Yes, the mind of the boy had been moulded by his mother, and a great deal of his just appreciation of women, and his delineations of the exquisite females he has drawn, are derived from the impressions she has given him.
As he reads from the thick volume, in which he learnt more accurately the facts, and date, of the history of his own country, he occasionally pauses to listen to his mother's song, to gaze up in her face, and to question her upon some point he has arrived at, and which he remembers to have heard her relate before.
Music and singing were much more cultivated (even amongst the humble classes) than in our own times, in England, and where indeed they are now scarcely cultivated at all. The sweet old songs "of the old age," are for the most part lost to us, they have departed with the quainter dwellings in which they were warbled.
In those days the strains which floated through the halls of the great, and the notes which were heard in the low-roofed apartments of the citizen, were calculated to soothe and quiet the passions of man. In our own times they are meant to arouse and excite—they are a whirl, a discordant noise. The lullabys which the mother chanted as she worked, were scraps of songs, great favourites at the time, and afterwards adapted from the recollection of the hearer in some of his works:
"Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,—
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again,—bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,—seal'd in vain."[2]
Not only the history of his own land, and which all ranks at this period were lamentably ignorant in, did the youthful Shakespeare receive the rudiments of from his mother; but she loved to amuse him with those stories of romance she had learned from her own parents, and which had been handed down from the chivalric ages, when the female of high degree was the teacher of youth. The great lady—"of exalted rank and inaccessible,"—who cultivates the mind of the youthful page—a mother, a sister, a guardian angel, and yet of such high degree, that she seems (in the austerity of her counsels, and the difficulties to be overcome, ere her favour can be gained) too great even to receive the adoration of him whose service costs so many sighs. Till in the end, as the accomplished knight is produced, the incarnation of merit and grace all fades away before the powerful god.
The youth achieves greatness, and becomes lord of that beautiful lady, her dark castle, and her broad domain, "with shadowy forests, and with champions rich."