*RARY
'ERSITY Of LIFORNIA
IL
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE,
A BIOGRAPHY.
FORMING A COMPANION VOLUME
TO THE
NATIONAL EDITION OF THE PICTORIAL SHAKSPERE.
BY CHARLES KNIGHT.
LONDON:
CHARLES KNIGHT, FLEET STREET.
1851.
LONDON : WILLIAM WILCOCKSON,
ROLLS PRINTING OFFICK.
Ur/
ADVERTISEMENT.
THIS is a re-publication, with many alterations of arrangement, and some modifi- cations of opinion grounded upon new information, of a volume published in 1843. That book has befcn long out of print ; and it is a gratification to me to re-produce it in a cheap form.
In the original advertisement I said, " Every Life of Shakspere must, to a certain extent, be conjectural; and all the Lives that have been written are conjectural. This ' Biography ' is only so far more conjectural than any other, as regards the form which it assumes, by which it has been endeavoured to associate Shakspere with the circumstances around him, in a manner which may fix them in the mind of the reader by exciting his interest." I quoted the opinion of Steevens — " All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspere is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon — married, and had children there — went to London, where he commenced actor and wrote poems and plays — returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." I pointed out that this was exaggeration, but I somewhat hastily termed it " slight exaggeration." I fully agree with Mr. Hunter, with regard to the want of information on the life of Shakspere, that he is, in this respect, in the state in which most of his contemporary poets are — Spenser for instance — but with this difference, that we do know more concerning Shakspere than we know of most of his contemporaries of the same class. Admitting this sound reasoning, I still believe that the attempt which I ventured to make, for the first time in English Literature, to write a Biography which, in the absence of Diaries and Letters, should surround the known facts with the local and temporary circumstances, and with the social relations amidst which one of so defined a position must have moved, was not a freak of fancy — a " Burlesque" as one critic has been pleased to call it, — but an approximation to the truth, which could not have been reached by a mere documentary narrative. I venture to think that I have made the course of Shakspere clear and consistent, without any extravagant theories, and with some successful resistance to long received prejudices. If there were faults of taste in the original attempt, I have endeavoured to correct them, in this edition, to the best of my judgment.
CHARLES KNIGHT.
MARCH 1, 1850.
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
TO
THE BIOGRAPHY.
BOOK I.
PAGE
1. Half-Title to Book I. — Infant Shakspere, after Romney 1
CHAPTER I.— ANCESTRY.
2. Arms of John Shakspere . .314. Church of Aston Cantlow . . 8
3. Village of Wilmecote . . 6 |
CHAPTER II.— STRATFORD. 5. Clopton's Bridge . . . .9(6. Snitterfield, 15
CHAPTER III.— THE REGISTER.
7. Ancient Font, formerly in Stratford
Church 10
8. Fac-simile of baptismal register of
W. Shakspere . . . .17
9. The Church Avenue 18
10. Stratford Church . . . .19
11. John Shakspere's House in Henley
Street 21
12. Room in the House in Henley Street 23
CHAPTER IV.— THE SCHOOL.
13. Inner Court of the Grammar School 24 I 15. Chapel of the Guild, and Grammar
14. Interior of the Grammar School . 30 | School : Street Front . . .31
CHAPTER V.— THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 16. Village of Aston Cantlow . . 33 | 17. The Fair 38
CHAPTER VI.— HOLIDAYS.
18. The Boundary Elm, Stratford . 40 I 20. Bidford Bridge . . . .46
19. Shottery 45 | 21. Clopton House .... 50
CHAPTER VII.— KENILWORTH
22. Chimney-piece in Gatehouse, at
Kenil worth . . . .51
23. Queen Elizabeth . . . .52
24. Entrance to the Hall, Kenilworth . 53
25. Earl of Leicester . . . .56
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
CHAPTER VIII.— PAGEANTS.
PAGE
26. Coventry Cross . . . . 57 | 27. St. Mary's Hall, Coventry : Street
Front 63
CHAPTER IX.— THE FIEESIDE.
28. Fireside in the House in Henley | 29. The Fireside. . . . .68
Street . 64
BOOK II.
30. Half-Title to Book II. 69
CHAPTER I.— A CALLING.
31. Stratford Church and Mill. From an original Drawing at the beginning of the last
Century 71
CHAPTER II.— THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD.
32. The Bailiff's Play . . . . 78 | 33. Thomas Sackville .... 83
CHAPTER III.— LIVING IN THE PAST.
34. Guy's Cliff in the 17th Century . 84
35. Tomb of King John, Worcester . 87
37. Ancient Statue of Guy at Guy's Cliff 90
38. St. Mary's Hall: Court Front . . 92
36. Bridge at Evesham
CHAPTER IV.— YORK AND LANCASTER.
39. St. Mary's Hall : Interior . . 94 I 41. Leicester Abbey . . . .103
40. Entrance to Warwick Castle . 98 |
CHAPTER V.— RUINS, NOT or TIME.
42. Evesham : the Bell Tower . . 104
43. Chapter-House, Gateway . . 106
44. Old House : Evesham . . .107
45. Bengeworth Church, 'seen through
the Arch of the Bell Tower . Ill
CHAPTER VI.— THE WAKE.
46. Welford: the Wake 112
CHAPTER VII.— CHARLCOTE.
47. Charlcote Church .... 117 I 49. Charlcote House : from Avenue . 121
48. Deer Barn : Fulbrooke . . . 120 | 50. Charlcote House : from the Avon . 122
CHAPTER VIII.— SPORTS.
51. Daisy Hill 125
52. Ingon Hill 128
54. The Crab Tree . . . .132
55. Bidford Grange . . . .134
53. Marl Cliffs : near Bidford . 128 bis*
* By an error of the Printer, 127 and 128 have been numbered twice.
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
CHAPTER IX.— SOLITARY HOUES.
PAGE
56. Hampton Lucy : from Road near
Alveston . . . . 137
57. Meadows near Welford . . .140
58. Near Alveston 144
59. Old Church of Hampton Lucy . 145
60. A Peep at Charlcote . . . 146
61. Below Charlcote .... 147
62. Near Alveston 149
CHAPTER X.— THE TROTHPLIGHT AND THE WEDDING.
63. Hampton Lucy : Old Church . 150 | 65. House in Charlcote Village . . 159
64. Shottery Cottage . . . .152
BOOK III.
66. Half-Title to Book III 163
CHAPTER I.— LEAVING HOME.
67. Clifford Church 165
Note . 174
CHAPTER II,— A NEW PLAY.
68. A Play at the Blackfriars 175
CHAPTER III. — THE ONLY SHAKE- SCENE.
69. Old London 184
CHAPTER IV.— THE MIGHTY HEART.
70. Funeral of Sydney . . . 199 | 71. Camp at Tilbury . . . .201
CHAPTER V.— LEISURE.
72. Richmond 210
73. St. James's 211
74. Somerset House .... 213
75. Merry Wives of Windsor, performed
before Elizabeth at Windsor . 220
76. Windsor . 221
CHAPTER VI.— THE GLOBE.
77. The Globe Theatre . . .222
78. Entry in Parish Register of Strat-
ford of the Burial of Hamnet Shakspere . . . .227
79. Seal and Autograph of Susanna
Hall 227
80. Autograph of Judith Shakspere . 228
81. Lord Southampton . . .231
CHAPTER VII.— EVIL DAYS.
82. Essex House . . . . 232 I 84. Fac- simile pf the Register of the
83. Earl of Essex . . . . 238 | Burial of John Shakspere . . 240
CHAPTER VIII.— DID SHAKSPERE VISIT SCOTLAND.
85. Edinburgh in the 17th Century . 241 I 87. James the Sixth of Scotland and
86. Dunsinane 244 First of England . . .249
CONTENTS AND ILLUSTEATIONS.
BOOK IV.
Half-Title to Book IV 251
CHAPTER I.— GLIMPSES OF SOCIETY.
PAGE
Jonson . • . . . . 253 | 90. Thomas Dekker .... 267 CHAPTER II. — LABOURS AND REWARDS.
91. Hall of the Middle Temple . . 268
92. Interior of the Temple Church . 270
93. Harefield 272
94. Tenement at Stratford . . 273
95. Funeral of Queen Elizabeth . 274
96. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke 276
97. Philip Herbert, Earl of Mont-
gomery 277
98. Wolsey's Hall, Hampton Court . 278
99. Banqueting-House, Whitehall . 279
CHAPTER III.— REST.
100. The Garden of New Place . . 281
101. Monument of Sir Thomas Lucy . '289
102. The CoUege . . . .291
103. Ancient Hall in the CoUege . 292
104. Fac-simile of entry hi Parish
Register of the Marriage of John
105. Signature of Dr. Hall . . .295
106. House in the High Street, Strat-
ford 296
107. Bishopton Chapel . . . 297
108. Foot-bridge above the Mill . . 298
109. Stratford Church . . 299
Hall and Susanna Shakspere . 295
CHAPTER IV.— VISITS TO LONDON. 110. The Bear Garden 300
CHAPTER V. — THE LAST BIRTHDAY.
111. Chancel of Stratford Church . 308
112. Monument of John Combe . . 310
113. Weston Church . . . .312
114. Signature of Thomas Quiney . 312
115. Fac-simile of entry in Parish Register of the Burial of Wil- liam Shakspere . . .316
APPENDIX.
I. SHAKSPERE'S WILL. 116. Monument at Stratford 3J9
II. SOME POINTS OF SHAKSPERE'S WILL.
117. Fac-simile of Register of the Burial
of Mrs. Shakspere . . .323
118. Ditto of Susanna Hall . . .323
III. THE AUTOGRAPHS OF SHAKSPERE. 121. Fac-simile of Autographs, as Frontispiece.
IV. STRATFORD REGISTERS. V. THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKSPERE.
119. Ditto of Judith Quiney . . 324
120. Signature of Eliza Barnard . 324
I Infant Shaksp*re.)
•==g
I Arras of John Shakspere.l CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY
ON the 22nd of August, 1485, there was a battle fought for the crown of England, a short battle ending in a decisive victory. In that field a crowned king, " manfully fighting in the middle of his enemies, was slain and brought to his death;" and a politic adventurer put on the crown, which the immediate descendants of his house wore for nearly a century and a quarter. The battle-field was Bosworth. Two months afterwards the Earl of Richmond was more solemnly crowned and anointed at Westminster by the name of King Henry VII. ; arid " after this," continues the chronicler, " he began to remember his especial friends and fautors, of whom some he advanced to honour and dignity, and some he enriched with possessions and goods, every man according to his desert and merit." * Was there hi that victo- rious army of the Earl of Richmond, — which Richard denounced as a " company of traitors, thieves, outlaws, and runagates," — an Englishman bearing the name of Chacksper, or Shakespeyre, or Schakespere, or Schakespeire, or Shakespeyre, or Schakspere, or Shakespere, or Shakspere,t — a martial name, however spelt ? " Breakspear, Shakespear, and the like, have been surnames imposed upon the first bearers of them for valour and feats of arms." J Of the warlike achievements of
* Hall's Chronicle.
t A list of the brethren and sisters of the Guild of Knowle, near Rowington, in Warwickshire, exhibits a great number of the name of Shakspere in that fraternity, from about 1460 to 1527 ; and the names are spelt with the diversity here given, Shakspere being the latest.
t Verstegan's " Restitution," &c.
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
this Shakspcre there is no record : his name or his deeds would have no interest for us unless there had been born, eighty years after this battle-day, a direct de- scendant from him —
ention,
" Whose muse, full of high thought's inventi Doth like himself heroically sound ; " * —
a Shakspcre, of whom it is also said —
'* He seems to shake a lance As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance." f
A public document, bearing the date of 1599, affirms, upon "credible report," of " John Shakspere, now of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentle- man," that his " parent, great-grandfather, and late antccessor, for his faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince King Henry VII. of famous memory, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements, given to him in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit." Such is the recital of a grant of arms to John Shakspere, the father of William Shakspere, which document refers to "his ancient coat of arms, heretofore assigned to him, whilst he was her Majesty's officer and bailiff of Stratford." In those parts of Warwickshire, then, lived and died, we may assume, the faithful and approved servant of the " unknown Welshman," as Richard called him, who won for himself the more equivocal name of " the most prudent prince." He was probably advanced in years when Henry ascended the throne ; for in the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, his great-grandson, John Shakspere, was a burgess of the corporation of Stratford, and was in all probability born about 1530. The family had continued in those parts, we are assured, " by some descents ; " but how they were occupied in the business of life, what was their station in society, how they branched out into other lines of Shaksperes, we have no distinct record. The name may be traced by legal documents in many parishes of Warwickshire ; but we learn from a deed of trust executed in 1 550, by Robert Arden, the maternal grand- father of William Shakspere, that Richard Shakspere was the occupier of land in Snitterfield, the property of Robert Arden. At this parish of Snitterfield lived a Henry Shakspere, who as we learn from a declaration in the Court of Record at Strat- ford, was the brother of John Shakspere.IjI It is conjectured, and very reasonably, that Richard Shakspere, of Snitterfield, was the paternal grandfather of William Shakspere. Snitterfield is only three miles distant from Stratford. They probably were cultivators of the soil, unambitious small proprietors.
Harrison, a painter of manners who comes near the time of John Shakspere, has described the probable condition of his immediate ancestors : " Yeomen are those
which by our law are called legates homines, free men born English
The truth is, that the word is derived from the Saxon term zeoman, or geoman,
which signifieth (as I have read) a settled or staid man This sort of
people have a certain pre-eminence and more estimation than labourers and the common sort of artificers."
But the grant of arms in 1599, opens another branch of inquiry into Shakspere's ancestry. It says, " for that the said John Shakespere having married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wellingcote, [Wilmecote] and also produced this his ancient coat of arms, we [the heralds] have likewise upon one other escutcheon impaled the same with the ancient arms of the said Arden of Welling-
* Spenser. f Ben Jonson.
J See Halliwell's "Life of Shakspere," p. 8, and Collier's " Life," p. 62.
CHAP. I.] ANCESTRY.
cote." They add that John Shakspere, and his children, issue, and posterity, may bear and use the same shield of arms, single or impaled.
The family of Arden was one of the highest antiquity in Warwickshire. Dugdale traces its pedigree uninterruptedly up to the time of Edward the Confessor. Under the head of Curd worth, a parish in the hundred of Hemlingford, he says — " In this place I have made choice to speak historically of that most ancient and worthy family, whose surname was first assumed from their residence in this part of the country, then and yet called Arden, by reason of its woodiness, the old Britons and Gauls using the word in that sense." At the time of the Norman invasion there resided at Warwick, Turchil, " a man of especial note and power " and of " great possessions." In the Domesday Book his father, Alwyne, is styled vice comes. Turchil, as well as his father, received favour at the hands of the Conqueror. He retained the possession of vast lands in the shire, and he occupied Warwick Castle as a military governor. He was thence called Turchil de Warwick by the Normans. But Dugdale goes oil to say — " He was one of the first here in England that, in imitation of the Normans, assumed a surname, for so it appears that he did, and wrote himself Turchittus de Eardene, in the days of King William Rufus." The history of the De Ardens, as collected with wonderful industry by Dugdale, spreads over six centuries. Such records seldom present much variety of incident, however great and wealthy be the family to which they are linked. In this instance a shrievalty or an attainder varies the register of birth and marriage, but generation after generation passes away without leaving any enduring traces of its sojourn on the earth. Fuller has not the name of a single De Arden amongst his " Worthies" — men illustrious for something more than birth or riches, — with the exception of those who swell the lists of sheriffs for the county. The pedigree which Dugdale gives of the Arden family brings us no nearer in the direct line to the mother of Shakspere than to Robert Arden, her great-grandfather : he was the third son of Walter Ardeu, who married Eleanor, the daughter of John Hampden, of Buck- inghamshire ; and he was brother to Sir John Arden, squire for the body to Henry VII. Malone, with laudable industry, has continued the pedigree in the younger branch. Robert's son, also called Robert, was groom of the chamber to Henry VII. He appears to have been a favourite ; for he had a valuable lease granted him by the king of the manor of Yoxsall, in Staffordshire, and was also made keeper of the royal park of Aldercar. Robert Arden, the groom of the chamber, probably left the court upon the death of his master. He married, and he had a son, also Robert, who had a family of seven daughters. The youngest was Mary, the mother of William Shakspere.
From the connection of these immediate ancestors of Shakspere's mother with the court of Henry VII., Malone has assumed that they were the " antecessors "* of John Shakspere declared to have been advanced and rewarded by the conqueror of Bosworth Field. Because Robert Arden had a lease of the royal manor of Yoxsall, in Staffordshire, Malone also contends that the reward of lands and tenements stated in the grant of arms to have been bestowed upon the ancestor of John Shakspere really means the beneficial lease to Robert Arden. He holds that popularly the grandfather of Mary Arden would have been called the grandfather of John Shak- spere, and that John Shakspere himself would have so called him. The answer is very direct. The grant of arms recites that the greatgrandfather of John Shakspere had been advanced and rewarded by Henry VII., and then goes on to say that John
* In a draft of the grant of arms, dated 1596, there are several variations from that of 1599. Amongst others we have, — " whose parents and late antecessors were for this valiant and faithful service " instead of " parent, great-grandfather, and late antecesaor, for his faithful and approved sen-ice," &c.
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i.
Shakspere had married the daughter of Eobert Arden of Wellingcote : He has an ancieiit coat-of-arms of his own derived from his ancestor, and the arms of his wife are to be impaled with these his own arms. Can the interpretation of this docu- ment then be that Mary Arden's grandfather is the person pointed out as John Shakspere's grraz£-grandfather ; and that, having an ancient coat-of-arms himself, his ancestry is really that of his wife, whose arms are totally different 1
Mary Ardeii ! The name breathes of poetry. It seems the personification of some Dryad of
" Many a huge-grown wood, and many a shady grove/'
called by that generic name of Arden, — a forest with many towns,
*' Whose footsteps yet are found, In her rough woodlands more than any other ground, That mighty Arden held even in her height of pride, Her one hand touching Trent, the other Severn's side." *
High as was her descent, wealthy and powerful as were the numerous branches of her family, Mary Arden, we doubt not, led a life of usefulness as well as innocence, within her native forest hamlet. Her father died in December, 1556. His will is dated the 24th of November in the same year, and the testator styles himself " Kobert Arden, of Wyhncote, in the paryche of Aston Cauntlow."
[Village of Wilmecote,]
The face of the country must have been greatly changed in three centuries. A canal, with lock rising upon lock, now crosses the hill upon which the village stands ; but traffic has not robbed the place of its green pastures and its shady nooks, though nothing is left of the ancient magnificence of the great forest. There is very slight
Drayton. " Polyolb'on," 13th Song.
CHAP. I.] ANCESTRY.
appearance of antiquity about the present village, and certainly not a house in which we can conceive that Robert Arden resided.
It was in the reign of Philip and Mary that Robert Arden died ; and we cannot therefore be sure that the wording of his will is any absolute proof of his religious opinions : — " First, I bequeath my soul to Almighty God and to our blessed Lady Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven, and my body to be buried in the churchyard of Saint John the Baptist in Aston aforesaid." Mary, his youngest daughter, occupies the most prominent position in the will : — " I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter Mary all my land in "Wilmecote, called Asbies, and the crop upon the ground, sown and tilled as it is, and six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence of money to be paid over ere my goods be divided," To his daughter Alice he bequeaths the third part of all his goods, moveable and unmoveable, in field and town : to his wife Agnes (the step-mother of his children) six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence, under the condition that she should allow his daughter Alice to occupy half of a copyhold at Wilmecote, the widow having her "jointure in Snitterfield." The remainder of his goods is divided amongst his other children. Alice and Mary are made the "full executors" to his will. We thus see that the youngest daughter has an undivided estate and a sum of money ; and the crop was also bequeathed to her. The estate consisted of fifty-six acres of arable and pasture, and a house. But she also possessed some property in Snitterfield, which had probably been secured to her upon her father's second marriage. It was in Snitterfield that Richard Shakspere occupied part of the Arden property.
