THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON HIS DRAMATIC WRITINGS. HEREVER any extraordinary display of huWH man intellect has been made, there will human curiosity, at one period or the other, be busy to obtain some personal acquaintance with the distinguished mortal whom Heaven had been pleased to endow with a larger portion of its own ethereal energy. If the favoured man walked on the high places of the world; if he were conversant with courts; if he directed the movements of armies or of states, and thus held in his hand the fortunes and the lives of multitudes of his fellow-creatures, the interest, which he excites, will be immediate and strong he stands on an eminence where he is the mark of many eyes; and dark and unlettered indeed must be the age in which the incidents of his eventful life will not be noted, and the record of them be preserved for the instruction or the entertainment of unborn generations. But if his course were through the vale of life: if he were unmingled with the factions and the contests of the great: if the powers of his mind were devoted to the silent pursuits of literature-to the converse of philosophy and the Muse, the possessor of the ethereal treasure may excite little of the attention of his contemporaries; may walk quietly, with a veil over his glories, to the grave; and, in other times, when the expansion of his intellectual greatness has filled the eyes of the world, it may be too late to inquire for his history as a man. The bright track of his genius indelibly remains; but the trace of his mortal footstep is soon obliterated for ever. Homer is now only a name—a solitary name, which assures us, that, at some unascertained period in the annals of mankind, a mighty mind was indulged to a human being, and gave its wonderful productions to the perpetual admiration of men, as they spring in succession in the path of time. Of Homer himself we actually know nothing; and we see only an arm of immense power thrust forth from a mass of impenetrable darkness, and holding up the hero of his song to the applauses of never-dying fame. But it may be supposed that the revolution of, perhaps, thirty centuries has collected the cloud which thus withdraws the father of poesy from our sight. Little more than two centuries has elapsed since William Shakspeare conversed with our tongue, and trod the selfsame soil with ourselves; and if it were not for the records kept by our Church in its registers of births, marriages, and burials, we should at this moment be as personally ignorant of the "sweet swan of Avon" as we are of the old minstrel and rhapsodist of Meles. That William Shakspeare was born in Stratford upon Avon; that he married and had three children; that he wrote a certain number of dramas; that he died before he had attained to old age, and was buried in his native town, are positively the only facts, in the personal history of this extraordinary man, of which we are certainly possessed; and, if we should be solicitous to fill up this bare and most unsatisfac tory outline, we must have recourse to the vague reports of unsubstantial tradition, or to the still more shadowy inferences of lawless and vagabond conjecture. Of this remarkable ignorance of one of the most richly endowed with intellect of the human species, who ran his mortal race in our own country, and who stands separated from us by no very great intervention of time, the causes may not be difficult to be ascertained. William Shakspeare was an actor and a writer of plays; in neither of which characters, however he might excel in them, could he be lifted high in the estimation of his contemporaries. He was honoured, indeed, with the friendship of nobles, and the patronage of monarchs: his theatre was frequented by the wits of the metropolis; and he associated with the most intellectual of his times. But the spirit of the age was against him; and, in opposition to it, he could not become the subject of any general or comprehensive interest. The nation, in short, knew little and cared less about him. During his life, and for some years after his death, inferior dramatists outran him in the race of popularity; and then the flood of puritan fanaticism swept him and the stage together into temporary oblivion. On the restoration of the monarchy and the theatre, the school of France perverted our taste, and it was not till the last century was somewhat advanced that William Shakspeare arose again, as it were, from the tomb, in all his proper majesty of light. He then became the subject of solicitous and learned inquiry: but inquiry was then too late; and all that it could recover, from the ravage of time, were only a few hu man fragments, which could scarcely be united into a man. To these causes of our personal ignorance of the great bard of England, must be added his own strange indifference to the celebrity of genius. When he had produced his admirable works, ignorant or heedless of their value, he abandoned them with perfect indifference to oblivion or to fame. It surpassed his thought that he could grow into the admiration of the world; and, without any reference to the curiosity of future ages, in which he could not conceive himself to possess an interest, he was contented to die in the arms of obscurity, as an unlaurelled burgher of a provincial town. To this combination of causes are we to attribute the scantiness of our materials for the Life of William Shakspeare. His works are in myriads of hands: he constitutes the delight of myriads of readers: his renown is coextensive with the civilization of man; and, striding across the ocean from Europe, it occupies the wide region of transatlantic empire: but he is himself only a shadow which disappoints our grasp; an undefined form which is rather intimated than discovered to the keenest searchings of our eye. Of the little however, questionable or certain, which can be told of him, we must now proceed to make the best use in our power, to write what by courtesy may be called his ife; and we have only to lament that the result | gious faith, has recently been made the subject of of our labour must greatly disappoint the curiosity controversy. According to the testimony of Rowe, which has been excited by the grandeur of his reputation. The slight narrative of Rowe, founded on the information obtained, in the beginning of the last century, by the inquiries of Betterton, the famous actor, will necessarily supply us with the greater part of the materials with which we are to work. * grounded on the tradition of Stratford, the father of our Poet was a dealer in wool, or, in the