A life of William Shakespeare

Preface

The manuscript of this Life was finished, except for the Notes, in May, 1901, and from the beginning of June to the middle of September was kept in a Safety Vault at Cambridge. In October it mysteriously disappeared from my library. Though I had little doubt by whom it was taken, the evidence was purely circumstantial ; and for that and other reasons it was impossible for me to make any effoii; to regain possession of it. The person who took it intended, after reading it, to return it without betraying himself, but he was afterwards tempted to put it into other hands with a false statement of its history, possibly with a view to its being utilized, in part if not as a whole, in print. This can hardly be done with safety, but it has complicated the affair and interfered with the return of the manuscript in time for it to go to press as promised.

I have therefore been compelled to undertake the depressing task of rewriting it, and the present volume is the result. Whether it is better for being a twice-told tale I cannot say, but I am inclined to think it is no worse. My aim has been to give the main facts, traditions, and conjectures concerning Shakespeare's personal and literary history, adding, so far as my limits allow, the evidence for the facts and the reasons for accepting ii Preface

or rejecting the traditions and conjectures. Biographers have never agreed, and probably never will agree, on many of these doubtful or disputed matters. I have endeavoured to be fair in stating theories and opinions which I feel obliged to criticize, generally letting their authors or advocates speak for themselves, and leaving the reader to judge whether they are right or I am.

My indebtedness to Halliwell-Phillipps is acknowledged on almost every page, and is even greater than is explicitly recognized. He sent me the successive editions of his Outlines, and we discussed many points in them by correspondence. In the prefaces to the latest editions he mentions five persons by name to whom his " gratitude " for '< substantial corrections " is " restricted," and of these I happen to be the only one in this country.

To Mr. Sidney Lee's more recent Life of Shakespeare I have also been indebted, though I have sometimes had to disagree with him, particularly on the history and interpretation of the Sonnets.

Shakespeare's Poems (aside from the Sonnets) have received comparatively slight attention from his biographers and editors. In my edition of his works I attempted to treat them as thoroughly as the plays, and I have followed the same course here, quoting freely from the few critics who, to my thinking, have done justice to the real merit and interest of these early poetical productions, which have been quite overshadowed by the author's later and greater achievements in dramatic art.

In the Bibliography, which is necessarily a brief selection from material that would fill a volume larger than this, I have given a fuller account of the typographical peculiarities of the first folio than I have seen elsewhere.

Preface

It will suffice, I think, to prove beyond all question that the folio could not have been edited by Bacon, as the "cranks" — I cannot call them critics — who believe him to be the author of the plays have assumed, making it, indeed, the corner-stone of their crazy hypothesis.

W. J. R.

■ Cambridge, April 23, 1902.

This life was written as a supplement to the New Century (subscription) PMition of " Shakespeare," and for this reason has not been hitherto available as an independent work. As neither time nor care was spared on the preparation for its original appearance, no addition or alteration has been deemed necessary or advisable.

The portrait of Doctor Rolfe was prepared for the book as first published, but he declined to permit its insertion. It is with extreme reluctance that he yields to the request of the publishers that it may appear in the present edition.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Shakespeare at the Age of Twelve . Portrait of Dr. Rolfe Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy Stratford from Memorial Chapel .

GowER Monument . ...

Shakespeare Memorial Building Bust of Shakespeare, Trinity Church

PAGE

Frontispiece

. 16

. 39

. 94

. 150

. 224 '

. 324 '

. 475

Chapter I. Intkoductort

More than one biographer of Shakespeare has begun by quoting what George Steevens wrote somewhat more than a hundred years ago: "All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford - on - 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." And Tennyson is reputed to have said that "the world should be thankful that there are but five facts absolutely known to us about Shakespeare: the date of his birth, April 23, 1564; his marriage at nineteen to Anne Hathaway; his connection with the Globe theatre and with Blackf riars ; his retirement from theatrical life, with a competency, to Stratford; and the date of his death, which took place upon the anniversary of his birth, 1616."

It should be understood, however, that there is nothing exceptional in this, though certain folk who deny that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare have laid much stress upon it. The biographies of the great majority of literary men of that time, especially the dramatists, are as meagre as Shakespeare's or more so. In the latest sketch of- the lives of Beaumont and Fletcher (in the " Mermaid Series ") the first sentence reads thus : " Beaumont and Eletcher, though not of obscure origin, like the greater number of their fellow dramatists, yet afford no exception to the general rule in the obscurity that surrounds their lives." Those who desire to see " all the scraps of information that can be collected concerning either poet" are referred to Mr. Dyce's introduction to his edition of their works. The volume of the same series devoted to Webster and Tourneur says: "Nothing is known about the lives of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur. We are ignorant where they were born and when they died," etc. The personal history of Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, and others is much the same.

