKL OF SOUTHAMPTON 209 The tide of adulation of patrons and patronesses alike, in (what Shakespeare himself called) ' the liver vein,' long flowed without check. Until comparatively late in the seventeenth century there was ample justification for Sir Philip Sidney's warning of the flattery that awaited those who patronised poets and poetry : ' Thus doing, you shall be [hailed as] most fair, most rich, most wise, most all ; thus doing, you shall dweU upon superlatives ; thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante's Beatrice.' ^ There can be a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are often amorous in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare's sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem The Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke's Love, 1592, and another work of his, The Countess of Pembroke's Passion (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the countess, his literary patroness, a homage which is indis- tinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and over- mastering passion. Patronesses as well as patrons are addressed in the same adulatory terms in the long series of sonnets before Spenser's Faerie Queene, at the end of Chapman's Iliad, and at the end of John Davies's Microcosmos, 1603. Other addresses to patrons and patronesses are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson's Forest and Underwoods and Donne's Poems. Sonnets to men are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences in honour of women. Sonnet xi. in Draji^on's sonnet-fiction called ' Idea ' (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero ; and a few others of Drayton's sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Southern's eccentric collection of love-sonnets. Pandora (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford ; and William Smith in his Chloris (1596) (a sonnet - fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long sequence of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poem Cynthia a set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth caUed Ganymede. Barnfield explained that he was fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil's Eclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostro- phises the shepherd-boy Alexis. ^ Apologie for Poetrie (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62, P 210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE little doubt that Shakespeare, always susceptible to the contemporary vogue, penned many sonnets in that ' liver vein ' which was especially calculated to flatter the ear of a praise-loving Maecenas Hke the Earl of Southampton. It is quite possible that beneath all the conventional adulation there lay a genuine affection. But the perfect illusion of passion which often colours Shakespeare's poetic vows of friendship may well be fruit of his interpretation of the common usage in the glow of his dramatic instinct. Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again in him (cvi.), spear^e's ^^at absence from him was misery, and that assurances j^g affection was vnalterable. Writing with- of affection. , . , . out concealment m their own names, many other poetic clients gave their Maecenases the like assurances, crediting them with every perfection of mind and body, and ' placing ' them, in Sidney's phrase, ' with Dante's Beatrice.' Matthew Roydon wrote of liis patron, Sir Philip Sidney : His personage seemed most divine, A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. To heare him speak and sweetly smile You were in Paradise the while. Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ' his good personage and noble deeds ' made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom ' the antique poets ' were ' wont so much to sing.' This comphment, which Shake- speare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi.,^ recurs \vith especial frequency in contemporary sonnets of adula- tion. Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as ' my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the » Cf. Sonnet lix. : Show me your image in some antique book . . . Oh sure I am the wits of former days To subjeote worse have given admiring praise. PATRONAGE OF EAEL OF SOUTHAJVIPTON 211 Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, ' the admired virtues ' of the patron's youth Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse That it could scarcely utter naked truth. "■ Yet it is in foreign poetry which just preceded Shakespeare's era that the English dramatist's plaintive _ , and yearning language is most closely adum- the Duke brated. The greatest Italian poet of the era, Tasso, not merely recorded in numerous sonnets his amorous devotion for bis first patron, the Duke of Ferrara, but he also carefully described in prose the senti- ments which, with a view to retaining the ducal favour, he sedulously cultivated and poetised. In a long prose letter to a later friend and patron, the Duke of Urbino, he wrote of his attitude of mind to his first patron thus ^ : ' I confided in him, not as we hope in men, but as we trust in God. ... It appeared to me, so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death had no power over me. Burning thus with devotion to my lord, as much as man ever did with love to his mistress, I became, without perceiving it, almost an idolater. I continued in Rome and Ferrara many days and months in the same attachment and faith.' With illuminating frank- ness Tasso added : ' I went so far with a thousand acts of observance, respect, affection, and almost adoration, that at last, as they say the courser groAvs slow by too much spurring, so his [i.e. the patron's] goodwill towards me slackened, because I sought it too ardently.' There is practical identity between the alternations of feeling which find touching voice in many of the sonnets 1 Campion's Poems, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets : O how I faint when I of you do write (I t-itt 1), Finding thy worth a, limit past my praise (lixxii. 6). See also Donne's Poems (in Muses' Library), ii. 34. " Tasso, Operc, Pisa, 1821-32, vol. xiii. p. 298. p 2 212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of Shakespeare and those which colour Tasso's picture of his intercourse with his Duke of Ferrara. Italian and English poets profess for a man a loverlike ' idolatry,' although Shakespeare conventionally warns his ' lord ' : ' Let not my love be called idolatry ' (Sonnet cv.). Both writers attest the hopes and fears which his favour evokes in them, with a fervour and intensity of emotion which it was only in the power of great poets to feign. An even closer parallel in both sentiment and phraseo- logy with Shakespeare's sonnets of friendship is furnished by the sonnets of the French poet Etienne sonnets to Jodelle, whose high reputation as the inventor IS pa ron. ^£ French classical drama did not obscure his fame as a lyrist. Jodelle was well known in both capaci- ties to cultivated Elizabethans. The suspicions of atheism under which he laboured, and his premature death in distressing poverty at the early age of forty-one, led English observers of the day to liken him to ' our tragical poet Marlowe.' ^ To a noble patron, Comte de Fauquemberge et de Courtenay, Jodelle addressed a series of eight sonnets which anticipate Shakespeare's sonnets at every turn.^ In the opening address to the nobleman Jodelle speaks of his desolation in his patron's absence which no crowded company can alleviate. Yet when his friend is absent, the French poet yearningly fancies him present — Present, absent, je pais I'ame a toy toute deue. So Shakespeare wrote to his hero : Thyself away art present still with me ; For thou not further than my thoughts can move (xlvii. 10-11). ^ The parallel between the careers of Marlowe and Jodelle first appeared in Thomas Beard's Theatre oj God's Judgements, 1597, and was repeated by Francis Meres next year in his Palladia Tamia (cf. French Renaissance in England, 430-1). ', ^ These were first published with a long collection of ' amours,' chiefly in sonnet form, in 1574. Cf. Jodelle, LEuvres, 1870, ed. ii. p. 174. Throughout these sonnets Jodelle addresses his lord in the second person singular, as Shakespeare does in all but thirty -four of his sonnets. PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 213 Jodelle credits his patron with a genius which puts labour and art to shame, with rank, virtue, wealth, with intellectual grace, and finally with Une bonte qui point ne change ou s'epouvante. Similarly Shakespeare commemorates his patron's ' birth or wealth or wit ' (xxxvii. 5) as well as his 'bounty' (liii. 11) and his 'abundance' (xxxvii. 11). None the less the French poet, echoing the classical note, avers that the greatest joy in the Count's life is the com- pleteness of the sympathy between the patron and his poetic admirer, which guarantees them both immortahty. Hotly does the French sonnetteer protest the eternal constancy of his affection. His spirit droops when the noble lord leaves him to go hunting or shooting, and he then finds his only solace in writing sonnets in the truant's honour. Shakespeare in his sonnets, it will be remembered, did no less : Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor think the bitterness of absence sour When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Ivii. 5-8.) |0 absence ! what a torment wouidst thou prove, (Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave |To entertain the time with thoughts of love. (;xxxix. 9-11.) 1 Elsewhere Jodelle declares that he, a servant {serf, serviieur), has passed into the relation of a beloved and loving friend. The master's high birth, wealth, and intellectual endowments interpose no bar to the force of the friendship. The great friends of classical antiquity, Pylades and Orestes, Scipio and Laehus, and the rest, 1 Cf. also : Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire ? (Sonnet Ivil. 1-2.) That god forbid that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure. (Sonnet Iviii. 1-2.) 214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEABE lived with one another on such terms of perfect equality. While Jodelle wrote of his patron Et si Ion dit que trop par ces vers je me vante, C'est qu'estant tien je veux te vanter en mes heurs, Shakespeare greeted his ' lord of love ' with the assurance 'Tis thee, myself, — that for myself I praise. (Sonnet Lxii. 13.) Finally Jodelle confesses to Shakespeare's experience of suffering, and grieves, like the English sonnetteer, that he was the victim of slander. Although Shakespeare's poetic note of pathos is beyond Jodelle's range, yet the phase of sentiment which shapes these French greetings of a patron in sonnet form is rarely distinguishable from that of Shakespeare's sonnetteering triumph. Some dozen poems which are dispersed through Shake- speare's collection at irregular intervals detach themselves in point of theme from the rest. These pieces sonnets of Combine to present the poet and the youth in intrigue. relations which are not easy at a first glance to reconcile with an author's idealised worship of a patron. The poet's friend, we are here told, yielded to the seduc- tions of the poet's mistress. The woman is bitterly denounced for her treacherj', the youth is complacently pardoned amid regretful rebukes. The poet professes to be torn asunder by his double affection for friend and mistress, and he lays the blame for the crisis on the woman's malign temperament ^ : Two loves I have of comfort and despair Which like two spirits do suggest [i.e. tempt] me still : The better angel is a man right fair. The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. (Sonnet cxliv.) The traitress is ' the dark lady ' of the Sonnets of con- ventional vituperation. Whether the misguided youth of ^ The dozen sonnets fall into two groups. Six of them — xxxiii.-v., Ixix. and xcv.-vi. — reproach the youth in a general way with sensual excesses, and the other six— xl.-xlii. cxxxii.-iii. and cxliv. — specifically point to the poet's traitorous mistress as the wilful cause of the youth's * fault.' PATEONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAJIPTON 215 the intrigue is to be identified with the patron-friend of the other sonnets of friendship may be an open question. It might be in keeping with Southampton's sportive tem- perament to accept the attentions of a Circe, by whose fascination his poet was lured. The sonnetteer's sorrow- ful condonation of the young man's offence may be an illustration, drawn from life, of the strain which a self-willed patron under the spell of the ethical irregularities of the Renaissance laid on the forbearance of a poetic 'protege. But while we admit that some strenuous touches in Shakespeare's presentation of the episode may well owe Th fl' suggestion to either autobiographic experience of love and or personal observation, we must bear in mind ip. ^j^^^ ^j^^ intrigue of the ' Sonnets ' in its main phase is a commonplace of Renaissance romance, and that Shakespeare may after his wont be playing a variation on an accepted literary theme with the slenderest prompt- ing apart from his sense of literary or dramatic effect. Italian poets and novelists from the fourteenth century onwards habitually brought friendship and love into rivalry or conflict.^ The call of friendship often demanded the sacrifice of love. The laws of ' sovereign amity ' were so fantastically interpreted as frequently to require a lover, at whatever cost of emotional suffering, to abandon to his friend the woman who excited their joint adoration. The Itahan novelist Boccaccio offered the era of the Renaissance two alternative solutions of this puzzling problem, and both long enjoyed authority in Boccaccio's j.iTi uti.- a.- c treatment ^he uterary world. In his narrative poem of of the ' Teseide,' Boccaccio pictured the two devoted tneme. ^ friends Palamon and Arcite as ahenated by their common love for the fair Emilia. Their rival claims to the lady's hand are decided by a duel in which Palamon ^ Cf. Petrarch's sonnet ccxxvii. : Cariti di signore, amor di donna Son le catene, ove con multi affanni Legato son, perch'io stesso mi strinsi. So Beza's Poemata, 1548, Epigrammata, xc. : ' De sua in Candidam et Audebertum benevolentia.' 216 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is vanquished although he is not mortally wounded. But just after his victory Arcite is fatally injured by a fall from his horse. In his dying moments he and^^°cite bestows Emilia's hand on his friend. This is the fable which Chaucer retold in his ' Knight's Tale,' and Shakespeare and Fletcher, accepting the cue of an earlier Elizabethan dramatist, combined to dramatise the theme in ' The Two Noble Kinsmen.' ^ But Boccaccio also devised an even more famous prescription for the disorder of friends caught in the same toils of love. In the ' Decameron ' (Day x. Novel 8) Gesippo, whose friendship with Tito has the classical perfection, is affianced to the lady Sophronia. But Gesippo soon dis- covered that his friend is hkewise enslaved by G^^si ^^o^ ^^® lady's beauty. Thereupon Gesippo, in the contemporary spirit of quixotic chivalry, contrives that Tito shall, by a trick which the lady does not suspect, take his place at the marriage and become her husband.'^ In the sequel Gesippo is justly punished with a long series of abject misfortunes for his self-denying wiles. But Tito, whose friendship is immutable, finally restores Gesippo's fortunes and gives him his sister in marriage.^ The chequered adventures of these devoted friends of Italy caught the hterary sentiment of Tudor 1 The perfect identity which is inherent in friendship of the Re- naissance type finds emphatic expression in this play. Palamon assures Arcite : [ We are an endless mine to one another ; We're one another's wife, ever begetting New births o£ love ; we're father, friends, acquaintance!^; We are, in one another, families ; 1 am your heir, and you are mine. (II. ii. 79-83.) - Into two plays, All's Well and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, true to the traditions of the Renaissance, introduces the like deception, — on the part of Helena in the former piece and on that of Mariana in the latter. * The first outline of this story is found in a miscellany of the twelfth century, L>e Clencali discipLina by Petrus Alfonsus, and thence found its way into the Gesia Romanorum (No. 171), the most popular story book of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio's tale enjoyed much vogue in a Latin version in the fifteenth century by Filippo Beroaldo. This was rendered back into Italian by Bandello in 1509 and was turned PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAJMPTON 217 England and enjoyed a wide vogue there in Shakespeare's youth .^ Shakespeare's contemporary, John Lyly, in his popular romance of 'Euphues,' treated the theme of friendship J . , in competition with love on Boccaccio's lines Euphues and although with important variations. Lyly's autus. jiero, Euphues, forms a rapturous friendship, which the author likens to that of Tito and Gesippo, with a young man called Philautus. The latter courts the fair but fickle Lucetta, and he is soon supplanted in her good graces by his ' shadow ' Euphues. Less amiable than Boccaccio's Gesippo, Lyly's Philautus denounces, with all the fervour of Shakespeare's vituperative sonnets, both man and woman. But Lucetta soon transfers her atten- tions to ^ new suitor. Curio, and Euphues and Philautus renew their interrupted ties of mutual devotion in their former strength. Lyly's Philautus, liis Euphues, and his into French verse by Franc^ois Habert in 1551. Early in the seventeenth century the French dramatist Alexandre Hardy dramatised the story as Qenippe ou les deux Amis. 1 Sir Thomas Elyot worked a long rendering of Boccaccio's story into his formal treatise on the cvilture of Tudor youth which he called The Governour (1531), see Croft's edition, ii. 132 seq., while two English poetasters contributed independent poetic versions to early Tudor literature. The later of these, which was issued in 15G2, is entitled The most wonderful and pleasaunt History of Titus and Gisippus, whereby is fully declared the figure of ptrfect frendshyp, drawen into English metre. By Edward Lewicke, 1562. Robert Greene frequently cites the tale of Tito and Gesippo as an example of perfect friendship (cf. Works, ed. Grosart, iv. 211, vii. 243), and the story is the theme of the popular Elizabethan ballad ' Alphonso and Ganselo ' (Sievers, Thomas Deloney, Berlin, 1904, pp. 83 seq.). Twice was the tale drama- tised in the infancy of Tudor drama, once in Latin by a good scholar and schoolmaster Ralph RadclifEe in the reign of Edward VI, and again in English about 1576 by an anonymous pen. Queen Elizabeth directed the English play — The Historie of Titus and Gisippus — to be acted before her on the night of Shrove Tuesday, February 19, 157d— 7. Neither the Latin nor the English play survives. Two plays by Richard Edwardes (d. 1566) on like themes of friendship — Damon and Pythias and Palemon and Arcite — were acted before the Queen, in 1564 and 1566 respectively. Only Damon and Pythias is extant. 218 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Lucetta, are, before the advent of Curio, in the precise situation with which Shakespeare's sonnet-intrigue credits the poet, the friend, and the lady. Yet another phase of the competing calls of love and friendship is portrayed by the French poet, Clement Marot. He personally claims the experience Marot's which Shakespeare in his intrigue assigns to testimony, j^-^ £j,jgjj(j^ Marot relates how he was sohcited in love by his comrade's mistress, and in a poetic address, ' A celle qui souhaita Marot aussi amoureux d'elle qu'un sien Amy,' warns her of the crime against friendship to which she prompts him. Less complacent than Shake- speare's ' friend,' Marot rejects the Siren's invitation on the ground that he has only haK a heart to offer her, the other half being absorbed by friendship.^ Before the sonnets were penned, Shakespeare himself too, in the youthful comedy ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' treated friendship's struggle with of the"^^^ lo"^6 i^ ^^® exotic light which the Renaissance 'Two ^ sanctioned. In ' The Two Gentlemen ' when Valentine learns of his friend Proteus' infatua- tion for his own lady-love Silvia, he, like Gesippo in Boccaccio's tale, resigns the girl to his supplanter. Valentine's unworthy surrender is frustrated by the potent appeal of Proteus' own forsaken mistress Juha. But the episode shows that the issue at stake in the sonnets' tale of intrigue already fell within Shakespeare's dramatic scrutiny. Shakespeare would have been conforming to his wonted practice in drama had he adapted his tale of intrigue in the ' Sonnets ' from the stock theme of con- hood o/a" temporary romance. Yet a piece of external personal evidence suggests that in some degree fact mingled with fiction, truth with makebeheve, earnestness with jest in Shakespeare's poetic presentation 1 Marot's (Euvres, 1565, p. 437. On Marot's verse loans were freely levied by Edmund Spenser and other Elizabethan poets. See French Renaissance in England, 109 seq. PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 219 of the clash between friendship and love,^ and that while the poet knew something at first hand of the disloyalty of mistress and friend, he recovered his composure fvidemfe ^^ quickly and completely as did Lyly's romantic hero Philautus under a like trial, A Hterary comrade obtained a license on September 3, 1594, for the publication of a poem called ' Willobie his Avisa, • Wiiiobie Qj. ^i^g rj^j.^^ Picture of a Modest Maid and of a his Avisa. Chaste and Constant Wife.' ^ In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse — in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a wife — with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged author — Henry Willobie — is introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, ' being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while ^ The closest parallel to the Shakespearean situation (see esp. Sonnet xlii. ) is that seriously reported by the seventeenth-century French writer. Saint Evxemond, who, complaining of a close friend's relations with his mistress (apparently la Comtesse d'Olonne), wrote thus to her in 1654 of his twofold affection for her and for his comrade : ' Apprenez-moi contre qui'je me dois facher d'avantage, ou contre lui qui m'enleve une maitresse, ou contre vous, qui me volez un ami. . . . J'ai trop de passion pour donner rien au ressentiment ; ma tendresse I'importera toujours sur vos outrages. J'aime la perfide [i.e the mistress], j'aime I'infidele [i.e. the friend].' [(Euvrts Melees de Saint Evremond, ed. Giraud, 1865, iii. 5.) * The edition of 1594 was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his Occasional Issues. 1880, and in 1904 by Mr. Charles Hughes, who brings new argu- ments to justify association of the book with Shakespeare's biography. Extracts from the poem appear in the New Shakspere Society's Allusion Books, i. 169 seq. In Mistress D'Avenant the dark lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1913), Mr. Arthur Acheson again reprints Willobie his Avisa by way of supporting a fanciful theory which would make the ' dark lady ' of the sonnets the heroine of that poem, and would identify her with the wife of the Oxford innkeeper who was mother of Sir William D'Avenant (see p. 451). 220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his famihar friend W . S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recovered of the like infection. Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing conceit,' encouraging Willobie to beheve that Avisa would ultimately yield ' with pains, dihgence, and some cost in time.' ' The miserable comforter ' [W. S.], the narrative continues, was moved to comfort his friend ' with an impossibihty,' for one of two reasons. Either he ' now would secretly laugh at his friend's folly ' because he ' had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.' Or ' he would see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving comedy,' would ' see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for ttie old player. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,' owing to Avisa's unrelenting temper. Happily, ' time and necessity ' effected a cure.^ In two succeeding cantos in verse (xlv. and xlvii.) W. S. is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives him, in oratio recta, light-hearted and cynical counsel. Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shake- speare's identity with H. W.'s unfeehng adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation,^ and it is to be re- ^ The narrator ends by claiming for his ' discourse ' that in it ' is lively represented the unruly rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove at liberty, with the divers and sundry changes of affections and temptations, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise.' ( 1> illobie his Avidu, ed. C. Hughes, p. 4:1.) " W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them made some reputation in Shakespeare's day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 200 n. 1, a i/runcj man.mrm -tke, oriaitial fiiclurt. a/ u'c/rccA ^ ^/n>f.u-. L:.E Jor. PuUirbed >iy 3rMth.E1.1r.r*Co '.b.Wdttrlns Hjci PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 225 five or twenty-six. The earlier portrait, which is re- produced on the opposite page, shows a young man resplendently attired. His doublet is of white satin ; a broad collar, edged with lace, half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver thread ; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced with gold ; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is decorated at intervals with white silk bows ; the hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold ; purple garters, embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings below the knee. Light body armour, richly damascened, lies on the ground to the right of the figure ; and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in gold. Such gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer bestowed much attention on his personal equipment. But the head is more interesting than the body. The eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and the expression sedate ; rings are in the ears ; beard and moustache are at an incipient stage, and are of the same bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of Southampton's mother that is also at Welbeck.^ But, however scanty is the down on the youth's cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant. It is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is now of walnut, but was originally of Ughter tint. The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598. A cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand. Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion, and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin upturned moustache are of brighter auburn and are fuller than before, although still slight. The blue eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill health, but differ little from those features in the earlier portrait. 1 Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet iii. : Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime. 226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE From either of the two Welbeck portraits of South- ampton might Shakespeare have drawn his picture of the youth in the ' Sonnets.' Many times does he tell us that the youth is ' fair ' in complexion, and that his eyes are ' fair.' In Sonnet Ixviii., when he points to the youth's face as a map of what beauty was ' without all ornament, itself and true ' — before fashion sanctioned the use of artificial ' golden tresses ' — there can be Uttle doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about South- ampton's neck.^ A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be allotted to a date which is very distant from 1594 ; only two bear unmistakable signs of much later composition. In Sonnet Ixx. the poet no longer credits his hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a ' pure, unstained prime,' which has ' passed Sonnet cvii., by the ambush of young days.' Sonnet of the series, cvii., apparently the last of the series, was penned long after the mass of its companions, for it makes references that cannot be ignored to three events that took place in 1603 — to Queen Ehzabeth's death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who was convicted in 1601 of comphcity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and had Bince that year been in prison in the Tower of London. The first two events are thus described : The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured And the sad augurs mock their own presage ; Incertainties now crown themselves assured And peace proclaims olives of endless age. It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the 1 Southampton's singularly long hair procured him at times un- welcome attentions. ■\\Tien, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off, owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by * pulling off some of the Earl's locks.' On the incident being reported to the Queen, she ' gave Willoughby thanks for what he did, in the presence ' (Sydney Papers, ii. 83). PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 227 spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which EHzabeth's crown had passed, Allusion to ■^itliou^ civil war, to the Scottish King, and Elizabeth's thus the revolution that had been foretold as ^^^ ■ the inevitable consequence of EHzabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia {i.e. the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, FuLke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. ' Fair Cynthia's dead ' sang one. Luna's e;xtinct ; and now beholde the sunne Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares, wrote Henry Petowe in his ' A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of Dead EHza,' 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One poet asserted that death ' veiled her glory in a cloud of night.' Another argued : ' Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in darkest night.' A third varied the formula thus : When winter had cast off her weed Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh ! light most fair.^ At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance ' not with an oUve branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone ' but to all Europe.2 ' The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same sonnet cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the happiest augury. ' All things look fresh,' one poet sang, ' to greet his 1 These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle's England's Mourning Garment (London, 1603). * Gervase ilaikham's Honour in her Perfection, 1624. Q 2 228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE excellence.' ' The air, the seasons, and the earth ' were represented as in sympathy with the general joy in ' this sweetest of all sweet springs.' One source Allusions to of gjigf alone was acknowledged : Southampton Southamp- * .„ . • , rr. . i ton's re- was Still a prisoner m the lower, supposed as pdlon!"""^ forfeit to a confined doom.' All men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day follow- ing the Queen's death, wished him at liberty.^ The wish was fulfilled quickly. On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by ' a warrant from the King.' So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamber- lain to Dudley Carleton two days later, ' raised all men's spirits . . . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves great things. '^ Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton's release in buoyant verse. ^ It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent. ' My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding lines of sonnet cvii. and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his ' poor rhyme,' ' when tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.' It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron's favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame. 1 Manningham's Diary, Camden Soc, p. 148. - Court and Times of James I, i. i. 7. ^ See Appendix iv. PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 229 The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' are thus seen to be identical with those that are apparent in the rest of his Summary i rm of con- hterary work. They present one more proof respecting °^ ^"^ punctiUous regard for the demands the of public taste, and of his marvellous genius Sonnets. i i -n • i • t • ^ i • and skill in adaptmg and transmuting for his own purposes the hints of other workers in the field which for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shake- speare's ' Sonnets ' were produced under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to' sonnetteering within the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from subhmity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare's collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue. Apo- strophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings ^f the beauties of nature, ideaUsation of a protege's regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion, vivacious compliments on a woman's hair or her touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind — all appear as frequently in contemporar}^ collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrows very manj' of his competitors' words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience inspired few EUzabethan sonnets, and no hterary liistorian can accept the claim which has been preferred in behalf of Shakespeare's 230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' Sonnets ' to be at all points a self-evident exception to the general rule. A personal note may have escaped the poet involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and remorse, but Shakespeare's dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more there than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. In a scattered series of some twelve sonnets he introduced a detached topic — a lover's supersession by his friend in his mistress's graces : but there again he shows httle independence of his comrades. He treated a theme which was wrought into the web of Renaissance romance, and if he sought some added sustenance from an incident of his own life, he was inspired, according to collateral testimony, by a passing adventure, which deserved a smile better than a tear. The sole biographical inference which is deducible witli full confidence from the ' Sonnets ' is that at one time in his career Shakespeare, like the majority of his craft, disdained few weapons of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles the nobleman to a place in the poet's biography resembling that filled by the Duke of Ferrara in the early biography of Tasso. XIII THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER All the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron [How] to no other pass ray verses tend Than of your graces and your gifts to tell, his dramatic work was steadily advancing. AVhile he never ceased to garner hints from the labours of others, he was during the last years of Queen Ehzabeth's long reign very surely widenuig the interval between his own dramatic achievement and that of all contemporaries. To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs ' Mid- summer Night's Dream.' ^ The comedy may well have ^ No edition appeared before 1600. On October 8, 1600, Thomas Fisher, formerly a draper, who had only become a freeman of the Stationers' Company in the previous June, and remained for a very few years a bookseller and publisher (never possessing a printing press), obtained a license for the publication of the Dream (Arber, ii. 174). The name of Fisher, the pubhsher, figured alone on the title- page of the first quarto of 1600 ; no printer was mentioned, but the book probably came from the press of James Roberts, the printer and publisher of ' the players' bills.' The title-page runs : ' A Midsommer Nights Dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publikely acted, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Imprmted at London for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe at the signe of the White Hart in Fleete Streete 1600.' A second quarto, which corrects some misprints in the first version, and was reprinted in the First Folio, bears a different printer's device and has the brief imprint ' Printed by James Roberts, 1600.' It is ingeniously suggested that this imprint is a misrepresenta- tion and that the second quarto of the Dream was not published before 1619, when it was printed by William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts's press, for Thomas Pavier, a stationer of doubtful repute. (Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq.) 231 232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE been written to celebrate a marriage in high society — perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, . . Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third Earl summer of Bedford, on December 12, 1594 ; or that at SiSm ' Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5, of Wilham Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby, brother of a former patron of Shakespeare's company of actors and himself an amateur dramatist,^ with Elizabeth, daughter of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a Avild- living nobleman of literary proclivities. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, ' a fair vestal throned by the west ' (n. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the home of the little magical flower called ' Love-in-idleness ' that he bids Puck fetch for him, seems hterally to report one of the scenic pageants with which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Ehzabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575.^ Although the Avhole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy, it furnishes fresh proof of Shakespeare's studious versatility. The plot ingeniously weaves together four independent and apparently con- flicting threads of incident, for which Shake- soiurces. speare found suggestion in various places. The Athenian background, which is dominated by the nuptials of Theseus, Duke of Athens, with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, owes much to the setting of Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale.' There Chaucer was himself under debt to Boccaccio's ' Teseide,' a mediaeval rendering of classical myth, where the classical vision is blurred by a mediaeval haze. For his Greek topic Shakespeare may ^ On June 30, 1599, the sixth Earl of Derby was reported to be ' busyed only in penning commodyes for the commoun players ' (State Papers Dom. Eliz., vol. 271, Nos. 34 and 35) ; see p. ^^'2 supra. * See Oberon's Vision, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin {Shakespeare Society), 1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth fetes, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were publishedjin 1570. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 233 have sought supplementary aid in the ' Life of Theseus ' in Plutarch's storehouse of biography, mth which his later work shows much famiharity. The story of the tragicomedy of ' Pyramus and Thisbe,' which Bottom and his mates burlesque, is an offspring of the dramatist's re- searches in Ovid's ' Metamorphoses,' and direct from the Latin text of the same poem he drew the beautiful name of his fairy queen Titania. Oberon the king of the fairy world and his ethereal company come from ' Huon of Bordeaux,' the French mediaeval romance of which a translation by Lord Berners was first printed m 1534. The Athenian lovers' quarrels sound a more modern note and there is no need for suggesting a hterary origin. Yet the influence of Shakespeare's predecessor in comedy, John Lyl}^ is perceptible in the raillery in which both Shakespeare's mortals and immortals indulge, and the intermeddling of fairies in human affairs is a contrivance in which Lyly made an earher experiment. The humours which mark the presentation of the play of ' Pyramus and Thisbe ' improve upon a device which Shakespeare had already employed in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' The ' rude mechanicals ' who produce the piece are credited, hke the rest of the dramatis personoe, with Athenian citizenship ; yet they most faith- fully reflect the temper of the Elizabethan artisan, and their crude mingling of tragic tribulation with comic horseplay travesties much extravagance in contemporary drama. When all Shakespeare's literary debts are taken into account, the final scheme of the ' ^lidsummer Night's Dream ' remains an example of the author's freshest inven- tion. The dramatist endows the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, which was beyond the reach of Lyly or any forerunner. Shakespeare may indeed be said to have conquered in this fairy comedy a new realm for art. More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of ' All's Well that Ends Well ' of which the original draft may be tentatively allotted to 1595. The general treat- ment illustrates the writer's tightening grip on the 234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE subtleties of romance. Francis Meres, writing in 1598, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called ' Love's Labour's Won.' This title, which is not otherwise known, ^Ji) may well be appUed to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of the Shrew,' which has also been identified with ' Love's Labour's Won,' has shghter claim to the designation. The main story of ' All's Well ' is of Itahan origin. Although it was accessible, like the plot of 'Romeo and JuUet,' in Painter's ' Palace of Pleasure ' (No. xxxviii.), the original source is Boccaccio's 'Deca- meron ' (Day iii. Novel 9). On the old touching story of Helena's love for her social superior, the unworthy Bertram, Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted the three comic cha- racters of the braggart ParoUes, whose name is French for ' words,' the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) less witty than his compeers ; all are of the dramatist's own devising. Another original creation, Bertram's mother, Countess of Rousillon, is a charming portrait of old age. In spite of the effective rehef which is furnished by the humours of the boastful coward Parolles, the pathetic The element predominates in ' All's Well.' The heroine heroine Helena, whose ' pangs of despised love ' Helena. , . , , • -, ^ are expressed with touchmg tenderness, ranks, in spite of her ultimate defiance of modern standards of maidenly modesty, with the greatest of Shakespeare's female creations. Shakespeare failed to ehminate from his Itahan plot all the frankness of Renaissance manners. None the less he finally succeeded in enforcing an ideal of essential purity and refinement. The style of ' All's Well,' m regard both to language and to metre, presents a puzzhng problem. Early and late features of Shakespeare's work are per- puzzie plexingly combined. The proportion of rhyme St le^ ^'•^ blank verse is high, and the rhymed verse in which epistles are penned by two of the characters (in place of prose) is a clear sign of j'outhful artifice ; one letter indeed takes the lyric form of a sonnet. On the other hand, nearly half the play is in prose, DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 235 and the metrical irregularities of the blank verse and its elliptical tenour are characteristic of the author's ripest efiforts. No ear Her version of the play than that which appears in the First Folio is extant, and the dis- crepancy of style suggests that the FoHo text presents a late revision of an early draft. 'The Taming of The Shrew '—which, like 'All's Well.' was first printed in the FoHo — was probably composed soon after the first planning of that solemn Taming comedy. It is a revision of an old play on ^ t^^ , luies somewhat differing from those which Shakespeare had followed previously. A comedy called ' The Taming of A Shrew ' was produced as an old piece at Newington Butts by the conjoined companies of the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain on June 11, 1594, and was fii'st pubUshed in the same year.^ From that source Shakespeare drew the Induction (an outer dramatic framework) ~ as well as the energetic scenes in which the hero Petruchio conquers Katharine the Shrew. The dramatist accepted the scheme of the old piece, but he first endowed the incident with the vital spirit of comedy. While following the old play in its general outlines , Shakespeare's revised version added, moreover, an entirely new underplot, the intrigue of the Shrew's younger sister, Bianca, with three rival lovers. That subsidiary woof of ^ Of. Henslowe's Diary, ii. 164. The pubUshed quarto described the old play as acted by the Earl of Pembroke's company, for whom it was originally written. It was reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844, and was re-editcd by Prof. F. S. Boas in 1908. - Although comparatively rare, there are many examples in Eliza- bethan drama of the device of an Induction or outer framework in which a set of characters are presented at the outset as arranging for the production of the substantive piece, and remain on the stage as more or less critical spectators of the play through the course of its performance. Besides the old play of TIte Taming of A Shrciv Shakespeare may well have known George Peele's Old Wivefi" Tah (15?»5), Robert Gveene sKi-ng James IV oj Scotland (l.TOB), and Anthonj'^ Muuday's Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1601), all of which are furnished with an ' induction ' of the accepted sort. A more critical kind of ' induction ' figures in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour (1600) and Cynthia's Revels (1601), Marston's Malcontent (1604), and Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight^of the Burning Pestle (1613). 236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE fable which is ingeniously interwoven with the main web, owes much to the ' Supposes,' an Elizabethan comedy adapted by George Gascoigne from Ariosto's underoiot ItaUan comedy ' I Suppositi.' The association has historic interest, for Gascoigne's ' Supposes ' made known to Enghshmen for the first time the modern conception of romantic comedy which Italy developed for all Europe out of the classical model. Yet evidence of style — the liberal introduction of tags of Latin and the beat of the doggerel — makes it difficult to allot the Bianca scenes of ' The Taming of the Shrew ' to Shakespeare ; those scenes were probably due to a coadjutor. The Induction to ' The Taming of the Shrew ' has a direct bearing on Shakespeare's biogi'aphy, for the poet admits into it a number of hteral references allusions to Stratford and his native county. Such per- in the sonahties are rare in Shakespeare's plays, and can only be paralleled in two of slightly later date — the ' Second Part of Henry IV ' and ' The Merrj'' Wives of Windsor.' All these local allusions may well be due to such a renewal of Shakespeare's personal relations with the town as is indicated by facts in his private history of the same period.^ In the Induction the tinker, Christopher Sly, describes himself as ' Old Sly's son of Burton Heath.' Burton Heath is Barton-on-the- Heath, the home of Shakespeare's aunt, Edmund Lambert's wife, and of her sons. The Lamberts Avere relatives whom Shakespeare had no reason to regard with much favour. The stern hold which Edmund Lambert and his son John kejit on Asbies, the estate of the dramatist's mother, caused Shakespeare's parents continued anxiety through his early manhood. The tinker Sly in like local vein confesses that he has run up a score with Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot.^ The references to Wincot and the 1 See p. 281 infra. * All these details are of Shakespeare's invention, and do not figure in the old plaj'. But in the crude induction theie the non- descript drunkard is named without prefix ' SUe.' That surname, although it was verj' common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 237 Hackets are singularly precise. The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as ' on a heath.' Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwickshire villages, and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly's drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was once an EUzabethan mansion ; it is situated on what was doubtless in Shake- speare's day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath. This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare's day. On November 21, 1591, ' Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,' was baptised in Quinton church. ^ Yet by Warwickshire con- temporaries the Wincot of ' The Taming of the Shrew ' was unhesitatingly identified with Wilnecote, near Tam- worth, on the Staffordshire border of Warwickshire, at some distance from Stratford. That village, whose name was pronounced ' Wincot,' was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century — a distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged to any place of like name. The Warwickshire poet, Sir Aston Cokain, within half a century of the production of Shake- speare's ' Taming of the Shrew,' addressed to ' Mr. Clement Fisher of Wincott ' (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin Shakespeare your Wincoi ale hath much renowned. That fox' 1 a Beggar so (by chance was found Sleeping) that there needed not many a word To make him to believe he was a Lord. appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that that piece was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play which can be associated with Warwickshire. 1 Mr. Richard Savage, formerly secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he discovered. 238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit ' Wincot '" (i.e. Wilnecote) to drink Such ale as Shakespeare fancies Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.^ It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously invested the home of Kit Sly and of Kit's hostess with characteristics of Wilnecote as well as of the hamlet near Stratford. Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare's mother, is also said to have been popularly pronounced ' Wincot.' A tradition which was first recorded by Capell as late as 1780 in his notes to 'The Taming of the Shrew ' (p. 26) is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at ' Wincot ' to enjoy the society of a ' fool who belonged to a neighbouring mill,' and the Wincot of this story is, we are told, locally associated with the village of Wilmcote. But the links that connect Shakespeare's tinker with Wilmcote are far shghter than those which connect him with Wincot and Wilnecote. The mention of Kit Sly's tavern comrades — Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell — was in all likelihood a reminiscence of contemporary Warwickshire life as Hteral as the name of the hamlet where the drunkard dwelt. There was a genuine Stephen Sly who was in the dramatist's day a self-assertive citizen of Stratford ; and ' Greece,' whence ' old John Naps ' de- rived his cognomen, is an obvious misreading of Greet, a hamlet by Winchcomb in Gloucestershire, not far removed from Shakespeare's native town.^ 1 Small Poems of Divers Sorts. 1658, p. 224 (mispaged 124). - According to local tradition Shakespeare was acquainted with Greet, Winchcomb, and all the villages in the immediate neighbourhood. He is still credited with the authorship of the local jingle which enumerates the chief hamlets and points of interest in the district. The lines run : Dirty Qretton, dingy Greet, Beggarly Winclicomb, Sudely sweet ; Hartshorn and Wittington Bell, Andoversford and Jlerry Frog Mill. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 239 In 1597 Shakespeare turned once more to English history. He studied anew Holinshed's ' Chronicle.' At the same time he carefully examined a value- less but very popular piece, ' The Famous Victories of Henry V, containing the Honourable battle of Agincourt,' which was repeatedly acted by the Queen's company of players betAveen 1588 and 1595.^ The ' Famous Victories ' opens A\ith a perfunctory sketch of Henry IV's last years ; in the crudest spirit of farce Prince Hal while heir apparent engages in roistering horseplay with disreputable associates ; the later scenes present the most stirring events of his reign. From Holinshed and the old piece Shakespeare worked up with splendid energy two plays on the reign of Henry IV, with an independent sequel on the reign of Henry V — the three plays forming together the supreme trilogy in the range of history drama. Shakespeare's two plays concerning Henry IV are con- tinuous in subject-matter ; they are knoAAH respectively as Parts I. and II. of ' Henry IV.' The First Part carries the historic episode from the close of the play of ' Richard II ' The down to the battle of Shrewsbury, July 21, 1403, historical when Henry IV, Richard II's successor on the "^" ^° ■ throne, triumphed over the rebeUion of his new subjects. The Second Part treats more cursorily of the remaining ten years of Henry IV's reign and ends with that monarch's collapse under the strain of kingly cares and with the coronation of his son Henrj' V. The main theme of the two pieces is serious in the extreme. Henry IV is a figure of gloom, and a cause of gloom in his environment. But Shakespeare, boldly improving on the example of the primitive old play of ' The Famous Victories ' and of much other historical drama, hnked to the tragic scheme his most convincing portrayal of broad and comprehensive humour. 1 It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598 as acted by the Queens company. A re-issue of 1617 credits the King's company {i.e. Shakespeare's company) with its production — a fraudu- lent device of the publisher to identify it with Shakespeare's work. 240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE The ' Second Part of Henry IV ' is almost as rich as the Induction to ' The Taming of the Shrew ' in direct references to persons and districts famiUar More oi 1 m Stratford to Shakespeare. Two amusmg scenes pass memories. ^^ ^^^ j^^^^^ ^j Justice Shallow in Gloucester- shire, a county which touched the boundaries of Stratford (ttt. ii. and v. i.). Justice Shallow, as we have seen, boldly caricatures Sir Thomas Lucy, a bugbear of Shake- speare's youth at Stratford, the owner of the neighbouring estate of Charlecote.i When, in the play, the justice's factotum, Davy, asked his master ' to countenance William. Visor of Woncot 2 against Clement Perkes of the HiU,' the allusions are unmistakable to persons and places within the dramatist's personal cognisance. The Gloucestershire village of Woodmancote, where the family of Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth century, is still pronounced Woncot. The adjoinmg Stinchcombe Hill (still famiharly known to natives as ' The Hill ') was in the sixteenth century the home of the family of Perkes. Very precise too are the allusions to the region of the Cotswold Hills, which were easily accessible from Stratford. ' Will Squele, a Cotswold man,' is noticed as one of Shallow's friends in youth (m. ii. 23) ; and when Shallow's servant Davy receives his master's instructions to sow ' the head- land ' ' with red wheat ' in the early autumn, there is an obvious reference to the custom almost pecuUar to the Cotswolds of sowing ' red lammas ' wheat at an unusually early season of the agricultural year.^ The kingly hero of the two plays of ' Henry IV ' had figured under his princely name of Henry BoHngbroke * See pp. 3-4-6 supra. - The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote : all the folios read Woncot. Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted reading of Wincot, which' has been unwisely adopted by .succeeding editors. ^ These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden in hia Diary of Master Silence, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Of. Blunt's Z)ur5?e ly and its Neighbourhood, Huntley's Glossary of thr Cotswold Dialect, and Marshall's Rural Economy of Cotttvold ( ^ 796) . DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 241 as a spirited young man in ' Richard II ' ; he was now represented as weighed down by care and age. With him are contrasted (in Part I.) his impetuous and Henly IV ambitious subject Hotspur and (in both Parts) and his j^jg gon and heir Prince Hal, whose boisterous 'Oils. 1 1 T and restless disposition drives him from Court to seek adventures among the haunters of taverns. Hot- spur is a vivid and fascinating portrait of a hot-headed soldier, courageous to the point of rashness, and sacrificing his life to his impetuous sense of honour. Prince Hal, despite his riotous vagaries, is endowed by the dramatist with far more self-control and common sense. On the first, as on every subsequent, production of ' Henry IV ' the main pubhc interest was concentrated neither on the King, nor on his son, nor on Hotspur, but on the chief of Prince Hal's riotous companions. In the old pla}^ of ' The Famous Victories ' the Prince at the head of a crew of needy ruffians robs the royal tax-collectors on Gadshill or drinks and riots in a tavern in Eastcheap, while a clown of the traditional stamp who is finally impressed for the war adds to the merriment by gulfing a number of simple tradesmen and artisans. Shakespeare was not bfind to the hints of the old drama, but he touched its comic scenes with a magic of his own and sujnmoned out of its dust and ashes the radiance of his inimitable Falstaff. At the outset the propriety of that gi'eat creation was questioned on a pohtical or historical ground of doubtful relevance. Shakespeare in both parts of ' Henry IV ' originally named the chief of the Prince's associates after a serious Lollard leader. Sir John Oldcastle, a very sub- ordinate and shadowy character in the old play. But influential objection was taken by Henry Brooke, eighth lord Cobham, who succeeded to the title on March 5, 1596-7, and claimed descent in the female line from the historical Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, who had sat in the House of Lords as Lord Cobham. The new Lord Cobham's father, W^iUiam Brooke, the seventh lord, had filled the 242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE office of Lord Chamberlain for some seveu months before his death (August 8, 1596-March 5, 1596-7) and had dis- played Puritanic prejudices in his attitude to the acting profession. The new Lord Cobham showed himself a loyal son in protesting against the misuse on the stage of his Lollard ancestor's appellation. Shakespeare met the objec- tion by giving Prince Hal's tunbellied follower the new and deathless name of Falstaff. When the First Part of Shake- speare's ' Henry IV ' was licensed for publica- Jrote?t^* tion on February 25, 1597-8,i the name of Falstaff was abeady substituted for that of Oldcastle in the title. Yet the text preserved a rehc of the earlier name in Prince Hal's apostrophe of Falstaff as ' my old lad of the Castle ' (i. ii. 40) . A less trustworthy edition of the Second Part of ' Henry IV ' also with Falstaff's name in the place of that of Oldcastle appeared in 1600. ^ Andrew Wise, the publisher in 1597 of Richard II and Richard III, obtained on February 25, 1597-S, a license for the publication of tiie historye of Henry iiij^^ with his battaile of Shrewsburye against Henry Hotspurre of the Norihe with the conceipted mirlhe of Sir John Falstaff (Arber, iii. 105). This quarto, which, although it bore no author's name, presented a satisfactory version of Shakespeare's text, was printed for Wise by Peter Short at the Star on Bread Street Hill. A second edition ' newly corrected by W. Shake-speare ' was printed for Wise by a different printer, Simon Stafford of Adling Hill, near Carter Lane, in 1599. Wise made over his interest in this First Part of Henry IV on June 25, 1603, to Matthew Lawe of St. Paul's Churchj-ard, who produced new editions in 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The First Folio text gives with some correction the Quarto of 1613. Meanwhile Wise had entered into partnership with another bookseller, William Aspley, of the Parrot in St. Paul's Churchyard in 1600, and Wise and Aspley jointly obtained on August 23, 1600, a license to publish both Much Ado about Nothing and the Second Parte of thi history of Kinjc Henry th:: iiij^^ with tlve humotirs of Sir John Fallstaff, wrytten by Master Shakespere (Arber, iii. 170-1). This is the earliest mention of Shake- speare's name in the Stationers' Register. In previous entries of his plays no author's name was given. The original edition of the Second Part of Henry IV was printed for Wise by Valentine Simmes (or Sims) in 1600 : it followed an abbreviated acting version ; most exemplars omit Act III Sc. i., which only appears in a few copies on two inserted leaves. A second edition was reached before the close of the year. There was no reissue of the Quarto. The First Folio of 1623 adopted a dijSerent and a rather fuller version of Shakespeare's text of 2 Henry IV . DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 243 There the epilogue ironically denied that FalstafE had any characteristic in common with the martyr Oldcastle : ' Oldcastle died a martyi-, and this is not the man.' Again, however, the text retained tell-tale marks ; the abbrevia- tion ' Old.' stood before one of Falstaflf's speeches (i. ii. 114), and Falstaff was credited like the genuine Oldcastle with serving in boyhood as ' page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk ' (in. ii. 24-5). Nor did the employment of the name ' Falstaff ' silence all caviUing. The new name hazily recalled Sir John Fastolf, an historical warrior of repute and wealth of the fifteentli centuiy who had already figured in the Fhst Part of ' Hemy VI,' and was owner at one time of the Boar's Head Tavern in South- wark.^ An Oxford scholar, Dr. Richard James, writing about 1625, protested that Shakespeare, after offend- ing Sir John Oldcastle's descendants by giving his ' bulfoon ' the name of that resolute martyr, ' was put to make an ignorant shift of abusing Sir John Fastolf, a man not inferior in vertue, though not so famous in piety as the other.' ^ George Daniel of Beswick, the Cavalier poet, similarly complained in 1647 of the ill use to which Shakespeare had put Falstolf's name in order to escape the imputation of vilifying the Lollard leader.^ Furthermore Fuller, in his ' Worthies,' first pubUshed in 1662, while expressing satisfaction that Shakespeare had ' put out ' of the play Sir John Oldcastle, was eloquent in his avoAval of regret that ' Sir John Fastolf ' was ' put in,' on the ground that it was making overbold with a great w amor's memory ^ According to traditional stage directions, first adopted by Theo- bald in 1733, the Prince and his companions in Henry IV frequent the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, a popular tavern where plays were occa- sionally performed. Eastcheap is several times mentioned in Shake- speare's text as the scene of FalstafE's revels, but the tavern is not described more specificaUy than as ' the old place ' (- Henri/ 1 \ , u. ii. 161). 2 James MS. 34, Bodleian Library, Oxford ; cf. HaUiwell, On the Character of Sir John FaUtaff, 1841, pp. 19, 20. ^ George Daniel's Poems, ed. Grosart, 1878, pp. 112-13. R 2 244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE to make him a 'Thrasonical puff and emblem of mock- valour.' The offending introduction and withdrawal of Old- castle's name left a curious mark on hterary history. Fal t 2 ^^ many as four humbler men of letters and (Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, Michael Drayton, and Richard Hathaway), seeking to profit by the attention dra^\Ti by Shakespeare to the historical Oldcastle, combined to produce a poor dramatic version of that worthy's genuine history. They pretended to vindicate the Lollard's memory from the slur that Shakespeare's identification of him with his fat knight had cast upon it.^ This unimpressive counterstroke was produced by the Lord Admiral's company in the autumn of 1599 and was received with favour. It was, like Shake- speare's ' Henry IV,' in two parts, and when the second part was revived in the autumn of 1602 Thomas Dekker, the well-known writer, whose versatile capacity gave him an uncertain Uveliliood and left him open to the temptation of a bribe, was employed to make additions to the original draft. Shakespeare was obviously innocent of any share in this many-handed piece of hack-work, two of whose contrivers, Drayton and Dekker, were capable of more dignified occupation. Nevertheless of two early editions of the first part of ' Su- John Oldcastle ' bearing the date 1600, one ' printed for T[homas] P[avier] ' was impudently described on the title-page as by Shakespeare, and the false description misled innocent editors of Shakespeare's collective works in the second half of the seventeenth century into including the feeble dramatic reply to Shake- speare's work among his own waitings.^ The second part of ' Sir John Oldcastle ' has vanislied. Non-dramatic ^ In the prologue to the play of Oldctstle (1600; appear the lines : It is no pampered glutton we pra-;ent, Kor aged councellor to youtliful sinue ; But one whose vertue shone above the rest, A valiant martyr and a vertuous Peere. * The early edition of The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, with Shakespeare's name on the title-page and bearing the date 1600, is believed to have been deliberately antedated by the publisher Pavier, DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 245 literature was also enlisted in the controversy over Shakespeare's alleged defamation of the historic Old- castle's character. John Weever, an antiquarian poet, pur- sued the dramatists' path of rehabilitation. In 1601 he issued a narrative poem entitled ' The Mirror of Martyrs or the Life and Death of that thrice vahant capitaine and most godly martyr Sir John Oldcastle Knight — Lord Cobham. Printed by V[alentine] S[immes] for WiUiam Wood.' Weever calls his ' mirror ' ' the true Oldcastle ' and cites incidentally phrases from the Second Part of ' Henry IV ' which by covert impHcation convict Shake- speare of fathering ' the false Oldcastle.' But none of the historical traditions which are con- nected with FalstafiF helped him to his fame. His perennial attraction is fruit of the personality owing personaiitv i^ot^^i^o to history with which Shakespeare's imaginative power clothed him. The knight's unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity and love of his o's^ti ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and joUity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way^of life supplies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from the highest manifestations of humour. His talk is always in prose of a rarely matched pith. The EHzabethan public, despite the protests of historical critics, recognised the triumphant success of the effort, and many of Falstaflf's telling phrases with the names of his foils, Justices Shallow and Silence, and to have been actually publLshed by him some years later — in 1619 — at the press of William Jaggard. It is not easy to reconcile with the facts of the situation the report of the gossiping letterwriter Roland Whyte (Sydney Papers, ii. 175) to the effect that the Lord Chamberlain's [i.e. Shakespeare's] company acted ' Sir John Oldcastle with good contentment ' on March 6, 1599-1600 at Lord Hunsdon's private house, after a dinner given in honour of a Flemish envoy to the English court It is highly improbable that the Lord Chamberlain's players would have performed the piece of Sir John Oldcastle, which] was written for the Lord Admiral's company, in opposition to Shakespeare's 1 Henry I V The reporter was doubtless referring hastily to Shakespeare's V Henry I V and gave it the name of Sir John Oldcastle which the character of FalstafE originally bore. 246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE at once took root in popular speech. Shakespeare's purely comic power culminated in Falstaff ; he may be claimed as the most humorous figure in literature. In all probability ' The Merry Wives of Windsor,' a domestic comedy inclining to farce, followed close upon ' Henry IV. ^ The piece is unquahfied by any Wives of pathetic interest. The low-pitched sentiment is Windsor. couched in a colloquial vein. The high ratio of prose to verse finds no parallel elsewhere in Shakespeare's work. Of the 3000 lines of the ' Merry Wives ' only one tenth is in metre. In the epilogue to the ' Second Part of Henry IV ' Shakespeare had written : ' If you be not too much cloyed _ , „ with fat meat, our humble author will continue Falstaff ■ 1 c- T 1 • -. and Queen the story With bir John m it . . . where for EUzabeth. anything I know Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a' be killed with your hard opinions.' Falstaff was not destined to the fate which the dramatist airily foreshadowed. External influence gave an un- expected turn to Sir John's career. Rowe asserts that Queen Elizabeth ' was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of " Henry IV " that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love.' John Dennis, the hterary critic of Queen Anne's era, in the dedication of a tasteless adaptation of the ' Merry Wives ' which he called ' The Comical Gallant' (1702), noted that the ' Merry Wives ' was A^Titten at Queen Ehzabeth's ' command and by her direction ; and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days, and was afterwards, as tradition tells us, very well pleased with the representation.' ^ In his ' Letters ' ^ Dennis reduces the 1 In the prologue to his adaptation Dennis repeated the story : But Shalrspeare's Play in fourteen day^ was writ, And in that space to make all just and fit. Was an attempt surpassing human Wit. Yet our great Shakespeare's matcUess Muse was such, Xone e'er in so small time perfonn'd so much. 2]27], p. 232. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 247 period of composition to ten days — ' a prodigious thing,' added Gildon,^ ' where all is so well contrived and carried on without the least confusion.' The locahsation of the scene at Windsor, and the compUmentary references to Windsor Castle, corroborate the tradition that the comedy was prepared to meet a royal command. The tradition is very plausible. But the royal suggestion failed to pre- serve the vital interest of the comedy from an ' alacrity in sinking.' Although Falstaff is the central figure, he is a mere caricature of his former self. His power of retort has decayed, and the laugh invariably turns against him. In name only is he identical with the potent humourist of ' Henry IV.' The matrimonial adventures out of which the plot of the ' Merry Wives ' is woven formed a frequent and a characteristic feature of Itahan fiction. The Italian noveHst delighted in presenting the amorous intrigues of matrons who by farcical tricks lulled their jealous husbands' suspicions, and they were at the same time expert devisers of innocent deceits which faithful wives might practise on foolish amorists. Much Italian fiction of the kind would seem to have been accessible to Shakespeare. A tale from Straparola's ' Notti ' (iv. 4), of which an adaptation figured in the miscellany of novels called Tarleton's ' Newes out of Purgatorie ' (1590), another ItaUan tale from the ' Pecorone ' of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (i. 2), and a third romance, the Fishwife's tale of Brainford in the collection of stories, drawn from Itahan sources, called ' Westward for Smelts,' ^ all supply incidents of matrimonial strategy against dissolute gallantry and marital jealousy which resemble episodes in Shakespeare's comedy. Yet in spite of the Italian affinities of the fable ^ Remarks, p. 291. 2 This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to have been published in 1603, although no edition earher than 1620 is now known. The 1620 edition of Westvxird for Smelts, written by Kinde Kit of Kingston, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. Shakespeare's Library, ed. Hazhtt, i. ii. 1-80. 248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and of Falstaff's rather cosmopolitan degeneracy, Shake- speare has nowhere so vividly reflected the bluff temper of average English men and women in contemporary middle-class society. The presentation of the buoyant domestic life of an Elizabethan country town bears, too, distinctive marks of Shakespeare's own experience. Again, there are literal references to the neighbourhood of Stratford. Justice Shallow reappears, and his coat-of- arms, which is described as consisting of ' luces,' openly identifies him with Shakespeare's early foe, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote.^ Wlien Shakespeare makes Master Slender repeat the report that Master Page's fallow grey- hound was 'outrun on Cotsall ' (i. i. 93), he testifies to his interest in the coursing matches for which the Cotswold district was famed at the period. A topical allusion of a different kind and one rare in Shakespearean drama is made in some detail at the end of the play. One of the characters, the Host of the Garter Inn at Windsor, recalls bitterly and with hteral frankness the losses which tavernkeepers of Reading, Maidenhead, and Colnbrook actually incurred some years before at the hands of a German tourist, one Frederick Duke of Wiirtemberg, who, while travel- ling incognito as Count Mompelgard, had been granted by Queen Elizabeth's government the right to requisi- tion posthorses free of charge. The ' Duke de Jamany ' made liberal use of his privilege, and the absence of official compensation is the grievance to which Shakespeare's candid ' Host ' gives loud voice. The imperfections of the surviving text of the ' Merry Wives' graphically illustrate the risks of injury to which the publishing methods of his day exposed • The Merry Shakespeare's work. A Hcense for the publi- ^^^^^■* cation of the play was granted by the Stationers' Company to the stationer John Busby of the Crane in St. Paul's Churchyard, on January 18, 1601-2.2 A very 1 See p. 35 supra. 2 Arber, iii. 199 ; Pollard, 45 seq. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 249 imperfect draft was printed in 1602 by Thomas Creede, the well-known printer of Thames Street, and was pub- hshed at the ' Fleur de Luce ' in St. Paul's Churchyard by Arthur Johnson, who took the venture over from Busby on the same day as the latter procured his license. The inflated title-page ran : ' A most pleasaunt and excellent conceited comedie, of Syr lohn Falstaflfe, and the merrie Wiues of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, lustice Shallow, and his wise Cousin M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll and Corporall Nym. By William Shakespeare. As it hath bene diuers times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamberlaines seruants. Both before her Maiestie, and elsewhere.' The incoherences of this edition show that it was prepared either from a transcript of ignorant shorthand notes taken in the theatre or, less probably, from a report of the play made in longhand from memory. In any case the version of the play at the printers' disposal was based on a drastic abbreviation of the author's di-aft. This crude edition was reissued without change in 1619, by Arthur Johnson, the former pubhsher. A far better and far fuller text happily figured in the First Folio of 1623. Several speeches of the First Quarto were omitted, but many passages of importance were printed for the first time. The First FoUo editors clearly had access to a version of the piece which widely differed from that of the original quarto. But the Folio manuscript also bears traces of mutilation for stage purposes, and though a joint recension of the Quarto and the Foho texts presents an intelhgible whole, we cannot confidently claim to know from the existing evidence the precise shape in which the play left Shakespeare's hand.i 1 The First Quarto was reprinted as ' The first sketch of The Merry Wives ' in 1842, ed. by J. O. Halliwell for the Shakespeare Society. A photolithographic facsimile appeared in 1881 with a valuable intro- duction by P. A. Daniel. A typed facsimile was very fully edited by Mr. W. W. Greg for the Clarendon Press in 1910. 250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The spirited character of Prince Hal (in ' Henry IV ') was pecuHarly congenial to its creator, and in the play of ' Henry V ' Shakespeare, during 1598, brought his career to its zenith. The piece was performed early in 1599, probably in the newly built Globe theatre — ' this wooden ' of the opening chorus. Again printers and publishers combined to issue to the reading public a reckless perversion of Shakespeare's manuscript. A piratical and incompetent shorthand reporter was responsible for the text of the first edition which appeared in quarto in The text. ^g^^ -g^^ ^j ^^^ pj^^ ^^g ignored. There were no choruses, and much of the prose, in which a great part of the play was written, was printed in separate hnes of unequal length as if it had been intended to be verse. A note in the register of the Stationers' Company dated August 4, 1600, runs : ' Henry the ffift, a booke, to be staled.' Yet in spite of the order of a stay of pubHcation, the book was published in the same year. The publishers were jointly Thomas IVIilUngton of Cornhill and John Busby of St. Paul's Chiu-chyard.^ The printer was Thomas Creede of Thames Street, who had just proved his recklessness in his treatment of the First Quarto of the ' Merry Wives.' There were two reprints of this disreputable volume — ostensibly dated in 1602 and 1608 — before an adequate 1 Miliington had published the first edition of 'Titus' (1594) with Edward White, and was responsible for two editions of both The Con- tention (1594 and 1600) and True Tragedie (1595 and 1600)— the first drafts respectively of Shakespeare's second and third parts of Henry VI. Busby, MiUington's partner in Henry V, acquired on January 18, 1601-2, a Ueense for the Merry Wives only to part with it immediately to Arthur Johnson. In hke fashion Busby and SlilUngton made over their interest in Henry V before August 14, 1600. to Thomas Pavier of Cornhill, an irresponsible pirate, who undertook the disreputable reissue of 1602 (Arber, iii. 169). It was Pavier who published the plays of Sir John Oldcastle (doubtfully dated 1600) and the Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) under the fraudulent pretence that Shakespeare was their author. A third uncorrectedreprintof Hen?-?/ V — ' Printed for T. P. 1608' — seems to be deliberately misdated and to have been first issued by Pavier in 1619 at the press of William Jaggard. (See Pollard, Shakespeare Folios OTid Quartos. 1909, pp. 81 seq.) DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 251 presentation of the piece appeared for the first time in the First Foho of 1623. There the 1623 hnes of the piratical quarto gave way to an improved text of more than twice the length. The dramatic interest of ' Henry V ' is slender. In construction the play resembles a military pageant. The events, which mainly concern Henry V's wars ^fTh^'^^Y in France, bring the reign as far as the treaty of peace and the King's engagement to the French princess. The climax is reached earlier, in the brilhant victory of the English at Agincourt, which powerfully appealed to patriotic sentiment. Holinshed's ' Chronicle ' and the crude drama of ' The Famous Victories of Henry the Fift' are both laid under generous contri- bution. 'The argument indeed enjoyed already an excep- tionally wide popularity. Another piece (' Harry the V ') which the Admiral's company produced under Henslowe's managership for the first time on November 28, 1595, was repeated thirteen times AAdthin the folloAving eight months. That piece, which has disappeared, may have stimulated Shakespeare's interest in the theme if it did not offer him supplementary hints for its development.^ In ' Hemy V ' Shakespeare incidentally manipulated on somewhat original Hnes a dramatic device of classical descent. At the opening of each act he intro- choruses duces a character in the part of prologue or ' chorus ' or interpreter of the coming scene. ' Henry V ' is the only plaj' of Shakespeare in which every fresh act is heralded thus. Elsewhere two of the five acts, as in ' Romeo and Juliet,' or only one of tlie acts, as in the Second Part of ' Henry IV,' is similarly introduced. Nowhere, too, is such real service rendered to the pro- gress of the story by the ' chorus ' as in ' Hemy V,' nor are the speeches so long or so memorable. The choric prologues of ' Henry V ' are characterised by exceptional solemnity and sublimity of phrase, by a lyric fervour and ^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 177. 252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE philosophical temper which set them among the greatest of Shakespeare's monologues. Through the first, and the last, runs an almost passionate appeal to the spectators to bring their highest powers of imagination to the realisation of the dramatist's theme. As in the ' Famous Victories ' and in the two parts of ' Henry IV,' there is abundance of comic element in ' Henry V,' but death has removed Falstafif, The soldiers -^yi^ose last moments are described Anth the in the cast. simple pathos that comes of a matchless art, and, though Falstaff's companions survive, they are thin shadows of his substantial figure. New comic characters are introduced in the persons of three soldiers respectively of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationahty, whose racial traits are contrasted with effect. The irascible Irishman, Captain MacMorris, is the only representa,tive of his nation who figures in the long hst of Shakespeare's dramatis personos. The Scot James is stohd and undemon- strative. The scene in which the pedantic but patriotic Welsh captain, Fluellen, avenges the sneers of the braggart Pistol at his nation's emblem, by forcing him to eat the leek, overflows in vivacious humour. There are also ori- ginal and lifelike sketches of two EngHsh private soldiers, Wilhams and Bates. On the roj'al hero's manhness, whether as soldier, ruler, or lover, Shakespeare loses no opportunity of laying emphasis. In no other play has he cast a man so entirely in the heroic mould. Alone in Shakespeare's gallery of English monarchs does Henry's portrait evoke at once a joyous sense of satisfaction in the high potenti- aUties of human character and a feeling of pride among Englishmen that one of his mettle is of Enghsh race. ' Henry V ' may be regarded as Shakespeare's final experi- ment in the dramatisation of Enghsh history, and it artistically and patriotically rounds off the series of his ' histories ' which form collectively a kind of national epic. For ' Henry VIII,' which was x^roduced very late in his career, Shakespeare was only in part responsible, and that ' history ' consequently belongs to a different category. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 253 A glimpse of autobiography may be discerned in the direct mention by Shakespeare in ' Henry V ' of an exciting episode in current history. At the time of and The^^^ ^^^^ Composition of ' Henry V ' pubhc attention Earl of -^^ras riveted on the exploits of the impetuous Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, whose virtues and defects had the faculty of evoking immense popularity. Earty in 1599, he had tempted fate by accept- ing the appointment of lord deputy of Ireland where the native Irish were rebelling against English rule. He left London for Dublin on March 27, 1599, and he rode forth from the English capital amid the deafening plaudits of the populace.^ Very confident was the general hope that he would gloriously pacify the distracted province. The Earl's close friend Southampton, Shakespeare's patron, bore him company, and the dramatist shared in the general expectation of an early and triumphant home- coming. Li the prologue or ' chorus ' to the last act of ' Henry V ' Shakespeare foretold for the Earl of Essex an the rebeiiioa enthusiastic reception by the people of London of i6oi. when he should return after ' broaching ' rebelhon in Iieland. Were now the general of our gracious empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming. Bringing rebeUion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him ! (Act V. Chorus, U. 30-4.) But Shakespeare's prognostication was woefully belied, ^ Cf. Stow's Annals, ed. Howes, 1631, p. 788 : ' The twentie seuen of March, 1599, about two a clocke in the aftemoone, Robert Earle of Essex, Vicegerent of Ireland, &c., tooke horse in Seeding Lane, and from thence beeing accompanied with diuers Noblemen, and many others, himselfe very plainely attired, roade through Grace-streete, Cornehill, Cheapeside, and other high streetes, in aU which places, and in the fieldes, the people pressed exceedingly to behold him, especially in the highwayes for more then four myles space, crying and saying, God blesse your Lordship, God preserue your honour, &c., and some followed him untill the evening, onely to behold him.' 254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Essex's Irish policy failed. He proved unequal to the task which was set him. Instead of a glorious fulfilment of his Irish charge, soon after ' Henry V ' was produced he crept back hurriedly to London, with his work undone, and under orders to stand his trial for disobedience to royal directions and for neglect of duty. Dismissed after tedious litigation from all offices of state (on August 26, 1600), Essex saw his hopes fataUy bhghted. With a view- to recovering his position, he thereupon formed the desperate resolve of forcibly removing from the Queen's councils those to whom he attributed his ruin. South- ampton and other young men of social position joined in the reckless plot. They vainly counted on the good- will of the citizens of London. Wlieu the year 1601 opened, the conspirators were completing their plans, and Shakespeare's sympathetic reference to Essex's popularity with Londoners bore fruit of some peril to his theatrical colleagues, if not to himself. On the eve of the projected rising, a few of the rebel leaders, doubtless at Southampton's suggestion, sought „, „, , the dramatist's countenance. They paid 405. The Globe *' ^ and Essex's to Augustine PhiUips, a leadmg member of re e ion. Shakespeare's company and a close friend of the di'amatist, to induce him to revive at the Globe theatre ' the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second ' (beyond doubt Shakespeare's play), in the hope that its scenes of the deposition and murder of a king might encourage a i3opular outbreak. Phillips prudently told the conspirators who bespoke the piece that ' that play of KjTig Richard ' was ' so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company at it.' None the less the performance took place on Saturday, February 7, 1600-1, the day preceding the one fixed by Essex for his rising in the streets of London. The Queen, in a later conversation (on August 4, 1601) with Wilham Lambarde, a well-known antiquary, complained rather wildly that ' this tragedie ' of ' Richard II,' which she had always viewed ^vith suspicion, was played at the DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 255 period with seditious intent ' forty times in open streets and houses.' ^ At any rate the players' appeal failed to provoke the response which the consph-ators anticipated. On Sunday, February 8, Essex, with Southampton and others, fully armed, vainly appealed to the people of London to march on the Court. They addressed them- selves to deaf ears, and being arrested by the Queen's troops were charged with high treason. At the joint trial of Essex and Southampton, the actor Phillips gave evidence of the circumstances in which the tragedy of ' Richard II ' was revived at the Globe theatre. Both Essex and Southampton were found guilty and sentenced to death. Essex was duly executed on Feb- ruary 25 within the precincts of the Tower of London ; but Southampton was reprieved on the ground that his offence was due to his ' love ' of Essex. He was imprisoned in the Tower until the Queen's death, more than two years later. No proceedings were taken against the players for their impHed support of the traitors,- but Shakespeare wisely abstained, for the time, from any pubhc reference to the fate either of Essex or of his patron Southampton. Such incidents served to accentuate rather than injure Shakespeare's growing reputation. For several years his genius as dramatist and poet had been acknow- s^^ie's ledged by critics and plaj^goers ahke, and his popularity social and professional position had become con- influence, siderable. Inside the theatre his influence was supreme. When, in 1598, the manager of the company rejected Ben Jonson's first comedy — his ' Every Man in his Humour ' — Shakespeare intervened, according to a credible tradition (reported by Rowe but denounced by Gifford), and procured a reversal of the decision in the interest of the unknown dramatist, who was his junior by ^ Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth, iii. 552. - Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85 ; and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1598-1601, pp. 575-8. 256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE nine years, Shakespeare took a part in the performance. On September 22, 1598, after the production of the comedy, Jonson unluckily killed a fellow- actor, Gabriel Spenser, in a duel in Moorfields, and being convicted of murder escaped punishment by benefit of clergy. According to a story pubhshed at the time, he owed his release from ' purgatory ' to a player, ' a charitable copper laced Christian,' and his benefactor has been identified with Shakespeare.^ Whatever may have been Shakespeare's specific acts of benevolence, Jonson was of a difficult and jealous temper, and subsequently he gave vent to an occasional expression of scorn at Shakespeare's expense. But, despite passing manifes- tations of his unconquerable surUness, the proofs are com- plete that Jonson cherished genuine esteem and affection for Shakespeare till death. ^ Within a very few years of Shakespeare's death Sir Nicholas L'Estrange, an indus- trious collector of anecdotes, put into writing a stoiy for which he made John Donne, the poetic Bean of St. Paul's, responsible, attesting the amicable social relations that commonly subsisted between Shakespeare and Jonson. ' Shakespeare,' ran the tale, ' was godfather to one of Ben Jonson's children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up and asked him why he was so melancholy. " No, faith, Ben," says he, " not I, but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my god- child, and I have resolv'd at last." " I pr'ythee, what ? " sayes he. " I' faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen good ' ^ Se« Dekker's Satiromastix, wliich was produced by Shakespeare's company in the autumn of 1601, where Horace, a caricature portrait of Ben Jonson, is thus addressed : ' Thou art the true arraign'd Poet, and shoudst have been hang'd, but for one of these part-takers, these charitable Copper-lac'd Christians that fetcht thee out of Purgatory, Players I meane, Theaterians, pouchmouth stage- walkers ' (act iv. sc. iii. 252 seq.) ^ Cf. Gilchrist, Examination of the charges . . . of Jonson's Enmity towards Shakespeare, 1808. See Ben Jonson's elegy in the First FoUo and his other references to Shakespeare's writings at p. -589 ivfra. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 257 Lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them." ' ^ The friendly irony is in the gentle vein with which Shakespeare was traditionally credited. Very mildly is Ben Jonson rebuked for his vainglorious assertion of classical learning, the comparative lack of which in Shakespeare was a frequent theme of Jonson's taunts. The creator of Falstaff could have been no stranger to tavern hfe, and he doubtless took part with zest in the ™, con viviaU ties of men of letters. Supper parties Mermaid at City inns were a welcome experience of all mee ings. pQets and dramatists of the time. The bright wit flashed freely amid the substantial fare of meat, game, pastry, cheese and fruit, with condiments of ohves, capers and lemons, and flowing cups of ' rich Canary wine.' ^ The veteran ' Mermaid ' in Bread Street, Cheapside, and the 'Devil' at Temple Bar, were celebrated early in the seventeenth century for their literary associations,' while other taverns about the City, named respectively the ' Sun,' the ' Dog,' and the ' Triple Tun,' long boasted of their lettered patrons. The most famous of the literary hostelries in Shakespeare's era was the ' Mermaid,' where Sir Walter Raleigh was held to have inaugurated the poetic feasts. Through Shakespeare's middle years Ben Jonson exercised supreme control over the convivial Ufe of hterary London, and a reasonable tradition reports that Shakespeare was a frequent visitor to the ' Mermaid ' tavern at the period when Ben Jonson presided over its parHament of wit. Of the intellectual brilliance of those ' merry meetings ' the dramatist Francis Beaumont ^ ' Latten ' is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in Merry Wives of Windsor (i. i. 165) likens Slender to a 'latten bilbo,' that is, a sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. Anecdotes and Traditions, edited from L'Estrange's MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society (1839), P- 2. ^ Cf. Ben Jonson's Epigrams, No. ci. ' Inviting a Friend to Supper.' * Cf. Herrick's Poems (Muses' Library, ii. 110) where in his 'ode for ' Ben Jonson, Herrick mentions : those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tim. 258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE wrote glowingly in his poetical letter to the presiding genius : What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ? heard words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull Ufe.i ' Manj' were the wit-combats,' wrote Fuller of Shake- speare in his ' Worthies ' (1662), ' betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold hke a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war ; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespear, with the EngUsh man of war, lesser in bulk, but Ughter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.' Of the many testimonies paid to Shakespeare's reputa- tion as both poet and dramatist at this period of his career, Meres's ^^® most striking was that of Francis Meres, eulogy. Meres was a learned graduate of Cambridge ' University, a divine and schoolmaster, who in 1598 brought out a collection of apophthegms on morals, reUgion, and literature which he entitled ' Palladis Tamia ' or ' Wits Treasury.' In the volume he interpolated ' A comparative discourse of our English poets with the Greek, Latin, and ItaUan poets,' and there exhaustively surveyed contemporary Uterary effort in England. Shakespeare figured in Meres's pages as the greatest man of letters of the day. ' The Muses would speak Shakespeare's fine- filed phrase,' Meres asserted, ' if they could speak EngUsh.' ' Ajnong the English,' he declared, ' he is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage ' {i.e. tragedy and comedy), rivalling the fame of Seneca in the one kind, and of Plautus in the other. There follow the titles of six comedies : ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' ' Errors,' ' Love's ^ Francis Beaumont's Poems in Old Dramatists (Beaumont and Fletcher), ii. 708. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 259 Labour's Lost,' ' Love's Labour's Won ' {i.e. ' All's Well '), ■ Midsummer Night's Dream,' and ' Merchant of Venice,' and of six tragedies : ' Richard II,' ' Richard III,' ' Henry IV,' ' King John,' ' Titus,' and ' Romeo and Juliet.' Mention was also made of Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis,' his ' Lucrece,' and his ' sugred ^ sonnets among his private friends.' Shakespeare's poems ' Venus and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece ' received in contemporary Uterature of the closing years of Queen Elizabeth's reign more frequent commen- The growing dation than his plays. Yet ' Romeo and Juliet,' worship i ./ ! of Shake- ' Love's Labour's Lost,' and ' Richard III ' dramatfs^ were all greeted with approving notice at critical hands ; and familiar references to Justice Silence, Justice Shallow, and Sir John Falstaff, with echoes of Shakespearean phraseology, either in printed plays or in contemporary private correspondence, attest the spreading range of Shakespeare's conquests. ^ At the turn of the century the ' Pilgrimage to Parnassus ' and the two parts of the ' Returne from Parnassus,' a tri- logy of plays by wits of Cambridge University, introduce a student who constantly quotes 'pure Shakespeare and ^ This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of Shakespeare as Adonis, Venus, Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with ' sugred tongues ' in his Epigrams of 1599. In the Return from Parnassus (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare.' Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of 'sweetest Shakespeare ' in U Allegro. ^ See Centurie of Praise, under the years 1600 and 1601. In Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) one character is described as ' a kinsman of Justice Silence,' and of another it is foretold that he might become ' as fat as Sir John Falstaff.' A country gentleman, Sir Charles Percy, writing to a friend in London from his country seat in Gloucestershire, said : ' If I stay heere long in this fashion, at my return I think you will find mee so dull that I shall bee taken for Justice Silence or Justice Shallow . . . Perhaps thee will not exempt mee from the opinion of a Justice Shallow at London, yet I will assure you, thee will make mee passe for a very sufficient gentleman in Gloucestershire ' (MS. letter in Public Record Office, Domestic State Papers, vol. 275, No. 146). 260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatres.' The admirer asserts that he will hang a picture of ' sweet Mr. Shakespeare ' in his study, and denounces as ' duncified ' the world which sets Spenser and Chaucer above his idol. Shakespeare's assured reputation is convincingly cor- roborated by the value which unprincipled publishers attached to his name and by the zeal with uaprincipied which they sought to palm off on their customers "?^°^ the productions of inferior pens as his work, speare's The practice began in 1594 and continued not name. ^^^y through the rest of Shakespeare's career bat for some half-century after his death. The crude deception was not wholly unsuccessful. Six valueless pieces which pubUshers put to his credit in his lifetime found for a time unimpeded admission to his collected works. As early as July 20, 1594, Thomas Creede, the printer of the surreptitious editions of ' Henry V ' and the ' Merry Wives ' as well as of the more or less authentic TsCTTptions versions of ' Richard III ' (1598) and ' Romeo in his and Juliet ' (1599), obtained a hcense for the issue of the crude ' Tragedie of Locrine ' which he pubMshed during 1595 as ' newly set foorth overseene and corrected. By W. S.' ' Locrine,' which lamely dramatises a Brito-Trojan legend from Geoffrey of Mon- mouth's history, appropriated many passages from an older piece called ' SeUmus,' which was also printed and pubHshed by Thomas Creede in 1594. ' SeUmus ' was no doubt from the pen of Robert Greene, and came into being long before Shakespeare was out of his apprenticeship. Scenes of dumb show which preface each act of ' Locrine ' indicate the obsolete mould in which the piece was cast. The same initials — ' W. S.' ^ — figured on the title-page of ^ A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing for the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603, thirteen plays, none of which are extant. The Hector of Germanie, an extant play ' made by W. Smith ' and published ' with new additions ' in 1615, was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic DEVELOPMENT OF DKAMATIC POWER 261 ' The True Chronicle Historie of Thomas, Lord Cromwell . . . Written by W. S.,' which was licensed on August 11, 1602, was printed for William Jones in that year, and was reprinted verbatim by Thomas Snodham in 1613. The piece is described as having been acted by Shakespeare's company, both when under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain and under that of King James. ' Lord Cromwell ' is a helpless collection of disjointed scenes from the biography of King Henry VIII's minister ; it is quite destitute of literary quaUty. On the title-page of a comedy entitled ' The Puritaine, or the Widdow of WatUng Streete,' which George Eld printed in 1607, ' W. S.' was for a third time stated to be the author. ' The Puritaine . . . Written by W. S.' is a brisk farce portraying the coarseness of bourgeois London Ufe in a manner which Ben Jonson essayed later in his ' Bartholomew Fair.' According to the title-page, the piece was ' acted by the children of Paules ' who never interpreted any of Shakespeare's works. Through the same period Shakespeare's full name appeared on the title-pages of three other pieces which are equally destitute of any touch of his hand, viz. : 'The First Part of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle ' in 1600 (printed for T[homas] P[avier]), ' The London Prodigall ' in 1605 (printed by T[homas] C[reede] for Nathaniel Butter), and 'A Yorkshire Tragedy' in 1608 (by R. B. for Thomas Pavier). 'The First Part of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle ' was the piece designed by other pens in 1599 to reUeve the hero's character of the imputations which Shakespeare was supposed to cast upon it in his first sketch of FalstafE's portrait.^ ' The London Prodigall,' which was acted by Shakespeare's company, work by him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials ' W. S.' was not due to the publishers' belief that Wentworth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief that the plays were by Shake- speare. ^ See p. 244 n. 2 supra. 262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE humorously delineates middle-class society after the mamier of ' The Puritaine.' ' A Yorkshire Tragedy,' which was , . acted by his Majesty's players at the Globe, was Yorkshire assigned to Shakespeare not only on the title- rage y. page of the published book but on the license granted to Thomas Pavier, the pirate publisher, by the Stationers' Company (May 2, 1608).^ The title-page describes the piece, which was unusually short, as ' not so new as lamentable and true ' ; it dramatises current reports of the sensational murder in 1605 by a Yorkshire squire of his children and of the attempted murder of his wife. 2 None of the six plays just enumerated, which passed in Shakespeare's lifetime under either his name or his initials, has any reasonable pretension to Shakespeare's authorship ; nevertheless all were uncritically included in the Third Folio of his collected works (1664), and they reappeared in the Fourth FoUo of 1685. Save in the case of ' A Yorkshire Tragedy,' criticism is unanimous in decreeing their exclusion from the Shakespearean canon. Nor does serious value attach to the grounds which led Schlegel and a few critics of repute to detect signs of Shakespeare's hand in ' A Yorkshire Tragedy.' However superior that drama is to its companions in passionate and lurid force, it is no more than ' a coarse, crude, and vigorous impromptu ' which is as clearly as the rest by a far less experienced pen than Shakespeare's. The fraudulent practice of crediting Shakespeare with valueless plays from the pens of comparatively dull-witted contemporaries extended far beyond the six as^rfptions pieces which he saw circulating under his name, after his ^nd which the later FoUos accepted as his. The worthless old play on the subject of King John was attributed to Shakespeare in the reissues of ^ Arber's Stationers^ Reg. iii. 377. ' The piece was designed as one of a set of four plays, and it has the alternative title : ' All's one or One of the four plaies in one.' A second edition of 1619 repeats the attribution to Shakespeare. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 263 1611 and 1622, and enterprising traders continued to add to the illegitimate record through the next generation. Humphrey Moseley, a London pubhsher of hterary pro- clivities, who, between 1630 and his death early in 1661, issued much poetic literature, including the first collection of Milton's Minor Poems in 1645, claimed for Shakespeare the authorship in whole or in part of as many as seven addi- tional plays. On September 9, 1653, he obtained from the Stationers' Company license to pubhsh no less than forty-one ' severall Playes.' The list includes ' The Merry Devill of Edmonton ' which the publisher assigned wholly to Shakespeare ; ' The History of Carden[n]io,' which was said to be a joint work of Shakespeare and Fletcher ; and two pieces called ' Henry I ' and ' Henry II,' respon- sibiUty for which was divided between Shakespeare and a minor dramatist called Robert Davenport. On June 29, 1660, Moseley repeated his bold exploit,^ and obtained a second license to pubhsh twenty-eight further plays, three of which he again put without any warrant to Shakespeare's credit. The titles of this trio ran : ' The History of King Stephen,' ' Duke Humphrey, a tragedy,' and ' Iphis and lantha, or a marriage without a man, a comedy.' Of the seven reputed Shakespearean dramas which appear on Moseley's Hsts, only one, ' The Merry Devill of Edmonton,' is extant. Pieces called the ' History of Cardenio ' ^ and ' Henry the First ' were acted by Shakespeare's company. Manuscripts of three other of Moseley's alleged Shake- spearean plays (' Henry the First,' ' Duke Humphrey,' and ' The History of King Stephen ') would seem to have belonged in the early part of the eighteenth century to the antiquary and herald John Warburton, whose cook, traditionally christened Betsy Baker, through his ' care- lessness ' and her ' ignorance ' committed them and many other papers of a similar kind to the kitchen ^ Moseley's lists are carefully printed from the Stationers' Company's Registers in Mr. W. W. Greg's article ' The Bakings of Betsy ' in The Library, July 1911, pp. 237 seq. * See p. 438 infra. 264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE flames. 1 ' The Merry Devill of Edmonton,' the sole survival of Moseley's alleged Shakespearean discoveries, was produced on the stage before the close Devill of of the sixteenth century ; it was entered on Edmonton.' ^j^^ . Stationers' Register ' on October 22, 1607, was first published anonymously in 1608, ' as it hath beene sundry times Acted, by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the bankside,' and was revived before the Court at WTiitehall in May 1613. There was a sixth quarto edition in 1655. None of the early impressions bore an author's name. Francis Kirkman, another prominent London bookseller of Moseley's temper, assigned it to Shakespeare in his catalogue of 1661 ; a copy of it was bound up in Charles II 's library with two other Elizabethan plays — ' Faire Em ' and ' Mucedorus ' — and the volume was labeUed by the binders 'Shakespeare, volume L' ^ 'The Merry Devill ' is a delightful comedy, abounding in both humour and romantic sentiment ; at times it recalls scenes of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor.' Superior as it is at aU points to any other of Shakespeare's falsely reputed plays, it gives no sign of Shakespeare's workmanship.^ ^ Warburton's list of some fiity-six plays, aU but three or four of which he charges his servant with destrojong, is in the British Museum, Lansdowne MS. vol. 807, a volume which also contains the MS. of three pieces and the fragment of a fourth, the sole relics of the servant's holocaust. The list is printed in Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 468-470, and more carefully by Mr. Greg in The Library, July 1911, pp. 230-2. Among the pieces named are Henry I by Will. Shakespear and Robert Davenport ; Duke Humphrey, by Will. Shakespear ; and A Play by Will. Shakespeare vaguely identified with ' The History of King Stephen.' Sir Henry Herbert licensed The History of Henry the First to the King's company on April 10, 1624, attributing it to Davenport alone (Malone, iii. 229). Nothing else is known of Warburton's two other alleged Shakespearean pieces. * This volume, which was at one time in the library of the actor Garrick, passed to the British Museum. Its contents are now bound up separately, the old label being long since discarded. (Cf. Malone's Variorum, 1821, ii. 682 ; Simpson's School of Shakspere, ii. 337.) ^ The authorship cannot be positively determined. Coxeter, an eighteenth-century antiquary, assigned it to Michael Drayton. Charles Lamb and others, more probably, put it to Thomas Heywood's credit. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 265 The bookseller, Francis Kirkman, showed greater rash- ness in issuing in 1662 a hitherto unprinted piece called ' The Birth of Merlin,' an extravagant romance which he described on the title-page as ' written by William Shake- speare and Wilham Rowley.' A few snatches of poetry fail to Uft this piece above the crude level of Rowley's unaided work. It cannot be safely dated earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death. ^ Bold speculators have occasionally sought to justify the rashness of Charles II's bookbinder in labelling as Shake- speare's work the two pieces ' Mucedorus ' and ' Faire Em ' along with the 'Merry DeviU.' The bookseller Kirkman accepted the attribution in his ' Catalogue of Plays ' of 1671, and his fallacious guidance was followed by Wilham Winstanley (1687) and Gerard Langbaine (1691) in their notices of Shakespeare in their respective ' Lives of English Poets.' 2 'Mucedorus' is an elementary effort in romantic comedy somewhat in Greene's vein. It is interspersed with clownish 'M d • horseplay and dates from the early years of Elizabeth's reign ; it was first pubhshed in 1598 after having been ' sundrie times plaid in the hono- rable Cittie of London.' Its prolonged popularity is attested by the unparalleled number of sixteen quarto editions through which it passed in the seventeenth century. According to the title-page of the third quarto of 1610, the piece was acted at Court on Shrove Sunday night by Shakespeare's company, ' His highnes servants 1 A useful edition of fourteen ' doubtful ' plays, competently edited by Mr. C. F. Tucker Brooke under the general title of The Shakespeare Apocrypha, was published by the Clarendon Press in 1908. Mr. A. F. Hopkinson edited in three volumes (1891^) twelve doubtful plays and published a useful series of Essays on Shakespeare's doubtful plays (1900). Five of the apocryphal pieces, Faire Em, Merry DeviU, Edivard III, Merlin, Arden of Feversham, were edited by Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt (Halle, 1883-8). ' Kirkman also put to Shakespeare's credit, in his Catalogue of 1671, Peele's Arraignment of Pari*, another foolish blunder which Winstanley and Langbaine adopt. 266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE usually playing at the Globe,' and the text was then ' ampHfied with new additions.' These ' additions ' exhibit a dramatic ability above that of the dull level of the rest, and were presumably made after the comedy had come under the control of Shakespeare's associates. The new passages have deluded one modern critic into a justification of the seventeenth-century association of Shakespeare's name with the piece. Mr. Payne Collier, who included ' Mucedorus ' in his privately printed edition of Shakespeare in 1878, was confident that one of the scenes (iv. i.) interpolated in the 1610 version — that in which the King of Valentia laments the supposed loss of his son — displayed genius which Shakespeare alone could compass. HoAvever readily critics may admit the superiority in Uterary value of the additional scene to anything else in the piece, none can seriously accept Mr. Collier's extravagant estimate. The scene was probably from the pen of an admiring but faltering imitator of Shakespeare.^ ' Faire Em,' although it was first printed at an un- certain date early in the seventeenth century and again in 1631, was, according to the title-page of Em/^^ both editions, acted by Shakespeare's company while Lord Strange was its patron (1589-93). Two lines from the piece (v. 121 and 157) are, how- ever, quoted and turned to ridicule by Shakespeare's foe, Robert Greene, in his ' Farewell to Folly,' a mawkish penitential tract, with an appendix of short stories, which was hcensed for pubhcation in 1587, although no edition is known of earHer date than 1591. ' Faire Em ' must therefore have been in circulation before Shakespeare's career as dramatist opened. It is a very rudimentary endeavour in romantic comedy, in which two compUcated tales of amorous adventure run independent courses ; the one tale has for its hero William the Conqueror, 1 Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1908, pp. vii, xxiii seq., 103 seq. ; Dodsley's Old Plays, od. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, rii. 236-8. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 267 and the other has for heroine the fictitious Faire Em, daughter of one Sir Thomas Goddard who disguises him- self for purposes of intrigue as a miller of Manchester. The piece has not even the pretension of ' Mucedorus ' to one short scene of conspicuous literary merit.^ Poems no less than plays, in which Shakespeare had no hand, were deceptively placed to his credit as soon ,„, as his fame was established. In 1599 WilUam The Passionate Jaggard, a none too scrupulous publisher, I grim. issued a small poetic anthology which he entitled ' The Passionate Pilgrim, by W. Shakespeare.' The volume, of which only two copies are known to be extant, consists of twenty lyrical pieces, the last six of which are introduced by the separate title-page : ' Sonnets to sundry notes of Musicke.' ^ Only five of the twenty poems can be placed to Shakespeare's credit. Jaggard's volume opened with two sonnets by Shakespeare which were not previously in print (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv. in the Sonnets of 1609), and there were scattered through the remaining pages three poems drawn from the already published play of ' Love's Labour's Lost.' The rest of the fifteen pieces were by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, and even less prominent versifiers, not all of whom can be identified.' 1 Richard Simjison, in his School of Shakspere (1878, iii. 339 seq.), fantastically argues that the piece is by Shakespeare, and that it present? the leading authors and actors under false names, the main object being to satirise Robert Greene. Fleay thinks Robert Wilson, who was both actor and dramatist, was the author. ^ The word ' sonnet ' is here used in the sense of ' song.' No ' quator- zain ' is included in the last part of the Passionate Pilgrim. No notes of music were supplied to the volume ; but in the case of the poems ' Live with me and be my love ' and ' My flocks feed not ' con- temporary airs are found elsewhere. ^ The five pieces by Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two — 'If music and sweet poetry agree' (No. viii.) and 'As it fell upon a day ' (No. xx.) — were borrowed from Barnfield's Poems in ditiers humors (1598). Four sonnets on the theme of Venus and Adonis (Nos. iv. vi. ix. and xi.) are probably by Bartholomew Griffin, from whose Fidessa (1596) No. xi. is directly adapted. ' My flocks feed not ' (No. xvii.) comes from Thomas Weelkes's Madrigals (1597), but Barnfield is again pretty certainly the author. 268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE According to custom, many of the pieces were circulating in dispersed manuscripts. The pubhsher had evil precedent for bringing together in a single volume detached poems by various pens and for attributing them all on the title-page to a single author who was responsible for a very small number of them.^ Jaggard issued a second edition of ' The Passionate Pilgrim ' in 1606, but no copy survives. A third edition appeared in 1612 with an expanded title-page : The third ' rjij^g Passionate Pilgrime, or Certaine Amorous edition. " Sonnets betweene Venus and Adonis, newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespere. The third edition. Whereunto is newly added two Loue-Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellens answere back againe to Paris. Printed by W. Jaggard. 1612.' The old text reappeared without change ; the words ' certain amorous sonnets between Venus and Adonis ' appropriately describe four non-Shakespearean poems in the original edition, and the fresh emphasis laid on them in the new title-page had the intention of suggesting a connection with Shakespeare's first narrative poem. But the unabashed * Live with me and be my love ' (No. xix.) is by Marlowe, and four lines are quoted by Sir Hugh Evans in Shakespeare's Merry Wives (m. i. 17 seq.). The appended stanza to Marlowe's lyric entitled ' Love's Answer ' is by Sir Walter Ralegh. ' Crabbed age and youth cannot live together' (No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by Elizabethan dramatists. ' It was a Lording's daughter ' (No. xv.) is a baUad possibly by Thomas Deloney. Nos. vii. jc. riii. xiv. and xviii. are commonplace love poems in six-line stanzas of no individuality, the authorship of which is unknown. See for full discussion of the various questions arising out of Jaggard's volume the introduction to the facsimile of the 1699 edition (Oxford, 1905, 4to). 1 See Bryton's Bowre of Delights, 1591, and Arbor of Amorous Deuices . . ., by N. B. Gent, 1594 — two volumes of miscellaneous poems, all of which the publisher Richard Jones assigned to the poet Nicholas Breton, though the majority of them were by other writers. Breton plaintively protested that the earlier volume ' weis done altogether without my consent or knowledge, and many things of other men mingled with a few of mine ; for except Amoris Lachrimce, an epitaph upon Sir Philip Sidney, and one or two other toys, which I know not how he {i.e. the publisher) unhappily came by, I have no part of any of them.' (Prefatory note to Breton's Pilgrimage to Paradisi., 1592.) DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 269 Jaggard added to the third edition of his pretended Shake- spearean anthology two new non-Shakespearean poems which he silently filched from Thomas Heywood's ' Troia Britannica.' That work was a collection of poetry which Jaggard had published for HeyM'ood in 1609. Hey wood called attention to his personal grievance in the dedica- tory epistle before his ' Apology for Actors ' (1612) which was addressed to a rival publisher Nicolas Okes, and he added the important information that Shakespeare re- sented the more substantial injury which the publisher had done him. Heywood's words run : ' Here, Hkewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that work [i.e. 'Troia Britannica' of 1609] by taking the two epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a less volume [i.e. ' The Passionate Pilgrim ' of 1612] under the name of another [i.e. Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him, and he to do himself right, hath since pubHshed them in his own name : but as I must acknowledge my lines not worth Heywood's his [i.e. Shakespeare's] patronage under whom ShakI- "" ^® [*-^- Jaggard] hath pubhshed them, so the speare's author, I know, much offended with M. Jaggard that altogether unknown to him presumed to make so bold with his name.' In the result the publisher seems to have removed Shakespeare's name from the title- page of a few copies.^ Heywood's words form the sole recorded protest on Shakespeare's part against the many injuries which he suffered at the hands of contemporary publishers. In 1601 Shakespeare's full name was attached to ' A poeticall essaie on the Phoenix and the Turtle,' which was pubhshed by Edward Blount, a prosperous London 1 Only two copies of the third edition of the Passionate Pilgrim are extant ; one formerly belonging to Mr. J. E. T. Loveday of WUliamscote near Banbury was sold by him to an American collector in 1906 ; the other is in the Malone collection at the Bodleian. The Malone copy has two title-pages, from one of which Shakespeare's name is omitted. The Loveday copy has the title-page bearing Shakespeare's name. 270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE stationer of literary tastes, as part of a supplement or appendix to a volume of verse by one Robert Chester. Chester's work bore the title : ' Love's Martyr, Phcenix ^^ Rosalin's complaint, allegorically shadowing and the the Truth of Love in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle . . . [with] some new com- positions of seueral moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their seuerall workes.' Neither the drift of Chester's crabbed verse, nor the occasion of its composition is clear, nor can the praise of perspicuity be allowed to the supplement, to which Shakespeare contri- buted. His colleagues there are the dramatic poets John Marston, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and two writers signing themselves respectively ' Vatum Chorus ' and ' Ignoto.' The supplement is introduced by an indepen- dent title-page running thus : ' Hereafter follow diverse poeticall Essaies on the former subject, viz. : the Turtle and Phcenix. Done by the best and chief est of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes : never before extant ; and (now first) consecrated by them all generally to the love and merite of the true- noble knight. Sir John SaHsburie.' Sir John Sahsbury was the patron to whom Robert Chester, the author of the main work, modestly dedicated his labours. Sir John Sahsbury, a Welsh country gentleman of Lleweni, Denbighshire, and by two years Shakespeare's junior, married in early hfe Ursula Stanley, an iaiisbuA-'s illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby, patronage ^j^q -^-as at one time patron of Shakespeare's of poets. . io,-Ti • j^ 1 theatrical company.^ Sir John was appomted an esquire of the body to Queen Ehzabeth in 1595, and spent much time in London during the rest of the reign, being knighted in 1601. A man of literary culture, he could turn a stanza with some deftness, and was a generous patron of many Welsh and Enghsh bards who wrote much 1 Sir John's surname is usuall}' spelt Salisbury. Dr. Johnson's friend, Sirs. Thrale (afteiwaids Mrs. Piozzi), whose maiden name was Salusbury, was a direct descendant. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 271 in honour of himself and his family. Robert Chester was evidently a confidential protege closely associated with the knight's Welsh home. But it is clear that Sir John was acquainted with Ben Jonson and other men of letters in the capital and that Shakespeare and the rest good-naturedly contributed to Chester's volume by way of showing regard for a minor Maecenas of the day. Chester's own work is a confused collection of grotesque allegorical fancies which is interrupted by an elaborate _ , metrical biography of King Arthur.^ The writer Chester's would Seem to celebrate in obscure and figurative °^ ' phraseology the passionate love of Sir John for his wife and its mystical reinforcement on the occasion of the birth of their first child. Some years appear to have elapsed between the com- position of Chester's verses and their pubUcation, and the friendly pens who were responsible for the supplement embroidered on Chester's fantasy fresh conceits, which, while they were of vague relevance to his symbohc inten- tion, were designed to conciliate his master's favour. The contributor who conceals his identity under the pseudonym ' Vatum Chorus,' and signs the opening Unes of the supple- ment, greeted ' the worthily honoured knight, Sir John Salusbury,' as ' an honourable friend,' whose merits were ' parents to our several rhymes.' All the contributors play enigmatic voluntaries on the familiar mythology of the phoenix, the unique bird of Arabia, and the turtle- dove, the symbol of loving constancy, whose mystical union was Chester's recondite theme. Like Chester they make the phoenix feminine and the turtle-dove mascuUne, and their general aim is the glorification of a perfect ^ By way of enhancing the mystification, the title-page describes the main work as ' now first translated [by Robert Chester] out of the Venerable Italian Torquato Coeliano.' No Italian poet of this name is known, the designation seems a fantastic amalgam of the Christian name (Torquato) of Tasso and the surname of a contemporary Italian poetaster, Livio Celiano. Chester described his interpolated ' true legend of famous King Arthur ' as ' the first essay of a new Brytish Poet collected out of diverse Authentical Records.' 272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE example of spiritual love. Shakespeare's ' poeticall essaie ' consists of thirteen four- lined stanzas in trochaics, each line being of seven syllables, with the rhymes disposed as in Tennyson's ' In Memoriam.' The concluding ' threnos ' is in five three-lined stanzas, also in trochaics, each stanza having a single rhyme.^ Both in tone and metre Shake- speare's verses differ from the other contributions. They strike unmistakably an elegiac or funereal note which is out of keeping with their environment. The dramatist cryptically describes the obsequies, which other birds attended, of the phoenix and the turtle-dove, after they had been knit together in life by spiritual ties and left no offspring. Chaucer's ' Parhament of Poules ' and the abstruse symboUsm of sixteenth-century emblem books are thought to be echoed in Shakespeare's lines ; but their closest affinity seems to lie with the imagery of Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sir Phihp Sidney, where the turtle-dove and phoenix meet the swan and eagle at the dead hero's funeral and there play roles somewhat similar to those which Shakespeare assigns the birds in his 'poeticall essaie.' ^ The internal evidence scarcely justifies the conclusion that Shakespeare's poem, which is an exercise in alle- gorical elegy in untried metre, was penned for Chester's book. It must have been either devised in an idle hour with merely abstract intention, or it was suggested by the death within the poet's owti circle of a pair and his'^^^ of devoted lovers. The resemblances with the ie^^ow verses of Chester and his other coadjutors are specious and superficial and Shakespeare's piece would seem to have been admitted to the miscellany at the soUcitation of friends who were bent on paying as com- prehensive a comphment as possible to Sir John Sahsbury. The poem's pubhcation in its curious setting is chiefly memorable for the evidence it offers of Shakespeare's ^ Shakespeare's concluding ' Threnos ' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in hia Mad Lover in the song ' The Lover's Legacy to his Cruel ilistress.' ^ See Spenser's Colin Clout's Come, Home Again (1595), ad fin. DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 273 amiable acquiescence in a fantastic scheme of professional I homage on the part of contemporary poets to a patron of > promising repute.^ ^ A unique copy of Chester's Love,''s Martyr is in Mr. Christie-Miller's library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original edition in 1611 with a new title, The Annals of Great Brittaine, a copy (also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of ' Occa- sional Issues.' It was also printed in the same year as one of the pub- lications of the New Shakspere Society. Dr. A. H. R. Fairchild, in ' The Phoenix and Turtle : a critical and historical interpretation ' {Englische Studkn, 1904, vol. xxxiii. pp. 337 seq.), examines the poem in the light of mediaeval conceptions of love and of the fantastic allegorical imagery of the emblematists. A more direct light is thrown on the history of Chester's volume and incidentally of Shakespeare's contribution to it in Mr. Carleton Brown's ' Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester ' (Bryn Maivr College Monographs, vol. xiv. 1913). Mr. Brown prints manj' poems by Sir John, by Robert Chester, and by other of Sir John's proteges, from MSS. at Christ Church, Oxford (formerly the property of Sir John Salisbury). These MSS. include an autograph poem of Ben Jonson. Mr. Brown has also laid under contribution a very rare published volume, Robert Parry's Siwtes (1597), which was dedicated to Sir John, and contains much verse by the patron as well as by the poet. Furthermore Mr. Brown supplies from original sources an exhaustive biography of Sir John and confutes Dr. Grosart's erroneous identification of the poet Robert Chester, whose Welsh connections are plainly indicated in his verse, with a country gentleman (of the same names) of Royston, Hertfordshire. No student of Chester's volume can a fiord to overlook ilr. Brown's valuable researches. XIV THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE In London Shakespeare resided as a rule near the play- houses. Soon after his arrival he found a home in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, within sp^are's ©^sy reach of ' The Theatre ' in Shoreditch. residences There he remained until 1596. In the autumn m London. ^ ■ ^ i mi of that year he migrated across the Thames to the Liberty of the Chnk in Southwark, where actors, dramatic authors, and pubhc entertainers generally were already congregating.^ Meanwhile Shakespeare's name was placed on the roll of ' subsidy men ' or taxpayers for St. Helen's parish, and his personal property there was valued otilg^ation ^°^ fiscal purposes at 51. In 1593 Parliament had voted to the Crown three subsidies, and each subsidy involved a payment of 25. 8d. in the pound on the personal assessment. Shakespeare thus became liable for an aggregate sum of 21. — 13s. ^d. for each of the three subsidies. But the collectors of taxes in the City of London worked sluggishly. For three years tliey put no pressure on the dramatist, and Shakespeare left Bishops- gate without discharging the debt. Soon afterwards, however, the Bishopsgate officials traced him to his new ^ A missing memorandum by Alleyn (quoted by Malone), the general trustworthiness of which is attested by the fiscal records cited injra, locates Shakespeare's Southwark residence in 1596 ' near the Bear Garden.' The Bear Garden was a popular place of entertainment which was chiefly devoted to the rough sports of bear- and bull-baiting. Near at hand in 1 59 > were the Rose and the Swan theatres — the earliest playhouses to be erected on the south side of the Thames. 274 THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 275 Southwark lodging. The Liberty of the Clink within which his new abode lay was an estate of the Bishop of Winchester, and was under the Bishop's exclusive juris- diction. In October 1596 the revenue officer of St, Helen's obtained the permission of the Bishop's steward to claim the overdue tax of Shakespeare across the river. Next year the poet paid on account of the St. Helen's assessment a first instalment of 55. A second instalment of 13s. 4:d. followed next year.^ There is Uttle reason to doubt that Southwark, which formed the chief theatrical quarter through the later years of Shakespeare's life, remained a customary s^ th k P^^ce of residence so long as his work required his presence in the metropolis. From 1599 onwards hfe was thoroughly identified with the fortunes of the Globe theatre on the Bankside in Southwark, the leading playhouse of the epoch, and in adjacent streets lodged Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and many other actors, with whom he was socially on intimate terms. His youngest brother, Edmund, who became a 'player.' Avas buried in St. Saviour's Church in Southwark on December 31, 1607, a proof that he at any rate was a resident in that parish. Shakespeare had close pro- fessional relations too with the contemporary dramatist, John Fletcher, who, according to Aubrey, hved with his literary partner Francis Beaumont, ' on the Banke-side (in Southwark) not far from the playhouse {i.e. the Globe).' But Shakespeare's association with South London during his busiest years did not altogether withdraw him ^ Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies, City of London, 146/369, Public Record Office; Prof. J. W. Hales in Athenaeum, March 26, 1904. No documentary evidence has yet been discovered of any other contribution by Shakespeare to the national taxes during any part of his career, either in Stratford or London. The surviving fiscal archives of the period have not yet been quite exhaustively searched. But it is clear that taxation was levied at the period partially and irregularly, and that numerous persons of substance escaped the collectors' notice. See the present writer's ' Shakespeare and Public Affairs ' in Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1913. T 2 276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE from other parts of the city. Some of his colleagues at the Globe theatre preferred to reside at some distance from their place of work.^ The greatest actor of Shake- speare's company, Richard Burbage, would seem to have remained through life a resident in Shoreditch, where he served at ' The Theatre ' his histrionic apprenticeship .^ Two other professional friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were for many years highly respected parishioners of St. Mary Aldermanbury near Cripplegate, where Heminges served as churchwarden in 1608, and CondeU ten years later. Visits to friends' houses from time to time called the dramatist from South Avark, and he made an occasional stay in the central district of the City, where Heminges and Condell had their home. In the year 1604 Shakespeare 'laye in the house' of Christopher Montjoy, a Huguenot refugee, who carried on the business of a ' tiremaker ' {i.e. maker of ladies' headdresses) in Silver Street, near Wood Street, Cheap- ^ See the wills and other documents in Collier's Lives of the Actors. - A theory that Shakespeare was, like the Burbages, remembered as a Shoreditch resident, rests on a shadowy foundation. Aubrey's bio- graphical jottings which are preserved in his confused autograph at the Bodleian contain some enigmatic words which seem to have been intended by the writer to apply to one of three persons — either to Shake- speare, to John Fletcher or to John Ogilbj', a well-known dancing- master of Aubrey's day. The incoherent arrangement of the page renders it impossible to determine the individual reference. The disjointed pass- age runs: 'The more to be admired q. [t.e. quod or quia] he [t.e. Shake- speare, Fletcher, or Ogilby] was not a company keeper, lived in Shore- ditch, would not be debauched & if iuA-ited to writ ; he was in paine.' The next line is blank save for ' W. Shakespeare ' in the centre. The succeeding note states that one Mr. William Beeston possessed informa- tion about Shakespeare which he derived from the actor Mr. Lacy. Sir G. F. Warner inclines to the opinion that Shakespeare was intended in the obscure passage ; Mr. Falconer Madan thinks Fletcher. If Shake- speare were intended the words would mean that he avoided social dissipation, that he resided in Shoreditch, and that the practice of writing caused him pain. None of these assertions have any coherence with better attested information. See E. K. Chambers, A Jotting by John Aubrey, in Malone Soc. Collections (1911), vol. i. pp. 324 seq. Mr. Andrew Clark, in his edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, 1898, vol. i. p. 97, MTongly makes the entry refer to the actor William Beeston. THE PEACTICAL AFFAIES OF LIFE 277 side.^ It is clear that for some time before and after 1604 the dramatist was on famihar terms with the ' tire- . , , . maker ' and with his family, and that he inter- A lodger in - ' Silver Street, ested himself benevolently in their domestic °^' affairs. One of Montjoy's near neighbours was Shakespeare's early Stratford friend Eichard Field, the prosperous stationer, who after 1600 removed from Ludgate Hill, Blackfriars, to the sign of the Splayed Eagle in Wood Street. Field's wife was a Huguenot and the widow of a prominent member of the Huguenot community in London. Shakespeare may have owed a passing acquaintance with the Huguenot ' tiremaker ' to his fellow-townsman Field, and to Field's Huguenot connections.^ The sojourn under Montjoy's roof was ^ Cf. Jonson's Silent Wcrnmn, iv. ii. 94-5 (Captain Otter of Mrs. Otter) : ' All her teeth wore made i' the Black-Friers, both her eyobrowes i' the Strand, and her haire in Siluer-streel.' * The knowledge of Shakespeare's relations with Silver Street and with the Montjoy family is duo to Dr. C. W. Wallace's recent researches at the Public Record Office. In Harper's Magazine, March 1910, Dr. Wallace first cited or described a long series of legal documents connected with a lawsuit of 1612 in the Court of Requests — Bellott v. Montjoy — in which Montjoy was the defendant and ' William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in the County of Warwick, gentleman, of the age of jdvii yeares or thereabouts ' was a witness for the plaintiff, Stephen Bellott, Montjoy's son-in-law. The litigation arose out of the con- ditions of the marriage which took place on Nov. 19, 1604, between Mary Montjoy, daughter of Shakespeare's host in Silver Street, and Bellott, then her father's apprentice. Bellott's apprenticeship to Montjoy ran from 1598 to 1604. To a witness, Jlrs. Joan Johnson, formerly a female servant in Montjoy's employ, we owe the statement that ' one, Mr. Shakespeare, that layein the house ' had helped at the instance of the girl's mother to persuade the apprentice — a reluctant wooer — to marry his master's daughter. Other witnesses state, partly on the authority of Shakespeare's communications to them, that Bellott con sented to the marriage on condition that he received 501. together with ' certain household stuff ' and the promise of a further sum of 200/. on Montjoy's death. It was to confirm this alleged contract which Montjoy repudiated that Bellott brought his action in 1612. In the de- position which Shakespeare signed on May 11, 1612, he supports Bellott's aillegations, adding that he knew the apprentice ' duringe the tyme ' of his service with Montjoy ; that it appeared to him that Montjoy did ' all the time ' of Bellott's service ' bear and show great good will and 278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE unlikely in any case to have been more than a passing interlude in the dramatist's Southwark life. Shakespeare, in middle life, brought to practical affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament. In Shake- ' R^-tseis Ghost ' (1605), an anecdotal biography speare's of GamaHel Ratsey, a notorious highwayman, tempera- who was hanged at Bedford on March 26, 1605, ™^'^^- the highwayman is represented as compelling a troop of actors whom he met by chance on the road to perform in his presence. According to the memoir Ratsey rewarded the company with a gift of forty shilhngs, of which he robbed them next day. Before dismissing his victims Ratsey addressed himself to a leader of the company in somewhat mystifying terms. He would dare wager that if his auditor went to London and played Hamlet there, he would outstrip the cele- brated player who was making his fame in that part. It was needful to practise the utmost frugality in the capital. ' Wlien thou feelest thy purse well lined (the counsellor proceeded, less ambiguously), buy thee some place or lordship in the country that, growing weary of playing, thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation.' To this speech the player replied : ' Sir, I thanke you for this good counsell ; I promise you I wiU make use of it, for I have heard, indeede, of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.' Finally the whimsical outlaw directed the player to kneel down and mockingly conferred on him the title of ' Sir Simon Two Shares and a HaKe.' "Whether or no Ratsey's biographer consciously identified the highway- affection towards ' him, and that he heard the defendant and his wife speak well of their apprentice at ' divers and sundry tymes.' The Court remitted the case to the Consistory of the French Huguenot Church in London, which decided in Bellott's favour. The numerous records in the case, which throw no precise light on the length or reasons of Shakespeare's stay in Silver Street, have been printed in extenso by Dr. Wallace in University Studies, Nebraska, U.S.A. The autograph signature which Shakespeare appended to his deposition is reproduced on p. 519 infra. THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 279 man's auditor with Shakespeare, it Avas the prosaic course of conduct which Ratsey recommended to his actor that Shakespeare hterally followed. As soon as his position in his profession was assured, he devoted his energies to re- estabUshing the fallen fortunes of his family in his native place and to acquiring for himself and his successors the status of gentlefolk. No sooner was Shakespeare's purse ' well lined,' than he bought ' some place or lordship in the country' which assured him 'dignity and reputation.'^ His father's pecuniary embarrassments had steadily increased since his son's departure. Creditors harassed „. the elder Shakespeare unceasingly. In 1587 father's one Nicholas Lane pursued him for a debt which he owed as surety for his impecunious brother Henry, who was still farming their father's lands at Snitter- field. Through 1588 and 1589 John Shakespeare retali- ated with pertinacity on a debtor named John Tompson. But in 1591 a substantial creditor, Adrian Quiney, a ' mercer ' of repute, with whom and with whose family the dramatist was soon on intimate terms, obtained a writ of distraint against his father. Happily the elder Shake- speare never forfeited his neighbours' faith in his integrity. In 1592 he attested inventories taken on the death of two neighbours, of Ralph Shaw, a wooldriver, with whose prosperous son, JuUus, Shakespeare was later in much personal intercourse, and of Henry Field, father of the London printer. None the less the dramatist's father was on December 25 of the same year ' presented ' as a recusant 1 The only copy known of Ratseis Gfiost (1605) is in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The author doubtless had his eye on Burbagc as well as on Shakespeare. ' Two and a half shares ' formed at the outset Burbage's precise holding in the first Globo theatre, and would entitle him better than Shakespeare to be called ' Sir Simon Two Shares and a Half.' Ratsey's hearer is warned moreover that when he has made his fortune he need not care ' for them that before made thee proud with speaking their words upon the stage ' — phraseology which suggests that Ratsey was taking into account the actor's rather than the author's fortunes. On the other hand, Burbage is not known to have acquired, like Shakespeare, a ' place or lordship in the country.' 280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE for absenting himself from church. The commissioners reported that his absence was probably due to ' fear of process for debt.' He figures for the last time in the pro- ceedings of the local court, in his customary rdle of defen- dant, on March 9, 1594-5. He was then joined with two fellow-traders — Philip Green, a chandler, and Henry Rogers, a butcher — as defendant in a suit again brought by Adrian Quiney, but now in conjunction with one Thomas Barker, for the recovery of the large sum of five pounds. Unlike his partners in the htigation, the elder Shakespeare's name is not followed in the record by a mention of his calUng, and when the suit reached a later stage his name was omitted altogether. These may be viewed as indications that in the course of the proceedings he finally retired from trade, which had been of late prohfic in disasters for him. In January 1596-7 he conveyed a shp of land attached to his dwelHng in Henley Street to one George Badger, a Stratford draper.^ There is a hkelihood that the poet's wife fared, in the poet's absence, no better than his father. The only contemporary mention made of her between His wife's ^ler marriage in 1582 and the execution of her husband's wiU in the spring of 1616 is as the borrower at an unascertained date (evidently before 1595) of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet and dis- tribute it among the poor of Stratford.^ 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 13. - Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186 ; J. W. Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage, 1905, pp. 28-29. The pertinent clause in shepherd Whittington's will directs payment to be made ' unto the poor people of Strat- ford [of the sum of] xl' that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere wyffo unto Sir. Wyllyam Shaxspere, and is due debt to me. The sum is to be paid to mine executor by the said VVillyam Sliaxspere or his assigns according to the true meanying of this my will.' Whittington's estate was valued at 501. Is. lid. The testator's debtors included, in addition to Mrs. Anne Shakespeare, John and THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 281 It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, after nearly eleven years' absence, to his native town, , and very quickly did he work a revolution in the his only son, affairs of his family. The prosecutions of his ^^^ ■ father in the local court ceased. The poet's relations with Stratford were thenceforth uninterrupted. He still resided in London for most of the year ; but until the close of his professional career he paid the town at least one annual visit, and he was always formally described there and elsewhere as ' of Stratford-on-Avon, gentleman.' He was no doubt at Stratford on August 11, 1596, when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the parish church ; the boy was eleven and a half years old. Two daughters were now Shakespeare's only children — Hamnet's twin-sister Judith £tnd the elder daughter Susanna, now a girl of thirteen. At the same date the poet's father, despite his pecuniary embarrassments, took a step, by way of regaining his prestige, which must be assigned to the poet's and fhe^^^ intervention.^ He made application to the Heralds' College of Heralds for a coat-of-arms.^ Heraldic College. ^ ambitions were widespread among the middle classes of the day, and many Elizabethan actors besides William Hathaway, her brothers, who owed him an aggregate sum of 61. 2s. lid. Of this sum 31. was an unpaid bequest made to him by Mrs. Joan Hathaway, Mrs. Shakespeare's mother, who having lately died had appointed her sons, John and William Hathaway, her e.xecutors. On the other side of the account, Whittington admitted that ' a quarter of a year's board ' was due from him to the two brothers Hathaway. ^ There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the poet's heraldry in Herald arid Genealogist, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in Miscellanea Oenealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599 [Out- lines, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotia- tion of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year. ^ It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father aUve that the application should be made in the father's name, and the transaction conducted as if the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below. 