The Shakespeare Monument in the Parish Church, Stratford-on-Avon.

THE FACTS ABOUT
SHAKESPEARE

BY

WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

AND

ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE, Ph.D., L.H.D.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1927

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1913,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1913. Reprinted April, 1914; July, 1915; May, November, 1916; January, 1918; February, September, 1920; September, 1921; March, 1922; February, December, 1923; October, 1924; June, 1926; January, December, 1927.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE BERWICK & SMITH CO.

Transcriber's Notes

Unique page headings have been retained and displayed in the left-hand margin.

Many spelling inconsistencies exist due to the historical period of the quoted sources. These, in addition to the original punctuation, have been retained.

Obvious typesetting errors have been corrected and noted in the [Transcriber's Endnotes] at the end of the text.

Some index entries have been re-sequenced to allow for clarity of sub-entries. These changes are recorded in the [Transcriber's Endnotes] along with a copy of the original text.

Contents

THE FACTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

The Facts about Shakespeare

CHAPTER I

Shakespeare's England and London

Shakespeare lived in a period of change. In religion, politics, literature, and commerce, in the habits of daily living, in the world of ideas, his lifetime witnessed continual change and movement. When Elizabeth came to the throne, six years before he was born, England was still largely Catholic, as it had been for nine centuries; when she died England was Protestant, and by the date of Shakespeare's death it was well on the way to becoming Puritan. The Protestant Reformation had worked nearly its full course of revolution in ideas, habits, and beliefs. The authority of the church had been replaced by that of the Bible, of the English Bible, superbly translated by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Within his lifetime, again, England had attained a national unity and an international importance heretofore unknown. The Spanish Armada had been defeated, the kingdoms of England and Scotland united, and the first colony established in America. Even more revolutionary had been the assertion of national greatness in literature and thought. The Italian Renaissance, following the rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature, had extended its influence to England early in the century, but only after the accession of Elizabeth did it bring full harvest. The names that crowd the next fifty years represent fine native endowments, boundless aspiration, and also novelty,—as Spenser in poetry, Bacon in philosophy, Hooker in theology. In commerce as well as in letters there was this same activity and innovation. It was a time of commercial prosperity, of increase in comfort and luxury, of the growth of a powerful commercial class, of large fortunes and large benefactions. Whatever your status, your birth, trade, profession, residence, religion, education, or property, in the year 1564 you had a better chance to change these than any of your ancestors had; and there was more chance than there had ever been that your son would improve his inheritance. The individual man had long been boxed up in guild, church, or the feudal system; now the covers were opened, and the new opportunity bred daring, initiative, and ambition. The exploits of the Elizabethan sea rovers still stir us with the thrill of adventure; but adventure and vicissitude were hardly less the share of merchant, priest, poet, or politician. The individual has had no such opportunity for fame in England before or since. Tudor EnglandThe nineteenth century, which saw the industrial revolution, the triumphs of steam and electricity, and the discoveries of natural science, is the only period that equalled the Elizabethan in the rapidity of its changes in ideas and in the conditions of living; and even that era of change offered relatively fewer new impulses to individual greatness than the fifty years of Shakespeare's life.

Shakespeare's England was an agricultural country of four or five million inhabitants. It fed itself, except when poor harvests compelled the importation of grain, and it supplemented agriculture by grazing, fishing, and commerce, chiefly with the Netherlands, but growing in many directions. The forests were becoming thin, but the houses were still of timber; the roads were poor, the large towns mostly seaports. The dialects spoken were various, but the speech of the midland counties had become established in London, at the universities, and in printed books, and was rapidly increasing its dominance. The monasteries and religious orders were gone, but feudalism still held sway, and the people were divided into classes,—the various ranks of the nobility, the gentry, the yeomen, the burgesses, and the common people. But changes from one class to another were numerous; for many lords were losing their inheritances by extravagance, while many business men were putting their profits into land. In spite of persecutions, occasional insurrections, and the plague which devastated the unsanitary towns, it was a time of peace and prosperity. The coinage was reformed, roads were improved, taxes were not burdensome, and life in the country was more comfortable and secure than it had been. Books and education were spreading. Numerous grammar schools taught Latin, the universities made provision for poor students, and there were now many careers besides that of the church open to the educated man.

Stratford, then a village of some two thousand inhabitants, somewhat off the main route of traffic, was far more removed from the world than most towns of similar size in this day of railways, newspapers, and the telegraph. With the nearby country, it made up an independent community that attended to its own affairs with great thoroughness. The corporation, itself the outgrowth of a medieval religious guild, regulated the affairs of every one with little regard for personal liberty. It was especially severe on rebellious servants, idle apprentices, shrewish women, the pigs that ran loose in the streets, and (after 1605) persons guilty of profanity. Regular church attendance and fixed hours of work were required. The corporation frequently punished with fines (the poet's father on one occasion) those who did not clean the street before their houses; and it was much occupied in regulating the ale-houses, of which the village possessed some thirty. Like all towns of this period, Stratford suffered frequently from fire and the plague. Trade was dependent mainly on the weekly markets and semi-annual fairs, Sports and Playsand Stratford was by no means isolated, being not far from the great market town of Coventry, near Kenilworth and Warwick, and only eighty miles from London.

Shakespeare's England was merry England. At least, it was probably as near to deserving that adjective as at any time before or since. There was plenty of time for amusement. There were public bowling-greens and archery butts in Stratford, though the corporation was very strict in regard to the hours when these could be used. Every one enjoyed hunting, hawking, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, dancing, until the Puritans found such enjoyments immoral. The youthful Shakespeare acquired an intimate knowledge of dogs and horses, hunting and falconry, though this was a gentleman's sport. The highways were full of ballad singers, beggars, acrobats, and wandering players. Play-acting of one kind or another had long been common over most of rural England. Miracle plays were given at Coventry up to 1580, and bands of professional actors came to Stratford frequently, and on their first recorded appearance received their permission to act from the bailiff, John Shakespeare (1568-1569). There was many a Holofernes or Bottom to marshal his pupils or fellow-mechanics for an amateur performance; and Shakespeare may have seen the most famous of the royal entertainments, that at Kenilworth in 1575, when Gascoigne recited poetry, and Leicester, impersonating Deep Desire, addressed Elizabeth from a bush, and a minstrel represented Arion on a dolphin's back. The tradition may be right which declares that it was the trumpets of the comedians that summoned Shakespeare to London.

In the main, life in the country was not so very different from what it is now in the remoter places. Many a secluded English village, as recently as fifty years ago, jogged on much as in the sixteenth century. Opportunity then as now dwelt mostly in the cities, but the city of the sixteenth century bore slight resemblance to a city of to-day.

London, with less than 200,000 inhabitants, was still a medieval city in appearance, surrounded by a defensive wall, guarded by the Tower, and crowned by the cathedral. The city proper lay on the north of the Thames, and the wall made a semicircle of some two miles, from the Tower on the east to the Fleet ditch and Blackfriars on the west. Seven gates pierced the wall to the north, and the roads passing through them into the fields were lined with houses. Westward along the river were great palaces, behind which the building was practically continuous along the muddy road that led to the separate city of Westminster. The Thames, noted for its fish and swans, was the great thoroughfare, crowded with many kinds of boats and spanned by the famous London Bridge. By one of the many rowboats that carried passengers hither and thither, or on foot over the arches of the bridge, between the rows of houses that lined it, and under the Tudor Londonheads of criminals which decorated its entrance, you might cross the Thames to Southwark. Turning west, past St. Saviour's and the palace of the Bishop of Winchester, you were soon on the Bankside, a locality long given over to houses of ill fame and rings for the baiting of bulls and bears. The theaters, forbidden in the city proper, were built either in the fields to the north of the walls, or across the river close by the kennels and rings. Here, as Shakespeare waited for a boatman to ferry him across to Blackfriars, the whole city was spread before his eyes, in the foreground the panorama of the beautiful river, beyond it the crowded houses, the spires of many churches, and the great tower of old St. Paul's.

It was a city of narrow streets, open sewers, wooden houses, without an adequate water supply or sanitation, in constant danger from fire and plague. But dirt and disease were no more prevalent than they had been for centuries; in spite of them, there was no lack of life in the crowded lanes. The great palaces were outside the city proper, and there were few notable buildings within its precincts except the churches. The dismantled monasteries still occupied large areas, but were being made over to strange uses, the theaters eventually finding a place in Blackfriars and Whitefriars. The Strand was an ill-paved street running behind the river palaces, past the village of Charing Cross, on to the royal palace of Whitehall and to the Abbey and Hall at Westminster. The walls and surrounding moat had ceased to be of use for defense, and building constantly spread into the fields without. These fields were favorite places for recreation and served the purpose of city parks. The Elizabethans were fond of outdoor sports and spent little daytime indoors. The shops were open to the street, and the clear spaces at Cheapside and St. Paul's Church-yard seem to have been always crowded. St. Paul's, although still used for religious services, had become a sort of city club or general meeting place. Mules and horses were no longer to be found there as in the reign of Mary, but the nave was in constant use as a place for gossip and business. The churchyard was the usual place for holding lotteries, and here were the shops of a majority of the London booksellers. In its northeast corner was Paul's Cross, the famous pulpit whence the wishes of the government were announced and popularized by the Sunday preachers. And here the variety of London life was most fully exhibited. The processions and entertainments at court, the ambassadors from afar, the law students from the Temple, the old soldiers destitute after service in Flanders, the seamen returned from plundering the Spanish gold fleet, the youths from the university come to the city to earn their living by their wits, the bishop and the puritan, who looked at each other askance, the young squire come to be gulled of his lands by the roarers of the tavern, the solid merchant with his chain of gold, the wives who aped the court ladies with their enormous farthingales Commercial Prosperityand ruffs, the court gallant with his dyed beard and huge breeches, the idle apprentices quick to riot, the poor poets in prison for debt—these and how many more are familiar to every reader of the Elizabethan drama. As often in periods of commercial prosperity, luxury became fantastic. Men sold their acres to put costly garments on their backs. Clothing was absurd and ran to extreme sizes of ruffs, farthingales, and breeches, or to gaudy colors and jewels. Enormous sums were spent on feasts, entertainments, and masques, especially in the reign of James I. Cleanliness did not thrive, perfumes took the place of baths, and rushes, seldom renewed, covered the floor even of the presence chamber of Elizabeth. But the comforts and luxuries of life increased and spread to all classes. Tobacco, potatoes, and forks were first introduced in Shakespeare's time. Building improved, streets were widened, and coaches became so common as to excite much animadversion and complaint. If some poets spent much time in the debtors' prison, others lived well, and some actors gained large fortunes.

The industrious apprentice who refused the allurements of pageants, theaters, tailors, and taverns, was sure to have his reward. It was a time of commercial expansion, such as the last generation has witnessed in Germany and the United States. Bankers, brokers, and merchants gained great fortunes and managed to protect them. Industry, thrift, and shrewdness were likely to win enough to buy a knighthood. The trade of the old East and the new West came to the London wharves, and every one was ready to take a risk. The merchants of London had furnished support to the policies of Henry VIII and were rich enough to fit out the expedition against Flanders and to pay for a third of the fleet that met the Armada. It was a time, too, for great enterprises and benefactions to charity. Sir Thomas Gresham built the Exchange, Sir Hugh Middleton paid for the New River water supply, and there were many gifts to hospitals. With all this increase in wealth, the various professions prospered, especially that of law. The inns of court were crowded with students, not a few of whom forsook the courts for the drama. The age of chivalry was over, that of commerce begun. No one gained much glory by a military career in the days of Elizabeth. The church, the law, banking, commerce, even politics and literature, offered better roads to wealth or fame.

The importance of the court in Elizabethan London is not easy to realize to-day. It dominated the life of the small city. Its nobles and their retainers, its courtiers and hangers-on, made up a considerable portion of the population; its shows supplied the entertainment, its gossip the politics of the hour. It was the seat of pageantry, the mirror of manners, the patron or the oppressor of every one. No one could be so humble as to escape coming somehow within its sway, and some of the greatest wrecked their lives in efforts to secure its approval. It is no wonder that the plays of The City and the CourtShakespeare deal so largely with kings, queens, and their courts. Under the Tudors, and still more under the Stuarts, the court aimed at increasing the central authority so as to bring every affair of its subjects under its direct control. In London, however, this effort at centralization met with strong opposition. The government was in the hands of the guilds representative of the wealth of the city, and was coming face to face with many of the problems of modern municipalities. The corporation was in constant clash with the court; and in the end the city, which had supported Henry VIII and Elizabeth against powerful nobles, became the Puritan London that aided in ousting the Stuarts.

This conflict between city and court is illustrated in the regulation of the theaters and companies of actors. The actors had a legal status only as the license of some nobleman enrolled them as his servants, and they relied on the protection of their patron and the court against the opposition of the city authorities. The fact that they were employed to give plays before the Queen was, indeed, about the only argument that won any consideration from the corporation. This opposition was based in part on moral or puritan grounds, but was determined still more by the fear of three menaces, fire, sedition, and the plague. Wooden buildings were already discouraged by statute, and the danger of fire from the wooden theaters is shown by the burning of the Globe and the Fortune. The gathering of crowds was feared by every property holder, and the theaters were frequently the scenes of outbreaks of the apprentices. The danger of the plague from the crowd at plays was the greatest of all. London was hardly ever free from it, and suffered terrible devastation in the years 1593 and 1603. For these reasons the theaters were forbidden within the city's jurisdiction, and were driven into the outskirts. The best companies appeared frequently at court, and on the accession of James I they were licensed directly as servants of various members of the royal family. The actors were thereafter under the immediate control of the court, and certain "private" theaters were established within the city. But this triumph of the court over the long opposition of the city was not an unmixed blessing for the drama.

The theaters in 1590 represented the public on which they depended for support; by 1616 they were far less representative of the nation or London, and more dependent on the court and its following. The Blackfriars theater, before which gathered the crowd of coaches that annoyed the puritans of the neighborhood, was a symptom of the growth of wealth and luxury, and of the increased power of the monarchy; the protests of the puritan neighborhood were an indication of the growth of a large class hostile alike to an arbitrary court, luxury, and the theater.

Shakespeare's lifetime, however, saw little of this sharp division into parties or of that narrow moral Elizabethan Incongruitiesconsistency which Puritanism came to require. Looking back on his age in contrast with our own, we are perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets—Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson—and of these, only Spenser and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and moral grandeur.

The Italian Renaissance, with its mingled passions for beauty, art, blood, lust, and intellect, seems for a time transferred to London and dwelling alongside of commerce and Puritanism. Yet these incongruities of character, manners, and motives that seem so striking to us to-day may probably be explained by conditions already described. The opportunities created by the changes in church and religion, the new education and prosperity, the new America, and the revived classics, all tended to create a new thirst for experience. This thirst for experience led to excess and incongruity, but it also furnished an unparalleled range of human motive for a poet's observation and imitation.

In the wide range of our poet's survey, there is, however, one notable omission. The reign of Elizabeth, like those of her three predecessors, was one of religious controversy, change, and persecution. But all this strife, all this debate, repression, persecution, and all of this great turmoil working in the minds of Englishmen, find little reflection in Shakespeare's plays, and little in the whole Elizabethan drama. Religious controversy had played a part in the drama of the reign of Edward and Mary, but it rarely enters the Elizabethan drama, and then mainly in the form of ridicule for the puritan. Shakespeare's plays seem almost to ignore the most momentous facts of his time. They treat pagan, Catholic, and Protestant with cordiality and only smile at the puritan or Brownist. His England of the merry wives or Falstaff's justices seems strangely untroubled by questions of faith or ritual. There is, to be sure, plenty of religion and controversy in the literature of the time, but the drama as a whole is An Age of Freedomsingularly non-religious. It reflects rather that freedom from restraint, that buoyancy of spirit, that lively interest in experience, which had their full course in the few years when the old garment was off and the new not quite fitted. The immense intellectual and imaginative activity of the period consists precisely in this freedom from restrictions, partisanship, dogmas, or caste. Things had lost their labels and some time and argument were required to find new ones. Ideas were free and not bound to any school, party, or cause. You grasped an idea without knowing whether it made you realist, romanticist, or classicist; papist, puritan, or pagan. After centuries of imprisonment, individuality had its full chance in the world of ideas as elsewhere.

In a few years this was all over, and your sphere of life and the ideas proper to that sphere were prescribed for you. By another century, England had fought out the issues of creed and government with expense of blood and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of 1688. In Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom from ancient precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama found its panorama of novel and varied experience making and marring character.

Shakespeare lived peaceably in the heyday of this change, nearly of an age with Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe. Like Marlowe in the soliloquies of Barabbas and Faust, he recognized the new possibilities that the age opened through money or ideas. He made much out of the commercial prosperity of the day, gained such profits as were possible from his profession, raised his estate, and acquired wealth. He gave his mind not to any cause or party but to the study of men. The drunkards of the London inn, the yokels of Warwickshire, and the finest gentlewomen of the land alike came under the scrutiny of the creator of Falstaff, Dogberry, and Rosalind. And like his great contemporaries, he triumphed over incongruities, for he translated his studies of the human mind into verse of immortal beauty that yet delighted the public stage which was located halfway between the bear dens and the brothels.

CHAPTER II

Biographical Facts and Traditions

In the time of Shakespeare, the fashion of writing lives of men of letters had not yet arisen. The art of biography could hardly be said to be even in its infancy, for the most notable early examples, such as the lives of Wolsey by Cavendish and of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law in the sixteenth century, and Walton's handful in the seventeenth, are far from what the present age regards as scientific biography. The preservation of official records makes it possible for the modern scholar to reconstruct with considerable fullness the careers of public men; but in the case of Shakespeare, as of others of his profession, we must needs be content with a few scrappy documents, supplemented by oral traditions of varying degrees of authenticity. About Shakespeare himself it must be allowed that we have been able to learn more than about most of his fellow dramatists and actors.

In a matter which has been the subject of so much controversy, it may be an aid to clearness if the facts established by contemporary documents be first related, and the less trustworthy reports added later. The first indubitable item is trivial and unsavory enough. In April, 1552, a certain John Shakespeare, residing in Henley Street, Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, was fined twelvepence for failing to remove a heap of filth from before his door. This John, who shared his surname with a multitude of other Shakespeares in the England and especially in the Warwickshire of his time, appears, without reasonable doubt, to have been the father of the poet. He is described in later tradition as a glover and as a butcher; the truth seems to be that he did a miscellaneous business in farm products. For twenty years or more after this first record he prospered, rising through various petty municipal offices to the position of bailiff, or mayor, of the town in 1568. His fortunes must have been notably improved by his marriage, for the Mary Arden whom he wedded in 1557 was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, Robert Arden, who bequeathed her £6 13s. 4d. in money and a house with fifty acres of land.

To John and Mary Shakespeare was born a son William, whose baptism was registered in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford on April 26, 1564. He was their eldest son, two daughters previously born being already dead. Their other children were Gilbert, Joan, Anna, Richard, and Edmund. The precise day of William's birth is unknown. The monument over his grave states that at his death on April 23, 1616, he was "Ætatis 53," which would seem to indicate that he must have been born at least as early as April 22; and, since in those days baptism usually took place Marriagewithin a very few days of birth, there is no reason for pushing the date farther back.

