Memoirs of the life of William Shakespeare, with an essay toward the expression of his genius, and an account of the rise and progress of the English drama

Front matter

Qass t-

Book

LIFE AND GENIUS

Preface

npHIS volume is the result of an endeavor -^ to present in a narrative form what is known and may be reasonably inferred concerning Shakespeare's life, with an appreciation of his genius, and such a history of our early drama as would conduce to that appreciation and be suited to the perusal of the generality of his intelligent readers. During the last hundred and fifty years much has been written upon these subjects by men of various fitness for the task, and of widely differing degrees of abihty. But unless my knowledge of this literature is imperfect, the present book, in its scope, its purpose, and its method, is without a rival among its predecessors. It is not intended for lovers of desultory gossip on the one hand, or for antiquaries and Shakespearian scholars on the other. I have undertaken to examine and to estimate the

^jj^ PREFACE.

mass of material which has been accumulated by the painstaking researches of previous investigators of the facts connected with Shakespeare's life and of the earlier records of the English drama, — much of it having the slightest possible connection, and more no connection at all, with the subject, — to arrange with compactness and coherence that which seemed to me to be distinguished from the remainder by truth and significance, and so to tell the story that it might have a continuous interest for readers not especially devoted to dramatic studies.

Having given my authority in most cases for statement or hypothesis, it is not necessary that I should here repeat my acknowledgment of obligations in this regard. Little has been added, and nothing of moment, to the results either of the searches made in the last two centuries by Betterton, Malone, and Chalmers for tradition and record concerning Shakespeare, or of their investigations of the social and professional conditions under which his life must have been passed. The last two writers seemed also to have exhausted the field of research in regard to the history of the English drama and the Enoflish sta2:e. But Mr.

PREFACE. ix

Collier's later work upon those subjects, by its fulness and its systematic arrangement, supersedes all others, either for the use of the dramatic student, or as a book of reference for the occasional inquirer. Yet the account of the English drama given in the following pages will be found to be something more, as well as something less, than an abridgment of Mr. Collier's three octavo volumes.

These remarks apply only to the first and last divisions of this volume. The second, the Essay toward an Expression of Shakespeare's Genius, is the endeavor of one who, having read the poet much and his critics little, has thought his own thoughts and trusted his own judgment upon this subject, until, with a mingling of confidence and diffidence which it would be difficult to explain, he now ventures to offer his conclusions as hints and aids to others ; conscious the while that those who can judge them best are those who need them least.

Thus the purpose of this book is to enable its reader to form as nearly as possible a full and just appreciation of Shakespeare as a man, a poet, and a dramatist. No other thought entered

^ PREFACE.

my mind when I laid out my work. But I will own that, as I wrote the following pages, I conceived the hope that those who read them might be led to remember, and not only to remember but to take to heart, the pregnant and all-important truth, that with the intellectual wealth and glory of Shakespeare and Milton and their contemporaries and antecessors, we have inherited, not in any indirect and collateral way, but as coheirs and equals with our blood brethren in Great Britain, however sharp our political severance from them, those principles of liberty, that intelligent respect for law, and that capacity of self-government, which belong to and distinguish the English race, which some call Anglo-Saxon ; — that if we have attained a national prosperity and power, a diffusion of mental culture and moral sensibility, and a union of stability and progressive force hitherto unheard of among any people, it is only because we have transplanted here, and developed by a normal and unconstrained growth, the same political principles and the same laws of social development from which spring the real power and the true glory of the British nation ; — that we in our Englishhood, as they in theirs, are

PREFACE. xi

SO subject to the same laws of moral and intellectual development that, however that development may be modified by circumstances, and though we are politically two nations with sometimes clashing interests, we are not, and indeed cannot be, other than one people ; — and that, with all our mutual emulation, inevitable as it is from the community of our origin, our mental constitution, and the similarity of our pursuits, we owe each other, if not mutual regard, at least a mutual consideration, respect, and confidence heartier than that which befits the merely formal intercourse of two nations which are called friendly because they are not at open enmity. Our common inheritance is one which each of us may enjoy to the full without diminishing the other's share, or impugning the other's title, and which we should share without envy, certainly without malice or uncharitableness. These truths are trite ; but the day will be a sad one, should it ever come, when they finally lose their vital binding force for those who read in a common mother tongue the words of William Shakespeare.

R. G. W.

New York, May 23d, 1865.

THE name and the works of William Shakespeare were widely known and highly thought of by his contemporaries. UnHke Homer's, his figure does not loom vaguely from the obscurity of a pre-historic period ; unlike Dante's, it is not revealed by fitful and lurid light amid the convulsions of society upon the verge of the dark ages. From early manhood to maturity he lived, and labored, and throve, in the chief city of a prosperous and peaceful country, at a period of high intellectual and moral development. His life was passed before the public in days when the pen recorded scandal in the diary, and when the press, though the daily newspaper did not yet exist, teemed with personality. Yet of Dante, driven in haughty wretchedness from city to city, and singing his immortal hate of his pursuers as he fled, we know more than we do of Shakespeare ; the paucity of whose personal memorials is so extreme, that he has shared with the almost mythical Homer the fortune of having the works which make his fame immortal pronounced medleys, in the composition of which he was but indirectly and partially concerned ; and two enthusiasts, one in the Old England and the other in the New, have even maintained that they were written by the great philosophers and statesmen of his day, who used his name as a stalking horse with which to conceal themselves and mislead the public*

Two generations had not followed that which gave to the world the great poet of our race and of mankind, when Thomas Betterton, the most celebrated London actor of his day, journeyed from the scene of Shakespeare's metropolitan distinction to that of his rustic youth and his rural retirement, in the hope of finding in the latter those traces of his private life which had been so entirely obliterated in the former. The grateful and reverential player, who had gained competence and reputation chiefly by performing Shakespeare's characters, gathered and preserved a few fading but important traditions ; to these the assiduous investigation of more than a century and a half has added the records of a few other facts

* The accomplished and gifted lady who broached this theory on this side of the ocean in Putnam'' s Magazine for January, 1856, was then, doubtless, suffering from that mental aberration which soon after consigned her to the asylum in which she died. The Transatlantic critics are, I believe, without a similar excuse for the strange fancy of her British rival, which they were so quick to condemn in her as a trait of " American " extravagance.

of hardly more significance, and confirmation of some of those traditions ; and this is all the faint and uncertain light which falls from the past upon the man whose works cast such a blaze of everbrightening glory upon our literature. There have been issued, indeed, to us of the present generation, pamphlets professing to give new particulars of the life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even more pretentious titles. But from all these there has been but small satisfaction, save to those who can persuade themselves that, by knowing what Shakespeare might have done, they know what he did, or that a reflex of his daily life can be seen in parchments beginning, " This indenture made," or " Noverint tmiversi per prcese7ttes!' It is with no disrespect, nay, it is rather with thankfulness and sorrowing sympathy, that the devotee of Shakespeare, after examining the fruit of the laborious researches of men who have wasted sunlight and candles, and worn good eyes, in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments on which they are written, and as dry as the dust which covered them, will reluctantly decide that all this mousing has been almost in vain. It has incidentally resulted in the diffusion of a knowledge of the times and circumstances in which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity ; but only those who have the taste of the literary antiquary can accept these documents, which have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly printed, — extracts from parish registers and old account-books, inventories, including Hsts of the knives and spoons and pots and pans of the guzzling aldermen of Stratford, last wills and testaments, leases, deeds, bonds, declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters, — as having aught to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. They have, most of them, told us nothing, and only serve to mark and mock our futile efforts. For, although we do know something of Shakespeare's life, yet, compared with what we long to know, and what it would seem that we should be able to discover, our knowledge is, as knowledge often is, only the narrow boundary which marks the limit of a wide waste of ignorance. We do not know positively the date of Shakespeare's birth, or the house in which he first saw the light, or a single act of his life from the day of his baptism to the month of his obscure and suspicious marriage. We are equally ignorant of the date of that event, and of all else that befell him from its occurrence until we find him in London ; and when he went there we are not sure, or when he finally returned to Stratford. That he wrote the plays which bear his name we know ; but, except by inference, we do not know the years in which they were written, or even that in which either of them was first performed. We do not know that he laid his father

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

or his mother in the grave, or stood by the dying bedside of his only son, or that he gave the sanction of his presence to the marriage of his bestloved daughter. Hardly a word that he spoke has reached us, and not a familiar line from his hand, or the record of one interview at which he was present. Yet from the few facts which have been ascertained, and the vague and sometimes incongruous traditions which have been preserved concerning him, from the circumstances in which he must have been placed, and the mention of and allusion to him by some of his contemporaries, we may discover what manner of man this player-poet was, and learn, though imperfectly, his life's almost uneventful story.

Warwickshire, in Old England, seems to have been the favorite haunt, if it were not the ancestral soil, of a family whose name more than any other in our tongue sounds of battle and tells of knightly origin. It is possible, indeed, that Shakespeare is a corruption of some name of more peaceful meaning, and therefore mayhap (so bloody was ambition's very lowest step of old) of humbler derivation ; for in the irregular, phonographic spelling of antiquity it appears sometimes as Chacksper and Shaxptir. But upon such an uncertain foundation it is hardly safe even to base a doubt ; and as the martial accents come down to us from the verge of the fourteenth century, we may safely assume that a name thus spoken in chivalric days was not without chivalric significance *

The Shakespeares, however, seem never to have risen to the rank of heraldic gentry, or to have established themselves firmly among the landholders of the county. An old register of the Guild of Saint Anne of KnoUe in Warwickshire, which goes back to 1407, shows that, among many

* The manner in which the name is spelled in the old records varies almost to the extreme capacity of various letters to produce a sound approximating to that of the name as we pronounce it. It appears as Chacksper, Shaxpur, Shaxper, Schaksper, Schakesper, Schakspere, Schakespeire, Schakespeyr, Shagspere, Saxpere, Shaxpere, Shaxpeare, Shaxsper, Shaxspere, Shaxespere, Shakspere, Shakspear, Shakspeere, Schakspear, Shackspeare, Shackespeare, Shackespere, Shakspeyr, Skaksper, Shakespere, Shakyspere, Shakeseper, Shakespire, Shakespeire, Shakespear, Shakespeare, Shakaspeare ; and there are even other varieties of its orthography. But Shakespeare himself, and his careful friend Ben Jonson, when they printed the name, spelled it Shakespeare^ the hyphen being often used ; and in this form it is found in almost every book of their time in which it appeared. The final e is mere superfluity, and might with propriety be dropped ; but then we should also drop it from Greene, Marlowe, Peele, and other names in which it appears. There seems, therefore, to be no good reason for deviating from the orthography to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries gave a kind of formal recognition. As to the superior martial significance of this name to all others, we have, indeed, Breakspeare, Winspeare, Shakeshaft, Shakelance, Briselance, Hackstaff, Drawswerde, Curtlemace, Battleman, and some others of that sort ; but in this regard they all must yield to that which was an attribute of Mars himself as long ago as when Homer wrote : —

Shakespeares in whose eternal welfare the brothers and sisters were led to concern themselves, there was a Prioress Isabella, whose soul was prayed for in 1505 (did player William know it when he wrote Measure for Measure ?), and a Lady (" Domina") Joan, who seems to have been living in 1527; but these trifling distinctions are the highest which have been discovered in connection with the name.

Little need we care, however, what was the condition of those Shakespeares who were mouldering in the earth before he without whom they would never have been heard of appeared upon it. Who his paternal grandfather was, we do not surely know ; but there is hardly a doubt that he was one Richard Shakespeare, farmer, of Snitterfield, a village near Stratford on Avon. This Richard Shakespeare was a tenant of Robert Arden, a gentleman of ancient family but moderate estate, who lived at Wilmecote, three miles from Stratford, and who tilled a part of his patrimonial fields, and let a part to humbler husbandmen. The Ardens had been high among the gentry of Warwickshire since a time long before the Conquest, at which period Turchill de Arden was military governer, vice-comes (or viscount, then not an hereditary dignity) of Warwick Castle. The family took its name from the wooded country, called Arden or Ardern, which lay in the northern and western part of that county, of which at one time they had no small part in their possession * Robert Arden's branch of this family held lands in Snitterfield as far back, at least, as the early part of the fifteenth century; and he inherited his property there in direct succession. Two of the family had held places of some honor and responsibility in the household of King Henry VI L, — Sir John Arden, who was squire of the body, and his nephew Robert, who was page of the bedchamber, to that shrewd and thrifty monarch, in whose service they both prospered. This John Arden did not escape great peril of marriage in his youth. For when he was about eighteen years old he was carried off bodily by a certain Richard Bracebridge of Kingsbury, who threatened him with his daughter Alice. As to which proposition, indeed, the lad's father had no small difference with the lady's. " Howbeit," says Dugdale, who tells the story, " at length, by a reference to Sir Simon Mountfort of Colshill, Knight, and Sir Richard Bingham (the Judge who then lived at Middleton), it was determined that the marriage should be solemnized betwixt them, and, in consideration of two hundred marks portion, a convenient jointure settled ; and also that, for the trespass done by the same Richard Brace-

* The name Ardern, or Wood, was given at first to a forestcovered tract, which extended from the Avon to the Trent on the north, and the Severn on the west ; but it was retained at a very early period by that part only which lay within Warwickshire,

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. g

bridge in so taking away the young gentleman, he should give to the before specified Walter Arden the best horse that could by him be chosen in Kingsbury Park." *

Robert Arden, the page of the bedchamber, was grandfather to the Robert Arden who let his land to Richard Shakespeare, — a fact in which we may be sure that landlord and tenant took some pride, because, as we shall see, it was so well remembered by their grandson. Of the family affairs and fortunes of Richard Shakespeare, nothing of interest is known ; but among the Shakespeares of Snitterfield were two, John and Henry, who were of the age which his sons might be, and who were brothers. There appears to have been but one family of the name in the place, and there is hardly room for doubt that they called him father. Henry Shakespeare's name will come up again ; but our concern is with the fortunes of his brother John, who appears to have been a man of thrift and capacity, and withal, as such men are apt to be, somewhat ambitious. Robert Arden had no son to inherit his name, his property, and his bedchamber honors ; but he had seven daughters. The youngest of these, Mary, who seems to have been her father's favorite, John Shakespeare won to look on him with liking ; and so he married into the landlord's family, and allied his blood to that of the Ardens, with their high old English

* Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, (fol., 1656,) p. 678.

jQ MEMOIRS OF

pedigree, stretching past the Conqueror away beyond the reign of the Confessor. And to us of Endish race it is a matter of some interest to know that Shakespeare came of pure Enghsh blood, and not upon his mother's side of Norman, as some have concluded, because of her gentle and ancient lineage, and because, to use the words of one of them, Arden "sounds like a Norman name." But Arderm, which became Arden, is Celtic, and the name was given to the northern part of Warwickshire by the ancient Britons. And as there has even been a book written to show that Shakespeare was a Celt, it may be well to say here, that the Turchill * de Arden who is above mentioned was the first of his family who assumed a surname. His father s name was Alwin, which, like his own, was common enough of old among the English. He called himself, from the place in which he lived, Turchill de Ardern ; but the Normans called him Turchill de Warwick, because of the ofiice which he held under Edward the Confessor, and which the Conqueror allowed him to retain in spite of his English, or possibly Danish blood, because, like many other powerful Englishmen, he had not helped Harold, and did not oppose Duke William's title.f For it should

* The ch is hard in this name, which was often written Turkill

t " This Turchill resided here at Warwick, and had great possessions in this county when William Duke of Normaiady invaded

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. jj

always be remembered that, according to the loose dynastic notions of that day, the Norman bastard had some claim to the throne of England, and that it was the land of a divided people that he successfully invaded. From this people, who swallowed up their conquerors (like themselves, of Teutonic family), and imposed upon them their language, their customs, and their very mental traits, came the man in whose origin we have so great an interest ; and, to all intents and purposes, from this people only, even on the mother's side ; for the Ardens, in spite of their position, seem to have intermarried almost altogether with English families.*

But to return to the humbler members of the Arden family, with whom we have more immediate concern. Whether Robert Arden consented to the marriage of the daughter who has given

England and vanquisht King Harold ; and though he were then a man of especial note and power, yet did he give no assistance to Harold in that battail, as may be easily seen from the favor he

received at the hands of the Conqueror And though he

had so much respect from the victorious Norman as to possess these during his life, yet is it most clear that his son [Siward] enjoyed none of them as his heir, but by the favor of the Conqueror By which instance we may partly see how hardly

the native English were dealt with ; viz., not to enjoy their inheritances though they did not at all oppose the Conqueror's title, as by that trust committed to this Turchill for enlarging of Warwick Castle may be inferred." — Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, pp. 302, 303. * See Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, passim.

him a consequence in the eyes of posterity that he httle dreamed of, or whether the pedigree and the charms of the fair Mary were the only motives of John Shakespeare's choice, we cannot tell ; because the wedding did not take place until after, and probably not until a full year after, the death of the young lady's father, by which event she became the inheritress of a pretty fortune in possession and in reversion. Her father had bequeathed her a farm, of between fifty and sixty acres, in Wilmecote, called Ashbies, with a crop upon the ground, and £6 \is. ^d. in money, beside her share in what was left after legacies were paid ; and she had also a reversionary interest of far greater value than Ashbies in a stepmother's dower estate at Snitterfield, and in some other land at Wilmecote. The small sum of money set down to the young heiress (though in the end she doubtless had much more) may excite a smile, until we remember that money had then nearly six times its present value, and also how very little of actual money is got, or in fact needed, by agricultural people, even of comparatively large possessions.

Robert Arden died about the ist of December, 1556, and the first child of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden was baptized on September i5j 155S. Joan Shakespeare received her name in the Church of the Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford on Avon, where her father had for some years been settled, and had become a prosperous and rising man. When he went thither, we do not know ; but he was there, and a householder in Henley Street, in 1552. His chief occupation seems to have been that of a glover ; for he is so styled in a law document issued in June, 1556. But he was also engaged in husbandry, and in company with another person ; for on the 19th of November in the same year he brought a suit against Henry Field, who unjustly kept from him eighteen quarters of barley. John Shakespeare's private and public fortunes advanced steadily and rapidly for twenty years from the time when he first appears in Stratford. It is true that he could not write his name ; but that was no disgrace, and little impediment, at a time when men much above him in social position were equally incapable. In 1556 he purchased the copyhold of two houses, one with a garden and croft, and one — that in Henley Street — with a garden only. In the course of the next year he acquired other property (how considerable for a man in his station, we have already seen) by his marriage. In this year he was regarded as of sufficient substance and importance to be marked as one of the jury of the court-leet, upon which he served soon afterward ; and at this date he was also appointed ale-taster, — an office of which, in spite of its humble name, the mighty consumption of that fluid in Old England must have made the duties arduous, though pleasant, and the perquisites acceptable.

He must have o-iven the buro:esses of Stratford cause to speak well of him over the Hquor that they loved ; for in 1557 they elected him one of their number, and they were only fourteen. The next year saw him a constable, and also the father of the girl who was called after him; and in 1559 he was re-elected one of the keepers of the Queen's peace in Stratford. About this time he appears to have dropped his glover's trade. It was, indeed, quite inconsistent with the notions of propriety in that day that the husband of an Arden and an heiress should be an artisan ; and this consideration could not but have its weight with the young burgess, now that he had land and beeves. The year 1561 saw him made an afifeeror in the spring, and before the leaves began to fall, elected chamberlain. It was the duty of an affeeror to impose fines upon offenders who were punishable arbitrarily for misdemeanors to which no express penalty was attached by statute, ■ — an office only to be filled by a man of discretion and integrity ; and as John Shakespeare, according to the date when he is with good reason believed to have been born, was at this time but thirty or thirty-one years old, his appointment to this office by the court indicates, not only soundness of character on his part, but somewhat unusual ripeness of judgment. He served as chamberlain two years, in the second

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

of which another daughter was born to him, who was called Margaret. But Mary Arden's little family did not thrive like her husband's business. A few months lightened the young mother's arms, to lay a load upon her heart. Margaret as well Joan died in early infancy.

To the now childless couple there came consolation and a welcome care in their first-born son, whom, on the 26th of April, 1564, they christened and called William. The Reverend (or, as he was then called, Sir) John Breechgirdle probably performed that office. Of the day of William Shakespeare's birth there exists, and probably there was made, no record. Why should it have been otherwise ? He was only the son of a Warwickshire yeoman, a burgess of a little rural town. And there were two score at least of children born that year in Stratford, who, in the eyes of their parents and of the good townsfolk, were of just as much importance, and of whose appearance in the world no other note was taken than such as tells us of his advent, — the entry of their christening in the parish register. As yet it was not the custom to record upon the blank leaves of the Bible the dates of life and death in humble families ; and had John Shakespeare owned a Bible, neither he nor even his higher-born wife could have written the words to read which, if they had endured, men would have made a pilgrimage. All unsuspecting what he was whom she had borne and whom she cherished in her bosom, the mother of WilHam Shakespeare could have looked on him only as the probable inheritor of his father's little wealth, the possible recipient of his father's little honors, or mayhap, in some moment of high hope, the occupant of a position like that of his maternal grandfather. And had he become a peer instead of a player, the day of his birth might have been no less uncertain. Tradition says it was the 23d of April ; and the old custom of christening the third day after birth, though it was far from universal, if it did not give rumor a hint, gives tradition some support.

A court roll tells us that in 1552 John Shakespeare lived in Henley Street ; and another, that he bought the copyhold of a house in that street in 1556. Tradition points out a house in Henley Street, which we know belonged to John Shakespeare, as the birthplace of his illustrious son, who himself became its owner ; and the probability of the truth of this tradition amounts, to all intents and purposes, to certainty. Neglect, subdivision, and base uses had reduced this house at the beginning of the present century to a very forlorn and unsightly condition. But as late as 1769 it preserved enough of its original form to show that William Shakespeare was born and passed his childhood and his adolescent years in a home which was not only pretty and pictu-