Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, hungry Grafton,
Dudging Exhall, Popish Wickford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.
Hear them tell the story of Shakespeare’s crab-tree, how that the young poet was one of a party who accepted a challenge for a drinking bout from certain topers at Bidford, how that the hero became so overcome that when he started home he could proceed no further than the crab-tree, and so lay down there and sheltered for the night.[108] Hear, too, of ‘ye Falcon Tavern,’ close to the grammar school where the poet was almost certainly educated. And this is all that the present limit allows.
How died he? We turn to the pages of an inimitable diary, and read thus:
After this act (referring to the making of his will) we surmise the poet’s strength rallied, his friends probably heard of his illness, and crowded around him.... Then came Ben Jonson and Drayton, his chosen ones—they shared his inmost heart. In the city, on the stage, at good men’s feasts.... Their minds had been as one. Shakespeare was sick, and they came to cheer, to sooth, to sympathize with his sufferings. Animated and excited by their long-tried and much-loved society, as the sound of the trumpet rouses the spirit of the dying war-horse, their presence and voices made him forget the weakness that even then was bowing him to the very dust. He left his chamber, and perhaps quitted his bed to join the circle; we think we hear him, with musical voice, exclaim, ‘Sick now! droop now!’ We imagine we behold his pale face flushed with the brilliant animation of happiness, but not of health. We see his eyes flashing with the rays of genius, and sparkling with sentiments of unmingled pleasure. He is himself again, the terrors of death are passed away, the festive banquet is spread, and the warm grasp of friendly hands have driven the thick coming fancies from his lightened heart; he is the life of the party, the spirit of the feasts; but the exertion was far too great for his fragile frame, ‘the choice of death is rare,’ and the destroyer quitted not his splendid victim.[109]
So passed away William Shakespeare, whose influence cannot be better summed up than in the words of a very thoughtful writer:—
In all his works he is a witness ever ready to declare and expose the ruling sin of his day and generation. It is true that he sometimes found a picture gallery among the drunkards, used them in his artistic way, and made them extol the virtues of the thing that lowered them to what they were, the buffoons of his creation; but in his heart of hearts, as he would himself express it, he abhorred the thing, while he could not resist the acknowledgment of its fascination.
The same cannot be said of his friend, Ben Jonson, who, like so many of the dramatists of the period, as Marlowe, Greene, and Nash, was a notoriously free liver. His naturally passionate disposition, so unlike that of his famous friend, was rendered more hasty and vindictive by his addiction to drink. He goes near to condemn himself in his apostrophe ‘To Penshurst’:—
Whose liberal board doth flow
With all that hospitality doth know!
Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat
Without his fear, and of my lord’s own meat;
Where the same beer and bread, and self-same wine,
That is his lordship’s shall be also mine.
And I not fain to sit—as some this day
At great men’s tables—and yet dine away.
Here no man tells my cups.
To him canary was