His extraordinary flights of genius, his wondrous conceptions, she had no part in. She, indeed, could scarce understand them; and that which she could not comprehend she looked upon as the rhapsodizing of a boy. Even those beautiful descriptions, and the music of his honeyed vows, for Shakespeare, although married, was still a lover, were now listened to without the smile of appreciation. "Alas!" he said to himself, "maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives." In short, the youthful poet found that he had matched unhappily. There was little sympathy in feeling, although there might have been in choice; and so their loves passed
"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night."
They dwelt in Henley Street, in the house next to that in which the youth's parents inhabited; and he occasionally assisted his father in his business as a dealer in wool.
In Stratford, at this time, there was a knot of young fellows celebrated for little else beside their idleness, their wit, and their reckless daring. One or two of these were apprenticed to different trades in the town. One had made the voyage, and returned a reckless desperado, although a jovial and most amusing companion; another had served for a brief space in the Low Countries, "the land of pike and caliver," where finding hard knocks more plentiful than either pay or promotion, and his courage none of the greatest, he had deserted his colours, and returned home with a marvellous capacity for imbibing strong liquors, and relating wondrous stories of his own exploits whilst a soldier:—
"Of healths five fathom deep,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
And all the current of the heady fight."
With these youths young Shakespeare had before been in the habit of associating. Their eccentricity amused him; there was a kind of character in their lives which he loved to contemplate. Before his marriage he had loved however to indulge his thoughts a good deal alone, to wander and meditate amidst the delicious scenery in the neighbourhood. Now it was somewhat different, he had home and its duties to attend to, besides matters connected with his father's business, to keep him from so continually excursionizing as heretofore.
His meetings with these choice and master spirits, these jolly companions who "daffed the world aside, and bid it pass," were, therefore, for the most part, in after hours, and when the business of the day was over.
Besides these lads of mettle, there was another person whose company young Shakespeare had of late much affected, and in whose society he found a perfect fund of entertainment, a feeling which was quite mutual, as this friend was of a capacity as fully to appreciate the extraordinary talents and delightful society of the juvenile poet, as the latter was to enjoy the wit and humour of his entertainer.
This person, who was a resident at Stratford, although not a native there, was a most singular compound. He was possessed of some property in the town; but his expenditure was generally greater than his means warranted, and he was consequently obliged often to eke out his funds by laying his companions under contribution. He was ever in difficulties, and yet ever jovial, hospitable, and with his friends around him. His eccentricity, his wit, and his follies were a continual feast to young Shakespeare; his absurdities, and the scrapes he got into, a continual tax upon his intimates to get him respectably clear of. By the sober and puritanical of the townsfolk he was detested, for he made them the subject of his biting jests. By the respectable citizen he was feared as an intimate, for his tongue was a continual libel upon all his acquaintance. By the more light-hearted and careless, who laughed with him and at him, he was tolerated, and even sought after, for his amusing qualities.
In his person, the man was its singular as in his disposition—fat, and unwieldy in figure; he was upwards of six feet in height, with a round ruddy face, in which the laughing features were lost amidst the puffed-out cheeks and double chin—a sort of figure and face, which looked as if the owner had been fat and full of jollity at the time of his birth, and gone on increasing up to his present age.