282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare sought heraldic distinction. The loose or- ganisation of the Heralds' CoUege favoured the popular predilection. Rumour ran that the College was ready to grant heraldic honours without strict inquiry to any applicant who could afford a substantial fee. In numerous cases the heralds clearly credited an apphcant's family with a fictitious antiquity. Rarely can much reUance therefore be placed on the biographical or genea- logical statements alleged in Elizabethan grants of arms. The poet's father, or the poet himself, when first applying to the College stated that John Shakespeare, in 1568, while he was baihfi of Stratford, and while he was by virtue of that office a justice of the peace, had obtained from Robert Cook, then Clarenceux herald, a ' pattern ' or sketch of an armorial coat. This allegation is not confirmed by the records of the College, and may be an invention designed by John Shakespeare and his son to recommend their claim to the notice of the easy-going heralds in 1596. The negotiations of 1568, if they were not apocryphal, were certainly abortive ; otherwise there would have been no necessity for further action in later years. In any case, on October 20, 1596, a draft, which remains in the College of Arms, was prepared under the direction of WiUiam Dethick, Garter King-of-Arms, granting John's Th draft request for a coat-of-arms. Garter stated, ' Coat ' of with characteristic vagueness, that he had ^^^ ■ been ' by credible report ' informed that the apphcant's ' parentes and late antecessors were for theire valeant and faithfull service advanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memorie, sy thence whiche tyme they have continewed at those partes [i.e. Warwickshire] in good reputacion and credit ' ; and that ' the said John [had] maryed Mary, daughter and one of the heyres of Robert iVrden, of Wilm- cote, gent.' In consideration of these titles to honour, Garter declared that he assigned to Shakespeare this shield, viz. : ' Gold on a bend sable, a spear of the first, the point steeled proper, and for his crest or cognizance THE PEACTICAL AFFAIES OF LIFE 283 a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid.' In the margin of this draft-grant there is a pen sketch of the arms and crest, and above them is written the motto ' Non Sans Droict.' ^ A second copy of the draft, also dated in 1596, is extant at the College. The only alterations are the substitution of the word ' grandfather ' for ' antecessors ' in the account of John Shakespeare's ancestry, and the substitution of the word ' esquire ' for ' gent ' in the description of his wife's father, Robert Arden. At the foot of this draft, however, appeared some disconnected and unverifiable memoranda which had been supplied to the heralds, to the effect that John had been bailiff of Stratford, had received a ' pattern ' of a shield from Cook, the Clarenceux herald, was a man of substance, and had married into a worshipful family .2 Neither of these drafts was fuUy executed. It may have been that the unduly favourable representations „, made to the College respecting John Shake- piification speare's social and pecuniary position excited ^^^^' suspicion even in the credulous and corruptly interested minds of the heralds. At any rate, Shake- speare and his father alloAved three years to elapse before (as far as extant documents show) they made a further endeavour to secure the coveted distinction. In 1599 their efforts were crowned with success. Changes in the interval among the officials at the College may have facilitated the proceedings. In 1597 the Earl of Essex had become Earl Marshal and chief of the Heralds' College (the office had been in commission in 1596) ; while the ^ In a manuscript in the British Museum {Harl. MS. 6140, f. 45) is a copy of the tricking of the arms of William ' Shakspere,' which is described ' as a pattentt per Will'm Dethike Garter, Principall King of Armes ' ; this is figured in French's Shakespeareana Oenealogica, p. 524. ^ These memoranda ran (with interlineations in brackets) : — [This John shoeth] A patieme therof under Clarent Cookes hand in paper xx. years past. [The Q. officer and chefEe of the towne] [A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or xvj. years past. That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance [500 li.] That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent, of worship]. 284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE great scholar and antiquary, William Camden, had joined the College, also in 1597, as Clarenceux King-of-Arms. The poet was favourably known both to Camden, the admiring preceptor and friend of Ben Jonson,^ and to the Earl of Essex, the close friend of the Earl of Southampton. His father's application now took a new form. No grant of arms was asked for. It was asserted without quahfica- tion that the coat, as set out in the draft-grants of 1596, had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were merely invited to give him a ' recog- nition ' or ' exemplification ' of it.^ At the same time he asked permission for himseK to impale, and his eldest son and other children to quarter, on ' his ancient coat-of-arms ' that of the Ardens of Wilmcote, his wife's family. The College officers were characteristically complacent. A draft was prepared under the hands of Dethick, the Garter King, and of Camden, the Clarenceux King, granting the required ' exempUfication ' and authorising the required impalement and quartering. On one point only did Dethick and Camden betray conscientious scruples. Shakespeare and his father obviously desired the heralds to recognise the title of Mary Shakespeare (the poet's mother) to bear the arms of the great Warmckshire family of Arden, then seated at Park Hall. But the relationship, if it existed, was undetermined ; the Warwick- shire Ardens were gentry of influence in the county, and were certain to protest against any hasty assumption of identity between their line and that of the humble farmer of Wilmcote. After tricking the Warwickshire Arden coat in the margin of the draft-grant for the purpose of ^ Camden was in the near neighbourhood of Stratford-on-Avon on Aug. 1, 1600, when he organised the elaborate heraldic funeral of old Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, and bor ■ the dead knight's ' cote of armes ' at the interment in Charlecote Church {Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 556). * An ' exemplification ' was invariably secured more easily than a new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without examination, the applicant's statement that his family had borne arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the obligation of close inquiry into his present status. THE PRACTICAJ. AFFAIRS OF LIFE 285 indicating the manner of its impalement, the heralds on second thoughts erased it. They substituted in their sketch the arms of an Arden family living at Alvanley in the distant county of Cheshire. With that stock there was no pretence that Robert Arden of Wilmcote was lineally connected ; but the bearers of the Alvanley coat were unlikely to learn of its suggested impalement with the Shakespeare shield, and the heralds were less liable to the risk of complaint or htigation. But the Shakespeares wisely reUeved the College of all anxiety by omitting to assume the Arden coat. The Shakespeare arms alone are displayed with full heraldic elaboration on the monument above the poet's grave in Stratford Church ; they alone appear on the seal and on the tombstone of his elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, impaled with the arms of her husband ^ ; and they alone were quartered by Thomas Nash, the first husband of the poet's granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall.^ Shakespeare's victorious quest of a coat-of-arms was one of the many experiences which he shared with pro- /-.iu * . fessional associates. Two or three officers of Other actors heraldic the Heralds' College, who disapproved of the pre ensions. ^^^^ methods of their colleagues, indeed pro- tested against the bestowal on actors of heraldic honours. Special censure was levelled at two of Shakespeare's closest professional allies, Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope, comedians of repute and fellow-shareholders in the Globe theatre, whose names figure in the prefatory fist of the ' principal actors ' in the First Folio. At the opening of King James's reign William Smith, who held the post of Rouge Dragon pursuivant at the Heralds' College and dis- approved of his colleagues' lenience, poured scorn on the two actors' false heraldic pretensions.^ The critic wrote ^ On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare's elder son-in-law, the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall. * French, Geriealogica Shakes-pear ea-na, p. 413. ^ Smith's censure figures in an elaborate exposure of recent heraldic scandals, which he dedicated to Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, K.G., a commissioner for the office of Earl Marshal from 1604, and thereby a chief controller of the College of Arms. The indictment, which 286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE thus : ' Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S"" W™ Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph's cote quartred, which I shewed to M'' York [i.e. Ralph Brooke, another rigorous champion of heraldic orthodoxy], at a small graver's shopp in Poster Lane ' (leaf 8a). Phillips's irresponsibly adopted ancestor, ' Sir WiUiam Phillipp, Lord Bardolph,' won renown at Agin- court in 1415, and the old warrior's title of Lord Bardolf or Bardolph received satiric commemoration at Shake- speare's hands when the dramatist bestowed on FalstafiF's red-nosed companion the name of his actor-friend's imaginary progenitor. Smith's charge against Thomas Pope was to similar effect : ' Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of S"^ Tho. Pope, Chancelor of ye Augmentations.' Player Pope's alleged sponsor in heraldry. Sir Thomas Pope, was the Privy Councillor, who died without issue in the first year of Queen Ehzabeth's reign, after founding Trinity College, Oxford. Shake- speare's claim in his own heraldic apphcation to descent from unspecified persons who did ' vahant and faithful service ' in Henry the Seventh's time Avas comparatively modest. But his heraldic adventure had good precedent in the contemporary ambition of the theatrical pro- fession. Rouge Dragon Smith omitted specific mention of Shakespeare ; but his equally censorious colleague, Ralph Brooke, York Herald, was not so reticent, porary Independently of Smith, Brooke drew up a list of'shake- °^ twenty-three persons whom he charged with speare's obtaining coats-of-arms on more or less frau- dulent representations. Fourth on his list stands the surname Shakespeare, and eight places below appears that of Cov/ley, who may be identified with is in Smith's autograph, bears the title : ' A brieS Discourse of ye causes of Discord amongst ye Officers of arms and of the great abuses and absurdities com[m]ited by [heraldic] painters to the great prejudice and hindrance of the same office.' The MS. was kindly lent to the present writer by Messrs. Peaxson & Co., Pail Mail Place. THE PKACTICAL AFFAIES OF LIFE 287 Shakespeare's actor friend, Richard Cowley, the creator of Verges in ' Much Ado about Nothing.' In thirteen cases Brooke particularises with sarcastic heat the imposture which he claims to expose.^ But Shakespeare's name is merely mentioned in Brooke's long indictment without annotation. Elsewhere the critic took the less serious objection that the arms ' exemphfied ' to Shakespeare usurped the coat of Lord Mauley, on whose shield ' a bend sable ' also figured. Dethick and Camden, the official guardians of heraldic etiquette, deemed it fitting to reply on this minor technical issue. They pointed out that the Shakespeare shield bore no greater resemblance to the Mauley coat than it did to that of the Harley and the Ferrers families, both of which also bore ' a bend sable,' but that in point of fact it dififered conspicuously from all three by the presence of a spear on the ' bend.' Dethick and Camden added, with customary want of pre- cision, that the person to whom the grant was made had ' borne magistracy and was justice of peace at Stratford- on-Avon ; he maried the daughter and heire of Arderne, and was able to maintain that Estate.' ^ 1 This heraldic manuscript, which was also lent me by Messrs. Pearson, is a paper book of seventeen leaves, without title, containing desultory notes on grants of arms which (it was urged) had been errone- ously made by Sir William Dethick, Garter King, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Two handwritings figure in these pages, one of which is the autograph of Ralph Brooke, York Herald, and the other, which is not identified, may be that of Brooke's clerk. Brooke's detailed charges include statements that an embroiderer, calling himself Parr, who failed to give proof of his right to that surname and was unquestionably the son of a pedlar, received permission to use the crest and coat of Sir William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, who died in 1.571 ' the last male of his house.' Three other men, who bought honourable pedi- grees of the college, are credited with the occupations respectively of a seller of stockings, a haberdasher, and a stationer or printer, while a fourth offender was stated to be an alien. In some cases Garter was charged with pocketing his fee, and then with prudently postponing the formal issue of the promised grant of arms until the applicant was dead. ^ The details of Brooke's second accusation are deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to his complaint. Two copies of the answer are accessible : one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds' 288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE While the negotiation with the CoUege of Arms was in progress in the elder Shakespeare's name, the poet in his own p , person had openly taken a more effective step of New towards rehabilitating himself and his family in the eyes of his fellow- townsmen at Stratford. On May 4, 1597, he purchased the largest house in the town. The edifice, which was knowTi as New Place, had been built by Sir Hugh Clopton more than a century before, and seems to have fallen into a ruinous condition. But Shake- speare paid for it, with two barns and two gardens, the then substantial sum of 60^. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford ' manor- house,' Wilham Underbill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county, Fillongley near Coventry, and the legal transfer of New Place to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill's eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in jeopardy of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to ' the felon's ' next brother Hercules, who on coming of age in May 1602 completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.^ There was only one larger house in the town — the College, which before the Reformation had been the official home of the clergy of the parish church, and was subsequently confiscated by the Crown. In 1596 that imposing residence was acquired by a rich native of Stratford, Thomas Combe, whose social relations with Shakespeare were soon close.- In 1598, a year after purchasing New Place, the drama- tist procured stone for the repair of the house, and before 1602 he had set a fruit orchard in the land adjoining it. He is traditionally said to have interested himself in the spacious garden, and to have planted with his own hands College, f. 276 ; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the Herald and Genealogist, i. 514. 1 Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries, p. 232. Halliwell's History of New Place, 1863, folio, collects a mass of pertinent information on the fortunes of Shakespeare's mansion. * See p. 469 infra. THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 289 a mulberry-tree, which was long a prominent feature of it. When this tree was cut down in 1758, numerous relics made from the wood were treated with an almost super- stitious veneration.^ Shakespeare does not appear to have permanentl}^ settled at New Place till 1611. In 1609 the house, or part of it, was occupied by Thomas Greene, ' alias Shakespeare,' a lawyer, who claimed to be the poet's cousin. Greene's mother or grandmother seems to have been a Shakespeare. He was for a time town-clerk of the town, and occasionally acted as the poet's legal adviser. ^ It was doubtless under their son's guidance that Shakespeare's father and mother set on foot in November ^ The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry-tree was not put on record till it was cut down in 1758 (see p. 510 infra). In 1760 mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation's archives from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his Life of Shakespeare, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since Shakespeare's lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry trees through the midland counties by order of James I, who desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Pliillipps, i. 134, 411-16). Thomas Sharp, a wood-carver of Stratford-on-Avon, was chiefly responsible for the eighteenth-century mementos of the tree — goblets or fancy boxes or inkstands. But far more objects than could possibly be genuine have been represented by dealers as being manufactured from Shakespeare's mulberry-tree. From a slip of the original tree is derived the mulberry-tree which still flourishes on the central lawn of New Place garden. Another slip of the original tree was acqiiired by Edward Capell, the Shakespearean com- mentator, and was planted by him in the garden of his residence, Troston Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds. That tree lived for more than a century, and many cuttings taken from it still survive. One scion was presented by the owner of Troston Hall to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in October 1896, and flourishes there, being labelled ' Shakespeare's mulberry.' The Director of Kew Gardens, Lieut. -Col. Sir David Prain, writes to me (March 23, 1915) confirming the authenticity of ' our tree's descent.' Sir David adds ' We have propagated from it rather freely, have planted various offshoots from it in various parts of the garden, and have sent plants to places where there are memorials of Shakespeare and to people interested in matters relating to him.' ^ See p. 476 infra. u 290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1597 — six months after his acquisition of New Place — a fresh lawsuit against John Lambert, his mother's nephew, for the recovery of her mortgaged estate of Asbies in Wilmcote.^ The litigation dragged on till near the end of the century with some appearance of favouring the di'amatist's parents, but, in the result, the estate remained in Lambert's hands. The purchase of NeAv Place is a signal proof of Shake- speare's growing prosperity, and the transaction made a deep impression on his fellow- townsmen. Shakespeare Letters wTitten during 1598 by leading men fellow- at Stratford, which are extant among the KgT" archives of the Corporation and of the Bu-th- place Trustees, leave no doubt of the reputation for wealth and influence Avhich he straightway acquired in his native place. His Stratford neighbours stood in urgent need of his help. In the summer of 1594 a severe fire did much damage in the town, and a second outbreak ' on the same day ' twelve months later intensified the suffering. The two fires destroyed 120 dwelling-houses, estimated to be worth 12,000Z., and 400 persons were ren- dered homeless and destitute. Both conflagrations staited on the Lord's Day, and Puritan preachers throughout the country suggested that the double disaster was a divine judgment on the townsfolk ' chiefly for prophaning the Lords Sabbaths, and for contemning his word in the mouth of his faithfull Ministers.' ^ In accordance with precedent, the Town Council obtained permission from the quarter sessions of the county to appeal for help to the country at large, and leading townsmen were despatched to various parts of the kingdom to make collections. The Stratford collectors began their first tour in the autumn of 1594, and their second in the autumn of the following ^ Halljwell-Phillipps, ii. 13-17; cf. !Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environinent, 45-47. See also p. 14 supra. 2 Lew-is ^.Baj'ly, The Practice of Piety, 1613 ed., p. 551. Bayly's allegation is repeated in Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements, 1631, p. 555. THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF IJFE 291 year. Shakespeare's friends, Alderman Richard Quiney the elder, and John Sadler, were especially active on these expeditions, and the returns were satisfactory, though the collectors' personal expenses ran high.^ But new troubles followed to depress the fortunes of the town. The har- vests of 1594 and the three following years yielded badly. The prices of grain rapidly rose. The consequent distress was acute and recovery was slow. The town suffered addi- tional hardships owing to a royal proclamation of 1597, which forbade all but farmers who grew barley to brew malt between Lady Day and Michaelmas, and restric- tions were placed on ' the excessive buying of bailey for that use and purpose.' ^ Every householder of Stratford had long been in the habit of making malt ; ' servants were hired only to that purpose.' Urban employment was thus diminished ; while the domestic brewing of beer was seriously hindered in the interest of the farmer-maltsters to the grievous injury of the humbler townsfolk. Early in 1598 the ' dearness of corn ' at Stratford was reported to be ' beyond all other counties,' and riots threatened among the labouring people. The town council sought to meet the difficulty by ordering an inventory of the corn and malt in the borough. Shakespeare, who was described as a householder in Chapel Street, in which New Place stood, was reported to own the very substantial quantity of ten 1 Full details of the collections of 1594 appear in Stratford Council Book B, under dates September 24 and October 25. Richard Quiney obtained from some of the Colleges at Oxford the sum of 11. Os. lid. and he and Sadler with two others obtained from Northampton as much as 261. 10s. M. Documents describing the collections for both years 1594 and 1595 are in the Wheler Papers, vol. i. ff. 43-4. In the latter year Quiney and Sadler begged with success tlirough the chief towns of Norfolk and Suffolk and afterwards visited Lincoln and London ; but of the 151. 6s. which was received Quiney disbursed as much as 54i. 95. 4d. on expenses of travel. The journey lasted from October 18, 1595, to January 26, 159."-6, and horse-hire cost a shilling a day. In 1595 the corporation of Leicester gave to ' collectors of the town of Stratforde- upon-Haven 13s. 4rf. in regard of their loss by fire.' (W. Kelly, Notices illustrative of the Drama at Leicester, 1865, p. 224; Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson, 1905, iii. 320.) ' Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-9, pp. 314 seq. u 2 292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE quarters or eighty bushels of corn and malt. Only two inhabitants were credited with larger holdings.^ While Stratford was in the grip of such disasters Parliament met at Westminster in 1597 and imposed on the country fresh and formidable taxation. ^ The machi- nery of collection was soon set in motion and the impover- ished community of Stratford saw all hope of recovering its solvency shattered. Thereupon in January 1598 the council sent a delegate to London to represent to the Government the critical state of its affairs. The choice fell on Shakespeare's friend, Alderman Richard Qu^ey's Quiney, a draper of the town who had served mission to the ofhce of bailiff in 1592, and was re-elected in 1601, dying during his second term of office. Quiney and his family stood high in local esteem. His father Adrian Quiney, commonly described as ' a mercer,' was still living ; he had been bailiff in 1571. the year pre- ceding John Shakespeare's election. Quiney's mission de- tained him in London for the greater part of twelve months. He lodged at the Bell Inn in Carter Lane. Friends at Stratford constantly importuned Quiney by letter to enlist the influence of great men in the endeavour to obtain relief for the townsmen, but it was on Shakespeare that he was counselled to place his chief reliance. During his sojourn in the capital, Quiney was therefore in frequent intercourse with the dramatist. Besides securing an ' ease and dis- charge of such taxes and subsidies wherewith our town is likely to be charged,' he hoped to obtain from the Exchequer rehef for the local maltsters, and to raise a loan of money to meet the Corporation's current needs. ^ The return, dated February 4, 1597-S, is printed from the corpora- tion records by Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 58. The respective amounts of corn and malt are not distinguished save in the case of Thomas Badsey, who is credited with ' vj. quarters, bareley j. quarter.' The two neighbours of Shakespeare who possessed a larger store of corn and malt were ' Mr. Thomas Dyxon, xvij quarters,' and ' Mr. Aspinall, aboutes xj quarters.' Shakespeare's friend Julius Shaw owned ' vij. quarters.' 2 Three lay subsidies, six fifteenths, and three clerical subsidies were granted. THE PKACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 293 A further aim was to borrow money for the commercial enterprises of himself and his family. In fulfilling all these purposes Quiney and his friends at Stratford were sanguine of benefiting by Shakespeare's influence and prosperity. Quiney's most energetic local correspondent was his wife's brother, Abraham Sturley, an enterprising trades- man, who was bailiff of Stratford in 1596. He had gained at the Stratford grammar school a command of colloquial Latin and was prone to season his correspondence with Latin phrases. Sturley gave constant proof of his faith in Shakespeare's present and future fortune. On January 24, 1597-8, he wrote to Quiney from Stratford, of his 'great fear and doubt ' that the burgesses were ' by no means able to pay ' any of the taxes. He added a significant message in regard to Shakespeare's fiscal affairs : ' This is one special remembrance from [Adrian Quiney] our father's motion. It seeraeth by him that our countiyman, Mr. Shaksper, is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland ^ or other at Shottery, or near about us : he thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes. By the instructions you can give him thereof, and by the friends he can make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to shoot at, and not impossible to hit. It obtained would advance him indeed, and would do us much good.' After his manner Sturley reinforced the exhortation by a Latin rendering : ' Hoc movere, et quantum in te est permovere, ne necligas, hoc enim et sibi et nobis maximi erit momenti. Hie labor, hie opus esset eximie et gloriae et laudis sibi.'^ As far as Shottery, the native hamlet of Shakespeare's wife, was concerned, the suggestion was without effect ; but in the matter of the tithes Shakespeare soon took very practical steps.^ ^ A yardland was the technical name of a plot averaging between thirty and forty acres. ^ ' To urge this, and as far as in you lies to persist herein, neglect not ; for this wiU be of the greatest importance both to him and to us. Here pre-eminently would be a task, here would be a work of glory and praise for him.' ^ See p. 320 infra. 294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Some months later, on November 4, 1598, Sturley was still pursuing the campaign with undiminished vigour. Local ■^^ ^^^^ expressed anxiety to hear ' that our appeals countryman, Mr, Wm. Shak., would procure us money, which I will like of, as I shall hear when, and where, and how, and I pray let not go that occasion if it may sort to any indifferent [i.e. reasonable] conditions.' Neither the writer nor Richard Quiney, his brother- in-law, whom he was addressing, disguised their hope of personal advantage from the dramatist's afflu- Quiney's ence. Amid his public activities in London, Sh^k^ ^° Quiney appealed to Shakespeare for a loan of money wherewith to discharge pressing private debts. The letter, which is interspersed with references to Quiney's municipal mission, ran thus : ' Loveinge contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yovvr helpe with xxxli vppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, and I have especiall cawse. Yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeing me out of aU the debettes I owe in London, I thancke God, & muche quiet my mynde, which wolde nott be indebeted. [I am nowe towardes the Courte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my buysenes.] Yow shal nether loase creddytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge ; & nowe butt perswade yowrselfe soe, as I hope, & yow shall nott need to feare, butt, with all hartie thanckefullenes, I wyll holde my tyme, & content yowr ffrende, & yf we bargaine farther, yow shal be the paie-master yo\sTseLfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I committ thys [to] yo\vr care & hope of yowr helpe. [I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Co\ATte.] Haste. The Lorde be with yow & with vs all. Amen ! ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25 October, 1598. Yowts in all kyndenes, Ryc. Quyney.' Outside tlie letter was the superscription in Quiney's hand : ' To my loveinge good ffrend and contreymann Mr. Wm. Shackespere dehver thees.' THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 295 This document is preserved at Shakespeare's Birth- place and enjoys the distinction of being the only sur- viving letter which was delivered into Shakespeare's hand. Quiney, Shakespeare's would-be debtor, informed his family at Stratford of his application for mone}'-, and he soon received the sanguine message from his father Adrian : ' If you bargain with William Shakespeare, or receive money therefor, bring your money home that [i.e. as] you may.'^ It may justly be inferred that Shakespeare did not behe the confidence which his fellow -toAvnsmen reposed both in his good will towards them and in his powers of assistance. In due time Quiney's long-drawn mission was crowned on the leading issue Avith success. On January 27, 1598-9, a warrant was signed at Westminster by tlie Chancellor of the Exchequer releasing ' the ancient borough ' from the payment of the pending taxes on the ' reasonable and conscionable ' grounds of the recent fires. ^ This letter, which is undated, may be assigned to November or December 1598, and in the course of it Adrian Quiney urged his son to lay in a generous supj^ly of knitted stockings for which a large demand was reported in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Much of Abraham Sturley's and Richard Quiney's correspondence remains, with other notes respecting the town's claims for relief from the subsidy of 1598, among the archives at the Birthplace at Stratford. (Cf. Catalogue of Shakespeare's Birthplace, 1910, pp. 112-3.) In the Variorum Shake- speare, 1821, vol. ii. pp. 561 seq., Jlalone first printed four of Sturley's letters, of which one is wholly in Latin. Halliwell-Phillipps reprinted in his Outlines, ii. 57 seq., two of these letters dated respectively January 24, 1597-8, and November 4, 1598, from which citation is made above, together with the undated letter of Adrian Quiney to his son Richard. XV SHAKESPEARE'S FIN.4NCIAL RESOURCES The financial prosperity to which the correspondence just cited and the transactions immediately preceding it p. ^ . . point has been treated as one of the chief position mysteries of the dramatist's career, but the 1599. ^£gp^2^jeg g^j.Q gratuitous. A close study of the available information leaves practically nothing in Shakespeare's financial position which the contemporary conditions of theatrical life fail to explain. It was not until 1599, when Shakespeare co-operated in the erection of the Globe theatre, that he acquired any share in the profits of a playhouse. But his revenues as a successful dramatist and actor were by no means contemptible at an earlier date, although at a later period their dimensions greatly expanded. Shakespeare's gains in the capacity of dramatist formed through the first half of his professional career a smaller ^ ,. , , source of income than his wages as an actor. Dramatists . ^ fees until The highest price known to have been paid ^^^^' before 1599 to an author for a play by the manager of an acting company was 111. ; 61. was the lowest rate.^ A small additional gratuity — rarely exceed- ing ten shillings — was bestowed on a dramatist whose piece ^ The purchasing power of a pound during Shakespeai'e's prime may be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equiva- lent to that of five pounds of the present currency. The money value of corn then and now is nearly identical ; but other necessaries of life — meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like — were much cheaper in Shakespeare's day. In 1586 a leg of veal and a shoulder of mutton at Stratford each sold for tenpence, a loin of veal for a shilling, and a quarter of lamb for twopence more (Haliiwell, Cal. Stratford Records, p. 334). Threepence was the statutory price of a gallon of beer. 296 SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 297 on its first production was especially well received ; and the author was by custom allotted, by way of ' benefit,' a certain proportion of the receipts of the theatre on the production of a play for the second time.^ Other sums, amounting at times to as much as 41., were bestowed on the author for revising and altering an old play for a revival. The nineteen plays which may be set to Shakespeare's credit between 1591 and 1599, combined mth such revising work as fell to his lot during those nine years, cannot consequently have brought him less than 200^., or some 201. a year. Eight or nine of these plays were published during the period, but the pubhshers operated independently of the author, taking all the risks and, at the same time, all the receipts. The company usually forbade under heavy penalties the author's sale to a publisher of a play which had been acted. The publication of Shakespeare's plays in no way affected his monetary resources. But his friendly relations with the printer Field doubtless secured him, despite the absence of any copyright law, some part of the profits in the large and continuous sale of his narrative poems. At the same time the dedications of the poems, in accordance with contemporary custom, brought him a tangible reward. The pecuniary recognition which patrons accorded to dedicatory epistles varied greatly, and ranged from a fee of two or three pounds to a substantial pension. Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was con- spicuous for his generous gifts to men of letters who sought his good graces.^ ^ Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq., and ed. Greg, ii. 110 seq. ' Beneficial second days ' were reckoned among dramatists' sources of income until the Civil War. (Cf. ' Actors' Remonstrance,' 1643, in Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, 1869, p. 264.) After the Restoration the receipts of the third performance were given for the author's ' benefit.' ^ Cf. Malone's VarioruTn,\u. 164, and p. 197 supra. The ninth Earl of Northumberland gave to George Peele 3Z. in June 1593 on the presentation of a congratulatory poem {Hist. MSS. Comm. vi. App. p. 227), while to two literary mathematicians, Walter Warner and Thomas Harriot, he gave pensions of 40Z. and 120Z. a year respectively (Aubrey's Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 16). See Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 1909, pp. 26, 32. 298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE But it Avas as an actor that at an early date Shakespeare acquired a genuinely substantial and secure income. There is abundance of contemporary evidence to of^ctOTs^ show that the stage was for an efficient actor an assured avenue to comparative wealth. In 1590 Robert Greene describes in his tract entitled ' Never too Late ' a meeting with a player whom he took by his ' outward habit ' to be ' a gentleman of great living ' and a ' substantial man.' The plaj^er informed Greene that he had at the beginning of his career travelled on foot, bearing his theatrical properties on his back, but he prospered so rapidly that at the time of speaking ' his very share in playing apparel would not be sold for 200Z.' Among his neighbours ' where he dwelt ' he was reputed able ' at liis proper cost to build a windmill.' In the university play, 'The Return from Parnassus' (1601 ?), a poor student enviously complains of the wealth and position which a successful actor derived from his calling : England affords those glorious vagabonds, That carried erst their fardles on their backs, Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets, Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits. And pages to attend their masterships ; With mouthing words that better wits had framed. They piu-chase lands and now esquires are made.^ The travelling actors, who gave a performance at the bidding of the highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey in 1605, received from him no higher gratuity than forty shillings to be divided among them ; but the company was credited 1 Return from Parnassus, v. i. 10-16. Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]'s Laquei Sidiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed ' Theatrum Licencia ' : Cotta's become a player most men know, And will no longer take such toyling paines ; For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow And brings them damnable excessive gaines That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs, Since Greene's Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs. Greene's Tu Quoque was a popular comedy that had once been per- formed at Coiul; by the Queen's players, and ' Garlicke Jigs ' alluded derisively to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses. SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 299 with a confident anticipation of far more generous re- muneration in London. According to the author of ' The Pilgrimage to Parnassus ' (1601 ?), Shakespeare's colleague Will Kemp assured undergraduate aspirants to the stage : ' You haue happened vpon the most excellent vocation in the Avorld for money : they come north and south to bring it to our playhouse, and for honours, who of more report, then Dick Burhage and Will Kempe ? ' (iv. iii. 1826-32). The scale of the London actors' salaries rose rapidly during Shakespeare's career, and was graduated accord- ing to capacity and experience. A novice who received ten shillings a week in a London theatre in 1597 could count on twice that sum thirty years later, although the rates were always reduced by half when the company was touring the provinces. A pla5^er of the highest rank enjoyed in London in the generation following the dramatist's death an annual stipend of 1801} Shake- P , speare's emoluments as an actor, whether in Court per- London or the provinces, are not Kkely to have fallen before 1599 below 100/. Very substantial remuneration was also derived by his company from per- formances at Court or in noblemen's houses, and from that source his yearly revenues would receive an addition of something approaching lOl.^ ^ Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 291 ; documents of 1635 cited by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 310 seq. - Each piece acted before Queen Elizabeth at Court was awarded 10/., which was composed of a fixed official fee of 61. I3s. 4d. and of a special royal gratuity of 3/. 65. 8d. The number of actors among whom the money was divided was commonly few. In 1594 a sum of 20/. in payment of two plays was divided by Shakespeare and his two acting colleagues, Burbage and Kemp, each receiving 6/. 13s. 4d. apiece (see p. S7). Shakespeare's company performed six plays at Court during the Christmas festivities of 1596, and four eacli at those of 1597-8 and 1601-2. The fees for performances at private houses varied but were usually smaller than those at the royal palaces. In the play of Sir Thotnas More, probably written about 1598, a pro- fessional company of players received ten angels (i.e. 5/.) for a per- formance in a private mansion. {Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. Tucker Brooke, p. 407.) 300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Thus a sum approaching 150Z. (equal to 750?. of to-day) would be the poet's average annual revenue before 1599. Such a sum would be regarded as a verv large Shake- ^ o speare's income in a country town. According to the ^com^^ author of ' Ratseis Ghost,' the actor practised before in London a strict frugality. There seems no ^^' reason why Shakespeare should not have been able in 1597 to draw from his savings 601. wherewith to buy New Place. His resources might weU justify his fellow-townsmen's high opinion of his wealth in 1598, and suffice between 1597 and 1599 to meet his expenses, in rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and conducting various legal proceedings. But, according to an early and well-attested tradition, he had in the Earl of Southampton, to whom liis two narrative poems were dedicated, a wealthy and exceptionally generous patron, who on one occasion gave him as much as one tliousand pounds to enable ' him to go through with ' a jDurchase to which he had a mind. A munificent gift, added to profes- sional gains, leaves nothing unaccounted for in Shake- speare's financial position before 1599. From 1599 onwards Shakespeare's relations with theatrical enterprise assumed a different phase and his P^'^^^i^^y resoiu'ces grew materially. When speare's in 1598 the actor Richard Burbage and his thf GiS)e brother Cuthbert, who owned • The Theatre ' theatre in Shoreditcli, resolved to transfer the fabric to a new site in Southwark, they enlisted the personal co-operation and the financial support of Shake- speare and of four other prosperous acting colleagues, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Heminges. For a term of thirty-one years running from Christmas 1598 a large plot of land on the Bankside . was leased by the Burbages, in aUiance with Shakespeare and the four other actors. The Burbage brothers made themselves responsible for one half of the liabihty and the remaining five accepted joint responsibility for the other half. The deed was finally executed by the seven lessees SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 301 on February 21, 1598-9. The annual rental of the Bank- side site was 14^. 105., and on it Shakespeare and his partners straightway erected, at an outlay of some 5001. which was variously distributed among them, the new Globe theatre. Much timber from the dismantled Shoreditch theatre was incorporated in the new building, which was ready for opening in May. There is conclusive evidence that Shakespeare played a foremost part in both the initiation and the develop- ment of the new playhouse. On May 16, 1599, ^^the^site^ the Globe property was described, in a formal inventory of the estate of which it formed part, as ' in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others.'^ The dramatist's name was alone specified — a proof that his reputation excelled that of any of liis six partners. Some two years later the demise on October 12, 1601, of Nicholas Brend, then the ground landlord, who left an infant heir Matthew, compelled a resettlement of the estate, and the many inevitable legal documents described the tenants of the playhouse as ' Richard Burbage and William Shackespeare, Gent ' ; the greatest of his actor allies was thus joined with the dramatist. This description of the Globe tenancy was frequently repeated in legal instruments affecting the Brend property in later years. Although the formula ultimately received the addition of two other partners, Cuthbert Burbage and John Heminges, Shakespeare's name so long as the Globe survived was retained as one of the tenants in documents defining the tenancy. The estate records of Southwark thereby kept alive the memory of the dramatist in his capacity of theatrical shareholder,^ after he was laid in his grave. ^ This description appears in the ' inquisitio post mortem ' (dated May 12, 1599) of the property of the lately deceased Thomas Brend, who had owned the Bankside site and had left it to his son, Nicholas Brend. - The Globs theatre was demolished in 1644, twenty-eight years after the dramatist's death. See the newly discovered documents in the Public Record Office cited by Dr. C. W. Wallace in ' New Light on Shakespeare ' in The Times, April 30 and May 1, 1914. 302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE On the foundation of the Globe theatre the proprietor- ship was divided among the seven owners in ten shares. The fixed moiety which the two Burbages ''^h ^h^id°r" a-cciuired at the outset they or their representa- tives held nearly as long as the playhouse lasted. The other moiety was originally divided equally among Shakespeare and his four colleagues. There was at no point anything unusual in such an application of shareholding principles.^ It was quite customary for leading members of an acting company to acquire individually at the meridian of their careers a proprietary interest in the theatre wliich their company occupied. Hamlet claims, in the play scene (ni. ii. 293), that the success of his improvised tragedy deserved to ' get him a fellowship in a cry of players ' — evidence that a successful dramatist no less than a successful actor expected such a reward for a conspicuous effort.^ Shakespeare as both actor and play- ^ James Burbage had in 1576 allotted shares in the receipts of The Theatre to those who had advanced him capital ; but these investors were commercial men and their relations with the managerial owner differed from those subsisting between liis sons and the actors who held shares with them in the >?ankside playhouse. The Curtain theatre was also a shareholding concern, and actors in course of time figured among the proprietors ; shares in the Ciirtain were devised by will by the actors Thomas Pope (in 1603) and John Underwood (in 1624). (Cf. Collier's Lives of the Actors.) The property of the Whitefriars theatre (in 1608) was divided, like that of the Globe, into fixed moieties, each of which was distributed independently among a differing number of sharers (Xeiv Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pp. 271 seq.). Heminges produced evidence in the suit Keysar v. Heminges, Condell and others in the Court of Requests in 1608 (see pp. 310, 312 infra) to show that the moiety of the Globe which Shakespeare and he shared was converted at the outset into ' a joint tenancy ' which deprived the individual shareholder of any right to his share on his death or on his withdrawal from the company, and left it to be shared in that event by surviving shareholders, the last survivor thus obtaining the whole. But this legal device, if not revoked, was ignored, for the two sharing colleagues of Shakespeare who died earliest, Thomas Pope (in 1603) and Augustine Phillips (in 1605), both bequeathed their shares to their heirs. - Later litigation suggests that a successful actor often claimed as a right at one or other period of his career the apportionment of a share in the theatrical estate. Sometimes the share was accepted in lieu of wages. After Paris Garden on the Bankside was rebuilt SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAI. RESOURCES 303 wright of his company had an exceptionally strong claim to a proprietary interest, but contemporaries who were authors only are known to have enjoyed the same experi- ence. John Marston, the well-known dramatist, owned before 1608 a share in the Blackfriars theatre. Through the same period Michael Drayton, whose fame as a poet was greater than that as a dramatist, was, with hack playwrights like Lodowick (or Lording) Barry and John Mason, a shareholder in the Whitefriars theatre.^ The shareholders, whether they were actors or dramatists, or merely organising auxiliaries of the profession, were soon technically known as the ' housekeepers.' Actors of the company who held no shares were distinguished by the title of ' the hired actors ' or ' hirelings ' or ' journeymen,' and they ' usually bound themselves to serve the ' house- keepers ' for a term of years under heavy penalties for breach of their engagement.- as a theatre in 1613, the owners, Philip Henslowo and Jacob Meade, engaged for the Lady Elizabeth's company which was then occupying the stage an actor named Robert Dawes for three years ''for db at the rate of one whole share, according to the custom of players.' (Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 124; cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 139.) In other cases the share was paid for by the actor, who received a salary, in addition to his dividend. The greedy eyes which aspiring actors cast on theatrical shares is probably satirised in Troilus and Cressida, n. iii. 214, where Ulysses addresses to Ajax in his sullen pride the taunt ' 'A would have ten shares.'' In Dekkor and Webster's play of North- tvard Ho, 1607, Act iv. sc. i. (Dekker'a Works, iii. p. 45), 'a player' who is also ' a sharer ' is referred to as a person of great importance. In 1635 three junior members of Shakespeare's old company, Robert Benfieid, Hilliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, jointly petitioned the Lord Chamberlain of the day (the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery) for compulsory' authority to purchase of John Shanks, a fellow actor who had accumulated shares on a liberal scale, three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars. Their petition was granted. John Shanks had bought his five shares of Heminges's son, William, in 1633, for a total outlay of 506Z. (See documents in extenso in Halliwell- Phillipps's Outlines, i. 311-4.) ^ See documents from Public Record Office relating to a suit brought against the shareholders in the Whitefriars theatre in 1609 in New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1889-92, pp. 269 seq. ^ In Dekker's tract, A Knight's Conjuring, 1607 (Percy Soc. p. 65), a company of ' country players ' is said to ponsist of ' one sharer and the 304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Thus M^hen the Globe theatre opened the actor and dramatist Shakespeare was a ' housekeeper ' owning a tenth part of the estate. The share entitled Th|i^'story him to a tenth part of the profits, but also speare's made him responsible for a tenth part of the 1599-^1616. ground-rent and of the working expenses. Till his death — for some fifteen or sixteen years — he probably drew a substantial profit-income from the Globe venture. But the moiety of the property to which his holding belonged experienced some redivisions which modified from time to time the proportion of his receipts and liabilities. Within six months of the inauguration of the Globe, William Kemp, the great comic actor, who had just created the part of Dogberry in Shakespeare's ' Much Ado,' abandoned his single share, which was equivalent to a tenth part of the whole. Kemp resented, it has been alleged, a reproof from his colleagues for his practice of inventing comic ' gag.' However that may be, his holding was distributed in four equal parts among his former partners in the second moiety. For some years therefore Shakespeare owned a share and a quarter, or an eighth instead of a tenth part of the collective estate. The actor-shareholder Pope died in 1603 and Phillips two years later, and their interest was devised by them by will to their respective heirs who were not members of the profession. Subsequently fresh actors of note were, according to the recognised custom, suffered to parti- cipate anew in the second moiety, and Shakespeare's pro- portionate interest experienced modification accordingly. In 1610 Henry Condell, a prominent acting colleague, with whom Shakespeare's relations were soon as close as with Burbage and Heminges, was allotted a sixth part of the second moiety or a twelfth part of the whole property. Each of the four original holders consequently surrendered a corresponding fraction (one twenty-fourth) of his existing rest journeymen.' In the satiric play Histriomastix, 1610, ' hired men ' among the actors are sharply contrasted with ' sharers ' and ' master- sharers.' SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 305 proprietary right. A further proportionate decrease in Shakespeare's holding was effected on February 21, 1611-2, when a second actor of repute, William Ostler, the son- in-law of the actor and original sharer John Heminges, acquired a seventh part of the moiety, or a fourteenth part of the whole estate. Another new condition arose some sixteen months later. On June 29, 1613, the original Globe playhouse was burnt down, and a new building was erected on the same site at a cost of 1400^. To this outlay the shareholders were required to contribute in proportion to their holdings. But one of the proprietors, a man named John Witter, who had inherited the original interest of his dead father-in-law, the actor Phillips, was unable or declined to meet this liability, and Heminges, then the company^'s business manager, seized the forfeited share. Heminges's holding thus became twdce that of Shakespeare. No further reapportionment of the shares took place in Shakespeare's lifetime, so that his final interest in the Globe exceeded by very little a fourteenth part of the whole property.^ ^ Shakespeare would appear to have retained to the end in addition to his original share his quarter of Kemp's original allotment, but the successive partitions reduced both portions of his early allotment in the same degree. The subsequent history of Shakespeare's and his partners' shares in the Globe is clearly traceable from documentary evidence. Nathan Field, the actor-dramatist, has been wrongly claimed as a shareholder of the Globe after Shakespeare's death. He was clearly a ' hired ' member of the company for a few years, but probably retired in 1619, when, on Richard Burbage's death, Joseph Taylor, who succeeded to Burbage's chief roles, was admitted also in a hired capacity in spite of earlier litigation with Heminges, the manager. Field had certainly withdrawn by 1621 (E. K. Chambers, in Mod. Language Rev. iv. 395). Neither Field at anytime, nor Taylor at this period, was a ' housekeeper ' or shareholder. But such a dignity was bestowed within a short period of Shakespeare's death on John Underwood, a young actor of promise, who received an eighth part of the subsidiary moiety. This share, along with an eighth share at the Blackfriars, Underwood bequeathed to his children by will dated October 4, 1624 (Malone, iii. 214 ; Collier, p. 230 ; cf. Halh- well-Phillipps, i. 313). After Underwood's admission the Globe property was described as consisting of sixteen shares, eight remaining in the Bur- bages' hands. The whole of the second moiety was soon acquired by Heminges and Condell. The latter died in 1627 and the former in 1630. X 306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's pecuniary interest in the Blackfriars theatre was only created at a late period of his life, when his active career was nearing its close, Shake- ^^fj j^ig fuH enioyment of its benefit extended speare s share in the Over little more than five years (1610-6). The Som^fS Blackfriars playhouse became in 1597 the sole property of Richard Burbage, by inheritance from his father. Until 1608 the house was leased by Burbage to Henry Evans, the manager of the boys' com- pany which was known in Queen Elizabeth's reign as ' Children of the Chapel Royal ' and m the beginning of King James 's reign as ' Children of the Queen's Revels.' In the early autumn of 1608 Burbage recovered possession of the Blackfriars theatre owing to Evans's non-payment of rent under his lease. On August 9 of that year the great actor-owner divided this playhouse into seven shares, retaining one for himself, and allotting one each to Shake- speare, to his brother Cuthbert, to Heminges, CondeU, and William Sly, his acting colleagues ; the seventh and last Their two heirs, Heminges's son and Condell's widow, were credited in 1630 with owning respectively four shares apiece (see documents printed in Halliwell-PhLllipps, i. 311). There is reason to believe that it was to Heminges, the business man of the company and the last survivor of the original owners of the second moiety, that Shakespeare's holding, like that of Phillips, Ostler, and others, ultimatelj- came. After Heminges's death in 1630 his four shares were disposed of by his son and heir, William Heminges ; one was then divided between the actors, Taylor and Lowin, who acquired a second share from the Burbage moiety, wliich was then first encroached upon ; the remaining three of Heminges's four shares passed to a third actor, John Shanks, who soon made them over under compulsion to tliree junior actors, Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard. About the same time Condell's widow parted with two of her four shares to Taylor and Lowin, who thus came to hold four shares between them. Richard Burbage had died in 1619 and Cuthbert Burbage in 1636. Their legatees — Richard's widow and the daughters of Cuthbert — retained between them, till the company dissolved, seven shares, and Condell's widow two shares. The five actor-shareholders, Taylor, Lowin, Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard, outlived the demolition of the Globe in 1644 and were, together with the private persons who were legatees of the Biu'bages and of Condell, the last successors of Shakespeare and of the other original owners of the playhouse. SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 307 share was bestowed on Henry Evans, the dispossessed lessee. Until the close of the next year (1609) Evans's company of boy actors continued to occupy the Blackfriars stage intermittently, and Shakespeare and his six partners took no part in the management. It was only in January 1610 that full control of the Blackfriars theatre was assumed by Shakespeare, Burbage, and their five colleagues. Thence- forth the company of the Globe regularly appeared there during the winter seasons, and occasionally at other times. Shakespeare's seventh share in the Blackfriars now en- titled him to a seventh part of the receipts, but imposed as at the Globe a proportionate liability for the working expenses.^ During the last few years of his hfe Shake- speare thus enjoyed, in addition to his revenues as actor and dramatic author, an income as ' housekeeper ' or part proprietor of the two leading playhouses of the day. The first Globe theatre, a large and popular playhouse, accommodated some 1600 spectators, whose places cost them sums varying from a penny or twopence at the* ^^ to half-a-crowTi. The higher priced seats were Globe, comparatively few, and the theatre was probably 1599-1613. r J ^ r J closed on the average some 100 days a year while the company was resting, whether voluntarily or ^ There was no re-partition of the Blackfriars during Shakespeare's lifetime. But on Sly's early death (Aug. 13, 1608) his widow made over her husband's share to Burbage and he transferred it to the actor William Ostler on his marriage to Heminges's daughter (May 20, 1611). After Shakespeare's death John Underwood, a new actor, of youthful promise, was admitted (before 1624) as an eighth partner, and the pro- portional receipts and liabilities of each old proprietor were readjusted accordingly. Heminges, who lived till 1630, seems to have ultimately acquired four shares or half the whole, while the two Burbages and Condell's and Underwood's heirs retained one each. Of Heminges's four shares, two were after his death sold by his son William to the actors Taylor and Lowin respectively, and two to a third actor of a junior generation, John Shanks, who soon parted with them to the three players Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard. When the Blackfriars company was finally dissolved in the Civil Wars, Taylor and Lowin and these three actors held one moietj' and the other moiety was equally shared by legatees of the two Burbages, of Condell, and of Underwood. 308 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE compulsorily, or while it was touring the provinces. During the first years of the Globe's hfe the daily takings were not likely on a reasonable system of accountancy to exceed 15Z., nor the receipts in gross to reach more than 3000Z. a year.^ The working expenses, including ground-rent, cost of pro- perties, dramatists' andHcensers' fees, actors' salaries, main- tenance of the fabric, and the wages of attendants, might well absorb half the total receipts. On that supposition the residue to be divided among the shareholders would be no more than 1500Z. a jeax. When Shakespeare was ^ WTien at the end of the sixteenth centiiry Philip Henslowe was managing the Rose and Newington theatres, both small houses, and was probably entitled to less than a half of the takings, he often received as his individual share some 31. to 41. a performance at each house. On one occasion he pocketed as much as 61. 7s. 8d. (CoUier's Hist. iii. ; of. Dr. Wallace in Englische Siudien, xliii. pp. 360 seq.). The average takings at the Fortune theatre, which was of the same size as the Globe but enjoyed less popularity, have been estimated at 121. a day (Hens- lowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 135). It should, however, be pointed out that Henslowe's extant accounts which are at Dulwich are incomplete, and there is lack of agreement as to their interpretation {ibid. ii. pp. 110 seq. ; Dr. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. pp. 357 seq., and E. K. Chambers in Mod. Layig. Rev. iv. 489 seq.). Malone reckoned the receipts at both the Globe and the Blackfriars early in the seven- teenth century at no more than 9Z. a day ; but his calculation was based on a somewhat special set of accounts rendered for some five years (1628-34) subsequent to Shakespeare's death to Sir Henry Herbert, the licenser of plays, who was allowed an annual ' benefit ' at each theatre (Malone's Variorum, iii. 175 seq.). Herbert reckoned his ten ' benefits ' during the five years in question at sums varying between \ll. 10a. and \l. 5s., but Herbert's ' benefits ' involved conditions which were never quite normal. In Actors' Remotistrance (1643) the author, who clearly drew upon a long experience, vaguely estimated the jdeld of a share of each theatrical ' housekeeper ' who ' grew wealthy by actors' endeavours ' at from ' ten to thirty shillings ' for each performance, or from some lOOZ. to 300Z. a year. (See Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, 1869, p. 262.) It would seem that shareholders enjoyed some minor perquisites at the uheatre. Profits, which were sometimes made in the playhouse on wine, beer, ale, or tobacco, were reckoned among the assets of the ' housekeepers ' (New Shakspere Society Trans- actions, 1887-92, p. 271). The costumes, which at the chief Elizabethan theatres involved a heavy expense, were sold from time to time to smaller houses and often fetched as secondhand apparel substantial sums. ... . was at this epoch reaching its maximum of 180?. a year. Actor-shareholders were also allowed to take apprentices or pupils with Avhom they received premiums. Among Shakespeare's colleagues Richard Burbage and Augustine Phillips are both known to have had articled pupils. 2 The fees paid to dramatists for plays also rose rapidly * See p. 384 infra. " Collier's History, iii. 434. SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOUECES 315 in the early years of the seventeenth century, while the value of the author's ' benefits ' grew conspicuously -with Later ^^^ gro-\\ing vogue of the theatre. Additional income as payments on an enhanced scale were made, amatist. ^^^^ £^^ revisions of old dramas on their revival in the theatres. Play\^Tights of secondary rank came to receive a fixed yearly stipend from the company, but the leading dramatists apparently continued to draw remuneration piece by piece. The exceptional popularity of Shakespeare's work after 1599 gave him the full advan- tage of higher rates of pecuniary reward in all directions. The seventeen plays which were produced by him between that year and the close of his professional career could not have brought him less on an average than 251. each or some 4:001. in all — nearly 40?. a year, while the ' benefits ' and other supplementary dues of authorship may be pre- sumed to have added a further 201.^ Thus Shakespeare, during fourteen or fifteen years of the later period of his life, must have been earning at the g, . theatre a sum well exceeding 700/. a year in speare's money of the time. With so large a profes- income. g^^j^g^j income he could easily, with good management, have completed those purchases of houses and land at Stratford on which he laid out, between 1599 and 1613, a total sum of 970/., or an annual average of 70Z. These properties, it must be remembered, represented ^ In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation, charged for a drama as much as 251. (Alleyn Papers, ed. Collier, p. 65). A little later (in 1635) a hack-writer, Richard Brome, one of Ben Jonson's ' servants ' or disciples, contracted to write three plays a year for three years for the Salisbury Coxirt theatre at 155. a week together with author's ' benefits ' on the production of each work. In 1638 Brome was offered, for a further term of seven years, an increased salary of 20s. a week with ' benefits,' but a rival theatre, the Cockpit, made a more generous proposal, which the dramatist accepted instead. A dramatist of Brome's slender repute may thus be credited with earning as a playwright at his prime some 80Z. a year. In the Actors' Remon- strance, 1643, ' our ablest or dinar ie poets ' were credited with large incomes from their ' annual stipends and beneficial second days ' (Hazlitt's English Drama, 1869, p. 264). 316 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE investments, and he drew rent from most of them. Like the other well-to-do householders or landowners of the town, he traded, too, in agricultural produce. There is nothing inherently improbable in the statement of John Ward, the seventeenth-century vicar of Stratford, that the dramatist, in his last years, ' spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard,' although we may reasonably make allowance for some exaggeration in the round figures. Shakespeare's comparative affluence presents no feature which is unmatched in the current experience of the profession.^ Gifts from patrons may have continued occasionally to augment his resources, but his wealth can be satisfactorily assigned to better attested agencies. There is no ground for treating it as of mysterious origin. Between 1599 and 1611, while London remained Shake- speare's chief home and his financial position was assured, _ ,. he built up at Stratford the large landed estate Domestic ^ ° incident, inaugurated by his purchase of New Place. i6oi- . Early in the new century the death of his parents made some addition to his interest in house property. In 1601 his father died, being buried in Stratford church- yard on September 8. In spite of the decay of his fortune John Shakespeare retained much local esteem. Within a few months of the end the Town Council accepted from him suggestions for its conduct of a lawsuit which the lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville, was bringing against the bailiff and burgesses. Sir Edward made claim to a toll on wheat and barley entering the town.^ The old man appar- ently left no will, and the poet, as the eldest son, inlierited, subject to the widow's dower, the houses in Henley Street, the only portion of the property of the elder Shakespeare or of his wife which had not been alienated to creditors. Shakespeare's mother continued to reside in one of the 1 For a comparison of Shakespeare's estate at death with that of other actors and theatrical shareholders of the day, see p. 495. - Stratford-on-Avon Corporation Records, Miscdl. Documents, vol. V. No. 20. SHAKESPEAEE'S FINANCIAL RESOUECES 317 Henley Street houses until her death. She had been a widow for just seven years, and was buried beside her husband on September 9, 1608. The dramatist's presence in the town on the sad occasion of his mother's funeral enabled him to pay a valued compliment to the bailifiF of the town, one Henry Walker, a mercer of High Street, to whom a son had just been born. The dramatist stood godfather to the boy, who was baptised at the parish church, in the name of William, on October 19, 1608.^ The Henley Street tenement where the poet's mother died remained by his indulgence the home of his married sister, Mrs. Joan Hart, and of her family. "Whether his sister paid him rent is uncertain. But through the last years of his Hfe the dramatist enjoyed a modest return from a small part of the Henley Street property. A barn stood in the grounds behind the residence, and this Shakespeare leased to a substantial neighbour, Robert Johnson, keeper of the White Lion Inn. On the innkeeper's death in 1611 the unexpired lease of tlie building was valued at 201.^ On May 1, 1602, Shakespeare purchased for the im- posing sum of 320/. a large plot of 107 acres (or Formation ' ^^^^ yard-lands ') of arable land near his of the native place. The transaction brought the estate at Stratford, dramatist into close relation with men of 1601-10. wealth and local influence ; the vendors were William Combe and his nephew John Combe, members of a family which had settled at Stratford some sixty years before, and owned much land near the town and elsewhere. William Combe had entered the Middle ^ See p. 462 infra. Henry Walker was very active in municipal affairs, being chamberlain in 1603 and becoming an alderman soon after. He is to be distinguished from the Henry Walker ' citizen and minstrel of London ' of whom Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars in 1613. (See pp. 459 and 491 infra.) William Walker, son of the Stratford Henry Walker and Shakespeare's godson, proved, like his father, a useful citizen of Stratford, serving as chamberlain of the borough in 1644-5 William Walker, ' gent.,' his wife Frances, and many children were resident in the town in 1657. He was bmied at Stratford in ^March 1679-80. (Cf. Halliwell, Cal. Stratford Records, 129, 442, 465.) - The inventory of Robert Johnson's goods is described from the Stratford records by Mr. Richard Savage in Athenceum, August 29, 1908. 318 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Temple on October 19, 1571/ and long retained a set of chambers there ; but his career was identified with the city of Warwick, where he acquired a large property, and was held in high esteem.^ He also owned the important estate of Alvechurch Park in Worcestershire. In the con- veyance of the land to Shakespeare in 1602 he is described as ' of Warwick in the county of Warwick, esquire.' ^ His nephew John Combe of ' Old Stratford in the county aforesaid, gentleman,' the joint vendor of the property, was a wealthy Stratford resident, with whom Shake- speare was soon to enjoy much personal intercourse. The conveyance of the Combes' land was delivered, in the poet's absence, to his brother Gilbert, ' to the use of the within named William Shakespeare,' in the presence of the poet's friends Anthony and John Nash and three other neighbours.* A less imposing purchase quickly followed. ^ Middle Temple Records — Minutes of Parliament, i. 181, where William Combe is described as ' second son of John Combe late of Stratford upon Avon esquire, deceased.' ^ Black Book of Waricick, ed. Kemp, pp. 406-8. * William Combe of Warwick married after 1596 Jane widow of Sir John Puckering, lord keeper of the great seal (or lord chancellor), but left no issue. He was M.P. for the town of Warwick in 1592-3 and for the county in 1597, was Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1608 and died two years later. His will, which was signed on Sept. 29, 1610, was proved on June 1, 1611. The original is preserved at Somerset House (P.C.C. 62 Wood). Most of his property was left to his widow, ' Lady Jane Pucker- ing.' His executors were his ' cosins John Combe and William Combe of Stratforde, esquires ' [respectively liis nephew and grand-nephew] but probate was only granted to William, son of his nephew Thomas. He left lOl. to the poor of Stratford, as well as 201. to the poor of Warwick. The will of his nephew Thomas Combe, John Combe's brother (P.C.C. Dorset 1.3), establishes the relationship between WiUiam Combe of Warwick and John Combe of Stratford. Thomas Combe, who predeceased his 'good uncle William Combe ' in Jan. l(i08-9, made him in the first draft of his wiU an executor along with his brother John and his son WiUiam. William Combe of Warwick is invariably confused with his grand-nephew and Thomas Combe's son Wilham, who, born at Stratford in 1586, was closely associated with Shakespeare after 1614. See p. 474 infra. The dramatist was not brought into personal relation with the elder William Combe, save over the sales of land in 1602 and subsequent years. * Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19. The original deed is at Shake- speare's Birthplace (Cat. No. 158). SHAKESPEARE^S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 319 On September 28, 1602, at a court baron of the manor of Rowington, one Walter Getley transferred to the poet a cottage and a quarter of an acre of land which were situated at Chapel Lane (then called ' Walkers Streete alias Dead Lane ') adjoining the lower grounds of his residence of New Place. These properties were held practically in fee-simple at the annual rental of 25. 6d. The Manor of Rowington, of which numerous other Shake- speares were tenants, had been granted by Queen Eliza- beth to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Leicester's brother, who held it until his death in 1589. The Earl's widow and third wife, Anne Countess of Warwick, remained Lady of the Manor until her death on February 9, 1603-4, when the property fully reverted to the Crown. The Countess of Warwick was thus Lady of the Manor when Shakespeare purchased the property in Chapel Lane. It appears from the manorial roll that Shakespeare did not attend the manorial court held at Rowington on the day fixed for the transfer of tlie property, and it was conse- quently stipulated then that the estate should remain in the hands of the Lady of the Manor until the dramatist com- pleted the purchase in person. At a later period he made the brief journey and was admitted to the copyhold, settling the remainder on his two daughters in fee, although the manorial custom (as it proved) only allowed the elder child to succeed to the property.^ Subsequently Shakespeare negotiated a further purchase from the two Combes of 20 acres of meadow or pasture land, to add to the 107 of arable land which he had acquired of the same owners in 1602. In April 1610 he paid to the vendors, the uncle and nephew William and John Combe, a fine of lOOZ. in respect of the two purchases.^ Shakespeare had thus become a substantial landowner in his native place. A yet larger investment was mean- while in contemplation. As early as 1598 Abraham 1 See p. 490 infra. Cf. HalliweU-Phillipps, ii. 19 ; Dr. C. W. Wallace in The Times, May 8, 1915, and Mrs. Stopes in Athenceum, June 5, 1915. 2 HalUwell-Pliillipps, ii. 25 (from P.R.O. Feet of Fines, Wamick, Trin. 8 Jac. I, 1610, Skin 15). 320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Sturley, the Stratford citizen who deeply interested himself in Shakespeare's material fortunes, had sug- ~, gested that the dramatist should purchase the Stratford tithes of Stratford. The advice was taken ^^' after an interval of seven years. On July 24, 1605, Shakespeare bought for 440Z. of Ralph Huband, owner of the well-known Warwickshire manor of Ipsley, a lease of a ' moiety ' of ' the tithes ' of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. Although loosely called a ' moiety,' Shakespeare's share of ' the tithes ' ■ — a miscellaneous property including houses, cottages, and fields — scarcely amounted to a quarter. The whole had formed part of the forfeited ecclesiastical estate of The College, and had been leased by the officers of that institu- tion in 1544 for a term of ninety- two years to one WiUiam Barker, of Sonning, Berkshire. On the dissolution of The College by act of parliament in 1553, the property was devised to the Stratford Corporation on the expiration of the lease. Barker soon sub-leased the tithe estate, and when Shakespeare acquired his ' moiety ' the property was divided among over thirty local owners in allotments of various dimensions. Shakespeare's holding, of which the ninety-two years' lease had thirty-one years to run, had come into the hands of the vendor Ralph Huband on the recent death of his brother Sir John Huband, who had acquired it of Barker. It far exceeded in value all the other shares save one, and it was estimated to yield 60Z. a year. But all the shares were heavily encumbered. Shakespeare's ' moiety ' was subject to a rent of 111. to the corporation, who were the reversionarj^ owners of the tithe-estate, while John Barker, heir of the first lessee, claimed dues of 51. a year. According to the harsh terms of the sub-leases, any failure on the part of any of the sub-lessees to pay Barker a prescribed contribution forfeited to him the entire property. The investment thus brought Shakespeare, under the most favourable circumstances, no higher income than 38?., and the refusal of his fellow-shareholders to acknowledge the full extent of their habihty to Barker constantly imperilled all SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 321 the poet's rights. If he wished to retain his interest in the event of the others' default, he was required to pay their debts. After 1609 Shakespeare entered a suit in the Court of Chancery to determine the exact responsibihties of all the tithe-owners. With him were joined Richard Lane, of Alveston on the Avon near Stratford, Thomas Greene, the lawyer who was town-clerk of Stratford from 1610 to 1617 and claimed to be the dramatist's cousin,^ and tlie rest of the more responsible sharers. In 1612 Shakespeare and his friends presented a bill of complaint to Lord- Chancellor Ellesmere. The judgment has not come to light, but an accommodation, whereby the poet was fully secured in his holding, was clearly reached. His investment in the tithes proved fruitful of legal embarrassments, but the property descended to his heirs.- Shakespeare inherited his father's love of litigation, and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business relations. In Marcli 1600 ' William Shackspere ' sued Recovery /- it , of small Jolin Clayton ' Yeoman, of Wellington in Bed- debts, fordshire, in the Court of Queen's Bench, for the repajmient of a debt of 7/.^ The plaintiff's attorney was Thomas Awdley, and on the failure of the defendant to put in an appearance, judgment was given for the plaintiff with 20s. costs. There is nothing to identify John Clayton's creditor with the dramatist, nor is it easy to explain why he should have lent money to a Bedford- shire yeoman.* It is beyond question however that at Stratford Shakespeare, like many of his fellow-townsmen, wa,s a frequent suitor in the local court of record. WTiile 1 See p. 476 infra. " Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 19 seq. ; ^iTS.^to^Gs'B Shakespeare^ a Environ- ment, 82-4. 3 The record is in the Public Record Office (Coram Bege Roll, Easter 42 Eliz. No. 1361, Mem. 293). Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 185, mentions the litigation without giving any authority. I owe the clue to the kindness of Mrs. Stopes. * Shakespeare's granddaughter. Lady Bernard, in her will claimed as her ' cousin ' a Bedfordshire ' gent.,' ' Thomas Welles, of Carleton ' in that county, but there is no clue to the kinship ; see p. 515. Y 322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE he was not averse from advancing money to impecunious neighbours, he was punctual and pertinacious in demands for repayment. In July 1604 he sued for debt in the local court Philip Rogers, the apothecary of the town. Like most of the larger householders at Stratford, Shake- speare found means of evading the restrictions on the domestic manufacture of malt which proved efficacious in the case of the humbler toAVTisfolk. Affluent residents indeed often rendered their poorer neighbours the service of selling to them their superfluities. In such conditions Shakespeare's servants dehvered to the apothecary Rogers at fortnightly intervals between March 27 and Msby 30, 1604, twenty pecks or five bushels of malt in varying small quantities for domestic use. The supply Avas valued at 11. 19s. lOd. On June 25 the apothecary, who was usually in pecuniary difficulties, borrowed 25. of Shake- speare's household. Later in the summer he repaid 6s. and in Michaelmas terra the dramatist sued him for the balance of the account 11. 15s. lOd.^ During 1608 and 1609 he Avas at law with another feUow-townsman, John Addenbroke. On February 15, 1609, the dramatist, who seems to have been legally represented on this occasion by his kinsman, Thomas Greene,^ obtained judgment from 1 The Latin statement of claim — ' Shexpere versus Rogers ' — ^which was filed by Shakespeare's attorney William Tetherton, is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace. (See Catalogue, No. 114.) There is no clue to any later stage of the suit, at the hearing of which Shakespeare was disabled by contemporary procedure from giving evidence on his own behalf. Similar actions were taken against local purchasers of small quantities of malt during the period by Shakespeare's wealthy local friends, Mr. Jolin Combe, ilr. John Sadler, Mr. Anthony Nash and others. The grounds on which Shakespeare's identification with Rogers's creditor has been questioned are fallacious. (See Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Family, p. 121 ; The Times, Maj' 15, 1915 ; and The Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1915.) Philip Rogers, the apothecary, was something of a professional student. In the same year as Shakespeare sued him, he sued a fellow-townsman, Valentine Palmes, or Palmer, for detaining a copy of Gale's Certain Workes of Chirurgery, which Rogers valued at 10s. . costs, but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren. Shakespeare avenged himself by- proceeding against Thomas Horneby, who had acted as the absconding debtor's bail.^ Horneby had succeeded his father Richard Horneby on his death in 1606 as a master blacksmith in Henley Street, and was one of the smaller sharers in the tithes. The family forge lay near Shakespeare's Birthplace. Plaintiff and defendant in this last prosecution had been playmates in childhood and they had some common interests in adult life. But litigation among the residents of Stratford showed scant regard for social ties, and in his handling of practical affairs Shake- speare caught the prevailing spint of rigour. 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80, where all the extant documents in the archives of the Stratford Court bearing on the suits against both Rogers and Addenbroke are printed in full. T 2 XVI MATURITY OF GENIUS With an inconsistency that is more apparent than real, the astute business transactions of these years (1597- 1611) synchronise with the production of Literary > j x work in Shakespeare's noblest literary work — of his ^^^^' most sustained and serious efforts in comedy, tragedy, and romance. In 1599, after abandoning English history with ' Henry V,' he addressed himself to the composition of his three most perfect essays in romantic comedy — ' Much Ado about Nothing,' ' As You Like It,' and ' Twelfth Night.' There is everj^ likelihood that all three were quickly drafted within the year. The component parts of the trilogy are closely linked one to another in manner of construction. In each play Shakespeare works over a more or less serious poetic romance by another hand, and with the romantic theme he intervveaves original episodes of genial irony or broad comedy which are convincingly interpreted by characters wholly of his own invention. Much penetrating reflection on grave ethical issues is fused with the spirited portrayal of varied comic phases of humanity. In aU three comedies, moreover, the dramatist presents youthful womanhood in the fascinating guise which is instinct at once with gaiety and tenderness ; while the plays are interspersed with melodious songs which enrich the dominant note of harmony. To this versatile trilogy there attaches an equable charm which is scarcely rivalled elsewhere in Shakespearean drama. The christening of each piece — ' Much Ado about Nothing,' ' As You Like It,' ' Twelfth 324 MATURITY OF GENIUS 325 Night ' — seems to exliibit the author in a peculiarly buoyant vein. Although proverbial and disjointed phrases often served at the time as titles of drama, it is not easy to parallel the lack of obvious relevance in the name of ' Twelfth Night ' or the merely ironic pertinence of ' Much Ado about Nothing ' or the careless insolence of the phrase ' As You Like It,' which is re-echoed in ' What You Will,' the alternative designation of ' Twelfth Night.' ' Much Ado ' was probably the earliest of the three pieces and may well have been wTitten in the early summer 'M hAd *^^ 1599. The sombre romance of Hero and about ^ Claudio, which is the main theme, was of ^^' Italian oiigin. The story, before Shakespeare handled it, had passed from foreign into EngUsh hterature, and had been turned to theatrical uses in England. Bandello, to whose work Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists made very frequent recourse, first narrated at length in his ' Novelle ' (No. xxii.) the sad experiences of the slandered heroine, whom he christened Fenicia, and Bandello's story was translated into French in Belleforest's _, ' Les Histoires Tragiques.' Meanwhile Ariosto Italian grafted the tale on his epic of ' Orlando Furioso ' source. (canto v), christening the injured bride Ginevra and her affianced lover Ariodante. While Shakespeare was still a youth at Stratford-on-Avon, Ariosto's version was dramatised in English. According to the accounts of the Court revels, ' A Historic of Ariodante and Ginevra ' was shown ' before her Majestie on Shrove Tuesdaie [Feb. 12] at night ' in 1583, the actors being boy-scholars of Merchant Taylors' School, under the direction of their capable headmaster, Richard Mulcaster. ^ In 1591, moreover, Ariosto's account was angHcised by Sir John Harington in his spirited translation of ' Orlando J^^ Furioso,' and Spenser wrought a variation of Ariosto's 1 This dramatised ' Historie ' has not sxirvived in print or manuscript. Cf. Wallace, Evolution of the English Drama, p. 209 ; Cunningham's Revels (Shakespeare Society), p. 177 ; Malone'a Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 406. 326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE rendering of the tale into his ' Faerie Queene,' renaming the heroine Claribell (Bk. II. canto iv). To one or other of the many Enghsh adaptations of Ariosto Shakespeare may have owed some stimukis, but he drew substantial aid alone from Bandello or from his French translator. All the serious episodes of the play come from the Italia-n novel. Yet it was not the wrongs of the Italian heroine nor the villain}'' of her enemies which gave Shakespeare's genius in ' Much Ado ' its chief oj^portunity. speare's The drama owes its life to his creation of two embellish- subsidiary threads of comic interest — the bril- ments. . -^ liant encounters of Benedick and Beatrice, and the blunders of the watchmen Dogberry and Verges, who are very plausible caricatures of Elizabethan constables. All these characters won from the first triumphant success on the stage. The popular comic actor William Kemp created the role of Dogberry before he left the newly opened Globe theatre, while Richard Cowlej^ a comedian of repute, appeared as Verges. In the early editions — in both the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 — these actors' names are prefixed hy a copyist's error to some of the speeches allotted to the two cha- racters (act IV. scene ii). ' As You Like It,' which quickl}^ follovred ' Much Ado ' in the autumn of 1599, is a dramatic adaptation of Thomas Lodge's pastoral romance ' Rosalynde, Euphues UkeTt".^ Golden Legacie ' (1590), which, although of English authorshij), has many ItaUan affinities. None of Shakespeare's comedies breathes a more placid temper or catches more faithfully the spirit of the pas- toral type of drama wliich Tasso in ' Aminta,' and Guarini in ' Pastor Fido,' had lately created not for Italy alone but for France and England as well. The dramatist follows Mdthout serious modification the novelist's guidance in his treatment of the stor3\ But he significantly rejects Lodge's amorphous name of Rosader for his hero and substitutes that of Orlando after the hero of Ariosto's MATURITY OF GENIUS 327 Italian epic.i While the main conventions of Lodge's pastoral setting are loyally accepted, the action is touched by Shakespeare with a fresh and graphic vitality. Lodge's forest of Ardennes, which is the chief scene of his story, belonged to Flanders, but Shakespeare added to Lodge's Flemish background some features suggestive of the Warwickshire woodland of Arden which lay near Strat- ford-on-Avon. Another source than Lodge's pastoral tale, too, gave Shakespeare hvely hints for the scene of Orlando's fight with Charles the WVestler, and for Touchstone's fantastic description of the diverse shapes of a he which prompted duelling. Both these passages were largely inspired by a book called ' Saviolo's Prac- tise,' a manual of the art of self-defence, which appeared in 1595 ^from the pen of Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian fencing-master in the service of the Earl of Essex. In more effective fashion Shakespeare strengthened the human fibre of Lodge's narrative by original additions to the dramatis personce. Very significant is his intro- duction of three new characters, tAvo of whom, Jaques „, and Touchstone, are incisive critics of life, The original each from his own point of view, while the c arac ers. ^i^jj-d, Audrey, supplies broadly comic relief to the play's comprehensive study of the feminine tem- perament. Jaques is a finished study of the meditative cynic who has enjoyed much worldly experience and dissipation. Touchstone is the most carefully elaborated of all Shakespeare's professional wits. The hoyden 1 Shakespeare directly borrowed his hero's name from The Historie of Orlando Furioso (written about 1591 and published in 1594), a crude dramatic version of Ariosto's epic by Robert Greene, Shakespeare's early foe. In Greene's play, as in Ariosto's poem (canto xxiii.) much space is devoted to the love poetry inscribed on ' the barks of divers trees ' by the hero's rival in the affections of Angelica, or by the lady herself. It is the sight of these amorous inscriptions, which in both Greene's play and the Italian poem unseats Orlando's reason, and thus introduces the main motive. Lodge makes much in his novel of Eosa- lynde of his lover Rosader's ' writing on trees.' The change of name to Orlando in As You Like It is thus easily accounted for. 328 WILLIAM SHxVKESPEARE Audrey adds zest to the brilliant and humorous portrayal of Rosalind, Celia, and Phoebe, varied types of youthful womanhood which Shakespeare perfected from Lodge's sketches. A new play was commonly produced at Queen Ehza- beth's Court each Twelfth Night. On the title-pages of the first editions of two of Lyly's comedies, 'jTweifth 'Campaspe' (1584) and ' IVIidas ' (1591), pro- minence was given to the fact that each was performed before Queen Elizabeth on ' twelfe day at night.' The main title of Shakespeare's piece has no refe- rence to the plot, and doubtless commemorates the fact that it was designed for the Twelfth Night of 1599-1600, when Shakespeare's company is known to have entertained the Sovereign with a play.^ The alternative title of ' What You Will' repeats the easy levit}' of ' As You Like It.'^ Several passages in the text support the conjecture that the play was ready for production at the turn of the year 1599-1600. ' The new map with the augmenta- tion of the Indies,' spoken of by Maria (in. ii. 86), was a respectful reference to the great map of the world or ' hydrographical description ' which seems to have been engraved in 1599, and first disclosed the full extent of recent explorations of the East and West Indies — in the New World and the Old.^ The tune of the beautiful 1 Shakespeare's company also performed at Court on Twelfth Night, 1595-6, 1596-7, 1597-8, and 1600-1, but the collateral evidence points to Twelfth Night of the year 1599-1600 as the date of the production of Shakespeare's piece (Cunninghams Revels, x;sxii-iii ; Mod. Lang. Rev. ii. 9 seq.) ^ The dramatist Marston paid Shakespeare the flattery of imitation by also naming a comedy ' What You Will ' which was acted in 1601, although it was first published in 1607. ^ The map is very occasionally found in copies of the second edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, 1598-1600. It has been repro- duced in The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator, ed Captain A. H. Markham, Hakluyt Soc. 1880. (See Sir. Coote's note on the New Map, bcxxv-xcv), and again in Hakluyt's Principal Navi- gatioiis (Glasgow, 1903, vol. i. ad fin.) A paper, by Mr. Coote, on Shakespeare's mention of the map appears in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1877-9, pt. i. pp. 88-100. MATUEITY OF GENIUS 329 lyric ' mistress mine, where are you roaming ' was published also in 1599 in a popular music book — Thomas Morley's ' First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by divers exquisite authors.' There is no reason to deprive Shake- speare of the authorship of the words ; but it is plain that they were accessible to the musical composer before the year 1599 closed.^ Like ' The Comedy of Errors,' ' Twelfth Night ' enjoyed early in its career the experience of production at an Inn of Court. On February 2, 1601-2, it was acted by Shakespeare's company at The per- Middle Temple Hall, and John Manningham, lormance -^ in Middle a student of the Middle Temple, who was Feb!^2^i^or.' present, described the performance in his diary, which forms an entertaining medley of current experiences.- Manningham wTote that the piece ' called Twelfe Night or what you will ' which he witnessed in the Hall of his Inn was ' much hke " The Comedy of Errors" or " Menechmi " in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called " Inganni." ' The diarist especially commends the tricks played on Malvolio and was much diverted by the steward's ' gesture in smiling.' The Middle Temple diarist was justified in crediting the main plot of ' Twelfth Night ' with Itahan affinities. ~, Mistakes due to the strong resemblance between The " Italian a young man and his sister, whom circum- ^ ° ■ stance has led to assume the disguise of a boy, were a common theme of Italian drama and romance, and several Italian authors had made the disguised girl the embarrassed centre of complex love-adventures. But ^ Robert Jones included in The first booke oj Songes and Ayres (1600) the words and music of a feeble song 'Farewell, dear love, since I must needs be gone,' of which Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (n. iii.) sings snatches of the first stanza. Robert Jones was collecting popular ' ditties ' ' by divers gentlemen.' Sir Toby Belch borrows in the play several specimens of the same kind, which were already of old standing. ^ Diary (Camden Soc. p. 18), ed. by John Bruce from Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 5353. The Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play of Twelfth Night in IVIiddle Temple Hall on February 10, 11, and 12, 1897. 330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the Middle Temple student does inadequate justice to the pre-Shakespearean treatment of Viola's fortunes either in Italian literature or on the Italian stage. No less than three Italian comedies of the sixteenth cen- tury adumbrate the experience of Shakespeare's heroine. Two of these Italian plays are called ' Gli Inganni ' (The Deceits) , a title which Manningham cites ; but both these pieces owe much to an earher and more famous Italian play entitled ' Gli Ingannati ' (The Deceived) ,^ which anticipates Shakespeare's serious plot in ' Twelfth Night ' more closely than any successor. ' GU Ingannati ' was , p.. both acted and published at Siena as early as Ingannati ' 1531 and it subsequently enjoyed a world-wide vogue, which neither of the two ' Gli Inganni ' shared.^ ' Gli Ingannati ' alone was repeatedly reprinted, adapted, or translated, not merely in Italy but in France, Spain, and England, long before Shakespeare set to work on ' Twelfth Night.' ^ 1 Of the two pieces which are christened Gli Inganni, the earlier, by Nicolo Secchi, was 'recitata in Milano I'anno 1547' and seems to have been first printed in Florence in 1562. There a girl Genevra in the disguise of a boy Ruberto provokes the love of a lady called Portia, and herself falls in love with her master Gostanzo ; Portia in the end voluntarily transfers her affections to Genevra's twin brother For- tunato, who is indistinguishable from his sister in appearance. The second GU Inganni is by one Curzio Gonzaga and was printed at Venice in 1592. This piece closely follows the lines of its predecessor ; but the disguised heroine assumes the masculine name of Cesare, which is significantly like that of Cesario, Viola's adopted name in Twelfth Night. - Secchi's Gli Inganni was known in France where Pierre de Larivey, the well-known writer of comedies, converted it into Les Tromperies, but Gli Ingannati alono had an European repute. ^ A French version of Gli Ingannati by Charles Etienne, called at first Le Sacrifice and afterwards Les Abusez, went through more than one edition (1543, 1549, 1556). A Spanish version — Comedia de los Engaiia- dos — by Lope de Rueda appeared at Valencia in 1567. On Etienne's French version of the piece an English scholar at the end of the sixteenth century based a Latin play entitled Laclia (after the character adumbrat- ing Shakespeare's Viola). This piece was performed at Queens' College, Cambridge, before the Earl of Essex and other distinguished visitors, on March 1, 1595. The MS. of Lcelia is at Lambeth, and was first edited by Prof. G. C. Moore Smith in 1910. MATURITY OF GENIUS 331 There is no room for doubt that, whatever the points of similarity with either of the two ' Gli Inganni,' the Itahan comedy of ' Gli Ingannati ' is the ultimate '^Nicuoia^ source of the leading theme of Shakespeare's ' Twelfth Night.' But it is improbable that the poet depended on the original text of the drama. He may have gathered an occasional hint from subsequent dramatic adaptations in Italian, French, or Latin. Yet it is difficult to question that he mainly relied for the plot of ' Twelfth Night ' on one of the prose tales which were directly based upon the piimal Italian play. Bandello's Italian romance of ' Nicuola,' which first appeared in his ' Novelle ' (ii. 36) in 1554, is a very literal rendering of the fable of ' Gli Ingannati,' and this novel was accessible to the Elizal^ethans not only in the original Italian but in the popular French translation of Bandello's work, ' Les Histoires Tragiques,' by Fran9ois de Belleforest (Paris, 15S0, No. 63). Cinthio, another Italian novelist of the sixteenth century, also narrated the dramatic fable in his collection of stories called ' Hecatommithi ' (v. 8) which appeared in 1565. It was from Cinthio, with some help from Bandello, that Barnabe Riche the Elizabethan author drew his English tale of ' Apolonius and Silla ' (]581).i Either the Frenchman Belleforest or the Englishman Riche furnished Shakespeare with his first knowledge of the history of Orsino, Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, although the dramatist gave these characters names which they had not borne previously. In any case the Enghsh playwright was handling one of the most familiar tales in the range of sixteenth-century fiction, and was thereby identifying himself beyond risk of mis- conception with the European spirit of contemporary romance. 1 In Riche's tale the adventures of Apolonius, Silla, Julina, and Silvio anticipate respectively those of Shakespeare's Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian. Riche makes Julina (Olivia) a rich widow, and Manningham speaks of Olivia as a widow, a possible indication that Shakespeare, who presents her as a spinster in the extant comedy, gave her in a first draft the status with which Riche credited her. 332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare invests the romantic pathos of Viola's and her companions' amorous experiences, which the genius of _, Italy created, with his own poetic glamour, and dramatis as in ' Much Ado ' and ' As You Like It,' he persona. qualifies the languorous tones of the well-worn tale by grafting on his scene an entirely new group of characters whose idiosyncrasies give his brisk, humorous faculty varied play. The steward Malvolio, whose ludi- crous gravity and vanity take almost a tragic hue as the comedy advances, owes nothing to outside suggestion, while the mirthful portrayals of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Teste, and Maria the witty serving-maid, all bear signal witness to the originality and fertility of Shakespeare's comic powers in the energetic era of his maturity. No attempt was made at the time of composition to print ' Twelfth Night,' which may justly be reckoned the flower of Shakespeare's efforts in romantic publication comedy. The play was first published in the of the pirst FoHo of 1623. But publishers made an trilogy. . . ^ endeavour to issue its two associates Much Ado ' and ' As You Like It,' while the pieces were winning theu' first commendations on the stage. The acting com- pany who owned the plays would seem to have placed obstacles in the way of both publications, and in the case of ' As You Like It ' the protest took practical effect. In the early autumn of 1600 appHcation was made to the Stationers' Company to license both ' Much Ado ' and ' As You Like It ' with two other plays which Shakespeare's company had lately produced, his own ' Henry V ' and Ben Jonson's ' Every Man in his Humour.' But on August 4 the Stationers' Company ordered the issue of the four plays ' to be staled.' ^ Twenty days passed and on August 24 ' Much Ado ' was again entered in the Stationers' Register by the pubUshers Andrew Wise and WilUam Aspley, ^ Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 37. MATURITY OF GENIUS 333 together with another Shakespearean piece, ' The Second Part of Henry IV.' ^ The comedy was then duly printed and pubUshed. There are clear indications that the first printers of ' Much Ado ' had access through the good offices of an indulgent actor to an authentic playhouse copy. The original Quarto was reproduced in the First Folio with a few additional corrections which had been made for stage purposes. Of the four plays which were ' staied ' on August 4, 1600, only ' As You Like It ' failed to surmount the barriers which were then placed in the way of its publication. There is no issue of ' As You Like It ' earlier than that in the First Folio. Shakespeare's activity knew no pause and a little later in the year (1600) which saw the production of 'Twelfth , , .. Night ' he made an experiment in a path of Caesar,' drama which he had previously neglected, ^ °°' although it had been already well trodden by others. Shakespeare now drew for the first time the plot of a tragedy from Plutarch's ' Lives.' On Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar, supplemented by the memoirs of Brutus and of Mark Antony, he based his next dramatic venture, the tragedy of ' Julius Caesar.' This was the earliest of his Roman plays and it preceded by many years his two other Roman tragedies — ' Antony and Cleopatra ' and ' Coriolanus.' ^ The piece was first published in the Folio of 1623. Internal evidence alone determines the date of composition. The characterisation is signally virile ; the metrical features hover between early regularity and late irregularity, and the deliberate employment of prose, ^ Stationers'' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 170. ^ Although Titus Andronicus professes to piesent incident of late Roman history, the plot lacks aU historical foundation. In any case Shakespeare had small responsibility for that piece. His second narra- tive poem, Lucrece, is securely based, however, on a legend of early Roman history and attests Shakespeare's youthful interest in the subject. 334 WILLIASl SHAKESPEAEE notably in the studied oratorj'' of Brutus in the great scene of the Forum, would seem to anticipate at no long interval the like artistic usage of 'Hamlet.' All these traits suggest a date of composition at the midmost point of the dramatist's career, and the autumn of 1600 satisfactorily answers the conditions of the problem. ^ In his choice alike of theme and of authority Shake- speare adds in ' Julius Caesar ' one more striking proof of his , ., eager readiness to follow in the wake of workers Popularity " of the in drama abroad as well as at home. Plutarch's ^^^' biographies furnished the dramatists of Italy, France, and England with much tragic material from the middle years of the sixteenth century, and the fortunes of Julius Casar in the Greek biographer's pages had chiefly attracted their energy .^ 1 John Weever's mention in his Mirror of Martyrs (1601) of the speeches of Brutus and Antony in the Forum and of their effects on ' the many-headed multitude ' is commonly held to echo Shakespeare's play. But Weever's slender reference to the topic may as well have been drawn from Plutarch or Appian, and may have been framed without knowledge of Shakespeare's spirited eloquence. Nothing more definite can be deduced from Drayton's introduction into his Barons' Wars (1603) of lines depicting the character of his hero Mortimer, which are held to reflect Antony's elegy on Brutus {Julius Ccesar, v. v. 73-6). Both passages attribute perfection in man to a mixture of the elements in due proportion — a reflection which was a commonplace of con- temporary literature. - Marc-Antoine Miiret, professor of the college of Guienne at Bor- deaux, based on Plutarch's life of Cffisar a Latin tragedy, which was acted by his students (the essayist Montaigne among them) in 1544. Sixteen years later Jacques Grevin, then a pupil at the College of Beauvais, wrote for presentation by his fellow -collegians a tragedy on the same topic cast in Senecan mould in rhj'ming French verse. Grevin's tragedy acquired a wide reputation and inaugurated some traditions in the dramatic treatment of Caesar's death, which Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously developed. Grevin sought his material in Appian's Romance Historice as well as in Plutarch. Robert Gamier, the chief French writer of tragedy at the end of the sixteenth century, intro- duced Csesar, Mark Antony, Cassius, and other of Shakespeare's charac- ters, into his tragedy of Cornelie (Pompey's widow). Mark Antony is also the leading personage in Garnier's two other Roman tragedies, Porcie (Portia, Brutus's widow) and Marc Antoine. In 1594 an Italian MATUEITY OF GENIUS 335 At times Shakespeare's predecessors sought additional information about the Dictator in the ' Roman histories ' of the Alexandrine Greek Appian, and there The debt ^j.g gigns that Shakespeare, too, may have had occasional recourse to that work, which was readily accessible in an English version published as early as 1578. But Plutarch, whose ' Lives ' first raised biography to the level of a literary art, was Shakespeare's main guide. The Greek biographies were at his hand in an English garb, which was worthy of the original language. Sir Thbmas North's noble translation was first printed in London by the Huguenot stationer, Vautrollier, in 1579, and was reissued by Shakespeare's fellow-townsman and Vautrollier's successor Richard Field in 1595.^ Shake- speare's character of Theseus in ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' may owe something to Plutarch's account of that hero. But there is no proof of any thorough study of Plutarch on Shakespeare's part before he planned his drama of ' Julius Caesar.' There he follo^\ ed the details of Plutarch's story in North's rendering with an even closer fidelity than when Holinshed's Chronicle guided him in his English history plays. But Shake- speare is never a slavish disciple. With characteristic origi- nality he interweaves Plutarch's biographies of Brutus and Antony with his life of Csesar. Brutus 's fate rather than Csesar's is his leading concern. Under the vivifying force of Shakespeare's genius Plutarch's personages and facts finally acquire a glow of dramatic fire which is all the dramatist's own gift. dramatist, Orlando Pescetti, published at Verona II Cesare Tragoedia (2nd ed. 1604) which like Grevin's work is based on both Plutarch and Appian and anticipates at many points, probably by accident, Shake- speare's treatment. See Dr. Alexander Boecker's A Probable Italian Source of Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar (New York, 1913). ^ North followed the French version of Jacques Amyot (Paris, 1559), which made Plutarch's Lives a standard French work. Montaigne, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Plutarch, called Amyot's rendering ' our breviary.' 336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare plainly hints at the wide dissemination of Caesar's tragic story through dramatic literature when he makes Cassius prophesy, in presence of sp^ai-e's ^^^ dictator's bleeding corpse (iii. i. 111-114), and other plays about How many ages hence Caesar. Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er In states unborn and accents yet unknown I — a speech to which Brutus adds the comment How many times shall Csesar bleed in sport ! In ' Hamlet' (iii, ii. 108 seq.) Shakespeare makes Polonius recall how he played the part of Julius Csesar ' at the University ' and how he was killed by Brutus in the Capitol. Yet, in spite of his recognition of pre-existing dramatic literature on the subject, no clear trace is found in Shake- speare's tragedy of indebtedness to any of his dramatic forerunners. In England Caesar's struggle with Pompey had been pressed into the earlier service of drama quite as frequently as his overthrow, and that episode in Caesar's life Shakespeare well-nigh ignored.^ Shakespeare's piece is a penetrating study of political life. Brutus, whose family traditions compel in him devotion to the cause of political liberty, allows sp(fare's himself to be persuaded to head a revolution ; political but his gentle and philosophic temper engenders scruples of conscience which spell failure in the stormy crisis. In Cassius, the man of action, an honest 1 Most of the early English plays on Cassar's history are lost. Such was the fate of a play called Julius Ccesar acted before Queen Elizabeth in February 1562 (Machyn's Diary) ; of TJie History of Ccesar and Pompey which was popular in London about 1580 (Gosson's Plays Confuted, 1581) ; of a Latin drama called CcBsar Interfectus by Richard Eades, which was acted at Christ Church. Oxford, in 1582. and may be the university piece cited by Polonius ; of Ccesar and Pompey (' Seser and Pompie ') which was produced by Henslowe and the Admiral's company on November 8. 1594, and of the second part of Ccesar (the 2 pte of Sesore) which was similarly produced on June 18. 1595. Surviving plays of the epoch in which Csesar figures were produced after Shakespeare's tragedy, e.g. WiUiam Alexander, Earl of Stirling's Juliics Ccesar (1604) and George Chapman's Ccesar and Pompey (1614 ?) MATUEITY OF GENIUS 337 abhorrence of political tyranny is freed from any punc- tilious sense of honour. Casca, the third conspirator, is an aristocratic liberal pohtician with a breezy contempt for the mob. Mark Antony, the pleasure-seeker, is metamor- phosed into a statesman — decisive and eloquent — by the shock of the murder of Csesar, his uncle and benefactor. The death and funeral of Caesar form the central episode of the tragedy, and no previous dramatist pursued the story beyond the outcry of the Roman populace against Caesar's assassins. Shakespeare alone among playwrights carries on the historic episode to the defeat and suicide of the leading conspirators at the battle of Philippi. The peril of di-amatic antichmax in relegating Caesar's assassination to the middle distance is subtly averted in „. ^ Shakespeare's play by the double and some- conception what ironical process of belittling, on the one o aesar. hand, Csesar's stature in his last days of life, and of magnifying, on the other hand, the spu-itual influence of his name after death. The dramatist divests Csesar of most of his heroic attributes ; his dominant personality is seen to be sinking from the outset under the burden of physical and moral weakness. Yet his exalted posthumous fame supplies an efficient motive for the scenes which succeed his death. ' Thou art mighty yet, thy spirit walks abroad,' the words which spring to the lips of the dying Brutus, supply the key to the dramatic equipoise, which Shakespeare maintains to the end. The fifth act, which presents the battle of Philippi in progress, proves ineffective on the stage, but the reader never relaxes his interest in the fortunes of the vanquished Brutus, whose death is the catastrophe. The notable success of ' Julius Caesar ' in the theatre is strongly corroborated by an attempt on the part of a rival manager to supplant it in public favour A rival i^y another piece on the same popular theme. In 1602 Henslowe brought together a band of distinguished authors, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and others, and com- 338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE missioned them to produce ' a book called " Caesar's Fall." ' The manager advanced to the syndicate the sum of 51. on May 22, 1602. Nothing else is knoAvn of the design. The theatrical world was meantime gravely disturbed by critical incidents which only remotely involved literary _. T J issues. While ' Julius Caesar ' was winning its The Lord J^ Mayor and first laurels on the stage, the fortunes of the London theatres were menaced by two mani- festations of unreasoning prejudice on the part of the public. The earlier manifestation, although speciously serious, was in effect innocuous. The Puritans of the City had long agitated for the suppression of all theatrical performances, whether in London or its environs. But the Privy Council stood by the plaj^ers and declined to sanction the restrictive by-laws for which the Corporation from time to time pressed. The flames of the municipal agitation had burnt briskly, if without genuine effect, on the eve of Shakespeare's arrival in London. The outcry gradually subsided, although the puritan suspicions were not dead. After some years of comparative inaction the civic authorities inaugurated at the end of L596 a fresh and embittered campaign against the players. The puritanic Lord Cobham then entered on his short tenure of office as Lord Chamberlain. His predecessor Lord Hunsdon was a warm friend of the actors, and until his death the staunch patron of Shakespeare's company. In the autumn of 1596 Thomas Nashe, the dramatist and satirist, sadly wrote to a friend : ' The players are piteously persecuted by the lord mayor and aldermen, and however in their old Lord's [the late Lord Hansdon's] time they thought their state settled, 'tis noAv so uncertain they cannot build upon it.' The melancholy prophecy soon seemed on perilous point of fulfilment. On July 28, 1597, the Privy Council, contrary to its wonted policy, ordered, at the Lord Mayor's invitation, all playhouses Avithin a radius of three miles to be pulled down. Happily the Council was in no earnest mood. It suffered its drastic order to remain a dead letter, and soon bestowed on the profession fresh MATUKITY OF GENIUS 339 marks of favour. Next year (February 19, 1597-8) the Council specifically acknowledged the rights and privi- leges of the Lord Admiral's and the Lord Chamberlain's companies/ and when on July 19, 1598, the vestry of St. Saviour's parish, Southwark, repeated the City Cor- poration's protest and urged the Council to suppress the playhouses on the Bankside, a deaf ear was turned officially to the appeal. The Master of the Revels merely joined with two prominent members of the Council, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, in an endeavour to soften the vestry's heart, not by attacking the ofiFending theatres, but by arranging with the Southwark players to contribute to the support of the poor of the parish. The Council appeared to be delibe- rately trending paths of conciliation or mediation in the best interest of the players. None the less the renewed agitation of the Lord Mayor and his colleagues failed to abate, and in the summer of 1600 the Privy Council seemed to threaten under pressure a reversal of its com- placent policy. On June 22, 1600, the Council issued to the officers of the Corporation of London and to the justices of the peace of Middlesex and Surrey an order restraining ' the immoderate use and The Privy company of playhouses and players.' Two Order, acting companies — the Lord Admiral's and the i6oo. ^*' Lord Chamberlain's — were alone to be suffered to perform in London, and only two playhouses were to be allowed to continue work — one in Middlesex (the ' Fortune ' in Cripplegate, Alleyn's new playhouse then in course of building), and the other in Surrey (the ' Globe ' on the Bankside) . The ' Curtain ' was to be pulled down. All stage plays were to be forbidden ' in any common inn for public assembly in or near about the city,' and the prohibition was interpreted to extend to the 1 Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-8, p. 327. The two companies were described as alone entitled to perform at Court, and ' a third company ' (which was not more distinctly named) was warned against encroaching on their rights. z 2 340 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' private ' playhouses of the Blackfriars and St. PauFs, which were occupied by boy actors. The two privileged companies were, moreover, only to perform twice a week, and their theatres were to be closed on the Sabbath day, during Lent, and in times of ' extraordinary sickness ' in or about the City.^ The contemplated restrictions were likely, if carried out, to deprive a large number of actors of emploj^ment, to drive others into the provinces M'here their livelihood was always precarious, and seriously to fetter the activities of the few actors who were specially excepted from the bulk of the new regulations. The decree promised Shakespeare's company a certain relief from comj)etition, but the price was high. Not only was their regular employment to be arbitrarily diminished, but they were to make a humiliating submission to the vexatious prejudices of a narrow clique. Genuine alarm was created in the profession bj'- the Privy Council's action ; but fortunately the sound and fury came to little. What was the intention of the Council must remain matter for conjecture. It is certain that neither the municipal authorities nor the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex, to all of whom the Privy Council addressed itself, made any attempt to put the stringent decree into operation, and the Privy Council was quite ready to let it sleep. All the London theatres that were already in existence went on their \vay unchecked. The inn-yards continued to be applied to theatrical uses. The London companies saw no decrease in their numbers, and performances followed one another day after day without interruption. But so solemn a threat of legal interference bred for a time anxiety in the profession, and the year 1601 was a period of suspense among men of Shakespeare's calling.'^ 1 Ads of the Privy Council, 1599-1600, pp. 395-8. - On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex e;spressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the number of playhouses in accordance vith ' our order set down and MATURITY OF GENIUS 341 More calamitous was a temporary reverse of fortune which Shakespeare's company, in common with some other companies of adult actors, suffered, as between ^ ^^^^ ^6^^' century dawned, at the hands, not of adult and fanatical enemies of the drama, but of play- boy actors. 1-1 mi goers who were its avowed supporters, ihe company of boy actors recruited from the choristers of the Chapel Royal, and known as ' the Children of the Chapel,' was in the autumn of 1600 firmly installed at the new theatre in Blackfriars, and near the same date a second company of boy actors, which was formed of the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral, after a five years' interval re- opened its private playhouse within the cathedial precincts. Through the winter season of 1600-1 the fortunes of the veterans, .who occupied the public or ' common ' stages of London, were put in jeopardy by the extravagant out- burst of public favour evoked by the performances of the two companies of boys. Dramatists of the first rank placed their services at the boys' disposal. Ben Jonson and George Chapman, whose dramatic Mork Avas rich in comic strength, were active in the service of the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars theatre, Avhile John Marston, a playwright who promised to excel in romantic tragedy, allowed his earliest and best plaj's to be interpreted for the first time by the ' Children of Paules.' The boy actors included in their ranks at the time performers of ex- ceptional promise. Three of the Chapel Children, Nathaniel Field, William Ostler, and John Underwood, who won their first laurels during the memorable season of 1600-1, joined in manhood Shakespeare's company, while a fourth child prescribed about a year and a half since.' But nothing followed during Shakespeare's lifetime, and no more was heard officially of the Council's order until 1619, when the Corporation of London called atten- tion to its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 307-9. They are well digested in Dr. V. C. Gildersleeve's Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1908, pp. 178 seq.) 342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE actor of the period, Salatliiel Pavy, who died prematurely, still lives in Ben Jonson's pathetic elegy, where the poet plays with the fancy that the boy rendered old men's parts so perfectly as to give Death a wTong impression of his true age. Many references in plays of the period bear witness to the loss of popular favour and of pecuniary profit which the boys' triumphs cost their professional speare seniors. Ben Jonson, in his ' Poetaster,' puts winter ^^ ^^® mouth of One of his characters ' Histrio, season the actor,' the statement that the winter of 1600-1 ' hath made us all poorer than so many starved snakes.' ' Nobody,' adds the disconsolate player, ' comes at us, not a gentleman nor a .' ^ The most graphic account of the actors' misfortunes figures in Shakespeare's tragedy of ' Hamlet,' which was first sent to press in an imperfect draft in the year 1602.2 ' The tragedians of the Citj^' in whom Hamlet was ' wont to take such delight,' are represented as visiting Elsinore on a provincial tour. Hamlet expresses surprise that they should ' travel,' seeing that the town brought actors greater ' reputation and profit ' than the country. But the explanation is offered : Y' faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away. For the principal publike audience that Came to them [i.e. the old actors] are turned to private playes And to the humours of children.^ ^ Poetaster, ed. MaUory, iv. iii. 345-7. - Only the First Folio Version of 1623 suppUes Shakespeare's full comment on the subject : see act n. sc. ii. 348-394. Both the First and the Second Quarto notice the misfortunes of the ' tragedians of the city ' very briefly. To the ten lines which the quartos furnish the First Folio adds twenty. ^ These lines are peculiar to the First Quarto. In the Second Quarto and in the First Folio they are replaced by the sentence ' I think their [i.e. the old actors'] inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.' Many commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the ' late innovation ' of the later Hamlet texts as the order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two and otherwise prejudicing the actors' freedom ; but that order was MATURITY OF GENIUS 343 The public no longer (Hamlet learns) held the actors in ' the same estimation ' as in former years. There was no falUng off in their efficiency, but they were out-matched by ' an aery [i.e. nest] of children, little eyases' [i.e. young hawks], who dominated the theatrical world, and mono- polised public applause. ' These are now the fashion,' the dramatist lamented, and he made the common players' forfeiture of popularity the text of a reflection on the fickleness of public taste : Hamlet. Do the boys carry it away ? RosENCRANTZ. Ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too. Hamlet. It is not very strange ; for my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little.^ The difficulties of the actors in the public theatres were gred,tly accentuated by a heated controversy which burnt very briskly in 1601 among the drama- shie^in^'^^ tists, and involved Shalcespeare's company Jonson's and to some extent Shakespeare himself, contro- The boys' notoriety and success were signally nq8-i6oi increased by personal dissensions among the playwrights. As early as 1598 John Marston made a sharp attack on Ben Jonson's literary style, opening the campaign in his satire entitled ' The Scourge of Villanie,' and quickly developing it in his play of ' Histriomastix.' Jonson soon retaliated by lampoon- ing Marston and his friends on the stage. Each pro- tagonist was at the time a newcomer in the literary field, and the charges which they brought against each other were no more heinous than that of penning ' fustian ' or of inventing awkward neologisms. Yet they quickly managed to divide the playAVTights of the day into two hostile camps, and public interest fastened on their recri- never put in force, and in no way affected the actors' fortunes. The First Quarto text makes it clear that ' the late innovation ' to which the players' misfortunes were assigned in the later texts was the ' noveltie ' of the boys' performances. ' Private plays ' were plays at private theatres — the class of playhouse to which both the Blackfriars and Paul's theatres belonged (see p. 66). 1 Hamlet, n. ii. 349-64. 344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE minations. Ben Jonson's range of attack came to cover dramatists, actors, courtiers, or citizens who either failed to declare themselves on his side or professed indifference to the quarrel. This war of personalities raged confusedly for three years, reaching its climax in 1601. Shake- speare's company and both the companies of the boys were pressed by one or the other party into the strife, and the intervention of the Children of the Chapel gave them an immense advantage over the occupants of rival stages. In the initial phases of the campaign Shakespeare's company lent Jonson its countenance. The assault on , ^T. ^ . Jonson which Marston inaugurated in his book Histno- =^ mastix,' of satires, he continued with the aid of friends ^^^ ■ in the play involving varied personal issues called ' Histriomastix or the Player Whipt.' ^ The St. Paul's boys, who were producing Marston's serious dramatic work at the time, were apparently responsible for the early performances of this lumbering piece of irony. Jonson weightily retorted in 1599 in his comprehensive social satire of ' Every Man out of his Humour,' and out^oPhis^^ Shakespeare's company so far identified them- Humour,' selves with the sensitive dramatist's cause as 1599- to stage that comedy at the Globe theatre. ' Every Man out of his Humour ' proved the first of four pieces of artillery which Jonson brought into the field. But Shakespeare's company was reluctant to be dragged further at Jonson's heel, and it was the boys at Blackfriars who interpreted the rest of his controversial dramas to the ^ This rambling review of the vices of contemporary society derided not onl}' Ben Jonson's arrogance (in the character of Chrisoganus) but also adult actors generally with their patrons and their authors. Some of the shafts were calculated to disparage Shakespeare's company, the best organised troop on the stage. The earliest extant edition of Histriomastix is dated 1610. But internal evidence and a reference which Jonson made to it in his Every Man out of his Humour, 1599 (Act m. sc. i.), show it to have been written in 1598. It is reprinted in Simpson's School of Shukspere, ii. 1 seq. MATURITY OF GENIUS 345 huge delight of playgoers who welcomed the paradox of hearing Ben Jonson's acrid humour on childish tongues. In his more or less conventional comedy of intrigue called ' The Case is Altered,' which the boys brought out in 1599, four subsidiary characters, Antonio Balladino^ the pageant poet, Juniper a cobbler, Peter Onion groom of the hall, and Pacue a French page, were justly suspected of travestying identifiable men of letters. A year later, in 1600, Jonson won a more pronounced success when he caused the Children of the Chapel to pro- R^^l?'^' duce at Blackfriars his 'Cynthia's Revels,' an encyclopaedic satire on literary fashions and on the public taste of the day. There, under the Greek names of Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, and Anaides, various literary foes were paraded as laughing-stocks. An ' Induction ' to the play takes the shape of a pretended quarrel amongst three of the actor- children as to who shall speak the prologue. ' By this light,' the third child remarks Avith mocking self-depreciation, ' I wonder that any man is so mad to come and see these rascally tits play here ' ^ ; but it is certain that the sting of Jonson's taunts lost nothing on the boys' precocious lips. There is some ground for assuming that the Children . j^^j^ of Paul's replied without delaj'- to ' Cynthia's Drum's Revels ' in an anonymous piece called ' Jack ment,' 1601. Drum's Entertainment, or the Comedie of ^ Antonio Balladino is a plain caricatvire of Anthony !Manday, the industrious playwright, and, although Marston's features are not recog- nised with certainty in any of the other ludicrous dramatis personce. The Case is Altered was held to score heavily in Jonson's favour in his fight with Marston. According to the title-page of the first edition (1609) the piece was ' sundry times acted by the Children of the Blackfriers.' It seems to have been the earliest piece of the kind which was entrusted to the Chapel boys' tender mercies. 2 The author, in the person of Crites, one of the characters, shrewdly argues that fantastic vanity and futile self-conceit are the springs of all fashionable drama and poetry. Incidental compliments to Queen Elizabeth, who was represented as presiding over the Kterary revels in her familiar poetic name of Cjmthia, increased the play's vogue. 346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Pasquil,' where a story of intrigue is interwoven with mordant parodies of Jonson's foibles.^ Meanwhile the rumour spread that Marston and Dekker, who deemed themselves specially maligned by 'Cynthia's Revels,' were planning a bolder revenge at the Globe theatre. Jonson forestalled the blow by completing within fifteen weeks a fourth 'comical satire' which he called 'Poetaster, or his arraignment.' This new attack, which 'i6o!f*^^^^^'' ^^® ^°y^ delivered at Blackfriars early in 1601, was framed in a classical mould. ^ The main theme ^ caustically presents the poet Horace as pestered by the importunities of the poetaster Crispinus and his friend Demetrius. Horace finally arraigned his two tormentors before Caesar on a charge of defamation, in that they had * taxed ' him falsely of ' self-love, arrogancy, impudence, railing, and filching by translation.' Virgil was summoned by Caesar to sit with other Latin poets in judgment on these ^ In ' The Introduction ' of Jack Drum's Entertainment, one of the children, parodying Jonson's manner, promises the audience not to torment your listening eares With mouldie fopperies of stale Poetrie, XJnpossible drie mustie fictions. Elsewhere in the piece emphasis is laid on the gentility and refined manners of the audience for which the St. Paul's boys catered, as com- pared with the roughness and boorishness of the frequenters of the adult actors' theatres. The success of the ' cliildren ' is assigned to that advantage rather than to their histrionic superiority over the men. Jack Drum's Entertainment , which was published in 1601. would seem to be the work of a critical onlooker of the pending controversy who detected faults on both sides, but deemed Jonson the cliief oSender. See reprint in Simpson's School of Shakspere, ii. 199 et passim. - In the words of the prologue, Jonson chose Augiistus Caesar's times When wit and arts were at their height in Rome ; To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits did not want Detractors then or practisers against them. ^ A subsidiary thread of interest was innocuously wrought out of the familiar tale of the poet Ovid's amours and exile, while brisk sketches were furnished of Ovid's literary contemporaries, TibuUus, Propertius, and other well-known Roman writers. MATURITY OF GENIUS 347 accusations. A triumphant acquittal of Horace follows, and the respondents are convicted of malicious libel. Demetrius admits the offence, while Crispinus, who is sen- tenced to drink a dose of hellebore, vomits with Rabe- laisian realism a multitude of cacophonous words to which he has given literary currency. Although the identifica- tion of many of the personages of the ' Poetaster ' is open to question, Jonson himself, Marston, and Dekker stand confessed beneath the names respectively of Horace, Crispinus, and Demetrius. In subsidiary scenes Histrio, an adult actor, was held up to scornful ridicule and else- where lawyers were roughly handled. Ben Jonson put little restraint on his temper, and the boys once again proved equal to their interpretative functions. Clumsy yet effective retaliation was provided without delay by the players of Shakespeare's company. They ' answered ' Jonson and his ' company of horrible Dekker's • Satiro- blackfryers ' ' at their own weapons,' by pro- mastix,' ducing after a brief interval a violent piece of 1601. " ^ detraction' by Dekker called ' Satiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humourous Poet,' ^ Amid an irrelevant story of romantic intrigue all the polemical extravagances of the ' Poetaster ' were here parodied at Jonson's expense with brutal coarseness. Jonson's per- sonal appearance and habits were offensively analysed, and he was ultimately crowned with a garland of stinging nettles. 'The Children of Paul's' — who were the per- sistent rivals of the Chapel Children — eagerly aided the men actors in this strenuous endeavour to bring Jonson to book. ' Satiromastix ' was produced in the private playhouse of Paul's soon after it appeared at the Globe.^ The issue of this wide publicity was happier than might ^ This piece was licensed for the press on November 11, 1601, which was probably near the date of its first performance. The epilogue makes a refeience to ' this cold weather.' ^ On the title-page of the first edition (1602) Satiromastix is stated to have ' bin presented publikely by the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants and priuately by the children of Paules.' 348 ^VILLIAM SHAKESPEARE have been expected. The foolish and freakish controversy- received its deathblow. Jonson peacefully accepted a warning from the authorities to refrain from of the" further hostihties, and his opponents readily dramatists' came to terms with him. He was soon ^\Titin^ feud. for Shakespeare's company a new tragedy, ' Sejanus ' (1603), in which Shakespeare played a part. Marston, in dignified Latin prose, dedicated to him his next play, ' The Malcontent ' (1604), and the two gladiators thereupon joined forces with Chapman in the composition of a third piece, ' Eastward Ho ' (1605).^ The most material effect of ' that terrible poeto- machia ' (to use Dekker's language) was to stimulate the vogue of the children. Playgoers took sides and t^he^^'^^ ^ ^lie struggle, and their attention was for the ' poeto- season of 1600-1 riveted, to the exclusion of macnia. . topics more germane to then* provmce, on the actors' and dramatists' boisterous war of personalities.^ 1 Much ingenuity has been expended on the interpretation of the many personal allusions scattered broadcast through the various plays in which the dramatic poets fought out their battle. Save in the few- instances which are cited above, the application of the personal gibes is rarel}' quite certain. Ben Jonson would seem at times to have inten- tionally disguised his aim by crediting one or other subsidiary character in his plays with traits belonging to more persons than one. Nor did he confine his attack to dramatists. He hit out freely at men who had offended him in all ranks and professions. The meaning of the con- troversial sallies has been very thoroughly discussed in ilr. Josiah H. Penniman's The War of the Theatres (Series in Philology, Literature and Archajology, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1897, iv. 3) and in his introduction to Ben Jonson's Poetaster and Dekker's Satiromastix in Belles-Lettres Series (1912), as well as by H. C. Hart in Xotes and Queries, Series IX. vols. 11 and 12 'passim, and in Roscoe A. Small's 'The Stage Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the so-called Poetasters' in Forschungen zur Englischen Sprache und Litteratur, 1899. Useful reprints of the rare plays Histrio)7iastix (159S) and Jack Druin's Entertainment (1601) figure in Simpson's School of Shakspere, but the conclusion regarding the poets' warfare reached in the prefatory comments there is not very convincing. " Tliroughout the year 1601 offensive personalities seem to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly MATURITY OF GENIUS 349 It is not easy to trace Shakespeare's personal course of action through this ' war of high words ' — Avhich he stigmatised in ' Hamlet ' as a ' throwing about of brains.' It is only on collateral incidents of the petty strife that he has left any clearly expressed view, but he obviously resented the enlistment of the children in the campaign of virulence. In his play of ' Hamlet ' the Shake- dramatist protested vigorously against the speare s ■"■ . . references abusive speech which Jonson and his satellites struggle. contrived that the children's mouths should level at the men actors of * the common stages,' or public theatres. Rosencrantz declared that the children 'so berattle [i.e. assaQ] the common stages — so they call them — that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither ' [i.e. to the public theatres].^ Pursuing the theme, Hamlet pointed out that the writers Avho encouraged the precocious insolence of the ' child actors ' did them a poor service, because when the boys should reach men's estate they would run the risk, if they continued on the stage, of the levelled by the actors of the ' Curtain ' at gentlemen ' of good desert and quality, and directed the magistrates to examine all plaj's before they were produced ' (Privy Council Register). Jonson subsequently issued an ' apologetical dialogue ' (appended to printed copies of the Poetaster), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players of the common stages : Kow for the players 'tis true I tax'd them, And yet but some, and those so sparingly As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned, Had they but had the wit or conscience To think well of themselves. But impotent they Thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe ; And much good do it them. What they have done against me I am not moved with, if it gave them meat Or got them clothes, 'tis well ; that was their end, Only amongst them I am sorry for Some better natures by the rest so drawn To run in that vile line. ^ Jonson in Cynthia's Revels (Induction) applies the term ' common stages ' to the public theatres. ' Goosequillian ' is the epithet applied to Posthast, an actor -dramatist who is a character in Histriomastix (see p. 3i4 supra). 350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE same insults and neglect with which they now threatened their seniors. Hamlet. What, are they children ? who maintains 'em ? how are they escoted ? [i.e. paid]. Will they pursue the quality [i.e. the actor's profession] no longer than they can sing ? will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players — as it is most like, if their means are no better — their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their own succession ? RosENCKANTZ. Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [i.e. incite] them to controversy : there was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cu2s in the question. Hamlet. Is it possible ? GuiLDENSTEKN. 0, there has been much throwing about of brains ! Shakespeare was not alone among the dramatists in his emphatic expression of regret that the boys should have Thomas been pressed into the futile warfare. Thomas Haywood Hev^vood, the acto^-plav^vTight who shared his echoes . x v (-^ Shakespeare's prof essional sentiments as well as his profes- protest. sional experiences, echoed Hamlet's shrewd comments when he wrote : ' The liberty which some arrogate to themselves, committing their bitternesse, and liberall invectives against all estates, to the mouthes of children, supposing their juniority to be a priviledge for any rayling, be it never so violent, I could advise all such to curb and limit this presumed liberty within the bands of discretion and government.' ^ ^^^lile Shakespeare thus sided on enlightened grounds with the adult actors in their professional competition with the bo3''s, he would seem to have watched Ben speare's dis- Jonson's personal strife both with feUow-authors ^t^t^d^'^ and with actors in the serene spirit of a dis- interested spectator and to have eschewed any partisan bias. In the prologue to ' Troilus and Cressida,' which he penned in 1603, he warned his hearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson's battles, that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor or poet. ^ Heywood, Apology for Actors, 1612 (Sh. Soc), p. 61. MATURITY OF GENIUS 351 Jonson had in his ' Poetaster ' put into the mouth of his Prologue the lines : If any muse why I salute the stage, An armed Prologue ; know, 'tis a dangerous age : Wherein, who writes, had need present his scenes Fortie fold-proofe against the conjuring meanes Of base detractors, and illiterate apes. That fill up roomes in faire and formall shapes. 'Gainst these, have we put on this forc't defence. In ' Troilus and Cressida ' Shakespeare's Prologue retorted : Hither am I come, A prologue arm'd, but not in confidence Of author's pen or actor's voice, but suited In like conditions as oiu: argument, which began ' in the middle ' of the Graeco-Trojan ' broils.' Passages in Ben Jonson's ' Poetaster ' suggest, moreover, that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously an attitude of neutrality on the main issues that Jonson finally acknow- ledged him to be qualified for the role of peacemaker. The gentleness of disposition with which Shakespeare was invariably credited by his friends would have well fitted him for such an office. Jonson, who figures in the ' Poet- aster ' under the name of Horace, joins his friends, Tibullus Virgil in ^"^ Gallus, in eulogising the work and genius jonson's ^ of another character, Virgil, and the terms which are employed so closely resemble those which were popularly applied to Shakespeare that the praises of Viigil may be regarded as intended to apply to the great dramatist (act v. sc. i). Jonson points out that Virgil, by his penetrating intuition, achieved the great effects which others laboriously sought to reach through rules of art : His learning labours not the school-like gloss That most consists of echoing words and terms . . . Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance — Wrapt in the curious generalties of arts — But a direct and analytic sum Of all the worth and first effects of arts. And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life That it shall gather strength of life with being. And live heieafter, more admired than now. 352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Tibullus gives Virgil equal credit for having in his wTitings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude of human existence : That which he hath writ Is with such judgment laboured and distilled Through all the needful uses of omi lives That, could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point But he might breathe his spirit out of him.