SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON. LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. BY WM. M. ROSSETTI. WHAT shall be said about Shakespeare? What shall not be said? How could one adequately express the sense of his greatness? How word anything on this subject which has not been worded, and better worded, before? The mind bows down before this supreme embodiment of human intellect and of the universality of human character, and confesses its incompetence to estimate him, or to express even such estimate as it can attain to forming. Analysis has long been exhausted, and praise along with that: enthusiasm and reverence remain ; but the terms in which they could be imparted show colourless and dull, sound thin and hollow. I shall attempt little beyond summarizing the known or presumed facts of Shakespeare's life. William Shakespeare came of a family of decent credit on the paternal side, and on the maternal of some dignity and position. John Shakespeare, his father, was son of a substantial farmer at Snitterfield, a village three or four miles distant from Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire. Mary Arden, the poet's mother, was grand-niece to a gentleman who had been Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII., and who was a brother of Sir John Arden: this family was connected with that which produced the Hampden so famous in the time of Charles I. Mary's father was an opulent yeoman at Wilmecote, and she herself heiress to a small farm named Ashbies; she married John Shakespeare presumably about 1557. The latter, towards 1551, had opened a shop in Henley Street, Stratford, for the sale of gloves, and probably of meat, wool, and barley. He prospered, and bought two small copyhold properties; became a burgess and an alderman of the town-which may at this time have numbered some twelve hundred inhabitantsand held other local offices. He was not only an ordinary alderman, but in 1568, xi four years after the poet's birth, bailiff or chief magistrate of Stratford, and in September 1571 chief alderman: this clearly stamps him as a person of eminent credit in his locality, or, as we should now say, of "the highest respectability." A grant of arms was made to him in 1569, and confirmed in 1599. The instrument of confirmation recites that the great-grandfather of John Shakespeare had been rewarded with lands and tenements for services rendered to Henry VII. Thus we see that, both on the father's and on the mother's side, the dramatist had special reasons for bearing the first Tudor sovereign in loyal memory; and his play of Richard III. indicates that so he did. It is universally, and we may say correctly, assumed that in that world-famous house in Henley Street the poet was born in April 1564. The day of his baptism was the 26th of that month. The exact natal day is fixed at the 23rd, St. George's Day, by the tradition (supposing it to be true) that he died on the very anniversary of his birth. There were seven other children of the marriage, two of them preceding and dying before the birth of William; four younger ones, three brothers named Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and a sister Joan, grew up. Edmund, who died in 1607, became, like Shakespeare himself, an actor in London. Joan married a Mr. Hart; and to the Hart family the house in Henley Street continued to belong up to 1806. William was probably sent at an early age to the Free School of Stratford: it is to be presumed that he here learned the rudiments of Latin, but not any Greek. He is said to have left school prematurely, owing to the narrowing circumstances of his father, who in 1578 had to mortgage the farm of Ashbies, and can in other respects be traced to have declined. What Shakespeare did upon leaving school is matter of conjecture, or at best of obscure tradition. Aubrey retails a story indicating that he was apprenticed to a butcher, or perhaps served his own father in the butchering branch (if such existed) of the paternal business. "When he killed a calf," says Aubrey, "he would do it in a high style, and make a speech;" a story which was indeed easy to invent, but which is also not particularly difficult to believe. Another story, also from Aubrey, is that he acted as a country schoolmaster; a third supposition-founded on the intimate acquaintance with legal terms apparent in so many of his writings-that he entered a lawyer's office. In his nineteenth year Shakespeare married; and the facts suggest that the bride-elect had been liberal of her favours to her boy-wooer in anticipation of the nuptial ceremony. The damsel, about eight years his senior, was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a well-to-do yeoman at Shottery, a village distant about a mile or so from Stratford. There was only one asking of the banns of marriage, instead of the prescribed and customary three; and, to save the licencing bishop and his officers harmless for such an irregularity and against other contingencies, two friends of the Hathaways, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, had to enter beforehand into a bond, dated 28th November 1582, taking all the responsibility on themselves. The wedding ensued; and only about six months thereafter, on the 26th of May 1583, the firstborn child, Susanna, was baptized. It should be understood that Anne Hathaway's indiscretion, if any there was, was not a very grave one according to the standard of those times, for betrothal or precontract carried the privileges of marriage; in order to legitimize the offspring, however, actual preceding marriage was requisite. At Charlecote, in the neighbourhood of Stratford, resided a magistrate, Sir Thomas Lucy, who for various reasons was by no means in good odour with the townsmen. There was no park at Charlecote, and therefore many modern scrutinizers of well-worn old stories say there were not any deer; nevertheless it is possible that there were deer, although there was not a park. It is highly conceivable that the ruffling boon-companions and mounting young spirits of Stratford thought it a fine sort of thing to harass the public enemy Sir Thomas by any means they could, and among others by appropriating his deer, if any existed-an act which should rather be regarded under the circumstances as retaliatory poaching than as strictly criminal deer-stealing. And it is equally possible that Shakespeare may have borne his part in expeditions of this kind. No proof to any such effect is, or ever has been, adduced; but an old and constant tradition purports that he stole deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, and was prosecuted for so doing. As bearing on this tradition we have to take count of the first scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor. Here Justice Shallow accuses Falstaff of having "beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge ;" and he and his ancestors are said by his cousin Slender to have "the dozen white luces in their coat" [coat of arms], and the parson Sir Hugh Evans puns or blunders upon this observation, "The dozen white louses do become an old coat well." The luce (pike-fish or jack) was the crest of the Lucy family. A different motive suggested for Shakespeare's going to London is the decrease of his father's means, and the necessity for doing what he could for his own growing family two twins, Hamnet and Judith, had succeeded Susanna, and had been christened in February 1585. These, however, were in fact the last of his children, to all appearance. How did Shakespeare fare in London? It is certain that at some time. perhaps in 1586, he became an actor in Lord Strange's (afterwards the Lord Chamberlain's) company at one of the two theatres in Shoreditch; but whether this was his first employment is questioned. A member of an Inn of Court, writing about 1693, says that Shakespeare was originally received into the playhouse as a "servitor;" and the story runs that he used to hold the horses of the gentlemen who came to see the performances, and that he got noted for expertness in his humble vocation. Leaving this dubious preliminary, we behold William Shakespeare initiated into his immortality by the fact of his becoming an actor-various companies of players had visited Stratford in his boyhood. and had possibly excited in him some emulous longings and aptitudes --and by his being thus put in the way, not only of acting, but also of revising and re-adapting plays writtten by other authors, and hence in the sequel under taking plays of his own; how different from all that had preceded, and how supreme over all, even if we look only to his earliest original productions, the world has sufficiently found out.-I will divide Shakespeare's London career into three sections, and consider him-1st, as the Actor; 2nd, as the Author; 3rd, as the Man. 1. Shakespeare the Actor. There is a famous passage (which will be quoted farther on) in the work which Robert Greene wrote on his deathbed in 1592, A Groatsworth of Wit, attacking Shakespeare savagely; this work was edited by Henry Chettle, stationer (i.e. printer or compositor) and playwright, who a few months afterwards apologized for the attack, and averred Shakespeare to be "excellent" in his vocation; and, though there is nothing to show that he ever made a great sensation as an actor, we may reasonably assume that he was a creditable, and even a distinguished, member of his company. It is said that he played the part of a king in various pieces, and some part or other in Ben Jonson's Sejanus, and (among other characters) the Ghost in Hamlet. Whether he played the part "like an oyster-wife" would be matter of opinion. Thomas Lodge was entitled to his opinion, and he, in his Wit's Misery, dated 1596, has a funny passage applicable to some actor of the Ghost, possibly (though this is the merest conjecture) Shakespeare: "He [the fiend HateVirtue] looks as pale as the visard of the Ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, 'Hamlet, revenge!'" The facts of Shakespeare's subsequent connection with the Blackfriars Theatre, and afterwards with the Globe (or Bankside) Theatre, have been involved in great confusion by definite mis-statements, worse than a free confession of simple uncertainty; it has been said, for instance, and repeated times out of number, that he was a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre as early as 1589, and concurred in the building of the Globe. The contrary is apparent from documents recently published, and seemingly unimpugnable. Richard Burbage (who became the most celebrated actor of the time) and his brother, Cuthbert Burbage, built the Globe Theatre in 1599. They placed Shakespeare in the theatre, and made him and some others partners in the profits of " the House" (so-called)—a term which may at that time have designated the money paid at the doors, and perhaps something more. At a later date-later certainly than May 1603, when James I. came to the throne-the Burbages re-entered upon the Blackfriars Theatre, which had been built by their father years before the Globe; and here also they placed Shakespeare and other actors. The date when he left the stage is not certainly known: "after 1603" used to be the date assigned, but it is now clear that his retirement must have been some considerable while after 1603, which, as we have just seen, is the year when he was transferred (or re-transferred) to the Blackfriars boards. Manifestly he did not wholly like his occupation. He felt that it lowered him in the eyes of others; perhaps too even in his own, for Shakespeare, it may be abundantly inferred from his writings, always accounted himself a gentleman by birth and breeding, and the associates of his choice were gentlemen. Witness the following passages from his sonnets (110, III): 2. Shakespeare the Author. If we except the doggerel effusions dubiousl, ascribed to his youth, before he came to London,-some abusive verses on Sir Thomas Lucy, and a still more juvenile quatrain ridiculing the neighbouring villages where he had drunk,'-we know of nothing written by Shakespeare 1 Here are the verses : "Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, and hungry Grafton, |