THE BENEDICT.
The course of events connected with our story has necessarily obliged us to deviate from the locality in which we have heretofore progressed. We must, however, now again, after such brief excursion, return to the spot from whence we started, and as the sun shines brightly upon park and field, and wooded glade, once more look upon fair and fertile Warwickshire.
Sweet Stratford-upon-Avon! those who know thee, and know thee well—who have lingered in thy old-world streets, and wandered in thy neighbourhood, breathing the scented air which smells so wooingly amongst the shadowy groves and unfrequented glades around, will acknowledge that there is no place in England, for situation and beauty, thy superior.
There is a freshness in thy neighbourhood, a quiet beauty in thy streets, a cozy comfort in many of thy dwellings, and a venerable and impressive grandeur in thy religious edifices, belonging alone to an English town of good and ancient descent. Was a stranger to be dropped suddenly in the centre of this town, whilst he looked around, and noted the sweet aspect of the locality he had so suddenly arrived in, methinks he would say to himself that he had reached a spot noted and celebrated in the world's esteem beyond most others in the kingdom. Yes, in this rural picture we think the stranger might find all these peculiar features characteristic of the old haunts in which Englishmen of a former age dwelt so happily. Those verdant villages, which made the English, however much they loved military adventure the whilst they formed the hosts of kings in the vasty fields of France, look back from the splendour of the tented field upon their own pleasant woodlands and quiet homes with fond yearning.
Tuck of drum might sound, the horn's sweet note be carried by the evening breeze, as it floated over some stricken field during those splendid wars of the Edwards and Henries. The gonfalon might flutter, and the knight, with all his train, ride stately amidst the white range of tents; the archer might lean upon his bow and gaze upon the splendour of the host. But the noble, and the knight, and the peasant-born soldier of England, alike sighed in his heart of hearts for the hour that was to see his foreign marches over, and himself amidst the scenes of his island home.
"That England hedged in with the main,
That precious gem set in the silver sea."
If then our readers love fair Warwickshire, and admire the grandeur and beauty of its scenery as we do, they will scarce be angry with us for again leading them back toward Stratford-upon-Avon.
And Shakespeare is married. One great event of his life is passed. He dwells with his wife in his native town; beyond the precincts of which he is comparatively unknown, or, being known, but little regarded.
He is scarcely more than eighteen years of age, and his wife is four-and-twenty. Their means are small, and their comforts few. The prospect before them is not of the brightest, but they are young, and in youth all seems beautiful because all is new. A female, however, of twenty-four, wedded to a youth of eighteen—a mere boy, as she terms him—will be likely to have her own way in everything; at least she will try to have it, and that is almost as bad. We fear, too, the blooming Anne is a "little shrew." She hath a high spirit withal, and we opine that her tastes and dispositions are not in exact accordance with those of her youthful husband. He is all imagination—all fire, energy, and spirit; whilst she is more matter of fact. The gods have certainly not made her poetical, and she thanks the gods therefore. And then her age. Beautiful as she is in face and form, she is not matched in respect of years, and she knows it.
"Too old, by heaven; let still the woman take
An elder than herself—so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart."[12]
William Shakespeare had married in opposition to the advice of his parents. The handsome Anne had done the same in regard to her's. Such cases are by no means rare in their walk of life. The present is all that is considered, the future unthought of. Old folks do sometimes, however, know more than young ones give them credit for; and in this instance they prognosticated the match would not be a happy one.
That the youthful poet felt some sort of disappointment when he found how widely his disposition and tastes differed from the companion he had chosen, there can be little doubt.
His extraordinary flights of genius, his wondrous conceptions, she had no part in. She, indeed, could scarce understand them; and that which she could not comprehend she looked upon as the rhapsodizing of a boy. Even those beautiful descriptions, and the music of his honeyed vows, for Shakespeare, although married, was still a lover, were now listened to without the smile of appreciation. "Alas!" he said to himself, "maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives." In short, the youthful poet found that he had matched unhappily. There was little sympathy in feeling, although there might have been in choice; and so their loves passed
"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night."
They dwelt in Henley Street, in the house next to that in which the youth's parents inhabited; and he occasionally assisted his father in his business as a dealer in wool.
In Stratford, at this time, there was a knot of young fellows celebrated for little else beside their idleness, their wit, and their reckless daring. One or two of these were apprenticed to different trades in the town. One had made the voyage, and returned a reckless desperado, although a jovial and most amusing companion; another had served for a brief space in the Low Countries, "the land of pike and caliver," where finding hard knocks more plentiful than either pay or promotion, and his courage none of the greatest, he had deserted his colours, and returned home with a marvellous capacity for imbibing strong liquors, and relating wondrous stories of his own exploits whilst a soldier:—
"Of healths five fathom deep,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
And all the current of the heady fight."
With these youths young Shakespeare had before been in the habit of associating. Their eccentricity amused him; there was a kind of character in their lives which he loved to contemplate. Before his marriage he had loved however to indulge his thoughts a good deal alone, to wander and meditate amidst the delicious scenery in the neighbourhood. Now it was somewhat different, he had home and its duties to attend to, besides matters connected with his father's business, to keep him from so continually excursionizing as heretofore.
His meetings with these choice and master spirits, these jolly companions who "daffed the world aside, and bid it pass," were, therefore, for the most part, in after hours, and when the business of the day was over.
Besides these lads of mettle, there was another person whose company young Shakespeare had of late much affected, and in whose society he found a perfect fund of entertainment, a feeling which was quite mutual, as this friend was of a capacity as fully to appreciate the extraordinary talents and delightful society of the juvenile poet, as the latter was to enjoy the wit and humour of his entertainer.
This person, who was a resident at Stratford, although not a native there, was a most singular compound. He was possessed of some property in the town; but his expenditure was generally greater than his means warranted, and he was consequently obliged often to eke out his funds by laying his companions under contribution. He was ever in difficulties, and yet ever jovial, hospitable, and with his friends around him. His eccentricity, his wit, and his follies were a continual feast to young Shakespeare; his absurdities, and the scrapes he got into, a continual tax upon his intimates to get him respectably clear of. By the sober and puritanical of the townsfolk he was detested, for he made them the subject of his biting jests. By the respectable citizen he was feared as an intimate, for his tongue was a continual libel upon all his acquaintance. By the more light-hearted and careless, who laughed with him and at him, he was tolerated, and even sought after, for his amusing qualities.
In his person, the man was its singular as in his disposition—fat, and unwieldy in figure; he was upwards of six feet in height, with a round ruddy face, in which the laughing features were lost amidst the puffed-out cheeks and double chin—a sort of figure and face, which looked as if the owner had been fat and full of jollity at the time of his birth, and gone on increasing up to his present age.
What was the history of his former life none could tell, for he had come a stranger to the town. Some said, however, that in his youth he had been engaged in the wars of the Netherlands, and cashiered for cowardice; others affirmed that he was the discarded steward of some noble, dismissed for arrant knavery and dishonest practices; whilst by others, again, he was said to have been the host of a low tavern, situated in the purlieus of Whitefriars of London, and, that having amassed a small competency, he had since pretty well dissipated it, and was now living at Stratford to be out of the way.
Be that, however, as it may, at the period of our story he resided at a sort of tavern or hostel, situated in the suburbs of the town, and which hostel himself and yoke fellows principally occupied, leading a roaring, rollicking life, to the great scandal of the more steady portions of the community.
In this society young Shakespeare heard many things which considerably augmented his store of knowledge. The soldier described "the toil o' the war," and the abuses of the service he had been in, where "preferment went by letter and affection." The adventurer told of seas, "whose yeasty waves confound and swallow navigation up;" of islands full of noises, and peopled by strange monsters; and the fat host spoke of the "cities usuries," "the art o' the Court," and the adventures and intrigues himself had been the hero of in various localities from his youth upwards.
In proportion to the pleasure young Shakespeare took in this society, was the dislike entertained for it by his wife; for the character of the presiding genius of the tavern she was well aware of, together with his loudness for, and capacity of, imbibing strong liquors, and carrying them steadily. His professed libertinism, and light opinion of the whole sex,—his impudent boast of favours received from several of the good dames of the town, and the various cudgellings he had received from their husbands—each and all of those matters had been industriously poured into her ear by her female gossipers, with the additional information, that the unwieldy gentleman, notwithstanding his unfitness for such exploits, was much given to walking, or rather riding, by moonlight; and, with his more active friends, making free with a stray haunch occasionally, at the expense of the neighbouring gentry. Nay, it was even affirmed, that some of the midnight excursions of himself and followers had not been entirely for the purpose of coney-catching and deer-stealing, but that more than once they had stopped certain travellers between Coventry and Warwick, and eased them of their cash.
As he was, however, well known to be one of the most arrant cowards that ever buckled on a rapier, this latter story was for the most part disbelieved, as far as he was concerned.
Be that as it may, the companionship of the eccentric John Froth, and his yoke-fellows was not likely to lead a youth of the free, unsuspicious, and generous disposition of young Shakespeare into any good employment, and that his wife well knew and as roundly told him of. Had her advice been well-timed, and gently given, perhaps it might have produced its effect; but unhappily, the fair Anne possessed a shrewd temper and little tact.
"In bed he slept not for her urging it,
At board he fed not, for her urging it,
Alone, it was the subject of her theme;
In company she often glanced at it."
And therefore came it that the man was wretched. In short, his sleep was hindered by her railings; his head made light, and his meat sauced with her upbraidings; so that he was driven, for relief, to associate the more with the very companions his wife was so jealous of.
"Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy—
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
The venom clamours of a jealous woman,
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth."
Perhaps one great charm young Shakespeare felt in the society of his fat friend, was the faculty he seemed to possess of enjoying every moment of his life to the utmost. He turned everything to mirth. Nothing could for a moment damp his spirits, unless his fears for his own personal safety were aroused; and, even then, he was the more amusing, from the very absurdity of his apprehensions, labouring, as he did, to persuade those who so well knew his infirmity, of the heroic nature of his disposition.
It was, indeed, in consequence of the amusement to be derived from this latter failing, that he had been once or twice invited by his companions to join in several of their poaching expeditions. The state of alarm he had been in, and the difficulties his associates had led him into, having furnished, even himself, with an endless theme of amusement after the exploit was over.