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A LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

SIR SIDNEY LEE

IN PIAM MEMORIAM

This King Shakespeare does he not shine in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs ; /^destructible ; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another, ‘Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him.’

(Thomas Caklyle : Heroes and Hero Worship [1841] : The Hero as Poet.')

PREFACE

The biography of Shakespeare, which I originally published seventeen years ago, is here re-issued in a new shape. The whole has been drastically revised and greatly enlarged. Recent Shakespearean research has proved unexpectedly fruitful. My endeavour has been to present in a just perspective all the trustworthy and relevant information about Shakespeare’s life and work which has become available up to the present timte. My obligations to fellow-workers in the Shakespearean field are numerous, and I have done my best to acknowledge them fully in my text and notes. The new documentary evidence, which scholars have lately discovered touching the intricate stage history of Shakespeare’s era, has proved of especial service, and I have also greatly benefited by the ingenious learning which has been recently brought to bear on vexed questions of Shakespearean bibliography. Much of the fresh Shakespearean knowledge which my personal researches have yielded during the past few years has already been published in various places elsewhere, and whatever in my recent publications has seemed to me of pertinence to my present scheme I have here co-ordinated as succinctly as possible with the rest of my material. Some additional information which I derived while this volume was in course of preparation, chiefly from Elizabethan and Jacobean archives at Stratford-on-Avon and from the wills at Somerset House of Shakespeare’s Stratford friends, few of which appear to have been consulted before, now sees the light for the first time. In the result I think that I may claim to have rendered an account of Shakespeare's career which is more comprehensive at any rate than any which has been offered the public previously.

It is with peculiar pleasure that I acknowledge the assistance rendered me, while these pages have been passing through the press, by M. Seymour de Ricci, a soldier and scholar of French nationality who is now serving as an interpreter with our army in Flanders. M. de Ricci has in the intervals of active warfare sent me from the front, entirely on his own initiative, numerous suggestive comments which he had previously made from time to time on an earlier edition of my Life of Shakespeare. The conditions in which M. de Ricci has aided me pointedly illustrate the completeness of the intellectual sympathy which now unites the French and English nations.

My gratitude is also due to Mr. F. C. Wellstood, M.A. Oxford, secretary and librarian to the Trustees of Shakespeare’s Birthplace and deputy keeper of the Records of the Stratford Corporation, for the assiduity and ability with which he has searched in my behalf the collections of documents in his keeping. Finally, I have to thank my secretary, Mr. W. B. Owen, M.A. Cambridge, for the zealous service he has continuously rendered me throughout the laborious composition of the work. My sister, Miss Elizabeth Lee, has shared with Mr. Owen the tasks of reading the proofs and of compiling the Index.

Sidney Lee.

London, October 15, 1915.

This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which I contributed last year to the fifty-first volume of the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography.’ But the changes and additions which the article has undergone during my revision of it for separate publication are so numerous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an independent venture. In its general aims, however, the present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography.’ I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist’s personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit. I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master’s career. I have avoided merely aesthetic criticism. My estimates of the value of Shakespeare’s plays and poems are intended solely to fulfil the obligation that lies on the biographer of indicating succinctly the character of the successive labours which were woven into the texture of his hero’s life. ^Esthetic studies of Shakespeare abound, and to increase their number is a work of supererogation. But Shakespearean literature, as far as it is known to me, still lacks a book that shall supply within a brief compass an exhaustive and well- arranged statement of the facts of Shakespeare’s career, achievement, and reputation, that shall reduce conjecture to the smallest dimensions consistent with coherence, and shall give verifiable references to all the original sources of information. After studying Elizabethan literature, history, and bibliography for more than eighteen years, I believed that I might, without exposing myself to a charge of presumption, attempt something in the way of filling this gap, and that I might be able to supply, at least tentatively, a guide-book to Shakespeare’s life and work that should be, within its limits, complete and trustworthy. How far my belief was justified the readers of this volume will decide.

I cannot promise my readers any startling revelations. But my researches have enabled me to remove some ambiguities which puzzled my predecessors, and to throw light on one or two topics that have hitherto obscured the course of Shakespeare’s career. Particulars that have not been before incorporated in Shakespeare’s biography will be found in my treatment of the following subjects: the conditions under which ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost ’ and ‘ The Merchant of Venice ’ were written ; the references in,Shakespeare’s plays to his native town and county; his father’s applications to the Heralds’ College for coat-armour; his relations with Ben Jonson and the boy-actors in 1601; the favour extended to his work by James I and his Court; the circumstances which led to the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the dramatist’s portraits. I have somewhat expanded the notices of Shakespeare’s financial affairs which have already appeared in the article in the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography,’ and a few new facts will be found in my revised estimate of the poet’s pecuniary position.

In my treatment of the sonnets I have pursued what I believe to be an original line of investigation. The strictly autobiographical interpretation that critics have of late placed on these poems compelled me, as Shakespeare’s biographer, to submit them to a very narrow scrutiny. My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, but I have felt bound, out of respect to writers from whose views I dissent, to give in detail the evidence on which I base my judgment. Matthew Arnold sagaciously laid down the maxim that ‘the criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and artistic¹ purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result.’ It is criticism inspired by this liberalising principle that is especially applicable to the vast sonnet-literature which was produced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is criticism of the type that Arnold recommended that can alone lead to any accurate and profitable conclusion respecting the intention of the vast sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan era. In accordance with Arnold’s suggestion, I have studied Shakespeare’s sonnets comparatively with those in vogue in England, France, and Italy at the time he wrote. I have endeavoured to learn the view that was taken of such literary endeavours by contemporary critics and readers throughout Europe. My researches have covered a very small portion of the wide field. But I have gone far enough, I think, to justify the conviction that Shakespeare’s collection of sonnets has no reasonable title to be regarded as a personal or autobiographical narrative.

In the Appendix (Sections in. and iv.) I have supplied a memoir of Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, and an account of the Earl’s relations with the contemporary world of letters. Apart from Southampton’s association with the sonnets, he promoted Shakespeare’s welfare at an early stage of the dramatist’s career, and I can quote the authority of Malone, who appended a sketch of Southampton’s history to his biography of Shakespeare (in the ‘ Variorum ’ edition of 1821), for treating a knowledge of Southampton’s life as essential to a full knowledge of Shakespeare’s. I have also printed in the Appendix a detailed statement of the precise circumstances under which Shakespeare’s sonnets were published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 (Section v.), and a review of the facts that seem to me to confute the popular theory that Shakespeare was a friend and prottgt of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who has been put forward quite unwarrantably as the hero of the sonnets (Sections vi., vn., vin.).¹ I have also included in the Appendix (Sections ix. and x.) a survey of the voluminous sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan poets between 1591 and i597> with which Shakespeare’s sonnetteering efforts were very closely allied, as well as a bibliographical note on a corresponding feature of French and Italian literature between 1550 and 1600.

Since the publication of the article on Shakespeare in the ‘ Dictionary of National Biography,’ I have received from correspondents many criticisms and suggestions which have enabled me to correct some errors. But a few of my correspondents have exhibited so ingenuous a faith in those forged documents relating to Shakespeare and forged references to his works, which were promulgated chiefly by John Payne Collier more than half a century ago, that I have attached a list of the misleading records to my chapter on ‘The Sources of Biographical Information ’ in the Appendix (Section 1). I believe the list to be fuller than any to be met with elsewhere.

The six illustrations which appear in this volume have been chosen on grounds of practical utility rather than of artistic merit. My reasons for selecting as the frontispiece the newly discovered ‘ Droeshout ’ painting of Shakespeare (now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon) can be gathered from the history of the painting and of its discovery which I give on pages 528-30. I have to thank Mr. Edgar Flower and the other members of the Council of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford for permission to reproduce the picture. The portrait of Southampton in early life is now at Welbeck Abbey, and the Duke of Portland not only permitted the portrait to be engraved for this volume but lent me the negative from which the plate has been prepared. The Committee of the Garrick Club gave permission to photograph the interesting bust of Shakespeare in their possession,¹ but, owing to the fact that it is moulded in black terra-cotta, no satisfactory negative could be obtained; the engraving I have used is from a photograph of a white plaster cast of the original bust, now in the Memorial Gallery at Stratford. The five autographs of Shakespeare’s signature — all that exist of unquestioned' authenticity — appear-in the three remaining plates. The three signatures on the will have been photographed from the original document at Somerset House by permission of Sir Francis Jeune, President of the Probate Court; the autograph on the deed of purchase by Shakespeare in 1613 of the house in Blackfriars has been photographed from the original document in the Guildhall Library by permission of the Library Committee of the City of London; and the autograph on the deed of mortgage relating to the same property, also dated in 1613, has been photographed from the original document in the British Museum by permission of the Trustees. Shakespeare’s coat-of-arms and motto, which are stamped on the cover of this volume, are copied from the trickings in the margin of the draft-grants of arms now in the Heralds’ College.

The Baroness Burdett-Coutts has kindly given me ample opportunities of examining the two peculiarly interesting and valuable copies of the First Folio² in her possession. Mr. Richard Savage, of Stratford-on- Avon, the Secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, and Mr. W. Salt Brassington, the Librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford, have courteously replied to the many inquiries that I have addressed to them verbally or by letter. Mr. Lionel Cust, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, has helped me to estimate the authenticity of Shakespeare’s portraits. I have also benefited, while the work has been passing through the press, by the valuable suggestions of my friends the Rev. H. C. Beeching and Mr. W. J. Craig, and I have to thank Mr. Thomas Seccombe for the zealous aid he has rendered me while correcting the final proofs.

October is, i8g8.

CONTENTS

In Piam Meraoriam Preface

Preface to (1898)

PARENTAGE AND BIRTH

CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE

THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

THE MIGRATION TO LONDON

SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS

ON THE LONDON STAGE

FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS

PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594

THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC

THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER

THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE

SHAKESPEARE’S FINANCIAL RESOURCES

MATURITY OF GENIUS

THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I

THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 1608

THE LATEST PLAYS

THE CLOSE OF LIFE

SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS

AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS,

QUARTOS AND FOLIOS PAGE

THE EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER.

SHAKESPEARE’S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

SHAKESPEARE’S FOREIGN VOGUE

GENERAL ESTIMATE

APPENDIX

THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY

THE YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.’

'MR. WILLIAM HERBERT'

SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE

THE 'WILL' SONNETS

THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1397

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE, 1550-1600

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

PARENTAGE AND BIRTH

Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was borne through the middle ages by residents in very many parts of England — at Penrith in _Distribu. Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in tionofthe Yorkshire, as well as in nearly all the mid- ^name' land counties. The surname had originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear.¹ Its first recorded holder is William Shakespeare or ‘ Sakspere,’ who was convicted of robbery and hanged in 1248²; he belonged to Clapton, a hamlet in the hundred of Kiftergate, Gloucestershire (about seven miles south of Stratford-on-Avon). The second recorded holder of the surname is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at ‘Freyndon/ perhaps Frittenden, Kent.³ The great mediaeval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the fifteenth century.⁴ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than elsewhere. The archives of no fewer than twenty-four towns and villages there contain notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century^ and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by Shakespeare families in the seventeenth century. Among them all William was a common Christian name. At Rowington, twelve miles to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of the most prolific Shakespeare families of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no fewer than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560,

1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William. At least one other William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington. As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous contemporaries who were identically named.¹

The poet’s ancestry cannot be defined with absolute certainty. The poet’s father, when applying for a The poet’s grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grand- ancestry. father (the poet’s great-grandfather) received for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII.² No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious. But there is a probability that the poet came of good yeoman stock, and that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners.³ Adam Shakespeare,; a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire in 1389, seems to have been greatgrandfather of one Richard Shakespeare who during the first thirty-four years (at least) of the sixteenth century held neighbouring land at Wroxall, some ten miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Another Richard Shakespeare who is conjectured to have been nearly akin to the Wroxall family was settled in 1535 as a farmer at Snitterfield, a village six miles south of Wroxall and four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon.¹ It is probable that he was the poet’s grandfather. In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he died at the close of 1560, and on February iq of the next year letters of administration of his goods, chattels, and debts were issued by the Probate Court at Worcester to his son John, who was there described as a farmer or husbandman (agricola) of Snitterfield. The estate was valued at 35/. 17s.² Besides the son John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly had a son Henry; while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage is undetermined, may have been a third son. The son Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he engaged in farming with gradually diminishing success; he died in very embarrassed circumstances in December ^IS9^-³ John, the son who administered Richard’s estate, was in all likelihood the poet’s father.

About 1551 John Shakespeare left the village of Snitterfield, which was his birthplace, to seek a career in the neighbouring borough of Stratford-on-Avon, then a well-

/ ¹ Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, ii. 207, and J. W. Ryland, Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor, Warwickshire, 1903, passim.

² The purchasing power of money may be reckoned in the middle of the sixteenth century eight times what it is now, and in the later years of the century when prices rapidly rose, five times. In comparing sums of money mentioned in the text with modem currency, they should be multiplied by eight if they belong to years up to rs6o, and by five if they belong to subsequent years. (See p. 296 n. 1 infra.) The letters of administration in regard to Richard Shakespeare’s estate, which are in the district registry of the Probate Court at Worcester, were printed in full by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Shakespeare’s Tours (privately issued 1887), pp. 44-5, and again in J. W. Gray’s Shakespeare’s Marriage, .pp. 259-60. They do not appear in any edition of Halliwell- Phillipp’s Outlines.

³ Henry Shakespeare, the dramatist’s uncle, was buried at Snitterfield on Dec. 29, 1596, leaving no surviving issue. His widow Margaret was buried at Snitterfield six weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1596-7. Cf. Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment, 1914, pp. 66 seq.

to-do market town of some two thousand inhabitants.¹

In the middle of the sixteenth century the The poet’s _maj_n industries of Stratford were the weaving settles in of wool into cloth or yarn and the making on-Aran" ^{of malt}- ^{Some substantial} fortunes were °n von. _mac[_{e QUt} dealings in wool, and on June 28,

¹553j ^a charter of incorporation (or of self-government) rewarded the general advance of prosperity. Some^ fifty-seven years later, on July 23, 1610, the municipal; privileges and franchises were confirmed anew by James I. Meanwhile, however, fortune proved fickle. As Queen Elizabeth’s reign drew to a close, although the population was estimated to increase by half as much j again, the manufacturing activities and the earnings of commerce and labour declined. The local trade tended to confine itself to the retail distribution of imported -j manufactures or agricultural produce. There were many seasons of scarcity and frequent losses by disastrous fires. Yet municipal life remained busy and, the richer townsfolk and neighbouring landowners did what they could to lighten the borough’s burden of misfortunes.²

In the middle years of the century there was every promise of a prosperous career for an enterprising immi-, grant from a neighbouring village who was provided with- a small capital. John Shakespeare arrived in Stratford;

¹In 1547 the communicants residing in the main thoroughfares* were reckoned at 1500; in 1562 the population would seem to have numbered as many as 2000. About 1598 the corporation when petitioning for an alteration of their charter reckoned the householders at 1500 ‘at the least’ — a figure which would suggest a population of near s^oo°j but there was a possihle endeavour here to magnify the importance of the place. (See Wheler MSS., Shakespeare’s Birthplace, i. f. 72.) According to a census of April 19, 1765, the population : only numbered 2287. The census of 1911 gives the figure 8532.

² In 1590 the bailiff and burgesses complained that the town ‘had fallen much into decay for want of such trade as heretofore they had by clothing and making of yarn.’ The decline seems to have made steady progress through Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in 1615 it was stated that ‘no clothes or stuffs were made at Stratford hut were bought* at London or elsewhere.’ (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 554-55.)

on the eve of its incorporation, and he at once set up as a trader in all manner of agricultural produce and in many articles which were manufactured out of it. Corn, wool, malt, meat, skins, and leather were among the commodities in which he dealt. Documents of a somewhat later date often describe him as a glover. Aubrey, Shakespeare’s first biographer, reported the tradition that he was a butcher. But though both designations doubtless indicated important branches of his business, neither can be regarded as disclpsing its full extent. The bulk of his varied stock-in-trade came from the land, which his family farmed at Snitterfield and in which he enjoyed some interest. As long as his father lived he seems to have been a frequent visitor to Snitterfield, and until the date of his father’s death in 1560 legal documents designated him a farmer or 'husbandman’ of that place. But it was with Stratford-on-Avon that his life was mainly identified.

In April 1552 John Shakespeare was living in Henley Street at Stratford, a thoroughfare leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden. He is first men- j_ohn tioned in the borough records as paying in that Shake- month a fine of twelvepence for having a dirt-heap in front of his house. His frequent ^office- appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was a keen man of business. For some seven and twenty years his mercantile progress knew no check and his local influence grew steadily. In October 1556 he purchased two freehold tenements at Stratford — one, with a garden, in Henley Street (it adjoins that now known as the poet’s birthplace), and the other in Greenhill Street with a garden and croft. Thenceforth he played a prominent part in municipal affairs under the constitution which the charter of 1553 brought into being. In 1557 he was chosen an ale-taster, whose duty it was to test the quality of malt liquors and bread. About

the same time he was elected a burgess or town councillor, and in September 1558, and again on October 6, 1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables by a vote of the jury of the court-leet. Twice in 1559 and 1561 — he was chosen one of the affeerors officers appointed to determine the fines for those offences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which no express penalties were prescribed by statute. In 1561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the borough, an office of financial responsibility whicji he held for two years. He delivered his second statement of accounts to the corporation in January 1564. When attesting documents he, like many of his educated neighbours, made his mark, and there is no unquestioned specimen of his handwriting in the Stratford archives; but his financial aptitude and ready command <af figures satisfactorily relieve him of the imputation of illiteracy. The municipal accounts, which were checked by tallies and counters, were audited by him after he ceased to be chamberlain, and he more than once advanced small sums of money to the corporation. He was reputed to be a man of cheerful temperament, one of ‘ a merry cheek,’ who dared crack a jest at any time.¹

With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of assured fortune — Mary, youngest daughter of Robert The poet’s Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the mother. parish of Aston Cantlow, three miles from Stratford. The chief branch of the Arden family was

¹ Archdeacon Thomas Plume (1630-1704) bequeathed to his native town of Maldon in Essex, with books and other papers, a MS. collection of contemporary hearsay anecdotes which he compiled about 1656. Of the dramatist the archdeacon there wrote that he ‘was a glover’s son ’ and that ‘ S[i]r John Mennes saw once his old f[athe]r in h[is] shop — a merry cheeked old man th[a]t s[ai]d “Will was a g[oo]d Hon[est] Fellow, but he darest h[ave] crackt a jeast w[i]th him at any time.” ’ (Communicated hy the Rev. Andrew Clark, D.D., rector of Great Leighs, Chelmsford.) Plume was probahly repeating gossip which he derived from Sir John Mennes, the versifier and admiral of Charles I’s reign, who was only two years old when Shakespeare’s father died in 1601, and could not therefore have himself conversed with the elder Shakespeare. No other Sir John Mennes is discoverable.

settled at Parkhall, in the parish of Curdworth, near Birmingham, and it ranked with the most influential of the county. Robert Arden, a progenitor of that branch, was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 (16 Hen. VI), and this sheriff’s direct descendant, Edward Arden, who was himself high sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. John Shakespeare’s wife belonged to a humbler branch of the family, and there is no trustworthy evidence to determine the exact degree of kinship between the two branches. Her grandfather, Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitterfield, which passed, with other property, to her father Robert; John Shakespeare’s father, Richard, was one of this Robert Arden’s Snitterfield tenants. By his first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had seven daughters, of whom all but two married; John Shakespeare’s wife seems to have been the youngest. Robert Arden’s second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of John Hill (d'. 1545), a substantial farmer of Bearley, survived him; by her he had no issue. When he died at the end of 1556, he owned a farmhouse and many acres at Wilmcote, besides some hundred acres at Snitterfield, with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants. The post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on December 9, 1556, shows that he had lived in comfort; his house was adorned by as many as eleven ‘painted cloths,’ which then did duty for tapestries among the middle class.¹ The exordium of his will, which was drawn up on November 24, 1556, and proved on December 16 following, indicates that he was an observant

¹ ‘Painted cloths’ were broad strips of canvas on which figures from the Bible or from classical mythology were, with appropriate mottoes, crudely painted in tempera. Cf. i Henry IV, iv. ii. 25, ‘as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth.’ Shakespeare lays stress on the embellishment of the mottoes in Lucrece, 245 :

Who fears a sentence or an old man’s saw Shall by a fainted cloth be kept in awe.

Catholic. For his two youngest daughters, Alice and Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them his executors. Mary received not only 6 I. 135. 4d. in money, but the fee-simple of his chief property at Wilmcote, consisting of a house with some fifty acres of land, —■ an estate which was known as Asbies. She also acquired, under an earlier settlement, an interest in two messuages at Snitterfield.¹ But, although she was well provided with worldly goods, there is no sure evidence that she could write; several extant documents bear her mark, and no autograph signature is extant.

John Shakespeare’s marriage with Mary Arden doubtless took place at Aston Cantlow, the parish church of The poet’s Wilmcote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church birth and registers begin at a later date). On Septem- haptism. b_cr 1558, their first child, a daughter, Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford. A second child, another daughter, Margaret, was baptised on December 2, 1562; but both these children died in infancy. The poet William, the first son and third child, was born on April 22 or 23, 1564. The later day was the day of his death, and it is generally accepted as his birthday. There is no positive evidence on the subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that he was baptised on April 26, and it was a common practice at the time to baptise a child three days after birth. The baptismal entry runs ‘Gulielmus filius Johannis,'; Shakspere.’²

Some doubt has been raised as to the ordinarily ac-

¹ HaUiwell-Phillipps, ii. 179.

^a The vicar, who performed the christening ceremony; was John Bretchgirdle, M.A. He had been appointed on Feb. 27, 1559-60, and was buried in Stratford church on June 21, 1565. The (broken) ’bowl of the old font of Stratford church is still preserved there (Bloom’s Stratford-upon-Avon Church, 1902, pp. 101—2). The existing vellum parish register of this period is a transcript of the original ‘paper book’; it was made before 1600, in accordance with an order of Convocation : of Oct. 25, 1597, by Richard Byfield, who was vicar for some ten years from 1596.

cepted scene of the dramatist’s birth. Of two adjoining houses now forming a detached building on _Shake_ the north side of Henley Street and known as speare’s Shakespeare’s House or Shakespeare’s Birth- ^Birthplace' place, both belonged to the dramatist’s father for many years and were combined by him to serve at once as private residence and as shop or warehouse. The tenement to the east he purchased in 1556, but there is no documentary evidence that he owned the house to the west before 1575. Yet this western house has been long known as the poet’s birthplace, and a room on the first floor has been claimed for two centuries and more as that in which he was born. It may well be that John Shakespeare occupied the two houses jointly in 1564 (the year of the poet’s birth), although he only purchased the western building eleven years later. The double residence became Shakespeare’s property on his father’s death in 1601, but the dramatist never resided there after his boyhood. His mother inhabited the premises until her death in 1608, and his sister Mrs. Joan Hart and her family dwelt there with her. Mrs. Hart was still living there in 1616 when Shakespeare died, and he left his sister a life interest in the two houses at a nominal rent of one shilling. On Mrs. Hart’s death thirty years later, the ownership of the property passed to the poet’s elder daughter, Mrs. Hall, and on her death in 1649 to the poet’s only granddaughter and last surviving descendant, Lady Bernard.¹ By her will in 1670 Lady Bernard made the buildings over to Thomas Hart, the dramatist’s grandnephew, then the head of the family which supplied an uninterrupted succession of occupiers for the best part of two centuries.

Early in Mrs. Joan Hart’s occupancy of the ‘Birthplace’ she restored the houses to their original state of two separate dwellings. While retaining the western portion for her own use, she sublet the eastern half to a tenant who converted it into an inn. It was known at

¹ See p. 512 infra.

first as the ¹ Maidenhead ’ and afterwards as the ‘ Swan and Maidenhead.’ The premises remained subdivided¹ . thus for some two hundred years, and the inn

theprem-¹ enjoyed a continuous existence until 1846. ises, 1670- Thomas Hart’s kinsmen, to whom the ownership ^l847' of both eastern and western tenements meanwhile descended, continued to confine their residence to the western house as long as the property remained in their hands. The tradition which identified that tenement with the scene of the dramatist’s birth gathered substance from its intimate association with his surviving kindred through some ten generations. During the eighteenth century the western house was a popular showplace and the Harts derived a substantial emolument from the visits of admirers of Shakespeare.

In 1806 the surviving representatives of the Harts at Stratford abandoned the family home and the whole Their property was sold for 230Z. to one Thomas present Court, the tenant of the eastern house which ¹ still did duty as the ‘Swan and Maidenhead’

inn. Thereupon Court turned the western house into a butcher’s shop.¹ On the death of his widow in 1846 the whole of the premises were put up for auction in London and they were purchased for 30001, on behalf of subscribers to a public fund on September 16, 1847. Adjoining buildings were soon demolished so as to isolate, the property, and after extensive restoration on the lines of the earliest accessible pictorial and other

¹ In 1834 a writer in the Tewkesbury Magazine described ‘Shakespeare’s House’ thus: ‘The house in which Shakespeare's father lived, and in which he was born, is now divided into two — the northern [i.e. western] half being, or having lately been, a butcher’s shop — and the southern [i.e. eastern] half, consisting of a respectable public-house, bearing the sign of the Swan and Maidenhead.’ (French’s Shake- speareana Genealogica, p. 409.) The wife of John Hart (1753-^00) of ‘the Birthplace,’ son of Thomas Hart (1729-1793), belonged to Tewkesii bury and their son William Shakespeare Hart (1778-1834) settlecT here. The latter wrote of ‘tie Birthplace’ in 1810: ‘My grandfather [Thomas Hart] used to obtain a great deal of money by shewing the premises to strangers who used to visit them.’ (Shakespeare’s Birthplace MSS., Saunders MS. 1191, p. 63.)

evidence, the two houses were reconverted into a single detached domicile for the purposes of public exhibition; the western house (the ‘birthplace’) was left unfurnished, and the eastern house (the ‘inn’) was fitted up as a museum and library. Much of the Elizabethan timber and stonework survives in the double structure, but a cellar under the ‘birthplace’ is the only portion which remains as it was at the date of the poet’s birth.¹ The buildings were vested under a deed of trust in the corporation of Stratford in 1866. In 1891 an Act of Parliament (54 & 55 Viet. cap. iii.) transferred the property in behalf of the nation to an independent body of trustees, consisting of ten life-trustees, together with a number of ex-officio trustees, who are representative of the authorities of the county of Warwickshire and of the town of Stratford.

¹ Cf. documents and sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99. The earliest extant view of the Birthplace buildings is a drawing by Richard Greene (1716-1793), a well-known Lichfield antiquary, which was engraved for the Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1769. Richard Greene’s hrother, Joseph (1712-1790), was long headmaster of Stratford Grammar School. In 1788 Colonel Philip De la Motte, an archaeologist, of Bats- ford, Gloucestershire, made an etching of the Birthplace premises, which closely resembles Greene’s drawing; the colonel’s original copperplate is now preserved in the Birthplace. The restoration of the Birthplace in 1847 accuratdy conformed to the view of 1769.

CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE

In July 1564, when William was three months old, the plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford. The plague One in every seven of the inhabitants perished, of 1564. Twice in his mature years — in 1593 and 1693

— the dramatist was to witness in London more fatal visitations of the pestilence; but his native place was spared any experience which compared with the calamitous epidemic of his infancy.¹ He and his family were unharmed, and his father liberally contributed to the relief of his stricken neighbours, hundreds of whom were rendered destitute.

Fortune still favoured the elder Shakespeare. On July 4, 1565, he reached the dignity of an alderman. The father ^'^{rom z}5^7 onwards he was accorded in the as alder- corporation archives the honourable prefix of manand ‘Mr.’² At Michaelmas 1568 he attained the highest office in the corporation gift, that of bailiff, and during his year of office the corporation for the first time entertained actors at Stratford. The Queen’s Company and the Earl of Worcester’s Company each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome,

¹ An epidemic of exceptional intensity visited London from August'! to December 1563, and several country towns were infected somewhat;) sporadically in the following spring. Leicester, Lichfield, and Canter-| bury seem with Stratford-on-Avon to have been the chief sufferers in the provinces. (Creighton, Epidemics in Britain, i. 309.)

² According to Sir Thomas Smith’s Commonwealth of England, 1594, ‘Master is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen.’ Cf. Merchant of Venice, II. ii. 45 seq., where Launcelot Gobbo, on being called Master Launcelot, persistently disclaims the dignity. ‘No master, sir [he protests], but a poor man’s son.’ The dramatist reached the like titular dignity comparatively early (see p. 293).

and gave a performance in the Guildhall before the council.¹ On September 5, 1571, he was chief alderman, a post which he retained till September 30 the following year. In 1573 Alexander Webbe, a farmer of Snitter- field, and the husband of his wife’s sister Margaret, made him overseer of his will of which Henry Shakespeare, his brother, was executor. In 1575 the dramatist’s father added substantially to his real estate by purchasing two houses in Stratford; one of them, the traditional ‘birthplace’ in Henley Street, adjoined the tenement acquired nineteen years before. In 1576 Alderman Shakespeare contributed twelvepence to the beadle’s salary. But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active part in municipal affairs, and he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings.

Signs were gradually apparent that John Shakespeare’s luck had turned. In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the weekly sum of fourpence for the relief of the poor, or his contribution ‘ towards the furniture of three pikemen, two billmen, and one archer ’ who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county.

Meanwhile his family was increasing. Four children besides the poet —■ three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 13,1566), Richard (baptised March 11,1573-4), Brothers and Edmund (baptised May 3, 1580), with a sisters, daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569) — reached maturity. A daughter Ann was baptised on September 28, 1571, and was buried on April 4, 1579. To meet his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money

¹ The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant, 1897, weakly argued that John Shakespeare was a puritan from the fact that the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571), while he held office as chamberlain or chief alderman. These decrees were mere acts of conformity with the new ecclesiastical law. John Shakespeare’s encouragement of actors is conclusive proof that he was no puritan. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat- armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. infra, pp. 281 seq.)

from his wife’s kinsfolk, and he and his wife mortgaged, on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for 40/. to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on- the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden. Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the ‘rents and profits’ of the estate. Asbies was thereby alienated for ever. Next year, on October 15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum of 40/., his wife’s property at Snitterfield.¹

John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiliation of having parted, although as he hoped only tem- _The porarily, with his wife’s property of Asbies, and father’s in the autumn of 1580 he offered to pay off difficulties ^mortgage; but his brother-in-law, Lambert,

' retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none. The negotiation, which was the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive.² Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which process could be levied.³ On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman’s gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings.⁴

¹ The sum is stated to be 41, in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and 401, in another (ib. p. 179); the latter is the correct sum.

^s Edmund Lambert died on March 1, 1586-7, in possession of Asbies. Fresh legal proceedings were thereupon initiated by John Shakespeare , to recover the property from Edmund Lambert’s heir, John Lambert. , The litigation went on intermittently through the next twelve years, but the dramatist’s family obtained no satisfaction. Cf. Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment, pp. 37 seq.

⁸ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 238. The Henley Street property was apparently treated as immune from distraint.

⁴ The embarrassments of Shakespeare’s father have been at times assigned in error to another John Shakespeare of Stratford. The second 3 John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to ~ Stratford as a young man, married there'on Nov. 25, 1584, and was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of ^! Master of the Shoemakers’ Company in 1592 — a certain sign of pecuniary ] stability. He left Stratford in T594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. T37-40). ,

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons. They were entitled to free, tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, _Sliake. which had been refashioned in 1553 by Edward speare’s VI out of a fifteenth century foundation. An ^sch°^o1- unprecedented zeal for education was a prominent characteristic of Tudor England, and there was scarcely an English town which did not witness the establishment in the sixteenth century of a well-equipped public school.¹ Stratford shared with the rest of the country the general respect for literary study. Secular literature as well as theology found its way into the parsonages, and libraries adorned the great houses of the neighbourhood.² The townsmen of Stratford gave many proofs of pride in the municipal school which offered them a taste of academic culture. There John Shakespeare’s eldest son William, probably made his entry in 1571, when Walter Roche, B.A., was retiring from the mastership in favour of Simon Hunt, B.A. Hunt seems to have been succeeded in 1577 by one Thomas Jenkins, whose place was taken in 1579 by John Cotton ‘ late ’ of London.³ Roche, Hunt, and Cotton were all graduates of Oxford; Roche would appear to have held a Lancashire fellowship at his college, Corpus Christi, and to have left the Stratford School to become rector of the neighbouring church of Clifford

¹ Before the reign of the first Tudor sovereign Henry VII England could boast of no more than 16 grammar schools, i.e. public schools, unconnected with the monasteries. Sixteen were founded in addition in different towns during Henry VH’s reign, 63 during Henry VIII’s reign, 50 during Edward VI’s reign, 19 during Queen Mary’s reign, 138 during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and 83 during James I’s reign.

² The post-mortem inventory of the goods of John Marshall, curate of Bishopton, a hamlet of Stratford, enumerates 170 separate books, including Ovid’s Tristia, Erasmus’s Colloquia, Ascham’s Scholemaster, Virgil, Aristotle’s Problemes, Cicero’s Epistles, besides much controversial divinity, scriptural commentaries and educational ^ manuals. See Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment (pp. 57-61). Sir George Carew (afterwards Earl of Totnes), of Clopton House, Stratford, purchased, for his library there on its publication in 1598 John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English Dictionary; this volume is now in the Shakespeare Birthplace Library. (See Catalogue, No. 161.)

³ Gray’s Shakespeare’s Marriage, p. 108.

Chambers. The schoolmasters owed their appointment to the town council, but a teacher’s license from the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) was a needful credential.

As was customary in provincial schools, the poet? learned to write the ‘ Old English ’ character, which reshake- sembles that still in vogue in Germany. He speaje’s was never taught the Italian script, which was cumcuium. _wj_nn|_ng j_{ts wa}y i_n cultured society, and is now universal among Englishmen. Until his death Shakespeare’s ‘Old English’ handwriting testified to his provincial education.¹ The general instruction was conveyed in Latin. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through Latin conversation books like the ‘Sen- tentias Pueriles,’ and the standard elementary Latin grammar of William Lily (first highmaster of St. Paul’s School), to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. Some current Latin literature was in common use in the lower forms. The Latin eclogues of the popular renaissance poet, Baptista Mantuanus, were usually preferred to Virgil’s for beginners; they were somewhat crudely modelled in a post-classical idiom on Virgil’s pastorals, but were reckoned ‘both for style and matter very familiar and grateful to children and therefore read in most schools.’² The rudiments of Greek were occasion-

¹ See pp. 517 seq. infra.

² Cf. Charles Hoole’s New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School (published 1660, written 1640). Evidence abounds of the popularity of Mantuanus’s work, which Shakespeare quotes in the original in Loves Labours Lost (see p. 18 n. 1). Drayton, a Warwickshire boy, records {Of Poets and Poesy) that his tutor

First read to me honest Mantuan,

Then Virgil’s Eclogues.

So Thomas Lodge (Defence of Poetry, 1579): ‘Miserable were our state if our younglings [wanted] the wrytings of Mantuan.’ Dr. Johnson notes that Mantuan was read in some English schools down to the beginning of the eighteenth century (Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, iii. 317). Mantuanus’s Eclogues have been fully and admirably edited by Dr. W. P. Mustard, Baltimore, 1911. '

ally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama.¹

Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ‘Essay on Shakespeare’s Learning’ (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever _Shake_ knowledge he displayed of the classics and of speare’s Italian and French literature to English trans- ^learnmg- lations. But several French and Italian books whence

¹ James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels hetween expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a Graice et Latine edition. I believe Lowell’s parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents — proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare’s part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as that with which Hamlet’s mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra are the lines ri7i-3 :

Qvijtov irtyvKas Trarpbs, *HXiitTpa, (ftpSver

Qvtit&s S’ ' Opt arris • cjcrrt \lav <rrive.

IIa<riv yap ijp.iv tout’ dtftelXerai iradetv

(i.e. ‘Remember, Electra,- your father whence you sprang is mortal. Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of > us has this debt of suffering to be paid’). In Hamlet (1. ii. 72 seq.) are the familiar sentences:

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die. . . .

But you must know, your father lost a father ;

That father lost, lost his . . . But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness.

Cf. Sophocles’s CEdipus Coloneus, 880: Tots toi Smalois jSpaxis viKq. p.4yav (‘In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,’ Jehh), and

2 Henry VI, in. ii. 233, ‘Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.’ Shakespeare’s ‘prophetic soul’ in Hamlet (1. v. 40) axi&theSonnet (cvii. 1) may he matched hy the Tpi/iams 6vpis of Euripides’s Andromache, 1075; and Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’ (111. i. 59) hy the nanwv ir4\ayos of Jischylus’s Perse, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and ^Eschylus’s Clytemnestra, who ‘in man’s counsels hore no woman’s heart’ (yvmixbs Mp6[iov\ov IKrl^ov Kiap, Agamemnon, 11), most closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemhlance attests no knowledge of ^Eschylus on Shakespeare’s part, hut merely the close community of tragic genius that suhsisted hetween the two poets, c

Shakespeare derived the plots of his^ dramas —- BeUe-j forest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques,’ Ser Giovannis II Pe- corone,’ and Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi,’ for example — were not accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare’s exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature' of France and. Italy. Schoolfellows of the dramatist who took to trade and lacked literary aspirations showed; themselves on occasion capable of writing letters in accurate Latin prose or they freely seasoned their familiar English correspondence with Latin phrases, while at least one Stratford schoolboy of the epoch shewed in manhood some familiar knowledge of French poetry.¹ It was thus in accord with common experience that Shakespeare in his writings openly acknowledged his acquaintance with the Latin and French languages, and with many Latin poets of the school curriculum. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost ’ and Sir Hugh Evans in ‘ Merry Wives of The poet’s Windsor,’ Shakespeare placed Latin phrases classical drawn directly from Lily’s grammar, from the equipment. <Sententiae Pueriles,’ and from ‘the good old Mantuan.’² Some critical knowledge of Latin drama

¹ Cf. Richard Quiney’s Latin letter to his father (c. 1598) in Malone’s. Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 564, and Abraham Sturley’s English cone-- spondence, which is studded with Latin phrases, in Halliwell-PhillippJ ii. 59. Thomas Quiney, a Stratford youth, who became one of Shakespeare’s sons-in-law, when chamberlain of the borough in 1623 inscribed on the cover of the municipal account book the French couplet:

Heureux celui qui pour devenir sage ■

Du mal d’autrui fait son apprentisage.

(See Catalogue of Shakespeare’s Birthplace, p. 115.)

² From Mantuanus’s first eclogue Holofemes quotes the opening words: J

Fauste, precor, gelida quaudo pecus omne sub umbra '

Ruminat

(.Love’s Labour’s Lost, iv. ii. 89-90). See p. 16 n. 3 supra.

is suggested by Polonius’s remark in his survey of dramatic literature: ‘ Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light’ (‘Hamlet,’ 11. ii. 395-6). Many a distinctive phrase of Senecan tragedy seems indeed to be interwoven with Shakespeare’s dramatic speech, nor would the dramatist appear to have disdained occasional hints from Seneca’s philosophical discourses.¹ From Plautus’s ‘Menaechmi’ Shakespeare drew the leading motive of his ‘Comedy of Errors,’ while through the whole range of his literary work, both poetic and dramatic, signs are apparent of close intimacy with Ovid’s verse, notably with the ‘Metamorphoses,’ the most popular classical poem, at school and elsewhere, in mediaeval and renaissance Europe.

¹ Apart from two Latin quotations from Seneca’s Hippolytus in Titus Andronicus (of doubtful authorship), n. i. 133-5, ^Iv- i* 82-3, there are many notable resemblances between Seneca’s and Shakespeare’s language. The following parallel is typical:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? (Macbeth, u. ii. 60-r.)

Quis Tanais aut quis Nilus aut quis persica Violentus unda Tigris aut Rhenus ferox Tagusve bibera turbidus gaza fluens Abluere dextram poterit? arctoum licet Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus:

Haerebit altum facinus. {Hercules Furens, 1330-6.)

See J. W. Cunliffe’s The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, 1893, and his Early English Classical Tragedies, 1912. Professor E. A. Sonnenschein in Latin as an Intellectual Force, a paper read at the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, September 1904, forcibly argued that Portia’s speech on mercy was largely based on Seneca’s tractate De Clementia. The following passages illustrate the similarity of temper:

It becomes Nullum clementia ex omnihus magis

The throned monarch better than His quam regem aut principem decet. crown. (Merck, of Venice, xv. i. {De Clementia, 1. iii. 3.) 189-90.)

And earthly power doth then show likest Quid autem ? non proximum eis (dis-

God’s locum tenet is qui se ex deorum natura

When mercy seasons justice, (iv. i. gerit beneficus et largus et in melius

196-7.) potens? (1. xix. 9.)

Ovid’s poetry filled the predominant place among _ the studies of Shakespeare’s schooldays. In his earliest' _The play, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (rv. ii. 127), he influence cites him as the schoolboy’s model for Latin ^of0vid- verse: ‘Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odorifer- f ous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?’¹ In his later writings Shakespeare vividly assimilates number-:^ less mythological episodes from the rich treasury of the ‘Metamorphoses.’² The poems ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ are both offspring of Ovidian parentage; the first theme comes direct from the ‘ Metamorphoses ’ and is interwoven by Shakespeare with two other tales from the same quarry, while the title-page bears a Latin; couplet from a different poem of Ovid — his ‘Amores.’. In Shakespeare’s latest play of ‘The Tempest’ Prospero’s recantation of his magic art (v. i. 33 seq.) —

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, &c.

— verbally echoes Medea’s incantation when making her rejuvenating potion, in the ‘Metamorphoses’ (vii._? 197 seq.). In his ‘Sonnets’ too Shakespeare borrows;] from the same Latin poem his chief excursions into cosmic and metaphysical philosophy.³ Finally there is good reason for believing that the actual copy of Ovid’s¹ work which the dramatist owned still survives. There. is in the Bodleian Library an exemplar of the Aldine

¹ In Titus Andronicus, for which Shakespeare’s full responsibility is questioned, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is brought on the stage and from the volume the tragic tale of Philomel is read out (iv. i. 42 seq.). Later in the play (iv. iii. 4) the Latin words ‘terras Astrsea reliquit!’ are intro-; duced from the Metamorphoses, i. 150. An intimate acquaintance with Ovid’s poem was an universal characteristic of Elizabethan culture.

² When in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, sc. ii. 59-61, the lord’s servant makes allusion, for the benefit of the tinker Sly, to Daphne’s disdain of Apollo’s advances, he paraphrases Ovid’s story in the Metamorphoses (i. 508-9). Twice Shakespeare makes airy allusion to the tale (which Ovid first narrated) of Baucis and Philemon, the rustics who entertained Jove unawares (Much Ado, n. i, 100, and As You Like It, n. iii. 10-11). Many other examples could be given.

³ Cf. the present writer’s ‘Ovid and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ in Quarterly Review, April 1909, and see pp. 180 seq. infra.

edition of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (1502), and on the title is the signature ‘W®. Sh^e.,’ which experts have declared — on grounds which deserve attention — to be a genuine autograph of the poet.¹

English renderings of classical poetry and prose were growing common in Shakespeare’s era. The poetry of Virgil and of Ovid, Seneca’s tragedies and some _{The of} parts of his philosophical work, fragments of transU- Homer and Horace, were among the classical ^tions' writings which were accessible in the vernacular in the eighth decade of the sixteenth century. Many of Shakespeare’s reminiscences of the . ‘ Metamorphoses ’ show indebtedness to the popular English version which came in ballad metre from the pen of Arthur Golding in 1567. That translation long enjoyed an especially wide vogue; a seventh edition was issued in, 1597, and Golding’s phraseology is often reflected in Shakespeare’s lines. Yet the dramatist never wholly neglected the Latin text to which he had been introduced at school. Twice does the Latin poet confer on Diana, in her character of Goddess of Groves, the name Titania (‘Metamorphoses,’ iii. 173 and vi. 364). In both cases the translator Golding omits this distinctive appellation, and calls Diana by her accustomed title. Ovid’s Latin alone accounts for Shakespeare’s designation of his fairy queen as Titania, a word of great beauty which he first introduced into English poetry. There is no ground for ranking’ the dramatist with classical scholars or for questioning his liberal use of translations. A lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the ‘ small Latin and

¹ Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq. The volume was purchased for the Bodleian at the sale of a London bookseller, William Henry Alkins of Lombard Street, in January 1865. On a leaf facing the title-page is an inscription, the genuineness of which is unquestioned: ‘This little Booke of Ovid was given to me by W Hall who satd it was once Will Shaksperes. T. N. 1682.’ The identity of ‘W Hall’ and ‘T. N.’ has not been satisfactorily established. The authenticity of the Shakespeare signature is ably maintained by Dr. F. A. Leo in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, vol. xvi. (1880), pp. 367-75 (with photographic illustrations).

less Greek’ with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson. But Aubrey’s report that ‘he understood Latin pretty well’ is incontestable. ^ The original speech of Ovid and Seneca lay well within his mental grasp.

Shakespeare’s knowledge of French — the language of Ronsard and Montaigne — at least equalled his knowledge of Latin. In ‘Henry V’ the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate, if not idiomatic. There is, too, no reason to •doubt that the dramatist possessed sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of an Italian poem by Ariosto or Tasso or of a novel by Boccaccio or Bandello.¹ Hamlet knew that the story of Gonzago was ‘extant, and written in very choice Italian’ (m. ii- 256). • _

The books in the English tongue which were accessible to Shakespeare in his schooldays, whether few or many, The Eng- included the English Bible, which helped to lish Bihie. mould his budding thought and expression. Two versions were generally available in his boyhood ■— the Genevan version, which was first issued in a complete form in 1560, and the Bishops’ revision of 1568, winch the Authorised Version bf 1611 closely followed and superseded. The Bishops’ Bible was authorised for use in churches. The Genevan version, which

¹ Cf. Spencer Baynes, ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School,’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq. Henry Ramsay, one of the panegyrists of Ben Jonson, in the collection of elegies entitled Jonsonus Virbius (1637), wrote of Jonson:

That Latin he reduced, and could command

That which your Shakespeare scarce could understand.

Ramsay here merely echoes Jonson’s familiar remarks on Shakespeare’S; ‘small Latin.’ No greater significance attaches to Jasper Mayne’s vague assurance in his elegy on Jonson (also in Jonsonus Virbius) that Jonson’s native genius was such that he .

Without Latin helps had heen as rare As Beaumont, Fletcher, or as Shakespeare were.

The conjunction of Shakespeare with Beaumont and Fletcher, who were well versed in the classics, proves the futility of Mayne’s rhapsody.

was commonly found in schools and middle-class households, was clearly the text with which youthful Shakespeare was chiefly familiar.¹

References to scriptural characters and incidents are not conspicuous in Shakespeare’s plays, but, such as they are, they are drawn from all parts of the Bible, _Shake and indicate a general acquaintance with speare and the narrative of both Old and New Testa- ^theBlble- ments. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. ' Elizabethan English was¹ saturated with scriptural expressions. Many enjoyed colloquial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were liberally scattered through Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles’ and secular works whence the dramatist drew his plots. Yet there is a savour of early study about his normal use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history. His scriptural reminiscences bear trace of the assimilative or receptive tendency of 'an alert youthful mind. It is futile to urge that his knowledge of the Bible was mainly the fruit of close and continuous application in adult life,²

Games flourished among Elizabethan boys, and Shakespeare shows acquaintance in his writings with childish pastimes, like ‘the whipping of tops,’ ‘hide Youthful and seek,’ ‘more sacks to the mill,’ ‘push recreation, pin,’ and ‘nine men’s morris.’ Touring players vis

¹ When Shylock speaks of ‘your prophet the Nazarite’ (Merchant of Venice, 1. iii. 31), and when Prince Henry speaks of ‘a good amendment of life’ (1 Hen. IV. 1. ii. 106), both the italicised expressions come from the Genevan version of the Bible, and are replaced by different expressions in other English versions, by the Nazarene in the first case, and by repentance in the second. Similar illustrations abound.

² Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But . the bishop’s deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare’s adult piety seem strained. The Rev. Thomas Carter’s Shakespeare and Holy Scripture (1905) is open to much the same exceptions as the bishop’s volume, but no Shakespearean student will fail to derive profit from examining his exhaustive collection of parallel passages.

ited Stratford from time to time during Shakespeare's , schooldays, and it was a habit of Elizabethan parents in provincial towns to take their children with them to local performances of stage plays.¹ The actors made, as we have seen, their first appearance at Stratford in 1568, while Shakespeare’s father was bailiff. The experiment was repeated almost annually by various companies between the dramatist’s ninth and twenty-first years.² Dramatic entertainments may well have ranked among Shakespeare’s juvenile amusements. There were, too, cognate diversions in the neighbourhood of Stratford in which the boy may have shared. In July 1575, when Shakespeare had reached the age of eleven, Queen Elizabeth made a progress through Warwickshire on a visit to her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, at his castle of Kenilworth. References have been justly detected in Oberon’s vision in Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (n. i. 148-68) to the fantastic pageants, masques,| and fireworks with which the queen was entertained in : Kenilworth Park during her stay. Two full and graphic i descriptions which were published in 1576 in pamphlet

¹ One R. Willis, who was senior to Shakespeare by a year, tells how his father took him as a child to see a travelling company’s rendering of a piece called the Cradle of Security in his native town of Gloucester. ‘At . such a play my father tooke me with him, and made mee stand between!! his leggs as he sate upon one of the benches, where wee saw and heard very well’ — R Willis’s Mount Tabor or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner, published in the yeare of his Age 75, Anno Dom. 1639, pp. 110-3; cf. Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 28-30.

² In 1573 Stratford was visited by the Earl of Leicester’s men; in 1576 by the Earl of Warwick’s and the Earl of Worcester’s men; in 1577 by the Earl of Leicester’s and the Earl of Worcester’s men; in 1579 by the Lord Strange’s and the Countess of Essex’s men; in 1580 by the Earl of Derby’s players; in 1581 by the Earl of Worcester’s and Lord Berkeley’s players; in 1582 by the Earl of Worcester’s players; in 1583 by Lord Berkeley’s and Lord Chandos’s players; in 1584 by players under the respective patronage of the Earl of Oxford, the Earl i of Warwick, and the Earl of Essex, and in 1586 by an unnamed company. As many as five companies — the Queen’s, the Earl of Essex’s, ■ the Earl of Leicester’s, Lord Stafford’s and another company— visited the town in 1587 (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 150-1) Mr F. C. Wellstood, the secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, has kindly " prepared for me a full transcript of all the references to actors in the Chamberlain’s accounts in the Stratford-on-Avon archives.

form, might have given Shakespeare his knowledge of the varied programme.¹ But Leicester’s residence was only fifteen miles from Stratford, and the country people came in large numbers to witness the open-air festivities. It is reasonable to assume that some of the spectators were from Stratford and that they included the elder Shakespeare and his son.

In any case Shakespeare’s opportunities of recreation, whether within or without Stratford, saw some restriction as his schooldays drew to an end. His father’s financial difficulties grew steadily, and they drawai caused the boy’s removal from school at an unusually early age. Probably in 1577, when ' he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes. ‘I have been told heretofore,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade,’ which, according to the writer, was that of a butcher. It is possible that John’s ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business. His son may have been formally apprenticed to him. An early Stratford tradition describes him as ‘apprenticed to a butcher.’² ‘When he kill’d a calf,’ Aubrey adds less convincingly, ‘he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher’s son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father’s anxieties. He married. His wife, according carriage.'⁸ to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years. Rowe states that she ‘was the

¹ See p. 232 infra.

² Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (pub

lished in 1838).

daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.

On September i, 1581, Richard Hathaway, ‘husbandman’ of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Stratford, made his will, which was proved on “ay July 9, 1582, and is now preserved at Somer- of shot- _set House. His house and land, ^ two and a half virgates,’ had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances. His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of the eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned. Six other children—three sons and three daughters — received sums of money; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were each allotted 61. 13s. 4d., ‘to be paid at the day of her marriage,’ a phrase common in wills of the period. Anne Anne and Agnes were in the sixteenth century¹ Hathaway, alternative spellings of the same Christian name; and there is little doubt that the daughter ‘Agnes’ of Richard Hathaway’s will became, within a few months of Richard Hathaway’s death, Shak,espeare’s| wife.¹ *

The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, dnd reached from Stratford by field-paths, undoubtedly once formed part of Richard Hathaway's! farmhouse, and, despite numerous alterations and reno

¹ Thomas Whittington, a shepherd in the service of the Hathaway^ at Shottery, makes in his will dated 1602 mention of Mrs. Anne Shake-' speare, Mrs. Joan Hathaway [the mother], John Hathaway and William Hathaway [the brothers] in such close collocation as to dissipate all; doubt that Shakespeare’s wife was a daughter of the Shottery household^ (see p. 280 infra). Longfellow, the American poet (in his Poems of Places, 1877, vol. ii. p. 198), rashly accepting a persistent popular fallacy, assigned to Shakespeare a valueless love poem entitled ‘Anne Hathaway,’| which is in four stanzas with the weak punning refrain ‘She hath a way, Anne Hathaway.’ The verses are by Charles Dibdin, the eighteenth- century song-writer, and appear in the chief collected editions of his songs, as well as in his novel Hannah Remit; or the Female Crusoe, 1796. Dibdin helped Garrick to organise the Stratford jubilee of 1769, and the poem may date from that year.

vations, still preserves the main features of a thatched farmhouse of the Elizabethan period.¹ The house remained in the Hathaway family till ^ha- 1838, although the male line became extinct ^way’^s in 1746. It was purchased in behalf of the ^cottage' public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892.

No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare’s marriage survives. Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject. A local tradition, which seems to have come into being during the nineteenth century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish registers now exist. But one important piece of documentary evidence directly bearing on the poet’s matrimonial venture is accessible. In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, responsible ‘husbandmen of Stratford/ ² bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of 40/. to free the bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment— ‘by reason of any precontract’ [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity—be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, J_g¹^_n^b_st^nd then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare ^imP^edi- with Anne Hathaway. On the assumption ^{men s}' that no such impediment was known to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her

¹ John Hathaway, a direct descendant of Richard (father of Shakespeare’s wife) and owner of the house at the end of the seventeenth century, commemorated some repairs by inserting a stone in one of the chimney stacks which is still conspicuously inscribed ‘I. H. 1697.’ John Hathaway’s reparations were clearly superficial.

* Both Fulk Sandells and John Richardson were men of substance and local repute. Richardson was buried at Stratford on Sept. 19, 1594, and Sandells, who was many years his junior, on Oct. 14,1624. Sandells, who attested the post-mortem inventories of the property of several neighbours, helped to appraise the estate of Richardson, his fellow- bondsman, on Nov. 4, 1594. (Stratford Records, Miscell. Doc. vol. v. 32.)

‘friends/ the marriage might proceed ‘with once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.’ _ . . 1

Bonds of similar purport, although differing in significant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century. They were obtainable on the payment of a fee to the bishop’s commissary, and had the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law. But they were not common,^ and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble; position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by ‘thrice asking of the banns.a Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare’s marriage differs in important respects from that commonly adopted.¹ In other extant examples j it is usually provided that the marriage shall not take ., place without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and bridegroom. In the case of the marriage of an ‘infant’ bridegroom the formal consent of his parents was essential to strictly regular procedure, al- j though clergymen might be found who were ready to j shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run ! the risk of solemnising the marriage of an ‘infant’ without inquiry as to the parents’ consent. The clergyman ¹ who united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway * was obviously of this easy temper. Despite the circum- i stance that Shakespeare’s bride was of full age and he ¹ himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shake-.j speare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the j bride’s ‘friends,’ and ignored the bridegroom’s parents altogether. Nor was this the only irregularity in the ■ document. In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the ] kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the j

¹ These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of consent on the part of parents to their children’s marriages are also extant j there among the sixteenth-century archives.

bridegroom’s father figures as one of the two sureties, and is mentioned first of the two. Had the usual form been followed, Shakespeare’s father would have been the chief party to the transaction in behalf of his ‘infant’ son. But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of ’Shottery, the bride’s native place. Sandells was a ‘ supervisor ’ of the will of the bride’s father, who there describes him as ‘ my trustie friende and neighbour.’

The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare’s marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells and Rich- Birth of a ardson, representing the lady’s family, doubt- ^daughter- less secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend’s daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place, without the consent of the bridegroom’s parents — it may be without their knowledge

— soon after the signing of the deed-. The scene of the ceremony was clearly outside the bounds of Stratford parish •— in. an unidentified church of the Worcester diocese, the register of which is lost. Within six months of the marriage bond — in May 1583 — a daughter was bom to the poet, and was baptised in the name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.

Shakespeare’s apologists have endeavoured to show that the public betrothal or formal ‘troth- Formal plight ’ which was at the time a common prelude betrothal to a wedding carried with it all the privileges dispensed of marriage. But neither Shakespeare’s detailed ^with- description of a betrothal¹ nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support. Moreover, the circum-

¹ Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. II. 160-4 •

A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,

Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings;

stances of the case render it highly improbable that;, Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal preliminaries of a betrothal. In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom’s parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet’s matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his . identity with one ‘William Shakespeare,’ to puted ^ whom, according to an entry in the Bishop Ucense^ge Worcester’s register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare’s wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it seems unsafe to assume that the bishop’s clerk, when making a note of the grant of the license in his register, erred so extensively as to write ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton ’ for ‘Anne Hathaway of Shottery.’¹ The husband of Anne Whateley cannot

And all the ceremony of this compact |

Seal’d in my [i.e. the priest’s] function by my testimony.

In Measure for Measure Claudio’s offence is intimacy with the Lady Juliet after the contract of betrothal and before the formality of marriage (cf. act 1. sc. ii. 1. 155, act iv. sc. i. 1. 73). In As You Like It, in. ii. 333 ' seq., Rosalind points out that the interval hetween ihe contract and the marriage ceremony, although it might be no more than a week, did not allow connuhial intimacy: ‘Marry, Time trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnised. If the interim be but a sennight, Time’s pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven years.’

'Inaccuracies in the surnames are not uncommon in the Bishop of Worcester’s register of licenses for the period (e.g. Baker for Barbarj Darby for Bradeley, Edgock for Elcock). But no mistake so thoroughgoing as in the Shakespeare entpr has been discovered. Mr. J. W. Gray, in his Shakespeare’s Marriage (1905), learnedly argues for the clerk’s error in copying, and deems the Shakespeare-Whateley license to be the authorisation for the marriage of the dramatist with Anne Hatha-1 way. He also claims that marriage by license was essential at certain 1 seasons of the ecclesiastical year during which marriage by banns was

reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester., Had a license for the poet’s marriage been secured on November 27, it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ‘against impediments,’ the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was supererogatory after the grant was made.

prohibited by old canonical regulations. The Shakespeare-Whateley license (of November 27) might on this showing have been obtained with a view to eluding the delay which one of the close seasons — from Advent Sunday (November 27-December 3) to eight days after Epiphany {i.e. January 14) — interposed to marriage by banns. But it is questionable whether the seasonal prohibitions were strictly enforced at the end of the sixteenth century, when marriage licenses were limited by episcopal rule to persons of substantial estate. In the year 1592 out of thirteen marriages (by banns) celebrated at the parish church of Stratford, as many as three, the parties to all of which were of humble rank, took place in the forbidden month of December. There is no means of determining who Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton precisely was. No registers of the parish for the period are extant. A Whateley family resided in Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple Grafton was connected with it. It is undoubtedly a strange coincidence that two persons, both named William Shakespeare, should on two successive days not only be arranging with the Bidiop of Worcester’s official to marry, but should be involving themselves, whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whateley was licensed to marry was probably of the superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate.

Ill

THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

Anne Hathaway’s greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by Hushand her friends were not circumstances of happy and wife, augury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare’s dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage an ‘elder than herself,’¹ and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ‘barren hate, sour-ey’d disdain, and discord,’ suggests a personal interpretation.² To both these unpromising! features was added, in the poet’s case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2, and were named after their father’s friends, Hamnet Sadler, and Judith, Sadler’s wife. Hamnet Sadler, a prosperous tradesman whose broth# John was twice bailiff, continued a friend for life, rendering Shakespeare the last service of witnessing his will. The

¹ Twelfth Night, act ii. sc. iv. 1. 29:

Let still tbe woman take An elder than herself; so wears she to him So sways she level in her husband’s heart. ’

² Tempest, act iv. sc. i. 11. 15-22 :

If thou dost break her virgin knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite he minister’d,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; hut barren hate Sour-ey’d disdain, and discord, shall bestrew '

The union of your hed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both.

dramatist’s firstborn child Susanna was a year and nine moilths old, when the twins were christened. Shakespeare had no more children, and all the evidence points to the conclusion, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that he fixed his abode in London in the course of 1586. Although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he seems to have seen ilittle of wife or children for some eleven years. Between jlithe winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596 — an interval [(which synchronises with his first literary triumphs — li there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Strat- siford records. On March 1, 1586-7, there died Edmund tiLambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, 8 and a few months later Shakespeare’s name, as owner of A a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and (i mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal 8 to confer on Edmund’s son and heir, John Lambert, an _B absolute title to the Wilmcote estate on condition of his k cancelling the mortgage and paying 201. But the deed I, does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted ^ at the transaction.¹

| Shakespeare’s early literary work proves that while in 5 the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, _r; and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs. All I, his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless , as a youth practised many field sports. Sympathetic L references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early plays and poems.² There is small doubt, too, that his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits.

Some practical knowledge of the art of poaching seems to be attested by Shakespeare’s early lines:

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11-13.

² Cf. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883; J. E. Harting, Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare’s knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his entertaining and at the same time scholarly Diary of Master William Silence: a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport, 1897 (new edition, 1907).

What! hast not thou full often struck a dee And borne her cl'eanly by the keeper’s nose ?

Titus Andronicus, H. 1. 92-3.

A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of Shakespeare’s long severance Poaching f^rom his native place. ‘He had/ wrote the at biographer Rowe in 1709, ‘by a misfortune

Chariecote. _common enough to young fellows, fallen into

ill company; and, amongst them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Chariecote near Stratford.: For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter himself in Lon-f don.’ The independent testimony of Archdeacon Rich-' ard Davies, who was vicar of Sapperton, Gloucester-3 shire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect*! that Shakespeare was ‘much given to all unluckiness in stealing vension and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.’ The law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months’ imprisonment and the payment of thrice the") amount of the damage done.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Chariecote deer-park was of later date than the

Unwar-

sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was rr an extensive game-preserver, and owned at of the Chariecote a warren in which a few harts or tradition, does doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare!

THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

-v'

stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Ful- broke Park, a few . miles off, and Ireland supplied in his ‘Views on the Warwickshire Avon,’ 1795, an engraving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare’s ‘deer-barn,’ but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy’s property in Elizabeth’s reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention.¹

The ballad, which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive. No authenticity justice can be allowed the worthless stanza beginning ^sha-^Uow- ‘A parliament member, a justice of peace,’ which was represented to be Shakespeare’s on the authority of Thomas Jones, an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703, aged upwards of ninety.² But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakespearean drama. Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of Charlecote. According to Archdeacon Davies of Sapper- ton, Shakespeare’s ‘ revenge was so great that ’ he caricatured Lucy as ‘Justice Clodpate,’ who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as ‘ a great man,’ and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy’s name, ‘three louses rampant for his arms.’ Justice Shallow, Davies’s ‘Justice Clodpate/ came to birth in the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ (1597), and he is represented in the opening scene of the ‘ Merry Wives of Windsor’ as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a

¹ Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Deerstealer, 1862; Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 123.

² Copies of the lines which were said to have been taken down from the old man’s lips belonged to both Edward Capell and William Oldys (cf. Yeowell’s Memoir of Oldys, 1862, p. 44). A long amplification, clearly of later date, is in Malone, Variorum, ii. 138, 563.

poaching raid on his estate. ‘ Three luces hauriant argent ’ were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys. \ A 'luce’ was a full-grown pike, and the meaning of the word fully explains Falstaff’s contemptuous mention of the garrulous country justice as ‘the old pike’ (‘2 Henry IV/ hi. ii. 323).¹ The temptation punningly to confuse ‘ luce ’ and ‘ louse ’ was irresistible, and the dramatist’s pro- ; longed reference in the ‘ Merry Wives ’ to the ‘ dozen white _ luces’ on Justice Shallow’s ‘old coat’ fully establishes J Shallow’s identity with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing ;< The flight f^rom Lucy’s persecution, at once sought an from asylum in London. William Beeston, a seven- stratford. teenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ‘in his younger years,’ and it seems possible that on..first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village. The suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, a band of youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name and county.² The knowledge of a soldier’s life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the direct evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect ^: by force of his imagination.

¹ It is curious to note that William Lucy (1594—1677), grandson of Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas Lucy, who became Bishop of St. David’s, adopted the pseudonym of William Pike in his two volumes'(i657-8) j of hostile ‘ observations ’ on Hobbes’s Leviathan.

² Cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 16 seq. . Sir Philip Sidney, writing from Utrecht on March 24, 1585-6, to his | father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, mentioned ‘I wrote to yow

a letter by Will, my lord of Lester’s jesting plaier’ (Lodge’s Portraits, ■ ii. 176). The messenger was the well-known actor Will Kempe, and not, as has been rashly suggested, Shakespeare.

Amid the clouds which gathered about him in his native place during 1585, Shakespeare’s hopes turned towards London, where high-spirited youths of the _Thej_our_ day were wont to seek their fortune from all ney to parts of the country. It was doubtless in the ^London-early summer of 1586 that Shakespeare first traversed the road to the capital. There was much intercourse at the time between London and Stratford-on-Avon. Tradesmen of the town paid the great city repeated visits on legal or other business; many of their sons swelled the ranks of the apprentices; a few were students at the Inns of Court.¹ A packhorse carrier, bearing hi S' load

¹ Three students of the Middle Temple towards the end of the sixteenth century were natives of Stratford, viz. William, second son of John Combe, admitted on October 19, 1571; Richard, second son of Richard Woodward (born on March 11,1578-9), on November 25, 1597; and William, son and heir of Thomas Combe, and grandnephew of his elder namesake, on October 7, 1602 (Middle Temple Records, i. 181, 380, 425). For names of Stratford apprentices in the publishing trade of London see p. 40 n. 2 infra. There is a remarkable recorded instance of a Stratford boy going on his own account and unbefriended to London to seek mercantile employment and making for himself a fortune and high position in trade there. The lad, named John Sadler, belonged to Shakespeare’s social circle at Stratford. Born there on February 24, 1586-7, the son of John Sadler, a substantial townsman who was twice bailiff in 1599 and 1612, and nephew of the dramatist’s friend Hamnet Sadler, the youth, early in the seventeenth century, in order to escape a marriage for which he had a. distaste, suddenly (according to his daughter’s subsequent testimony) ‘joined himself to the carrier [on a good horse which was supplied him by his friends] and came to London, where he had never been before, and sold his horse in Smithfield; and having no acquaintance in London to recommend or assist him, he went from street to street and house to house, asking if they wanted an apprentice, and though he met with many discouraging scorns and a thousand denials, he went till he light on Mr. Brooksbank, a grocer in Buck-

in panniers, made the journey at regular intervals, and a solitary traveller on horseback was wont to seek the carrier’s protection and society.¹ Horses could be hired at cheap rates. But walking was the common mode of travel for men of small means, and Shakespeare’s first journey to London may well have been made on foot.²

lershury.’ The story of Sadler’s journey to London and his first employment there is told in his daughter’s autobiography, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, late wife of A[ntony] W[alker] D.D. (1690). Sadler’s fortunes in London progressed uninterruptedly. He became one of the chief grocers or druggists of the day, and left a large estate, including property in Virginia, on his death in 1658. His shop was at the Red Lion in Bucklershury—the chief trading quarter for men of his occupation. Shakespeare in Merry Wives, ni. iii. 62, writes of fops who smelt ‘like Bucklersbury in simple time’ — a reference to the dried herbs which the grocers stocked in their shops there. A Stratford neigh- hour, Richard Quiney, Sadler’s junior by eight months, _ became his partner, and married his sister (on August 27, 1618); Quiney died in 1655. Sadler and Quiney jointly presented to the Corporation of Stratford on August 22, 1632, ‘two'fayre gilte maces,’ which are still in use (cf. French’s Shakespeareana Gencalogica, pp. 560 seq.), and they also together made over to the town a sum of 150/. ‘to be lent out, lie increase [i.e. interest] to be given the poor of the borough for ever’ (Wheler’s I History of Stratford, p. 88). Shakespeare was on intimate terms with both the Sadler and Quiney families. Richard Quiney’s father (of the same names) was a correspondent of the dramatist (see p. 294 infra), ! and his brother Thomas married the dramatist’s younger daughter, ' Judith (see p. 462 infra).

¹ Shakespeare graphically portrays packhorse carriers of the time in

1 Henry IV. 11. i. 1 seq.

² Stage coaches were unknown before the middle of the seventeenth century, although at a little earlier date carriers from the large towns hegan to employ wagons for the accommodation of passengers as well as merchandise. Elizabethan men of letters were usually good pedestrians. In 1570 Richard Hooker, the eminent theologian, journeyed as an undergraduate on foot from Oxford to Exeter, his native place. Izaak Walton, Hooker’s hiographer, suggests that, for scholars, walking ‘was then either more in fashion, or want of money or their humility made it so.’ On the road Hooker visited at Salisbury Bishop Jewel, who lent him a walking staff with which the bishop ‘professed he had travelled through many parts of Germany’ (Walton’s Lives, ed. Bullen, p. 173). Later in the century John Stow, the antiquary, travelled through the country ‘on foot’ to make researches in the cathedral towns (Stow’s Annals, i6rs, ed. Howes). In r6c>9 Thomas Coryat claimed to have walked in five months r975 miles on the continent of Europe. In r6r8 Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson walked from London to Edinburgh and much of the way hack. In the same year John Taylor, the water-poet, also walked independently from London to Edinburgh, and thence to Braemar (see his Pennyles Pilgrimage, 1618).

There were two main routes by which London was approached from Stratford, one passing through Oxford and High Wycombe, and the other through Alternative Banbury and Aylesbury.¹ The distance either ^routes- way was some 120 miles. Tradition points to the Oxford and High Wycombe road as Shakespeare’s favoured thoroughfare. The seventeenth-century antiquary, Aubrey, asserts on good authority that at Grendon Underwood, a village near Oxford, ‘he happened to take the humour of the constable in “Midsummer Night’s Dream’”— by which the writer meant, we may suppose, ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ There were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself. But a specially blustering specimen of the class may- have arrested Shakespeare’s attention while he was moving about the Oxfordshire countryside. The Crown- Inn (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of the dramatist’s favourite resting places on his journeys to and from the metropolis. With the Oxford innkeeper John, Davenant and with his family Shakespeare formed a close intimacy. In 1605 he stood godfather to the son William who subsequently as Sir William D’Avenant enjoyed the reputation of a popular playwright.²

The two roads which were at the traveller’s choice between Stratford and London became one within twelve miles of the city’s walls. All Stratford wayfarers met at Uxbridge, thenceforth to follow a single path. Much desolate country intervened between Uxbridge and their destination. The most conspicuous landmark was ‘the triple tree’ of Tyburn (near the present Marble Arch)

— the triangular gallows where London’s felons met their doom. The long Uxbridge Road (a portion of which is now christened Oxford Street) knew few habitations until the detached village of St. Giles came in view. Beyond

¹ Cf. J. W. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. j-24.

² See p. 449 infra. ,

• . i

St. Giles, the posts and chains of Holborn Bars marked j (like Temple Bar in the Strand) London’s extramural or suburban limit, but the full tide of city life was first joined at the archway of Newgate. It was there that Shakespeare caught his first glimpse of the goal of his youthful ? ambition.¹ , '

The population of London nearly doubled during Shakespeare’s lifetime, rising from 100,000 at the begin- Stratford ning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign to 200,000 in settlers. the course of her successor’s. On all sides, the capital was spreading beyond its old decaying] walls, so as to provide homes for rural immigrants/ Already in 1586 there were in London settlers from Stratford to offer Shakespeare a welcome. It is specially ] worthy of note that shortly before his arrival, three young men had come thence to be bound apprentice to London! printers, a comparatively new occupation with which the development of literature was closely allied. With one of these men, Richard Field, Shakespeare was soon in close relations, and was receiving from him useful aid and encouragement.²

¹ The traveller on horseback by either route spent two nights on the road and reached Uxbridge on tie third day. The pedestrian would spend three nights, arriving at Uxbridge on the fourth day. Several ‘bills of charges’ incurred by citizens of Stratford in riding to and from London during Shakespeare’s early days are extant among the Elizabethan manuscripts at Shakespeare’s Birthplace. The Banbury route was rather more frequented than the Oxford Road; it seems to have been richer in village inns. Among the smaller places on this route at which the Stratford travellers found good accommodation were Stretton Audley, Chenies, Wendover, and Amersham (see Mr. Richard Savage’s ‘Ahstracts from Stratford Travellers’ Accounts’ in Athenaum, September s, 1908). .

² Of the two other stationer’s apprentices from Stratford, Roger, son of John Locke, glover, of Stratford-on-Avon, was apprenticed on August 24, 1577, for ten years to William Pickering (Arber, Transcripts of Registers of the Stationers’ Company, ii. 80), and Allan, son of Thomas Orrian, tailor, of Stratford, was bound apprentice on March 25, 1585, for seven years to Thomas Fowkes {ibid.. ii. 132). Nothing further seems known of Roger Locke. Allan Orrian was made free of the Stationers’ Company on October 16, 1598 {ibid. ii. 722). No information is accessible; regarding his precise work as stationer, but he was prosperous in husiness for some seven years, in the course of which there were hound to him

Field’s London career offers illuminating parallels with that of Shakespeare at many practical points. Born at Stratford in the same year as the dramatist, Richard he was a son of Henry Field, a fairly pros- ^Field- perous tanner, who was a near neighbour of Shakespeare’s father. The elder Field died in 1592, when the poet’s father, in accordance with custom, attested ‘a trew and perfecte inventory’ of his goods and chattels. On September 25, 1579, at the usual age of fifteen, Richard was apprenticed to a London printer and stationer of repute, George Bishop, but it was arranged five weeks later that he should serve the first six years of his articles with a more interesting member of the printing fraternity, Thomas Vautrollier, a Frenchman of wide sympathies and independent views. Vautrollier had come to London as a Huguenot refugee and had established his position there by publishing in 1579 Sir Thomas North’s renowned translation of ‘ Plutarch’s Lives ’ — a book in which Shakespeare was before long to be well versed. When the dramatist reached London, Vautrollier was at Edinburgh in temporary retirement owing to threats of prosecution for printing a book by the Italian sceptic Giordano Bruno. His Stratford apprentice benefited by his misfortune. With the aid of his master’s wife, Field carried on the business in Vau- trollier’s absence, and thenceforth his advance was rapid and secure. Admitted a freeman of the Stationers’ Company on February 6, 1586-7, he soon afterwards mourned his master’s death and married his widow. Vautrollier’s old premises in Blackfriars near Ludgate became his property,¹ and there until the century closed he engaged in many notable ventures. These included

seven apprentices, all youths from country districts. The latest notice of Orrian in the Stationers’ Register is dated October 15, 1605, when he was fined ‘12d for nonappearance on the quarter day’ {ibid. ii. 840). In one entry in the Stationers’ Register his name appears as ‘Allan Orrian alias Currance’ (ibid. ii. 243).

¹ About 1600 Field removed from Blackfriars to the Sign of the Splayed Eagle in the parish of St. Michael in Wood Street.

a new edition of North’s translation of ‘Plutarch' , (1595) and the first edition of Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’ (IS9¹)-¹

Field long maintained good relations with his family j at Stratford, and on February 7, 1591-2, he sent for his 1 Field and younger brother Jasper, to serve him as appren- Shake- tice. In the early spring of the following year speare. g_{avc s}ig_nal proof of his intimacy with his

fellowtownsman Shakespeare by printing his poem ‘Venus and Adonis,’ the earliest specimen of Shakespeare’s writing which was committed to the press. Next year Field performed a like service for the poem ‘Lucrece,’ Shakespeare’s second publication. The metropolitan ' prosperity of the two Stratford settlers was by that time assured, each in his own sphere. Some proof of defective sympathy with Shakespeare’s ambitions may lurk in the fact that Field was one of the inhabitants of Blackfriars who signed in 1596 a peevish protest against the plan of James Burbage, Shakespeare’s theatrical colleague, to convert into a ‘ common playhouse ’ a Blackfriars dwell- ■ ing-house.² Yet, however different the aspirations of the two men, it was of good omen for Shakespeare to meet on his settlement in London a young fellow-townsman whose career was already showing that country breeding proved no bar to civic place And power.³ Finally Field rose to the head of his profession, twice filling the high office of Master of the Stationers’ Company. He survived the dramatist by seven years, dying in 1623.

In the absence of strictly contemporary and categorical information as to how Shakespeare employed his time on arriving in the metropolis, much ingenuity has been wasted in irrelevant speculation. The theory that Field

¹ A friendly note of typographical directions from Sir John Harington to Field is extant in an autograph copy of Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso (B.M. MSS. Addit.’ 18920, f. 336). The terms of the note suggest very amiable relations between Field and his authors. (Information kindly supplied by Mr. H. F. B. Brett-Smith.)

² Mrs. Stopes’s Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage, 1913, pp. 174-5.

³ See Shakespeare’s Venus and, Adonis in facsimile, edited by Sidney Lee, Oxford, rgoj, pp. 39 seq.

found work for him in Vautrollier’s printing office is an airy fancy which needs no refutation. _shake_ Little more can be said in behalf of the ^sP,^eare’^s attempt to prove that he sought his early - legsjex- livelihood as a lawyer’s clerk. In spite of the P^erimce- marks of favour which have been showered on this conjecture, it fails to survive careful scrutiny. The assumption rests on no foundation save the circumstance that Shakespeare frequently employed legal phraseology in his plays and poems.¹ A long series of law terms and of metaphors which are drawn from legal processes figure there, and it is argued that so miscellaneous a store of legal information could only have been acquired by one who was engaged at one time or another in professional practice. The conclusion is drawn from fallacious premises. Shakespeare’s legal knowledge is a mingled skein of accuracy and inaccuracy, and the errors are far too numerous and important to justify on sober inquiry the plea of technical experience. No judicious reader of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ or ‘Measure for Measure’ can fail to detect a radical unsoundness in Shakespeare’s interpretation alike of elementary legal principles and of legal procedure.

Moreover the legal terms which Shakespeare favoured were common forms of speech among contem- _The i;_teI._ porary men of letters and are not peculiar to his “y babit literary or poetic vocabulary. Legal phrase- phrSe- ology in Shakespeare’s vein was widely dis- ^ology- tributed over the dramatic and poetic literature of his

¹ Lord Campbell, who greatly exaggerated Shakespeare’s legal knowledge in his Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements (1859), was the first writer to insist on Shakespeare’s personal connection with the law. Many subsequent writers have been misled by Lord Campbell’s book (see Appendix II). The true state of the case is presented by Charles Allen in his Notes on the Bacon Shakespeare Question (Boston, 1900, pp. 22 seq.) and by Mr. J. M. Robertson in his Baconian Heresy (1913, pp. 31 seq.). Mr. Allen’s chapter (ch. vii) on ‘Bad Law in Shakespeare’ is especially noteworthy. Of the modish affectation of legal terminology by contemporary poets some instances are given below in Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets, 1593, and in the collection of sonnets called Zepheria, 1594 (see Appendix ix).

day. Spenser in his ‘Faerie Queene’ makes as free as Shakespeare with strange and recondite technical terms of law. The dramatists Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Webster use legal words and phrases and describe legal processes with all the great dramatist s frequency and facility, and on the whole with fewer blunders.¹ It is beyond question that all these writers lacked a legal training. Elizabethan authors' common habit of legal phraseology is indeed attributable to causes in which professional experience finds no pace. Throughout the period of Shakespeare’s working career, there was an active social intercourse between men of letters and young lawyers, and the poets and dramatists f caught some accents of their legal companions’ talk. Litigation at the same time engaged in an unprecedented| degree the interests of the middle classes among Elizabeth’s and James I’s subjects. Shakespeare’s father and his neighbours were personally involved in endless legal suits the terminology of which became household words., among them. Shakespeare’s liberal employment of law terms is merely a sign on the one hand of his habitual readiness to identify himself with popular literary fashions of the day, and, on the other hand, of his general quickness of apprehension, which assimilated suggestion from every phase of the life that was passing around him. It may be safely accepted that from his first arrival in London until his final departure Shakespeare’s mental energy was absorbed by his poetic and dramatic ambitions. He had no time to devote to a technical or professional training in another sphere of activity.

¹ When in All’s Well Bertram is ordered under compulsion by the king his guardian to wed Helena, Shakespeare ignores the perfectly:! good plea of ‘disparagement’ which was always available to protect a‘ ward of rank from forced marriage with a plebeian. Ben Jonson proved to be more alive to Bertram’s legal privilege. In his Bartholomew Fair (act hi. sc. i.) Grace Wellborn, a female ward who is on the point of being married by her guardian against her will, is appropriately advised to have recourse to the legal ‘device of disparagement.’ For Webster’s liberal use of law terms see an interesting paper ‘ Webster and the Law: a.Parallel,’ by L. J. Sturge in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1906, xlii. 148-57.

Tradition and commonsense alike point to the stage as an early scene of Shakespeare’s occupation in London. Sir William D’Avenant, the dramatist, who was ten years old when Shakespeare died and was theafrical an eager collector of Shakespearean gossip, is credited with the story that the dramatist was ^men ' originally employed at ‘ the playhouse ’ in ‘ taking care of the gentlemen’s horses who came to the play,’ and that he so prospered in this humble vocation as • to organise a horse-tending service of ‘Shakespeare’s boys.’ The pedigree of the story is fully recorded. D’Avenant confided the tale to Thomas Betterton, the great actor of the Restoration, who shared Sir William’s zeal for amassing Shakespearean lore. By Betterton the legend was handed on to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, who told it to Pope. But neither Rowe nor Pope published it. The report was first committed to print avowedly on D’Avenant’s and Betterton’s authority in Theophilus Cibber’s ‘Lives of the Poets’ (i. 130) which were published in 1753.¹ Only two regular theatres (‘The Theatre’ and the ‘Curtain’) were working in London at the date of Shakespeare’s arrival. Both were situate outside the city walls, beyond Bishopsgate; fields lay around them, and they were often reached on horseback by visitors. According to the Elizabethan poet Sir John Davies, in his ‘Epigrammes,’ No. 7 (1598),

¹ Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, they were written by Robert Shiels, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson, and other hack-writers under Cibber’s editorial direction.

the well-to-do citizen habitually rode ‘into the fields’ when he was bent on playgoing.¹ The owner of ‘The Theatre,’ James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smith- field. There is no inherent improbability in the main drift of D’Avenant’s strange tale, which Dr. Johnson fathered in his edition of Shakespeare in 1765.

No doubt is permissible that Shakespeare was speedily: offered employment inside the playhouse. According to Rowe’s vague statement, ‘he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.’ William Castle,² parish clerk of Stratford through great part of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that the dramatist entered the playhouse as ‘a servitor.’ In 1780 Malone recorded a stage traditionii ‘that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter si attendant,’ or call boy. Evidence abounds to show that his intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers were soon recognised, and that his promotion to more dignified employment was rapid.

Shakespeare’s earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his _The histrionic fame, he remained a prominent player’s ^ member of the actor’s profession till near the " ' end of his life. The profession, when Shake-, speare joined it, was in its infancy, but while he was a boy Parliament had made it on easy conditions a lawful ! and an honourable calling. By an Act of Parliament of ^IS7^I (^I4 Eliz. cap. 2) which was re-enacted / in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4) an obligation was imposed on players of procuring a''license for the exercise of their function

¹ So, too, Thomas Dekker in his Gills Hornbook, 1609 (ch. v. ‘How a young Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary’), describes how French lacqueys and Insh footboys were wont to wait ‘with their masters hobby horses outside the doors of ordinaries for the gentlemen

to nde to the new play; that’s the rendezvous, thither they are galloped ’ in post. Only playhouses north of the Thames were thus reached To theatres south of the river the usual approach was by boat

² Castle’s family was of old standing at Stratford, where he was bom on July 19, 1614, and died m 1701; see Dowdall’s letter, pp. 6₄r-₂ infra

from a peer of the realm or ‘other honourable personage of greater degree.’ In the absence of such credential they were pronounced to be of the status of rogues, vagabonds, or sturdy beggars, and to be liable to humiliating punishments; but the license gave them the unquestioned rank of respectable citizens. Elizabethan peers liberally exercised their licensing powers, and the Queen gave her subfects’ activity much practical encouragement. The services of licensed players were constantly requisitioned by the Court to provide dramatic entertainment there. Those who wished to become actors found indeed little difficulty in obtaining a statutory license under the hand and seal of persons in high station, who enrolled them by virtue of a formal fiction among their ‘servants,’ became surety for their behaviour and relieved them of all risk of derogatory usage.¹ An early statute of King James’s reign (1 Jac. cap. 7) sought in 1603 to check an admitted abuse whereby the idle parasites of a magnate’s household were wont to plead his ‘ license ’ by way of exemption from the penalties of vagrancy or disorder. But the new statute failed seriously to menace the actors’ privileges.² Private persons may

¹ The conditions attaching in Shakespeare’s time to the grant of an actor’s license may be deduced from the earliest known document relating to the matter. In 1572 six ‘players,’ who claimed to be among the Earl of Leicester’s retainers, appealed to the Earl in view of the new statute of the previous year ‘to reteyne us at this present as your houshold Servaunts and daylie wayters, not that we meane to crave any further stipend or benefite at your Lordshippes handes but our Lyveries as we have had, and also your honors License to certifye that we are your houshold Servaunts when we shall have occasion to travayle amongst our frendes’ (printed from the Marquis of Bath’s MSS., in Malone Soc. Coll. i. 348-9). The licensed actor’s certificate was an important asset; towards the end of Shakespeare’s life there are a few cases of fraudulent sale by .a holder to an unauthorised person or of distribution of forged duplicates by an unprincipled actor who aimed at forming a company of his own. But the regulation of the profession was soon strict enough to guard against any widespread abuse (Dr. C. W. Wallace in EngUsche Studien, xliii. 385, and Murray, English Dramatic Companies, ii. 320, 343 seq.)

² Under this new statute proceedings were sanctioned against suspected rogues or vagrants notwithstanding any ‘authority’ which should be ‘given or made by any baron of this realm or any other hon-

have proved less ready, in view of the greater stringency of the law, to exercise the right of licensing players, but there was a compensating extension of the^ range of the royal patronage. The new King excelled his predecessor' % in enthusiasm for the drama. He acknowledged by letters patent the full corporate rights of the leading company, and other companies of repute were soon admitted under like formalities into the ‘service’ of his Queen and of his two elder sons, as well as of his daughter and son-in-law. The actor’s calling escaped challenge of legality, nor did it suffer legal disparagement, at any period of Shakespeare’s epoch.¹

From the middle years of the sixteenth century many hundreds of men received licenses to act from noblemen The acting and other persons of social position, and the companies, licensees formed themselves into companies of players which enjoyed under the statute of 157¹ the standing of lawful corporations. Full}’' a hundred peers and knights during Shakespeare’s youth bestowed the requisite legal recognition on bands of actors who were each known as the patron’s ‘men’ or ‘servants’ and wore his ‘livery’ with his badge on their sleeves. The fortunes of these companies varied. Lack of public favour led to financial difficulty and to periodic suspension of their careers, or even to complete disbandment, y Many companies confined their energies to the provinces or they only visited the capital on rare occasions in order

ourable personage of greater degree unto any other person or persons.’ The clauses which provided ‘houses of correction’ for the punishment >| of vagrants were separately re-enacted in a stronger form six >ears later (7 Jac. cap. 4); all reference to magnates’ licensed ‘servants’ was there omitted. *

¹ Shakespeare’s acquaintance, Thomas Heywood, the well-known'^ actor and dramatist, in his Apology for Actors, i6r2, asserts of the actors’ profession (Sh. Soc. p. 4): ‘It hath beene esteemed by the best and ' greatest. To omit all the noble patrons of the former world, I need alledge no more then the royall and princely services in which we now live.’ Towards the end of his tract Heywood after describing the estimation in which actors were held abroad adds (p. 60): ‘But in no country they are of that eminence that ours are: so our most royall and ever renouned soveraigne hath licenced us in London: so did his predecessor, the thrice vertuous virgin, Queene Elizabeth.’

to perform at Court at the summons of the Sovereign, who wished to pay a compliment to their titled master. Yet there were powerful influences making for permanence in the infant profession, and when Shakespeare arrived in London there were at work there at least seven companies, whose activities, in spite of vicissitudes, were continuous during a long course of years. The leading companies each consisted on the average of some twelve active members, the majority of whom were men, and the rest youths or boys, for no women found admission to the actors’ ranks and the boys filled the female parts.¹ Now and then two companies would combine, or a prosperous company would absorb an unsuccessful one, or an individual actor would transfer his services from one company, to another; but the great companies formed as a rule independent and organic units, and the personal constitution only saw the gradual changes which the passage of years made inevitable. Shakespeare, like most of the notable actors of the epoch, remained through his working days faithful to the same set of colleagues.²

Of the well-established companies of licensed actors which enjoyed a reputation in London and the provinces when Shakespeare left his native place, three The great were under the respective patronage of the P^atrons- Earls of Leicester, of Pembroke,³ and of Worcester, while

¹ As many as twenty-six actors are named in the full list of members of Shakespeare’s company which is prefixed to the First Folio of 1623, but at that date ten of these were dead, and three or four others had retired from active work.

² The best account of the history and organisation of the companies

is given in John Tucker Murray’s English Dramatic Companies, 1558

1642, 2 vols. London, 1910. Fleay’s History of the Stage, which also collects valuable information on the theme, is full of conjectural assertion, much of which Mr. Murray corrects.

⁵ This theatrical patron was Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, the father of William Herbert, the third Earl, who is well known to Shakespearean students (see infra, pp. 164, 682-9). The Pembroke company broke up on the second Earl’s death on January 19, 1601, and it was not till some' years after Shakespeare’s death that an Earl of Pembroke again fathered a company of players.

a fourth ‘ served ’ the Lord Admiral Lord Charles Howard j of Effingham. These patrons or licensers were all peers of prominence at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, and a noted band of actors bore one or other of their names.¹

The fifth association of players which enjoyed general,: repute derived its license from Queen Elizabeth and was called the Queen’s company.² This troop of actors was first formed in 1583 of twelve leading players who were drawn from other companies. After being ‘sworn the. Queen’s servants’ they ‘were allowed wages and liveries as grooms of the chamber.’³ The company’s career, in spite of its auspicious inauguration, was chequered; it ceased to perform at Court after 1591 and was irregular in its appearances at the London theatres after 1594; but it was exceptionally active on provincial tours until the Queen’s death.

In the absence of women actors the histrionic vocation was deemed especially well adapted to the capacity of The com- boys, and two additional companies, which paaiesof were formed exclusively of boy actors, were ^boys‘ in the enjoyment of licenses from the Crown. They were recruited from the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel Royal. The youthful performers, whose dramatic programmes resembled those of their seniors, acquired much popularity and proved formidable competitors with the men. The rivalry; knew little pause during Shakespeare’s professional life.

The adult companies changed their name when a

¹ The companies of the Earls of Sussex and of Oxford should not be reckoned among the chief companies; they very rarely gave public performances in London; nor in the country were they continuously employed. The Earl of Oxford’s company, which was constituted;^ mainly of boys, occupied the first Blackfriars theatre in 1582—4, hut was only seen publicly again in London in the two years 1587 and 1602; in the latter year it disappeared altogether.

² A body of men was known uninterruptedly by the title of the Queen’s Players from the opening years of Henry VIII’s reign; but no marked prestige attached to the designation until the formation of the new Queen’s company of 1583.

³ Stow’s Chronicle, ed. Howes (sub anno 1583).

new patron succeeded on the death or the retirement of his predecessor. Alterations of the companies’ titles were consequently frequent, and introduce Thefor- some perplexity in the history of their several 9^f careers. But there is good reason to believe Leicester’s that the band of players which first fired ^compan‘^y- Shakespeare’s histrionic ambitions was the one which long enjoyed the patronage of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester, and subsequently under a variety of designations filled the paramount place in the theatrical annals of the era.

At the opening of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the Earl of Leicester, who was known as Lord Robert Dudley before the creation of the earldom in 1564, numbered among his household retainers, men who provided the household with rough dramatic or musical entertainment. Early in 1572 six of these men applied to the Earl for a license in conformity with the statute of 1571, and thus the earliest company of licensed players was created.¹ The histrionic organization made rapid progress. In 1574 Lord Leicester’s company which then consisted of no more than five players inaugurated another precedent by receiving the grant of a patent of incorporation under the privy seal. Two years later James Burbage, whose name heads the list of Lord Leicester’s ‘men’ in the primordial charters of the stage, built in the near neighbourhood of London the first English playhouse, which was known as ‘The Theatre.’ The company’s numbers grew quickly and in spite of secessions which temporarily deprived them both of their home at ‘The Theatre’ and of the services of James Burbage, Lord Leicester’s players long maintained a coherent organisation. They acted for the last time at Court on Dec. 27, 1586,² but were busy in the provinces

¹ See p. 47, n. i. The names run, James Burbage, John Perkin, John Laneham, William Johnson, Robert Wilson and Thomas Clarke. Thomas Clarke’s name was omitted from the patent of 1574.

² Cf. E. K. Chambers’s ‘ Court Performances before Queen Elizabeth’ in Modern Language Renew, vol. ii. p. 9.

until their great patron’s death on September 4, ^IS^8. Then with little delay the more prominent members joined forces with a less conspicuous troop of actors who were under the patronage of a highly cultured nobleman Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, son and heir of the fourth Earl of Derby. Lord Leicester’s company was merged in that of Lord Strange to whose literary sympathies the poet Edmund Spenser bore witness, and when the new patron’s father died on September 25, 1593, the company again changed its title to that of the Earl of Derby’s servants. The new Earl lived less than seven months longer, dying on April 16, 1594,¹ and, though for the following month the company christened itself after his widow ‘the Countess of Derby’s players/ it: found in June a more influential and more constant patron in Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, who hfeld (from 1585) the office of Lord Chamberlain.

~ Lord Hunsdon had already interested himself modestly in theatrical affairs. For some twelve previous years his protection was extended to players of humble fame, some of whom were mere acrobats.² The Earl of Sussex, too, Hunsdon’s predecessor in the post of Lord Chamberlain (1572-1583), had at an even, earlier period lent his name to a small company of actors, and, while their patron held office at Court, Lord Sussex’s men occa

¹ The 5th Earl of Derby was celebrated under the name ‘Amyntas’^ in Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (c. 1594). His brother ana successor, William Stanley, 6th Earl, on succeeding to the earldom,, appears to have taken under his protection a few actors, but his cam-’ pany won no repute and its operations which lasted from 1594 to 16071 were confined to the provinces. Like many other noblemen, the sixth i Earl of Derby was deeply interested in the drama and would seem to have essayed playwriting. See p. 232 infra.

² During 1584 an unnamed person vaguely described as ‘owner’ of ‘The' Theatre’ claimed that he was under Lord Hunsdon’s protection. The reference is probably to one John Hyde to whom the building was then mortgaged by James Burbage rather than to Burbage himself. Lord Hunsdon’s men were probably performing at the house in the absence of Leicester’s company. Cf. Malone Society’s Collections, vol. i. p. 166; Dr. C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre (Nebraska^ University Studies), 1913, p. 12; Murray, English Dramatic CompaniejJP

sionally adopted the alternative title of the Lord Chamberlain’s servants.’¹ But the association of the Lord Chamberlain with the stage acquired genuine importance in theatrical history only in 1594 when Lord Hunsdon re-created his company by enrolling with a few older dependents the men who had won their professional spurs as successive retainers of the Earls of Leicester and Derby. James Burbage now rejoined old associates, while his son Richard, who, unlike his father, had worked with Lord Derby’s men, shed all the radiance of his matured genius on the Lord Chamberlain’s new and far-famed organisation.² The subsequent stages in the company’s pedigree are readily traced. There were no further graftings or reconstitution. When the Lord Chamberlain died on July-23, 1596, his son and heir, George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, accepted his histrionic responsibilities, and he, after a brief interval, himself became Lord Chamberlain (in March 1597). On February 19,1597-8, the Privy Council bore witness to the growing repute of ‘ The Lord Chamberlain’s men ’ by making the announcement (which proved complimentary rather than operative) that that company and the Lord Admiral’s company were the only two bands of players whose license strictly entitled them to perform plays anywhere about London or before Her Majesty’s Court.³

¹ Malone Society’s Collections, vol. i. pp. 36-7 ; Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare (1821), iii. 406.

² Besides Richard Burbage the following actors, according to extant lists of the two companies, passed in 1594 from the service of the Earl of Derby (formerly Lord Strange) to that of the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Hunsdon), viz.: William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, George Biyan, Harry Condell, Will Sly, Richard Cowley, John Duke, Christopher Beeston. Save the two last, all these actors are named in the First Folio among ‘the principal actors’ in jhakespeare’s plays; they follow immediately Shakespeare and Richard Burbage who head the First Folio list. William Kemp, Thomas Pope, and George Bryan were at an earlier period prominent among Lord Leicester’s servants. The continuity of the company’s personnel through all the changes pf patronage is well attested. (Fleay’s History of the Stage, pp. 82-85, 13s, 189.) , ... 0/ \

³ Acts of the Privy Council, new series, vol. xxviu. 1597-159° (i9°4)j p. 327; see p. 338 infra.

The company underwent no further change of name until the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. A more signal recognition awaited it when King James ascended the throne in 1603. The new King took the company into The King’s his own patronage, and it became known as servants. ‘The King’s’ or ‘His Majesty’s’ players. Thus advanced in titular dignity, the company re-, mained true to its well-seasoned traditions during the rest of Shakespeare’s career and through the generation beyond.

There is little doubt that at an early period Shakespeare joined this eminent company of actors which in shake- due time won the favour of King James, speare’s From 1592, some six years after the drama-, company. j-jst’s arrival in London, until the close of his professional career more than twenty years later, such an association is well attested. But the precise date and circumstance of his enrolment and his initial promotions are matters of conjecture. Most of his colleagues of latter life opened their histrionic careers in Lord Leicester’s professional service, and there is plausible ground for inferring that Shakespeare from the first trod in their footsteps.¹ But direct information is lacking. Lord Leicester, who owned the manor of Kenilworth, was a Warwickshire magnate, and his players twice visited Stratford in Shakespeare’s boyhood, for the first time in 1573 and for the second in 1577. Shakespeare may well have cherished hopes of admission to Lord Leicester’s company in early youth. A third visit was paid by Leicester’s company or its leading members to . _ 1

¹ Richard Burbage and John Heminges, leading actors of the company while it was known successively as Lord''Derby’s and the Lard Chamberlain’s ‘men,’ were close friends of Shakespeare from early years, but the common assumption that they were natives of Stratford® is erroneous. Richard Burbage was probably bom in Shoreditch (London) and John Heminges at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Green, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull theatre until his death 1612, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds tha. deserve attention. Shakespeare is not known to have been associatf^T with him in any way.

Shakespeare’s native town in 1587, a year in which as many as four other companies also brought Stratford within the range of their provincial activities. But by that date the dramatist, according to tradition, was already in London. Lord Leicester’s ‘ servants ’ gave a farewell performance at Court at Christmas 1586,¹ and early in 1587 the greater number of them left London for a prolonged country tour. James Burbage had temporarily seceded and was managing ‘The Theatre’ in other interests and with the aid of a few only of his former colleagues. The legend which connects Shakespeare’s earliest theatrical experience exclusively with Burbage’s playhouse therefore presumes that he associated himself near the outset of his career with a small contingent of Lord Leicester’s ‘ servants ’ and did not share the adventures of the main body.

Shakespeare’s later theatrical fortunes are on record. In 1589, after Lord Leicester’s death, his company was reorganised, and it regained under the aegis His ties of Lord Strange its London prestige. With with the Lord Strange’s men Shakespeare was closely chamber- associated as dramatic author. He helped in ^lain’^smen- the authorship of the First Part of ‘Henry VI,’ with which Lord Strange’s men scored a triumphant success early in 1592. When in 1594 that company (then renamed the Earl of Derby’s men) was merged in the far-famed Lord Chamberlain’s company, Shakespeare is proclaimed by contemporary official documents to have been one of its foremost members. In December of that year he joined its two leaders, Richard Burbage the tragedian and William Kemp the

¹ Lord Leicester’s men are included among the players whose activities in London during Shakespeare’s first winter there (1586-7) are thus described in an unsigned letter to Sir Francis Walsingham under date Jan. 25, ^86-7: ‘Every day in the weeke the playeres billes are sett upp in sondry places of the cittie, some in the name of her Majesties menne, some the Earle of Leic: some the E. of Oxfordes, the Lo. Ad- myralles, and dyvers others, so that when the belles tole to the lectoures, the trumpettes sounde to the stages.’ (Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 286; HalKwell-Phillipps, Illustrations, 1874, p. 108.)

comedian, in two performances at Court.¹ He was prominent in the counsels of the Lord Chamberlain’s servants through 1598 and was recognised as one of their chieftains in 1603. Four of the leading members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company — Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Henry Condell and Augustine Phillips, all of whom worked together under Lord Strange (Earl of Derby) — were among his lifelong friends. Similarly under this company’s auspices, almost all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays were presented to the public.² Only two of the dramas claimed for him — ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke,’ a first draft of ‘3 Henry VJ’ — are positively known to have been performed by other bands of players. The ‘True Tragedie’ was, according to the title-page of the published version of 1595,

‘ sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke his servants,’ while ‘Titus Andronicus’; is stated on the title-page of the first edition of 1594 to have been ‘plaide’ not only by the company of ‘the Right Honourable the Earle of Derbie,’ but in addition by the seryants of both ‘the Earle of Pembroke and Earle of Sussex.’³ Shakespeare was responsible for fragments only of these two pieces, and the main authors

¹ See p. 87.

² On the title-pages of thirteen plays which were published (in quarto) in Shakespeare’s lifetime it was stated that they had been acted by this company under one or other of its four successive designations (the Earl of Derby’s, the Lord Chamberlain’s, Lord Hunsdon’s, or the King’s servants). The First Folio of 1623, which collected all Shakespeare’s plays, was put together by Shakespeare’s fellow actors Heminges and Condell, who claimed ownership in them as having been written for their company. .

³ The second edition of Titus Andronicus (r6oo) adds ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s servants’; but the Earl of Derby-and the Lord Chamberlain were as we have seen successive patrons of Shakespeare’s company. Lord Pembroke’s servants in 1593-4 were in firanml straits, and sold some of their plays to Shakespeare’s and other companies. Titus was produced as a ‘new play’ by Lord Sussex’s men at the Rose Theatre on January 23, 1593-4 (cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 78, 105); it may have been sold to them by the Pembroke company after, an abortive attempt at representation.

would seem to have been attached to other companies, which, after having originally produced them, transferred them to Shakespeare’s colleagues. It is alone with the company which began its career under the protection of Lord Leicester and ended it under royal patronage that Shakespeare’s dramatic activities were conspicuously or durably identified.

ON THE LONDON STAGE

‘The Theatre/ the playhouse at Shoreditch, where Shakespeare is credibly reported to have gained his first The first experience of the stage, was a timber structure playhouse' which had been erected in 1576. Its builder m England. _anc[ p_rop_ri_et₀r James Burbage, an original member of Lord Leicester’s company, was at one time a humble carpenter and joiner, and he carried out his great design on borrowed capital. The site, which had once formed part of the precincts of-the Benedictine priory (or convent) of Holywell, lay outside the city’s north-eastern boundaries, and within the jurisdiction not of the Lord Mayor and City .Council which viewed! the nascent drama with puritanic disfavour, but of the justices of the peace for Middlesex, who had not committed themselves to an attitude of hostility. The building stood a few feet to the east of the thoroughfare now known as Curtain Road, Shoreditch, and near at hand was the open tract of land variously known as Finsbury Fields and Moorfields.¹ ‘The Theatre’ was the first house erected in England to serve a theatrical purpose. Previously plays had been publicly performed in innyards or (outside London) in Guildhalls| More select representations were given in the halls of

¹ The precise site of ‘The Theatre¹ has been lately determined by Mr. W. W. Braines, a principal officer of the London County Council. (See London County Council — Indication of Houses of Histor&t Interest in London — Part xliii. Holywell Priory and the site of the Theatre, Shoreditch, 1915.) Mr. Braines corrects errors on the subject for which Halliwell-Phillipps (Outlines, i. 351) was responsible.

royal palaces, of noblemen’s mansions and of the Inns of Court. Throughout Shakespeare’s career all such places continued to serve theatrical uses. Drama never ceased altogether in his time to haunt innyards and the other makeshift scenes of its infancy to which the public at large were admitted on payment; there was a growth, too, in the practice of presenting plays before invited guests in great halls of private ownership. But James Burbage’s primal endeavour to give the drama a home of its own quickly bore abundant fruit. Puritanism launched vain invectives against Burbage’s ‘ungodly edifice ’ as a menace to public morality. City Councillors at the instigation of Puritan preachers made futile endeavours to close its doors. Burbage’s innovation promised the developing drama an advantage which was appreciated by the upper classes and by the mass of the people outside the Puritan influence. The growth of the seed which he sowed was little hindered by the clamour of an unsympathetic piety. The habit of play- going spread rapidly, and the older and more promiscuous arrangements for popular dramatic recreation gradually yielded to the formidable competition which flowed from the energy of Burbage and his disciples.

James Burbage, in spite of a long series of pecuniary embarrassments, remained manager and owner of ‘The Theatre ’ for nearly twenty-one years. Shortly “The after the building was opened, in 1576, there ^Curtain ” came into being in its near neighbourhood a second London playhouse, the ‘Curtain,’¹ also within a short distance of Finsbury Fields or Moorfields, and near the present Curtain Road, Shoreditch, which preserves its name. The two playhouses proved friendly rivals, and for a few years (1585-1592) James Burbage of ‘The Theatre’ shared in the management of the younger house at the same time as he controlled the older. Towards the close of the century Shakespeare

¹ The name was derived from an adjacent ‘ curtain ’ or outer wall of in obsolete fortification abutting on the old London Wall.

spent at least one season at the Curtain.¹ But between 1586 and 1600 there arose in the environs of London six new theatres in addition to ‘ The Theatre ’ and the ‘Curtain,’ and within the city walls the courtyards of the larger inns served with a new vigour theatrical purposes. Actors thus enjoyed a fairly wide choice of professional homes when Shakespeare’s career was in full flight.² I

When Shakespeare and his colleagues first came under the protection of Lord Strange, they were faithful to Shake- ‘^Tlie Theatre ’ save for an occasional perform* I speareat ance in the innyard of the ‘Crosskeys’ in the‘Rose.’ Qj-acgchurch Street,³ but there soon followed j a prolonged season at a playhouse called the ‘ Rose/

¹ After 1600 the vogue of the ‘Curtain’ declined. No reference to the ‘Curtain’ playhouse has been found later than 1627.

² The chief of the Elizabethan playhouses,apart from ‘The Theatre' and the ‘Curtain’ were the Newington Butts (erected before 1586); the Rose on the Bankside (erected ahout 1587 and reconstructed ia 1592); the Swan also on the Bankside (erected in 1595); the Globfig also on the Bankside (erected out of the dismantled fabric of ‘The Theatre’ in 1599); the Fortune in Golden Lane without Cripplegate (modelled on lie Globe in 1600); and the Red Bull in St. John’s Street, Clerkenwell (built about 1600). Besides these edifices which were un- ‘ roofed there were two smaller theatres of a more luxurious and secluded type — ‘Paul’s’ and ‘Blackfriars’ — which were known as ‘private’ houses (see p. 67 infra). At the same time there were several inns, in the quadrangular yards or courts of which plays continued to be acted from time to time in Shakespeare’s early years; these were the Bel Sauvage in Ludgate Hill, the Bell and the Crosskeys both in Grace- church Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate, and the Boar’s Head in East- cheap. During the latter part of Shakespeare’s life only one addition was made to the public theatres, viz. the Hope in 1613 on the site of the demolished Paris Garden, in Southwark, but two new ‘ private ’ theatres were construtted—the Whitefriars, adjoining Dorset Gardens, Fleet Street (huilt before 1608), and the Cockpit, afterwards rechristened,the Phcenix (built about 1610), the first playhouse in Drury Lane. See Henslowe’s Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, 1904; W. J. Lawrence’s The Elizar bethan Playhouse and other Studies, 2nd ser. p. 237; James Greenstreet’s ‘Lawsuit about the Whitefriars Theatre in 1609’ in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1887-92, pp. 269 seq., and Dr. Wallace’s Threl London Theatres of Shakespeare's Time, in Nebraska University Studies,f| 1909, ix. pp. 287 seq., his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (15971603), 1908, and his paper ‘The Swan Theatre and the Earl of Pembroke’s Servants’ in Englische Studien (1910-1) xliii. 350 sq.

* Hazlitt’s English Drama, 1869, pp. 34-5.

ffhich Philip Henslowe, the speculative theatrical nanager, had lately reconstructed on the Bankside, Southwark. It was the earliest playhouse in a district jvhich was soon to be specially identified with the drama. Lord Strange’s men began work at the ‘Rose’ on February 19, 1591-2. At the date of their occupation of this theatre, Shakespeare’s company temporarily allied itself with the Lord Admiral’s men, which was its chief rival among the companies of the day. The Lord Admiral's players numbered the great actor Edward Alleyn imong them.¹ Alleyn now for a few months took the iirection at the ‘ Rose ’ of the combined companies, but the two bodies quickly parted, and no later opportunity ivas offered Shakespeare of enjoying professional relations with Alleyn. The ‘Rose’ theatre was the first scene of Shakespeare’s pronounced successes alike as ictor and dramatist.

Subsequently, during the theatrical season of 1594, Shakespeare and his company, now known as the Lord Chamberlain’s men', divided their energies between the stage of another youthful theatre at Newington Butts ind the older-fashioned innyard of the ‘Crosskeys.’ The next three years were chiefly ‘spent in their early Shoreditch home ‘The Theatre,’ which had been occupied in their absence by other companies. But during [598, owing to ‘The Theatre’s’ structural decay and to :he manager Burbage’s difficulties with his creditors ind with the ground landlord,, the company found a Drief asylum in the neighbouring ‘Curtain,’ in which nore than one fellow-actor of the dramatist acquired a proprietary interest.² There ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was •evived with applause.³ This was Shakespeare’s last

¹ Alleyn and the Lord Admiral's men had previously worked for a ime with James Burbage at ‘The Theatre,’ and Alleyn’s company oined the older Lord Chamberlain’s company in a performance at 'ourt, January 6, 1585—ti. (Halliwell’s Illustrations, 31.)

² See Thomas Pope’s and John Underwood’s wills in Collier’s Lives f the Actors, pp. 127, 230,

³ Maiston’s Scourge of Villanie, 1598, Satyre 10.

experience for some twelve years of a playhouse on the north side of the Thames. The theatrical quarter-of London was rapidly shifting from the north to the south of the river.

At the close of 1598 the primal English playhouse ‘The Theatre’ underwent a drastic metamorphosis-] in which the dramatist played a foremost part. James Burbage, the owner and builder of the veteran house; died on February 2, 1596-7, and the control of the property passed to his widow and his two sons Cuthbert and the actor Richard. The latter, Shakespeare’s life-long friend, was nearing the zenith of his renown. The twenty-one years’ lease of the land in Shoreditch ran out on April 13 following and the landlord was reluctant to grant the Burbages a renewal of the tenancy.¹ Prolonged negotiation failed to yield a settlement. Thereupon Cuthbert Burbage, the elder son and heir, in conjunction with his younger brother Richard, took the heroic resolve of demolishing the building and transferring it bodily to ground to be rented across the Thames. Shakespeare and four other members of the company, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and William Kemp, were taken by the Burbages into their counsel. The seven men proceeded jointly to lease for a term of thirty-one years a site on the Bankside in Southwark. The fabric of ‘ The Theatre ’ was accordingly torn down in defiance of the landlord during the last days of December 1598 and the timber materials were re-erected, with liberal reinforcements, on the new site

¹ James Burbage, throughout his tenure of ‘The Theatre,’ was involved in very complicated litigation arising out of the terms of the original lease of the ground and of the conditions in which money was invested in the venture by various relatives and others. The numerous legal records are in the Public Record Office. A few were found there and were printed by J. P. Collier in his Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (1846), pp. 7 seq., and these reappear with substantial additions in Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines of the Life of Shak- speare (i. 357 seq.). Dr. Wallace’s researches have yielded a mass of supplementary documents which were previously unknown, and he has printed the whole in The First London Theatre, Materials for a History, Nebraska University Studies, 1913.

between January and May 1599.¹ The transplanted building was christened ‘The Globe,’ and it quickly entered on an era of prosperity which was without precedent in theatrical annals. ‘The ingofthe^d" Glory of the Bank [i.e. the Bankside],’ as Ben ^GIobe> Jonson called ‘The Globe,’ was, like ‘The ^IS99' Theatre,’ mainly constructed of wood. A portion only was roofed, and that was covered with thatch. The exterior, according to the only extant contemporary • view, was circular, and resembled a magnified martello tower.² In the opening chorus of ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare would seem to have written of the theatre as ‘this cockpit’ (line ri), and ‘this wooden O’ (line 13), and to have likened its walls to a girdle about the stage (line 19) .³ Legal instruments credited Shakespeare with playing a principal rdle in the mai^y complex transactions of which the ‘ Globe’ theatre was the fruit.⁴

| Giles Allen, the ground landlord of ‘The Theatre,’ brought an action against Peter Street, the carpenter who superintended the removal of the fabric to Southwark, but after a long litigation the plaintiff was nonsuited. .

² See Hondius’s ‘View of London 1610’ in Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines, i. 182. The original theatre was burnt down on June 29, 1613, and was rebuilt ‘in a far fairer manner than.before’ (see pp. 445-7 infra). Visscher, in his well-known View of London 1616, depicts the new structure as of octagonal or polygonal shape. The new building was demolished on April 16, 1644, and the site occupied by small tenements.

⁸ The prologue to The Merry Devil of Edmonton acted at the Globe before 1607 has the line:

We ring this round with our invoking spells.

* See p. 301 infra. The Globe Theatre abutted on Maid Lane (now known as Park Street), a modest thoroughfare in Southwark running some way behind Bankside on the river bank and parallel with it. There is difficulty in determining whether the theatre stood on the north or the south side of the roadway, the north side backing on to Bankside and the south side stretching landwards. At a short distance to the south of Maid Lane there long ran a passage (now closed), which was christened after the theatre Globe Alley. A commemorative tablet was placed in 1909 on the south side of the street on the outer wall of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins’s brewery, which formerly belonged to Henry Thrale, Dr. Johnson’s friend, and has for 150 years been locally identified with the site of the theatre. The southern site is indeed powerfully supported by a mass of legal evidence, by plans and maps, and by local tradition qf the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Dr.

With yet another memorable London theatre the, Blackfriars — Shakespeare’s fortunes were intimately The bound, though only through the closing^ years Blackfriars. ₀f ^jg professional life. The precise^ circumstances and duration of his connexion with this playhouse have often been misrepresented. In origin the Blackfriars was only a little younger than The Theatre,’ but it differed widely in structure and saw many changes of fortune in the course of years. ^ As early as 1578 a spacious suite of rooms in a dwelling- house within the precincts of the dissolved monastery of Blackfriars was converted into a theatre of modest appointment. For six years the Blackfriars playhouse enjoyed a prosperous career. But its doors were closed in 1584, and for some dozen years the building resumed its former status of a private dwelling. In 1596 James Burbage, the founder of ‘The Theatre,’ ambitious to extend his theatrical enterprise in spite of the attendant anxieties, purchased for tool, the premises which had given Blackfriars a fleeting theatrical fame together witii adjacent property, and at a large outlay fashioned his purchase afresh into a playhouse on an exceptionally luxurious plan.¹ It was no more than half the size of the

William Martin’s exhaustive and fully illustrated paper on ‘The Site of the Globe Playhouse’ in Surrey Archeological Collections, vol. xxiii. (1910), pp. 148-202.) But it must be admitted that Dr. Wallace brought to light in 1909 a legal document in the theatrical lawsuit, Osteler t. Heminges, 1616 (Pro Coram Rege, 1454, 13 Jac. 1, Hil. m. 692), which, according to the obvious interpretation of the words, allots the theatre to the north side of Maid Lane (see Shakespeare in London, The Times, October 2 and 4, 1909). Further evidence (dating between 1593 and 1606), which was adduced by Dr. Wallace in 1914 from the Records of the Sewers Commissioners, shows that the owners of the playhouse owned property on the north side even if the theatre were on the south side (see The Times, April 30, 1914), while Visscher’s panoramic map of London 1616 alone of maps of the time would appear to place the theatre on the north side. It seems barely possible to reconcile the conflicting evidence. The controversy has lately been continued in Notes and Queries (nth series, xi. and xii.) chiefly by Mr. George Hubbard, who champions anew the northern site, and by Dr. Martin who strongly supports afresh the southern site.

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, in his Outlines (i. 299), printed the deed of the transfer of the Blackfriars property to James Burbage on Feb. 4, 1595-6

Globe, .but was its superior in comfort and equipment. Unhappily the new scheme met an unexpected check. The neighbours protested against the restoration of the Blackfriars stage, and its re-opening was postponed. The adventurous owner died amid the controversy (on February 2, 1596-7), bequeathing his remodelled theatre to his son Richard Burbage. Richard declined for the time personal charge of his father’s scheme, and he arranged for the occupation of the Blackfriars by the efficient company of young actors known as the Children of the Chapel Royal.¹ On September 21, 1600, he formally leased the house for twenty-one years to Henry Evans who was the Children’s manager. For the next five seasons the Children’s performances at Blackfriars rivalled in popularity those at the Globe itself. Queen Elizabeth proved an active patron of the boys of the Blackfriars, inviting them to perform at Court twice in the winters of 1601 and of 1602.² When

(cf. Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. 60-9). Much further light on the history of the Blackfriars theatre has been shed by the documents discovered by Prof. Albert Feuillerat and cited in his ‘The Origin of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre: Recent Discovery of Documents,’ in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. xlviii. (1912), pp. 81-102, and in his ‘Blackfriars Records’ in Malone Society’s Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. (1913). Dr. Wallace also brought together much documentary material in his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597-1603 (1908), and in his ‘ Shakespeare in London’ (The Times, Oct. 2 and 4, 1909). The Blackfriars theatre was on the site of The Times publishing office off Queen Victoria Street. Its memory survives in the passage called Playhouse Yard, which.adjoins The Times premises.

¹ Evans was lessee and general manager of the theatre and instructed the Children in acting. Nathaniel Giles, a competent musical composer, who became ‘Master of the Children of the Chapel’ under a patent dated July 15, 1597, was their music master. (Fleay, Hist, of Stage, 126 seq.) When, at Michaelmas 1600, Evans took, in ‘confederacy’ with Giles, a lease of the Blackfriars theatre from Burbage for twenty-one years at an annual rental of 401, in the interest of the Children’s performances the building was described in the instrument as ‘then or late’ in Evans’s ‘tenure or occupation.’ These words are quite capable of the interpretation that the ‘Children’ were working at the Blackfriars under Giles and Evans some years before Evans took his long lease (but cf. E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 156).

^! Murray, i. 335; E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Rev. ii. 12. Sir Dudley Carleton, the Court gossip, wrote on Dec. 29, 1601, that the Queen dined that day privately at my Lord Chamberlain’s (i.e. Lord

James I ascended the throne they were admitted to the service of Queen Anne of Denmark and rechristened ‘Children of the Queen’s Revels’ (Jan. 13,. 1603-4.) But the youthful actors were of insolent demeanour and often produced plays which offended the Court’s political susceptibilities.¹ In 1605 the company was peremptorily dissolved by order of the Privy Council. Evans’s lease of the theatre was unexpired but no rent was forthcoming, and Richard Burbage as owner recovered possession on August 9, 1608.² After an interval, in January 1610, the great actor assumed full control of his father’s chequered venture, and Shakespeare thenceforth figured prominently in its affairs. Thus for the last six years of Shakespeare’s life his company maintained two London playhouses, the Blackfriars as well as the Globe. The summer season was spent on the Bankside and the winter at Blackfriars.³

Hunsdon’s). He adds ‘I came even now from the Blackfriars where I saw her at the play with all her candidae auditrices.’ {Cal. State Papers' Dom. 1601-3, P- 1:36; Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, p. 95.) The last words have been assumed to mean that the Queen visited the Blackfriars theatre. There is no other instance of her appearance in a playhouse. The house of the Queen’s host, Lord Hunsdon, lay in the precincts of Blackfriars and the reference is probably to a dramatic entertainment which he provided for his royal guest under his own roof. A dramatic entertainment after dinner was not uncommon at Hunsdon House. On March 6, 1599-1600, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon' ‘feasted’ the Flemish envoy Verreiken ‘and there in the afternoone his Plaiers acted before [his guest] Sir John Oldcastell to his great contentment’ {Sydney Papers, ii. 175). Queen Henrietta Maria seems to be the first English Sovereign of whose visit to a theatre there is no question. Her presence in the Blackfriars theatre on May 13, 1634, is fully attested ('Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 167).

¹ See p. 306 infra.

² The ‘Children’ were rehabilitated in 1608, and Burbage allowed them to act at the Blackfriars theatre at intervals till January 4, 1609-10. Beaumont and Fletcher’s Scornful Lady was the last piece which they produced there. They then removed to the Whitefriars theatre. Two years later they were dissolved altogether, the chief members of the troop being drafted into adult companies.

³ This arrangement continued long after Shakespeare’s death— until Sept. 2, r642, when all theatres were closed by order of the Long Parliament. The Blackfriars was pulled down on August 5, 1655, and, as in the case of the Globe Theatre which was demolished eleven years earlier, tenements were erected on its site.

The divergences in the structure of the two houses rendered their usage appropriate at different seasons of the year. A ‘public’ or ‘common’ theatre like _The the Globe had no roof over the arena. The ‘private’ Blackfriars, which was known as a ‘ private’\^playhous^' theatre, better observed conditions of privacy or seclusion in the auditorium, and made fuller provision for the comfort of the spectators. | It was as well roofed as a private residence and it was lighted by candles.¹ At the private theatre properties, costumes, and music were more elaborately contrived than at the public theatre.' But the same dramatic fare was furnished at both kinds of playhouse. Each filled an identical part in the drama’s literary history.

It was not only to the London public which frequented the theatres that the professional actor of Shakespeare’s epoch addressed his efforts. Beyond the _Perform. theatres lay a superior domain in which the ancesat professional actor of Shakespeare’s day con- ^Court- stantly practised his art with conspicuous advantage both to his reputation and to his purse. Every winter and occasionally %t other seasons of the year the well- estab’ished companies gave, at the royal palaces which ringed London,.’dramatic performances in the presence of the Sovereign and the Court. The pieces acted at Elizabeth’s Court were officially classified as ‘morals, pastorals, stories, histories, tragedies, comedies, interludes, inventions,, and antic plays.’ During Shakespeare’s youth, masques or pageants in which scenic device, music, dancing, and costume overshadowed the spoken word, filled a large place in the royal programme.

¹ The ‘private’ type of theatre, to which the Blackfriars gave assured vogue, was inaugurated in a playhouse which was formed in 1581 out of the singing school at St. Paul’s Cathedral near the Convocation House for the acting company of the cathedral choristers; this building was commonly called ‘Paul’s.’ Its theatrical use by St. Paul’s boys was suspended between 1590 and 1600 and finally ceased in 1606 when the manager of the rival company of the ‘chapel’ boys at the Blackfriars bribed the manager of the St. Paul’s company to close his doors. Cf. E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Review, 1909, p. 153 seq.

Such performances were never excluded from the Court festivities, and in the reign of King James I were often undertaken by amateurs, who were drawn from the courtiers, both men and women. But full-fledged stage plays which were only capable of professional presenta** tion signally encroached on spectacular entertainment. Throughout Shakespeare’s career the chief companies made a steadily increasing contribution to the recreations of the palace, and the largest share of the coveted work fell in his later years to the dramatist and his colleagues. The boy companies were always encouraged by the Sovereign, and they long vied with their seniors in supplying the histrionic demands of royalty. But Shakespeare’s company ultimately outstripped at Court the popularity even of the boys.

The theatrical season at Court invariably opened on the day after Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day (Dec. 26), and performances were usually continued on the succeeding St. John’s Day (Dec. 27), on Innocents’ Day (Dec. . 28), on the next Sunday, and on Twelfth Night (Jan. 6). The dramatic celebrations were sometimes resumed on Candlemas day (Feb. 2), and always on Shrove Sunday or Shrove Tuesday. Under King James, Hallowmas (Nov. 1) and additional days in November and at Shrovetide were also similarly distinguished, and at other periods of the year, when royal hospitalities were extended to distinguished foreign guests, a dramatic entertainment by professional players was commonly provided. A different play was staged at each performance, so that in some years there were produced at Court as many as twenty-three separate pieces. The dramas which the Sovereign witnessed were seldom written for the occasion. They had already won the public ear in the theatre. A special prologue and epilogue were usually prepared for the performances at Court, but in other respects the royal productions were faithful to the popular fare. The Court therefore enjoyed ample opportunity of familiarising itself with the public taste.

Queen Elizabeth sojourned by turns at her many palaces about London. Christmas was variously spent at Hampton Court, Whitehall, Windsor, and Greenwich. At other seasons she occupied royal residences, which have long since vanished, at Nonsuch, near Cheam, and at Richmond, Surrey. James I acquired an additional residence in Theobalds Palace at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. To all these places, from time to time, Shakespeare and his fellow-players were warmly welcomed. A temporary stage was set up for their use in the great hall of each royal dwelling, and numerous artificers, painters, carpenters, wiredrawers, armourers, cutlers, plumbers, tailors, feather-makers were enlisted by the royal officers in the service of the drama. Scenery, properties and costume were of rich and elaborate design, and the common notion that austere simplicity was an universal characteristic of dramatic production through Shakespeare’s lifetime needs some radical modification, if due consideration be paid to the scenic methods which were habitual at Court. Spectacular embellishments characterised the performances of the regular drama no less than of masques and pageants. Painted canvas scenery was a common feature of all Court theatricals. The scenery, was constructed on the multiple or simultaneous principle which prevailed at the time in France a.nd Italy and rendered superfluous change in the course of the performance. The various scenic backgrounds which the story of the play prescribed formed compartments (technically known as ‘houses’ or ‘mansions’) which were linked together so as to present to the audience an unbroken semicircle. The actors moved about the stage from compartment to compartment or from ‘house’ to ‘house’ as the development of the play required. This ‘multiple setting’ was invariably employed during Elizabeth’s reign in the production at Court not merely of pageants or spectacles, but of the regular drama.¹ In the reign of King James

¹ That scenic elaboration on the ‘house’ system, to which painted canvas scenery was essential, accompanied dramatic entertainments

the scenic machinery at Court rapidly developed at the hands of Inigo Jones, the great architect, and separate set scenes with devices for their rapid change came to replace the old methods of simultaneous multiplicity. The costume too, at any rate in the production of masques, ultimately satisfied every call of archaeological or historical, as well as of artistic propriety. The performances at Court always took place by night, and great attention was bestowed on the fighting of the royal hall by means of candles and torches. The emoluments | which were appointed for the players’ labours at Court were substantial.¹ For nearly twenty years Shakespeare and his intimate associates took a constant part in dramatic representations which were rendered in these favoured conditions.²

of all kinds at Queen Elizabeth’s Court is clearly proved by the extant records of the Master of the Revels Office (Feuillerat’s Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs, p. 66 n.). Sir Thomas Benger, Master of the Revels at j the opening of the Queen’s reign, gave, according to the documentary ' evidence, orders which his successors repeated ‘for the apparelling, disgyzinge, ffurnishing, ffitting, garnishing & ,orderly setting foorthe of men, woomen and children: in sundry Tragedies, playes, maskes | and sportes, with theier apte howses of paynted canvas & properties incident suche as mighte most lyvely expresse the effect of the histories plaied, &c.’ (Feuillerat’s Documents &c., 129). Elsewhere the evidence attests that ‘six playes . . . were lykewise throwghly apparelled, & furniture, flitted and garnished necessarely, & answerable to the matter, person and parte to be played: having also apt howses: made of can- vasse, fframed, ffashioned & paynted accordingly, as mighte best serve theier severall purposes. Together with sundry properties incident, ffashioned, paynted, garnished, and bestowed as the partyes them selves required and needed’ {ibid. 145). In 1573 40s. was paid ‘for canvas for the howses made for the players’ {ibid. 221) and in 1574-5 81. 155. for canvas ‘imployed upon the houses and properties made for the players’ {ibid,. 243).

¹ See pp. 299, 313 infra.

^s The activities of the players at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I are very amply attested. For the official organisation of the court performances and expenditure on the scenic arrangement during Queen Elizabeth s reign, see E. K. Chambers, Notes on the History of the Revels Office under the Tudors, 1906, and Feuillerat’s Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Elizabeth in Bang’s Materialien, Bd. xxi. (Louvain, 1908) and in Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs et la mise en scene d la cour d Elizabeth (Louvain, 1910). Court performances were formally registered in three independent repertories of original official documents, viz.: i. The Treasurer of the Chamber’s Original Accounts (of which

The royal example of requisitioning select performances of plays by professional actors at holiday seasons was followed intermittently by noblemen and by the benchers of the Inns of Court.¹ Of the welcome which was accorded to travelling companies at private mansions Shakespeare offers a graphic picture in the ‘Taming of the Shrew ’ and in ‘ Hamlet.’ In both pieces he laid under contribution his personal experience. Evidence, moreover, is at hand to show that his ‘Comedy of Errors’ was acted before benchers, students, and their guests (on Innocents’ Day, Dec. 28, 1594) in the hall of Gray’s Inn, and his ‘Twelfth Night’ in that of the Middle Temple on Candlemas Day, February 2, 1601-2. In such environment the manner of presentation was identical with that which was adopted at the Court.

abstracts were entered in the Declared Accounts of the Audit Office, such abstracts being duplicated in the Rolls of the Pipe Office); 2. The Acts of The Privy Council; and 3. The ‘original accounts’ or office books of the Masters of the Revels. The entries in the three series of records follow different formulse, and the information which is given in one series supplements that given in the others. Only the Declared Accounts which abstract the Original Accounts and are duplicated in the Pipe Rolls, are now extant in a complete state. The bulk of all these records are preserved at the Public Record Office, but some fragments have drifted into the British Museum (Harl. MSS. 1641, 1642, and 1644) and into the Bodleian Library (Raivl. MSS. A 239 and 240). A selection of the accessible data down to 1585 was first printed in George Chalmers’s An Apology for Believers, 1797, p. 394 seq., and this was reprinted with important additions in Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 360409, 423-9, 445-50. Peter Cunningham, in his Extracts from the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James the First (Shakespeare Society, 1842), confined his researches to the extant portions of the Treasurer of the Chamber’s Original Accounts, and to the Master of the Revel’s Office Books, between 1560 and 1619. Dr. C. W. Wallace, in The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 1912, pp. 199-225, prints most of the relevant documents in the Record Office respecting Court performances between 1558 and 1585. Mr. E. K. Chambers, in his ‘Court Performances before Queen Elizabeth’ (Mod. Lang. Review, 1907, pp. i-r3) and in his ‘Court Performances under James I’ (ib. 1909, pp. 153-66) valuably supplements tie information which is printed elsewhere, from the Declared Accounts and the Pipe Rolls between 1558 and 1616.

¹ Dramatic performances which were more or less elaborately staged, were usually provided for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth and James I on their visits to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But the pieces were commonly written specially by graduates for the occasion, and were acted by amateur students.

Methods of representation in the theatres of Shakespeare’s day, whether of the public or private type, had Methods of little in common with the complex splendours presenta- in vogue at Court. Yet the crudity of the public equipment which is usually imputed to the theatres. Elizabethan theatre has been much exaggerated. It was only in its first infancy that the Elizabethan stage showed that poverty of scenic machinery which has been erroneously assigned to it through the whole of the Shakespearean era. The rude traditions of the innyard, the earliest public home of the drama, were not eliminated quickly, and there was never any attempt to emulate the luxurious Court fashions, but there were many indications during Shakespeare’s lifetime of a steady development of scenic or spectacular appliances in professional quarters. The ‘private’ playhouse of which the Blackfriars was the most successful example mainly differed from the public theatre in the enhanced comfort which it assured the playgoer, and in the more select audience which the slightly higher prices of admission encouraged. The substantial roof covering all parts of the house gave the ‘private’ theatre an advantage over the ‘public’ theatre, the area of which was open to the sky, and the innovation of artificial lighting proved a complementary, attraction. The_; scenic apparatus and accessories of the ‘private’ theatre may have been more abundant and more refined than in the ‘public’ theatre. But there was no variation in principle and it was for the public theatres that most of Shakespeare’s work as both actor and dramatist was done. In the result the scenic standards with which he was familiar outside the precincts of the Court fell far short of the elaboration which flourished there, but they ultimately satisfied the more modest calls of scenic illusion. Scenic spectacle invaded the regular playhouse at a much later date. In the Shakespearean theatre the equipment and machinery were always simple enough to throw, on the actor a heavier responsibility than any which!

his successors knew. The dramatic 'effect owed almost everything to his intonation and gesture. The available evidence credits Elizabethan representations with making a profound impression on the audience. The fact bears signal tribute to the histrionic efficiency of the profession when it counted Shakespeare among its members.

The Elizabethan public theatres were usually of octagonal or circular shape. In their leading,features they followed an uniform structural plan, but there Thestruc- were many variations in detail, which perplex turaipian. counsel. The area or pit was at the disposition of the ‘groundlings’ who crowded round three sides of the projecting stage. Their part of the building which was open to the sky was without seats. The charge for admission there was one penny. Beneath a narrow circular roof of thatch three galleries, a development of the balconies of the quadrangular innyards, encircled the auditorium; the two lower ones were partly divided into boxes or rooms while the uppermost gallery was unpartitioned. The cost of entry to the galleries ranged from twopence in the highest tier to half a crown in the lowest. Seats or cushions were to be hired at a small additional fee. Foreign visitors to the Globe were emphatic in acknowledgment that from all parts of the house there was a full view of the stage.¹ A small section of the audience was also accommodated in some theatres in less convenient quarters. In many houses visitors were allowed to occupy seats on the stage.² Sometimes expensive ‘rooms’ or ‘boxes’ were provided in an elevated

¹ A foreign visitor’s manuscript diary, now in the Vatican, describes a visit to the Globe on Monday, July 3, 1600. His words ran ‘ Audivimus Comoediam Anglicam; theatrum ad morem antiquorum Romanorum constructum ex lignis, ita formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores commodissime singula videre possint.’ {The Times, April 4, 1914.)

² Cf. Thomas Dekker, Guls Hornbook, 1609, chap. vi. (‘How a Gallant . should behave himself in a Playhouse’): ‘Whether therefore the gatherers [i.e. the money-takers] of the publique or private playhouses stand to receive the aftemoones rent, let our Gallant (having paid it) presently advance himselfe up to the Throne of the stage on the very Rushes where the Comedy is to dance. ... By sitting on the stage you may have a good stool for sixpence.’

gallery overlooking the back of the stage. It has been estimated that the Globe Theatre held some 1200 spectators, and the Blackfriars half that number.¹ ^

The stage was a rough development of the old improvised raised platform of the innyard. It ran far into the auditorium so that the actors often spoke in The stage. _{the
centre 0}f _th_e house, with the audience of

the arena well-nigh encircling them. There was no front curtain or proscenium arch. The wall which closed the stage at'the rear had two short and slightly projecting wings, each of which was pierced by a door opening sideways on the boards while a third door in the back wall directly faced the auditorium. Through one or other of the three doors the actors made their entrances and exits and thence they marched to the' front of the platform. Impinging on the backward limit of the stage was the ‘tiring house’ (‘mimorum aedes’) which was commonly of two stories. There the actors had their dressing-rooms.

¹ Cf. C. W. Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 15971603, 1908,* pp. 49 seq. The chief pieces of documentary evidence as to the internal structure of the Elizabethan theatres are the detailed building contracts for the erection of the Fortune Theatre in 1600 after the plan of the Globe and of the Hope Theatre in 1613 after the plan of the Swan. Both are at Dulwich and were first printed by Malone (Variorum, iii. 338 seq.) and more recently in Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, pp. 4 seq. and 19 seq. A Dutchman John De Witt visiting London in 1596 made a drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre, a copy at which is extant in the library at Utrecht. A short description in Latin is appended. De Witt’s sketch is of great interest, not merely from its size and completeness, but as being the only strictly contemporary picture of the interior of a sixteenth century playhouse which has yet come to light. At the same time it is difficult to reconcile De Witt’s sketch with the other extant information. He may have depended for his detail on memory. His statement that the Swan Theatre held 3000 persons ‘in sedilibus’ (i.e. in the seated galleries apart from the arena) would seem to be an exaggeration (see Zur Kenntniss der Altenglischen Biihne von Karl Theodor Gaedertz. Mit der ersten authentischen innern Ansicht des Schwan-Theaters in London, Bremen, 1888). Three later pictorial representations of a seventeenth-century stage are known; all are of small size and they differ in detail from De Witt and from one another they appear respectively on the title-pages of William Alabaster’s Roxana (1632), of Nathaniel Richards’s Tragedy of MessaMna (1640), and of The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1672). The last is described as the stage of the Red Bull Theatre. The theatres shown oil the two other seventeenth-century engravings are not named.

From the first story above the central stage door there usually projected a narrow balcony forming an elevated or upper stage overhanging the back of the great platform and leaving the two side doors free. From this balcony the actdrs spoke (‘ aloft ’ or ‘ above ’) when occasion required it to those below. From such an elevation Juliet addressed R9H160 in the balcony scene, and the citizens of Angers (in ‘King John’) or of Harfleur (in ‘Henry V’) held colloquy from their ramparts with the English besiegers. At times room was also found in the balcony for musicians or indeed for a limited number of spectators. From the fore-edge of the balcony there hung sliding ‘ arras’ curtains, technically known as ‘traverses.’ The background which these curtains formed when they were drawn together, gave the stage one of its most distinctive features. The recess beyond the ‘traverses’ served, when they were drawn back, as an interior which stage directions often designated as ‘within.’ It was in this fashion that a cave, an arbour, or a bedchamber was commonly presented. In ‘ Romeo and Juliet ’ (v. iii.) the space exposed to view behind the curtains was the tomb of the Capulets; in ‘Timon of Athens’ and in ‘Cymbeline’ it formed a cave; in ‘The Tempest’ it was Prospero’s cell.¹

¹ Much special study has heen hestowed of late years hy students in England, America, France, and Germany on the shape and appointments of the Elizabethan stage as well as on the methods of Elizabethan representation. The variations in practice at different theatres have occasioned controversy. The minute detail which recent writers have recovered from contemporary documents or from printed literature far exceeds that which their predecessors accumulated.^ Yet the earlier researches of Malone, J. P. Collier and F. G. Fleay illuminated most of the broad issues and remain of value, in spite of errors which later writers have corrected. Perhaps the most important of the numerous recent expositions of the structure and methods of the Elizabethan theatre are G. F. Reynolds’s Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging, Chicago, 1905; William Creizenach’s Die Schauspiele der Englischen KomSdianten, Berlin and Stuttgart (n.d.); Richard Wegener’s Die Biihnmeinrichtung des Shakespeareschen Theaters nach der zeitgenossischen Dramen, Halle, 1907; Dr. Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, Nebraska, 1908; Mr. William Archer’s article ‘The Elizabethan Stage’ in the Quarterly Review, 1908 j Victor E. Albright’s The Skakesperian

A slanting canopy of thatch was fixed high above the' stage; technically known as ‘the shadow’ or ‘the heavens,’ it protected the actors from the elements, to which the spectators in the arena were exposed. The tapestry hangings were suspended from this covering, at some height from the stage, but well within view of the audience. When tragedies were performed, the hangings were of black. ‘ Hung be the heavens with black ’ — the opening words of the First Part of ‘ Henry VI ’ — had ^ in theatrical terminology a technical significance.¹ The platform stage was fitted with trap-doors from which ghosts and spirits ascended or descended. Thunder was simulated and guns were fired from apartments in the ‘ tiring house ’ behind or above the stage. It was at a performance of ‘Henry VIII’ ‘that certain cannons being shot off at the King’s entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light on the thatch’ of the stage roof, ‘and so caused a fire, which demolished the theatre.’² The set scenery or ‘painted canvas’ which was familiar at Court was unknown to the Elizabethan theatre; but there were abundant endeavours to supplement the scenic illusion of the ‘traverses’ by a lavish use of properties. Rocks, tombs, and trees (made of canvas and pasteboard), thrones, tables, chairs, and beds were among a hundred articles which were in constant request. The name of the place in which the author located his scene was often inscribed on a board exhibited on the stage, or was placarded above one or other of the side-doorways of entry and exit. Sir Philip Sidney, in the pre-Shake- spearean days of the Elizabethan theatre, made merry over the embarrassments which the spectators suffered¹ by such notifications of dramatic topography. He condoled, too, with the playgoer whose imagination was left to create on the bare platform a garden, a rocky coast,

Stage, New York, 1909; and Mr. W. J. Lawrence’s The Elizabethan Playhouse and other Studies, two series, 1912-13.

Cf. ‘Black stage for tragedies and murders fell.’ Lucrece, 1. 766. ■

¹ See p. 445 infra. .1

and a battle-field in quick succession.¹ But the use alike of properties and of the inner curtains greatly facilitated scenic illusion on the public stage after Sidney’s time, and although his criticism never lost all its point, it is not literally applicable to the theatrical production of Shakespeare’s prime.²

Costume on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages was somewhat in advance of the scenic standards. There’ was always opportunity for the exercise of artistic ingenuity in the case of fanciful characters like ‘Rumour painted full of tongues’ in the Second Part of ‘Henry IV,’ or ‘certain reapers properly habited’ in the masque of ‘The Tempest.’ But the actors in normal roles wore the ordinary costumes of the day without precise reference to the period or place of action. Ancient Greeks and Romans were attired in doublet arid hose, or, if they were soldiers, in Tudor armour. The contents of the theatrical wardrobe were often of rich material and in the height of current fashion. Many foreign _Costume visitors to London recorded in their diaries '

their admiration of the splendour of the leading actors’ costume.³ False hair and beards, crowns and sceptres,

¹ Sidney’s Apology for Poetrie, ed. by E. S. Shuckburgh, p. 52.

² Only after the Restoration in 1660 did the public theatres adopt

the curtain in front of the stage and the changeable scenic cloth at the

back. Both devices were employed in dramatic performances at James

I’s court. The crudity of the scenic apparatus on the popular stage in

James I and Charles I’s reign has been unduly emphasised. Richard Flecknoe in his Short Discourse of the English 'Stage published in 1664 generalised rather too sweepingly when he wrote ‘The theatres of former times had no other scenes or decorations of the stage, but only old tapestry and the stage strewd with rushes.’ (Hazlitt, English Drama, Documents and Treatises, p. 280.) On the other hand tapestry hangings, if the illustrations in Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare (1709) are to be trusted, still occasionally formed in the early eighteenth century

the stage background of Shakespearean productions, in spite of the almost universal adoption of painted scenic cloths.

⁸ German writers seem to have measured fine costume by the standards of magnificence which they reckoned characteristic of English actors. Well-dressed Germans were said to ‘strut along like the English comedians in the_ theatres’ (J. O. Variscus, Ethnographia Mundi, pars iv, Geldtklage, Magdeburg, 1614, p. 472, cited in Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany, p. cxxxvi.)

mitres and croziers, armour, helmets, shields, vizors, and weapons of war, hoods, bands, and cassocks, were freely employed to indicate differences of age, rank, or profession. Towards the close of Shakespeare’s career, plays on English history were elaborately ‘costumed.’ In the, summer of 16x3 ‘Henry VIII’ ‘was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even ' to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like.’¹ A very notable distinction between Elizabethan and modern modes of theatrical representations was the com- Absence of pkte absence of women actors from the Eliza- women bethan stage. All female roles were, until the Restoration, assumed in public theatres by men or boys. Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women’s parts when he makes Rosalind say laughingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to ‘As You Like It’ ‘If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that please me.’ Similarly, in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (v. ii. 216-220), Cleopatra on her downfall laments

the quick comedians Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.

Men taking women’s parts seem to have worn masks. In ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Flute is bidden (1. ii. 52) by Quince play Thisbe ‘in a mask’ because he has a beard coming. It is clear that during Shakespeare’s professional career boys or young men rendered female roles effectively and without serious injury to the dramatist’s conceptions. ^ Although age was always telling on masculine proficiency in women’s parts and it was never easy to conceal the inherent incongruity of the habit, the prejudice against the presence of women on the public stage faded slowly. It did not receive its death-blow till December 8,1660, when at a new theatre in Clare Market

¹ See p. 443 infra.

a prologue announced the first appearance of women on the stage and intimated that the rSle of Desdemona was no longer to be entrusted to a petticoated page.¹

Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning of the performance. The trumpeter was stationed within a lofty open turret overlooking the stage. No programmes were distributed among the audience. The name of the day’s play was placarded beforehand on posts in the street. Such advertisements were called ‘the players’ ‘bills,’ and a similar ‘bill’ was paraded on the stage at the opening of the performance. Musical diversion was provided on a more or less ample scale. A band of musicians stood either on the stage or in a neighbouring box or ‘room.’ They not merely accompanied incidental songs or dances, and sounded drum and trumpet in military episodes, but they provided instrumental interludes between the acts.² The scenes of each act

¹ See pp. 600-1 infra. The prologue, which was by the hack poetThomas Jordan, sufficiently exposed the demerits of the old custom:

I come unknown to any of the rest,

To tell you news: I saw the lady drest:

The woman plays to-day; mistake me not,

No man in gown, or page in petticoat.

In this reforming age

We have intents to civilize the stage.

Our women are defective and so siz’d

You’d think they were some of the guard disguis’d.

For to speak truth, men act, that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen;

With bone so large, and nerve so incompliant,

When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.

The ancient practice of entrusting women’s parts to men survived in the theatres of Rome till the end of the eighteenth century, and Goethe who was there in r786 and 1787 describes the highly favourable impression which that histrionic method left on him, and seeks somewhat paradoxically to justify it as satisfying the aesthetic aims of imitation (Travels in Italy, Bohn’s Libr. 1885, pp. 567-571). On the other hand, Montesquieu reports on his visit to England in 1730 how he heard Lord Chesterfield explain to Queen Caroline that the regrettable absence of women from the Elizabethan stage accounted for the coarseness and inadequacy of Shakespeare’s female characterisation (Montesquieu, (Euvres Completes, ed. Laboulaye, 1879, vii. 484). _

² See G. H. Cowling, Music on the Shakespearean Stage, Cambridge, 1913; and W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, 1st ser. 1912, ch. iv.

would seem to have followed one another without any longer pause than was required by the exits and entries of the actors. The absence of a front curtain might well leave an audience in some uncertainty as to the point at which a scene or act ended. In blank verse dramas a rhyming couplet at the end of a scene often gave the needful cue, or the last speaker openly stated that he and the other actors were withdrawing.¹

In Shakespeare’s early days the public theatres were open on Sundays as well as on week-days; but the Puritan outcry gradually forced the actors to leave the stage untenanted on the Lord’s Day. In the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Sunday performances were forbidden by the Privy Council on pain of imprisonment, but it was only during her successor’s reign that they ceased altogether; they were not forbidden by statute till 1628 (3 Car. I, c. 1) and the example of the Court which favoured dramatic entertainment on the Sabbath always challenged the popular religious scruple. More effective and more embarrassing to the players was the Privy Council’s prohibition of performances during the season of Lent, and ‘likewise at such time and times as any extraordinary sickness or infection of disease shall appear to be in or about the city.’² The announcement of thirty deaths a week of the plague was held to warrant the closing of the theatres until the rate of mortality fell below that figure.³ At the public theatres the perform

¹ For example, in Shakespeare’s Tempest the last words of nearly every scene are to such effect; cf. ‘Come, follow’ (1. ii.), ‘Go safely on’ (11. i.), ‘Follow, I pray you’ (in. iii.), and ‘Follow and do me service’ (iv. i.). Similarly in tragedies the closing words of the text often categorically direct the removal of the dead heroes; cf. Hamlet, v. iii. 393, ‘Take up the bodies,’ and Coriolanus, v. vi. 148, ‘Take him [i.e. the dead hero] up.’ Hotspur, when slain, in 1 Henry IV, is carried off on Falstaff’s back.

² Cf. Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent, vol. xxx. 15991600, p. 397; see Earle’s Microcosmographie xxiii. (‘A Player’): ‘Lent is more damage to him [i.e. the player] than the butcher’ (the sale of meat being forbidden during Lent).

³ See Privy Council Warrant, April 9, 1604, in Henslowe Papers-, ed. Greg, 1907, p. 61; and cf. Middleton’s Your Five Gallants, licensed

ances usually began at two o’clock in winter and three o’clock in the summer and they lasted from two to three hours.¹ No artificial light was admitted, unless the text of the play prescribed the use of a lantern or a candle on the stage.

However important the difference between the organisation of the public theatres in Shakespeare’s day and our own, many professional customs which fell Provincial within his experience still survive without much ^tours- change. The practice of touring in the provinces was followed in Queen Elizabeth’s and James I’s reigns with a frequency which subsequent ages scarcely excelled. The chief actors rode on horseback, while their properties were carried in wagons. The less prosperous companies which were colloquially distinguished by the epithet ‘strolling’ avoided London altogether and only sought the suffrages of provincial audiences. But no companies with headquarters in London' remained there through the summer or autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could safely reckon on at least one visit of actors from the capital between May and October. The compulsory closing of the London theatres during the ever-recurrent outbreaks of plague or lack of sufficient theatrical accommodation in the capital at times drove thriving London actors into the provinces at other seasons than summer and autumn. Now and then the London companies were on tour in mid-winter. Many records of the Elizabethan actors’ provincial visits figure in municipal archives of the

March 22, 1608: "Tis e’en as uncertain as playing, now up and now down; for if the hill do rise to above thirty, here’s no place for players.’ The prohibiting rate of mortality was raised to 40 in 1620.

¹ When the- Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon petitioned the Lord Mayor on Oct. 8, 1594, ^to permit Shakespeare’s company to perform during the winter at the ‘Crosskeys’ in Gracechurch Street, it was stated that the performances would ‘hegin at two and have done hetweene fower and five’ (Halliwell’s Illustrations, 32). For acting purposes the author’s text was often drastically abbreviated, so as to bring the performance within the two hours limit which Shakespeare twice lightly mentions — in prologues to Romeo and Juliet (line 12) and to Henry VIII (line 13).

period. The local records have not yet been quite exhaustively searched but the numerous entries which have come to light attest the wide range of the players’ circuits. Shakespeare’s company, whose experience is typical of that of the other London companies of the time, performed in thirty-one towns outside the metropolis during the twenty-seven years between 1587 and 1614, and the separate visits reached, as far as is known, a total of eighty. The itinerary varied in duration and direction from year to year. In 1593 Shakespeare and his fellow players were seen at eight provincial cities and in 1606 at six. They would appear to have contented themselves with a single visit in 1590 (to Faversham), in 1591 (to Cambridge), in 1602 (to Ipswich), and in 1611 (to Shrewsbury). Their route never took them far north; they never passed beyond York, which they visited twice. But in all parts of the southern half of the kingdom they were more or less familiar figures. To each of the cities Coventry and Oxford they paid eight visits and to Bath six. To Marlborough, Shrewsbury and Dover they went five times, and to Cambridge four times. Gloucester, Leicester, Ipswich and Maidstone come next in the provincial scale of favour with three visits apiece. Apparently Southampton, Chester, Nottingham, Folkestone, Exeter, Hythe, Saffron Walden, Rye, Plymouth, and Chelmsford did not invite the company’s return after a first experience, nor did Canterbury, Bristol, Barnstaple, Norwich, York, New Romney, Faversham, and Winchester after a second.¹

¹ In English Dramatic Companies 1558-1642 (1910) Mr. J. Tucker Murray has carefully, though not exhaustively, investigated the actors' tours of the period. His work supersedes, however, Halliwell-PhiUipps’s Visits of Shakespeare’s Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England (privately printed, 1887). Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors mentions performances by unidentified companies at Lynn in Norfolk and at Perrin in Cornwall. These are not noticed by Mr. Murray, who also overlooks visits of Shakespeare’s company to Oxford and Maidstone in 1593, to Cambridge in 1594, and to Nottingham in 1615. (See F. S. Boas’s University Drama, p. 226, and his ‘Hamlet in Oxford,’ Fortnightly Reviewj August 1913; Cooper’s Annals of Cambridge, ii. 538; Nottingham Records, iv. 328, and Maidstone Cham-

Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his Sonnets have been reasonably interpreted as reminiscences of early acting tours. It is clear that he had ample opportunities of first-hand observation of his native land. But it has often been argued Scottish that his journeys passed beyond the limits of ^tours- England. It has been repeatedly urged that Shakespeare’s company visited Scotland and that he went with it.¹ In November 1599 English actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin Slater,² and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the King.³

berlains’ Accounts, MS. notes kindly communicated by Miss Katharine Martin.) The following seems to have been the itinerary of Shakespeare’s company year by year while he was associated with it:

Dover,

Bristol,

1587 Dover, Canterbury, Oxford,

Marlborough, Southampton, Exeter, Bath, Gloucester,' Stratford-on-Avon,

Lathom House, Lancs.,

Coventry (twice), Leicester, Maidstone, and Norwich.

1588 Dover, Plymouth, Bath,

Gloucester, York, Coventry, Norwich, Ipswich,

Cambridge.

1590 Faversham.

1591 Cambridge.

1592 Canterbury, Bath, Glouces

ter and Coventry.

1593 Chelmsford, Bristol, Bath,

Shrewsbury, Chester,

York, Maidstone and Oxford.

rS94 Coventry, Cambridge, Leicester, Winchester, Marlborough.

¹ Cf. Knight’s Life of Shakespeare (1843), p. 41; Fleay, Stage, pp. 135-6.

² Martin Slater (often known as Martin) was both an actor and dramatist. From rS94 to 1597 he was a member of the Admiral’s Company, and was subsequently from 1605 to 1625 manager of a subsidiary travelling company, under the patronage of Queen Anne. Cf. Dr. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. 383.

³ The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so

1597 Faversham, Rye, Marlborough,

Bath.

1602 Ipswich.

1603 Shrewsbury, Coventry.

1604 Bath, Oxford, Mortlake.

1605 Barnstaple, Oxford.

1606 Marlborough, Oxford, Leices

ter, Saffron Walden, Dover, Maidstone. r6o7 Barnstaple, Oxford, Cambridge.

r6o8 Marlborough, Coventry. r6o9 Ipswich, Hythe, New Rom- ney.

1610 Dover, Oxford, Shrewsbury.

1611 Shrewsbury.

1612 New Romney, Winchester.

1613 Folkestone, Oxford, Shrews

bury. r6r4 Coventry. i6rs Nottingham.

Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earlier. Shakespeare’s company never included Martin Slater. Fletcher repeated the Scottish visit in October 1601.¹ There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare’s company. In like manner, Shakespeare’s accurate reference in ‘Macbeth’ to the ‘nimble’ but ‘ sweet ’ climate of Inverness ² and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience ; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been, read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and at the theatres after James I’s accession.

A few English actors in Shakespeare’s day combined from time to time to make professional tours through foreign lands, where Court society invariably gave them a hospitable reception. In Denmark, Germany,

marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The English agent, George Nicholson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote : ‘The four Sessions of this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletpher and Mertyn (i.e. Martyn), with their company), and not knowing the King’s ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted (that) their flocks (yvere) to forbear and not topome to or haunt profane games, sports, or plays.’ Thereupon the King summoned the sessions before him in Council and threatened them with the full rigour of the law. Obdurate at first, the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their hostile references to the actors. Finally, Nicholson adds, ‘The King this day by proclamation with sound of trumpet hath commanded the players liberty to play, and forbidden their hinder or impeachment therein.’ (MS. State Papers Dom. Scotland, P.R.O. vol. lxv. No. 64.)

¹ Fleay, Stage, pp. 126-44. On returning to England Fletcher seems to have given a performance at Ipswich on May 30, 1602, and to have irresponsibly called himself and his companions ‘His Majesty’s Players.’ Cf.'Murray’s English Dramatic Companies, i. 104 n.

² Cf. Duncan’s speech (on arriving at Macbeth’s castle of Inverness):

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air ^v

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.

Banquo. This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,

By his lov’d mansionry, that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here. (‘Macbeth,’ r. vi. 1-6.)