^ Finally, in the play, Virgil, at Caesar's invitation, judges between Horace and his libellers, and it is he who ad- vises the administration of purging hellebore to Marston (Crispinus), the chief offender. ^ On the other hand, one contemporary witness has been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide , „^ „ , of Jonson's embittered activity by no peace- ' ihe Return . . "^ . . , . ^ from Par- making interposition, but by joining his foes, nassus, i or. ^^^^ ^y administering to him, with then* aid, much the same course of medicine which in the ' Poetaster ' is meted out to his enemies. In the same year (1601) as the ' Poetaster ' was produced, and before the literary war had burnt itself out on the London stage, ' The Return from Parnassus ' — the last piece in a trilogy of plays — was ' acted by the students in St. John's CoUege, Cambridge.' It was an ironical review of the current life and aspirations of London poets, actors, and di'amatists. In this piece, as in its two predecessors, Shakespeare received, both as a playwright and a poet, much com- mendation in his own name. His poems, even if one character held that they reflected somewhat too largely ^ These expressions were at any rate accepted as applicable to Shake- speare by the writer of the preface to the dramatist's Troilus and Cressida (1609). The preface includes the sentences : ' this author's [i.e. Shake- speare's] comedies are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit.' ^ The proposed identification of ^'irgil in the Poetaster with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman's literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play. MATURITY OF GENIUS 353 ' love's lazy foolish languishment,' were hailed by others as the perfect expression of amorous sentiment. The actor Burbage was introduced in his o^vn name instructing an aspirant to the actor's profession in the part of Richard the Third, and the familiar lines from Shakespeare's play- Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer bj' this sun of York — were recited by the pupil as part of his lesson. Subse- quently, in a prose dialogue between Shakespeare's fellow- actors Burbage and Kemp, the latter generally disparages university dramatists who are wont to air their classical learning, and claims for Shakespeare, his theatrical col- league, a complete ascendancy over them. ' Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down [Kemp remarks] ; aye, and Ben Jonson, too. ! that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill ; but our feUow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bcAvray his credit.' Burbage adds : ' It's a shrewd fellow indeed.' This perplexing passage has been held to mean that Shakespeare took a decisive part against Jonson in the controversy with Marston, Dekker, and their friends. But such a conclusion is nowhere corroborated, and seems to be con- spe^re's futed by the eulogies of Virgil in the ' Poetaster ' alleged ^^(j even by the general handling of the theme purge. ^ o o in ' Hamlet.' The words quoted from ' The Return from Parnassus ' ma}^ well be incapable of a literal interpretation. Probably the ' purge ' that Shakespeare was alleged by the author of ' The Return from Parnassus ' to have given Jonson meant no more than that Shake- speare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular esteem. As the author of ' Julius Caesar,' he had just proved his command of topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson's classicised vein,^ and had in fact outrun his churlish * The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in Julius 2 a 354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE comrade on his own ground. Shakespeare was, too, on the point of dealing in a new play a crushing blow at the pretensions of all who reckoned themselves his masters. Soon after the production of ' Julius Caesar ' Shake- speare completed the first draft of a tragedy which finally left Jonson and all friends and foes lagging far 1602™^^^'' behind him in reputation. This new exhibition of the force of his genius re-estabhshed, too, the ascendancy of the adult actors who interpreted his work, and the boys' supremacy was jeopardised. Early in the second year of the seventeenth century Shake- speare produced ' Hamlet,' ' that piece of his which most kindled English hearts.' As in the case of so many of Shakespeare's plots, the story of his Prince of Denmark was in its main outlines of ancient origin, was well known in contemporary France, and had been turned to dramatic purpose in England before he dealt with the theme. The rudimentary tale Ccesar, and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to liim from other considerations. ' Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, ' hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter : As when hee said in the person of Ccesar, one speaking to him [i.e. Csesar] : Ccesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. Caesar] replyed : Ccesar did never wrong, butt with just cause : and such like, which were ridiculous.' Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the Induc- tion to The Staple of News (1625) : ' Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.' Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare's character of Ccesar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism they do not figure in the FoUo version, the sole version that has reached via. The only words there that correspond with Jonson's quotation are Caesar's remark : Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause Will he be satisfied. (m. i. 47-8.) The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word ' wrong ' of the phrase ' but with just cause,' which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity in the theatre of Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar to Ben Jonson's Roman play of Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeaje's Poems) ; see p. 591 71. 2 infra. MATUEITY OF GENIUS 355 of a prince's vengeance on an uncle wlio has slain his royal father is a medigeval tradition of pre-Christian Denmark. As early as the thirteenth century Danish the Danish chronicler, Saxo Grammaticus, legend. embodied Hamlet's legendary history in his 'Historia Danica,' which was first printed in 1514, Saxo's unsophisticated and barbaric narrative found in 1570 a place in 'Les Histoires Tragiques,' a French miscellan}' of translated legend or romance by Pierre de Belief orest .^ The French collection of tales was familiar to Shake- speare and to many other dramatists of the day. No English translation of Belleforest's French version of Hamlet's history seems to have been available when Shakespeare attacked the theme.^ But a dramatic adap- tation was already at his disposal in liis own tongue. The primordial Danish version of the ' Hamlet ' story, which the French rendering literally follows, is a relic ^^ , of heathenish barbarism, and the dramatic The bar- . i • i n, i barism of processes of purgation which Shakespeare per- the legend, ^qq^^q^ ^ere clearly begun bj'- another hand. The pretence of madness on the part of the young prince who seeks to avenge his father's murder is a central feature of the fable in all its forms, but in the original version the motive develops without much purpose in a repulsive environment of unqualified brutality. Horwen- dill. King of Denmark, the father of the hero Amleth, was according to Saxo craftily slain in a riot by his brother Fengon, who thereupon seized the crown and married Geruth the hero's mother. In order to protect himself 1 Histoire No. cviii. Cf . Gericke und Max Moltke, Hamlet-Qudlen, Leipzig, 1881. Saxo Grammaticus's Historia Danica, bks. i.-ix., appeared in an English translation by Prof. Oliver Elton with an introduction by Prof. York Powell in 1894 (Folklore Soc. vol. 33). Hamlet's story was absorbed into Icelandic mythology ; cf. Ambales Saga, ed. by Prof. Israel Gollancz, 1898. - The Historic of Hamblett, an English prose translation of BeUeforest, appeared in 1608. It was doubtless one of many tributes to the interest in the topic which Shakespeare's drama stimulated among his fellow- countrymen. 2 A 2 356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE against the new King's malice, Amletli, an only child who has a foster-brother Osric, deliberately feigns mad- ness, without verj' perceptibly affecting the situation. The usurper suborns a beautiful maiden to tempt Amleth at the same time as she tests the genuineness of his malady. Subsequently his mother is induced by King Fengon to pacify Amleth 's fears ; but in tlie interview the son brings home to Geruth a sense of her infamy, after he has slain in her presence the prying chamberlain of the court. Amleth gives evidence of a savagery, which harmonises with his surroundings, by dismembering the dead body, boiling the fragments and flinging them to the hogs to eat. Thereupon the uncle sends his nephew to England to be murdered ; but Amleth turns the tables on his guards, effects their death, marries the English King's daughter, and returns to the Danish Court to find his funeral in course of celebration. He succeeds in setting fire to the palace and kills his uncle while he is seeking to escape tlie flames. Amleth finally becomes King of Denmark, only to encounter a fresh series of crude mis- adventures ^^hich issue in his violent death. Much reconstruction was obviously imperative before Hamlet's legendary experiences could be converted into tragedy of however rudimentary a type. Shakespeare "w as spared the pains of applj'ing the first sjDade to the unpro- mising soil. The first Ehzabethan play which presented Hamlet's tragic fortunes has not survived, save possiblj^ in a few fragments, which are imbedded in a piratical and crudely printed' first edition of Shakespeare's later play, as well as in a free German adaptation of somewhat mj'sterious origin .^ But external evidence proves that 1 See p. 363 infra. Der Bestrafte Brudermord, oder Prinz Hamlet aus Ddnnemark, the German piece, which seems to preserve fragments of the o\d^ Hamlet, was first printed^- in Berlin in 1781 from a MS. in the Dresden librar}-, dated 1710. The drama originally belonged to the reper- tory of one of the English companies touring early in Germany. The crude German play, while apparently based on the old Hamlet, bears many signs of awkward revision in the light of Shakespeare's subsequent version. Much ingenuity has been devoted to a discussion of the precise relations of Der Bestrafte Brudermord to the First Quarto and Second MATURITy OF GENIUS 357 an old piece called ' Hamlet ' was in existence in 1589 — soon after Shakespeare joined the theatrical profession. In that year the pamphleteer Tom Nashe The old credited a uTiter whom he called ' English play. . ° Seneca ' with the capacity of penning ' whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.' Nashe's ' English Seneca ' may be safely identified with Thomas Kyd, a dramatist v.hose bombastic and melo- dramatic 'Spanish Tragedie, containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio and Bel-Imperia, with the pittiful death of olde Hieronimo,' was written about 1586, and held the breathless attention of the average Ehzabethan playgoer for at least a dozen years.^ Kyd's ' Spanish Tragedie ' anticipates with some skill the leading motive and an important part of the machinery of Shake- speare's play. Kyd's hero Hieronimo seeks to avenge the murder of his son Horatio in much the same spirit as Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet seeks to avenge his father's death. Horatio, the friend of airthorship Shakespeare's Hamlet, is called after the victim of Kyd's tragedy. Hieronimo, more- over, by way of testing his suspicions of those whom he beheves to be his son Horatio's murderers, devises a play the performance of which is a crucial factor in the development of the plot. A gjiost broods over the whole action in agreement with the common practice of the Latin tragedian Seneca. The most distinctive scenic devices of Shakespeare's tragedy manifestly lay within the range of Kyd's dramatic faculty and experience. The Danish Quarto texts of Shakespeare's Hamlet, as well as to the old lost play. (See A. Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, cv seq. ; 237 seq. ; Gustav Tanger in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiii. pp. 224 seq. ; Wilhelm Creizenach in Modern Philology, Chicago, 19u4-5, ii. 249-260 ; and M. Blakemore Evans, ibid. ii. 433-449.) ^ According to Dekker's Satiromastix, Ben Jonson himself played the part of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedie on a provincial tour, when he first joined the profession. In 1602 Jonson made ' additions ' to Kyd's popular piece, and thus tried to secure for it a fresh lease of life. (Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, lx,sxiv-v.) The superior triumph of Shakespeare's Hamlet in the same season may well have|i;been regarded by Jonson's foes as another ' purging pill ' for him. 358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE legend knew nothing of the ghost or the interpolated play. There is abundant external proof that in one scene of the lost play of ' Hamlet ' the ghost of the hero's father exclaimed 'Hamlet, revenge.' Those words, indeed, deepty impressed the play going pubhc in the last years of the sixteenth century and formed a popular catch- phrase in Ehzabethan speech long before Shakespeare brought his genius to bear on the Danish tale. Kyd may justly be credited with the first invention of a play of ' Hamlet ' on the tragic lines which Shakespeare's genius expanded and subtiUsed.i The old ' Hamlet ' enjoyed in the London theatres almost as long a spell of favour as Kyd's ' Spanish Revivals Tragedie.' On June 9, 1594, it was revived at of the old the Newington Butts theatre, when the Lord Chamberlain's men, Shakespeare's company, were co-operating there with the Lord Admiral's men.^ A httle later Thomas Lodge, in a pamphlet called ' Wits Miserie ' (1596), mentioned ' the ghost which cried so miser- ably at the Theator hke an oister wife Hamlet revenge.'' Lodge's words suggest a fresh revival of the original piece at the Shoreditch plaj^house. In the ' Satiromastix ' of 1601 the blustering Captain Tucca mocks Horace (Ben Jonson) witli the sentences : ' My name's Hamlet Revenge ; thou hast been at Parris Garden, hast not ? ' ^ Dekker's gibe implies yet another revival of the old ^ Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in The Taming of the Shrew the current catch-phrase ' Go by, Jeronimy,' which owed its currency to words in The Spanish Tragedie. Shakespeare, too, quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (i. i. 271) : ' In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke ' ; but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson's Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it first. * Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 1G4. ^ Horace [i.e. Jonson] replies that lie has played ' Zulziman ' at Paris Garden. ' Soliman ' is the name of a character in the interpolated play scene of The Spanish Tragedie and also of the hero of anotlicr of Kyd's tragedies — Soliman and Perseda. MATUKITY OF GENIUS 359 tragedy in 1601 at a third playhouse — the Paris Garden theatre. There is little reason to doubt that Shakespeare's new interpretation of the popular fable was first acted at the The recep- Globe theatre in the early winter of 1602, not tion of long after the polemical ' Satiromastix ' had speare's run its course on the same boards.^ Burbage tragedy. created the title role of the Prince of Denmark with impressive effect ; but the dramatic triumph was as warmly acknowledged by readers of the piece as by the spectators in the playhouse. An early appreciation is extant in the handwriting of the critical scholar Gabriel 1 Tucca's scornful mention of ' Hamlet ' in Satiromastix -was uttered on Shakespeare's stage by a fello-w-actor in November 1601. Tucca's words presume that only the old play of Hamlet was then in existence, and that Shakespeare's own play on the subject had not yet seen the light. The dramatist's fellow- players scored a very pronounced success with the production of Shakespeare's piece, and it was out of the question that they should make its hero's name a term of reproach after they had produced Shakespeare's tragedy. Some difficulty as to the date is suggested by the statement in all the printed versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, beginning with the first quarto of 1603, that ' the tragedians of the city ' had been lately forced to ' travel ' in the country through the menacing rivalry of the boy actors in London. No positive evidence is at hand to prove any unusual provincial activity on the part of Shakespeare's company or any other company of men actors during the seasons of 1600 or of 1601. Such partial research in municipal records as has yet been undertaken gives no specific indication that Shakespeare's company was out of London between 1597 and 1602, although three unspecified companies of actors are shown by the City Chamberlain's accounts to have visited Oxford in 1601. But the accessible knowledge of the men actors' provincial experience is too fragmentary to oSer safe guidance as to their periods of absence from London. (See p. 8J supra.) Examination of municipal records has shed much light on actors' country tours. But the research has not yet been exhaustive. The municipal archives ignore, moreover, the men's practice of per- forming at countrj' fairs and at country houses, and few clues to such engagements survive. The absence of recorded testimony is not therefore conclusive evidence of the failure of itinerant players to give provincial performances during this or that season or in this or that place. Shakespeare's implication that the leading adult actors were much out of London in the course of the years 1600-1 is in the circumstances worthier of acceptance than any inference from collateral negative premisses. 360 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Harvey. Soon after the play was made accessible to readers, Harvey wrote of it thus : ' The j^-ounger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis : Harvey's but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, comment. prince of Demuarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort.' ^ Many dramatists of repute were soon echoing lines from the successful piece, while famihar reference was made to ' mad Hamlet ' by the pamphleteers. In the old play the ghost had excited popular enthusiasm ; in Shakespeare's tragedy the personaUty of Anthony . ,-r^ i- i it Scoloker's the Prmce of Denmark riveted pubhc atten- notice. ^-^^^^ j^ jqq^ ^^^ Anthony Scoloker published a poetical rhapsody called ' Daiphantus or the Passions of Loue.' In an eccentric appeal ' To the Reader ' the writer commends in general terms the comprehensive attractions ^ The precise date at which Gabriel Harvey penned these sentencca is difficult to determine. They figure in a long and disjointed series of autograph comments on current literature which Harvey inserted in a copy of Speght's edition of Chaucer published in 1598 (see Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, pp. 232-3). Throughout the volume Harvey scattered many manuscript notes, and on the title-page and on the last page of the printed text he attached the date 1598 to his own signature, sufficient proof that he acquired the book in the year of its publication. There is no ground for assuming that Harvey's mention of Hamlet was made in the same year. Fi'ancis Meres failed to include Hamlet in the full list of Shakespeare's successful plays which he supplied late in 1598 in his Palladis Tamia ; and Harvey, who was through life in the habit of scribbling in the margin of his books, clearly annotated his Speght's Chaucer at idle hoiu-s in the course of various years. Little which is of strict chronological pertinence is deducible from the dates of publication of the poetical works, which he strings together in the long note containing the reference to Hamlet. One sentence ' The Eai-le of Essex much commendes Albion's England ' might suggest at a first glance that Harvey was writing at any rate before February 1601, when the Earl of Essejc was executed. Yet much of the context makes it plain that Harvey uses the present tense in the historic fashion. In a later sentence he includes in a list of ' our flourishing metricians ' the poet Watson, who v.as dead in 1592. He "KTote of Watson in the present tense long after the poet ceased to live. A succeeding laudatory mention of John Owen's New JE'2)isim7?w which were first published in 1606 supports the inference that Harvey penned his note several years after Speght's Chaucer was acquired. No light is therefore thrown by Harvey on the precise date of the composition or of the Irst performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Harvey's copy of Speght's Chaucer (1598) was in the eighteenth century in the possession of Dr. Thomas rercy. Bishop of Dromore. MATURITY OF GENIUS 361 of ' friendly Shakespeare's tragedies ' ; as for the piece of writing on which he was engaged he disavows the hope that it should ' please all hke prince Hamlet,' adding some- what ambiguously * then it were to be feared [it] would run mad.' In the course of the poem which follows the ' Epistle,' Scoloker, describing the maddening effects of love, credits his lover with emulating Hamlet's behaviour. He Puts ofiE his clothes ; his shirt he only wears Much like Tna.d- Hamlet, j Parodjnng Hamlet's speech to the players, Scoloker's hero calls ' players fools ' and threatens to ' learn them action.' ^ Thus as early as 1604 Shakespeare's recon- struction pf the old play was receiving exphcit marks of popular esteem. The bibUography of Shakespeare's ' Hamlet ' offers a puzzling problem. On July 26, 1602, ' A Book called the _, Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it The pro- o ' ^ biem of its was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain pu cation, j^ig Servants,' was entered on the Stationers' Company's Registers by the printer James Roberts, and it was published in quarto next year by N[ichola8] L[ing] and John Trundell.^ The title-page ran : ' The Tragical! George Steovens, in his edition of Shakespeare 1773, cited the manuscript note respecting Hamlet while the book formed part of Bishop Percy's library, and Malone commented on Steevens's transcript in letters to Bishop Percy and in his Variorum edition, 1821, ii. 369 (cf. HalLiwell- PhiUipps, Memoranda on Hamlet, 1879, pp. 46-9). The volume, which was for a long time assumed to be destroyed, now belongs to Miss Meade, great-granddaughter of Bishop Percy. The whole of Harvey's note is reproduced in facsimile and is fully annotated in Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-on-Avon, 1913). ' Scoloher's work was reprinted by Dr. Grosai-t in 1S8(>. ^ Although James Roberts obtained on July 26, 1; 02, the Stationers* Company's license for the publication of Hamlet, and although he printed the Second Quarto of 1604, he had no hand in the First Quarto of 1603, which v.as in all regards a piracy. Its chief promoter was Nicholas Ling, a bookseller and publisher, not a printer, who had taken up his freedom as a stationer in 1579, and was called into the livery in 1598. He was himself a man of letters, having designed a series of collected aphorisms in four volumes, of which the second wag 362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. By William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his ^^ ^. ^ Highnesse Seruants in the Cittie of London The First ° . . . Quarto, as also in the two unmersities oi Lam- ^ °^' bridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.' The Lord Chamberlain's servants were not known as ' His High- nesse seruants ' — the designation bestowed on them on the title-page — before their formal enrolment as King James's players on May 19, 1603.^ It was therefore after that date that the First Quarto saw the hght.^ The First Quarto of 'Hamlet ' was a surreptitious issue. The text is crude and imperfect, and there is little doubt ^^ , , , that it was prepared from shorthand notes The defects ^ ^ of the First taken from the actors' lips during an early Quarto. performance at the theatre. But the dis- crepancies between its text and that of more authentic editions of a later date cannot all be assigned to the incompetence of the ' copy ' from which the printer the well-known Palladis Tamia (1598) by Francis Meres. Ling compiled and published both the first volume of the series called PoUteupheuia (1697), and the third called Wifs Theatre of the Little World (1599). In 1607 he temporarily acquired some interest in the publication of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Borneo and Juliet (Arber, iii. 337, 365). With Ling there was associated in the unprincipled venture of the First Quarto of Hamlet, John Trundell, a stationer of small account. He took up his freedom as a stationer on October 29, 1597, but the Hamlet of 1603 was the earliest volume on the title-page of which he figured. He had no other connection with Shakespeare's works. Ben Jonson derisively introduced Trundell's name as that of a notorious dealer in broadside ballads into Every Man in his Humour (i. ii. 63 folio edition, 1616). The printer of the First Quarto, who is unnamed on the title-page, has been identified with Valentine Simmes, who was often in difficulties for unlicensed and irregiilar printing. But Simmes had much experience in printing Shakespeare's plays ; from his press came the First Quartos of Richard III (1597), Richard II (1597), 2 Henry IV (1600), and Much Ado (1600). (Cf. PoUard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 73 seq. ; Mr. H. R. Plomer in Library, April 1906, pp. 153-5.) ^ See p. 377 infra. - The further statement on the title-page, that the piece was acted not only in the City of London but at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, is perplexing. At both Oxford and Cambridge the academic authorities did aU thoy could, from 158n onwards, to prevent performances MATURITY OF GENIUS 363 worked. The numerous divergences touch points of construction which are beyond the scope of a reporter or a copyist. The transcript followed, however lamely, a draft of the piece which was radically revised before ' Hamlet ' appeared in print again. The First Quarto furnishes 2143 lines — scarcely half as many as the Second Quarto, which gives the play substantially its accepted form. Several of peare's first the characters appear in the First Quarto under roug ra . jjj^fa^jjjQiar names ; Polonius is called Corambis, Reynaldo Montano.^ Some notable speeches — ' To be or not to be ' for example — appear at a different stage of the action from that which M-as finally allotted them. One scene (11. 1247-82) has no counterpart in other editions ; there the sQueen suffers herself to be convinced by Horatio of her second husband's infamous character ; in signal conflict with her attitude of mind in the subsequent version, she acknowledges treason in his [i.e. King Claudius's] lookes That seem'd to sugar or'e his villanie. Through the last three acts the rhythm of the blank verse and the vocabulary are often reminiscent of Kyd's acknow- ledged work, 2 and lack obvious afiuiity with Shakespeare's by the touring companies within the University precincts. The Vice- Chancellor made it a practice to bribe visiting actors with sums varying from ten to forty shillings to refrain from playing. The municipal officers did not, however, share the prejudice of their academic neighbours, and according to the accounts of the City Chamberlain, as many as three companies, which the documents unluckily omit to specify indi- vidually by name, gave performances in the City of Oxford during the year 1600-1. It was only the towns of Oxford and Cambridge and not the universities themselves which could have given Shakespeare's Hamlet an early welcome. The misrepresentation on the title-page is in keeping with the general inaccuracy of the First Quarto text. (See F. S. Boas, * Hamlet at the Universities ' in Fortnightly Review, August 1913, and his University Drama, 1914.) 1 Osric is only known as ' A Braggart Gentleman ' and Francisco ' A sentinel,' but here the shorthand notetaker may have failed to catch the specific names. * Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, pp. xlv-liv — ' The Ur-Hamlet ' ; cf. G. Sarrazin, ' Entstehung der Hamlet-tragodie ' in Amjlia xii-iv. 364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE style. The collective evidence suggests that the First Quarto presents with much typographical disfigurement Shakespeare's first experiment with the theme. His design of a sweeping reconstruction of the old play was not fully worked out, and a few fragments of the original material were suffered for the time to remain.^ A revised edition of Shakespeare's work, jjrinted from a far more complete and accurate manuscript, was published in 1604. This quarto volume bore the title : ' The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, by William ShakesjJeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie.' The printer was I[ames] R[oberts] and the publisher N[icholas] L[ing].2 The concluding A'.ords — Th S d ' according to the true and perfect coppie ' — Quarto, of the title-page of the Second Quarto authori- ^ °^' tatively stamped its predecessor as sm-reptitious and unauthentic. A second impression of the Second Quarto of ' Hamlet ' bore the date 1605, but was otherwise unaltered. Ling, the pubhsher of the First Quarto, and ^ No other theory fits the conditions of the problem. Both omissions and interpolations make it clear that the transcriber of the First Quarto was not dependent on Shakespeare's final version, nor is there ground for crediting the transcriber with the abiUty to foist by his own initiative reminiscences of the old piece on a defective shorthand report of Shakespeare's complete play. An internal discrepancy of construction which Shakespeare's later version failed to remove touches the death of Ophelia. According to the Queen's familiar speech (rv. vii. 167-84) the girl is the fatal victim of a pure accident. The bough of a wiUow tree, on which she rests while serenely gathering wild flowers, snaps and flings her into the brook where she is drowned. Yet in the scene of her burial aU the references to her death assume that she committed suicide. It looks as if in the old play Ophelia took her own life, and that while Shakespeare altered her mode of death in act iv. sc. vii. he failed to reconcile with the change the comment on Ophelia's end in act v. sc. i. which echoed the original drama. * The printer of the Second Quarto, James Roberts, who held the Stationers' Company's license of Jxily 26, 1G02, for the publication of Hamlet, had clearly come to terms with Nicholas Ling, the piratical publisher of the First Quarto. Roberts, who was printer and publisher of ' the players' bills,' had been concerned in IGOO in the publication of Titus Andronicus (see p. 1^1), of The Merchant of Venice (see p. 136 n.), and of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream (see p. 2C1 n.). He also obtained a license for the publication of Troilus and Cressida in 1003 (see p. 367). MATURITY OF GENIUS 365 not Roberts, the original licensee and printer of the Second Quarto, would seem to have been recognised as owner of copjTight in the piece. On November 19, 1607, there was transferred, with other hterary property, to a different pubUsher, John Smethwick, ' A booke called Hamlet . . . Whiche dyd belonge to Nicholas L^mge.' ^ Smethwick published a Fourth Quarto of 'Hamlet' m 1611 as well as a Fifth Quarto which was undated. Both follow the guidance of the Second Quarto. The Second Quarto is carelessly printed and awkwardly punctuated, and there are signs that the ' copy ' had been curtailed for acting purposes. But the Second Quarto presents the fullest of all extant versions of the play. It numbers nearly 4000 lines, and is by far the longest of Shakespeare's dramas.^ A third ^version (long the textus receptus) figured in the Folio of 1623. Here some hundred lines which are wanting _, _. in the quartos appear for the first time. The Folio Folio's additions include the full account of ersion. ^^^ quarrel between the men actors and the boys, and some uncomplimentary references to Deimiark in the same scene. Both these passages may well have been omitted from the Second Quarto of 1604 in deference to James I's Queen Anne, who was a Danish princess and an active patroness of the ' children-players.' At the same time more than two hundred lines which figure in the Second Quarto are omitted from the Folio. Among the deleted passages is one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies (' How all occasions do inform against me ') with the preliminary observations which give him his cue (IV. iv. 9-66). The Folio text clearly followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated somewhat more dras- tically than the Second Quarto and in a different fashion.^ 1 Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 365. * Hamlet is thus some three hundred lines longer than Richard III — the play by Shakespeare that approaches it most closely in numerical strength of Lines. ^ Cf. Hamlet — parallel texts of the First and Second Quarto, and First Folio — ed. Wilhelm Victor, Marburg. 1891 ; The Devonshire Hamlets, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins. 366 \YILI.TAM SHAKESPE.\EE But the printers did their work more accurately than their predecessors. A collation of the First Foho with the Second Quarto is essential to the formation of a satis- factory text of the play. An endeavour of the kind was first made on scholarly lines by Lewis Theobald in ' Shake- speare Restor'd ' (1726). Theobald's text. Avith further em- bellishments by Sir Thomas Hanmer, Edward Capell, and the Cambridge editors of 1866, is now generally adopted. Shakespeare's ' Hamlet ' has since its first production attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and readers of all capacities than any other of his popui^^t>-'^ plays. From no piece of literature have so of , many phrases passed into colloquial speech. Its world-wide popularity from its author's day to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres of France and Germany as in those of the British Empire and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct. The old barbarous legend has been transfigured, and its coarse brutahties are sublimated in a new atmosphere of subtle thought. At a first glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting. Shakespeare's ' Hamlet ' is mainly a psychological effort, a study of the reflective temperament in excess. The action develops slowly ; at times there is no movement at all. Not only is the piece in its final shape the longest of Shakespeare's dramas, but the total length of Hamlet's speeches far exceeds that of those allotted by Shake- speare to any other of his characters. Humorous and quite original relief is effectively supphed to the tragic theme by the garruhties of Polonius and the rustic grave-diggers. The controversial references to contem- porary theatrical history (ii. ii. 350-89) could only count on a patient hearing from a sympathetic EHzabethan audience, but the pungent censure of actors' perennial defects is calculated to catch the ear of the average playgoer of all ages. The minor characters are vividly elaborated. But it is not to these subsidiarv features MATTT^ITY OF GEXIUS 367 that the universality of the play's vogue can be attri- buted. It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare contrives to excite in the character of the hero that explains the position of the tragedy in popular esteem. The play's unrivalled po^ver of attraction lies in the pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every calibre by the central figure — a high-born youth of chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who. when stirred to avenge in action a desperate private wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain that paralyse the will. The pedigree of the conception flings a flood of light on the magical property of Shake- speare's individual genius. Although the difficulties of determining the date of ' Troilus aijd Cressida ' are very great, there are many grounds for assigning its composition to the and early days of 1603. Four years before, in Cressida.' j^gg ^^^ dramatists Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Philip Henslowe to prepare a play of identical name for the Earl of Nottingham's (formerly the Lord Admiral's) company — the chief rival of Shakespeare's company among the men actors. Of the pre-Shake- spearean drama of ' Troilus and Cressida,' only a fragment of the plot or scenario survives. There is smaD doubt that that piece suggested the topic to Shakespeare, although he did not follow it closely.^ On February 7, 1602-3, James Roberts, the original licensee of Shakespeare's ' Hamlet,' obtained a license for ' the booke of " Troilus and Cresseda " as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men [i.e. Shakespeare's company].^ to print when lie has gotten ^ The ' plot ' of a play on the subject of Troilus and Cressida which may be attributed to Dekker and Chettle is preserved in the British Museum ilSS. Addit. 10449 f. 5. This was first printed in Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, p. 142. Eleven Unes in the 1610 edition of Histrio- masiix (Act m. 11. 269-79) parody a scene in Shakespeare's Troilus (v. ii.). Histriomastix was first produced in 1599. The passage in the edition of 1610 is clearly an interpolation of uncertain date and gives no clue to the year of composition or production of Shakespeare's piece. * Statio7iers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, ui. 22G. 368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE suflficient authority for it.' Roberts's ' book ' was probably Shakespeare's play. Roberts, who printed the Second Quarto of ' Hamlet ' and others of Shakespeare's plays, failed in his effort to send ' Troilus ' to press. The inter- position of the players for the time defeated his effort to get ' sufficient authority for it.' But the metrical cha- racteristics of Shakespeare's ' Troilus and Cressida ' — the regularity of the blank verse — powerfully confirm the date of composition which Roberts's abortive license suggests. Six years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9. a new license for the issue of ' a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida ' was granted to other publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley,i and these publisliers, more fortunate than Roberts, soon issued a quarto bearing on the title-page Shakespeare's full name as author and the date 1609. The volume was printed by George Eld, but the typography is not a good specimen of his customary skill. Exceptional obscurity attaches to the circumstances of the publication. Some copies of the book bear an ordinary type of title-page stating that ' The publication Historie of Troylus and Cresseida ' was printed of 1609. i ^g -^ ^.^^ acted by the King's Majesties seruants at the Globe,' and that it was ' written by WiUiam Shakespeare.' But in other copies, which differ in no way in regard either to the text of the play or to the pub- lishers' imprint, there was substituted a more pretentious title-page running : ' The famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, excellent^ expressing the begiiming of their loues witli the conceited wooing of Pandarus, prince of Licia, written by William Shakespeare.' This pompous description was followed, for the first and only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare published in his lifetime, by an advertisement or preface superscribed ' A never Avriter to an ever reader. News.' The anonymous pen supplies in the interest of the publisliers a series of high-flown 1 Stationers^ Company^s Registers, ed. Arber, iii. iOO. MATURITY OF GENIUS 369 but well-deserved compliments to Shakespeare as a uTiter of comedies. 1 ' Troilus and Cressida ' was declared to be the equal of the best work of Terence and Plautus, and there was defiant boasting that the ' grand poss- essers ' — i.e. the theatrical owners — of the manuscript deprecated its publication. By way of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and unacted, that it was ' a new play never staled with the stage, never clapper- clawed with the palms of the vulgar,' The purchaser was adjured : ' Refuse not nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude.' This address aa^s possibly a brazen reply of the publishers to a more than usually emphatic protest on the part of players or- dramatist against the printing of the piece. The ' copy ' seemed to follow a version of the play which _, had escaped theatrical revision or curtailment, First Folio and may have reached the press with tiie cor- version. ^_^^^ connivance of a scrivener in the author's and managers' confidence. Tiie editors of the First Folio evinced distrust of the Quarto edition by printing ^ The tribute is worthy of note. The most eulogistic sentences run thus : ' Were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main grace of their gravities ; especially this author's comedies that are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit, that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. And all such dull and heavy-witted worldlings as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations have found that wit that they never foiind in themselves, and have parted better witted than they came ; feeling an edge of wit set upon them more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies, that they seem (for their height of pleasure) to be born in that sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this : and had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not (for so much as wiU make you think your testern well bestowed) ; but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it, deserves such a labour as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus.' 2 B 370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE their text from a different copy, but its deviations were not always for the better. The Folio ' copy,' however, supplied Shakespeare's prologue to the play for the first time.i The work, which in point of construction shoAvs signs of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the „ ^ ^ least attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare's Treatment L^ of the middle life. In matter and manner ' Iroiius ^™^' and Cressida ' combines characteristic features of its author's early and late performances. His imagery is sometimes as fantastic as in ' Romeo and Juliet ' J elsewhere his intuition is as penetrating as in ' King Lear.' The problem resembles that which is presented by ' All's Well ' and may be solved by the assumption that the play was begun by Shakespeare in his early days, and Avas completed in the season of maturity. The treatment of the strange Trojan love story from which the piece takes its name savours of Shakespeare's youthful hand, while tlie complementary scenes, Avhich the Greek leaders and soldiers dominate, bear trace of a mo. e mature pen. The story is based not on the Homeric poem of Troy but on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which a fertile mediaeval imagination quite irrespon- fhe^'^^ot^^ sibly wove round Homeric names. Both Troilus, the type of loyal love, and Cressida, the type of perjured love, were children of the twelfth century and of no classical era. The literature of the 1 A curious uncertainty as to the place which the piece should occupy in their volume was evinced by the First Folio editors. They began by printing it in their section of tragedies after Romeo and Juliet. With that tragedy of love Troilus and Cressida" s cynical denoiiment awkwardly contrasts, nor is the play, strictly speaking, a tragedj^ Both hero and heroine leave the scene alive, and the death in the closing pages of Hector at Acliilles' hand is no regular climas. Ultimately the piece was given a detached place without pagination between the close of the section of ' Histories ' and the opening of the section of ' Tragedies.' The editors' perplexities are reflected in their preliminary table or catalogue of contents, in which Troilus and Cressida finds no mention at aU. See First Folio Facsimile, ed. Sidney Lee, Intro- duction, xxvii-xxix. MA.TURITY OF GENIUS 371 Middle Ages first gave them their general fame, which the literature of the Renaissance steadily developed. Boccaccio first bestowed literary form on the tale of Troilus and his fickle mistress in his epic of ' Filostrato ' of 1348, and on that foundation Chaucer built his touching poem of ' Troylus and Criseyde '—the longest of all his poetic narratives. To Chaucer the story owed its wide English vogue ^ and from him Shakespeare's love story in the play took its cue. No pair of lovers is more often cited than Troilus and his faithless mistress by Elizabethan poets, and Shakespeare, long before he finished his play, introduced their names in familiar allusion in ' The Merchant of Venice ' (v. i. 4) and in ' Twelfth Night ' (iii. i. 59). The military and political episodes in the wars of Trojans and Greeks, with which Shakespeare encircles his romance, are traceable to two mediseval books easily accessible to Elizabethans, which both adapt in different ways the far- famed Guido della Colonna's fantastic reconstruction or expansion of the Homeric myth in the thirteenth century ; the first of these authorities was Lydgate's ' Troy booke,' a long verse rendering of Colonna's ' Historia Trojana,' and the second was Caxton's ' Recuyell of the historyes of Troy,' a prose translation of a French epitome of Colonna. Shakespeare may have read the first instalment of Chapman's great translation of Homer's ' Iliad,' of which two volumes appeared in 1598 — one con- speare's taining seven books (i. ii. vii. viii. ix. x. xi.) acceptance ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^iBv, caUed ' AchiUes' Shield,' con- mediffivai taining book xviii. But the drama owed nothing to Homer's epic. Its picture of the Homeric world was a fruit of the mediseval falsifications. At one point the dramatist diverges from his authorities with notable originality. Cressida figures in his play as a ^ Cressida's name iu Benoit de Ste. More's Roman de Troyes, where her story was first told in the twelfth century, appears as Briaeide, a derivative from the Homeric Briseis. Boccaccio converted the name into Griseide and Chaucer into Criseyde, whence Cressida easily developed. 372 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE heartless coquette ; the poets who had previously treated her story — Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Robert Henry son, the Scottish writer Avho echoed Chaucer — had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on their scorn. But Shakespeare's innovation is dramatically effective, and deprives fickleness in love of any false glamour. It is impossible to sustain the charge frequently brought against the dramatist that he gave proof of a new and original vein of cynicism, when, in ' Troilus and Cressida,' he disparaged the Greek heroes of classical antiquity by investing them with contemptible characteristics. Guido dclla Colonna and the authorities whom Shakespeare followed invariably condemn Homer's glorification of the Greeks and depreciate their characters and exploits. Shakespeare indeed does the Greek chieftains Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon better justice than his guides, for whatever those veterans' moral defects he concentrated in their speeches a marvellous wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has fortunately obtained pro- verbial currency. Otherwise Shakespeare's conception of the Greeks ran on the traditional mediseval hnes. His presentation of Achilles as a brutal coward is entirely loyal to the spirit of Guido della Colonna, whose veracity was unquestioned bj^ Shakespeare or his tutors. Shake- speare's portrait interpreted the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride Avith which the warrior was credited by Homer's mediaeval expositors. Shakespeare's treatment of his theme cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty- minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Irony at the expense of classical hero- M'orship was a common note of the Middle Ages. Shake- speare had already caught a touch of it when he portrayed Julius Csesar, not in the fulness of the Dictator's powers, but in a pitiable condition of physical and mental de- MATURITY OF GENIUS 373 crepitude, and he was subsequently to show his tolerance of prescriptive habits of disparagement by contributing to the two pseudo-classical pieces of ' Pericles ' and ' Timon of Athens.' Shakespeare worked in ' Troilus and Cressida ' over well-seasoned specimens of mcdiseval romance, which were uninfluenced by the true classical sphit. Mediaeval romance adumbrated at all points Shakespeare's unheroic treatment of the Homeric heroes.^ 1 Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by F. G. Fleay and George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shake- speare's contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor- friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites ho denounced with equal bitterness Marston, despite Marston's antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson's foes. The controversial interpretation of the play is in contiict with chronology (for Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson, Dekker, and Marston, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion'of the theatrical, quarrel (see pp. 343 seq. and especially p. 351). Another untenable theory represents Troilus and Cressida as a splenetic attack on George Chapman, the translator of Homer and champion of classical literature (see Acheson's SItake- speare and the Rival Poet, 1903). XVII THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I Despite the suspicions of sympatliy -with the Earl of Essex's revolt which the players of Shakespeare's com- pany incurred and despite their stubborn Last per- controversy with the Children of the Chapel formances -r. i i -■ • i i • n . before Koyal, the dramatist and his colleagues mam- EUzabeth tained their hold on the favour of the Court till the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign. No political anxiety was suffered to interrupt the regular succession of their appearances on the roj'^al stage. On Boxing Day 1600 and on the succeeding Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's company was at Whitehall rendering as usual a comedy or interlude each night. Within little more than a month Essex made his sorry attempt at rebellion in the City of London (on February 9, 1600-1), and on Shrove Tuesday (February 24) Queen Elizabeth signed her favourite's death warrant. Yet on the evening of that most critical day — barely a dozen hours before the Earl's execution within the precincts of the Tower of London — Shakespeare's band of players produced at Whitehall one more play in the sovereign's presence. As the disturbed year ended, the guests beneath the royal roof were exceptionally feM.^ but the acting company's * Of. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, vol. 283, no. 48 (Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, Dee. 29, 1601) : ' There has been such a small Court this Christmas that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.' Besides the plays at Court this Christmas the Queen witnessed one performed in her honour at Lord Hunsdon's house in Blackfriars, presumably by Shakespeare's company of which Lord Hunsdon, then Lord Chamberlain, was the patron (ibid.) 371 THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 375 exertions were not relaxed at Court. During the next Christmas season Shakespeare's company revisited Wliite- hall no less than four times — on Boxing Day and St. John's Day (December 27, 1601) as well as on New Year's Day and Shrove Sunday (February 14, 160l-2).i Their services were requisitioned once again on Boxing Day, 1602, but Queen Elizabeth's days were then at length numbered. On Candlemas Day (February 2) 1602-3 the company travelled to Richmond, Surrey, whither the Queen had removed in vain hope of recovering her failing health, and there for the last time Shakespeare and his friends offered her a dramatic entertainment.^ She lived only seven weeks longer. On March 24, 1602-3, she breathed her last at Richmond.^ The literary ambitions of Henry Chettle, Shakespeare's early eulogist and Robert Greene's publisher, had long withdrawn him from the publishing trade. At the end of the century he was making a penurious livelihood by ministering with vast industry to the dramatic needs of the Lord Admiral's company of players. speareand 'The London Florentine,' the last piece (now the Queen's jog^j which was prepared for presentation by the Lord Admiral's men before the Queen early in March 1602-3, was from the pen of Chettle in partner- ship with Thomas Hey^-ood, and for its rendering at Court Chettle wrote a special prologue and epilogue.'* It M^as not unfitting that the favoured author should inter- rupt his dramatic labour in order to commemorate the Queen's death. His tribute was a pastoral elegy (of mingled 1 E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. (1907), vol. ii. p. 12. * Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 105 seq. ; Cunningham, Revels,' "sxxxi seq. \ ^ After the last performance of Shakespeare's company at the Palace of Kichmond and before the Queen's death, Edward Alleyn with the Lord Admiral's company twice acted before her there — once on Shrove Sunday (March 6), and again a day or two later on an unspecified date. See Tucker Murray, English j Dramatic Companies, i. 138 ; Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 171-3 ; Cunningham, Revels, xxxiv. * Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 173. 376 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE verse and prose) called ' England's Mourning Garment.' It appeared just after Elizabeth's funeral in Westminster Abbey on April 28. Into his loyal panegyric the zealous elegist wove expressions of surprised regret that the best known poets of the day had withheld their pens from his own great theme. Under fanciful names in accordance with the pastoral convention, Chettle, who himself assumed Spenser's pastoral title of Colin, appealed to Daniel, Drayton, Chapman, Ben Jonson, and others to make the Sovereign's royal name ' live in their lively verse.' Nor was Shakespeare, whose progress Chettle had watched with sympathy, omitted from the list of neglectful singers. ' The silver-tongued Melicert ' was the pastoral appellation under which Chettle lightly concealed the great dramatist's identity. Deeply did he grieve that Shakespeare should forbear to Drop from his honied muse one sable teare. To mourne her death that graced his desert. And to his laies opened her royal ears. The apostrophe closed with the lines : Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth, And sing her Rape done by our Tarquin Death. The reference to Shakespeare's poem of ' Lucrece ' left the reader in no doubt of the writer's meaning.^ But there were critics of the day who deemed Shakespeare better employed than on elegies of royalty. Testimonies to the worth of the late Queen flowed in abundance from the pens of ballad-mongers whose ineptitudes were held by many to profane ' great majesty.' A satiric wit heaped scorn on Chettle who calde to Shakespeare, Jonson, Greene ; To write of their dead noble Queene. Any who responded to the invitation, the satirist suggested, would deserve to suffer at the stake for poetical heresy .2 1 England's Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D 3, reprinted in Shak- spere Allusion Books (New Shak. Soc. 1874), ed. C. M. Ingleby, p. 98. - Epigratns ... By I. C. Gent., London [1604 ?], No. 12 ; see Shakspere Allusion Books, pp. 121-2. The author I. C. is unidentified. His reference to ' Greene ' is to Thomas Greene, the popular comedian. THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 377 Save on grounds of patriotic sentiment, the Queen's death justified no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare. He had no material reason for mourning. accession ^^ *^® withdrawal of one royal patron he and his friends at once found another, who proved far more liberal and appreciative. Under the immediate auspices of the ne^v King and Queen, dramatists and actors enjoyed a prosperity and a consideration which improved on every precedent. On May 19, 1603, James I, very soon after his accession, extended to Shakespeare and other members of the Lord Chamberlain's company a very marked and v^tenPTo valuable recognition. To them he granted Shake- under royal letters patent a license ' freely company, to use and exercise the arte and facultie of May 19, playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enter- ludes, moralls, pastoralles, stage-plaies, and such other like as they have already studied, or hereafter shall use or studie as well for the recreation of our loving subjectes as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall thinke good to see them during our pleasure.' The Globe theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, but permission was granted to them to perform in the town-hall or moot-hall or other convenient place in any country town. Nine actors were alone mentioned individually by name. Other members of the com- pany were merely described as ' the rest of their asso- ciates.' Lawrence Fletcher stood first on the list ; he had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare came second and Burbage third. There followed Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry CondeU, William Sly, Robert Armin, Shake- and Richard Cowley. The company to Mhich Groom Sha,kespeare and his colleagues belonged was Chamber. thenceforth styled the King's company, its members became ' the King's Servants.' In accordance, moreover, with a precedent created by Queen Elizabeth in 1583, they were numbered among the 378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Grooms of the Ch amber. i The hke rank was conferred on the members of the company which was taken at the same time into the patronage of James I's Queen-consort Anne of Denmark, and among Queen x\nne's new Grooms of the Chamber was the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood, whose career was always running parallel with that of the great poet. Shakespeare's new status as a complementai-y member of the royal household had material advantages. In that capacity he and his fellows received from time to time cloth wherewith to provide themselves liveries, and a small fixed salary of 525. Ad. a year. Gifts of varying amount were also made them at festive seasons by the controller of the royal purse at the Sovereign's pleasure and distinguished royal guests gave them presents. The household office of Groom of the Chamber was for the most part honorary, ^ but occasionally the actors were 1 The royal license of iNlay 19, 1603, was first printed from the Patent Roll in Rymer'a Foedera (1715), xvi. 505, and has been very often reprinted (cf. Malone Soc. CoU. 1911, vol. i. 264). At the same time the Earl of Worcester's company of which Thomas Heywood, the actor-dramatist, was a prominent member, was taken into the Queen's patronage, and its members became the Queen's servants, and likewise ' Grooms of the Chamber,' while the Lord Admiral's (or the Earl of Nottingham's) company was taken into the patronage of Henry Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince's Servants until his death in 1612, when they were admitted into the ' service ' of his brother-in-law the Elector Palatine. The remnants of the ill-fated company of Queen Elizabeth's Servants seem to have passed at her death first to the patronage of Lodovick Stuart, duke of Lenox, and then to Prince Charles, Duke of York, afterwards Prince of Wales and King Charles I (Murray's English Dramatic Companies, i. 228 seq.) This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the 'King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B. ^ See Dr. Mary Sullivan's 'Court Masques of James I (New York, 1913), where many new details are given from the Lord Chamberlain's and Lord Steward's records in regard to the pecuniary rewards of actors who were Grooms 'of |the Chamber. The Queen's company, which was formed in 1583, but soon lost its prestige in London, had been previously allotted the same status of ' Grooms of the Chamber ' on its formation (see p. 50 supra). At the French Court at the end of the sixteenth century the leading actors were given the corresponding rank of ' valets dc chambre ' in the royal household. See French Eenaissance in England, p. 439. THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 379 required to perform the duties of Court ushers, and they were then allotted board wages or the pecuniary equi- valent in addition to their other emoluments. From the date of Shakespeare's admission to titular rank in the royal household his plays were repeatedly acted in the royal presence, and the dramatist grew more intimate than of old with the social procedure of the Court, There is a credible tradition that King James wrote to Shakespeare ' an amicable letter ' in his own hand, which was long in the possession of Sir William D'Avenant.i In the autumn and winter of 1603 an exceptionally virulent outbreak of the plague led to the closing of the .^„,.,^ theatres in London for fully six months. The At Wilton, '' Dec. 2, King's players were compelled to make a pro- °^' longed tour in the provinces, and their normal income seriously decreased. For two months from the third week in October, the Court was temporarily in- stalled at Wilton, the residence of William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, a nobleman whose literary tastes were worthy of a nephew of Sir Philip Sidney. Late in November Shakespeare's company was summoned thither by the royal officers to perform before the new King. The actors travelled from Mortlake to Salisbury ' unto the Courte aforesaide,' and their performance took place at Wilton House on December 2. They received next day ' upon the Councells warrant ' the large sum of 30^ ' by way of his majesties reward.'- 1 This circumstance was first set forth in print, on the testimony of ' a credible person then living,' by Bernard Lintot the bookseller, in the preface of his edition of Shakespeare's poems in 1710. Oldys suggested that the ' credible person ' who saw the letter while in D'Avenant's possession was John Sheffield, |Duke of Buckingham (1648-1721), who characteristically proved his regard for Shakespeare by adapting to the Restoration stage his Julius Ccesar. ^ f The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham's Extracts from the Accounts of the Bevels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunning- ham's transcript with the original in the Public ^Record -Office (Audit Office — Declared Accounts— Ire&SMrei of the Chamber, Roll 41, Bundle No. 288) ehows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way 380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE A few weeks later the King gave a further emphatic sign of his approbation. The plague failed to abate and the Court feared to come nearer the capital than toi^o™n Hampton Court. There the Christmas holidays Christmas' were spent, and Sha.kespeare's company were ^ °^ '*' summoned to that palace to provide again entertainment for the King and his family. Durmg the festive season between St. Stephen's Day, December 26, 1603, and New Year's Day, January 1, 1603-4, the King's players rendered six plays — four before the King and two before Prince Henry. The programme included ' a play of Robin Goodfellow,' which has been rashly identified with a ' A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The royal reward amounted to the generous sum of 531.^ In view of the fatal persistence of the epidemic Shakespeare's company, when the new year opened, were condemned to idleness, for the Privy Council maintained its prohibition of public per- formances ' in or neare London by reason of greate perill that might growe through the extraordinarie concourse and assemblie of people.' The King proved afresh his benevolent interest in his players' welfare by directing the payment, on February 8, 1603-4, of 30?. to Richard Burbage ' for the mayntenance and reliefe of himselfe and the reste of his companie.' ^ The royal favour flowed indeed in an uninterrupted stream. The new King's state procession through the City of London, from the Tower to Whitehall, was origin- ally designed as part of the coronation festivities for the summer of 1603. But a fear of the coming plague con- responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603-10, pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the^first^'time by5 the owners of Wilton, that As You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence. "■ < 1 See Cunningham's Extracts from the Revels, p. xjyv, and Ernest Law's History of Hampton Court Palace, ii. 13. ^ Cunningham, ibid. THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 381 fined the celebrations then to the ceremony of the crown- ing in Westminster Abbey on July 25, and the procession was postponed till the spring of the following The royal ^ „f, ,, * .., • i ? progress year. When the course of the sickness was at London length stayed, the roj^al progress through the March 15, capital was fixed for March 15, 1603-4, and the °^ pageantry was j)lanned on an elaborate scale. Triumphal arches of exceptional artistic charm spanned the streets, and the beautiful designs were reproduced in finished copper-plate engravings. ^ Just before the ap- pointed day Shakespeare and eight other members of his acting company each received as a member of tjie royal household from Sir George Home, master of the great wardrobe, four and a half yards of scarlet cloth wheremth to make themselves suits of royal red. In the document authorising the grant, Shakespeare's name stands first on the list ; it is immediately followed by that of Augustine Phillips, LawTence Fletcher, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage.2 There is small likelihood that Shakespeare and his colleagues joined the royal cavalcade in their gay apparel. For the Herald's official order of precedence allots the actors no place, nor is their presence noticed by Shakespeare's friends, Drayton and Ben Jonson, or by the dramatist Dekker, all of whom published descriptions of the elaborate ceremonial in verse or prose. ^ But twenty days after the royal passage through London — on April 9, 1604 — the 1 See The Arches of Triumph . . . invented and published by Stephen Harrison, Joyner a7id Architect and graven by William Kip, London, 1G04. ' The grant -which is in the Lord Chamberlain's books ix. 4 (5) in the Public Record Office was printed in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions 1877-9, Appendix II. The main portion is reproduced in facsimile in Mr. Ernest Law's Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber, 1910, p. 8. A blank space in the list separates the first five names (given above) from the last four, viz. WiUiam Sly, Robert Armin, Henry Condell, and Richard Cowley. " The King's players on the other hand were allotted a place in the funeral procession of James I in 1625, while a like honour was accorded the Queen's players in her funeral procession in 1618 (Law's Shake- speare as a Groom of the Chamher, 12-13). 382 WILLIAM SHAKEJSPEARE King added to his proofs of friendly regard for the fortunes of his actors. He caused the Privy Council to send an official letter to the Lord Mayor of London and the Justices of the Peace for jMiddlesex and Surrey, bidding them ' permit and suffer ' the King's plaj^ers to ' exercise then* playes ' at their ' usual house,' the Globe.^ The plague had disappeared, and the Corporation of London was plainly warned against indulging their veteran grudge against Shakespeare's profession. Nor in the ceremonial conduct of current diplomatic affairs did the Court forgo the personal assistance of the actors. Early in August 1604 there reached The actors -r -, ti i.- •• j^i-i at Somerset London, on a diplomatic mission of nigh House, Aug. iiational interest, a Spanish ambassador-extra- 9-28, 1604. . ^ ordinary, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, duke de Frias, Constable of Castile, and Great Chamberlain to King Philip III of Spain. His companions were two other Spanish statesmen and three representatives of Archduke Albert of Austria, the governor of the Spanish province of the Netherlands. The purpose of the mission was to ratify a treaty of peace between Spain and England.* Through nearly the whole of Queen Elizabeth's reign — from the daj^s of Shakespeare's youth — the tAvo countries had been engaged in a furious duel by sea and land in both ' A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen's players acting at the Fortune and the Prince's players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King's players at the Globe, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner's Cat. Dulwich MS8. pp. 26-7). CoUier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured. ^ There is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, a painting by Marc Gheeraerdts, representing the sis foreign envoys in consultation over the treaty at Somerset House in August 1604 with the five EngUsh commissioners, viz. Thomas SackviUe, Earl of Dorset (co-author in early life of the first English tragedy of Gorboduc) ; Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral (patron of the well-known company of players) ; Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire (Essex's successor as Lord Deputy of Ireland) ; Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton; and Sir Eobert Cecil, the King's Secretary (afterwards Lord Cranborne and Earl of Salisbury). THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 383 hemispheres. The defeat of the Armada in 1588 was for England a glorious incident in the struggle, but it brought no early settlement in its train. Sixteen years passed without terminating the quarrel, and though in the autumn of 1604 many Englishmen still agitated for a continuance of the warfare, James I and his Government were reso- lutely bent on ending the long epoch of international strife. The English Court prepared a magnificent reception for the distinguished envoys. The ambassador was lodged, with his two companions from Spain, at the roj^al residence of Somerset House in the Strand, and there the twelve chief members of Shakespeare's company were ordered in their capacity of Grooms of the Chamber to attend the Spanish guests for the whole eighteen days of their stay. The three Flemish envoys were entertained at Durham House, also in the Strand, and there Queen Anne's com- pany of actors, of which Thomas Heywood was a member, provided the household service. On August 9 Shake- speare and his colleagues went into residence at Somerset House ' on his Majesty's service,' in order to ' wait and attend ' on the Constable of Castile, who headed the special embassy, and they remained there till August 28. Profes- sional work was not required of the players. Crudei sport than the drama was alone admitted to the official pro- gramme of amusements. The festivities in the Spaniards' honour culminated in a splendid banquet at Whitehall on Sunday August 28 (new style) — the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning the tweWe actors with the other members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House to James I's palace. At the banquet, Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the Earl of Pembroke acted as stewards. There followed a ball, and the eventful day was brought to a close with exhibitions of bear-baiting, bull-baiting, rope-dancing, and feats of horsemanship. 1 Subsequently Sir John Stanhope ^ Cf. Stow's Chronicle, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relacion de la Jornada del exc^'^ Condesiahlh de Castilla. i;tc., Antwerp, 384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (afterwards Lord Stanhope of Harrington), who was Treasurer of the chamber, received order of the Lord Chamberlain to pay Shakespeare and his friends for their services the sum of 211. 12s.^ The Spanish Constable also bestowed a liberal personal gift on every English official who attended on him during his eighteen days' sojourn in London. At normal times throughout his reign James I relied to an ever-increasing extent on the activity of Shake- speare's company for the entertainment of the Court, and royal appreciation of Shakespeare's dramatic work is well 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis's Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in ilr. W. B. Rye's England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117-124. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days' attendance with four men to direct the non-dramatic entertainments ' at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne ' (Public Record Ofl&ce, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office RoU 2805)."^ ^ The formal record of the service of the King's players and of their payments is in the Public Record Office among the Audit Office Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Kynges Majesties Chamber, Roll 41, Bundle No. 388. The same information is repeated in the Pipe Office Parchment Bundle, No. 543. The warrant for payment was granted ' to AugTistine Phillipps and John Hemynges for the allowance of them- selves and tenne of their fellowes.' Shakespeare, the very close associate of Phillips and Heminges, was one of the ' tenne.' The remaining nine certainly included Burbage, Lawrence Fletcher, Condell, Sly, Armin, and Cowley. HalliweU-PhiUipps, in his Outlines (i. 213), vaguely noted the effect of the record without giving any reference. Mr. Ernest Law has given a facsimile of the pay warrant in his Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber, 1910, pp. 19 seq. The popular comedian Thomas Greene, and ten other members of the Queen's company (including Heywood) who were in ' waiting as Grooms of the Chamber ' on the Spanish envoy's companions — the three diplomatists from the Low Countries — at Durham House, for the eighteen days of their sojourn there received a fee of 191. 16s. — a rather smaller sum than Shakespeare's com- pany (Mary Sullivan, Court Masques of James I, 1913, p. 141). The Flemish embassy was headed by the Count d'Aremberg, and one of his two companions was Louis Verreiken, whom, on a previous visit to London, in March 1599-1600, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Cham- berlain, had entertained at Hunsdon House when Shakespeare's com- pany performed a play there for his amusement (see p. 65 n. 1 and 244 n. 2 supra). THE ACCESSION' OE KING JAMES I 385 attested year by year. In the course of 1604 Queen Anne expressed a wish to witness a play under a private roof, and the Earl of Southampton's mansion in the ' Lovers ° Strand was chosen for the purpose. A promi- Labour's nent officer of the Court, Sir Walter Cope, in whose hands the arrangements were left, sent for Burbage, Shakespeare's friend and colleague. Burbage informed Sir Walter that there was ' no new play that the Queen had not seen ' ; but his company had ' just revived an old one called "Love's Labour's Lost," which for wit and mirth ' (he said) would ' please her Majesty exceedingly.' Cope readily accepted the suggestion, and the earliest of Shakespeare's comedies which had won Queen Elizabeth's special approbation was submitted to the new Queen's judgment. ^ At holiday seasons Shakespeare and his friends were invariably visitors at the royal palaces. Between All Saints' Day (Nov. 1), 1604, and the ensuing Shake- Shrove Tuesday (Feb. 12, 1604-5), they gave plays at no less than eleven performances at Whitehall.^ j6^^. As many as seven of the chosen plays during this season were from Shakespeare's pen. ' Othello, ' ' The Merry Wives of Windsor,' ' Measure for Measure,' ' The Comedy of Errors,' ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' Henry V,' were each rendered once, while of ' The Mer- chant of Venice ' two performances were given, the second 1 Cope gave the actor a written message to that effect for him to carry to Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Cranborne, the King's secretary. Cope inquired in his letter whether Lord Cranborne would prefer that his own house should take the place of Lord Southampton's for the purpose of the performance (Calendar of MSS. of the Marquis of Salisbury, in Hist. MSS. Comm. Third Hep. p. 148). ^ At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I's reign. These documents show that Shakespeare's company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday. Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1604-5. 2 c 386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE being specially ' com[m]aunded by the Kings M[aje8]tie.'^ The King clearly took a personal pride in the repute of the company which bore his name, and he lost no opportunity of making their proficiency known to distinguished foreign visitors. When the Queen's brother, Frederick, King of Denmark, was her husband's guest in the summer of 1606, the King's players were specially summoned to perform three plays before the two monarchs — two at Greenwich and one at Hampton Court. The celebration of the marriage of the King's daughter Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine in February 1613 was enlivened by an exceptionally lavish dramatic entertainment which was again furnished by the actors of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. During the first twelve years (1603-1614) of King James's reign, Shakespeare's company, according to extant records of royal expenses, received fees for no less than 150 performances at Court.^ ^ Cf. Ernest Law's Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, pp. ;xvi seq. with facsimile extract from ' The Reuells Booke, An" 1605,' in the Public Record Office. * Cunningham, Bevels, p. xxxiv ; Murray, English Dramatic Com- panies, i. 173 seq. XVIII THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shake- speare's activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is IS'^ Mea- produced in the blaze of Court favour. The sure for Qj-^^ six years of the new reign saw him absorbed in the highest themes of tragedy ; and an un- paralleled intensity and energy, which had small affinity with the atmosphere of a Court, thenceforth illumined almost every scene that he contrived. To 1604, when Shakespeare's fortieth year was closing, the composition of two plays of immense grasp can be confidently assigned. One of these — ' Othello ' — ranks with Shakespeare's greatest achievements ; while the other — ' Measure for Measure ' — although as a whole far inferior to ' Othello ' or to any other example of his supreme power — contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, ii. ii. 43 seq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, ni. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean drama. ' Othello ' was doubtless the first new piece by Shake- speare that was acted before James. It was produced on November 1, 1604, in the old Banqueting House perform- at Whitehall, which had been often put by Queen ances. Elizabeth to Hke uses, although the building was now deemed to be ' old, rotten, and slight builded ' and in 1607 a far more ornate structure took its place. ^ 1 Cf. Stow's Annals, ed. Howes, p. 891, col. 1. James I's Ban- queting House at Whitehall was destroyed by fire after a dozen years' 387 2 c 2 388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' Measure for Measure ' followed ' Othello ' at Whitehall on December 26, 1604, and that play was enacted in a different room of the palace, ' the great hall.' ^ Neither piece was printed in Shakespeare's lifetime. ' Measure for Measure ' figured for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. usage on January 12, 1618-9, and was then rebuilt from the designs of Inigo Jones. The new edifice was completed on March 31, 1622. Inigo Jones's Banqueting House, now part of the United Service Institution in Parliament Street, is all that survives of Whitehall Palace. ^ These dates and details are drawn from ' The Reuells Booke, An° 1605,' a slender manuscript pamphlet among the Audit Office archives formerly at Somerset House, and now in the Public Record Office. The ' booke ' covers the year November 1604-October 1605. It was first printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, a well-known Shake- spearean student and a clerk in the Audit Office, in his Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (Shakespeare Soc. 1842, pp. 203 seq.). When Cunningham left the Audit Office in 1858 he retained in his possession this ' Reuells Booke ' of 1605 as well as one for 1611-2 and some Audit Office accounts of 1636-7. These documents were missing when the Audit Office papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public Record Office in 1859, but they were recovered from Cunningham by the latter institution in 1868. It was then hastily suspected that both the ' Booke ' of 1605 and that of 1611-2, which also contained Shakespearean information, had been tampered with, and that the Shakespearean references were modern forgeries. The authenticity of the Shakespearean entries of 1604-5 was, however, confirmed by manuscript notes to identical eSect which had been made by Malone from the Audit Office archives at the beginning of the nine- teenth century, and are preserved in the Bodleian Library among the Malone papers (MS. Malone 29). A very thorough investigation carried out by Mr. Ernest Law has recently cleared the ' Reuells Booke Ano 1605 ' as well as that of 1611-2, and the papers of 1636-7, of all suspicion. See Ernest Law's Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, and More about Shakespeare ' Forgeries,^ 1913 ; see Appendix i. p. 650 infra. J. P. CoUier's assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton's residence at Harefield, near Uxbridge, on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere's MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk. Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton's household expenses. This document, which CoUier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc. 1840), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be ' a shameful forgery ' (cf. Ingleby's Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5), and there is no possibility of this verdict being i"6versed. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 389 ' Othello,' which held the stage continuously,^ first ap- peared in a belated Quarto in 1622, six years after the dramatist's death. The publisher, Thomas Walkley, had obtained a theatre copy which had been of^'^o'theiio ' abbreviated and was none too carefully tran- scribed. He secured a license from the Sta- tioners' Company on October 6, 1621, and next year the volume issued from the competent press of Nicholas Okes, ' as it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants.' In an ' address to the reader ' Walkley claimed sole responsi- bility (' the author being dead ') for the undertaking. He forbore to praise the play ; ' for that which is good I hope every man will commend without entreaty ; and I am the bolder because the author's name is sufficient to vent his work.' The editors of the First Folio ignored Walkley's venture and presented an independent and a better text. The plots of both ' Othello ' and ' Measure for Measure ' come from the same Italian source — from a collection of Italian novels known as ' Hecatommithi,' Cinthio's which was penned by Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, novels. . a sixteenth-century disciple of Boccaccio. Cinthio's volume was first published in 1565. But while Shakespeare based each of the two plays on Cinthio's romantic work, he remoulded the course of each story at its critical point. The spirit of melodrama was exorcised. Varied phases of passion were interpreted with magical subtlety, and the language was charged with a poetic intensity which seldom countenanced mere rhetoric or declamation. Cinthio's painful story of 'Un Capitano Moro,' or ' The Moor of Venice ' (decad. iii. Nov. vii.), is not known to have been translated into English before Shakespeare ^ The piece was witnessed at the Globe theatre on April 30, 1610 by a German visitor to London, Prince Lewis Frederick of Wiirtemberg (Rye's England as seen by Foreigners, pp. cxviii-ix, 61), and it was repeated at Court early in 1613 {Sh. Soc. Papers, ii. 124). 390 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE dramatised it in the play on which he bestowed the title of ' Othello.' He frankly accepted the main episodes and characters of the Italian romance. At the Shakespeare ,• i i, ,i ,. and the same time he gave all the personages exceptmg Italian tale Desdemona names of his own devising, and of Othello. . • 1 1 he invested every one of them with a new and graphic significance.^ Roderigo, the foolish dupe of lago, is Shakespeare's own creation, and he adds some minor characters like Desdemona's father and uncle. The only character in the Italian novel with whom Shakespeare dispensed is lago's little child. The hero and heroine (Othello and Desdemona) are by no means featureless in the Italian novel ; but the passion, pathos, and poetry with which Shakespeare endows their speech are all his own. lago, who lacks in Cinthio's pages any trait to distinguish him from the conventional criminal of Italian fiction, became in Shakespeare's hands the subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hypocrisy. The lieutenant Cassio and lago's wife Emilia are in the Italian tale lay figures. But Shakespeare's genius declared itself most signally in his masterly reconstruction of the cata- strophe. He lent Desdemona's tragic fate a wholly new and fearful intensity by making lago's cruel treacherj^ known to Othello at the last — just after lago's perfidy had impelled the noble-hearted Moor, in groundless jealousy, to murder his gentle and innocent wife.^ ^ In Cinthio's story none of the characters, save Desdemona, have proper names ; they are known only by their office ; thus Othello is ' ii capitano moro ' or ' il moro.' lago is ' I'alfiero ' (i.e. the ensign or ' ancient ') and Cassio is ' il capo di squadrone.' ^ In Cinthio's melodramatic denoument ' the ensign ' (lago) and ' the Moor ' (Othello) plot together the deaths of ' the captain ' (Cassio) and Desdemona. Cassio escapes unhurt, but lago in Othello's sight kills Desdemona -svith three strokes of a stocking filled with sand ; whereupon Othello helps the murderer to throw down the ceiling of the room on his wife's dead body so that the death might appear to be accidental. Though ignorant of Desdemona's innocence, Othello soon quarrels with lago, who in revenge contrives the recall of the Moor to Venice, there to stand his trial for Desdemona's murder. The Moor, after being tortured without avail, is released and is ulti- mately slain by Desdemona's kinsfolk ^^ithout being disillusioned. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 391 The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage the dramatist's mature powers. An unfaltering equilibrium . ,. ,. is maintained in the treatment of plot and Artistic -1 rrt r> • tt • unity of characters alike. The first act passes m Venice ; t etrage y. ^j^^ ^^^^ ^£ ^j^^ pj^^ j^^^ -^^ scene in Cjrprus. Dr. Johnson, a champion of the classical drama, argued that had Shakespeare confined the action of the play to Cyprus alone he would have satisfied all the canons of classical unity. It might well be argued that, despite the single change of scene, Shakespeare realises in ' Othello ' the dramatic ideal of unity more effectively than a rigid adherence to the letter of the classical law would allow. The absence of genuine comic relief emphasises the classical affinity, and differentiates ' Othello ' from its chief fore- runner ' Hamlet.' ^ France seems to have first adapted to literary purposes the central theme of ' Measure for Measure ' ; early in the sixteenth century French drama and fic- of '^Measure ^ion both portrayed the agonies of a virtuous i°^ , woman, who, when her near kinsman Hes under lawful sentence of death, is promised his pardon by the governor of the State at the price of her chastity.^ The repulsive tale impressed the imagination of all Europe ; but in Shakespeare's lifetime it chiefly circulated in the form which it took at the hand of the Italian novelist Cinthio in the later half of the century. Cinthio made the perilous story the subject not only of a romance tare^^°'^ but of a tragedy called ' Epitia,' and his romance found entry into EngHsh literature, before Shakespeare wrote his play. Direct recourse to the Italian text was not obligatory as in the case of Cinthio's lago is charged with some independent ofEence and dies under torture. Cinthio represents that the story was true, and that he owes his know- ledge of it to lago's widow, Shakespeare's Emilia. 1 lago's cynical and shameless mirth does not belong to the category of comic relief, and the clown in Othello's service, whose wit is unim- pressive, plays a small and negligible part. ^ Cf. Boas, University Drama, p. 19 ; Lee, French Renaissance in England, p. 408. 392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE story of ' Othello.' Cinthio's novel of ' Measure for Measure ' had been t^ice rendered into English by George Whetstone, an industrious author, who was the friend of the Elizabethan literary pioneer, George Gascoigne. Whet- stone not only gave a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of ' Promos and Cas- sandra ' (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, called ' Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses ' (1582). ' Measure for Measure ' owes its episodes to Whetstone's work, although Shakespeare borrows little of his language. Whetstone changes Cinthio's nomenclature, and Shakespeare again gives all the personages new appellations. Cinthio's Juriste and Epitia, who are respectively rechristened by Whetstone Promos and Cassandra, become in the poet's pages Angelo and Isabella.^ There is a bare likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio's Italian play, which was untranslated ; there, as in the Italian novel, the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known as Juriste, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which may have suggested Shakespeare's designation. ^ In the hands of the poet's predecessors the popular tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But Shake- Sh k speare prudently showed scant respect for their speare's handhng of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as ^ Whetstone states, however, that his ' rare historic of Promob and Cassandra ' was ' reported ' to him by ' Madam Isabella,' who is not otherwise identified. * Richard Garnett's Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227. Angelo, how- ever, is a name which figures not infrequently in lists of dramatis personce of other English plays in the opening years of the seventeenth century. Subordinate characters are so christened in Ben Jonson's The Case is Altered, and in Chapman's May Day, both of which were written before 1602, though they were first printed in 1609 and 1611 respectively. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 393 the price of her brother's Hfe. The central fact of Shake- speare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastOy conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana ' of the moated grange ' — the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella's would-be seducer — skilfully ex- cludes the possibihty of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage. The dramatist's argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption "with which unchecked sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic interludes' which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was performed. But the two em- phatic references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In act I. sc. i. 67-72 the Duke remarks : I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do Mell, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement. Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act ir. sc. iv. 27-30) : The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish'd king, . . . Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence.^ 1 When James I made his great progress from Edinburgh to London on his accession to the English throne, the loyal author of The true narration of the entertainment of his Royal Majesty (1603) on the long journey noted that ' though the Iving greatly tendered ' his people's ' love,' yet he deemed their ' multitudes ' oppressive, and published ' an inhibition against the inordinate and daily access of people's coming ' 394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE In ' Macbeth,' the ' great epic drama,' which he began in 1605 and completed next year, Shakespeare employed , , a setting wholly in harmony with the accession of a Scottish king. The story was drawn from Holinshed's ' Chronicle of Scottish History,' with occasional reference, perhaps, to earlier Scottish soiu-ces. But the chronicler's bald record supplies Shakespeare with the merest scafifolding. Duncan appears in the ' Chronicle ' _., as an incapable ruler, whose removal com- legend in mends itself to his subjects, while Macbeth, in ° "^^ ^ ' spite of the crime to which he owes his throne, proves a satisfactory sovereign through the greater part of his seventeen years' reign. Only towards the close does his tyranny provoke the popular rebelhon which proves fatal to him. Holinshed's notice of Duncan's murder by Macbeth is bare of detail. Shakespeare in his treatment of that episode adapted HoUnshed's more precise account of another royal murder — that of King Duff, an earUer Scottish King who was slain by the chief Donwald, while he was on a visit to the chief's castle. The vaguest hint was offered by the chronicler of Lady Macbeth's influence over her husband. In subsidiary incident Shakespeare borrowed a few passages almost verbatim from Holinshed's text ; but every scene which has supreme dramatic value is the poet's own invention. Although the chronicler briefly notices Macbeth's meeting with the witches, Shakespeare was under no debt to any predecessor for the dagger scene, for the thrilling colloquies of husband and wife concerning Duncan's murder, for Banquo's apparition at the feast, or for Lady Macbeth's walking in her sleep. The play gives a plainer indication than any other of Shakespeare's works of the dramatist's desire to concih- ate the Scottish King's idiosyncrasies. The supernatural (cf. Nichols's Progresses of Kiibg James I, i. 76). At a later date King James was credited ^^-ith ' a hasty and passionate custom which often in his sudden distemper would bid a pox or plague on such as flocked to see him " {Life oj Sir SimoMs D'Eives, i. 170). THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 395 machinery of the three -witches which Hohnshed suggested accorded with the King's superstitious faith in demonology. The dramatist was lavish in sympathy with The appeal Banquo, James's reputed ancestor and founder to lames I. ^ -^ _ of the Stuart dynasty ; while Macbeth's vision of kings who carry ' twofold balls and treble sceptres ' (iv. i. 20) loyally referred to the union of Scotland with England and Ireland under James's sway. The two ' balls ' or globes were royal insignia which King James bore in right of his double kingship of England and Scotland, and the three sceptres were those of his three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. No monarch before James I held these emblems conjointly. The irrelevant description in the play of the English King's practice of touching for the King's evil (rv, iii. 149 seq.) was doubtless designed as a further personal compliment to King James, whose confid- ence in the superstition was profound. The allusion by the porter (ii. iii. 9) to the ' equivocator . . . who com- mitted treason ' was perhaps suggested by the insolent defence of the doctrine of equivocation made by the Jesuit Henry Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share in the ' Gunpowder Plot.' The piece, which was not printed until 1623, is in its existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare's tragedies ('Hamlet' is nearly twice as long), eiabora^Uon. ^^^ ^^ ^^ possible that it suTvives only in an abbreviated acting version. Much scenic elaboration characterised the production. Dr. Simon Forman, a playgoing astrologer, witnessed a performance of the tragedy at the Globe on April 20, 1610, and noted that Macbeth and Banquo entered the stage on horse- back, and that Banquo's ghost was materially represented (in. iv. 40 seq.) ^ ^ In his Booke of Plaies (among Ashmole's MSS. at the Bodleian) Forman's note on Macbeth begins thus : ' In Mackbeth at the Globe 1610, the 20 of Aprill Saturday, there was to be observed, firste howe Mackbeth and Banko, two noble men of Scotland, ridinge thorow a wod, ther stode before them three women feiries or nimphs . . .' Of the 396 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE ' Macbeth ' ranks with ' Othello ' among the noblest tragedies either of the modern or of the ancient world. Yet the bounds of sensational melodrama are Jh^actars approached by it more nearly than by any other of Shakespeare's plays. The melo- dramatic effect is heightened by the physical darkness which envelopes the main episodes. It is the poetic fertihty of the language, the magical simplicity of speech in the critical turns of the action, the dramatic irony accentuating the mj'^sterious issues, the fascinating com- plexity of the two leading characters which Hft the piece into the first rank. The characters of hero and heroine — Macbeth and his wife — are depicted with the utmost subtlety and insight. Their worldly ambition involves them in hateful crime. Yet Macbeth is a brave soldier who is endowed with poetic imagination and values a good name. Though Lady Macbeth lack the moral sense, she has no small share of womanly tact, of womanly affections, and above all of womanly nerves. In three points ' Macbeth ' differs somewhat from other of the poet's productions in the great class of literature to which it belongs. The interweaving with Eatures°^^^ the tragic story of supernatural interludes in which Fate is weirdly personified is not exactly matched in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. In the second place, the action proceeds with a rapidity that is wholly without parallel in the rest of Shakespeare's plays ; the critical scenes are unusually short ; the great sleep- walking scene is only seventy lines long, of which scarcely twenty, the acme of dramatic brevity, are put in Lady Macbeth's mouth. The SAvift movement only slackens when the poet is content to take his cue from Holinshed, as in the somewhat tedious episode of Macduff's negotiation feasting scene Forman wrote : ' The ghosto of Banco came and sate down in his [i.e. Maobeth's] cheier be-hind him. And he turninge about to sit down again sawe the goste of Banco which fronted him so.' (Halli- well-Phillipps, ii. 86.) See for Forman's other theatrical experiences p. 125 71. supra and p. 422 irifra. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 397 in England mth Malcolm, Duncan's son and hen (act iv. sc. iii.). Nowhere, in the third place, has Shakespeare introduced comic reUef into a tragedy with bolder effect than ia the porter's speech after the murder of Duncan (n. iii. I seq.). The theory that this passage was from another hand does not merit acceptance. Yet elsewhere there are signs tliat the play as it stands incorporates occasional passages by a second pen. Duncan's interview with the ' bleeding sergeant ' otSr °ens ^^^^ ^' ^^' "'^ ^^^^ ^*^ ^^^ below the style of the rest of the play as to suggest an interpolation by a hack of the theatre. So, too, it is difficult to credit Shakespeare with the superfluous interposition (act ii. sc. v.) of Hecate, a classical goddess of the infernal world, who appears unheralded to complain that the witches lay their spells on Macbeth without asking her leave. The resemblances between Thomas Middleton's later play of ' The Witch ' (1610) and portions of ' Macbeth ' may safely be ascribed to plagiarism on Middleton's part. Of two songs which, according to the stage directions, were to be sung during the representation of ' Macbeth,' ' Come away, come away' (m. v.) and 'Black spirits &c.' (rv. i.), only the first words are noted there, but songs beginning with the same words are set out in full in Middleton's play ; they were probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of ' Macbeth ' after its original production. ' King Lear,' in which Shakespeare's tragic genius moved ^vithout any faltering on Titanic heights, was ' King written during 1606, and was produced before Lear.' the Court at Whitehall on the night of De- cember 26 of the same year.^ Eleven months later, on November 26, 1607, two undistinguished stationers, John Busby and Nathaniel Butter, obtained a license for the pubHcation of the great tragedy ' under the hands of ' Sir 1 This fact is stated in the Stationers' Company's license of Nov. 26, 1607, and is repeated a little confusedly on the title-page of the Quarto of 1608. 398 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE George Buc, the Master of the Revels, and of the wardens of the company.^ Nathaniel Butter published a quarto edition in the following year (1608). The verbose T^be^Quarto ^^^jg^ which is from the pen of a bookseller's hack, ran thus : ' M. William Shak-speare : his true chronicle historic of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters. With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam. As it was played before the King's Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas HoUidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing usually at the Gloabe on the Banke-side.' In the imprint the publisher mentions ' his shop in Pauls Churchyard at the signe of the Pide Bull near St. Austin's Gate.' The printer of the volume, who is unnamed, was probably Nicholas Okes, a young friend of Richard Field, who had stood surety for him in 1603 when he was made free of the Stationers' Company, and who fourteen years later printed the first quarto of ' Othello.' Butter's edition of ' King Lear ' followed a badly transcribed playhouse copy and abounds in gross typographical errors.^ Another edition, also bearing the date 1608, is a later reprint of a copy of Butter's original ^ John Busby, whose connection with the transaction does not extend beyond the mention of his name in the entry in the Stationers' Register, was five years before as elusively and as mysteriously associated with the first edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602). Butter, who was alone the efiective promoter of the publication of King Lear, became a freeman of the Stationers' Company early in 1604, and he lived on to 1664, acquiring some fame in Charles I's reign as a purveyor of news-sheets or rudimentary journals. His experience of the trade was very limited before he obtained the license to publish Shakespeare's Kifig Lear in 1607. ^ There was no systematic correction of the press; but after some sheets were printed oS, the type was haphazardly corrected here and there, and further sheets were printed off. The uncorrected sheets were not destroyed and the corrected and uncorrected sheets were carelessly bound together in proportions which vary in extant copies. In the result, accessible examples of the edition present many typo- graphical discrepancies one from another. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 399 issue and repeats its typographical confusions.^ The First Folio furnished a greatly improved text. Fewer verbal errors appear there, and some 110 lines are new. At the same time the FoHo omits 300 lines of the Quarto text, including the whole of act iv. sc. iii. (with the beautiful description of Cordelia's reception of the news of her sisters' maltreatment of their father), and some other passages which are as unquestionably Shakespearean. The editor of the Folio clearly had access to a manu- script which was quite independent of that of the Quarto, but had undergone abbreviation at different points. The FoUo ' copy,' as far as it went, was more carefully tran- scribed than the Quarto ' copy.' Yet neither the Quarto nor the Folio version of ' King Lear ' reproduced the author's autograph ; each was derived from its o%\ti play- house transcript. As in the case of its immediate predecessor ' Macbeth,' Shakespeare's tragedy of ' King Lear ' was based on a story with which Holinshed's ' Chronicle ' had and the long familiarised Elizabethans ; and other story of writers who had anticipated Shakespeare in adapting Holinshed's tale to literary purposes gave the dramatist help. The theme is part of the legendary lore of pre-Roman Britain which the Elizabethan chronicler and his readers accepted without question as authentic history, Holinshed had followed the guidance of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the twelfth century first undertook a history of British Kings. Geoffrey recorded the exploits * The Second Quarto has a title-page which differs from that of the first in spelling the dramatist's surname ' Shakespeare ' instead of ' Shak-speare ' and in giving the imprint the curt form ' Printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1608.' There seems reason to believe that the dated imprint of the Second Quarto is a falsification, and that the volume was actually published by Thomas Pavier at the press of William Jaggard as late as 1619 (see Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909). The Second Quarto is, like the First, unmethodically made up of corrected and uncorrected sheets, but in all known copies of the Second Quarto two of the sheets (E and K) always appear in their corrected shape. 400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEB of a Celtic dynasty which traced its origin to a Trojan refugee Brute or Brutus, who was reputed to be the grand- son of Aeneas of Troy. EUzabethan poets and dramatists aUke welcomed material from Geoffrey's fables of Brute and his line in Holinshed's version. Brute's son Locrine was the Brito-Trojan hero of the pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy of the name, which had appeared in print in 1595. * King Lear ' was one of many later occupants of Locrine's throne, who figured on the Elizabethan stage. Nor was Shakespeare the first playuTight to give theatrical vogue to King Lear's mythical fortunes. On April 6, 1594, a piece called ' Kinge Leare ' was piay*^^'^ acted at the Rose theatre ' by the Queene's men and my lord of Susexe together.' On May 14, 1594, a Ucense was granted for the printing of this piece under the title : ' The moste famous chi'onicle historye of Leire Kinge of England and his three daughters.' But the permission did not take effect, and some eleven years passed before the actual publication in 1605 of the pre-Shakespearean play. The piece was then entitled^ ' The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, as it hath bene divers and sundry times lately acted.' The author, whose name is unknown, based his work on Holinshed's ' Chronicle,' but he sought occasional help in the three derivative poetic narratives of King Lear's fabulous career, which figure respectively in WiUiam Warner's ' Albion's England ' (1586, bk. iii. ch. 14), ui ' The Mirror for Magistrates ' (1587), and in Edmund Spenser's ' Faerie Queene ' (1590, bk. ii. canto X. stanzas 27-32). At the same time the old dramatist embelhshed his borrowed cues by devices of his own invention. He gave his ill-starred monarch a com- panion who proved a pattern of fidelity and became one of the pillars of the dramatic action. The King of France's hasty courtship of King Lear's banished daughter Cordelia foUows original lines. Lear's sufferings in a thunderstorm during his wanderings owe nothing to earUer literature. But the restoration of Lear to his thione at the close of THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 401 the old piece agrees with all earher versions of the fable.i Shakespeare drew many hints from the old play as well as from a direct study of Holinshed. But he refashioned and strengthened the great issues of the plot peare's in- by methods which lay outside the capacity of nova ions, gj^^^ej. old dramatist or chronicler. There is no trace of Lear's Fool in any previous version. Shake- speare too sought an entirely new complication for the story by grafting on it the complementary by-plot of the Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, wliich he drew from an untried source, Sir PhiHp Sidney's ' Arcadia.' ^ Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were found in Harsnet's ' Declaration of Popish Impostures,' 1603. Above all, Shakespeare ignored the catastrophe of the chronicles which contented the earlier dramatist and preceding poets. They restored Lear to his forsaken throne at the triumphant hands of Cordeha and her husband the French King. Shakespeare mvented the defeat and death of King Lear and of his daughter CordeUa. Thus Shakespeare first converted the story into inexorable tragedy. In every act of ' Lear ' the pity and terror of which tragedy is capable reach their chmax. Only one who has something of the Shakespearean gift of greatness of language could adequately characterise the ^^ ^^^' scenes of agony — ' the hving martyrdom ' — to which the fiendish ingiatitude of his daughters condemns in Shakespeare's play the abdicated king — ' a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.' The elemental passions burst forth in his utterances with all the vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about his defenceless 1 Cf. The Chronicle History of King Leir : the original of Shake- speare's King Lear, ed. by Sidney Lee, 1909. ^ Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled ' The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his kind son ; first related by the son, then by the blind father ' (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590, 4to. ; pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.) 2 D 402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE head in the scene on the heath. The brutal bhnding of the Earl of Gloucester by the Duke of Cornwall exceeds in horror any other situation that Shakespeare created, if we assume that he was not responsible for similar scenes of mutilation in ' Titus Andronicus.' At no point in ' Lear ' is there any loosening of the tragic tension. The faithful half-witted lad who serves the king as his fool plays the jesting chorus on his master's fortunes in penetrating earnest and deepens the desolating pathos. The metre of ' King Lear ' is less regular than in any earlier play, and the language is more elliptical and allusive. The verbal and metrical temper gives the first signs of that valiant defiance of all conventional restraint which marks the latest stage in the development of Shakespeare's style and becomes habitual to his latest efforts. Although Shakespeare's powers were unexhausted, he rested for a while on his laurels after his colossal effort of 'Lear' (1607). He reverted in the following Athens^' °^ X®^^ ^^ earUer habits of collaboration. In two succeeding dramas, ' Timon of Athens ' and ' Pericles,' he would appear indeed to have done httle more than lend his hand to brilliant embellishments of the duU incoherence of very pedestrian pens. Lack of constructive plan deprives the two pieces of substantial dramatic value. Only occasional episodes which Shake- speare's genius illumined lift them above the rank of mediocrity. An extant play on the subject of ' Timon of Athens ' was composed in 1600,^ but there is nothing to show that Shakespeare or his coadjutor, who remains Piutarch^'^ anonymous, was acquainted with it. Timon was a familiar figure in classical legend and was a proverbial type of censorious misanthropy. ' Critic Timon ' is hghtly mentioned by Shakespeare in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' His story was originally told, by way ^ Dyoe first edited the manuscript, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, »South Kensington, for the Shakespeare Society in 1842. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 403 of parenthesis, in Plutarch's ' Life of Marc Antony.' There Antony was described as emulating at one period of his career the life and example of ' Timon Misanthropos the Athenian,' and some account of the Athenian's perverse experience was given. From Plutarch the tale passed into Painter's miscellany of Elizabethan romances called ' The Palace of Pleasure.' The author of the Shakespearean play may too have known a dialogue of Lucian entitled ' Timon,' which Boiardo, the poet of fifteenth-century Italy, had previously converted into an Italian comedy under the name of ' II Timone.' With singular clumsiness the English piece parts company with all preceding versions of Timon's history by grafting on the tradition of his misanthropy a shado^^y and irrelevant „, fable of the Athenian hero Alcibiades. A The . 1 • T episode of series of subsidiary scenes presents Alcibiades ci la es. -j^ ^j^g throes of a quarrel with the Athenian senate over its punishment of a friend ; finally he lays siege to the city and compels its rulers to submit to his will. Such an incident has no pertinence to Timon's fortunes. The piece is as reckless a travesty of classical life and history as any that came from the pen of a mediaeval fabulist.^ Nowhere is there a glimmer of the true Greek spirit. The interval between tire Greek nomenclature and the characterisation or action of the personages is even wider than in ' Troilus and Cressida.' Internal evidence makes it clear that the groundwork and most of the superstructure of the incoherent tragedy were due to Shakespeare's colleague. To that crude '^'l^. ^^^^4^*^ pen must be assigned nearly the whole of acts III. and V. and substantial portions of the three remaining acts. Yet the characters of Timon him- self and of the churlish cynic Apemantus bear witness to ^ Although Timon is presented in the play as the contemporary of Alcibiades and presumably of the generation of Pericles, he quotes Seneca. In much the same way Hector quotes Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida. Alcibiades in Timon makes his entry in battle array ' with drum and fife.' 2 D 2 404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's penetration. The greater part of the scenes which they dominate owed much to his hand. Timon is cast in the psychological mould of Lear. The play was printed for the first time in the First Folio from a very defective transcript.^ There seems some basis for the behef that the poet's anonymous coadjutor in 'Timon' was George Wilkins, ^ . , a -vvTiter of ill-developed dramatic power, who is known to have wTitten occasionally for Shakespeare's company. In 1607 that company produced Wilkins's ' The Miseries of Enforced Marriage,' which was published in the same year and proved popular. The play dealt with a melodramatic case of murder which had lately excited public interest. Next year the same episode served for the plot of ' The Yorkshire Tragedy,' a drama falsely assigned by the publishers to Shakespeare's pen. The hectic fury of the criminal heio in both these pieces has affinities with the impassioned rage of Timon which Shakespeare may have elaborated from a first sketch by Wilkins. At any rate, to Wilkins may safely be allotted the main authorship of ' Pericles,' a romantic play which was composed in the same year as ' Timon ' and of which Shakespeare was again announced as the sole author. During his lifetime and for many subsequent years Shakespeare was openly credited with the whole of ' Pericles.' Yet the internal evidence plainly relieves him of responsibility for the greater part of it. The frankly pagan tale of ' Pericles Prince of Tyre ' was invented by a Greek novelist near the opening of the Christian era, and enjoyed during the ]\Iiddle Ages an * There is evidence that when the First Folio was originally planned the place after Romeo and Juliet which Timon now fills was designed for Troilus and Cressida, and that, after the typographical composition of Troilus was begun in succession to Borneo, Troilus was set aside with a view to transference elsewhere, and the vacant space was hurriedly occupied by Timon by way of stop-gap. (See pp. 369-70 n.) The play is followed in the Folio by a leaf printed on one side only which contains ' The Actors' Names.' This arrangement is unique in the First Folio. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 405 immense popularity, not merely in a Latin version, but through translations in every vernacular speech of Europe. The lineage of the Shakespearean drama is somewhat . . , obscured by the fact that the hero was given in The original -^ i . , , , . i- . i legend of the play a name which he bore m none of the Pericles. numerous preceding versions of his story. The Shakespearean Pericles of Tyre is the Apollonius of Tyre who permeates post-classical and mediaeval hterature. The Enghsh dramatist derived most of his knowledge of the legend from the rendering of it which John Gower, the English poet of the fourteenth century, furnished in his rambling poetical miscellany called ' Confessio Amantis. A prominent figure in the Shakespearean play is ' the chorus ' or ' presenter ' who explains the action before or during the acts. The ' chorus ' bears the name of the poet Gower. ^ At the same time the sixteenth century saw several ver- sions of the veteran tale in both French and English prose, and while the dramatist found his main inspiration in ' old Gower ' he derived some embellishments of his work from an Elizabethan prose rendering of the myth, which first appeared in 1576, and reached a third edition in 1607.2 Indeed the reissue in 1607 of the Elizabethan version of the story doubtless prompted the dramatisa- tion of the theme, although the three leading characters of the play, Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and his daughter Marina, all bear appellations for which there is no previous authority. The hero's original name of Pericles recalls 1 Of the eight speeches of the chorus (filling in all 305 lines), five (filling 212 lines) are in the short six- or seven-syllable rhyming couplets of Gower's Confessio. 2 In 1576 the tale was ' gathered into English [prose] by Laurence Twine, gentleman ' under the title : ' The Patterne of painefull Aduen- tures, containing the most excellent, pleasant, and variable Historie of the strange accidents that befell vnto Prince ApoUonius, the Lady Lucina his wife and Tharsia his daughter. Wherein the vncertaintie of this world, and the fickle state of man's life are liuely described. . . . Imprinted at London by William How, 1576.' This volume was twice reissued (about 1595 and in 1607) before the play was attempted. The translator, Laurence Twine, a graduate of All Souls' College, Oxford, performed his task without distinction. 406 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE with characteristic haziness the period in Greek history to which ' Timon of Athens ' is vaguely assigned.^ The ancient fiction of Apollonius of Tyre was a tale of adventurous travel, and was inherently incapable of effective dramatic treatment. The rambling Incoher- ^ ences of scenes of the Shakespearean ' Pericles ' and the e piece. j^^^ years which the plot covers tend to inco- herence. Choruses and dumb shows ' stand i' the gaps to teach the stages of the story.' Yet numerous references to the piece in contemporary Uterature attest the warm welcome which an uncritical pubhc extended to its early representations. 2 After the fkst production of ' Pericles ' at the Globe in the spring of 1608, Edward Blount, a publisher of hterary proclivities, obtained (on May 20, 1608) a license J?qi5tT for the play's pubhcation. But Blount failed to exercise his right, and the piece was actually pubhshed next year by an undistinguished ' stationer,' 1 In all probability the name Pericles confuses reminiscences of the Greek Pericles with those of Pyrocles, one of the heroes of Sidney's romance of Arcadia, whence Shakespeare had lately borrowed the by-plot of King Lear. Richard Flecknoe, writing of the Shakespearean play in 1656, called the hero Pyrocles. Musidorus, another hero of Sidney's romance, had already supplied the title of the romantic play, Mucedorus, which appeared in 1595. ^ In the prologue to Robert Tailor's comedy, The Hogge hath lost his Pearle (1614), the writer says of his own piece : If it prove so happy as to please, Weele say 'tis fortunate like Perides. On May 24, 1619, the piece was performed at Court on the occasion of a great entertainment in honour of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Trenouille. The play was still popular in 1630 when Ben Jonson, indignant at the failure of his own piece, The Netv Inn, sneered at ' some mouldy tale like Pericles ' in his sour ode beginning ' Come leave the lothed stage.' On June 10, 1631, the piece was revived before a crowded audience at the Globe theatre ' upon the cessation of the plague.' At the Restoration Pericles renewed its popularity in the theatre, and Betterton was much applauded in the title-role. All the points connected with the history and bibliography of the play are discussed in the facsimile reproduction of Pericles, ed. by Sidney Lee, Clarendon Press, 1905. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 407 Henry Gosson, then living ' at the sign of the Sunne in Paternoster Row.' The exceptionally bad text was clearly derived from the notes of an irresponsible short- hand reporter of a performance in the theatre. A second edition, without correction but with some tj'pographical variations, appeared in the same year, and reprints which came from other presses in 1611, 1619, 1630. and 1635,^ bear strange witness to the popularity of the book. The original title-page is couched in ostentatious phraseology which sufficiently refutes Shakespeare's responsibility for the publication. The words run : ' The late and much ad- mired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole Historic, aduentures, and fortunes of the said Prince : as also, the no lesse strange and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life of his Daughter Mariana. As it hath been diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.' All the quarto editions credit Shakespeare with the sole authorship ; but the piece was with much justice excluded from the First Folio of 1623 and from the Second Folio of 1632. It was not admitted to the collected works of the di'amatist until the second issue of the Third Folio in 1664. There is no sustained evidence of Shakespeare's handi- work in ' Pericles,' save in acts iii. and v. and parts of Shake- ^^^ ^^' "^^^ Shakespearean scenes teU the speare's story of Pericles's daughter Marina. They open with the tempest at sea during which she is born, and they close with her final restoration to her parents and her betrothal. The style of these scenes is in the manner of which Shakespeare gives earnest in ' King Lear.' ^ The unnamed prmter of both first and second editions would seom to have been William White, an inferior workman whose press was near Smithfield. White was responsible for the first quarto of Love's Labour's Lost in 1598. The second edition of Pericles is easily dis- tinguishable from the first by a misprint in the first stage direction. ' Enter Gower ' of the first edition is reproduced in the second edition as ' Eneer Gower.' 408 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The ellipses are often puzzling, but the condensed thought is intensely vivid and glows with strength and insight. The themes, too, of Shakespeare's contribution to ' Pericles ' are nearly akin to many which figured elsewhere in his latest work. The tone of Marina's appeals to Lysimachus and Boult in the brothel resembles that of Isabella's speeches in ' Measure for Measure.' Thaisa, whom her husband imagines to be dead, shares some of the experi- ences of Hermione in ' The Winter's Tale.' The portrayal of the shipwTeck, amid which Marina is born, adumbrates the opening scene of ' The Tempest ' ; and there are ingenuous touches in the dehneation of Marina which suggest the girlhood of Perdita. There seems good ground for assuming that the play of ' Pericles ' was originally penned by George Wilkins and that it was over his draft that Shakespeare Wiikins's worked. One curious association of Wilkins novel of ^ with the play is attested under his own hand. Very soon after the piece was staged he pub- lished in his own name a novel in prose which he asserted to be based upon the play. The novel preceded by a year the publication of the drama, but the filial relation in Avhich the romance stands to the play is precisely stated alike in the title-page of the novel and in its ' argument to the whole historic.' The novel bears the title : ' The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was latety presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower.' ^ In the ' argument ' the reader is requested ' to receive this Historic in the same maner as it was under the habite of ancient Gower, the famous English Poet, by the King's Maiesties Players excellently presented.' ^ 1 The imprint runs : ' At London. Printed by T[homas] P[avier] for Nat. Butter, 1608 ' ; see the reprint edited by Tycho jSIommsen (Oldenburg, 1857). ^ At times the language of the drama is exactly copied by Wiikins's novel, and, though transferred to prose, preserves the rhythm of blank verse. The novel is far more carefully printed than the play, and THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 409 On the same day (May 20, 1608) that Edward Blount obtained his abortive license for the issue of ' Pericles ' , . , he secured from the Stationers' Company a Antony ^ '' and cieo- second license, also by the authority of Sir pa ra, I o . QgQj-gg Buc, the licenser of plays, for the pubhcation of a far more impressive piece of Uterature — ' a booke called " Anthony and Cleopatra." ' No copy of this date is kno"v\Ti, and once again the company probably hindered the publication. The play was first printed in the Folio of 1623. Shakespeare's ' Antony and Cleopatra' is the middle play of his Roman trilogy which opened some seven years before with ' Julius Caesar ' and ended with ' Coriolanus.' As in the case of all Shakespeare's Roman plays, the plot of ' Antony and Cleopatra ' comes from Sir Thomas North's version of Plutarch's ' Lives.' On the opening section of Plutarch's Life of Antony the poet had already levied substantial loans in ' Julius Caesar.' 1 He now produced a full dramatisation of it. The story of Antony's love of Cleopatra had passed from classical history into the vague floating tradi- Life of tion of mediaeval Europe. Chaucer assigned ° °^^' her the first place in his ' Legend of Good Women.' But Plutarch's graphic biography of Antony first taught western Europe in the early days of the corrects some of the manifold corruptions of the printed text of the latter. On the other hand Wilkins's novel shows at several points divergence from the play. There are places in which the novel develops incidents which are barely noticed in the play, and elsewhere the play is somewhat fuller than the novel. One or two phrases which have the Shakespearean ring are indeed found alone in the novel. A few lines from Shakespeare's pen seem to be present there and nowhere else. After the preliminary 'argument ' of the novel, there follows a list of the dramatis personcB headed ' The names of the Personages mentioned in the Historic ' which is not to be found in the play, but seems to belong to it. The discrepancies between the play and the novel suggest that Wilkins's novel followed a manuscript version of the play different from that on which the printed quarto was based. ^ Shakespeare showed elsewhere familiarity with the memoir. Into the more recent tragedy of Macbeth (m. i. 54-57) he drew from it a pointed reference to Octavius Caesar, and on a digression in Plutarch's text he based his lurid sketch of the misanthropy of Titnon of Athens. 410 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Renaissance the whole truth about his relations with the Queen of Egypt. Early experiments in the Renaissance drama of Italy, France, and England anticipated Shake- speare in turning the theme to dramatic uses. The pre- Shakespearean dramas of Antony and Cleopatra at some points suggest Shakespeare's design. But the resemblances between the ' Antony and Cleopatra ' of Shakespeare and the like efforts of his predecessors at home or abroad seem to be due to the universal dependence on Plutarch.^ Shakespeare follows the lines of Plutarch's biography even more loyaUy than in ' Juhus Csesar.' Many trifling g, , details which in the play accentuate Cleopatra's speare'sdebt idiosyncrasy come unaltered from the Greek to utarc . g^^^j^Qj.^ The superb description of the barge in which the Queen journej^s do\\Ti the river Cydnus to meet Antony is Plutarch's language. Shakespeare borroM^s the supernatural touches which complicate the tragic motive. At times, even in the heat of the tragedy, the speeches of ^ The earliest dramatic version of the Plutarchan narrative came from an Italian pen about 1540. The author, Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, is best known by that collection of prose tales, Hecatommithi, which supplied Shakespeare with the plots of Othello and Measure for Measure. The topic enjoys the distinction of havmg inspired the first regular tragedy in French literature. This piece, Cleopatre Captive bj' Estienne Jodelle, was published in 1552. Within twenty years of Jodelle's eSort, the chief dramatist of the French Renaissance, Robert Gamier, handled the theme in his tragedy called 3Iarc Antoine. Finally the inferior hand of Nicolas de Montreux took up the parable of Cleopatra in 1594 ; his five-act tragedy of Cleopatre, alike in construction and plot, closely follows Jodelle's Cleopatre Captive. It was such French efforts Mhich gave the cue to the dramatic versions of Cleopatra's history in Elizabethan England which preceded Shakespeare's work. The earliest of these English experiments was a translation of Garnier's tragedy. This came from the accomplished pen of Sir Philip Sidney's sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke ; it was published in 1592. Two years later, by way of sequel to the Countess's work, her protege, Daniel, issued an original tragedy of Cleopatra on the Senecan pattern. Daniel pursued the topic some five years later in an imaginary verse letter from Antony's wife Octavia to her husband. A humble camp-follower of the Elizabethan army of poets and dramatists, one Samuel Brandon, emulated Daniel's example, and contrived in 1598 The tragicomedie of the tnrtuov.s Octavia. Brandon's catastrophe is the death of Mark Antony, and Octavia's jealousy of Cleopatra is the main theme. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 411 the hero and heroine and of their attendants are trans- ferred bodily from North's prose. ^ Not that Shakespeare accepts the whole of the episode which Plutarch narrates. Although he adds nothing, he makes substantial omissions, and his method of selection does not always respect the calls of perspicuity. Shakespeare ignores the nine years' interval between Antony's first and last meetings with Cleopatra. During that period Antony not only did much important political work at Rome, but conducted an obstinate war ia Parthia and Armenia. Nor does Shake- speare take cognisance of the eight or nine months which separate Antony's defeat at Actium from his rout under the walls of Alexandria. With the complex series of events, which Shakespeare cuts adrift, his heroine has no concern, yet the neglected incident leaves in the play some jagged edges which impair its coherence and symmetry. Shakespeare is no slavish disciple of Plutarch. The dramatist's mind is concentrated on Antony's infatua- tion for Cleopatra, and there he expands and develops Plutarch's story with magnificent freedom and originality. The leading events and characters, which Shakespeare drew from the Greek biography, are, despite his liberal speare's borrowings of phrase and fact, re-incarnated in recreation ^j^g crucible of the poet's imagination, so that of the story. ^ '=' ' they glow m his verse with an heroic and poetic glamour of which Plutarch gives faint conception. All the scenes which Antony and Cleopatra dominate show Shake- speare's mastery of dramatic emotion at its height. It is doubtful if any of his creations, male or female, deserve ^ George Wyndham, in his introduction to his edition of North's Plutarch, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of Shakespeare's play to Plutarch's life of Antonius. See also M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Background (1910), pp. 318 seq. The extent to which the dramatist saturated himself vdth Plutarchan detail may be gauged by the circumstance that he christens an attendant at Cleopatra's Court with the name of Lamprius (i. ii. 1 stage direction). The name is accounted for by the fact that Plutarch's grandfather of similar name (Lamprj-as) is parenthetically cited by the biographer as hearsay authority for some backstairs gossip of the palace at Alexandria. 412 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE a rank in his great gallery higher than that of the Queen of Egypt for artistic completeness of conception or sureness of touch in dramatic execution. It is almost adequate comment on Antony's character to affirm that he is a worthy companion of Cleopatra. The notes of roughness and sensuality in his temperament are ultimately sub- limated by a vein of poetry, which lends singular beauty to aU his farewell utterances. Herein he resembles Shake- speare's Richard II and Macbeth, in both of whom a native poetic sentiment is quickened by despair. Among the minor personages, Enobarbus, Antony's disciple, is especially worthy of study. His frank criticism of passing events invests him through the early portions of the play Avith the function of a chorus who sardonically warns the protagonists of the destiny awaiting their delinquencies and follies. The metre and style of ' Antony and Cleopatra,' when they are compared with the metre and style of the great tragedies of earlier date, plainly indicate fresh oi the piece, development of faculty and design. The tendency to spasmodic and disjointed effects, of which ' King Lear ' gives the earliest warnings, has become habitual. Coleridge applied to the language of ' Antony and Cleopatra ' the Latin motto ' feUciter audax.' He credited the dramatic diction with ' a happy valiancy,' a description which could not be bettered. Throughout the piece, the speeches of great and small characters are instinct with figurative allusiveness and metaphorical subtlety, which, however hard to paraphrase or analyse, convey an impression of sublimity. At the same time, in their moments of supreme exaltation, both Antony and Cleopatra employ direct language which is innocent of rhetorical involution. But the tone of sub- limity commonly seeks sustenance in unexpected com- plexities of phrase. Occasional lines tremble on the verge of the grotesque. But Shakespeare's ' angeUc strength ' preserves him from the perils of bombast.^ ^ A full review of the play and its analogues by the present writer appears in the introduction to the text in the ' Caxton ' Shakespeare. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 413 Internal evidence points with no uncertain finger to the late months of 1608 or early months of 1609 as the period , . , of the birth of ' Coriolanus,' the last piece of Shakespeare's Roman trilogy. The tragedy was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 from a singularly bad transcript.^ The irregularities of metre, the ellipses of style closely associate ' Coriolanus ' with ' Antony and Cleopatra.' The metaphors and similes of ' Coriolanus ' are hardly less abundant than in the previous tragedy and no less vivid. Yet the austerity of Coriolanus's tragic story is the ethical antithesis of the passionate subtlety of the story of Antony and his mistress, and the contrast renders the tragedy a fitting sequel. As far as is kno\ATi, only one dramatist in Europe anticipated Shakespeare in turning Coriolanus's fate to dramatic purposes. Shakespeare's single predecessor was his French contemporary Alexandre Hardy, who, freely interpreting Senecan principles of drama, produced his tragedy of ' Coriolan ' on the Parisian stage for the first time in 1607.^ Coriolanus's story, as narrated by the Roman historian Livy, had served in Shakespeare's youth for material of a prose tale in Painter's well-known ' Palace of to^PiufidK Pleasure.' There Shakespeare doubtless made the acquaintance of his hero for the first time. But once again the dramatist sought his main authority in a ^ Ben Jonson's Silent Woman, which is kno\\"n to have been first acted in 1609, seems to echo a phrase of Shakespeare s play. In n. ii. 105 Cominius says of the hero's feats in youth that ' he lurch'd [i.e. deprived] all swords of the garland.' The phrase has an uncommon ring and it would be in full accordance with Jonson's habit to have assimilated it, when he penned the sentence ' Well, Dauphin, you have lurched your friends of the better half of the garland ' (Silent Woman, v. iv. 227-8). ^ Hardy declared that ' few subjects ■\\ ill be found in Roman history to be worthier of the stage ' than Coriolanus. The simplicity of the tragic motive with its filial sentiment well harmonises with French ideals of classical drama and with the French domestic temperament. For more than two centuries the seed which Hardy had sowii bore fruit in France ; and no less than three-and-twenty tragedies on the subject of Coriolanus have blossomed since Hardy's day in the French theatres. 414 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEB biography of Plutarch, and he presented Plutarch's leading facts in his play with a documentary fidelity which excels any earlier practice. He amplifies some subsidiary details and omits or contracts others. Yet the longest speeches in the play — the hero's address to the Volscian general, Aufidius, when he offers him his military services, and Volumnia's great appeal to her son to rescue his fellow- countrymen from the perils to which his desertion is exposing them — both transcribe Plutarch's language with small variation for two-thirds of their length. There is magical vigour in the original interpolations. But the identity of phraseology is almost as striking as the changes or amphfications.^ ' In Plutarch, Coriolanus' first words to Aufidius in his own house run : ' If thou knowest me not yet, TuUus, and seeing me, dost not believe me to be the man that I am indeed, I must of necessity betray myself to be that I am.' In Shakespeare Coriolanus speaks on the same occasion thus : If, TuUus, Not yet thou knowest me, and, seeing me, dost not Think me for the man I am, necessity Commands me name myself, (rv. v. 54-57.) Volumnia's speech offers like illustration of Shakespeare's dependence. Plutarch assigns to Volumnia this sentence : ' So though the end of war be uncertain, yet this, notwithstanding, is most certain : that if it be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou reap of this thy goodly conquest to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of thy country.' Shakespeare transliterates with rare dramatic effect (v. iii. 140-148) : Thou know'st, great son. The end of war's uncertain, but this certain, That if thou conquer Eome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses ; Whose chronicle thus writ : ' The man was noble. But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroy'd his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr'd." Like examples of Shakespeare's method of assimilation might be quoted from Coriolanus's heated speeches to the tribunes and his censures of democracy (act in. sc. i.). The account which the tribune Brutus gives of Coriolanus's ancestry (n. iii. 234 seq.) is so literally paraphrased from Plutarch that an obvious hiatus in the corrupt text of the play, which the syntax requires to be filled, is easily supplied from North's page. A full review of the play and its analogues by the present writer appears in the introduction to the text in the ' Caxton ' Shakespeare. THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 415 Despite such liberal levies on Plutarch's text Shake- speare imbues Plutarch's theme with a new vivacity. The unity of interest and the sinsjleness of the cha^ract^^s dramatic purpose render the tragedy nearly as of the complete a triumph of dramatic art as ' Othello.' Shakespeare's Coriolanus is cast in a Titanic mould. No turn in the wheel of fortune can modify that colossal sense of the sacredness of caste with which his mother's milk has infected him. Coriolanus's mother, Volumnia, is as vivid and finished a picture as the hero himself. Her portrait, indeed, is a greater original effort, for it owes much less to Plutarch's inspiration. From her Coriolanus derives alike his patrician prejudice and his military ambition. But in one regard Volumnia is greater than her ' stubborn heir. The keenness and pliancy of her intellect have no counterpart in his nature. Very artistically are the other female characters of the tragedy, Coriolanus's v,nie, Virgilia, and Virgilia's friend Valeria, presented as Volumnia's foils. Valeria is a high-spirited and honourable lady of fashion, with a predilection for frivolous pleasure and easy gossip. Virgilia is a gentle wife and mother, who well earns Coriolanus's apostrophe of ' gracious silence.' Of other subsidiary characters, Mene- nius Agrippa, Coriolanus's old friend and counseUoi, is a touching portrait of fideUty to which Shakespeare lends a significance unattempted by Plutarch. Throughout the play Menenius criticises the progress of events with ironi- cal detachment after the manner of a chorus in classical tragedy. His place in the dramatic scheme resembles that of Enobarbus in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' and the turn of events involves him in almost as melancholy a fate. More important to the dramatic development are the spokesmen of the mob and their leaders, the tribunes „., ,. Brutus and Sicinius. The dark colours in The poli- tical crisis which the poet paints the popular faction are e p ay. q^^^q^^ held to reflect a personal predilection for aristocratic predominance in the body pohtic or for feudal conditions of poUtical society. It is, however, very doubtful 416 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE whether Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the Roman crowd, was conscious of any intention save that of dramatically interpreting the social and political environment which Plutarch allots to Coriolanus's career. The political situ- ation which Plutarch described was alien to the experi- ence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shake- speare was in all likelihood merely moved by the artistic and purely objective ambition of investing unfamiUar episode with dramatic plausibility. No personal malice nor political design need be imputed to the dramatist's repeated references to the citizens' ' strong breaths ' or ' greasy caps ' which were conventional phrases in Eliza- bethan drama. Whatever failings are assigned to the plebeians in the tragedy of ' Coriolanus,' it is patrician defiance of the natural instinct of patriotism which brings about the catastrophe and works the fatal disaster. Shakespeare's detached but inveterate sense of justice holds the balance true between the rival political interests. XIX THE LATEST PLAYS Through the first decade of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare's powers were at their zenith, he devoted his V energies, as we have seen, almost exclusively Shake- ^q tragedy. During the years that intervened ' tragic between the composition of ' Juhus Csesar,' in 1600-9. 1600, and that of ' Coriolanus,' in 1609. tragic themes of solemn import occupied his pen unceasingly. The gleams of humour which illumined a few scenes scarcely relieved the sombre atmosphere. Seven plays in the great tragic series — ' Juhus Caesar,' 'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' 'Macbeth,' ' Kmg Lear,' 'Antony and Cleopatra,' and ' Coriolanus ' — won for their author the pre-eminent place among workers in the tragic art of every age and chme. A popular theory presumes that Shakespeare's decade of tragedy was the outcome of some spiritual calamity, of some episode of tragic gloom in his private life. No tangible evidence supports the allegation. The external facts of Shakespeare's biography through the main epoch of his tragic energy show an unbroken progress of prosperity, a final farewell to pecuniary anxieties, and the general recognition of his towering genius by contem- porary opinion. The biographic record lends no support to the suggestion of a prolonged personal experience of tragic suffering. Nor does the general trend of his literary activities countenance the nebulous theory. Tragedy was no new venture for Shakespeare when the seventeenth century opened. His experiments in that branch of drama 417 2 E 418 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE date from liis earliest years. Near the outset of his career he had given signal proof of his tragic power in ' Romeo and Juliet,' in ' King John,' in ' Richard II,' and ' Richard III.' Into his comedies ' The Merchant of Venice,' ' Much Ado,' and ' Twelfth Night,' he imported tragic touches. With his advance in years there came in comedy and tragedy ahke a larger grasp of life, a firmer style, a richer thought. Ultimately, tragedy rather than comedy gave him the requisite scope for the full exercise of his matured endowments, by virtue of the inevitable laws governing the development of dramatic genius. To seek in the necessarily narrow range of his personal experi- ence the key to Shakespeare's triumphant conquest of the topmost peaks of tragedy is to underrate his creative faculty and to disparage the force of its magic. In the EUzabethan realm of letters interest combined with instinct to encourage the tragic direction of Shake- speare's dramatic aptitudes. Public taste gave of°tragedv tragedy a supreme place in the theatre. It was on those who excelled in tragic drama that the highest rewards and the loudest applause were be- stowed. There is much significance in the circumstance that Shakespeare's tragedy of ' King Lear,' the most appalling of all tragedies, was chosen for presentation at Whitehall on the opening of the joyous Christmas festivities of 1606. The Court's choice was dictated by the prevalent Hterary feeling. Shakespeare's devotion to tragedy at the zenith of his career finds all the explanation that is needed in the fact that he was a great poet and dramatic artist whose progressive power was in closest touch and surest sympathy with current predilections.^ There is no conflict with this conclusion in the circum- Shake- Stance that after completing ' Coriolanus,' the reurrn'to eighth drama in the well-nigh uninterrupted romance. succession of his tragic masterpieces, Shake- speare turned from the storm and stress of great tragedy 1 Cf. the present writer's essay on ' The Impersonal Aspect of Shake- speare's Art ' (English Association Leaflet, No. 13, July 1909). THE LATEST PLAYS 419 to the serener field of meditative romance. A relaxa- tion of the prolonged tragic strain was needed by both author and audience. Again the dramatist was pursuing a path which at the same time harmonised with the playgoers' idiosyncrasy and conformed with the conditions of his art. The Elizabethan stage had under Italian or Franco- Itahan influence welcomed from early days, by way of relief from the strenuousness of unqualified tragedy, experiments in tragicomedy or romantic comedy which aimed at a fusion of tragic and comic elements. At first the result was a crude minghng of ingredients which refused to coalesce.