Some twenty years after the death of Robert Ardeii, Harrison described the growth of domestic luxury in England, saying, " There are old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain, which have noted three things to be marvellously altered in England within their sound remembrance." One of these enormities is the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas formerly each one made his fire against a reredosse in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat : the second thing is the great amendment of lodging — the pillows, the beds, the sheets, instead of the straw pallet, the rough mat, the good round log or the sack of chaff under the head : the third thing is the exchange of vessels, as of treen platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. He then describes the altered splendour of the substantial farmer : " A fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessels going about the house ; three or four feather-beds ; so many coverlids and carpets of tapestry ; a silver salt, a bowl for wine, and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit." Robert Arden had certainly not a mansion filled with many needless articles for use or ornament. In the inventory of his goods taken after his death we find table-boards, forms, cushions, benches, and one cupboard in his hall ; there are painted cloths [pictures] in the hall and in the chamber ; seven pair of sheets, five board-cloths, and three towels ; there is one feather-bed and two mat- tresses, with sundry coverlets, and articles called canvasses, three bolsters, and one pillow. The kitchen boasts four pans, four pots, four candlesticks, a basin, a chafing-dish, two cauldrons, a frying-pan, and a gridiron. And yet this is the grandson of a groom of a king's bedchamber, an office filled by the noble and the rich, and who, in the somewhat elevated station of a gentleman of worship, would probably possess as many conveniences and comforts as a rude state of society could command. There was plenty outdoors — oxen, bullocks, kine, weaning calves, swine, bees, poultry, wheat in the barns, barley, oats, hay, peas, wood in the yard, horses, colts, carts, ploughs. Robert Arden had lived through unquiet times, when there was little accumulation, and men thought rather of safety than of indulgence : the days of security were at hand. Then came the luxuries that Harrison looked upon with much astonishment and some little heartburning.
8
WILLIAM SHAKSFERE t A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i
And so iu the winter of 1556 was Mary Ardcn left without the guidance of a father. We learn from a proceeding in chancery some forty years later, that with the land of Asbies there went a messuage. Mary Arden had therefore a roof-tree of her own. Her sister Alice was to occupy another property in Wilmecote with the widow. Mary Arden lived in a peaceful hamlet ; but there were some strange things around her, — incomprehensible things to a very young woman. When she went to the church of Aston Cantlow, she now heard the mass sung, and saw the beads bidden ; whereas a few years before there was another form of worship within those walls. She learnt, perhaps, of mutual persecutions and intolerance, of neigh- bour warring against neighbour, of child opposed to father, of wife to husband. She might have beheld these evils. The rich religious houses of her county and vicinity had been suppressed, their property scattered, their chapels and fair chambers desecrated, their very walls demolished. The new power was trying to restore them, but, even if it could have brought back the old riches, the old reverence had passed away. In that solitude she probably mused upon many things with an anxious heart. The wealthier Ardens of Kingsbury and Hampton, of Kotley and Rodburne and Park Hall, were her good cousins ; but bad roads and bad times perhaps kept them separate. And so she lived a somewhat lonely life, till a young yeoman of Stratford, whose family were her father's tenants, came to sit oftener and oftener upon the wooden benches in the old hall — a substantial yeoman, a burgess of the corporation in 1557 or 1558 ; and then in due season, perhaps in the very year when Romanism was lighting its last fires in England, and a queen was dying with "Calais" written on her heart, Mary Arden and John Shakspere were, in all likelihood, standing before the altar of the parish church of Aston Cantlow, and the house and lands of Asbies became administered by one who took possession " by the right of the said Mary," who thenceforward abided for half a century in the good town of Stratford. There is no register of the marriage discovered : but the date must have been about a year after the father's death ; for " Joan Shakspere, daughter to John Shakspere," was, according to the Stratford register, baptized on the 15th September, 1558.
"^
•'•*>k*J
[Church of Aston Cantlow.]
CHAP, n.]
STRATFORD.
-
' [Clopton's Bridge.]
CHAPTER II.
STRATFORD.
A PLEASANT place is this quiet town of Stratford — a place of ancient traffic, " the name having been originally occasioned from the ford or passage over the water upon the great street or road leading from Henley in Arden towards London."* England was not always a country of bridges : rivers asserted their own natural rights, and were not bestrid by domineering man. If the people of Henley in Arden would travel towards London, the Avon might invite or oppose their passage at his own good will ; and, indeed, the river so often swelled into a rapid and dangerous stream, that the honest folk of the one bank might be content to hold somewhat less intercourse with their neighbours on the other than Englishmen now hold with the antipodes. But the days of improvement were sure to arrive. There were charters for markets, and charters for fairs, obtained from King Richard and King John ; and in process of time Stratford could shew in a wooden bridge, though with- out a causey, and exposed to constant damage by flood. And then an alderman of London, — in days when the very rich were not slow to do magnificent things for public benefit, and did less for their own vain pride and luxury, — built a stone bridge over the Avon, which has borne the name of Clopton's Bridge, even from the days of Henry VII. until this day. Ecclesiastical foundations were numerous at Stratford ; and such were, in every case, the centres of civilization and prosperity. The parish church was a collegiate one, with a chantry of five priests ; and there was an ancient guild and chapel of the Holy Cross, partly a religious and partly a civil institution. A grammar-school was connected with the guild ; and the muni-
* Dugdale.
10 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
cipal government of the town was settled in a corporation by charter of Edward VI., and the grammar-school especially maintained. Here then was a liberal accumula- tion, such as belongs only to an old country, to make a succession of thriving communities at Stratford ; and they did thrive, according to the notion of thrift in those days. But we are not to infer that when John Shakspere removed the daughter and heiress of Arden from the old hall of Wilmecote he placed her in some substantial mansion in his corporate town, ornamental as well as solid in its archi- tecture, spacious, convenient, fitted up with taste, if not with splendour. Stratford had, in all likelihood, no such houses to offer ; it was a town of wooden houses, a scattered town, — no doubt with gardens separating the low and irregular tenements, sleeping ditches intersecting the properties, and stagnant pools exhaling in the road. A zealous antiquarian has discovered that John Shakspere inhabited a house in Henley Street as early as 1552 ; and that he, as well as two other neighbours, was fined for making a dung-heaps in the street.* In 1553, the jurors of Stratford present certain inhabitants as violators of the municipal laws : from which present- ment we learn that ban-dogs were not to go about unmuzzled ; nor sheep pastured in the ban-croft for more than an hour each day ; nor swine to feed on the common land uuringed.t It is evident that Stratford was a rural town, surrounded with common fields, and containing a mixed population of agriculturists and craftsmen. The same character was retained as late as 1618, when the privy council represented to the corporation of Stratford that great and lamentable loss had " happened to that town by casualty of fire, which, of late years, hath been very frequently occa- sioned by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combus- tible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without restraint."!
The population of the corporate town of Stratford, containing within itself rich endowments and all the framework of civil superiority, would appear insignificant in a modern census. The average annual number of baptisms in 1564 was fifty- five ; of burials in the same year forty-two : these numbers, upon received principles of calculation, would give us a total population of about one thousand four hundred. In a certificate of charities, &c., in the thirty-seventh year of Henry VIII., the number of "houselyng people" in Stratford is stated to be fifteen hundred. This population was furnished with all the machinery by which Englishmen, even in very early times, managed their own local affairs, and thus obtained that aptitude for practical good government which equally rejects the tyranny of the one or of the many. The corporation in the time of John Shakspere consisted of fourteen alder- men and fourteen burgesses, one of the aldermen being annually elected to the office of bailiff. The bailiff held a court of record every fortnight, for the trial of all causes within the jurisdiction of the borough in which the debt and damages did not amount to thirty pounds. There was a court-leet also, which appointed its ale- tasters, who presided over the just measure and wholesome quality of beer, that necessary of life in ancient times ; and which court-leet chose also, annually, four affeerors, who had the power in their hands of summary punishment for offences for which no penalty was prescribed by statute. The constable was the great police officer, and he was a man of importance, for the burgesses of the corporation inva- riably served the office. John Shakspere appears from the records of Stratford to have gone through the whole regular course of municipal duty. In 1556 he was on the jury of the court-leet ; in 1557, an ale-taster ; in 1558, a burgess ; in 1559, a
* Hunter : "New Illustrations," vol. i. p. 18.
f The proceedings of the court are given in Mr. Halliwell's "Life of Shakespeare/' — a book which may be fairly held to contain all the documentary evidence of this life which has been discovered. | Chalmers's "Apology," p. 618.
CHAP. II.] STRATFORD. 11
constable ; in 1560, an affeeror ; in 1561, a chamberlain ; in 1565, an alderman ; and in 1568, high bailiff of the borough, the chief magistrate.
There have been endless theories, old and new, as to the worldly calling of John Shakspere. There are ancient registers in Stratford, minutes of the Common Hall, proceedings of the Court-leet, pleas of the Court of Record, writs, which have been hunted over with unwearied diligence, and yet they tell us little of John Shak- spere ; and what they tell us is too often obscure. When he was elected an alderman in 1565, we can trace out the occupations of his brother aldermen, and readily come to the conclusion that the municipal authority of Stratford was vested, as we may naturally suppose it to have been, in the hands of substantial tradesmen, brewers, bakers, butchers, grocers, victuallers, mercers, woollen-drapers.* Prying into the secrets of time, we are enabled to form some notion of the literary acquire- ments of this worshipful body. On rare, very rare occasions, the aldermen and burgesses constituting the town council affixed their signatures, for greater solemnity, to some order of the court ; and on the 29th of September, in the seventh of Eliza- beth, upon an order that John Wheler should take the office of bailiff, we have nineteen names subscribed, aldermen and burgesses. There is something in this document which suggests a motive higher than mere curiosity for calling up these dignitaries from their happy oblivion, saying to each, " Dost thou use to write thy name ? or hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest, plain-dealing man ? " Out of the nineteen six only can answer, " I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name." We were reluctant to yield our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name, in this document. But subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used two marks — one, something like an open pair of compasses — the other, the common cross. Even half a century later, to write was not held indispensable by persons of some pretension. In Decker's " Wonder of a Kingdom," the following dialogue takes place between Gentili and Buzardo :
" Gen. Wh.it qualities arc you furnished withl
Buz. My education has been like a gentleman. Gen. Have you any skill in song or instrument ?
Buz. As a gentleman should have ; I know all but play on none : I am no barber. Gen. Barber ! no, sir. I think it. Are you a linguist'?
Buz. As a gentleman ought to be ; one tongue serves one head; I am no pedlar, to travel countries.
Gen. What skill ha' you in horsemanship '{
Buz. As other gentlemen have ; I ha' rid some beasts in my time.
Gen. Can you write and read then ?
Buz. As most of your gentlemen do ; my bond has been taken with my mark at it.'
We must not infer that one who gave his bond with his mark at it, was necessarily ignorant of all literature. It was very common for an individual to adopt, in the language of Jack Cade, " a mark to himself," possessing distinctness of character, and almost heraldically alluding to his name or occupation. Many of these are like ancient merchants' marks ; and on some old deeds the mark of a landowner alien- ating property corresponds with the mark described in the conveyance as cut in the turf, or upon boundary stones, of unenclosed fields.
One of the aldermen of Stratford in 1565, John Wheler, is described in the town records as a yeoman. He must have been dwelling in Stratford, for we have seen that he was ordered to take the office of high bailiff, an office demanding a near and constant residence. We can imagine a moderate landed proprietor cultivating his
* See Malone's " Life of Shakspeare," Boswell's Malone, vol. ii., p. 77.
1 2 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
own soil, renting perhaps other land, seated in a house in the town of Stratford, such as it was in the middle of the sixteenth century, as conveniently as in a soli- tary grange several miles away from it. Such a proprietor, cultivator, yeoman, we consider John Shakspere to have been. In 1556, the year that Robert, the father of Mary Arden, died, John Shakspere was admitted at the court-leet to two copyhold estates in Stratford. The jurors of the leet present that George Tumor had alienated to John Shakspere and his heirs one tenement, with a garden and croft, and other premises in Grenehyll Street, held of the lord at an annual quit-rent ; and John Shakspere, who is present in court and does fealty, is admitted to the same. The same jurors present that Edward West has alienated to John Shakspere one tene- ment and a garden adjacent in Henley Street, who is in the same way admitted, upon fealty done to the lord. Here then is John Shakspere, before his marriage, the purchaser of two copyholds in Stratford, both with gardens, and one with a croft, or small enclosed field.*
In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenances, called Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds. When he married, the estate of Asbies, within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his possession ; and so did some landed property at Snitterfield. With these facts before us, scanty as they are, can we reasonably doubt that John Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when men of substance very often thought it better to take the profits direct than to share them with the tenant ? In " A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale of this Realme of Englande," pub- lished in 1581, — a Dialogue once attributed to William Shakspere, — the knight says, speaking of his class, " many of us are enforced either to keep pieces of our own lands when they fall in our own possession, or to purchase some farm of other men's lands, and to store it with sheep or some other cattle, to help make up the decay in our revenues, and to maintain our old estate withal, and yet all is little enough."
The belief that the father of Shakspere was a small landed proprietor and culti- vator, employing his labour and capital in various modes which grew out of the occupation of land, offers a better, because a more natural, explanation of the cir- cumstances connected with the early life of the great poet than those stories which would make him of obscure birth and servile employments. Take old Aubrey's story, the shrewd learned gossip and antiquary, who survived Shakspere some eighty years : — " Mr. William Shakespear was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade ; but when he killed a calf he would do it in high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young." With an undoubting confidence in Aubrey, Dr. Farmer averred that, when he that killed the calf wrote —
" There's a divinity that shapes OUT ends, Rough hew them how we will,"f
the poet-butcher was thinking of skewers ? Malone also held that he who, when a
* Malone, with the documents before him, treats this purchase as if it had been the mere assign- ment of a lease ; and, Malone having printed the documents, no one who wrote about Shakspere previous to the publication of our "Biography," in 1843, deduced from them that Shakspere's father was necessarily a person of some substance before his marriage, a purchaser of property.
f " Hamlet," Act v. Sc. n.
CHAP. II.] STRATFORD. 13
boy, exercised his father's trade, has described the process of calf-killing with an accuracy which nothing but profound experience could give —
" And as the butcher takes away the calf, And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays, Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house ; Even so, remorseless, have they borne him hence. And as the dam runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went, And can do nought but wail her darling's loss, Even so," &c.*
The story, however, has a variation. There was at Stratford, in the year 1693, a clerk of the parish church, eighty years old, — that is, he was three years old when William Shakspere died, — and he, pointing to the monument of the poet, with the pithy remark that he was the " best of his family," proclaimed to a member of one of the Inns of Court that " this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound ap- prentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London." t His father was a butcher, says Aubrey ; he was apprentice to a butcher, says the parish clerk. Aubrey was picking up his gossip for his friend Anthony-a-Wood in 1680, and it is not very difficult to imagine that the identical parish clerk was his authority. That honest chronicler, old as he was, had forty years of tradition to deal with in this matter of the butcher's son and the butcher's apprentice ; and the result of such glimpses into the thick night of the past is sensibly enough stated by Aubrey him- self : — " What uncertainty do we find in printed histories ! They either treading too near on the heels of truth, that they dare not speak plain ; or else for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and dark."
Akin to the butcher's trade is that of the dealer in wool. .It is upon the autho- rity of Betterton, the actor, who, in the beginning of the last century, made a journey into Warwickshire to collect anecdotes relating to Shakspere, that Rowe tells us that John Shakspere was a dealer in wool : — " His family, as appears by the register and the public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment." We are now peeping " through the blanket of the dark." But daylight is not as yet. Malone was a believer in Howe's account ; and he was confirmed in his belief by possessing a piece of stained glass, bearing the arms of the merchants of the staple, which had been removed from a window of John Shakspere's house in Henley Street. But, unfor- tunately for the credibility of Howe, as then held, Malone made a discovery, as it is usual to term such glimpses of the past : " I began to despair of ever being able to obtain any certain intelligence concerning his trade ; when, at length, I met with the following entry, in a very ancient manuscript, containing an account of the pro- ceedings in the bailiff's court, which furnished me with the long sought-for infor- mation, and ascertains that the trade of our great poet's father was that of a glover ;" " Thomas Siche de Arscotte in com. Wigorn. querif versus Johm Shakyspere de Stretford, in com. Warwic. Glover, in plac. quod reddat ei oct. libras, &c." This Malone held to be decisive.
We give this record above as Malone printed it, not very correctly ; and having seen the original, we maintained that the word was not O lover. Mr. Collier and Mr. Halliwell affirm that the word Glo, with the second syllable contracted, is glover ; and we accept their interpretation. But we still hold to our original belief that he was, in 1556, a landed proprietor and an occupier of land ; one who, although
* "Henry VL," Part II. Act in. Sc. i. f "Traditionary Anecdotes of Shakespere."
14 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
sued as a glover on the 1 7th June of that year, was a suitor in the same court on the 19th November, in a plea against a neighbour for unjustly detaining eighteen quarters of barley. We still refuse to believe that John Shakspere, when he is described as a yeoman in after years, " had relinquished his retail trade," as Mr. Halliwell judges ; or that his mark, according to the same authority, was emblema- tical of the glove-sticks used for stretching the cheveril for fair fingers. We have no confidence that he had stores in Henley Street of the treasures of Autolycus, —
" Gloves as sweet as damask roses."
We think, that butcher, dealer in wool, glover, may all be reconciled with our position, that he was a landed proprietor, occupying land. Our proofs are not purely hypothetical.
Harrison, who mingles laments at the increasing luxury of the farmer, with some- what contradictory denouncements of the oppression of the tenant by the landlord, holds that the landlord is monopolizing the tenant's profits. His complaints are the natural commentary upon the social condition of England, described in "A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale :" — " Most sorrowful of all to under- stand, that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have any gain at all, that they themselves become GRAZIERS, BUTCHERS, TANNERS, SHEEPMASTERS, WOODMEN, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their own hands, leaving the commonalty weak, or as an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in time of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." Has not Harrison solved the mystery of the butcher ; explained the tradition of the wool-merchant ; shewn how John Shakspere, the woodman, naturally sold a piece of timber to the corporation, which we find recorded ; and, what is most difficult of credence, indicated how the glover is reconcilable with all these employments? We open an authentic record of this very period, and the solution of the difficulty is palpable : In John Strype's " Memorials Ecclesiastical under Queen Mary I," under the date of 1558, we find this passage: "It is certain that one Edward Home suffered at Newent, where this Deighton had been, and spake with one or two of the same parish that did see him there burnt, and did testify that they knew the two persons that made the fire to burn him ; they were two glovers or FELLMONGERS."* A fellmonger and a glover appear from this passage to have been one and the same. The fellmonger is he who prepares skins for the use of the leather-dresser, by separating the wool from the hide — the natural coadjutor of the sheep-master and the wool- man. Shakspere himself implies that the glover was a manufacturer of skins : Dame Quickly asks of Slender's man, " Does he not wear a great round beard like a glover's paring knife?" The peltry is shaved upon a circular board, with a great round knife, to this day. The fellmonger's trade, as it now exists, and the trade in un- tanned leather, the glover's trade, would be so slightly different, that the generic term, glover, might be applied to each. There are few examples of the word " fell- monger" in any early writers. " Glover" is so common that it has become one of the universal English names derived from occupation, — far more common than if it merely applied to him who made coverings for the hands. At Coventry, in the middle of the sixteenth century, (the period of which we are writing) the Glovers and Whittawers formed one craft. A whittawer is one who prepares tawed leather — untanned leather — leather chiefly dressed -from sheep skins and lamb skins by a simple process of soaking, and scraping, and liming, and softening _by alum and salt. Of such were the large and coarse gloves in use in a rural district, even amongst
* Vol. y., p. 277— edit. 1816.
CHAP. II.]
STRATFORD.
15
labourers ; and such process might be readily earned on by one engaged in agricul- tural operations, especially when we bear in mind that the white leather was the especial leather of " husbandly furniture," as described by old Tusser.
We may reasonably persist, therefore, even in accord with "flesh and fell" tradition, in drawing the portrait of Shakspere's father, at the time of his marriage, in the free air, — on his horse, with his team, at market, at fair — and yet a dealer in carcases, or wood, or wool, or skins, his own produce. He was a proprietor of land, and an agriculturist, li ving in a peculiar state of society, as we shall see hereafter, in which the division of employments was imperfectly established, and the small rural capitalists strove to turn their own products to the greatest advantage.
[Snitterfield.]
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
[Ancient Font, formerly in Stratford Church.] CHAPTER III.
THE REGISTER.
TJS the eleventh century the Norman Conqueror commanded a Register to be com- pleted of the lands of England, with the names of their possessors, and the number of their free tenants, their villains, and their slaves. In the sixteenth century Thomas Cromwell, as the vicegerent of Henry VIII. for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, issued Injunctions to the Clergy, ordaining, amongst other matters, that every offi- ciating minister shall, for every Church, keep a Book, wherein he shall register every Marriage, Christening, or Burial. In the different character of these two Registers we read what five centuries of civilization had effected for England. Instead of being recorded in the gross as cotarii or servi, the meanest labourer, his wife, and his children, had become children of their country and their country's religion, as much as the highest lord and his family. Their names were to be inscribed in a book and carefully preserved. But the people doubted the intent of this wise and liberal injunction. A friend of Cromwell writes to him, " There is much secret and several communications between the King's subjects ; and [some] of them, in sundry places within the shires of Cornwall and Devonshire, be in great fear and mistrust what the King's Highness and his Council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish that they should make a book, and surely to be kept, wherein to be specified the names of as many as be wedded, and the names of them that be buried, and of all those that be christened." * They dreaded new " charges ; " and well they might dread. But Thomas Cromwell had not regal
* Cromwell's Correspondence, in the Chapter-House, Quoted in Rickman's Preface to Population Returns, 1831.
CHAP. III.] THE REGISTER. 17
exactions in his mind. The Registers were at first imperfectly kept ; but the regu- lation of 1538 was strictly enforced in the first year of Elizabeth; and then the Register of the Parish of Stratford-upon-Avon commences, that is, in 1558.
Every such record of human life is a solemn document. Birth, Marriage, Death ! — this is the whole history of the sojourn upon earth of nearly every name inscribed in these time-preserved pages. And after a few years what is the interest, even to their own descendants, of these brief annals ? The last entry is too frequently the most interesting ; for the question is, Did they leave property ? Is some legal verification of their possession of property necessary '? —
" No further seek their merits to disclose."
But there are entries in this Register-book of Stratford that are interesting to us — to all Englishmen — to universal mankind. We have all received a precious legacy from one whose progress from the cradle to the grave is here recorded — a bequest large enough for us all, and for all who will come after us. Pause we on the one entry of that book which most concerns the human race : —
William, the son of John Shakspere, baptized on the 26th April, 1564.* And when born ? The want of such information is a defect in all parish-registers. Baptism so immediately followed birth in those times, when infancy was surrounded with greater dangers than in our own days of improved medical science, that we may believe that William Shakspere first saw the light only a day or two previous to this legal record of his existence. There is no direct evidence that he was born on the 23rd of April according to the common belief. But there was probably a tradition to that effect, for some years ago the Rev. Joseph Greene, a master of the grammar-school at Strat- ford, in an extract which he made from the Register of Shakspere's baptism, wrote in the margin, " Born on the 23rd." We turn back to the first year of the registry, 1558, and we find the baptism of Joan, daughter to John Shakspere, on the 15th of September. Again, in 1562, on the 2nd of December, Margaret, daughter to John Shakspere, is baptized. In the entry of burials in 1563 we find, under date of April 30, that Margaret closed a short life in five months. The elder daughter Joan also died young. We look forward, and in 1566 find the birth of a son, after William, registered : — Gilbert, son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 1 3th of October of that year. In 1569 there is the registry of the baptism of Joan, daughter of John Shakspere, on the 15th of April. Thus, the registry of a second Joan leaves no reasonable doubt that the first died, and that a favourite name was preserved in the family. In 1571 Anne is baptized ; she died in 1579. In 1573-4 another son was baptized, — Richard, son of Master (Magister) John Shakspere, on the 1 1th of
* The date of the year, and the word April, occur three lines above the entry — the baptism being the fourth registered in that month. The register of Stratford is a tall narrow book, of considerable thickness, the leaves formed of very fine vellum. But this book is only a transcript, attested by the vicar and four churchwardens, on every page of the registers from 1558 to 1600. The above is there- fore not a fac-simile of the original entry.
18 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
March. The last entry, which determines the extent of John Shakspcre's family, is that of Edmund, son of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 3rd of May, 1580. Here, then, we find that two sisters of William were removed by death, probably before his birth. In two years and a half another son, Gilbert, came to be his play- mate ; and when he was five years old that most precious gift to a loving boy was granted, a sister, who grew up with him, and survived him. Another sister was born when he had reached seven years ; and as he was growing into youthful strength, a boy of fifteen, his last sister died ; — and then his youngest brother was born. William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, Edmund, constituted the whole of the family who survived the period of infancy. Howe, we have already seen, mentions the large family of John Shakspere, " ten children in all." Malone has established very satisfactorily the origin of this error into which Howe has fallen. In later years there was another John Shakspere in Stratford. In the books of the coq^oration the name of John Shakspere, shoemaker, can be traced in 1580 ; in the register in 1584 we find him married to Margery Roberts, who died in 1587 ; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589, 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip, are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569 -" Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden ; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597, which we shall notice hereafter, it is set forth that John Shakspere and his wife Mary, in the 20th Elizabeth, 1577, mortgaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, with- out the honourable addition of Master, were also her children. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reason- ably be expected.
William Shakspere has been carried to the baptismal font in that fine old church of Stratford. The "thick-pleached alley" that leads through the churchyard to
[The Church Avenue.]
CHAP. III.]
THE REGISTER.
the porch is putting forth its buds and leaves.* The chestnut hangs its white blossoms over the grassy mounds of that resting-place. All is joyous in the spring sunshine. Kind neighbours arc smiling upon the happy father ; maidens and matrons snatch a kiss of the sleeping boy. There is "a spirit of life in everything" on this 26th of April, 1564. Summer comes, but it brings not joy to Stratford. There is wailing in her streets and woe in her houses. The death- register tells a fearful history. From the 30th June to the 31st December, two hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants, a sixth of the population, are carried to the grave. * The plague is in the fated town ; the doors are marked with the red cross, and the terrible inscription, " Lord, have mercy upon us." It is the same epidemic which ravaged Europe in that year ; which in the previous year had desolated London, and still continued there ; of which sad time Stow pithily says — " The poor citizens of London were this year plagued with a three- fold plague, pestilence, scarcity of money, and dearth of victuals ; the misery whereof were too long here to write : no doubt the poor remember it ; the rich by flight into the countries made shift for themselves." Scarcity of money and dearth of victuals arc the harbingers and the ministers of pestilence. Despair gathers up itself to die. Labour goes not forth to its accustomed duties. Shops are closed. The market-cross hears no hum of trade. The harvest lies almost ungathered in the fields. At last the destroying angel has gone on his way. The labourers ace thinned ; there is more demand for labour ; "victuals" arc not more abundant, but there are fewer left to share the earth's bounty. Then the adult rush into marriage. A year of pestilence is followed by a year of weddings;* and such a "strange eventful history" does the Stratford register tell. The Charnel-house — a melan- choly-looking appendage to the chancel of Stratford Church, (now removed,) had
[Stratford Church.]
* It is supposed that such a green avenue was an okl appendage to the church, the present trees having taken the place of more ancient ones.
•f See " Malthus on Population," book ii., chap. 12.
c 2
20 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
then its heaps of unhonoured bones fearfully disturbed : but soon the old tower heard again the wedding-peal. The red cross was probably not on the door of John Shakspere's dwelling. " Fortunately for mankind," says Malone, " it did not reach the house where the infant Shakspere lay ; for not one of that name appears on the dead list. A poetical enthusiast will find no difficulty in believing that, like Horace, he reposed secure and fearless in the midst of contagion and death, protected by the Muses to whom his future life was to be devoted : —
'sacra
Lauroque, collataque myrto, Non sine diis animosus infans.' "
There were more real dangers around Shakspere than could be averted by the sacred laurel and the myrtle — something more fearful than the serpent and the bear of the Koman poet.* He, by whom
" Spirits are not finely touch'd But to fine issues,"
may be said, without offence, to have guarded this unconscious child. William Shakspere was to be an instrument, and a great one, in the intellectual advancement of mankind. The guards that He placed around that threshold of Stratford, as secondary ministers, were cleanliness, abundance, free air, parental watchfulness. The " non sine diis" — the " protected by the Muses," — rightly considered, must mean the same guardianship. Each is a recognition of something higher than acci- dent and mere physical laws.
The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564 ? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street — houses which still exist — houses which the people of England have agreed to preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. William Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copyhold houses, in Greenhill Street, or in Henley Street ; he might have been born at Ingon ; or his father might have occupied one of the two freehold houses in Henley Street at the time of the birth of his eldest son. Tradition says, that William Shakspere ivas born in one of these houses ; tradition points out the very room in which he was born.
Whether Shakspere were born here, or not, there can be little doubt that this property was the home of his boyhood. It was purchased by John Shakspere, from Edmund Hall and Emma his wife, for forty pounds. In a copy of the chirograph of the fine levied on this occasion (which is now in the possession of Mr. Wheler, of Stratford) the property is described as two messuages, two gardens, and two orchards, with their appurtenances. This document does not define the situation of the property, beyond its being in Stratford-upon-Avon ; but in the deed of sale of another property in 1591, that property is described as situate between the houses of Robert Johnson and John Shakspere ; and in 1597 John Shakspere himself sells a " toft, or parcel of land," in Henley Street, to the purchaser of the property in 1591. The properties can be traced, and leave no doubt of this house in Henley Street being the residence of John Shakspere. He retained the property during his life ; and it descended, as his heir-at-law, to his son William. In the last testament of the poet is this bequest to his " sister Joan : " — " I do will arid devise unto her the house, with the appurtenances, in Stratford, wherein she dwelleth, for her natural life, under the yearly rent of twelve-pence." His sister Joan, whose name by mar-
* Hor. lib. iii., car. iv.
22 WILLIAM BHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK. I.
riagc was Hart, was residing there in 1639, and she probably continued to reside there till her death in 1646. The one house in which Mrs. Hart resided was doubtless the half of the building now forming the butcher's shop and the tenement adjoining; for the other house was known as the Maidenhead Inn, in 1642. In another part of Shakspcre's will he bequeaths, amongst the bulk of his property, to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, with remainder to her male issue, " two messuages or tenements, with the appurtenances, situate, lying, and being in Henley Street, within the borough of Stratford." There are existing settlements of this very property in the family of Shakspere's eldest daughter and grand-daughter ; and this grand-daughter, Elizabeth Nash, who was married a second time to Sir John Barnard, left both houses, — namely, " the inn, called the Maidenhead, and the adjoining house and barn," — to her kinsmen Thomas and George Hart, the grandsons of her grand- father's " sister Joan." These persons left descendants, with whom this property remained until the beginning of the present century. But it was gradually dimi- nished. The orchards and gardens were originally extensive : a century ago tene- ments had been built upon them, and they were alienated by the Hart then in possession. The Maidenhead Iim became the Swan Inn, and is now the Swan and Maidenhead. The White Lion, on the other side of the property, was extended, so as to include the remaining orchards and gardens. The house in which Mrs. Hart had lived so long became divided into two tenements ; and at the end of the last century the lower part of one was a butcher's shop.
The engraving (page 21) exhibits John Shakspere's houses in Henley Street under three different aspects. No. 1 (the top) is from an original drawing made by Colonel Delamotte in 1788. The houses, it will be observed, then presented one uniform front ; and there were dormer windows connected with rooms in the roof. We have a plan before us, accompanying Mr. Wheler's account of these premises, which shows that they occupied a frontage of thirty-one feet. No. 2 is from an original drawing made by Mr. Pyne, after a sketch by Mr. Edridge in 1807. We now see that the dormer windows are removed, as also the gable at the east end of the front. The house has been shorn of much of its external importance. No. 3 is from a lithograph engraving in Mr. Wheler's account, published in 1824. The premises, we now see, have been pretty equally divided. The Swan and Maidenhead half has had its windows modernized, and the continuation of the timber-frame has been obliterated by a brick casing. In 1807, we observe that the western half had been divided into two tenements ; — the fourth of the whole premises, that is the butcher's shop, the kitchen behind, and the two rooms over, being the portion commonly shown as Shakspere's House. Some years ago, upon a frontage in con- tinuation of the tenement at the west, three small cottages were built. The whole of this portion of the property has been purchased for the nation, as well as the two tenements.
Was William Shakspere, then, born in the house in Henley Street which has been purchased by the nation 1 - For ourselves, we frankly confess that the want of absolute certainty that Shakspere was there born, produces a state of mind that is something higher and pleasanter than the conviction that depends upon positive evidence. We are content to follow the popular faith undoubtingly. The traditionary belief is sanctified by long usage and universal acceptation. The merely curious look in reverent silence upon that mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak, where they are told the poet of the human race was born. Eyes now closed on the world, but who have left that behind which the world " will not willingly let die," have glistened under this humble roof, and there have been thoughts unutterable — solemn, confiding, grateful, humble — clustering round their hearts in that hour. The autographs of Byron and Scott are amongst
CHAP, m.]
THE REGISTER.
23
hundreds of perishable inscriptions. Disturb not the belief that William Shakspere first saw the light in this venerated room.
" The victor Time has stood on Avon's side To doom the fall of many a home of pride ; Eapine o'er Evesham's gilded fane has strode, And gorgeous Kenilworth has paved the road : But Time has gently laid his withering hands On one frail House — the House of Shakspere stands ; Centuries are gone — fallen ' the cloud-capp'd tow'rs ; ' But Shakspere *8 home, his boyhood's home, is ours ! "
Prologue for the Shakspere Night, Dec. 7, 1847, by C. Knight.
[Room in the House in Henley Street.]
24
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i.
[Inner Court of the Grammar School.] CHAPTER IV.
THE SCHOOL.
THE poet in his well-known " Seven Ages" has necessarily presented to us only the great boundary-marks of a human life : the progress from one stage to another he has left to be imagined : —
" At first the infant Muling and puking in the nurse's arms."
Perhaps the most influential, though the least observed part of man's existence, that in which he learns most of good or of evil, lies in the progress between this first act and the second : —
" And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school."
Between the "nurse's arms" and the "school" there is an important interval, filled up by a mother's education.
There is a passage in one of Shakspere's Sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a
CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 25
belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude: —
"Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, And I will comment upon that offence : Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt ; Against thy reasons making no defence."
Again, in the 37th Sonnet: —
"Asa decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth."
These lines have been interpreted to mean that William Shakspere was literally lame, and that his lameness was such as to limit him, when he became an actor, to the representation of the parts of old men. Mr. Harness has truly observed that " many an infirmity of the kind may be skilfully concealed, or only become visible in the moments of hurried movement ;" and he adds, "either Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron might, without any impropriety, have written the verses in question." We should have no doubt whatever that the verses we have quoted may be most fitly received in a metaphorical sense, were there not some subsequent lines in the 37th Sonnet which really appear to have a literal meaning ; and thus to render the pre- vious lame and lameness expressive of something more than the general self-abasement which they would otherwise appear to imply. In the following line's lame means something distinct from poor and despised : —
"For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, of all, or more. Entitled in thy parts do crowncc. sit, I make my love engrafted to this store : So then I am not lime, poor, nor despis'd, Whilst that tliis shadow doth such substance give."
Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure — that, if Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same series of verses that have suggested this belief that he was lame also showr that he was a horseman.* His entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nature, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental injury, may have modified the energy of such a child ; and have cherished in him that love of books, and traditionary lore, and silent contemplation, without which his intellect could not have been nourished into its wondrous strength. But we cannot imagine William Shaksperc a petted child, chained to home, not breathing the free air upon his native hills, denied the boy's privilege to explore every nook of his own river. We would imagine him communing from the first with Nature, as Gray has painted him —
" The dauntless child Strctch'd forth his little arms and smil'd."
The only qualifications necessary for the admission of a boy into the Free Grammar School of Stratford \vere, that he should be a resident in the town, of seven years of age, and able to read. The Grammar School was essentially connected with the Corporation of Stratford ; and it is impossible to imagine that, when the son of John Shakspere became qualified by age for admission to a school where the best education of the time was given, literally for nothing, his father, in that year, being chief alder-
* See Sonnets 50 and 51.
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
man, should not have sent him to the school. We assume, without any hesitation, that William Shakspere did receive in every just sense of the word the education of a scholar ; and as such education was to be had at his own door, we also assume that he was brought up at the Free Grammar School of his own town. His earlier instruction would therefore be a preparation for this school.
In the first year of Edward VI. was published by authority " The ABC, with the Pater-noster, Ave, Crede, and Ten Commandementtes in Englysshe, newly translated and set forth at the kynges most gracious commandement." But the ABC soon became more immediately connected with systematic instruction in religious belief. The alphabet and a few short lessons were followed by the catechism, so that the book containing the catechism came to be called an A B C book, or Absey-book. Towards the end of Edward's reign was put forth by authority " A Short Cate- chisme, or playne instruction, conteynynge the sume of Christian learninge," which all schoolmasters were called upon to teach after the "little catechism" previously set forth. Such books were undoubtedly suppressed in the reign of Mary, but upon the accession of Elizabeth they were again circulated. A question then arises, Did William Shakspere receive his elementary instruction in Christianity from the books sanctioned by the Eeformed Church 1 It has been maintained that his father be- longed to the Koman Catholic persuasion. This belief rests upon the following foundation. In the year 1770, Thomas Hart, who then inhabited one of the tene- ments in Henley Street which had been bequeathed to his family by William Shakspere's grand-daughter, employed a bricklayer to new tile the house ; and this bricklayer, by name Mosely, found hidden between the rafters and the tiling a manuscript consisting of six leaves stitched together, which he gave to Mr. Peyton, an alderman of Stratford, who sent it to Mr. Malone, through the Rev. Mr. Devon- port, vicar of Stratford. This paper, which was first published by Malone in 1790, is printed also in Reed's Shakspeare and in Drake's " Shakspeare and his Times." It consists of fourteen articles, purporting to be a confession of faith of " John Shakspear, an unworthy member of the holy Catholic religion." We have no hesi- tation whatever in believing this document to be altogether a fabrication. Chalmers says, " It was the performance of a clerk, the undoubted work of the family priest."* Malone, when he first published the paper in his edition of Shakspeare, said — " I have taken some pains to ascertain the authenticity of this manuscript, and, after a very careful inquiry, am perfectly satisfied that it is genuine." In 1796, however, in his work on the Ireland forgeries, he asserts — " I have since obtained documents that clearly prove it could not have been the composition of any one of our poet's family." We not only do not believe that it was " the composition of any one of our poet's family," nor " the undoubted work of the family priest," but we do not believe that it is the work of a Roman Catholic at all. It professes to be the writer's "last spiritual will, testament, confession, protestation, and confession of faith." Now, if the writer had been a Roman Catholic, or if it had been drawn up for his approval and signature by his priest, it would necessarily, professing such fulness and completeness, have contained something of belief touching the then material points of spiritual difference between the Roman and the Reformed Church. Nothing, however, can be more vague than all this tedious protestation and confession ; with the exception that phrases, and indeed long passages, are introduced for the purpose of marking the supposed writer's opinions in the way that should be most offensive to those of a contrary opinion, as if by way of bravado or seeking of persecution. In this his last confession, spiritual will, and testament, he calls upon all his kins- folks to assist and succour him after his death " with the holy sacrifice of the mass," with a promise that he " will not be ungrateful unto them for so great a benefit," * "Apology for the Believers," page 199.
CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 27
well knowing that by the Act of 1581 the saying of mass was punishable by a year's imprisonment and a fine of 200 marks, and the hearing of it by a similar imprison- ment and fine of 100 marks. The fabrication appears to us as gross as can well be imagined.
That John Shakspere was what we popularly call a Protestant in the year 1568, when his son William was four years old, may be shown by the clearest of proofs. He was in that year the chief magistrate of Stratford ; he could not have become so without taking the Oath of Supremacy, according to the statute of the 1st of Elizabeth, 1558-9. To refuse this oath was made punishable with forfeiture and imprisonment, with the pains of prsemunire and high treason. " The conjecture," says Chalmers (speaking in support of the authenticity of this confession of faith), " that Shakspeare's family were Roman Catholics, is strengthened by the fact that his father declined to attend the corporation meetings, and was at last removed from the corporate body." He was removed from the corporate body in 1586, with a distinct statement of the reason for this removal — his non-attendance when sum- moned to the halls. But a subsequent discovery of a document in the State Paper Office, communicated by Mr. Lemon to Mr. Collier, shews that in 1592, Mr. John Shakspere, with fourteen of his neighbours, were returned by certain Commissioners as " such recusants as have been heretofore presented for not coming monthly to the church according to her Majesty's laws, and yet are thought to forbear the church for debt and for fear of process, or for some other worse faults, or for age, sickness, or impotency of body." John Shakspere is classed amongst nine who •" came not to church for fear of process for debt." We shall have to notice this assigned reason for the recusancy in a future Chapter. But the religious part of the question is capable of another solution, than that the father of Shakspere had become reconciled to the Romish religion. At that period the puritan section of the English church were acquiring great strength in Stratford and the neighbourhood; and in 1596, Richard Bifield, one of the most zealous of the puritan ministers, became its Vicar.* John Shakspere and his neighbours might not have been Popish recusants, and yet have avoided the church. It must be borne in mind that the parents of William Shakspere passed through the great changes of religious opinion, as the greater portion of the people passed, without any violent corresponding change in their habits derived from their forefathers. In the time of Henry VIII. the great contest of opinion was confined to the supremacy of the Pope ; the great practical state measure was the suppression of the religious houses. Under Edward VI. there was a very careful compromise of all those opinions and practices in which the laity were participant. In the short reign of Mary the persecution of the Reformers must have been offensive even to those who clung fastest to the ancient institutions and modes of belief ; and even when the Reformation was fully established under Elizabeth, the habits of the people were still very slightly interfered with. The astounding majority of the conforming clergy is a convincing proof how little the opinions of the laity must have been disturbed. They would naturally go along with their old teachers. We have to imagine, then, that the father of William Shakspere, and his mother, were, at the time of his birth, of the religion established by law. His father, by holding a high municipal office after the accession of Elizabeth, had solemnly de- clared his adherence to the great principle of Protestantism — the acknowledgment of the civil sovereign as the head of the church. The speculative opinions in which the child was brought up would naturally shape themselves to the creed which his father must have professed in his capacity of magistrate ; but, according to some opinions, this profession was a disguise on the part of his father. The young Shak- spere was brought up in the Roman persuasion, according to these notions, because * Hunter: "New Illustrations," Vol. I., p. 106.
