THREE AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES WRITTEN BY SHAKESPEARE ON THREE SHEETS OF HIS WILL
From the document now at Somerset House, London
Our knowledge of Shakespeare's personal appearance is also far from being definite. The bust on the monument in the church at Stratford was cut apparently before 1623 by a Dutch stone cutter called Gerard Janssen. It was originally colored; probably the eyes light hazel, and the hair auburn. Its crude workmanship renders it unreliable as a likeness. The frontispiece to the First Folio was engraved for that work by Martin Droeshout, who was only twenty-two years old at the time, so that he is more likely to have made it from a portrait than from memory. No portrait has been found that seems actually to have served this purpose, though there are resemblances between the engraving and the portrait, dated 1609, presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford by Mrs. Charles Flower. The numerous other portraits that have been claimed as likenesses of the dramatist have varying degrees of probability, but none has a pedigree without a flaw. Those with most claim to interest are the Ely Palace portrait, the Chandos portrait, the Garrick Club bust, and the Kesselstadt death-mask.[2]
Such is the very considerable body of authenticated facts about the life of Shakespeare. Lacking though they are in intimate and personal touches, they can hardly be said to leave the main outlines of his career shadowy or mysterious. But they do not by any means exhaust the data at our disposal for forming an impression of the poet's personality. A large mass of tradition, of less than legal validity but much of it of a high degree of probability, has come down to us, the sources of which may now be detailed.
In the seventeenth century we have several biographical and critical collections in which Shakespeare figures, the most important being these: Fuller's Worthies of England (1662), Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Men (compiled 1669-1696), Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum (1675), and Langbaine's English Dramatic Poets (1691). The two last are for strictly biographical purposes negligible, though interesting as early criticism. Fuller began his work in 1643, so that he may be supposed to have had access to oral tradition from men who actually knew Shakespeare. He gives few facts, but some hints as to temperament. "Though his Sources of Traditionsgenius generally was jocular and inclining him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed, be solemn and serious.... Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war; master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow, in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."
Among the actors who, with Shakespeare, took part in the first production of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour was Christopher Beeston, who when he died in 1637 was manager of the Cockpit Theater in Drury Lane. He was succeeded in this office by his son William, who became in his old age the revered transmitter to Restoration players and playwrights of the traditions of the great age in which he had spent his youth. From him, and from another actor of the same period, John Lacy, as well as from other sources, the antiquary John Aubrey collected fragments of gossip for his lives of the English poets. According to Aubrey's notes, confused and unequal in value, Shakespeare "did act exceeding well"; "understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country"; "was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." It is Aubrey, too, that reports that John Shakespeare was a butcher, and he adds, "I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade.... When he killed a calf, he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall wit, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young." The same writer is authority for the statement that it was at Grendon, near Oxford, on the road from Stratford to London, that the dramatist "happened to take the humour of the constable in Midsummer Night's Dream"—a remark that may refer loosely either to Bottom and his friends, or to Dogberry and Verges. He also ascribes to the poet an apocryphal epigram on a Stratford usurer, John Combe.