Shakespeare in London.
But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there? We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established in the city; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to the favor of the Queen. He has no literary backing of the colleges, or of degrees, or of learned associates; nay, not being so high placed, or so well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their heads at mention of him.
But he has heard the strolling players; perhaps has journeyed up in their trail; he has read broadsides, very likely, from London; we may be sure that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went courting to the Hathaway cottage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with them; precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows from the universities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing plays of their own; but lacking Shakespeare’s instinct as to what will take hold of the popular appetite, or rather—let us say—what will touch the human heart.
There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight.
Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs:
“Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear.
“For there, his smell, with others being mingled,
The hot-scent snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled
With much ado, the cold fault clearly out;
Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies
As if another chase were in the skies.
“By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening fear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be comparéd well
To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.”
It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought.
I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:—
“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of Death;
When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time,
The endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor, which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge
And make us heirs of all Eternity!”