The village constable referred to was well known to one Josias Howe, son of the rector, born at Grendon, March 29th, 1612, died August 28th, 1701, who told Aubrey the story at Oxford, in 1642.
The lofty gabled red brick and timber end of Shakespeare Farm, illustrated here, is the earlier part of the building, although the whole of it is probably as old as Shakespeare’s time. That earlier wing, the part to which tradition points, is not now occupied, and is, in fact, in a very dilapidated condition, occasional floorboards, and even some of the stairs, being missing. Where the wearied guests of long ago rested, broody hens are set by the careful farmer’s wife on their clutches of eggs. There is little interesting in the architectural way in these dark and deserted rooms, but the flat, pierced, wooden banisters of the staircase are genuinely old and quaint.
CHAPTER IV
Continued decline in the affairs of John Shakespeare—William Shakespeare’s success in London—Death of Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son—Shakespeare buys New Place—He retires to Stratford—Writes his last play, The Tempest—His death.
That Shakespeare left his wife and family at home at Stratford-on-Avon every one takes for granted. He “deserted his family,” says a rabid Baconian, who elsewhere complains of the lack of evidence to support believers in the dramatist; forgetting that there is no evidence for this “desertion” story; only one of those many blanks in the life of this elusive man, by which it would appear that while he was reaching fame and making money in London as a playwright and an actor, he held no communication with his kith and kin. There remains no local record of William Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon between the year 1587, when he joined with his father in mortgaging the property at Asbies, Wilmcote, which had been his mother’s marriage portion, until 1596, when the register of the death of Hamnet, his only son, occurs at Stratford church, on August 11th. But this is sheer negative evidence of his not having visited his native town for over ten years, and is on a par with the famous Baconian argument that because no scrap of Shakespeare’s handwriting, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived, therefore he cannot have written the plays still attributed to him.
Meanwhile, his father’s affairs steadily grew worse, and in 1592 he was returned as a “recusant” by the commissioners who visited the town for the purpose of fining the statutable fine of £20 all those who had not attended church for one month. John Shakespeare’s recusancy has been unwarrantably assumed to be due to Roman Catholic obstinacy; but the fine was remitted because it was shown that he was afraid to go to church “for processe of debt”; which, together with the infirmities of age, or sickness, was a lawful excuse.
Shakespeare’s success in London as an actor, a reviser and editor of old and out-of-date plays, as manager, theatre-proprietor and playwright, is due to that sprack-witted capacity for excelling in almost any chosen field of intellectual activity with which a born genius is gifted. The saying that “genius is a capacity for taking pains” is a dull, plodding man’s definition. Genius will very often fling away the rewards of its powers through just this lack of staying power, and no plodding pains will supply that intuitive knowledge, that instant perception, which is what we call genius.
It was the psychological moment for such an one as Shakespeare to come to London. The drama had future before it: the intellectual receptivity of the Renascence permeated all classes, and the country was prosperous and growing luxurious. Playwrights were numerous, but as yet their productions had not reached a high level, excepting those of Marlowe, to whose inspiration Shakespeare at first owed much. If Shakespeare lived in these times he would be called a shameless plagiarist, for he went to other authors for his plots—as Chaucer had done with his Canterbury Tales, two hundred years earlier, and as all others had done in between. Not a man of them would escape the charge; but what Shakespeare took of plot-construction and of dialogue he transmuted from the dull and soulless lines we could not endure to read to-day, into a clear fount of wit, wisdom and literary beauty.
Shakespeare’s career of playwright began as a hack writer and cobbler of existing plays. As an actor his technical knowledge of the requirements of the stage rendered his help invaluable to managers, and the conditions of that time gave no remedy to any author whose plays were thus altered. It may be supposed from lack of evidence to the contrary, that most other dramatic authors submitted to this treatment in silence; perhaps because they had all been employed, at some time or other in the same way. But one man seems to have bitterly resented a mere actor presuming to call himself an author. This was Robert Greene, who died Sept. 3rd, 1592, after a long career of play-writing and pamphleteering. He died a disappointed man, and wrote a farewell tract, published after his death, which includes a warning to his fellow-authors and an undoubted attack upon Shakespeare, under the thin disguise of “Shake-scene.”
It is to be considered that Shakespeare had by this time been five years in London; that he had proved himself singularly adaptable, and had finally, on March 3rd, 1592, attained his first popular success, in the production at the newly-opened “Rose Theatre” on Bankside, Southwark (third London playhouse, opened February 19th, 1592), of Henry the Sixth. It was a veritable triumph. The author played in his own piece, and the other dramatists looked on in dismay. Jealousy does not seem to have followed Shakespeare’s good fortune, and the numerous references to him as poet and playwright by others are kindly and fully recognise his superiority. Only Greene’s posthumous work exists to show how one resented it. The tract has the singular title of “A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance.” Incidentally it warns brother-dramatists against “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his ovine conceite, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.”