The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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СКАЧАТЬ in a country." Here the allusion to Shakespeare's name is quite plain, and the line in italics is a parody on one in one of the plays which he appears to have thus treated. As this allusion seems to have caused just offence, Chettle, who had given Green's work to the world, took occasion shortly after in a work of his own, his Kind-hart's Dream, to make an apology, in which he says of Shakespeare, "Myself have seen his demeanour, no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art." We thus see that Shakespeare was regarded as an excellent player (for quality then answered to profession at the present time), as an elegant writer (facetious being employed in its classic sense), and as an upright and honourable man, and further, perhaps, as moving in what we should term good society.

      Moreover this work of Chettle's, published at the end of 1592 or beginning of 1593, furnishes what I regard as a proof that Shakespeare had not at that time brought an original piece on the stage; for speaking of Green he says, "He was of singular pleasance, the very supporter, and—to no man's disgrace be this intended—the only comedian of a vulgar writer in this country;" of which last words the plain meaning is, that Green had as yet been the only tolerable writer of English comedy. Now we have sufficient means for judging of Green's comic powers; and surely no man in his senses would have ventured to write these words, had he been ever so prejudiced, if Shakespeare had already produced the Comedy of Errors or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We may therefore venture to assert that neither of these plays was acted earlier than 1593.

      We may here, by the way, notice some curious coincidences between Shakespeare and the great comic poet of France, Molière. There is some reason to suppose that both of them were originally connected with the law; they both went on the stage at, we may say, the age of twenty, or a little later. Shakespeare was in his thirtieth year when he produced his first original play, Molière in his thirty-second when he wrote L'Etourdi; but he had previously given some short pieces. Finally, the former died at the close, the latter at the commencement of his fifty-second year.

      The allusion to the poet's literary character in Kindhart's Dream was in all probability to his Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593, but which may, as was the custom in those days, have previously circulated in manuscript among his "private friends;" or it may have been to his Sonnets, which, as we shall presently see, thus circulated at this time. It is impossible to say when this poem was written; but there certainly is no necessity for supposing, with Mr. Collier, that it was composed at Stratford. Shakespeare's mind easily retained the requisite rural imagery; and with his power of rapid composition and command of language, a very few weeks would suffice at any time for its production. This poem, which he terms his "unpolished lines," and "the first heir of my invention," was dedicated to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton. It met with general applause, and was followed, in 1594, by Lucrece, also dedicated to the same accomplished nobleman. The dedication, commencing with "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end," would seem to intimate some degree of friendship on both sides; and as Shakespeare's private character, as we have seen, appears to have been most respectable, and Southampton was a well-known admirer of the drama, some kind of intimacy between him and the poet is not by any means improbable. There is also nothing incredible in what Rowe says had been "handed down by Sir William Davenant," of Lord Southampton's having "at one time given him £1000 to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." But the amount must be much exaggerated; for none of Shakespeare's purchases that we hear of ever came to so large a sum. Mr. Collier thinks, with some probability, that, as it appears that the Globe Theatre on the Bankside was built in 1594 by the company to which Shakespeare belonged, Lord Southampton may have given him as much money as his share of the cost came to, which could not well have been more than a few hundred pounds.

      It was probably also about this time that he wrote his very enigmatic Sonnets, which Meres, in 1598, calls "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," meaning perhaps which only circulated privately in manuscript. I assign them this early date because their style and language so strongly resemble those of his two poems and his early plays, such as Love's Labour's Lost. They were not published till 1609, and then not by the author himself. They seem to have been collected from those who had the manuscripts by a Mr. W. H., whom therefore the publisher in his dedication terms "the only begetter" of them, "begetter" in the language of the time being getter, collector, &c. It has been conjectured, with great probability, that many of them were written in the person of Lord Southampton for the lady with whom he was enamoured; and others may have been written for other persons, a usual custom then of the poets of France and England. I feel almost convinced that few or none of them were written in the poet's own person. Thus in 1598 he was only thirty-four years old, and yet some of them are in the character of a man grey and advanced in years; even in 1609 he was only forty-five.

      Along with the Sonnets was published a poem named A Lover's Complaint, of the genuineness of which I am rather dubious. There had already appeared, in 1599, under the name of Shakespeare, a catchpenny collection called The Passionate Pilgrim, in which are two of his manuscript sonnets, and three of those published the preceding year in Love's Labour's Lost, all of them with an altered text.

      An account of the dates, &c., of Shakespeare's plays will follow this Life. Here, therefore, it need only be remarked that they extended over a space of less than twenty years (from 1592 to 1610?), during which time he had an active share in the management of the two theatres, and was also an actor for the whole or the greater part of it. He was, as we may well suppose, with Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and others, a member of the club instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh, and which met at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street, in which street, it may be observed by the way, Milton was born during this period. Fuller has left us some account of the wit-combats that used to take place at the Mermaid between our poet and Ben Jonson.

      The relations between Shakespeare and his family during this time are in a state of ambiguity, which no conjecture can fully clear up. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever was on ill terms with his wife; and surely we have no right to suppose that, like La Fontaine, he left her in the country while he himself lived in the metropolis; for Shakespeare was a householder, while La Fontaine lived usually in the hôtels of his patrons. The more natural supposition is that he would have removed his wife and children to London as soon as he had got a firm footing there. Certainly no entry of the birth of any child of his is to be found in the register of any London parish; but may not some physical change, with which we are unacquainted, have caused his wife to cease from childbearing after the birth of the twins? There is also no entry of this kind in the register of Stratford; and yet it can hardly be that he, any more than La Fontaine, abstained from the bed of his wife in the annual visits which, according to Aubrey's very probable account, he was in the habit of making to his native town. But the burial of his son Hamnet took place in Stratford on the 11th of August, 1596, whence it might appear that the family was living there at that time. To this, however, it may be replied that the family, though usually resident in London, may have been down at Stratford when Hamnet took ill, or that he may have taken ill in London and have been ordered by the physicians to try the effect of his native air, or that, finally, he may have died in London, and his body have been taken down to Stratford for interment with his family, an act quite in character with Shakespeare. The mist, therefore, remains so far undispelled. But we are also to remember that Shakespeare, as above stated, was a householder in London, which might seem to intimate that he had a family there. It is to me a matter of extreme difficulty to believe that he who created so many of the loveliest female characters that the world has ever witnessed, should have led, as, we may say, he otherwise must have done, an irregular life with regard to the sex; for the effect of such conduct is almost always a degrading view of female nature; and how pure on this subject his ideas must always have been is strongly indicated by the circumstance that three of his most lovely female characters—Perdita, Miranda, Imogen—occur in the very last plays he wrote. We may here note the difference between him and La Fontaine. On the whole, then, my opinion is that Shakespeare had his wife and children with him in London, and that his life there was as regular and domestic as his profession СКАЧАТЬ