As I have intimated, this is also true of other great authors than dramatists. Professor Hales begins the introduction to the "Globe" edition of Spenser as follows: "The life of Spenser is wrapt in a similar obscurity to that which hides from us his great predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporary Shakespeare. As in the case of Chaucer, our principal external authorities are a few meagre entries in certain official docnments, and such facts as may be gathered from his works. The birth-year of each poet is determined by inference. The circumstances in which each died are a matter of controversy. What sure information we have of the intervening events of the life of each one is scanty and interrupted ; " and so on.

We need not wonder, then, that Mr. Halliwell- Phillipps, in the preface to his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, compares "the fragments of the personal history of the dramatist which have hitherto been discovered" to "the remains of New Place" (the residence of Shakespeare in his later years), which consist of a few stones and bricks of the foundations, absolutely nothing being left of the structure that rested upon them. He adds : " In this respect the great dramatist participates in the fate of most of his literary contemporaries, for if a collection of the known facts relating to all of them were tabularly arranged, it would be found that the number of the ascertained particulars of his life reached at least the average. At the present day, with biography carried to a wasteful and ridiculous excess, and Shakespeare the idol not merely of a nation but of the educated world, it is difficult to realize a period when no interest was taken in the events of the lives of authors, and when the great poet himself, notwithstanding the immense popularity of some of his works, was held in no general reverence. It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable. The intelligent appreciation of genius by individuals was not sufficient to neutralize in these matters the effect of public opinion and the animosity of the religious world; all circumstances thus uniting to banish general interest in the history of persons connected in any way with the stage. This biographical indifference continued for many years, and long before the season arrived for a real curiosity to be taken in the subject, the records from which alone a satisfactory memoir could have been constructed had disappeared. At the time of Shakespeare's decease, non-political correspondence was rarely preserved, elaborate diaries were not the fashion, and no one, excepting in semi-apocryphal collections of jests, thought it worth while to record many of the sayings and doings, or to delineate at any length the characters, of actors and dramatists, so that it is generally by the merest accident that particulars of interest respecting them have been recovered."

Still, as Karl Elze remarks, "we might have possessed more biographical material relating, to Shakespeare, were it not that political and other events combined to destroy what existed. The Civil Wars, Puritanism, and a strange succession of conflagrations, are to blame for having destroyed the few records of Shakespeare's life that had survived Ms day. Upon the accession of Charles I. only a few years after Shakespeare's death, and but two years after the publication of his works [in the folio of 1623], the political affairs of the country assumed so serious and threatening an aspect that all other considerations were thrust into the background — more especially everything connected with the drama, which, as is well known, was one of the first things attacked by the fanaticism of the Puritans. The appreciation of and interest in literature — especially in dramatic literature — which had shortly before risen to an unparalleled height, and which had affected all the different strata of the nation, died out, or rather was stifled by main force; and this change was accomplished with extraordinary rapidity and with a force that hurled down everything that came in its way. . . . The neglect into which Shakespeare was allowed to fall can be accounted for only by the fact that the political revolution was also a complete upturning of the whole social fabric, and of the moral, literary, and Eesthetic ideas which affected the very character of the nation."

Besides these political events, other causes, as already stated, helped in the destruction.' Chief among these was a series of fires, which, by a strange coincidence, destroyed all the buildings where any papers of Shakespeare's, or records of his life, might have been obtained. In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIIL, the Globe theatre was burned, and in all probability manuscripts of the poet, or other written records relating to the history and management of this theatre, were destroyed at that time. In the following year, a second conflagration devastated a large portion of Stratford, and although New Place was spared, it may be assumed, as fifty-four houses fell victims to the flames, that many records and important papers referring to Shakespeare's family were then lost. A few years later a fire broke out in Ben Jonson's house, destroying more especially books and papers. There can be no doubt that among his papers were letters of Shakespeare, and editions of single works, even though Ben Jonson does not mention this fact in the poem ("An Execration upon Vulcan") in which he recounts his losses. It is probable also that the Great Fire of London, in 1666, still further lessened the scanty memorials of Shakespeare's life and work.