28 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
he intimates an acquaintance with the practices of the Roman church, and mentions purgatory, shrift, confession, in his dramas.* Surely the poet might exhibit this familiarity with the ancient language of all Christendom, without thus speaking "from the overflow of Roman Catholic zeal."t Was it "Roman Catholic zeal" which induced him to write those strong lines in King John against the " Italian priest," and against those who
" Purchase corrupted pardon of a man 1 "
Was it " Roman Catholic zeal" which made him introduce these words into the famous prophecy of the glory and happiness of the reign of Elizabeth —
" God shall be truly known ?"
He was brought up, without doubt, in the opinions which his father publicly pro- fessed, in holding office subject to his most solemn affirmation of those opinions. The distinctions between the Protestant and the Popish recusant were then not so numerous or speculative as they afterwards became. But, such as they were, we may be sure that William Shakspere learnt his catechism in all sincerity ; that he frequented the church in which he and his brothers and sisters were baptized ; that he was prepared for the discipline of the school in which religious instruction by a minister of the church was regularly afforded as the end of the other knowledge there taught. He became tolerant, according to the manifestation of his after-writings, through nature and the habits and friendships of his early life. But that tolerance does not presume insincerity in himself or his family. The " Confession of Faith," found in the roof of his father's house two hundred years after he was born, would argue the extreme of religious zeal, even to the defiance of all law and authority, on the part of a man who had by the acceptance of office professed his adherence to the established national faith. If that paper were to be believed, we must be driven to the conclusion that John Shakspere was an unconscientious hypocrite for one part of his life, and a furious bigot for the other part. It is much easier to believe that the Reformation fell lightly upon John Shakspere, as it did upon the bulk of the laity ; and that he and his wife, without any offence to their consciences, saw the Common Prayer take the place of the Mass-book, and acknowledged the temporal sovereign to be head of the church : that in the education of their children they dispensed with auricular confession and penance ; but that they, in common with their neighbours, tolerated, and perhaps delighted in, many of the festivals and imaginative forms of the old religion, and even looked up for heavenly aid through intercession, without fancying that they were yielding to an idolatrous superstition, such as Puritanism came subsequently to denounce. The transition from the old worship to the new was not an ungentle one for the laity. The early reformers were too wise to attempt to root up habits — those deep-sunk foundations of the past which break the plough- shares of legislation when it strives to work an inch below the earth's surface.
To the grammar-school, then, with some preparation, we hold that William Shakspere goes, about the year 1571. His father is at this time, as we have said, chief alderman of his town ; he is a gentleman, now, of repute and authority, — he is Master John Shakspere ; and assuredly the worthy curate of the neighbouring village of Luddington, Thomas Hunt, who was also the school-master, would have received his new scholar with some kindness. As his " shining morning face " first passed out of the main street into that old court through which the upper room of learning was to be reached, a new life would be opening upon him. The humble minister of religion who was his first instructor has left no memorials
* See Chalmers's " Apology," p. 200. f Chalmers. See also Drake, who adopts, in great measure, Chalmers's argument.
CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 29
of his talents or his acquirements ; and in a few years another master came after him, Thomas Jenkins, also unknown to fame. All praise and honour be to them ; for it is impossible to imagine that the teachers of William Shakspere were evil instruc- tors— giving the boy husks instead of wholesome aliment. They could not have been harsh and perverse instructors, for such spoil the gentlest natures, and his was always gentle : — " My gentle Shakspere" is he called by a rough but noble spirit — one in whom was all honesty and genial friendship under a rude exterior. His wondrous abilities could not be spoiled even by ignorant instructors.
In the seventh year of the reign of Edward VI. a royal charter was granted to Stratford for the incorporation of the inhabitants. That charter recites — "That the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon was an ancient borough, in which a certain guild was theretofore founded, and endowed with divers lands, tenements, and posses- sions, out of the rents, revenues, and profits whereof a certain free grammar-school for the education of boys there was made and supported."* The charter further recites the other public objects to which the property of the guild had been applied ; — that it was dissolved ; and that its possessions had come into the hands of the king. The charter of incorporation then grants to the bailiff and burgesses certain properties which were parcel of the possessions of the guild, for the general charges of the borough, for the maintenance of an ancient almshouse, " and that the free grammar-school for the instruction and education of boys and youth there should be thereafter kept up and maintained as theretofore it used to be." It may be doubted whether Stratford was benefited by the dissolution of ita guild. We sec that its grammar-school was an ancient establishment : it was not a creation of the charter of Edward VI., although it is popularly called one of the grammar- schools of that king, and was the last school established by him.t The people of Stratford had possessed the advantage of a school for instruction in Greek and Latin, which is the distinct object of a grammar-school, from the time of Edward IV., when Thomas Jolyffe, in 1482, "granted to the guild of the Holy Cross of Strat- ford-upon-Avon all his lands and tenements in Stratford and Dodwell, in the county of Warwick, upon condition that the master, aldermen, and proctors of the said guild should find a priest, fit and able in knowledge, to teach grammar freely to all scholars coming to the school in the said town to him, taking nothing of the scholars for their teaching."! Dugdale describes the origin of guilds, speaking of this of Stratford : — " Such meetings were at first used by a mutual agreement of friends and neighbours, and particular licenses granted to them for conferring lands or rents to defray their public charges in respect that, by the statute of mortmain, such gifts would otherwise have been forfeited."
In the surveys of Henry VIII., previous to the dissolution of religious houses, there were four salaried priests belonging to the guild of Stratford, with a clerk, who was also schoolmaster, at a salary of ten pounds per annum.§ They were a hospit- able body these guild-folk, for there was an annual feast, to which all the fraternity resorted, with their tenants and farmers ; and an inventory of their goods in the 15th of Edward IV. shows that they were rich in plate for the service of the table, as well as of the chapel. That chapel was partly rebuilt by the great benefactor of Stratford, Sir Hugh Clopton ; and after the dissolution of the guild and the esta- blishment of the grammar-school by the charter of Edward VI., the school was in all probability kept within it. There is an entry in the Corporation books, of February 18, 1594-5 — "At this hall it was agreed by the bailiff and the greater number of the company now present that there shall be no school kept in the chapel from this time following." In associating, therefore, the schoolboy days of William
* " Report of the Commissioners for inquiring concerning Charities." f See Strype's " Memorials." !J! " Report of Commissioners," &c. § Dugdale.
30
WILLIAM 8HA.K8PBBE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK I.
Shakspcre with the Free Grammar-School of Stratford, we cannot with any certainty imagine him engaged in his daily tasks in the ancient room which is now the school-
[ Interior of the Grammar School.]
room. And yet the use of the chapel as a school, discontinued in 1595, might only have been a temporary u3e. A little space may be occupied in a notice of each building.
The grammar-school is now an ancient room over the old town-hall of Stratford ; — both, no doubt, offices of the ancient guild. We enter from the street into a court, of which one side is formed by the chapel of the Holy Cross. Opposite the chapel is a staircase, ascending which we are in a plain room, with a ceiling. But it is evident that this work of plaster is modern, and that above it we have the oak roof of the sixteenth century. In this room are a few forms and a rude antique desk.
The Chapel of the Guild is in great part a very perfect specimen of the plainer ecclesiastical architecture of the reign of Henry VII. : — a building of just propor- tions and some ornament, but not running into elaborate decoration. The interior now presents nothing very remarkable. But upon a general repair of the chapel in 1804, beneath the whitewash of successive generations, was discovered a series of most remarkable paintings, some in that portion of the building erected by Sir Hugh Clopton, and others in the far more ancient chancel. A very elaborate series of coloured engravings has been published from these paintings, from drawings made at the time of their discovery by Mr. Thomas Fisher. There can be little doubt, from the defacement of some of the paintings, that they were partially destroyed by violence, and all attempted to be obliterated in the progress of the Reformation. But that outbreak of zeal did not belong to the first periods of religious change ; and it is most probable that these paintings were existing in the early years of
CHAP. IV.]
THE SCHOOL.
31
[Chapel of the Guild, and Grammar School: Streit Front.]
Elizabeth's reign. When the five priests of the guild were driven from their home and their means of maintenance, the chapel no doubt ceased to be a place of worship ; and it probably became the school-room, after the foundation of the grammar-school, distinct from the guild, under the charter of Edward VI. If it was the school-room of William Shakspere, those rude paintings must have pro- duced a powerful effect upon his imagination. Many of them in the ancient chancel constituted a pictorial romance — the history of the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the Creation of the World to its rescue from the pagan Cosdroy, King of Persia, by the Christian King, Heraclius ; — and its final Exaltation at Jerusalem, — the anniversary of which event was celebrated at Stratford at its annual fair, held on the 1 4th of September. There were other pictures of Saints, and Martyrdoms ; and one, especially, of the murder of Thomas h, Becket, which exhibits great force, without that grotesqueness which generally belongs to our early paintings. There were fearful pictures, too, of the last Judgment ; with the Seven Deadly Sins visibly portrayed, — the punishments of the evil, the rewards of the just. Surrounded as he was with the memorials of the old religion — with great changes on every side, but still very recent changes — how impossible was it that Shakspere should not have been thoroughly imbued with a knowledge of all that pertained to the faith of his ancestors ! One of the most philosophical writers of our day has said that Catholicism gave us Shakspere.* Not so, entirely. Shakspere belonged to the tran- * Carlvle : " French Revolution."
32 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
sition period, or he could not have been quite what he was. His intellect was not the dwarfish and precocious growth of the hot-bed of change, and still less of con- vulsion. His whole soul was permeated with the ancient vitalities — the things which the changes of institutions could not touch ; but it could bourgeon under the new influences, and blend the past and the present, as the "giant oak" of five hundred winters is covered with the foliage of one spring. But there was one blessing which Catholicism would have withheld from him. When in the year 1537 the Bible in English was first printed by authority, Eichard Grafton, the printer, sent six copies to Cranmer, beseeching the archbishop to accept them as his simple gift, adding, " For your lordship, moving our most gracious prince to the allowance and licensing of such a work, hath wrought such an act worthy of praise as never was mentioned in any chronicle in this realm." From that time, with the excep- tion of the short interval of the reign of Mary, the presses of London were for the most part employed in printing Bibles. That book, to whose wonderful heart- stirring narratives the child listens with awe arid love, was now and ever after to be the solace of the English home. With "the Great Bible" open before her, the mother would read aloud to her little ones that beautiful story of Joseph sold into slavery, and then advanced to honour — and how his brethren knew him not when, suppressing his tears, he said, " Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake f ' — or, how, when the child Samuel was laid down to sleep, the Lord called to him three times, and he grew, and God was with him ; — or, how the three holy men who would not worship the golden image walked about in the midst of the burning fiery furnace ; — or how the prophet that was unjustly cast into the den of lions was found unhurt, because the true God had sent his angels and shut the lions' mouths. These were the solemn and affecting narratives, wonderfully preserved for our instruction from a long antiquity, that in the middle of the sixteenth century became unclosed to the people of England. But more especially was that other Testament opened which most imported them to know ; and thus, when the child repeated in lisping accents the Christian's prayer to his Father in heaven, the mother could expound to him that, when the Divine Author of that prayer first gave it to us, He taught us that the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, were the happy and the beloved of God ; and laid down that comprehesive law of justice, " All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." We believe that the education of William Shakspere was grounded upon this Book ; and that, if this Book had been sealed to his childhood, he might have been the poet of nature, of passion, — his humour might have been as rich as we find it, and his wit as pointed, — but that he would not have been the poet of the most profound as well as the most tolerant philosophy ; his insight into the nature of man, his meanness and his grandeur, his weakness and his strength, would not have been what it is.
CHAP. V.]
THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD.
33
^T^-eces^-^ , ^ — s
[Village of Aston Cantlow.]
CHAPTER V.
THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD.
LET us pass over for a time the young Shakspere at his school-desk, inquiring not when he went from "The Short Dictionary" forward to the use of " Cooper's Lexi- con," or whether he was most drilled in the " Eclogues" of Virgil, or those of the " good old Mantuan." Of one thing we may be well assured, — that the instruction of the grammar-school was the right instruction for the most vivacious mind, as for him of slower capacity. To spend a considerable portion of the years of boyhood in the acquirement of Latin and Greek was not to waste them, as modern illumi- nation would instruct us. Something was to be acquired, accurately and completely, that was of universal application, and within the boy's power of acquirement. The particular knowledge that would fit him for a chosen course of life would be an after acquirement ; and, having attained the habit of patient study, and established in his own mind a standard to apply to all branches of knowledge by knowing one branch well, he would enter upon the race of life without being over-weighted with the elements of many arts and sciences, which it belongs only to the mature intellect to bear easily and gracefully, and to employ to lasting profit. Our grammar-schools were wise institutions. They opened the road to usefulness and honour to the humblest in the land ; they bestowed upon the son of the peasant the same advan- tages of education as the son of the noble could receive from the most accomplished teacher in his father's halls. Long may they be preserved amongst us in their integrity ; not converted by the meddlings of innovation into lecture-rooms for cramming children with the nomenclature of every science ; presenting little idea
34 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
even of the physical world beyond that of its being a vast aggregation of objects that may be classified and catalogued ; and leaving the spiritual world utterly uncared for, as a region whose products cannot be readily estimated by a money value.
Every schoolboy's dwelling-place is a microcosm ; but the little world lying around William Shakspere was something larger than that in which boys of our own time for the most part live. The division of employments had riot so com- pletely separated a town life from a country life as with us ; and even the town occupations, the town amusements, and the town wonders, had more variety in them than our own days of systematic arrangement can present. Much of the education of Shakspere was unquestionably in the fields. A thousand incidental allusions manifest his familiarity with all the external aspects of nature. He is very rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called ; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers, — reflections of his own native scenery, — spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. The sports, the festivals, of the lone farm or the secluded hamlet are presented by him with all the charms of an Arcadian age, but with a truthfulness that is not found in Arcadia. The nicest peculiarities in the habits of the lower creation are given at a touch : we see the rook wing his evening flight to the wood ; we hear the drowsy hum of the sharded beetle. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets ; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener's art can be expounded by him. All this he appears to do as if from an instinctive power. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself ; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the " green lap " in which the boy-poet was " laid." The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. Looking on its placid stream, its gently swelling hills, its rich pastures, its sleeping woodlands, the external world would to him be full of images of repose : it was in the heart of man that he was to seek for the sublime. Nature has thus ever with him something genial and exhilarating. There are storms in his great dramas, but they are the accompaniments of the more terrible storms of human passions : they are raised by the poet's art to make the agony of Lear more intense, and the murder of Duncan more awful. But his love of a smiling creation seems ever present. We must image Stratford as it was, to see how the young Shakspere walked " in glory and in joy" amongst his native fields. Upon the bank of the Avon, having a very slight rise, is placed a scattered town ; a town whose dwellings have orchards and gardens, with lofty trees growing in its pathways. Its splendid collegiate church, in the time of Henry VIII., was described to lie half a mile from the town. Its eastern window is reflected in the river which flows beneath ; its gray tower is embowered amidst lofty elm-rows. At the opposite end of the town is a fine old bridge, with a cause- way whose "wearisome but needful length" tells of inundations in the low pastures that lie all around it. We look upon Dugdale's Map of Barichway Hundred, in which Stratford is situated, published in 1656, and we see four roads issuing from the town. The one to Henley in Arden, which lies through the street in which Shak- spere may be supposed to have passed his boyhood, continues over a valley of some breadth and extent, unenclosed fields undoubtedly in the sixteenth century, with the hamlets of Shottery and Bishopton amidst them. The road leads into the then woody district of Arden. At a short distance from it is the hamlet of Wilmecote, where Mary Arden dwelt ; and some two miles aside, more in the heart of the
CHAP. V.]
THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD.
35
woodland district, and hard by the river Alne, is the village of Aston Cantlow. Another road indicated on this old map is that to Warwick. The wooded hills of Welcombe overhang it, and a little aside, some mile and a half from Stratford, is the meadow of Ingon which John Shakspere rented in 1570. Very beautiful, even now, is this part of the neighbourhood, with its rapid undulations, little dells which shut in the scattered sheep, and sudden hills opening upon a wide landscape. Ancient crab-trees and hawthorns tell of uncultivated downs which have rung to the call of the falconer or the horn of the huntsman ; and then, having crossed the ridge, we are amongst rich corn-lands, with farm-houses of no modern date scattered about ; and deep in the hollow, so as to be hidden till we are upon it, the old village of Snitterficld, with its ancient church and its yew-tree as ancient. Here the poet's mother had property ; and here, it is reasonably conjectured, his father's family lived On the opposite side of Stratford, the third road runs in the direction of the Avon to the village of Bidford, with a nearer pathway along the river-bank. We cross the ancient bridge by the fourth road (which also diverges to Shipston), and we are on our way to the celebrated house and estate of Charlcote, the ancient seat of the Lucys, the Shaksperian locality with which most persons are familiar through traditions of deer-stealing. A pleasant ramble indeed is this to Charlcote and Hampton Lucy, even with glimpses of the Avon from a turnpike-road. But let the road run through meadows without hedgerows, with pathways following the river's bank, now diverging when the mill is close upon the stream, now crossing a leafy elevation, and then suddenly dropping under a precipitous wooded rock, and we have a walk such as poet might covet, and such as Shakspere did enjoy in his early rambles.
Through these pleasant places would the boy William Shakspere walk hand in hand with his father, or wander at his own free will with his school companions. All the simple processes of farming life would be familiar to him. The profitable mysteries of modern agriculture would not embarrass his youthful experience. He would witness none of that anxious diligence which compels the earth to yield double crops, and places little reliance upon the unassisted operations of nature. The seed-time and the harvest in the corn-fields, the gathering-in of the thin grass on the uplands and of the ranker produce of the flooded meadows, the folding of the flocks on the hills, the sheep-shearing, would seem to him like the humble and patient waiting of man upon a bounteous Providence. There would-be no systematic rotation of crops to make him marvel at the skill of the cultivator. Implements most skilfully adapted for the saving of animal labour would be unknown to him. The rude plough of his Saxon ancestors would be dragged along by a powerful team of sturdy oxen ; the sound of the flail alone would be heard in the barn. Around him would, however, be the glad indications of plenty. The farmer would have abundant stacks, and beeves, and kine, though the supply would fail in precarious seasons, when price did not regulate consumption ; he would brew his beer and bake his rye-bread ; his swine would be fattening on the beech-mast and the acorns of the tree wood ; his skcps of bees would be numerous in his garden ; the colewort would sprout from spring to winter for his homely meal, and in the fruitful season the strawberry would present its much coveted luxury. The old orchard would be rich with the choicest apples, grafts from the curious monastic varieties ; the rarer fruits from southern climates would be almost wholly unknown. There would be no niggard economy defeating itself ; the stock, such as it was would be of the best, although no Bakewell had arisen to preside over its improvement : —
" Let careen and barren be shifted away, For best is the best, whatsoever ye pay." *
* Tusser, chapter xvi.