Of the education of the poet we have no record. Stratford had a free grammar school, to which such a boy as the bailiff's son would be sure to be sent; and the inference that William Shakespeare was a pupil there and studied the usual Latin authors is entirely reasonable. About 1577 his father began to get into financial difficulties, and it is reported that about this time the boy was withdrawn from school to help in his father's business. We know nothing certainly, however, until we learn from the registry of the Bishop of Worcester that on November 28, 1582, two husbandmen of Stratford gave bonds "to defend and save harmless" the bishop and his officers for licensing the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Of the actual marriage there is no record. Anne is probably to be identified with Agnes or Anne, the daughter of Richard Hathaway of the neighboring hamlet of Shottery, who had died in the previous July, and had owned the house of which a part still survives and is shown to visitors as "Anne Hathaway's cottage." The date on Anne's tombstone indicates that she was eight years older than the poet.

A comparison of the bond just mentioned with other documents of the kind indicates it to be exceptional in the absence of any mention of consent by the bridegroom's parents, a circumstance rendered still more remarkable by the fact that he was a minor. The bondsmen were from Shottery, and this, along with the considerations already advanced, has naturally led to the inference that the marriage was hurried by the bride's friends, and to the finding of a motive for their haste in the birth within six months of "Susanna, daughter to William Shakespere," who was baptized on May 26, 1583.

The record of the baptism of Shakespeare's only other children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, in February, 1585, practically exhausts the documentary evidence concerning the poet in Stratford until 1596. It is conjectured, but not known, that about 1586 he found his way to London and soon became connected with the theater, according to one tradition, as call-boy, to another, as holder of the horses of theatergoers. But by 1592 we are assured that he had entered the ranks of the playwrights, and had achieved enough success to rouse the jealous resentment of a rival. Robert Greene, who died on the third of September in that year, left unpublished a pamphlet, Greenes Groatsworth of Witte: bought with a Million of Repentaunce, in which he warned three of his fellows against certain plagiarists, "those puppits, I meane, that speake from our mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours." "Yes, trust them not," he goes on; "for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is "The only Shake-scene"in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrie. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions! I know the best husband of you all will never prove an usurer, and the kindest of them all wil never proove a kinde nurse; yet, whilst you may, seeke you better maisters, for it is pittie men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes." The phrase about the "tyger's heart" is an obvious parody on the line,

Oh Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide!

which occurs both in The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and in the variant of that play which is included in the First Folio as the third part of Henry VI. "The only Shake-scene" has naturally been taken as an allusion to Shakespeare's name; and it is scarcely possible to doubt the reference to him throughout the passage. This being so, we may infer that by this date Shakespeare had written, with whatever else, his share in the three parts of Henry VI, and was successful enough to seem formidable to the dying Greene. It is noteworthy, too, that thus early we have allusion to his double profession: as an actor in the words "player's hide" and "Shake-scene," and as an author in the charge of plagiarism. That the reference in "beautified with our feathers" is to literary plagiarism is confirmed by the following lines from Greene's Funeralls, by R. B., 1594, which seem to have been suggested by Greene's phrase:

Greene is the ground of everie painters die;
Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him.
Nay, more, the men that so eclipst his fame,
Purloynde his plumes: can they deny the same?

Somewhat less certain is the allusion in a document closely connected with the foregoing. Greenes Groatsworth had been prepared for the press by his friend Henry Chettle, and in the address "To the Gentlemen Readers" prefixed to his Kind-Harts Dreame (registered December 8, 1592), Chettle regrets that he has not struck out from Greene's book the passages that have been "offensively by one or two of them taken." "With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be. The other, whome at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my owne discretion,—especially in such a case, the Author beeing dead,—that I did not, I am as sory, as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civill, than he exelent in the qualitie[1] he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that First Publicationsaprooves his Art." This characterization so well fits in with the tone of later contemporary allusions to Shakespeare that it is regrettable that Chettle did not make its reference to him beyond a doubt.

Within a few months after the disturbance caused by Greene's charges, Shakespeare appeared in the field of authorship in quite unambiguous fashion. On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, himself a Stratford man, entered at Stationers' Hall a book entitled Venus and Adonis. The dedication, which is to the Earl of Southampton, is signed by "William Shakespeare," and the state of the text confirms the inference that the poet himself oversaw the publication. The terms of the dedication, read in the light of contemporary examples of this kind of writing, do not imply any close relation between poet and patron; and the phrase "the first heyre of my invention," applied to the poem, need not be taken as placing its composition earlier than any of the plays, since writing for the stage was then scarcely regarded as practising the art of letters. Lucrece was registered May 9, 1594, and appeared likewise without a name on the title-page, but with Shakespeare's full signature attached to a dedication, somewhat more warmly personal than before, to the same nobleman. The frequency of complimentary references to these poems, and the number of editions issued during the poet's lifetime (seven of Venus, and five of Lucrece), indicate that it was through them that he first obtained literary distinction.

Meanwhile he was gaining a footing as an actor. The accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber for March 15, 1594-5, bear record of Shakespeare's having been summoned, along with Kempe and Burbage, as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Company, to present two comedies before the Queen at Greenwich Palace in the Christmas season of 1594. This is the earliest mention of the poet as sharing with his company a kind of recognition as honorable as it was profitable.

The records now take us back to his family. On August 11, 1596, his only son Hamnet was buried. In the same year John Shakespeare applied to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms, basing the claim on services of his ancestors to Henry VII, the continued good reputation of the family, and John's marriage to "Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, gent." Since there is evidence to show that the financial difficulties that had beset John Shakespeare before his son went to London had continued, and since the attempts of actors to obtain gentility by grants of arms were not uncommon, it is likely that the poet was the moving force in this matter. Though a draft granting this request was drawn up, it was not executed; but in 1599 a renewed application was successful, the heralds giving an exemplification of the coat which the applicants claimed had been assigned them in 1568, "Gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, The Purchase of New Placesupporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid." The motto is "Non Sans Droit." These arms appear on the monument over Shakespeare's grave in Trinity Church in Stratford, and, impaled with the Hall arms, on the tombstone of his daughter Susanna and her husband John Hall.

A more substantial step towards restoring the standing of the family was taken when the poet bought on May 4, 1597, for sixty pounds, New Place, the largest house in Stratford. This was only the beginning of a considerable series of investments of the profits of his professional life in landed and other property in his native district. On his father's death in 1601 he inherited the two houses in Henley Street, the only real property of which the elder Shakespeare had retained possession; and in one of these the poet's mother lived until her death in 1608. About a hundred and seven acres of arable land with common pasture appertaining to it was conveyed to the poet on May 1, 1602, by William and John Combe, of Warwick and Old Stratford respectively, in consideration of £320; and twenty acres of pasture land were acquired from the same owners in 1610. On September 28, 1602, the Court Rolls of the Manor of Rowington record the transfer to Shakespeare from Walter Getley of a cottage and garden in Chapel Lane, Stratford. In 1605 he paid £440 for the thirty-one years remaining of a lease of the Stratford tithes, a purchase which involved him in a considerable amount of litigation. It was through this acquisition that he became involved in the dispute over the attempted inclosure of certain common fields belonging to the town of Stratford. John Combe, who died in July, 1614, bequeathing Shakespeare £5, left as heir a son, William, who with Arthur Mannering, sought to annex to their respective estates the aforesaid common lands. After having secured a deed safeguarding himself as part owner of the tithes from any loss that might result from the inclosure, Shakespeare seems to have lent his influence to Combe, in spite of the requests of the corporation for aid. The inclosure was not carried out.

His investments were not confined to his native county. A deed of sale has come down to us concerning the purchase of a house near the Blackfriars Theater in London, in March, 1613. The price was £140; but on the following day, March 11, Shakespeare gave the previous owner, Henry Walker, a mortgage deed for £60, which he never seems to have paid off. There is evidence of his ownership of other property in Blackfriars in three documents, recently discovered by Professor C. W. Wallace, dealing with a suit in Chancery, and dated April 26, May 15, and May 22, 1615, in which Shakespeare and others sought to obtain from one Matthew Bacon possession of certain deeds pertaining to their property within the precinct of Blackfriars.

Other traces of Shakespeare's business transactions suggest that he was by no means averse to going to law. After his resumption of relations with Stratford in Litigation1596, we find his parents engaged (November, 1597) in a lawsuit, the outcome of which does not appear to recover the mortgaged estate of Asbies, which had formed part of his mother's inheritance. The years 1600, 1604, 1608, and 1609 all contain records of suits by the poet to recover small sums of money; and, on the other hand, we find tax collectors in London seeking payment of taxes incurred on his goods while he lived in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopgate, in 1593 or 1594. These claims Shakespeare satisfied some years later when he was living across the river in Southwark. The documents of a law case of 1612, recently discovered by Professor C. W. Wallace in the Public Record office, include Shakespeare's deposition as a witness and add some interesting information. It appears that, possibly from 1598 to 1604, he lodged in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a wigmaker, at the corner of Muggle and Silver streets near Cripplegate. In 1604 he had aided in arranging the marriage of Mary Mountjoy to her father's apprentice, Stephen Bellott. The lawsuit was brought by Bellott against his father-in-law to secure the dowry and promise of inheritance. Shakespeare's negotiations in regard to the marriage play an important part in the various depositions, as the question whether a dowry of £50 had been promised was crucial to the case. Shakespeare himself was examined on September 11, but the poet failed to remember that a definite sum had been agreed upon for the dowry.

Further evidence relating to Shakespeare as a man of substance is to be found in letters in the Stratford archives, written by prominent townsmen. One, from Abraham Sturley to a relative in London on the business of the town of Stratford, dated January 24, 1597-8, contains a reference to "Mr. Shaksper" as "willing to disburse some money upon some odd yard-land or other at Shottery or near about us," and suggests urging upon Shakespeare the purchase of the tithes. It seems fairly certain from other letters of Sturley's that this one was addressed to Richard Quiney, father of Shakespeare's future son-in-law, Thomas Quiney. On October 25 of the same year, this Richard Quiney wrote from the Bell in Carter Lane, London, "to my loving friend and countryman, Mr. Wm. Shackespere," asking for his help with £30. From a letter from Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney on the following fourth of November it appears that Quiney was seeking an enlargement of the charter of Stratford, with a view to an increase of revenue. In Sturley's previous letter reference had been made to an attempt to gain "an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsidies wherewith our town is like to be charged, and I assure you I am in great fear and doubt by no means able to pay." In this extreme condition of affairs Sturley heard with satisfaction "that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us money, which I will like of as I shall here when, and where, and how; and I pray let not go that occasion if it may sort to any Professional Progressindifferent conditions." The poet is probably referred to in still another letter, of about the same period, to Richard Quiney, this time from his father Adrian: "If you bargain with Wm. Sha., or receive money therefor, bring your money home that you may." All of these documents carry the unmistakable implication that William Shakespeare in London was regarded by his fellow-townsmen as a person of resources, likely to be of service to his friends in financial stress.

If we return now to the evidences of Shakespeare's professional progress, we shall see whence these resources were derived. Confining ourselves still to explicit and unambiguous records, we find the year 1598 marking Shakespeare's emergence as actor and dramatist into a somewhat opener publicity. The quarto editions of Richard II and Love's Labour's Lost, issued that year, are the first plays to exhibit his name on the title-page; and in the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's works, attached to Every Man in His Humour, is the statement: "This Comedie was first Acted in the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his servants. The principal Comedians were Will. Shakespeare, Aug. Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh. Hemings, Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke." These evidences of prominence are more than corroborated by the famous passage in the Palladis Tamia (1598) of Francis Meres, in which he not only compares the "mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare" with Ovid for his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," but with Plautus and Seneca for his excellence "in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummers Night Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet." Barnfield in the same year harps on the "honey-flowing vein" of the author of Venus and Lucrece, and "honey-tongued" is again the opening epithet of John Weever's epigram "Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare" (1599), in which "Romeo" and "Richard" share the praises with the narrative poems. From this time on, publishers of the plays recognize Shakespeare's reputation by generally placing his name on the title-page: a form of compliment which the author probably did not appreciate when it was extended, as in the case of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), to pirated works, some of which were meant to be private, and others were not by him at all.

Reminiscences or references to his works are frequent in contemporary literature. Among these are several passages in two plays, The Return from Parnassus, acted in St. John's College, Cambridge, about 1601. In one passage, Kempe, the famous actor, speaks slightingly of the acting qualities of the plays by university pens and continues, "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, ay, and Ben Jonson too,"—Contemporary Allusionsanother identification of the actor and the dramatist Shakespeare. Another character in these plays prefers Shakespeare to Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser. Less enthusiastic though sincerely appreciative is John Webster, who, in the address to the Reader prefixed to The White Devil, 1612, acknowledges his indebtedness to his predecessors, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher and to "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood." Though of widely varying significance and interest, the numerous allusions to Shakespeare or to his plays give further testimony to his growing reputation.

While it is probable that the sale of Shakespeare's poems brought him in some financial return, he is not likely to have profited from the publication of his plays. The playwright at that time sold his product to the manager or company, and thereby gave up all rights. To the end of the sixteenth century managers usually paid from £5 to £11 for a new play, adding a bonus in the case of success, and sometimes a share of the proceeds of the second performance. During the first decade of Shakespeare's activity as a dramatist, then, we may calculate that he obtained for about twenty-one plays an average of about £10 each, which, making the usual allowance for the greater purchasing power of money, would be equivalent to about $400, or an annual income of about $800. During his second decade the prices for plays had so risen that he may be estimated to have received about twice as much from this source as in the early half of his career.

More profitable than playwriting was acting. Lee estimates Shakespeare's salary as an actor before 1599 at £100 a year at least, exclusive of special rewards for court performances, and we know that by 1635 an actor-shareholder, such as Shakespeare latterly was, had a salary of £180. Besides this, he became about 1599 a sharer, with Heming, Condell, Philips, and others, in the receipts of the Globe Theater, erected in 1597-8 by Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. The annual income from a single share was over £200, and Shakespeare may have had more than one. In 1610 he became a sharer also in the smaller Blackfriars Theater, after it had been acquired by the Burbages.

The evidence thus accumulated of Shakespeare's having acquired a substantial fortune is corroborated by what we know of the earnings of other members of his profession, and it leaves no mystery about the source of the capital which he invested in real property in Stratford and London.

The death of Elizabeth and the accession of James I improved rather than impaired Shakespeare's prospects. A patent, dated May 19, 1603, authorizes the King's servants, "Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage ... and the rest of their associats freely to use and exercise the arte and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, interludes, moralls, pastorals, stage-plaies, and such other like as they Growing Prosperityhave already studied, or hereafter shall use or studie, as well for the recreation of our lovinge subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall thinke good to see them, duringe our pleasure." By this document the Lord Chamberlain's Company became the King's, and so remained during the rest of Shakespeare's connection with the stage. At least a dozen instances are recorded in the Revels Accounts of the Company's having acted before his Majesty, and on the occasion of a performance before the court at the Earl of Pembroke's mansion of Wilton House, £30 was given them "by way of his majesty's reward." Shakespeare's name stands first in a list of nine actors who walked in a procession on the occasion of James's entry into London, March 15, 1604, when each actor was granted four yards and a half of scarlet cloth for cloaks for the occasion.

This recognition by the court is the latest evidence we have of Shakespeare's belonging to the profession of acting. He is mentioned in the Jonson Folio of 1616 as playing a part in Sejanus in 1603; but his name is absent from the list of the King's servants, as his company had now become, when they performed Volpone in 1605, The Alchemist in 1610, and Catiline in 1611. It would thus seem that he gave up acting shortly after the death of Elizabeth.

The date of his withdrawal from London to Stratford is less precisely indicated. The likelihood is that the transference was gradual; for after 1611, the date usually conjectured for his retirement from the metropolis, we have indications of at least occasional activities there, as in the collaboration with Fletcher, now generally admitted, in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and in the business dealings in Blackfriars already described. On the other hand, he had disposed of his shares in the theaters before his death; as we have seen, he appears frequently in his last years in connection with municipal affairs in Stratford; and later formal references are usually to "William Shakespeare, gent., of Stratford-on-Avon." It was during this period that we find record of the poet serving in a new capacity. There has recently been discovered in the Household Book at Belvoir Castle the following entry: "Item 31 Martij (1613) to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso xiiij s. To Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiij s. (Total) iiij^li viij^s." This means that the Earl of Rutland, who took part in a tournament at Whitehall on March 24, 1613, had the heraldic device for his shield made by Shakespeare and Burbage,—Burbage, whose skill as painter is well known, being probably responsible for the design and Shakespeare for the motto. Rutland was a friend and associate of that Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his two narrative poems.

The remaining documents are chiefly domestic. On June 5, 1607, his elder daughter Susanna married John Hall, a physician of Stratford, who succeeded Death and Burialthe poet in the occupancy of New Place; and on September 9, 1608, the Stratford Register records the burial of his mother, "Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe." His younger daughter, Judith, married Thomas Quiney on February 10, 1616, with such haste and informality as led to the imposition of a fine by the ecclesiastical court at Worcester. In the previous month Shakespeare had a draft of his will drawn up by Francis Collins, a solicitor of Warwick, and after certain changes this was signed in March. On the twenty-fifth of April the Registers show the burial of "Will. Shakespeare gent." The monument over his grave gives the day of his death as April 23 (Old Style). He was buried in the chancel of Stratford Church, and on the grave may still be read the much discussed lines:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

William Hall, who visited Stratford in 1694, records the tradition that the poet himself composed the lines in a style calculated to impress sextons and prevent them from digging up his bones and throwing them into the adjacent charnel house. However this may be, the grave has remained unopened.

Seven years later, thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays were collected by two of his former colleagues of the theater, Heming and Condell, whom he had remembered in his will, and published in the famous First Folio. The preliminary documents in this volume, printed in our appendix, close significantly the contemporary records of the man, and bind together the burgess of Stratford with the actor of London and the dramatist of the world.

Of Shakespeare's handwriting nothing that can be called his with complete assurance has survived except six signatures; one to the deposition in the matter of the Mountjoy marriage; one to the deed of the house he bought in Blackfriars in 1613, one to the mortgage-deed on the same house, executed on the day after the purchase, and one on each of the three sheets of paper containing his will, the last of which has in addition the words "By me." All six are somewhat crabbed specimens of the old English style of handwriting, which is the character he would naturally acquire in such a school as that at Stratford in the sixteenth century, as we learn from surviving examples of the copy-books of the period. The manuscripts of his plays have gone the way of all, or almost all, the autographs of the men of letters of his time, nor is it likely that future research will add materially to what we have. The exact signatures, though it is difficult to be certain of all the letters, seem to show a variation in spelling—Shakspere, Shakespere, or Shakspeare. His father's name appears in the records of the town in sixteen different forms, an illustration of the inconsistency in the orthography of proper names, as of other words, which was common Signatures and Portraitswith people of that time of greater worldly consequence and education than the poet or his father. The form of the name used in the present edition is that which generally appears on the title-pages of plays ascribed to him; it is that which he himself used in signing the dedications of his two poems to the Earl of Southampton; it is that which occurs in the legal documents having to do with his property; and it is the common spelling in the literary allusions of the seventeenth century.

