by the quickness of his wit and invention." Jonson himself has left a pleasant record of "gentle Shakespeare," saying: "I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any: he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." This accords with the testimony of Chettle, who (in addition to expressions already quoted) speaks of Shakespeare's "civil demeanour," and his "honesty," by which we should understand well-bred straightforwardness, the distinctive mark of a gentleman. 66 And now for the sonnets. This series, numbering 154 items, has, as we all know, been the object of all sorts of disquisitions and commentaries; some aiming to show that the sonnets contribute nothing, or next to nothing, to Shakespeare's biography; others, that they are written as in the person of a different speaker; others, that their main object is literary satire, a 'take-off" of the excesses of amorous sonneteers. Others again, accepting the sonnets as substantially autobiographical, debate to whom they are addressed, whence originating, and why presenting the poet to us in the light in which they do present him; and one frequent attempt has been to explain away such prima facie appearances in the sonnets as might induce us to think that Shakespeare was fond to fatuity of a male friend, and illicitly enamoured of a female inveigler. For my part, having given the sonnets the best consideration in my power, I can come to but one conclusion—namely, that these are the very points which must not be explained away; that the sonnets pourtray to us Shakespeare himself, and such as he really was in sentiment and environment. I can discover no reason why the sonnets, in this their twofold aspect, should not be a faithful picture of a certain stage in Shakespeare's life; and, therefore firmly, believe that he entertained a long-standing and most ardent attachment for a youth of high rank and eminent endowments of person and spirit, and that he got entangled with a paramour of some fascination and no character. Why, indeed, should we disbelieve either or both of these plainly intimated facts? The only reason appears to be that we, or some of us, would rather not believe them if we could help. Who the woman may have been is totally obscure-sonnet 152 shows her to have been a married woman: but the man has been searched for with diligence, and with some dim semblance of successful result. The sonnets were never published by Shakespeare himself; but in 1609 they were printed and issued by a bookseller, Thomas Thorpe, whose few words of introductory inscription' seem to imply that the male friend to whom most of the poems relate was a certain "Mr. W. H." I say 'seem to imply ; " for the syntactic construction of the words, no less than the meaning of one phrase "only begetter," is undoubtedly ambiguous, and has excited endless. 1 The words are as follows (I modernise the spelling): "To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet wisheth well. The wellwishing adventurer in setting forth T. T discussion. Assuming then that Mr. W. H. is the young man celebrated in the sonnets, we have to inquire who is represented by these initials. Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, are the only two probable competitors started by name. Each of these men was in 1609 a peer, and not a "Mr. :" but it is allowed on all hands that the application of the term "Mr." to a peer would be an anomaly not unexampled at that period. Both Wriothesly and Herbert were personally well known to Shakespeare the former, so far as all records go, was certainly the better known of the two, and was, as we have already seen, a specially attached friend of his. The inversion of the initials "W. H." if Wriothesly is meant, whereas there is no inversion if Herbert is meant, counts for a little in favour of Herbert; not for very much, for the inscription is obviously reticent to some extent, and may have been purposely reticent even to the extent of such an inversion. Wriothesly was born in 1573, and would at the presumed date of the earliest among the sonnets-say 1597-have been twenty-four years of age. Herbert, who is known to have been a handsome young man, was born in 1580, and would in 1597 have been but seventeen; an age which, youthful as it is, need not be deemed absolutely inconsistent with the tone of the sonnets, especially in the mind of Shakespeare who had himself married at eighteen. Besides, if the earliest sonnets may be dated about 1597, many others are of course later than that one of them seemingly refers to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and the accession of James I.-No. 107, beginning : "Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul." Altogether it seems that the claim of Herbert is rather the preferable one of the two. To me, accepting the sonnets as fairly autobiographical, it appears pretty clear that the friend who is represented in them as having intrigued with Shakespeare's mistress, and whom I plainly understand to be the same person as the friend mentioned in the earlier sonnets, must have been named William, not Henry; and, if so, Herbert Earl of Pembroke, not Wriothesly Earl of Southampton. I found this opinion on the following three sonnets (135, 136, and 143) addressed to the woman. I must now leave the sonnets, and revert to the general course of Shakespeare's life. He was probably still resident in London in 1611; by 1612 he is known to have been resettled at Stratford, which continued to be his home for the few remaining years of his life. The alderman's truant son returned to his native town a man of more worldly consequence, even in the eyes of his solid, humdrum, provincial fellow-citizens, than his father had ever been; he occupied the best house in Stratford, and was in all likelihood the "greatest man" in that small town, as well as in "the great globe itself." His only son Hamnet had died in 1596, his father in 1601, his mother in 1608. His eldest daughter Susanna had in 1607 married Dr. Hall, a local physician of some eminence, and they already had a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1608. Shakespeare's wife, and his younger daughter Judith, kept house with him. That he continued attentive to his own minor interests is shown by his having, in 1612, joined in a petition to the Court of Chancery to compel certain sharers with himself in the farming of the tithes to pay their quota of a general burden; and by his having resisted, in 1614, a proposed enclosure of some common lands detrimental to his property. In February 1616 he married his daughter Judith to Mr. Thomas Quiney. It may have been in preparation for this event that on the 25th of January he had drawn up his will; in that instrument, which was finally executed on the 25th of March, he professes himself to be "in perfect health and memory," so that there is nothing to indicate that he was then sensible of his closely impending death. By the will he left all his lands, tenements, &c., to Susanna; only £300 to Judith; and (by interlineation) his second-best bed with its furniture to his wife; and some trifling legacies were added. The insignificant bequest to his wife has often been commented upon, as showing that the poet held her in slight regard to this it is replied that, as almost all his estates were freehold, she was adequately provided for out of these by law, in the form of dower. It would seem that Shakespeare died worth no large sum in actual money; another inference is that he must, at some time or other, have disposed of his theatrical property, which does not figure at all in his will. In another month Shakespeare was no more; he died on the 23rd of April 1616. The only record of the cause of death, real or fictitious, is in Ward's Diary: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." On the 25th he was buried in the Parish-church of Stratford, with the following epitaph-not, we may reasonably suppose, the composition of such a brain and hand as were now for ever at rest within his grave: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here: Shakespeare's widow survived him seven years, dying in August 1623. His daughter Susanna Hall (the inheritor of the bulk of his property, and obviously therefore the person through whom he had hoped to "found a family," if that, as has sometimes been supposed, was really an object he had at heart) had but one child Elizabeth. This lady married Thomas Nash, Esquire, and after his death John Barnard, Esquire, knighted by Charles II. in 1661; she had no children, and died in 1670. Shakespeare's second daughter, Judith Quiney, had three sons, who died unmarried. And so, in brief space, the race of William Shakespeare was extinct. -It "What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted!" may be added that the poet Sir William Davenant, author of Gondibert, was regarded by some contemporaries as an illegitimate son of Shakespeare and was himself not averse to countenancing this surmise. The principal portraits representing Shakespeare, or supposed to represent him, are the Stratford bust adjacent to his grave, the Droeshout engraving, the Chandos painting, the Jansen painting, and the Felton Head; also a mask, taken apparently after death, belonging to Herr Becker of Darmstadt, and at one time deposited with Professor Owen, and the Kesselstadt picture (of a man lying dead), which, if the mask is accepted as authentic, may be surmised to be the like. The first two alone are certainly known to pourtray Shakespeare: they correspond closely enough, while the others deviate considerably in one respect or another. The bust was praised in 1623 as a faithful likeness; it was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Hollander, after the author's decease; the authority from which he worked is dubious, but is believed to have been a cast taken after death-not (the internal evidence suggests as much) the one above-mentioned belonging to Herr Becker. This bust was originally (and is now again) coloured, and shows light hazel eyes and auburn hair and beard. I need not enlarge upon other details in a matter so well known to all my readers. The Droeshout portrait was also produced in 1623, in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It was eulogized by Ben Jonson; and has been accepted as a true likeness by the idealist poet and painter William Blake, who professed to have seen Shakespeare's ghost, and who was at any rate better qualified than ninety-nine persons out of a hundred to infer from a man's spiritual product what his outer semblance might fittingly have been. THE CHRONOLOGY OF SHAKESPEARE'S WRITINGS. BY PROFESSOR EDWARD DOWDEN. THE most fruitful method of studying the works of Shakespeare is that which views them in the chronological order of their production. We thus learn something about their origin, their connection one with another, and their relation to the mind of their creator, as that mind passed from its early promise to its rich maturity and fulfilment. If we knew nothing about their date, we might well wonder how the same man could be the author of Love's Labor's Lost and of King Lear. Viewed in the chronological order we perceive that the one was the work of Shakespeare's clever 'prentice hand, the other the outcome of his manhood with its sorrow and experience; and we can trace some portions at least of the path of transition from the earlier play to the later. PERIODS OF SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER. GROUPS AND DATES OF PLAYS. By means of internal and external evidence we are enabled to determine the precise dates of some of Shakespeare's works, in the case of others we can at least approximate to the dates; only in a few cases are we left to conjecture where, within a range of at most some five or seven years, a drama should be placed. Thus, if there is uncertainty here and there in an attempt to assign dates to each particular play, there is little or no uncertainty in naming groups. of plays in chronological order, leaving undetermined the order of the plays within those groups. Shakespeare's entire career of authorship extends over twenty years and upwards, beginning about 1588 or 1590, ending about 1612: ten years and upwards lie in the sixteenth century, ten years and upwards in the seventeenth. Now the division of the centuries marks roughly a division in the career of Shakespeare. About 1601 his genius began to seek new ways; the histories and joyous comedies ceased to be created, and the great series of tragedies was commenced. But each of the decades, which together make up the years of Shakespeare's authorship, is itself clearly divisible into two shorter periods : first, from about 1590 to 1595-96, years of dramatic apprenticeship and experi |