36 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
William Shakspere would go out with his father on a Michaelmas morning, and the fields would be busy with the sowing of rye and white wheat and barley. The apples and the walnuts would be then gathered ; honey and wax taken from the hives ; timber would be felled, sawn, and stacked for seasoning. In the solitary fields, then, would stand the birdkeeper with his bow. As winter approached would come what Tusser calls " the slaughter-time," the killing of sheep and bullocks for home con- sumption ; the thresher would be busy now and then for the farmer's family, but the wheat for the baker would lie in sheaf. No hurrying then to market for fear of a fall in price ; there is abundance around, and the time of stint is far off. The simple routine was this : —
" In spring-time we rear, we do sow, and we plant ; In summer get victuals, lest after we want. In harvest we carry in corn, and the fruit, In winter to spend, as we need of each suit." *
The joyous hospitality of Christmas had little fears that the stock would bo prema- turely spent ; and whilst the mighty wood-fire blazed in the hall to the mirth of song and carol, neighbours went from house to house to partake of the abundance, and the poor were fed at the same board with the opulent. As the frost breaks, the labourer is again in the fields ; hedging and ditching are somewhat understood, but the whole system of drainage is very rude. With such agriculture man seems to have his winter sleep as well as the earth. But nature is again alive ; spring corn is to be sown ; the ewes and lambs are to be carefully tended ; the sheep, now again in the fields, are to be watched, for there are hungry " mastiffs and mongrels" about ; the crow and pie are to be destroyed in their nests ere they are yet feathered ; trees are to be barked before timber is fallen. Then comes the active business of the dairy, and, what to us would be a strange sight, the lambs have been taken from their mothers, and the ewes are milked in the, folds. May demands the labour of the weed-hook ; no horse-hoeing in those simple days. There are the flax and hemp too to be sown to supply the ceaseless labour of the spinner's wheel ; bees arc to be swarmed ; and herbs are to be stored for the housewife's still. June brings its sheep-washing and shearing ; with its haymaking, where the farmer is captain in the field, presiding over the bottles and the wallets, from the hour when the dew is dry to set of sun. Bustle is there now to get " grist to the mill," for the streams are drying, and if the meal be wanting how shall the household be fed ? The harvest- time comes ; the reapers cry " largess " for their gloves ; the tithe is set out for " Sir Parson ; " and then, after the poor have gleaned, and the cattle have been turned in "to mouth up" what is left,
" In harvest-time, harvest folk, servants and all, Should make, all together, good cheer in the hall ; And fill out the black bowl of blythe to their song, And let them be merry all harvest-time long."f
Such was the ancient farmer's year, which Tusser has described with wonderful spirit even to the minutest detail ; and such were the operations of husbandry that the boy Shakspere would have beheld with interest amidst his native corn-fields and pastures. When the boy became deep-thoughted he would perceive that many things were ill undertood, and most operations indifferently carried through. He would hear of dearth and sickness, and he would seek to know the causes. But that time was not as yet.
The poet who has delineated human life and character under every variety of passion and humour, must have had some early experience of mankind. The
* Tusser, chapter xxiv. f Ibid, chapter xlvii.
CHAP, v.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 37
loftiest imagination must work upon the humblest materials. In his father's home, amongst his father's neighbours, he would observe those striking differences in the tempers and habits of mankind which are obvious even to a child. Cupidity would be contrasted with generosity, parsimony with extravagance. He would hear of injustice and of ingratitude, of uprightness and of fidelity. Curiosity would lead him to the bailiff's court ; and there he would learn of bitter quarrels and obsti- nate enmities, of friends parted " on a dissension of a doit," of foes who " interjoin their issues" to worry some wretched offender. Small ambition and empty pride would grow bloated upon the pettiest distinctions ; and " the insolence of office " would thrust humility off the causeway. There would be loud talk of loyalty and religion, while the peaceful and the pious would be suspected ; and the sycophant who wore the great man's livery would strive to crush the independent in spirit. Much of this the observing boy would see, but much also would be concealed in the general hollowness that belongs to a period of inquietude and change. The time would come when he would penetrate into the depths of these things ; but mean- while what was upon the surface would be food for thought. At the weekly market there would be the familiar congregation of buyers and sellers. The house- wife from her little farm would ride in gallantly between her panniers laden with butter, eggs, chickens, and capons. The farmer would stand by his pitched corn, and, as Harrison complains, if the poor man handled the sample with the intent to purchase his humble bushel, the man of many sacks would declare that it was sold. The engrosser, according to the same authority, would be there with his understand- ing nod, successfully evading every statute that could be made against forestalling, because no statutes could prevail against the power of the best price. There, before shops were many, and their stocks extensive, would come the dealers from Birming- ham and Coventry, with wares for use and wares for show, — horse-gear and women- gear, Sheffield whittles, and rings with posies. At the joyous Fair-season it would seem that the wealth of a world was emptied into Stratford ; not only the sub- stantial things, the wine, the wax, the wheat, the wool, the malt, the cheese, the clothes, the uapery, such as even great lords sent their stewards to the fairs to buy,* but every possible variety of such trumpery as fill the pedlar's pack, — ribbons, inkles, caddises, coifs, stomachers, pomanders, brooches, tapes, shoe-ties. Great dealings were there on these occasions in beeves and horses, tedious chafferings, stout affirmations, saints profanely invoked to ratify a bargain. A mighty man rides into the fair who scatters consternation around. It is the Queen's Purveyor. The best horses are taken up for her Majesty's use, at her Majesty's price ; and they probably find their way to the Earl of Leicester's or the Earl of Warwick's stables at a considerable profit to Master Purveyor. The country buyers and sellers look blank ; but there is no remedy. There is solace, however, if there is not redress. The ivy-bush is at many a door, and the sounds of merriment are within, as the ale and the sack are quaffed to friendly greetings. In the streets there are morris- dancers, the juggler with his ape, and the minstrel with his ballads. We can imagine the foremost in a group of boys listening to the " small popular music sung by these cantabcuiqui upon benches and barrels' heads," or more earnestly to some one of the " blind harpers, or such-like tavern minstrels, that give a fit of mirth for a groat ; their matters being for the most part stories of old time, as ' The Tale of Sir Topas,' < Bevis of Southampton,' ' Guy of Warwick,' 'Adam BeU and Clyrnme of the dough,' and such other old romances or historical rhymes, made purposely for the recreation of the common people."t A bold fellow, who is full of queer stories and cant phrases, strikes a few notes upon his gittern, and the lads and
* See the " Northumberland Household Book." f Puttenham's "Art of Poetry/' 1689.
38
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i.
lasses are around him ready to dance their country measures. He is thus described in the year 1564, in a tract by William Bulleyn : "Sir, there is one lately come into this hall, in a green Kendal coat, with yellow hose, a beard of the same colour, only upon the upper lip ; a russet hat, with a great plume of strange feathers, and a brave scarf about his neck, in cut buskins. He is playing at the trey-trip with our host's son : he playeth trick upon the gittern, and dances ' Trenchmore ' and ' Heie de Gie,' and telleth news from Terra Florida." Upon this strange sort of indigenous troubadour would the schoolboy gaze, for he would seem to belong to a more know- ing race than dwelt on Avon's side. His " news from Terra Florida " tells us of an age of newstongues, before newspapers were. Doubtless such as he had many a story of home wonders ; he had seen London perhaps ; he could tell of Queens and Parliaments ; might have seen a noble beheaded, or a heretic burnt ; he could speak, we may fancy, of the wonders of the sea ; of ships laden with rich merchandize, unloading in havens far from this inland region ; of other ships wrecked on inhos-
[The Fair.]
pitable coasts, and poor men made rich by the ocean's spoils. At the fair, too, would be the poor old minstrel, with his gown of Kendal green, not tattered though somewhat tarnished. The harp laid by his side upon the bench tells his profession. There was a time when he was welcomed at every hall, and he might fitly wear starched ruffs, and a chain of pewter as bright as silver, and have the rest of his harp jauntily suspended by a green lace. Those times are past. He scarcely now dares to enter worshipful men's houses ; and at the fairs a short song of love or good fellowship, or a dp rice to the gittern, are preferred by most to his tedious
CHAP, v.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 39
legends. For many a long "fitte" had he, which told of doughty deeds of Arthur and his chivalry, Sir Bevis, Sir Gawain, Sir Launfal, and Sir Isenbras ; and, after he had preluded with his harp, the minstrel would begin each in stately wise with " Listen, lordings, and hold you still," or " Listen to me a little stond." He might maunder on, neglected by most, though one youth might treasure up his words. There are many traces in the works of Shakspere of his familiarity with old romances and old ballads ; but like all his other acquirements, there is no repro- duction of the same thing under a new form. Howe fancied that Shakspere's knowledge of the learned languages was but small, because " it is without con- troversy that in his works we scarce find any traces of anything that looks like an imitation of the ancients." It is for inferior men to imitate. It was for Shakspere to subject his knowledge to his original power of thought, so that his knowledge and his invention should become "one entire and perfect chrysolite;" and thus the minute critic, who desires to find the classical jewels set in the English gold, proclaims that they are not there, because they were unknown and unappreciated by the uneducated poet. So of the traditionary lore with which Shakspere must have been familiar from his very boyhood. That lore is not in his writings in any very palpable shape, but its spirit is there. The simplicity, the vigour, the pathos, the essential dramatic power, of the ballad poetry stood out in Shakspere's boyhood in remarkable contrast to the drawling pedantry of the moral plays of the early stage. The ballads kept the love and the knowledge of real poetry in the hearts of the people. There was something high, and generous, and tolerant, in those which were most popular ; something which demonstratively told they belonged to a nation which admired courage, which loved truth, which respected misfortune. Percy, speaking of the more ancient ballad of " Chevy Chase," says — " One may also observe a generous impartiality in the old original bard, when in the conclusion of his tale he represents both nations as quitting the field without any reproachful reflection on either ; though he gives to his own countrymen the credit of being the smaller number." The author of that ballad was an Englishman ; and we may believe this " impartiality" to have been an ingredient of the old English patriotism. At any rate it entered into the patriotism of Shakspere.
40
WILLIAM 8HAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
BOOK I.
[The Boundary Elm, Stratford.] CHAPTER VI.
HOLIDAYS.
IT is the twenty-third of April, and the birthday of William Shakspere is a general holiday at Stratford. It is St. George's day. There is high feasting at Westminster or at Windsor. The green rushes are strewn in the outward courts of the Palace ; the choristers lift up the solemn chants of the Litany as a procession advances from the Queen's Hall to her Chapel ; the Heralds move on gorgeously in their coat- armour ; the Knights of the Garter and the Sovereign glitter in their velvet robes ; the Yeomen of the Guard close round in their richest liveries.* At Stratford there is humbler pageantry. Upon the walls of the Chapel of the Holy Cross there was a wondrous painting of a terrible dragon pierced through the neck with a spear ; but he has snapped the weapon in two with his fearful talons, and a gallant knight in complete armour is uplifting his sword, whilst the bold horse which he bestrides rushes upon the monster with his pointed champfrein :t in the background is a crowned lady with a lamb ; and on distant towers a king and queen watching the combat. This story of Saint George and the delivery of the Princess of Silcne from the power of the dragon was, on the twenty-third of April, wont to be dramatized at Stratford. From the altar of Saint George was annually taken down an ancient
* See Nichols's " Progresses of Elizabeth," vol. i., p. 88.
f The armour for the horse's head, with a long projecting spike, so as to make the horse resemble an unicorn.
CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 41
suit of harness, which was duly scoured and repaired ; and from some storehouse was produced the figure of a dragon, which had also all needful annual reparation. Upon the back of a sturdy labourer was the harness fitted, and another powerful man had to bear the dragon, into whose body he no doubt entered. Then, all the dignitaries of the town being duly assembled, did Saint George and the Dragon march along, amidst the ringing of bells and the firing of chambers, and the shout of the patriotic population of "Saint George for England."* Here is the simplest of dramatic exhibitions, presented through a series of years to the observing eyes of a boy in whom the dramatic power of going out of himself to portray some incident, or character, or passion with incomparable truth, was to be developed and matured in the growth of his poetical faculty. As he looked upon that rude representation of a familiar legend, he may first have conceived the capability of exhibiting to the eye a moving picture of events, and of informing it with life by appropriate dialogue. But in truth the essentially dramatic spirit of the ancient church had infused itself thoroughly into the popular mind ; and thus, long after the Reformation had swept away most of the ecclesiastical ceremonials that were held to belong to the supersti- tions of Popery, the people retained this principle of personation in their common festivals ; and many were the occasions in which the boy and the man, the maiden and the matron were called upon to enact some part, that might require bodily activity and mental readiness ; in which something of grace and even of dignity might be called forth ; in which a free but good-tempered wit might command the applause of uncritical listeners ; and a sweet or mellow voice, pouring forth our nation's songs, would receive the exhilarating homage of a jocund chorus. Let us follow the boy William Shakspere, now, we will suppose, some ten or eleven years old, through the annual course of the principal rustic holidays, in which the yeoman and the peasant, the tradesman and the artisan, with their wives and children, were equally ready to partake. We may discover in these familiar scenes not only those peculiar forms of a dramatic spirit in real manners which might in some degree have given a direction to his genius, but, what is perhaps of greater importance, that poetical aspect of common life which was to supply materials of thought and of imagery to him who was to become in the most eminent degree the poet of humanity in all its imaginative relations.
The festivities of Christmas are over. The opening year calls the husbandman again to his labours ; and Plough Monday, with its plough dragged along to rustic music, and its sword-dance, proclaims that wassail must give place to work. The rosemary and the bays, the misletoe arid the holly, are removed from the porch and the hall, and the delicate leaves of the box are twined into the domestic garland/t* The Vigil of Saint Agnes has rewarded or disappointed the fateful charm of the village maiden. The husbandman has noted whether Saint Paul's day " be fair and clear," to guide his presages of the year's fertility. " Cupid's Kalendere" has been searched on the day of "Seynte Valentine," as Lydgate tells. The old English chorus, which Shakspere himself has preserved, has been duly sung —
" 'T is merry in hall, when beards wag all, And welcome merry Shrove-tide."
Easter is come, after a season of solemnity. The ashes were no longer blessed at the beginning of Lent, nor the palms borne at the close ; yet there was strong devotion in the reformed church — real penitence and serious contemplation. But
* It appears from accounts which are given in fac-simile in Fisher's Work on the Chapel of the Guild that this procession repeatedly took place in the reign of Henry VIII. ; and other accounts show that it was continued as late as 1579.
f Hcrrick.
42 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE I A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
the day of gladness arrives — a joy which even the great eye of the natural world was to make manifest. Surely there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. The young poet might have joined his simple neighbours on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, " We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth not dance on Easter-day." But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays has given life and movement to the sun : —
"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain's tops.
Saw he not the sun dance — heard he not the expression of the undoubting belief that the sun danced — as he went forth into Stratford meadows in the early twilight of Easter-day ?
On the road to Henley-in-Arden, about two or three hundred yards from the house in Henley Street where John Shakspere once dwelt, there stood, when this Biography was first written, a very ancient boundary-tree — an elm which is recorded in a Presentment of the Perambulation of the boundaries of the Borough of Strat- ford, on the 7th of April, 1591, as " The Elme at the Dovehouse-Close end."* The boundary from that elm in the Henley road continued in another direction to " the two elms in Evesham highway." Such are the boundaries of the borough at this day. At a period, then, when it was usual for the boys of Grammar Schools to attend the annual perambulations in Rogation-week of the clergy, the magistrates and public officers, and the inhabitants, of parishes and towns,t would William Shakspere be found, in gleeful companionship, under this old boundary elm. There would be assembled the parish priest and the schoolmaster, the bailiff and the church- wardens. Banners would wave, poles crowned with garlands would be carried by old and young. Under each Gospel-tree, of which this Dovehouse-Close Elm would be one, a passage from Scripture would be read, a collect recited, a psalm sung. With more pomp at the same season might the Doge of Venice espouse the Sea in testimony of the perpetual domination of the Republic, but not with more heartfelt joy than these the people of Stratford traced the boundaries of their little sway. The Reformation left us these parochial processions. In the 7th year of Elizabeth (1565) the form of devotion for the "Rogation days of Procession" was prescribed, " without addition of any superstitious ceremonies heretofore used;" and it was subsequently ordered that the curate on such occasions " shall admonish the people to give thanks to God in the beholding of God's benefits," and enforce the scriptural denouncements against those who removed their neighbours' landmarks. Beauti- fully has Walton described how Hooker encouraged these annual ceremonials : — " He would by no means omit the customary time of procession, persuading all, both rich and poor, if they desired the preservation of love and their parish rights and liberties, to accompany him in his perambulation ; and most did so ; in which per- ambulation he would usually express more pleasant discourse than at other times, and would then always drop some loving and facetious observations, to be remem- bered against the next year, especially by the boys and young people ; still inclining them, and all his present parishioners, to meekness and mutual kindnesses and love, because love thinks not evil, but covers a multitude of infirmities." And so, per- haps, listening to the gentle words of some venerable Hooker of his time, would the young Shakspere walk the bounds of his native parish. One day would not suffice
* The original is in the possession of R. Wheler, Esq., of Stratford. f See Brand's " Popular Antiquities/' by Sir H. Ellis, edit. 1841, vol. i., p. 123.
CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 43
;o visit its numerous Gospel-trees. Hours would be spent in reconciling differences amongst the cultivators of the common-fields ; in largesses to the poor ; in merry- making at convenient halting-places. A wide parish is this of Stratford, including leven villages and hamlets. A district of beautiful and varied scenery is this parish — hill and valley, wood and water. Following the Avon upon the north bank, against the stream, for some two miles, the processionists would walk through low and fertile meadows, unenclosed pastures then in all likelihood. A little brook falls into ,he river, coming down from the marshy uplands of Ingon, where, in spite of modern mprovement, the frequent bog attests the accuracy of Dugdale's description — ' Inge signifyeth in our old English a meadow or low ground." The brook is traced upwards into the hills of Welcombe ; and then for nearly three miles from Welcombe Grreenhill the boundary lies along a wooded, ridge, opening prospects of surpassing jeauty. There may the distant spires of Coventry be seen peeping above the ntermediate hills, and the nearer towers of Warwick lying cradled in their surround- ng woods. In another direction a cloud-like spot in the extreme distance is the far-famed Wrekin ; and turning to the north-west are the noble hills of Malvern, with their well-defined outlines. The Cotswolds lock-in the landscape on another side ; while in the middle distance the bold Bredon-hill looks down upon the vale of Evesham. All around is a country of unrivalled fertility, with now and then a plain of considerable extent ; but more commonly a succession of undulating hills, some wood-crowned, but all cultivated. At the northern extremity of this high land, which principally belongs to the estate of Clopton, and which was doubtless a park in early times, we have a panoramic view of the valley in which Stratford lies, with its hamlets of Bishopton, Little Wilmecote, Shottery, and Drayton. As the marvellous boy of the Stratford grammar-school looked upon that plain, how little could he have foreseen the course of his future life ! For twenty years of his manhood he was to have no constant dwelling-place in that his native town ; but it was to be the home of his affections. He would be gathering fame and opulence in an almost untrodden path, of which his young ambition could shape no definite image ; but in the prime of his life he was to bring his wealth to his own Stratford, and become the proprietor and the contented cultivator of some of the loved fields that he now saw mapped out at his feet. Then, a little while, and an early tomb under that gray tower — a tomb so to be honoured in all ages to come,
" That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."
For some six miles the boundary runs from north to south, partly through land which was formerly barren, and still known as Drayton Bushes and Drayton Wild Moor. Here,
" Far from her nest the lapwing cries away." *
The green bank of the Avon is again reached at the western extremity of the boundary, and the pretty hamlet of Luddington, with its cottages and old trees standing high above the river sedges, is included. The Avon is crossed where the Stour unites with it ; and the boundary extends considerably to the south-east, returning to the town over Clopton's Bridge.
Shottery, the prettiest of hamlets, is scarcely a mile from Stratford. Here, in all probability dwelt one who in a few years was to have an important influence upon the destiny of the boy-poet. A Court Roll of the 34th Henry VIII. (1543) shows us that John Hathaway then resided at Shottery ; and the substantial house which the Hathaway s possessed, now divided into several cottages, remained with their descendants till the very recent period of 1838. There were Hathaways, also, living
* " Comedy of Errors."