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.

The Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon for 1662 to 1668, kept about the time of his coming to this charge a diary in which he relates certain echoes of the conversation of the town at a time when the poet's nephews were still living there. From him we hear that in his elder days Shakespeare retired to Stratford; that in his most active period he wrote two plays a year; that he spent at the rate of £1000 a year; and that his death was due to a fever following a "merry meeting" in Stratford with Jonson and Drayton.

An additional reference to the tradition of Shakespeare's convivial tendencies is to be found in the legend of his visit to Bidford, six miles from Stratford, Traditionswith a group of cronies to compare capacities with the Bidford Drinkers. According to the earliest version of this somewhat widespread tale, that of a visitor to Stratford in 1762, "he enquired of a shepherd for the Bidford Drinkers, who replied they were absent but the Bidford sippers were at home, and, I suppose, continued the sheepkeeper, they will be sufficient for you; and so, indeed, they were; he was forced to take up his lodging under that tree [the crab-tree, long pointed out] for some hours."

The earliest description of Shakespeare as "a glover's son" is found in the memoranda of Archdeacon Plume of Rochester, written about 1656. Plume adds, "Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in his shop—a merry cheeked old man that said, 'Will was a good honest fellow, but he darest have crackt a jeast with him at any time.'" No Sir John Mennes who could have seen John Shakespeare is known, but the saying may well be the echo of contemporary gossip.

A manuscript preserved at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, contains certain notes made before 1688 by the Rev. William Fulman. Among them are interpolated others (given here in italics) by the Rev. Richard Davies previously to 1708. "William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire about 1563-4. Much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sr. ... Lucy, who had him whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement; but his reveng was so sweet that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that in allusion to his name bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor of playes he became a composer. He dyed Apr. 23, 1616, ætat 53, probably at Stratford, for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd. p. 520), on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. He dyed a papist." The inaccuracy of Davies's version of facts otherwise known warns us against too great a reliance on his individual contribution.

A certain John Dowdall left a short account of places he visited in Warwickshire in 1693. He describes the monument and tombstone, giving inscriptions, and adds, "The clarke that shew'd me this church is above 80 years old; he says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this towne bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he run from his master to London, and there was received into the play-house as a serviture, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards prov'd. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one for feare of the curse abovesaid dare touch his gravestone, tho his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be leyd in the same grave with him." The traditional explanation of the curse as reported by William Hall, has already been given (p. [35]).

The first regular biography of Shakespeare is that by Nicholas Rowe, written as a preface to his edition of Rowe's Biographythe plays which, issued in 1709, stands at the beginning of modern Shakespearean interpretation. Though compiled nearly a century after the poet's death, Rowe's life has claims upon our credit more substantial than might be expected. His chief source of information was the great actor Betterton, a Shakespeare enthusiast, who had himself taken pains to accumulate facts concerning his hero. Much of Betterton's material came to him through John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, two actors who had been colleagues of Shakespeare's and who lived into the Restoration period. According to John Downes, a theatrical prompter in the end of the seventeenth century, these veterans brought to the new generation the actual instruction they had received from the dramatist himself on the playing of the parts respectively of Henry VIII and Hamlet. Theatrical and other traditions reached Rowe also through Sir William D'Avenant, the leading figure in the revival of the stage after 1660. D'Avenant's father was host of the Crown Inn at Oxford, where, according to the statements of Aubrey and of Anthony Wood in 1692, Shakespeare was accustomed to put up on his journeys between London and Stratford. Wood reports that the elder D'Avenant was a "man of grave and saturnine disposition, yet an admirer of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare," and that Mrs. D'Avenant was "a very beautiful woman, of a good wit and conversation." William D'Avenant was generally reputed to be Shakespeare's godson, and Aubrey, whose gossip must be accepted with great hesitation, says that he was not averse to being taken as his son. In spite of the fact of this scandal's appearance in various seventeenth century anecdotes, the more careful account of the D'Avenants by Wood points to its rejection. The story is usually linked with another recorded by the lawyer Manningham in his Diary, March 13, 1602, that Burbage, who had been playing Richard III, was overheard by Shakespeare making an appointment with a lady in the audience. When the tragedian arrived at the rendez-vous, he found Shakespeare in possession; and on knocking was answered that "William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."

To return to the D'Avenants, the elder son, Robert, used to tell that when he was a child Shakespeare had given him "a hundred kisses." Sir William was Rowe's authority for the statement that the Earl of Southampton once gave the poet £1000 "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to"; but no purchase of this magnitude by Shakespeare is recorded. D'Avenant himself was said to own a complimentary letter written to Shakespeare by James I, and the publisher Lintot says that the Duke of Buckinghamshire claimed to have examined the document. The story about Shakespeare's first connection with the theater consisting in his holding horses outside, told first in a manuscript note preserved in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, 1748, Further Traditionsis also credited to D'Avenant. According to this tradition, frequently repeated, the future dramatist organized a regular corps of boys and monopolized the business, so that "as long as the practice of riding to the play-house continued the waiters that held the horses retained the appellation of Shakespeare's Boys."

Many of the natural inferences to be drawn from the data in the first part of the chapter are given by Rowe as facts. Thus he states positively that Shakespeare attended a free school, from which he was withdrawn owing to "the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of assistance at home." He repeats the deer-stealing anecdote, with further detail. As to his acting, Rowe reports, "Tho' I have inquir'd, I could never meet with any further account of him this way than that the top of his performance was the ghost in his own Hamlet." He corroborates the general contemporary opinion of Shakespeare's fluency and spontaneity in composition. As to his personality, he says, "Besides the advantages of his wit, he was in himself a good-natur'd man, of great sweetness in his manners and a most agreeable companion." Rowe credits Shakespeare with having prevented his company from rejecting one of Jonson's plays at a time when Jonson was altogether unknown, and is inclined to consider the latter ungenerous in his critical remarks on Shakespeare.

William Oldys, in his manuscript Adversaria, now in the British Museum, reports a few further fragments of gossip, the chief of which is that Shakespeare's brother Gilbert was discovered still living about 1660 and was questioned by some actors as to his memory of William. All he could give them was a vague recollection of his having played the part of Adam in As You Like It.

Such are the most significant details which tradition, unauthenticated but often plausible, has added to our knowledge of the documents. There exists also a very considerable amount of literary allusion to Shakespeare's productions from 1594 onwards, which is easily accessible in collected form. The most notable of these are the comments of his friend and contemporary, Ben Jonson. Besides the splendid eulogy prefixed to the First Folio, Jonson talked of Shakespeare's lack of art to Drummond of Hawthornden, and expressed himself with affection and discrimination in the famous passage in Timber.

After all allowances have been made for the inaccuracies of oral tradition, we may safely gather from those concerning Shakespeare some inferences which help to clothe the naked skeleton of the documented facts. It is clear that, within a generation after Shakespeare's death, common opinion both in Stratford and London recognized that in the actor and dramatist a great man had passed away, that he had been in a worldly sense highly successful, though starting from unpropitious beginnings, that he wrote with great swiftness and ease, and that in his personal relations he was gentle, kindly, genial, and witty. That the Evidence of the Sonnetsbailiff's son who returned to his native town as a prosperous gentleman, is to be identified with the actor and shareholder of the London theaters, and with the author of the plays and poems, it is difficult to see how there can remain any reasonable doubt; and, though the facts which prove this identity contain little to illuminate the vast intellect and soaring imagination which created Hamlet and Lear, they contain nothing irreconcilable with the personality, which these creations imply rather than reveal.

One further source of information about Shakespeare's personality has figured largely in some biographies. The Sonnets were published in 1609, evidently without Shakespeare's coöperation or consent, with a dedication by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to a Mr. W. H., "the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets." All attempts to identify this Mr. W. H. have failed. He may have been merely the person who procured the manuscript for Thorpe, though the language of the dedication seems to imply that he was the young gentleman who is the subject of a considerable number of the poems. Of this young gentleman and of a dark lady who seems to have been the occasion of other of the sonnets, much has been written, but no facts of Shakespeare's life have been established beyond those which are obvious to every reader: that Shakespeare wrote admiring and flattering sonnets to a young man who is urged to marry (and who may have been the Earl of Southampton, or an unknown Mr. W. H., or another); and that he treats of an intrigue with some unknown woman. The identification of the young man of the first seventeen sonnets with other friends who are praised in later sonnets is not certain, though in some cases probable; and much research and conjecture have entirely failed to make clear the relations between the poet, the rival poet, the lady, and the friend. The Sonnets furnish us with no knowledge of Shakespeare's personal affairs, and only a meager basis even for gossip as to some of his experiences with men and women.

Another kind of inquiry has sought to discover in the sonnets not facts or incidents of Shakespeare's life, but indications of his emotional experiences. The results of such inquiry are manifestly outside the scope of this chapter. For their discussion, the reader must be referred to Professor Alden's introduction to the Tudor edition of the Sonnets. Shakespeare's personality as it is reflected from his works will also be considered in the concluding chapter of this volume. So much stress, however, has been placed on interpretations of the sonnets, and these have so often occupied an exaggerated place in his biography, that it may be worth while to remark that whether these lyrical poems are genuine and personal or are conventional and literary, and whether they make the poet more clearly discernible or not, they must certainly be taken not alone by themselves, but in connection with the dramas as affording us an impression of the man who wrote them. Evidence of the SonnetsOf the sonnets, it may be said in almost the same words just now used of the documents and traditions, that whether they contain much or little to illuminate the vast intellect and soaring imagination which created Hamlet and Lear, they contain nothing irreconcilable with the personality which these creations imply rather than reveal.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I.e., profession, used especially at that time of the profession of acting.

[2] See frontispieces in the Tudor Shakespeare to editions of Henry V (Droeshout original), King Lear (Ely Palace), Romeo and Juliet (Chandos), Pericles (Garrick Club bust), and The Tempest (Death-mask). The Stratford Monument and the Droeshout engraving are reproduced in the present volume.

CHAPTER III

Shakespeare's Reading

We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than "The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in which Ben Jonson stated that the poet had "small Latin and less Greek," it is evident from the allusions throughout the plays that Shakespeare was a reader rather than a scholar. In other words, he used books for what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemanship, politics, and other fields; but such works are usually the products of enthusiasts in single subjects, who are apt to forget how much a man of acute mind and keen observation can pick up of a technical matter that interests him for the time, and how intelligently he can use it. The cross-examination of an expert witness by an able lawyer is an everyday illustration; and in the literature School-Booksof our own day this kind of versatility is strikingly exemplified in the work of such a writer as Mr. Kipling.

How Shakespeare learned to read and write his own tongue we do not know; that he did learn hardly needs to be argued. The free grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, like other schools of its type, was named from its function of teaching Latin grammar; and we may make what is known of the curricula of such schools in the sixteenth century the basis for our inferences as to what Shakespeare learned there.

The accidence, with which the course began, was studied in Lily's Grammar, and clear echoes of this well-known work are heard in the conversation between Sir Hugh Evans and William Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV. i, in 1 Henry IV, II. i. 104, in Much Ado, IV. i. 22, in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 82 (and perhaps, V. i. 10 and 84), in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 2, in The Taming of the Shrew, I. i. 167,—a line of Terence altered by Lily,—and in Titus Andronicus, IV. ii. 20-23, where Demetrius reads two lines from Horace, and Chiron says,

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes and Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably due to some elementary phrase-book no longer to be identified. It is to be noted how prominently this early comedy figures in the list of evidences of his school-day memories.

Among the first pieces of connected Latin prose read in the Elizabethan schools was Æsop's Fables, a collection which, after centuries of rewriting and re-compiling for adults, had come in the sixteenth century to be regarded chiefly as a school-book, but allusions to which are everywhere to be found in the literature of the day. In 2 Henry VI, III. i. 343, and Richard II, III. ii. 129, we find references to the fable of "The Countryman and a Snake"; in 2 Henry VI, III. i. 69, and Timon of Athens, II. i. 28, to "The Crow in Borrowed Feathers"; in 2 Henry VI, III. i. 77, to "The Wolf in the Sheep's Skin"; in King John, II. i. 139, to "The Ass in the Lion's Skin"; in Henry V, IV. iii. 91, to "The Hunter and the Bear"; in As You Like It, I. i. 87, to "The Dog that Lost his Teeth"; in All's Well, II. i. 71, to "The Fox and the Grapes"; besides a number of slighter and less definite allusions. The most detailed fable in Shakespeare, that of "The Belly and the Members," in Coriolanus, I. i. 99, is derived, not from Æsop, but from Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus.

The traces of the well-known collection of sayings from various writers called Sententiæ Pueriles, and of the so-called Distichs of Cato, both of which were commonly read in the second and third years, are only slight. Battista Spagnuoli Mantuanus, whose Eclogues, written about 1500, had become a text-book, is honored with explicit mention as well as quotation in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 95. Cicero, who was read from Ovidthe fourth year, has left his mark on only a phrase or two, in spite of his importance in Renaissance culture; but Ovid is much more important. The motto on the title-page of Venus and Adonis is from the Amores, and the matter of the poem is from Metamorphoses, X. 519 ff., with features from the stories of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (Meta. IV. 285 ff.), and the hunting in Calydon (Meta. VIII. 270 ff.). Ovid is quoted in Latin in three early plays; and even where a translation was available, the phrasing of Shakespeare's allusions sometimes shows knowledge of the original. Most of Ovid had been translated into English before Shakespeare began to write, and Golding's version of the Metamorphoses (1567) was used for the references to the Actæon myth in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, IV. i. 107 ff., and for a famous passage in The Tempest, V. i. 33. Livy, who had been translated in 1545 according to Malone, seems to have been the chief source of Lucrece, with some aid from Ovid's Fasti, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in Titus Andronicus; to the Medea myth in four or five passages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of classical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in A Midsummer-Night's Dream gives but a slight basis for proving literary relations.

Virgil followed Ovid in the fifth year, and with Virgil, Terence. Of direct knowledge of the latter the plays bear no trace, but of the former there seems to be an influence in the description of the painting of Troy in Lucrece, 1366 ff., and in two short Latin sentences in 2 Henry VI, II. i. 24, and IV. i. 117. Horace, Plautus, Juvenal, Persius, and Seneca were the new authors taken up in the last years in school. All the Horace in the plays may have been taken from other works, like the passage already quoted from Lily's Grammar. Juvenal and Persius have left no mark. The Menæchmi and Amphitruo of Plautus furnish the basis for The Comedy of Errors, and no English translation of either of these is known before that of the Menæchmi in 1595, which some critics think Shakespeare may have seen in manuscript. But no verbal similarities confirm this conjecture, and there is no reason why the dramatist should not have known both plays at first hand.

The influence of Seneca is dramatically the most important among the classical authors. All the plays that go by his name had been translated into English in the first part of Elizabeth's reign; he was the main channel through which the forms of classical tragedy reached the Renaissance; and when Shakespeare began to write he was the dominant force in the field of tragedy. This makes it hard to say whether the Senecan features in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and even Hamlet, are due to Seneca directly, or to the tradition already well established among Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries.

Results of Schooling

The impression which the evidence from the textbooks as a whole leaves on one is that Shakespeare took from school enough Latin to handle an occasional quotation[3] and to extract the plot of a play, but that he probably preferred to use a translation when one was to be had. The slight acquaintance shown with authors not always read at school, Caesar, Livy, Lucan, and Pliny, does not materially alter this impression. Much more conclusive as to the effect of his Latin training than the literary allusions are the numerous words of Latin origin either coined by Shakespeare, or used in such a way as to imply a knowledge of their derivation. The discovery of a lost translation may modify our views as to whether a particular author was used by him in the original, but the evidence from his use of Romance words gives clear proof that his schooling was no unimportant element in his mastery of speech.

Greek was occasionally begun in the Elizabethan grammar school, but we do not know whether this was the case in Stratford. Certainly we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare could read Greek, as all his knowledge of Greek authors could have been obtained from translations, and only two Greek words, misanthropos and threnos, occur in his writings. Yet no single author was so important in providing material for the plays as the Greek Plutarch. His Lives of Julius Cæsar, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and Caius Martius Coriolanus, in Sir Thomas North's translation, are the direct sources of the great Roman tragedies, and in a less important way the Lives of Antonius and Alcibiades were used in Timon of Athens. Homeric elements are discoverable in Troilus and Cressida, which derives mainly from the medieval tradition. As the Trojan story was already familiar on the stage, these need not have come from Chapman's Homer. The knowledge of Lucian which seems implied in Timon was probably not gained from the Greek original. The late Greek romances, which were popular in translation, may have been read by Shakespeare, since the reference to the "Egyptian thief" in Twelfth Night, V. i. 120, is from the Æthiopica of Heliodorus, translated in 1569. Attempts have been made by the assembling of parallel passages to prove a knowledge of Greek tragedy on the part of Shakespeare, but such parallelisms are more naturally explained as coincidences arising from the treatment of analogous themes and situations.

Of modern languages, French was the easiest for an Elizabethan Englishman to acquire, and the French passages and scenes in Henry V make it fairly certain that Shakespeare had a working knowledge of this tongue. Yet, as in the case of Latin, he seems to have preferred a translation to an original when he could find it. Montaigne, whose influence some have found pervasive in Shakespeare, he certainly used in Gonzalo's account of his ideal commonwealth in The Tempest,French and Italian II. i. 143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here. Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in As You Like It, III, ii. 238, and the great humorist is possibly the inspirer of some of Sir Andrew's nonsense in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century, and it is thought that in some cases Shakespeare shows direct acquaintance with Ronsard. He was thus acquainted with the three greatest French writers of his century, and French may well have been the medium through which he reached authors in other languages.

The class of Italian literature with which Shakespeare shows most acquaintance is that of the novelle, though there is no proof that he could read the language. The Decameron of Boccaccio contains the love-story of Cymbeline, though there may have been an intermediary; the plot of All's Well came from the same collection, but had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure; and the story of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice is found in a form closer to Shakespeare's in the English translation of the Gesta Romanorum than in the Decameron. Thus we cannot conclude that the poet knew this work as a whole. Similarly with Bandello and Cinthio. The plot of Much Ado is found in the former, and is translated by Belleforest into French, but at least one detail seems to come from Ariosto, and here again an intermediary is commonly conjectured. The novel from Cinthio's Hecatommithi which formed the basis of Othello existed in a French translation; and his form of the plot of Measure for Measure came to Shakespeare through the English dramatic version of George Whetstone. The version of the bond story in The Merchant of Venice closest to the play is in Il Pecorone of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, but the tale is widespread. Incidents in The Merry Wives have sources or parallels in the same work, in Straparola's Piacevoli Notti, and in Bandello, but in both cases English versions were available. A mass of Italian and French prototypes lies behind the plot of Twelfth Night, but most of the details are to be found in the English Apolonius and Silla of Barnabe Riche, and there is reason to conjecture a lost English play on the subject. The Taming of the Shrew, based on an extant older play, draws also on Gascoigne's version of Ariosto's I Suppositi; and the echoes of Petrarch in the Sonnets may well have come through French and English imitators. The introduction of stock types from the Italian drama, such as the pedant and the braggart-soldier, can be accounted for by the previous knowledge of these in England, and does not imply a first-hand reading of Italian literature. The negative position is still stronger in the case of Spanish, where the use of episodes from George of Montemayor's Diana in The Two Gentlemen, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer-Night's Dream, can be supposed to be due to the author's having access to Yonge's translation in Early Englishmanuscript, especially since there is no other trace of Spanish influence.

