English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to Anne

by Donald Grant Mitchell

I have tried—I will confess it now—to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies—whether places, or writers, or sovereigns—I said to myself—when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written—we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying—standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles—this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle—brimful of life—with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal—that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy—apart in his dim tower—piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony.

These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse—allusion—is of such weight—has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson;—not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted—but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship.

If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James—names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best—I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.

And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pilgrimage which he told us of in such winning numbers, make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the “Faërie Queene,” they are phantasmic; we may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely—they have no flesh and blood texture: and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the best-drawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well—Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters appear, but because none of them have that vital roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities.

We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us—maybe their pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know.

Shakespeare’s Youth.

And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue?

And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men—poets and dramatists—who belonged to his time, and who—with a pleasant egoism—let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family “wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless—aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted—to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him; he ran out of sight of them all.

He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born—his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers—whether in wool, meats, or gloves—and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family—in the female line[13]—toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;—hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them; wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges of coal and lumber swaying with the idle currents that swish among the sedges at the banks.