44 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
in the town of Stratford, contemporaries of John Shakspere. We cannot say, absolutely, that Anne Hathaway, the future wife of William Shakspere, was of Shottery ; but the prettiest of maidens (for the veracious antiquarian Oldys says there is a tradition that she was eminently beautiful) would have fitly dwelt in the pleasantcst of hamlets. Pass the back of the cottage in which the Hathaways lived, and enter that beautiful meadow which rises into a gentle eminence commanding the hamlet at several points. Throw down the hedges, and there is here the fittest of localities for the May-games. An impatient group is gathered under the shade of the old elms, for the morning sun casts his slanting beams dazzlingly across that green. There is the distant sound of tabor and bagpipe : — " Hark, hark ! I hear the dancing,
And a nimble inorris prancing ;
The bagpipe and the morris bells,
That they are not far hence us tells." *
From out of the leafy Arden are they bringing in the May-pole. The oxen move slowly with the ponderous wain : they are garlanded, but not for the sacrifice. Around the spoil of the forest are the pipers and the dancers — maidens in blue kirtles, and foresters in green tunics. Amidst the shouts of young and old, child- hood leaping and clapping its hands, is the May-pole raised. But there are great personages forthcoming — not so great, however, as in more ancient times. There are Robin Hood and Little John, in their grass-green tunics ; but their bows and their sheaves of arrows are more for show than use. Maid Marian is there ; but she is a mockery — a smooth-faced youth in a watchet-coloured tunic, with flowers and coronets, and a mincing gait, but not the shepherdess who
" With garlands gay Was made the lady of the May." f
There is farce amidst the pastoral. The age of unrealities has already in part arrived. Even amongst country-folks there is burlesque. There is personation, with a laugh at the things that are represented. The Hobby-horse and the Dragon, however, produce their shouts of merriment. But the hearty Morris-dancers soon spread a spirit of genial mirth amidst all the spectators. The clownish Maid Marian will now
" Caper upright like a wild Morisco : " J
Friar Tuck sneaks away from his ancient companions to join hands with some undisguised maiden ; the Hobby-horse gets rid of his pasteboard and his foot-cloth ; and the Dragon quietly deposits his neck and tail for another season. Something like the genial chorus of " Summer's Last Will and Testament " is rung out : —
" Trip and go, heave and ho, Up and down, to and fro, From the town to the grove, Two and two, let us rove, A Maying, a playing ; Love hath no gainsaying : So merrily trip and go."
The early-rising moon still sees the villagers on that green of Shottery. The piper leans against the May-pole ; the featliest of dancers still swim to his music : —
" So have I seen
Tom Piper stand upon our village green, Back'd with the May -pole, whilst a jocund crew In gentle motion circularly threw Themselves around him." §
* Weclkes's "Madrigals," 1600. f Nicholas Breton. J " Henry VI.," Part II.
§ Browne's " Britannia's Pastorals," Book ii. Second Song.
CHAP. VI.]
HOLIDAYS.
45
The same beautiful writer — one of the last of our golden age of poetry has
described the parting gifts bestowed ^DOU the " merry youngsters" by
" The lady of the May Set in an arbour, (on a holy-day,) Built by the May-pole, where the jocund swains Dance with the maidens to the bagpipe's strains, "When envious night commands them to be gone."*
[Shottery.J
Eight villages in the neighbourhood of Stratford have been characterized in well- known lines by some old resident who had the talent of rhyme. It is remarkable how familiar all the country-people are to this day with these lines, and how inva- riably they ascribe them to Shakspere : —
" Piping Pelnvorth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hilborough, hungry Grafton, Dudgingf Exhall, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford."
It is maintained that the.se epithets have a real historical truth about them ; and
* Browne's " Britannia's Pastorals," Book ii. Fourth Song. f Sulky, stubborn, in dudgeon.
46
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK I.
so we must place the scene of a Whitsun-Ale at Bidford. Aubrey has given a sen- sible account of such a festivity : — " There were no rates for the poor in my grand- father's days ; but for Kingston St. Michael (no small parish) the Church- Ale of Whitsuntide did the business. In every parish is, or was, a church-house, to which belonged spits, crocks, &c., utensils for dressing provision. Here the housekeepers met and were merry, and gave their charity. The young people were there, too, and had dancing, bowling, shooting at butts, &c., the ancients sitting gravely by and looking on. All things were civil, and without scandal."* The puritan Stubbs took a more severe view of the matter than Aubrey's grandfather : — " In certain towns where drunken Bacchus bears sway, against Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide, or some other time, the churchwardens of every parish, with the consent of the whole parish, provide half a score or twenty quarters of malt, whereof some they buy of the church-stock, and some is given them of the parishioners themselves, every one conferring somewhat, according to his ability ; which malt, being made into very strong ale or beer, is set to sale, either in the church or some other place assigned to that purpose. Then, when this is set abroach, well is he that can get the soonest to it, and spend the most at it."t Carew, the historian of Cornwall, (1602), says, " The neighbour parishes at those times lovingly visit one another, and this way frankly spend their money together." Thus lovingly might John Shakspere and his friends, on a Whit-Monday morning, have ridden by the pleasant road to Bidford — now from some little eminence beholding their Avon flowing amidst a low meadow on one side and a wood-crowned steep on t"he other, turning a mill-wheel, rushing over a dam — now carefully wending their way
••>-..
[Bidford Bridge.]
through the rough road under the hill, or galloping over the free downs, glad to escape from rut and quagmire. And then the Icknield Street t is crossed,
Miscellanies."
f " Anatomy of Abuses," 1585.
The Roman way which runs near Bidford.
CHAP. VL] HOLIDAYS. 47
and they look down upon the little town with its gabled roofs ; and they pass the old church, whose tower gives forth a lusty peal ; and the hostel at the bridge receives them ; and there is the cordial welcome, the outstretched hand and the full cup.
But nearer home Whitsuntide has its sports also. Had not Stratford its " Lord of Whitsuntide 1 " Might not the boy behold at this season innocence wearing a face of freedom like his own Perdita ? —
" Come take your flowers : Methinks, I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals."*
Would there not be in some cheerful mansion a simple attempt jat dramatic representation, such as his Julia has described in her assumed character of a page ? —
" At Pentecost,
When all our pageants of delight were play'd,
Our youth got me to play the woman's part ;
And I was trimm'd in madam Julia's gown ;
Which served me as fit, in all men's judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me :
Therefore I know she is about my height.
And at that time I made her weep a-good,
For I did play a lamentable part :
Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning
For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight."f
Certainly on that holiday some one would be ready to recite a moving tale from Gower or from Chaucer — a fragment of the " Confessio Amantis" or of the " Troilus and Creseide :" —
" It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves, and holy-ales."!
The elements of poetry would be around him ; the dramatic spirit of the people would be strugglij|g to give utterance to its thoughts, and even then he might cherish the desire to lend it a voice.
The sheep-shearing — that, too, is dramatic. Drayton, the countryman of our poet, has described the shepherd-king : —
" But, Muse, return to tell how there the shepherd-king, Whose flock hath chanc'd that year the earliest lamb to bring, In his gay baldric sits at his low grassy board, With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stor'd : And, whilst the bagpipe plays, each lu&ty jocund swain Quaffs syllabubs in cans to all upon the plain ; And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear, Some roundelays do sing, — the rest the burden bear."§
The vale of Evesham is the scene of Drayton's sheep-shearing. But higher up the Avon there are rich pastures ; and shallow bays of the clear river, where the wash- ing may be accomplished. Such a bay, so used, is there near the pretty village of Alveston, about two miles above Stratford. One of the most delicious scenes of the " Winter's Tale " is that of the sheep-shearing, in which we have the more poetical shepherd-<^<m. There is a minuteness of circumstance amidst the exqui- site poetry of this scene which shows that it must have been founded upon actual observation, and in all likelihood upon the keen and prying observation of a boy
* "Winter's Tale," Act iv., Scene in. f " Two Gentlemen of Verona," Act IV., Scene m.
$ "Pericles/' Act I. § " Polyolbion," Song XIV.
48 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
occupied and interested with such details. Surely his father's pastures and his father's homestead might have supplied all these circumstances. His father's man might be the messenger to the town, and reckon upon "counters" the cost of the sheep-shearing feast. "Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice" — and then he asks, " What will this sister of mine do with rice ] " In Bohemia, the clown might, with dramatic propriety, not know the use of rice at a sheep-shearing ; but a Warwickshire swain would have the flavour of cheese-cakes in his mouth at the first mention of rice and currants. Cheese-cakes and warden-pies were the sheep- shearing delicacies. How absolutely true is the following picture : —
" Fie, daughter ! when my old wife liv'd, upon This day she was both pantler, butler, cook ; Both dame and servant : welcom'd all, serv'd all : Would sing her song, and dance her turn ; now here At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle ; On his shoulder, and his : her face o' fire With laboiir ; and the thing she took to quench it She would to each one sip."
This is the literal painting of a Teniers ; but the same hand could unite the unri- valled grace of a Correggio. William Shakspere might have had some boyish dreams of a " mistress o' the feast," who might have suggested his Perdita ; but such a creation is of higher elements than those of the earth. Such a bright vision is something more than " a queen of curds and cream." The poet who says
" Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn ; With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' exir, And draw her home with music," *
had seen the Hock-Cart of the old harvest-home. It was the same that Paul Hentzner saw at Windsor in 1598 : " As we were returning to our inn we happened to meet some country-people celebrating their Harvest-home. Their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhapst hey would signify Ceres. This they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid-servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn." In the reign of James I., Moresin, another foreigner, saw a figure made of com drawn home in a cart, with men and women singing to the pipe and the drum. And then Puritanism arose, to tell us that all such expressions of the heart were pagan and superstitious, relics of Popery, abomi- nations of the Evil One. Robert Herrick, full of the old poetical feeling, sang the glories of the Hock-Cart in the time of Charles I. : but a severe religion, and there- fore an unwise one, denounced all such festivals as the causes of debauchery ; and so the debauchery alone remained with us. The music and the dancing were ban- ished, but the strong drinks were left. Herrick tells us that the ceremonies of the Hock-Cart were performed " with great devotion." Assuredly they were. Devotion is that which knocks the worldly shackles off the spirit ; strikes a spark out of our hard and dry natures ; enforces the money-getter for a moment to forego his gain, and the penniless labourer to forget his hunger-satisfying toil. Devotion is that which brings the tear into the eye and makes the heart throb against the bosom, in silent forests where the doe gazes fearlessly upon the unaccustomed form of man, by rocks overhanging the sea, in the gorge of the mountains, in the cloister of the cathedral when the organ-peal comes and goes like the breath of flowers, in the crowded city when joyous multitudes shout by one impulse. Devotion lived
* " Merchant of Venice," Act V., Scene I.
CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 49
amidst old ceremonials derived from a long antiquity ; it waited upon the seasons ; it hallowed the seed-time and the harvest, and made the frosts cheerful. And thus it grew into Religion. The feeling became a principle. But the formalists came, and required men to be devout without imagination ; to have faith, rejecting tradi- tion and authority, and all the genial impulses of love and reverence associated with the visible world, — the practical poetry of life, which is akin to faith. And so we are what we are, and not what God would have us to be.
We have retained Christmas ; a starveling Christmas ; one day of excessive eating for all ages, and Twelfth-cake for the children. It is something that rela- tions meet on Christmas-day ; that for one day in the year the outward shows of rivalry and jealousy are not visible ; that the poor cousin puts on his best coat to taste port with his condescending host of the same name ; that the portionless nieces have their annual guinea from their wealthy aunt. But where is the real festive exhilaration of Christmas ; the meeting of all ranks as children of a common father ; the tenant speaking freely in his landlord's hall ; the labourers and their families sitting at the same great oak-table ; the Yule Log brought in with shout and song ?
" No night is now with hymn or carol blest." *
There are singers of carols even now at a Stratford Christmas. Warwickshire has retained some of its ancient carols. But the singers are wretched chorus-makers, according to the most unmusical style of all the generations from the time of the Commonwealth. There are no " three-man song-men " amongst them, no " means and bases ; " there is not even " a Puritan " who " sings psalms to hornpipes." t They have retained such of the carols as will most provoke mockery : —
" Rise up, rise up, brother Dives,
And come along with me, For you 've a place provided in hell, Upon a sarpant's knee."
And then the crowd laugh, and give their halfpennies. But in an age of music we may believe that one young dweller in Stratford gladly woke out of his innocent sleep, after the evening bells had rung him to rest, when in the stillness of the night the psaltery was gently touched before his father's porch, and he heard, one voice under another, these simple aiid solemn strains : —
" As Joseph was a- walking He neither shall be clothed^
He heard an angel sing, In purple nor in pall,
This night shall be born But all in fair linen, Our heavenly king. As were babies all.
He neither shall be born He neither shall be rock'd
In housen nor in hall, In silver nor in gold,
Nor in the place of Paradise, But in a wooden cradle
But in an ox's stall. That rocks on the mould."
London has perhaps this carol yet, amongst its halfpenny ballads. A man whose real vocation was mistaken in his busy time, for he had a mind attuned to the love of what was beautiful in the past, instead of being enamoured with the ugly dispu- tations of the present, has preserved it ; t but it was for another age. It was for the age of William Shakspere. It was for the age when superstition, as we call it, had its poetical faith : —
" Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
* " Midsummer Night's Dream." f " Winter's Tale."
t William Hone's " Ancient Mysteries," p. 92.
50
WILLIAM BHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[l?OOK I.
This bird of dawning singeth all night long ; And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad, The nights are wholesome ; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm : So hallow'd and so gracious is the time." *
Surely it is the poet himself who adds, in the person of Horatio, "So have I heard, and do in part believe it."
Such a night was a preparation for a " happy Christmas ; " — the prayers of an earnest Church, the Anthem, the Hymn, the Homily. The cross of Stratford was garnished with the holly, the ivy, and the bay. Hospitality was in every house ; but the hall of the great landlord of the parish was a scene of rare conviviality. The frost or the snow will not deter the principal friends and tenants from the welcome of Clopton. There is the old house, nestled in the woods, looking down upon the little town. Its chimneys are reeking ; there is bustle in the offices ; the sound of the trumpeters and the pipers is heard through the open door of the great entrance ; the steward marshals the guests ; the tables are fast filling. Then advance, courteously, the master and the mistress of the feast. The Boar's head is brought in with due solemnity ; the wine-cup goes round ; and perhaps the Saxon shout of Waes-hael and Drink-hael may still be shouted. The Lord of Misrule and the Mummers from Stratford are at the porch. Very sparing are the cues required for the enactment of this short drama. A speech to the esquire, closed with a merry jest; something about ancestry and good Sir Hugh ; the loud laugh ; the song and the chorus, — and the Lord of Misrule is now master of the feast.
* " Hamlet," Act I., Scene i.
[Clopton House.]
CHAP. VII.]
KENILWORTH.
51
CHAPTER VII.
KENILWORTH.
WAS William Shakspere at Kenil worth in that summer of 1575, when the great Dudley entertained Elizabeth with a splendour which annalists have delighted to record, and upon which one of our own days has bestowed a fame more imperish- able than that of any annals ? Percy, speaking of the old Coventry Hock-play, says, " Whatever this old play or storial show was at the time it was exhibited to Queen Elizabeth, it had probably our young Shakspere for a spectator, who was then in his twelfth year, and doubtless attended with all the inhabitants of the surround- ing country at these ' princely pleasures of Kenilworth,' whence Stratford is only a few miles distant."* The preparations for this celebrated entertainment were on so magnificent a scale, the purveyings must have been so enormous, the posts so unintermitting, that there had needed not the flourishings of paragraphs (for the age of paragraphs was not as yet) to have roused the curiosity of aU mid-England. Elizabeth had visited Kenilworth on two previous occasions, — in 1565, and in 1572.
Whether the boy Shakspere was at Kenilworth in 1575, when Robert Dudley wel- comed his sovereign with a more than regal magnificence, is not necessary to be affirmed or denied. It is tolerably clear that the exquisite speech of Oberon in " A Midsummer Night's Dream" is associated with some of the poetical devices which he might have there beheld, or have heard described : —
" Obe. My gentle Puck, come hither : Thou remember'st Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song ;
* " On the Origin of the English Stage : " — Reliques, vol. i.
E 2
52 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE ; A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid's music.
Puck I remember.
Obe. That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,) Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all arm'd ; a certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west ; And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts : But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon ; And the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation fancy-free."
[Elizabeth.]
The most remarkable of the shows of Kenilworth were associated with the mytho- logy and the romance of lakes and seas. "Triton, in likeness of a mermaid, came toward's the Queen's Majesty." "Arion appeared sitting on a dolphin's back." So the quaint and really poetical George Gascoigne, in his " Brief Rehearsal, or rather a true Copy of as much as was presented before her Majesty at Kenilworth." But the diffuse and most entertaining coxcomb Laneham describes a song of Arion with an ecstacy which may justify the belief that the " dulcet and harmonious breath" of "the sea-maid's music" might be the echo of the melodies heard by the young poet as he stood beside the lake at Kenilworth : — " Now, Sir, the ditty in metre so aptly endited to the matter, and after by voice deliciously delivered ; the song, by a skilful artist into his parts so sweetly sorted ; each part in his instru- ment so clean and sharply touched ; every instrument again in his kind so excel- lently tunable ; and this in the evening of the day, resounding from the calm
CHAP. VII.]
KENILWORTH.
53
waters, where the presence of her Majesty, and longing to listen, had utterly damped all noise and din, the who!? harmony conveyed in time, tune, and temper thus incomparably melodious ; with what pleasure (Master Martin), with what sharpness of conceit, with what lively delight this might pierce into the hearers' hearts, I pray ye imagine yourself, as ye may." If Elizabeth be the " fair vestal throned by the west," of which there can be no reasonable doubt, the most appro- priate scene of the mermaid's song would be Kenilworth, and "that very time" the summer of 1575. ^
Percy, believing that the boy Shakspere was at Kenilworth, has remarked, with his usual taste and judgment, that "the dramatic cast of many parts of that superb entertainment must have had a very great effect upon a young imagination, whose dramatic powers were hereafter to astonish the world." Without assuming with Percy that "our young bard gained admittance into the castle" on the evening when " after supper was there a play of a very good theme presented ; but so set forth, by the actors' well handling, that pleasure and mirth made it seem very short, though it lasted two good hours and more ;"* yielding not our consent to Tieck's fiction, that the boy performed the part of " Echo " in Gascoigne's address to the Queen, and was allowed to see the whole of the performances by the especial favour of her Majesty, — we may believe there were parts of that entertainment, which, with- out being a favoured spectator, William Shakspere with his friends might have beheld ; and which " must have had a very great effect upon a young imagination,"
[Entrance to the Hall.] * Lanehnm.
*
54 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
assisting, too, in giving it that dramatic tendency which, as we have endeavoured already to point out, was a peculiar characteristic of the simplest and the com- monest festivals of his age.
