ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

Give me thy hand: now God's curse on me light,
If I forsake not grief in grief's despite.
Much, make a cry, and yeomen stand ye round:
I charge ye, never more let woeful sound
Be heard among ye; but whatever fall,

Laugh grief to scorn, and so make sorrow small. *
Marian, thou seest, though courtly pleasures want,
Yet country sport in Sherwood is not scant.
For the soul-ravishing delicious sound
Of instrumental music, we have found
The winged quiristers, with divers notes,
Sent from their quaint recording pretty throats,
On every branch that compasseth our bower,
Without command contenting us each hour.
For arras hangings, and rich tapestry,
We have sweet nature's best embroidery.

For thy steel glass, wherein thou wont'st to look,
Thy crystal eyes gaze on the crystal brook.
At court, a flower or two did deck thy head,
Now, with whole garlands it is circled;
For what in wealth we want, we have in flowers,
And what we lose in halls, we find in bowers.

*

Chettle was engaged in no less than thirty-eight plays between the years 1597 and 1603, four of which have been printed. Mr Collier thinks he had written for the stage before 1592, when he published Greene's posthumous work, 'A Groat's Worth of Wit.' Among his plays, the names of which have descended to us, is one on the subject of Cardinal Wolsey, which probably was the original of Shakspeare's Henry VIII. The best drama of this prolific author which we now possess, is a comedy called Patient Grissell, taken from Boccaccio. The humble charms of the heroine are thus finely described :

See where my Grissell and her father is,
Methinks her beauty, shining through those weeds,
Seems like a bright star in the sullen night.
How lovely poverty dwells on her back!
Did but the proud world note her as I do,
She would cast off rich robes, forswear rich state,
To clothe her in such poor habiliments.

The names of Haughton, Antony Brewer, Porter, Smith, Hathaway (probably some relation of Shakspeare's wife), Wilson, &c., also occur as dramatic writers. From the diary of Henslowe, it appears that, between 1591 and 1597, upwards of a hundred different plays were performed by four of the ten or eleven theatrical companies which then existed. Henslowe was originally a pawnbroker, who advanced money and dresses to the players, and he ultimately possessed a large share of the wardrobe and properties of the playhouses with which he was | concerned. The name of Shakspeare does not once occur in his diary.

Several good dramas of this golden age have descended to us, the authors of which are unknown. A few of these possess merit enough to have been considered first sketches of Shakspeare, but this opinion has been gradually abandoned by all but one or two German critics. Most of them have been published in Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays. The best are, the Merry Devil of Edmonton,' the London Prodigal,' the Yorkshire Tragedy,' 'Lord Cromwell,' the Birth of Merlin,' the Collier of Croydon,' Mucedorus,' Locrine,' Arden of Feversham,' the 'Misfortunes of Arthur,' 'Edward III.,' &c. The most correct and regular of these anonymous dramas is 'Arden of Feversham,' a domestic tragedy, founded on a murder which took place in 1551. Alice, the wife of Arden, proves unfaithful, and joins with her paramour Mosbie, and some assassins, in murdering her husband. Tieck has translated this play into German, as a genuine production of Shakspeare, but

[ocr errors]

the style is different. In the earliest acknowledged works of the Warwickshire bard, there is a play of wit, and of what Hallam calls analogical imagery,' which is not seen in Arden of Feversham,' though it exhibits a strong picture of the passions, and indicates freedom of versification and dramatic art. We subjoin one touching scene between Alice and her paramour-a scene of mutual recrimination, guilt, and tenderness :

[Scene from Arden of Feversham.]

ALICE ARDEN.-MOSBIE.

Mos. How now, Alice? What! sad and passionate? Make me partaker of thy pensiveness;

Fire divided burns with lesser force.

Al. But I will dam that fire in my breast, Till by the force thereof my part consume. Ah, Mosbie !

Mos. Such deep pathaires, like to a cannon's burst,
Discharged against a ruinated wall,
Breaks my relenting heart in thousand pieces.
Ungentle Alice, thy sorrow is my sore;
Thou knowest it well, and 'tis thy policy
To forge distressful looks, to wound a breast
Where lies a heart which dies when thou art sad.
It is not love that loves to anger love.

Al. It is not love that loves to murder love.
Mos. How mean you that?

Al. Thou know'st how dearly Arden loved me.
Mos. And then-

Al. And then-conceal the rest, for 'tis too bad,
Lest that my words be carried to the wind,
And published in the world to both our shames.
I pray thee, Mosbie, let our spring-time wither;
Our harvest else will yield but loathsome weeds.
Forget, I pray thee, what has past betwixt us:
For now I blush and tremble at the thoughts.
Mos. What are you changed?

Al. Ay, to my former happy life again;
From title of an odious strumpet's name
To honest Arden's wife, not Arden's honest wife-

Ha, Mosbie ! 'tis thou hast rifled me of that,
Even in my forehead is thy name engraven,
And made me slanderous to all my kin.
A mean artificer, that low-born name!
I was bewitcht; woe-worth the hapless hour
And all the causes that enchanted me.

And if you stand so nicely at your fame,
Mos. Nay, if thou ban, let me breathe curses forth;
Let me repent the credit I have lost.
I have neglected matters of import,
That would have 'stated me above thy state;
For slow'd advantages, and spurned at time;
Ay, fortune's right hand Mosbie hath forsook,
To take a wanton giglot by the left.
I left the marriage of an honest maid,
Whose dowry would have weigh'd down all thy wealth;
Whose beauty and demeanour far exceeded thee.
This certain good I lost for changing bad,
And wrapt my credit in thy company.
I was bewitcht; that is no theme of thine;
And thou unhallow'd hast enchanted me.
But I will break thy spells and exorcisms,
And put another sight upon these eyes,
That showed my heart a raven for a dove.
Thou art not fair; I view'd thee not till now:
Thou art not kind; till now I knew thee not:
And now the rain hath beaten off thy gilt,
Thy worthless copper shows thee counterfeit.
It grieves me not to see how foul thou art,
But mads me that ever I thought thee fair.
Go, get thee gone, a copesmate for thy hinds;
I am too good to be thy favourite.

Al. Ay, now I see, and too soon find it true,

[graphic]

is a pleasant and poetical tradition, that he was born on the 23d of the month, the anniversary of St

Birthplace of Shakspeare.

George, the tutelar saint of England; but all we know with certainty is, that he was baptised on the 26th. His father, John Shakspeare, was a woolcomber or glover, who had elevated his social position by marriage with a rustic heiress, Mary Arden, possessed of an estate worth about £70 per annum of our present money. The poet's father rose to be high bailiff and chief alderman of Stratford; but in 1578, he is found mortgaging his wife's inheritance, and, from entries in the town-books, is supposed to have fallen into comparative poverty. William was the eldest of six surviving children, and after some education at the grammar-school, he is said to have been brought home to assist at his father's business. There is a blank in his history for some years; but doubtless he was engaged, whatever might be his circumstances or employment, in treasuring up materials for his future poetry. The study of man and of nature, facts in natural history, the country, the fields, and the woods, would be gleaned by familiar intercourse and observation among his fellow-townsmen, and in rambling over the beautiful valley of the Avon. It has been conjectured that he was some time in a lawyer's office, as his works abound in technical legal phrases and illustrations. This has always seemed to us highly probable. The London players were also then in the habit of visiting Stratford: Thomas Green, an actor, was a native of the town; and Burbage, the greatest performer of his day (the future Richard, Hamlet, and Othello), was originally from Warwickshire. Who can doubt, then, that the high bailiff's son, from the years of twelve to twenty, was a frequent and welcome visitant behind the scenes?-that he there imbibed the tastes and feelings which coloured all his future life-and that he there felt the first stirrings of his immortal dramatic genius? We are persuaded that he had begun to write long before he left Stratford, and had most probably sketched, if not completed, his Venus