^ But by slow degrees there devel- oped an harmonious form of drama, technically knoAvn as ' tragicomedy,' in which a romantic theme, while it admitted tragic episode, ended happily and was imbued with a sentimental pathos unknown to either regular comedy or regular tragedy. Shakespeare's romantic dramas of ' Much Ado ' and ' Twelfth Night ' had at the end of the sixteenth century first indicated the artistic capabiHties of this middle term in drama. ' Measure for Measure,' which was penned in 1604, respected the essen- tial conditions of a tragicomedy. The main issues fell within the verge of tragedy, but left the tragic path before they reached solution. In the years that followed, Shake- speare's juniors applied much independent energy to popu- larising the mixed dramatic type. George Chapman's ' The Gentleman Usher,' which was published early in 1606 after its performance at the Blackfriars theatre by the Children of the Chapel, has all the features of a full-fledged tragicomedy. As in ' Twelfth Night ' and ' Much Ado,' serious romance is linked with much comic episode, but the incident is penetrated by strenuous romantic sentiment ^ The best known specimen of the early type is Richard Edwardes's empiric ' tragical] comedy ' of Damon and Pythias, which dates from 1566. See pp. 93, 217 supra. For^better-developed specimens on the contemporary French stage which helped to direct the development in England, cf. Lee's French Renaissance in England, 408 seq. 2 E 2 420 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and stern griefs and trials reach a peaceful solution. The example was turned to very effective account by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who, soon after their literary partnership opened in 1607, enlisted in the service of Shakespeare's company. In their three popular plays ' The Faithful Shepherdess,' ' Philaster,' and ' A King and no King,' they succeeded in establishing for a generation the vogue of tragicomedy on the English stage. It was to the tragicomic movement, which his ablest contemporaries had already espoused with public approval, that Shake- speare lent his potent countenance in the latest plays which came from his unaided pen. In ' Cymbeline,' ' The Winter's Tale,' and ' The Tempest,' Shakespeare applied himself to perfecting the newest phases of romantic drama. ' Cymbeline ' and ' The Winter's Tale,' which immediately followed his great tragic efforts, are the best specimens of tragicomedy which literature knows. Although ' The Tempest ' differs constructively from its companions, it completes the trilogy of which ' Cymbeline ' and ' The Winter's Tale ' are the first and second instalments. If ' The Tempest ' come no nearer ordinary comedy than they, it is further removed from ordinary tragedy.^ ^ Beaumont and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess and Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding, both of which may be classed with tragicomedies, would each seem to have been written in 1609, and the evidence suggests that they were the precursors rather than the successors of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale (cf. Ashley Thomdike's The Influence of Beau- mont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, Worcester, Mass., 1901, chaps, ix. and X.). Beaumont and Fletcher's A Kijig and no King, which also obeyed the laws of tragicomedy, was written before 1611 and was in all probability in course of composition at the same time as Cy?nbeline. All three pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted by Shakespeare's company. Guarini's Pastor Fido, the Italian pastoral drama, was very popular in England early in the seventeenth century and influenced the sentiment of Jacobean tragicomedy. In Fletcher's ' Address to the Reader ' before The Faithful Shepherdess, of which the first edition is an undated quarto assignable to 1609-10, a tragicomedy is thus defined in language silently borrowed from a critical essay of Guarini : ' A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must THE LATEST PLAYS 421 But it belongs to the category of its two predecessors by virtue of its romantic spirit, of the plenitude of its poetry, of its solemnity of tone, of its avoidance of the arbitre- ment of death. None of these three pieces was pubUshed in Shake- speare's Ufetime. All were first printed in the First FoUo, -j-jjg and the places they hold in that volume lack romantic justification. Although ' The Tempest ' was and the the last play which Shakespeare completed, it First Folio, gijg ^j^g £j.g^ pjg^^g ^ ^j^g j^jj.gt PqIjq^ standing at the head of the section of comedies. ' The Winter's Tale,' in spite of its composition just before ' The Tempest,' occupies the last place of the same section, being separated from ' The Tempest ' by the whole range of Shakespeare's endeavours in comedy. With even greater inconsistency, ' Cymbeline ' comes at the very end of the First Folio, filling the last place in the third and last section of tragedies. It is clear that the editors of the volume completely misconceived the chronological and critical relations of the three plays, alike to one another and to the rest of Shakespeare's work. They failed to recognise the distinctive branch of dramatic art to which ' Cymbeline ' belonged, and they set it among Shake- speare's tragedies, with which it bore small logical afiinity. Nor was ' The Tempest ' nor ' The Winter's Tale ' justly numbered among the comedies without a radical quaU- fication of that term. It is mainly internal evidence— points of style, language, metre, characterisation — which proves that the three plays Perform- ' Cj^mbeluie,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The ances of Tempest ' belonged to the close of the poet's latest plays career. The metrical irregularity, the con- durmgi6ii. ^g^ged imagery, the abrupt turns of subtle thought, associate the three pieces very closely with be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned.' (Cf. F. H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy, New York, 1910, p. 107; T. M. Parrott's Comedies of George Chapman, pp. 757 seq.) 422 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' Antony and Cleopatra ' and ' Coriolanus.' The discerning student recognises throughout the romantic trilogy the latest phase of Shakespeare's dramatic manner. The composition of ' Cymbehne ' and ' The Winter's Tale ' may be best assigned to the spring and autumn respectively of 1610, and ' The Tempest ' to the early months of the following year. External evidence shows that the three plays stood high in popular favour through the year 1611. Henry Manningham, the Middle Temple barrister, who described a performance of ' Twelfth Night ' in the Hall of his Inn in February 1601-2, was not the only contemporary reporter of early performances of Shakespeare's plays in London, Simon Forman, a prosperous London astrologer and quack doctor, also kept notes of his playgoing experi- ences in the metropolis a few years later. In the same notebook in which he described how he attended a revival of 'Macbeth' at the Globe in April 1610, he recorded that on May 15, 1611, he visited the same theatre and witnessed ' The Winter's Tale.' The next entry, which is without a date, gives a fairly accurate sketch of the comph- cated plot of Shakespeare's ' Cymbehne.' ^ Forman's notes do not suggest that he was present at the first production of any of the cited pieces ; but it is clear that ' The Winter's Tale ' and ' Cymbeline,' were, when he wrote of them, each of comparatively recent birth. Within six months of the date of Forman's entries ' The Tempest ' was performed at Court (Nov. 1, 1611) and a production of ' The Winter's Tale ' before royalty followed in four days (Nov. 5, 1611).2 ^ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 86 ; cf. p. 125 n. supra. ^ The entries of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in the BooTce of the Revells (October 31, 1611-November 1, 1612) in the Public Record Office were long under suspicion of forgery. But their authenticity is now established. See Ernest Law's Some supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, and his More about Shakespeare ' Forgeries,'' 1913. The Booke of tJie Revells in question was printed in Cunningham's Extracts from the Account of tlie Revels at Court, p. 210. In 1809 Malone, who examined the Revels Accounts, wrote of Tlie Tempest, ' I know that it had " a being and a name " in the autumn of 1611,' and he concluded that it was penned in the spring of that year. {Variorum Shakespeare, THE LATEST PLAYS 423 In ' Cymbeline ' Shakespeare weaves together three distinct threads of story, two of which he derives from well-known literary repertories. The first thread plot of concerns a poHtical quarrel between ancient ym e ine. g^j^g^jj^^ when it was a Roman province, and the empire of Rome, which claimed supreme dominion over it. Shakespeare derived his Brito-Roman incident from Holinshed's ' Chronicle,' a volume whence he had already drawn much legend as Avell as authentic history. His pusillanimous hero Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a late successor of King Lear and nearly the last of Lear's line. The second thread of the plot of ' CymbeUne,' which concerns the experiences of the heroine Imogen, comes with variations from a well-known novel of'^ Boccaccio. There Shakespeare's heroine was known as Ginevra ; her husband (Shakespeare's Posthumus) as Bernabo ; and his treacherous friend (Shakespeare's lachimo) as Ambrogiuolo. Boccaccio anticipates Shake- speare in the main fortunes of Imogen, including her escape in boy's attire from the death which her husband designs for her. But Shakespeare reconstructs the subsequent adventures which lead to her reconcihation with her husband. Boccaccio's tale was crudely adapted for English readers in a popular miscellany of fiction entitled ' Westward for Smelts, or the Waterman's Fare of Mad Merry Western Wenches, whose tongues albeit, like Bell- clappers, they never leave ringing, yet their Tales are sweet, and will much content you : Written by kinde Kitt of Kingstone.' This fantastically named book was, accord- ing to Malone and Steevens, first pubhshed in London in 1603, but no edition earlier than 1620 is known. Episodes analogous to those which form the plot of Shakespeare's ' Merry Wives of Windsor ' appear in the volume. But on any showing the indebtedness of the dramatist's 1821, XV. 423.) Tho Council's warrant, giving particulars of the pay- ment of the actors for their services at Court during the year 1611-12, is in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. A 204 (f . 305) ; the warrant omits all names of plays. 424 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' Cymbeline ' to it is very slender. He follows far more loyally Boccaccio's original text. Shakespeare would seem to have himself invented the play's third thread of story, the banishment from the British Court of the lord Belarius, who, in revenge for his expatriation, kidnapped the king's young sons and brought them up with him in the recesses of the mountains. Although most of the scenes of ' Cymbeline ' are laid in Britain in the first century before the Christian era, there is no pretence of historical vraisemblance. tion and With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness, the character!- British King's courtiers make merry with sation. ° "^ technical terms pecuHar to Calvinistic theology, like 'grace' and 'election.'^ The action, which, owing to the combination of the three threads of narrative, is varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of romance. But the dramatist atones for the remoteness of the incident and the looseness of construction by in- vesting the characters with a rare wealth of vivacious humanity. The background of the picture is unreal ; but the figures in the foreground are instinct with life and poetry. On Imogen, who is the main pillar of the action, Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius. She is tlie crown and flower of his conception of tender and artless womanhood. She pervades and animates the whole piece as an angel of fight, who harmonises its discursive and discordant elements. Her weakly suspicious husband Posthumus, her rejected lover the brutish Cloten, her would-be seducer lachimo are contrasted with her and with each other with luminous ingenuity. The mountain passes of Wales in wliich Belarius and his fascinating boy- companions play their part have some points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in ' As You Like It ' ; but fife throughout ' Cymbeline ' is grimly earnest, and the rude and bracing Welsh mountains nurture little of the contem- ^ In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as ' past grace ' in the theological sense. In i. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks : ' If it be a sin to make a true election, she is damned.' THE LATEST PLAYS 425 plative quiet which characterises existence on the sylvan levels of Arden. Save in a part of one scene, no doubt is permissible of Shakespeare's sole responsibihty. In the fourth scene of the fourth act (11. 30 seq.) the husband Posthumus, when imprisoned by Cymbeline, Kang of Britain, sees in an irrelevant vision his parents and his brothers, who summon Jupiter to restore his broken fortunes. All here is pitiful mummery, which may be assigned to an incompetent coadjutor. Anj' suspicion elsewhere that Shakespeare's imagination has suffered in energy is dis- pelled by the lyrical dirge ' Fear no more the heat of the sun,' which for perfect sureness of thought and expression has no parallel in the songs of previous years. The deaths of Cloten and his mother signalise the romantic triumph of Imogen's virtue over wrong, and accentuate the serious aspects of life without exciting tragic emotion. Far simpler than the plot of ' Cymbeline ' is that of ' The Winter's Tale,' which was seen by Dr. Forman at ._, the Globe on May 15, 1611, and was acted at Winter's Court on November 5 follo^ving.^ The play was wholly based upon a popular English romance of euphuistic temper which was called ' Pandosto ' in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened ' Dorastus and Fawnia.' Shakespeare's constructive method in ' The Winter's Tale ' resembled that which he pursued in ' As You Like It,' when he converted into a play a recent Enghsh romance, ' Rosalynde,' by Thomas Lodge. Some irony attaches to Shakespeare's choice of authority for the later play. The writer of the novel which Shakespeare dramatised The debt there was Robert Greene, who, on his death- to Greene's bed, some eighteen years before, had attacked the dramatist with much bitterness when his great career was opening. In many ways Shakespeare 1 Camillo's reflections (i. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who ' struck anointed kings ' have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as specially designed to gratify James I. The name of the play belongs to the same category as A Midsummer Nighfs Dream and Twelfth Night. The expression ' a winter's tale ' was in common use for a serious story. 426 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in ' The Winter's Tale ' was more loyal to the invention of his early foe than scholarship or art quite justified. Shakespeare followed Greene in allotting a seashore to Bohemia — an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry .^ The dramatist, Hke the novehst, located in the island of Delphos, instead of on the mainland of Phocis, the Delphic oracle of Apollo which a pseudo-classical prochvity irrelevantly brought into the story. The scheme of the piece suggests undue deference on the plajovright's part to the conditions of the novel. The action of the play is bluntly cut in two by an interval of sixteen years, which elapse between the close of act m. and the opening of act iv., and the speech of the chorus personifying Time proves barely able to bridge the chasm. The incidental deaths of two subsidiary good characters — the boy Mamihus and the kindly old courtier Antigonus — somewhat infringe the placid canons of romance. The second death is an invention of the dramatist. Shake- speare's dependence on Greene's narrative was indeed far from servile. After his wont he rechristened the characters, and he modified the spirit of the fable wherever his dramatic instinct prompted change. In the novel bold famiharities between Bellaria, Shakespeare's Hermione, and Egistus, Shakespeare's Pohxenes, lend some colour to the jealousy Shake- °^ Pandosto, Shakespeare's Leontes. In Shake- speare's speare's play all excuse for the husband's sus- innovations. • • <• i • -i- • j t ^.i, i picions oi his wife is swept away, in the novel Bellaria dies of grief on hearing of the death of her son Gerintes, Shakespeare's Mamihus. Hermione's long and secret retirement and her final reconcihation with Leontes are episodes of Shakespeare's coinage. At the same time he created the character of Paulina, Hermione's outspoken friend and companion, and he provided from his own resources welcome comic rehef in the gipsy pedlar and but the dramatist may possibly echo here Las Noches de Invierno (' The Winter Evenings '), the title of a collection of Spanish tales (Madrid, 1609) to which he may have had access, see p. 429 n. 1. ^ Conversations with Drummond, p. 16. THE LATEST PLAYS 427 thief Autolycus, who is skilled in all the patter of the cheap Jack and sings with a hght heart many popular airs. A few lines in one of Autolycus's speeches were obviously drawn from that story of Boccaccio with which Shake- speare had dealt just before in ' CymbeUne.' ^ But the rogue is essentially a creature of Shakespeare's fasliioning. Leontes' causeless jealousy, which is the motive of ' The Winter's Tale,' has nothing in common with the towering passion of Othello. Nor is it cast in quite the freshness Same mould as the wrongful suspicion which Posthumus cherishes of Imogen at lachimo's prompting in ' Cymbeline.' The jealousy of Leontes is the aberration of a weak mind and owes nothing to external pressure.^ The husband's feeble wrath is finely contrasted with his wife's gentle composure and patient fortitude in the presence of unwarrantable suffering which moves pathos of an infinite poignancy. The boy Mamihus is of near kin to the boys in ' CymbeHne.' Nowhere has the dramatist portrayed more convincingly boyhood's charm, quickness of perception, or innocence. Perdita develops the ethereal model of Marina in ' Pericles ' and shows tender ingenuous girlhood moulded by Nature's hand and free of the contamination of social artifice. The courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance. ;The freshness, too, of the pastoral incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare's presentations of country Ufe. Shakespeare's final labours in tragicomedy betray an enhanced mastery of the simple as well as of the complex aspect of human experience. ' The Tempest ' was in all probability the latest drama that Shakespeare completed. While chronologically and 1 In The Winter's Tale (iv. iv. 812 et seq.) Autolycus thi'eatens that the clown's son ' shall be flayed alive ; then 'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp's nest,' &c. In Boccaccio's story of Ginevra (Shakespeare's Imogen) the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare's lachimo), after ' being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,' was ' to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies wherewith that country abounded ' (cf. Decameron, transl. John Payne, i. 1G4). See also Apuleius's Golden Ass, bk. viii. c. 35. 428 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE organically it is closely bound to ' Cymbeline ' and ' The Winter's Tale,' it pursues a path of its own. It challenges familiar laws of life and nature far more openly '-J'^^ , than either of its immediate predecessors. Yet the dramatist's creative power has fired his impalpable texture with a Uving sentiment and emotion which are the finest flower of poetic romance. ' The Tempest ' has affinities with ' A Midsummer Night's Dream.' In both pieces supernatural fancies play a prominent part. But the contrasts are more notable than the resemblances. The busthng energy of the ' Dream ' is replaced in ' The Tempest ' by a steadily progressive calm. The poetry of the later drama rings with a greater profundity and a stronger human sym- pathy. ' The Tempest's ' echoes of classical poetry are less numerous or distinct than those of the ' Dream.' Yet into Prospero's great speech renouncing his practice of magical art (v. i. 33-37) Shakespeare wrought literal reminiscences of Golding's translation of Medea's invoca- tion in Ovid's ' Metamorphoses ' (vii. 197-206). Golding's rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare's best- loved books in youth, and his parting tribute proves the permanence of his early impressions, in spite of his widened interests. In ' The Tempest ' Shakespeare accepted two main cues, one from pre-existing romantic Uterature and the _,, other from current reports of contemporary' The sources ^ i -i i of the adventure. The mam theme of the exiled ^ ^' magician and his daughter was probably borrowed from a popular romance of old standing in many foreign tongues.^ The episode of the storm and the con- ception of Cahban were more obvious fruit of reported incident in recent voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. ^ The name Prospero, which Shakespeare first bestowed on the magician, would seem to have been drawn from the first draft of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (1598), where aUthe characters bear Italian names (in later editions changed into English). Ben Jonson afterwards christened his character of Prospero by the name of Wellbred. THE LATEST PLAYS 429 Several Spanish novelists, whose work was circulating in cultured English circles, had lately told of magicians of princely or ducal rank exiled by usurpers from their home to mysteriously remote retreats, in the company of an only daughter who was ultimately wooed and won by the son of the magician's archfoe.^ In the ' Comedia von der schonen Sidea,' a German play written about 1595, by Jacob Ayrer, a dramatist of Nuremberg, there are, moreover, adumbrations not only of the magician Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and her lover Ferdinand, but also of Ariel. 2 Enghsh actors were performing at Nuremberg, ^ Spanish romance was well known in Elizabethan England, as is shown by the vogue of Montemayor's Diayia, which includes a story analogous to that of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen. In the seventeenth century Spanish stories were repeatedly dramatised in England. Shake- speare's coadjutor Fletcher based numerous plays on the Exemplary Novels of Cervantes and the fiction of other Spaniards. A Spanish collection of short tales by Antonio de Eslava, bearing the general title ' Primera Parte de las Noches de Invierno ' — ' The First Part of the Winter Evenings ' (Madrid 1609) — includes the story of Dardanus, a king of Bulgaria, a virtuous magician, who, being dethroned by Nice- phorus, a usurping emperor of Greece, sails away with his only daughter Seraphina in a little ship, and in mid-ocean creates a beautiful submarine palace for their residence. There the girl grows up like Miranda on the desert island. When she reaches womanhood, the magician, dis- guised as a fisherman, captures the son of his usurping foe and brings the youth to his dwelling under the sea. The girl's marriage with the kidnapped prince follows. The usurper dies and the magician is restored to his kingdom, but finally he transfers his power to his daughter and son-in-law. On such a foundation Shakespeare's fable of Prospero might conceivably have been reared. ^ In the German play, which is printed in Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, a noble magician, Ludolph, prince of Lithuania, being defeated in battle by a usurper, Leudegast, prince of the WUtau, seeks refuge in a forest together with an only daughter Sidea. In the forest the exile is attended by a demon, Runcival, who is of Ariel's kindred. The forest, although difficult of access, is by no means uninhabited. Meanwhile the exile works his magic spell on his enemy's son Engel- brecht and makes him his prisoner in the sylvan retreat. The captive is forced by his master to bear logs, like Ferdinand in The Tempest. Finally the youth marries the girl, and the marriage reconciles the parents. At many points the stories of the German and English plays correspond. But there are too many discrepancies to establish a theory of direct dependence on Shakespeare's part. ■ 430 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare, or both German and Enghsh dramatists may have followed an identical piece of fiction, which has not been quite precisely identified. In no earher presentment of the magician's and his daughter's romantic adventures is any hint given either of the shipwreck or of Caliban. Suggestions ^^ ^ ^ for these episodes reached Shakespeare from a quarter nearer home than Spain or Germany. In the summer of 1609 a fleet bound for the new plantation of Jamestown in Virginia, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the admiral's ship, the ' Sea- Venture,' was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by the hogs which overran the island and by mysteri- ous noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home. Somers and his men were given up for lost, but in May 1610 they escaped from Bermuda in two boats of cedar to Virginia, and the news of their adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the seamen in September 1610. The sailors' arrival created vast pubhc excitement in London. At least five accounts were soon published of the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of the expedition. ' A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels,' written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October. A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who mentions the ' still- vexed Bermoothes ' (i. i. 229), incorporated in 'The Tempest' many hints from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphle- teers. The references to the gentle chmate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the spirits and THE LATEST PLAYS 431 devils that infested it, seem to render unquestionable its identification with the newly discovered Bermudas. There is no reasonable ground for disputing that the catastrophe around which the plot of ' The Tempest ' revolves was suggested by the casting away, in a terrific storm, on the rocky Atlantic coast, of the ship bound in 1609 for the new settlement of Jamestown. Prospero's uninhabited island reflects most of the features which the shipwrecked sailors on this Virginian voyage assigned to their involuntary asylum where they imagined themselves to be brought face to face with the elementary forces of Nature. The scene of the sailors' illusion stirred in the drama- tist's fertile imagination the further ambition to portray „, . . aborigiaal man in his own home. But before I he signi- ^ ficance of formulating his conception of Caliban, Shake- ^^ ^^' speare played parenthetically with current fancies respecting the regeneration which the New World held in store for the Old. The French essayist Montaigne had fathered the notion that aboriginal America offered Europe an example of Utopian communism. In his rambUng essay on cannibals (ii. 30) he described an un- known island of the New World where the inhabitants Hved according to nature and were innocent ahke of the vices and virtues of civihsation. In ' The Tempest ' (ii. i. 154 seq.), Gonzalo, the honest counsellor of Naples, after he and his companions are rescued from shipwreck sketches the kind of natural law which, if the planta- tion were left in his hands, he would establish on the desert island of their redemption. Here Shakespeare literally adopts Montaigne's vocabulary with its abrupt turns as it figured in Florio's English translation of the Frenchman's essays. But Shakespeare admits no personal faith in Montaigne's complaisant theorising, of which he takes leave with the comment that it is ' merry fooling.' CaHban was Shakespeare's ultimate conception of the true quality of aboriginal character. Specimens of the 432 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE American Indian had been brought to England by Eliza- bethan or Jacobean voyagers during the poet's working career. They had often been exhibited in London and thT^^^ ^^^ ^^® provinces by professional showmen as American miraculous monsters.^ Travellers had spoken native. . ,. i r ^ ■ i • and written freely of the native American. Caliban is an imaginary composite portrait, an attempt to reduce to one common denominator the aboriginal types whom the dramatist had seen or of whom he had heard or read.^ Shakespeare's American proves to have httle in common with the Arcadian innocent with which Mon- taigne identifies him. Shakespeare had lightly appHed to savage man the words ' a very land-fish, languageless, a monster,' before he concentrated his attention on the theme.^ But on closer study he rejected this description, and finally presented him as a being endowed with live senses and appetites, with aptitudes for mechanical labour, with some knowledge and some control of the resources of inanimate nature and of the animal world. But his hfe was passed in that stage of evolutionary development which preceded the birth of moral sentiment, of intellectual 1 A native of New England called Epenew was brought to England in 1611, and ' being a man of so great a stature ' was ' showed up and down London for money as a monster ' (Capt. John Smith's Historie of New EnglaTid, ed. 1907, ii. 7). The Porter in Henry VIII (v. iv. 32) clearly had Epenew in mind when he alludes to the I^ondon mob's rush after ' some strange Indian.' When Trinculo in The Tempest speaks of the eagerness of a London crowd to pay for a sight of ' a dead Indian ' (ii. ii. 34) Shakespeare doubtless recalls an actual experience. ' Indian ' is used by Shakespeare in the sense of ' Red Indian.' * Traits of the normal tractable type of Indian to which belonged the Virginian and Caribbean of the middle continent mingle in Caliban with those of the irredeemable savages of Patagonia to the extreme south of America. To the former type Red Indian visitors to England belonged. The evidence which justifies the description of Caliban as a composite portrait of varied types of the American Indian has been brought together by the present writer in two essays, ' The American Indian in Elizabethan England,' in Scribner's Maga- zine, September 1907, and ' Caliban's Visits to England,' in Cornhill Magazine, March 1913. ^ Troilus and Cressida, ni. iii. 264. THE LATEST PLAYS 433 perception, and of social culture, Caliban was a creature stumbling over the first stepping-stones which lead from savagery to civiUsation.^ The dramatist's notice of the god Setebos, the chief object of CaUban's worship, echoes accounts of the wild „ . , people of Patagonia, who Hved in a state of god unquahfied savagery. Pigafetta, an Italian Setebos. mariner, first put into writing an account of the Patagonians' barbarous modes of life and their uncouth superstitions. His tract circulated widely in Shakespeare's day in Enghsh translations, chiefly in Richard Eden's ' History of Travel ' (1577). During the dramatist's Ufe- time curiosity about the mysterious people spread. Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, in their circum- navigations of the globe, both paused on Patagonian territory and held intercourse with its strange inhabitants. 1 At some points Shakespeare reproduced in The Tempest with absolute literalness the experience of Europeans in their encounters with aboriginal inhabitants of newly discovered America. The savage's insistent recognition in the brutish Trinculo of divine attributes is a vivid and somewhat ironical picture of the welcome accorded to Spanish, French, and English explorers on their landing in the New World. Every explorer shared, too, Prospero's pity for the aborigines' inability to make themselves intelligible in their crabbed agglutinative dialects, and offered them instruction in civilised speech. The menial services which Caliban renders his civilised master specifically identify Prospero and his native servant with the history of early settlements of English- men in Virginia. ' I'U fish for thee,' Caliban tells Trinculo, and as soon as he believes that he has shaken off Prospero's tyrannical yoke he sings with exultant emphasis ' No more dams I'll make for fish.' These remarks of Caliban are graphic echoes of a peculiar experience of Elizabethans in America. One of the chief anxieties of the early English settlers in Virginia was lest the natives should fail them in keeping in good order the fish-dams, where fish was caught for food by means of a device of great ingenuity. When Raleigh's first governor of Virginia, Ralph Lane, detected in 1586 signs of hostility among the natives about his camp, his thoughts at once turned to the da,ms or weirs. Unless the aborigines kept them in good order, starvation was a certain fate of the colonists, for no Englishmen knew how to construct and work these fish-dams on which the settlement relied for its chief sustenance. (Cf. Hakluyt's Foyagr&s, ed. 1904, viii. 334 seq.) Caliban's threat to make ' no more dams for fish ' exposed Prospero to a very real and familiar peril. 2 F 434 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE In ' their great devil Setebos ' centred the most primitive conceptions of reHgion. CaUban acknowledges himself to be a votary of ' the Patagonian devil.' Twice he makes mention of ' my dam's god Setebos ' (i. ii. 373 ; v. i. 261). In one respect Shakespeare departs from his authorities. Although untrustworthy rumours described aboriginal „ ... , tribes in unexplored forests about the river Caliban s ^ distorted Amazon as hideously distorted dwarfs,^ the ^ ^^^' average Indian of America — even the Pata- gonian — was physically as well formed and of much the same stature as EngHshmen. Yet Cahban is described as of ' disproportioned ' body ; he is likened to a tortoise, and is denounced as a ' freckled whelp ' or a ' poor credulous monster.' Such misrepresentation is no doubt deliberate. CaHban's distorted form brings into bolder rehef his moral shortcomings, and more clearty defines his psychological significance. EUzabethan poetry completely assimilated the Platonic idea, that the soul determines the form of the body, Shakespeare invested his ' rude and savage man of Ind ' with a shape akin to his stunted intelHgence and sentiment.^ King James I and his circle now looked to Shakespeare for most of their dramatic recreation. ' The Tempest,' .-, penned in the spring of 1611, opened the Tempest' gay winter season at Court of 1611-2, and the twelve pieces which followed it included among them Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale.' 'The Tem- pest ' was again performed in February 1612-3 during the festivities which celebrated the marriage of King James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, with Frederick the Elector Palatine. Princess Elizabeth was, like ]\Iiranda, an island princess ; but there was no relevance in the plot to tlie ^ Cf. Othello's reference to the Anthropophagi and men whose heads ' Do grow beneath their shoulders ' (i. iii. 144-5). Raleigh, in his Discoverie of Chiiana, 1596, mentions on hearsay such a deformed race in a region of South America. * Cf. Browning, Caliban upon Setebos, Daniel Wilson, Caliban, or the Missing Link (1873), and Renan, Caliban (1878), a drama con- tinuing Shakespeare's play. THE LATEST PLAYS 435 circumstances of the royal bridal.^ Eighteen other plays at Court were given in honour of the nuptials by Shake- speare's company under the direction of its manager, John Heminges. Five pieces besides ' The Tempest ' in the extended programme were by Shakespeare, viz. : 'The Winter's Tale,' 'Much Ado about Nothing,' 'Sir John Falstaff' {i.e. 'Henry IV'), 'Othello,' and 'Julius Caesar.' Two of these plays, ' Much Ado ' and ' Henry IV,' were rendered twice. ^ The early representations of ' The Tempest ' evoked as much applause in the public theatre as at Court. The popular success of the piece owed something '^^'i^ogne ^Q ^i^g beautiful lyrics which were dispersed , through the play and were set to music by Robert Johnson, a lutenist in high repute.^ Like its predecessor ' The Winter's Tale,' ' The Tempest ' long maintained its original success on the stage, and the vogue of the two pieces drew a passing sneer from Ben Jonson. In the Induction to his ' Bartholomew Fair,' first acted in 1614, he wrote : ' If there be never a servant- monster in the Fair, who can help it ? he [i.e. the author] says, nor a nest of Antics. He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.' The ' servant-monster ' was an ^ A baseless theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents The Tempest as a masque written to celebrate Princess Elizabeth's marriage on February 14, 1612-13. It was clearly written some two years earlier. On any showing, the plot of The Tempest, which revolves about the forcible expvilsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter's wooing by the son of the usurper's chief ally, was hardly one that a shrewd playwright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his title to the crown as James I. * H*minges was paid on May 20, 1613, the total sum of 153Z. 6s. %d. for the company's elaborate services. See the accounts of Lord Stanhope, Treasurer of the Chamber, in the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. A 239 (f. 47), printed in Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines, ii. 87, and in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1885-6 ; ii. p. 419. * Harmonised scores of Johnson's airs for the songs ' Full Fathom Five ' and ' WTaere the Bee sucks ' are preserved in Wilson's Cheerful Ayres or Ballads set for three voices, 1660. 2 F 2 436 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE obvious allusion to Caliban, and ' the nest of Antics ' was a glance at the satyrs who figure in the sheep-shearing feast in ' The Winter's Tale.' Nowhere did Shakespeare give rein to his imagination with more imposing effect than in ' The Tempest.' The Fanciful serious atmosphere has led critics, without interpre- much reason, to detect in the scheme of the of ' The drama a philosophic pronouncement rather Tempest.' than a play of mature poetic fancy. Little reliance should be placed on interpretations which detach the play from its historic environment. The creation of Miranda is the apotheosis in Hterature of tender, ingenuous girlliood unsophisticated by social intercourse ; but Shake- speare had already sketched the outlines of the portrait in Marina and Perdita, the youthful heroines respectively of * Pericles ' and ' The Winter's Tale,' and these two characters were directly developed from romantic stories of girl- princesses, cast by misfortune on the mercies of Nature, to which Shakespeare had recourse for the plots of the two plays. It is by accident, rather than design, that in Ariel appear to be discernible the capabihties of human intellect when reheved of physical attributes. Ariel belongs to the same poetic world as Puck, although he is deHneated in the severer colours that were habitual to Shakespeare's fully developed art. Cahban, as we have seen, is an imaginary portrait, conceived with matchless vigour and vividness, of the aboriginal savage of the New World, descriptions of whom abounded in contemporary travellers' speech and writings, while a few living specimens, who visited Shake- speare's England, excited the Hvehest popular curiosity. In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have been sought of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, who was approaching in this play the date of his farewell to the enchanted work of his life, although he was not yet to abandon it altogether. Prospero is in the story a scholar- prince of rare intellectual attainments, whose engrossing study of the mysteries of science has given him magical THE LATEST PLAYS 437 command of the forces of Nature. His magnanimous renunciation of his magical faculty as soon as by its exer- cise he has restored his shattered fortunes is in accord with the general conception of a just and philosophical tempera- ment. Any other justification of his final act is superfluous.^ While there is every indication that in 1611 Shake- speare surrendered the regular habit of dramatic com- position, it has been urged with much plausi- f^^^e's bihty that he subsequently drafted more than relations one play which he suffered others to complete. Fletcher.'^ As his Uterary activity dechned, his place at the head of the professional dramatists came to be filled by John Fletcher, who in partnership with Francis Beaumont had from 1607 onwards been winning much applause from playgoers and critics. Beaumont's co-opera- tion with Fletcher was shortHved, and ceased in a little more than six years. Thereupon Fletcher found a new coadjutor in Philip Massinger, another competent playwright already enjoying some reputation, and Fletcher, with occasional aid from Massinger, has been credited on grounds of vary- ing substance with completing some dramatic work which engaged Shakespeare's attention on the eve of his retire- ment. Three plays, ' Cardenio,' ' The Two Noble Kinsmen,' and ' Henry VIII,' have been named as the fruits of Shakespeare's farewell co-operation with Fletcher. The evidence in the first case is too slender to admit of a con- clusion. In the case of the second piece the allegation of Shakespeare's partnership with Fletcher hangs in the balance of debate. Only in the third case of ' Henry VIII ' may Fletcher's association with Shakespeare be accepted without demur. On September 9, 1653, the pubHsher Humphrey Moseley obtained a hcense for the pubUcation of a play which he described as ' History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and ^ A full discussion of aU the points connected with The Tempest was contributed by the present writer to the beautifully printed edition, privately issued under the editorship of Willis Vickery, by the Rowfant Club, Cleveland. Ohio, in 1911. 438 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare.' No drama of the name survives, but it was probably identical with the lost piece called ' Cardenno,' _^ , , or ' Cardenna,' which was twice acted at The lost play of Court by Shakespeare s company in 1613 — m ar enio. ^/[g^y during the Princess Ehzabeth's marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy's am- bassador.^ Moseley failed to pubhsh the piece, and no tangible trace of it remains to confirm or to confute his de- scription of its authorship, which may be merely fanciful. ^ The title of the play leaves no doubt that it was a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of ' Don Quixote ' (ch. xxiii.-xxxvii.) . Cervantes' amorous storj^ first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton's translation of ' Don Quixote ' in 1612. There is no evidence of Shakespeare's acquaintance with Cervantes' great work. On the other hand Beaumont and Fletcher's farce of ' The Knight of the Burning Pestle ' echoes the mock heroics of the Spanish romance ; the adventures of Cervantes' ' Cardenio ' offer much incident in Fletcher's vein, and he subsequently found more than one plot in Cervantes' ' Exemplar}^ Novels.' The allega- tions touching the lost play of ' Cardenio ' had a curious sequel. In 1727 Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic, induced the managers of Drury Lane Theatre to stage a piece called ' Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,' on his mysterious representation that it was an unpublished play by Shakespeare. The story of Theo- bald's piece is the story of Cardenio, although the char- acters are renamed. ^^Tien Theobald published ' Double Falshood ' next year he described it on the title-page as ' written originally by W. Shakespeare, and now revised and adapted to the stage by Mr. Theobald.' Despite Theobald's warm protestations to the contrary ,3 there is ^ Treasurer's accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), printed in New Shakspere Soc's Transactions, 1895-6, pt. ii. p. 419. * For Moseley's assignment to Shakespeare of plays of doubtful authorship, see p. 263 supra. ^ In the ' preface of the editor ' Theobald wrote : ' It has been alledg'd as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost THE LATEST PLAYS 439 nothing in the play as published by him to suggest Shake- speare's hand. Theobald clearly took mystifying advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme.^ The two other pieces, ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' and ' Heniy VIII,' which have been attributed to a similar . ^^^ partnership, survive. ^ ' The Two Noble Kins- Noble men ' was first printed in 1634, and was, accord- insmen. ^^^ ^^ ^^^ title-page, not only ' presented at the Black-friers by the Kings Maiesties servants with great applause,' but was ' written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and ]VIr. Wilham Shake- speare, gentlemen.' Neither author was aUve at the date of the publication. Shakespeare had died in 1616 and Fletcher nine years later. The piece was not admitted to any early edition of Shakespeare's collected works, but it to the World for above a Century. To This my Answer is short ; that tho' it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Doivnes, the famous Old Prompter ; and, as I am credibly inform'd, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, and by Him design'd to have been usher'd into the World. What Accident prevented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know : Or thro' what hands it had successively pass'd before that Period of Time. There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person, who supply'd me with One of my Copies) that it was given by our Author, as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage. Two other Copies I have, (one of which I was glad to purchase at a very good Rate), which may not, perhaps, be quite so old as the Former ; but One of Them is much more perfect, and has fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense. . . . Others again, to depreciate the Affair, as they thought, have been pleased to urge, that tho' the Play may have some Resem- blances of Shakespeare, yet the Colouriiig, Diction, and Characters come nearer to the Style and Manner of Fletcher. This, I think, is far from deserving any Answer.' 1 Dr. Farmer thought he detected trace of Shirley's workmanship, and Malone that of Massinger. The piece was possibly Theobald's un- aided invention, and his claim for Shakespeare an ironical mystification. * The 1634 quarto of the play was carefully edited for the New Shakspere Society by Mr. Harold Littledale in 1876. See also William Spalding, Shakespeare's Authorship of ' Two Noble Kinsmen,'' 1833, reprinted by New Shakspere Society, 1876. 440 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE was included iii the second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher of 1679. Critics of repute affirm and deny with equal confidence the joint authorship of the piece, which tlie original title-page announced. The main plot is drawn directly from Chaucer's ' Knight's Tale ' of Palamon and Arcite in which the two knightly friends, while suffering captivity at Theseus's heroic hands, become estranged owing to their both falling in love with the same lady Emiha. After much chivalric adventure Arcite dies, and Palamon and Emilia are united in marriage. The rather unsatisfjang story had been already twice dramatised ; but neither of the earUer versions has survived. Richard Edwardes (the father of ' tragicall comedy ') was responsible for a lost play ' Palemon and Arcyte ' which was acted before Queen EUzabeth at Christ Church on her visit to Oxford in 1566^; while at the Newington theatre Philip Henslowe produced as a new piece a second play of hke name, 'Palamon and Arsett,' on September 17, 1594. Henslowe thrice repeated the performance in the two following months. ^ The obvious signs of indebtedness on the part of Fletcher and his coadjutor to Chaucer's narrative render needless any speculation whether or no the previous dramas were laid under contribution. With the Chaucerian tale the authors of ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' combine a trivial by-plot of crude workmanship in which ' the jailer's daughter ' develops for Palamon a desperate and un- requited passion which engenders insanity. A mention of ' the play Palemon ' in Ben Jonson's ' Bartholomew Fair,' which was produced in 1614, suggests the date of the composition which is attributed to Shakespeare's and Fletchei's dual authorship. On grounds ahke of aesthetic criticism and metrical tests, a substantial portion of the main scenes of ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' was assigned to Shakespeare's pen by judges of the acumen of Charles Lamb, Coleridge, * Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth, 1823, i. 210-3. * Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 168. THE LATEST PLAYS 441 De Quincey, and S\rinburne. The Shakespearean editor Dyce included the whole piece in his edition of Shake- speare. Coleridge positively detected Shakespeare's hand in act I., act n. sc. i., and act rn, sc. i. and ii. Li addition to those scenes, act rv. sc. iii. and act v. (except sc. ii.) have been subsequently placed to his credit by critics whose judgment merits respect. It is undeniable tliat two different styles figure in the piece. The longer and inferior part, including the subsidiary episode spe^are's ^^ ' ^^® jaUer's daughter,' may be allotted alleged to Fletcher's pen without misgiving, but, share. o o' > in spite of the weight attaching to the ver- dict of the affirmative critics, some doubt is inevitable as to whether the smaller and superior portion of the drama is Shakespeare's handiwork. The language of the disputed scenes often recalls Shakespeare's latest efforts. The opening song, ' Roses their sharp spines being gone,' echoes Shakespeare's note so closely that it is difficult to allot it to another. Yet the characterisation falls throughout below the standard of the splendid diction. The personages either lack distinctiveness of moral feature or they breathe a sordid sentiment which rmgs falsely. It may be that Shakespeare was content to redraft in his own manner speeches which Fletcher had already infected ■^\"ith unworthy traits of feeling. On the other hand, it is just possible that Philip Massinger, Fletcher's fellow- worker, who is known elsewhere to have echoed Shakespeare's tones with almost magical success, may be responsible for the contributions to ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' to which Fletcher has no claim, Massinger's ethical temper is indistinguishable from that which pervades ' The Two Xoble Kinsmen.' There may be nothing in Massinger's extant work quite equal to the style of the non-Fletcherian scenes there, but it is easier to believe that some exceptional impulse should have lifted Massinger for once to their level, than that Shakespeare should have belied on a single occasion his habitual ideals of ethical principle. 442 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE The literary problems presented by the play of ' Henry VIII ' closely resemble those attaching to ' The Two Noble Kinsmen.' Shakespeare had abandoned the vnT"^^ theme of Enghsh history with his drama of ' Henry V ' early in 1599. Pubhc interest in the English historical play thenceforth steadily declined ; fresh experiments Avere rare and occasional, and when they were made, they usually dealt with more recent periods of Enghsh history than were sanctioned at earher epochs. The reign of Henry VIII attracted much attention from dramatists when the historical mode of drama was ending its career. Shakespeare's company pro- plays on duced, when the sixteenth century was closing, t e opic. ^^^ plays dealing respectively with the hves of Henry VIII's statesmen, Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More. But though King Henry is the pivot of both plots, he does not figure in the dramatis personce.^ In 1605, an obscure dramatist, Samuel Rowley, ventured for the first time to bring Henry VIII on the stage as the hero of a chronicle-play or history-drama. The drama- tist worked on crude old-fashioned lines which recall ' The Famous Victories of Henry V.' The piece, which was per- formed by Prince Henry's company of players, bore the strange title ' When you see me you know me. Or the famous Chronicle Historie of King Henrie the Eight, With the Birth and vertuous Life of Edward Prince of Wales.' ^ ^ Thomas Lord Cromwell, which was published in 1602, was falsely ascribed to Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More, which was not printed till 1844, is extant in Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 7368, and has been carefully edited for the Malone Society, 1911. The Admiral's company under Henslowe's management produced in 1601 and 1602 two (lost) plays concerning Cardinal Wolsey, the first one called The Life, the other The Rising of the Cardinal. Henry Chettle would seem to have been the author of the Life and to have revised the Rising, which was from the pens of Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Went- worth Smith (Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 218). * The main themes are the birth of Prince Edward, afterwards Edward VI, the death of his mother. Queen Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's iifth wife, and the plots against the life of her successor. Queen Catherine Parr. The career of Cardinal Wolsey, who died long before Edward VI THE LATEST PLAYS 443 The prologue to the Shakespearean ' Henry VIII ' warned the audience that the Kmg's reign was to be ' All is treated on hnes differing from those followed in True.' Rowley's preceding effort. The play was not to be a piece of ' fool and fight,' with Henry VIII engaging his jester in undignified buffoonery. There were to be noble scenes such as draw the eye to flow and the incident was to justify the alternative title of the piece, ' All is True.' 1 The Shakespearean drama followed Holinshed with exceptional closeness. Nowhere was Holinshed's work Hoiinshed's better done than in his account of the early story. part of Henry VIII's reign, where he utihsed the unpubhshed ' Life of Wolsey ' by his gentleman usher, George Cavendish, a good specimen of sympathetic biography. One of the finest speeches in the Shake- spearean play, Queen Katharine's opening appeal on her trial, is in great part the chronicler's prose rendered „ into blank verse, without change of a word, tive defects Despite the debt to Holinshed's Chronicle the in e p a> . ^^^^ ^£ , Henry VIII ' shows a greater want of coherence and a bolder conflict with historical chronology was heard of, is prolonged by the playwright, so that he plays a sub- ordinate part in the drama. The King, Henry VIII, is the chief personage, and he appears at full length as bluff King Harry capable of terrifying outbursts of wrath and of almost as terrifj-ing outbursts of merriment. The King finds recreation in the companionship of his fool or jester, an historic personage Will Summers. Will Summers has a comic foil in Patch, the fool or jester of Cardinal Wolsej-. The two fools engage in many comic encounters. The King, in emulation of Prince Hal's (Henry V's) exploits, wanders in disguise about the purlieus of London in search of adventure. In the same year (1605) as When you see me you know me appeared, there came out a spectacular and rambling presentation of Queen Elizabeth's early life and coronation with a sequel celebrating the activity of London merchants and the foundation of the Royal Exchange. This piece of pageantry was from the industrious pen of Thomas Heyr^'ood, and bore the cognate title // you know not me, you know nobody. ^ Cf. Prologue, 1-7, 13-27, where the spectators are advised that they may ' here find truth.' The piece is described as ' our chosen truth]' and as solely confined to what id true. See p. 417 injra. 444 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE than are to be met with in Shakespeare's earher ' histories.' It is more loosely knit than ' Henry V,' which in design it resembles most closely.^ The King, Henry VIII, is a moving force throughout the play. He is no very subtle portrait, being for the most part King Hal of popular tradition, imperious and autocratic, impulsive and sensual, and at the same time both generous and selfish. But Queen Katharme, a touching portrait of matronly dignity and resignation, is the heroine of the drama, and her with- drawal comparatively early in its progress produces the impression of an anticlimax. The midway fall of Wolsey also disturbs the constructive balance ; the arro- gant statesman who has worked his way up from the ranks shows a self-confidence which his sudden peril renders pathetic, and the heroic dignity with which he meets his change of fortune prejudices the dramatic interest of the tamer incidents following his death. Anne Boleyn, who succeeds Queen Katharine as Kang Henry's wife, is no very convincing sketch of frivohty and coquettishness. Her confidante, the frank old lady, clearly reflected Shakespeare's alert intuition, but the character's conven- tional worldliness is far from pleasing. At the end of ' Henry VIII ' a new and inartistic note is struck without warning in the eulogy of Queen Anne's daughter, the Princess Ehzabeth, and in the complimentary reference to her successor on the EngHsh throne, King James, the patron of the theatre. ^ 1 The deaths of Queen Katharine (in 1536) and Cardinal Wolsey (in 1530) are represented as taking place at the same time, whereas Queen Katharine survived the Cardinal by six years. Cranmer's prose- cution by his foes of the Council precedes in the play Queen Elizabeth's christening (on September 10, 1533) whereas the archbishop's difficulties arose eleven years later (in 1544). 2 Throughout, the development of events is interrupted by five barely relevant pageants : (1) the entertainment provided for Henry VIII and Anne BolejTi by Cardinal Wolsey ; (2) the elaborate embellishment of the trial scene of Queen Katharine ; (3) the coronation of Aime BolejTi ; (4) a \'ision acted in dumb show in Queen Ivatharine's dying moments ; and (5) the christening procession of the Princess Elizabeth. THE LATEST PLAYS 445 The play was produced at the • Globe ' early in 1613. The theory that it was hastily completed for the special purpose of enabling the company to celebrate The scenic ^j^g marriage of Princess Ehzabeth and the Elec- elaboration. ° tor Palatine, which took place on February 14, 1612-13, seems fanciful. During the succeeding weeks nineteen plays, according to an extant hst, were produced at Court in honour of the event, but ' Henry VIII ' was not among them. According to contemporary evidence the piece ' was set forth [at the Globe] with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage ; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like : sufficient in truth within a while to make great- ness very' familiar, if not ridiculous.' ^ Salvoes of artillery saluted the King's entry in one of the scenes. The scenic elaboration well indicated the direction which the organisa- tion of the stage was taking in Shakespeare's last days. ' Henry VIII ' was not pubhshed in Shakespeare's life- time. But when the First Foho appeared in 1 623 , seven years after his death, the section of histories in that volume was closed by the piece called ' The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII.' Shakespeare was generally credited with the drama through the seventeenth century, but in the middle of the eighteenth century his sole responsibiUty was powerfully questioned on critical grounds.^ Dr. John- son asserted that the genius of Shakespeare authorship^ comes in and goes out with Katharine. The rest of the play in his opinion was not above the powers of lesser men. No reader with an ear for metre can fail to detect in the piece two rhythms, an inferior and a superior rhythm. Two different pens were clearly at work. The greater part of the play must be assigned to the pen of a coadjutor of Shakespeare, and considera- tions of metre and style identify his assistant beyond 1 Sir Henry Wotton in BeliquicB WottoniancB, 1675, pp. 425-6. 2 Cf. the notes by one ' Mr. Roderick ' in Edwards's Cartons of Criticism, 1765, p. 263. 446 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE doubt with John Fletcher. It is quite possible that here and there Philip Massinger collaborated Avith Fletcher ; but it is difficult to treat seriously the conjecture, despite the ability with which it has been pleaded, that Massinger was Fletcher's fellow-worker to the exclusion of Shakespeare. ^ A metrical analysis of the piece leads to the conclusion that no more than six out of the seventeen scenes of gjj ^ _ the play can be positively set to Shakespeare's speare's credit. Shakespeare's six unquestioned scenes are : act i. sc. i. and ii. ; ii. iii. and iv. ; the greater part of in. ii., and v. i. Thus Shakespeare can claim the first entry of Buckingham ; the scene in the council chamber in which that nobleman is charged with treason at the instigation of Wolsey ; the confidential talk of Anne BolejTi with the worldly old lady, who is ambitious for her protegee's promotion ; the trial scene of Queen Katharine which is the finest feature of the play ; the greater part of the episode of Wolsey's fall from power, and the King's assurances of protection to Cranmer when he is menaced by the CathoHc party. The metre and language of the Shakespearean scenes are as elhptical, irregular, and broken as in ' Coriolanus ' or ' The Tempest.' There is the same close-packed expression, the same rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, the same impatient and impetuous activity of intellect and fancy. The imagery has the pointed, vivid, homely strength of Shakespeare's latest plays. Katharine and Hermione in ' The Winter's Tale ' are clearly cast in the same mould, and the trial scene of the one invites comparison with that of the other. On the whole the palm must be given to Shakespeare's earHer effort. Some hesitation is inevitable in finally separatmg the non-Shakespearean from the Shakespearean elements of yr , ^, the play. One may well hesitate to deprive farewell Shakespeare of the dying speeches of Bucking- speec . ham and Queen Katharine. There is a third famous passage about the authorship of which it is ^ Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in New Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1884. THE LATEST PLAYS 447 unwise to dogmatise. Probably no extract from the drama has been more often recited than Wolsey's dying colloquy with his servant Cromwell. Many trained ears detect in the Cardinal's accents a cadence foreign to Shakespeare's verse and identical with that of Fletcher ; yet it is equally apparent that in concentration of thought and command of elevated sentiment these passages in ' Henry VIII ' reach a level above anything that Fletcher compassed elsewhere. They are comparable with the work of no dramatist save Shakespeare. Wolsey's valediction may be reckoned a fruit of Shakespeare's pen, though Shakespeare caught here his coadjutor's manner, adapting Fletcher's metrical formulae to his own great purpose. The play of ' Henry VIII ' contains Shakespeare's last dramd/tic work, and its production was nearly asso- ciated with the final scene in the history of Theburning that theatre which was identified with the of the ..... T^ Globe, trmmphs of his career. During a performance 161^3 ^^' '^^ ^^^ piece while it was yet new, in the summer of 1613 (on June 29) the Globe theatre was burnt to the ground. The outbreak began during the scene — at the end of act i. — when Henry VIII arrives at Wolsey's house to take part in a fancy-dress ball given in the King's honour, and Henry has his fateful intro- duction to Anne Boleyn. According to the stage direction, the King was received with a salute of cannon. What followed on the fatal day was thus described by a contemporary, who gives the piece its original name of ' All is True, representing some principal pieces in the reign of Henry VIII.' : ' Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain Canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did Hght on the Thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran roimd like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that vertuous fabrique ; 448 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE wherein yet nothing did perish, but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks ; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle[d] ale.' ^ There is reason to believe that in the demolished playhouse were many of the players' books, including Shakespeare's original manuscripts, which were the pro- perty of his theatrical company. Scattered copies sur- vived elsewhere in private hands, but the loss of the dramatist's autographs rendered incurable the many textual defects of surviving transcripts. ^ 1 Sir Henry Wotton in Reliquice Wottaniance, pp. 425-6. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Ralph Winwood on July 8, 1613, briefly mentions that the theatre was burnt to the ground in less than two hours owing to the accidental ignition of the thatch roof through the firing of cannon ' to be used in the Tp\a,y ' ; the audience escaped unhurt though they had ' but two narrow doors to get out ' (Winwood's Memorials, iii. p. 469). A similar account was sent by the Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., from London, June 30, 1613. ' The fire broke out,' Lorkin wrote, ' no longer since than j'esterday, while Burbage's company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII ' (Court and Times of James I, 1848, vol. i. p. 253). On June 30, 1613, the Stationers' Company licensed the publication of two separate ballads on the disaster, one called The Sodayne Burninge of the ' Globe ' on the Bankside in the Play tyme on Saint Peters day last, 1613, and the other A doleful ballad of the generall ouerthrowe of the famous theater on the Banksyde, called the ' Globe,' &c., by William Parrat. (Arber's Transcripts, iii. 528.) Neither of these publications survives in print; but one of them may be identical with a series of stanzas on ' the pittifull burning of the Globe playhouse in London,' which Haslewood first printed ' from an old manuscript volume of poems ' in the Gentle- man's Magazine for 1816, and Halliwell-Phillipps again printed {Outlines, pp. 310, 311) from an authentic manuscript in the library of Sir Matthew Wilson, Bart., of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire. The perils of Shakespeare's close friends Burbage, Condell and Heminges are crudely described in the following lines : Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes. Then out runne Burbidge too, Xhe Reprobates, though drunck on Munday, Prayed for the Poole and Henry Condye . . . Then with swolne eyes like druncken Fleminges Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges. * When the Fortune theatre suffered the Globe's fate on Dec. 1621 and was burnt to the groimd, John Chamberlain, the London gossip, WTote THE LATEST PLAYS 449 Ben Jonson deplored Vulcan's Ben Jonson mad prank dr=aster Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank. He wrote how he saw the building with two poor chambers [i.e. cannon] taken in [i.e. destroyed], And razed : ere thought could urge this might have been ! See the World's ruins ! nothing but the piles Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles. ^ The owners of the playhouse, of which Shakespeare was one, did not rest on their oars in face of misfortune. „, The theatre was rebuilt next year on a more building of elaborate scale than before. The large cost ^ ° ^' of 1400^. more than doubled the original outlay. The expenses were defrayed by the shareholders among themselves in proportion to their holdings. Shakespeare subscribed a sum sHghtly exceeding 1001.^ The ' new playhouse ' was re-opened on June 30, 1614, and was then described as ' the fairest that ever was in England. '^ But the poet's career was nearing its end, and in the management of the new building he took no active part. If the second fabric of the ' Globe ' fell short of the fame of the first, its place of precedence among London play- houses was not quickly questioned. It survived till 1644, when the Civil Wars suppressed all theatrical enterprise in England. For at least twenty of the thirty years of its Ufe the new Globe enjoyed a substantial measure of the old Globe's prosperity. that the building was ' quite burnt downe in two houres, & all their apparell & playbookes lost, wherby those poor Companions are quite undone ' {Court and Times of James I, ii. 280-1). It is unlikely that Shakespeare and his company suffered better fortune on June 29, 1613. Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 65. 1 Jonson's ' An Execration upon Vulcan ' in his Underwoods, Ixi. Jonson's poem deplored the burning of his own library which took place a few years after the destruction of the Globe. * See p. 309 supra. 2 John Chamberlain to Mr?, Alice Carlton, Court and Times of James I, 1848, i. 329. 2 a XX THE CLOSE OF LIFE AccoRDiisG to the Oxford antiquary John Aubrey, Shake- speare, through the period of his professional activities, paid an annual visit of unspecified duration Retirement ^ ^ , r ■, • to Stratford, to Stratford-on-Avon. ihe greater part ot his ^^^^" working career was spent in London. But vnth the year 1611, which saw the completion of his romantic drama of 'The Tempest,' Shakespeare's regular home would seem to have shifted for the rest of his Hfe to his native place.i It is clear that after Stratford became his fixed abode he occasionally left the town for sojourns in London which at times lasted beyond a month. Proof, too, is at hand to show that the intimacies which he had formed in the metropolis with professional associates continued till the end of his days. Yet there is no reason to question the veteran tradition that the five years which opened in 1611 formed for the dramatist an epoch of comparative seclusion amid the scenes of his youth. We may accept without serious qualification the assurance of his earliest biographer Nicholas Rowe that ' the latter part of his [Shakespeare's] life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.' Shakespeare's withdrawal to Stratford did not preclude the maintenance of business relations with the London theatres where he won his literary triumphs and his financial ^ ' He frequerted the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford.' — Diary of John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, p. 183. 460 THE CLOSE OF LIFE 451 prosperity. There is little doubt that he retained his shares in both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres till his death. If after 1611 he played only an inter- intere^rin mittent part in the affairs of the company who London occupied those stages, he was never unmindful theatres. of his personal interest m their fortunes. Plays from his pen were constantly revived at both theatres, and the demand for their performance at Court saw no abatement. In the early spring of 1613 when the marriage of James's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, with the Elector Palatine was celebrated with an exceptionally generous rendering of stage plays, there were produced at Whitehall no fewer than six pieces of Shakespeare's un- doubted authorship as well as the lost play of ' Cardenio,' for which he divided the credit with John Fletcher.^ According to an early tradition Shakespeare cherished through his later years some close social relations with Oxford, where to the last he was wont to break to?he l^is journey between Stratford and London. Crown Inn xt Oxford he invariablv lodged with John at Oxford. " . Davenant, a prosperous vintner, whose mn at Carfax in the parish of St. Martin's, subsequently known as the ' Crown,' was well patronised by residents as well as travellers. The innkeeper was credited by the Oxford antiquary Anthony a Wood with 'a melan- cholic disposition and was seldom or never seen to laugh,' yet he ' was an admirer and lover of plays and play- makers.' According to a poetic eulogist Hee had choyce giftes of Nature and of arte, Neither was fortune wanting on her parte To him in honours, wealth or progeny. Shakespeare is said to have delighted in the society of Davenant's wife, ' a very beautiful woman of a good wit and conversation,' and to have interested himself in ^ See pp. 435, 438 supra. The King's company were again active at Court at the Christmas seasons of 1614-5 and 1615-6 ; but the names of the pieces then performed have not been recovered. See Cunning- ham's Bevels, and E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 165-6. 2 u 2 452 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE their large famity. Much care was bestowed on the educa- tion of the five sons. Robert, who became a Fellow of St. John's College at Oxford and a doctor of divinity, was proud to recall in manhood how the dramatist ' had given him [when a boy] a hundred kisses.' The second son William gained much distinction as a poet and playwright in the middle of the seventeenth century, and was knighted as a zealous royalist christening ^^ 1643. He was baptised at St. Martin's, of Sir William Carfax, on March 3, 1605-6, and there is little D Avenant. doubt that Shakespeare was his god-father. The child was ten years old at the dramatist's death. The special affection which Shakespeare manifested for him subsequently led to a rumour that he was the dramatist's natural son. Young Davenant, whose poetic ambitions rendered the allegation congenial, penned in his twelfth year ' an ode in remembrance of Master William Shakespeare,' and changed the spelling of his name from Davenant to D'Avena,nt in order to suggest a connection with the river Avon. The scandal rests on flimsy founda- tion ; but there is adequate evidence of the bond of friendly sympathy which subsisted between Shakespeare and the Oxford innkeeper's family ,i and of the pleasant associations with the university city which the dramatist 1 The innkeeper John Davenant died in 1621 -while ho was Mayor of Oxford, a fortnight after the death of his wife. A verse elegy assigns his death to grief over her loss, and the pair are credited with an unbroken strength of mutual affection which seems to refute any imputation on the lady's character. Another elegiac poem reckons among Davenant's sources of felicity ' a happy issue of a vertuous wife.' A popular anecdote, in which the Oxford antiquary Hoame and tlie poet Pope delighted, runs to the effect that the boy D'Avenant once ' meeting a grave doctor of divinity ' told him that he was about to ask a blessing of his godfather, Shakespeare, who had just come to the town, and that the doctor retorted ' Hold, child, you must not take the name of God in vain.' The jest is of ancient lineage, and was originally told of other persons than Shakespeare and D'Avenant (Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 43 seq.). In an elegy on D'Avenant in 1668 he is represented as being greeted in the Elysian Fields by ' his cousin Shakespeare ' (Huth's Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, 1584- 1700, sheet S, 2 verso). THE CLOSE OF LIFE 453 enjoyed at the close of life, when going to or returning from London. Of Shakespeare's personal relations in his latest years with his actor colleagues, much interesting testimony ^, , . survives. It was characteristic of the friendly Relations i • i • <• n i ' with actor sympathy which he moved m his fellow- workers friends. J^^^ Augustine Phillips, an actor who was, like Shakespeare, one of the original shareholders of the Globe theatre, should on his premature death in Maj^ 1605 have bequeathed by his will ' to my fellowe William Shakespeare a thirty shillings peece in gould.'^ Of the members of the King's company who were longer-lived than Phillips and survived Shakespeare, the actors John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage chiefly enjoyed the dramatist's confidence in the season of his partial retire- ment. Heminges, the reputed creator of Falstaff, was the business manager or director of the company ; and Condell was, with the great actor Burbage, Heminges's chief partner in the practical organisation of the company's concerns. 2 All three were remembered by the dramatist in ^ Phillips had been a resident in Southwark. But within a year of his death he purchased a house and land at Mortlake, where he died. See his will in Collier's Lives of the Actors, pp. 85-88. Phillips died in affluent circumstances and remembered many of his fellow-actors in his will, leaving to ' his fellow ' Henry Condell and to his theatrical servant Christopher Beeston like sums as to Shakespeare. He also bequeathed 'twenty shillings in gould' to each of the actors Lawrence Fletcher, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cook, Nicholas Tooley, together with forty shillings and clothes or musical instruments to two theatrical apprentices Samuel Gilbome and James Sands. Five poimds were further to be equally distributed amongst ' the hired men of the company.' Of four executors three were the actors John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and William Sly, who each received a silver bowl of the value of five pounds. Phillips's share in the Globe theatre, which is not mentioned in his will, was identical with Shakespeare's and passed to his widow. See p. .'SOo supra. * The latest recorded incident within Shakespeare's lifetime touching the business management of the company bears the date March 29, 1615, when Heminges and Burbage. as two leading members of the company, were summoned before the Privy Council to answer a charge of giving performances during Lent. There is no entry in the Privy Council Register of the hearing of the accusation in which all the London 454 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE his will, and after his death two of them, Heminges and Condell, not merely carried through the noble project of the first collected edition of his plays, but they bore open and signal tribute to their private affection for him in the ' Address to the Reader ' which they prefixed to ^^d^B^^b"^ the undertaking. The thnd of Shakespeare's hfelong professional friends, Richard Burbage, was by far the greatest actor of the epoch. It was he who created on the stage most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. Contemporary witnesses attest the ' justice' with which Burbage rendered the dramatist's loftiest conceptions. It is beyond doubt that Shakespeare and Burbage cultivated the closest intimacy from the earliest days of their association. They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote of Shakespeare that is positively known to have been recorded in his life- time relates that Burbage, when playing Richard III, agreed with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance ; Shakespeare, overhearing the conver- sation, anticipated the actor's visit, and met Burbage on liis arrival at the lady's house with the quip that ' William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.' The credible chronicler of the story was the law student Manningham,^ who, about the same date, described an early performance of ' Twelfth Night ' in Middle Temple Hall. Other evidence shows that Burbage's relations with Shakespeare were not confined to their theatrical responsi- companies were involved. The absence from the summons of Shake- speare's name is corroborative of his vii'tual retirement from active theatrical life. ^ Manningham, Diary, March 13, 1601, Camden Soc, p. 39. The diarist's authority was his chamber-fellow ' Mr. Curie ' {not ' Mr. Touse ' as the name has been wrongly transcribed). The female patrons of the theatre in Shakespeare's time were commonly reckoned to be peculiarly susceptible to the actor's fascination. Cf. John Earle's Microcosmographie, 1628 (No. 22, ' A Player ') : ' The waiting women spectators are over-eares in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in their Chambers.' THE CLOSE OF LIFE 455 bilities. In the dramatist's latest years, when he had settled in his native town, he engaged with the great actor in a venture with which the drama had small concern. The partnership illustrates a deferential readiness on the part of author and actor to obey the rather frivolous behests of an influential patron. Early in 1613 Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, a nobleman of some literary pretension, invited Shake- speare and Burbage to join in devising, in Rutland's° conformity with a current vogue, an emble- 'impresa,' matic decoration for his equipment at a great Court joust or tournament. Tourna- ments or jousts, which descended from days of mediaeval chivalry, still formed in James I's reign part of the cere- monial refcreation of royalty, and throughout the era of the Renaissance poets and artists combined to ornament the jousters' shields with ingenious devices (known in Italy as ' imprese ' and in France as ' devises ') in which a miniature symbolic picture was epigrammatically interpreted by a motto or brief verse. ^ The fantastic 1 Literature on the subject of ' imprese ' abounded in Italy. The poet Tasso published a dialogue on the subject. The standard Italian works on ' imprese ' are Luca Contile's Ragionamenti sopra la proprietd delle Imprese (1573) and Giovanni Ferro's Theatro d'lmprese (Venice, 1623). Among French poets, Clement Marot supplies in his (Euvres (ed. Jannet, Paris, 1868) many examples of poetic interpretation of pictorial ' devises ' ; see his Epigramme xxix. ' Sur la Devise : " Non ce que je pense " ' (vol. iii. p. 15) ; Ixxv. 'Pour une dame qui donna une teste de mort en devise ' (ib. p. 32) ; xciii. ' Pour une qui donna la devise d'un neud a im gentilhomme ' (ib. p. 40). Etienne Jodelle was equally productive in the same kind of composition ; cf. ' RecueU des inscriptions, figures, devises et masquarades ordonnees en I'hostel de ville de Paris, le Jeudi 17 de Fevrier 1558 ' in honour of Henri II. (in Jodelle's (Euvres, ed. Marty-Laveaux, Paris, 1868, vol. i. p. 237). Similarly Ronsard wrote mottoes for ' emblesmes ' and ' devises ' ; cf. his (Euvres, ed. Blanchemain, ' Pour un emblesme repre- sentant des saules esbranchez ' (iv. 203) and ' Au Roy, sur sa devise ' (viii. 129). See too Jusserand's Literary History of the English People, 1909 (iii. 270). The fantastic exercise was also held in England to be worthy of the energy of eminent genius. Sir Philip Sidney was proud of his proficiency in the art. The poet Samuel Daniel translated an Italian treatise on ' imprese ' with abundance of original illustration. 456 WILLIAIVI SHAKESPEARE ' impresa ' or literary pictorial device, which had obvious affinities with heraldry, was variously applied to the deco- ration of architectural work, of furniture, or of costume, but it was chiefly used in the blazonry of the shields in jousts or tournaments. It was with the object of en- hancing the dignity of the Earl of Rutland's equipment at a spectacular tournament in which he and other courtiers engaged at Whitehall on March 24, 1612-3, that the great dramatist and the great actor exercised their ingenuity. Burbage was an accomplished painter as well as player, and he and Shakespeare devised for the Earl an ' impresa.' Shakespeare supplied the scheme with the interpreting 'word' or motto, while the actor executed the pictorial device.^ Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, in whose . behalf Shakespeare thus amiably employed an Earl of idle hour, belonged to that cultivated section "^ ^" ■ of the nobility which patronised poetry and drama with consistent enthusiasm and generosity. The English essays on the theme came from the pens of the scholarly anti- quary, William Camden, and of the Scottish poet, Drummond of Haw- thornden. Dm'ing Queen Elizabeth's and King James I's reigns a gallery at Whitehall was devoted to an exhibition of copies (on paper) of the ' imprese ' employed in contemporary tournaments (see Hentzner's Diary). Manningham, the IMiddle Temple student, gives in his Diary (pp. 3-5) descriptions of thirty -six ' devises and impressaes ' which he examined in ' the gallery at Whitehall 19 Martij 1601.' None show any brilliant invention. One of Manningham's descriptions runs : ' A palme tree laden with armor upon the bowes, the word Fero et patior.' ^ In dramatic work for which his authorship was undivided, Shake- speare only once mentioned ' imprese.' In Richard II (ii. i. 25) such devices are mentioned as occasionally emblazoned in the stained glass windows of noblemen's houses. But in a scene descriptive of a tourna- ment in the play of Pericles (ii. ii. 16 seq.), which must be assigned to Shakespeare's partner, six knights appear, each bearing on his shield an * impresa ' the details of which are specified in the text. The fourth device, ' a burning torch that's turned upside down ' with the motto ' Quod me alit me extinguit,' is borrowed from Claude Paradin's Heroicall Devices, translated by P. S., 1591. A like scene of a tournament with description of the knights' ' imprese ' figm-es in The Partiall Law (ed. Dobell, 1908), p. 19 ; the ' imprese ' on the shields of four knight are fully described. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 457 earl's fleeting association with the poet in 1613 harmonises with Shakespeare's earlier social experience. The poet's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was Lord Rutland's friend and the friend of his family. ^ He had joined the Earl of Southamjiton and his own elder brother in the Earl of Essex's plot of 1601 and had endured imprison- ment with them till the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. In August 1612, barely two months after his succes- sion to the earldom, he entertained King James and the Prince of Wales with regal splendour at Belvoir Castle — the family seat. It was some six months later that he solicited the aid of Shakespeare and Burbage in designing an ' impresa ' for the commg royal tournament. The poet and critic Sir Henry Wotton, who witnessed the mimic warfare, noted, in a letter to a friend, the cryptic subtlety of the many jousters' ' imprese.' ^ In the household book of the Earl of 1 The (sixth) Earl of Rutland consulted ' M"" Shakspeare ' about his ' impresa,' nine months after he succeeded to the earldom on the death on June 26, 1612, without issue, of his elder brother Roger, the fifth Earl, who was long the Earl of Southampton's closest friend. There had been talk of a marriage between the Earl of Southampton and his sister Lady Bridget Manners. The two Earls were constant visitors together to the London theatres at the end of the sixteenth century, and both suffered imprisonment in the Tower of London for complicity in the Earl of Essex's plot early in 1601. The fifth Earl's wife was daughter of Sir Philip SijjQey, and she cultivated the society of men of letters, constantly entertaining and corresponding with Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont. * Unluckily neither Wotton nor anyone else reported the details of Shakespeare's invention for the Earl of Rutland. Writing to his friend Sir Edmund Bacon from Loudon on March 31, 1613, Wotton described the tournament thus : ' The day fell out wet, to the disgrace of many fine plumes . . . The two Riches [i.e. Sir Robert Rich and Sir Henry Rich, brothers of the first Earl of Holland] only made a speech to the King. The rest [of whom the Earl of Rutland is mentioned by name as one] were contented with bare imprese, whereof some were so dark that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not be to understood. The two best to my fancy were those of the two earl brothers [i.e. the Earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery]. The first a small, exceeding white pearl, and the words solo candore valeo. The other, a sun casting a glance on the side of a pillar, and the beams reflecting with the motto Splendcnte 458 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Rutland which is preserved at Belvoir Castle, due record was made of the payment to Shakespeare and Burbage of forty-four shillings apiece for their services. The entry runs thus : 'Item 31 Martij [1613] to IVIr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso [sic] xliiijs. To Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiijs. [Total] iiij'i viij^'^ The prefix ' ]VIr.,' the accepted mark of gentility, stands in the Earl of Rutland's account-book before the dramatist's name alone. Payment was obvi- ously rendered the two men in the new gold pieces called ' jacobuses,' each of which was worth about 225.^ During the same month (March 1613), in which Burbage and Shakespeare were exercising their ingenuity in the Earl of Rutland's behalf, the dramatist was engaging in a private business transaction in London. While on a visit to the metropolis in the same spring, Shakespeare invested a smaU sum of money in a new property, not far distant refulget, in which device there seemed an agreement : the elder brother to allude to his own nature, and the other to his fortune.' (Logan Pearsall-Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, Oxford, 1907, vol. ii. p. 17.) ^ The Historical Manuscripts Commission's Report on the Historical Manuscripts of Belvoir Castle, calendared by Sir Henry jMaxwell-Lyte, Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, and ilr. W. H. Stevenson, vol. iv. p. 494 ; see article by the present writer in The Times, December 27, 1905. * Abundant evidence is accessible of Burbage's repute as a painter. An authentic specimen of his brush — ' a man's head ' — which belonged to Edward Alleyn, the actor and founder of Dulwich College, may stiU be seen at the Dulwich College Gallery. That Burbage's labour in ' painting and making ' the ' impresa ' which Shakespeare suggested and interpreted was satisfactory to the Earl of Rutland is amply proved by another entry in the Duke of Rutland's household books which attests that Burbage was employed on a like work by the Earl three years later. On March 25, 1616, the Earl again took part in a tilting-match at Court on the anniversary of James I's accession. On that occasion, too, his shield was entrusted to Bvirbage for armorial embellishment, and the actor-artist received for his new labour the enhanced remuneration of 4Z. 18s. The entry runs : ' Paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lorde's shelde and for the embleanco, 4i. 18s.' Shakespeare was no longer Burbage's associate. At the moment he lay on what proved to be his deathbed at Stratford. SHAKESPEARE S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE TO THE PURCHASE- DEED OF A HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS, DATED MARCH lO, 1612-3 rrom the original document now preserved in the Guildhall Library, London THE CLOSE OF LIFE 459 from the Blackfriars theatre. This was his last invest- ment in real estate, and his procedure closely followed the example of his friend Richard Burbage, speare's who with his brother Cuthbert also acquired a^ho^us^e in pieces of land or houses in their private capa- Biackfriars, city within the Blackfriars demesne.^ Shake- speare now purchased a house, with a yard attached, which was situated within six hundred feet of the Blackfriars theatre. ^ The former OA^Tier, Henry Walker, a musician, had bought the property for 100?. in 1604 of one Matthew Bacon of Holborn, a student of Gray's Inn. Shakespeare in 1613 agreed to pay Walker 140Z. The deeds of conveyance bear the date March 10 in that year.^ By a legal device Shakespeare made his ownership a joint tenancy, associating with himself three merely nominal partners or trustees, viz. William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, John Jackson and John Hemynge of London, gentlemen. The effect of such a legal technicality was to deprive Shakespeare's wife, if she survived him, of a right to receive from the estate a widow's dower. Hemynge was probably Shakespeare's theatrical colleague. On March 11, the day following the conveyance of the property, Shakespeare executed another deed (now in the British Museum ^) which stipulated that 601. of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage, with Henry Walker, the former owner, until the following Michaelmas. ^ The Burbages' chief purchases of private property in Blackfriars were dated in 1601, 1610, and 1614 respectively. See Blackfriars Records, ed. A. Feuillerat, Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 70 seq. * It stood on the west side of St. Andrew's Hill, formerly termed Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, adjoining what is now known as Ireland Yard. Opposite the house was an old building known as ' The King's Wardrobe.' The ground-floor was in the occupation of one William Ireland, a haberdasher. * The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell- Phillipps collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Provi- dence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897, and now belongs to Mr. H. C. Folger of New York. The indenture held by the vendor is in the Guildhall Library. * Egerton MS. 1787. 460 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The money was still unpaid at the dramatist's death three years later. In both purchase-deed and mortgage-deed Shakespeare's signature was witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, ' servant ' or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew the deeds, and LaAvrence's seal, bearing his initials ' H. L.,' was stamped in each case on the parchment-tag, across the head of which Shakespeare Avrote his name. In all three documents — the two indentures and the mortgage-deed — the poet is described as ' of Stratford-on-Avon, in the Countie of Warwick, Gentleman.' It was as an investment, not for his ovm occupation, that he acquired the property. He at once leased it to John Robinson, a resident in the neighbourhood.^ Two years later Shakespeare joined some neighbouring o^\^lers in a suit for the recovery of documents : elating to bis title in this newly acquired Blackfriars spe^are's property. The full story of the litigation is litigation still to seek ; but papeis belonging to one Blackfriars stage of it have been brought to light, and property, they supply a final illustration, within a year of his death, of Shakespeare's habitual readiness to enforce his legal rights. On April 26, 1615, a ' bill of complaint ' or petition was addressed in Chancery to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Chancellor, by ' Willyam Shake- spere gent ' (jointly with six fellow complainants, Sir Thomas Bendish, baronet, Edward Newport and William Thoresbie, esquires, Robert Dormer, esquire, and Marie his wife, and Richard Bacon, citizen of London). The Chan- cellor's ' orators ' prayed him to compel Matthew Bacon of Gray's Inn, a former owner of Shakespeare's Blackfriars house, to deliver up to them a number of ' letters patent, deeds, evidences, charters and writings,' which, it was alleged, were wrongfully detained by him and concerned their title to various houses and lands ' within the precinct of Blackfriars in the City of London or county of Middle- sex.' The houses and lands involved in the dispute are 1 Halliwell-Piiillipps, Outlines, ii. 25-41. SHAKESPEARE S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE TO A MORTGAGE-DEED- RELATING TO THE HOUSE PURCHASED BY HIM IN BLACKFRIARS, DATED MARCH II, I612-3 From Hie original document now preserved in Ihe British Museum THE CLOSE OF LIFE 461 sufficiently described for legal purposes ; but no specific detail identifies their exact sites or their precise distri- bution among the several owners.^ On May 15 the de- fendant Matthew Bacon filed his answer to the complaint of Shakespeare and his associates. Bacon did not dispute the complainants' right to the property in question, and he admitted that a collection of deeds came into his hands on the recent death of Anne Bacon his mother,^ . who had owned them for many years ; but he denied pre- *" t^'^ tHf*^ cise knowledge of their contents and all obligation to part with them. On May 22, the Court of Chancery decreed the surrender of the papers to Sir Thomas Bendish, Edward Newport, and the other petitioners.^ Shake- speare's participation in the successful suit involved him in personar negotiation with his co-plaintiff's and confirms the persistence of his London associations after he had finally removed to Stratford. ^ The disputed property is thus collectively described in the ' bill of complaint ' : ' One Capitall Messuage or Dwellinge howso w[th] there app[u]rten[a]nce3 ^[th] two Court Yardes and one void plot of ground sometymea vsed for a garden of the East p[te] of the said Dwellinge howse and so Much of one Edifice as now or soraetj'mea served for two Stables and one little Colehowse adioyninge to the said Stables Lymge on the South Side of the said Dwellinge howse And of another Messuage or Tenem[te] w[th] thapp[ur]ten[a]nces now in the occupac[i]on of Anthony Thompson and Thom[a]3 Perckes and of there Assignes, & of a void peece of grownd whervppon a Stable is buildod to the said messuage belonginge and of sou[o]rall othere bowses Devided into seu[er]all Lodginges or Dwellinge bowses Together w[th] all and Singuler sell[ors] Sollers Chambers Halls p[ar]lo[rs] Yardes Backsides Easem[tes] P[ro]fites and Comodityes Hervnto seu[er]allie belonginge And of Certaine Void plots of grownd adioyinge to the said Messuages and p[re] misses aforesaid or vnto some of them And of a Well howse All w[ch] messuages Tenemen[ts] and p[re] misses aforesaid be Lyinge w[th] in the p[re]cinct of Blackifriers in the Cittye of London or Countye of Middl[esex].' * Anne Bacon owned property adjoining Shakespeare's house at the time of his purchase. See deeds in Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 32, 37. * Dr. C. W. Wallace, of the University of Nebraska, discovered th(j three cited documents in this suit in the autumn of 1905 at the Public Record Office. Full copies were printed by Dr. Wallace fn the Standard newspaper on October 18, 1905, and again in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch for April 1906. 462 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The records of Stratford-on-Avon meanwhile show that at the same time as Shakespeare was protecting his interests elsewhere he was taking a full share there of Shake- social and civic responsibilities. In 1611 the and the chief townsmen of Stratford were anxious to hiffhways obtain an amendment of existing statutes for the repair of the highways. A fund was col- lected for the purpose of ' prosecuting ' an amending bill in Parliament. The list of contributors, which is still extant in the Stratford archives, includes Shakespeare's name. The words ' Mr. WiUiam Shackspere ' are written in the margin as though they were added after the list was first drawn up. The dramatist was probably absent when the movement was set on foot, and gave it his support on liis return to the town from a London visit.^ The poet's family circle at Stratford was large, and their deaths, marriages, and births diversified the course of his domestic history. Early in September 1608 his Domestic mother (Mary Arden) died at a ripe age, exceed- ing seventy years, in the Birthplace at Henley Street, where her daughter Mrs. Joan Hart and her grand- children resided with her. She was buried in the church- yard on September 9, just fifty-one years since her marriage and after seven years of widowhood. Three and a half years later, on February 3, 1611-2, there appears in the burial register of Stratford Church the entry ' Gilbert Shakespeare adolescens.' Shakespeare's brother, Gilbert, who was his junior by two and a half years, had then reached his forty-sixth year, an age to which the term ^ The list of names of contributors to the fund is in Stratford-upon- Avon Corporation Records, Miscell. Docs. I. No. 4, fol. 6. The document is headed ' Wednesdaye the xjth of September, 1611, Colected towardes the Charge of prosecutjTig the Bill in parliament for the better Repayre of the highe Wales, and amendinge diuers defectes in the statutes already made.' The seventy names include all the best known citizens, e.g. ' Thomas Greene, Esquire,' Abraham Sturley, Henry Walker, Julius Shawe, John Combes, WiUiam Combes, Mrs. Quynye, John Sadler. Only in the case of Thomas Greene, the town clerk, is the amount of the contribution specified ; he subscribed 2s. 6*^. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 463 ' adolescens ' seems inapplicable. Nothing is certainly known of Gilbert's history save that on May 1, 1602, he represented the dramatist at Stratford when William and John Combe conveyed to the latter 107 acres of arable land, and that on March 5, 1609-10, he signed his name as witness of a deed to which some very humble townsfolk were parties. ^ An eighteenth- century tradition represents that GUbert Shakespeare lived to a patriarchal age and was a visitor to London near his death. It is commonly assumed that the Gilbert Shakespeare who died at Stratford early in 1612 was a son of the poet's brother Gilbert ; but tbe identification is uncertain.^ It is weU established, however, that precisely a j^-ear later (February 4, 1612-3) Shakespeare's next brother Richard, who was just com- pleting his thirty-ninth year, was buried in the churchyard. Happier episodes characterised the affairs of Shake- speare's own household. His two daughters Susanna and Judith both married in his last years, and the Susann^a^ ° union of his elder daughter Susanna was satis- Shakespeare, factory from all points of view. On June 5, 1607, she wedded, at Stratford parish church, at the age of twenty-four, John Hall, a medical practi- tioner, eight years her senior. Hall, an educated man of Puritan leanings, was no native of Stratford, but at the opening of the seventeenth century he acquired there a * On the date in question Gilbert Shakespeare's signature, which is in an educated style of handwriting, was appended to a lease bj' Margery Lorde, a tavern-keeper in Middle Row, of a few yards of ground to a neighbour Richard Smyth alias Courte, a butcher. The document is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace (see Catalogue, No. 115). * Mrs. Stopes confutes Halliwell-Phillipps's assertion that Gilbert Shakespeare became a haberdasher in London in the parish of St. Bridget or St. Bride's. She shows that Halliwell-Phillipps has confused Gilbert Shakespeare with one Gilbert Shepheard. Mrs. Stopes also points out that in the Stratford burial register of the early seventeenth century the terms adolescens, adolescetitulus, and adoles- centula were aU used rather loosely, being applied to dead persons who had passed the period of youth. Butj her identification of the entry of February 3, 1611-2, with Shakespeare's brother Gilbert remains questionable. (See her Shakespeare's Environment, ^-5 ; 33.2-5.) 464 WILLIAM SHAKESPEABE good practice, which extended far into the countr3^side. The bride and bridegroom settled in a house in the thoroughfare leading to the church known as Old Town, not far from New Place. Their residence still stands and bears the name of Hall's Croft. In the February follow- ing their marriage there was born to them a daughter Elizabeth, who was baptised in the parish church on February 21, 1607-8. The Halls had no other children, and Elizabeth Hall was the only grandchild of the poet who was born in his lifetime. She proved to be his last surviving descendant. Stratford society was prone to slanderous gossip, and Mrs. Susanna Hall was in 1613, to her father's perturbation, the victim of a libellous rumour of immoral conduct, which was circulated by John Lane junior, son of a substantial fellow-townsman. A defamation suit was brought by Mrs. Hall against Lane in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Worcester, with the satisfactory result that the slanderer, who failed to put in an appearance at the hearing, was excommunicated on July 27. The case was heard on July 15 at the western end of the south aisle of the Cathedral, and the chief witness for the injured lady was Robeit Whatcote, one of the witnesses of Shakespeare's will.^ The dramatist's younger daughter Judith married later than her sister, on February 10, 1615-6, some two months before her father's death, and during (it would of^^dUh appear) his last illness. The bride had reached Shakespeare, j^gj. thirty-second year. Thomas Quiney, the bridegroom, was her junior by four years. He was a younger son of Shakespeare's close friend of middle life, Richard Quiney, the Stratford mercer, who had appealed to the poet in 1598 for a loan of money, and had * The sentence was entered in the Worcester Diocesan Registry, Act Book No. 9. According to the record of the Court, John Lane ' about five weeks reported that the plaintiff had the runninge of the raynes, and had bin naught -with. Rafe Smith and John Palmer.' See J. W. Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage, 167, 208. Cf. Halliwcll-Phillipps, Outlines, i. 242 ; ii. 243-4, 394. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 465 died while bailiff in 1601. Judith Shakespeare was a close friend of the Quiney family, and on December 4, 1611, she witnessed for Richard Quiney's widow and for her eldest son Adrian the deed of sale of a house belonging to them at Stratford.^ Judith Shakespeare's marriage with Thomas Quiney was solemnised during Lent, when ecclesiastical law prescribed that a hcense should be obtained before the performance of the rite. Banns, no doubt, had been called, but the wedding was hurried on, and took place before a license was obtained. The Bishop's Consistory Court at Worcester consequently issued a citation to Thomas Quiney and his wife to explain the omission. They put in no appearance, and a decree of excommunication was issued. ^ The poet died before judgment was delivered. He promised his daughter a marriage portion of lOOZ. which was unpaid at his death ; he made, however, belated provision for it in his will.^ The matrimonial union which opened thus inauspiciously was marred by many misfortunes. The development of the religious temper of the town Growth of ^^ Shakespeare's latest years can scarcely have Puritanism harmonised with his own sentiment. With the Puritans, whose outcries against the drama never ceased, Shakespeare was out of sympathy,^ and he ^ The deed is exhibited at Shakespeare's Birthplace {Cat. No. 91). Judith makes her mark by way of signature. ' See J. W. Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage, p. 248. ^ A hundred and fifty pounds is described as a substantial jointure in Merry Wives (m. iv. 49). Thomas Combe appointed by his will the large sum of 400Z. as the marriage portion of each of his two daughter.-s. ^ Shakespeare's references to Puritans in the plays of his middle and late life are so uniformly discourteous that they must be judged to reflect his personal feeling. Cf. the following conversation concerning Malvolio in Twelfth Night (n. iii. 153 et seq.) : Maria. Many, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan. Sir Andrew. O 1 if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog. Sm TOBY. What, for being a puritan ? thy exquisite reason, dear knight. SIR ANDREW. I have no exquisite reason for 't, but I have reason good enough. In Winter^s Tale (rv. iii. 46), the Clown, after making contemptuous references to the character of the shearers, remarks that there is ' but one puritan amongst thom, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.' In 2 H 466 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE could hardly have viewed with unvarying composure the steady progress that puritanisni was making among his fellow- townsmen. In 1615 Wilham Combe, the local land- owner, with whom Shakespeare lived on friendly terms, comprehensively denounced the townsfolk in a moment of anger as ' Puritan knaves.' Nevertheless a preacher, doubtless of Puritan prochvities, was entertained at Shake- speare's residence. New Place, after deUvering a sermon in the spring of 1614. The incident might serve to illustrate Shakespeare's characteristic placability, but his son-in-law Hall, who avowed sympathy with puritanism, was probably in the main responsible for the civihtj". The town council of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost overlooked Shakespeare's residence of New Place, gave curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama on February 7, 1611 2, when they passed a resolution that plays were unlawful and ' the sufferance of them against the orders heretofore made and against the example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,' and the council was therefore ' content,' the resolution ran, that ' the penalty of xs. imposed [on playeis heretofore] be xli. henceforward.' ^ A more definite anxiety arose in the summer of 1614 from a fresh outbreak of fire in the town on Saturday, July 9. The disaster Avould appear to have The Fire caused little less damage than the conflagrations of 1614. ° ° at the end of the previous century. The town was declared once more to be ' ruinated by fyre ' and appeal was made for relief to the charitable generositj- of the neighbouring cities and villages. ^ much the same tone Mrs. Quickly says in Merry Wives (i. iv. 10) of the servant John Rugby : ' His worst fault is that he is given to prayer.' * Ten years later the King's players (Shakespeare's own company) were bribed by the council to leave the town without playing. (See the present writer's Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.) * According to the Order Book of the Town Council (B. 267), the justices of the shire were requested, on July 15, 1614, to obtain roj'al let- ters patent authorising a collection through various parts of England in THE CLOSE OF LIFE 467 Shakespeare's social circle clearly included all the better- to-do inhabitants. The tradesfolk, from whom the baiUff, aldermen, and councillors were drawn, sp^are's were his nearest neighbours, and among them social circle were numerous friends of his youth. But within at Stratford. ... ., i , , a circuit of some mile or two lay the houses and estates of many country gentlemen, justices of the peace, who cultivated intimacies with prominent towns- people and were linked by social ties with the prosperous owner of New Place. Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the inspirer of Justice Shallow, belonged to a past genera- tion, and his type was decajdng. Official duties often called to Stratford in Shakespeare's last days a neighbouring landowner who combined in a singular degree poetic and pohtical repute. At Alcester, some nine miles from Strat- ford, stood the ancestral mansion of Beauchamp Court, where lived the poet and pohtician Sir Fulke Greville. On his father's death in 1606 he was chosen to succeed him in the office of Recorder of the borough of Stratford, and order to retrieve the town's losses by fire. The Council reported that ;• ' Within the space of lesse than two howres [there were] consumed and burnt fifty and fower dwelling bowses, many of them being very faire houses, besides Barnes, Stables, and other howscs of ofiice, together with great store of Come, Hay, Straw, Wood and timber therein, amounting to the value of Eight thowsand pounds and upwards ; the force of which fier was so great (the wind sitting ful upon the towne) that it dispersed into so many places thereof, whereby the whole towne was in very great danger to have beeno utterly consumed.' (Wheler's Hist, of Strafford, p. 15.) The ofiScial authorisation of the collection was not signed by King James till May 11, 1616, and the local collectors were not nominated till June 29 following. (Stratford Archives, Miscdl. Doc. vii. 122.) Charitable contributions were invited from the chief towns in the Midlands and the South, ' towardes the new buyldyng reedifyeing and erectyng of the sayd Towne of Stratford upon Avon, and the relief of all such his majesties poore distressed subiectes their wives and children as have sustayned losse and decay by the misfortune of a sodajTie and terrible fire there happenjTige.' The returns seem to have proved disappointing. The fire at Stratford-on-Avon, in the summer of 1614, made sufficient impression on the public mind to justify its mention in Edmund Howes' edition of Stow's Chronicle, 1631, p. 1004. No other notice of the town appears in that comprehensive record. 2 H 2 468 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE he retained the post till he died twenty-two years later. As recorder and also as justice of the peace Sir Fulke paid several visits year by year to the town and acce pted the hospitality of the baihff and his circle. A short walk across the borders of Gloucestershire separated New Place from the manor house of Chfiford Chambers, the residence of Sir Henry and Lady Rainsford.^ Their lifelong patronage of Michael Drayton, another Warwickshire poet and Shake- ^. ^, speare's friend, gives them an honoured Sir Henry ,.,.'. __. Rainsford place m hterary history. Drayton was born Chambers ^* ^^® village of Hartshill near Atherstone in the northern part of the county, and Lady Rainsford's father Sir Henry Goodere had brought the boy up in his adjacent manor of Polesworth. Lady Rainsford before her maniage was the adored mistress of Drayton's youthful muse, and in the days of his maturity, Drayton, who was always an enthusiastic lover of his native county, was the guest for many months each year of her husband and herself at CHfford Chambers, which, as he wrote in his ' Polyolbion,' hath ' been many a time the Muses' quiet port.' Drayton's host found at Stratford and its environment his closest friends, and several of his intimacies were freely shared by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's son-in- law, John Hall, a medical practitioner of Stratford, reckoned Lady Rainsford among his earUest patients from the first years of the century, and Drayton himself, while a guest at CHfford Chambers, came under Hall's professional care. The dramatist's son-in-law cured Drayton of a ' tertian ' by the administration of ' syrup of violets ' and described him in his casebook as ' an excellent poet.' ^ ' Sir Henry, born in 1575, married in 1596 and was knighted at King James I's coronation on July 23, 1603. (Cf. Bristol and Gloucester- shire Archceolog. Soc. Journal, xiv. 63 seq., and Genealogist, 1st ser. u. 105.) * Sir Henry Rainsford owned additional property in the hamlet of Alveston on the banks of the Avon across Stratford bridge. Drayton celebrated Sir Henry Rainsford's death on January 27, 1621-2, at the age of forty-six, with an affectionate elegy in which he described Sir THE CLOSE OF LIFE ^ 469 Drayton was not the only common friend of Shake- speare and Su' Henry Rainsford. Both enjoyed at Stratford personal mtercourse with the wealthy landowning family of the Combes, the chief members of which lived within the limits of the borough of Stratford, while they took rank with the landed gentry of the county. With three genera- tions of this family Shakespeare maintained social relations. The Combes came to Stratford from North Warwickshire in Henry VIII 's reign, and after the dissolution of the monasteries they rapidly acquired a vast series of estates, not in Warwickshire alone, but also in the adjoining counties of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. The part of the town known as Old Stratford remained the family's chief place of abode, although WilUam Combe, a younger son of the first Stratford settler, made his home at Warwick. It was by the purchase of land at Strat- ford from Wilham Combe of Warwick jointly with his nephew John Combe of Stratford in 1602 that Shake- speare laid the broad foundations of his local estate. While the dramatist was establishing his position in his native town, John Combe and his elder brother, Thomas, exerted an imposing influence on the social fortunes of „ the borough. In 1596 Thomas Combe acquiied Combe of of the Cro^vn for his residence the old Tudor t e oi ege. jj^a^j^gion near the church known as ' The College House.' 1 There Drayton's host of Clifford Chambers was Henry as ' what a friend should be ' and praised ' his care of me ' as proof that to no other end He had been born but only for my friend. Rainsford's heir, also Sir Henry Rainsford {d. 1641), continued to the poet until his death the hospitality of Clifford Chambers. Drayton's last extant letter, which is addressed to the Scottish poet Drummond of Hawthornden, is dated from ' Clifford in Gloucestershire, 14 July 1631 ' ; Drayton explains that he is writing from ' a knight's house in Gloucestershire, to which place I yearly use to come in the summertime to recreate myself, and to spend some two or three months in the country.' (Oliver Elton, Introduction to Michael Drayton, 1895, p. 43.) ^ According to his will he left to his son and heir William (subject to his wife's tenancy for life or a term of thirty years) ' the house I dwell 470 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE an honoured visitor. Thomas Combe stood godfather to Sir Henry Rainsford's son and heir (of the same names), and when he made his will on December 22, 1608, he summoned from Clifford Chambers both Sir Henry and that knight's guardian and stepfather ' William Barnes, esquire ' to act as witnesses and to accept the office of overseers. The testator described the two men, who were deeply attached to each other, as his ' good friends ' in whom he reposed ' a special trust and confidence.' ^ With Thomas Combe's sons WilHam and Thomas, the former of whom succeeded to his vast property and influence, Shakespeare was actively associated until his last days. But the member of the Combe family whose personaUty appealed most strongly to the dramatist was Combe of Thomas Combe's brother John, a confirmed Stratford. bachelor,^ who in spite of liis ample landed estate largely added to liis resources by loans of money on interest to local tradespeople and farmers. For some thirty years he kept the local court of record busy with a long series of suits against defaulting cHents. Nevertheless his social position in town and county was quite as good as that of his brother Thomas or his uncle WilHam. A charitable instinct quahfied his usurious practices and he Hved on highly amiable terms with his numerous kinsfolk, with his in called The College House and the ortyards and other appurtenancea therewith, to me by our late Sovereign Queen Elizabeth devised.' These words dispose of the often repeated error that Thomas Combe's brother John was owner of ' The College House,' which duly descended to Thomas Combe's heir William. ^ Thomas Combe's will is at Somerset House (P.C.C. Dorset 13). Combe was buried at Stratford church on January 11, 160S-9, and his will was proved by his executor and elder son William, on Feb. 10, 1608-9. His widow Mary was buried on April 5, 1617. * Many of Shakespeare's biographers wrongly credit Combe with a wife and children. Cf. Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 449, J. C. M. BeUew's Shakespeare's Home, 1863, pp. 67 and 365 seq. ; Mrs. Stopes, Shake- speare's Warwickshire Contemporaries, 1907, p. 220. The confusion is due to the fact that his father, a married step-brother, and a married nephew all bore the same Christian name of John. The terms of the will of the John Combe who was Shakespeare's especial friend leave his celibacy in no doubt. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 471 Stratford neighbours, and with the leading gentry of the county. His real property included a house at Warwick, where his uncle WilHam held much property, a substantial estate at Hampton Lucy, and much land at Stratford, in- cluding a meadow at Shottery. On January 28, 1612-3, he made his will, and he died on July 12 next year (1614). He distributed his vast property with much precision.^ Two brothers (George and John), a sister (Mrs. Hyatt), an uncle (John Blount, his mother's brother), many nephews, nieces, cousins, and servants were all generously remembered. His nephew Thomas (younger son of his late brother Thomas) was his heir and residuary legatee. But a wider historic Combe's interest distinguishes John Combe's testamentary legacy to tributes to his friends who were not lineally re- Shakespeare.^ lated to him. To ' Air. William Shakespeare ' he left five pounds. Sir Henry Rainsford of Clifford Chambers was an overseer of the will, receiving 5/. for his service, while Lady Rainsford was allotted 405. wherewith to buy a memorial ring. Another overseer of as high a standing ^ Combe's will w preserved at Somerset House. An office copy signed by tliree deputy registrars of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury is among the Stratford Records, Miscell. Doc. vii. 254. The will was proved by the nephew and executor, Thomas Combe, on November 10, 1G15 (not 1G16 as has been erroneously stated). The pecuniary bequests amount to 1500/. A fair sum was left to charity. Apart from bequests of 20/. to the poor of Stratford, 51. to the poor of Alcester, and 5/. to the poor of Warwick, all the testator's debtors wore granted relief of a shilling in the pound on the discharge of their debts ; 100/. was to be applied in loans to fifteen poor or young tradesmen of Stratford for terms of three years, at two-and-a-half per cent, interest, the interest to be divided among the Stratford almsfolk. The bequest of Shottery meadow to a cousin, Thomas Combe, was saddled with an annual payment of 11. 13s. id. — 1/. for two sermons in Stratford Church, and the rest for ten black gowns for as many poor people to bo chosen by the bailiff and aldermen. Henry Walker, whose son William was Shakespeare's godson, received twenty shillings. The bequests to John's brother George included ' the close or grounds known by the name of Parson's Close alias Shakespeare's Close ' — land at Hampton Lucy, which has been erroneously assumed to owe its alternative title to association with the dramatist (Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 497 seq.). 472 WILLIAiyi SHAKESPEAEE in the county was Sir Francis Smyth, lord of the manor of Wootton Wawen, who received an additional 51. wherewith to buy a hawk, while on his wife Lady Ann was bestowed the large sum of 40Z. wherewith to buy a bason and ewer. There were three executors, each receiving 20?. ; with the heir Thomas Combe, there were associated in that capacity Bartholomew Hales, the squire of Snitterfield, and Sir Richard Verney, knight, of Compton Veme^^, whose wiie was sister of Sir Fulke Greville the poet and politician.^ Combe directed that he should be buried in Stratford Church, ' near to the place where mj' mother was buried,' and that a convenient tomb of the value of Combe's threescore pounds should ' within one year of my decease be set over me.' An elaborate altar-tomb with a coloured recumbent effigy still stands in a recess cut into the east wall of the chancel. The sculptor was Garret Johnson, a tomb-maker of Dutch descent living in Southwark, who within a very few years was to undertake a monument near at hand in honour of Shakespeare. 2 According to contemporary evidence, there was long ' fastened ' to Combe's tomb in Stratford Church four doggerel verses which derisively condemned his reputed practice of lending money at the ^°T^h^ rate of ten per cent. The crude lines were first committed to print in 1618 when they took this form : Ten-in-the-hundred must lie in his grave. But a hundred to ten -whether God -will him have. Who then must be interr'd in this tombe ? Oh, quoth the Divill, my John-a-Combe. The first couplet would seem to have been adapted from an epigram devised to cast ridicule on some earher ^ The third overseer was Sir Edward Blount, a kinsman of the testator's mother, and the fourth was John Palmer of Compton, whose lineage was traceable to a very remote period. Dugdale in his Anti- quities of Warwickshire gives a full account of the families of Smyth of Wootton Wawen, Verney of Compton Verney, and Palmer of Compton. 2 See pp. 496-7 infra. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 473 member of the usurious profession who had no concern with Combe or Stratford.^ In 1634 a Nonvich visitor to Stratford who kept a diary first recorded the local tradition to the effect that Shakespeare was himself the author of the ' witty and facetious verses ' at Combe's expense which were then to be read on Combe's monument. ^ The story of Shakespeare's authorship was adopted on inde- pendent local testimony both by John Aubrey and by the dramatist's first biographer Nicholas Rowe.^ ^ The epitaph as quoted above appeared in Richard Brathwaite's Remains in 1618 under the heading : ' Upon one John Combe of Stratford upon Avon, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had Caused to be buUt in his Life Time.' The first two lines imitate a couplet p^e^'^ousIy in print : see H[enry] P[arrot]'s The More the Merrier (a collection of Epigrams, 1608), FENEHATORIS EPriAPHIUM. Ten in the hundred lies under this stone, And a hundred to ten to the devil he's gone. Cf. also Camden's epitaph of ' an usurer ' in his Remaines, 1614 (ed. 1870, pp. 429^30) : Here lyes ten in the hundred, In the ground fast ramm'd ; 'Tis a hundred to ten But his soule is danm'd. 2 I^ansdowne MS. 213 f. 332u ; see p. 600 and note infra. * The lines as quoted by Aubrey [Lives, ed. Clark, IL 226) run : Ten in the hundred the Devill allows But Combes will have twelve, he sweares and vowes ; If any one askes, who lies in his tombe, Hah I quoth the Devill, 'Tis my John o Combe. Rowe's version rims somewhat differently : Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav'd. 'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd. If any man ask", who lies in this tomb ? Oh I ho 1 quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Oombe. One Robert Dobyns, in 1673, cited, in an account of a visit to Stratford, the derisive verse in the form given by Rowe, adding ' since my being at Stratford the heires of Mr. Combe have caused these verses to be razed so yt they are not legible.' (See Athenceum, Jan. 19, 1901.) There is now no visible trace on Combe's tomb of any inscription save the original epitaph (inscribed above the effigy on the wall within the recess) which runs : ' Here lyeth interred the body of John Combe, Esqr., who departed this life the 10th day of July A° Dni 1614 bequeathed by his last wiU and testament to pious and charitable uses these sumes in[s]ving anually to be paied for ever viz. yxs. for two sermons to be preached in this church, six poundes 474 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Other impromptu sallies of equally futile mortuary wit were assigned to Shakespeare by collectors of anecdotes early in the seventeenth century. But the internal evidence for them is as unconvincing as in the case of Combe's doggerel epitaph. ^ John Combe's death involved the poet more conspi- cuously than before in civic affairs. Combe's two nephews, Wilham and Thomas ,2 sons of his brother threatened Thomas, who had died in 1609, now divided enclosure, between them the family's large estates about Stratford. William had succeeded five years before to his father's substantive property including the College House, and Thomas now became owmer of his xiiis. & 4 pence to buy ten goundes for ten poore people within the borrough of Stratford & one hundred poundes to be lent unto 15 pooro tradesmen of the same borrough from 3 yeares to 3 yeares changing the pties every third yeare at the rate of fiftie shillinges p. anum the wch increase he appointed to be distributed toward the reliefe of the almes people theire. More he gave to the poore o Statforde Twenty [pounds] . . .' The last word is erased. ^ There is evidence that it was no uncommon sport for wits at social meetings of the period to suggest impromptu epitaphs for themselves and their friends, and Shakespeare is reported in many places to have engaged in the pastime. A rough epitaph sportively devised for Ben Jonson at a supper party is assigned to Shakespeare in several seven- teenth-century manuscript collections. According to Ashmole MS. No. 38, Art. 340 (in the Bodleian Library), ' being Merrie att a Tauern, Mr. Jonson hauing begun this for his Epitaph — Here lies B«n Johnson that was once one, he giues ytt to Jlr. Shakspear to make up ; he presently wryght : Who while he liu'de was a sloe thing And now being dead is no thing.' Archdeacon Plume, in a manuscript note-book now in the corporation archives of Maldon, Essex, assigns to Shakespeare (on Bishop Hacket's authority) the feeble mock epitaph on Ben weakly expanded thus : Here lies Benjamin . . . w[it]h littlhairup[on] his chin Who w[hi]l[e] he lived w[as] a slow th[ing], and now he is d[ea]d is noth[ing]. Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that an unnamed friend had written of him {Conversations, p. 36) : Here lyes honest Ben That had not a beard on his chen. * William was baptised at Stratford Church on December 8, 1586, and Thomas on February 9, 1588-9. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 475 uncle John's wealth. The elder brother, Wilham, was in his twenty-eighth year, and his brother, Thomas, was in his twenty-sixth year when their uncle John passed away. Wilham had entered the Middle Temple on October 17, 1602, when his grand-uncle William Combe, of Warwick, was one of his sureties.^ Though the young man was not called to the bar, he made pretensions to some legal knowledge. Both brothers were of violent and assertive temper, the elder of the two showing the more domineering disposition. Within two months of their uncle's death, they came into serious conflict with the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon. In the early autumn of 1614 they announced a resolve to enclose the borough's common lands on the outskirts of the town in the direction of Welcombe, Bishopton, and Old Stratford, hamlets about which some of the Combe property lay. The enclosure also menaced the large estate which, by the disposition of King Edward VI, owed tithes to the Corporation, and after the expiration of a ninety-two years' lease was to become in 1636 the absolute property of the town. The design of the Combes had much current precedent. In all parts of the country landowners had long been seeking ' to remove the ancient bounds of lands with a view to inclosing that which was wont to be common.' ^ The invasion of popular rights was everywhere hotly resented, and as recently as 1607 the enclosure of commons in north Warwickshire had provoked something like insurrection.^ Although the disturbances were repressed with a strong hand, James I and his ministers disavowed sympathy with the landoAvners in their arrogant defiance of the pubHc interest. The brothers Combe began work cautiously. They first secured the support of Arthur Mainwaring, the steward of the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who was ex-officio ^ Middle Temple Minutes of Parliament, p. 425. » Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, i. 33, 88, ii. 98. Cf. StafEord's Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints, 1581. " Stow's Annals, ed. Howes, p. 890. 476 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE lord of the manor of Stratford in behalf of the Crown.^ Mainwaring resided in London, knew nothing of local feel- ing, and was represented at Stratford by one Council's Wilham Replingham, who acted as the Combes' resistance. ^gent. The Town Council at once resolved to offer the proposed spoliation as stout a resistance as had been offered like endeavours elsewhere. Thomas Greene, a cultivated lawyer, had been appointed the first town clerk of the town in 1610 — an office which was created by James I's new charter. He took prompt and effective action in behaK of the townsmen. The town clerk, who had already given the dramatist some legal help, -wrote of him as ' my cosen Shakespeare.' Whatever the Uneal relation- ship, Greene was to prove in the course of the coming controversy his confidential intimacy with Shakespeare alike in London and Stratford.- ^ Owing to the insolvency of Sir Edward Greville, of Mileote, who had been lord of the manor since 1596, the manor had recently passed to King James I. - Greene's historj' is not free of difficulties. ' Thomas Green alias Shakspere ' was buried in Stratford Church on March 6, 1589-90. The ' alias ' which implies that Shakespeare was the maiden name of this man's mother suggested to Malone that he was father of the drama- tist's legal friend. On the other hand Shakespeare's Thomas Greene who is described in the Stratford records {Misc. Doc. x. No. 23) as ' coun- cillor at law, of the Middle Temple ' is clearly identical with the student who was admitted at that Inn on November 20, 1595, and was described at the time in the Bench Book (p. 162) as ' son and heir of Thomas Greene of Warwick, gent.,' his father being then deceased. The Middle Temple student was called to the bar on October 29, 1600, and long retained chambers in the inn. His association with Stratford was a temporary episode in his cai-eer. He was acting as ' solicitor ' or ' counsellor ' for the Corporation in 1601, and on September 7, 1603, became steward (or judge) of the Court of Record there and clerk to the aldermen and burgesses. On July 8, 1610, he added to his office of steward the new post of town clerk or common clerk which was created by James I's charter of incorporation. Numerous papers in his crabbed handwriting are in the Stratford archives. He resigned both his local offices early in 1617 and soon after sold the house at Stratford which he occupied in Old Town as well as his share in the town tithes which he had acquired along with Shakespeare in 1605 and owned jointly with his wife Lettice or Letitia. Thenceforth he was exclusively identified with London, and made some success at the bar, becoming autumn reader of his inn in 1621 and treasurer in 1629 (Middle Temple Bench Book, pp. 70-1). It is THE CLOSE OF LIFE 477 Both parties to the strife bore witness to Shakespeare's local influence by seeking his countenance.^ But he proved ^, , un-niUinor to identify himself with either side. The appeal ° "■ ... to Shake- He contented himself with protectmg his own speare. property from possible injury at the hands of the Combes. Personally Shakespeare had a twofold interest in the matter. On the one hand he owned the freehold of 127 acres which adjoined the threatened common fields. This land he had purchased of ' old ' John Combe and his uncle William, of Warwick. On the other hand he was a joint owner with Thomas Greene, the town clerk, and many others, of the tithe-estate of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton. The value of his freeholds could not be legally affected by the proposed enclosure.^ But too grasping a neighbour, might cause him anxiety there. On the other hand, his profits as lessee of a substantial part of the tithe-estate might be imperilled if the Corporation were violently dispossessed of control of the tithe-paying land. necessary to distinguish him from yet another Thomas Greene, a yeo- man of Bishopton, who was admitted a burgess or councillor of Stratford on September 1, 1615, was churchwarden in 1026, leased for many years of the Corporation a house in Henley Street, and played a promin- ent part in municipal affairs long after Shakespeare's Thomas Greene had left the town. ^ The archives of the Stratford Corporation supply full information as to the course of the controversy ; and the official papers are sub- stantially supplemented by a surviving fragment of Thomas Greene's private diary (from Nov. 15, 1614, to Feb. 15, 1616-7). Of Greene's diary, which is in a crabbed and barely decipherable handwriting, one leaf is extant among the Wheler MSS., belonging to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trustees, and three succeeding leaves are among the Cor- poration documents. The four leaves were reproduced in autotype, with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott and illustrative extracts from Corporation records and valuable editorial comment by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D., in Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Cormnon Fields at Welcombe, Birmingham, 1885. Some interesting additional information has been gleaned from the Stratford records by Mrs. Stopes in Shakespeare's Environment, pp. 81-91 and 336-342. * Thomas Greene drew up at the initial stage of the controversy a list of ' ancient freeholders in Old Stratford and Welcombe ' who were interested parties. The first entry runs thus : ' Mr. Shakspeare, 4 yard land [i.e. roughly 127 acres], noe common nor ground beyond Gospel Bush, noe ground in Sandfield, nor none in Slow Hillfield beyond Bishopton, nor none in the enclosure beyond Bishopton. Sept. 5th, 1614.' 478 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE At the outset of the controversy WilUam Combe prudently approached Shakespeare through his agent Replingham, and sought to meet in a conciHatory spe^are's spirit any objection to his design which the agreement dramatist might harbour on personal grounds. Combes' On October 28, 1614, ' articles ' were drafted 28^^614'^' between Shakespeare and Replingham indemni- fying the dramatist and his heirs against any loss from the scheme of the enclosure. At Shakespeare's suggestion the terms of the agreement between himself and Combe's agent were devised to cover the private interests of Thomas Greene, who, in his capacity of joint tithe-owner, was in much the same position as the drama- tist. On November 12 the Council resolved that ' all lawful meanes shalbe used to prevent the enclosing that is pretended of part of the old town field,' and Greene proceeded to London in order to present a petition to the Privy Council. Four days later, Shakespeare reached the metropolis on business of his own. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival Greene called upon liim and talked over the local crisis. The dramatist was reassuring. He had (he said) discussed the plan of the enclosure with his son-in-law, John Hall, and they had reached the con- clusion that ' there will be nothyng done at all.'^ Shake- speare avoided any expression of his personal CouncU'^s^ sympathies. He would seem to have been Jitter to absent from Stratford until the end of the speare, year, and the Corporation chafed against his ?6^i''4.^^' neutral attitude. On December 23, 1614, the Council in formal meeting drew up two letters to be delivered in London, one addressed to Shakespeare, ^ ' Jovis 17 No : [1614]. My Cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday to towne, I went to see him howe he did ; he told me that they assured him they ment to inclose noe further then to gospell bushe, & so vpp straight (leavj'ng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedge & take in Salisburyes peece ; and that they meane in Aprill to servey the Land, & then to gyve satisfaccion & not before, & he & Mr. Hall say they think there vill be nothyng done at all ' (Greene's Diary). THE CLOSE OF LIFE 479 imploring his active aid in their behalf, and the other addressed to Mainwaring. Almost all the Councillors appended their signatures to each letter. Greene also on his own initiative sent to the dramatist ' a note of inconveniences [to the town] that would happen by the enclosure.' ^ But, as far as the extant evidence goes, Shakespeare remained silent. WiUiam Combe was in no yielding mood. In vain a deputation of six members of the Council laid their case before him. They were dismissed Avith contumely. The young landlord's arrogance stiffened the resistance of the Corporation. The Councillors were determined to ' preserve their inheritance ' ; ' they would not have it said in future time they were the men which gave way to the undoing of the toAyn ' ; 'all three fires were not so great a loss to the town as the enclosures would be.' Early next year (1615) labourers were employed by Combe to dig ditches round the area of the proposed enclosure, and the townsmen attempted to fill them up. A riot followed. The Lord ^ '23rd Dec. 1614. A Hall. Lettres wrytten, one to Mr. Mannerj'ng, another to Mr. Shakspearo, with almost all the companyes hands to eyther : I alsoe wrytte of myself to my Coscn Shakspeare the coppyes of all oiir oathes made then, alsoe a not of the Inconvcnyences wold grow by the Inclosure ' (Greene's Diary). The minute book of the Town Council under date December 23 omits mention of the letters to Shakespeare and Mainwaring, although the minutes show that the controversy over the enclosures occupied the whole time of the Council as had happened at every meeting from September 23 onwards. No trace of the letter to Shakespeare survives ; but a contemporary copy, apparently in Greene's handwriting, of the letter to Mainwaring (doubt- less the counterpart of that to Shakespeare) is extant among the Stratford archives (WTieler Papers, vol. i. f. 80) ; it is printed in Greene's Diary, ed. Ingleby, Appendix ix. p. 15. The bailiff, Francis Smyth senior, and the Councillors mention the recent ' casualties of fires ' and the ' ruin of this borough,' and entreat Mainwaring ' in your Christian meditations to bethink you that such enclosure will tend to the great disabling of performance of those good meanings of that godly king [Edward VI, by whose charter of incorporation ' the common fields ' passed to the town for the benefit of the poor] to the ruyne of this Borough wherein live above seven hundred poor which receive almes, whose curses and clamours will be poured out to God against the enterprise of such a thing.' 480 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, was on the Wanvickshire Assize, and in reply to a petition from the Town Council he on March 27 declared from the bench at Warwick that Combe's conduct defied the law of the realm.^ The quarrel was not thereby stayed. But an uneasy truce followed. In September 1615, during the lull in the conflict, the town clerk again made record of Shakesj)eare's attitude. Greene's ungrammatical diary supphes the speare's clumsy entry : ' Sept. [1615] W. Shakspeares statement, tellyng J. Greene that I was not able to beare Sept. 1615. ^ o the encloseinge of Welcombe.' J. Greene was the town clerk's brother John, who had been solicitor to the Corporation since October 22, 1612. ^ It was with him that Shakespeare was represented in conversation. Shake- speare's new statement amounted to nothing more than a reassertion of the continued hostility of Thomas Greene to WUliam Combe's nefarious purpose.^ Shakespeare clearly ^ ' 14 April 1615. A Coppy of the Order made at Warwick Assises 27 Marcij xiiio Jacobi R. : ' Warr § Vpon the humble petition of the Baylyffe and Burgesses of Stratford uppon Avon, It was ordered at thes Assises that noe in- closure shalbe made within the parish of Stratforde, for that yt is agaynst the Lawes of the Realme, neither by Mr. Combe nor any other, untUl they shall shewe cause at open assises to the Justices of Assise ; neyther that any of the Commons beinge aunciente greensworde shalbe plowed upp ejiiher by the saj^d Mr. Combe or any other, untill good cause be lykewise shewed at open assises before the Justices of Assise ; and this order is taken for preventynge of tumultes and breaches of his Majesties peace ; where of in this very towne of late upon their occasions there hadd lyke to have bene an evill begynnynge of some great mischief. ' Edw. Coke.' " Cal. Stratford Records, p. 102. * The wording of the entry implies that Shakespeare told J[ohn] Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Those who would wish to regard Shakespeare as a champion of popular rights have endeavoured to interpret the ' I ' in ' I was not able ' as ' he.' Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare would be rightly credited with telling John Greene that lie disliked the enclosure ; but palaeographers only recognise the reading ' I.' (Cf. Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, ed. Ingleby, 1885, p. 11.) In spite of Shakespeare's tacit support of WUliam Combe in the matter of the enclosure, he would seem according THE CLOSE OF LIFE 481 regarded his agreement with Combe's agent as a bar to any active encouragement of the Corporation. The fight was renewed early next year when Wilham Combe was chosen to serve as high sheriff of the county and acquired fresh leverage in his oppression o/the'^ of the townsfolk. He questioned the Lord townsmen, Chief Justice's authority to run counter to his scheme. Sir Edward Coke reiterated his warning, and the country gentry at length ranged themselves on the popular side. A few months later Shakespeare passed away. Soon afterwards Combe was compelled to acknow- ledge defeat. Within two years of Shakespeare's death the Privy Council, on a joint report of the Master of the Rolls and Sir Edward Coke, condemned A\dthout quahfication Combe's course of action (February 14, 1618). There- upon the disturber of the local peace sued for pardon. He received absolution on the easy terms of paying a fine of 4:1. and of restoring the disputed lands to the precise condition in which they were left at his uncle's death. ^ to another entry in Greene's diary to have gently intervened amid the controversy in the interest of one of the young tyrant's debtors. Thomas Barber (or Barbor), who was described as a ' gentleman ' of Shottery and was thrice bailiff of Stratford in 1578, 1586, and 1594, had become surety for a loan, which young Combe or his uncle John had made Mrs. Quiney, perhaps the widow of Richard. Mrs. Quiney failed to meet the liability, and application was made to Barber for repayment in the spring of 1615. Barber appealed to Thomas Combe, William's brother, for some grace. But on April 7, 1615 ' W[illiam] Combe willed his brother to shew ]\Ir. Barber noe favour and threatned him that he should be served upp to London within a fortnight (and so ytt fell out).' Barber's wife Joan was buried within the next few months (August 10, 1615) and he followed her to the grave five days later. On September 5, Greene's diary attests that Shakespeare sent ' for the executors of Mr. Barber to agree as ys said with them for Mr. Barber's interest.' Shakespeare would seem to have been benevolently desirous of relieving Barber's estate from the pressure which Combe was placing upon it. (Cf. Stopes, Shakespeare's Environment, 1913, pp. 87 8eq.) ^ William Combe long survived his defeat, and for nearly half a century afterwards cultivated more peaceful relations with his neigh- bours. He is commonly identified with the William Combe who was elected to the Long Parliament (November 2, 1640) but whose election was at once declared void. He died at Stratford on January 30, 1666-7; 2 I 482 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE At the beginning of 1616, although Shakespeare pro- nounced himself to be, in conventional phrase, ' in perfect health and memory,' his strength was clearly Francis failing, and he set about making his wiU. Collins and rr^, ^ , Shake- Thomas Greene, who had recently acted as sp_eares j^-^ jggg^j adviser, was on the point of resigning his office of town clerk and of abandoning his relations with Stratford. Shakespeare now sought the pro- fessional services of Francis Collins, a solicitor, who had left the tOAvn some twelve years before, and was practising at Warwick. CoUins, whose friends or cUents at Stratford were numerous, Avas much in the confidence of the Combe family. He was soHcitor to John Combe's brother Thomas, the father of the heroes of the enclosure controversy, whose will he had witnessed at the College on December 22, 1608. Thomas Combe's brother, the wealthy John Combe, stood godfather to Collins's son John, and gave in his will sub- stantial proofs of his regard for CoUins and his family.^ In employing Collins to make his will Shakespeare was loyal to distinguished local precedent. Shakespeare's will was wTitten by Collins ^ and was ready for signature on January 25, but it was for the time laid aside. Next month the poet suffered domestic affak^s^ ^^ anxiety OA^dng to the threatened excommunica- Feb -April j^jgn of his younger daughter Judith and of his son-in-law Thomas Quiney on the ground of an irregularity in the celebration of their recent marriage in Stratford Church on February 10, 1615-6. John Ward, who was vicar of Stratford in Charles II's time and compiled a diaiy of local gossip, is responsible for at the age of eighty, and was buried in the parish church, where a monu- ment commemorates him with his wife, a son, and nine daughters. ^ John Combe bequeathed sums of 10^. to both Francis Collins and his godson John Collins as well as 6Z. 13s. 4rf. to Francis Collins's wife Susanna. Collins had two sons named John who were baptised in Stratford Church, one on June 2, 1601, the other on November 22, 1604. (See Baptismal Register.) The elder son John probably died in infancy. ^ Collins's penmanship is established by a comparison of the will with admitted specimens of his handwriting in the Stratford archives. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 483 the statement that Shakespeare later in this same spring entertained at New Place his two hterary friends Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Jonson's old intimacy with Shakespeare continued to the last. The hospitahty which Drayton constantly enjoyed at Clifford Chambers made him a famiUar figure in Stratford. According to the further testimony of the vicar Ward, Shakespeare and his two guests Jonson and Drayton, when they greeted him at Stratford for the last time, ' had a merry meeting,' ' but ' (the diarist proceeds) ' Shakespeare itt seems drank too hard, for he died of a feavour there contracted.' Shake- speare may well have cherished Falstaff 's faith in the virtues of sherris sack and have scorned ' thin potations,' but there is no ground for imputing to him an excessive indulgence in ' hot and rebellious hquors.' An eighteenth-century legend credited him with engaging in his prime in a prolonged and violent drinking bout at Bidford, a village in the near neighbourhood of Stratford, but no hint of the story was put on record before 1762, and it lacks credibihty.^ ^ In the British Magazine, June 1762, a visitor to Stratford described how, on an excursion to the neighbouring village of Bidford, the host of the local inn, the White Lion, showed him a crabtree, ' called Shake- speare's canopy,' and repeated a tradition that the poet had slept one night under that tree after engaging in a strenuous drinking mrtch with the topers of Bidford. A Stratford antiquary, John Jordan, who invented a variety of Shakespearean mji:hs, penned about 1770 an elaborate narrative of this legendary exploit, and credited Shakespeare on his recovery from his drunken stupor at Bidford with extemporising R crude rhyming catalogue of the neighbouring villages, in all of which he claimed to have proved his prowess as a toper. The doggerel, which long enjoyed a local vogue, ran : Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough and Hunsry Grafton, With Dadging Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom, and Dninien Bidford. The Bidford crabtree round which the story crystallised was sketched by Samuel Ireland in 1794 (see his Warwickshire Avon, 1795, p. 232), and by Charles Frederick Green in 1823 (see his Shakespeare's Crab- tree, 1857, p. 9). The tree was taken down in a decayed state in 1824. The shadowy legend was set out at length in W. H. Ireland's Confessions, 1805, p. 34, and in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. pp. 500-2. It is also the theme of the quarto volume, Shakespeare's Crabtree and its Legend (with nine lithographic prints), by Charles Frederick Green, 1857. 2 I 2 484 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE The cause of Shakespeare's death is undetermined. Chapel Lane, which ran beside his house, was known as a noisome resort of straying pigs ; and the insanitary- atmosphere is likely to have prejudiced the faihng health of a neighbouring resident. During the month of March Shakespeare's illness seemed to take a fatal The signing turn. The will which had been drafted in of Shake- . • -i ^ speare's the previous January was now revised, and on ril'i&T^ March 25 ^ the document was finaUy signed by the dramatist in the presence of five neighbours. Three of the witnesses, who watched the poet write his name at the foot of each of the three pages of his will, were local friends near the testator's omu age, filling respon- sible positions in the to^\^l. At the head of the hst stands the name of Francis Collins, the sohcitor of Warwick, who a year later accepted an invitation to resettle The five g^^ Stratford as Thomas Greene's successor in witnesses. the office of tovna. clerk, although death limited his tenure of the dignity to six months.^ CoUins's signa- ture was followed by that of JuHus Shaw, who after holding most of the subordinate municipal offices was now serving as bailiS or chief magistrate. He was long the occupant of a substantial house in Chapel Street, two doors off the poet's residence.^ A third signatory of Shakespeare's wUl, Hamnet Sadler, whose Christian name was often written ^ In the extant will the date of execution is given as ' vicesimo quinto die Martii ' ; but ' Martii ' is an interlineation and is written above the word ' Januarii ' which is crossed through. * CoUins's will dated September 20, 1617, was proved by Francis his son and executor on November 10 following (P.C.C. Weldon, 101). He would appear to have died and been buried at Warwick. A successor as town-clerk of Stratford was appointed on Oct. 18, 1617 (Council Book B). ^ Julius Shaw, who was baptised at Stratford in September 1571, was acquainted with Shakespeare from boyhood. Shakespeare's father John attested the inventory of the property of Juhus Shaw's father Ralph at his death in 1591, when he was described as a ' wooldriver.' Julius Shaw's house in Chapel Street was the property of the Corporation, and he was in occupation of it in 1599, when the Corporation carefully described it in its survey of its tenements in the town (Cal. Stratford Records, p. 169). Julius Shaw was churchwarden of Stratford in 1603-4, chamberlain in 1609-10, and being successively a burgess and an alderman was bailiff for a second time in 1628-9. A THE CLOSE OF LIFE 485 Hamlet, was brother of John Sadler who served twice as baihfif — in 1599 and 1612 — and he himself was often in London on business of the Corporation. His intimacy with Shakespeare was already close in 1585, when he stood god- father to the poet's son Hamnet.^ The fourth witness of Shakespeare's will, Robert Whatcote, apparently a farmer, was a chief witness to the character of the dramatist's daughter when she brought the action for defamation in 1614. The fifth and last witness, John Robinson, occa- sionally figured as a htigant in the local court of record. ^ Of the five signatories Collins and Sadler received legacies under the wiU. On April 17 Shakespeare's only brother-in-law, William Hart, of Henley Street, who, according to the register, was in trade as a hatter, was buried in the parish speare's churchyard. Six days later, on Tuesday, 23,^1616;^'^ April 23, the poet himself died at New Place. and burial. He had just Completed his fifty-second year. On Thursday, April 25, he was buried inside Stratford Church in front of the altar, not far from the northern wall of the chancel. As part owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, the dramatist had a right of interment in the chancel, and his local repute man of wealth, he was through his later years entitled ' gentleman ' in local records. He was buried in Stratford churchyard on June 24, 1629 ; his will is in the probate registry at Worcester {Worcester Wilh, Brit. Rec. Soc. ii. 135). His widow Anne Boyes, whom he married on August 5, 1593, was buried at Stratford on October 26, 1630. ^ Hamnet Sadler died on October 26, 162-4. He would seem to have had a family of seven sons and five daughters, but only five of these survived childhood. His sixth son, born on February 5, 1597-8, was named William, probably after the dramatist. * See p. 4o4 supra. Whatcote claimed damages in 2 Jac. I for the loss of six sheep which had been worried by the dogs of one Robert Suche (Cal. Stratford Records, p. 325). John Robinson brought actions for assault against two different defendants in 1608 and 1614 respectively (ibid. p. 211 and 231). Whether Whatcote or Robinson's home lay within the boundaries of Stratford is uncertain. No person named Whatcote figures in the Stratford parish registers, nor is there any entry which can be positively identified with the witness John Robinson. He should be in all probability distinguished from the John Robinson who was lessee of Shakespeare's house in Blackfriars. See p. 46u supra. 486 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE justified the supreme distinction of a grave before the altar. ^ But a special peril attached to a grave in so conspicuous a situation. Outside in the churchyard stood the charnel- house or ' bone-house ' impinging on the northern wall of the chancel, and there, according to a universal custom, bones which were dug from neighbouring graves lay in confused heaps. The scandal of such early and The raina- • i i i.- • • toryinscrip- irregular exhumation was a crying grievance tion on the throughout England in the seventeenth century. gravestone. i i Hamlet bitterly voiced the prevailing dread. When he saw the gravedigger callously fling up the bones of his old playmate Yorick in order to make room for Ophelia's coffin, the young Prince of Denmark exclaimed ' Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggats with 'em ? Mine ache to think on 't.' Yorick's body had ' lain in the grave ' twenty-three years. ^ It was to guard against profanation of the kind that Shakespeare gave orders for the inscription on his grave of the fines : Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare To dig the dust enclosed heare; Bleste be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones. ^ 1 A substantial fee seems to have attached to the privilege of burial in the chancel, and in the year before Shakespeare's death, on December 4, 1615, the town council deprived John Rogers the vicar, whose 'faults and failings ' excited much local complaint, of his traditional right to the money. At the date of Shakespeare's burial, the fee was made payable to the borough chamberlains, and was to be applied to the repair of the chancel and church {Cal. Stratford Records, p. 107). * Similarly Sir Thomas Browne, in his Hydriotaphia, 1658, urged the advantage of cremation over a mode of burial which admitted the ' tragicall abomination, of being knav'd out of our graves and of having our skulls made drinking bowls and our bones turned into pipes.' According to Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary', the Royalist writer Sir John Berkenhead, in December 1679, gave directions in his will for his burial in the yard ' weer the Church of St. Martyn's in the Field ' instead of inside the church as was usual with persons of his status. ' His reason was because he sayd they removed the bodies out of the church ' (Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 1898, i. 105). * Several early transcripts of these lines, which were fu'st printed in Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, are extant. The Warwick- ; «-- - _ mmamm^^m l^- ■■' -'^ fifl^l mi m 1 CyM^"i Kll mTi^k ■^^ ^i^^HH ^R^ BB i^^g^ pH 3' Ij >l o I THE CLOSE OF LIFE 487 According to one William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694,^ Shakespeare penned the verses in order to suit ' the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most part a very ignorant set of people.' Had this curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton would not have hesitated in course of time to remove Shakespeare's dust to ' the bone-house.' As it was, the grave was made seven- teen feet deep, and was never opened, even to receive his wife and daughters, although (according to the diary of one Dowdall, another seventeenth-century visitor to Strat- ford) they expressed a desire to be buried in it. In due time his wife was buried in a separate adjoining grave on the north side of his own, while three graves on the south side afterwards received the remains of the poet's elder daughter, of her husband, and of the first husband of their only child, the dramatist's granddaughter. Thus a row of five graves in the chancel before the altar ultimately bore witness to the local status of the poet and his family. Shakespeare's will, the first draft of which Avas drawn up before January 25, 1615-6, received many interlineations and erasures before it was signed in the ensuing March. The religious exordium is in conven- tional phraseology, and gives no clue to Shakespeare's per- -pjjg sonal religious opinions. What those opinions religious precisely were, we have neither the means nor the warrant for discussing. The plays furnish many ironical references to the Puritans and their doc- trines, but we may dismiss as idle gossip the irresponsible report that ' he dyed a papist,' which the Rev. Richard Davies, rector of Sapperton, first put on record late in the shire antiquary Dugdale visited Stratford-on-Avon on July 4, 1634, and his transcript of the lines which he made on that day is still preserved among his manuscript collections at Mcrevale. In 1673 a tourist named Robert Dobyns visited the church and copied this inscription as well as that on John Combe's tomb (see p. 473 supra). The late Bertram Dobell, the owner of Dobyns' manuscript, described it in the Athenaeum, January 19, 1901. ^ Hall's letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, from the original, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 488 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE seventeenth century.^ That he was to the last a conforming member of the Church of England admits of no question. The name of Shakespeare's wife was omitted from the original draft of the Avill, but by an interlineation in the final draft she received his ' second best bed Bequest to ^^ith the furniture.' No other bequest was made nis wife. _ ^ her. It was a common practice of the period to specify a bedstead or other defined article of house- hold furniture as a part of a wife's inheritance. Nor was it unusual to bestow the best bed on another member of the family than the wife, leaving her only ' the second best,' 2 but no will except Shakespeare's is forthcoming in which a bed forms the wife's sole bequest. There is nothing to show that the poet had set aside any property under a previous settlement or jointure with a view to making independent provision for his widow. Her right to a widow's dower — i.e. to a third share for hfe in freehold estate — was not subject to testamentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps to prevent her from benefiting, at any rate to the full extent, by that legal arrangement. He had barred her dower in the case of his latest purchase of freehold estate, viz. the house at Blackfriars.^ Such ^ Richard Davies, who died in 1708, inserted this and other remarks in some brief adversaria respecting Shakespeare, which figured in the manuscript collections of WiUiam Fulman, the antiquary, which are in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. For the main argument in favour of Davies's assertion see Father H. S. Bowden's The Religion of Shakespeare, chiefly from the writings of Richard Simpson, London, 1899. A biography of Shakespeare curiously figures in the imposing Catholic work of reference Die Convertiten seit der Reformation nach ihrem Leben und ihren Schriften dargestellt von Dr. Andreas Raess, Bischof von Strassburg (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1866-80, 13 vols and index vol.), vol. jdii. 1880, pp. 372-439. * Thomas Combe of Stratford (father of Thomas and William of the enclosure controversy), while making adequate provision for liis wife in his will (dated December 22, 1608), specifically withheld from her his ' best bedstead . . . with the best bed and best furniture thereunto belonging ' ; this was bequeathed to his elder son William to the exclusion of his widow. (See Thomas Combe's will, P.C'.C. Dorset 13.) 3 The late Charles Elton, Q.C., was kind enough to give me a legal opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897 : ' I have looked to the authorities with my friend jMr. Herbert Mackay, and there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.' Mr. Mackay's THE CLOSE OF LIFE 489 procedure is pretty conclusive proof that he had the inten- tion of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death. But, however plausible the theory that his relations with her were from first to last wanting in sym- pathy, it is improbable that either the slender mention of her in the will or the barring of her dower was designed by Shakespeare to make public his indiflference or disUke. Local tradition subsequently credited her with a ^vish to be buried in his grave ; and her epitaph proves that she inspired her daughters with genuine affection. Probably her ignorance of affairs and the infirmities of age (she was past sixty) combined to unfit her in the poet's eyes for the con- trol of property, and, as an act of ordinary prudence, he com- mitted her to the care of his elder daughter, who inherited, according to such information as is accessible, some of his own shrewdness, and had a capable adviser in her husband. This elder daughter, Susanna Hall, was, under the terms of the will, to become mistress of New Place, and prac- tically of all the poet's estate. She received (with remainder to her issue in strict entail) New Place, the two messuages or tenements in Henley Street (subject to the Hfe interest of her aunt INIrs. Hart), the cottage and land in Chapel Lane which formed part of the manor of Rowington, and indeed all the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford, together with the drama- tist's interest in the tithes and the house in Blackfriars, London. Moreover, IVIrs. Hall and her husband were appointed executors and residuary legatees, with full rights opinion is couched in the following terms : ' The conveyance of the Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 1613 shows that the estate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare's wife would be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bar- gainees.' That was a remote contingency which did not arise, and Shakespeare always retained the power of making ' another settlement when the trustees were shrinking.' Thus the bar was for practical pur- poses perpetual, and disposes of Jlr. Halliwell-Phillipps's assertion that Shakespeare's wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate. Cf. Davidson on Conveyancing ; Littleton, sect. 45 ; Coke upon Littleton, ed. Hargrave, p. 379 6, Jiote 1. See also p. 459 supra and p. 493 n. 1 infra. 490 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE over nearly all^^the j)oet's household furniture and personal belongings. To their only child, the testator's grand- daughter or ' niece,' Elizabeth Hall, was bequeathed his plate, with the exception of his broad silver and gilt bowl, which was reserved for his younger daughter, Judith. To his younger daughter he also left 1501. in money, of which 1001., her marriage portion, was to be paid within a year, and another 160Z. to be paid to her if alive three years after the date of the will. Ten per cent, interest was to be allowed until the money was paid. Of the aggregate amount the sum of 501. was specified to be the consideration due to Judith for her surrender of her interest in the cot- tage and land in Chapel Lane which was held of the manor of Rowington. To the poet's sister, Joan Hart, whose husband, William Hart, predeceased the testator by only six days, he left, besides a contingent reversionary interest in Judith's pecuniary legacy, his wearing apparel, 201. in money, and a life interest in the Henley Street property, with 51. for each of her three sons, William, Thomas, and Michael. Shakespeare extended his testamentary benefactions beyond his domestic circle, and thereby proved the wide range of his social ties. Only one bequest to fiends ^^^^ applied to charitable uses. The sum of 101. was left to the poor of Stratford. Eight fellow-townsmen received marks of the dramatist's regard. To Mr. Thomas Combe, yoimger son of Thomas Combe of the College, and younger nephew of his friend John Combe, Shakespeare left his sword — possibly by way of ironical allusion to the local strife in which the legatee had borne a part.^ No mention was made of Thomas's elder brother WiUiam, who was still actively urgmg his claim 1 All effort to trace Shakespeare's sword has failed. Its legatee, Mr. Thomas Combe, who died at Stratford in July Is '57, aged 68, directed his executors, by his will dated June 20, 1656, to convert all his personal property into money, and to lay it out in the purchase of lands, to be settled on WiUiam Combe, the eldest son of a cousin, John Combe, of Alvechurch, in the county of Worcester, Gent., and his heirs male with remainder to his two brothers successively (Varioru)tt, Shakespeare, ii. 004 ?i.). THE CLOSE OF LIFE 491 to enclose the common land of the town. The large sum of 131. 6s. 8d. was allotted to Francis Collins, who was described in the will as ' of the borough of Warwick, gent.' ; within a year he was to be called to Stratford as town clerk. A gift of xx5. in gold was bestowed on the poet's godson, WilKam Walker, now in his ninth year. Four adult Stratford friends, Hanmet Sadler, Wilham Reynoldes, gent., Anthony Nash, gent., and IVIr. John Nash, were each given 26s. 8d. wherewith to buy memorial rings. All were men of local influence, although William Reynoldes and the Nash brothers were of rather better status than the dramatist's friend from boyhood, Hamnet Sadler, a witness to the will. William Reynoldes was a local landowner in his thirty-third year. His father, ' Mr. Thomas Reynoldes, gent.,' of Old Stratford, who had died on September 8, 1613, enjoyed heraldic honours; and John Combe, who described Reynoldes's mother as his ' cousin,' had made generous bequests of land or money to aU members of the family and even to the servants. William Reynoldes inherited from John Combe two large plots of land on the Evesham Road to the west of the toAAH, which were long familiarly known as ' Salmon Jowl ' and 'Salmon Tail' respectively. ^ Anthony Nash was the owner of much land at Welcombe, and had a share in the tithes.- His brother John was less affluent, but made at his death substantial provision for his family. A younger generation of the poet's family continued his own intimacy with the Nashes. Thomas, a younger son of Anthony Nash, who was baptised on June 20, 1593, became in 1626 the first husband of Shakespeare's granddaughter, EHzabeth HaU. ^ See Cal. Stratford Records. William Reynoldes married Frances De Bois of London, described as a Frenchwoman (see Visitation of Warwickshire, 1019, Harl. Soc, p. 243). He was buried in Stratford Church on March 6, 163i'-3. * Anthony IS'ash was buried in Stratford on November 18, 1622. A younger son was christened John on October 15, 1598, after his uncle John, Shakespeare's legatee. The latter's wUl dated November 5, 1623, was proved by his sole executor and son-in-law William Home just a fortnight later {P.C.C. Swann 122). 492 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Another legatee, Thomas Russell, alone of all the persons mentioned in the will, bore the dignified designa- ^ tion of ' Esquire.' He received the sum of Russell, 51., and was also nominated one of the two Esquire. overseers, Francis CoUins being the other. There is no proof in the local records that RusseU was a resident in Stratford,^ and he was in all probabiUty a London friend. Shakespeare had opportunities of meeting in London one Thomas Russell, who in the dramatist's later life enjoyed a high reputation there as a metallurgist, obtaining patents for new methods of extracting metals from the ore. For almost a decade before Shakespeare's death Russell would seem to have been in personal relations with the poet Michael Drayton. Both men enjoyed the patronage of Sir David Murray of Gorthy, who was a poetaster as weU as controller of the household of Henry, Prince of Wales ; in his capacity of minor poet, Murray received a handsome tribute in verse from Drayton. As early as 1608 Francis Bacon was seeking Thomas Russell's acquaintance on the twofold ground of his scientific in- genuity and his social influence. ^ Shakespeare probably owed to Drayton an acquaintanceship with RusseU, which Bacon aspired to share. More interesting is it to note that three ' fellows ' or colleagues of his theatrical career in London, were com- _,, , memorated by Shakespeare in his wiU in precisely to the the same fashion as his four chief friends at Strat- ford,— Sadler, Reynoldes, and the two Nashes. The actors John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry CondeU also received 26s. 8d. apiece A^herewith to buy memorial rings. All were veterans in the theatrical service, ^ The dramatist's father John Shakespeare occasionally co-operated in local affairs with one Henry Russell, who held for a time the humble office of Serjeant of the mace in the local court of record. Henry Russell married Elizabeth Perry in 1559 and may have been father of Thomas Russell, although the latter's name is absent from the baptismal register, and his status makes the suggestion improbable. ^ Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1610-1624 ; Spedding's Life and Letters of Bacon, iv. 23, 63. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 493 and acknowledged leaders of the theatrical profession, to whose personal association with the dramatist his biography furnishes testimony at every step. When their company, of which Shakespeare had been a member, received a new patent on March 27, 1619, the Hst of patentees was headed by the three actors whom the poet honoured in his will. While 'Francis Collins, gent.,' and 'Thomas Russell, esquire,' were overseers of the will, Shakespeare's son- in-law and his daughter, John and Susanna and Hall, were the executors. The will was proved executors. ^^ London by HaU and his wife on June 22, 1616. Most of the landed property was retained by the beneficiaries during their lifetime in accordance with Shakespeare's testamentary provision.^ HaU and his wife alienated only one portion of the poet's estate ; they parted to the Corporation wdth Shakespeare's interest in the tithes in August 1624 for 4001., reserving ' two closes ' which they had lately leased ' to Mr. William Combe, esquier.' Thus Shakespeare, according to the terms of his will, died in command of an aggregate sum of 350/. in money in addition to personal belongings of realisable speare's value, and an extensive real estate the greater theatrical -psiTt of which he had purchased out of his SHoXcS. savings at a cost of 1200(. But it was rare for wills of the period to enumerate in full detail the whole of a testator's possessions. A complete inventory was reserved for the ' inquisitio post mortem,' which in Shake- speare's case, despite a search at Somerset House, has ^ On February 10, 1617-8, John Jackson, John Hemynge of London, gentlemen, and William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, whom Shakespeare had made nominal co-owners or trustees of the Blackfriars estate, made over their formal interest to John Greene of Clement's Inn, gent. (Thomas Greene's brother), and Matthew Morris, of Stratford, gent., with a view to facilitating the disposition of the property ' accord- ing to the true intent and meaning ' of Shakespeare's last will and testa- ment. The house passed to the Halls, subject to the lawful interest of the present lessee, John Robinson (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 36-41). 494 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE not come to light. The absence from the dramatist's will of any specific allusion to books is no proof that he left none ; they were doubtless included by his lawyer in the comprehensive entry of ' goodes ' and ' chattells ' which fell, with the rest of his residuary estate, to his elder daughter and to John Hall, her well-educated husband. When Hall died at New Place in 1635, a ' study of books ' was among the contents of his house.^ There is every reason to believe, too, that Shakespeare retained till the end of his life his theatrical shares — a fourteenth share in the Globe and a seventh share in the Blackfriars — which his will again fails to mention. Such an omission is paralleled in the testaments of several of his acting col- leagues and friends. Neither Augustine Phillips [d. 1605), Richard Burbage [d. 1619), nor Henry Condell {d. 1627) made any testamentary reference to their theatrical shares, although substantial holdings passed in each case to their heirs. John Heminges,^ one of the thi'ee actors who are commemorated by bequests in Shakespeare's will, was the business manager of the dramatist's company. Shortly after Shakespeare's death Heminges largely in- creased his proprietary rights in both the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres. There is little question that he acquired of the residuary legatees (Susanna and John Hall) Shakespeare's shares in both houses. At his death in 1630, Heminges owned as many as four shares in each of the two theatres. It is reasonable to regard his large theatrical estate as incorporating Shakespeare's theatrical property.^ ^ See p. 508 infra. * The practice varied. In the wills of Thomas Pope [d. 1603), John Heminges (d. 1630), and John Underwood {d. 1624) specific bequest is made of their theatrical shares. ^ See p. 305 n. 1 supra. The capitalised value of theatrical shares rarely rose much above the annual income. The leases of the land on which the theatre stood were usually short, and the prices of shares were bound to fall as the leases neared extinction. In 1633, when the leases of the sites of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres had only a few years to run, three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars were sold for no more than an aggregate sum of 506Z. John Hall and THE CLOSE OF LIFE 495 Exhaustive details of the estates of Jacobean actors are rarely available. The provisions of their wills offer as a rule vaguer information than in Shake- of contem-^ speare's case. But the co-ordinated evidence porary shows that, while Shakespeare died a richer actors. » , . .... man than most members of his profession, his wealth was often equalled and in a few instances largely exceeded. The actor Thomas Pope, who died in 1603, made pecuniary bequests to an amount exceeding 340Z, and disposed besides of theatrical shares and much real estate. Henry Condell, who died in 1627, left annuities of 311. and pecuniary legacies of some 70Z. as well as exten- sive house property in London and his theatrical shares. Burbage, whose will was nuncupative, was popularly reckoned to be worth at his death (in March 1618-9) 300/. in land, apart from personal and theatrical property. A far superior standard of affluence was furnished by the estate of the actor Edward Alleyn, Burbage's chief rival, who died on November 25, 1626. Li his lifetime he purchased an estate at Dulwich for some 10,000/. in money of that period, and he built there the College ' of God's Gift ' which he richly endowed with land else- where. At the same time Alleyn disposed by his will of a sum of money approaching 2000/. and made provision out of an immense real estate for the building and endow- ment of thirty almshouses. Alleyn speculated in real property with great success ; but his professional earnings were always considerable. Shakespeare's wealth was modest when it is compared with Alleyn's. Yet Alleyn's financial experience proves the wide possibilities of fortune which were open to a contemporary actor who possessed mercantile aptitude.^ A humble poetic admirer, Leonard Digges, in com- his wife may well have sold to Heminges Shakespeare's theatrical interest for some 300Z. ^ For AUeyn's will see Collier's Alleyn Papers, pp. xxi-xxvi, and for the wills of many other contemporary actors see Collier's Lives of the Actors. 496 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE mendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote that Shakespeare's works would be alive when Time dissolves thy Stratford monument. It is clear that before the year 1623, possibly some three years earUer, the monument in Shakespeare's honour, „, which is still affixed to the north wall of the The Stratford chancel overlooking his grave, was placed in umen . g^j-^tford Church. The memorial was de- signed and executed in Southwark, within a stone's throw of the Globe theatre, and it thus constitutes a material link between the dramatist's professional life on the Bankside and his private career at Stratford. ' Gheeraert Janssen,' a native of Amsterdam, settled in the parish of St. Thomas, Southwark, early in 1567 and under the Anglicised name of ' Garret Johnson ' made a high reputation as a tomb-maker, forming a clientele extending far beyond his district of residence. In 1591 he received the handsome sum of 200Z. for designing and erecting the elaborate tombs of the brothers Edward Manners, third Earl of Rutland, and John Manners, fourth Earl, which were set up in the church at Bottesford, Leices- tershire, the family burying-place.^ The sculptor died in St. Saviour's parish, Southwark, in August 1611, dividing his estate between his widow Mary and two of his sons. Garret and Nicholas. They had chiefly helped him in his tombmaking business, and they carried it on after his death with much of his success. Shakespeare's tomb came from the Southwark stone-yard, while it was controlled by the younger Garret Johnson and his brother Nicholas. ^ ^ Garret Johnson's work at Bottesford is fully described by Lady Victoria Manners in ' The Rutland I\Ionuments in Bottesford Church,' Art Journal, 1903, pp. 28S-9. See also Rutland Papers (Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep.), iv. 397-9, where elaborate details are given of the conveyance of the tombs from London ; Eller's Hist, of Belvoir Castle, 1841, pp. 369 seq. * The will of Garret Johnson, ' tombmaker,' of St. Saviour's parish, dated July 24, 1611, and proved July 3, 1612, is at Somerset House {P.C.C. Fenner 66). His burial is entered in St. Saviour's parish register in August 1611. The return of aliens dated in 1593 credits him with five sons of ages ranging between 22 and 4, and with a daughter aged 14 ; but only two sons are mentioned in his wUl, which was apparently THE CLOSE OF LIFE 497 Nicholas was by far the better artist of the two. He con- tinued his father's association with the Rutland family, and designed and executed in 1618-9 the splendid tomb which commemorated Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rut- land, and his Countess (Sir Philip Sidney's daughter) at Bottesford.^ The order was given by the sixth Earl of Rutland (brother of the fifth Earl), with whom Shake- speare was in personal relations in 1613. The dramatist bad shared the Earl's favour with the sculptor. Shake- speare's monument was designed on far simpler lines than this impressive Bottesford tomb, and the main features suggest by their crudity the hand of Nicholas's brother Garret, though some of the subsidiary ornament is identical with that bf Nicholas's work at Bottesford Church and attests his partial aid. One or other of the Johnsons had lately, too, provided for St. Saviour's Church (now Southwark Cathedral) a tomb of a design very similar to that of Shakespeare's, in honour of one John Bingham, a prominent Southwark parishioner, and saddler to Queen Ehzabeth and James I.^ The poet's monument in Stratford Church was in tablet form and was coloured, in accordance with contem- made in haste on the point of death. (Cf. Kirk's ' Return of Aliens,' Huguenot Soc. Proceedings, iii. 445.) Dugdale in his diary noted under the year 1653 that Shakespeare's and Combe's monuments in Stratford Church were both the work of ' one Gerard Johnson ' {Diary, ed. Hamper, 1827, p. 299), but the editor of the diary knew nothing of the younger Garret, and by identifying the sculptor of Shakespeare's tomb with the elder Garret propounded a puzzle which is here solved for the first time. 1 Lady Victoria Manners's * Rutland Monuments ' in Art Journal, 1903, pp. 335 seq., and Rutland Papers, iv. pp. 517 and 519. * Probably Garret and Nicholas Johnson designed the effigies in Southwark Cathedral of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes {d. 1626), and of John Treherne (d. 1618), gentleman porter to James I, together with that of his wife Margaret {d. 1645). See W. Thompson's Southwark Cathedral, 1910, pp. 78, 121. To the same Johnson family doubtless belonged Bernard Janssen or Johnson, who was brought to England in 1613 from Amsterdam by the distinguished English monumental sculptor Nicholas Stone, and settling in Southwark helped Stone in much important work. Together they executed in 1615 Thomas Sutton's tomb at the Charter- house and later Sir Nicholas Bacon's tomb in Redgrave Church, SuSolk. See A. E. Bullock's Some Sculptural Works uf Nicholas Stone, 1908. 2 K 498 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE porary practice. It presents a central arch flanked by- two Corinthian columns which support a cornice and entablature.^ Within the arch was set a half- length figure of the poet in relief. The dress consists of a scarlet doublet, slashed and loosely buttoned, with white cuffs and a turned-down or faUing white collar. A black gown hangs loosely about the doublet from the shoulders. The eyes are of a light hazel and the hair and beard auburn. The hands rest upon a cushion, the right hand holding a pen as in the act of writing and the left hand resting on a scroll. Over the centre of the entablature is a block of stone, on the surface of which the poet's arms and crest are engraved, and on a ledge above rests a full-sized skull. These features closely resemble the Hke details in Nicholas Johnson's tomb of the fifth earl of Rutland in Bottesford Church. The stone block is flanked by two small seated nude figures ; the right holds a spade in the right hand, while the other figure places the hke hand on a skull lying at its side and from the left hand droops a torch reversed with the flame extinguished. Similar standing figures with identical emblematic objects surmount the outer columns of the Rutland monument, and Nicholas Johnson the designer of that tomb explained in his ' plot ' (or descriptive plan) that the one figure was a ' portraiture of Labor,' and ' the other of Rest.' ^ Beneath the arch which ^ The pillars were of marble, the ornaments were of alabaster, and the rest of the fabric was of stone which has been variously described as a ' soft bliiish grey stone,' a ' loose freestone,' a ' soft whitish grey lime- stone ' (Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare's Environ7nent, pp. 117-8). * Nicholas Johnson's ' plot ' of his Rutland monument which is dated 28 May (apparently 1(317) is extant among the family archives at Belvoir and is printed in f uU by Lady Victoria Manners in Art Journal, 1903, pp. 335-6. Like figures surmount the outer columns of the Sutton monument at the Charterhouse, and they adorn, as on Shake- speare's tomb, the cornices of Sir Wilham Pope's monument in Wroxton Church ( 1633) and of Robert Kelway's tomb in Exton Church. These three monuments were designed by the English sculptor Nicholas Stone, whose coadjutor Bernard Janssen or Johnson of Southwark was possibly related to Nicholas and Garret Johnson, and he may have exchanged suggestions with his kinsmen. The earliest sketch of the Shakespeare monument is among Dugdale's MSS. at Merevale, and is THE CLOSE OF LIFE 499 holds the dramatist's effigy is a panel which bears this inscription : Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, Terra tegit, populus mseret, Olympus habet. Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast ? Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast Within this monument ; Shakspeare with whome Quick nature dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe Far more then cost ; sith all yt he hath writt Leaves living art but page to serve his witt. Obiit ano. doi 1616 ^tatis 53 Die 23 Ap. The authorship of the epitaph is undetermined. It was doubtless by a London friend who belonged to the same circle as William Basse or Leonard Kxipt^Sii ■^^SS^^' whose elegies are on record elsewhere. The Avriter was no superior to them in poetic capacity. The opening Latin distich with its comparison of the dramatist to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil, echoes a cultured convention of the day, while the succeeding English stanza embodies a conceit touching art's supre- macy over nature which is characteristic of the spirit of the Renaissance.^ Whatever their defects of style, the lines presented Shakespeare to his fellow-townsmen as the greatest man of letters of his time. According to the elegist, literature by all other living pens was, at the date of the dramatist's death, only fit to serve ' all that he hath writ ' as ' page ' or menial. In Stratford Church, Shakespeare was acclaimed the master-poet, and all other writers were declared to be his servants. dated 1634. Dugdale's drawing is engraved in his Antiquities of Warwick- shire, 1656. It differs in many details, owing to inaccurate draughts- manship, from the present condition of the monument. For discussion of the variations and for the history of the renovations which the monument is known to have xmdergone in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries, see pp. 525-7 infra. ^ The epitaph on the tomb of the painter Raphael in the Pantheon at Rome, by the cultivated Cardinal Pietro Bembo, adumbrates the words ' with whom quick nature dide ' in Shakespeare's epitaph : Hie ille est Raphael, metuit qui sospite vinci Renim magna parens, et moriente mori (i.e. Here lies the famous Raphael, in whose lifetime great mother Nature feared to be outdone, and at whose death feared to die). 2 K 2 500 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Some misgivings arose in literary circles soon after Shakespeare's death, as to whether he had received appropriate sepulture. Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest English poet of pre-Elizabethan times, had been accorded a grave in Westminster Abbey in October 1400. It was association with the royal household rather than poetic eminence which accounted for his interment in the national church. But in 1551 the services to poetry of the author of ' The Canterbury Tales ' were directly acknowledged by the erection of a monument near his grave in the south transept of the Abbey. When the sixteenth century drew to a close, Chaucer's growing fame as the father of EngHsh poetry suggested the propriety of burying within the shadow of his tomb the eminent poets of bis race. On January 16, 1598-9, Edmund Spenser, who died in King Street, Westminster, and had apostro- phised ' Dan Chaucer ' as ' well of English undefiled,' was buried near Chaucer's tomb, and the occasion was made a demonstration in honour of his poetic faculty, spe^are" and Spenser's ' hearse was attended by poets, and Westminster mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wTote them were thrown into his tomb.'^ Some seven weeks before Shakespeare died, there passed away (on March 6, 1615-6) the dramatist Francis Beaumont, the partner of John Fletcher. Beaumont was the second Eizabethan poet to be honoured with burial at Chaucer's side. The news of Shakespeare's death reached London after the dramatist had been laid to rest amid his own people at Stratford. But men of letters raised a crj^ of regret that his ashes had not joined those of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont in Westminster Abbey. William Basse, an enthusiastic admirer, gave the sentiment poetic expression in sixteen lines which would seem to have been penned some three or four j^ears after Shake- spare's interment at Stratford. The poet's monument in the church there was already erected, and the elegist 1 Camden's Annals of Elizabeth, 1688 ed. p. 565. THE CLOSE OF LIFE 501 in his peroration accepted the accomphshed fact, acknow- ledging the fitness of giving Shakespeare's unique genius ' unmolested peace ' beneath its own ' carved marble,' apart from fellow-poets who had no claim to share his glory .^ An echo of Basse's argument was impressively sounded by a more famous elegist. In his splendid greeting of his dead friend prefixed to the First Folio of 1623, Ben Jonson reconciled himself to Shakespeare's exclusion from the Abbey where lay the remains of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont, in the great apostrophe : My Shakespeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further to make thee a room. Thou art a monument without a tomb. And art alive still, while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. 1 Basse's elegy runs thus in the earliest extant version : Renowned Spencer lye a thought more nye To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lye A little neerer Spenser, to make roome For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe. To lodge all £owre in one bed make a shift Vntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fi£t Betwixt ys day and yt by Fate be slayne. For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe. If your precedency in death doth barre A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher, Vnder this earned marble of thine owne, Sleepe, rare Tragoedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone ; Thy unmolested peace, vnshared Caue, Possesse as Lord, not Tenant, of thy Graue, That vnto us & others it may be Honor hereafter to be layde by thee. There are many 17th century manuscript versions of Basse's lines. The earliest, probably dated 1620, is in the British Museum (Lansdowne MSS. 777, f. 676), and though it is signed William Basse, is in the hand- writing of the pastoral poet William Browne, who was one of Basse's friends. It was first printed in Donne's Poewis, 1633, but was withdrawn in the edition of 1635. Donne doubtless possessed a manuscript copy, which accidentally found its way into manuscripts of his own verses. Basse's poem reappeared signed ' W. B.' among the prefatory verses to Shakespeare's Poems, 1640, and without author's name in Witts' Recreations, edd. 1640 and 1641, and^among the additions to Poems by Francis Beaumont, 1652. (See Basse's Poetical Works, ed. Warwick Bond, pp. 113 seq, ; and Century of Praise, pp. 136 seq.) 502 WILLIA.M SHAKESPEARE Apart from Spenser and Beaumont, only two poetic con- temporaries, Shakespeare's friends Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, received the honour, which the dramatist was denied, of interment in the national church. Drayton at the end of 1631 and Ben Jonson on August 16, 1637, were both buried within a few paces of the graves of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont.^ Although Shakespeare slept in death far away, Basse's poem is as convincing as any of the extant testimonies, to the national fame which was allotted Shakespeare by his own generation of poets. High was the place in the ranks of literature which contemporary authors accorded Shakespeare's genius and its glorious fruit. Yet the impressions which Personal j^jg personal character left on the minds of his associates were those of simplicity, modesty, and straightforwardness. At the opening of Shakespeare's career Chettle -oTote of his ' civil demeanour ' and of ' his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.' In 1601 — when near the zenith of his fame — he was apostrophised as ' sweet Master Shakespeare ' in the play of ' The Return from Parnassus,' and that adjective was long after associated with his name. In 1604 Anthony Scoloker, in the poem called ' Daiphantus,' bestowed on him the epithet ' fiiendly.' After the close of his career Ben Jonson wrote of him : ' I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature.' ^ No more definite judgment of Shakespeare's individuality was recorded by a contemporary. His dramatic work is essentially impersonal, and fails to betray the author's idiosyncrasies. The ' Sonnets,' which alone of his literary work have been widely credited with self-portraiture, give a ^ See A. P. Stanley's Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 1869, pp. 295 seq. * ' Timber ' in Works, 1641. Jonson seems to embody a reminiscence of lago's description of Othello : The Moor is of a free and open nature. That thinks men honest that but seem to be so. {Othello, I. iii. 405-6.) THE CLOSE OF LIFE 503 potent illusion of genuine introspection, but they rarely go farther in the way of autobiography than illustrate the poet's readiness to accept the conventional bonds which attached a poet to a great patron. His literary practices and aims were those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference in the quality of his work and theirs was due to no conscious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius. He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority to his professional comrades. The references in his will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as they announce in the First Folio) they approach the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, unassuming mien. The later traditions brought together by John Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, depict him as ' very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit,' and other early references suggest a genial if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a quiet turn for good-humoured satire. But Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no dominant attraction for Shakespeare. His extant work attests the 'copious' and continuous in- dustry which was a common feature of the contemporary world of letters.^ With Shakespeare's literary power and his sociability, too, there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business. Pope had just warrant for the surmise that he For gain not glory winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite. His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of making a permanent provi- sion for himself and his daughters. He was frankly,' am- bitious of restoring among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father's misfortunes had imperilled. At ^ John Webster, the dramatist, wrote in the address before his White Divel in 1612 of ' the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood.' 504 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Stratford in later life he loyally conformed to the social standards which prevailed among his well-to-do neighbours, and he was proud of the regard which small landowners and prosperous traders extended to him as to one of their own social rank. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare in poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among \\Titers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards life's ordinary incidents. XXI SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS Of Shakespeare's three brothers, two predeceased him at a comparatively early age. Edmund, the youngest brother, 'a player,' was buried at St. Saviour's Church, speare's - Southwark, ' with a forenoone knell of the great brothers. ^^^j , ^^ December 31, 1607 ; he was in his twenty-eighth year. Richard, John Shakespeare's third son, died at Stratford in February 1612-3, at the age of thirty-nine. The dramatist's next brother, Gilbert, would seem to have survived him, and he lived accord- ing to Oldys to a patriarchal age ; at the poet's death he would have reached his fiftieth year.^ The drama- tist's only sister, ]\Irs. Joan Hart, continued to reside with her family at Shakespeare's Birthplace in Henley Street until her death in November 1646 at the ripe age of seventy-seven. She was by five years her dis- tinguished brother's junior, and she outlived him by more than thirty years. Shakespeare's widow (Anne) died at New Place on g . August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven. ^ speare's She survived her husband by some seven and \vi ow. ^ j^^|£ years. Her burial next him within the chancel took place two days after her death. Some Latin elegiacs — doubtless from the pen of her son-in-law — ^ See p. 463 sujyra. * The name is entered in the parish register as ' Mrs. Shakespeare ' and immediately beneath these words is the entry ' Anna uxor Richardi James.' The close proximity of the two entries has led to the very 505 506 WILLIAM SHAKESPBAEE were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the stone above her grave. ^ The verses give poignant expression to filial grief. Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, long resided with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house at the Bridge Street corner of High Street, Mistress Judith which he leased of the Corporation from the '3'^'y- date of his marriage in 1616 till 1652. There he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took some part in municipal affairs. He acted as a councillor from 1617, and as chamberlain in 1622-3. In the local records he bears the cognomen of ' gent.' He was a man of some education and showed an interest in French literature. But from 1630 onwards his affairs were embarrassed, and after a long struggle with poverty he left Stratford late in 1652 for London. His brother Richard, who was a flourishing grocer in Bucklersbury, died in 1656, and left him an annuity of 12L Thomas would not seem to have long survived the welcome bequest. By his wife Judith he had three sons, but all died in youth before he abandoned Stratford. The eldest, Shakespeare, was baptised at Stratford Church on November 23, 1616, and was buried an infant in the churchyard on May 8, 1617 ; the second son, Richard (baptised on February 9, 1617-18), died shortly after his twenty- first birthday, being buried on February 26, 1638-9 ; fanciful conjecture that they both describe the same person and that Shakespeare's widow Anne was the wife at her death of Eichard James. ' Mrs. Shakespeare ' is a common form of entry in the Stratford register ; the word ' vidua ' is often omitted from entries respecting widows. The terms of the epitaph on Mrs. Shakespeare's tomb refute the assumption that she had a second husband. 1 The words run : ' Heere lyeth interred the bodye of Anne, wife of Mr. William Shakespeare, who depted. this life the 6th day of August, 1623, being of the age of 67 yeares. Vbera, tu, mater, tu lac vitamq. dedisti, Vae mihi ; pro tanto muuere sasa dabo. Quam mallem, amoueat lapidem bonus Angel[us] ore, Exeat ut Christi Corpus, imago tua. Sed nil vota Talent ; venias cito, Christe ; resurget, Clausa licet tumulo, mater, et astra petet.' SUKVIVOKS AND DESCENDANTS 507 and the third son, Thomas (baptised on January 23, 1619-20), was just turned nineteen when he was buried on January 28, 1638-9. Judith outlived her husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on February 9, 1661-2, in her seventy-seventh year. Unlike other members of her family, she was not accorded burial in the chancel of the church. Her grave lay in the churchyard, and no inscription marked its site. The poet's elder daughter, j\Irs. Susanna Hall, resided till her death at New Place, her father's residence, which she inlierited under his will. Her only child Mr. John Elizabeth married" on April 22, 1626, Thomas, ^^"- eldest son and heir of Anthony Nash of Wel- combe, the poet's well-to-do friend. Thomas, who was baptised at Stratford on June 20, 1593, studied law at Lincoln's Inn, but soon succeeded to his father's estate at Stratford and occupied himself with its management. After her marriage Mrs. Nash settled in a house which adjoined New Place and was her husband's freehold. Meanwhile the medical practice of her father John Hall still prospered and he travelled widely on professional errands ; the Earl and Countess of Northampton, who lived as far off as Ludlow Castle, were among his patients. ^ Occasionally he visited London, where he owned a house, but Stratford was always his home. In municipal affairs he played a somewhat troubled part ; he was thrice elected a member of the town council, but, owing in part to his professional engagements, his attendance was irregular ; in October 1633, a year after his third election, he was fined for continued absence, and he was ultimately expelled for ' breach of orders, sundry other misdemeanours and for his continual disturbances ' at the meetings. With the govern- 1 Drayton was not Hall's only literary patient. (See p. 468 supra.) His case-book records a visit to Southam, some ten miles north of Stratford, where he attended Thomas ' the only son of Mr. [Francis] Holyoake, who framed the Dictionary ' (i.e. Dictionarie Etymologicall 1617, enlarged and revised as Dictionarium Etymologicum Latinum 3 pts. 4to. 1633). Francis Holyoake was rector of Southam from 1604 to 1652. 508 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE ment of the church he was more closely and more peaceably associated. He was successively borough churchwarden, sidesman, and vicar's warden, and he presented a new hexagonal and well-carved pulpit which did duty until 1792. Hall's closest friends were among the Puritan clergy, but he reconciled his Puritan sentiment with a kindly regard for Roman Catholic patients. He died at New Place on November 25, 1635, when he was described in the register as ' medicus peritissimus.' He was buried next day in the chancel near the graves of his Mdfe's parents.^ By a nun- cupative will, which was dated the day of his death, he left his wife a house in London, and his only child Eliza- beth, wife of Thomas Nash, a house at Acton and ' my meadow.' His ' goods and money ' were to be equally divided between wife and daughter. His ' study of books ' was given to his son-in-law Nash, ' to dispose of them as you see good,' and his manuscripts Avere left to the same legatee for him to burn them or ' do with them what you please.' ' A study of books ' implied in the terminology of the day a library of some size. There is no clue to the details of Hall's literary property apart from his case-books, with which his widow subsequently parted. Whether his ' study of books ' included Shakespeare's Hbrary is a question which there is no means of answering. Mrs. Hall, who survived her husband some fourteen years, was designated in his epitaph ' fidissima conjux ' and ' vitae comes.' As wife and mother her Susanna character was above reproach, and she renewed ^^^' an apparently interrupted intimacy with her mother's family, the Hathaways, which her daughter cherished until death. With two brothers, Thomas and ^ The inscription on Hall's tombstone ran : ' Here lyeth y"' Body of John Halle gent. He marr. Susanna daugh. (co-heire) of Will. Shake- spare gent. Hee deceased Nove. 25. A: 1635. Aged 60. Hallius hie situs est, medica celeberrimus arte : Expectans regni gaudia laeta Dei ; Dignus erat mentis qui Nestora vinceret annis, In terris omnes sed rapit aequa dies. Ne tumulo quid desit, adest fidissima conjux, Et vitae comitem nunc quoq ; mortis habet ' SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 509 William Hathaway (her first cousins), and with the former's young daughters, she and her daughter were long in close relations. Through her fourteen years' widowhood, ]Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, resided with her under her roof, and until his death her son-in-law, Thomas Nash, also shared her hospitality. Thomas Nash, indeed, took control of the household, and caused his mother-in-law trouble by treating her property as his o\\ti. On the death in 1639 of Mrs. Hall's nephew Richard Quiney, the last surviving child of her sister Judith, her son-in-law induced her to covenant with his wife and himself for a variation of the entail of the property which the poet had left IVIrs. Hall. Save the share in the tithes, which she and Hall had sold to the corporation in 1625, 411 Shakespeare's realty remained in her hands intact.^ On May 27, 1639, Mrs. Hall signed, in a regular well-formed hand\\Titing with her seal appended,^ the fresh settlement, the terms of which, while they acknow- ledged the rights of her daughter Elizabeth as heir general, provided that after her death in the event of the young woman predeceasing her husband without child, the poet's property should pass to the ' heires and assignes of the said Thomas Nash.' The poet's sister, Joan Hart, who was still living at Shakespeare's Birthplace in Henley Street, was thus, with her children, hypothetically disin- herited. But public affairs also helped to disturb Mrs. Hall's equanimity. The tumult of the Civil Wars invaded Stratford. On July 10, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria left Newark with an army of 2000 foot, 1000 horse, some 100 wagons, and a train of artillery. The Queen and her escort reached Stratford on the 11th, and Mrs. Hall was compelled to entertain her for three days at New Place. ^ While her husband lived, llrs. Hall and he regularly paid dues or fines in their joint names to the manor of Rowington in respect of the cottage and land in Chapel Lane, which the poet bought in 1602. After her husband's death Mrs. Hall made the necessary payments in her sole name until her death. See Dr. Wallace's extracts from the manorial records in The Times, May 8, 1915. ^ The seal bears her husband's arms, three talbot's heads erased, with Shakespeare's arms impaled. The document is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace [Cat. 121.) 510 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE On the 12th of the month, Prince Rupert arrived with another army of 2000 men, and next day he conducted the Queen to Kineton, near the site of the battle of Edge- hill of the previous year. At Kineton the Queen met the King, and a day later the two made their triumphal entry into Oxford. Stratford soon afterwards passed into the control of the army of the Parliament, and Parliamen- tary soldiers took the place of Royalists as Mrs. Hall's compulsory guests. In 1644, when Parliamentary troops occupied the town, James Cooke, a doctor of Warwick who was in attendance on them, enjoyed an interesting interview with Mrs. Hall. A friend of Mrs. Hall's late husband brought him to her house in order no£b™ ^^ see HaU's books, which Nash had inherited. The first volumes which Cooke examined were stated by Mrs. HaU to belong to her husband's library. Subsequently she produced some manuscripts, which she said that her husband had purchased of ' one that professed physic' Cooke, who knew her husband's apothecary and had thus seen his handwTiting, recognised in Mrs. Hall's second collection memoranda in Hall's autograph. Mrs. Hall disputed the identification with an unexplained warmth. Ultimately Cooke bought of her some note-books which HaU had clearly prepared for publication. The contents were merely a selected record in Latin of several hundred (out of a total of some thousand) cases which he had attended. Cooke subsequently translated, edited, and issued Hall's Latin notes, with a preface describing his interview with Shakespeare's daughter.^ ^ The full title of HaU's work which Cooke edited was : ' Select Observations on English Bodies, or Cures both Empericall and Historical! performed upon very eminent persons in desperate Diseases. First written in Latine by Mr. John Hall, physician living at Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, where he was very famous, as also in the counties adjacent, as appears by these observations drawn out of severall hundreds of his, as choysest ; Now put into English for common benefit by James Cooke Practitioner in Physick and Chinirgery : London, printed for John Sherley, at the Golden Pelican in Little Britain, 1657.' Other editions appeared in 1679 and 1683. SUEVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 511 Mrs. Hall's son-in-law, Thomas Nash, died on April 4, 1647, and was buried next Shakespeare in the chancel of Stratford Church, on the south side of the grave. The wiU of opposite to that on which lay the dramatist's son-in-law, wife. Nash's will, which was dated nearly five Nash!^' years before (August 20, 1642) and had a codicil of more recent execution, involved Mrs. Hall and her daughter in a new perplexity. Nash, who was owner of the house adjoining New Place and of much other real estate in the town, made generous provision for his wife, and by the codicil he left sums of 501. apiece to his mother-in-law, and to Thomas Hathaway and to Hatha- way 's daughter Elizabeth, mth 10/. to Judith another of Hathaway 's daughters (all relatives of the dramatist's wife). The modest sum of forty shillings was evenly divided between his sister-in-law, Judith Quiney, and her hus- band Thomas Quiney ' to buy them rings.' But, in spite of these proofs of family affection, Nash at the same time was guilty of the presumption of disposing in his will of Mrs. Hall's real property which she had inherited from her father and to which he had no title. His only associa- tion with Mrs. Hall's heritage was through his wife who had a reversionary interest in it. With misconceived generosity he left to his first cousin, Edward Nash, New Place, the meadows and pastures which the dramatist had bought of the Combes, and the house in Blackfriars.^ Complicated legal formaUties were required to defeat Nash's unwar- ranted claim. Mother and daughter resettled all their property on themselves, and they made their kinsmen Thomas and William Hathaway trustees of the new settle- ment (June 2, 1647). Both ladies' signatures are clear and bold.2 Legal business consequently occupied much of the attention of Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Nash during the last two years of Mrs. Hall's life. At length Edward Nash, 1 Thomas Nash's long will is printed in extenso in Halliwell's New Place, pp. 117-24, together with the consequential resettlements of his mother-in-law's estate. 2 The document is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace {Cat. 122). 512 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Thomas Nash's heir, withdrew his pretensions to the dis- puted estate in consideration of a right of pre-emption on Mrs. Nash's death. The young widow took refuge from her difficulties in a second marriage. On June 5, 1649, she became the wife of a Northamptonsliire squire, John Bernard or Barnard, of Abington, near Northampton. The wedding took place at the village of Billesley, four miles from Stratford. Within a little more than a month of her marriage (on July 1 1 , 1649) Mrs. Bernard's mother died. Mrs. Hall's j^g body was committed to rest near her parents. Hall's her husband, and her son-in-law in the chancel of Stratford Church. A rhyming stanza, describing her as ' witty above her sexe,' was engraved on her tombstone. The whole inscription ran : ' Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, Gent, ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent. She deceased ye 11th of Jvly, a.d. 1649, aged 6Q. ' Witty above her sexe, but that's not all. Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall ; Something of Shakespere was in that, but this Wholy of Him with whom she's now in blisse. Then, passenger, ha'st ne're a teare, To weepe with her that wept with all ? That wept, yet set herseKe to chore Them up with comforts cordiall. Her Love shall live, her mercy spread. When thou hast ne're a tear to shed.' ^ IN'Irs. Hall's death left her daughter, the last surviving descendant of the poet, mistress of New Place, of Shake- speare's lands near Stratford, and of the Henley Street property, as weU as of the dramatist's house in Black- friars. The first husband of Mrs. Hall's only child Elizabeth, 1 One Francis Watts, of Rine Clifford, was buried beside Mrs. Hall m 1691, and his son Richard was apparently committed to her grave in 1 707. The elegy on Mrs. Hall's tomb which is preserved by Dugdale was erased in 1707 in order to make way for an epitaph on Richard Watts. The original inscription on Mrs. Hall's grave was restored in 1844 (see Samuel Neil's Home of Shakespearp., 1871, p. 49). SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 513 Thomas Nash of Stratford had died, as we have seen, childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, and on June 5, „, , ^ 1649, she had married, as her second husband, The last . ' descen- a widower, John Bernard or Barnard, of Abins- ton Manor, near Northampton. Bernard or Barnard was of a good family, which had held Abington for more than two hundred years. By his first wife, who died in 1642, Bernard had a family of eight children, four sons and four daughters ; but only three daughters reached maturity or at any rate left issue.^ Shakespeare's grand- daughter was forty-one years old at the time of her second marriage and her new husband some three years her senior. They had no issue. Until near the Resto- ration they seem to have resided at New Place. They then removed to Abington Manor, and Mrs. Bernard's personal association with Stratford came to an end. On November 25, 1661, Charles II created her husband a baronet, though it was usual locally to describe him as a knight. Lady Bernard died at Abington in the middle of February 1669-70, and was buried in a vault under the south aisle of the church on February 16, 1669-70. Her death extinguished the poet's family in the direct line. Sir John Bernard survived her some four years, dying intestate at Northampton on March 3, 1673^, in the sixty- ninth year of his age. A Latin inscription on a stone slab in the south aisle of Abington Church still attests his good descent.* * These daughters were Elizabeth, wife of Henry Gilbert, of Locko, in Derbyshire ; Mary, wife of Thomas Higgs, of Coleabourne, Gloucester- shire ; and Eleanor, wife of Samuel Cotton, of Hen wick, in the county of Bedford (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 625). * No inscription marked the grave of Lady Bernard ; but the following words have recently been cut on the stone commemorating her husband : ' Also to Elizabeth, second wife of Sir John Bernard, Knight (Shakespeare's granddaughter and last of the direct descendants of the poet), who departed this life on the 17th February MDCLXIX. Aged 64 years. 3Iors est janua vitae.' Bernard's estate was adminis- tered by his two married daughters, Mary Higgs and Eleanor Cotton, and his son-in-law Henry Gilbert (of. Baker's Northamptonshire, vol. i. p. 10). The post-mortem inventory of his ' goods and chattels,' dated 2 L 514 WILLIA3I SHAKESPEARE By her will, dated January 1669-70, and proved in the following March ,i Lady Bernard gave many j)roofs of her aflfection for the kindred both of her Bernard's grandfather the dramatist and of his wife, her ^^" maternal grandmother. She left 40/. apiece to Rose, Elizabeth and Susanna Hathaway, and 50/. apiece to Judith Hathaway and to her sister Joan, wife of Edward Kent. All five ladies were daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of the poet's wife. To Edward Kent, a son of Joan, 30/. was apportioned ' towards putting him out as an apprentice.' The two houses in Henley Street, one of which was her grandfather's Birthplace, the testatrix bestowed on her cousin, Thomas Hart, grandson of the dramatist's sister Joan.^ Mrs. Joan Hart, Shakespeare's widowed sister, had lived there wdth her family till her death in 1646, and Thomas Hart, her son, had since continued the tenancy by Lady Bernard's favour. By a new settlement (April 18, 1653), Lady Bernard had appointed Henry Smith, of Stratford, gent., and Job Dighton, of the Middle Temple, London, The final esquire, trustees of the rest of the estate fortunes , • , i • i • i i i< of Shake- which She inherited through her mother from estate.'^ ' William Shackspeare gent, my grandfather,' ' but Smith alone survived her, and by her \vill, and in agreement with the terms of the recent settlement. October 14, 1674, is printed from the original at Somerset House in New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1881-6, pp. ISf seq. The whole is valued at 948Z. lOs. 'AH the Bookes in the studdy ' are valued at 291. lis. ' A Rent at Stratford vpon Avon ' is described as worth 4Z., and ' old goods and Lumber at Stratford vpon Avon ' at the same sum. Bernard's house and grounds at Abington were lately acquired by the Northampton Corporation and are now converted into a public museum and park. ^ See Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines, ii. 62-3. * See p. 317 supra. ^ This deed is exhibited at Shakespeare's Birthplace, Cat. 124. Lady Bernard's trustee Job Dighton became in 1642 guardian of Henry Rainsford of Clifford Chambers, son and heir of the second Sir Henry, and before 1649 he acquired all the Rainsford estate about Stratford. He died in 1659. (Bristol and Gloucester Archceolog. Soc. Journal, i. 889-90, xiv. 70 seq.) SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 515 Lady Bernard directed him to sell New Place and her grandfather's land at Stratford six months after her hus- band's death. The first option of purchase was allowed Edward Nash, her first husband's cousin, and a second option was offered her ' loving kinsman, Edward Bagley, citizen of London,' whom she made her executor and re- siduary legatee.^ Shakespeare's house in Blackfriars was burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the site now appears to have passed to Bagley. Neither he nor Edward Nasli exercised their option in regard to Lady Bernard's Stratford property, and both New Place and the land adjoining Stratford which Shakespeare had purchased of the Combes were sold on May 18, 1675, to Sir Edward Walker, Garter King-of-Arms. His only child, Barbara, was wife of Sir John Clopton, of Clopton House, near Stratford, a descendant of the first builder of New Place. Sir Edward sought a residence near his daughter and her family. He died at New Place on February 19, 1676-7, and he left the Shakespearean house and estate to his eldest grandchild, Edward Clopton, who inhabited New Place till May 1699. In that month Edward Clopton surrendered the house to Sir John his father.^ In 1702 Sir John pulled down the original building, and rebuilt it on a larger scale, settling the new house on his second son, Hugh Clopton {b. 1672). Hugh was prominent in the affairs of the town. He became steward of the Court of Record in 1699 and was knighted in 1732. He died at New Place on December 28, 1751.^ In 1753 Sir Hugh's son-in-law and executor, Hemy Talbot, sold the residence and the garden to a ^ No clue has been found to Lady Bernard's precise lineal tie either with her ' kinsman ' Bagley, or with another of her legatees, Thomas Welles of Carleton, Bedfordshire, whom she describes as her ' cousin.' * Edward Clopton removed next door, to Nash's house, which he occupied till 1705. To the garden of Nash's house he added the great garden of New Place. Hugh Clopton, the occupant and owner of New Place, did not recover possession of Shakespeare's great garden till 1728. ^ He had some literary proclivities, and published in 1705 a new edition of Sir Edward Walker's Historical Discourses. 2 L 2 516 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE stranger, Francis Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, Cheshire, who was seeking a summer residence. Gastrell's occupa- tion of New Place had a tragic sequel. A surly temper made him a difficult neighbour. He was soon involved in serious disputes with the town council on a question of assessment. By way of retaliation in the autumn of 1758 he cut down the celebrated mulberry tree, which was planted near the house.^ But the quarrel was not abated, and in 1759 in a fresh fit of temper lition 0™° Gastrell razed New Place to the ground. After New Place, (iigposing of the materials, he ' left Stratford, amidst the rages and curses of the inhabitants.' ^ The site of New Place has thenceforth remained vacant. In March 1762 Gastrell, who thenceforth lived at Lichfield in a house belonging to his wife, leased the desolate site of New Place with the garden JSrchasT" to William Hunt, a resident of Stratford, of New The iconoclastic owTier died at Lichfield in 1768, leaving his Stratford property to his widow, Jane, who sold it to Hunt in 1775. The sub- sequent succession of private owTiers presents no points of interest. The vacant site, with the ' great garden ' attached, was soon annexed to the garden of the adjoin- ing (Nash's) house. In 1862 the whole of the property, including Nash's house and garden, was purchased by a 1 See p. 289 n. 1 supra. * Cf. Halliwell's New Place ; R. B. Wheler's Stratford-on-Avon. A contemporary account of Gastrell's vandalism by a visitor to Stratford in 1760 runs thus : ' There stood here till lately the house in which Shakespeare lived, and a mulberry tree of his planting ; the house was large, strong, and handsome. As the curiosity of this house and tree brought much fame, and more company and profit, to the town, a certain man, on some disgust, has pulled the house down, so as not to leave one stone upon another, and cut down the tree, and piled it as a stack of firewood, to the great vexation, loss and disappointment of the inhabitants ' (Letter from a lady to her friend in Kent in The London Magazine, July 1760). According to BoswcU {Life of Johnson) Gastrell's wife ' participated in his guilt.' She was sister of Gilbert Walmisley of Lichfield, a man of cultivation who showed much interest in Johnson and Garrick in their youth, and whose memory they always revered. SUKVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 517 public subscription, which was initiated by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, the biographer of Shakespeare. New Place garden was converted into a public garden and a small portion of Nash's house was employed as a Museum. In 1891 the New Place estate was conveyed by Act of Parliament to the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trustees. In 1912 the trustees renovated Nash's house, which in the course of two centuries of private ownership had undergone much structural change and disfigurement. Surviving features of the sixteenth century were freed of modern accretions and the fabric was restored in all essentials to its Elizabethan condition. The whole of Nash's house was thenceforth applied to public uses. XXII AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS The only extant specimens of Shakespeare's hand-wTiting that are of undisputed authenticity consist of the six autograph signatures which are reproduced in TJ^^J^Ji*^^ this volume. To one of these signatures there of Shake- speare's are attached the words ' By me.' But no wUing. other relic of Shakespeare's handwriting outside his signatures — no letter nor any scrap of his literary work — is known to be in existence. The ruin which has overtaken Shakespeare's wTitings is no peculiar experience. Very exiguous is the fragment of Elizabethan or Jacobean literature which survives in the authors' autographs. Barely forty plays, and many of those of post- Shakespearean date, remain accessible in contemporary copies ; and all but five or six of these are in scriveners' handwriting. Dramatic manuscripts, which were the pro- perty of playhouse managers, habitually suffered the fate of waste-paper.^ Non-dramatic literature of the time ran hardly smaller risks, and autograph relics of Elizabethan or Jacobean poetry and prose are Httle more abundant than those of plays. Ben Jonson is the only literary contemporary of Shakespeare of whose handA\iiting the surviving specimens exceed a few scraps. Of the volu- minous fruits of Edmund Spenser's pen, nothing remains in his handwriting save one holograph business note, and ^ See pp. 549, 560 infra. Of the 3000 separate plays, which it is estimated were produced on the stage between 1586 and 1642, scarcely more than one in six is even preserved in print. The residue, which far exceeds 2000 pieces, has practically vanished. 518 AUTOGKAPHS, POKTRAITS, MEMORIALS 519 eight autograph signatures appended to business documents —all of which aie in the Public Record Office. The MSS. of the ' Paerie Queene ' and of Spenser's other poems have perished. Shakespeare's script enjoyed a better fate than that of Christopher Marlowe, his tutor in tragedy, of John Webster, his chief disciple in the tragic art, and of many another Elizabethan or Jacobean author or dramatist no scrap of whose ^vriting, not even a signature, has been traced.^ The six extant signatures of Shakespeare all belong to his latest years, and no less than three of them were ^, . attached to his will, which was executed within The SIX 1 • 1 , mi signatures, a few days of his death. The earliest extant 1612-6. autograph {Willrh Shak'p') is that affixed to his deposition in the suit brought by Stephen Bellott against his father-in-law, Christopher Mont joy, in the Court of Requests. The document, which bears the date May 11, 1612, is in the Public Record Office and is on exhibition in the museum there.' ^ It is curious to note that Moliere, the great French dramatist, whose career (1623-1673) is a little nearer to our own time than Shakespeare's, left behind him as scanty a store of autograph memorials. The only extant specimens of Moliere's handwriting (apart from mere autographs) consist of two brief formal receipts for sums of money paid him on account of professional services dated respectively in 1650 and 1656. Both were discovered comparatively recentlj' (in 1873 and 1885 respec- tively) in the departmental archives of the H^rault by the archivist there, M. de la Pijardiere. Several detached signatures of the French play^vright appended to legal documents are also preserved. One of these is exhibited in the British Museum. No scrap of Moliere's literary work in his own writing survives. (See H. M. TroUope' a Life of 21 oliere, 1905, pp. 105-117). 2 See p. 277 n. 2 supra. The signature to the deposition of May 11, 1612, has symbols of abbreviation in the surname, in place both of the middle ' s ' or ' es ' and of the final letters ' ere ' or ' eare.' It was common for the sylJable ' -per ' or '-pere ' to be represented in contemporary signatures by a stroke or loop about the lower stem of the ' p.' Many surviving autographs of the surnames ' Draper,' ' Roper,' ' Cowper,' present the identical curtailment. 520 WILLIAIH SHAKESPEARE The second extant autograph is affixed to the purchase- deed (on parchment), dated March 10, 1612-3, of the house in Blackfriars, which the poet then acquired. Since 1841 the document has been in the Guildhall Library, London. The third extant autograph is affixed to a mortgage- deed (on parchment), dated March 11, 1612-3, relating to the house in Blackfriars, purchased by the poet the day before. Since 1858 the document has been in the British Museum (Egerton MS. 1787). The poet's will was finally executed in March 1615-6. The day of the month is uncertain ; the original draft gave the date as January 25, but the word January was deleted, and the word March interlineated before the will was executed. Shakespeare's will is now at Somerset House, London. It consists of three sheets of paper, at the foot of each of which Shakespeare signed his name ; on the last sheet the words ' By me ' in the dramatist's hand- "v^Titing precede the signature.^ Other signatures attributed to the poet are either of questionable authenticity or demonstrable for- Doubtful geries. Fabrications appear on the preliminary signatures. *= , ^^ ^ •' pages of many sixteenth or early seventeenth century books. Almost all are the work of William Henry 1 Shakespeare's will is kept in a locked oaken box in the ' strong room ' of the Principal Probate Registry [at Somerset House]. ' Each of the three sheets of which the will consists has been placed in a separate locked oaken frame between two sheets of glass. The paper, which had suffered from handling, has been mended with pelure d'oignon, or some such transparent material, and fixed to the glass. The work appears to have been carried out above fifty or sixty years ago. The sheets do not appear to have been damaged by dampness or dust since they were framed and mended, though the process of mending has darkened the front of the sheet in places. Every care is now taken of the will. Visitors are only allowed to inspect it in the " strong room." A sloping desk has been fixed near the recess occupied by the box which holds the three frames, and the frames are exhibited to visitors on the desk. The frames are never unlocked. Permission is given to photograph the will under special precautions.' (See Eoyal Commission on Public Records, Second Report, 1914, vol. ii. pt. ii. p, 137.) AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 521 Ireland, the forger of the late eighteenth century .^ In the case of only two autograph book-inscriptions has the genuineness been seriously defended and in neither instance is the authenticity established. The genuineness of the autograph signature (' W^ Sh« ') in the Aldine edition of Ovid's ' Metamorphoses ' at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, remains an open question.^ Much has been urged, too, in behalf of the signature in a copy of the 1603 edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays now at the British Museum. The alleged autograph, which runs ' Willm Shakspere,' is known to have been in the volume when it was in the possession of the Rev. Edward Patteson, of Smethwick, Staffordshire, in 1780. Sir Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts, purchased the book for the British Museum of Patteson's son for 140^ in 1837. In a paper in ' Archseologia ' (published as a pamphlet in 1838), Madden vouched for the authenticity, but, in spite of his authority, later scrutiny inclines to the theory of fabrication. In all the authentic signatures Shakespeare used the old ' English' mode of writing, which resembles that still in vogue in Germany. During the seventeenth century S^wdting ^^® ^^^ ' English ' character was finally displaced in England by the ' Italian ' character, which is now universal in England and in aU English-speaking countries. In Shakespeare's day highly educated men, who were graduates of the Universities and had travelled abroad in youth, were capable of WTiting both the old ' English ' and the ' Italian ' character with equal facility. As a rule they employed the ' English ' character in their ordinary correspondence, but signed their names in the ' Italian ' hand. Shakespeare's exclusive use of the * English ' script was doubtless a result of his provincial education. He learnt only the ' English ' character at school at Stratford-on-Avon, and he never troubled to exchange it for the more fashionable ' Italian ' character in later life. ^ See p. 647 infra. - See p. 21 supra. 522 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Men did not always spell their surnames in the same way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The g ... , poet's surname has been proved capable of the poet's as many as four thousand variations.^ The name. name of the poet's father is entered sixt^-six times in the Council books of Stratford-on-Avon, anS is spelt in sixteen ways. There the commonest form is ' Shaxpeare.' Tlie poet cannot be proved to have acknow- ledged any finality as to the spelling of his surname. It is certain that he wTote it indifferently Shak.^pere, Shake- spere, Shakespear or Shakspeare. In these circumstances it is impossible to credit any one form of spelling with a supreme claim to correctness. Shakespeare's surname in his abbreviated signature to the deposition of 1612 (Willm Shak'p') may be trans- „ literated either as ' Shaksper ' or ' Shakspere.' autograph The surname is given as ' Shakespeare ' wherever spe gs. -^ jg introduced into the other records of the litigation. The signature to the purchase-deed of March 10, 1612-.3, should be read as ' William Shakspere.' A flourish above the first ' e ' is a cursive mark of abbreviation which was well known to professional scribes, and did duty here for an unoTitten final ' e.' The signature to the mortgage- deed of the following day, March 11, 1612-3, has been interpreted both as ' Shakspere ' and ' Shakspeare.' The letters following the ' pe ' are again indicated by a cursive flourish above the ' e.' The flourish has also been read less satisfactorily as ' a ' or even as a rough and ready indica- tion that the wTiter was hindered from adding the final 're ' by the narrowness of the strip of parchment to which he was seeking to restrict his handwriting. In the body of both deeds the form ' Shakespeare ' is everj^where adopted. The ink of the first signature which Shakespeare appended to his will has now faded almost beyond recog- nition, but that it was ' Shakspere ' may be inferred from the facsimile made by George Steevens in 1776. 1 Wise, Autograph of William Shakespeare . . . together with 4000 ways of spelling the name. Philadelphia, 1869. AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 523 The second and third signatures to the will, which are easier to decipher, have been variously read as ' Shak- spere,' ' Shakspeare,' and ' Shakespeare ' ; but ^"th^^iu^ a close examination suggests that, whatever the second signature may be, the third, which is preceded by the two words ' By me ' (also in the poet's hand\\Titing) , is ' Shakspeare.' In the text of the instru- ment the name appears as ' Shackspeare.' ' Shakspere ' is the spelling of the alleged autograph in the British Museum copy of Florio's ' Montaigne,' which is of disputable authenticity. It is to be borne in mind that ' Shakespeare ' was the form of the poet's surname that was adopted in the text of most of the legal documents relating to the spea^e^' the poet's property, including the royal license accepted granted to him in the capacity of a player in 1603. That form is to be seen in the inscrip- tions on the graves of his wife, of his daughter Susanna, and of her husband in the church of Stratford-on-Avon, although in the rudely cut inscription on his own monument his name appears as ' Shakspeare.' ' Shakespeare ' figures in the poet's printed signatures affixed by his authority to the dedicatory epistles in the original editions of his two narrative poems 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and ' liUcrece ' (1594) ; it is seen on the title-pages of the Sonnets and of twenty-two out of twenty-four contemporary quarto editions of the plays, ^ and it alone appears in the sixteen mentions of the surname in the preliminary pages of the First Folio of 1623. The form ' Shakespeare ' was employed in almost all the published references to the dramatist in the seventeenth century. Consequently, cf the form ' Shakespeare ' it can be definitely said that it has the predominant sanction of legal and literary usage. Aubrey reported that Shakespeare was ' a handsome well-shap't man,' but no portrait exists which can be ^ The two exceptions are Lovers Labour's Lost (1598), where the surname is given as ' Shakespere,' and King Lear (1608, 1st edition), where the surtame apperrs as ' Shakspeare.' 524 WILLIA3I SHAKESPEAEE said with absolute certainty to have been executed during his lifetime. Only two portraits are positively -, , known to have been produced within a short Shake- •■■ speare's period of his death. These are the bust of portraits. ^^^ half-length effigy in Stratford Church and the frontispiece to the Folio of 1623. Each was an attempt at a posthumous likeness by an artist of no marked skill. The bust was executed the earlier of the two. It was carved before 1623, by Garret Johnson the younger, and ^, his brother Nicholas, the tombmakers, of The Stratford Southwark. The sculptors may have had monumen . gQ^^g personal knowledge of the dramatist ; but they were mainly dependent on the suggestions of friends. The Stratford bust is a clumsy piece of work. The bald domed forehead, the broad and long face, the plump and rounded chin, the long upper lip, the full cheeks, the massed hair about the ears, combine to give the burly countenance a mechanical and unintellectual expression. The Warwickshire antiquary, Sir William Dugdale, visited Stratford on July 4, 1634, and then made the earliest surviving sketch of the monument, sketch^^'^ Dugdale's drawing figures in autograph notes of his antiquarian travel which are still preserved at Merevale. It was engraved in the ' Antiquities of War- wickshire ' (1656), and was reproduced without alteration in the second edition of that great work in 1730. 0\^ing to Dugdale's imsatisfactory method of delineation both effigy and tomb in his sketch differ materially fiom their present aspect.^ He depended so completely on his memory that 1 The countenance is emaciated instead of plump, and, wMle the forehead is bald, the face is bearded ■with drooping moustache. The arms are awkwardly bent outwards at the elbows, and the hands lie lightly with palms downwards on a large cushion or weU-stulied sack. Dugdale's presentation of the architectural features of the monument apart from the portrait -figure also varies from the existing form. In Dugdale's sketch the two little nude figures sit poised on the extreme edge of the cornice, one at each end, instead of attaching themselves without any intervening space to the heraldically engraved block of stone above the cornice ; the figure on the right holdi in its left hand an hourglass AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 525 little reliance can be placed on the fidelity of his draughts- manship in any part of his work. The drav^ing of the Carew monument in Stratford Church in his ' Antiquities of War«-ickshire ' varies quite as -n-idely from the existing structure as in the case of Shakespeare's tomb.^ The figures, especially, in all his presentations of sculptured monuments are sketchily vague and fanciful. Dugdale's engraving was, however, literally reproduced in Rowe's edition of Shakespeare, 1709, and in Grignion's illustration in Bell's edition of Shakespeare, 1786. Later eighteenth-century engravers were more accu- rate delineators, but they were not wholly proof against Vertue'3 ^^® temptation to improve on their models. engraving , In 1725 George Vertue, whose artistic skill was ^725- greater than that of preceding engravers, prepared for Pope's edition of Shakespeare a plate of the monument which accurately gives most of its present architectural features,^ but, while the posture and dress instead of an inverted torch, while the right hand is free. The con- temporary replicas of the little figures on Nicholas Johnson's Rutland tomb at Bottesford here convict Dugdale of error beyond redemption. (See p. 498 supra.) The Corinthian columns which support the en- tablature are each fancifully surmounted in Dugdale's sketch bv a leopard's face, of which the present monument shows no trace. (See !Mrs. Stopes's The True Story of the Stratford Bust, 1904, reprinted with much additional information in her Shakespeare's Environment (1914), 104-123, 346-353.) ilrs. Stopes has printed many xiseful extracts from the eighteenth and nineteenth century correspondence about the bust among the Birthplace archives, but there is very little force in her argument to the effect that Dugdale's sketch faithfully represents the original form of the monument, which was subsequently refashioned out of all knowledge. (See ilr. Lionel Cust and M. H. Spielmann in Trans. Bibliog. Soc. vol. ix. pp. 117-9.) 1 The original sketch of the Carew monument does not appear in Dugdale's note-books at Merevale. The engraving in the Antiquities was doubtless drawn by another hand which was no more accurate than Dugdale's (see Andrew Lang, Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, 1912, pp. 179 seq). * Apart from the effigy the variations chiefly concern the hands of the nude figures on the entablature. Each holds in one hand an upright lighted torch. The other hand rests in one case on an hourglass, and in the other case is free, although a skull lies near by. 526 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of the effigy are correct, Vertue's head and face differ alike from Dugdale's sketch of Shakespeare and from the existing statue. Vertue would seem to have irresponsibly adapted the head and face from the Chandos portrait. Gravelot's engraving in Hanmer's edition 1744 follows Vertue's main design, but here again the face is fancifully conceived and presents features which are not found elsewhere. In 1746 Shakespeare's monument was stated for the first time (as far as is precisely known) to be much decayed. The John Ward, Mrs. Siddons's grandfather, gave oFm8 ^ ^^® town-hall at Stratford-on-Avon, on September 8, 1746, a performance of ' Othello,' the proceeds of which Avere handed to the churchwardens as a contribution to the costs of repair. After some delay, John Hall, a limner of Stratford, was commissioned, in November 1748, to ' beautify' as well as to ' repair ' the monument. Some further change followed later. In 1793 Malone persuaded James Davenport, a long-lived vicar of Stratford, to have the monument painted white, and thereby prompted the ironical epigram : Stranger, to whom this monument is shewn. Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone ; Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays, And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays. ^ In 1814 George Bullock, who owned a museum of curiosities in London, took a full-sized cast of the effigy, and disposed of a few copies, two of which are now in Shakespeare's Birthplace. Bullock coloured his cast, which was modelled ^ Gent. Magazine, 1815, pt. i. p. 390. In the Stratford Church Album (now in the Birthplace) the painter Haydon defended Malone's treatment of the monument, but wrote with equal disparagement of his critical work : Ye who visit the shrine Of the poet divine With patient Malone don't be vextl On his face he's thrown light By painting it wliite Which you know he ne'er did on his text I July IS, 1828. E. B. H. AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 527 with strict accuracy.^ Thomas PhiUips, R.A., painted from the cast a portrait which he called ' the true effigies ' of Shakespeare, and this was engraved by William Ward, A.R.A., in 1816. In 1861 Simon Collins, a well-known picture restorer of London, was employed to remove the white paint of 1793, and to restore the colours, of which some trace remained beneath. The effigy is now in the state in which it left Collins's hands. There is no reason to doubt that it substantially preserves its original condition. 2 The effigy in the church is clearly the foundation of the Stratford portrait, which is prominently displayed in the Birthplace, but lacks historic or artistic value. 'Stratford' It was the gift in 1864 to the Birthplace portrait. Trustees of William Oakes Hunt (6. 1794, d. 1873), town clerk of Stratford, whose family was of old standing in Stratford and whose father Thomas Hunt preceded him in the office of town clerk and died in 1827. The donor stated that the picture had been in the pos- session of his family since 1758. The allegation that the artist was John Hall, the restorer of the monument, is mere conjecture. The engraved portrait — nearly a half-length — which was printed on the title-page of the Folio of 1623, was by Martin Droeshout. On the opposite page lines by Ben 1 The painter Haydon, when visiting Stratford Church in July 1828, wrote his impressions of the monument at length in the Church Album which is now in the Birthplace Library. He declared the whole bust to be ' stamped with an air of fidelity, perfectly invaluable.' To this entry Daniel Maclise added the ironical words, dated August 1832, ' Remarks worthy of Haydon.' Sir Francis Chantrey, near the same date, pronounced the ' head ' to be ' as finely chiselled as a master man could do it ; but the bust any common labom-er would produce ' (see Wash- ington Irving's Stratford-upon-Avon from the Sketch Book, ed. Savage and Brassington, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1900, pp. 127-9). In 1835 a Society was formed at Stratford for the ' renovation and restoration of Shakespeare's monument and bust.' But, although the church suffered much repair in 1839, there is no evidence that the monument received any attention. * A chromolithograph issued by the New Shakspere Society in 1880 is useful for purposes of study. 528 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Jonson congratulate ' the graver ' on having satisfactorily ' hit ' the poet's ' face.' ^ Jonson's testimony does no credit to his artistic discernment ; the expression of Droeshout s countenance is neither distinctive nor lifelike, engraving. The engraver, Martin Droeshout, was, like Garret and Nicholas Johnson, the sculptors of the monu- ment, of Flemish descent, belonging to a family of painters and engravers long settled in London, where he was bom in 160L He was thus fifteen years old at the time of Shake- speare's death in 1616, and it is improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the dramatist. The engraving was doubtless produced by Droeshout just before the publica- tion of the First Folio in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year. It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver's professional career, in which he never achieved extended practice or reputation. In Droeshout's engraving the face is long and the forehead high ; the one ear which is visible is shapeless ; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears. There is a scanty moustache and a thin fringe of hair under the lower lip. A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dress, in which there are 1 Ben Jonson's familiar lines run : This Figure, that thou hero seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; Wherein the Graver had a strife With Nature, to out-do the life : O, could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass, as he hath hit His face, the Print would then surpass All that was ever writ in brass. But, since he cannot, Eeader, look, Not on his Picture, but his Book. Ben Jonson's concluding conceit seems to be a Renaissance con- vention. The French poet Malherbe inscribed beneath Thomas de Leu's portrait of Montaigne in the 1611 edition of his Essais these lines to like effect : Voici du grand Montaigne una entifire ficrure ; Le peintre a peint le corps st lui son bel esprit ; Le premier par son art, ^gale la nature ; Mais I'autre la turpatse en tout ce qu'ii icrit. AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 529 patent defects of perspective, is of a pattern which is common in contemporary portraits of the upper class. The dimensions of the head and face are dispropor- tionately large as compared with those of the body. Yet the ordiaary condition of the engraving does Droeshout's modest ability some unmerited injustice. His work was obviously unfitted for frequent reproduction, and the plate was retouched for the worse more than once The first after it left his hands. Two copies of the engraving in its first state are known. One is in Malone's perfect copy of the First Polio which is now in the Bodleian Library. The other was extracted by J. 0. Halliwell-Phillipps from a First Folio in his pos- session, and framed separately by him ; it now belongs to the American collector Mr. H. C. Folger of New York.^ Although the first state of the engraving offers no varia- tion in the general design, the tone is clearer than in the ordinary exemplars, and the details are better defined. The light falls more softly on the muscles of the face, especially about the mouth and below the eye. The hair is darker than the shadows on the forehead and flows naturally, but it throws no reflection on the collar as in the later impressions. As a result the wooden effect of the expression is qualified in the first state of the print. The forehead loses the unnaturally swollen or hydrocephalous appearance of the later states, and the hair ceases to resemble a raised wig. In the later impres- sion all the shadows have been darkened by cross-hatching and cross-dotting, especially about the chin and the roots of the hair on the forehead, while the moustache has been roughly enlarged. The later reproductions in extant copies of the First Folio show many slight variations ^ The copy of the First Folio to which Halliwell-Phillipps's original impression of the engraving belonged is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Stratford-on-Avon. For descriptions of the iirst state of the engraving see Sidney Lee's Introduction to Facsimile of the First Folio (Clarendon Press, 1905, p. xxii) ; The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio, 1911, pp. 9-10 and plates i. and ii. ; J. 0. Halliwell's Catalogue of Shakespearian Engravings and Drawings (privately printed ; 1S68, pp. 35-37). 2 M 530 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE among themselves, but all bear witness to the deterio- ration of the plate. The Droeshout engraving was copied by WilUam Marshall for a frontispiece to Shakespeare's ' Poems ' in 1640, and William Faithorne made a second copy for the frontispiece of the edition of ' The Rape of Lucrece ' pubHshed in 1655. Both Marshall's and Faith- orne's copies greatly reduce the dimensions of the original plate and introduce fresh and fanciful detail. Sir George Scharf was of the opinion that Droeshout worked from a preliminary drawing or ' limning.' But Mr. Lionel Cust has pointed out that limnings Surce'of ^^ or ' portraits in small ' of this period were dis- Droeshout's tinguished by a minuteness of workmanship of which the engraving bears small trace. Mi'. Cust makes it clear however that professional engravers were in the habit of following crude pictures in oils especially pre- pared for them by ' picture-makers,' who ranked in the profession far below hmners or portrait-painters of repute. That Droeshout's engraving reproduces a picture of coarse calibre may be admitted ; but no existing picture can be positively identified with the one which guided Droeshout's hand. In 1892 ]\Ir. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a private gentleman with artistic tastes residing ' Flower ' at Peckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent portrai . Shakespeare. It was claimed that the picture, which was faded and somewhat worm-eaten, dated from the early years of the seventeenth century. The fabric was a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the upper left-hand corner was the inscription ' Will™ Shake- speare, 1609.' The panel had previously ' served for a portrait of a lady in a high ruflf — the line of which can be detected on either side of the head — clad in a red dress, the colour and glow of which can be seen xinder the white of the wired band in front. '^ ]\Ir. Clements purchased the por- 1 Spielmann, Portraits of Shakespeare, p. 14. AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 531 trait from an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip of paper when he acquired it. The note that he then ^rrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the picture ran as follows : ' The original portrait of Shakespeare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his death. The picture was painted nine [vere seven] years before his death, and consequently sixteen [vere fourteen] years before it was published. . . . The picture was publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and many thousands went to see it.' These statements were not independently corro- borated. In its comparative dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the size of the head and that of the body, this picture is identical with the Droeshout engrav- ing, but the engraving's incongruities of light and shade are absent, and the ear and other details of the features which are abnormal in the engraving are normal in the painting. Though stiffly drawn, the face is far more skil- fully presented than in the engraving, and the expression of countenance betrays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the print. Connoisseuis, including Sir Edward Poynter, Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Gust, have pronounced the picture to be anterior in date to the engraving, and they deem it probable that it was on this painting that Droeshout directly based his work. On the other hand, Mr. M. H. Spielmann, while regarding the picture as ' a record of high interest ' and ' possibly the first of all the poet's painted portraits,' insists with much force that it is far more likely to have been painted from the Droeshout engraving than to have formed the foundation of the print. Mr. Spielmann argues that the picture differs materially from the first state of the en- graving, while it substantially corresponds with the later states. If the engraver worked from the picture it was to be expected that the first state of the print would represent the picture more closely than the later states, 2 M 2 532 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE which embody very crude and mechanical renovations of the original plate. The discrepancies between the painting and the print in its various forms are no conclusive refutation of the early workmanship of the picture, but they greatly weaken its pretensions to be treated as Droeshout's original inspiration or to date from Shake- speare's lifetime. ^ On the death of Mr. Clements, the owner of the picture, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs. No attempt at restoration has been made. A photogravure forms the frontispiece to the present volume. A fine coloured reproduction has been lately issued by the Medici Society of London. ^ Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although less closely resembling it than the picture just described, Th ' El ^^ ^^® ' ^^^ House ' portrait (now the property House' of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford). This por rai . picture, which was purchased in 1845 by Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, was acquired on his death on January 7, 1864, by the art-dealer Henry Graves, who presented it to the Birthplace on April 23 following. This painting has much artistic value. The features are far more delicately rendered than in the ' FloAver ' painting, or in the normal states of the Droeshout engraving, ^ Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school have been detected in the picture, but little can be made of the suggestion that it is from the brush of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droeshout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this country on January 25, 1607-8, when he was described as a 'painter of Brabant.' * Mr. Lionel Cust, formerly director of the National Portrait Gallery, who has supported the genuineness of the picture, gave an interesting account of it at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on Dec. 12, 1895 (cf. Society's Proceedings, second series, vol. xvi. p. 42). See also Illustrated Catalogue of the Pictures in the Memorial Gallery, 1896, pp. 78-83, and Bibliog. Trans. 1908, pp. 118 seq. Mr. M. H. Spielmann ably disputes the authenticity in his essay on Shakespeare's Portraits in Stratford Toii^n Shakespeare, 1906, vol. x. AUTOGEAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 533 but the claim of the ' Ely House ' portrait to workmanship of very early date is questioned by many experts.^ Early in Charles II 's reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in T , his house in St. James's. Mention is made Lord Clarendon's of it in a letter from the diarist John Evel5Ti picture. ^^ j^.g fj,ig^(j Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Claren- don's collection was dispersed at the end of the seventeenth century and the picture has not been traced.^ Of the numerous extant paintings which have been described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the ' Droeshout ' portrait and the ' Ely House ' portrait, both ^MtTaits ^^ which are at Stratford, bear any definable resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in the church. In spite of their admitted imperfections, the engraving and the bust can alone be held indisputably to have been honestly intended to preserve the poet's features. They must be treated as the main tests of the genuineness of all portraits claiming authenticity on late and indirect evidence.^ ^ See Harper's Magazine, May 1897, and JVIr. Spielmann's careful account ut supra. ^ Cf. Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence, iii. 444. ,* Numberless portraits, some of which are familiar in engravings, have been falsely identified with Shakespeare, and it would bo futile to attempt to make the record of the supposititious pictures complete. Upwards of sixty have been offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1856, and not one of these has proved to possess the remotest claim to authenticity. During the past ten years the present WTiter has been requested by correspondents in various parts of England, America, and the colonies to consider the claims to authenticity of more than tliirty different pictures alleged to be contemporary portraits of Shakespeare. The following are some of the wholly unauthentic portraits that have attracted public attention : Three portraits assigned to Zucchero, who left England in 1580, and cannot have had any relations with Shakespeare — one in the Art Museum, Boston, U.S.A.; another, also in America, formerly the property at various times of Richard Cosway, R.A., of Mr. J. A. Langford of Birmingham, and of Augustine Daly, the American actor (engraved in mezzotint by H. Green) ; and a third, at one time in the possession of Mr. Archer, librarian of Bath, which was purchased in 1862 by the 534 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most famous and interesting is the ' Chandos ' portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery. Its pedigree ' Chandos ' suggests that it was designed to represent the portrait. poet, but numerous and conspicuous divergences from the authenticated likenesses show that it was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years after his death. Although the forehead is high and bald, as in both the monumental bust and the Droeshout engraving, the face and dress are unlike those presentments. The features in the Chandos portrait are of ItaUan rather than of English type. The dense mass of hair at the sides and back of the head falls over the collar. A thick fringe of beard runs from ear to ear. The left ear, which the posture of the head alone leaves visible, is adorned by a plain gold ring. Oldys reported the traditions that the picture was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare's feUow-actor, who enjoyed much reputation as a limner,^ and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare. These Baroness Burdett-Coutts and now belongs to Mr. Burdett-Coutts. At Hampton Court is a wholly unauthentic portrait of the Chandos type, which was at one time at Penshurst ; it bears the legend ' iEtatis suje 34 ' (cf . Law's Cat. of Hampton Court, p. 234). A portrait inscribed ' ietatis suse 47, 1611,' formerly belonging to the Rev. Clement Usill Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, now owned by Mx. R. Levine of Norwich, was engraved in mezzotint by G. F. Storm in 1864. (See Mr. Spielmann's art. in Connoisseur, April 1910.) At the end of the eighteenth century ' one Zincke, an artist of little note, but grandson of the celebrated enameller of that name, manufactured fictitious Shakespeares by the score ' (Chambers's Journal, Sept. 20, 1856). One of the most successful of Zincke's frauds was an alleged portrait of the dramatist painted on a pair of bellows, which the great French actor Talma acquired. Charles Lamb visited Talma in Paris in 1822 in order to see the fabrication, and was completely deluded. (See Lamb's Works, ed. Lucas, vol. vii. pp. 573 seq., where the Talma portrait, now the pro- perty of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge of Glasgow, is reproduced.) Zincke had several successors, among whom one Edward Holder proved the most successful. To a very different category belong the many avowedly imaginary portraits by artists of repute. Of these the most elaborately desi r titious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors that expos'd them : euen those are now oflfer'd to your view cur'd and perfect of their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceiued them.' The writers of the Address further assert that ' what [Shakespeare] thought he vttered with that easinesse that wee haue scarce receiued from him a blot in his papers.' Ben Jonson recorded a remark made to him by ' the players ' to the same effect.^ The precise source and value of the ' copy ' which the actor-editors furnished to the printers of the First FoUo ^^ are not easilv determined. The actor-editors The source of the clearly meant to suggest that they had access '^°^^' to Shakespeare's autographs undefaced by his own or any other revising pen. But such an assurance is in open conflict with theatrical practice and with the volume's contents. In the case of the twenty plays which had not previously been in print, recourse was alone possible to manuscript copies. But external and internal evidence renders it highly improbable that Shakespeare's auto- graphs were at the printer's disposal. Well-nigh all the plays of the First Folio bear internal marks of transcription ^ George Steevens claimed the Address ' To the Great Variety of Readers ' for Ben Jonson, and cited in support of his contention many parallel passages from Jonson's works. (See Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, vol. ii. pp. 663-675.) Prof. W. Dinsmore Briggs has on like doubtful grounds extended Jonson's claim to the dedication (of. The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 12, 1914, and April 22, 1915), but Mr. Percy Simpson has questioned Prof. Briggs 's conclusions on grounds that deserve acceptance (cf. ibid. Nov. 19, 1914, and May 20, 1915). '^ See p. 97 supra. 560 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and revision by the theatrical manager. In spite of their heated disclaimer, the editors sought help too from the published Quartos. But most of the pieces were printed from hitherto unprinted copies which had been made for theatrical uses. Owing to the sudden destruction by fire of the Globe theatre in 1613 there were special difficulties in bringing material for the volume together. When the like disaster befel the Fortune theatre in 1621, we learn specifi- cally that none of the theatrical manuscripts or prompt books escaped. Heminges, who was ' book-keeper ' as well as general manager of the Globe, could only have replen- ished his theatrical library with copies of plays which were not at the date of the fire in his custody at the theatre. Two sources were happily available. Many transcripts were in the private possession of actors, and there were extant several ' fair copies ' which the author or actor had according to custom procured for presentation to friends and patrons .1 ^ Copies of plays were at times also preserved by the licenser of plays, who was in the habit of directing the ' book-keeper ' of the theatre to supply him with ' a fair copy ' of a plaj' after he had examined and corrected the author's manuscript. ' A fair copy ' of Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man^s Fortune (pla}'ed in 1613) which was made for the licenser Sir Henry Herbert is in the Dyce Library at South Kensington ; a note in the licenser's autograph states that the original manuscript was lost. Apart from pieces written by students for the Universities, all save some half-a-dozen autographs of Elizabethan and Jacobean plaj^s seem to have disappeared, and the contemporary scrivener's transcripts which survive are few. A good example of a private transcript made for a patron by a professional scribe is a draft of Beaumont and Fletcher's Humorous Lieutenant dated in 1625, which is preserved among the WjTin MSS. at Peniarth. Fair copies of like calibre of six plays of William Percy, a minor dramatist, were until lately in the Duke of Devonshire's collection, and nine plays avowedly prepared for a patron by their author Cosmo Manuche belonged in the eighteenth century to the Marquis of Northampton. Of private transcripts which were acquired and preserved by contemporary actors, two good specimens are a copy of The Telltale, an anonymous comedy in five acts, among the Dulwich College manuscripts, No. xx, and a copy of Middleton's Witch among Malone's MSS. at the Bodleian. The actor Alleyn'e manuscript copy of portions of Greene's play of Orlando Furioso also at Dulwich (I. No. 138) presents many points of interest. The Egerton MS. 1994 contains as many as fifteen transcripts QUAKTOS AND FOLIOS 561 There are marked inequalities in the textual value of the thirty-six plays of the First Folio. The twenty newly published pieces vary greatly in authenticity. Jextual 'The Tempest; 'The Two Gentlemen of the newly Verona,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'A Winter's Tale,' pCys^'^ ' Julius Csesar,' and ' Antony and Cleopatra ' adhere, it would seem, very closely to the form in which they came from the author's pen. ' The Taming of the Shrew,' ' The Comedy of Errors,' ' As You Like It,' the three parts of ' Henry VI,' ' King John,' and ' Henry VIII ' follow fairly accurate transcripts. But the remaining six pieces, ' All's Well that Ends Well,' ' Measure for Measure,' ' Macbeth,' ' Coriolanus,' ' Cymbeline,' and ' Timon of Athens,' are very corrupt versions and abound in copyists' incoherences. With regard to the sixteen plays of which printed Quartos were available, the editors of the First Folio ignored eight „, . , of the preceding editions. Of ' Richard III,' neglected ' Merry Wives,' ' Henry V,' ' Othello,' ' Lear,' Quartos. .^ Henry IV,' 'Hamlet,' and ' Troilus and Cressida,' all of which were in print, manuscript versions were alone laid under contribution by the Foho. The Quartos of ' Richard III,' ' Merry Wives,' and ' Henry V ' lacked authentic value, and the FoHo editors did good service in superseding them. Elsewhere their neglect of the Quartos reflects on their critical acumen. of plays nearly aU of which seem to answer the description of private transcripts made either for actors or for their friends or patrons. The publisher, Humphrey Moseley, when he collected in a folio volume the un- printed plays of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, informed his readers that he ' had the originalls from such as received them from the Authors themselves,' that ' when private friends desir'd a copy, they [i.e. the Actors] then (and justly too) transcribed what they Acted,' and that ' 'twere vain to mention the chargeableness of this work [i.e. the cost of gathering the scattered plays for collective publication], for those who own'd the Manuscripts too well knew their value to make a cheap esti- mate of any of these Pieces.' Moseley brought the ' copy ' together after the theatres wore closed and their libraries dispersed, but hi? references to the distribution of dramatic manuscripts and the manner of col- lecting them presume practices of old standing. See p. 554 n. 562 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE In the case of ' Lear ' and ' Troilus and Cressida,' several passages of value which figure in the Quartos are omitted by the Foho, and the FoHo additions need supplementing before the texts can be reckoned complete. Similar relations subsist between the text of the Second Quarto of ' Hamlet ' and the independent Foho version of the play. On the other hand, the new Folio text of ' Othello ' improves on the Quarto text. The FoUo text of ' The Second Part of Henry IV ' supplies important passages absent from the Quarto ; yet it is inferior to its predecessor in general accuracy. Of the remaining eight Quartos substantial use was made by the Folio editors, in spite of the comprehensive ^^ . ^, slur which they cast on all pre-existing editions. The eight '' \ , ,. . i • n reprinted At times the editors made additions chiefly Quartos. ^^ ^j^^ ^^^^ ^j stage directions to such Quarto texts as they employed. If the Quarto existed in more than one edition, the Folio editors usually accepted the guidance of a late issue, however its textual value compared with its predecessor. The only Quarto of ' Love's Labour's Lost ' — that of 1598 — was reproduced literally, but without scrupulous care. ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' followed rather more carefully the text of Pavier's (second) Quarto, which is said to have been falsely dated 1600. The FoUo version of ' Richard II ' follows the late (fourth) Quarto of 1615, which is for the most part less trustworthy than the first Quarto of 1597 — in spite of the temporary suppression there of great part of the deposition scene first supphed in the third Quarto of 1608. ' Romeo and Juliet ' is taken from the third Quarto of 1609, and though the punctuation is improved and the stage directions expanded, the Foho text shows some typographical degeneracy. The First Folio prints the 1611 (the third) Quarto of 'Titus Andronicus ' with new stage directions, some textual alterations and some additions including one necessary scene (act iii. sc. 2). ' The First Part of Henry IV ' is printed from the fifth Quarto of 1613 with a good many corrections. ' The Merchant of Venice ' is faithful to the 1600 or the earher of two Quarto issues, and ' Much Ado ' is loyal to the only QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 563 Quarto of 1600 ; in both cases new stage directions are added. As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary foHos of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly gra^ h^°' printed. It looks as though Jaggard's printing office were undermanned. Proofs that the book was printed ofiF without adequate supervision could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Passages in foreign languages are rarely intelligible, and testify with singular completeness to the proofreader's inefficiency. Apart from misprints in the text, errors in pagination and in the signatures recur with embarrassing frequency. Many headUnes are irregular. Capital letters irresponsibly distin- guish words within the sentence, and although italic type is more methodically employed, the implicit rules are often disobeyed. The system of punctuation which was adopted by Jacobean printers of plays differed from our own ; it would seem to have followed rhythmical rather than logical principles ; commas, semicolons, colons, brackets and hj^hens indicated the pauses which the rhythm required. But the punctuation of the First FoUo often ignored all just methods.^ The sheets seem to have been worked off very slowly, and corrections, as was common, were made while the press was working, so that the copies struck off later differ occasionally from the earlier copies. An irregularity which is common to all copies is that ' Troilus and Cressida,' though in the body of the book it opens the section of tragedies, is not mentioned at all in the table of contents, and the play is unpaged except on its second and third pages, which bear the numbers 79 and 80.^ Several copies are distinguished 1 To Mr. Percy Simpson is due the credit of determining in his Shakespearian Punctuation (1911) the true principles of Elizabethan and Jacobean punctuation. ^ Cf. p. 3()9 supra. Full descriptions of this and other irregularities of the First Folio are given in the present author's Introduction to the Oxford facsimile of the First Folio, 1902. 2 o 2 564 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE by more interesting irregularities, in some cases unique. Copies in the Public Library in New York and the Barton collection in the Boston Public Library, Irregular jy^g ^j^g copy sold in 1897 to an American copies. -^ '' collector by Bishop John Vertue, include a cancel duplicate of a leaf of ' As You Like It ' (sheet R of the Comedies).^ In Bishop Samuel Butler's copy, now in the National Library at Paris, a proof leaf of ' Hamlet ' was bound up with the corrected leaf .^ The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears in one of the two copies of the book which belonged to ^^ the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and is now The Sheldon the property of Mr. Burdett-Coutts. This copy, ^°^^' which is known as the Sheldon Folio, formed in the seventeenth century part of the library of the Sheldon family of Weston Manor in the parish rf Long Compton, Warwickshire, not very far from Stratford- on-Avon.2 A subsequent owner was John Home Tooke, the radical politician and philologist, who scattered about the margins of the volume many manuscript notes attesting an unqualified faith in the authenticity of the First Foho text.* In the Sheldon Folio the opening page ^ The copy in the New York Public Library was bought by Lenox the American collector at Sotheby's in 1855 for 1631. 16s. He inserted a title-page (inlaid and bearing the wilfully mutUated date 1622) from another copy, which had been described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821 (xxi. 449) as then in the possession of Messrs. J. and A. Arch, booksellers, of Cornhill. * This is described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, xxi. 449-50. ^ The book would seem to have been acquired in 1628 by William Sheldon of Weston (who was born there March 9, 1588-9, and died on April 9, 1659). Its next owner was apparently William Sheldon's son, Ralph Sheldon (who was born on Aug. 4, 1623, and died without issue on June 24, 1684), and from him the book passed to his cousin and heir, also Ralph Sheldon, who died on Dec. 20, 1720. A note in a contem- porary hand records that the copy was bought in 1628 for 31. 15s., a somewhat extravagant price. A fm-ther entry says that it cost three score pounds of silver, i.e. pounds Scot (= 60 shillings). The Sheldon family arms are on the sides of the volume. * Home Tooke, whose marginal notes interpret^difficult words, cor- rect misprints, or suggest^new readings, presented the volume in 1810 QUAKTOS AND FOLIOS 565 of ' Troilus and Cressida,' of which the recto or front is occupied by the prologue and the verso or back by the opening Unes of the text of the play, is followed by a super- fluous leaf. On the recto or front of the unnecessary leaf '■ are printed the concluding hnes of ' Romeo and JuUet ' in place of the prologue to ' Troilus and Cressida.' At the back or verso are the opening lines of ' Troilus and Cressida ' repeated from the preceding page. The presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page proves that the two are taken from different settings of the type. At a later page in the Sheldon copy the concluding Unes of ' Romeo and Juliet ' are duly reprinted at the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, which supplies them in their right place, is the opening passage, as in other copies, of ' Timon of Athens.' These curious con- fusions attest that while the work was in course of composi- tion the printers or editors of the volume at one time intended to place ' Troilus and Cressida,' with the prologue omitted, after ' Romeo and Juliet.' The last page of ' Romeo and Juliet ' is in all copies numbered 79, an obvious misprint for 77 ; the first leaf of ' Troilus ' is unpaged ; but the second and third pages of ' Troilus ' are numbered 79 and 80. It was doubtless determined suddenly while the volume was in the press to transfer ' Troilus and Cressida ' to the head of the tragedies from a place near the to his friend Sir Francis Burdett. On Sir Francis's death in 1844 it passed to his only son, Sir Robert Burdett, whose sister, the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, inherited it on Sir Robert's death in 1880. In his ' Div- ersions of Pm-ley ' (ed. 1840, p. 338) Home Tooke wrote thus of the First Folio which he studied in this copy : ' The First Folio, in my opinion, is the only edition worth regarding. And it is much to be wished, that an edition of Shakespeare were given literatim according to the First Folio ; which is now become so scarce and dear, that few persons can obtain it. For, by the presumptuous licence of the dwarfish commentators, who are for ever cutting him down to their own size, we risque the loss of Shakespeare's genuine text ; which that Folio assuredly contains ; notwithstanding some few slight errors of the press, which might be noted, without altering.' 1 It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the leaf is missing, but it was presumably G Q 3. 566 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the further extensive correction of the pagination that was required by the play's change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to go forth unnumbered.^ Yet another copy of the First FoUo presents unique features of a different kind of interest. Mr. Coningsby Sib- thorp of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, possesses Ta per QT'd's presenta- a copy which has been in the library of his ^l°° ^°Py family for more than a century, and is beyond First doubt one of the very earliest that came from the press of the printer William Jaggard. The title-page, which bears Shakespeare's portrait, shows the plate in an early state, and the engraving is printed with unusual firmness and clearness. Although the copy is not at all points perfect and several leaves have been suppUed in facsimile, it is a taller copy than any other, being I3h inches high, and thus nearly half an inch superior in stature to that of any other known copy. The binding, rough calf, is partly original ; and on the title-page is a manuscript inscription, in contemporary handwriting of indisputable authenticity, attesting that the copy was a gift to an intimate friend by the printer Jaggard. The inscription reads thus : The fragment of the original binding is stamped with an heraldic device, in which a muzzled bear holds a banner in its left paw and in its right a squire's helmet. There is a crest of a bear's head above, and beneath is a scroll with the motto 'Augusta Vincenti ' (i.e. 'proud things to the ^ The copy of the First Folio which belonged to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, of New York, contains a like irregularity. See the present writer's Ce,nsus oj Extant Copies of the First Folio, a supplement to the Facsimile Reproduction (Oxford 1902). QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 567 conqueror '). This motto proves to be a pun on the name of the owner of the heraldic badge — Augustine Vincent, a highly respected official of the College of Arms, who is knoMTi from independent sources to have been, at the date of the publication, in intimate relations with the printer of the First Folio.^ It is therefore clear that it was to Augustine Vincent that Jaggard presented as a free gift one of the first copies of this great volume which came from his press. The inscription on the title-page is in Vincent's handwriting. ^ Shortly before this great Shakespearean enterprise was undertaken, Vincent the Herald and Jaggard the printer had been jointly the object of a violent and slanderous attack by a perverse-tempered personage named Ralph Brooke. This Brooke was one of Vincent's colleagues at the College of Arms. He could never forgive the bestowal, some years earlier, of an office superior to his own on an outsider, a stranger to the College, William Camden, the distinguished writer on history and archaeology. From that time forth he made it the business of his life to attack in print Camden and his friends, of whom Vincent was one. He raised objection to the grant of arms to Shakespeare, for which Camden would seem to have been mainly responsible (see p. 284 supra). His next step was to compile and publish a Catalogue of the Nobility, a Bort of controversial Peerage, in which he claimed, with abusive vigour, to expose Camden and his friends' ignorance of the genealogies of the great families of England. Brooke's book was printed in 1619 by Jaggard. The Camden faction discovered in it abundance of dis- creditable errors. The errors were due, Brooke replied, in a corrected edition of 1622, to the incompetence of his printer Jaggard. Then Augustine Vincent, Camden's friend, the first owner of the Sibthorp copy of the First Folio, set himself to prove Brooke's pretentious incom- petence and malignity. Jaggard, who resented Brooke's aspersions on his professional skill in typography, not only printed and published Vincent's Discovery of Brooke's Errors, as Vincent entitled his reply, but inserted in Vincent's volume a personal vindication of his printing- office from Brooke's strictures. Vincent's denunciation of Brooke, to which Jaggard contributed his caustic preface, was published in 1622, and gave Brooke his quietus. Incidentally, Jaggard and his ally Vincent avenged Brooke's criticism of the great dramatist's right to the arms that the Heralds' CoUege, at the instance of Vincent's friend Camden, had granted him long before. It was appropriate that Jaggard when he next year engaged in the great enterprise of the Shakespeare First Folio should present his friend and fellow-victor in the recent strife with an early copy of the volume. (See art. by present writer in Cornhill Magazine, April 1899.) 568 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE A copy of the Folio delivered in sheets by the Stationers' Company late in 1623 to the librarian of the Bodleian, „ Oxford, was sent for binding to an Oxford The Turbutt binder on February 17, 1623-4, and, being duly copy. returned to the Ubrary, was chained to the shelves. The volume was sold by the curators of the Bodleian as a duplicate on purchasing a copy of the Third Folio in 1664 ; but it was in 1906 re-purchased for the Bodleian from Mr. W. G. Turbutt of Ogsdon Hall, Derby- shire, an ancestor of whom seems to have acquired it soon after it left the Bodleian Library. The portrait is from the plate in its second state. ^ The First Folio is intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English literature, and extrinsically is only exceeded in value by some half-dozen number of volumes of far earlier date and of exceptional extaat typographical interest. The original edition copies. J IT o J. o probably numbered 500 copies. Of these more than one hundred and eighty are now traceable, one-third of them being in America. ^ Several of the extant copies are very defective, and most have undergone extensive reparation. Only fourteen are in a quite perfect state, that is, with the portrait printed {not inlaid) on the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured. (The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson's verses attesting the truthfulness of the portrait.) Excellent copies which remain in Great Britain in this enviable state are in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the Ubraries of the Earl of Crawford and Mr. W. A. Burdett- ^ The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare, by F. Madan, G. R. M. Turbutt, and S. Gibson, Oxford, 1905, fol. A second copy of the First Folio in the Bodleian is in the Alalone collec- tion and has been in the library since 1821. * One hundred and sixty copies in various conditions were described by me in the Census of Extant Copies appended to the Oxford Facsimile of the First Folio (1902), and fourteen additional copies in Notes and Additions to the Census, 1906. Six further copies have since come under my notice. Of fourteen first-rate copies which were in England in 1902, five have since been sold to American collectors. QUAETOS AND FOLIOS 569 Coutts. Two other copies of equal merit, which were formerly the property of A. H. Huth and the Duke of Devonshire respectively, have recently passed to America. The Huth copy was presented to Yale University by Mr. A. W. Cochran in 1911. The Duke's famous copy became the property of Mr. Archer Huntington of New York in 1914. A good but somewhat inferior copy, formerly the property of Frederick Locker-Lampson of Rowfant, was bequeathed in 1913 to Harvard University by Harry Elkins Widener of Philadelphia. Several good copies of the volume have lately been acquired by Mr. H. C. Folger of New York. On the continent of Europe three copies of the First Foho are known. One is in the Royal Library at Berlin, and another in the Library of Padua University, coD'es^^^*^^ but both of these are imperfect ; the third copy, which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, is perfect save that the preliminary verses and title-page are mounted.^ The ' Daniel ' copy which belonged to the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and is on the whole the finest and cleanest extant, measures 13 1 inches by 8^, and was vaiu^oT^^ purchased by the Baroness for 716?. 25. at the First the sale of George Daniel's hbrary in 1864. This comparatively small sum was long the highest price paid for the book. A perfect copy, measuring 12^3^ inches by 7f|, fetched 840?. (4200 doUars) at the sale of Mr. Brayton Ives's hbrary in New York, in March 1891. A copy, measuring 13f inches by 8|, was privately purchased for more than 1000?. by the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, of New York, in June 1899, of Mr. C. J. Toovey, bookseller, of Piccadilly, London. A copy measuring 12 J inches by 8|, which had long been in Belgium, was pur- chased by Mr. Bernard Buchanan Macgeorge, of Glasgow, ^ The Paris copy was bought at the sale of Samuel Butler, Bishop of Lichfield, in 1840, together with copies of the other three Folios ; the First Folio sold for 1875 francs (751.) and each of the others for 500 francs {201.) (M. Jusserand in Athenceum, August 8, 1908.) 570 WILLIAJVI SHAKESPEAEE for IIOOI., at a London sale, July 11, 1899, and was in June 1905 sold, with copies of the Second, Third, and Fourth FoUos, to Mr. Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, U.S.A., for an aggregate sum of 10,000?. On March 23, 1907, the copy of the First Folio formerly in the library of the late Frederick Locker-Lampson, of Rowfant, and now at Harvard, fetched at Sotheby's 3600Z. ; this is the largest sum yet realised at public auction.^ The Second Folio edition was printed in 1632 by Thomas Cotes for a syndicate of five stationers, John Smethwick, William Aspley, Richard Hawkins, Richard Second Meighen and Robert Allot, each of whose names figures separately with their various addresses as pubHsher on different copies. Copies supply- ing Meighen's name as publisher are very rare. To Allot, whose name is most often met with on the title-page, Blount had transferred, on November 16, 1630, his rights in the sixteen plays which were first Ucensed for publication in 1623.2 ijij^Q Second FoUo was reprinted from the First ; a few corrections were made in the text, but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless, and prove the editor's incompetence.^ Charles I's copy is at Windsor, and Charles IPs at the British Museum. The ' Perkins FoUo,' formerly in the Duke of Devonshire's possession, in which John Payne Collier introduced forged emendations, was ^ A reprint of the First Folio unwarrantedly purporting to be exact was published in 1807-8 ; it bears the imprint ' E. and J. Wright. St. John's Square [ClerkenweU].' The best tj'pe-reprint was issued in three parts by Lionel Booth in 1861, 1863, and 1864. A photo-zinoo- graphic reproduction, by Sir Henry James and Howard Staunton, appeared in sixteen parts (Feb. 1864-Oct. 1865). A greatly reduced photographic facsimile followed in 1876, with a preface by Halliwell- Phillipps. In 1902 the Oxford University Press issued a collotype facsimile of the Duke of Devonshire's copy at Chatsworth, with intro- duction and a census of copies by the present writer. Notes and Additions to the Cens%is followed in 1906. * Arber, Stationers' Registers, iii. 242-3. ' Malone examined, once for all, the textual alterations of the Second Folio in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1790). See Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, i. 208-26. QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 571 a copy of that of 1632> The highest price paid at pubHc auction is 13501., which was reached at the sale in New York of Robert Hoe's Library on May 3, 1911 ; the copy bore Allot's imprint. Mr. Macgeorge acquired for 540^ at the Earl of Orford's sale in 1895 the copy formerly belonging to George Daniel ; this passed to Mr. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1905 with copies of the First, Third, and Fourth FoUos for 10,000^. The Third FoUo — mainly a reprint of the Second — was first published in 1663 by Philip Chet\\'ynde, who reissued it next year with the addition of seven plays. Third SIX of which have no claim to admission among ° °' Shakespeare's works. ^ ' Unto this impression,' runs the title-page of 1664, ' is added seven Playes never before printed in folio, viz. : Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigal. The History of Thomas Ld. Crom- well. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorksliire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine.' Shakespeare's partial responsibility for ' Pericles ' justified a place among his works, but its six companions in the Third Folio were all spurious pieces which had been at- tributed by unprincipled publishers to Shakespeare in his lifetime. Fewer copies of the Third FoUo are reputed to be extant than of the Second or Fourth, owing ^ On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the AthencBum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ' Tho Perkins his Booke,' was anno- tated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ' essential ' manu- script readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy followed, but in 1859 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, of the British Museum, in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand. * The 1663 impression has the imprint * Printed for Philip Chet- wynde ' and that of 1664 ' Printed for P. C The 1664 impression removes the portrait from the title-page, and prints it as a frontispiece on the leaf facing the title, with Ben Jonson's verses below. The Fourth Folio adopts the same procedure. 572 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (according to George Steevens) to the destruction of many unsold impressions in the Fire of London in 1666. On June 1, 1907, a copy of the 1663 impression fetched at Sotheby's 1550Z., and on May 3, 1911, a copy of the 1664 impression fetched at the sale in New York of Robert Hoe's library the large sum of 3300Z. The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 ' for H. Herringman, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,' reprints the folio of 1664 without change except in the way of Fourth modernising the spelling, and of increasing the Folio. number of initial capitals within the sentence.