And yet it is difficult to imagine anything more tedious than the fulsome praise, the mythological pedantries, the obscure allusions to Constancy and Deep-Desire, which were poured into the ears of Elizabeth during the nineteen days of Kenilworth. There was not, according to the historians of this visit, one fragment of our real old poetry produced, to gratify the Queen of a nation that had the songs and ballads of the chivalrous times still fresh upon its lips. There were no Minstrels at Kenil- worth ; the Harper was unbidden to its halls. The old English spirit of poetry was dead in a scheming court. It was something higher that in a few years called up Spenser and Shakspere. Yet there was one sport, emanating from the people, which had heart and reality in it. Laneham describes this as a " good sport presented in an historical cue by certain good-hearted men of Coventry, my lord's neighbours there." They " made petition that they might renew now their old storial show : of argument how the Danes, whilom here in a troublous season, were for quietness borne withal and suffered in peace ; that anon, by outrage and unsupportable inso- lency, abusing both Ethelred the King, then, and all estates everywhere beside, at the grievous complaint and counsel of Huna, the King's chieftain in wars, on Saint Brice's night Anno Dom. 1012 (as the book says, that falleth yearly on the thirteenth of November), were all despatched, and the realm rid. And for because that the matter mentioneth how valiantly our Englishwomen, for love of their country, behaved themselves, expressed in action and rhymes after their manner, they thought it might move some mirth to her Majesty the rather. The thing, said they, is grounded in story, and for pastime wont to be played in our city yearly, without ill example of manners, papistry, or any superstition ; and else did so occupy the heads of a number, that likely enough would have had worse meditations ; had an ancient beginning and a long continuance, till now of late laid down, they knew no cause why, unless it was by the zeal of certain of their preachers, men very commendable for their behaviour and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime." The description by Laneham is the only precise account which remains to us of the " old storial show," the "sport presented in an historical cue." It was a show not to be despised ; for it told the people how their Saxon ancestors had arisen to free themselves from " outrage and unsupportable insolency," and " how valiantly our Englishwomen, for love of their country, behaved themselves." Laneham, in his accustomed style, is more intent upon describing " Captain Cox," an odd man of Coventry, " mason, ale-conner, who hath great oversight in matters of story," than upon giving us a rational account of this spectacle. We find, however, that there were the Danish lance-knights on horseback, and then the English ; that they had furious encounters with spear and shield, with sword and target ; that there were footmen, who fought in rank and squadron ; and that " twice the Danes had the better, but at the last conflict beaten down, overcome, and many led captive for triumph by our Englishwomen." The court historian adds, — " This was the effect of this show, that as it was handled made much matter of good pastime, brought all indeed into the great court, even under her Highness's window, to have seen." But her Highness, having pleasanter occupation within, " saw but little of the Coventry play, and commanded it therefore on the Tuesday following to have it full out, as accordingly it was presented." This repetition of the Hock-play in its completeness, full out, necessarily leads to the conclusion that the action was somewhat more complicated than the mere repetition of a mock-combat. Laneham, in his general description of the play, says, " expressed in action and rhymes." That he has preserved none of the rhymes, and has given
CHAP. VII.] KENILWORTH. 55
us a very insufficient account of the action, is characteristic of the man and of the tone of the courtiers. The Coventry clowns came there, not to call up any patriotic feeling by their old traditionary rhymes and dumb-show, but to be laughed at for their awkward movement and their earnest declamation. It appears to us that the conclusion is somewhat hasty which says of this play of Hock Tuesday, " It seems to have been merely a dumb-show."* Percy, resting upon the authority of Lane- ham, says that the performance " seems on that occasion to have been without reci- tation or rhymes, and reduced to mere dumb-show." Even this we doubt. But certainly it is difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than that of Percy, that the play, as originally performed by the men of Coventry, " expressed in action and rhymes after their manner," — representing a complicated historical event, — the insolence of tyranny, the indignation of the oppressed, the grievous complaint of one injured chieftain, the secret counsels, the plots, the conflicts, the triumph, — must have offered us " a regular model of a complete drama." If the young Shakspere were a witness to the performance of this drama, his imagination would have been more highly and more worthily excited than if he had been the favoured spectator of all the shows of Tritons, and Dianas, and Ladies of the Lake that proceeded from " the conceit so deep in casting the plot " of his lordship of Leicester. It would be not too much to believe that this storial show might first suggest to him how English history might be dramatized ; how a series of events, terminating in some remark- able catastrophe, might be presented to the eye ; how fighting-men might be mar- shalled on a mimic field ; how individual heroism might stand out from amongst the mass, having its own fit expression of thought and passion ; how the wife or the mother, the sister or the mistress, might be there to uphold the hero, even as the Englishwomen assisted their warriors ; and how all this might be made to move the hearts of the people, as the old ballads had once moved them. Such a result would have repaid a visit to Kenilworth by William Shakspere. Without this, he, his father, and their friends, might have retired from the scene of Dudley's magnificence, as most thinking persons in all probability retired, with little satisfaction. There was lavish expense ; but, according to the most credible accounts, the possessor of Kenilworth was the oppressor of his district. We see him not delighting to show his Queen a happy tenantry, such as the less haughty and ambitious nobles and esquires were anxious to cultivate. The people came under the windows of Elizabeth as objects of ridicule. Slavish homage would be there to Leicester from the gentle- men of the county. They would replenish his butteries with their gifts ; they would ride upon his errands ; they would wear his livery. There was one gentleman in Warwickshire who would not thus do Leicester homage — Edward Arden, the head of the great house of Arden, the cousin of William Shakspere's mother. But the mighty favourite was too powerful for him : " Which Edward, though a gentleman not inferior to the rest of his ancestors in those virtues wherewith they were adorned, had the hard hap to come to an untimely death in 27 Eliz., the charge laid against him being no less than high treason against the Queen, as privy to some foul inten- tions that Master Somerville, his son-in-law (a Roman Catholic), had towards her person : For which he was prosecuted with so great rigour and violence, by the Earl of Leicester's means, whom he had irritated in some particulars (as I have credibly heard), partly in disdaining to wear his livery, which many in this county, of his rank, thought, in those days, no small honour to them ; but chiefly for galling him by certain harsh expressions, touching his private accesses to the Countess of Essex before she was his wife ; that through the testimony of one Hall, a priest, he was found guilty of the fact, and lost his life in Smithfield."t The Rev. N. J. Halpin,
* Collier : " Annals of the Stage," vol. i., p. 234. f Dugdale's " Warwickshire," p. 681.
56
WILLIAM 8HAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK I.
who has contributed a most interesting tract to the publications of " The Shakespeare Society" on the subject of " Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer Night's Dream," has explained the allusions in that exquisite passage with far more success than the belief of Warburton that the Queen of Scots was pointed at, or of Mr. Boaden that Amy Eobsart was the " little western flower." He considers that Edward Arden, a spectator of those very entertainments at Kenilworth, discovered Leicester's guilty " accesses to the Countess of Essex ; " that the expression of Oberon, " That very time, I saw, but thou couldst not," referred to this discovery ; that when " the Imperial Votaress passed on," he " marked where the bolt of Cupid fell ; " that " the little western flower," pure, "milk-white" before that time, became spotted, "purple with love's wound." We may add that there is bitter satire in what follows — " that flower," retaining the original influence, " will make or man or woman madly dote," as Lettice, Countess of Essex, was infatuated by Leicester. The discovery of Edward Arden, and his " harsh expressions " concerning it, might be traditions in Shakspere's family, and be safely allegorized by the poet in 1594 when Leicester was gone to his account.
[Leicester.]
CHAP, vni.]
PAGEANTS.
57
CHAPTER VIII.
PAGEANTS.
IT is " the middle summer's spring." On the day before the feast of Corpus Christi all the roads leading to Coventry have far more than their accustomed share of pedes- trians and horsemen. The pageants are to be acted to-morrow, and perhaps for the last time. The preachers in their sermons have denounced them again and again ; but since the Queen's Majesty was graciously pleased with the Hock-play at Kenilworth, that ancient sport, so dear to the men of Coventry, has been revived, and the Guilds have struggled against the preachers to prevent their old pageantis from being suppressed. And why, say they, should they be suppressed 1 Have not they, the men of the Guilds, been accustomed to act their own pageants long after the Gray Friars had gone into obscurity ? Has not the good city all that is needful for their proper performance ? Do not they all know their parts, as arranged by the town- clerk ? Are not their robes in goodly order, some new, and all untattered ? Moreover, is not the trade of the city greatly declined — its blue thread thrust out by thread brought from beyond sea — its caps and girdles superseded by gear from London ;* and was not in the old time "the con- fluence of people from far and near to see this show extraordinary great, and yielded no small advantage to this city?"t The pageants shall be played in spite of the preachers ; and so the bruit thereof goes through the country, and Coventry is still to see its accustomed crowds on the day of Corpus Christi.
It requires not the imagination of the romance-writer to assume that before William Shakspere was sixteen, that is, before the year 1580, when the pageants at Coventry, with one or two rare excep- tions, were finally suppressed, he would be a spectator of one of these remarkable
See " A Briefe Conceipte of English Pollicye," 1581.
f Dugdale.
58 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
performances, which were hi a few years wholly to perish ; becoming, however, the foundations of a drama more suited to the altered spirit of the people, more uni- versal in its range, — the drama of the laity, and not of the church. What a glorious city must Coventry have been in the days when that youth first looked upon it — the " Prince's Chamber," as it was called, the " third city of the realm," a " shire- town,"* full of stately buildings of great antiquity, unequalled once in the splendour of its monastic institutions, full of associations of regal state, and chivalry, and high events ! As he finally emerges from the rich woodlands and the elm-groves which reach from Kenilworth, there would that splendid city lie before him, surrounded by its high wall and its numerous gates, its three wondrous spires, which he had often gazed upon from the hill of Welcombc, rising up in matchless height and symmetry, its famous cross towering above the gabled roofs. At the other extre- mity of the wall, gates more massive and defying — a place of strength, even though no conqueror of Cressy now dwelt therein — a place of magnificence, though the hand of spoliation had been there most busy. William Shakspere and his com- pany ride through the gate of the Gray Friars, and they are presently in the heart of that city. Eager crowding is there already in those streets on that eve of Corpus Christi, for the waits are playing, and banners are hung out at the walls of the different Guilds. The citizens gathered round the Cross are eagerly discussing the particulars of to-morrow's show. Here and there one with a beetling brow indig- nantly denounces the superstitious and papistical observance ; whilst the laughing smith or shearman, who is to play one of the magi on the morrow, describes the bravery of his new robe, and the lustre of his pasteboard crown that has been fresh gilded. The inns are fun, " great and sumptuous inns," as Harrison describes those of this very day, " able to lodge two hundred or three hundred persons, and their horses, at ease, and thereto, with a very short warning, make such provision for their diet as to him that is unacquainted withal may seem to be incredible : And it is a world to see how each owner of them contendeth with other for goodness of entertainment of their guests, as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate, strength of drink, variety of wines, or well using of horses." So there would be no lack of cheer ; and the hundreds that have come into Coventry will be fed and lodged better even than in London, whose inns, as the same authority tells us, are the worst in the kingdom. Piping and dancing is there in the chambers, madrigals worth the listening. But silence and sleep at last fitly prepare for a busy day. Perhaps, however, a stray minstrel might find his way to this solemnity, and forget the hour in the exercise of his vocation, like the very ancient anonymous poet of the Alliterative Metre, whose manuscript, probably of the date of Henry V., has contrived to escape destruction : —
" Ones y me ordayned, as y have ofte doon, With frendes, and felawes, frendemen, and other; And caught me in a company on Corpus Christi even, Six, other seven myle, oute of Suthampton, To take melodye, and mirthes, among my makes ; With redyng of romaunces, and revelyng among, The dym of the darknesse drowe into the west, And began for to spryng in the gray day." f
The morning of Corpus Christi comes, and soon after sunrise there is stir in the streets of Coventry. The old ordinances for this solemnity required that the Guilds
* Coventry had altogether separate jurisdiction. It is called " a shire-town " by Dugdale, to mark this distinction.
f See Percy's " Reliques :" On the Alliterative Metre. We give the lines as corrected in Sharp's " Coventry Mysteries."
CHAP. VIII.] PAGEANTS. 59
should be at their posts at five o'clock. There is to be a solemn procession — for- merly, indeed, after the performance, of the pageant — and then, with hundreds of torches burning around the figures of our Lady and St. John, candlesticks and chalices of silver, banners of velvet and canopies of silk, and the members of the Trinity Guild and the Corpus Christi Guild bearing their crucifixes and candlesticks, with personations of the angel Gabriel lifting up the lily, the twelve apostles, and renowned virgins, especially St. Catherine and St. Margaret. The Keformation has, of course destroyed much of this ceremonial ; and, indeed, the spirit of it has in great part evaporated. But now, issuing from the many ways that lead to the Cross, there is heard the melody of harpers and the voice of minstrelsy ; trumpets sound, banners wave, riding-men come thick from their several halls ; the mayor and aldermen in their robes, the city servants in proper liveries, St. George and the Dragon, and Herod on horseback. The bells ring, boughs are strewed in the streets, tapostry is hung out of the windows, officers in scarlet coats struggle in the crowd while the procession is marshalling. The crafts are getting into their ancient order, each craft with its streamer and its men in harness. There are " Fysshers and Cokes, — Baxters and Milners, — Bochers, — Whittawers and Glovers, — Pynners, Tylers, and Wrightes, — Skynners, — Barkers, — Corvy sers, — Smythes, — We vers, — Wirdrawers, — Cardemakers, Sadelers, Peyntours, and Masons, — Gurdelers, — Tay- lours, Walkers, and Sherman, — Deysters, — Drapers, — Mercers."* At length the procession is arranged. It parades through the principal lines of the city, from Bishopgate on the north to the Gray Friars' Gate on the south, and from Broadgate on the west to Gosford Gate on the east. The crowd is thronging to the wide area on the north of Trinity Church, and St. Michael's, for there is the pageant to be first performed. There was a high house or carriage which stood upon six wheels ; it was divided into two rooms, one above the other. In the lower room were the performers ; the upper was the stage. This ponderous vehicle was painted and gilt, surmounted with burnished vanes and streamers, and decorated with imagery ; it was hung round with curtains, and a painted cloth presented a picture of the subject that was to be performed. This simple stage had its machinery, too ; it was fitted for the representation of an earthquake or a storm ; and the pageant in most cases was concluded in the noise and flame of fireworks. It is the pageant of the company of Shearmen and Tailors which is now to be performed, — the sub- ject the Birth of Christ and Offering of the Magi, with the flight into Egypt and Murder of the Innocents. The eager multitudes are permitted to crowd within a reasonable distance of the car. There is a moveable scaffold erected for the more distinguished spectators. The men of the Guilds sit firm on their horses. Amidst the sound of harp and trumpet the curtains are withdrawn, and Isaiah appears, prophesying the blessing which is to come upon the earth. Gabriel announces to Mary the embassage upon which he is sent from Heaven. Then a dialogue between Mary and Joseph, and the scene changes to the field where shepherds are abiding in the darkness of the night — a night so dark that they know not where their sheep may be ; they are cold and in great heaviness. Then the star shines, and they hear the song of " Gloria in excelsis Deo." A soft melody of concealed music hushes even the whispers of the Coventry audience ; and three songs are sung, such as may abide in the remembrance of the people, and be repeated by them at their Christmas festivals. " The first the shepherds sing : " —
" As I rode out this endersf night,
Of three jolly shepherds I saw a sight,
And all about their fold a star shone bright ;
They sang terli terlow :
So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow."
* Sharp's " Dissertation," page 160. f Enders night — last night.
60 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
There is then a song "the women sing f —
" Lully, lulla, you little tiny child ; By, by, lully, lullay, you little tiny child :
By, by, lully, lullay.
0 sisters two, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling, for whom we do sing
By, by, lully, lullay ?
Herod the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee, And ever mourn and say, For thy parting neither say nor sing By, by, lully, lullay."
The shepherds again take up the song : —
" Down from heaven, from heaven so high, Of angels there came a great company, With mirth, and joy, and great solemnity : They sang terly, terlow : So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow."
The simple melody of these songs has come down to us ; they are part songs, each having the treble, the tenor, and the bass.* The star conducts the shepherds to the " crib of poor repast," where the child lies ; and, with a simplicity which is highly characteristic, one presents the child his pipe, the second his hat, and the third his mittens. Prophets now come, who declare in lengthened rhyme the wonder and the blessing : —
" Neither in halls nor yet in bowers Born would he not be, Neither in castles nor yet in towers That seemly were to see."
The messenger of Herod succeeds ; and very curious it is, and characteristic of a period when the king's laws were delivered in the language of the Conqueror, that he speaks in French. This circumstance would carry back the date of the play to the reign of Edward III., though the language is occasionally modernized. We have then the three kings with their gifts. They are brought before Herod, who treats them courteously, but is inexorable in his cruel decree. Herod rages in the streets ; but the flight into Egypt takes place, and then the massacre. The address of the women to the pitiless soldiers, imploring, defying, is not the least curious part of the performance ; for example —
" Sir knightes, of your courtesy, This day shame not your chivalry, But on my child have pity,"
* This very curious Pageant, essentially different from the same portion of Scripture-history in the " Ludus Coventrice," is printed entire in Mr Sharp's " Dissertation," as well as the score of these songs.
CHAP. VIII.] PAGEANTS. 61
is the mild address of one mother. Another raves —
*' He that slays my child in sight, If that my strokes on him may light, Be he squire or knight, I hold him but lost."
The fury of a third is more excessive : —
" Sit he never so high in saddle, But I shall make his brains addle, And here with my pot ladle With him will I fight."
We have little doubt that he who described the horrors of a siege, —
" Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen."* —
had heard the bowlings of the women in the Coventry pageant. And so "fynes lude de taylars aiid scharmen"
And now the men of Coventry lead the way of the strangers to another spot, with the cry of " The Hock-play, the Hock-play ! " There was yawning and ill- repressed laughing during the pageant, but the whole population now seems animated with a spirit of joyfulness. As one of the worthy aldermen gallantly presses his horse through the crowd, there is a cry, too, of " A Nycklyn, a Nyck- lyn ! " for did not the excellent mayor, Thomas Nycklyn, three years ago, cause " Hock Tuesday, whereby is mentioned an overthrow of the Danes by the inhabi- tants of this city, to be again set up and showed forth, to his great commendation and the city's great commodity ?"t In the wide area of the Cross-cheaping is the crowd now assembled. The strangers gaze upon " that stately Cross, being one of the chief things wherein this city most glories, which for workmanship and beauty is inferior to none in England." $ It was not then venerable for antiquity, for it had been completed little more than thirty years ; but it was a wondrous work of a gorgeous architecture, story rising above story, with canopies and statues, to a magni- ficent height, glittering with vanes upon its pinnacles, and now decorated with numerous streamers.§ Around the square are houses of most picturesque form ; the balconies of their principal floors filled with gazers, and the windows imme- diately beneath the high-pitched roofs showing as many heads as could be thrust through the open casements. The area is cleared, for the play requires no scaffold. The English and the Danes marshal on opposite sides. There are fierce words and imprecations, shouts of defiance, whisperings of counsel. What is imperfectly heard or ill understood by the strangers is explained by those who are familiar with the show. There is no ridicule now ; no laughing at Captain Cox, in his velvet cap, and flourishing his tonsword ; all is gravity and exultation. Then come the women of Coventry, ardent in the cause of liberty, courageous, much enduring ; and some one tells, in the pauses of the play, how there once rode into that square, in a death- like solitude and silence, a lady all naked, who, " bearing an extraordinary affection for this place, often and earnestly besought her husband that he would free it from
* " Henry V.," Act in., Scene in.
j Extract from manuscript Annals of Coventry in Sharp's "Dissertation," p. 129.
J Dugdale.
§ The Cross has perished, not through age, but by the hands of Common-councilmen and Com- missioners of Pavement. The Turks broke up the Elgin marbles to make mortar for their Athenian hovels, and we call them barbarians.
62 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
that grievous servitude whereunto it was subject;"* and he telling her the hard conditions upon which her prayer should be granted, —
"She rode forth, clothed on with chastity." — (TENNYSON.)
Noble-hearted women such as the Lady Godiva were those of Coventry who assisted their husbands to drive out the Danes ; and there they lead their captives in triumph ; and the Hock-play terminates with song and chorus.
But the solemnities of the day are not yet concluded. In the space around Swine Cross, and near St. John's School, is another scaffold erected ; not a lofty scaffold like that of the drapers and shearmen, but gay with painted cloths and ribbons. The pageant of " The Nine Worthies" is to be performed by the dramatic body of the Grammar School ; the ancient pageant, such as was presented to Henry VI. and his Queen in 1455, and of which the Leet-book contains the faithful copy.t Assuredly there was one who witnessed that performance carefully employed in noting down the lofty speeches which the three Hebrews, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabseus ; the three Infidels, Hector, Alexander, and Julius Csesar ; and the three Christians, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Boulogne, uttered on that occasion. In the Coventry pageant Hector thus speaks : —
" Most pleasant princes, recorded that may be, I, Hector of Troy, that am chief conqueror, Lowly will obey you, and kneel on my knee."
And Alexander thus : —
" I, Alexander, that for chivalry bcareth the ball, Most courageous in conquest through the world am I named, — Welcome you, princes."
And Julius Csesar thus : —
'• I, Julius Csesar, sovereign of knighthood And emperor of mortal man, most high and mighty, Welcome you, princes most benign and good."
Surely it was little less than plagiary, if it was not meant for downright parody, when, in a pageant of " The Nine Worthies" presented a few years after, Hector comes in to say —
" The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,
Gave Hector a gift, the heir of Ilion : A man so breath'd, that certain he would fight, yea,
From morn till night, out of his pavilion. I am that flower."
And Alexander : —
" When in the world I liv'd, I was the world's commander ; By east, west, north, and south, I spread my conquering might : My 'scutcheon plain declares that I am Alisander."
And Pompey, usurping the just honours of his triumphant rival : —
" I Pompey am, Pompey surnamed the great, That oft in field, with targe and shield, did make my foe to sweat."
* Dugdale., f Sharp, page 145.
CHAP. VIII.]
PAGEANTS.
63
But the laugh of the parody was a harmless one. The Nine "Worthies were utterly dead and gone in the popular estimation at the end of the century. Certainly in the crowd before St. John's School at Coventry there would be more than one who would laugh at the speeches — merry souls, ready to " play on the tabor to the Worthies, and let them dance the hay." *
* " Love's Labour 's Lost," Act v. It is scarcely necessary to refer the reader to the same play for the speeches of Hector, Alexander, and Pompey. The coincidence between these and the old Coventry Pageant is remarkable.
__
<-'•
[St. Mary's Hall, Coventry : Street Front.]
64
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i.