Moreover, he himself appears to have made no effort to leave any record of his life to posterity. He did not trouble himself about the printing or the preservation of his works. It is true that they were not written with a view to being printed, but were doubtless sold outright to theatrical managers for representation upon the stage ; but, though a poet, he was eminently practical, knew how to make and invest money and to take good care of his property, and we may be sure that he preserved the legal and other documents relating to these business transactions. Doubtless he also had manuscripts of some if not all of his works and copies of some of the editions that had been published ; and these may have had corrections and other memoranda that would throw light upon their history and upon many textual and other questions that perplex editors and critics. But his will makes no reference to books, manuscripts, documents, letters, or other written matter in which he was interested. These may have been informally entrusted to his family, but, if so, they do not appear to have taken care for their preservation. We have no evidence that they did anything to honour his memory except by the erection of the monument in the Stratford church. This apparent neglect, it has been suggested, may be due not so much to any want of esteem or affection as to the fact that he left no male heir. "After his death there was no one who could be regarded as the representative of the family, and for whom it would have been a matter both of pride and of duty to cherish the memory of its founder."

His daughters had married, and had family cares and interests of their own. Tradition says that Lady Barnard (the only grandchild of the poet who lived to be twenty years old), upon her second marriage, took certain family documents with her to her future home; but not even tradition pretends to tell what became of them. It appears from the records of litigation concerning her rights in Kew Place, in which she was engaged after the death of her first husband, that she inherited the shrewd business qualities of her grandfather. At that time she states that she "hath in her hands or custodie many deeds, evidences, writings, charters, escripts, and muniments, which concern the lands and premises which the defendant claymeth as her inheritance, and other the lands which are the defendant's joynture, and are devised to her by the said Thomas Nash." Besides the title deeds of New Place and other documents relating to that estate, here referred to, it is not unlikely that she had preserved other papers and memorials connected with the history of Shakespeare. She was only eight years old when he died, but that he was very fond of her is proved by his bequeathing to her nearly all his plate in addition to a valuable contingent interest in his estate. We can imagine that she had a childish affection for him which developed and strengthened in after years, and that she treasured many mementoes of him which, as she left no descendants, were subsequently scattered and lost.

Unfortunately, the first biography of Shakespeare worthy of the name was not written until 1709, or nearly a century after his death, being prepared by Nicholas Eowe as an introduction to his edition of the poet's works. It was based mainly upon the researches of Betterton the actor, who a few years earlier (the precise date is uncertain) had visited . Stratford for the express purpose of ascertaining what could be learned there concerning the personal history of the dramatist. He comnmnicated the results of his investigations to B,owe, who incorporated the better part of them in his biographical sketch. Eowe says, in referring to Betterton, "I must own a particular obligation to him for the most considerable part of the passages relating to his life which I have here transmitted to the public, his veneration for the memory of Shakespeare having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great a value." We are indebted to Eowe for the rescue of these and other fragments of information which otherwise would have been lost, and there is no reason for doubting his general accuracy. That he drew for the most part from reliable sources is unquestionable. A few errors have been detected in the minor details that he gives, but the more important particulars have been verified by later investigations. He appears to have exercised great caution in dealing with his materials, discriminating carefully between what he regards as established fact and as doubtful tradition.

With respect to the credibility of the traditional matter, Halliwell-Phillipps remarks in the preface to his Outlines : —

" There are many who question the value of the stray morsels collected by Betterton and others in the seventeenth century. The main external argument brought forward in support of their incredulity lo Life of Shakespeare

is the late period at which the traditions have been recorded. Thus it is said, and witli truth, that there is no intimation of the poet having followed the trade of a butcher until nearly a century afterwards, that the poaching exploit remained unnoticed for a still longer time, and so on; these long terms of silence being, it is considered, fatal to a dependence upon such testimonies. But it appears to be overlooked that the Stratford biographical notices, unless we adopt the incredible theory that they were altogether gratuitous and foolish inventions, were in all probability mere repetitions of gossip belonging to a much earlier period. This gossip, it must be remembered, was of a character that was seldom jotted down, and that still more rarely found its way into print. Independently even of these considerations, the above line of argument, however plausible, will not bear the test of impartial examination. It would apply very well to the present age, when incessant locomotion and the reign of newspapers have banished the old habit of reliance upon hearsay for intelligence or for a continuity in the recollection of minor events. The case was very different indeed in the country towns and villages of bygone days, when reading of any kind was the luxury of the few, and intercommunication exceedingly restricted. It may be confidently asserted that, previously to the time of Rowe, books or journals were very rarely to be met with at Stratford-on-Avon, while the large majority of the