The conclusion with regard to Italian and Spanish, then, seems to be that Shakespeare in his search for plots was aware of the riches of the novelle, but that he found what he wanted as a rule in English or French versions; and that we have no evidence of his knowledge of anything but fiction from these literatures.

Turning now to English, we find Shakespeare's knowledge of books in his own tongue beginning after the Conquest. The romances of the Middle Ages were in the Elizabethan time rapidly undergoing the process of degradation that was soon to end in the chap-books, but the material was still widely known. The particular versions read by the dramatist can rarely be determined on account of the slight nature of most of the references, but we find allusions to the Arthurian romances, to Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, The Squire of Low Degree, Roland and Oliver, and to Huon of Bordeaux, from which last came the name of Oberon as king of the fairies. Among popular ballads, those of Robin Hood are frequently alluded to; the story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid appears in no fewer than five plays; Hamlet knew a ballad on Jephtha's daughter, and Sir Toby one on the chaste Susanna. A large number of popular songs appear in fragments; and rimes and spells, current jests and anecdotes, combine with the fairy-lore of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merry Wives to assure us that Shakespeare was thoroughly versed in the literature and traditions of the people.

His acquaintance with more formal letters begins with Chaucer, whose Knight's Tale contributed some details to A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and the main plot of The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which Shakespeare is now usually supposed to have had a hand. This story had, however, been already dramatized by Richard Edwardes. More certainly direct is his knowledge of Chaucer's Troilus, which, with Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, is the main source of Troilus and Cressida. The references to the leprosy of Cressida are due to Henryson's Testament of Creseide, a Scots sequel to Chaucer's poem, printed in the sixteenth century editions of the older poet's works. In the Legend of Good Women he may have found the story of Pyramus, and a version of the tragedy of Lucrece, to supplement his main sources in Livy and Ovid. Chaucer's contemporary Gower contributed to his stock the story of Florent (Taming of the Shrew, I. ii. 69) from the Confessio Amantis, and from the same collection a version of the tale of Apollonius of Tyre, dramatized by Shakespeare and another in Pericles.

With the non-dramatic literature produced by Shakespeare's contemporaries, we naturally find most evidence of his acquaintance in the case of those books which provided material for his plays. Thus the otherwise obscure Arthur Brooke, whose poem Romeus and Juliet Contemporary Literatureis the chief source of the tragedy, is much more prominent in such an enumeration as the present than he probably was in Shakespeare's view of the literature of the day. Painter, whose version of the same story in his Palace of Pleasure cannot be shown to have been used much, if at all, by the dramatist, seems nevertheless to have been known to him; and we hardly need evidence that Shakespeare must have kept a watchful eye on similar collections of stories, such as Whetstone's, Riche's, and Pettie's. Of the greater writers of imaginative literature there is none missing from the list of those he knew, though, as has been implied, the evidence is not always proportionate to the greatness; and some prominent figures in other fields, such as Hooker and Bacon, do not appear. Spenser, who is supposed to have alluded to Shakespeare in Colin Clout's come home again and, less probably, in The Teares of the Muses, is in turn alluded to in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, V. i. 52; and his version of the story of Lear in The Faerie Queene, II. x, is believed to have given Shakespeare his form of the name Cordelia. Evidence is more abundant in the case of Sir Philip Sidney. The under-plot of King Lear is based on the story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in the Arcadia, and Sidney's sonnets, along with those of Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Watson, and Barnes, formed the main channel through which the French and Italian influences reached Shakespeare's. However we may estimate the original element in his sonnets, and in our opinion it is very great, there is no question of the author's having had a thorough familiarity with contemporary sonnetteers.

Similarly we can be certain that he had read many of the elaborate narrative poems then in vogue, a class to which he contributed Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and A Lover's Complaint. Daniel's Rosamond and Marlowe's Hero and Leander especially have left many traces, and Daniel's Barons' Wars is intimately related to Richard II and Henry IV. The longer prose fictions of the time he also watched, and Lyly's Euphues contributed the germ of a number of passages, as Lodge's Rosalynde and Greene's Pandosto supplied the plots of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale respectively.

Reference has already been made to his knowledge of folk beliefs about fairies. To this should be added other supernatural beliefs, especially as to ghosts, devils, and witches, evidence of his familiarity with which will occur to every one. Matters of this sort were much discussed in his time, the frequency of ghosts in Senecan plays having made them conspicuous in Elizabethan imitations, and religious controversy having stimulated interest in demonology. Several important books appeared on the subject, and one of these at least Shakespeare read, Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, for from it Edgar, as Poor Tom in King Lear, derived many of the names and phrases which occur in his pretended ravings.

The most useful book in all his reading, if we judge by the amount of his work that is based on it, was Contemporary Dramathe second edition of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, compiled by Raphael Holinshed. With it he used the work by Hall on The Union of Lancaster and York, the Chronicles of Grafton and of Fabyan, and the Annals of John Stowe. On these were based the greater number of the historical plays, Macbeth, and the political part of Cymbeline. In the case of Henry VIII there should be added the Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs, of John Foxe.

To deal adequately with Shakespeare's reading in the plays of his time would be to write a history of the Elizabethan drama. Older dramatists, like Preston, Gascoigne, and Whetstone, he knew, for he quotes Cambyses, and from the two last he derives material for the plots of The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure. Anonymous writers supplied the older plays on which he based King John, King Lear, and Hamlet, parts of Henry V and VI, and of Richard III, and probably others. Allusions prove a familiarity with all of Marlowe's dramas; Hamlet is indebted to the tradition of which Kyd was one of the founders; Lyly taught him much in the handling of light comic dialogue; and he quotes lines from Peele. Greene's contribution is less specifically marked; but Shakespeare's profession of acting, as well as that of play-writing, of necessity made him acquainted with the whole dramatic production of the time. Thus, as has been stated in a previous chapter, he acted in several of Jonson's plays, and a good case has been made out for his modelling his last comedies on the new successes of Beaumont and Fletcher.

No Englishman of that day was insensible to what was going on in exploration and conquest of the Western World; and in The Tempest, Othello, and other plays we have clear ground for stating that Shakespeare shared this interest, and read books like Eden's History of Travayle in the West and East Indies, Raleigh's Discoverie of Guiana, and such pamphlets as were used in the vast compilation of Richard Hakluyt. The scientific knowledge implied in the plays reflects current beliefs, and must have been derived from such works as Pliny, Batman uppon Bartholome his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum, and from conversation.

Finally, Shakespeare knew his Bible. Several volumes have been written to exhibit the extent of this knowledge, and it has been shown by Anders that he knew both the Genevan and the Great Bible, as well as the Prayer Book.

Taken all together, the amount of literature indicated by this summary account of the evidences in the plays and poems abundantly proves the statement that Shakespeare, if not a scholar, was a man of wide and varied reading. When it is further considered that only a fraction of what any author reads leaves a mark that can be identified on what he writes, we shall readily allow that in the matter of study Shakespeare showed an activity and receptivity of mind that harmonizes with the impression received from his creative work.

His Reading Typical

It agrees with our impressions of him derived from other sources also, that his reading reflects not so much idiosyncrasies of taste as the prevalent literary interests of the day. Thus in Latin literature the most conspicuous author among general readers, as distinguished from scholars, was Ovid, whose romantic narratives appealed to a time which reveled in tales gathered from all quarters; and this same prominence of Ovid has been shown to exist among the classical authors known to the dramatist. Similarly his use of chronicles like that of Holinshed merely reflects a widespread interest in national history; and Shakespeare shared the popular interest in the translations of novelle and the like that poured in from the Continent. The age of Elizabeth was an age of great expansion in reading—especially in the literature of entertainment. For the first time since the introduction of printing the people were free to indulge in books as a recreation, and the enormous growth of publishing in this era indicates the response to the new demand. In all this Shakespeare took part, and the evidences appear in his works so far as the nature of their themes permitted it. But the drama gave no opportunity for anything but passing allusions to scientific, philosophical, and religious matters, so that direct evidence is lacking as to how far Shakespeare was acquainted with what was being written in these fields. On the other hand, the profundity of his insight into human motive and behavior, the evidences of prolonged and severe meditation on human life and the ways of the world, and the richness of the philosophical generalizations that lie just below the surface of his greater plays, make it difficult to believe that in these fields also he did not join in the intellectual activity of his day.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] See the list in the appendix to Schmidt's [Lexicon].

CHAPTER IV

Chronology and Development

The value of a knowledge of the order in which an author's works were composed no longer needs to be argued. The development of power and skill which such knowledge reveals is an important part of biography, and an individual work is more surely interpreted when we know the period and the circumstances of the author's life in which it was written, and what other works, by himself and his fellows, lie nearest in point of time. Without a knowledge of chronology, the indebtedness of contemporary authors to one another and the growth of literary forms cannot be determined.

The fact, so often to be insisted upon, that at the beginning of Shakespeare's career stage plays were hardly regarded as literature at all and were not published by their authors, deprives us of the evidence usually afforded by date of publication. We are thus forced to have recourse to a variety of more or less casually recorded data, and to indications of differences of maturity in style and matter which are often much less clear than could be wished. Before giving the results of the research that has been pursued for a century and a half, it will be worth while to enumerate the most fruitful methods which have been employed, and the sorts of evidence available.

Of purely external evidence, the chief kinds are these: records of the performance of plays in letters, diaries, accounts, and the like; quotation, allusion, imitation, or parody in other works; entries in the books of the Master of the Revels at Court, and in the Register of the Stationers' Company; dates on the title-pages of the plays themselves; facts and traditions about the life of the author; dates in the lives of actors and in the careers of companies known to have performed the plays, and in the histories of theaters in which they were presented. Instances of some of these are the manuscript which tells of a performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn in 1594; the diary of the quack, Dr. Simon Forman, who witnessed performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale at the Globe in 1610 and 1611; the appreciation of Shakespeare, with a list of a dozen plays by him, in the Palladis Tamia[4] of Francis Meres, 1598; and the pamphlets on Somers's voyage to Virginia, which offered suggestions for The Tempest.

Partly external and partly internal are the evidences derived from allusions in the plays to current events, personal or political, such as the reference in the Prologue to Henry V to the expedition of Essex to Ireland in 1599; references to other books, like the quotation from Marlowe in As You Like It, III. v. 82; Kinds of Evidencereferences from one play of Shakespeare's to another, like the promise in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV to "continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France."

The purely internal evidence is seldom as specific as the external, and requires to be handled with much judgment and caution. Most difficult in this class is the weighing of considerations of a moral or esthetic nature; for, though these are often powerful in their effect on the individual reader, they are usually incapable of proof to another person with different tastes and a different point of view. Of such tests, those afforded by a study of the methods used in the treatment of plot and in the development of character are perhaps the least subjective. Somewhat more palpable are the changing characteristics of style. The number and nature of classical allusions and Latin words and quotations; the kind and degree of elaboration of figures of speech, puns, conceits, and the like; diffuseness or concentration in the expression of thought; artificiality or lifelikeness in the treatment of dialogue; the use of prose or verse; the employment of oaths, checked by statute shortly after the accession of James I: these are the main aspects of style which can be used in determining, not exact dates, but the period of Shakespeare's activity within which a given work falls. More capable of mechanical calculation than the tests of either matter or style are those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most valuable, the position of the pause in the line ("end-stopped" or "run on"), and feminine endings or hypermetrical lines, such as

"These many summers in a sea of glor-y."

Many of these variable features were not consciously manipulated by the author; and, even when a general drift in a certain direction is clearly observable in his practice with regard to them, it is not to be assumed that his progress was perfectly regular, without leaps forward and occasional returns to an earlier usage. It is to be noted also that the subject and atmosphere of a particular play might induce a metrical treatment of a special kind, in which case the verse tests would yield evidence not primarily chronological at all. Nevertheless, when all allowances have been made and all due caution exercised, it will be found that the indications of the versification corroborate and supplement the external evidences in a valuable way.

Metrical Tests

TABLE I

TABLE II

Collaborated Plays

The accompanying Tables[5] give the detailed results of investigations along these lines, and a study of the data therein contained will reveal both their possibilities and their limitations. In Tables I and II the order of the plays is approximately that of the dates of their composition (virtually the same as the dates of first performance). The second and third columns cannot be regarded as giving any clue to chronology, except that they show that in the dramas written under the influence of Marlowe prose is comparatively Metrical Testsrare. Elsewhere Shakespeare employed prose for a variety of purposes: for low comedy, as in the tavern scenes in Henry IV, and the scenes in which Sir Toby figures in Twelfth Night; for repartee, as in the wit-combats of Beatrice and Benedick; for purely intellectual and moralizing speeches, such as Hamlet's over the skull of Yorick. On the other hand, highly emotional scenes are usually in verse, as are romantic passages like the conversation of Lorenzo and Jessica in the moonlight at Belmont, or the dialogues of Fenton and Anne Page, which contrast with the realistic prose of the rest of the Merry Wives and also the artificial pastoralism of Silvius and Phœbe in As You Like It. Few absolute rules can be laid down in the matter, but study of Shakespeare's practice reveals an admirable tact in his choice of medium.

The frequency of rhyme, as shown in the fourth column, has more relation to date. While there is no very steady gradation, it is clear that in his earlier plays he used rhyme freely, while at the close of his career he had practically abandoned it. The large number of rhymes in A Midsummer-Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet is accounted for mainly by the prevailing lyrical tone of a great part of these plays, while, on the other hand, in All's Well it probably points to survivals of an earlier first form of this comedy. It ought to be noted that, in the figures given here, the rhyming lines in the play scene in Hamlet, the vision in Cymbeline, the masque in The Tempest, and the Prologue and Epilogue of Henry VIII are not reckoned.

More significant are the percentages in columns five, six, and seven. Before 1598, feminine endings never reach twenty per cent of the total number of pentameter lines; after that date they are practically always above that number, and show a fairly steady increase to the thirty-five per cent of The Tempest. The variations of run-on lines (which, of course, carry with them the frequency of pauses within the line, and inversely the growing rarity of end-stopped lines) are closely parallel to those of the feminine endings; while the increase in the proportion of speeches ending within the line is still more striking. In The Comedy of Errors this phenomenon hardly occurs at all; in The Tempest it happens in over eighty-four per cent of the speeches, the increase being especially regular after 1598. Yet in some cases other causes are operative. Thus cuts and revisions of plays were apt to leave broken lines at the ends of speeches, and the comparatively high percentages in Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and All's Well are probably in part due to these causes.

The phenomena recorded in the last column are peculiar. Previous to the date of Macbeth it appears that Shakespeare practically avoided ending a line with light or weak words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs, but that from about 1606 to the end he employed them in proportions ranging Risks of Errorfrom 3.53 per cent in Antony and Cleopatra to 7.14 per cent in his part of Henry VIII.

The figures for plays not wholly written by Shakespeare are naturally less significant, and have therefore been given separately; yet, on the whole, they show the same general tendencies in the use of meter.

It will be observed that while the developments suggested by the different columns are fairly consistent, they do not absolutely agree in any two cases, and can obviously be used, as has been said, only to corroborate other evidence in placing a play in a period, not to fix a precise year. Further, in the calculations involved, there are many doubtful cases calling for the exercise of individual judgment, especially as to what constitutes a run-on line, or a light or weak ending. Thus Professor Bradley differs from König in several cases as to the figures given in the seventh column, counting the percentage of speeches ending within the line as 57 for Hamlet, 54 for Othello, 69 for King Lear, and 75 for Macbeth. For Acts III, IV, and V of Pericles, the 71 per cent is Bradley's, for which König's 17.1 is clearly a mistake. Serious as are such discrepancies, and suggestive of a need for a general re-counting of all the more significant phenomena, they are not so great as to shake the faith of any scholar who has seriously studied the matter in the usefulness of metrical tests as an aid in the settling of the chronology.

TABLE III

Table III gives a summary of the results of all the kinds of evidence available as recorded in the introduction to individual plays in the Tudor Shakespeare. The First Periodclassification into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies draws attention at once to the changes in the type of drama on which Shakespeare concentrated his main attention, and suggests the usual division of his activity into four periods. In the first of these, extending from the beginning of his writing (perhaps earlier than 1590) to the end of 1593, he attempted practically all the forms of drama then in vogue. Plays which were given him to revise, or in which he was invited to collaborate, may naturally be supposed to have preceded independent efforts, and his still undetermined share in Henry VI is usually regarded as his earliest dramatic production. What he learned in this field of tragic history from his more experienced fellows may be seen in Richard III, in which he can be observed following in the footsteps of Marlowe in the treatment of meter, in the rhetorical and lyrical nature of the dialogue, and in the conception of the central character. Even less of his individual quality is to be discerned in the field of tragedy, for the most that can be claimed for him in Titus Andronicus is the re-combination of the repellent episodes of that crude specimen of the tragedy of blood, and the rewriting of the lines which occasionally cloak the horrors with passages of poetry. If, as is unlikely, the first form of Romeo and Juliet was written in this period, the extant form must show it so radically revised that it leaves us little ground for generalization as to his power in tragedy in this first period.

It was in comedy that Shakespeare first showed originality. Love's Labour's Lost is one of the few plays whose plots seem to have been due to his own invention; and full of sparkle and grace as it is, it bears obvious marks of the tour de force, the young writer's conscious testing of his powers in social satire, in comic situation, and most of all in verbal mastery and the manipulation of dialogue. In The Comedy of Errors he had the advantage of a definite model in the well-defined type of the Plautian comedy; but here again in the doubling of the twins and the elaboration of the entanglements there are traces of the beginner's delight in technic for its own sake. The clearly contrasted types in the two pairs of heroes and heroines of The Two Gentlemen of Verona point to a conscious effort in characterization, as the author's attention had been concentrated on dialogue and on situation in the other two comedies of this group. Thus, regarding the variety of kind and the nature of his achievement in these first eight or nine plays, we can hardly fail to acquiesce in the general opinion that views the first period as one of experiment.

The chronicle history was the Elizabethan dramatic form whose possibilities were first exhausted. King John had been only a making over of an earlier work, and perhaps the most significant single change Shakespeare made was the excision of the anti-Romanist bias which in the older play had made John a Protestant hero. Yet this history voices, too, in the speeches of Second PeriodFaulconbridge, that patriotic enthusiasm which finds fuller expression in the dying Gaunt's eulogy of England in Richard II, and culminates in the triumphant heroics of Henry V. This national enthusiasm, especially ebullient in the years following the Great Armada, is justly to be regarded as an important condition of the flourishing of these plays on English history; and it is natural to suppose that the ebbing of this spirit in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign is not unconnected with the decline of this dramatic type. There are, however, other causes clearly perceptible. The material was nearly exhausted. Almost every prominent national figure for the three hundred years before the founding of the Tudor dynasty had been put upon the stage; and to come down to more recent times was to meddle with matters of controversy, the ashes of which were not yet cold. The reign of Henry VIII was not touched till after the death of Elizabeth, and the nature of the treatment given to the court of her father by Shakespeare and Fletcher corroborates our view. Further, the growing mastery of technic which is so clearly perceptible in the comedies of the second period must have been accompanied by a restlessness under the hampering conditions as to the manipulation of character and plot which were imposed by the less plastic material of the chronicles. Some effort towards greater freedom the dramatist made in the later histories. The earlier plays of this class had been prevailingly tragic; but now he supplemented and enlivened the political element with the comic scenes which gave us Falstaff; yet these scenes, brilliant as they are in dialogue and superb in characterization, are of necessity little more than episodes. The form had served its purpose as an outlet for national feeling, but it was now outgrown. So distinguished, however, is Shakespeare's achievement in this kind that we might be almost justified in calling this second period that of the culmination of the chronicle history.

The main objection to this title lies in his contemporary accomplishment in comedy. A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, the one in its graceful poetic fancy and dainty lyricism, the other in its balanced treatment of all the elements of dramatic effectiveness—action, character, and dialogue,—exhibit the dramatist in complete control of his technical instruments, the creator of masterpieces of romantic comedy. The Taming of the Shrew is a more or less perfunctory revision, probably in collaboration, of an older farce comedy; The Merry Wives of Windsor bears on its face corroboration of the tradition that it was written to order in a fortnight. The power in high comedy first fully shown in The Merchant of Venice reaches its supreme pitch in the three plays composed at the turn of the century, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In each of these a romantic love-tale, laid in some remote holiday world, is taken up, given a specific atmosphere, Third Periodacted out by a group of delightful creations who are endowed with intellect, wit, and natural affection, bathed in poetic imagination, and yet handled with sufficient naturalism to awaken and hold our human sympathies. No more purely delightful form of dramatic art has ever been contrived; none has ever been treated so as to yield more fully its appropriate charm; so that in view of the completeness of the artist's success we are bound to call the period which closed with the first year of the seventeenth century the triumph of comedy.

Julius Cæsar, the first of the plays dealing with Roman history, may have been written before 1600, but, whether it preceded Hamlet by one year or three, it forms a gradual introduction to the group of the great tragedies. Masterly as it is in its delineation of types, rich in political wisdom and the knowledge of human nature, splendid in rhetoric, it still fails to rise to the intensity of passion that marks the succeeding dramas. In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, Shakespeare at length faced the great fundamental forces that operate in individual, family, and social life, realized especially those that make for moral and physical disaster, took account alike of the deepest tendencies in character and of the mystery of external fate or accident, exhibited these in action and reaction, in their simplicity and their complexity, and wrought out a series of spectacles of the pity and terror of human suffering and human sin without parallel in the modern world. In these stupendous tragedies he availed himself of all the powers with which he was endowed and all the skill which he had acquired. His verse has liberated itself from the formalism and monotony that had marked it in the earlier plays, and is now free, varied, responsive to every mood and every type of passion; the language is laden almost to the breaking point with the weight of thought; the dialogue ranges from the lightest irony to heart-rending pathos and intolerable denunciation; the characters lose all semblance of artificial creations and challenge criticism and analysis like any personage in history; the action is pregnant with the profoundest significance. Hardly, if at all, less powerful are the later tragedies of the Roman group. Antony and Cleopatra is unsurpassed for the intensity of its picture of passion, for its superb mastery of language, for its relentless truth. The more somber scenes of Coriolanus convey a tragedy which either on its personal or its political side scarcely yields to its predecessors in poignancy and gloom. Whatever else he may have written in these years, here is surely the period of tragedy.

Nor do the plays classed as comedies and falling in the first three years of the new century seriously modify this impression of the prevailing tone of the period. Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure present a marked contrast to the romantic comedy of the preceding stage. The love-story of the first deals with a coquette and ends sordidly; Fourth Periodwhile in the political plot, though it gives occasion for speeches full of weighty thinking, jealousy and intrigue overwhelm the heroic element. The second, alone of Shakespeare's comedies, has a hero who is a rake; and, skilful as is the delineation of Helena, it needs all the dramatist's power to hold our sympathy and to force us to an unwilling assent to the title. Measure for Measure has its scene laid in a city seething in moral corruption: out of this rises the central situation of the play; and the presence of the most idealistic of Shakespeare's heroines does not avail to counterbalance the atmosphere of sin and death that mocks the conventional happy ending, and makes this play, even more than the two others, seem more in place among the tragedies than among the comedies.

The plays of the last period are, in the Folio, classed with comedies, and such no doubt they are if judged merely by the nature of their dénouements. But if we consider their characteristic note, and the fact that through the greater part of each play the forces and passions involved are rather those operative in tragedy than in comedy, we easily perceive why they have been classed as tragi-comedies or dramatic romances. Pericles in many respects stands apart from the other three in nature as well as in date, for it is a dramatization of an old Greek romance, and in it the hand of another than Shakespeare is only too evident. Yet it shares with the others certain common features: like The Tempest it has scenes at sea; all four deal with the separation and reuniting of families; all show us sympathetic figures deeply wronged and finally overcoming their injurers by forgiveness. The abounding high spirits of the earlier comedies are here replaced by a mood of calm assurance of the ultimate triumph of good and a placid faith that survives a rude acquaintance with the evil that is in men's hearts. No period has a more distinctive quality than this of the dramatic romances, in which the dramatist, on the eve of his retirement from London, gave his imagination free play, and in both character and action stamped his last creations with the mark of a lofty idealism.

The obvious fitness of this fourfold division into periods inevitably raises the question of its causes, and attempts at an answer have run along two main lines. One of these has been followed out with much eloquence and persuasiveness by Professor Dowden, whose phrases "In the Workshop," "In the World," "In the Depths," "On the Heights," to describe the four periods, point clearly enough to the kind of significance which he finds in the changes in mood and type of play. With the first of these phrases few will be disposed to quarrel. In his period of experiment Shakespeare's style was as yet comparatively unformed, and his attention was so much occupied with problems of technic that even the most psychological of critics finds here little revelation of personality, and must be content to describe the stage as one of professional apprenticeship. In the terms used of the three later periods, however, Interpretation of Periodsthere is an implication that the tone and mood of the plays in each are the direct reflection of the emotional experiences through which the poet himself was passing at the period of their composition. But this is to take for granted a theory of the relation between artist and production which has against it the general testimony of creator and critic alike. It is not at the pitch of an emotional experience that an artist successfully transmutes his life into art, but in retrospect, when his recollective imagination reproduces his mood in a form capable of being expressed without being dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare must have lived and enjoyed and suffered intensely; but this does not commit us to a belief in an immediate turning to account of personal experience in the writing of drama. His boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, about the time that he was writing The Merchant of Venice and the rollicking farce of The Taming of the Shrew, and just before he conceived Falstaff; it was fourteen years later that he gave us the pathetic figure of the young Mamillius in The Winter's Tale. From all we know of his personal life, the years of King Lear and Othello were years of abounding prosperity. The lacrimæ rerum that touch the mind in these stupendous tragedies are the outcome of profound meditation and vivid imagination, not the accompaniment of a cry of instant pain. However we are to reconstruct the spiritual biography of Shakespeare, it is clear that it is by no such simple reading of his life in terms of his treatment of comic or tragic themes.

The other line of explanation will suggest itself to any thoughtful student who contemplates the facts summed up in Chapter V on the Elizabethan drama. Whatever Shakespeare's preëminence in the quality of his work, he was not singular for innovations in kind. Not only are the plays of his experimental stage preceded by models easily discerned, but throughout his career one can see him eagerly taking up and developing varieties of drama on which less capable men had stumbled and for which the public had shown relish. Chronicle history, romantic comedy, tragedies of blood and revenge, dramatic romance, had all been invented by others, and Shakespeare never hesitated to follow their trail when it promised to lead to popular success. This does not mean that he did not put conscience into his work, but only that the change in type of play perceptible from period to period is more safely to be explained by changes of theatrical fashion and public taste than by conjectures as to the inner life of the dramatist. Nor are we prevented from finding here too that great good fortune as to occasion and opportunity that is needed, along with whatever natural endowment, to explain the achievement of Shakespeare. The return of the vogue of tragedy after he had attained maturity and seen life was indeed happy for him and for us; as was the rise of the imaginative type of dramatic romance when the storm and stress of his youth had gone by. Had the theatrical demand called for tragedy when Shakespeare was in the early Dates of the Poemsthirties and light comedy when he was in the forties, it seems likely that he would have responded to the demand, though we can hardly suppose that the result would have been as fortunate as in the existing state of things it proved to be.

The foregoing discussion has been confined to Shakespeare's plays; the poems present problems of their own. Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), indeed, resemble the plays of the first period, with which they are contemporary, both in conforming to a familiar type then much in vogue, the re-telling in ornate style of classical legends drawn chiefly from Ovid, and in exhibiting marks of the conscious exercise of technical dexterity. They show the Shakespeare of the dramas mainly in their revelation of a remarkable power of detailed observation and their richness of phrase and fluency of versification. Vivid and eloquent though they are, they can hardly be regarded as affording a sure prophecy of the passion and power of characterization that mark his mature dramatic production.

The case of the Sonnets is very different. From Meres's mention of them in 1598 we know that some had been written and were being circulated in manuscript by that date, and certain critics have sought to assign the main body of them to the first half of the last decade of the sixteenth century. But they were not published till 1609, and many of the greatest strike a note of emotion more profound than can be heard before the date of Hamlet. In writing them, Shakespeare was, to be sure, following a vogue, but as Professor Alden has pointed out in his introduction to them in the Tudor Shakespeare, they stand apart in important respects from the ordinary sonnet sequences of the time. All our researches have failed to tell us to whom they were addressed, if, indeed, they were addressed to any actual person at all; it is hardly necessary to urge that Shakespeare was capable of profound and passionate utterance under the impulse of imagination alone. The probability is that they were produced at intervals over a period of perhaps a dozen years, and that they represent a great variety of moods, impulses, and suggestions. While some of them betray signs of youth and remind us of the apprentice workman of Loves Labour's Lost, others display in their depth of thought, intensity of feeling, and superb power of incisive and concentrated expression, the full maturity of the man and the artist. Hardly in the great tragedies themselves is there clearer proof of Shakespeare's supremacy in thought and language.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See Appendix A, [13].

[5] The figures here given are based in columns 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the calculations of Fleay; in 5, 6, and 7 on those of König; and in 8 on those of Ingram. (S) = Shakespeare's scenes.

CHAPTER V

The Elizabethan Drama

Shakespeare's lifetime was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama. By the date of his birth Europe was witnessing the passing of the religious drama that had held its course for some five centuries, and the creation of new and mixed forms under the incentive of classical tragedy and comedy. These new forms were at first mainly written by scholars and performed by amateurs, but in England, as everywhere else in western Europe, the growth of a class of professional actors was threatening to make the drama popular, whether it should be new or old, classical or medieval, literary or farcical. Court, school, organizations of amateurs, and the strolling actors were all rivals in supplying a widespread desire for dramatic entertainment; and no boy who went to a grammar school could be ignorant that the drama was a form of literature which gave glory to Greece and Rome and might yet bestow its laurels on England.

When Shakespeare was twelve years old the first public playhouse was built in London. For a time literature held aloof from this public stage. Plays aiming at literary distinction were written for schools or court, or for the choir boys of St. Paul's and the royal chapel, who, however, gave plays in public as well as at court. But the professional companies prospered in their permanent theaters, and university men with literary ambitions were quick to turn to these theaters as offering a means of livelihood. By the time that Shakespeare was twenty-five, Lyly, Peele, and Greene had made comedies that were at once popular and literary; Kyd had written a tragedy that crowded the pit; and Marlowe had brought poetry and genius to triumph on the common stage—where they had played no part since the death of Euripides. A native literary drama had been created, its alliance with the public playhouses established, and at least some of its great traditions had been begun.

The development of the Elizabethan drama for the next twenty-five years is of exceptional interest to students of literary history, for in this brief period, in connection with the half-dozen theaters of a growing city and the demands of its varied population, we may trace the beginning, growth, florescence, and decay of many kinds of plays, and of many great careers. Actors, audiences, and dramatists all contributed to changes in taste and practice and to a development of unexampled rapidity and variety. In every detail of dramatic art there was change and improvement, a constant addition of new subject-matter, a mastery of new methods of technic, and an invention of new kinds of plays. The popular successes of Marlowe and Kyd Elizabethan Dramaand the early plays of Shakespeare himself seemed old-fashioned and crude to the taste of twenty years after, yet the triumphs of Shakespeare's maturity failed to exhaust the opportunities for innovation and advance. We are amazed to-day at the mere number of plays produced, as well as by the number of dramatists writing at the same time for this London of two hundred thousand inhabitants. To realize how great was the dramatic activity, we must remember further that hosts of plays have been lost, and that probably there is no author of note whose entire work has survived. By the time, however, that Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford the drama had reached its height. The dozen years from 1600 to 1612 included not only Shakespeare's great tragedies, but the best plays of Jonson, Chapman, and Webster, and the entire collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher. The only other decades comparable with this in the history of the drama are that which heard plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes and that other which saw the masterpieces of Racine and Molière.

The greatness of the drama, however, by no means ended with the retirement and death of Shakespeare. Some of those who had been his early associates continued to write for the stage, and younger men, as Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, carried on the traditions of their predecessors. If, as in other forms of literature, there was decline and decadence during the next twenty-five years, the drama also retained initiative, poetry, and intellectual force until the end. It was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters, actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters, and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history of the drama's development from such semi-moralities as Cambises and The Nice Wanton to the last plays of Massinger and Shirley.

For nearly a quarter of a century he was a sharer in this dramatic movement, working in London as actor, manager, and playwright. While no playwright was more desirous than he to find in the stage full opportunity for his genius, he was as keen as any in gauging the immediate theatrical demand and in meeting the varying conditions of a highly competitive profession. As we have already noted, he began by imitating those who had won success, and to the end he was adroit in taking advantage of a new dramatic fashion or discovery. Like his fellows, he often took his plots from novels, histories, or other narratives; but his very choice of stories might be determined by the theatrical taste of the moment, and in his treatment of those stories he shows in person, situation, or scene, a consideration of current practices, traditions, and conventions. In every field of literature, a writer is conditioned by the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and this Beginnings of the Dramadependence on current taste is especially important in the drama, where practice tends to fix itself in convention, and where innovation to be successful requires coöperation from the actors and approval from the audience as well as genius from the author. Though Shakespeare is for all time, he is part and parcel of the Elizabethan drama. If his plays are Elizabethan in their defects and limitations, such as their trivial puns and word-play, their overcrowded imagery, their loose and broken structure, their paucity of female rôles, their mixture of comic and tragic, their reliance on disguise and mistaken identity as motives, their use of improbable or absurd stories; they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their noble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound analysis of the sources of human tragedy.

The Elizabethan drama was a continuation of the medieval drama transformed by the influence of classical models, especially the comedies of Terence and Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. In England, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Miracle and Mystery plays were declining and were soon to disappear. The most common type of drama for the next sixty years was the Morality, which symbolized life as a conflict of vices and virtues or of the body and the soul. The drama was rapidly changing from long out-door performances to brief plays that could be given almost anywhere by a few actors. The term Interludes became common for all such entertainments, and allegorical frameworks served to contain a wide variety of matter, farce, pedagogy, politics, religion, history, or pageant. Close imitations of the classical forms were soon attempted by scholars and men of letters; but as the professional actors grew in importance the development of a national comedy and tragedy went on without much direction from critics or theorists, but rather in response to the demands of actors and audiences and to the initiative of authors.

The developments of comedy were numerous. Allegory gradually disappeared, and the Morality ceased to exist as a definite type, though its symbolization of life and its concern with conduct were handed along to the later drama. The plays of Robert Wilson, about 1580, show an interesting use of allegory for the purposes of social satire, and realism and satire long continued to characterize Elizabethan comedy, though for a time confined mostly to incidental scenes. Common and incidental also was farce, which is found in most plays of the century whether tragic, comic, or moral in their main purpose. Further, it was soon discovered that the Plautian scheme of comedy was well suited to farcical incident, as in Gammer Gurton's Needle (1552).[6] The classical models or their Italian imitations also produced Influence of Plautusother and less domestic imitations, as in Gascoigne's translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (pr. 1566) and Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1540); a little later, Lyly's Mother Bombie, Munday's Two Italian Gentlemen, and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Indeed such adaptations continued much later and resulted in some of the best farces, or realistic comedies of intrigue, as Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), Heywood's Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), Jonson's Epicene (1609) and Alchemist (1610).

The Plautian model, however, was far more influential than can be indicated by these close adaptations or by any list of direct imitations or borrowings. For the Elizabethan it offered a standard of comedy, and its plots, persons, and devices were freely used in all kinds of plays, romantic as well as realistic, sentimental as well as satirical or farcical. The plots of Plautus and Terence offer a series of tricks in which the complications are often increased by having the trickster tricked. Certain fixed types of character play the parts of gulls or gullers, as the old parents, the young lovers, the parasite, the braggart soldier, and the clever slave. The intrigue is forwarded by the use of disguise, mistaken identity, and most surprising coincidences; and it is accomplished by dialogue, often gross and abusive, but usually lively. This model served every nation of western Europe, reappearing with prolonged vitality in the inventions of Lope de Vega, the "commedia del arte" of Italy, and in the masterpieces of Molière. Much in its scheme that seems artificial and theatrical to-day was, we must remember, accepted without question by Europe of the sixteenth century as essential and desirable in comedy, especially in realistic comedy of intrigue or manners.

The plots of Terence, notably that of the Andria, also gave some encouragement to the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love, and some classical sanction to the abundant romantic material that was knocking at the doors of comedy. If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. It included the medieval stories of knights and their gests, and also the fresher tales of classical mythology; the Americas and Indies of contemporary adventure and the artificial Arcadias of humanist imitators of Virgil and Theocritus. Ovid and Malory, Homer and Boccaccio, Drake and Sanazzaro, were all contributors. The union of this romance with comedy on the stage began in two ways, and principally under the innovation of two writers, Lyly and Greene.

The taste for pageants, processions, and tableaux grew and flourished under the patronage of the court; and music, dancing, and spectacle were combined with dialogue in various court exhibitions and plays given by the child actors. John Lyly, writing for these choir boys, developed this type of entertainment into a distinct Lyly and Greenespecies of comedy. Of his eight plays, written at intervals from 1580 to 1593, all but one were in prose, and all except the Plautian Mother Bombie adhere loosely to a common formula. Classical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications. Gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. The witty page supersedes the rude buffoon of earlier plays, and everything is graceful and ingenious, slight in serious interest, but relieved by movement and song.