^ Two hundred and fifteen pounds is the highest price yet reached by the Fourth Folio at public auction. ^ In the imprint of many copies Chiswell's name is omitted. In a few copies the imprint has the rare variant : ' Printed for H. Herringman, and are to be sold by Joseph Knight and Francis Saunders, at the Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange.' XXIV EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER Dryden in his ' Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the last Age' (1672) ^expressed surprise at the reverence extended to Shakespeare in view of the fact that every Perplexities *• ... of the early page in the accessible editions presented texts. some ' solecism in speech or some notorious flaw in sense.' Many of the defects which Dryden imputed to the early texts were due to misapprehension either of the forms of Elizabethan or Jacobean speech or of the methods of Ehzabethan or Jacobean typography. Yet later readers of the Folios or Quartos, who were better versed than Dryden in hterary archaeology, echoed his complaint. It was natural that, as Shakespearean stud}' deepened, efforts should be made to remove from the printed text the many perplexities which were due to the early printers' spelling vagaries, their misreadings of the ' copy,' and their inability to reproduce intelligently any sentence in a foreign language. The work of textual purgation began very early in the eighteenth century and the FoUo versions, which at the time enjoyed the widest circulation, chiefly engaged century editorial ingenuity. The eighteenth-century editors. editors of the collected works endeavoured with varying degrees of success to free the text of the in- coherences of the Fohos. Before long they acknowledged 1 Dryden's ' Essay ' was also entitled Defence of the Epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada ; see Dryden's Essays, ed. Ker, i. 165. 574 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE a more or less binding obligation to restore, where good taste or good sense required it, the readings of the neglected Quartos. Since 1685, when the Fourth Folio appeared, some two hundred independent editions of the collected works have been published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many thousand editions of separate plays. The vast figures bear witness to the amount of energy and ingenuity which the textual emendation and elucidation of Shake- speare have engaged. The varied labours of the eighteenth- century editors were in due time co-ordinated and win- nowed by their successors of the nineteenth century. In the result Shakespeare's work has been made intelligible to successive generations of general readers untrained in criticism, and the universal significance of his message has suffered little from textual imperfections and diffi- culties. A sound critical method was not reached rapidly.^ Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne's reign, and poet laureate to George I, made the first Rowe, attempt to edit the work of Shakespeare. He 1674-1718. produced an edition of his plays in six octavo volumes in 1709, and another hand added a seventh volume which included the poems (1710) and an essay on the drama by a critic of some contemporary repute, Charles Gildon. A new impression in eight volumes followed in 1714, again with a supplementary (ninth) volume adding the poems and a critical essay by Gildon. Rowe pre- fixed a valuable life of the poet embodying traditions which were in danger of perishing without a record. The great actor Betterton visited Stratford in order to 1 A useful account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by the late Dr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of National Biography supply much information. See also Eighteenth- century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith, 1903 ; T. R. Lounsbury, The First Editors of Shakespeare {Pope and Theobald), 1906 ; and Ernest Walder, ' The Text of Shakespeare,' in Cambridge History of Literature, vol. v. pt. i. pp. 258-82. EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 575 supply Rowe with local information.^ His text mainly followed that of the Fourth Folio. The plays were printed in the same order, and ' Pericles ' and the six spurious pieces were brought together at the end. Rowe made no systematic study of the First Foho or of the Quartos, but in the case of ' Romeo and Juliet ' he met with an early Quarto while his edition was passing through the press and he inserted at the end of the play the prologue which is met with only in the Quartos. A late Quarto of ' Hamlet ' (1676) also gave him some suggestions. He made a few happy emendations, some of which coincide accidentally with the readings of the First FoUo ; but his text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis personce to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected and modernised. The poet Pope was Shakespeare's second editor. His edition in six spacious quarto volumes was completed . . ^ , in 1725, and was issued by the chief publisher Pope, of the day, Jacob Tonson. ' Pericles ' and the -1744- gjjj. spurious plays were excluded. The poems, edited by Dr. George Sewell, with an essay on the rise and progress of the stage, and a glossary, appeared in an independent seventh volume. In his preface Pope, while he fully recognised Shakespeare's native genius, deemed his achievement deficient in artistic quality. Pope had indeed few qualifications for his task, and the venture, moreover, was a commercial failure. His claim to have collated the text of the Fourth Folio with that of all pre- ceding editions cannot be accepted. There are indica- tions that he had access to the First Folio and to some of the Quartos. But it is clear that Pope based his text ^ John Hughes, the poetaster, who edited Spenser, corrected the proofs of the 1714 edition and supplied an index or glossary ( Variornm Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 677). 576 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE substantially on that of Rowe. His innovations are numerous, and although they are derived from ' his private sense and conjecture,' are often plausible and ingenious. He was the first to indicate the ' place ' of each new scene, and he improved on Rowe's scenic subdivision. A second edition of Pope's version in ten duodecimo volumes appeared in 1728 with Sewell's name on the title-page as well as Pope's ; the ninth volume supplied ' Pericles ' and the six spurious plays. There were very few alterations in the text, though a preliminary table supplied a list of twenty-eight Quartos, which Pope claimed to have consulted. In 1734 the publisher Tonson issued aU the plays in Pope's text in separate 12mo. volumes which were distributed at a low price by book-pedlars throughout the country. ^ A fine reissue of Pope's edition was printed on Garrick's suggestion at Birmingham from Baskerville's types in 1768. Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, although contemptible as a writer of original verse . and prose, proved himself the most inspired Theobald, of all the textual critics of Shakespeare. Pope -1744- savagely avenged himself on his censor by holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the original edition of the ' Dunciad ' in 1728. Theobald first dis- played his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which deserves to rank as a classic in English literature. The title runs ' Shakespeare Restored, or a specimen of the many errors as weU committed as unamended by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet, designed not only to correct the said edition but to restore the true reading of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet publish'd.' There at page 137 appears the classical emendation in Shakespeare's account of Falstaff's death (' Henry V,' n. iii. 17) : ' His nose was ^ This was the first attempt to distribute Shakespeare's complete works in a cheap form ; it proved so successful that a rival publisher R. Walker ' of the Shakespeare's Head,' London, started a like venture in rivalry also in 1734. Tonson denounced Walker's edition as a cor- rupt piracy, and Walker retorted on Tonson with the identical charge. EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 577 as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields,' iii place of the reading in the old copies, ' His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.' ^ In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of Shakespeare in seven volumes. In 1740 it reached a second issue. A third edition was published in 1752. Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold.^ Theobald made a just use of the First Folio and of the contem- porary Quartos, yet he did not disdain altogether Pope's discredited version, and his ' gift of conjecture ' led him to reject some correct readings of the original editions. Over 300 original corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have, however, become part and parcel ^of the authorised canon. In dealing with admitted corruptions Theobald remains unrivalled, and he has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism. ^ His principles of textual criti- cism were as enlightened as his practice was ordinarily triumphant. ' I ever labour,' he wrote to Warburton, ' to make the smallest deviation that 1 possibly can from the text ; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense ; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.' The following are favour- able specimens of Theobald's insight. In ' Macbeth ' ^ Theobald doea not claim the invention of this conjecture. He writes ' I have an edition of Shakespeare bjr Me w ith some Marginal Conjectures of a Gentleman sometime deceas'd, and he is of the Mind to correct the Passage thus.' * Theobald's editorial fees amounted to 6521. 10s., a substantial sum when contrasted with SQL 10s. granted to Rowe (together with 281. Is. to his assistant, John Hughes), and with 2171. 12s. received by Pope, whose assistants received 781. lis. Qd. Of later eighteenth- century editors, Warburton received 360/., Dr. Johnson 480/., and Capell 300/. Cf. Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, vol. ii. p. 677. ^ Churton Collins's admirable essay on Theobald's textual criti- cism of Shakespeare, entitled ' The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,' is reprinted from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq. 2 p 578 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE (I. vii. 6) for ' this bank and school of time,' he substituted the famihar ' bank and shoal of time,' and he first gave the witches the epithet ' weird ' which he derived from Holinshed, therewith supplanting the m- effective ' weyward ' of the First Folio. In ' Antony and Cleopatra ' the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony : For his bountj', There vra,s no winter in't ; an Anthony it was That grew the more by reaping. For the gibberish ' an Anthony it was,' Theobald read ' an autumn 'twas,' and thus gave the lines true point and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in ' Coriolanus ' (n. i. 59-60) when Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version ' what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character ? ' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' {i.e. purbhnd), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ' Hamlet ' (ii. ii. 529).^ The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hanmer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing a large measure of mother wit. He was Speaker Thomas ^^ ^he Housc of Commons for a few months in Hanmer 1714, and retu'ing soon afterwards from public life devoted his leisure to a thoroughgoing scrutiny of Shakespeare's plays. His edition, which was the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was finely printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hay man, and was long highly valued by book collectors. No editor's name was given. In forming his text, which he 1 Collier doubtless followed Theobald's hint when he pretended to have foimd in his ' Perkins Folio ' the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of ' bisson multitude ' for ' bosom multiplied ' in Coriolanus's speech : How shall this bisson multitude digest The senate's courtesy ? — Coriolanus (ra. i. 131-3). EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 579 claimed to have ' carefully revised and corrected from the former editions,' Hanmer founded his edition on the work of Pope and Theobald and he adopted many of their conjectures. He made no recourse to the old copies. At the same time his own ingenuity was responsible for numerous original alterations and in the result he supplied a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted. ^ Hanmer's edition was reprinted in 1770-1. In 1747 William Warburton, a blustering divme of multifarious reading, who was a friend of Pope and became Bsho Bishop of Gloucester in 1759, produced a new Warburton, edition of Shakespeare in eight volumes, on the I 9 -1779- title-pages of which he joined Pope's name with his own. Warburton had smaller qualification for the task than Pope, whose labours he eulogised extravagantly. He boasted of his own performance that ' the Genuine Text (collated with all the former editions and then corrected and emended) is here settled.' It is doubtful if he examined any early texts. He worked on the editions of Pope and Theobald, making occasional reference to Hanmer. He is credited with a few sensible emendations, e.g. ' Being a god kissing carrion,' in place of ' Being a good kissing carrion ' of former editions of ' Hamlet ' (ii. ii. 182). But such improvements as he introduced are mainly bor- rowed from Theobald or Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. Most of his reckless changes defied all known principles of Ehzabethan speech, and he justified them by arguments of irrelevant pedantry. The Bishop was consequently ^ A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King Lear, m. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar's enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line ' Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].' For the last word Hanmer substituted ' lym,' which was the Elizabethan sjTionym for bloodhound. In Hamlet (iii. iv. 4) Hanmer first substituted Polonius's ' I'll sconce me here ' for ' I'll silence me here ' (of the Quartos and Folios), and in Midsummer Night's Dream (l. i. 187), Helena's ' Your words I catch ' for ' Ymirs would I catch ' (of the Quartos and Folios). 580 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers ; among them, by Thomas Edwards, a country gentleman of much literary discrimina- tion, whose witty ' Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare ' first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed ' The Canons of Criticism ' next year in the third edition, passed through as many as seven editions by 1765. Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition in eight volumes in 1765, and a second issue followed three years later. Although he made some Johnson, independent collation of the Quartos and 1709-17 4- restored some passages %vhich the Folios ignored, his textual labours were slight, and his verbal notes, however felicitous at times, show little close know- ledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. But in his preface and elsewhere he displays a genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare's greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to indicate con- vincingly Shakespeare's triumphs of characterisation. Dr. Johnson's praise is always helpful, although his blame is often arbitrary and misplaced.^ The seventh editor, Edward Capell, who long filled the office of Examiner of Plays, advanced on his predecessors in many respects. He was a clumsy writer, Capell, and Johnson declared, with some justice, 1713-17 I- ^jjg^^ ]^g ' gabbled monstrously,' but his collation of the Quartos and the First and Second Folios was con- ducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his forerunners, not excepting Theo- bald. He also first studied with care the principles of Shakespeare's metre. Although his conjectural changes are usually clumsy his industry was untiring ; he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. Capell's edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768. He showed himself well versed in 1 Cf. Johnson on Shakespeare, by Walter Raleigh, London, 1908. EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 581 Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which ap- peared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled ' Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,' which were not pubhshed till 1783, two years after his death. The last volume, ' The School of Shakespeare,' supplied ' authentic extracts ' from English books of the poet's day.i George Steevens, a literary knight-errant whose saturn- ine humour involved him in a Ufelong series of quarrels „ with rival students of Shakespeare, made in- George . . r ' Steevens, valuable contributions to Shakespearean study. 173 -I 00. j^ 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from copies of the Quartos which Garrick lent him. Soon after- wards he 'revised Johnson's edition without much assist- ance from the Doctor, and his revision, which accepted many of Capell's hints and embodied numerous original improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 1773. It was long regarded as the standard version. Steevens's antiqua- rian knowledge alike of Elizabethan history and literature was greater than that of any previous editor ; his citations of parallel passages from the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in elucidation of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors. All commentators of recent times are more deeply indebted in this department of their labours to Steevens than to any other critic. But he lacked taste as well as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare's sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, ' the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.' ^ The second edition of Johnson and Steevens's version appeared in ten volumes in 1778. The third edition, published in ten volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens's 1 Capell gave to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1779, his valuable Shakespearean library, of which an excellent catalogue (' Capell's Shakespeareana '), prepared for the College by Mr. W. W. Greg, was privately issued in 1903. * Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7. 582 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE friend, Isaac Reed (1742-1807), a scholar of his own type. The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens's life- time, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not Avithout humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose sur- names were in each instance appended. He had known and quarrelled with both. Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Giflford applied to him of ' the Puck of Commentators.' Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens's quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archaeo- Edmund logist, without much ear for poetry or delicate Malone, literary taste. He threw abundance of new 1741-1 12. j^g]^^ Q^ Shakespeare's biography and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone is due the first rational ' attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.' His earliest conclusions on the topic were contributed to Steevens's edition of 1778. Two years later he published, as a ' Supplement ' to Steevens's work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, Avith reprints of Arthur Broke's ' Romeus and Juliet,' Shakespeare's Poems, ' Pericles ' and the six plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued ' A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,' tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts. ' Pericles,' together Avith all Shakespeare's poems, was here first admitted to the authentic canon, Avliile EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 583 the six spurious companions of ' Pericles ' (in the Third and Fourth Folios) were definitely excluded. ^ What is known among booksellers as the ' First Variorum ' edition of Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens's ^itions™ death. It was based on a copy of Steevens's work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous manuscrij^t additions, and it embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was published in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The ' Second Variorum ' edition, which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 1813. The ' Third Variorum ' was prepared for the press by James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson's biographer. It was based on Malone's edition of 1790, but included ^ The series of editions ^^ith which Johnson, Steevens, Reed and Malone were associated inaugurated Shakespearean study in America. The first edition to be printed in America was begun in Philadelphia in 1795. It was completed in eight volumes next year. The title-page claimed that the text was ' corrected from the latest and best London editions, with notes by Samuel Johnson.' The inclusion of the poems sug- gests that Malone's edition of 1790 was mainly followed. This Philadelphia edition of 1795-G proved the parent of an enormous family in the United States. An edition of Shakespeare from the like text appeared at Boston for the first time in 8 volumes, being issued by Munroe and Francis in 1802—4. The same firm published at Boston in 1807 the variorum edition of 1803 which thej' reissued in 1810-2. Two other Boston editions from the text of Isaac Reed followed in 1813, one in one large volume and the other in six volumes. An edition on original lines by E. W. B. Peabody appeared in seven volumes at Boston in 1836. At New York the first edition of Shakespeare was issued by Collins and Hanney in 1821 in ten volumes and it reappeared in 1824. Meanwhile further editions appeared at Philadelphia in 1809 (in 17 vols.) and in 1823 (in 8 vols.). Of these early American editions only the Boston edition of 1813 (in 6 vols.) is in the British Museum. (See Catalogue of the Barton Collection in the Boston Public Library by J. M. Hubbard, Boston 1880.) The first wholly original critical edition to be undertaken in America appeared in New York in serial parts 1844-6 under the direc- tion of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870), Vice-Chancellor of the University of New York, with woodcuts after previously published designs of Kenny Meadows, William Harvey, and others ; Verplanck's edition reappeared in three volumes at New York in 1847 and was long the standard American edition. 584 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by Malone at his death. Malone had been long engaged on a revision of his edition, but died in 1812, before it was com- pleted. Boswell's ' Malone,' as the new work is often called, appeared in tAventy-one volumes in 1821. It is the most valuable of all collective editions of Shakespeare's works. The three volumes of prolegomena, and the illustrative notes concluding the final volume, form a rich store- house of Shakespearean criticism and of biographical, historical and bibliographical information, derived from all manner of first-hand sources. Unluckily the vast material is confusedly arranged and is unindexed ; many of the essays and notes break off abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone's death. A new ' Variorum ' edition, on an exhaustive scale, was undertaken by INIr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, who between 1871 and his death in 1912 prepared Variorum ^^^ publication the fifteen plays, 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet,' 2 vols., 'King Lear,' ' Othello,' ' Merchant of Venice,' ' As You Like It,' ' Tempest,' ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' ' Winter's Tale,' 'Much Ado,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' ' Antony and Cleopatia,' and ' Cymbeline.' Mi-. Furness, who based his text on the First Folio, not merely brought together the apparatus criticus of his predecessors but added a large amount of shrewd original comment. IVIr. Fumess's son, Horace Howard Furness, junior, edited on his father's plan ' Richard III ' in 1908, and since his father's death he is contmuing the series ; ' JuKus Caesar ' was published in 1913. Of nineteenth-century editors who have prepared collective editions of Shakespeare's work with original Nineteenth- ^^^notations those who have best pursued the century exhaustive tradition of the eighteenth century are Alexander Dyce, Howard Staunton, Nikolaus Delius, and the Cambridge editors William George Clark (1821-1878) and William Aldis Wright (1836- 1914). All exemplify a tendency to conciseness which is EDITOES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 585 in marked contrast with the expansiveness of the later eighteenth-century commentaries. Alexander Dyce was almost as well read as Steevens in Elizabethan literature, and especially in the drama of the period, and his edition of Shakespeare in nine /\.icx3riciCi ^ Dyce, volumes, which was first published in 1857, has 179 -I 9- many new and valuable illustrative notes and a few good textual emendations, as well as a useful glossary ; but Dyce's annotations are not always adequate, and often tantalise the reader by their brevity. Howard „ , Staunton's edition first appeared in three Staunton, volumes between 1868 and 1870. He also was 10- 1 74. ^^^gj^ read in contemporary literature and was an acute textual critic. His introductions bring together much interesting stage history. Nikolaus DeUus's edition Nikoiaus ^^^ issued at Elberfeld in seven volumes Deiius, between 1854 and 1861. Delius's text, although ^ ■ it is based mainly on the Folios, does not neglect the Quartos and is formed on sound critical prin- ciples. A fifth edition in two volumes appeared in 1882. The Cambridge edition, which first appeared Cambridge ^^ ^^^^ volumes between 1863 and 1866, ^86 '-e' exhaustively notes the textual variations of all preceding editions, and supplies the best and fullest apparatus criticus. (Of new editions, one dated 1887 is also in nine volumes, and another, dated 1893, in forty volumes.) ^ The labours of other editors of the complete annotated works of Shakespeare whether of the nineteenth or of the twentieth century present, in spite of zeal and learning, ^ A recent useful contribution to textual study is the Bankside edition of 21 selected plays (New York Sh. Soc. 1888-1906, 21 vols.) under the general editorship of Mr. Appleton Morgan. The First Folio text of the plays is printed on parallel pages with the earlier versions either of the Quartos or of older plays on which Shakespeare's work is based. The ' Bankside Restoration ' Shakespeare, under the same general editorship and published by the same Society, similarly contrasts the Folio texts with that of the Restoration adaptations (5 vols. 1907-8). 586 AVILLTAAI f^HAKESPEARE fewer distinctive features than those of the men who have been ab-eady named. The long hst includes ^ Samuel Weller Singer (1826. 10 vols., printed at the nineteenth- Chiswick Press for William Pickering, with a tTm'Srth- ^^ c.f the poet by Dr. Charles Symmons. illus- centTiry trated by wood engravings by John Thompson after Stothard and others ; reissued in Xew York in 1S4:3 and in London in 1856 with essays by William Watkiss Lloyd) ; Charles Knight, ^vith discursive notes and pictorial illustrations by Wilham Harvey, F. W. Fahholt. and others (" Pictorial edition.' S vols., including biogi-aphy and the doubtful plays. 1838-43, often reissued under diiierent designations) : the Rev. H. X. Hudson, Boston, U.S.A.. 1S51-6. 11 vols. 16mo. (revised and reissued as the -Hai-vard ' edition. Boston. 1881. 20 vols.) ; J. 0. HalhweU (1853-61, 15 vols, folio, with an encyclopedic ' variorum ' apparatus of annotations and pictorial illus- trations) : Richard Grant WTiite (Boston. L'.S.A.. 1857-65, 12 vols., reissued as the ' Riverside ' Shakespeare. Boston, iHiJl. 3 vcls.. : W. J. Rolfe (Xew York, 1871-96, -iO vols.) ; F. A. Marshall with the aid of various contributors ("The Henry Lrving Shakespeare,' which has useful notes on stage history, 1880-90, 8 vols.) : Prof. Israel Gollancz (" The Temple Shakespeare,' with concise annotations. 189-i-6, 40 vols., 12mo.) : Prof. C. H. Herford ("The Eversley Shakespeare.' l"^'.."'. 10 vols.. Svo.) : Prof. Edward Dowden. W. J. Craig. Prof. R. H. Case CThe Arden Shakespeare," 1899-1915, in progress, 31 vols., each undertaken by a different contributor) ; Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke ('The First Folio" Shakespeare with very fuU aimotation, New York. 1903, 13 vols., and 1912, -40 vols.) ; Sir Sidney Lee (The " Renaissance ' Shakespeare, L^ni- ^ The following English editors, although their complete editions have now lost their hold on stndeiAs' attention, are ^^ orthy of mention : William Harness (1825, 8 vols.) ; Bnan Waller Procter, i.e. Barry Comwall (1839-43, 3 vols.), illustrated by Kenny Meadows ; John Payne Collier (1841-4, 8 vols. ; another edition, 8 vols., privately printed (187S, 4to) ; and Samuel Phelps, the actor (1852-4. 2 vols. ; another edition, 1882-4). EDITORS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 587 versity Press of Cambridge, Mass., 1907-10, 40 vols. ; with general introduction and annotations by the editor and separate introductions to the plays and poems by various hands ; reissued in London as the ' Caxton ' Shakespeare, 1910, 20 vols.).^ ^ Finely printed complete (but unannotated) texts of recent date are the ■ Edinburgh Folio ' edition, ed. W. E. Henley and Walter P^leigh (Edinburgh, 1901-4, 10 vols.), and the 'Stratford Town' edition, ed. A. H. BuUen, with an appendix of essays (Stratford-on-Avon, 1904—7, 10 vols.). The ' Old Spelling Shakesp^re,' ed. F. J. Furnivall and F. W. Clarke, M.A., preserves the orthography of the authentic Quartos and Folios ; seventeen volumes have appeared since 1904 and others are in preparation. Of one-volume editions of the unannotated text, the best are the ' Globe,' editedby W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright (IS&i, and constantly reprinted — since 1891 v>ith a new glossan.) ; the 'Leopold ' from Delius's text, with prcfac-e by F. J. Furnivall (1876) ; and the ' Oxford,' edited by W. J. Craig (1894). XXV 7 SHAKESPEARE'S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN ENGLAND AND A:»IERICA_ j SHAKEsrEAEE defied at every stage in his career the laws of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the unities of time, place, and action. The formal critics sp^are" ^^ ^^ ^^7 zealously championed the ancient and the rules, and viewed infringement of them with cIcLssicists distrust. But the force of Shakespeare's genius — its revelation of new methods of dramatic art — was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways ; and even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by contemporary play- goers, cultured and uncultured alike. The unauthorised publishers of ' Troilus and Cressida ' in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they prefaced that ambigu- ous work with the note : ' This author's comedies are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies.' Shakespeare's nterary eminence was abundantly recognised while he lived. At the period of his death no mark of honour was denied his name. Dramatists and poets echoed his phrases ; cultured men and women of fashion studied his works ; preachers cited them in the pulpit in order to illustrate or enforce the teachings of Scripture.^ ^ According to contemporary evidence, Nicholas Richardson, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in a sermon which he twice preached in 588 POSTHUMOUS KEPUTATION 589 The editors of the First Folio repeated the contempo- rary judgment, at the same time as they anticipated the Ben final verdict, when they wrote, seven years after tribu°e'^ Shakespeare's death : ' These plays have had 1623. ' their trial already and stood out all appeals.' ^ Ben Jonson, the staunohest champion of classical canons, was wont to allege in familiar talk that Shakespeare ' wanted art,' but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among aU dramatists, in- cluding those of Greece and Rome, Jonson claimed that all Europe owed Shakespeare homage : Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time. Ben Jonson's tribute was followed in the First Foho by less capable elegies of other enthusiasts. One of these, Hugh Holland, a former Fellow ot Trinity College, Cam- bridge, told how the bays crowned Shakespeare ' poet first, then poefs king,' and prophesied that though his line of life went soone about, The life yet of his lines shall never out. In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on ' the great heir of fame' : What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in piled stones, Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid ? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame. What need'st thou such weak ^\itness of thy name ? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a lasting monument. These lines were admitted to the prehminary pages of , . the Second Foho of 1632. A writer of fine The eulogies " of 1632. insight who veiled himself under the initials the University church (in 1620 and 1621) cited Juliet's speech from Romeo and Juliet (n. ii. 177-82) ' applying it to God's love to Hia saints ' (Jlacray's Begisier of Magdalen College, vol. iii. p. 144). 1 Cf . the opening line of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet on Shakespeare : Others abide our question. Thou art free. 590 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE I. M. S.i contributed to the same volume even more pointed eulogy. The opening lines declare ' Shakespeare's freehold ' to have been A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear And equal surface can make things appear Distant a thousand years, and represent Them in their lively colours' just extent. It was his faculty To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates. Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates Of death and Lethe, where confused lie Great heaps of ruinous mortalit}'. A third (anonymous) panegyric prefixed to the Second Folio acclaimed as unique Shakespeare's evenness of com- mand over both ' the comic vein ' and ' the tragic strain.' The praises of the First and Second Folios echoed an un- challenged public opinion .2 During Charles I's reign the ., . like unanimity prevailed among critics of tastes Admurers . i , , • in Charles SO varied as the volummous actor-dramatist I's reign. Thomas Hey wood, the Cavalier lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic recluse John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and Court, Sir William D'Avenant. Sir John Suckhng, who introduced many lines from Shakespeare's poetry into his own verse, caused his own portrait to be painted by Van Dyck with a copy of the First Folio in his hand, opened at the play of ' Hamlet.' ^ Before 1640 John Hales, Fellow of Eton, whose learning and hberal culture obtained for him the epithet of ' ever- memorable,' is said to have triumphantly 1 These letters have been interpreted as standing either for the in- scription ' In Memoriam Scriptoris ' or for the name of the writer. In the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusiveh* read as Jasper Maj-ne (Student), a young Oxford writer ; as John Marston (Student or Satirist) ; and as John Milton (Senior or Student). " Cf. ShaJcspere's Centunj of Praise, 1591-1693, New Shakspere See, ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, 1879 ; and Fresh Allusions, ed. Furnivall, 1886. The whole was re-editcd w ith additions by J. Munro, 2 vols., 1909. ^ The picture, which was exhibited at the New Gallery in January 1902, is the property of Mrs. Lee, at Hartwell House, Aylesbury (see Walpole"s Anecdotes of Fainting, ed. Wornum, i. 332). POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 591 established, in a public dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that ' there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done in Shakespeare.' ^ Leonard Digges, who bore testimony in the First Folio to his faith in Shake- speare's immortality, was not content with that assurance ; he supplemented it with fresh proofs in the 1640 edition of the ' Poems.' There Digges asserted that Avliile Ben Jonson's famous work had now lost its vogue, every revival of Shakespeare's plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and galleries alike. ^ At a little later date, Shakespeare's 1 Charles Gildon in 1694, in Some Reflections on Mr. RyriKr's Short View of Tragedy which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical version of this incident. ' To give the world,' Gildon informs Dryden, ' some' satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Venera- tion paid his Excellence by men of unquestion'd parts as this I now express of him, I shall give some account of what I have heard from your Mouth, Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain'd over all the Ancients by the Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr. Hales of Eaton afSrm'd that he wou'd shew all the Poets of Antiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of Shakespear wou'd by no means yield him so much Excellence : so that it came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject ; the place agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales's Chamber at Eaton ; a great many Boolis were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly unanimously gave the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and Roman Poets were adjudg'd to Vail at least their Glory in that of the English Hero.' * Digges' tribute of 1(340 includes the lines : So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare, And on the stage at halie-sword parley were Brutus and Cassius : oh how the Audience Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence, When some new day they would not brooke a line Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline ; Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz'de more Honest logo, or the jealous iloore. . . . When let but Fa/staffc come, Hall, Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a roome Ah is so pester'd ; let but Beatrice And Beneiiickc be seeue, we in a trice The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full To hear Malvoglio, that crosse-garter'd guU. 592 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE writings were the ' closet companions ' of Charles the First's 'sohtudes.'i After the Restoration public taste in England veered towards the classicised model of drama then in vogue in Critics France.2 Literary critics of Shakespeare's work of the laid renewed emphasis on his neglect of the ancient principles. They elaborated the view that he was a child of nature who lacked the training of the only authentic school. Some critics complained, too, that his language was growing archaic. None the less, very few questioned the magic of his genius, and Shake- speare's reputation suffered no lasting injury from a closer critical scrutiny. Classical pedantry found its most thoroughgoing champion in Thomas Rymer, who levelled colloquial abuse at all divergences from the classical conventions of drama. In his ' Short View of Tragedy ' (1692) Rymer mainly concentrated his attention on ' Othello,' and reached the eccentric conclusion that it was ' a bloody farce without salt or savour.' But Rymer's extravagances awoke in England no substantial echo. Samuel Pepys the diarist was an indefatigable playgoer who reflected the average taste of the times. A native im- patience of poetry or romance led him to deny ' great wit ' to ' The Tempest,' and to brand ' A IVIidsummer Night's Dream ' as ' the most insipid and ridiculous play ' ; but Pepys's lack of hterary sentiment did not deter him from witnessing forty-five performances of fourteen of Shake- speare's plays between October 11, 1660, and February 6, 1668-9, and on occasion the scales fell from his eyes. * Hamlet,' Shakespeare's most characteristic play, won the diarist's ungrudging commendation ; he saw four render- ings of the tragedy with the great actor Betterton in the title-role, and with each performance his enthusiasm rose.^ ^ Milton, Iconodastes, 1690, pp. 9-10. * Cf. EveljTi's Diary, November 26, 1661 : ' I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined age, since His Majesty's being so long abroad.' ' Cf. ' Pepys and Shakespeare ' in the present writer's Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 82 seq. POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 593 Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, was a wide- minded critic who was innocent of pedantry, and he both guided and reflected the enlightened judgment Dryden's ^f j^jg gj.g^ According to his own account he verdict. '^ was first taught by Sir William D Avenant ' to admire' Shakespeare's work. Very characteristic are his frequent complaints of Shakespeare's inequalities — ' he is the very Janus of poets.' ^ But in almost the same breath Dryden declared that Shakespeare was held in as mucli veneration among Englishmen as /Eschylus among the Athenians, and that ' he was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehen- sive soul. . . . When he describes anything, you more than see it — you feel it too.' ^ In 1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet acknowledged the gift thus : TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER. Shakespear, thy Gift, I place before my sight ; With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write ; With Reverence look on his Majestick Face ; Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race. His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write, And I, like Tencer, under Ajax fight. Writers of Charles II's reign of such opposite tempera- ments as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued in Dryden's strain for Shakespeare's supremacy. As a girl the sober duchess declares she fell in love with Shakespeare, fpefre's In her 'Sociable Letters,' published in 1664, fashionable gj^e enthusiastically, if diffusely, described how Shakespeare creates the illusion that he had been ' transformed into every one of those persons he 1 Conquest of Granada, 1672. * Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adapta- tion of Troilus and Cressida in 1679. In the prologue to his and D'Avenant's adaptation of The Tempest in 1676, he wrote : But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be ; Within that circle none durst walk but he. 2 Q 594 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEB hath described,' and suffered all their emotions. "V\Tien she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life. ' Indeed,' she concludes, ' Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution.' The profhgate Sedley, in a prologue to the 'Wary Widdow,' a comedy by one Higden, which was produced in 1693, boldly challenged Rymer's warped vision when he apostrophised Shakespeare thus : Shackspear whose fruitful! Genius, happy Mit Was fram'd and finisht at a lucky hit, The pride of Nature, and the shame of Schools, Born to Create, and not to Learn from Rules. Throughout the period of the Restoration, the traditions of the past kept Shakespearean drama to the fore on the stage.^ 'Hamlet,' 'Julius Csesar," Othello,' and ad%*ters!°'^ other pieces were frequently produced in the authentic text. 'King Lear ' it was reported was acted 'exactly as Shakespeare wrote it.' The chief actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, won his spurs as the inter- preter of Shakespeare's leading parts, chiefly in unre vised or slightly abridged versions. Hamlet was accounted that actor's masterpiece. ' No succeeding tragedy for several years,' wrote DoAvnes, the prompter at Betterton's theatre, ' got more reputation or money to the company than this.' At the same time the change in the dramatic sentiment of ' After Charles II's restoration in 1660, two companies of actors received licenses to perform in public : one knoA\Ti as the Duke's company ■was directed by Sir William D'Avenant, having for its patron the King's brother the Duke of York ; the other company, known as the King's company, was directed by Tom Killigrew, one of Charles II's boon companions, and had the King for its patron. The right to perform sixteen of Shakespeare's plays A^as distributed between the two com- panies. To the Duke's company were allotted the nine plaj's : The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet ; to the ICing's company were allotted the seven plays : Julius Ccesar, Henry I V, Merry Wives, Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andro- nicus. In 1682 the two companies were amalgamated, and the sixteen plaj-s ^^ere thenceforth all vested in the same hands. POSTHTOIOUS KEPUTATION 595 the Restoration was accompanied by a marked develop- ment of scenic and musical elaboration on the stage in place of older methods of simplicity, and many of Shake- speare's plays were deemed to need drastic revision in order to fit them to the new theatrical conditions. Shake- speare's work was freely adapted by dramatists of the day in order to satisfy the alteration alike in theatrical taste and machinery. No disrespect was intended to Shake- speare's memory by those who engaged in these acts of va,ndahsm. Sir William D'Avenant, who set the fashion of Shakespearean adaptation, never ceased to write or speak of the dramatist with affection and respect, while Dryden's activity as a Shakespearean reviser went hand in hand with many professions of adoration. D'Avenant, Dryden and their coadjutors worked arbitrarily. They endeavoured without much method to recast Shakespeare's plays in a GaUicised rather than in a strictly classical mould. They were no fanatical observers of the unities of time, place and action. In the French spirit, they viewed love as the dominant passion of tragedy, they gave tragedies happy endings, and they qualified the wickedness of hero or heroine. While they excised much humorous incident from Shakespearean tragedy, they dehghted in tragicomedy in which comic and pathetic sentiment was liberally mingled. Nor did the Restoration adapters abide by the classical rejection of scenes of violence. They added violent episodes with melodramatic license. Shakespeare's lan- guage was modernised or simplified, passages which were reckoned to be difficult were rewritten, and the calls of intelligibility were deemed to warrant the occasional transfer of a speech from one character to another, or even from one play to another. It scarcely needs adding that the claim of the Restoration adapters to ' improve ' Shake- speare's text was unjustifiable, save for a few omissions or transpositions of scenes.^ ^ Dr. F. W. Kilbourne's Alteratio7is and Adaptations of Shakespeare, Boston 1906. 2 Q 2 596 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE D'Avenant began the revision of Shakespeare's work early in February 1662, by laying reckless hands on ' Measure for Measure.' With Shakespeare's ' revised ' romantic play he incorporated the characters of versions. Benedick and Beatrice from ' Much Ado ' and rechristened his performance ' The Law against Lovers.'^ D'Avenant worked on ' Macbeth ' in 1666, and ' The Tempest ' a year or two later. In both these pieces he introduced not only original characters and speeches, but new songs and dances which brought the plays within the category of opera. D'Avenant also turned ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' into a comedy which he called ' The Rivals' (1668). Dryden entered the field of Shakespearean revision by aiding D'Avenant in his version of ' The Tempest ' which was first published after D'Avenant's death with a preface by Dryden in 1670. A second edition which appeared in 1674 embodied further changes by Thomas Shad well. ^ Subsequently Dryden dealt in similar fashion with ' Troilus ' (1679), and he imitated ' Antony and Cleopatra ' on original lines in his tragedy of ' All for Love ' (1678). John Lacy, the actor, adapted ' The Taming of the Shrew ' (produced as 'Sawny the Scot,' April 19, 1667, published in 1698). Thomas ShadAvell revised ' Timon ' (1678) ; Thomas Otway ' Romeo and Juliet ' (1680) ; John Crowne the First and Second Parts of 'Henry VI ' (1680-1) ; Nahum Tate ^ This piece was first acted at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on February 18, 1662, and was first printed in 1673. 2 Shadwell's name does not figure in the printed version of 167-4 which incorporates his amplifications. Only Dryden and D'Avenant are cited as revisers. ShadMeU's opera of The Tempest is often men- tioned in theatrical history on the authority of Do^^■nes's Roscius Angli- caniLS (1708), but it is his ' improvement ' of D'Avenant and Dryden's version which is in question. (See W. J. Lawrence's The Elizabethan Playhouse, 1st ser. 1912, pp. 94 seq. reprinted from Anglia 1904, and Sir Ernest Clarke's paper on ' The Tempest as an Opera ' in the Athenceum, August 25, 1906.) Thomas DufFett, a very minor dramatist, produced at the Theatre Royal in 1675 The Mock Tempest in ridicule of the efforts of Dryden, D'Avenant and Shad«ell. POSTHUMOUS KEPUTATION 597 'Richard II' (1681), 'Lear' (1681), and 'Coriolanus' (1682) ; and Tom Durfey ' Cymbeline ' {1Q82)} From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day the tide of Shakespeare's reputation, both on the stage and Pj.^ among critics, has flowed onward almost unin- 1702 terruptedly. The censorious critic, John Dennis, actively shared in the labours of adaptation ; but in his 'Letters' (1711) on Shakespeare's 'genius' he gave his work whole-hearted commendation : ' One may say of him, as they did of Homer, that he had none to imitate ; and is himself inimitable.' ^ Cultured opinion gave the answer which Addison wished when he asked in ' The Spectator ' on February 10, 1714, the question : 'Who would not rather read one of Shakespeare's plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, where there is not one of them violated ? ' No poet who won renown in the age of Anne or the early Georges failed to pay a sincere tribute to Shakespeare in the genuine text. James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, joined in the chorus of praise. David Hume the philosopher and historian stands alone among cultured contemporaries in ques- tioning the justice 'of much of this eulogy,' on the specious ground that Shakespeare's ' beauties ' were ' surrounded with deformities.' Two of the greatest men of letters of the eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold censure, paid the ^ John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, revised Julius Cczsar in 1692, but his version, which was first published in 1722, was never acted. Post-Kestoration adaptations of Shakespeare include Colley Gibber's Richard III (1700) ; Charles Gildon's Measure for Measure (1700) ; John Dennis's Comical Gallant {1102. : a revision of The Merry Wives) ; Charles Burnaby's Love Betray d (1703 : a rehash of AWs Well and Twelfth Night) ; and John Dennis's The Invader of his Country (1720 : a new version of Coriolanus). See H. B. Wheatley's Post-Restoration Quartos of Shakespeare's Plays, London, 1913 (reprinted from The Library, July 1913). ^ D. Nichol Smith, Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903 p. 21. 598 WILLIA]VI SHAKESPEARE dramatist, as we have seen, the practical homage of becoming his editor. As the eighteenth century closed, the outlook of the critics steadily widened, and they brought to the study increased learning as well as profounder insight, of critical Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel College, insight. Cambridge, in his ' Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare' (1767) deduced from an exhaustive study of Ehzabethan literature the sagacious conclusion that the poet was well versed in the writings of his English contemporaries. Meanwhile the chief of Shakespeare's dramatis personce became the special topic of indepen- dent treatises.^ One writer, Maurice Morgann, in his ' Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff ' (1777) claimed to be the first to scrutinise a Shake- spearean character as if he were a Hving creature belonging to the history of the human race rather than to the annals of literary invention. WiUiam Dodd's 'Beauties of Shakespeare ' (1752), the most cyclopaedic of anthologies, brought home to the popular mind, in numberless editions, the range of Shakespeare's obser- vations on human experience. Shakespearean study of the eighteenth century not only strengthened the foundations of his fame but stimulated its subsequent growth. The school of textual schools of criticism which Theobald a ad Capell founded cnticism. ^^ ^j^g middle years of the century has never ceased its activity since their day.^ Edmund Malone's 1 See William Richardson's Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare's remarkable Characters (2 vols. 1774, 1789), and Thomas ^Miately's Remarks on Some of the Cliaracters of Shakespeare (published in 1785 but completed before 1772). 2 W. Sidney Walker (1795-1846), sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, deserves special mention among textual critics of the nine- teenth century. He was author of two valuable works : Shakespeare's Versification and its apparent Irregularities explained by Examples from Early and Late English Writers, 1854, and A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, with Remarks on his Language and that of his Contemporaries, together with Notes on his Flays and Poems, POSTHUMOUS EEPUTATION 599 devotion at the end of the eighteenth century to the biography of the poet and the contemporary history of the stage inspired a vast band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter (1783-1861), John Payne ColUer (1789- 1883) and James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards HalHwell- Philhpps (1820-1889), best deserve mention. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there arose a school of critics to expound more systema- The new tically than before the aesthetic excellence of esthetic the plays. Eighteenth-century writers Uke Richardson, Whately and Maurice Morgann had pointed out the way. Yet in its inception the new aesthetic school owed much to the example of Schlegel and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. The long-lived popular fallacy that Shakespeare was the unsophisticated child of nature was finally dispelled, and his artistic instinct, his sound judgment and his psycho- logical certitude were at length established on firm foun- dations. Hazlitt in his ' Characters of Shakespeare's Plays ' (1817) interpreted with a Hght and rapid touch the veracity or verisimilitude of the chief personages of the plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his ' Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare ' proved himself the subtlest spokesman of the modern aesthetic school in this or any other country.^ Although Edward Dowden in his ' Shake- speare, his Mind and Art' (1874; 11th edit. 1897) and Algernon Charles Swinburne in his ' Study of Shakespeare ' (1880) were worthy disciples of the new criticism, Coleridge as an aesthetic critic remains unsurpassed. Among hving I860, 3 vols. Walker's books were published from his notes after his death, and are ill-arranged and unindexed, but they constitute a rich quarr}' , which no succeeding editor has neglected without injury to his work. ^ See Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coleridge, now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly resented the remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare (Coleridge to Mudford, 1818 ; cf. Dykes Campbell's Memoir oj Coleridge, p. cv, and see p. 616 note, infra. 600 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE English critics in the same succession, Mr. A. C, Bradley- fills the first place. In the effort to supply a fuller interpretation of Shake- speare's works — textual, historical, and aesthetic — two publishing societies have done much valuable speare' work. The Shakespeare Society was founded pubUshing j^ 1841 bv ColUcr, HalUwell, and their friends, SOClGtlGS *' and published some forty-eight volumes before its dissolution in 1853. The New Shakspere Society, which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in 1874, issued during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven pubhcations, illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary life and Hterature. Almost from the date of Shakespeare's death his native town of Stratford-on-Avon was a place of pilgrimage for his admirers. As early as 1634 Sir WilHam Shake- Dugdale visited the town and set on record speare's '^ . . -j^i -j^ ht ^i fame at Shakespeare s association with it. Many other ^^^Avorf visitors of the seventeenth century enthusias- tically identified the dramatist with the place in extant letters and journals.^ John Ward, who became 1 See p. 473 n. 3, supra. As early as 1630 a traveller through the town put on record that ' it was most remarkable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare ' ('A Banquet of Feasts or Change of Cheare,' 1630, in Shakespeare's Centurie of Praise, p. 181). Four years later another tourist to the place described in his extant diary ' a neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. Wm. Shakespere ; who was borne heere ' (Brit. Mus. Lansdowne MS. 213 f. 332; A Relation of a Short Survey, ed. Wickham Legg, 1904, p. 77). Sir William Dugdale concluded his account of Stratford in his Antiquities of Warivickshire (1656, p. 523) : ' One thing more in reference to this antient To^^^l is observable, that it gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church.' Sir Aston Coka3'ne in complimentary verses to Dugdale on his great book wrote : Now Stratford upon Avon, we would choose Thy gentle and Ingenuous Shakespeare Muse, (Were he among the living yet) to raise T'our Antiquaries merit some just praise. (Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. 111.) Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, in his Theatrum Poetarum, 1677, begins his notice of the poet thus : ' William Shakespear, the Glory of the English Stage ; whose nativity at Stratford ujwn Avon is the highest honour that Town can boast of.' POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 601 Vicar of Stratford in 1662, bore witness to the genius loci when he made the entry in his ' Diary ' : ' Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays and bee much versed in them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter.'^ In the eighteenth century the visits of Shakespearean students rapidly grew more frequent. In the early years the actor Betterton came from London to make Shake- spearean researches there. It was Betterton's successor, Garrick, who, at the height of his fame in the middle years of the century, Garrick at gave an impetus to the Shakespearean cult at Stratford. Stratford which thenceforth steadily developed into a national vogue, and helped to quicken the popular enthusiasm. In May 1769 the Corporation did Garrick the honour of making him the first honorary free- man of the borough on the occasion of the opening of the new town hall. He acknowledged the compUment by presenting a statue of the dramatist to adorn the fa9ade of the building, together with a portrait of him- self embracing a bust of Shakespeare, by Gainsborough, which has since hung on the walls of the chief chamber. Later in the year Garrick personally devised and conducted a Shakespearean celebration at Stratford Stratford which was called rather inaccurately i76g^^^' ' Shakespeare's Jubilee.' The ceremonies lasted from September 6 to 9, 1769, and under Garrick's zealous direction became a national demon- stration in the poet's honour. The musical composer, Dr. Arne, organised choral services in the church ; there were public entertainments, a concert, and a horse-race, and odes were recited and orations deUvered in praise of the poet. The visitors represented the rank and fashion of the day. Among them was James Boswell, the friend and biographer of Dr. Johnson. The irrelevance of most of the ceremonials excited ridicule, but a pageant at Drury Lane Theatre during the following season recalled 1 Ward's Diary, 1839, p. 184. 602 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE the chief incidents of the Stratford Jubilee and proved attractive to the London playgoer.^ Like festivities were repeated at Stratford from time to time on a less ambitious scale. A birthday celebration took place in April 1827, and was renewed three years later. A ' Shakespeare Tercentenary Festival,' which was held from April 23 to May 4, 1864, was designed as a national commemoration.^ Since 1879 there have been without interruption annual Shakespearean festivals in April and May at Shakespeare's native place, and they have steadily grown in popular favour and in features of interest.^ On the English stage the name of every eminent actor since Burbage, the great actor of the dramatist's own period, , has been identified with Shakespearean drama. English Betterton, the chief actor of the Restoration, ^^^se. ^g^g loyal to Burbage's tradition. Steele, writing in the 'Tatler' (No. 167) in reference to Betterton 's funeral in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey on May 2, 1710, instanced his rendering of Othello as a proof of an un- surpassable talent in reahsing Shakespeare's subtlest con- ceptions on the stage. One great and welcome innovation in Shakespearean acting is closely associated with Better- ton's name. The substitution of women for boys in female parts was inaugurated by Killigrew at the appearance opening of Charles II's reign, but Betterton's ^ Shake-^*^^ encouragement of the innovation gave it per- spearean manence. The first rdle that was professionally rendered by a woman in a public theatre was that of Desdemona in ' Othello,' apparently on December 8, 1660.* The actress on that occasion is said to have been Mrs. Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert's mistress ; but Betterton's wife, who was at first known on the stage as Mrs. Saunderson, was the first actress to present a series of Shakespeare's great female characters. Mrs. Betterton gave her husband powerful support, from 1663 onwards, in 1 See Whaler's History of Stratford-on-Avon, 1812, pp. 164-209. * R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 186-4. ^ See pp. 542-3 supra. * See p. 78 svpra. POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 603 such roles as Ophelia, Juliet, Queen Katharine, and Lady- Macbeth. Betterton formed a school of actors who carried on his traditions for many years after his death. Robert Wilks (1670-1732) as Hamlet, and Barton Booth (1681- 1733) as Henry VIII and Hotspur, were popularly accounted no unworthy successors. Colley Gibber (1671-1757), as actor, theatrical manager, and dramatic critic, was both a loyal disciple of Betterton and a lover of Shakespeare, though his vanity and his faith in the ideals of the Restora- tion incited him to perpetrate many outrages on Shake- speare's text when preparing it for theatrical representa- tion. His notorious adaptation of ' Richard III,' which was first produced in 1700, long held the stage to the exclu- sion of the original version. But towards the middle of the eighteenth century all earlier efforts to interpret Shake- speare in the playhouse were eclipsed in public esteem by the concentrated energy and intelHgence of David Garrick. j^ ^. , Garrick's enthusiasm for the poet and his his- Garrick, trionic genius riveted Shakespeare's hold on I7I7-I779- public taste. His claim to have restored to the stage the text of Shakespeare — purified of Restor- ation defilements — cannot be allowed without serious qualifications. Garrick had no scruple in presenting plays of Shakespeare in versions that he or his friends had recklessly garbled. He supplied 'Romeo and Juliet' with a happy ending ; he converted ' The Taming of the Shrew ' into the farce of ' Katherine and Petruchio,' 1754; he was the first to venture on a revision of 'Hamlet' (in 1771); he introduced radical changes in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' ' Cymbeline,' and ' Mid- summer Night's Dream.' Neither had Garrick any faith in stage-archaeology ; he acted ' Macbeth ' in a bagwig and ' Hamlet ' in contemporary court dress. Nevertheless, no actor has won an equally exalted reputation in so vast and varied a repertory of Shakespearean roles. His triumphant debut as Richard III in 1741 was followed by equally successful performances of Hamlet (first given for his benefit at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on August 12, 604 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1742), 1 Lear, Macbeth, King John, Romeo, Henry IV, lago, Leontes, Benedick, and Antony in ' Antony and Cleopatra.' Garrick was not quite undeservedly buried in Westminster Abbey on February 1, 1779, at the foot of Shakespeare's statue. Garrick was ably seconded by Mi's. Clive (1711-1785), Mrs. Gibber (1714-1766), and Mrs. Pritchard (1711-1768). Mrs. Gibber as Gonstance in ' King John,' and Mrs. Prit- chard in Lady Macbeth, excited something of the same enthusiasm as Garrick in Richard III and Lear. There were, too, contemporary critics who judged rival actors to show in certain parts powers equal, if not superior, to those of Garrick. Charles Macklin (1697 ?-1797) for nearly half a century, from 1735 to 1785, gave many hundred performances of a masterly rendering of Shylock. The character had, for many years previous to Macklin's assumption of it, been allotted to comic actors, but Macklin effectively concentrated his energy on the tragic significance of the part with an effect that Garrick could not surpass. Mackhn was also reckoned successful in Polonius and lago. John Henderson, the Bath Roscius (1747-1785), who, hke Garrick, was buried in Westminster Abbey, derived im- mense popularity from his representation of Falstaff ; while in such subordinate characters as Mercutio, Slender, Jaques, Touchstone, and Sir Toby Belch, John Palmer (1742 ?- 1798) was held to approach perfection. But Garrick was the accredited chief of the theatrical profession until his death. He was then succeeded in his place of pre- eminence by John Phihp Kemble, who derived invaluable support from his association with one abler than himself, his sister, Mrs. Siddons. Somewhat stilted and declamatory in speech, Kemble John enacted a wide range of characters of Shake- Philip spearean tragedy with a dignity that won the 1757-1823. admiration of Pitt, Sir Walter Scott, Charles ^ W. J. Lawrence, The ElizabetJian Playhouse and other Studies, 2nd ser. 229-23U. POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 605 Lamb, and Leigh Hunt. Coriolanus was regarded as his masterpiece, but his renderings of Hamlet, King John, Wolsey, the Duke in ' Measure for Measure,' Leontes, and j^ c u Brutus satisfied the most exacting canons of Siddons, contemporary theatrical criticism. Kemble's 1755-1 31- sister, Mrs. Siddons, was the greatest actress that Shakespeare's countrymen have known. Her noble and awe-inspiring presentation of Lady Macbeth, her Con- stance, her Queen Katharine, have, according to the best testimony, not been equalled even by the achievements of the eminent actresses of France. During the nineteenth century the most conspicuous histrionic successes in Shakespearean drama were won by Edmu d 'Edmund Kean, whose triumphant rendering Kean, of Shylock on his first appearance at Drury 33- Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, is one of the most stirring incidents in the history of the English stage. Kean defied the rigid convention of the ' Kemble School,' and gave free rein to his impetuous passions. Besides Shylock, he excelled in Richard III, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear. No less a critic than Coleridge declared that to see him act was like ' reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.' Among other Shakespearean actors of Kean's period a high place was allotted by public esteem to George Frederick Cooke (1756-1811), whose Richard III, first given in London at Co vent Garden Theatre, October 31 , 1801, was accounted his masterpiece. Charles Lamb, writing in 1822, declared that of all the actors who flourished in his time, Robert Bensley ' had most of the swell of soul,' and Lamb gave with a fine enthusiasm in his ' Essays of Elia ' an analysis (which has become classical) of Bensley's performance of Malvolio. But Bensley's powers were rated more moderately by more experienced playgoers.^ Lamb's praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) as OpheHa, Helena, and Viola in ' Twelfth Night,' are corroborated by the eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part ' Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 seq. 606 WTLLIMI SHAKESPEAEE of Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have beaten jVIts. Siddons out of the field. The torch thus lit by Garrick, by the Kembles, by Kean and his contemporaries was worthily kept alive by Wilham Charles Macready, a cultivated and conscien- William ,. j. ^ ■> • j: • i £ Charles tious actor, who, during a professional career of Macready, j^ore than forty years (1810-1851), assumed every great part in Shakespearean tragedy. Although Macready lacked the classical bearing of Kemble or the intense passion of Kean, he won as the interpreter of Shakespeare the whole-hearted suffrages of the educated pubhc. Macready 's chief associate in women characters was Helen Faucit (1820-1898, afterAvards Lady Martin), whose refined impersonations of Imogen, Beatrice, Juliet, and Rosalind form an attractive chapter in the history of the stage. The most notable tribute paid to Shakespeare by any actor-manager of recent times was rendered by Samuel Phelps (1804-1878), who gave during his tenure Sv^vais. o^ Sadler's Wells Theatre between 1 844 and 1 862 competent representations of all the plays save six ; only ' Richard II,' the three parts of ' Henry VI,' ' Troilus and Cressida,' and ' Titus Andronicus ' were omitted. The ablest actress who appeared with Phelps at Sadler's Wells was Mrs. Warner (1804-1854), who had previously supported Macready in many of Shakespeare's dramas, and was a partner in Phelps's Shakespearean speculation in the early days of the venture. Charles Kean (1811-1868), Edmund Kean's son, between 1851 and 1859 produced at the Princess's Theatre, London, some thirteen plays of Shakespeare ; his own roles included Macbeth, Richard II, Cardinal Wolsey, Leontes, Richard III, Prospero, King Lear, Shylock, Henry V. But the younger Kean depended for the success of his Shakespearean produc- tions on their spectacular attractions rather than on his histrionic efficiency. He may be regarded as the founder of the spectacular system of Shakespearean representation. Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who from 1878 till 1901 was ably seconded by ]\Iiss Ellen Terry, revived at the POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 607 Lyceum Theatre between 1874 and 1902 twelve plays ('Hamlet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Othello,' 'Richard III,' 'The Merchant of Venice,' ' Much Ado about Nothing,' ' Twelfth Night,' ' Romeo and Juhet,' ' King Lear,' ' Henry VIII,' ' Cymbeline,' and ' Coriolanus '), and gave each of them all the advantage they could derive from thoughtful acting reinforced by lavish scenic elaboration.^ Sir Henry Irving was the first actor to be knighted (in 1895) for his services to the stage, and the success which crowned his efforts to raise the artistic and intellectual temper of the theatre was acknowledged by his burial in Westminster Abbey (October 20, 1905). Sir Henry Irving's mantle was assumed at his death by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who produced three of Shakespeare's plays at the Hay- market Theatre between 1889 and 1896 and no less than fifteen more at His Majesty's Theatre since 1897. In the course of each of the nine years (1905-13) Sir Herbert also organised at His Majesty's Theatre a Shakespeare festival in which different plays of Shakespeare were acted on successive days during several weeks by his own and other companies. 2 Much scenic magnificence has distinguished Sir Herbert's Shakespearean productions in which he has played leading parts of very varied range ; his impersona- tions include Hamlet, Antony in both ' Julius Csesar ' and ' Antony and Cleopatra,' Shylock, Malvolio, and Falstaff. Mr. F. R. Benson, since 1883, has devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of Shakespearean drama and has produced all but two of Shakespeare's plays. Mr. Benson's activities have been chiefly confined to the provinces, and for twenty- six years he has organised the dramatic festivals at Stratford-on-Avon.^ Many efficient actors owe to 1 Hamlet in 1874-5 and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession ; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare's plays are known to have enjoyed. * In April 1907 Sir Herbert appeared on the Berlin stage in five of Shakespeare's plays, Richard II, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, Merry Wives, and Hamlet. * See p. 543 supra. 608 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE association with him and his company theii- earliest training in Shakespearean parts. In isolated Shake- spearean roles high reputations of recent years have been won by several actors, among whom may be mentioned Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson in ' Hamlet ' (first rendered at the Lyceum Theatre on September 11, 1897), Lewis Waller in Henry V (first rendered at Christmas 1900 at the Lyric Theatre, London), and Mr. Arthur Bourchier at the Garrick Theatre as Shylock (first rendered on October 11, 1905) and as Macbeth (first ren- dered on January 16, 1907). In spite of the recent efforts of Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. F. R. Benson, no theatrical manager since Phelps's retirement from Sadler's Wells in 1862 has systematically and continuously illustrated on the London stage the fuU range of Shakespearean drama. Far more in this direction has been attempted in Germany. The failure to represent in the chief theatres of London and the other great cities of the country Shakespeare's plays constantly and in their variety is mainly attributable to the demand, by a large section of the playgoing pubhc, for the spectacular methods of production which were inaugurated by Charles Kean in the metropohs in 1851 and have since been practised from time to time on an ever-increasing scale of splendour. The cost Spectacular gf the spectacular display involves financial Shake- risks wliich prohibit a frequent change of pro- d?ama^^ gramme and restrict the manager's choice to such plays as lend themselves to spectacular setting. In 1895 Mr. William Poel founded in London ' The Elizabethan Stage Society ' with a view to pro- ducing Shakespearean and other Elizabethan dramas either without any scenery or with scenery of a simple kind conforming to the practice of the EHzabethan or Jacobean epoch. Although Mr. Poel's zealous efiort re- ceived a respectful welcome from scholars, it exerted no appreciable infiuence on the taste of the general public. ^ See William Poel's Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1913, pp. 203 seq. POSTHTMOUS REPUTATION 609 In one respect, however, the history of recent Shake- spearean representations can be viewed by the literary student with unquaUfied satisfaction. Although some changes of text or some rearrangement of the scenes are found imperative in all theatrical productions of Shake- speare, a growing public sentiment in England and else- where has for many years favoured as loyal an adherence as is practicable to the authorised version of the plays on the part of theatrical managers. In this regard, the evil traditions of the eighteenth-century stage are well-nigh extinct. Music and art in England owe much to Shakespeare's influence. From Thomas Morley, Purcell, Matthew Locke, ^and Arne to William Lin ley, Sir Henry Bishop, ^"(T^f^ and Sir Arthur Sullivan, every distinguished musician of the past has sought to improve on his predecessor's setting of one or more of Shakespeare's songs, or has composed concerted music in illustration of some of his dramatic themes.^ Of living composers Mr. Edward German has musically illustrated with much success ' Henry VIII ' (1894), ' Richard II,' ' Richard III,' ' Romeo and Juliet ' and ' Much Ado.' Sir Alexander Mackenzie is responsible for an Overture to ' Twelfth Night ' and music for ' Coriolanus,' and Sir Edward Elgar is the composer of ' FalstafF,' a symphonic study (1913). In art, the publisher John Boydell in 1787 organised a scheme for illustrating scenes in Shakespeare's work by the greatest Hving English artists. Some fine pictures were the result. A hundred and sixty-eight were painted in all, and the artists whom Boydell employed included Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Stothard. John Opie, Benjamin West, James Barry, and Henry Fuseli. All the pictures were exhibited from time to time between 1789 and 1804 at a gallery specially built for the purpose in Pall Mall, and in 1802 Boydell pubUshed a 1 Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shahspere Music, 1878 ; Songs in Shakspere . . . set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc. ; E. W. Naylor, Shake- speare and Music, 1896, and L. C. Elson, Shakespeare in Music, 1901. 2 B 610 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE collection of engravings of the chief pictures. The great series of paintings was dispersed by auction in 1805. Few eminent painters of later date, from Daniel Mac Use to Sir John Millais, have lacked the ambition to interpret some scene or character of Shakespearean drama, while English artists in black and white who have in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century devoted themselves to the illustration of Shakespeare's writings include Sir John Gilbert, R.A., Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Hugh Thomson and E. J. Sullivan. In America of late years no less enthusiasm for Shake- speare has been manifested than in England. The first edition of Shakespeare's works to be printed in America appeared in Philadelphia in 1795-6,^ but editors and critics have since the middle years of the nineteenth century been hardly less numerous there than in England. Some criticism from American pens, like that of James Russell Lowell, has reached the highest literary level. Prof. G. P. Baker and Prof. Brander Matthews have recently developed more zealously than Enghsh writers the study of Shakespeare's dramatic technique. Nowhere, perhaps, has more labour been devoted to the interpretation of his works than that bestowed by Horace Howard Furness of Philadelphia on the preparation of his ' New Variorum ' edition. ^ The passion for acquiring early editions of Shakespeare's plays and poems or early illustrative literature has grown very rapidly in the past and present generations. The library of the chief of early Shakespearean collectors, James Lenox (1800-1880), now forms part of the Public Library of New York.^ Another important collection of Shakespeareana was formed at an early date by Thomas Pennant Barton (1803-1869) and was acquired by the Boston Public Library in 1873 ; the elaborate catalogue (1878-80) contains some 2500 entries. Private collections of later periods like those ^ See p. 583 n. 1, supra. ^ See p. 584, supra. * See Henry Stevens's Jiecollections of James Lenox and the formation of his Library. London, 1886, POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 611 formed by Mr. Marsden J. Perrj', of Providence, Rhode Island, Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, and Mr. W. A. White, of Brooklyn, are all rich in rare editions. First of Shakespeare's plays to be represented in America, ' Richard III ' was performed in New York on March 5, 1750. More recently Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), Edwin Forrest (1806-1892), John Edward McCullough, Forrest's disciple (1837-1885), Edwin Booth, Junius Brutus Booth's son (1833-1893), Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), Ada Rehan {b. 1859), Julia Marlowe, and Maud Adams have maintained on the American stage the great traditions of Shakespearean acting. Between 1890 and 1898 Augustin Daly's company included in their repertory ^ nine Shakespearean comedies which were ren- dered with admirable effect, chiefly with Ada Rehan and John Drew in the leading roles. Of late years Shake- spearean performances in America have been intermittent. Among American artists Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) devoted high gifts to pictorial representation of scenes from Shakespeare's plays. 2 E 2 XXVI SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE Save the Scriptures and the chief writings of classical antiquity, no literary compositions compare with Shake- speare's plays and poems in their appeal to spe^are's readers or critics who do not share the author's foreign nationaUty or speak his language. The Bible, alone of literary compositions, has been trans- lated more frequently or into a greater number of languages. The progress of the dramatist's reputation in France, Italy and Russia was somewhat slow at the outset. But every- where it advanced steadily through the nineteenth century. In Germany the poet has received for more than a century and a half a recognition scarcely less pronounced than that accorded him in his own country.^ Enghsh actors who made professional tours through Germany at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries frequently per- IP formed plays by Shakespeare before German audiences. At first the Enghsh actors spoke in Enghsh, but they soon gave their text in crude German translations. German adaptations of ' Titus Andronicus ' and 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' were published in 1620. In 1626 ' Hamlet,' ' King Lear,' ' Juhus Caesar,' and ' Romeo and Juliet ' were acted by English players at Dresden, and German versions of ' The Merchant of Venice,' of ' The Taming of the Shrew ' and of the Inter- lude in ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' as well as a crude ^ See Prof. J. G. Robertson's ' Shakespeare on the Continent ' in Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v. chap. xii. pp. 283-308. 612 SHAKESPEAEE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 613 adaptation of ' Hamlet,' ^ were current in Germany later in the century. But no author's name was at the time associated with any of these pieces. Meanwhile German- speaking visitors to England carried home even in Shakespeare's lifetime copies of his works and those of his contemporaries. Among several Enghsh volumes which Johann Rudolf Hess of Ziirich brought to that city on re- turning from London about 1614 were Smethwick's quartos of 'Romeo and Juliet ' (1609) and 'Hamlet' (1611). The books are still preserved in the pubhc hbrary of the town.^ Shakespeare was first specifically mentioned in 1682 by a German writer Daniel Georg Morhof in his ' Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie' (Kiel, p. 250). But Morhof merely confesses that he had read of Shake- speare, as well as of Fletcher and Beaumont, in Dryden's work ' Essay of Dramatic Poesy.' Morhof, however, broke the ice. A notice of the pathos of ' the Enghsh tragedian Shakespeare ' was transferred from a French translation of Sir William Temple's ' Essay on Poetry ' to German Barthold Feind's ' Gedanken von der Opera' Shake- (Stade) in 1708. Next year Johann Franz speareana. . . Buddeus copied from Colher's ' Historical Dictionary ' (1701-2) a farcically inadequate biographical sketch of Shakespeare into his ' Allgemeines historisches Lexicon' (Leipzig), and this brief memoir was reprinted in Johann Burckhart Mencke's ' Gelehrten Lexicon ' (Leip- zig, 1715) and in popular encyclopaedias of later date.^ Of greater significance was the appearance at Berlin in 1741 of a poor German translation of ' Juhus Caesar ' by Baron Caspar Wilhelm von Borck, formerly Prussian ^ See p. 356 supra. * The purchaser Hess who was at a later date a member of the Great Cotrncil of Zurich carried home from London nine English books of recent publication. Besides the Shakespearean quartos, they included Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) and George Wilkins's novel of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608) of which only one other copy (in the British Museum) survives ; see Tycho Mommsen's Preface (pp. ii-iii) to his reprint of George WUkins's novel of Pericles (Oldenburg, 1857). ^ Cf. Zedler's C2/cfcipaedia( 1743) and Jocher'sGeZeArte/iLeartcon( 1751). 614 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE minister in London. This was the earliest complete and direct translation of any play by Shakespeare into a foreign language. A prose translation of ' Richard III ' from another pen followed in 1756. Shakespeare was not suffered to receive such first halting marks of German respect without a protest. Johann Christopher Gottsched (1700-1766), a champion of classicism, warmly denounced the barbaric lawlessness of Shakespeare in a review of von Borck's effort in ' Beitrage zur kritischen Historic der deut- schen Sprache ' (1741). The attack bore unexpected fruit. Johami EUas Schlegel, one of Gottsched's disciples, offended his master by defending in the same periodical Shake- speare's neglect of the classical canons, and uithin twenty years the influential pen of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing came T . , to Shakespeare's rescue wdth triumphant effect. Lessmg s ^ ^ tribute, Lessing first drew to Shakespeare the earnest at- ^^^^" tention of the educated German public. It was on February 16, 1759, in No. 17 of a journal entitled ' Brief e die neueste Literatur betreffend ' that Lessing, after detect- ing in Shakespeare's work affinity with the German Volks- drama, urged his superiority, not only to the French drama- tists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets save Sophocles : 'After the " CEdipus " of Sophocles no piece can have more power over our passions than " Othello," " King Lear," " Hamlet." ' Lessing restated his doctrine with greater reservation in his ' Hamburgische Dramaturgic ' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo.), but the seed which he had soA\Ti proved fertile, and the tree wliich sprang from it bore rich fruit. A wide expansion of German knowledge and curiosity is traceable to a prose translation of Shakespeare wliich Christopher Martin Wieland (1733-1813) began in 1762 and issued at Ziirich in 1763-6 (in 8 vols.). Before long Wieland's useful work was thoroughly revised by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743-1820), whose edition appeared also at Ziirich in 13 vols. (1775-7). The dissemination of all Shakespeare's writings in a German garb greatly SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 615 strengthened the romantic tendencies of German hterary sentiment, and the Enghsh dramatist soon attracted that ^ ,, , wide German worship which he has since re- Growth of ^ study and tained. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg in enthusiasm. jjgg.Y j^ ' Brief e iiber Merkwiirdigkeiten der Litteratur,' treated Shakespearean drama as an integral part of the world of nature to which criticism was as inapplicable as to the sea or the sky. The poet Johann Gottfried Herder in 1773 showed a more chastened spirit of enthusiasm when he sought to account historically for the romantic temper of Shakespeare. Goethe, king of the German romantic movement, and aU who worked with him thenceforth eagerly acknowledged their discipleship to Shakespeare. Unwavering veneration of his achieve- ment became a first article in the creed of German roman- ticism, and the form and spirit of the German romanti- cists' poetry and drama were greatly influenced by their Shakespearean faith. Goethe's criticism of ' Hamlet ' in ' Willi elm Meisters Lehrjahre ' (1795-6) was but one of the many masterly tributes of the German romantic school to Shakespeare's supremacy.^ A fresh and vital impetus to the Shakespearean cult in Germany was given by the romantic leader, August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Between 1797 and 1801 fransi^fion ^® issued metrical versions of thirteen plays, adding a fourteenth play ' Richard III ' in 1810. Schlegel reproduced the spirit of the original with such magical efficiency as to consummate Shakespeare's natura- ^ Throughout his long life Goethe was the most enthusiastic of Shake- speare's worshippers. In 1771, at the age of twenty-two, he composed an oration which he delivered to fellow-students at Strasburg by way of justifying his first passionate adoration (see Lewes, Life of Goethe, 1890, pp. 92-5). Besides the detailed analysis of the character of Hamlet, which occupies much space in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisler, many eulogistic references to Shakespeare figure in Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung, and in Eckermann's Reports of Goethe''s Conversation. A remarkable essay on Shakespeare's pre-eminence was written by Goethe in 1815 under the title Shakespeare und kein Ende. This appears in the chief editions of Goethe's collected prose works in the section headed ' Theater und dramatische Dichtung.' 616 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE lisation in German poetry. Ludwig Tieck, who published a prose rendering of ' The Tempest ' in 1796, completed Schlegel's undertaking in 1825, but he chiefly confined him- self to editing translations by various hands of the plays which Schlegel had neglected.^ Many other German trans- lations in verse were undertaken ia emulation of Schlegel and Tieck's version — by J. H. Voss and his sons (Leipzig, 1818-29), by J. W. O. Benda (Leipzig, 1825-6), by J. Korner (Vienna, 1836), by A. Bottger (Leipzig, 1836-7), by E. Ortlepp (Stuttgart, 1838-9), and by A. Keller and M. Rapp (Stuttgart, 1843-6) . The best of more recent German translations is that by a band of poets and eminent men of letters including Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Ferdinand FreiHgrath, and Paul Heyse (Leipzig, 1867-71, 38 vols.) But, despite the high merits of von Bodenstedt and liis companions' performance, Schlegel and Tieck's achievement still holds the field. Schlegel may be justly reckoned one of the most effective of all the promoters of Shakespearean study. His lectures on ' Dramatic Literature,' which include a suggestive survey of Shakespeare's work, were dehvered at Vienna in 1808, and were translated into Enghsh in 1815. They are worthy of comparison with the criticism of Coleridge, who owed much to their influence. Wordsworth in 1815 declared that Schlegel and his disciples first marked out the right road in aesthetic appreciation, and that they enjoyed at the moment superiority over all Enghsh aesthetic critics of Shakespeare.^ In 1815, too, ^ Revised editions of Schegel and Tieck's translation appeared in Leipzig, ed. A. Brandl, 1897-9, 10 vols., and at Stuttgart, ed. Hermann Conrad, 1905-6. In 1908 Friedrich Gundolf began a reissue of Schegel's translations with original versions of many of the dramas with which Schlegel failed to deal. * In his ' Essay, Supplementary to the Preface ' in the edition of his Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote : ' The Germans only, of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shake- speare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the poet ; for among us, it is a common — I might say an established — opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be " a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are com- pensated by great beauties." How long may it be before this miscon- SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 617 Goethe lent point to Wordsworth's argument in his stimu- lating essay ' Shakespeare und kein Ende ' in which he brought his voluminous criticism to a close. A few years later another very original exponent of German romanti- cism, Heim-ich Heine, enrolled himself among German Shakespeareans. Heine pubhshed in 1838 charming studies of Shakespeare's heroines, acknowledging only one defect in Shakespeare — that he was an Enghshman. An Enghsh translation appeared in 1895. During the last eighty years textual, aesthetic, and biographical criticism has been pursued in Germany with unflagging industry and energy ; and although Modem laboured and supersubtle theorising charac- German ^ ^ . . writers on terises much German aesthetic criticism, its sp^are. mass and variety testify to the impressiveness of the appeal that Shakespeare's work makes in permanence to the German intellect. The efforts to stem the current of Shakespearean worship essayed by the reaUstic critic, Gustav Riimelin, in his ' Shakespeare- studien ' (Stuttgart, 1866), and subsequently by the drama- tist, J. R. Benedix, in ' Die Shakespearomanie ' (Stuttgart, 1873, 8vo), proved of no effect. In studies of the text and metre Nikolaus Dehus (1813-1888) should, among recent German writers, be accorded the first place ; and in studies of the biography and stage history Friedrich Karl Elze (1821-1889). Among recent aesthetic critics in Germany a high place should be accorded Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig (1818-1879), in spite of the frequent cloudiness of vision with which a study of Hegel's aesthetic philosophy infects his ' Vorlesungen iiber Shakespeare ' (Berlin, 1858 and 1874) and his ' Shakespeare- Fragen ' (Leipzig, 1871). Otto Ludwig the poet (1813-1865) published some enlightened criticism in his ' Shakespeare- Studien ' (Leipzig, 1 87 1 ) ,i and Eduard Wilhelm Sievers ( 1 820- ception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare ... is not less admirable than his imagination ? ' ^ See his Nachlass-Schriften, edited by Moritz Heydrich, Leipzig, 1874, Bd. u. 618 WILLIMI SHAKESPEARE 1895) is author of many valuable essays as well as of an uncompleted biography.^ Ulrici's ' Shakespeare's Dramatic Art ' (first published at Halle in 1839) and Gervinus's ' Commentaries ' (first pubhshed at Leipzig in 1848-9), both of which are famihar in English translations, are suggestive interpretations, but too speculative to be convincing. The Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, founded at Weimar in 1865, has pubhshed fifty-one year-books (edited successively by von Bodenstedt, Dehus, Elze, F. A. Leo, and Prof. Brandl, with Wolfgang Keller and Max Forster) ; each contains useful contributions to Shakespearean study, and the whole series admirably and exhaustively illustrates the merits and defects of Shakespearean criticism and research in Germany. In the early days of the Romantic movement Shake- speare's plays were admitted to the repertory of the „ , national stage, and the fascination which German they exerted on German playgoers in the last ^ ^^^' years of the eighteenth century has never waned. Although Goethe deemed Shakespeare's works unsuited to the stage, he adapted ' Romeo and Juliet ' in 1812 for the Weimar theatre, while Schiller prepared 'Macbeth' (Stuttgart, 1801). The greatest of German actors, Friedrich Ulrich Ludwig Schroder (1744-1816), may be said to have estabhshed the Shakespearean vogue on the German stage when he produced ' Hamlet ' at the Hamburg theatre on September 20, 1776. Schroder's most famous successors among German actors, Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832), his nephew Gustav EmH Devrient (1803- 1872), and Ludwig Barnay {b. 1842), largely derived their fame from their successful assumptions of Shakespearean characters. Another of Ludwig Devrient's nephews, Eduard (1801-1877), also an actor, prepared, with his son Otto, a German acting edition (Leipzig, 1873, and follow- ^ Cf. Sievers, William Shakespeare : Sein Leben U7id Dichten (Gotha, 1866) vol. i. (aU published), and his Shakespeare's Ziveite Mittelalter- lichen Dramen-Cyclus (treating mauily of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V), edited with a notice of Sievers's Shakespearean work by Dr. W. Wetz, Berlin, 1896. SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 619 ing years). An acting edition by Wilhelm Oechelhauser appeared previously at Berlin in 1871. Thirty- two of the thirty-seven plays assigned to Shakespeare are now on recognised lists of German acting plays, including all the histories. In the year 1913 no fewer than 1133 perform- ances were given of 23 plays, an average of three Shake- spearean representations a day in the German-speaking regions of Europe.^ It is not only in capitals like Berlin and Vienna that the representations are frequent and popular. In towns Hke Altona, Breslau, Frankfort-on- the-Maia, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Rostock, Shake- speare is acted constantly, and the greater number of his dramas is regularly kept in rehearsal, ' Othello,' ' Hamlet,' ' Romeo and JuHet,' ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' ' The Merchant of Venice,' and ' The Taming of the Shrew ' usually prove the most attractive. Much industry and ingenuity have been devoted to the theatrical setting of Shakespearean drama in Germany. Simple but adequate scenery and costume which reasonably respected archaeo- logical accuracy was through the nineteenth century the general aim of the most enlightened interpreters. A just artistic method was inaugurated by K. Immermann, the director, at the Diisseldorf theatre in 1834, and was de- veloped on scholarly lines at the Meiningen couj't theatre from 1874 onwards, and at the Munich theatre during 1889 and the following years. A new and somewhat revo- lutionary system of Shakespearean representation which largely defies tradition was inaugurated in 1904 by Max Reinhardt, then director of the Neue Theater at Berhn, with the production of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' ; from 1905 onwards Reinhardt developed his method at the Deutsche Theater, in his presentation of twelve further Shakespearean pieces, including ' The Merchant of Venice,' ' Much Ado,' ' Hamlet,' ' King Lear,' The First d,nd Second Parts of 'Henry IV,' and 'Romeo and Juliet.' With the help of much original stage mechanism Reinhardt ^ Cf. Jdhrbiicher d. Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1894-1914. 620 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE made the endeavour to beautify the stage illusion and to convey at the same time a convincing impression of naturalism.^ Reinliardt's ingenious mnovations have en- joyed much vogue in Germany for some eleven years past, and have exerted some influence on recent Shakespearean revivals in England and America. Of the many German musical composers who have worked on Shake- spe^arean spearean themes, 2 Mendelssohn (in ' A Mid- German summer Night's Dream,' 1826), Otto Nicolai music. , , , (in ' Merry Wives,' 1849), Schumann and Franz Schubert (in setting separate songs) have achieved the greatest success. In France Shakespeare won recognition after a longer struggle than in Germany. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619- 1655), in his tragedy of ' Agrippine,' seemed to echo passages in ' Cymbehne,' ' Hamlet,' and ' The Merchant of Venice,' but the resemblances prove to be accidental. It was Nicolas Clement, Louis XIV's librarian, who, first among Frenchmen, put on record an appreciation of Shakespeare. When, about 1680, he entered in the catalogue of the royal hbrary the title of the Second Foho of 1632, he added a note in which he allowed Shake- speare imagination, natural thoughts, and ingenious expres- sion, but deplored his obscenity.^ Nearly half a century elapsed before France evinced any general interest in Shakespeare. A popular French translation of Addison's ' Spectator ' (Amsterdam, 1714) first gave French readers some notion of Shakespeare's EngHsh reputation. It is to Voltaire that his countrymen owe, as he himself boasted, their first effective introduction to Shakespeare.^ Voltaire studied Shakespeare thoroughly on his visit to ^ Cf. Jahrbuch d. Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesdlschaft, 1914, pp. 107 seq. ^ Joseph Haydn composed as early as 1774 music for the two tragedies of Uamlei and King Lear (ib. pp. 51-9). ^ Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 56. This copy of the Second Folio remains in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. See p. 569 supra. * Cf. Alex. Schmidt, Voltaires Verdienst von der Einfiihrwig Shake- speares in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864 ; Prof. T. Lounsbury, Shake- speare and Voltaire, 1902, an exhaustive examination of Voltaire's SHAKESPEAKE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 621 England between 1726 and 1729, and the English dramatist's influence is visible in his own dramas. His tragedy of ' Brutus ' (1730) evinces an intimate knowledge Voltaire's q£ ' Julius Csesar,' of which he also prepared estimate. ' ^ ^ a direct paraphrase in 1731. His 'Eryphile' (1732) was the product of many perusals of ' Hamlet.' His ' Zaire ' (1733) is a pale reflection of ' Othello,' and his ' Mahomet ' (1734) of ' Macbeth.' In his ' Lettre sur la Tragedie' (1731), and in his ' Lettres Philosophiques ' (1733), afterwards reissued as ' Lettres sur les Anglais,' 1734 (Nos. xviii. and xix.), Voltaire fully defined his critical attitude to Shakespeare. With an obstinate persistency he measured his work by the rigid standards of classicism. While he expressed admiration for Shakespeare's genius, he attacked with vehemence his want of taste and art. ' En Angleterre,' Voltaire -wTote, ' Shakespeare crea le theatre. II avait un genie plein de force et de fecondite, de naturel et de sublime ; mais sans la moindre etincelle de bon gout, et sans la moindre connaissance des regies.' In Voltaire's view Shakespeare was, in spite of ' des mor- ceaux admirables,' ' le Corneille de Londres, grand fou d'ailleurs.' Voltaire's influence failed to check the growth of sounder views in France. The Abbe Prevost in his periodical ' Le Pour et le Contre' (1738 e^se^'.) showed freedom y°^onents from classical prejudice in a sagacious acknow- ledgement of Shakespeare's power. The Abbe Leblanc in his ' Lettres d'un Fran9ais ' (1745) while he credited Shakespeare with grotesque extravagance paid an unqualified tribute to his sublimity. Portions of twelve plays were translated in De la Place's ' Theatre Anglais ' (1745-8, 8 vols.), with an appreciative preface, and Voltaire's authority was thenceforth diminished. The ' Anglomanie ' which flourished in France in the middle years of the century did much for Shakespeare's reputation. Under the headings of ' Genie,' ' Stratford,' and ' Tragedie,' attitude to Shakespeare's work ; J. Churton Collins, Voltaire, Montes- quieu and RoiLsseau in England, ] 9r>8. 622 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Diderot made in his ' Encyclopedie ' (1751-72) a determined stand against the Voltairean position. Garrick visited Paris in 1763 and 1764, and was received with enthu- siasm by cultivated society and by the chief actors of the Comedie Fran^aise, and his recitations of scenes from Shakespeare in the salons of the capital were loudly applauded. But Voltaire was not easily silenced. He rephed many times to the critics of his earlier Shakespearean pronounce- ment. His ' Observations sur le Jules Cesar de Shake- speare ' appeared in 1744 and there followed his ' Appel a toutes les nations de I'Europe des jugements d'un ecrivain anglais, ou manifest-e au sujet des honneurs du pavilion entre les theatres de Londres et de Paris ' (1761). Johnson repHed to Voltaire's general criticism in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu in 1769 in a separate volume, which was translated into French in 1777. Further opportunity of studying Shake- speare's work in the French language increased the poet's vogue among Voltaire's fellow-countrymen. Jean-Frangois Ducis (1733-1816) metrically adapted, without much insight and with reckless changes, six plays for the French stage, beginning in 1769 with ' Hamlet,' and ending with ' Othello ' in 1792. His versions were welcomed French^ ^^ ^^^ Paris theatres, and were admitted to trans- the stages of other continental countries. In lations. . ^ 1776 Pierre Le Toumeur began a prose trans- lation of all Shakespeare's plays, which he completed in 1782 (20 vols.). In the preface to his first volume Le Tourneur, who was more faithful to his original than any of his French predecessors, declared Shakespeare to be ' the god of the theatre.' Such praise exasperated Voltaire anew. He was in his eighty-third year, but his energetic vanity was irrepressible and he now retorted on Le Tourneur in two violent letters, the first of which was read by D'Alem- bert before the French Academy on August 25, 1776. Here Shakespeare was described as a barbarian, whose works — ' a huge dimghill ' — concealed some pearls, whose ' sparks of genius ' shone ' in a horrible night.' SHAKESPEAKE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 623 Although Voltaire's verdict was rejected by the majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment bom of the genius of the nation, and made an impression critics^ that was never entirely effaced. The pioneers gradual of the Romantic School at the extreme end ti^n^rom of the eighteenth century were divided in their Voitairean estimates of Shakespeare's achievement. Mar- montel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his ' Essai sur Shakespeare,' 1801, in- clined to Voltaire's valuation ; but Madame de Stael in her ' De la Litterature,' 1800 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5), and Charles Nodier in his ' Pensees de Shakespeare ' ( 1 805) supplied effective antidotes.^ None the less, ' at this day,' wrote Wordsworth, as late as 1815, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to " this darhng of our nation." " The Enghsh with their bouffon de Shake- speare " is as famihar an expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. Baron Grimm is the only French writer who seems to have perceived his infinite supe- riority to the first names of the French theatre ; an advantage which the Parisian critic owed to his German blood and German education.' ^ But the rapid growth of the Romantic movement tended to discountenance all unqualified depreciation. Paul Duport, in ' Essais Litteraires sur Shakespeare ' (Paris, 1828, 2 vols.), was the last French critic of repute to repeat Voltaire's censure unreservedly, although Ponsard, when he was admitted to the French Academy in 1856, gave Voltaire's views a modified approval in his inaugural 'discours.' The re- vision of Le Tourneur's translation by Francois Guizot and A. Pichot in 1821 secured for Shakespeare a fresh and fruitful advantage. Guizot's prefatory discourse ^ See the present MTiter's Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 111-3. * Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and the encyclo- pidistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his voluminous Correspondance Litter aire Philosophique et Critique, extend- ing over the period 1753-1770, the greater part of which was published in 16 vols. 1812-13. 624 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ' Sur la Vie et les CEuvres de Shakespeare ' (reprinted separately from the translation of 1821 and rewritten as ' Shakespeare et son Temps' 1852) set Shakespeare's fame in France on firm foundations which were greatly strengthened by the monograph on ' Racine et Shakespeare ' by Stendhal (Henri Beyle) in 1825 and by Victor Hugo's preface to his tragedy of ' Cromwell ' (1827). At the same time Barante in a study of ' Hamlet ' ^ and Villemain in a general essay ^ acknowledged with comparatively few quahfications the mightiness of Shakespeare's genius. The latest champions of French romanticism were at one in their worship of Shakespeare. Alfred de Musset became a dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. Alfred de Vigny prepared a version of ' Othello ' for the Theatre-Francais in 1829 with eminent success. A somewhat free adaptation of ' Hamlet ' by Alexandre Dumas was first performed in 1847, and a render- ing by the Chevalier de Chatelain (1864) was often repeated. George Sand translated ' As You Like It ' (Paris, 1856) for representation by the Comedie Fran9aise on April 12, 1856. To George Sand everything in hterature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. Guizot's complete translation was followed by those of Francisque IVIichel (1839), of Benjamin Laroche (1851), of Emile Montegut (1868-73, 10 vols.), and of G. Duval (1903 and following years, 8 vols.) ; but the best of all French renderings was the prose version by Francois Victor Hugo (1850-67), whose father, Victor Hugo the poet, renewed his adoration in a rhapsodical eulogy in 1864. Alfred Mezieres's ' Shakespeare, ses (Euvres et ses Critiques ' (Paris, 1860), and Lamartine's ' Shakespeare et son (Euvre ' (1865) are saner appreciations. Ernest Renan bore witness to the stimulus which Shakespeare exerted on the enlightened French mind in his ' CaUban suite de la Tempete ' (1878). The latest appreciation of Shakespeare is to be found in M. Jusserand's ' Histoire Litteraire du peuple anglais ' (1908) : it illustrates French sentiment at its best. 1 Melanges Historiques, 1824, iii. 217-34. 2 Melanges, 1827, iii. 141-87. SHAKESPEAEE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 625 Before the close of the eighteenth centurj^ ' Hamlet ' and ' Macbeth,' ' Othello,' and a few other Shakespearean „ , plays, were in Ducis's renderings stock pieces French on the French stage. The great actor Talma as s age. Othello in Ducis's version reached in 1792 the climax of his career. A powerful impetus to theatrical re- presentation of Shakespeare in France was given by the per- formance in Paris of the chief plays by a strong company of Enghsh actors in the autumn of 1827. ' Hamlet ' and ' Othello ' were acted successively by Charles Kemble and Macready ; Edmund Kean appeared as Richard III, Othello, and Shylock; Miss Harriet Constance Smithson, who became the wife of Hector Berhoz the musician, filled the roles of OpheUa, Juhet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Portia. French critics were divided as to the merits of the performers, but most of them were enthusiastic in their commendations of the plays. ^ Lady Macbeth has been represented in recent years by Madame Sarah Bern- hardt, and Hamlet by M. Mounet Sully of the Theatre- rran9ais. The actor and manager Andie Antoine at the Theatre Antoine in Paris recently revived Shakespearean drama in an admirable artistic setting and himself played effectively the leading roles in ' King Lear ' (1904) and ' Juhus Caesar' (1906). Four French musicians — Berlioz in his symphony of ' Romeo and Juhet,' Gounod in his opera of ' Romeo and Juhet,' Ambroise Thomas in his opera of ' Hamlet,' and Saint-Saens in his opera of ' Henry VIII ' — have interpreted musically portions of Shakespeare's work. The classical painter Ingres intro- duced Shakespeare's portrait into his famous picture ' Le Cortege d'Homere' (now in the Louvre). ^ 1 Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day by day in the Paris newspaper Le Globe. They were by Charles Maginn, who reprinted them in his Causeries et Meditations Historiques et Litteraires (Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.). * M. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous V Ancien Regime, Paris, 1898 (English translation entitled Shakespeare in France, London, 1899), is the chief authority on its subject. Cf. Lacroix, Histoire de r Influence de Shakespeare sur le Thedtre-FrauQais, 1867 ; Ediitburgh Review, 1849, 2 s 626 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE In Italy it was chiefly under the guidance of Voltaire that Shakespeare was j&rst studied, and ItaHan critics of the eighteenth century long echoed the French ^' philosopher's discordant notes. Antonio Conti (1677-1749), an ItaHan who distinguished himself in science as well as in letters, hved long in England and was the friend of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1726 he pubhshed his tragedy of ' II Cesar,' in which he acknowledged indebtedness to ' Sasper,' but he only knew Shakespeare's play of ' JuHus Caesar ' in the duke of Buckingham's adaptation. Conti's plays of ' Giunio Bruto ' and ' Marco Bruto ' show better defined traces of Shakespearean study, although they were cast in the mould of Voltaire's tragedies. Francis Quadrio in his ' Delia Storia e della Ragione d'ogni Poesia ' (Alilan, 1739-52) thoroughly famiUarised ItaUan readers with Voltaire's view of Shakespeare. Giuseppe Baretti (1719- 1789), the Anglo-ItaHan lexicographer, who long Hved in England, was in 1777 the first Italian to defend Shake- speare against Voltaire's strictures.^ The subsequent Romantic movement which owed much to German influence planted in Italy the seeds of a potent faith in Shakespeare. IppoHto Pinde- Shake- monte of Verona (1735-1828), in spite of his clas- and the sicist tendencies, respectfuUy imitated Shake- p^^^s^ speare in his tragedy ' Arminio,' and Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828) who is reckoned a regenerator of ItaHan Hterature bore witness to Shakespearean influence in his great tragedy ' Caius Gracchus.' Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), author of ' I Promessi Sposi,' acknowledged discipleship to Shakespeare no less than to Goethe, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. Many ItaHan translations of separate plays were pub- Hshed before the eighteenth century closed. The French pp. 39-77 ; and Elze, Essays, pp. 193 seq. Some supplementary infor- mation appears in ' Esquisse d'une histoire de Shakespeare en France " in F. Baldensperger's Etudes d'Histoire Litteraire, 2^ serie (1910). ^ Cf. L. Pignotti, La tomba di Shakespeare, Florence, 1779, and Giovanni Andres, DelV Origine, Progressi e Stato attuale d'ogni Lettera- tura, 1782. SHAKESPEAKE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 627 adaptation of ' Hamlet ' by Ducia was issued in Italian blank verse (Venice, 1774, 8vo). Soon afterwards Ales- sandro Verri (1741-1816), a writer of romance, trans- turned ' Hamlet ' and ' Othello ' into Italian ations. prose. Complete translations of all the plays direct from the EngUsh were issued in verse by Michele Leoni at Verona (1819-22, 14 vols.), and in prose by Carlo Rusconi at Padua in 1838 (new edit. Turin, 1858-9). Giuho Carcano the Milanese poet accurately but rather baldly rendered selected plays (Florence 1857-9) and sub- sequently pubUshed a complete version at IVIilan (1875-82, 12 vols.). 'Othello' and 'Romeo and Juhet' have been often translated into Itahan separately in late years, and these and other dramas have been constantly represented in the Itahan theatres for nearly 150 years. The Itahan players, Madame Ristori (as Lady Macbeth), Eleonora Duse, Salvini (as Othello), and Rossi rank among Shakespeare's most effective interpreters. Rossini's opera of OtheUo and Verdi's operas of Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (the last two with hbretti by Boito), manifest close and appre- ciative study of Shakespeare. In Spain Shakespeare's fame made slower progress than in France or Italy. During the eighteenth century Spanish hterature was dominated by French influences. Ducis's versions of Shakespeare were frequently rendered on the Spanish stage in the native language before the end of the eighteenth century. In 1798 Leandro Fernandez di Moratin, the reviver of Spanish drama on the French model, pubhshed at Madrid a prose translation of ' Hamlet ' with a life of the author and a commentary condemning Shakespeare's defiance of classical rule. Yet the Spanish romanti- cists of the earher nineteenth century paid Shakespeare somethuig of the same attention as they extended to Byron. The appearance of a Spanish translation of Schlegel's lectures on ' Dramatic Literature ' in 1818 stimu- lated Shakespearean study. Blanco White issued select passages in Spanish in 1824. Jose di Espronceda (1809- 2 s 2 628 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE 1842), a chieftain among Spanish romanticists, zealously studied Shakespearean drama, and Jose Maria Quadrado (1819-1896), a man of much literary refinement, boldly recast some plays in the native language. The Spanish critic and poet Menendez y Pelayo {b. 1856) subsequently set Shakespeare above Calderon. Two Spanish translations of Shakespeare's complete works were set on foot inde- pendently in 1875 and 1885 respectively ; the earlier (by J. Clark) appeared at Madrid in five volumes, and three volumes of the other (by G. Macpherson) have been pub- lished. An interesting attempt to turn Shakespeare into the Catalan language has lately been initiated at Barcelona. A rendering of ' Macbeth ' by C. Montoliu appeared in 1908 and an admirable version of ' King Lear ' by Anfos Par with an elaborate and enlightened commentary followed in 1912.1 It was through France that Holland made her first acquaintance with Shakespeare's work. In 1777 Ducis's version of ' Hamlet ' appeared in Dutch at Holland ^^^ Hague ; ' Lear ' followed nine years later, and ' OtheUo ' in 1802. Between 1778 and 1782 fourteen plays were translated direct from the original English text into Dutch prose in a series of five volumes with notes translated from Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson and Capell. Two com- plete Dutch translations have since been pubhshed : one in prose by A. S. Kok (Amsterdam, 1873-1880, 7 vols.), the other in verse by Dr. L. A. J. Burgersdijk (Leyden, 1884-8, 12 vols.). In Denmark French classical influence delayed appre- In elation of Shakespeare's work till the extreme Denmark. ^^^ q£ ^j^g eighteenth century. A romantic school of poetry and criticism was then founded and ^ A curious imaginary conversation by Senor Carlos Navarro Lamarca on the possibilities of successfully translating Hamlet into Spanish appeared in the Spanish magazine Helios, Madrid, July 1903. The supposed interlocutors are Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Librarian of the British Museum, the present WTiter, and Lopez and Gonzales, two pretended Spanish students. See also Helios, January 1904. SHAKESPEAKE'S FOEEIGN VOGUE 629 during the nineteenth century it completely established Shakespeare's supremacy. Several of his plays were translated into Danish by N. Rosenfeldt in 1791. Some twenty years later the Danish actor Peter Foersom, who was a disciple of the German actor Schroder, secured for Shakespearean drama a chief place in the Danish theatre. Many of the tragedies were rendered into Danish by Foersom with the aid of P. F. WulflE (Copenhagen, 1807-25, 7 vols.). Their labours were revised and completed by E. Lembcke (Copenhagen, 1868-73, 18 vols.). Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, published in 1895 at Copenhagen a Danish study of Shakespeare which at once won a high place in critical literature, &.nd was translated into English, French and German. In Sweden a complete translation by C. A. Hagberg appeared at Lund ui 1847-51 (12 vols.) and a valuable In biography by H. W. Schiick at Stockholm in Sweden. jggs^ An interesting version of the ' Sonnets ' by C. R. Nyblom came out at Upsala in 1871. In Eastern Europe^ Shakespeare's plays became known at a rather earlier date than in Scandinavia, mainly through French translations. The Russian Russia dramatist Alexander Soumarakov pubUshed in Petrograd as early as 1748 a version of ' Hamlet ' in Russian verse which was acted in the Russian capital two years later. The work was based on De la Place's free French rendering of Shakespeare's play. In 1783 ' Richard III ' was rendered into Russian with the help of Le Tourneur's more hteral French prose. The Empress Catherine II in 1786 encouraged the incipient Shakespearean vogue by converting Eschenburg's German rendering of the ' Merry Wives ' into a Russian farce. ^ ^ See Andre Lirondelle, Shakespeare en Eusaie, 1748-1840, Paris, 1912. * The scene of the piece was transferred to St. Petersburg [Petro- grad], and the characters bore Russian names ; FalstafE becomes lakov Vlasievitch Polkadov. 630 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE In the same year she introduced many Shakespearean touches through the German into two Russian history plays called respectively ' Rurik ' and ' Oleg,' and she prepared a Hberal adaptation of ' Timon of Athens.' Shakespeare found his first whole-hearted Russian champion in N. Karamzine, a foe to French classicism who, having learned Shakespeare's language on a visit to this country, turned ' Juhus Caesar ' from Enghsh into Russian prose at Moscow in 1787. A preface claims for Shakespeare complete insight into human nature. Early in the nineteenth century the tragedies ' Othello,' ' Lear,' ' Hamlet ' were rendered into Russian from T*^® . the French of Ducis and were acted with great romantic succcss on Russian stages. The romantic movement . • -n • Ti. i. i i and movement in Russian uterature owed much Shake- ^q ^j^g growing worship and study of Shake- speare. Pushkin learnt English in order to read Shakespeare and Byron in the original, and his Russian plays are dj^ed in Shakespearean colours. Lermontov poured contempt on the French version of Ducis and insisted that Shakespearean drama must be studied as it came from the author's pen. Tourgeniev and the younger romanticists were deeply indebted to Shakespeare's in- spiration. At the instigation of Behnsky, the chief of Russian critics, a scholarly translation into Russian prose was begun by N. Ketzcher in 1841 ; eighteen plays appeared at Moscow (8 vols. 1841-50), and the work was com- pleted in a new edition (Moscow, 9 vols. 1862-79). In 1865 there appeared at Petrograd the best translation in verse (direct from the English) by Nekrasow and Gerbel Gerbel also issued a Russian translation of the ' Sonnets ' in 1880. Another rendering of all the plays by P. A. Kanshin, 12 vols., followed in 1893. A new verse trans- lation by various hands, edited by Professor Vengerov of Petrograd, with critical essays, notes, and a vast number of illustrations, appeared there in 1902-4 (5 vols. 4to). More recent are the translations of A. L. Sokolovski (Petrograd, 1913, 12^ vols.) and of A. E. Gruzinski (Moscow, SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 631 1913, 3 vols.). Almost every play has been represented in Russian on the Russian stage ; and a large critical hterature attests the general enthusiasm. The Grand Duke Con- stantine Constantinovitch privately issued at Petrograd in three sumptuous volumes in 1899-1900 a Russian translation of ' Hamlet ' with exhaustive notes and com- mentary in the Russian language ^ ; the work was dedi- cated to the Avddow of Tsar Alexander III. A somewhat perverse protest against the Russian idohsation of Shakespeare was launched by Count Leo , Tolstoy in his dechning days. In 1906 Tolstoy attack pubhshed an elaborate monograph on Shake- ^^° ' speare in which he angrily denounced the EngUsh dramatist as an eulogist of wealth and rank and a contemner of poverty and humble station. Nor would Tolstoy allow the EngUsh dramatist genuine poetic thought or power of characterisation. But throughout his phiHppic Tolstoy shows radical defects of judgment, After a detailed comparison of the old play of ' King Leir ' with Shakespeare's finished tragedy of ' Lear ' he pronounces in favour of the earher production. ^ In Poland the study of Shakespeare followed much the same course as in Russia. The last King of the country, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski (1732-1798), while in England from February to June 1754 first saw a play of Shakespeare on the stage; he there- upon abandoned all classical prejudices and became for life an ardent worshipper of Shakespeare's work and ^ The Grand Duke presented a copy to the library of Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford. * See Tolstoy's Shakespeare, trad, de Rasse par J. W. Bienstock (Paris, 1906) ; and Joseph B. Mayor, Tolstoi as Shakespearean Critic (in Trans. Roy. Soc. Lit. 1908, 2nd ser. vol. 28 pt. i. pp. 23-55). Prof. Leo Wiener in his An Interpretation of the Russian People (New York, 1915, pp. 187-91) supplies the best refutation of Tolstoy's verdict in a description of the strong sympathetic interest excited in a Russian peasant girl at a Sunday School by a reading of a Russian translation of Shakespeare's King Lear. Tolstoy selects the identical play for special condemnation. 632 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE art.^ After his accession to the PoUsh throne in 1764 he found opportunities of disseminating his faith among his fellow countrymen, and the nobihty of Poland soon idohsed the EngHsh poet.^ German actors seem to have first performed Shake- speare's plays at Warsaw, where they produced ' Romeo „ ,. . and Juhet ' in 1775 and ' Hamlet ' in 1781. Polish trans- A Polish translation through the French of lations. c ^gj.j,y ^-^gg , appeared in 1782, and ' Hamlet ' was acted in a PoHsh translation of the German actor Schroder's version at Lemberg in 1797. As many as sixteen plays now hold a recognised place among Pohsh acting plays. A Pohsh translation of Shakespeare's collected works appeared at Warsaw in 1875 (edited by the PoHsh poet Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski), and was long reckoned among the most successful renderings in a foreign tongue. It has been lately superseded by a fresh transla- tion by eight prominent Pohsh men of letters, which was completed in twelve volumes in 1913 under the editorship ^ See Poniatowsld's Memoires, ed. Serge Gorialnow, Petrograd, 1914 ; i. 112-3. In 1753 Poniatowski translated into French some scenes from Julius Ccesar ; the manuscript survives in the Czartoryski Museum at Cracow and was printed by Dr. Bernacki in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1906), xlii. 186-202. * The Polish princess, Isabella wife of Prince Adam Czartoryski, visited Stratford-on-Avon in July 1790 and on November 28 following her secretary, Count Orlovski, purchased on her behalf for 20 guineas a damaged arm-chair at Shakespeare's Birthplace which was reported to have belonged to the poet. The vendor was Thomas Hart, who was then both tenant and owner of the Birthplace. A long account of the trans- action is at the Birthplace in the Sanders 3IS. 1191. (See also George Burnet's View of the Present State of Poland, 1807, and Gent. Mag. May 1815.) The descendants of the princess long preserved the chair in a museum known as ' Das Gothische Haus ' erected by her in the grounds of her chateau at Pulawy (Nova Alexandrova) near Lublin, together with an attestation of the chair's authenticity which was signed at Stratford on June 17, 1791, by J. Jordan, Thomas Hart, and Austin WarrUow. The chair is described in their certificate, a copy of which has been communicated to the present writer, as ' an ancient back chair, commonly called Shakespeare's chair, which at this time ia much deformed owing to its being cut to pieces and carried away by travellers.' SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 633 of Prof. Roman Dyboski, professor of English Language and Literature at Gracow.^ In Hungary, Shakespeare's greatest works have since the beginning of the nineteenth century enjoyed the enthusiastic regard of both students and play- J? goers. ' Romeo and Juhet ' was translated Hungary. ® into Hungarian in 1786 and ' Hamlet ' in 1790. In 1830, 1845, and 1848, efforts were made to issue complete translations, but only portions were pubhshed. The first complete translation into Hungarian appeared at Budapest under the auspices of the Kisfaludy Society (1864-78, 19 vols.). At the National Theatre at Budapest twenty- two plays have been of late included in the repertory .^ Other complete translations have been pubhshed in Bohemian (Prague, 1856-74), and Finnish (Helsingfors, 1892-5). In Armenian, three plays (' Hamlet,' In other . Romeo and Juhet,' and ' As You Like It ') countries. ' ' have been issued. Separate plays have appeared in Welsh, Portuguese, Friesic, Flemish, Servian, Roumanian, Maltese, Ukrainian, Wallachian, Croatian, modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese ; while a few have been rendered into BengaU, Hindustani, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kanarese, and other languages of India, and have been acted in native theatres. ^ Dr. Bernacki, vice-custodian of the Ossolinski Institute at Lemberg, adds a valuable account of Shakespeare in Poland down to the destruc- tion of Polish independence in 1798. , * See August Greguss's Shakspere . . . elso hotel : Shakspere palyaja, Budapest, 1880 (an account of Shakespeare in Hungarian), and Shakespeare Drdmdi Hazduk Ban (a full bibliography with criti- cisms of Hungarian renderings of Shakespeare), by J. Bayer, 2 vols. Budapest, 1909. XXVII GENERAL ESTIMATE The study of Shakespeare's biography in the light of contemporary literary history shows that his practical experiences and fortunes closely resembled speare's those of the many who in his epoch followed thTbio^^ the profession of dramatist. His conscious aims graphic and practices seem indistinguishable from those of contemporary men of letters. It is beyond the power of biographical research to determine the final or efficient cause of his poetic individuality. Yet the concep- tion of his dramatic and poetic powers growls more real and actual after the features in his hfe and character which set him on a level with other men have been piecisely defined by the biographer. The infinite difference between his endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magical and involuntary working of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has o'mied as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom it pleases. The hterary history of the world proves the hopelessness of seeking in biographical data, or in the facts of everyday business, the secret springs of poetic inspiration. Emerson's famous aphorism — ' Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare ' — seems, until it be submitted to a radical qualification, to rest on a profound impersonal misapprehension. An unquestionable character- aspect of istic of Shakespeare's art is its impersonaUty. The plain and positive references in the plays to Shakespeare's personal experiences either at Stratford- on-Avon or in London are rare and fragmentary, and 634 GENERAL ESTIMATE 635 nowhere else can we point with confidence to any auto- biographic revelations. As a dramatist Shakespeare lay under the obligation of investing a great crowd of characters with all phases of sentiment and passion, and no critical test has yet been found whereby to dis- entangle Shakespeare's personal feeUngs or opinions from those which he imputes to the creatures of his dramatic world. It was contrary to Shakespeare's dra- matic aim to label or catalogue in drama his private sympathies or antipathies. The most psychological of EngUsh poets and a dramatic artist of no mean order, Robert Browning, bluntly declared that Shakespeare ' ne'er so httlc ' at any point in his work ' left his bosom's gate ajar.'' Even in the ' Sonnets ' lyric emotion seems to Browning to be transfused by dramatic instinct. It is possible to deduce from his plays a broad practical philo- sophy which is aHve with an active moral sense. But we seek in vain for any self-evident revelation of personal experience of emotion or passion.^ Many forces went to the making of Shakespeare's mighty achievement. His national affinities he on the surface. A love of his own country and a Domestic confident faith in its destiny find exalted and foreign . . , . , -n ■ ^^ ■,■ t ^ ■ influences expression m his work. Especially did he inter- affinifies P^®^ ^^ perfection the humour peculiar to his race. His drama was cast in a mould which English predecessors had invented. But he is free of all taint of insularity. His lot was thrown in the full current of the intellectual and artistic movement known as the Renaissance, which taking its rise in Italy of the lourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in his hfetime still active in every country of Western Europe. He shared in the great common stock of thought and aspiration — in the certain hope of intellectual enfranchisement and in the enthusiastic recognition of the beauty of the world and humanity — ^ See the present writer's The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare' a Art (English Association, Leafiet xiii, July 1909). 636 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE to which in his epoch authors of all countries under the sway of the Renaissance enjoyed access. Like aU great poets Shakespeare was not merely gifted with a supreme capacity for observing what was passing about him in nature and human life, but he was endowed with the rare power of assimilating with rapidity the fruits of reading. Literary study rendered his imagination the more productive and robust. His genius caught light and heat from much foreign as well as domestic literature. But he had the faculty of transmuting in the crucible of his mind the thought and style of others into new sub- stance of an unprecedented richness. His mind may best be Ukened to a highly sensitised photographic plate, which need only be exposed for however brief a period to anything in life or literature, speare's i^ Order to receive upon its surface the receptive gj.jjj outHne of a picture which could be faculty. '- developed and reproduced at will. If Shake- speare's mind came in contact in an alehouse with a burly, good-humoured toper, the conception of a Falstaff found instantaneous admission to his brain. The character had revealed itself to him in most of its involutions, as quickly as his eye caught sight of its external form, and his ear caught the sound of the voice. Books offered Shakespeare the same opportunity of reahsing human life and experience. A hurried perusal of an Itahan story of a Jew in Venice conveyed to him the mental picture of Shy lock, vnth all his racial temperament in energetic action, and all the background of Venetian scenery and society accurately defined. A few hours spent over Plutarch's 'Lives' brought into being in Shakespeare's brain the true aspects of Roman character and Roman inspiration. Whencesoever the external impressions came, whether from the world of books or the world of Hving men, the same mental process was at work, the same visualising instinct which made the thing, which he saw or read of, a Uving and a lasting reaHty. No analysis of the final fruits of Shakespeare's genius GENERAL ESTIMATE 637 can be adequate. In knowledge of human character, in perception and portrayal of the workings of passion, in wealth of humour, in fertility of fancy, estimate ^^^ ^^ soundness of judgment, he has no rival, of his It is true of him, as of no other Avriter, that his language and versification adapt them- selves to every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of feUcity. Some defects are to be acknow- ledged, but they sink into insignificance when they are measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elhptical expressions, mixed metaphors, verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmo- sphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hopelessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shakespeare's vast work is scrutinised with due attention, the glow of his imagination is seen to leave few passages wholly unillumined. Some of his plots are hastily constructed and inconsistently developed, but the intensity of the interest with which he contrives to invest the personahty of his heroes and heroines triumphs over halting or digressive treatment of the story Ln which they have their being. Although he was versed in the technicahties of stagecraft, he occasionally disregarded its elementary conditions. The success of his presentments of human life and character depended indeed httle on his manipulation of theatrical machinery. His unassailable supremacy springs from the versatile working of his intellect and imagination, by virtue of which his pen hmned with unerring precision almost every gradation of thought and emotion that animates the hving stage of the world. Shakespeare, as HazUtt suggested, ultimately came to know how human faculty and feehng would develop in any conceivable change of fortune on the highways achieve- of life. His great characters give voice to ^^^^- thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that commonly rouse in the intelhgent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing 638 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE men and women speak unpremeditatingly among them- selves, rather than that they are reading wTitten speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination — fairies, ghosts, witches — are dehneated with a hke potency, and the reader or spec- tator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air. So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common hmita- tions of nationahty, and in every quarter of the globe to which civihsed life has penetrated Shake- universal speare's power is recognised. All the world recogni- over, language is apphed to his creations that ordinarily appHes to bemgs of flesh and blood. Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shy- lock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Cahban are studied in almost every civihsed tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their hps are rooted in the speech of civihsed humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of the world, speaking in divers accents, apphes with one accord his own words : ' How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in apprehension how hke a god ! ' The prince of French romancers, the elder Dumas, set the Enghsh dramatist next to God in the cosmic system ; ' after God,' wrote Dumas, ' Shakespeare has created most.' APPENDIX APPENDIX THE SOUnCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE The scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare's career has been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over _ two centuries has brought together a mass of detail rary records which far exceeds that accessible in the case of any a un an . other contemporary professional writer. Nevertheless, a few links are missing, and at some points appeal to con- jecture is inevitable. But the fully ascertained facts are numerous enough to define sharply the general direction that Shakespeare's career followed. Although the clues are in some places faint, the trail never eludes the patient investigator. FuUer, in his ' Worthies ' (1662), attempted the first biographical notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, the Oxford P^^^ antiquary, in his gossiping ' Lives of Eminent Men,' ^ efforts in based his ampler information on reports communicated biography. ^^ ^^^ ^^ William Beeston (d. 1682), an aged actor, whom Dryden called ' the chronicle of the stage,' and who was doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. Beeston's father, Christopher Beeston, was a member of Shakespeare's company of actors, and he for a long period was himself connected with the stage. Beeston's friend, John Lacy, an actor of the Restoration, also supplied Aubrey with further information. ^ A few addi- tional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the Rev. John Ward (1629-1681), vicar of Rtratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum -book written between 1661 and 1663 (ed. Charles Severn, 1839) ; by the Rev. William Fulman, ' Compiled between 1669 and 1696 ; fir3t printed in Letters from the Bodleian Library, 1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press in 1898 by the Eev. Andrew Clark (2 vols.). 2 See art. ' Shakespeare in Oral Tradition ' in the present writer's Shakespeare and the Modem Stage, 1906, pp. 49 seq. 641 2 T 642 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with valuable interpolations made before 1708 by Archdeacon Richard Davies, vicar of Sapperton, Gloucestershire) ; by John DowdaU, who recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 1693 (London, 1838) ; and by William Hall, who descriVjed a visit to Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Hall's letter among the Bodleian MSS.). Phillips in his ' Theatrum Poetarum ' (1675), and Langbaine in his ' EngUsh Dramatick Poets ' (1691), confined themselves to elementary criticism. Li 1709 Nicholas Rowe prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious memoir than had yet been attempted, and embodied some hitherto unrecorded Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton (1635-1710) suppUed him. A little fresh gossip was collected by WiUiam Oldys, and was printed from his manuscript ' Adversaria ' (now in the British Museum) as an appendix to Yeowell's ' Memoir of Oldys,' 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the narratives of their predecessor. Rowe. In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and especially in that of 1821, there was embodied a mass of fresh information derived by Edmund Malone from sys- oMhl*^'^"* tematic researches among the parochial records of nineteenth Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated bv the actor century. . ^ Alleyn at Dulwich, and official papers of state preserved in the public offices in London (now collected in the Pubhc Record Office). The available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was thus greatly extended, and Malone's information in spite of subsequent discoveries remains of supreme value. John Payne ColUer, in his ' History of Enghsh Dramatic Poetry' (1831), in his 'New Facts' about Shakespeare (1835), his ' New Particulars ' (1836), and his ' Further Particulars ' (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe's ' Diary ' and the ' Alleyn Papers ' for the Shakespeare Society, while occasionally throwing some further light on obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare's biography a series of ingeniously forged documents which have greatly perplexed succeeding biographers.^ Joseph Hunter in 'New Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1845) and George Russell French's ' Shakespeareana Genealogica ' (1869) occasionally supple- mented Malone's researches. James Orchard HaUiwell (afterwards HaUiwell-Phillipps 1820-1889) printed separately, between 1850 and 1884, in various privately issued pubUcations, ample selections from the Stratford archives and the extant legal documents bearing on ! ' See pp. 648 seq. SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 643 Shakespeare's career, many of them for the first time. In 1881 Halliwell-Phillipps began the collective publication of materials for a full biography in his ' Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare ' ; this work was generously enlarged in successive editions until it acquired massive proportions ; in the seventh edition of 1887, which embodied the author's final corrections and additions, it reached near 1000 pages. (Subsequent editions reprint the seventh edition without change.) Frederick Gard Fleay (1831-1909), in his ' Shakespeare Manual ' (1876), in his ' Life of Shakespeare ' (1886), in his ' History of the Stage ' (1890), and his ' Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama' (1891), adds much useful information respecting stage liistory and Shakespeare's relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries ; but many of Mr. Fleay's statements and conjectures are unauthenticated. Dr. C. W. Wallace, of ^Nebraska, has since 1904 added some subsidiary biographical details of much interest from documents at the PubUc Record Ofiice which he has examined for the first time.^ The history of Stratford-on-Avon and Shakespeare's relations with the town are treated in Wheler's ' History and Antiquities ' Stratford (1806), and his ' Birthplace of Shakespeare ' (1824) ; in topo- John R. Wise's ' Shakespeare, his Birthplace and its ^^^ ^' Neighbourhood ' (1861) ; in the present writer's ' Strat- ford-on-Avon to the Death of Shakespeare ' (new edit. 1907) ; in J. Harvey Bloom's ' Shakespeare's Church' (1902); in C. I. Elton's ' WiUiam Shakespeare : his Family and Friends ' (1904) ; in J. W. Gray's 'Shakespeare's Marriage' (1905), and in Mrs. Stopes's ' Shake speare's Warwickshire Contemporaries ' (new edit. 1907), and her ' Shakespeare's Environment ' (1914). Wise appends a ' glossary of words still used in WarwicLshire to be found in Shakspere.' The parish registers of Stratford have been edited by Mr. Richard Savage for the Parish Registers Society (1898-9). Harrison's ' Description of England ' and Stubbes's ' Anatomy of Abuses ' (both reprinted by the New Shakspere Society) supply contemporary accounts of the social conditions prevailing in Shakespeare's time. 1 Recent researches by Dr. Wallace and others on the history of the theatres are already catalogued in this volume in the notes to chapters V. (' Shakespeare and the Actors ') ; VI. (' On the London Stage ') ; XT. (' Shakespeare's Financial Resources ') ; see especially pp. 310-1, note. An epitome of the biographical in- formation to date is supplied in Karl Elze's Life of Shakespeare (Halle, 1876 ; English translation, 1888), with which Elze's Eisays from the pubUcations of the German Shakespeare Society (EngUsh translation, 1874) are worth studying. Samuel Keil's Shakespeare, a critical Biography (1861), Edward Dowden's Shakespere Primer (1877) and Introduction to Shakspere (1893), and F. J. FumivaU's Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere, reissued as Shakespeare : Life and Work (1U08), are useful. 2 T 2 644 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Later compilations on the subject are Nathan Drake's ' Shakespeare and his Times' (1817) and G. W. Thornbury's ' Shakspere's England ' (185G). The chief monographs on special points in Shakespeare's bio- graphy are Dr. Richard Farmer's ' Essay on the Learning of _ ■ ,. , Shakespeare' (1767), reprinted in the Variorum studies in editions ; Octavius Gilchrist s Examination of the lograp y. Charges ... of Ben Jonson's Enmity towards Shakespeare' (1808); W. J. Thoms's 'Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier ? ' (1849), a study based on an erroneous identification of the poet with another WilUam Shakespeare ; John Charles Buck- Dill's ' Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare ' (1860) ; C. F. Green's ' Shakespeare's Crab-Tree, with its Legend ' (1862) ; C. H. Brace- bridge's ' Shakespeare no Deer-stealer ' (1862) ; H. N. Ellacombe's ' Plant Lore of Shakespeare ' (1878) ; William Blades's ' Shakspere and Typography' (1872) ; J. E. Harting's ' Ornithology of Shake- speare ' (1871) ; D. H. Madden's ' Diary of Master William Silence (Shakespeare and Sport),' new edit. 1907 ; and H. T. Stephenson's 'Shakespeare's London' (1910). Shakespeare's knowledge of law has been the theme of many volumes, among which may be men- tioned W. L. Rush ton's four volumes 'Shakespeare a Lawyer' (1858), 'Shakespeare's Legal Maxims' (18.59, new edit. 1907), 'Shakespeare's Testamentary Language' (1869) and 'Shakespeare illustrated by the Lex Scripta' (1870); Lord Campbell's 'Shake- speare's Legal Acquirements' (1859) ; C. K. Davis's 'The Law in Shakespeare ' (St. Paul, U.S.A., 1884) and E. J. White's ' Com- mentaries on the Law in Shakespeare ' (St. Louis, 1911). Speculations on Shakespeare's rehgion may be found in T. Carter's 'Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant' (1897) and in H. S. Bow- den's ' The Rehgion of Shakespeare ' (1899), which attempts to prove Shakespeare a CathoUc. Shakespeare's knowledge of music is also the theme of many volumes : see E. M. Naylor's ' Shake- speare and Music' (1896), and 'Shakespeare Music' (1912); L. C. Elson's ' Shakespeare in Music ' (6th ed. 1908) ; and G. H. Cowhng's ' Music on the Shakespearian Stage ' (1913). Francis Donee's ' Illustrations of Shakespeare ' (1807, new edit. 1839), ' Shakespeare's Library ' (ed. J. P. Colher and W. C. Hazlitt, 1875), ' Shakespeare's Plutarch ' (ed. Skeat, ftud/of 1875, and ed. Tucker-Brooke, 1909), and 'Shake- texts^'^ speare's Hohnshed ' (ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896) are, ^vith H. R. D. Anders's ' Shakespeare's Books ' (Berlin, 1904), of service in tracing the sources of Shakespeare's plots. M. W. MacCallum's 'Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Backgroimd ' (1910) is a very complete monograph. The sources SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 645 of the plots are presented methodically in Messrs. Chatto and Windus's series of ' Shakespeare Classics ' of which ten volumes have appeared. Alexander Schmidt's ' Shakespeare Lexicon ' (1874, 3rd edit. 1902), Dr. E. A. Abbott's 'Shakespearian Grammar' (1869, new edit. 1893), and Prof. W. Franz's ' Shakespeare-Grammatik,' 2 pts. (Halle, 1898-1900, 2nd ed. 1902), with his ' Die Gnindziige der Sprache Shakespeares ' (BerUn, 1902), and ' Orthographic, Lautgebung und Wortbildung in den Werken Shakespeares ' (Heidelberg, 1905), and Wilhelm Victor's 'Shakespeare's Pronun- ciation ' (2 vols., Marburg, 1906), are valuable aids to a oncor ances. philological study of the text. Useful concordances to the Plays have been prepared by Mrs. Cowden-Clarke (1845 ; re- vised ed. 1864), to the Poems by Mrs. H. H. Fumess (Philadelphia, 1875), and to Plays and Poems, in one volume, with references to numbered Unes, byJohn Bartlett (London and New York, 1895).