Equally silly is their talk about the dirty streets of Stratford. They seem to have just discovered that Elizabeth's England was a badly drained country, with heaps of garbage in the streets. Shakespeare's father, they tell us, was a butcher, and evidently from a butcher's son, living in an ill-swept town, and careless about the spelling of his name, not much in the way of intellectual achievement was to be expected! In point of fact, Shakespeare's parents belonged to the middle class. His father owned several houses in Stratford and two or three farms in the neighbourhood. As a farmer in those days, he would naturally have cattle slaughtered on his premises and would sell wool off the backs of his own flocks, whence the later tradition of his having been butcher and wool dealer. That his social position was good is shown by the facts that he was chief alderman and high bailiff of Stratford, and justice of the peace, and was styled "Master John Shakespeare," or (as we should say) "Mr.;" whereas, had he been one of the common folk, his style had been "Goodman Shakespeare." A visit to his home in Henley Street, and to Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery, shows that the two families were in eminently respectable circumstances. The son of the high bailiff would see the best people in the neighbourhood. There was in the town a remarkably good free grammar school, where he might have learned the "small Latin and less Greek" which his friend Ben Jonson assures us he possessed. This expression, by the way, is usually misunderstood, because people do not pause to consider it. Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say that "small Latin and less Greek" might fairly describe the amount of those languages ordinarily possessed by a member of the graduating class at Harvard in good standing. It can hardly imply less than the ability to read Terence at sight, and perhaps Euripides less fluently. The author of the plays, with his unerring accuracy of observation, knows Latin enough at least to use the Latin part of English most skilfully; at the same time, when he has occasion to use Greek authors, such as Homer or Plutarch, he usually prefers an English translation. At all events, Jonson's remark informs us that the man whom he addresses as "sweet swan of Avon" knew some Latin and some Greek,—a conclusion which is so distasteful to one of our Baconizers, Mr. Edwin Reed, that he will not admit it. Rather than do so, he has the assurance to ask us to believe that by the epithet "sweet swan of Avon" Jonson really meant Francis Bacon! Dear me, Mr. Reed, do you really mean it? And how about the editor of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, when, in his dedication to Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Pembroke, he speaks of "Sweet Swan of Avon Shakespear"? Was he too a participator in the little scheme for fooling posterity? Or was he one of those who were fooled?
Whether Shakespeare had other chances for book-lore than those which the grammar school afforded, whether there was any interesting parson at hand, as often in small towns, to guide and stimulate his unfolding thoughts,—upon such points we have no information. But there were things to be learned in the country town quite outside of books and pedagogues. There, while the poet listened to the "strain of strutting chanticleer," and watched the "sun-burn'd sicklemen, of August weary," putting on their rye-straw hats and making holiday with rustic nymphs, he could rejoice in
"Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines with clust'ring bunches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;"
there he could see the "unbacked colts" prick their ears, advance their eyelids, lift up their noses, as if they smelt music; there he knew, doubtless, many a bank where the wild thyme grew and on which the moonlight sweetly slept; there he watched the coming of "violets dim," "pale primroses," flower-de-luce, carnations, with "rosemary and rue" to keep their "savour all the winter long,"
"When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail."
Such lore as this no books or college could impart.
It was this that Milton had in mind when he introduced Shakespeare and Ben Jonson into his poem "L'Allegro." Milton was in his thirtieth year when Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey; he was only a boy of eight years when Shakespeare died, but the beautiful sonnet written fourteen years later shows how lovingly he studied his works:—
"What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones," etc.
The poem "L'Allegro" and its fellow "Il Penseroso" describe the delights of Milton's life at his father's country house near Windsor Castle. He used often to ride into London to hear music or pass an evening at the theatre, as in the following lines:—
"Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild."