The identification of this crow in borrowed plumage, this “Shake-scene,” is completed by the line, “O tiger’s heart, wrapp’d in a woman’s hide,” which is a quotation from the Third Part of Henry the Sixth, where the Duke of York addresses Queen Margaret; while the term “Johannes factotum,” i.e. “Johnny Do-everything,” is a sneer at Shakespeare’s adaptability and many-sided activities.
The merits of Shakespeare as an actor are uncertain. Greene seems to imply that he was of the ranting, bellowing type who tore a passion to tatters and split the ears of the groundlings. Rowe, who wrote of him in 1709 says: “The top of his performance (as an actor) was the Ghost in his own Hamlet”; not an exacting part; other traditions say Adam in As You Like It, an even less important character, was his favourite; but the suggestion we love the better to believe is that his best part was the cynical, melancholy, philosophic Jaques. Donnelly, chief of the Bacon heretics, has in his Great Cryptogram, a weird story of how Bacon wrote the part of Falstaff for Shakespeare, to fit his great greasy stomach. He knew Shakespeare could not act, and so provided a part in which no acting should be required; turning Shakespeare’s natural disabilities to account, so that, if the audience could not laugh with him in his acting, they should laugh at him and dissolve into merriment at the clumsy antics of so fat a man!
There are actor-managers in our times—no actor-author-managers like Shakespeare—who deserve the cat-calls and the missiles of their audiences. They do not merely “lag superfluous on the stage,” but ought never to be on it; like the celebrated actor-manager whose impersonation of Hamlet was, according to Sir W. S. Gilbert’s caustic remark, “funny without being vulgar.” It is not conceivable that Shakespeare himself, who puts such excellent advice to actors into the mouth of Hamlet, should himself have been incompetent.
With Shakespeare’s leap into fame, in 1592, went a simultaneous “boom,” as it might now be termed, in theatres and the drama. Theatres multiplied in London, theatrical companies grew prosperous, and such men as Shakespeare, Merle and the Burbages amassed wealth.
In 1596 died William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, whose burial register in the books of Holy Trinity church, Stratford, runs—
“August 11th, Hamnet, filius William Shakespeare.” His father must surely have been present on this occasion. This year is generally said to be that in which the dramatist who in his time had played many parts, returned to his native town, a made man. He came back with his triumphs ringing fresh in his ears, for that season witnessed the great success of the production of Romeo and Juliet. In July, also, his father had applied to the Heralds’ College for a grant of arms, an application for a patent of gentility which would have come absurdly from a penniless tradesman. The inference therefore, although we have no documentary evidence to that effect, is that William Shakespeare had not only kept in touch with his people, but had helped his father out of his difficulties and was himself the instigator of this application for a grant of arms. The application was eventually successful. The arms thus conferred are: “Or, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, steeled proper. Crest, a falcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing upon a wreath of his colours and supporting a spear in pale, or.” The motto chosen was “Non sanz droiet.”
What was this right to heraldic honours and the implied gentility they carried, the Shakespeares claimed? It was based upon a quibble that John Shakespeare’s “parent, great-grandfather and late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the most prudent prince king H. 7 of famous memorie, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him,” etc. The description of the miserly Henry the Seventh as “prudent” is, like “mobled queen,” distinctly “good”; but we are not greatly concerned with that, only with the fact that the martial and loyal antecessors claimed for John Shakespeare were really those of his wife. He adopted his wife’s family, or rather, her family’s pretensions to call cousins with the more famous Ardens.
William Shakespeare had returned to Stratford a well-to-do man, with an income which has been estimated at about £1300 of our money, but he had not yet completed his work, and his reappearance in his native town was not permanent. You figure him now, the dramatist and manager, with considerable shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, rather concerned to relinquish the trade—not a profession, really, you know—of actor, but with his company much in request at Court and in the mansions of the great. He was, one thinks, a little sobered by the passage of time; and by the death, this year, of his only son; and quite sensible of the dignity that new patent of arms had conferred upon his father and himself. To mark it, he bought in 1597 a residence, the best residence in the town, although wofully out of repair. It was known, with some awe, to his contemporaries as “the great house.” Sixty pounds sterling was the purchase money: we will say £480 of present value. It was bought so cheaply probably because of its dilapidated condition, for it seems to have been built by Sir Hugh Clopton in 1485, and at this time was “in great ruyne & decay & unrepayred.” Shakespeare thoroughly renovated his newly-acquired property, and styled it “New Place.”
He did not, apparently, at once take up his residence here, for his theatrical company was acting before the Queen at Whitehall in the spring and he would doubtless have been present, and perhaps accompanied them when they were on tour in Kent and Sussex in the summer. But he was at Stratford a part of the next year, which was a year of scarcity. He had accumulated a large stock of corn, over against the shortage, and in a return made of the quantity of grain held in the town he held ten quarters. In the January of this year he contemplated buying some land at Shottery. “Our countriman, Mr. Shaksper,” wrote Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney on January 24th, “is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shotterei or neare about us.” It would seem that Shakespeare did not, after all, purchase this land. Perhaps he could not get it a bargain, and what we know of his business transactions, small though it may be, all goes to show that he was a keen dealer and not at all likely to spend his money rashly.
This year is remarkable for the writing of a letter to Shakespeare by Richard Quiney, the only letter addressed to him now in existence. It is dated October 25th and addressed from Carter Lane, in the City of London. Shakespeare was apparently then at Stratford—