A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare / Player, Poet, and Playmaker

by Frederick Gard Fleay

SECTION II.

THE PERSONAL CONNECTIONS OF SHAKESPEARE WITH OTHER POETS.

One of the objects of the present treatise is to bring into clearer light the relations of Shakespeare with contemporary dramatists. Strangely enough this has scarcely been attempted in earlier biographies. His dealings in malt have been carefully chronicled: his connections with poets have been slurred over. It will be useful, therefore, to gather up the scattered notices of personal contact between him and his fellows in dramatic production. Mere allusions to his works, whether complimentary or otherwise, will not come under this category. Such will be found collected, and well collected, in Dr. Ingleby's Century of Praise; but they consist almost entirely of slight references to his published works, and have no bearing of importance on his career. Nor, indeed, have we any extended material of any kind to aid us in this investigation; one source of information, which is abundant for most of his contemporaries, being in his case entirely absent. Neither as addressed to him by others, nor by him to others, do any commendatory verses exist in connection with any of his or other men's works published in his lifetime—a notable fact, in whatever way it may be explained. Nor can he be traced in any personal contact beyond a very limited circle, although the fanciful might-have-beens so largely indulged in by his biographers might at first lead us to an opposite conclusion.

With John Lyly, the founder of English Comedy, he seems to have had no personal intercourse, although the reproduction by him of many of Lyly's puns and conceits, and some few of his dramatic situations, distinctly prove that he had carefully examined his published plays. Nor does the solitary reference to Shakespeare in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, however it may display strong personal feeling, lead us to suppose that there had been any personal relations between these dramatists; in fact, the very wording of the passage properly understood distinctly disproves the existence of such relations. Of all the dramatists who had preceded him on the London stage the only two with whom he can be even conjecturally brought in personal contact before the opening of the Rose Theatre in 1592 are Robert Wilson and George Peele. It is unlikely that he should have begun his career as a novice and journeyman independent of tutor or coadjutor, and a minute examination of the careers of these two dramatists leads me to infer that they were connected with the same company as Shakespeare in 1590-1. In any case, they were his immediate models in his early work in several respects. It is from Wilson that his liking for doggerel rhymes and alternately rhyming stanzas was derived: it is from Peele that his love tragedy of Romeo and Juliet—his only early tragedy—derived, in its earliest form, as acted in 1591, whatever in it was not Shakespeare's own. Wilson was probably his tutor or coadjutor in Comedy and Peele in Tragedy. But this is after all conjecture; on the other hand, it is certain that in 1592-3 a greater than Peele or Wilson was writing for the same company as Shakespeare, and necessarily in close connection with him. For Marlowe he certainly had a sincere regard: from his poem of Hero and Leander Shakespeare makes the only direct quotation to be found in his plays; on his historical plays Shakespeare, after his friend's decease, bestowed in addition, revision, and completion, a greater amount of minute work than on his own; and the earlier of his own histories were distinctly built on lines similar to those of Edward II. and Edward III. The relation of Shakespeare's Histories to Marlowe's is far more intimate than that of his Comedies or of Romeo to any predecessor's productions. I cannot find a trace of direct connection between Shakespeare and any other poet than these mentioned, during the life of Lord Strange. His connection with Lord Southampton seems to have been more intimate than any with his fellow-poets. In the Sonnets addressed to him there is mention of other pens who have dedicated poems to his lordship, and whom Shakespeare for poetical purposes professes to regard as dangerous rivals. The only persons known to have dedicated anything to Southampton are Nash and Markham, although George Peele had written a high eulogy of him in his Honour of the Garter in 1593. Markham's dedication is one of four prefixed to his poem on The Tragedy of Sir Richard Grenvile (S. R. 9th September 1595); (1.) to Charles Lord Montjoy (in prose); (2.) to Robert Earl of Sussex (Sonnet); (3.) to the Earl of Southampton (Sonnet); (4.) to Sir Edward Wingfield (Sonnet). I am not aware of any previous attempt to identify Markham with the rival alluded to in the Sonnets of Shakespeare, and yet there are many coincidences of language which would lead to this conclusion. Take Sonnet 78, for instance. "Thine eyes ... have added feathers to the learned's wing and given grace a double majesty." In Markham we find in 1, "hath given wings to my youngling Muse;" and in 3, "whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen" (cf. in 1, "that thine eyes may lighten," &c.); and in 4, the double majesty of the grace, "vouchsafe to grace my work and me, Gracing the soul beloved of heaven and thee." I do not find in Markham the "affable familiar ghost" of Sonnet 86, but this and other allusions may have referred to his Thyrsis and Daphne (S. R. 23d April 1593, five days after the entry of Venus and Adonis) which is now unfortunately lost; and there is something like it in the Grenvile Tragedy, in which Markham calls on Grenvile's soul to "sit on his hand" while he writes, which the ghost apparently does until it is dismissed to its "rest" at the end of the poem. Markham was an exceedingly learned man and the "proud full sail of his great verse" would well apply to his stilted and conceited effusion. He does not in it allude to Southampton's beauty, though he may have done so in his Thyrsis, but he calls him "Bright lamp of virtue" with which compare Sonnet 79: "He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word from thy behaviour." On the whole I incline to regard Markham as the rival poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets. As to Nash, his supposed satirical allusions to Shakespeare, as set forth by the fertile fancy of Mr. Simpson, have no more real existence than the allusions discovered by other like imaginations in the writings of Spenser. His only notice of Shakespeare's writings is the well-known mention of the representation of Talbot on the stage, and that is highly complimentary. He may be included under the "every alien pen" of Sonnet 78, but he is not (as I once thought he was) the rival poet alluded to. It may be of interest in connection with this matter to note that in The Dumb Knight, in which Markham certainly wrote i. 2, ii. 1, iii. 4, and iv. 2, Venus and Adonis is satirised as a lascivious poem.