This is the form of comedy which Shakespeare adopted for Love's Labour's Lost and perfected in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. But Lyly's contribution should not be defined merely by this type of drama, original as it is in its departure from medieval or classical precedents. He showed how comedy might be a courtly and literary entertainment and also the playground of fancy and wit.

The second development of romantic comedy came through the dramatization of stories of love, adventure, and marvels. To such stories Robert Greene gave a heightened charm through the idealization of his heroines. His Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590) is a magic play with an historical setting; but the interest gathers and centers on the love story of Margaret, the Keeper's daughter. In James IV (c. 1591) the pseudo-historical setting frames the stories of the noble Ida and the wronged but faithful Dorothea. In the incidents of the plot, with its woman disguised as a page, the faithless lover, and the final reconciliation, and also in the sweetness, modesty, and loyalty of the heroine, the play reminds us of Shakespeare's comedies and is indeed very close to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which he was clearly adopting Greene's formula.

Tragedy naturally lagged somewhat behind comedy as a form of popular entertainment. So far as we can judge from the extant plays, there was until the appearance of Kyd and Marlowe no real union between Senecan imitations like Gorboduc (1562), Jocasta (1566), and The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), on the one hand, and popular medleys of morality, tragedy, and farce like Cambises (1565), Horestes (pr. 1567), and Appius and Virginia (1563), on the other. Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587) was an epoch-making play because it brought to the popular drama true poetry and genuine passion; but it and its successors also established a new type of tragedy. Marlowe made no effort to retain the structure or themes of classical tragedy; on the contrary, he made his plays loosely connected series of scenes dealing with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play Marlowe and Kydcenters its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their direful catastrophes. These plays set the key for all Elizabethan tragedy, including Shakespeare's Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. They were immediately followed by dozens of imitators. All blank verse echoed Marlowe's mighty line, and tragedy was filled with ranting conquerors like Tamburlaine, monstrous villains like Barabbas, and murders like that of Edward II. Shakespeare was his pupil in the 2 and 3 Henry VI, mastered his methods in Richard III, and still wrote in emulation, though no longer in imitation, in Richard II and The Merchant of Venice.

Within a few months of Tamburlaine, appeared a play of almost equal influence on subsequent drama, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was a student of Seneca, a translator of Garnier's Cornelia, a Senecan imitation; and he adapted some elements of classical tragedy to the English stage. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired. They were believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues, and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story. Kyd modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus, long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan structure; but his main borrowing was the essential story of a crime and its punishment. He thus brought to the Elizabethan stage the classical theme of retribution. In his Spanish Tragedy, a murder is avenged under the direction of a ghost, by a hesitating and soliloquizing protagonist, who is driven through doubt and speculation almost to madness, and then to craft, with which he outwits the wily villain and brings all the leading dramatis personæ to a final slaughter.

Blood revenge was established as the favorite motive of tragedy; the conflict of craft between protagonist and villain made up the action, and the speculations of the avenger gave a chance for wisdom and eloquence. One other play, probably by Kyd, the lost Hamlet, also presented these features and later formed the basis for Shakespeare's tragedy. Other plays, as Soliman and Perseda, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and Locrine immediately adopted Kyd's theme and technic; indeed the stage for half a dozen years abounded in avenging heroes, diabolical villains, shrieking ghosts, and long soliloquies on fate, death, retribution, and kindred themes. Titus Andronicus is quite in the English History PlaysKydian vein. Many plays combined the salient traits of Marlowe and Kyd, and henceforth no one wrote tragedy without paying homage to their inventions.

We have now noticed the most important developments in comedy and tragedy made by the time that Shakespeare began writing for the theaters; and he made quick use of the progress accomplished by Plautian and Lylyan comedy, by Greene's romances, and by the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe. There were other plays not easily classified under these names and of less service to Shakespeare. But to the critical playgoer of 1590 few plays would have seemed either 'right comedies' or 'right tragedies.' The majority were mere dramatizations of story without close construction or selection of material, seeking merely varied and abundant action. They drew their material from all kinds of narrative sources, Italian novelle, current pamphlets, Latin historians, or English chronicles; and, whether historical or fictitious, were usually known as Histories, i.e., stories.

The patriotic interest in English history fostered the presentation of its scenes upon the stage. The chronicles of Halle and Holinshed furnished abundant material; and embassies, processions, and pitched battles filled the stage with movement. Historical plays might, indeed, draw from classical history or from current foreign history, but from 1590 to 1603 a very large number of plays give scenic representation to the reigns of English kings.

Some of these form a distinct class, since, however mixed with comic matter, they imitate Kyd or Marlowe and recast the chronicle of a reign to fit the accepted subjects of tragedy, the downfall of a prince, the revenge for a crime, the overthrow of a tyrant, or the retribution brought upon a conspirator or usurper. Conceived under Marlowe's influence, and perhaps owing something to his hand, is the tetralogy that includes the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.

Those history plays, however, that do not follow the formulas for tragedy, are a heterogeneous group not easily classified. They usually keep to the loose chronicle method that presented a series of scenes without much regard to unity or coherence. Farce, comedy, magic, spectacle, heroics, and everything that might have happened was permissible in these plays, and perhaps the only thing indispensable was a pitched field with opposing armies. Biographical, comic, popular, patriotic, or what not, these plays brought a variety of scenes to the theaters, but offered only a loose and flexible form rather than any dramatic direction or model to the creator of Falstaff.

The early deaths of Greene and Marlowe and the retirement of Lyly left Shakespeare the heir of their inventions. Though his plays were at first imitative, he soon surpassed his predecessors in gift of expression, in depiction of character, and in deftness of dramatic technic. The years from 1593 to near the turn of the century are particularly lacking in records of Shakespeare's Leadershipplays or theaters; but it seems clear that the main developments of the drama were in romantic comedy and chronicle history; and it is also clear that Shakespeare was the unquestioned leader in both of these forms.

In comparison with his associates, he was now the master, relying on his own experience rather than on their innovations. Neither the crude but popular Mucedorus (1595) nor Dekker's poetical extravagance, Old Fortunatus (1596), could contribute to his development of romantic comedy; and domestic comedy could not instruct the inventor of Launce and Launcelot. Incidental relationships may indeed be noted. As You Like It, for example, dramatizes a pastoral novel with the addition of scenes that recall Robin Hood's forest life, and may owe something to the suggestion of two Robin Hood plays by Chettle and Munday, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598). But, on the whole, the indebtedness was on the other side, and imitations indicate that men of Shakespeare's day realized that romantic comedy and history could not be carried farther.

In fact, a certain reaction set in against these forms of drama. Near the close of the century new tendencies became manifest. Comedy tended to become more realistic and satiric. Chapman, Marston, Middleton, and Jonson, all began writing romantic comedy, but changed shortly to realistic. Jonson, in his Every Man in His Humour (1598), announced his opposition to the lawless drama which had preceded—whether romantic comedy or chronicle history—and proposed the creation of a new satirical comedy of manners. He was moved partly by a desire to break from past methods in order to bring comedy closer to classical example, and partly by a desire for realism, a faithful presentation, analysis, and criticism of current manners. The growth of London and the increase in luxury and immorality seem to have encouraged such a movement, and for the decade after 1598 there were many comedies of London life, mostly satiric, and nearly all realistic. Many varieties are to be found, from gross representation of the seamy side of city life to serious discussion of social questions, and from sympathetic picturing of certain trades to satiric exposure of the evils of society.

Jonson's emulation of Aristophanes led him into arrogant personal satire in the Poetaster (1601), and there ensued the so-called war of the theaters, in which Marston, Dekker, and, according to report, Shakespeare were Jonson's opponents. If Shakespeare, indeed, had a share in this war, he showed only slight interest in the prevailing comedy. Measure for Measure uses the device of a spying duke employed in Marston's Malcontent, and discusses sexual relationships somewhat in the tone of the time, while the scenes dealing with houses of ill fame are not unlike similar scenes in the contemporary plays of Middleton, Webster, and others. Troilus and Cressida, also, show more of a satiric temper Realistic Comedythan is usual in Shakespeare. But neither of these plays partakes to any extent of the prevailing satire on contemporary London. Wide as was the range of Shakespeare's genius, it seems to have avoided the field of satire.

A review of the drama must, however, at least remark the importance of this development of realistic comedy which flourished in the decade after 1598 and continued to the end. Jonson's comedy of 'humors' includes Volpone (1605), which overstepped the bounds of comedy in its denunciation of evil, the Alchemist (1611), perhaps the best English play on the Latin model, and Bartholomew Fair (1614), most original and English of them all. Dekker's fine drama of middle class life, The Honest Whore (1604), and Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play suggesting both the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century and the problem play of to-day, also belong to this very remarkable era of domestic themes and serious realism.

If Shakespeare did not turn to satire or realism or current social problems, he did turn away from chronicle history plays and romantic comedies. As we saw in the last chapter, for a period of eight or nine years, from Julius Cæsar to Antony and Cleopatra, he gave his best efforts of his maturity to tragedy. The day for mere imitation of Seneca, Kyd, or Marlowe, was past; and scholars like Jonson and Chapman as well as Shakespeare sought in the tragedy of the public theater, an opportunity for wisdom and poetry and a criticism of life.

For models, Shakespeare did not need to go back farther than his own Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, nor to imitate any other than himself. Yet his great plays may have seemed to his contemporaries to adopt rather than to depart from current dramatic practices. They belong to the Elizabethan 'tragedy of blood'; against a background of courts and battles they present the downfall of princes; they rest on improbable stories that end in fearful slaughter; they invariably set forth great crimes, compact of murder, lust, villainous intrigue, and ferocious cruelty. Some of them follow Kyd in recounting a story of blood vengeance presided over by ghosts, or discover the retribution due for crime in physical torments. Nearly all follow Marlowe in centering the tragic interest in the fate of a supernormal protagonist who is swayed by an overpowering emotion, and in elevating these human desires and passions into tremendous forces that work their waste of devastation and ruin on character and life.

The contemporary tragedy is brought closest to Shakespeare in the relations of the revenge plays to Hamlet. The type, introduced by Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet, underwent a special development in Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1598) and several other plays appearing from 1598 to 1603, that dealt with the blood vengeance of a son for a father. At the same time Shakespeare turned to the Tragedyremaking of the old Hamlet and to a new treatment of the old theme, yet retained many of the old accessories. Marston reproduces the essential story of blood vengeance, presided over by a ghost, crossed by both lust and sentimental love, commented on by long soliloquies, and accompanied by pretended madness. Chettle, in Hoffman, amplifies the horrors and villainy and brings the story of the mad girl into closer juncture with the main plot than is the case in Hamlet. Tourneur, writing independently of Shakespeare, introduces, among all sorts of horrors, a Christian ghost who forbids blood vengeance and commands submission to Providence. Ben Jonson, in his additions to the old Spanish Tragedy, gives fine imaginative interpretation of the wavering moods of meditation, irony, and frenzy with which Kyd had dealt only crudely. The later development of this type proceeded without much regard to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but rather in the direction started by Marston's tragedies and his influential tragi-comedy, The Malcontent. While Hamlet may be described as centering attention on a meditative and high-minded avenger, Tourneur, Webster, Middleton, and later dramatists found greater interest in the study of villainy and intrigue. Revenge is born of depravity rather than duty, and given a setting of physical horrors and unnatural lust. Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy (1606) and Webster's White Devil (1610) and Duchess of Malfi (1611) represent the culmination of this play of revenge, lust, and horror, and supply a sort of standard for tragedy until the Civil War. Webster, it must be added, was hardly less interested than Shakespeare in character and motive, though he chose to study these in a chamber of horrors.

Shakespeare's Roman tragedies also suggest comparison with contemporary plays, those either on Roman or on contemporary foreign history. Tragedies dealing with Roman history had preceded Julius Cæsar, but that play doubtless stimulated Jonson's Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). Both these plays attempted an approach to classical structure and a thorough study and digest of classical history. This effort to make tragedy a serious and authoritative interpretation of history was also shared by Chapman in his plays dealing with contemporary French history, 1 and 2 Bussy D'Ambois (1601-1607) and 1 and 2 Biron (1608). While Jonson strove to free his style from the abundance of conceits, figures, and passages of description that had characterized earlier drama, Chapman used every chance to crowd his verse with far-stretched figure and weighty apothegm. At its worst it is peculiarly representative of Elizabethan confusion and bombast; at its best it is closest of all in its resemblance to Shakespeare's. Like Jonson and Chapman, Shakespeare sought historical backgrounds for his characters and found a fascination in the interpretation of the motives of the great protagonists of the world of antiquity. It is worthy of note, however, that he seems to have taken no interest in another class of subjects much Beaumont and Fletcherfavored by his contemporaries. Contemporary crimes treated with an excess of realism and didactic conclusions are common in drama from Arden of Feversham (1590) on, and engaged the services of Jonson, Webster, Ford, Dekker, and others.

About 1607 a new departure appeared in the work of the dramatic collaborators, Beaumont and Fletcher. After some experiments, they won, in their tragi-comedies, Philaster (1608) and A King and No King (1610), and their tragedy, The Maid's Tragedy (1609), great theatrical successes, and in these and similar plays established a new kind of dramatic romance. The realistic comedies of Jonson and Middleton, which, along with the great tragedies of Shakespeare, crowd the stage history of the preceding ten years, had offered nothing similar to these romances which joined tragic and idyllic material in scenes of brilliant theatrical effectiveness, abounding in transitions from suspense to surprise, and culminating in telling dénouements. This new realm of romance is an artificial one, contrasting pure love with horrid entanglements of lust, and ever bringing love in conflict with duty, friendship, or the code of honor. In its intriguing courts, or in nearby forests where the idyls are placed, love of one kind or another is the ruling and vehement passion, riding high-handed over tottering thrones, rebellious subjects, usurping tyrants, and checked, if checked at all, only by the unexampled force of honor. Romance, in short, depends on situation, on the artificial but skilful juxtaposition of emotions and persons, and on the new technic that sacrifices consistency of characterization for surprise. Characterization tends to become typical, and motives tend to be based on fixed conventions, such as the code of honor might dictate to a seventeenth-century gentleman; but the lack of individuality in character is counterbalanced by the vividness with which the lovers, tyrants, faithful friends, evil women, and sentimental heroines are presented, and by the fluent and lucid style which varies to any emotional requirement and rises to the demands of the most sensational situations.

Cymbeline in its plot bears some close resemblances to Philaster, and it seems likely that Shakespeare was adopting the methods and materials of the new romance. At all events, he turned from tragedy to romance, and in Cymbeline and the far more original and successful Winter's Tale and Tempest produced tragi-comedies that, like Beaumont and Fletcher's, rely on a contrast of tragic and idyllic and on surprising plots and idealized heroines. After Beaumont's retirement in 1611 or 1612, it seems probable that Fletcher and Shakespeare collaborated together on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

There is ample evidence that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher won a great popular renown, surpassing for a time those of Shakespeare and all others. Beaumont did not live long after he ceased to write for the stage, dying at thirty, in the same year as Shakespeare. Jonson Tragi-Comedyhad given up dramatic writing for the time, and Fletcher was left the chief writer for Shakespeare's old company and the undoubted leader of the theater. Including the plays written in collaboration with Beaumont, Shakespeare, and later with Massinger, he left some sixty dramas of many kinds, varying from farcical comedy of manners to the most extreme tragedy. The comedies of manners present the affairs of women, and spice their lively conversation and surprising situations with a wit that often reminds one of the Restoration; indeed they carry the development of comedy nearly to the point where Wycherley and Congreve began. The tragi-comedies, which display the qualities already noted as belonging to the romances, have the technical advantage that the disentanglement of their rapid plots and sub-plots is left hanging in the balance until the very end. The happy ending to tragic entanglements won a favor it has never lost on the English stage, and tragi-comedy of the Fletcherian type continued the most popular form of the drama until Dryden.

It is unnecessary here to dwell long over the drama after Shakespeare's death. Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and Webster wrote from time to time, and Middleton devoted his versatile talent to whatever kind of play was in vogue, now rather to Websterian tragedy and Fletcherian tragi-comedy than to realistic comedy. Yet, in collaboration with Rowley, he produced the powerful tragedy, The Changeling, and the much-admired tragi-comedy, A Fair Quarrel. After Fletcher's death in 1625, Massinger took his place as leader of the stage, and his work, with that of Ford and Shirley, carry on the great traditions of the drama to the very end. A host of minor writers, as Brome, D'Avenant, Suckling, Cartwright, offer little that is new; but no survey of the drama, however brief, can neglect to mention the skilful exposition, admirable psychology, and sound structural principles that characterized the best of Massinger's many plays, the unique and amazing dramatic genius shown in Ford's masterpieces, The Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and the ingenuity in plot, adroitness in characterization, and genuine poetic gifts of Shirley.

Comedies from 1616 to 1642 reveal two chief influences; they are realistic and satiric, following Jonson, or they are light-hearted, lively combinations of manners and intrigue, after Fletcher. In the former class are Massinger's two great comedies, The City Madam and A New Way to Pay Old Debts. To the latter class belong most of the comedies of Shirley. Tragi-comedies follow Fletcher with the variations due to the authors' ingenuity, and include perhaps the most attractive plays of Massinger and Shirley. Tragedies usually mingle lust, devilish intrigue, physical horror, after the fashion of Webster and Tourneur, but now often with romantic variation on the theme of love, and a technic of suspense and surprise similar to Beaumont and Fletcher. These are the main tendencies in the last twenty years of the drama, and Pastoral and Masquecharacterize in the large the work of the greater men as well as of the less. Shakespeare's influence is widespread, but appears incidentally in particular scene, situation, character, or phrase, rather than as affecting the main course and fashions of the drama. After the publication of his plays in 1623, this incidental influence increased, and is distinctly noticeable in the plays of Ford and Shirley.

A glance must suffice for two dramatic forms that had only slight connection with the public theaters, the Pastoral Play and the Court Masque. Pastoral elements are found in many early entertainments and in the plays of Lyly and Peele. Later, in imitation of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, attempts were made to inaugurate a pastoral drama, presenting a full-fledged dramatic exposition of the golden age. Daniel's Queen's Arcadia (1605) and Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess (1609) had many later followers, but the form won no permanent hold on the popular taste. Traces of its influence, however, may often be seen, as in Shakespeare's As You Like It, or Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster. The masque, originally only a masquerade, soon acquired some dramatic accompaniment, and in the court of James I developed into an elaborate form of entertainment. The masked dance of the ladies and gentlemen of the court was merely the focus for dialogue, elaborate setting, spectacle, music, and grotesque dances by professionals. These shows, costing vast sums for staging, costumes, and music, depended for their success mainly on the architect Inigo Jones, but in some degree also on Ben Jonson, who was the creator of the Court Masque as a literary form. Such expensive spectacles were far beyond the reach of the public theater, but provoked considerable imitation, as in Shakespeare's Tempest, or several of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. Later Milton immortalized the form in Comus.

The most hasty review of the Elizabethan drama must suggest how constantly Shakespeare responded to its prevailing conditions. There are, of course, great variations in the signs which different plays offer of contemporary influence and peculiarity. So it is with most of his fellow dramatists. Lear and Othello were perhaps written within the same year, yet Othello, in its unity, its technical excellence, and its depiction of character, is the most modern of the tragedies, while Lear, with its impossible story, its horrors, its treatment of madness, its likeness to the chronicle plays, its prolonged passage from crisis to catastrophe, in its very conception, is the most Elizabethan, though perhaps the most impressive of the tragedies. Twelfth Night is suited to any stage, but Troilus and Cressida and Pericles are hardly conceivable except on the Elizabethan. Despite such variations, however, Shakespeare's relations to the contemporary drama were manifestly constant and immediate. If it was rarely a question with him what the ancients had written, it was always a question what was being acted and what was successful at the Shakespeare and His Contemp­orariesmoment. His own growth in dramatic power goes step by step with the rapid and varied development of the drama, and the measure for comparison must be, not by decades, but by years or months.

A study of the Elizabethan drama may help to excuse some of the faults and limitations of Shakespeare, but it also enforces his merits. Both faults and merits are often to be understood in the efforts of lesser men to do what he did. We admire his triumphs the more as we consider their failures. Yet they often had admirable success, and their triumphs as well as his are due in part to the dramatic conditions which gave the freest opportunity for individual initiative in language, verse, story, and construction. Noble bursts of poetry, richness and variety of life, an intense interest in human nature, comic or tragic—these are the great merits of that drama. That in a superlative degree they are also the characteristics of Shakespeare is not due solely to his exceptional genius, but to the fact that his genius worked in a favorable environment.

A TYPICAL SHAKESPEREAN STAGE

From Albright's Shaksperian Stage

FOOTNOTES:

[6] In this chapter the dates appended to the plays indicate the conjectured year of presentation. Dates of publication are prefixed by pr.

CHAPTER VI

The Elizabethan Theater

In 1576, James Burbage, father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, and himself a member of the Earl of Leicester's company, built the first London playhouse, the Theater in Shoreditch. In the next year a second playhouse, the Curtain, was erected nearby, and these seem to have remained the only theaters until 1587-1588, when probably the Rose, on the Bankside, was built by Henslowe. In 1599 Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, after some difficulty over their lease, demolished the old Theater and used the timber for the Globe, near the Rose, on the Bankside. The Swan, another theater, had been built there in 1594, somewhat to the west; and in 1614 the Hope was erected hard by the old Rose and the new Globe, which in 1613 had replaced the old Globe. Meantime the Fortune had been built by Henslowe and Alleyn in 1600 in Golden Lane to the north of Cripplegate, on the model of the Globe, and the Red Bull was erected in the upper end of St. John's Street about 1603-1607. These were all public theaters, open to the air, built of wood, outside the city limits and the jurisdiction of the city corporation.

Before the Theater, plays had been acted in various places about the city, and especially in inn-yards, some of which long continued to be used for dramatic performances. At an early date also, the companies of children actors connected with the choirs of St. Paul's and the Queen's Chapel had given public performances, probably indoors, at places near St. Paul's and in Blackfriars. When the Burbages were in difficulties about the Theater, they had leased certain rooms in the dismantled monastery of Blackfriars, but had then released these to a company of children which acted there for some years. In 1608 the Burbages regained possession of this property, and Shakespeare's company began acting there. This Blackfriars theater was known as a private theater in order to avoid the application of certain statutes directed against the public theaters, but it differed from them merely in being indoors, with artificial lights, and higher prices. It was used by Shakespeare's company as a winter theater, while the Globe served for summer performances, and it was the model for various other private theaters, two of which survived the Protectorate and became in turn the models for the Restoration Theater. Drury Lane and Covent Garden, indeed, trace their ancestry back directly to the Blackfriars through the Cockpit and the Salisbury Court playhouses.

The companies of actors which occupied these theaters were coöperative organizations. Eight or ten actors formed a company, leased a theater, hired supernumeraries, Companies of Actorsbought plays, and shared in the profits. In Elizabeth's reign they secured a legal position by obtaining a license from some nobleman, and so were known as the Earl of Leicester's men, Lord Admiral's men, and so on. On the accession of James I, the leading London companies were taken directly under patronage of members of the royal family. During Shakespeare's time there were innumerable companies, but the tendency was for the best actors to become associated in a few companies, and for each company to keep to a particular theater; so that at the accession of James I, there were only five adult companies in London with permanent theaters. The best companies were frequently employed to act at court, and during the summer or when the plague was raging in London, they often toured the country. The children's companies flourished from time to time, and especially from 1599-1607 they were, as we learn from Hamlet, formidable rivals of the men.

The history of the adult companies shows the growth of two distinct interests, that of Henslowe and Alleyn, and that of the Burbages. Henslowe, whose diary is one of the chief documents for the history of the theater, built the Rose, and in partnership with his son-in-law, the famous actor Alleyn, controlled the Fortune and the Hope, and the companies known as the Admiral's and the Earl of Worcester's men, and later on the Queen's and the Prince's men. The Burbages owned the Theater, the Globe, and the Blackfriars, and were in control of Shakespeare's company. This company, at first the Earl of Leicester's men, was known by the names of its various patrons, Strange's, Derby's, Hunsdon's, and the Lord Chamberlain's, until in 1603 it became the King's men. For a short time, as Lord Strange's men, it acted at the Rose, and apparently later at the playhouse in Newington Butts, but its regular theaters were the Theater, the Globe, and Blackfriars. With this company Shakespeare was connected from the beginning, and he aided in making it the chief London company. For a time, Alleyn and the Admiral's men were its close rivals, but even before the accession of James I, Shakespeare and Burbage had given it a supremacy that it maintained to the closing of the theaters.

There are various pictures of the exterior of Elizabethan theaters in the contemporary maps or views of London, the best representation of the four Bankside theaters being the engraving of Hollar printed in the Tudor edition of Twelfth Night. This was first published in Londinopolis, 1657, but represents the Bankside as it was about 1620. Four pictures of interiors have been preserved, that from Kirkman's Drolls, those from the title-pages of Roxana and Messalina, and the DeWitt drawing of the Swan, reproduced in the Tudor Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI. The drawing from Kirkman's Drolls is usually known as the Red Bull stage, but it was not issued until 1679, and does not seem to have anything to do with the Red Bull or with Public Theatersany other regular theater. The Messalina and Roxana pictures are small, and both show a rear curtain and a projecting stage. The DeWitt drawing was done from hearsay evidence, is inaccurate in details, and represents a theater with a movable stage, probably not long regularly used for plays; it gives little idea of the stage, but does afford a good general notion of the interior of a public theater. The contract for the Fortune theater, built on the model of the Globe, except that it was square instead of octagonal, has been preserved and enables us to complete this view of the interior in detail.

The public theaters were usually round, or nearly round, wooden buildings of three stories. These stories were occupied by tiers of galleries encircling the pit, which was open to the air. The stage projected halfway into the pit, and was provided with dressing rooms in the rear, and a protecting roof overhead, supported in some cases by pillars. At the top was the 'hut', a room used to provide apparatus for raising and lowering persons or properties from the stage, Light when needed was provided by torches. Admission to standing room in the pit was usually only a penny, but seats in the gallery or boxes or on the stage cost much more, rising as high as half a crown. Performances were given on every fair day except Sunday, and a flag flying from the hut indicated that a play was to be performed. Some of the public playhouses were used for acrobats, fencing, or even bear-baiting as well as for plays; but the better theaters, as the Globe and Fortune, seem to have been limited to dramatic performances.

The size and arrangement of the stage doubtless varied somewhat with the different theaters, and considerable changes seem to have been introduced by the indoor private theaters. But the Curtain was used from 1577 to 1642, some new theaters were modeled closely on the old, and the same plays were acted on different stages, so it is apparent that in all the stage was the same in its main features. For clearness these may be again enumerated. The stage was a platform projecting into the pit, open on three sides, and without any front curtain. In the rear were two doors, and between them, an alcove, or inner stage, separated from the front stage by curtains. Above the inner stage was a gallery, also provided with curtains, and over the doors were windows or balconies. The arrangement of doors, inner stage, gallery, and curtain may have varied somewhat, but the essential elements are a curtained space at the rear, and a gallery above. Trap-doors were also provided, and the hut overhead supplied the machinery for ascents and descents of gods and goddesses.

Our diagram for the ground floor of the Fortune shows a square-cornered stage with doors flat on the rear, while the perspective drawing from Dr. Albright's Shaksperian Stage shows a tapering stage, as in the Messalina picture, with doors on the bias. Some stagesThe Fortune Theater may have had rounded corners with doors in the side. The pillars were not necessary in the private theaters; or in some public houses where other means were found for supporting the roof.

GROUND PLAN OF THE FORTUNE THEATER
Dimensions: 80 ft. square on the outside; 55 ft. square on the inside,
the stage 43 ft. wide and extending to the middle of the pit.

The performance of a play differed in many ways from one to-day. There was no scenery and there were no women actors. Though scenes were used in court performances as early as 1604, they do not seem to have been employed by the professional companies to any extent until after the Restoration. Female parts were taken by boys, and, except in plays acted by the children's companies, there were rarely more than two important female characters in a play. Though without scenery, the Elizabethan stage was by no means devoid of spectacle. Processions, battles, all kinds of mythological beings, ascents to heaven, descents to hell, fire-works, and elaborate properties, were employed. Numerous contemporary plays indicate that neither the fairyland of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, nor the magnificent court of Henry VIII, was devised without an eye to the resources of the stage. Large sums of money were lavished on costumes, the cost of a coat often exceeding the price paid an author for a play. Costume was anachronistic; Cleopatra was impersonated by a boy in stays and farthingale; and Cæsar, probably by Burbage, in a costume much like that worn by the Earl of Essex. Some attention, however, was paid to appropriateness. Shepherds were clothed in white, hunters in green; and doubtless mermaids, Stage Presentationfairies, Venuses, and satyrs were given as appropriate a dress as fancy could devise. The action of a play seems usually to have been completed in two hours. There was sometimes music between the acts, but there were no long waits, and little stage business.

The peculiarities in the presentation of a play due to the arrangement of the stage were considerable, and have been the subject of much discussion and misunderstanding among investigators. There is, however, no doubt that the action was largely on the front stage, and that most of the scenes, at least in Shakespeare's lifetime, were designed for presentation on this projecting platform. Since there was no drop-curtain, actors had some distance to traverse, on entrances and exits, between the doors and the front. At the end of a scene or a play, all must retire, and the bodies of the dead must be carried out. Hence a tragedy often ends with a funeral procession, a comedy with a dance. The indications of scene supplied by modern editors for Shakespeare's plays help to visualize a modern presentation, but are misleading as to Shakespeare's intentions or an Elizabethan performance. The majority of scenes in his plays differ strikingly from those in a modern play in that they offer no hints as to the exact locality. Often it is not clear from the text whether the scene is conceived as indoors or outdoors, in the palace, or the courtyard, or before the entrance. Even when the scene is presumably within a room, there is often no indication of the nature of the furnishings, never any of the elaborate attention to details of setting, such as we find in a play by Pinero or Shaw. Sometimes placards were hung up indicating the scene of a play, but apparently these merely gave the general scene, as "Venice" or "Verona," and did not often designate localities more closely. In fact the majority of the scenes were probably written with no precise conception of their setting. They were written to be acted on a front stage, bare of scenery, projecting out into the audience. This did not represent a particular locality, but rather any locality whatever.

The inner stage and the gallery above, and to some extent the doors and the windows, were used to indicate specific localities when these were necessary. The gallery represented the wall of a town, an upper story of a house, or any elevated locality. The doors represented doors to houses or gates to a city, and the windows or balconies over them were often used for the windows of the houses. The inner stage was used in various ways to indicate a specific locality requiring properties, and this use apparently increased as time went on, and especially in the indoor, artificially lighted private theaters. In any case, however, when the curtains were opened, the inner stage became a part of the main stage, and while action might take place there, it might also serve as a background for action proceeding in the front. Properties could be brought on and off the inner stage, behind the closed curtains, hence large properties were confined to its precincts. Inner StageFurniture, as chairs, tables, or even beds, could, however, be pushed or carried out from the inner to the outer stage. A play might be given on the front stage without using the curtained recess at all, but numerous references to curtains make it clear that the inner stage was used from the early days of the theater.

The uses of the inner stage have been much discussed and are still in dispute, but they may be summarized briefly. First, the inner stage was used for a specific, restricted, and usually propertied locality—a cave, a study, a shop, a prison. Second, the inner stage was used for scenes requiring discovery or tableaux. Numerous stage directions indicate the drawing of the curtains to present a scene set on the inner stage, as Bethsabe at her bath, Friar Bungay in bed with his magical apparatus about him, Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Third, the use of the inner stage was extended so that it represented any propertied background, especially for scenes in a forest, church, or temple. In As You Like It, for example, the last four acts are located in the Forest of Arden. "This is the Forest of Arden," says Rosalind as soon as she arrives there; and even before this, Duke senior alludes to "these woods," and later we learn that there are practicable trees on which Orlando hangs his verses. The forest setting, consisting of trees and rocks, was placed on the inner stage and served to give a scenic background. Of course, different places in the forest are to be presumed, but one forest background would be sufficient for all. In the course of the four acts, however, there are three scenes (II. ii; II. iii; III. i) that are not in the forest, but at unspecified and unpropertied places about the palace and Oliver's house. For these scenes the curtain would be closed, shutting off the forest background and transferring the spectators to the unspecified localities of Act I, i.e., to the bare front stage. Fourth. An extension of this last use made it possible to employ the curtain to indicate change of scene. Several scenes, where no heavy properties were required, might succeed one another on the front stage with the curtains closed; but the opening of the curtains would reveal a special background and a manifest change of scene. One instance of this use of the inner stage is seen in the immediate change from an outdoor to an indoor scene, or vice versa. The scene is in the street, i.e., on the front stage; the person knocks at one of the doors and is admitted to a house; when he reappears, it is through the inner stage, the curtains of which have been drawn, disclosing the setting of a room. Or this process is reversed. In A Yorkshire Tragedy, there is an interesting case of such an alternation from indoors to outdoors, with one character remaining on the stage all of the time. A more extensive use of this "alternation" could be employed to indicate marked changes of place. As long as the action remains in Venice, the bare front stage will do, but a transfer to Portia's house at Belmont can be made by means of the curtains and the inner stage. Evolution of the TheaterIn the later plays at the private theaters this use of the inner stage, then better lighted, seems to have increased, especially in the change from a street or general hall to special apartments.

These uses of the inner stage, together with that of the upper stage or gallery, gave a chance for considerable variety in the action, and rendered the rapid succession of scenes less bewildering than one would at first suppose. Shakespeare's stage was the outcome of the peculiar conditions of acting by professionals in the sixteenth century, but it was also a natural step in the evolution from the medieval to the modern stage. On the medieval stage there was a neutral place or platea and special localized and propertied places called sedes, domus, loca. On the Elizabethan stage the front stage is the platea, the inner and upper stages the domus or loca. In the Restoration theater the scenery was placed on the inner stage and shut off from the outer stage by a curtain. With the use of scenery, the inner stage became more important, and the projecting apron of the front stage was gradually cut down. The proscenium doors in front of the curtain long survived their original use as entrances, but, as a rule, they have now finally disappeared with the front stage. The modern picture-frame stage of to-day is the evolution of the inner stage of the Elizabethans. Similarly the method of stage presentation has changed only gradually from Shakespeare's day to ours. The alternation from outer to inner stage was very common in the Restoration theaters, where flat scenes were used instead of a curtain, and it may still be seen in the production of melodrama or of Shakespeare's plays. A painted drop shuts off a few feet of the stage, which becomes a street or a hall, while properties and scenery are being arranged in the rear. When the drop goes up, we pass from the street or the court of the wicked Duke to the Forest of Arden, just as the Elizabethans did.

The Elizabethan stage affected Shakespeare's dramatic art in many ways. The absence of scenery, of women actors, and of a front curtain, the use of a bare stage that served for neutral or unspecified localities, naturally influenced the composition of every play. But the theatrical presentation was by no means as crude or as medieval as these differences from modern practice seem to indicate. The intimacy established between actors and audience by the projecting stage, the rapidity of action hastened by the lack of scenery or furniture, the possibilities of rapid changes of scene rendered intelligible by the use of the inner stage, were all manifest advantages in encouraging dramatic invention. The traditions formed in this theater for the presentation of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the other plays, were handed on from Shakespeare and Burbage to Lowin and Taylor, to Betterton, Cibber, and Garrick, down to the present day; and have perhaps been less revolutionized by scenery and electric lights than we might imagine.

CHAPTER VII

The Text of Shakespeare

The main difficulties that stand in the way of determining the actual form in which Shakespeare left his plays are due, first, to the total absence of manuscripts, and, secondly, to the fact that he, like his contemporaries, regarded dramatic literature as material for performance on the stage, not as something to be read in the library. The most obvious evidence of this lies in his having himself issued with every appearance of personal attention his poems of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, while he permitted his plays to find their way into print without any trace of supervision and, in some cases, apparently without his consent. When the author sold a play to the theatrical company which was to perform it, he appears to have regarded himself as having no longer any rights in it; and when a play was published, we are in general justified in supposing either that it had been obtained surreptitiously, or that it had been disposed of by the company. Exceptions to this begin to appear in the first half of the seventeenth century, notably in the case of Heywood, who defended his action on the plea of protecting the text from mutilation, and in that of Ben Jonson, who issued in 1616, in the face of ridicule for his presumption, a folio volume of his "Works." But, though Shakespeare is reported to have felt annoyance at the pirating of his productions, there is no evidence of his having been led to protect himself or the integrity of his writings by departing from the usual practice in his profession.

Among the various documents which make us aware of this situation, so general then, but so strongly in contrast with modern methods, three explicit statements by Heywood are so illuminating that they deserve quotation. One occurs in the preface to his Rape of Lucrece, 1630:

To the Reader.—It hath beene no custome in mee of all other men (courteous Reader) to commit my plaies to the presse: the reason though some may attribute to my owne insufficiencie, I had rather subscribe in that to their seuare censure then by seeking to auoide the imputation of weaknes to incurre greater suspition of honestie: for though some haue vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the presse, For my owne part I heere proclaime my selfe euer faithfull in the first, and neuer guiltie of the last: yet since some of my plaies haue (vnknowne to me, and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the Printers hands, and therefore so corrupt and mangled, (coppied only by the eare) that I have bin as vnable to know them, as ashamed to chalenge them, This therefore, I was the willinger to furnish out in his natiue habit: first being by consent, next because the rest haue beene so wronged in being publisht in such sauadge and ragged ornaments: accept it courteous Gentlemen, and prooue as fauorable Readers as we haue found you gratious Auditors. Yours T. H.

The Right to PrintThe second is in Heywood's Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 1637, the prologue to If you know not me, you know no bodie; Or, The troubles of Queen Elizabeth. It is as follows:

A Prologve to the Play of Queene Elizabeth as it was last revived at the Cock-pit, in which the Author taxeth the most corrupted copy now imprinted, which was published without his consent.

Prologue

Playes have a fate in their conception lent,
Some so short liv'd, no sooner shew'd than spent;
But borne to-day, to morrow buried, and
Though taught to speake, neither to goe nor stand.
This: (by what fate I know not) sure no merit,
That it disclaimes, may for the age inherit.
Writing 'bove one and twenty: but ill nurst,
And yet receiv'd as well performed at first,
Grac't and frequented, for the cradle age,
Did throng the Seates, the Boxes, and the Stage
So much: that some by Stenography drew
The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:)
And in that lamenesse it hath limp't so long,
The Author now to vindicate that wrong
Hath tooke the paines, upright upon its feete
To teache it walke, so please you sit, and see't.

The third passage occurs in the address to the reader prefixed to The English Traveller, 1633:

True it is that my plays are not exposed to the world in volumes, to bear the titles of Works (as others). One reason is that many of them by shifting and changing of companies have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print; and a third that it was never any great ambition in me in this kind to be voluminously read.

From these passages we gather that Heywood considered it dishonest to sell the same play to the stage and to the press; that some of his plays were stolen through stenographic reports taken in the theater and were printed in corrupt forms; that, in order to counteract this, he obtained the consent of the theatrical owners to his publication of a correct edition; that some actors considered the printing of plays against their interest (presumably because they thought that if a man could read a play, he would not care to see it acted); and that many plays were lost through negligence and the changes in the theatrical companies. That we are here dealing with the conditions of Shakespeare's time is clear enough, since the edition of If you know not me on which Heywood casts reflections was published in 1605, and in 1604 Marston supplies corroboration in the preface to his Malcontent:

I would fain leave the paper; only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read, and that the least hurt I can receive is to do myself the wrong. But since others otherwise would do me more, the least inconvenience is to be accepted. I have myself, therefore, set forth this comedy; but so, that my enforced absence must much rely upon the printer's discretion: but I shall entreat slight errors in orthography may be as slightly overpassed, and that the unhandsome shape which Pirated Editionsthis trifle in reading presents, may be pardoned for the pleasure it once afforded you when it was presented with the soul of lively action.

The only form in which any of Shakespeare's plays found their way into print during his lifetime was that of small pamphlets, called Quartos, which were sold at sixpence each.[7] In the case of five of these there is general agreement that they came to the press by the surreptitious method of reporting described by Heywood: the first Quarto versions of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives, Hamlet, and Pericles. All of these bear clear traces of the effects of such mutilation as would naturally result from the attempt to write down the dialogue during the performance, and patch up the gaps later. The first Quartos of Richard III and King Lear, though much superior to the five mentioned, yet contain so many variants from the text of the Folio which seem to be due to mistakes of the ear and to slips of memory on the part of the actors, that probably they should also be included in the list of those surreptitiously obtained.

Redress for such pirating as is implied in these publications was difficult on account of the absence of a law of copyright. The chief pieces of legislation affecting the book trade were the law of licensing and the charter of the Stationers' Company. According to the first, all books, with a few exceptions, such as academic publications, had to be licensed before publication by the Bishop of London or the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was an unworkable provision, and in fact the responsibility for all books not likely to raise political or theological controversy was left to the Stationers' Company. This close corporation of printers and publishers exercised its powers for the protection of its members rather than of authors. A publisher wishing to establish a monopoly in a book he had acquired entered it on the Stationers' Register, paying a fee of sixpence, and was thereby protected against piracy. When the copy so registered was improperly acquired, the state of the case is not so clear. At times the officials showed hesitation about registering a book until the applicant "hath gotten sufficient authoritye for yt," and As You Like It, for example, appears in the Register only "to be staied," which it was until the publication of the first Folio. Further, the pirated Romeo and Juliet and Henry V were never entered at all; the pirated Hamlet and Pericles were entered, but to other publishers, who in the case of Hamlet brought out a more correct text in the following year; the pirated Merry Wives was transferred from one publisher to another on the day of entry, and actually issued by the second. Thus this group of plays does not support the view that the Stationers' Company stood ready to give perpetual copyright to their members even for obviously stolen goods. It is to be noted, too, that the previous publication of these surreptitious copies formed no hindrance to the later Publisher's Copyrightissue of an authentic copy. The second Quarto of Hamlet, printed from a complete manuscript, followed, as has been said, the first the next year, and the same thing happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet.

On the other hand, the great majority of the Quartos printed from playhouse copies of the plays were regularly entered, and the rights of the original publisher preserved to him. The appearance of groups of plays in the market following interference with theatrical activity such as came from the plague in 1594, from the breaking up of companies, or from Puritan attempts at restriction, confirm the belief that these better Quartos were honorably acquired by the publishers from the companies owning them, when the actors thought that there was more to gain than to lose by giving them to the press.

The accompanying "Table of Quarto Editions" gives the names of all the Shakespearean plays issued in this form before the publication of the collected edition in 1623, known as the First Folio. In the cases of Romeo and Juliet, 1 Henry IV, Love's Labour's Lost, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Richard II, a Quarto, usually the most recent, provided the text from which the version in the Folio was printed. Hence, though in several cases the copy of the Quarto thus employed seems to have been one used by the actors and containing corrections of some value, the extant Quarto rather than the Folio is the prime authority for the text to-day. The same is true of Titus Andronicus, except that in this case the Folio restores from some manuscript source a scene which had been dropped from the Quarto. If, as some hold, the Folio texts of Richard III and King Lear were printed from Quartos, there must have been available also a manuscript version, which is so heavily drawn upon that the Folio text virtually represents an independent source, as it does in the case of four of the five plays acknowledged to be due to surreptitious reporting. Pericles, the fifth of these, was first admitted to the collected works in the third Folio, and is the only "reported" text forming our sole authority.[8]

Table of Quarto Editions

TABLE OF QUARTO EDITIONS BEFORE 1623

The First FolioWe come now to the publication of the First Folio, the most important single volume in the history of the text of Shakespeare. On November 8, 1623, the following entry occurs in the Stationers' Register:

Mr. Blount: Isaak Jaggard. Entred for their copie under the hands of M^r Doctor Worrall and M^r Cole, Warden, M^r William Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said copyes as are not formerly entred to other men viz^t, Comedyes. The Tempest. The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors. As you like it. All's well that ends well. Twelft Night. The winters tale. Histories. The thirde part of Henry the sixt. Henry the eight. Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius Cæsar. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline.

One notes here the omission of 1 and 2 Henry VI, King John, and The Taming of the Shrew, which had neither been previously entered nor issued in Quarto. This is probably due to the fact that three of these are based on older plays of which Quartos exist, which may have seemed to the publishers reason enough to save their sixpences. If we assume that "The thirde part of Henry the sixt" is a misprint for "The first part," the explanation covers the whole case. The registration of Antony and Cleopatra was superfluous, as it had been entered, though not printed, so far as we know, on May 20, 1608.

There are thus in the First Folio, the publication of which immediately followed this entry in 1623, twenty plays not before issued, for which the text of this volume is our sole authority. The emphasis so commonly placed on the supreme value of the text of the First Folio is justified with regard to these twenty plays; as for the remaining seventeen, its importance is shared, in proportions varying from play to play, with the texts of the Quartos. The sources from which the compilers of the Folio obtained their new material were in all probability playhouse copies, as in the case of the better Quartos. Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare's actor colleagues and friends, who sign the Address to the Readers,[9] would obviously be the instruments for obtaining such copies. As for the so-called "private transcripts" which some have postulated as a source of material, there is no evidence that at this date any such existed. Whether any of the playhouse manuscripts provided by Heminge and Condell were in Shakespeare's autograph we can neither affirm nor deny, but it is well to be cautious in accepting at its face value the implication contained in their words that they had "scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

The Title Page of the First Folio
(From the copy in the New York Public Library.)

The First FolioThe First Folio is a large volume of 908 pages, measuring in the tallest extant copy 13⅜ x 8½ inches. A reduced facsimile of the title page with the familiar wood-cut portrait appears on the opposite page. The text is printed in two columns with sixty-six lines to a column. The typography is only fairly good, and many mistakes occur in the pagination. Extant copies, of which there are at least 156, vary in some respects, on account of the practice of making corrections while the sheets were being printed. The printer was William Jaggard, and his associates in the publishing enterprise were his son Isaac and the booksellers, William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount. Estimates of the size of the edition vary from five to six hundred.

Many of the causes which made the text of these early editions inaccurate are common to all the plays, while some are peculiar to those obtained by reporters in the theater. Of the first, the most fundamental is, of course, the illegibility or ambiguity of the author's original manuscript. Such flaws were perpetuated and multiplied with each successive transcript, and when the manuscript copy came into the printer's hands, the errors of the compositor—confusion of words sounding alike, of words looking alike, unconscious substitution of synonyms, mere manual slips, and the like—were added to those already existing. The absence of any uniform spelling, and carelessness in punctuation, which led to these being freely modified by the printer, increased the risk of corruption. The punctuation of both Quartos and Folio, though by no means without weight, cannot be regarded as having the author's sanction, and all modernized editions re-punctuate with greater or less freedom. Most nineteenth-century editors carry on with minor modifications the punctuation of Pope, so that their texts show a composite of sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century methods; the text used in the Tudor edition is frankly punctuated, as far as the syntax permits, according to modern methods, with, it is believed, no loss in authority. There is no clear evidence that, in such productions as plays, proof was read outside of the printing-office. The theory, insisted on by Dr. Furness in successive volumes of the New Variorum Shakespeare, that the Elizabethan compositor set type to dictation is without foundation, the phenomena which he seeks to explain by it occurring commonly to-day when there is no question of such a practice.

Another class of variation in text arose from the treatment of the manuscript in the playhouse. Cuts, additions, and alterations were made for acting purposes, stage directions were added with or without the assistance of the author, revivals of the play called for revision by the original writer or another. The majority of stage directions in modern editions, except exits and entrances, are due to editors from Rowe onwards, and these unauthorized additions are distinguished in the Tudor edition by brackets. Almost Corruptions of Textall notes of place at the beginnings of scenes belong to this class.

The defects to which the texts of the surreptitiously obtained Quartos are particularly subject include omissions and alterations due to lapse of memory on the part of the actors, additions due to the tendency to improvise which Shakespeare censures in Hamlet, omissions due to the reporter's failure to hear or to write quickly enough, garbled paraphrases made up to supply such omissions, and the writing of prose as verse and verse as prose.

Such are the most important of the causes of the corruptions which the long series of editors of Shakespeare have devoted their study and their ingenuity to remedying. The series really begins with the second Folio of 1632 and is continued with but slight improvements in the third Folio of 1663, reprinted with the addition of Pericles and six spurious plays in 1664, and in the fourth Folio of 1685. The emendations made in the seventeenth-century editions are mainly modernizations in spelling and such minor changes as occurred to members of the printing staff. In no case do they have any authority except such as may be supposed to belong to a man not far removed from Shakespeare in date; and they add about as many mistakes as they remove.

The difficulty of the task of the modern editor varies greatly from play to play. It is least in the twenty plays for which the First Folio is the sole authority, greater in the eight in which the Folio reprints a Quarto with some variations, greatest in the nine in which Folio and Quarto represent rival versions. In these last cases, it is the duty of the editor to decide from all the accessible data which version has the best claim to represent the author's intention, and to make that a basis to be departed from only in clear cases of corruption. The temptation, which no editor has completely resisted, is naturally towards an eclecticism which adopts the reading that seems most plausible in itself, without giving due weight to the general authority of the text chosen as a basis. If carried far, such eclecticism results in a patchwork quite distinct from any version that Shakespeare can have known.

The first editor of Shakespeare, in the modern sense, was Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate under Queen Anne. He published in 1709 an edition of the plays in six octavo volumes, preceded by the first formal memoir of the dramatist, and furnished with notes. The poems were issued in the following year in similar form, with essays by Gildon. Rowe based his text upon that of the fourth Folio, with hardly any collation of previous editions. He corrected a large number of the more obvious corruptions, the most notable of his emendations being perhaps the phrase in Twelfth Night, "Some are become great," which he changed to "Some are born great." On the external aspect of the plays Rowe has left a deeper mark than any subsequent editor. In the Folios only eight of the Rowe and Popeplays had lists of dramatis personæ; Rowe supplied them for the rest. In the Folios the division into acts and scenes is carried out completely in only seventeen cases, it is partially done in thirteen, and in six it is not attempted at all. Rowe again completed the work, and though some of his divisions have been modified and others should be, he performed this task with care and intelligence. He modernized the spelling and the punctuation, completed the exits and entrances, corrected many corrupt speech-tags, and arranged many passages where the verse was disordered. In virtue of these services, he must, in spite of his leaving much undone, be regarded as one of the most important agents in the formation of our modern text.

A second edition of Rowe's Shakespeare was published in 1714, and in 1725 appeared a splendid quarto edition in six volumes, edited by Alexander Pope. In his preface Pope made strong professions of his good faith in dealing with the text. "I have discharged," he said, "the dull duty of an editor to my best judgment, with more labor than I expect thanks, with a religious abhorrence of all innovation, and without any indulgence to my private sense or conjecture.... The various readings are fairly put in the margin, so that anyone may compare 'em; and those I have preferred into the text are constantly ex fide codicum, upon authority.... The more obsolete or unusual words are explained." Hardly one of these statements is entirely true. Pope possessed copies of the first and second Folios, and at least one Quarto of each play that had been printed before 1623, except Much Ado, but these he consulted only occasionally, and seldom registered the variants as he said he had done. When he did, he gave no clue to their source. He constantly inserted his private conjectures without notice, and his explanations of difficult expressions are few and frequently wrong. Passages considered by him inferior or spurious he relegated to the foot of the pages; others he merely omitted without notice. His ear was often jarred by the freedom of Shakespeare's verse, and he did his best to make it "regular" by eighteenth-century standards. Yet Pope spent much ingenuity in striving to better the text, and no small number of restorations and emendations are to be credited to him, especially in connection with the arrangement of the verse. He is to be credited also with discernment in rejecting the seven plays added to the Shakespearean canon in the third Folio, of which only Pericles has since been restored.

The weaknesses of Pope's edition did not long remain hidden. In the spring of 1726 appeared "Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the many Errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this Poet. Designed not only to correct the said edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet publish'd." Lewis Theobald, the author, was a translator and scholar, Theobald and Hanmermuch better equipped than Pope for the work of editing, and his merciless exposure of Pope's defects gave a foretaste of the critical ability later displayed in the edition of Shakespeare which he published in 1734. Lovers of Shakespeare discerned at the time the service performed by Theobald in this attack on Pope, but the publication in 1728 of the first edition of the Dunciad, with Theobald as hero, gave Pope his revenge, and cast over the reputation of his critic a cloud which is only now dispersing. Modern scholarship, however, has come to recognize the primacy of Theobald among emendators of Shakespeare's text, and the most famous of his contributions, his correction of "a table of green fields" to "'a babled of green fields," in Quickly's account of the death of Falstaff in Henry V, II. iii. 17, is only a specially brilliant example of the combination of acuteness, learning, and sympathy which made his edition a landmark in the history of the text. For many of his troubles, however, Theobald was himself to blame; he attacked his opponents with unnecessary vehemence, as he expressed his appreciation of his own work with unnecessary emphasis; he was not always candid as to what he owed to others, even to the despised edition of Pope, from which he printed; and he indulged his appetite for conjecture at times beyond reasonable bounds.

Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by that of Sir Thomas Hanmer in six beautifully printed volumes. This edition is based on that of Pope, and even goes farther than Pope's in relegating to the foot of the page passages supposed unworthy. Hanmer performed no collating worth mentioning, but made some acute conjectures.

The student is apt to be prejudiced against the work of William Warburton on account of the extravagance of his claims and his ungenerous treatment of predecessors to whom he was greatly indebted. "The Genuine Text," he announced, "(collated with all former editions and then corrected and emended) is here settled: Being restored from the Blunders of the first editors and the Interpolations of the two Last"; yet he based his text on Theobald's and joined Pope's name with his own on the title-page. Whatever value belongs to Warburton's edition (1747) lies in a number of probable conjectural emendations, some of which he had previously allowed Theobald to use, and in the amusing bombast and arrogance of many of his notes. The feeble support that lay behind the pretensions of this editor was exposed by a number of critics such as John Upton, Zachary Grey, Benjamin Heath, and Thomas Edwards, who did not issue new editions, but contributed a considerable number of corrections and interpretations.

The value of Dr. Johnson's edition (1765) does not lie in his emendations, which are usually, though not always, poor, or in his collation of older editions, for which he was too indolent, but in the sturdy common-sense of his interpretations and the consummate skill Johnson and Capellfrequently shown in paraphrases of obscure passages. His Preface to the edition was the most weighty general estimate of Shakespeare so far produced, and remains a valuable piece of criticism. In scientific treatment of the text, involving full use of all the Quartos and Folios then accessible, Johnson and his predecessors were far surpassed by Edward Capell, who issued his edition in ten volumes in 1768. Unfortunately, the enormous labor Capell underwent did not bear its full fruit, for he suppressed much of his textual material in the interests of a well-printed page, and his preface and notes are written in a crabbed style that obscures the acuteness of his editorial intelligence. He elaborated stage directions, and carried farther the correction of disarranged meter; but, like most of his fellow-editors in that century, he did less than justice to his predecessors and was too indulgent to his own conjectures. This edition was supplemented by volumes of notes published in 1775 (1 vol.) and 1779-1783 (3 vols.).

Before the publication of Capell's text, the antiquary George Steevens had issued in 1766 reprints of twenty of the early Quartos; and in 1773 he produced, in association with Johnson, an edition with a good text in which he benefited from Capell's labors (though he denies this). Through his knowledge of Elizabethan literature he made substantial contributions to the interpretation of difficult passages. He restored Pericles to a place in the canon, but excluded the Poems, because "the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service." To the second edition of Johnson and Steevens's text (1778) Edmund Malone contributed his famous "Essay on the Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays," which began modern investigation of this subject. The third edition was revised in 1785 by Isaac Reed; and this was succeeded by the edition of Malone in 1790, in which the vast learning and conscientious care of that scholar combined to produce the most trustworthy text so far published. Malone was not brilliant, but he was extremely erudite and candid, and his so-called "Third Variorum" edition in twenty-one volumes, brought out after his death by James Boswell in 1821, is a mine of information on theatrical history and cognate matters, which will probably always be of value to students of the period. The name of "First Variorum Edition" is given to the fifth edition of Johnson and Steevens, revised by Reed in 1803, and "Second Variorum" to the sixth edition of the same, 1813. Meantime occasional critiques of complete editions contributed something to the text. Johnson's edition called forth comment by Kendrick in 1765 and Tyrwhitt in 1766, and the Johnson and Steevens text was criticized by Joseph Ritson in 1783 and 1788, and by J. Monck Mason in 1785. The first American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1795-1796 from Johnson's text; the first continental edition at Brunswick in 1797-1801 by C. Wagner.