[Fireside in the House in Henley Street.] CHAPTER IX.
THE FIRESIDE.
THE happy days of boyhood are nearly over. William Shakspere no longer looks for the close of the day when, in that humble chamber in Henley Street, his father shall learn something of his school progress, and hear him read some English book of history or travel, — volumes which the active presses of London had sent cheaply amongst the people. The time is arrived when he has quitted the free-school. His choice of a worldly occupation is scarcely yet made. It is that pause which so often takes place in the life of a youth, when the world shows afar off like a vast plain with many paths, all bright and sunny, and losing themselves in the distance, where it is fancied there is something brighter still. At this season we may paint the family of John Shakspere at their evening fireside. The mother is plying her distaff, or hearing Richard his lesson out of the ABC book. The father and the elder son are each intent upon a book of chronicles, manly reading. Gilbert is teaching his sister Joan Gamut " the ground of all accord." A neighbour comes in upon business with the father, who quits the room ; and then all the group crowd round their elder brother, who has laid aside his chronicle, to entreat him for a story ; the mother even joins in the children's prayer to their gentle brother. Has not he himself
CHAP. IX.] THE FIRESIDE.
pictured such a home scene ? May we not read for Hermione, Mary Shakspere, and for Mamillius, William 1
"Her. What wisdom stirs amongst you] Come, sir, now I am for you again : Pray you, sit by us, And tell 'a a tale.
Mam. Merry, or sad, shall 't be ?
Her. As merry as you will.
Mam. A sad tale 's best for winter :
I have one of sprites and goblins.
•Her. Let's have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down : — Come on, and do your best To fright me with your sprites : you're powerful at it.
'Mam. There was a man, —
Her. Nay, come, sit down ; then on.
Mam. Dwelt by a churchyard. — I will tell it softly ; Yon crickets shall not hear it.
Her. Come on then,
And give 't me in mine ear."*
And truly that boy must have had access to a prodigious mine of such stories, whether " merry or sad." What a storehouse was " The Palace of Pleasure, beautified, adorned, and well furnished with pleasaunt histories and excellent riouelles, selected out of diners good and commendable authors ; by William Painter, Clarke of the Ordinaunce and Armarie." In this book, according to the dedication of the trans- lator to Ambrose Earl of Warwick, was set forth " the great valiance of noble gentle- men, the terrible combats of courageous personages, the virtuous minds of noble dames, the chaste hearts of constant ladies, the wonderful patience of puissant princes, the mild sufferance of well-disposed gentlewomen, and, in divers, the quiet bearing of adverse fortune." Pleasant little apophthegms and short fables were there in that book. There was ^Esop's fable of the old lark and her young ones, wherein " he prettily and aptly doth premonish that hope and confidence of things attempted by man ought to be fixed and trusted in none other but in himself." There was the story, most delightful to a child, of the bondman at Rome, who was brought into the open place upon which a great multitude looked, to fight with a lion of marvellous bigness ; and the fierce lion when he saw him " suddenly stood still, and afterwards by little and little, in gentle sort, he came unto the man as though he had known him," and licked his hands and legs ; and the bondman told that he had healed in former time the wounded foot of the lion, and the beast be- came his friend. In the same storehouse was a tale which Painter translated from the French of Pierre Boisteau — a true tale, as he records it, " the memory whereof to this day is so well known at Verona, as unnethst their blubbered eyes be yet dry that saw and beheld that lamentable sight." It was " The goodly history of the true and constant love between Romeo and Julietta ; " and there was described how Romeo came into the hall of the Capulets whose family were at variance with his own, the Montesches, and, " very shamefaced, withdrew himself into a corner ; — but by reason of the light of the torches, which burned very bright, he was by and by known and looked upon by the whole company ; " how he held the frozen hand of Juliet, the daughter of the Capulet, and it warmed and thrilled, so that from that moment there was love between them ; how the lady was told that Romeo was the " son of her father's capital enemy and deadly foe ; " how, in the little street before her father's house, Juliet saw Romeo walking, "through the brightness of the moon ;" how they were joined in holy marriage secretly by the good Friar Lawrence ; and then came bloodshed, and grief, and the banishment of Romeo, and the friar gave
* " Winter's Tale," Act n., Scene I. f Unneths, scarcely.
66 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I.
the lady a drug to produce a pleasant sleep, which was like unto death ; and she, " so humble, wise, and debonnaire," was laid " in the ordinary grave of the Capulets," as one dead, and Romeo, having bought poison of an apothecary, went to the tomb, and there laid down and died ; and the sleeping wife awoke, and with the aid of the dagger of Borneo she died beside him. From the same collection of tales would he learn the story of " Giletta of Narbonne," who cured the King of France of a painful malady, and the King gave her in marriage to the Count Beltramo, with whom she had been brought up, and her husband despised and forsook her, but at last they were united, and lived in great honour and felicity. There was another collection, — the "Gesta Romanorum," translated by R. Robinson in 1577, — old legends, come down to those latter days from monkish historians, who had embodied in their narratives all the wild traditions of the ancient and modern world. Such was the story of the rich heiress who chose a husband by the machinery of a gold, a silver, and a leaden casket ; — and another story of the merchant whose inexorable creditor required the fulfilment of his bond in cutting a pound of flesh nearest the merchant's heart, and by the skilful interpretation of the bond the cruel creditor was defeated. There was the story, too, in these legends, of the Emperor Theodosius, who had three daughters ; and those two daughters who said they loved him more than themselves were unkind to him, but the youngest, who only said she loved him as much as he was worthy, succoured him in his need, and was his true daughter. There was in that collection also a feeble outline of the history of a king whose wife died upon the stormy sea, and her body was thrown overboard, and the child she then bore was lost, and found by the father after many years, and the mother was also wonderfully kept in life. Stories such as these, preserved amidst the wreck of time, were to that youth like the seeds that are found in the tombs of ruined cities, lying with the bones of forgotten generations, but which the genial influences of nature will call into life, and they shall become flowers, and trees, and food for man. But, beyond all these, our Mamillius had many a tale " of sprites and goblins." He told them, we may well believe at that period, with an assenting faith, if not a prostrate reason. They were not then, in his philosophy, altogether " the very coinage of the brain." Such appearances were above nature, but the commonest movements of the natural world had them in subjection : —
" I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day, and at his warning, Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine."*
Powerful they were, but yet powerless. They came for benevolent purposes : to warn the guilty ; to discover the guilt. The belief in them was not a debasing thing. It was associated with the enduring confidence that rested upon a world beyond this material world. Love hoped for such visitations ; it had its dreams of such — where the loved one looked smilingly, and spoke of regions where change and separation were not. They might be talked of, even amongst children then, without terror. They lived in that corner of the soul which had trust in angel protections ; which believed in celestial hierarchies ; which listened to hear the stars moving in harmonious music —
" Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins," — * "Hamlet."
CHAP. IX.] THE FIRESIDE. 67
but listened in vain, for,
" Whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." *
There was another most valued book, which told how,
" In olde dayis of the king Artour, Of which that Bretons speken gret honour, All was this lond full filled of faerie; The elf-queene, with her jolly compagnie, Danced full oft in many a grene mede." f
Here was the ground-work of beautiful visions of a pleasant race of supernatural beings ; who lived by day in the acorn-cups of Arden, and by moonlight held their revels on the green sward of Avon-side, the ringlets of their dance being duly seen ;
" Whereof the ewe not bites; "
who tasted the honey-bag of the bee, and held council by the light of the glow- worm ; who kept the cankers from the rosebuds, and silenced the hootings of the owl. But from Chaucer the youth must have acquired many high things — the highest things in poetry — besides his glimpses of the fairies. We believe that Shakspere was the pupil of Chaucer ; we imagine that the fine bright folio of 1542, whose bold black letter seems the proper dress for the rich antique thought, was his closet companion. The boy would delight in his romance ; the poet would, in a few years, learn from him what stores lay hidden of old traditions and fables, — legends that had travelled from one nation to another, gathering new circumstances as they became clothed in a new language, the property of every people, related in the peasant's cabin, studied in the scholar's cell ; and Chaucer would teach him that these were the best materials for a poet to work upon, for their universality proved that they were akin to man's inmost nature and feelings. The time would arrive when, in his solitary walks, unbidden tears would come into his eyes as he recollected some passage of matchless pathos ; or irrepressible laughter arise at those touches of genial humour which glance like sunbeams over the page. Finally, the matured judgment would learn from Chaucer the possibility of delineating indi- vidual character with the minutest accuracy, without separating the individual from the permanent and the universal ; and Chaucer would show how a high morality might still consist with freedom of thought and even laxity of expression, and how all that is holy and beautiful might be loved without such scorn or hatred of the impure and the evil as would exclude them from human sympathy. An early familiarity with such a poet as Chaucer must have been a loadstar to one like Shakspere, who was launching into the great ocean of thought without a chart.
But as yet " the realms of gold" were dimly seen. At that hearth, in Henley Street, if the youth began to speak of witches, there would be fear and silence. For did not Mary Shakspere recollect that in the year she was married Bishop Jewel had told the Queen that her subjects pined away, even unto the death, and that their affliction was owing to the increase of witches and sorcerers ? Was it not known how there were three sorts of witches, — those that can hurt and not help, those that can help and not hurt, and those that can both help and hurt ?$ It was unsafe even to talk of them. But the youth would have met with the history of the murder of Duncan, King of Scotland, in a chronicler older than Holinshed ; and he might tell softly, so that " yon crickets shall not hear it," — that as Macbeth and
* " Merchant of Venice." f Chaucer : " Wife of Bath's Tale."
J See Scot's " Discovery of Witchcraft/' 1584.
F 2
68
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.
[BOOK i.
Banquo journeyed from Torres, sporting by the way together, when the warriors came in the midst of a laund, three wierd sisters suddenly appeared to them, in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of an elder world, and prophesied that Macbeth should be king of Scotland ; and Macbeth from that hour desired to be King, and so killed the good King his liege lord. And then the story-teller and his listeners might pass On to safer matters — to the calculations of learned men who could read the fates of mankind in the aspects of the stars ; and of those more deeply learned, clothed in garments of white linen, who had command over the spirits of the earth5 of the water, and of the air. Some of the children might aver that a horse-shoe over the door, and vervain and dill, would preserve them, as they had been told, from the devices of sorcery. But their mother would call to their mind that there was security far more to be relied on than charms of herb or horse- shoe— that there was a Power that would preserve them from all evil, seen or unseen, if such were His gracious will, and if they humbly sought Him, and offered up their hearts to Him, in all love and trust. And to that Power this household would address themselves ; and the night would be without fear, and their sleep pleasant.
[The Fireside.]
[Stratford Church, and Mill. From an original drawing at the beginning of the last century.] CHAPTER I.
A CALLING.
WE have endeavoured to fill up, with some imperfect forms and feeble colours, the very meagre outline which exists of the schoolboy life of William Shakspere. He is now, we will assume, of the age of fourteen — the year 1578 ; a year which has been held to furnish decisive evidence as to the worldly condition of his father and his family. The first who attempted to write " Some Account of the Life of William Shakspeare," Howe, says, " His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment. He had bred him, it is true, for some time at a free-school, where, it is probable, he acquired what Latin he was master of : but the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home, forced his father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily prevented his further proficiency in that language." This statement, be it remembered, was written one hundred and thirty years after the event which it professes to record — the early removal of William Shakspere from the free-school to which he had been sent by his father. It is manifestly based upon two assumptions, both of which are incorrect : — The first, that his father had a large family of ten children, and was so narrowed in his circumstances that he could not spare even the time of his eldest son, he being taught for nothing ; and, secondly, that the son, by his early removal from the school where he acquired "what Latin he was master of," was prevented
72 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK II.
attaining a " proficiency in that language," his works manifesting " an ignorance of the ancients." Mr. Haiti well, commenting upon this statement, says, " John Shakspeare's circumstances began to fail him when William was about fourteen, and he then withdrew him from the grammar-school, for the purpose of obtaining his assistance in his agricultural pursuits." Was fourteen an unusually early age for a boy to be removed from a grammar-school ? We think not, at a period when there were boy- bachelors at the Universities. If he had been taken from the school three years before, when he was eleven, — certainly an early age, — we should have seen his father then recorded, in 1575, as the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street, and the "narrowness of his circumstances" as the reason of Shakspere's " no better proficiency," would have been at once exploded. In his material allegation Rowe utterly fails.
The family of John Shakspere did not consist, as we have already shown, of ten children. In the year 1578, when the school education of William may be reason- ably supposed to have terminated, and before which period his " assistance at home" would rather have been embarrassing than useful to his father, the family consisted of five children : William, aged fourteen ; Gilbert, twelve ; Joan, nine ; Anne, seven ; and Richard four. Anne died early in the following year ; and, in 1580, Edmund, the youngest child, was born ; so that the family never exceeded five living at the same time. But still the circumstances of John Shakspere, even with five children, might have been straitened. The assertion of Rowe excited the persevering diligence of Malone ; and he collected together a series of documents from which he infers, or leaves the reader to infer, that John Shakspere and his family gradually sank from their station of respectability at Stratford into the depths of poverty and ruin. The sixth section of Malone's posthumous "Life" is devoted to a consideration of this subject. It thus commences : " The manufacture of gloves, which was, at this period, a very flourishing one, both at Stratford and Worcester (in which latter city it is still carried on with great success), however generally beneficial, should seem, from whatever cause, to have aftorded our poet's father but a scanty maintenance." We have endeavoured to show to what extent, and in what manner, John Shakspere was a glover. However, be his occupation what it may, Malone affirms that " when our author was about fourteen years old" the "distressed situation" of his father was evident : it rests " upon surer grounds than conjecture." The corporation books have shown that on particular occasions, such as the visitation of the plague in 1564, John Shakspere contributed like others to the relief of the poor ; but now, in January, 1577-8, he is taxed for the necessities of the borough only to pay half what other aldermen pay ; and in November of the same year, whilst other aldermen are assessed fourpence weekly towards the relief of the poor, John Shakspere " shall not be taxed to pay anything." In 1579 the sum levied upon him for providing soldiers at the charge of the borough is returned, amongst similar sums of other persons, as " unpaid and unaccounted for." There are other corroborative proofs of John Shakspere's poverty at this period brought forward by Malone. In this precise year, 1 5 78, he mortgages his wife's inheritance of Asbies to Edmund Lambert for forty pounds ; and, in the same year, the will of Mr. Roger Sadler of Stratford, to which is subjoined a list of debts due to him, shows that John Shakspere was indebted to him five pounds ; for which sum Edmund Lambert was a security, — " By which," says Malone, " it appears that John Shakspeare was then considered insolvent, if not as one depending rather on the credit of others than his own." It is of little consequence to the present age to know whether an alderman of Stratford, nearly three hundred years past, became unequal to maintain his social position ; but to enable us to form a right estimate of the education of William Shakspere, and of the circumstances in which he was placed at the most influential period of his life,
CHAP. L] A CALLING. 73
it may not be unprofitable to consider how far these revelations of the private affairs of his father support the case which Malone holds he has so triumphantly proved. At the time in question, the best evidence is unfortunately destroyed ; for the registry of the Court of Kecord at Stratford is wanting, from 1569 to 1585. Nothing has been added to what Malone has collected as to this precise period. It amounts therefore to this, — that in 1578 he mortgages an estate for forty pounds ; that he is indebted also five pounds to a friend for which his mortgagee had become security ; and that he is excused one public assessment, and has not contributed to another. At this time he is the possessor of two freehold houses in Henley Street, bought in 1574. Malone, a lawyer by profession, supposes that the money for which Asbies was mortgaged went to pay the purchase of the Stratford freeholds ; according to which theory, these freeholds had been unpaid for during four years, and the " good and lawful money" was not "in hand" when the vendor parted with the premises. We hold, and we think more reasonably, that in 1578, when he mortgaged Asbies, John Shakspere became the purchaser, or at any rate the occupier, of lands in the parish of Stratford, but not in the borough ; and that, in either case, the money for which Asbies was mortgaged was the capital employed in this undertaking. The lands which were purchased by William Shakspere of the Combe family, in 1601, are described in the deed as " lying or being within the parish, fields, or town of Old Stretford." But the will of William Shakspere, he having become the heir-at- law of his father, devises all his lands and tenements " within the towns, hamlets, villages, fields, and grounds of Stratford-upon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe." Old Stratford is a local denomination, essentially different from Bishopton or Welcombe ; and, therefore, whilst the lands purchased by the son in 1001 might be those recited in the will as lying in Old Stratford, he might have derived from his father the lands of Bishopton and Welcombe, of the purchase of which by himself we have no record. But we have a distinct record that William Shakspere did derive lands from his father, in the same way that he inherited the two freeholds in Henley Street. Mr. Halliwell prints, without any inference, a " Deed of Settlement of Shakespeare's Property, 1639 ;" that deed contains a remarkable recital, which appears conclusive as to the position of the father as a landed pro- prietor. The fine for the purpose of settlement is taken upon ; 1, a tenement in Blackfriars ; 2, a tenement at Acton ; 3, the capital messuage of New Place ; 4, the tenement in Henley Street ; 5, one hundred and twenty-seven acres of land purchased of Combe ; and 6, " all other the messuages, lands, tenements and hereditaments whatsoever, situate lying and being in the towns, hamlets, villages, fields and grounds of Stratford-upon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe, or any of them in the said comity of Warwick, which heretofore were the INHERITANCE of Wittiatn Shak- spere, gent., deceased." The word inheritance could only be used in one legal sense ; they came to him by descent, as heir-at-law of his father. It would be difficult to find a more distinct confirmation of the memorandum upon the grant of arms in the Heralds' College to John Shakspere, "he hath lands and tenements, of good wealth and substance, 50(tf." The lands of Bishopton and Welcombe are in the parish of Stratford, but not in the borough. Bishopton was a hamlet, having an ancient chapel of ease. We hold, then, that in the year 1578 John Shakspere, having become more completely an agriculturist — a yeoman as he is described in a deed of 1579 — ceased, for the purposes of business, to be an occupier within the borough of Strat- ford. Other aldermen are rated to pay towards the furniture of pikemen, billmen. and archers, six shillings and eight-pence ; whilst John Shakspere is to pay three shillings and four-pence. Why less than other aldermen 1 The next entry but one, which relates to a brother alderman, suggests an answer to the question : — " Robert Bratt, nothing IN THIS PLACE." Again, ten months after, — " It is ordained
74 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK II.
that every alderman shall pay weekly, towards the relief of the poor, four-pence, save John Shakspere and Robert Sratt, who shall not be taxed to pay any thing." Here John Shakspere is associated with Robert Bratt, who, according to the previous entry, was to pay nothing in this place ; that is, in the borough of Stratford, to which the orders of the council alone apply. The return, in 1579, of Mr. Shakspere as leaving unpaid the sum of three shillings and three-pence, was the return upon a levy for the borough, in which, although the possessor of property, he might have ceased to reside, or have only partially resided, paying his assessments in the parish. The Borough of Stratford, and the Parish of Stratford, are essentially different things, as regards entries of the Corporation and of the Court of Record. The Report from Commissioners of Municipal Corporations says, " The limits of the borough extend over a space of about half a mile in breadth, and rather more in length * * *. The mayor, recorder, and senior aldermen of the borough have also jurisdiction, as justices of the peace, over a small town or suburb adjoining the Church of Stratford-upon- Avon, called Old Stratford, and over the precincts of the church itself." We shall have occasion to revert to this distinction between the borough and the parish, at a more advanced period in the life of Shakspere's father, when his utter ruin has been somewhat rashly inferred from certain obscure registers.
Seeing, then, that at any rate, in the year 1574, when John Shakspere purchased two freehold houses in Stratford, it was scarcely necessary for him to withdraw his son William from school, as Rowe has it, on account of the narrowness of his cir- cumstances (the education of that school costing the father nothing), it is not difficult to believe that the son remained there till the period when boys were usually with- drawn from grammar-schools. In those days the education of the university commenced much earlier than at present. Boys intended for the learned profes- sions, and more especially for the church, commonly went to Oxford and Cambridge at eleven or twelve years of age. If they were not intended for those professions, they probably remained at the grammar-school till they were thirteen .or fourteen ; and then they were fitted for being apprenticed to tradesmen, or articled to attorneys, a numerous and thriving body in those days of cheap litigation. Many also went early to the Inns of Court, which were the universities of the law, and where there was real study and discipline in direct connection with the several Societies. To assume that William Shakspere did not stay long enough at the grammar-school of Stratford to obtain a very fair " proficiency in Latin," with some knowledge of Greek, is to assume an absurdity upon the face of the circumstances ; and it could never have been assumed