Of intercourse with other dramatists while a member of the Chamberlain's company, the first instance is that with Lodge and Drayton. That the connection with Drayton terminated in a misunderstanding is clear from the excision of the favourable notice of Shakespeare's Lucrece from his Matilda, and from Drayton's taking the chief part in writing Sir John Oldcastle, the object of which was to keep alive the ill-feeling produced by the unfortunate adoption of that name from the old play of Henry V. for the character afterwards called Sir John Falstaff. This connection with Drayton ended in 1597, that with Lodge in 1599. If I am right in my attribution of part authorship to Lodge in Henry VI. and The Taming of the Shrew in its original form, Shakespeare revised and altered his plays, but not till after Lodge's retirement from connection with the Chamberlain's company. Soon after this, in 1601, he founded his Hamlet on Kyd's, but with Kyd himself I have not been able to find that he was at any time personally connected. Nevertheless, as regards mere outward form, Kyd was the chief model for the great tragedies of Hamlet, Lear, &c. Of course, as regards all poetic essentials, his influence on Shakespeare cannot for a moment be compared to Marlowe's.

With Marston, Chapman, and Dekker, Shakespeare's relations were ephemeral, in connection with the great stage quarrel of 1599-1601, and in no respect personal, unless we suppose that he had a hand in hiring Dekker to oppose Jonson. My own belief is that he was away in Scotland when Satiromastix was produced, and that the division of the company left in London did this without his knowledge. With Jonson his relations were evidently personal and of very varied nature. He probably introduced him to the Chamberlain's company in 1598; he certainly acted in his play of Every Man in his Humour: he did not act in Every Man out of his Humour—and then Jonson joined the Chapel children, and entered on his three years' struggle with Marston, Dekker, &c. In 1601 Shakespeare satirised these children in Hamlet, and about the same time administered the "purge" to Jonson mentioned in The Return from Parnassus: at the end of the same year, he, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston were contributors to Chester's Love's Martyr. In 1603 Jonson, who had again joined the Chamberlain's men, wrote Sejanus in conjunction with some one (with Shakespeare in my opinion), and got into trouble for it. Shakespeare certainly acted in this play, and must at that time have been on good terms with Jonson. All the allusions to Shakespeare's Henry V., &c., in the Prologue at the revival of Every Man in his Humour in 1601 by the Chapel children, and the purge administered to Jonson, had been forgiven and forgotten on both sides. But in 1605 Jonson wrote Volpone, in which Shakespeare did not act, and which gave offence at Court: and this caused a new disagreement between him and the King's men (formerly the Chamberlain's). He left them, and with Chapman and Marston wrote Eastward Ho, in which Hamlet is ridiculed, and for allusions to Scotland in which, similar to those in Volpone, the authors were imprisoned. The King's men retaliated with the additions to Mucedorus, of which more elsewhere, and Jonson did not join them again for years. He wrote for the Chapel children in 1609, and not till 1610, at the end of the year, when Shakespeare's dramatic career was just expiring, did he produce The Alchemist for them at the Globe. It is to be hoped that these two great dramatists were not at open enmity during the later part of Shakespeare's life; but all record of any real friendship between them ends in 1603, and little value is to be attributed either to the vague traditions of Jonson's visiting him at Stratford, or to the abundant praise lavished on him by Jonson in commendatory verses after his death. Much more important for ascertaining the real relations existing between them are the allusions to The Tempest and Winter's Tale so abundantly scattered through all Jonson's plays from 1609 to 1616, while Shakespeare was yet alive.

Of other dramatists who were connected with Shakespeare in King James's time I know only of Tourneur and Wilkins—the former simply as an author writing for Shakespeare's company, the latter as the playwright who wrote Pericles in its original form: the history of the production of this play has already been given.

As to Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, &c., who after 1610 wrote for the King's men, and the numerous contemporaries who wrote for other companies, no trace of any intercourse with Shakespeare, personal or otherwise, remains to us, though abundant guesses and hypotheses utterly foundationless[3] will be found in the voluminous Shakespearian literature already existing. The truth appears to be that Shakespeare at no time sought for a large circle of acquaintance, and that his position as almost sole provider of plays for his company relieved him of that miscellaneous comradeship which was the bane of Dekker, Heywood, and many other gifted writers of the time. Of any one of these a far larger personal connection can be proved than I believe ever existed in the case of Shakespeare: and to this we no doubt are greatly indebted for the depth and roundness of those great plays, which could never have been conceived without much solitude, much suffering, and much concentration.