and Adonis, and the Lucrece. The amount of his education at the grammar-school has been made a question of eager scrutiny and controversy. Ben Jonson says, he had 'little Latin, and less Greek.' This is not denying that he had some. Many Latinised idioms and expressions are to be found in his plays. The choice of two classical subjects for his early poetry, and the numerous felicitous allusions in his dramas to the mythology of the ancients, show that he was imbued with the spirit and taste of classical literature, and was a happy student, if not a critical scholar. His mind was too comprehensive to degenerate into pedantry; but when, at the age of four or five and twenty, he took the field of original dramatic composition, in company with the university-bred authors and wits of his times, he soon distanced them all, in correctness as well as facility, in the intellectual richness of his thoughts and diction, and in the wide range of his acquired knowledge. It may be safely assumed, therefore, that at Stratford he was a hard, though perhaps an irregular, student. The precocious maturity of Shakspeare's passions hurried him into a premature marriage. On the 28th of November 1582, he obtained a license at Worcester, legalising his union with Anne Hathaway, with once asking of the banns. Two of his neighbours became security in the sum of £40, that the poet would fulfil his matrimonial engagement, he being a minor, and unable, legally, to contract for himself. Anne Hathaway was seven years older than her husband. She was the daughter of a 'substantial yeoman' of the village of Shottery, about a mile from Stratford. The hurry and anxiety with respect to the marriage-license, is explained by the register of baptisms in the poet's native town; his daughter Susanna was christened on the 26th May 1583, six months after the marriage. In a year and a half, two other children, twins, were born to Shakspeare, who had no family afterwards. We may readily suppose that the small town of Stratford did not offer scope for the ambition of the poet, now arrived at early manhood, and feeling the ties of a husband and a father. He removed to London in 1586 or 1587. It has been said that his departure was hastened by the effects of a lampoon he had written on a neighbouring squire, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, in revenge for Sir Thomas prosecuting him for deer-stealing. The story is inconsistent in its details. Part of it must be untrue; it was never recorded against him in his lifetime; and the whole may have been built upon the opening scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor (not written till after Sir Thomas Lucy's death), in which there is some wanton wit on the armorial bearings of the Lucy family. The tale, however, is now associated so intimately with the name of Shakspeare, that, considering the obscurity which rests and probably will ever rest on his history, there seems little likelihood of its ever ceasing to have a place in the public mind.* Shakspeare soon rose to dis

[graphic]

* Mr Washington Irving, in his Sketch-Book,' thus adverts to Charlecote, and the deer-stealing affair :

'I had a desire to see the old family seat of the Lucys at Charlecote, and to ramble through the park where Shakspeare, in company with some of the roysters of Stratford, committed his youthful offence of deer-stealing. In this hair-brained exploit, we are told that he was taken prisoner, and carried to the keeper's lodge, where he remained all night in doleful captivity. When brought into the presence of Sir Thomas Lucy, his treatment must have been galling and humiliating; for it which was affixed to the park-gate at Charlecote. so wrought upon his spirit, as to produce a rough pasquinade,

This flagitious attack upon the dignity of the knight so incensed him, that he applied to a lawyer at Warwick to put the severity of the laws in force against the rhyming deer-stalker.

12

tinction in the theatre. He was a shareholder of been produced. With the nobles, the wits, and the Blackfriars Company, within two or three years poets of his day, he was in familiar intercourse. The after his arrival; of the fifteen shareholders of thegentle Shakspeare,' as he was usually styled, was theatre in November 1589, Shakspeare's name is throned in all hearts. But notwithstanding his brilliant success in the metropolis, the poet early looked forward to a permanent retirement to the country. He visited Stratford once a-year; and when wealth flowed in upon him, he purchased property in his native town and its vicinity. He bought New Place, the principal house in Stratford; in 1602, he gave £320 for 107 acres of land adjoining to his purchase; and in 1605, he paid £440 for the lease of the tithes of Stratford. The latest entry of his name among the king's players is in 1604, but he was living in London in 1609. The year 1612 has been assigned as the date of his final retirement to the country. In the fulness of his fame, with a handsome competency, and before age had chilled the enjoyment of life, the poet returned to his native town to spend the remainder of his days among the quiet scenes and the friends of his youth. His parents were both dead, but their declining years had been gladdened by the prosperity of their illustrious son. Four years were spent by Shakspeare in this dignified retirement, and the history of literature scarcely presents another such picture of calm felicity and satisfied ambition. He died on the 23d of April 1616, having just completed his fifty-second year. His widow survived him seven years. His two daughters were both married (his only son Hamnet had died in 1596), and one of them had three sons; but all these died without issue, and there now remains no lineal representative of the great poet.