^ With these' works may be classed the briefer compilations. R. J. Cunhffe's 'A new Shakespearean Dictionary' (1910) and C. T. Onions's ' Shakespeare Glossary ' (1911). Extensive bibho- graphies are given in Lowndes's ' Library Manual ' (ed. Bohn) ; in Franz Thimm's 'Shakespeariana' (1864 and 1871); in 'British Museum Catalogue ' (the Shakespearean entries — 3680 ograp les. ^j^j^g — separately published in 1897); in the 'Encyclo- paedia Britannica,' 11th edit, (skilfully classified by Mr. H. Pt. Tedder); and in Mr. William Jaggard's ' Shakespeare Bibliography,' Stratford-on-Avon, 1911. The Oxford University Press's facsimile reproductions of the First Folio (1902), and of Shakespeare's 'Poems' and 'Pericles' (1905), together with 'Four Quarto Editions of Plays of Shakespeare. The Property of the Trustees of Shakespeare's Birthplace. With five illustrations in facsimile ' (Stratford-on-Avon. Printed for the Trustees, 1908) contain much bibliographical information collected by the present writer. Mr. A. W. Pollard's 'Shakespeare Folios and Quartos' (1909) is the most comprehensive treatise on its subject which has yet been published. The valuable pubUcations of the Shakespeare Society, the New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare- Gesellschaft, are noticed above (see pp. 600, 618). studS! ^° *^® critical studies by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dowden, and Swinburne, on which comment has been made (see p. 599), there may be added the essays on Shakespeare's heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin •The earliest attempts at a concordance were A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, by F. Twiss (1805), and An Index to the Remarkable Paitaget and Words, by Samuel Ayscough (1827), but these are now superseded. 646 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE in 1885 ; Sir A. W. Ward's ' English Dramatic Literature ' (1875, new edit. 1898) ; Richard G. Moulton's ' Shakespeare as a Dra- matic Artist' (1885); 'Shakespeare Studies ' by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893); F. S. Boas's 'Shakspere and his Predecessors' (1895); Georg Brandes's 'William Shakespeare' — a somewhat fanciful study (London, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo) ; W. J. Courthope's ' History of Enghsh Poetry,' 1903, vol. iv. ; A. C. Bradley's ' Shakespearean Tragedy ' (London, 1904), and his ' Oxford Lectures in Poetry ' (1909) ; the present writer's ' Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century' (1904), and his 'Shakespeare and the Modern Stage' (1906); J. C. CoUins's 'Studies in Shakespeare' (1904); Sir Walter Raleigh's 'Shakespeare' in 'Enghsh Men of Letters' series (1907); G. P. Baker's 'The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist' (1907); Felix E. Schelling's 'Eliza- bethan Drama 1558-1642 ' (1908) 2 vols. ; and Brander Matthews's ' Shakespeare as a Playwright ' (1913). The intense interest which Shakespeare's hfe and work have long universally excited has tempted unprincipled or sportively _, , mischievous writers from time to time to deceive the Shake- spearean public by the forgery of documents purporting to orgeries. supply new information. George Steevens made some foolish excursions in this direction, and his example seems to have stimulated the notable activity of forgers which persisted from 1780 to 1850. The frauds have caused students so much perplexity that it may be useful to warn them against those Shakespearean forgeries which have obtained the widest currency. In the 'Theatrical Review,' 1763 (No. 2), there was inserted in an anonymous biography of Edward Alleyn (from the pen st*°^v ns's °^ George Steevens) a letter purporting to be signed 'G.Peei' ' G. Peel' and to have been addressed to Marlowe j^g"*^* '°°' ('Friend Marie'). The writer pretends to describe his meeting at the ' Globe ' with Edward Alleyn and Shakespeare, when AUeyn taunted the dramatist with having borrowed from his own conversation the ' speech about the quahtyes of an actor's excellencye, in Hamlet his tragedye.' This clumsy fabrication was reproduced unquestioningly in the ' Annual Register ' (1770), in Berkenhout's ' Biographia Literaria ' (1777), in the ' Gentle- man's Magazine' (1801), in the 'British Critic' (1818, p. 422), in Charles Severn's introduction to John Ward's ' Diary ' (1839, p. 81), in the 'Academy' (London, 18 Jan. 1902), in 'Poet Lore' (Boston, April 1902), and elsewhere. Alexander Dyce in his first edition of George Peele's ' Works ' (1829, 1st ed. vol. i. p. 1 1 1 ) reprinted it with a very slender reservation ; Dyce's example was followed in Wilham Yoimg's ' History of Dulwich College ' (1889, ii. 41-2). The fraud was SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 647 justly denounced without much effect by Isaac Disraeli in his 'Curiosities of Literature' (1823) and more recently by the present writer in an article entitled ' A Peril of Shakespearean Research.' i The futile forgery still continues to mislead unwary inquirers who unearth it in early periodicals. Much notoriety was obtained by John Jordan (1746-1809), a resident at Stratford -on- A von, whose most important achievement was the forgery of the will of Shakespeare's father ; i74fr-i8o9^"' ^^^ many other papers in Jordan's ' Original Collections on Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon ' (1780), and ' Original Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Famihes of Shakespeare and Hart,' are open to the gravest suspicion.* The best known Shakespearean forger of the eighteenth century was VViUiam Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister's clerk, who, Their la d with the aid of his father, Samuel Ireland (1740 ?- forgeries, ' 1800), an author and engraver of some repute, produced ^ ^ ■ in 1796 a volume of forged papers claiming to relate to Shakespeare's career. The title ran : ' Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shake- speare, including the tragedy of " King Lear " and a small fragment of " Hamlet " from the original MSS. in the possession of Samuel Ireland.' On April 2, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble produced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse entitled ' Vortigern ' under the pretence that it was by Shakespeare, and that it had been recently found among the manuscripts of the dramatist which had fallen into the hands of the Irelands. The piece, which was published, was the invention of yoimg Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands for some time deceived a section of the literary public, but it was finally exposed by .Malone in his valuable ' Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland MSS' (1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his ' Confessions ' (1805). He had acquired much skill in copying Shakespeare's genuine signature from the facsimile in Steevens's edition of Shakespeare's works of the mort- gage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 1612-13.' He conformed to that style of handwriting in his forged deeds and literary compositions.* He also inserted copies of the dramatist's signa- ture on the title-pages of many sixteenth -century books, and often added notes in the same feigned hand on their margins. ' Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 188-197. 2 Jordan's Collections, induding this fraudulent will of Shakespeare's father, was printed privately by J. 0. Halliwell-PhiUipps in 1864. 3 See p. 459. ■* See a full dei?cription of a large private collection of Ireland forgeries in the sale catalogue of John Eliot Hodgkin's library dispersed at Sotheby's May 19, 1914. 648 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Numerous sixteenth-century volumes embellished by Ireland in this manner are extant in the British Museum and in private collections. Ireland's forged signatures and marginalia have been frequently mistaken for genuine autographs of Shakespeare. But Steevens's, Ireland's and Jordan's frauds are clumsy compared with those that belong to the nineteenth century. Most of the works relating to the biography of Shakespeare Forgeries qj. ^jjg history of the Elizabethan stage produced by promulgated X n i i ■ • i by Collier John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between ^835-1849! 1835 and 1849 are honeycombed with forged references to Shakespeare, and many of the forgeries have been admitted unsuspectingly into literary history. The chief of these forged papers I arrange below in the order of the dates that have been allotted to them by their manufacturers.^ 1589 (November). Appeal from the Blackfriars players (16 in number) to the Privy Council for favour. Shakespeare's name stands twelfth. From the manuscripts at Bridge- water House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. First printed in CoUier's ' New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare,' 1835. 1596, (July). List of inhabitants of the Liberty of Southwark, Shakespeare's name appearing in the sixth place. First printed in CoUier's ' Life of Shakespeare,' 1858, p. 126. 1596. Petition of the owners and players of the Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in reply to an alleged petition of the inhabitants requesting the closing of the play- house. Shakespeare's name is fifth on the Mst of petitioners. This forged paper is in the Public Record OflBce, and was first printed in CoUier's ' History of English Dramatic Poetry' (1831), vol. i. p. 297, and has been constantly reprinted as if it were genuine." 1696 (circa). A letter signed H. S. (i.e. Henry, Earl of South- ampton), addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, praying I Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See p. 571, note 1. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are : An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier's Annotated Shakspere Folio., 1G32, and of certain Shaktperian Documents likewise published by Mr. Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, 1860 ; A Complete View of the Shake- speare Controversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter affecting the Works and Biography of Shakspere, published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Researches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity CoUege, Cambridge, London, 1861 ; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn's College of God's Gift at Dulwich, by George F. Warner, M.A., 1881 ; Notes on tlie Life of John Payne Collier, with a Complete List of his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884. ' See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1595-7, p. 310. SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KXO^VLEDGE 649 protection for the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, and mentioning Burbage and Shakespeare by name. First printed in Collier's ' New Facts.' ^1596 {circa). A Ust of sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre with the valuation of their property, in which Shakespeare is credited with four shares, worth 933L 6s. Sd. This was first printed in ColUer's ' New Facts,' 1835, p. 6, from the Egerton MSS. at Bridgewater House. 1602 (August 6). Notice of the performance of ' Othello ' by Burbage' s ' players ' before Queen Ehzabeth when on a visit to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord-keeper, at Hare- field, in a forged account of disbursements by Egerton's steward, Arthur Mainwaringe, from the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. Printed in Collier's ' New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare,' 1836, and again in Colher's edition of the ' Egerton Papers,' 1840 (Camden Society), pp. 342-3. 1603 (October 3). Mention of ' Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe ' in a letter at Dulwich from JVIrs. Alleyn to her husband ; part of the letter is genuine. First pubUshed in CoUier's ' Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 1841, p. 63.^ 1604 (April 9). List of the names of eleven players of the King's Company fraudulently appended to a genuine letter at Dulwich College from the Privy Council bidding the Lord Mayor permit performances by the Bang's players. Printed in CoUier's ' Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 1841, p. 68.* 1607. Notes of performances of ' Hamlet ' and ' Richard II ' by the crews of the vessels of the East India Company's fleet oflE Sierra Leone. First printed in ' Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631,' edited by Thomas Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, p. 231, from what purported to be an exact transcript ' in the India Office ' of the ' Journal of William KeeUng,' captain of one of the vessels in the expedition. KeeUng's manu- script journal is still at the India Office, but the leaves that should contain these entries are now, and have long been, missing from it. 1609 (January 4). A warrant appointing Robert Dabome, William Shakespeare, and other instructors of the Children of the Revels. From the Bridgewater House MSS. First printed in Collier's ' New Facts,' 1835. i^See Warner's Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6. ' CL'tbid. pp. 26-7. 650 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1609 (April 6). List of persons assessed for poor rate in South- wark, April 6, 1609, in which Shakespeare's name appears. First printed in CoUier's ' Memoirs of Edward AUeyn,' 1841, p. 91. The forged paper is at Dulwich.^ The entries in the Master of the Revels Accoimt books noting court performances of the ' Moor of Venice ' (or ' OtheUo ') on Nov- ^ , , ember 1, 1604, of ' Measure for Measure ' on December FsIsgIv suspected 26, 1604, of 'The Tempest' on November 1, 1611, documents. ^^^ ^j < rf,^^^ Winter's Tale ' on November 5, 1611, were for a time suspected of forgery. These entries were first printed by Peter Cunningham, a friend of CoUier, in the volume ' Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court ' pubhshed by the Shake- speare Society in 1842. The originals were at the time in Cunning- ham's possession, but were restored to the PubUc Record Office in 1868 when they were suspected of forgery. The authenticity of the documents was completely vindicated by Mr. Ernest Law in his 'Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries' (1911) and 'More about Shakespeare "Forgeries'" (1913). Mr. Law's conclusions were supported by Sir George Warner, Sir H. MaxweU Lyte, Dr. C. W. Wallace and Sir James Dobbie, F.R.S., Government Analyst, who analysed the ink of the suspected handwriting.^ > See Warner's Catalogue of Dulicich ilSS. pp. 30-31. ^ The Revels' Accounts were originally among the papers of the Audit Office at Somerset House, where Mr. Cunningham was employed as a clerk, from 1834 to 1858. In 1869 the Audit Oflfice papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public Record Office. But the suspected account books for 1604-5 and certain accounts for 1636-7 were retained in Cunningham's possession. In 1868 he offered to sell the two earlier books to the British lluseum, and the later papers to a bookseller. All were thereupon claimed by the Public Record Office, and were placed in that repository with the rest of the Audit Office archives. Cunningham's reputation was not rated hi?h. The documents were submitted to no careful scrutiny ; Mr. E. A.. Bond, Keeper of the M.'^S. in the British Museum, e.^ressed doubt of the genuineness of the Booke of lfi04-5, mainly owing to the spelling of Phakespeare's name as ' Sha.xberd ' ; the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, inclined to the same view. Shakespearean critics, who on aesthetic grounds deemed 1G04 to be too early a date to which to ascribe Othello, were disinclined to recognise the Revels Account as genuine. On the other hand Malone had access to the Audit Office archives at the end of the eighteenth century, and various transcripts dating between 1571 and 1588 are printed in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 360-409. An extract from them for the year 1604-5 is preserved amon? the Malone papers at the Bodleian Library (Malone 29). This memorandum agrees at all points with Cunningham's ' Revells Booke" of 1604-5. Moreover Malone positively assigned the date 1011 to The Tempest in 1809 on information which he did not specify ( Variorum Shakespeare, iv. 423), but which corresponds with the suspected ' Revells Booke ' of the same year. A series of papers in the Athenceum for 1911 and 1912 (signed 'Audi alteram partem') vainly attempted to question Mr. Law's vindication of the documents. 11 THE BACON -SHAKESPEARE CONTEOVEESY The accepted version of Shakespeare's biography rests securely on documentary evidence and on a continuous stream of oral tradition, D ,, „> which went whoUv unquestioned for more than three of the centuries, and has not been seriously impugned since, con rove sy. Ye't'^t'iJe apparent contrast between the homeliness of Shakespeare's Stratford career and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his Uterary work has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name. Perverse attempts have been made either to pronounce the authorship of his works an open question or to assign them to his contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great prose-WTiter, philosopher and lawyer.^ AU the argument bears witness to a phase of that more or less morbid process ot scepticism, which was aut horitatively analysed by Archbishop Whately in his ' Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte ' (1819). The Archbishop there showed how ' obstinate habits of doubt, divorced from full knowledge or parted from the power of testing evidence, can speciously challenge any narrative, however circumstantial, however steadily maintained, however pubUc and however important the events it narrates, however grave the authority on which it is based.' Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, d. 1855), in his 'Romance of Yachting' (1848), fir-st raised doubts of Shake- speare's authorship. There followed in a like temper exponents. ' Who wrote Shakespeare ? ' in ' Chambers's Journal,' August 7, 1852, and an article by Miss Deha Bacon in ' Putnams' Monthly,' January 1856. On the latter was based ' The 1 Equally ludicrous endeavours have been made to transfer Shakespeare's responsi- bility to the shoulders of other contemporaries besides Bacon. Karl Bleibtreu's Der wahre Shakespeare (Munich 1907), and 0. Demblon's Lord Rutland est Shakespeare (Paris 1913), are fantastic attempts to identify Shakespeare with Francis Manners sizth Earl of Rutland ; see p. 455 supra. 651 652 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,' with a neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, London and Boston, 1857. Miss DeUa Bacon, who was the first to spread abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the estabhshed facts of Shakespeare's career, died insane on September 2, 1859.^ Mr. WilUam Henry Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in ' Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays? — a letter to Lord Ellesmere ' (1856), which was repubUshed as ' Bacon and Shakespeare ' (1857). The chief early exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who pubUshed at New York in 1866 ' The Authorship of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,' a monument of misappUed ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.). Bacon's ' Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,' a commonplace book in Bacon's handwriting in the British Museum (London, 1883), was first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian theory ; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest hmits. Mr. Edwin Reed's ' Bacon and Shakespeare ' (2 vols., Boston, 1902), continued the wasteful labours of Holmes and Mrs. Pott. The iaAmMiwi. Baconian theory, which long foimd its main acceptance in America, achieved its wildest manifestation in the book called ' The Great Cryptogram : Francis Bacon's Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays ' (Chicago and London, 1887, 2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, Mimiesota. The author professed to apply to the First FoUo text a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters at certain intervals forming words and sentences which stated that Bacon was author not merely of Shakespeare's plays, but also of Marlowe's work, Montaigne's ' Essays,' and Burton's ' Anatomy of Melan- choly.' Many refutations were pubhshed of Mr. Donnelly's arbitrary and baseless contention. Another bold effort to discover in the First FoUo a cypher-message in the Baconian interest was made by Mrs. GaUup, of Detroit, in ' The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon ' (1900). The absurdity of this endeavour was demonstrated in numerous letters and articles published in The Times newspaper (December 1901-January 1902). The Baconians subsequently found an EngUsh champion in Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence (1837- 1914) who pressed into his service every manner of misapprehension in his ' Bacon is Shakespeare' (1900), of a penny abridgment of which he claimed to have circulated 300,000 copies during 1912. i Cf. Life by Theodore. Bacon, London, 1888. BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 653 Sir Edwin, like Donnelly, freakishly credited Bacon with the composition not only of Shakespeare's works but of almost all the great literature of his time.^ The argimaent from the alleged cipher ia unworthy of sane consideration. Otherwise the Baconians presume in Shakespeare's plays a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) of which no contemporary except Bacon is alleged to show command. At any rate such accomplishment is held by the Baconians to be incredible in one enjoying Shakespeare's limited opportunities of education. They insist that there are many close parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare's and in Bacon's works, and that Bacon makes enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret ' recreations ' and ' alphabets ' and concealed poems for which his alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone account. No substance attached to any of these plea.s. There is a far closer and. more constant resemblance between Shakespeare's vocabulary and that of other contemporaries than between his and Bacon's language, and the similarities merely testify to the general usage of the day.^ Again Shakespeare's frequent employment of 1 A Bacon Society was founded in London in 1885 to develope and promulgate the unintelligible theory, and it inaugurated a magazine (named since May 1893 Baconiana). A quarterly periodical also called Baconiana, and issued in the same interest, was estab- lished at Chicago in 1892. The Bibliography oj the Shaketp fare- Bacon Controvcrty by W. H. Wyman, Cincinnati, 1884, gives the titles of 255 books or pamphlets on both sides of the subject, published since 1848 ; the list was continued during 1886 in Shake- speariana, a monthly journal published at Philadelphia, and might now be extended to fully thrice its original number. ^ Most of the parallels that are commonly quoted by Baconians are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare both make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in his Xicomachean Ethict, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1C05), wrote : ' Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to bo regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy ? ' (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Eitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, in TroHus and Cressida, n. ii. 166, wrote of ' young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy.' But the alleged error of substituting moral for political philosophy in Aristotle's text is more apparent than real. By ' political ' philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called ' morals.' In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle's Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle's language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular Colloquia (Florence, 1531, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts ' into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of morcU philosophy ' (' in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethicte philosophise '). In the Latin play, Pedantius (1581 ?), a philosopher tells his pupil, ' Tu non es idoneus auditor moralis philosophise ' (1. 327). In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis (Paris, 1553), the passage is rendered ' parquoy 654 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKB legal terminology conforms to a literary fashion of the day, and was practised on quite as liberal a scale and with far greater accuracy by Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and many other eminent writers who enjoyed no kind of legal training and were never engaged in legal work. (See pp. 43-4 supra.) The allegation that Bacon was the author of works which he hesitated to claim in his lifetime has no just bearing on the issue. The Baconians' case _• ^ . . commonly rests on an arbitrary misinterpretation Matthew't of the evidence on this subject. Sir Tobie Matthew wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after January 1621 : ' The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another.' ^ This unpretending sen- tence is distorted into conclusive evidence that Bacon composed works of commanding excellence under another's name, and among them probably Shakespeare's plays. According to the only sane interpretation of Matthew's words, his ' most prodigious wit ' was some Enghshman named Bacon whom he met abroad. There is Uttle doubt that Matthew referred to his friend Father Thomas Southwell, a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low Countries, whose real surname was Bacon. (He was bom in 1592 at Sculthorpe, near Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of that place ; he died at Watten in 1637.) " Such authentic examples of Bacon's effort to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibiUty of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. His ' Trans- lation of Certaine Psalmes into English Verse ' (1625) convicts him of inabihty to rise above the level of clumsy doggerel. Recent English sceptics have fought shy of the manifest le ieune eafant n'est suffisant auditeur de la science civile ' ; and an English com- mentator (in a manuscript note written about 1606 in a copy in the British Museum) Englished the sentence : ' Whether a young man may be a fitte schoUer of morall philosophie.' In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to his DiscoTsi sopra Comelio Tacito, has the remark, ' E non 6 discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele, il qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle tnorali ' (cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440). • Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon's brother Anthony, who died in 1601 ; Matthew was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later. " It was with reference to a book published by this man that Sir Henry Wotton wrote, in language somewhat resembling Sir Tobie Matthew's, to Sir Edmund Bacon, half-brother to the great Francis Bacon, on December 5, 1638 : ' The Book of Con- troversies issued under the name of F. Baconus hath this addition to the said name, cUias SoiUhwell, as those of that Society shift their names as often as their shirts ' (^Rdiquice Wottonianae, 1672, p. 475). BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 655 absurdities of the Baconian heresy and have concentrated their effort on the negative argument that the positive knowledge ft"?^ of Shakespeare's career is too sUght to warrant Jc^ptlcsf^ the accepted tradition. These writers have for the most part been lawyers who lack the required literary training to give their work on the subject any genuine authority. Many of them after the manner of ex-parte advocates rest a part of their case on minor discrepancies among orthodox critics and biographers. Like the Baconians, they exaggerate or misrepresent the extent of Shakespeare's classical and legal attainments. They fail to perceive that the curriculum of Stratford Grammar School and the general cultivation of the epoch, combined with Shake- speare's rare faculty of mental assimilation, leave no part of his acquired knowledge unaccounted for. They ignore the cognate development of poetic and intellectual power which is convincingly illustrated by the careers of many contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, notably by that of the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood. To crown all, they make no just allowance for the mysterious origin and miraculous processes of all poetic genius — features which are signally exemplified in the case of Chatterton, Burns, Keats and other poets of humbler status and fortune than Shakespeare. The most plausible manifestoes from the pens of the legal sceptics are Judge Webb's ' The Mystery of VViUiam Shakespeare,' Mr. G. C. Bompas's ' The Problem of the Shake- speare Plays,' Lord Penzance's ' The Bacon-Shakespeare Contro- versy,' all of which were published in 1902. A more pretentious effort on the same lines was Mr. G. G. Greenwood's ' The Shakespeare Problem Restated' (1908), which the author supplemented with ' Li re Shakespeare: Beeching v. Greenwood. Rejoinder' (1909) and ' The Vindicators of Shakespeare : A reply to Critics ' (1911). Perhaps the chief interest attaching to Mr. Greenwood's performance was the adoption of his point of view by the American humourist Mark Twain, who in his latest book ' Is Shakespeare dead ? ' (1909) attacked the accredited beUef. Mark Twain's intervention in what he called ' the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle ' proved as might be expected that his idiosyncrasies unfitted him for treating seriously matters of Uterary history or criticism. A wholesome corrective in a small compass to the whole attitude of doubt may be found in Mr. Charles AUen's ' Notes on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question ' (Boston, 1900), and many later vindications of the orthodox faith are worthy of notice. Judge WiUis in ' The Shakespeare- Bacon Controversy ' (1903) very carefully examined in legal form the documentary evidence and pronounced it to establish conclusively 656 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Shakespeare's position from a strictly legal point of view. Forcible replies to Mr. Greenwood's attack were issued by Dean Beeching in his ' William Shakespeare. Player, Playmaker, and Poet ' (1908), and by Andrew Lang in his 'Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown' (1912). The most comprehensive exposure of both the Baconian and sceptical delusions was made by Mr. J. M. Robertson, M.P., in ' The Baconian Heresy : A Confutation ' (1913). m THE YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON From the dedicatory epistles addressed by Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton in the opening pages of his two narrative poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and ' Lucrece ' Southampton (I594),i from the account given by Sir William Shakespeare. 'D'Avenant, and recorded by Nicholas Rowe, of the earl's liberal bounty to the poct,^ and from the lan- guage of the ' Sonnets,' it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare enjoyed very friendly relations with Southampton from the time when the dramatist's genius was nearing its matiu-ity. No con- temporary document or tradition suggests that Shakespeare was the friend or protege of any man of rank other than Southampton ; and the student of Shakespeare's biography has reason to ask for some information respecting him who en- joyed the exclusive distinction of serving Shakespeare as his patron. Southampton was a patron worth cultivating. Both his parents came of the New Nobility, and enjoyed vast wealth. His father's father was Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, and Parentage. '' when the monasteries were dissolved, although he was faithful to the old reUgion, he was granted rich estates in Hamp- shire, including the abbeys of Titchfield and BeauUeu in the New Forest. He was created Earl of Southampton early in Edward VI's reign, and, dying shortly afterwards, was succeeded by his only son, the father of Shakespeare's friend. The second earl loved magni- ficence in his household. ' He was highly reverenced and favoured of all that were of his own rank, and bravely attended and served by the best gentlemen of those counties wherein he hved. His muster-roll never consisted of four lacqueys and a coachman, but of a whole troop of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen.' ^ The second earl remained a Catholic, hke his father, 1 See pp. 141, 147. 2 gee p. 197. 3 Gervase Markham, Honour in Ms Perfection, 1624. 657 2 Tj 658 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE and a chivalrous avowal of sympathy with Mary Queen of Scots procured him a term of imprisonment in the year preceding his distinguished son's birth. At a youthful age he married a lady of fortune, Mary Browne, daughter of the first Viscount Montague, also a Cathohc. Her portrait, now at Welbeck, was painted in her early married days, and shows regularly formed features beneath bright auburn hair. Two sons and a daughter were the issue of the union. Shakespeare's friend, the second son, was bom at her father's residence, Cowdray House, near Midhurst, Oct'6?°i573. °^ October 6, 1573. He" was thus Shakespeare's junior by nine years and a half. ' A goodly boy. God bless him ! ' exclaimed the gratified father, writing of his birth to a friend.^ But the father barely survived the boy's infancy. He died at the early age of thirty-five — two days before the child's eighth birthday. The elder son was already dead. Thus, on October 4, 1581, the second and only surviving son became third Earl of Southampton, and entered on his great inheritance.* As was customary in the case of an infant peer, the Uttle earl became a royal ward — ' a child of state ' — and Lord Burghley, the Prime Minister, acted as the boy's guardian in the Education. , i i ix -n i i i i T Queen s behalf. Burghley had good reason to be satisfied with his ward's intellectual promise. ' He spent,' wrote a contemporary, ' his childhood and other yoimger terms in the study of good letters.' At the age of twelve, in the autumn of 1585, he was admitted to St. John's College, Cambridge, ' the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all the University.' Southampton breathed easily the cultured atmosphere. Next summer he sent his guardian, Burghley, an essay in Ciceronian Latin on the some- what cynical text that ' All men are moved to the pursuit of virtue by the hope of reward.' The argument, if unconvincing, is pre- cocious. ' Every man,' the boy tells us, ' no matter how well or how iU endowed with the graces of humanity, whether in the enjoyment of great honour or condemned to obscurity, experiences that yearning for glory which alone begets virtuous endeavour.' The paper, still preserved at Hatfield, is a model of cahgraphy ; every letter is shaped with deUcate regularity, and betrays a refine- ment most uncommon in boys of thirteen.^ Southampton remained at the University for some two years, graduating M.A. at sixteen 1 Loseley MSS. ed. A. J. Kempe, p. 240. 2 His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in 1594 Sir Thomas Heneage, vice-chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth's household ; but he died within a year, and in 1596 she took a third husband, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I. i* By kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at Hatfield. YOUTHFUL CAKEER OF SOUTHMIPTON 659 in 1589. Throughout his after life he cherished for his college ' great love and affection.' Before leaving Cambridge Southampton entered his name at Gray's Inn. Some knowledge of law was deemed needful in one wR) was to control a landed property that was not only large already but likely to grow.^ Meanwhile he was sedulously culti- vating his Uterary tastes. He took into his ' pay and patronage ' John Florio, the well-known author and Italian tutor, and was soon, according to Florio's testimony, as thoroughly versed in Italian as ' teaching or learning ' could make him. ' When he was young,' wrote a later admirer, ' no ornament of youth was wanting in him ' ; and it was naturally to the Court that his friends sent him at an early age to display his varied graces. He can hardly have been more than seventeen when he was presented to his sovereign. She showed him kindly notice, and the Earl of Essex, her brilliant favourite, acknowledged his fascination. Thenceforth Essex displayed in his welfare a brotherly interest which proved in course of time a very doubtful blessing. While still a boy, Southampton entered with as much zest into the sports and dissipations of his fellow courtiers as into their literary and artistic pursuits. At tennis, in jousts of^Scmth-°° ^^^ tournaments, he achieved distinction ; nor was ampton's he a Stranger to the dehghts of gambling at primero. beauty. In 1592, when he was in his eighteenth year, he was recognised as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young lords who frequented the royal presence. In the autumn of that year Elizabeth paid Oxford a visit in state. Southampton was in the throng of noblemen who bore her company. In a Latin poem describing the brilliant ceremonial, which was published at the time at the University Press, eulogy was lavished without stint on aU the Queen's attendants ; but the academic poet declared that Southampton's personal attractions exceeded those of any other in the royal train. ' No other youth who was present,' he wrote, ' was more beautiful than this prince of Hampshire (quo non formosior alter affuit), nor more distinguished in the arts of learning, although as yet tender down scarce bloomed on his cheek.' 1 In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel in Wardour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an additional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his ' nonage,' Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means ' of the smallest hope.' Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton's ' most feared rival ' in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was refer- ring to the father of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described as Shakespeare's friend of the Sonnets (cf . Calendar of HatfleUi MSS. iii. 365). 2 u 2 660 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The last words testify to Southampton's boyish appearance.^ Next year it was rumoured that his ' external grace ' was to receive signal recognition by his admission, despite his juveniUty, to the Order of the Garter. ' There be no Knights of the Garter new chosen as yet,' wrote a well-informed courtier on May 3, 1593, ' but there were four nominated.' ^ Three were eminent pubUc servants, but first on the Ust stood the name of young Southampton. The purpose did not take effect, but the compliment of nomination was, at his age, without precedent outside the circle of the Sovereign's kinsmen. On November 17, 1595, he appeared in the Usts set up in the Queen's presence in honour of the thirty-seventh anniversary of her accession. The poet George Peele pictured in blank verse the gorgeous scene, and likened the Earl of Southampton to that ancient type of chivalry, Bevis of Southampton, so ' valiant in arms,' so ' gentle and debonair, ' did he appear to all beholders. * But clouds were rising on this sunht horizon. Southampton, a wealthy peer without brothers or uncles, was the only male representative of his house. A lawful heir was S^'man-y'^^ essential to the entail of his great possessions. Early marriages — child-marriages — were in vogue in all ranks of society, and Southampton's mother and guardian regarded matrimony at a tender age as especially incumbent on him in view of his rich heritage. When the boy was seventeen Burghley accordingly oflfered him a wife in the person of his granddaughter. Lady EUza- beth Vere, eldest daughter of his daughter Anne and of the Earl of Oxford. The Countess of Southampton approved the match, and told Burghley that her son was not averse from it. Her wish was father to the thought. Southampton declined to marry to order, and, to the confusion of his friends, was stiU a bachelor when he came of age in 1594. Nor even then did there seem much prospect of his changing his condition. He was in some ways as young for his years in inward disposition as in outward appearance. Although gentle and amiable in most relations of Ufe, he could be childishly self-willed and impulsive, and outbursts of anger involved him, at Court and elsewhere, in many petty quarrels which were with difficulty settled without bloodshed. Despite his * C£. ApoUinis et Musarum Evktiko. KlSvWta, Oxford, 1592, reprinted in Eliza- bethan Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), edited by Cbarles Plummer, xxix. 294 : Post hunc (i.e. Earl of Essex) insequitur clara de stirpe Dynasta Comes Ixire suo diues quern South-Hamptonia magnum boutn- Vendicat heroem ; quo non formosior alter tonia Affuit, aut docta iuuenis pnestantior arte ; Ora licet tenerS vix dum lanugine vement. 2 Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix), p. 521 6. 3 Peele's Aiiglorum Ferice. YOUTHFUL CAREEE OF SOUTHAMPTON 661 rank and wealth, he was consequently accounted by many ladies of far too uncertain a temper to sustain marital responsibilities with credit. Lady Bridget Manners, sister of his friend the Earl of Rutland, was in 1594 looking to matrimony for means of release from the servitude of a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Her guardian suggested that Southampton or the Earl of Bedford, who was intimate with Southampton and exactly of his age, would be an eUgible suitor. Lady Bridget dissented. Southampton and his friend were, she objected, ' so young,' ' fantastical,' and volatile (' so easily carried away '), that should ill fortune befaU her mother, who was ' her only stay,' she ' doubted their carriage of themselves.' She spoke, she said, from observation.^ In 1695, at two-and-twenty, Southampton justified Lady Bridget's censure by a pubUc proof of his fallibility. The fair Intrigue with Mistress Vemon (first cousin of the Earl of Essex), Elizabeth 'a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her spell on him. Her virtue was none too stable, and in September the scandal spread that Southampton was courting her ' with too much familiarity.' The entanglement with ' his fair mistress ' opened a new chapter in Southampton's career, and Ufe's tempests began in earnest. Either to free himself from his mistress's toils, or to divert attention from his intrigue, he in 1596 withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation. Despite his mistress's lamentations, which the Court gossips duly chronicled, he played a part with his friend Essex in the military and naval expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. He developed a martial ardour which brought him renown, and Mars (his admirers said) vied with Mercury for his allegiance. He travelled on the Continent, and finally, in 1598, he accepted a subordinate place in the suite of the Queen's Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, who was going on an embassy to Paris. But Mistress "Vemon was still fated to be his evil genius, and Southampton learnt while in Paris in^9*8^^ that her condition rendered marriage essential to her decaying reputation. He hurried to London and, yielding his own scruples to her entreaties, secretly made her his wife during the few days he stayed in this country. The step was full of peril. To marry a lady of the Court without the Queen's ' Cal. of the Duke of RiUland's MSS. i. 321. Bamabe Barnes, who was one of South- ampton's poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to ' the Beautiful Lady, The Lady Bridget Manners,' in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton. Both are appended to Barnes's collection of sonnets and other poems entitled Parthcnophe and Parthenophil (cf. Arber's Oarner, v. 486). Barnes apostrophises Lady Bridget as ' fairest and sweetest Of all those sweet and fair flowers, The pride of chaste Cynthia's [i.e. Queen Elizabeth's] rich crown.' 662 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE consent infringed a prerogative of the Crown by which EUzabeth set exaggerated store. The story of Southampton's marriage was soon public property. His wife quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Channel a few weeks later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, who had the Queen's orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For the time his career was ruined. Although he was soon released from gaol, all avenues to the Queen's favour were closed to him. He sought employment in the wars in Ireland, but high command was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late in 1600 joined Essex, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebeUion in London, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited. The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood their trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. South- ampton was condemned to die, but the Queen's Imprison- ^ . ment, Secretary pleaded with her that ' the poor yoimg earl, °^~^" merely for the love of Essex, had been drawn into this action,' and his punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life. Further mitigation was not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But Essex, Southampton's friend, had been James's sworn ally. The first act of James I as monarch of England was to set Southampton free (April 10, 1603). After a confinement of more than two years, Southampton resumed, under happier auspices, his place at Court. Southampton's later career does not directly concern the student of Shakespeare's biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated Southampton on his Uberty in his Sonnet cvii., there is no trace of further relations between them, although there is no reason to doubt that they remained friends to the end. Southampton on his release from prison was immediately installed a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor of the Isle of Wight, while an Act of Parliament reUeved him of all the dis- abiUties incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth a prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a coranto with the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at Whitehall on August 19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the special ambassador of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of peace between his sovereign and James I.^ But home poUtics proved no congenial field for the exercise of Southampton's energies. Quarrels with fellow-courtiers continued to jeopardise his fortunes. With Sir Robert Cecil, with PhiUp Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and with the Duke of Buckingham he had violent disputes. It was > See p. 383 and note. YOUTHFUL CAREER OF SOUTHAMPTON 663 in the schemes for colonising the New World that Southampton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped to equip expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours as a colonial pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the age of fifty-one, Southampton, with characteristic spirit, took command of a troop of EngUsh volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector Palatine, husband of James I's daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with the Emperor and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his eldest son, Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries were attacked by fever. The younger man succumbed at once. The Earl regained sufficient strength to accompany his son's body Death o ^° Bergen-op-Zoom, but there, on November 10, he Nov. 10, himself died of a lethargy. Father and son were ^*' both buried in the chancel of the church of Titch- field, Hampshire, on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shakespeare by more than eight years. IV THE EABL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERAKY PATEON Sottthampton's close relations with men of letters of his time give powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron whom Shakespeare commemorated in the ' Sonnets.' From earUest to latest manhood — throughout the dissipations of Court life, amid the torments that his intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel — the earl never ceased to cherish the passion for hterature which was implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, St. John's, is characteristic. When a new library was in course of construction there during the closing tou's coiiec- years of his life, Southampton collected books to the tion of books, ^^^^g ^f 3gQ^_ wherewith to furnish it. This ' monu- ment of love,' as the College authorities described the benefaction, may still be seen on the shelves of the College hbrary. The gift largely consisted of illuminated manuscripts — books of hours, legends of the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. Southampton caused his son to be educated at St. John's, and his wife expressed to the tutors the hope that the boy would ' imitate ' his father ' in his love to learning and to them.' I Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton's career is traced are enhvened by references to his Uterary interests. Especially refreshing are the i^^huletters active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with to poems and ^jjg great birth of Enghsh drama. It was with plays that he joined other noblemen in 1598 in entertaining his chief. Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that embassy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris ' certain songs ' which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of Uterary tastes, should share his deUght in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton 664 SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 665 was in Ireland, a letter to him from the countess attested that current Hterature was an everyday topic of their private talkj ' All the news I can send you,' she wrote to her husband, ' that I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly miller's thumb — a boy that's aU head and very httle body ; but this is a secret.' ^ This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl and coimtess familiarity with Falstaff's adventures in Shakespeare's ' Henry IV,' where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as ' good pint pot ' (Pt. I. ii. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested thus hghtly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of ' the boy that was all head and very little body,' was a playful allusion to Sir John's creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. In the letters of Sir Tobie Matthew, many of which were written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstafi seems to have been bestowed on Shakespeare : ' As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, " what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and Ubertie, I never dealt better since I was a man." ' ^ When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland ' come not to Court ' but ' pass away the time the theatre. merely in going to plays every day.' » It seems that the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and Essex in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare's ' Richard II ' at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play-scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their rebellious design.* Imprisonment sharpened Southampton's zest for the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his feUow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden present the ' old ' play of ' Love's Labour's Lost,' whose ' wit and mirth ' were calculated ' to please her Majesty exceedingly.' * 1 The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145. - The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaff's remarks in 1 Henry IV, II. iv. The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines 190-1. ■^ Sidney Papers, ii. 132. ■♦ See pp. 254-5. 5 See p. 385 supra. 666 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton's literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of his pohtical or domestic life, that the amplest proofs sur\dve of his devotion to letters. From the hour that, as a hand- some and accomphshed lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation adui'aUon °^ literary effort of almost every quality and form. He had in his Itahan tutor Florio, whose circle of acquaintance included all men of Hterary reputation, a mentor who iJlowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton's honour in contemporary prose and verse. Soon after the publica- tion, in April 1593, of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' with its salutation of Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the . poet's craft, Bamabe Barnes, confided to a pubUshed Barnabe r ' r Barnes's Sonnet of unrestrained fervour his conviction that Sonne , 1593. Southampton's eyes — ' those heavenly lamps ' — were the only sources of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed ' to the Right Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,' runs : Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand (Which sacred Muses make their instrument) These worthless leaves, which I to thee present, (Sprung from a rude and unmanured land) That Mith your countenance graced, they may withstand Hundred-eyed Envy's rough encounterment, WTicse patronage can give encouragement, To scorn back-wounding ZoUus his band. Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, ^^ith gracious eyes — Those heavenly lamps ■which give the Muses light. Which give and take in course that holy fire — To view my Muse with your judicial sight : Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise. Shall to thy virtues, of much \\orth, aspire. Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nashe, evinced little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly essay in romance, 'The Life of Jack W^ilton.' He adSeSes.^^* describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of age, as ' a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' 'A new brain,' he exclaims, ' a new wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to posterity, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption.' '■ Although ' Jack Wilton ' was the 1 See Nashe's Works, ed. Mckerrow, ii. 201. The whole passage runs : ' How wel or ill I haue done in it, I am ignorant : (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 667 first book Nashe formally dedicated to Southampton, it is probable that Nashe had made an earlier bid for the earl's patronage. In a digression at the close of his ' Pierce Pennilesse ' he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he entitles * the matchless image of honour and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Jove's eagle-bome Ganimede. thrice noble Amintas.' In a sonnet addressed to ' this renowned lord,' who ' draws all hearts to his love,' Nashe expresses regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate *so special a pillar of nobiUty ' in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the ' Faerie Queene ' ; and in the last lines of his sonnet Nashe suggests that Spenser suppressed the nobleman's name Because fev/ words might not comprise thy fame.* Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for v^hom Nashe, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned •amorous villanellos and qui passas.' One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nashe survives in an obscene love-poem entitled 'The Choise of Valentines,' which may be dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nashe addressed his young patron as his * friend.' 2 into it seUe) : only your Honoiire applauding encouragement hath power to maka mee arrogant. Incomprehensible is the heigth of your spirit both in heroicai resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriueably perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper which on the diamond rocke of your iudgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the loners of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English : that smal braine I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my trends, and fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption. Of your gracious fauor I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast. . . . Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.' 1 The complimentary title of ' Amyntas,' which was naturalised in English literature by Abraham Fraunce's two renderings of Tasso's Aminia — one direct from the Italian and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson — was apparently bestowed by Spenser on the Earl of Derby in his Colin Cloutt come ffome againe (1595) ; and some critics assume that Nashe referred in Pierce Pennilesse to that nobleman rather than to Southampton. But Nashe's comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. ' Amyntas ' as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied exclusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard Bamfield and by other of Watson's panegyrists. 2 Two manuscript copies of the poem, which was printed (privately) for the first time, under the editorship of Mr. John S. Farmer, in 1899, are extant — one among the Rawlinson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). The opening dedicatory sonnet, which is inscribed ' to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton] ' runs : ' Pardon, sweete flower of matchles poetrye, And fairest bud the red rose euer bare, Although my muse, devorst from deeper care, Presents thee with a wanton Elegie. 668 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's glorious fight off the Azores. Markham somje^^Tsos. "^^^ ^^^ content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with blas- phemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, dehghted the ear of Almighty God. Markham's sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus : Thou glorious laiu-el of the Muses' hill, Whose eyes doth cro%vn the most victorious pen. Bright lamp of virtue, in ^hose sacred sldll Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men. From graver subjects of thy grave assays, Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines — The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise True honour's spirit iii her rough designs — And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres ; So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee And from thy lips suck their eternitj'. Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl's name with his great ItaUan-English dictionary — the * Worlde of Wordes ' — more soberly defined the earl's place in the republic of letters when he ' Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitye For painting forth the things that hidden are, Since all men act what I in speeche declare, Onlie induced with varietie. ' Complaints and praises, every one can write, And passion out their pangs in statlie rimes ; But of loues pleasures none did euer write, That have succeeded in theis latter times. ' Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle gree, And better lines, ere long, shall honor thee.' The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and is succeeded by a second sonnet addressed by Nashe to his patron : ' Thus hath my penne presum'd to please my friend. Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo's eye. No, Honor brookes no such impietie. Yet Ovid's wanton muse did not offend. ' He is the foimtaine whence my streames do flowe — Forgive me if I speak as I was taught ; Alike to women, utter all I knowe. As longing to unlade so bad a fraught. ' My mynde once purg'd of such lascivious witt. With purified words and hallowed verse. Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse. That better male thy grauer view befitt. ' Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write Or for attempting banish me your sight. ' THOMAS NASHB.' SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERAEY PATRON 669 wrote : ' As to me and many more the glorious and gracious sun- shine of your honour hath infused light and life.' ^ A tribute Fiorio's which Thomas Heywood, the dramatist and Shake- address, speare's friend, rendered the Earl's memory just after his death, suggests that Heywood was an early member of that _, circle of poetic cUents whom Florio had in mind. Thomas "^ Hey^vood's In ' A Funeral Elegie upon the death of King James ' which Heywood pubhshed in 1625 within a few months of Southampton's death he thus commemorates his relations with Southampton : Henry, Southampton's Earle, a souldier proved. Dreaded in warre, and in milde peace beloved : O ! give me leave a little to resound His memory, as most in dutie bound, Because his servant once. The precise 'significance which attaches to the word 'servant' in Heywood's lines is an open question. Heywood was a prominent actor as well as dramatist, and his earhest theatrical patron was the Earl of Worcester, to whom he dedicates his elegy on King James. There is no evidence that Southampton took any company of actors under his patronage, and Heywood when he calls himself Southampton's 'servant once' was doubtless vaguely recalling his association with the Earl as one of his many poetic clients.* The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already argued, in Shakespeare's ' Sonnets.' The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters granulations until Southampton's death. When he was released of the poets from prison on James I's accession in April 1603, his praises in poets' mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his 'Sonnets' (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of H^ereford offered the Earl ' In 1597 William Burton (1575-1645) dedicated to Southampton his translation o£ Achilles Tatius — a very rare book (cf. Times Lit. Suppl. Feb. 10, 1905). In 1600 Edward Blount, a professional friend of the publisher Thorpe, dedicated one of his publications (The HistoHe of the Uniting of the Kingdom of Fortwjail to the Crowyie of Castill) ' to the most noble and aboundant president both of Honor and Vertue, Henry Earle of South- ampton." ' In such proper and plaine language ' (Blount wrote ' to the right honourable and worthy Earl ') ' as a most humble and affectionate duetie I doo heere offer upon the altar of my hart, the first fruits of my long growing endevors ; which (with much constancie and confidence) I have cherished, onely waiting this happy opportunity to make them manifest to your Lordship : where now if (in respect of the knowne distance betwixt the height of your Honorable spirit and the flatnesse of my poore abilities) they tume into smoake and vanish ere they can reach a degree of your merite, vouchsafe yet (most excellent Earle) to remember it was a fire that kindled them and gave them life at least, if not lasting. Tour Honor's patronage is the onely object I aime at ; and were the worthinesse of this Historic I present such as might warrant me an election out of a worlde of nobilitie, I woulde still pursue the happines of my first choise.' " J. P. Collier's Biblioffraphicai Account of Early English Literature, i. 371-3. 670 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE congratulation in more prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these : The world had never taken so full not© Of what thou art, hadsfc thou not been undone : And only thy affliction hath begot I\lore fame than thy best fortunes could have won ; For ever by adversity are ^^TOught The greatest works of admiration ; And all the fair examples of renown Out of distress and misery are gro^v'll; . . . Only the best-compoa'd and worthiest hearts God sets to act the hard'st and constant'st parts.' Davies was more jubilant : Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad. And cannot choose — their hearts are all so glad. Then let's be merry in our God and King, That made us merry, being ill bestead. Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling. And on the viol there sweet praises sing. For he is come that grace to all doth bring. ^ Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Musicians as well as poets acknowledged bis cultivated tastes, and a popular piece of instrumental music which Captain Tobias Hume included in his volume of ' Poetical Musicke ' in 1607 bore the title of 'The Earl of Southamptons favoret.'* Sir John Beaumont, on Southampton's death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance : I keep that glory last which is the best, The love of learning which he oft expressed In conversation, and respect to those Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose. 1 Daniel's Certaine Epistles, 1603 : see Daniel's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 217 seq. 2 See Preface to Davies's Microcosmos, 1603 (Daries's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 14). At the end of Davies's ilicrocosmos there is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liberation (ib. p. 96), beginning : Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord, From the deep seas of danger and distress There like thou wast to be thrown overboard In every storm of discontentedness. , 3 Other pieces in the collection bore such titles as ' The Earle of Sussex deUght,' The Lady Arabellas favoret,' ' The Earl of Pembrokes Galiard," and ' Sir Christopher Hattons Choice ' (cf . Eimbault, Bibliotheca Madrigalia, p. 25). SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 671 To the same effect are some twenty poems -which were pub- lished in 1624, just after Southampton's death, in a volume en- titled ' Teares of the Isle of Wight, shed on the Tombe ^ouThamptoa '^^ their most noble valorous and loving Captaine and Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton.' The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the first poem by one Francis Beale : Ye famous poets of the southern isle, Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse. And with your Laureate pens come and compile The praises due to this great Lord : peruse His globe of worth, and eke bis vertues brave, Like learned Maroes at Mecasuas' grave. V THE TETJB HISTORY OF THOMAS THOEPE AND ' MR. W. H.' TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . THESE . rNSVINO . SONNETS . MR . W. H. ALL . HAPPINESSE . AND . THAT . ETERNITIE . PROMISED . BY . CUB . EVER-LIVINa . POET . WISHETH . THE . WELL-WISHING . ADVENTURER . IN . SETTING . FORTH . T. T. In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare's best known works his ' sugar'd sonnets among his private friends.' None of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' are known to have tion o^the^ been in print when Meres wrote, but they were doubt- ;sonneu' jggg jjj circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of in 1609. ^ them were printed for the first time by the pubnsher, William Jaggard, in the opening pages of the first edition of ' The Passionate Pilgrim.' On January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, a publisher of small accoimt, obtained a license for the publication of a work bearing the title ' A Booke called Amours by J. D., with certein other Sonnetes by W. S.' No book answering this description is extant. In any case it is doubtful if Edgar's venture concerned Shakespeare's ' Sonnets.' It is more probable that his ' W. S.' was William Smith, who had pubhshed a collection of sonnets entitled ' Chloris ' in 1596.^ On May 20, 1609, a license ' Amours of J. D. were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier's suggestion that J. T). was a misprint for M. D., i.e. Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets 672 THOMAS THORPE AND ' MR. W. H.' 673 for the publication of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' was granted by the Stationers' Company to a publisher named Thomas Thorpe, and shortly afterwards the complete collection as they have reached us was pubUshed by Thorpe for the first time.^ To the volume Thorpe prefixed a dedication in the terms which are printed above. The words are fantastically arranged. In ordinary gram- matical order they would run : ' The well-wishing adventurer in set- ting forth [i.e. the publisher] T[homas]T [horpe] wisheth Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, aU happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-Uving poet.' Few books of the sixteenth or seventeenth century were ushered into the world without a dedication. In most cases it was the work of the author, but numerous volumes, besides Shakespeare's ' Sonnets,' are extant in which the pubUsher (and not the author) fills the role of dedicator. The cause of the substitution is not far to seek.^ The signing of the dedication was an assertion of full and responsible ownership in the pubhcation, and the pubUsher in Shakespeare's lifetime was the full and responsible owner of a pubhcation quite as often as the author. The modem conception of copyright had not yet been evolved. Whoever in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century was in actual possession of a manu- script was for practical purposes its full and responsible owner. Literary work largely circulated in manuscript.* Scriveners made a precarious hvelihood by multiplying written copies, and an enterprising pubUsher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book without the author's sanction or knowledge. When a volume in the reign of EUzabeth or James I was pubUshed independently of the author, the publisher exercised unchaUenged aU the owner's rights, not the least valued of which was that of choosing the patron of the enterprise, and of penning the dedicatory compUment above his signature. decUcatons. Occasionally circumstances might speciously justify the pubUsher' s appearance in the guise of a dedicator. In the case of a posthumous book it sometimes happened that the author's friends renounced ownership or neglected to assert it. In other instances, the absence of an author from London while his work was passing through the press might throw on the pubUsher the task of supplying the dedication without exposing him to any in 1594 the title of Amours. That word was in Prance a common designation of collections of sonnets (cf. Drayton's Poems, ed. Collier, Eoxburghe Club, p. xxv). ' A full account of Thorpe's relations with the Sonnets appears in my introduction to the facsimile of the original edition (Clarendon Press, 1905). 2 See note to p. 157 supra. 2 X 674 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE charge of sharp practice. But as a rule one of only two inferences is possible when a pubhsher's name figured at the foot of a dedicatory- epistle : either the author was ignorant of the publisher's design, or he had refused to countenance it, and was openly defied. In the case of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' it may safely be assumed that Shakespeare received no notice of Thorpe's intention of publishing the work, and that it was owing to the author's ignorance of the design that the dedication was composed and signed by the ' well- wishing adventurer in setting forth.' But whether author or publisher chose the patron of his wares, the choice was determined by much the same considerations. Self-interest was the principle underlying transactions between literaiy patron and protege. PubUsher, like author, commonly chose as patron a man or woman of wealth and social influence who might be expected to acknowledge the compliment either by pecuniary reward or by friendly advertisement of the volume in their own social circle. At times the publisher, sHghtly extending the field of choice, selected a personal friend or mercantile acquaintance who had rendered him some service in trade or private Ufe, and was likely to appreciate such general expressions of good wiU as were the accepted topic of dedications. Nothing that was fantastic or mysterious entered into the Elizabethan or the Jacobean publishers' shrewd schemes of business, and it may be asserted with confidence that it was in the everyday prosaic conditions of current literary traffic that the pubhsher Thorpe selected ' Mr. W. H.' as the patron of the original edition of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets.' A study of Thorpe's character and career clears the point of doubt. Thorpe has been described as a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's county, and a man eminent in his e^'i'^Ufe profession. He was neither. He was a native of Bamet in IVIiddlesex, where his father kept an inn, and he himself through thirty years' experience of the book trade held his own with diificulty in its humblest ranks. He enjoyed the customary prehminary training.^ At midsummer 1584 he was apprenticed for nine years to a reputable printer and stationer, Richard Watkins.* Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the Stationers' Company, and was thereby quaUfied to set up as a pubUsher on his own account.* He was not destitute of a taste for hterature ; he knew scraps of Latin, and recognised a good manuscript when he saw one. But the ranks of London pubUshers The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber's Transcript of the Registers the Stationers' Company, ' Arber, ii. 124. ^ n. ii. 713. THOMAS THORPE AND ' MR. W. H/ 675 were overcrowded, and such accomplishments as Thorpe possessed were poor compensation for a lack of capital or of family con- nections amoiag those already established in the trade.i For many years he contented himself with an obscure situation as assistant or clerk to a stationer more favourably placed. It was as the self-appointed procurer and owner of an unprinted manuscript — a recognised role for novices to fill in the book trade of the period — that Thorpe made his first distinguishable appearance on the stage of Uterary history. In 1600 there fell into his hands in an unexplained manner a written copy of JMarlowe's unprinted translation of the first book of 'Lucan.' Thorpe shf °of°the confided his good fortune to Edward Bloimt, then manuscript^ a Stationer's assistant like himself, but with better ?Lucan°"'^ prospects. Blount had already achieved a modest success in the same capacity of procurer or picker-up of neglecte4 'copy.' ^ In 1598 he became proprietor of Marlowe's unfinished and unpublished ' Hero and Leander,' and found among better-equipped friends in the trade both a printer and a publisher for his treasure -trove. Blount good-naturedly interested himself in Thorpe's ' find,' and it was through Blount's good offices that Peter Short undertook to print Thorpe's manuscript of Marlowe's * Lucan,' and Walter Burre agreed to sell it at his shop in St. Paul's Churchyard. As owner of the manuscript Thorpe exerted the right of choosing a patron for the venture and of supplying the dedicatory epistle. The patron of his choice was ^'^ '^^'i'j^" bis friend Blount, and he made the dedication the tory adaress ... to Edward vehicle of his gratitude for the assistance he had in°i'6oo. just received. The style of the dedication was some- what bombastic, but Thorpe showed a literary sense when he designated Marlowe * that pure elemental wit,' and a good deal of dry humour in ofiering to ' his kind and true friend ' Blount ' some few instructions ' whereby he might accommodate himself to the unaccustomed role of patron.* For the conventional 1 A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (of. Arber's Transcript, ii. 213). 2 Cf. my paper ' An Elizabethan Bookseller ' in Bibliographica, i. 474-98. ■* Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, anc" amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. ' When I bring you the book,' he advises Blount, ' take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.' Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron's love ' both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices,' 2x2 676 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE type of patron Thorpe disavowed respect. He preferred to place himself under the protection of a friend in the trade whose good will had already stood him in good stead, and was capable of benefiting him hereafter. This venture laid the foundation of Thorpe's fortunes. Three years later he was able to place his own name on the title-page of two humbler literary prizes — each an insignificant pamphlet on current events.^ Thenceforth for a dozen years his name reappeared annually on one, two, or three volumes. After 1614 his operations were few and far between, and they ceased altogether in 1624. He seems to have ended his days in poverty, and has been identified with the Thomas Thorpe who was granted an alms-room in the hospital of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on December 3, 1635.» Thorpe was associated with the publication of twenty-nine volumes in all,^ including Marlowe's ' Lucan ' ; but in almost all his operations his personal energies were confined, of his as in his initial enterprise, to procuring the manuscript, usiness. j,^^ ^ short period in 1608 he occupied a shop, The Tigers Head, in St. Pauls Churchyard, and the fact was duly announced on the title-pages of three pubhcations which he issued in that year.* But his other undertakings were described on their title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him by another ; and when any address found mention at all, it was the shopkeeper's address, and not his own. He never enjoyed in permanence the profits or dignity of printing his ' copy ' at a press of his own, or selling books on premises of his own, and he can claim the distinction of having pursued in this homeless fashion the weU-defined profession of procurer of manuscripts for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers' Company. Though many others began their career in that capacity, all except Thorpe, as far as they can be traced, either developed into printers or booksellers, or, failing in that, betook themselves to other trades. 1 One gave an account of the East India Company's fleet ; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard ilartin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London. - Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527. 3 Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603 ; one in 1604 ; two in 1605 ; two in 1606 ; two in 1607 ; three in 1608 ; one in 1609 (i.e. the SoriTiets) ; three in 1610 (i.e. Histrio-mastU, or the Playwright, as well as Healey's translations) ; two in 1611 ; one in 1612 ; three in 1613 ; two in 1614 ; two in 1616 ; one in 1618 ; and finally one in 162-1. The last was a new edition of George Chapman's Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608. * They were Wits A. B.C. or a cenlurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen OoUege, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library) ; Chapman's Byron, and Jonson's Masques of Blackness and Beauty. THOMAS THORPE AND ' IVm. W. H/ 677 Very few of his wares does Thorpe appear to have procured direct from the authors. It is true that between 1605 and 1611 there were issued under his auspices some eight volumes of genuine literary value, including, besides Shakespeare's ' Sonnets,' three plays by Chapman,^ four works of Ben Jonson, and Coryat's ' Odcombian Banquet.' But the taint of mysterious origin attached to most of his hterary properties. He doubtless owed them to the exchange of a few pence or shillings with a scrivener's hireling ; and the transaction was not one of which the author had cogni- sance. It is quite plain that no negotiation with the author preceded the formation of Thorpe's resolve to pubUsh for the first time Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' in 1609. Had Shakespeare associated himself with the enterprise, the world would fortunately have been spared Thorpe's dedication to ' Mr. W. H.' ' T. T.'s ' place would have been filled by ' W. S.' The whole transaction was in Thorpe's vein. Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' had been already circulating in manuscript for eleven years ; only two had as yet Shake- been printed, and those were issued by the publisher, speare s ^ . i i ■ sufferings at WilUam Jaggard, in the fraudulently christened hands. ^^^ volume, ' The Passionate Pilgrim, by William Shake- speare,' in 1599. Shakespeare, except in the case of his two narrative poems, showed indifference to all questions touching the publication of his works. Of the sixteen plays of his that were pubUshed in his lifetime, not one was printed with his sanction. He made no audible protest when seven contemptible dramas in which he had no hand were published with his name or initials on the title-page while his fame was at its height. With only one pubHsher of his time, Richard Field, his fellow-townsman, who was responsible for the issue of ' Venus ' and ' Lucrece,' is it likely that he came into personal relations, and there is nothing to show that he maintained relations with Field after the publication of ' Lucrece ' in 1594. In fitting accord with the circumstance that the publication of the ' Sonnets ' was a tradesman's venture which ignored the author's feelings and rights, Thorpe in both the entry of the book 1 Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author's sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken parti- cular care with Jonson's books, but none of Jonson's works fell into his hands before 1605 or after 1608, a small traction of Jonson's hterary life. It is significant that the author's dedication — the one certain mark of publication with the author's sanction — appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. One or two copies of Thorpe's impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe's edition of Chapman's Gentleman Vsker has any dedication. 678 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in the Stationers' Registers and on its title-page brusquely designated it * Shakespeares Sonnets,' instead of following the more urbane collocation of words commonly adopted by living authors, viz. ' Sonnets by Wilham Shakespeare.' ^ In framing the dedication Thorpe followed established precedent. Initials run riot over Ehzabethan and Jacobean books. Printers and pubhshers, authors and contributors of prefatory initials to commendations were all in the habit of masking them- dedications selves behind such symbols. Patrons figured imder bethan and initials in dedications somewhat less frequently than books^*° other sharers in the book's production. But the conditions determining the employment of initials in that relation were well defined. The employment of initials in a dedication was a recognised mark of close friendship or intimacy between patron and dedicator. It was a sign that the patron's fame was Hmited to a small circle, and that the revelation of his full name was not a matter of interest to a wide pubhc. Such are the dominant notes of almost all the extant dedications in which the patron is addressed by his initials. In 1598 Samuel Rowlands addressed the dedication of his ' Betraying of Christ ' to his ' deare affected friend Maister H. W., gentleman.' An edition of Robert Southwell's ' Short Rule of Life ' which appeared in the same year bore a dedication addressed ' to my deare affected friend M. [i.e. Mr.] D. S., gentleman.' The poet Richard Barnfield also in the same year dedicated the opening sonnet in his ' Poems in divers Humours ' to his ' friend Maister R. L.' In 1617 Dunstan Gale dedicated a poem, ' Py ramus and Thisbe,' to the ' worshipfull his verie friend D. [i.e. Dr.] B. H.' * There was nothing exceptional in the words of greeting which Thorpe addressed to his patron ' Mr. W. H.' Dedications of Shakespeare's time usually consisted of two distinct parts. There was a dedicatory epistle, which might touch at any length, in either verse or prose, on the subject of the book and the writer's ' The nearest parallel is the title Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), a poetic miscellany piratically assigned to the poet Nicholas Breton by the stationer Richard Jones. But compare Churchyards Chippes (1575) and Churchyards Challenge (1593). - Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under sUghtly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.'s [i.e. possibly Richard Stafford's] ' Epistle dedicatorie ' before his HeraclUus (Oxford, 1609) was inscribed ' to his much honoured father S. F. S.' An Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. D. O. his assertion . . . by ^F. H. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to ' the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladle M. H.' This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare's Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day. THOMAS THORPE AND ' ME. W. H/ 679 relations with his patron. But there was usually, in addition, a preliminary salutation confined to such a single sentence as Thorpe displayed on the first page of his edition of Shake- of wishes^ speare's ' Sonnets.' In that preUminary sentence for ' happi- the dedicator usually followed a widely adopted 'eternity ' in formula which was of great antiquity. ^ He habitually greetSies^ ' '^isheth ' his patron one or more of such blessings as health, long hfe, happiness, and eternity. ' AU perseverance with soules happiness ' Thomas Powell * wisheth ' the Countess of Kildare on the first page of his ' Passionate Poet ' in 1601. 'All happines ' is the greeting of Thomas Watson, the sonnetteer, to his patron, the Earl of Oxford, on the threshold of Watson's ' Passionate Century of Love.' There is hardly a book pubhshed by Robert Greene between 1580 and 1592 that does not open with an adjuration before the dedicatory epistle in the form : ' To ^ — Robert Greene wisheth increase of honour with the full fruition of perfect felicity.' Thorpe in Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' left the conventional saluta- tion to stand alone ; he omitted the supplement of a dedicatory epistle. 2 There exists an abundance of contemporary examples of the dedicatory salutation without the sequel of the dedicatory epistle. Edmimd Spenser's dedication of the ' Faerie Queene ' to Ehzabeth consists solely of the salutation in the form of an assurance that the writer ' consecrates these his labours to hve with the eternitie of her fame.' Michael Drayton both in his 'Idea, The Shepheard's Garland' (1593) and in his 'Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall ' (1609) confined his address to his patron to a single sentence of salutation.^ Richard Brathwaite in 1611 exclusively saluted the patron of his ' Golden Fleece ' with ' the continuance of God's temporall blessings in this hfe, with the crowne of immortaUtie in the world to come ' ; while in Uke manner he greeted 1 Dante employed it in the dedication of his Divina Commedia which ran ' Domino Kani Grand! de Scala devotissLmus suus Dante Aligherius . . . vitam optat per tempora diutuma felicem et gloriosi nominis in perpetuum incrementum.' - Thorpe's dedicatory formula and the type in which it was set were clearly in- fluenced by Ben Jonson's form of dedication before the first edition of his Volpone (1607), which, Uke Shakespeare's Sonnets, was published by Thorpe and printed for him by George Eld. The preliminary leaf in Volpone waa in short lines and in tha same fount of capitals as was employed in Thorpe's dedication to ' Mr. W. H.' On the opening leaf of Volpone stands a greeting of 'The Two Famous Universities,' to which ' Ben: Jonson (The Grateful Acknowledger) dedicates both it [the play] and Himselfe.' la very small type at the right-hand comer of the page, below the dedication, run the words 'There follows an Epistle if (yon dare venture on) the length.' The Epistle begins overleaf. 3 In the volunie of 1593 the words run : ' To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Eobert Dudley, enriched with aU vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.' 680 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the patron of his ' Sonnets and Madrigals ' in the same year -vnth 'the prosperitie of times successe in this life, with the reward of eternitie in the world to come.' It is ' happiness ' and ' eternity,' or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing.^ In his dedication of the ' Sonnets ' to ' Mr. W. H.' he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, prophesied for his verse in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magnilo- quence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, ' promised by our ever-living poet,' to the conventional dedicatory wish for his patron's 'all happiness' and 'eternitie.'* Thorpe 'wisheth' 'Mr. W. H.' 'eternity' no less grudgingly than 'our ever-Uving poet ' offered his own friend the * promise ' of it in his 'Sonnets.' Other phrases in Thorpe's dedicatory greeting have a tech- nical significance which exclusively concerns Thorpe's position as the pubUsher. In accordance with professional custom he dubbed himself ' the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.' Similarly, John Marston called himself ' my own setter-out ' when he assumed the rare responsibility of pubhshing one of his own plays ('Parasitaster or the Fawne' 1G06), while the pubhsher Thomas Walkley, when reprinting Beaumont and Fletcher's ' Phil- 1 In 1610, in dedicating St. Angustine, Of the Citie of Ood to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ' a desired citie sure in heaven,' and assigns to ' St. Augustine and his commentator Vives ' a ' savour of the secular.' In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pro- nounces the book to be ' the hand to philosophy ; the Instrument of iustruments ; as Kature greatest in the least ; as Homer's Ilias in a nutshell ; in lesse compasse more cunning.' For other examples of Thorpe's pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 683, note 3, and p. 689. 2 The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe's salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither's Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation ' To himselfe G. W. wisheth aU happinesse.' It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe's dedication to ' Mr. W. H.' in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton — the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of ' W. H.'s ' Southwell manuscript — there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind ' W. H.'s' greeting of Mathew Saunders (see below), but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints. THOMAS THORPE AND ' MR. W. H/ 681 aster' in 1622, wrote that he 'adventured to issue it' 'knowing how many well-wishers it had abroad.' Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to Shakespeare's ' Sonnets.' His dedicatory experience was j,..^ previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe's dedications ' Lucan ' in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade. y orpe. Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date subse- quent to the issue of the ' Sonnets.' One of these is addressed to John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke.^ But these three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe's prey after the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of Healey's unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the ' Sonnets,' and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had followed — deUberately and for reasons that he fully stated — in his first and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, ' W. H.' Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' is not the only volume of the period in the introductory pages of which the initials ' W. H.' play a prominent part. In 1606 one who concealed him- sign's dedi- self under the same letters performed for ' A Foure- SouthweiVs fould Meditation ' (a collection of pious poems which poems the Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his death) the identical service that Thorpe performed for Marlowe's ' Lucan ' in 1600, and for Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' in 1609. In 1606 Southwell's manuscript fell into the hands of this ' W. H.,' and he published it through the agency of the printer, George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton.^ ' W. H.,' in his capacity of owner, supphed the dedication with his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit's newly recovered 1 Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epicletus his Manually and Cebes his Table, out of Oreek originall by lo. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke St. Aiigustine, Of the Citie of God. . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey's Epictetus, 1616. 2 Southwell's Foure-foidd Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy (lately in the library of Mr. Robert Hoe, of New York) having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to the Athenaeum on November 1, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ' W. H.,' the dedicator of Southwell's poem, with Thorpe's ' Mr. W. H.' 682 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE poems ' W. H.' "wrote, ' Long have they lien hidden in obscuritie, and haply had never seene the light, had not a meere accident conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring unto them.' ' W. H.' chose as patron of his venture one Mathew Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a con- ventional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The greeting was printed in large and bold type thus : — To the Right Worfhipfull and Vertuous Gentleman, Mathew Saunders, Efquire. W. H. wifheth, with long life, a profperous achieuement of his good defires. There follows in small type, regularly printed across the page, a dedicatory letter — the frequent sequel of the dedicatory salu- tation — in which the writer, ' W. H.,' commends the religious temper of ' these meditations ' and deprecates the coldness and sterihty of his own ' conceits.' The dedicator signs himself at the bottom of the page ' Your ^Yorships unfained affectionate, W. H.' ^ The two books — Southwell's ' Foure-fould Meditation ' of 1606, and Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' of 1609 — have more in common than the appearance on the prehminary pages of the initials ' W. H.' in a prominent place, and of the common form of dedicatory saluta- tion. Both volumes, it was announced on the title-pages, came from the same press — the press of George Eld. Eld for many years co-operated with Thorpe in business. In 1605, and in each of the years 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610 at least one of his ventures was publicly declared to be a specimen of Eld's typography. Many of Thorpe's books came forth without any mention of the printer ; ' A manuscript volume at Oscott College cxjn tains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which ' unfained afiectionate W. H.' first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ' epistel dedicatorie ' which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The words ran : ' To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of worsliipp in this worlde, And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever.' THOMAS THORPE AND "^m. W. H/ 683 but Eld's name figures more frequently upon them than that of any other printer. Between 1605 and 1609 it is Ukely that Eld printed all Thorpe's ' copy ' as matter of course and that he was in constant relations with him. There is Uttle doubt that the ' W. H.' of the Southwell volume was Mr. William Hall, who, when he procured that manuscript ' w H ' and ^°'" P^bUcation, was an humble auxiliary in the Mr. William publishing army.^ \YiUiam HaU, the ' W. H.' of the Southwell dedication, was too in all probability the Mr. W. H.' of Thorpe's dedication of the ' Sonnets.' '' The objection that ' Air. W. H.' could not have been Thorpe's friend in trade, because while wishing him all happiness and eternity 'Theonlie Thorpe dubs him ' the onUe begetter of these insuing begetter* sonnets,' is not formidable. Thorpe did not employ means only n , ■ . f j procurer.' ^ begetter in the ordinary sense ^ but in much the ' Hall flits rapidly across the stage of literary history. He served an apprenticeship to the printer and stationer John AJlde from 1577 to 15S4, and was admitted to the freedom of the Stationers' Company in the latter year. For the long period of twenty- two years after his release from his indentures he was connected with the trade in a dependent capacity, doubtless as assistant to a master-stationer. ^Tien in 1606 the manuscript of Southwell's poems was conveyed to his hands and he adopted the recognised rdle of procurer of their publication, he had not set up in business for himself. It was only later in the same year (1606) that he obtained the license of the Stationers' Company to inaugurate a press in his own name, and two yeare passed before he began business. In 160S lie obtained for publication a theological manuscript which appeared next year with his name on the title-page for the first time. This volume constituted the earliest credential of his independence. It entitled him to the prefix ' Mr.' in all social relations. Between 1609 and 1614 he printed some twenty volumes, most of them sermons and almost all devotional in tone. The most important of his secular imdertaking was QuiUim's far-famed Display of Heraldrie, a folio issued in 1610. In 1612 Hall printed an account of the conviction and execution of a noted pickpocket, John Selman, who had been arrested while professionaUy engaged in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. On the title-p^e Hall gave his own name by his initials only. The book was described in bold type as ' printed by W. H.' and as on sale at the shop of Thomas Archer in St. Paul's Churchyard. Hall was a careful printer with a healthy dread of misprints, but his business dwindled after 1613, and, soon disposing of it to one John Beale, he disappeared into private life. - A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers' Company bearing at the required dates the initials of ' W. H.' But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe. ■^ Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which it is often diSBcult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in 1610 — the year after the issue of the Sonnets- — Healey's Epictctus his ManuaU ' to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister John Florio,' Thorpe writes of Epictetus's work : ' In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It fillcs not the hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons : nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.' In the same year, when dedicating Healey's translation of St. Augustine's Citie of God to the Earl of Pem- broke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke's patron^e of Healey's earlier efforts in translation thus : ' He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoned his more abiUtie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.' 684 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE same technical significance which other of his dedicatory expres- sions bear. ' Begetter,' when Uterally interpreted as appUed to a Uterary work, means father, author, producer, and it cannot be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe ' Mr. W. H.' as the author of the ' Sonnets.' ' Begetter ' has been used in the figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by ' onHe begetter ' Thorpe meant ' sole inspirer,' and that by the use of those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting between ' W. H.' and Shakespeare in the dramatist's early life ; but that interpretation presents as we have seen numberless difficulties. Of the figurative meanings set in Elizabethan English on the word ' begetter,' that of ' inspirer ' is by no means the only one or the most common. ' Beget ' was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of ' get,' ' procure,' or ' obtain,' a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of ' bring into being.* Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them ' in the very whirl- wind of passion acqviire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.' ' I have some cousins german at Court,' wrote Dekker in 1602, ta his ' Satiro-Mastix,' ' [that] shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels.' ' Mr. W. H.,' whom Thorpe described as ' the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,' was in all probabihty the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, who brought the book into being either by first placing the manu- script in Thorpe's hands or by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word ' begetter ' was entirely in Thorpe's vein.^ Thorpe described his role in the enterprise of the ' Sonnets ' as that of ' the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' i.e. the hopeful speculator in the scheme. ' Mr. W. H.' doubtless played the almost equally important part — one as well known then as now in commercial operations — of the ' vendor ' of the property to be exploited. A few years earher, in 1600, one John Bodenham in similar circumstances made over to a ' stationer ' Hugh Astley an anthology of pubHshed and unpubhshed poetic quotations, which Astley issued under the title of ' Belvedere or The Garden of the Muses.' In a prefatory page 1 This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone's disciple, James BosweU the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority. For further evidence of the use of the word ' beget ' in the sense of 'get,' 'gain,' or 'procure' in English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see the present writer's Introduction to the Sonnets Facsimile (Oxford, 1905) pp. 38-9. The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators — men like Malone and Steevens — who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century should have failed to recognise any connection between 'Mr. W. H.' and Shakespeare's personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the nineteenth century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archaeologists. THOMAS THORPE AND ' MR. W. H.' 685 Bodenham was called 'First causer andcollectour of these Flowers,' and at the end of the book ' The Gentleman who was the cause of this collection.' Thorpe apphed to ' Mr. W. H.' the word ' begetter ' in the same sense as Astley apphed the words ' first causer ' and ' the cause ' to John Bodenham, the procurer of the copy for his volume known as ' Belvedere ' in 1600. VI * MB. WILLIAM HEBBERT ' Foe some eighty years it has been very generally assumed that Shakespeare addressed the bulk of his sonnets to the young Earl of Pembroke. This theory owes its origin to a spe- notion that. ciously lucky guess which was first disclosed to the stMdrfor^ ' public in 1832, and won for a time almost imiversal 'Mr. Wiiuam acceptance.^ Thorpe's form of address was held to justify the mistaken inference that, whoever * Mr. W. H.' may have been, he and no other was the hero of the alleged story of the ' Poems ' ; and the cornerstone of the Pembroke theory was the assumption that the letters 'Mr. W. IL' in the dedication did duty for the words ' Mr. William Herbert,' by which name the (third) Earl of Pembroke was represented as having been known in youth. The originators of the theory claimed to discover in the Earl of Pembroke the only young man of rank and wealth to whom the initials ' W. H.' apphed at the needful dates. In thus interpreting the initials, the Pembroke theorists made a blimder that proves on examination to be fatal to their whole contention. The nobleman under consideration succeeded to the earldom of Pembroke on his father's death on January 19, 1601 (N.S.), when he '■ James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare's Sonnets which he published in 1837. 0. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare's Auto- biographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without quali- fication, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Varionim editions of Shakespeare nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malono or George Chalmers. The most arduous of its recent supporters was Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the Sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ' dark lady ' of the Sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke's mistress. Tyler endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April 1899 under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory : a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. 686 ' ME. WILLIAM HERBERT ' 687 was twenty years and nine months old, and from that date it is unquestioned that he was always known by his lawful title. But it has been overlooked that the designation ' Mr. William The Earl of Herbert,' for which the initials «Mr. W. H.' have Pembroke known only been long held to stand, could never in the mind of bert'in youth. Thomas Thorpe or any other contemporary have de- nominated the earl at any moment of his career. When he came into the world on April 9, 1580, his father had been (the second) Earl of Pembroke for ten years, and he, as the eldest son, was from the hour of his birth known in all relations of life — even in the baptismal entry in the parish register — by the title of Lord Herbert, and by no other. During the lifetime of his father and his own minority several references were made to him in the extant correspondence of friends of varying degrees of intimacy. He is called by them, without exception, 'my Lord Herbert,' 'the Lord Herbert,' or ' Lord Herbert.' ^ It is true that as the eldest son of an earl he held the title by courtesy, but for all practical purposes it was as well recognised in common speech as if he had been a peer in his own right. No one nowadays would address in current parlance, or entertain the conception of. Viscount Cranborne, the heir of the present Marquis of Sahsbury, as ' Mr. R. C or ' Mi. Robert Cecil.' It is no more legitimate to assert that it would have occurred to an Elizabethan — least oi all to a personal acquaintance or to a publisher who stood toward his patron in the relation of a personal dependent — to describe 'young Lord Herbert,' of Elizabeth's reign, as 'Mr. WiUiam Herbert.' A lawyer, who in the way of business might have to mention the young lord's name in a legal document, would have entered it as ' WilUam Herbert, commonly called Lord Herbert.' The appellation ' Mr.' was not used loosely then as now, but indi- cated a precise social grade. Thorpe's employment of the prefix 'Mr.' without quaUfication is in itself fatal to the pretension that any lord, whether by right or courtesy, was intended.^ 1 Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. ' My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my Lord Harbert (is) come up to see the Queen ' (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595) ; and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, ' Toung Lord Harbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir WiUiam Woodhouse, are aU in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.' Chamberlain's Letters (Camden Soc), p. 57. 2 Thomas SackviUe, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was bom plain ' Thomas SackviUe,' and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ' Mi. SackviUe.' He wTote all his literary work whUe he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned Uterature for poUtics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604 — at the age of sisty-eight — he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ' M. [i.e. Mr.] SackviUe,' were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopaedic anthology, England's Parnassus, which was published, whoUy independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About 688 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Proof is at hand to establish that Thorpe was under no mis- apprehension as to the proper appellation of the Earl of Pembroke, and was incapable of ventm-ing on the meaningless Thorpe's niisnomer of ' Mr. W. H.' Insignificant pubUsher mode of • i i r ^ addressing though he was, and sceptical as he was of the merits plmbroke°* of noble patrons, he was not proof against the tempta- tion, when an opportimity was directly offered him, of adorning the prefatory pages of a publication with the name of a nobleman, who enjoyed the high official station, the hterary culture, and the social influence of the third Earl of Pembroke. In 1610 — a year after he pubhshed the ' Sonnets ' — there came into his hands the manuscripts of John Healey, that humble hterary aspirant who had a few months before emigrated to Virginia, and had, it would seem, died there. Healey, before leaving England, had secured through the good offices of John Florio (a man of influence in both fashionable and hterary circles) the patronage of the Earl of Pem- broke for a translation of Bishop Hall's fanciful satire, 'Mundus alter et idem.' Calling his book ' The Discoverie of a New World,' Healey had prefixed to it, in 1609, an epistle inscribed in garish terms of flattery to the ' Truest mirrour of truest honor, WiUiam Earl of Pembroke.' ^ When Thorpe subsequently made up his mind to pubhsh, on his own account, other translations by the same hand, he found it desirable to seek the same patron. Accordingly, in 1610, he prefixed in his own name, to an edition of Healey'a translation of St. Augustine's ' Citie of God,' a dedicatory address • to the honorablest patron of the Muses and good mindes. Lord William, Earle of Pembroke, Knight of the Honourable Order (of the Garter), &c.' In involved sentences Thorpe teUs the 'right gracious and gracefule Lord ' how the author left the work at death to be a ' testimonie of gratitude, observance, and heart's honor to your honour.' ' Wherefore,' he explains, ' his legacie, laide at your Honour's feete, is rather here dehvered to your Honour's humbly thrise-kissed hands by his poore delegate. Your Lordship's true devoted, Th. Th.' Again, in 1616, when Thorpe procured the issue of a second edition of another of Healey' s translations, ' Epictetus ManuaU. the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unau- thorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or ilr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke ' Mr. W. H.' As might be anticipated, persistent research afiords no parallel for the latter irregularity. 1 An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian — none is in the British Museum — shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume. ' MR. WILLIAM HERBERT ' 689 Oebes Table. Theophrastus Characters,' he supplied more conspiou- 0U3 evidence of the servility with which he deemed it incumbent on him to approach a potent patron. As this address by Thorpe to Pembroke is difficult of access, I give it i7i extenso : ' To the Right Honourable, William Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to His Majestic, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, &o. ' Right Honorable. — It may worthily seeme strange unto your Lordship, out of what frenzy one of my meanenesse hath presumed to commit this Sacriledge, in the straightnesse of your Lordship's leisure, to present a peece, for matter and model so unworthy, and in this scribbling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly with Dedications. All I can alledge in extenuation of so many incongruities, is the bequest of a deceased Man ; who (in his Ufe- time) having offered some translations of his ucnto your Lordship, ever wisht if these ensuing were pubhshed they might onely bee addressed unto your Lordship, as the last Testimony of his dutifull affection (to use his oAvn termes) The true and reall upholder of Learned endeavors. This, therefore, beeing left unto mee, as a Legacie imto your Lordship (pardon my presumption, great Lord, from so meane a man to so great a person) I could not without some impiety present it to any other ; such a sad priviledge have the bequests of the dead, and so obhgatory they are, more than the requests of the living, la. the hope of this honourable acceptance I will ever rest, ' Your lordship's humble devoted, 'T. Th.' With such obeisances did pubUshers then habitually creep into the presence of the nobihty. In fact, the law which rigorously maintained the privileges of peers left them no option. The alleged erroneous form of address in the dedication of Shakespeare's ' Sonnets ' — ' Mr. W. H.' for Lord Herbert or the Earl of Pembroke — would have amounted to the offence of defamation. And or that misdemeanour the Star Chamber, always active in protecting the dignity of peers, would have promptly called Thorpe to account.^ Of the Earl of Pembroke, and of his brother the Earl of Mont- gomery, it was stated a few years later, ' from just observation,' ' On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as ' goodman Morley.' A technical defect — the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence — in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. See Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of John Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, P.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348. 2 Y 690 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE oa very pertinent authority, that ' no men came near their lordships [in their capacity of Uterary patrons], but with a kind of religious address.' These words figure in the prefatory epistle which two actor-friends of Shakespeare addressed to the two Earls in the posthumously issued First Foho of the dramatist's works. Thorpe's ' kind of religious address ' on seeking Lord Pembroke's patronage for Healey's books was somewhat more unctuous than was custom- ary or needful. But of erring conspicuously in an opposite direction he may, without misgiving, be pronounced innocent. vn SHAKESPEAEB AJ^D THE EARL OF PEMBROKE With the disposal of the allegation that ' Mr. W. H.' represented the Earl of Pembroke's youthful name, the whole theory of that earl's identity with Shakespeare's friend collapses. Outside Thorpe's dedicatory words, only two scraps of evidence with any title to consideration have been adduced to show that Shakespeare was at any time or in any way associated with Pembroke. In the late autumn of 1603 James I and his Court were installed at the Earl of Pembroke's house at Wilton for a period of two months, owing to the prevalence of the plague in with the London. By order of the officers of the royal house- co^any hold, the King's company of players, of which Shake- at Wilton speare was a member, gave a performance before the King at Wilton House on December 2. The actors travelled from Mortlake for the purpose, and were paid in the ordin- ary manner by the treasurer of the royal household out of the public funds. There is no positive evidence that Shakespeare attended at Wilton with the company, but assuming, as is probable, that he did, the Earl of Pembroke can be held no more responsible for his presence than for his repeated presence under the same conditions at Whitehall. The visit of the King's players to Wilton in 1603 has no bearing on the Earl of Pembroke's alleged relations with Shakespeare.^ ' See p. 379. A traditioa sprang up at Wilton at the end of the last century to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke? bade hei* son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ' We have j ] the man Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forth j | coming, "and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances ^ under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the olBcers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known : she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as ' the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer in 1897 what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet Lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ' Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603.' The ink and hand- 691 2 y 2 692 WILLIAM ; SHAKESPEARE The second instance of the association in the seventeenth century of Shakespeare's name with Pembroke's tells wholly against the conjectured intimacy. Seven years after the drama- tion of the tist's death, two of his friends and feUow-actors pre- First Folio. pared the collective edition of his plays known as the First Foho, and they dedicated the volume, in the conventional language of eulogy, ' To the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren, William Earl of Pembroke, &c., Lord Chamberlaine to the King's most excellent Majesty, and Phihp, Earl of Montgomery, &c., Gentleman of His Majesties Bedchamber. Both Knights of the most Noble Order of the Garter and our singular good Lords.' The choice of such patrons, whom, as the dedication intimated, 'no one came near but with a kind of religious address,' proves no private sort of friendship between them and the dead author. To the two earls in partnership books of literary pretension were habitually dedicated at the period.^ Moreover, the third Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain in 1623, and exercised supreme authority in theatrical affairs. That his patronage should be sought for a collective edition of the works of the acknowledged master of the contemporary stage was natural. It is only surprising that the editors should have yielded to the vogue of soliciting the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain's brother in conjunction with the Lord Chamberlain. The sole passage in the editors' dedication that can be held to bear on the question of Shakespeare's alleged intimacy with Pembroke is to be found in their remarks : ' But since your lord- ships have beene pleas'd to thinke these trifles something, hereto- fore ; and have prosequuted both them, and their Authour living, with so much favour : we hope that (they outliving him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them you have done unto their parent. There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or find them : This hath done both. For, so much were your lordships' likings of the severall parts, when they were acted, as, before they were published, the Volume ask'd to be yours.' There is nothing whatever in these sentences that does more than justify the inference that the brothers shared the enthusiastic esteem which James I and all the noblemen of his Court extended to Shakespeare and his plays in the dramatist's writing are quite modem, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of anyone accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5, 1S98, an expert examination was made of the portrait and the inscription, on the invitation of the present earl, and the inscription was unanimously rejected. ^ Cf. Ducci's Ars Aiilka or The Courtier's Arte, 1607 ; Stephens's A World of Wonders, 1607 ; and Gerardo The Unfortunate Spaniard, Leonard Digges's translation from the Spanish, 1622. SHAKESPEAEE AND LORD PEMBROKE 693 lifetime. Apart from his -work as a dramatist, Shakespeare, in his capacity of one of * the King's servants ' or company of players, was personally known to all the officers of the royal household who collectively controlled theatrical representations at Court. Throughout James I's reign his plays were repeatedly performed in the royal presence, and when the dedicators of the First Folio, at the conclusion of their address to Lords Pembroke and Mont- gomery, describe the dramatist's works as ' these remaines of your Servant Shakespeare,' they make it quite plain that it was in tho capacity of ' King's servant ' or player that they knew him to have been the object of their noble patrons' favour. The ' Sonnets ' offer no internal indication that the Earl of Pembroke and Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all is deducible from the vague parallelisms that have been adduced between the carl's character and position in life and those with which the poet credited the youth of the 'Sonnets.' tion^^n^'he ^^ ™^y ^® granted that both had a mother (Sonnet iii.), 'Sonnets' that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that both were youth's iden- regarded by admirers as cultivated, that both were PembMke. self -indulgent in their relations with women, and that both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence. The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare's youth was not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. Francis Davison, when dedicating his 'Poetical Rhap- sody ' to the earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously quahfied reference to the attractiveness of his person in the lines : [His] outward shape, though it most lovely be. Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire. The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle age,i and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned handsome at any time of Ufe ; at most they confirm Anthony Wood's description of him as in person 'rather majestic than elegant.' But the point is not one of moment, and the argument neither gains nor loses, if we allow that Pembroke may, at any rate in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at one period reflected, like Shakespeare's youth, ' the lovely April of his mother's prime.' But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any showing, be admitted to be common to both Pembroke and Shake- speare's alleged friend, they all prove to be equally indistinctive. All could be matched without difficulty in a score of youthful 1 Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vanderroerst, aiter the portrait by Mytens. 694 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE noblemen and gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court. Direct external evidence of Shakespeare's friendly intercourse with one or other of EUzabeth's young courtiers must be produced before the • Sonnets' ' general references to the youth's beauty and grace can render the remotest assistance in establishing his identity. Although it may be reckoned superfluous to adduce more arguments, negative or positive, against the theory that the Earl of Pembroke was a youthful friend of Shakespeare, it is worth noting that John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, and the biographer of most EngUshmen of distinction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was zealously researching from 1650 onwards into the careers aUke of Shakespeare and of various members of the Earl of Pembroke's family — one of the chief in Wiltshire. Aubrey rescued from oblivion many anecdotes — scandalous and otherwise — both about the third Earl of Pembroke ignorance of *^^ about Shakespeare. Of the former he wrote in any relation his ' Natural History of Wiltshire ' (ed. Britton, Shakespeare 1847), recalling the earl's relations with Massinger Pembroke ^^^ many other men of letters. Of Shakespeare, Aubrey narrated much lively gossip in his 'Lives of Eminent Persons.' But neither in his account of Pembroke nor in his account of Shakespeare does he give any hint that they were at any time or in any manner acquainted or associated with one another. Had close relations existed between them, it is impossible that all trace of them would have faded from the traditions that were current in Aubrey's time and were embodied in his writings.^ 1 It is unnecessary, aft«r what has been said above (pp. 194, 195 n.), to consider seriously the suggestion that the ' dark lady ' of the Sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke's mis- tress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the Sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the Sonnets were addressed. Lady Xewdegate's Gossip from a Muniment Room (1897), which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two weU-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by ilr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by llr. C. 0. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Kewdegate's volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle- aged admirer, a married friend of the family. Sir William liaollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollvs was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ' AVill Herbert ' for ' the dark lady's ' favours in the Sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.). But that is a shot whoUy out of range. The wording of those Sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the Sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name. VIII THE WILL SONNETS No one has had the hardihood to assert that the text of the ' Sonnets ' gives internally any indication that the youth's name took the hapless form of ' WiUiam Herbert ' ; but many com- mentators argue that in three or four sonnets Shakespeare admits in so many words that the youth bore his own Christian name of Will, and even that the disdainful lady had among her admirers other gentlemen entitled in familiar intercourse to similar designa- tion. These are fantastic assumptions which rest on a misconcep- tion of Shakespeare's phraseology and of the character of the conceits of the ' Sonnets,' and are solely attributable to the fanatical anxiety of the supporters of the Pembroke theory to extort, at all hazards, some sort of evidence in their favour from Shakespeare's text.i In two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) — the most artificial and 'con- ceited ' in the collection — the poet plays somewhat enigmatically on his Christian name of ' WiU,' and a similar pun has been doubt- fully detected in Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. That Shakespeare was known to his intimates as ' Will ' is attested by the well-known lines of his friend Thomas Heywood : ' jMellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quUl Commanded mirth and passion was but Will.^ - The groundwork of the sonnetteer's pleasantry is the identity in form of the proper name with the common noun 'will.' This word connoted in Elizabethan English a generous variety of Elizabethan conceptions, of most of which it has long since meanings of been deprived. Then, as now, it was employed in ^' ■ the general psychological sense of volition ; but it was more often specifically applied to two limited manifestations * Edward Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxrv.) writes : ' It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere's friend was the same as his own, Will,' and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like WiUiam Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name. 2 Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). 595 696 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of the volition. It was the commonest of synonyms ahke for ' self- will ' or ' stubbornness ' — in which sense it stiU survives in ' wilful ' — and for ' lust,' or ' sensual passion.' It also did occasional duty for its own diminutive ' wish,' for ' caprice,' for ' goodwill,' and for 'free consent' (as nowadays in 'wiUing,' or 'willingly'). Shakespeare constantly used ' will ' in all these significations, lago recognised its general psychological value when he said ' Our , , , bodies are our gardens, to the which our wiUs are uses of gardeners.' The conduct of the ' will ' is discussed the word. after the manner of philosophy in ' Troilus and Cressida ' (n. ii. 51-68). In another of lago's sentences, ' Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will,' Ught is shed on the process by which the word came to be specifically apphed to sensual desire. The last is a favourite sense with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Angelo and Isabella, in ' Measure for Measure,' are at one in attributing their conflict to the formers ' will.' The self-indulgent Bertram, in 'AU's Well,' 'fleshes his "will" in the spoil of a gentlewoman's honour.' In ' Hamlet ' (m. iv. 88) the prince warns his mother : ' And reason panders wiU.' In ' Lear ' (IV. vi. 279) Regan's heartless plot to seduce her brother-in-law is assigned to ' the undistinguished space ' — the boundless range — ' of woman's will.' Similarly, Sir Phihp Sidney apostrophised lust as ' thou web of will.' Thomas Lodge, in ' Philhs ' (Sonnet xi.), warns lovers of the ruin that menaces all who ' guide their course by will.' Nicholas Breton's fantastic romance of 1599, entitled ' The Will of Wit, Wit's Will or Will's Wit, Chuse you whether,' is especially rich in Uke illustrations. Breton brings into marked prominence the antithesis which was famiUar in his day between ' will ' in its sensual meaning, and ' wit,' the Ehzabethan synonym for reason or cognition. ' A song between Wit and Will ' opens thus : Wit : What art thou, Will ? Will : A babe of nature's brood. Wit : Who was thy sire ? Will : Sweet Lust, as lovers say. Wit : Thy mother who ? Will : Wild lusty wanton blood. Wit : When ^\ast thou born ? Will : In merry month of May. Wit : And where brought up ? Will : In school of little skill. Wit : What learn'dst thou there ? Will : Love is my lesson stUl. Of the use of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will, Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his ' Scholemaster ' (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as ' will,' which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be ' with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' * ' A woman will have i Ed. ilayor, p. 35. THE 'WILL' SONNETS 697 her will ' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of the last word. The phrase suppUed the title of ' a pleasant comedy,' by Wilham Haughton, which — from 1597 onwards — held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of forty years. ' Women, because they cannot have their wills when they dye, they will have their wills while they Uve,' was a current witticism which the barrister Manningham deemed worthy of record in his ' Diary ' in 1602.1 In wmiam Goddard's ' Satirycall Dialogue ' (1615 ?) ' Will ' is personiiied as ' women's god,' and is introduced in female attire as presiding over a meeting of wives who are discontented with their husbands. ' Dame WiU ' opens the proceedings with an ' oration ' addressed to her ' subjects ' in which figure the lines : Know't I am Will,* and will yield you releife. Be bold to speake, 1 a the wine's delight. And euer was, and wil.be, tWushandes spight. It was not only in the ' Sonnets ' that Shakespeare — almost invariably with a glance at its sensual significance — rang the changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earhest play, ' Love's Labour's Lost' (ii. i. 97-101), after the princess has tauntingly assured the King of Navarre that he will break his vow to avoid women's society, the king repUes ' Not for the world, Shakespeare's fg^jj. madam, by my wiir (i.e. wiUingly). The princess the word. retorts ' Why will [i.e. sensual desire] shall break it [i.e. the vow], will and nothing else.' In ' Much Ado' (v. iv. 26 seq.), when Benedick, anxious to marry Beatrice, is asked by the lady's uncle, ' What's your will ? ' he playfully fingers on the word in his answer. As for his ' will,' his ' will ' is that the uncle's ' goodwill may stand with his ' and Beatrice's ' wiU ' — in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former misinterprets the young lady's ' What is your wiU ? ' into an inqmry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere better iUustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words ' will ' and ' wish,' the latter 1 Manningham's Diary, p. 92 ; cf. Bamabe Barnes's Odes Pastoral, sestine 2 : But women will have their own wiUs, Alas, why then should I complain ? 2 The text of this part of Goddard's volume is printed in italics, but the word ' Will,' which constantly recurs, is always distinguished by reman type. Goddard's very rare Dialogue was reprinted privately by Mr. John S. Farmer in 1897. 698 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the ' Two Gentlemen of Verona ' (i. iii. 63 and iv. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor's ' wish ' is in harmony with another interlocutor's ' will.' It is in this vein of pleasantry — ' will ' and ' wish ' are identically contrasted in Sormet cxxxv. — that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modem readers, makes play with the word ' will ' in the ' Sonnets,' and especially in the two sonnets (cxxxv- vi.) which alone speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the name of Will. One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this inter- pretation is that the word ' will ' in these sonnets is frequently itahcised in the original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument. The corrector of the press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. largely turned upon a and'i^eeii- simple pun between the writer's name of ' WiU ' and lar use of the lady's ' will.' That fact, and no other, he indicated Elizabethan very roughly by occasionally italicising the crucial P^fn/ere?^^""" word. Typography at the time foUowed no firmly fixed rules, and, although ' will ' figures in a more or less pimning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed on the word the distinction of itaUcs in only ten instances, and those were selected arbitrarily. The itahcs indicate the obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe that ' Will ' is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. cxxxiv. and cxliii., ' will ' occurs once only ; it alone is itahcised in the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, arbitrarily and without just cause.^ The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them * Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved itahcisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. George Wyndham in his careful note on the t3rpography of the Quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large nimiber of Elixabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion. THE 'WILL' SONNETS 699 Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coincidences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word ' will.' ' Will ' is the Christian name of the enslaved writer ; ' will ' is the of Sonnets Sentiment with which the lady inspires her worship- inter^reted P®^^ ' ^^*^ ' ^^ ' designates stubbomness as well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to the poet's reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of the lady's disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her ' proud heart ' or ' foul pride,' and her sensuality or ' foul faults.' These are her ' wills,' and they make up her being. In crediting the lady with such a constitution Shakespeare was not recording any deiinite observation or experience of his own, but was following, as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets. Bamabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose ' proud disdainfulnesg ' he suffered. Why dost thou my delights delay, Aud with thy cross unldnduess kills (sci) Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills ? Barnes answers his question in the next lines : But women will have their own wills. Since what she lists her heart fulfils. ^ Similar passages abound in Elizabethan sonnets, but certain verbal similarities give good ground for regarding Shakespeare's ' will ' sonnets as deliberate adaptations — doubtless with satiric purpose — of Barnes's stereotyped reflections on women's obduracy. The form and the constant repetition of the word ' will ' in these two sonnets of Shakespeare also seem to imitate derisively the same rival's Sonnets Ixxii. and Ixxiii. in which Barnes puts the words ' grace ' and ' graces ' through much the same evolutions as Shakespeare puts the words ' will ' and ' wills ' in the Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi.^ 1 Barnes's ParthenophU in Arber's Gamer, v. 440. 2 Aiter quibbling in Sonnet Lsxii. on the resemblance between the graces of his cruel mistress's face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own) : Why did rich Nature graces grant to thee, Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace ? O how can graces in thy body be ? Where neither they nor pity find a place I . . . Grant me some grace.' For thou with grace art wealthy And kindly may'st afford some gracious thing. 700 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's Sonnet cxxxv. runs : Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And will to boot, and will in over-plus ; More than enough am I that vex thee still. To thy sweet will making addition thus. Wilt thou, Mhose will is large and spacious,^ Not once vouchsafe to hide my ^\ill in thine ? Shall will in others seem right gracious. And in my will no fair acceptance shine ? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still. And in abundance addeth to his store ; So thou, being rich in ^^ill, add to thy will One will of muie, to make thj' large Mill more. Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill ; Think all but one, and me m that one — Will. In the opening words, ' Whoever hath her wish,' the poet prepares the reader for the punning encounter by a shght variation on the current catch-phrase ' A woman will have cxxxv* ^^^ will.' At the next moment we are in the thick of the wordy fray. The lady has not only her lover named Will, but untold stores of ' will ' — in the sense ahke of stubbornness and of lust — to which it seems supererogatory to make addition.^ To the lady's ' over-plus ' of ' will ' is punningly attributed her defiance of the ' will ' of her suitor Will to enjoy her favours. At the same time ' will ' in others proves to her ' right gracious,' ^ although in him it is unacceptable. All this, the poet hazily argues, should be otherwise ; for as the sea, although rich in water, does not refuse the falling rain, but freely adds it to its abundant store, so she, ' rich in will,' should accept her lover Will's ' will ' and ' make her large wiU more.' The poet sums up his ambition in the final couplet : Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill ; Think all but one, and me in that one — Will. 1 Cf. Lear, IV. vi. 279, ' undistinguish'd space of woman's will ' ; i.e. ' O boundless range of woman's lust.' - Edward Dowden says ' will to boot ' is a referenc« to the Christian name of Shake- speare's friend, ' William [? Mr. W. H.] ' {Sonnets, p. 23G) ; but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line ' And will to boot, and wUl in over-plus,' is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as — Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5). Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4). Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14). In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification. ^ Cf. Barnes's Sonnet Ixxiii. : ' AU her looks gracious, yet no grace do bring To me, poor wretch I Yet be the Graces there. THE 'WILL' SONNETS 701 This is as much as to say, * Let not my mistress in her unkindness kill any of her fair-spoken adorers. Rather let her think all who beseech her favours incorporate in one alone of her lovers — and that one the writer whose name of "Will" is a synonym for the passions that dominate her.' The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only one of the lady's lovers — to the definite exclusion of all others — whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the ' will ' which controls her being. The same equivocating conceit of the poet Will's title to identity with the lady's * will ' in all senses is pursued in Sonnet cxxxvi. The sonnet opens : If thy soul check thee that I come so near, Swear to thy blind soul that I \\as thy wHl,^ And will thy soul knows is admitted there. Here Shakespeare adapts to his punning purpose the familiar philosophic commonplace respecting the soul's domina- cxxxvi *^°^ ^y * ^^^ ' ^^ volition, which was more clearly expressed by his contemporary. Sir John Davies, in the philosophic poem, ' Nosce Teipsum ' : Will holds the royal sceptre in the soul, And on the passions of the heart doth reign. Whether Shakespeare's lines be considered with their context or without it, the tenor of their thought and language positively refutes the commentators' notion that the ' will ' admitted to the lady's soul is a rival lover named Will. The succeeding lines run : Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.* Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love ; Ay, fill it full with, ^vills, and my will one. In things of great receipt with ease we prove Among a number one is reckon'd none : Then in the number let me pass untold. Though in thy stores' accoimt, I one must be ; For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing me, a something sweet to thee. Here the poet Will continues to claim, in punning right of his Christian name, a place, however small and inconspicuous, among the *wiUs,' the varied forms of will (i.e. lust, stubbornness, and ' Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the ' sightless view ' of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the ' centre of his sinful earth ' in Sonnet cxM. 2 The use of the word ' fulfil ' in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes's introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above : Since what she lists her heart fulfils. 702 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE willingness to accept others' attentions), which are the constituent elements of the lady's being. The plural ' wills ' is twice used in identical sense by Barnabe Barnes in the lines already quoted : Mine heart, bound martjT to thy wills. But women will have their owti wills. Impulsively Shakespeare brings his fantastic pretension to a some- what more practical issue in the concluding apostrophe : Make but my name thy love, and love that stiU, And then thou lovest me — for my name ia WUl.^ That is equivalent to saying 'Make "will"' (i.e. that which is yourself) 'your love, and then you love me, because Will is my name.' The couplet proves even more convincingly than the one which clinches the preceding sonnet that none of the rivals whom the poet sought to displace in the lady's affections could by any chance have been, like himself, called Will. The writer could not appeal to a mistress to concentrate her love on his name of Will, because it was the emphatic sign of identity between her being and him, if that name were common to him and one or more rivals, and lacked exclusive reference to himself. Loosely as Shakespeare's * Sormets ' were constructed, the couplet at the conclusion of each poem invariably summarises the general intention of the preceding twelve Unes. The concluding couplets of these two Sonnets cxxxv.-vi., in which Shakespeare has been alleged to acknowledge a rival of his own name in his suit for a lady's favour, are consequently the touchstone by which the theory of ' more Wills than one ' must be tested. As we have just seen, the situation is summarily embodied in the first couplet thus : Let no unkind no fair beseecher3 kill ; Think all but one, and me in that one — Will. It is re-embodied in the second couplet thus : Make but my name thy love, and love that still. And then thou lovest me — for my name is Will. The whole significance of both couplets resides in the twice- repeated fact that one, and only one, of the lady's lovers is named Will, and that that one is the writer. To assume that the poet had a rival of his own name is to denude both couplets of all point. 1 Thomas Tyler paraphrases these lines thus : ' You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is WiU," p. 297. Edward Dowden, hardly more illumiaating, says the lines mean : ' Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will, i.e. all desire.* THE 'WILL' SONNETS 703 * Will,' we have learned from the earlier lines of both sonnets, is the lady's ruling passion. Punning mock-logic brings the poet in either sonnet to the ultimate conclusion that one of her lovers may, above all others, reasonably claim her love on the ground that his name of Will is the name of her ruling passion. Thus his pretension to her affections rests, he pminingly assures her, on a strictly logical basis. Unreasonable as any other interpretation of these sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) seems to be, I believe it far more fatuous to seek in Sonnet the single and isolated use of the word ' will ' in each cxxxiv. Qf ^jjg Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. any confirmation of the theory of a rival suitor named Will. Sonnet cxxxiv. runs : So now I have confess'd that he is thine. And I myself am mortgaged to thy will.' lHj^self I'll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still. But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous and ho is kind. He learn'd but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take. Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, And sue a friend came debtor for my sake ; So him I lose through my unkind abuse. Him have I lost ; thou hast both him and me ; He pays the whole, and yet am I not free. Here the poet describes himself as ' mortgaged to the lady's will ' {i.e. to her personality, in which ' will,' in the double sense of stubbornness and sensual passion, is the strongest element). He deplores that the lady has captivated not merely himself, but also his friend, who made vicarious advances to her. Sonnet cxliii. runs : Lo, as a careful house^^ife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe, and makes all swift despatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay ; Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face. Not prizing her poor infant's discontent : 1 The word ' will ' is not here italicised in the original edition o£ Shakespeare's Sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes's line quoted above : Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills. 704 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE So ninn'st thou after that which flies from thee, TVTiilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind ; But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me, And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind : So will I pray that thou mayst have thy ^\-ilI,^ If thou turn back and my loud crying still. In this sonnet — which presents a very clear-cut picture, although its moral is somewhat equivocal — the poet represents the lady as a country housewife and himself as her babe ; while SoMeTc^iii ^^ acquaintance, who attracts the lady but is not attracted by her, is figured as a * feathered creature ' in the housewife's poultry-yard. The fowl takes to flight ; the housewife sets down her infant and pursues ' the thing.' The poet, believing apparently that he has little to fear from the harmless creature, lightly makes play with the current catch-phrase (*a woman will have her will '), and amiably wishes his mistress success in her chase, on condition that, having recaptured the truant bird, she turn back and treat him, her babe, with kindness. In praying that the lady * may have her will ' the poet is clearly appropriating the current catch-phrase, and no pun on a second suitor's name of ' Will ' can be fairly wrested from the context. ' Because ' will ' by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed Will in the first edition of the Sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, i.e. the friend ' Will [? W. H.] ' This interpretation seems to introduce a needless compUcation. IX THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1597 The sonnetteering vogue, as I have already pointed out,i reached its full height between 1591 and 1597, and when at its briskest it drew Shakespeare into its current. An enumeration of volumes containing sonnet-sequences or detached sonnets that were in circula- tion during the period best illustrates the overwhelming force of the sonnettfeering rage of those years, and, with that end in view, I give here a bibliographical account, with a few critical notes, of the chief efforts of Shakespeare's rival sonnetteers.- The earUest collections of sonnets to be published in England were those by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, which first appeared in the pubUsher Tottel's poetical mis- Suxrey's ^°'^ cellany called ' Songes and Sonnetes ' in 1557. This Sonnets, volume included sixteen sonnets by Surrey and twenty ^ 15*57^. ^y Wyatt. Many of them were translated directly from Petrarch, and most of them treated conventionally of the torments of an imrequited love. Surrey included, however, three sonnets on the death of his friend Wyatt, and a fourth on the death of one Clere, a faithful follower. Tottel's volume was seven times reprinted by 1587. But no sustained endeavour was made to emulate the example of Surrey and Wyatt till Thomas Watson about 1580 circulated in manuscript his ' Booke of Passionate ' See p. 153 supra. A fuller account of the Elizabethan sonnet and its indebted- ness to foreign masters is to be found in my preface to the two volumes of Elizabethan Sonnets (1904), in Messrs. Constable's revised edition of Arber's English Garner. The Elizabethan sonnetteers' indebtedness to the French sonnetteers of the second half of the sixteenth century is treated in detail in my French Renaissance iyi Englayid, Orford, 1910. - The word ' sonnet ' was often irregularly used for ' song ' or ' poem.' Neither Bamabe Googe's Eglogs, Epytlaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word ' quatorzain ' was the term almost as frequently applied as ' sonnet ' to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey ; cf. ' crazed quatorzains ' in Thomas Na-^he's preface to his edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stilla, 1591 ; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton's Sonnets, 159-1. 705 2 z 706 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Sonnetes,' which he wrote for his patron, the Earl of Oxford. The volume was printed in 1582 under the title of ' 'EKATOMIIAOIA, „, ^ , or Passionate Centurie of Loue. Divided into two Watson's , r i /> , , . i ' Centurie of parts : whereof the first expresseth the Authours Loue, 15 2. sufferance on Loue : the latter his long farewell to Loue and all his tyrannic. Composed by Thomas Watson, and pubUshed at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.' Watson's work, which he called ' a toy,' is a curious literary mosaic. He supplied to each poem a prose commentary, in which he not only admitted that every conceit was borrowed, but quoted chapter and verse for its origin from classical literature or from the work of French or ItaUan sonnetteers.^ Two regular quatorzains are prefixed, but to each of the ' passions ' there is appended a four-line stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular fourteen lines. Watson's efforts were so well received, however, that he appUed himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets in strict metre. This collection, entitled ' The Tears of Fancie,' only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime.' Meanwhile a greater poet, Sir PhiHp Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of 'AsUophel Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him imder the and Stella," name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated SteUa. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's efforts, and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. Sidney's sonnets were first pubhshed surreptitiously, under the title of ' Astrophel and Stella,' by a pubhshing adventurer named Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appendix of ' sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen.' Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the appendix anonymously and without the author's knowledge. Two other editions of Sidney's ' Astrophel and SteUa ' without the appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney's sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed anony- mously in 1594, with the sonnets of Henrj' Constable, and these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition of 1 See pp. 170-1 supra. - All Watson's sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson's Forms, 1895 ; ' The Tears of Fancie ' are in Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, i. 137-161. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 707 Sidney's ' Arcadia ' and other works that appeared in 1598. Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous sonnets in 1591 spiirred nearly every Uving poet in England emulate his achievement.^ In order to facihtate a comparison of Shakespeare's sonnets with those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney's under the three headings of (1) sonnets of more or less feigned love, addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress ; (2) sonnets of adulation, addressed to patrons ; and (3) sonnets invoking metaphysical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or philosophy.* In February 1592 Samuel Daniel pubUshed a collection of I Collected fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed sonnets of to his patroness, Sidney's sister, the Countess of eigne ove. Pembroke. As in many French volumes, the collec- tion concluded with an 'ode.'* At every point Daniel betrayed his indebtedness to French sonnetteers, even when apologising for his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.). His title he borrowed from the collection of Maurice Seve, whose assemblage of dixains called ' Delie, objet de plus haute vertu ' (Lyon, ■Deifa' 1592. 1544), was the pattern of many later sonnet sequences on love. Many of Daniel's sonnets are adaptations or translations from the Italian. But he owes much to the French sonnetteers Du Bellay and Desportes. His methods of handling liis material may be judged by a comparison of his Son- net xxvi. with Sonnet Ixii. in Desportes' collection, * Cleonice : Dernieres Amours,' which was issued at Paris in 1575. Desportes' sonnet runs : Je verray par les ans vengeurs de men martyre Que I'or de vos cheveux argente deviendra, Que de vos deux soleila la splendour s'esteindra, Et qu'il faudra qa' Amour tout confus s'en retire. ' In a preface to Newman's first edition of Astrophel and Stella the editor, Thomas Nashe, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney's sonnets, exclaimed : ' Put out your rushhghts, you poets and rhymers I and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers I for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.' But the effect of Sidney's work was just the opposite to that which Nashe anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since. - With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic. 3 Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney's Astrophel. These nine he permanently dropped. 2 z 2 708 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE La beaute qui si douce a present vous inspire, Cedant aux lois du Temps ses favours reprendra, L'hiver de vostre teint les fleurettes perdra, Et ne laissera rien des thresors que i'admiie. Cest orgueil desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m'aimer. En regret et chagrin se verra transformer, Avec le changement d'une image si belle : Et peut estre qu'alorg vous n'aurez desplaisir De revi\Te en mes vers chauds d'araoureux desir, Ainsi que le Phenix au feu se renouvelle. This is Daniel's version, which he sent forth as an original production : I once may see, \\hen years may wreck my \\Tong, And golden hairs may change to silver m ire ; And those bright rays (that kindle all this fire) Shall fail in force, their power not so strong. Her beauty. noM- the burden of mj- song, Whose glorious blaze the ^^orld"s eye doth admire. Must j-ield her praise to tyrant Time's desire ; Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long. When if she grieve to gaze her in her glass, ^Vhich then presents her Minter-withered hue . Go you my verse ! go tell her ^hat she was ! For ^^hat she was, she best may find in you. Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass, But Phoenix- like to make her live anew. In Daniel's beautiful sonnet (xHx.) beginning Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness bom, he echoes De Baif and Pierre de Brach's invocations of ' O Sommeil chasse-soin.' But again he chiefly relies on Desportes, vrhose words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet Ixxv. of Desportes' ' Amours d'Hippolyte ' opens thus : Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire .... frere de la Mort, que tu m'es ennemi ! Daniel's soimets were enthusiastically received. With some additions they were repubUshed in 1504 with his narrative poem Fame of * "^^^ Complaint of Rosamimd.' The volume was Daniel's called ' Delia and Rosamund Augmented.' Spenser, in his ' Colin Clouts come Home againe,' lauded the ' well -tuned song ' of Daniel's sormets, and Shakespeare has some claim to be classed among Daniel's many sonnetteering disciples. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 709 The anonymous author of 'Zepheria' (1594) declared that the ' sweet tuned accents ' of ' Delian sonnetry ' rang throughout England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his 'Fidessa' (1596) openly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet x v. 'Care- charmer Sleep, . . . brother of quiet Death.' In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete version of Daniel's ' DeHa,' Henry Constable pubHshed ' Diana : Constable's *^® Praises of his JMistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.' 'Diana,' Like the title, the general tone and many complete ^^^' poems were drawn from Desportes' * Amours de Diane.' Twenty-one poems were included, all in the French vein. The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 under the title ' Diana ; or. The excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages.' This volume is a typical venture of the book- sellers.i The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, supphed dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their cus- tomers with a disordered miscellany of what they called 'orphan poems.' Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were claimed for Sir Phihp Sidney, and the remaining forty-seven are by various hands which have not as yet been identified. In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notable reinforce ments. In May came out Barnabe Barnes's interesting volume, Barnes's ' Pa-rthenophil and Parthenophe : Sonnets, Madrigals, sonnets, Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous ^^^" gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.' * The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble the sonnet -collections of Petrarch or the ' Amours ' of Ronsard. There are a himdred and five soimets altogether, interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three 'canzons,' and twenty 'odes,' one in sonnet form. There is, moreover, included what purports to be a translation of 'Moschus' first eidiUion describing love,' but is clearly a rendering of a French poem by Amadis Jamj-n, entitled ' Amour Fuitif , du grec de Mos- chus,' in his ' CEuvres Poetiques,' Paris, 1579.^ At the end of Barnes's volume there also figure six dedicatory sonnets. In Sonnet xcv. Barnes pays a compUment to Sir PhiUp Sidney, ' the Arcadian shepherd, Astrophel,' but he did not draw so largely on 1 Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 75-114. 2 Ibid. i. 165-316. 2 Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1G08. 710 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Sidney's work as on that of Ronsard. Desportes, De Baif, and Du Bellay. Legal metaphors abound in Barnes's poems, but amid many crudities he reaches a high level of beauty in Sonnet Isvi., which runs : Ah, sweet Content ! where is thy mild abode ? Is it with shepherds, and light-hearted swains. Which sing upon the downs, and pipe abroad, Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains ? Ah, sweet Content ! where dost thou safely rest ? In Heaven, with Angels ? \^hich the praises sing Of Him that made, and rules at His behest, The minds and hearts of every living thing. Ah, sweet Content ! where doth thine harbour hold ? Is it in churches, with religious men, 'Which please the gods with prayers manifold ; And in their studies meditate it then ? Whether thou dost in Heaven, or earth appear ; Be where thou •\\ilt ! I'hou ^\ilt not harbour here ! ^ In August 1593 there appeared a posthumous collection of sixty-one sonnets by Thomas Watson, entitled ' The ' Tears of Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained.' They are •^^"5'^'* throughout of the imitative type of his previously published ' Centurie of Love.' Many of them sound the same note as Shakespeare's sonnets to the ' dark lady.' In September 1593 followed Giles Fletcher's ' Licia, or Poems of Love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his Fletcher's Lady.' This collection of fifty-three sonnets is 'Licia,' dedicated to the wife of Sir Richard MoUineux. Fletcher makes no concealment that his sonnets are literary exercises. ' For this kind of poetry,' he tells the reader, ' I did it to try my humour ' ; and on the title-page he notes that the work was written ' to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' ^ The most notable contribution to the sonnet-literature of 1593 was Thomas Lodge's ' Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Lodge's Elegies, and Amorous Delights.' ' Besides forty son- ' Phillis,' nets, some of which exceed fourteen lines in length and others are shorter, there are included three elegies and an ode. A large number of Lodge's sonnets are literally translated from Ronsard and Desportes, but Lodge also made * Delvier's well-known song, ' Oh, sweet content," in his play of ' Patient Grisselde ' 1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes. - Elixabelhan Sonnets, ii. 23-74. 3 There is a convenient reprint of Lodge's Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by Martha Foote Crow, 1896 ; see also Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 1-22. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 711 free with the works of the Italian sonnetteers Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, Bembo and Lodovico Paschale. How servile Lodge could be may be learnt from a comparison of his Sonnet xxxvi. with Desportes' sonnet from ' Lea Amours de Diane,' livre n. sonnet iii. Thomas Lodge's Soimet xxxvi. runs thus : If so I seek the shades, I presently do see The god of love forsake his bow and sit mo by ; If that I think to write, his Muses pliant be ; If so I plain my grief, the wanton boy will cry. If I lament hLs pride, he doth increase my pain ; If tears my cheeks attaint, his cheeks are moist with moan ; If I disclose the wounds the \\hich my heart hath slain, He takes his fascia off, and wipes them dry anon. If so I walk the woods, the woods are his delight ; If I myself torment, he bathes him in my blood ; He will 'my soldier be if once I Mend to fight. If seas delight, he steers my bark amidst the flood. In brief, the cruel god doth never from me go, But makes my lasting love eterual with my woe. Desportes wrote in ' Les Amours de Diane,' book ii. sonnet iii. : Si ie me siea a I'ombre, aussi soudaincment Amour, laissant son arc, s'assiet et se repose : Si ie pense k des vers, ie le voy qu'il compose : Si ie plains mes doideurs, il se plaint hautement. Si ie me plains du mal, il accroist mon tourment : Bf. Si ie respan des pleurs, son visage il arrose : ^ Si ie monstre la playe en ma poitriue enclose, jii II defait son bandeau I'essuyant doucement. Si ie vay par les bois, aux bois il m'accompagne : Si ie me suis cruel, dans mon sang il se bagno : Si ie vais a la guerre, il deuient mon soldart : Si ie passe la mer, il conduit ma nacelle : Bref, iamais I'inhumain de moy ne se depart. Pour rendre mon amour et ma peine eternelle. Three new volumes in 1594, together with the reissue of Daniers ' DeUa ' and of Constable's ' Diana ' (in a piratical miscellany of sonnets from many pens), prove the steady growth of the sonnetteering vogue. Michael Drayton in June produced his Drayton's ' ^'^^^^ MirrouT, Amovu-s in Quatorzains,' containing 'Idea,' fifty-one 'Amours' and a sonnet addressed to 'his ^'^'*' ever kind Mecsenas, Anthony Cooke.' Drayton acknowledged his devotion to ' divine Sir Philip,' but by his choice of title, style, and phraseology, the English sonnetteer once more 712 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE betrayed his indebtedness to French compeers. ' L'Idee ' was the name of a collection of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux in 1579. Many additions were made by Drayton to the sonnets that he pubhshed in 1594, and many were subtracted before 1619, when there appeared the last edition that was prepared in Drayton's lifetime. A comparison of the various editions (1594, 1599, 1605, and 1619) shows that Drayton published a hundred sonnets, but the majority were apparently circulated by him in early life. William Percy, the ' dearest friend ' of Bamabe Barnes, pubUshed in 1594, in emulation of Barnes, a collection of twenty ' Sonnets Percy's *° *^® fairest Coelia.' ^ He explains, in an address ■CoeUa,' to the reader, that out of courtesy he had lent the ^^^'*' sonnets to friends, who had secretly committed them to the press. Making a virtue of necessity, he had accepted the situation, but begged the reader to treat them as ' toys and amorous devices.' A collection of forty sonnets or ' canzons,' as the anonymous author calls them, also appeared in 1594 with the title ' Zepheria.' ^ In some prefatory verses addressed ' Alii veri fighoU 1594. ^"*' delle Muse ' laudatory reference was made to the sonnets of Petrarch, Daniel, and Sidney. Several of the sonnets labour at conceits drawn from the technicaUties of the law, and Sir John Davies parodied these efforts in the eighth of his ' guUing sonnets ' beginning ' My case is this. I love Zepheria bright.' Four interesting ventures belong to 1595. In January, appended to Richard Barnfield's poem of ' Cynthia,' a panegyric on Queen Elizabeth, was a series of twenty sonnets extolling the personal charms of a young man in emulation of Virgil's Eclogue ii., in which the shepherd Cor3'^don addressed the shepherd-boy Barnfield's Ai-irr. , , i sonnets to Alexis.-* in Sonnet xx. the author expressed regret ^s^qT™^'^^' *^^* *^® ^^^^ ^^ celebrating his young friend's praises had not fallen to the more capable hand of Spenser (' great Cohn, chief of shepherds aU ') or Drayton (' gentle Rowland, my professed friend '). Bamfield at times imitated Shakespeare. Almost at the same date as Barnfield's * Cynthia ' made its appearance there was pubUshed the more notable collection by Spenser's Edmund Spenser of eighty-eight sonnets, which, 'Amoretti,' in reference to their Italian origin, he entitled ' Amoretti.' * Spenser had already translated many sonnets on| philosophic topics of Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay. 1 Elizabethan Sonnets, ii. 137-151. 2 md. ii. 153-178. 3 Reprinted in Arber's English Scholars' Library, 1882. ■* It waa licensed for the press on Noyember 19, 1594. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 713 Some of the ' Amoretti ' were doubtless addressed by Spenser in 1593 to the lady who became his wife a year later. But the senti- ment was largely ideal, and, as he says in Sonnet Ixxxvii., he wrote, like Drayton, with his eyes fixed on ' Idsea.' Several of Spenser's sonnets are unacknowledged adaptations of Tasso or Desportes. An unidentified ' E. C, Esq.,' produced also in 1595, imder the title of ' Emaricdulfe,' ^ a collection of forty sonnets, echoing 'Emaric- English and French models. In the dedication to his duife,' ' two very good friends, John Zouch and Edward ^^^^' Fitton Esquiers,' the author tells them that an ague confined him to his chamber, ' and to abandon idleness he completed an idle work that he had already begun at the command and service of a fair dame.' To 1595 may best be referred the series of nine ' Gullinge sonnets ' or parodies, which Sir John Davies wrote and circulated in manu- script, in order to put to shame what he regarded as Sir John < ^j^g bastard sonnets ' in vogue. He addressed his Davies s » 'Gullinge collection to Sir Anthony Cooke, whom Drayton had 1595.^ ^' already celebrated as the ' Mecaenas ' of his sonnetteer- ing efforts.* Davies seems to have aimed at Shakespeare as well as at insignificant rhymers like the author of ' Zepheria.' ^ No. viii. of Davies's ' gullinge soimets,' which ridicules the legal metaphors of the sonnetteers, may be easily matched in the collections of Barnabe Barnes or of the author of ' Zepheria,' but Davies's phraseology suggests that he also was glancing at Shake- speare's legal sonnets Ixxxvii. and cxxxiv. Davies's sonnet runs : My case is this. I love Zepheria bright. Of her I hold my heart by fealty : Which I discharge to her perpetually. Yet she thereof will never me acquit[e]. For, now supposing I withhold her right. She hath distrained my heart to satisfy The duty which I never did deny. And far av.ay impounds it ^^ith despite. 1 labour therefore justly to repleave [i.e. recover] My heart which she unjustly doth impound. But quick conceit which now is Love's high shreive Returns it as eslojTied [i.e. absconded], not to be found. Then what the law affords — I only crave Her heart, for mine inwit her name to have. 1 Reprinted for the Eoxburghe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds. ' Emaricdulfe ' is an anagram of a lady's name, Marie Cu/eld, alias Cufaud, alias Cowfold, of Ciifaud Manor near Basingstoke. Her mother, a daughter of Sir GeofErey Pole, was maid of honour to Queen Mary (cf. Monthly Packet, 1884-5). She seems to have married one William Ward. 2 Davies's Poems, ed. Grosart, i. 51-62. ^ See p. 174, Twte. 714 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE * R. L., gentleman,' probably Richard Linche, published in 1596 thirty-nine sonnets under the title 'Diella.'^ The effort is j^. , , thoroughly conventional. In an obsequious address 'Dieiia,' by the publisher, Henry Olney, to Anne, wife of Sir ^^^ ■ Henry Glenham, Linche's sonnets are described as ' passionate ' and as ' conceived in the brain of a gallant gentleman.' To the same year belongs Bartholomew Griffin's 'Fidessa,' sixty-two sonnets inscribed to * William Essex, Esq.' Griffin _ .^ , designates his sonnets as 'the iirst fruits of a young ' Fidessa,' beginner.' He is a shameless plagiarist. Daniel is ^^^ ■ his chief model, but he also imitated Sidney, Watson, Constable, and Drayton. Sonnet iii., beginning 'Venus and yoimg Adonis sitting by her,' is almost identical with the fourth poem — a sonnet beginning 'Sweet Cytheraea, sitting by a brook' — in Jaggard's piratical miscellany, ' The Passionate Pilgrim,' _, which bore Shakespeare's name on the title-page.* Campion, Jaggard doubtless borrowed the poem from Griffin. ^^^ ■ Three beautiful love-sonnets by Thomas Campion, which are found in the Harleian MS. 6910, are there dated 1596.* William Smith was the author of ' Chloris,' a third collection of sonnets appearing in 1596.* The volume contains forty-eight sonnets of love of the ordinary type, with three Smith's adulating Spenser ; of these, two open the volume ^cwons,' g^mj Qj^g concludes it. Smith says that his sonnets were 'the budding springs of his study.' In 1600 a license was issued by the Stationers' Company for the issue of ' Amours ' by W. S. This no doubt refers to a second collection of sonnets by Wilham Smith. The projected volume is not extant.^ In 1597 there came out a similar volume by Robert Tofte, entitled ' Laura, the Joys of a Traveller, or the Feast of Fancy.' The book is divided into three parts, each consisting of forty ' sonnets ' in irregular metres. There is a prose dedication to Lucy, sister of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland. Tofte tells his patroness that most of his ' toys ' ' were Tone's conceived in Italy.' As its name implies, his work j^g-"^'^' is a pale reflection of Petrarch. A postscript by a friend — ' R. B.' — complains that a publisher had intermingled with Tofte's genuine efforts ' more than thirty sonnets ^ EHzahethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 297-320. 2 Hid. ii. 261-29G. 3 Cf. Brydges's Excerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 35-7. One was printed with some alterations in Rosseter's Book of Ayres (1610), and another in the T/tird Book of Ayres (1617 ?) ; see Campion's Worlcs, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. 15-16, 102. ■• Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 321-349. * See p. 672 and note. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 715 not his.' But the style is throughout so uniformly tame that it is not possible to distinguish the work of a second hand.^ To the same era belongs Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora,' a collection of a hundred and six sonnets, with a few songs and Sir William elegies interspersed on French patterns. Sir William Alexander's describes the work as 'the first fancies of his youth,' and formally inscribes it to Agnes, Countess of Argyle. It was not published till 1604.- Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the intimate friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and Recorder of Stratford-on-Avon from Sir Fulke 1606 till his death, was author of a like collection of Greviiie's sonnets called ' Cselica.' The poems number a hundred and nine, but few are in strict sonnet metre. Only a small proportion profess to be addressed to the poet's fictitious mistress, Coelica. Many celebrate the charms of another beauty named Myra, and others invoke Queen Ehzabeth under her poetic name of Cynthia (cf. Sonnet xvii). There are also many addresses to Cupid and meditations on more or less metaphysical themes, but the tone is never very serious. Greville doubtless wrote the majority of his ' Sonnets ' during the period under survey, though they were not published until their author's works appeared in folio for the first time in 1633, five years after his death. With Tofte's volume in 1597 the pubUcation of collections of love-sonnets practically ceased. Only two collections on a volumin- ^ . , , ous scale seem to have been written in the early years Estimate of -, r ,, number of of the Seventeenth century. About 1607 William issu^d"^^*^ Drummond of Hawthomden penned a series of sixty- between 1591 eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, nearly all of which were translated or adapted from modem Italian sonnetteers.' About 1610 John Davies of Hereford • Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 351—124. 2 Practically to the same category as these coUections of somiets belong the volu- minous laments of lovers, in sis, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are Wiilobie his Avisa, 1594 ; Alcilia : Philoparthen's Loving Folly, by J. C, 1595 ; Arbor of Amorous Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton ; Alba, the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598 ; Daiphantus, or the Passions of Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1G04 ; Breton's The Passionate Shepheard, or The Shep- heardes Lozie : set doicne in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia : with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sojiets fit for yoting heads to passe away idle houres, 1G04 (none of the ' sonets ' are in sonnet metre) ; and John Reynolds's Dolamys Primerose . . . wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue, 160G. Though George Wither's similar productions — his exquisitely fanciful Fidelia (1617) and his Faire- Virtue, the Mistrcsse of Phil' Arete (1622) — were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century. •* They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author's death, in Poems by that famous wit, William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew. The best modem edition is that of Prof. L. E. Zastner in 1913. A useful edition by Mr. W. C. Ward appeared in the ' Muses' Library '(1894). 716 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE published his ' Wittes Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous Somiets.' Of more than two hundred separate poems in this volume, only the hundred and four sonnets in the opening section make any claim to answer the description on the title-page, and the majority of those are metaphysical meditations on love which are not addressed to any definite person. Some years later William Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sormets entitled ' CaeUa ' and a few detached sonnets of the same type.^ The dates of produc- tion of Drummonds, Davies's, and Browne's sonnets exclude them from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that between 1591 and 1597 there had been printed nearly twelve hundred sonnets of the amorous kind. If to these we add Shakespeare's poems, and make allowance for others which, only circulating in manuscript, have not reached us, it is seen that more than two hundred love-sonnets were produced in each of the six years under survey. The Uterary energies of France and Italy pursued a like direction during nearly the whole of the century, but at no other period and in no other country did the love-sonnet dominate hteratvu:e to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 1597. Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached specimens may be found in nearly every pubUshed book of the period, the chief collections were : A long series of sonnets prefixed to ' Poetical Exercises of a Vacant Hour ' by King James VI of Scotland, 1591 ; twenty- II Sonnets three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey's ' Four Letters and to patrons, certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene' (1592), including Edmimd Spenser's fine sonnet of compli- ment addressed to Harvey ; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed in 'Harleian JVliscellany,' 1813, ix. 491); six adulatory sonnets appended by Barnabe Barnes to his ' Parthenophil ' in May 1593 ; four sonnets to ' Sir Philip Sidney's soul,' prefixed to the first edition of Sidney's ' Apologie for Poetrie ' (1595) ; seventeen sonnets which were originally prefixed to the first edition of Spenser's ' Faerie Queene,' bk. i.-iii., in 1590, and were reprinted in the edition of 1596 ^ ; sixty sonnets to peers, peeresses, and officers of state, appended to Henry Locke's (or Lok's) ' Ecclesiasticus ' (1597) ; forty sonnets by Joshua Sylvester addressed to Henry IV ' Cf. William Browne's Poems in ' Muses' Library ' (1894), ii. 217 et seq. Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to his translation of Homer in 1610 ; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his ilicrocosmos (1G03) and to his Scourge of Folly (1611). Divers sonnets, epistles, &c. addressed to patrons by Joshua Sylvester between 1590 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 1641 edition of his Du BaHas his divine weekes and u:orkes. VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 717 of France ' upon the late miraculous peace in Fraunce ' (1599) ; Sir John Davies's series of twenty-six octosyllabic sonnets, which he entitled ' Hymnes of Astraea,' all extravagantly eulogising Queen EUzabeth (1599). The collected sonnets on reUgion and philosophy that appeared in the period 1591-7 include sixteen ' Spirituall Sonnettes to the honour of God and Hys Saynts,' written by Constable about 1593, and circulated only in manuscript ; these were first Soaaets on printed from a manuscript in the Harleian collection philosophy (5993) by Thomas Park in ' HeUconia,' 1815, vol. ii. and religion. \ ' ^ ' ' In 1595 Bamabe Barnes pubUshed a ' Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets,' and, in dedicating the collection to Toby Matthew, bishop of Durham, mentions that they were written a year before, while travelling in France. They are closely modelled on the two series of ' Sonnets Spirituels ' which the Abbe Jacques de BiUy pubhshed in Paris in 1573 and 1578 respectively. A long aeries of ' Sonnets Spirituels ' written by Anne de Marquets, a sister of the Dominican Order, who died at Poissy in 1598, was first pub- Ushed in Paris in 1605. In 1594 George Chapman pubhshed ten sonnets in praise of philosophy, which he entitled ' A Coronet for his IMistress Philosophy.' In the opening poem he states that his aim was to dissuade poets from singing in sonnets ' Love's Sensual Empery.' In 1597 Henry Locke (or Lok) appended to his verse- rendering of Ecclesiastes ^ a collection of ' Sundrie Sonets of Christian Passions, %\-ith other AfEectionate Sonets of a Feeling Conscience.' Lok had in 1593 obtained a hcense to pubUsh ' a hundred Sonnets on Meditation, HumiUation, and Prayer,' but that work is not extant. In the volume of 1597 his sonnets on rehgious or philo- sophical themes number no fewer than three himdred and twenty- eight.2 Thus in the total of sonnets published between 1591 and 1597 must be included at least five hundred sonnets addressed to patrons, and as many on philosophy and rehgion. The aggregate far exceeds two thousand. 1 Eemy Belleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Eccle- siastes entitled Vanite. - There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies's WiUes POtjTimage (1610 ?). BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE, 1550-1600 In the earlier years of the sixteenth century Melin de Saint-Gelais (1487-1558) and Clement Marot (1496-1544) made a few scattered efforts at sonnetteering in France ; and Maurice Seve laid down the lines of aU sonnet -sequences on themes of love fis^^i'^sSs) in ^is dixains entitled • Delie ' (1544). But it was ^?. ' H' Ronsard (1524-1585), in the second half of the century, who first gave the sonnet a pronounced vogue in France. The sonnet was handled with the utmost assiduity not only by Ronsard, but by the literary comrades whom he gathered round him, and on whom he bestowed the title of ' La Pleiade.' The leading aim that united Ronsard and his friends was the reformation of the French language and literature on classical models. But they assimilated and naturaUsed in France not only much that was admirable in Latin and Greek poetry,^ but all that was best in the recent Italian literature.* Although they were * Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet like Anacreon appear in Anacrion et les Poimes anacriontiques, Texte grec avec les Tra- ductions et Imitations des Poetes du XV le siide, par A. Delboulle (Havre, 1891). A trans- lation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's essay, ' Anacr^n au XVIe sifecle,' in his Tableau de la Poesie fran^aise au X Vie siMe (1893), pp. 432— i7. In the same connection Anthologie cm Recueil des plus beaux Epigrammes Grecs, . . . mis en vers frangois sur la version Laiine, par Pierre Tamisier (Lyon, 1589, new edit. 1607), is of interest. - Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonneta, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell' Aquila (1466- 1500), Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1630), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (d. 1585), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (fl. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi's Storia delia Letteratura Italiana, 1770-1782 ; Dr. Gamett's History of Italian Literature, 1897 ; Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, edit. 1898, vols. iv. and vi. ; and Francesco Flamini, II Cinquecento, Milan, n.d.). The present writer's preface to Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), and the notes to Watson's PassionaU Cenlurie of Love, pubhshed in 1582 (see p. 171 note), to Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (ed. Mr. A. H. Bullen, 1891), and to Poems of Drummond of Uauthomdcn (ed. W. C. Ward, 1891, and L. E. Kastner, 1913), give many illustrations of English sonnetteers" indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century. 718 THE SOXXET IX FRANCE 719 learned poets, Ronsard and the majority of his associates had a natural lyric vein, which gave their poetry the charms of freshness and spontaneity. The true members of ' La Pleiade.' according to Ronsard's own statement, were, besides himself. Joachim du Bellay (1524-1560) : Estienne Jodelle (1532-1573) : Remy Belleau (1528-1577) ; Jean Dinemandy, usually known as Daurat or Dorat (1508-1588), Ronsard's classical teacher in early life ; Jean-Antoine de Baif (1532-1589) ; and Pontus de Thyard (1521-1605). Others of Ronsards literary allies are often loosely reckoned among the 'Pleiade.' These writers include Jean de la Peruse (1529-1554), Olivier de Magny (153mographlp, 157 n 1 ; the work cited, 80 n 1, 454 n 1 Earlom, Ri-hard, 536 Eden, Richard, his History of Travel 433 Edcar, Eleazar, publisher, 672 ' Edinburgh Folio ' edition, 587 n 1 Editors of Shakespenre, in the eighteenth century, 573-84 : in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 584—7 Edward III, assigned to Shake- speare, 138 seq., 158; sources of, 139; views of authorship by CapcU. Tennyson, and Swin- burne, 139 ; cf . 158, 205 n Edwards, Richard, author of two ' friendship ' plays, 217 n 1 ; his Damon and Pythias, a tragicomedy, 419 n 1 ; his lost play, Palemon and Arcyte, 440 Edwards, Thomas, his Canons of Criticism, 580 Eld, George, printer, 159, 261, 368, 681-3 Elgar, Sir Edward, 610 Elizabeth, Queen, at Kenilworth, 24, 232 ; her palaces, 68 ; extravagant compliments to, 207 and n 1 ; her death, 375 ; poetic panegyrics, 227, 375-6 ; witnesses dramatic perform- ance at Christ Church, Oxford, 440 ; her visit to Oxford (1592), 659 ; relations with the Earl of Southampton, 662 ; her company of actorsT" 47, 50 and n 2, 51 ; company visits Stratford, 13; performs Henry V, 239 ; its later patrons, 378 n r Elizabeth, Princess, marriage of, 386, 434, 435 and n 1, 438, 445, 451 EUacombe. H. N., 644 Ellain, Nicolas, 720 Ellesmere, Francis Egerton, first Earl of. 535 Ellesmere, Sir Thomas Egerton, Baron, Lord Chancellor, 321, 460, 648- 9 Elsinore, Lord Leicester's com- pany at, 85 n 2 Elson," L. a., 644 Elton, Charles T., 643 ' Ely House ' portrait of Shake- speare, 532 Elze, Friedrioh Karl, 617, 643 n Em/irirdulfe. sonnets bv E. C, 179 n 2, 713 and n 1 " Enclosure of common lands : attempts by William and Thomas Combe at Stratford, 475 seq. ; popular resentment, 475 Ensor, Martin, stationer, 675 Erasmus, 653 n 2 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim, 614, 629 Eslava, Antonio de, his ' Winter Evenings ' (a collection of talcs) and the plot of The Tempest, 426 n, 429 n 1 Espronceda, Jose di, his apprecia- tion of Shakespeare, 627 Essex, Robert Devereux, second Earl of, relations with Lopez, 133 n 1; allusions to in Henry V, 253-5 ; Earl Marshal of Ireland, 283-4 ; his rebellion and death, 255, 374, 457 and n, 661-2 3b WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE Essex, Walter Devereux, first Earl of, visit of his company of actors to Stratford, 24 ti 2 Eton College, Balph Roister Doister acted at, 91 Euripides, 17 n 1, 92 Evans, Henry, lessee of Black- friars Theatre, 64 and n 2, 65, 306 seq. ; shareholder, 307, 313 Evelyn, John, mentions Lord Clarendon's portrait of Shake- speare, 533 ; criticism of Shake- speare, 592 n 2 ' Eversley Shakespeare, The,' 586 Exeter, players at, 81, 82 n Faithobne, William, 530 Faire Em, play of doubtful authorship, 264, 265 and n 1, 266, 267 and n 1 Fairholt, F. W., 586 Falstaii, Sir John, named origin- ally ' Sir John Oldcastle,' 241 ; protests against the name, 241 ; attraction of his personality, 245, 246 ; Queen Elizabeth and, 246, 247 ; last moments of, 252 ; the Countess of South- ampton on, 665 and n 2 Farmer, Richard, on Shakespeare's learning, 18, 598, 644 Fastolf, Sir John, 243 Faucit, Helen, afterwards Lady Martin, 543, 606, 645 Faversham, plavers at, 82 and n Feind, Barthold", 613 Felix and Philomena, The History of, 107 ' Felton ' portrait of Shakespeare, 537-8 Felton, S., 537 Ferro, Giovanni, his work on ' Imprese,' 455 n FeuiUerat, Prof. Albert, 64 n 1 Fiamma, Gabriello, 718 n 2 Fidele and Fortunio, 107 n 1 Field, Henry, father of Richard Field, 41, "279 Field, Jasper, brother and appren- tice of Richard Field, 42 Field, Nathaniel, actor and drama- tist, 97 n, 305 n ; as boy actor, 341 Field, Richard, of Stratford-on- Avon, settled in London, as printer's apprentice, 41 ; assist- ant to Thomas Vautrollier, 41 ; succeeds Vautrollier, 41 ; master of Stationers' Company, 42, 146 ; death, 42 ; publishes Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, 42, 141, 146. See also 277 seq., 335, 398, 677 Fiorentino, Giovanni. See under Giovanni Firenzuola, Agnolo, 718 n 2 Fisher, Thomas, bookseller, 231 n 1 Fitton, Edward, 713 Fitton, Mary, and the ' dark lady,' 195 n, 694 n 1 Fitzwilliam, Earl, 535 Fleay, F. G., his History of the Stage, 49 n 2, and passim; his works on Shakespeare, 643 Flecknoe, Richard, 76 n 2, 406 n 1 Fletcher, Dr. Giles, 147 and w 2 ; admits imitation of other poets, 172 ; on insincerity of sonnet- teers, 173 ; his Licia, 708 Fletcher, John, residence in Southwark, 275, 276 n 2; his tragicomedies in collaboration with Francis Beaumont [q.v.], 420 and n 1 ; Shakespeare's relations with, 437 ; Massinger's relations with, 437 ; colla- borates with Shakespeare in Turn Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII, 437, 439^7; See also 449, 451, 499 Fletcher, Lawrence, 83 and notes 3 and 4, 377, 381, 384 w 1,453 n 1 Florio, John, alleged original of Holofernes, 104 n ; sonnet pre- faced to his Second Frutes, 154 and n 1 ; Southampton's protege and Italian tutor, 154 n 1, 155 n, 201, 659, 666; his translation of Montaicrne's Essays, 155 n; his Worlde of Wordes, 15 n 3, 201, 668, 669, 681 and n 1 .^.a, ^ INDEX 739 Flower ' portrait of Shakespeare, 530-2 Flower, Charles E., 542 Flower, Mrs. Charles, 532 Flower, Edgar, 530 Foersom, Peter, Danish actor, and Shakespeare, 629 Folger, H. C, owner of ' Droes- hout ' engraving of Shake- speare, 529 ; his unique copy of the 1594 quarto of Titus Andronicus, 131 ti, 552, 553 n 2 ; his copies of the First Folio, 569. -See also 553 n 2, and 611 Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays : First Folio, names of principal actors nientioned in, 53 w 2 ; account of, 554-570 ; editors, printers and publishers, 554— 6 ; the license to publish 556 ; order of the plays, 557 ; form and price of, 557 ; actors' addresses to patrons, 558 ; Ben Jonson's share, 558 ; source and textual value of the ' copy,' 559-61 ; re- lations of text to that of the quartos, 562 ; the typo- graphy and punctuation, 563 and notes ; irregularities of pagination, 563^ ; the ' Shel- don ' Folio, 564 ; Jaggard's presentation copy, 566-7 ; the ' Turbutt ' copy, 568 ; census of extant copies, 568- 9 ; pecuniary value of, 569- 70 ; reprints of, 570 n 1 Second Folio, 570-1 Third Folio, 571-2 Fourth Folio, 572 Folkestone, players at, 81, 82 n Ford, John, 166 n I Forman, Simon, on Macbeth, 395 and n 1 ; his notes on the early performances of Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Tempest, 422, 425 Forrest, Edwin, American actor, 611 Fortune theatre. Golden Lane, 59 n 2 ; internal structure. 73 n 2 ; takings at, 308 n ; allowed to continue, 339, 382 n 1 ; its destruction by fire, 448 71 2 Fournier, Paul, his bronze statue of Shakespeare in Paris, 541 Fowkes, Thomas, London printer, 40 n 2 France, Tudor English actors in, 85 ; criticism and versions of Shakespeare in, 620-4 ; stage representation of Shakespeare in, 625 Frankfort-on-the-Main, English actors at, 85 Franz, W., 645 Fraunce, Abraham, his Victoria, 107 n 1 ; Spenser's allusion to, 150 n 2 ; his translation of Tasso's Aminta, 667 n 1 Frederick, King of Denmark, 386 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, husband of Princess Elizabeth, 378 n 1, 386, 434, 435 n 1, 445, 451 FreOigrath, Ferdinand, his trans- lation of Shakespeare, 616 French, George Russell, his Shake- speareana Genealogica, 642 Friendship, sonnets of, 205, 210- 14 ; classical traditions of, 205 ; medieval and renaissance literary examples of, 205 and n 1, 206 FrisweU, J. Hain, his account of Shakespeare's portraits, 540 n 2 Frittenden, Shakespeares at, 1 Fulbroke Park, 34-5 Fuller, Thomas, allusion in his ' Worthies ' to Sir John Fas- tolf, 243, 244; on the ' wit- combats ' between Shakespeare and Jonson, 258 ; his notice of Shakespeare, 150 w 3, 641 Fulman, WiUiam, 488 n 1, 642 Furness, Horace Howard, his ' Variorum ' edition of Shake- speare, 584, 611 Furness, Horace Howard, junior, continues his father's Variorum edition of Shakespeare, 584 Furness, Mrs. Horace Howard, 645 3b 2 740 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Furness, Walter Rogers, on the portraits of Shakespeare, 540 n 2 FumivaU, F. J., 552 n 1, 587 n 1, 600, 643 n Fuseli, Henry, 537, 610 Gale, Dunstan, 678 Gallup, Mrs., 652 Gambe, Come de la, 110 n Gamett, Henry, the Jesuit, prob- ably alluded to in Macbeth, 395" Gamier, Robert, his Roman tragedies on Caesar and Antony, 334 n 2 ; his tragedy Marc Antoine, 410 n 1 Garrick, Da^-id, 26 n, 576, 601, 603-4 ; in Paris, 612 ; his collec- tion of quartos, 553 Garrick club bust of Shakespeare, 538-9 Gascoigne, George, his Supposes and Jocasta, performed at Gray's Inn Hall, 92 ; his ' tragicall comedie,' 93 ; his prose translation of Ariosto's Gli Sttppositi, 101 n 3 ; his definition of a sonnet, 104 n 1 ; Shakespeare's indebtedness to the Supposes, 236 Gastrell, Francis, his demolition of New Place, and the mulberry tree there, 516 and n Gates, Sir Thomas, 430 Gerbel, Russian translator of Shakespeare, 630 German, Edward, musician, 610 Germany, English actors in, 84—5 &nd notes; Shakespearean repre- sentations in, 612, 61&-620; translations and criticism of Shakespeare in, 84 n 2, 613- 18 ; Shakespeare society in, 618 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von, 615 Gervinus, Commentaries by, 618 Gesta Romanorum, 132 Getlev, Walter, 319 Gilbert, Sir John, 610 Gilbome, Samuel, 453 n 1 Gilchrist, Octavius, 644 GOLLANCZ GUdon, Charles, on the rapid composition of Merry Wives, 247 ; his criticism of Shake- speare, 574, 591 n ; his adapta- tion of Measure for Measure, 597 n 1 Giles, Nathaniel, 64 n 2 Giovanni Fiorentino, 18, 131 and n 3, 247 Glenham, Anne, Lady, 714 Glenham, Sir Henry, 714 Globe theatre, Bankside, 59 n 2 ; erected from dismantled fabric of ' The Theatre,' 59 n 2, 62 and n 2 ; its site, 62 n 4 ; performance at, described by foreign visitor, 72 n 1, of. 389 n ; seating capacity, 73 ; internal structure, 73 n 2 ; performances at, 87, 126-7, 250, 254-5, 264, 326, 347, 358, 368, 389, 395 and n 1, 406-7, 422, 425, 444 seq. ; reference to structure in Henry V, 250 ; its use in the Earl of Essex's rebellion, 254-5 ; Shakespeare's close relations with, 275, 296 ; shareholders in, 300 seq. Shakespeare's shares in, 304, seq., 305 n\; its destruction by fire, and rebuilding, 305, 309, 447 seq. ; its later demolition, 301 n 2 ; prices of admission, 307-9 ; takings at, 307-9 ; lawsuits relating to, 310 n; value of shares in, 312 n 2 ; city's attitude to, 338 seq., forged documents relating to, 649. See also 382, 386 ' Globe ' edition, 587 n 1 Gloucester, players at, 81, 82 n Goddard, William, his Satirycall Dialogue, 697 and n 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, on acting in Rome, IS n 1 ; criti- cism and adaptation of Shake- speare bv, 615 and n 1, 617, 618 Golding, Arthur, his English version of Ovid's Metamor- phoses, 21, 150 n 2, 180, 181 and n 1, 182, 428 Gollancz, Israel, 586 INDEX 741 Goodere, Sir Henry, 468 Googe, Barnabe, 705 n 2 Gorges, Arthur, 150 n 2 Gosson, Henry, stationer, 407 Gosson, Stephen, 132 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, his denunciation of Shakespeare, 614 Gounod, Charles, his opera of Romeo and Juliet, 625 Gower, John, represented by the speaker of ' the chorus ' in Pericles, 405 ; his Confessio Amantis, 405 Gower, Lord Ronald, his statue of Shakespeare at Stratford, 541 Grammar schools, number of, in Tudor England, 15 n 2 Grammaticus, Saxo, 355 and n 1 Grant, Baron Albert, 541 Gravelot, Hubert F., engraver, 526, 578 Graves, Henry, 532 Gray, J. W., on Shakespeare's marriage, 3 n, 643 Gray, Thomas, 597 Gray's Inn Hall, Comedy of Errors acted at, 137-8 and n 1 Graz, English actors at, 85 Green, C. F., 644 Green, Philip, 280 Greene, John, 480 and n 3, 493 n Greene, Joseph, headmaster of Stratford grammar school, 11 w Greene, Richard, 11 w Greene, Robert, 94, 95 ; Shake- speare's indebtedness to, in ' Winter's Tale,' 98 ; his fraudu- lent disposal of his plays, 99 n; his attack on Shake- speare, 115 seq. ; 116 n 2 ; his repentance, 266 ; his share in the original draft of Henry VI, 121 ; in Titus Androni- cus, 129 ; treatment of Adonis fable, 144 ; his use of the induction in King James of Scotland, 235 n 2 ; on affluence of actors, 298 ; his use of the dedicatory epistle, 679 Greene, Thomas, comedian, 54 n 1 ; lawsuit relating to, 311 n; cf. 376 and n 2, 384 n 1 GRUZTNSKI Greene, Thomas, town clerk of Stratford, contributes to Strat- ford highways fund, 462 n 1 ; represents townsmen of Strat- ford against the enclosure of common lands by the Combes, 476 seq. ; his career, 476 n ; his alleged kinship with Shakespeare, 476 and n ; joint owner with Shakespeare of Stratford tithes, 321-2, 477; his diary, 477 n 1 ; negotiations with Shakespeare over Combe's enclosure, 478 and n 1, 480 Greene, Thomas, yeoman of Bishopton, 476 n Greenstreet, James, 310 n Greenwich, royal palace at, 68, 87, 152 Greenwood, G. G., 655 Greet, hamlet in Gloucestershire, 238 and n 2 Greg, W. W., his view of the authenticity of the suspected 1619 quartos, 552 n Grendon, near Oxford, 39 Greville, Sir Edward, claim against Stratford-on-Avon, 316 Greville, Sir Fulke, regrets circula- tion of uncorrected manuscript copies of the Arcadia, 157 n 1 ; gives Queen Elizabeth the appellation of ' Cynthia ' in his verse, 227 ; invocations to Cupid in his Coelica, 166 n 1, 715; his relations with Strat- ford, 467-8, 472 Grevin, Jacques, his tragedy on Julius Caesar, 334 n 2 ; his sonnets, 720 Griffin, Bartholomew, his Fidessa, 267 and n 3, 714 Griggs, W., 552 n 1 Grignion, engraving of Shake- speare's tomb, 525 Grimm, Frederic Melchior, Baron, his appreciation of Shake- speare, 623 and n 2 Grooms of the Chamber, 377-84 and notes Groto, Luigi, 110 n, 718 n 2 Gruzinski, A. E., Russian transla- tor of Shakespeare, 630 742 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Guarini, Giovanni Battista, his pastoral drama Pastor Fido and Shakespeare's sonnets, 186, 420 n 1, 718 n 2 Guillim, John, his Display oj Heraldrie cited, 13 n Guizot, FranQois, his criticism of Shakespeare, 623, 624 ' H., Mb. W.,' 'patron' of Thorpe's pirated issue of the Sonnets, 161, 547 ; relations with Thorpe, 672-85 ; identified with WiUiam Hall, 161 n 1, 683 ; his publication of South- well's A Foure-fold Medita- tion, 161 n ; erroneously said to indicate the Earl of Pem- broke, 163, 686-90 Hacket, Marian and Cicely, in the Taming of the Shrew, 236-8 Hagberg, C. A., Swedish translator of Shakespeare, 629 Hakluyt, Richard, his Principal Navigations and the ' new map,' 328 n 3 Hales, Bartholomew, 472 Hales, John, of Eton, on superior- ity of Shakespeare to all poets, 590, 591 n Hall, Bishop, 688 Hall, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's granddaughter and last surviv- ing descendant, 285, 464 ; lega- tee under Shakespeare's will, 490 ; marriage to Thomas Nash, 491, 507 ; cf. 509 ; marriage to second husband John Bernard, 512-13, cf. 9, 321 n 4; death and burial, 513 and n 2 ; her wiU, 514-15 ; her estate at Stratford, 514-15 Hall, John, physician, Shake- speare's son-in-law, account of, 463 seq., 507 seq. ; his sympathy with Puritanism, 466, 508 ; his Warwickshire patients, 468, 478, 507; co- executor of Shakespeare's will, 489-90, 493 ; his library, 494, 508 ; his sale of Shake- speare's theatrical shares to John Heminges, 494 and n 3 ; his death and will, 508 ; his epitaph, 508 n ; his note-books, 510 Hall, John, limner, repaired Shake- speare's monument, 526, 527 Hall, Susanna, daughter of the dramatist, 9, 285 ; her marriage, 463 seq. ; victim of slander, 464 ; heiress to the dramatist's property, 489 seq. ; executor of Shakespeare's will, 489-90, 493 ; her residence at Stratford, 507 seq. ; account of , 508-10; enter- tains Queen Henrietta Maria at New Place, 509 ; her death and burial, 512 ; epitaph, 512 and n Hall, William {see also ' Mr. W. H.'), 683 and n 1 Hall, W'illiam, visitor to Stratford, account of inscription over Shakespeare's grave, 487 and n 1, 642 HalliweU, afterwards Halliwell- Phillipps, J. 0., initiates public purchase of New Place, 517 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 586, 599, 600; his Outlines (cited passim), 642-3 Hamlet, mention of travelling companies in, 70 ; Shake- speare's role in, 88 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; debt to John Lyly, 101 n 1 ; reference to theatrical shares in, 309 ; allusions to boy-actors, 349, 350 ; account of, 354-67 ; date of production, 354 ; sources of the plot, 354, 355 ; previous popularity of the story on the stage, 355 and n 2, 356 and 7i 1 ; the old play and its author- ship, 356—8 ; Burbage creates the title-role, 359 ; contempo- rary comment on, 359-61 ; pro- blem of its publication, 361 ; the First Quarto, 362-3; the Second Quarto, 364-5 ; the First Folio version, 365 ; its world-wide popularity, 358-9, 365-7, 594 ; the characters, INDEX 743 366 ; the humorous element, 366; the length of, 366; the German version of Hamlet (Der bestrafte Brudermord), 85 n 2, 356 TO 1 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; wit- nessed by Pepys and Evelyn, 592 and n 2 ; passages cited, 17 n 1, 19, 79 n 2, 104 n 1, 309, 336, 342, 343, 349, 350, 363, 579 and n Hamlet, the old play of, 356 seq. ; Kyd's share in, 356-7 ; re- vivals of, 357-8 ; contempo- rary references to, 358 Hampton Court, royal palace at, 68 ; plays at, 380 Handwriting, Tudor modes of, 16 ; Shakespeare's use of ' Old English ' ■script, 16, 521 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 365 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 578, 579 and n 1 Hardy, Alexandre, his tragedy of Coriolan, 413 and n 2 Hardy, Sir Thomas DuSus, 650 71 2 Harington, Sir John, his trans- lation of Ariosto [5.V.], 325 J./. '. . Harington, Lucy, her marriage to the third Earl of Bedford, 232 Harness, William, 586 n 1 Harriot, Thomas, 297 n 2 Harrison, John, stationer, pub- lisher of Venus and Adonis, 141 ; of Lucrece, 146 Harrison, William, his Description of England, 643 Harsnet, Samuel, his Declaration of Popish Impostures, 401 Hart, Jlrs. Joan, Shakespeare's sister, 9, 317, 462; legatee under Shakespeare's will, 490 ; residence at Shakespeare's birthplace, and death, 505, 509, 514 Hart, John, 10 w 1 Hart, Joseph C, 651 Hart, Michael, 490 Hart, Thomas, son of Mrs. Joan Hart, 490, 514 Hart, Thomas, the poet's grand- nephew, 9, 514 Hart, William, Shakespeare's brother-in-law, 485, 490 Hart, William, son of William above, 490 Halting, J. E., 644 Harvard, copy of First Folio at, 570 Harvey, Gabriel, his mention of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, 149 ; bestows on Spenser the title of ' an English Petrarch,' 170 ; justifies imitation of Petrarch, 170 to 2 ; on insin- cerity of sonnetteers, 172, 173 ; his parody of sonnetteering, 174, 194 ; his advice to Barnes, 202 ; his allusion to Hamlet, 359 and to 1 ; Spenser's com- plimentary sonnet to, 716 Harvey, William, 586 Hasselriis, Luis, his statue of Shakespeare at Kxonberg, 541 Hathaway, Anne or Agnes, 26 seq.; her cottage, 27, 542. See also under Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway, Bartholomew, 26 Hathaway, Catherine, 26 Hathaway, Elizabeth, 511, 514 Hathaway, Joan, 26, 281 to, 514 Hathaway, John, 27 to 1, 280 TO 2 Hathaway, Judith, 511, 514 Hathaway, Richard, part author of play of Oldcastle, 244 Hathaway, Richard, of Shottery, 26 seq. Hathaway, Rose, 514 Hathaway, Susanna, 514 Hathaway, Thomas, 508, 511, 514 Hathawav, William, 26 to 1, 281 to, 509 Haughton, William, 548, 697 Hawkins, Richard, 570 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 652 Haydon, Benjamin, criticism of Malone, 526 to 1 ; his visit to Stratford, 527 to 1 ; his view of Shakespeare's bust, 527 TO 1 Hayman, Francis, 578 Hazlitt, William, his Shake- spearean criticism, 599, 645 744 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE Healey, John, 681 and n 1, 683 n 3, 688, 690 Hearne, Thomas, 452 n Heine, Heinrich, studies of Shake- speare's heroines, 617 Heminges, John, actor, member of Lord Chamberlain's company and lifelong friend of Shake- speare, 53 n 2, 54 n, 56, 61, 377, 381, 384 n 1 ; residence in Aldermanbury, 276 ; shareholder in Globe theatre, 300 seq. ; defendant in lawsuit respecting shares, 302 n 1 ; shareholder in Blackfriars theatre, 306, 307 n ; lawsuits relating to, 310 n ; later relations with Shakespeare, 453 ; reputed creator of Falstaff, 453 ; exe- cutor of Phillips's will, 453 n 1 ; summoned for giving dramatic performances during Lent, 453 n 2 ; legatee under Shake- speare's will, 492 ; acquires Shakespeare's shares in Globe and Blackfriars, 494 and n 3 ; organised printing of First Folio, 554 seq. Eeminges, William, 303 n, 306 n, 307 n Hemynge, John, probably John Heminges, 459, 489 n, 493 n Henderson, John, actor, 604 Henley Street, Shakespeare's pro- perty in, 316-17 Henrietta Maria, Queen, visits Blackfriars theatre, 65 n. 1 ; at Stratford, 509 Henry I and Henry II, plays attributed to Shakespeare, 263 Henry IV (pt. i.), 79 n 2 ; per- formed at Court, 88, 435 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; debt to Lyly's Euphues, 104 n 1 ; debt to Holinshed, 239 ; characteri- sation, 240 seq. ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; licensed for pub- lication, 242 ; the inclusion of Oldcastle in dramatis personae, 243-5 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passsges cited, 7 n 1 ; 23 n 1, 93 n 1, 104 n 1 Henry IV (pt. ii.), use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; references to Stratford personages, 240 ; pub- lication of, 242 ; the inclusion of Oldcastle in dramatis personae, 243-5 ; characterisation, 245-6 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 36, 240 and n 3, 242, 243, 246 -v^-. Henry V, French dialogue in, 18-19 ; mention of the Globe theatre in, 62 ; performed at Court, 88, 385 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; sonnet form in, 156 ; references to sonnet in, 175 ; account , of, 250-4 ; date of production, 250 ; im- perfect drafts of the play, 250 ; First Folio version of, 251 ; sources, 251 ; popularity of the main topic (victory of Agincourt), 251 ; the Choruses, 251, 252 ; comic characters in, 252 ; Shakespeare's final experiment in the dramatisa- tion of English history, 252 ; allusions to the Earl of Essex in, 253-5 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; Theobald's emendation in, 577 ; passages cited, 175, 250, 253, 577 Henry V, The Famous Victories of, groundwork of Henry IV and Henry V, 239, and n 1, 241, 251, 252 Henry VI (pt. i.) : Shakespeare's share in revision of, 114 seq., 117-18; acted at Rose theatre, 114; Nashe's praise of, 115; Greene's attack on Shake- speare's share in, 115-16 ; publi- cation of, 117 ; Shakespeare's coadjutors, 120 seq. ; editions of, 548 seq. ; CYowne's revision, 596; passage cited, 116 Henry VI (pt. ii.) : editions of, 117, 548 665'. ; publication of, 118; full title of, 118; Shake- speare's share in, 119 ; his coadjutors, 120 seq. Henry VI (pt. iii.) : editions of, 117, 548 seq. ; publication of, 119; full title of, 119; Shake- INDEX 745 speare's share in, 119; his coadjutors, 120 seq. Henry VIII, attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher, 437 ; account of, 441-8 ; previous plays on the topic, 442 and n 1, n 2 ; prologue to, 442 and n 1 ; material] drawn from Holinshed, 443 ; defects of the play, 443, 444 and n 1, n 2 ; dates of pro- duction and publication, 444, 445 ; scenic elaboration of, 77, 80 n 3, 445; Sir Henry Wotton on, 445 ; Shakespeare's share in, 445-7 ; Fletcher's share, 445-6 ; Massinger's pos- sible share in, 446; Wolsey's farewell speech, 446, 447 ; per- formance of, causes fire at Globe theatre, 447 seq. ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 432 r» 1, 443 ' Henry Irving Shakespeare, The,' 586 Henryson, Robert, his treatment of the story of Cressida, 372 Henslowe, Philip, builds Rose theatre, 60 ; manager, 337, 367, 548 ; owner of Paris Garden, 303 n ; his takings as manager of Rose and Newington theatres, 308 n ; produces a play Palamon and Arsett, 440 ; his Diary, 642 Heraldic grants, 281 seq. Herbert, Sir Henry, licenser of plays, 308 n, 560 n 1 ' Herbert, MJr. William,' his alleged identity with ' Mr. W. H.,' 686-90 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 615 Harford, C. H., 586 Herringman, H., 572 and n 1 Hess, Johann Rudolf, 613 Heyes, Laurence, son of Thomas Heyes, 136 n Heyes or Haies, Thomas, publisher, 135 and n 2 Heyse, Paul, German translator of Shakespeare, 616 Hey^ood, Thomas, his references to actors' provincial tom^, 82 71 ; to foreign tours, 85 ; as actor and dramatist, 96, 655 ; his pride in the actor's pro- fession, 96 ; complains of publi- cation of crude shorthand re- ports of plays, 112 re 3; his poems pirated in the Passionate Pilgrim, 269 ; his allusion to the boy-actors, 350 ; a member of the Lord Admiral's com- pany, 367 ; a ' groom of the chamber,' 378 and n 1, 383 ; his admiration of Shake- speare, 503 n 1, 590 ; his elegy on Southampton, 669 ; has reference to Shakespeare as ' Will,' 695 ; his Apology for Actors cited, 48 n 2, 82 n, 85 ; his London Florentine, 375, 378 and w 1 ; his General History of Women, 547 Higden, Henry, his Wary Widdow, 594 HiUiard, Nicholas, his ' Shake- spearean ' miniature, 538 Historie of Error, The, 108 Histriomastix, 344, 367 n 1 Hodgson, Sir Arthur, 538 Hoe, Robert, 547, 571-2 Holinshed, Ralph, Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 23, 98; 118, 122, 125, 138, 139, 239, 394, 399, 400, 401, 423, 443 Holland, English actors in, 84, 85 w 1 ; translations of Shake- speare in, 628 Holland, Hugh, his tribute to Shakespeare in First Folio, 557, 589 Holmes, Nathaniel, 652 Holmes, William, bookseller, 683 n 2 Holyoake, Francis, 507 n Holyoake, Thomas, 507 n Holywell, Benedictine priory, the site of ' The Theatre,' 57 and n Home, Sir Gregory, 381 Homer, 21 Hondius, his ' View of London,' 62 n 2 Hooker, Richard, 38 » 2 Hoole, Charles, 16 n 3 Hope theatre, Southwark, 59 n, 73 71 2 746 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Horace, his claim for the immor- talitv of verse, 16, 21, 186 and n 3 ' Home, William, 491 n 2 Horneby, Richard, 323 Horneby, Thomas, 323-4 Houbraken, engraving of ' Chan- dos ' portrait, 536 Howard of Effingham, Lord Charles, Lord High Admiral, patron of Spenser, 210 ; his company of actors, 50, 96, 367 ; performs in London, 55 n 1 ; includes Edward Alleyn, 60 and n 1 ; temporarily amal- gamated with Lord Chamber- lain's company, 60 ; perform before Queen Elizabeth, 375 and n 3 ; taken under patronage respectively of Prince Henry of Wales and Elector Palatine, 378 n 1 Howe, Earl, owner of Vander- gucht's crayon copy of ' Chan- dos ' portrait, 535 ; his collec- tion of quartos, 553 Huband, Sir John, 320 Huband, Ralph, 320 Hubbard, George, 63 n 2 Hudson, Rev. H. N.. 586 Hughes, Mrs. Margaret, plays female parts in the place of boys, 602 Hughes, William, and 'Mr. W. H.,' 162 n 1 Hugo, Fran9ois Victor, French translator of Shakespeare, 624 Hugo, Victor, 624 Hume, David, his censure of Shakespeare, 597 Hume, Captain Tobias, his Poetical Musicke, 670 Humphry, Ozias, crayon copy of ' Chandos ' portrait, 535 Hungary, translation and perform- ance of Shakespeare's plays in, 633 and n 2 Hunsdon, George Carey, second Lord, entertains Flemish envoy at Hunsdon House, 245 ; suc- ceeds first Lord Hunsdon as Lord Chamberlain and patron of the company of actors. known later as the ' King's servants,' 53-4, cf. 65 n 1, 80 n 1 ; plays performed by, 87, 112-13, 123, 130, 201, 231 n 1, 245 71, 248, 344, 347 n 2, 361, 367, 375 Hunsdon, Henry Carey, first Lord, Lord Chamberlain, his company of actors, known later as the ' King's servants,' 52-3 ; Shakespeare's association with, 55-6 ; places of performances, 60, 80 n 3 ; provincial tours, 81 seq. ; plays performed by, 235, 358. See also 244 n 2, 338 Hunt, Simon. 16 Hunt, Thomas, 527 Hunt, William, 516 Hunt, William Oakes, 527 Hunter, Rev. Joseph, 599, 642, 686 n 1 Huntington, Archer, 553, 559 Huth, A. H., 569 Hyatt, Mrs., a married sister of John Combe of ' The College,' 471 Hyde, John, mortgagee of ' The Theatre,' 52 n 2 ' Hymn,' term applied to secular poems, 202, 203 n 1 Hythe, players at, 81, 82 n Immermann, K., his staging of Shakespeare in Germany, 619 Imprese, see 455 seq., and especi- ally 455 n ; Shakespeare's use of the word, 456 n 1 India, translations and repre- sentations of Shakespeare in, 633 Induction, the device of the, in Elizabethan drama, 235 n 2 Ingannati, Gli, its resemblance to Twelfth Night, 330 and n 3, 331 Inganni, Gli, and Twelfth Night, 330 and n I, n 2 Ingram, Dr., 101 n 1 Ingres, J. D. A., his portrait of Shakespeare, 625 Inns, used for theatrical perform- ances, see especially 59 n 2 INDEX 747 Inns of Court, dramatic perform- ances at, 70-1 Interludes, 90 and n Inverness, 84 and n 1 Iphis and lantha, 263 Ipswich, players at, 81, 82 n, 83 n 4 Ireland, Samuel, on Shakespeare's poaching episode, 34 ; his for- geries, 647 Ireland, WUIiam, 459 Ireland, William Henry, forgeries of Shakespeare's signatures, 520-1 ; his Shakespearean for- geries, 647-8 Irishman, the only, in Shake- speare's dramatis personae, 252 Irving, Sir Henry, 606, 607 and n 1 Italics, use of, by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, 698 and n 1 Italy, Shakespeare's alleged travels in, 86 ; translations and per- formances of Shakespeare in, 626, 627 ; the sonnet vogue in, 718 n 2 Ives, Brayton, 569 Jack Drum's Entertainment, 345, 346 and n 1 Jackson, John, 459, 489 n, 493 n Jacob, Edward, 139 n 1 Jaggard, Isaac, 555 seq. Jaggard, William, printer, 131 n 2 ; prints unauthorised edition of Merchant of Venice, 136 n, 551 and n 2 ; piratically inserts two of Shakespeare's sonnets in his Passionate Pilgrim, 158,159, 213 n 1, 224 n 1, 672, 677 ; his Passionate Pilgrim, 267-7, 399 n 1, 545, 555, 714; prints sus- pected Shakespearean quartos of 1619, 551 and n 2 ; prints the First Folio, 554 seq. ; ac- quires right to print ' players' bills,' 555 ; his presentation copy of the First Folio, 566 seq. Jaggard, William, his Shakespeare Bibliography, 645 James VI of Scotland and I of England, his accession to the English throne, 226-8; his progress through London, 380 seq. ; his dislike of crowds referred to by Shakespeare, 393 and n ; appeal to, in Mac- beth, 395 ; his sonnets, 716 ; his encouragement of drama, 48, 54, 83 n 3 ; his patronage and pay- ment of actors, 313-14, 434-5 and notes ; grants recognition as the ' King's servants ' to Lord Chamberlain's company, 377 seq. and notes ; members of company, 453 ; act at Wilton, 379 ; at Hampton Court, 380 ; take part in royal processions and functions, 381 and w 3 ; at Somerset House, 382 seq. and notes ; performances of Shake- speare's plays by, 113, 126, 362, 368, 385' seg., 387-8, 397-8, 407, 438-9 ; performances of other plays, 87, 261-4, 348 James II, Shakespeare's plays performed bj^ his (the Duke's) company, 594 n 1 James, Sir Henry, 570 n 1 James, Dr. Richard, 243 Jameson, Mrs. Anna, 645 Jamyn, Amadis, 191 n 1, 709, 719-720 and n Jansen or Johnson, Garret, tomb- maker. See Johnson, Garret ' Janssen ' portrait of Shake- speare, 536-7 ; copies of, 536 n 1 Janssen, Bernard. See Johnson, Bernard Janssen van Keulen, Cornells, his portraits of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton, 536 Jenkins, Thomas, 16 Jennens, Charles, 535 ; owner of ' Janssen ' portrait, 536-7 ; his edition of King Lear, 536 ; his collection of quartos, 553 Jewel, Bishop, 438 n 2 Jodelle, Etienne, Shakespeare's probable debt to, 145 n 1, 192, 193 and n ; 212, 213, 214; 748 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE his Cleopaire Captive, 410 n 1 ; his interpretations of ' imprese ' 455 w 1 ; his sonnets, 719-20; John, King, 91 : absence of prose in, 101 n 2, 136 ; date of composition, 136 ; debt to contemporary plays on the theme, 136 ; publication of, 137 ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 120 n 1 John, The Troublesome Raigne of King, attributed to Shake- speare, 136-7, 262 Johnson, Arthur, publisher of Merry Wives, 249, 550 Johnson, Bernard, 497 n 2, 498 n 2 Johnson, Garret, senior, makes John Combe's tomb, 472 ; his tombs for the third and fourth Earls of Rutland, 496-7 and notes ; his family, 496-7 Johnson, Garret, junior, 496 ; the probable maker of Shake- speare's tomb, 497 and n ; his bust of Shakespeare, 524 Johnson, Mrs. Joan, 277 n 2 Johnson, Nicholas, tombmaker ; his tomb for the fifth Earl of Rutland, 497 and notes, 498 n 2, 525 n ; other work by, 497 n 2 Johnson, Robert, of Stratford-on- Avon, 317 and n 2 Johnson, Robert, lyrics set to music by, 435 and n 3 Johnson, Samuel, on English vogue of Mantuanus, 17 n ; on Shakespeare's early employ- ment in London, 46 ; on Othello, 391 ; on Shakespeare's share in Henry VIII, 445 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 580, 581 ; his editorial fees, 577 n 2 ; his biography of Shakespeare, 642 Johnson, William, 51 n 1, 459, 489 n, 493 n Jones, Inigo, 69 Jones, Robert, his First Booke of Songes, 329 n 1 Jones, Thomas, 35 Jonson, Ben, his knowledge of the classics, 22 and n ; his walking tour from London to Edinburgh, 39 n ; his use of legal phrases, 44 and n, 654 ; his references to the Globe theatre, 62, 449 ; as actor and dramatist, 96 ; his criticism of Shakespeare's hasty work- manship, 97 ; his plays censored, 127 ; his reference to Titus Andronicus, 129; tributes to Shakespeare, 150, 152 ; his view of Petrarch, 173 n 2 ; identified by some as the ' rival poet,' 204 ; his apostrophe to the Earl of Desmond, 210 ; his use of the ' induction,' 235 n 2 ; relations with Shakespeare, 256, 257 ; and The Phoenix and the Turtle, 270 ; his relations with the boy actors, 341 ; the actors' share iu his literary controversies, 343- 8 ; Shakespeare's attitude to, in the controversy about the actors, 350—4 ; his criticism of Julius Caesar, 353 n 1 ; and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, 357 n 1 ; sneers at Pericles, 406 n 2 ; allusion to Coriolanus in his Silent Woman, 413 n 1 ; sneer- ing references to Winter's Tale and Tempest, 426, 435, 457 n 1 ; Shakespeare's reputed epitaph on, 474 71 1 ; his latest relations with Shakespeare, 483 ; his elegy on Shakespeare, 501 ; his tribute to Shakespeare, 502 and n 2, 589 ; his lines on the Droeshout engraving of Shake- speare, 582 and n I ; his lines on portrait in First Folio, 557 ; alleged authorship of dedicatory address in First Fclio, 558-9 n 1 ; on Shakespeare's ease in writing, 559 ; his burial in West- minster Abbey, 502 ; portrait by Janssen, 536 ; edition of his works, 554 and n 1 ; his works referred to : Bartholoinew Fair, 261, 435, 440, 457 w 1 ; The Case is Altered, 345 and n 1 ; INDEX 749 JONSONUS Catiline, 354 n, 591 n 2 ; Cyn- thia's Revels, 235 n 2, 345 and n 2, 349 n 1 ; Eastward Ho, 348 ; Every Man in his Huinour, performed, 87 and 88 n 1 ; use of name of ' Prospero ' in, 428 n 1 ; Shakespeare's role in, 255 ; Every Man out of his Humour, 235 n 2, 344; Hue and Cry after Cupid, 709 n 3 ; New Inn, 406 n 2 ; Poetaster, 143 n, 346-7, 349, 351-2; Sejanus, produced at the Globe, 87, 88 n I, 342, 348, 591 n 2; Silent Woman, 277 n I, 413 n 1 ; Staple of News, 354 n ; Timber, or Discoveries, 354 n, 562 and n 2 ; Under- woods, 449 tind n ; Volpone, Thorpe's dedication, 679 n 2 Jonsonus Virbius, 22 n Jordan, John, account of Shake- speare's drinking bout at Bidford, 483 n 1 ; his Shake- spearean forgeries, 747 and n 2 Jordan, Thomas, 78 n 1 Jordan, Mrs., actress, 605, 606 Jourdain, Sylvester, 430 Julius Caesar, use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; date of composition 333, 334 and n 1 ; earlier plays on the topic, 334 and n 2, 336; debt to Plutarch, 98, 335 ; characterisation, 336-7 ; a rival piece on the subject, 337-8 ; acted at Court, 435 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; the Duke of Buckingham's revision, 597 n 1 ; passage cited, 336 Jusserand, J. J., his appreciation of Shakespeare, 624 Kanshin, p. a., Russian trans- lator of Shakespeare, 630 Karamzine, N., Russian trans- lator of Julius Caesar, 630 Kean, Charles, 606 Kean, Edmund, 605 Keats, John, 180 Keck, Robert, 535 Keller, A., German translator of Shakespeare, 616 Kelway, Robert, 498 n 2 Kemble, Charles, actor, 625 Kemble, John Philip, his collection of quartos, 553 ; his acting, 604-5 ; production of Vortigern, 647 Kemp, William, actor, 36 n 2 ; member of the Lord Chamber- lain's company, 53 n 2 ; per- forms at Court, 55, 152 ; his fee for acting, 299 and n 2 ; joins Burbage in building of Globe theatre, 61 ; at Elsi- nore, 85 n 2 ; creator of Peter in Borneo and Juliet, 87, 111 ; and of Dogberry in Much Ado, 326 ; his shares in Globe theatre, 300 seq. ; abandons his share, 304 Kcnilworth, Queen Elizabeth's visit to, 24, 232 Kent, William, designs Shake- speare's monument in West- minster Abbey, 541 Kesselstadt death mask of Shake- speare, 539-40 Kesselstadt, Francis von, 540 Ketzcher, N., Russian translator of Shakespeare, 630 Keysar, Robert, lawsuit against Heminges and Condell, 310 n ; estimate of his shares in Blackfriars theatre, 312-13, 313 n Kildare, Countess of, 679 Killigrew, Thomas, director of King's (i.e. Charles II) company of actors, 694 n 1 ; his sub- stitution of women for boys in female parts, 602 ' King's servants.' See under James I Kirkland, Shakespeares at, 1 Kirkman, Francis, publisher, 264-6 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, his copy of ' Chandos ' portrait, 535, 593 Knight, Charles, 586 Knight, Joseph, 572 n 1 KnoUys, Sir William, 694 n 1 Kok, A. S., Dutch translator of Shakespeare, 628 750 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAKE KONIGSBERG Konigsberg, English actors at, 85 Korner, J., German translator of Shakespeare, 616 Kraszewski, Jozef Ignacz, Polish translator of Shakespeare 632 Kreyssig, Friedrich Alexander Theodor, his studies of Shake- speare, 617 Kyd, Thomas, 94, 95, 139 n 1 ; his share in Titus Andronicus, 129 ; and the story of Hamlet, 356, 357 ; Shakespeare's ac- quaintance with the work of, 357 n 2 Labe, Louise, 720 and n Lacy, John, 276 n 2, 596, 641 La Harpc, and the Shakespearean controversy in France, 623 Lamartine, A. de, on Shake- speare, 624 Lamb, Charles, 440, 534 n, 605 Lambarde, William, 254 Lambert, Edmumd, mortgagee of the Asbies property, 14 and n 2, 236 Lambert, John, 14 n 2, 290 Lane, John, his slander of Mrs. Susanna HaU, 464 Lane, Nicholas, creditor of John Shakespeare, 279 Lane, Richard, 321 Laneham, John, actor, 51 n 1 Lang, Andrew, 656 Langbauie, Gerard, 265 ; notice of fii'st edition of Titus Andro- nicus, 130 Laroche, Benjamin, French trans- lator of Shakespeare, 624 Larivey, Pierre de, his La Fiddle, 107 n 1 Law, Ernest, 381 seq., and notes, 650 and n 2 La we, Matthew, publisher, ac- quires rights in Richard III and Richard II, 124 n 1, 242 n 1 Lawrence, Sir Edwin D., 652 Lawrence, Henry, 460 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 537 Lear, King, performed at Court, 88, 397 ; prose in, 101 w 2 ; ac- count of, 397^02 ; dates of com- position and publication, 397, 398 and 71 1, n 2, 399 ; Butter's imperfect editions, 398 and n 1, n 2, 399 and n 1 ; sources of the plot, 399-401 ; Shakespeare's innovations, 401 ; the greatness of the tragedy, 401, 402 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; Tates re\ision, 597 ; passage cited, 579 n 1 Leblane Abbe, 621 Legal knowledge of Shakespeare, 43-4 and notes, 174, 713 Legge, Thomas, his Ricardus Tertius, 122 Leicester, players at, 81, 82 n Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, his entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth, 24, 232 ; his Warwickshire regi- ment in the Low Countries, 36 ; his early company of players, 47, 49, 51 n I; names of his licensed players, 51 ti 1 ; their visits to Stratford, 24 n 2, 54 ; growth of companj', 52 ; merged in Earl of Derby's company, 52, 55 : his actors in London, 55 n 1 ; in Germany and Denmark, 85 n 2 Leir, King, the old play of, 400, 401 n 1 Lembeke, G., Danish translator of Shakespeare, 629 Lenox, James, 611 Lenox, Lodovick Stuart, Earl of, 378 n 1 Lent, dramatic performances pro- hibited in, SO and n 1 See also 340, 453 n 2 Leo, F. A., 21 n 2 Leoni, Michele, Italian translator of Shakespeare, 627 ' Leopold ' edition, 587 n 1 Lermontov and Shakespeare, 630 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, his defence of Shakespeare, 614 Lessing, Otto, his statue of Shakespeare at Weimar, 541 INDEX 751 L ESTRANGE L'Estrange, Sir Nicholas, 256 Le Tourneur, Pierre, French translator of Shakespeare, 622 Life and Death of Jack Straw, The, 124 Lilly, John. See Lyly, John LUy, William, his ' Sententiae Pueriles,' 16, 19 Linche, Richard, his Diella, 714 Ling, Nicholas, publisher, 106 n 2, 113 n 1, 361 n 2, 364 and n 1, 555 Linley, William, 609 Lintot, Bernard, 379 n 1, 545 Lister-Kaye, Sir John, 538 Lloyd, WiUiam Watkis, 586 Locke (or Lok), Henry, 670, 716- 17 Locke, John, glover, of Stratford- on-Avon, 40 n 2 Locke, Matthew, musician, 609 Locke, Roger, son of John Locke, of Stratford, printer's apprentice in London, 40 n 2 Locker -Lampson, Frederick, 569, 570 Locrine, Tragedie of, 260 Lodge, Thomas, 17 n, 95 ; Shake- speare's indebtedness to his Rosalynde in As You Like It, 98, 326-7 ; in Venus and Adonis, 144-5, 145 n 1 ; his lise of the ' sixain,' 145 ; Spenser's reference to, 150 n 2 ; his plagiarisms in his Phillis, 171 and n 3, 710, 711 ; and the old play of Hamlet, 358 ; his use of the word ' will,' 696 London, plague in, 80 and n 2, 380 ; routes to, from Stratford- on-Avon, 39-40 ; population of, 40 ; natives of Stratford settled in, 37 and n, 41 seq. London Prodigall, The, 261 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 26 n 1 Lopez, Roderigo, original of Shylock, 133 and n 1 Lord Admiral's company of actors. See under Howard of Effingham, Lord Charles Lord Chamberlain's company of actors. See under Hunsdon, first and second Lords, and Sussex, Earl of Lorkin, Rev. Thomas, on the burning of the Globe theatre, 448 n 1 Love, Language of, in Elizabethan poets, 206, 207 ; similar in poems addressed either to men (friends and patrons) or to women, 208 n, 209 n ' Lover ' and ' love,' synonymous with ' friend ' and ' friendship ' in Elizabethan English, 206 n I Lover's Complaint, A, Shake- speare's responsibility for, 160 and n 1 Love's Labour's Lost, performed at Court, 88, 106, 152, 385; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; first play written by Shakespeare, 102 ; Hobert Tofte*s reference to (1598), 102 n 1 ; the plot, 103 ; reference to contemporary persons and incidents, 103 and n ; debt to John Lyly, 104 seq. ; publication of, 106 and notes, 113 n 1; state of text, 106 ; sonnet form in, 154 and n 1 ; alleged ridiciile of Florio in, 155 n ; affinities with the Sonnets, 156 ; reference to sonnets in, 175 ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; editions of, 548 ; passages cited, 19 and n 1, 20, 175, f90, 191 n 3, 695 Love's Labour's Won, 234, 259 Lowell, James Russell, 17 n 1, 610, 611 Lowin, John, shareholder in Globe theatre, 306 n, 307 n Lowndes, William T., 645 Lucian, his dialogue of Timon, 403 Lucrece, account of, 145 seq. ; metre of, 145-6 ; publication of, 42, 146 ; sources of the story, 146-7 ; echoes of Daniel's Rosa- mond in, 146-7 ; dedicatory letter to the Earl of Southamp- ton, 147-8 ; popularity of, 148 ; praise of contemporaries, 149, 177, 221, 259; editions, 150, 544-5; Gabriel Harvey's mention, 359 ; extant copies of 752 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE early editions, 545 n i ; pas- sages cited, 7 w 1 ; 75 n 1 Lucy, Sir Thomas, of Charlecote, his prosecution of Shakespeare for poaching, 34-5 ; caricatured as Justice Shallow, 35-6, 240, 248, 467 ; Shakespeare's pun on the name, 36 and n 1 ; his funeral, 284 n 1 Lucy, Wi liam, grandson of Sir Thomas Lucy, 36 n 1 Lud\\ ig. Otto, his studies of Shakespeare, 617 Lumley, John Lord, his portrait of Shakespeare, 536 Lydgate, John, his Troy Booke drawn on for Troilus and Cres- sida, 371-2 Lyly, John, 94, 95, 101 n 2 ; influence of his Euphues on Shakespeare's comedies, 104 and n 1, 166, 233 ; his Court comedies, 104-5 and n ; his repartee, word-play, and con ceits, 105 ; influence on Two Genllemen, 106-7 ; his treat- ment of friendship in Euphues, 217, 218 ; his Campaspe and 3Iidas, 328 Lynn, plague at, 82 n Lyte, Sir H. Maxwell, 650 Macbeth, use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; account of, 394—7 ; date of composition, 394 ; the story drawn from Holinshed, 394 ; Shakespeare's manipulation of the story and the additions of his own invention, 394 ; its appeal to James I (of England), 394, 395 ; publication, 395 ; the scenic elaboration, 395 and n 1 ; the chief characters, 396 ; points of difference from the other great Shakespearean tra- gedies, 396 ; interpolations by other pens, 397 ; Middleton's plagiarisms, 397 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; D'Avenant's adapta- tion, 596 ; passages cited, 19 n 2, 84 n 1, 120 » 1, 395, 397, 409, 578 MANXrCHE I MacCallum, M. W., 644 McCarthy, Henrj', monument of Shakespeare in Southwark I cathedral, 542 McCulIough, John Edward, American actor, 611 MacGeorge, Bernard Buchanan, ! 569-71 i Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 610 Macklin, Charles, 604 Maclise, Daniel, 527, 610 Macpherson, G., his Spanish trans- lation of Shakespeare, 628 Macready, William C, 606, 625 I Madden, D. H., 644 I Madden, Sir Frederick, 521 Magellan, Ferdinand, 433 ! Magny, Olivier de, 719-20 Maid Lane, Southwark, 62 n 4 ' Maidenhead ' inn, Stratford-on- Avon, 9-10 Maidstone, players at, 81, 82 w Maine or Mayenne, Due de, 103 n 1 Mainwaring, Arthur, 475 seq., 479 and n, 649 Malherbe, lines on Montaigne, 528 n Malone, Edmund, 46 ; on Shake- speare's first theatrical employ- ment, 46 ; his share in repair of Shakespeare's monuments, 526 ; his edition of the Sonnets, 546 ; his Shakespeare collection, 553 ; his critical works on Shakespeare, 582 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 582-4, 598-9; his life of Shakespeare, 642 ; his Shakespeare papers, 650 n 2 Malvezzi, Virgilio, 654 n Manners, Lady Bridget, 475 n 1, 661 Manningham, John, diarist, re- cords general desire for South- ampton's release, 228 ; his description of Twelfth Night, 329, 422 ; anecdote of Burbage, 454 and n 1 ; his account of ' imprese ' at Whitehall, 456 n ; on ' will,' 697 and n 1 Mantuanus, or Mantuan, Baptista, his Latin eclogues, 16 and n 3, 19 and n 1 Manuche, Cosmo, 560 n 1 INDEX 753 Manzoni, Alessandro, his apprecia- tion of Shakespeare, 626 Marino, Giovanni Battista, 172, 718 n 2 Markham, Gervase, his adulation of Southampton in his sonnets, 200, 203, 668 Marlborough, players at, 81, 82 n Marlowe, Christopher, 94, 95, 114, 115, 117, 139-40; his share in 2 Henry VI, 121 and n, 122 ; his influence on Shake- speare's work, 109, 122 seq., 125, 133; his violent death, 122 ; Shakespeare's allusions to, 134-5 ; influence of his Hero and Leander on Venus and Adonis, 142, 675 ; his translation of Ovid's Amores, 143 n 1 ; his translation of Lucan, 159, 161, 675, 676, 681 ; absence of his autographs, 519. See also 555, 646, 652 Marlowe, Julia, American actress, 611 Marmontel and the Shakespearean controversy in France, 623 Marot, Clement, his treatment of love and friendship, 218 ; his interpretation of ' imprese,' 455 n 1 ; his sonnets, 718 Marquets, Anne de, 717, 720 Marshall, F. A., 586 Marshall, John, his library at Stratford, 15 n 3 Marshall, William, 530, 546 Marston, John, on popularity of Borneo and Juliet, 60 n 3, 112 and n 1 ; identified by some as the ' rival poet,' 204 ; his use of the ' induction,' 235 n 2 ; contributes to The Phoenix and the Turtle, 270 ; his comedy, What You Will, 328 n 2 ; rela- tions with the boy-actors, 341 ; his Scourge of Villanie, 343 ; his Histriomastix, 344 and n 1 ; his quarrel with Jonson, 343-8 ; publication of his Malcontent, 584 n 5 ; publishes his Parasi- taster himself, 680 ; his share in Blackfriars theatre, 303, 313 n MEHCHANT Martin, Martyn or Mertyn. See under Slater, Martin Martin, Ladj^ See Faucit, Helen Martin, Dr. William, 63 n Mason, John, shareholder in Whitefriars theatre, 303 Massey, Gerald, on the Sonnets, 160 n 2 Massinger, Philip, his use of legal phrases, 44 ; his association with John Fletcher, 437, 446 Masuccio, 110 n Matthew, Sir Tobie, 654, 665 Matthew, Toby, bishop of Dur- ham, 717 Matthews, Brander, 611, 646 Mayne, Jasper, 22 n, 557 Meade, Jacob, 303 n Meadows, Kenny, 586 n 1 Measure for Measure, perform- ance at Court, 88, 385, 388, 650 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; dates of composition and production, 387, 388; first published in First Folio, 388 ; treatment of theme in French and Italian sixteenth -century drama and fiction, 391, 392; sources, 391, 392 ; Shakespeare's variations on the old treatment, 392, 393 ; the name of Angelo, 392 and n 2 ; creates character of Mari- ana, 393 ; philosophic subtlety of Shakespeare's argument, 393 ; references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, 393 and n 1 ; D'Avenant's revision of, 596 ; passages cited, 30 n 1, 216 n 2, 3S7, 393 Meighen, Richard, 570 Mencke's Lexicon, 613 Mendelssohn, Felix Bartholdy, 620 Mennes, Sir John, 6 n Merchant of Venice, The, per- formed at Court, 88, 385; Marlowe's influence in, 122 ; sources, 131 seq. ; debts to II Pecorone, Gesta Bornanorum, and Wilson's Three Ladies of London, 131-2 ; traces of Marlowe's influence, 133 seq. ; Shakespeare's study of Jewish 3 o 754 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE MERCHANT character, 133-4 ; date of com- position, 134 ; publication of, 135 ; state of text, 135 ; un- authorised reprint of, 135 n 2 ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; etiitions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 12 n 2 ; 19 n 2, 23 n 1 Merchant Taylors' School, drama- tic performance by boy-actors of, 325 Meres, Francis, credits Shake- speare with Titus Andronicus, 129 ; his commendation of Shakespeare's ' sugred sonnets,' 158, 177, 672 ; testimony to Shakespeare's reputation, 258, 259 Mermaid Tavern, 257, 258 Merry Devill of Edmonton, The, 263, 264 and n 3, 265 and 7i 1 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 35 ; performed at Court, 88, 385 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; reminiscences of Marlowe in, 135 ; account of, 246-9 ; date of composition, 246 ; sources, 247 ; publication of, 248-9 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; pas.- ages cited, 19, 38 n, 135, 248, 257 n 1, 268 n, 465 n 3, 466 n Mertyn. See under Martin Metrical tests in Shakespearean drama, 100, 101 n 1 Mezi res, Alfred, on Shakespeare, 624 Michael Angelo, ' dedicatory ' sonnets of, 208 n 1 Michel, Frf.ncisque, French trans- lator of Shakespeare, 624 Middle Temple, Gorboduc pro- duced at, 91 ; Twelfth Night at, 329 Middleton, Thomas, his allusion to mortality from plague, 80 n 2; his allusion to La Mothe, 103 n 1 ; his plagiarisms of Macbeth in The Witch, 397 ; MS. of The Witch, 560 n 1 Midsummer Night's Dream, date of composition, 231 and n 1, 232, 231-3 ; reference to Queen Elizabeth's visit to K en il worth, 232 ; sources, 105, 232, 233 ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; wit- nessed by Pepvs, 592 ; passages cited, 25, 77, 93 n 1,579 n 1 MiUais, Sir John, 610 Millingtoii, Thomas, publisher, lis, 119 and 7i, 130 Milton, John, applies epithet ' sweetest ' to Shakespeare, 259 n 1 ; his Minor Poems (1645) printed by Moseley, 263 ; his portrait by Janssen, 536 ; his tribute to Shakespeare printed in Second Folio, 589 Miniatures of Shakespeare, 538 Minto. Prof. W., 240 n 1 Miracle plays, 90 and n 1 Moli re, extant signatures of, 519 n 1 Mollineux, Sir Richard, 710 Monarcho, 103 n Money, value of, in Shakespeare's England. See 3 n 2, 296 n 1 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 399, 400 Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth, 622 Montaigne, Michel de, 521, 652 ; Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 22, 431 ; lines on T. de Leu's portrait of, 528 n Montegut, Emile, French trans- lator of Shakespeare, 624 Montemayor, George de, hLs Diana, 107 and notes 2 and 3, 429 n 1 Montesquieu, on English actine, 78 n Montgomery, Philip Herbert, Earl of, 558, 662, 689 ; his ' impresa,' 457 n 2 Monti, Vincenzo, his appreciation of Shakespeare, 626 Mont joy, Christopher, 276 seq., 519 Montjoy, Mary, 277 n 2 Montolin, C, Catalan translator of Macbeth, 628 , Montreux, Nicolas de, his tragedy of CUopatre, 410 n 1 Moorfields, 57-8 Moralities, 90 and n '' Moratin, Leandro Fernandez di Spanish translator of Hamlet, 627 INDEX 755 Morgan, J. Pierpont, his copy of the First Folio, 566 w 1, 569 Morgann Maurice, on FalstafE, 598, 599 Morhof, Daniel Georg, 613 Morley, Lord, 689 n Morley, Thomas, musician, his First Booke of Consort Lessons, 329, 609 Morris, Matthew, 493 n Mortlake, 379 Moschus, 709 Mosoley, Humphrey, publisher, 263, 264, 437, 438 and n 2, 561 n Mothe or La Mothe, 103 n 1 Moulton, Pvichard G., 646 Mucedorus, play of doubtful authorship, 264, 265, 266, 406 n 1 Much Ado about Nothing, per- formed at Court, 88, 435 ; use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; references to sonnets in, 175 ; account of, 325—6 ; date of composition, 325 ; sources, 98, 325, 326 ; characters of Shakespeare's in- vention, 326 ; parts taken by the actors Kemp and Cowley, 111 n 3, 326; publication of, 332, 333 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 20 n 2, 39, 147 n 2, 175, 358 n, 695 Mulberry tree, Shakespeare's, 288, 289 n, 516 and n Mulcaster, Richard, head master of Merchant Taylors' School, 325 Munday, Anthony, his use of the ' induction,' 235 n 2 ; part author of play of Oldcastle, 244 ; 337. See also 107 n 1, 132 n 2 Munich, English actors at, 85 Muret, Marc-Antoine, his tragedy on Julius Caesar, 334 n 2 Murray, Sir David, of Gorthy, 492 Murray, John Tucker, his English Dramatic Companies, 49 n 2 and passim Musaeus, 142 Music on the Elizabethan stage, 79 and n 1 Musset, Alfred de, influence of Shakespeare on, 624 Mystery plays, 90 and n 1 Nash, Anthony, 322 n 1 ; legatee under Shakespeare's wUl, 491 and n 2 Nash, Edward, 511-12, 515 Nash, John, legatee under Shake- speare's will, 491 and n 2 Nash, John, son of Anthony Nash, 491 n 2 Nash, Thomas, son of Anthony Nash, 285 and n 1 ; married Elizabeth HaU, 491, 507; ac- count of, 507 ; legatee under John Hall's wUl, 508, 509; death and burial, 511, 513 ; his will, 511 and n 1 Nash's House, 516-17, 542 Nashe, Thomas, 112 n 3, 115; his mention of 1 Henry VI, 115 ; falls under ban of censor, 127 ; piracy of his Terrors of the Night, 157 n 1 ; on the immortalising power of verse, 187 ; his dedica- tion of Jack Wilton to, and his sonnets addressed to Southamp- ton, 200 ; on the persecution of actors, 338 ; and the old play of Hamlet, 356 ; his praise of Southampton, 666 and n 1, 667 and n 1, n 2 ; his Life of Jack Wilton, 666, 667 ; his Pierce Penniless, 667 ; on the sonnet, 705 n 2 ; his praise of Sidney's sonnets, 707 n 1 Navarre, King of, 103 n 1 Naylor, E. M., 644 Neagle, James, 537 Neil, Samuel, 643 n Nekrasow, Russian translator of Shakespeare, 630 Newcastle, Margaret, Duchess of, her criticism of Shakespeare, 593, 594 Newcastle, miracle plays at, 91 Newdegate, Lady, 686 n 1, 694 n 1 Newington Butts theatre, 59 n 2, 60 ; takings at, 308 n ; per- formances at, 235, 358, 440 Newman, Thomas, piratical pub- lisher of Sidney's Sonnets, 157 n 1, 706 New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, built by Sir Hugh Clopton, 288 ; ! purchase and repair of, by Shake- 3 c 2 756 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Bpeare, 288 ; mulberry tree at, 288 and n 3, 516 and n ; its owners and occupants, 289 ; later fortunes, 514 seq., 542 Newport, Edward, 460 1 New Romney, players at, 82 and n New Shakspere Society, 645 Nichols, John, 535 Nicholson, George, 83 n 3 Nicolai, Otto, 620 Nodier, Charles, his appreciation of Shakespeare, 623 Nonsuch, royal residence at, 68 Norris, J. Parker, his account of Shakespeare's portraits, 540 n 2 North, Sir Thomas. See under Plutarch Northampton, Henry Howard Earl of, 285 n 3, 507 Northampton, William Parr, mar- quis of, 287 n 1 Northcote, Lord, 538 Northumberland, Henry, ninth Earl of, patron of men of letters, 297 n 2, 714 Northumberland, Lucy, Countess of, 714 Norton, Thomas, his Gorboduc, 91 Norwich, players at, 82 and n Nottingham, players at, 81, 82 n Nottingham, Earl of. See under Howard, Charles Nuremburg, English actors at, 85 and n 1 Nyblom, C. R., Swedish trans- lator of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 629 Oberon, vision of, 232 ; in Huon of Bordeaux, 233 Oechelhaeuser, WUhelm, 619 Ogilby, John, 276 n 2 Okes, Nicholas, printer, 389, 398 ' Old Spielling Shakespeare, The,' 587 n 1 Oldcastle, Sir John, play on his history, 244 and n 1, n 2, 245, 261 ; acted at Hunsdon House, 65 n 1 Oldcastle, Sir John, the original name of Falstaff in Henry IV, 241, 242, 243 Oldys, William, 35 n 2, 88 and n 4, 379 n 1, 534, 642 Olney, Henry, 714 Onions, C. T., 645 Opie, John, 610 Orator, The, 132 n 2 Orford, Earl of, 571 Orrian, Thomas, tailor of Strat- ford-on-Avon, 40 ?i 2 Orrian, alias Currance, Allan, son of Thomas Orrian, of Strat- ford, printer's apprentice in London, 40 n 2 Ortelsburg, English actors at, 85 Ortlepp, E., German translator of Shakespeare, 616 Ostler, Thomasina, lawsuit against her father John Heminges, 310 n, 312 ; estimate of the value of her theatrical shares in Globe and Blackfriars theatres, 311 and n 2, 312 Ostler, William, shareholder in Globe theatre, 305 ; in Black- friars theatre, 307 n ; a boy- actor, 341 Othello, use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; account of, 387-91 ; dates of composition and production, 387 ; performed at Court, 387, 435, 650 ; publication of, 388, 389 ; indebtedness to Cinthio, 98, 389, 390 and nl,n2; new characters and features intro- duced by Shakespeare, 390 ; ejiiibits his fully matured powers, 391 ; its posthumous printing, 552 ; passages cited, 434 n 1, 502 n 2 Otway, Thomas, 596 Ovid, 17, 23 ; his influence on Shakespeare, 177, 180, 181 and n, 233, 428 ; his claim for the immortality of verse, 186 and 71 3 ; his Amores, 21 ; quoted on title-page of Venus and Adonis, 143 n ; partly trans- lated by Marlowe, 143 n 1 ; popular with Elizabethans, 143 n 1 ; his Fasti, 146 ; his Metamorphoses (see also under Golding, Arthur), 20 and notes 1 and 2, 21 and n 2, 22, 143-4, INDEX 757 180, 181 and n 1, 182, 428; Shakespeare's copy of, 21, 521 Owen,' Sir Richa?Ctr'^39, 5?0 Oxford, players at, 81, 82 n, 440; Hamlet at, 362 and n 2 ' Oxford ' edition, 587 n 1 Oxford, Earl of, his company of actors at Stratford, 24 n 2 ; in London, 50 n 1, 55 n 1 ; patron of Watson, 679, 706 Oxford, Edward Harley, Earl of, his alleged miniature of Shake- speare, 538 Padua, copy of First Folio nt, 569 Page, William, his account of Shakespeare's portraits, 540 n 2 ' Painted cloths,' 7 and n 1 Painter, William, indebtedness of Shakespeare to his Palace of Pleasure, 110 and n, 139, 146, 403, 413 Palamon and A r sett, 440 Palmer, John, 464, 472 n 1 Palmer or Palmes, Valentine, 322 n 1 Par, Anfos, Catalan translator of King Lear, 628 Paris, copy of First Folio at, 564, 569 and n 1 Paris Garden theatre, shares in 302 n 1, performance of the old Hamlet at, 388 Parrot, Henry, 298 n 1, 473 n 1 Partridge, William Ordway, his statue of Shakespeare in Chicago, 541 Paschale, Lodovico, 711 Pasqualigo, Luigi, his II Fedele, 107 n 1 Pasquier, Etienne, 719 Passerat, Jean, 719-20 Passionate Pilgrim, The, piratical insertion of two sonnets in, 267 ; contents of, 267 n 3 ; editions of, 545 ; included in Poems of 1640, 546 Patteson, Rev. Edward, 521 Pavier, Thomas, printer, 112 n 3, 1 19 w, 231 n 1, 244 and n 1, 261, 262, 399 re 1 ; his share in the suspected quartos of 1619, 136 n, 550-1 and notes Pavy, Salathiel, boy-actor, Jon- son's elegy on, 342 Pedantius, Latin play of, 653 n 2 Peele, George, 94, 95, 115, 150 n 2 ; as actor and dramatist, 96 ; his alleged share in Henry VI, 121 ; in Titus Andronicus, 129 ; his use of the ' induction ' in Old Wives' Tale, 235, n 2 ; protege of the Earl of North- umberland, 297 n 2 ; his praise of Southampton, 660 ; forged letter of, 646 Pela^'o, Menendez y, his apprecia- tion of Shakespeare, 628 Pembroke, Henry Herbert, second earl of, 659 n 1 ; his company of actors, 49 and n 2 ; perform- ances by, 56, 119, 130, 235 n 1 Pembroke, Countess of, dedication of Daniel's Delia to, 199, 707; her translation of Garnier's 3Iarc Antoine, 410 n 1 Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl of, 493 n 3, 379 and n 2, 383, 558, 659 n 1, 681 and n 1 ; his ' impresa,' 457 n 2 ; ques- tion of identification with ' Mr. W. H.,' 163, 686-90; Shake- speare's relations with, 691-4 ; dedication of First Folio to, 692 Penrith.Cumberland, Shakespeares at, 1 Penzance, Lord, 655 Pepys, Samuel, 533 ; his criticisms of the Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, 592 Percy, Sir Charles, his testimony to Shakespeare's growing popu- larity, 259 n 2 Percy, William, plays of, 560 n 1 ; friend of Barnabe Barnes, 709 ; his Coelia, 712 Perez, Antonio, 133 w 1 Pericles, 404-8 ; date of com- position, 404 ; Shakespeare's collaboration in, 404 ; sources 404, 405, 406 and n 1 dlt^^^ 758 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE incoherences of the piece, 406 ; contemporary criticism of, 406 n 2 ; the quarto edi- tions, 406, 407 and n 1 ; Shake- speare's share in, 407, 408 and n 2 ; reference to ' impresa ' in, 456 n 1 Perkes, Qement, in Henry IV , 240 Perkin, John, 51 n 1 Perkins, Thomas, his copy of the Second Folio, 570-1 and n 1 Perrin, Cornwall, players at, 82 n Perry, Marsden J., his collection of the Folios, 570-1, 611 Peruse, Jean de la, 719 Pescetti, Orlando, his tragedy on Julius Caesar, 334 n 2 Petowe, Henrv, elegy on Queen Elizabeth, 227 Petrarch, emulated by Eliza- bethan sonnetteers, 153, 155, 171, 172, 705 seq. ; Spenser's translations from, 170 ; Shake- speare's indebtedness to, 177, 178, 183 and n 3 Phelps, Samuel, 586 n 1, 606 Phillips, Augustine, member of the Lord Chamberlain's com- pany, 53 n 2 ; 56, 61 ; induced to revive Richard II at the Globe (1601), 254, 255; resi- dence in Southwark, 275 ; his false claim to heraldic honours, 285 seq. ; shares in Globe theatre, 300 seq., 302 n 1 ; has articled pupils, 314 ; a ' groom of the Chamber,' 377, 381, 384 n 1 ; later relations with Shakespeare, 453 seq. and notes ; his will, 453 n 1, 494 Phillips, Edward, Milton's nephew, his criticism of Shakespeare, 600 n 1, 642 ; editor of Drum- raond's poems, 715 n 3 Phillips, Thomas, his portrait of Shakespeare, 527 Phoenix theatre, Drury Lane, 59 n 2 Phoenix and the Turtle, The, account of, 269 seq. ; Shake- speare's contribution to, 272-3 Pichot, A., 623 Pickering, William, London printer, 40 n, 586 * Pictorial edition ' of Shakespeare, 586 Pike, William, pseudonym for William Lucy, 36 n 1 Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The, 259, 299 Pindar, his claim for the immor- tality of verse, 186 and n 3 Pindemonte, Ippolito, of Verona, his imitation of Shakespeare, 626 Plague, at Stratford-on-Avon, 12 and n 1 ; in Londcn and provinces, 12 n 1, 379-80 ; dramatic performances pro- hibited during time of, 80 and n 2, 340, 380 Plato, his influence on Shake- speare, 177-180 Plautus, 16, 19, 20 ; his influence on English drama, 91 ; his Menaechmi, 108 ; in English translation, 109 ; his Amphitruo, 109 Players' Quartos, 100 n 1, 549, 5B0 and n 1 Playhouse yard, Blackfriars, 64 n 1 Plays, sale of, 99 and n ; revision of, 99 ; their publication depre- cated by playhouse proprietors, 100 n ; fees paid for, 99 n ; 314-15 and n 1 Pleiade, La, 718-20 Plessis, Comte de, 654 n Plume, Archdeacon Thomas, his MS. collection of anecdotes, 6 n, 474 n 1 Plutarch, Shakespeare's indebted- ness to, 98, 233, 333, 335, 402, 403, 409 and n 1, 410, 411 and n I, 414 and n 1, 415, 416 ; North's translation of his Lives, 41, 335 and n 1, 409 Plymouth, players at, 81, 82 n Poel, WUliam, 609 Poems (1640) Shakespeare's, 646- 7, 546 n 2 ; stationer's entry of, 546 n 2 ; contents, 647 ; rarity of volume, 647 and n 1 ; later editions, 547 INDEX 759 Poems on Affairs of State, 545 Poland, study of Shakespeare in, 631, 632 and .n 2, 633 and n 1 '4>i> Pole, Sir Geotfrey, 713 Pollard, A. W., his Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 552 n, 556 n 2, 645 Pollard, Thomas, holder of theatrical shares, 303 n, 306 n Poniatowski, King Stanislas, his appreciation of Shakespeare, 631, 632 and n 1 Ponsard, Francois, and the Shake- spearean controversy in France, 623 Pontoux, Claude de, name of his heroine copied by Drayton, 172 ; Shakespeare's probable debt to, 192 ; his work, 712, 720 Pope, Alexander, 452 n ; tribute to Shakespeare, 503 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 575-6, 577 and n 2, 642 Pope, Thomas, actor, member of the Lord Chamberlain's com- pany, 53 n 2 ; residence in Southwark, 275 ; his false claim to heraldic honours, 285 seq. ; shares in Globe and Curtain theatres, 300 seq., 302 n 1 ; his will and bequests, 60 n 2, 61, 494 n 2, 495 Pope, Sir Thomas, 286 Pope, Sir William, 498 n 2 Porter, Charlotte, 586 Porto, Luigi de, 110 n Pott, Mrs. Henry, 652 Powell, Thomas, 679 Poynter, Sir Edward, on the ' Flower ' portrait, 531 Preston, Thomas, his tragedy of Cambisef, 93 n Prevost, Abbe, 621 Pritchard, Mrs., 604 ' Private ' theatres, 59 7i 2, 66 and n 2, 340 Privy Council, orders for regula- tion of the theatres, 338-40 and 7iotes Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry Cornwall), 586 n 1 Propert, Lumsden, 538 QTJINEY Prose, use of, in Elizabethan drama, 101 and n 2 Provincial tours of actors. See esp. 80 seq. Puckering, Lady Jane, wife of William Combe of Warwick, 318 n 3 Puckering, Sir John, first husband of Lady Jane Puckering, 318 n 3 Purcell, Henry, 609 Puritaine, The, or the Widdow of Watliny Slreefe, 261, 262 Puritanism, hostility to the drama, 338 ; prevalence of, at Stratford, 13 n, 465-6 ; Shakespeare's references to, 465 n 4 Pushkin and Shakespeare, 630 Pyramus and Thisbe, 233 QtJADRADO, Jose Maria, his Spanish versions of Shake- speare, 628 Quadrio, Francis, 626 ' Quality,' meaning of, 86 w 3 Quarles, Francis, 544 Quarles, John, his continuation of Lucrece, 544 Quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays : publication, 547 seq. ; original price of, 548 ; publi- cation objected to by theatri- cal managers, 548 ; pirated editions, 548 ; the ' copj%' 549 ; textual value of, 549 ; popularity of, 550 ; suspected quartos of 1619, 550-1 and notes ; scarcity of, 552 ; litho- graphed facsimiles of. 552 n 1 ; chief collections of, 553 ; biblio- graphy of, 553 n 1 ; present prices of, 553 n 2 ; quartos neglected by the editors of the First Folio, 561 ; relation of text of quartos to that of First Folio, 562 Quatorzin, meaning and use of, 705 w 2. 707 n 2 ' Queen's players ' in Henry VIII's reign, 50 n 2 Quiney, Adrian, sues John Shake- speare for debt, 279-80. See also 292 seq., 295 n 1 760 WILLIA3I SHAKESPEARE Quiney, Judith, Shakespeare's daughter, 32, 281, 462 n ; her marriage to Thomas Quiney, 38 n, ^^^; excommunication for irregmarity of marriage, 482 ; legatee under Shake- speare's will, 490 ; her resi- dence at Stratford, 506 ; her sons, 506-7 ; her death and burial, 507 ; of. 511 Quiney, Richard, the elder, his knowledge of Latin, 18 n 1 ; account of, 38 n ; bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon, 292 ; appeals in London for help for Strat- ford, 292 seq. ; his letter to Shakespeare, 294 -5, 295 w 1 ; of. 464-5, 481 n Quiney, Richard, the younger, brother of Thomas Quiney the elder, 38 n, 506 Quiney, Ricnard, son of Thomas Quiney the elder, 506, 509 Quiney, Thomas, the elder, his knowledge of French, 18 7i 1 ; his marriage to Judith Shake- speare, 38 n, 464-5 ; account of, 506-7; cf. 511 Quiney, Thomj^s, the younger, son of Thomas Quiney the elder, 507 Quinton, Hacket family at, 237 Rackham, Arthur, 610 Radcliffe, Ralph, his version of Tito and Gesippo, 217 n 1 Rainsford, Sir Henry, the elder, 468 ; patron of ilichael Dray- ton, 468 and n 2 ; his wife, 468 ; friend of Thomas Combe, 469-70 ; legatee under John Combe's will, 471, cf. 514 n 3 Rainsford, Sii- Henry, the younger, 469 n, 514 n 3 Raleigh, Sir Walter, adoration of Queen Elizabeth, 207, 227 Raleigh, Prof. Sir Walter, liis life of Shakespeare, 646 Ramsay, Henry, 22 n Ramsden, Lady Guendolen, 537 Raphael, epitaph on tomb of, 499 n I Rapp, M., German tr. prnriation nf Shakesprar;^, 624 Sandells, Fulk. 27 and n 2, 29 Sands, James, 453 n 1 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 172, 711, 718 n 2 INDEX 763 Sarrazin, Dr. Gregor, on Shake- speare's alleged Italian travel, 86 n 2 Saunders, Francis, 572 n 1 Saunders, Mathew, 682 Saunderson, Mrs., first actress to play Shakespeare's great female characters, 602 Savage, Richard, 237 n 1, 317 n 2, 643 Saviolo, Vincentio, his Practise and As You Like It, 327 Scenery on the Elizabethan stage. See under Theatres Scenic elaboration at Court dra- matic performances, 68-9 and nl Scharf, Sir George, his opinion of ' Droesh,out ' engraving, 530 ; tracing of ' Chandos ' portrait, 536 ; his account of Shake- speare's portraits, 540 n 2 Scheemakers, Peter, his statue of Shakespeare, 541 Schelling, Felix E., 646 Schiller, Friedrich von, his trans- lation of Macbeth, 618 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 599 ; his German translation and criti- cism of Shakespeare, 615, 616 Schlegel, Johann Elias, 614 Schmidt, Alexander, 645 Schroder, Friedrich Ulrich Lud- wig, German actor of Shake- spearean parts, 618 Schubert, Franz, 620 Schiick, H. W., Swedish bio- grapher of Shakespeare, 629 Schumann, Robert, 620 Scoloker, Anthony, his Daiphantus, 715 ; allusions to Hamlet in, 360-1 ; his tribute to Shake- speare, 502 Scotland, actors' tours to, 83 and notes Scott, Sir Walter, 35, 504 Sedley, Sir Charles, his praise of Shakespeare, 593, 594 Selimus, 260 Seneca, his influence on English drama, 16, 19 and n 2, 22, 91 Serafino dell' Aquila, Watson's in- debtedness to, 147 n 2, 171 and n 1, 718 n 2 SHAKESPEARE Seve, Maurice, 172, 707, 718, 720 n Severn, Charles, 646 Sewell, Dr. George, 575, 576 ShadweU, Thomas, his adapta- tions of Shakespeare, 596 and n 2 Shakespeare, distribution of the name, 1-2 ; its significance, 1 Shakespeare, Adam, 2 Shakespeare, Ann, the dramatist's sister, 14 Shakespeare (born Hathaway), Anne, the dramatist's wife, 26 seq. ; her cottage, 27, 542 ; debtor to Thomas Whittington ; 280 and n 2 ; Shakespeare's bequest of ' second best bed * to, 488-9; death, 505 and n 2 ; burial, 506 ; epitaph, 506 n 1 Shakespeare, Edmund, the drama- tist's brother, 13 ; burial in Southwark, 275, 505 Shakespeare, Gilbert, the drama- tist's brother, 13, 462-3 and n 2 ; account of his brother's acting, 88 ; negotiates in behalf of the poet for purchase of land near Stratford, 318, 463 and n 1 ; Mrs. Stopes on, 463 n 2 ; burial of, 505 Shakespeare, Hamnet, the drama- tist's son, 32 ; death of, 281 Shakespeare, Henry, the drama- tist's uncle, 3 and n 3, 279 Shakespeare, Joan (1), the drama- tist's sister, 8 Shakespeare, Joan (2), the drama- tist's sister, 14. 5e^ under Hart, Mrs. Joan Shakespeare, John, of Frittenden, Kent (fl. 1279), 1 Shakespeare or Shakspere, John, shoemaker at Stratford, confused with the dramatist's father, 15 n 1 Shakespea,re, John, son of Richard, of Snitterfield, the dramatist's father^ 3 ; settles jj*5 jL at Stratford, "5-ST' his business, , ^/ 5; in municipal oSice, 5-6 /*/7 * ■*^**** 492 n 1 ; property, 5; charao 764 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEAKB teristics, 6 and n ; his marriage, 7 ; his family, 8, 13 ; his tenancy of Shakespeare's birth- place, 9-10 ; alderman and bailiff at Stratford, 12-13 ; wel- comes actors to Stratford, 13 ; purchases Shakespeare's birth- place, 13 ; his alleged puritan- ism, 13 n ; applies for coat-of- arms, 2, 13 v, 282 ; financial difficulties, 14-15, 279-80; de- prived of alderman's gown, 15 ; prosecuted for non-attendance at church, 279-80 ; his death, 316 Shakespeare, Judith. See Quiney, Judith Shakespeare, Margaret, the drama- tist's aunt, 3 n 3 Shakespeare, Margaret, sister of the dramatist, 8 Shakespeare, Mary, the drama- tist's mother, parentage and an- cestry, 6, 284—5 ; her property 7-8; 289-90; her death and burial, 317, 462, 487 Shakespeare, Richard, the drama- tist's brother, 13 ; his death, 463, 505 Shakespeare, Richard, of Rowing- ton, 2 Shakespeare, Richard, of Snitter- field [d. 1560), probably the dramatist's grandfather, 3 ; his family and estate, 3 and n 2, 4, 7 Shakespeare, Richard of ^Y^oxall, 2-3 Shakespeare, Susanna, daughter of the poet, 29, 281 Shakespeare, Thomas, 3 Shakespeare, William, husband of Anne Whateley, 30 seq. Shakespeare or ' Sakspere ' Wil- liam, of Clapton, Gloucester- shire (d. 1248), 1 Shakespeare, WiUiam, of Rowing- ton, 2 Shakespeare, William : ances- try, 2 seq. ; parentage, 3-8 ; birth and baptism, 8 ; birth- place, 8-11 ; brothers and sisters, 13-14 ; education, 15 seq. ; school curriculum, 16-17 ; study of Greek and Latin SHAKESPEARE classics, 16-17 ; affinities with Greek tragedians, 17 n 1 ; study of Italian and French litera- ture, 18-19, 22 ; reminiscences of MantuaniLs, 19 and n \; of Seneca, 19 and n 2 ; indebted- ness to Ovid. 20-2 ; his use of the Bible, 22-3, 23 n 2 ; youth- ful recreation, 24 ; references to visit to Kendworth, 24 ; withdrawal from school, 25 ; marriage, 26 seq. ; the marriage bond, 27 seq. ; birth of hLs first daughter, 29 : his other children, 32-3 ; his knowledge of nature and of sport, 33 and n 2 ; his poaching adventure at Charle- cote, 34 seq. ; prosecution bv Sir Thomas Lucy, 34-6 ; flight from Stratford, 3G ; migration to London, 37 seq. ; relations Avith Richard Field, publisher, 41-3 ; his alleged legal experi- ence, 43—4 ; early theatrical employment, 45-6 ; early repu- tation as actor, 46 seq. ; joined Earl of Leicester's company, later known as the ' King's servants,' 54 ; writes plays for the company, 55-6 ; performs at Court, 68, 88 ; at ' The Theatre,' 57 ; his successes at the Rose theatre, 60 ; at the Curtain, 60 ; prominent in affalira of the Globe theatre, 62, and of the Blackfriars theatre, 65 ; his alleged travels in England and abroad, 81-6 ; his roles, 87-8 ; his view of the acting profession, 89 ; his first dramatic efforts, 90 seq. ; his receptivity, 95 ; as actor- dramatist, 96 ; Ben Jonson's criticism of his hasty workman- ship, 97 ; his borrowed plots, 98 ; re%'ision of old plaj'S, 99 ; chronology of the plays, 99-100 ; metrical tests, 100 ; his use of prose, 101 and n 2 ; his Love's Labour's Lost [q.v."], 102-6 ; his Two Gentlemen of Verona [q.v.], 106-S ; his Comedy of Errors [g.r.] 108-9 ; his Borneo INDEX 765 SHAKESPEAEK and Jvliet [q.v.], 109-13; his adaptations of others' plays, 114 seq. ; Henry VI [q.v.], 114 seq. ; attacked by Robert Greene, 115 seq. ; influence of Marlowe on, 109, 122, 133-4 ; his Richard III [q-v.], 122-^; his Richard II [q.v.], 124-8; relations with the censor, 126 seq. ; his Titus Andronicus, [q.v.], 128-31 ; his Merchant oj Venice [q.v.], 131-5 ; his King John [q.v.], 136-7 ; early plays assigned to, 138 seq. [see under Arden of Feversham and Edward III] ; his Venus and Adonis [q.v.], 141-5 ; Lucrece, [q.v.], 145-8 ; tributes to, 148-9 ; Spenser's praise of, 150 ; his popularity at Court, 152 ; his Sonnets [q.v.], 153-95 ; his vise of sonnet form in his plays, 154 ; his relations with the Earl of Southampton, 196-230, 657 seq. ; development of dramatic power, 231 seq. ; his Midsummer Night's Dream [q.v.], 231 seq. ; AlVs Well [q.v.], 234-5 ; Taming of the Shrew [q.v.], 235 seq. ; Henry IV [q.v.], 239 seq. ; his creation of f alstafl, 241 seq. ; Merry Wives of Windsor [q.v.], 246 seq. ; Henry V [q.v.], 250 seq. ; his use of choruses, 251-2 ; relations with the Earl of Essex, 253 seq. ; his growing reputation, 255 ; his share in meetings at the ' Mermaid,' 257 ; praised by Meres and other contemporaries, 258 seq. ; unprincipled use of his name, 260 ; plays falsely ascribed to, 260 seq. [see under Locrine ; Cromwell, Lord ; Yorkshire Tragedy, A ; Merry Devill of Edmonton, The ; Gar- denia ; Henry I ; Henry II ; King Stephen ; Duke Hum- phrey ; Iphis and lantha ; Faire Em ; Mucedorus] ; his Passionate Pilgrim [q.v.], 267 seq. ; his share in the Phoenix and Turtle [q.v.], 269 seq. ; his London residences, 274 seq. ; tax- SHAKESPEAEE payer of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, 274 ; in Southwark, 274, 275 ; in Cheapside, 276 seq. ; alleged residence in Shoreditch, 276 n 2 ; his practical temperament, 278 ; his application for a coat-of- arms, 281 seq. ; purchase of New Place, 288 ; litigation with John Lambert, 289 ; his posi- tion among his fellow towns- men, 290 seq. ; his supply of corn and malt, 291-2 ; appeals to, from Stratford for aid, 292 seq. ; his financial position before 1599, 296 ; acquires theatrical shares, 296 ; his fees as dramatist, 296 seq. ; his income as actor, 298 seq. ; his shares in Globe theatre, 300 seq., 304-5 and n, 309; shares in Blackfriars theatre, 306 seq., 309 seq. ; his income from performances at Court, 313 seq. ; a ' groom of the Chamber,' 313-14, 377 seq. ; later income as actor, and as dramatist, 314 seq. ; his final income, 315-16 ; his parents' death, 316-17 ; formation of his estate at Stratford, 317 seq. ; acquires property near Stratford of the Combes, 317 ; purchases cot- tage and land in Chapel Lane, 319 ; purchases lease of moiety of the tithes of Stratford, 320'; recovery of small debts, 321-3 ; maturity of his genius, 324 seq. ; Much Ado about Nothing [q.v.], 325-6 ; As You Like It [q.v.], 326-8 ; Twelfth Night [q.v.], 328-32 ; Julius Caesar [q.v.], 333-8 ; his share in actor's quarrels, 341 seq. ; his Hamlet [q.v.], 354 5cg. ; Troilus and Cres- eida [q.v.], 367 seq. ; his plays at Court, 374-5, 385 seq. ; his Othello [q.v.], 389-90 ; Pleasure for Measure [q.v.], 391-3 ; Mac- beth [q.v.], 394-7 ; King Lear [q.v.], 397-402 ; Timon of Athens [q.v.], 402-4 ; Pericles [q.v.], 404-8 ; his Antony and Cleopatra [q.v.], 409-12 ; his 766 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEASE Coriolanus [g.v.], 413-16 ; the latest plays — his tragic period, 417 seq. ; his return to romance, 418 seq. ; Cymbeline [q-v.], 423-5; The Winter's Tale [q.v.] 425-7 ; The Tempest [q.v.], 427-37 ; his collaboration with John Fletcher in Cardenio [q.v.], 438-9 ; Two Noble Kins- men [q.v.], 439-41 ; and Henry VIII [q.v.], 442-47 ; his retire- ment to Stratford, 450 ; his financial interest in London theatres, 451 ; visits to Oxford, 451-2 ; relations with Burbage, 454 ; his device for the Earl of Rutland's impresa, 455 seq. ; his purchase of a house in Blackfriars, 459 ; his litigation over the property, 460-1 ; rela- tions with Stratford and neigh- bourhood, 462 seq. ; friendship with the Combes, 469 seq. ; his attitude to the Stratford enclosures, 477 seq. ; his will, 482-5, 487 seq. ; his death and burial, 485 ; his grave, 486 ; his bequests, 488 seq. ; his theatrical shares, 493 seq. ; his monument, 496-9, 524-7 ; pleas for his burial in West- minster Abbey, 500 seq. ; his character, 502 ; his survivors and descendants, 505 seq. ; his estate, 514 seq. ; auto- graphs, 518 seq. ; his mode of writing, 521 ; spelling of hi^. name, 522^3 ; ~ porlraits *or, b23-39"; ' tiis death mask, 539- 40 ; public memorials, 541-3 ; quarto and folio editions of his works, 544-72 ; his eighteenth- century editors, 573-84 ; nine- teenth-century editors, 584-6 ; his reputation in England, 588-609 ; on the English stage, 602 seq. ; in music and art, 608-9 ; reputation in America, 610-11 ; his foreign vogue, 612 ; in Germany, 612-20 ; in France, 620-5; in Italy, 626-7; in Spain, 627-8 ; in Holland, 628 ; in Denmark, 628 ; in Sweden, 629 ; in Russia, 629-31 ; in Poland, 631-2 ; in Hungary, 633 ; in other countries, 633 ; impersonality of his art, 634 ; his foreign aflSnities, 635-6 ; his receptive faculty, 636-7 ; his universality, 638 Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford- on-Avon, 542-3 Shakespeare's Birthplace, 8-12 ; visitors to, 542 ' Shakespeare Society,' The, 600 ' Shakspeie Society, The New,' 600 Shallow, Justice, Sir Thomas Lucy caricatured as, 35-6, 240 ; his house in Gloucestershire, 240, 245, 248 Shanks, John, holder of theatrical shares, 303 n, 306 n, 307 n Sharp, Thomas, 289 n Shaw, Julius, 279, 292 n 1, 462 n ; witness to Shakespeare's will, 484 ; account of his career, 484 n 3 Sheldon copj- of the First Folio, 564, 566 Sheldon, Ralph, 564 n 3 Sheldon, WUliain, 564 n 3 Shelton, Thomas, translator of Don Quixote, 438 Sheridan, R. B., 647 Shcrwin, W., 538 Shiels, Robert, 45 n Shoreditch, first theatrical quarter, 53, 54 n 1, 57 and n 64. See also under ' The Curtain ' and ' The Theatre ' Short, Peter, printer, 242 n 1, 675 Shorthand versions of plays, 100 n, 112 n 3 Shottery, Anne Hatha vvay's cot- tage at, 26 seq., 542 ; Sbalce- speare's propertj' at, 293 ; John Combe's property at, 471 and n Shrewsbury, players at, 81, 82 v, 128 Sibthorp, Coningsby, his copy of the First Folio, 566-7 Siddons, Mrs., 605 Sidney, Sir Philip, reference to William Kemp, actor, 36 t? 2 ; INDEX /767 on stage scenery, 76 ; his view of early Elizabethan drama, 93 ; his lyric verse, 95 ; trans- lates verses from Montemayor's Diana, 107 n 3 ; his family connexions, 379, 457 n 1 ; brings the sonnet into vogue in England, 153 ; publication of his sonnets, 157 n ; warns readers against insincerity of eonnetteers, 172, 209 ; Shake- Bpeare's debt to, 178, 179, 186 ; on the conceit of the immortalis- ing power of verse, 186, 187 ; his praise of ' blackness,' 191 ; his proficiency in mottoes for ' imprese,' 455 n 1 ; his use of the word ' will ' 696 ; Shake- speare's debt to his Arcadia, 401 and n 2, 406 w 1 ; his Astrophel and Stella, 153 seq., 176 w, 706-7, 709-10 ; Nashe's praise of, 707 n 1 ; metre of, 164 n 1 ; address to Cupid in, 166 n 1 Sidney, Sir Robert, 664 Sievers, Eduard Wilhelm, his studies of Shakespeare, 617, 618 and n 1 Silver Street, Cheapside, Shake- speare's residence in, 276 seq. and notes Simraes (or Sims), Valentine, printer, 119 n, 124 n 1, 242 n 1, 361 n 2 Simpson, Percy, on Jonson's contributions to First Folio, 559 n 1 ; on Shakespearean punctuation, 563 n 1 Singer, Samuel Weller, 586 Sir Thomas More, fee for per- formance of, 297 n 2 Sixain or six-lined stanza, its use by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lodge, 144—5 Slater, Martin, also known as Martin, 83 and notes 2 and 3 ; law-suit relating to, 311 n Sly, Christopher, probably drawn from life, 236, 237, 238 Sly, William, actor, member of Lord Chamberlain's company, 53 n 2, 377, 381 n 2, 384 71 1 ; shareholder in Blackfriars theatre, 306, 307 n 1 ; executor ' of Phillips's will, 453 n 1 Smethwick, John, publisher, 106 n 2 ; 113 n. 1, 364, 555 seq., 570 Smith, Henry, 514 Smith, Rafe, 464 Smith, Richard, 70^ Smith, Sir Thomas, his Common- wealth of England cited, 12 n 2 Smith, Wentworth, plays pro- duced by and ascribed to Shakespeare, 260 and n 1, 261 Smith, William, Rouge Dragon, censures actors' heraldic claims 285 and n 3, 286 Smith, William, sonnets of, 208 n 1, 672; his Chloris, 714 Smith, William Henry, 652 Smithson, Miss Harriet, actress, 625 Smyth, Lady Ann, 472 Smyth, Sir Francis, 472, 479 n 1 Snitterfield, birthplace of the dramatist's father, 3-8 ; Arden property at, 3 ; sale of Mary Shakespeare's property at, 14 Snodham, Thomas, printer, 261 ' Soest ' or ' Zoust ' portrait of Shakespeare, 538 Sokolovski, A. L., Russian trans- lator of Shakespeare, 630 Somers, Sir George, wreck of his ship ofi the Bermudas, 430, 431 Somerset, Duke of, 537 Somerset House, Shakespeare's company of actors at, 382-3 Somerville, William, 53L Sonnet, Gascoigne's definition of, 164 n 1 ; meaning of, 267 n 2 ; 705 n 2 ; vogue of, in Eliza- bethan England, 153 seq., 705- 18 ; form of, 164 ; French and Italian models, 169-72 ; its vogue in France, 718-20 ; in Italy, 718 and n Sonnets, Shakespeare's, debt to Ovid's Metamorphoses, 21 and n 1, 180 seq. ; Shakespeare's view of actor's callmg in, 89 ; the poet's first attempts, 154 ; majority composed in 1594, 155-6 ; a few composed later (e.g. cvii. in 1603), 156 ; their 768 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE literary value, 157 ; circulation in manuscript, 157 ; commended by Meres, 158, 177 ; their pirati- cal publication in 1609, 159- 163 ; their form, 163, 164 ; want of continuity, 165 ; the two ' groups,' 165, 166 ; main topics of the first ' group,' 166, 167 ; of the second ' group,' 167, 168 ; re-arrangement in the edition of 1640, 168 ; not to be regarded as unqualified auto- biography, 168,'"I69," 1'?^, 178 ; censured by Sir John DaVies, 174; comparative study of , 177, 178 ; their borrowed conceits, 179-186 ; the poet's claims of immortality for his sonnets, 186-9 ; the ' will ' sonnets, 189, 695-704; the praise of ' blackness,' 190-2 ; sonnets of vituperation, 192-4 ; ' the dark lady,' 194r-5 ; ' dedica- tory ' sonnets, and biographic facts, 196-200 ; the ' rival poet,' 200-5 ; sonnets of friendship, 205-14 ; Southampton and the sonnets of friendship, 222-9; sonnets of intrigue, 214-22 ; treatment of theme of conflict between love and friendship by other writers, 215-18 ; the likeli- hood of a personal experience in Shakespeare's case, 218-22 ; external evidence of this in Willobie his Avisa (1594), 219- 21 ; summary of conclusions respecting the sonnets, 229, 230 ; editions of, 545-6 ; extant copies of 1609 edition, 545 and n 3 Sonnets, Shakespeare's, quoted with explanatory comments : xiv., 180 n; xx., 162 n ; xxii., 155 n ; xxvi., 174, 198 ; xxxii., 198 ; xxxvii., 200 ; xxxviii, 184, 199 ; xxxix., 200, 213; xlvii., 212, 213 n ; liii., 180 ; Iv., 188 ; Ivii., 213 ; Iviii., 213 n; lix-, 210 n ; Ix., 181 ; Ixii., 155 n, 214 ; Ixiii., 188 ; Ixiv., 182 ; Ixix., 158 n ; Ixx., 167 ; Ixjiii., 155 n ; SOUTHWELL Ixxiv., 200; Ixxvi., 178; Ixxviii., 196, 202 ; Ixxx., 203 ; Ixxxi., 188; xciv., 140, 158; c, 197 ; ci., 180 n ; ciii., 197 ; civ., 162 n ; cvi., 182 ; cvii., 17 n 1 ; 227, 228 ; cxix., 179 n; ex., 89 ; cxi., 89 ; cxx, 189 ; cxxxv., cxxxvi., 162 n ; cxxxviii., 155 n ; cxliii., 162 n ; cxliv., 214; cliv., 185 n; cvii., 662, 669 ; cxxxv.-vi., 697, 698, 700, 701, 702 ; cxxxiv., 703 ; cxliii., 703, 704 Soothern, John, sonnets to the Earl of Oxford, 208 n 1 Sophocles, 17 n 1 Soumarakov, Alexander, Russian translator of Hamlet and Richard III, 629 Southampton, players at, 81, 82 n Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, second Earl of, 657, 658 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of, as a literary patron, 107 n 2, 297, 664-71 ; his relations with Shakespeare, 141-3, 147-8, 152, 197 seq., 300, 657 ; his parentage and birth, 657-9 ; his career, 657-63 ; his youthful beauty, 223, 659-60 ; direct references to, in the sonnets, 222, 223 ; his identity with the youth of Shakespeare's sonnets of ' friendship ' evidenced by his portraits, 223 and n, 225, 226 ; his long hair, 226 n ; his marriage, 661, 662; his relations with the Earl of Essex, 253-5, 457 ; his imprisonment, 226-8, 662 ; his later career, 662, 663 ; his death, 663 ; fascination of the drama for, 665 Southampton, Thomas Wriothes- ley, first Earl of, 657 Southwark, Shakespeare's resi- dence in, 274 seq. Southwark Cathedral, Shakespeare memorial at, 542 ; stained glass portrait at, 542 n Souths ell, Robert, manuscript copies of his Mary Maydalen^s Funeral Tears, 158 n ; his INDEX 769 SOUTHWELL Fourefmdd Meditation, 161 n 1, 681 and n 2, 682 ; dedication of his Short Rule of Life, 678 Southwell, alias Bacon, Thomas, 654 Spain, translations of Shake- speare in, 627, 628 and n 1 Spanish romances in Elizabethan England, 429 n 1 Spenser, Edmund, his use of legal phrases, 44, 654 ; treat- ment of Adonis fable, 144 ; his use of the ' sixain,' 145 ; his re- ference to Shakespeare, 150-1; referred to by Shakespeare, 150-1 ; sonnets of, 164, 708, 712-13 ; translations of sonnets from Du Bellay and Petrarch, 170 and n 3, 719 ; on the immortalising power of verse, 187 ; adulation of Queen Eliza- beth, 207 and n 1, 227, 376; his sonnet to Admiral Lord Charles Howard, 210 ; his in- debtedness to Ariosto, 325 ; story of Lear in his Faerie Queene, 400 ; burial in West- minster Abbey, 500-2 ; absence of his manuscripts, 519-20 ; dedication of the Faerie Queene, 679 Spielmann, M. H., his view of Shakespeare's monument, 525 n ; his opinion of the ' Flower ' portrait of Shakespeare, 531, 532 n 2 ; of the ' Felton ' portrait, 537-8 ; his account of Shakespeare's portraits, 540 n 2 Stael, Mme. de, and the Shake- spearean controversy in France, 623 Stafford, Lord, his compary of actors at Stratford, 24 n 2 Stafford, Simon, printer, 242 n I Stage, Elizabethan, see esp. 14: n 1 Stampa, Gaspara, 718 n 2 Stanhope, Sir John, Lord Stan- hope of Harrington, 383, 385 and n 2 Stansby, WiUiam, printer Staunton, Howard, 570 n 1 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 584-5 STRATFORD Steele, Sir Richard, on Betterton's rendering of Othello, 602 Steevens, George : his edition of the Sonnets, 546 ; his edition of Shakespeare, 581, 582 ; his revision of Johnson's edition, 581 ; his critical comments, 581, 582; styled the 'Puck of commentators,' 582 ; hia Shakespearean forgeries, 646—7. See also 55d w 1,572 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), on Shake- speare, 624 Stephen, King, The History of, 263 Stephenson, H. T., 644 Stinchcombe HUl, referred to as ' the Hill ' in Henry IV, 240 Stone, Nicholas, 497 n 2, 498 n 2 Stopes, Mrs. Charlotte, her ac- count of Shakespeare's bust, 525 n ; her researches on Shake- speare (cited passim), 643 Storm, G. F., engraver of Shake- speare's portrait, 534 n Stothard, Thomas, 610 Stow, John, 38 n 2, 132 n 1, 138 Strange, Lord. See Derby, Earl of Straparola, his Notti and the Merry Wives of Windsor, 247 Strasburg, English actors at, 85 Stratford-on-Avon, popula tion of, 4 and n 1, settlement by John Shakespeare, the dramatist's father, at, 4-6 ; industries at, 4 and n 2 ; church at, 8 and n 2 ; parish registers at, 8 n 2 ; Shakespeare's birthplace at, 8- 12; plague at, 12 and n 1 ; actors at, 13, 124 and n 2 ; grammar school and curriculum at, 15-17 (for masters see under Cotton, John ; Greene, Joseph ; Hunt, Simon ; Jenkins, Tiiomas ; Roche, Walter) ; natives of, settled in London, 37 seq. {see under Combo, William ; Field, Richard ; Locke, Roger ; Orrian , Allan ; Quiney, Richard ; Sadler, John ; Shakespeare, William ; Woodward, Richard) ; routes from, to London, 39, 40 and n 1 ; allusions to, in Taming of the Shrew, 236 ; destructive 3 D 770 ^VILLIAM SHAKESPEARE STRATFORD fires at, 290, 466 ; disastrous harvests at, 291 seq. ; malting at, 291-2 ; appeals for aid to London and to Shakespeare, 292-5, 462, 466 w 2 ; Shake- speare's purchase of property and tithes at, 317-320 ; Shake- speare's support for repair of highways, 462 and n ; Shake- speare's posthumous fame at, 600 and n 1 ; Garrick at, 601 ; the ' Jubilee ' at, 601 ; the ' Tercentenary ' at, 602. See also under Chapel Lane ; Combe, Thomas and William ; Enclo- sure ; New Place ; Shakespeare, William ' Stratford Town ' edition, 5S7 n 1 ' Stratford ' portrait of Shake- speare, 527 Street, Peter, 62 n 1 Stubbes, Philip, his Anatomy of Abuses, 643 Sturley, Abraham, bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon ; his know- ledge of Latin, 18 n 1 ; his letter to Richard Quiney, 293, 295 n 1. See also 320, 462 n Suckling, Sir John, 590 ' Sugred,' applied to Shakespeare's work, 178, 259 and Ji 1 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 609 Sullivan, Barry, 543 Sullivan, E. J., 610 Sullivan, Sir Edward, on Shake- speare's Italian travels, 86 n 2 Sullj', Mounet, French actor, as Hamlet, 625 Sunday, dramatic performances on, 79, 340 Surrey, Earl of, sonnets of, 153, 164 ; imitation of Petrarch, 170 n 2, 705 Sussex, Earl of, lord chamberlain, 62 ; his company of actors, 50 7J 1 ; performances bv, 56 n 2, 130, 400 Sutton, Thomas, 497 n 2, 498 n 2 Swan theatre, Bankside, 59 n 2, 274 n 1 ; description of interior by John de Witt, 73 w 2 ; seating capacity, 73 n 2 ; law- suit relating to, 311 n ' Swan and Maidenhead ' inn, 9-10 Swanston, HUliard, holder of theatrical shares, 303 n, 306 n, 307 71 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, hia criticism of Richard ///,123 ; of Arden of Feversham, 138 ; of Edward III, 139 ; see also 440, 599, 645 Sylvester, Joshua, 670, 716 and n 2 Symmons, Dr. Charles, 586 Tahxjreatt, Jacques, 720 TaUle, Jacques de la, 720 and n Taille, Jean de la, 720 and n Tailor, Robert, his allusion to Pericles, 406 n 2 Talma, the French actor, 534 n ; as Othello, 625 Taming of A Shrew, The, 235 and notes Taming of The Shrew, The, refer- ence to travelling companies in, 70 ; early German translation, 85 71 ; publication of, 113 n 1 ; account of, 235-8 ; probable date of composition, 235 ; its doubtful identity with Love's Labour's Won, 234 ; sources, 235, 236 ; biographical bearing of the induction, 236—8 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 20 n 2, 236, 238, 357 n 2 Tamisier, Pierre, 718 Tansillo, Luigi, 718 n 2 Tarleton, Richard, 151, 247 Tasso, Bernardo, 718 n 2 Tasso, Torquato, 22, 718 n 2 ; influence of, on Shakespeare, 179 n 1, 211, 212 ; on Spenser, 713 ; relations -with the Duke of Ferrara, 211, 212 ; his dialogue on ' imprese ' 455 n Tate, Nahum, 596, 597 Taylor, John, water-poet, 39 n Taylor, Joseph, actor and theatri- cal shareholder, 305 n, 306 n, 307 «, 534 Teares of the Isle of Wight, elegies on the Earl of Southampton, 671 Tell Tale, The, 'fair copy' of 560 n ] INDEX TtnvfM, Tht, 75, 76, 79 « 2, 42r>, 421, 422; performed at Coon, 88, 422, 434, 435 aod iKJ*^*, 65(- ; use of pro*e in, 101 n 2 ; qurCtAtion frora ilontaisne's Eanyt in, 155 *i, 431 ; po=it*cm of, in Pits* Folio, 421; fiist perfonaaiK*; of, 421, 422, aod « 2 ; aoeoTmt of, 427-37 ; eoirtiaBt'eri vitji Cjrm- ieime, iftatar'x 7a2e, and MU- mmmtr Si^4 Dnatm, 428; toeaof tfae infaaKe of Ovid, ^8 ; «u«e*a . 428-31 ; ridfw reek (rf Set GeoKige Sobob' tfetdt oS tibe BenmdaB sad tke fiot ci The Temvt^. 430. 431 : Bignifi- caace of Caiitfei- 431—4 ; rogue •C, 435-4; ^nfjfa] asterpret*- tioiis 4^ tfi, 437; sefleets Shakeepeaccr'B hi^jbeet; ima^aa-- ti-re pc-FOS, 43S; cafitaooE of, »49 aeg. ; witaeaBed by Pcpys, a§3; Dryicn'g »ad Dfcrr-aiiit'B adaptarif and Shwlvel'B ie*i- eaon, 396 ; paaeages e&ed, 30, 32 » 2, 86, 428, 4311, 433 «, 434 ' Teapie rfciiim« bh. The,' 386 Ti—j|iwnv Alfred, Losd, Im viev- -6 aiid » 2 ; costume, 76-7 and « 1, 3<>% » ; a}»eo«e of woBkea aetoxs, 77-ek asd » ; peograaaMs aad advertase- ■MmU at, 78-« ; araae at, 79 ; Saaday p€timaiii n r»B at, 79 ; Pnitaa oaiecy a^aiDrt, 79-§0 ; pedUbilion «f daring L^e&t aadceasem ol pfagae, W; toae of pcrfenuaees, 89 aad « 3 ; ^aiae «C chares ia, 312 k 2 ; e^ye stbeaspt to B a pptq g , 336- 40. Sm JLso vmer Bfaa^ fnai?, Coekpit, GDaarisefB, Cazto^ FoitBae, Ciebe, Hope, Ybb. yaraiE, Seviagitoa "B^Mta, FlMieaEXj'PTrrate' tlKestr«s,E«d Bd, BoBe, Svam Hate Tla^ttre, IVafaieal lavsate. JSee 310 m Hkeobaid, IjsmTm, \m eaBaB^zXvx& rA Hmmiia, 3&3; Ioe piaj ItvMf. FdLsd»a»i iSkis^ Vo be by Sbakespeare, 438 aai a 3, ^9 aad a 1 ; Us enfianBt of Pope, 576; Us editiaa of Oake- speare, 576, 577 aad « 2; has texToal enwadbitasBs;, 977 aad Kcte*. 578; las ei&taml feca, 577 K 2, 586 Ihoobaidn, xsjal pala«e at, i8 x^SEBOB, ^^saai^ v4o Yiaamtm, Amlarofee^ bis opeca of Hmmdk, «Sa llbaaipBaaL, Jobs, ca^^aver, 586 Tbaaaa, W. J^ 444 Ba^CM ~ 58r7 WSBaaa, ^9 rr, G. W^ «44 fisber of teaa^eepesTe's soametK, Ui-O, .>4T, -S-S5 ; Isffi rda- taaaa w3A. Maoem^ IM ; adds A. Iahkm's CTsa^datat to iiK odection. of WKsan^bE, liW ; Ub bomiastie deSeastasa to 'Ife. W. H:,' 1«1, 16; km ^^ J'^'M^^^m^SBa, ^jt %ats ciSaainS, IfiB ; libe t!ra& iaabary «£, aad 'lie W. H-,' €73-S5 llaale, Hsirr. 52 « 4 Tbjaid. Fsafeie de. 718 3 3 2 772 ^VILLIAIH SHAKESPEAEE Tieck, Ludwig, German translator of Shakespeare, 616 Tilney, Edmund, 384 n Timon of Athens, 75, 402-4; date of composition, 402 ; a previous play on the same subject, 402 and n 1 ; its sources, 402. 403 ; the divided authorship, 403, 404 ; Shad- well's revision, 596 Tito Andronico : a German play, 129 n2 Tito and Gesippo, story of, 216 and n, 217 and n Titus Andronicus, acted by Earl of Pembroke's company, 56, 130; and by Lord Sussex's men, 56 n 2, 130 ; performed in Germany, 84 n 2 ; publica- tion of, 112 n 3, 128, 130; Meres's reference to, 129 ; Ravenscroft's assertion as to its authenticity, 129 ; Shake- speare's share in, 129 ; his coadjutors, 129 ; plays on the theme, 129 and n 2 ; editions of, 130-1, 548 seq. ; mentioned by Meres, 259 ; passages cited, 19 n2,20n 1, 33 Tttus and Vespasian, 129 and n 2 Tofte, Robert, describes per- formance of Love's Labour's Lost, 102 and n 1 ; his Laura, 714, 715 ; his Alba, 715 n 2 Tolstoy, his attack on Shake- speare, 631 and n 2 Tompson, John, 279 Tonson, Jacob, bookseller, 575, 576 and n 1 Tooke, John Home, his copy of the First Folio, 564 and n 4 Tooley, Nicholas, 453 n 1 Tottel, Henry, 705 Tourgeniev, influence of Shake- speare on, 630 Tragicomedy, definition of, 419, 420 n 1 ; first experiments in, due to Italian or Franco- Italian influence, 419 ; vogue of, assured by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Faithful Shep- herdess, Philaster, and A King and no Kiyig, 420 ; other Eliza- bethan tragicomedies, 419 and 71 1, 420 and n 1 ; Shakespeare's contributions to, 419-20 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 607 and 71 2 Treheme, John, 497 n 2 Trinity College, Cambridge, col- lection of quartos at, 553 Troilusand Cressida, 367-73 ; use of prose in, 101 71 2 ; reference to theatrical shares in, 303 n ; date of production, 367 ; the quarto edition of 1609, 368 and n 2, 369; the First Folio version, 369 and n 1, 563 seq. ; treatment of the theme, 370 ; plot drawn from medieval and not classical tradition, 371 ; attempt to treat play as Shake- speare's contribution to con- troversy between Jonson, Marston, and Dekker, 373 n 1 ; Dryden's adaptation, 596 ; pas- sages cited, 351, 432, 653 n 2 Trundell, John, stationer, 361 and n 2 Turbervile, George, 705 n 2 Turbutt, W. G., his copy of the First Folio, 568 and n 1 Turner, Charles, 537 Turton, Thomas, bishop of Ely, 532 Twain, Mark, 655 Twelfth Night, use of prose in, 101 n 2 ; account of, 328-332 date of production, 328, 329 allusion to the ' new map 328 and n 3 ; produced at Court, 328 ; at Middle Temple Hall, 71, 329 ; Manningham's description of, 329, 422 ; Italian sources of, 98, 329-30 ; the new characters, 332 ; publication of, 332, 333; reference to Puritans in, 465 n 4 ; editions of 548 seq. ; passages cited, 30 71 1 ; 32 71 1 ; 186 7i 2 ; 329 ti 1 ; 465 n 4 Twine, Laurence, his translation of ApoUonius of Tyre, 405 n 1 Twiss, F., 645 n Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, ^ early German rendering, 84 n 2 ; INDEX 773 debt to John Lyly, 105, 106; sources of, 107 and n 1 ; debt to Montemayor, 107 and n ; pub- lication of, 108 ; reference to sonnetteering in, 175 ; the struggle of friendship with love in, 218 ; mentioned by Meres, 258 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 86, 175 Two Italian Oentlemen, 107 and n 1 Two Noble Kinsmen, 216, 439-41 ; attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare, 439, 440 ; plot drawn from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, 440 ; Shakespeare's al- leged share in, 440, 441 ; Mas- singer's alleged share in, 441 ; D'Avenant's adaptation of, 596 Tyler, Thomas, on the Sonnets, 160 n 2, 686 n 1, 694 n 1, 702 n 1 Udall, Nicholas, his Ralph Roister Doister, 91 Ulrici : his criticism of Shake- speare, 618 Underbill, Fulk, 288 Underbill, Hercules, 288 Underbill, William, owner of New Place, 288 Underwood, John, his will, 60 « 2 ; shareholder in Curtain theatre, 302 n 1 ; in Globe theatre, 305 n ; in Blackfriars, 305 n ; 307 w University dramatic performances, 70 n 1 Vandergucht, Gerard, his crayon copy and engraving of the ' Chandos ' portrait, 535-6 Variorum editions of Shake- speare, 583, 584 Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, 720 and n VautroUier, Thomas, Huguenot printer of London, 41-2, 335 Vega, Lope de, 110 n Velasco, Juan Fernandez de, duke de Frias, Constable of Castile, entertained at Somerset House, 382-4 Venesyon Comedy, The, 134 Vengerov, Prof., Russian trans- lator of Shakespeare, 630 Venus and Adonis, publication of, 42, 141 ; the dedicatory letter to the Earl of Southampton, 140 ; its debt to Ovid, 143 ; influence of Lodge, 144—5 ; vogue of the classical story, 144 and 145 n 1 ; the metre, 145 ; the poem's popularity, 148; editions, 149-50, 544; praised by Meres, 177, 259 ; Gabriel Harvey's mention, 359 and n 1 ; extant copies of early editions, 545 n 1 ; passage cited 186 Verdi, his operas of Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff, 627 Vere, Lady Elizabeth, 232, 660 Verney, Sir Richard, 472 Vernon, Mistress Elizabeth, 661, 662 Verona, statue of Shakespeare at, 541-2 Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 583 n 1 Verreiken, Louis, 65 n 1, 384 Verri, Alessandro, Italian trans- lator of Hamlet and Othello, 627 Vertue, George : his engraving of Shakespeare's monument, 525- 6 ; of ' Chandos ' portrait, 535 ; of a miniature of Shakespeare, 538 Victor, Wilhelm, 645 Vigny, Alfred de, his version of Othello, 624 Villemain, on Shakespeare, 624 Vincent, Augustine, 567 and n Virgil, 16, 17, 21, 22 Virginia, expeditions to, equipped by Southampton, 663 Virginia Company, 663 Visor, William, in Henry IV, 240 Visscher, his view of London, 62 n 2 Voltaire, adverse criticisms of Shakespeare by, 620 and n 4, 621, 622, 623 ; opponents of his views in France, 621, 622 Voss, J. H., German translator of Shakespeare, 616 774 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Wales, Henry Prince of, his patronage of actors, 378 n 1 Walker, Barbara. See under Clopton, Lady Walker, Sir Edward, 515 and n 3 Walker, Henry of Stratford, 317 and n 1, 459, 462 m, 471 n Walker, Henry, citizen of London, 317 n 1 Walker, R., publisher, 576 n 1 Walker, W. Sidney, on Shake- speare's versification, 598 n 2 Walker, WUliam, godson of the dramatist, 317 and n 1, 471 n, 491 Walkley, Thomas, publisher, 389, 680 Wallace, Charles William, his Shakespearean researches quoted 'passim {see esp. 61-5 and notes, 70 n, 73 n 2, 643); his re- searches into Shakespeare's resi- dence in Silver Street, 277 n 2 ; his researches into theatrical lawsuits, 310 n ; discovery of documents relating to Shake- speare's Blackfriars property, 461 n 3 Waller, Lewis, 608 Walley, Henry, publisher, 368 Walmisley, Gilbert, 516 and n Walsh, C. M., on the Sonnets, 160 n 2 Walsinghara, Sir Francis, 36 n 2, 55 n 1 Walton, Izaak, 38 n 2 Warburton, John, 263, 264 and wl Warburton, WUliam, bishop of • Gloucester, his edition of Shake- speare, 579, 580 ; his editorial fees, 577 n 2 Ward, Sir A. W., 646 Ward, J. Q. A., his statue of Shakespeare in New York, 541 Ward, John, actor, 526 Ward, John, vicar of Stratford- on-Avon ; notices of Shake- speare, 316, 450 n 1, 600 ; account of Shakespeare's death, 482-3 ; his diary, 641-2 Ward, WUliam, engraving of Shakespeare's portrait, 527 WHATELY Warner, Sir George, 650 Warner, IVIrs. Mary, actress, 636 Warner, Walter, 297 n 2 Warner, WUliam, translation of Plautus' comedies, 109 ; the story of Lear in his Albion'' s England, 400 Warren, John, 546 Warwick, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of, his company of actors at Stratford, 24 7i 1 ; lord of the manor of Rowington, 319 Watkins, Richard, printer, 674 Watson, Thomas, sonnets of, 95, 153, 170, 171, 705-6, 710; their publication, 157 n ; their foreign origin, 147 and n 2, 171 and n 1 ; Shakespeare's debt to, 178 ; Daniel's debt to, 714. See also 667 n 1, 679 Webb, Judge, 655 Webbe, Alexander, 14 Webbe, Robert, 14 Webster, John, his use of legal phrases, 44 and n ; his share in Caesar's Fall, 337 ; his tribute to Shakespeare, 503 n 1 ; loss of his manuscripts, 519 Weelkcs, Thomas, 267 n 3 Weever, John, his praise of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, 149 ; his Mirror of Martyrs, 245 ; allusion in, to Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral, 334 n 1 Welcombe, enclosure of common lands at, 474 seq. WeUes, Thomas of Carleton, Bed- fordshire, ' cousin ' to Lady Bernard, 321 w 4 West, Benjamin, 610 Westminster Abbey, resting-place of Chaucer and of Shakespeare's contemporaries, 500-2 ; poetic pleas for Shakespeare's burial in, 500-1 Westward for Smelts, coUection of stories called, 247 and n 2, 4:23 Whatcote, Robert, 464 ; witness of Shakespeare's wiU, 485 and n 2 Whateley, Anne, 30 seq. Whately, Archbishop Richard, 651 Whately, Thomas, 599 INDEX 775 Wheler, R. B., his papers at Stratford, 4 m 1 ; his works on Shakespeare, 643 Whetstone, George, his Promos and Cassandra, 392 ; his Heptameron of Ciuill Discourse:^, 392 White, Blanco, 627 White, E. J., 644 White, Edward, publisher, 130, 131 and n 1 White, Richard Grant, 586 White, William, printer, 106 n 1 ; 119 w, 407 n 1 White, W. A., 611 Whitefriars theatre, 59 n 2, 65 n 3 ; shareholders in, 302 n 1, 303 ; lawsuits relating to, 303 n 1, 311 74 ; value of share in, 312 n 2 Whitehall, royal palace at, per- formances at, 68, 152, 370, 383, 385, 387, 388, and n 1, 397-8, 418, 456, 662, 691 Whittington, Thomas, of Shottery, creditor of Shakespeare's wife, 26 n, 280 and n 2 Widener, HaiTy E., 509 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 614 Wilkins, George, his collaboration with Shakespeare in Timon of Athens and Pericles, 404, 408; his Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 404 ; his novel of Pericles, 4^)8 and n 1, n 2 Wilks, Robert, actor, 603 ' Will ' sonnets, the, 189, 695-704 ; Elizabethan meanings of ' will,' 695-6 ; Shakespeare's use of word ' will,' 696-7 ; Shake- speare's puns on the word ' will,' 697-8 ; the play upon ' wish ' and ' will,' 697, 698 ; interpretation of the word in Sonnets cxsxiv.,cxjcxv.,cx2:xvi., cxliii, 698-704 Willis, R., 24 n 1 Willis, Judge, 655 Willobie his Avisa, 219-21, 715 n 2 WUmcote, native place of Shake- speare's mother, 6, 282 seq. ; alleged reference in Taming of the Shrew to. 238 Wilson, J., 537 Wilson, Robert, actor and dra- matist, 51 n 1, 96 n 1, 132 n 1 ; anticipates Shakespeare's Shy- lock in his Three Ladies of London, 132 and n 1 ; part author of play of Oldcastle, 244 WUson, Thomas, 107 n 2 Wilton, Shakespeare and his com- pany at, 379, 691 and n 1 Winchester, players at, 82 and n Winchester, Bishop of, jurisdiction of, 274-5 Wincot (in the Taming of the Shrew), its identification, 237, 238, 239 Windsor, royal palace at, 68, 152, 247, 375, 570 Winsor, Justin, his Bibliography of Quartos and Folios of Shake- speare, 553 n 1 Winstanley, William, 265 Winter's Tale, A, performed at Court, 88, 422, 425, 435, 650; prose in, 101 n 2, 420, 421, 422 ; position of, in First Folio, 421 ; first performance of at the Globe, 421, 422 and n 2, 425 ; notice by Simon Forman, 422 ; account of, 425-7 ; based on Greene's Pan- dosto, 98, 425, 420; Shake- speare's innovations, 426, 427 ; his presentment of country life, of boyhood, 427 ; of girlhood, 427, 436 ; reference to Puritans in, 465 n 4 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; passages cited, 425 n 1, 427 n, 465 n 4 Wire, use of the word, for women's hair, 189 and n 3 Wise, Andrew, publisher, 124 n 1, 242 n 1 Wise, John R., 643 Wislicenvis, Paul, his Shakespeare's Totenmaske, 540 n 1 Wither, George, his indictment of publishers, 100 n. See also 670, 715 n 2 Wits, or Sport upon Sport, The, 73 n 2 Witter, John, shareholder in Globe theatre, 305 ; lawsuit relating to, 310 n ; estimate of the value of his share, 311 776 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Wivell, Abraham, his account of Shakespeare's portraits, 540 n 1 Women actors, absence of, from Elizabethan stage, 77-8 and notes ; first introduced by Thomas Killigrew, 594 n 1 ; the first women actors in Shake- spearean parts, 602-3 Woncot in Henry IV identified as Woodmancote, 240 Wood, Anthony a, 451 Woodmancote. See Woncot Woodward, Richard, 37 n Worcester, Earl of, his company of actors at Stratford, 13, 24 n 2 ; his company of actors on the Continent, 86 n ; taken under patronage of Anne of Denmark, 96, 378 n 1 Wordsworth, Charles, on Shake- speare's knowledge of the Bible, 23 n 2 Wordsworth, William, the poet, on German aesthetic criticism of Shakespeare, 616 and n 2 Wotton, Sir Henry, on the burning of the Globe theatre, 448 n 1 ; on the Earl of Rutland's entertainment of King James I, 457 and n 2 ; letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, 654 n 2 Wright, John, bookseller, 159 Wright, John Itlichael, his chalk drawing of Shakespeare's por- trait, 538 Wright, Thomas, 538 Wright, W. Aldis, 584, 587 n 1 Wriothesley, Lord, 663 WroxaU, Shakespeares at, 2 -3 Wulff, P. F., Danish translator of Shakespeare, 629 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, sonnets of, 153, 164 ; his translations of Petrarch's sonnets, 170 n 2, 705 Wyman, W. H., 653 Wyndham, George, on the sonnets, 160 n 2, ISO n 1, 698 n 1 Xenophon Ephesius, 110 n Yale, copy of First Folio at, 569 Yonge, Bartholomew, 107 n 2 York, players at, 82 and n, 128 ; miracle plays at, 91 Yorkshire Tragedy, A, 262, 404 Young, Edward, 597 Young, William, 646 Zepheria, 707, 712, 713 Zincke, his fraudulent Shake- speare portraits, 534 n Zouch, John, 713 Zucchero, alleged portraits of Shakespeare by, 533 n 3 PBINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COIiCHESTBB LiONDON AND ETON A Life of William Shakespeare By SIR SIDNEY LEE, LittD. SOME ^RESS OPINIONS OF PREVIOUS EDITIONS. ' This masterly work is an honour to English scholarship, an almost perfect mode! of its kind, and it is matter for great national rejoicing that the standard hfe of Shakespeare has at last been made in England. Rarely have we seen a book so wholly satisfying, so admirably planned, so skilfully executed. ... It is an absolutely indispensable handbook for every intelligent reader of the plays.' 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