Austria, Holland, and France many dramatic performances were given at royal palaces or in public places by English actors between 1580 and 1630. actors on The foreign programmes included tragedies or jfe c°ⁿ- comedies which had proved their popularity ' on the London stage, together with' more or less extemporized interludes of boisterous farce. Some of Shakespeare’s plays found early admission to the foreign repertories. At the outset the English language was alone employed, although in Germany a native comedian was commonly associated with the English players and he spoke his part in his own tongue. At a later period the English actors in Germany ventured on crude German translations of their repertory.¹ German-speaking audiences proved the most enthusiastic of all foreign clients, and the towns most frequently visited were Frankfort- on-the-Main, Strasburg, Nuremberg, Cassel, and Augsburg. Before Shakespeare’s life ended, English actors' had gone on professional missions in German-speaking countries as far East as Konigsberg and Ortelsburg and as far South as Munich and Graz.²

That Shakespeare joined any of these foreign expedi-

¹ There was published in 1620 sine loco (apparently at Leipzig) a volume entitled Engeliscke Comedien md Tragedien containing German renderings of ten English plays and five interludes which had been lately acted by English companies in Germany. The collection included crude versions of Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. A second edition appeared in 1624 and a second volume (‘ander theil’)—Engelische Comodien— followed in 1630 supplying eight further plays, none of which can be identified with extant English pieces. In the library at Dresden is a rough German translation in manuscript of the first quarto of Hamlet (‘Der bestrafte Brudermord ’), which is clearly of very early origin. Early German manuscript renderings of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet are also eitant. (Cf. Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany, 1865.)

² Thomas Heywood in his Apology for -Actors, 1612 (Shakespeare Soc. 1841), mentions how in former years Lord Leicester’s company of English comedians was entertained at the court of Denmark (p. 40), how at Amsterdam English actors had lately performed before the burghers and the chief inhabitants (p. 58), and how at the time of writing the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Cardinal at Bruxelles each had in their pay a company of English comedians (p. 60). Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865; E. Herz’s Englische Schauspieler und engUsches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutsck-

tions is improbable. Few actors of repute at home took part in them; the majority of the foreign performers never reached the first rank. Many lists of those who joined in the tours are extant, and Shakespeare’s name appears in none of them. It would seem, moreover, that only on two occasions, and both before Shakespeare joined the theatrical profession, did members of his own company visit the Continent.¹

It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the Continent of Europe in either a private or a proShake fessional capacity. He repeatedly ridicules the speareand craze for foreign travel.² To Italy, it is true, ^Italy' and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment. But his Italian scenes lack the intimate detail which would attest a first-hand experience of the country. The presence of barges on the waterways of northern Italy was common enough partially to justify the voyage of Valen-

land, Hamburg, 1903; H. Maas’s ‘Aussere Geschichte der Englischen Theatertruppen in dem Zeitraum von 1559 bis 1642 ’ (Bang’s Materialien, vol. xix. Louvain, 1907); J. Bolte’s ‘Englische Komodianten in Dane- mark und Schweden’ (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiv. p. 99, 1888); and his ‘Englische Komodianten in Munster und Ulm’ {ibid. xxxvi. p. 273, 1900); K. Trautmann’s ‘Englische Komodianten in Numberg, 15931648’ {Archiv, vols. xiv. and xv.); Meissner, Die englischen Comodiankn zur Zeit Shakespeare’s in Oeslerreich, Vienna, 1884; Jon Stefansson on ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’ in Contemporary Review, Jan. 1896; and M. Jusserand’s Shakespeare in France, 1899, pp. 50 seq.

¹ In 1585 and 1586 a detachment of Lord Leicester’s servants made tours through Germany, which were extended to the Danish Court at Elsinore. The leader was the comic actor, William Kemp, who was subsequently to become for a time a prominent colleague of Shakespeare. In the closing years of the sixteenth century the Earl of Worcester’s company chiefly supplied the English actors who undertook expeditions on the European Continent. The Englishmen who won foreign histrionic fame early in the seventeenth century were rarely known at home.

² Cf. As You Like It, iv. i. 22 seq. (Rosalind loq.), ‘Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: look you lisp and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.’

tine by ‘ship’ from Verona to Milan (‘Two Gent.’ 1. i. 71). But Prospero’s embarkation in ‘The Tempest’ on an ocean ship at the gates of Milan (1. ii. 129-144) renders it difficult to assume that the dramatist gathered his Italian knowledge from personal observation.¹ He doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled friends, or to books the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising.

. The publisher Chettle wrote in 1592 that Shakespeare was ‘exelent in the qualitie² he professes,’ and the old actor William Bees ton asserted in the next century that Shakespeare ‘did act exceedingly well.’³ But the rdles in which he distinguished himself are imper- _Shake. fectly recorded. Few surviving documents speare’s refer specifically to performances by him. At ^riles' Christmas 1594 he joined the popular actors William Kemp, the chief comedian of the day, who had lately created Peter in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor, who had lately created Richard III, in ‘ two several comedies or interludes ’ which were acted on St. Stephen’s Day and on Innocents’ Day (December 26 and 28) at Greenwich Palace before the Queen. The three players received in accordance with the accepted tariff ‘ xiij/i. vjs. viijJ. and by waye of her Majesties reward vjli. xiijs. iiijd. in all xxfc’.’⁴ Neither plays nor parts are mentioned.

¹ Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq- Dr. Gregor Sarrazin in a series of well-informed papers generally entitled Neue italienische Skizzen zu Shakespeare (in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 189s, igoo, 1903, 1906), argues in favour of Shakespeare’s personal experience of Italian travel, and his view is ably supported by Sir Edward Sullivan in ‘ Shakespeare and the Waterways of North Italy’ in Nineteenth Century, 1908, ii. 215 seq. But the absence of any direct confirmation of an Italian visit leaves Dr. Sarrazin’s and Sir Edward’s arguments very shadowy.

² ‘Quality’ in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the actor’s ‘profession.’

* Aubrey’s Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226.

⁴ The entry figures in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Royal Chamber (Pipe Office Declared Accounts, vol. 542, fol. 207b, Public Record Office) which are the chief available records of the acting companies’ performances at Court. Mention is sometimes made of the plays produced, but the parts assumed by professional actors at Court

Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list of those who took part in 1598 in the original production by the Lord Chamberlain’s servants, apparently - at ‘The Curtain,’ of Ben Jonson’s earliest and best-known comedy ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ Five years later, in 1603, a second play by Ben Jonson, his tragedy of ‘Sejanus,’ was first produced at the ‘Globe’ by Shakespeare’s company, then known as the King’s servants. Shakespeare , was again one of the interpreters. In the original cast of this play the actor’s names are arranged in two columns, and Shakespeare’s name heads the second column, standing parallel with Burbage’s, which heads the first.¹ The lists of actors in Ben Jonson’s plays fail to state the character allotted to each actor; but it is reasonably claimed that in ‘Every Man in his Humour’ Shakespeare filled the role of ‘Kno’well an old gende-. man.’² John Davies of Hereford noted that he ‘played some kingly parts in sport.’³ One of Shakespeare’s younger brothers, presumably Gilbert, often came (wrote Oldys) to London in his younger days to see his brother act in his own plays; and in his old age, and with failing memory, he recalled his brother’s performance of Adam in ‘As You Like It’ when the dramatist ‘wore a long beard.’⁴ Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, identified only one of Shakespeare’s parts — ‘the Ghost in his own “Hamlet.”’ He declared his assumption of that character to be ‘the top of his performance.’ Until the close of Shakespeare’s career his

are never stated. It is very rare, as in the present instance, to find the actors in the royal presence noticed individually. No name is usually found save that of the manager or assistant-manager to whom the royal fee was paid. (Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121;. Mrs. Stopes in Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq.)

¹ The date of the first performance with the lists of the original actors of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour and of his Sejanus is given in Jonson’s works, 1616, fol. The first quarto editions of Every Man in his Humour (1598) and of Sejanus (1605) omit these particulars.

² In the first edition Jonson gave his characters Italian names and old Kno’well was there called Lorenzo di Pazzi senior.

³ Scourge 0} Folly, r6io, epigr. 159. .

’ James Yeowell’sMemoir ofWittiamOldys (1:862)^.46: cf.p. 460infra.

company was frequently summoned to act at Court, and it is clear that he regularly accompanied them. The plays which he and his colleagues produced before his spvereign in his lifetime included his own pieces ‘ Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ ‘ 1 Henry IV,’ ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ ‘Henry V,’ ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ and ‘The Tempest.’ It may be presumed that in all these dramas some role wa5 allotted him. In the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Works’ his name heads the prefatory list ‘of the principall actors in all'these playes.’ That Shakespeare chafed under some of the conditions of the actors’ calling is commonly inferred from the ‘Sonnets.’ There he reproaches himself with becoming ‘a motley to the view’ (ex. .2), and chides fortune for having provided for his livelihood nothing better than public means that public manners breed, whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5). If such regrets are to be literally or personally interpreted, they only reflected an evanescent mood. His interest In whatever touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active. All the technicalities of the theatre were familiar to him.' He was a keen critic of actors’ elocution, and in ‘Hamlet ’ shrewdly denounced their common failings, while he clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improvement. As a shareholder in the two chief playhouses of his time,¹ he long studied at close quarters the practical organisation of theatrical effort. His highest ambitions lay, it is true, elsewhere than in acting or theatrical management, and at an early period of his theatrical career he undertook, with triumphant success, the labours of a playwright. It was in dramatic poetry that his genius found its goal. But he pursued the profession of an actor and fulfilled all the obligations of a theatrical shareholder loyally and uninterruptedly until very near the date of his death.

¹ See pp. 300 seq. infra.

The English drama as an artistic or poetic branch of literature developed with magical rapidity. It had not Pre-Eliza- P^assed the stage of infancy when Shakespeare bethan left Stratford-on-Avon for London, and within drama. three decades the unmatched strength of its maturity was spent. The Middle Ages were fertile in ‘miracles’ and ‘mysteries’ which were embryonic dramatisations of the Scriptural narrative or legends of Saints. Late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century there flourished ‘moralities’ or moral plays where allegorical figures interpreted more or less dramatically the significance of virtues or vices. But these rudimentary efforts lacked the sustained plot, the portrayal of character, the distinctive expression and the other genuine elements of dramatic art. No very material change was effected in the middle of the sixteenth century by the current vogue of the interlude — an offshoot of the morality. There the allegorical machinery of the morality was superseded by meagre sketches of men and women, presenting in a crude dramatic fashion and without the figurative intention of the morality a more or less farcical anecdote of social life. The drama to which Shakespeare devoted his genius owed no substantial debt to any of these dramatic experiments, and all were nearing extinction when he came of age. Such opportunities as he enjoyed of observing them in boyhood left small impression on his dramatic work.¹

¹ Mirade and mystery plays were occasionally performed in provincial places till the close of the sixteenth century. The Warwickshire town

90 ■

Although in its development Elizabethan drama assimilated an abundance of the national spirit, it can claim no strictly English parentage. It traces its . origin to the regular tragedy and comedy of c!fEiiza-^h classical invention which flourished at Athens kethan and bred imitation at Rome. .Elizabethan ’ drama openly acknowledged its descent from Plautus and Seneca, types respectively pf dramatic levity and dramatic seriousness, to which, according to Polonius, all drama, as he knew it, finally conformed.¹ An English adaptation of a comedy by Plautus and an English tragedy on the Senecan model begot the English strain of drama which Shakespeare glorified. The schoolmaster Nicholas Udall’s farcical ‘Ralph Roister Doister’ (1540), a free English version of the Plautine comedy of ‘Miles Gloriosus,’ and the first attempt of two young barristers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, to give Senecan tragedy an English dress in their play of ‘Gorboduc’ (1561) are the starting-points of dramatic art in this country. The primal English comedy, which was in doggerel rhyme, was acted at Eton College, and the primal English tragedy, which was in blank verse, was produced in the Hall of the Middle Temple. It was in cultured circles that the new and fruitful dramatic movement drew its first breath.

In the immediate succession of Elizabethan drama the foreign mould remained undisguised. During 1566 the examples set by ‘ Ralph Roister Doister ’ and ‘ Gorboduc ’ were followed in a second comedy and a second tragedy,

of Coventry remained an active centre for this shape of dramatic energy until about 1575. At York, at Newcastle, at Chester, at Beverley, the representation of ‘miracles’ or ‘mysteries’ continued some years longer (E. K. Chambers, Medieval Stage; Pollard, English Miracle Plays, 1909 ed., p. lix). But the sacred drama, in spite of some endeavours to continue its life, was reckoned by the Elizabethans a relic of the past. The morality play with its ethical scheme of personification, and the ‘interlude’ with its crude farcical situations, were of later birth than the miracle or mystery, and although they were shorter-lived, absorbed much literary industry through the first stages of Shakespeare’s career.

¹ Hamlet, n. ii. 395-6.

both from the pen of George Gascoigne, who, after education at Cambridge, became a member of parliament and subsequently engaged in military service abroad; both pieces were produced in the Hall of Gray’s Inn.- Gascoigne’s comedy, the ‘Supposes,’ which was in prose and developed a slender romantic intrigue, was a translation from the Italian of Ariosto, whose dramatic work was itself of classical inspiration. Gasc°ig^ne’s tragedy, of ‘Jocasta,’ which like ‘Gorboduc’ was in blank verse, betrayed more directly its classical affinities. It was an adaptation from the ‘Phcenissae’ of Euripides, and was scarcely the less faithful to its statuesque original because the English adapter depended on an intermediary Italian version by the well-known Lodovico Dolce.

Subsequent dramatic experiments in England showed impatience of classical models in spite of the parental debt. The history of the nascent Elizabethan drama indeed shows the rapid elimination or drastic modification , of many of the classical elements and their supersessioii by unprecedented features making for life and liberty in obedience to national sentiment. The fetters of the classical laws of unity — the triple unity of action, place, and time — were soon loosened or abandoned. The classical chorus was discarded or was reduced to the slim proportions of a prologue or epilogue. Monologue was driven from its post of vantage. The violent action, which was relegated by classical drama to the descriptive speeches of messengers, was now first physically presented on the stage. There was a fusing of comedy and tragedy — the two main branches of drama which, according to classical critics, were mutually exclusive. A new element of romance or sentiment was admitted into both branches and there ultimately emerged a new middle type of romantic drama. In all Elizabethan drama, save a sparse and fastidious fragment which sought the select suffrages of classical scholars, the divergences between classical and English methods grew very wide. But the literary traces of a classical origin were never

wholly obliterated at any stage in the growth of the Elizabethan theatre.

During Shakespeare’s youth literary drama in England was struggling to rid itself of classical restraint, but it gave in the process no promise of the harvest which _Amnrplin,,. his genius was to reap. During the first deveiop- eighteen years of Shakespeare’s life (1564- ^ments- 1582) there was no want of workers in drama of the new pattern. But their literary powers were modest, and they obeyed the call of an uncultured public taste. They suffered coarse buffooneries and blood-curdling sensations to deform the classical principles which gave them their cue. The audience not merely applauded tragedy of blood or comedy or horseplay, but they encouraged the incongruous combination in one piece of the two kinds of crudity. Sir Philip Sidney accused the first Elizabethan dramatists of linking hornpipes with funerals. Even Gascoigne yielded to the temptation of concocting a ‘tragicall comedie.’ Shakespeare subsequently flung scorn on the unregenerate predilection for ‘very tragical mirth.’¹ Yet the primordial incoherence did not deter him from yoking together comedy and tragedy within the confines of a single play. But he, more fortunate than his tutors, managed, while he defied classical law, to reconcile the revolutionary policy with the essential conditions of dramatic art.

¹ Theseus, when he reads the title of Bottom’s'play:

A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus

And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth.

adds the comment

Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!

That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.

How shall we find the concord of this discord?

Mids. Night*s Dream, v. i. 57-60.

A typical early tragicomedy by Thomas Preston was^ entitled ‘ A lamentable tragedy, mixed full of pleasant mirth conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Persia’ (1569). Falstaff, when seeking to express himself grandiloquently, refers mockingly to the hero of this piece.: ‘I must speak it in passion and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein,.’ 1 Henry IV, n. iv. 370.

Another method of broadening the bases of drama was essayed in this early epoch. History was enlisted in the service of the theatre. There, too, the first results were halting. The ‘ chronicle plays ’ were mere pageants or processions of ill-connected episodes of history in Chronicle which drums and trumpets and the clatter of Plays. swords and cannon largely did duty for dramatic speech or action. Here again Shakespeare accepted new methods and proved by- his example how genius might evoke order out of disorder and supplant violence by power. The English stage of Shakespeare’s boyhood knew nothing of poetry, of coherent plot, of graphic characterisation, of the obligation of restraint.

It was his glory to give such elements of drama an abiding place of predominance.

In his early manhood — after 1582 — gleams of re- , form lightened the dramatic horizon and helped him to j A period Of his goal. A period of purgation set in. At purgation, length the new forms of drama attracted the literary and poetic aspiration of men who had received at the universities sound classical training. From 1582 onwards John Lyly, an Oxford graduate, was framing fantastic comedies with lyric interludes out of stories of the Greek mythology, and his plays, which were capably interpreted by boy actors, won the special favour of Queen Elizabeth and her Court. Soon afterwards George Peele, another Oxford graduate, sought among other dramatic endeavours to fashion a play to some dramatic purpose out of the historic career of Edward I. Robert Greene, a Cambridge graduate, after an industrious career as a writer of prose romances, dramatised a few romantic tales, and he brought literary sentiment to qualify the prevailing crudity. Thomas Kyd, who knew Latin and modern languages, though he enjoyed no academic training, slightly tempered the blood-curdling incident of tragedy by interpolating romance, but he owed his vast popularity to extravagantly sensational situations and ‘the swelling bombast of

bragging blank verse.’ Finally another graduate of Cambridge, Christopher Marlowe, signally challenged the faltering standard of popular tragedy, and in his stirring drama of ‘Tamberlaine’ (1588) first proved beyond question that the English language was capable of genuine tragic elevation.

It was when the first reformers of the crude infant drama, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe, were busy with their experiments that Shakespeare _Shake_ joined the ranks of English dramatists. As he speare’s set out on his road he profited by the lessons Mow*-⁰ which these men were teaching. Kyd and workers. Greene left more or less definite impression on all Shakespeare’s early efforts. But Lyly in comedy and Marlowe in tragedy may be reckoned the masters to whom he stood on the threshold pf his career in the relation of disciple. With Marlowe there is evidence that he was for a brief season a working partner.

Shakespeare shared with other men of genius that receptivity of mind which impelled them to assimilate much of the intellectual energy of their contemporaries.¹ It was not only from the current drama of his youth that his mind sought some of its sustenance. The poetic fertility of his epoch outside the drama is barely rivalled in literary history, and thence he caught abundant suggestion. The lyric and narrative verse of Thomas Watson, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, and Thomas Lodge, were among the rills which fed the mighty river of his lyric invention. But in all directions he rapidly bettered the instruction of fellow- workers. Much of their work was unvalued ore, which he absorbed and transmuted into gold in the process.

¹ Ruskin forcibly defines the receptivity of genius in the following sentences: ‘The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and, if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original power, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it. ’ — Modern Painters, iii. 362 (Appendix).

By the magic of his genius English drama was finally lifted to heights above the reach of any forerunner or contemporary.

No- Elizabethan actor achieved as a dramatist a position which was comparable with Shakespeare’s. But in The actor his practice of combining the work of a play- dramatist. _wright with the functions of a player, and later of a theatrical shareholder, there was nothing uncommon. The occupation of dramatist grew slowly into a professional calling. The development was a natural sequel of the organisation of actors on professional lines. To each licensed company there, came to be attached two or three dramatic writers whose services often, but not invariably, were exclusively engaged. In many instances an acting member of the corporation undertook to satisfy a part, at any rate, of his colleagues’ dramatic needs. George Peele, who was busy in the field of drama before Shakespeare entered it, was faithful to the double role of actor and dramatist through the greater part of his career. The first association of the dramatist Ben Jonson with the theatre was in an actor’s capacity. Probably the most instructive parallel that could be drawn between the experiences of Shakespeare and those of a contemporary is offered by the biography of Thomas Heywqod, the most voluminous playwright of the era, whom Charles Lamb generously dubbed ‘a sort of prose Shakespeare.’ There is ample evidence of the two men’s personal acquaintance. For many years before 1600 Heywood served the Admiral’s company as both actor and dramatist. In 1600 he transferred himself to the Earl of Worcester’s company, which on James I’s accession was taken into the patronage of the royal consort Queen Anne of Denmark. Until her death in 1619 he worked in- defatigably in that company’s interest. He ultimately claimed to have had a hand in the writing of more than 220 plays, although his literary labours were by no means confined to drama. In his elaborate ‘Apology

for Actors’ (1612) he professed pride in his actor’s vocation, from which, despite his other employments, he never dissociated himself.¹

In all external regards Shakespeare’s experience can be matched by that of his comrades. The outward features of his career as dramatist, no less than as actor, were cast in the current mould. In his prolific industry, in his habit of seeking his fable in pre-existing literature, in his co-operation with other pens, in his avowals of deference to popular taste, he faithfully followed the common paths. It was solely in the supreme quality of his poetic and dramatic achievement that he parted company with his fellows.

The whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic work was probably begun and ended within two decades (1591-1611) between his twenty-seventh and forty-seventh year. If the works traditionally assigned to speare’s him include some contributions from other ^^r₀^a_r“^atic pens, he was perhaps responsible, on the other hand, for portions of a few plays that are traditionally claimed for others. When the account is balanced Shakespeare must be credited with the production, during these twenty years, of a yearly average of two

¹ See pp. 112 n. 3, 269, 695. Numerous other instances could be given of the pursuit by men of letters of the theatrical profession. When Shak'espeare first reached London, Robert Wilson was at once a leading dramatist and a leading actor. (See p. 134 n. 1.) The poet Michael Drayton devoted much time to drama and was a leading shareholder in the Whitefriars theatre and in that capacity was involved in much litigation {New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. iii. pp. 269 seq.). William Rowley, an industrious playwright with whom there is reason for believing that Shakespeare collaborated in the romantic drama of Pericles, long pursued simultaneously the histrionic and dramatic vocations. The most popular impersonator of youthful rdles in Shakespeare’s day, Nathaniel Field, made almost equal reputation in the two crafts; while another boy actor, William Barkstead, co-operated in drama with John Marston and wrote narrative poems in the manner of Shakespeare, on whose ‘ art and wit ’ he bestowed a poetic crown of laurel. Cf. Bark- stead’s Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis (1607):

His song was worthie merrit {Shakespeare hee):

■ Lawrdl is due to him, his art and wit Hath purchas’d it. ,

plays, nearly all of which belong to the supreme rank of literature. Three volumes of poems must be added to the total. Ben Jonson was often told by the players that ‘whatsoever he penned he never blotted out [i.e. erased] a line.’ The editors of the Erst Folio attested that ‘what he thought he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ Signs of hasty workmanship are not lacking, but they are few when it is considered how rapidly his numerous compositions came from his pen, and in the aggregate they are unimportant.

By borrowing his plots in conformity with the general custom he to some extent economised his energy. The His bor- range of literature which he studied in his rowed search for tales whereon to build his dramas ^pIots' was wide. He consulted not merely chronicles' of English history (chiefly Ralph Holinshed’s) on which’ he based his English historical plays, but he was well read in the romances of Italy (mainly in French or English translations), in the biographies of Plutarch, and in the romances and plays of English contemporaries. His Roman plays of ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Coriolanus’ closely follow the narratives of the Greek biographer in the masculine English rendering of Sir Thomas North. Romances by his contemporaries, Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, suggested the fables respectively of ‘As You Like It’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale.’ ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ and ‘Cymbeline’ largely rest on foundations laid by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Novels by the sixteenth-century Italian, Bandello, are the ultimate sources of the stories of ‘ Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ and ‘Twelfth Night.’ The tales of ‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for Measure’ are traceable to an Italian novelist of his own era, Giraldi Cinthio. Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques,’ a popular collection of French versions of the Italian romances of Bandello, was often in Shakespeare’s hands. In treating of King John, Henry IV,

Henry V, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and Hamlet, he worked over ground which fellow- dramatists had first fertilised. Most of the fables which he borrowed he transformed, and it was not probably with any conscious object of conserving his strength that he systematically levied loans on popular current literature. In his untiring assimilation of others’ labours he betrayed something of the practical temperament which is traceable in the conduct of the affairs of his later life. It was doubtless with the calculated aim of ministering to the public taste that he unceasingly adapted, as his genius dictated, themes which had already, in the hands of inferior writers .or dramatists, proved capable of arresting public attention.

The professional playwrights sold their plays outright to the acting companies with which they were associated, and they retained no legal interest in them _The after the manuscript had passed into the revision hands of the theatrical manager.¹ It was ^ofpIays- not unusual for the manager to invite extensive revision of a play at the hands of others than its author before it was produced on the stage, and again whenever it was revived. Shakespeare gained much early experience as a dramatist by revising or rewriting behind the scenes , plays that had become the property of his manager. It is possible that some of his labours in this direction remain unidentified. In a few cases his alterations were possibly slight, but as a rule his fund of originality was too abundant to restrict him, when' working as an adapter, to mere recension, and the results of most of his known labours in that capacity are entitled to rank among original compositions.

¹ One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two companies. ‘Ask the Queen’s players,’ his accuser bade him in Cuth- bert Cony-Catcher’s Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, ‘if you sold them not Orlando Vurioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about 7/.], and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral’s men for as many more.’

The determination of the exact order in which Shakespeare’s plays were written depends largely on con- chronoiogy j^ecture- External evidence is accessible in of the only a few cases, and, although always worthy ^p]ays- of the utmost consideration, is not invariably conclusive. The date of publication rarely indicates the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty- seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were, published in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether any were published under his supervision.¹ But subject- matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly insight the subtle gradations of human sentiment and the mysterious workings of human- passion. Comedy and tragedy are gradually blended;

¹ The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of the theatre, and Shakespeare would seem to have had no direct responsibility for the publication of his plays. Professional opinion condemned such playwrights as sought ‘a double sale of their labours, first to the stage and after to the press ’ (Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, 1638. Address to Reader). A very small proportion of plays acted in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I — some 600 out of a total of 3000 — consequently reached the printing press, and the hulk of them is now lost. In 1633 Heywood wrote of ‘some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print.’ (English Traveller pref.). But, in the absence of any law of copyright, publishers often contrived to defy the wishes of the author or owner of manuscripts. The poet and satirist George Wither, in his The Scholler’s Purgatory [1625], which is the classical indictment of publishers of Shakespeire’s day, charged them with habitually taking ‘uppon them to publish bookes contrived^ altered and mangled at their owne pleasures without consent of the writers . . . and all for their owne private lucre.’ Many copies of a popular play were made for the actors or their patrons, and if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher’s hands, it was issued without any endeavour to ohtain either author’s or manager’s sanction. It was no uncommon practice, moreover, ‘for a visitor to the theatre to take down a popular piece surreptitiously in shorthand (see p. us w. 2 infra)) and to dispose to a publisher of his unauthorised transcript, which was usually confused and only partially coherent. For fuller discussion of the conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays saw the light see bibliography, pp. 545 seq. infra.

and his work finally developed a pathos such as could only come of ripe experience. Similarly the metre undergoes emancipation from the hampering restraints of fixed rule and becomes flexible enough to Metrical respond to every phase of human feeling. In ^tests- the blank verse of the early plays a pause is strictly observed at the close of almost every line, and rhyming couplets are frequent. , Gradually the poet overrides such artificial restrictions; rhyme largely disappears; the pause is varied indefinitely; iambic feet are replaced by trochees; lines occasionally lack the orthodox number of feet; extra syllables are, contrary to strict metrical law, introduced at the end of lines, and at times in the middle; the last word of the line is often a weak and unemphatic conjunction or preposition.¹ In his early work Shakespeare was chary of prose, and employed verse in scenes to The use which prose was better adapted. As his ^o£ P^rose- experience grew he invariably clothed in prose the voice of broad humour or low comedy, the speech of mobs, clowns and fools, and the familiar and intimate conversation of women.² To the latest plays fantastic

¹ W. S. 'Walker in his Shakespeare’s Versification, 1854, and Charles Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare’s Versification at Different Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. Dr. Ingram’s paper on ‘The Weak Endings’ in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions (1874), vol. i. is of great value. Mr. Fleay’s metrical tables, which first appeared in the same Society’s Transactions (1874), and were re-issued by Dr. Furnivall in a somewhat revised form in his introduction to his Leopold Shakspere and elsewhere, give all the information possible.

² In Italy prose was the generally accepted instrument of the comedy of the Renaissance from an early period of the sixteenth century. This usage soon spread to France and somewhat later grew familiar in Elizabethan England. In 1566 Gascoigne rendered into English prose, Gli Suppositi, Ariosto’s Italian prose comedy, and most of Lyly’s ‘Court Comedies’ were wholly in prose. In his first experiment in comedy, Lime’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare, apparently under the influence of foreign example, makes a liberal employment of prose, more than a third of the whole eschews verse. But in all other plays of early date Shakespeare uses prose sparingly; in two pieces, Richard II and King John, he avoids it altogether. In his mature work he first uses it on a large scale in the two parts of Henry IV, and it abounds in Henry V and in the three romantic comedies Twelfth Nighty As You Like It, and Much Ado. The Merry Wives is almost entirely in prose, and there is a substantial amount in Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.

and punning conceits which abound in early work are for the most denied admission. But, while Shakespeare’s achievement from the beginning to the end of his career offers clearer evidence than that of any other writer of genius of the steady and orderly growth of his poetic faculty, some allowance must be made for ebb and flow in the current of his artistic progress. Early work occasionally anticipates features that become habitual to late work, and late work at times embodies traits that are mainly identified with early work. No exclusive reliance in determining the precise chronology can be placed on the merely mechanical tests afforded by tables of metrical statistics. The chronological order can only be deduced with any confidence from a consideration of all the internal characteristics as well as the known external history of each play. The premisses are often vague and conflicting, and no chronology hitherto suggested receives at all points universal assent.

There is no external evidence to prove that any piece in which Shakespeare had a hand was produced before ‘Love’s . the spring of 1592. No play by him was Labour’s published before 1597, and none bore his name on the title-page till 1598. But his first essays have been with confidence allotted to 1591. To ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ may reasonably be assigned priority in point of time of all Shakespeare’s dramatit productions. In 1598 an amorous poet, writing in a melancholy mood, recorded a performance of the piece which he had witnessed long before.¹ Internal evidence,

In the great tragedies Julius Casar, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Othello, there is comparatively little prose. In Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Winter’s Tale, the ratio of prose to verse again mounts high, but it falls perceptibly in Cymbdine and The Tempest. In the aggregate Shakespeare’s prose writing is of substantial amount; fuDy a fourth part of his extant work takes that shape.

¹ Loves Labor Lost, I once did see a Play Ycleped so, so called to my paine ...

To every one (saue me) twas Comicall,

Whilst Tragick like to me it did befalL Each Actor plaid in cunning wise his part,

But chiefly Those entrapt in Cupids snare. ii

R[obert] T[ofte], Alba, 1598 (in Grosart’s reprint 1880, p. 105). 1

which alone offers any precise clue, proves that it was an early effort. But the general treatment suggests that the author had already lived long enough in London to profit by study of a current mode of fight comedy which was winning a fashionable vogue, while much of the subject-matter proves that he had already enjoyed extended opportunities of surveying London life and manners, such as were hardly open to him in the very first years of his settlement in the metropolis. ‘Love’s Labpur’s Lost’ embodies keen observation of contemporary life in many ranks of society, both in town and country, while the speeches of the hero Biron clothe much sound philosophy in masterly rhetoric often charged with poetic fervour. Its slender plot stands almost alone among Shakespeare’s plots in that it is not known to have been borrowed, and it stands quite alone in its sustained travesty of familiar traits and incidents of current social and political life. The names of the chief characters are drawn from the leaders in the civil war in France, which was in progress between 1589 and 1594, and was anxiously watched by the English public.¹ Contemporary projects of academies for disciplining young men; fashions of speech and dress current in fashionable circles; recent attempts on the part of Eliza

¹ The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of the real King of Navarre (Biron’s later career subsequently formed the subject of a double tragedy by Chapman, The Conspiracie and Tmgedie of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, which was produced In 1608). The name of the Lord Dumain in Low's Labour's Lost Is a common anglicised version of that Due de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connexion with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty. Ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who was long popular In London; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love s Labour’s Lost was written. In Chapman’s An Humourous Day’s Mirth, 150Q1 M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare’s play, suggests much punning on the word ‘mote.’ As late as

beth’s government to negotiate with the Tsar of Russia;- the inefficiency of rural constables and the pedantry of village schoolmasters and curates are all satirised with good humour. Holofernes, Shakespeare’s Latinising pedagogue, is nearly akin to a stock character of the sixteenth-century comedy of France and Italy which was just obtaining an English vogue.

In ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ moreover, Shakespeare assimilates some new notes which Elizabethan comedy owed to the ingenuity of John Lyly, an active map of letters during most of Shakespeare’s life. Lyly secured his first fame as early as 1580 by the publication of his didactic romance of ‘Euphues,’ which brought into fashion a mannered prose of strained antitheses and affected conceits.¹ But hardly less originality was be-

1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii-. scene ii. line 215, wrote:

Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it

When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.

Armado, ‘the fantastical Spaniard’ who haunts Navarre’s Court, and is duhhed hy another courtier ‘a phantasm, a Monarcho,’ is a caricature of a half-crazed Spaniard known as ‘fantastical Monarcho’ who for many years hung ahout Elizaheth’s Court, and was under the delusion that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantasticall Monarcho’s Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene (Love’s Labour’s Lost, v. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess’s lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception hy ladies of Elizaheth’s Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the ladies of the English nohility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey’s Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.). For further indications of topics of the day treated in the play, see ‘A New Study of “Love’s Lahour’s Lost,”’ hy the present writer, in Gent. Mag. Oct. r88o; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 155 n. 2).

¹ In later life Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly’s Euphues Polonius’s advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for lie affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in 1 Henry IV, 11. iv. 445 : ‘For though the camomile, the more it is trodden

trayed, by the writer in a series of eight comedies which .came from his pen between 1580 and 1592, and were enthusiastically welcomed at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, where they were rendered by the boy companies under the royal patronage.¹ Lyly adapted to the stage themes of Greek mythology from the pages of Lucian, Apuleius, or Ovid, and he mingled with his classical fables scenes of low comedy which smacks of Plautus. The language is usually euphuistic. In only one play, ‘The Woman in the Moone,’ does he attempt blank verse; elsewhere his dramatic vehicle is exclusively prose. The most notable characteristics of Lyly’s dramatic work are brisk artificial dialogues which glow with repartee and word-play, and musically turned lyrics. Such features were directly reflected in Shakespeare’s first essay in comedy. Many scenes and characters in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ were obviously inspired by Lyly. Sir Tophas, ‘ a foolish braggart ’ in Lyly’s play of ‘Endimion,’ was the father of Shakespeare’s character of Armado, while Armado’s pagerboy, Moth, is as filially related to Sir Tophas’s page-boy, Epiton. The verbal encounters of Sir Tophas and Epiton in Lyly’s ‘Endimion’ practically reappear in the dialogues of Armado and Moth in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ Probably it was in conformity with Lyly’s practice that Shakespeare denied the ornament of verse to fully a third part of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ while in introducing lyrics into his play Shakespeare again accepted Lyly’s guidance. Shakespeare had at command from his early days a fuller-blooded humanity than that which lay within Lyly’s range. But Lyly’s

on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’ Cf. Lyly’s Works, ed. R. W. Bond (1902), i. 164-75.

¹ The titles of Lyly’s chief comedies are (with dates of first publication) : Alexander and Cumpaspe, 1584; Sapho andPhao, 1584 j Endimion, ■ 1591; Gallathea, 1592; Mydas, 1592; Mother Bombie, 1594; TheWoman in the Moone (in blank verse), 1597; Love’s Metamorphosis, 1601. The first six pieces were issued together in 1632 as ^£Six Courte Comedies . . .. Written by the only rare poet of that time, the wittie, comicall, facetiously quicke and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts.’

influence long persisted in Shakespearean comedy. It is clearly visible in the succeeding plays of ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ was revised in 1597, probably for a Christmas performance at Court. ‘A pleasant conceited comedie called Loues labors lost’ was first published next year ‘ as it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas.’ The publisher was Cuthbert Burbie, a liveryman of the Stationers’ Company with a shop in Cornhill adjoining the Royal Exchange.¹ On the title-page, which described the piece as ‘newly corrected and augmented,’ Shakespeare’s name (‘By W. Shakespere ’) first appeared in print as that of author of a play. No license for the publication figures in the Stationers’ Company’s Register.² The manuscript which the printer followed seems to have been legibly written, but it did not present the author’s final corrections. Here and there the published text of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ admits passages in two forms — the unrevised original draft and the revised version. The copyist failed to delete many unrevised lines, and his neglect, which the press-corrector did not repair, has left Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts side by side. A graphic illustration is thus afforded of the flowing current of Shakespeare’s art.³

Less gaiety characterised another comedy of the same date: ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ for the most ‘Two P^{art a} lyrical romance of love and friendship, Gentlemen reflects something of Lyly’s influence in both of Verona. sentimental and its comic vein, but the

construction echoes more distinctly notes coming from

¹ The printer was William White, of Cow Lane, near the Holbom Conduit.

² Love’s Labour’s Lost was first mentioned in tbe Stationers’ Register on Ja.n. 22, 1606-7, when the publisher Burbie transferred his right in the piece to Nicholas Ling, who made the title over to another stationer John Smethwick on Nov. 19, 1607. No quarto of the play was published by Smethwick till 1631.

^aCf. Love’s Labour’s Lost, iv. iii. 11. 299-301 and 320-333; ii. 11. 302-304 and 350-353; v. ii. 11. 827-832 and 847-881.

the South of Europe — from Italy and Spain. The perplexed fortunes of the two pairs of youthful lovers and the masculine disguise of one of the heroines are reminiscent of Italian or Spanish ingenuity. Shakespeare had clearly studied ‘ The pleasaunt- and fine conceited Comedie of Two Italian Gentlemen,’ a crude comedy of double intrigue penned in undramatic rhyme, which was issued anonymously in London in 1584, and was adapted from a somewhat coarse Italian piece of European repute.¹ The eager pursuit by Shakespeare’s Julia in a man’s disguise of her wayward lover Proteus suggests, at the same time, indebtedness to the Spanish story of ‘The Shepardess Felismena,’ who endeavoured to conceal her sex in her pursuit of her fickle lover Don Felix. The tale of Felismena forms part of the Spanish pastoral romance ‘Diana,’ by George de Montemayor, which long enjoyed popularity in England.² The ‘ history of Felix and Philomena,’ a lost piece which was acted at Court in 1584, was apparently a first attempt to dramatise Montemayor’s story, and it may have given Shakespeare one of his cues.³

¹ Fidele and Fortunio, The Two Italian Gentlemen, which was edited for the Malone Society by W. W. Greg in igro. is of uncertain authorship. Collier ascribed it to Anthony Munday, but some passages seem to have come from the youthful pen of George Chapman (see England’s Parnassus, ed. by Charles Crawford, 1913, pp. 517 seq.; Malone Soc. Collections, 1909, vol. i. pp. 218 seq.). The Italian original called II Fedele was by Luigi Pasqualigo, and was printed at Venice in 1576. A French version, Le Fidelle, by Pierre de Larivey, a popular French dramatist, appeared in 1579, and near the same date a Latin rendering was undertaken by the English classicist, Abraham Fraunce. Fraunce’s work was first printed from the manuscript at Penshurst by Prof. G. C. Moore Smith in Bang’s Materialien, Band XIV., Louvain, 1906, under the title Victoria, the name of the heroine.

² No complete English translation of Montemayor’s romance was published before that of Bartholomew Yonge in 1598, but a manuscript version by Thomas Wilson, which was dedicated to Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, in 1596, possibly circulated earlier (Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 18638). ...

³ Some verses from Diana were translated by Sir Philip Sidney a.nd were printed with his poems as early as 1591. Other current Italian fiction, which also anticipated the masculine disguise of Shakespeare’s Julia, was likewise accessible in an English garb. The industrious soldier-author* Barnabe Riche drew a cognate story (‘Apolonius and

Many of Lyly’s idiosyncrasies readily adapted them- ₍ selves to the treatment of the foreign fable. Trifling and' irritating conceits abound and tend to an atmosphere of artificiality; but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed — the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men — overflow with a farcical drollery which improves on Lyly’s verbal smartness. The ‘Two Gentlemen’ was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime ; it first appeared in the Folio of 1623, after having, in all probability, undergone some revision.¹

Shakespeare next tried his hand, in the ‘Comedy of Errors’ (commonly known at the time as ‘Errors’), at ‘Comedy boisterous farce. The comic gusto is very of Errors.’ slightly relieved by romantic or poetic speech, but a fine note of sober and restrained comedy is struck in the scene where the abbess rebukes the shrewish wife Adriana for her persecution of her husband (v. i.). ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ like ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ was first published in 1623. Again, too, as in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ allusion was made to the; civil war in France. France was described as ‘making war against her heir’ (in. ii. 125) —an allusion which assigns the composition of the piece to 1591. Shakespeare’s farce, which is by far the shortest of all his dramas, may have been founded on a play, no longer extant, called ‘The Historie of Error,’ which was acted in 1576 at Hampton Court. In theme Shakespeare’s piece resembles the ‘ Menaschmi ’ of Plautus, and treats of mistakes of identity arising from the likeness of

Silla’) from an Italian source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, 1565, pt. 1, 15th day, Novel 8. _ Riche’s story is the second tale in his ‘Farewell to Militarie Profession conteining verie pleasaunt discourses fit for a peaceable tyme,’ 1581. A more famous Italian novelist, Bandello, had previously employed the like theme of a girl in man’s disguise to more satisfying purpose in his Novelle (1554; Pt. II. Novel 36). Under Bandello’s guidance Shakespeare treated the topic again and with finer insight in Twelfth Night, his masterpiece of romantic comedv (see pp. 327-8 infra).

¹ Fleay, Life, pp. 188 seq.

twin-born children, although Shakespeare adds to Plautus’s single pair of identical twins a second couple of serving men. The scene in Shakespeare’s play (act iii. sc. i.) in which Antipholus of Ephesus is shut out of his own house, while his indistinguishable brother is entertained at dinner within by his wife who mistakes him for her husband, recalls an episode in the ‘Amphitruo’ of Plautus. Shakespeare doubtless had direct recourse to Plautus as well as to the old play. He had read the Latin dramatist at school. There is only a bare possibility that he had an opportunity of reading Plautus in English when ‘The Comedy of Errors’ was written in 1591. The earliest translation of the ‘Me- naschmi ’ was not licensed for publication before June 10, 1594, and was not published until the following year. No translation of any other play of Plautus appeared in print before. On the other hand, it was stated in the preface to this first published translation of the ‘ Menaschmi ’ that the translator, W. W., doubtless William Warner, a veteran of the Elizabethan world of letters, had some time previously ‘Englished’ that and ' ‘ divers ’ others of Plautus’s comedies, and had circulated them in manuscript ‘for the use of and delight of his private friends, who, in Plautus’s own words, are not able to understand them.’

Each of these three plays — ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ and ‘The Comedy of Errors’ — gave promise of a dramatic capacity ‘Romeo out of the common way; yet none can be and Juliet.’ with certainty pronounced to be beyond the ability of other men. It was not until he produced ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ his first tragedy, that Shakespeare proved himself the possessor of a poetic instinct and a dramatic insight of unprecedented quality. Signs of study of the contemporary native drama and of other home-born literature are not wanting in this triumph of distinctive genius. To Marlowe, Shakespeare’s only English predecessor in poetic and passionate tragedy, some rhetori-

cal circumlocutions and much metrical dexterity are undisguised debts. But the pathos which gave ‘Romeo and Juliet’ its nobility lay beyond Marlowe’s dramatic scope or sympathy. Where Shakespeare, in his early efforts, manipulated themes of closer affinity with those of Marlowe, the influence of the master penetrates deeper. In ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Shakespeare turned to rare account a tragic romance of Italian origin, which was already popular in English versions, and was an accepted theme of drama throughout Western Europe.¹ Arthur Broke, who in 1562 rendered the story into English verse from a French rendering of Bandello’s standard Italian narrative, mentions in his ‘ Address to the Reader’ that he had seen ‘the same argument lately set forth on stage with more commendation’ than he could ‘look for,’ but no tangible proof of this statement has yet come to light. A second English author, William Painter, greatly extended the English vogue of

¹ The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance of Anthia and Abrocomas by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century, seems to have been first told in modem Europe about 1470 by Masuccio, ‘the Neapolitan Boccaccio,’ in his Novellino (No. xxxiii.: cf. W. G. Waters’s translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel, La Giulietta, 1535, and by Bandello in his Novelle, 1554, pt. ii. No. ix. Bandello’s version became classical; it was translated into French in the Ilistoires Tragiques of Franjois de Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. The English writers Broke and Painter are both disciples of Boaistuau. Near the same time that Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, the Italian story was dramatised, chiefly with Bandello’s help, by Italian, French, and Spanish writers. The blind dramatist Luigi Groto published at Venice in 1583 La Hadriana,- tragedia nova, which tells of Romeo and Juliet under other names and closely anticipates many passages of Shakespeare’s play. (Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Soc., pp. xxi seq.) Meanwhile a French version (now lost) of Bandello’s Romeo and Juliet, by C6me de la Gambe, called ‘ Chateauvieux,’ a professional actor and groom of the chamber to Henri III, was performed at the French Court in 1580. (See the present writer’s French Renaissance in England, 1910, pp. 439-440.) Subsequently Lope de Vega dramatised the tale in his Spanish play called Castelvines y Monteses (i.e. Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope’s play, which ends happily, see Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xxi. 451-60. Lope’s play appeared in an inaccurate English translation in 1770, and was rendered literally by Mr. F. W. Cosens in a privately printed volume in 1869.

the legend by publishing in 1567, in his anthology of fiction called ‘The Palace of Pleasure/ a prose paraphrase of the same French version as Broke employed. Shakespeare followed Broke’s verse more closely than Painter’s prose, although he studied both. At the same time he impregnated the familiar story with a wholly original poetic fervour, and relieved the tragic intensity by developing the humour of Mercutio, and by investing with an entirely new and comic significance the character of the Nurse.¹ Dryden was of opinion that, ‘in his Mercutio, Shakespeare showed the best of his skill’ as a delineator of ‘gentlemen,’ and the critic, who was writing in 1672, imputed to Shakespeare the remark ‘that he was forced to kill him [Mercutio] in the third act to prevent being killed by him.’ ² The subordinate comic character of Peter, the nurse’s serving-man, enjoyed the advantage of being interpreted on the production of the piece by William Kemp, a leading comedian of the day.³ Yet it is the characterisation of hero and heroine on which Shakespeare focussed his strength. The ecstasy of youthful passion is portrayed by Shakespeare in language of the highest lyric beauty, and although he often yields to the current predilection for quibbles and conceits, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ as a tragic poem on the theme of love, has no rival in any literature. If the Nurse’s remark, ‘’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years’ (1. iii. 23), be taken literally, the composition of the play must at least have begun in 1591, for

¹ Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere

Society.

¹ Dryden’s Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, i. 174. Dryden continued his

comments thus on Shakespeare’s alleged confession: ‘But, for my part,

I cannot find he [Mercutio] was so dangerous a person: I see nothing in him but what was so exceedingly harmless, that he might have lived

to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without ofience to any

man.’ _

⁸ By a copyist’s error Kemp’s name is substituted for Peter’s in the second and third quartos of the play (iv. v. 100). A like error of transcription in the text of Much Ado about Nothing (Act 11. Sc. ii.) establishes the fact that Kemp subsequently created the part of Dogberry.

no earthquake in the sixteenth century was experienced' in England after 1580. A few parallelisms with Daniel’s ‘Compiainte of Rosamond’ suggest that Shakespeare read that poem before completing his play. Daniel’s work was published in i59²> ^and it is probable that Shakespeare completed his piece early that year. The popularity of the tragedy was unquestioned from the first, and young lovers were for a generation commonly credited with speaking ‘naught but pure Juliet and, Romeo. ’¹ ...

The tragedy underwent some revision after its first production.² The earliest edition appeared in 1597 annonymously and surreptitiously. The title-page ran: ‘An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid pub- liquely by the right honourable the L[ord] of Hunsdon his seruants.’ The printer and publisher, John Danter, a very notorious trader in books, of Hosier Lane, near Hol- born Conduit, had acquired an unauthorised transcript which had doubtless been prepared from a shorthand report.³ The reporter filled gaps in his imperfect notes

¹ Marston’s Scourge of Villanie (1598), Satyre 10.

² Cf. Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society; Fleay, Life, pp. 191 seq.

³'Danter first obtained notoriety in rS93 as the publisher of Thomas Nashe’s scurrilous attacks on the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey. Subsequently he enjoyed the unique distinction among Elizabethan stationers of being introduced under his own name in the dramatis persona of an acted play of the period. ‘Danter the printer’ figured as a trafficker in the licentious products of academic youth in the academic play of The Returne from Parnassus, act 1. sc. iii (1600?). Besides Romeo and Juliet, Danter published Titus Andronicus (early in 1594; see p. 132). He died in 1597 or 1598. The evil practice of publishing crude shorthand reports of plays, from which Shakespeare was to suffer frequently, is capable of much independent illustration. The dramatist Thomas Heywood, who began his long career as dramatist before 1600, complained that some of his pieces accidentally fell into the printer’s hands, and then ‘so corrupt and mangled, copied only by the ear, that I have been as unable to know them as ashamed to challenge them’ (Rape of Lucrece, 1638, address). Similarly Heywood included in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 1637 (pp. 248-9) a prologue for the revival of an old play of his concerning Queen Elizabeth, called ‘If you know not me, you know nobody,’ which he had lately revised for

with unwieldy descriptive stage directions of his own devising. A second quarto — ‘The most excellent and lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, newly, corrected, augmented, and amended; As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted by the right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants ’ — was .published, from an authentic stage version, in 1599, by a stationer of higher reputation, Cuthbert Burbie of Comhill.¹ In Burbie’s edition the tragedy first took coherent shape. Ten years later a reprint of Burbie’s quarto introduced further improvements (‘as it hath been sundrie times publiquely acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants at

acting purposes. Nathaniel Butter had published the first and second editions of the piece in 1605 and 1608, and Thomas Pavier the third in

1610. In a prose note preceding the new prologue the author denounced the printed edition as ‘the most corrupted copy, which was published without his consent.’ In the prologue itself, Heywood declared that the piece had on its original production on the stage pleased the audience:

So much that some by stenography drew

The plot, put it in print, scarce one word true.

Sermons and lectures were frequently described on their title-page as ‘taken by characterie’ (cf. Stephen Egerton’s Lecture 1598, and Sermons of Henry Smith, 1590 and 1591). The popular system of Elizabethan shorthand was that devised by Timothy Bright in his ‘Characterie : An arte of shorte scripte, and secrete writing by character,’ 1588. In rS9o Peter Bales devoted the opening section of his ‘Writing Schoolmaster’ to the ‘Arte of Brachygraphy.’ In 1612 Sir George Buc, in his ‘Third Vniversitie of England’ (appended to Stow’s Chronicle), wrote of ‘the much-to-be-regarded Art of Brachygraphy’ (chap. xxxix.), that it ‘is an art newly discovered or newly recovered, and is of very good and necessary use, being well and honestly exercised, for, by the mearies and helpe thereof, they which know it can readily take a Sermon, Oration, Play, or any long speech, as they are spoke, dictated; acted, and uttered in the instant.’

¹ This quarto was printed for Burbie by Thomas Creede g,t the Katharine Wheel in Thames Street. Burbie bad a year earlier issued the quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had no other association with Shakespeare’s work. The Stationers’ Company’s Register contains no license for the issue of either Danter’s or Burbie’s quarto of Romeo and Juliet. The earliest mention of the piece in the Stationers’ Register is under date January 22, 1606—7, when Burbie assigned his rights in that tragedy, as well as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew, to the stationer Nicholas Ling; but Ling transferred his title on November 19, 1607, to John Smethwick, who was responsible for the third quarto of Romeo and Juliet of 1609.

the Globe’), and that volume, which twice re-appeared in quarto — without date and in 1637 — ^was the basis of the standard text of the First Folio. The prolonged series of quarto editions show that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ fully retained its popularity throughout Shakespeare’s generation.

PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594

Three pieces with which Shakespeare’s early activities were associated reveal him as an adapter of plays by other hands. Though they lack the interest shake- attaching to his unaided work, they throw in- ^^e_a^ar_t^e_e^^s_of valuable light on some of his early methods of others”⁰ composition and on his early relations with ^plays- other dramatists. Proofs are offered of Shakespeare’s personal co-operation with his great forerunner Marlowe, and the manner of influence which Marlowe’s example exerted on him is precisely indicated. Shakespeare, moreover, now experimented for the first time with the dramatisation of his country’s history. That special branch of drama was rousing immense enthusiasm in Elizabethan audiences, and Shakespeare’s first venture into the historical field enjoyed a liberal share of the popular applause.

On March 3, 1591-2, ‘Henry VI,’ described as a ‘new’ or reconstructed piece, was acted at the Rose Theatre by Lord Strange’s men. It was ‘Henry no doubt the play subsequently known ,as ^VI-’ Shakespeare’s ‘ The First Part of Henry VI,’ which presented the war in France and the factious quarrels of the nobility at home from the funeral of King Henry V (in'1422) to the humiliating treaty of marriage between his degenerate son, King Henry VI, with Margaret of Anjou (in 1445). On its production the piece, owing to its martial note, won a popular triumph, and the unusual number of fifteen performances followed within the year.¹ ‘How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the

¹ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i. 13 et passim; ii. 152, 338. The last recorded performance was on Jan. 31, 1593.

terror of the French),’ wrote Thomas Nashe, the satiric pamphleteer, in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ (1592, licensed August 8), with reference to the striking scenes of Talbot’s death (act iv. sc. vi. and viii.), ‘to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should .triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding! ’ There is no categorical record of the production of a second piece in continuation of the theme, but indirect evidence planly attests that such a play was quickly staged. A third piece, treating of the concluding incidents of Henry Vi’s reign, attracted much attention in the theatre early in the autumn of the same year (1592).

The applause attending the completion of this historical trilogy caused -bewilderment in the theatrical pro- Greene’s fession. Older dramatists awoke to the fact attack. that their popularity was endangered by a young stranger who had set up his tent in their midst, and was challenging the supremacy of the camp. A rancorous protest was uttered without delay. Late in the summer of 1592 Robert Greene lay, after a reckless life, on a pauper’s deathbed. His last hours were spent in preparing for the press a miscellany of eu- phuistic fiction which he entitled ‘ Greens Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentaunce.’ Towards the close the sardonic author introduced a letter addressed to ‘those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plays.’ Here he warned three nameless literary friends who may best be. identified with Peele, Marlowe, and Nashe, against, putting faith in actors whom he defined as ‘buckram gentlemen, painted monsters, puppets who speak from our mouths, antics garnished in our colours.’ Such men were especially charged with defying their just obligations to dramatic authors. But Greene’s venom

was chiefly excited by a single member of the acting fraternity. ‘There is,’ he continued ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his owne conceit, the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. . . . Never more acquaint [those apes] with your admired inventions, for it is pittie men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.’ The ‘only Shake-scene’ is a punning attack on Shakespeare. The tirade is an explosion of resentment on the part of a disappointed senior dramatist at the energy of a young actor — the theatre’s factotum — in trespassing on the playwriter’s domain. The ‘upstart crow’ had revised the dramatic work of his seniors without adequate acknowledgment but with such masterly effect as to imperil their future hold on the esteem of manager and playgoer. When Greene mockingly cites as a specimen of his ‘only Shake-scene’s’ capacity the line ‘Tyger’s heart wrapt in a players hide’ he travesties the words ‘ Oh Tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide ’¹ from the third piece in the trilogy of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ (1. iv. 137). It may be inferred that Greene was especially' angered by Shakespeare’s revision of this piece in devising which he originally had a part.²

The sour critic died on September 3, 1592, as soon as he laid down his splenetic pen. But Shakespeare’s amiability of character and versatile ambition had

¹ These words which figure in one of the most spirited outbursts in the play — the Duke of York’s savage denunciation of Queen Margaret — were first printed in r595 in the earliest known draft of the drama The True Tragedie of the Duke of York (see p. 120 infra).

² Greene’s complaint that he was robbed of his due fame by literary plagiaries, among whom he gave Shakespeare the first place, was emphatically repeated by an admiring elegist:

Greene gaue the ground to all that wrote vpon him.

Nay more the men that so eclipst his fame Purloynde his Plumes; can they deny the same?

(Greenes Funeralls, by R. B. 1594. ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1911, Sonnet IX.)

already won him admirers, and his success excited the sympathetic regard of colleagues more kindly than Chettle’s Greene. At any rate the dying man had clearly apology. miscalculated Marlowe’s sentiment. Marlowe- was already working with Shakespeare, and showed readiness to continue the partnership. In December 1592, moreover, Greene’s publisher, Henry Chettle, who was himself about to turn dramatist, prefixed an apology for Greene’s attack on the young actor to his ‘Kind Hartes Dreame,’ a tract describing contemporary phases of social life. He reproached himself with failing to soften Greene’s phraseology before committing it to the press. ‘I am as sory,’ Chettle wrote, ‘as if the original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seene his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] demeanour no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.’ It is obvious that Shakespeare at the date of Chettle’s apology was winning a high reputation alike as actor, man, and writer.

The first of the three plays dealing with the reign of ‘Henry VI’ was originally published in 1623, in the collected edition of Shakespeare’s works. The actor- editors of the First Folio here accepted a veteran stage tradition of its authorship. The second and third plays were previous to the publication of the First Folio each printed thrice in quarto volumes in a form very different from that which they assumed long after when they followed the first part in the Folio. Two editions of the second and third parts of ‘Henry VI’ came forth without any author’s name; but the third separate issue boldly ascribed both to Shakespeare’s pen. The attribution has justification but needs qualifying. Criticism has proved beyond doubt that in the three parts of Henry VI’ Shakespeare with varying energy revised and expanded other men’s work. In the first part

there may be small trace of his pen, but in the second and third evidence of his handiwork abounds.

At the most generous computation no more than 300 out of the 2600 lines of the ‘First Part’ bear the impress of Shakespeare’s style. It may be doubted whether he can be safely credited with aught speare’s beyond the scene in the Temple Gardens, “°^t"^bu' where white and red roses are plucked as ‘TheFirst emblems by the rival political parties (act 11. HeSryVi’ sc. iv.), and Talbot’s speeches on the battlefield (act iv. sc. v.-vii.), to the enthusiastic reception of which on the stage Nashe bears witness. It may be, however, that the dying speech of Mortimer (act 11. sc. v.) and the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk (act v. sc. iii.) also bear marks of Shakespeare’s vivid power. The lifeless beat of the verse and the crudity of the language conclusively deprive Shakespeare of all responsibility for the brutal scenes travestying the story of Joan of Arc which the author of the first part of ‘ Henry VI’ somewhat slavishly drew from Holinshed. The classical allusions throughout the piece are far more numerous and recondite than Shakespeare was in the habit of employing. Holinshed’s ‘ Chronicle ’ supplies the historical basis for all the pieces, but the playwright defies historic chronology in the ‘First Part’ with a callous freedom exceeding anything in Shakespeare’s fully accredited history work.

The second part of Henry Vi’s reign, which carried on the story from the coronation of Queen Margaret to the initial campaign of ‘the Wars of the Roses, _{First edi}_ was first published anonymously in 1594 from tgns of a rough stage copy by Thomas Millington, a andThird stationer of Comhill. A license for the publication was granted him on March 12,

¹593-4, and the volume, which was printed by Thomas Creede of Thames Street, bore on its title-page the rambling description ‘The first part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster

with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade; and the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the crowne.’

The third part of Henry Vi’s reign, which continues the tale to the sovereign’s final dethronement and death, was first printed under a different designation with greater care next year by Peter Short of Bread Street Hill, and was published, as in the case of its predecessor, by Millington. This quarto bore the title ‘The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke his seruants. ’¹ The first part of the trilogy had been acted by Lord Strange’s company with which Shakespeare was associated, and the interpretation of the third and last instalment by Lord Pembroke’s men was only a temporary deviation from normal practice.

In their earliest extant shape, the two continuations of the First Part of ‘Henry VI’ — the ‘Contention’ and the ‘ True Tragedie ’ — show liberal traces of Shakespeare’s revising pen. The foundations were

¹ Millington reissued both The Contention and True Tragedie in 1600, the former being then printed for him by Valentine Simmes (or Sims), the latter by William White. On April 19, 1602, Millington made over to another publisher, Thomas Pavier, his interest in ‘The first and second parts of Henry the vj^m ii bookes’ (Arber, iii. 304). This entry would seem at a first glance to imply that the first as well as the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI were prepared for separate publication in 1602, but no extant edition of any part of Henry VI belongs to that year. It is more probable that Pavier’s reference is to The Contention and True Tragedie — early drafts respectively of Parts II and III of Henry VI. Pavier, to whom Millington assigned the two parts of Henry the vj^m in 1602, published a new edition of The Contention with the True Tragedie in 1619, when the title-page bore the words ‘newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shake-speare, Gent.’ This is the earliest attribution of the two plays to Shakespeare, but Pavier the publisher, although he had some warrant in this case, is rarely a trustworthy witness, for he had little scruple in attaching Shakespeare’s name to plays by other pens (see p. 262 infra).

clearly laid throughout by another hand, but Shakespeare is responsible for much of the superstructure. The humours of Jack Cade in ‘The Contention’ can owe their savour to him alone. Queen Margaret’s simple words in the ‘True Tragedie,’ when in the ecstasy of grief she cries out to the murderers of her son ‘You have no children,’ have a poignancy of which few but Shakespeare had the secret. Twice in later plays did he repeat the same passionate rebuke in cognate circumstances.¹

Shakespeare may be absolved of all responsibility for the original drafts of the three pieces. Those drafts have not survive^- It was in revised versions that the plays were put on the stage in 1592, and the text of the second and third parts which the actors then presented is extant in the printed editions of ‘The Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedie.’ But much further reconstruction engaged Shakespeare’s energy before he left the theme. With a view to a subsequent revival, Shakespeare’s services were enlisted in a fresh recension, at any rate of the second and third parts, involving a great expansion. ‘The Contention’ was thoroughly overhauled, and was converted into what was entitled in the Folio ‘The Second Part of Henry VI.’ There more than 500 lines keep their old form: 840 lines are more or less altered; some 700 of the earlier lines are dropped altogether, and are replaced by 1700 new lines. ‘The True Tragedie,’ which became ‘The Third Part of Henry VI’ of the Folio, was less drastically handled; no part of the old piece is here abandoned; some 1000 lines are retained unaltered, and some 900 are recast. But a thousand fresh lines make their appearance. Each of the Folio pieces is longer than its forerunner by at least a third. The 2000 lines of the old pieces grow into the 3000 of the new.²

¹ Cf. Constance’s bitter cry to the papal legate in King John ‘He talks to me that never had a son’ (m. iv. 91); and Macduff’s reproach ‘He has no children’ (Macbeth, iv. iii. 216).

² Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 235 seq.; Trans. New Shakspere Soc., 1876, pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, Study, pp. 51 seq.

Of the two successive revisions of the primal ‘Henry VI’ in which Shakespeare had a hand the first may be shake- dated in 1592 and the second in 1593. That speare’s Shakespeare in both revisions shared the work coadjutors. _wj_t^ _another is clear from the internal evidence, and the identity of his coadjutor may be inferred with reasonable confidence. The theory that Robert Greene, with George Peele’s co-operation, produced the original draft of the three parts of ‘Henry VI,’ which Shakespeare twice helped to recast, can alone account for Greene’s indignant denunciation of Shakespeare as ‘an upstart crow, beautified with the feathers^ of himself and his fellow dramatists. Greene and Peele were classical scholars to whom there would come naturally such unfamiliar classical allusions as figure in all the pieces. The' lack of historic sense which is characteristic of Greene’s romantic tendencies may well account for the historical errors which set ‘The First Part of Henry VI’ in a special category of ineptitude. Peele elsewhere, in his dramatic presentation of the career of Edward I, libels, under the sway of anti-Spanish prejudice, the memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile; he would have found nothing uncongenial in the work of vilifying Joan of Arc. Signs are not wanting that it was Marlowe, the greatest of his predecessors, whom Shakespeare joined in the first revision which brought to birth ‘ The Contention’ and the ‘True Tragedie.’ There the fine writing, the over-elaboration of commonplace ideas, the tendency to rant in language of some dignity, are sure indications of Marlowe’s hand. In the second and last recension there are also occasional signs of Marlowe’s handiwork,¹ but most of the new passages are indubitably from

¹ Few will question that among the new lines in the ‘Second Part’ Marlowe is responsible for such as these (iv. i. 1-4) :

The gaudy blabbing and remorseful day

Is crept into tbe bosom of the sea,

And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades That drag the tragic melancholy night.

When in the ‘ Third Part ’ the Duke of York’s son Richard persuaded

Shakespeare’s pen. Marlowe’s assistance at the final stage was fragmentary. It is probable that he began with Shakespeare the last revision, but that his task was interrupted by his premature death. The lion’s share of the closing phase of the work fell to his younger coadjutor.

Marlowe, who alone of Shakespeare’s contemporaries can be credited with exerting on his efforts in tragedy a really substantial influence, met his death on Marlowe's June 1, 1593, in a drunken brawl at Deptford, influence. He died at the zenith of his fame, and the esteem which his lurid tragedies enjoyed in his lifetime at the playhouse survived his violent end. ‘Tambur- laine,’ ‘The Jew of Malta,’ ‘ Dr. Faustus,’ and ‘Edward II’ were among the best applauded productions through the year 1594. Shakespeare’s next two tragedies, ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II,’ again pursued historical themes; a little later the tragic story of Shylock the Jew was enshrined in his comedy of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ In all three pieces Shakespeare plainly disclosed a conscious and a prudent resolve to follow in the dead Marlowe’s footsteps.

In ‘Richard III’ Shakespeare, working singlehanded, takes up the history of England at the precise point where Marlowe and he, working in partnership, ‘Richard left it in the third part of ‘Henry VI.’ The ^m-’ murder of King Henry closes the old piece; his funeral opens the new; and the historic episodes are carried onwards, until the Wars of the Roses are finally ended by Richard’s death on Bosworth Field. Richard’s career was already familiar to dramatists, but Shake-

his father to aim at the throne it is unthinkable that any other pen than Marlowe’s converted the bare lines of the old piece,

Then, noble father, resolve yourselfe,

And once more claime the crowne,

into the touching but strained eloquence of the new piece (1. ii. 28-31):

Father, do but think How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown:

Within whose circuit is Elysium,

And all that poets feign of bliss and Joy.

speare found all his material in the ‘ Chronicle’ of Holin- shed. ‘Ricardus Tertius,’ a Latin piece of Senecan temper by Dr. Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, Cambridge, had been in favour with academic audiences since 1579, when it was first acted by students at St. John’s College, Cambridge.¹ About 1591 ‘The True Tragedie of Richard III,’ a crude piece in English of the chronicle type by some unknown pen, was produced at a London theatre, and it issued from the press in 1594. Shakespeare’s piece bears little resemblance to either of its forerunners. The occasional similarities which have been detected seem due to all the writers’ common dependence on the same historic authority.² Throughout Shakespeare’s play the effort to emulate Marlowe is unmistakable. The tragedy is, says Swinburne, ‘as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, though never .so inflated in expression, as Marlowe’s “ Tamburlaine ” itself.’ In thought and melody Marlowe is for the most part outdistanced, yet the note of lyric exaltation is often caught from his lips. As in his tragic efforts, the interest centres in a colossal type of hero. Richard’s boundless egoism and intellectual cunning overshadow all else. Shakespeare’s characterisation of the King betrayed a subtlety beyond Marlowe’s reach. But it was the turbulent incident in his predecessor’s vein which chiefly assured the popularity of the piece. Burbage’s stirring impersonation of the hero was the earliest of his many original interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters to excite public enthusiasm. His vigorous enunciation of Richard Ill’s cry ‘A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse! ’ gave the words proverbial currency.³

¹ See F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 1914, pp. in seq.

² See G. B. Churchill, Richard III up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 1900.

³ Cf. Richard Corbet’s Iter Boreale written about 1618, where it is said of an innkeeper at Bosworth who acted as the author’s guide to the local battlefield:

For when he would have said King Richard died

And called ‘A horse, a horse! ’ he Burbage cried.

It was not until ‘Richard III’ had exhausted its first welcome on the stage that an attempt was made to publish the piece. A quarto edition ‘ as it hath _PubIication beene lately acted by the. Right honourable of‘Richard the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants,’ appeared ^IIL’ in 1597. That year proved of importance in the history of Shakespeare’s fame and of the publication of his work. In 1597 there also came from the press the crude version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and the first issue of ‘Richard II/ the play which Shakespeare wrote immediately after ‘Richard III.’ But the text of the early editions of ‘ Richard III ’ did the drama scant justice. The Quarto followed a copy which had been severely abbreviated for stage purposes. The First Folio adopted another version which, though more complete, omits some necessary passages of the earlier text. A combination of the Quarto and the Folio versions is needful to a full comprehension of Shakespeare’s effort. None the less the original edition of the play was, despite its defects, warmly received, and before the First Folio was published in 1623 as many as six re-issues of the defective quarter were in circulation, very slightly varying one from another.¹

The composition of ‘Richard II’ seems to have followed that of ‘Richard III’ without delay. The piece was probably written very early in 1593. Once again

¹ Andrew Wise, who occupied the shop at the sign of the Angel in St. Paul’s Churchyard for the ten years that he was in trade (15931603), was the first publisher of Richard III. He secured licenses for the publication of Richard II and Richard III on August 29 and October 20, 1597, respectively. Both volumes were printed for Wise by Valentine Simmes (or Sims), whose printing office was at the White Swan, at the foot of Adling Hill, near Baynard’s Castle. Second editions of each were issued by Wise in 1598; Richard II was again printed by Simmes, but the second quarto of Richard III was printed by Thomas Creede at the Katharine Wheel in Thames Street. In 1602 Creede printed for Wise a third edition of Richard III which was described without due warrant as ‘newly augmented.’ On June 25, 1603, Wise made over his interest in both Richard II and-Richard III to Matthew Lawe of St. Paul’s Churchyard, who reissued Richard III in 1605, 1612, 1622, and 1629, and Richard II in 1608 and 1615.

Shakespeare presents an historic figure who had already received dramatic attention. Richard. II was a chief ‘Richard character in a brief dramatic sketch of Wat ^II-’ Tyler’s rebellion (in 1381), which was com

posed in 1587 and was published anonymously in

1593 as ‘The Life and Death of Jack Straw.’ The King’s troubled career up to his delusive triumph over his enemies in 1397, was also the theme of a longer piece by another anonymous hand.¹ But Shakespeare owed little to his predecessors’ labours. He confined his attention to the two latest years and the death of the King and ignored the earlier crises of his reign which had alone been dramatised previously. ‘Richard II’ is a more penetrating study of historic character and a more concentrated portrayal of historic action than Shakespeare had yet essayed. There is a greater restraint, a freer flow of dramatic poetry. But again there is a clear echo of Marlowe’s ‘mighty line,’ albeit in the subdued tone of its latest phase. Shakespeare in ‘Richard II’ pursued the chastened path of placidity on which Marlowe entered in ‘Edward II,’ the last piece to engage his pen. Both Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s heroes were cast by history in the same degenerate mould, and Shakespeare’s piece stands to that of Marlowe-in much the relation of son to father. Shakespeare traces the development of a self-indulgent temperament under stress of misfortune far more subtly than his predecessor. He endows his King Richard in his fall with an imaginative charm, of which Marlowe’s

¹ The old play of Richard II, which closes with the murder of the King’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1397, survives in MS. in the British Museum (MS. Egerton 1994). It was first printed in an edition of eleven copies by Halliwell in 1870, and for a second time in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch for 1900, edited by Dr. Wolfgang Keller. The piece is a good specimen of the commonplace dramatic work of the day. Its composition may be referred to the year 1591. A second (lost) piece of somewhat later date, again dealing exclusively with the early part of Richard II’s reign, which Shakespeare’s play ignores, was witnessed at the Globe Theatre on April 30,

1611, by Simon Forman, who has left a description of the chief incidents (New Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1875-6, pp. 415-6).

King Edward shows only incipient traces. Yet Marlowe’s inspiration nowhere fails his great disciple altogether. Shakespeare again drew the facts from Holin- shed, but his embellishments are more numerous than in ‘Richard III’; they include the magnificent eulogy of England which is set in the mouth of John of Gaunt. The speech indicates for the time the high-water mark of dramatic eloquence on the Elizabethan stage, and illustrates the spirited patriotism which animated Shakespeare’s interpretation of English history. As in the first and third parts of ‘Henry VI,’ prose is avoided throughout; gardeners and attendants speak in verse like their betters, a sure sign of Shakespeare’s youthful hand.

The printers of the quarto edition of ‘Richard II,’ which first appeared in 1597, had access to what was in the main a satisfactory manuscript. Two re- _Pubi;cat;on prints followed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and of‘Richard the editors of the First Folio were content to ⁿ' adopt as their own the text of the third quarto. The choice was prudent. From the first two quartos, in spite of their general merits, an important passage was omitted, and the omission was not repaired till the issue of the third in 1608 when the title-page announced that the piece was reprinted ‘ with new additions of the Parliament sceane and the deposing of King Richard, as it hath been lately acted by the Kinge’s Maiesties seruantes at the Globe.’ The cause of this temporary mutilation of the text demands some inquiry, for it illustrates a common peril of literature of the time, which Shakespeare here, encountered for the first, but, as it proved, the only time.

Since the infancy of the drama a royal proclamation had prohibited playwrights from touching ‘matters of religion or governance of the estate of the g_hake_ common weal,’¹ and on November 12, 1589, spe^eand when Shakespeare was embarking on his career, ^ecensor-

, ¹ The proclamation was originally promulgated on May 16, I559i long before the drama had any settled habitation or literary coherence.

the Privy Council reiterated the prohibition, and^! created precise machinery for its enforcement. All plays were to be licensed by three persons, one to be nominated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the second by the Lord Mayor, and the third by the Master of the Revels. Again there was a warning against unseemly reference to matters of divinity and state.’ This regulation of 1589 remained in force through Shakespeare?s working days with two slight qualifications. In the first place the Master of the Revels — an officer of the Royal household — came to perform the licensing duties singlehanded, and in the second place Parliament; strengthened the licenser’s hand by constituting impiety on the stage a penal offence.¹

In the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime fellow dramatists not infrequently fell under the licenser’s lash on charges of theological or political comment and their offence was purged by imprisonment or fine. Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Thomas Nashe were among the playwrights who were at one time or another suspected of covert censure of Government or Church and suffered in consequence more or less condign punishment. There was a nervous tendency on the part of the authorities to scent mischief where none was intended. Yet, in spite of official sensitiveness and some vexatious molestation of authors, literature on and off the stage enjoyed in practice a large measure of liberty. The allegation in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ (lxvi. 9) that ‘art’ was ‘tongue- tied by authority ’ is the casual expression of a pessimistic mood, and has no precise bearing on Shakespeare’s personal experience. Amid the whole range of Shakespeare’s work there is only a single passage which, as far as is known, evoked official censure. The licenser’s veto only fell upon 165 lines in Shakespeare’s play of

Mayors of cities, lords lieutenants of counties, and justices of the peace were directed to inhibit within their jurisdictions the performance of stage plays tending to heresy or sedition (Collier’s History, i. 168-9).

A statute of 1605 (3 Jac. I. cap. 21) rendered players liable to a fine of ten pounds for ‘profanely abusing the name of God’ on the stage.

‘Richard II.’ When that drama was produced, the scene of the King’s deposition in Westminster HalL was robbed of the fine episode where the conquered hero, summoned to hear his doom, makes his great speeches of submission (iv. i. 154-318). It is curious to note that a cognate incident in Marlowe’s ‘Edward II’ (act v. sc. i.) escaped rebuke and figured without abridgment in the printed version of 1594. But Richard II’s fate always roused in Queen Elizabeth an especially active sense of dread. Her fears were not wholly caprice, for a few years later —■ early in 1601 — disaffected subjects cited Richard II’s fortunes as an argument for rebellion, and the rebel leaders caused Shakespeare’s piece to be revived at the Globe theatre with the avowed object of fanning a revolutionary flame.¹ The licenser of ‘Richard II’ had some just ground for his endeavour to conciliate royal anxieties. Even so, he did his spiriting gently; he sanctioned the scenes portraying the monarch’s arrest and his murder in Pomfret Castle, and his knife only fell on the King’s voluntary surrender of his crown. The prohibition, moreover, was not lasting. The censored lines were restored to the issue of 1608 when James I was King. Shakespeare’s interpretation of historic incident was invariably independent and sought the truth.' It does honour to himself and to the government of the country that at no other point in his work did he encounter official reprimand.

Through the last nine months of 1593, from April to December, the London theatres were closed, owing to the virulence of the plague. The outbreak excelled The plague in severity any of London’s recent experiences, ^{o£ IS93}- and although there were many recurrences of the pestilence before Shakespeare’s career ended, it was only once — in 1603—-that the terrors of 1593 were surpassed. In 1593 the deaths from the plague reached a total of 15,000 for the city and suburbs, one in 15 of the population; the victims included the Lord Mayor ¹ See p. 254 infra.

of London and four aldermen. Not merely was public recreation forbidden until the peril passed, but contrary to precedent, no Bartholomew fair was held in Southfield.¹ Deprived of the opportunity of exercising their craft in the capital, the players travelled in the country, visiting among other places Bristol, Chester, Shrewsbury, Chelmsford, and York. There is small reason to question that Shakespeare accompanied his colleagues on their long tour.

But, wherever he sojourned while the plague held London in its grip, his pen was busily employed, and before the close of the next year — 1594 — he had given marvellous proof of his rapid and versatile industry.

It was early in that year (1594) that there was both acted and published ‘Titus Andronicus/ a bloodstained ‘Titus An- tragedy which plainly savoured of an earlier dromcus.’ gpo^ although it was described as ‘new.’ The piece was in his own lifetime claimed for Shakespeare without qualification. Francis Meres, Shakespeare’s admiring critic of 1598, numbered it among his fully accredited works, and it was admitted to the First Folio. But Edward Ravenscroft, a minor dramatist of Charles II’s time, who prepared a new version of the piece in 1678, wrote of it: ‘I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters.’ Ravenscroft’s assertion deserves acceptance. The sanguinary tragedy presents a fictitious episode illustrative of the degeneracy of Imperial Rome. The hero is a mythical Roman general, who gives and receives blows of nauseating ferocity. The victims of the tragic story are not merely killed but savagely mutilated. Crime succeeds crime at an ever-quickening pace. The repulsive plot and the recondite classical allusions differentiate i|^

¹ Stow’s Annals, p. 766; Creighton’s Epidemics in Britain, i. 253-4; Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 74 n.

from Shakespeare’s acknowledged work. Yet the offensive situations are often powerfully contrived and there are lines of artistic force and even of beauty. Shakespeare’s hand is only visible in detached embellishments. The play was in all probability written orginally in 1591 by Thomas Kyd, with some aid, it may be, from Greene or Peele, and it was on its revival in 1594 that Shakespeare improved it here and there.¹ A lost piece of like character called ‘Titus and Vespasian’ was played by Lord Strange’s men on April 11, 1591.² ‘Titus Androni- cus’ may well have been a drastic adaptation of this piece which was designed, with some help from Shakespeare, to prolong public interest in a profitably sensational theme. Ben Jonson credits ‘Titus Andronicus’ with a popularity equalling Kyd’s lurid ‘Spanish Tragedy.’ It was favorably known abroad as well as at home.

The Shakespearean ‘Titus Andronicus’ was acted at the Rose theatre by the Earl of Sussex’s men on January 23, 1593-4, when it was described as a ‘new’ Publication piece; yet that company’s hold on it was ^of‘^Tltus-’ fleeting; it was immediately afterwards acted by Shakespeare’s company, while the Earl of Pembroke’s men also claimed a share of the early representations. The title-page of the first edition of 1594 describes it as having been performed by the Earl of Derby’s servants (one of the successive titles of Shakespeare’s company), as well as by those of the Earls of Pembroke and Sussex.

¹ Mi. J. M. Robertson, in his Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus ? (1905) ably questions Shakespeare’s responsibility at any point.

² Cf. Henslowe, ed. Greg, i. 14 seq.; ii. 155 and 159-162. A German play called Tito Andronico, which presents with broad divergences the same theme as the Shakespearean piece, was acted by English players in Germany and was published in 1620. There Vespasianus, who is absent from the Shakespearean Titus, figures among the dramatis persona. The German piece is doubtless a rendering of the old English play Titus and Vespasian, no text of which survives in the original language. (See Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 155 seq.) Two Dutch versions of Titus and Vespasian were made early in the seventeenth century. Of these the later, which alone survives, was first printed in 1642 (see a paper by H. de W. Fuller in Modern Language Association of America Publications, 1901, ix. p. 1).

In the title-page of the second edition of 1600, to these three noblemen’s names was added that of the Lord Chamberlain, who was .the Earl of Derby’s successor in the patronage of Shakespeare’s company. Whatever the circumstances in which other companies presented the piece, it was more closely identified with Shakespeare’s colleagues than with any other band of players. John Danter, the printer, of Hosier Lane, who produced the first (imperfect) quarto of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ received a license to publish the piece on February 6, 1593-4. His edition soon appeared, being published jointly by Edward White, whose shop ‘ at the little North doore of Paules’ bore, as the title-page stated, ‘the sign of the Gun,’ and by Thomas Millington, the publisher of ‘The First Contention’ and the ‘True Tragedie’ (early drafts of the Second and Third Parts of ‘Henry VI’), whose shop, unmentioned in the ‘Titus’ title-page, was in Cornhill.¹ A second edition of ‘Titus’ was published solely by Edward White in 1600.² This edition was printed by James Roberts, of the Barbican, who was printer and publisher of ‘the players’ bills’ or placard', of the theatrical performances which were displayed on posts in the street.³ Roberts was in a favourable position to realise how strongly ‘Titus Andronicus’ gripped average theatrical taste.

On any showing the distasteful fable of ‘Titus An- dronicus’ engaged little of Shakespeare’s attention. All his strength was soon absorbed by the composition of

• ¹ Only one copy of this quarto is known. Its existence was noticed by Langbaine in 1691, but no copy was found to confirm Langbaine’s statement until January 1905, when an exemplar was discovered among the books of a Swedish gentleman of Scottish descent, named Robson, who resided at Lund (cf. Atkenaum, Jan. 21, 1905). The quarto was promptly purchased by an American collector, Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, for 2000I.

² Some years later—in 1611 — Edward White published a reprint of his second edition, which was reproduced in the First Folio. The First Folio version adds a short scene (act .ni. sc. ii.), which had not been in print before.

³ This office Roberts purchased in 1594 of John Charlewood, and held it till 1615, when he sold it to William Jaggard. See p. 553 infra.

‘The Merchant of Venice,’ a comedy, in which two romantic love stories are magically blended with a theme of tragic import. The plot is a child of mingled ,_The parentage. For the main thread Shakespeare Merchant had direct recourse to a book in a foreign tongue ^{o£ Vemce}-’ — to ‘II Pecorone,’ a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, of which there was no English translation.¹ There a Jewish creditor demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, and the*latter is rescued through the advocacy of ‘the lady of Belmont,’ who is wife of the debtor’s friend. The management of the plot in the Italian novel is closely followed by Shakespeare. A similar story of a Jew and his debtor’s friend is very barely outlined in a popular mediaeval collection of anecdotes called ‘Gesta Roma- norum,’ while a tale of the testing of a lover’s character by offer of a choice of three caskets of gold, silver, and lead, which Shakespeare combined in ‘The Merchant’ with the legend of the Jew’s loan, is told independently (and with variations from the Shakespearean form) in another portion of the ‘Gesta.’ But Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant’ owes important debts to other than Italian or Latin sources. He caught hints after his wont from one or more than one old English play. Stephen Gosson, the sour censor of the infant drama in England, described in his ‘Schoole of Abuse’ (1579) a lost play called ‘the Jew . . . showne at the Bull [inn] . . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of usurers.’ The writer excepts this piece from the censure which he flings on well-nigh all other English plays. Gosson’s description suggests that the two stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined in drama before Shakespeare’s epoch. The scenes in Shakespeare’s play in which Antonio negotiates with

¹ Cf. W. G. Waters’s translation of II Pecorone, pp. 44-60 (fourth day, novel 1). The Italian collection was not published till 1558, and the story followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but the original.

Shylock are roughly anticipated, too, by dialogues between a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor in the extant play of ‘The Three Ladies of London’ by R[obert] W[ilson], which was printed in 1584.¹ There the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the lines:

Signor Mercatore, why do you not pay me? Think you I will be mocked in this sort?

This three times you have flouted me — it seems you make thereat a sport.

Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently,

Or hy mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee.

Subsequently, when the judge is passing judgment in favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts:

Stay there, most puissant judge. Signor Mercatore, consider what you do.

Pay me the principal, as for the interest I forgive it you.

Such phrases are plainly echoed by Shakespeare.²

Above all is it of interest to note that Shakespeare in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ shows the last indisputable Shylock ^and material trace of his discipleship to Mar- andRode- lowe. Although the delicate comedy which ngo opez. jightgjjg the serious interest of Shakespeare’s play sets it in a wholly different category from that of Marlowe’s ‘Jew of Malta,’ the humanized portrait of the Jew Shylock embodies reminiscences of Marlowe’s

¹ The author Robert Wilson was, like Shakespeare himself, well known both as player and playwright. The London historian Stow credited him with ‘a quick delicate refined extemporal wit.’ He made a reputation hy his improvisations. In his Three Ladies of London, as in the other plays assigned to him, allegorical characters (in the vein of the morality) join concrete men and women in the dramatis persona. -

² In The Orator (a series of imaginary declamations, which Anthony Munday translated from the French and published in 1596) the speech of a Jew who claims a pound of flesh of a Christian debtor and the reply of the debtor bear a further resemhlance to Shylock’s and Antonio’s passages at arms. The first part of the Orator appeared in French in 1571, and the whole in 1581. It is unsafe to infer that the Merchant of Venice must have been written after 1596, the date of the issue of the first English version of the Orator. Shakespeare was quite capable of consulting the book in the original language.

caricature presentment of the Jew Barabas, while Marlowe’s Jewess Abigail is step-sister to Shakespeare’s Jewess Jessica. But everywhere Shakespeare outpaced his master, and the inspiration that he drew from Marlowe in the ‘ Merchant ’ goes little beyond the general conception of the Jewish figures. Marlowe’s Jewish hero, although he is described as a victim of persecution, typifies a savage greed of gold, which draws him into every manner of criminal extravagance. Shakespeare’s Jew, despite his mercenary instinct, is a penetrating and tolerant interpretation of racial characteristics which are degraded by an antipathetic environment. Doubtless the popular interest aroused by the trial in February

1594 and the execution in June of the Queen’s Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez, incited Shakespeare to a subtler study of Jewish character than had been essayed before.¹ It is Shylock (not the merchant Antonio) who is the hero of the play, and the main interest culmiiiates in the Jew’s trial and discomfiture. That solemn scene trembles on the brink of tragedy. Very bold is the transi-

¹ Lopez was the Earl of Leicester’s physician before 1586, and the Queen’s chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II’s persecution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his death-warrant, he was hanged at Tybum on June 7, 1594. His trial and execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time. That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the articje on Roderigo Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography; ‘The Original of Shylock,’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. February r88o; Dr. H. Graetz, Shylock in den Sagen in den Dramen und in der Geschichte, Krotoschin, 1880; New Shakespere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 15892; ‘The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,’ by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in English Historical Review (1894), iv. 440 seq.

tion to the gently poetic and humorous incidents of the concluding act, where Portia and her waiting maid in masculine disguise lightly banter their husbands Bassanio and Gratiano on their apparent fickleness. The change of- tone attests a mastery of stage craft; yet the interest of the play, while it is sustained to the end, is, after Shylock’s final exit, pitched in a lower key.

A piece called ‘The Venesyon Comedy’ which the Lord Admiral’s men produced at the Rose theatre on August 25, 1594, and performed twelve times knowiedg- within the following nine months,¹ was pre- mentsto sumed by Malone to be an early version of Mar owe. - Merchant of Venice.’ The identifica

tion is very doubtful, but the ‘Merchant’s’ affinity with Marlowe’s work, and the metrical features which resemble those of the ‘Two Gentlemen,’ suggest that the-date of first composition was scarcely later than 1594. ‘ The Merchant’ is the latest play in which Marlowe’s sponsorship is a living inspiration. Shakespeare’s subsequent allusions to his association with Marlowe sound like fading reminiscences of the past. In ‘As You Like It’ (nr. v. 80) he parenthetically and vaguely commemorated his acquaintance with the elder dramatist by apostrophising him in the lines :

Dead Shepherd! now I find thy saw of might:

‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’

The ‘saw’ is a quotation from Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero and Leander’ (line 76). In the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ (ill. i. 17-21) Shakespeare places on the lips of Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, confused snatches of verse from Marlowe’s charming lyric, ‘ Come live with me and be my love.’ The echoes of his master’s voice have lost their distinctness.

On July 17, 1598, several years after its production on the stage, the well-established ‘stationer’ James Roberts, who printed the second edition of ‘Titus

¹ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i. 19, ii. 167 and 170.

Andronicus⁷ and other of Shakespeare’s plays, secured a license from the Stationers’ Company for the publication of ‘The Merchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise p_ublicatian called the Jewe of Venyce.’ But to the license of ‘The there was attached the unusual condition that ^Merchant-’ neither Roberts nor ‘any other whatsoever’ should print the piece before the Lord Chamberlain gave his assent to the publication.¹ More than two years elapsed after the grant of the original license before ‘The Merchant’ actually issued from the press. ‘By consent of Master Roberts’ a second license was granted on October 28, 1600, to another stationer Thomas Heyes (or Haies), and when the year 1600 was closing Heyes published'the first edition which Roberts printed for him. Heyes’s text, which was more satisfactory than was customary, was in due time transferred to the First Folio.²

To 1594 must be assigned one more historical piece, ‘King John.’ Like the First and Third Parts of ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard II’ the play altogether <jrjng eschews prose. Strained conceits and rhe- J°^hn-’

¹ Arber, Stationers’ Registers, iii. 122. Apparently the players were endeavouring to persuade their patron the Lord Chamberlain to exert his influence against the unauthorised publication of plays. On June r, 1599, the wardens of the Stationers’ Company, by order of the Arch- hishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, gave the drastic direction ‘That noe playes be printed excepte they bee allowed by suche as haue aucthorytie.’ The prohibition would seem to have resulted in a temporary suspension of the issue of plays which were in the repertory of Shakespeare’s company; but the old irregular conditions were resumed in the autumn of 1600, and they experienced no further check in Shakespeare’s era.

² The imprint of the first quarto of The Merchant runs: ‘At London, Printed by I[ames] R[oberts] for Thomas Heyes and are to be sold in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon. 1600.’ Cf. Arber, Transcript, iii. 175. Heyes attached pecuniary, value to his publishing rights in The Merchant of Venice. On July 8, 1619, his son, Laurence, as heir to his father, paid a fee to the Stationers’ Company on their granting him a formal recognition of his exclusive interest in the publication (Arber, iii. 651). There is ground for treating another early quarto of The Merchant which bears the imprint ‘Printed by J. Roberts 1600’ as a revised but unauthorised and misdated reprint of Heyes’s quarto which William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts’s press, printed for Thomas Pavier, an unprincipled stationer, in 1619 (see Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq., and p. 559 infra).

torical extravagances which tend to rant and bombast are clear proofs of early composition. Again the theme had already attracted dramatic effort. Very early in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Bishop Bale, a fanatical protestant controversialist, had produced a crude piece called ‘King Johan,’ which presented from an ultra- protestant point of view the story of that King’s struggle with Rome for the most part allegorically, after the manner of the morality. There is no evidence that Shakespeare knew anything of Bale’s work, which remained in manuscript until 1838. More pertinent is the circumstance that in 1591 there was published anonymously a rough piece in two parts entitled ‘ The Troublesome Raigne of King John.’ A preliminary ‘Address to the Gentlemen Readers’ reminds them of the good reception which they lately gave to the Scythian Tambur- laine. This reference to Marlowe’s tragedy points to the model which the unknown author set before himself. There is no other ground for associating Marlowe’s name with the old play, which lacks any sign of genuine power. Yet the old piece deserves grateful mention, for it supplied Shakespeare with all his material for his new ‘history.’ In ‘King John’ he worked without disguise over a predecessor’s play, and sought no other authority. Every episode and every character are anticipated in the previous piece. Like his guide, Shakespeare embraces the whole sixteen years of King John’s reign, yet spends no word on the chief political event — the signing of Magna Carta. But into the adaptation Shakespeare flung all his energy, and the theme grew under his hand into great tragedy. It is not only that the chief characters are endowed with new life and glow with dramatic fire, but the narrow polemical and malignant censure of Rome and Spain which disfigures the earlier play is for the most part eliminated. The old ribald scene designed to expose the debaucheries of the monks of Swinstead Abbey is expunged by Shakespeare, and he pays little heed to the legend of the monk’s poisoning

of King John, which fills a large place on the old canvas. The three chief characters ■— the mean and cruel king, the noble-hearted and desperately wronged Constance, and the soldierly humorist, Faulconbridge — are recreated by Shakespeare’s pen, and are portrayed with the same sureness of touch that marks in Shylock his rapidly maturing strength. The scene in which the gentle boy Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered his eyes to be put out is as affecting as any passage in tragic literature. The older playwright’s lifeless presentation of the incident gives a fair measure of his ineptitude. Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ was not printed till 1623, but an unprincipled and ill-advised endeavour was made meanwhile to steal a march on the reading public. In 1611 the old piece was reissued as ‘written by W. Sh.’ In 1622 the publisher went a step further in his career of fraud and on the title-page of a new edition declared its author to be ‘W. Shakespeare.’

At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare’s early farce, ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ gave him a passing notoriety that he could well have spared. The ,_Comedy piece was played (apparently by professional ₀f Errors’ actors) on the evening of Innocents’ Day j°_n^G„y,’₁^s (December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray’s Inn, before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and their friends. There was some disturbance during the evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, who, dissatisfied with the accommodation afforded them, retired in dudgeon. ‘So that night,’ a contemporary chronicler states, ‘was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called the “Night of Errors.”’¹ Shakespeare was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present. On the morrow a commission of oyer and terminer inquired into

¹ Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript. A second performance of the Comedy of Errors was given at Gray’s Inn Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895.

the causes of the tumult, which was mysteriously attributed to a sorcerer having ‘foisted a company of base and common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions.’

Fruitful as were these early years, there are critics who would enlarge by conjecture the range of Shakespeare’s Early plays accredited activities. Two plays of uncertain doubtfully authorship attracted public attention during shake- ^t0 the period under review (1591-4) — ‘Arden of speare. Feversham’¹ and ‘Edward III.’ ² Shakespeare’s hand has been traced in both, mainly on the ground that their dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant. There is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship in either case. ‘Arden of Feversham’ dramatises with intensity and insight a sordid murder of a husband by a wife which was perpetrated at Faversham on February 15, 1550-1,

<_of and was fully reported by Holinshed and more Fever- briefly by Stow. The subject in its realistic veracity is of a different type from any which Shakespeare is known to have treated, and although the play may be, as Swinburne insists, ‘a young man’s work,’ it bears no relation either in topic or style to the work on which young Shakespeare was engaged at a date so early as 1591 or 1592. The character of the murderess (Arden’s wife Alice) is finely touched, but her brutal instincts strike a jarring note which conflicts with the Shakespearean spirit of tragic art.³

‘Edward III’ is a play in Marlowe’s vein, and has been assigned to Shakespeare with greater confidence on even more shadowy grounds. The competent Shake

¹ Licensed for publication April 3, 1592, and published in 1592.

² Licensed for publication December i, 1595, and published in 1596.

³ In 1770 the critic Edward Jacob, in his edition of Arden of Feversham, first assigned Arden to Shakespeare, claiming it to be‘his earliest dramatic work.’ Swinburne supported the theory, which is generally discredited. The piece would seem to be by some unidentified disciple of Kyd (cf. Kyd’s Works, ed. Boas, p. boarix).

spearean critic Edward Capell reprinted it in his ‘ Prolusions ’ in 1760, and described it as ‘thought to be writ by Shakespeare.’ A century later Tennyson ‘Edward accepted with some qualification the attri- ^m-’ bution, which Swinburne, on the other hand, warmly contested. The piece is a curious medley of history and romance. Its main theme, confusedly drawn from Holin- shed, presents Edward Ill’s wars in France, with the battles of Crecyand.Poitiers and the capture of Calais, but the close of act 1. and the whole of act 11. dramatise an unhistoric tale of dishonourable love which the Italian novelist Bandello told of an unnamed King of England who sought to defile ‘the Countess of Salisbury,’ the wife of a courtier. Bandello’s fiction was rendered into English in Painter’s ‘ Palace of Pleasure/ and the author of ‘Edward III’ unwarrantably put the tale of illicit love to the discredit of his hero. Many speeches scattered through the drama and the whole scene (act n. sc. ii.), in which the Countess of Salisbury repulses the advances of Edward III, show the hand of a master. The Countess’s language, which breathes a splendid romantic energy, has chiefly led critics to credit Shakespeare with responsibility for the piece. But there is even in the style of these contributions much to dissociate them from Shakespeare’s acknowledged work, and to justify their ascription to some less gifted disciple of Marlowe.¹ A linp in act 11. sc. i. (‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’) reappears in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ (xciv. line 14),² and there are other expressions in those poems, which seem to reflect phrases in the play of ‘Edward III.’ It was contrary to Shakespeare’s practice literally to plagiarise himself. Whether the dramatist borrowed from a manuscript copy of the ‘Sonnets’ or the sonnet- teer borrowed from the drama are questions which are easier to ask than to answer.³

¹ Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare, pp. 231-274.

² See p. 159 infra.

³ For other plays of somewhat later date which have been falsely assigned to Shakespeare, see pp. 260 seq. infra.

During the busy years (1591-4) that witnessed his first pronounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came Publication before the public in yet another Literary, ca- and^Venus P^acity- On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, Adonis,’ the printer, who was his fellow-townsman, ob- ^IS93- tained a license for the publication of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ Shakespeare’s metrical version of a classical tale of love. The manuscript was set up at Field’s press at Blackfriars, and the book was published in accordance with the common contemporary division of labour by the stationer John Harrison, whose shop was at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard. No author’s name figured on the title-page, but Shakespeare appended his full signature to the dedication, which he addressed in conventional terms to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. The Earl, who was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the handsomest man at Court, with a pronounced disposition to gallantry. He had vast possessions, was well educated, loved literature, and through life extended to men of

First letter ^^{etters a} g^enerous patronage.¹ ‘I know not to the Earl how I shall offend,’ Shakespeare now wrote to ampton¹ him i^{n a} style flavoured by euphuism, ‘ in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden; only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have hon-

¹ See Appendix, sections iii. and iv.

oured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather; and never after ear [i.e. plough] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.’ The subscription ran ‘Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.’

The writer's mention of the work as ‘the first heir of my invention’ implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare undertook ,_The ^ any of his dramatic work. But there is reason heir of my to believe that the first draft lay in the author’s ^mvention- desk through four or five summers and underwent some retouching before it emerged from the press in its final shape. Shakespeare, with his gigantic powers of work, could apparently count on ‘idle hours’ even in the well-filled days which saw the completion of the four original plays — ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Two Gentle- ment of Verona,’ ‘Comedy of Errors,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet ’ — as well as the revision of the three parts of ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Titus Andronicus,’ while ‘Richard III’ and ‘ Richard II ’ were in course of drafting. Marlowe’s example may here as elsewhere have stimulated Shakespeare’s energy; for at that writer’s death (June 1, 1593) he left unfinished a poetic rendering of another amorous tale of classic breed — the story of Hero and Leander by the Greek poet Musseus.¹

Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness; but it is

¹ Marlowe’s Hero and Leander was posthumously licensed for the press on September 28, 1593, some months after Venus and Adonis; but it was not published till 1598, in a volume to which George Chapman contributed a continuation completing the work. About 1596 Richard Carew in a letter on the ‘Excellencie of the English tongue’ linked Shakespeare’s poem with Marlowe’s ‘fragment,’ and credited them jointly with the literary merit of Catullus (Camden’s Remaines, 1614, p. 43).

imbued with a juvenile tone of license, which harmonises with its pretension of youthful origin. The irrelevant details, the many figures drawn from the sounds and sights of rural or domestic life, confirm the impression of adolescence, although the graphic justness of observation and the rich harmonies of language anticipate the touch' of maturity, and traces abound of wide reading in both classical and recent domestic literature. The topic was one which was likely to appeal to a young patron like Southampton, whose culture did not discourage lascivious tastes.

The poem offers signal proof of Shakespeare’s early devotion to Ovid. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto:

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

The lines come from the Roman poet’s ‘Amores,’ and, in his choice of the couplet, Shakespeare again showed loyalty to Marlowe’s example.¹

The legend of Venus and Adonis was sung by Theocritus and Bion, the pastoral poets of Sicily; but The debt Shakespeare made its acquaintance in the brief to Ovid. version which figures in a work by Ovid which is of greater note than his ‘Amores’ — in his ‘Metamorphoses’ (Book X. 520-560; 707-738). Not that

¹ The motto is taken from Ovid’s Amores, liber i. elegy xv. 11. 35-6. Portions of the Amores or Elegies of Love were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date, probably about 1597, in Epigrammes and Elegies by I[ohn] D[avies] and C[hris- * topher] M[arlowe], Marlowe, whose version circulated in manuscript in the eight years’ interval, rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus:

Let base conceited wits admire vile things,

Fair Phcebus lead me to the Muses’ springs!

This poem of Ovid’s Amores was popular with other Elizabethans. Ben Jonson placed another version of it on the lips of a character called Ovid in his play of the Poetaster (r6o2). Jonson presents Shakespeare’s ' motto in the awkward garb:

Kneele hindes to trash: me let bright Phoebus swell,

With cups full flowing from the Muses’ well.

Shakespeare was a slavish borrower. On Ovid’s narrative of the Adonic fable he embroidered reminiscences of two independent episodes in the same treasury of mythology, viz.: the wooing of the reluctant Herma- phroditus by the maiden Salmacis (Book IV.) and the hunting of the Calydonian boar (Book VIII.). Again, however helpful Ovid’s work proved to Shakespeare, ‘the first heir’ of his invention found supplementary inspiration elsewhere. The Roman poet had given the myth a European vogue. Echoes of it are heard in the pages of Dante and Chaucer, and it was developed before Shakespeare wrote by poets of the Renaissance in sixteenth-century Italy and France. In the year of Shakespeare’s birth Ronsard, the chieftain of contemporary French poetry, versified the tale of Venus and Adonis with pathetic charm,¹ and during Shakespeare’s boyhood many fellow-countrymen emulated the Continental example. Spenser, Robert Greene, and Marlowe bore occasional witness in verse to the myth’s Tnflngn^ fascination, while Thomas Lodge described in ^o£ Lodge, detail Adonis’s death and Venus’s grief in prefatory stanzas before his ‘Scillaes Metamorphosis : Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus ’ (published in 1589). Lodge’s main theme was a different fable, drawn from the same rich mine of Ovid. His effort is the most notable pre-Shakespearean experiment in the acclimatisation of Ovid’s ‘ Metamorphoses ’ in English verse.

Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ is in the direct succession of both Continental and Elizabethan culture, which was always loyal to classical tradition. His metre is the best proof of his susceptibility to current vogue. He employed the sixain or six-line stanza rhyming ababcc, which is the commonest of all forms of narrative verse in both English and French poetry of the sixteenth century. Spenser had proved the stanza’s capacity in his ‘Astrophel,’ his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, while Thomas

¹ See French Renaissance in England, 220.

Lodge had shown its adaptability to epic purpose in that Ovidian poem of ‘Scillaes Metamorphosis’ which treats in part of Shakespeare’s theme. On metrical as well as on critical grounds Lodge should be credited with helping efficiently to mould Shakespeare’s first narrative poem.¹

A year after the issue of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ in 1594, Shakespeare published another poem in like vein, which ‘Lucrece ’ ^to^ ^traS^lc tale °f Lucrece, the accepted ' pattern of conjugal fidelity alike through classical times and the Middle Ages. The tone is graver than that of its predecessor,' and the poet’s reading had clearly taken a wider range. Moral reflections abound, and there is some advance in metrical dexterity and verbal harmony. But there is less freshness in the imagery and at times the language tends to bombast. Long digressions interrupt the flow of the narrative. The heroine’s allegorical addresses to ‘ Opportunity Time’s servant’ and to ‘Time the lackey of Eternity’ occupy 133 lines (869-1001), while the spirited description of a picture of the siege of Troy is prolonged through 202 lines (1368-1569), nearly a ninth part of the whole poem. The metre is changed. The six-line stanza of ‘Venus’ is replaced by a seven-line stanza which Chaucer often used in the identical form ababbcc. The

¹ Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, by James P. Reardon, in ‘Shakespeare Society’s Papers,’ iii. ⁱ43^-6- Cf. Lodge’s description of Venus’s discovery of the wounded Adonis:

Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere,

Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke,

Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere,

Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke:

How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying,

As if the boy were then but new a-dying.

In the minute description in Shakespeare’s poem of the chase of the hare (11. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the Ode de la Chase. (on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his CEuvres et Meslanges Poetiques, 15 74. For fuller illustration of Shakespeare’s sources and analogues of the poem, and of its general literary history and bibliography, see the present writer’s introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the first quarto edition of Venus and Adonis (1593). Clarendon Press, 1905.

stanza was again common among Elizabethan poets. Prosodists christened it ‘rhyme royal’ and regarded it as peculiarly well adapted to any ‘historical or grave’ theme.

The second poem was entered in the ‘Stationers’ Registers’ on May 9, 1594, under the title of ‘A Booke in titled the Ravyshement of Lucrece,’ and _First was published in the same year under the title edition, of ‘Lucrece.’ As in the case of ‘Venus and ^IS94' Adonis,’ it was printed by Shakespeare’s fellow-towns- man Richard Field. But the copyright was vested in John Harrison, who published and sold it at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard. He was a prominent figure in the book-trade of the day, being twice master of the Stationers’ Company, and shortly after publishing Shakespeare’s second poem he acquired of Field the copyright, in addition, of the dramatists’ first poem, of which he was already the publisher.

Lucrece’s story, which flourished in classical literature, was absorbed by mediaeval poetry, and like the tale of Venus and Adonis was subsequently endowed Sources of with new life by the literary effort of the Euro- ^{the story}- pean Renaissance. There are signs that Shakespeare ’ sought hints at many hands. The classical version of Ovid’s ‘Fasti’ (ii. 721-852) gave him a primary clue. But at the same time he seems to have assimilated suggestion from Livy’s version of the fable in his ‘ History of Rome’ (Bk. I. ch. 57-59), which William Painter paraphrased in English in the ‘Palace of Pleasure.’ Admirable help was also available in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ (lines 1680-1885), where the fifth section deals with Lucretia’s pathetic fortunes, and Bandello had developed the theme in an Italian novel. Again, as in ‘Venus and Adonis,’ there are subsidiary indications in phrase, episode, and sentiment of Shakespeare’s debt to contemporary English poetry. The accents of Shakespeare’s ‘Lucrece’ often echo those of Daniel’s poetic ‘Complaint of Rosamond’ (King Henry II’s mistress),

which, with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to ‘Lu- crece’ in even closer relation than Lodge’s ‘Scilla,’ with its six-line stanza, to ‘ Venus and Adonis.’ The piteous accents of Shakespeare’s heroine are those of Daniel’s heroine purified and glorified.¹ Lucrece’s apostrophe to Time (lines 939 seq.) suggests indebtedness to two other English poets, Thomas Watson in ‘Hecatompathia,’ 1582 (Sonnets xlvii. and lxxvii.), and Giles Fletcher in ‘Licia,’ 1593 (Sonnet xxviii.). Fletcher anticipated at many points Shakespeare’s catalogue of Time’s varied activities.² The curious appeal of Lucrece to personified ‘ Opportunity ’ (lines 869 seq.) appears to be his unaided invention.

Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first, but his Second language displays a greater warmth of feeling, letter to Shakespeare now addressed the young Earl in South- terms of devoted friendship, which were not un- ampton. common at the time in communications between patrons and poets, but they suggest here that Shakespeare’s relations with the brilliant young nobleman had grown closer since he dedicated ‘Venus and Adonis’ to him in more formal style a year before. ‘ The love I dedicate to your lordship,’ Shakespeare wrote

¹ Rosamond, in Daniel’s poem, muses thus when King Henry challenges her honour:

But what ? he is my King and may constraine me;

Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed.

The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me,

I shall be judg’d his Love and so be shamed;

We see the faire condemn’d that never gamed.

And if I yeeld, ’tis honourable shame.

If not, I live disgrac’d, yet thought the same.

* The general conception of Time’s action can of course be traced very far back in poetry. Watson acknowledged that his lines were borrowed from the Italian Serafino, and Fletcher imitated the Neapolitan Latinist Angerianus; while both Serafino and Angerianus owed much to Ovid’s pathetic lament in Tristia (iv. 6, 1-10). That Shakespeare knew Watson’s chain of reflections seems proved by his verbatim quotation of one link in Much Ado about Nothing (i. i. 271) : ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.’ There are plain indications in Shakespeare’s Sonnets that Fletcher’s Licia was familiar to him.

in the opening pages of ‘Lucrece,’ ‘is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship; to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.’ The subscription runs ‘ Your Lordship’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.’¹

In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal to the world of readers. The London playgoer already knew his name as that of a promising actor . and a successful playwright. But when ‘ Ve- jfcrecep^' nus and Adonis’ appeared in 1593, no word ^ of his dramatic composition had seen the light ^w°^poeras- of the printing press. Early in the following year, a month or two before the publication of ‘ Lucrece,’ there were issued the plays of ‘ Titus Andronicus ’ and the first part of the‘Contention’ (the early draft of the Second Part of ‘Henry VI’), to both of which Shakespeare had lent a revising hand. But so far, his original dramas had escaped the attention of traders in books. His early plays brought him at the outset no reputation as a man of letters. It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, but in the restricted rdle of versifier of classical fables familiar to all cultured Europe, that he first impressed studious contemporaries with the fact of his mighty genius. The reading public welcomed his poetic tales with unqualified enthusiasm. The sweetness of the verse, the poetic flow of the narrative, and the graphic imagery discountenanced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes even on the part of the seriously minded. Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulo-

¹ For fuller illustration of the poem’s literary history and bibliography, see the present writer’s introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the first quarto edition of Lucrece (1594), Clarendon Press, 19051

gies in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus. ‘Lucrece,’ wrote Michael Drayton in his ‘Legend of Matilda’ (1594), was ‘revived to live another age.’ A year later William Covell, a Cambridge fellow, in his ‘Polimanteia,’ gave ‘all praise’ to ‘sweet Shakespeare' for his ‘Lucrecia.’¹

In 1598 Richard Barnfield, a poet of some lyric power, sums up the general estimate of the two works thus:

Bam field’s And Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing Vaine, tribute. (Pleasing the World) thy Praises doth obtaine.

Whose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweete and chaste)

Thy name in fames immortall Booke have plac’t,

Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever:

Well may the Bodye dye, but Fame dies never.²

In the same year the rigorous critic and scholar, Gabriel Harvey, distinguished between the respective impressions which the two poems made on the public. Harvey reported that ‘the younger sort take much delight’ in ‘Venus and Adonis,’ while ‘Lucrece’ pleased ‘the wiser sort.’³ A poetaster John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to ‘honey-tongued Shakespeare’ in his ‘Epigramms’ (1599), eulogised the poems indiscriminately as an un- matchable achievement, while making vaguer and less articulate mention of the plays ‘Romeo’ and ‘Richard¹ and ‘more whose names I know not.’

Printers and publishers of both poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers-. No fewer than six editions of ‘Venus’ appeared between 1592 and 1602; a seventh followed in 1617, and a

¹ In a copy supposed to be unique of this work, formerly the property of Prof. Dowden, the author gives his name at the foot of the dedication to the Earl of Essex as ‘W. Covell.’ (See Dowden’s Sale Catalogue Hodgson and Co., London, Dec. 16, 1913, p. 40.) Covell was a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. (See Diet. Nat. Biog.) In all other known copies of the Polimanteia the author’s signature appears as ‘W. C.’ — initials which have been wrongly identified with those of William Clerke, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

² Bamfield’s Poems in Divers Humours, 1589, ‘A Remembrance of some English Poets.’

³ Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, 1913; see p. 358.

twelfth in 1636. ‘Lucrece ’ achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare’s death, and an eighth edition in

^SS-¹ . _

There is a likelihood, too, that Edmund Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shake- _Shake_ speare’s admirers. Among the ten contempo- speareand rary poets whom Spenser saluted mostly under ^Spenser- fanciful names in his ‘Colin Clouts come home againe’ (completed in 1594),² it is hardly doubtful that he greeted Shakespeare under the name of ‘AejLion’ — a familiar Greek proper name derived from aertk, an eagle. Spenser wrote:

And there, though last not least is Aetion;

A gender Shepheard may no where be found,

Whose muse, full of high thought’s invention,

Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.

The last line alludes to Shakespeare’s surname, and adumbrates the later tribute paid by the dramatist’s friend, Ben Jonson, to his ‘true-filed lines,’ which had the power of ‘a lance as brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance.’³ We may assume that the admiration of Spenser for Shakespeare was reciprocal. At any rate Shakespeare paid Spenser the compliment of making reference to his ‘Teares of the Muses’ (1591) in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (v. i. 52-3).

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death]

Of learning, late deceased in heggary,

is there paraded as the theme of one of the dramatic entertainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate

¹ See pp. 542-3 infra. _m

² Cf. Malone's Variorum, ii. 224—279, where an able attempt is made to identify all the writers noticed by Spenser, e.g. Thotnas Churchyard (‘Harpalus’), Abraham Fraunce (‘CorydonO, Arthur Gorges (‘Alcyon’), George Peele (‘Palin’), Thomas Lodge (‘Alcon’), Arthur Golding (‘Palemon’), and the fifth Earl of Derby (‘Amyntas⁷)? the patron of Shakespeare’s company of actors. Spenser mentions Alabaster and Daniel without disguise. .

^y³ Similarly Fuller, in his Worthies, likens Shakespeare to ‘Martial in the warlike sound of his surname/

Theseus’s marriage. In Spenser’s ‘Teares of the Muses’ each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on the literary and dramatic effort of the age. Shakespeare’s Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the frank but not unkindly comment:

That is some satire keen and critical,

Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

But it may be safely denied that Spenser in the same poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the recent death of ‘ our pleasant Willy.’¹ The name Willy was frequently used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Philip Sidney was addressed as ‘Willy’ by some of his elegists. A comic actor, ‘ dead of late ’ in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton.² Similarly the ‘gentle spirit’ who is described by Spenser in a still later stanza as sitting ‘in idle cell ’ rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be more reasonably identified with Shakespeare.³

¹ All these and all that els the Comick Stage With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,

By which mans life in his likest image

Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . .

And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate,

With kindly counter under mimick shade,

Our pleasant Willy, ah Ms dead of late;

With whom all joy and jolly meriment

Is also deaded and in dolour drent (11. 199—210).

² A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser’s Works (cf. Outlines, ii. 394—5).

³ But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen Large streames of honnie and sweete nectar flowe,

Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,

Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell

Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (U. 217-22).

Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem in a circle more exclusive than that of actors, men of letters, or the general reading public. His genius and patrons ‘civil demeanour’ of which Chettle wrote in ^atcourt- 1592 arrested the notice not only of the brilliant Earl of Southampton but of other exalted patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with Burbage and Kemp, the two most famous actors of the day, during the Christmas season of 1594 was possibly due in part to the personal interest which he had excited among satellites of royalty. Queen Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. Every year his company contributed to her Christmas festivities. The revised version of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Queen Elizabeth’s successor Shakespeare greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen’s appreciation equalled that of King James I. When Jonson in his elegy of Shakespeare wrote

Those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James,

he was mindful of the many representations of Shakespeare’s plays which glorified the river palaces of Whitehall, Windsor, Richmond, and Greenwich during the last decade of the great Queen’s reign.

It was doubtless to Shakespeare’s personal relations with men and women of the Court that most of his sonnets The vogue owed their existence. In Italy and France the of the practice of writing and circulating series of hethan sonnets inscribed to great personages flour- sonnet. ished continuously through the. greater part of the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney’s collection of sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney’s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere.¹ Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets or in short series their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of long sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame

¹ Section ix. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597.

in the country failed to count a patron’s ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height.

The dramatist lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Ten times he wove the quatorzain into his early dramatic verse. _stiatp_ Seven examples figure in ‘Love’s Labour’s speare’s Lost, ’ probably his earliest play ¹; both the ^_t^e_s^xperi" choruses in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (before acts 1. and 11.) are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helena in ‘ All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which bears traces of early composition, takes the same shape (m. iv. 4-17). It has, moreover, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ which prefaced in 1591 Florio’s ‘Second Frutes,’ a series of Italian-English dialogues for students.²

¹ Love’s Labour's Lost, I. i. 80-93, 163-176; rv. ii. 109-122; iii. 2639,60-73; v. ii. 343-56.; 402-15,

² Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio/ runs:

Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase,

How fit a rival art thou of the Spring!

For when each branch hath left his flourishing,

And green-locked Summer’s shady pleasures cease;

She makes the Winter’s storms repose in peace,

And spends her franchise on each living thing:

The daisies sprout, the little hirds do sing,

Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.

So when that all our English Wits lay dead,

(Except the laurel that is ever green)

Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o’erspread,

And set thy flowery pleasance to he seen.

Such fruits, such flow’rets of morality,

Were ne’er before brought out of Italy.

John Florio (i553?-i625), at first a teacher of Italian at Oxford and later well known in London as a lexicographer and translator, was a. protege of the Earl of Southampton, whose ‘pay and patronage’ he acknowledged in 1598 when dedicating to him his Worlde of Wordes. He was afterwards a beneficiary of the Earl of Pembroke. His circle of acquaintance included the leading men of letters of the day. Shake-

But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a noble. . man’s patronage for his earliest publication, oftt ‘Venus and Adonis,’ that he turned to sonnet- sonnets* teering on the regular plan, outside dramatic composed composition. One hundred and fifty-four ^{m IS94}' sonnets survive apart/r^tm his plays, and there are signs that a large part of tne collection was inaugurated while the two narrative poems were under way during 1593 and 1594 — his thirtieth and thirty-first years. Occasional reference in the sonnets to the writer’s growing age was a conventional device — traceable to Petrarch — of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation.¹ In matter and in

speare doubtless knew Florio first as Southampton’s protggg. He quotes his fine translation of Montaigne’s Essays in The Tempest; seep. 429. Although the fact of Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Florio is not open to question, it is responsible for at least one mistaken inference. Farmer and Warburton argue that Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofemes in Love’s Labour's Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio’s bombastic prefaces to his Worlde of Wordes and his translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster.

¹ Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:

My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1).

But when my glass shows me myself indeed,

Beated and chopp’d with tann'd antiquity (lxii. g-10).

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1—2).

My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).

Daniel in Delia (xxiii.) in i59r, when twenty-nine years old, exclaimed:

My. years draw on my everlasting night,

. . . My days are done.

Richard Bamfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom he addressed his Affectionate Shepherd and a sequence of sonnets in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):

Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,

My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.

Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he was barely thirty-one, wrote:

Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries,

I see the ugly face of my deformed cares With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs;

LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS

manner the greater number of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not yet middle-aged. Language and imagery closely connect the sonnets with the poetic and dramatic work which is known to have engaged Shakespeare’s early pen. The phraseology which is matched in plays of a later period is smaller in extent than that which finds a parallel in the narrative poems of 1593 and 1594, or in the plays of similar date. Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ seems to offer a longer list of parallel passages than any other of his works. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts from time to time and at irregular intervals during the closing years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, although only once — in the epilogue of ‘Henry V,’ which was penned in 1599 — did he introduce the sonnet-form into his maturer dramatic verse. Sonnet cvn., in which reference is made to Queen Elizabeth’s death, may be fairly regarded as one of the latest acts of homage on Shakespeare’s part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height.

In literary value Shakespeare’s sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and medi-

and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how

Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.

All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton followed the Italian master’s words more closely than their contemporaries. Cf. Petrarch’s Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet lxxxi. (to Laura after death); the latter begins: —

Dicemi spesso il mio fklat o speglio,

L’animo stanco e la cangiata scorza E la scemata mia destrezza e forza; .

Non ti nasconder piil: tu se’ pur veglio.

(i.e. ‘My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me: “It cannot longer be hidden from you, you are old.”’)

tative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the Their mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the literary depth of thought and feeling, the vividness ^value- of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and' their defects Shakespeare’s sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in ‘Venus and Adonis’ or in ‘Lucrece,’ although traces of their intensity appear in occasional utterances of Shakespeare’s Roman heroine. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed less to the accession of power that comes with increase of years than to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.

In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript.¹ But their reputation grew, and

¹ The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long circulated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare’s at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in manuscript, Sidney’s Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely ‘ spread abroad in written copies,’ and had ‘gathered much corruption by ill writers’ [i.e. copyists]. Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume wbicb he entitled ‘Diana.’ This was an authorised publication. But in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable’s knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of ‘Diana,’ which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix ix. for further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating literature in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney’s father-in- law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected

public interest was aroused in them in spite of his unreadiness to give them publicity. The melliflu- _Circulation ous verse of Richard B arnfield, which was printed in manu- in 1594 and 1595, assimilated many touches ^scnpt' from Shakespeare’s sonnets as well as from his narrative poems. A line from one sonnet:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14)¹

and a phrase ‘scarlet ornaments’ (for ‘lips’) from another (cxlii. 6) were both repeated in the anonymous play of ‘Edward III,’ which was published in 1596 and was probably written before 1595. Francis Meres, the critic, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare’s ‘sugred² sonnets among his private friends,’ and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems.³ William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in the poetic miscellany which he deceptively entitled ‘The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare.’

At length, in 1609, a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets was surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the

manuscript copies of the then unprinted Arcadia were ‘so common.’ In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work had long flown about ‘fast and false.’ Nash, in the preface to his Terrors of the Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend had ‘wrested’ from him, had ‘progressed [without his authority] from one scrivener’s shop to another, and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e. shop-signs], like a pair of indentures.’ Thorpe’s bookselling friend, Edward Blount, gathered together, without the author’s aid, the scattered essays by John Earle, and he published them in 1628 under the title of Micro- cosmographie, frankly describing them as ‘many sundry dispersed transcripts, some very imperfect and surreptitious.’

¹ Cf. Sonnet box. 12 :

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.

² For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shakespeare’s work, see p. 259, note 1.

³ Meres’s words run: ‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: So the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.’

moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was

. professionally engaged in procuring for publica- piraticai tion literary works which had been widely dis- pubiication _seminated in written copies, and had thus passed m 1609. b_ey_0n(j their authors’ control; for the law then ignored any natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the author’s wishes. Thorpe’s career as a procurer of neglected ‘copy’ had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe’s translation of the ‘First Book of Lucan.’ On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the publication of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets,’ and this tradesman-like form of title figured not only on the ‘Stationers’ Company’s Registers,’ but on the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld, whose press was at the White Horse, in Fleet Lane, Old Bailey, to print the work, and two booksellers, William Aspley of the Parrot in St. Paul’s Churchyard and John Wright of Christ Church Gate near Newgate, to dis-' tribute the volume to the public. On half the edition. Aspley’s name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June,¹ and the owner of the ‘copy’ left the public under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his own pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher’s (instead of from the author’s) hand was, unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no part in the publication. Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594

¹ The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf. Warner’s^ Dulwich MSS. p. 92). The symbol ¹5^^? (i.e. fivepence) is also inscribed in contemporary handwriting on the title-page of the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) in the John Rylands Library, Manchester.

respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe’s collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas entitled ‘A Lover’s Complaint, by William Shake-speare,’ in which a girl laments her be- <_ALover._s trayal by a deceitful youth. The title is com- Common in Elizabethan poetry, and although the ^plaint- metre of the Shakespearean ‘Lover’s Complaint’ is that of ‘Lucrece,’ it has no other affinity with Shakespeare’s poetic style. Its vein of pathos is unknown to the ‘Sonnets.’ Throughout, the language is strained and the imagery far-fetched. Many awkward words appear in its lines for the first and only time, and their invention seems due to the author’s imperfect command of the available poetic vocabulary. Shakespeare’s responsibility for ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ may well be questioned.¹

A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe’s preface and his part in the publication has encouraged many critics in a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Thomas poems,² and has caused them to be accorded a J^Mr. place in his biography to which they have small w. h.’

¹ Cf. the present writer’s introduction to the facsimile of the Sonnets, Clarendon Press, 1905, pp. 49-50, and, especially, Prof. J. W. Mackail’s essay on A Lover’s Complaint in Engl. Association Essays and Studies, vol. iii. 1912. After a careful critical study of the poem Prof. Mackail questions Shakespeare’s responsibility. He suggests less convincingly that the rival poet of the Sonnets may be the author.

² The present writer has published much supplementary illustration of the Sonnets and their history in the Introduction to the Clarendon Press’s facsimile reproduction of the first edition of the Sonnets (1905), in the footnotes to the Sonnets in the Caxton Shakespeare [1909], vol. xix., and in The French Renaissance in England, 1910, pp. 266 seq. The chief recent separate editions of the Sonnets with critical apparatus are those of Gerald Massey (1872, reissued 1888), Edward Dowden

title. Thorpe’s dedication was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to him. He advertised Shakespeare as ‘our ever-living poet.’ As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself in mercantile phraseology of the day, ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture a partner in the speculation, ‘Mr. W. H.’ In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘all happiness’ and ,‘eternity,’ such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe’s ‘First Book of Lucan’ in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. ‘W. H.’ was doubtless in a like position.¹ When Thorpe dubbed ‘Mr. W. H.,’ with characteristic magniloquence, ‘the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,’ he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the publishing fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and to make possible its surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave the procurer’s initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials

(1875, reissued i8g6), Thomas Tyler (1890), George Wyndham (1898), Samuel Butler (1899), and Dean Beeching (1904). Butler and Dean Beeching argue that the sonnets were addressed to an unknown youth of no high birth, who was the private friend, and not the patron, of the poet. Massey identifies the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. Tyler accepts the identification with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Mr. C. M. Walsh, in Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets (1908), includes the sonnets from the plays, holds aloof from the conflicting theories of soluticSi, arranges the poems in a new order on internal evidence only, and adds new and useful illustrations from classical sources.

¹ ‘W. H. ’ is best identified with a stationer’s assistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring ‘copy.’ In 1606 ‘W. H.’ won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year ‘W. H.’ announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem — ‘A Foure-fould Meditation’ — by the Jesuit Robert Southwell, who_ had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed ‘W. H.’) vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove (see Appendix v.).

to their common circle of friends. Thorpe’s ally was not a man of such general reputation as to render it likely that the printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers.

It has been assumed that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ‘Mr. W. H.,’ a young nobleman, to whom (it is argued) the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare. But this assumption ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe’s efforts were confined.¹ There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe’s methods of business. His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration circumstances touching Shakespeare’s private affairs. The poet, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued his questionable calling. It was outside Thorpe’s aim to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with a cryptic significance.

No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials ‘Mr. W. H.’ Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the

¹ It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets cxxxv.-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of the sonnets bore his own Christian name of Will (see for a full examination of these sonnets Appendix viii.). Further, it has been fantastically suggested that the friend’s surname was Hughes, because of a pun supposed to lurk in the line (xx. 7) describing the youth (in the original text) as ‘Amaninhew, all Hews in his controwling’ (i.e. a man in hue, or complexion, who exerts, by virtue of his fascination, control, or influence over the hues or complexion of all he meets). Three other applications to the youth of the ordinary word ‘hue’ (cf. ‘your sweet hue,’ civ. 11) are capriciously held to corroborate the theory. On such grounds a few critics have claimed that the friend’s name was William Hughes. No known contemporary of that name, either in age or position in life, bears any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in his Sonnets (cf. Notes arid Queries, 5 th ser. v. 443).

contrary has often-been asserted) with William (Herbert), third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth.¹ But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’ The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols ‘Mr. W. H.’ In 1609 the Earl of Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles. Star- Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his tradesmanlike temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe’s address to ‘Mr. W. H.’ belongs to the biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the scope of Shakespeare’s biography.²

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ ignore the somewhat complex scheme of metre adopted by Petrarch whom the Eliza- The form ^ethan sonnetteers, like the French and Italian of shake- sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised Sonnets. ^to ^ ^in
inost respects their master. The foreign writers strictly divided their poems into an octave and a sestett, and they subdivided each octave into two quatrains, and each sestett into two tercets {abba, abba, cde, cde). The rhymes of the regular foreign pattern are so repeated as never to exceed a total of five, and a couplet at the close is sternly avoided.

¹ See Appendix vi., ‘Mr. William Herbert’; and vn., ‘Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke.’

² The full results of my researches into Thprpe’s history, his methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix v., ‘The True History of Thomas Thorpe and “Mr, W, H,”'

Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three'decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet; the quatrains rhyme alternately, and independently of one another; the number of different rhyming syllables reach a total of seven (abab cdcd efef gg)} A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more. The collection of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets thus has the aspect of a series of detached poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe’s edition opens the volume.

It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. Endeavours have been made to detect in want of the original arrangement of the poems a con- continuity, nected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted.² It is usual to divide the son-

¹ The metrical structure of the fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long hefore he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English (published in Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: ‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.’ In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney’s collection entitled Astrophd and Stella consists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. Spenser interlaces his rhymes more subtly than Shakespeare ; but he is faithful to the closing couplet. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge’s Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.); and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to the collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics: see p. 166, note 1.

² If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of

nets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young The two man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were ‘groups;’ addressed to a woman. This division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the addressee’s sex. Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.). A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or ‘benefit of ill’ (cxix.). The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first ‘group,’ does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy who is warned that he must, in due course, succumb to Time’s inexorable law of death.¹ And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second ‘group’ (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform supernarrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare’s sonnets were applied to the booksellers’ miscellany of sonnets called Diana (1594), that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made to reveal the sequence of an individual lover’s moods quite as readily, and, if no external bibliographical evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as Thorpe’s collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan sonnets, despite their varying poetic value, are not merely substantially in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression of homogeneity.

¹ Shakespeare merely warns his ‘lovely boy’ that, though he be now the ‘minion’ of Nature’s ‘pleasure,’ he will not succeed in defying Time’s inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid as ‘blind hitting boy,’ as in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.). Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton’s sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville’s collection entitled CaMca (cf. lxxxiv., beginning ‘Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth’). A similar theme to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song ‘Love is ever dying,’ in his tragedy of the Broken Heart, 1633.

scription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly’s song of ‘Cupid and Campaspe,’ and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly’s songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid’s fire.¹

The choice and succession of topics in each ‘group’ give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first ‘group’ the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the , .

,, 1 , , Main

poet s appeal to a young man to marry so topics of that his youth and beauty may survive in the first

» • mm grOUp.

children. There is almost a contradiction in ' terms between the poet’s handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend’s youth and accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. Ixiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. d. cvii.). These assurances alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet’s affections (cf. xxi. lii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. 1. cxiii.). There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.). At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet’s mistress in the poet’s absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.). In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.

Thou hast pass’d by the ambush of young days,

Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d!

¹ See p. 185, note 2.

At times melancholy overwhelms the writer : he despairs of the corruptions of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his profession of acting (ex. cxi.), and foretells his approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.). Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet’s verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.). Butin one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.). In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.).

In two sonnets of the second ‘group’ (cxxvii. cliv.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve topics of sonnets he hotly denounces his ‘dark’ mistress the second f_or h_er p_roucj disdain of his affection, and for ' her manifold infidelities with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first ‘group’ the poet rebukes a woman for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.). Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.), or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxxvi.) — the word ‘will’ being capable of many meanings in Elizabethan English. In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ‘group’ lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.

It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640 — thirty-one years after their first

appearance — they were presented in a completely different order.¹ The short descriptive titles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short unbroken sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.

In whatever order Shakespeare’s sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can only be _Lackof accepted with many qualifications. The fact genuine that they create in many minds the illusion of a series of earnest personal confessions bethan does not justify their treatment by the biog- ^sonnets- rapher as self-evident excerpts from the poet’s autobiography. Shakespeare’s mind was dominated and engrossed by genius for drama, and his supreme mastery of dramatic power renders it unlikely that any production of his pen should present an unqualified piece of autobiography. The emotion of the sonnets may on a priori grounds well owe much to that dramatic instinct which reproduced intuitively in the plays the subtlest thought and feeling of which man’s mind is capable. In his drama Shakespeare acknowledged that ‘ the truest poetry is the most feigning.’ The exclusive embodiment in verse of mere private introspection was barely known to his era, and in this phrase the dramatist paid an explicit tribute to the potency in poetic literature of artistic impulse and control contrasted with the impotency of personal sensation, which is scarcely capable of discipline. To few of the sonnets can a controlling artistic impulse _j be denied by criticism. To pronounce' them, alone of his extant work, wholly free of that ‘feigning,’ which he identified with ‘the truest poetry,’ is almost tantamount to denying his authorship of them, and to dismissing them from the Shakespearean canon.

In spite of their poetic superiority to those of his contemporaries, Shakespeare’s sonnets cannot be dis- ¹ See p. 544 infra.

sociated from the class of poetic endeavour with which they were identified in Shakespeare’s own time. Elizabethan sonnets of all degrees of merit were commonly the artificial products of the poet’s fancy. A strain of personal emotion is discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions were not the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative or assimilative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves. Daniel’s fine sonnet (xlix.) on ‘ Care-charmer sleep,’ although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Brach¹ apostrophising ‘le pendence sommeil chasse-soin ’ (in the collection entitled on French ‘Les Amours d’Aymee’), or the sonnet of models!*¹¹" Philippe Desportes invoking ‘ Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire’ (in the collection entitled ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’). But, throughout Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to classical Italian and French effort is unmistakable.² Spensei, in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of ‘ an English Petrarch ’ — the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer.³ Thomas Watson in 1582, in his

^{1 i}547~i6o4. Cf. De Brach, (Euvres Poetigues, edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60.

² See Appendices dc. and x. Of the vastness of the debt that the Elizabethan sonnet owed to foreign poets, a fuller estimate is given by the present writer in his preface to Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), in the revised edition of-Arber’s English Garner.

³ Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch’s sonnets (‘Petrarch’s invention is pure love itself; Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself’), justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground that ‘all the

collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled 'EKATOMIIA®IA, or A Passionate Century of Love,’ prefaced each poem, which he termed a ‘passion,’ with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one ‘passion’ was ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch’; that in another passion ‘he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard’; while ‘the sense or matter of “a third” was taken out of Serafino in his “Strambotti.”’ In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation.¹

noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiahlest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.’ Both French and English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay’s Les Amours, ed. Becq de FouquiSres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel’s Delia, Sonnet xxxviii.). The dependent rdations in which both English and French sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised hy comparing such a popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions lxxxviii.) in Sonetti in Vita ii M. Laura, beginning ‘S’ amor non 6, che dunque 6 quel ch’ i’ sento?’ with a rendering of it into French like that of De Balf in his Amours de Francine (ed. Becq de FouquiSres, p. 121), beginning, ‘ Si ce n’est pas Amour, que sent donques mon coeur ? ’ or with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in his Passionate Century, No. v., heginning, ‘If’t bee not love I feele, what is it then?’ Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the earliest efforts of Surray and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master. Petrarch’s sonnet In vita ii M. Laura (No. Ixxx. or lxxxi., beginning ‘Cesare, poi che ’1 traditor d’ Egitto’) was independently translated both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, ahout 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 60), and by Francis Davison in his Poetical Rhapsody (1602, ed. Bullen, i. go). Petrarch’s sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii., heginning ‘Pommi ove ’1 Sol uccide i fiori e 1’erba’) was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf. Putten- ham’s Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 231) and by Drummond of Hawthomden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221).

¹ Eight of Watson’s sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell’ Aquila (14661500); four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (iji4?-ij73), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (/!. 1548), and jEneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of

Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled ‘Idea/ declared that it was ‘a fault too common in this latter time’ ‘to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch’s pen.’¹ Lodge did not acknowledge his many literal borrowings from Ronsard and Ariosto, but he made a plain profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: ‘Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody’s hand.’² Dr. Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called ‘Licia’ (1593) simulated the varying moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all written in ‘imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’ Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources not merely in the Italian sonnets of Petrarch, and the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro, but in the French verse of Ronsard, of his colleagues of the Pleiade, and of their half-forgotten disciples.³ The Elizabethans usually

the epic 'Argonautica’); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace,-Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus, or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modem Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus.

/.No.importance can be attached to Drayton’s pretensions to greater originality than his rivals. The very line in which he makes the claim (‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’) is a verbatim quotation from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella, Ixxiv. 8), and is originally from an epigram of Persius. .

² Lodge’s Margarite, p. 79. See Appendix ix. for the text of Desportes s sonnet (Diana, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge’s translation in Phillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Desportes in his romance of Rosalind (Hunterian Society’s reprint, P- 74/j ^and in his volume of poems called Scillaes Metamorphosis (p. 44)- Many sonnets in_ Lodge’s Phillis are rendered with equal literalness from Ronsard, Ariosto, Paschale, and others.

_ ^a See Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses’ Library, 1894, 1. 207 seq.; and The Poetical Works of William Drummond, ed. L. E. Kastner (Manchester University Press), 1913, 2 vols.

gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Seve¹ in christening his collection ‘Delia’; Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ‘ Diana ’; while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ‘Amours,’ but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux,² although it was employed by other French contemporaries.

With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘ no inward touch ’ was to be expected from sonnet- teers of his day, whom he describes as

[Men] that do dictionary’s method bring Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;

[Men] that poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.

Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments. But ‘even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey in ‘Pierces Supererogation’ in 1593, ‘are but _{Sonn t} dainties of a pleasurable wit.’ Drayton’s son- teers’Vd- nets more nearly approached Shakespeare’s in missions of

msmcenty

quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled ‘ Idea ’³

¹ SSve’s Delie was first published at Lyons in 1544.

² Pontoux’s VIdee was published at Lyons in 1579, just after the author’s death.

³ In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in the 1594 edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton asserts that his ‘fair Idea’ embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his acquaintance (see p. 466 infra), and he repeats the statement in two other short poems; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in the 1594 edition.

Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . .

Only I call [i.e. I call only] on my divine Idea.

Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in addressing sonnets to ‘ L’ldce,’ left the reader in no doubt of his intent by concluding one poem thus:

La, 8 mon ame, au plus hault ciel guidee Tu y pourras recognoistre l’Id£e De la beauty qu’en ce monde j’adore.

(Du Bellay’s Olive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)

(after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere. ‘In all humours sportively he ranged,’ he declared. Dr. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ‘Lida, or Poems of Love/ with the warning, ‘Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.’¹

The dissemination of false or artifidal sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical Contem treatment of ‘the pangs of despised love’ or porary the joys of requited affection, did not escape sonnet⁶ °^f c^ensure °f contemporary criticism. The

teers’ false air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the sentiment. _{most re}spected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet- sequence in his ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid.’² Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled ‘A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,’ appealed to his literary comrades to abandon ‘ the painted cabinet ’ of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton’s ‘Idea’) he inveighed against the ‘bastard sonnets’ which ‘base rhymers’ ‘daily’ begot ‘to their own shames and poetry’s disgrace.’ In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he 'wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen series

¹ Ben Jonson, echoing without acknowledgment an Italian critic’s epigram (cf. Athenteum, July 9, 1904), told Drummond of Hawthomden that ‘he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said were like that tyrant’s bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short’ (Jonson’s Conversations, p. 4).

² See p. 194 infra.

LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS

of nine ‘gulling sonnets’ or parodies of the conventional efforts.¹ Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies’s condemnation. Sir John is ‘Gulling especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled Sonnets.’ conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth ‘gulling sonnet,’ in which he ridicules the application of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.²; while Davies’s Sonnet ix., beginning:

To love, my lord, I do knight’s service owe

must have parodied Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxvi., beginning:

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage, &c.⁸

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays. _RhaVp ‘Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,’ speare’s exclaims Biron in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ IjjfJSmsto (iv. iii. 158). In the ‘Two Gentlemen of sonnets in Verona’ (111. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch ^p¹^- in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke :

You must lay lime to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets whose composed rime Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .

Say that upon the altar of her beauty

You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo : ‘ Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry, she had

¹ They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society in 1873 in his edition of ‘the Dr. Farmer MS.,’ a sixteenth and seventeenth century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester, pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems in his edition of Sir John Davies’s Works, 1876, ii. 53-62.

² Davies’s Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix rx.

^s See p. 198 infra.

a better love to be-rhyme her.’¹ In later plays Shakespeare’s disdain of the sonnet is equally pronounced. In ‘Henry V’ (in. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, ‘ I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: “Wonder of nature!”’ The Duke of Orleans retorts: ‘ I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.’ The Dauphin replies : ‘ Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.’ In ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ (v. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’ Benedick jestingly promises one ‘in so high a style that no man living shall come over it.’ Subsequently (v. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.

The claim of Sidney, Drayton, and others that their efforts were free of the fantastic insincerities of fellow shake- practitioners was repeated by Shakespeare, speare and More than once in his sonnets Shakespeare ventionai declares that his verse is innocent of the profession ‘strained touches’ of rhetoric (lxxxii. 10), of sincerity, ‘proud’ and ‘false compares’ (xxi. and cxxx.), of the ‘newfound methods’ and ‘compounds strange⁷ (lxxvi. 4) — which he imputes to the sonnetteer- ing work 'of contemporaries.² Yet Shakespeare modestly admits elsewhere (lxxvi. 6) that he keeps ‘invention in a noted weed’ [i.e. he is faithful to the normal style]. Shakespeare’s protestations of veracity are not always distinguishable from the like assurances of other Elizabethan sonnetteers.

¹ Romeo and Juliet, ii. iv. 41-4.

² Cf. Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet iii., where the poet affirms that his sole inspiration is his beloved’s natural beauty.

Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine . . .

Ennobling new-found tropes witb problems old,

Or with strange similes enrich each line . . .

Phrases and problems from my reach do grow. . , .

THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current con- autoblo- ventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well graphical as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in shat?^tm dramatic instinct and invention — an affluence ^”’₃^S which enabled him to identify himself with ' every phase of human emotion —■ the autobiographic element, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets is studied comparatively with the many thousand poems of cognate theme and form that the printing-presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare’s performances prove to be little more than trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the poetic effort of his own or of past ages at home and abroad. Francis Meres, the critic of 1598, adduced not merely Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis' and his ‘Lucrece’ but also ‘his sugared sonnets’ as evidence that ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.’ Much of the poet’s thought in the sonnets bears obvious trace of Ovidian inspiration. But Ovid was only one of many nurturing forces. Echoes of Plato’s ethereal message filled the air of Elizabethan poetry. Plato, Ovid, Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes (among foreign authors of earlier time), Sidney, N 177

Watson, Constable, and Daniel (among native contemporaries) seem to have quickened Shakespeare’s sonnet- _The teering energy in much the same fashion as his- imitative torical writings, romances or plays of older and element. contemporary date ministered to his dramatic activities. Of Petrarch’s and Ronsard’s sonnets scores were accessible to Shakespeare in English renderings, but there are signs that to Ronsard and to some of Ronsard’s fellow countrymen Shakespeare’s debt was often as direct as to tutors of his own race. Adapted or imitated ideas or conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare’s collection. The transference is usually manipulated with consummate skill. Shakespeare invariably gives more than he receives, yet his primal indebtedness is rarely in doubt. It is just to interpret somewhat literally Shakespeare’s own modest criticism of his sonnets (lxxvi. 11-12):

So all my best is dressing old words new,

Spending again what is already spent.

The imitative or assimilative element in Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ is large enough to refute the assertion

The illusion *ⁿ ^^{em
as a w}h°l^e he sought to ‘unlock

ofautohio-ⁿ his heart.’¹ Few of the poems have an indis- rnnfpswlnns putable right to be regarded as untutored ’ cries of the soul. It is true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing illusion of autobiographic confessions. But the energetic lines in which the poet appears to betray his inmost introspections are often adaptations of the less forcible and less coherent utterances of contemporary poets, and the ethical or emotional themes are common

¹ Wordsworth in his sonnet on The Sonnet (1827) claimed that ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ — a judgment which Robert Browning, no mean psychologist or literary scholar, strenuously attacked in the two poems At the Mermaid and House (1876). Browning cited in the latter poem Wordsworth’s assertion, adding the gloss: ‘Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! ’

to almost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets.¹ Shakespeare’s noble sonnet on the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force and insight a stereotyped topic of sonnetteers, and it may have owed its immediate cue to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet on ‘Desire.’²

Plato’s ethereal conception of beauty which Petrarch first wove into the sonnet web became under the influence of the metaphysical speculation of the shake- Renaissance a dominant element of the love poetry of sixteenth century Italy and France, concept In Shakespeare’s England, Spenser was Plato’s ^tions- chief poetic apostle. But Shakespeare often caught in his sonnets the Platonic note with equal subtlety. Plato’s disciples greatly elaborated their master’s conception of earthly beauty as a reflection or ‘shadow’ of a heavenly essence or ‘pattern’ which, though immaterial, was the only true and perfect ‘substance.’ Platonic or neo- Platonic ‘ideas’ are the source of Shakespeare’s metaphysical questionings (Sonnet liii. 1-4):

¹ The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,

Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,

adopts expressions in Bamabe Barnes’s sonnet (No. xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a ‘siren,’ that poet incoherently ejaculates:

From my love’s limbeck [sc. have I] still [di]stilled tears!

Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch’s sonnets. Tasso in Scelta delle Rime, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning ‘Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso’) which adumbrates Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxix. (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) and lxvi. (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’). Drummond of Hawthomden translated Tasso’s sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond’s Sonnets xxv. (‘What cruel star into this world was brought’) and xxxii. (‘If crost with all mishaps be my poor life’) are pitched in the identical key.

² Sidney’s Certain Sonnets (No. xiii.) appended to Astrophd and Stella in the edition of 1598. In Emaricdulfe: Sonnets written by E. C. 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning ‘O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,’ even more closely resembles Shakespeare’s sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.’s rare volume is reprinted in the Lamport Garland (Roxburghe Club), 1881.

What is your substance, whereof are you made That millions of strange shadows on you tend ?

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you, but one, can every shadow lend.¹

Again, when Shakespeare identifies truth with beauty² and represents both entities as independent of matter or time, he is proving his loyalty to the mystical creed of the Graeco-Italian Renaissance, which Keats subsequently summarised in the familiar lines:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Shakespeare’s favourite classical poem, Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ which he and his generation knew well in The debt Golding’s English version, is directly responsible to Ovid’s for a more tangible thread of philosophical theory speculation which, after the manner of other contemporary poets, Shakespeare also wove dispersedly into the texture of his sonnets.³ In varied periphrases he confesses to a fear that ‘nothing’ is ‘new’; that ‘that which is hath been before’; that Time, being in a perpetual state of ‘revolution,’ is for ever reproducing natural phenomena in a regular rotation ; that the most impressive efforts of Time, which the untutored mind regards as ‘novel’ or ‘strange’ ‘are but dressings of a former sight,’ merely the rehabilitations of a past experience, which fades only to repeat itself at some future epoch.

The metaphysical argument has only a misty relevance to the poet’s plea of everlasting love for his friend. The

¹ The main philosophic conceits of the Sonnets are easily traced to their sources. See J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry (New York, 1903); George Wyndham, The Poems of Shakespeare (London, T898), p. cxxii. seq.; Lilian Winstanley, Introduction to Spenser’s Foure Hymnes (Cambridge, 1907).

² Cf. ‘Thy end is truth and beauty’s doom and date’ (Sonnet xiv. 4).

‘Both truth and beauty on my love depend’ (ci. 3); cf. liv. 1-2.

³ The debt of Shakespeare’s sonnets to Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been worked out in detail by the present writer in an article in the Quarterly Review, April, 1909.

poet fears that Nature’s rotatory processes rob his passion of the stamp of originality. The reality and individuality of passionate experience appear to be prejudiced by the classical doctrine of universal ‘revolution.’ With no very coherent logic he seeks refuge from his depression in an arbitrary claim on behalf of his friend and himself¹ to personal exemption from Nature’s and Time’s universal law which presumes an endless recurrence of ‘growth' and ‘waning.’

It is from the last book of Ovid’s ‘ Metamorphoses ’ that Shakespeare borrows his cosmic theory which, echoing Golding’s precise phrase, he defines in _sliake_ one place as ‘the conceit of thik inconstant speare’s stay ’¹ (xv. 9), and which he christens elsewhere phy_S^<io-^ed ‘nature’s changing course’ (xviii. 8), ‘revolu- graphy. tion’ (lix. 12), ‘interchange of state’ (lxiv. 9), and ‘the course of altering things’ (cxv. 8). But even more notable is Shakespeare’s literal conveyance from Ovid or from Ovid’s English translator of the Latin writer’s physiographic illustrations of the working of the alleged rotatory law. Ovid’s graphic appeal to the witness of the sea wave’s motion —

As emery wave drives others forth, and that that comes behind Both thrusteth and is thrust himself; even so the times by kind Do fly and follow both at once and evermore renew —

is loyally adopted by Shakespeare in the fine lines:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend. — Sonnet lx. 1-4.

Similarly Shakespeare reproduces Ovid’s vivid descriptions of the encroachments of land on sea and sea on land which the Latin poet adduces from professedly

¹ Golding, Ovid’s Elizabethan translator, when he writes of the Ovidian theory of Nature’s unending rotation, repeatedly employs a, negative periphrasis, of which the word ‘stay’ is the central feature. Thus he asserts that ‘in all the world there is not that that standeth at a stay,’ and that ‘our bodies’ and ‘the elements never stand at stay.’

personal observation as further evidence of matter’s endless rotations. Golding’s lines run:

Even so have places oftentimes exchanged their estate,

For I have seen it sea which was substantial ground alate:

Again where sea was, I have seen the same become dry land.

This passage becomes under Shakespeare’s hand:

When 1 have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store; _ When I have seen such interchange of state. (Sonnet lxiv.)

Shakespeare has no scruple in claiming to ‘have seen’ with his own eyes the phenomena of Ovid’s narration. Shakespeare presents Ovid’s doctrine less confidently than the Latin writer. In Sonnet lix. he wonders whether ‘five hundred courses of the sun’ result in progress or in retrogression, or whether they merely bring things back to the precise point of departure (11. 13^14)- Yet, despite Shakespeare’s hesitation to identify himself categorically with the doctrine of ‘revolution,’ the fabric of his speculation is Ovid’s gift.

In the same Ovidian quarry Shakespeare may have found another pseudo-scientific theory on which he other meditates in the Sonnets — xliv. and xlv. — the philosophic notion that man is an amalgam of the four conceits. elements, earth, water, air, and fire; but that superstition was already a veteran theme of the sonnetteers at home and abroad, and was accessible to Shakespeare in many places outside Ovid’s pages.¹ In Sonnet cvi. Shakespeare argues that the splendid praises of beauty which had been devised by poets of the past anticipated the eulogies which his own idol inspired.

So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring;

And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing.

¹ Cf. Spenser, lv.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil, lxxvii.; Fulke Greville’s Ctzlica, No. vii.

The conceit which has Platonic or neo-Platonic affinities may well be accounted another gloss on Ovid’s cosmic philosophy. But Henry Constable, an English sonnetteer, who wrote directly under continental guidance, would here seem to have given Shakespeare an immediate cue:

Miracle of the world, I never will deny

That former poets praise the beauty of their days;

But all these beauties were but figures of thy praise,

And all those poets did of thee but prophesy}

Another of Shakespeare’s philosophic fancies — thought’s nimble triumphs over space (xliv. 7-8) — is clothed in language which was habitual to Tasso, Ron- sard, and their followers.² .

The simpler conceits wherewith Shakespeare illustrates love’s working under the influence of spring or summer, night or sleep, often appear to echo in deepened Amorous notes Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baiif, and Des- ^conce!ts- portes, or English disciples of the Italian and French masters.³ In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops the

¹ In his Miscellaneous Sonnets (No. vii.) written about 1590 (see Hazlitt’s edition, 1859, p. 2 7) — not in his Diana. Constable significantly headed his sonnet: ‘To his Mistrisse, upon occasion of a Petrarch he gave her, showing her the reason why the Italian commentators dissent so much in the exposition thereof.’

² Cf. Ronsard’s Amours, 1. clxviii. (‘ Ce fol penser, pour s’envoler trop haut’); Du Bellay’s Olive, xliii. (‘Penser volage, et leger comme vent’); Amadis Jamyn, Sonnet xxi. (‘Penser, qui peux en un moment grande erre courir’); and Tasso’s Rime (1583, Venice, i. p. 33) (‘Come s’ human pensier di giunger tenta A1 luogo’).

³ Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of the poet’s love (cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets xcviii. xcix.) play variations on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch’s well-known sonnet xlii., ‘In morte di M. Laura,’ beginning:

Zefiro toma e ’1 bel tempo rimena,

E i fiori e 1’ erbe, sua dolce famiglia,

E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena,

E primavera Candida e vermiglia.

Ridono i prati, e ’1 ciel si rasserena;

Giove s’ allegra di mirar sua figlia; _

L’ aria e 1’ acqua e la terra 6 d’ amor piena;

Ogni animal d’ amar si riconsiglia.

Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piu gravi Sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c.

old-fashioned fancy to which Ronsard gave a new lease of life, that his love’s portrait is painted on his heart; and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard’s phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of ‘tables,’ is ‘character’d’ in his brain.¹ Again Constable may be credited with suggesting Shakespeare’s Sonnet xcix., where the flowers are reproached with stealing their charms from the features of the poet’s love. Constable had published in 1592 an identically turned compliment in honour of his poetic mistress Diana (Sonnet xvii.). Two years later Drayton issued a sonnet in which he fancied that his ‘fair Muse’ added one more to ‘the old nine.’ Shakespeare adopted the conceit (xxxviii. 9-10 :)

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth Than those old nine, which rhymers invocate.²

^ In two or three instances Shakespeare engaged in the literary exercise of offering alternative renderings of the same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases twice over — appropriating many of Watson’s words — the unexhilarating notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the

See a translation by) William Drummond of Hawthomden in Sonnets, pt. 11. No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer abound in French and English (cf. Becq de FouquiSre’s (Euvres ckoisies J'-A. de Baif, passim, and (Euvres choisies des Contemporains de Ronsard, p. 108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamyn) et passim), tor descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard’s Amours (livre 1. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii.; Odes, livre iv. No. iv., and his Odes Re- tranchies m (Euvres, edited by Blanchemain, ii. 302-4). Cf. Bames’s Parthenophe and Partkenopkil, lxxxiii. cv.

t 9f' ^R-^onsard’s Amours, livre i. clxxviii.: Sonnets pour Astrfavi. The latter opens:

£ ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes Pour vous graver que celles de mon coeur Ou de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur,

Vous a grav6e et vos graces parfaites.

\®^e.^e Drayton’s Ideas Mirrovr, 1594, Amour 8. Drayton represents that his ladylove^ adds one to the nine angels and the nine worthies as well as to the nine muses. Sir John Davies severely castigated this ^e3rF^a^^aS^ance ?,EP'Sram Decium. Cf. Jonson’s Conversations mth Drummond (Shakespeare Soc., p. 15).

greater influence on lovers.¹ In the concluding sonnets, cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek Anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers.²

Two themes of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets,’ both of which, in spite of their different calibre, touch rather more practical issues than any which have yet been cited — the duty of marriage on the one hand and the immortality of poetry on the other — thrifty

, .,, ,. , , , r. ., loveliness.

present with exceptional coherence definite phases of contemporary sentiment. ' The seventeen opening sonnets in which the poet urges a youth to marry, and to bequeath his beauty to posterity, repeat the plea of ‘unthrifty loveliness,’ which is one of the commonplaces of Renaissance poetry.³ As a rule the appeal is addressed by earlier poets to a woman. Yet in Guarini’s world-famous pastoral drama of ‘Pastor Fido’ (1585) a

¹A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxiv. Ron- sard’s Ode (Iivre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. (‘Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core’) is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while Ms Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson’s Tears of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resembles Shakespeare’s pair); Drayton’s Idea, xxxiii.; Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenoph.il, xx., and Constable’s Diana, vi. 7.

¹ The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in Selecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench loves’ torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher’s Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet’s Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ‘she touched the water and it burnt with Love,’ but also

Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss Which all diseases quickly can remove.

Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the ‘cool well’ into which Cupid’s torch had fallen ‘from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,’ but also that it grew ‘a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.’ _ .

³ The common conceit may owe something to Ovid’s popular Ars Amatoria, where appear the lines:

young man, Silvio, who is the hero of the poem, receives the warning of Shakespeare’s sonnets, while in Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ (Book iii.) in one place a young man and in another a young woman are severally reminded that their beauty, which will perish unless it be reproduced, lays them under the obligation of marrying. Italian and French sonnetteers developed the conceit on lines which Shakespeare varied little.¹ Nor did Shakespeare show in the sonnets his first familiarity with the widespread theme. Thrice in his ‘Venus and Adonis’ does Venus fervently urge on Adonis the duty of propagating his charm (cf. lines 129-132, 162-174, 751-768), and a fair maiden is admonished of the like duty in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1. i. 218-228).²

It is abundantly proved that a gentle modesty was an abiding note of Shakespeare’s character. In the mistake- merous sonnets in which he boasted that his speaxe’s verse was so certain of immortality that it was tam>r-°^£ capable of immortalising the person to whom taiity for it was addressed, he therefore gave voice to his sonnets. _{n0 conv}i_cti₀rL that was peculiar to his mental constitution. He was merely proving his supreme mastery of a theme which Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe.³ Sir Philip Sidney, in his ‘Apologie

Carpite florera Qui, nisi carptus erit, turpiter ipse cadet, (iii. 79-80).

Erasmus presents the argument in full in his Colloquy ‘Prod et Puellae,’ and Sir Thomas Wyatt notices it in his poem ‘That the season of enjoyment is short.’

¹ See French Renaissance in England, pp. 268-9.

² Cf. also All’s Well, 1. i. 136, and Twelfth Night, 1. v. 273-5, where the topic is treated more cursorily. Shakespeare abandons the conceit in his later work.

³ In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar’s Olympic Odes, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk’s Poetm Lyrici Grad. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, De Senectute, c. 207; in Virgil’s Georgies, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. But it is the versions of Horace (Odes, iii. 30) and of Ovid (Metamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.) which the poets of the sixteenth

for Poetrie’ (1595), wrote that it was the common habit of poets ‘ to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses.’¹ Men of great calling,’ Nashe declared in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse,’ 1593, ‘take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets.’² In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ‘eternising’ faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic. Spenser wrote of his mistress in his ‘Amoretti’ (1595, Sonnet lxxv.) : ■

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name.³

century adapted most often. In French and English literature numerous traces survive of Horace’s far-famed ode (iii. 30):

Exegi monumentum asre perennius Regalique situ pyramidum altius,

Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis Annorum series, et fuga temporum.

as well as of the lines which end Ovid’s Metamorphoses (xv. 871-9).

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes,

Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.

Cum volet ilia dies, quas nil nisi corporis hujus Jns habet, incerti spatum mihi finiat asvi;

Parte tamen meliore mei super alt a perennis Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.

Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most holdly, although Du Bellay popularised Ovid’s lines in an avowed translation, and also in an original poem, ‘De 1’immortalite des pofites,’ which gave the boast an exceptionally huoyant expression. Ronsard’s odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liherality. The following lines from Ronsard’s Ode (livre i. No. vii.) ‘Au Seigneur Camavalet,’ illustrate his hahitual treatment of the theme:

C’est un travail de bon-beur Les neuf divines pucelles

Chanter les hommes louables, Gardent ta gloire chez elles;

Et leur bastir un honneur Et mon luth, qu’ell’ont fait estre

Seul vainqueur des ans muables. De leurs secrets le grand prestre,

Le marbre ou l’airain vestu Par cest hymne solennel

D’un labeur vif par l’enclume Respandra dessus ta race

N’animent tant la vertu Je ne sjay quoy de sa grace

Que les Muses par la plume. . . . Qui te doit faire etemel.

(CEuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)

¹ Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

* Shakespeare Soc. p. 93.

* Spenser, when commemorating the death of the Earl of War-

Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration. Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ‘my immortal song’ (‘Idea,’ vi. 14) and ‘my world-outwearing rhymes ’ (xliv. 7)1 embodied the vaunt in such lines as:

While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (‘Idea,’ xliv. 1). Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (ib. xliv. ii).

My name shall mount unto eternity (ib. xliv. 14).

All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 14).

Daniel was no less explicit:

This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9). Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,

Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10).

These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect That fortify thy name against old age;

And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect Against the dark and time’s consuming rage (ib. 1. 9-12).

Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste. Amid the oblivion of the day of doom Shakespeare foretells that his friend

shall in these black lines be seen,

And they shall live, and he in them still green. (Sonnet lxiii. 13-14.) ‘Your monument’ (the poet continues) ‘shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’erread . . .

You still shall live, — such virtue hath my pen. (Sonnet lxxxi. 9-10,13.)

Characteristically in Sonnet lv. Shakespeare invested the conventional vaunt with a splendour that was hardly approached by any other poet:

wick in the Ruines of Time (c. isgi), assured the Earl’s widowed Countess,

Thy Lord shall never die the whiles this verse Shall live, and surely it shall live for ever:

For ever it shall live, and shall rehearse His worthie praise, and vertues dying never,

Though death his soul doo from his body sever;

And thou thyself herein shalt also live:

Such grace the heavens doo to my verses give.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone hesmear’d with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And hroils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall hum The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death and all-ohlivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Very impressively does Shakespeare subscribe to a leading tenet of the creed of all Renaissance poetry.¹

The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a woman. In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name of Will with a lady’s ‘will’ (the synonym in Elizabethan

¹ See also Shakespeare’s Sonnets xix. liv. lx. lxv. and cvii. In the three quotations in the text Shakespeare catches very nearly Ronsard’s notes:

Donne moy l’encre et le papier aussi,

En cent papiers tesmoins de mon souci Je veux tracer la peine que j’endure:

En cent, papiers plus durs que diamant,

A fin qu’un jour nostre race future

Juge du mal que je souffre en aimant. _

CAmours, 1. cxxxiii. (Euvres, i. 109.) Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur Au moms tant que vivront les plumes et le livre. ^

(Sonnets pour HSline, n. ii.)

Plus dur que fer j’ay fini mon ouvrage,

Que Fan, dispos k demener les pas,

Que I’eau, le vent ou le brulant orage,

L’injuriant, ne ru’ront h bas.

Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespas M’assoupira d’un somme dur, a l’heure,

Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,

Restant de luy la part meilleure^ ... _<

Sus donque, Muse, emporte au del la gloire Que j’ay gaign£e, annongant la victoire Dont a bon droit je me voy jouissant. ...

(Odes, livre v. No. xxxii. ‘A sa Muse.)

In Sonnet barii. in Amours (livre i.), Ronsard declares that his mistress’s name

Victorieux des peuples et des rois S’en voleroit sus l’aile de ma ryme.

English, of both ‘lust’ and ‘obstinacy’), he derisively challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of . . rival sonnetteers, especially of Bamabe Barnes, s^Com^Ce^ets^tSad- who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress’s dressed to ‘wills,’ and had turned the word ‘grace’ to a woman. ^ _same p_Unning account as Shakespeare turned the word ‘will.’¹ Similarly in Sonnet cxxx., beginning —

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red . . .

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,²

the poet satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses’ features. It was not the only time that Shakespeare deprecated the sonnetteer’s practice of comparing features of women’s beauty with ‘earth and sea’s rich gems’ (xxi. 5-6).³

In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare graciously notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features

¹ See Appendix vm., ‘The Will Sonnets,’ for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s conceit and like efforts of Barnes.

² Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnet- teers’ affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel’s Delia, 1591, No. xxvi., ‘And golden hair may change to silver wire’-, Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, ‘Made blush the beauties of her curled wire’-, Barnes’s Parthenophil, sonnet xlviii., ‘Her hairs no grace of golden wires want.’ For the habitual comparison of lips with coral cf. ‘Coral-coloured lips’ (Zepheria, IS94> No. xxiii.); ‘No coral is her lip’ (Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, No. viii.) ‘Ce beau coral’ are the opening words of Ronsard’s Amours, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women’s features. Remy Belleau, one of Ronsard’s poetic colleagues, treated that comparative study most comprehensively in ‘Les Amours et nou- veaux eschanges des pi'erres precieuses, vertus et proprietez d’icelles’ which was first published at Paris in 1576. In A Loner’s Complaint, lines 280-1, the writer betrays knowledge of such strained imagery when he mentions:

, deep-brained sonnets that did amplify

Each stone’s dear nature, worth and quality.

³ Here Spenser in his Amoretti, No. ix., gives Shakespeare a very direct cue, as may be seen when Spenser’s cited sonnet is read alongside of Shakespeare’s sonnet xxi.

of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He commends the ‘ dark lady ’ for refusing to prac- _{The ra!se} tise those arts by which other women of the day of ‘biack- gave their hair and faces colours denied them ^ness'’ by Nature.¹ In his praise of ‘blackness’ or a dark complexion Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (iv. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as ‘black as ebony,’ with ‘brows decked in black,’ and in ‘mourning’ for her fashionable sisters’ indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet. ‘ No face is fair that is not full so black, exclaims Rosaline’s lover. But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare’s praise of ‘blackness’ claim the merit of being his own invention. The conceit is familiar to the French sonnetteers.² Sir Philip Sidney, in Sonnet vii. of his ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ had anticipated its employment in England. The ‘beams’ of the eyes of Sidney’s mistress were ‘wrapt in colour black’ and wore ‘this mourning weed,’ so

That whereas black seems beauty’s contrary,

She even in black doth make all beauties flow.³

¹ Cf. Sonnet lxviii. 3-7. Desportes had previously protested with equal warmth against the artificial disguises — false hair and cosmetics — of ladies’ toilets:

Ceste vive couleur, qui ravit et qui blesse Les esprits des amans, de la feinte abusez,

Ce n’est que blanc d’Espagne, [i.e. a cosmetic] et ces cheveux frisez Ne sont pas ses cheveux: c’est une fausse tresse.

(‘Diverses Amours,’ Sonnet xxix. in CEmres, ed. Michiels, p. 398.)

^sCf.

La modeste Venus, la honteuse et las age,

Estoit par les anciens toute peiute de noir . .

Noire est la VeritS cachee en un nuage.

(Amadis Jamyn, (Euvres, i. p. 129, No. xcv.)

³ Shakespeare adopted this phraseology- of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet; while Sidney’s further conceit that the lady’s eyes are in ‘this mourning weed’ in order ‘to honour all their deaths who for her bleed ’ is reproduced in Shakespeare’s Sonnets cxxxii. — one of the two under consideration — where he tells his mistress that her eyes ‘have put on black’ to become ‘loving mourners’ of him who is denied her love.

To his praise of ‘blackness’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit.¹ Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart. Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in the play, does he mock his ‘ dark lady' with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.

The two sonnets, in which this uncomplimentary view of ‘blackness ’ is developed, form part of a series of twelve, The son which belongs to a special category of sonnet- nets of teering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons vitupera- th_e sugared sentiment which characterises most

*-¹⁰ⁿ- £ 1 * 1 1 1 IP ••

of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets. He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman whom he represents as disdaining his advances. She is as ‘ black as hell,’ as ‘ dark as night,’ and with ‘ so foul a face ’ was ‘ the bay where all men ride.’ The genuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but in Shakespeare’s sonnets of vituperation, despite their dramatic intensity, there is a declamatory parade of figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned.

Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren. Among Shakespeare’s English contemporaries Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female ‘tyrant,’ a ‘Medusa,’ a ‘rock.’ ‘Women’ (Barnes laments) ‘ are by nature proud as devils.’ On the

¹ O paradox! Black as the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.

_ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 254-5.)

To look like her are chimney-sweepers black,

And since her time are colliers counted bright, ■

And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack.

Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (ib. 266-9).

European continent the method of vituperation was long practised systematically. Ronsard’s sonnets celebrated in Shakespeare’s manner a ‘fierce tigress,’ a ‘murderess,’ a ‘Medusa.’ Another French sonnetteer Claude de Pontoux broadened the formula in a sonnet addressed to his mistress which opened:

Affamee Meduse, enragee Gorgonne,

Horrible, espouvantable, et felonne tigresse,

Cruelle et rigoureuse, allechante et tiaistresse,

Meschante abominable, et sanglante Bellonne.¹

A third French sonnetteer, of Ronsard’s school, Etienne Jodelle, designed in 1570 a collection of as many as three hundred vituperative sonnets which he j_odeu_e»_s inscribed to ‘hate of a woman,’ and he ap- ‘Contr’ _> propriately entitled them ‘Contr’ Amours’ ^Amours- in distinction from ‘Amours,’ the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein. Only seven of Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours’ are extant. In one the poet forestalls Shakespeare’s confession of remorse for having lauded the black hair arid complexion of his mistress.² But at

¹ De Pontoux’s VIdee (sonnet ccviii.), a sequence of 288 sonnets published in 1579.

² No. vii. of Jodelle’s Contr⁹ Amours runs thus:

Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dor€

Ces cheueux noirs dignes d’vne Meduse?

Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m’amuse,

Ay-ie de lis et roses colorS?

Combien ce front de rides labour6

Ay-ie applani? et quel a fait ma Muse Le gros sourcil, ou folle elle s’abuse,

Ayant sur luy rare d’Amour figurS?

Quel ay-ie fait son oeil se renfongant?

Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant?

Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps?

Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,

Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles.

(Jodelle’s (Euvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.)

With this should be compared Shakespeare’s Sonnets cxxxvii. cxlviii. and cl. In No. vi. of his Contr’ Amours Jodelle, after reproaching his

* traitres vers ’ with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, and concludes:

Ja si long temps faisant d’un Diable vn Ange Vous m’ouurez l’ceil en Tiniuste louange,

Et m’aueuglez en Tiniuste tourment,

all points there is complete identity of tone between Jodelle’s and Shakespeare’s vituperative efforts.

The artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers of all lands sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they exhausted their faculty of adulation, Harvey’s excited ridicule in both England and France. ‘Amorous In Shakespeare’s early life the convention was Sonnet.’ wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in ‘An Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed.’¹ After extolling the beauty and virtue of his mistress above that of Aretino’s Angelica, Petrarch’s Laura, Catullus’s Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as ‘a serpent in brood,’ ‘a poisonous toad,’ ‘a heart of marble,’ and ‘a stony mind as passionless as a block.’ Finally he tells her,

If ever there were she-devils incarnate They are altogether in thee incorporate.

The ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ may in her main lineaments be justly ranked with the son- Thecon netteer’s well-seasoned type of feminine ob- ventionof duracy. It is quite possible that Shakespeare lady ^^{ark ma}y have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands. But no such incident is needed

With this should be compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxliv., lines g-io:

And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend Suspect I may, yet not directly tell.

A conventional sonnet of extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthomden translated from Marino {Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond’s collection of ‘sugared’ sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv.: Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217).

¹ The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey’s Letter-book (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43).

to account for the presence of the ‘dark lady’ in the sonnets. The woman acquires more distinctive features in the dozen sonnets scattered through the collection which reveal her in a treacherous act of intrigue with the poet’s friend. At certain points in the series of sonnets she becomes the centre of a conflict between the competing calls of love and friendship. Though. the part which is there imputed to her lies outside the sonnetteer’s ordinary conventions, the r61e is a traditional one among heroines of Italianate romance. It cannot have lain beyond the scope of Shakespeare’s dramatic invention to vary his portrayal of the sonnetteer’s conventional type of feminine obduracy by drawing a fresh romantic interest from a different branch of literature.¹ She has been compared, not very appositely, with Shakespeare’s splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both. There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare’s personal environment the original of the ‘ dark lady ’ of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.

¹ The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the ‘dark lady,’ and that the ‘dark lady’ is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are shadowy conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was the protege of Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted with his patron’s mistress. See Appendix vn. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had ‘robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents’ (cxlii. 8) and ‘in act her bed- vow broke’ (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely.

Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shakespeare’s sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the circumstances in his external- life that at- facHn ufe tended their composition. If few can be ‘dedica- safely regarded as autobiographic revelations nets. ^s°ⁿ °f sentiment, many of them offer evidence of the relations iii which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron’s literary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled ‘dedicatory’ sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without much periphrasis to be a patron of the poet’s verse (Nos. xxiii. xxvi. xxxii. xxxvii. xxxviii. lxix. Ixxvii.-lxxxvi. c. ci. ciii. cvi.) In one of these — Sonnet lxxviii. — Shakespeare asserted:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse And found such fair assistance in my verse As every alien pen hath got my use And under thee their poesy disperse.

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron’s readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron’s esteem.

Shakespeare’s biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are indicated so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple. Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.

Sing [re. O Muse !] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,

And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).

196

For to no other pass my verses tend

Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare who is known to biographical research. No contemporary document or tradition gives any hint that J_{^hg_o^' Shakespeare was the friend or dependent ampton of any other man of rank. Shakespeare’s sole patron, close intimacy with the Earl is attested under his own hand in the dedicatory epistles of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece,’ which were penned respectively in 1593 and 1594. A trustworthy tradition corroborates that testimony. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first adequate biographer, ‘there is one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time.’

There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the _The poet’s patron. Three of the twenty ‘dedi- ‘dedica- catory’ sonnets merely translate into the ^tory’

1 „ , 1 ,. 1 , sonnets.

language of poetry the dedicated words which writers use’ (Ixxxii. 3), the accepted expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces ‘Lucrece.’

That epistle, which opens with the sentence ‘The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end,’¹ is finely paraphrased in Sonnet xxvi.:

¹ The whole epistle is quoted on pp. 148-9 supra. For comment on the use of ‘lover’ and ‘love’ in Elizabethan English as synonyms for ‘friend’ and ‘friendship,’ see p. 205 n. 1.

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,

To thee I send this written ambassage,

■ To witness duty, not to show my wit:

Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine

May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,

But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,

Points on me graciously with fair aspect,

And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:

Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;

Till then not show my head where thou may’st prove me.¹

The ‘Lucrece’ epistle’s intimation that the patron’s love alone gives value to the poet’s ‘untutored lines’ is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression :

If thou survive my well-contented day,

When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,

Compare them with the bettering of the time,

And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,

Exceeded by the height of happier men.

O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:

‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,

A dearer birth than this his love had brought,

To march in ranks of better equipage ²;

But since he died, and poets better prove,

Theirs for their style.I’ll read, his for his love.’

¹ There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ‘gulling’ sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one.

To love my lord I do knight’s service owe.

And therefore now he hath my wit in ward;

But while it [i.e. the poet’s wit] is in his tuition so Methinks he doth intreat [i.e. treat] it passing hard . . .

But why should love after minority ,

(When I have passed the one and twentieth year)

Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty,

And make it still the yoke of wardship hear?

I fear he [i.e. my lord] hath another title [i.e. right to my wit] got And holds my wit now for an idiot.

² Thomas Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1398 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii.:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,

While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse?

O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;

For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,

When thou thyself dost give invention light?

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth¹ Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;

And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth Eternal numbers to outlive long date.

If my slight Muse do please these curious days,

The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

The central conceit here so finely developed — that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protege’s .verse because he inspires it — belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation. When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled ‘Delia’ to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. Daniel wrote:

Great patroness of these my humble rhymes,

Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .

O leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . . Whereof the travail I may challenge mine, ,

But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.

Elsewhere in the sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the ‘Lucrece’ epistle. Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is ‘part

in Marston’s Pigmalion’s Image, published in 1598, where ‘stanzas’ are said to ‘march rich bedight in warlike equipage.’ The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature long before Marston employed it. Nashe, in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon, which was published in is8g, wrote that the works of the poet Watson ‘march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.’ (Cf. Peele’s Works, ed. Bullen, ii. 236.)

¹ Cf. Drayton’s Ideas Mirrovr 1594, Amour 8.

of all ’ he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the sonnets with such expressions as these:

[I] by a part of all your glory live (xxxvii. 12);

Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2);

My spirit is thine, the better part of me (lxxiv. 8);

while ‘the love without end’ which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as ‘eternal love’ (cviii. 9) and a devotion ‘what shall have no end’ (ex. 9).

The identification of the rival poets whose ‘richly compiled’ ‘comments’ of his patron’s ‘praise’ excited _al Shakespeare’s jealousy is a more difficult inin South- quiry than the identification of the patron. favour¹¹'^S rival poets with their ‘precious phrase by

all the Muses filed’ (lxxxv. 4) are to be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men. In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters.¹ Thomas Nashe justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his ‘Life of Jack Wilton’ in 1594, as ‘ a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’ Nashe addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Bamabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Ger- vase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton’s countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare’s with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly John Florio, the Earl’s Italian tutor, who is to be reckoned among Shakespeare’s literary acquaintances,² wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before

¹ See Appendix rv. for a full account of Southampton’s relations with Nashe and other men of letters.

²*£ee p. 155-6, note 2.

his ‘Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), ‘ as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’

Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protege of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an ‘able’ and a ‘better’ ‘spirit,’ ‘a worthier pen,’ a vessel ‘of spare's tall building and of goodly pride,’ compared ^a with whom he was himself ‘a worthless boat.’ ^nva
poet‘ He detected a touch of magic in the man’s writing. His ‘spirit,’ Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been ‘by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch,’ and ‘an affable familiar ghost’ nightly gulled him with intelligence. Shakespeare’s dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by ‘ the proud full sail of his [rival’s] great verse’ sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (Ixxxvi.).

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare’s laudation of ‘the other poet’s’ powers. He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. ‘Eloquence and courtesy,’ wrote Gabriel Har- -vey at the time, ‘are ever bountiful in the amplifying vein ’; and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival’s identification with the Oxford scholar Barnabe Bames⁶ Barnes, a youthful panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collection of sonnets, ‘ Parthenophil and Parthe- nophe,’ with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, ‘A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,’ in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the

classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at least one first-rate sonnet (No. lxvi. ‘Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode?’)- The veteran Thomas Churchyard called Bames ‘Petrarch’s scholar’ ; the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him ‘ go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,’ and ‘be the gallant poet, like Spenser’; the fine poet Campion judged his verse to be ‘heady and strong.’ In a sonnet that Bames addressed in this earliest volume to the ‘virtuous’ Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron’s eyes were ‘the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,’ and that his sole ambition was ‘by flight to rise’ to a height worthy of his patron’s ‘virtues.’ Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet Ixxviii. that his lord’s eyes

that taught the dumb on high to sing,

And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,

Have added feathers to the leamed’s wing,

And given grace a double majesty;

while in the following sonnet he asserted that the ‘worthier pen’ of his dreaded rival when lending his patron ‘virtue’ was guilty of plagiarism, for he ‘stole that word ’ from his patron’s ‘behaviour.’ The emphasis, laid by Bames on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton’s ‘gracious eyes’ on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron’s ‘ virtue ’ on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Bames as his chief competitor in the hody contested race for Southampton’s favour. In Sonnet Ixxxv. Shakespeare declares that he cries ‘“Amen” to every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.’ Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard’s practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Bames twice applies the word to his poems of love.¹ When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet

¹ Cf. Parthenophil, Madrigal L line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9. The French usage of applying the term ‘ hymne ’ to secular lyrics was un-

Ixxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron —

My saucy bark, inferior far to his . . .

Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat, —

he seems to write with an eye on Barnes’s identical choice of metaphor

My fancy’s^ ship tossed here and there by these [re. sorrow’s floods]

Still floats in danger ranging to and fro.

How fears my thoughts’ swift pinnace thine hard rock !¹

Gervase Markham, an industrious man of letters, is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the potent influence of his patron’s ‘eyes,’ which, „ ,

£ [, 1 . • I Other theo-

ne says, crown the most victorious pen — a ri_es as to possible reference to Shakespeare. Nashe’s poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusi- ' astic, and are of a finer literary temper than Markham’s. But Shakespeare’s description of his rival’s literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nashe than the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes.

Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival’s genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman, .the dramatist and classical translator, than by that of any other contemporary poet. But Chapman produced no conspicuously ‘great verse’ till he began his rendering of Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 1610 to a complete edition of his translation a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in cold terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies that he had previously no close relations.²

common in' England, although Chapman styles each section of his poem ‘Shadow of the Night’ (1594) ‘a hymn’ and Michael Drayton contributed ‘hymns’ to his Harmonie of the Church (1591).

¹ Parthenophil, Sonnet xci. _

² Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chap-

The poet Drayton, and the dramatists Ben Jonson and Marston, have also been identified by various critics with ‘ the rival poet/ but none of these shared Southampton’s bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare applies to his rival’s verse specially applicable to the productions of any of them.

man’s claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in bis Characteristics of English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write_ by ‘spirits’ — ‘his compeers by night’ —■ as well as by ‘an affable familiar ghost’ which gulled him with intelligence at night (lxxxvi. 5 seq.). Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some lines by Chapman in his Shadows of Night (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have ‘drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,’ and in another place sportively invited ‘nimble and aspiring wits’ to join him in consecrating their endeavours to ‘sacred night.’ There is no connection between Shakespeare’s theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival’s influence and Chapman’s trite allusion to the current faith in the power of ‘nightly familiars’ over men’s minds and lives, or Chapman’s invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. Nashe in his prose tract called independently The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of ‘familiars’ more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that ‘ this spirit [i.e. Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul’s] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a familiar of your own.’ On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto’s line of argument, Nashe, Thorpe, or Blount, whose ‘familiar’ is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A second argument in Chapman’s favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of the Iliads (1611) denounces without mentioning any name ‘a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.’ It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments ‘detraction.’ There is small ground for identifying Chapman’s ‘windsucker’ with Shakespeare (cf._ Wyndham, p. 255). Mr. Arthur Acheson in Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (1903) adopts Prof. Minto’s theory of Chapman’s identity with the rival poet, arguing on fantastic grounds that Shakespeare and Chapman were at lifelong feud, and that Shakespeare not only attacked his adversary in the sonnets but held him up to ridicule as Holofemes in Love’s Labour’s Lost and as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida.

Many besides the ‘dedicatory⁷ sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth ai;d rank, for whom the poet avows ‘love,’ in the Elizabethan sense of _n
The friendship.¹ Although no specific reference is Sonnets of made outside the twenty ‘dedicatory’ sonnets ^friendshiP- to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the inference that the greater number of the sonnets of devoted ‘love’ also have Southampton for their subject.

Classical study is mainly responsible in the era of the Renaissance for the exalted conception of friendship which placed it in the world of literature on the level of love. The elevated estimate editions was largely bred in Renaissance poetry of the traditions attaching to such twin heroes of ^{611 s 1P}‘ antiquity as Pylades and Orestes, Theseus and Pirithous, Laelius and Scipio. To this classical catalogue Boccaccio, amplifying the classical legend, added in the fourteenth century the new examples of Palamon and Arcite and of Tito and Gesippo, and the latter pair of heroic friends fully shared in -Shakespeare’s epoch the literary vogue of their forerunners. It was to well- seasoned classical influence that poetry of the sixteenth century owed the tendency to identify the ideals of friendship and love.² At the same time it is important

¹ ‘Lover’ and ‘friend’ were interchangeable terms in Elizabethan English. Cf. p. 197 note. Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ‘Romans, countrymen, and lovers,’ and subsequently describes Julius Caesar as ‘my best lover’ (Julius Cmsar, 111. ii. *3-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ‘the bosom lover of my lord’ (Merchant of Venice, m. iv. r7). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent’s ‘ever true lover’; and Drayton, writing to William Drummond, of Hawthomden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was ‘in love’ with him. The word ‘love’ was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nashe, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to Southampton, calls him ‘a dear lover ... of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’

² Records of friendship in Elizabethan literature invariably acknow-

to recognise that in Elizabethan as in all Renaissance literature — more especially in sonnets — the word ‘love’ together with all the common terms of endearment was freely employed in a conventional or figurative fashion, which deprives the expressions of much of the emotional force attaching to them in ordinary speech.

That the whole language of love was applied by Elizabethan poets to their more or less professional intercourse with those who appreciated and en- _F;gurat;ve couraged their literary activities is convinc- jangimge ingly illustrated by the mass of verse which ^{0 ove}' was addressed to the greatest of all patrons of Eliza-

ledged the classical debt. Edmund Spenser when describing the perfect quality of friendship, cites as his witnesses :

great Hercules, and Hyllus dear;

True Jonathan, and David trusty tried;

Stout Theseus, and Pirithous his fear;

Pylades and Orestes by his side;

Mild Titus, and Gesippus without pride;

Damon and Pythias, whom death could not sever.

{Faerie Queene, Bk. iv. Canto x. st. 27.)

Lyly, in his romance of Euphues, makes his hero Euphues address his friend Philautus thus (ed. Arber, p. 49):

⁴ Assure yourself that Damon to his Pythias, Pilades to his Orestes, Tytus to his Gysippus, Thesius to his Pirothus, Scipio to his Lffilius, was never founde more faithfull, then Euphues will bee to Philautus/

The story of Damon and Pythias formed the subject of a popular Elizabethan tragicomedy by Richard Edwardes (1570). Shakespeare pays a tribute to the current vogue of this classical legend when he makes Hamlet call his devoted friend Horatio ‘O Damon dear’ (Hamlet, in.

ii. 284). Cicero’s treatise De Amicitia which was inspired by the ideal relations subsisting between Scipio and Laslius was very familiar to Elizabethan men of letters in both the Latin original and English translations, and that volume helped to keep alive the classical example. Montaigne echoed the classical strain in his essay ‘On Friendship’ which finely describes his affection for Etienne de la Boetie and their perfect community of spirit. It may be worth noticing that Bacon, while in his essay ‘On Friendship’ he pays a fine tribute to the sentiment, takes an unamiable view of it in a second essay ‘On Followers and Friends,’ where he scornfully treats friends as merely interested and self-seeking dependents and frankly disparages the noble classical conception. The concluding words of Bacon’s second essay are significant: •

‘ There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one tbe other.’

bethan poetry — the Queen. The poets who sought her favour not merely commended the beauty of her mind and body with the semblance of amorous ecstasy; they carried their protestations of ‘love’ to the extreme limits of realism; they seasoned their notes of adoration with reproaches of inconstancy and infidelity, which they clothed in peculiarly intimate phraseology. Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Barnfield, and Sir John Davies were among many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who wrote of their sovereign with a warmth that would mislead any reader who ignores the current conventions of the amorous vocabulary.¹

¹ Here are some of the lines in which Spenser angled for Queen Elizaheth’s professional protection (‘Colin Clouts come home againe,’ c. IS94) =

To her my thoughts I daily dedicate,

To her my heart I nightly martyrize;

To her my love I lowly do prostrate,

To her my life I wholly sacrifice:

My thought, my heart, my love, my life is she.

Sir Walter Raleigh similarly celehrated his devotion to the Queen in a poem called ‘Cynthia’ of which only a fragment survives. The tone of such portion as is extant is that of unrestrainahle passion. At one point the poet reflects how

that the eyes of my mind held her beams In every part transferred by love’s swift thought:

Far off or near, in waking or in dreams,

Imagination strong their lustre brought.

Such force her angelic appearance had To master distance, time or cruelty.

The passionate illusion could hardly he produced with more vivid effect than in a succeeding stanza from the pen of Raleigh in the capacity of literary suitor:

The thoughts of past times, like flames of bell,

Kindled afresh within my memory The many dear achievements that befell In those prime years and infancy of love.

See ‘Cynthia,’ a fragment in Poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 38. Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem of Cynthia, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also extravagantly descrihed the Queen’s heanty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Davies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizaheth, who was then sixty-six years old, thus:

It was in the rhapsodical accents of Spenser and Raleigh that Elizabethan poets habitually sought, not Gabriel ^the Queen’s countenance only, but that of her Harvey courtiers. Great lords and great ladies alike slr'phliip were repeatedly assured by poetic clients of the Sidney. infatuation which came of their mental and physical charms. The fashionable tendency to clothe love and friendship in the same literary garb eliminated all distinction between the phrases of affection which were addressed to patrons and those which were addressed to patronesses. Nashe, a typical Elizabethan, bore graphic witness to the poetic practice when he in 1595 described how Gabriel Harvey, who religiously observed the professional ritual, ‘courted’ his patron Sir Philip Sidney with every extravagance of amorous language.¹

Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit

You give such lively life, such quickening power,

Such sweet celestial influences to it

As keeps it still in youth’s immortal flower . . .

O many, many years may you remain A happy angel to this happy land.

(Nosce Teipsum, dedication.)

Davies published in the same year twenty-six ‘ Hymnes of Astrea’ on Elizabeth’s beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the words ‘Elizabetha Regina,’ and the language of love is simulated on almost every page.

¹ Nashe wrote of Harvey: ‘I have perused vearses of his, written vnder his owne hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he were another Cyparissus or Ganimede: the last Gordian true loues knot or knitting up of them is this:

Sum iecur, ex quo te primum, Sydneie, vidi;

Os oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur.

All liver am I, Sidney, since I saw thee;

.My mouth, eyes, rule it and to loue doth draw mee.’

Have with you to Saffron Walden in Nashe’s Works, ed. McKerrow, iii. 92. Cf. Shakespeare’s comment on a love sonnet in Love’s Labour’s Lost (iv. iii. 74 seq.):

This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity,

A green goose a goddess; pure, pure idolatry.

God amend us, God amend! we are much out of the way.

Throughout Europe sonnets or poems addressed to patronesses display identical characteristics with those that were addressed to patrons.

The tide of adulation of patrons and patronesses alike, in (what Shakespeare himself called) ⁴the liver vein,’ long flowed without check. Until comparatively late in the seventeenth century there was ample justification for Sir Philip Sidney’s warning of the flattery that awaited those who patronised poets and poetry: ‘ Thus doing, you shall be [hailed as] most fair, most rich, most wise, most all; thus doing, you shall dwell upon superlatives; thus doing, your soul- shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrice.’¹ There can be little doubt that Shakespeare, always susceptible to the contemporary

One series of Michael Angelo’s impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in b6th, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are often amorous in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare’s sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem The Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke’s Love, 1592, and another work of his, The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the countess, his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. Patronesses as well as patrons are addressed in the same adulatory terms in the long series of sonnets before Spenser’s Faerie Queene, at the end of Chapman’s Iliad, and at the end of John Davies’s Microcosmos, 1603. Other addresses to patrons and patronesses are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jon- son’s Forest and Underwoods and Donne’s Poems. Sonnets to men are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences in honour of women. Sonnet xi. in Drayton’s sonnet-fiction called ‘Idea’ (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton’s sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern’s eccentric collection of love-sonnets, Pandora (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in his Chloris (1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xli*. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long sequence of sonnets addressed to.a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barn- field appended to his poem Cynthia a set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. Barnfield explained that he was fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy Alexis.

* Apologie for Poetrie (1595), ^ Shuckburgh, p. 62.

vogue, penned many sonnets in that ‘liver vein’which was especially Calculated to flatter the ear of a praise- loving Maecenas like the Earl of Southampton. It is quite possible that beneath all the conventional adulation there lay a. genuine affection. But the perfect illusion of passion which often colours Shakespeare’s poetic vows of friendship may well be fruit of his interpretation of the common usage in the glow of dramatic instinct.

Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and shake chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again in speare's him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, assurances _an(j th_at his affection was unalterable. Writ-

of affection. . . ,

mg without concealment in their own names, many other poetic clients gave their Maecenases the like assurances, crediting them with every perfection of mind and body, and ‘placing’ them, in Sidney’s phrase, ‘with Dante’s Beatrice.’ Matthew Roydon wrote of his patron, Sir Philip Sidney:

His personage seemed most divine,

A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.

To heare him speak and sweetly smile You were in Paradise the while.

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ‘his good personage and noble deeds’ made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom ‘the antique poets’ were ‘wont so much to sing.’ This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi.,* recurs with especial frequency in contemporary sonnets of adulation. Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as ‘my best-best lov’d.’ Campion told Lord

¹ Cf. Sonnet lix.:

Show me your image in some antique book . . .

Oh sure I am the wits of former days

To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

Walden, the Earl of Suffolk’s undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, ‘the admired virtues’ of the patron’s youth

Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse That it could scarcely utter naked truth.¹ ■

Yet it is in foreign poetry which just proceded Shakespeare’s era that the English dramatist’s plaintive and yearning language is most closely adumbrated. _{Tasso and} The greatest Italian poet of the era, Tasso, the Duke not merely recorded in numerous sonnets his ^ofFerrara- amorous devotion for his first patron, the Duke of Ferrara, but he also carefully described in prose the sentiments which, with a view to retaining the ducal favour, he sedulously cultivated and poetised. In a long prose letter to a later friend and patron, the Duke of Urbino, he wrote of his attitude of mind to his first patron thus:² ‘ I confided in him, not as we hope in men, but as we trust in God. ... It appeared tome, so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death had no power over me. Burning thus with devotion to my lord, as much as man ever did with love to his mistress, I became, without perceiving it, almost an idolater. I continued in Rome and Ferrara many days and months in the same attachment and faith.’ With illuminating frankness Tasso added: ‘ I went so far with a thousand acts of observance, respect, affection, and almost adoration, that at last, as they say the courser grows slow by too much spurring, so his [i.e. the patron’s] goodwill towards me slackened, because I sought it too ardently.’

There is practical identity between the alternations of feeling which find touching voice in many of the sonnets of Shakespeare and those which colour Tasso’s

¹ Campion’s Poems, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: .

0 how I faint when I of you do write (Ixxx. i). _

Finding thy worth a limit past my praise (lxxxii. 6).

See also Donne’s Poems (in Muses’ Library), ii. 34.

² Tasso, Opere, Pisa, 1821-32, vol. xiii. p. 298. .

picture of his intercourse with his Duke of Ferrara. Italian and English poets profess for a man a loverlike ‘idolatry,’ although Shakespeare conventionally warns his ‘lord’: ‘Let not my love be called idolatry’ (Sonnet cv.). Both writers attest the hopes and fears which his favour evokes in them, with a fervour and intensity of emotion which it was only in the power of great poets to feign.

An even closer parallel in both sentiment and phraseology with Shakespeare’s sonnets of friendship is furnished jodeiie’s by the sonnets of the French poet Etienne sonnets to Jodelle, whose high reputation as the inventor his patron. classical drama did not obscure his

fame as a lyrist. Jodelle was well known in both capacities to cultivated Elizabethans. The suspicions of atheism under which he laboured, and his premature death in distressing poverty at the early age of forty- one, led English observers of the day to liken him to ‘our tragical poet Marlowe.’¹ To a noble patron, Comte de Fauquemberge et de Courtenay, Jodelle addressed a series of eight sonnets which anticipate Shakespeare’s sonnets at every turn.² In the opening address to the nobleman Jodelle speaks of his desolation in his patron’s absence which no crowded company can alleviate. Yet when his friend is absent, the French poet yearningly fancies him present —

Present, absent, je pais l’ame a toy toute deue.

So Shakespeare wrote to his hero :

Thyself away art present still with me;

For thou not further than my thoughts can move (xlvii. io-ii).

¹ The parallel between the careers of Marlowe and Jodelle first appeared in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements, 1597, and was repeated by Francis Meres next year in his Palladis Tamia (cf. French Renaissance in England, 430-1).

² These were first published with a long collection of ‘amours’ chiefly in sonnet form, in 1574. Cf. Jodelle, (Euwes, 1870, ed. ii. p. 174- Throughout these sonnets Jodelle addresses his lord in the second person singular, as Shakespeare does in all but thirty-four of his sonnets.

Jodelle credits his patron with a genius which puts labour and art to shame, with rank, virtue, wealth, with intellectual grace, and finally with

Une bontfi qui point ne change ou s’epouvante.

Similarly Shakespeare commemorates his patron’s ‘birth or wealth or wit’ (xxxvii. 5) as well as his ‘bounty’ (liii. 11) and his ‘abundance’ (xxxvii. 11). None the less the French poet, echoing the classical note, avers that the greatest joy in the Count’s life is the completeness of the sympathy between the patron and his poetic admirer, which guarantees them both immortality. Hotly does the French sonnetteer protest the eternal constancy of his affection. His spirit droops when the noble lord leaves him to go hunting or shooting, and he then finds his only solace in writing sonnets in the truant’s honour. Shakespeare in his sonnets, it will be remembered, did no less:

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

Nor think tie bitterness of absence sour When you have bid your servant once adieu.

(Ivii. 5-8.)

O absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove,

Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave To entertain the time with thoughts of love.

(xxxix. 9-n.)¹

Elsewhere Jodelle declares that he, a servant (serf, serviteur), has passed into the relation of a beloved and loving friend. The master’s high birth, wealth, and intellectual endowments, interpose no bar to the force of the friendship. The great friends of classical antiquity, Pylades and Orestes, Sdpio and Laelius, and the

¹ Cf. also:

Being your slave, what should I do hut tend Upon the hours and times of your desire?

(Sonnet lvii. 1-2.)

That god forbid that made me first your slave,

I should in thought control your times of pleasure.

(Sonnet lviii. 1-2.)

rest, lived with one another on such terms of perfect equality. While Jodelle wrote of his patron

Et si Ion dit que trop par ces vers je me vante,

C’est qu’estant tien je veux te vanter en mes heurs,

Shakespeare greeted his ‘lord of love’ with the assurance

’Tis thee, myself, — that for myself I praise.

(Sonnet lxii. 13.)

Finally Jodelle confesses to Shakespeare’s experience of suffering, and grieves, like the English sonnetteer, that he was the victim of slander. Although Shakespeare’s poetic note of pathos is beyond Jodelle’s range, yet the phase of sentiment which shapes these French greetings of a patron in sonnet form is rarely distinguishable from that of Shakespeare’s sonnetteering triumph.

Some dozen poems which are dispersed through Shakespeare’s collection at irregular intervals detach them- iii The selves in point of theme from the rest. These sonnets of pieces combine to present the poet and the intrigue. y_0Uth in relations which are not easy at a first glance to reconcile with an author’s idealised worship of a patron. The poet’s friend, we are here told, yielded to the seductions of the poet’s mistress. The woman is bitterly denounced for her treachery, the youth is complacently pardoned amid regretful rebukes. The poet professes to be torn asunder by his double affection for friend and mistress, and he lays the blame for the crisis on the woman’s malign temperament.¹

Two loves I have of comfort and despair

Which like two spirits do suggest (i.e. tempt) me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill. (Sonnet cxliv.)

¹ The dozen sonnets fall into two groups. Six of them — xxxiii.-v., lxix. and xcv.-vi. — reproach the youth in a general way with sensual excesses, and the other six — xl.—xlii. cxxxii.—iii. and cxliv. — specifically point to the poet’s traitorous mistress as the wilful cause of the youth’s ‘fault.’ >

The traitress is ‘the dark lady' of the Sonnets of conventional vituperation. Whether the misguided youth of the intrigue is to be identified with the patron-friend of the other sonnets of friendship may be an open question. It might be in keeping with Southampton’s sportive temperament for him to accept the attentions of a Circe, by whose fascination his poet was lured. The sonnetteer’s sorrowful condonation of the young man’s offence may be an illustration, drawn from life, of the strain which a self-willed patron under the spell of the ethical irregularities of the Renaissance laid on the forbearance of a poetic protege.

But while we admit that some strenuous touches in Shakespeare’s presentation of the episode may well owe suggestion either to autobiographic experience _Thecon or to personal observation, we must bear in flictof mind that the intrigue of the ‘Sonnets’ in its l°.^ve“4

. , . ° , , t, • friendship.

mam phase is a commonplace of Renaissance romance, and that Shakespeare may after his wont be playing a variation on an accepted literary theme with the slenderest prompting apart from his sense of literary or dramatic effect. Italian poets and novelists from the fourteenth century onwards habitually brought friendship and love into rivalry or conflict.¹ The call of friendship often demanded the sacrifice of love. The laws of ‘sovereign amity’ were so fantastically interpreted as frequently to require a lover, at whatever cost of emotional suffering, to abandon to his friend the woman who excited their joint adoration.

The Italian novelist Boccaccio offered the era of the Renaissance two alternative solutions of this puzzling problem and both long enjoyed authority in the liter-

¹ Cf. Petrarch’s sonnet ccxxvii.

‘ Caritil,di signore, amor di donna _

Son le'catene, ove con multi affanni_

Legato son, perch’io stesso mi strinsi.’

So Beza’s Poemata, 1548, Epigrammata, xc.: ‘De sua in Candidam et Audebertum benevolentia.’

ary world. In his narrative poem of ‘Teseide,’ Boccaccio pictured the two devoted friends Palamon and . , Arcite as alienated by their common love for treatment^S the fair Emilia. Their rival claims to the lady’s the hand are decided by a duel in which Palamon is vanquished although he is not mortally wounded. But just after his victory Arcite is fatally Palamon injured by a fall from his horse. In his dying and Ardte. moments he bestows Emilia's hand on his friend. This is the fable which Chaucer retold in his ‘Knight’s Tale,’ and Shakespeare and Fletcher, accepting the cue of an earlier Elizabethan dramatist, combined to dramatise it in ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen.’¹ But Boccaccio also devised an even more famous prescription for the disorder of friends caught in the same toils of love. In the ‘Decameron’ (Day x., Novel 8) Gesippo, whose friendship with Tito has the classical perfection, is affianced to the lady Sophronia. But Tito and Gesippo soon discovered that his friend is like- Gesippo. -flrige enslaved by the lady’s beauty. Thereupon Gesippo, in the contemporary spirit of quixotic chivalry, contrives that Tito shall, by a trick which the lady does not suspect, take his place at the marriage and become her husband.² In the sequel Gesippo is justly punished with a long series of abject misfortunes for his self-denying wiles. But Tito, whose friendship is immutable, finally restores Gesippo’s fortunes and gives him his sister in marriage.³ The chequered ad

* The perfect identity which is inherent in friendship of the Renaissance type finds emphatic expression in this play. Palamon assures Arcite:

We are an endless mine to one another;

We’re one another’s wife, ever begetting

New births of love; we’re father, friends, acquaintance;

We are, in one another, families;

I am your heir, and you are mine. (n. ii. 79-83.)

² Into two plays, All's Well and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, true to the traditions of the Renaissance, introduces the like deception, — on the part of Helena in the former piece and on that of Mariana in the latter.

³ The first outline of this story is found in a miscellany of the twelfth

ventures of these devoted friends of Italy caught the literary sentiment of Tudor England, and enjoyed a wide vogue there in Shakespeare’s youth.¹

Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Lyly, in his populaf romance of ‘Euphues,’ treated the theme of friendship in competition with love on Boccaccio’s lines , although with important variations. Lyly’s Euphues hero, Euphues, forms a rapturous friendship, “4. which the author likens to that of Tito and ^auus' Gesippo, with a young man called Philautus. The latter courts the fair but fickle Lucetta, and he is soon supplanted in her good graces by his ‘shadow’ Euphues. Less amiable than Boccaccio’s Gesippo, Lyly’s Philautus denounces, with all the fervour of Shakespeare’s vituperative sonnets, both man and Woman. But Lucetta soon transfers her attentions to a new suitor,

century, De Clericali disciplina by Petrus Alfonsus, and thence found, its way into the Gesta Romanorum (No. 171), the most popular story book of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio’s tale enjoyed much vogue in a Latin version in the fifteenth century by Filippo Beroaldo. This was rendered back into Italian by Bandello in 1509 and was turned into French verse by Franjois Habert in 1551. Early in the seventeenth century the French dramatist Alexandre Hardy dramatised the story as Gesippe ou les deux Amis.

¹ Sir Thomas Elyot worked a long rendering of Boccaccio’s story into his formal treatise on the culture of Tudor youth which he called The Governour (1531), see Croft’s edition, ii. 132 seq., while two English poetasters contributed independent poetic versions to early Tudor literature. The later of these, which was issued in 1562, is entitled The most wonderful and pleasaunt History of Titus and Gisippus, whereby is fully declared the figure of perfect frendshyp, drawen into English metre. By Edward Lewicke, 1562. Robert Greene frequently cites the tale of Tito and Gesippo as an example of perfect friendship (cf. Works, ed. Grosart, iv. 211, vii. 243), and the story is the theme of the popular Elizabethan ballad ‘Alphonso and Ganselo’ (Sievers, Thomas Deloney, Berlin, 1904, pp. 83 seq.). Twice was the tale dramatised in the infancy of Tudor drama, once in Latin by a good scholar and schoolmaster Ralph Rad- cliffe in the reign of Edward VI, and again in English about 1576 by an anonymous pen. Queen Elizabeth directed the English play—The Historie of Titus and Gisippus— to be acted before her on the night of Shrove Tuesday, February 19, 1576-7. Neither the Latin nor the English play survives. Two plays by Richard Edwards (d. 1566) on like themes of friendship — Damon and Pythias and Palemon and Arcite — were acted before the Queen, in 1564 and 1566 respectively. Only Damon and Pythias is extant.

Curio, and Euphues and Philautus renew ^ their interrupted ties of mutual devotion in their former strength. Lyly’s Philautus, his Euphues, and his Lucetta, are, before the advent of Curio, in the precise situation with which Shakespeare’s sonnet-intrigue credits the poet, the friend, and the lady.

Yet another phase of the competing calls of love and friendship is portrayed by the French poet, Clement clement Marot. He personally claims the experience Marot’s which Shakespeare in his intrigue assigns to testimony. ^ f_ri_en(j Marot relates how he was solicited in love by his comrade’s mistress, and in a poetic address, ‘A celle qui souhaita Marot aussi amoureux d’elle qu’un sien Amy’ warns her of the crime against friendship to which she prompts him. Less complacent than Shakespeare’s ‘friend,’ Marot rejects the Siren’s invitation on the ground that he has only half a heart to offer her, the other half being absorbed by friendship.¹ j

Before the sonnets were penned, Shakespeare himself too, in the youthful comedy ‘The Two Gentlemen of The crisis Verona,’ treated friendship’s struggle with of the^nsis love in the exotic light which the Renaissance j tiemen^G,en sanctioned. In ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ when ‘ Valentine learns of his friend Proteus’ infatua

tion for his own lady-love Silvia, he, like Gesippo in Boccaccio’s tale, resigns the girl to his supplanter. Valentine’s unworthy surrender is frustrated by the potent appeal of Proteus’ own forsaken mistress Julia. But the episode shows that the issue at stake in the sonnets’ tale of intrigue already fell within Shakespeare’s dramatic scrutiny.

Shakespeare would have been conforming to his wonted dramatic practice had he adapted his tale of intrigue in the ‘Sonnets’ from the stock theme of contemporary romance. Yet a piece of external evidence

¹ Marot’s CEuvres, 1565, p. 437. On Marot’s verse loans were freely levied by Edmund Spenser and other Elizabethan poets. See French Renaissance in England, 109 seq.

suggests that in some degree fact mingled with fiction, truth with make-believe, earnestness with jest _Th ^ ^ in Shakespeare’s poetic presentation of the hoodofa clash between friendship and love,¹ and that P^erso?^aI while the poet knew something at first hand of ^expenence- the disloyalty of mistress and friend, he recovered his composure as quickly and completely as did External Lyly’s romantic hero Philautus under a like ^evidence- trial. A literary comrade obtained a license on September 3, 1594, for the publication of a poem ‘wiiiobie called ‘ Wiiiobie his Avisa, or the True Picture ^Av!sa-’ of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.’² In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse — in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a wife — with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged author — Henry Wiiiobie — is introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty- nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa’s obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose

¹ The closest parallel to the Shakespearean situation (see esp. Sonnet xiii.) is that seriously reported by the seventeenth-century French writer, Saint Evremond, who complaining of a close friend’s relations with his mistress (apparently la Comtesse d’Olonne), wrote thus to her in 1654 of his twofold affection for her and for his comrade: ‘Apprenez-moi contre qui je me dois fitcher d’avantage, ou contre lui qui m’enlSve une maltresse, ou contre vous, qui me volez un ami. . . . J’ai trop de passion pour donner rien au ressentiment; ma tendresse 1’importera tou- jours snr vos outrages. J’aime la perfide [i.e. the mistress], j’aime l’infidele [i.e. the friend].’ ((Euvres Mttees de Saint Evremond, ed. Giraud, 1865, iii. 5.)

² The edition of 1594 was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his Occasional Issues, 1880, and in 1904 by Mr. Charles Hughes, who brings new arguments to justify association of the book with Shakespeare’s biography. Extracts from the poem appear in the New Shakspere Society’s Allusion Books, i. r69 seq. In Mistress D’Avenant the dark lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets ^913), Mr. Arthur Acheson again reprints Wiiiobie his Avisa by way of supporting a fanciful theory which would make the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets the heroine of that poem, .and would identify her with the wife of the Oxford innkeeper who was mother of Sir William D’Avenant (see p. 449).

(canto xliv.). It is there stated that Willobie, ‘being suddenly affected with' the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recovered of the like infection. Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing conceit,’ encouraging Willobie to believe that Avisa would ultimately yield ‘with pains, diligence, and some cost in time.’ ‘The miserable comforter’ [W. S.], the narrative continues, was moved to comfort his friend ‘with an impossibility,’ for one of two reasons. Either he ‘now would secretly laugh at his friend’s folly’ because he ‘had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.’ Or ‘he would see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving comedy,’ would ‘see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,’ owing to Avisa’s unrelenting temper. Happily, ‘time and necessity’ effected a cure.¹ In two succeeding cantos in verse (xlv. and xlvii.) W. S. is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives .him, in oratio recta, light-hearted and cynical counsel.

Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shakespeare’s identity with H. W.’s unfeeling adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation,² and it is to be re-

¹ The narrator ends by claiming for his ‘discourse’ that in it ‘is lively represented the unruly rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove at liberty, with the divers and sundry changes of affections and temptations, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise.’ (Willobie his Avisa, ed. C. Hughes, p. 41.)

² W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them

membered that some attempt was made by a supposititious editor of the poem to question the veracity of the story of the heroine ‘Avisa’ and her lovers. In a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the writer, after mentioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead, enigmatically discusses whether or no the work be ‘a poetical fiction.’ In a new edition of 1596 the same editor decides the point in the affirmative. But Dorell’s protestations scarcely carry conviction, and suggest an intention to put his readers off the true scent. In any case the curious episode of ‘W. S.’ is left without comment. The mention of ‘W. S.’ as ‘the old player,’ and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing his relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the fact that Shakespeare, at a date when mentions of him in print were rare, was greeted by name as the author of ‘Lucrece’ (‘And Shake-speare paints poore Lucrece rape’) in some prefatory verses to the volume. From such considerations the theory of Shakespeare’s identity with ‘W. S.,’Willobie’s acquaintance, acquires substance. If we agree that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the disdain of ‘ chaste Avisa ’ because he had ‘ newly recovered ’ from the effects of a like experience, it follows that the sonnets’ tale of the theft of the poet’s mistress by his friend is no cry of despair springing, as is often represented, from the depths of the poet’s soul. The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of ‘Avisa’ remove it, in fact, from the confines of tragedy and bring it nearer those of comedy.

The story of intrigue which is interpolated in the Sonnets has much interest for the student of psychology

made some reputation in Shakespeare’s day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 260 n. infra), and there was a William Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called Chloris in 1595- A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter’s identity with Willobie’s counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has the better claim.

and for the literary historian, but the precise proportion in which it mingles elements of fact and fiction' . does not materially affect the general inter

ferences pretation of the main series of the ppems. to South- The trend of the story is not out of keeping the^PsonnSs with the somewhat complex conditions of Eliza- °hip^iend" bethan friendship. The vocabulary in which professions of Elizabethan friendship were phrased justify, as we have seen, the inference that Shakespeare’s only literary patron, the Earl of Southampton, was the hero of the greater number of the sonnets. That conclusion is corroborated by such definite personal traits as can be deduced from the shadowy eulogies in those poems of the youth’s gifts and graces. In real life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat ‘crowned’ in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, might justly be declared to be ‘as fair in knowledge as in hue.’ The opening sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth is admonished to marry and beget a son so that ‘his fair house’ may not fall into decay, was appropriately addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of his family. The sonnetteer’s exclamation, ‘You had a father, let your son say so,’ had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his father’s death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598. To no other peer of the day do the words seem to be exactly applicable. The ‘lascivious comment ’ on his ‘ wanton sport ’ which pursues the young friend through the Sonnets, and adds point to the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, associates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both at Court and, according to Nashe, among men of letters.¹

¹ See p. 664, note 1.

There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ must have been another than Southampton because the terms in Hisyouth- which he is often addressed imply extreme ^fulness- youth.¹ The young man had obviously reached manhood, and Southampton was under twenty-one in 1594, when we have good reason to believe that the large majority of the sonnets was in course of composition. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen.² But Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman almost ten years his junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and disposition.³ ‘Young’ was the epithet invariably applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert Cecil referred to him as the ‘poor young Earl.’

But the most striking evidence of the identity of the friend of Shakespeare’s sonnets with Southampton is found in the likeness of feature and complexion which characterises the poet’s description of the youth’s out

¹ This objection is chiefly taken by those who unjustifiably assign the composition of the sonnets to a date approximating to 1609, the year of their publication.

^a Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, Sonnets pour Helene (No. xiv.), beginning: ‘ Trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeil me tient pris.’ See French Renaissance in England, p. 267.

³ Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the ‘boy Caesar’ who ‘wears the rose of youth’ (Antony and Cleopatra, ni. ii. 17 seq.). Spenser in his Astrophel apostrophises Sir Philip Sidney on his death, near the close of his thirty-second year, as ‘oh wretched boy’ (1. 133) and ‘luckless boy’ (1. 142). Conversely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to exaggerate their own age. See p. 156, n. 1.

ward appearance and the extant pictures of Southampton as a young man. Shakespeare’s many references Theevi- ^to y°^uth’^s ‘painted counterfeit’ (xvi. xxiv. dence of xlvii. Ixvii.) suggest that his hero often sat. for portraits. ^ p_0rt_rait. Southampton’s countenance survives in probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. At least fifteen extant portrail s have been, identified on good authority— ten paintings* 1three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by.^: Isaac Oliver), and two contemporary prints.¹ Most of ihese, it is true, portray their subject in middle age., when the roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to the present argument. But the two portraits, that are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the information that can be desired of Southampton’s aspect ‘in his youthful morn.’² One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the other at twenty-five or twenty-six. The earlier portrait, which is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a

¹ Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, arejat Welbeck Abbey, and are described above. . Of the remaining eight paintings two have been assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early middle age; one, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon; the other, aha'i length, a charming picture formerly belonging to the late Sir James Knowles, and now to Mrs. Holman Hunt, is more probably by Mireveldt; That artist certainly painted the Earl several times at a later period of his career; portraits by Mireveldt are now at Woburn Abbey (the property of the Duke of Bedford), at Althorpe, and at the National °ort’ Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a. sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master’s Lodge at St. John’s College, Cambridge,, where Southampton was educated^ The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which' also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert’s collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belonged respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, Bt. ¹ (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889; pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to best advantage in the one now; the property of Mrs. Holman Hunt.

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young man resplendently attired. His doublet is of white satin; a broad collar, edged with lace, half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver thread; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced with gold; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is decorated at intervals with white silk bows; the hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold; purple garters, embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings below the knee. Light body armour, richly damascened, lies on the ground to the right of the figure; and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in gold. Such gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer bestowed much attention on his personal equipment. But the head is more interesting than the body. The eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and the expression sedate; rings are in the ears; beard and moustache are at an incipient stage, and are of the same bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of Southampton’s mother that is also at Welbeck.¹ But, however scanty is the down on the youth’s cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant. It is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is now of walnut, but was originally of lighter tint.

The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598. A cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand. Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion, and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin upturned moustache are of brighter auburn and are fuller than before, although still slight. The blue eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill health, but differ little from those features in the earlier portrait.

From either of the two Welbeck portraits of South-

¹ Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet iii.:

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

ampton might Shakespeare have drawn his picture of the youth in the ‘Sonnets.’ Many times does he tell us that the youth is ‘fair’ in complexion, and that his eyes are ‘fair.’ In Sonnet lxviii., when he points to the youth’s face as a map of what beauty was ‘without all ornament, itself and true’ — before fashion sanctioned the use of artificial ‘ golden tresses ’ —■ there can be little doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about Southampton’s neck.¹

A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be allotted to a date which is very distant from 1594; only two bear unmistakable c\ra°^ethe signs of much later composition. In Sonnet

last of the ix_x the poet no longer credits his hero with

series. ■

juvenile wantonness, but with a ‘pure, unstained prime,’ which has ‘passed by the ambush of young days.’ Sonnet cvii., apparently the last of the series, was penned long after the mass of its companions, for it makes references that cannot be ignored to three events that took place in 1603 — to Queen Elizabeth’s death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and had since that year been in prison in the Tower of London. The first two events are thus described:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured And the sad augurs mode their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assured And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected

¹ Southampton’s singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off, owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by ‘pulling off some of the Earl’s locks.’ On the incident being reported to the Queen, she ‘gave Willoughby thanks for what he did, in the presence’ (Sydney Papers, ii. 83).

turn of events, by which Elizabeth’s crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevi- ₄₁₁ . ,

, _c til 1 . Ailusion to

table consequence of Elizabeth s demise was Elizabeth’s

happily averted. Cynthia (i.e. the moon) was ^deatb' the Queen’s recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greyille, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. ‘Fair Cynthia’s dead’ sang one. ’

Luna’s extinct; and now beholde the sunne Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,

wrote Henry Petowe in his ‘A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of Dead Eliza,’ 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One poet asserted that death ‘ veiled her glory in a cloud of night.’ ■ Another argued: ‘Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in darkest night.’ A third varied the formula thus:

. When winter had cast off her weed

Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair.¹

At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance ‘not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone’ but to all Europe.²

‘The drops of this most balmy time,’ in this same Sonnet cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of Allusions to rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned Southamp- of the happiest augury. ‘All things look lease from fresh,’ one poet sang, ‘to greet his excellence.’ P^nson- ‘The air, the seasons, and the earth’ were represented

¹ These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle’s England’s Mourning Garment (London, 1603).

² Gervase Markham’s Honour in her Perfection, 1624.

as in sympathy with the general joy in ‘ this sweetest of all sweet springs.’ One source of grief alone was acknowledged : Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, ‘ supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.’ All men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen’s death, wished him at liberty.¹ The wish was fulfilled quickly. On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by ‘ a warrant from the King.’ So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton two days later, ‘raised all men’s spirits .. . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves great things.² Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton’s release in buoyant verse.³ It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent. ‘My love looks fresh,’ he wrote in the concluding lines of sonnet cvii. and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his ‘poor rhyme,’ ‘when tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.’ It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare’s genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron’s favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton,, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.

The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ are thus seen to be identical with those that are apparent in the rest of his literary work. They present one more proof of his punctilious

¹ Manningham’s Diary, Camden Soc., p. 148.

² Court and Times of James 1,1. i. 7. * See Appendix rv.

regard for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the hints of other workers _Summary in the field which for the moment engaged of con- his attention. Most of Shakespeare’s ‘Son- ^peTting nets’ were produced under the incitement of the _} that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, ^Sonnets- taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare’s collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue. Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the beauties of nature, idealisation of a protege’s regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion, vivacious compliments on a woman’s hair or her touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind — all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare’s. He borrows very many of his competitors’ words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Genuine emotion or the writer’s personal experience inspired few Elizabethan sonnets, and no literary historian can accept the claim which has been preferred in behalf of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ to be at all points a self-evident exception to the general rule. A personal note may have escaped the poet involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and re

morse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more there than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. In a scattered series of some twelve sonnets he introduced a detached topic —■ a lover’s supersession by his friend in his mistress’s graces: but there again he shows little independence of his comrades. He treated a theme which was wrought into the web of Renaissance romance, and if he sought some added sustenance from an incident of his own life, he was inspired, according to collateral testimony, by a passing adventure, which deserved a smile better than a tear. .The sole biographical inference which is deducible with full confidence from the ‘Sonnets’ is that at one time in his career Shakespeare, like the majority of his craft, disdained few weapons of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles the nobleman to a place in the poet’s biography resembling that filled by the Duke of Ferrara in the early biography of Tasso.

All the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron

[How] to no other pass my verses tend

Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,

his dramatic work was steadily advancing. While he never ceased to garner hints from the labours of others, he was during the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign very surely widening the interval between his own dramatic achievement and that of all contemporaries.

To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’¹ The comedy may well have been written to celebrate a marriage in high society — perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets,

_ ¹ No edition appeared before 1600. On October 8, 1600, Thomas Fisher, formerly a draper, who had only become a freeman of the Stationers’ Company in the previous June, and remained for a very few years a bookseller and publisher (never possessing a. printing press), obtained a license for the publication of the Dream (Arber, ii. 174). The name of Fisher, the publisher, figured alone on the title-page of the first quarto of 1600; no printer was mentioned, but the book probably came from the press of James Roberts, the printer and publisher of ‘ the players’ bills.’ The title-page runs: ‘A Midsommer Nights Dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publikely acted, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. Imprinted at London for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe at the signe of the White Hart in Fleete Streete 1600.’ A second quarto, which corrects some misprints in the first version, and was reprinted in the First Folio, bears a different printer’s device and has the brief imprint ‘Printed by James Roberts, 1600.’ It is ingeniously suggested that this imprint is a misrepresentation and that the second quarto of the Dream was not published before 1619, when it was printed by William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts’s press, for Thomas Pavier, a stationer of doubtful repute. (Pollard’s Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq.)

Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third Earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that at Greenwich on , January 24, 1594-5, of William Stanley, sixth

summer Earl of Derby, brother of a former patron of Dream’ Shakespeare’s company of actors and himself an ^am’ amateur dramatist,¹ with Elizabeth, daughter of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a wild- living nobleman of literary proclivities. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ (11. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon’s fanciful description (55?© 148-68) of the home of the little magical flower called ‘Love-in-idleness’ that he bids Puck fetch for him, seems literally to report one of the scenic pageants with which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575.²

Although the whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy, it furnishes fresh proof of The Shakespeare’s studious versatility. The plot sources. ingeniously weaves together four independent and apparently conflicting threads of incident, for which Shakespeare found suggestion in various places. The Athenian background, which is dominated by the nuptials of Theseus, Duke of Athens, with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, owes much to the setting of Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale.’ There Chaucer was himself under obligation to Boccaccio’s ‘Teseide,’ a mediaeval rendering of classical myth, where the classical vision is blurred by a mediaeval haze. For his Greek topic Shakespeare may have sought supplementary aid in the ‘Life of Theseus’ in Plutarch’s storehouse of biography, with which his later work shows much familiarity. The

s ¹ On June 30,1599, the sixth Earl of Derby was reported to be ‘busyed only in penning commodyes for the commoun players’ (State Papers Dorn. Eliz., vol. 271, Nos. 34 and 35); see p. 52 supra.

² See Oberon’s Vision, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society),

1843. Two accounts of the Keliilworth fetes, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576.

story of the tragicomedy of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe/ which Bottom and his mates burlesque, is an offspring of the dramatist’s researches in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses/ and direct from the Latin text of the same poem he drew the beautiful name of his fairy queen Titania. Oberon the king of the fairy world and his ethereal company come from ‘Huon of Bordeaux/ the French mediaeval romance of which a translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534. The Athenian lovers’ quarrels sound a more modern note and there is no need for suggesting a literary origin. Yet the influence of Shakespeare’s predecessor in comedy, John Lyly, is perceptible in the raillery in which both Shakespeare’s mortals and immortals indulge, and the intermeddling of fairies in human affairs is a contrivance in which Lyly made an earlier experiment. The humours which mark the presentation of the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ improve upon a device which Shakespeare had already employed in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ The ‘rude mechanicals’ who produce the piece are credited, like the rest of the dramatis personae, with Athenian citizenship; yet they most faithfully reflect the temper of the Elizabethan artisan, and their crude mingling of tragic tribulation with comic horseplay travesties much extravagance in contemporary drama. When all Shakespeare’s literary debts are taken into account, the final scheme of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ remains an example of the author’s freshest invention. The dramatist endows the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, which was beyond the reach of Lyly or any forerunner. Shakespeare may indeed be said to have conquered in this fairy comedy a new realm for art.

More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ of which the original draft may be tentatively allotted to 1595. The ‘All’s ' general treatment illustrates the writer’s tight- ^Wel1-’ ening grip on the subtleties of romance. Meres, writing

in 1598, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called ‘Love’s Labour’s Won.’ This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied to ‘All’s Well.’ ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ which has also been identified with ‘Love’s Labour’s Won,’ has slighter claim to the designation. The main story of ‘All’s Well’ is of Italian origin. Although it was accessible, like the plot of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ in Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’ (No. xxxviii.), the original source is Boccaccio’s ‘Decamerone’ (Day iii. Novel 9). On the old touching story of Helena’s love for her social superior, the unworthy Bertram, Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted the three comic characters of the braggart Parolles, whose name is French for ‘words,’ the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) less witty than his compeers; all are of the dramatist’s own devising. Another original creation, Bertram’s mother, Countess of Roussillon, is a charming portrait of old age.

In spite of the effective relief which is furnished by the humours of the boastful coward Parolles, the pathetic _The element predominates in ‘All’s Well.’ The heroine heroine Helena, whose ‘pangs of despised love’ Helena. _are expressed with touching tenderness, ranks, in spite of her ultimate defiance of modern standards of maidenly modesty, with the greatest of Shakespeare’s female creations. Shakespeare failed to eliminate from his Italian plot all the frankness of Renaissance manners. None the less he finally succeeded in enforcing an ideal of essential purity and refinement.

The style of ‘All’s Well,’ in regard both to language and to metre, presents a puzzling problem. Early and _The late features of Shakespeare’s work are per- puzzie of plexingly combined. The proportion of rhyme the style. _{tQ verse} j_s high, and the rhymed verse

in which epistles are penned by two of the characters (in place of prose) is a clear sign of youthful artifice; one letter indeed takes the lyric form of a sonnet. On the other hand, nearly half the play is in prose, and the

metrical irregularities of the blank verse and its elliptical tenour are characteristic of the author’s ripest efforts. No ear her version of the play than that which appears in the First Folio is extant, and the discrepancy of style suggests that the Folio text presents a late revision of an early draft.

‘The Taming of the Shrew’ — which, like ‘All’s Well,’ was first printed in the Folio — was probably composed soon after the first planning of that solemn <_Taming comedy. It is a revision of an old play on of the lines somewhat differing from those which ^shrew-’ Shakespeare had followed previously. A comedy called ‘The Taming of A Shrew’ was produced as an old piece at Newington Butts by the conjoined companies of the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain on June 11, 1594, and was first published in the same year.¹ From that source Shakespeare drew the Induction (an outer dramatic framework)² as well as the energetic scenes in which the hero Petruchio conquers Katharine the Shrew. The dramatist accepted the scheme of the old'piece, but he first endowed the incident with the vital spirit of comedy. While following the old play in its general outlines, Shakespeare’s revised version added, moreover, an entirely new underplot, the intrigue of the shrew’s younger sister, Bianca, with three rival lovers. That

¹ Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ii. 164. The puhlished quarto descrihed the old play as acted hy the Earl of Pembroke’s company, for whom it was originally written. It was reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in

1844, and was re-edited hy Prof. F. S. Boas in 1908.

² Although comparatively rare, there are many examples m Elizabethan drama of- the device of an Induction or outer framework in which a set of characters are presented at the outset as arranging for the production of the suhstantive piece, and remain on the stage as more or less critical spectators of the play through the course of its performance. Besides the old play of The Taming of A Shrew Shakespeare may well have known George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (1595), Rohert Greene’s King James IV of Scotland (1598), and Anthony Munday’s Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1601), all of which are furnished with an ‘induction’ of the accepted sort. A more critical kind of ‘induction’ figures in Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour (1600) and Cynthia’s Revels (1601), Marston’s Malcontent (1604), and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613). <

subsidiary woof of fable which is ingeniously interwoven with the main web, owes much to the ‘Supposes,’ an The Elizabethan comedy which George Gascoigne underplot, adapted from Ariosto’s Italian comedy ‘I Sup- positi.’ The association has historic interest, for Gascoigne’s ‘ Supposes ’ made known to Englishmen for the first time the modern conception of romantic comedy which Italy developed for all Europe out of the classical model. Yet evidence of style — the liberal introduction of tags of Latin and the beat of the doggerel — makes it difficult to allot the Bianca scenes of the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ to Shakespeare; those scenes were probably due to a coadjutor.

The Induction to the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s biography, for the poet admits into it a number of literal references to ajhfsions Stratford and his native county. Such per- in the sonalities are rare in Shakespeare’s plays, and

^uc °ⁿ' can only be paralleled in two of slightly later date — the ‘ Second Part of Henry IV ’ and the ‘ Merry Wives of Windsor.’ All these local allusions may well be due to such a renewal of Shakespeare’s personal relations with the town, as is indicated by facts in his private history of the same period.¹ In the Induction the tinker, Christopher Sly, describes himself as ‘Old Sly’s son of Burton Heath.’ Burton Heath is Barton- on-the-Heath, the home of Shakespeare’s aunt, Edmund Lambert’s wife, and of her sons. The Lamberts were relatives whom Shakespeare had no reason to regard with much favour. The stern hold which Edmund Lambert and his son John kept on Asbies, the estate of the dramatist’s mother, caused his parents continued anxiety through his early manhood. The tinker Sly in like local vein confesses that he has run up a score with Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot.² The refer

¹ See p. 280—1 infra.

_ ² All these details are of Shakespeare’s invention, and do not figure in the old play. But in the crude induction there the nondescript

ences to Wincot and the Hackets are singularly precise. The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as ‘ on a heath.’

Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwickshire villages, and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly’s . drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet ^Wmcot- named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was once an Elizabethan mansion; it is situated on what was doubtless in Shakespeare’s day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath. This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare’s day. On November 21, 1591, ‘Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,’ was baptised in Quinton church.¹ Yet by Warwickshire contemporaries the Wincot of the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ was unhesitatingly identified with Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffordshire border of Warwickshire, at some distance from Stratford. That village, whose name was pronounced ‘Wincot,’ was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, a distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged to any place of like name. The Warwickshire poet, Sir Aston Cokain, within half a century of the production of Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ addressed to ‘Mr. Clement Fisher of Win- cott’ (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin

drunkard is named without prefix ‘Slie.’ That surname, although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that that piece was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play which can be associated with Warwickshire.

¹ Mr. Richard Savage, formerly secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he discovered.

Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renowned,

That fox’d a Beggar so (by chance was found Sleeping) that there needed not many a word To make him to believe he was a Lord.

In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit ‘Wincot ’ (i.e. Wilnecote) to drink

Such ale as Shakespeare fancies Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.¹

It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously invested the home of Kit Sly and of Kit’s hostess with characteristics of Wilnecote as well as of the hamlet near Stratford.

Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare’s mother, is also said to have been popularly pronounced ‘Wincot.’ A tradition which was first recorded by Capell as late as 1780 in his notes to the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ (p. 26) is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at ‘Wincot’ to enjoy the society of a ‘fool who belonged to a neighbouring mill,’ and the Wincot of this story is, we are told, locally associated with the village of Wilmcote. But the links that connect Shakespeare’s tinker with Wilmcote are far slighter than those which connect him with Wincot and Wilnecote.

The mention of Kit Sly’s tavern comrades —

Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece,

And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell —

was in all likelihood a reminiscence of contemporary Warwickshire life as literal as the name of the hamlet where the drunkard dwelt. There was a genuine Stephen Sly who was in the dramatist’s day a self-assertive citizen of Stratford; and ‘Greece,’ whence ‘old John Naps’ derived his cognomen, is an obvious misreading of Greet, a hamlet by Winchcomb in Gloucestershire, not far removed from Shakespeare’s native town.²

¹ Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. 224 (mispaged 124).

² According to local tradition Shakespeare was acquainted with Greet, Winchcomb, and all the villages in the immediate neighbourhood. He

In 1597 Shakespeare turned once more to English history. He studied anew Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle.’ At the same time he carefully examined a value- ‘Henry less but very popular piece, ‘The Famous ^IV-’ Victories of Henry V, containing the Honourable battle of Agin court/ which was repeatedly acted by the Queen’s company of players between 1588 and 159s.¹ The ‘Famous Victories’ opens with a perfunctory sketch of Henry IV’s last years; in the crudest spirit of farce Prince Hal, while heir apparent, engages in roistering horseplay with disreputable associates; the later scenes present the most stirring events of his reign. From Holinshed and the old piece Shakespeare worked up with splendid energy two plays on the reign of Henry IV, with an independent sequel on the reign of Henry V — the three plays forming together the supreme trilogy in the range of history drama.

Shakespeare’s two plays concerning Henry IV are continuous in subject matter; they are known respectively as Parts I. and II. of ‘Henry IV.’ The First _The Part carries the historic episode from the close historical of the play of ‘Richard II’ down to the battle ^madent- of Shrewsbury on July 21, 1403, when Henry IV, Richard II’s successor on the throne, triumphed over the rebellion of his new subjects. The Second Part treats more cursorily of the remaining ten years of Henry IV’s reign and ends with that monarch’s collapse under the strain of kingly cares and with the coronation of his son Henry

is still credited with the authorship of the local jingle which enumerates the chief hamlets and points of interest in the district. The lines run:

Dirty Gretton, dingy Greet,

Beggarly Winchcomb, Sudely sweet;

Hartshorn and Wittington Bell,

Andoversford and Merry Frog Mill.

¹ It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598 as acted by the Queen’s company. A re-issue of 1617 credits the King’s company (i.e. Shakespeare’s company) with its production — a fraudulent device of the publisher to identify it with Shakespeare’s work.

V. The main theme of the two pieces is serious in the extreme. Henry IV is a figure of gloom, and a cause of gloom in his environment. But Shakespeare, boldly improving on the example of the primitive old play of ‘The Famous Victories’ and of much other historical drama, linked to the tragic scheme his most convincing portrayal of broad and comprehensive humour.

The ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ is almost as rich as the Induction to ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in direct _More references to persons and districts familiar Stratford to Shakespeare. Two amusing scenes pass memories. _at th_e house of Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, a county which touched the boundaries of Stratford (m. ii. and v. i.). Justice Shallow, as we have seen, boldly caricatures Sir Thomas Lucy, a bugbear of Shakespeare’s youth at Stratford, the owner of the neighbouring estate of Charlecote.¹ When, in the play, the justice’s factotum, Davy, asked his master ‘to countenance William Visor of Woncot² against Clement Perkes of the Hill,’ the allusions are unmistakable to persons and places within the dramatist’s personal cognisance. The Gloucestershire village of Woodmancote, where the family of Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth century, is still pronounced Woncot. The adjoining Stinchcombe Hill (still familiarly known to natives as ‘The Hill’) was in the sixteenth century the home of the family of Perkes. Very precise too are the allusions to the region of the Cotswold Hills, which were easily accessible from Stratford. ‘Will Squele, a Cotswold man,’ is noticed as one of Shallow’s friends in youth (hi. ii. 23); and when Shallow’s servant Davy receives his master’s instructions to sow ‘the headland’ ‘with red wheat’ in the early autumn, there is an obvious reference to the custom almost peculiar to the Cotswolds

¹ See pp. 35-6 supra.

² The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot. Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding editors.

of sowing ‘red lammas’ wheat at an unusually early season of the agricultural year.¹

The kingly hero of the two plays of ‘Henry IV’ had figured under his princely name of Henry Bolingbroke as a spirited young man in ‘ Richard II ’; he ■. was now represented as weighed down by care HeSy iv and age. With him are contrasted (in Part I.) his impetuous and ambitious subject Hotspur ‘ and (in both Parts) his son and heir Prince Hal, whose boisterous and restless disposition drives him from Court to seek adventures among the haunters of taverns. Hotspur is a vivid and fascinating portrait of a hot-headed soldier, courageous to the point of rashness, and sacrificing his life to his impetuous sense of honour. Prince Hal, despite his riotous vagaries, is endowed by the dramatist with far more self-control and common sense.

On the first, as on every subsequent, production of ‘Henry IV’ the main public interest was concentrated neither on the King nor on his son, nor on Hotspur, but on the chief of Prince Hal’s riotous ^ast ' companions. In the old play of ‘The Famous Victories’ the Prince at the head of a crew of needy ruffians robs the royal tax-collectors on Gadshill or drinks and riots in a tavern in Eastcheap, while a clown of the traditional itamp who is finally impressed for the war adds to the merriment by gulling a number of simple tradesmen and artisans. Shakespeare was not blind to the hints of the old drama, but he touched its comic scenes with a magic of his own and summoned out of its dust and ashes the radiance of his inimitable Falstaff.

At the outset the propriety of that great creation was questioned on a political or historical ground of doubtful relevance. Shakespeare in both parts of The first ‘Henry IV’ originally named the chief of the P^rotest- Prince’s associates after a serious Lollard leader, Sir

¹ These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden in his Diary of Master Silence, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt’s Dursley and its Neighbourhood, Huntley’s Glossary of the Cotswold Dialect, and Marshall’s Rural Economy of Cotswold (1796).

John Oldcastle, a very subordinate and shadowy character in the old play. But influential objection was taken by Henry Brooke, eighth Lord Cobham, who succeeded to the title on March 5, 1596-7, and claimed descent in the female line from the historical Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, who had sat in the House of Lords as Lord Cobham. The new Lord Cobham’s father, William Brooke, the seventh lord, had filled the office of Lord Chamberlain for some seven months before his death (August 8,1596-March 5,1597) and had betrayed Puritanic prejudices in his attitude to the acting profession. The new Lord Cobham showed himself a loyal son in protesting against the misuse on the stage of his Lollard ancestor’s appellation. Shakespeare met the objection by bestowing on Prince Hal’s tunbellied follower the new and deathless name of Falstaff. When the First Part of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’ was licensed for publication on February 25, 1597-8,¹ the name of

' ¹ Andrew Wise, the publisher in 1597 of Richard II and Richard III, obtained on February 25, 1597-8, a license for the publication of the his- torye of Henry iiij^th with his battaile of Shrewsburye against Henry Hot- spurre of the Northe with the conceipted mirthe of Sir John Falstaff (Arber,

iii. 105). This quarto, which, although it bore no author’s name, presented a satisfactory version of Shakespeare’s text, was printed for Wise by Peter Short at the Star on Bread Street Hill. A second edition ‘newly corrected by W. Shake-speare ’ was printed for Wise by a different printer, Simon Stafford of Adling Hill, near Carter Lane, in 1599. Wise made over his interest in this First Part of Henry IV on June 25, 1603, to Matthew Lawe of St. Paul’s Churchyard, who produced new editions in 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The First Folio text gives with some correction the Quarto of 1613. Meanwhile Wise had entered into partnership with another bookseller, William Aspley, of the Parrot in St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1600, and Wise and Aspley jointly obtained an August 23, 1600, a license to publish both Much Ado about Nothing and the Second Parte of the history of Kinge Henry the iiij^th with the humours of Sir John Fallstajf, wrytten by Master Shakespere (Arber, iii. r7o-i). This is the earliest mention of Shakespeare’s name in the Stationers' Register. In previous entries of his plays no author’s name was given. The original edition of the Second Part of Henry IV was printed for Wise by Valentine Simmes (or Sims) in r6oo: it followed an abbreviated acting version; most exemplars omit Act III Sc. i., which only appears in a few copies on two inserted leaves. A second edition was reached before the close of the year. There was no reissue of the Quarto. The First Folio of 1623 adopted a different and a rather fuller version of Shakespeare's text of 2 Henry IV.

Falstaff was already substituted for that of Oldcastle in the title. Yet the text preserved a relic of the earlier name in Prince Hal’s apostrophe of Falstaff as ‘my old lad of the Castle’ (1. ii. 40). A less trustworthy edition of the Second Part of ‘Henry IV’ also appeared with Falstaff’s name in the place of that of Oldcastle in 1600. There the epilogue ironically denied that Falstaff had any characteristic in common with the martyr Oldcastle: ‘ Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.’ Again, however, the text retained tell-tale marks; the abbreviation ‘Old.’ stood before one of Falstaff’s speeches (1. ii. 114), and Falstaff was credited like the genuine Oldcastle with serving in boyhood as ‘page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk’ (111. ii. 24-5). Nor did the employment of the name ‘Falstaff’ silence all cavilling. The new name hazily recalled Sir John Fastolf, an historical warrior of repute and wealth of the fifteenth century who had already figured in the First Part of ‘Henry VI,’ and was owner at one time of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Southwark.¹ An Oxford scholar, Dr. Richard James, writing about 1625, protested that Shakespeare, after offending Sir John Oldcastle’s descendants by giving his ‘buffoon’ the name of that resolute martyr, ‘was put to make an ignorant shift of abusing Sir John Fastolf, a man not inferior in vertue, though not so famous in piety as the other.’² George Daniel of Beswick, the Cavalier poet, similarly complained in 1647 of the ill use to which Shakespeare had put Fastolf’s name in order to escape the imputation of vilifying the Lollard leader.³ Furthermore Fuller, in his ‘Worthies,’ first published in 1662, while expressing satisfaction that

¹ According to traditional stage directions, first adopted by Theobald in 1733, the Prince and his companions in Henry IV frequent the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, a popular tavern where plays were occasionally performed. Eastcheap is several times mentioned in Shakespeare’s text as the scene of Falstaff’s revels, but the tavern is not described more specifically than as ‘the old place’ (2 Henry IV, 11. ii. 161).

² James MS. 34, Bodleian Library, Oxford; cf. Halliwell, On the Character of Sir John Falstaff, 1841, pp. 19, 20.

' George Daniel’s Poems, ed. Grosart, 1878, pp. 112—13.

Shakespeare had ‘put out’ of the play'Sir John Old- castle, was eloquent in his avowal of regret that ‘Sir John Fastolf’ was ‘put in,’ on the ground that it was making overbold with a great warrior’s memory to make him a ‘Thrasonical puff and emblem of mock valour.’ .

The offending' introduction and withdrawal of Old- castle’s name left a curious mark on literary history. Faistaff As many as four humbler men of letters (An- and thony Munday, Robert Wilson, Michael Oldcastle. j)_rayt_on, and Richard Hathaway), seeking to profit by the attention drawn by Shakespeare to the historical Oldcastle, combined to produce a poor dramatic version of that worthy genuine history. They pretended to vindicate the Lollard’s memory from the slur that Shakespeare’s identification of him with his fat knight had cast upon it.¹ This unimpressive counterstroke was produced by the Lord Admiral’s company in the autumn of 1599 and was received with favour. It was, like Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV,’ in two parts, and when the second part was revived in the autumn of 1602 Thomas Dekker, the well-known writer, whose versatile capacity gave him an uncertain livelihood and left him open to the temptation of a bribe, was employed to make additions to the original draft. Shakespeare was obviously innocent of any share in this many-handed piece of hack-work, two of whose contrivers, Drayton and Dekker, were capable of more dignified occupation. Nevertheless of two early editions of the first part of ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ bearing the date i6oo_; one ‘printed for T[homas] Pfavier]’ was impudently described on the title-page as by Shakespeare, and the false description misled innocent editors of Shakespeare’s collective works in the second half of the

¹ In the prologue to the play of Oldcastle (1600) appear the lines:

It is no pampered glutton we present,

Nor aged councellor to youthful sinne;

But one whose vertue shone above the rest,

A valiant martyr and a vertuous Peere.

seventeenth century into including the feeble' dramatic reply to Shakespeare’s work among his own writings.¹ The second part of ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ has vanished. Non-dramatic literature was also enlisted in the controversy over Shakespeare’s alleged defamation of the historic Oldcastle’s character. John Weever, an antiquarian poet, pursued the dramatists’ path of rehabilitation. In 1601 he issued a narrative poem entitled ‘The Mirror of Martyrs or the Life and Death of that thrice valiant capitaine and most godly martyr Sir John Oldcastle Knight — Lord Cobham. Printed by V[alentine] S[immes] for William Wood.’ Weever calls his ‘mirror’ ‘the true Oldcastle’ and cites incidentally phrases from the Second Part of ‘Henry IV’ which by covert implication convict Shakespeare of fathering ‘ the false Oldcastle.’

But none of the historical traditions which are connected with Falstaff helped him to his fame. His perennial attraction is fruit of the personality owing _Falgtaff,_s nothing to history with which Shakespeare’s personal- imaginative power clothed him. The knight’s ^lty' unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way of life sup-:

¹ The early edition of The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, with, Shakespeare’s name on the title-page and bearing the date 1600, is believed to have been deliberately antedated by the publisher Pavier, and to have been actually published by him some years later—in 1619 — at the press of WilUam Jaggard. It is not easy to reconcile with the facts of the situation the report of the gossiping letterwriter Roland Whyte [Sydney,Papers, ii. 175) to the effect that the Lord Chamberlain’s [i.e. Shakespeare’s] company acted ‘Sir John Oldcastle with good contentment ’ m March 6, ^99-1600 at Lord Hunsdon’s private house, after a dinner jiven in honour of a Flemish envoy to the English court. It is highly mprobable that the Lord Chamberlain’s players would have performed he piece of ‘Sir John Oldcastle,’ which was written for the Lord Admiral’s :ompany, in opposition to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. The reporter ras doubtless referring hastily to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and gave it he name of Sir John Oldcastle which the character of FalstaS originally rare. ' -

plies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from the highest manifestations of humour. His talk is always in prose of a rarely matched pith. The Elizabethan public, despite the protests of historical critics, recognised the triumphant success of the effort, and many of Falstaff’s telling phrases, with the names of his foils, Justices Shallow and Silence, at once took root in popular speech. Shakespeare’s purely comic power culminated in Falstaff; he may be claimed as the most humorous figure in literature.

In all probability ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a domestic comedy inclining to farce, followed close upon ■Merry ‘Henry IV.’ The piece is unqualified by any wives of pathetic interest. The low-pitched sentiment Windsor.’ _couc}_ie(^ j_{n a} colloquial vein. The high ratio of prose to verse finds no parallel elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work. Of the 3000 lines of the ‘Merry Wives’ only one tenth is in metre.

In the epilogue to the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ Shakespeare had written: ‘ If you be not too much cloyed Falstaff with fat meat, our humble author will continue and Queen the story with Sir John in it . . . where for Elizabeth, j k_now Falstaff shall die of a sweat,

unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions.’ Falstaff was not destined to the fate which the dramatist airily foreshadowed. External influence gave an unexpected turn to Sir John’s career. Rowe asserts that Queen Elizabeth ‘ was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of “Henry IV” that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love.’ John Dennis, the literary critic of Queen Anne’s era, in the dedication of a tasteless adaptation of the ‘Merry Wives’ which he called ‘The Comical Gallant’ (1702), noted that the ‘Merry Wives’ was written at Queen Elizabeth’s ‘ command and by her direction; and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days, and was afterwards, as tradition tells us, very well pleased with the

representation.’¹ In his ‘Letters’² Dennis reduces the period of composition to ten days — ‘a prodigious thing,’ added Gildon,⁸ where all is so well contrived and carried on without the least confusion.’ The localisation of the scene at Windsor, and the complimentary references to Windsor Castle, corroborate the tradition that the comedy was prepared to meet a royal command. The tradition is very plausible. But the royal suggestion failed to preserve the vital interest of the comedy from an ‘ alacrity in sinking.’ Although Falstaff is the central figure, he is a mere caricature of his former self. His power of retort has decayed, and the laugh invariably turns against him. In name only is he identical with the potent humourist of ‘Henry IV.’

The matrimonial adventures out of which the plot of the ‘Merry Wives’ is woven formed a frequent and a characteristic feature of Italian fiction. The ^ Italian novelist delighted in presenting the ^{e p 0} ' amorous intrigues of matrons who by farcical tricks lulled their jealous husbands’ suspicions, and they were at the same time expert devisers of innocent deceits which faithful wives might practise on foolish amorists. Much Italian fiction of the kind would seem to have been accessible to Shakespeare. A tale from Straparola’s ‘Notti’ (iv. 4), of which an adaptation figured in the miscellany of novels called Tarleton’s ‘Newes out of Purgatorie’ (1590), another Italian tale from the ‘Peco- rone’ of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (i. 2), and a third romance, the Fishwife’s tale of Brainford in the collection of stories, drawn from Italian sources, called ‘Westward for Smelts,’ ⁴ all supply incidents of matrimonial strategy

¹ In the prologue to his adaptation Dennis repeated the story:

But Shakespeare’s Play in fourteen days was writ,

And in that space to make all just and fit,

Was an attempt surpassing human Wit.

Yet our great Shakespeare’s matchless Muse was such,

None e’er in so small time perform’d so much.

²1721, p. 232. ⁸ Remarks, p. 291.

⁴ This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to

against dissolute gallantry and marital jealousy which resemble episodes in Shakespeare’s comedy. Yet in spit,e of the Italian affinities of the fable and of Falstaff’s rather cosmopolitan degeneracy, Shakespeare has nowhere so vividly reflected the bluff temper of average English men and women in contemporary middle-class society. The presentation of the buoyant domestic life of an Elizabethan country town bears, too, distinctive marks of Shakespeare’s own experience. Again, there are literal references to the neighbourhood of Stratford. Justice Shallow reappears, and his coat-of-arms, which is described as consisting of ‘luces,’ openly identifies him with Shakespeare’s early foe, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote.¹ When Shakespeare makes Master Slender repeat the report that Master Page’s fallow greyhound was ‘outrun on CotsalT (1. i. 93), he testifies to his interest in the coursing matches for which the Cotswold district was famed at the period. A topical allusion of a different kind and one rare in Shakespearean drama is made in some detail at the end of the play. One of the characters, the Host of the Garter Inn. at Windsor, recalls bitterly and with literal frankness the losses which tavernkeepers of Reading, Maidenhead, and Colebrook actually incurred some years before at the hands of a German tourist, one Frederick Duke of Wirtemberg, who, while travelling incognito as Count Mompelgard, had been granted by Queen Elizabeth’s government the right to requisition posthorses free of charge. The ‘Duke de Jamany’ made liberal use of his privilege and the absence of official compensation is the grievance to which Shakespeare’s candid ‘Host’ gives loud voice.

The imperfections of the surviving text of the ‘Merry

have been published in ,1603, although no edition earlier than 1620 is now known. The 1620 edition of Westward for Smelts, written by Kinie Kit of Kingston, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. Shakespeare’s Library, ed. Hazlitt, I .i. 1-80.

¹ See p. 35-6 supra.

Wives ’ graphically illustrate the risks of injury to which the publishing methods of his day exposed Shakespeare’s work. A license for the publication of the _{The te3rt
o{} play was granted by the Stationers’ Company ‘TheMerry to the stationer John Busby of the Crane in ^Wlves-’

St. Paul’s Churchyard, on January 18, 1601-2.¹ A very imperfect draft was printed in 1602 by Thomas Creede, the well-known printer of Thames Street, and was published at the ‘Fleur de Luce’ in St. Paul’s Churchyard by Arthur Johnson, who took the venture over from Busby on the same day as the latter procured his license. The inflated title-page ran: ‘A most pleasaunt and excellent conceited comedie, of Syr Iohn Falstaffe, and the merrie Wiues of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Iustice Shallow, and his wise Cousin M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll and Corporall Nym. By William Shakespeare. As it hath bene diuers times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamber- laines seruants. Both before her Maiestie, and elsewhere.’ The incoherences of this edition show that it was prepared either from a transcript of ignorant shorthand notes taken in the theatre or, less probably, from a report of the play made in longhand from memory. In any case the version of the play at the printers’ disposal was based on a drastic abbreviation of the author’s draft. This crude edition was reissued without change in 1619, by Arthur Johnson, the former publisher. A far better and far fuller text happily figured in the First Folio of 1623. Several speeches of the First Quarto were omitted, but many passages of importance were printed for the first time. The First Folio editors clearly had access to a version of the piece which widely differed from that of the original quarto. But the Folio manuscript also bears traces of mutilation for stage purposes, and though a joint recension of the Quarto and the Folio texts presents an intelligible whole, we cannot confidently

¹ Arber, iii. 199; Pollard, 45 seq.

claim to know from the existing evidence the precise shape in which the play left Shakespeare’s hand.¹

The spirited character of Prince Hal (in‘Henry IV’) was peculiarly congenial to its creator, and in the play of ₍ , ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare, during 1598, brought ‘Henry v.’ y_{g career to} j_{ts zen}ith. The piece was performed early in 1599, probably in the newly built Globe theatre — ‘this wooden O’ of the opening chorus. Again printers and publishers combined to issue to the reading public a reckless perversion of Shakespeare’s manuscript. A piratical and incompetent shorthand reporter was responsible for the text of the The text. £_{rgt ec}jj_tj_{on w}iuch appeared in quarto in 1600. Half of the play was ignored. There were no choruses, and much of the prose, in which a great part of the play was written, was printed in separate lines of unequal lengths as if it had been intended to be verse. A note in the register of the Stationers’ Company dated August 4, 1600, runs: ‘Henry the ffift, a booke, to be staied.’ Yet in spite of the order of a stay of publication, the book was published in the same year. The publishers were jointly Thomas Millington of Cornhill and John Busby of St. Paul’s Churchyard.² The printer was Thomas

¹ The First Quarto was reprinted as ‘The first sketch of The Merry Wives ’ in 1842, ed. by J. O. Halliwell for the Shakespeare Society. A photolithographic facsimile appeared in 1881 with a valuable introduction by P. A. Daniel. A typed facsimile was very fully edited by Mr. W. W. Greg for the Clarendon Press in 1910. _

² Millington had published the first edition of ‘Titus’ (1594) with Edward White, and was responsible for two editions of both The Contention (1594 and 1600) and True Tragedie (1595 and 1600) — the first drafts respectively of Shakespeare’s second and third parts of Henry VI. Busby, Millington’s partner in Henry V, acquired on January 18,1601-2 a license for the Merry Wives only to part with it immediately to Arthur Johnson. In like fashion Busby and Millington made over their interest in Henry V before August 14, 1600, to Thomas Pavier of Comhill, an irresponsible pirate, who undertook the disreputable reissue of 1602 (Arber, iii. 169). It was Pavier who published the plays of Sir John Oldcastle (doubtfully dated 1600) and the Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) under the fraudulent pretence that Shakespeare was their author. A third uncorrected reprint of Henry V — ‘Printed for T. P. 1608’ — seems to be deliberately misdated and to have been first issued by Pavier in 1619 at the press of William Jaggard. (See Pollard, Shakespeare Folks and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq.)

Creede of Thames Street, who had just proved his recklessness in his treatment of the First Quarto of the ‘Merry Wives.’ There were two reprints of this disreputable volume — ostensibly dated in 1602 and 1608 — before an adequate presentation of the piece appeared for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. There the 1623 lines of the piratical quarto gave way to an improved text of more than twice the length.

The dramatic interest of ‘Henry V’ is slender. In construction the play resembles a military pageant. The events, which mainly concern Henry V’s wars _Popularlty in France, bring the reign as far as the treaty of the of peace and the King’s engagement to the ^topic' French princess. The climax is reached ear her, in the brilliant victory of the English at Agincourt, which powerfully appealed to patriotic sentiment. Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle’ and the crude drama of the ‘Famous Victories of Henry the Fift’ are both laid under generous contribution. The argument indeed enjoyed already an exceptionally wide popularity. Another piece (‘Harry the V’) which the Admiral’s company produced under Henslowe’s managership for the first time on November 28,-1595, was repeated thirteen times within the following eight months. That piece, which has disappeared, may have stimulated Shakespeare’s interest in the theme if it did not offer him supplementary hints for its development.¹

In ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare incidentally manipulated on somewhat original lines a dramatic device of classical descent. At the opening of each act he intro- The duces a character in the part of prologue or choruses, ‘chorus’ or interpreter of the coming scene. ‘Henry V’ is the only play of Shakespeare in which every fresh act is heralded thus. Elsewhere two of the five acts, as in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ or only one of the acts, as in the Second Part of ‘Henry IV,’ is similarly introduced. Nowhere, too, is such real service rendered to the progress ¹ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 177.

of the story by the ‘chorus’ as in ‘Henry V,’ nor are the speeches so long or so memorable. The choric prologues of ‘Henry V’ are characterised by exceptional solemnity and sublimity of phrase, by a lyric fervour and philosophical temper which sqts them among the greatest of Shakespeare’s monologues. Through the first, and the last, runs an almost passionate appeal to the spectators to bring their highest powers of imagination to the realisation of the dramatist’s theme.

As in the ‘ Famous Victories ’ and in the two parts of ‘Henry IV,’ there is abundance of comic element in _The ‘Henry V,’ but death has removed Falstaff, soldiers in whose last moments are described with the the cast. _si_mpl_e pathos that comes of a matchless art, and, though Falstaff’s companions survive, they are thin shadows of his substantial figure. New comic characters are introduced in the persons of three soldiers respectively of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationality, whose racial traits are contrasted with effect. The irascible Irishman, Captain MacMorris, is the only representative of his nation who figures in the long list of Shakespeare’s dramatis persona. The Scot James is stolid and undemonstrative. The scene in which the pedantic but patriotic Welsh captain, Fluellen, avenges the sneers of the braggart Pistol at his nation’s emblem, by forcing him to eat the leek, overflows in vivacious humour. There are also original and lifelike sketches of two English private soldiers, Williams and Bates. On the royal hero’s manliness, whether as soldier, ruler, or lover, Shakespeare loses no opportunity of laying emphasis. In no other play has he cast a man so entirely in the heroic mould. Alone in Shakespeare’s gallery of English monarchs does Henry’s portrait evoke at once a joyous sense of satisfaction in the high potentialities of human character and a feeling of pride among Englishmen that one of his mettle is of English race. ‘Henry V’ may be regarded as Shakespeare’s final experiment in the dramatisation of English history, and it artistically

and patriotically rounds off the series of his ‘histories’ which form collectively a kind of national epic. For ‘Henry VIII,’ which was produced very late in his career, Shakespeare was only in part responsible, and that ‘history’ consequently belongs to a different category.

A glimpse of autobiography may be discerned in the direct mention by Shakespeare in ‘Henry V’ of an exciting episode in current history. At the time of the composition of ‘Henry V’ public attention speareand was riveted on the exploits of the impetuous Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, whose ’

virtues and defects had the faculty of evoking immense popularity. Early in 1599, he had tempted fate by accepting the appointment of lord deputy of Ireland where the native Irish were rebelling against English rule. He left London for Dublin on March 27, 1599, and he rode forth from the English capital amid the deafening plaudits of the populace.¹ Very confident was the general hope that he would gloriously pacify the distracted province. The Earl’s close friend Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, bore him company and the dramatist shared in the general expectation of an early triumphant homecoming.

In the prologue or ‘chorus’ to the last act of ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare foretold for the Earl of Essex Essex and an enthusiastic reception by the people of helium of London when he should return after ‘broach- 1601. ing’ rebellion in Ireland.

Were now the general of our gracious empress,

As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him! (Act v. Chorus, 11. 30-4.)

¹ Cf. Stow’s Annals, ed. Howes, 1631, p. 788: ‘The twentie seuen of March, rS99, about two a clocke in the afternoone, Robert Earle of Essex, Vicegerent of Ireland, &c., tooke horse in Seeding Lane, and from thence beeing accompanied with diuers Noblemen, and many others, himselfe very plainely attired, roade through Grace-streete, Comehill, Cheapeside, and other high streetes, in all which places, a.nd in the fieldes, the people pressed exceedingly to behold him, especially in the highwayes

But Shakespeare’s prognostication was woefully belied. Essex’s Irish policy failed. He proved unequal to the task which was set him. Instead of a glorious fulfilment of his Irish charge he, soon after ‘Henry V’ was produced, crept back hurriedly to London, with his work undone, and under orders to stand his trial for disobedience to royal directions and for neglect of duty. Dismissed after tedious litigation from all offices of state (on August 26, 1600), Essex saw his hopes fatally blighted. With a view to recovering his position, he thereupon formed the desperate resolve of forcibly removing from the Queen’s councils those to whom he attributed his ruin. Southampton and other young men of social position joined in the reckless plot. They vainly counted on the goodwill of the citizens of London. When the year 1601 opened, the conspirators were completing their plans, and Shakespeare’s sympathetic reference to Essex’s popularity with Londoners bore fruit of some peril to his theatrical colleagues, if not to himself.

On the eve of the projected rising, a few of the rebel leaders, doubtless at Southampton’s suggestion, sought The Globe dramatist’s countenance. They paid 405. and Essex’s to Augustine Phillips, a leading member of re ^{e lon}' Shakespeare’s company and a close friend of the dramatist, to induce him to revive at the Globe theatre ‘the play of the deposing and murder of King Richard the Second’ (beyond doubt Shakespeare’s play), in the hope that its scenes of the deposition and killing of a king might encourage a popular outbreak. Phillips prudently told the conspirators who bespoke the piece that ‘that play of Kyng Richard’ was ‘so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company at it.’ None the less the performance took place on Saturday, February 7, 1600-1, the day preceding the one fixed by Essex for his rising in the streets of London.

for more then four myles space, crying and saying, God blesse your Lordship, God preserue your honour, &c., and some followed him untill the evening, onely to behold him.’

The Queen, in a later conversation (on August 4, 1601) with William Lambarde, a well-known antiquary, complained rather wildly that ‘this tragedie’ of ‘Richard II,’ which she had always viewed with suspicion, was played at the period with seditious intent ‘forty times in open streets and houses.’¹ At any rate the players’ appeal failed to provoke the response which the conspirators anticipated. On Sunday, February 8, Essex, with Southampton and others, fully armed, vainly appealed to the people of London to march on the Court. They addressed themselves to deaf ears, and being arrested, by the Queen’s troops were charged with high treason. At the joint trial of Essex and Southampton, the actor Phillips gave evidence of the circumstances in which the tragedy of ‘ Richard II ’ was revived at the Globe theatre. Both Essex and Southampton were found guilty and sentenced to death. Essex was duly executed on February 25 within the precincts of the Tower of London; but Southampton was reprieved on the ground that his offence was due to his ‘love’ of Essex. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London until the Queen’s death, more than two years later. No proceedings were taken against the players for their implied support of the traitors,² but Shakespeare wisely abstained, for the time, from any public reference to the fate either of Essex or of his patron Southampton.

Such incidents served to accentuate rather than injure Shakespeare’s growing reputation. For several years his genius as dramatist and poet had been ac- shake- knowledged by critics and playgoers alike, and pPp^a_u^r,^e_a’_r^s_ity his social and professional position had become and considerable. Inside the theatre his influence ^mfluence- was supreme. When, in 1598, the manager of the company rejected Ben Jonson’s first comedy — his ‘Every Man in his Humour’ —■ Shakespeare intervened,

¹ Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth, iii. 552.

² Cf Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, ijg8-r6oT, pp. 575-8.

according to a credible tradition (reported by Rowe but denounced by Gifford), and procured a reversal of the decision in the interest of the unknown dramatist, who was his junior by nine years. Shakespeare took a part when the piece was performed. On September 22, 1598, after the production of the comedy,'Jonson unluckily killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spenser, in a duel in Moor- fields, and being convicted of murder escaped punishment by benefit of clergy. According to a story published at the time, he owed his release from ‘purgatory’ to. a player, ‘a charitable copperlaced Christian,’ and his benefactor has been identified with Shakespeare.¹ Whatever may have been Shakespeare’s specific acts of benevolence, Jonson was of a difficult and jealous temper, and subsequently he gave vent to an occasional expression of scorn at Shakespeare’s expense. But, despite passing manifestations of his unconquerable surliness, the proofs are complete that Jonson cherished genuine esteem and affection for Shakespeare till death.² Within a very few years of Shakespeare’s death Sir Nicholas L’Es- trange, an industrious collector of anecdotes, put into writing an anecdote for which he made John Donne, the poetic Dean of St. Paul’s, responsible, attesting the amicable social relations that commonly subsisted between Shakespeare and Jonson. ‘Shakespeare,’ ran the story, ‘was godfather to one of Ben Jonson’s children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up and asked him why he was so melancholy. “No, faith, Ben,” says he, “not I, but I have been considering a great while what should be the

^J See Dekker’s Satiromastix, which was produced by Shakespeare’s company in the autumn of 1601, where Horace, a caricature portrait of Ben Jonson, is thus addressed: ‘Thou art the true arraign’d Poet, and shouldst have been hang’d, but for one of these part-takers, these charitable Copper-lac’d Christians that fetcht thee out of Purgatory, Players

I meane, Theaterians, pouchmouth stage-walkers’ (act iv. sc. iii. 252 seq.).

* Cf. Gilchrist, Examination of the charges ... of Jonson’s Enmity towards Shakespeare, 1808. See Ben Jonson’s elegy in the First Folio and his other references to Shakespeare’s writings at p. 587 infra.

fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have resolv’d at last.” “I pr’ythee, what?” sayes he. “I’ faith, Ben, I’ll e’en give him a dozen good Lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them.”’¹ The friendly irony is in the gentle vein with which Shakespeare was traditionally credited. Very mildly is Ben Jonson rebuked for his vainglorious assertion of classical learning, the comparative lack of which in Shakespeare was a frequent theme of Jonson’s taunts.

The creator of Falstaff could have been no stranger to tavern life, and he doubtless took part with zest in the convivialities of men of letters. Supper parties _The at City inns were a welcome experience of all Mermaid poets and dramatists of the time. The bright ^meetmgs- wit flashed freely amid the substantial fare of meat, game, pastry, cheese and fruit, with condiments of olives, capers and lemons, and flowing cups of ‘rich Canary wine.’² The veteran ‘ Mermaid ’ in Bread Street, Cheap- side, and the ‘Devil’ at Temple Bar, were celebrated early in the seventeenth century for their literary associations,³ while other taverns about the City, named respectively the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Dog,’ and the ‘Triple Tun,’ long boasted of their lettered patrons. The most famous of the literary hostelries in Shakespeare’s era was the ‘Mermaid,’ where Sir Walter Raleigh was held to have inaugurated the poetic feasts. Through Shakespeare’s middle years Ben Jonson exercised supreme control over the convivial life of literary London, and a reasonable tradition reports that Shakespeare was a frequent visitor to the ‘Mermaid’ tavern at the period

¹ ‘ Latten’ is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in Merry Wives of Windsor [1. i. 165] likens Slender to a ‘latten bilbo,’ that is, a sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. Anecdotes and Traditions, edited from L’Estrange’s MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society, p.

² Cf. Ben Jonson’s Epigrams, No. ci. ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper.’

³ Cf. Herrick’s Poems (Muses’ Library, ii. no) where in his ‘ode for’ Ben Jonson, Herrick mentions:

those lyric feasts Made at the Sun,

The Dog, the Triple Tun.

when Ben Jonson presided over its parliament of wit. Of the intellectual brilliance of those ‘merry’ meetings the dramatist Francis Beaumont wrote glowingly in his poetical letter to the presiding genius :

What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ? heard words that have heen So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,

As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.¹

‘Many were the wit-combats,’ wrote Fuller of Shakespeare in his ‘Worthies’ (1662), ‘betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war; Master Jonson (lik§ the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespear, with the Englishman of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.’

Of the many testimonies paid to Shakespeare’s reputation as both poet and dramatist at this period of his Meres’s career, the most striking was that of Francis eulogy, Meres. Meres was a learned graduate of ^isq8' Cambridge University, a divine and schoolmaster, who brought out in 1598 a collection of apophthegms on morals, religion, and literature which he entitled ‘Palladis Tamia’ or ‘Wits Treasury.’ In the volume he interpolated ‘A comparative discourse of our English poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian poets,’ and there exhaustively surveyed contemporary literary effort in England. Shakespeare figured in Meres’s pages as the greatest man of letters of the day. ‘The Muses would speak Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase,’ Meres asserted, ‘if they could speak English.’ ‘Among the English,’ he declared, ‘he is the most excellent in

¹ Francis Beaumont’s Poems in Old Dramatists (Beaumont and Fletcher), ii. 708.

both kinds for the stage' (i.e. tragedy and comedy), rivalling the fame of Seneca in the one kind, and of Plautus in the other. There follow the titles of six comedies: ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ ‘Errors,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ (i.e. ‘All’s Well’), ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Merchant of Venice,’ and of six tragedies, ‘Richard II,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘Henry IV,’ ‘King John,’ ‘Titus,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ Mention was also made of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis,’ his ‘Lucrece,’ and his ‘sugred ¹ sonnets among his private friends.’

Shakespeare’s poems ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ received in contemporary literature of the closing years of Queen Elizabeth's reign more fre- _{Thg ro} quent commendation than his plays. Yet in/* wo"’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ |^_e°^f and ‘Richard III’ all received some approving speareas notice at critical hands; and familiar references ^dramat!st- to Justice Silence, Justice Shallow, and Sir John Falstaff, with echoes of Shakespearean phraseology, either in printed plays or in contemporary private correspondence, attest the spreading range of Shakespeare’s conquests.² At the turn of the century the ‘ Pilgrimage to Parnassus, and the two parts of the ‘Returne from Parnassus,’ a tri-

¹ This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of Shakespeare as Adonis, Venus, Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with ‘sugred tongues’ in his Epigrams of 1599. In the Return from Parnassus (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as ‘sweet Master Shakespeare.’ Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of ‘sweetest Shakespeare’ in L’Allegro.

² See Centurie of Praise, under the years 1600 and 1601. In Ben Jon- son’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) one character is described as ‘a kinsman of Justice Silence,’ and of another it is foretold that he might become ‘as fat as Sir John Falstaff.’ A country gentleman, Sir Charles Percy, writing to a friend in London from his country seat in Gloucestershire, said: ‘If I stay heere long in this fashion, at my return I think you will find mee so dull that I shall bee taken for Justice Silence or Justice Shallow . . . Perhaps thee will not exempt mee from the opinion of a Justice Shallow at London, yet I will assure you, thee will make mee passe for a very sufficient gentleman in Gloucestershire’ (MS. letter in Public Record Office, Domestic State Papers, vol. 275, No. 146).

logy of plays by wits of Cambridge University, introduce a student who constantly quotes ‘ pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatres.’ The admirer asserts that he will hang a picture of ‘sweet Mr. Shakespeare’ in his study, and denounces as ‘dunci- fied’ the world which sets Spenser and Chaucer above his idol.

Shakespeare’s assured reputation is convincingly corroborated by the value which unprincipled publishers Publishers’ ^attached to his name and by the zeal with unpriii- ⁼ which they sought to palm off on their cus- of^PShtke- toiners the productions of inferior pens as his speare’s work. The practice began in 1594 and con- ^name' tinued not only through' the rest of Shakespeare’s career, but for some half-century after his death. The crude deception was not wholly unsuccessful. Six valueless pieces which publishers put to his credit in his lifetime found for a time unimpeded admission to his collected works.

As early as July 20, 1594, Thomas Creede, the printer of the surreptitious editions of ‘ Henry V ’ and the ‘ Merry False Wives’ as well as of the more or less authentic ascriptions versions of ‘Richard III’ (1598) and ‘Romeo lifetime ^and Juliet’ (1599) obtained a license for the issue of the crude ‘Tragedie of Locrine’ which he published during 1595 as ‘newly set foorth overseene and corrected. By W. S.’ ‘Locrine,’ which lamely dramatises a Brito-Trojan legend from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history, appropriated many passages from an blder piece called ‘Selimus,’ which was also printed and published by Thomas Creede in 1594. ‘Selimus’ was no doubt from the pen of Robert Greene, and came into being long before Shakespeare was out of his apprenticeship. Scenes of dumb show which preface each act of ‘Locrine’ indicate the obsolete mould in which the piece was cast. The same initials — ‘W. S.’¹ — figured on

¹ A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing for the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603, thirteen

the title-page of ‘ The True Chronicle Historie of Thomas, Lord Cromwell . . . Written by W. S.,’ which was licensed on August 11, 1602, was printed for William Jones in that year, and was reprinted verbatim by Thomas Snodham in 1613. The piece is described as having been acted by Shakespeare’s company, both when under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain and under that of King James. ‘Lord Cromwell’ is a helpless collection of disjointed scenes from the biography of King Henry VIII’s ministers; it is quite destitute of literary quality. On the title-page of a comedy entitled ‘The Puritaine, or the Widdow of Watling Streete,’ which George Eld printed in 1607, ‘W. S.’ was for a third time stated to be the author. ‘The Puritaine . . . Written by W. S.’ is a brisk farce portraying the coarseness of bourgeois London life in a manner which Ben Jonson essayed later in his ‘Bartholomew Fair.’ According to the title-page, the piece was ‘ acted by the children of Paules ’ who never interpreted any of Shakespeare’s works.

Through the same period Shakespeare’s full name appeared on the title-pages of three other pieces which are equally destitute of any touch of Shakespeare’s hand, viz.: ‘The First Part of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle’ in 1600 (printed for T[homas] Pfavier]), ‘The London ProdigalF in 1605 (printed by T[homas] C[reede] for Nathaniel Butter), and ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ in 1608 (by R. B. for Thomas Pavier). The first part of the ‘Life of Sir John Oldcastle’ was the piece designed by other pens in 1599 to relieve the hero’s character of the imputations which

plays, none of which are extant. The Hector of Germanie, an extant play ‘made by W. Smith’ and published ‘with new additions’ in 1615, was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials ‘W. S.’ was not due to the publishers’ belief that Wentworth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief that the plays were by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was supposed to cast upon it in his first sketch of Falstaff’s portrait.¹ ‘The London Prodigall,’ which was acted by Shakespeare’s company, humorously delineates middle-class society after the manner of ,_A ‘The Puritaine.’ ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy,’

Yorkshire which was acted by his Majesty’s players Tragedy.’ _at Globe, was assigned to Shakespeare not only on the title-page of the published book, but on the license granted to Thomas Pavier, the pirate publisher, by the Stationers’ Company (May 2, 1608).² The title-page describes the piece, which was unusually short, as ‘not so new as lamentable and true’; it dramatises current reports of the sensational murder in 1605 by a Yorkshire squire of his children and of the attempted murder of his wife.³

None of the six plays just enumerated, which passed in¹ Shakespeare’s lifetime under either his name or his initials, has any reasonable' pretension to Shakespeare’s authorship; nevertheless all were uncritically included in the Third Folio of his collected works (1664), and they reappeared in the Fourth Folio of 1685. Save in the case of ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy,’ criticism is unanimous in decreeing their exclusion from the Shakespearean canon. Nor does serious value attach to the grounds which led Schlegel and a few critics of repute to detect signs of Shakespeare’s hand in ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy.’ However superior that drama is to its companions in passionate and lurid force, it is no more than ‘ a coarse, crude, and vigorous impromptu ’ which is as clearly as the rest by a far less experienced pen than Shakespeare’s.

The fraudulent practice of crediting Shakespeare with valueless plays from the pens of comparatively dull- witted contemporaries extended far beyond the six pieces which he saw circulating under his name, and

¹ See p. 244 n. supra.

² Arber’s Stationers’ Reg. iii. 377.

³ The piece was designed as one of a set of four plays, and it has the alternative title : ‘ All’s one or One of the four plaies in one.’ A second edition of 1619 repeats the attribution to Shakespeare.

which the later Folios accepted as his. The worthless old play on the subject of King John was attributed to Shakespeare in the reissues of 1611 and 1622, and enterprising traders continued to add to ascriptions the illegitimate record through the next gen- Jj^^his eration. Humphrey Moseley, a London pub- ‘ lisher of literary proclivities, who, between 1630 and his death early in 1661, issued much poetic literature, including the first collection of Milton’s Minor Poems in 1645, claimed for Shakespeare the authorship in whole or in part of as many as seven additional plays. On September 9, 1653, he obtained from the Stationers’ Company license to publish no less than forty-one ‘severall Playes.’ The list includes ‘The Merry Devill of Edmonton’ which the publisher assigned wholly to Shakespeare; ‘ The History of Carden[n]io,’ which was said to be a joint work of Shakespeare and Fletcher; and two pieces called ‘Henry I’ and ‘Henry II,’ responsibility for which was divided between Shakespeare and a minor dramatist called Robert Davenport. On June 29, 1660, Moseley repeated his bold exploit,¹ and obtained a second license to publish twenty-eight further plays, three of which he again put without any warrant to Shakespeare’s credit. The titles of this trio ran: ‘The History of King Stephen,’ ‘Duke Humphrey, a tragedy,’ and ‘Iphis and Iantha, or a marriage without a man, a comedy.’ Of the seven reputed Shakespearean dramas which appear on Moseley’s lists, only one, ‘ The Merry Devill of Edmonton,’ is extant. Pieces called the ‘History of Cardenio’² and ‘Henry the First’ were acted by Shakespeare’s company. Manuscripts of three other of Moseley’s alleged Shakespearean plays (‘Henry the First,’ ‘Duke Humphrey,’ and ‘The History of King Stephen’) would seem to have belonged in the

¹ Moseley’s lists are carefully printed from the Stationers’ Company’s Registers in Mr. W. W. Greg’s article ‘The Bakings of Betsy’ in The Library, July 1911, pp. 237 seq.

^! See p. 438 infra.

early part of the eighteenth century to the antiquary and herald John Warburton, whose cook, traditionally christened Betsy Baker, through his ‘carelessness’ and her ‘ignorance’ committed them and many papers of a like kind to the kitchen flames.¹ ‘The Merry Devill of Edmonton,’ the sole survival of Moseley’s alleged ,_The Shakespearean discoveries, was produced on they Merry stage before, thedose.of the-sixteenth century; u Edmoa°^{f i1: was} entered on the ‘Stationers’ Register’ , ton.’ on October 22, 1607, was first published anonymously in 1608, ‘as it hath beene sundry times Acted, by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the bankside,’ and was revived before the Court at Whitehall in May 1613. There was a sixth quarto edition in 1655. None of the early impressions bore an author’s name. Francis Kirkman, another prominent London bookseller of Moseley’s temper, assigned it to Shakespeare in his catalogue of 1661; a copy of it was bound up in Charles II’s library with two other Elizabethan plays — ‘Faire Em’ and ‘Mucedorus’ — and the volume was labelled by the binders ‘Shakespeare, volume i.’² ‘ The Merry Devill ’ is a delightful comedy, abounding ' in both humour and romantic sentiment; at times it recalls scenes of the ‘ Merry Wives of Windsor.’ Superior as it is at all points to any other of Shakespeare’s falsely

¹ Warburton’s list of some fifty-six plays, all but three or four of which he charges his servant with destroying, is in the British Museum, Lansdowne MS. vol. 807, a volume which also contains the MS. of three pieces and the fragment of a fourth, the sole relics of the servant’s holocaust. The list is printed in Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 468470, and more carefully by Mr. Greg in The Library, July 1911, pp. 230-2. Among the pieces named are Henry I by Will. Shakespear and Robert Davenport; Duke Humphrey, by Will. Shakespear; and A Play by Will. Shakespeare vaguely identified with ‘The History of King Stephen.’ Sir Henry Herbert licensed The History of Henry the First to the King’s company on April 10, 1624, attributing it to Davenport alone (Malone, iii. 229). Nothing else is known of Warburton’s two other alleged Shakespearean pieces.

² This volume, which was at one time in the library of the actor- Garrick, passed to the British Museum. Its contents are now bound up separately, the old label being long since discarded. (Cf. Malone’s Variorum, 1821, ii. 682; Simpson’s School of Shakspere, ii. 337.)

reputed plays, it gives no sign of Shakespeare’s workmanship.¹ The bookseller, Francis Kirkman, showed greater rashness in issuing in 1662 a hitherto unprinted piece called ‘The Birth of Merlin,’ an extravagant romance which he described on the title-page as ‘written by William Shakespeare and William Rowley.’ A few snatches of poetry fail to lift this piece above the crude level of Rowley’s unaided work. It cannot be safely dated earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare’s death.²

Bold speculators have occasionally sought to justify the rashness of Charles II’s bookbinder in labelling as Shakespeare’s work the two pieces ‘ Mucedorus ’ and ‘Faire Em’ along with the ‘Merry Devill.’ The bookseller Kirkman accepted the attribution in his ‘ Catalogue of Plays ’ of 1671, and his fallacious guidance was followed by William Winstanley (1687) and Gerard Langbaine (1691) in their notices of Shakespeare in their respective ‘Lives of English Poets.’³

‘Mucedorus’ is an elementary effort in romantic comedy somewhat in Greene’s vein. It is interspersed with clownish horseplay and dates from the <Muce- early years of Elizabeth’s reign; it was first ^dorus-’ published in 1598 after having been ‘sundrie times plaid in the honorable Cittie of London.’ Its prolonged popularity is attested by the unparalleled number of sixteen quarto editions through which it passed in the

¹ The authorship cannot be positively determined. Coxeter, an eighteenth-century antiquary, assigned it to Michael Drayton. Charles Lamb and others, more probably, put it to Thomas Heywood’s credit.

² A useful edition of fourteen ‘doubtful’ plays, competently edited by Mr. C. F. Tucker Brooke under the general title of ‘The Shakespeare Apocrypha,’ was published by tbe Clarendon Press in igo8. Mr. A. F. Hopkinson edited in three volumes (1891-4) twelve doubtful plays and published a useful series of Essays on Shakespeare’s doubtful plays (1900). Five of the apocryphal pieces, Faire Em, Merry Devill, Edward III, Merlin, Arden of Feversham, were edited by Karl Warnke and Ludwig Proescholdt (Halle, 1883-8).

* Kirkman also put to Shakespeare’s credit in his Catalogue of 1671, Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, another foolish blunder which Winstanley and Langbaine adopt.

seventeenth century. According to the title-page of the third quarto of 1.610, the piece was acted at Court on Shrove Sunday night by Shakespeare’s company, ‘His highnes servants usually playing at the Globe,’ and the text was then ‘amplified with new additions.’ These ‘ additions ’ exhibit a dramatic ability above that of the dull level of the rest, and were presumably made after the comedy had come under the control of Shakespeare’s associates. The new passages have deluded one modern critic into a justification of the seventeenth-century association of Shakespeare’s name with the piece. Mr. Payne Collier, who included ‘ Mucedorus ’ in his privately printed edition of Shakespeare in 1878, was confident that one of the scenes (iv. i.) interpolated in the 1610 version — that in which the King of Valentia laments the supposed loss of his son — displayed genius which Shakespeare alone could compass. However readily critics may admit the superiority in literary value of the additional scene to anything else in the piece, none can seriously accept Mr. Collier’s extravagant estimate. The scene was probably from the pen of an admiring but faltering imitator of Shakespeare.¹

‘Faire Em,’ although it was first printed at an uncertain date early in the seventeenth century and again ■Faire in 1631, was, according to the title-page of ^Em-’ both editions, acted by Shakespeare’s company while Lord Strange was its patron (1589-93). Two lines from the piece (v. 121 and 157) are, however, quoted and turned to ridicule by Shakespeare’s foe, Robert Greene, in his ‘Farewell to Folly,’ a mawkish penitential tract, with an appendix of short stories, which was licensed for publication in 158.7, although no edition is known of earlier date than 1591. ‘Faire Em’ must therefore have been in circulation before Shakespeare’s career as dramatist opened. It is a very rudimentary endeavour in romantic comedy, in which two

¹ Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1908, pp. vii, xxiii seq., 103 seq.; Dodsley’s Old Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8.

complicated tales of amorous adventure run independent courses; the one tale has for its hero William the Conqueror, and the other has for heroine the fictitious Faire Em, daughter of one Sir Thomas Goddard who disguises himself for purposes of intrigue as a miller of Manchester. The piece has not even the pretension of ‘Mucedorus’ to one short scene of conspicuous literary merit.¹

Poems no less than plays, in which Shakespeare had no hand, were deceptively placed to his credit as soon as his fame was established. In 1599 William ,_The Jaggard, a none too scrupulous publisher, Passionate issued a small poetic anthology which he en- ^Pllgrim-’ titled ‘The Passionate Pilgrim, by W. Shakespeare.’ The volume, of which only two copies are known to be extant, consists of twenty lyrical pieces, the last six of which are introduced by the separate title-page: ‘ Sonnets to sundry notes of Musicke.’² Only five of the twenty poems can be placed to Shakespeare’s credit. Jaggard’s volume opened with two sonnets by Shakespeare which were not previously in print (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv. in the Sonnets of 1609), and there were scattered through the remaining pages three poems drawn from the already published play of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ The rest of the fifteen pieces were by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, and even less prominent versifiers, not all of whom can be identified.³

¹ Richard Simpson, in his School of Shakspere (1878, iii. 339 seq.), fantastically argues that the piece is by Shakespeare, and that it presents the leading authors and actors under false names, the main object being to satirise Robert Greene. Fleay thinks Robert Wilson, who was hoth actor and dramatist, was the author.

² The word ‘ sonnet ’ is here used in the sense of ‘ song.’ No ‘ quator- zain ’ is included in the last part of the Passionate Pilgrim. No notes of music were supplied to the volume; but in the case of the poems_‘Live with me and be my love ’ and ‘ My flocks feed not ’ contemporary airs are found elsewhere......

³ The five pieces hy Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two — ‘ If music and sweet poetry agree ’ (No. viii.) and ‘ As it fell upon a day' (No. xx.) — were borrowed from Barn- field’s Poems in diners humors (1598). Four sonnets on the theme of

According to custom, many of the pieces were circulating in dispersed manuscripts. The publisher had evil precedent for bringing together in a single volume detached poems by various pens and for attributing them all on the title-page to a single author who was responsible for a very small number of them.¹

Jaggard issued a second edition of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim ’ in 1606, but no copy survives. A third edition The third appeared in 1612 with an expanded title-page: edition. ‘The Passionate Pilgrime, or Certaine Amorous Sonnets betweene Venus and Adonis, newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespere. The third edition. Whereunto is newly added two Loue-Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellens answere back againe to Paris. Printed by W. Jaggard. 1612/ The old text reappeared without change; the words ‘certain amorous sonnets between Venus and Adonis’ appropriately describe four non-Shakespearean poems in the original edition, and the fresh emphasis laid on them in

Venus and Adonis (Nos. iv. vi. ix. and xi.) are probably by Bartholomew Griffin, from whose Fidessa (1596) No. xi_ is directly adapted. ‘My flocks feed not’ '(No. xvii.) comes from Thomas Weelkes’s Madrigals (1597), but Bamfield is again pretty certainly the author. ‘Live with me and be my love’ (No. xix.) is by Marlowe, and four limes are quoted by Sir Hugh Evans in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives (m. i. 17 seq.). The appended stanza to Marlowe’s lyric entitled ‘Love’s Answer’ is by Sir Walter Ralegh. ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together’ (No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by Elizabethan dramatists. "It was a Lording’s daughter’ (No. xv.) is a ballad possibly by Thoims Ddoney. Nos. vii. x. xiii xiv. and xviii. are commonplace love poems in six-line stanzas of no individuality, the authorship of which is on- known. See for full discussion of the various questions ariaiy oat of Jaggard’s volume the introduction to the facsimile of the 1599 edition (Oxford, 1905, 4to).

¹ See Bryton’s Bourre of Delights, 1591, and Arbor of Amorous Devices . . ., by N. B. Gent, 1594— two volumes of miscellaneous poems, itt of which the publisher Richard Jones assigned to the poet Nicholas Breton, though the majority of them were by other writers. Breton plaintively protested that the earlier volume ‘was done altogether without my consent or knowledge, and many things of other men mingled with a few of mine; for except Amoris Lackrinue, an epitaph upon Sir Philip Sidney, and one or two other toys, which I know not how he (tJ. the publisher) unhappily came by, I have no part of any of them.’ (Prefatory note to Breton's Pilgrimage to Paradise, 1592.)

the new title-page had the intention of suggesting a connection with Shakespeare’s first narrative poem. But the unabashed Jaggard added to the third edition of his pretended Shakespearean anthology, two new non- Shakespearean poems which he silently filched from Thomas Heywood’s ‘Troia Britannica.’ That work was a collection of poetry which Jaggard had published for Heywood in 1609. Heywood called attention to his personal grievance in the dedicatory epistle before his ‘Apology for Actors’ (1612) which was addressed to a rival publisher Nicolas Okes, and he added the important information that Shakespeare resented the more substantial injury which the publisher had done him. Heywood’s words run: ‘ Here, likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that work [i.e. ‘Troia Britannica’ of 1609] by taking the two epistles or Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a less volume [i.e. ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ of 1612] under the name of another [i.e. Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him, and he to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name: but as I must acknowledge my _Thomas lines not worth his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] patronage Heywood’s under whom he [i.e. Jaggard] hath published shake-^m them, so the author, I know, much offended speare’s with M. Jaggard that altogether unknown to ^name- him presumed to make so bold with his name.’ In the result the publisher seems to have removed Shakespeare’s name from the title-page of a few copies.¹ Heywood’s words form the sole recorded protest on Shakespeare’s part against the many injuries which he suffered at the hands of contemporary publishers.

In 1601 Shakespeare’s full name was attached to ‘a

¹ Only two copies of the third edition of the Passionate Pilgrim, are extant; one formerly belonging to Mr. J. E. T. Loveday of _Williamscote near Banbury, was sold by him to an American collection in 1906; the other is in the Malone collection at the Bodleian. The Malone copy has two title-pages, from one of which Shakespeare’s name is omitted. The Loveday copy has the title-page bearing Shakespeare’s name.

poetical essaie on the Phoenix and the Turtle,’ which was ,_The published by Edward Blount, a prosperous Phoenix London stationer of literary tastes, as part of a Turtle^ supplement or appendix to a volume of verse by one Robert Chester. Chester’s work bore the title: ‘ Love’s Martyr, or Rosalin’s complaint, allegorically shadowing the Truth of Love in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle . . . [with] some new compositions of seueral moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their seuerall workies.’ Neither the drift of Chester’s crabbed verse, nor the occasion of its composition is clear, nor can the praise of perspicuity be allowed to the supplement, to which Shakespeare contributed. His colleagues there are the dramatic poets, John Marston, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and two writers signing themselves respectively ‘Vatum Chorus’ and ‘Ignoto.’ The supplement is introduced by an independent title-page running thus: ‘ Hereafter follow diverse poeticall Essaies on the former subject, viz.: the Turtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes: never before extant; and (now first) consecreated by them all generally to the love and merite of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie.’ Sir John Salisbury was also the patron to whom Robert Chester, the author of the main work, modestly dedicated his labours.

Sir John Salisbury, a Welsh country gentleman of Lleweni, Denbighshire, who was by two years Shake- Sir John ^sP^eare’^s junior, married in early life Ursula Salisbury's Stanley, an illegitimate daughter of the fourth of poet?⁶ E^arl °f Derby, who was at one time patron of Shakespeare’s theatrical company.¹ Sir John was appointed an esquire of the body to Queen Elizabeth in 1595, and spent much time in London during the

¹ Sir John’s surname is usually spelt Salisbury. Dr. Johnson’s friend, Mrs. Thrale (afterwards Mrs. Piozzi), whose maiden name was Salisbury, was a direct descendant.

rest of the reign, being knighted in 1601. A man of literary culture, he could turn a stanza with some deftness, and was a generous patron of many Welsh and English bards who wrote much in honour of himself and his family. Robert Chester was clearly a confidential protige closely associated with the knight’s Welsh home. But it is clear that Sit John was acquainted with Ben Jonson and other men of letters in the capital and that Shakespeare and the rest good- naturedly contributed to Chester’s volume by way of showing regard for a minor Maecenas of the day.

Chester’s own work is a confused collection of grotesque allegorical fancies which is interrupted by an elaborate metrical biography of King Arthur.¹ The _Robert writer would seem to celebrate in obscure and Chester’s dgurative phraseology the passionate love of ^Work'

Sir John for his wife and its mystical reinforcement on the occasion of the birth of their first child.

Some years appear to have elapsed between the composition of Chester’s verses and their publication, and the friendly pens who were responsible for the supplement embroidered on Chester’s fantasy fresh conceits, which, while they were of vague relevance to his symbolic intention, were designed to conciliate his master’s favour. The contributor who conceals his identity under the pseudonym ‘Vatum Chorus,’ and signs the opening lines of the supplement, greeted ‘ the worthily honoured knight, Sir John Salusbury,’ as ‘an honourable friend,’ whose merits were ‘parents to our several rhymes.’ All the contributors play enigmatic voluntaries on the familiar mythology of the phoenix, the unique bird of Arabia, and the turtle-dove, the symbol of loving constancy, whose

¹ By way of enhancing the mystification, the title-page describes the main work as ‘now first translated [by Robert Chester] out of the Venerable Italian Torquato Coeliano.’ No Italian poet of this name is known, the designation seems a fantastic amalgam of the Christian name (Torquato) of Tasso and the surname of a contemporary Italian poetaster, Livio Celiano. Chester described his interpolated ‘ true legend of famous King Arthur’ as ‘the first essay of a new Brytish Poet collected out of diverse Authentical Records,’

mystical union was Chester’s recondite theme. Like Chester they make the phoenix feminine and the turtledove masculine, and their general aim is the glorification of a perfect example of spiritual love. Shakespeare’s ‘poetical essaie’ consists of thirteen four-lined stanzas in trochaics, each line being of seven syllables, with the rhymes disposed as in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam.’ The concluding ‘threnos’ is in five three-lined stanzas, also in trochaics, each stanza having a single rhyme.¹ Both in tone and metre Shakespeare’s verses differ from their companions. They strike unmistakably an elegiac or funereal note which is out of keeping with their environment. The dramatist cryptically describes the obsequies, which other birds attended, of the phoenix and the turtle-dove, after they had been knit together in life by spiritual ties and left'no offspring. Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Foules’ and the abstruse symbolism of sixteenth-century emblem books are thought to be echoed in Shakespeare’s lines; but their closest affinity seems to lie with the imagery of. Matthew Roydon’s elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, where the turtle-dove and phoenix meet the swan and eagle at the dead hero’s funeral, and there play roles somewhat similar to those which Shakespeare assigns the birds in his ‘poeticall essaie.’² The internal evidence scarcely justifies the conclusion that Shakespeare’s poem, which is an exercise in allegorical elegy in untried metre, was penned shake- for Chester’s book. It must have been either

speare and devised in an idle hour with merely abstract his fellow . , .. ,,,11

contnbu- intention, or it was suggested by the death

tors. within the poet’s own circle of a pair of

devoted lovers. The resemblances with the verses

of Chester and his other coadjutors are specious

and superficial and Shakespeare’s piece would seem

¹ Shakespeare’s concluding ‘Threnos’ is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song ‘The Lover’s Legacy to his Cruel Mistress.’

² See Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1595), ad Jin.

to have been admitted to the miscellany at the solicitation of friends who were bent on paying as comprehensive a compliment as possible to Sir John Salisbury. The poem’s publication in its curious setting is chiefly memorable for the evidence it offers of Shakespeare’s amiable acquiescence in a fantastic scheme of professional homage on the part of contemporary poets to a patron of promising repute.¹

¹A unique copy of Chester’s Love’s Martyr is in Mr..Christie-MiUer’s library at BritweU. Of a reissue of the original edition in 1611 with a new title, The Annals of Great Brittaine, a copy (also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of ‘Occasional Issues.’ It was also printed in the same year as one of the publications of the New Shakspere Society. Dr. A. H. R. Fairchild, in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle: a critical and historical interpretation ’ (Englische Studien, 1904, vol. xxxiii. pp. 337 seq.), examines the poem in the light of mediaeval conceptions of love and of the fantastic allegorical imagery of the em- blematists. A more direct light is thrown' on the history of Chester’s volume and incidentally of Shakespeare’s contribution to it in Mr. Carle- ton Brown’s ‘Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester’ (Bryn Mawr College Monographs, vol. xiv. 1913). Mr. Brown prints many poems by Sir John, by Robert Chester, and by other of Sir John’s proteges, from MSS. at Christ Church, Oxford (formerly the property of Sir John Salisbury). These MSS. include an autograph poem of Ben Jonson. Mr. Brown has also laid under contribution a very rare published volume, Robert Parry’s Sinetes (1597), which was dedicated to Sir John, and contains much verse by tbe patron as well as by the poet. Furthermore Mr. Brown supplies from original sources an exhaustive biography of Sir John and confutes Dr. Grosart’s erroneous identification of the poet Robert Chester, whose Welsh connections are plainly indicated in his verse, with a country gentleman (of the same names) of Royston, Hertfordshire. No student of Chester’s volume can afford to overlook Mr. Brown’s valuable researches.

In London Shakespeare resided as a rule near the playhouses. Soon after his arrival he found a home in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, within speared easy reach of ‘The Theatre’ in Shoreditch, residences There he remained until 1506. In the autumn

in London. .

of that year he migrated across the Thames to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, where actors, dramatic authors, and public entertainers generally were already congregating.¹

Meanwhile Shakespeare’s name was placed on the roll of ‘subsidy men’ or taxpayers for St. Helen’s parish, His fiscal and his personal property there was valued obligation. f_or fiscal purposes at 5/. In 1593 Parliament had voted to the Crown three subsidies, and each subsidy involved a payment of 25. 8^.'in the pound on the personal assessment. Shakespeare thus became liable for an aggregate sum of 21. —■ 13s. 4d. for each of the three subsidies. But the collectors of taxes in the city of London worked sluggishly. For three years they put no pressure on the dramatist, and Shakespeare left Bishopsgate without discharging the debt. Soon afterwards, however, the Bishopsgate officials traced him to his new Southwark lodging. The Liberty of the Clink within which his new abode lay was an estate of

¹ A missing memorandum by Alleyn (quoted by Malone), the general trustworthiness of which is attested by the fiscal records cited infra, locates Shakespeare’s Southwark residence in 1596 ‘near the Bear Garden.’ The Bear Garden was a popular place of entertainment which was chiefly devoted to the rough sports of bear- and bull-baiting. Near at hand in 1596 were the Rose and the Swan theatres — the earliest playhouses to be erected on the south side of the Thames.

274

the Bishop of Winchester, and was under the Bishop’s exclusive jurisdiction. In October 1596 the revenue officer of St. Helen’s obtained the permission of the Bishop’s steward to claim the overdue tax of Shakespeare across the river. Next year the poet paid on account of the St. Helen’s assessment a first instalment of 55. A second instalment of 13s. 4d. followed next year.¹

There is little reason to doubt that Southwark, which formed the chief theatrical quarter through the later years of Shakespeare’s life, remained a i_n south- customary place of residence so long as his ^wark- work required his presence in the metropolis. From 1599 onwards he was thoroughly identified with the fortunes of the Globe Theatre on the Bankside in Southwark, the leading playhouse of the epoch, and in adjacent streets lodged Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and many other actors, with whom his social relations were very close. His youngest brother, Edmund, who became a ‘player/ was buried in St. Saviour’s Church in Southwark on December 31, 1607, a proof that he at any rate was a resident in that parish. Shakespeare had close professional relations too with the contemporary dramatist, John Fletcher, who, according to Aubrey, lived with his literary partner Francis Beaumont, ‘on the Banke-side (in Southwark) not far from the playhouse {i.e. the Globe).’

But Shakespeare’s association with South London during his busiest years did not altogether withdraw him from other parts of the city. Some of his colleagues at the Globe Theatre preferred a residence at some dis

¹ Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies, City of London, 146/369, Public Record Office; Prof. J. W. Hales in Athenasum, March 26, 1904. _No_documentary evidence has yet been discovered of any other contribution by Shakespeare to the national taxes during any part of his career, either in Stratford or London. The surviving fiscal archives of the period have not yet been quite exhaustively searched. But it is clear that taxation was levied at the period partially and irregularly, and that numerous persons of substance escaped the collectors’ notice. See the present writer’s ‘Shakespeare and Public Affairs’ in Fortnightly Review, Sept.

1913-

tance from their place of work.¹ The greatest actor of Shakespeare’s company, Richard Burbage, would seem to have remained through life a resident in Shoreditch, where he served at ‘The Theatre’ his histrionic apprenticeship.² Two other professional friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were for many years highly respected parishioners of St. Mary Aldermanbury near Cripplegate when Heminges served as churchwarden in 1608 and Condell ten years later. Visits to friendjs’ houses from time to time called the dramatist from Southwark, and he made an occasional stay in the central district of the City where Heminges and Condell had their home.

In the year 1604 Shakespeare ‘laye in the house’ of Christopher Mont joy, a Huguenot refugee, who carried a lodger in on the business of a ‘ tiremaker ’ (i.e. maker Street °f ladies’ headdresses) in Silver Street, near 1604. ’ Wood Street, Cheapside.³ It is clear that for

¹ See the wills and other documents in Collier’s Lives of the Actors.

² A theory that Shakespeare was, like the Burbages, remembered as a Shoreditch resident, rests on a shadowy foundation. Aubrey’s biographical jottings which are preserved in his confused autograph at the Bodleian contain some enigmatic words which seem to have been intended by the writer to apply to one of three persons — either to Shakespeare, to John Fletcher or to John Ogilby, a well-known dancing master of Aubrey's day. The incoherent arrangement of the page renders it impossible to determine the individual reference. The disjointed passage runs: ‘The more to be admired q. [i.e. quod or quia] he [i.e. Shakespeare, Fletcher, or Ogilby] was not a company keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched & if invited to writ; he was in paine.’ The next line is blank save for ‘W. Shakespeare’ in the centre. The succeeding note states that one Mr. William Beeston possessed information about Shakespeare which he derived from the actor Mr. Lacy. Sir G. F. Warner inclines to the opinion that Shakespeare was intended in the obscure passage; Mr. Falconer Madan thinks Fletcher. If Shakespeare were intended the words would mean that he avoided social dissipation, that he resided in Shoreditch, and that the practice of writing caused him pain. None of these assertions have any coherence with better attested information. See E. IC. Chambers, A Jotting by John Aubrey, in Malone Soc. Collections (1911), vol. i. pp. 324 seq. Mr. Andrew Clark in his edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 1898, vol. i. p. 97> wrongly makes the entry refer to the actor William Beeston.

³ Cf. Jonson’s Silent Woman, iv. ii. 94-5 (Captain Otter of Mrs. Otter): ‘All her teeth were made i’ the Black-Friers, both her eyebrowes i’ the Stfand, and her haire in Siluer-street.’

some time before and after 1604 the dramatist was on familiar terms with the ‘ tiremaker ’ and with his family, and that he interested himself benevolently in their domestic affairs. One of Montjoy’s near neighbours was Shakespeare’s early Stratford friend Richard Field, the prosperous stationer, who after 1600 removed from Ludgate Hill, Blackfriars, to the sign of the Splayed Eagle in Wood Street. Field’s wife was a Huguenot and the widow of a prominent member of the Huguenot community in London. Shakespeare may have owed a passing acquaintance with the Huguenot ‘ tiremaker ’ to his fellow-townsman Field, and to Field’s Huguenot connections.¹ The sojourn under Montjoy’s roof was

¹ The knowledge of Shakespeare’s relations with Silver Street and with the Montjoy family is due to Dr. C. W. Wallace’s recent researches at the Public Record Office. In Harper’s Magazine, March 1910, Dr. Wallace first cited or descrihed a long series of legal documents connected with a lawsuit of 1612 in the Court of Requests — Bellott v. Montjoy — in which Montjoy was the defendant and ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in the County of Warwick, gentleman, of the age of xlvii yeares or thereabouts’ was a witness for the plain tiff, Stephen Bellott, Montjoy’s son-in-law. The litigation arose out of the conditions of the marriage which took place on Nov. 19, i6oi, between Mary Montjoy, daughter of Shakespeare’s host in Silver Street, and Bellott, then her father’s apprentice. Bellott’s apprenticeship to Montjoy ran from 1598 to 1604. To a witness, Mrs. Joan Johnson, formerly a female servant in Montjoy’s employ, we owe the statement that ‘one, Mr. Shakespeare, that laye in the house’ had helped at the instance of the girl’s mother to persuade the apprentice — a reluctant wooer — to marry his master’s daughter. Other witnesses state, partly on the authority of Shakespeare’s communications to them, that Bellott consented to the marriage on condition that he received 501, together with ‘certain household stuff’ and the promise of a further sum of 200I. on Montjoy’s death. It was to confirm this alleged contract which Montjoy repudiated that Bellott brought his action in 1612. In the deposition which Shakespeare signed on May 11, 1612, he supports Bellott’s allegations, adding that he knew the apprentice ‘duringe the tyme’ of his service with Montjoy; that it appeared to him that Montjoy did ‘all the time’ of Bellott’s service ‘bear and show great good will and affection towards’ him, and that he heard the defendant and his wife speak well of their apprentice at ‘ divers and sundry tymes.’ The Court remitted the case to the Consistory of the French Huguenot Church in London, which decided in Bellott’s favour. The numerous records in the case, which throw no precise light on the length or reasons of Shakespeare’s stay in Silver Street, have been printed in extenso by Dr. Wallace in University Studies, Nehraska, U.S.A. The autograph signature which Shakespeare appended to his deposition is reproduced on p. 319 infra.

unlikely in any case to have been more than a passing interlude in the dramatist’s Southwark life.

Shakespeare, in middle life, brought to practical affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament. In shake- ‘Ratseis Ghost’ (1605), an anecdotal biography speare’s ₀f Gamaliel Ratsey, a notorious highwayman, tempera- who was hanged at Bedford on March 26, 1605, ment. the highwayman is represented as compelling a troop of actors whom he met by chance on the road to perform in his presence. According to the memoir Ratsey rewarded the company with a gift of forty shillings, of which he robbed them next day. Before dismissing his victims Ratsey addressed himself to a leader of the company in somewhat mystifying terms. He would dare wager that if his auditor went to London and played ‘Hamlet’ there, he would outstrip the famous player, who was making his fame in that part. It was needful to practise the utmost frugality in the capital. ‘When thou feelest thy purse well lined (the counsellor proceeded, less ambiguously), buy thee some place or lordship in the country that, growing weary of playing, thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation.’ To this speech the player replied: ‘Sir, I thanke. you for this good counsell; I promise you I will make use. of it, for I have heard, indeede, of some that have gone to • London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.’ Finally the whimsical outlaw directed the player to kneel down and mockingly conferred on him the title of ‘Sir Simon Two Shares and a Halfe.’ Whether or no Ratsey’s biographer consciously identified the highwayman’s auditor with Shakespeare, it was the prosaic course of conduct which Ratsey recommended to his actor that Shakespeare literally followed. As soon as his position in his profession was assured, he devoted his energies to re-establishing the fallen fortunes of his family in his native place and to acquiring for himself and his successors the status of gentlefolk. No sooner was Shakespeare’s purse ‘well lined,’ than he

bought ‘some place or lordship in the country’ which assured him ‘dignity and reputation.’¹

His father’s pecuniary embarrassments had steadily increased since his son’s departure. Creditors harassed the elder Shakespeare unceasingly. In 1587 jjj,. one Nicholas Lane pursued him for a debt which father’s he owed as surety for his impecunious brother ^difficulties- Henry, who was still farming their father’s lands at Snitterfield. Through 1588 and 1589 John Shakespeare retaliated with pertinacity on a debtor named John Tompson. But in 1591 a substantial creditor, Adrian Quiney, a ‘ mercer ’ of repute, with whom and with whose family the dramatist was soon on intimate terms, obtained a writ of distraint against his father. Happily the elder Shakespeare never forfeited his neighbours’ faith in his integrity. In 1592 he attested inventories taken on the death of two neighbours, of Ralph Shaw, a wooldriver, with whose prosperous son, Julius, Shakespeare was later in much personal intercourse, and of Henry Field, father of the London printer. None the less the dramatist’s father was on December 25 of the same year ‘presented’ as a recusant for absenting himself from church. The commissioners reported that his absence was probably due to ‘fear of process for debt.’ He figures for the last time the proceedings of the local court, in his customary rdle of defendant, on March 9, 1594-5. He was then joined with two fellow traders —■ Philip Green, a chandler, and Henry Rogers, a butcher

— as defendant in a suit again brought by Adrian

¹ The only copy known of Ratseis Ghost (1605) is in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The author doubtless had his eye on Burhage as well as on Shakespeare. ‘ Two and a half shares ’ formed at the outset Burbage’s precise holding in the first Globe Theatre, and would entitle him better than Shakespeare to be called ‘Sir Simon Two Shares and a Half.’ Ratsey’s hearer is warned moreover that when he has made his fortune he need not care ‘ for them that before made thee proud with speaking their words upon the stage’—; phraseology which suggests that Ratsey was taking into account the actor’s rather than the author’s fortunes. On the other hand, Burhage is not known to have acquired, like Shakespeare, a ‘place or lordship in the country.’

Quiney, but now in conjunction with one Thomas Barker, for the recovery of the large sum of five pounds. Unlike his partners in the litigation, the elder Shakespeare’s name is not followed in the record by a mention of his calling, and when the suit reached a later stage his name was omitted altogether. These may be viewed as indications that in the course of the proceedings he finally retired from trade, which had been of late prolific in disasters for him. In January 1596-7. he conveyed a slip of land attached to his dwelling in Henley Street to one George Badger, a- Stratford draper.¹

There is a likelihood that the poet’s wife fared, in the poet’s absence, no better than his father. The His wife’s only contemporary mention made of her be- ^debt- tween her marriage in 1582 and the execution of her husband’s will in the spring of 1616 is as the borrower at an unascertained date (evidently before 1595) of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father’s shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it among the poor of Stratford.²

It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, after nearly eleven years’ absence, to his native town, and very quickly did he work a revolution in the affairs of his family. The prosecutions of his father in the local

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 13. ,

² Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186; J. W. Gray’s Shakespeare's Marriage, ^I9°S> PP- 28-29. The pertinent clause in shepherd Whittington’s will directs payment to be made ‘unto the poor people of Stratford [of the sum of] xl^B that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere wyffe unto Mr. Wyllyam Shaxspere, and is due debt to me. The sum is to be paid to mine executor by the said Willyam Shaxspere or his assigns according to the true meanying of this my will.’ Whittington’s estate was valued at serf. is.

1 id. The testator’s debtors included, in addition to Mrs. Anne Shakespeare, John and William Hathaway, her brothers, who owed him an aggregate sum of 61. 2s. 11 d. Of this sum 31, was an unpaid bequest made to him by Mrs. Joan Hathaway, Mrs. Shakespeare’s mother, who having lately died had appointed her sons, John and William Hathaway, her executors. On the other side of the account, Whittington admitted that ‘a quarter of a year’s board’ was due from him to the two brothers Hathaway.

court, ceased. The poet’s relations with Stratford were thenceforth uninterrupted. He still resided in London for most of the year; but until the close of his _Death
o{ professional career he paid the town at least his only one annual visit, and he was always formally ^son’ ^IS96‘ described there and elsewhere as ‘of Stratford-on-Avon, gentleman.’ He was no doubt at Stratford on August 11, 1596, when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the parish church; the boy was eleven and a half years old. Two daughters were now Shakespeare’s only children —■ Hamnet’s twin-sister Judith and the elder daughter Susanna, now a girl of thirteen.

At the same date the poet’s father, despite his pecuniary embarrassments, took a step, by way of regaining his prestige, which must be assigned to the poet’s shake- intervention.¹ He made application to the speareand College of Heralds for a coat-of-arms.³ Heral- Tr^in.' die ambitions were widespread among the ^CoIlege- middle classes of the day, and many Elizabethan actors besides Shakespeare sought heraldic distinction. The loose organisation of the Heralds’ College favoured the popular predilection. Rumour ran that the College was ready to grant heraldic honours without strict inquiry to any applicant who could afford a substantial fee. In numerous cases the heralds clearly credited an applicant’s family with a fictitious antiquity. Rarely can much reliance therefore be placed on the biographical or genealogical statements alleged in Elizabethan grants of arms. The poet’s father, or the poet himself, when

¹ There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the poet’s heraldry in Herald and Genealogist, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the documents preserved in- the College of Arms are given in Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints imperfectly one of the rS96 draft-grants, and that of 1599 (.Outlines, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotiation of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year.

² It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application should be made in the father’s name, and the transaction conducted as if the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below.

first applying to the College stated that John Shakespeare, in 1568, while he was bailiff of Stratford, and while he was by virtue of that office a justice of the peace, had obtained from Robert Cook, then Clarenceux herald, a ‘pattern’ or sketch of an armorial coat. This allegation is not confirmed by the records of the College, and may be an invention designed by John Shakespeare and his son to recommend their' claim to the notice of the easy-going heralds in 1596. The negotiations of 1568, if they were not apocryphal, were certainly abortive; otherwise there would have been no necessity for the further action of the later years. In any case, on October 20, 1596, a draft, which remains in the College of Arms,, was prepared under the direction of William Dethick, Garter King-of-Arms, granting John’s request for a coat- The draft of-arms. Garter stated, with characteristic ‘Coat’of vagueness, that he had been ‘by credible re- ^I596, port ’ informed that the applicant’s ‘ parentes and late antecessors were for theire valeant and faith- full service advanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memorie, sythence whiche tyme they have continewed at those partes [i.e. Warwickshire] in good reputation and credit’; and that ‘ the said John [had] maryed Mary, daughter and one of the heyres of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, gent.’ In consideration of these titles to honour, Garter declared that he assigned to Shakespeare this shield, viz.: ‘Gold on a bend sable,‘a spear of the first, the point steeled proper, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid.’ In the margin of this draft-grant there is a pen sketch of the arms and crest, and above them is written the motto, ‘Non Sans Droict.’¹ A second copy of the draft, also dated in 1596, is extant at the College.

¹ In a manuscript in the British Museum (Earl. MS. 6140, f. 45) I^s a copy of the tricking of the arms of William ‘Shakspere,’ which is described ‘as a pattentt per Will’m Dethike Garter, Principall King of Armes’; this is figured in French’s Shakespeareana Genealogica, p. S²4’

The only alterations are the substitution of the word ‘grandfather’ for ‘antecessors’ in the account of John Shakespeare’^ ancestry, and the substitution of the word ‘ esquire ’ for ‘ gent ’ in the description of his wife’s father, Robert Arden. At the foot of this draft, however, appeared some disconnected and unverifiable memoranda which had been supplied to the heralds, to the effect that John had been bailiff of Stratford, had received a ‘pattern’ of a shield from Cook, the Clarenceux herald, was a man of substance, and had married into a worshipful family.¹

Neither of these drafts was fully executed. It may have been that the unduly favourable representations made to the College respecting John Shake- _{The exem}_ speare’s social and pecuniary position excited pHfication suspicion even in the credulous and corruptly ^{of IS99}' interested minds of the heralds. At any rate, Shakespeare and his father allowed three years to elapse before (as far as extant documents show) they made a further endeavour to secure the coveted distinction. In 1599 their efforts were crowned with success. Changes in the interval among the officials at the College may have facilitated the proceedings. In 1597 the Earl of Essex had become Earl Marshal and chief of the Heralds’ College (the office had been in commission in 1596); while the great scholar and antiquary, William Camden, had joined the College, also in 1597, as Clarenceux King-of-Arms. The poet was favourably known both to Camden, the admiring preceptor and friend of Ben Jonson,² and to the Earl of Essex, the close friend of the

¹ These memoranda ran (with interlineations in brackets): —

[This John shoeth] A patieme therof under Clarent Cookes hand in paper xx. years past. [The Q. officer and cheffe of the towne]

[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or xvj. years past.

That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance. [500, li.]

That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent, of worship].

² Camden was in the near neighbourhood of Stratford-on-Avon on Aug. 7, 1600, when he organised the elaborate heraldic funeral of old Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, and bore the dead knight’s ‘cote of armes’ at the interment in Charlecote Church (Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 556).

Earl of Southampton. His father’s application now took a new form. No grant of arms was asked for. It was asserted without qualification that the coat, as set out in the draft-grants of 1596, had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were merely invited to give him a ‘recognition’ or ‘exemplification’ of it.¹ At the same time he asked permission for himself to impale, and his eldest son and other children to quarter, on ‘his ancient coat-of-arms’ that of the Ardens of Wilmcote, his wife’s family. The College officers were characteristically complacent. A draft was prepared under the hands of Dethick, the Garter King, and of Camden, the Clarenceux King, granting the required ‘ exemplification ’ and authorising the required impalement and quartering. On one point only did Dethick and Camden betray conscientious scruples. Shakespeare and his father obviously desired the heralds to recognise the title of Mary Shakespeare (the poet’s mother) to bear the arms of the great Warwickshire family of Arden, then seated at Park Hall. But the relationship, if it existed, was undetermined; the Warwickshire Ardens were gentry of influence in the county, and were certain to protest against any hasty assumption of identity between their line and that of the humble farmer of Wilmcote. After tricking the Warwickshire Arden coat in the margin of the draft- grant for the purpose of indicating the manner of its impalement, the heralds on second thoughts erased it. They substituted in their sketch the arms of an Arden family living at Alvanley in the distant county of Cheshire. With that stock there was no pretence that Robert Arden of Wilmcote was lineally connected; but the bearers of the Alvanley coat were unlikely to learn of its suggested impalement with the Shakespeare

¹ An ‘exemplification’ was invariably secured more easily than a new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without examination, the applicant’s statement that his family had borne arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the obligation of close, inquiry into his present status.

shield, and the heralds were less liable to the risk of Complaint or litigation. But the Shakespeares wisely relieved the College of all anxiety by omitting to assume the Arden coat. The Shakespeare arms alone are displayed with full heraldic elaboration on the monument above the poet’s grave in Stratford Church; they alone appear on the seal and on the tombstone of his elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, impaled with the arms of her husband ¹; and they alone were quartered by Thomas Nash, the first husband of the poet’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall.²

Shakespeare’s victorious quest of a coat-of-arms was one of the many experiences which he shared with professional associates. Two or three officers other of the Heralds’ College, who disapproved of actors^ the easy methods of their colleagues, indeed _p“- ^c protested against the bestowal on actors of ^tensions- heraldic honours. Special censure was levelled at two of Shakespeare’s closest professional allies, Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope, comedians of repute and fellow shareholders in the Globe theatre, whose names figure in the prefatory list of the ‘principal actors’ in the First Folio. At the opening of King James’s reign William Smith, who held the post of Rouge Dragon pursuivant at the Heralds’ College and disapproved of his colleagues’ lenience, poured scorn on the two actors’ false heraldic pretensions.³ The critic wrote thus:

‘ Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S^r W™ Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L.

¹ On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare’s elder son-in-law, the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall.

² French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, p. 413. _

⁸ Smith’s censure figures in an elaborate exposure of recent heraldic

scandals, which he dedicated to Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, K.G., a commissioner for the office of Earl Marshal from 1604, a.nd thereby a chief controller of the College of Arms. The indictment, which is in Smith’s autograph, bears the title: ‘A brief! Discourse of ye causes of Discord amongst ye Officers of arms and of the great abuses and absurdities com[m]ited by [heraldic] painters to the great prejudice and hindrance of the same office.’ The MS. was kindly lent to tie present writer by Messrs. Pearson & Co., Pall Mall Place.

Bardolph’s cote quartred, which I shewed to M^r York [i.e. Ralph Brooke, another rigorous champion of heraldic orthodoxy], at a small graver’s shopp in Foster Lane’ (leaf 8a). Phillips’s irresponsibly adopted ancestor, ‘Sir William Phillipp, Lord Bardolph,’ won renown at Agincourt in 1415, and the old warrior’s title of Lord Bardolf or Bardolph received satiric commemoration at Shakespeare’s hands when the dramatist bestowed on Falstaff’s red-nosed companion the name of his actor- \ friend’s imaginary progenitor. Smith’s charge against Thomas Pope was to similar effect: ‘Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of S^r Tho. Pope, Chancelor of ye Augmentations.’ Player Pope’s alleged sponsor in heraldry, Sir Thomas Pope, was the Privy Councillor, who died without issue in the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, after founding Trinity College, Oxford. Shakespeare’s claim in his own heraldic application to descent from unspecified persons who did ‘valiant and faithful service’ in Henry the Seventh’s time was comparatively modest. But his heraldic adventure had good precedent in the contemporary ambition of the theatrical profession.

Rouge Dragon Smith omitted specific mention of Shakespeare; but his equally censorious colleague, Contempo- Ralph Brooke, York Herald, was less reticent. rary cnti- ^rndependently of Smith, Brooke drew up a shake- ^st of twenty-three persons whom he charged arms'⁶'³ with obtaining coats-of-arms on more or less fraudulent representations. Fourth on his list stands the surname Shakespeare, and eight places below appears that of Cowley, who may be identified with Shakespeare’s actor friend, Richard Cowley, the creator of Verges, in ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ In thirteen cases Brooke particularises with sarcastic heat the imposture which he claims to expose.¹ But Shake

¹ This heraldic manuscript, which was also lent me by Messrs. Pearson, is a paper book of seventeen leaves, without title, containing desultory notes on grants of arms which (it was urged) had been errone-

speare’s name is merely mentioned in Brooke’s long indictment without annotation. Elsewhere the critic took the less serious objection that the arms ‘exemplified’ to Shakespeare usurped the coat of Lord Mauley, on whose shield ‘a bend sable’ also figured. Dethick and Camden, the official guardians of heraldic etiquette, deemed it fitting to reply on this minor technical issue. They pointed out that the Shakespeare shield bore no greater resemblance to the Mauley coat than it did to that of the Harley and the Ferrers families, both of which also bore ‘ a bend sable,’ but that in point of fact it differed conspicuously from all three by the presence of a spear on the ‘bend.’ Dethick and Camden added, with customary want of precision, that the person to whom the grant was made had ‘borne magistracy and was justice of peace at Stratford-on-Avon; he maried the daughter and heire of Arderne, and was able to maintain that Estate.’¹

While the negotiation with the College of Arms was in progress in the elder Shakespeare’s name, the poet had taken openly in his own person a more effective _Purchase step towards rehabilitating himself and his of New family in the eyes of his fellow-townsmen at ^place’ Stratford. On May 4, 1597, he purchased the largest

ously made by Sir William Dethick, Garter King, at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Two handwritings figure in these pages, one of which is the autograph of Ralph Brooke, York Herald, and the other, which is not identified, may be that of Brooke’s clerk. Brooke’s detailed charges indude statements that an embroiderer, calling himself Parr, who failed to give proof of his right to that surname and was unquestionably the son of a pedlar, received permission to use the crest and coat of Sir William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, who died in 1571 ‘the last male of his house.’ Three other men, who bought honourable pedigrees of the college, are credited with the occupations respectively of a seller of stockings, a haberdasher, and a stationer or printer, while a fourth offender was stated to be an alien. In some cases Garter was charged with pocketing his fee, and then with prudently postponing the formal issue of the promised grant of arms until the applicant was dead.

¹ The details of Brooke’s second accusation are deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to his complaint. Two copies of the answer are accessible: one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds’ College, f. 276; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the Herald and Genealogist, i. 514.

house but one in the town. The edifice, which was known as New Place, had been built by Sir Hugh Clopton more than a century before, and seems to have fallen into a ruinous condition. But Shakespeare paid for it, with two barns and two gardens, the then substantial sum of 6ol. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford ‘manor-house,’ William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county, Fillongley near Coventry, and the legal transfer of New Place to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in jeopardy of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to ‘the felon’s’ next brother Hercules, who on coming of age in May 1602 completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.¹ There was only one larger house in the town — the College, which had before the Reformation been the official home of the clergy of the parish church, and was subsequently confiscated by the Crown. In 1596 that imposing residence was acquired by a rich native of Stratford, Thomas Combe, whose social relations with Shakespeare were soon close.² In 1598, a year after his purchase of New Place, the dramatist procured stone for the repair of the house, and before 1602 he had set a fruit orchard in the land adjoining it. He is traditionally said to have interested himself in the spacious garden, and to have planted with his own hands a mulberry-tree, which was long a prominent feature of it. When this tree was cut down in 1758, numerous relics, which were made from the wood, were treated with an almost superstitious veneration.³

¹ Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries, p. 232. Halliwell’s History of New Place, 1863, folio, collects a mass of pertinent information on the fortunes of Shakespeare’s mansion.

² See p. 467 infra.

³ The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry-tree was not put on record till it was cut down in 1758 (see p. 514 infra). In 1760

Shakespeare does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place till 1611. In 1609 the house, or part of it, was occupied by Thomas Greene, ‘ alias Shakespeare,’ a lawyer, who claimed to be the poet’s cousin. Greene’s mother or grandmother seems to have been a Shakespeare. He was for a time town-clerk of the town, and acted occasionally as the poet’s legal adviser.¹ '

It was doubtless under their son’s guidance that Shakespeare’s father and mother set on foot in November ^IS97 — ^ months after his acquisition of New Place

— a fresh lawsuit against John Lambert, his mother’s nephew, for the recovery of her mortgaged estate of Asbies in Wilmcote.² The litigation dragged on till near the end of the century with some appearance of favour-

mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation’s archives from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his Life of Shakespeare, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since «Shakespeare’s lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry-trees through the midland counties by order of James I., who desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 134, 411-16). Thomas Sharp, a woo'd-carver of Stratford-on-Avon, was chiefly responsible for the eighteenth century mementos of the tree — goblets or fancy boxes or inkstands. But far more objects than could possibly be genuine have been represented by dealers as heing manufactured from Shakespeare’s mulberry-tree.' From a slip of the original tree is derived the mulberry-tree which still flourishes on the central lawn of New Place garden. Another slip of the original tree was acquired by Edward Capell, the Shakespearean commentator, and was planted by him in the garden of his residence, Troston Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds. That tree lived for more than a century, and many cuttings taken from it still survive. One scion was presented by the owner of Troston Hall to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in October 1896, and flourishes there, being labelled ‘ Shakespeare’s mulberry.’ The Director of Kew Gardens, Lieut.-Col. Sir David Prain, writes to me (March

23, 1915) confirming the authenticity of ‘our tree’s descent.’ Sir David adds, ‘We have propagated from it rather freely, have planted various offshoots from it in various parts of the garden, and have sent plants to places where there are memorials of Shakespeare and to people interested in matters relating to him.’

¹ See pp. 473-4 infra. .

² HalUwell-Pbillipps, ii. 13-17; cf. Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment, 45-47. See also p. 14 supra.

ing the dramatist’s parents, but, in the result, the estate remained in Lambert’s hands.

The purchase of New Place is a signal proof of Shakespeare’s growing prosperity, and the transaction made shake- ^a deep impression on his fellow-townsmen. speareand Letters written during 1598 by leading men townsmen at Stratford, which are extant among the' in 1598. archives of the Corporation and of the Birthplace Trustees, leave no doubt of the reputation for wealth and influence which he straightway acquired in Tiis native place. His Stratford neighbours stood in urgent need of his help. In the summer of 1594 a severe fire did much damage in the town, and a second outbreak ‘on the same day’ twelve months later intensified the suffering. The two fires destroyed 120 dwelling- houses, estimated to be worth 12,0001., and 400 persons were rendered homeless and destitute. Both conflagrations started on the Lord’s Day, and Puritan preachers through the country suggested that the double disaster was a divine judgment on the townsfolk* ‘ chiefly for prophaning the Lords Sabbaths, and for contemning his word in the mouth of his faithfull Ministers.’¹ In accordance with precedent, the Town Council obtained permission from the quarter sessions of the county to appeal for help to the country at large, and the leading townsmen were despatched to various parts of the kingdom to make collections. The Stratford collectors began their first tour in the autumn of 1594, and their second in the autumn of the following year. Shakespeare’s friends, Alderman Richard Quiney the elder, and John Sadler, were especially active on these expeditions, and the returns were satisfactory, though the collectors’ personal expenses ran^high.² But new troubles

¹ Lewis Bayly_r The Practice of Piety, 1613 ed., p. 551. Bayly’s allegation is repeated in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements, 1631,

^p- ^sss' . . .,

² Full details of the collections of 1594 appear in Stratford Council

Book B, under dates September 24 and October 23. Richard Quiney obtained from some of the Colleges at Oxford the sum of 7I. os. ud.

followed to depress the fortunes of the town. The harvests of 1594 and the three following years yielded badly. The prices of grain rapidly Tose. The consequent distress was acute and recovery was slow. The town suffered additional hardships owing to a royal proclamation of 1597, which forbade all but farmers who grew barley to brew malt between Lady Day and Michaelmas, and restrictions were placed on ‘ the excessive buying of barley for that use and purpose.’¹ Every householder of Stratford had long been in the habit of making malt; ‘servants were hired only to that purpose.’ Urban employment was thus diminished; while the domestic brewing of beer was seriously hindered in the interest of the farmer-maltsters to the grievous injury of the humbler townsfolk. Early in 1598 the ‘dearness of corn’ at Stratford was reported to be ‘ beyond all other counties,’ and riots threatened among the labouring people. The town council sought to meet the difficulty by ordering an inventory of the corn and malt in the borough. Shakespeare, who was described as a householder in Chapel Street, in which New Place stood, was reported to own the very substantial quantity of ten quarters or eighty bushels of corn and malt. Only two inhabitants were credited with larger holdings.² •

and be and Sadler with two others obtained from Northampton as much as 26I. 10s. 3d. Documents describing the collections for both years r594 and rj9S are in the Wheler Papers, vol. i. flf. 43-4. In the latter year Quiney and Sadler begged with success through the chief towns of Norfolk and Suffolk and afterwards visited Lincoln and London; but of the 75I. 6s. which was received Quiney disbursed as much as 541. gs. 4i. on expenses of travel. The journey lasted from October 18, 1595, to January 26, 1595-6, and horse-hire cost a shilling a day. In r595 the corporation of Leicester gave to ‘ collectors of the town of Stratforde- upon-Haven 13s. 4d. in regard of their loss by fire.’ (W. Kelly, Notices illustrative of the drama at Leicester, 1865, p. 224; Records of the Borough of Leicester, ed. Bateson, 1905, iii. 320.)

¹ Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-9, pp. 314 ^seQ-

¹ The return, dated February 4, 1597-8, is printed from the corporation records by Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 58. The respective amounts of com and malt are not distinguished save in the case of Thomas Badsey, who is credited with ‘vj. quarters, bareley j. quarter.’ The two neighbours of Shakespeare who possessed a larger store of corn and malt were

While Stratford was in the grip of such disasters Parliament met at Westminster in 1597 and imposed on the country fresh and formidable taxation.¹ The machinery of collection was soon set in motion and the impoverished community of Stratford saw all hope shattered of recovering its solvency. Thereupon in January 1598 the Council sent a delegate to London to represent to the Government the critical state of its . affairs. The choice fell on Shakespeare’s friend,

Quine/s Alderman Richard Quiney, a draper of the ^t0 town who had served the office of bailiff in 1592, °ⁿ °ⁿ' and was re-elected in 1601, dying during his second term of office. Quiney and his family stood high in local esteem. His father Adrian Quiney, commonly described as ‘a mercer,’ was still living; he had been bailiff in 1571, the year preceding John Shakespeare’s election. Quiney’s mission detained him in London for the greater part of twelve months. He lodged at the Bell Inn in Carter Lane. Friends at Stratford constantly importuned Quiney by letter to enlist the influence of great men in the endeavour to obtain relief for the townsmen, but it was on Shakespeare that he was counselled to place his chief reliance. During his sojourn in the capital, Quiney'was therefore in frequent intercourse with the dramatist. Besides securing an ‘ease and discharge of such taxes and subsidies wherewith our town is likely to be charged,’ he hoped to obtain from the Court of Exchequer relief for the local maltsters, and to raise a loan of money wherewith to meet the Corporation’s current needs. A further aim was to borrow money for the commercial enterprises of himself and his family. In fulfilling all these purposes Quiney and his friends at Stratford were sanguine of benefiting by Shakespeare’s influence and prosperity.

‘Mr. Thomas Dyxon, xvij quarters,’ and ‘Mr. Aspinall, aboutes xj quarters.’ Shakespeare’s friend Julius Shaw owned ‘vij. quarters.’

¹ Three lay subsidies, six fifteenths, and three clerical subsidies were granted.

Quiney’s most energetic local correspondent was his wife’s brother, Abraham Sturley, an enterprising tradesman, who was bailiff of Stratford in 1596. He had gained at the Stratford grammar school a command of colloquial Latin and was prone to season his correspondence with Latin phrases. Sturley gave constant proof of his faith in Shakespeare’s present and future fortune. On January 24, 1597-8, he wrote to Quiney from Stratford, of his ‘great fear and doubt’ that the burgesses were ‘by no means able to pay’ any of the taxes. He added a significant message in regard to Shakespeare’s fiscal affairs: ‘This is one special remembrance from [Adrian Quiney] our father’s motion. It seemeth by him that our countryman, Mr. Shaksper, is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland ¹ or other at Shottery, or near about us: he thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes. By the instructions you can give him thereof, and by the friends he can make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to shoot at, and not impossible to hit. It obtained would advance him indeed, and would do us much good.’ After his manner Sturley reinforced the exhortation by a Latin rendering: ‘Hoc movere, et quantum in te est permovere, ne necligas, hoc enim et sibi et nobis maximi erit momenti. Hie labor, hie opus esset eximie et gloriae et laudis sibi.’² As far as Shottery, the native hamlet of Shakespeare’s wife, was concerned, the suggestion was without effect; but in the matter of the tithes Shakespeare soon took very practical steps.³

Some months later, on November 4, 1598, Sturley was still pursuing the campaign with undiminished vigour. He now expressed anxiety to hear ‘that our

¹A yardland was the technical name of a plot averaging between thirty and forty acres. _

¹ ‘To urge this, and as far as in you lies to persist herein, neglect not; for this will be of the greatest importance both to him and to us. Here pre-eminently would be a task, here would be a work of glory and praise for him.’

* See p. 319 infra.

countryman, Mr. Wm. Shak., would procure us money, Local which I will like of, as I shall hear when, appeals and where, and how, and I pray let not go for aid. that occasion if it may sort to any indifferent [i.e. reasonable] conditions.’

Neither the writer nor Richard Quiney, his brother-in- law, whom he was addressing, disguised their hope of Richard personal advantage from the dramatist’s afflu- Qumey’s ence. Amid his public activities in London, shake-° Quiney appealed to Shakespeare for a loan of speare. money wherewith to discharge pressing private debts. The letter, which is interspersed with references to Quipey’s municipal mission, ran thus: ‘Loveinge contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe with xxxli vppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, and I have espedall cawse. Yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeing me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke God, & muche quiet my mynde, which wolde nott be in- debeted. [I am nowe towardes the Courte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my buysenes.] Yow shal nether loase creddytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge; & nowe butt perswade yowrselfe soe, as I hope, & yow shall nott need to feare, butt, with all hartie thanckefullenes, I wyll holde my tyme, & content yowr ffrende, & yf we bargaine farther, yow shal be the paie-master yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I committ thys [to] yowr care & hope of yowr helpe. [I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte.] Haste. The Lorde be with yow & with vs all, Amen! ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25 October, 1598. Yowrs in all kyndenes, Ryc. Quy- ney.’ Outside the letter was the superscription in Quiney’s hand: ‘ To my loveinge good ffrend and con- treymann Mr. Wm. Shackespere deliver thees.’

This document is preserved at Shakespeare’s Birthplace and enjoys the distinction of being the only sur

viving letter which was delivered into Shakespeare’s hand. Quiney, Shakespeare’s would-be debtor, informed his family at Stratford of his application for money, and he soon received the sanguine message from his father Adrian: ‘ If you bargain with William Shakespeare, or receive money therefor, bring your money home that [i.e. as] you may.’¹ It may justly be inferred that Shakespeare did not belie the confidence which his fellow- townsmen reposed both in his good will towards them and in his powers of assistance. In due time Quiney’s long-drawn mission was crowned on the leading issue with success. On January 27, 1598-9, a warrant was signed at Westminster by the Chancellor of the Exchequer releasing ‘the ancient borough’ from the payment of the pending taxes on the ‘reasonable and con- sdonable’ grounds of the recent fires.

¹ This letter, which is undated, may be assigned to November or December 1598, and in the course of it Adrian Quiney urged his son to lay in a generous supply of knitted stockings for which a large demand was reported in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Much of Abraham Sturley’s and Richard Quiney’s correspondence remains, with other notes respecting the town’s claims for relief from the subsidy of 1598, among the archives at the Birthplace at Stratford. (Cf. Catalogue of Shakespeare's Birthplace, 1910, pp. ri2~3.) In the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, vol. ii. pp. 561 seq., Malone first printed four of Sturley’s letters, of which one is wholly in Latin. Halliwell-Phillipps reprinted in his Outlines, ii. 57 seq., two of these letters dated respectively January

24, r597-8, and November 4, 1598, from which citation is made above, together with the undated letter of Adrian Quiney to his son Richard.

The financial prosperity to which the correspondence just cited and the transactions immediately preceding Financial ^ P°i^nt has been treated as one of the chief position be- mysteries of Shakespeare’s career, but the fore 1599. difficulties are gratuitous. A close study of the available information leaves practically nothing in Shakespeare’s financial position which the contemporary conditions of theatrical life fail to explain. It was not until 1599, when Shakespeare co-operated in the erection of the Globe theatre, that he acquired any share in the profits of a playhouse. But his revenues as a successful dramatist and actor were by no means contemptible at an earlier date, although at a later period their dimensions greatly expanded.

Shakespeare’s gains in the capacity of dramatist formed through the first half of his professional career a Drama- smaller source of income than his wages as an tists’ fees actor. The highest price known to have been until 1599. p_aj^ before to an author for a play by the manager of an acting company was 11/.; 61. was the lowest rate.¹ A small additional gratuity — rarely exceeding ten shillings — was bestowed on a dramatist whose piece on its first production was especially well

¹ The purchasing power of a pound during Shakespeare’s prime may be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equivalent to that of five pounds of the present currency. The money value of corn then and now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life— meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like — were much cheaper in Shakespeare’s day. In 1586 a leg of veal and a shoulder of mutton at Stratford each sold for tenpence, a loin of veal for a shilling, and a quarter of lamb for twopence more (Halliwell, Cal. Slraiford Records, P- 334)- Threepence was the statutory price of a gallon of beer.

296

received; and the author was by custom allotted, by way of ‘benefit,’ a certain proportion of the receipts of the theatre on the production of a play for the second time.¹ Other sums, amounting at times to as much as 41., were bestowed on the author for revising and altering an old play for a revival. The nineteen plays which may be set to Shakespeare’s credit between 1591 and 1599, combined with such revising work as fell to his lot during those nine years, cannot consequently have brought him less than 2001., or some 20I. a year. Eight or nine of these plays were published during the period, but the publishers operated independently of the author, taking all the risks and, at the same time, all the receipts. The company usually forbade under heavy penalties the author’s sale to a publisher of a play which had been acted. The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in no way affected his monetary resources. But his friendly relations with the printer Field doubtless secured him, despite the absence of any copyright law, some part of the profits in the large and continuous sale of his narrative poems. At the same time the dedications of the poems, in accordance with contemporary custom, brought him a tangible reward. The pecuniary recognition which patrons accorded to dedicatory epistles varied greatly, and ranged from a fee of two or three pounds to a substantial pension. Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, was conspicuous for his generous gifts to men of letters who sought his good graces.²

¹ Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq., and ed. Greg. ii. no seq. ‘Beneficial second days’ were reckoned among dramatists’ sources of income until the Civil War. (Cf. ‘Actors’ Remonstrance,’ 1643, in Hazlitt’s English Drama and Stage, 1869, p. 264.) After the Restoration the receipts of the third performance were given for the author’s ‘benefit.’ _

² Cf. Malone’s Variorum, iii. 164, and p. 197 supra. The ninth Earl of Northumberland gave to George Peele 31, in June 1593 on the presentation of a congratulatory poem (Hist. MSS. Comm. vi. App. p. 227), while to two literary mathematicians, Walter Warner and Thomas Harriot, he gave pensions of 401, and 1201, a year respectively (Aubrey’s Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 16). See Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession

But it was as an actor that at an early date Shakespeare acquired a genuinely substantial and secure income. Affluence There is abundance of contemporary evidence of actors, to show that the stage was for an efficient actor an assured avenue to comparative wealth. In 1590 Robert Greene describes in his tract entitled ‘Never too Late’ a meeting with a player whom he took by his ‘outward habit’ to be ‘a gentleman of great living’ and a ‘substantial man.’ The player informed Greene that he had at the beginning of his career travelled on foot, bearing his theatrical properties on his back, but he prospered so rapidly that at the time of speaking ‘his very share in playing apparel would not be sold for 2001.’ Among his neighbours ‘where he dwelt’ he was reputed able ‘at his proper cost to build a windmill.’ In the university play, ‘The Return from Parnassus’ (1601?), a poor student enviously complains of the wealth and position which a successful actor derived from his calling:

England affords those glorious vagabonds,

That carried erst their fardles on their backs,

Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,

Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,

And pages to attend their masterships;

With mouthing words that better wits had framed,

They purchase lands and now esquires are made.¹

The travelling actors, who gave a performance at the bidding of the highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey, in 1605, received from him no higher gratuity than forty shil-

¹ Return from Parnassus, v. i. 10-16. Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]’s Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed ‘Theatrum Licencia ’:

Cotta’s become a player most men know,

And will no longer take such toy ling paines;

For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow And brings them damnable excessive gaines

That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs,

Since Greene’s Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs.

Greene's Tu Quoque was a popular comedy that had once been performed at Court by the Queen’s players, and ¹ Garlicke Jigs ’ alluded derisively to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses.

lings to be divided among them; but the company was credited with a confident anticipation of far more generous remuneration in London. According to the author of ‘The Pilgrimage to Parnassus’ (1601?), Shakespeare’s colleague Will Kemp assured undergraduate aspirants to the stage: ‘You haue happened vpon the most excellent vocation in the world for money: they come north and south to bring it to our playhouse, and for honours, who of more report, then Dick Burbage and Will Kempe ?’ (iv. iii. 1826-32). The scale of the London actors’ salaries rose rapidly during Shakespeare’s career, and was graduated according to capacity and experience. A novice who received ten shillings a week in a London theatre in 1597 could count on twice that sum thirty years later, although the rates were always reduced by half when the company was touring the provinces. A player of the highest rank enjoyed in London in the generation following Shakespeare’s death an annual stipend of 180Z.¹ Shakespeare’s emoluments as an actor, whether in London or the provinces, are not _Feesfor likely to have fallen before 1599 below 100/. Court per- Very substantial remuneration was also de- ^formances- rived by his company from performances at Court or in noblemen’s houses, and from that source his yearly revenues would receive an addition of something approaching 101?

¹ Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 291; documents of 1635 cited by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 310 seq.

² Each piece acted before Queen Elizabeth at Court was awarded 10/., which was composed of a fixed official fee of 61. 13s. 4d. and of a special royal gratuity of 31. 6s. Sd. The number of actors among whom lie money was divided was commonly few. In r594 a sum of 20I. in payment of two plays was divided by Shakespeare and his two acting colleagues, Burbage and Kemp, each receiving 61. 13s. qd. apiece (see p. 87). Shakespeare’s company performed six plays at Court during the Christmas festivities of isg6, and four each of those of 1597-8 and 1601-2. The fees for performances at private houses varied but were usually smaller than those at the royal palaces. In the play of ‘ Sir Thomas More’ probably written about 1598, a professional company of players received ten angels (i.e. 5/.) for ^a performance in a private mansion. (Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. Tucker Brooke, p. 407.)

Thus a sum approaching 150/. (equal to 750/. of to-day) would be Shakespeare’s average annual revenue before Shake *599- Such a sum would be regarded as a very speare’s large income in a country town. According to average author of ‘ Ratseis Ghost,’ the actor practised

income , • <*

before m London a strict frugality. 1 here seems no ^I599‘ reason why Shakespeare should not have been able in 1597 to draw from his savings 601, wherewith to buy New Place. His resources might well justify his fellow-townsmen’s high opinion of his wealth in 1598, and suffice between 1597 and 1599 to meet his expenses, in rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and conducting various legal proceedings. But, according to an early and well-attested tradition, he had in the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were dedicated, a wealthy and exceptionally generous patron, who on one occasion gave him as much as one thousand pounds to enable ‘him to go through with’ a purchase to which he had a mind. A munificent gift, added to professional gains, leaves nothing unaccounted for in Shakespeare’s financial position before 1599.

From 1599 onwards Shakespeare’s relations with theatrical enterprise assumed a different phase and his pecuniary resources grew materially. When speare’s in 1598 the actor Richard Burbage and his the'Giobe brother Cuthbert, who owned ‘The Theatre’ theatre in Shoreditch, resolved to transfer the fabric to from 1599. _{a new
g}j_te j_n Southwark, they enlisted the personal co-operation and the financial support of Shakespeare and of four other prosperous acting colleagues, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Heminges. For a term of thirty-one years running from Christmas 1598 a large plot of land on the Bankside was leased by the Burbages, in alliance with Shakespeare and the four other actors. The Burbage brothers made themselves responsible for one half of the liability and the remaining five accepted joint responsibility for the other half. The deed was finally executed by the seven lessees

on February 21, 1598-9. The annual rental of the Bankside site was 141. 10s., and on it Shakespeare and his partners straightway erected, at an outlay of some 500/. which was variously distributed among them, the new Globe theatre. Much timber from the dismantled Shoreditch theatre was incorporated in the new building, which was ready for opening in May.

There is conclusive evidence that Shakespeare played a foremost part in both the initiation and the development of the new playhouse. On May 16, 1599, as a lessee the Globe property was described, in a formal ^{o£ the site}- inventory of the estate of which it formed part, as in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others.’¹ The dramatist’s name was alone specified — a proof that his reputation excelled that of any of his six partners. Some two years later the demise on October 12, 1601, of Nicholas Brend, then the ground landlord, who left an infant heir Matthew, compelled a resettlement of the estate, and the many inevitable legal documents described the tenants of the playhouse as ‘ Richard Burbage and William Shackespeare, Gent ’; the greatest of his actor allies was thus joined with the dramatist. This description of the Globe tenancy was frequently repeated in legal instruments affecting the Brend property in later years. Although the formula ultimately received the addition of two other partners, Cuthbert Burbage and John Heminges, Shakespeare’s name so long as the Globe survived was retained as one of the tenants in documents defining the tenancy. The estate records of Southwark thereby kept alive the memory of the dramatist in his capacity of theatrical shareholder,² after he was laid in his grave.

'This description appears in the ‘inquisitio post mortem’ (dated^- May 12,1599) of the property of the lately deceased Thomas Brend, who had owned the Bankside site and had left it to his son, Nicholas Brend.

² The Globe theatre was demolished in 1644, twenty-eight years after the dramatist’s death. See the newly discovered, documents in the Public Record Office cited by Dr. C. W. Wallace in ‘New Light on Shakespeare’ in The Times, April 30 and May i, 1914.

On the foundation of the Globe theatre the proprietorship was divided among the seven owners in ten shares.

The fixed moiety which the two Burbages ac- actOT- quired at the outset they or their representa- hoider tivcs held nearly as long as the playhouse lasted.

The other moiety was originally divided equally among Shakespeare and his four colleagues. There was at no point anything unusual,in such an application of shareholding principles.¹ It was quite customary for leading members of an acting company to acquire individually at the meridian of their careers a proprietary interest in the theatre which their company occupied. Hamlet claims, in the play scene (iii. ii. 293), that the success of his improvised tragedy deserved to ‘get him a fellowship in a cry of players’—evidence that a successful dramatist no less than a successful actor expected such a reward for a conspicuous effort.² Shakespeare

¹ James Burbage had in 1576 allotted shares in the receipts of The Theatre to those who had advanced him capital; but these investors were commercial men and their relations with the managerial owner differed from those subsisting between his sons and the actors who held shares with them in the Bankside playhouse. The Curtain theatre was also a shareholding concern, and actors in course of time figured among the proprietors; shares in the Curtain were devised by will by the actors Thomas Pope (in 1603) and John Underwood (in 1624). (Cf. Collier’s Lives of the Actors.) The property of the Whitefriars theatre (in 1608) was divided, like that of the Globe, into fixed moieties, each of which was distributed independently among a differing number of sharers (NewShakspere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pp. 271 seq.). Heminges produced evidence in the suit Keysar v. Heminges, Condett and others in tie Court of Requests in 1608 (see pp. 309-312 infra) to show that the moiety of the Globe which Shakespeare and he shared was converted at the outset into ‘a joint tenancy’ which deprived the individual shareholder of any right to his share on his death or on his withdrawal from the company, and left it to be shared in that event by surviving shareholders, the last survivor thus obtaining the whole. But this legal device, if not revoked, was ignored, for the two sharing colleagues of Shakespeare who died earliest, Thomas Pope (in 1603) and Augustine Phillips (in 1605), both bequeathed their shares to their heirs.

² Later litigation suggests that a successful actor often claimed as a right at one or other period of his career the apportionment of a share in the theatrical estate. Sometimes the share was accepted in lieu of wages. After Paris Garden on the Bankside was rebuilt as a theatre in 1613, the owners Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade, engaged for the Lady Elizabeth’s company which was then occupying the stage an actor

as both actor and playwright of his company had an exceptionally strong claim to a proprietary interest, but contemporaries who were authors only are known to have enjoyed the same experience. John Marston, the well-known dramatist, owned before 1608 a share in the Blackfriars theatre. Through the same period Michael Drayton, whose fame as a poet was greater than that as a dramatist, was, with hack playwrights like Lodo- wick (or Lording) Barry and John Mason, a shareholder in the Whitefriars theatre.¹ The shareholders, whether they were actors or dramatists, or merely organising auxiliaries of the profession, were soon technically known as the ‘housekeepers.’ Actors of the company who held no shares were distinguished by the title of ‘the hired actors’ or ‘hirelings’ or ‘journeymen,’ and they usually bound themselves to serve the ‘housekeepers’ for a term of years under heavy penalties for breach of their engagement.²

named Robert Dawes for three years ‘for &• at the rate of one whole share, according to the custom of players’ (Benslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 124; cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg. ii. 139.) In other cases the share was paid for by the actor, who received a salary, in addition to his dividend. The greedy eyes which aspiring actors cast on theatrical shares is probably satirised in Trottus and Cressida, 11. iii. 214, where Ulysses addresses to Ajax in his sullen pride the taunt “’A would have ten shares’ In Dekker and Webster’s play of Northward Ho, 1607, Act iv. sc. i. (Dekker’s Works, iii. p. 45), ‘a player’ who is also ‘a sharer’ is referred to as a person of great importance. In 1635 three junior members of Shakespeare’s old company, Robert Benfield, Hilliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, jointly petitioned the Lord Chamberlain of the day (the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery) for compulsory authority to purchase of John Shanks, a fellow actor who had accumulated shares on a liberal scale, three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars. Their petition was granted, John Shanks had bought his five shares of Heminges’s son, William, in 1633, for a total outlay of 5061. (See documents in extenso in Halliwell-PMlipps’s Outlines, i. 311-4.)

¹ See documents from Public Record Office relating to a suit brought against the shareholders in the Whitefriars theatre in 1609 in New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1889-92, pp. 269 seq.

^s In Dekker’s tract, A Knight’s Conjuring, 1607 (Percy Soc. p. 65), a , company of ‘country players’ is said to consist of ‘one sharer and the rest journeymen.’ In the satiric play Histriomastix, 1610, ‘hired men’ among the actors are sharply contrasted with ‘sharers’ and ‘master- sharers.’

Thus when the Globe theatre opened the actor and dramatist Shakespeare was a ‘housekeeper’ owning a The his- tenth part of the estate. The share entitled toryof him to a tenth part of the profits, but also speaie’s made him responsible for a tenth part of the shares, ground-rent and of the working expenses. Till 1599-1616. k'_{s (}j_eatj₁ —, f_{or some} fifteen or sixteen years — he probably drew a substantial profit-income from the Globe venture. But the moiety of the property to which his holding belonged experienced some redivisions which modified from time to time the proportion of his receipts and liabilities. Within six months of the inauguration of the Globe, William Kemp, the great comic actor, who had just created the part of Dogberry in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado,’ abandoned his single share, which was equivalent to a tenth part of the whole. Kemp resented, it has been alleged, a reproof from his colleagues for his practice of inventing comic ‘ gag. ’ However that may be, his holding was distributed in four equal parts among his former partners in the second moiety. For some years therefore Shakespeare owned a share and a quarter, or an eighth instead of a tenth part of the collective estate. The actor-shareholder Pope died in 1603 and Phillips two years later, and their interest was devised by them by will to their respective heirs who were not members of the profession. Subsequently fresh actors of note were, according to the recognised custom, suffered to participate anew in the second moiety, and Shakespeare’s proportionate interest experienced modification accordingly. In 1610 Henry Condell, a prominent acting colleague, with whom Shakespeare’s relations were soon as close as with Burbage and Heminges, was allotted a sixth part of the second moiety or a twelfth part of the whole property. Each of the four original holders consequently surrendered a corresponding fraction (one twenty-fourth) of his existing proprietary right. A further proportionate decrease in Shakespeare’s holding was effected on February 21, 1611-2, when a

second actor of repute, William Ostler, the son-in-law of the actor and original sharer John Heminges, acquired a seventh part of the moiety, or a fourteenth part of the whole estate. Another new condition arose some sixteen months later. On June 29, 1613, the original Globe playhouse was burnt down, and a new building was erected on the same site at a cost of 14001. To this outlay the shareholders were required to contribute in proportion to their holdings. But one of the proprietors, a man named John Witter, who had inherited the original interest of his dead father-in-law, the actor Phillips, was unable or dedined to meet this liability, and Heminges, then the company’s business manager, seized the forfeited share. Heminges’s holding thus became twice that of Shakespeare. No further reapportionment of the shares took place in Shakespeare’s lifetime, so that his final interest in the Globe exceeded by very little a fourteenth part of the whole property.¹

¹ Shakespeare would appear to have retained to the end in addition to his original share his quarter of Kemp’s original allotment, but the successive partitions reduced both portions of his early allotment in the same degree. The subsequent history of Shakespeare’s and his partners’ shares in the Globe are clearly traceable from documentary evidence. Nathan Field, the actor dramatist, has been wrongly claimed as a shareholder of the Globe after Shakespeare’s death. He was clearly a ‘hired’ member of the company for a few years, but probably retired in 1619, when, on Richard Burbage’s death, Joseph Taylor, who succeeded to Burbage’s chief rdles, was admitted also in a hired capacity in spite of earlier litigation with Heminges, the manager. Field had certainly withdrawn by 1621 (E. K. Chambers, in Mod. Language Rev. iv. 395). Neither Field at any time, nor Taylor at this period, was a ‘housekeeper’ or shareholder. But such a dignity was hestowed within a. short period of Shakespeare’s death on John Underwood, a young actor of promise, who received an eighth part of the subsidiary moiety. This share, along with an eighth share at the Blackfriars, Underwood bequeathed to his children by will dated October 4, 1624 (Malone, iii. 214; Collier, p. 230; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 313). After Underwood’s admission the Globe property was described as consisting of sixteen shares, eight remaining in the Burbages’ hands. The whole of the second moiety was soon acquired by Heminges and Condell. The latter died in 1627 and the former in 1630. Their two heirs, Heminges’s son and Condell’s widow, were credited in 1630 with owning respectively four shares apiece. (See documents printed in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 311.) There is reason to believe that it was to Heminges, the business man of the company and the last survivor of the original owners of the second moiety, that Shake-

Shakespeare’s pecuniary interest in the Blackfriars theatre was only created at a late period of his life, when _shBlrp his active career was nearing its close, and his speare's full enjoyment of its benefit extended over the Black- ^more than ^^ve years (i6xo-6). The

friars from Blackfriars playhouse became in 1597 the sole ^l6°⁸' property of Richard Burbage, by inheritance from his father. Until 1608 the house was leased by Burbage to Henry Evans, the manager of the beys’ company which was known in Queen Elizabeth’s reign as ‘ Children of the Chapel Royal ’ and in the beginning of King James’s reign as ‘ Children of the Queen’s Revels. In the early autumn of 1608 Burbage recovered possession of the Blackfriars theatre owing to Evans’s nonpayment of rent under his lease. On August 9 of that year the great actor-owner divided this playhouse into seven shares, retaining one for himself, and allotting one each to Shakespeare, to his brother Cuthbert, to Hem- inges, Condell, and William Sly, his acting colleagues, while the seventh and last share was bestowed on Henry Evans, the dispossessed lessee. . Until the close of the following year (1609) Evans’s company of boy actors continued to occupy the Blackfriars stage intermittently, and Shakespeare and his six partners took no part in the management. It was only in January 1610 that

speare’s holding, like that of Phillips, Ostler, and others, ultimately came. After Heminges’s death in 1630 his four shares were disposed of by his son and heir, William Heminges; one was then divided between the actors, Taylor and Lowin, who acquired a second share from the Burbage moiety, which was then first encroached upon; the remaining three of Heminges’s four shares passed to a third actor, John Shank9, who soon made them over under compulsion to three junior actors, Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard. About the same time Condell’s widow parted with two of her four shares to Taylor and Lowin, who thu9 came to hold four shares between them. Richard Burbage had died in 1619 and Cuthbert Burbage in 1636. Their legatees — Richard’s widow and the daughters of Cuthbert — retained between them, till the company dissolved, seven shares, and Condell’s widow two shares. The five actor- shareholders, Taylor, Lowin, Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard, outlived the demolition of the Globe in 1644 ^and were, together with the private persons who were legatees of the Burbages and of Condell, the last successors of Shakespeare and of the other original owners of the playhousei

full control of the Blackfriars theatre was assumed by Shakespeare, Burbage, and their five colleagues. Thenceforth the company of the Globe regularly appeared there during the winter seasons, and occasionally at other times. Shakespeare’s seventh share in the Blackfriars now entitled him to a seventh part of the receipts, but imposed as at the Globe a proportionate liability for the working expenses.¹ During the last few years of his life Shakespeare thus enjoyed, in addition to his revenues as actor and dramatic author, an income as ‘housekeeper’ or part proprietor of the two leading playhouses ^f the day.

The first Globe theatre, a large and popular playhouse, accommodated some 1600 spectators, whose places cost them sums varying from a penny or twopence _Th to half-a-crown. The higher priced seats were ;_ngs at the comparatively few, and the theatre was probably closed on the average some 100 days a ^{1
99-1 I3}‘ year, while the company was resting, whether voluntarily or compulsorily, or while it was touring the provinces. During the first years of the Globe’s life the daily takings were not likely on a reasonable system of accountancy to exceed 151., nor the receipts in gross to reach more than 30001, a year.² The working expenses, including

¹ There was no re-partition of the Blackfriars during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But on Sly’s early death (Aug. 13, 1608) his widow made over her husband’s share to Burbage and he transferred it to the actor William Ostler on his marriage to Heminges’s daughter (May 20, 1611). After Shakespeare’s death John Underwood, a new actor, of youthful promise, was admitted (before 1624) as an eighth partner, and the proportional receipts and liabilities of each old proprietor were readjusted accordingly. Heminges, who lived till 1630, seems to have ultimately acquired four shares or half the whole, while the two Burbages and Con- deU’s and Underwood’s heirs retained one each. Of Heminges’s four shares, two were after his death sold by his son William to the actors Taylor and Lowin respectively, and two to a third actor of a junior generation, John Shanks, who soon parted with them to the three players Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard. When the Blackfriars company was finally dissolved in the Civil Wars, Taylor and Lowin and these three actors held one moiety and the other moiety was equally shared by legatees of the two Burbages, of Condell, and of Underwood.

² When at the end of the sixteenth century Philip Henslowe was managing the Rose and Newington theatres, both small houses, and was probably entitled to less than a half of the takings, he often received

ground-rent, cost of properties, dramatists’ and licensers’ fees, actors’ salaries, maintenance of the fabric, and the wages of attendants, might well absorb half the total receipts. On that supposition the residue to be divided among the shareholders would be no more than 1500/. a year. When Shakespeare was in receipt of a tenth share of the profits he could hardly count on more than 150/. annually from that source. Later his share decreased to near a fourteenth, in conformity with the practice of extending the number of actor-housekeepers, but the increased prosperity of the playhouse would insure him against a diminution of profit and might lead to some increase. When the theatre was burnt down in 1613, Shakespeare’s career was well-nigh ended. His contribution to the fund which the shareholders

as his individual share some 3I. to 41, a performance at each house. On one occasion he pocketed as much as 61. 7s. 8d. (Collier’s Hist, iii.; cf. Dr. Wallace in Engliscke Studien, xliii. pp. 360 seq.). The average takings at the Fortune theatre, which was of the same size as the Glohe but enjoyed less popularity, have been estimated at 121, a day (Hens- lowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 135). It should, however, be pointed out that Henslowe’s extant accounts which are at Dulwich are incomplete, and there is lack of agreement as to their interpretation (ibid. ii. pp. 110 seq.j_ Dr. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. pp. 357 seq., and E. K. Chamhers" in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 489 seq.). Malone reckoned the receipts at hath the Globe and the Blackfriars early in the seventeenth century at na more than 91, a day; but his calculation was based on a somewhat special set of accounts rendered for some five years (1628-34) subsequent to Shakespeare’s death to Sir Henry Herbert, the licenser of plays, who was allowed an annual ‘benefit’ at each theatre (Malone’s Variorum, iii. 175 seq.). Herbert reckoned his ten ‘benefits’ during the five years in question at sums varying between 17I. 10s. and 11. 5s., but Herbert’s ‘benefits’ involved conditions which were never quite normal. In Actors’ Remonstrance (1643) the author, who clearly drew upon a long experience, vaguely estimated the yield of a share of each theatrical ‘housekeeper' who ‘grew wealthy by actors’ endeavours’ at from ‘ten to thirty shillings’ for each performance, or from some 1001, to 3001, a year. (See Hazlitt’s English Drama and Stage, 1869, p. 262.) It would seem that shareholders enjoyed some minor perquisites at the theatre. Profits, which were sometimes made in the playhouse on wine, beer, ale, or tobacco, were reckoned among the assets of the ‘housekeepers’ (New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1887-92, p. 271). The costumes, which at the chief Elizabethan theatres involved a heavy expense, were sold from time to time to smaller houses and often fetched as secondhand apparel substantial sums. (See Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1910, xlvi. 239240.)

raised to defray the cost of rebuilding apparently exceeded 100I. The profits of the new playhouse somewhat exceeded those of the old, but Shakespeare lived little more than a year after the new playhouse opened and there was barely time for him to benefit conspicuously by the improved conditions. His net income from the Globe during his last year was probably not greatly in excess of former days.

The rates of admission for the audience at the Blackfriars were rather higher than at the Globe, but the hotise held only half the number of spectators. The _Th dividend which Shakespeare’s seventh share i_ngsatthe earned there was consequently no larger than that which a fourteenth share earned at the '

Globe. Thus a second sum of 150Z. probably reached him from the younger theatre. On such an assumption Shakespeare, as ‘housekeeper’ or part proprietor of both playhouses, received, while the two were in active work, an aggregate yearly sum of some 300/., equivalent to 1500Z. in modern currency. In the play of ‘Hamlet’ both ‘a share’ and ‘a half share’ of ‘a fellowship in a cry 9t players’ are described as assets of enviable value (iri. ii. 294-6). |In view of the affluence popularly imputed to shareowning actors and the wealth known from their extant wills to have been left by them at death,¹ Hamlet’s description would hardly justify a lower valuation of Shakespeare’s holdings than the one which is here suggested.

No means is at hand to determine more positively the precise pecuniary returns which Shakespeare’s The pecu- theatrical shares yielded. Litigation among ^^_sof shareholders was frequent and estimates of the shake- value of their shares have come to light in the theatrical archives of legal controversy, but the figures are shares, too speculative and too conflicting to be very serviceable.²

¹ See p. 493 infra. .

¹ Very numerous depositions and other documents connected with theatrical litigation in Shakespeare’s epoch are in the Public Record

The circumstances in which a share in the Globe (of the same dimensions as Shakespeare’s) which was Share- originally owned by Augustine Phillips, was ac- hoiders’ quired in 1614 by Heminges led to a belated suit law-smts. j_n jfijg f_or its recovery by Phillips’s son-in-law, John Witter. Witter, whose suit was dismissed as frivolous and whose testimony carried no weight with the Court, reckoned that before the fire of 1613 the share’s annual income brought a modest return of between 30/.'

Office. Such as have been examined throw more or less light on the financial side of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical enterprise. The earliest known records of theatrical litigation— in which James Burbage was involved at The Theatre late in the sixteenth century — were first published by J. P. Collier in Lives of Actors, 1846; and Collier’s documents were re-edited by Halliwell-Phillipps and again edited and supplemented by Mrs. Stopes in her Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage and by Dr. Wallace in his First London Theatre. But it is only theatrical litigation of a somewhat late date which is strictly relevant to a discussion of Shakespeare’s theatrical earnings. Investigation in this direction has been active very recently, but its results are scattered and not easily accessible. It may be convenient here to tabulate bibliographically the recent publications (within my knowledge) of the legal records of theatrical litigation which bear in any degree on Shakespeare’s financial experience:

I.-III. Three lawsuits among persons claiming financial interests in the Blackfriars Theatre just before Shakespeare’s association with it, discovered by James Greenstreet in the Public Record Office, and printed in full in Fleay’s History of the Stage, T887. I. Clifton v. Robinson, Evans and others in the Star Chamber, t6oi (Fleay, pp. 127-33). Evans v. Kirkham and III. Kirkham v. Painton in the Court of Chancery, 1612 (ib. 208-251).

IV-VII. Four interesting cases to which Shakespeare’s fellow- shareholders were parties in the early years of the seventeenth century discovered by Dr. C. W. Wallace; they supply various ex parte estimates of the pecuniary value of theatrical shares practically identical with Shakespeare’s. IV. Robert Keyzar v. John Heminges, Henry Condell, and others in the Court of Requests, 1608, described by Dr. Wallace in the Century Magazine for September 1910; all the documents printed in Nebraska University Studies for that year. V. Mrs. Thomasina Ostler v. John Heminges (her father) iu the Court of King’s Bench, 1614-5, described by Dr. Wallace in The Times (London) for Oct. 2 and Oct. 4, 1909; the only document found here, the plaintiff's long plea, printed by Dr. Wallace in extern0 in the original Latin in a privately-circulated pamphlet. VI. John Witter v. John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the Court of Requests, 1619, described in the Century Magazine for August 1910, of special interest owing to the many documents concerning the early financial organisation of the Globe theatre which were exhibited by John Heminges, who was both manager of the theatre and the cus:

and 401, a year; he vaguely admitted that after the fire the revenue had vastly increased. Meanwhile in October 1614 a different litigant, who claimed a year’s profits on another and a somewhat smaller share in the Globe, valued the alleged debt after the fire at 300/. The claimant, Heminges’s daughter, was widow of the actor-shareholder William Ostler, whose dividend, she alleged, was wrongly detained by her father.¹ Mrs. Ostler’s suit also throws a flicker of light on the profits of the Blackfriars house at a time when Shakespeare was a part proprietor. She claimed of her father a second sum of 300^., being her estimate of the previous year’s dividend on her husband’s seventh share at the Blackfriars. Shakespeare’s proportionate interest in the two theatres was very little larger than Ostler’s, so that if

todian of its archives. VII. John Heminges v. Joseph Taylor in 1610 for the recovery of 111, for theatrical costume, sold by Heminges to the Duke of York’s company of which Taylor the defendant was a member (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1910, xlvi. 239-40).

VHI. A financial sharing dispute before the Lord Chamberlain in 1635 among Shakespearer’s actor-successors at the Globe and Blackfriars winch is of great importance; printed from the Lord Chamberlain’s archives by Halliwell-Phillipps first in his Illustrations, 1873, and again in his Outlines, i. 312-9.

IX.-XII. Four theatrical lawsuits touching the affairs of theatres of Shakespeare’s time other than the Globe or Blackfriars, and furnishing collateral information. IX. Robert Shaw and four other actors v. Francis Langley, owner of the Swan theatre, in the Court of Requests, 1:597—8 (documents summarised by Mrs. Stopes in The Stage, Jan. 6, 1910, and printed in full in her Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage, 1913, pp. 177-83; also printed with much comment by Dr. Wallace in Eng- Usche Studien, 1910-1, xliii. 340-95). X. George Androwes v. Martin Slater and other persons interested in the Whitefriars theatre, in the Court of Chancery, 1609 (documents printed by James Greenstreet in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1887-92, pp. 269-84). XI. Woodford v. Holland, concerning the ownership of a share in the Red Bull theatre, in the Court of Requests in 1613 (documents discovered by James Greenstreet and printed in Fleay’s History of the Stage, pp. 194-9). XII. A suit in the Court of Chancery, 1623-6, to which actors of the Queen’s company at the Cockpit in Drury Lane were parties among themselves, a main issue being the company’s pecuniary obligations to the widow of a prominent member, Thomas Greene, who died in 1612 (the documents discovered by James Greenstreet and printed in full in Fleay’s History of the Stage, pp. 270-297).

¹ Ostler, who died in 1614, had been granted both a fourteenth share of the Globe and a seventh share of the Blackfriars.

Mrs. Ostler’s estimates were accurate, Shakespeare’s income from the playhouses in 1614 would have slightly exceeded tool. But Mrs. Ostler’s claim was probably as much in excess of the truth as Witter’s random valuation fell below it.¹

Meanwhile, in 1610, a third litigant, a goldsmith of the City of London, Robert Keysar, who engaged from 1606 onwards in theatrical management,⁸ propounded another estimate of the value of a share in the Blackfriars while Shakespeare was one of the owners. Keysar in February 1610 brought an action for 1000I. damages against Shakespeare’s company on the ground that that corporation had unjustly seized a sixth share in the Blackfriars theatre which he had purchased for 100I. about 1606, when Henry Evans was the lessee and before Burbage and his friends had taken possession. Keysar generously estimated the profit which Shakespeare and his partners divided at the Blackfriars at 15001, for half a year or over 2001, on each share.³

¹ Mrs. Ostler, of whose suit only her ex parte plea has come to light, seemed in her evidence to treat the capital value of her husband’s shares as worth no more than a single year’s dividends. Such a valuation of theatrical property would appear to be generally accepted at the time. In 1608 an investor in a share at the Whitefriars theatre who anticipated an annual return of iooi. was offered the share at 901, and finally bought it for 701. (New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1887-92, p. 299). A second share in the same theatre changed hands at the like period for 1001. At a later date, in 1633, three actors bought three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars for a total sum of 5061. The capital value of shares was doubtless influenced in part by the number of years which the lease of the site of the theatre concerned had yet to run when the shares were sold. The Whitefriars lease was short, and had in 1608 only five years to run, and the Globe lease in 1633, although the original term had been extended, was approaching extinction.

² To Keysar the publisher of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle dedicated the play in 1613. (See E. K. Chambers, in Mod. Lang. Rev. 1909, iv. 160 seq.)

³ Keysar maintained not only that he had paid John Marston, pre

sumably the dramatist, 100Z. for a sixth share in 1606, but that he had

advanced between that year and r6o8 500Z. for the training of the boy actors who were located at the time at the Blackfriars. His further

declaration that the new management, which consisted of Shakespeare and

six other actors, had in 1608 offered him 400Z. for his holding was wannly

denied by them. The result of Keysar’s claim has not yet come to light.

There is no wide discrepancy between Keysar’s and Mrs. Ostler’s independent reckonings of the profits at the Blackfriars. Yet the evidence of both litigants is discredited by a number of facts which are accessible outside the records of the law courts. The problem must seek its solution in a more comprehensive and less interested survey of theatrical enterprise than that which ex parte statements in legal disputes are likely to furnish. It is only safe to rely on the dispassionate evidence of dramatic history.

Shakespeare’s professional income was never derived exclusively from his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres after 1599. Earlier sources of revenue increased remained open to him and yielded richer returns ^^e_e^s^°“_t than before. Performances of his company at ..nlw Court proved increasingly profitable. The J^{ames L} dramatist and his colleagues had become on James I’s succession ‘the servants of the King,’ and their services were each year enlisted by the sovereign at least three times as often as in the old reign. Actors in the royal presence at the palaces in or near London still received as a rule 101, for each play in agreement with Queen Elizabeth’s tariff; but Prince Henry and the royal children made additional and independent calls on the players’ activities, and while the princes’ fee was a third less than the King’s, the company’s total receipts from the royal patronage thereby rose. In 1603 a special performance of the company before James I while the King was the Earl of Pembroke’s guest out of London — at Wilton — brought the enhanced remuneration of 30/. For Court performances in London alone Shakespeare and his colleagues received for the six years (from 1608-9 to 1613-4) a total sum of 9121. 12s. 8d. or over 1601, a year. Shakespeare’s proportional share in these receipts may be reckoned as adding to his income an average sum of at least 15^ a year. It is to be remembered, too, that Shakespeare and his acting colleagues came on the accession of James I under the direct patronage of the King, and were thenceforth, in accordance with

a precedent set by Queen Elizabeth, reckoned among officers of the royal household (‘grooms of the chamber’). The rank entitled them individually, and irrespectively of professional fees for acting services, to a regular stipend of between 21, and 3/. a year, with various perquisites and gratuities, which were at times substantial.¹

Shakespeare’s remuneration as both actor and dram- matist between 1599 and 1611 was also on the upward Salary grade. , The sharers or housekeepers were wont as actor. to draw for regular histrionic service a fixed salary, which was at this epoch reaching its maximum of 180Z. a year. Actor-shareholders were also allowed to take apprentices or pupils with whom they received premiums. Among Shakespeare’s colleagues Richard Burbage and Augustine Phillips are both known to have had articled pupils.²

The fees paid to dramatists for plays also rose rapidly in the early years of the seventeenth century, while the Later in- value of the author’s ‘benefits’ grew con- come as spicuously with the growing vogue of the dramatist, ^gatra. Additional payments on an enhanced scale were made, too, for revisions of old dramas on their revival in the theatres. Playwrights of secondary rank came to receive a fixed yearly stipend from the company, but the leading dramatists apparently continued to draw remuneration piece by piece. The exceptional popularity of Shakespeare’s work after T599 gave him the full advantage of higher rates of pecuniary reward in all directions. The seventeen plays which were produced by him between that year and the close of his professional career could not have brought him less on an average than 25I. each or some 400/. in all — nearly 401, a year, while the ‘benefits’ and other supplementary dues of authorship may be presumed to have added a further 201.³

Thus Shakespeare, during fourteen or fifteen years of

¹ See p. 382 infra. ² Collier’s History, iii. 434. ,

³ In 1613 Robert Dabome, a playwright of insignificant reputation, charged for a drama as much as 25Z. (Alleyn Papers, ed. Collier, p. 65)' A little later (in 1635) a hackwriter, Richard Brome,' one of Ben Jonson’s

the later period of his life, must have been earning at the theatre a sum well exceeding 700/. a year in money of the time. With so large a profes- _Speare’s sional income he could easily, with good ^finai inmanagement, have completed those purchases ' of houses and land at Stratford on which he laid out, between 1599 and 1613, a total sum of 9701., or an annual average of 70/. These properties, it must be remembered, represented investments, and he drew rent from most of them. Like the other well-to-do householders or landowners at Stratford, he traded, too, in agricultural produce. There is nothing inherently improbable in the statement of John Ward, the seventeenth- century vicar of Stratford, that the dramatist, in his last years, ‘ spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard,’ although we may reasonably make allowance for some exaggeration in the round figures. Shakespeare’s comparative affluence presents no feature which is unmatched in the current experience of the profession.¹ Gifts from patrons may have continued occasionally to augment his resources, but bis wealth can be satisfactorily assigned to better attested agencies. There is no ground for treating it as of mysterious origin.

Between 1599 and 1611, while London remained Shakespeare’s chief home and his financial _Domestic position was assured, he built up at Stratford incident, the large landed estate which his purchase of ^l6oi~⁸- New Place had inaugurated. Early in' the new century

‘servants’ or disciples, contracted to write three plays a year for three years for the Salisbury Court theatre at 15s. a week together with author’s ‘benefits’ on the production of each work. In 1638 Brome was offered, for a further term of seven years, an increased salary of 20s. a week with ‘benefits,’ but a rival theatre, the Cockpit, made a more generous proposal, which the dramatist accepted instead. A dramatist of Brome’s slender repute may thus be credited with earning as a playwright at his prime some 801, a year. In the Actors’ Remonstrance, 1643, 'oar ablest ordinarie poets’ were credited with large incomes from their ‘annual stipends and beneficial second days’ (Hazlitt’s English Drama, 1869, p. 264). _

¹ For a comparison of Shakespeare’s estate at death with that of other actors and theatrical shareholders of the day, see p. 493.

the death of his parents made some addition to his interest in house property. In 1601 his father died, being buried on September 8. In spite of the decay of his fortune the elder Shakespeare retained much local esteem. Within a few months of the end the Town Council accepted from him suggestions for its conduct of a lawsuit which the lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville, was bringing against the bailiff and burgesses. Sir Edward made claim to a toll on wheat and barley entering the town.¹ The old man apparently left no will, and the poet, as the eldest son, inherited, subject to the widow’s dower, the houses in Henley Street, the only portion of the property of the elder Shakespeare or of his wife which had not been alienated to creditors. Shakespeare’s mother continued to reside in one of the Henley Street houses till her death. She survived her husband for just seven years. She was buried in Stratford churchyard on September 9,

1608. The dramatist’s presence in the town on the sad occasion of his mother’s funeral enabled him to pay a valued compliment to the bailiff of the town, one Henry Walker, a mercer of High Street, to whom a son had just been bom. The dramatist stood godfather to the boy, who was baptised at the parish church, in the name of William, on October 19, 1608.²

The Henley Street tenement where Shakespeare’s mother died remained by his indulgence the home of his married sister, Mrs. Joan Hart, and of her family. Whether his sister paid him rent is uncertain. But through the last years of his life the dramatist enjoyed a modest

¹ Stratford-on-Avon Corporation Records, Miscell. Documents, vol. v. No. 20.

*_See p. 460 infra. Henry Walker was very active in municipal affairs, being chamberlain in 1603 and becoming an alderman soon after. He is to be distinguished from the Henry Walker ‘citizen and minstrel of London’ of whom Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars in 1613. (See pp. 456-7 and 489 infra.) William Walker, son of the Stratford Henry Walker and Shakespeare’s godson, proved, like his father, a useful citizen of Stratford, serving as chamberlain of the borough in 1644-5. William Walker, ‘gent.,’ his wife Frances, and many children were resident in the town in 1657. He was buried at Stratford in March 1679-80. (Cf. Halliwell, Cal. Stratford Records, 129, 442, 465.)

return from a small part of the Henley Street property. A barn stood in the grounds behind the residence, and this Shakespeare leased to a substantial neighbour, Robert Johnson, keeper of the White Lion Inn. On the innkeeper’s death in 1611 the unexpired lease of the building was valued at 201.¹

On May 1, 1602, Shakespeare purchased for the substantial sum of 3201, a large plot of 107 acres (or ‘four yard-lands’) of arable land near the town, formation The transaction brought the dramatist into °^ft^he close relation with men of wealth and local Stratford, influence. The vendors were William Combe ^l6oi-^IC»- and his nephew John Combe, members of a family which had settled at Stratford some sixty years before, and owned much land near the town and elsewhere. William Combe had entered the Middle Temple on October 19, 1571,² and long retained a set of chambers there; but his career was identified with the city of Warwick, where he acquired a large property, and was held in high esteem.³ He also owned the important estate of Alve- church Park in Worcestershire. In the conveyance of the land to Shakespeare in 1602 he is described as ‘of Warwick in the county of Warwick, esquire.’⁴ His nephew John Combe of ‘Old Stratford in the county aforesaid, gentleman,’ the joint vendor of the property,

¹ The inventory of Robert Johnson’s goods is described from the Stratford records by Mr. Richard Savage in the Alhentzum, August 29, 1908.' _ '

² Middle Temple Records — Minutes of Parliament, i. 181, where William Combe is described as ‘second son of John Combe late of Stratford upon Avon esquire, deceased.’

³ Black Book of Warwick, ed. Kemp, pp. 406-8.

‘William Combe of Warwick married after. 1596 Jane widow of Sir John Puckering, lord keeper of the great seal (or lord chancellor), but left no issue. He was M.P. for the town of Warwick in 1592-3 and for the county in 1597, was Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1608 and died two years later. His wifi, which was signed on Sept. 29, 1610, was proved on June 1, 1611. The original is preserved at Somerset House (P.C.C. 52 Wood). Most of his property was left to his widow, ‘Lady Jane Puckering.’ His executors were his ‘ cosins John Combe and William Combe of Stratforde, esquires’ [respectively his nephew and grand-nephew] but probate was only granted to William, son of his nephew Thomas. He

was a wealthy Stratford resident, with whom Shakespeare was soon to enjoy much personal intercourse. The conveyance of the Combes’ land was delivered, in the poet’s absence, to his brother Gilbert, ‘ to the use of the within named William Shakespeare,’ in the presence of the poet’s friends Anthony and John Nash and three other neighbours.¹ A less imposing purchase quickly followed. On September 28, 1602, at a court baron of the manor of Rowington, one Walter Getley transferred to the poet a cottage and a quarter of an acre of land which were situated at Chapel Lane (then called ‘Walkers Streete alias Dead Lane’) adjoining the lower grounds of his residence of New Place. These properties were held practically in fee-simple at the annual rental of 2s. 6d. The Manor of Rowington, of which numerous other Shakespeares were tenants, had been granted by Queen Elizabeth to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Leicester’s brother, who held it until his death in 1589. The Earl’s widow and third wife, Anne Countess of Warwick, remained Lady of the Manor until her death on February 9, 1603-4, when the property fully reverted to the Crown. The Countess of Warwick was thus Lady of the Manor when Shakespeare purchased the property in Chapel Lane. It appears from the manorial roll that Shakespeare did not attend the manorial court held at Rowington on the day fixed for the transfer of the property, and it was consequently

left 10I. to the poor of Stratford, as well as 20I. to the poor of Warwick. The will of his nephew Thomas Combe, John Combe’s brother (P;C.C. Dorset 13), establishes the relationship between William Combe of Warwick and John Combe of Stratford. Thomas Combe who predeceased his ‘good uncle William Combe’ in Jan. 1608-9, made him in the first draft of his will an executor along with his brother John and his son William. William Combe of Warwick is invariably confused with his grand-nephew and Thomas Combe’s son William, who, born at Stratford in 1586, was closely associated with Shakespeare after 1614. See p. 472 infra. The dramatist was not brought into personal relation with the elder William Combe, save over the sales of land in 1602 and subsequent years. .

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19. The original deed is at Shakespeare's Birthplace (Cat. No. 158). * .

stipulated then that the estate should remain in the hands of the Lady of the Manor until the dramatist completed the purchase in person. At a later period he made the brief journey and was admitted to the copyhold, settling the remainder on his two daughters in fee, although the manorial custom (as'it proved) only allowed the elder child to succeed to the property.¹ Subsequently Shakespeare negotiated a further purchase from the two Combes of 20 acres of meadow or pasture land, to add to the 107 of arable land which he had acquired of the same owners in 1602. In April 1610 he paid to the vendors, the uncle and nephew William and John Combe, a fine of 100/. in respect of the two purchases.²

Shakespeare had thus become a substantial landowner in his native place. A yet larger investment was meanwhile in contemplation. As early as 1598 _The Abraham Sturley, the Stratford citizen who Stratford deeply interested himself in Shakespeare’s ^tlthes' material fortunes, had suggested that the dramatist should purchase the tithes of Stratford. The advice was taken after an interval of seven years. On July 24, 1605, Shakespeare bought for 4401, of Ralph Huband, owner of the well-known Warwickshire manor of Ipsley, a lease of a ‘moiety’ of ‘the tithes’ of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. Although loosely called a ‘moiety,’ Shakespeare’s share of ‘the tithes’ — a miscellaneous property including houses, cottages, and fields, — scarcely amounted to a quarter. The whole had formed part of the forfeited ecclesiastical estate of The College, and had been leased by the officers I of that institution in 1544 for a term of ninety-two years to one William Barker, of Sonning, Berkshire. On the dissolution of The College by act of parliament in 1553,

■

_f ¹ See p. 488 infra. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 19; Dr. C. W. Wallace '■in The Times, May 8, 1915, and Mrs. Stopes in The Athenaum, June 5, 1915.

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 25 (from P.R.O. Feet of Fines, Warwick Tnn.

; 8 Jac. I, 1610, Skin 15).

the property was devised to the Stratford Corporation on the expiration of the lease. Barker soon sub-leased the tithe estate, and when Shakespeare acquired his ‘moiety’ the property was divided among over thirty local owners in allotments of various dimensions. Shakespeare’s holding, of which the ninety-two years’ lease had thirty-one years to run, had come into the hands of the vendor Ralph Huband on the recent death of his brother Sir John Huband, who had acquired it of Barker. It far exceeded in value all the other shares save one, and it was estimated to yield 601, a year. But all the shares were heavily encumbered. Shakespeare’s ‘moiety’ was subject to a rent of 171, to the corporation, who were the reversionary owners of the tithe-estate, while John Barker, heir of the first lessee, claimed dues of 51, a year, According to the harsh terms of the sub-leases, any failure on the part of any of the sub-lessees to pay Barker a prescribed contribution forfeited to him the entire property. The investment thus brought Shakespeare, under the most favourable circumstances, no higher income than 38/., and the refusal of his fellow-share- holders to acknowledge the full extent of their liability to Barker, constantly imperilled all the poet’s rights. If he wished to retain his interest in the event of the others’ default, he was required to pay their debts, After 1609 Shakespeare entered a suit in the Court of Chancery to determine the exact responsibilities of all the tithe-owners. With him were joined Richard Lane, of Alveston on the Avon near Stratford, Thomas Greene, the lawyer who was town clerk of Stratford from 1610 to 1617 and claimed to be the dramatist’s cousin,¹ and the rest of the more responsible sharers. In 1612 Shakespeare and his friends presented a bill of complaint to' Lord-Chancellor Ellesmere. The judgment has not come to light, but an accommodation, whereby the poet was fully secured in his holding, was clearly reached. His investment in the tithes

¹ See pp. 473-4 infra.

proved fruitful of legal embarrassments, but the property- descended to his heirs.¹

Shakespeare inherited his father’s love of litigation, and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business relations. In March 1600 ‘ William Shackspere ’ _Recovery sued John Clayton ‘Yeoman’ of Wellington in of small Bedfordshire, in the Court of Queen’s Bench, for ^debts' the repayment of a debt of 71.² The plaintiff’s attorney was Thomas Awdley, and on the failure of'the defendant to put in an appearance, judgment was given for the plaintiff with 20s. costs. There is nothing to identify John Clayton’s creditor with the dramatist, nor is it easy to explain why he should have lent money to a Bedfordshire yeoman.³ It is beyond question however that at Stratford Shakespeare, like many of his fellow-towns- men, was a frequent suitor in the local court of record. While he was not averse from advancing money to impecunious neighbours, he was punctual and pertinacious in demands for repayment. In July 1604 he sued for debt in the local court Philip Rogers, the apothecary of the town. Like most of the larger householders at Stratford, Shakespeare found means of evading the restrictions on the domestic manufacture of malt which proved efficacious in the case of the humbler townsfolk. Affluent residents indeed often rendered their poorer neighbours the service of selling to them their superfluities. In such conditions Shakespeare’s servants delivered to the apothecary Rogers at fortnightly intervals between March 27 and May 30, 1604, twenty pecks or five bushels of malt in varying small quantities for domestic use. The supply was valued at ii. 19s. 10d. On June 25 the

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 19 seq.; Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment, 82-4.

² The record is in the Public Record Office (Coram Rege Roll, Easter 42 Eliz. No. i36r, Mem. 293). Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 185, mentions the litigation without giving any authority. I owe the clue to the kindness of Mrs. Stopes.

⁸ Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Lady Bernard, in her will claimed as her ‘cousin’ a Bedfordslnre ‘gent.,’ ‘Thomas Welles, of Carleton’ in that county, but there is no clue to the kinship; see p. 513.

apothecary, who was usually in pecuniary difficulties, borrowed 2s. of Shakespeare’s household. Later in the summer he repaid 6s. and in Michaelmas term the dramatist sued him for the balance of the account 11, 15s. 10d.¹ During 1608 and 1609 he was at law with another fellow-townsman, John Addenbroke. On February 15, 1609, the dramatist, who appears to have been legally represented on this occasion by his kinsman, Thomas Greene,² obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of 61., with 11. 5s. costs, but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren. Shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding against Thomas Horneby, who had acted as the absconding debtor’s bail.³ Horneby had succeeded his father Richard Horneby on his death in 1606 as a master blacksmith in Henley Street, and was one of the smaller sharers in the tithes. The family forge lay near Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Plaintiff and defendant in this last prosecution had been playmates in childhood and they had some common interests in adult life. But litigation among the residents of Stratford showed scant regard for social ties, and -in his handling of practical affairs Shakespeare caught the prevailing spirit of rigour.

¹ The Latin statement of claim— ‘Shexpere versus Rogers’ — which was filed by Shakespeare’s attorney William Tetherton, is exhibited in Shakespeare’s Birthplace. (See Catalogue, No. 114.) There is no due to any later stage of the suit, at the hearing of which Shakespeare was disabled by contemporary procedure from giving evidence on his own behalf. Similar actions were taken against local purchasers of small quantities of malt during the period by Shakespeare’s wealthy local friends, Mr. John Combe, Mr. John Sadler, Mr. Anthony Nash and others. The grounds on which Shakespeare’s identification with Rogers’s creditor has been questioned are fallacious. (See Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Family, p. 121; The Times, May 15, igrs; and The Times_ Literary Supplement, May 27, rgrs.) Philip Rogers, the apothecary, was something of a professional student. In the same year as Shakespeare sued him, he sued a fellow-townsman, Valentine Palmes, or Palmer, for detaining a copy of Gale’s Certain Workes of Chirurgery, which Rogers valued at 10s. 6d. Cf. HalUwell’s Cat. Stratford Records, ²37i 3^r6, 365; Mrs. Stopes’s Shakespeare’s Environment, 57.

² See pp. 473-4 and n.

³ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80, where all the extant documents in the archives of the Stratford Court bearing on the suits against both Rogers and Addenbroke are printed in full.

With an inconsistency that is more apparent than real, the astute business transactions of these years (15971611) synchronise with the production of _L;terary Shakespeare’s noblest literary work — of his “work in most sustained and serious efforts in comedy, ^I599' tragedy, and romance. In 1599, after abandoning English history with ‘Henry V,’ he addressed himself to the composition of his three most perfect essays in romantic comedy — ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘As You Like It,’ and ‘Twelfth Night.’ There is every likelihood that all three were quickly drafted within the year. The component parts of the trilogy are closely linked one to another in manner of construction. In each play Shakespeare works over a more or less serious poetic romance by another hand and with the romantic theme he interweaves original episodes of genial irony or broad comedy which are convincingly interpreted by characters wholly of his own invention. Much penetrating reflection on grave ethical issues is fused with the spirited portrayal of varied comic phases of humanity. In all three comedies, moreover, the dramatist presents youthful womanhood in the fascinating guise which is instinct at once with gaiety and tenderness; while the plays are interspersed with melodious songs which enrich the dominant note of harmony. To this versatile trilogy there attaches an equable charm which is scarcely rivalled elsewhere in Shakespearean drama. The christening of each piece — ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘As You Like It,’ ‘Twelfth Night’ — seems to exhibit the author

323

in' a peculiarly buoyant vein. Although proverbial and disjointed phrases often served at the time as titles of drama, it is not easy to parallel the lack of obvious relevance in the name of ‘Twelfth Night’ or the merely ironic pertinence of ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ or the careless insolence of the phrase ‘As You Like It,’ which is re-echoed in ‘What You Will/ the alternative designation of ‘Twelfth Night.’

‘Much Ado’ was probably the earliest of the three pieces and may well have been written in the early sum- ‘Much Ado ^{mer I}599- The sombre romance of Hero and about Claudio, which is the main theme, was of Nothing, jtalian origin. The story, before Shakespeare handled it, had passed from foreign into English literature, and had been turned to theatrical uses in England. Bandello, to whose work Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists made very frequent recourse, first narrated at length in his ‘Novelle’ (No. xxii.) the sad experiences of the slandered heroine, whom he christened Fenicia, and Bandello’s story was translated into French _The in Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques.’ Mean- itaiian while Ariosto grafted the tale on his epic of ‘ ‘Orlando Furioso’ (canto v), christening the

injured bride Ginevra and her affianced lover Ariodante. While Shakespeare was still a youth at Stratford-on- Avon, Ariosto’s version was dramatised in English. According to the accounts of the Court revels, ‘A Historie of Ariodante and Ginevra’ was shown ‘beforeher Majestie on Shrove Tuesdaie [Feb. 12] at night’ in 1583, the actors being boy-scholars of Merchant Taylors’ School, under the direction of their capable headmaster, Richard Mulcaster.¹ In i59i, moreover, Ariosto’s account was anglicised by Sir John Harington in his spirited translation of ‘Orlando Furioso,’ and Spenser wrought a

¹ This dramatised ‘Historie’ has not survived in print or manuscript. Cf. Wallace, Evolution of the English Drama, p. 209; Cunningham’s Revels_ (Shakespeare Society), p. 177; Malone’s Variorum Shakesp.eare, 1821, iii. 406.

variation of Ariosto’s rendering of the tale into his ‘Faerie Queene,’ renaming the heroine Claribell (Bk. II. canto iv.). To one or other of the many English adaptations of Ariosto Shakespeare may have owed some stimulus, but he drew substantial aid alone from Bandello or from his French translator. All the serious episodes of the play come from the Italian novel.

Yet it was not the wrongs of the Italian heroine nor the villainy of her enemies which gave Shakespeare’s genius in ‘Much Ado’ its chief opportunity.

The drama owes its life to his creation of two speared subsidiary threads of comic interest-—the brilliant encounters of Benedick and Beatrice, and ‘ the blunders of the watchmen Dogberry and Verges, who are very plausible caricatures of Elizabethan constables. All these characters won from the first triumphant success on the stage. The popular comic actor William Kemp created the role of Dogberry before he left the newly opened Globe theatre, while Richard Cowley, a comedian of repute, appeared as Verges. In the early editions — in both the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 —■ these actors’ names are prefixed by a copyist’s error to some of the speeches allotted to the two characters (act iv. scene ii.).

‘As You Like It,’ which quickly followed ‘Much Ado' in the autumn tif 1599, is a dramatic adaptation of Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance ‘Rosalynde, Euphues <As You Golden Legacie’ (1590), which, although of ^LlkeIt-’ English authorship, has many Italian affinities. None of Shakespeare’s comedies breathes a more placid temper or catches more faithfully the spirit of the pastoral type of drama which Tasso in ‘Aminta,’ and Guarini in ‘Pastor Fido,’ had lately created not for Italy alone but for France and England as well. The dramatist follows without serious modification the novelist’s guidance in his treatment of the story. But he significantly rejects Lodge’s amorphous name of Rosader for his hero and substitutes that of Orlando after the hero of Ariosto’s

Italian epic.¹ While the main conventions of Lodge’s pastoral setting are loyally accepted, the action is touched by Shakespeare with a fresh and graphic vitality, Lodge’s forest of Ardennes, which is the chief scene of his story, belonged to Flanders, but Shakespeare added to Lodge’s Flemish background some features suggestive of the Warwickshire woodland of Arden which lay near Stratford-on-Avon. Another source than Lodge’s pastoral tale, too, gave Shakespeare lively hints for the scene of Orlando’s fight- with Charles the Wrestler, and for Touchstone’s fantastic description of the diverse shapes of a lie which prompted duelling. Both these passages were largely inspired by a book called ‘ Saviolo’s Practise,’ a manual of the art of self-defence, which appeared in 1595 from the pen of Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian fencing-master in the service of the Earl of Essex. In more effective fashion Shakespeare strengthened the human fibre of Lodge’s narrative by original additions to the dramatis persona. Very significant is his introduction of three new characters, two of whom, Jaques _The and Touchstone, are Incisive critics of life, original each from his own point of view, while the characters, Audrey, supplies broadly comic relief

to the play’s comprehensive study of the feminine temperament. Jaques is a finished study of the meditative cynic who has enjoyed much worldly experience and dissipation. Touchstone is the most carefully elaborated of all Shakespeare’s professional wits.' The hoyden Audrey adds zest to the brilliant and humorous portrayal

¹ Shakespeare directly borrowed his hero’s name from The Historic of Orlando Furioso (written about 1591 and published in 1594), a crude, dramatic version of Ariosto’s epic by Robert Greene, Shakespeare’s early foe. In Greene’s play, as in Ariosto’s poem (canto xxiii.) much space is devoted to the love poetry inscribed on ‘the barks of divers trees’ by the hero’s rival in the affections of Angelica, or by the lady herself. It is the sight of these amorous inscriptions, which in both Greene’s play and the Italian poem unseats Orlando’s reason, and thus introduces the main motive. Lodge makes much in his novel of Rosa- lynde of his lover Rosader’s 'writing on trees.’ The change of name to Orlando in As You Like It is thus easily accounted for.

of Rosalind, Celia, and Phoebe, varied types of youthful womanhood which Shakespeare perfected from Lodge’s sketches.

A new play was commonly produced at Queen Elizabeth’s Court each Twelfth Night. On the title-pages of the first editions of two of Lyly’s comedies, ‘Twelfth ‘Campaspe’ (1584) and ‘Midas’ (1591), promi- Night.’ nence was given to the fact that each was performed before Queen Elizabeth on ‘twelfe day at night.’ The main title of Shakespeare’s piece has no reference to the plot, and doubtless commemorates the fact that it was designed for the Twelfth Night of 1559-1600, when Shakespeare’s company is known to have entertained the Sovereign with a play.¹ The alternative title of ‘What You Will’ repeats the easy levity of ‘As You Like It.’² Several passages in the text support the conjecture that the play was ready for production at the turn of the year 1599-1600. ‘The new map with the augmentation af the Indies,’ spoken of by Maria (111. ii. 86), was a respectful reference to the great map of the world or ^:hydrographical description’ which seems to have been engraved in 1599, and first disclosed the full extent of recent explorations of the East and West Indies — in the New World and the Old.³ The tune of the beautiful lyric ‘ 0 mistress mine, where are you roaming ’ was published also in 1599 in a popular music book — Thomas

¹ Shakespeare’s company also performed at Court on Twelfth Night, [595-6, 1596-7, 1597-8, and 1600-1, hut the collateral evidence points .0 Twelfth Night of the year 1599—1600 as the date of the production )f Shakespeare’s piece (Cunningham’s Revels, xxxii-iii; Mod. Lang. Rev. i. 9 seq.). _ _ _

² The dramatist Marston paid Shakespeare the flattery of imitation 3y also naming a comedy ‘What You Will’ which was acted in 1601, ilthough it was first puhlished in 1607. , .

³ The map is very occasionally found in copies of the second edition )f Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, 1598—1600. It has heen repro- luced in The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator, ed. Captain A. H. Markham, Hakluyt Soc. 1880. (See Mr. Coote’s note on he New Map, lxxxv.—xcv.), and again in Hakluyt’s Principal^ Nam- 'fiUons (Glasgow, 1903, vol. i. ad fin.). A paper on Shakespeare’s men- :ion of the map, hy Mr. Coote, appears in New Shakspere Society s Transactions, 1877-9, Pt- *■ PP- 88-100.

Morley’s ‘First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by divers exquisite authors.’ There is no reason to deprive Shakespeare of the authorship of the words; but it is plain that they were accessible to the musical composer before the year 1599 closed.¹ Like the ‘Comedy of Errors/ ‘Twelfth Night’ enjoyed early in its career the experience of production at an Inn of Court.. On The er February 2, 1601-2, it was acted by Shake- formance speare’s company at Middle Temple Hall, and Temple*'⁶ J°hⁿ Manningham, a student of the Middle Hail, Feb. Temple, who was present, described the per- 2,1602. formance in his diary which forms an entertaining medley of current experiences.² Manningham wrote that the piece ‘called TVelfe Night or what you will’ which he witnessed in the Hall of his Inn was ‘much like the “Comedy of Errors” or “Menechmi” in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called “In- ganni.”’ The diarist especially commends the tricks played on Malvolio and. was much diverted by the steward’s ‘gesture in smiling.’

The Middle Temple diarist was justified in crediting the main plot of ‘Twelfth Night’ with Italian affinities. _The Mistakes due to the strong resemblance between Italian a young man and his sister, whom circum- ^plot' stance has led to assume the disguise of a boy, was a common theme of Italian drama and romance, and several Italian authors had made the disguised girl the embarrassed centre of complex love-adventures. But the Middle Temple student does inadequate justice to the pre-Shakespearean treatment of Viola’s fortunes either in Italian literature or on the Italian stage. No

¹ Robert Jones included in The first booke of Songes ■and Ayres (1600) the words and music of a feeble song ‘Farewell, dear love, since I must needs be gone,’ of which Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (n. iii.) sings snatches of the first stanza. Robert Jones was collecting popular ‘ditties’ ‘by divers gentlemen.’ Sir Toby Belch borrows in the play several specimens of the same kind, which were already of old standing.

² Diary (Camden Soc. p. 18) ed. by John Bruce from Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 5353. The Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play of Twelfth Night in Middle Temple Hall on February 10, 11, and 12, 1897.

less than three Italian comedies of the sixteenth century adumbrate the experience of Shakespeare’s heroine. Two of these Italian plays are called ‘Gli Inganni’ (The Deceits), a title which Manningham cites; but both these pieces owe much to an earlier and more famous Italian play entitled ‘Gli Ingannati’ (The Deceived),¹ which anticipates Shakespeare’s serious plot in ‘Twelfth Night’ more closely than any successor. ‘Gli Ingannati’ was both acted and published at Siena as early as <_Gi;in_ 1531 and it subsequently enjoyed a world-wide gannati’ vogue, which neither of the two ‘Gli Inganni’ ^o£Siena- shared.² ‘ Gli Ingannati ’ alone was repeatedly reprinted, adapted, or translated, not merely in Italy,’ but in France, Spain, and England, long before Shakespeare set to work on ‘Twelfth Night.’³

There is no room for doubt that, whatever the points of similarity with either of the two ‘ Gli Inganni,’ the Italian comedy of ‘Gli Ingannati’ is the ultimate Bandeiio’s source of the leading theme of Shakespeare’s ‘Nicuoia.’ ‘Twelfth Night.’ But it is improbable that the poet

¹ Of the two pieces which are christened Gli Inganni, the earlier, by Nicolo Secchi, was ‘recitata in Milano l’anno 1547’ and seems to have been first printed in Florence in 1562. There a girl Genevra in the disguise of a boy Ruberto provokes the love of a lady called Portia, and herself falls in love with her master Gostanzo; Portia in the end voluntarily transfers her affections to Genevra’s twin brother Fortunato, who is indistinguishable from his sister in appearance. The second Gli Inganni is by one Curzio Gonzaga and was printed at Venice in 1592. This piece closely follows the lines of its predecessor; but the disguised heroine assumes the masculine name of Cesare, which is significantly like that of Cesario, Viola’s adopted name in Twelfth Night.

¹ Secchi’s Gli Inganni was known in France where Pierre de Larivey, the well-known writer of comedies, converted it into Les Tromperies, but Gli Ingannati alone had an European repute.

³ A French version of Gli Ingannati by Charles Etienne called at first Le Sacrifice and afterwards Les Abusez went through more than one edition (1543, 1549, 1556). A Spanish version — Comedia de los Engana- dos—by Lope de Rueda appeared at Valencia in 1567. On Etienne’s French version of the piece an English scholar at the end of the sixteenth century based a Latin play entitled LaeHa (after the character adumbrating Shakespeare’s Viola). This piece was performed at Queens’College, Cambridge, before the Earl of Essex and other distinguished visitors, on March 1, 1595. The MS. of Lcelia is at Lambeth, and was first edited by Prof. G. C. Moore Smith in 1910.

depended on the original text of the drama. He may have gathered an occasional hint from subsequent dramatic adaptations in Italian, French, or Latin. Yet it is difficult to question that he mainly relied for the plot of ‘Twelfth Night’ on one of the prose tales which were directly based upon the primal Italian play. Ban- dello’s Italian romance of ‘Nicuola,’ which first appeared in his ‘Novelle’ (ii. 36) in 1554, is a very literal rendering of the fable of ‘ Gli Ingannati,’ and this novel was accessible to the Elizabethans not only in the original Italian, but in the popular French translation of Bandello’s work, ‘Les Histoires Tragiques,’ by Frangois de Belle- forest (Paris, 1580, No. 63). Cinthio, another Italian novelist of the sixteenth century, also narrated the dramatic fable in his collection of stories called ‘Heca- tommithi’ (v. 8) which appeared in 1565. It was from Cinthio, with some help from Bandello, that Barnabe Riche the Elizabethan author drew his English tale of ‘Apolonius and Silla’ (1581).¹ Either the Frenchman Belieforest or the Englishman Riche furnished Shakespeare with his first knowledge of the history of Orsino, Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, although the dramatist gave these characters names which they had not borne before. In any case the English playwright was handling one of the most familiar tales in the range of sixteenth-century fiction, and was thereby identifying himself beyond risk of misconception with the European spirit of contemporary romance.

Shakespeare invests the romantic pathos of Viola’s and The new h^er companions’ amorous experiences, which dramatis the genius of Italy created, with his own poetic persona. gl_{amour; anc}[ _as i_n ¹ Much Ado’ and ‘As You Like It,’ he qualifies the languorous tones of the well-

¹ In Riche’s tale the adventures of Apolonius, Silla, Julina, and Silvio anticipate respectively those of Shakespeare’s Orsino, Viola, Olivia and Sebastian. Riche makes Julina (Olivia) a rich widow, and Manningham speaks of Olivia as a widow, a possible indication that Shakespeare, who presents her as a spinster in the extant comedy, gave her in a first draft the status with which Riche credited her.

worn tale by grafting on his scene an entirely new group of characters whose idiosyncrasies give his brisk humorous faculty varied play. The steward Malvolio, whose ludicrous gravity and vanity take almost a tragic hue as the comedy advances, owes nothing to outside suggestion, while the mirthful portrayals of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Feste, and Maria the witty serving-maid, all bear signal witness to the originality and fertility of Shakespeare’s comic powers in the energetic era of his maturity.

No attempt was made at the time of composition to print ‘ Twelfth Night,’ which may justly be reckoned the flower of Shakespeare’s efforts in romantic _{Thg ub} comedy. The play was first published in the ucation First Folio of 1623. But publishers made an endeavour to issue its two associates ‘Much " Ado’ and ‘As You Like It,’ while the pieces were winning their first commendations on the stage. The acting company who owned the plays would seem to have placed obstacles in the way of both publications and in the case of ‘As You Like It’ the protest took practical effect.

In the early autumn of 1600 application was made to the Stationers’ Company to license both ‘ Much Ado ’ and ‘As You Like It ’ with two other plays which Shakespeare’s company had lately produced, his own ‘Henry V’ and Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ But on August 4 the Stationers’ Company ordered the issue of the four plays ‘to be staied.’¹ Twenty days passed and on August 24 ‘Much Ado’ was again entered in the Stationers’ Register by the publishers Andrew Wise and William Aspley, together with another Shakespearean piece, ‘The Second Part of Henry IV.’² The comedy was then duly printed and published. There are clear indications that the first printers of ‘Much Ado’ had access through the good offices of an indulgent actor to an authentic playhouse copy. The original quarto was

¹ Stationers' Company’s Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 37. ² Ibid., 170.

reproduced in the First Folio with a few additional corrections which had been made for stage purposes. Of the four plays which were ‘staied’ on August 4, 1600, only ‘As You Like It’ failed to surmount the barriers which were then placed in the way of its publication. There is no issue of ‘As You Like It’ earlier than that in the First Folio.

Shakespeare’s activity knew no pause and a little later in the year (1600) which saw the production of ‘Twelfth ‘Julius Night’ he made an experiment in a path of Caesar,’ drama which he had previously neglected, ^l6oa although it had been already welI,-trodden by others. Shakespeare now drew for the first time the plot of a tragedy from Plutarch’s ‘Lives.’ On Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar, supplemented by the memoirs of Brutus and of Mark Antony, he based his next drafnatic venture, his tragedy of ‘Julius Caesar.’ This was the earliest of his Roman plays and it preceded by many years his two other Roman tragedies — ‘ Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘Coriolanus.’¹ The piece was first published in the Folio of 1623. Internal evidence alone determines the date of composition. The characterisation is signally virile; the metrical features hover between early regularity and late irregularity, and the deliberate employment of prose, notably in the studied oratory of Brutus in the great scene of the Forum, would seem to anticipate at no long interval the like artistic usage of ‘Hamlet.’ All these traits suggest a date of composition at the midmost point of the dramatist’s career, and the autumn of 1600 satisfactorily answers the conditions of the problem.^

¹ Although Titus Andronicus professes to present incident of late Roman history, the plot lacks all historical foundation. In any case Shakespeare had small responsibility for that piece. His second narrative poem, Lucrece, is securely based, however, on a legend of early Roman history and attests Shakespeare’s youthful interest in the subject

² John Weever’s mention in his Mirror of Martyrs (1601) of the speeches of Brutus and Caesar in the Forum and of their effects on ‘the many-headed multitude ’ is commonly held to echo Shakespeare’s play. But Weever’s slender reference to the topic may as well have: been

In his choice alike of theme and of authority Shakespeare adds in ‘Julius Caesar’ one more striking proof of his eager readiness to follow in the wake of p_opularity workers in drama abroad as well as at home, of the Plutarch’s biographies furnished the dramatists ^theme- of Italy, France, and England with much tragic material from the middle years of the sixteenth century, and the fortunes of Julius Caesar in the Greek biographer’s pages had chiefly attracted their energy.¹

At times Shakespeare’s predecessors sought additional information about the Dictator in the ‘ Roman histories ’ of the Alexandrine Greek Appian, and there are _The
debt signs that Shakespeare, too, may have had occa- to sional recourse to that work, which was readily ^Plutarch- accessible in an English version published as early as 1578. But Plutarch, whose ‘Lives’ first raised biography to the level of a literary art, was Shakespeare’s main

drawn from Plutarch or Appian, and may have been framed without knowledge of Shakespeare’s spirited eloquence. Nothing more definite can be deduced from Drayton’s introduction into his Barons’ Wars

(1603) of lines depicting the character of his hero Mortimer, which are held to reflect Antony’s elegy on Brutus (Jul. Cces. v. v. 73~6). . Both passages attribute perfection in man to a mixture of the elements in due proportion — a reflection which was a, commonplace of contemporary literature. _#

¹ Marc-Antoine Muret, professor of the college of Guienne at Bordeaux, based on Plutarch’s life of Cassar a Latin tragedy, which was acted by his students (the essayist Montaigne among them) in 1544. Sixteen years later Jacques Gr6vin, then a pupil at the College of Beauvais, wrote for presentation by his fellow-collegians a tragedy on the same topic cast in Senecan mould in rhyming French verse. Grevin’s tragedy acquired a wide reputation and inaugurated some traditions in the dramatic treatment of Csesar’s death, which Shakespeare^consciously or unconsciously developed. Gr6vin sought his material in Appian’s Romance Historic as well as in Plutarch. Robert Gamier, the chief French writer of tragedy at the end of the sixteenth century, introduced Cffisar, Mark Antony, Cassius, and other of Shakespeare’s characters, into his tragedy of Cornelie (Pompey’s widow). Mark Antony is also the leading personage in Gamier’s two other Roman tragedies, Porcie (Portia, Brutus’s widow) and Marc Antoine. In r594 an Italian dramatist, Orlando Pescetti, published at Verona II Cesare Tragoedia (2nd ed. 1604) which like Grevin’s work is based on both Plutarch and Appian and anticipates at many points, probably by accident, Shakespeare’s treatment. See Dr. Alexander Boecker’s A Probable Italian Source of Shakespeare’s Julius Ccesar (New York, 1913).

guide. The Greek biographies were at his hand in an English garb, which was worthy of the original language. Sir Thomas North’s noble translation was first printed in London by the Huguenot stationer, Vautrollier, in 1579, and was reissued by Shakespeare’s fellow-townsman and Vautrollier’s successor Richard Field in 1595.¹ Shakespeare’s character of Theseus in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ may owe something to Plutarch’s account of that hero. But there is no proof of any thorough study of Plutarch on Shakespeare’s part before he planned his drama of ‘Julius Caesar.’ There he followed the details of Plutarch’s story in North’s rendering with an even closer fidelity than when Holinshed’s Chronicle guided him in his English history plays. But Shakespeare is never a slavish disciple. With characteristic originality he interweaves Plutarch’s biographies of Brutus and Antony with his life of Caesar. Brutus’s fate rather than Caesar’s is his leading concern. Under the vivifying force of Shakespeare’s genius Plutarch’s personages and facts finally acquire a glow of dramatic fire which is all the dramatist’s own gift.

Shakespeare plainly hints at the wide dissemination of Caesar’s tragic story through dramatic literature when Shake- he makes Cassius prophesy, in presence of Mdother ^ dictator’s bleeding corpse (hi. m-114),

plays about

Cssar. How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er In states unborn and accents yet unknown I

a speech to which Brutus adds the comment ‘How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport!’

In Hamlet’ (111. ii. 108 seq.) Shakespeare makes Polonius recall how he played the part of Julius Caesar ‘at the

* North followed the French version of Jacques Amyot (Paris, 1559), which made Plutarch’s Lives a standard French work. Montaigne, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Plutarch, called Amyot’s rendering ‘our breviary.’ ^

University’ and how he was killed by Brutus in the Capitol. Yet, in spite of his recognition of pre-existing dramatic literature on the subject, no clear trace is found in Shakespeare’s tragedy of indebtedness to any of his dramatic forerunners. In England Cassar’s struggle with Pompey had been pressed into the earlier service of drama quite as frequently as his overthrow, and that episode in Cassar’s life Shakespeare well-nigh ignored.¹

Shakespeare’s piece is a penetrating study of political life. Brutus, whose family traditions compel in him devotion to the cause of political liberty, allows himself to be persuaded to head a revolution; spot’s but his gentle and philosophic temper engenders P^ol.^it;i^cal scruples of conscience which spell failure in the ^insig stormy crisis. In Cassius, the man of action, an honest abhorrence of political tyranny is freed from any punctilious sense of honour. Casca, the third conspirator, is an aristocratic liberal politician with a breezy contempt for the mob. Mark Antony, the pleasure-seeker, is metamorphosed into a statesman — decisive and eloquent — by the shock of the murder of Cassar, his uncle and benefactor. The death and funeral of Caesar form the central episode of the tragedy, and no previous dramatist pursued the story beyond the outcry of the Roman populace against Cassar’s assassins. Shakespeare alone among playwrights carries on the historic episode to the defeat and suicide of the leading conspirators at the battle of Philippi. '

¹ Most of the early English plays on Caesar’s history are lost. Such was the fate of a play called Julius Casar acted before Queen Elizabeth in February 1562 (Machyn’s Diary); of The History of Cczsar and Pompey which was popular in London about 1580 (Gosson’s Plays Confuted, 1581); of a Latin drama called Casar Interfectus by Richard Eades, which was acted at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1582, and may be the university piece cited by Polonius; of Cesar and Pompey (‘Seser and Pompie’) which was produced by Henslowe and the Admiral’s company on November 8, 1594, and of the second part of Casar (the 2 pte of Sesore) which was similarly produced on June 18, 1595. Surviving plays of the epoch in which Ca;sq,r figures were produced after Shakespeare’s tragedy, e.g. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling’s Julius Casar

(1604) and George Chapman’s Casar and Pompey (1614?).

The peril of dramatic anticlimax in relegating Caesar’s assassination to the middle distance is subtly averted in His con- Shakespeare’s play by the double and some- ception of what ironical process of belittling, on the one ^Ca5Sar' hand, Caesar’s stature in his last days of life, and of magnifying, on the other hand, the spiritual influence of his name after death. The dramatist divests Caesar of most of his heroic attributes; his dominant personality is seen to be sinking from the outset under the burden of physical and moral weakness. Yet his exalted posthumous fame supplies an efficient motive for the scenes which succeed his death. ‘Thou art mighty yet, thy spirit walks abroad,’ the words which spring to the lips of the dying Brutus, supply the key to the dramatic equipoise, which Shakespeare maintains to the end. The fifth act, which presents the battle of Philippi in progress, proves ineffective on the stage, but the reader never relaxes his interest in the fortunes of the vanquished Brutus, whose death is the catastrophe.

The pronounced success of ‘Julius Caesar ’ in the theatre is strongly corroborated by an attempt on the part of a A rival rival manager to supplant it in public favour piece. by another piece on the same popular theme. In 1602 Henslowe brought together a band of distinguished authors, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and others, and commissioned them to produce ‘a book called “Caesar’s Fall.”’ The manager advanced to the syndicate the sum of 5I. on May 22, 1602. Nothing else is known of the design.

The theatrical world was meantime gravely disturbed by critical incidents which only remotely involved literary The Lord i^ssues- While ‘ Julius Caesar ’ was winning its Mayor first laurels on the stage, the fortunes of the theatres. London theatres were menaced by two manifestations of unreasoning prejudice on the part of the public. The earlier manifestation, although speciously serious, was in effect innocuous. The Puri

tans of the City had long agitated for the suppression of all theatrical performances, whether in London or its environs. But the Privy Council stood by the players and declined to sanction the restrictive bylaws for which the Corporation from time to time pressed. The flames of the municipal agitation had burnt briskly, if without genuine effect, on the eve of Shakespeare’s arrival in London. The outcry gradually subsided, although the puritan suspicions were not dead. After some years of comparative inaction the civic authorities inaugurated at the end of 1596 a fresh and embittered campaign against the players. The puritanic Lord Cobham then entered on his short tenure of office as Lord Chamberlain. His predecessor Lord Hunsdon was a warm friend of the actors, and until Ms death the staunch patron of Shakespeare’s company. In the autumn of 1596 Thomas Nashe, the dramatist and satirist, sadly wrote to a friend: ‘The players are piteously persecuted by the lord mayor and aldermen, and however in their old Lord’s [the late Lord Huns- don’s] time they thought their state settled, ’tis now so uncertain they cannot build upon it.’ The melancholy prophecy soon seemed on perilous point of fulfilment. On July 28, 1597, the Privy Council, contrary to its wonted policy, ordered, at the Lord Mayor’s invitation, all playhouses within a radius of three miles to be pulled down. Happily the Council was in no earnest mood. It suffered its drastic order to remain a dead letter, and soon bestowed on the profession fresh marks of favour. Next year (February 19, 1597-8) the Council specifically acknowledged the rights and privileges of the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s companies,¹ and when on July 19, 1598, the vestry of St. Saviour’s parish, Southwark, repeated the City Corporation’s protest

¹ Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-8, p. 327. The two companies were described as alone entitled to perform at Court, and ‘athird company’ (which was not more distinctly named) was warned against encroaching on their rights.

and urged the Council to suppress the playhouses on the Bankside, a deaf ear was turned officially to the appeal. The Master of the Revels merely joined with two prominent members of the Council, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, in an endeavour to soften the vestry’s heart, not by attacking the offending theatres, but by arranging with the Southwark players to contribute to the support of the poor of the parish. The Council appeared to be deliberately treading paths of conciliation or mediation in the best interest of the players. None the less the renewed agitation of the Lord Mayor and his colleagues failed to abate, and in the summer of 1600 the Privy Council seemed to threaten under pressure a reversal of its complacent policy. On June 22, 1600, the Council issued to the officers of the Corporation of London and to the justices of the peac* The Privy °f Middlesex and Surrey an order restrainii._i' Counci¹ ‘the immoderate use and company of play- june^j, houses and players.’ Two acting companies 1600. — the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s — were alone to be suffered to perform in London, and only two playhouses were to be allowed to continue work —■ one in Middlesex (the ‘Fortune’ in Cripplegate, Alleyn’s new playhouse then in course of building), and the other in Surrey (the ‘Globe’ on the Bankside). The ‘ Curtain ’ was to be pulled down. All stage plays were to be forbidden ‘in any common inn for public assembly in or near about the city’ and the prohibition was interpreted to extend to the ‘private’ playhouses of the Blackfriars and St. Paul’s, which were occupied by boy actors. The two privileged companies were, moreover, only to perform twice a week, and their theatres were to be closed on the Sabbath day, during' Lent, and in times of ‘extraordinary sickness’ in or about the City.¹ The contemplated restrictions were likely, if carried out, to deprive a large number of actors of employment, to drive others into the provinces where ¹ Acts of the Privy Council, 1599-1600, pp. 395-8,

their livelihood was always precarious, and seriously to fetter the activities of the few actors who were specially excepted from the bulk of the new regulations. The decree promised Shakespeare’s company a certain relief from competition, but the price was high. Not only was their regular employment to -be arbitrarily diminished, but they were to make a humiliating submission to the vexatious prejudices of a narrow clique.

Genuine alarm was created in the profession by the Privy Council's action; but fortunately the sound and fury came to little. What was the intention of the Council must remain matter for conjecture. It is certain that neither the municipal authorities nor the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex, to all of whom the Privy Council addressed itself, made any attempt to put the stringent decree into operation, and the Privy Council was quite ready to let it sleep. All the London theatres that were already in existence went on their way unchecked. The innyards continued to be applied to theatrical uses. The London companies saw no decrease in their numbers, and performances followed one another day after day without interruption. But so solemn a threat of legal interference bred for a time anxiety in the profession, and the year 1601 was a period of suspense among men of Shakespeare’s calling.¹

More calamitous was a temporary reverse of fortune which Shakespeare’s company, in common with some other companies of adult actors, suffered, as the new

¹ On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the number of playhouses in accordance with ‘our order set down and prescribed about a year and a half since.’ But nothing followed during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no more was heard officially of the Council’s order until 1619, when the Corporation of London called attention to its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 307-9. They are well digested in Dr. V. C. Gildersleeve’s Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1908, pp. 178 seq.).

century dawned, at the hands, not of fanatical enemies . of the drama, but of play-goers who were between^⁶ its avowed supporters. The company of boy adult and actors, recruited from the choristers of the oy actors, ^apel Royal, and known as ‘ the Children of the Chapel,’ was in the autumn of 1600 firmly installed at the new theatre in Blackfriars, and near the same date a second company of boy actors, which was formed of the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, re-opened, after a five years’ interval, its private playhouse within the cathedral precincts. Through the winter season of

1600-1 the fortunes of the veterans, who occupied the public or ‘common’ stages of London, were put in jeopardy by the extravagant outburst of public favour evoked by the performances of the two companies of boys. Dramatists of the first rank placed their services at the boys’ disposal. Ben Jonson and George Chapman, whose dramatic work was rich in comic strength, were active in the service of the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars theatre, while John Marston, a playwright who promised to excel in romantic tragedy, allowed his earliest and best plays to be interpreted for the first time by the ‘Children of Paules.’ The boy actors included in their ranks at the time performers of exceptional promise. Three of the Chapel Children, Nathaniel Field, William Ostler, and John Underwood, who won their first laurels during the memorable season of 1600-1, joined in manhood Shakespeare’s company, while a fourth child actor of the period, SalatHiel Pavy, who died prematurely, still fives in Ben Jonson’s pathetic , elegy, where the poet plays with the fancy that the boy rendered old men’s parts so perfectly as to give Death a wrong impression of his true age.

Many references in plays of the period bear witness to the loss of popular favour and of pecuniary profit which the boys’ triumphs cost their professional seniors. Ben Jonson, in his ‘Poetaster,’ puts in the mouth of one of his characters ‘ Histrio, the actor,’ the statement that

the winter of 1600-1 ‘hath made us all poorer than so many starved snakes.’ ‘Nobody/ the discon- shake- solate player adds, ‘ comes at us, not a gentle- speare on

man nor a .’¹ The most graphic account of season”¹”

die actors’ misfortunes figures in Shakespeare’s ^l6oo_I- tragedy of ‘Hamlet,’ which was first sent to press in an imperfect draft in the year 1602.² ‘The tragedians of the city,’ in whom Hamlet was ‘wont to take such delight,’ are represented as visiting Elsinore on a provincial tour. Hamlet expresses surprise that they should travel,’ seeing that the town brought actors greater ‘reputation and profit’ than the country. But the explanation is offered:

_; Y’ faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away,

For the principal publike audience that

Came to them [i.e. the old actors] are turned to private playes

And to the humours of children.³

The public no longer (Hamlet learns) held the actors in ‘the same estimation’ as in former years. There was no falling off in their efficiency, but they were outmatched by ‘ an aery [i.e. nest] of children, little eyases [i.e. young hawks],’ who dominated the theatrical world, and monopolised public applause. ‘ These are now the

¹ Poetaster, ed. Mallory, rv. iii. 345-7.

^s Only the First Folio Version of 1623 supplies Shakespeare’s full comment on the subject: see act n. sc. ii. 348-394. Both the First and the Second Quarto notice the misfortunes of the ‘tragedians of the city’ very briefly. To the ten lines which the quartos furnish the First Folio adds twenty.

⁸ These lines are peculiar to the First Quarto. In the Second Quarto and in the First Folio they are replaced by the sentence ‘I think their [i.e. the old actors’] inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.’ Many commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the ‘late innovation’ of the later Hamlet texts as the order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two and otherwise prejudicing the actors’ freedom; but that order was never put in force, and in no way affected the actors’ fortunes. The First Quarto text makes it clear that ‘the late innovation’ to which the players’ misfortunes were assigned in the later texts was the ‘noveltie’ of the boys’ performances. ‘Private plays’ were plays at private theatres — the class of playhouse to which both the Blackfriars and Paul’s theatres belonged (see p. 67). .

fashion,’ the dramatist lamented, and he made the common players’ forfeiture of popularity the text of a reflection on the fickleness of public taste:

Hamlet. Do the boys carry it away?

Rosencrantz. Ay, that they do, ray lord, Hercules and his load too.

Hamlet. It is not very strange; for my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while ray father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little.¹

The difficulties of the actors in the public theatres were greatly accentuated by a heated controversy which burnt very briskly in 1601 among the drama- share^ain°^rS tists, and involved Shakespeare’s company jonson’s and to some extent Shakespeare himself. The control boys’ notoriety and success were signally 159^1601 i^ncreased by personal dissensions among the ^J " playwrights. As early as 1598 John Marston made a sharp attack on Ben Jonson’s literary style, opening the campaign in his satire entitled ‘ The Scourge of Villanie,’ and quickly developing it in his play of ‘Histriomastix.’ Jonson soon retaliated by lampooning Marston and his friends on the stage. Each protagonist was at the time a newcomer in the literary field, and the charges which they brought against each other were no more heinous than that of penning ‘fustian’ or of inventing awkward neologisms. Yet they quickly managed to divide the playwrights of the day into two hostile camps, and public interest fastened on their recriminations. Ben Jonson’s range of attack came to cover dramatists, actors, courtiers, or citizens who either failed to declare themselves on his side or professed indifference to the quarrel. This war of personalities raged confusedly for three years, reaching its climax in 1601. Shakespeare's company and both the companies of the boys were pressed by one or the other party into the strife, and the intervention of the Children of the Chapel gave them an immense advantage over the occupants of rival stages.

¹ Hamlet, n. ii. 349-64.

In the initial phases of the campaign Shakespeare’s company lent Jonson its countenance. The assauit on Jonson which Marston inaugurated in his book <^^0 of satires, he continued with the aid of friends mastk,’ in the play involving varied personal issues ^IS98' called ‘ Histriomastix or the Player Whipt.’¹ The St. Paul’s boys, who were producing Marston’s serious dramatic work at the time, were apparently responsible for the early performances of this lumbering piece of irony. Jonson weightily retorted in 1599 in his comprehensive social satire of ‘Every Man out of <E_Very his Humour,’ and Shakespeare’s company so Man out far identified themselves with the sensitive Humour,’ dramatist’s cause as to stage that comedy at the ⁱs*»- Globe theatre. ‘Every Man out of his Humour' proved the first of four pieces of artillery which Jonson brought into the field. But Shakespeare’s company was reluctant to be dragged further at Jonson’s heel, and it was the boys at Blackfriars who interpreted the rest of his controversial dramas to the huge delight of play-- goers who welcomed the paradox of hearing Ben Jonson’s acrid humour on childish tongues. In his more or less conventional comedy of intrigue called ‘The Case is Altered,’ which the boys brought out in 1599, four subsidiary characters, Antonio Balladino ² the pageant

¹ This rambling review of the vices of contemporary society derided not only Ben Jonson’s arrogance (in the character of Chrisoganus) but also adult actors generally with their patrons and their authors. Some of the shafts were calculated to disparage Shakespeare’s company, the best organised troop on the stage. The earliest extant edition of Histriomastix is dated 1610. But internal evidence and a reference which Jonson made to it in his Every Man out of his Humour, 1599 (Act m. sc. i.), show it to have been written in rs98. It is reprinted in Simpson’s School of Shakspere, ii. 1 seq.

² Antonio Balladino is a plain caricature of Anthony Munday, the industrious playwright, and,- although Marston’s features are not recognised with certainty in any of the other ludicrous dramatis personce, The Case is Altered was held to score heavily in Jonson’s favour in his fight with Marston. According to the title-page of the first edition (1609) the piece was ‘sundry times acted by the Children of the Blackfriers.’ It seems to have been the earliest piece of the kind which was entrusted to the Chapel boys’ tender mercies.

poet, Juniper a cobbler, Peter Onion groom of the hall, and Pacue a French page, were justly suspected of travestying identifiable men of letters. A year later, in 1600, Jonson won a more pronounced success when ‘Cynthia’s he caused the Children of the Chapel to pro- Reveis.’ duce at Blackfriars his ‘Cynthia’s Revels,’ an encyclopaedic satire on literary fashions and on the public taste of the day. There, under the Greek names of Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, and Anaides, various literary foes were paraded as laughing-stocks. An ‘Induction’ to the play takes the shape of a pretended quarrel amongst three of the actor-children as to who shall speak the prologue. ‘By this light,’ the third child remarks with mocking self-depreciation, ‘ I wonder that any man is so mad to come and see these rascally tits play here ’¹; but it is certain that the sting of Jonson’s taunts lost nothing on the boys’ precocious lips.

There is some ground for assuming that the Children ‘jack of Paul’s replied without delay to ‘Cynthia’s Entertain R^evel^s’ i^{n an} anonymous piece called ‘Jack ment/^am’ Drum’s Entertainment, or the Comedie of

^l601- Pasquil,’ where a story of intrigue is interwoven with mordant parodies of Jonson’s foibles.² Meanwhile

¹ The author, in the person of Crites, one of the characters, shrewdly argues that fantastic vanity and futile self-conceit are the springs'of all fashionable drama and poetry. Incidental compliments to Queen Elizabeth, who was represented as presiding over the literary revels in her familiar poetic name of Cynthia, increased the play’s vogue.

² In ‘The Introduction’ of Jack Drum’s Entertainment, one of the children, parodying Jonson’s manner, promises the audience not to torment ^ .

your listening eares With mouldie fopperies of stale Poetrie,

Unpossible drie mustie fictions.

Elsewhere in the piece emphasis is laid on the gentility and refined manners of the audience for which the St. Paul’s boys catered, as compared with the roughness and boorishness of the frequenters of the adult actors’ theatres. The success of the ‘children’ is assigned to that advantage rather than to their histrionic superiority over the men. Jack Drum’s Entertainment, which was published in 1601, would seem to be the work of a critical onlooker of the pending controversy who detected faults on both sides, but deemed Jonson the chief offender. See reprint in Simpson’s School of Shakspere, ii. 199 et passim.

the rumour spread that Marston and Dekker, who deemed themselves specially maligned by ‘Cynthia’s Revels/ were planning a bolder revenge at the Globe theatre. Jonson forestalled the blow by completing within fifteen weeks a fourth ‘comical satire’ which he called ‘Poetaster, or his arraignment.’ This <p₀etas- new attack, which the boys delivered at Black- ^ter>’ friars early in 1601, was framed in a classical mould.¹ The main theme² caustically presents the poet Horace as pestered by the importunities of the poetaster Cris- pinus and his friend Demetrius. Horace finally arraigned his two tormentors before Caesar on a charge of defamation, in that they had ‘ taxed ’ him falsely of ‘ selflove, arrogancy, impudence, railing, and filching by translation.’ Virgil was summoned by Caesar to sit with other Latin poets in judgment on these accusations. A triumphant acquittal of Horace follows, and the respondents are convicted of malicious libel. Demetrius admits the offence, while Crispinus, who is sentenced to drink a dose of hellebore, vomits with Rabelaisian realism a multitude of cacophonous words to which he has given literary currency. Although the identification of many of the personages of the ‘ Poetaster ’ is open to question, Jonson himself, Marston, and Dekker stand confessed beneath the names respectively of Horace, Crispinus, and Demetrius. In subsidiary scenes Histrio, an adult actor, was held up to scornful ridicule and elsewhere lawyers were roughly handled. Ben Jonson put little restraint on his temper, and the boys once again proved equal to their interpretative functions.

¹ In the words of the prologue, Jonson

chose Augustus Csesar’s times _

When wit and arts were at their height in Rome;

To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits did not want Detractors then or practisers against them.

■A subsidiary thread of interest was innocuously wrought out of the familiar tale of the poet Ovid’s amours and exile, while brisk sketches were furnished of Ovid’s literary contemporaries, Tibullus, Propertius, and other well-known Roman writers.

Clumsy yet effective retaliation was provided without delay by the players of Shakespeare’s company. They ‘ answered ’ Jonson and his ‘ company of horrible* ‘Satire-^s blackfryers’ ‘at their own weapons,’ by pro- mastix,’ ducing after a brief interval a violent piece of ‘ detraction ’ by Dekker called ‘ Satirotnastix, or the Untrussing of the Humourous Poet.’¹ Amid an irrelevant story of romantic, intrigue all the polemical extravagances of the ‘Poetaster’ were here parodied at Jonson’s expense with brutal coarseness. Jonson’s personal appearance and habits were offensively analysed, and he was ultimately crowned with a garland of stinging nettles. ‘The Children of Paul’s’ — who were the persistent rivals of the Chapel Children — eagerly aided the men actors in this strenuous endeavour to bring Jonson to book. ‘ Satiromastix ’ was produced in the private playhouse of Paul’s soon after it appeared at the Globe.² The issue of this wide publicity was happier than might have been expected. The foolish and freakish controversy received its deathblow. Jonson peace- The end accepted a warning from the authorities

of the¹¹ to refrain from further hostilities, and his op- feu(i^atists' P^onents readily came to terms with him. He was soon writing for Shakespeare’s company a new tragedy, ‘Sejanus’ (1603), in which Shakespeare played a part. Marston, in dignified Latin prose, dedicated to him his next play, ‘The Malcontent’ (1604), and the two gladiators thereupon joined forces with Chapman in the composition of a third piece, ‘ Eastward Ho’ (1605).³

¹ This piece was licensed for the press on November 11, 1601, which was probably' near the date of its first performance. The epilogue makes a reference to ‘this cold weather.’

² On the title-page of the first edition (1602) Satiromastix is stated to have ‘bin presented publikely by the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants and priuately by the children of Paules.’

³ Much ingenuity has been expended on the interpretation of the many personal allusions scattered broadcast through the various plays in which the^ dramatic poets fought out their battle. Save in the few instances which are cited above, the application of the personal gibes

The most material effect of ‘that terrible poeto- machia’ (to use Dekker’s language) was to stimulate the vogue of the children. Playgoers took sides in _Sha__ke_ the struggle, and their attention was for the speare season of 1600-1 riveted, to the exclusion of *poeto-^e topics more germane to their province, on the ^machia-’ actors’ and dramatists’ boisterous war of personalities.¹

It is not easy to trace Shakespeare’s personal course of action through this ‘ war of high words ’ — which he stigmatised in ‘Hamlet’ as a ‘throwing about of brains.’ It is only on collateral incidents of the petty strife that

is rarely quite certain. Ben Jonson would seem at times to have intentionally disguised his aim by crediting one or other subsidiary character in his plays with traits belonging to more persons than one. Nor did he confine his attack to dramatists. He hit out freely at men who had offended him in all ranks and professions. The meaning of the controversial sallies has been very thoroughly discussed in Mr. Josiah H. Penniman’s The War of the Theatres (Series in Philology, Literature and Archaeology, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1897, iv. 3) and in his introduction to Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and Dekker’s Satiromastix in Belles-Lettres Series (1912), as well as by H. C. Hart in Notes and Queries, Series IX. vols. 11 and 12 passim, and in Roscoe A. Small’s ‘The Stage Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the so-called Poetasters’ in Forschungen zur Englischen Sprache und Litteratur, 1899. Useful reprints of the rare plays Histriomastix (1598) and Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1601) figure in Simpson’s School of Shakspere, but the conclusion regarding the poets’ warfare reached in the prefatory comments there is not very convincing.

¹ Throughout the year 1601 offensive personalities seem to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by the actors of the ‘Curtain’ at gentlemen ‘of good desert and quality, and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced’ (Privy Council Register). Jonson subsequently issued an ‘apologetical dialogue’ (appended to printed copies of the Poetaster), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players of the common stages:

Now for the players ’tis true I tax’d them And yet hut some, and those so sparingly As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned,

Had they hut had the wit or conscience To think well of themselves. But impotent they Thought each man’s vice helonged to their whole trihe; _

And much good do it them. What they have done against me - I am not moved with, if it gave them meat Or got them clothes, ’tis well; that was their end,

Only amongst them I am sorry for Some better natures hy the rest so drawn To run in that vile line.

he has left any clearly expressed view, but he obviously Shake- resented the enlistment of the children in the speare’s^ campaign of virulence. In his play of ‘Ham- tothe^nces let’ he protested vigorously against the abu- struggie. _sj_ve speech which Jonson and his satellites contrived that the children’s mouths should level at the men actors of ‘the common stages,’ or public theatres. Rosencrantz declared that the children ‘so berattle [i.e. assail] the common stages — so they call them — that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither [i.e. to the public theatres].’¹ Pursuing the theme, Hamlet pointed out that the writers who encouraged the precocious insolence of the ‘child actors’ did them a poor service, because when the boys should reach men’s estate they would run the risk, if they continued on the stage, of the same insults and neglect with which they now threatened their seniors.

Hamlet. What, are they children? who maintains ’em? how are they escoted ? [i.e. paid]. Will they pursue the quality [i.e. the actor’s profession] no longer than they can sing? will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players — as it is most like, if their means are no better — their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their own succession?

Rosencrantz. Faith, there has heen much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [i.e. incite] them to controversy: there was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.

Hamlet. Is it possible ?

Guildenstern. O, there has been much throwing about of brains!

Shakespeare was not alone among the dramatists in his Thomas emphatic expression of regret that the boys Heywood should have been pressed into the futile warfare. Ihake- Thomas Heywood, the actor-playwright who speare’s shared Shakespeare’s professional sentiments as well as his professional experiences, echoed Hamlet’s shrewd'comments when he wrote: ‘The liberty

¹ Jonson in Cynthia’s Revels (Induction) applies the term ‘common stages⁹ to the public theatres. ‘ Goosequillian⁹ is • the epithet applied to Posthast, an actor-dramatist who is a character in Histriomastix (see p. 343 supra).

which some arrogate to themselves, committing their Ditternesse, and liberall invectives against all estates, to the mouthes of children, supposing their juniority to :>e a privilegde for any rayling, be it never so violent, I :ould advise all such to curb and limit this presumed Liberty within the bands of discretion and government.’¹ While Shakespeare thus sided on enlightened grounds with the adult actors in their professional competition with the boys, he would seem to have watched _shake_

Ben Jonson’s personal strife both with fellow |?^^re’^s authors and with actors in the serene spirit of a terested disinterested spectator and to have eschewed attitude, any partisan bias. In the prologue to ‘Troilus and Cressida’ which he penned in 1603, he warned his bearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson’s battles, that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor or poet.

Jonson had in his ‘Poetaster’ put into the mouth of his Prologue the lines:

If any muse why I salute the stage,

An armed Prologue; know, ’tis a dangerous age:

Wherein, who writes, had need present his scenes Fortie fold-proofe against the conjuring meanes Of base detractors, and illiterate apes,

That fill up roomes in faire and formall shapes.

’Gainst these, have we put on this forc’t defence.

In ‘Troilus and Cressida' Shakespeare’s Prologue retorted:

Hither am I come,

A prologue arm’d, but not in confidence Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited In like conditions as our argument,

which began ‘in the middle’ of the Graeco-Trojan ‘broils.’ Passages in Ben Jonson’s ‘Poetaster’ suggest, moreover, that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously an attitude of neutrality on the main issues that Jonson finally acknowledged him to be qualified for the rdle of.

¹ Heywood, Apology for Actors, 1612 (Sh. Soc.), p. 6r.

peacemaker. The gentleness of disposition with which Shakespeare was invariably credited by his friends would have well fitted him for such an office. Jonson, Virgil in who figures in the ‘Poetaster’ under the name jonson’s of Horace, joins his friends, Tibullus and Gallus, ‘Poetaster.’ j_{n eu}i₀gi_si_ng the work and genius of another character, Virgil, and the terms whch are employed so closely resemble those which were popularly applied to Shakespeare that the praises of Virgil may be regarded as intended to apply to the great dramatist (act v. sc. i.). Jonson points out that Virgil, by his penetrating intuition, achieved the great effects which others laboriously sought to reach through rules of art.

His learning labours not the school-like gloss That most consists of echoing words and terms . . .

Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance — .

Wrapt in the curious generalties of arts —

But a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of arts.

And for his poesy, ’tis so rammed with life That it shall gather strength of life with being,

And live hereafter, more admired than now.

Tibullus gives Virgil equal credit for having in his writings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude of human existence.

That which he hath writ Is with such judgment laboured and distilled Through all the needful uses of our lives That, could a man remember but his lines,

He should not touch at any serious point But he might breathe his spirit out of him.¹

Finally, in the play, Virgil, at Caesar’s invitation, judges between Horace and his libellers, and it is he who ad

¹ These expressions were at any rate accepted as applicable to Shakespeare by the writer of the preface to the dramatist’s Troilus and Cressida (1609). The preface includes the sentences: ‘this author’s [i.e. Shakespeare’s] comedies are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit.’

vises the administration of purging hellebore to Marston (Crispinus), the chief offender.¹

On the other hand, one contemporary witness has been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide of Jonson’s embittered activity by no peace- , making interposition, but by joining his foes, tumfrom and by administering to him, with their aid, fg™^assus’’ much the same course of medicine which in the ' ‘Poetaster’ is meted out to his enemies. In the same year (1601) as the ‘Poetaster’ was produced, and before the literary war had burnt itself out on the London stage, ‘ The Return from Parnassus ’ — the last piece in a trilogy of plays—was ‘acted by the students in St. John’s College, Cambridge.’ It was an ironical review of the current life and aspirations of London poets, actors, and dramatists. In this piece, as in its two predecessors, Shakespeare received, both as a playwright and a poet, much commendation in his own name. His poems, even if one character held that they reflected somewhat too largely ‘love’s lazy foolish languishment,’ were hailed by others as the perfect expression of amorous sentiment. The actor Burbage was introduced in his own name instructing an aspirant to the actor’s profession in the part of Richard the Third, and the familiar lines from Shakespeare’s play —

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York —

were recited by the pupil as part of his lesson. Subsequently, in a prose dialogue between Shakespeare’s fel- low-actors Burbage and Kemp, the latter generally disparages university dramatists who are wont to air their classical learning, and claims for Shakespeare, his theatrical colleague, a complete ascendancy over them. ‘Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down [Kemp

¹The proposed identification of Virgil in the Poetaster with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman’s literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play.

remarks]; aye, and Ben Jonson, too. O! that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’ Burbage adds: ‘It’s a shrewd fellow indeed.’ This perplexing passage has been held to mean that Shakespeare took a decisive part against Jonson in the controversy with Marston, Dekker, and their friends. But such a conclusion is nowhere corroborated, and speare’s seems to be confuted by the eulogies of Virgil alleged_; j_n ‘Poetaster’ and even by the general handling of the theme in ‘Hamlet.’ The words quoted from ‘The Return from Parnassus’ may well be incapable of, a literal interpretation. Probably the ‘purge’ that Shakespeare was alleged by the author of ‘The Return from Parnassus’ to have given Jonson meant no more than that Shakespeare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular esteem. As the author of ‘Julius Caesar,’ he had just proved his command of topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson’s classicised vein,¹ and had in fact outrun his churlish comrade on his

¹ The most scornful criticism that Jon'Son is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at-a passage in Julius Ctzsar, and as Jonson’s attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. ‘Many times,’ Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, ‘hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Ctzsar, one speaking to him [i.e. Caesar]; Casar, thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. Caesar] replyed: Ctzsar did never wrong, butt with just cause: and such like, which were ridiculous.’ Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to The Staph aj News (1625): ‘ Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.¹ Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare’s character of Ctzsar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson’s captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson’s quotation are Caesar’s remark:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause

Will he be satisfied

(111. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word ‘wrong’ of the phrase ‘but with just cause,’ which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1388-1633), one of Shake-

awn ground. Shakespeare was, too, on the point of iealing in a new play a crushing blow at the pretensions af all who reckoned themselves his masters.

Soon after the production of ‘Julius Caesar’ Shakespeare completed the first draft of a tragedy, which finally left Jonson and all friends and foes ‘Hamlet,’ lagging far behind him in reputation. This ^l6°²- new exhibition of the force of his genius re-established, boo, the ascendency of the adult actors who interpreted his work, and the boys’ supremacy was jeopardised. Early in the second year of the seventeenth century Shakespeare produced ‘Hamlet,’ ‘ that piece of his which most kindled English hearts.’

As in the case of so many of Shakespeare’s plots, the story of his prince of Denmark was in its main outlines of indent origin, was well known in contemporary _The France, and had been turned to dramatic pur- Danish pose in England before he applied his pen to it. ^legend- The rudimentary tale of a prince’s vengeance on an uncle who has slain his royal father is a mediaeval tradition of pre-Christian Denmark. As early as the thirteenth century the Danish chronicler, Saxo Grammaticus, embodied Hamlet’s legendary history in his Historia Danica,’ which was first printed in 1514. Saxo’s unsophisticated and barbaric narrative found in 1570 a place in ‘Les Histoires Tragiques,’ a French mis- :ellany of translated legend or romance by Pierre de Belleforest.¹ The French collection of tales, was familiar to Shakespeare and to many other dramatists of

speare’s admiring critics, emphasises ’ the superior popularity in the theatre of Shakespeare’s Julius Casar to Ben Jonson’s Roman play of Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges’s leath in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems); see p. 589 n. 2 Infra.

¹ Histoire No. cviii. Cf. Gericke und Max Moltke, Hamlet-Quellen, Leipzig, 1881. Saxo Grammaticus’s Historia Danica, bks. i.-ix., appeared in an English translation by Prof. Oliver Elton with an intro- luction by Prof. York Powell in 1894 (Folklore Soc. vol. 33). Hamlet’s story was absorbed into Icelandic mythology; cf. Ambales Saga, ed. by Prof. Israel Gollancz, 1898.

the day. No English translation of Belleforest’s French version of Hamlet’s history seems to have been available when Shakespeare attacked the theme.¹ But a dramatic adaptation was already at his disposal in his own tongue.

The primordial Danish version of the ‘Hamlet’story, which the French rendering literally follows, is a relic of The bar- heathenish barbarism, and the dramatic pro- i barism of cesses of purgation which Shakespeare perfected the legend. _{were c}x_earjy begun by another hand. The pretence of madness on the part of the young prince who seeks to avenge his father’s murder is a central feature of the fable in all its forms, but in the original version the motive develops without much purpose in a repulsive environment of unqualified brutality. Horwendill, King of Denmark, the father of the hero Amleth, was according to Saxo craftily slain in a riot by his brother Fengon, who thereupon seized the crown and married Geruth the hero’s mother. In order to protect himself against the new King’s malice, Amleth, an only child who has a foster brother Osric, deliberately feigns madness, without very perceptibly affecting the situation. The usurper suborns a beautiful maiden to tempt Amleth at the same time as she tests the genuineness of his malady. Subsequently his mother is induced by King Fengon to pacify Amleth’s fears; but in the interview the son brings home to Geruth a sense of her infamy, after he has slain in her presence the prying chamberlain of the court. Amleth gives evidence of a savagery, which harmonises with his surroundings, by dismembering the dead body, boiling the fragments and flinging them to the hogs to eat. Thereupon the uncle sends his nephew to England to be murdered; but Amleth turns the tables on his guards, effects their death, marries the English King’s daughter,

¹ The Historie of HamhleU, an English prose translation of Belleforest, appeared in 1608. It was doubtless one of many tributes to the interest in the topic which Shakespeare’s drama stimulated among his fellow- countrymen.

and returns to the Danish Court to find his funeral in course of celebration. He succeeds in setting fire'to the palace and he kills his uncle while he is seeking to escape the flames. Amleth finally becomes King of Denmark, only to encounter a fresh series of crude misadventures which issue in his violent death.

Much reconstruction was obviously imperative before Hamlet’s legendary experiences could be converted into tragedy of however rudimentary a type. Shakespeare was spared the pains of applying the first spade to the unpromising soil. The first Elizabethan play which presented Hamlet’s tragic fortunes has not survived, save possibly in a few fragments, which are imbedded in a piratical and crudely printed first edition of Shakespeare’s later play, as well as in a free German adaptation of somewhat mysterious origin.¹ But external evidence proves that an old piece called ‘Hamlet’ was in existence in 1589 —• soon after Shakespeare joined the theatrical profession. In that year the pamphleteer Tom The old Nashe credited a writer whom he called ‘Eng- Polish Seneca’ with the capacity of penning ‘whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.’ Nashe’s ‘English Seneca’ may be safely identified with Thomas Kyd, a dramatist whose bombastic and melodramatic ‘Spanish Tragedie, containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio and Bel-Imperia, with the pittiful death of olde Hieronimo,’ was written about 1586, and held the

¹ See p. 362 infra. Der Bestrafle Brudermord, odor Prinz Hamlet aus Diinnemark, the German piece, which seems to preserve fragments of the old Hamlet, was first printed in Berlin in 1781 from a MS. in the Dresden library, dated 1710. The drama originally belonged to the repertory of one of the English companies touring early in Germany. The crude German piece, while apparently based on the old Hamlet, bears many signs of awkward revision in the light of Shakespeare’s subsequent version. Much ingenuity has been devoted to a discussion of the precise relations of Der Bestrafle Brudermord to the First Quarto and Second Quarto texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as to the old lost play. (See A. Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany,_ cv. seq.; 237 seq.; Gustav Tanger in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiii. pp. 224 seq.; Wilhelm Creizenach in Modern Philology, Chicago, 1904-5, ii. 249-260; and M. Blakemore Evans, ibid. ii. 433-449).

breathless attention of the average Elizabethan playgoer for at least a dozen years.¹ Kyd’s ‘ Spanish Trag- edie’ anticipates with some skill the leading motive and an important part of the machinery of Shakespeare’s play. Kyd’s hero Hieronimo seeks to avenge the murder of his son Horatio in much the same spirit as Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet seeks to avenge his father’s Kyd’s death. Horatio, the friend of Shakespeare’s authorship. Hamlet, is called after the victim of Kyd’s tragedy. Hieronimo, moreover, by way of testing his suspicions of those whom he believes to be his son Horatio’s murderers, devises a play the performance of which is a crucial factor in the development of the plot. A ghost broods over the whole action in agreement with the common practice of the Latin tragedian Seneca. The most distinctive scenic devices qf Shakespeare’s tragedy manifestly lay within the range of Kyd’s dramatic faculty and experience. The Danish legend knew nothing of¹ the ghost or the interpolated play. There is abundant external proof that in one scene of the lost play of ‘Hamlet’ the ghost of the hero’s father exclaimed ‘Hamlet, revenge.’ Those words, indeed, deeply impressed the playgoing public in the last years of the sixteenth century and formed a popular catch- phrase in Elizabethan speech long before Shakespeare brought his genius to bear on the Danish tale. Kyd may justly be credited with the first invention of a play of ‘Hamlet’ on the tragic fines which Shakespeare’s genius expanded and subtilised.²

¹ According to Dekker’s Satiromastix, Ben Jonson himself played the part of Hieronimo in the Spanish Tragedie on a provincial tour, when he first joined the profession. In 1602 Jonson made ‘additions’ to Kyd’s popular pitece, and thus tried to secure for it a fresh lease of life. (Kyd’s Works, ed. Boas, lxxxiv-v.) The superior triumph of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the same season may well have been regarded by Jonson’s foes as another ‘purging pill’ for him.

² Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd’s work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current catch-phrase ‘Go by, Jeronimy,’ which owed its currency to words in The Spanish Tragedie. Shakespeare, too, quotes verbatim a line from

The old ‘Hamlet’ enjoyed in the London theatres almost as long a spell of favour as Kyd’s ‘Spanish Tragedie.’ On June 9, 1594, it was revived at _Revivals the Newington Butts theatre, when the Lord of the old Chamberlain’s men, Shakespeare’s company, ‘^Hamlet-’ were co-operating there with the Lord Admiral’s men.¹ A little later Thomas Lodge, in a pamphlet called ‘ Wits Miserie’ (1596), mentioned ‘the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator like an oister wife Hamlet revenge.’ Lodge’s words suggest a fresh revival of the original piece at the Shoreditch playhouse. In the ‘Satiromastix’ of 1601 the blustering Captain Tucca mocks Horace (Ben Jonson) with the sentences:¹ ‘My name’s Hamlet Revenge; thou hast been at Parris Garden, hast not ? ’² This gibe implies yet another revival of the old tragedy in 1601 at a third playhouse — the Paris Garden theatre.

There is little reason to doubt that Shakespeare’s new interpretation of the popular fable was first The recep- acted at the Globe theatre in the early winter ^{tion of} of 1602, not long after the polemical ‘Satiro- _spear?s mastix’ had run its course on the same boards.³ tweedy. Burbage created the title rdle of the Prince of Denmark

the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (1. i. 271): ‘In time the savage hull doth hear the yoke’; hut Kyd practically horrowed that line from Watson’s Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it first.

¹ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 164.

² Horace [i.e. Jonson] replies that he has played ‘Zulziman’ at Paris Garden. , ‘Soliman’ is the name of a character in the interpolated play scene of the Spanish Tragedie and also of the hero of another of Kyd’s tragedies — Soliman and Perseda.

³ Tucca’s scornful mention of ‘Hamlet’ in Satiromastix was uttered on Shakespeare’s stage hy a fellow-actor in November 1601. Tucca’s words presume that only the old play of Hamlet was then in existence, and that Shakespeare’s own play on the subject had not yet seen the light. The dramatist’s fellow players scored a very pronounced success vrith the production of Shakespeare’s piece, and it was out of the question that they should make its hero’s name a term of reproach after they had produced Shakespeare’s tragedy. Some difficulty as to the date is suggested hy the statement in all the printed versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, beginning with the first quarto of 1603, that ‘the tragedians

with impressive effect; but the dramatic triumph was as warmly acknowledged by readers of the piece as by the spectators in the playhouse. An early appreciation is extant in the handwriting of the critical scholar Gabriel Harvey. Soon after the play was made accessible to readers, Harvey wrote of it thus: ‘ The younger sort Gabriel takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Harvey’s Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of comment. u_aml_et, Prince of Denmarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort.’¹ Many dramatists of repute

of.the city’ had been lately forced to ‘travel’ in the country through the menacing rivalry of the boy actors in London. No positive evidence is at hand to prove any unusual provincial activity on the part of Shakespeare’s company or any other company of men actors during the seasons of 1600 or of 1601. Such partial research in municipal records as has yet been undertaken gives no specific indication that Shakespeare’s company was out of London between 1597 and 1602, although three unspecified companies of actors are shown by the City Chamberlain's accounts to have visited Oxford in 1601. But the accessible knowledge of the men actors’ provincial experience is too fragmentary to offer safe guidance as to their periods of absence from London. (See p. 83 supra.) Examination of municipal records has shed much light on actors’ country tours. But the research has not yet been exhaustive. The municipal archives ignore, moreover, the men’s practice of performing at country fairs and at country houses, and few clues to such engagements survive. The absence of recorded testimony is not therefore conclusive evidence of the failure of itinerant players to give provincial performances during this or that season or in this or that place. Shakespeare’s implication that the leading adult actors were much out of London in the course of the years 1600-1 is'in the circumstances worthier of acceptance than any inference from collateral negative premisses.

¹ The precise date at which Gabriel Harvey penned these sentences is difficult to determine. They figure in a long and disjointed series of autograph comments on current literature which Harvey inserted in a copy of Speght’s edition of Chaucer published in 1598 (see Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, pp. 232-3). Throughout the volume Harvey scattered many manuscript notes, and on the title- page and on the last page of the printed text he attached the date 1598 to his own signature, sufficient proof that he acquired the book in the year of its publication. There is no ground for assuming that Harvey’s mention of Hamlet was made in the same year. Francis Meres failed to include Hamlet in the full list of Shakespeare’s successful plays which he supplied late in 1598 in his Palladis Tamia; and Harvey, who was through life in the habit of scribbling in the margin of his books, clearly annotated his Speght’s Chaucer at idle hours in the course of various years. Little which is of strict chronological pertinence is deducible

were soon echoing lines from the successful piece, while familiar reference was made to ‘mad Hamlet’ by the pamphleteers. In the old play the ghost had excited popular enthusiasm; in Shakespeare’s Anthony tragedy the personality of the Prince of Den- Scoioker’s mark riveted public attention. In 1604 one ^notlce' Anthony Scoloker published a poetical rhapsody called ‘Daiphantus or the Passions of Loue.’ In an eccentric appeal ‘To the Reader’ the writer commends in general terms the comprehensive attractions of ‘friendly Shakespeare’s tragedies ’; as for the piece of writing on which he was engaged he disavows the hope that it should ‘please all like prince Hamlet,’ adding somewhat ambiguously ‘then it were to be feared [it] would run mad.’ In the course of the poem which follows the ‘Epistle,’ Scoloker, describing the maddening effects of love, credits his lover with emulating Hamlet’s behaviour. He

Puts off his clothes; his shirt he only wears

Much like mad-Hamlet.

from the dates of publication of the poetical works, which he strings together in' the long note containing the reference to Hamlet. One sentence ‘The Earle of Essex much commendes Albion’s England’ might suggest at a first glance that Harvey was writing at any rate before February 1601, when the Earl of Essex was executed. Yet much of the context makes it plain that Harvey uses the present tense in the historic fashion. In a later sentence he includes in a list of ‘ our flourishing metricians’ the poet Watson, who was dead in 1592. He wrote of Watson in the present tense long after the poet ceased to live. A succeeding laudatory mention of John Owen’s New Epigrams which were first published in 1606 supports the inference that Harvey penned his note several years after Speght’s Chaucer was acquired. No light is therefore thrown by Harvey on the precise date of the composition or of the first performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Harvey’s copy of Speght’s Chaucer (1598) was in the eighteenth century in the possession of Dr. Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore. George Steevens, in his edition of Shakespeare, 1773, cited the manuscript note respecting Hamlet while the book formed part of Bishop Percy’s library, and Malone commented on Steevens’s transcript in letters to Bishop Percy and in his Variorum edition, 1821, ii. 369 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Memoranda on Hamlet, 1879, pp. 46-9). The volume, which was for a long time assumed to be destroyed, now belongs to Miss Meade,_ great-granddaughter of Bishop Percy. The whole of Harvey’s note is reproduced in facsimile and is fully annotated in Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-on-Avon, 1913).

Parodying Hamlet’s speech to the players, Scoloker’s hero calls ‘players fools’ and threatens to ‘learn them action.’¹ Thus as early as 1604 Shakespeare’s reconstruction of the old play was receiving explicit marks of popular esteem.

The bibliography of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ offers a puzzling problem. On July 26, 1602, ‘A Book called the Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it kmoflts was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his pubiica- Servants,’ was entered on the Stationers’ Company’s Registers by the printer James Roberts, and it was published in quarto next year by N[icholas] L[ing] and John Trundell.² The title-page The First ^{ran: 1} The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince Quarto, of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare. As ^l6°³' it hath beene diuerse times acted by his High- nesse Seruants in the Cittie of London as also in the

¹ Scoloker’s work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in 1880.

² Although James Roberts obtained on July 26, 1602, the Stationers’ Company’s license for the publication of Hamlet, and although he printed the Second Quarto of 1604, he had no hand in the First Quarto of 1603, which was in all regards a piracy. Its chief promoter was Nicholas Ling, a bookseller and puhlisher, not a printer, who had taken up his freedom as a stationer in 1579, and was called into the livery in 1598. He was himself a man of letters, having designed a series of collected aphorisms in four volumes, of which the second was the well-known Palladis Tamia (1598) by Francis Meres. Ling compiled and puhlished both the first volume of the series called Politeupheuia (1597), and the third called Wit’s Theatre 0f the Little World (1599). In 1607 he temporarily acquired some interest in the publication of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet (Arher, iii. 337, 365). With Ling there was associated in the unprincipled venture of the First Quarto of Hamlet, John Trundell, a stationer of small account. He took up his freedom as a stationer on October 29, 1597, hut the Hamlet of 1603 was the earliest volume on the title-page of which he figured. He had no other connection with Shakespeare’s works. Ben Jonson derisively introduced Trundell’s name as that of a notorious dealer in broadside ballads into Every Man in his Humour (1. ii. 63 folio edition, 1616). The printer of the First Quarto, who is unnamed on the title-page, has been identified with Valentine Simmes, who was often in difficulties for unlicensed and irregular printing. But Simmes had much experience in printing Shakespeare’s plays; from his press came the First Quartos of Richard III (1597), Richard II (1597), 2 Henry IV (1600), and Much Ado (1600). (Cf. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 73 seq.; Mr, H. R. Plomer in Library, April 1906, pp. 153-5.)

two Uniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.’ The Lord Chamberlain’s servants were not known as ‘His Highnesse seruants’ — the (designation bestowed on them on the title-page — before their formal enrolment as King James’s players on May 19, 1603.¹ It was therefore after that date that the First Quarto saw the light.²

The First Quarto of ‘ Hamlet ’ was a surreptitious issue. The text is crude and imperfect, and there is little doubt that it was prepared from shorthand notes _{The defects} taken from the actor’s lips during an early of the First performance at the theatre. But the dis- ^Quart0- crepancies between its text and that of more authentic editions of a later date cannot all be assigned to the incompetence of the ‘copy’ from which the printer worked. The numerous divergences touch points of construction which are beyond the scope of a reporter or a copyist. The transcript followed, however lamely, a draft of the piece which was radically revised before ‘Hamlet’ appeared in print again.

The First Quarto furnishes 2143 lines — scarcely half as many as the Second Quarto, which gives the play substantially its accepted form. Several of the characters appear in the First Quarto under unfamiliar names;

¹ See p. 375 infra.

² The further statement on the title-page, that the piece was acted not only in the City of London but at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, is perplexing. At both Oxford and Cambridge the academic authorities did all they could, from 1589 onwards, to prevent performances by the touring companies withm the University precincts. The Vice-Chancellor made it a practice to bribe visiting actors with sums varying from ten to forty shillings to refrain from playing. The municipal officers did not, however,, share the prejudice of their academic neighbours, and according to the accounts of the City Chamberlain, as many as three companies, which the documents unluckily omit to specify individually by name, gave performances in the City of Oxford during the year 1600-1. It was only the towns of Oxford and Cambridge and not the universities themselves which could have given Shakespeare’s Hamlet an early welcome. The misrepresentation on the title-page is in keeping with the general inaccuracy of the First Quarto text. (See F. S. Boas, ‘Hamlet at the Universities’ in Fortnightly Review, August 1913, and his University Drama, 1914.)

Polonius is called Corambis, Reynaldo Montano.¹ Some notable speeches — ‘To be or not to be’ for speare’s example — appear at a different stage of the firstrough action from that which was finally allotted ¹ them. One scene (11. 1247-82) has no counter

part in other editions; there the Queen suffers herself to be convinced by Horatio of her second husband’s infamous character; in signal conflict with her attitude of mind in the subsequent version, she acknowledges

treason in his [i.e. King Claudius’s] lookes That seem’d to sugar or’e his villanie.

Through the last three acts the rhythm of the blank verse and the vocabulary are often reminiscent of Kyd’s acknowledged work,² and lack obvious affinity with Shakespeare’s style. The collective evidence suggests that the First Quarto presents with much typographical disfigurement Shakespeare’s first experiment with the theme. His design of a sweeping reconstruction of the old play was not fully worked out, and a few fragments of the original material were suffered for the time to remain.³

A revised edition of Shakespeare’s work, printed from

¹ Osric is only known as ‘A Braggart Gentleman’ and Francisco ‘A sentinel,’ but here the shorthand notetaker may have failed to catch the specific names.

² Kyd’s Works, ed. Boas, pp. riv-liv—‘The Ur-Hamlet’; cf. G. Sarrazin, ‘Entstehung der Hamlet-tragSdie ’ in Anglia xii-iv.

³ No other theory fits the conditions of the problem. Both omissions and interpolations make it clear that the transcriber of the First Quarto was not dependent on Shakespeare’s final version, nor is there ground for crediting the transcriber with the ability to foist by his own initiative reminiscences of the old piece on a defective shorthand report of Shakespeare’s complete play. An internal discrepancy of construction which Shakespeare’s later version failed to remove touches the death of Ophelia. According to the Queen’s familiar speech (iv. vii. 167-84) the girl is the fatal victim of a pure accident. The bough of a willow tree, on which she rests while serenely gathering wild flowers, snaps and flings her into the brook where she is drowned. Yet in the scene of her burial all the references to her death assume that she committed suicide. It looks as if in the old play Ophelia took her own life, and that while Shakespeare altered her mode of death in act iv. sc. vii. he failed to reconcile with the change the comment on Ophelia’s end in act v. sc. i. which echoed the original drama.

a far more complete and accurate manuscript, was published in 1604. This quarto volume bore the title : ‘The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, by William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie.’ The printer was I[ames] R[oberts] and the publisher Nicholas] Lpng].¹ The concluding words—-‘according to the true and per- _TheSecond feet coppie’ — of the title-page of the Second Quarto, Quarto authoritatively stamped its predecessor ^l6°⁴' as surreptitious and unauthentic. A second impression of the Second Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ bore the date 1605, but was otherwise unaltered. Ling, the publisher of the First Quarto, and not Roberts, the original licensee and printer of the Second Quarto, would seem to have been recognised as owner of copyright in the piece. On November 19, 1607, there was transferred, with other literary property, to a different publisher, John Smethwick, ‘A booke called Hamlet . . . Whiche dyd be- longe to Nicholas Lynge.’² Smethwick published a Fourth Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ in 1611 as well as a Fifth Quarto which was undated. Both follow the guidance of the Second Quarto. The Second Quarto is carelessly printed and awkwardly punctuated, and there are signs that the ‘copy’ had been curtailed for acting purposes. But the Second Quarto presents the fullest of all extant versions of the play. It numbers nearly 4000 lines, and is by far the longest of Shakespeare’s dramas.³

¹ The printer of the Second Quarto, James Roberts, who_ held the Stationers’ Company’s license of July 26, 1602 for the publication of Hamlet, had clearly come to terms with Nicholas Ling, the piratical publisher of the First Quarto. Roberts, who was printer and publisher of ‘the players’ bills,’ had been concerned in 1600 in the publication of Titus Andronicus (see p. 132), of the Merchant of Venice (see p. 137 n. 2), and of the Midsummer Night’s Dream (see p. 231 ».). He also obtained a license for the publication of Troilus and Cressida in r6o3 (see pp. 365-6).

² Stationers’ Company’s Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 365.

³ Hamlet is thus some three hundred lines longer than Richard III — the play by Shakespeare that approaches it most closely in numerical

strength of lines.

A third version (long the textus receptus) figured in the Folio of 1623. Here some hundred lines which are want- The First *^n
t^^ie q^uartos appear for the first time.

Folio The Folio’s additions include the full account Version. q_uarrel between the men actors and the

boys, and some uncomplimentary references to Denmark in the same scene. Both these passages may well have been omitted from the Second Quarto of 1604 in deference to James I’s Queen Anne, who was a Danish princess and an active patroness of the ‘ children-players.’ At the same time more than two hundred lines which figure in the Second Quarto are omitted from the Folio. Among the deleted passages is one of Hamlet’s most characteristic soliloquies (‘How all occasions do inform against me’) with the preliminary observations which give him his cue (iv. iv. 9-66). The Folio text clearly followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated somewhat more drastically than the Second Quarto and in a different fashion.¹ But the printers did their work more accurately than their predecessors. A collation of the First Folio with the Second Quarto is essential to the formation of a satisfactory text of the play. An endeavour of the kind was first made on scholarly lines by Lewis Theobald in his ‘Shakespeare Restor’d’ (1726). Theobald’s text, with further embellishments by Sir Thomas Hanmer, Edward Capell, and the Cambridge editors of 1866, is now generally adopted.

Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ has since its first production

attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and

_ readers of all capacities than any other of his

Permanent , „ ^{r J} ,

popularity plays. Jbrom no piece of literature have so

‘Hamlet.’ ^many phrases passed into colloquial speech.

Its world-wide popularity from its author’s day to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres

^ ¹ Cf. Hamlet — parallel texts of the First and Second Quarto, and First Folio — ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; Tfus Devonshire Hamlets, i860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins.

of France and Germany as in those of the British Empire and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare’s dramatic instinct. The old barbarous legend lias been transfigured, and its coarse brutalities are sublimated in a new atmosphere of subtle thought. At a tirst glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting. Shakespeare’s ‘ Hamlet ’ is mainly a psychological effort, a study of the retleetive temperament in excess. The action develops slowly; at times there is no movement at all. The piece in its final shape is not only the longest of Shakespeare's dramas, but the total length of Hamlet’s speeches far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any othe* of his characters. Humorous and quite original relief is effectively supplied to the tragic theme by the garrulities of Polonius and the rustic grave-diggers. The controversial references to contemporary theatrical history (n- ii. 350-89) could only count on a patient hearing from a sympathetic Elizabethan audience, but the pungent censure of actors’ perennial defects is calculated to catch the ear of the average playgoer of all ages. The minor characters are vividly elaborated. But it is not to these subsidiary features that the universality of the play’s vogue can be attributed. It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare contrives to excite in the character of the hero that explains the position of the play in popular esteem. The play's unrivalled power of attraction lies in the pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every calibre by the central figure--a high-born youth of chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who, when stirred to avenge in action a desperate private wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain that paralyse the will. The pedigree of the conception flings a flood of light on the magical property of Shakespeare’s individual genius.

Although the difficulties of determining the date of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ are very great, there are many

grounds for assigning its composition to the early days of 1603. Four years before, in i599> the dramatists ‘Troiius Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Philip and^{01 US} Henslowe to prepare a play of identical name for Cressida.’ ^ g_arj ₀f Nottingham’s (formerly the Lord Admiral’s) company —the chief rival of Shakespeare’s company among the men actors. Of the pre-Shake- spearean drama of ‘Troiius and Cressida,’ only a fragment of the plot or scenario survives. There is small doubt that that piece suggested the topic to Shakespeare, although he did not follow it closely.¹ On February 7, 1602-3, James Roberts, the original licensee of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet,’ obtained a license for ‘the booke of “Troiius and Cresseda” as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men (i.e. Shakespeare’s company),² to print when he has gotten sufficient authority for it.’ Roberts’s ‘book’ was probably Shakespeare’s play. Roberts, who printed the Second Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ and others of Shakespeare’s plays, failed in his effort to send ‘Troiius’ to press. The interposition of the players for the time defeated his effort to get ‘ sufficient authority for it.’ But the metrical characteristics of Shakespeare’s ‘ Troiius and Cressida ’ — the regularity of the blank verse — powerfully confirm the date of composition which Roberts’s abortive license suggests. Six years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9, ^a new license for the issue of ‘a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida’ was granted to other publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley,³ and these publishers, more fortunate than Roberts, soon issued a quarto bearing on the title-page Shakespeare’s full name as author and the date

¹ The ‘plot’ of a play on the subject of Troiius and Cressida which may be attributed to Dekker and Chettle is preserved in the British Museum MSS. Addit. 10449 f- 5- This was first printed in Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, p. 142. Eleven lines in the 1610 edition of Histrio- mastix (Act iii. 11. 269-79) parody a scene in Shakespeare’s Troiius (v. ii.). Histriomastix was first produced in 1599. The passage in the edition of 1610 is clearly an interpolation of uncertain date and gives no clue to the year of composition or production of Shakespeare’s piece.

² Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 226. ³ Ibid., 4⁰⁰-

1609. The volume was printed by George Eld, but the typography is not a good specimen of his customary skill.

Exceptional obscurity attaches to the circumstances of the publication. Some copies of the book bear an ordinary type of title-page stating that ‘The _Xhepub Historie of Troylus and Cresseida ’ was printed iication ‘as it was acted by the King’s Majesties ^{of l6}°⁹' seruants at the Globe,’ and that it was ‘written by William Shakespeare.’ But in other copies, which differ in no way in regard either to the text of the play or to the publishers’ imprint, there was substituted a more pretentious title-page running: ‘The famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the beginning of their loues with the conceited wooing of Pan- darus, prince of Licia, written by William Shakespeare.’ This pompous description was followed, for the first and only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare published in his lifetime, by an advertisement or preface superscribed ‘A never writer to an ever reader. News.’ The anonymous pen supplies in the interest of the publishers a series of high-flown but well-deserved compliments to Shakespeare as a writer of comedies.¹ ‘Troilus and Cressida’ was declared to be the equal of the best work

¹ The tribute is worthy of note. The most eulogistic sentences run thus: ‘Were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main grace of their gravities; especially this author’s comedies that are so framed to the fife, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit, that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. And all such dull and heavy witted worldlings as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations have found that wit that they never found in themselves, and have parted better witted than they came; feeling an edge of wit set upon them more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies, that they seem (for their height of pleasure) to be born in that sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this: and had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not (for so much as will make you think your testem well bestowed); but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it, deserves such a labour as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautjis.’

of Terence and Plautus, and there was defiant boasting that the ‘grand possessors’—i.e. the theatrical owners— of the manuscript deprecated its publication. By way of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and unacted, that it was ‘a new play never staled with the stage, never clapperclawed with the palms of the vulgar.’ The purchaser was adjured: ‘ Refuse not nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude.’ This address was possibly a brazen reply of the publishers to a more than usually emphatic protest on the part of players or dramatist against the printing of the piece. The ‘copy’ seemed to follow a The First version of the play which had escaped theatrical Folio revision or curtailment, and may have reached version. ^ p_ress with the corrupt connivance of a scrivener in the authors’ and managers’ confidence. The editors of the First Folio evinced distrust of the Quarto edition by printing their text from a different copy, but its deviations were not always for the better. The Folio ‘copy,’ however, supplied Shakespeare’s prologue to the play for the first time.¹

The work, which in point of construction shows signs of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the Treatment l^east attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare’s of the middle life. In matter and manner ‘Troilus ' and Cressida’ combines characteristic features

of its author’s early and late performances. His imagery

¹ A curious uncertainty as to the place which the piece should occupy in their volume was evinced by the First Folio editors. They began by printing it in their section of tragedies after Romeo and Juliet. With that tragedy of love Troilus and Cressida’s cynical denodment awkwardly contrasts, nor is the play, strictly speaking, a tragedy. Both hero and heroine leave the scene alive, and the death in the closing pages of Hector at Achilles’ hand is no regular climax. Ultimately the piece was given a detached place without pagination between the close of_ the section of ‘Histories’ and the opening of the section of ‘Tragedies.’ The editors’ perplexities are reflected in their preliminary table or catalogue of contents, in which Troilus and Cressida finds no mention at all. See First Folio Facsimile, ed. Sidney Lee, Introduction, xxvii-xxix.

is sometimes as fantastic as in ‘Romeo and Juliet’; elsewhere his intuition is as penetrating as in ‘King Lear.’ The problem resembles that which is presented by ‘All’s Well’ and may be solved by the assumption that the play was begun by Shakespeare in his early days, and was completed in the season of maturity. The treatment of the strange Trojan love story from which the piece takes its name savours of Shakespeare’s youthful hand, while the complementary scenes, which the Greek leaders and soldiers dominate, bear trace of a more mature pen.

The story is based not on the Homeric poem of Troy but on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which a fertile mediaeval imagination quite irrespon- source of sibly wove round Homeric names. ' Both ^the P^Iot- Troilus, the type of loyal love, and Cressida, the type of perjured love, were children of the twelfth century and of no classical era. The literature of the Middle Ages first gave them their general fame, which the literature of the Renaissance steadily developed.

Boccaccio first bestowed literary form on the tale of

Troilus and his fickle mistress in his epic of ‘ Filostrato ’ of

1348, and on that foundation Chaucer built his touching

poem of ‘Troylus and Criseyde’ — the longest of all his

poetic narratives. To Chaucer the story owed its wide

English vogue ¹ and from him Shakespeare’s love story

in the play took its cue. No pair of lovers is more

often cited than Troilus and his faithless mistress by

Elizabethan poets, and Shakespeare, long before he

finished his play, introduced their names in familiar

allusion in ‘ The Merchant of Venice ’ (v. i. 4) and in

‘Twelfth Night’ (m. i. 59). The military and political

episodes in the wars of Trojans and Greeks, with which

Shakespeare encircles his romance, are traceable to two

mediaeval books easily accessible to Elizabethans, which

¹ Cressida’s name in Benoit de Ste. More’s Roman de Troyes, where her story was first told in the twelfth century, appears as Briseide, a derivative from the Homeric Briseis. Boccaccio converted, the name into Griseide and Chaucer into Criseyde, whence Cressida easily developed.

2 B

both adapt in different ways the far famed Guido della Colonna’s fantastic reconstruction or expansion of the Homeric myth in the thirteenth century; the first of these authorities was Lydgate’s ‘Troy booke,’ a long verse rendering of Colonna’s ‘Historia Trojana,’ and the second was Caxton’s ‘Recuyell of the his- toryes of Troy/ a prose translation of a French epitome of Colonna. Shakespeare may have read the first instalment of Chapman’s great translation of Homer’s , Iliad, of which two volumes appeared in 1598

Shake-............ ’ , . . , 1 /• •

speare’s — one containing seven books (1. n. vn. vm. ix.

acceptance _x ^ \ _an(j ₀ther, called ‘Achilles’ Shield,’

of a medi- ' , ,

aval containing book xvm. But the drama owed tradition. _nothi_ng to Homer’s epic. Its picture of the Homeric world was a fruit of the mediaeval falsifications. At one point the dramatist diverges from his authorities with notable originality. Cressida figures in his play as a heartless coquette; the poets who had previously treated her story — Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Robert Henryson, the Scottish writer who echoed Chaucer — had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on their scorn. But Shakespeare’s innovation is dramatically effective, and deprives fickleness in love of any false glamour. It is impossible to sustain the charge frequently brought against the dramatist that he gave proof of a new and original vein of cynicism, when, in ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ he disparaged the Greek heroes of classical antiquity by investing them with contemptible characteristics. Guido della Colonna and the authorities whom Shakespeare followed invariably condemn Homer’s glorification of the Greeks and depreciate their characters and exploits. Shakespeare indeed does the Greek chieftains Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon a better justice than his guides, for whatever those veterans’ moral defects he concentrated in their speeches a marvellous wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has fortunately obtained proverbial currency. Otherwise

Shakespeare’s conception of.the Greeks ran on the traditional mediaeval lines. His presentation of Achilles as a brutal coward is entirely loyal to the spirit of Guido della Colonna, whose veracity was unquestioned by Shakespeare or his tutors. Shakespeare’s portrait interpreted the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride with which the warrior was credited by Homer’s mediaeval expositors.

Shakespeare’s treatment of his theme cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Irony at the expense of classical hero-worship was a common note of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare had already caught a touch of it when he portrayed Julius Caesar, not in the fulness of the Dictator’s powers, but in a pitiable condition of physical and mental decrepitude, and he was subsequently to show his tolerance of prescriptive habits of disparagement by contributing to the two pseudo-classical pieces of ‘ Pericles ’ and ‘Timon of Athens.’ Shakespeare worked in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ over well-seasoned specimens of mediaeval romance, which were uninfluenced by the true classical spirit. Mediaeval romance adumbrated at all points Shakespeare’s unheroic treatment of the Homeric heroes.¹

¹ Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by F. G. Fleay and George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shakespeare’s contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor- friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced with equal bitterness Marston, despite Marston’s antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack hy Jonson’s foes. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the periQd of the war between Jonson, Dekker, and Marston, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 342 seq. and especially pp. 349-50). Another untenable theory represents Troilus and Cressida as a splenetic attack on George Chapman, the translator of Homer and champion of classical literature (see Acheson’s Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, 1903).

Despite the suspicions of sympathy with the Earl of Essex’s revolt which the players of Shakespeare’s com- Last per- pany incurred and despite their stubborn formances controversy with the Children of the Chapel Queen Royal, Shakespeare and his colleagues main- Eiizabeth. tained their hold on the favour of the Court till the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. No political anxiety was suffered to interrupt the regular succession of their appearances on the royal stage. On Boxing Day 1600 and on the succeeding Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s company was at Whitehall rendering as usual a comedy or interlude each night. Within little more than a month Essex made his sorry attempt at rebellion in the City of London (on February 9, 1600-1) and on Shrove Tuesday (February 24) Queen Elizabeth signed her favourite’s death warrant. Yet on the evening of that most critical day —■ barely a dozen hours before the Earl’s execution within the precincts of the Tower of London — Shakespeare’s band of players produced at Whitehall one more play in the sovereign’s presence. As the disturbed year ended, the guests beneath the royal roof were exceptionally few,¹ but the acting company’s exertions were not relaxed at Court. During the next Christmas season Shakespeare’s company revisited

¹ Cf. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, vol. 283, no. 48 (Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, Dec. 29, 1601): ‘There has been such a small court this Christmas that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.’ Besides the plays at Court this Christmas the Queen witnessed one performed,in her honour at Lord Hunsdon’s house in Blackfriars, presumably by Shakespeare’s company of which Lord Hunsdon, then Lord Chamberlain, was the patron [ibid.).

372

Whitehall no less than four times — on Boxing Day and St. John’s Day (December 27, 1601) as well as on New Year’s Day and Shrove Sunday (February 14, 1601-2).¹ Their services were requisitioned once again on Boxing Day, 1602, but Queen Elizabeth’s days were then at length numbered. On Candlemas Day (February 2)

1602-3, the company travelled to Richmond, Surrey, whither the Queen had removed in vain hope of recovering her failing health, and there for the last time Shakespeare and his friends offered her a dramatic entertain-r ment.² She lived only seven weeks longer. On March 24, 1602-3, ^sh^e breathed her last at Richmond.³ , The literary ambitions of Henry Chettle, Shakespeare’s early eulogist and Robert Greene’s publisher, had long withdrawn him from the publishing trade. At _Shake_ the end of the century he was making a penuri- speare and ous livelihood by ministering with vast industry Queen’s to the dramatic needs of the Lord Admiral’s ^death- company of players. ‘The London Florentine,’ the last piece (now lost) which was prepared for presentation by the Lord Admiral’s men before Queen Elizabeth early in March 1602-3, ^was from the pen of Chettle in partnership with Thomas H₍eywood, and for its rendering at Court Chettle prepared a special prologue and epilogue.⁴ It was not unfitting that the favoured author should interrupt his dramatic labour in order to commemorate the Queen’s death. His tribute was a pastoral elegy (of mingled verse and prose) .called ‘England’s Mourning Garment.’ It appeared just after the Sovereign’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on April 28. Into

¹ E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. (1907), vol. ii. p. 12.

² Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 105 seq.; Cunningham, Revels, xxxii. seq.

³ After the last performance of Shakespeare’s company at the Palace of Richmond and before the Queen’s death, Edward Alleyn with the Lord Admiral’s company twice acted before her there — once on Shrove 5un(.<»y (March 6), and again a day or two later on an unspecified date. See Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 138;. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i. 171-3; Cunningham, Revels, xxxiv.

⁴ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i. 173.

his loyal panegyric the zealous elegist wove expressions of surprised regret that the best known poets of the day had withheld their pens from his own great theme. Under fanciful names in accordance with the pastoral convention, Chettle, who himself assumed Spenser’s pastoral title of Colin, appealed to Daniel, Drayton, Chapman, Ben Jonson, and others to make Elizabeth’s royal name ‘live in their lively verse.’ Nor was Shakespeare, whose progress Chettle had watched with sympathy, omitted from the list of neglectful singers. ‘The silver-tongued Melicert’ was the pastoral appellation under which Chettle lightly concealed the great dramatist’s identity. Deeply did he grieve that Shakespeare should forbear to

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare,

To mourne her death that graced his desert,

And to his laies opened her royal eare.

The apostrophe closed with the lines :

Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth,

And sing her Rape done by our Tarquin Death.

The reference to Shakespeare’s poem of ‘Lucrece’ left the reader in no doubt of the writer’s meaning.¹ But there were critics of the day who deemed Shakespeare better employed than on elegies of royalty. Testimonies to the worth of the late Queen flowed in abundance from the pens of ballad-mongers whose ineptitudes were held by many to profane ‘great majesty.’ A satiric wit heaped scorn on Chettle who

calde to Shakespeare, Jonson, Greene To write of their dead noble Queene.

Any who responded to the invitation, the satirist suggested, would deserve to suffer at the stake for poetical heresy.²

¹ England’s Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3, reprinted in Shak- spere Allusion Books (New Shak. Soc. 1874), ed. C. M. Ingleby, p. 98.

²‘Epigrams ... By I. C. Gent.,’ London [1604?], No. 12; see Shakspere Allusion Books, pp. 121—2. The author I. C. is unidentified. His reference to ‘Greene’ is to Thomas Greene, the popular comedian.

Save on -grounds of patriotic sentiment, the Queen’s death justified no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare, lie had no material reason for mourning. j_amc#r» On the withdrawal of one royal patron he and ^accc,8lon. his friends at once found another, who proved far more liberal and appreciative. Under the immediate auspices of the new King and Queen, dramatists and actors enjoyed a prosperity and a consideration which improved on every precedent.

On May iq, 1603, James I, very soon after his accession, extended to Shakespeare and other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company a very marked and valuable recognition. To them he granted ™tent^yto under royal letters patent a license ‘freely Shake- to use and exercise the arte and facultie of JSmpany, playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enter- May 19, , iudes, moralls, pastoralles, stage-plaies, and ' such other like as they have already studied, or hereafter shall use or studio as well for the recreation of our loving subjectes as for our solaee and pleasure, when we shall thinke good to see them during our pleasure.’ The Globe theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, but permission was granted lo them to perform in the town-hall or moot-hall or other convenient place in any country town. Nine actors were alone mentioned individually by name. Other members of the company were merely described as ‘the rest of their associates.’ Lawrence Fletcher stood first on the list; he had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 and 1601. Shakespeare cann second and Burbage third. There followed Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, shake- and Richard Cowley. The company to which JP_r^e₀^a₀™“⁸ Shakespeare and his colleagues belonged was ₀f the thenceforth styled the King’s company, its Chamber, members became ‘the king’s Servants.’ In accordance, moreover, with a precedent created by Queen Elizabeth in 1583, they were numbered among the Grooms of the

Chamber.¹ The like rank was conferred on the members of the company which was taken at the same time into the patronage of James I’s Queen-consort Anne of Denmark, and among Queen Anne’s new Grooms of the Chamber was the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood, whose career was always running parallel with that of the great poet. Shakespeare’s new status as a complementary member of the royal household had material advantages. In that capacity he and his fellows received from time to time cloth wherewith to provide themselves liveries, and a small fixed salary of 525. 4d. a year. Gifts of varying amount were also made them at festive seasons by the controller of the royal purse at the Sovereign’s pleasure and distinguished royal guests gave them presents. The household office of Groom of the Chamber was for the most part honorary,² but occasionally the actors were required to perform the duties of Court

¹ The royal license of May 19, 1603, was first printed from the patent roll in Rymer’s Feeder a (1715), xvi. 505, and has been very often reprinted (cf. Malone Soc. Coll. 19x1, vol. i. 264). At the same time the Earl of Worcester’s company, of which Thomas Heywood, the actor- dramatist, was a prominent member, was taken into the Queen’s patronage, and its members became the Queen’s servants, and likewise ‘ Grooms of the Chamber,’ while the Lord Admiral’s (or the Earl of Nottingham’s) company were taken into the patronage of Henry Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince’s Servants until his death in 1612, when they were admitted into the ‘service’ of his brother-in-law the Elector Palatine. The remnants of the ill-fated company of Queen Elizabeth’s Servants seem to have passed at her death first to the patronage of Lodovick Stuart, Duke of Lenox, and then to Prince Charles, Duke of York, afterwards Prince of Wales and King Charles I (Murray’s English Dramatic Companies, i. 228 seq.). This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B.

² See Dr. Mary Sullivan’s Court Masques of James I (New York, 1913), where many new details are given from the Lord Chamberlain’s and Lord Steward’s records in regard to the pecuniary rewards of actors who were Grooms of the Chamber. The Queen’s company, which was formed in 1583, but soon lost its prestige in London, had been previously allotted the same status of ‘Grooms of the Chamber’ on its formation (see p. 50 supra). At the French Court at the end of the sixteenth century the leading actors were given the corresponding rank of ‘valets de chambre’ in the royal household. See French Renaissance in England, P- 439-

ushers, and they were then allotted board wages or the pecuniary equivalent in addition to their other emoluments. From the date of Shakespeare’s admission to titular rank in the royal household his plays were repeatedly acted in the royal presence, and the dramatist grew more intimate than of old with the social procedure of the Court. There is a credible tradition that King James wrote to Shakespeare ‘an amicable letter’ in his own hand, which was long in the possession of Sir William D’Avenant.¹

In the autumn and winter of 1603 an exceptionally virulent outbreak of the plague led to the closing of the theatres in London for fully six months. The _{At Wilton} King’s players were compelled to make a Dec. 2, ’ prolonged tour in the provinces, and their ^l6°^3- normal income seriously decreased. For two months from the third week in October, the Court was temporarily installed at Wilton, the residence of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, a nobleman*whose literary tastes were worthy of a nephew of Sir Philip Sidney. Late in November Shakespeare’s company was summoned thither by the royal officers to perform before the new King. The actors travelled from Mort- lake to Salisbury ‘unto the Courte aforesaide,’ and their performance took place at Wilton House on December 2. They received next day‘upon the Councells warrant’ the large sum of 301, ‘by way of his majesties reward.’²

¹ This circumstance was first set forth in print, on the testimony of ‘a credible person then living,’ by Bernard Lintot the bookseller, in the preface of his edition of Shakespeare’s poems in 1710. Oldys suggested that the ‘credible person’ who saw the letter while in D’Avenant’s possession was John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham (1648-1721), who characteristically proved his regard for Shakespeare by adapting to the Restoration stage his Julius Cassar.

¹ The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham’s Extracts from_ the Accounts of the Revels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham’s transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (Audit Office — Declared Accounts— Treasurer of the Chamber, Roll 41, Bundle No. 388) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the

A few weeks later the King gave a further emphatic sign of his approbation. The plague failed to abate and the Court feared to come nearer the capital ton^ourt, than Hampton Court. There the Christmas Christmas, holidays were spent, and Shakespeare’s company ' were summoned to that palace to provide again entertainment for the King and his family. During the festive season between St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, 1603, and New Year’s Day, January 1, 1604, the King’s players rendered six plays — four before the King and two before Prince Henry. The programme included ‘a play of Robin Goodfellow,’ which has been rashly identified with ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The royal reward amounted to the generous sum of 53/.¹ In view of the fatal persistence of the epidemic Shakespeare’s company, when the new year opened, were condemned to idleness, for the Privy Council maintained its prohibition of public performances ‘in or neare London by reason* of greate perill that might growe through the extraordinarie concourse and assemblie of people.’ The King proved afresh his benevolent interest in his players’ welfare by directing the payment, on February 8, 1603-4, of 30I. to Richard Burbage ‘for the mayntenance and reliefe of himselfe and the reste of his companie.’²

The royal favour flowed indeed in an uninterrupted stream. The new King’s state procession through the City of London, from the Tower to Whitehall, was originally designed as part of the coronation festivities for the summer of 1603. But a fear of the coming plague confined the celebrations then to the ceremony of the crowning in Westminster Abbey on July 25, and the proCourt was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dm. 1603-10, pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that .4s You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence.

¹ See Cunningham’s Extracts from the Revels, p. xxxv, and Ernest Law’s History of Hampton Court Palace, ii. 13.

² Cunningham, ibid.

cession was postponed till the spring of the following year. When the course of the sickness was at length stayed, the royal progress through the capital _Theroyal was fixed for March 15, 1603-4, and the page- progress antry was planned on an elaborate scale. London Triumphal arches of exceptional artistic charm March is, spanned the streets, and the beautiful designs ^l6°⁴' were reproduced in finished copper-plate engravings.¹ Just before the appointed day Shakespeare arid eight other members of his acting company each received as a member of the royal household from Sir George Home, master of the great wardrobe, four and a half yards of scarlet cloth wherewith to make themselves suits of royal red. In the document authorising the grant, Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list; it is immediately followed by that of Augustine Phillips, Lawrence Fletcher, John Heminges, and Richard Burbage.² There is small like-' lihood that Shakespeare and his colleagues joined the royal cavalcade in their gay apparel. For the Herald’s official order of precedence allots the actors no place, nor is their presence noticed by Shakespeare’s friends, Drayton and Ben Jonson, or by the dramatist Dekker, all of whom published descriptions of the elaborate ceremonial in verse or prose.³ But twenty days after the royal passage through London — on April 9, 1604 — the King added to his proofs of friendly regard for the fortunes of his actors. He caused the Privy Council to send an official letter to the Lord Mayor of London and

¹ See The Arches of Triumph . . . invented and published by Stephen Harrison, Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip, London, 1604.

^s The grant which is in the Lord Chamberlain’s books ix. 4 (5) in the Public Record Office was printed in the New Shakspere Society’s Transactions 1877-9, Appendix II. The main portion is reproduced in facsimile in Mr. Ernest Law’s Shakespeare as o Groom of the Chamber, 1910, p. 8. A blank space in the list separates the first five names (given above) from the last four, viz. William Sly, Robert Annin, Henry Condell, and Richard Cowley.

⁵ The King’s players on the other hand were allotted a place in the funeral procession of James I in 1625, while a like honour was accorded the Queen’s players in her funer.il procession in 1618 (Law’s Shakespeare as a Groom ■/ the Chamber, 12-13).

the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey, bidding them ‘permit and suffer’ the King’s players to ‘exercise their playes’ at their ‘usual house/ the Globe.¹ The plague had disappeared, and the Corporation of London was plainly warned against indulging their veteran grudge against Shakespeare’s profession.

Nor in the ceremonial conduct of current diplomatic affairs did the Court forgo the personal assistance of the The actors actors. Early in August _ 1604 there reached at Somer- London, on a diplomatic mission of high Au_g^H™28, national interest, a Spanish ambassador- ⁱ⁶°4- ’ extraordinary, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Duke de Frias, Constable of Castile, and Great Chamberlain to King Philip III of Spain. His. companions were two other Spanish statesmen and three representatives of Archduke Albert of Austria, the governor of the Spanish province of the Netherlands. The purpose of the mission was to ratify a treaty of peace between Spain and England.² Through nearly the whole of Queen Elizabeth’s reign — from the , days of Shakespeare’s youth — the two countries had engaged in a furious duel by sea and land in both the hemispheres. The defeat of the Armada in 1588 was for England a glorious incident in the struggle, but it brought no early settlement in its train. Sixteen years passed without terminating the quarrel, and though in the autumn of 1604

¹ A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen’s players acting at the Fortune and the Prince’s players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King’s players at the Globe, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner’s Cat. Dulwich MSS. pp. 26—7). Collier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured.

² There is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, a painting by Marc Gheeraedts, representing the six foreign envoys in consultation over the treaty at Somerset House in August 1604 with the five English commissioners, viz., Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset (co-author in early life of the first English tragedy of Gorboduc); Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral (patron of the well-known company of players); Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire (Essex’s successor as Lord Deputy of Ireland); Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, and Sir Robert Cecil, the King’s Secretary (afterwards Lord Cranbome and Earl of Salisbury).

many Englishmen still agitated for a continuance of the warfare, James I and his Government were resolutely bent on ending the long epoch of international strife. The English Court prepared a magnificent reception for the distinguished envoys. The ambassador was lodged, with his two companions from Spain, at the royal residence of Somerset House in the Strand, and there the twelve chief members of Shakespeare’s company were ordered in their capacity of Grooms of the Chamber to attend the Spanish guests for the whole eighteen days of their stay. The three Flemish envoys were entertained at another house in the Strand, at Durham House, and there Queen Anne’s company of actors, of which Thomas Heywood was a member, provided the household service. On August 9 Shakespeare and his colleagues went into residence at Somerset House ^£on his Majesty’s service,’ in order to ‘wait and attend’ on the Constable of Castile, who headed the special embassy, and they remained there till August 28. Professional work was not required of the players. Cruder sport than the drama was alone admitted to the official programme of amusements. The festivities in the Spaniards’ honour culminated in a splendid banquet at Whitehall on Sunday August 28 (new style) — the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning the twelve actors with the other members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House to James I’s palace. At the banquet, Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the Earl of Pembroke acted as stewards. There followed a ball, and the eventful day was brought to a close with exhibitions of bear-baiting, bull-baiting, rope-dancing, and feats of horsemanship.¹ Subsequently Sir John Stanhope (after-

¹ Cf. Stow’s Chronicle 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relation de la jornada del exd^mo Condestabile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp,

1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis’s Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye’s England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117—124. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels for the year October 1603 to

wards Lord Stanhope of Harrington), who was Treasurer of the chamber, received order of the Lord Chamberlain to pay Shakespeare and his friends for their services the sum of 211. 12s.¹ The Spanish Constable also bestowed a liberal personal gift on every English official who attended on him during his eighteen days’ sojourn in London.

At normal times throughout his reign James I relied to an ever-increasing extent on the activity of Shake. speare’s company for the entertainment of the “Lore's °^f Court, and royal appreciation of Shakespeare’s /Labour’s dramatic work is well attested year by year.

In the course of 1604 Queen Anne expressed a wish to witness a play under a private roof, and the Earl of Southampton’s mansion in the Strand was chosen for the purpose. A prominent officer of the Court, Sir Walter Cope, in whose hands the arrangements

October 1604, charge is made for his three days’ attendance with four men to direct the non-dramatic entertainments ‘at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne’ (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office Roll 2805).

¹ The formal record of the service of the King’s players and of their payments is in the Public Record Office among the Audit Office Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Kynges Majesties Chamber Roll 41, Bundle No. 388. The same information is repeated in the Pipe Office Parchment Bundle, No. 543. The warrant for payment was granted ‘to Augustine Phillipps and John Hemynges for the allowance of themselves and tenne of their fellowes.’ Shakespeare, the very close associate of Phillips and Heminges, was one of the ‘tenne.’ The remaining nine certainly included Burbage, Lawrence Fletcher, Condell, Sly, Armin, and Cowley. Halliwell-PhiUipps, in .his Outlines (i. 213), vaguely noted the effect of the record without giving any reference. Mr. Ernest Law has given a facsimile of the pay warrant in his Shakespeare as a Grom of the Chamber, igio, pp. ig seq. The popular comedian Thomas Greene, and ten other members of the Queen’s company (including Heywood) who were in ‘waiting as Grooms of the Chamber’ on the Spanish envoy’s companions — the three diplomatists from the Low Countries — at Durham House, for the eighteen days of their sojourn there received a fee of 191. 16s. —■ a rather smaller sum than Shakespeare’s compajiy (Mary Sullivan, Court Masques of James I, 1913, p. r4i). The Flemish embassy was headed by the Count d’Aremberg, and one of his two companions was Louis Verreiken, whom, on a previous visit to London, in March 1599-1600, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, had entertained at Hunsdon House when Shakespeare’s company performed a play there for his amusement (see p. 65 n. 2 and 244 n. supra).

were left, sent for Burbage, Shakespeare’s friend and colleague. Burbage informed Sir Walter that there was ‘no new play that the Queen had not seen’; but his company had ‘just revived an old one called “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which for wit and mirth’ (he said) would ‘please her Majesty exceedingly.’ Cope readily accepted the suggestion, and the earliest of Shakespeare’s comedies which had won Queen Elizabeth’s special approbation was submitted to the new Queen’s judgment.¹

At holiday seasons Shakespeare and his friends were invariably visitors at the royal palaces. Between All Saints’ Day (November 1), 1604, and the ensu- shake- ing Shrove Tuesday (February 12,1604-5), they speare’s gave no less than eleven performances at White- court,^at hall.² As many as seven of the chosen plays ⁱ⁶°4-s- during this season were from Shakespeare’s pen. ‘Othello,’ the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Henry V,’ were each rendered once, while of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ two performances were given, the second being specially ‘ com[m]aunded by the Kings M[ajes]tie.³ The King clearly took a personal pride in the repute of the company which bore his name, and he lost no opportunity of making their proficiency known

¹ Cope gave the actor a written message to that effect for him to carry to Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Cranbome, the King’s secretary. Cope inquired in his letter whether Lord Cranborne would prefer that his own house should take the place of Lord Southampton’s for the purpose of the performance (Calendar of MSS. of the Marquis of Salisbury, in Hist. MSS. Comm. Third Rep. p. 148).

² At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I’s reign. These documents show that Shakespeare’s company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28,1604, and on January 7 and 8, February

2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1604-5.

³ Cf. Ernest Law’s Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, rgn, pp. xvi seq. with facsimile extract from The Revells Booke An⁰ 1605 in the Public Record Office.

to distinguished foreign visitors. When the Queen’s brother, Frederick, King of Denmark, was her husband’s guest in the summer of 1606, the King’s players were specially summoned to perform three plays before the two monarchs — two at Greenwich and one at Hampton Court. The celebration of the marriage of the King’s daughter Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine in February 1613 was enlivened by an exceptionally lavish dramatic entertainment which was again furnished by the actors of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. During the first twelve years (1603-1614) of King James’s reign, Shakespeare’s company, according to extant records of royal expenses, received fees for no less than 150 performances at Court.¹

¹ Cunningham, Revels, p. xxxiv; Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 173 seq.

Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shakespeare’s activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is _<0tlie]lo, produced in the blaze of Court favour. The and'Mea- first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed ™^re
for ,

Measure

in the highest themes of tragedy; and an unparalleled intensity and energy, which had small affinity with the atmosphere of a Court, thenceforth illumined almost every scene that he contrived. '

To 1604, when Shakespeare’s fortieth year was closing, the composition of two plays of immense grasp can be confidently assigned. One of these — ‘ Othello ’ — ranks with Shakespeare’s greatest achievements; while the other — ‘ Measure for Measure ’ — although as a whole far inferior to ‘Othello’ or to any other example of Shakespeare’s supreme power — contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, 11. ii. 43 seq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, in. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean drama.

‘Othello’ was doubtless the first new piece by Shakespeare that was acted before James. It was produced on November 1, 1604, in the old Banqueting House _{His Court} at Whitehall, which had been often put by perfonn- Queen Elizabeth to like uses, although the build- ^ances’ ing was now deemed to be ‘ old, rotten, and slight builded ’ and in 1607 a far more ornate structure took its place.¹

¹ Cf. Stow’s Annals, ed. Howes, p. 891, col. 1. James I’s banqueting house at Whitehall was destroyed by fire after a dozen years’ usage on

2 c 385

‘Measure for Measure’ followed ‘Othello’ at Whitehall on December 26, 1604, and that piece was enacted in a different room of the palace, ‘the great hall.’¹ Neither piece was printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. ‘Measure for Measure’ figured for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. ‘Othello,’ which held the stage continuously,²

January 12, 1618-9, and was then rebuilt from the designs of Inigo Jones. The new edifice was completed on March 31, 1622. Inigo Jones’s banqueting house, now part of the United Service Institution in Parliament Street, is all that survives of Whitehall Palace.

¹ These dates and details are drawn from ‘The Reuells Booke, An°

1605,’ a slender manuscript pamphlet among the Audit Office archives formerly at Somerset House, and now in the Public Record Office. The ‘booke’ covers the year November 1604-October 1605. It was first printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, a well-known Shakespearean- student and a clerk in the Audit Office, in his Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (Shakespeare Soc. 1842, pp. 203 seq.). When Cunningham left the Audit Office in 1858 he retained in his possession this ‘Reuells Booke’ of 1605 as well as one for 1611-2 and some Audit Office accounts of 1636-7. These documents were missing when the Audit Office papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public Record Office in 1859, but they were recovered from Cunningham by the latter institution in 1868. It was then hastily suspected that both the ‘Booke’ of 1605 and that of 1611-2 which also contained Shakespearean information, had been tampered with, and that the Shakespearean references were modem forgeries. The authenticity of the Shakespearean entries of 1604-5 ^wasi however, confirmed by manuscript notes to identical effect which had been made by Malone from the Audit Office archives at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and are preserved in the Bodleian Library among the Malone papers (MS. Malone 29). A very thorough investigation carried out by Mr. Ernest Law has recently cleared the ‘Reuells Booke An° 1605’ as well as that of i6ri-2, and the papers of 1636-7 of all suspicion. See Ernest Law’s Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, and More about Shakespeare ‘Forgeries,’ 1913; see Appendix I, p. 650 infra. Collier’s assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton’s residence at Harefield, near Uxbridge, on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere’s MSS. at. Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton’s household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in i860 to be ‘a shameful forgery’ (cf. Ingleby’s Complete View of the Skak- spere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5), ^and there is no possibility of this verdict being reversed.

² The piece was witnessed at the Globe theatre on April 30, 1610, by a German visitor to London, Prince Lewis Frederick of Wiirtemberg (Rye’s England as seen by Foreigners, pp. cxviii—ix, 61), and it was repeated at Court early in 1613 (Sh. Soc. Papers, ii. 124).

first appeared in a belated Quarto in 1622, six years after Shakespeare’s death. The publisher, Thomas Walkley, had obtained a theatre copy which had been _Publica abbreviated and was none too carefully tran- tionof scribed. He secured a license from the Sta- ‘^0theUo-’ tioners’ Company on October 6, 1621, and next year the volume issued from the competent press of Nicholas Okes, ‘ as it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants.’ In an ‘address to the reader’ Walkley claimed sole responsibility (‘ the author being dead ’) for the undertaking. He forbore to praise the play; ‘for that which is good I hope every man will commend without entreaty; and I am the bolder because the author’s name is sufficient to vent his work.’ The editors of the First Folio ignored Walkley’s venture and presented an independent and a better text.

The plots of both ‘ Othello ” and ‘ Measure for Measure ’ come from the same Italian source — from a collection of Italian novels known as ‘Hecatommithi,’ cinthio’s which was penned by Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, novels, a sixteenth-century disciple of Boccaccio. Cinthio’s volume was first published in 1565. But while Shakespeare based each of the two plays on Cinthio’s romantic work, he remoulded the course of each story at its critical point. The spirit of melodrama was exorcised. Varied phases of passion were interpreted with magical subtlety, and the language was charged with a poetic intensity, which seldom countenanced mere rhetoric or declamation. '

Cinthio’s painful story of ‘Un Capitano Moro,’ or ‘The Moor of Venice’ (decad. iii. Nov. vii.), is not known to have been translated into English before Shake- Shakespeare dramatised it in the play on which he ®P^eaI^e£^nd bestowed the title of ‘Othello.’ He frankly taieof^aian accepted the main episodes and characters of ^0theUo- the Italian romance. At the same time he gave all the personages excepting Desdemona names of his own

devising, and he invested every one of them with a new and graphic significance.¹ Roderigo, the foolish dupe of Iago, is Shakespeare’s own creation, and he adds some minor characters, like Desdemona’s father and uncle. The only character in the Italian novel with whom Shakespeare dispensed is Iago’s little child. The hero and heroine (Othello and Desdemona) are by no means featureless in the Italian novel¹; but the passion, pathos, and poetry with which Shakespeare endows their speech are all his own. Iago, who lacks in Cinthio’s pages any trait to distinguish him from the conventional criminal of Italian fiction, became in Shakespeare’s hands the subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hypocrisy. The lieutenant Cassio and Iago’s wife Emilia are in the Italian. tale lay figures. But Shakespeare’s genius declared itself most signally in his masterly reconstruction of the catastrophe. He lent Desdemona’s tragic fate a wholly new and fearful intensity by making Iago’s cruel treachery known to Othello at the last—just after Iago’s perfidy had impelled the noble-hearted Moor, in groundless jealousy, to murder his gentle and innocent wife.²

The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage the dramatist’s mature powers. An unfaltering equilib

¹ In Cinthio’s story none of the characters, save Desdemona, have proper names; they are known only by their office; thus Othello is ‘il capitano moro’ or ‘il moro.’ Iago is ‘1’ alfiero’ (i.e. the ensign or ‘ancient’) and Cassio is ‘il capo di squadrone.’

² In Cinthio’s melodramatic dfinofiment ‘the ensign’ (Iago) and ‘the Moor’ (Othello) plot together the deaths of‘the captain’ (Cassio) and Desdemona. Cassio escapes unhurt, but Iago in Othello’s sight kills Desdemona with three strokes of a stocking filled with sand; whereupon Othello helps the murderer to throw down the ceiling of the room on his wife’s dead body so that the death might appear to be accidental. Though ignorant of Desdemona’s innocence, Othello soon quarrels with Iago, who in revenge contrives the recall of the Moor to Venice, these to stand his trial for Desdemona’s murder. The Moor, after being tortured without avail, is released and is ultimately slain by Desdemona’s kinsfolk without being disillusioned. Iago is charged with some independent offence and dies under torture. Cinthio represents that the story was true, and that he owes his knowledge of it to Iago’s widow, Shakespeare’s Emilia.

rium is maintained in the treatment of plot and char- * acters alike. The first act passes in Venice; the rest of the play has its scene in Cyprus. Dr. John- . son, a champion of the classical drama, argued unityof that had Shakespeare confined the action of *^e ■ the play to Cyprus alone he would have satis- ^{age y}' fied all the canons of classical unity. It might well be argued that, despite the single change of scene, Shake-. speare realises in ‘Othello’ the dramatic ideal of unity more effectively than a rigic adherence to the letter of the classical law would allow. The absence of genuine comic relief emphasises the classical affinity, and differentiates ‘Othello’ from its chief forerunner ‘Hamlet.’¹

France seems to have first adapted to literary purposes the central theme of ‘Measure for Measure’; early in the sixteenth century French drama and _ThetIieme fiction both portrayed the agonies of a virtuous ₀f ‘Me™⁶ woman, who, when her near kinsman lies under _s^f“_e. lawful sentence of death, is promised his par- '

don by the governor of the State at the price of her chastity.² The repulsive tale impressed the imagination ,of all Europe; but in Shakespeare’s lifetime it chiefly circulated in the form which it took at the hand of the Italian novelist Cinthio in the later half of the century. Cinthio made the perilous story the subject not cinthio’s only of a romance but of a tragedy called ‘ Epi- ^tale- tia/ and his romance found entry into English literature, before Shakespeare wrote his play. Direct recourse to the Italian text was not obligatory as in the case of Cinthio’s story of ‘Othello.’ Cinthio’s novel of ‘Measure for Measure’ had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone, an industrious author, who was the friend of the Elizabethan literary pioneer, George Gascoigne. Whetstone not only gave a somewhat

¹ Iago’s cynical and shameless mirth does not belong to the category of comic relief, and the clown in Othello’s service, whose wit is unimpressive, plays a small and negligible part.

² Cf. Boas, University Drama, p. 19; Lee, French Renaissance in England, p. 408.

altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy' play of ‘Promos and Cassandra’ (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, called ‘Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses’ (1582). ‘Measure for Measure’ owes its episodes to Whetstone’s work, although Shakespeare borrows little of his language. Whetstone changes Cinthio’s nomenclature, and Shakespeare again gives all. the personages new appellations. Cinthio’s Juriste and Epitia, who are respectively rechristened by Whetstone Promos and Cassandra, become in Shakespeare’s pages Angelo and Isabella.¹ There is a bare likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio’s Italian play, which was untranslated; there, as in the Italian novel, the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known as Juriste, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which may have suggested Shakespeare’s designation.²

In the hands of Shakespeare’s predecessors the popular tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But Shake- shake- speare prudently showed scant respect for their speare’s handling of the narrative. By diverting the variations. _{course 0}f p}₀t _at a critical point he not

merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother’s life. The central fact of Shakespeare’s play is Isabella’s inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare’s alterations, like the Duke’s abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of

¹ Whetstone states, however, that his ‘rare historie of Promos and Cassandra’ was ‘reported’ to him by ‘Madam Isabella,’ who is not otherwise identified.

² Richard Garnett’s Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227. Angelo, however, is a name which figures not infrequently in lists of dramatis persona of other English plays in the opening years of the seventeenth century. Subordinate characters are so christened in Ben Jonson’s The Case is Altered, and in Chapman’s May Day, both of which were written before 1602, though they were first printed in 1609 and r6ir respectively.

Mariana ‘of the moated grange’ — the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella’s would-be seducer — skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage. Shakespeare’s argument is throughout philosophically subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was performed. But the two emphatic references to a ruler’s dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious. In act 1. sc. i. 67-72 the Duke remarks:

I love the people,

But do not like to stage me to their eyes.

Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement.

Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it.

Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act 11. sc. iv. 27-30):

The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish’d king, . . .

Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love

Must needs appear offence.¹

In ‘Macbeth,’ the ‘great epic drama,’ which he began in 1605 and completed next year, Shakespeare employed

¹ When James I made his great progress from Edinburgh to London on his accession to the English throne, the loyal author of ‘The true narration of the entertainment of his Royal Majesty’ (1603) on the long journey, noted that ‘though the King greatly tendered’ his people’s ‘love,’ yet he deemed their ‘multitudes’ oppressive, and published ‘an inhibition against the inordinate and daily access of people’s coming’ (cf. Nichols’s Progresses of King James I, i. 76). At a later date King James was credited with ‘a hasty and passionate custom which often in his sudden distemper would bid a pox or plague on such as flocked to see him’ (Life of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, i. 170).

a setting wholly in harmony with the accession of a Scottish king. The story was drawn from Holinshed’s ₍ , ‘ Chronicle of Scottish History/ with occasional ‘Macbeth.’ _ref_erencej perhaps, to earlier Scottish sources. But the chronicler’s bald record supplies Shakespeare with the merest scaffolding. Duncan appears in the _The ‘ Chronicle ’ as an incapable ruler whose removal legend in commends itself to his subjects, while Macbeth, Hohnshed. -_n gpj^g ₀f the crime to which he owes his throne, proves a satisfactory sovereign through the greater part of his seventeen years’ reign. Only towards the close does his tyranny provoke the popular rebellion which proves fatal to him. Holinshed’s notice of Duncan’s murder by Macbeth is bare of detail. Shakespeare in his treatment of that episode adapted Holinshed’s more precise account of another royal murder — that of King Duff, an earlier Scottish King who was slain by the chief Donwald, while he was on a visit to the chief’s castle. The vaguest hint was offered by the chronicler of Lady Macbeth’s influence over her husband. In subsidiary incident Shakespeare borrowed a few passages almost verbatim from Holinshed’s text; but every scene which has supreme dramatic value is Shakespeare’s own invention. Although the chronicler briefly notices Macbeth’s meeting with the witches, Shakespeare was under no debt to any predecessor for the dagger scene, for the thrilling colloquies of husband and wife concerning Duncan’s murder, for Banquo’s apparition at the feast or for Lady Macbeth’s walking in her sleep.

The play gives a plainer indication than any other of Shakespeare’s works of the dramatist’s desire to condli- The appeal ate the Scottish King’s idiosyncrasies. The to James i. supernatural machinery of the three witches which Holinshed suggested accorded with the King’s superstitious faith in demonology. The dramatist was lavish in sympathy with Banquo, James’s reputed ancestor and founder of the Stuart dynasty; while Macbeth’s vision of kings who carry ‘ twofold balls and

treble sceptres * (iv. i. 20) loyally referred to the union of Scotland with England and Ireland under James’s sway. The two ‘ balls ’ or globes were royal insignia which King James bore in right of his double kingship of England and Scotland, and the three sceptres were those of his three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. No monarch before James I held these emblems conjointly. The irrelevant 'description in the play of the English King’s practice of touching for the King’s evil (iv. iii. 149 seq.) was doubtless designed as a further personal compliment to King James, whose confidence in the superstition was profound. The allusion by the porter (11. iii. 9) to the ‘equivocator . . . who committed treason’ was perhaps suggested by the insolent defence of the doctrine of equivocation made by the Jesuit Henry Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share in the ‘ Gunpowder Plot.’

The piece, which was not printed until 1623, is in its existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare’s tragedies (‘Hamlet’ is nearly twice as long), _Xhescenic and it is possible that it survives only in eiabora- an abbreviated acting version. Much scenic ^tI0n‘ elaboration characterised the production. Dr. Simon Forman, a playgoing astrologer, witnessed a performance of the tragedy at the Globe on April 20, 1610, and noted that Macbeth and Banquo entered the stage on horseback, and that Banquo’s ghost was materially represented (m. iv. 40 seq.).¹

‘Macbeth’¹ ranks with ‘Othello’ among the noblest tragedies either of the modern or the ancient world. Yet

¹ In his Boohe of Plaits (among Ashmole’s MSS. at the Bodleian) Forman’s note on Macbeth begins thus: ‘In Mackbeth at the Globe 1610, the 20 of Aprill Saturday, there was to be observed, firste howe Mackheth and Banko, two noble men of Scotland, ridinge thorow 'a wod, ther stode hefore them three women feiries or nimphs . . .’ Of the feasting scene Forman wrote: ‘The ghoste of Banco came and sate down in his [i.e. Macbeth’s] cheier be-hind him. And he tuminge about to sit down again sawe the goste of Banco which fronted him so.’ (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 86.) See for Forman’s other theatrical experiences p. 126 supra and p. 420 infra.

the bounds of sensational melodrama are approached by it more nearly than by any other of Shakespeare’s The chief plays. The melodramatic effect is heightened characters, by the physical darkness which envelopes the main episodes. It is the poetic fertility of the language, the magical simplicity of speech in the critical turns of the action, the dramatic irony accentuating the mysterious issues, the fascinating complexity of the two leading characters which lift the piece into the first rank. The characters of hero and heroine — Macbeth and his wife

— are depicted with the utmost subtlety and insight. Their worldly ambition involves them in hateful crime. Yet Macbeth is a brave soldier who is endowed with poetic imagination and values a good name. Though Lady Macbeth lacks the moral sense, she has no small share of womanly tact, of womanly affections, and above all of womanly nerves.

In three points ‘Macbeth’ differs somewhat from other of Shakespeare’s productions in the great class of liter- Excep- ature to which it belongs. The interweaving tionai with the tragic story of supernatural interludes features. j_n p_at_e j_s weirdly personified is not exactly

matched in any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In the second place, the action proceeds with a rapidity that is wholly without parallel in the rest of Shakespeare’s plays; the critical scenes are unusually short; the great sleepwalking scene is only seventy lines long, of which scarcely twenty, the acme of dramatic brevity, are put in Lady Macbeth’s mouth. The swift movement only slackens when Shakespeare is content to take his cue from Holinshed, as in the somewhat tedious episode of Macduff’s negotiation in England with Malcolm, Duncan’s son and heir (act iv. sc. iii.). Nowhere, in the third place, has Shakespeare introduced comic relief into a tragedy with bolder effect than in the porters speech after the murder of Duncan (ii. iii. i seq.). The theory that this passage was from another hand does not merit acceptance.

Yet elsewhere there are signs that the play as it stands incorporates occasional passages by a second pen. Duncan’s interview with the ‘ bleeding sergeant ’ signs of (act 1. sc. ii.) falls so far below the style of the ^other Purest of the play as to suggest an interpolation by a hack of the theatre. So, too, it is difficult to credit Shakespeare with the superfluous interposition (act 11. sc. v.) of Hecate, a classical goddess of the infernal world, who appears unheralded to complain that the witches lay their spells on Macbeth without asking her leave. The resemblances between Thomas Middleton’s later play of ‘The Witch’ (1610) and portions of ‘Macbeth’ may safely be ascribed to plagiarism on Middleton’s part. Of two songs which, according to the stage directions, were to be sung during the representation of ‘ Macbeth,’ ‘Come away, come away’ (111. v.) and ‘Black spirits &c.’ (iv. i.), only the first words are noted there, but songs beginning with the same words are set out in full in Middleton’s play; they were probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of ‘Macbeth’ after its original production.

‘King Lear,’ in which Shakespeare’s tragic genius moved without any faltering on Titanic heights, was written during 1606, and was produced before ‘King the Court at Whitehall on the night of Decem- ^Lear-’ ber 26 of that year.¹ Eleven months later, on November 26, 1607, two undistinguished stationers, John Busby and Nathaniel Butter, obtained a license for the publication of the great tragedy ‘ under the hands of ’ Sir George Buc, the Master of the Revels, and of the wardens of the company.² Nathaniel Butter published a quarto

¹ This fact is stated in the Stationers’ Company’s license of Nov. 26, 1607, and is repeated a little confusedly on the title-page of the Quarto of 1608.

² John Busby, whose connection with the transaction does not extend beyond the mention of his name in the entry in the Stationers’ Register, was five years before as elusively and as mysteriously associated with the first edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602). Butter, who was alone the effective promoter of the publication of King Lear, became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company early in 1604, and he

edition in the following year (1608). The verbose title, which is from the pen of a bookseller’s hack, ran The Quarto thus: ‘M. William Shak-speare: his true of 1608. chronicle historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters. With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam. As it was played before the King’s Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing usually at the Gloabe on the Banke-side.’ In the imprint the publisher mentions ‘ his shop in Pauls Churchyard at the signe of the Pide Bull near St. Austin’s Gate.’ The printer of the volume, who is unnamed, was probably Nicholas Okes, a young friend of Richard Field, who had stood surety for him in 1603 when he was made free of the Stationers’ Company, and who fourteen years later printed the first quarto of ‘Othello.’ Butter’s edition of ‘King Lear’ followed a badly transcribed playhouse copy, and it abounds in gross typographical errors.¹ Another edition, also bearing the date 1608, is a later reprint of a copy of Butter’s original issue and repeats its typographical confusions.²

lived on to 1664, acquiring some fame in Charles I’s reign as a purveyor of news-sheets or rudimentary journals. His experience of the trade was very limited before he obtained the license to publish Shakespeare’s King Lear in 1607.

¹ There was no systematic correction of the press; but after some sheets were printed off, the type was haphazardly corrected here and there, and further sheets were printed off. The uncorrected sheets were not destroyed and the corrected and uncorrected sheets were carelessly bound together in proportions which vary in extant copies. In the result, accessible examples of the edition present many typographical discrepancies one from another.

² The Second Quarto has a title-page which differs from that of the first in spelling the dramatist’s surname ‘Shakespeare’ instead of ‘Shak- speare’ and in giving the imprint the curt form ‘Printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1608.’ There seems reason to believe that the dated imprint of the second quarto is a falsification, and that the volume was actually published by Thomas Pavier at the press of William Jaggard as late as r6rg (see Pollard’s Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, rgog). The Second Quarto is, like the First, unmethodically made up of corrected and uncorrected sheets, but in all known copies of the Second Quarto two of the sheets (E and K) always appear in their corrected shape.

The First Folio furnished a greatly improved text. Fewer verbal errors appear there,_ and some no lines are new. At the same time the Folio omits 300 lines of the Quarto text, including the whole of act iv. sc. iii. (with the beautiful description of Cordelia’s reception of the news of her sisters’ maltreatment of their father), and some other passages which are as unquestionably Shakespearean. The editor of the Folio clearly had access to a manuscript which was quite independent of that of the Quarto, but had undergone abbreviation at different points. The Folio ‘copy,’ as far as it went, was more carefully transcribed than the Quarto ‘copy.’ Yet neither the Quarto nor the Folio Version of ‘King Lear’ reproduced the author’s autograph; each was derived from its own playhouse transcript.

As in the case of its immediate predecessor ‘Macbeth,’ Shakespeare’s tragedy of ‘King Lear’ was based on a story with which Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle’ had _Holinshed long familiarised Elizabethans; and other and the writers who had anticipated Shakespeare in ^of adapting Holinshed’s tale to literary purposes gave the dramatist help. The theme is part of the legendary lore of pre-Roman Britain which the Elizabethan chronicler and his readers accepted without question as authentic history. Holinshed had followed the guidance of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the twelfth century first undertook a history of British Kings. Geoffrey recorded the exploits of a Celtic dynasty which traced its . origin to a Trojan refugee Brute or Brutus, who was reputed to be the grandson of Aeneas of Troy. Elizabethan poets and dramatists alike welcomed material from Geoffrey’s fables of Brute and his line in Holinshed’s version. Brute’s son Locrine was. the Brito- Trojan hero of the pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy of the name, which had appeared in print in 1595. ‘King Lear’ was one of many later occupants of Locrine’s throne, who figured on the Elizabethan stage.

Nor was Shakespeare the first playwright to give

theatrical vogue to King Lear’s mythical fortunes. On April 6, 1594, a piece called ‘Kinge Leare’ was acted The old at the Rose theatre ‘by the Queene’s men P^Iay- and my lord of Susexe together.’ On May 14, 1594, a license was granted for the printing of this piece under the title: ‘ The moste famous chronicle historye of Leire Kinge of England and his three daughters.’ But the permission did not take effect, and some eleven years passed before the actual publication in 1605 of the pre-Shakespearean play. The piece was then entitled: ‘The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, as it hath bene divers and sundry times lately acted.’ The author, whose name is unknown, based his work on Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle,’ but he sought occasional help in the three derivative poetic narratives of King Lear’s fabulous career, which figure respectively in William Warner’s ‘Albion’s England’ (1586, bk. iii. ch. 14), in ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’ (1587), and in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (1590, bk. ii. canto x. stanzas 27-32). At the same time the old dramatist embellished his borrowed cues by devices of his own invention. He gave his ill-starred monarch a companion who proved a pattern of fidelity and became one of the pillars of the dramatic action. The King of France’s hasty courtship of King Lear’s banished daughter Cordelia follows original lines. Lear’s sufferings in a thunderstorm during his wanderings owe nothing to earlier literature. But the restoration of Lear to his throne at the close of the old piece agrees with all earlier versions of the fable.¹

Shakespeare drew many hints from the old play as well as from a direct study of Holinshed. But he refashioned Shake- ^and strengthened the great issues of the plot speare’sin- by methods which lay outside the capacity of novations. _ejth_er old dramatist or chronicler. There is no trace of Lear’s Fool in any previous version. Shake-

¹ Cf. The Chronicle History of King Leir: the original of Shakespeare’s King Lear, ed. by Sidney Lee, 1909.

speare too sought an entirely new complication for the story by grafting on it the complementary by-plot of the Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, which he drew from .an untried source, Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia.’¹ Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were found in Harsnet’s ‘ Declaration of Popish Impostures,’ 1603. Above all, Shakespeare ignored the catastrophe of the chronicles which contented the earlier dramatist and preceding poets. They restored Lear to his forsaken throne at the triumphant hands of Cordelia and her husband the French King. Shakespeare invented the defeat and death of King Lear and of his daughter Cordelia. Thus Shakespeare first converted the story into inexorable tragedy.

In every act of ‘Lear’ the pity and terror of which tragedy is capable reach their climax. Only one who has something of the Shakespearean gift of. _Thegreat_ language could adequately characterise the ness of _ scenes of agony — ‘ the living martyrdom ’ — to ^{King Lear}' which the fiendish ingratitude of his daughters condemns in Shakespeare’s play the abdicated king — ‘ a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.’ The elemental passions burst forth in his utterances with all the vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about his defenceless head in the scene on the heath. The brutal blinding of the Earl of Gloucester by the Duke of Cornwall exceeds in horror any other situation that Shakespeare created, if we assume that he was not responsible for similar scenes of mutilation in ‘Titus Andronicus.’ At no point in ‘Lear’ is there any loosening of the tragic tension. The faithful half-witted lad who serves the king as his fool plays the jesting chorus on his master’s fortunes in penetrating earnest and deepens the desolating pathos. The metre of ‘King

¹ Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled ‘The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind long and his kind son; first related by the son, then by the blind father’ (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590, 4to. pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.).

Lear’ is less regular than in any earlier play, and the language is more elliptical and allusive. The verbal and metrical temper gives the first signs of that valiant defiance of all conventional restraint which marks the latest stage in the development of Shakespeare’s style, and becomes habitual to his latest efforts.

Although Shakespeare’s powers were unexhausted, he rested for a while on his laurels after his colossal effort of ‘Timonof ‘Lear’ (1607). He reverted in the following Athens.’ y_ear to earlier habits of collaboration. In two succeeding dramas, ‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘Pericles,’ he would seem indeed to have done little more than lend his hand to brilliant embellishments of the dull incoherence of very pedestrian pens. Lack of constructive plan deprives the two pieces of substantial dramatic value. Only occasional episodes which Shakespeare’s genius illumined lift them above the rank of mediocrity.

An extant play on the subject of ‘Timon of Athens’ was composed in 1600 ¹ but there is nothing to show that Timon and Shakespeare or his coadjutor, who remains Plutarch, anonymous, was acquainted with it. Timon was a familiar figure in classical legend and was a proverbial type of censorious misanthropy. ‘Critic Timon’ is lightly mentioned by Shakespeare in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ His story was originally told, by way of parenthesis, in Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marc Antony.’ There Antony was described as emulating at one period of his career the life and example of ‘Timon Misanthropos the Athenian,’ and some account of the Athenian’s perverse experience was given. From Plutarch the tale passed into Painter’s miscellany of Elizabethan romances called ‘The Palace of Pleasure.’ The author of the Shakespearean play may too have known a dialogue of Lucian entitled ‘Timon,’ which Boiardo, the poet of fifteenth century Italy, had previously converted into an Italian comedy under the name of ‘ II Timone.’

¹ Dyce first edited the manuscript, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, for the Shakespeare Society in 1842.

With singular clumsiness the English piece parts company with all preceding versions of Timon’s history by grafting on the tradition of his misanthropy a shadowy and irrelevant fable of the Athenian hero Aid- _nee]j_ biades. A series of subsidiary scenes presents sodeof Alcibiades in the throes of a quarrel with the ^Aklbiades- Athenian senate over its punishment of a friend; finally he lays siege to the city and compels its rulers to submit to his will. Such an incident has no pertinence to Timon’s fortunes.

The piece is as reckless a travesty of classical life and history as any that came from the pen of a mediaeval fabulist.¹ Nowhere is there a glimmer of the _The true Greek spirit. The interval between the divided Greek nomenclature and the characterisation or ^authorshlP- action of the personages is even wider than in ‘ Troilus and Cressida.’ Internal evidence makes it clear that the groundwork and most of the superstructure of the incoherent tragedy were due to Shakespeare’s' colleague. To that crude pen must be assigned nearly the whole of acts hi. and v. and substantial portions of the three remaining acts. Yet the characters of Timon himself and of the churlish cynic Apemantus bear witness to Shakespeare’s penetration. The greater part of the scenes which they dominate owed much to his hand. Timon is cast in the psychological mould of Lear. The play was printed for the first time in the First Folio from a very defective transcript.²

¹ Although Timon is presented in the play as the contemporary of Alcibiades and presumably of the generation of Pericles, he quotes Seneca. In much the same way Hector quotes Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida. Alcibiades in Timon makes his entry in battle array ‘with drum and fife.’ _ _ _

² There is evidence that when the First Folio was originally planned the place after Romeo and Juliet which Timon now fills was designed for Troilus and Cressida, and that, after the typographical composition of Troilus was begun in succession to Romeo, Troilus was set aside with a view to transference elsewhere, and the vacant space was hurriedly occupied by Timon by way of stop-gap. (See p. 368 n.) The play is followed in the Folio by a leaf only printed on one side which contains ‘The Actors’ Names.’ This arrangement is unique in the First Folio.

There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare’s anonymous coadjutor in ‘Timon’ was George , . , Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic

^{en es}' power, who is known to have written occasionally for Shakespeare’s company. In 1607 that company produced Wilkins’s ‘ The Miseries of Enforced Marriage/ which was published in the same year and proved popular. The piece dealt with a melodramatic case of murder which had lately excited public interest. Next year the same episode served for the plot of ‘The Yorkshire A Tragedy/ a piece falsely assigned by the publishers to Shakespeare’s pen. The hectic fury of the criminal hero in both these pieces has affinities with the impassioned rage of Timon which Shakespeare may have elaborated from a first sketch by Wilkins. At any rate, to Wilkins may safely be allotted the main authorship of ‘ Pericles,’ a romantic play which was composed in the same year as ‘Timon’ and of which Shakespeare was again announced as the sole author. During his lifetime and for many subsequent years Shakespeare was openly credited with the whole of ‘Pericles.’ Yet the internal evidence plainly relieves him of responsibility for the greater part of it.

The frankly pagan tale of ‘Pericles Prince of Tyre’ was invented by a Greek novelist near the opening of the _The Christian era, and enjoyed during the Middle original Ages an immense popularity, not merely in a Perides°^f Latin version, but through translations in every vernacular speech of Europe. The lineage of the Shakespearean drama is somewhat obscured by the fact that the hero was given in the play a name which he bore in none of the numerous preceding versions of his story. The Shakespearean Pericles of Tyre is the Apollonius of Tyre who permeates post-classical and mediaeval literature. The English dramatist derived most of his knowledge of the legend from the rendering of it which John Gower, the English poet of the fourteenth century, furnished in his rambling poetic

miscellany called ‘ Confessio Amantis.’ A prominent figure in the Shakespearean play is ‘the chorus’ or ‘presenter ’ who explains the action before or during the acts. The ‘ chorus ’ bears the name of the poet Gower.¹ At the same time the sixteenth century saw several versions of the veteran tale in both French and English prose, and while the dramatist found his main inspiration in ‘old Gower ’ he derived some embellishments of his work from an Elizabethan prose rendering of the myth, which first appeared in 1576, and reached a third edition in 1607.² Indeed the reissue in 1607 of the Elizabethan version of the story doubtless prompted the dramatisation of the theme, although the three leading characters of the play, Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and his daughter Marina, all bear appellations for which there is no previous authority. The hero’s original name of Pericles recalls with characteristic haziness the period in Greek history to which ‘Timon of Athens’ is vaguely assigned.³

The ancient fiction of Apollonius of Tyre was a tale of adventurous travel, and was inherently incapable of effective dramatic treatment. The rences of rambling scenes of the Shakespearean ‘ Pericles ’ ^{the piece}' and the long years which the plot covers tend to inco-

¹ Of the eight speeches of the chorus (filling in all 305 lines), five (filling 212 lines) are in the short six- or seven-syllable rhyming couplets of Gower’s Confessio.

² In 1576 the tale was ‘gathered into English [prose] by Laurence Twine, gentleman’ under the title: ‘The Patteme of painefull Aduen- tures, containing the most excellent, pleasant, and variable Historie of the strange accidents that hefell vnto Prince Apollonius, the Lady Lucina his wife and Tharsia his daughter. Wherein the vncertaintie of this world, and the fickle state of man’s life are liuely described. . . . Imprinted at London by William How, 1576-’ This volume was twice reissued (about 159s and in 1607) before the play was attempted. The translator, Laurence Twine, a graduate of All Souls’ College, Oxford, performed his task without distinction.

⁸ In all probability the name Pericles confuses reminiscences of the Greek Pericles with those of Pyrocles, one of the heroes .of Sidney’s romance of Arcadia, whence Shakespeare had lately borrowed the byplot of King Lear. Richard Flecknoe, writing of the Shakespearean play in 1656, called the hero Pyrocles. Musidorus, another hero of Sidney’s romance, had already supplied the title of the romantic play, Mucedorus, which appeared in IS9S-

herence. Choruses and dumb shows ‘stand i’ the gaps to teach the stages of the story.’ Yet numerous references to the piece in contemporary literature attest the warm welcome which an uncritical public extended to its early representations.¹

After the first production of ‘ Pericles ’ at the Globe in the spring of 1608, Edward Blount, a publisher of literary The issues prochvities, obtained (on May 20, 1608) a in quarto, license for the play’s publication. But Blount failed to exercise his right, and the piece was actually published next year by an undistinguished ‘stationer,’ Henry Gosson, then living ‘at the sign of the Sunne in Paternoster Row.’ The exceptionally bad text was clearly derived from the notes of an irresponsible shorthand reporter of a performance in the theatre.- A second edition, without correction but with some typographical variations, appeared in the same year, and reprints which came from other presses in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 163s,² bear strange witness to the book’s popularity. The original title-page is couched in ostentatious phraseology which sufficiently refutes Shakespeare’s responsibility for

¹ In the prologue to Robert Tailor’s comedy, The Hogge hath lost his Pearle (1614) the writer says of his own piece : —

If it prove so happy as to please,

Weele say ’tis fortunate like Pericles.

On May 24, 1619, the piece was performed at Court on the occasion of 'a great entertainment in honour of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Trenouille. The play was still popular in 1630 when Ben Jonson, indignant at the failure of his own piece, The New Inn, sneered at ‘some mouldy tale like Pericles’ in his sour ode beginning ‘Come leave the lothed stage.’ On June 10, 1631, the piece was revived before a crowded audience at the Globe theatre ‘upon the cessation of the plague,’ At the Restoration Pericles renewed its popularity in the theatre, and Betterton was much applauded in the title rSle. AU the points connected with the history and bibliography of the play are discussed in the facsitnile reproduction of Pericles, ed. by Sidney Lee, Clarendon Press, 1903.

² The unnamed printer of both first and second editions would seem to have been William White, an inferior workman whose press was near Smithfield. White was responsible for the first quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598. The second edition of Pericles is easily distinguishable from the first by a misprint in the first stage direction. ‘En/er Gower’ of the first edition is reproduced in the second edition as ‘ Eneer Gower.’

the publication. The words run: ‘ The late and much admired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole Historie, aduentures, and fortunes of the said Prince: as also, the no lesse strange and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life of his Daughter Mariana. As it hath been diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.' All the quarto editions credit Shakespeare with the sole authorship; but the piece was with much justice excluded from the First Folio of 1623 and from the Second Folio of 1632. It was not admitted to the collected works of the dramatist until the second issue of the Third Folio in 1664.

There is no sustained evidence of Shakespeare’s handiwork in ‘Pericles,’ save in acts 111. and v. and parts of act iv. The Shakespearean scenes tell the _Shake_ story of Pericles’s daughter Marina. They speare’s. open with the tempest at sea during which she ^share' is born, and they close with her final restoration to her parents and her betrothal. The style of these scenes is in the manner of which Shakespeare gives earnest in ‘King Lear.’ The ellipses are often puzzling, but the condensed thought is intensely vivid and glows with strength and insight. The themes, too, of Shakespeare’s contribution to ‘Pericles’ are nearly akin to many which figured elsewhere in his latest work. The tone of Marina’s appeals to Lysimachus and Boult in the brothel resembles that of Isabella’s speeches in ‘Measure for Measure.’ Thaisa, whom her husband imagines to be dead, shares some of the experiences of Hermione in ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ The portrayal of the shipwreck amid which Marina is born adumbrates the opening scene of ‘ The Tempest ’; and there are ingenuous touches in the delineation of Marina which suggest the girlhood of Perdita.

There seems good ground for assuming that the play of ‘Pericles’ was originally penned by George Wilkins and that it was over his draft that Shakespeare worked.

One curious association of Wilkins with the play is attested under his own hand. Very soon after the piece was staged he published in his own name a novel wiUdns’s in prose which he asserted to be based upon the “Pericles ’ The novel preceded by a year the pub

" lication of the drama, but the filial relation in which the romance stands to the play is precisely stated alike in the title-page of the novel and in its ‘ argument to the whole historie.’ The novel bears the title: ‘The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower.’¹ In the ‘argument’ the reader is requested ‘to receive this Historie in the same maner as it was under the habite of ancient Gower, the famous English Poet, by the King’s Maiesties Players excellently presented.’² ■ On the same day (May 20, 1608) that Edward Blount obtained his abortive license for the issue of ‘Pericles’ he secured from the Stationers’ Company a and cieo- second license, also by the authority of Sir 1608^' George Buc, the licenser of plays, for the publication of a far more impressive piece of literature— ‘a booke called “Anthony and Cleopatra.’”

¹ The imprint runs: ‘At London. Printed by T[homas] P[avier] for Nat. Butter, 1608’; see the reprint edited by Tycho Mommsen (Oldenburg, 1857).

² At times the language of the drama is exactly copied by Wilkins's novel, and, though transferred to prose, preserves the rhythm of blank verse. The novel is far more carefully printed than the play, and corrects some of the manifold corruptions of the printed text of the latter. On the other hand Wilkins’s novel shows at several points divergence from the play. There are places in which the novel develops incidents which are barely noticed in the play, and elsewhere the play is somewhat fuller than the novel. One or two phrases which have the Shakespearian ring are indeed found alone in the novel. A few lines from Shakespeare's pen seem to be present there and nowhere else. After the preliminary ‘argument’ of the novel, there follows a list of the dramatis personn headed ‘The names of the Personages mentioned in the Historie’ which is not to be found in the play, but seems to belong to it. The discrepancies between the play and novel suggest that Wilkins’s novel followed a manuscript version of the play different from that on which the printed quarto was based.

No copy of this date is known, and once again the company probably hindered the publication. The play was first printed in the folio of 1623. Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ is the middle play of Shakespeare’s Roman trilogy which opened some seven years before with ‘Julius Caesar’ and ended with ‘Coriolanus.’ As in the case of all the poet’s Roman plays, the plot of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ comes from Sir Thomas North’s version of Plutarch’s ‘Lives.’ On the opening section of Plutarch’s Life of Antony Shakespeare had already levied substantial loans in ‘Julius Caesar.’¹ He now produced a full dramatisation of it. The story of Antony’s love of Cleopatra had passed from p_lut'_arcll>_s classical history into the vague floating tradi- Life of ’ tion of mediaeval Europe. Chaucer assigned ^Antony- her the first place in his ‘Legend of Good Women.’ But Plutarch’s graphic biography of Antony first taught western Europe in the early days of the Renaissance the whole truth about his relations with the Queen of Egypt. Early experiments in the Renaissance drama of Italy, France, and England anticipated Shakespeare in turning the theme to dramatic uses. The pre-Shakespearean dramas of Antony and Cleopatra suggest at some points Shakespeare’s design. But the resemblances between the ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ of Shakespeare and the like efforts of his predecessors at home or abroad seem to be due to the universal dependence on Plutarch.²

¹ Shakespeare showed elsewhere familiarity with the memoir. Into the more recent tragedy of Macbeth (m. i. 54-57) he drew from it a painted reference to Octavius Caesar, and on a digression in Plutarch’s text he based his lurid sketch of the misanthropy of Timon of Athens.

¹ The earliest dramatic version of the Plutarchan narrative came from an Italian pen about 1540. The author, Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, is best , known hy that collection of prose tales, Hecatommithi, which supplied Shakespeare with the plots of Othello and Measure for Measure. The topic enjoys the distinction of having inspired the first regular tragedy in French literature. This piece, Cleopatre Captive by Estienne Jodelle, was published in 1552. Within twenty years of Jodelle’s effort, the chief dramatist of the French Renaissance, Robert Gamier, handled the theme in his tragedy called Marc Antoine. Finally the inferior hand of Nicolas de Montreux took up the parable of Cleopatra

Shakespeare follows the lines of Plutarch’s biography even more loyally than in ‘Julius Caesar.’ Many trifling details which in the play accentuate Cleopatra’s s^eare’s idiosyncrasy come unaltered from the Greek Plutarch ^author. The superb description of the barge ^{u c} ' in which the Queen journeys down the river Cydnus to meet Antony is Plutarch’s language. Shakespeare borrows the supernatural touches, which complicate the tragic motive. At times, even in the heat of the tragedy, the speeches of the hero and heroine and of their attendants are transferred bodily from North’s prose.¹ Not that Shakespeare accepts the whole of the episode which Plutarch narrates. Although he adds nothing, he makes substantial omissions, and his method of selection does not always respect the calls of perspicuity. Shakespeare ignores the nine years’ interval between Antony’s first and last meetings with Cleopatra. During that period Antony not only did much important political

in 1594; his five-act tragedy of CUopatre, alike in construction and plot, closely follows Jodelle’s Cleopatre Captive. It was such French efforts which gave the cue to the dramatic versions of Cleopatra’s history in Elizabethan England which preceded Shakespeare’s work. The earliest of these English experiments was a translation of Gamier’s tragedy. This came from the accomplished pen of Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke; it was published in 1592. Two years later, by way of sequel to the Countess’s work, her protege, Daniel, issued an original tragedy of Cleopatra on the Senecan pattern. Daniel pursued the topic some five years later in an imaginary verse letter from Antony’s wife Octavia to her husband. A humble camp-follower of the Elizabethan army of poets and dramatists, one Samuel Brandon, emulated Daniel’s example, and contrived in 1598 The tragicomedie of the virtuous Octavia. Brandon’s catastrophe is the death of Mark Antony, and Octavia’s jealousy of Cleopatra is the main theme.

¹ George Wyndham, in his introduction to his edition of North’s Plutarch, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of Shakespeare’s play to Plutarch’s life of Antonius. See also M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their background (1910), pp. 318 seq. The extent to which the dramatist saturated himself with Plutarchan detail may be gauged by the circumstance that he christens an attendant at Cleopatra’s Court with the name of Lamprius (1. ii. 1 stage direction). The name is accounted for by the fact that Plutarch’s grandfather of similar name (Lampryas) is parenthetically cited by the biographer as hearsay authority for some backstairs gossip of the palace at Alexandria.

work at Rome, but conducted an obstinate war in Pat- thia and Armenia. Nor does Shakespeare take cognisance of the eight or nine months which separate Antony’s defeat at Actium from his rout under the walls of Alexandria. With the complex series of events, which Shakespeare cuts adrift, his heroine has no concern, yet the neglected incident leaves in the play some jagged edges which impair its coherence and symmetry.

Shakespeare is no slavish disciple of Plutarch. The dramatist’s mind is concentrated on Antony’s infatuation for Cleopatra, and there he expands and de- shake- velops Plutarch’s story with magnificent free- speare’s dom and originality. The leading events and ofthe^atl°ⁿ characters, which Shakespeare drew from the ^story- Greek biography, are, despite his liberal borrowings of phrase and fact, re-incarnated in the crucible of the poet’s imagination, so that they glow in his verse with an heroic and poetic glamour of which Plutarch gives faint conception. All the scenes which Antony and Cleopatra dominate show Shakespeare’s mastery of dramatic emotion at its height. It is doubtful if any of his creations, male or female, deserve a rank in Ins great gallery higher than that of the Queen of Egypt for artistic completeness of conception or sureness of touch in dramatic execution. It is almost adequate comment on Antony’s character to affirm that he is a worthy companion of Cleopatra. The notes of roughness and sensuality in his temperament are ultimately sublimated by a vein of poetry, which lends singular beauty to all his farewell utterances. Herein he resembles Shakespeare’s Richard II and Macbeth, in both of whom a native poetic sentiment is quickened by despair. Among the minor personages, Enobarbus, Antony’s disciple, is especially worthy of study. His frank criticism of passing events invests him through the early portions of the play with the function of a chorus who sardonically warns the protagonists of the destiny awaiting their delinquencies and follies.

The metre and style of ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ when they are compared with the metre and style of the great The style tragedies of earlier date, plainly indicate fresh of the development of faculty and design. The ten- ^piece' dency to spasmodic and disjointed effects, of which ‘King Lear’ gives the earliest warnings, has become habitual. Coleridge applied to the language of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the Latin motto ‘feliciter ^udax.’ He credited the dramatic diction with ‘ a happy valiancy,’ a description which could not be bettered. Throughout the piece, the speeches of great and small characters are instinct with figurative allusiveness and metaphorical subtlety, which, however hard to paraphrase or analyse, convey an impression of sublimity. At the same time, in their moments of supreme exaltation, both Antony and Cleopatra employ direct language which is innocent of rhetorical involution. But the tone of sublimity commonly seeks sustenance in unexpected complexities of phrase. Occasional lines tremble on the verge of the grotesque. But Shakespeare’s ‘angelic strength’ preserves him from the perils of bombast.¹

Internal evidence points with no uncertain finger to the late months of 1608 or early months of 1609 as the period ‘ Corioia- of the birth of ‘ Coriolanus,’ the last piece of ^nus-’ Shakespeare’s Roman trilogy. The tragedy was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 from a singularly bad transcript.² The irregularities of metre, the ellipses of style closely associate ‘Coriolanus’ with ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ The metaphors and similes of ‘Coriolanus’ are hardly less abundant than in the previous tragedy and no less vivid. Yet the austerity

¹ A full review of the play and its analogues hy the present writer appears in the introduction to the text in the ‘Caxton’ Shakespeare.

² Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman, which is known to have heen first acted in 1609, seems to echo a phrase of Shakespeare’s play. In n. u. 105 Cominius says of the hero’s feats in youth that ‘he lurch’d [i.e. deprived] all swords of the garland.’ The phrase has an uncommon ring and it would he in full accordance with Jonson’s habit to have assimilated it, when he penned the sentence, ‘Well, Dauphin, you have lurched your friends of the better half of the garland’ (Silent Woman, v. iv. 227-8).

of Coriolanus’ tragic story is the ethical antithesis of the passionate subtlety of the story of Antony and his mistress, and the contrast renders the tragedy a fitting sequel.

As far as is known, only one dramatist in Europe anticipated Shakespeare in turning Coriolanus’ fate to dramatic purposes. Shakespeare’s single predecessor was his French contemporary Alexandre Hardy, who, freely interpreting Senecan principles of drama, produced his tragedy of ‘Coriolan’ on the Parisian stage for the first time in 1607.¹

Coriolanus’ story, as narrated by the Roman historian Livy, had served in Shakespeare’s youth for material of a prose tale in Painter’s well-known ‘Palace of _The fidelity Pleasure.’ There Shakespeare doubtless made to the acquaintance of his hero for the first time. ^Plutarch- But once again the dramatist sought his main authority in a biography of Plutarch, and he presented Plutarch’s leading facts in his play with a documentary fidelity which excels any earlier practice. He amplifies some subsidiary details and omits or contracts others. Yet the longest speeches in the play — the hero’s address to the Volscian general, Aufidius, when he offers him his military services, and Volumnia’s great appeal to her son to rescue his fellow-countrymen from the perils to which his desertion is exposing them — both transcribe with small variation for two-thirds of their length Plutarch’s language. There is magical vigour in the original interpolations. But the identity of phraseology is almost as striking as the changes or amplifications.²

¹ Hardy declared that ‘few subjects will be found in Roman history to be worthier of the stage’ than Coriolanus. The simplicity of the tragic motive with its filial sentiment well harmonises \pith French ideals of classical drama and with the French domestic temperament. For more than two centuries the seed which Hardy had sown bore fruit in France; and no less than three-and-twenty tragedies on the subject of Coriolanus have blossomed since Hardy’s day in the French theatres.

² In Plutarch, Coriolanus’ first words to Aufidius in his own house run: ‘If thou knowest me not yet, Tullus, and seeing me, dost not believe me to be the man that I am indeed, I must of necessity betray myself

Despite such liberal levies on Plutarch’s text Shakespeare imbues Plutarch’s theme with a new vivacity.

. The unity of interest and the singleness of the characters dramatic purpose render the tragedy nearly as ^{of th}® complete a triumph of dramatic art as ‘ Othello.’ ^{trase y}' Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is cast in a Titanic mould. No turn in the wheel of fortune can modify that colossal sense of the sacredness of caste with which his mother’s milk has infected him. Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia, is as vivid and finished a picture as the hero himself. Her portrait, indeed, is a greater original effort, for it owes much less to Plutarch’s inspiration. From her Coriolanus derives alike his patrician prejudice and his military ambition. But in one regard Volumnia is greater than her stubborn heir. The keenness and pliancy of

to be that I am.’ In Shakespeare Coriolanus speaks on the same occasion thus:

If Tullus,

Not yet thou knowest me, and, seeing me, dost not Think me for the man I am, necessity Commands me name myself, (iv. v. 54-57-)

Volumnia’s speech offers like illustration of Shakespeare’s dependence. Plutarch assigns to Volumnia this sentence: ‘So though the end of war be uncertain, yet this, notwithstanding, is most certain that if it be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou reap of this thy goodly conquest to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of thy country.’ Shakespeare transliterates with rare dramatic effect (v. iii. 140-148):

Thou know’st, great son,

The end of war’s uncertain, but this certain,

That if thou conquer Rome, the henefit Which thou shalt therehy reap is such a name Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses;

Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was nohle,

But with his last attempt he wiped it out,

Destroy’d his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr’d.’

Like examples of Shakespeare’s method of assimilation might be quoted from Coriolanus’ heated speeches to the tribunes and his censures of democracy (act m. sc. i.). The account which the tribune Brutus gives of Coriolanus’ ancestry (11. iii. 234 seq.) is so literally paraphrased from Plutarch that an obvious hiatus in the corrupt text of the play which the syntax requires to be filled, is easily supplied from North’s page. A full review of the play and its analogues by the present writer appears in the introduction to the text in the ‘Caxton’ Shakespeare.

her intellect have no counterpart in his nature. Very artistically are the other female characters of the tragedy, Coriolanus’ wife, Virgilia, and Virgilia’s friend Valeria, presented as Volumnia’s foils. Valeria is a high-spirited and honourable lady of fashion, with a predilection for frivolous pleasure and easy gossip. Virgilia is a gentle wife and mother, who well earns Coriolanus’ apostrophe of ‘gracious silence.’ Of other subsidiary characters, Menenius Agrippa, Coriolanus’ old friend and counsellor, is a touching portrait of fidelity to which Shakespeare lends a significance unattempted by Plutarch. Throughout the tragedy Menenius criticises the progress of events with ironical detachment after the manner of a chorus in classical tragedy. His place in the dramatic scheme resembles that of Enobarbus in ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and the turn of events involves him in almost as melancholy a fate.

More important to the dramatic development are the spokesmen of the mob and their leaders, the tribunes Brutus and Sicinius. The dark colours in _Thepol;_t. which Shakespeare paints the popular faction are icai crisis often held to reflect a personal predilection for ^{o£ the play}‘ aristocratic predominance in the body politic or for feudal conditions of political society. It is, .however, very doubtful whether Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the Roman crowd, was conscious of any intention save that of dramatically interpreting the social and political environment which Plutarch allots to Coriolanus’ career. The political situation which Plutarch described was alien to the experience of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespeare was in all likelihood merely moved by the artistic and purely objective ambition of investing unfamiliar episode with dramatic plausibility. No personal malice nor political design need be imputed to the dramatist’s repeated references to the citizens’ ‘ strong breaths ’ or ‘ greasy caps ’ which were conventional phrases in Elizabethan drama. Whatever failings are assigned to the plebeians in the tragedy of ‘ Coriolanus,’

it is patrician defiance of the natural instinct of patriotism which brings about the catastrophe, and works the fatal disaster. Shakespeare’s detached but inveterate sense of justice holds the balance true between the rival political interests.

Through the first decade of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare’s powers were at their zenith, he devoted his energies, as we have seen, almost shake- exclusively to tragedy. During the years that speare’s intervened between the composition of ‘Julius period,’ Caesar,’ in 1600, and that of ‘Coriolanus,’ in ^l6o°-«- 1609, tragic themes of solemn import occupied his pen unceasingly. The gleams of humour which illumined a few scenes scarcely relieved the sombre atmosphere. Seven plays in the great tragic series —■ ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Kang Lear,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘ Coriolanus ’ — won for their author the pre-eminent place among workers in the tragic art of every age and clime. A popular theory presumes that Shakespeare’s decade of tragedy was the outcome of some spiritual calamity, of some episode of tragic gloom in his private life. No tangible evidence supports the allegation. The external facts of Shakespeare’s biography through the main epoch of his tragic energy show an unbroken progress of prosperity, a final farewell to pecuniary anxieties, and the general recognition of his towering genius by contemporary opinion. The biographic record lends no support to the suggestion of a prolonged personal experience of tragic suffering. Nor does the general trend of his literary activities countenance the nebulous theory. Tragedy was no new venture for Shakespeare when the seventeenth century opened. His experiments in that branch of drama date from his earliest years. Near the outset of his career he had given signal proof of his tragic power in

‘Romeo and Juliet,’ in ‘King John,’ in ‘Richard II,’ and ‘Richard III.’ Into his comedies ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ ‘Much Ado,’ and ‘Twelfth Night,’ he imported tragic touches. With his advance in years there came in comedy and tragedy alike a larger grasp of life, a firmer style, a richer thought. Ultimately, tragedy rather than comedy gave him the requisite scope for the full exercise of his matured endowments, by virtue of the inevitable laws governing the development of dramatic genius. To seek in the necessarily narrow range of his personal experience the key to Shakespeare’s triumphant conquest of the topmost peajts of tragedy is to underrate his creative faculty and to disparage the force of its magic.

In the Elizabethan realm of letters interest combined with instinct to encourage the tragic direction of Shake- Popuiarity speare’s dramatic aptitudes. Public taste gave of tragedy, tragedy a supreme place in the theatre. It was on those who excelled in tragic drama that the highest rewards and the loudest applause were bestowed. There is much significance in the circumstance that Shakespeare’s tragedy of ‘King Lear,’ the most appalling of all tragedies, was chosen for presentation at Whitehall on the opening of the joyous Christmas festivities of 1606. The Court’s choice was dictated by the prevalent literary feeling. Shakespeare’s devotion to tragedy at the zenith of his career finds all the explanation that is needed in the fact that he was a great poet and dramatic artist whose progressive power was in closest touch and surest sympathy with current predilections.¹

There is no conflict with this conclusion in the circumstance that after completing ‘Coriolanus,’ the eighth drama in the well-nigh uninterrupted suc- speare’s cession of his tragic masterpieces, Shake- romance° ^sP^eare turned from the storm and stress of great tragedy to the serener field of meditative romance. A relaxation of the prolonged tragic strain

¹ Cf. the present writer’s essay on ‘The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare’s Art’ (English Association Leaflet, No. 13, July 1909).

was needed by both author and audience. Again the dramatist was pursuing a path which at once harmonised with the playgoers' idiosyncrasy and conformed with the conditions of his art.

The Elizabethan stage had under Italian or Franco- Italian influence welcomed from early days, by way of relief from the strenuousness of unqualified tragedy, experiments in tragicomedy or romantic comedy which aimed at a fusion of tragic and comic elements. At first the result was a crude mingling of ingredients which refused to coalesce.¹ But by slow degrees there developed an harmonious form of drama, technically known as ‘tragicomedy,’ in which a romantic theme, while it admitted tragic episode, ended happily and was imbued with a sentimental pathos unknown to either regular comedy or regular tragedy. Shakespeare’s romantic dramas of ‘Much Ado’ and ‘Twelfth Night’ had at the end of the sixteenth century first indicated the artistic capabilities of this middle term in drama. ‘Measure for Measure,’ which was penned in 1604, respected the essential conditions of a tragicomedy. The main issues fell within the verge of tragedy, but left the tragic path before they reached solution. In the years that immediately followed, Shakespeare’s juniors applied much independent energy to popularising the mixed dramatic type. George Chapman’s ‘The Gentleman Usher,’ which was published early in 1606 after its performance at the Blackfriars Theatre by the Children of the Chapel, has all the features of a full-fledged tragicomedy. As in ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Much Ado,’ serious romance is linked with much comic episode, but the incident is penetrated by strenuous romantic sentiment and stern griefs and trials reach a peaceful solution. The example was turned to very effective account by Francis

¹ The best known specimen of the early type is Richard Edwards’s empiric ‘tragicall comedy’ of Damon and Pythias, which dates from 1566. See pp. 93, 217 supra. For better-developed specimens on the contemporary French stage which helped to direct the development in England, cf. Lee’s French Renaissance in England, 408 seq.

Beaumont and John Fletcher, who, soon after their literary partnership opened in 1607, enlisted in the service of Shakespeare’s company. In their three popular plays ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ ‘Philaster,’ and ‘A King and no King,’ they succeeded in establishing for a generation the vogue of tragicomedy on the English stage. It was to the tragicomic movement, which his ablest contemporaries had already espoused with public approval, that Shakespeare lent his potent countenance in the latest plays which came from his unaided pen. In ‘ Cymbeline,’ ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and ‘The Tempest,’ Shakespeare applied himself to perfecting the newest phases of romantic drama. ‘Cymbeline’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ which immediately followed his great tragic efforts, are the best specimens of tragicomedy which literature knows. Although ‘The Tempest’ differs constructively from its companions, it completes the trilogy of which ‘Cymbeline’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale ’ are the • first and second instalments. If ‘ The Tempest’ come no nearer ordinary comedy than they, it is further removed from ordinary tragedy.¹ But it

¹ Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess and Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding, both of which may be classed with tragicomedies, would each seem to have been written in 1609, and the evidence suggests that they were the precursors rather than the successors of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale (cf. Ashley Thorndike’s The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, Worcester, Mass., 1901, chaps, ix. and x.). Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and no King, which also obeyed the laws of tragicomedy, was written before i6ir and was in all probability in course of composition at the same time as Cymbeline. All three pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted by Shakespeare’s company. Guarini’s Pastor Fido, the Italian pastoral drama, was very popular in England early in the seventeenth century and influenced the sentiment of Jacobean tragicomedy. In Fletcher’s ‘Address to the Reader’ before The Faithful Shepherdess, of which the first edition is an undated quarto assignable to 1609—10, a tragicomedy is thus defined in language silently borrowed from a critical essay of Guarini: ‘A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned.’ (Cf. F. H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy, New York, 1910, p. 107; T. M. Parrott’s Comedies of George Chapman, pp. 7S7 seq.)

belongs to the category of its two predecessors by virtue of its romantic spirit, of the plenitude of its poetry, of its solemnity of tone, of its avoidance of the arbitrament of death.

None of these three pieces was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. All were first printed in the First Folio, and the places they hold in that volume lack _The justification. Although ‘The Tempest’ was romantic the last play which Shakespeare completed, it andthe fills the first plaice in the First Folio, standing ^{F!rst Folio}- at the head of the section of comedies. ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ in spite of its composition just before ‘The Tempest,’ occupies the last place of the same section, being separated from ‘The Tempest’ by the whole range of Shakespeare’s endeavours in comedy. With even greater inconsistency, ‘ Cymbeline ’ comes at the very end of the First Folio, filling the last place in the third and last section of tragedies. It is clear that the editors of the volume completely misconceived the chronological and critical relations of the three plays, alike to one another and to the rest of Shakespeare’s work. They failed to recognise the distinctive branch of dramatic art to which ‘Cymbeline’ belonged, and they set it among Shakespeare’s tragedies with which it bore small logical affinity. Nor was ‘The Tempest’ nor ‘The Winter’s Tale’ justly numbered among the comedies without a radical qualification of that term.

It is mainly internal evidence — points of style, language, metre, characterisation — which proves that the three plays ‘Cymbeline,’ ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and ‘The Tempest’ belonged to the close of three Shakespeare’s career/ The metrical irregular- ^®_;^_g^plays ity, the condensed imagery, the abrupt turns 1611. of subtle thought, associate the three pieces very closely with ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘Coriolanus.’ The discerning student recognises throughout the romantic trilogy the latest phase of Shakespeare’s dramatic manner. The composition of ‘ Cymbeline ’ and ‘ The Winter’s

Tale’ may be best assigned to the spring and autumn respectively of 1610, and ‘The Tempest’ to the early months of the following year. External evidence shows that the three plays stood high in popular favour through the year 1611. Henry Manningham, the Middle Temple barrister, who described a performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ in the Hall of his Inn in February 1601-2, was not the only contemporary reporter of early performances of Shakespeare’s plays in London. Simon Forman, a prosperous London astrologer and quack doctor, also kept notes of his playgoing experiences in the metropolis a few years later. In the same notebook in which he described how he attended a revival of ‘Macbeth’ at the Globe theatre in April 1610, he recorded that on May 15, 1611, he visited the same theatre and witnessed ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ The next entry, which is without a date, gives a fairly accurate sketch of the complicated plot of Shakespeare’s ‘ Cymbeline.’¹ Forman’s notes do not suggest that he was present at the first production of any of the cited pieces; but it is clear that ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline,’ were, when he wrote of them, each of comparatively recent birth. Within six months of the date of Forman’s entries ‘The Tempest’was performed at Court (Nov. 1, 1611) and a production of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ before royalty followed in four days (Nov. 5, 1611).²

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 86; cf. p. 125 n. supra.

² The entries of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in the Boole of the Revells (October 31, 1611-November *, 1612) in the Public Record Office were long under suspicion of forgery. But their authenticity is now established- See Ernest Law’s Some supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 1911, and his More about Shakespeare Forgeries, 1913. The Booke of the Revells in question was printed in Cunningham’s Extracts from the Account of the Revels at Court, p. 210. In 1809 Malone, who examined the Revels Accounts, wrote of The Tempest, ‘I know that it had “a being and a name” in the autumn of 1611,’ and he concluded that it was penned in the spring of that year. (Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xv. 423.) The Council’s warrant, giving particulars of the payment of the actors for their services at Court during the year 1611—125 is in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. A 204 (f. 305); the warrant omits all names of plays..

In ‘Cymbeline’ Shakespeare weaves together three distinct threads of story, two of which he derives from well-known literary repertories. The first The triple thread concerns a political quarrel between Pcymbe- ancient Britain, when it was a Roman province, line.’ and the empire of Rome, which claimed supreme dominion over it. Shakespeare derived his Brito-Roman incident from Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle,’ a volume whence he had already drawn much legend as well as authentic history. His pusillanimous hero Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a late successor of King Lear and nearly the last of Lear’s line. The second thread of the plot of ‘ Cymbeline,’ which concerns the experiences of the heroine Imogen, comes with variations from a well-known novel of Boccaccio. There Shakespeare’s heroine was known as Ginevra; her husband (Shakespeare’s Posthumus) as Bernabo; and his treacherous friend (Shakespeare’s Iachimo) as Ambrogiuolo. Boccaccio anticipates Shakespeare in the main fortunes of Imogen, including her escape in boy’s attire from the death which her husband designs for her. But Shakespeare reconstructs the subsequent adventures which lead to her reconciliation with her husband. Boccaccio’s tale was crudely adapted for English readers in a popular miscellany of fiction entitled ‘Westward for Smelts, or the Waterman’s Fare of Mad Merry Western Wenches, whose tongues albeit, like Bell-clappers, they never leave ringing, yet their Tales are sweet, and will much content you: Written by kinde Kitt of Kingstone.’ This fantastically named book was, according to Malone and Steevens, first published in London in 1603, but no edition earlier than 1620 is known. Episodes analogous to those which form the plot of Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ appear in the volume. But on any showing the indebtedness of the dramatist’s ‘Cymbeline’ to it is slender. He follows far more loyally Boccaccio’s original text. Shakespeare would seem to have himself invented the play’s third thread of story, the banish

ment from the British Court of the lord, Belarius, who, in revenge for his expatriation, kidnapped the king’s young sons and brought them up with him in the recesses of the mountains.

Although most of the scenes of ‘Cymbeline’ are laid in Britain in the first century before the Christian era,

there is no pretence of historical vraisemblance. tiorTanJf With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness, character- the British King’s courtiers make merry with

isation • • •

technical terms peculiar to Calvinistic theology,, like ‘grace’ and ‘election.’¹ The action, which, owing to the combination of the three threads of narrative, is varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of romance. But the dramatist atones for the remoteness of the incident and .the looseness of construction by investing the characters with a rare wealth of vivacious humanity. The background of the picture is unreal; but the figures in the foreground are instinct with life and poetry. On Imogen, who is the main pillar of the action, Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius. She is the crown and flower of his conception of tender and artless womanhood. She pervades and animates the whole piece as an angel of light, who harmonises its discursive and discordant elements. Her weakly suspicious husband Posthumus, her rejected lover the brutish Clo- ten, her would-be seducer Iachimo are contrasted with her and with each other with luminous ingenuity. The mountain passes of Wales in which Belarius and his fascinating boy-companions play their part have some points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in ‘As You Like It ’; but life throughout ‘ Cymbeline ’ is grimly earnest, and the rude and bracing Welsh mountains nurture little of the contemplative quiet which characterises existence on the sylvan levels of Arden. Save in a part of one scene, no doubt is permissible of Shake

¹ In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as ‘past grace’ in the theological sense. In 1. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks: ‘If it be a’sin to make a true election, she is damned.’

speare’s sole responsibility. In the fourth scene of the fourth act (11. 30 seq.) the husband Posthumus, when imprisoned by Cymbeline, King of Britain, sees in an irrelevant vision his parents and his brothers, who summon Jupiter to restore his broken fortunes. All here is pitiful mummery, which may be assigned to an incompetent coadjutor. Any suspicion elsewhere that Shakespeare’s imagination has suffered in energy is dispelled by the lyrical dirge ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,’ which for perfect sureness of thought and expression has no parallel in the songs of previous years. The'deaths of Cloten and his mother signalise the romantic triumph of Imogen’s virtue over wrong, and accentuate the serious aspects of life without exciting tragic emotion.

Far simpler than the plot of ‘Cymbeline’ is that of ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ which was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on May 15, 1611, and was acted at <_The Court on November 5 following.¹ The play Winter’s was wholly based upon a popular English ^Tale"’ romance of euphuistic temper which was called ‘ Pandosto’ in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened ‘Dorastus and Fawnia.’ Shakespeare’s constructive method in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ resembled that which he pursued in ‘As You Like It,’ when he converted into a play a recent English romance, ‘ Rosalynde,’ by Thomas Lodge. Some irony attaches to Shakespeare’s choice of authority for the later play. The writer of the novel which Shakespeare dramatised there was Robert Greene, xjje debt who, on his deathbed, some eighteen years to Greene’s before, had attacked the dramatist with much ^nove' bitterness when his great career was opening. In many

¹ Camillo’s reflections (1. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who ‘struck anointed kings’ have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as specially designed to gratify James I. The name of the play belongs to tile same category as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night.

■ The expression ‘a winter’s tale’ was in common use for a serious story, but the dramatist may possibly echo here Las Noches de Invierno (‘The Winter Evenings’), the title of a collection of Spanish tales (Madrid, 1609) to which he may have had access, see p. 427 n. 1.

ways Shakespeare in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ was more loyal to the invention of his early foe than scholarship or art quite justified. Shakespeare followed Greene in allotting a seashore to Bohemia — an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry.¹ The dramatist, like the novelist, located in the island of Delphos, instead of on the mainland of Phocis, the Delphic oracle of Apollo which a pseudo-classical proclivity irrelevantly brought into the story. The scheme of the piece suggests an undue deference on the playwright’s part to the conditions of the novel. The action of the play is bluntly cut in two by an interval of sixteen years, which elapse between the close of act in. and the opening of act iv., and the speech of the chorus personifying Time proves barely able to bridge the chasm. The incidental deaths of two subsidiary good characters — the boy Mamilius and the kindly old courtier Antigonus

— somewhat infringe the placid canons of romance. The second death is an invention of the dramatist. Shakespeare’s dependence on Greene’s narrative was indeed far from servile. After his wont he rechristened the characters, and he modified the spirit of the fable wherever his dramatic instinct prompted change. In the novel bold familiarities between Bellaria, Shakespeare’s Her- mione, and Egistus, Shakespeare’s Polixenes, lend some Shake ^c°l°^{ur to} the jealousy of Pandosto, Shakespeare’s speo.re’s Leontes. In Shakespeare’s play all excuse for tions^Va’ husband’s suspicions of his wife is swept

away. In the novel Bellaria dies of grief on hearing of the death of her son Gerintes, Shakespeare’s Mamilius. Hermione’s long and secret retirement and her final reconciliation with Leontes are episodes of Shakespeare’s coinage. At the same time he created the character of Paulina, Hermione’s outspoken friend and companion, and he provided from his own resources welcome comic relief in the gipsy pedlar and thief Auto- lycus, who is skilled in all the patter of the cheap Jack

¹ Conversations with Drtmktond, p. 16.

and sings with a light heart many popular airs. A few lines in one of Autolycus’s speeches were obviously drawn from that story of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare had dealt just before in ‘Cymbeline.’¹ But the rogue is essentially a creature of Shakespeare’s fashioning.

Leontes’ causeless jealousy, which is the motive of ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ has nothing in common with the towering passion of Othello. Nor is it cast in _The quite the same mould as the wrongful suspicion freshness which Posthumus cherishes of Imogen at ^oftone- Iachimo’s prompting in ‘Cymbeline.’ Leontes’ jealousy is the aberration of a weak mind and owes nothing to external pressure. The husband’s feeble wrath is finely contrasted with his wife’s gentle composure and patient fortitude in the presence of unwarrantable suffering which moves pathos of an infinite poignancy. The boy Mamil- ius is of near kin to the boys in ‘Cymbeline.’ Nowhere has the dramatist portrayed more convincingly boyhood’s charm, quickness of perception or innocence. Perdita develops the ethereal model of Marina in ‘ Pericles ’ and shows tender ingenuous girlhood moulded by Nature’s hand and free of the contamination of social artifice. The .courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance. The freshness, too, of the pastoral incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare’s presentations of country life. Shakespeare’s final labours in tragicomedy betray an enhanced mastery of the simple as well as of the complex aspect of human experience.-

‘The Tempest’ was probably the latest drama that Shakespeare completed. While chronologically and organically it is closely bound to ‘Cymbeline’ and ‘The

¹ In The Winter’s Tale (rv. iv. 812 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that the clown’s son ‘shall be flayed alive; then ’nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest,’ &c. In Boccaccio’s story of Ginevra (Shakespeare’s Imogen) the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare’s Iachimo), after ‘being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,’ was ‘to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies therewith that country abounded’ (cf. Decameron, transl. John Payne, i. 164). See also Apuleius’ Golden Ass, bk. viii. c. 35.

Winter’s Tale,’ it pursues a path of its own. It challenges familiar laws of life and nature far more openly ‘The than either of its immediate predecessors. Yet Tempest.’ the dramatist’s creative power has fired his impalpable texture with a living sentiment and emotion which are the finest flower of poetic romance. . ‘The Tempest’ has affinities with the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ In both pieces supernatural fancies play a prominent part. But the contrasts are more notable than the resemblances. The bustling energy of the ‘Dream’ is replaced in ‘The Tempest’ by a steadily progressive calm. The poetry of the later drama rings with a greater profundity and a stronger human sympathy. ‘The Tempest’s’ echoes of classical poetry are less numerous or distinct than those of the ‘Dream.’ Yet into Prospero’s great speech renouncing his practice of magical art (v. i. 33-37) Shakespeare wrought literal reminiscences of Golding’s translation of Medea’s invocation in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (vii. 197-206). Golding’s rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare’s best-loved books in youth, and his parting tribute proves the permanence of his early impressions, in spite of his widened interests.

In ‘The Tempest’ Shakespeare accepted two main cues, one from pre-existing romantic literature and the _The other from current reports of contemporary sources of adventure. The main theme of the exiled the fable. _magj_cj_an
an(j daughter was probably borrowed from a popular romance of old standing in many foreign tongues.¹ The episode of the storm and the conception of Caliban were more obvious fruit of reported incident in recent voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.

Several Spanish novelists, whose work was circulating

¹ The name Prospero, which Shakespeare first bestowed on the magician, would seem to have been drawn from the first draft of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour (1598), where all the characters bear Italian names (in later editions changed into English). Ben Jonson afterwards christened his character of Prospero by the name of Wellbred.

in cultured English circles, had lately told of ma.giria.ns of princely or ducal rank exiled by usurpers from their home to mysteriously remote retreats, in the company of au only daughter who was ultimately wooed and won by the son of the magician’s archfoe.¹ In the ‘ Comedia von der schonen Sidea,’ a German play written about 1595, by Jacob Ayrer, a dramatist of Nuremberg, there are, moreover, adumbrations not only of the magician Pros- pero, his daughter Miranda, and her lover Ferdinand, but also of Ariel.² English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare, or both German and English dramatists may have fol-

¹ Spanish romance was well known in Elizabethan England, as is shown by the vogue of Montemayor’s Diana, which includes a story analogous to that of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen. In the seventeenth century Spanish stories were repeatedly dramatised in England. Shakespeare’s coadjutor Fletcher based numerous plays on the Exemplary Novels of Cervantes and the fiction of other Spaniards. A Spanish collection of short tales by Antonio de Eslava, bearing the general title ‘Primera Parte de las Noches de Invierno’ — ‘The First Part of the Winter Evenings’ (Madrid 1609) —-includes the story of Dardanus, a king of Bulgaria, a virtuous magician, who, being dethroned hy Nice- phorus, a usurping emperor of Greece, sails away with his only daughter Seraphlna in a little ship, and in mid-ocean creates a beautiful submarine palace for their residence. There the girl grows up like Miranda on the desert island. When she reaches womanhood, the magician, disguised as a fisherman, captures the son of his usurping foe and brings the youth to his dwelling under the sea. The girl’s marriage with the kidnapped prince follows. The usurper dies and the magician is restored to hi^ kingdom, but finally he transfers his power to his daughter and son-in-law. On such a foundation Shakespeare’s fable of Prospero might conceivably have been reared.

² In the German play, which is printed in Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany, a noble magician, Ludolph, prince of Lithuania, heing defeated in battle by a usurper, Leudegast, prince of the Wiltau, seeks refuge in a forest together with an only daughter Sidea. In the forest the exile is attended by a demon, Runcival, who is of Ariel’s kindred. The • forest, although difficult of access, is by no means uninhabited. Meanwhile the exile works his magic spell on his enemy’s son Engelbrecht and makes him his prisoner in the sylvan retreat. The captive is forced by his master to bear logs, like Ferdinand in The Tempest. Finally the youth marries the girl, and the marriage reconciles the parents. At many points the stories of the German and English plays correspond. But there are too many discrepancies to establish a theory of direct dependence on Shakespeare’s part.

lowed an identical piece of fiction, which has not been quite precisely identified.

In no earlier presentment of the magician’s and his daughter’s romantic adventures, is any hint given either The ship- of the shipwreck or of Caliban. Suggestions wreck. f_or these episodes reached Shakespeare from a quarter nearer home than Spain or Germany. In the summer of 1609 a fleet “bound for the new plantation of Jamestown in Virginia, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the admiral’s ship, the ‘Sea-Venture,’ was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home. Somers and his men were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda in two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 1610, and the news of their adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the seamen in September 1610. The sailors’ arrival created vast public excitement in London. At least five accounts were soon published of the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of the expedition. ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas, other* wise called the Isle of Divels,’ written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October. A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of _t the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who mentions the ‘still vexed Bermoothes’ (1. i. 229), incorporated in ‘The Tempest’ many hints from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphleteers. The references to the gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the spirits and devils that infested it, seem to render unquestionable its identification with

the newly discovered Bermudas. There is no reasonable ground for disputing that the catastrophe around which the plot of ‘The Tempest’ revolves was suggested by the casting away, in a terrific storm, on the rocky Atlantic coast, of the ship bound in 1609 for the new settlement of Jamestown. Prospero’s uninhabited island reflects most of the features which the shipwrecked sailors on this Virginian voyage assigned to their involuntary asylum, where they imagined themselves to be brought face to face with the elementary forces of Nature.

The scene of the sailors’ illusion stirred in the dramatist’s fertile imagination the further ambition to portray aboriginal man in his own home. But before _{The signif}_ he formulated his conception of Caliban, Shake- rcance of speare played parenthetically with current ^CaUban- fancies respecting the regeneration which the New World held in store for the Old. The French essayist Montaigne had fathered the notion that aboriginal America, offered Europe an example of Utopian communism. In his rambling essay on cannibals (11. 30) he described an unknown island of the New World where the inhabitants lived according to nature and were innocent alike of the vices and virtues of civilisation. In ‘The Tempest’ (11. i. 154 seq.), Gonzalo, the honest counsellor of Naples, sketches after he and his companions are rescued from shipwreck the kind of natural law which, if the plantation were left in his hands, he would establish on the desert island of their redemption. Here Shakespeare literally adopts Montaigne’s vocabulary with its abrupt turns as it figured in Florio’s English translation of the Frenchman’s essays. But Shakespeare admits no personal faith in Montaigne’s complaisant theorising, of which he takes leave with the comment that it is ‘merry fooling.’

Caliban was Shakespeare’s ultimate conception of the true quality of aboriginal character. Specimens of the American Indian had been brought to England by Elizabethan or Jacobean voyagers during Shakespeare’s work

ing career. They had often been exhibited in London and shake- the provinces by professional showmen as mir- speare and aculous monsters.¹ Travellers had spoken and ican ^er" written freely of the native American. Caliban native. j_{s an} imaginary composite portrait, an attempt to reduce to one common denominator the aboriginal types whom the dramatist had seen or of whom he had heard or read.² Shakespeare’s American proves to have little in common with the Arcadian innocent with which Montaigne identifies him. Shakespeare had lightly applied to savage man the words ‘ a very land-fish, languageless, a monster,’ before he concentrated his attention on the theme.³ But on closer study he rejected this description, and finally presented him as a being endowed with live senses and appetites, with aptitudes for mechanical labour, with some knowledge and some control of the resources of inanimate nature and of the animal world. But his life was passed in that stage of evolutionary development which preceded the birth of moral sentiment, of intellectual perception, and of social culture. Caliban was a creature stumbling over the first stepping-stones which lead from savagery to civilisation.⁴

¹ A native of New England called Epenew was brought to England in 1611, and ‘being a man of so great a stature’ was ‘showed up and down London for money as a monster’ (Capt. John Smith’s Historie of New England, ed. 1907, ii. 7). The Porter in Henry VIII (v. iv. 32) doubtless had Epenew in mind when he alludes to the London moh’s rush after ‘some strange Indian.’ When Trinculo in The Tempest speaks of the eagerness of a London crowd to pay for a sight of ‘ a dead Indian’ (n. ii. 34) Shakespeare doubtless recalls an actual experience. ‘Indian’ is used by Shakespeare in the sense of ‘Red Indian.’

² Traits of the normal tractable type of Indian to which belonged the Virginian and Carihbean of the middle continent mingle in Caliban with those of the irredeemable savages of Patagonia to the extreme south of America. _ To the former type Red Indian visitors to England belonged. The evidence which justifies the description of Caliban as a composite portrait of varied types of the American Indian has been brought together by the present writer in two essays, ‘The American Indian in Elizabethan England,’ in Scribner’s Magazine, September 1907, and ‘ Caliban’s Visits to England,’ in Cornhill Magazine, March 1913.

³ Troilus and Cressida, ni. iii. 264.

⁴ At some points Shakespeare reproduced in The Tempest with absolute literalness the experience of Europeans in their encounters with

The dramatist’s notice of the god Setebos, the chief object of Caliban’s worship, echoes accounts of the wild people of Patagonia, who lived in a state of _CaIiban._s unqualified savagery. Pigafetta, an Italian god “^s mariner, first put into writing an account of ^Setebos- the Patagonians’ barbarous modes of life and their uncouth superstitions. His tract circulated widely in Shakespeare’s day in English translations, chiefly in Richard Eden’s ‘History of Travel’ (1577). During the dramatist’s lifetime curiosity about the mysterious people spread. Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, in their circumnavigations of the globe, both paused on Patagonian territory and held intercourse with its strange inhabitants. In ‘their great devil Setebos’ centred the most primitive conceptions of religion. Caliban acknowledges himself to be a votary of ‘the Patagonian devil.’ Twice he makes mention of ‘my dam’s god Setebos’ (1. ii. 373; v. i. 261).

In one respect Shakespeare departs from his authorities.

aboriginal inhabitants of newly discovered America. The savage’s insistent recognition in the brutish Trinculo of divine attributes is a vivid and somewhat ironical picture of the welcome accorded to Spanish, French, and English explorers on their landing in the New World. Every explorer shared, too, Prospero’s pity for the aborigines’ inability to make themselves intelligible in their crabbed agglutinative dialects, and offered them instruction in civilised speech. The menial services which Caliban renders his civilised master specifically identify Prospero and his native servant with the history of early settlements of Englishmen in Virginia. ‘I’ll fish for thee,’ Caliban tells Trinculo, and as soon as he believes that he has shaken off Prospero’s tyrannical yoke he sings with exultant emphasis, ‘No more dams I’ll make for fish.’ These remarks of Caliban are graphic echoes of a peculiar experience of Elizabethans in America. One of the chief anxieties of the early English settlers in Virginia was lest the natives should fail them in keeping in good order the fish-dams, where fish was caught for food by means of a device of great ingenuity. When Raleigh’s first governor of Virginia, Ralph Lane, detected in 1586 signs of hostility among the natives about his camp, his thoughts at once turned to the dams or weirs. Unless the aborigines kept them in good order, starvation was a certain fate of the colonists, for no Englishmen knew how to .construct and work these fish-dams on which the settlement relied for its chief sustenance. (Cf. Hakluyt’s Voyages, ed. 1904, viii. 334 seq.) Caliban’s threat to make ‘no more dams for fish’ exposed Prospero to a very real and familiar peril.

Although untrustworthy rumours described aboriginal tribes in unexplored forests about the river Amazon as hideously distorted dwarfs,¹ the average Indian of Caliban’s America — even the Patagonian — was physi- distorted cally as well formed and of much the same stat- ^shape' ure as Englishmen. Yet Caliban is described as of ‘disproportioned’ body; he is likened to a tortoise, and is denounced as a ‘freckled whelp’ or a ‘poor credulous monster.’ Such misrepresentation is no doubt deliberate. Caliban’s distorted form brings into bolder relief his moral shortcomings, and more clearly defines his psychological significance. Elizabethan poetry completely assimilated the Platonic idea, that the soul determines the form of the body. Shakespeare invested his ‘rude and savage man of Ind’ with a shape akin to his stunted intelligence and sentiment.²

King James I and his circle now looked to Shakespeare for most of their dramatic recreation. ‘The Tempest,’ ‘The penned in the spring of 1611, opened the Tempest’ gay winter season at Court of 1611-2, and at Court. _twej_ve pi_eces which followed it included

among them Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale.’ ‘The Tempest’ was again performed in February 1612-3 during the festivities which celebrated the marriage of King James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, with Frederick the Elector Palatine. Princess Elizabeth was, like Miranda, an island princess; but there was no relevance in the plot to the circumstances of the royal bridal.³ Eighteen

¹ Cf. Othello’s reference to the Anthropophagi and men whose heads ‘Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1. iii. 144-5). Raleigh, in his Dis- coverie of Guiana, 1596, mentions on hearsay such a deformed race in a region of South America.

² Cf. Browning, Caliban upon Setebos, Daniel Wilson, Caliban, or the Missing Link [1873], and Renan, Caliban [1878], a drama continuing Shakespeare’s play.

⁸ A baseless theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents The Tempest as a masque written to celebrate Princess Elizabeth’s marriage on February 14, 1612-13. It was clearly written some two years earlier. On any showing, the plot of The Tempest which revolves about the forcible expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter’s wooing by the son of the usurper’s chief ally, was hardly one that a shrewd play-

other plays at Court were given in honour of the nuptials by Shakespeare’s company under the direction of its manager, John Heminges. Five pieces besides ‘The Tempest’ in the extended programme were by Shakespeare, viz.: ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘Sir John Falstaff’ (i.e. Henry IV’), ‘Othello,’ and ‘Julius Caesar.’ Two of these plays, ‘Much Ado’ and ‘Henry IV,’ were rendered twice.¹

The early representations of ‘The Tempest’ evoked as much applause in the public theatre as at Court. The popular success of the piece owed something The vogue to the beautiful lyrics which were dispersed of*e play- through the play and were set to music by Robert Johnson, a lutenist in high repute.² Like its predecessor ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ ‘The Tempest’ long maintained its first success on the stage, and the vogue of the two pieces drew a passing sneer from Ben Jonson. In the Indue- . tion to his ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ first acted in 1614, he wrote: ‘If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it? he [i.e. the author] says, nor a nest of Antics. He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.’ The ‘servant-monster’ was an obvious allusion to Caliban, and ‘ the nest of Antics ’ was a glance at the satyrs who figure in the sheep-shearing feast in ‘ The Winter’s Tale.’ '

Nowhere did Shakespeare give rein to his imagination with more imposing effect than in ‘The Tempest.’ The serious atmosphere has led critics, without much reason,

wright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his tide to the crown as James I.

¹ Heminges was paid on May 20, 1613, the total sum of 133?. 6s. 8d. for the company’s elaborate services. See the accounts of Lord Stanhope, Treasurer of the Chamber, in the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl.

A 239 (f. 47), printed in Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines, ii. 87, and in the New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1885-6; ii. p. 419.

¹ Harmonised scores of Johnson’s airs for the songs_ ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Where the Bee sucks’ are preserved in Wilson’s Cheerful Ayres or Ballads set for three voices, 1660.

to detect in the scheme of the drama a philosophic pronouncement rather than a play of mature poetic Fanciful fancy. Little reliance should be placed on in- interpre- terpretations which detach the play from its ot'vae historic environment. The creation of Miranda Tempest.’ i_s the apotheosis in literature of tender, ingenuous girlhood unsophisticated by social intercourse; but Shakespeare had already sketched the outlines of the portrait in Marina and Perdita, the youthful heroines respectively of ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and these two characters were directly developed from romantic stories of girl-princesses, cast by misfortune on the mercies of Nature, to which Shakespeare had recourse for the plots of the two plays. It is by accident, rather than design, that in Ariel appear to be discernible the capabilities of human intellect when relieved of physical attributes. Ariel belongs to the same poetic world as Puck, although he is delineated in the severer colours that were habitual to Shakespeare’s fully developed art. Caliban, as we have seen, is an imaginary portrait, conceived with matchless vigour and vividness, of the aboriginal savage of the New World, descriptions of whom abounded in contemporary travellers’ speech and writings, while a few living specimens, who visited Shakespeare’s England, excited the liveliest popular curiosity. In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have been sought of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, who was approaching in this play the date of his farewell to the enchanted work of his life, although he was not yet to abandon it altogether. Prospero is in the story a scholar-prince of rare intellectual attainments, whose engrossing study of the mysteries of science has given him magical command of the forces of Nature. His magnanimous renunciation of his magical faculty as soon as by its exercise he has restored his shattered fortunes is in accord with the general conception of a just and philosophical tern-

perament. Any other justification of his final act is superfluous.¹

While there is every indication that in 1O11 Shakespeare surrendered the regular habit of dramatic composition, it has been urged with much ]>lausi- _S|_m|„, biiity that he subsequently drafted more than »peoro’i one play which he Hul'fered others to complete, wldi John Ah his literary activity declined, his place at the ^I'^l,'^li:‘^lor' head of the professional dramatists came to he filled by John Fletcher, who in partnership with Francis Beaumont had from 1607 onwards been winning much applause from playgoers and critics. Beaumont’s cooperation with Fletcher was shortlived, and ceased in little more than six years. Thereupon Flctchcr found a new coadjutor in Philip Massinger, another competent playwright already enjoying some reputation, and Fletcher, with occasional aid from Massinger, has been credited on grounds of varying substance with completing some dramatic work which engaged Shakespeare’s attention on the eve of his retirement. Three plays, ‘Cardenio/ ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen/ and ‘Henry VIII/ have been named as the fruits of Shakespeare’s farewell co-operation with Fletcher. The evidence in the first case 1b too slender to admit of a conclusion. In the case of the second piece the allegation of Shakespeare’s partnership with Fletcher hangs in the balance of debate. Only in the third case of ‘Henry VIII’ may Fletcher’s association with Shakespeare be accepted without demur.

On September^, 1653, the publisher I lumphrey Moseley obtained a license for the publication of a play _T|,_eIost which he described as ‘History of Cardenio, piaypf , by Flctchcr and Shakespeare.’ No drama of ^ the name Burvlves, but it was probably identical with

'A full dltcuillon of ult I lie pnlnlM connected wllli The lew post wai contributed by the i>t<wni wrlli'r i<> the beautifully printed edition, privately iitued under ilic nlliorHhlp of Wllll» Vickery, by the Rowfant Club, Clovalund, Ohio, in 1911.

the lost piece called ‘Cardenno,’ or ‘Cardenna,’ which was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare’s company in 1613 — in May during the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador.¹ Moseley failed to publish the piece, and no tangible trace of it remains to confirm or to confute his description of its authorship, which may be merely fanciful.² The title of the play leaves no doubt that it was a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of ‘Don Quixote’ (ch. xxiii.—xxxvii.). Cervantes’s amorous story first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton’s translation of ‘Don Quixote’ in 1612. There is no evidence of Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Cervantes’s great work. On the other hand Beaumont and Fletcher’s farce of ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’ echoes the mock heroics of the Spanish romance; the adventures of Cervantes’ ‘Cardenio’ offer much incident in Fletcher’s vein, and he subsequently found more than one plot in Cervantes’ ‘Exemplary Novels.’ The allegations touching the lost play of ‘ Cardenio ’ had a curious sequel. In 1727 Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic, induced the managers of Drury Lane Theatre to stage a piece called ‘Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,’ on his mysterious representation that it was an unpublished play by Shakespeare. The story of Theobald’s piece is the story of Cardenio, although the characters are renamed. When Theobald published ‘Double Falshood’ next year he described it on the title-page as ‘written originally by W. Shakespeare, and now revised and adapted to the stage by Mr. Theobald.’ Despite Theobald’s warm protestations to the contrary,³ there is nothing in the play as published by him to suggest Shake

¹ Treasurer’s accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), printed in New Shakspere Soc.’s Transactions, r89S—6, pt. ii. p. 419.

² For Moseley’s assignment to Shakespeare of plays of doubtful authorship, see p. 263 supra.

³ In the ‘preface of the editor’ Theobald wrote: ‘It has been alleg’d as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost to the World

speare’s hand. Theobald clearly took mystifying advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme.¹

The two other pieces, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and ‘Henry VIII,’ which have been attributed to a similar partnership, survive.² ‘The Two Noble Kins- _<Two men’ was first printed in 1634, and was, accord- Noble ing to the title-page, not only ‘presented at the ^Kmsmen-’ Black-friers by the Kings Maiesties servants with great applause,’ but was ‘written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen.’ Neither author was alive at the date of the publication. Shakespeare had died in 1616 and Fletcher nine years later. The piece was not admitted to any early edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, but it was included, in the second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher of 1679. Critics of repute affirm and deny with equal confidence the joint authorship of the piece, which the original title-page announced.

for above a Century. To This my Answer is short; that tho’ it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter; and, as I am credibly inform’d, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, and by Him design’d to have been usher’d into the World. What Accident prevented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know: Or thro’ what hands it had successively pass’d before that Period of Time. There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person, who supply’d me with One of my Copies) that it was given by our Author, as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage. Two other Copies I have, (one of which I was glad to purchase at a very good Rate), which may not, perhaps, be quite so old as the Former; but One of Them is much more perfect, and hag fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense. . . . Others again, to depreciate the Affair, as they thought, have been pleased to urge, that tho’ the Play may have some Resemblances of Shakespeare, yet the Colouring, Diction, and Characters come nearer to the Style and Manner of Fletcher. This, I think, is far from deserving any Answer.’

* Dr. Farmer thought he detected trace of Shirley’s workmanship, and Malone that of Massinger. The piece was possibly Theobald’s unaided invention, and his claim for Shakespeare an ironical mystification.

² The 1634 quarto of the play was carefully edited for the New Shak- spere Society by Mr. Harold Littledale in r876. See also William Spalding, Shakespeare’s Authorship of ‘Two Noble Kinsmen,’ 1833, reprinted by New Shakspere Society, 1876. .

The main plot is drawn directly from Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ o>f Palamon and Arcite in which the two _Th knightly friends, while suffering captivity at

e p ot. Theseus’s heroic hands, become estranged owing to their both falling in love with the same lady Emilia. After much chivalric adventure Arcite dies, and Palamon and Emilia are united in marriage. The rather unsatisfying story had been already twice dramatised; but neither of the earlier versions has survived. Richard Edwardes (the father of ‘tragicall comedy’) was responsible for a lost play ‘Palemon and Arcyte’ which was acted before Queen Elizabeth at Christ Church on her visit to Oxford in 1566 ¹; while at the Newington theatre Philip Henslowe produced as a new piece a second play of like name, ‘Palamon and Arsett,’ on September 17, 1594. Henslowe thrice repeated the performance in the two following months.² The obvious signs of indebtedness on the part of Fletcher and his coadjutor to Chaucer’s narrative render needless any speculation whether or no the previous dramas were laid under contribution. With the Chaucerian tale the authors of ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ combine a trivial by-plot of crude workmanship in which ‘the jailer’s daughter’ develops for Palamon a desperate and unrequited passion which engenders insanity. A mention of ‘the play Palemon’ in Ben Jonson’s ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ which was produced in 1614) suggests the date of the composition which is attributed to Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s dual authorship.

On grounds alike of assthetic criticism and metrical tests, a substantial portion of the main scenes of ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ was assigned to Shakespeare by judges of the acumen of Charles Lamb, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Swinburne. The Shakespearean editor Dyce included the whole piece in his edition of Shakespeare. Coleridge positively detected Shakespeare’s hand

¹ Nichols’s Progresses of Elizabeth, 1823, i. 210-3.

² Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 168.

in act i., act n. sc. i., and act iii. sc. i. and ii. In addition to those scenes, act iv. sc. iii. and act v. (except sc. ii.) have been subsequently placed to his credit by critics whose judgment merits respect. It is undeniable that two different styles figure in the piece, spelt’s The longer and inferior part, including the •

- subsidiary episode of ‘ the jailer’s daughter,’ ' may be allotted to Fletcher’s pen without misgiving, but in spite of the weight attaching to the verdict of the affirmative critics, some doubt is inevitable as to whether the smaller and superior portion of the drama is Shakespeare’s handiwork. The language of the disputed scenes often recalls Shakespeare’s latest efforts. The opening song, ‘Roses their sharp spines being gone,’ echoes Shakespeare’s note so closely that it is difficult, to allot it to another. Yet the characterisation falls throughout below the standard of the splendid diction. The personages either lack distinctiveness of moral feature or they breathe a sordid sentiment which rings falsely. It may be that Shakespeare was content to redraft in his own manner speeches which Fletcher had already infected with unworthy traits of feeling. On the other hand, it is just possible that Philip Massinger, Fletcher’s fellow-worker, who is known elsewhere to have echoed Shakespeare’s tones with almost magical success, may be responsible for the contributions to ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ to which Fletcher has no claim. Massinger’s ethical temper is indistinguishable from that which pervades ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen.’ There may be nothing in Massinger’s extant work quite equal to the style of the non-Fletcherian scenes there, but it is easier to believe that some exceptional impulse should have lifted Massinger for once to their level, than that Shakespeare should have belied on a single occasion his habitual ideals of ethical principle.

The literary problems presented by the play of ‘Henry VIII’ closely resemble those attaching to ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen.’ Shakespeare had abandoned the theme

of English history with his drama of ‘Henry V’ early in 1599. Public interest in the English historical play ‘Henry thenceforth steadily declined; fresh experiments viii.’ _were rare and occasional, and when they were made, they usually dealt with more recent periods of English history than were sanctioned at earlier epochs.

The reign of Henry VIII attracted much attention from dramatists when the historical mode of drama was Previous ending its career. Shakespeare’s company plays on produced, when the sixteenth century was the topic. _ci_osi_ng₎ two plays dealing respectively with the lives of Henry VIH’s statesmen, Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More. But though King Henry is the pivot of both plots, he does not figure in the dramatis persona.¹ In 1605, an obscure dramatist, Samuel Rowley, ventured for the first time to bring Henry VIII on the stage as the hero of a chronicle-play or history-drama. The dramatist worked on crude old fashioned lines which recall ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V.’ The piece, which was performed by Prince Henry’s company of players, bore the strange title ‘When you see me you know me. Or the famous Chronicle Historie of King Henrie the Eight, With the Birth and vertuous Life of Edward Prince of Wales.’²

¹ Thomas Lord Cromwell, which was published in 1602, was falsely ascribed to Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More, which was not printed till 1844, is extant in Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 7368, and has been carefully edited for the Malone society, igrr. The Admiral’s company under Henslowe’s management produced in r6oi and r6o2 two (lost) plays concerning Cardinal Wolsey, the first one called The Life, the other The Rising of the Cardinal. Henry Chettle would seem to have been the author of the Life and to have revised the Rising, which was from the pens of Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Wentworth Smith (Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 2r8).

² The main themes are the birth of Prince Edward, afterwards Edward VI, the death of his mother, Queen Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, and the plots against the life of her successor, Queen Catherine Parr. The career of Cardinal Wolsey, who died long before Edward VI was heard of, is prolonged by the playwright, so that he plays a subordinate part in the drama. The King, Henry VIII, is the chief personage, and he appears at full length as bluff King Harry capable of terrifying outbursts of wrath and of almost as terrifying outbursts of merriment. The King finds recreation in the companionship of his

The prologue to the Shakespearean ‘Henry VIII’ warned the audience that the King’s reign was to be treated on lines differing from those followed <Aiiis in Rowley’s preceding effort. The play was ^True-’ not to be a piece of ‘fool and fight,’ with Henry VIII engaging his jester in undignified buffoonery. There were to be noble scenes such as draw the eye to flow and the incident was to justify the alternative title of the piece, ‘All is True.’¹

The Shakespearean drama followed Holinshed with exceptional closeness. Nowhere was Holinshed’s work better done than in his account of the early _Holin_ part of Henry VIII’s reign, where he utilised shed’s the unpublished ‘Life of Wolsey’ by his ^story' gentleman usher, George Cavendish, a good specimen of sympathetic biography. One of the finest speeches in the Shakespearean play, Queen Katharine’s opening appeal on her trial, is in great part the chronicler’s prose rendered into blank verse, without _Construc change of a word. Despite the debt to Holin- ti°ede-^c shed’s Chronicle the play of ‘Henry VIII’ (^piay' shows a greater want of coherence and a bolder ’ conflict with historical chronology than are to be met with in Shakespeare’s earlier ‘ histories. ’ It is more loosely knit than ‘Henry V,’ which in design it resembles most closely.² The King, Henry VIII, is a moving force

fool or jester, an historic personage Will Summers. Will Summers has a comic foil in Patch, the fool or jester of Cardinal Wolsey. The two fools engage in many comic encounters. The King, in emulation of Prince Hal’s (Henry V’s) exploits, wanders in disguise about the purlieus of London in search of adventure. In the same year (1605) as When you see me you know me appeared, there came out a spectacular and rambling presentation of Queen Elizabeth’s early life and coronation with a sequel celebrating the activity of London merchants and the foundation of the Royal Exchange. This piece of pageantry was from the industrious pen of Thomas Heywood, and bore the cognate title If you know not me, you know nobody. _

* Cf. Prologue, r-7, 13-27, where the spectators are advised that they may ‘here find truth.’ The piece is described as ‘our chosen truth’ and as solely confined to what is true. See p. 445 infra.

’ The deaths of Queen Katharine (in 1536) and Cardinal Wolsey (in 1530) are represented as taking place at the same time, whereas

throughout the play. He is no very subtle portrait, being for the most part King Hal of popular tradition, imperious and autocratic, impulsive and sensual, and at the same time both generous and selfish. But Queen Katharine, a touching portrait of matronly dignity and resignation, is the heroine of the drama, and her withdrawal comparatively early in its progress produces the impression of an anticlimax. The midway fall of Wolsey also disturbs the constructive balance; the arrogant statesman who has worked his way up from the ranks shows a self-confidence which his sudden peril renders pathetic, and the heroic dignity with which he meets his change of fortune prejudices the dramatic interest of the tamer incidents following his death. Anne Boleyn, who succeeds Queen Katharine as King Henry’s wife, is no very convincing sketch of frivolity and coquettishness. Her confidante, the frank old lady, clearly reflected Shakespeare’s alert intuition, but the character’s conventional worldliness is far from pleasing. At the end of ‘Henry VIII’ a new and inartistic note is struck without warning in the eulogy of Queen Anne’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, and in the complimentary reference to her successor on the English throne, King James, the patron of the theatre.¹

The play was produced at the Globe theatre early in 1613. The theory that it was hastily completed for the The scenic special purpose of enabling the company to cele- eiabora- brate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, which took place on February 14, 1612-13, seems fanciful. During the succeeding

Queen Katharine survived the Cardinal by six years. Cranmer’s prosecution by his foes of the Council precedes in the play Queen Elizabeth’s christening (on September 10,1533), whereas the archbishop’s difficulties arose eleven years later (in 1544).

¹ Throughout, the development of events is interrupted by five barely relevant pageants : (1) the entertainment provided for Henry VIII and Anne ^Boleyn by Cardinal Wolsey; (2) the elaborate embellishment of the trial scene of Queen Katharine; (3) the coronation of Anne Boleyn; (4) a vision acted in dumb show in Queen Katharine’s dying moments; and (5) the christening procession of the Princess Elizabeth.

weeks, nineteen plays, according to an extant list, were produced at Court in honour of the event, but ‘Henry VIII’ was not among them. According to contemporary evidence the piece ‘was set forth [at the Globe] with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp ahd Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.’¹ Salvoes of artillery saluted the King’s entry in one of the scenes. The scenic elaboration well indicated the direction which the organisation of the stage was taking in Shakespeare’s last days.

‘Henry VIII’ was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. But when the First Folio appeared in 1623, seven years after his death, the section of histories in that volume was closed by the piece called ‘The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII.’ Shakespeare was generally credited with the drama through the seventeenth century, but in the middle of the eighteenth century his sole responsibility was powerfully questioned on critical grounds.² Dr. Johnson asserted _The that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and divided goes out with Katharine. The rest of the piece ^authorshlP- was not in his opinion above the powers of lesser men. No reader with an ear for metre can fail to detect in the piece two rhythms, an inferior and a superior rhythm. Two different pens were clearly at work. The greater part of the play must be assigned to the pen of a coadjutor of Shakespeare, and considerations of metre and style identify his assistant beyond doubt with John Fletcher. It is quite possible that here and there Philip Massinger collaborated with Fletcher; but it is difficult to treat seriously the conjecture, despite the ability with which it has been pleaded, that Massinger

¹ Sir Henry Wotton in Reliquia Wottonianm, 1675, pp. 425-6.

¹ Cf. the notes by one ‘Mr. Roderick’ in Edwards’s Canons of Criticism, 1765, p. 263.

was Fletcher’s fellow-worker to the exclusion of Shakespeare.¹

A metrical analysis of the piece leads to the .conclusion that no more than six of the seventeen scenes of _stiaVp the play can be positively set to Shakespeare's speare’s credit. Shakespeare’s six unquestioned scenes ^share- are: act i. sc. i. and ii.; n. iii. and iv.; the greater part of in. ii., and v. i. Thus Shakespeare can claim the first entry of Buckingham; the scene in the council chamber in which that nobleman is charged with treason at the instigation of Wolsey; the confidential talk of Anne Boleyn with the worldly old lady, who is ambitious for her protegee’s promotion; the trial scene of Queen Katharine which is the finest feature of the play; the greater part of the episode of Wolsey’s fall from power, and the King’s assurances of protection to Cranmer when he is menaced by the Catholic party. The metre and language of the Shakespearean scenes are as elliptical, irregular, and broken as in ‘Coriolanus’ or ‘The Tempest.’ There is the same close-packed expression, the same rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, the same impatient and impetuous activity of intellect and fancy. The imagery has the pointed, vivid, homely strength of Shakespeare’s latest plays. Katharine and Hermione in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ ate clearly cast in the same mould, and the trial scene of the one invites comparison with that of the other. On the whole the palm must be given to Shakespeare’s earlier effort.

Some hesitation is inevitable in finally separating the non-Shakespearean from the Shakespearean elements of Wolsey’s the play. One may well hesitate to deprive farewell Shakespeare of the dying speeches of Bucking- speech. _anc[ Queen Katharine. There is a third

famous passage about the authorship of which it is unwise to dogmatise. Probably no extract from the drama has been more often recited than Wolsey’s

¹ Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1884.

dying colloquy with his servant Cromwell. Many trained ears detect in the Cardinal’s accents a cadence foreign to Shakespeare’s verse and identical with that of Fletcher; yet it is equally apparent that in concentration of thought and command of elevated sentiment these passages in ‘Henry VIII’ reach a level above anything that Fletcher compassed elsewhere. They are comparable with the work of no dramatist save Shakespeare. Wolsey’s valediction may be reckoned a fruit of Shakespeare’s pen, though Shakespeare caught here his coadjutor’s manner, adapting Fletcher’s metrical formulae to his own great purpose.

The play of ‘Henry VIII’ contains Shakespeare’s last dramatic work, and its production was nearly associated with the final scene in the history of that The bum- theatre which was identified with the triumphs ^the of his career. During a performance of the June 29, piece while it was yet new, in the summer of ^l6r3- 1613 (on June 29) the Globe theatre was burnt to the ground. The outbreak began during the scene — at the end of act 1. — when Henry VIII arrives at Wolsey’s house to take part in a fancy-dress ball given in the King’s honour, and Henry has his fateful introduction to Anne Boleyn. According to the stage direction, the King was received with a salute of cannon. What followed on the fatal day, was thus described by a contemporary, who gives the piece its original name of ‘All is True, representing some principal pieces in the reign of Henry VIII.’: ‘Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s House, and certain Canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the Thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that vertuous fabrique; wherein yet nothing did perish, but wood

and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle[d] ale.’¹

There is reason to believe that in the demolished playhouse were many of the players’ books, including Shakespeare’s original manuscripts, which were the property of his theatrical company. Scattered copies survived elsewhere in private hands, but the loss of the dramatist’s autographs rendered incurable the many textual defects of surviving transcripts.²

¹ Sir Henry Wotton in Reliquice Wottoniana, pp. 425—6. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Ralph Winwood on July 8, 1613, briefly mentions that the theatre was burnt to the ground in less than two hours' owing to the accidental ignition of the thatch roof through the firing of cannon ‘to be used in the play’; the audience escaped unhurt though they had ‘but two narrow doors to get out’ (Winwood’s Memorials, iii. p. 469). A similar account was sent by the Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., from London, June 30, 1613. ‘The fire broke out,’ Lorkin wrote, ‘ no longer since than yesterday, while Burbage’s company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII’ (Court and Times of James 1,1848, vol. i. p. 253). On June 30,1613, the Stationers’ Company licensed the publication of two separate ballads on the disaster, one called The Sodayne Burninge of the ‘Globe’ on the Bankside in the Play tyme on Saint Peters day last, i6r3, and the other A doleful ballad of the generall ouerthrowe of the famous theater on the Banksyde, called the ‘Globe,’ &c., by William Parrat. (Arber’s Transcripts, iii. 528.) Neither of these publications survives in print; but one of them may be identical with a series of stanzas on ‘the pittifull burning of the Globe playhouse in London,’ which Haslewood first printed ‘from an old manuscript volume of poems’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1816, and Halliwell-Phillipps again printed (Outlines, pp. 310, 311) from an authentic manuscript in the library of Sir Matthew Wilson, Bart., of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire. The perils of Shakespeare’s close friends Burbage, Condell and Heminges are crudely described in the following lines:

Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes,

Then out runne Burbidge too,

The Reprobates, though drunck on Munday,

Prayed for the Foole and Henry Condye . . .

Then with swolne eyes like druncken Fleminges Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.

² When the Fortune theatre suffered the Globe’s fate on Dec. 1621 and was burnt to the ground, John Chamberlain, the London gossip, wrote that the building was ‘quite burnt downe in two houres, & all their apparell & playbookes lost, wherby those poor Companions are quite undone’ (Court and Times of James I, ii. 280-1). It is unlikely that

Ben Jonson deplored Vulcan’s

_t , Ben Jon-

mad prank son on

Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank/ the

disaster.

He wrote how he saw the building

‘with two poor chambers [i.e. cannon] taken in [i.e. destroyed], And razed: ere thought could urge this might have been !

See the World’s ruins ! nothing but the piles!

Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles.’¹

The owners of the playhouse, of which Shakespeare was one, did not rest on their oars in face of misfortune. The theatre was rebuilt next year on a more _There. elaborate scale than before. The large cost building of of 1,400/. more than doubled the original ^theGlobe- outlay. The expenses were defrayed by the shareholders among themselves in proportion to their holdings. Shakespeare subscribed a sum slightly exceeding 1001.² The ‘new playhouse’ was re-opened on June 30, 1614, and was then described as ‘the fairest that ever was in England.’³ But Shakespeare’s career was nearing its end, and in the management of the new building he took no active part.- If the second fabric of the ‘ Globe ’ fell short of the fame of the first, its place of precedence among London playhouses was not quickly questioned. It survived till 1644, when the Civil Wars suppressed all theatrical enterprise in England. For at least twenty of the thirty years of its life the new Globe enjoyed a substantial measure of the old Globe’s prosperity.

Shakespeare and his company suffered better fortune on June 29, 1613. Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 65.

¹ Jonson’s An Execration upon Vulcan in his Underwoods, bri. Jonson’s poem deplored the burning of his own library which took place a few years after the destruction of the Globe. ,

^a See pp. 308-9 supra.

³ John Chamberlain to Mrs. Alice Carlton, Court and Times of James I, 1848, i. 329.

According to the Oxford antiquary John Aubrey, Shakespeare, through the period of his professional Retire- activities, paid an annual visit of unspecified Stratford, duration to Stratford-on-Avon. The greater ¹⁶¹ part of his working career was spent in London.

But with the year 1611, which saw the completion of his romantic drama of ‘The Tempest,’ Shakespeare’s regular home would seem to have shifted for the rest of his life to his native place.¹ It is clear that after Stratford became his fixed abode he occasionally left the town for sojourns in London which at times lasted beyond a month. Proof, too, is at hand to show that the intimacies which' he had formed in the metropolis with professional associates continued till the end of his days. Yet there is no reason to question the veteran tradition that the five years which opened in 1611 formed for the dramatist an epoch of comparative seclusion amid the scenes of his youth. We may accept without serious qualification the assurance of his earliest biographer Nicholas Rowe that ‘the latter part of his [Shakespeare’s] life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, re'tirement, and the conversation of his friends.’

Shakespeare’s withdrawal to Stratford did not preclude. the maintenance of business relations with the London theatres where he won his literary triumphs and his financial prosperity. There is little doubt that

¹ ‘He frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford.’ — Diary of John Ward, Vicar of St/ratfori, p. 183.

he retained his shares in both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres till his death. If after 1611 he . only played an intermittent part in the affairs interest^ of the company who occupied those stages, he ^_h°_eⁿ_a^d_t°“ was never unmindful of his personal interest '

in its fortunes. Plays from his pen were constantly revived at both theatres, and the demand for their performance at Court saw no abatement. In the early spring of 1613 when the marriage of James’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, with the Elector Palatine was celebrated with an exceptionally generous rendering of stage plays, there were produced at Whitehall no fewer than six pieces of Shakespeare’s undoubted authorship as well as the lost play of ‘Cardenio,’ for which he divided the credit with John Fletcher.¹

According to an early tradition Shakespeare cherished through his later years some close social relations with Qxford, where to the last he was wont to break _Visitst0 his journey between Stratford and London, the’Crown He invariably lodged at Oxford with John Davenant, a prosperous vintner whose inn at " Carfax in the parish of St. Martin’s, subsequently known as the ‘ Crown,’ was well patronised by residents as well as travellers. The innkeeper was credited by the Oxford antiquary Anthony a Wood with ‘ a melancholic disposition and was seldom or never seen to laugh,’ yet he ‘was an admirer and lover of plays and play- makers.’ According to a poetic eulogist

Hee had choyce giftes of Nature and of arte,

Neither was fortune wanting on her parte

To him in honours, wealth or progeny.

Shakespeare is said to have delighted in the society of Davenant’s wife, ‘ a very beautiful woman of a good wit and conversation/ and to have interested himself in

¹ See pp. 43s, 436 supra. The King’s company were again active at Court at the Christmas seasons of 1614-5 and 1615-6; but the names of the pieces then performed have not been recovered. See Cunningham’s Revels, and E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 165-6.

their large family. Much care was bestowed on the education of the five sons. Robert, who became a Fellow of St. John’s College at Oxford and a doctor of divinity, was proud to recall in manhood how the dramatist ‘ had given him [when a boy] a hundred kisses.’

The second son William gained much distinction as a poet and playwright in the middle of the seventeenth The chris- century, and was knighted as a zealous royalist teningof in 1643. He was baptised at St. Martin’s, william Carfax, on March 3, 1605-6, and there is little D’Avenant. doubt that Shakespeare was his godfather. The child was ten years old at the dramatist’s death. The special affection which Shakespeare manifested for him subsequently led to a rumour that he was Shakespeare’s natural son. Young Davenant, whose poetic ambitions rendered the allegation congenial, penned in his twelfth year ‘ an ode in remembrance of Master William Shakespeare,’ and changed the spelling of his name from Davenant to D’A Dewant in order to suggest a connection with the river Avon. The scandal rests on flimsy foundation; but there is adequate evidence of the bond of friendly sympathy which subsisted between Shakespeare and the Oxford innkeeper’s family,¹ and of the pleasant associations with the university city which the dramatist enjoyed at the close of life, when going to or returning from London.

¹ The innkeeper John Davenant died in 1621 while he was Mayor of Oxford, a fortnight after the death of his wife. A verse elegy assigns his death to grief over her loss, and the pair are credited with .an unbroken strength of mutual affection which seems to refute any imputation on the lady’s character. Another elegiac poem reckons among Davenant’s sources of felicity ‘a happy issue of a vertuous wife.’ A popular anecdote, in which the Oxford antiquary Heame and the poet Pope delighted, runs to the effect that the boy D’Avenant once ‘meeting a grave doctor of divinity’ told him that he was about to ask a blessing of his godfather, Shakespeare, who had just come to the town, and that the doctor retorted ‘Hold, child, you must not take the name of God in vain.’ The jest is of ancient lineage, and was originally told of other persons than Shakespeare and D’Avenant (Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 43 seq.). In ail elegy on D’Avenant in 1668 he is represented as being greeted in the Elysian Fields by ‘his cousin Shakespeare’ (Huth’s Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, 1584-1700, sheet S, 2 verso).

Of Shakespeare’s personal relations in his latest years with his actor colleagues, much interesting testimony survives. It was characteristic of the friendly _Relations sympathy which he moved in his fellow-workers with actor that Augustine Phillips, an actor who was, like ^fnends- Shakespeare, one of the original shareholders of the Globe theatre, should on his premature death in May 1605 have bequeathed by his will ‘to my fellowe William Shakespeare a thirty shillings peece in gould.’¹ Of the members of the King’s company who were longer- lived than Phillips and survived Shakespeare, the actors John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage chiefly enjoyed the dramatist’s confidence in the season of his partial retirement. Heminges, the reputed creator of Falstaff, was the business manager or director of the company; and Condell was, with the great actor Burbage, Heminges’s chief partner in the practical organisation of the company’s concerns.² All three were remembered by the dramatist in his will, and after his death two of them, Heminges and Condell, not merely

¹ Phillips had been a resident in Southwark. But within a year of his death he purchased a house and land at Mortlake, where he died. See his will in Collier’s Lives of the Actors, pp. 85-88. Phillips died in affluent circumstances and remembered many of his fellow-actors in his will, leaving to ‘his fellow’ Henry Condell and to his theatrical servant Christopher Beeston, like sums as to Shakespeare. He also bequeathed ‘twenty shillings in gould’ to eaoh of the actors Lawrence Fletcher, Robert Arinin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cook, Nicholas Tooley, together with forty shillings and clothes or musical instruments to two theatrical apprentices Samuel Gilbome and James Sands. Five pounds were further to be equally distributed amongst ‘the hired men of the company.’ Of four executors three were the actors John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and William Sly, who each received a silver bowl of the value of five pounds. Phillips’s share in the Globe theatre, which is not mentioned in his will, was identical with Shakespeare’s and passed to his widow. See p. 305 supra.

² The latest recorded incident within Shakespeare’s lifetime touching the business management of the company bears the date March 29, 1615, when Heminges and Burbage, as two leading members of the company, were summoned before the Privy Council to answer a charge of giving performances during Lent. There is no entry in the Privy Council Register of the hearing of the accusation in which all the London companies were involved. The absence from the summons of Shakespeare’s name is corroborative of his virtual retirement from active theatrical life.

carried through the noble project of the first collected edition of his plays, but they bore open and signal tribute to their private affection for him in the ‘Address shake- ^to ^e Reader’ which they prefixed to the speareand undertaking. The third of Shakespeare’s life- Burbage. j_ong professional friends, Richard Burbage, was by far the greatest actor of the epoch. It was he who created on the stage most of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. Contemporary witnesses attest the ‘justice’ with which Burbage rendered the dramatist’s loftiest conceptions. It is beyond doubt that Shakespeare and Burbage cultivated the closest intimacy from the earliest days of their association. They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote of Shakespeare that is positively known to have been recorded in his lifetime relates that Burbage, when playing ‘Richard III,’ agreed with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance; Shakespeare, overhearing the conversation, anticipated the actor’s visit, and met Burbage on his arrival at the lady’s house with the quip that ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.’ The credible chronicler of the story was the law student Manningham,¹ who, near the same date, described an early performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ in Middle Temple Hall.

Other evidence shows that Burbage’s relations with Shakespeare were not confined to their theatrical responsibilities. In the dramatist’s latest years, when he had settled in his native town, he engaged with the great actor in a venture with which the drama had small concern. The partnership illustrates a deferential

¹ Manningham, Diary, March 13, 1601, Camden Soc., p. 39. The diarist’s authority was his chamber-fellow ‘Mr. Curie’ (not ‘Mr. Touse’ as the name has been wrongly transcribed). The female patrons of the theatre in Shakespeare’s time were commonly reckoned to be peculiarly susceptible to the actors’ fascination. Cf. John Earle’s Micro- cosmographie, 1628 (No. 22, ‘A Player’): ‘The waiting women spectators are over-eares in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in their Chambers.’

readiness on the part of author and actor to obey the rather frivolous behests of an influential patron.

Early in 1613 Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, a nobleman of some literary pretension, invited Shakespeare and Burbage to join in devising, in

* ■*. -.i ⁶Vi The Earl of

conformity with a current vogue, an emble- Rutland’s matic decoration for his equipment at a j™P^resa’’ great Court joust or tournament. Tourna- ' ments or jousts, which descended from days of mediaeval chivalry, still formed in James I.’s reign part of the ceremonial recreation of royalty, and throughout the era of the Renaissance poets and artists combined to ornament the jousters’ shields with ingenious devices (known in Italy as ‘imprese’ and in France as ‘devises’) in which a miniature symbolic picture was epigrammatically interpreted by a motto or brief verse.¹ The fantastic

'Literature on the subject of ‘imprese’ abounded in Italy. The poet Tasso published a dialogue on the subject. The standard Italian works on ‘imprese’ are Luca Contile’s Ragionamenti sopra la propriety delle Imprese (1573) and Giovanni Ferro’s Theatro d’lmprese (Venice, 1623). Among French poets, Clement Marot supplies in his (Euvres (ed. Jannet, Paris, 1868) many examples of poetic interpretation of pictorial ‘devises’; see his Epigramme xxix. ‘Sur la Devise: “Non ce que je pense”’ (vol. iii. p. 15); lxxv. ‘Pour une dame qui donna une teste de mort en devise’ (ib. p. 32); xciii. ‘Pour une qui donna la devise d’un neud 3. un gentilhomme’ (ib. p. 40). Etienne Jodelle was equally productive in the same kind of composition; cf. ‘Recueil des inscriptions, figures, devises et masquarades ordonnees en I’hostel de ville de Paris, le Jeudi 17 de Fevrier 1558’ in honour of Henri II. (in Jodelle’s (Euvres, ed. Marty-Laveaux, Paris, 1868, vol. i. p. 237). Similarly Ronsard wrote mottoes for ‘emblesmes’ and ‘devises’; cf. his (Euvres, ed. Blanchemain, ‘Pour un emblesme representant des saules esbranchez’ (iv. 203) and ‘Au Roy, sur sa devise’ (viii. 129). See too Jusserand’s Literary History> of the English People, 1909 (iii. 270). The fantastic exercise was also held in England to be worthy of the energy of eminent genius. Sir Philip Sidney was proud of his proficiency in the art. The poet Samuel Daniel translated an Italian treatise on ‘imprese’ with abundance of original illustration. English essays on the theme came from the pens of the scholarly antiquary, William Camden, and of the Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden. During Queen Elizabeth’s and King James I.’s reigns a gallery at Whitehall was devoted to an exhibition of copies (on paper) of the ‘imprese’ employed in contemporary tournaments (see Hentzner’s Diary). Manningham, the Middle Temple student, gives in his Diary (pp. 3-5) descriptions of thirty-six ‘devises and impressaes’ which he examined in ‘the gallery at White-

‘impresa’ or literary pictorial device, which had obvious affinities with heraldry, was variously applied to the decoration of architectural work, of furniture or of costume, but it was chiefly used in the blazonry of the shields in jousts or tournaments. It was with the object of enhancing the dignity of the Earl of Rutland’s equipment at a spectacular tournament in which he and other courtiers engaged at Whitehall on March 24, 1612-3, that the great dramatist and the great actor exercised their ingenuity. Burbage was an accomplished painter as well as player, and he and Shakespeare devised for the Earl an ‘impresa.’ Shakespeare supplied the scheme with the interpreting ‘word’ or motto, while the actor executed the pictorial device.¹

Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, in whose behalf Shakespeare thus amiably employed an idle hour, The sixth belonged to that cultivated section of the Earl of nobility which patronised poetry and drama Rutland. _wj_t^ consistent enthusiasm and generosity. The earl’s fleeting association with the poet in 1613 harmonises with Shakespeare’s earlier social experience. The poet’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, was Lord Rutland’s friend and the friend of his family.² He had

hall 19 Martij 1601.’ None show any brilliant invention. One of Man- ningham’s descriptions runs: ‘ A palme tree laden with armor upon the bowes, the word Fero et patior.’

¹ In dramatic work for which his authorship was undivided, Shakespeare only once mentioned ‘imprese.’ In Richard II. (n. i. 25) such devices are mentioned as occasionally emblazoned in the stained glass windows of noblemen’s houses. But in a scene descriptive of a_ tournament in the play of Pericles (n. ii. 16 seq.), which must be assigned ta Shakespeare’s partner, six knights appear, each bearing on his shield an ‘impresa’ the details of which are specified in the text. The fourth device, ‘a burning torch that’s turned upside down’ with the motta ‘Quod me alit me extinguit,’ is borrowed from Claude Paradin’s Heroicall Devices, translated by P. S., 1591. A like scene of a tournament with description of the knights’ ‘imprese’ figures in The PartiaM Law (ed.. Dobell, 1908), p. 19; the ‘imprese’ on the shields of four knights are fully described.

² The (sixth) Earl of Rutland consulted ‘M^r Shakspeare’ about his ‘impresa,’ nine months after he succeeded to the earldom on the death on June 26, 1612, without issue, of his elder brother Roger, the fifth Earl, who was long the Earl of Southampton’s closest friend. There

joined the Earl of Southampton and his own elder brother in the Earl of Essex’s plot of 1601 and had endured imprisonment with them till the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. In August 1612, barely two months after his succession to the earldom, he entertained King James and the Prince of Wales with regal splendour at Belvoir Castle, the family seat. It was some six months later that he solicited the aid of Shakespeare and Burbage in designing an ‘impresa’ for the coming royal tournament. The poet and critic Sir Henry Wotton, who witnessed the mimic warfare, noted, in a letter to a friend, the cryptic subtlety of the many jousters’ ‘imprese.’¹ In the household book of the Earl of Rutland which is preserved at Belvoir Castle, due record was made of the payment to Shakespeare and Burbage of forty-four shillings apiece .for their services. The entry runs thus: ‘Item 31 Martij [1613] to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso (sic) xliiijs. To Richard Burbadge for paynting and making

had been talk of a marriage between the Earl of Southampton and his sister Lady Bridget Manners. The two Earls were constant visitors together to the London theatres at the end of the sixteenth century, and both suffered imprisonment in the Tower of London for complicity in the Earl of Essex’s plot early in 1601. The fifth Earl’s wife was daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and she cultivated the society of men of letters, constantly entertaining and corresponding with Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont. ,

¹ Unluckily neither Wotton nor anyone else reported the details of Shakespeare’s invention for the Earl of Rutland. Writing to his friend Sir Edmund Bacon from London on March 31, i6r3, Wotton described the tournament thus: ‘The day fell out wet, to the disgrace of many fine plumes . . . The two Riches [i.e. Sir Robert Rich and Sir Henry Rich, hrothers of the first Earl of Holland] only made a speech to the King. The rest [of whom the Earl of Rutland is mentioned by name as one] were contented with bare imprese, whereof some were so dark that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be understood. The two best to my fancy were those of the two earl brothers [i.e. the Earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery], The first a small, exceeding white pearl, and the words solo candore valeo. The other, a sun casting a glance on the side of a pillar, and the beams reflecting with the motto Splendente refidget, in which device there seemed an agreement: the elder brother to allude to his own nature, and the other to his fortune.’ (Logan Pearsall-Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, Oxford, 1907, vol. ii. p. 17.)

yt in gold xliiijs/ [Total] iii j¹¹ viij⁸.’¹ The prefix ‘Mr.,’ the accepted mark of gentility, stands in the Earl of Rutland’s account-book before the dramatist’s name alone. Payment was obviously rendered the two men in the new gold pieces called ‘jacobuses,’ each of which was worth about 22s.²

During the same month (March 1613), in which Burbage and Shakespeare were exercising their ingenuity in the Earl of Rutland’s behalf, the dramatist speare’s was engaging in a private business transaction a'house1n°^f iⁿ London. While on a visit to the metropolis Blackfriars, in the same spring, Shakespeare invested a ⁱ⁶ⁱ³‘ small sum of money in a new property, not far distant from the Blackfriars theatre. This was his last investment in real estate, and his procedure closely followed the example of his friend Richard Burbage, who with his brother Cuthbert also acquired pieces of land or houses in their private capacity within the Blackfriars demesne.³ Shakespeare now purchased a house, with a yard attached, which was situated within

* ‘ »

¹ The Historical Manuscripts Commission’s Report on the Historical Manuscripts of Belvoir Castle, calendared by Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records and Mr. W. H. Stevenson, vol. iv. p. 494; see article by the present writer in The Times, December 27,1905.

² Abundant evidfence is accessible of Burbage’s repute as a painter. An authentic specimen of his brush — ‘ a man’s head ’ — which belonged to Edward Alleyn, the actor and founder of Dulwich College, may still be seen at the Dulwich College Gallery. That Burbage’s labour in ‘painting and making’ the ‘impresa’ which Shakespeare suggested and interpreted was satisfactory to the Earl of Rutland "is amply proved by another entry in the Duke of Rutland’s household books which attests that Burbage was employed on a like work by the Earl three years later. On March 25, 1616, the Earl again took part in a tilting-match at Court on the anniversary of James I.’s accession. On that occasion, too, his shield was entrusted to Burbage for armorial embellishment, and the actor-artist received for his new labour the enhanced remuneration of 41. 18s. The entry runs : ‘Paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lorde’s shelde and for the embleanCe’, 4/. 185.’ Shakespeare was no longer Burbage’s associate. At the moment he lay on what proved to be his deathbed at Stratford. •

³ The Burbages’ chief purchases of private property in Blackfriars were dated in 1601, 1610, and 1614 respectively. See Blackfriars Records, ed. A. Feuillerat, Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 70 seq.

SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED TO THE PURCHASE-DEED OF A HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS ON MARCH 10, 1612-13.

Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the Guildhall Library, London.

six hundred feet of the Blackfriars theatre.¹ The former JlPwner, Henry Walker, a musician, had bought the property for 1001, in 1604 of one Matthew Bacon of Helborn, a student of Gray’s Inn. Shakespeare in 1613 agreed to pay Walker 140/. The deeds of conveyance bear the date March 10 in that year.² By a legal device Shakespeare made his ownership a joint tenancy, associating with himself three merely nominal partners or trustees, viz. William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, John Jackson and John Hemynge of London, gentlemen. The effect of such a legal technicality was to deprive Shakespeare’s wife, if she survived him, of a right to receive from the estate a widow’s dower. Hemynge was probably Shakespeare’s theatrical colleague. On March 11, the day following the conveyance of the property, Shakespeare executed another deed (now in the British Museum³) which stipulated that 60I. of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage, with Henry Walker, the former owner, until the following Michaelmas. The money was unpaid at Shakespeare’s death three years later. In both purchase- deed, and mortgage-deed Shakespeare’s signature was witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, ‘ servant ’ or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew the deeds, and, Lawrence’s seal, bearing his initials ‘H. L.,’ was stamped in each case on the parchment- tag, across the head of which Shakespeare wrote his name. In all three documents —■ the two indentures and the mortgage-deed — Shakespeare is described as

¹ It stood on the west side of St. Andrew’s Hill, formerly termed Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, adjoining what is now known as Ireland Yard. Opposite the hou^e was an old building known as ‘The King’s Wardrobe.’ The ground-floor was in, the occupation of one William Ireland, a haberdasher. »

² The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897, and now belongs to Mr. H. C. Folger of New York. The indenture held by the vendor is in the Guildhall Library.

⁸ Egerton MS. 1787.

of Stratford-on-Avon, in the Countie of Warwick, Gentleman.’ It was as an investment, not for his own occypa-' tion, that he acquired the property. He at once leased it to John Robinson, a resident in the neighbourhood.¹ -

Two years later Shakespeare joined some neighbouring owners in a suit for the recovery of documents, relating to his title in this newly acquired Blackfriars speare’s property. The full story of the litigation is litigation still to seek; but papers belonging to one Blackfriars stage of it have been brought to light, and property, they supply a final illustration, within a year of his death, of Shakespeare’s habitual readiness to enforce his legal rights. On April 26, 1615, a ‘bill of complaint ’ or petition was addressed in Chancery to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Chancellor, by ‘Willyam Shakespere gent’ (jointly with six fellow complainants, Sir Thomas Bendish, baronet, Edward Newport and William Thoresbie, esquires, Robert Dormer, esquire, and Marie his wife, and Richard Bacon, citizen of London). The Chancellor’s ‘orators’ prayed him to compel Matthew Bacon of Gray’s Inn, a former owner of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house, to deliver up to them a number of ‘letters patent, deeds, evidences, charters and writings,’ which, it was alleged, were wrongfully detained by him and concerned their title to various houses and lands ‘within the precinct of Blackfriars in the City of London or county of Middlesex.’ The houses and lands involved in the dispute are sufficiently described for legal purposes; but no specific detail identifies their exact sites or their precise destribution among the several owners.² On May 15 the defendant Matthew

¹ Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 25-41.

² The disputed property is thus collectively described in the ‘bill of complaint ’: ‘ One Capitall Messuage or Dwellinge howse w[th] there appfu]rten[a]nces w[th] two Court Yardes and one void plot of ground sometymes vsed for a garden of the East p[te] of the said Dwellinge howse and so Much of one Edifice as now or sometymes served for two Stables and one little Colehowse adioyninge to the said Stables Lyinge on the South Side of the said Dwellinge howse And of another Messuage or Tenem[te] w[th] thapp[ur]ten[a]nces now in the occupac[i]on of An-

SHAKESPEARE’S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED TO A DEED MORTGAGING HIS HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS ON MARCH ii, 1612-13.

Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the British Museum.

Bacon filed his answer to the complaint of Shakespeare and his associates. Bacon did not dispute the complainants’ right to the property in question, and he admitted that a collection of deeds came into his hands on the recent death of Anne Bacon his mother,¹ who had owned them for many years; but he denied precise knowledge of their contents and all obligation to part with them. On May 22, the Court of Chancery decreed the surrender of the papers to Sir Thomas Bendish, Edward Newport, and the other petitioners.² Shakespeare’s participation .in the successful suit involved him in personal negotiation with his co-plaintiffs and confirms the persistence of his London associations after he had finally removed to Stratford.

The records of Stratford-on-Avon meanwhile show that at the same time as Shakespeare was protecting his interests elsewhere he was taking a full shake- share there of social and civic responsibilities, spear^and In r6ir the chief townsmen of Stratford were f₀rd ^ra" anxious to obtain an amendment of existing highways, statutes for the repair of the highways. A fund was collected for the purpose of ‘prosecuting’ an amending bill in Parliament. The list of contributors, which is still extant in the Stratford archives, includes Shakespeare’s name. The words ‘Mr. William Shackespere’ are

thony Thompson and Thom[a]s Perckes and of there Assignes, & of a void peece of grownd whervppon a Stable is builded to the said messuage belonginge and of seu[e]rall othere howses Devided into seu[er]all Lodg- inges or Dwellinge howses Toginther w[th] all and Singuler sell[ors] Sollers Chambers Halls p[ar]lo[rs] Yardes Backsides Easem[tes] P[ro]fites and Comodityes Hervnto seuferjallie belonginge And of Certaine Void plots of grownd adioyinge to the said Messuages and p[re]misses aforesaid or vnto some of them And of a Well howse All w[ch] messuages Tenements] and p[re]misses aforesaid be Lyinge w[th] in the p[re]cinct of Blackffriers in the Cittye of London or Countye of Middlesex].’

¹ Anne Bacon owned property adjoining Shakespeare's house at the time of his purchase. See deeds in Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 32, 37.

⁸ Dr. C. W. Wallace, of the University of Nebraska, discovered the three cited documents in this suit in the autumn of 1905 at the Public Record Office. Full copies were printed by Dr. Wallace in the Standard, newspaper on October 18, 1905, and again in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch for April 1906. , •

written in the margin as though they were added after the list was first drawn up. The dramatist was probably absent when the movement was set on foot, and gave it his support on his return to the town from a London visit.¹

The poet’s family circle at Stratford was large, and their deaths, marriages, and births diversified the course Domestic of his domestic history. Early in September incident. 1608 his mother (Mary Arden) died at a ripe age, exceeding seventy years, in the Birthplace at Henley Street, where her daughter Mrs. Joan Hart and her grandchildren resided with her. She was buried in the. churchyard on the ninth of the month, just fifty-one years since her marriage and after seven years of widowhood. Three and a half years later, on February 3, 1611-2, there appears in the burial register of Stratford Church the entry ‘ Gilbert Shakespeare adolescens.’ Shakespeare’s brother, Gilbert, who was his junior by two and a half years, had then reached his forty-sixth year, an age to which the term ‘adolescens’ seems inapplicable. Nothing is certainly known of Gilbert’s history save that on May 1, 1602, he represented the dramatist at Stratford when William and John Combe conveyed to the latter 107 acres of arable land, and-that on March 5, 1609-10, he signed his name as witness of a deed to which some very humble townsfolk were parties.² An eighteenth-century tradition represents

¹ The list of names of contributors to the fund is in Stratford-upon- Avon Corporation Records, Miscell. Docs. I. No. 4, fol. 6. The document is headed ‘Wednesdaye the xjth of September, 1611, Colected towardes the Charge of prosecutyng the Bill in parliament for the better Repayre of the highe Waies, and amendinge diuers defectes in the statutes already made.’ The seventy names include all the best known citizens, e.g. ‘Thomas Greene, Esquire,’ Abraham Sturley, Henry Walker, Julius Shawe, John Combes, William Combes, Mrs. Quynye, John Sadler. Only in the case of Thomas Greene, the town clerk, is the amount of the contribution specified; he subscribed 2s. 6d.

² On the date in question Gilbert Shakespeare’s signature, which is in an educated style of handwriting, was appended to a lease by Margery Lorde, a tavern-keeper in Middle Row, of'a few yards of ground to a neighbour Richard Smyth alias Courte, a butcher. The document is exhibited in Shakespeare’s Birthplace (see Catalogue, No. 115).

that Gilbert Shakespeare lived to a patriarchal age and was a visitor to London near his death. It is commonly assumed that the Gilbert Shakespeare who died at Stratford early in 1612 was a son of the poet’s brother Gilbert; but the identification remains uncertain.¹ It is well established, however, that precisely a year later (February 4, 1612-3), Shakespeare’s next brother Richard, who was just completing his thirty-ninth year, was buried in the churchyard.

Happier episodes characterised the affairs of Shakespeare’s own household. His two daughters Susanna and Judith both married in his last years, and the Marriage union of his elder daughter Susanna was satis- ^of Susanna factory from all points of view. On June 5, speart 1607, she wedded, at Stratford parish church, at ^l60?- the age of twenty-four, John Hall, a medical practitioner, who was eight years her senior. Hall, an educated man of Puritan leanings, was no native of Stratford, but at the opening of the seventeenth century he acquired there a good practice, which extended far into the countryside. The bride and bridegroom settled in a house in the thoroughfare leading to the church known as Old Town, nor far from New Place. Their residence still stands and bears the name of Hall’s Croft. In the February following their marriage there was born to them a daughter Elizabeth, who was baptised in the parish church on February 21, 1607-8. The Halls had no other children, and Elizabeth Hall was the only grandchild of the poet who was born in his lifetime. She proved to be his last surviving descendant. Stratford society was prone to

¹ Mrs. Stopes confutes Halliwell-Phillipps’s assertion that Gilbert Shakespeare became a haberdasher in London in the parish of St. Bridget or St. Bride’s. She shows that Halliwell-Phillipps has confused Gilbert Shakespeare with one Gilbert Shepheard. Mrs. Stopes also points out that in the Stratford burial register of the early seventeenth century the terms adolescens, adolescentulus, and adolescentula were all used rather loosely, being applied to dead persons who had passed the period of youth. But her identification of the entry of February 3, 16112, with Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert remains questionable. (See her Shakespeare’s Environment, 63-5; 332-5.)

slanderous gossip. and Mrs. Susanna llall was in >(m^,

lo hor fttthor's perturbation. tin' victim of « libellous rumour of immoral conduct, which was circulated hy John l.anc junior, son of it substantial follow-townsman, A defamation suit was brought hy Mrs. Hull against Kane in t!u' Consistory Court of tho Mishop of Worcester, with tho satisfactory result that tho slanderer, who fuileii to put in an appearance at I ho hearing, was excommunicated on July ,'7. Tho oaso was hoard on July is at tho wostorn end of tho south aislo of tho Cathedral, a ml tho ohiof witiu-ss for the injured lady was Robert What* cote, ouo of tho witnossos of Shakespeare's will.¹

Tho dramatist's younger daughter Judith married lator than her sistor, on February 10, 1015 0, some two months MmriiiKr before hor father's death, and during tjt would stnkr'"' ^:'I'1^H’^;"’) illnoss. 'I’lio bride had reached

SJH'tUY, hor thirty-second year. Thomas (Quincy, tho ’^c"'^v bridegroom. was hor junior by lour years. lie was a younger son of Shakespeare's oloso friend of middle lifo. Kiohard Quinoy, tho Stratford mercer, who had up* poalod to tho dramatist in 150S for a loan of money, itltd had diod whilo haililT in iooi, Judith Shakospoaro was a dose friend of tho (Juinoy family, anil on IVcomhei' 4, t(> 11, she witnessed for Kiohard Quinoy's widow and for hor oldest son Adrian tho deed of sale of a house belong inn to them nt Stratford* Judith Shakespeare's marriage with Thomas (Juinoy was solemnised during I.out, when ecclesiastical law proscribed tlmt a lioonse should he obtained before tho performance of the rite. Mantis, no doubt, had boon called, but tho wedding was hurried on, and took place before a license was obtained. Hie

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¹ Net* J. \V, (Iviiv, SlMkwl>*m''s WiwWit^p, *.|M,

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characteristic placability, but his son-in-law Hall, who; avowed sympathy with puritanism, was probably in the main responsible for the civility. The town council of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost overlooked Shakespeare’s residence of New Place, gave curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama on February 7, 1611-2, when they passed a resolution that plays were unlawful and ‘the sufferance of them against the orders heretofore made and against the example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,’ and the council was therefore ‘content,’ the resolution ran, that ‘ the penalty of xs. imposed [on players heretofore] be xli. henceforward.’¹

A more definite anxiety arose in the summer of 1614 from a fresh outbreak of fire in the town on Saturday, The Fire July 9. The outbreak would appear to have °f 1614. caused little less damage than the conflagrations at the end of the previous century. The town was declared once more to be ‘ruinated by fyre’ and appeal was made for relief to the charitable generosity of the neighbouring cities and villages.²

¹ Ten years later the King’s players (Shakespeare’s own company) were bribed by the council to leave the town without playing. (See the present writer’s Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.)

² According to the Order Book of the Town Council (B. 267), the justices of the shire were requested, on July 15, 1614, to obtain royal letters patent authorising a collection through various parts of England in order to retrieve the town’s losses by fire. The Council reported that: ‘Within the space of lesse than two howres [there were] consumed and burnt fifty and fower dwelling howses, many of them being very faire houses, besides Barnes, Stables, and other bowses of office, together with great store of Corne, Hay, Straw, Wood and timber therein, amounting to the value of Eight thowsand pounds and upwards; the force of which fier was so great (the wind sitting ful upon the towne) that it dispersed into so many places thereof, whereby the whole towne was in very great danger to have beene utterly consumed.’ (Wheler’s Hist, of Stratford, p. 15.) The official authorisation of the collection was not signed by King James dll May 11, 1616, and the local collectors were not nominated till June 29 following. (Stratford Archives, Miscell. Doc. vii. 122.) Charitable contributions were invited from the chief towns in the Midlands and the South, ‘ towardes the new buyldyng reedifyeing and erectyng of the sayd Towne of Stratford upon Avon, and the relief of all such his majesties poore distressed subiectes their wives and ch.il-. dren as have sustayned losse and decay by the misfortune of a sodayne

Shakespeare’s social circle clearly included all the better-to-do inhabitants. The tradesfolk, from whom the bailiff, aldermen, and councillors were shake- drawn were his nearest neighbours, and speaxe’a among them were numerous friends of his |°“frat-^cle youth. But within a circuit of some mile or ^£ord- two there lay the houses and estates of many country gentlemen, justices of the peace, who cultivated intimacies with prominent townspeople, and were linked by social ties with the prosperous owner of New Place. Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the inspirer of Justice Shallow, belonged to a past generation, and his type was decaying. Official duties often called to Stratford in Shakespeare’s last days a neighbouring landowner who combined in a singular degree poetic and political repute. At Alcester, some nine miles from Stratford, stood the ancestral mansion of Beauchamp Court, where lived the poet and politician Sir Fulke Greville. On his father’s death in 1606 he was chosen to. succeed him in the office of Recorder of the borough of Stratford, and he retained the post till he died twenty-two years later. As recorder and also as justice of the peace Sir Fulke paid several visits year by year to the town and accepted the hospitality of the bailiff and his circle. A short walk across the borders of Gloucestershire separated New Place from the manor house of Clifford Chambers, the residence of Sir Henry and Lady Rainsford.¹ Their lifelong patronage of Michael Drayton, another Warwickshire poet and Shakespeare’s friend, gives _{sir Henry} them an honoured place in literary history. ^_t^aj?iifiord Drayton was born at the village of Hartshill chambers.

and terrible fire there happenynge.’ The returns seem to have proved disappointing. The fire at Stratford-on-Avon, in the summer of 1614, made sufficient impression on the public mind to justify its mention in Edmund Howes’ edition of Stow’s Chronicle, 1631, p. 1004. No other notice of the town appears in that comprehensive record.

¹ Sir Henry, born in 1575, married in 1596 and was knighted at King James I.’s coronation on July 23, 1603. (Cf. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archceolog. Soc. Journal, xiv. 63 seq., and Genealogist, 1st ser. ii. 105.)

2 s

near Atherstone in the northern part of the county, and Lady Rainsford’s father Sir Henry Goodere had brought the boy up in his ajdacent manor of Poles- worth. Lady Rainsford before her marriage was the adored mistress of Drayton’s youthful muse, and in the days of his maturity, Drayton, who was always an enthusiastic lover of his native county, was the guest for many months each year of her husband and herself at Clifford Chambers, which, as he wrote in his ‘ Polyolbion,’ hath ‘been many a time the Muses’ quiet port.’ Drayton’s host found at Stratford and its environment his closest friends, and several of his intimacies were freely shared by Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s son-in-law, John Hall, a medical practitioner of Stratford, reckoned Lady Rainsford among his earliest patients from the first years of the century, and Drayton himself, while a guest at Clifford Chambers, came under Hall’s professional care. The dramatist’s son-in-law cured Drayton of a ‘tertian’ by the administration of ‘syrup of violets’ and described him in his casebook as ‘ an excellent poet.’¹

Drayton was not the only common friend of Shakespeare and Sir Henry Rainsford. Both enjoyed at Stratford personal intercourse with the wealthy landowning family of the Combes, the chief members of which lived within the limits of the borough of Stratford, while they took rank with the landed gentry

¹ Sir Henry Rainsford owned additional property in the hamlet of Alveston on the banks of the Avon across Stratford bridge. Drayton celebrated Sir^ Henry Rainsford’s death on January 27, 1621-2, at the age of forty-six, with an affectionate elegy in which he described Sir Henry as ‘what a friend should be’ and praised ‘his care of me’ as proof

‘that to no other end He had been born but only for my friend.’

Rainsford’s heir, also Sir Heniy Rainsford (d. 1641), continued to the poet until his death the hospitality of Clifford Chambers. Drayton’s last extant letter, which is addressed to the Scottish poet Drummond of Hawthornden, is dated from ‘Clifford in Gloucestershire, 14 July 1631’; Drayton explains that he is writing from ‘a knight’s house in Gloucestershire, to which place I yearly use to come in the summertime to recreate myself, and to spend some two or three months in the country.’ (Oliver Elton, Introduction to Michael Drayton, 1895, p. 43.)

of the county. With three generations of this family Shakespeare maintained social relations. The Combes came to Stratford in Henry -VIII’s reign from North Warwickshire, and after the dissolution of the monasteries, they rapidly acquired a vast series of estates, not in Warwickshire alone, but also in the adjoining counties of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. The part of the town known as Old Stratford remained the family’s chief place of abode, though William Combe, a younger son of the first Stratford settler, made his home at Warwick. It was by the purchase of land at Stratford from William Combe of Warwick jointly with his nephew John Combe of Stratford in 1602 that Shakespeare laid the broad foundations of his local estate. While the dramatist was establishing his position in his native town, John Combe and his elder brother, Thomas, exerted an imposing influence on the social fortunes of the _Thomag town. Thomas Combe acquired of the Crown combe of in 1596 for his residence the old Tudor mansion near the church known as ‘ The College House. ’¹ ’

There Drayton’s host of Clifford Chambers was an honoured visitor. Thomas Combe stood godfather to Sir Henry Rainsford’s son and heir (of the same names), and when he made his will on December 22, 1608, he summoned from Clifford Chambers both Sir Henry and the knight’s guardian and stepfather ‘William Barnes, es- , quire ’ to act as witnesses and to accept the office of overseers. The testator described the two men, who were deeply attached to each other, as his ‘ good friends ’ in whom he reposed ‘ a special trust and confidence.’ ²

¹ According to his will he left to his son and heir William (subject to his wife’s tenancy for life or a term of thirty years) ‘ the house I dwell in called The College House and the ortyards and other appurtenances therewith, to me by our late Sovereign Queen Elizabeth devised.’ These words dispose of the often repeated error that Thomas Combe’s brother John was owner of ‘The College House,’ which duly descended to Thomas Combe’s heir William.

² Thomas Combe’s will is at Somerset House (P.C.C. Dorset 13). Combe was buried at Stratford church on January 11, 1608-9, and his

With Thomas Combe’s sons William and Thomas, the former of whom succeeded to his vast property and in- john fluence, Shakespeare was actively associated Combe of until his last days. But the member of the Stratford. c_omb_e family whose personality appealed most strongly to the dramatist was Thomas Combe’s brother John, a confirmed bachelor,¹ who in spite of his ample landed estate largely added to his resources by loans of money on interest to local tradespeople and farmers. For some thirty years he kept busy the local court of record with a long series of suits against defaulting clients. Nevertheless his social position in town and county was quite as good as that of his brother Thomas or his uncle William. A charitable instinct qualified his usurious practices and he lived on highly amiable terms with his numerous kinsfolk, with his Stratford neighbours, and with the leading gentry of the county. His real property included a house at Warwick, where his uncle William held much property, a substantial estate at Hampton Lucy, and much land at Stratford, including a meadow at Shottery. On January 28, 1612-3, he made his will, and he died on July

12 next year (1614). He distributed his vast property with much precision.² Two brothers (George and John),

will was proved by his executor and elder son, William, on February 10, 1608-9. His widow Mary was buried on April 5, 1617.

_¹ Many of Shakespeare’s biographers wrongly credit Combe with a wife and children. Cf. Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 449, J. C. M. Bellew’s Shakespeare's Home, 1863, pp. 67 and 365 seq.; Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries, 1907, p. 220. The confusion is due to the fact that his father, a married step-brother, and a married nephew all bore the same Christian name of John. The terms of the will of the John Combe who was Shakespeare’s especial friend leave his celibacy in no doubt.

² Combe’s will is preserved at Somerset House. An office copy signed by three deputy registrars of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury is among the Stratford Records, Miscell. Doe. vii. 254. The will was proved by the nephew and executor, Thomas Combe, on November 10, 1615 (not 1616 as has been erroneously stated). The pecuniary bequests amount to 1500I. A fair sum was left to charity. Apart from bequests of 20I. to the poor of Stratford, $1. to the poor of Alcester, and 5/. to the poor of Warwick, all the testator’s debtors were granted relief

a sister (Mrs. Hyatt), an unde (John Blount, his mother’s brother), many nephews, nieces, cousins, and servants were all generously remembered. His nephew Thomas (younger son of his late brother Thomas) was his heir and residuary legatee. But a wider historic interest distinguishes John Combe’s testamentary trib- _Comb , utes to his friends who were not lineally re- legac/to lated to him. To ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’ Shake-

spcare

he left five pounds. Sir Henry Rainsford of Clifford Chambers was an overseer of the will, receiving 5/. for his service, while Lady Rainsford was allotted 405. wherewith to buy a memorial ring. Another overseer of as high a standing in the county was Sir Francis Smyth, lord of the manor of Wootton Wawen, who received an additional 5/. wherewith to buy a hawk, while on his wife Lady Ann was bestowed the large sum of 401. wherewith to buy a bason and ewer. There were three executors, each receiving 20I.; with the heir Thomas Combe, there were associated in that capacity Bartholomew Hales, the squire of Snitterfield, and Sir Richard Verney, knight, of Compton Vemey, whose wife was sister of Sir Fulke Greville the poet and politician.¹

Combe directed that he should be buried in Stratford Church, ‘near to the place where my mother was buried,’

of a shilling in the pound on the discharge of their debts; 100I. was to be applied in loans to fifteen poor or young tradesmen of Stratford for terms of three years, at two-and-a-half per cent, interest, the interest to be divided among the Stratford almsfolk. The bequest of Shottery meadow to a cousin, Thomas Combe, was saddled with an annual payment of 71. 13s. 4d. —■ 11, for two sermons in Stratford Church, and the rest for ten black gowns for as many poor people to be chosen by the bailiff and aldermen. Henry Walker, whose son William was Shakespeare’s godson, received twenty shillings. The bequests to John’s brother George included ‘the close dr grounds known by tbe name of Parson’s Close alias Shakespeare’s Close’ — land at Hampton Lucy, which'has been erroneously assumed to owe its alternative^ title to association with the dramatist (Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 497 seq.).

¹ The third overseer was Sir Edward Blount, a kinsman of die testator’s mother, and the fourth was John Palmer of Compton, whose lineage was traceable to a very remote period. Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire gives a full account of the families of Smyth of Wootton Wawen, Verney of, Compton Vemey, and Palmer of Compton.

and that a convenient tomb of the value of threescore pounds should ‘within one year of my decease be set Comhe’s over me.’ An elaborate altar tomb with a tomb. coloured recumbent effigy still stands in a recess cut into the east wall of the chancel. The sculptor ' was Garret Johnson, a tomb-maker of Dutch descent living in Southwark, who within a very few years was to undertake a monument near at hand in honour of Shakespeare.¹ According to contemporary evidence, there was long ‘fastened ’ to Combe’s tomb in Stratford Church four doggerel verses which derisively condemned Combe’s his reputed practice of lending money at the epitaph. _rat_{e 0}f ten per cent. The crude lines were first committed to print in 1618 when they took this form:

Ten-in-the-hundred must lie in his grave,_

But a hundred to ten whether God will him have.

Who then must be interr’d in this tombe?

Oh, quoth the Divill, my John-a-Combe.

The first couplet would seem to have been adapted from an epigram devised to cast ridicule on some earlier member of the usurious profession who had no concern with Combe or Stratford.² In 1634 a Norwich visitor to Stratford who kept a diary first recorded the local tradition to the effect that Shakespeare was himself the author

¹ See pp. 494-5 infra.

² The epitaph as quoted above appeared in Richard Brathwaite’s Remains in 1618 under the heading: ‘Upon one John Combe of Stratford upon Aven, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had Caused to be built in his Life Time.’ The first two lines imitate a couplet previously in print: see Hfenryl P[arrot]’s The More the Merrier (a collection of Epigrams, 1608),

Feneratoris Epitaphium.

Ten in the hundred lies under this stone,

And a hundred to ten to the devil he’s gone.

Cf. also Camden’s epitaph of ‘an usurer' in his Remaines, 1614 (ed. 1870, pp. 429-43°) =

Here lyes ten in the hundred,

In the ground fast ramm’d;

-■ * ’Tis a hundred to ten

But his soule is damn’d.

of the ‘witty and facetious verses’ at Combe’s expense which were then to be read on Combe’s monument.¹ The story of Shakespeare’s authorship was adopted on independent local testimony both by John Aubrey and by the poet’s first biographer Nicholas Rowe.² Other impromptu sallies of equally futile mortuary wit were assigned to Shakespeare by collectors of anecdotes early in the seventeenth century. But the internal evidence for them is as unconvincing as in the case of Combe’s doggerel epitaph.³

¹ Lansdowne MS. 213!. 332 v; see p. 598 and note infra.

² The lines as quoted by Aubrey (Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 226) run:

Ten in the hundred the Devill allowes

But Combes will have twelve, he sweares and vowes;

If any one askes, who lies in his tombe,

Hah! quoth the Devill, ’Tis my John 0 Combe.

Rowe’s version runs somewhat differently:

Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav’d.

’Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not sav’d.

If any man ask, who lies in this tomb ?

Oh! ho I quoth the devil, ’tis my John-a-Combe.

One Robert Dobyns, in 1673, cited, in an account of a visit to Stratford, the derisive verse in the form given by Rowe, adding ‘since my being at Stratford the heires of Mr. Combe have caused these verses to be razed so yt they are not legible.’ (See Athenaum, Jan. 19, 1901.) There is now no visible trace on Combe’s tomb of any inscription save the original epitaph (inscribed above the effigy on the wall within the recess) which runs: ‘Here lyeth interred the body of John Combe, Esqr., who departed this life the 10th day of July A⁰ Dni 1614 bequeathed by his last will and testament to pious and charitable uses these sumes in[s]ving annually to be paied for ever viz. xxs. for two sermons to be preached in this church, six poundes xiiis. & 4 pence to buy ten goundes for ten poore people within the borrough of Stratford & one hundred poundes to be lent unto 15 poore tradesmen of the same borrough from 3 yeares to 3 yeares'changing the pties every third yeare at the rate of fiftie shillinges p. anum the wch increase he appointed to be distributed toward the re- liefe of the almes people theire. More he gave to the poore o Statforde Twenty [pounds] . . .’ The last word is erased. -

⁸ There is evidence that it was no uncommon sport for wits at social meetings of the period to suggest impromptu epitaphs for themselves and their friends, and Shakespeare is reported in many places to have engaged in the pastime. A rough epitaph sportively devised for Ben Jonson at a supper party is assigned to Shakespeare in several seventeenth-century manuscript collections. According to Ashmole MS.

John Combe’s death involved Shakespeare more conspicuously than before in civic affairs. Combe’s two nephews, William and Thomas,¹ sons of his threatened brother Thomas, who died in 1609, now divided enclosure, between them the family’s large estates about Stratford. William had succeeded five years before to his father’s substantive property including the College House, and Thomas now became owner of his uncle John’s wealth. The elder brother, William, was in his twenty-eighth year, and his brother, Thomas, was in his twenty-sixth year when their uncle John passed away. William had entered the Middle Temple on October 17, 1602, when his grand-uncle William Combe, of Warwick, was one of his sureties.² Though the young man was not called to the bar, he made pretensions to some legal knowledge. Both brothers were of violent and assertive temper, the elder of the two showing the more domineering disposition. Within two months of their uncle’s death, they came into serious conflict with £he Corporation of Stratford-on- Avon. In the early autumn of 1614 they announced a

No. 38, Art. 340 (in the Bodleian Library), ‘being Merrie att a Tauem, Mr. Jonson hauing begun this for his Epitaph —

Here lies Ben Johnson that was once one, he giues ytt to Mr. Shakspear to make up; he presently wryght:

Who while he liu’de was a sloe thing

And now being dead is no thing.’

Archdeacon Plume, in a manuscript note-book now in the corporation archives of Maldon, Essex, assigns to Shakespeare (on Bishop Hacket’s authority) the feehle mock epitaph on Ben weakly expanded thus: '

Here lies Benjamin . . . w[it]h littl hair up [on] his chin _

Who w[hi]l[e] he lived w[as] a slow t.h[ingj, and now he is d[ea]d is noth[ing).

Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that an unnamed friend had written of him (Conversations, p. 36) :

Here lyes honest Ben

That had not a heard on his chen.

¹ William was baptised at Stratford Church on December 8, 1586, and Thomas on February 9, T588-9.

² Middle Temple Minutes of Parliament, p. 425.

resolve to enclose the borough’s common lands on the outskirts of the town in the direction of Welcombe, Bishopton, and Old Stratford, hamlets about which some of the Combe property lay. The enclosure also menaced the large estate which, by the disposition of King Edward VI, owed tithes to the Corporation, and after the expiration of a ninety-two years’ lease was to become in 163,6 the absolute property of the town.

The design of the Combes had much current precedent. In all parts of the country landowners had long been seeking ‘to remove the ancient bounds of lands with a view to inclosing that which was wont to be common.’¹ The invasion of popular rights was everywhere hotly resented, and as recently as 1607 the enclosure of commons in north Warwickshire had provoked something like insurrection.² Although the disturbances were repressed with a strong hand, James I and his ministers disavowed sympathy with the landowners in their arrogant defiance of the public interest.

The brothers Combe began work cautiously. They first secured the support of Arthur Mainwaring, the steward of the Lord Chancellor Elesmere, who _{The Town} was ex-officio lord of the manor of Stratford in Council’s behalf of the Crown.³ Mainwaring resided in ^resistance- London, knew nothing of local feeling, and was represented at Stratford by one William Replingham, who acted as the Combes’ agent. The Town Council at once resolved to offer the proposed spoliation as stout a resistance as had been offered like endeavours elsewhere. Thomas Greene, a cultivated lawyer, had been appointed the first town clerk of the town in 1610, an office which was created by James I’s new charter. He took prompt and effective action in behalf of the towns

¹ Nashe’s Works, ed. McKerrow, i. 33, 88, ii. 98. Cf. Stafford’s Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints, 1581.

² Stow’s Annals, ed. Howes, p. 890. _

³ Owing to the insolvency of Sir Edward Greville, of Milcote, who had been lord of the manor since 1596, the manor had recently passed to King James I.

men. The town clerk, who had already given the dramatist some legal help, wrote of the dramatist as ‘my cosen Shakespeare.’ Whatever the lineal relationship, Greene was to prove in the course of the coming controversy his confidential intimacy with Shakespeare alike in London and Stratford.¹

Both parties to the strife bore witness to Shakespeare’s local influence by seeking his countenance.² But he

¹ Greene’s history is not free of difficulties. ‘Thomas Green alias Shakspere’ was buried in Stratford Church on March 6, 1589-90. The ‘alias’ which implies that Shakespeare was the maiden name of this man’s mother suggested to Malone that he was father of the dramatist’s legal friend. On the other hand Shakespeare’s Thomas Greene who is described in the Stratford records {Misc. Doc. a. No. 23) as ‘councillor at law, of the Middle Temple’ is clearly identical with the student who was admitted at that Inn on Novemher 20, 1595, and was described at the time in the Bench Book (p. 162) as ‘son and heir of Thomas Greene of Warwick, gent.,’ his father heing then deceased. The Middle Temple student was called to the bar on October 29, 1600, and long retained chamhers in the inn. His association with Stratford was a temporary episode in his career. He was acting as ‘solicitor’ or ‘counsellor’ for the Corporation in 1601, and on September 7, r6o3, hecame steward (or judge) of the Court of Record there and clerk to the aldermen and hurgesses. On July 8, 1610, he added to his office of steward the new post of town clerk or common clerk which was created hy James I’s charter of incorporation. Numerous papers in his crahbed handwriting are in the Stratford archives. He resigned hoth his local offices early in r6r7 and soon after sold the house at Stratford which he occupied in Old Town as well as his share in the town tithes which he had acquired along with Shakespeare in 1605 and owned jointly with his wife Lettice or Letitia. Thenceforth he was exclusively identified with London, and made some success at the bar, hecoming autumn reader of his inn in 1621 and treasurer in 1629 (Middle Temple Bench Book, pp. 70-1). It is necessary to distinguish him from yet another Thomas Greene, a yeoman of Bishopton, who was admitted a hurgess or councillor of Stratford on Septemher 1, 1615, was churchwarden in 1626, leased for many years of the Corporation a house in Henley "Street, and played a prominent part in municipal affairs long after Shakespeare’s Thomas Greene had left the town.

² The archives of the Stratford Corporation supply full information as to the course of the controversy; and the official papers are substantially supplemented hy a surviving fragment of Thomas Greene’s private diary (from Nov. 15, 1614, to Feh. 19, i6r6-7). Of Greene’s diary, which is in a crabhed and barely decipherable handwriting, one leaf is extant among the Wheler MSS., helonging to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trustees, and three succeeding leaves are among the Corporation documents. The four leaves were reproduced in autotype, with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L, Scott aild illustrative extracts from

proved unwilling to identify himself with either side. He contented himself with protecting his own property from possible injury at the hands of the Combes. _Theappeal Personally Shakespeare had a twofold interest to shake- in the matter. On the one hand he owned ^speare- the freehold of 127 acres which adjoined the threatened common fields. This land he had purchased of ‘old.¹ John Combe and his uncle William, of Warwick. On the other hand he was a joint owner with Thomas Greene, the town clerk, and many others, of the tithe- estate of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton. The value of his freeholds could not be legally affected by the proposed enclosure.¹ But too grasping a neighbour might cause him anxiety there.' On the other hand, his profits as lessee of a substantial part of the tithe-estate might be imperilled if the Corporation were violently dispossessed of control of the tithe-paying land.

At the outset of the controversy William Combe prudently approached Shakespeare through his agent Replingham, and sought to meet in a concilia- shake- tory spirit any objection to his design which speare’s

(1, PT P PTTl pyi t

the dramatist might harbour on personal with the grounds. On October 28, 1614, ‘articles’ were agent^es' drafted between Shakespeare and Replingham Oct: 28, indemnifying the dramatist and his heirs ^l6l4‘ against any loss from the scheme of the enclosure. At Shakespeare’s suggestion the terms of the agreement between himself and Combe’s agent were deCorporation records and valuable editorial comment by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D., in Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, Birmingham, 1885. Some interesting additional information has been gleaned from the Stratford records by Mrs. Stopes in Shakespeare’s Environment, pp. 81-91 and 336-342.

¹ Thomas Greene drew up at the initial stage of the controversy a list of ‘ancient freeholders in Old Stratford and Welcombe’ who were interested parties. The first entry runs thus: ‘Mr. Shakspeare, 4 yard land [i.e. roughly 127 acres], noe common nor ground beyond Gospel Bush, noe ground in Sandfield, nor none in Slow Hillfield beyond Bishopton, nor none in the enclosure beyond Bishopton. Sept. 5th, 1614.’

vised to cover the private interests of Thomas Greene, who, in his capacity of joint tithe-owner, was in much the same position as the dramatist. On November 12, the Council resolved that ‘all lawful meanes shalbe used to prevent the enclosing that is pretended of part of the old town field,’ and Greene proceeded to London to present a petition to the Privy Council. Four days later, Shakespeare reached the metropolis on business of his own. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival Greene called upon the dramatist and talked over the local crisis. The dramatist was reassuring. He had (he said) discussed the plan of the enclosure with his son-in-law, John Hall, and they had reached the conclusion'that ‘ there will be nothyng done at all.’¹ Shakespeare avoided any expression of his personal Council’s¹¹ sympathies. He would seem to have been letter to absent from Stratford till the end of the year, speit a,nd the Corporation chafed against his neu- Dec. 23, trality. On December 23, 1614, the Council in formal meeting drew up two letters to be delivered in London, one addressed to Shakespeare imploring his active aid in their behalf, and the other addressed to Mainwaring. Almost all the Councillors appended their signatures to each letter. Greene also on his own initiative sent to the dramatist ‘a note of inconveniences [to the town] that would happen by the enclosure.’² But, as far as the extant evidence goes, Shakespeare remained silent.

¹ ‘Jovis 17 No: [1614]. My Cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday to towne, I went to see him howe he did; he told me that they assured him they ment to inclose noe further then to gospell bushe, & so vpp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedge & take in Salisburyes peece; and that they meane in Aprill to servey the Land, & then to gyve satisfaccion & not before, & he & Mr. Hall say they think there will be nothyng done at all’ (Greene’s Diary).

² ‘ 23rd Dec. 1614. A Hall. Lettres wrytten, one to Mr. Manneryng, another to Mr. Shakspeare, with almost all the companyes hands to eyther: I alsoe wrytte of myself to my Cosen Shakspeare the coppyes of all our oathes made then, alsoe a not of the Inconvenyences wold grow by the Inclosure’ (Greene’s Diary). The minute book of the

William Combe was in no yielding mood. In vain a deputation of six members of the Council laid their case before him. They were dismissed with contumely. The young landlord’s arrogance stiffened the resistance of the Corporation. The Councillors were determined to ‘preserve their inheritance’; ‘they would not have it said in future time they were the men which gave way to the undoing of the town’; ‘ all three fires were not so great a loss to the town as the enclosures would be.’ Early next year (1615) labourers were employed by Combe to dig ditches round the area of the proposed enclosure and the townsmen attempted to fill them up. A riot followed. The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, was on the Warwickshire Assize, and in reply to a petition from the Town Council he on March 27 declared from the bench at Warwick that Combe’s conduct defied the law of the realm.¹ The quarrel was not thereby stayed. But an uneasy truce followed.

Town Council under date December 23 omits mention of the letters to Shakespeare and Mainwaring, although the minutes show that the controversy over the enclosures occupied the whole time of the Council as had happened at every meeting from September 23 onwards. No trace of the letter to Shakespeare survives; but a contemporary copy, apparently in Greene’s handwriting, of the letter to Mainwaring (doubtless the counterpart of that to Shakespeare) is extant among the Stratford archives (Wheler Papers, vol. i. f. 80); it is printed in Greene’s Diary, ed. Ingleby, Appendix ix. p. 15. The bailiff, Francis Smyth senior, and the Councillors, mention the recent ‘casualties of fires’ and the ‘ruin of this borough,’ and entreat Mainwaring ‘in your Christian meditations to bethink you that such enclosure will tend to the great disabling of performance of those good meanings of that godly king [Edward VI, by whose charter of incorporation ‘the common fields’ passed to the town for the benefit of the poor] to the ruyne of this Borough wherein live above seven hundred poor which receive almes, whose curses and clamours will be poured out to God against the enterprise of such a thing.’

¹ ‘14 April 1615. A Coppy of the Order made at Warwick Assises 27 Marcij xiii⁰ Jacobi R.:

‘Warr § Vpon the humble petition of the Baylyflfe and Burgesses of Stratford uppon Avon, It was ordered at thes Assises that noe inclosure shalbe made within the parish of Stratforde, for that yt is agaynst the Lawes of the Realme, neither by Mr. Combe nor any other, untill they shall shewe cause at open assises to the Justices of Assise; neyther that any of the Commons beinge aunciente greensworde shalbe plowed upp eyther hy the sayd Mr. Combe or any other, untill good cause be lyke- wise shewed at open assises before the Justices of Assise; and this order

In September 1615, during the lull in the conflict, the town clerk once again made record of Shakespeare’s attitude. Greene’s ungrammatical diary supplies speare’s the clumsy entry: 'Sept. [1615] W. Shak- statement, _Sp_eares tellyng J. Greene that I was not able Sept. 1615. _{tQ beare the enc}i_osei_nge
0f Welcombe.’ J.

Greene was the town clerk’s brother John, who had been solicitor to the Corporation since October 22, 1612.¹ It was with him that Shakespeare was represented in conversation. Shakespeare’s new statement amounted to nothing more than a reassertion of the continued hostility of Thomas Greene to William Combe’s nefarious purpose.² Shakespeare clearly reis taken for preventynge of tumultes and breaches of his Majesties peace; where of in this very towne of late upon their occasions there hadd lyke to have bene an evill begynnynge of some great mischief.

‘Edw. Coke.’

¹ Cal. Stratford Records, p. 102.

² The wording of the entry implies that Shakespeare told J[ohn] Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Those who would wish to regard Shakespeare as a champion of popular rights have endeavoured to interpret the ‘I’ in ‘I was not able’ as ‘he.’ Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare would be rightly credited with telling John Greene that he disliked the enclosure; but palaeographers only recognise the reading ‘I.’ (Cf. Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, ed. Ingleby, 1885, p. 11.) In spite of Shakespeare’s tacit support of William Combe in the matter of the enclosure, he would seem according to another entry in Greene’s diary to have gently intervened amid the controversy in the interest of one of the young tyrant’s debtors. Thomas Barber (or Barbor), who was described as a ‘gentleman’ of Shottery and was thrice bailiff of Stratford in 1578, 1586, and 1594, had become surety for a loan, which young Combe or his uncle John had made Mrs. Quiney, perhaps the widow of Richard. Mrs. Quiney failed to meet the liability, and application was made to Barber for repayment in the spring of 1615. Barber appealed to Thomas Combe, William’s brother, for some grace. But on April 7, 1615 ‘ W[illiam] Combe willed his brother to shew Mr. Barber noe favour and threatned him that he should be served upp to London within a fortnight (and so ytt fell out).’ Barber’s wife Joan was buried within the next few months (August 10, 1615) and he followed her to the grave five days later. On September 5, Greene’s diary attests that Shakespeare sent ‘for the executors of Mr. Barber to agree as ys said with them for Mr. Bairber’s interest.’ Shakespeare would seem to have been benevolently desirous of relieving Barber’s estate from the pressure which C&mbe was placing upon it. (Cf. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Environment, 1913, pp. 87 seq.)

garded his agreement with Combe’s agent as a bar to any active encouragement of the Corporation.

The fight was renewed early next year when William Combe was chosen to serve as high sheriff of the county and acquired fresh leverage in his oppression of the townsfolk. He questioned the Lord _men’s^0wns’ Chief Justice’s authority to run counter to his *^r^™^ph' scheme. Sir Edward Coke reiterated his warn- ' ing, and the country gentry at length ranged themselves on the popular side. A few months later Shakespeare passed away. Soon afterwards Combe was compelled ' to acknowledge defeat. Within two years of Shakespeare’s death the Privy Council, on a joint report of the Master of the Rolls and Sir Edward Coke, condemned without qiia.1ifira.tion Combe’s course of action (February 14, 1618). Thereupon the disturber of the local peace sued for pardon. He received absolution on the easy terms of paying a fine of 41, and of restoring the disputed lands to the precise condition in which they were left at his uncle’s death.¹

At the beginning of 1616, although Shakespeare pronounced himself to be, in conventional phrase, ‘in perfect health and memory,’ his strength was Francis clearly failing, and he set about making his Coiims and will. Thomas Greene, who had recently acted speare's as his legal adviser, was on the point of resign- ^wiU- ing his office of town clerk and of abandoning his relations with Stratford. Shakespeare now sought the professional services of Francis Collins, a solicitor, who had left the town some twelve years before, and was practising at Warwick. Collins, whose friends or clients at Stratford were numerous, was much in the

¹ William Combe long survived his defeat, and for nearly half a century afterwards cultivated more peaceful relations with his neighbours. He is commonly identified with the William Combe who was elected to . the Long Parliament (November 2, 1640) but whose election was at once dedared void. He died at Stratford on January 30, 1666-7, at the age of eighty, and was buried in the parish church, where a monument commemorates him with his wife, a son, and nine daughters.

confidence of the Combe family. He was solicitor to John Combe’s brother Thomas, the father of the heroes of the enclosure controversy, whose will he had witnessed at the College on December 22, 1608. Thomas Combe’s brother, the wealthy John Combe, stood godfather to Collins’s son John, and gave in his will substantial proofs of his regard for Collins and his family.¹ In employing Collins to make his will Shakespeare was loyal to distinguished local precedent.

Shakespeare’s will was written by Collins² and was ready for signature on January 25, but it was for the . time laid aside. Next month the poet suffered affair? *^c domestic anxiety owing to the threatened ex- fli6^-Apri1’ ^communi^cati°ⁿ °f bis younger daughter Judith and of his son-in-law Thomas Quiney on the ground of an irregularity in the celebration of their recent marriage in Stratford Church on February 10, 1615-6.

John Ward, who was vicar of Stratford in Charles II’s time and compiled a diary of local gossip, is responsible for the statement that Shakespeare later in this same spring entertained at New Place his two literary friends Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Jonson’s old intimacy with Shakespeare continued to the last. The hospitality which Drayton constantly enjoyed at Clifford Chambers made him a familiar figure in Stratford. According to the further testimony of the vicar Ward, Shakespeare and his two guests Jonson and Drayton, when they greeted him at Stratford for the last time, ‘had a merry meeting,’ ‘but’ (the diarist proceeds) ‘ Shakespeare itt seems drank too hard, for he died of a feavour there contracted.’ Shakespeare may well have cherished Falstaff’s faith in the virtues of sherris sack and have scorned ‘thin pota-

¹ John Comhe bequeathed sums of 101, to both Francis Collins'and his godson John Collins as well as 61. 135. 4d. to Francis Collins’s wife Susanna. Collins had two sons named John who were baptised in Stratford Church, one on June 2, 1601, the other on November 22, 1604. (See Baptismal Register.) The elder son John probably died in infancy.

² Collins’s penmanship is established by a comparison of the will with admitted specimens of his handwriting among the Stratford archives.

tions,’ but there is no ground for imputing to him an excessive indulgence in ‘hot and rebellious liquors.’ An eighteenth-century legend credited him with engaging in his prime in a prolonged and violent drinking bout at Bidford, a village in the near neighbourhood of Stratford, but no hint of the story was put on record before 1762, and it lacks credibility.¹

The cause of Shakespeare’s death is undetermined. Chapel Lane, which ran beside his house, was known as a noisome resort of straying pigs; and the _Thesign. insanitary atmosphere is likely to have prej- ingof udiced the failing health of a neighbouring fp_e^a^>_s resident. During the month of March Shake- wiH^Mardi speare’s illness seemed to take a fatal turn. ^25,11 ' The will which had been drafted in the previous January was revised, and on March 25 ² the document was finally signed by the dramatist in the presence of five neighbours.

¹ In the British Magazine, June 1762, a visitor to Stratford descrihed how, on an excursion to the neighbouring village of Bidford, the host of the local inn, the White Lion, shewed Mm a crah tree, ‘called Shakespeare’s canopy ’ and repeated a tradition that the poet had slept one night under that tree after engaging in a strenuous drinking match with the topers of Bidford. A Stratford antiquary, John Jordan, who invented a variety of Shakespearean myths, penned ahout 1770 an elaborate narrative of this legendary exploit, and credited Shakespeare on his recovery from his drunken stupor at Bidford with extemporising a crude rhyming catalogue of the neighbouring villages, in all of which he claimed to have proved his prowess as a toper. The doggerel, which long enjoyed a local vogue, ran:

Piping Pebwerth, Dancing Marston,

Haunted Hillborough and Hungry Grafton,

With Dadging Exhall, Papist Wixford,

Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford.

The Bidford crab tree round which the story crystallised was sketched by Samuel Ireland in 1794 (see his Warwickshire Avon, 1795, p. 232), and hy Charles Frederick Green in 1823 (see his Shakespeare’s Crabtree, 1857, p. 9). The tree was taken down in a decayed state in 1824. The shadowy'legend was set out at length in W. H. Ireland’s Confessions, 1805, p. 34 and in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. pp. 500-2. It is also the theme of the quarto volume, Shakespeare's Crabtree and its Legend (with nine lithographic prints), hy Charles Frederick Green, 1857.

² In the extant will the date of execution is given as ‘ vicesimo quinto • die Martii ’; hut ‘ Martii ’ is an interlineation and is written above the word ‘Januarii’ which is crossed through.

Three of the witnesses, who watched the poet write his name at the foot of each of the three pages of his will, The five were local friends near the testator’s own age, witnesses, filling responsible positions in the town. At the head of the list stands the name of Francis Collins, the solicitor of Warwick, who a year later accepted an invitation to resettle at Stratford as Thomas Greene’s successor in the office of town clerk, although death limited his tenure of the dignity to six months.¹ Collins’s signature was followed by that of Julius Shaw, who after holding most of the subordinate municipal offices was now serving as bailiff or chief magistrate. He was long the occupant of a substantial house in Chapel Street, two doors off Shakespeare’s residence.² A third signatory of Shakespeare’s will, Hamnet Sadler, whose Christian name was often written Hamlet, was brother of John Sadler who served twice as bailiff — in 1599 and 1612 — and he himself was often in London on business of the Corporation. His intimacy with Shakespeare was already close in 1585, when he stood godfather to Shakespeare’s son Hamnet.³ The fourth wit-

¹ Collins’s will dated September 20, 1617, was proved by Francis his son and executor on November 10 following (P.C.C. Weldon, 101). He would appear to have died and been buried at Warwick. A successor as town-derk of Stratford was appointed on October 18, 1617 (Council Book B).

² Julius Shaw, who was baptised at Stratford in September 1571, was acquainted with Shakespeare from boyhood. Shakespeare’s father John attested the inventory of the property of Julius Shaw’s father Ralph at his death in 1591, when he was described as a ‘ wooldriver.’ Julius Shaw’s house in Chapel Street was the property of the Corporation, and he was in occupation of it in 1599, when the Corporation carefully described it in its survey of its tenements in the town (Cal. Stratford Records, p. r6g). Julius Shaw was churchwarden of Stratford in 1603-4, chamberlain in 1609-T0, and being successively a burgess and an alderman was bailiff for a second time in 1628-9. A man of wealth, he was through his later years entitled ‘gentleman’ in local records. He was buried in Straford churchyard on June 24, T629; his will is in the probate registry at Worcester (Worcester Wills, Brit. Rec. Soc. ii. 13s). His widow Anne Boyes, whom he married on August 5, IS93, was buried at Stratford on October 26, 1630.

³ Hamnet Sadler died on October 26, 1624. He would seem to have had a family of seven sons and five daughters, but only five of these

ness of Shakespeare’s will, Robert Whatcote, apparently a farmer, was a chief witness to the character of the poet’s daughter when she brought the action for defamation in 1614. The fifth and last witness, John Robinson, occasionally figured as a litigant in the local court of record.¹ Of the five signatories Collins and Sadler received legacies under the will.

On April 17, Shakespeare’s only brother-in-law, William Hart, of Henley Street, who, according to the register, was in trade as a hatter, was buried in the parish churchyard. Six days later, on sp_e^a_a^k_re>_s Tuesday, April 23, the poet himself died at death, New Place. He had just completed his fifty- lid second year. On Thursday, April 25, he was ^p^f’_2S buried inside Stratford Church in front of the . ’ altar not far from the northern wall of the chancel. As part owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, the dramatist had a right of interment in the chancel, and his local repute justified the supreme distinction of a grave before the altar.² But a special peril attached to a grave in so conspicuous a situation. Outside in the churchyard stood the charnel-house or ‘bone-house’ impinging on the northern wall of the

survived childhood. His sixth son, bom on February 5, 1597-8, was named William, probably after the dramatist.

¹ See p. 462 supra. Whatcote claimed damages in 2 Jac. 1 for the loss of six sheep which had been worried by the dogs of one Robert Suche (Cal. Stratford Records, p. 325). John Robinson brought actions for assault against two different defendants in 1608 and 1614 respectively (ibid. p. 211 and 231). Whether Whatcote or Robinson’s home lay within the boundaries of Stratford is uncertain. No person named Whatcote figures in the Stratford parish registers, nor is there any entry which can -be positively identified with the witness John Robinson. He should be in all probability distinguished from the John Robinson who was lessee of Shakespeare’s house in Blackfriars. See p. 458 supra.

² A substantial fee seems to have attached to the privilege of burial in the chancel, and in the year before Shakespeare’s death on December 4, 1615, the town council deprived John Rogers the vicar, whose ‘faults and failings’ excited much local complaint, of his traditional right to the money. At the date of Shakespeare’s burial, the fee was made payable to the borough chamberlains, aud was to be applied to the repair of the chancel and church (Cal. Stratford Records, p. 107).

chancel, and there, according to a universal custom, bones which were dug from neighbouring graves lay in The raina- confused heaps. The scandal of such early and toryin- irregular exhumation was a crying grievance on'the™ throughout England in the seventeenth century, gravestone. Hamlet bitterly voiced the prevailing dread. When he saw the gravedigger callously fling up the bones of his old playmate Yorick in order to make room for Ophelia’s coffin, the young Prince of Denmark exclaimed. ‘Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play' at loggats with ’em? Mine ache to think on ’t.’- Yorick’s body had ‘lain in the grave’ twenty-three years.¹ It was to guard against profanation of the kind that Shakespeare gave orders for the inscription on his grave of the lines :

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare To dig the dust enclosed heare;

Bleste be the man that spares these stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones.²

According to one William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694,³ Shakespeare penned the verses in order to suit ‘ the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the

¹ Similarly Sir Thomas Browne, in his Hydriotaphia, r658, urged the advantage of cremation over a mode of burial which admitted the ‘ tragical! abomination, of being knav’d out of our graves and of having onr skulls made drinking bowls and our bones turned into pipes.’ According to Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, the Royalist writer Sir John Berkenhead, in December 1679, gave directions in his will for his burial in the yard ‘ neer the Church of St. Martyn’s in the Field ’ instead of inside the church as was usual with persons of his status. ‘ His reason was because he sayd they removed the bodies out of the church’ (Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 1898, i. ros).

² Several early transcripts of these lines, which were first printed in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warvoickshire, 1656, are extant. The Warwickshire antiquary Dugdale visited Stratford-on-Avon on July 4, r634, and his transcript of the lines which he made on that day is still preserved among his manuscript collections at Merevale. In 1673 a tourist named Robert Dobyns visited the church and copied this inscription as well as that on John Combe’s tomb (see pp. 470-r supra). The late Bertram Dobell, the owner of Dobyns’ manuscript, described it in The Athenaum, January r9, rgor.

³ Hall’s letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, from the original, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

most part a very ignorant set of people.’ Had this curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton would not have hesitated in course of time to remove Shakespeare’s dust to ‘the bone-house.’ As it was, the grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was never opened, even to receive his wife and daughters, although (according to the diary of one Dowdall, another seventeenth-century visitor to Stratford) they expressed a desire to be buried in it. In due time his wife was buried in a separate adjoining grave on the north side of his own, while three graves on the south side afterwards received the remains of the poet’s elder daughter, of her husband, and of the first husband of their only child, the dramatist’s granddaughter. Thus a row of five graves in the chancel before the altar ultimately bore witness to the local status of the poet and his family.

Shakespeare’s will, the first draft of which was drawn up before January 25, 1615-6, received many interlineations and erasures before it was signed in _Th the ensuing March. The religious exordium ^ewi ' is in conventional phraseology, and gives no clue to Shakespeare’s personal religious opinions. _The What those opinions precisely were, we have religious neither the means nor the warrant for dis- ^exordlum- cussing. The plays furnish many ironical references to the Puritans and their doctrines, but we may dismiss as idle gossip the irresponsible report that ‘he dyed a papist,’ which the Rev. Richard Davies, rector of Sapperton, first put on record late in the seventeenth century.¹ That he was to the last a conforming member of the Church of England admits of no question.

¹ Richard Davies, who died in 1708, inserted this and other remarks in some brief adversaria respecting Shakespeare, which figured_ in the manuscript collections of William Fulman, the antiquary, which are in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. For the main argument in favour of Davies’s assertion see Father H. S. Bowden’s The Religion of Shakespeare, chiefly from the writings of Richard Simpson, London, 1899. A biography of Shakespeare curiously figures in the imposing Catholic work of reference Die Converliten seit der Reformation nach ihrem Leben und ihren Schriften dargestellt von Dr. Andreas Raess,

The name of Shakespeare’s wife was omitted from the original draft of the will, but by an interlineation in the Bequest to final draft she received his ‘second best bed his wife. _with the furnitur.’ No other bequest was made her. It was a common practice of the period to specify a bedstead or other defined article of household furniture as a part of a wife’s inheritance. Nor was it unusual to bestow the best bed on another member of the family than the wife, leaving her only ‘thesecond best,’¹ but no will except Shakespeare’s is forthcoming in which a bed forms the wife’s sole bequest. There is nothing to show that Shakespeare had set aside any property under a previous settlement or jointure with a view to making independent provision for his widow. Her right to a widow’s dower — i.e. to a third share for life in freehold estate — was not subject to testamentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps to prevent her from benefiting, at any rate to the full extent, by that legal arrangement. He had barred her dower in the case of his latest purchase of freehold estate, viz. the house at Blackfriars.² Such procedure

Bischof von Strassburg (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1866-80, 13 vols. and index vol.), vol. xiii. 1880, pp. 372-439.

¹ Thomas Combe of Stratford (father of Thomas and William of the enclosure controversy) while making adequate provision for his wife in his will (dated December 22, 1608), specifically withheld from her his ‘best bedstead . . . with the best bed and best furniture thereunto belonging’; this was bequeathed to his elder son William to the exclusion of his widow. (See Thomas Combe’s will, P.C.C. Dorset 13.)

² The late Charles Elton, Q.C., was kind enough to give me a legal opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897 : ‘I have looked to the authorities with my friend Mr. Herbert Mackay, and there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.’ Mr. Mackay’s opinion is couched in the following terms: ‘The conveyance of the Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 1613 shows that the estate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare’s wife would be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bargainees.’ That was a remote contingency which did not arise, and Shakespeare always retained the power of making ‘another settlement when the trustees were shrinking.’ Thus the bar was for practical purposes perpetual, and disposes of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s assertion that Shakespeare’s wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate.

THREE AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES SEVERALLY WRITTEN BY SHAKESPEARE ON THE THREE SHEETS OF HIS WILL ON MARCH 25. 1610.

Reproduced from the original document now at Somerset House, London.

is pretty condusive proof that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death. But, however plausible the theory that his relations with her were from first to last wanting in sympathy, it is improbable that either the slender mention of her in the will or the barring of her dower was designed by Shakespeare to make public his indifference or dislike. Local tradition subsequently credited her with a wish to be buried in his grave; and her epitaph proves that she inspired her daughters with genuine affection. Probably her' ignorance of affairs and the infirmities of age (she was past sixty) combined to unfit her in the poet’s eyes for the control of property, and, as an act of ordinary prudence, he committed her to the care of his elder daughter, who inherited, according to such information as is accessible, some of his own shrewdness, and had a capable adviser in her husband.

This elder daughter, Susanna Hall, was, under the terms of the will, to become mistress of New Place, and practically of all the poet’s estate. She _Hisheiress received (with remainder to her issue in strict '

entail) New Place, the two messuages or tenements in Henley Street (subject to the life interest of her aunt Mrs. Hart), the cottage and land in Chapel Lane which formed part of the manor of Rowington, and indeed all the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford, together with the dramatist’s interest in the tithes and the house in Blackfriars, London. Moreover, Mrs. Hall and her husband were appointed executors and residuary legatees, with full rights over nearly all the poet’s household furniture and personal belongings. To their only child, the testator’s granddaughter or ‘niece,’ Elizabeth Hall, was bequeathed the poet’s plate, with the exception of his broad silver and gilt bowl, which

Cf. Davidson on Conveyancing; Littleton, sect. 45; Coke upon Littleton, ed. Hargrave, p. 379 b, note 1. See also pp. 456-7 supra and p. 491 n. 1 infra.

was reserved for his younger daughter, Judith. To his younger daughter he also left 150/. in money, of which 1001., her marriage portion, was to be paid within a year, and another 150/. to be paid to her if alive three years after the date of the will. Ten per cent, interest was to be allowed until the money was paid. Of the aggregate amount the sum of 50/. was specified to be the consideration due to Judith for her surrender of her interest in the cottage and land in Chapel Lane which was held of the manor of Rowington. To the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, whose husband, William Hart, predeceased the testator by only six days, he left, besides a contingent reversionary interest in Judith’s pecuniary legacy, his wearing apparel, 201, in money, and a life interest in the Henley Street property, with 51, for each of her three sons, William, Thomas, and Michael.

Shakespeare extended his testamentary benefactions beyond his domestic circle, and thereby proved the wide Legacies range of his social ties. Only one bequest to friends. _was applied to charitable uses. The sum of 101, was left to the poor of Stratford. Eight fellow townsmen received marks of the dramatist’s regard. To Mr. Thomas Combe, younger son of Thomas Combe of the College, and younger nephew of his friend John Combe, Shakespeare left his sword — possibly by way of ironical allusion to the local strife in which the legatee had borne a part.¹ No mention was made of Thomas’s elder brother William, who was still actively urging his claim to enclose the common land of the town. The large sum of 13I. 65. 8d. was allotted to Francis Collins, who was described in the will as ‘ of the borough of War-

¹ All effort to trace Shakespeare’s sword has failed. Its legatee, Mr. Thomas Combe, who died at Stratford in July 1657, aged 68, directed his executors, by his will dated June 20, 1656, to convert all his personal property into money, and to lay it out in the purchase of lands, to be settled on William Combe, the eldest son of a cousin, John Combe, of Alvethurch, in the county of Worcester, Gent., and his heirs male with remainder to his two brothers successively (Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 604 n.).

wick, gent.’; within a year he was to be called to Stratford as town clerk. A gift of xxs. in gold was bestowed on the poet’s godson, William Walker, now in his ninth year. Four adult Stratford friends, Hamnet Sadler, William Reynoldes, gent., Anthony Nash, gent., and Mr. John Nash, were each given 26s. 8d. wherewith to buy memorial rings. All were men of local influence, although William Reynoldes and the Nash brothers were of rather better status than the dramatist’s friend from boyhood Hamnet Sadler, a witness to the will. William Reynoldes was a local landowner in his thirty-third year. His father, ‘Mr. Thomas Reynoldes, gent.,’ of Old Stratford, who had died on September 8, 1613, enjoyed heraldic honours; and John Combe, who described Reynoldes’s mother as his ‘cousin,’ had made generous bequests of land or money to all members of the family and even to the servants. William Reynoldes inherited from John Combe two large plots of land on the Evesham Road to the west of the town, which were long familiarly known as ‘Salmon Jowl’ and ‘Salmon Tail’ respectively.¹ Anthony Nash was the owner of much land at Welcombe, and had a share in the tithes.² His brother John was less affluent, but made at his death substantial provision for his family. A younger generation of the poet’s family continued his own intimacy with the Nashes. Thomas, a younger son of Anthony Nash, who was baptised on June 20, 1593, became in 1626 the first husband of Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall.

Another legatee, Thomas Russell, alone of all the persons mentioned in the will, bore the dignified desig-

¹ See Cal. Stratford Records. William Reynoldes married Frances De Bois of London, described as a Frenchwoman (see Visitation of Warwickshire, 1619, Harl. Soc., p. 243). He was buried in Stratford Church on March 6, 1632-3.

² Anthony Nash was buried in Stratford on November 18, 1622. A younger son was christened John on October 15, 1598, after his uncle John, Shakespeare’s legatee. The latter’s will dated November S>.^r®²3> was proved by his sole executor and son-in-law William Horne just a fortnight later (P.C.C. Swann 122).

nation of ‘Esquire.’ He received the sum of $1., and was also nominated one of the two overseers, Francis Thomas Collins being the other. There is no proof in Russell, the local records that Russell was a resident Esquire. j_n Stratford,¹ and he was in all probability a London friend. Shakespeare’had opportunities of meeting in London one Thomas Russell, who in the dramatist’s later life enjoyed a high reputation there as a metallurgist, obtaining patents for new methods of extracting metals from the ore. For near a decade before Shakespeare’s death Russell would seem to have been in personal relations with the poet Michael Drayton. Both men enjoyed the patronage of Sir David Murray of Gorthy, who was a poetaster as well as controller of the household of Henry, Price of Wales; in his capacity of minor poet, Murray received a handsome tribute in verse from Drayton. As early as 1608 Francis Bacon was seeking Thomas Russell’s acquaintance on the twofold ground of his scientific ingenuity and his social influence.². Shakespeare probably owed to Drayton an acquaintanceship with Russell, which Bacon aspired to share.

More interesting is it to note that three ‘fellows’ or colleagues of his theatrical career in London, were com- Thebe- memorated by Shakespeare in his will in prequests to cisely the same fashion as his four chief friends the actors. _at Stratford, — Sadler, Reynoldes, and the two Nashes. The actors John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell also received 265. 8d. apiece wherewith to buy memorial rings. All were veterans in the theatrical service, and acknowledged leaders of the theatrical profession, to whose personal association with

¹ The dramatist’s father John Shakespeare occasionally co-operated in local affairs with one Henry Russell, who held for a time the humble office of serjeant of the mace in the local court of record. Henry Russell married Elizabeth Perry in 1559 and may have been father of Thomas Russell, although the latter’s name is absent from the baptismal register, and his status makes the suggestion improbable.

² Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1610-1624; Spedding’s Life and Letters of Bacon, iv. 23, 63.

the dramatist his biography furnishes testimony at every step. When their company, of which Shakespeare had been a member, received a new patent on March 27, 1619, the list of patentees was headed by the three actors whom Shakespeare honoured in his will.

While ‘Francis Collins, gent.,’ and ‘Thomas Russell, esquire,’ were overseers of the will, Shakespeare’s son-in- law and his daughter, John and Susanna Hall, _0verseers were the executors. The will was proved in and ^eers London by Hall and his wife on June 22, ^executors-

1616. Most of the landed property was retained by the beneficiaries during their lifetime in accordance with Shakespeare’s testamentary provision.¹ Hall and his wife only alienated one portion of the poet’s estate; they parted to the Corporation with Shakespare’s interest in the tithes in August 1624 for 400Z., reserving ‘two closes’ which they had lately leased ‘to Mr. William Combe, esquier.’

Thus Shakespeare, according to the terms of his will, died in command of an aggregate sum of 350Z. in money in addition to personal belongings of realisable value, and an extensive real estate the greater speare’s part of which he had purchased out of his savings at a cost of 1,2001. But it was rare for ' wills of the period to enumerate in full detail the whole of a testator.’s possessions. A complete inventory was reserved for the ‘inquisitio post mortem,’ which in Shakespeare’s case, despite a search at Somerset House, has not come to light. The absence from the dramatist’s will of any specific allusion to books is no proof that he left none; they were doubtless included by his lawyer in

¹ On February ro, 1617-8, John Jackson, John Hemynge of London, gentlemen, and William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, whom Shakespeare had made nominal co-owners or trustees of the Blackfriars estate, made over their formal interest to John Greene of Clement’s Inn, gent. (Thomas Greene’s brother), and Matthew Morris, of Stratford, gent., with a view to facilitating the disposition of the property ‘according to the true intent and meaning’ of Shakespeare’s last will and testament. The house passed to the Halls, subject to the lawful interest of the present lessee, John Robinson (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 36-41).

the comprehensive entry of ‘goodes’ and ‘ chatteUs ’ which fell, with the rest of his residuary estate, to his elder daughter and to John Hall, her well-educated husband. When Hall died at New Place in 1635, a ‘study of books’ was among the contents of his house.¹ There is every reason to believe, too, that Shakespeare retained till the end of his life his theatrical shares — a fourteenth share in the Globe and a seventh share in the Blackfriars — which his will again fails to mention. Such an omission is paralleled in the testaments of several of his acting colleagues and friends. Neither Augustine Phillips (d. 1605), Richard Burbage (d. 1619), nor Henry Condell {d. 1627) made any testamentary reference to their theatrical shares, although substantial holdings passed in each case to their heirs. John Heminges,² one of the three actors who are commemorated by bequests in Shakespeare’s will, was the business manager of the dramatist’s company. Shortly after Shakespeare’s death Heminges largely increased his proprietary rights in both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. There is little question that he acquired of the residuary legatees (Susanna and John Hall) Shakespeare’s shares in both houses. At his death in 1630, Heminges owned as many as four shares in each of the two theatres. It is reasonable to regard his large theatrical estate as incorporating Shakespeare’s theatrical property.³

Exhaustive details of the estates of Jacobean actors

¹ See p. 506 infra.

^s The practice varied. In the wills of Thomas Pope (d. 1603), John Heminges (d. 1630), and John Underwood (d. 1624) specific bequest is made of their theatrical shares.

³ See p. 305 n. 1 snpra. The capitalised value of theatrical shares rarely rose much above the annual income. The leases of the land on which the theatre stood were usually short, and the prices of shares were bound to fall as the leases neared extinction. In 1633, when the leases of the sites of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres had only a few years to run, three shares in 'the Globe and two in the Blackfriars were sold for no more than an aggregate sum of 506/. John Hall and his wife may well have sold to Heminges Shakespeare’s theatrical interest for some 300^.

are rarely available. The provisions of their wills offer as a rule vaguer information than in Shakespeare’s case. But the co-ordinated evidence shows that, while Shakespeare died a richer man than rf^hcontem-^S most members of his profession, his wealth was ^porary often equalled and in a few instances largely ^a° °^rs' exceeded. The actor Thomas Pope, who died in 1603, made pecuniary bequests to an amount exceeding 340/. and disposed besides of theatrical shares and much real estate. Henry Condell, who died in 1627, left annuities of 31/. and pecuniary legacies of some 70/. in addition to extensive house property in London and his theatrical shares. Burbage, whose will was nuncupative, was popularly reckoned to be worth at his death (in March 1618-9) 300/. in land, apart from personal and theatrical property. A far superior standard of affluence was furnished by the estate of the actor Edward Alleyn, Burbage’s chief rival, who died on November 25, 1626. In his lifetime he purchased an estate at Dulwich for some 10,000/. in money of his own time, and he built there the College ‘of God’s Gift’ which he richly endowed with land elsewhere. At the same time Alleyn disposed by his will of a sum of money approaching jpool. and made provision out of an immense real estate for the building and endowment of thirty almshouses. Alleyn speculated in real property with great success; but his professional earnings were always considerable. Shakespeare’s wealth was modest when it is compared with Alleyn’s. Yet Alleyn’s financial experience proves the wide possibilities of fortune which were open to a contemporary actor who possessed mercantile aptitude.¹

A humble poejtic admirer, Leonard Digges, in commendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote that Shakespeare’s works would be alive when Time dissolves thy Stratford monument.

¹ For Alleyn’s will see Collier’s Alleyn Papers, pp. xxi-xxvi, and for the wills of many other contemporary actors see Collier’s Lives of the Actors.

It is clear that before the year 1623, possibly some three years earlier, the monument in Shakespeare’s _The honour, which is still affixed to the north Stratford wall of the chancel overlooking his grave, monument. _wag pi_aceci j_n Stratford Church. The memorial was designed and executed in Southwark within a stone’s throw of the Globe theatre, and it thus constitutes a material link between Shakespeare’s professional life on the Bankside and his private career at Stratford. ‘ Gheeraert Janssen,’ a native of Amsterdam, settled in the parish of St. Thomas, Southwark, early in 1567 and under the Anglicised name of ‘ Garret Johnson’ made a high reputation as a tombmaker, forming a clientele extending far beyond his district of residence. In 1591 he received the handsome sum of 2001, for designing alnd erecting the elaborate tombs of the brothers Edward Manners, third Earl of Rutland, and John Manners, fourth Earl, which were set up in the church at Bottesford, Leicestershire, the family burying-place.¹ The sculptor died in St. Saviour’s, parish, Southwark, in August 1611, dividing his estate between his widow Mary and two of his sons, Garret and Nicholas. They had chiefly helped him in his tombmaking business, and they carried it on after his death with much of his success. Shakespeare’s tomb came from the Southwark stone-yard, while it was controlled by the younger Garret Johnson and his brother Nicholas.² Nicholas

¹ Garret Johnson’s work at Bottesford is fully described by Lady Victoria Manners in ‘The Rutland Monuments in Bottesford Church,’ Art Journal, 1903, pp. 288-9. See also Rutland Papers {Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep.), iv. 397-9, where elaborate details are given of the conveyance of the tombs from London; Eller’s Hist, of Belvoir Cattle, 1841, pp. 369 seq.

² The will of Garret Johnson, ‘tombmaker⁷ of St. Saviour’s parish, dated July 24, 1611, and proved July 3, 1612, is at Somerset House

(P.C.C. Penner 66). His burial is entered in St. Saviour’s parish register

in August 1611. The return of aliens dated in 1593 credits him with

five sons of ages ranging between 22 and 4, and with a daughter aged 14;

but only two sons are mentioned in his will, which was apparently made

in haste on the point of death. (Cf. Kirk’s ‘ Return of Aliens,* Huguenot Soc. Proceedings, iii. 445.) Dugdale in his diary noted under the year

was by far the better artist of the two. He continued his father’s association with the Rutland family, and designed and executed in 1618-9 the splendid tomb which commemorated Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, and his Countess (Sir Philip Sidney’s daughter) at Bottesford.¹ The order was given by the sixth Earl of Rutland (brother of the fifth Earl), with whom Shakespeare was in personal relations in 1613. The dramatist had shared the Earl’s favour with the sculptor. Shakespeare’s monument was designed on far simpler lines than this impressive Bottesford tomb, and the main features suggest by their crudity the hand of Nicholas’s brother Garret, though some of the subsidiary ornament is identical with that of Nicholas’s work at Bottesford Church and attests his partial aid. One or other of the Johnsons had lately, too, provided for St. Saviour’s Church (now Southwark Cathedral) a tomb of a design very similar to that of Shakespeare’s, in honour of one John Bingham, a prominent Southwark parishioner, and saddler to Queen Elizabeth and James I.²

The poet’s monument in Stratford Church was in tablet form and was coloured, in accordance with contemporary practice. It presents a central arch flanked

1653 that Shakespeare’s and Comhe’s monuments in Stratford Church were both the work of ‘one Gerard Johnson’ (Diary, ed. Hamper, 1827, p. 290), but the editor of the diary knew nothing of the younger Garret, and by identifying the sculptor of Shakespeare’s tomb with the elder Garret propounded a puzzle which is here solved for the first time.

¹ Lady Victoria Manners’ ‘Rutland Monuments’ in Art Journal, 1903, pp. 33s seq., and Rutland Papers, iv. pp. 517 and 519-, .

^s Probably Garret and Nicholas Johnson designed the effigies in Southwark Cathedral of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (d. 1626), and of John Treheme (d. 1618), gentleman porter to James I, together with that of his wife Margaret (d. 1645). See W. Thompson’s Southwark Cathedral, 1910, pp. 78, 121. To the same Johnson. family doubtless belonged Bernard Janssen or Johnson, who was brought to England in 1613 from Amsterdam by the distinguished English monumental sculptor Nicholas Stone, and settling in Southwark helped Stone in much important work. Together they executed in 1615 Thomas Sutton’s tomb at the Charterhouse and subsequently Sir Nicholas Bacon’s tomb in Redgrave Church, Suffolk. See A. E. Bullock’s Some Sculptural Works of Nicholas Stone, 1908.

by two Corinthian columns which support a cornice and entablature.¹ Within the arch was set a half-length figure of the poet in relief. The dress consists of Its design. _{a scar}j_et doublet, slashed and loosely buttoned, with white cuffs and a turned-down or falling white collar. A black gown hangs loosely about the doublet from the shoulders. The eyes are of a light hazel and the hair and beard auburn. The hands rest upon a cushion, the right hand holding a pen as in the act of writing and the left hand resting on a scroll. Over the centre of the entablature is a block of stone, on the surface of which the poet’s arms and crest are engraved, and on a ledge above rests a full-sized skull. These features closely resemble the like details in Nicholas Johnson’s tomb of the fifth earl of Rutland in Bottesford Church. The stone block is flanked by two small seated nude figures; the right holds a spade in the right hand, while the other figure places the like hand on a skull lying at its side and from the left hand droops a torch reversed with the flame extinguished. Similar standing figures with identical emblematic objects surmount the outer columns of the Rutland monument, and Nicholas Johnson the designer of that tomb explained in his ‘plot’ (or descriptive plan) that the one figure was a ‘portraiture of Labor,’ and ‘the other of Rest.’² Beneath the arch which

¹ The pillars were of marble, the ornaments were of alabaster, and the rest of the fabric was of stone which has been variously described as a ‘soft bluish grey stone,’ a ‘loose freestone,’ a ‘soft whitish grey limestone’ (Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Environment, pp. 117-8).

² Nicholas Johnson’s ‘ plot ’ of his Rutland monument which is dated 28 May (apparently 1617) is extant among the family archives at Bel- voir and is printed in full by Lady Victoria Manners in Art Journal, ^l9°3, pp. 335-6. Like figures surmount the outer columns of the Sutton monument at the- Charterhouse, and they adorn, as on Shakespeare’s tomb, the cornices of Sir William Pope’s monument in Wroxton Church (1633) and of Robert Kelway’s tomb in Exton Church. These three monuments were designed by the English sculptor Nicholas Stone, whose coadjutor Bernard Janssen or Johnson of Southwark was possibly related to Nicholas and Garret Johnson, and he may have exchanged suggestions with his kinsmen. The earliest sketch of the Shakespeare monument is among Dugdale’s MSS. at Merevale, and is dated 1634. Dugdale’s drawing is engraved in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656,

holds the dramatist’s effigy is a panel which bears this inscription:

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,

Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet.

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast?

Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast Within this monument; Shakspeare with whome Quick nature dide; whose name doth deck ys tombe Far more then cost; sith all yt he hath writt Leaves living art but page to serve his witt.

Ohiit ano. doi r6r6 /Etatis 53 Die 23 Ap.

The authorship of the epitaph is undetermined. It was doubtless by a London friend who belonged to the same circle as William Basse or Leonard Thein- Digges, whose elegies are on record else- ^scription- where. The writer was no superior to them in poetic capacity. The opening Latin distich with its comparison of the dramatist to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil echoes a cultured convention of the day, while the succeeding English stanza embodies a conceit touching art’s supremacy over nature which is characteristic of the spirit of the Renaissance.¹ Whatever their defects of style, the lines presented Shakespeare to his fellow- townsmen as the greatest man of letters of his time. According to the elegist, literature by all other living pens was, at the date of the dramatist’s death, only fit to serve ‘all that he hath writ’ as ‘page’ or menial. In Stratford Church, Shakespeare was acclaimed the master- poet, and all other writers were declared to be his servants.

It differs in many details, owing to inaccurate draughtsmanship, from the present condition of the monument. For discussion of the variations and for the history of the renovations which the monument is known to have undergone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see pp. 523-5 infra. _

¹ The epitaph on the tomb of the painter Raphael in the Pantheon at Rome, hy the cultivated Cardinal Pietro Bembo, adumbrates the words ‘with whom quick nature dide’ in Shakespeare’s epitaph:

Hie ille est Raphael, metuit qui sospite vinci Rerum magna parens, et moriente mori

(i.e. Here lies the famous Raphael, in whose lifetime great mother Nature feared to be outdone, and at whose death feared to die).

2 K

Some misgivings arose in literary circles soon after Shakespeare’s death, as to whether he had received appropriate sepulture. Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest English poet of pre-Elizabethan times, had been accorded a grave in Westminster Abbey in October 1400. It was association with the royal household rather than poetic eminence which accounted for his interment in the national church. But in 1551 the services to poetry of the author of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ were directly acknowledged by the erection of a monument near his grave in the south transept of the Abbey. When the sixteenth century drew to a close, Chaucer’s growing fame as the father of English poetry suggested the propriety of burying within the shadow of his tomb the eminent poets of his race. On January 16, 1598-9, Edmund Spenser, who died in King Street, Westminster, and had apostrophised ‘ Dan Chaucer ’ as ‘ well of English undefiled,’ was buried near Chaucer’s tomb, and the occasion was made a demonstration in honour of shake- his poetic faculty. Spenser’s ‘hearse was speareand attended by poets, and mournful elegies and minster poems with the pens that wrote them were ^Abbey. thrown into his tomb.’¹ Some seven weeks before Shakespeare died, there passed away (on March 6, 1615-6) the dramatist, Francis Beaumont, the partner of John Fletcher. Beaumont was the second Elizabethan poet to be honoured with burial at Chaucer’s side. The news of Shakespeare’s death reached London after the dramatist had been laid to rest amid his own people at Stratford. But men of letters raised a cry of regret that his ashes had not joined those of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont in Westminster Abbey. William Basse, an enthusiastic admirer, gave the sentiment poetic expression in sixteen lines which would seem to have been penned some three or four years after Shakespeare’s interment at Stratford. The dramatist’s monument in the church there was already erected, and the elegist ¹ Camden’s Annals of Elizabeth, 1688 ed. p. 565.

in his peroration accepted the accomplished fact, acknowledging the fitness of giving Shakespeare’s unique genius ‘ unmolested peace ’ beneath its own ‘carved marble,’ apart from fellow poets who had no claim to share his glory.¹ An echo of Basse’s argument was impressively sounded by a more famous elegist. In his splendid greeting of his dead friend prefixed to the First Folio of 1623, Ben Jonson reconciled himself to Shakespeare’s exclusion from the Abbey where lay the remains of Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont, in the great apostrophe:

My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further to make thee a room.

Thou art a monument without a tomb,

And art alive still, while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.

¹ Basse’s elegy runs thus in the earliest extant version:

Renowned Spencer lye a thought more nye

To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lye

A little neerer Spenser, to make roome ,

For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.

To lodge all fowre in one bed make a shift Vntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift Betwixt y^a day and y* by Fate be slayne,

For whom your Curtaines may he drawn againe.

If your precedency in death doth barre A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher,

Vnder this earned marble of thine owne,

Sleepe, rare Tragcedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone;

Thy unmolested peace, vnshared Caue,

Possesse as Lord, not Tenant, of thy Graue,

That vnto us & others it may he Honor hereafter to be layde by thee.

There are many .17th century manuscript versions of Basse’s lines. The earliest, probably dated 1620, is in the British Museum (Lansdowne MSS. 777, f. 67b), and though it is signed William Basse, is in the handwriting of the pastoral poet William Browne, who was one of Basse’s friends. It was first printed in Donne’s Poems, 1633, but was withdrawn in the edition of 1635. Donne doubtless possessed a manuscript copy, which accidentally found its way into manuscripts of his own verses. Basse’s poem reappeared signed ‘W. B.’ among the prefatory verses to Shakespeare’s Poems, 1640, and without author’s name in Witts’ Recreations, edd. 1640 and 1641, and among the additions to Poems by Francis Beaumont, 1652. (See Basse’s Poetical Works, ed. Warwick Bond, pp. it3 seq.; and Century of Praise, pp. 136 seq.)

Apart from Spenser and Beaumont, only two poetic contemporaries, Shakespeare’s friends Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, received the honour, which the dramatist was denied, of interment in the national church. Drayton at the end of 1631 and Ben Jonson on August 16, 1637, were both buried within a few paces of the graves of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont.¹ Although Shakespeare slept in death far away, Basse’s poem is as convincing as any of the extant testimonies, to the national fame which was allotted Shakespeare by his own generation of poets.

High was the place in the ranks of literature which contemporary authors accorded Shakespeare’s genius Personal and its glorious fruit. Yet the impressions character. _which his personal character left on the minds of his associates were those of simplicity, modesty, and straightforwardness. At the opening of Shakespeare’s career Chettle wrote of his ‘civil demeanour’ and of ‘his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.’ In 1601 — when near the zenith of his fame — he was apostrophised as ‘ sweet Master Shakespeare ’ in the play of ‘The Return from Parnassus,’ and that adjective was long after associated with his name. In 1604 Anthony Scoloker, in the poem called ‘Daiphantus,’ bestowed on him the epithet ‘friendly.’ After the close of his career Ben Jonson wrote of him: ‘I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature.’² No more definite judgment 9f Shakespeare’s individuality was recorded by a contemporary. His dramatic work is essentially impersonal, and fails to

¹ See A. P. Stanley’s Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 1869, pp. 295 seq.

² ‘Timber’ in Works, 1641. Jonson seems to embody a reminiscence of Iago’s description of Othello:

The Moor is of a free and open nature,

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.

{Othello, I. iii. 405-6.)

betray the author’s idiosyncrasies. The ‘Sonnets,’ which alone of his literary work have been widely credited with self-portraiture, give a potent illusion of genuine introspection, but they rarely go farther in the way of autobiography than illustrate the poet’s readiness to accept the conventional bonds which attached a poet to a great patron. His literary practices and aims were those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference in the quality of his work and theirs was due to no conscious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius. He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority to his professional comrades. The references in his will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as. they announced in the First Folio) they approach the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, unassuming mien. The later traditions brought together by John Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, depict him as ‘very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit,’ and other early references suggest a genial if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a quiet turn for good-humored satire. But Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no dominant attraction for Shakespeare. His extant work attests the‘copious’ and continuous industry which was a common feature of the contemporary world of letters.¹ With Shakespeare’s literary power and his sociability, too, there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business. Pope had just warrant for the surmise that he

For gain not glory winged his roving flight,

And grew immortal in his own despite.

His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of making a permanent provi

¹ John Webster, the dramatist, wrote in the address before his White Divelin 1612 of ‘the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood.’

sion for himself and his daughters. He was frankly ambitious of restoring among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled. At Stratford in later life he loyally conformed to the social standards which prevailed among his well- to-do neighbours and he was proud of the regard which small landowners and prosperous traders extended to him as to one of their own social rank. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare in poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards life’s ordinary incidents.

Of Shakespeare’s three brothers, two predeceased him at a comparatively early age. Edmund, the youngest brother, ‘a player,’ was buried at St. Saviour’s shake- Church, Southwark, ‘with a forenoone knell of -speare’s the great bell,’ on December 31,1607 ; he was in ^brothers- his twenty-eighth year. Richard, John Shakespeare’s third son, died at Stratford in February 1612-3, aged 39. The dramatist’s next brother Gilbert would seem to have survived him, and he lived according to Oldys to a patriarchal age; at the poet’s death he would have reached his fiftieth year.¹ The dramatist’s only sister Mrs. Joan Hart continued to reside with her family at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Henley Street until her death in November 1646 at the ripe age of seventy- seven. She was by five years her distinguished brother’s junior, and she outlived him by more than thirty years.

Shakespeare’s widow (Anne) died at New Place on August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven.² She survived her husband by some seven and a half _Shake_ years. Her burial next him within the chancel speare’s took place two days after her death. Some ^{WI ow}' Latin elegiacs —• doubtless from the pen of her son-in-

¹ See pp. 460-1 supra.

²The name is entered in the parish register as ‘Mrs. Shakespeare’ and immediately beneath these words is the entry ‘Anna uxor Richardi James.’ The close proximity of the two entries has led to the very fanciful conjecture that they both describe the same person and that Shakespeare’s widow Anne was the wife at her death of Richard James. ‘Mrs! Shakespeare’ is a common form of entry in the Stratford register; the word ‘vidua’ is often omitted from entries respecting widows. The terms of the epitaph on Mrs. Shakespeare’s tomb refute the assumption that she had a second husband.

law — were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the stone above her grave.¹ The verses give poignant expression to filial grief.

Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, long resided with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house Mistress ^{at t}^^ie Bridge Street corner of High Street, Judith which he leased of the Corporation from the Quiney. ₍j_ate
0£ _marri_ag_e i_n 1616 till 1652. There he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took some part in municipal affairs. He acted as a councillor from

1617, and as chamberlain in 1622-3. Iⁿ the local records he.bears the cognomen of ‘gent.’ He was a man of some education and showed an interest in French literature. But from 1630 onwards his affairs were embarrassed, and after a long struggle with poverty he left Stratford late in 1652 for London. His brother -Richard, who was a flourishing grocer in Bucklersbury, died in 1656, and left him an annuity of 121. Thomas would not seem to have long survived the welcome bequest. By his wife Judith he had three sons, but all died in youth before he abandoned Stratford. The eldest, Shakespeare, was baptised at Stratford Church on November 23, 1616, and was buried an infant in the churchyard on May 8, 1617; the second son, Richard (baptised on February 9, 1617-18), died shortly after his twenty-first birthday, being buried on February 26, 1638-9; and the third son, Thomas (baptised on January 23, 1619-20), was just turned nineteen when he was buried on January 28, 1638-9. Judith outlived her husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on February 9, 1661-2, in her seventy-seventh year. Unlike

¹ The words run: ‘Heere lyeth interred the bodye of Anne, wife of Mr. William Shakespeare, who depted. this life the 6th day of August, 1623, being of the age of 67 yeares.

Vbera, tu, mater, tu lac vitamq. dedisti,

Vae mihi; pro tanto munere saxa dabo.

Quam mallem, amoueat Iapidem bonus Angel[us] ore,

Exeat ut Christi Corpus, imago tua.

Sed nil vota valent; venias cito, Christe; resurget,

Clausa licet tumulo, mater, et astra petet.

other members of her family, she was not accorded burial in the chancel of the church. Her grave lay in the churchyard, and no inscription marked its site.

The poet’s elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, resided till her death at New Place, her father’s residence, which she inherited under his will. Her only child Mr. John Elizabeth married on April 22, 1626, Thomas, ^HaI1- eldest son and heir of Anthony Nash of Welcombe, the poet’s well-to-do friend. Thomas, who was baptised at Stratford on June 20, 1593, studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, but soon succeeded to his father’s estate at Stratford and occupied himself with its management. After her marriage Mrs. Nash settled in a house which adjoined New Place and was her husband’s freehold. Meanwhile the medical practice of her father John Hall still prospered and he travelled widely on professional errands. The Earl and Countess of Northampton, who lived as far off as Ludlow Castle, were among his patients.¹ Occasionally he visited London, where he owned a house. But Stratford was always his home. In municipal affairs he played a somewhat troubled part. He was thrice elected a member of the town council, but, owing in part to his professional engagements, his attendance was irregular. In October 1633, a year after his third election, he was fined for continued absence, and he was ultimately expelled for ‘breach of orders, sundry other misdemeanours and for his continual disturbances ’ at the meetings. With the government of the church he was more closely and more peaceably associated. He was successively borough churchwarden, sidesman, and vicar’s warden, and he presented a new hexagonal and well-carved pulpit which did duty until 1792. Hall’s closest friends were among the Puritan

¹ Drayton was not his only literary patient. (See p. 466 supra) His case-book records a visit to Southam, some ten miles north of Stratford, where he attended Thomas ‘the only son of Mr. [Francis] Holy- oake, who framed the Dictionary’ (i.e. Dictionarie Etymologicall, 1617, enlarged and revised as Dictionarium Etymologicum Latinum, 3 pts. 4to. 1633). Francis Holyoake was rector of Southam from 1604 to 1652.

clergy, but he reconciled his Puritan sentiment with a kindly regard for Roman Catholic patients. He died at New Place on November 25, 1635, when he was described in the register as ‘ medicus peritissimus.’ He was buried next day in the chancel near the graves of his wife’s parents.¹ By a nuncupative will, which was dated the day of his death, he left his wife a house in London, and his only child Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Nash, a house at Acton and ‘my meadow.’ His ‘goods and money’ were to be equally divided between wife and daughter. His ‘study of books’ was given to his son-in-law Nash, ‘to dispose of them as you see good,’ and his manuscripts were left to the same legatee for him to burn them or ‘do with them what you please.’ ‘A study of books’ implied in the terminology of the day a library of some size. There is no clue to the details of Hall’s literary property apart from his case-books, with which his widow subsequently parted. Whether his ‘study of books’ included Shakespeare’s library is a question which there is no means of answering.

Mrs. Hall, who survived her husband some fourteen years, was designated in his epitaph ‘fidissima conjux’ _Mrs and ‘vitae comes.’ As wife and mother her Si wins. character was above reproach, and she renewed an apparently interrupted intimacy with her mother’s family, the Hathaways, which her daughter cherished until death. With two brothers, Thomas and William Hathaway (her first cousins), and with the former’s young daughters, she and her daughter were long in close relations. Through her fourteen years’

¹ The inscription on his tombstone ran: Here lyeth y' Body of John Halle gent. He marr. Susanna daugh. (co-heire) of Will. Shakespare gent. Hee deceased Nove. 25. A: 1635. Aged 60.

Hallius hie situs est, medica celeberrimus arte:

Expectans regni gaudia laeta Dei;

Dignus erat meritis qui Nestora vinceret annis,

In terris omnes sed rapit aequa dies.

Ne tumulo quid desit, adest fidissima conjux,

Et vitae comitem nunc qnoq; mortis habet.

widowhood, Mrs. Hall’s only child, Elizabeth, resided with her under her roof, and until his death her son-in- law, Thomas Nash, also shared her hospitality. Thomas Nash, indeed, took control of the household, and caused his mother-in-law trouble by. treating her property as his own. On the death in 1639 of Mrs. Hall’s nephew Richard Quiney, the last surviving child of her sister Judith, her son-in-law induced her to covenant with his wife and himself for a variation of the entail of the property which the poet had left Mrs. Hall. Save the share in the tithes, which she and Hall had sold to the corporation in 1625, all Shakespeare’s realty remained in her hands intact.¹ On May 27, 1639, Mrs. Hall signed, in a regular well-formed handwriting with her seal appended,² the fresh settlement, the terms of which, while they acknowledged the rights of her daughter Elizabeth as heir general, provided that after her death in the event of the young woman predeceasing her husband without child, the poet’s property should pass to the ‘heires and assignes of the said Thomas Nash.’ The poet’s sister, Joan Hart, who was still living at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Henley Street, was thus, with her children, hypothetically disinherited. But public affairs also helped to disturb Mrs. Hall’s equanimity. The tumult of the Civil Wars invaded Stratford. On July 10, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria left Newark with an army of 2000 foot, 1000 horse, some 100 wagons, and a train of artillery. The Queen and her escort reached Stratford on the nth, and Mrs. Hall was compelled to entertain her for three days at New Place. On the 12th of the month, Prince Rupert arrived with another army of

¹ While her husband lived, Mrs. Hall and he regularly paid dues or. fines in their joint names to the manor of Rowington in respect of the cottage and land in Chapel Lane, which the poet hought in 1602. _ After her hushand’s death Mrs. Hall made the necessary payments in her sole name until her death. See Dr. Wallace’s extracts from the manorial records in The Times, May 8, 1915.

‘ ² The seal hears her hushand’s arms, three talhot’s heads erased, with Shakespeare’s arms impaled. The document is exhibited in Shakespeare’s Birthplace (Cat. 121).

2000 men, and next day he conducted the Queen to Kineton, near the site of the battle of Edgehill of the previous year. At Kineton the Queen met the King, and a day later the two made their triumphal entry into Oxford. Stratford soon afterwards passed into the control of the army of the Parliament, and Parliamentary soldiers took the place of Royalists as Mrs. Hall’s compulsory guests. In 1644, when Parliamentary troops occupied the town, James Cooke, a doctor of Warwick who was in attendance on them, enjoyed an interesting interview with Mrs. Hall. A friend of Mrs. Hall’s late John Hall’s husband brought him to her house in order note-books. t₀ see Hall’s books, which Nash had inherited. The first volumes which Cooke examined were stated by Mrs. Hall to belong to her husband’s library. Subsequently she produced some manuscripts, which she said that her husband had purchased of ‘one that professed physic.’ Cooke, who knew her husband’s apothecary and had thus seen his handwriting, recognised in Mrs. Hall’s second collection memoranda in Hall’s autograph. Mrs. Hall disputed the identification with an unexplained warmth. Ultimately Cooke bought of her some note-books which Hall had clearly prepared for publication. The contents were merely a selected record in Latin of several hundred (out of a total of some thousand) cases which he had attended. Cooke subsequently translated, edited, and issued Hall’s Latin notes, with a preface describing his interview with Shakespeare’s daughter.¹

Mrs. Hall’s son-in-law, Thomas Nash, died on April 4,

¹ The full title of Hall’s work which Cooke edited was: ¹ Select Observations on English Bodies, or Cures both Empericall and Historical performed upon very eminent persons in desperate Diseases. First written in Latine by Mr. John Hall, physician living at Stratford-upon- Avon, in Warwickshire, where he was very famous, as also in the counties adjacent, as appears by these observations drawn out of severall hundreds of his, as choysest; Now put into English for common benefit by James Cooke Practitioner in Physick and Chirurgery: London, printed for John Sherley, at the Golden Pelican in Little Britain, 1657.’ Other editions appeared in 1679 and 1683.

1647, and was buried next Shakespeare in the chancel of Stratford Church on the south side of the grave _The ^ _of opposite to that on which lay the dramatist’s Mrs. Hall’s wife. Nash’s will, which was dated nearly five Thomas'™’ years before (August 20, 1642) and had a ^Nash- codicil of more recent execution, involved Mrs. Hall and her daughter in a new perplexity. Nash, who was owner of the house adjoining New Place and of much other real estate in the town, made generous provision for his wife, and by the codicil he left sums of 501, apiece to his mother-in-law, and to Thomas Hathaway and to Hathaway’s daughter Elizabeth, with id. to Judith another of Hathaway’s daughters (all relatives of the dramatist’s wife). The modest sum of forty shillings was evenly divided between his sister-in-law, Judith Quiney, and her husband Thomas Quiney 'to buy them rings.’ But, in spite of these proofs of family affection, Nash at the same time was guilty of the presumption of disposing in his will of Mrs. Hall’s real property which she had inherited from her father and to which he had no title. His only association with Mrs. Hall’s heritage was through his wife who had a reversionary interest in it. With misconceived generosity he left to his first cousin, Edward Nash, New Place, the meadows and pastures which the dramatist had bought of the Combes, and the house in Blackfriars.¹ Complicated legal formalities were required to defeat Nash’s unwarranted claim. Mother and daughter resettled all their property on themselves, and they made their kinsmen Thomas and William Hathaway trustees of the new settlement (June 2, 1647). Both ladies’, signatures are clear and bold.² Legal business consequently occupied much of the attention of Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Nash during the last two years of Mrs. Hall’s life. At length Edward Nash,

¹ Thomas Nash’s long will is printed in extenso in HaJliwell’s New Place, pp. 117-24, together with title consequential resettlements of his mother-in-law’s estate.

’The document is exhibited in Shakespeare’s Birthplace (Cat. 122).

Thomas Nash’s heir, withdrew his pretensions to the disputed estate in consideration of a right of pre-emption on Mrs. Nash’s death. The young widow took refuge from her difficulties in a second marriage. On June 5, 1649, she became the wife of a Northamptonshire squire, John Bernard or Barnard, of Abington, near Northampton. The wedding took place at the village of Billesley, four miles from Stratford.

Within a little more than a month of her marriage (on July 11, 1649) Mrs. Bernard’s mother died. Mrs. Hall’s _Mrs body was committed to rest near her parents, Hall’s her husband, and her son-in-law in the chancel ■ of Stratford Church. A rhyming stanza,

describing her as ‘witty above her sexe,’ was engraved on her tombstone. The whole inscription ran:

‘Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, Gent, ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent. She deceased ye nth of Jvly, a.d. 1649, ^aged 66.

‘Witty above her sexe, but that’s not all,

Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall;

Something of Shakespere was in that, but this Wholy of Him with whom she’s now in blisse.

Then, passenger, ha’st ne’re a teare,

To weepe with her that wept with all ?

That wept, yet set herselfe to chere Them up with comforts cordiall.

Her Love shall live, her mercy spread,

When thou hast ne’re a tear to shed.’¹

Mrs. Hall’s death left her daughter, the last surviving descendant of the poet, mistress of New Place, of Shakespeare’s lands near Stratford, and of the Henley Street property, as well as of the dramatist’s house in Blackfriars.

The first husband of Mrs. Hall’s only child Elizabeth,

¹ One Francis Watts, of Rine Clifford, was buried beside Mrs. Hall in 1691, and his son Richard was apparently committed to her grave in ^I7°7- The elegy on Mrs. Hall’s tomb which is preserved by Dugdale was erased in 1707 in order to make way for an epitaph on Richard Watts. The original inscription on Mrs. Hall’s grave was restored, in 1844 (see Samuel Neil’s Home of Shakespeare, 1871, p. 49).

Thomas Nash of Stratford, had died, as we have seen, childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, and on _{The last} June 5, 1649, she had married, as her second descend- husband, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard, ^ant' ' of Abington Manor, near Northampton. Bernard or Barnard was of a good family, which had held Abington for more than two hundred years. By his first wife, who died in 1642, Bernard had a family of eight children, four sons and four daughters; but only three daughters reached maturity or at any rate left issue.¹ Shakespeare’s granddaughter was forty-one years old at the time of her second marriage and her new husband some three years her senior. They had no issue. Until near the Restoration they seem to have resided at New Place. They then removed to Abington Manor, and Mrs. Bernard’s personal association with Stratford came to an end. On November 25, 1661, Charles II created her husband a baronet, though it was usual locally to describe him as a knight. Lady Bernard died at Abington in the middle of February 1669-70, and was buried in a vault under the south aisle of the church on February 16, 1669-70. Her death extinguished the poet’s family in the direct line. Sir John Bernard survived her some four years, dying intestate at Northampton on March 3, 1673-4, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. A Latin inscription on a stone slab in the south aisle of Abington Church still attests his good descent.²

¹ These daughters were Elizabeth, wife of Heniy Gilbert, of Locko, in Derbyshire; Mary, wife of Thomas Higgs, of Colesbourne, Gloucestershire; and Eleanor, wife of Samuel Cotton, of Henwick, in the county of Bedford (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 625).

² No inscription marked Lady Bernard’s grave; but the following words have recently been cut on the stone commemorating her husband: ‘Also to Elizabeth, second wife of Sir John Bernard, Knight (Shakespeare’s granddaughter and last of the direct descendants of the poet), who departed this life on the r7th February MDCLXIX. Aged 64 years. Mors est janua vitae.’ Bernard’s estate was administered by his two married daughters, Mary Higgs and Eleanor Cotton, and his son-in-law Henry Gilbert (cf. Baker’s Northamptonshire, vol. i. p. 10). The post-mortem inventory of his ‘goods and chattels,’ dated October 14., 1674, is printed from the original at Somerset House in New Shak. Soc.

By her will, dated January 1669-70, and proved in the following March,¹ Lady Bernard gave many proofs _Lady of her affection for the kindred of both her Bernard’s grandfather the dramatist and of his wife, her ^waL maternal grandmother. She left 401, apiece to Rose, Elizabeth and Susanna Hathaway, and 50I. apiece to Judith Hathaway and to her sister Joan, wife of Edward Kent. All five ladies were daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of the poet’s wife. To Edward Kent, a son of Joan, 30/.was apportioned ‘towards putting him out as an apprentice.’ The two houses in Henley Street, one of which was her grandfather’s Birthplace, the testatrix bestowed on her cousin, Thomas Hart, grandson of the poet’s sister Joan.² Mrs. Joan Hart, Shakespeare’s widowed sister, had lived there with her family till her death in 1646, and Thomas Hart, her son, had since continued the tenancy by Lady Bernard’s favour.

By a new settlement (April 18, 1653), Lady Bernard had appointed Henry Smith, of Stratford, gent., and The final Job Dighton, of the Middle Temple, London, of'shake ^escl^ui^re, trustees of the rest of the estate which

speare’s

she inherited through her mother from estate. ‘William Shackspeare gent, my grandfather,’³ but Smith alone survived her, and by her will, and in agreement with the terms of the recent settlement, Lady Bernard directed him to sell New Place and her grandfather’s land at Stratford six months after her hus-

Trans. 1881-6, pp. 13! seq. The whole is valued at 948^ 10.9. ‘All the Bookes in the studdy’ are valued at 29I. 11.9. ‘A Rent at Stratford vpon Avon’ is described as worth 4I., and ‘old goods and Lumber at Stratford vpon Avon’ at the same sum. Bernard’s house and grounds at Abington were lately acquired by the Northampton Corporation and are now converted into a public museum and park.

¹ See HaUiwell-Phillipps’s Outlines, ii. 62-3.

² See p. 316 supra.

³ This deed is exhibited at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Cat. 124. Lady Bernard’s trustee Job Dighton became in 1642 guardian of Henry Rains- ford of Clifford Chambers, son and heir of the second Sir Henry, and before 1649 he acquired all the Rainsford estate about Stratford. He died in 1659. (Bristol and Gloucester Archceolog. Soc. Journal, i. 88990, xiv. 70 seq.)

band’s death. The first option of purchase was allowed Edward Nash, her first husband’s cousin, and a second option was offered her ‘loving kinsman, Edward Bagley, citizen of London,’ whom she made her executor and residuary legatee.¹ Shakespeare’s house in Blackfriars was burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the site now appears to have passed to Bagley. Neither he nor Edward Nash exercised their option in regard to Lady Bernard’s Stratford property, and both New Place and the land adjoining Stratford which Shakespeare had purchased of the Combes were sold on May 18, 1675, to Sir Edward Walker, Garter King-of-Arms. His only child, Barbara, was wife of Sir John Clopton, of Clopton House, near Stratford, a descendant of the first builder of New Place. Sir Edward sought a residence near his daughter and her family. He died at New Place on February 19, 1676-7, and he left the Shakespearean house and estate to his eldest grandchild, Edward Clopton, who inhabited New Place until May 1699. In that month Edward Clopton surrendered the house to Sir John his father.² In 1702 Sir John pulled down the original building, and rebuilt it on a larger scale, settling the new house on his second son, Hugh Clopton (b. 1672). Hugh was prominent in the affairs of the town. He became steward of the Court of Record in 1699 and was knighted in 1732. He died at New Place on December 28, 1751.³ In 1753 Sir Hugh’s son-in-law and executor, Henry Talbot, sold the residence and the garden to a stranger, Francis Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, Cheshire, who was seeking a summer residence. Gastrell’s occupation of New Place had a tragic sequel. A surly temper made him a

_¹ No clue has been found to Lady Bernard’s precise lineal tie either with her ‘kinsman’ Bagley, or with another of her legatees, Thomas Welles of' Carleton, Bedfordshire, whom she describes as her ‘cousin.’

² Edward Clopton removed next door, to Nash’s house, which he occupied till 1705. To the garden of Nash’s house he added the great garden of New Place. Hugh Clopton, the occupant and owner of New Place, did not recover possession of Shakespeare’s great garden till 1728. _ ^s He had some literary proclivities, and published in 170s a new edition of Sir’Edward Walker’s Historical Discourses.

difficult neighbour. He was soon involved in serious disputes with the town council on a question of assessment. By way of retaliation in the autumn of 1758 he cut down the celebrated mulberry tree, which was planted near the house.¹ But the quarrel was not Kdoifor^- abated, and in 1759 in a fresh fit of temper New Place, Gastrell razed New Place to the ground. After ^I7S9‘ disposing of the materials, he ‘left Stratford, amidst the rages and curses of the inhabitants.’² The site of New Place has thenceforth remained vacant.

In March 1762, Gastrell, who thenceforth lived at Lichfield in a house belonging to his wife, leased the The public desolate site of New Place with the garden to purchase William Hunt, a resident of Stratford. The Place* iconoclastic owner died at Lichfield in 1768, estate. leaving his Stratford property to his widow, Jane, who sold it to Hunt in 1775- The subsequent succession of private owners presents no points of interest. The vacant site, with the ‘great garden’ attached, was soon annexed to the garden of the adjoining (Nash’s) house. In 1862 the whole of the property, including Nash’s house and garden, was purchased by a public subscription, which was initiated by James Orchard Halhwell-PhiUipps, the biographer of Shakespeare. New Place gardenwas converted into a public garden and a small portion of Nash’s house was employed as a Museum.

¹ See p. 288 n. 2 supra.

² Cf. Halliwell’s New Place; R. B. Wheler’s Stratford-on-Avon. A contemporary account of Gastrell’s vandalism by a visitor to Stratford in 1760 runs thus: ‘There stood here till lately the house in which Shakespeare lived, and a mulberry tree of his planting; the house was large,, strong, and handsome. As the curiosity of this house and tree brought much fame, and more company and profit, to the town, a certain man, on some disgust, has pulled the house down, so as not to leave one stone upon another, and cut down the tree, and piled it as a stack of firewood, to the great vexation, loss and disappointment of the inhabitants’ (Letter from a lady to her friend in Kent in The London Magazine, July 1760). According to Boswell (Life of Johnson) Gastrell’s wife ‘participated in his guilt.’ She was sister of Gilbert Walmisley of Lichfield, a man of cultivation who showed much interest in Johnson and Garrick in their youth, and whose memory they always revered. ,

In 1891 the New Place estate was conveyed by Act of Parliament to the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trustees. In 1912 the trustees renovated Nash’s house, which in the course of two centuries of private ownership had undergone much structural change and disfigurement. Surviving features of the sixteenth century were freed of modern accretions and the fabric was restored in all essentials to its Elizabethan condition. The whole of Nash’s house was thenceforth applied to public uses.

AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS

The only extant specimens of Shakespeare’s handwriting that are of undisputed authenticity consist of the six The relics autograph signatures which are reproduced in of shake- this volume. To one of these signatures there hand^r-^es are attached the words ‘By me.’ But no writing. other relic of Shakespeare’s handwriting outside his signatures — no letter nor any scrap of his literary work — is known to be in existence. The ruin which has overtaken Shakespeare’s writings is no peculiar experience. Very exiguous is the fragment of Elizabethan or Jacobean literature which survives in the authors’ autographs. Barely forty plays, and many of those of post-Shakespearean date, remain accessible in contemporary copies; and all but five or six of these are in scriveners’ handwriting. Dramatic manuscripts, which were the property of playhouse managers, habitually suffered the fate of waste-paper.¹ Non-dramatic literature of the time ran hardly smaller risks, and autograph relics of Elizabethan or Jacobean poetry and prose are little more abundant than those of plays. Ben Jonson is the only literary contemporary of Shakespeare, of whose handwriting the surviving specimens exceed a few scraps. Of the voluminous fruits of Edmund Spenser’s pen, nothing remains in his handwriting save one holograph business note, and eight autograph signatures appended to business documents — all of which are in the Public Record

¹ See pp. 547, 558 infra. Of the 3000 separate plays, which it is estimated were produced on the stage between 1586 and 1642, scarcely more than one in six is even preserved in print. The residue, which far excecds 2000 pieces, has practically vanished.

5*6

Office. The MSS. of the ‘Faerie Queene’ and of Spenser’s other poems have perished. Shakespeare’s script enjoyed a better fate than that of Christopher Marlowe, his tutor in tragedy, of John Webster, his chief disciple in the tragic art, and of many another Elizabethan or Jacobean author or dramatist no scrap of whose writing, not even a signature, has been traced.¹

The six extant signatures of Shakespeare all belong to his latest years, and no less than three of them were attached to his will, which was executed within _Thesix a few days of his death. The earliest extant signatures, autograph (Willm Shak’p’) is that affixed to ^i6i2_6- his deposition in the suit brought by Stephen Bellott against his father-in-law, Christopher, Montjoy, in the

Court of Requests. The document, which bears the date May 11, 1612, is in the Public Record Office and is on exhibition in the museum there.²

¹ It is curious to note that Moliere, the great French dramatist, whose career (1623-1673) is a little nearer to our own time than Shakespeare’s, left behind him as scanty a store of autograph memorials. The only extant specimens of Moliere’s handwriting (apart from mere autographs) consist of two brief formal receipts for sums of money paid him on account of professional services dated respectively in 1650 and 1656. Both were discovered comparatively recently (in 1873 ^an(i *885 respectively) in the departmental archives of the H6rault by the archivist there, M. de la Pijardiere. Several detached signatures of the French playwright appended to legal documents are also preserved. One of these is exhibited in the British Museum. No scrap of Moliere’s literary work in his own writing survives. (See H. M. Trollope’s Life of Moliere, 1905, pp. 105-117.)

^sSee p. 277 n. supra. The signature to the deposition of May 11, 1612, has symbols of abbreviation in the surname, in place both of the middle ‘s’ or ‘es’ and of the final letters ‘ere’ or ‘eare.’ It was common for the syllable ‘-per’ or ‘-pere’ to be represented in contemporary signatures by a stroke or loop about the lower stem of the ‘p.’ Many surviving autographs of the surnames ‘Draper,’ ‘Roper,’ ‘Cowper,’ present the identical curtailment.

The second extant autograph is affixed to the purchase- deed (on parchment), dated March 10, 1612-3, °f the house in Blackfriars, which the poet then acquired. Since 1841 the document has been in the Guildhall Library, London.

The third extant autograph is affixed to a mortgage- deed (on parchment), dated March 11, 1612-3, relating to the house in Blackfriars, purchased by the poet the day before. Since 1858 the document has been in the British Museum (Egerton MS. 1787).

The poet’s will was finally executed in March 1615-6. The day of the month is uncertain; the original draft gave the date as January .25, but the word January was deleted, and the word March interlineated before the will was executed. Shakespeare’s will is now at Somerset House, London. It consists of three sheets of paper, at the foot of each of which Shakespeare signed his name; on the last sheet the words ‘By me’ in the poet’s handwriting precede the signature.¹

Other signatures attributed to Shakespeare are either of questionable authenticity or demonstrable forgeries. Doubtful Fabrications appear on the preliminary pages signatures. ₀f _many sixteenth or early seventeenth century books. Almost all are the work of William Henry Ireland, the forger of the late eighteenth century.² In

¹ Shakespeare’s will is kept in a locked oaken box in the ‘strong room’ of the Principal Probate Registry [at Somerset House]. ‘Each of the three sheets of which the will consists has been placed in a separate locked oaken frame between two sheets of glass. The paper, which had suffered from handling, has been mended with pelure d’oignon, or some such transparent material, and fixed to the glass. The work appears to have been carried out above fifty or sixty years ago. The sheets do not appear to have been damaged by dampness or dust since they were framed and mended, though the process of mending has darkened the front of the sheet in places. Every care is now taken of the will. Visitors are only allowed to inspect it in the “strong room.” A sloping desk has been fixed near the recess occupied by the box which holds the three frames, and the frames are exhibited to visitors on the desk. The frames are never unlocked. Permission is given to photograph the will under special precautions.’ (See Royal Commission on Public Records, Second Report, 1914, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 137.)

² See p. 647 infra.

the case of only two autograph book-inscriptions has the genuineness been seriously defended and in neither instance is the authenticity established. The genuineness of the autograph signature (‘W^m Sh^e') in the Aldine edition of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, remains an open question.¹ Much has been urged, too, in behalf of the signature in a copy of the 1603 edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays now at the British Museum. The alleged autograph, which runs ‘Willin Shakspere,’ is known to have been in the volume when it was in the possession of the Rev. Edward Patteson, of Smethwick, Staffordshire, in 1780. Sir Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts, purchased the book for the British Museum of Patteson’s son for 140/. in 1837. In a paper in ‘Archaeologia’ (published as a pamphlet in 1838), Madden vouched for the authenticity, but, in spite of his authority, later scrutiny inclines to the theory of fabrication.

In all the authentic signatures Shakespeare used the old ¹ English ’ mode of writing, which resembles that still in vogue in Germany. During the seventeenth His mode' century the old ‘ English ’ character was finally ^of writing, displaced in England by the ‘Italian’ character, which is now universal in England and in all English-speaking countries. In Shakespeare’s day highly educated men, who were graduates of the Universities and had travelled abroad in youth, were capable of writing both the old ‘English’ and the ‘Italian’ character with equal facility. As a rule they employed the ‘English’ character in their ordinary correspondence, but signed their names in the ‘ Italian ’ hand. Shakespeare’s exclusive use of the ‘English’ script was doubtless a result of his provincial education. He learnt only the ‘English’ character at school at Stratford-on-Avon, and he never troubled to exchange it for the more fashionable ‘Italian’ character in later life.

Men did not always spell their surnames in the same

• See pp. 20-1 supra.

way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The s effing of P^oet’^s surname has been proved capable of the poet’s as many as four thousand variations.¹ The ^name- name of the poet’s father is entered sixty-six times in the Council books of Stratford-on-Avon, and is spelt in sixteen ways. There the commonest form is ‘Shaxpeare.’ The poet cannot be proved to have acknowledged any finality as to the spelling of his surname. It is certain that he wrote it indifferently Shakspere, Shakespere, Shakespear or Shakspeare. In these circumstances it is impossible to credit any one form of spelling with a supreme claim to correctness.

Shakespeare’s surname in his abbreviated signature to the deposition of 1612 (Willm Shak’p’) may betrans- _The literated either as ‘Shaksper’ or ‘Shakspere.’ autograph The surname is given as ‘ Shakespeare ’ wherever spellings. introduced into the other records of the

litigation. The signature to the purchase-deed of March 10, 1612-3, should be read as ‘William Shakspere.’ A flourish above the first ‘ e ’ is a cursive mark of abbreviation which was well known to professional scribes, and did duty here for an unwritten final ‘e.’ The signature to the mortgage-deed of the following day, March 11, 1612-3, has been interpreted both as ‘Shakspere’ and ‘Shakspeare.’ The letters following the ‘pe’ are again indicated by a cursive flourish above the ‘e.’ The flourish has also been read less satisfactorily as ‘a’ or even as a rough and ready indication that the writer was hindered from adding the final ‘ re ’ by the narrowness of the strip of parchment to which he was seeking to restrict his handwriting. In the body of both deeds the form ‘ Shakespeare ’ is everywhere adopted.

The ink of the first signature which Shakespeare appended to his will has now faded almost beyond recognition, but that it was ‘Shakspere’ may be inferred from the facsimile made by George Steevens in 1776.

'Wise, Autograph of William Shakespeare . . . together with 4000 ways of spelling the name. Philadelphia, 1869.

The second and third signatures to the will, which are easier to decipher, have been variously _Auto read as ‘Shakspere,’ ‘Shakspeare,’ and ‘Shake- graph?in speare’; but a close examination suggests that, ^thew!U- whatever the second signature may be, the third, which is preceded by the two words ‘Byrne’ (also in the poet’s handwriting), is ‘Shakspeare.’ In the text of the instrument the name appears as ‘Shackspeare.’ ‘ Shakspere ’ is the spelling of the alleged autograph in the British Museum copy of Florio’s ‘Montaigne,’ which is of disputable authenticity.

, It is to be borne in mind that ‘ Shakespeare ’ was the form of the poet’s surname that was adopted in the text of most of the legal documents relating to the , poet’s property, including the royal license lpeare^rthe granted to him in the capacity of a player in f“^^pted 1603. That form is to be seen in the inscrip- °^rn!' tions on the graves of his wife, of his daughter Susanna, and of her husband, although in the rudely cut inscription on his own monument his name appears as ‘Shakspeare.’ ‘Shakespeare’ figures in the poet’s printed signatures affixed by his authority to the dedicatory epistles in the original editions of his two narrative poems ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593) and ‘Lucrece’ (1594); it is seen on the title-pages of the Sonnets and of twenty-two out of twenty-four contemporary quarto editions of the plays,¹ and it alone appears in the sixteen mentions of the surname in the preliminary pages of the First Folio of 1623. The form ‘ Shakespeare’ was employed in almost all the published references to the dramatist in the seventeenth century. Consequently, of the form ‘Shakespeare’ it can be definitely said that it has the predominant sanction of legal and literary usage.

, Aubrey reported that-Shakespeare was ‘a handsome

¹ The two exceptions are Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), where the surname is given as ‘Shakespere’ and King Lear (1608, rst edition), where the surname appears as ‘Shakspeare.’

well-shap’t man,’ but no portrait exists which can be shake- sdd with absolute certainty to have been speare’s executed during his lifetime. Only two por- portraits. f-_rajt_s
are positively known to have been produced within a short period of his death. These are the bust of the half-length effigy in Stratford Church and the frontispiece to the folio of 1623. Each was an attempt at a posthumous likeness by an artist of no marked skill.

The bust was executed the earlier of the two. It was carved before 1623, by Garret Johnson the younger and _The his brother Nicholas, the tombmakers, of Stratford Southwark. The sculptors may have had monument. _some p_ersonai knowledge of the dramatist; but they were mainly dependent on the suggestions of friends. The Stratford bust is a clumsy piece of work. The bald domed forehead, the broad and long face, the plump and rounded chin, the long upper lip, the full cheeks, the massed hair about the ears, combine to give the burly countenance a mechanical and unintellectual expression.

The Warwickshire antiquary, Sir William Dugdale, visited Stratford on July 4, 1634, and then made the Dugdaie’s earliest surviving sketch of the monument, sketch. Dugdaie’s drawing figures in autograph notes of his antiquarian travel which are still preserved at Merevale. It was engraved in the ‘Antiquities of Warwickshire’ (1656), and was reproduced without alteration in the second edition of that great work in 1730. Owing to Dugdaie’s unsatisfactory method of delineation both effigy and tomb in his sketch differ materially from their present aspect.¹ He depended so completely on his

¹ The countenance is emaciated instead of plump, and, while the forehead is bald, the face is bearded with drooping moustache. The arms are awkwardly bent outwards at the elbows, and the hands lie lightly with palms downwards on a large cushion or well-stuffed sack. Dugdaie’s presentation of the architectural features of the monument apart from the portrait-figure also varies from the existing form. In Dugdaie’s sketch the two little nude figures sit poised on the extreme edge of the cornice, one at each end, instead of attaching themselves without any intervening space to the heraldically engraved block of

memory that little reliance can be placed on the fidelity of his draughtsmanship in any part of his work. The drawing of the Carew monument in Stratford Church in Ms ‘Antiquities of Warwickshire’ varies quite as widely from the existing structure as in the case of Shakespeare’s tomb.¹ The figures, especially, in all his presentations of sculptured monuments are sketchily vague and fanciful. Dugdale’s engraving was, however, literally reproduced in Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, 1709, and in Grignion’s illustration in Bell’s edition of Shakespeare, 1786. ,

Later eighteenth-century engravers were more accurate delineators, but they were not wholly proof against the temptation to improve on their models. _Vertue’s In 1725 George Vertue, whose artistic skill was engraving, greater than that of preceding engravers, ^I?2S' prepared for Pope’s edition of Shakespeare a plate of the monument which accurately gives most of its present architectural features,² but, while the posture and dress

stone above the comice; the figure on the right'holds in its left hand an hourglass instead of an inverted torch, while the right hand is free. The contemporary replicas of the little figures on Nicholas Johnson’s Rutland tomb at Bottesford here convict Dugdale of error beyond redemption. (See p. 496 supra.) The Corinthian columns which support the entablature are each fancifully surmounted in Dugdale’s sketch by a leopard’s face, of which the present monument shows no trace. (See Mrs. Stopes’s The True Story of the Spratford Bust, 1904, reprinted with much additional information in her Shakespeare's Environment (rgi4), T04-T23, 346-353.) Mrs. Stopes has printed many useful extracts from the eighteenth and nineteenth century correspondence about the bust among the Birthplace archives, but there is very little force in her argument to the effect that Dugdale’s sketch faithfully represents the original form of the monument, which was subsequently refashioned out of all knowledge. (See Mr. Lionel Cust and M. H. Spielmann in Trans. Bibliog. Soc. vol. ix. pp. 117-9.)

¹ The original sketch of the Carew monument does not appear in Dugdale’s note-books at Merevale. The engraving in the Antiquities was doubtless drawn by another hand which was no more accurate than Dugdale’s (see Andrew Lang, Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, 1912, pp. T79 seq.);

* Apart from the effigy the variations chiefly concern the hands of the nude figures on the entablature. Each holds in one hand an upright lighted torch. The other hand rests in one case on an hourglass, and in the other case is free, although a skull lies near by.

of the effigy are correct, Vertue’s head and face differ alike from Dugdale’s sketch of Shakespeare and from the existing statue. Vertue would seem to have irresponsibly adapted the head and face from the Chandos portrait. Gravelot’s engraving in Hanmer’s edition 1744 follows Vertue’s main design, but here again the face is fancifully conceived and presents features which are not found elsewhere.

In 1746 Shakespeare’s monument was stated for the first time (as far as is precisely known) to be much _The decayed. John Ward, Mrs. Siddons’s grand- repairs father, gave in the town-hall at Stratford-on- of 1748. Avon, on September 8, 1746, a performance of ‘Othello,’ the proceeds of which were handed to the churchwardens as a contribution to the costs of repair. After some delay, John Hall, a limner of Stratford, was commissioned, in November 1748, to ‘beautify’ as well as to ‘repair’ the monument. Some further change followed later. In 1793 Malone persuaded James Davenport, a long-live^ vicar of Stratford, to have the monument painted white, and thereby prompted the ironical epigram:

Stranger, to whom this monument is shewn,

Invoke the poet’s curse upon Malone; ,

Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,

And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.¹

In 1814 George Bullock, who owned a museum of curiosities in London, took a full-sized cast of the effigy, and disposed of a few copies, two of which are now in Shake-

¹ Gent. Magazine, 1815, pt. i. p. 390. In the Stratford Church Album (now in the Birthplace) the painter Haydon defended Malone’s treatment of the monument, but wrote with equal disparagement of his critical work:

Ye who visit the shrine Of the poet divine With patient Malone don’t be vext!

On his face he’s thrown light By painting it white Which you know he ne’er did on his text!

July 18, 1828. R. B. H.

speare’s Birthplace. Bullock coloured his cast, which was modelled with strict accuracy.¹ Thomas Phillips, R.A., painted from the cast a portrait which he called ‘the true effigies’ of Shakespeare, and this was engraved by William Ward, A.R.A., in 1816. In 1861, Simon Collins, a well-known picture restorer of London, was employed to remove the white paint of 1793, and to restore the colours, of which some trace remained beneath. The effigy is now in the state in which it left Collins’s hands. There is no reason to doubt that it substantially preserves its original condition.²

The effigy in the church is clearly the foundation of the Stratford portrait, which is prominently displayed in the Birthplace, but lacks historic or artistic value. _The It was the gift in 1864 to the Birthplace Trus- ‘Stratford’ tees of William Oakes Hunt (b. 1794, d. 1873), ^portrait- town clerk of Stratford, whose family was of old standing in Stratford and whose father Thomas Hunt preceded him in the office of town clerk and died in 1827. The donor stated that the picture had been in the possession of his family since 1758. The allegation that the artist was John Hall, the restorer of the monument, is mere conjecture.

The engraved portrait — nearly a half-length — which was printed on the title-page of the folio of 1623, was by

¹ The painter Haydon, when visiting Stratford Church in July 1828, wrote his impressions of the monument at length in the Church Album which is now in the Birthplace Library. He declared the whole bust to be ‘stamped with an air of fidelity, perfectly invaluable.’ To this entry Daniel Maclise added the ironical words, dated August 1832, ‘Remarks worthy of Haydon.’ Sir Francis Chantrey, near the same date, pronounced the ‘head’ to be ‘as finely chiselled as a master man could do it; but the bust any common labourer would produce’ (see Washington Irving’s Stratford-upon-Avon from the Sketch Book, ed. Savage and Brassington, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1900, pp. 127-9). Iⁿ 1835 a Society was formed at Stratford for the ‘renovation and restoration of Shakespeare’s monument and bust.’ But, although the church suffered much repair in 1839, there is no evidence that the monument received any attention.

² A chromolithograph issued by the New Shakspere Society in 1880 is useful for purposes of study.

Martin Droeshout. On the opposite page lines by Ben Jonson congratulate ‘the graver’ on having satisfac- Droes- torily ‘hit’ the poet’s face.’¹ Jonson’s testi- hout’s mony does no credit to his artistic discern- engravmg. _men£. expression of countenance is neither distinctive nor lifelike. The engraver, Martin Droeshout, was, like Garret and Nicholas Johnson, the sculptors of the monument, of Flemish descent, belonging to a family of painters and engravers long settled in London, where he was born in 1601. He was thus fifteen years old at the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, and it is improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the dramatist. The engraving was doubtless produced'by Droeshout just before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year. It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver’s professional career, in which he never achieved extended practice or reputation. In Droeshout’s. engraving the face. is long and the forehead high; the one ear which is visible is shapeless; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears. There is a scanty moustache and a thin fringe of hair under the lower lip. A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately

¹ Ben Jonson’s familiar lines run : ,

This Figure, that thou here seest put,

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;

Wherein the Graver had a strife With Nature, to out-do the life:

O, could he but have drawn his wit »

As well in brass, as he hath hit His face, the Print would then surpass All that was ever writ in brass.

But, since he cannot, Reader, look,

Not on his Picture, but his Book.

Ben Jonson’s concluding conceit seems to be a Renaissance convention. The French poet Malherbe inscribed beneath Thomas de Leu’s portrait of Montaigne in the 1611 edition of his Essais these lines to like effect:

Voici du grand Montaigne une enti&re/gwe;

Le peintre a peint le corps et lui son bel esprit;

Le premier par son art, 6gale la nature;

Mais Pautre la surpasse en tout ce qu’il tcril.

bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dress in which there are patent defects of perspective is of a pattern which is common in contemporary portraits of the upper class. The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as compared with those of the body. Yet the ordinary condition of the engraving does Droeshout’s modest ability some unmerited injustice. His work was obviously unfitted for frequent reproduction, and the plate was retouched for The first the worse more than once after it left his hands. ^state- Two copies of the engraving in its first state are known. One is in Malone’s perfect copy of the First Folio which is now in the Bodleian Library. The other was extracted by J. 0. Halliwell-Phillipps from a First Folio in his possession, and framed separately by him; it now belongs to the American collector Mr. H. C. Folger of New York.¹ Although the first state of the engraving offers no variation in the general design, the tone is clearer than in the ordinary exemplars, and the details are better defined. The light falls more softly on the muscles of the face, especially about the mouth and below the eye. The hair is darker than the ■ shadows on the forehead and flows naturally, but it throws no reflection on the collar as in the later impressions. As a result the wooden effect of the expression is qualified in the first state of the print. The forehead loses the unnaturally swollen or hydrocephalous appearance of the later states, and the hair ceases to resemble a raised wig. In the later impression all the shadows have been darkened by crosshatching and cross-dotting, especially about the chin and the roots of the hair on the forehead, while the moustache

¹ The copy of the First Folio to which Halliwell-Phillipps’s original impression of the engraving belonged is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Stratford-on-Avon. For descriptions of the first state of the engraving see Sidney Lee’s Introduction to Facsimile of the First Folio (Clarendon Press, 1905, p. xxii); The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio, i9rr, pp. 9-10 and plates i. and ii.; J. O. Halliwell’s Catalogue of Shakespearian Engravings and Drafluings (privately printed; 1868,

PP- 35-37).

has been roughly enlarged'. The later reproductions in extant copies of the First Folio show many slight variations among themselves, but all bear witness to the deterioration of the plate. The Droeshout engraving was copied by William Marshall for a frontispiece to Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640, and William Faithome made a second copy for the frontispiece of the edition of ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ published in 1655. Both Marshall’s and Faithorne’s copies greatly reduce the dimensions of the original plate and introduce fresh and fanciful detail.

Sir George Scharf was of the opinion that Droeshout worked from a preliminary drawing or ‘limning.’ But _The Mr. Lionel Cust has pointed out that limnings original or ‘portraits in small’ of this period were dis- Droes-°^f tinguished by a minuteness of workmanship work'⁵ which the engraving bears small trace. Mr.

Cust makes it clear however that professional engravers were in the habit of following crude pictures in oils especially prepared for them by ‘picture-makers,’ who ranked in the profession far below limners or portrait- painters of repute. That Droeshout’s engraving reproduces a picture of coarse calibre may be admitted; but no existing picture can be positively identified with the one which guided Droeshout’s hand.

In 1892 Mr. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a _The private gentleman with artistic tastes residing ‘Flower¹ at Peckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent portrait. Shakespeare. It was claimed that the picture, which was faded and somewhat worm-eaten, dated from the early years of the seventeenth century. The fabric was a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the upper left-hand corner was the inscription ‘ Will^m Shakespeare, 1609.’ The panel had previously ‘served for a portrait of a lady in a high ruff — the line of which can be detected on either side of the head — clad in a red dress, the colour and glow of which can be seen under the white

of the wired band in front.’¹ Mr. Clements purchased the portrait from an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip of paper when he acquired it. The note that he then wrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the picture, ran as follows : ‘ The original portrait of Shakespeare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his death. The picture was painted nine [vere seven] years before his death, and consequently sixteen [vere fourteen] years before it was published. . . . The picture was publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and many thousands went to see it.’ These statements were not independently corroborated. In its comparative dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the size of the head and that of the body, this picture is identical with the Droeshout engraving, but the engraving’s incongruities of light and shade are absent, and the ear and other details of the features which are abnormal in the engraving are normal in the painting. Though stiffly drawn, the face is far more skilfully presented than in the engraving, and the expression of countenance betrays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the print. Connoisseurs, including Sir Edward Poynter, Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Cust, have pronounced the picture' to be anterior in date to the engraving, and they deem it probable that it was on this painting that Droeshout directly based his work. On the other hand, Mr. M. H. Spielmann, while regarding the picture as ‘a record of high interest’ and 'possibly the first of all the poet’s painted portraits/ insists with much force that it is far more likely to have been painted from the Droeshout engraving than to have formed the foundation of the print. Mr. Spielmann argues that the picture differs materially from the first state of the engraving, while it substantially corresponds with the later states. If the

¹ Spielmann, Portraits of Shakespeare, p. 14.

2 M

engraver worked from the picture it was to be expected that the first state of the print would represent the picture more closely than the later states, which embody very crude and mechanical renovations of the original plate. The discrepancies between the painting and the print in its various forms are no conclusive refutation of the early workmanship of the picture, but they greatly weaken its pretensions to be treated as Droeshout’s original inspiration or to date from Shakespeare’s lifetime.¹ On the death of Mr. Clements, the owner of the picture, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs. No attempt at restoration has been made. A photogravure forms the frontispiece to the present volume. A fine coloured reproduction has been lately issued by the Medici Society of London.²

Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although less closely resembling it than the picture just described, The‘Ely ^{1S the} ‘Ely House’ portrait (now the property House’ of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford). This portrait. picture, which was purchased in 1845, by Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, was acquired on his death on January 7, 1864, by the art-dealer Henry Graves, who presented it to the Birthplace on April 23, following. This painting has much artistic value. The features are far more delicately rendered than in the

¹ Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school have heen detected in the picture, but little can be made of the suggestion that it is from the brush of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droeshout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this country on January 25, 1607-8, when he was described as a ‘painter of Brabant.’

² Mr. Lionel Cust, formerly director of the National Portrait Gallery, who has supported the genuineness of the picture, gave an interesting account of it at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on December 12, 1895 (cf. Society’s Proceedings, second series, vol. xvi. p. 42). See also Illustrated Catalogue of the Pictures in the Memorial Gallery, 1896, pp. 78-83 and Bibliog. Trans. 1908, pp. 118 seq. Mr. M. H. Spielmann ably disputes the authenticity in his essay on Shakespeare’s Portraits in Stratford Tgwt Slnksspeare, 1906, yqI, x,

‘Flower' painting, or in the normal states of the Droes- hout engraving, but the claim of the ‘Ely House’ portrait to workmanship of very early date is questioned by many experts.¹

Early in Charles IPs reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in his house in St. James’s. Mention is made of it in a letter from the diarist John Evelyn cfaren- to his friend Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Claren- ^d°“’^s don’s collection was dispersed at the end of ^{pi ure}' the seventeenth century and the picture has not been traced.²

Of the numerous extant paintings which have been described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the ‘Droes- hout’ portrait and the ‘Ely House’ portrait, Later both of which are at Stratford, bear any defin- portraits, able resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in the church. In spite of their admitted imperfections, the engraving and the bust can alone be held indisputably to have been honestly intended to preserve the poet’s features. They must be treated as the main tests of the genuineness of all portraits claiming authenticity on late and indirect evidence.³

¹ See Harper's Magazine, May 1897, and Mr. Spielmann’s careful account ut supra.

² Cf. Evelyn’s Diary and Correspondence, iii. 444.

³ Numberless portraits, some of which are familiar in engravings, have been falsely identified with Shakespeare, and it would be futile to attempt to make the record of the supposititious pictures complete. Upwards of sixty have been offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1856, and not one of these has proved to possess the remotest claim to authenticity. During the past ten years the present writer has been requested by correspondents in various parts of England, America, and the colonies to consider the claims to authenticity of more than thirty different pictures alleged to be contemporary portraits of Shakespeare. The following are some of the wholly unauthentic portraits that have attracted public attention: Three portraits assigned to Zucchero, who left England in rs8o, and cannot have had any relations with Shakespeare — one in the Art Museum, Boston, U.S.A.; another, also in America, formerly the property at various times of Richard Cosway, R.A., of Mr. J. A. Langford of Birmingham, and of Augustine Daly, the American actor (engraved in mezzotint by H. Green); and a third, at one time in the possession of

'Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most famous and interesting is the ‘ Chandos ’ portrait now in _The the National Portrait Gallery. Its pedigree ■Chandos’ suggests that it was designed to represent the portrait. _{poet) but numerous a}nd conspicuous divergences from the authenticated likenesses show that it was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years after his death. Although the forehead is high and bald, as in both the monumental bust and the Droeshout engraving, the face and dress are unlike those presentments. The features in the Chandos portrait are of Italian rather than of English type. The dense mass of hair at the sides and back of the head falls over the collar. A thick fringe of beard runs from ear to ear. The left ear, which the posture of the head alone leaves visible, is adorned by a plain gold ring. Oldys reported the traditions that the picture was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare’s fellow-actor, who enjoyed much reputation as a limner,¹ and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare. These traditions are not

Mr. Archer, librarian of Bath, which was purchased in 1862 by the Baroness Bnrdett-Coutts and now belongs to Mr. Burdett-Coutts. At Hampton Court is a wholly unauthentic portrait of the Chandos type, which was at one time at Penshurst; it bears the legend ‘^Etatis suae 34’ (cf. Law’s Cat. of Hampton Court, p. 234). A portrait inscribed ‘aetatis suse 47, 1611,’ formerly belonging to the Rev. Clement Usill Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, now owned by Mr. R. Levine of Norwich, was engraved in mezzotint by G. F. Storm in 1864. (See Mr. Spielmann’s art. in Connoisseur, April 1910.) At the end of lie eighteenth century ‘one Zincke, an artist of little note, but grandson of the celebrated enameller of that name, manufactured fictitious Shakespeares by the score’ (Chambers’s Journal, Sept. 20, 1856). One of the most successful of Zincke’s frauds was an alleged portrait of the dramatist painted on a pair of bellows, which the great French actor Talma acquired. Charles Lamb visited Talma in Paris in 1822 in order to see the fabrication, and was completely deluded. (See Lamb’s Works, ed. Lucas, vol. vii. pp. 573 seq., where the Talma portrait, now the property of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge of Glasgow, is reproduced.) Zincke had several successors, among whom one Edward Holder proved the most successful. To a very different category belong the many avowedly imaginary portraits by artists of repute. Of these the most elaborately designed is that, by Ford Madox Brown, which was painted in 1850 and was acquired by the Municipal Gallery at Manchester in rgoo.

¹ See pp. 455-6 supra.

corroborated; but there is little doubt that it was at one time the property of Sir Willian D’Avenant, Shakespeare's reputed godson, and that it subsequently belonged successively to the actor Betterton and to Mrs. Barry the actress. In T693 Sir Godfrey Kneller made a fine copy as a gift for Dryden. Kneller’s copy, the property of Earl Fitzwilliam, is an embellished reproduction, but it proves that the original painting is to-day in substantially the same condition as in the seventeenth century. After Mrs. Barry’s death in 1713 the Chandos portrait was purchased for forty guineas by Robert Keck, a barrister of the Inner Temple. At length it reached the hands of one John Nichols, whose daughter married James Brydges (third marquis of Carnarvon and) third duke of Chandos. In due time the Duke became the owner of the picture, and it subsequently passed, through Chandos’s daughter, to her husband, the first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose son, the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold it with the rest of his effects at Stbwe in 1848, when it was purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere. ‘ The latter presented it to the nation in March 1856. Numerous copies of the Chandos portrait were made in the eighteenth century; one which is said to have been executed in 1760 by Sir Joshua Reynolds is not known to survive. In 1779 Edward Capell presented a copy by Ranelagh Barret to Trinity College, Cambridge, where it remains in the library. A large copy in coloured crayons by Gerard Vandergucht belonged to Charles Jennens, of Gopsall, Leicestershire, and is still the property there of Earl Howe. In August 1783, Ozias Humphry was commissioned by Malone to prepare a crayon drawing, which is now at Shakespeare’s Birthplace at- Stratford.¹ The portrait was first engraved by George Vertue in 1719 for ‘The Poetical Register’ and Vertue’s work reappeared in Pope’s edition (1725). Among the later engravings,

¹ The print of the picture in Malone’s Variorum edition was prepared from Humphry’s copy; cf. ii. Sir. .

those respectively by Houbraken in his ‘Heads of Illustrious Persons’ (1747) and by Vandergucht (1750) are the best. A mezzotint by Samuel Cousins is dated 1849. A good lithograph from a tracing by Sir George Scharf was published by the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in 1864. The late Baroness Burdett-Coutts purchased in 1875 a portrait of the same type as the Chandos picture. This painting (now the property of Mr. Burdett-Coutts) is doubtfully said to have belonged to John Lord Lumley, who died in 1609, and who formed a collection of portraits of the great men of his day at his house, Lumley Castle, Durham. Its early history is not authenticated, and it may well be an early copy of the Chandos portrait. The ‘ Lumley ’ painting was finely chromolithographed in 1863 by Vincent Brooks, when the picture belonged to one George Rippon.

The so-called ‘Janssen’ portrait was first identified as a painting of Shakespeare shortly before 1770, when _The it was in the possession of Charles Jennens, ‘Janssen’ the noted dilettante, of Gopsall, Leicestershire, portrait. legend that it formerly belonged to Prince

Rupert lacks any firm foundation and nothing is positively known of its history before 1770 when an admirable mezzotint (with some unwarranted embellishment) by Richard Earlom was prefixed to Jennens’s edition of ‘ King Lear.’ The portrait is a fine work of art, and may well have come from the accomplished easel of the Dutch painter Cornells Janssen (van Keulen) who was born at Amsterdam in 1590, practised his art in England for some .thirty years before his departure in 1643, and included among his English sitters the youthful Milton in 1618, Ben Jonson and many other men of literary and poetical or social distinction. But the features, which have no sustained likeness to those in the well-authenticated presentments of Shakespeare, fail to justify the identification with the dramatist.¹ The picture was sold by Jen-

_ ¹ A fair copy of the picture belonged to the Duke of Kingston eariy in the eighteenth century, and this has directly descended with a com-

nens’s heir in 1809, and early in the nineteenth century was successively the property of the ninth Duke of Hamilton, of the eleventh Duke of Somerset, and of his son, the twelfth Duke. The twelfth Duke of Somerset left it to his daughter, Lady Guendolen, who married Sir John William Ramsden, fifth baronet. Lady Guendolen died at her residence, Bulstrode Park, Buckinghamshire, on August 14, 1910, and the picture remains there the property of her son Sir John Frecheville Ramsden. There is a fanciful engraving of the Jansen portrait by R; Dunkarton (1811) and there are mezzotints by Charles Turner (1824) and by Robert Cooper (1825), as well as many later reproductions.¹

The ‘Felton’ portrait, a small head on an old panel, with a high and bald sugar-loaf forehead (which the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts acquired in 1873), _The was purchased by S. Felton, of Drayton, Shrop- ‘Felton’ shire, in 1792, of J. Wilson, the owner of the P°^rtrait- Shakespeare Museum in Pall Mall; it bears a late inscription, ‘Gul. Shakespear 1597, R. B.’ [i.e. Richard Burbage]. A good copy of the Felton portrait made by Joh^L Boaden in 1792 is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. The portrait was engraved by Josiah Boydell for George Steevens in 1797, and by James Neagle for Isaac Reed’s edition in 1803. Fuseli declared it to be the work of a Dutch artist, but the painters Romney and Lawrence doubtfully regarded it as of English workmanship of the sixteenth century. Steevens held that it was the original picture whence both Droeshout and Marshall made their engravings, but there are practically no points of resemblance between it and the prints. Mr. M. H. Spielmann suggests that the Felton portrait was based on ‘a striking likeness of Shakespeare,’ which was prefixed to Ays-

panion picture of Ben Jonson to the Rev. Henry Buckston of Sutton on-the-Hill, Derbyshire. Among many later copies one belongs to the¹ Duke of Anhalt at Worlitz near. Dessau. .

¹ See Mr. M. H. Spielmann’s papers in The Connoisseur, Aug. 1909, Feb. and Nov. 1910, and Jan. 1912.

cough’s edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works in 1790, and was described as ‘ engrav’d by W. Sherwin from the original Folio edition.’¹

The ‘Soest’ or ‘Zoust’ portrait — at one time in the possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye of the Grange, Wake- _The field — was in the collection of Thomas Wright, ‘Soest; painter, of Covent Garden, in 1725, when John portrait. Simon engraved it. Gerard Soest, a humble rival of Sir Peter Lely, was born twenty-one years after Shakespeare’s death, and the portrait is only on fanciful grounds identified with the poet. A chalk drawing by John Michael Wright, obviously inspired by the Soest portrait, was the property of Sir Arthur Hodgson, of Clopton House, and is now at the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery, Stratford.

Several miniatures have been identified with the dramatist’s features on doubtful grounds. Pope admitted . to his edition of Shakespeare Vertue’s engraving imatures. ^ _a beautiful miniature of Jacobean date, which was at the time in the collection of Edward Harley, afterwards second Earl of Oxford, and is now at Welbeck Abbey. The engraving, which was executed in 1721, was unwarrantably issued as a portrait of Shakespeare; Oldys declared it to be a youthful presentment of King James I. Vertue’s reproduction has been many times credulously copied. A second well-executed ‘Shakespearean’ miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, successively the property of William Somerville the poet, Sir James Bland Burges, and Lord Northcote, was engraved by Agar for vol. ii. of the ‘Variorum Shakespeare’ of 1821, and in Wivell’s ‘Inquiry,’ 1827. It has little claim to attention as a portrait of the dramatist, although its artistic merit is high. A third ‘ Shakespearean ’ miniature of popular fame (called the ‘Auriol’ portrait, after a former owner, Charles Auriol), has no better claim to authenticity; it formerly belonged to Mr. Lumsden Propert and is now in America.

A bust, said to be of Shakespeare, was discovered in 1848 bricked up in a wall in Spode and Copeland’s china warehouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The build- ™ ~

• r -it • far

ing was, at the time of the discovery, in course rick club

of demolition by order of the College of Sur- ^hust‘ geons, who had acquired the land for the purpose of extending their adjacent museum. The warehouse stood on the site of the old Duke’s Theatre, which was originally designed as a tennis court, and was first converted into a playhouse by Sir William D’Avenant in 1660. The theatre was reconstructed in 1695, and rebuilt in 1714. After 1756 the building was turned to other than theatrical uses. The Shakespearean bust was acquired of the College of Surgeons in 1849, by the surgeon William Clift, from whom it passed to Clift’s son-in-law, Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen, the naturalist. Owen, who strongly argued for the authenticity of the bust, sold it to the Duke of Devonshire, who presented it in 1855 to the Garrick Club, after having two copies made in plaster. One of these copies is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford, and from it an engraving has been made for reproduction in this volume. The bust, a delicate piece of work, is modelled in red terra-cotta, which has been painted black. But the assumption that it originally adorned the proscenium of Sir William D’Avenant’s old Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields will not bear close scrutiny. The design is probably a very free interpretation of the Chan- dos portrait, and the artistic style scarcely justifies the assignment of the sculpture to a date anterior to the eighteenth century. There is a likelihood that it is the work of Louis Francois Roubiliac, the French sculptor, who settled in London in 1730. Garrick commissioned Roubiliac in 1758 to execute a statue of Shakespeare which is now in the British Museum. Affinities between the head in Roubiliac’s statue and the Garrick Club bust give substance to this suggestion.¹

- The Kesselstadt death-mask was discovered by Dr. Ludwig Becker, librarian at the ducal palace at Darm- Aiieged stadt, in a rag-shop at Mainz in 1849. The death- features resemble those of an alleged portrait ^mask- of Shakespeare (dated 1637) which Dr. Becker purchased in 1847. This picture had long been in the possession of the family of Count Francis von Kesselstadt of Mainz, who died in 1843. Dr. Becker brought the mask and the picture to England in 1849, ^and Richard Owen supported the theory that it was taken from Shakespeare’s face after death and was the foundation of the bust in Stratford Church. There are some specious similarities between its features and those of the Garrick Club bust; but the theory which identifies the mask with Shakespeare acquires most of its plausibility from the accidental circumstance that it and the bust came to light, and were first submitted to Shakespearean students for examination, in the same year. The mask was for a long time in Dr. Becker’s private apartments at the ducal palace, Darmstadt.¹ The features are singularly attractive; but there is no evidence which would identify them with Shakespeare.²

¹ The mask is now the property of Frau Oberst Becker, the discoverer’s daughter-in-law, in Heidelbergerstrasse, Darmstadt. The most recent and zealous endeavour to prove the authenticity of the mask was made in Shakespeares Totenmaske,' a fully illustrated volume by Paul Wis- licenus (Darmstadt, 1910). .

² Mr. M. H. Spielmann has written on Shakespeare’s portraits more exhaustively than any other author. His critical examination with photogravures of the Droeshout engraving, the Stratford bust, the Chandos, Ely House and Jansen portraits, and the Garrick Cluh bust, is in Stratford Town Shakespeare 1906-7, vol. x. He has summarily covered the whole ground in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britan- nica (1911), and he has contributed to the Connoisseur (July 1908- March 1913) a series of twelve admirably full and detailed articles on alleged portraits of repute. His complete Shakespearean iconography is not yet published. Earlier works on Shakespeare’s portraits are: James Boaden, Inquiry into various Pictures and Prints of Shakespeare, 1824; Abraham Wivell, Inquiry into Shakespeare’s Portraits, 1827, with engravings by B. and W. Holl; George Scharf, Principal Portraits 0] Shakespeare, 1864; J. Ham Friswell, Lije-Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; William Page, Study of Shakespeare’s Portraits, 1876; Ingleby, Man and Book, 1877, pp. 84 seq.; J. Parker Norris, Portraits of Shakespeare,

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

From a plaster-cast of the terra-cotta bust now in the possession of the Garrick Club.

A monument, the expenses of which were defrayed by public subscription, was set up in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1741. Pope and the Earl of Burlington were among the promoters. _m^c“moriaii The design was by William Kent, and the ^,I}_|P^ubl,c statue of Shakespeare was executed by Peter ^paccs' Scheemakers after the Chandos portrait.¹ Another statue was executed by Roubiliac for Garrick, who bequeathed it to the British Museum in 1779. A third statue, freely adapted from the works of Scheemakers and Roubiliac, was executed for Baron Albert Grant and was set up by him as a gift to the metropolis in Leicester Square, London, in 1879. A fourth statue (by Mr. J. Q. A. Ward) was placed in 1882 in the Central Park, New York. In 1886 a fifth statue (by William Ordway Partridge) was placed in Lincoln Park, Chicago. A sixth in bronze (by M. Paul Fournier), which was erected in Paris in 1888 at the expense of an English resident, Mr. W. Knighton, stands at the point where the Avenue de Messine meets the Boulevard Haussmann. A seventh memorial in sculpture, by Lord Ronald Gower, the most elaborate and ambitious of all, stands in the garden of the Shakespeare memorial buildings at Stratford-on- Avon, and was unveiled in 1888; Shakespeare is seated on a high pedestal; below, at each side of the pedestal, stand figures of four of Shakespeare's principal characters: Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Sir John Falstaff. In the public park at Weimar an eighth statue (by Herr Otto Lessing) was unveiled on April 23,1904. A seated statue (by the Danish sculptor Luis Hasselriis) has been placed in the room in the castle of Kronborg where, according to an untrustworthy report, Shakespeare and other English actors performed before the

Philadelphia, 1885, with numerous plates. In 1885 Mr. Walter Rogers Furness issued, at Philadelphia, a volume of composite portraits, combining the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford Dust with the Chandos, jUnsswi, Felton, and Stratford portraits.

* Cf. GmUman’s Magasim, 1741, p. 105.

Danish Court. A tenth monument, consisting of a bust of Shakespeare on a pedestal, in which are reliefs representing Juliet and other of his heroines, was unveiled in Verona on October 30, 1910. The Verona memorial stands near the so-called ‘tomb of Juliet’; a marble tablet was previously placed by the municipality of Verona on a thirteenth-century house in the Via Capello, which is said to have been the home of the Capulets. On November 4, 1912, a memorial monument in Southwark Cathedral (formerly St. Saviour’s Church) was unveiled by the present writer; within a deeply recessed arch let into the wall of the south nave lies a semi-recumbent figure of the poet carved in alabaster. The background shows a view of sixteenth-century Southwark cut in low relief.¹

At Stratford, the Birthplace, acquired by the public in 1847, is, with Anne Hathaway’s cottage (which was _The purchased by the Birthplace Trustees in 1892), Stratford a place of pilgrimage for visitors from all parts memorials. _Q| ^ gfokg The 45,480 persons who visited the Birthplace in 1913 represented over seventy nationalities. The site of the demolished New Place, with Nash’s adjacent house and the gardens, is now also the property of the Birthplace Trustees, and is open to public inspection. Of a new memorial building on the

¹ The Southwark memorial, which was devised by Dr. R. W. Left- wich, is the work of Mr. Henry McCarthy, and the expenses were defrayed by public subscription. A bust of the poet surmounts the monument erected in 1896 to Heminges and Condell in the churchyard of St. Mary, Aldermanhury, where they lie buried. Numerous other statues or busts of the poet figure in the facades of public buildings, or form part of comprehensive memorials not designed solely to honour the dramatist, e.g. the Albert Memorial, in Kensington Gardens, London. Shakespearean portraits of modem and more or less fanciful design appear in the stained glass windows of many public institutions and churches, e.g. Stationers’ Hall, London, St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and Southwark Cathedral. Through the eighteenth century Shakespeare’s head was repeatedly stamped on tradesmen’s copper tokens and for nearly two centuries his features have formed the favourite suhject of distinguished medallists. Cameos and gems with intaglio portraits of Shakespeare have been frequently carved within the last 150 years.

river-bank at Stratford, consisting of a theatre, picture- gallery, and library, which was mainly erected through the munificence of Mr. Charles E. Flower (d. 1892), of Stratford, the foundation-stone was laid on April 23, 1877. The theatre was opened exactly two years later, when ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ was performed, with Helen Faucit (Lady Martin) as Beatrice and Barry Sullivan as Benedick. Festival performances of Shakespeare’s plays have since been given annually during April and May, while an additional season during the month of August was inaugurated in 1910. The Stratford festival performances have since 1887 been rendered by Mr. F. R. Benson and his dramatic company, with the assistance from time to time of the leading actors and actresses of London. Mr. Benson has produced on the Stratford stage all Shakespeare’s plays save two, viz. ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘All’s Well.’ The library and picture-gallery of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford were opened in 1881.¹ A memorial Shakespeare library was opened at Birmingham on April 23, 1868, to commemorate the Shakespeare tercentenary of 1864, and, after destruction by fire in 1879, was restoredj in 1882; it now possesses nearly ten thousand volumes relating to Shakespeare.

¹A History of the Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, 1882; Ilkistrated Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakespeare Memorial, 1896.

Only two of. Shakespeare’s works — his narrative poems

‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ — were published

with his sanction and co-operation. These

hsues of poems were the first specimens of his work to

the narra- appear in print, and they passed in his lifetime tivG poems ₉ 0 i

' through a greater number of editions than any

of his plays. At his death in 1616 there had been printed

six editions of ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593 and 1594 in

quarto, 1596, 1599, 1600, and 1602,¹ all in small octavo),

and five editions of ‘Lucrece’ (1594 in quarto, 1598,

1600, 1607, and 1616, in small octavo).

Within half a century of Shakespeare’s death two editions of ‘Lucrece’ were published, viz. in 1624 (‘the _Post sixth edition’) and in 1655, when Shakespeare’s humous work appeared with a continuation by John issues of Quarles, son of Francis Quarles the poet of the epoems. <g_m^_ems^ _entitled ‘The Banishment of Tar- quin, or the Reward of Lust.’ ² Of ‘Venus’ there were in the seventeenth century as many as seven posthumous editions (in 1617,1620,1627, two in 1630,1636, and 1675), making thirteen editions in eighty-two years.³ The

¹ It has been erroneously asserted that more than one edition appeared in 1602, and that the three extant copies of this edition represent as many different impressions. The three copies are identical at all points save that on the title-page of the British Museum copy a comma replaces a colon, which figures in the other two. That alteration was clearly made in the standing type before all the copies were worked off.

² Perfect copies contain a frontispiece engraved by William Fai- thome; in the upper part is a small oval portrait of Shakespeare adapted from the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio; below are full-length figures of Collatinus and Lucrece.

³ Copies of the early editions of the narrative poems are now very rare. Of the first edition of Venus and Adonis the copy in the Malone

two narrative poems were next reprinted in ‘Poems on Affairs of State’ in 1707 and in collected editions of Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1709, 1710, and 1725. Malone in 1790 first admitted them to a critical edition of Shakespeare’s works; his example has since been generally followed.

Three editions were issued of the piratical ‘Passionate Pilgrim,’ fraudulently assigned to Shakespeare by the publisher William Jaggard, although it <_The contained only a few occasional poems by the Passionate dramatist. The first edition appeared in 1599, ^Klgrim- and the third in 1612. No copy of the second edition survives.¹

The only lifetime edition of the ‘ Sonnets ’ was Thorpe’s venture of 1609, of which twelve copies now seem known.² Thorpe’s edition of the ‘Sonnets’ was first re- The printed in the second volume of Bernard Lintot’s ^Sonnets- ‘Collections of Poems by Shakespeare’ (1710) and for a second time in Steevens’s ‘Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare’ (1766). Malone first critically edited Thorpe’s text in 1780 in his ‘Supplement to the Edition

collection of the Bodleian Library alone survives. Three copies of the second edition (1594) are known; two of the third edition (1596); one only of the fourth edition (1599) in Mr. Christie Miller’s library, Brit- well Court, Maidenhead; one only of the fifth edition (1600) in the Malone Collection of the Bodleian Lihrary; and three of the sixth edition (1602). Of the editions of 1617, 1620, and of the two editions of 1630 unique copies again in each case alone survive. That of 1620 is in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge; the others are in the Bodleian Library. Two copies survive of each of the editions of 1627 and 1636, and of three extant copies of the edition of 1675 two ate in America, while the third which is in the Bodleian lacks the title- page. Extant copies of the early editions of Lucrece are somewhat more numerous. Ten copies of the first edition (1594) have been traced; one only of the 1598 edition (at Trinity College, Cambridge); two of the third edition (1600); two of the fourth edition (1607); four of the fifth edition (1616); six of the sixth edition (1624); five of the seventh edition (1632) and some twelve of the eighth edition (1655).

¹ See p. 267 supra. .

² See pp. 159—60 supra. Sales of the volume at auction have heen rare of late years. The last copy to be sold belonged to Sir Henry St. John Mildmay, of Dogmersfield, Hants. It was. in moderate condition and fetched 800Z. at Sotheby’s on April 20, 1907.

of Shakespeare’s Plays, published in 1778/ vol. i. The ‘Sonnets’ were first introduced into a collective edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1790 when Malone incorporated them with the rest of the poems in his edition of that year. They reappeared in the ‘Variorum’ edition of 1803 and in all the leading editions that have appeared since.¹

A so-called first collected edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640 (London, by T[homas]. Cotes for _The I[ohn], Benson) consisted of the ‘Sonnets,’ ‘Poems’ omitting eight (xviii. xix. xliii. lvi. lxxv. lxxvi. of 1640. _xcvj_ _an(j cxxvi.) and adding the twenty poems (both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean) of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ and a number of miscellaneous non-Shakespearean pieces of varied authorship.² A reduced and altered copy by William Marshall of the Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece of the volume of 1640. There were prefatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address ‘to the reader’ signed ‘ J. B.,’ the initials of the publisher. There Shakespeare’s ‘ poems ’ were described as ‘ serene, clear, and elegantly plain; such gentle strains as shall re-create and not perplex your brain. No intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect. Such as will raise your admiration to his praise.’ A chief point of interest in the ‘Poems’ of 1640 is the fact that Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ is omitted, and that the ‘Sonnets’ were printed there in a different order from that which was

¹ The first editions of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, the Sonnets, with the play of Pericles, were reproduced in facsimile by the Oxford University Press, in 1903, with introductions and full bibliographies by the present writer. The 1609 edition of the Sonnets was facsimiled for tie first time in 1862. The chief original editions of the poems were included in the two complete series of facsimiles of Shakespeare’s works in quarto which are noticed below, p. 550.

² The following entry appears in the Stationers’ Company’s Register on November 4, 1639: ‘Entred [to John Benson] for Ins Copie vnder the hands of doctor Wykes and Master ffetherston warden An Addicion of some excellent Poems to Shakespeares Poems by other gentlemen. viz¹. His mistris drowne and her mind by Beniamin Johnson. An Epistle to Beniamin Johnson by Ffrancis Beaumont. His Mistris shade by R. Herrick, &c. . . . vj^d.’ (Arber, iv. 461).

followed in the volume of 1609. Thus the poem numbered lxvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

which was in 1609 numbered cxliv., takes the thirty- second place in 1640. In most cases a more or less fanciful general title is placed in Benson’s edition at the head of each sonnet, but in a few instances a single descriptive heading serves for short sequences of two or three sonnets which are printed continuously without spacing. The non-Shakespearean poems drawn from ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ include the extracts (in the third edition of that miscellany) from Thomas Heywood’s ‘General History of Women’.; all are interspersed among the Sonnets and no hint is given that any of the volume’s contents lack claim to Shakespeare’s authorship. The Poems of 1640 concludes with three epitaphs on Shakespeare and with a short appendix entitled ‘an addition of some excellent poems to those precedent by other Gentlemen.’ The volume is of great rarity.¹ In 1710 it was reprinted in the supplementary volume to Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, and again in 1725 in the supplementary volume to Pope’s edition. Other issues of Benson’s volume appeared in 1750 and 1775. An exact reprint was issued in 1885.

Of Shakespeare’s plays there were printed before his death in 1616 only sixteen pieces (all in quarto), or eighteen pieces if we include the ‘Contention’ (1594 and 1600), and ‘The True Tragedy’ (1595 and 1600), the first drafts respectively of the Second and the Third

¹ Perfect copies open with a set of five leaves with signatures independent of the rest of the volume. These leaves supply the frontispiece, title-page, and other preliminary matter. A second title-page precedes the ‘poems’ which fill the main part of the book. A perfect copy of the volume, formerly belonging to Robert Hoe of New_ York, was sold in New York on May 3, 1911, for 3200/., the highest price yet reached.

Parts of ‘Henry VI.’ These quartos, which sold at five- pence or sixpence apiece, were publishers’ ventures, and Quartos of ^were undertaken without the cooperation of the Replays author. The publication of separate plays was poet’s as we have seen,¹ deemed by theatrical sharelifetime. holders, and even by dramatists, injurious to their interests. In March 1599 the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of ‘ Patient Grissell,’ by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, to abandon the publication of it by offering him a bribe of 2I. The publication was suspended till 1603.² In 1608 the share- The holders of the Whitefriars theatre imposed on objections ^^s^°y^al actors who yielding to publishers’ bribes to their ' caused plays to be put into print a penalty of issue. 401, and forfeiture of their places.³ Many times in subsequent years the Lord Chamberlain in behalf of the acting companies warned the Stationers’ Company against ‘procuring publishing and printing plays’ ‘by means whereof not only they [the actors] themselves had much prejudice, but the books much corruption, to the injury and disgrace of the authors.’⁴

But in spite of the manager’s repeated protests, the publishers found ready opportunities of effecting theirpur- pose. Occasionally a dramatist in self-defence against a threat of piracy sent a piece to press on his own account.⁵ But there is no evidence that Shakespeare assumed any personal responsibility for the printing of any of his dramas, or that any play in his own handwriting reached the press. Over the means of access to plays which were usually open to publishers the author exerted

¹ See p. 100 n. 1 supra.

² Cf. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i. ng.

³ Trans. New Shaksp. Soc. (1887-92), p. 271.

⁴ Cf. Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 160 seq.; Malone Soc. Collections, 1911, vol. i. pp. 364 seq.

⁶ In 1604 John Marston himself sent to press his play called The Malcontent in order to protect himself against a threatened piracy. He bitterly complained that ‘scenes invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively published to be read.’

no control. As a rule, the publisher seems to have bought of an actor one of the copies of the play

which it was necessary for the manager to

• i . i o i * Xue source

provide ior the company, buch copies were of the

usually made from the author’s autograph after ^copy' the manager, who habitually abbreviated the text and expanded the stage directions, had completed his revision. The divergences from the author’s draft varied with the character and length of the piece and the mood of the manager. The managerial pencil ordinarily left some severe scars. In the case of at least four of Shakespeare’s pieces — ‘ Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘ Henry V,’ the ‘ Merry Wives ’ and ‘ Pericles ’ — the earliest printed version lacked even the slender authority of a theatrical transcript; the printers depended on crude shorthand reports taken down from the lips of the actors during the performances.¹ A second issue of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ presented a more or less satisfactory theatrical copy of the tragedy, but no attempt was made in Shakespeare’s lifetime to meet the manifold defects of the quartos of ‘Henry V,’ the ‘Merry Wives,’ or ‘Pericles.’ Thus the textual authority of the lifetime quartos is variable. Yet despite the lack of efficient protection the authentic text at times escaped material injury. Most of the volumes are of .immense value for the Shakespearean student. The theatrical conventions of the day not only withheld Shakespeare’s autographs from the printing press but condemned them to early destruction. The quartos, whatever their blemishes, present Shakespeare’s handiwork in the earliest shape in which it was made accessible to readers of his own era.

The popularity of the quarto versions which were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime differed greatly. Thevari- Two of the plays, published thus, reached five editions before 1616, viz. ‘Richard III’ (1597, edition®. 1598,1602, 1605, 1612) and ‘The First Part of Henry IV’ (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613).

¹ See p. 112 n. 3 supra.

Three reached four editions, viz. ‘Richard II’ (1597, 1598, 1608 supplying the deposition scene for the first time, 1615); ‘Hamlet’ (1603 imperfect, 1604, 1605, 1611); and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1597 imperfect, 1599, two in 1609). ' •

Two reached three editions, viz. ‘Titus’ (1594, 1600, and 1611); and ‘Pericles’ (two in 1609, 1611, all imperfect) . •

Two reached two editions, viz. ‘Henry V’ (1600 and 1602, both imperfect); ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (both in 1609).

Seven achieved only one edition, viz. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (1598); ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1600);

‘ Merchant of Venice ’ (1600); ‘ The Second Part of Henry IV’ (1600); ‘Much Ado’ (1600); ‘Merry Wives’ (1602, imperfect), and ‘Lear’ (1608).

Three years after Shakespeare’s death, in 1619, a somewhat substantial addition was made to these The four quarto editions. In that year there was issued tSnecT ^{a secon}d edition of ‘Merry Wives’ (again im- quartos of perfect) and a fourth edition of ‘Pericles,’ as ⁱ⁶ⁱ9. well as a reissue of the pseudo-Shakespearean piece ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy’ and a new edition of the two parts of ‘The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke,’ where the original drafts of the Second and Third Parts of ‘Henry VI’ respectively were here brought together in a single volume and were described for the first time as ‘written by William Shakespeare, Gent.’ The name of Arthur Johnson, the original publisher of the ‘Merry Wives,’ reappeared in the imprint of the 1619 reissue. The title-pages of the three other volumes describe them as ‘printed for T. P.,’ i.e. Thomas Pavier, a publisher whose principles were far more questionable than those of most of his fraternity.

To the same year 1619 have also been assigned fresh editions of four other Shakespearean quartos and one other pseudo-Shakespearean quarto, all of which bear

on their title-pages earlier dates. The volumes in question are ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (‘printed by lames Roberts, 1600’), ‘Merchant of Venice’ _xhefive (‘printed by j. Roberts, 1600’), ‘Henry V’ suspected (‘printed for T. P., 1608’), and ‘Lear’(‘printed ^quartos- for Nathaniel Butter, 1608 ’), as well as the pseudo-Shake- spearean ‘Sir John Oldcastle’¹ (‘printed for T. P., 1600’). In the case of these five quartos the dates in the imprints are believed to be deceptive, and, save in the cases of ‘Henry V’ and ‘Sir John Oldcastle,’ the publishers or printers are held to be falsely named.

The five volumes were, it is alleged, first printed and published in 1619 at the press in the Barbican of William Jaggard, James Roberts’s successor, in _The charge collusion with the stationer Thomas Pavier. against In each case Jaggard and, Pavier are charged ^Pavier- with antedating the publication. The five suspected quartos have been met bound up in a single volume of seventeenth-century date along with the four Shakespearean or pseudo-Shakespearean quartos which were admittedly produced in 1619. It is suggested that Pavier planned in that year a first partial issue of Shakespeare’s collective work, in which he intended to include all the nine quartos. But the resort to fraudulent imprints in the case of five plays shews that he did not persist in that design.²

¹ The suspected reprint improves on the original by newly inserting on the title-page the words ‘ written by William Shakespeare.’

² Very strong technical evidence has been adduced against Pavier from the watermarks of the paper of the nine quartos. Eight of the suspected quartos bear too on the title-page the same engraved device, a carnation, with the Welsh motto ‘Heb Ddim, heb Ddieu’ (Without God, without all). The suspected quarto of A Midsummer Night’s Dream bears a different device, consisting of a half eagle and key, the arms of the city of Geneva, with the motto ‘Post tenebras lux.’ Both devices were of old standing in the trade, and the blocks seem to have come into the possession of the printer, William Jaggard. No intelligible motive has been assigned to Pavier, apart from general perversity. The textual superiority to its predecessor of the suspected re-issue of the Merchant of Venice conflicts with an accusation of wholesale piracy, which presumes the plagiarism of a pre-existing edition. Mr. W. W.

Only one of Shakespeare’s plays which were hitherto unpublished appeared in quarto within a few years of his death. ‘Othello’ was first printed in 1622. humous¹' In the same year there were issued sixth issue of ₎ editions of both ‘Richard III’ and ‘The ^{<0t e} °' First Part of Henry IV,’¹ while Shakespeare’s name appeared for the first time on a third edition of the old play of ‘King John’ in which he had no hand.

The original quartos are all to be reckoned among bibliographical rarities. Of many of them less than a „ dozen survive, and of some issues only one, two,

me scarc- , * • i t

ity of the or three copies. A single copy alone seems quartos. _extant ₀f the first (1594) quarto of ‘ Titus Andronicus' (now in the collection of Mr. Folger, of New York). Two copies survive of the 1597 quarto of ‘Richard II,’ of the first (1603) quarto of ‘Hamlet’ (both imperfect), of the 1604 quarto of ‘1 Henry IV,’ and of the 1605 quarto of ‘Hamlet.’ Three copies alone are known of the 1598 quarto of ‘ The First

Greg, in the Library for 1908, pp. 113-^31, 381-409, first questioned the authenticity of the imprints of the nine quartos in question. His conclusions are accepted by Mr. Alfred W. Pollard, in his Shakespeare’s Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq.

¹ The publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s work in the First Folio of 1623 did not bring to an end the practice of publishing separate plays in quarto; but the value and interest of such volumes fell quickly, in view of the higher authority which was claimed for the Folio text. Some of the more interesting quarto re-issues of post-Folio years were Richard III (1629), Pericles, Othello, and Merry Wives (1630), Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew (1631), Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice (1637). Later in the seventeenth century publishers often reissued in quarto, from the text of the Third or Fourth Folios, the tragedies of Hamlet, Julius Ccesar and Othello. These volumes are known to bibliographers as ‘The Players’ Quartos.’ They include four editions of Hamlet (1676, 1683, 1695 and 1703), five editions of Julius Ccesar (the first dated 1684 and the latest 1691) and five editions of Othello (1681, 1687, 1695, 1701, and 1705): see Library, April 1913, pp. 122 seq. Lithographed facsimiles of the quartos published before 1623, with some of the quarto editions of the poems (forty-eight volumes in all), were prepared by Mr.

E. W. Ashbee, and issued to subscribers by Halliwell-Phillipps between 1862 and 1871. A cheaper set of quarto facsimiles, undertaken by Mr. W. Griggs, under the supervision of Dr. F. J. Fumivall, appeared in forty-three volumes between 1880 and 1889.

Part of Henry IV’and of the second (1604) quarto of ‘Hamlet.’¹ ,

Many large collections of original quartos were formed in.the eighteenth century. The chief of these are now preserved in public libraries. To the British _Thechief Museum the actor Garrick bequeathed his collections collection in 1779; to the library of Trinity ^of(i^uartos- College, Cambridge, Edward Capell gave his Shakespeare library also in 1779²; and to the Bodleian Library Edmund Malone bequeathed his Shakespeare collection in 1812. The collections at the British Museum and the Bodleian acquired many supplementary quartos during the nineteenth century. The best collection which remains in private hands was brought together by the actor, John Philip Kemble, and was acquired in 1821 by the Duke of Devonshire, who subsequently made important additions to it. This collection remained in the possession of the Duke’s descendants till 1914, when the whole was sold to the American collector, Mr. Archer Huntington. Another good collection of quartos was formed in the eighteenth century by Charles Jennens, the well-known virtuoso, of Gopsall House, Leicestershire. Gopsall House and its contents descended to Earl Howe, who sold Jennens’s Shakespearean collection in December 1907.³

¹ Much information on the relative scarcity of the quartos will be found in Justin Winsor’s Bibliography of the Original Quartos and Folios of Shakespeare with particular reference to copies in America (Boston,

1874-5)- ¹

² See p. 579 n. 1 infra.

³ At the sale at Sotheby’s fourteen of the Gopsall quartos were purchased privately en bloc, while the remaining fourteen were disposed of publicly to various bidders. Perfect copies of Shakespeare quartos range in price, according to their rarity, from 3001, to 2,5001. In 1864, at the sale of George Daniel’s library, quarto copies of Love’s Labour’s Lost and of Merry Wives (first edition) each fetched 3461. 10s. On April 23, 1904, tie r6oo quarto of 2 Henry IV fetched at Sotheby’s 1,035/., while the 1594 quarto of Titus (unique copy found at Lund, Sweden) was bought privately by Mr. Folger of New York in January 1905 for 2,0001. On June 1, 1907, a quarto of The First Part of the Contention (1594) — the early draft of 2 Henry VI — fetched i.gio/. at Sotheby’s; and on July 9, 1914, a quarto, from the Huth Library, of

In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It was a The First venture of an exceptional kind. Whatever folio. _may have been the intentions of Pavier and Jaggard in 1619, there was only one previous collective publication of a contemporary dramatist’s works which was any way comparable with the Shakespearean project of 1623. In 1616 Ben Jonson, with the aid of the printer William Stansby, issued a folio volume entitled ‘The Workes of Beniamin Jonson,’ where nine of Jonson’s already published pieces were brought together.¹

Two of Shakespeare’s intimate friends and fellow- actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of whom Ed'tors received small bequests under his will, were printers, nominally responsible for the design of 1623. ^an£.., Heminges was the business manager of Shake-

publishers.

' speare’s company, and had already given ample proof of his mercantile ability and enterprise. Condell was closely associated with Heminges in the organisation of the stage. But a small syndicate of printers and publishers undertook all pecuniary liability for the collective issue of Shakespeare’s work. Chief of the syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 1611 to the City of London, who in 1594 began business solely as a bookseller in Fleet Street, east of the churchyard of St.

The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters (1605), the anonymous play which suggested Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear, fetched at Sotheby’s the gigantic sum of 2,4701. It hardly needs adding that American competition is the cause of the recent inflation of price.

¹ This folio has a frontispiece portrait by Vaughan. Each play has a separate title-page. There was a re-issue of the volume in 1640. Three other of Jonson’s plays were meanwhile reprinted in folio in 1631, and these were re-issued with yet another three pieces and a fragment of a fourth as ‘The second volume’ of Jonson’s Workes, also in 1640. There was only one other collective publication within the first half of the seventeenth century of the works of Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists, and that avowedly followed the precedent of the Shakespeare First Folio. Thirty-four Comedies and Tragedies by Beaumont and Fletcher which had not previously been printed were issued in a folio volume by Humphrey Moseley in 1647. See p. 558 n.

Dunstan in the West. As the piratical publisher of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ in 1599 he had acknowledged ' the commercial value of Shakespeare’s name. In 1608 he extended his operations by acquiring an interest in a printing press. He then purchased a chief share in the press which James Roberts worked with much success in the Barbican. There Roberts had printed the first quarto edition of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ in 1600 and die (second) quarto of ‘Hamlet’ in 1604. Roberts, moreover, enjoyed for nearly twenty-one years the right to print ‘ the players’ bills’ or programmes. That privilege he made over to Jaggard together with his other literary property in 1615. It is to the close personal relations with the playhouse managers into which the acquisition of the right of printing ‘the players’ bills’ brought Jaggard that the inception of the comprehensive scheme of the ‘First Folio’ may safely be attributed. Jaggard associated his son Isaac with the enterprise. They alone of the members of the syndicate were printers. Their three partners were publishers or booksellers only. Two of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had already speculated in plays of Shakespeare. Aspley had published with another in 1600 the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ and ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ and in 1609 half of Thorpe’s impression of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ Smethwick, whose shop was in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, Fleet Street, near Jaggard’s first place of business, had purchased in 1607 Nicholas Ling’s rights in ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ and had published the 1609 quarto of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and the 1611 quarto of ‘Hamlet.’ Edward Blount, the fifth partner, was an interesting figure in the trade, and, unlike his companions, had a true taste in literature. He had been a friend and admirer of Christopher Marlowe, and had actively engaged in the posthumous publication of two of Marlowe’s poems. He had published that curious collection of mystical verse entitled ‘Love’s Martyr,’ one poem in which, ‘a

poetical essay of the Phoenix and the Turtle,’ was signed ‘William Shakespeare.’¹ The First Folio was printed at the press in the Barbican which Jaggard had acquired of Roberts. Upon Blount The license P^r°bably fell the chief labour of seeing the Nov. 8, work through the press. It was in progress ^l6a3' throughout 1623, and had so far advanced by November 8, 1623, that on that day Edward Blount and Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained formal license from the Stationers’ Company to publish sixteen of the twenty hitherto unprinted plays which it was intended to include. The pieces, whose approaching publication for the first time was thus announced, were of supreme literary interest. The titles ran: ‘The Tempest,’‘The Two Gentlemen,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As You Like It,’ ‘All’s Well,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘The Third Part of Henry VI,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘Timon,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Four other hitherto unprinted dramas for which no license was sought figured in the volume, viz. ‘King John,’ ‘The First and Second Parts of Henry VI’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew ’; but each of these plays was based by Shakespeare on a play of like title which had been published at an earlier date, and the absence of a license was doubtless due to some misconception on the part either of the Stationers’ Company’s officers or of the editors of the volume as to the true relations subsisting between the old pieces and the new. The only play by Shakespeare that had been previously published and was not included in the First Folio was ‘Pericles.’²

_ ¹ See p. 270 seq. supra, and a memoir of Blount by the present writer m Bibliographica, p. 489 seq.

^a The present writer described, in greater detail than had been attempted before, the general characteristics of the First Folio in his' Introduction to the facsimile published at Oxford in 1902. Some of his conclusions are questioned in Mr. Alfred W. Pollard’s useful Shakespeare Quartos and Folios, 1909, which has been already cited.

Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together. Nine of the fourteen comedies, five of the ten histories, and six of the twelve tragedies were issued for the first time and were rescued from urgent peril of oblivion. Whatever be the First Folio’s typographical and editorial imperfections, it is the fountain-head of knowledge of Shakespeare’s complete achievement.

The plays were arranged under three headings: ‘Comedies,’ ‘Histories,’ and ‘Tragedies.’ It is clear that the volume was printed and made up in three _Xj,_eorder separate sections. Each division was inde- of the pendently paged, and the quires on which ^plays' each was printed bear independent series of signatures. The arrangement of the plays in each division follows ho consistent principle. The comedy section begins with ‘The Tempest,’ one of the latest of Shakespeare’s com- .positions, and ends with ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ The histories more justifiably begin with ‘King John’ and end with ‘Henry VIII’; here historic chronology is carefully observed. The tragedies begin with ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and end with ‘Cymbeline.’ The order of the First Folio, despite its want of strict method, has been usually followed in subsequent collective editions..

The volume consisted of nearly one thousand doublecolumn pages and was sold at a pound a copy. The book was described on the title-page as published by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and in the colophon as ‘printed at the charges of W. Jaggard, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley,’ as well as of Blount. On the title-page was engraved the Droeshout portrait, and on the fly-leaf facing the title are printed ten lines signed ‘B. I.’ [i.e. Ben Jonson] attesting the lifelike accuracy of the portrait. The preliminary pages contain a dedication in prose, an address ‘to the great variety of readers’ (also in prose), a list of ‘ The names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes,’ and ‘A Catalogue of the seuerall Comedies Histories and Tragedies contained in this Volume,’ with four sets of commendatory verses signed respectively

by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and I. M., perhaps Jasper Mayne.

The dedication was addressed to two prominent courtiers, the brothers William Herbert, third earl of The actors’ Pembroke, the lord chamberlain (from 1615 addresses. to 1626), and Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery. Shakespeare’s friends and fellow-actors John Heminges and Henry Condell signed the dedicatory epistle ‘To the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren.’ The same signatures were appended to the succeeding address ‘ to the great variety of readers.’ In both compositions the two actors made pretension to a larger responsibility for the enterprise than they probably incurred, but their motives in solely identifying themselves with the venture were beyond reproach. They disclaimed (they wrote) ‘ ambition either of selfe-profit or fame in undertaking the design,’ being solely moved by, anxiety to ‘keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.’ ‘It had bene a thing we confesse worthie to haue bene wished,’ they inform the reader, ‘ that the author himselfe had liued to haue set forth and ouerseen his owne writings.’

The two dedicatory Addresses — to the patrons and to the readers —■ which the actor-editors sign, contain Their phrases which crudely echo passages in the authorshi published writings of Shakespeare’s friend and by Ben ^P fellow-dramatist, Ben Jonson. From such par- jonson. allelisms has been deduced the theory that Ben Jonson helped the two actors to edit the volume and that his pen supplied the two preliminary documents in prose. But the ill-rounded sentences of the actors’ epistles lacked Jonson’s facility of style. His contribution to the First Folio may well be limited to the lines facing the portrait which he subscribed with his initials, and the poetic eulogy which he signed with his full name. Shakespeare’s colleagues, Heminges and Condell, had acted in Jonson’s plays, and may well have gathered from his writings hints for their unprac

tised pens. But it is more probable that they delegated much of their editorial duty to the publisher, Edward Blount, who was not unversed in the dedicatory art.¹

The title-page states that all the plays were printed ‘according to the true originall copies.’ The dedicators wrote to the same effect. ‘As where (before) Editorial you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and professions, surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors that expos’d them: euen those are now offer’d to your view cur’d and perfect of their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceiued them.’ The writers of the Address further assert that‘what [Shakespeare] thought he vttered with that easinesse that wee haue scarce receiued from him a blot in his papers.’ Ben Jonson recorded a remark made to him by ‘the players’ to the same effect.²

The precise source and value of the ‘copy’ which the actor-editors furnished to the printers of the First Folio are not easily determined. The actor-editors _Thesource clearly meant to suggest that they had access of the _j to Shakespeare’s autographs undefaced by his ^copy' own or any other revising pen. But such an assurance is in open conflict with theatrical practice and with the volume’s contents. In the case of the twenty plays which had not previously been in print, recourse was alone possible to manuscript copies. But external and internal evidence renders it highly improbable that Shakespeare’s autographs were at the printer’s disposal. Well-nigh all the plays of the First Folio bear internal marks of transcription and revision by the theatrical manager.

¹ George Steevens claimed the Address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ for Ben Jonson, and cited in support of his contention many parallel passages from Jonson’s works. (See Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, vol. ii. pp. 663—675.) Prof. W. Dinsmore Briggs has on like doubtful grounds extended Jonson’s claim to the dedication (cf. The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 12, 1914, and April 22, 1915), but Mr. Percy Simpson has questioned Prof. Briggs’s conclusions on grounds that deserve acceptance (cf. ibid. Nov. 19, 1914, and May 20, 1915).

^J See p. 97 supra.

In spite of their heated disclaimer, the editors sought help too from the published Quartos. But most of the pieces were printed from hitherto unprinted copies which had been made for theatrical uses. Owing to the sudden destruction by fire of the Globe theatre in 1613 there were special difficulties in bringing material for the volume together. When the like disaster befel the Fortune theatre in 1621, we learn specifically that none of the theatrical manuscripts or prompt books escaped. Heminges, who was ‘book-keeper’ as well as general manager of the Globe, could only have replenished his theatrical library with copies of plays which were not at the date of the fire in his custody at the theatre. Two sources were happily available. Many transcripts were in the private possession of actors, and there were extant several ‘ fair copies ’ which the author or actor had according to custom procured for presentation to friends and patrons.¹

¹ Copies of plays were at times also preserved by the licenser of plays, who was in the habit of directing the ‘book-keeper’ of the theatre to supply him with ‘a fair copy’ of a play after he had examined and corrected the author’s manuscript. ‘A fair copy’ of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune (played in 1613) which was made for the licenser Sir Henry Herbert is in the Dyce Library at South Kensington ; a note in the licenser’s autograph states that the original manuscript was lost. Apart from pieces written by students for the Universities, all save some half-a-dozen autographs of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays seem to have disappeared, and the contemporary scrivener’s transcripts which survive are few. A good example of a private transscript made for a patron by a professional scribe is a draft of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant dated in 1625, which is preserved among the Wynn MSS. at Peniarth. Fair copies of like calibre of six plays of William Percy, a minor dramatist, were until lately in the Duke of Devonshire’s coUection, and nine plays avowedly prepared for a patron by their author Cosmo Manuche belonged in the eighteenth century to the Marquis of Northampton. Of private transcripts which were acquired and preserved by contemporary actors, two good specimens are a copy of The Telltale, an anonymous comedy in five acts, among the Dulwich College manuscripts, No. xx, and a copy of Middleton’s Witch among Malone’s MSS. at the Bodleian. The actor Alleyn’s manuscript copy of portions of Greene’s play of Orlando Furioso also at Dulwich (I. No. 138) presents many points of interest. The Egerton MS. 1994 contains as many as fifteen transcripts of plays, nearly all of which seem to answer the description of private transcripts made either

There are marked inequalities in the textual value of the thirty-six plays of the First Folio. The twenty newly published pieces vary greatly in authen- _T , _; tidty. ‘The Tempest,,’ ‘The Two Gentlemen value of Verona,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ °^f_e^® ‘Julius Caesar,’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ printed adhere, it would seem, very closely to the ^plays' form in which they came from the author’s pen. ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As You Like It,’ the three parts of ‘Henry VI,’ ‘King John,’ and ‘Henry VIII’ follow fairly accurate transcripts. But the remaining six pieces, ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘Cym- beline,’ and ‘Timon of Athens,’ are very corrupt versions and abound in copyists’ incoherences.

With regard to the sixteen plays of. which printed Quartos were available, the editors of the First Folio ignored eight of the preceding editions. Of The eight] ‘Richard III,’ ‘Merry Wives,’ ‘Henry V,’ neglected ‘Othello,’ ‘Lear,’ ‘2 Henry IV/ ‘Hamlet,’ and ^Quartos’ ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ all of which were in print, manuscript versions were alone laid under contribution by the Folio. The Quartos of ‘Richard III,’ ‘Merry Wives,’ and ‘Henry V’ lacked authentic value, and the Folio editors did good service in superseding them. Elsewhere their neglect of the Quartos reflects on their critical acumen. In the case of ‘Lear’ and ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ several passages of value which figure in

for actors or for their friends or patrons. The publisher, Humphrey Moseley, when he collected in a folio volume the unprinted plays of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, informed his readers that he ‘had the originalls from such as received them from the Authors themselves,’ that ‘when private friends desir’d a copy, they [i.e. the Actors] then (and justly too) transcribed what they Acted,’ and that ‘ ’twere vain to mention the chargeableness of this work [i.e. the cost of gathering the scattered plays for collective publication], for those who own’d the Manuscripts too well knew their value to make a cheap estimate of any of these Pieces.’ Moseley brought the ‘copy’ together after the theatres were closed and their libraries dispersed, but his references to the distribution of dramatic manuscripts and the manner of collecting them presume practices of old standing. See p. 552 n.

the Quartos are omitted by the Folio, and the Folio additions need supplementing before the texts can be reckoned complete. Similar relations subsist between the text of the Second Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ and the independent Folio version of the play. On the other hand, the new Folio text of ‘ Othello ’ improves on the Quarto text. The Folio text of ‘The Second Part of Henry IV’ supplies important passages absent from the Quarto; yet it is inferior to its predecessor in general accuracy.

Of the remaining eight Quartos substantial use was made by the Folio editors, in spite of the comprehensive The eight ^s^^ur which they cast on all pre-existing editions, reprinted At times the editors made additions chiefly Quartos. '_{n wa}y ₀f _st_ag_e directions to such Quarto texts as they employed. If the Quarto existed in more than one edition, the Folio editors usually accepted the guidance of a late issue, however its textual value compared with its predecessor. The only Quarto of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ — that of 1598 — was reproduced literally, but without scrupulous • care. ‘ A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ followed rather more carefully the text of Pavier’s (second) Quarto, which is said to have been falsely dated 1600. The Folio version of ‘Richard II’ follows the late (fourth) Quarto of 1615, which is for the most part less trustworthy than the first Quarto of ^IS97—iⁿ spite of the temporary suppression there of great part of the deposition scene first supplied in the third Quarto of 1608. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is taken from the third Quarto of 1609, and though the punctuation is improved and the stage directions are expanded, the Folio text shows some typographical degeneracy. The First Folio prints the 1611 (the third) Quarto of ‘Titus Andronicus’ with new stage directions, some textual alterations and some additions including one necessary scene (Act III. Sc. 2). ‘The First Part of Henry IV’ is printed from the fifth Quarto of 1613 with a good many corrections. ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is faithful to the 1600 or the earlier of two Quarto issues,

and ‘Much Ado’ is loyal to the only Quarto of 1600; in both cases new stage directions are added.

As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly and cor- xhetypog- rectly printed. It looks as though Jaggard’s ^raP^hy- printing office were undermanned. Proofs that the book was printed off without adequate supervision could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Passages in foreign languages are rarely intelligible, and testify with singular completeness to the proofreader’s inefficiency. Apart from misprints in the text, errors in pagination and in the signatures recur with embarrassing frequency. Many headlines are irregular. Capital letters irresponsibly distinguish words within the sentence, and although italic type is more methodically employed, the implicit rules are often disobeyed. The system of punctuation which was adopted by Jacobean printers of plays differed from our own; it would seem to have followed rhythmical rather than logical principles; commas, semicolons, colons, brackets and hyphens indicated the pauses which the rhythm required. But the punctuation of the First Folio often ignored all just methods.¹ The sheets seem to have been worked off very slowly, and corrections, as was common, were made while the press was working, so that the copies struck off later differ occasionally from the earlier copies.

An irregularity which is common to all copies is that ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ though in the body of the book it opens the section of tragedies, is not men- irregular tioned at all in the table of contents, and the ^c°P^ies- play'is unpaged except on its second and third pages, which bear the numbers 79 and 80.² Several copies are

¹ To Mr. Percy Simpson is due the credit of determining in his Shake

spearian Punctuation (1911) the true principles of Elizabethan and Jacobean punctuation.

³ Cf. p. 368 supra. Full descriptions of this and other irregularities of the First Folio are given in the present author’s Introduction to the Oxford facsimile of the First Folio, 1902,

distinguished by more interesting irregularities, in some cases unique. Copies in the Public Library in New York and the Barton collection in the Boston Public Library, like the copy sold in 1897 to an American collector by Bishop John Vertue, include’a cancel duplicate of a leaf of ‘As You Like It’ (sheet R of the Comedies).¹ In Bishop Samuel Butler’s copy, now in the National Library at Paris, a proof leaf of ‘Hamlet’ was bound up with the corrected leaf.² .

The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears in one of the two copies of the book which belonged to _The the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and is now Sheldon the property of Mr. Burdett-Coutts. This copy, ^copy' which is known as the Sheldon Folio, formed in the seventeenth century part of the library of the Sheldon family of Weston Manor in the parish of Long Compton, Warwickshire, not very far from Stratford- on-Avon.³ A subsequent owner was John Horne Tooke, the radical politician and philologist, who scattered about the margins of the volume many manuscript notes attesting an unqualified faith in the authenticity of the First Folio text.⁴ In the Sheldon Folio the opening page

¹ The copy in the New York Public Library was bought by Lenox the American collector at Sotheby’s in 1855 for 163/. 16s. He inserted a title-page (inlaid and bearing tie wilfully mutilated date 1622) from another copy, which had been described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821 (xxi. 449) as then in the possession of Messrs. J. and A. Arch, booksellers, of Cornhill.

² This is described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, xxi. 449^50.

⁸ The book would seem to have been acquired in 1628 by William

Sheldon of Weston (who was born there March 9, 1588-9, and died on April 9, 1659). Its next owner was apparently William Sheldon’s son, Ralph Sheldon) who was born on Aug. 4, 1623, and died without issue on June 24, 1684), and from him the book passed to his cousin and heir, also Ralph Sheldon, who died on Dec. 20, 1720. A note in a contemporary hand records that the copy was bought in 1628 for 31. 155., a somewhat extravagant price. A further entry says that it cost three score pounds of silver, i.e. pounds Scot (=60 shillings). The Sheldon family arms are on the sides of the volume. •

⁴ Horne Tooke, whose marginal notes interpret difficult words, correct misprints, or suggest new readings, presented the volume in 1810 to his friend Sir Francis Burdett. On Sir Francis’s death in 1844 it passed to his only son, Sir Robert Burdett, whose sister, the late Baroness

of ‘Troiius and Cressida,’ of which the recto or front is occupied by the prologue and the Verso or back by the opening lines of the text of the play, is followed by a superfluous leaf. On the recto or front of the unnecessary leaf¹ are printed the concluding lines of'‘Romeo and Juliet’ in place of the prologue to ‘Troiius and Cressida.’ At the back or verso are the opening lines of ‘Troiius and Cressida’ repeated from the preceding page. The presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page proves that the two are taken from different settings of the type. At a later page in the Sheldon copy the concluding lines of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are duly reprinted at the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, which supplies them in their right place, is the opening passage, as in other copies, of ‘Timon of Athens.’ These curious confusions attest that while the work was in course of composition the printers or editors of the volume at one time intended to place ‘Troiius and Cressida,’ with the prologue omitted, after ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ The last page of ‘ Romeo and Juliet ’ is in all copies numbered 79, an obvious misprint for 77; the first leaf of ‘Troiius’ is unpaged; but the second and third pages of ‘Troiius’ are numbered 79 and 80. It was doubtless determined suddenly while the volume was in the press to transfer ‘Troiius and Cressida’ to the head of the tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the further extensive

Burdett-Coutts, inherited it on Sit Robert’s death in 1880. In his ‘Diversions of Purley’ (ed. 1840, p. 338) Horne Tooke wrote thus of the First Folio which he studied m this copy: ‘The First Folio, in my opinion, is the only edition worth regarding. And it is much to be wished, that an edition of Shakespeare were given literatim according to the first Folio; which is now become so scarce and dear, that few persons can ohtain it. For, by the presumptuous licence of the dwarfish commentators, who are for ever cutting him down to their own size, we risque the loss of Shakespeare’s genuine text; which that Folio assuredly contains; notwithstanding some few slight errors of the press, which might be noted, without altering.’

¹ It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3.

correction of the pagination that was required by the , play’s change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to go forth unnumbered.¹ ,

Yet another copy of the First Folio presents unique features of a different kind of interest. Mr. Coningsby ’ Sibthorp of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, pos- , presenta- sesses a copy which has been in the library of his I of°the°^Py family for more than a century, and is beyond First doubt one of the very earliest that came from , f°h°. thg press of the printer William Jaggard. The title-page, which bears Shakespeare’s portrait, shows the plate in an early state, and the engraving is printed with unusual firmness and clearness. Although the copy is not at all points perfect and several leaves have been supplied in facsimile, it is a taller copy than any other, being thirteen and a half inches high, and thus nearly half an inch superior in stature to that of any other known copy. The binding, rough calf, is partly original; and on the title-page is a manuscript inscription, in contemporary handwriting of indisputable authenticity, attesting that the copy was a gift to an intimate friend by the printer Jaggard. The inscription reads thus:

The fragment of the original binding is stamped with an heraldic device, in which a muzzled bear holds a banner in its left paW and in its right a squire’s helmet. There is a crest of a bear’s head above, and beneath is a scroll with the motto ‘Augusta Vincenti’ {i.e. ‘proud things to the conqueror ’). This motto proves to be a pun on the name of the owner of the heraldic badge — Augustine Vincent, a highly respected official of the College of Arms, who is

¹ The copy of the First Folio, which belonged to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, of New York, contains a like irregularity. See the present writer’s Census of Extant Copies of the First Folio, a supplement to the Facsimile Reproduction (Oxford, 1902).

known from independent sources to have been, at the date of the publication, in intimate relations with the printer of the First Folio.¹ It is therefore clear that it was to Augustine Vincent that Jaggard presented as a free gift one of the first copies of this great volume which came from his press. The inscription on the title-page is in Vincent’s handwriting.

A copy of the Folio delivered in sheets by the Stationers’ Company late in 1623 to the librarian of the Bodleian, Oxford, was sent for binding to an _The Oxford binder on February 17, 1623-4, and, Turhutt being duly returned to the library, was chained ^copy' to the shelves. The volume was sold by the curators of

¹ Shortly before this great Shakespearean enterprise was undertaken, Vincent the Herald and Jaggard the printer had been jointly the object of a violent and slanderous attack by a perverse-tempered personage named Ralph Brooke. This Brooke was one of Vincent’s colleagues at the College of Arms. He could never forgive the bestowal, some years earlier, of an office superior to his own on an outsider, a stranger to the College, William Camden, the distinguished writer on history and archaeology. From that time forth he made it the business of his life to attack in print Camden and his friends, of whom Vincent was one. He raised objection to the grant of arms to Shakespeare, for which Camden would seem to have been mainly responsible (see pp. 281 seq. supra). His next step was to compile and publish a Catalogue of the Nobility, a sort of controversial Peerage, in which he claimed, with abusive vigour, to expose Camden and his friends’ ignorance of the genealogies of the

¹ great families of England. Brooke’s book was printed in i6rg by Jaggard. The Camden faction discovered in it abundance of discreditable errors. The errors were due, Brooke replied, in a corrected edition of 1622, to the incompetence of his printer Jaggard. Then Augustine Vincent, Camden’s friend, the first owner of the Sibthorp copy of the First Folio, set himself to prove Brooke’s pretentious incompetence and malignity. Jaggard, who resented Brooke’s aspersions on his professional skill in typography, not only printed and published Vincent’s Discovery of Brooke’s Errors, as Vincent entitled his reply, but inserted in Vincent’s volume a personal vindication of his printing-office from Brooke’s strictures. Vincent’s denunciation of Brooke, to which Jaggard contributed his caustic preface, was published in 1622, and gave Brooke his quietus. Incidentally, Jaggard and his ally Vincent avenged Brooke’s criticism of the great dramatist’s right to the arms that the Heralds’ College, at the instance of Vincent’s friend Camden, had granted him long before. It was appropriate that Jaggard when he next year engaged in the great enterprise of the Shakespeare First Folio should present his friend and fellow-victor in the recent strife with an early copy of the volume. (See art. by present writer in Comhill Magazine, April 1899.)

the Bodleian as a duplicate on purchasing a copy of the Third Folio in 1664; but it was in 1906 re-purchased for the Bodleian from Mr. W. G. Turbutt of Ogsdon Hall, Derbyshire, an ancestor of whom seems to have acquired it soon after it left the Bodleian Library. The portrait is from the plate in its second state.¹

The First Folio is intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English literature, and extrin-

. sically is only exceeded in value by some halfnumber of dozen volumes of far earlier date and of ex- ^exti?^nt ceptional typographical interest. The original edition probably numbered 500 copies. Of these more than one hundred and eighty are now traceable, one-third of them being in America.² Several of the extant copies are very defective, and most have undergone extensive reparation. Only fourteen are in a quite perfect state, that is, with the portrait printed (not inlaid) on the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured. (The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson’s verses attesting the truthfulness of the portrait.) Excellent copies which remain in Great Britain in this enviable state are in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the libraries of the Earl of Crawford and Mr. W. A. Burdett- Coutts. Two other copies of equal merit, which were formerly the property of A. H. Huth and the Duke of Devonshire respectively, have recently passed to America. The Huth copy was presented to Yale University by Mr. A. W. Cochran in 1911. The Duke’s famous copy became the property of Mr. Archer Huntington of New

¹ The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare, by F. Madan, G. R. M. Turbutt, and S. Gibson, Oxford, 1903, fol. A second copy of the First Folio in the Bodleian is in the Malone collection and has been in the library since 1821.

² One hundred and sixty copies in various conditions were described by me in the Census of Extant Copies appended to the Oxford Facsimile of the First Folio (1902), and fourteen additional copies in Notes and Additions to the Census, 1906. Six further copies have since come under my notice. Of fourteen first-rate copies which were in England in 1902, five have since been sold to American collectors.

:York in 19x4. A good but somewhat inferior copy, formerly the property of Frederick Locker-Lampson of Rowfant, was bequeathed in 1913 to Harvard University by Harry Elkins Widener of Philadelphia. Several good copies of the volume have lately been acquired by Mr. H. C. Folger of New York.

On the continent of Europe three copies of the First Folio are known. One is in the Royal Library at Berlin, and another in the Library of Padua University, continen- but both of these are imperfect; the third copy, ^{tal c}°P^ies- which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, is perfect save that the preliminary verses and title-page are mounted.¹

The ‘Daniel’ copy which belonged to the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and is on the whole the finest and cleanest extant, measures 13! inches by 8j, and was . purchased by the Baroness for 716/. 2s. at vaffe'oP the sale of George Daniel’s library in 1864.

This comparatively small sum was long the highest price paid for the book. A perfect copy, measuring i2j\ inches by 7j|, fetched 840/. (4200 dollars) at the sale of Mr. Brayton Ives’s library in New York, in March 1891. A copy, measuring 13! inches by 8f, was privately purchased for more than 10001, by the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, of New York, in June 1899, of Mr. C. J. Toovey, bookseller, of Piccadilly, London. A copy measuring 12! inches by 8f, which had long been in Belgium, was purchased by Mr. Bernard Buchanan Macgeorge, of Glasgow, for I’jool., at a London sale, July 11, 1899, and was in June 1905 sold, with copies of the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, to Mr.. Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, U.S.A., for an aggregate sum of 10,000/. On March 23, 1907, the copy of the First Folio formerly in the library of the late Frederick Locker, ¹ The Paris copy was bought at the sale of Samuel Butler, Bishop of Lichfield, in 1840, together with copies of the other three Polios; the First Folio-sold for 1875 francs (751.) and each of the others for 500 francs (20/.). (M. Jusserand in Athenaum, August 8, 1908.)

Lampson, of Rowfant, and now at Harvard, fetched at Sotheby’s 3600/.; this is the largest sum yet realised at public auction.¹

The Second Folio edition was printed in 1632 by Thomas Cotes for a syndicate of five stationers, John _The Smethwick, William Aspley, Richard Hawkins, Second Richard Meighen and Robert Allot, each of ^Folio- whose names figures separately with their various addresses as publisher on different copies. Copies supplying Meighen’s name as publisher are very rare. To Allot, whose name is most often met with on the title- page, Blount had transferred, on November 16, 1630, his rights in the sixteen plays which were first licensed for publication in 1623.² The Second Folio was reprinted from the First; a few corrections were made in the text, but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless, and prove the editor’s incompetence.³ Charles I’s copy is at Windsor, and Charles II’s at the British Museum. The ‘Perkins Folio,’ formerly in the Duke of Devonshire’s possession, in which John Payne Collier introduced forged emendations, was a copy of that of 1632.⁴ The highest

¹ A reprint of the First Folio unwarrantedly purporting to be exact was published in 1807-8; it bears the imprint ‘E. and J. Wright. St. John’s Square [Clerkenwell].’ The best type-reprint was issued in three parts by Lionel Booth in 1861, 1863, and 1864. A photo-zincographic reproduction, by Sir Henry James and Howard Staunton, appeared in sixteen parts (Feb. 1864-Oct. 1865). A greatly reduced photographic facsimile followed in 1876, with a preface by Halliwell-Phillipps. In 1902 the Oxford University Press issued a collotype facsimile of the Duke of Devonshire’s copy at Chatsworth, with introduction and a census of copies by the present writer. Notes and Additions to the Census followed in 1906.

² Arber, Stationers’ Registers, iii. 242-3.

³ Malone examined, once for all, the textual alterations of the Second Folio in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1790). See Variorum Shakespeare, 1821; i. 208-26.

⁴ On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the Athenaum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ‘Tho Perkins his Booke,’ was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ‘essential’ manuscript readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire.

price paid at public auction is 1350/., which was reached at the sale in New York of Robert Hoe’s Library on May 3, 1911; the copy bore Allot’s imprint. Mr. Macgeorge acquired for 5401, at the Earl of Oxford’s sale in 1895 the copy formerly belonging to George Daniel; this passed to Mr. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1905 with copies of the First, Third, and Fourth Folios for 10,0001.

The Third Folio — mainly a reprint of the Second — was first published in 1663 by Philip Chetwynde, who reissued it next year with the addition of seven _The plays, six of which have no claim to admission Third among Shakespeare’s works.¹ ‘Unto this im- ^Folio' pression,’ runs the title-page of 1664, ‘is added seven Playes never before printed in folio, viz.: Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigal. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine.’ Shakespeare’s partial responsibility for ‘Pericles’ justified a place among his works, but its six companions in the Third Folio were all spurious pieces which had been attributed by unprincipled publishers to Shakespeare in his lifetime. Fewer copies of the Third Folio are reputed to be extant than of the Second or Fourth, owing (according to George Steevens) to the destruction of many unsold impressions in the Fire of London in 1666. On June 1, 1907, a copy of the 1663 impression fetched at Sotheby’s 1550/., and on May 3, 1911, a copy of the 1664 impression fetched at the sale in New York of Robert Hoe’s library the large sum of 3300/.

A warm controversy followed, but in 1859 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, of the British Museum, in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth- century hand.

¹ The 1633 impression has the imprint ‘Printed for Philip Chetwynde’ and that of 1664 ‘Printed for P. C.’ The 1664 impression removes the portrait from the title-page, and prints it as a frontispiece on the leaf facing the title, with Ben Jonson’s verses below, The Fourth Folio adopts the same procedure.

The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 ‘for H. Herringman,

E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,’ reprints the _The folio of 1664 without change except in the way Fourth of modernising the spelling, and of increasing the number of initial capitals within the sentence.¹ Two hundred and fifteen pounds is the highest price yet reached by the Fourth Folio at public auction.

¹ In the imprint of many copies Chiswell’s name is omitted. In a few copies the imprint has the rare variant: ‘Printed for H. Herringman, and are to be sold by Joseph Knight and Francis Saunders, at the Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange.’

EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

Dryden in his ‘Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the last Age’ (1672)¹ expressed surprise at the reverence extended to Shakespeare in view of the fact that every . page in the accessible editions presented some ties^Pof^X1~ ‘solecism in speech or some notorious flaw in ^®_t®^arIy sense.’ Many of the defects which Dryden ’ imputed to the early texts were due to misapprehension either of the forms of Elizabethan or Jacobean speech or of the methods of Elizabethan or Jacobean typography. Yet later readers of the Folios or Quartos^ who were better versed than Dryden in literary archaeology, echoed his complaint. 'It was natural that, as Shakespearean study deepened, efforts should be made to remove from the printed text the many perplexities which were due to the early printers’ spelling vagaries, their misreadings of the ‘ copy,’ and their inability to reproduce intelligently any sentence in a foreign language.

The work of textual purgation began very early in the eighteenth Century and the Folio versions, which at the time enjoyed the widest circulation, chiefly engaged editorial ingenuity. The eighteenth- eenth-cen- century editors of the collected works en- ^_ors deavoured with varying degrees of success to free the text of the incoherences of the Folios. Before long they acknowledged a more or less binding obligation to restore, where good taste or good sense required it, the readings of the neglected Quartos. Since 1685,

- ¹ Dryden’s ‘Essay' was also entitled Defence of the Epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada: see Dryden’s Essays, ed. Ker, i. 165-

when the Fourth Folio appeared, some two hundred independent editions of the collected works have been published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many thousand editions of separate plays. The vast figures bear witness to the amount of energy and ingenuity which the textual emendation and elucidation of Shakespeare have engaged. The varied labours of the eighteenth-century editors were in due time co-ordinated and winnowed by their successors of the nineteenth century. In the result Shakespeare’s work has been made intelligible to successive generations of general readers untrained in criticism, and the universal significance of his message has suffered little from textual imperfections and difficulties.

A sound critical method was not reached rapidly.¹ Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne’s Nicholas reig¹¹; ^and poet laureate to George I, made the Rowe, first attempt to edit the work of Shakespeare. 1674-1718. jj_e p_rod_uce(j _an edition of his plays in six octavo volumes in 1709, and another hand added a seventh volume which included the poems (1710) and an essay on the drama by a critic of some contemporary repute, Charles Gildon. A new impression in eight volumes followed in 1714, again with a supplementary (ninth) volume adding the poems and a critical essay by Gildon. Rowe prefixed a valuable life of the poet embodying traditions which were in danger of perishing without a record. The great actor Betterton visited Stratford in order to supply Rowe with local information.² His

¹ A useful account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by the late Dr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of National Biography supply much information. See also Eighteenth- century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith, 1903; T. R. Louns- bury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (Pope and Theobald), 1906; and Ernest Walder, The Text of Shakespeare, in Cambridge History of Literature, vol. v. pt. i. pp. 258-82.

² John Hughes, the poetaster, who edited Spenser, corrected the proofs of the 1714 edition and supplied an index or glossary (Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 677).

text , mainly followed that of the Fourth Folio. The plays were printed in the same order, and ‘Pericles’ and the six spurious pieces were brought together at the end. Rowe made no systematic study of the First Folio or of the Quartos, but in the case of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he met with an early Quarto while his edition was passing through the press and he inserted at the end of the play the prologue which is met with only in the Quartos. A late Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ (1676) also gave him some suggestions. He made a few happy emendations, some of which coincide accidentally with the readings of the First Folio; but his, text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis persona to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected and modernised.

The poet Pope was Shakespeare’s second editor. His edition in six spacious quarto volumes was completed in 1725, and was issued by the chief publisher Alexander of the day Jacob Tonson. ‘Pericles’ and the Pope, six spurious plays were excluded. The [poems, ^{1 I744}‘ edited by Dr. George Sewell, with an essay on the rise and progress of the stage, and a glossary, appeared in an independent- seventh volume. In his preface Pope, while he fully recognised Shakespeare’s native genius, deemed his achievement deficient in artistic quality. Pope had indeed few qualifications for his task, and the venture, moreover, was a commercial failure. His claim to have collated the text of the Fourth Folio with that of all preceding editions cannot be accepted. There are indications that he had access to the First Folio and to some of the Quartos. But it is clear that Pope based his text substantially on that of Rowe. His innovations are numerous, and although they are derived from ‘his private sense and conjecture,’ are often plausible and ingenious. He was the first to indicate the ‘ place ’ of each

new scene, and he improved on Rowe’s scenic subdivision. A second edition of Pope’s version in ten duodecimo volumes appeared in 1728 with Sewell’s name on the title-page, as well as Pope’s; the ninth volume supplied ‘Pericles’ and the six spurious plays. There were very few alterations in the text, though a preliminary table supplied a list of twenty-eight Quartos, which Pope claimed to have consulted. In 1734 the publisher Tonson issued all the plays in Pope’s text in separate i2mo. volumes which were distributed at a low price by book-pedlars throughout the country.¹ A fine reissue of Pope’s edition was printed on Garrick’s suggestion at Birmingham from Baskerville’s types in 1768.

Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, although contemptible as a writer of original verse and Lewis prose, proved himself the most inspired of all Theobald, the textual critics of Shakespeare. Pope 1688-1744- _savag_eiy avenged himself on his censor by holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the original edition of the ‘Dunciad’ in 1728. Theobald first displayed his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which deserves to rank as a classic in English literature. The title runs ‘Shakespeare Restored, or a specimen of the many errors as well committed as unamended by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet, designed not only to correct the said edition but to restore the true reading of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet publish’d.’ There at page 137 appears the classical emendation in Shakespeare’s account of Falstaff’s death (‘Henry V,’ n. iii. 17):“ His nose was as sharp as a pen and a’ babbled of green fields,’ in place of the reading in the old copies, ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.’² In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of

¹ This was the first attempt to distribute Shakespeare’s complete works in a cheap form and proved so successful that a rival publisher R. Walker ‘of the Shakespeare’s Head, London’ started a like venture in rivalry also in 1734. Tonson denounced Walker’s edition as a corrupt piracy, and Walker retorted on Tonson with the identical charge.

² Theobald does not claim the invention of this conjecture. He

Shakespeare in seven volumes. In 1740 it reached a second issue. A third edition was published in 1752. Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold.¹ Theobald made a just use of the First Folio and of the contemporary Quartos, yet he did not disdain altogether Pope’s discredited version, and his ‘gift of conjecture’ led him to reject some correct readings of the original editions. Over 300 original corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have, however, become part and parcel of the authorised canon.

In dealing with admitted corruptions Theobald remains unrivalled, and he has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism.² His principles of textual criticism were as enlightened as his practice was ordinarily triumphant. ‘I ever labour,’ he wrote to Warburton, ‘to make the smallest deviation that I possibly can from the text; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.’ The following are favourable specimens of Theobald’s insight. In ‘ Macbeth ’ (1. vii. 6) for ‘ this bank and school of time,’ he substituted the familiar ‘bank and shoal of time,’ and he first gave the witches the epithet ‘weird’ which he derived from Holinshed, therewith supplanting the ineffective ‘weyward’ of the First Folio. In ‘An-

writes ‘I have an edition of Shakespeare by Me with some Marginal Conjectures of a Gentleman sometime deceas’d, and he is of the Mind to correct the Passage thus.’

¹ Theobald’s editorial fees amounted to 6521. 10s., a substantial sum when contrasted with 36/. ios. granted to Rowe (together with 281, p. to his assistant, John Hughes), and with 217I. 12s. received by Pope, whose assistants received 78/. us. 6d. Of later eighteenth- century editors, Warburton received 360/., Dr. Johnson 480/., and Capell 3001. Cf. Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, vol. ii;

P- ⁶77- ...

^a Churton Collins’s admirable essay on Theobald’s textual criticism of Shakespeare, entitled ‘The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,’is reprinted from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq.

tony and Cleopatra’ the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony:

For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t; an Anthony it was That grew the more by reaping.

For the gibberish ‘an Anthony it was,’ Theobald read ‘an autumn ’twas,’ and thus gave the lines true point and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in ‘Coriolanus’ (n. i. 59-60) when Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version ‘ what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?’ Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet ‘besom’ by ‘bisson’ (i.e. purblind) , a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ‘Hamlet’ (11. ii. 529).¹

The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hanmer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing _s;r a large measure of mother wit. He was Speaker

Thomas of the House of Commons for a few months in Kanmer^ 1714, and retiring soon afterwards from public ’ life devoted his leisure to a thoroughgoing scrutiny of Shakespeare’s plays. His edition, which was the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was finely printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, and was long highly valued by book collectors. No editor’s name was given. In forming his text, which he claimed to have ‘carefully revised and corrected from the former editions,’ Hanmer founded his edition on the work of Pope and Theobald and he adopted many of their conjectures. He made no recourse to the old copies.

¹ Collier doubtless followed Theobald’s hint when he pretended to have found in his ‘Perkins Folio’ the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of ‘bisson multitude’ for ‘bosom multiplied’ in Coriolanus’s speech:

How shall this bisson multitude digest

The senate’s courtesy? — Coriolanus (m. i. 131-2).

At the same time his own ingenuity was responsible for numerous original alterations and in the result he supplied a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted.¹ Hanmer’s edition was reprinted in 17 70-1.

In 1747 William Warburton, a blustering divine of multifarious reading, who was a friend of Pope and became Bishop of Gloucester in 1759, produced . a new edition of Shakespeare in eight volumes, warbur- on the title-pages of which he joined Pope’s name with his own. Warburton had smaller ^{1 9 I779}' qualification for the task than Pope, whose labours he eulogised extravagantly. He boasted of his own performance that ‘ the Genuine Text (collated with all the former editions and then corrected and emended) is here settled.’ It is doubtful if he examined any early texts. He worked on the editions of Pope and Theobald, making occasional reference to Hanmer. He is credited with a few sensible emendations, e.g. ‘Being a god, kissing carrion,’ in place of ‘Being a good kissing carrion’ of former editions of ‘Hamlet’ (11. ii. 182). But such improvements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald or Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. Most of his reckless changes defied all known principles of Elizabethan speech, and he justified them by arguments of irrelevant pedantry. The Bishop was consequently criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers; among them, by Thomas Edwards, a country gentleman of much literary discrimination, whose witty ‘Supplement to Warburton’s

¹A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King Lear, m. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar’s enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line ‘Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].’ For the last word Hanmer substituted ‘lym,’ which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound. In Hamlet (iii. rv. 4) Hanmer first substituted Polonius’s ‘I’ll sconce me here’ for ‘I’ll silence me here’ (of the Quartos and Folios), and in Midsummer Night’s Dream (1. i. 187), Helena’s ‘ Your words I catch ’ for ‘ Yours would I catch’ (of the Quartos and Folios).

Edition of Shakespeare’ first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed ‘The Canons of Criticism’ next year in the third edition, passed through as many as seven editions by 1765.

Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition in eight volumes in 1765, and a second issue followed _Dr three years later. Although he made some

Johnson, independent collation of the Quartos and 1709-1784. _rest_ore(j some passages which the Folios ignored, his textual labours were slight, and his verbal notes, however felicitous at times, show little close knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. But in his preface and elsewhere he displays a genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare’s greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to indicate convincingly Shakespeare’s triumphs of characterisation. Dr. Johnson’s praise is always helpful, although his blame is often arbitrary and misplaced.¹

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, who long filled the office of Examiner of Plays, advanced on his predecessors Edward ^manY respects. He was a clumsy writer,

Capell, and Johnson declared, with some justice, 1713-1781. that he ‘gabbled monstrously,’ but his collation of the Quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his forerunners, not excepting Theobald. He also first studied with care the principles of Shakespeare’s metre. Although his conjectural changes are usually clumsy his industry was untiring; he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. Capell’s edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768. He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled ‘Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,’ which were not published till 1783, two years after his death. The last volume, ‘The School of Shakespeare,’ supplied

‘authentic extracts' from English books of the poet’s day.¹

George Steevens, a literary knight-errant whose saturnine humour involved him in a lifelong series of quarrels with rival students of Shakespeare, made in- _George valuable contributions to Shakespearean study, steevens, In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from ^i736_i8o°- copies of the Quartos which' Garrick lent him. Soon afterwards he revised Johnson’s edition without much assistance from the Doctor, and his revision, which accepted many of Capell’s hints and embodied numerous original improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 1773. It was long regarded as the standard version. Steevens’s antiquarian knowledge alike of Elizabethan history and literature was greater than that of any previous editor; his citations of parallel passages from the writings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, in elucidation of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors. All commentators of recent times are more deeply indebted in this department of their labours to Steevens than to any other critic. But he lacked taste as well as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, ‘ the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.’² The second edition of Johnson and Steevens’s version appeared in ten volumes in 1778. The third edition, published in ten volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens’s friend, Isaac Reed (1742-1807), a scholar of his own type. The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens’s lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying

¹ Capell gave to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1779, bis valuable Shakespearean library, of which an excellent catalogue (‘ Capell’s Shake- speareana’), prepared for the College by Mr. W. W. Greg, was privately

issued in 1903.

² Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7.

those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended. He had known and quarrelled with both. Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied to him of ‘the Puck of Commentators.’

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens’s quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archas- Edmund ologist, without much ear for poetry or delicate Malone, literary taste. He threw abundance of new 1741-1812. ijght _on Shakespeare’s biography and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone is due the first rational ‘attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.’ His earliest conclusions on the topic were contributed to' Steevens’s edition of 1778. Two years later he published, as a ‘Supplement’ to Steevens’s work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Brake’s ‘Romeus and Juliet,’ Shakespeare’s Poems, ‘Pericles’ and the six plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed. ,In 1787 Malone issued ‘A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,’ tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts. ‘ Pericles,’ together with all Shakespeare’s poems, was here first admitted to the authentic canon, while the six spurious companions of ‘Pericles’ (in the Third and Fourth Folios) were definitely excluded.¹

¹ The series of editions with which Johnson, Steevens, Reed and Malone were associated inaugurated Shakespearean study in America.

What is known among booksellers as the ‘First Variorum’ edition of Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens’s friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens’s variorum death. It was based on a copy of Steevens’s editions, work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous manuscript additions, and it embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was published in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The ‘Second Variorum’ edition, which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 1813. The ‘Third Variorum’ was prepared for the press by James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson’s biographer. It was based on Malone’s edition of 1790, but included massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by Malone at his death. Malone had been long engaged on a revision of his edition, but died in-1812, before it was completed. Boswell’s ‘Malone,’ as the new work is often called,' appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1821.

The first edition to be printed in America was begun in Philadelphia in 1795. It was completed in eight volumes next year. The title-page claimed that the text was ‘corrected from the latest and best London editions, with notes by Samuel Johnson.’ The inclusion of the poems suggests that Malone’s edition of 1790 was mainly followed. This Philadelphia edition of 1795-6 proved the parent of an enormous family in the United States. An edition of Shakespeare from the like text appeared at Boston for the first time in 8 volumes, being issued by Mun- rae and Francis in 1802-4. The same firm published at Boston in 1807 the variorum edition of 1803 which they reissued in 1810-2. Two other Boston editions from the text of Isaac Reed followed in 1813, one in one large volume and the other in six volumes. An edition on original lines by E. W. B. Peabody appeared in seven volumes at Boston in 1836. At New York the first edition of Shakespeare was issued by Collins and Hanney in 1821 in ten volumes and it reappeared in 1824. Meanwhile further editions appeared at Philadelphia in 1809 (in 17 vols.) and in 1823 (in 8 vols.). Of these early American editions only the Boston edition of 1813 (in 6 vols.) is in the British Museum. (See Catalogue of the Barton Collection in the Boston Public Library by J. M. Hubhard, Boston 1880.) The first wholly original critical edition to be undertaken in America appeared in New York in serial parts 1844-6 under the direction of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870), Vice-Chancellor of the University of New York, with woodcuts after previously published designs of Kenny Meadows, William Harvey, and others; Verplanck’s edition reappeared in three volumes at New York in 1847 and was long the standard American edition.

It is the most valuable of all collective editions of Shakespeare’s works. The three volumes of prolegomena, and the illustrative notes concluding the final volume, form a rich storehouse of Shakespearean criticism and of biographical, historical and bibliographical information, derived from all manner of first-hand sources. Unluckily the vast material is confusedly arranged and is unindexed; many of the essays and notes break off abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone’s death.

A new ‘ Variorum ’ edition, on an exhaustive scale, was undertaken by Mr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, The new who between 1871 and his death in 1912 prevariorum. p_are(j f_or publication the fifteen plays, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Hamlet,’ 2 vols., ‘King Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Merchant of Venice,’ ‘As You Like It,’ ‘Tempest,’ ‘Misdummer Night’s Dream,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘Much Ado,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Mr. Furness, who based his text on the First Folio, not merely brought together the apparatus criticus of his predecessors, but added a large amount of shrewd original comment. Mr. Furness’s son, Horace Howard Furness, junior, edited on his father’s plan ‘Richard III’ in 1908, and since his father’s death he is continuing the series; ‘Julius Caesar’ was published in

1913-

Of nineteenth-century editors who have prepared collective editions of Shakespeare’s work with original _N!ne_ annotations those who have best pursued the teenth- exhaustive tradition of the eighteenth century Sftonf ^are Alexander Dyce, Howard Staunton, Nikolaus Delius, and the Cambridge editors William George Clark (1821-1878) and William Aldis Wright (1836-1914). All exemplify a tendency to conciseness which is in marked contrast with the expansiveness of the later eighteenth-century commentaries.

Alexander Dyce was almost as well read as Steevens in Elizabethan literature, and especially in the drama of the period, and his edition of Shakespeare in nine volumes, first published in 1857, ha.s many new and _Alexatlder valuable illustrative notes and a few good Dyce, textual emendations, as well as a useful glos- ⁱ’^,9^8-i869- sary; but Dyce’s annotations are not always adequate, and often tantalise the reader by their brevity. Howard Staunton’s edition first appeared in three _Howard volumes between 1868 and 1870. He also was Staunton, well read in contemporary literature and was ^1810-18?4' an acute textual critic. His introductions bring together much interesting stage history. Nikolaus Delius’s edition was issued at Elberfeld in seven volumes _Nikoi_aus between 1854 and 1861. Delius’s text, al- Delius, though it is based mainly on the Folios, does ^i8i3_i888- not neglect the Quartos and is formed on sound critical principles.' A fifth edition in two volumes appeared in 1882. The Cambridge edition, which first appeared in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866, Cambridge exhaustively notes the textual variations of all preceding editions, and supplies the best and ' fullest apparatus criticus. (Of new editions, one dated 1887 is also in nine volumes, and another, dated 1893, in forty volumes.)¹

The labours of other editors of the complete annotated works of Shakespeare whether of the nineteenth or of the twentieth century present, in spite of zeal and other nine- learning, fewer distinctive features than those century or of the men who have been already named. The ^“_u^tieth" long list includes ² Samuel Weller Singer (1826, editions.

¹ A recent useful contribution to textual study is the Bankside edition of 21 selected plays (New York Sh. Soc. 1888-1906,- 21 vols.) under the general editorship of Mr. Appleton Morgan. The First Folio text of the plays is printed on parallel pages with the earlier versions either of the Quartos or of older plays on which Shakespeare’s work is based. The ‘Bankside Restoration’ Shakespeare, under the same general editorship and published by the same Society, similarly contrasts the Folio texts with that of the Restoration adaptations (5 vols. 1907-8).

* The following English editors, although their complete editions

10 vols., printed at the Chiswick Press for William Pickering, with a life of the poet by Dr. Charles Symmons, illustrated by wood engravings by John Thompson after Stothard and others; reissued in New York in 1843 ^and in London in 1856 with essays by William Watkiss Lloyd); Charles Knight, with discursive notes and pictorial illustrations by William Harvey,

F. W. Fairholt, and others (‘Pictorial edition,’ 8 vols., including biography and the doubtful plays, 1838-43, often reissued under different designations); the Rev. H. N. Hudson, Boston, U. S. A., 1851-6, 11 vols. i6mo. (revised and reissued as the Harvard edition, Boston, 1881, 20 vols.); J. 0. Halliwell (1853-61, 15 vols. fplio, with an encyclopaedic ‘variorum’ apparatus of annotations and pictorial illustrations); Richard Grant White (Boston, U. S. A., 1857-65, 12 vols., reissued as the ‘Riverside’ Shakespeare, Boston, 1901, 3 vols.); W. J. Rolfe (New York, 1871-96, 40 vols.); F. A. Marshall with the aid of various contributors (‘ The Henry Irving Shakespeare/ which has useful notes on stage history, 1880-90, 8 vols.); Prof. Israel Gollancz (‘The Temple Shakespeare,’ with concise annotations, 1894-6, 40 vols., nmo.); Prof. C. H. Herford (‘The Eversley Shakespeare,’ 1899, ¹⁰ vols., 8vo.); Prof. Edward Dowden, W. J. Craig, Prof. R. H. Case (‘The Arden Shakespeare,’ 1899-1915, in progress, 31 vols., each undertaken by a different contributor); Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke (‘The First Folio’ Shakespeare with very full annotation, New York, 1903, 13 vols., and 1912, 40 vols.); Sir Sidney Lee (The ‘Renaissance’ Shakespeare, University Press of Cambridge, Mass., 1907-10, 40 vols.; with general introduction and annotations by the editor and separate introductions

have now lost their hold on students’ attention, are worthy of mention: William Harness (1825, 8 vols.); Bryan Waller Procter, i.e. Barry Cornwall (1839-43, 3 vols.), illustrated by Kenny Meadows; John Payne Collier (1841-4, 8 vols.; another edition, 8 vols., privately printed, 1878, 4to); and Samuel Phelps, the actor ^852-4, 2 vols.; another edition, 1882-4).

to the plays and poems by various hands; reissued in London as the ‘Caxton’ Shakespeare, 1910, 20 vols.).¹

¹ Finely printed complete (but unannotated) texts of recent date are the ‘Edinburgh Folio’ edition, ed. W. E. Henley and Walter Raleigh (Edinburgh, 1901-4, 10 vols.), and the ‘Stratford Town’ edition, ed. A. H. Bullen, with an appendix of essays (Stratford-on-Avon, 1904-7, 10 vols.). The ‘Old Spelling Shakespeare,’ ed. F. J. Fumivall and

F. W. Clarke, M.A., preserves the orthography of the authentic Quartos and Folios; seventeen volumes have appeared since 1904 and others are in preparation.

Of one-volume editions of the unannotated text, the best are the ‘Globe,’ edited by W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright (r864, and constantly reprinted — since 1891 with a new glossary); the ‘Leopold’ from Delius’s text, with preface by F. J. Fumivall (1876); and the ‘Oxford,’ edited by W. J. Craig (1894). .

SHAKESPEARE’S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

Shakespeare defied at every stage in his career the laws of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the _shak unities of time, place, and action. The formal speare critics of his day zealously championed the an-

^a,^nd‘^h.^e cient rules, and viewed infringement of them

classicists ^u

with distrust. But the force of Shakespeare’s genius — its revelation of new methods of dramatic art — was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways; and even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by contemporary playgoers, cultured and uncultured alike. The unauthorised publishers of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they prefaced that ambiguous work with the note: ‘ This author’s comedies are so framed to the life that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies.’ Shakespeare’s literary eminence was abundantly recognised while he lived. At the period of his death no mark of honour was denied his'name. Dramatists and poets echoed his phrases; cultured men and women of fashion studied his works; preachers cited them in the pulpit in order to illustrate or enforce the teachings of Scripture.¹

¹ According to contemporary evidence, Nicholas Richardson, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in a sermon which he twice preached in the University church (in 1620 and 1621) cited Juliet’s speech from

586

The editors of the First Folio repeated the contemporary judgment, at the same time as they anticipated the final verdict, when they wrote, seven years after Shakespeare’s death: ‘These plays have had jonson’s their trial already and stood out all appeals.’¹ t^ute, Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classi- ^1
23’ cal canons, was wont to allege in familiar talk that Shakespeare ‘wanted art,’ but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome. Jonson claimed that all Europe owed Shakespeare homage:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,

To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time.

Ben Jonson’s tribute was followed in the First Folio by less capable elegies of other enthusiasts. One of these, Hugh Holland, a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, told how the bays crowned Shakespeare ‘poet first, then poet’s king,’ and prophesied that

though his line of life went soone ahout,

The life yet of his lines shall never out.

In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on ‘ the great heir of fame ’:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured hones The labour of an age in pil&d stones,

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name ?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast huilt thyself a lasting monument.

These lines were admitted to the preliminary pages of the Second Folio of 1632. A writer of fine insight who

Romeo and Juliet (11. ii. 177-82) ‘applying it to God’s love to His saints’ (Macray’s Register of Magdalen College, vol. iii. p. 144) >

¹ Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold’s Sonnet on Shakespeare:

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

veiled himself under the initials I. M. S.¹ contributed

_The to the same volume even more pointed eulogy.

, jiogies The opening lines declare ‘ Shakespeare’s free-

^{of l6$2}' hold ’ to have been

A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear And equal surface can make things appear Distant a thousand years, and represent Them in their lively colours’ just extent.

It was his faculty

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,

Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates Of death and Lethe, where confused lie Great heaps of ruinous mortality.

A third (anonymous) panegyric prefixed to the Second Folio acclaimed as unique Shakespeare’s evenness of command over both ‘the comic vein’ and ‘the tragic strain.’

The praises of the First and Second Folios echoed an unchallenged public opinion.² During Charles I’s reign Admirers ^t^^ie ^ke unanimity prevailed among critics of in Charles tastes so varied as the voluminous actor- i s reign. d_ramati_st Thomas Heywood, the cavalier lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic recluse John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William D’Avenant. Sir John Suckling, who introduced many lines from Shakespeare’s poetry into his own verse, caused his own portrait to be painted by Van Dyck with a copy of the First Folio in his hand, opened at the play of ‘Hamlet.’³ Before 1640 John

¹ These letters have been interpreted as standing either for the inscription ‘In Memoriam Scriptoris’ or for the name of the writer. In the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusively read as Jasper Mayne (Student), a young Oxford writer; as John Mars ton (Student or Satirist); and as John Mil ten (Senior or Student).

² Cf. Shakspere’s Century of Praise, ^91-1693, New Shakspere Soc., ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, T879; and Fresh Allusions, ed. Fumi- vall, t886. The whole was re-edited with additions by J. Munro, 2 vols., 1909.

³ The picture, which was exhibited at the New Gallery in January 1902, is the property of Mrs. Lee, at Hartwell House, Aylesbury (see Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, ed. Womum, L 332).

Hales, Fellow of Eton, whose learning and liberal culture obtained for him the epithet of ‘ ever-memorable,’ is said to have triumphantly established, in a public dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that ‘ there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done in Shakespeare.’¹ Leonard Digges, who bore testimony in the First Folio to his faith in Shakespeare’s immortality, was not content with that assurance; he supplemented it with fresh proofs in the 1640 edition of the ‘Poems.’ There Digges asserted that while Ben Jonson’s famous work had now lost its vogue, every revival of Shakespeare’s plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and galleries alike.² At a little later date, Shakespeare’s

¹ Charles Gildon, in 1694, in Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical version of this incident. ‘To give the world,’ Gildon informs Dryden, ‘some satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Veneration paid his Excellence by men of unquestion’d parts as this I now express of him, I shall give some account of whatil have heard from your Mouth, Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain’d over all the Ancients by the Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr. Hales of Eaton affirm’d that he wou’d shew all the Poets of Antiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of Shakespear wou’d by no means yield him so much Excellence: so that it came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject; the place agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales’s Chamber at Eaton; a great many Books were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly unanimously gave the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and Roman Poets were adjug’d to Vail at least their Glory in that of the English Hero.’

^a Digges’ tribute of 1640 includes the lines:

So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,

And on the stage at halfe-sword parley were Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence,

When some new day they would not brooke a line Of tedious (though well lahoured) Catiline;

Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz’de more Honest Iago, or the jealous Moore. . .

When let hut Falstafe come,

Hall, Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a roome

writings were the ‘closest companions’ of Charles I’s ‘solitudes.’¹

After the Restoration public taste in England veered towards the classicised model of drama then in vogue

.. in France.² Literary critics of Shakespeare’s oPthe work laid renewed emphasis on his neglect of the Res- the ancient principles. They elaborated the

toration

view that he was a child of nature who lacked the training of the only authentic school. Some critics complained, too, that his language was growing archaic. None the less, very few questioned the magic of his genius, and Shakespeare’s reputation suffered no lasting injury from a closer critical scrutiny. Classical pedantry found its most thoroughgoing champion in Thomas Rymer, who levelled colloquial abuse at all divergences from the classical conventions of drama. In his ‘Short View of Tragedy’ (1692) Rymer mainly concentrated his attention on ‘Othello,’ and reached the eccentric conclusion that it was ‘a bloody farce without salt or savour.’ But Rymer’s extravagances awoke in England no substantial echo. Samuel Pepys the diarist was an indefatigable playgoer who reflected the average taste of the times. A native impatience of poetry or romance led him to deny ‘great wit’ to ‘The Tempest,’ and to brand ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as ‘ the most insipid and ridiculous play ’; but Pepys’s lack of literary sentiment did not deter him from witnessing forty-five performances of fourteen of Shakespeare’s plays between October 11, 1660, and February

6, 1668-9, ^and on occasion the scales fell from his eyes. ‘Hamlet,’ Shakespeare’s most characteristic play, won

All is so pester’d; let but Beatrice And Benedicke be seene, we in a trice The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full To hear Malvoglio, that crosse garter’d gull.

¹ Milton, Iconoclastes, 1690, pp. 9-10.

² Cf. Evelyn’s Diary, November 26, 1661: ‘I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined age, since His Majesty’s being so long abroad.’

the diarist’s ungrudging commendation; he saw four renderings of the tragedy with the great actor Betterton in the title-r&le, and with each performance his enthusiasm rose.¹

Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, was a wide- minded critic who was innocent of pedantry, and he both guided and reflected the enlightened judgment Dryden’s of his era. According to his own account he ^verdict- was first taught by Sir William D’Avenant ‘to admire’ Shakespeare’s work. Very characteristic are his frequent complaints of Shakespeare’s inequalities — ‘he is the very Janus of poets.’² But in almost the same breath Dryden declared that Shakespeare-was held in as much veneration among Englishmen as ^Eschylus among the Athenians, and that ‘ he was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. . . . When he describes anything, you more than see it — you feel it too.’³ In 1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet acknowledged the gift thus:

TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER

Shakes pear, thy Gift, I place before my sight;

With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write;

With Reverence look on his Majestick Face;

Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race.

His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write,

And I, like Teucer, under Ajax fight.

Writers of Charles IFs reign of such opposite temperaments as Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, and

¹ Cf. ‘Pepys and Shakespeare’ in the present writer’s Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 82 seq. ,

¹ Conquest of Granada, 1672. _

* Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adaptation of Troikts and Cressida in 1679. In the prologue to his and D’Avenant’s adaptation of The Tempest in 1676, l\e wrote:

But Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be;

Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued in Dryden’s strain for Shakespeare’s supremacy. As a girl the sober duchess declares she fell in love with Shakespeare's speare. In her ‘Sociable Letters/ published fashionable j_n ^64, she enthusiastically, if diffusely, de- ^vosue' scribed how Shakespeare creates the illusion that he had been ‘transformed into every one of those- persons he hath described,’ and suffered all their emotions. When she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life. ‘Indeed,’ she concludes, ‘Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution.’ The profligate Sedley, in a prologue to the ‘Wary Widdow,’ a comedy by one Higden, which was produced in 1693, boldly challenged Rymer’s warped vision when he apostrophised Shakespeare thus:

Shackspear whose fruitfull Genius, happy wit Was fram’d and finisht at a lucky hit,

The pride of Nature, and the shame of Schools,

Bom to Create, and not to Leam from Rules.

Throughout the period of the Restoration, the traditions of the past kept Shakespearean drama to the Restora- f°^re on the stage.¹ ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ tion ‘Othello,’ and other pieces were frequently adapters. p_r0(j_uced in the authentic text. ‘King Lear’ it was reported was acted ‘ exactly as Shakespeare wrote

¹ After Charles II’s restoration in 1660, two companies of actors received licenses to perform in public: one known as the Duke’s company was directed by Sir William D’Avenant, haviiig for its patron the King’s brother the Duke of York; the other company, known as the King’s company, was directed by Tom Killigrew, one of Charles II’s boon companions, and had the King for its patron. The right to perform sixteen of Shakespeare’s plays was distributed between the two companies. To the Duke’s Company were allotted the nine plays: The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet; to the King’s Company were allotted the seven plays: Julius Ccesar, Henry IV, Merry Wives, Midsummer Night’s Dream,-Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus. In 1682 the two companies were amalgamated, and the sixteen plays were thenceforth all vested in the same hands.

it.’ The chief actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, won his spurs as the interpreter of Shakespeare’s leading parts, chiefly in unrevised or slightly abridged versions. Hamlet was accounted that actor’s masterpiece. ‘No succeeding tragedy for several years,’ wrote Downes, the prompter at Betterton’s theatre, ‘got more reputation or money to the company than this.’ At the same time the change in the dramatic sentiment of the Restoration was accompanied by a marked development of scenic and musical elaboration on the stage in place of older methods of simplicity, and many of Shakespeare’s plays were deemed to need drastic revision in order to fit them to the new theatrical conditions. Shakespeare’s work was freely adapted by dramatists of the day in order to satisfy the alteration alike in theatrical taste and machinery. No disrespect was intended to Shakespeare’s memory by those who engaged in these acts of vandalism. Sir William D’Avenant, who set the fashion of Shakespearean adaptation, never ceased to write or speak of the dramatist with affection and respect, while Dryden’s activity as a Shakespearean reviser went hand in hand with many professions of adoration. D’Avenant, Dryden and their coadjutors worked arbitrarily. They endeavoured without much method to recast Shakespeare’s plays in a Gallicised rather than in a strictly classical mould. They were no fanatical observers of the unities of time, place and action. In the French spirit, they viewed love as the dominant passion of tragedy, they gave tragedies happy endings, and they qualified tie wickedness of hero or heroine. While they excised much humorous incident from Shakespearean tragedy, they delighted in tragicomedy in which comic and pathetic sentiment was liberally mingled. Nor did the Restoration adapters abide by the classical rejection of scenes of violence. They added violent episodes .with melodramatic license. Shakespeare’s language was modernised or simplified, passages which were reckoned to be difficult were re-

written, and the calls of intelligibility were deemed to warrant the occasibnal transfer of a speech from one character to another, or even from one play to, another. It scarcely needs adding that the claim of the Restoration adapters to ‘improve’ Shakespeare’s text was unjustifiable, save for a few omissions or transpositions of scenes.¹

D’Avenant began the revision of. Shakespeare’s work early in February 1662, by laying reckless hands on ‘ Measure for Measure. ’ With Shakespeare’s ro- ^evised’ mantic play he incorporated the characters of 1662-80 Benedick and Beatrice from ‘Much Ado’ and ’ rechristened his performance ‘ The Law against Lovers.’² D’Avenant worked on ‘Macbeth’ in 1666, and ‘The Tempest’ a year or two later. In both these pieces he introduced not only original characters and speeches, but new songs and dances which brought the plays within the category of opera. D’Avenant also turned ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ into a comedy which he called ‘The Rivals’ (1668).

Dryden entered the field of Shakespearean revision by aiding D’Avenant in his version of ‘The Tempest’ which was first published after D’Avenant’s death with a preface by Dryden in 1670. A second edition which appeared in 1674 embodied further changes by Thomas Shadwell.³ Subsequently'Dryden dealt in similar fashion

¹ Dr. F. W. Kilboume’s Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare, Boston 1906.

⁸ This piece was first acted at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on February 18, 1662, and was first printed in 1673.

³ Shadwell’s name does not figure in the printed version of 1674 which incorporates his amplifications. Only Dryden and D’Avenant are cited as revisers. Shadwell’s opera of The Tempest is often mentioned in theatrical history on the authority of Downes’s Roscius An- glicanus (1708), but it is his ‘improvement’ of D’Avenant and Dryden’s version which is in question. (See W. J. Lawrence’s The Elizabethan Playhouse, 1st ser. 1912, pp. 94 seq. reprinted from Anglia 1904, and Sir Ernest Clarke’s paper on ‘The Tempest as an Opera’ in the Athenaum, August 25, 1906). Thomas Dufiett, a very minor dramatist, produced at the Theatre Royal in 1675 The Mock Tempest in ridicule of the efforts of Dryden, D’Avenant and Shadwell.

with ‘Troilus’ (1679), and he imitated ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ on original lines in his tragedy of ‘All for Love’ (1678). John Lacy, the actor, adapted ‘The Taming of the Shrew ’’ (produced as ‘Sawny the Scot,’ April 19, 1667, published in 1698). Thomas Shadwell revised ‘Timon’ (1678); Thomas Otway ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1680); John Crowne the ‘First and Second Parts of Henry VI’ (1680-1); Nahum Tate ‘Richard II’ (1681), ‘Lear’ (1681), and ‘Coriolanus’ (1682); and Tom Durfey ‘Cypnbeline’ (1682).¹

From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day the tide of Shakespeare’s reputation, both on the stage and among critics, has flowed onward almost _From uninterruptedly. The censorious critic, John 1702 Dennis, actively shared in the labours of adap- ^onwards- tation; but in his ‘Letters’ (i7ri) on Shakespeare’s ‘genius’ he gave his work whole-hearted commendation: ‘One may say of him, as they did of Homer, that he had none to imitate; and is himself inimitable.’² Cultured opinion gave the answer which Addison wished when he asked in ‘The Spectator’ on February 10,1714, the question : ‘ Who would not rather read one of Shakespeare’s plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, where there is not one of them violated?’ No poet who won renown in the age of Anne or the early Georges failed to pay a sincere tribute to Shakespeare in the genuine text. James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, joined in the chorus of praise. David Hume the

¹ John Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, revised Julius Ccesar in 1692, hut his version, which was first published in 1722, was never acted. Post-Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare include Colley Cibher’s Richard III (1700); Charles Gildon’s Measure for Measure (1700); John Dennis’s Comical Gallant (1702 : a revision of The Merry Wives)] Charles Burnaby’s Love Betray’d (1703: a rehash of All's Well and Twelfth Night)) and John Dennis’s The Invader of his Country .(1720: a new version of Coriolanus). See H. B. Wheatley’s Post-Restoration Quartos of Shakespeare’s Plays, London, 1913 (reprinted from The Library, July 1913).

² D. Nichol Smith, Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903, p. 24. .

philosopher and historian stands alone among cultured contemporaries in questioning the justice ‘of much of this eulogy,’ on the specious ground that Shakespeare’s ‘beauties’ were ‘surrounded with deformities.’ Two of the greatest men of letters of the eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold censure, paid the dramatist, as we have seen, the practical homage of becoming his editor.

As the eighteenth century closed, the outlook of the critics steadily widened, and they brought to the study The growth increased learning as well as profounder insight, of critical Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel College, insight., Cambridge, in his ‘Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare’ (1767) deduced from an exhaustive study of Elizabethan literature the sagacious conclusion that Shakespeare was well versed in the writings of his English contemporaries. Meanwhile the chief of Shakespeare’s dramatis persona became the special topic of independent treatises.¹ One writer, Maurice Morgann,. in his ‘Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff’ (1777) claimed to be the first to scrutinise a Shakespearean character as if he were a living creature belonging to the history of the human race rather than to the annals of literary invention. William Dodd’s ‘Beauties of Shakespeare’ (1752), the most cyclopaedic of anthologies, brought home to the popular mind, in numberless editions, the range of Shakespeare’s observations on human experience.

Shakespearean study of the eighteenth century not only strengthened the foundations of his fame Modem but stimulated its subsequent growth. The schools of school of textual criticism which Theobald criticism. _an(j £_ap_ejj founded in the middle years of the century has never ceased its activity since their

¹ See William Richardson’s Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare's remarkable Characters (2 vols. 1774, 1789), and Thomas Whately’s Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (published in 1785 but completed before T772).

day.¹ Edmund Malone’s devotion at the end of. the eighteenth century to the biography of the poet and the contemporary history of the stage inspired a vast band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter (1783-1861), John Payne Collier (1789-1883) and James Orchard Halliwell, afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889), best deserve mention.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there arose a school of critics to expound more systematically than before the aesthetic excellence of _{The new} the plays. Eighteenth-century writers like esthetic Richardson, Whately and Maurice Morgann ^sch°^o1- had pointed out the way. Yet in its inception the new aesthetic school owed much to the example of Schlegel and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. The long-lived popular fallacy that Shakespeare was the unsophisticated child of nature was finally dispelled, and his artistic instinct, his sound judgment and his psychological certitude were at length established on firm foundations. Hazlitt in his ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’ (1817) interpreted with a light and rapid touch the veracity or verisimilitude of the chief personages of the plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his ‘Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare’ proved himself the subtlest spokesman of the modem aesthetic school in this or any other country.² Although Edward Dowden in his

¹W. Sidney Walker (1795-1846), sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Camhridge, deserves special mention among textual critics of the nineteenth century. He was author of two valuahle works: Shakespeare’s Versification and its apparent Irregularities explained by Exar, pies from Early and Late English Writers, 1854, and A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, with Remarks on his Language and that of his Contemporaries, together with Notes on his Plays and Poems, i860, 3 vols. Walker’s hooks were puhlished from his notes after his death, and are ill-arranged and unindexed, hut they constitute a rich quarry, which no succeeding editor has neglected without injury to his work.

² See Notes and Lectures -on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coleridge, now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly resented the remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare (Coleridge to Mud- fard, 1818; cf. Dykes Campbell’s Memoir of Coleridge, p. cv, and see p. 614 note, infra. .

‘Shakespeare, his Mind and Art’ (1874;^ nth edit. 1897) and Algernon Charles Swinburne in his ‘Study of Shakespeare’ (1880) were worthy disciples of the new criticism, Coleridge as an aesthetic critic remains unsurpassed. Among living English critics in the same succession, Mr. A. C. Bradley fills the first place.

In the effort to supply a fuller interpretation of Shakespeare’s works —■ textual, historical, and aesthetic two publishing societies have done much valuable speaxe" work. The Shakespeare Society was founded publishing in 1841 by Collier, Halliwell, and their friends, soodies. _and pushed _some forty-eight volumes before

its dissolution in 1853. The New Shakspere Society, which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in 1874, issued during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven publications, illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary life and literature. _

Almost from the date of Shakespeare’s death his native town of Stratford-on-Avon was a place of pilgrimage for Shake- his admirers. As early as 1634 Sir William speare’s Dugdale visited the town and set on record Stratford- Shakespeare’s association with it. Many other on-Avon. visitors of the seventeenth century enthusiastically identified the dramatist with the place in extant letters and journals.¹ John Ward, who became Vicar

¹ See p. 471, n. 2 supra. As early as 1630 a traveller through the town put on record that ‘it was most remarkable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare’ (‘A Banquet of Feasts or Change of Cheare,’ 1630, in Shakespeare’s Centurie of Praise, p. 181). Four years later another tourist to the place described in his extant diary ‘a neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. Wm. Shakespere; who was borne heere’ (Brit. Mus. Lansdowne MS. 213 f. 332; A Relation of a Short Survey, ed. Wickham Legg, 1904, p. 77). Sir William Dugdale concluded his account of Stratford in Ms Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656, p. 523): ‘One thing more in reference to this antient Town is observable, that it gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church.’ Sir Aston Cokayne in complimentary verses to Dugdale on his great book wrote: .

Now Stratford upon Avon, we would choose Thy gentle and ingenuous Shakespeare Muse,

(Were he among the living yet) to raise T’our Antiquaries merit some just praise.

of Stratford in 1662, bore witness to the genius loci when he made the entry in his ‘Diary’: ‘Remember to peruse Shakespeare’s plays and bee much versed in them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter.’¹ In the eighteenth century the visits of Shakespearean students rapidly grew more frequent. In the early years the actor Betterton came from London to make Shakespearean researches there.

It was Betterton’s successor, Garrick, who, at the height of his fame in the middle years of the century, gave an impetus to the Shakespearean cult at Garrick at Stratford which thenceforth steadily developed Stratford, into a national vogue, and helped to quicken the popular enthusiasm. In May 1769 the Corporation did Garrick the honour of making him the first honorary freeman of the borough on the occasion of the opening of the new town hall. He acknowledged the compliment by presenting a statue of the' dramatist to adorn the facade of the building, together with a portrait of himself embracing a bust of Shakespeare, by Gainsborough, which has since hung on the walls of the chief chamber. Later in the year Garrick personally devised and conducted a Shakespearean celebration at Strat- ,_The ford which was called rather inaccurately Stratford ‘Shakespeare’s Jubilee.’ The ceremonies lasted |^^ee’’ from September 6 to 9, 1769, and under ' Garrick’s zealous direction became a national demonstration in the poet’s honour. The musical composer, Dr. Arne, organised choral services in the church; there were public entertainments, a concert, and a horserace, and odes were recited and orations. delivered in praise of the poet. The visitors represented the rank and fashion of the day. Among them was James Bos-

(Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. nr.) Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, in his Theatrum Poetarum, 1677, begins his notice of the poet thus: ‘William Shakespear, the Glory of the English Stage; whose nativity at Stratford upon Avon is the highest honour that Town can boast of.’ . . . .

¹ Ward’s Diary, 1839, p. 184.

well, the friend and biographer of Dr. Johnson. The irrelevance of most of the ceremonials excited ridicule, but a pageant at Drury Lane Theatre during the following season recalled the chief incidents of the Stratford Jubilee and proved attractive to the London playgoer.¹

Like festivities were repeated at Stratford from time to time on a less ambitious scale. A birthday celebration took place in April 1827, and was renewed three years later. A ‘Shakespeare Tercentenary Festival/ which was held from April 23 to May 4, 1864, was designed as a national commemoration.² Since 1879 there have been without interruption annual Shakespearean festivals in April and May at Shakespeare’s native place, and they have steadily grown in popular favour and in features of interest.³

On the English stage the name of every eminent actor since Burbage, the great actor of the dramatist’s own On the period, has been identified with Shakespearean English drama. Betterton, the chief actor of the stage, j Restoration, was loyal to Burbage’s tradition. Steele, writing in the ‘Tatler’ (No. 167) in reference to Betterton’s funeral in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey on May 2, 1710, instanced his rendering of Othello as a proof of an unsurpassable talent in realising Shakespeare’s subtlest conceptions on the stage. One great and welcome innovation in Shakespearean acting is closely associated with Betterton’s name. The substitution of women for boys in female parts was in- The first augurated by Killigrew at the opening of appearance Charles II’s reign, but Betterton’s encourage- in shake-^{65 me}nt of the innovation gave it permanence, spearean The first rSle that was professionally rendered by a woman in a public theatre was that of Desdemona in ‘Othello,’ apparently on December 8, 1660.⁴ The actress on that occasion is said to have

¹ See Wheler’s History of Stratford-on-Avon, 1812, pp. 164-209.

² R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864.

⁸ See pp. 540-1 supra. ⁴ See pp. 78-9 supra.

been Mrs. Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert’s mistress; but Betterton’s wife, who was at first known on the stage as Mrs. Saunderson, was the first actress to present a series of Shakespeare’s great female characters. Mrs. Betterton , gave her husband powerful support, from 1663 onwards, in such roles as Ophelia, Juliet, Queen Katharine, and Lady Macbeth. Betterton formed a school of actors who carried on his traditions for many years after his death-. Robert Wilks (16701732) as Hamlet, and Barton Booth (1681-1733) as Henry VIII and Hotspur, were popularly accounted no unworthy successors. Colley Cibber (1671-1757), as actor, theatrical manager, and dramatic critic, was both a loyal disciple of Betterton and a lover of Shakespeare, though his vanity and his faith in the ideals of the Restoration incited him to perpetrate many outrages on Shakespeare’s text when preparing it for theatrical representation. His notorious adaptation of ‘Richard III,’ which was first produced in 1700, long held the stage to the exclusion of the original version. But towards the middle of the eighteenth century all earlier efforts to interpret Shakespeare in the playhouse were eclipsed in public esteem by the concentrated energy and intelligence of David Garrick. Garrick’s enthusiasm for the poet and his histrionic genius riveted Shakespeare’s hold on public taste. His claim to have restored to the stage the text of Shakespeare — purified of Restoration defilements — cannot be allowed without serious qualifications. Garrick had no scruple in presenting plays of Shakespeare in versions _Davi(j that he or his friends had recklessly garbled. Garrick, He supplied ‘ Romeo and Juliet ’ with a happy ^{1717 I779}' ending; he converted ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ into the farce of ‘Katherine and Petruchio,’ 1754; he was the first to venture on a revision of ‘Hamlet’ (in 1771); he introduced radical changes in ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ ‘Cymbeline,’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Neither had Garrick any

faith in stage-archaeology; he acted ‘Macbeth’ in a bagwig and ‘Hamlet’ in contemporary court dress. Nevertheless, no actor has won an equally exalted reputation in so vast and varied a repertory of Shakespearean rSles. His triumphant debut as Richard III in 1741 was followed by equally successful performances of Hamlet (first given for his benefit at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on August 12, 1742),¹ Lear, Macbeth, King John, Romeo, Henry IV, Iago, Leontes, Benedick, and Antony in ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ Garrick was not quite undeservedly buried in Westminster Abbey on February 1, 1779, at the foot of Shakespeare’s statue.

Garrick was ably seconded by Mrs. Clive (1711-1785), Mrs. Cibber (1714-1766), and Mrs. Pritchard (17111768). Mrs. Cibber as Constance in ‘King John,’ and Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth, excited something of the same enthusiasm as Garrick in Richard III and Lear. There were, too, contemporary critics who judged rival actors to show in certain parts powers equal, if not superior, to those of Garrick. Charles Macklin (1697?- 1797) for nearly half a century, from 1735 to 1785, gave many hundred performances of a masterly rendering of Shylock. The character had, for many years previous to Macklin’s assumption of it, been allotted to comic actors, but Macklin effectively concentrated his energy on the tragic significance of the part with an effect that Garrick could not surpass. Macklin was also reckoned successful in Polonius and Iago. John Henderson, the Bath Roscius (1747-1785), who, like Garrick, was buried in Westminster Abbey, derived immense popularity from his representation of Falstaff; while in such subordinate characters as Mercutio, Slender, Jaques, Touchstone, and Sir Toby Belch, John Palmer (i742?-i798) was held to approach perfection. But Garrick was the accredited chief of the theatrical profession until his death. He was then succeeded in

*'W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and other Studies, 2nd ser. 229-230. '

his place of pre-eminence by John Philip Kemble, who derived invaluable support from his association with one abler than himself, his sister, Mrs. Siddons.

Somewhat stilted and declamatory in speech, Kemble enacted a wide range of characters of Shakespearean tragedy with a dignity that won the admiration of Pitt, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, puk_p and Leigh Hunt. Coriolanus was regarded as ^Kemble. his masterpiece, but his renderings of Hamlet, ^{1757
1 23}‘ King John, Wolsey, the Duke in ‘Measure for Measure/ Leontes, and Brutus satisfied the most exacting _{Mrs Sarah} canons of contemporary theatrical criticism. Siddons, Kemble’s sister, Mrs. Siddons, was the greatest ^I7ss_l831' actress that Shakespeare’s countrymen have known. Her noble and awe-inspiring presentation of La;dy Macbeth, her Constance, her Queen Katharine, have, according to the best testimony, not been equalled even by the achievements of the eminent actresses of France.

During the nineteenth century the most conspicuous histrionic successes in Shakespearean drama were won by Edmund Kean, whose triumphant rendering _Edmund of Shylock on his first appearance at Drury Kean, Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, is one of ^i787_i833- the most stirring incidents in the history of the English stage. Kean defied the rigid convention of the ‘ Kemble School,’ and gave free rein to his impetuous passions. Besides Shylock, he excelled in Richard III, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear. No less a critic than Coleridge declared that to see him act was like ‘ reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.’ Among other Shakespearean actors of Kean’s period a high place was allotted by public esteem to George Frederick Cooke (1756-T811), whose Richard III, first given in London at Covent Garden Theatre, October 31, 1801, was accounted his masterpiece. Charles Lamb, writing in 1822, declared that of all the actors who flourished in his time, Robert Bensley ‘had most of the swell of soul,’ and Lamb gave with a fine enthusiasm in his ‘ Essays of Elia ’ an analysis

(which has become classical) of Bensley’s performance of Malvolio. But Bensley’s powers were rated more moderately by more experienced playgoers.¹ Lamb’s praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) as Ophelia, Helena, and Viola in ‘Twelfth Night,’ are corroborated by the eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part of Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have beaten Mrs. Siddons out .jf the field.

The torch thus lit by Garrick, by the Kembles, by Kean and his contemporaries was worthily kept alive

by William Charles Macready, a cultivated

William , ... , 1 j •

Charles and conscientious actor, who, during a pro-

1793-1873’ f^essi°^nal career of more than forty years (1810’ 1851), assumed every great part in Shakespearean tragedy. Although Macready lacked the classical bearing of Kemble or the intense passion of Kean, he won as the interpreter of Shakespeare the whole-hearted suffrages of the educated public. Ma- cready’s chief associate in women characters was Helen Faucit (1820-1898, afterwards Lady Martin), whose refined impersonations of Imogen, Beatrice, Juliet, and Rosalind form an attractive chapter in the history of the stage.

The most notable tribute paid to Shakespeare by any actor-manager of recent times was rendered by Samuel Recent Phelps (1804-1878), who gave during his tenure revivals. ₀f Sadler’s Wells Theatre between 1844 and 1862 competent representations of all the plays save six; only ‘ Richard II,’ the three parts of ‘ Henry VI,’ ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ and ‘Titus Andronicus’ were omitted. The ablest actress who appeared with Phelps at Sadler’s Wells was Mrs. Warner (1804-1854), who had previously supported Macready in many of Shakespeare’s dramas, and was a partner in Phelps’s Shakespearean speculation in the early days of the venture. Charles Kean (1811-1868), Edmund Kean’s son, between 1851 and 1859 produced at the Princess’s Theatre, London,

¹ Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 seq.

some thirteen plays of Shakespeare; his own roles included Macbeth, Richard II, Cardinal Wolsey, Leontes, Richard III, Prospero, King Lear, Shylock, Henry V. But the younger Kean depended for the success of his Shakespearean productions on their spectacular attractions rather than on his histrionic efficiency. He may be regarded as the founder of the spectacular system of Shakespearean representation. Sir Henry Irving (18381905), who from 1878 till 1901 was ably seconded by Miss Ellen Terry, revived at the Lyceum Theatre between 1874 and 1902 twelve plays (‘Hamlet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Cymbeline,’ and ‘ Coriolanus ’), and gave each of them all the advantage they could derive from thoughtful acting reinforced by lavish scenic elaboration.¹ Sir Henry Irving was the first actor to be knighted (in 1895) for his services to the stage, and the success which crowned his efforts to raise the artistic and intellectual temper of the theatre was acknowledged by his burial in Westminster Abbey (October 20, 1905). Sir Henry Irving’s mantle was assumed at his death by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who produced three of Shakespeare’s plays at the Hay- market Theatre between 1889 and 1896 and no less than fifteen more at His Majesty’s Theatre since 1897. In the course of each of the nine years (1905-13) Sir Herbert also organised at His Majesty’s Theatre a Shakespeare festival in which different plays of Shakespeare were acted on successive days during several weeks by his own and other companies.² Much scenic magnificence has distinguished Sir Herbert’s Shakespearean productions

¹ Hamlet in 1874-5 ^and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare’s plays are known' to have enjoyed. _

² In April 1907 Sir Herbert appeared on the Berlin stage in five of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard II, Twelfth Night, Antony an<h Cleofo&TQ, Merry Wives, and Hamlet.

in Which he has played leadings parts of very varied range; his impersonations include Hamlet, Antony in both ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ Shy- lock, Malvolio, and Falstaff. Mr. F. R. Benson, since 1883, has devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of Shakespearean drama and has produced all but two of Shakespeare’s plays. Mr. Benson’s activities have been chiefly confined to the provinces,, and for twenty-six years he has organised the dramatic festivals at Stratford-on-Avon.¹ Many efficient actors owe to association with him and his company their earliest training in Shakespearean parts. In isolated Shakespearean rdles high reputations of recent years have been won by several actors, among whom may be mentioned Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson in ‘Hamlet’ (first rendered at the Lyceum Theatre on September 11, 1897), Lewis Waller in Henry V (first rendered at Christmas 1900 at the Lyric Theatre, London), and Mr. Arthur Bourchier at the Garrick Theatre as Shylock (first rendered on October 11, 1905) and as Macbeth (first rendered on January 16, 1907).

In spite of the recent efforts of Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. F. R. Benson, no theatrical manager since Phelps’s retirement from Sadler’s Wells in 1862 has systematically and continuously illustrated on the London stage the full range of Shakespearean drama. Far more in this direction has been attempted in Germany. The failure to represent in the chief theatres of London and the other great cities of the country Shakespeare’s plays constantly and in their variety is mainly attributable to the demand, by a large section of the playgoing public, for the Spectacular spectacular methods of production which shake⁸ °^{f were} i^naug^urated by Charles Kean in the me- spearean tropolis in 1851 and have since been practised drama. f_r0m time to time on an ever-increasing scale of splendour. The cost of the spectacular display involves

¹ See p. 541 supra.

financial risks which prohibit a frequent change of programme and restrict the manager’s choice to such plays as lend themselves to spectacular setting. In 1895 Mr. William Poel founded in London ‘The Elizabethan Stage Society’ with a View to producing Shakespearean and other Elizabethan dramas either without any scenery or with scenery of a simple kind conforming to the practice of the Elizabethan or Jacobean epoch. Although Mr. Poel’s zealous effort received a respectful welcome from scholars, it exerted no appreciable influence on the taste of the general public.¹ In one respect, however, the history of recent Shakespearean representations can be viewed by the literary student with unqualified satisfaction. Although some changes of text or some rearrangement of the scenes are found imperative in all theatrical productions of Shakespeare, a growing public sentiment in England and elsewhere has for many years favoured as loyal an adherence as is practicable to the authorised version of the plays on the part of theatrical managers. In this regard, the evil traditions of the eighteenth-century stage are well- nigh extinct.

Music and art in England owe much to Shakespeare’s influence. From Thomas Morley, Purcell, Matthew Locke, and Arne to William Linley, Sir Henry i_{n mU}sic Bishop, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, every dis- ^{and art}- tinguished musician of the past has sought to improve bn his predecessor’s setting of one or more of Shakespeare’s songs, or has composed concerted music in illustration of some of his dramatic themes.² Of living composers Mr. Edward German has musically illustrated with much success ‘Henry VIII’ (1894), ‘Richard II,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Much Ado.’ Sir Alexander Mackenzie is responsible for' an Overture

¹ See William Poel’s Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1913, pp. 203 seq.

² Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shakspere Music, 1878,; Songs in Shaks,pere

set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc.; E. W. Naylor, Shakespeare and Music, 1896, and L. C. Elson, Shakespeare in Music, igoi.

to ‘Twelfth Night’ and music for ‘Coriolanus,’ and Sir Edward Elgar is the composer of ‘ Falstaff,’ a symphonic study (1913).

In art, the publisher John Boydell in 1787 organised a scheme for illustrating scenes in Shakespeare’s work by the greatest living English artists. Some fine pictures were the result. A hundred and sixty-eight were painted in all, and the artists whom Boydell employed included Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Stothard, John Opie, Benjamin West, James Barry, and Henry Fuseli. All the pictures were exhibited from time to time between 1789 and 1804 at a gallery specially built for the purpose in Pall Mall, and in 1802 Boydell published a collection of engravings of the chief pictures. The great series of paintings was dispersed by auction in 1805. Few eminent painters of later date, from Daniel Maclise to Sir John Millais, have lacked the ambition to interpret some scene or character of Shakespearean drama, while English artists in black and white who have in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century devoted themselves to the illustration of Shakespeare’s writings include Sir John Gilbert, R.A., Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham,' Hugh Thomson and E. J. Sullivan,

In America of late years no less enthusiasm for Shakespeare has been manifested than in England. The first in edition of Shakespeare’s works to be printed

America. j_n America appeared in Philadelphia in 1795-6,¹ but editors and critics have since the middle years of the nineteenth century been hardly less numerous there than in England. Some criticism from American pens, like that of James Russell Lowell, has reached the highest literary level. Prof. G. P. Baker and Prof. Brander Matthews have recently developed more zealously than English writers the study of Shakespeare’s dramatic technique. Nowhere, perhaps, has more labour been devoted to the interpretation of his works than that bestowed by Horace Howard Furness of Philadelphia

¹ See pp. 580-1 n. i, supra.

on the preparation of his ‘ New Variorum ’ edition.¹ The -passion for acquiring early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems or early illustrative literature has grown very rapidly in the past and present generations. The library of the chief of early Shakespearean collectors, James Lenox (1800-1880), now forms part of the Public Library of New York.² Another important collection of Shakespeareana was formed at an early date by Thomas Pennant Barton (1803-1869) and was acquired by the Boston Public Library in 1873; the elaborate catalogue (1878-80) contains some 2500 entries. Private collections of later periods like those formed by Mr. Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, and Mr. W. A. White, of Brooklyn, are all rich in rare editions.

First of Shakespeare’s plays to be represented in America, ‘Richard III’ was performed in New York on March 5, 1750. More recently Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), Edwin Forrest (1806-1892), John Edward McCullough, Forrest’s disciple (1837-1885), Edwin Booth, Junius Brutus Booth’s son (1833-1893), Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), Ada Rehan (b. 1859), Julia Marlowe, and Maud Adams have maintained on the American stage the great traditions of Shakespearean acting. Between 1890 and 1898 Augustin Daly’s company included in their repertory nine Shakespearean comedies which were rendered with admirable effect, chiefly with Ada Rehan and John Drew in the leading rdles. Of late years Shakespearean performances in America have been intermittent. Among American artists Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) devoted high gifts to pictorial representation of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.

¹ See p. 582 supra. .

² See Henry Stevens’s Recollections of James Lenox and the formation of his Library. London, 1886.

Save the Scriptures and the chief writings of classical antiquity, no literary compositions compare with Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their appeal to speare’s readers or critics who do not share the author’s foreign nationality or speak his language. The Bible, alone of literary compositions, has been translated more frequently or into a greater number of languages. The progress of the dramatist’s reputation in France, Italy and Russia was somewhat slow at the outset. But everywhere it advanced steadily through the nineteenth century. In Germany the poet has received for more than a century and a half a recognition scarcely less pronounced than that accorded him in his own country.¹

English actors who made professional tours through Germany at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning in of the seventeenth centuries frequently i per-

Germany. formed plays by Shakespeare before German audiences. At first the English actors spoke in English, but they soon gave their text in crude German translations. German adaptations of ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ were published in 1620. In 1626 ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were acted by English players at Dresden, and German versions of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and of the interlude in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ as well as a

¹ See Prof. J. G. Rohertson’s ‘Shakespeare on the Continent’ in Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v. chap. xii. pp. 283-308.

610

crude German adaptation of ‘ Hamlet, ’¹ were current in Germany later in the century. But no author’s name was at the time associated with any of these pieces. Meanwhile German-speaking visitors to England carried home even in Shakespeare’s lifetime copies of his works and those of his contemporaries. Among several English volumes which Johann Rudolf Hess of Zurich brought to that city on returning from London about 16T4 were Smethwick’s quartos of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1609) and ‘Hamlet’ (1611). The books are still preserved in the public library of the town.²

Shakespeare was first specifically mentioned in 1682 by a German writer Daniel Georg Morhof in his ‘ Un- terricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie’

(Kiel, p. 250). But Morhof merely confesses German that he had read of Shakespeare, as well as of ^shake_ Fletcher and Beaumont, in Dryden’s work '

‘Essay of Dramatic Poesy.’ Morhof, however, broke the ice. A notice of the pathos of ‘ the English tragedian Shakespeare’ was transferred from a French translation of Sir William Temple’s -‘Essay on Poetry’ to Barthold Feind’s ‘Gedanken von der Opera’ (Stade) in 1708. Next year Johann Franz Buddeus copied from Collier’s ‘Historical Dictionary’ (1701-2) a farcically inadequate biographical sketch of Shakespeare into his ‘ Allgemeines historisches Lexicon’ (Leipzig), and this brief memoir was reprinted in Johann Burckhart Mencke’s ‘ Gelehrten Lexicon’ (Leipzig, 1715) and in popular encyclopaedias of later date.³ Of greater significance was the appearance at Berlin in 1741 of a poor German translation of ‘Julius .Caesar’ by Baron Caspar Wilhelm von Borck, formerly

¹ See p. 355 supra.

¹ The purchaser Hess who was at a later date a member of the Great Council of Zurich, carried home from London nine English books of recent publication. Besides the Shakespearean quartos, they included Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607) and George Wilkins’s novel of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608) of which only one other copy (in the British Museum) survives; see Tycho Mommsen’s Preface (pp. ii—iii) to his reprint of George Wilkins’s novel of Pericles (Oldenburg, 1857).

* Cf. Zedler’s Cyclopaedia 1743 and Jocher’s Gelehrten Lexicon (r75i).

Prussian minister in London. This was the earliest complete and direct translation of any play by Shakespeare into a foreign language. A prose translation of ‘ Richard III ’ from another pen followed in 1756. Shakespeare was not suffered to receive such first halting marks of German respect without a protest. Johann Christopher Gottsched (1700-1766), a champion of classicism, warmly denounced the barbaric lawlessness of Shakespeare in a review of von Borck’s effort in ‘Beitrage zur kritischen Historie der deutschen Sprache’ (1741). The attack bore unexpected fruit. Johann Elias Schlegel, one of Gottsched’s disciples, offended his master by defending in the same periodical Shakespeare’s neglect of the classical canons, and within twenty years the influential pen of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Lessing’s came to Shakespeare’s rescue with triumphant tribute, effect. Lessing first' drew to Shakespeare the ^I759' earnest attention of the educated German public. It was on February 16, 1759, in No. 17 of a journal entitled ‘Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend’ that Lessing, after detecting- in Shakespeare’s work affinity with the German Volks-drama, urged his superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modem poets save Sophocles: ‘After the “(Edipus” of Sophocles no piece can have more power over our passions than “Othello,” “King Lear,” “Hamlet.”’ Lessing restated his doctrine with greater reservation in his ‘Hamburgische Dramaturgic’ (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols, 8vo), but the seed which he had sown proved fertile, and the tree which sprang from it bore rich fruit.

A wide expansion of German knowledge and curiosity is traceable to a prose translation of Shakespeare which Christopher Martin Wieland (1733-1813) began in 1762 and issued at Zurich in 1763-6 (in 8 vols.). Before long Wieland’s useful work was thoroughly revised by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743-1820), whose edition

appeared also at Zurich in 13 vols. (1775-7). The dissemination of all Shakespeare’s writings in a German garb greatly strengthened the romantic tendencies of German literary sentiment, and the English dramatist soon attracted that wide German worship which he has since retained. Heinrich Wilhelm von study and Gerstenberg in 1766-7, in ‘Briefe iiber Merk- ^e.^nthu_ wiirdigkeiten der Litteratur,’ treated Shake- ’ spearean drama as an integral part of the world of nature to which criticism was as inapplicable as to the sea or the sky. The poet Johann Gottfried Herder in 1773 showed a more chastened spirit of enthusiasm when he sought to account historically for the romantic temper of Shakespeare. Goethe, king of the German romantic movement, and all who worked with him thenceforth eagerly acknowledged their discipleship to Shakespeare. Unwavering veneration of his achievement became a first article in the creed of German romanticism, and the form and spirit of the German romanticists’ poetry and drama were greatly influenced by their Shakespearean faith. Goethe’s criticism of ‘Hamlet’ in ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’ (1795-6) was but one of the many masterly tributes of the German romantic school to Shakespeare’s supremacy.¹

A fresh and vital impetus to the Shakespearean cult in Germany was given by the romantic leader, August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Between 1797 and Schiegei’s 1801 he issued metrical versions of thirteen translation, plays, adding a fourteenth play ‘Richard III’ in 1810.

¹ Throughout his long life Goethe was the most enthusiastic of Shakespeare’s worshippers. In 1771, at the age of twenty-two, he composed an oration which he delivered to fellow-students at Strasburg by way of justifying his first passionate adoration (see Lewes, Life of Goethe, 1890, pp. 92-5). Besides the detailed analysis of the character of Hamlet, which occupies much space in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisttr many eulogistic references to Shakespeare figure in Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung, and in Eckermann’s Reports of Goethe’s Conversation. A remarkable essay on Shakespeare’s pre-eminence was written by Goethe in i8rs under the title Shakespeare und hein Ende. This appears in the chief editions of Goethe’s collected prose works in the section headed ‘Theater und dramatische Dichtung.’

Schlegel reproduced the spirit of the original with such magical efficiency as to consummate Shakespeare’s naturalisation in German poetry. Ludwig Tieck, who published a prose rendering of ‘The Tempest’ in 1796, completed Schlegel’s undertaking in 1825, but he chiefly confined himself to editing translations by various hands of the plays which Schlegel had neglected.¹ Many other German translations in verse were undertaken in emulation of Schlegel and Tieck’s version — by J. H. Voss and his sons (Leipzig, 1818-29), by J. W. O. Benda (Leipzig, 1825-6), by J. Korner (Vienna, 1836), by A. Bottger (Leipzig, 1836-7), by E. Ortlepp (Stuttgart, 1838-9), and by A. Keller and M. Rapp (Stuttgart, 1843-6). The best of more recent German translations is that by a band of poets and eminent men of letters including Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Ferdinand Freili- grath, and Paul Heyse (Leipzig, 1867-71, 38 vols.). But, despite the high merits of von Bodenstedt and his companions’ performance, Schlegel and Tieck’s achievement still holds the field. Schlegel may be justly reckoned one of the most effective of all the promoters of Shakespearean study. His lectures on ‘Dramatic Literature,’ which include a suggestive survey of Shakespeare’s work, were delivered at Vienna in 1808, and were translated into English in 1815. They are worthy of comparison with the • criticism of Coleridge, who owed much to their influence. Wordsworth in 1815 declared that Schlegel and his disciples first marked out the right road in aesthetic appreciation, and that they enjoyed at the moment superiority over all English aesthetic critics of Shakespeare.² In 1815, too, Goethe

¹ Revised editions of Schegel and Tieck’s translation appeared in Leipzig, ed. A. Brandi, 1897-9, 10 vols., and at Stuttgart, ed. Hermann Conrad, 1905-6. In 1908 Friedrich Gundolf began a reissue of Schlegel’s translations with original versions of many of the dramas with which Schlegel failed to deal.

² In his ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ in the edition of his Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote: ‘The Germans, only of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shakespeare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the

lent point to Wordsworth’s argument in his stimulating essay ‘ Shakespeare und kein Ende ’ in which he brought his voluminous criticism to a close. A few years later another very original exponent of German romanticism, Heinrich Heine, enrolled himself among German Shake- speareans. Heine published in 1838 charming studies of Shakespeare’s heroines, acknowledging only one defect in Shakespeare — that he was an Englishman. An English translation appeared in 1895.

During the last eighty years textual, aesthetic, and biographical criticism has been pursued in Germany with unflagging industry and energy; and al- Modem though laboured and ■ supersubtie theorising German characterises much German aesthetic criticism, shake- its mass and variety testify to the impres- ^sP^eare- siveness of the appeal that Shakespeare’s work makes in permanence to the German intellect. The efforts to stem the current of Shakespearean worship essayed by the realistic critic, Gustav Rumelin, in his ‘ Shakespeare- studien’ (Stuttgart, 1866), and subsequently by the dramatist, J. R. Benedix, in ‘Die Shakespearomanie’ (Stuttgart, 1873, 8vo), proved of no effect. In studies of the text and metre Nikolaus Delius (1813-1888) should, among recent German writers, be accorded the first place; and in studies of the biography and stage history Friedrich Karl Elze (1821-1889). Among recent aesthetic critics in Germany a high place should be accorded Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig (1818-1879), in spite of the frequent cloudiness of vision with which a study of Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy infects his ‘Vor- lesungen iiber Shakespeare’ (Berlin, 1858 and 1874) and his ‘Shakespeare-Fragen’ (Leipzig, 1871). Otto Lud-

fellow-countrymen of the poet; for among us, it is a common — I might say an established — opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be “a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties.” How long may it be before this misconception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare ... is not less admirable than his imagination?’

wig the poet (1813—1865) published some enlightened criticism in his ‘ Shakespeare-Studien’ (Leipzig, 1871),¹ and Eduard Wilhelm Sievers (1820-1895) is author of many valuable essays as well as of an uncompleted biography.² Ulrici’s Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art’ (first published at Halle in 1839) and Gervinus’s ‘Commentaries’ (first published at Leipzig in 1848-9), both of which are familiar in English translations, are suggestive interpretations, but too speculative to be convincing. The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaf t, founded at Weimar in 1865, has published fifty-one year-books (edited successively by von Bodenstedt, Delius, Elze, F. A. Leo, and Prof. Brandi, with Wolfgang Keller and Max Forster) ; each contains useful contributions to Shakespearean study, and the whole series admirably and exhaustively illustrates the merits and defects of Shakespearean criticism and research in Germany.

In the early days of the Romantic movement Shakespeare’s plays were admitted to the repertory of the On the national stage, and the fascination which they German exerted on German playgoers in the last ^stage' years of the eighteenth century has never waned. Although Goethe deemed Shakespeare’s works unsuited to the stage, he adapted ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in 1812 for the Weimar Theatre, while Schiller prepared ‘Macbeth’ (Stuttgart, 1801). The greatest of German actors, Friedrich Ulrich Ludwig Schroder (1744-1816), may be said to have established the Shakespearean vogue on the German stage when he produced ‘Hamlet’ at the Hamburg theatre on September 20, 1776. Schroder’s most famous successors among German actors, Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832), his nephew Gustav Emil De-

¹ See his Nachlass-Schriften, edited by Moritz Heydrich, Leipzig, 1874, Bd. ii.

² Cf. Sievers, William Shakespeare: Sein Leben und Dichten (Gotha, 1866), vol. i. (all published), and his Shakespeare’s Zweite Mittelalter- lichen Dramen-Cyclus (treating mainly of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V), edited with a notice of Sievers’s Shakespearean work by Dr. W. Wetz, Berlin, 1896.

vrient (1803-1872), and Ludwig Barnay (b. 1842), largely derived their fame from their successful assumptions of Shakespearean characters. Another of Ludwig De- vrient’s nephews, Eduard (1801-1877), also an actor, prepared, with his son Otto, a German acting edition (Leipzig, 1873, and following years). An acting edition by Wilhelm Oechelhauser appeared previously at Berlin in 1871. Thirty-two of the thirty-seven plays assigned to Shakespeare are now on recognised lists of German acting plays, including all the histories. , In the year 1913 no fewer than 1133 performances were given of 23 plays, an average of three Shakespearean representations a day in the German-speaking regions of Europe.¹ It is not only in capitals like Berlin and Vienna that the representations are frequent and popular. In towns like Altona, Breslau, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Rostock, Shakespeare is acted constantly, and the greater number of his dramas is regularly kept in rehearsal. ‘Othello,’ ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ usually prove the most attractive. Much industry and ingenuity have been devoted to the theatrical setting of Shakespearean drama in Germany. Simple but adequate scenery and costume which reasonably respected archaeological accuracy was through the nineteenth century the general aim of the most enlightened interpreters. A just artistic method was inaugurated by K. Immermann, the director, at the Diisseldorf theatre in 1834, and was developed on scholarly lines at the Meiningen court theatre from 1874 onwards, and at the Munich theatre during 1889 and the following years. A new and somewhat revolutionary system of Shakespearean representation which largely defies tradition was inaugurated in 1904 by Max Reinhardt, then director of the Neue Theater at Berlin, with the production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; from 1905 onwards Rein-

hardt developed his method at the Deutsche Theater, in his presentation of twelve further Shakespearean pieces, including ‘ The Merchant of Venice,’ ‘ Much Ado,’ ‘ Hamlet,’ ‘ King Lear,’ The First and Second Parts of ‘ Henry IV ’ and ‘ Romeo and Juliet.’ With the help of much original stage mechanism Reinhardt made the endeavour to beautify the stage illusion and to convey at the same' time a convincing impression of naturalism.¹ Reinhardt’s ingenious innovations have enjoyed much vogue in Germany for some eleven years past, and have exerted some influence on recent Shakespearean revivals in England and America. Of the many German musical composers who have worked on Shakespearean spearean themes.² Mendelssohn (in ‘A Midsummer German Night’s Dream,’ 1826), Otto Nicolai (in ‘Merry Wives,’ 1849), Schumann and Franz Schubert (in setting separate songs) have achieved the greatest success.

In France Shakespeare won recognition after a longer struggle than in Germany. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619- inFrance ^I^SS)> tragedy of ‘Agrippine/ seemed to

echo passages in ‘Cymbeline,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ but the resemblances prove to be accidental. It was Nicolas Clement, Louis XIV’s librarian, who, first among Frenchmen, put on record an appreciation of Shakespeare. When, about 1680, he entered in the catalogue of the royal library the tide of the Second Folio of 1632, he added a note in which he allowed Shakespeare imagination, natural thoughts, and ingenious expression, but deplored his obscenity.³ Nearly half a century elapsed before France evinced any general interest in Shakespeare. A popular French translation of Addison’s ‘Spectator’ (Amsterdam, 1714) first

¹ Cf. Jahrbuch d. Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1914, pp. 107 seq.

² Joseph Haydn composed as early as r 7 74 music for the two tragedies of Hamlet and King Lear (ib. pp. 51-9).

³ Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 56. This copy of the Second Folio remains in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. See p. 567 supra.

gave French readers some notion of Shakespeare’s English reputation.

It is to Voltaire that his countrymen owe, as he himself boasted, their first effective introduction to Shakespeare.¹ Voltaire studied Shakespeare thoroughly on his visit to England between 1726 y°!^^r_f^e„’^s and 1729, and the English dramatist’s influence is visible in his own dramas. His tragedy of ‘Brutus’ (1730) evinces an intimate knowledge of ‘Julius Caesar,’ of which he also prepared a direct paraphrase in 1731. His ‘Eryphile ’ (1732) was the product of many perusals of ‘Hamlet.’ His ‘Zaire’ (1733) is a pale reflection of ‘Othello,’ and his ‘Mahomet’ (1734) of ‘Macbeth.’ In his ‘Lettre sur la Tragedie’ (1731) and in his ‘Lettres Philosophiques’ (1733), afterwards reissued as ‘Lettres sur les Anglais,’ 1734 (Nos. xviii. and xix.), Voltaire fully defined his critical attitude to Shakespeare. With an obstinate persistency he measured his work by the rigid standards of classicism. While he expressed admiration for Shakespeare’s genius, he attacked with vehemence his want of taste and art. ‘En Angleterre,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘Shakespeare crea le theatre. II avait un genie plein de force et de fecondite, de naturel et de sublime; mais sans la moindre etincelle de bon gout, et sans la moindre connaissance des r&gles.’ In Voltaire’s view Shakespeare was, in spite of ‘des morceaux admirables,’ ‘le Corneille de Londres, grand fou d’ailleurs.’

Voltaire’s influence failed to check the growth of sounder views in France. The Abbe Prevost in his periodical ‘Le Pour et le Contre’ (1738 et seq.) Voltaire’s showed freedom from classical prejudice in a opponents, sagacious acknowledgment of Shakespeare’s power. The Abbe Leblanc in his ‘Lettres d’un Franfais’ (1745)

¹ Cf. Alex. Schmidt, Voltaires Verdienst von der Einfiihrung Shake- speares in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864; Prof. T. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire, igo2, an exhaustive examination of Voltaire’s attitude to Shakespeare’s Work; J. Churton Collins, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau in England, 1908.

while he credited Shakespeare with grotesque extravagance paid an unqualified tribute to his sublimity. Portions of twelve plays were translated in De la Place’s ‘Theatre Anglais’ (1745-8, 8 vols.), with an appreciative preface, and Voltaire’s authority was thenceforth diminished. The ‘Anglomanie’ which flourished in France in the middle years of the century did much for Shakespeare’s reputation. Under the headings of ‘Genie,’ ‘Stratford,’ and ‘Tragedie,’ Diderot made in his ‘Encyclop6die’ (1751-72) a determined stand against the Voltairean position. , Garrick visited Paris in 1763 and 1764, and was received with enthusiasm by cultivated society and by the chief actors of the Comedie Franfaise, and his recitations of scenes from Shakespeare in the salons of the capital were loudly applauded.

But Voltaire was not easily silenced. He replied many times to the critics of his earlier Shakespearean pronouncement. His ‘ Observations sur le Jules Cesar de Shakespeare’ appeared in 1744 and there followed his ‘Appel El toutes les nations de l’Europe des juge- ments d’un ecrivain anglais, ou manifeste au sujet des honneurs du pavilion entre les theatres de Londres et de Paris’ (1761). Johnson replied to Voltaire’s general criticism in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu in 1769 in a separate volume, which was translated into French in 1777. Further opportunity of studying Shakespeare’s work in the French language increased the poet’s vogue among Voltaire’s fellow- countrymen. Jean-Franfois Ducis (1733-1816) metrically adapted, without much insight and with reckless changes, six plays for the French stage, beginning in 1769 with ‘Hamlet,’ and ending with ‘Othello’ in 1792. The first versions were welcomed in the Paris theatres, French and were admitted to the stages of other con- lSs. tinental countries. In 1776 Pierre Le Tourneur began a prose translation of all Shakespeare’s plays, which he completed in 1782 (20 vols.). In the

preface to his first volume Le Tourneur, who was more faithful to his original than any of his French predecessors, declared Shakespeare to be ‘ the god of the theatre.’ Such praise exasperated Voltaire anew. He was in his eighty-third year, but his energetic vanity was irrepressible and he now retorted on Le Tourneur in two violent letters, the first of which was read by D’Alembert before the French Academy on August 25, 1776. Here Shakespeare was described as a barbarian, whose works—‘ a huge dunghill ’—concealed some pearls, whose ‘sparks of genius’ shone ‘in a horrible night.’

Although Voltaire’s verdict was rejected by the majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was never entirely effaced, crftks’

The pioneers of the Romantic School at the gradual

, - . ,, . emancipa-

extreme end of the eighteenth century were tionfrom divided in their estimates of Shakespeare’s achievement. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie- Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his ‘Essai sur Shakespeare,’ 1801, inclined to Voltaire’s valuation; but Madame de Stael in her ‘De la Litterature,’ 1800 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5), and Charles Nodier in his ‘Pensees de Shakespeare’ (1805) supplied effective antidotes.¹ None the less, ‘at this day,’ wrote Wordsworth, as late as 1815, ‘the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to “this darling of our nation.*’ “The English with their bouffon de Shakespeare” is as familiar an expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. Baron Grimm is the only French writer who seems to have perceived his infinite superiority to the first names of the French theatre; an advantage which the Parisian critic owed to his German blood and German education.’ ² But the rapid growth of the Romantic move

¹ See the present writer’s Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. m-3. „ ,

² Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and the encyclo-

ment tended to discountenance all unqualified depreciation. Paul Duport, in ‘Essais Litteraires sur Shakespeare’ (Paris, 1828, 2 vols.), was the last French critic of repute to repeat Voltaire’s censure unreservedly, although Ponsard, when he was admitted to the French Academy in 1856, gave Voltaire’s views a modified approval in his inaugural ‘discours.’ The revision of Le Tourneur’s translation by Francois Guizot and A. Pichot in 1821 secured for Shakespeare a fresh and fruitful advantage. Guizot’s prefatory discourse ‘Sur la Vie et les (Euvres de Shakespeare ’ (reprinted separately from the translation of 1821 and rewritten as‘Shakespeare et son Temps’ 1852) set Shakespeare’s fame in France on firm foundations which were greatly strengthened by the monograph on ‘Racine et Shakespeare’ by Stendhal (Henri Beyle) in 1825 and by Victor Hugo’s preface to his tragedy of ‘Cromwell’ (1827). At the same time Barante in a study of ‘Hamlet’¹ and Ville- main in a general essay² acknowledged with comparatively few qualifications the mightiness of Shakespeare’s genius. The latest champions of French romanticism were at one in their worship of Shakespeare. Alfred de Musset became a dramatist under Shakespeare’s spell. Alfred de Vigny prepared a version of ‘Othello’ for the Theatre-Frangais in 1829 with eminent success. A somewhat'free adaptation of ‘Hamlet’ by Alexandre Dumas was first ■ performed in 1847, ^and a rendering by the Chevalier de Chatelain (1864) was often repeated. George Sand translated ‘As You Like It’ (Paris, 1856) for representation by the Comedie Fran- faise on April r2, 1856. To George Sand everything in literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare’s poetry.

pgdistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his voluminous Correspondance Litteraire Philosophique el Critique, extending over the period 1753-177°, the greater part of which was puhlished m 16 vols. 1812-13.

¹ Melanges Historiques, 1824, iii. 217-34.

² Melanges, 1827, iii. 141-87.

Guizot’s complete translation was followed by those of Frandsque Michel (1839), of Benjamin Laroche (1851), of Emile Montegut (1868-73, ¹⁰ vols.), and of G. Duval (1903 and following years, 8 vols.): but the best of all French renderings was the prose version by Frangois Victor Hugo (1850-67,) whose father, Victor Hugo the poet, renewed his adoration in a rhapsodical eulogy in 1864. Alfred Mezieres’s ‘Shakespeare, ses (Euvres et ses Critiques’ (Paris, i860), and Lamartine’s ‘Shakespeare et son CEuvre’ (1865) are saner appreciations. Ernest Renan bore witness to the stimulus which Shakespeare exerted on the enlightened French mind in his ‘Caliban suite de la Tempete’ (1878). The latest appreciation of Shakespeare is to be found in M. Jusse- rand’s ‘Histoire Litteraire du peuple anglais’ (1908) : it illustrates French sentiment at its best. '

¹ Before the close of the eighteenth century ‘Hamlet’ and ‘ Macbeth,’ ‘ Othello,’ and a few other Shakespearean plays, were in Ducis’s renderings stock pieces on ^ _the the French stage. The great actor Talma as French Othello in Ducis’s version reached in 1792 the ^stage' climax of his career. A powerful impetus to theatrical representation of Shakespeare in France was given by the performance in Paris of the chief plays by a strong company of English actors in the autumn of 1827. ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’ were acted successively by Charles Kemble and Macready; Edmund Kean appeared as Richard III, Othello, and Shylock; Miss Harriet Constance Smithson, who became the wife of Hector Berlioz the musician, filled the rdles of Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Portia. French critics were divided as to the merits of the performers, but most of them were enthusiastic in their commendations of the plays.¹ Lady Macbeth has been represented in recent

¹ Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day by day in the Paris newspaper Le Globe. They were by Charles Maginn, who reprinted them in his Causeries et Meditations Historiques et Litte- raires (Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.)

years by Madame Sarah Bernhardt, and Hamlet by M. Mounet Sully of the Theatre-Franfais. The actor and manager Andre Antoine at the Theatre Antoine in Paris recently revived Shakespearean drama in an admirable artistic setting and himself played effectively the leading roles in ‘King Lear’ (1904) and ‘Julius Caesar’ (1906). Four French musicians — Berlioz in his symphony of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Gounod in his opera of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Ambroise Thomas in his opera of ‘Hamlet,’ and Saint-Saens in his opera of ‘Henry VIII’ — have interpreted musically portions of Shakespeare’s work. The classical painter Ingres introduced Shakespeare’s portrait into his famous picture ‘Le Cortege d’Homere’ (now in the Louvre) }

In Italy it was chiefly under the guidance of Voltaire that Shakespeare was first studied, and Italian critics of 1' j the eighteenth century long echoed the French ^{n ay}‘ philosopher’s discordant notes. Antonio Conti (1677-1749), an Italian who distinguished himself in science as well as in letters, lived long in England and was the friend of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1726 he published his tragedy of ‘II Cesar,’ in which he acknowledged indebtedness to ‘ Sasper,’ but he only knew Shakespeare’s play of ‘Julius Caesar’ in the duke of Buckingham’s adaptation. Conti’s plays of ‘ Giunio Bruto ’ and ‘ Marco Bruto’ show better defined traces of Shakespearean study, although they were cast in the mould of Voltaire’s tragedies. Francis Quadrio in his ‘Della Storia e della Ragione d’ogni Poesia’ (Milan, 1739-52) thoroughly familiarised Italian readers with Voltaire’s view of Shakespeare. Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789), the Anglo- Italian lexicographer, who long lived in England, was

¹ M. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous VAncien Regime, Paris, 1898 (English translation entitled Shakespeare in France, London, 1899), is the chief authority on its subject. Cf. Lacroix, Histoire de I’Influence de Shakespeare sur le ThtcLtre-Franqais, 1867; Edinburgh Review, 1849, PP- 39—77 > ^and Elze, Essays, pp. 193 seq. Some supplementary information appears in ‘Esquisse d’une histoire de Shakespeare en France’ in F. Baldensperger’s Etudes d’Histoire Littfraire, 2^e serie (1910).

in 1777 the first Italian to defend Shakespeare against Voltaire’s strictures.¹

The subsequent Romantic movement which owed much to German influence planted in Italy the seeds of a potent faith in Shakespeare. Ippolito Pinde- _shake_ monte of Verona (1735-1828), in spite of his speare classicist tendencies, respectfully imitated romantic Shakespeare in his tragedy ‘Arminio,’ and ^pioneers- Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828) who is reckoned a regenerator of Italian literature bore witness to Shakespearean influence in his great tragedy ‘Caius Gracchus.’ Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), author of ‘I Promessi Sposi,’ acknowledged discipleship to Shakespeare no less than to Goethe, Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

Many Italian translations of separate plays were published before the eighteenth century closed. The French adaptation of ‘ Hamlet ’ by Ducis was issued in _Italiail Italian blank verse (Venice, 1774, 8vo). transSoon afterwards Alessandro Verri (1741- ^lations- 1816), a writer of romance, turned ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’ into Italian prose. Complete translations of all the plays direct from the English were issued in verse by Michele Leoni at Verona (1819-22, 14 vols.), and in prose by Carlo Rusconi at Padua in 1838 (new edit. Turin, 1858-9). Giulio Carcano the Milanese poet accurately but rather baldly rendered selected plays (Florence 1857-9) and he subsequently published a complete version at Milan (1875-82, 12 vols.). ‘Othello’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ have been often translated into Italian separately in late years, and these and other dramas have been constantly represented in the Italian theatres for nearly 150 years. The Italian players, Madame Ristori (as Lady Macbeth), Eleonora Duse, Salvini (as Othello), and Rossi rank among Shakespeare’s most effective interpreters. Rossini’s opera of Othello

¹ Cf. L. Pignotti, La tomba di Shakespeare, Florence, 1779, and Giovanni Andres, Dell’ Origine, Progressi e Stato attuale d’ogni Letteratara, 1782.

and Verdi’s operas of Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (the last two with libretti by Boito), manifest close and appreciative study of Shakespeare.

In Spain Shakespeare’s fame made slower progress than in France or Italy. During the eighteenth century . Spanish literature was dominated by French In Spain, influence Ducis’s versions of Shakespeare were frequently rendered on the Spanish stage in the native language before the end of the eighteenth century. In 1798 Leandro Fernandez di Mora tin, the reviver of Spanish drama on the French model, published at Madrid a prose translation of ‘Hamlet’ with a life of the author and a commentary condemning Shakespeare’s defiance of classical rule. Yet the Spanish romanticists of the earlier nineteenth century paid Shakespeare something of the same attention as they extended to Byron. The appearance of a Spanish translation of Schlegel’s lectures on ‘Dramatic Literature’ in 1818 stimulated Shakespearean study. Blanco White issued select passages in Spanish in 1824. Jose di Espronceda (18091842), a chieftain among Spanish romanticists, zealously ■ studied Shakespearean drama, and Jose Maria Quadrado (1819-1896), a man of much literary refinement, boldly recast some plays in the native language. The Spanish critic and poet Menendez y Pelayo (b. 1856) subsequently set Shakespeare above Calderon. Two Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s complete works were set on foot independently in 1875 and 1885 respectively; the earlier (by J. Clark) appeared at Madrid in five volumes, and three volumes of the other (by G. Macpherson) have been published. An interesting attempt to turn Shakespeare into the Catalan language has lately been initiated at Barcelona. A rendering of ‘Macbeth’ by C. Montoliu appeared in 1908 and an admirable version of ‘King Lear’ by Anfos Par with an elaborate and enlightened commentary followed in 1912.¹

¹ A curious imaginary conversation by Senor Carlos Navarro Lamarca on the possibilities of successfully translating Hamlet into Spanish ap-

It was through France that Holland made her first acquaintance with Shakespeare’s work. In 1777 Duds’s version of ‘Hamlet’ appeared in Dutch at in the Hague; ‘ Lear ’ followed nine years later, ^Ho,land- and ‘Othello’ in 1802. Between 1778 and 1782 fourteen plays were translated direct from the original English text into Dutch prose in a series of five volumes with notes translated from Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson and Capell. Two complete Dutch translations have since been published; one in prose by A. S. Kok (Amsterdam, 1873-1880, 7 vols.), the other in verse by Dr. L. A. J. Burgersdijk (Leyden, 1884-8, 12 vols.).

In Denmark French classical influence delayed appreciation of Shakespeare’s work till the extreme end of the eighteenth century. A romantic school in of poetry and criticism was then founded and ^Denmark- in the nineteenth century it completely established Shakespeare’s supremacy. Several of his plays were translated into Danish by N. Rosenfeldt in 1791. Some twenty years later the Danish actor Peter Foersom, who was a disciple of the German actor Schroder, secured for Shakespearean drama a chief place in the Danish theatre. Many of the tragedies were rendered into Danish by Foersom with the aid of P. F. Wulff (Copenhagen, 1807-25, 7 vols.). Their labours were revised and completed by E. Lembcke (Copenhagen, 1868-73, 18 vols.). Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, published in 1895 at Copenhagen a Danish study of Shakespeare which at once won a high place in critical literature, and was translated into English, French and German.

In Sweden a complete translation by C. A. Hagberg appeared at Lund in 1847-51 (12 vols.) and a valuable

peared in the Spanish magazine Helios, Madrid, July 1903. The supposed interlocutors are Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Lihranan of the British Museum, the present writer, and Lopez and Gonzales, two pretended Spanish students. See also Helios, January 1904.

biography by Ii. W. Schiick at Stockholm in 1883. in An interesting version of the ‘Sonnets’ by

Sweden. q R. Nyblom came out at Upsala in 1871.

In Eastern Europe,¹ Shakespeare’s plays became known rather earlier than in Scandinavia, mainly in through French translations. The Russian

Russia. dramatist Alexander Soumarakov published in Petrograd as early as 1748 a version of ‘Hamlet’ in Russian verse which was acted in the Russian capital two years later. The work was based on De la Place’s free French rendering of Shakespeare’s play. In 1783 ‘ Richard III ’ was rendered into Russian with the help of Le Tourneur’s more literal French prose. The Empress Catherine II in 1786 encouraged the incipient Shakespearean vogue by converting Eschenburg’s German rendering of the ‘Merry Wives’ into a Russian farce.² In the same year she introduced many Shakespearean touches through the German into two Russian history plays called respectively ‘Rurik’ and ‘Oleg,’ and she prepared a liberal adaptation of ‘Timon of Athens.’

Shakespeare found his first whole-hearted Russian

champion in N. Karamzine, a foe to French classicism

who, having learned Shakespeare’s language

Russian ^{on a} visit to this country, turned ‘Julius

romantic Caesar’ from English into Russian prose at

movement jy£_oscow j_n 3:787. A preface claims for Shake-

shake- speare complete insight into human nature, speare. • • *

Early in the nineteenth century the tragedies

‘Othello,’ ‘Lear,’ ‘Hamlet’ were rendered into Russian

from the French of Ducis and were acted with great

success on Russian stages. The romantic movement in

Russian literature owed much to the growing worship

and study of Shakespeare. Pushkin learnt English in

¹ See Andr6 Lirondelle, Shakespeare en Russie, 1748-1840, Paris, 1912.

² The scene of the piece was transferred to St. Petersburg [Petrograd], and the characters bore Russian names; Falstaff becomes Iakov Vlasie- vitch Polkadov.

)rder ^ to read Shakespeare and Byron in the original, ind his Russian plays are dyed in Shakespearean colours. Lermontov poured contempt on the French version of Ducis and insisted that Shakespearean drama must be studied as it came from the author’s pen. Tourgeniev ind the younger romanticists were deeply indebted to Shakespeare’s inspiration. At the instigation of Be- insky, the chief of Russian critics, a scholarly translation into Russian prose was begun by N. Ketzcher in 1841; eighteen plays appeared at Moscow (8 vols. 1841-50), and the work was completed in a new edition [Moscow, 9 vols. 1862—79). In 1865 there appeared at Petrograd the best translation in verse (direct from the English) by Nekrasow and Gerbel. Gerbel also issued 1 Russian translation of the ‘Sonnets’ in 1880. An- sther rendering of all the plays by P. A. Kanshin, 12 vols., followed in 1893. A new verse translation by various hands, edited by Professor Vengerov of Petro- sjrad, with critical essays, notes, and a vast number of illustrations, appeared there in 1902-4 (5 vols. 4to). More recent are the translations of A. L. Sokolovski [Petrograd, 1913, 12 vols.) and of A. E. Gruzinski [Moscow, 1913, 3 vols.). Almost every play has been represented in Russian on the Russian stage; and a large critical literature attests the general enthusiasm. The Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovitch privately issued at Petrograd in three sumptuous volumes in 18991900 a Russian translation of ‘ Hamlet ’ with exhaustive notes and commentary in the Russian language; the work ivas dedicated to the widow of Tsar Alexander III.¹

A somewhat perverse protest against the Russian dolisation of Shakespeare was launched by Count Leo Tolstoy in his declining days. In 1906 Tolstoy _Toi_stoy>_s published an elaborate monograph on Shake- attack, speare in which he angrily denounced the ¹⁹⁰ ' English dramatist as an eulogist of wealth and rank and 1 contemner of poverty and humble station. Nor would

¹ The Grand Duke presented a copy to the library of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford.

Tolstoy allow the English dramatist genuine poetic thought or power of characterisation. But throughout his philippic Tolstoy shows radical defects of judgment. After a detailed comparison of the old play of ‘King ¹ Leir’ with Shakespeare’s finished tragedy of ‘Lear’ he pronounces in favour of the earlier production.¹

In Poland the study of Shakespeare followed much the same course as in Russia. The last King of the country, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski (1732-1798), ^InPoan ■ while in England from February to June 1754 first saw a play of Shakespeare on the stage; he thereupon abandoned all classical prejudices and became for life an ardent worshipper of Shakespeare’s work and art.² After his accession to the Polish throne in 1764 he found opportunities of disseminating his faith among his fellow countrymen, and the nobility of Poland soon idolised the English poet.®

¹ See Tolstoy’s Shakespeare, trad, de Russe par J. W. Bienstock (Paris, 1906); and Joseph B. Mayor, Tolstoi as Shakespearean Critic (in Trans. Roy. Soc. Lit. 1908, 2nd ser. vol. 28, pt. i. pp. 23-55). Prof. Leo Wiener in his An Interpretation of the Russian People (New York, 1915, pp. 18791) supplies the best refutation of Tolstoy’s verdict in a description of the strong sympathetic interest excited in a Russian peasant girl at a Sunday School by a reading of a Russian translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Tolstoy selects the identical play for special condemnation.

² See Poniatowski’s Memoir es, ed. Serge Goriainow, Petrograd, 1914; i. 112-3. In 1753 Poniatowski translated into French some scenes from Julius Casar; the manuscript survives in the Czartoryski Museum at Cracow and was printed by Dr. Bernacki in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1906), xlii. 186-202. ,

³ The Polish princess, Isabella wife of Prince Adam Czartoryski, visited Stratford-on-Avon in July 1790 and on November 28 following, her secretary, Count Orlovski, purchased on her behalf for 20 guineas a damaged arm-chair at Shakespeare’s Birthplace which was reported to have belonged to the poet. The vendor was Thomas Hart, who was then both tenant and owner of the Birthplace. A long account of the transaction at the Birthplace is in the Sanders MS. 1191. (See also George Burnet’s View of the Present State of Poland, 1807, and Gent. Mag. May 1815.) The descendants of the princess long preserved the chair in a museum known as ‘Das Gothische Haus’ erected by her in the grounds of her chateau at Pulawy (Nova Alexandrova) near Lublin, together with an attestation of the chair’s authenticity which was signed at Stratford on June 17, 1791, by J. Jordan, Thomas Hart, and- Austin Warrilow. The chair is described in their certificate, a copy of which has been com-

German actors seem to have first performed Shakespeare’s plays at Warsaw, where they produced ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in 1775 and ‘Hamlet’ in 1781. p_olish A Polish translation through the French of trans- ‘Merry Wives’ appeared in 1782, and ‘Hamlet’ ^latl0ns- was acted in a Polish translation of the German actor Schroder’s version at Lemberg in 1797. As many as sixteen plays now hold a recognised place among Polish acting plays. A Polish translation of Shakespeare’s collected works appeared at Warsaw in 1875 (edited by the Polish poet Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski), and was long reckoned among the most successful renderings in a foreign tongue. It has been lately superseded by a fresh translation by eight prominent Polish men of letters, which was completed in twelve volumes in 1913 under the editorship of Prof. Roman Dyboski, professor of English Language and Literature at Cracow.¹

In Hungary, Shakespeare’s greatest works have since the beginning of the nineteenth century enjoyed the enthusiastic regard of both students and play- in goers. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was translated ^Huns^ary- into Hungarian in 1786 and ‘Hamlet’ in 1790. In 1830, 1845, ^and 1848, efforts were made to issue complete translations, but only portions were published. The first complete translation into Hungarian appeared at Budapest under the auspices of the Kisfaludy Society (1864-78, 19 vols.). At the National Theatre at Budapest twenty-two plays have been of late included in the repertory.²

Other complete translations have been published in

municated to the present writer, as ‘an ancient back chair, commonly called Shakespeare’s chair, which at this time is much deformed owing to its being cut to pieces and carried away by travellers.’

¹ Dr. Bemacki, vice-custodian of the Ossolinski Institute at Lemberg, adds a valuable account of Shak'espeare in Poland down to the destruction of Polish independence in 1798. _v _

² See August Greguss’s Shakspere . . . elso kotet: Shakspere pdlyaja, Budapest, 1880 (an account of Shakespeare in Hungarian), and Shakespeare Drdmdi Hazduk Ban (a full bibliography with criticisms of Hungarian renderings of Shakespeare), by J. Bayer, 2 vols. Budapest, 1909.

Bohemian (Prague, 1856-74), and Finnish (Helsingfors, 1892-5). In Armenian, three plays (‘Hamlet/ in other ‘Romeo and Juliet/ and ‘As You Like It’) ^countries- have been issued. Separate plays have appeared in Welsh, Portuguese, Friesic, Flemish, Servian, Roumanian, Maltese, Ukrainian, Wallachian, Croatian, modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese; while a few have been rendered into Bengali, Hindustani, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kanarese, and other languages of India, and have been acted in native theatres.

GENERAL ESTIMATE

The study of Shakespeare’s biography in the light of contemporary literary history shows that his practical experiences and fortunes closely resembled _Shake those of the many who in his epoch followed the speare’s profession of dramatist. His conscious aims and practices seem indistinguishable from those graphic of contemporary men of letters. It is beyond ^£acts' the power of biographical research to determine the final or efficient cause of his poetic individuality. Yet the conception of his dramatic and poetic powers grows more real and actual after the features in his life and character which set him on a level with other men have been precisely defined by the biographer. The infinite difference between his endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magical and involuntary working of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has owned as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom it pleases. The literary history of the world proves the hopelessness of seeking in biographical data, or in the facts of everyday business, the secret springs of poetic inspiration.

Emerson’s famous aphorism — ‘ Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare ’ — seems, until it be submitted to a radical qualification, to rest on _The;m a profound misapprehension. An unquestion- personal able characteristic of Shakespeare’s art is its impersonality. The plain and positive refer- snces in the plays to Shakespeare’s personal experiences either at Stratford-on-Avon or in London are rare and fragmentary, and nowhere else can we point with confidence to any autobiographic revelations. As a drama-

63*

tist Shakespeare lay under the obligation of investing a great crowd of characters with all phases of sentiment and passion, and no critical test has' yet been found whereby to disentangle Shakespeare’s personal feelings or opinions from those which he imputes to the creatures of his dramatic world. It was contrary to Shakespeare’s dramatic aim to label or catalogue in drama his private sympathies or antipathies. The most psychological of English poets and a dramatic artist of no mean order, Robert Browning, bluntly declared that Shakespeare ‘ ne’er so little ’ at any point in his work ‘ left his bosom’s gate ajar.’ Even in the ‘Sonnets’ lyric emotion seems to Browning to be transfused by dramatic instinct. It is possible to deduce from his plays a broad practical philosophy which is alive with an active moral sense. But we seek in vain for any self-evident revelation of personal experience of emotion or passion.¹

Many forces went to the making of Shakespeare’s mighty achievement. His national affinities he on Domestic the surface. A love of his own country and Muencef^{1 a con}fident faith in its destiny find exalted and expression in his work. Especially did he affinities, interpret to perfection the humour peculiar to his race. His drama was cast in a mould which English predecessors had invented. But he is free of all taint of insularity. His lot was thrown in the full current of the intellectual and artistic movement known as the Renaissance, which taking its rise in Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in his lifetime still active in every country of western Europe. He shared in the great common stock of thought and aspiration — in the certain hope of intellectual enfranchisement and in the enthusiastic recognition of the beauty of the world and humanity — to which in his epoch authors of all countries under the sway of the Renaissance enjoyed access.