Introductory ii

inhabitants had never in their lives travelled beyond twenty or thirty miles from their homes. There was in fact a conversational and stagnant, not a reading or a travelling, population ; and this state of things continued, with gradual but almost imperceptible advances in the latter directions, until the development of the railway system. The oral history of local affairs thus became in former days imprisoned, as it were, in the districts of their occurrence; and it is accordingly found that, in some cases, provincial incidents have been handed down through successive generations with an accuracy that is truly marvellous. There has been, for example, a tradition current at Worcester from time immemorial that a robber of the sanctus-bell was flayed, and his skin nailed to one of the doors of the cathedral. This is a species of barbarity that must be assigned to a very remote period, and yet the fact of its perpetration has been established in recent years by a scientific analysis of fragments hanging to an ancient door which is still preserved in the crypt. Other instances nearly as curious might be adduced, including the verification of one of Eowe's statements that was first given by him from an oral source a hundred and thirty years after the period to which it refers."

A few of these traditions had been noted in manuscript or in print, as well as some slight mention of facts in Shakespeare's life, before the .appearance of Kowe's brief biography.

We might have expected that Sir William Dugdale, who was born in 1605, eleven years before the death of Shakespeare, and whose Antiquities of Warwickshire was published in 1656, would have given us some valuable information concerning the personal history of the poet, but he barely mentions him in describing the church and tombs at Stratford.

Fuller, in his Worthies (1662), has a very brief account of Shakespeare, which contains no information of value or interest. In the same year (1662) the E.ev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford, recorded in his memorandum-book certain traditions about the dramatist. Although he had settled in the town only in that year, there can be no doubt that he reports accurately the local gossip of the time. Many people were then living who must have known Shakespeare personally; and his daughter survived until 1662. It is to be regretted that the vicar did not collect more information from these and other available sources than he has preserved for us.

In 1675 Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton, in his Theatrum Poeticum, writes thus: "William Shakespeare, the glory of the English stage, whose nativity at Stratford-on-Avon is the highest honour that town can boast of, from an actor of tragedies and comedies, he became a maker; and such a maker that, though some others may pretend to a more exact decorum and economy, especially in tragedy, never any expressed a more lofty and tragick height ;

never any represented nature more purely to the life J and where the polishments of art are most wanting, as probably his learning was not extraordinary, he phraseth with a certain wild and native elegance ; and in all his writings hath an unvulgar style, as well in his Venus and Adonis, his Bape of Lucrece, and other various poems, as in his dramatioks."

Malone, after quoting this, remarks : " I had long since observed, in the margin of my copy of this book, that the hand of Milton, who was the author's uncle, might be traced in the preface, and in the passage above quoted. The book was licensed for publication two months before the death of that poet. My late friend, Mr. Warton, has made the same observation."

About 1680, John Aubrey, the antiquary, in his Minutes of Lives, the manuscript of which he sent to Anthony Wood for use in his Athence Oxonienses, recorded certain traditions concerning Shakespeare that he had gathered in a visit to Stratford. Halliwell-Phillipps doubts whether Aubrey is as trustworthy as Ward. He says of him : —

"This industrious antiquary was the author of numerous little biographies, which are here and there disfigured by such palpable or ascertained blunders, that it would appear that he must have been in the habit of compiling from imperfect notes of conversations, or, no doubt in many instances, from his own recollections of them. He was unfortunately also one of those foolish and detestable gossips who record everything that they hear or misinterpret, and this without so much as giving a thought to the damage that they may inflict upon the reputation of their victims. It would, therefore, be hazardous as a rule to depend upon his statements in the absence of corroborative evidence, but we may at the same time in a great measure rely upon the accuracy of main facts in those cases in which there is too much elaboration for his memory to have been entirely at fault. We need not, for instance, give credence to his assertion that Shakespeare's father was a butcher, in the literal sense of that term, but it is scarcely possible that he would have given the story about the calf if he had not been told that the poet himself had followed the occupation. In the same way, although it is obvious that the anecdote respecting the constable 1 is incorrectly narrated, no one should hesitate

iThe "calf" story is told by Aubrey thus : "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 kill'd a calfe, he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech." As to the "constable," Aubrey, after remarking that Shakespeare " drew his characters from the different persons that he met," adds that "the constable in the Midsummer-NighV s Dream'''' (he probably meant Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing) was drawn from a certain constable at Grendon, Buckinghamshire, where Shakespeare staid one Midsummer night on his way from London to Stratford.

at accepting for truth the circumstance that Shakespeare occasionally rested at Grendon Underwood in taking the Aylesbury route in his journeys between his native town and the metropolis. Very meagre indeed are the fragments of information to be safely collected from Aubrey."

In 1693, a traveller named Dowdall, who visited and described Stratford and several other towns in Warwickshire, gives the inscriptions on Shakespeare's monument, and adds a few traditions which he got from William Castle, who was then the parish clerk and sexton. He told Dowdall that Shakespeare's father was a butcher (and Aubrey also cites him as authority for the statement), but does not add the " calf " story. Halliwell-Phillipps believes that Castle was " a person who could have had no motive for deception in such matters ; and the main facts of the poet's Stratford life would, moreover, have been clearly known in that town all through the seventeenth century,"

About the same time the Rev. Eichard Davies, rector of Sapperton in Gloucestershire, added a few notes on the life of the dramatist to a manuscript biographical dictionary; and these were evidently drawn from oral sources not unworthy of credence.

For almost a century after the appearance of Eowe's Life of Shahespeare no serious attempt was made to improve upon it. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens in the biographical sketches prefixed to their editions substantially repeated Eowe's matter.

Malone was the first to attempt a biography on a more extended scale. In the introductions to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and 1821 he presented a large amount of new information, based on his researches in the Stratford records, the manuscripts collected by the actor and manager, Edward Alleyn, at Dulwich, and official records and documents in London. His Life of Shakespeare, as completed and published in the Variorum of 1821, fills 287 octavo pages ; and to this the discussion of the chronological order of the plays adds 180 pages more.

Of the many contributions to Shakespearian biography since the time of Malone it is not my purpose to attempt any detailed account here. The most important of these have been made by Halliwell- Phillipps, who, between 1850 and his death in 1889, made elaborate investigations in the Stratford archives and other ancient records and documents likely to throw light on the history of Shakespeare and his works, and printed the results of his researches in successive publications and finally in the monumental work in two royal octavo volumes which he modestly entitled Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, the ninth edition of which was issued in 1890.

Mr. Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare (1898) is the most noteworthy of the other biographies of the dramatist published in the last half-century.

CHAPTEE 11.

THE NAME OF SHAKESPEARE

The name Shakespeare occurs in widely separated parts of England from the thirteenth century. A Simon Shakespeye (probably Shakespere) is mentioned as living in Gloucestershire in 1260; and a Geoffrey Shakespeare in Surrey in 1268. Simon Sakesper was in the service of the Crown in 1278 as " herderer of the Forest of Essex ; " and a John Shakespeare appears in a judicial case in 1278-79 at Freyndon in Kent. A Henry Shakespere was a resident of Kirkland, near Penrith, as early as 1349, and "the land of Allan Shakespeare" occurs in connection with a conveyance of landed property in Penrith in 1398, when a William Shakespeare was one of the witnesses. There were also Shakespeares in Nottingham between 1357 and 1360.

The earliest appearance of the name that has been discovered in Warwickshire is in 1359, when two bailiffs of Coventry " account for the property of Thomas Shakespere, felon, who had left his goods and fled."

Other Shakespeares, at about the same time, appear to have been no less disreputable. In certain records of the reign of Eichard II. (from June, 1377, to June, 1379) there is an entry of " Walter Shakespere, formerly in gaol in Colchester Castle; " and a John Shakespeare was "imprisoned in Colchester gaol as a perturbator of the King's peace," March 3rd, 1381. A few other notices of Shakespeares in the fourteenth century have been collected by Mrs. Stopes {Shakespeare^ s Family, 1901) and others. In the fifteenth century the name is often found in parish and other records, particularly in Warwickshire, — in the town of Warwick, in Stratford, Snitterfield, Wraxhall, Temple Balsall, Eowington, Pachwood, Little Packington, Kenilworth, Charlecote, Coventry, Hampton, Lap worth, Nuneaton, Kington, and many other places. At Eowington, twelve miles from Stratford, "one of the most prolific Shakespeare families resided, and no less than three Eichard Shakespeares of Eowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William" (Lee).

The origin of the name has been the subject of controversy, but it is generally agreed that it is compounded of shake and spear, and was suggested by the bearing of arms or feats of arms. Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 1605) says : "Breakspear, Shakespeare, and the lyke, have bin surnames imposed upon the first bearers of them for valour and feates of armes ; " and Camden {Remains, 1605) remarks: "Some are named from that