Externally, however, his existence seems to have pursued a tranquil course. His name is mixed up in no literary quarrel; and, but for the malicious allusions of the envious Ben Jonson, scarcely would a single criticism be associated with the panegyrics which bear witness to his superiority. All the documents which we possess exhibit Shakspeare to us placed at last in the position which he was rightfully entitled to occupy, and valued as much for the charm of his character as for the brilliancy of his talents, and the admiration due to his genius. A glance, too, at the affairs of the poet will prove that he was beginning to introduce into the details of his existence that order and regularity which are essential to respectability. We find him successively purchasing, in his native town, a house and various portions of land, which soon formed a sufficient estate to insure him a competent income. The profits which he derived from the theatre, in his double capacity of author and actor, have been estimated at two hundred pounds a year, a very considerable sum at that time; and if the liberalities of Lord Southampton were added to the economy of the poet, we may conclude that, at least, they were not unwisely employed. Rowe, in his Life of Shakspeare, seems to think that the gifts of Queen Elizabeth also had some share in building up the fortune of her favorite poet. The grant of an escutcheon which was made, or rather confirmed to his father in 1599, proves a desire to bestow honor on his family. But there is nothing to indicate that Shakspeare obtained from Elizabeth and her court any marks of distinction superior, or even equal to those conferred by Louis XIV. upon Molière, like himself an actor and a poet. If we except his intimacy with Lord Southampton, Shakspeare, like Molière, chose his habitual acquaintance chiefly among men of letters, whose social condition he had probably contributed to elevate. The Mermaid Club, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, and of which Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and many others were members, was long celebrated for the brilliant "wit-combats," which took place there between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, and in which the vivacity of the former gave him an immense advantage over the laborious slowness of his opponent. The anecdotes which are quoted on this point are not worthy of being collected at the present day. Few bons-mots are sufficiently good to survive for two centuries.
Who would not suppose that a life which had become so honorable and pleasant would long have retained Shakspeare in the midst of society conformable to the necessities of his mind, and upon the theatre of his glory? Nevertheless, in 1613, or 1614 at the latest, three or four years after having obtained from James I. the direction of the Blackfriars Theatre, without having apparently incurred the displeasure of the king to whom he was indebted for this new mark of favor, or of the public for whom he had just produced "Othello" and "The Tempest," Shakspeare left London and the stage to take up his residence at Stratford, in his house at New Place, in the midst of his fields. Had he become anxious to taste the joys of family life? He might have brought his wife and children to London. Nothing seems to indicate that he was greatly grieved at separation from them. During his residence in London, he used, it is said, to make frequent journeys to Stratford; but he has been accused of having found, on the road, pleasures of a kind which may have consoled him, at least, for the absence of his wife; and Sir William Davenant used loudly to boast of the poet's intimacy with his mother, the pretty and witty hostess of the Crown, at Oxford, where Shakspeare always stopped on his way to Stratford. If Shakspeare's sonnets were to be regarded as the expression of his dearest and most habitual feelings, we might reasonably be astonished at not finding in them a single allusion to his native place, to his children, or even to the son whom he lost at twelve years of age. And yet Shakspeare could not have been ignorant of the power of paternal love. He who, in "Macbeth," has described pity as "a naked, new-born babe;" he who has put these words into the mouth of Coriolanus,
"Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see;"
he who has so well depicted the tender puerilities of maternal affection, could not have looked upon his own children without experiencing the fond emotions of a father's heart. But Shakspeare, as his character presents itself to our mind, had long been able to find, in the distractions of the world, enough to occupy the place, in his soul and life, which he was capable of giving up to family affections. However this may be, it is more difficult to discern the causes which led to his departure from London, than to perceive those which might have tended to prolong his residence in that city. Perhaps the arrival of infirmities may have warned him of the necessity of repose; and perhaps, also, the very natural desire of showing himself in his native place, under circumstances so different from those in which he had left it, made him hasten the moment of renouncing labors which no longer had the pleasures of youth for their compensation.
New pleasures could not fail to spring up for Shakspeare in his retirement. A natural disposition to enjoy every thing heartily rendered him equally adapted to delight in the calm happiness of a tranquil life, and to find enjoyment in the vicissitudes of an agitated existence. The first mulberry-tree introduced into the neighborhood of Stratford was planted by Shakspeare's hands, in a corner of his garden at New Place, and attested for more than a century the gentle simplicity of the occupations in which his days were spent. A competent fortune seemed to unite with the esteem and friendship of his neighbors to promise him that best crown of a brilliant life, a tranquil and honored old age, when, on the 23d of April, 1616, the very day on which he attained his fifty-second year, death carried him off from that calm and pleasant position, the happy leisure of which he would doubtless not have consecrated to repose alone.
We have no information regarding the nature of the disease to which he fell a victim. His will is dated on the 25th of March, 1616; but the date of February, effaced to make way for that of March, gives us reason to believe that he had commenced it a month previously. He declares that he had written it in perfect health; but the precaution taken thus opportunely, at an age still so distant from senility, leads to the presumption that some unpleasant symptom had awakened within him the idea of danger. There is no evidence either to confirm or to set aside this supposition; and Shakspeare's last days are surrounded by an obscurity even deeper, if possible, than that which enshrouds his life.
His will contains nothing very remarkable, with the exception of a new proof of the little estimation in which he held the wife whom he had so hastily married. After having appointed his daughter Susannah, who had married Mr. Hall, a physician at Stratford, his chief legatee, he bequeaths tokens of friendship to various persons, among whom he does not include his wife, but mentions her afterward, in an interlineation, merely to leave to her his "second best bed." A similar piece of forgetfulness, repaired in the same manner, is remarkable in reference to Burbage, Heminge, and Condell, the only ones of his theatrical friends of whom he makes mention; to each of these he bequeaths, also in an interlineation, thirty-six shillings, "to buy them rings." Burbage, the best actor of his time, had contributed greatly to the success of Shakspeare's plays; Heminge and Condell, seven years after his death, published the first complete edition of his dramatic works.
This singular omission of the name of Shakspeare's wife, repaired in so slight a manner, probably indicates something more than forgetfulness; and we are tempted to regard it as the sign of an aversion or dislike, the manifestation of which the poet was induced to modify, in a slight degree, by the approach of death alone.