¹ See the present writer’s The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare’s Art (English Association, Leaflet xiii, July 1909).

Like all great poets Shakespeare was not merely gifted with a supreme capacity for observing what was parsing about him in nature and human life, but he was endowed with the rare power of assimilating with rapidity the fruits of reading. Literary study rendered his imagination the more productive and robust. His genius caught light and heat from much foreign as well as domestic literature. But he had the faculty of transmuting in the crucible of his mind the thought and style of others into new substance of an unprecedented richness. His mind may best be likened to a highly sensitised photographic plate, which need only be exposed for however brief a period to anything in life or literature, in order to receive upon its surface _Slialr<>_ the firm outline of a picture which could be speare’s developed and reproduced at will. If Shake- j?|^^ve speare’s mind came in contact in an alehouse ' with a burly, good-humoured toper, the conception of a Falstaff found instantaneous admission to his brain. The character had revealed itself to him in most of its involutions, as quickly as his eye caught sight of its external form, and his ear caught the sound of the voice. Books offered Shakespeare the same opportunity of realising human life and experience. A hurried perusal of an Italian story of a Jew in Venice conveyed to him the mental picture of Shylock, with all his racial temperament in energetic action, and all the background of Venetian scenery and society accurately defined. A few hours spent over Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ brought into being in Shakespeare’s brain the true aspects of Roman character and Roman inspiration. Whencesoever the external impressions came, whether from the world of books or the world of living men, the same mental process was at work, the same visualising instinct which made the thing, which he saw or read of, a living and a lasting reality.

No analysis of the final fruits of Shakespeare’s genius can be adequate. In knowledge of human character,

in perception and portrayal of the workings of passion, in wealth of humour, in fertility of fancy, and in sound-

General ^n6SS J^UC^§^ment» ^^{aS n0} ^Val. It is true of him, as of no other writer, that his lanolins guage and versification adapt themselves to ' every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknowledged, but they sink into insignificance when they are measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hopelessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shakespeare’s vast work is scrutinised with due attention, the glow of his imagination is seen to leave few passages wholly unillumined. Some of his plots are hastily constructed and inconsistently developed, but the intensity of the interest with which he contrives to invest the personality of his heroes and heroines triumphs over halting or digressive treatment of the story in which they have their being. Although he was versed in the technicalities of stagecraft, he occasionally disregarded its elementary conditions. The success of his presentments of human life and character depended indeed little on his manipulation of theatrical machinery. His unassailable supremacy springs from the versatile working of his intellect and imagination, by virtue of which his pen limned with unerring precision almost every gradation of thought and emotion that animates the living stage of the world.

Shakespeare, as Hazlitt suggested, ultimately came to know how human faculty and feeling would develop His final *^{n an}Y conceivable change of fortune on the achieve- highways of hfe. His great characters give voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that commonly rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they

are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditat- ingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination — fairies, ghosts, witches — are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.

So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated Shakespeare’s power is recognised. All the world universal over, language is applied to his creations that J;?™®¹"" ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. ' Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive phrases that fall from their lips are rooted in the speech of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect of the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with one accord his own words: ‘ How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a god! ’ The prince of French romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system; ‘after God,’ wrote Dumas, ‘Shakespeare has created most.’

APPENDIX

THE SOURCES Or BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

The scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare’s career has been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over two centuries has brought together a mass of detail contempo- which far exceeds that accessible m .the case of any rary records other contemporary professional writer. Nevertheless, ^abundant- a few links are missing, and at some points appeal to conjecture is inevitable. But the fully ascertained facts are numerous enough to define sharply the general direction that Shakespeare’s career followed. Although the clues are in some places faint, the trail never eludes the patient investigator.

Fuller,in his ‘Worthies’ (1662), attempted the first biographical notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, in his gossiping ‘Lives of Eminent Men,’¹ _First based his ampler information on reports communicated efforts in to him by William Beeston (d. 1682), an aged actor, ^blography' whom Dryden called ‘the chronicle of the stage,’ and who was doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. Beeston’s father, Christopher Beeston, was a member of Shakespeare’s company of actors, and he for a long period was himself connected with the stage. Beeston’s friend, John Lacy, an^ actor of the Restoration, also supplied Aubrey with further information.² A few additional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the Rev. John Ward (r629-r68i), vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book written between r66i and 1663 .(ed. Charles Severn, 1839); by the Rev. William Fulman, whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with valuable interpolations made before 1708 by Archdeacon Richard Davies, vicar of Sapperton, Gloucestershire); by John Dowdall,

¹ Compiled between r66g and 1696; first printed in Letters from the Bodleian Library, 1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press m 1898 by the Rev. Andrew Clark (2 vols.). . . , . ■ ,

^aSee art. ‘Shakespeare in Oral Tradition’ in the present writers Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 49 seq.

2 X 641 .

who recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 1693 (London, 1838); and by William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Hall’s letter among the Bodleian MSS.). Phillips in his ‘Theatrum Poetarum’ (1675), and Langbaine in his ‘English Dramatick Poets’ (1691), confined themselves to elementary criticism. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious memoir than had yet been attempted, and embodied some hitherto unrecorded Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton (1635-1710) supplied him. A little fresh gossip was collected by William Oldys, and was printed from his manuscript ‘Adversaria’ (now in .the British Museum) as an appendix to Yeowell’s ‘Memoir of Oldys,’ 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the narratives of their predecessor, Rowe.

In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and especially in that of 1821, there was embodied a mass of fresh Bio ra hers ‘ⁿf^ormat‘^on derived by Edmund Malone from sys- _>0fTe^aP
ers tematic researches among the parochial records of nineteenth Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated by the actor cen ury. Alleyn at Dulwich, and official papers of state preserved in the public offices in London (now collected in the Public Record Office). The available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare’s biography, was thus greatly extended, and Malone’s information in spite of subsequent discoveries remains of supreme value. John Payne Collier, in his ‘History of English Dramatic Poetry' (1831), in his ‘New Facts’ about Shakespeare (1835), his ‘New Particulars’ (1836), and his ‘Further Particulars’ (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe’s ‘Diary’ and the ‘Alleyn Papers’ for the Shakespeare Society, while occasionally throwing some further light on obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare’s biography a series of ingeniously forged documents which have greatly perplexed succeeding biographers.¹ Joseph Hunter in ‘New Illustrations of Shakespeare’ (1845) and Geo’-gc Russell French’s ‘ Shakespeareana Genealogica’ (1869) occasionally supplemented Malone’s researches. James Orchard Halliwell (afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps 1820-1889) printed separately, between 1850 and 1884, in various privately issued publications, ample selections from the Stratford archives and the extant legal documents bearing on Shakespeare’s career, many of them for the first time. In 1881 Halliwell-Phillipps began the collective publication of materials for a full biography in his ‘Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare ’; this work was generously enlarged in successive editions until it acquired massive proportions; in the seventh edition of 1887, which embodied the author’s final corrections and

¹ See pp. 647 seq.

additions, it reached near 1000 pages. (Subsequent editions reprint the seventh edition without change.) Frederick Gard Fleay (1831-1909), in his ‘Shakespeare Manual’ (1876), in his ‘Life of Shakespeare’ (1886), in his ‘History of the Stage’ (1890), and his ‘Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama’ (1891), adds much useful information respecting stage history and Shakespeare’s relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries; but many of Mr. Fleay’s statements and conjectures are unauthenticated. Dr. C. W. Wallace, of Nebraska, has since 1904 added some subsidiary biographical details of much interest from documents at the Public Record Office which he has examined for the first time.¹

The history of Stratford-on-Avon and Shakespeare’s relations with the town are treated in Wheler’s ‘History and Antiquities’ (1806), and his ‘Birthplace of Shakespeare’ (1824); in Stratford John R. Wise’s ‘Shakespeare, his Birthplace and its topog- Neighbourhood’ (1861); in the present writer’s ‘Strat- ^raphy' ford-on-Avon to the Death of Shakespeare’ (new edit. 1907); in J. Harvey Bloom’s ‘Shakespeare’s Church’ (1902); in C. I. Elton’s ‘William Shakespeare: his Family and Friends’ (1904); in J. W. Gray’s ‘Shakespeare’s Marriage! (1905), and in Mrs. Stopes’s ‘Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries’ (new edit. 1907), and her ‘Shakespeare’s Environment’ (1914). Wise appends a ‘glossary of words still used in Warwickshire to be found in Shak- spere.’ The parish registers of Stratford have been edited by Mr. Richard Savage for the Parish Registers Society (1898-9). Harrison’s ‘Description of England’ and Stubbes’s ‘Anatomy of Abuses’ (both reprinted by the New Shakspere Society) supply contemporary accounts of the social conditions prevailing in Shakespeare’s time. Later compilations on the subject are Nathan Drake’s ‘Shakespeare and his Times’ (1817) and G. W. Thombury’s Shakspere’s England’ (1856). _

The chief monographs on special points in Shakespeare’s biography are Dr. Richard Farmer’s ‘Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare’ (1767), reprinted in the Variorum _Spec!ai_i?Hi editions; Octavius Gilchrist’s ‘Examination of the studies in Charges ... .of Ben Jonson’s Enmity towards Shake- ^y-

speare’ (1808); W. J. Thoms’s ‘Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?’

¹ Recent researches by Dr. Wallace and others on the historyof the theatres axe already catalogued in tins volume in the notes to chapters V. ( Shakespeare and the Actors’); VI. (‘On the London Stage'); XVI. (‘Shakespeare’s Financial Resources ); see especially pp. 310-1, note. An epitome of the biographical information to date is supplied in Karl Elze’s Life of Shakespeare (Halle, 1876; English translation, r888), with which Elze’s Essays from the publications of the German Shakespeare Society (English translation, 1874) are worth studying. Samuel Neil’s Shakespeare, a critical Biography (r86i), Edwara Dowden’s Shakespere Primer {1877) and Introduction toSnak- spere (1893), and F. J. Fumivall’s Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere, reissued as Shakespeare: Life and Work (1908), are useful.

(1849), a study based on an erroneous identification of the poet with another William Shakespeare; John Charles Bucknill’s ‘Medical Knowledge of ^Shakespeare’ (i860); C. F. Green’s ‘Shakespeare’s Crab-Tree, with its Legend’ (1862); C. H. Brace- bridge’s ‘Shakespeare no Deer-stealer’ (1862); H. N. Ellacombe’s ‘Plant Lore of Shakespeare’ (1878); William Blades’s ‘Shakspere and Typography’ (1872); J. E. Harting’s ‘Ornithology of Shakespeare’ (1871); D. H. Madden’s ‘ Diary of Master William Silence (Shakespeare and Sport),’ new edit. 1907 ; and H. T. Stephenson’s ‘Shakespeare’s London’ (1910). Shakespeare’s knowledge of law has been the theme of many volumes, among which may be mentioned W. L. Rushton’s four volumes — ‘Shakespeare a Lawyer’ (1858), ‘Shakespeare’s Legal Maxims’ (1859, new edit. 1907), ‘Shakespeare’s Testamentary Language’ (1869) and ‘Shakespeare illustrated by the Lex Scripta’ (1870); Lord Campbell’s ‘Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements’ (1859); C. K. Davis’s ‘The Law in Shakespeare’ (St. Paxil, U.S.A., 1884) and E. J. White’s ‘Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare’ (St. Louis, 1911). Speculations on Shakespeare’s religion may be found in T. Carter’s ‘ Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant’ (1897) and in H. S. Bowden’s ‘The Religion of Shakespeare’ (1899), which attempts to prove Shakespeare a Catholic. Shakespeare’s knowledge of music is also the theme of many volumes: see E. M. Naylor’s ‘ Shakespeare and Music’ (1896), and ‘Shakespeare Music’ (1912); L. C. Elson’s ‘Shakespeare in Music’ (6th ed. 1908); and G. H. Cowling’s ‘Music on the Shakespearian Stage’ (1913).

Francis Douce’s ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’ (1807, new edit. 1839), ‘Shakespeare’s Library' (ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. Aids to Hazlitt, 1875), ‘Shakespeare’s Plutarch’ (ed. Skeat, study of 1875, and ed. Tucker-Brooke, 1909), and ‘Shake- tixts^and speare’s Holinshed’ (ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896)

' are, with H. R. D. Anders’s ‘Shakespeare’s Books’

(Berlin, 1904), of service in tracing the sources of Shakespeare’s plots. M. W. MacCallum’s ‘ Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background’ (1910) is a very complete monograph. The sources of the plots are presented methodically in Messrs. Chatto and Windus’s series of ‘Shakespeare Classics’ of which ten volumes have appeared. Alexander Schmidt’s ‘Shakespeare Lexicon’ (1874, 3rd edit. 1902), Dr. E. A. Abbott’s ‘Shakespearian Grammar’ (1869, new edit. 1893), and Prof. W. Franz’s ‘Shakespeare- Grammatik,’ 2 pts. (Halle, 1898-1900, 2nd ed. 1902), with his ‘Die Grundziige der Sprache Shakespeares’ (Berlin, 1902), and ‘ Orthographie, Lautgebung und Wortbildung in den Werken Shake- Concor- speares’ (Heidelberg, 1905), and Wilhelm Vietor’s dances. ‘Shakespeare’s Pronunciation’ (2 vols., Marburg, 906), are valuable aids too a philological study of the text. Useful con

cordances to the Plays have been prepared by Mrs. Cowden-Clarke (1845; revised ed. 1864), to the Poems by Mrs. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1875), and to Plays and Poems in one volume, with references to numbered lines, by John Bartlett (London and New York, 1895).¹ With these works may be classed the briefer compilations, R. J. Cunliffe’s ‘A new Shakespearean Dictionary’ (1910) and C. T. Onions’s ‘Shakespeare Glossary’ (1911). Extensive bibliographies are given in Lowndes’s ‘Library Manual’ (ed. Bohn); in Franz Thimm’s Shakespeariana’ (1864 Bibliog- and 1871); in ‘British Museum Catalogue’ (the Shake- ^raP^bies- spearean entries — 3680 titles — separately published in 1897); in the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ nth edit, (skilfully classified by Mr. H. R. Tedder); and in Mr. William Jaggard’s ‘ Shakespeare Bibliography,’ Stratford-on-Avon, 1911. The Oxford University Press’s facsimile reproductions of the First Folio (1902), and of Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ and ‘Pericles’ (1905), together with ‘Four Quarto Editions of Plays of Shakespeare. The Property of the Trustees of Shakespeare’s Birthplace. With five illustrations in facsimile.’ (Stratford-on-Avon. Printed for the Trustees, 1908) contain much bibliographical information collected by the present writer. Mr. A. W. Pollard’s ‘Shakespeare Folios and Quartos’ (1909) is the most comprehensive treatise on its subject which has yet been published.

The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesell- schaft, are noticed above (see pp. 600, 618). To the critical critical studies by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dowden, and studies. Swinburne, on which comment has been made (see p. 599), there may be added the essays on Shakespeare’s heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885; Sir A. W. Ward’s ‘English Dramatic Literature’ (1875, new edit. 1898); Richard G. Moulton’s ‘Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist’ (1885); ‘Shakespeare Studies’ by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893); F. S. Boas’s ‘Shakspere and his Predecessors’ (1895); Georg Brandes’s ‘William Shakespeare’ — a somewhat fanciful study (London, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo); W. J. Courthope’s ‘History of English Poetry,’ 1903, vol. iv.; A. C. Bradley’s ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ (London, 1904), and his ‘Oxford Lectures in Poetry’ (1909); the present writer’s ‘Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century’ (1904), and his ‘Shakespeare and the Modern Stage’ (1906); J. C. Collins’s ‘ Studies in Shakespeare ’ (1904); Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Shakespeare’ in ‘English Men of Letters’ series (1907); G. P. Baker’s ‘The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist’ (1907);

¹ Tbe earliest attempts at a concordance were A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, by F. Twiss (1805), and An Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words, by Samuel Ayscougb (1827), but these are now superseded.

Felix E. Schelling’s ‘Elizahethan Drama 1558-1642’ (1908) 2 vols.; and Brander Matthews’s ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’

(i9^J3)- .

The intense interest which Shakespeare’s life and work have long universally excited has tempted unprincipled or sportively Shake- mischievous writers from time to time to deceive the spearean puhlic by the forgery of documents purporting to forgeries. supply new information. George Steevens made some foolish excursions in this direction, and his example seems to have stimulated the notahle activity of forgers which persisted from 1780 to 1850. The frauds have caused students so much perplexity that it may be useful to warn them against those Shakespearean forgeries which have obtained the widest currency. In the ‘Theatrical Review,’ 1763 (No. 2), there was inserted in an George anonymous biography of Edward Alleyn (from the pen Stevens's ₀f George Steevens) a letter purporting to be signed fabrication, ‘G. Peel’ and to have been addressed to Marlowe 1763- , (‘Friend Marie’). The writer pretends to descrihe his meeting at the ‘Globe’ with Edward Alleyn and Shakespeare, when Alleyn taunted the dramatist with having borrowed from his own conversation the ‘speech ahout the qualityes of an actor’s excellencye, in Hamlet his tragedye.’ This clumsy fabrication was’reproduced unquestioningly in the ‘Annual Register’ (1770), in Berkenhout’s ‘Biographia Literaria’ (1777), in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ (1801), in the ‘British Critic’ (1818, p. 422), in Charles Severn’s introduction to John Ward’s ‘Diary’ (1839, p. 81), in the ‘Academy’ (London, 18 Jan. 1902), in ‘Poet Lore’ (Boston, April 1902), and elsewhere. Alexander Dyce in his first edition of George Peele’s ‘Works’ (1829, 1st ed. vol. i. p. in) reprinted it with a very slender reservation; Dyce’s example was followed in William Young’s ‘History of Dulwich College’ (1889, ii. 41-2). The fraud was justly denounced without much effect by Isaac Disraeli in his ‘Curiosities of Literature’ (1823) and more recently hy the present writer in an article entitled ‘ A Peril of Shakespearean Research.’¹ The futile forgery still, continues to mislead unwary inquirers who unearth it in early periodicals.

Much notoriety was obtained hy John Jordan (1746-1809), a resident at Stratford-on-Avon, whose most important achievement John Jordan, was the forgery of the will of Shakespeare’s father; 1746-1809. hut many other papers in Jordan’s ‘Original Collections on Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon’ (1780), and ‘Original Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Families of Shakespeare and Hart,’ are open to the gravest suspicion.²

¹ Shakespeare and the Modem Stage, 1906, pp. 188-197.

Jordan’s Coljections, including this fraudulent will of Shakespeare’s father, was printed privately by J. 0. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1864.

The best known Shakespearean forger of the eighteenth century was William Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister’s clerk, who, with the aid of his father, Samuel Ireland (1740?- _The Ireland 1800), an author and engraver of some repute, produced forgeries, in 1796 a volume of forged papers claiming to relate ^I79®- to Shakespeare’s career. The title ran: ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the tragedy of “King Lear” and a small fragment of “Hamlet” from the original MSS. in the possession of Samuel Ireland.’ On April 2, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble produced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse entitled ‘Vortigem’ under the pretence that it was by Shakespeare, and that it had been recently found among the manuscripts of the dramatist which had fallen into the hands of the Irelands. The piece, which was published, was the invention of young Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands for some time deceived a section of the literary public, but it was finally exposed by Malone in his valuable ‘ Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland MSS ’ (1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his ‘Confessions’ (1805). He had acquired much skill in copying Shakespeare’s genuine signature from .the facsimile in Steevens’s edition of Shakespeare’s works of the mortgage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 1612-13.¹ He conformed to that style of handwriting in his forged deeds and literary compositions.² He also inserted copies of the dramatist’s signature on the title-pages of many sixteenth- century books, and often added notes in the same feigned hand on their margins. Numerous sixteenth-century volumes embellished by Ireland in this manner are extant in the British Museum and in private collections. Ireland’s forged signatures and marginalia have been frequently mistaken for genuine autographs of Shakespeare.

But Steevens’s, Ireland’s and Jordan’s frauds are .clumsy compared with those that belong to the nineteenth century. Most of the works relating to the biography of Shakespeare Forgeries or the history of the Elizabethan stage produced by g™coilfer^ted John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between and others, 1835 ^and 1849 are honeycombed with forged references 1835-1849. to Shakespeare, and many of the forgeries have been admitted unsuspectingly into literary history. The chief of these forged papers I arrange below in the order of the dates that have been allotted to them by their manufacturers.³

¹ See a full description of a large private collection of Ireland forgeries in the sale

catalogue of John Eliot Hodgkin’s library'dispersed at Sotheby’s May 19, 1914.

³ Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See p. 568, note 1. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are: An

1589 (November). Appeal from the Blackfriars players (16 in number) to the Privy Council for favour. Shakespeare’s namp stands twelfth. From the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. First printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare,’ 1835.

1596 (July). List of inhabitants of the Liberty of Southwark, Shakespeare’s name appearing in the sixth place. First printed in Collier’s ‘Life of Shakespeare,’ 1858, p. 126.

1596. Petition of the owners and players of the Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in reply to an alleged petition of the inhabitants requesting the closing of the playhouse. Shakespeare’s name is fifth on the list of petitioners. This forged paper is in the Public Record Office, and was first printed in Collier’s ‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’ (1831), vol. i. p. 297, and has been constantly reprinted as if it were genuine.¹

1596 {circa). A letter signed H. S. {i.e. Henry, Earl of Southampton), addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, praying protection for the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, and mentioning Burhage and Shakespeare by name. First printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts.’

1596 {circa). A list of sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre with the valuation of their property, in which Shakespeare is credited with four shares, worth 933/. 6s. 81i. This was first printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts,’ 1.835, P- 6, from the Egerton MSS. at Bridgewater House.

1602 (August 6). Notice of the performance of ‘Othello’ by Burbages ‘players’ before Queen Elizaheth when on a visit to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord-keeper, at Hare- field, in a forged account of disbursements by Egerton’s steward, Arthur Mainwaringe, from the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. Printed in Collier’s ‘New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare,’ 1836, and again in Collier’s edition of the ‘Egerton Papers,’ 1840 (Camden Society), pp. 342-3.

1603 (October 3). Mention of ‘Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe’ in a letter at Dulwich from Mrs. Alleyn to her husband;

Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere Folio, 1632, and of certain Shaksperian Documents likewise published by Mr. Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, i860; A Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter affecting the Works and Biography of Shakspere, published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Researches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, London, 1861; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn's College of God's Gift at Dulwich, by George F. Warner, M.A., 1881; Notes on the Life of John Payne Collier, with a Complete List of his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884.

¹ See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, iS95-7> P- 3io-

part of the letter is genuine. First published in Collier’s ‘Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 63.¹

1604 (April 9). List of the names of eleven players of the King’s Company fraudulently appended to a genuine letter at Dulwich College from the Privy Council bidding the Lord Mayor permit performances by the King’s players. Printed in Collier’s ‘Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 68.²

1607. Notes of performances of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Richard II’ by the crews of the vessels of the East India Company’s fleet ofi Sierra Leone. First printed in ‘Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631,’ edited by Thomas Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, p. 231, from what purported to be an exact transcript ‘in the India Office’ of the ‘Journal of William Keeling,’ captain of one of the vessels in the expedition. Keeling’s manuscript journal is still at the India Office, but the leaves that should contain these entries are now, and have long been, missing from it.

1609 (January 4). A warrant appointing Robert Daborne, William Shakespeare, and other instructors of the Children of the Revels. From the Bridgewater House MSS. First printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts,’ 1835.

1609 (April 6). List of persons assessed for poor rate in Southwark, April 6, 1609, in which Shakespeare’s name appears. First printed in Collier’s ‘Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 91. The forged paper is at Dulwich.³

The entries in the Master of the Revels Account books noting court performances of the ‘Moor of Venice’ (or ‘Othello’) on November 1, 1604, of ‘Measure for Measure’ on December _FaIsely 26, 1604, of ‘The Tempest’ on November 1, 1611, suspected and of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ on November 5, 1611, were ^documents- for a time suspected of forgery. These entries were first printed by Peter Cunningham, a friend of Collier, in the volume ‘Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court ’ published by the Shakespeare Society in 1842. The originals were at the time in Cunningham’s possession, but were restored to the Public Record Office in 1868 when they were suspected of forgery. The authenticity of the documents was completely vindicated by Mr. Ernest Law in his ‘Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries’ (1911) and ‘More about Shakespeare “Forgeries’” (1913). Mr. Law’s conclusions were supported by Sir George Warner, Sir H. Maxwell Lyte, Dr. C. W.

¹ See Warner’s Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6.

* Cf. ibid. pp. 26-7.

* See ibid. pp. 30'S¹*

Wallace and Sir James Dobbie, F.R.S., Government Analyst, who analysed the ink of the suspected handwriting.¹

¹ Tbe Revels’ Accounts were originally among the papers of the Audit Office at Somerset House, where Mr. Cunningham was employed as a clerk, from 1834 to 1858. In 1859 the Audit Office papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public Record Office. But the suspected account hooks for 1604-5 and certain accounts for 1636-7 were retained in Cunningham’s possession. In 1868 he offered to sell the two earlier hooks to the British Museum, and the later papers to a bookseller. All were thereupon claimed hy the Public Record Office, and were placed in that repository with the rest of the Audit Office archives. Cunningham’s reputation was not rated high. The documents were suhmitted to no careful scrutiny; Mr. E. A. Bond, Keeper of the MSS. in the British Museum, expressed doubt of the genuineness of the Booke of 1604-5, mainly owing to the spelling of Shakespeare’s name as ‘ Shaxberd’; the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, Sir Thomas Duff us Hardy, inclined to the same view. Shakespearean critics, who on esthetic grounds deemed 1604 to he too early a date to which to ascribe Othello, were disinclined to recognise the Revels Account as genuine. On the other hand Malone had access to the Audit Office archives at the end of the eighteenth century, and various transcripts dating between 1571 and 1588 are printed in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 360-409. An extract from them for the year 1604-5 is preserved among the Malone papers at the Bodleian Lihrary (Malone 29). This memorandum agrees at all points with Cunningham’s ‘Revells Booke’ of 1604-5. Moreover Malone positively assigned the date 1611 to The Tempest in 1809 on information which he did not specify (Variorum Shakespeare, xv. 423), hut which corresponds with the suspected ‘Revells Booke’ of the same year. A series of papers in the Athenaum for 1911 and 1912 (signed ‘Audi alteram partem’) vainly attempted to question Mr. Law’s vindication of the documents.

The accepted version of Shakespeare’s biography rests securely on documentary evidence and on a continuous stream of oral tradition, which went wholly unquestioned for more than three p_eryers;_ty ■ centuries, and has not been seriously impugned since, of the , Yet the apparent contrast between the homeliness of ^controversy' Shakespeare’s Stratford career and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his literary work has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name. Perverse attempts have been made either to pronounce the authorship of his works an open question or to assign them to his contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great prose-writer, philosopher and lawyer.¹

All the argument bears witness to a phase of that more or less morbid process of scepticism, which was authoritatively analysed by Archbishop Whately in his ‘Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte’ (1819). The Archbishop there showed how ‘obstinate habits of doubt, divorced from full knowledge or parted from the power of testing evidence, can speciously challenge any narrative, however circumstantial, however steadily maintained, however public and however important the events it narrates, however grave the authority on which it is based.’

Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, d. 1855), in his ‘Romance of Yachting’ (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare’s authorship. There followed in a like temper ‘Who chief wrote Shakespeare?’ in ‘Chambers’s Journal,’ August exponents.

7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon, in ‘Putnams’ Monthly,’ January 1856. On the latter was based ‘The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,’ with a neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, London and Boston, 1857. Miss Delia Bacon, who was the first to spread abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the established facts of Shakespeare’s career, died insane on September 2, 1859.¹ Mr. William Henry

¹ Equally ludicrous endeavours have been made to transfer Shakespeare’s responsibility to the shoulders of other contemporaries besides Bacon. Karl Bleibtreu s Der ivahrt Shakespeare (Munich 1907), and C. Demblon’s Lord Rutland est Shakespeare_(rans ^I9^I3)> are fantastic attempts to identify. Shakespeare with Francis Manners sixth Earl of Rutland; see p. 453 supra.

² Cf- Life by Theodore ^Bacon, London, 1888.

Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in ‘Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare’s plays? — a letter to Lord Ellesmere’ (1856), which was republished as ‘Bacon and Shakespeare’ (1857). The chief early exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who published at New York in 1866 ‘The Authorship of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,’ a monument of misapplied ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.). Bacon’s ‘Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,’ a commonplace book in Bacon’s handwriting in the Brifish Museum (London, 1883), was first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest limits. Mr. Edwin Reed’s ‘Bacon and Shakespeare’ (2 vols., Bostop, 1902), continued the wasteful labours of Holmes and Mrs. Pott, its vogue The Baconian theory, which long found its main accept- in America. _ance j_n America, achieved its wildest manifestation in the book called ‘The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays’ (Chicago and London, 1887,

2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, Minnesota. The author professed to apply to the First Folio text a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters at certain intervals forming words and sentences which stated that Bacon was author not merely of Shakespeare’s plays, but also of Marlowe’s work, Montaigne’s ‘Essays,’ and Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy.’ Many refutations were published of Mr. Donnelly’s arbitrary and baseless contention. Another bold effort to discover in the First Folio a cypher-message in the Baconian interest was made by Mrs. Gallup, of Detroit, in ‘The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon’ (1900). The absurdity of this endeavour was demonstrated in numerous letters and articles published in The Times newspaper (December 1901-January 1902). The Baconians subsequently found an English champion in Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence (1837-1914) who pressed into his service every manner of misapprehension in his ‘Bacon is Shakespeare’ (1900), of a penny abridgment of which he claimed to have circulated 300,000 copies during 1912. Sir Edwin, like Donnelly, freakishly credited Bacon with the composition not only of Shakespeare’s works but of almost all the great literature of his time.¹

¹ A Bacon Society was founded in London in 1885 to develope and promulgate the unintelligible theory, and it inaugurated a magazine (named since May 1893 Baconiana). A quarterly periodical also called Baconiana, and issued in the same interest, was established at Chicago in 1892, The Bibliography of the Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy by W. H. Wyman,_ Cincinnati, 1884, gives the titles of 25s books or pamphlets on both sides of the subject, puhlished since 1848; the list was continued during 1886 in Shake- speariana, a monthly journal published at Philadelphia, and might now be extended to fully thrice its original number.

^ The argument from the alleged cypher is unworthy of sane consideration. Otherwise the Baconians presume in Shakespeare’s plays a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) of which no contemporary except Bacon is alleged to show command.' At any rate such accomplishment is held by the Baconians to be incredible in one enjoying Shakespeare’s limited opportunities of education. They insist that there are many close parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare’s and in Bacon’s works, and that Bacon makes enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret ‘ recreations ’ and ‘ alphabets ’ and concealed poems for which his alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone account. No substance attached to any of these pleas. There is a far closer and more constant resemblance between Shakespeare’s vocabulary and that of other contemporaries than between his and Bacon’s language, and the similarities merely testify to the general usage of the day.¹ Again Shakespeare’s frequent employment of legal terminology conforms to a literary fashion of the day, and was practised on quite as liberal a scale and with far greater accuracy by Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and many other eminent writers who enjoyed no kind of legal training and were never engaged in legal work. (See pp. 43-4 supra.) The allegation that Bacon was the author of works which he hesitated to claim in _{sir Tobie} his lifetime has no just bearing on the issue. The Ba- Matthew’s conians’ case commonly rests on an arhitrary misinter- ^letter- pretation of the evidence on this subject. Sir Tobie Matthew

¹ Most of the parallels that are commonly quoted by Baconians are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare both make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), wrote: ‘Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy?’ (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, in Troilus and Cressida, n. ii. 166, wrote of ‘young men whom Aristotle thought_ unfit to hear moral philosophy.' But the alleged error of substituting moral for ^o/jfe'eafphilosophy in Aristotle’s text is more apparent than real. _ By ‘political’ philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called ‘morals.’ In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle's Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle’s language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular Calloquia (Florence, i53^r, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts ‘ into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of moral philosophy’ (‘in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethiae philosophise’). In the Latin play, Pedantius (1581 ?), a philosopher tells his pupil, ‘Tu non es idoneus auditor moralis philosophic’ (1. 327), In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis (Paris, 1553), the passage is rendered ‘parquoy le ieune enfant n’est suffisant auditeur de la science civile’; and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy in the British Museum) Englished the sentence: ‘Whether a young man may be a fitte scholler of morall pbilosophie.’ In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to his Discorsi sopra Cornelia Tacito, has the remark, ‘E non fe discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele; il qual dice, che i giovani non sono huoni ascultatori delle maraU’ (cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739» 44°)*

wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after January 1621: ‘The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.’¹ This unpretending sentence is distorted into conclusive evidence that Bacon composed works of commanding excellence under another’s name, and among them probably Shakespeare’s plays. According to the only sane interpretation of Matthew’s words, his ‘most prodigious wit’ was some Englishman named Bacon whom he met abroad. There is little doubt that Matthew referred to his friend Father Thomas Southwell, a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low Countries, whose real surname was Bacon. (He was bom in 1592 at Scul- thorpe, near Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of that place; he died at Watten in 1637.)²

Such authentic examples of Bacon’s effort' to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. His ‘Translation of Certaine Psalmes into English Verse’ (1625) convicts him of inability to rise above the level of clumsy doggerel.

Recent English sceptics have fought shy of the manifest absurdities of the Baconian heresy and have concentrated their effort The legal on the negative argument that the positive knowledge sceptics. ₀f Shakespeare’s career is too slight to warrant the accepted tradition. These writers have for the most part been lawyers who lack the required literary training to give their work on the subject any genuine authority. Many of them after the manner of ex-parte advocates rest a part of their case on minor discrepancies among orthodox critics and biographers. Like the Baconians, they exaggerate or misrepresent the extent of Shakespeare’s classical and legal attainments. They fail to perceive that the curriculum of Stratford Grammar School and the general cultivation of the epoch, combined with Shakespeare’s rare faculty of mental assimilation, leave no part of his acquired knowledge unaccounted for. They ignore the cognate development of poetic and intellectual power which is convincingly illustrated by the careers of many 'contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, notably by that of the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood. To crown all, they make no just allowance for the mysterious origin

¹ Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon,^1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony, who died in 1601; Matthew was writing of a¹ man who was alive more than twenty years later.

_ ² It was with reference to a book published hy this man that Sir Henry Wotton wrote, in language somewhat resembling Sir Tobie Matthew’s, to Sir Edmund Bacon, halfbrother to the great Francis Bacon, on December 5, 1638: ‘The_ Book of Controversies issued under the name of F. Baconus hath this addition to the said name, alias Southwell, as those of that Society shift their names as often as their shirts' (Religuice Wottoniana, 1672, p. 475).

and miraculous processes of all poetic genius — features which are signally exemplified in the case of Chatterton, Burns, Keats and other poets of humbler status and fortune than Shakespeare. The most plausible manifestoes from the pens of the legal sceptics are Judge Webb’s ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare,’ Mr. G. C. Bompas’s ‘The Problem of the Shakespeare Plays,’ Lord Penzance’s ‘The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy,’ all of which were published in 1902. A more pretentious effort on the same lines was Mr. G. G. Greenwood’s ‘The Shakespeare Problem Restated’ (1908), which the author supplemented with ‘In re Shakespeare: Beeching v. Greenwood. Rejoinder’ (1909) and ‘The Vindicators of Shakespeare: A reply to Critics’ (1911). Perhaps the chief interest attaching to Mr. Greenwood’s performance was the adoption of his point of view by the American humourist Mark Twain, who in his latest book ‘Is Shakespeare dead?’ (1909) attacked the accredited belief. Mark Twain’s intervention in what he called ‘the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle’ proved as might be expected that his idiosyncrasies unfitted him for treating seriously matters of literary history or criticism. A wholesome corrective in a small compass to the whole attitude of doubt may be found in Mr. Charles Allen’s ‘Notes on the Bacon- Shakespeare Question’ (Boston, 1900), and many later vindications of the orthodox faith are worthy of notice. Judge Willis in ‘The Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy’ (1903) very carefully examined in legal form the documentary evidence and pronounced it to establish conclusively Shakespeare’s position from a strictly legal point of view. Forcible replies to Mr. Greenwood’s attack were issued by Dean Beeching in his ‘William Shakespeare, Player, Playmaker, and Poet’ (1908), and by Andrew Lang in his ‘Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown’ (1912). The most comprehensive exposure of both the Baconian and sceptical delusions was made by Mr. J. M. Robertson, M.P., in ‘The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation’ (1913).

Ill

From the dedicatory epistles addressed by Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton in the opening pages of his two narrative _s . poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593) and ‘Lucrece’ ampton and (1594),¹ from the account given by Sir William D’Ave- Shake- nant, and recorded by Nicholas Rowe, of the earl’s lib- speare. _era[ bounty to the poet,² and from the language of the ‘Sonnets,’ it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare enjoyed very friendly relations with Southampton from the time when the dramatist’s genius was nearing its maturity. No contemporary document or tradition suggests that Shakespeare was the friend or protege of any man of rank other than Southampton; and the student of Shakespeare’s biography has reason to ask for some information respecting him who enjoyed the exclusive distinction of serving Shakespeare as his patron.

Southampton was a patron worth cultivating. Both his parents came of the New Nobility, and enjoyed vast wealth. His father’s _p father was Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, and

^{111611 ge}' when the monasteries were dissolved, although he was faithful to the old religion, he was granted rich estates in Hampshire, including the abbeys of Titchfield and Beaulieu in the New Forest. He was created Earl of Southampton early in Edward Vi’s reign, and, dying shortly afterwards, was succeeded by his only son, the father of Shakespeare’s friend. The second earl loved magnificence in his household. ‘He was highly reverenced and favoured of all that were of his own rank, and bravely attended and served by the best gentlemen of those counties wherein he lived. His muster-roll never consisted of four lacqueys and a coachman, but of a whole troop of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen.’³ The second earl remained a Catholic, like his father, and a chivalrous avowal of sympathy with Mary Queen of Scots procured him a term of imprisonment in the year preceding his distinguished son’s birth. At a youthful age he married a lady of fortune, Mary Browne, daughter of the first Viscount Montague, also a Catholic. Her portrait, now at Welbeck, was painted in her early married days, and shows regu-

¹ See pp. 142, 146. ^ ² See p. 197.

⁸ Gervase Markham, Honour in his Perfection, 1624.

656

larly formed features beneath bright auburn hair. Two sons and a daughter were the issue of the union. Shakespeare’s friend, the second son, was born at her father’s residence, Cowdray Birth on House, near Midhurst, on October 6, 1573. He was Oct. 6,1573. thus Shakespeare’s junior by nine years and a half. ‘A goodly boy, God bless him! ’ exclaimed the gratified father, writing of his birth to a friend.¹ But the father barely survived the boy’s infancy. He died at the early age of thirty-five — two days before the child’s eighth birthday. The elder son was already dead. Thus, on October 4, 1581, the second and only surviving son became third Earl of Southampton, and entered on his great inheritance.²

As was customary in the case of an infant peer, the little earl became a royal ward — ‘a child of state’ — and Lord Burghley, the Prime Minister, acted as the boy’s guardian in the _Educat!on Queen’s behalf. Burghley had good reason to be satis- '

fied with his ward’s intellectual promise. ‘He spent,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘his childhood and other younger terms in the study of good letters.’ At the age of twelve, in the autumn of 1585, he was admitted to St. John’s College, Cambridge, ‘the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all the University.’ Southampton breathed easily the cultured atmosphere. Next summer he sent his guardian, Burghley, an essay in Ciceronian Latin on the somewhat cynical text that ‘All men are moved to the pursuit of virtue by the hope of reward.’ The argument, if unconvincing, is precocious. ‘Every man,’ the boy tells us, ‘no matter how well or how ill endowed with the graces of humanity, whether in the enjoyment of great honour or condemned to obscurity, experiences that yearning for glory which alone begets virtuous endeavour.’ The paper, still preserved at Hatfield, is a model of caligraphy; every letter is shaped with delicate regularity, and betrays a refinement most uncommon in boys of thirteen.³ Southampton remained at the University for some two years, graduating M.A. at sixteen in 1589. Throughout his after life he cherished for his college ‘great love and affection.’

Before leaving Cambridge Southampton entered his name at Gray’s Inn. Some knowledge of law was deemed needful in one who was to control a landed property that was not only large already but likely to grow.⁴ Meanwhile he was sedulously culti-

¹ Loseley MSS. ed. A. J. Kempe, p. 240. _#

_# ¹ His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in rsQ4 Sir Thomas Heneage, vice-chamberlain of Queen Elizaheth’s household; but he died within a year, and in 1596 she took a third hushand, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I.

H tiPld^^ permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at

⁴ In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of War- dour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an addi-

vating his literary tastes. He took into his ‘pay and patronage’ John Florio, the well-known author and Italian tutor, and was soon, according to Florio’s testimony, as thoroughly versed in Italian as ‘teaching or learning’ could make him.

‘When he was young,’ wrote a later admirer, ‘no ornament of youth was wanting in him’; and it was naturally to the Court that his friends sent him at an early age to display his varied graces. He can hardly have been more than seventeen when he was presented to his sovereign. She showed him kindly notice, and the Earl of Essex, her brilliant favourite, acknowledged his fascination. Thenceforth Essex displayed in his welfare a brotherly interest which proved in course of time a very doubtful blessing.

While still a boy, Southampton entered with as much zest into the sports and dissipations of his fellow courtiers as into their Recognition literary and artistic pursuits. At tennis, in jousts °mpton£ ^and tournaments, he achieved distinction; nor was youthful he a stranger to the delights of gambling at primero. beauty. j_{n I}tjg₂, when he was in his eighteenth year, he was recognised as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young lords who frequented the royal presence. In the autumn of that year Elizabeth paid Oxforql a visit in state. Southampton was in the throng of noblemen who bore her company. In a Latin poem describing the brilliant ceremonial, which was published at the time at the University press, eulogy was lavished without stint on all the Queen’s attendants; but the academic poet declared that Southampton’s personal attractions exceeded those of any other in the royal train. ‘No other youth who was present,’ he wrote, ‘was more beautiful than this prince of Hampshire (quo non formosior alter affuit), nor more distinguished in the arts of learning, although as yet tender down scarce bloomed on his cheek.’ The last words testify to Southampton’s boyish appearance.¹ Next year it was rumoured that his ‘external grace’ was to receive signal recognition by his admission, despite his juvenility, to the Order of the Garter. ‘There be no Knights of the Garter new chosen as yet,’ wrote a well-informed courtier on May 3, 1593, ‘but there were four nominated.’² Three were eminent public

tional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his ‘nonage/ Arundel wrote, the Earl was hy no means ‘of the smallest hope/ Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton’s ‘most feared ^t-^^ie
cornP^etition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the lather of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been descrihed as Shakespeare’s friend of the Sonnets (cf. Calendar of Hatfield MSS. iii. 365.)

¹ Cf. Apollinis et Musarum Ev/eruca EiSvAAta Oxford, 1592, reprinted m Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), edited by Charles Plummer, xxix. 294:

Comes ?^ost h^unc .(*'•«• Earl of Essex) insequitur clari de stirpe Dynasta South- ^^uo ^^lues Q^uera South-Hamptonia magnum

Hamb- Vendicat heroem; quo non formosior alter

tonkB Affuit, aut docta iuuenis prasstantior arte;

' * Ora licet tenerS, vix dnm lanugine vement.

² Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix), p. 521 b_%

servants, but first on the list stood the name of young Southampton. The purpose did not take effect, but the compliment of nomination was, at his age, without precedent outside the circle of the Sovereign’s kinsmen. On November 17, 1595, he appeared in the lists set up in the Queen’s presence in honour of the thirty-seventh anniversary of her accession. The poet George Peele pictured in blank verse the gorgeous scene, and likened the Earl of Southampton to that ancient type of chivalry, Bevis of Southampton, so ‘valiant in arms,’ so ‘gentle and debonair,’ did he appear to all beholders.¹

But clouds were rising on this sunlit horizon. Southampton, a wealthy peer without brothers or uncles, was the only male representative of his house. A lawful heir was essential Reluctance to the entail of his great possessions. Early marriages ^tD
marry— child-marriages — were in vogue in all ranks of society, and Southampton’s mother and guardian regarded matrimony at a tender age as especially incumbent on him in view of his rich heritage. When the boy was seventeen Burghley accordingly offered him a wife in the person of his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, eldest daughter of his daughter Anne and of the Earl of Oxford. The Countess of Southampton approved the match, and told Burghley that her son was not averse from it. Her wish was father to the thought. Southampton declined to marry to order, and, to the confusion of his friends, was still a bachelor when he came of age in 1594. Nor even then did there seem much prospect of his changing his condition. He was in some ways as young for his years in inward disposition as in outward appearance. Although gentle and amiable in most relations of life, he could be childishly self-willed and impulsive, and outbursts of anger involved him, at Court and elsewhere, in many petty quarrels which were with difficulty settled without bloodshed. Despite his rank and wealth, he was consequently accounted by many ladies of far too uncertain a temper to sustain marital responsibilities with credit. Lady Bridget Manners, sister of his friend the Earl of Rutland, was in 1594 looking to matrimony for means of release from the servitude of a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Her guardian suggested that Southampton or the Earl of Bedford, who was) intimate with Southampton and exactly of his age, would be an eligible suitor. Lady Bridget dissented. Southampton and hi^ friend were, she objected, ‘so young,’ ‘fantastical,’ and volatile (‘so easily carried away’), that should ill fortune befall her mother, who was ‘her only stay,’ she ‘doubted their carriage of themselves.’ She spoke, she said, from observation.²

¹ Peele’s Anglorum Feria. . _ , _ , . ₀ ,,

* Cal. of the Duke of Rutland's MSS. 1. 321. Bamabe Barnes, who was one of Southampton's poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to the Beautiful Lady, The Lady Bridget Manners,’ in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton, tfotn

In 1595, at two-and-twenty, Southampton justified Lady Bridget’s censure by a public proof of his fallibility. The fair _z . Mistress Vernon (first cousin of the Earl of Essex),

w1th^8ue a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her spell on Vemon¹¹¹ ^^cr virtue ^was none too stable, and in September

the scandal spread that Southampton was courting her ‘with too much familiarity.’ The entanglement with ‘his fair mistress ’ opened a new chapter in Southampton’s career, and life’s tempests began in earnest. Either to free himself from his mistress’s toils, or to divert attention from his intrigue, he in 1596 withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation. Despite his mistress’s lamentations, which the Court gossips duly chronicled, he played a par-t with his friend Essex in the military and naval expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. He developed a martial ardour which brought him renown, and Mars (his admirers said) vied with Mercury for his allegiance. He travelled on the Continent, and finally, in 1598, he accepted a subordinate place in the suite of the Queen’s Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, who was going on an embassy to Paris. But Mistress Vernon was still fated to be his evil genius, and Southampton learnt Marriage while in Paris that her condition rendered marriage in isg8. essential to her decaying reputation. He hurried to London and, yielding his own scruples to her entreaties, secretly made her his wife during the few days he stayed in this country. The step was full of peril. To marry a lady of the Court without the Queen’s consent infringed a prerogative of the Crown by which Elizabeth set exaggerated store.

The story of Southampton’s marriage was soon public property. His wife quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Channel a few weeks later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, who had the Queen’s orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For the time his career was ruined. Although he was soon released from gaol, all avenues to the Queen’s favour were closed to him. He sought employment in the wars in Ireland, but high command was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late in 1600 joined Essex, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebellion in London, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited. The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood their trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. Southampton was condemned to die, but the Queen’s Secretary pleaded with her that ‘the poor young earl, merely for the love

are appended to Barnes’s collection of sonnets and other poems entitled Parlkenophc

and Farthenophil (cf. Arber’s Garner, v. 486). Bames apostrophises Lady Bridget as fairest and sweetest •

Of all those sweet and fair flowers,

The pride of chaste Cynthia’s [i.e. Queen Elizabeth’s] rich crown.’

of Essex, had been drawn into this action,’ and his punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life. Further mitigation was not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But Essex, Southampton’s friend, had heen James’s sworn ally, ment,

The first act of James I as monarch of England was ^l6ol_3' to set Southampton free (April 10, 1603). After a confinement of more than two years, Southampton resumed, under happier auspices, his place at Court.

Southampton’s later career does not directly concern the student of Shakespeare’s biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated Southampton on his liberty in his Sonnet cvii., there _Latercareer is no trace of further relations between them, although ^a ' there is no reason to doubt that they remained friends to the end. Southampton on his release from prison was immediately installed a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor of the Isle of Wight, while an Act of Parliament relieved him of all the disabilities incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth a prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a coranto with the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at Whitehall on August 19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the special ambassador of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of peace hetween his sovereign and James I.¹ But home politics proved no congenial field for the exercise of Southampton’s energies. Quarrels with fellow-courtiers continued to jeopardise his fortunes. With Sir Rohert Cecil, with Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and with the Duke of Buckingham he had violent disputes. It was in the schemes for colonising the New World that Southampton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped to equip expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours as a colonial pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the age of fifty-one, Southampton, with characteristic spirit, took command of a troop of English volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector Palatine, husband of James I’s daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with the Emperor and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his eldest son, Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries were attacked by fever. The younger man succumbed at once. The Earl regained sufficient strength to accompany his son’s hody to Bergen-op-Zoom, but there, on November 10, he _{Death on} himself died of a lethargy. Father and son were both Nov. 10, buried in the chancel of the church of Titchfield, ^{1 24}' Hampshire, on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shakespeare by more than eight years.

¹ See p. 381 and note.

Southampton’s dose relations with men of letters of his time give powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron , whom Shakespeare commemorated in the ‘Sonnets.’ tWsraUrc- From earliest to latest manhood — throughout the tion of dissipations of Court life, amid the torments that his ’ intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel —

the earl never ceased to cherish the passion for literature which was implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, St. John’s, is characteristic. When a new library was in course of construction there during the closing years of his life, Southampton collected books to the value of 3601, wherewith to furnish it. This ‘monument of love,’ as the College authorities described the benefaction, may still be seen on the shelves of the College library. The gift largely consisted of illuminated manuscripts — books of hours, legends of the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. Southampton caused his son to be educated at St. John’s, and his wife expressed to the tutors the hope that the boy would ‘imitate’ his father ‘in his love to learning and to them.’

Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton’s career is traced are enlivened by references to References hterary interests. Especially refreshing are the

in his letters active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with and°^eia'^Ss ^t^^le £^reat birth of English drama. It was with plays an pays. he joined other noblemen in 1598 in entertaining

his chief, Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that embassy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris ‘certain songs’ which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney,, a friend of hterary tastes, should share his delight in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton was in Ireland, a letter to him from the countess attested that current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk. ‘All the news I can send you,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘that I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly miller’s thumb — a boy that’s all head and very

little body; but this is a secret.’¹ This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl and countess familiarity with Falstaff’s adventures in Shakespeare's ‘Henry IV,’ where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as ‘good pint pot’ (Pt. I. n. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of ‘the boy that was all head and very little body,’ was a playful allusion to Sir John’s creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. In the letters of Sir Tobie Matthew, many of which were written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been bestowed on Shakespeare: ‘As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, “what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man.”’ ²

When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland ‘come not to Court’ but ‘pass away the time His love of merely in going to plays every day.’³ It seems that ^the theatre, the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and Essex in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play- scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their rebellious design.⁴ Imprisonment sharpened Southampton’s zest for the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his fellow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden present the ‘old’ play of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ whose ‘wit and mirth’ were calculated ‘to please her Majesty exceedingly.’ ⁶

But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton’s literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of his political or domestic life, that the amplest Poetic proofs survive of his devotion to letters. From the adulation, hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose cirde of acquaintance included all men of literary reputation, a mentor who allowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the

¹ The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145. . . ,, _TT. „ .

¹ The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaff s remarks m i Henry IV, II. iv.¹ The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines 190-1.

⁸ Sidney Papers, ii. 132. ⁴ See pp. 254-5. ^B See p. 383 supra.

scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton’s honour in contemporary prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 1593, of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis,’ with its salutation of „ . Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the poet’s BllSes’s craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to a published sonnet sonnet, 1593. ₀f unrestrained fervour his conviction that Southampton’s eyes — ‘those heavenly lamps’ — were the only sources of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed ‘to the Right Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,’

runs: .

Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thnce sacred hand (Which sacred Muses make their instrument)

These worthless leaves, which I to thee present,

Sprung from a rude g.nd unmanured land That with your countenance graced, they may withstand Hundred-eyed Envy’s rough encounterment,

Whose patronage can give encouragement,

To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band.

Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes —

Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light,

Which give and take in course that holy fire —

To view my Muse with your judicial sight:

Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise,

Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire.

Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nashe, evinced little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly TomNashe’s essay in romance, ‘The Life of Jack Wilton.’ He addresses. describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of age, as ‘a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’ ‘A new brain,’ he exclaims, ‘a new wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to posterity, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption.’¹ Although ‘Jack Wilton’ was the first book Nashe formally dedicated to Southampton, it is probable that Nashe had made an earlier bid for the earl’s patronage. In a digression at the dose of his ‘ Pierce Pennilesse ’ he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he entitles ‘the matchless image of honour and magnificent re-

¹ See Nashe’s Works, ed. Mckerrow, ii. 201. The whole passage runs: ‘How wel or ill I haue done in it, I am ignorant: (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe): only your Honours applauding encouragement hathpower to make mee arrogant. Incomprehensible is the heigth of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriueably pensheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your iudgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English: that smal braioe I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my frends, and fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption. Of your gracious fauor I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast. . . . Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.’

warder of vertue, Jove’s eagle-horne Ganimede, thrice nohle Amintas.’ In a sonnet addressed to ‘this renowned lord,’ who ‘draws all hearts to his love,’ Nashe expresses regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate ‘so special a pillar of nobility’ in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the ‘Faerie Queene’; and in the last lines of his sonnet Nashe suggests that Spenser suppressed the nobleman’s name

Because few words might not comprise thy fame.¹

Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for whom Nashe, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned ‘amorous villanellos and qui passas.’ One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nashe survives in an obscene love-poem entitled ‘The Choise of Valentines,’ which may be dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nashe addressed his young patron as his friend.’²

¹ The complimentary title of ‘ Amyntas,’ which was naturalised in English literature hy Abraham Fraunce’s two renderings of Tasso’s Aminta — one direct from the Italian and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson — was apparently bestowed by Spenser on the Earl of Derby in his Colin Clouts come home againe (159s); and some critics assume that Nashe referred in Pierce Pennilesse to that nobleman rather than to Southampton. But Nashe’s comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. ¹ Amyntas’ as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied exclusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard Barnfield and by other of Watson’s panegyrists.

* Two manuscript copies of the poem, which was printed (privately) for the first time, under the editorship of Mr. John S. Farmer, in r899, are extant — one among the Raw- linson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). The opening dedicatory sonnet, which is inscribed ‘to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton]’ runs:

‘Pardon, sweete flower of matcbles poetrye,

And fairest bud the red rose euer bare,

Although my muse, devorst from deeper care,

Presents thee with a wanton Elegie.

‘ Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitye

For painting forth the things that hidden are,

Since all men act what I in speeche declare,

Onlie induced with varietie.

‘Complaints and praises, eveiy one can write,

Ana passion out their pangs in statlie rimes;

But of loues pleasures none did euer write,

That have succeeded in theis latter times.

‘Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle gree,

And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.

The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and is succeeded by a second sonnet addressed by Nashe to his patron :

^;Tbus hath my penne presum’d to please my friend.

Oh migbtst thou lykewise _#please Apollo’s eye.

No, Honor hrookes no such impietie,

Yet Ovid’s wanton muse did not offend.

‘ He is the fountains whence my ^treames do flowe —

Forgive me if I speak as I was taught;

Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Markham’s Grenville’s glorious fight ofi the Azores. Markham sonnet, 1595. _was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron’s eyes, but with blasphemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God. Markham’s sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus:

Thou glorious laurel of the Muses’ hill,

Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen,

Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skill Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men,

From graver subjects of thy grave assays, _

Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines —

The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise True honour’s spirit in her rough designs —

And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres;

So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee And from thy lips suck their eternity.

Subsequently, Florio, in associating the earl’s name with his great Italian-English dictionary — the ¹ Worlde of Wordes ’ — more Florio’s soberly defined the earl’s place in the republic of letters address. when he wrote: ‘As to me and many more the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’¹ A tribute which Thomas Heywood, the dramatist and Shake-

Alike to women, utter all I knowe,

As longing to unlade so bad a fraught.^

‘My mynde once purg'd of such lascivious witt,

With purifiM words and hallowed verse,

Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse,

That better maie thy grauer view befitt. ^

‘Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write Or for attempting banish me your sight.

’ ‘Thomas Nashe.’

¹ In 1597 William Burton ‘(1575-1645) dedicated to Southampton his translation of Achilles Tatius —- a very rare book (cf. Times Lit. Suppl. Feb. to, 1905). Ia 1600 Edward Blount, a professional friend of the publisher Thorpe, dedicated one of his publications (The Historic of the Uniting of the Kingdom of Portugall to the Croime of C as till) ‘to the most noble and aboundant president both of Honor and Vertue, Henry Earle of Southampton.’ ‘In such proper and plaine language’(Blount wrote ‘to the right honourable ana worthy Earl¹) ‘as a most humble and affectionate duetie I doo heere offer upon the altar of my hart, the first fruits of my long growing endevors; which (with much con- stancie and confidence) I have cherished, onely waiting this happy opportunity to make them manifest to your Lordship: where now if (in respect of the knowne distance betwixt the height of your Honorable spirit and the flatnesse of my poore abilities) they tume into smoake and vanish ere they can reach a degree of your merite, vouchsafe yet (most excellent Earle) to remember it was a fire that kindled them and gave them life at least, if not lasting. Your Honor’s patronage is the onely object I aime at; and were the worthinesse of this Historie I present such as might warrant me an election out of a worlde of nobilitie, I woulde still pursue the happioes of my first choise.’

speare’s friend, rendered the Earl’s memory just after his death, suggests that Heywood was an early member of that cirde of poetic clients whom Florio had in mind. _Thomas In ‘A Funeral Elegie upon the death of King James’ Heywood’s which Heywood published in 1625 within a few months ^tribute- of Southampton’s death he thus commemorates his relations with Southampton:

Henry, Southampton’s Earle, a souldier proved,

Dreaded in warre, and in milde peace beloved:

O! give me leave a little to resound His memory, as most in dutie bound,

Because his servant once.

The precise significance which attaches to the word ‘servant’ in Heywood’s lines is an open question. Heywood was a prominent actor as well as dramatist, and his earliest theatrical patron was the Earl of Worcester, to whom he dedicates his elegy on King James. There is no evidence that Southampton took any company of actors under his patronage, and Heywood when he calls himself Southampton’s ‘servant once’ was doubtless vagudy recalling his association with the Earl as one of his many poetic dients.¹

The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as I have already argued, in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters _The until Southampton’s death. When he was released gratuiations from prison on James I’s accession in April 1603, 9^ his praises in poets’ mouths were especially abundant. '

Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the latest of his ‘Sonnets’ (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:

The world had never taken so full note Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone :

And only thy affliction hath begot

More fame than thy best fortunes could have won;

For ever by adversity are wrought The greatest works of admiration:

And all the fair examples of renown Out of distress and misery are grown; . . .

Only the best-compos’d and worthiest hearts God sets to act the hard’st and constant’st parts.²

¹ J. P. Collier’s Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature, i. 37T-3.

² Daniel’s Certaine Epistles, 1603: see Daniel’s Works, ed, Giosart, 1. 217 seq.

Davies was more jubilant:

Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad,

And cannot choose — their hearts are all so glad.

Then let’s be merry in our God and King,

That made us merry, being ill bestead.

Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling,

And on the viol there sweet praises sing,

For he is come that grace to all doth bring.¹

Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Musicians as well as poets acknowledged his cultivated tastes, and a popular piece of instrumental music which Captain Tobias Hume included in his volume of ‘Poetical Musicke’ in r6o7 bore the title of ‘The Earl of Southamptons favoret.’² Sir John Beaumont, on Southampton’s death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:

I keep that glory last which is the best,

The love of learning which he oft expressed In conversation, and respect to those Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.

To the same effect are some twenty poems which were published in 1624, just after Southampton’s death, in a volume en- Eiegies on titled ‘Teares of the Isle of Wight, shed on the Tombe South- of their most noble valorous and loving Captaine and ampton. Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton.’ The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the first poem by one Francis Beale:

Ye famous poets of the southern' isle,

Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse,

And with your Laureate pens come and compile The praises due to this great Lord: peruse His globe of worth, and eke his vertues brave,

Like learned Maroes at Mecsenas’ grave.

¹ See Preface to Davies’s Microcosmos, 1603 (Davies’s Works, ed. Grosart, i. 14), At the end of Davies’s Microcosmos there is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liheration (ib. p. 96), heginning:

‘Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord,

From the deep seas of danger and distress There like thou wast to he thrown overboard In every storm of discontentedness.’ ,

² Other pieces in the collection bore such titles as ‘The Earle of Sussex delight,’ ‘The Lady Arabellas favoret,’ ‘The Earl of Pembrokes Galiard,’ and ‘Sir Christopher Hattons Choice’ (cf. Rimbault, Bibliotheca Madrigalia, p. 25).

TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .

MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . AND . THAT . ETERNITIE . PROMISED .

BY .

OUR . EVER-LIVING . POET . WISHETH .

THE . WELL-WISHING . ADVENTURER . IN .

In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare’s best known works his ‘sugar’d sonnets among his private friends.’ None of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ are known to have been in print when Meres wrote, but they were doubt- tion of the*" less in circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of ‘Sonnets' them were printed for the first time by the publisher, ^{m 1} °⁹‘ William Jaggard, in the opening pages of the first edition of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim.’ On January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, a publisher of small account, obtained a license for the publication of a work bearing the title ‘A Booke called Amours by J. D., with certein other Sonnetes by W. S.’ No book answering this description is extant. In any case it is doubtful if Edgar’s venture concerned Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ It is more probable that his ‘W. S.’ was William Smith, who had published a collection of sonnets entitled ‘Chloris’ in 1596.¹ On May 20, 1609, a license for the publication of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ was granted by the Stationers’ Company to a publisher named Thomas Thorpe,

¹ Amours of J. D. were doubtless sonnets hy Sir John Davies, of which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier’s suggestion that J. D. was a misprint for M. D., i.e. Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the title of Amours. That word was in France a common designation of collections of sonnets (cf. Drayton’s Poems, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv).

SETTING FORTH .

T. T.

and shortly afterwards the complete collection as they have reached us was published by Thorpe for the first time.¹ To the volume Thorpe prefixed a dedication in the terms which are printed above. The words are fantastically arranged. In ordinary grammatical order they would run: ‘The well-wishing adventurer in setting forth [i.e. the publisher] T[homas] T[horpe] wisheth Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet.’

Few books of the sixteenth or seventeenth century were ushered into the world without a dedication. In most cases it was the work of the author, but numerous volumes, besides Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets,’ are extant in which the publisher (and not the author) fills the rdle of dedicator. The cause of the substitution is not far to seek. The signing of the dedication was an assertion of full and responsible ownership in the publication, and the publisher in Shakespeare’s lifetime was the full and responsible owner of a publication quite as often as the author.' The modern conception of copyright had not yet been evolved. Whoever in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century was in actual possession of a manuscript was for practical purposes its full and responsible owner. Literary work largely circulated in manuscript.² Scriveners made a precarious livelihood by multiplying written copies, and an enterprising publisher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book without the author’s sanction or knowledge. When a volume in the reign of Elizabeth or James I was published independently of the author, the publisher exercised unchallenged all the owner’s rights, not the least valued of which was that of choosing the patron of the enterprise, and of pen- Pubiishers’ ning the dedicatory compliment above his signature, dedications. Occasionally circumstances might speciously justify the publisher’s appearance in the guise of a dedicator. In the case of a posthumous book it sometimes happened that the author’s friends renounced ownership or neglected to assert it. In other instances, the absence of an author from London while his work was passing through the press might throw on the publisher the task of supplying the dedication without exposing him to any charge of sharp practice. But as a rule one of only two inferences is possible when a publisher’s name figured at the foot of a dedicatory epistle: either the author was ignorant of the publisher’s design, or he had refused to countenance it, and was openly defied. In the case of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ it may safely be assumed that Shakespeare received no notice of Thorpe’s intention of publishing the work, and that it was owing to the author’s ingnorance

¹ A full account of Thorpe’s relations with the Sonnets appears in my introduction to the facsimile of the original edition (Clarendon Press, r905). ^

² See note to p. 158 supra.

of the design that the dedication was composed and signed by the ‘well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.’

But whether author or publisher chose the patron of his wares, the choice was determined by much the same considerations. Self-interest was the principle underlying transactions between literary patron and protegi. Publisher, like author, commonly chose as patron a man or woman of wealth and social influence who might be expected to acknowledge the compliment either by pecuniary reward or by friendly advertisement of the volume in their own social circle. At times the publisher, slightly extending the field of choice, selected a personal friend or mercantile acquaintance who had rendered him some service in trade or private life, and was likely to appreciate such general expressions of good will as were the accepted topic of dedications. Nothing that was fantastic or mysterious entered into the Elizabethan or the Jacobean publishers’ shrewd schemes of business, and it may be asserted with confidence that it was in the everyday prosaic conditions of current literary traffic that the publisher Thorpe, selected ‘Mr. W. H.’ as the patron of the original edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’

A study of Thorpe’s character and career clears the point of doubt. Thorpe has been described as a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare’s county, and a man eminent in his pro- Thorpe’s fession. He was neither. He was a native of Barnet ^earl5'^lif'- in Middlesex, where his father kept an inn, and he himself through thirty years’ experience of the book trade held his own with difficulty in its humblest ranks. He enjoyed the customary preliminary training.¹ At midsummer 1584 he was apprenticed for nine years to a reputable printer and stationer, Richard Watkins.² Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the Stationers’ Company, and was thereby qualified to set up as a publisher on his own account.³ He was not destitute of a taste for literature; he knew scraps of Latin, and recognised a good manuscript when he saw one. But the ranks of London publishers were overcrowded, and such accomplishments as Thorpe possessed were poor compensation for a lack of capital or of family connections among those already established in the trade.⁴ For many years he contented himself with an obscure situation as assistant or clerk to a stationer more favourably placed. _

It was as the self-appointed procurer and owner of an unprinted manuscript — a recognised rdle for novices to fill in the book trade

¹ The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arher’s Transcript of the Registers 0} the

Stationers' Company. . ..

* Arher, ii. 124. _t ⁿ- 7*3- '

< A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared hefore gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arher s 1 ranscnpt, 11. 213)-

of the period —that Thorpe made his first distinguishable appearance on the stage of literary history. In 1600 there fell into his His owner- hands in an unexplained manner a written copy of ship of the Marlowe’s unprinted translation of the first book of “{Marlowe’s ‘Lucan.’ Thorpe confided his good fortune to Edward ‘Lucan.’ Blount, then a stationer’s assistant like himself, but with better prospects. Blount had already achieved a modest success in the same capacity of procurer or picker-up of neglected ‘copy.’¹ In 1598 he became proprietor of Marlowe’s unfinished and unpublished ‘Hero and Leander,’ and found among better- equipped friends in the trade both a printer and a publisher for his treasure-trove. Blount good-naturedly interested himself in Thorpe’s ‘find,’ and it was through Blount’s good offices that Peter Short undertook to print Thorpe’s manuscript of Marlowe’s ‘Lucan,’ and Walter Burre agreed to sell it at his shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard. As owner of the manuscript Thorpe exerted the right of choosing a patron for the venture and of supplying the Hisdedica- dedicatory epistle. The patron of his choice was toiy address his friend Blount, and he made the dedication the Bioun™ vehicle of his gratitude for the assistance he had in 1600. j_ust received. The style of the dedication was somewhat bombastic, but Thorpe showed a literary sense when he designated Marlowe ‘that pure elemental wit,’ and a good deal of dry humour in offering to ‘his kind and true friend’ Blount ‘some few instructions’ whereby he might accommodate himself to the unaccustomed rdle of patron.² For the conventional type of patron Thorpe disavowed respect. He preferred to place himself under the protection of a friend in the trade whose good will had already stood him in good stead, and was capable of benefiting him hereafter.

This venture laid the foundation of Thorpe’s fortunes. Three years later he was able to place his own name on the title-page of two humbler literary prizes — each an insignificant pamphlet on current events.³ Thenceforth for a dozen years his name reappeared annually on one, two, or three volumes. After 1614 his operations were few and far between, and they ceased altogether in 1624. He seems to have ended his days in poverty, and has

¹ Cf. my paper ‘An Elizabethan Bookseller’ in Bibliographica, i. 474-98.

² Tborpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. ‘When I hring you the hook/ he advises Blount, ‘ take physic and keep state. Assign me a time hy your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your {that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised^ myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.’ Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron’s love ‘both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.’

³ One gave an account of the East India Company’s fleet; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London.

been identified with the Thomas Thorpe who was granted an alms-room in the hospital of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on Decemher 3,

163s-¹ .

Thorpe was associated with the publication of twenty-nine volumes in all,² including Marlowe’s ‘Lucan’; but in almost all his operations his personal energies were confined, _Character as in his initial enterprise, to procuring the manuscript, nf his For a short period in 1608 he occupied a shop, The ^husmess- Tiger’s Head, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and the fact was duly announced on the title-pages of three publications which he issued in that year.³ But his other undertakings were descrihed on their title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him hy another; and when any address found mention at all, it was the shopkeeper’s address, and not his own. He never enjoyed in permanence the profits or dignity of printing his ‘copy’ at a press of his own, or selling books on premises of his own, and he can claim the distinction of having pursued in this homeless fashion the well-defined profession of procurer of manuscripts for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers’ Company. Though many others began their career in that capacity, all except Thorpe, as far as they can he traced, either developed into printers or hooksellers, or, failing in that, hetook themselves to other trades.

Very few of his wares does Thorpe appear to have procured direct from the authors. It is true that between 1605 and 1611 there were issued under his auspices some eight volumes of genuine literary value, including, besides Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets,’ three plays by Chapman,⁴ four works of Ben Jonson, and Coryat’s ‘Odcomhian Banquet.’ But the taint of mysterious origin attached to most of his literary properties. He doubtless owed them to the exchange of a few pence or shillings with a scrivener’s hireling; and the transaction was not one of which the author had cognisance.

_ _o «

¹ Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. s*7* . .

² Two hore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in iods; two m 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 {i.e. the Sonnets)', three in i6id {i.e. Eistrio-mastix, or the Playwright, as well as Healey’s translations); two in 1611one in 1612; three in 1613; two in r6i4; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1024. The last was a new edition of George^ Chapman’s Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in i6d8.

³ They were Wits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library); Chapman’s Byron, and Jonson s Masques of Blackness and Beauty. . ' .

⁴ Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author’s sanction. Thorpe seems _ tD have taken particular care with Jonson’s books, but none of Jonson’s works fell into his hands before 1605 or after i6d8, a small fraction of Jonson’s literary life. It is significant that the author’s dedication — the one certain mark of publication with the author s sanction appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. One or two copies of Thorpe’s impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe s edition of Chapman s Gentleman Usher has any dedication.

It is quite plain that no negotiation with the author preceded the formation of Thorpe’s resolve to publish for the first time Shake- Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ in 1609. Had Shakespeare speare’s associated himself with the enterprise, the world would publishers’¹* fortunately have been spared Thorpe’s dedication to hands. ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘T. T.’s’ place would have been filled by ‘W. S.’ The whole transaction was in Thorpe’s vein. Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ had been already circulating in' manuscript for 1 eleven years; only two had as yet been printed, and those were issued by the publisher, William Jaggard, in the fraudulently christened volume, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim, by William Shakespeare,’ in 1599. Shakespeare, except in the case of his two narrative poems, showed indifference to all questions touching the publication of his works. Of the sixteen plays of his that were published in his lifetime, not one was printed with his sanction. He made no audible protest when seven contemptible dramas in which he had no hand were published with his name or initials on the title-page while his fame was at its height. With only one publisher of his time, Richard Field, his fellow-townsman, who was responsible for the issue of ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece,’ is it likely that he came into personal relations, and there is nothing to show that he maintained relations with Field after the publication of ‘Lucrece ’ in 1594.

In fitting accord with the circumstance that the publication of the ‘Sonnets’ was a tradesman’s venture which ignored the author’s feelings and rights, Thorpe in both the entry of the book in the Stationers’ Registers and on its title-page brusquely designated it ‘Shakespeares Sonnets,’ instead of following the more urbane collocation of words commonly adopted by living authors, viz. ‘Sonnets by William Shakespeare.’¹

In framing the dedication Thorpe followed established precedent. Initials run riot over Elizabethan and Jacobean books. Printers The use* of ^an<^ publishers, authors and contributors of prefatory initials in commendations were all in the habit of masking them- ofEHza°^ns selves behind such symbols. Patrons figured under hethanand initials in dedications somewhat less frequently than hooks'*¹¹ other sharers in the book’s production. But the

" conditions determining the employment of initials in

that relation were well defined. The employment of initials in a dedication was a recognised mark of dose friendship or intimacy between patron and dedicator. It was a sign that the patron’s fame was limited to a small circle, and that the revelation of his full name was not a matter of interest to a wide public. Such

_ ¹ The nearest parallel is the title Brittens Bowre of Delights (r59r), a poetic miscellany piratically assigned to the poet Nicholas Bretnn hy the stationer Richard Jones. But compare Churchyards Chippes (1575) and Churchyards Challenge (1593).

are the dominant notes of almost all the extant dedications in which the patron is addressed by his initials. In 1598 Samuel Rowlands addressed the dedication of his ‘Betraying of Christ’ to his ‘deare affected friend Maister H. W., gentleman.’ An edition of Robert Southwell’s ‘ Short Rule of Life ’ which appeared in the same year bore a dedication addressed ‘ to my deare affected friend M. [i.e. Mr.] D. S., gentleman.’ The poet Richard Barnfield also in the same year dedicated the opening sonnet in his ‘Poems in divers Humours’ to his ‘friend Maister R. L.’ In 1617 Dunstan Gale dedicated a poem, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ to the ‘worshipfull his verie friend D. [i.e. Dr.] B. H.’¹

There was nothing exceptional in the words of greeting which Thorpe addressed to his patron ‘Mr. W. H.’ Dedications of Shakespeare’s time usually consisted of two distinct _{Fre uej>} .parts. There was a dedicatory epistle, which might of wishes touch at any length, in either verse or prose, on the subject of the book and the writer’s relations with his 'eternity’ in patron. But there was usually, in addition, a pre- dedicatory

* * fiTCfitlDCS

liminary salutation confined to such a single sentence as '

Thorpe displayed on the first page of his edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ In that preliminary sentence the dedicator usually followed a widely adopted formula which was of great antiquity.² He habitually ‘wisheth’ his patron one or more of such blessings as health, long life, happiness, and eternity. ‘All perseverance with soules happiness’ Thomas Powell ‘wisheth’ the Countess of Kildare on the first page of his ‘Passionate Poet’ in 1601. ‘All happines’ is the greeting of Thomas Watson, the sonnetteer, to his patron, the Earl of Oxford, on the threshold of Watson’s ‘Passionate Century of Love.’ There is hardly a book published by Robert Greene between 1580 and 1592 that does not open with

an adjuration before the dedicatory epistle in the form: ‘To----------

Robert Greene wisheth increase of honour with the full

fruition of perfect felicity.’ '

Thorpe in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ left the conventional salutation to stand alone; he omitted the supplement of a dedicatory epistle.³ There exists an abundance of contemporary examples

¹ Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy betweea dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.’s [i.e. possihly Richard Stafford’s] ‘Epistle dedicatorie’ before lfis Heraclitus (Oxford, 1609) was inscrihed ‘to his much honoured father S. F. S.* -<4# Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion ... by W. S. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, i6og), was dedicated to ‘the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.’ This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom 'with which init.ia.1s were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day. _>

² Dante employed it in the dedication of his Divina Commedia which ran Domino foni Grandi de Scala devotissimus suus Dante Aligherius . . . vitam optat pertempora diutuma felicem et gloriosi nominis in perpetuum incrementum. _#

³ Thorpe’s dedicatory formula and the type in which it was set were clearly influenced by Ben Jonson’s form of dedication before the first edition of his Volpone (1607), which,

of the dedicatory salutation without the sequel of the dedicatory epistle. Edmund Spenser’s dedication of the ‘Faerie Queene’ to Elizabeth consists solely of the salutation in the form of an assurance that the writer ‘consecrates these his labours to live with the eternitie of her fame.’ Michael Drayton both in his ‘Idea, The Shepheard’s Garland’ (1593) and in his ‘Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall’ (1609) confined his address to his patron to a single sentence of salutation.¹ Richard Brathwaite in 1611 exclusively saluted the patron of his ‘Golden Fleece’ with ‘the continuance of God’s temporall blessings in this life, with the crowne of im- mortalitie in the world to come’; while in like manner he greeted the patron of his ‘Sonnets and Madrigals’ in the same year with ‘the prosperitie of times successe in this life, with the reward of eternitie in the world to come.’ It is ‘happiness’ and ‘eternity,’ or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron’s favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author’s writing.² In his dedication of the ‘Sonnets’ to ‘Mr. W. H.’ he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, prophesied for his verse in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magniloquence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, ‘promised by our ever-living poet,’ to the conventional dedicatory wish for his patron’s ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternitie.’³ Thorpe

like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was published hy Thorpe and printed for him by George Eld. The preliminary leaf in Volpone was in short lines and in the same fount of capitals as was employed in Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ On the opening leaf of Volpone stands a greeting of ‘The Two Famous Universities,’ to which ‘Ben: Jonson (The Grateful Acknowledger) dedicates both it [the play] and Himselfe.’ In very small type at the right-hand corner of the page, below the dedication, run the words ‘There follows an Epistle if (you dare venture on) the length.’ The Epistle hegins overleaf.

¹ In the volume of 1593 the words run: ‘To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.’

² In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Cilie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ‘a desired citie sure in heaven,’ and assigns to ‘St. Augustine and his commentator Vives’ a ‘savour of the secular.’ In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be ‘the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer’s Bias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.* For other examples of Thorpe’s pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see pp. 679-80 note, and pp. 684-5. .

³ The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe’s salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither’s Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation ‘To himselfe G. W, wisheth all happinesse.’ It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, hut at a feature common to scores of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton —

‘wisheth’ ‘Mr. W. EL’ ‘eternity’ no less grudgingly than ‘our ever-living poet’ offered his own friend the ‘promise’ of it in his ‘Sonnets.’

Other phrases in Thorpe’s dedicatory greeting have a technical significance which exclusively concerns Thorpe’s position as the publisher. In accordance with professional custom he dubbed himself ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.’ Similarly, John Marston called himself ‘my own setter-out’ when he assumed the rare responsibility of publishing one of his own plays (‘Parasitaster or the Fawne’ 1606), while the publisher Thomas Walkley, when reprinting Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Phil- aster’ in 1622, wrote that he ‘adventured, to issue it’ ‘knowing how many well-wishers it had abroad.’

Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ His dedicatory experience was previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe’s _Five ‘Lucan’ in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade, dedications Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date subse- ^by'^rhorP^e- quent to the issue of the ‘Sonnets.’ One of these is addressed to John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke.¹ But these three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe’s prey after the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of Healey’s unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the ‘ Sonnets,’ and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had followed — deliberately and for reasons that he fully stated — in his first and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, ‘W. H.’

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ is not the only volume of the period in the introductory pages of which the initials ‘W. H.’ play a prominent part. In , 1606 one who concealed him- ,_{w H}, self under the same letters performed for ‘A Foure- signs dedi- fould Meditation’ (a collection of pious poems which iSwdl’s the’Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his p°™s death) the identical service that Thorpe performed ^{m 1 0} ■

the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of ‘ W. H.’s ’ Southwell manuscript — there is a hare chance that Wither had in mmd W. H. s greeting 01 Mathew Saunders (see helow), but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints. „ , _ , ,, _ ,, . , ~ ,

¹ Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epictetus his Manuall, and Cebes his Table, out oj_ Greek originallby Io. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke St. Augustine, Oj the Citie of God. . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey s Epictetus,

1616.

for Marlowe’s ‘ Lucan* in 1600, and for Shakespeare s Sonnets in 1609. In 1606 Southwell’s manuscript fell into the hands of this ‘ W. H.,’ and he published it through the agency of the printer, George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton.¹ ‘W H.,’ in his capacity of owner, supplied the dedication with his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit’s newly recovered poems ‘W. H.’ wrote, ‘Long have they hen hidden in obscuritie, and haply had never seene the light, had not a meere accident conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring unto them.’ ‘W. H.’ chose as patron of his venture one Mathew Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a conventional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The greeting was printed in large and bold type thus:

To the Right Worfhipfull and

Vertuous Gentleman, Mathew Saunders, Efquire.

W. H. wifheth, with long life, a profperous achieuement of his good difires.

There follows in small type, regularly printed across the page, a dedicatory letter — the frequent sequel of the dedicatory salutation— in which the writer, ‘W. H.,’ commends the religious temper of ‘these meditations’ and deprecates the coldness and sterility of his own ‘ conceits.’ The dedicator signs himself at the bottom of the page ‘Your Worships unfained affectionate, W. H.’²

The two books — Southwell’s ‘Foure-fould Meditation’ of 1606,

¹ Southwell’s Foure-fould Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy (lately in the library of Mr. Robert Hoe, of New York) having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work Vas reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copylin manuscript, hy Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to the Athencsum on November i, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ‘W. H./ the dedicator of Southwell’s poem, with Thorpe’s‘Mr. W. H.*

² A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which ‘unfained affectionate W. H.’ first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name)’ eotered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ‘epistel dedicatorie ’ which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. _ The words ran: ‘To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continuance of wor- shipp in this worlde, And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever/

and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ of 1609 — have more in common than the appearance on the preliminary pages of the initials ‘ W. H.’ in a prominent place, and of the common form of dedicatory salutation. Both volumes, it was announced on the title-pages, came from the same press — the press of George Eld. Eld for many years co-operated with Thorpe in business. In 1605, and in each of the years 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610 at least one of his ventures was publicly declared to be a specimen of Eld’s typography. Many of Thorpe’s books came forth without any mention of the printer; but Eld’s name figures more frequently upon them than that of any other printer. Between 1605 and 1609 it is likely that Eld printed all Thorpe’s ‘ copy’ as matter of course and that he was in constant relations with him.

There is little doubt that the ‘W. H.’ of the Southwell volume was Mr. William Hall, who, when he procured that manuscript for publication, was an humble auxiliary in the pub- ,_{w H}, _and lishing army.¹ William Hall, the ‘ W. H.’ of the South- Mr. William well dedication, was too in all probability the ‘ Mr. W. ^Hal1'

H.’ of Thorpe’s dedication of the ‘Sonnets.’²

The objection that ‘Mr. W. H.’ could not have been Thorpe’s friend in trade, because while wishing him all happiness and eternity Thorpe dubs him ‘ the onlie begetter of these ,_{The onlie} insuing sonnets,’ is not formidable. Thorpe did not em- begetter’ ploy ‘begetter’ in the ordinary sense ³ but in much the ”^e₀^a₍^.g°?^ly same technical significance which other of his dedicatory '

¹ Hall flits rapidly across the stage of literary history. He served an apprenticeship to the printer and stationer John Allde from 1577 to 1584, and was admitted to the freedom of the Stationers' Company in the latter year. For the long period of twenty-two years after his release from has indentures he was connected with the trade in a dependent capacity, doubtless as assistant to a master-stationer. When in 1606 the manuscript of Southwell’s poems was conveyed to his hands and he^ adopted the recognised rdlc of

Erocurer of their publication, he had not set up in husiness for himself. It was only iter in the same year (1606) that he ohtained the license of the Stationers’ Company to inaugurate a press in his own name, and two years passed before he hegan husmess. In 1608 he obtained for publication a theological manuscript which appeared next year with his name on the title-page for the first time. This volume constituted^ the earliest credential of his independence. It entitled him to the prefix ‘Mr.’ in all social relations. Between 1609 and 1614 he printed some twenty volumes, most of them sermons and almost all devotional in tone. The most important of his secular undertaking was Guil- lim’s far-famed Display of Heraldrie, a folio issued in i6ro. .In i6r2 Hall printed an account of the conviction and execution of a noted pickpocket, John Selman, who had been arrested while professionally engaged in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. On the title-page Hall gave his own name by his initials only. The book was descrihed in bold type as ‘printed hy W. H.’ and as on sale at the shop of Thomas^ Archerm St.^Pauls Churchyard. Hall was a careful printer with a healthy dread of misprints, hut his husiness dwindled after 1613, and, soon disposing of it to one John Beale, he disappeared into private life. ' . .

¹ A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in husmess for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other memher of the Stationers’ Company hearing at the required dates the initials of ¹W. H.* But he was ordinarily^ known hy his full name, ana there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe. _ _# . , ,

_# * Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bomhast which it is often difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in i6ro — the year after the issue of the Sotinets — Healey’s Epictetus his Manuall¹ to a true fauorer of forward spirits,

expressions bear. ‘Begetter'when literally interpreted as applied to a literary work, means father, author, producer, and it cannot be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe ‘Mr. W. H.’ as tjie author of the ‘Sonnets.’ ‘Begetter’ has been used in the figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by ‘onlie begetter’ Thorpe meant ‘sole inspirer,’ and that by the use of those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting between ‘W. H.’ and Shakespeare in the dramatist’s early life; but that interpretation presents as we have seen numberless difficulties. Of the figurative meanings set in Elizabethan English on the word ‘begetter,’ that of ‘inspirer’ is by no means the only one or the most common. ‘Beget’ was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of ‘get,’ -procure,’ or ‘obtain,’ a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of ‘bring into being.’ Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them ‘in the very whirl wind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.’ ‘I have some cousins german at Court,’ wrote Dekker in 1602, in his ‘Satiro-Mastix,’ ‘[that] shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King’s Revels.’ ‘Mr. W. H.,’ whom Thorpe described as ‘ the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,’ was in all probability the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, who brought the book into being either by first placing the manuscript in Thorpe’s hands or by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word ‘begetter’ was entirely in Thorpe’s vein.¹ Thorpe described his rdle in the enterprise of the ‘ Sonnets ’ as that of ‘ the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ i.e. the hopeful speculator in the scheme. ‘Mr. W. H.’ doubtless played the almost equally important part — one as well known then as now in commercial operations— of the ‘vendor’ of the property to be exploited. A few years earlier, in 1600, one John Bodenham in similar circumstances

Maister John Florio/ Thorpe writes of Epictetus’s work: ‘In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imhraced, yea inhosomed. It filles not the hand with leanes, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more sencejess than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.' In the same year, when dedicating Healey’s translation of St. Augustine's Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily ref ere to Pembroke’s patronage of Healey’s earlier efforts in translation thus: ‘He that against detraction heyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance,’ ■

_< \This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone’s disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a hihliographical expert of the highest authority. For further evidence of the use of the word ‘beget' in the sense of ‘get/ 'gain/ or ‘procure’ in English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see the present writer’s Introduction to the Sonnets Facsimile (Oxford, 1905) PP- 38-9- The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators — men like Malone and Steevens ■— who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century should have failed to recognise any connection between ‘Mr. W. H.' and Shakespeare’s personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the nineteenth century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archaeologists.

made over to a ‘stationer’ Hugh Astley an anthology of published and unpublished poetic quotations, which Astley issued under the title of ‘Belvedere or The Garden of the Muses.’ In a prefatory page Bodenham was called ‘First causer and collectour of these Flowers,’ and at the end of the book ‘ The Gentleman who was the cause of this collection.’ Thorpe applied to ‘Mr. W. H.’ the word ‘begetter’ in the same sense as Astley applied the words ‘first causer’ and ‘the cause’ to John Bodenham, the procurer of the copy for his volume known as ‘Belvedere’ in 1600.

For some eighty years it has been very generally assumed that Shakespeare addressed the bulk of his sonnets to the young Earl _ . . ... of Pembroke. This theory owes its origin to a spe- notfon that⁶ ciously lucky guess which was first disclosed to the ‘Mr w. H.’ public in 1832, and won for a time almost universal ‘Mr. WU- acceptance.¹ Thorpe’s form of address was held to liam Her- justify the mistaken inference that, whoever ‘ Mr. W. H.’ may have been, he and no other was the hero of the alleged story of the ‘Poems’; and the cornerstone of the Pembroke theory was the assumption that the letters ‘Mr. W. H.’ in the dedication did duty for the words ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ by which name the (third) Earl of Pembroke was represented as having been known in youth. The originators of the theory claimed to discover in the Earl of Pembroke the only young man of rank and wealth to whom the initials ‘W. H.’ applied at the needful dates. In thus interpreting the initials, the Pembroke theorists made a blunder that proves on examination to be fatal to their whole contention.

The nobleman under consideration succeeded to the earldom of Pembroke on his father’s death on January 19, 1601 (N.S.), when The Earl of ^e ^was twenty years and nine months old, and from that Pembroke date it is unquestioned that he was always known by afLord°Hcr- ^is lawful title. But it has been overlooked that the hertin designation ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ for which the youth. initials ‘Mr. W. H.’ have been long held to stand, could never in the mind of Thomas Thorpe or any other contemporary

¹ James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentletnan’s Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as r8i9, although he had not published it. Boadeo re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare’s Sonnets which he published in r837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii- 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The most arduous of its recent supporters was Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the Sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress. Tyler endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April 1899 under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories hy Lady New- degate and by myself].

have denominated the earl at any moment of his career. When he came into the world on April 9, 1580, his father had been (the second) Earl of Pembroke for ten years, and he, as the eldest son, was from the hour of his birth known in all relations of life — even in the baptismal entry in the parish register — by the title of Lord Herbert, and by no other. During the lifetime of his father and his own minority several references were made to him in the extant correspondence of friends of varying degrees of intimacy. He is called by them, without exception, ‘my Lord Herbert,’ ‘the Lord Herbert,’ or ‘Lord Herbert.’¹ It is true that as the eldest son of an earl he held the title by courtesy, but for all practical purposes it was as well recognised in common speech as if he had been a peer in his own right. No one nowadays would address in current parlance, or entertain the conception of, Viscount Cranborne, the heir of the present Marquis of Salisbury, as ‘Mr. R. C.’ or ‘Mr. Robert Cecil.’ It is no more legitimate to assert that it would have occurred to an Elizabethan — least of all to a personal acquaintance or to a publisher who stood toward his patron in the relation of a personal dependent — to describe ‘young Lord Herbert,’ of Elizabeth’s reign, as ‘Mr. William Herhert.’ A lawyer, who in the way of business might have to mention the young lord’s name in a legal document, would have entered it as ‘William Herbert, commonly called Lord Herbert.’ The appellation ‘Mr.’ was not used loosely then as now, but indicated a precise social grade. Thorpe’s employment of the prefix ‘Mr.’ without qualification is in itself fatal to the pretension that any lord, whether by right or courtesy, was intended.²

Proof is at hand to establish that Thorpe was under no misapprehension as to the proper appellation of the Earl of Pembroke, and was incapable of venturing on the meaningless misnomer of ‘Mr. W. H.’ Insignificant publisher though he was, and

¹ Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. ‘My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my Lord Barbert (is) come up to see the Queen' (Rowland Whyte to Sir Rohert Sydney, Octoher 8, rs9i), and again p. 361 (November 16,1595); and p. 372 (December 5,159s). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1,1599, ‘Young Lord Herbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, wbo shall set the best legge foremost.’ Chamberlain’s Letters (Camden Soc.), p. 57.

¹ Thomas Sackville, the autbor of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was_ bom plain Thomas Sackville,’ and was ordinarily addressed in youth as ‘Mr. Sackville.’ He wrote all his^ literary work while he hore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned^literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckburst. Very late in life, in T604 at the age of sixty-eight — he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, ‘M. [i.e. Mr.] Sackville,’ were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopedic anthology, England’s Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprmt, unauthorised hy him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascrihed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and*the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke Mr. W. H. As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.

sceptical as he was of the merits of noble patrons, he was not proof against the temptation, when an opportunity was directly offered Thorpe’s him, of adorning the prefatory pages of a publication modcof _with the name of a nobleman, who enjoyed the high the Earfof official station, the literary culture, and the social influ- Pembroke. _{ence 0}f the third Earl of Pembroke. In 1610 —■ a year after he published the ‘ Sonnets ’ — there came into his hands the manuscripts of John Healey, that humble literary aspirant who had a few months before emigrated to Virginia, and had, it would seem, died there. Healey, before leaving England, had secured through the good offices of John Florio (a man of influence in both fashionable and literary circles) the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke for a translation of Bishop Hall’s fanciful satire, ‘ Mun- dus alter et idem.’ Calling his book ‘The Discoverie of a New World,’ Healey had prefixed to it, in 1609, an epistle inscribed in garish terms of flattery to the ‘Truest mirrour of truest honor, William Earl of Pembroke.’¹ When Thorpe subsequently made up his mind to publish, on his own account, other translations by the same hand, he found it desirable to seek the same patron. Accordingly, in 1610, he prefixed in his own name, to an edition of Healey’s translation of St. Augustine’s ‘ Citie of God,’ a dedicatory address ‘ to the honorablest patron of the Muses and good mindes, Lord William, Earle of Pembroke, Knight of the Honourable Order (of the Garter), &c.’ In involved sentences Thorpe tells the ‘right gracious and gracefule Lord’ how the author left the work at death to be a ‘ testimonie of gratitude, observance, and heart’s honor to your honour.’ ‘Wherefore,’ he explains, ‘his legacie, laide at your Honour’s feete, is rather here delivered to your Honour’s humbly thrise-kissed hands by his poore delegate. Your Lordship’s true devoted, Th. Th.’

Again, in 1616, when Thorpe procured the issue of a second edition of another of Healey’s translations, ‘Epictetus Manuall. Cebes Table. Theophrastus Characters,’ he supplied more conspicuous evidence of the servility with which he deemed it incumbent on him to approach a potent patron. As this address by Thorpe to Pembroke is difficult of access, I give it in extenso :

‘To the Right Honourable, William Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to His Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie Counsell, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, &c. ‘Right Honorable. — It may worthily seeme strange unto your Lordship, out of what frenzy one of my meanenesse hath presumed to commit this Sacriledge, in the straightnesse of your Lordship’s

¹ An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian — none is in the British Museum — shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, hy Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.

leisure, to present a peece, for matter and model so unworthy, and in this scribbling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly with Dedications. All I can alledge in extenuation of so many incongruities, is the bequest of a deceased Man; who (in his lifetime) having offered some translations of his unto your Lordship, ever wisht if these ensuing were published they might onely bee addressed unto your Lordship, as the last Testimony of his dutifull affection (to use his own termes) The true and reall upholder of Learned endeavors. This, therefore, beeing left unto mee, as a Legacie unto your Lordship (pardon my presumption, great Lord, from so meane a man to so great a person) I could not without some impiety present it to any other; such a sad priviledge have the bequests of the dead, and so obligatory they are, more than the requests of the living. In the hope of this honourable acceptance I will ever rest,

‘Your lordship’s humble devoted,

‘T. Th.’

With such obeisances did publishers then habitually creep into the presence of the nobility. In fact, the law which rigorously Maintained the privileges of peers left them no option. The alleged erroneous form of address in the dedication of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ — ‘Mr. W. H.’ for Lord Herbert or the Earl of Pembroke

— would have amounted to the offence of defamation. And for that misdemeanour the Star Chamber, always active in protecting the dignity of peers, would have promptly called Thorpe to account.¹

Of the Earl of Pembroke, and of his brother the Earl of Montgomery, it was stated a few years later, ‘from just observation,’ on very pertinent authority, that ‘ no men came near their lordships [in their capacity of literary patrons], but with a kind of religious address.’ These words figure in the prefatory epistle which two actor-friends of Shakespeare addressed to the two Earls in the posthumously issued First Folio of the dramatist’s works. Thorpe’s ‘kind of religious address’ on seeking Lord Pembroke’s patronage for Healey’s books was somewhat more unctuous than was customary or needful. But of erring conspicuously in an opposite direction he may, without misgiving, be pronounced innocent.

¹ On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as ‘goodman Morley. A technical defect

— the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence — in tbe bill of indictment led to a dismissal of tbe cause. See Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata,_ 1593 to 1009, edited from the manuscript of John Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.

With the disposal of the allegation that ‘ Mr. W. H.’ represented the Earl of Pembroke’s youthful name, the whole theory of that earl’s identity with Shakespeare’s friend collapses. Outside Thorpe’s dedicatory words, only two scraps of evidence with any title to consideration have been adduced to show that Shakespeare was at any time or in any way associated with Pembroke.

In the late autumn of 1603 James I and his Court were installed at the Earl of Pembroke’s house at Wilton for a period of two Shakespeare ^months, owing to the prevalence of the plague in with the London. By order of the officers of the royal house- compaoy hold, the King’s company of players, of which Shake- atwatoo speare was a member, gave a performance before the m 1603. King at Wilton House on December 2. The actors travelled from Mortlake for the purpose, and were paid in the ordinary manner by the treasurer of the royal household out of the public funds. There is no positive evidence that Shakespeare attended at Wilton with the company, but assuming, as is probable, that he did, the Earl of Pembroke can be held no more responsible for his presence than for his repeated presence under the same conditions at Whitehall. The visit of the King’s players to Wilton in 1603 has no bearing on the Earl of Pembroke’s alleged relations with Shakespeare.¹

¹ See p. 377. A tradition sprang up at Wilton at the end of the last century to the effect that a letter once existed there m which the Couatess of Pembroke bade her soq the earl while he was in attendance on James X at Salisbury hriog the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us.’ No tangihle evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, ana jts teoor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupicd Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have heen summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly _ necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring^ to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper bave referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer in 1897 what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back ^ was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare^ Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ‘Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603.’ The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to he of old date in the eyes of anyone accustomed to study manuscripts. Oa May 5, 1898, an expert examination was made of the portrait and the inscription, on the invitation of the present earl, and the inscription was unanimously rejected.

The second instance of the association in the seventeenth century of Shakespeare’s name with Pembroke’s tells wholly against the conjectured intimacy. Seven years after the drama- _{The dedica}. tist’s death, two of his friends and fellow-actors pre- tionofthe pared the collective edition of his plays known as the ^{Flrst FoIl}°- First Folio, and they dedicated the volume, in the conventional language of eulogy, ‘To the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren, William Earl of Pembroke, &c., Lord Chamberlaine to the King’s most excellent Majesty, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, &c., Gentleman of His Majesties Bedchamber. Both Knights of the most Noble Order of the Garter and our singular good Lords.’

The choice of such patrons, whom, as the dedication intimated, ‘no one came near but with a kind of religious address,’ proves no private sort of friendship between them and the dead author. To the two earls in partnership books of literary pretension were habitually dedicated at the period.¹ Moreover, the third Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain in 1623, and exercised supreme authority in theatrical affairs. That his patronage should be sought for a collective edition of the works of the acknowledged master of the contemporary stage was natural. It is only surprising that the editors should have yielded to the vogue of soliciting the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain’s brother in conjunction with the Lord Chamberlain.

The sole passage in the editors’ dedication that can be held to bear on the question of Shakespeare’s alleged intimacy with Pembroke,is to be found in their remarks: ‘But since your lordships have beene pleas’d to thinke these trifles something, heretofore ; and have prosequuted both them, and their Authour living, with so much favour: we hope that (they outliving him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them you have done unto their parent. There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or find them: This hath done both. For, so much were your lordships’ likings .of the severall parts, when they were acted, as, before they were published, the Volume ask’d to be yours.’ There is nothing whatever in these sentences that does more than justify the inference that the brothers shared the enthusiastic esteem which James I and all the noblemen of his Court extended to Shakespeare and his plays in the dramatist’s lifetime. Apart from his work as a dramatist, Shakespeare, in his capacity of one of ‘ the King’s servants ’ or company of players, was personally known to all the officers of the royal house

¹ Cf. Ducci’s Ars Atilica or The Courtier’s Arte, 1607; Stephens’s A World of Wonders, 1607; and Gerardo The Unfortunate Spaniard, Leonard Digges’s translation from the Spanish, 1622.

hold who collectively controlled theatrical representations at Court. Throughout James I’s reign his plays were repeatedly performed in the royal presence, and when the dedicators of the First Folio, at the conclusion of their address to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, describe the dramatist’s works as ‘these remaines of your Servant Shakespeare,’ they make it quite plain that it was in the capacity of ‘King’s servant’ or player that they knew him to have been the object of their noble patrons’ favour.

The ‘Sonnets’ offer no internal indication that the Earl of Pembroke and Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all is deducible from the vague parallelisms that have been tionin the" adduced between the earl’s character and position in life ‘Sonnets’ _an(j those with which the poet credited the youth of the youth’siden- ‘Sonnets.’ It may be granted that both had a mother Pembroke (Sonnet iii.), that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that em ro e. _were regarded by admirers as cultivated, that

both were self-indulgent in their relations with women, and that both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence. The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare’s youth was not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke’s account. Francis Davison, when dedicating his ‘Poetical Rhapsody’ to the earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously qualified reference to the attractiveness of his person in the lines:

[His] outward shape, though it most lovely be,

Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire.

The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle age,¹ and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned handsome at any time of life; at most they confirm Anthony Wood’s description of him as in person ‘rather majestic than elegant.’ But the point is not one of moment, and the argument neither gains nor loses, if we allow that Pembroke may, at any rate in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at one period reflected, like Shakespeare’s youth, ‘the lovely April of his mother’s prime.’

But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any showing, he admitted to be common to both Pembroke and Shakespeare’s alleged friend, they all prove to be equally indistinctive. All could be matched without difficulty in a score of youthful nohlemen and gentlemen of Elizabeth’s Court. Direct external evidence of Shakespeare’s friendly intercourse with one or other of Elizabeth’s young courtiers must be produced before the ‘ Sonnets’ ’ general references to the youth’s beauty and grace can render the remotest assistance in establishing his identity.

¹ Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens.

Although it may be reckoned superfluous to adduce more arguments, negative or positive, against the theory that the Earl of Pembroke was a youthful friend of Shakespeare, it is , . , worth noting that John Aubrey, the Wiltshire anti- ignorance uf quary, and the biographer of most Englishmen of dis- |^{ny rektitm} tinction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was Shakespeare zealously researching from 1650 onwards into the |^ad, _k careers alike of Shakespeare and of various members of ^{em 10
e}' the Earl of Pembroke’s family — one of the chief in Wiltshire. Aubrey rescued from oblivion many anecdotes — scandalous and otherwise — both about the third Earl of Pembroke and about Shakespeare. Of the former he wrote in his ‘Natural History of Wiltshire’ (ed. Britton, 1847), recalling the earl’s relations with Massinger and many other men of letters. Of Shakespeare, Aubrey narrated much lively gossip in his ‘Lives of Eminent Persons.’ But neither in his account of Pembroke nor in his account of Shakespeare does he give any hint that they were at any time or in any manner acquainted or .associated with one another. Had close relations existed between them, it is impossible that all trace of them would have faded from the traditions that were current in Aubrey’s time and were embodied in his writings.¹

¹ It is unnecessary, after what has been said ahove (pp. 194, 195 n.), to coosider seriously the suggestion that the * dark lady’ of the Sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the Sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the Sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate’s Gossip from a Muniment Room (1897), which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Laay Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. 0. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate’s book. We also leam from Lady Newdegate’s volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. _> It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ‘Will Herbert' for ‘the dark lady’s’ favours in the Sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.). But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those Sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the Sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.

No one has had the hardihood to assert that the text of the ‘Sonnets’ gives internally any indication that the youth’s name took the hapless form of ‘William Herbert’; but many commentators argue that in three or four sonnets Shakespeare admits in so many words that the youth bore his own Christian name of Will, and even that the disdainful lady had ^among her admirers other gentlemen entitled in familiar intercourse to similar designation. These are fantastic assumptions which rest on a misconception of Shakespeare’s phraseology and of the character of the conceits of the ‘Sonnets,’ and are solely attributable to the fanatical anxiety of the supporters of the Pembroke theory to extort, at all hazards, some sort of evidence in their favour from Shakespeare’s text.¹

In two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) — the most artificial and ‘conceited ’ in the collection — the poet plays somewhat enigmatically Elizabethan ^on ^^ls Christian name of ‘Will,’ and a similar pun has meanings of been doubtfully detected in Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. ‘will.’ That Shakespeare was known to his intimates as ‘Will’ is attested by the well-known lines of his friend Thomas Heywood:

‘Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill Commanded mirth and passion was but Will.’²

The groundwork of the sonnetteer’s pleasantry is the identity in form of the proper name with the common noun ‘will.’ This word connoted in Elizabethan English a generous variety of conceptions, of most of which it has long since been deprived. Then, as now, it was employed in the general psychological sense of volition; but it was more often specifically applied to two limited manifestations of the volition. It was the commonest of synonyms alike for ‘ self will ’ or ‘ stubbornness ’ — in which sense it still survives in ‘wilful’ — and for ‘lust,’ or ‘sensual passion.’ It also did occasional duty for its own diminutive ‘wish,’ for ‘caprice,’ for ‘goodwill,’ and for ‘free consent’ (as nowadays in ‘willing, ’ or ‘ willingly ’). ¹

¹ Edward Dowden (Sonnets, p. mv) writes: ‘It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere’s friend was the same as his own, Will,¹ and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.

² Eicrarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635).

690

Shakespeare constantly used ‘will’ in all these significations.. Iago recognised its general psychological value when he said ‘Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gar- _shate. deners.’ The conduct of the ‘will’ is discussed after speare’s uses the manner of philosophy in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ ^{ol thc word}' (n. ii. 51-68). In another of Iago’s sentences, ‘Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will,’ light is shed on the process hy which the word came to be specifically applied to sensual desire. The last is a favourite sense with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Angelo and Isabella, in ‘ Measure for Measure,’ are at one in attributing their conflict to the former’s ‘will.’ The self-indulgent Bertram, in ‘All’s Well,’ ‘fleshes his “will” in the spoil of a gentlewoman’s honour.’ In ‘Hamlet’ (in. iv. 88) the prince warns his mother: ‘And reason panders will.’ In ‘Lear’ (iv. vi. 279) Regan’s heartless plot to seduce her brother-in-law is assigned to ‘the undistinguished space’ — the boundless range — ‘of woman’s will.’ Similarly, Sir Philip Sidney apostrophised lust as ‘thou web of will.’ Thomas Lodge, in ‘Phillis’ (Sonnet xi.), warns lovers of the ruin that menaces all who ‘guide their course hy will.’ Nicholas Breton’s fantastic romance of 1599, entitled ‘The Will of Wit, Wit’s Will or Will’s Wit, Chuse you whether,’ is especially rich in like illustrations. Breton brings into marked prominence the antithesis which was familiar in his day between ‘will’ in its sensual meaning, and ‘wit,’ the Elizabethan synonym for reason or cognition. ‘A song between Wit and Will’ opens thus: >

Wit: What art thou, Will? Will: A babe of nature’s hrood.

Wit: Who was thy sire? Will: Sweet Lust, as lovers say.

Wit: Thy mother who? Will: Wild lusty wanton blood.

Wit: When wast thou born? Will: In merry month of May.

Wit: And where brought up? Will: In school of little skill.

Wit: What leam’dst thou there ? Will: Love is my lesson still.

Of the use of. the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will, Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his ‘Scholemaster’ (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as ‘will,’ which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be ‘with sharp chastisement daily cut away.’¹ ‘A woman will have her will’ was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverhial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of the last word. The phrase supplied the title of ‘a pleasant comedy,’ by William Haughton, which — from 1597 onwards — held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of forty years. ‘Women, because they cannot have their wills when

they dye, they will have their wills while they live,’ was a current witticism which the barrister Manningham deemed worthy of record in his ‘Diary’ in 1602.¹ In William Goddard’s ‘Satirycall Dialogue’ (1615?) ‘Will’ is personified as ‘women’s god,’ and is introduced in female attire as presiding over a meeting of wives who are discontented with their husbands. ‘Dame Will’ opens the proceedings with an ‘oration’ addressed to her ‘subjects’ in which figure the lines:

Know’t I am Will,² and will yeild you releife.

Be bold to speake, I am the wiue’s delight,

And euer was, and wilbe, th’usbandes spight.

It was not only in the ‘Sonnets’ that Shakespeare — almost invariably with a glance at its sensual significance — rang the Shake changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earliest speare’s play, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (n. i. 97-ior), after the the'word princess has tauntingly assured the King of Navarre ' that he will break his vow to avoid women’s society, the king replies ‘Not for the world, fair madam, by my wilV (i.e. willingly). The princess retorts ‘Why will [i.e. sensual desire] shall break it [i.e.the vow], will and nothing else.’ In ‘Much Ado’ (v. iv. 26 seq.), when Benedick, anxious to marry Beatrice, is asked by the lady’s uncle, ‘What’s your will?’ he playfully lingers on the word in his answer. As for his ‘will,’ his ‘will’ is that the uncle’s ‘goodwill may stand with his’ and Beatrice’s ‘ will ’ — in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former misinterprets the young lady’s ‘ What is your will ? ’ into an inquiry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words ‘will’ and ‘wish,’ the latter being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (1. iii. 63 and rv. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor’s ‘wish’ is in harmony with another interlocutor’s ‘will.’

It is in this vein of pleasantry — ‘will’ and ‘wish’ are identically

¹ Manningham*s Diary, p. 92; cf. Bamabe Barnes’s Odes Pastoral, sestine 2 :

‘But women will have tbeir own wills,

Alas, why then should I complain?’

* The text of this part of Goddard’s volume is printed in italics, but the word ‘Will.’ which constantly recurs, is always distinguished by roman type. Goddard’s very rare Dialogue was reprinted privately by Mr. John S. Farmer in 1897.

contrasted in Sonnet cxxxv. — that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modern readers, makes play with the word ‘will’ in the ‘Sonnets,’ and especially in the two sonnets (cxxv-vi.) which alone speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the name of Will.

One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation is that the word ‘will’ in these sonnets is frequently italicised in the original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument. The corrector of the _

press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. largely fa” use of¹’ turned upon a simple pun between the writer’s name of SkHSL,, ‘Will’ and the lady’s ‘ will.’ That fact, and no other, and he indicated very roughly by occasionally italicising the punter™ crucial word. Typography at the time followed no '

firmly fixed rules, and, although ‘will’ figures in a more or less punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, and those were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe that ‘Will’ is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. cxxxiv. and cxliii., ‘ will’ occurs once only; it alone is italicised in the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, arbitrarily and without just cause.¹

The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coin- _{The CQnce;ts} ddences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word ₀f Sonnets ‘will.’ ‘Will’ is the Christian name of the enslaved writer; ‘will’ is the sentiment with which the lady '

inspires her worshippers; and ‘will’ designates stubbornness as well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to the poet’s reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of the lady’s disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her ‘proud heart’ or ‘foul pride,’ and her sensuality or ‘foul faults.’ These are her ‘wills,’ and they make up her being. In crediting the lady with such a constitution Shakespeare was not recording any

¹ Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But tbey did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. George Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the Quarto of 1609 {pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics Dt capital letters, but an exnmination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

definite observation or experience of his own, but was following, as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets. Bamabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose ‘proud disdainfulness’ he suffered,

Why dost thou my delights delay, _

And with thy cross unkmdness kills (sic)

Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills?

Barnes answers his question in the next lines:

But women will have their own wills,

Since what she lists her heart fulfils.¹

Similar passages abound in Elizabethan sonnets, but certain verbal similarities give good ground for regarding Shakespeare’s ‘will’ sonnets as deliberate adaptations — doubtless with satiric purpose — of Barnes’s stereotyped reflections on women’s obduracy. The form and the constant repetition of the word ‘will’ in these two sonnets of Shakespeare also seem to imitate derisively the same rival’s Sonnets lxxii. and lxxiii. in which Barnes puts the words ‘grace’ and ‘graces’ through much the same evolutions as Shakespeare puts the words ‘will’ and ‘wills’ in the Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi.²

Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxxv. runs:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And will to boot, and will in over-plus';

More than enough am I that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,’

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will One will of mine, to make thy large will more.

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one — Will.

¹ Barnes’s Parthenophil in Arber’s Garner, v. 440. ¹ _

_# ² After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. Dn the resemblance between the graces o! his cruel mistress’s face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):

‘Why did rich Nature graces grant tD thee,

Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace ?

O how can graces iu thy body be ?

Where neither they nor pity find a place ! . . .

Grant me some grace / For tbDu with grace art wealthy And kindly may st afford some gracious thing.’

⁸ Cf. Lear, iv. vi. 279, ‘O undistinguish’d space of woman’s will’; i.e. ‘O boundless range Df woman’s lust.’

In the opening words, ‘Whoever hath her wish,’ the poet prepares the reader for the punning encounter by a slight variation on the current catch-phrase ‘A woman will have her sonnet will.’ At the next moment we are in the thick of the ™v. wordy fray. The lady has not only her lover named Will, but untold stores of ‘will’ — in the sense alike of stubbornness and of lust — to which it seems supererogatory to make addition.¹ To the lady’s ‘over-plus’ of ‘will’ is punningly attributed her defiance of the ‘will’ of her suitor Will to enjoy her favours. At the same time ‘will’ in others proves to her ‘right gracious,’² although in him it is unacceptable. All this, the poet hazily argues, should be otherwise; for as the sea, although rich in water, does not refuse the falling rain, but freely adds it to its abundant store, so she, ‘rich in will,’ should accept her lover Will’s ‘will’ and ‘make her large will more.’ The poet sums up his ambition in the final couplet:

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one — Will.

This is as much as to say, ‘Let not my mistress in her unkindness kill any of her fair-spoken adorers. Rather let her think all who beseech her favours incorporate in one alone of her lovers — and that one the writer whose name of “Will” is a synonym for the passions th^t dominate her.’ The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only one of the lady’s lovers — to the definite exclusion of all others — whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the ‘will’ which controls her being.

The same equivocating conceit of the poet Will’s title to identity with the lady’s ‘will’ in all senses is pursued in Sonnet sonnet cxxxvi. The sonnet opens: cxxxvi.

If thy soul check thee that I come so near,

Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will,’

And will thy soul knows is admitted there.

^] Edward Dowden says ‘will to boot’ is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend, ‘William [? Mr. W. H.]' (Sonnets, 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis hy repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line ‘ And will to boot, and will in over-plus,’ is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as —

‘Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind’ (cv. 5).

‘Beyond all date, even to eternity’ (cxxii. a). ^

‘Who art as hlack as hell, as dark'as night’ (cxlvii. 14).

In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification.

* Cf. Barnes’s Sonnet lxxiii.:

; ‘All her looks gracious, yet no grace do hring

To me, poor wretch ! Yet be the Graces there.’

* Shakespeare refers to the hlindness, the ‘sightless view’ of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii, and apostrophises the soul as the * centre of his sinful earth ’ in Sonnet cxlvi.

Here Shakespeare adapts to his punning purpose the familiar philosophic commonplace respecting the soul’s domination by ‘will’ or volition, which was more clearly expressed by his contemporary, Sir John Davies, in the philosophic poem, ‘Nosce Teipsum’:

Will holds the royal sceptre in the soul, _

And on the passions of the heart doth reign.

Whether Shakespeare’s lines be considered with their context or without it, the tenor of their thought and language positively refutes the commentators’ notion that the ‘will’ admitted to the lady’s soul is a rival lover named Will. The succeeding lines run:

Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.¹ Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love;

Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.

In things of great receipt with ease we prove Among a number one is reckon’d none:

Then in the numher let me pass untold,

Though in thy stores’ account, I one must he;

For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.

Here the poet Will continues to claim, in punning right of his Christian name, a place, however small and inconspicuous, among the ‘wills,’ the varied forms of will (i.e. lust, stubbornness, and willingness to accept others’ attentions), which are the constituent elements of the lady’s being. The plural ‘wills’ is twice used in identical sense by Bamabe Barnes in the lines already quoted:

Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills.

But women will have their own wills. •

Impulsively Shakespeare brings his fantastic pretension to a somewhat more practical issue in the concluding apostrophe:

Make hut my name thy love, and love that still,

And then thou lovest me — for my name is Will.²

That is equivalent to saying ‘Make “will” ’ (i.e. that which is yourself) ‘your love, and then you love me, because Will is my name.’ The couplet proves even more convincingly than the one which clinches the preceding sonnet that none of the rivals

, ¹ The use of the word ‘fulfil’ io this and the next line should he compared with Barnes's introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given ahove:

‘Since what she lists her heart fulfils.’

² Thomas Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: ‘You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name aloae, aod theo you love me, for my oame is Will/ p. 297. Edward Dowdea, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: ‘Love only my oame (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my oame is Will, and I myself am all will, t.e. all desire.’

whom the poet sought to displace in the lady’s affections could by any chance have been, like himself, called Will. The writer could not appeal to a mistress to concentrate her love on his name of Will, because it was the emphatic sign of identity between her being and him, if that name were common to him and one or more rivals, and lacked exclusive reference to himself.

Loosely as Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ were constructed, the couplet at the conclusion of each poem invariably summarise the general intention of the preceding twelve lines. The concluding couplets of these two Sonnets cxxxv.-vi., in which Shakespeare has been alleged to acknowledge a rival of his own name in his suit for a lady’s favour, are consequently the touchstone by which the theory of ‘more Wills than one’ must be tested. As we have just seen, the situation is summarily embodied in the first couplet thus:

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one — Will.

It is re-embodied in the second couplet thus:

Make but my name thy love, and love that still,

And then thou lovest me — for my name is Will.

The whole significance of both couplets resides in the twice- repeated fact that one, and only one, of the lady’s lovers is named Will, and that that one is the writer. To assume that the poet had a rival of his own name is to denude both couplets of all point. ‘Will,’ we have learned from the earlier lines of both sonnets, is the lady’s ruling passion. Punning mock-logic brings the poet in either sonnet to the ultimate conclusion that one of her lovers may, above all others, reasonably claim her love on the ground that his name of Will is the name of her ruling passion. Thus his pretension to her affections rests, he punningly assures her, on a strictly logical basis.

Unreasonable as any other interpretation of these sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) seems to be, I believe it far more fatuous to seek in the single and isolated use of the word ‘will’ in each Sonnet of the Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. any confirmation ^cxx*^lv- of the theory of a rival suitor named Will.

Sonnet cxxxiv. runs:

So now I have confess’d that he is thine,

And I myself am mortgaged to thy will.¹ Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still.

¹ The word ‘will’ is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes’s line quoted above:

‘Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills.’

But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,

For thou art covetous and he is kind,

He learn’d but surety-like to write for me,

Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.

The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,

Thou usurer, that putt’st forth all to use,

And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;

So him I lose through my unkind abuse.

Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me;

He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.

Here the poet describes himself as ‘mortgaged to the lady’s will’ (i.e. to her personality, in which ‘will,’ in the dpuble sense of stubbornness and sensual passion, is the strongest element). He deplores that the lady has captivated not merely himself, but also his friend, who made vicarious advances to her.

Sonnet cxliii. runs:

Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away,

Sets down her babe, and makes all swift despatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay;

Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,

Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent - To follow that which flies before her face,

Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent:

So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,

Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;

But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me,

And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind :

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy will,¹ If thou turn back and my loud crying still.

In this sonnet —■ which presents a very clear-cut picture, although its moral is somewhat equivocal — the poet represents the lady as Meaning of a country housewife and himself as her babe; while Sonnet cxliii. _an acquaintance, who attracts the lady but is not attracted by her, is figured as a ‘ feathered creature ’ in the house-wife’s poultry-yard. The fowl takes to flight; the housewife sets down her infant and pursues ‘ the thing.’ The poet, believing apparently that he has little to fear from the harmless creature, lightly makes play with the current catch-phrase (‘a woman will have her will’), and amiably wishes his mistress success in her chase, on condition that, having recaptured the truant bird, she turn back and treat him, her babe, with kindness. In praying that the lady ‘may have her will ’ the poet is clearly appropriating the current catch- phrase, and no pun on a second suitor’s name of‘Will’ can be fairly wrested from the context.

¹ Because ‘will’ by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is bere printed Will in the first edition of the Sonnets, Professor Dowden^is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to helieve the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, i.e. the friend ‘Will [? W. H.]’ This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication.

The sonnetteering vogue, as I have already pointed out,¹ reached its full height between 1591 and 1597, and when at its briskest it drew Shakespeare into its current. An enumeration of volumes containing sonnet-sequences or detached sonnets that were in circulation during the period best illustrates the overwhelming force of the sonnetteering rage of those years, and, with that end in view, I give here a bibliographical account, with a few critical notes, of the chief efforts of Shakespeare’s rival sonnetteers.²

The earliest collections of sonnets to be published in England were those by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, which first appeared in the publisher Tottel’s poetical miscellany called ‘Songes and Sonnetes’ in 1557. This volume included sixteen sonnets by Surrey and twenty Sonnets, by Wyatt. Many of them were translated directly from Petrarch, and most of them treated conventionally ’ of the torments of an unrequited love. Surrey included, however, three sonnets on the death of his friend Wyatt, and a fourth on the death of one Clere, a faithful follower. Tottel’s volume was seven times reprinted by 1587. But no sustained endeavour was made to emulate the example of Surrey and Wyatt till Thomas Watson about 1580 circulated in manuscript his ‘Booke of Passionate Sonnetes,’ which he wrote for his patron, the Earl of Oxford. The volume was printed in 1582 under the title of ¹EKATOMIIAOIA ’ or Passionate Centurie of Loue. Divided into two _Watson._s parts: whereof the first expresseth the Authours suf- ‘Centurieof ferance on Loue: the latter his long farewell to Loue Loue,’ 1382. and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson, and pub-

¹ See p. 154. supra. A fuller account of the Elizabethan sonnet and its indebtedness to foreign masters is to be found in my preface to the two volumes of Elizabethan Sonnets (1904), in Messrs. Constable's revised edition of Arher’s English Garner. The Elizabethan sonnetteers' indebtedness to the French sonnetteers pf the second half of the sixteenth century is treated in detail in my French Renaissance in England, Oxford, 1910.

* The word ‘sonnet’ was often irregularly used for ‘song’ or ‘poem.’ Neither Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George^ Turhervile’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word *quatorzain’ was the term almost as frequently applied as ‘sonnet’ to the fourteen- line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone_falls within my survey; cf. crazed quator- zains’ in Thomas Nashe’s preface to his edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, I59¹* and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton s Sonnets, 1594699

lished at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.’ Watson’s work, which he called ‘a toy,’ is a curious literary mosaic. He supplied to each poem a prose commentary, in which he not only admitted that every conceit was borrowed, but quoted chapter and verse for its origin from classical literature or from the work of French or Italian sonnetteers.¹ Two regular quatorzains are prefixed, but to each of the ‘passions’ there is appended a four-line stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular fourteen lines. Watson’s efforts were so well received, however, that he applied himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets in strict metre. This collection, entitled ‘The Tears of Fancie,’ only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime.²

Meanwhile a greater poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious Sidne’s collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of ‘Astrophei Sidney’s sonnets were addressed by him under the i59i^Stella’' name of Astrophei to a' beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney’s efforts, and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. Sidney’s sonnets were first published surreptitiously, under the title of ‘Astrophei and Stella,’ hy a publishing adventurer named Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appendix of ‘sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen.’ Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the appendix anonymously and without the author’s knowledge. Two other editions of Sidney’s ‘Astrophei and Stella’ without the appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney’s sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed anonymously in 1594, with the sonnets of Henry Constahle, and these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition of Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and other works that appeared in 1598. Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous sonnets in 1591 spurred nearly every living poet in England to emulate his achievement.³

¹ See pp. 170-r supra.

^! All Watson’s sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson’s Poems, 1805: ‘The

lears of Fancie are in ’Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, i. 137-164.

³ In a preface to Newman’s first edition of Astrophei and 'Stella the editor Thomas JNashe, m a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney’s sonnets, exclaimed: ‘Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers 1 and bequeath ^Cr^^z. *⁽l^uat«^rza.^mSr^to-}^he
c,^handl?^rs’ ^for.^Io> ^here
he cometh that hath hroken your Jl Jr ^C1 ^oi
Sldn₊^ey V⁰? ^{JUst th}l °PP^{oslte t0} that which Nashe anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed hefore or since.

In order to facilitate a comparison of Shakespeare’s sonnets with those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney’s under the three headings of (1) sonnets of more or less feigned love, addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress; (2) sonnets of adulation, addressed to patrons; and (3) sonnets invoking metaphysical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or philosophy.¹

In February 1592 Samuel Daniel published a collection of fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to his patroness, Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, j _CoUecte(j As in many French volumes, the collection concluded sonnets of with an ‘ode.’² At every point Daniel betrayed his ^fels^nedlove, indebtedness to French* sonnetteers, even when apologising for his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.). His title he borrowed from the collection of Maurice Seve, whose assemblage of dixains called ‘Delie, objet de plus haute vertu’ (Lyon, _Dan;_c],_s 1544), was the pattern of many later sonnet sequences ‘Delia,’ on love. Many of Daniel’s sonnets are adaptations ^IS92- or translations from the Italian. But he owes much to the French sonnetteers Du Bellay and Desportes. His methods of handling his material may be judged by a comparison of his Sonnet xxvi. with Sonnet lxii. in Desportes’ collection, ‘Cleonice: Demieres Amours,’ which was issued at Paris in 1575.

Desportes’ sonnet runs:

Je verray par les ans vengeurs de mon njartyre Que l’or de vos cheveux argente deviendra,

Que de vos deux soleils la splendeur s’esteindra,

Et qu’il faudra qu’Amour tout confus s’en retire.

La beaut6 qui si douce 4 present vous inspire,

Cedant aux lois du Temps ses faveurs reprendra,

L’hiver de vostre teint les fleurettes perdra,

Et ne laissera rien des thresors que i’admire.

Gest orgueil desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m’aimer,

En regret et chagrin se verra transformer,

Avec le changement d’une image si belle:

Et peut estre qu’alors vous n'aurez desplaisir De revivre en mes vers chauds d’amoureux desir,

Ainsi que le Phenix au feu se renouvelle.

This is Daniel’s version, which he sent forth as an original production :

¹ With collections of sonnets of the first kmd are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, hut I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic. ... , . , , ,

* Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney’s Aslrophel. These nine he permanently dropped.

I once may see, when years may wreck my wrong,

And golden hairs may change to silver wire;

And those hright rays (that kindle all this fire)

Shall fail in force, their power not so strong,

Her beauty, now the burden of my song,

Whose glorious hlaze the world’s eye doth admire,

Must yield her praise to tyrant Time’s desire;

Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long,

When if she grieve to gaze her in her glass,

Which then presents her winter-withered hue:

Go you my verse ! go tell her what she was !

For what she was, she hest may find in you.

Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass,

But Phoenix-like to make her live anew.

In Daniel’s beautiful sonnet (xlix.) beginning

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sahle Night,

Brother to Death, in silent darkness horn,

he echoes De Baif and Pierre de Brach’s invocations of ‘O Sommeil chasse-soin.’ But again be chiefly relies on Desportes, whose words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet lxxv. of Desportes’ ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’ opens thus:

Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire . . .

O frSre de la Mort, que tu m’es ennemi!

Daniel’s sonnets were enthusiastically received. With some additions they were republished in 1594 with his narrative poem Fame of ‘The Complaint of Rosamund.’ The volume was Daniel’s called ‘Delia and Rosamund Augmented.’ Spenser, sonnets. jxi his ‘Colin Clouts come home againe,’ lauded the ‘well-tuned song’ of Daniel’s sonnets, and Shakespeare has some claim to be classed among Daniel’s many sonnetteering disciples. The anonymous author of ‘Zepheria’ (1594) declared that the ‘sweet tuned accents’ of ‘Delian sonnetry’ rang throughout England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his ‘Fidessa’ (1596) _Lopenly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet xv. ‘Care- charmer Sleep, . . . brother of quiet Death.’

In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete version of Daniel’s ‘Delia,’ Henry Constable published ‘Diana: Constable’s the Praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.’ •Diana,’ Like the title, the general tone and many complete ^IS92, poems were drawn from Desportes’ ‘Amours de

Diane.’ Twenty-one poems were included, all in the French vein. The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 under the title ‘Diana; or, The excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages.’ This volume is a typical venture of the book

sellers.¹ The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their customers with a disordered miscellany of what they called ‘orphan poems.’ Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were claimed for Sir Philip Sidney, and the remaining forty-seven are by various hands which have not as yet been identified.

In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notablfe reinforcements. In May came out Barnabe Barnes’s interesting volume, ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, _Barnes>s Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous sonnets, gentleman,M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.’^{2 IS93}'

The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble the sonnet-collections of Petrarch or the ‘Amours’ of Ronsard. There are a hundred and five sonnets altogether, interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three ‘canzons,’ and twenty ‘odes,’ one in sonnet form. There is, moreover, included what purports to be a translation of ‘Moschus’ first eidillion describing love,’ but is clearly a rendering of a French poem by Amadis Jamyn, entitled ‘Amour Fuitif, du grec de Moschus,’ in his ‘CEuvres Po6tiques,’ Paris, 1579.³ At the end of Barnes’s volume there, also figure six dedicatory sonnets. In Sonnet xcv. Barnes pays a compliment to Sir Philip Sidney, ‘the Arcadian shepherd, Astrophel,’ but he did not draw so largely on Sidney’s work as on that of Ronsard, Desportes, De Baif, and Du Bellay. Legal metaphors abound in Barnes’s poems, but amid many crudities he reaches a high level of beauty in Sonnet lxvi., which runs:

Ah, sweet Content! where is thy mild ahode?

Is it with shepherds, and light-hearted swains,

Which sing upon the downs, and pipe ahroad,

Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains?

Ah, sweet Content! where dost thou safely rest?

In Heaven, with Angels? which the praises sing Of Him that made, and rules at His hehest,

The minds and hearts of every living thing.

Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harhour hold?

Is it in churches, with religious men,

Which please the gods with prayers manifold;

And in their studies meditate it then?

Whether thou dost in Heaven, or earth appear;

Be where thou wilt! Thou wilt not harbour here! *

■ Elizabethan Sanntts, ed. Lee, ii. 75-114. ^ ¹ Ibid.,i. 165-316.

* Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1608.

[ ⁴ Dekker’s well-known song, ‘Oh, sweet content,’ in his play of ‘Patient Grisselde’ (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes.

In August 1593 there appeared a posthumous collection of , sixty-one sonnets by Thomas Watson, entitled ‘The ‘TearTof Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained.’' They are through- Fande, out of the imitative type of his previously published /' ^I593' ‘Centurie of Love.’ Many of them sound the same

note as Shakespeare’s sonnets to the ‘dark lady.’

In September 1593 followed Giles Fletcher’s ‘Licia, or Poems of Love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his Fletcher’s Lady.’ This collection of fifty-three sonnets is dedi- ' Licia,’ cated to the wife of Sir Richard Mollineux. Fletcher ^I593- makes no concealment that his sonnets are literary exercises. ‘For this kind of poetry,’ he tells the reader, ‘I did it to try my humour’; and on the title-page he notes that the work was written ‘to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’¹

The most notable contribution to the sonnet-literature of 1593 was Thomas Lodge’s ‘Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Lodge’s Elegies, and Amorous Delights.’² Besides forty son- ‘ Phillis,’ nets, some of which exceed fourteen lines in length and ^I59J- others are shorter, there are included three elegies and an ode. A large number of Lodge’s sonnets are literally translated from Ronsard and Desportes, but Lodge also made free with the works of the Italian sonnetteers Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, Bembo and Lodovico Paschale. How servile Lodge could be may be learnt from a comparison of his Sonnet xxxvi. with Desportes’ sonnet from ‘Les Amours de Diane,’ livre n. sonnet iii.

Thomas Lodge’s Sonnet xxxvi. runs thus:

If so I seek the shades, I presently do see The god of love forsake his bow and sit me by;

If that I think to write, his Muses pliant be;

If so I plain my grief, the wanton boy will cry.

If I lament his pride, he doth increase my pain;

If tears my cheeks attaint, his cheeks are moist with moan;

If I disclose the wounds the which my heart hath slain,

He takes his fascia off, and wipes them dry anon.

If so I walk the woods, the woods are his delight;

If I myself torment, he bathes him in my blood;

He will my soldier be if once I wend to fight,

If seas delight, he steers my bark amidst the flood.

In brief, the cruel god doth never from me go,

But makes my lasting love eternal with my woe.

Desportes wrote in ‘Les Amours de Diane,’ book ir. sonnet iii.:

Si ie me si6s it l’ombre, aussi soudainement Amour, laissant son arc, s’assiet et se repose :

¹ Elizabethan Sonnets, ii. 23-74.

² There is a convenient reprint of Lodge’s Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by Martha Foote Crow, 1896; see also Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 1-22. •

Si ie pense a des vers, ie le voy qu’il compose:

Si ie plains mes douleurs, il se plaint hautement.

Si ie me plains du mal, il accroist mon tourment:

Si ie respan des pleurs, son visage il arrose:

Si ie monstre la playe en ma poitrine enclose,

_ II dfefait son bandeau l’essuyant doucement.

Si ie vay par les bois, aux bois il m’accompagne:

Si ie me suis cruel, dans mon sang il se bagne:

Si ie vais a la guerre, il deuient mon soldart:

Si ie passe la mer, il conduit ma nacelle:

Bref, iamais l’inhumain de moy ne se depart,

Pour rendre mon amour et ma peine eternelle.

Three new volumes in 1594, together with the reissue of Daniel’s ‘Delia’ and of Constable’s ‘Diana’ (in a piratical miscellany of sonnets from many pens), prove the steady growth of _Dlayton>_s the sonnetteering vogue. Michael Drayton in June ‘idea,’ produced his ‘Ideas Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains,’ ^IS94' containing fifty-one ‘Amours’ and a sonnet addressed to ‘his ever kind Mecasnas, Anthony Cooke.’ Drayton acknowledged his devotion to ‘divine Sir Philip,’ hut by his choice of title, style, and phraseology, the English sonnetteer once more betrayed his indebtedness to French compeers. ‘L’ldee’ was the name of a collection of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux in 1579. Many additions were made by Drayton to the sonnets that he published in 1594, and many were subtracted before 1619, when there appeared the last edition that was prepared in Drayton’s lifetime. A comparison of the various editions (1594, 1599, 1605, and 1619) shows that Drayton published a hundred sonnets, but the majority were apparently circulated by him in early life.

William Percy, the ‘dearest friend’ of Barnabe Barnes, published in 1594, in emulation of Barnes, a collection of twenty ‘Sonnets to the fairest Coelia.’¹ He explains, in an address _Percy»_s to the reader, that out of courtesy he had lent the ‘Coelia,’ sonnets to friends, who had secretly committed them ^IS94- to the press. Making a virtue of necessity, he had accepted the situation, hut begged the reader to treat them as ‘ toys and amorous devices.’

A collection of forty sonnets or ‘canzons,’ as the anonymous author calls them, also appeared in 1594 with the title ‘Zepheria.’² In some prefatory verses addressed ‘Alii veri figlioli ‘Zepheria,’ delle Muse’ laudatory reference was made to the son- ^I594- nets of Petrarch, Daniel, and Sidney. Several of the sonnets .labour at conceits drawn from the technicalities of the law, and Sir John Davies parodied these efforts in the eighth of his ‘gulling sonnets’ beginning ‘My case is this. I love Zepheria hright.’

¹ Elizabethan Sonnets, ii. 137-151. ² Jb. ii. 153-178.

Four interesting ventures belong to 1595. In January, appended to Richard Bamfield’s poem of ‘Cynthia,’ a panegyric on Queen Elizabeth, was a series of twenty sonnets extolling the fornets to ' personal charms of a young man in emulation of Virgil’s Ganymede, Eclogue ii., in which the shepherd Corydon addressed ^IS9S' the shepherd-boy Alexis.¹ In Sonnet xx. the author

expressed regret that the task of celebrating his young friend’s praises had not fallen to the more capable hand of Spenser (‘great Colin, chief of shepherds all’) or Drayton (‘gentle Rowland, my professed friend’). Barnfield at times imitated Shakespeare.

Almost at the same date as Bamfield’s ‘Cynthia’ made-its appearance there was published the more notable collection by s enser’s Edmund Spenser of eighty-eight sonnets, which, in ‘Amoretti,’ reference to their Italian origin, he entitled ¹ Amoretti.’² ¹⁵⁹⁵• Spenser had already translated many sonnets on phil

osophic topics of Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay. Some of the ‘Amoretti’ were doubtless addressed by Spenser in 1593 to the lady who became his wife a year later. But the sentiment was largely ideal, and, as he says in Sonnet lxxxvii., he wrote, like Drayton, with his eyes fixed on ‘Idsea.’ Several of Spenser’s sonnets are unacknowledged adaptations of Tasso or Desportes.

An unidentified ‘E. C., Esq.,’ produced also in 1595, under the title of ‘Emaricdulfe,’³ a collection of forty sonnets, echoing ‘Emaric- English, and French models. In the dedication to his duife,’ ‘two very good friends, John Zouch and Edward IS95- Fitton Esquiers,’ the author tells them that an ague confined him to his chamber, ‘ and to abandon idleness he completed an idle work that he had already begun at the command and service of a fair dame.’

To 1595 may best be referred the series of nine ‘ Gullinge sonnets’ or parodies, which Sir John Davies wrote and circulated in manu- Sirjohn script, in order to put to shame what he regarded as ^Gum^e ‘the bastard sonnets’ in vogue. He addressed his Sonnetf,’ collection to Sir Anthony Cooke, whom Drayton had IS9S- already celebrated as the ‘ Mecasnas ’ of his sonnetteer- ing efforts.⁴ Davies seems to have aimed at Shakespeare as-well as at insignificant rhymers like the author of ‘Zepheria.’⁵ No. viii. of Davies’s ‘gullinge sonnets,’ which ridicules the legal metaphors of the sonnetteers, may be easily matched in the collections of Barnabe Barnes or of the author of ‘Zepheria,’ but Davies’s

¹ Reprinted in Arbei’s English Scholars* Library, 1882.

² It was licensed for tbe press on November 19, 1594.

⁸ Reprinted for tbe Roxburgbe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr, Cbarles Edmonds. ‘Emaricdulfe' is an anagram of a lady’s name, Marie Cufeld, alias Cufaud, alias Cowfold, of Cufaud Manor near Basingstoke.’ Her mother, a daughter of Sir Geoffrey Pole, was maid of honour to Queen Mary (cf. Monthly Packet, 1884-5). Sbe seems to have married one William Ward. '

¹ Davies’s Poems, ed. Grosart, i. sr-62. ⁵ See p. 175, note.

' phraseology suggests that he also was glancing at Shakespeare’s legal sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxxiv. Davies’s sonnet runs:

My casp is this. I love Zepheria bright,

Of her I hold my heart by fealty:

Which I discharge to her perpetually,

Yet she thereof will never me acquit[e].

For, now supposing I withhold her right,

She hath distrained my heart to satisfy The duty which I never did deny,

And far away impounds it with despite. -

I labour therefore justly to repleave [i.e. recover]

My heart which she unjustly doth impound.

But quick conceit which now is Love’s high shreive Returns it as esloyned [i.e. absconded], not to be found.

Then what the law affords — I only crave Her heart, for mine inwit her name to have.

‘R. L., gentleman,’ probably Richard Linche, published in 1596 thirty-nine sonnets under the title ‘Diella.’¹ The effort is thoroughly conventional. In an obsequious address by the _Linche»_s publisher, Henry Olney, to Anne, wife of Sir Henry ‘Diella,’ Glenham, Linche’s sonnets are described as ‘pas- ¹⁵⁹⁶¹ sionate’ and as ‘conceived in the brain of a gallant gentleman.’

To the same year belongs Bartholomew Griffin’s ‘Fidessa,’ sixty-two sonnets inscribed to ‘William Essex, Esq.’ Griffin ^! designates his sonnets as ‘ the first fruits of a young _Griffin._s beginner.’ He is a shameless plagiarist. Daniel is ‘Fidessa,’ his chief model, but he also imitated Sidney, Watson, ^I596, Constable, and Drayton. Sonnet iii., beginning ‘Venus and young Adonis sitting by her,’ is almost identical with the fourth poem — a sonnet beginning ‘Sweet Cytherasa, sitting by a brook’

— in Jaggard’s piratical miscellany, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim,’ which bore Shakespeare’s name on the title-page.² _Thomas Jaggard doubtless borrowed the poem from Griffin. Campion, _ Three beautiful love-sonnets by Thomas Campion, ^IS96‘ which are found in the Harleian MS. 6910, are there dated 1596.® William Smith was the author of ‘Chloris,’ a third collection of sonnets appearing in 1596.⁴ The volume contains forty-eight [ sonnets of love of the ordinary type, with three adulat- _william I" ing Spenser; of these, two open the volume and one Smith’s _; concludes it. Smith says that his sonnets were ‘the '™^oris’’ budding springs of his study.’ In 1600 a license was issued by the Stationers’ Company for the issue of ‘Amours’

I,.-.' ¹ Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 297-320. ² Ib. ii. 261-206.

K * Cf. Brydges’s Excerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 35^-7* . On^e t *7T ^som? f

jV fiions in Rosseter’s Book of Ayres (1610}, ana another in the Thtrd Book of Ayres (1017*);

■See Campion’s Works, ed. A. H. BuUen, pp. iS^-*6, 102.

⁴ Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 321-349.

by W. S. This no doubt refers to a second collection of sonnets by William Smith. The projected volume is not extant.¹

In 1597 there came out a similar volume by Robert Tofte, entitled ‘Laura, the Joys of a Traveller, or the Feast of Fancy.’ The book is divided into three parts, each consisting TofS of forty ‘sonnets’ in irregular metres. There is a ■Laura,’ prose dedication to Lucy, sister of Henry, ninth Earl ^IS97' of Northumberland. Tofte tells his patroness that most of his ‘toys’ ‘were conceived in Italy.’ As its name implies, his work is a pale reflection of Petrarch. A postscript by a friend

— ‘R. B.’ — complains that a publisher had intermingled with Tofte’s genuine efforts ‘more than thirty sonnets not his.’ But the style is throughout so uniformly tame that it is not possible to distinguish the work of a second hand.²

To the same era belongs Sir William Alexander’s ‘Aurora,’ a collection of a hundred and six sonnets, with a few songs and Sit William elegies interspersed on French patterns. Sir William Alexander’s describes the work as ‘the first fancies of his youth,’ ‘Aurora.’ _and formally inscribes it to Agnes, Countess of Argyle. It was not published till 1604.³

Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the intimate friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and Recorder of Stratford-on-Avon from Sir Fulke ^ his death, was author of a like collection of

Greviiie’s sonnets called ‘ Cselica.’ The poems number a hundred ■ Caehca ’ _ancj nine, but few are in strict sonnet metre. Only a small proportion profess to be addressed to the poet’s fictitious mistress, Cselica. Many celebrate the charms of another beauty named Myra, and others invoke Queen Elizabeth under her poetic name of Cynthia (cf. Sonnet xvii). There are also many addresses to Cupid and meditations on more or less metaphysical themes, but the tone is never very serious. Greville doubtless wrote the majority of his ‘ Sonnets’ during the period under survey, though they were not published until their author’s works appeared in folio for the first time in 1633, five years after his death.

¹ See p. 669 and note. _t *

² Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 351-424.

⁸ Practically tD the same category as these collections of sonnets belong the voluminous laments of lovers, in.six, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are Wiiiobie his Avisa, 1594; Alcilia: Philoparthen's Loving Folly, by J. C,, 1595; Arbor of Amorous Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton; Alba, the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598; Daiphantus, or the Passions of Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton’s The Passionate Shepheard, or The Shep- hcardes Loue: set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia: with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres, 1604 (none of the ‘sonets’ are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds’s Dolarnys Primerose . . . wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue, 1606. Though George Witbers’s similar productions — his exquisitely fanciful Fidelia (1617) and his Fair e-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil’ Arete (1622) •—were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century.

With Tofte’s volume in 1597 the publication of collections of love-sonnets practically ceased. Only two collections on a voluminous scale seem to have been written in the early _Est;_mate
o£ years of the seventeenth century. About 1607 William number of Drummond of Hawthomden penned a series of sixty- |°_s^v_u^e_ej™^ets eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, tween 1591 nearly all of which were translated or adapted from ^{and IS9?}- modern Italian sonnetteers.¹ About 1610 John Davies of Hereford puhlished his ‘ Wittes Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous Sonnets.’ Of more than two hundred separate poems in this volume, only the hundred and four sonnets in the opening section make any claim to answer the description on the title-page, and the majority of those are metaphysical meditations on love which are hot addressed to any definite person. Some years later William Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sonnets entitled ‘ Caelia’ and a few detached sonnets of the same type.¹ The dates of production of Drummond’s, Davies’s, and Browne’s sonnets exclude them from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that between i<oi and 1SQ7 there had been printetLnearlY-twelve hundred sonnets of the amorous Hnd. If to these we add "Shakespeare's poems, ari3~make allowance for others which, only circulating in manuscript, have not reached us, it is seen that more than two hundred love-sonnets were produced in each of the six years under survey. The literary energies of France and Italy pursued a like direction during nearly the whole of the century, but at no other period and in no other -country did the love-sonnet dominate literature to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 1597.

Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached specimens may be found in nearly every published book of the period, the chief collections were:

A long series of sonnets prefixed to ‘Poetical Exercises of a Vacant Hour’ by King James VI of Scotland, 1591; twenty- three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Four Letters and _n
Sonnets certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene’ (1592), to patrons, including Edmund Spenser’s fine sonnet of compli- ^{1591 7}' ment addressed to Harvey; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed in ‘Harleian Miscellany,’ 1813, ix. 491); six adulatory sonnets appended byBamabe Barnes to his ‘ Parthenophil ’ in May 1593; four sonnets to ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s soul,’ prefixed to the first edition of Sidney’s ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595); seventeen son

¹They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author’s death, in Poems by that famous wit. William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nepbew. The best modern edition is that of Prof. L. E. Kastner m 1913 A useful edition by Mr. W. C. Ward appeared in the ‘Muses’ Library (1894)-

» Cf. William Browne’s Poems in ‘Muses’ Library’ (1894), ii. 2r7 et seq.

nets which were originally prefixed to the first edition of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ bk. i.—iii., in 1590, and were reprinted in the edition of 1596;¹ sixty sonnets to peers, peeresses, and officers of state, appended to Henry Locke’s (or Lok’s) ‘Ecclesiasticus’ (1597); forty sonnets by Joshua Sylvester addressed to Henry IV of France ‘upon the late miraculous peace in Fraunce’ (1599); Sir John Davies’s series of twenty-six octosyllabic sonnets, which he entitled ‘Hymnes of Astrsea,’ all extravagantly eulogising Queen Elizabeth (1599).

The collected sonnets on religion and philosophy that appeared in the period 1591-7 include sixteen ‘Spiritual! Sonnettes to the _ honour of God and Hys Saynts,’ written by Constable on philosi>^tS about 1593, and circulated only in manuscript; these phy and _were fi_rst printed from a manuscript in the Harleian reigion. collection (5993) by Thomas Park in ‘Heliconia,’ 1815, vol. II. In 1595 Bamabe Barnes published a ‘Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets,’ and, in dedicating the collection to Toby' Matthew, bishop of Durham, mentions that they were written a. year before, while travelling in France. They are closely modelled on the two series of ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ which the Abbe Jacques de Billy published in Paris in 1573 and 1578 respectively. A long series of ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ written by Anne de Marquets, a sister of the Dominican Order, who died at Poissy in 1598, was first published in Paris in 1605. In 1594 George Chapman published ten sonnets in praise of philosophy, which he entitled ‘A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy.’ In the opening poem he states that his aim was to dissuade poets from singing in sonnets ‘Love’s Sensual Empery.’ In 1597 Henry Locke (or Lok) appended to his verse- rendering of Ecclesiastes ² a collection of ‘ Sundrie Sonets of Christian Passions, with other Affectionate Sonets of a Feeling Conscience.’ Lok had in 1593 obtained a license to publish ‘a hundred Sonnets on Meditation, Humiliation, and Prayer,’ but that work is not extant. In the volume of 1597 his sonnets on religious or philosophical themes number no fewer than three hundred and twenty-eight.³

Thus in the total of sonnets published between 1591 and 1597 must be included at least five hundred sonnets addressed to patrons, and as many on philosophy and religion. The aggregate far exceeds two thousand.

¹ Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to bis translation of Homer in 1610; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his Microcosmos (1603) and to his Scourge of Folly (1611). Divers sonnets, epistles, &c. addressed to patrons hy Joshua Sylvester between 1S90 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 164* edition of his Du Bartas his divine weekcs and workes.

² Remy Eelleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Ecclesiastes entitled Vanitt.

* There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies's Wittes Pilgrimage (1610?).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE,

1550-1600

In the earlier years of the sixteenth century Melin de Saint-Gelais (1487-1558) and Clement Marot (1496-1544) made a few scattered efforts at sonnetteering in France; and Maurice Seve _Ronsard laid down the lines of all sonnet-sequences on themes of (152^-1585) love in his dixains entitled ‘Delie’ (1544). But it was Ronsard (1524-1585), in the second half of the century, ' who first gave the sonnet a pronounced vogue in France. The sonnet was handled with the utmost assiduity not only by Ronsard, hut by the literary comrades whom he gathered round him, and on whom he bestowed the title of ‘La Pleiade.’ The leading aim that united Ronsard and his friends was the reformation of the French language and literature on classical models. But they assimilated and naturalised in France not only much that was admirable in Latin and Greek poetry,¹ but all that was best in the recent Italian literature.'² Although they were learned poets, Ronsard and the majority of his associates had a natural lyric vein, which gave their poetry the charms of freshness and

¹ Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet like Anacreon appear in Anacrion et les Poimes anacriontiques, Texle grec avec les Traductions et Imitations des PoUes du XVIe siicle, par A. Delhoulle (Havre, 1891). A translation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve’s essay, ‘Anacreon au XVI* si&cle/ in his Tableau de la PoSsie francaise au XVIe siicle (1893), pp. 432-47. In the same connection Antkologie ou Recueil des plus beaux Epigrammes Grecs, . . . mis en vers franqois sur la version Latine, par Pierre Tamisier (Lyon, 1589, new edit. r6o7), is of interest. _€ . ,

^a Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France m the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell’ Aquila (14661500), Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547). Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino ^492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma_ (d. 1585)* Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (Jl. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi’s Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 1770-1782; Dr. Garnett’s History of Italian Literature, 1897; Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, edit. 15898, vols. iv. and vi.; and Francesco Flamini, II Cinquecento, Milan, n.d.). The present writer's preface to Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), and the notes to^ Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love, published in 1582 (see p. 171 note), to Davison s^ Poetical Rhapsody (ed. Mr. A. H. Bullen, r89i), and to Poems of Drummond of Eawtkornden (ed. W. C. Ward, 1894, and L. E. Kastner, i9r3), give many illustrations of English sonnetteers indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century.

spontaneity. The true members of ‘La Pleiade,’ according to Ronsard’s own statement, were, besides himself, Joachim du Bellay (1524-1560); Estienne Jodelle (1532-1573); Remy Belleau (1528-1577); Jean Dinemandy, usually known as Daurat or Dorat (1508-1588), Ronsard’s classical teacher in early life; Jean-Antoine de Bai'f (1532-1589); and Pontus de Thyard (1521-1605). Others of Ronsard’s literary allies are often loosely reckoned among the ‘Pleiade.’ These writers include Jean de la Peruse (1529-1554). Olivier de Magny (1530-1559), Amadis Jamyn (1538?-!585), Jean Passerat (1534-1602), Philippe Desportes (1546-1606), Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), Scevole de Sainte-Marthe (1536-1623), and Jean Bertaut (1552-1611). These subordinate members of the Desportes ¹ Pleiade ’ were no less devoted to sonnetteering than (1546-1606). the original members. Of those in this second rank, Desportes was most popular in France as well as in England. Although many of Desportes’s sonnets are graceful in thought and melodious in rhythm, most of them abound in overstrained conceits. Not only was Desportes a more slavish imitator of Petrarch than the members of the ‘Pleiade,’ but he encouraged numerous disciples to practise ‘Petrarchism,’ as the imitation of Petrarch was called, beyond healthful limits. Under the influence of Desportes the French sonnet became, during the latest years of the sixteenth century, little more than an empty and fantastic echo of the Italian.

The following statistics will enable the reader to realise how closely the sonnetteering movement in France adumbrated that . in England. The collective edition in 1584 of the works

collections °f Ronsard, the master of the ‘Pleiade,’ contains more of French than nine hundred separate sonnets arranged under such published titles as ‘Amours de Cassandre,’ ‘Amours de Marie,’ between ‘Amours pour Astree,’ ‘Amours pour Helene ’; besides 158°^and ‘Amours Divers’ and ‘Sonnets Divers,’ complimentary addresses to friends and patrons. Du Bellay’s ‘ Olive,’ a collection of love-sonnets, first published in 1549, reached a total of a hundred and fifteen. ‘Les Regrets,’ Du Bellay’s sonnets on general topics, some of which Edmund Spenser first translated into English, numbered in the edition of 1565 a hundred and eighty-three. Pontus de Thyard produced between 1549 and 1555 three series of his ‘Erreurs Amourenses,’ sonnets addressed to Pasithee. De Baif published two long series of sonnets, entitled respectively ‘Les Amours de Meline’ (1552) and ‘Les Amours de Francine’ (1555). Amadis Jamyn was responsible for ‘Les Amours d’Oriane,’ ‘Les Amours de Calliree,’ and ‘Les Amours d’Artemis’ (1575). Desportes’ ‘Premieres CEuvres’ (1575), a very popular book in England, included more than three hundred sonnets — a hundred and fifty being addressed to Diane, eighty-

six to Hippolyte, and ninety-one to Cleonice. Belleau brought out a volume of ‘Amours’ in 1576. .

Among other collections of sonnets published by less known writers of the period, and arranged here according to date of first publication, were those of Guillaume des Autels,

‘Amoureux Repos’ (1553); Olivier de Magny, ^Mj.^nor_t. ‘Amours, Soupirs,’ &c. (1553, 1559); Louise Labe, SK ‘(Euvres’ (1555); Jacques Tahureau, ‘Odes, Sonnets,’ ^s°^ , &c. (i554, 1574); Claude de Billet, ‘Amalthee,’ a between hundred and twenty-eight love sonnets (1561); Vau- ^|53 arua quelin de la Fresnaye, ‘Foresteries’ (1555 et annis ¹ °^S' seq.); Jacques Grevin, ‘Olympe’ (1561); Nicolas Ellain, ‘Sonnets’ (1561); Scevole de Sainte-Marthe, ‘(Euvres Franchises’ (1569, 1579); Etienne de la Boetie, ‘(Euvres’ (1572), and twenty- nine sonnets published with Montaigne’s ‘Essais’ (1580); Jean et Jacques de la Taille, ‘(Euvres’ (1573); Jacques de Billy, ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ (first series 1573, second series 1578); Etienne Jodelle, ‘(Euvres Poetiques’ (1574); Claude de Pontoux, ‘Sonnets de l’ldee’ (1579); two hundred and eighty-eight regular sonnets with odes, chansons and other verse; Les Dames des Roches, ‘(Euvres’ (1579, 1584); Pierre de Brach, ‘Amours d’Aymee’ (circa 1580); Gilles Durant, ‘Poesies’ — sonnets to Charlotte and Camille (1587, 1594); Jean Passerat, ‘Vers . . . d’Amours’ (1597); and Anne de Marquets, who died in 1588, ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ (1605).¹

¹ There are modem reprints of most of these books, but not of all. The writings of the seven original members of ‘La Pleiade’ are reprinted in La PUiade Francaise, edited by Marty-Laveaux, r6 vols., 1866-93. Ronsard’s Amours, bk. i. ed. Vaganay (1910) has an admirable apparatus criticus. The reprint of Ronsard’s works, edited by Prosper Blancbemain, in La BiUiotheque Elz&virienne, 8 vols. 1867, is useful. _ The works of Remy Belleau are issued in the same series. Maurice Sfeve’s Delie was reissued at Lyons in 1862. Pierre* de Brach’s poems were carefully edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris (2 vols., Paris, 1862). A complete edition of Desportes’s works, edited by Alfred Michiels, appeared in 1863. Prosper Blanchemain edited a reissue of tbe works of Louise Lab6 m r87S. The works of Jean de la Taille, of Amadis Jarayn, and of Guillaume des Autels are reprinted in Trlsor des Vieux Poites Franqais (1877 et annis seq.). See Sainte-Beuve’s Tableau Eistorique et Critique de la Po&sie Franqaise du XVIe SUcle (Paris, 1893); Henry Francis Cary's Early French Poets (London, 1846); Becq de Fouquteres’ (Euvres ckoisies des PoStes Franqais du XVle SUcle contemporains avec Ronsard (1880), and the same editor’s selections from De Baif, Du Bellay, and Ronsard; Darmesteter et Hatzfeld’s Le Seizietne Siicle en France — Tableau de la LitUrature et de la Langue (6th edit., 1897); Petit de Julleville’s Historie de la Langue et de la Literature Franqaise (1897, iii. 136-260), and the present writer’s French Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1910), bk. iv.