Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare!" Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author of "Paradise Lost;" "He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And conceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being actually all the information accessible concerning him!
But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter was discovered among the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, and indorsed by this latter, "From Mr. Dowdall; description of several places in Warwickshire"—as it bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county—the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc.—it has always been accepted as authentic. After a description of the tomb and resting place of "our English tragedian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues:
"The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * He says that this Shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him."
* I.e. (more than "above" three years old when she died.)
This letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifford, which
were sold by auction—and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-
known antiquarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street,
London, in 1834. Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in
1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year).
It is dated "Butler's Merston in Warwickshire, April, the
10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your very faithful kinsman and most
aff'te humble serv't till death, John at Stiles," and is
addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv't." This is
Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his
handwriting, "From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several
places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was
"an Inns'-of-Court-Man."
Next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton, * in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to his friend's manuscripts. Among these annotations he writes the following of William Shakespeare: "William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great that he is his 'Justice Clodpate' ** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor he became a composer. He died April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford—for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd.)
* His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman
(in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in
the library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.
** Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in "Merry Wives
of Windsor." p. 520.
on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. He died a papist. Whatever these may be worth—for, of course, like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay—it is fair to include them in a collection of what the law calls "general reputation," "general report," or "common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, at least, against that "common fame" and "common reputation" which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone and the Ireland forgeries as "the Stratford poet,") who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakespeare and others (as representing Stratford) against the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition is of no value except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions, associates, and contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench—was almost any thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been created since by those who knew him not. Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we have remarked, than a reputation for "book-learning;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's.
When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean drama—first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will.
But the statement is the nearest and best evidence we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.
First (for Rowe has only—in his eight honest pages of biographical notice—narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and Condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report—but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford "Shaughraun," the further away he got from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far from concluding that—because he finds no such name as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla—therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand their business. He says: