THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Or the personal life of the author of these plays and poems we know very little, but quite as much as we could reasonably expect to know of a man who was of very humble birth, of no political or social importance, who was neither a soldier nor a churchman, and who lived three hundred years ago.

The name Shakespeare is an old one, it having been discovered in a document dated A. D. 1278, a time when surnames were rare.1 The number of those who bore this name seems to have been always comparatively small; nor have they been widely distributed. They are most frequently heard of in Warwickshire; but even there they did not form a family with a coherence and a settled place of abode. They were yeomen, and not yeomen of substance and established position, but little above the peasantry; small farmers mostly, although some of them were small traders. In the reign of Edward VI. (A. D. 1547-1553), one of these Shakespeares, named Richard, was a tenant farmer, with a cottage and a little land, in the very small and obscure village of Snitterfield, Warwickshire. He had two sons, Henry and John, the former of whom lived his life in Snitterfield. The latter went to the neighboring borough-town, Stratford-onAvon, and set himself up in the glover's trade; and in the year 1552 he was living there in a hired house in Henley Street. Like most other persons in his condition of life at that time, he turned his hand to getting an honest penny in any way, and dealt in wool and in corn. He became a thriving and a rising man, and was chosen to fill various town offices, until in 1561

1 It seems to me more than doubtful that the name is of martial origin, meaning shake spear. I suspect that it was a trisyllable, pronounced shak-es-per or shak-es-pur ; and that it became first sharper, and then shake-speare through the tendency to perversion toward simple meaning which is common in regard to surnames. - R. G. W.

he was made one of the Chamberlains of the borough, and at last, in 1568, High Bailiff.

Stratford-on-Avon was at this time a very dirty little place, with a few hundred inhabitants; let us hope that among the many dirty little places then scattered over England, there was none dirtier. The streets were filled with mud, slops, and all sorts of foul refuse, including dung-heaps. Of the latter assemblages of filth, a certain number were publicly recognized and allowed in specified places; and yet the Stratford folk were so careless of cleanliness that they would lazily let these heaps gather in the streets before their houses. Although one of the permitted sterquinaria was not far from his door, John Shakespeare offended in this way beyond bearing, even in such a rising man, and was fined therefor. The Stratford folk were also very rude and ignorant. Few even of the best of them could write their own names; and among those who could not was John Shakespeare.

In the year 1557, four years before he was made Chamberlain, John Shakespeare married Mary Arden, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a fairly rich yeoman farmer in the neighborhood, who had died a few months before. Mary Arden had inherited by her father's will, some money, a little estate of sixty acres, called Ashbies, and the reversion of another, called Wilmecote; and thus, considering John Shakespeare's condition in life, he had married an heiress. The influence of money in obtaining the esteem of the world and social consideration was soon apparent in this instance. The husband of Mary Arden entered immediately upon his upward career in the borough, and from being called simply Shakespeare, and then John Shakespeare, in the town records, he came to be called Master John Shakespeare.

In 1556 he had bought, for £40, the house and land on which he lived in Henley Street (mortgaging it, however, it would appear, for its full value); and there, in April, 1564, was born to him a son, who was baptized William on the 26th of that month. We know the day of his baptism, but not that of his birth. The custom of the time makes it quite certain that the birth preceded the baptism but a very few days; and Mr. Halliwell-Phillips, the highest authority upon such a question, says that it took

place "upon or almost immediately before the twenty-second day of April, 1564, but most probably on that Saturday." For two years William was an only child; then a second son was born, who was named Gilbert. He became a haberdasher in London. Of John Shakespeare's other children, it is only necessary to remark that one, Edmund, also went to London, and became an actor at the Globe Theatre.

There was a grammar school at Stratford, and it is highly probable that William Shakespeare went to this school for a while in his early boyhood. The language which was taught at this school was Latin, nothing else; and Shakespeare's writings show some knowledge of that language, with some remembrance of the grammar-books generally used at such schools in the reign of Elizabeth and long after.1 John Shakespeare's little prosperity was, however, short-lived: he got into trouble; he was obliged to mortgage his wife's few acres at Ashbies, and it appears that his eldest son was taken away early from school to begin to earn his living. When he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, he was apprenticed to a butcher. There was a tradition that "when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech;" but this is probably an ornamental flourish, in honor of his after reputation. Tradition does not speak of him as an industrious apprentice, nor as a model youth; rather that he was "given to all unluckiness," to ill company, and to deer-stealing. One item in his unluckiness, the circumstances of which support traditionary censure on other points, was that, when he was a penniless youth of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman of twenty-six, the daughter of Richard Hathaway, a small yeoman farmer, in the hamlet of Shottery, hard by Stratford, and that Mistress Anne's first child (a daughter, named Susannah) was born within about five months of her mar

1 The foundation of Latin in such schools as that at Stratford was in Lily's grammar and conversation books, after which the boys read Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. In the Bodleian Library is a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses with "W She" on the title-page, which may have been Shakespeare's once. His schoolmasters, Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans, lard their conversation with scraps drawn from the schoolbooks which Shakespeare used. James Russell Lowell, in his Shakespeare Once More, hazards an opinion that Shakespeare made use of an edition of the Greek tragedians, Graecè et Latinè, and instances several plausible parallelisms in support of his conjecture. The chief English book accessible to him was the Bible, and his frequent use of Biblical phrases has led to the publication of whole books designed to point out his indebtedness to the Bible and familiarity with it.

riage, which did not take place in her own parish and upon publication of banns, but by special license, and at some remote church, which diligent search has not yet discovered.

In 1585 twins (who were named Hamnet and Judith) were born to this needy, improvident couple; and this is the last fact in regard to William Shakespeare that we know with any approach to certainty for many years.

We next hear of him in London; but when he went there, and why, we know but vaguely, and only by inference assisted by tradition. Tradition says that he poached on the grounds of Charlecote, the beautiful residence of Sir Thomas Lucy, near Stratford; and that, being treated severely by the knight, he wrote a lampoon upon him, and set it up on the gates of Charlecote Park; whereupon Sir Thomas's wrath was so hot against him that he fled from Stratford, and hid himself in London.1 Something of truth there probably is in this; but to William Shakespeare, the son of a ruined village tradesman, the husband at twenty-one of a wife nearly thirty, and the father of three infant children, without a business, without a pound that he could call his own, there were necessary no motives of extraneous origin to drive him to London to seek his fortune. For seven years (from 1585 to 1592) we are without authentic information of any kind in regard to him. But tradition, which is strongly supported by probability on all points, says that he reached London in such poverty that he lived at first by holding the horses of gentlemen who rode to the theatre; that he afterwards became a servitor in Burbage's theatre, a prompter's attendant, or, in plain words, a call-boy, The author of Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello a call-boy, at the age of twenty-one or twentytwo years, in a rude, roofless theatre, were indeed a sight for gods and men. During these seven years when he was eating

1 Sir Thomas Lucy is doubtless caricatured in Justice Shallow of II. Henry VI., and Merry Wives of Windsor. Mr. Lee seems to think that Shakespeare, on leaving Stratford, did not go immediately to London, and quotes William Beeston, a seventeenth century actor, who remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country school

master.

2 It is apparent that Burbage's company, loosely so-called, had for its patron the Earl of Leicester, came after his death under the patronage of the Earl of Derby, and thereafter was known as the Lord Chamberlain's company, until upon the accession of King James I., it was known as the King's Players. To this company Shakespeare appears to have been attached the greater part of his life, and in it to have acquired great distinction as an actor, apart from his reputation as a playwright.

the bitter bread of poverty, he must have found time to obtain some knowledge of books (of which, except Bibles and the schoolhouse grammars, there were probably not a dozen in all Stratford, and of which he could have learned nothing from his mother, for she, like his father, could not write even her own name), and then to show effectively his powers as a writer. For in 1592, Robert Greene, dying of debauchery, and eaten up with envy in his soul, as in his body with disease, thus alludes to him, professing to warn his fellow playwrights against actor-authors: "Trust them not, 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, in his own conceit, the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." In this invaluable ebullition of spleen we have manifestly a satirical travesty of the line,

"O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide,"

in the Third Part of King Henry the Sixth; and hence it is evident that all the three parts of that series of Histories were written before 1592, and that Shakespeare was known as having been more or less concerned in their composition. It also shows him to us working his way in the theatres by being ready to turn his hand to anything, and that the attention attracted by his writing had excited the malicious envy of the mean-souled among the dramatists of the day, whose hate was further provoked by a consciousness of superiority on his part, which he could not well keep wholly hidden. But Shakespeare had also won admirers and made friends among the more generous. This we know by the testimony of Henry Chettle, who had edited poor Greene's pamphlet, which was published after his death. Shakespeare was of course annoyed by Greene's derogatory fling; and Chettle, soon afterwards publishing a book of his own, called Kind Heart's Dream, took occasion to refer to the matter and to say, "I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault because myselfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civil than he exelent in the qualitie he professes; besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his