Charlecote House.

the eleventh on the list. In 1596, his name is the fifth in a list of only eight proprietors; and in 1603, he was second in the new patent granted by King James. It appears from recent discoveries made by Mr Collier, that the wardrobe and stage properties afterwards belonged to Shakspeare, and with the shares which he possessed, were estimated at £1400, equal to between £6000 and £7000 of our present money. He was also a proprietor of the Globe Theatre; and at the lowest computation, his income must have been about £300 a-year, or £1500 at the present day. As an actor, Shakspeare is said by a contemporary (supposed to be Lord Southampton) to have been of good account in the company; but the cause of his unexampled success was his immortal dramas, the delight and wonder of his

agc

That so did take Eliza and our James, as Ben Jonson has recorded, and as is confirmed by various authorities. Up to 1611, the whole of Shakspeare's plays (thirty-seven in number, according to the first folio edition) are supposed to have Shakspeare did not wait to brave the united puissance of a knight of the shire and a country attorney. * *

I now found myself among noble avenues of oaks and elms, whose vast size bespoke the growth of centuries. ** It was

from wandering in early life among this rich scenery, and about the romantic solitudes of the adjoining park of Fulbroke, which then formed a part of the Lucy estate, that some of Shakspeare's commentators have supposed he derived his noble forest meditations of Jaques and the enchanting woodland pictures in "As You Like It." ** [The house] is a large building of brick, with stone quoins, and is in the Gothic style of Queen Elizabeth's day, having been built in the first year of her reign. The exterior remains very nearly in its original state, and may be considered a fair specimen of the residence of a wealthy country gentleman of those days.** The

front of the house is completely in the old style-with stoneshafted casements, a great bow window of heavy stone-work,

and a portal with armorial bearings over it, carved in stone.

**The Avon, which winds through the park, makes a bend just at the foot of a gently sloping bank, which sweeps round the rear of the house. Large herds of deer were reposing upon its borders.'

Shakspeare, it is believed, like his contemporary the works of others, and adapting them for the stage. dramatists, began his career as an author by altering The extract from Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit,' which we have given in the life of that unhappy author, shows that he had been engaged in this subor dinate literary labour before 1592. Three years previous to this, Nash had published an address to the students of the two universities, in which there is a remarkable passage:-'It is,' he says, 'a common practice now-a-days, among a sort of shifting companions, that run through every art, and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could scarce Latinise their neck verse if they should have need; yet English Seneca, read by candle-light, yields many good sentences, as blood is a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreat him far in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches.' The term Noverint was applied to lawyers' clerks, so called from the first word of a Latin deed of those Know all men, &c. We have no doubt that Nash times, equivalent to the modern commencement of alluded to Shakspeare in this satirical glance, for Shakspeare was even then, as has been discovered, a

shareholder in the theatre; and it appears from the title-page to the first edition of 'Hamlet,' in 1604, that, like Romeo and Juliet,' and the Merry Wives of Windsor,' it had been enlarged to almost twice its original size. It seems scarcely probable that the great dramatist should not have commenced writing before he was twenty-seven. Some of his first drafts, as we have seen, he subsequently enlarged and completed; others may have sunk into oblivion, as being judged unworthy of resuscitation or improvement in his riper years. Pericles is supposed to be one of his earliest adaptations. Dryden, indeed, expressly states it to be the first birth of his muse; but two if not three styles are distinctly traceable in this play, and the two first acts look

[ocr errors]

magnificent conceptions which were afterwards embodied in the Lear, the Macbeth, Othello, and Tempest of his tragic muse.

The chronology of Shakspeare's plays has been arbitrarily fixed by Malone and others, without adequate authority. Mr Collier has shown its incorrectness in various particulars. He has proved, for example, that Othello' was on the stage in 1602, though Malone assigns its first appearance to 1604. Macbeth' is put down to 1606, though we only know that it existed in 1610. Henry VIII. is assigned to 1603, yet it is mentioned by Sir Henry Wotton as a new play in 1613, and we know that it was produced with unusual scenic decoration and splendour in that year. The Roman plays were undoubtedly among his latest works. The Tempest' has been usually considered the last, but on no decisive authority. Adopting this popular belief, Mr Campbell has remarked, that the 'Tempest' has a 'sort of sacredness' as the last drama of the great poet, who, as if conscious that this was to be the case, has been inspired to typify himself as a wise, potent, and benevolent magician.'

like the work of Greene or Peele. Titus Andronicus resembles the style of Marlow, and if written by Shakspeare, as distinct contemporary testimony affirms, it must have been a very youthful production. The Taming of the Shrew is greatly indebted to an old play on the same subject, and must also be referred to the same period. It is doubtful whether Shakspeare wrote any of the first part of Henry VI. The second and third parts are modelled on two older plays, the Contention of York and Lancaster,' and the True Tragedy of the Duke of York. Whether these old dramas were early sketches of Shakspeare's own, or the labours of some obscure and forgotten playwright, cannot now be ascertained: they contain the death-scene of Cardinal Beaufort, the last speech of the Duke of York, and the germs of that vigorous delineation of character and passion completed in ‘Richard III.' We know no other dramatist of that early period, excepting Marlow, who could have written those powerful sketches. From the old plays, Shakspeare borrowed no less than 1771 entire lines, and nearly double that number are merely alterations. Such wholesale appropriation of the labours of others is There seems no good reason for believing that found in none of his other historical plays (as King Shakspeare did not continue writing on to the period John, Richard III., &c., modelled on old dramas), of his death in 1616; and such a supposition is counand we therefore incline to the opinion, that the tenanced by a tradition thus recorded in the diary Contention and the True Tragedy were early pro- of the Rev. John Ward, A.M., vicar of Stratfordductions of the poet, afterwards enlarged and im-on-Avon, extending from 1648 to 1679. 'I have proved by him, as part of his English historical heard,' says the careless and incurious vicar, who series, and then named Henry VI. might have added largely to our stock of Shakspearian facts, had he possessed taste, acuteness, or industry- I have heard that Mr Shakspeare was a natural wit, without any art at all. He frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for it had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of £1000 a-year, as I have heard. Shakspeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakspeare died of a fever there contracted.' We place no great reliance on this testimony, either as to facts literary or personal. Those who have studied the works of the great dramatist, and marked his successive approaches to perfection, must see that

The gradual progress of Shakspeare's genius is supposed to have been not unobserved by Spenser. In 1594, or 1595, the venerable poet wrote his pastoral, entitled 'Colin Clout's Come Home Again,' in which he commemorates his brother poets under feigned names. The gallant Raleigh is the Shepherd of the Ocean, Sir Philip Sidney is Astrophel, and other living authors are characterised by fictitious appellations. He concludes as follows:

And then, though last not least, is Aëtion,
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
Doth, like himself, heroically sound.

tion, that he attained to the highest pitch of dramatic art, and the most accurate philosophy of the human mind, and that he was, as Schlegel has happily remarked, a profound artist, and not a blind and wildly-luxuriant genius.**

*Coleridge boasted of being the first in time who publicly demonstrated, to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakspeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan.' He maintains, with his

usual fine poetical appreciation and feeling, that that Law of

unity which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity

The sonorous and chivalrous-like name of Shak-he united the closest study to the keenest observaspeare seems here designated. The poet had then published his two classical poems, and probably most of his English historical plays had been acted. The supposition that Shakspeare was meant, is at least a pleasing one. We love to figure Spenser and Raleigh sitting under the 'shady alders' on the banks of Mulla, reading the manuscript of the 'Faery Queen; but it is not less interesting to consider the great poet watching the dawn of that mighty mind which was to eclipse all its contemporaries. A few years afterwards, in 1598, we meet with an important notice of Shakspeare by Francis Meres, a contemporary author.As Plautus and Seneca,' he says, are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspeare, among the English, is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour Lost, his Love's Labour Won (or All's Well that Ends Well), his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.' This was indeed a brilliant contribution to the English drama, throwing Greene, Peele, and Marlow immeasurably into shade, and far transcending all the previous productions of the English stage. The harvest, however, was not yet half reaped the glorious intellect of Shakspeare was still forming, and his imagination nursing those

of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere,
and at all times, observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read
Romeo and Juliet-all is youth and spring; youth with its fol-
lies, its virtues, its precipitancies; spring with its odours, its
flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that
commences, goes through, and ends the play.' This unity of
action, or of character and interest, conspicuous in Shakspeare,
Coleridge illustrates by an illustration drawn, with the taste of
Whence arises the harmony
a poet, from external nature.
that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes-in the rela

tive shapes of rocks-the harmony of colours in the heaths,
ferns, and lichens-the leaves of the beech and the oak-the

stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other moun

tain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring

compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations? From this-that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. In working out his conceptions, either

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »