[7] Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 179.
[8] Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Letter to Elze, 1888.
[9] Cf. Documents and Sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99.
[10] The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant, 1897, has endeavoured to show that John Shakespeare was a puritan in religious matters, inclining to nonconformity. He deduces this inference from the fact that, at the period of his prominent association with the municipal government of Stratford, the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571). These entries merely prove that the aldermen and councillors of Stratford strictly conformed to the new religion as by law established in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign. Nothing can be deduced from them in regard to the private religious opinions of John Shakespeare. The circumstance that he was the first bailiff to encourage actors to visit Stratford is, on the other hand, conclusive proof that his religion was not that of the contemporary puritan, whose hostility to all forms of dramatic representations was one of his most persistent characteristics. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. infra, p. 187 seq.)
[12a] The sum is stated to be £4 in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and £40 in another (ib. p. 179); the latter is more likely to be correct.
[12b] Ib. ii. 238.
[12c] Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of Shakespeare’s father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of Master of the Shoemakers’ Company in 1592—a certain sign of pecuniary stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, 137-40).
[13] James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a Gracè et Latinè edition. I believe Lowell’s parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents—proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare’s part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as that with which Hamlet’s mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra, are the lines 1171-3:
Θνητου πέφυκας πατρος, Ήλέκτρα, φρονει·
Θνητος δ’ Ορέστης ωστε μη λίαν στένε.
Πασιν γαρ ημιν τουτ’ οφείλεται παθειν
(i.e. ‘Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal. Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us has this debt of suffering to be paid’). In Hamlet (I. ii. 72 sq.) are the familiar sentences: