The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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СКАЧАТЬ Shakespeare—pronounced, it would seem, Shǎkspěr—was numerous in Warwickshire during the middle ages. About the middle of the sixteenth century John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, a farmer residing at Snitterfield in that county, was settled at Stratford-on-Avon, and was—though it appears he could neither read nor write—a leading member of the Corporation. Various accounts are given of his trade and occupation. We have proof that in 1556 he was a glover; he was afterwards a farmer or yeoman; Aubrey says he was a butcher; and according to Rowe, he was "a considerable dealer in wool." He would seem in fact to have been one who was ready to turn to any honest occupation by which money might be made.

      In 1557 John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote, a man of good landed property, and belonging to a family of no mean note in the county of Warwick. By her he had either eight or ten children, of whom we need only notice William, the third, who was baptized April 26th, 1564; but the exact date of his birth is unknown. As his father was a member of the Corporation, it is highly probable that, as Rowe asserts, he was sent to the Free School of the town. How long he continued at it, and what he learned there, are matters on which we have no certain information. He had probably an ordinary English education, and he certainly, as his writings show, had learned some Latin; but he does not seem to have got beyond the elementary books, and of Greek, if it was taught in the school, he learned nothing whatever. We are told by one authority that he acted as an assistant in the school; by another that his father took him away early to assist in his own business of wool-stapling or, as the former, namely Aubrey, says, of butchering, who adds that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech,"—of course a mere figment. Malone conjectures—and in my opinion not without a show of probability—from the frequent occurrence of law-terms in his dramas, and his correct appreciation of their meaning, that he may have been for some time in the office of an attorney in Stratford. This, however, is all uncertainty; but at all events, judging from the turn of his mind, I should be inclined to say that, beside his accurate observation of men and manners, he read all the books he could obtain in his native town.

      In the registry of the diocese of Worcester is preserved a document bearing date November 28, 1582, securing the Bishop against injury in the case of his licensing certain persons to be married with once asking of the banns. These persons are William Shakespeare, then in his nineteenth year, and Anne Hathaway, then apparently aged twenty-six years; for she died in 1623 at the age of sixty-seven years: she was therefore about eight years her husband's senior. When their marriage was celebrated we are unable to learn; but the baptism of Susanna, their first child, took place on the 26th of May, 1583, just six months after the date of the document quoted above. The natural inference is obvious. Shakespeare, like Burns, knew his wife before the law had made her his; and, like him, he acted honourably towards her.

      This, perhaps the only imprudent act of Shakespeare's life, has been variously judged. Nothing, we know, is more common than for young men to fall in love with women older than themselves; and among the class of society to which both parties belonged, instances were, and are, not uncommon of the rules of prudence being transgressed in moments of weakness, while the moral principle remains untainted. We know that Burns's "Bonnie Jean" proved a most exemplary wife; and one of the most truly virtuous and unaffectedly modest women I ever knew was one who had acted thus imprudently. The bride of the future poet was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a husbandman, or substantial yeoman, of Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford, an intimate friend, it would appear, of John Shakespeare's; and hence we may presume that an intimacy prevailed also between the two families, and the not unlikely result was what has been stated.

      We now have Shakespeare, at the commencement of his twentieth year, a married man, and the father of a child. On the 2nd of February, 1584–85, before he had completed his twenty-first year, were baptized Hamnet and Judith, twins. We hear of no more children of William and Anne Shakespeare; and soon after—most probably in 1586—Shakespeare left Stratford, and set out to seek his fortune in the metropolis. According to Rowe, he fled to escape from the persecution of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote-park, near Stratford, from whose park he and some other young men had stolen deer—a not unusual, and not very discreditable practice in those days. The knight, we are told, was indignant and vindictive, and the transgressor took his revenge by writing and affixing to the gate of Charlecote-park a satirical ballad, of which the first stanza has been preserved, and which, if genuine, is mere doggrel and utterly unworthy of Shakespeare. He may, however, have so written it on purpose. This is said to have added oil to the fire of the knight's rage, and to escape from it the author fled to London. His biographers in general are of opinion that his resentment against his persecutor did not die out, and that after his death and the lapse of many years he ridiculed him in the character of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this was little in the character of "gentle" Shakespeare; and the whole theory is refuted by the fact that the allusion to "the dozen white luces" in the Justice's coat-armour, on which it is founded, does not occur in the original form of that play. It may have been made afterwards by way of joke, and without any malignity.

      There is certainly no inherent improbability in this narrative; and it may have had its effect in determining Shakespeare to quit Stratford. But that it should have been the sole cause of his doing so is what I am disposed to question. We must recollect that Shakespeare was a man endowed with genius of the very highest order, and that he must have aspired to a wider field for its exercise than his native town could afford, that he had a family, and that his circumstances were very slender, while those of his father, as we have sufficient evidence, had been greatly reduced. Nor does it appear that he—who, as has been already observed, except in the case of his marriage, was always prudent—set out for London without having a definite object in view.

      Now various companies of players, as we learn, were in the habit of visiting Stratford, like other country towns, and performing there in the Guildhall. It can be hardly doubted that Shakespeare, in whom dramatic genius was inborn, must have been excited by these performances, however low the merit of the pieces—perhaps even have felt that he was capable of producing something superior to them of the same kind. He probably then made the acquaintance of the players, one of whom, Burbage, was, it is supposed, a native of the town, and some others, natives of the county, and proposed embracing their profession. He was young, handsome, of animated and even brilliant conversation. There can be little doubt, then, that he met with encouragement, and was readily received among them. This was, it is most likely, in the year 1586, when he was two-and-twenty. Rowe says "he was received into the company at first in a very mean rank;" and in 1693 the parish-clerk of Stratford, a man eighty years of age, told a person named Dowdall, that he "was received into the playhouse as a serviture." Of course, like almost every other actor, he began at the bottom, having as it were to serve his apprenticeship. This, then, seems to be all true enough; not so another tradition, related by Johnson as coming from Pope and Rowe, namely, that his first occupation in London was holding gentlemen's horses at the door of the playhouse, in which business he succeeded so well that he hired boys to act under him. How little like Shakespeare this is need hardly be said.

      A question which cannot be answered very satisfactorily is, What did Shakespeare at this time do with his wife and children? The probability would seem to be, that he left them at Stratford, and, as is most likely, at his father's, till he should see what success he was likely to meet with in London.

      It would seem that for the first few years he was merely an actor; and if the Ellesmere Papers, published by Mr. Collier, be genuine, he had in 1589 become a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre. Before this date he may have begun to try his hand at making additions and alterations in the plays of others. Of these we seem to have examples in the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.; and there is a manifest allusion to this practice of his in the following passage of Green's Groat's Worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, published after his death in 1592. Green is addressing his fellow dramatists Marlow, Peele, and others; and he says, "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygre's heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit СКАЧАТЬ