provincial vocabulary of his country, a wool-driver; and such he has been deemed by all the biographers of his son, till the fact was thrown into doubt by the result of the inquisitiveness of Malone. Finding, in an old and obscure MS. purporting to record the proceedings of the bailiff's court in Stratford, our WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, or SHAKSPERE, (for John Shakspeare designated as a glover, Malone the floating orthography of the name is properly exults over the ignorance of poor Rowe, and asattached to the one or the other of these varieties,) sumes no small degree of merit to himself as the was baptized in the church of Stratford upon Avon, discoverer of a long sought and a most important as is ascertained by the parish register, on the 26th historic truth. If he had recollected the remark of of April, 1564; and he is said to have been born on the clown in the Twelfth Night, that "a sentence the 23d of the same month, the day consecrated to is but a cheverel glove to a good wit. How quickly the tutelar saint of England. His parents, John the wrong side may be turned outwards!" he would, and Mary Shakspeare, were not of equal ranks in doubtless, have pressed the observation into his serthe community; for the former was only a respect-vice, and brought it as an irresistible attestation of able tradesman, whose ancestors cannot be traced the veracity of his old MS. into gentility, whilst the latter belonged to an ancient and opulent house in the county of Warwick, being the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote. The family of the Ardens (or Ardernes, as it is written in all the old deeds,) was of considerable antiquity and importance, some of them having served as high sheriffs of their county, and two of them (Sir John Arden and his nephew, the grandfather of Mrs. Shakspeare,) having enjoyed each a station of honour in the personal establishment of Henry VII. The younger of these Ardens was made, by his sovereign, keeper of the park of Aldercar, and bailiff of the lordship of Codnore. He obtained, also, from the crown, a valuable grant in the lease of the manor of Yoxsal, in Staffordshire, consisting of more than 4,600 acres, at a rent of 424. Mary Arden did not come dowerless to her plebeian husband, for she brought to him a small freehold estate called Asbies, and the sum of 64. 13s. 4d. in money. The freehold consisted of a house and fifty-four acres of land; and, as far as it appears, it was the first piece of landed property which was ever possessed by the Shakspeares. Of this marriage the offspring was four sons and four daughters; of whom Joan (or, according to the orthography of that time, Jone,) and Margaret, the eldest of the children died, one in infancy and one at a somewhat more advanced age; and Gilbert, whose birth immediately succeeded to that of our Poet, is supposed by some not to have reached his maturity, and by others, to have attained to considerable longevity. Joan, the eldest of the four remaining children, and named after her deceased sister, married William Hart, a hatter in her native town; and Edmund, the youngest of the family, adopting the profession of an actor, resided in St. Saviour's parish in London; and was buried in St. Saviour's Church, on the last day of December, 1607, in his twenty-eighth year. Of Anne and Richard, whose births intervened between those of Joan and Edmund, the parish register tells the whole history, when it records that the former was buried on the 4th of April, 1579, in the eighth year of her age, and the latter on the 4th of February, 1612-13, when he had nearly completed his thirty ninth. Whatever may have been the trade of John Shakspeare, whether that of wool-merchant or of glover, it seems, with the little fortune of his wife, to have placed him in a state of easy competence. In 1569 or 1570, in consequence partly of his alliance with the Ardens, and partly of his attainment of the prime municipal honours of his town, he obtained a concession of arms from the herald's office, a grant, which placed him and his family on the file of the gentry of England; and, in 1574, he purchased two houses, with gardens and orchards annexed to them, in Henley Street, in Stratford. But before the year 1578, his prosperity, from causes not now ascertainable, had certainly declined; for in that year, as we find from the records of his borough, he was excused, in condescension to his poverty, from the moiety of a very moderate assessment of six shillings and eight pence, made by the members of the corporation on themselves; at the same time that he was a.together exempted from his contribution to the relief of the peor. During the remaining years of his life, his fortunes appear not to have recovered themselves; for he ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation hall, where he had once presided; and, in 1586, another person was substituted as alderman in his place, in consequence of his magisterial inefficiency. He died in the September of 1601, when his illustrious son had already attained to high celebrity; and his wife, Mary Shakspeare, surviving him for seven years, deceased in the September of 1608, the burial of the former being registered on the eighth and that of the latter on the ninth of this month, in each of these respective years. On the 30th of June, 1564, when our Poet had not yet been three months in this breathing world, his native Stratford was visited by the plague; and, during the six succeeding months, the ravaging disease is calculated to have swept to the grave more than a seventh part of the whole population of the place. But the favoured infant reposed in security in his cradle, and breathed health amid an atmosphere of pestilence. The Genius of England may be supposed to have held the arm of the destroyer, and not to have permitted it to fall on the conse crated dwelling of his and Nature's darling. The In consequence of a document, discovered in the disease, indeed, did not overstep his charmed thresyear 1770, in the house in which, if tradition is to hold; for the name of Shakspeare is not to be found be trusted, our Poet was born, some persons having in the register of deaths throughout that period of concluded that John Shakspeare was a Roman accelerated mortality. That he survived this desoCatholic, though he had risen, by the regular gra-lating calamity of his townsmen, is all that we know dation of office, to the chief dignity of the corpora- of William Shakspeare from the day of his birth tion of Stratford, that of high bailiff; and, during till he was sent, as we are informed by Rowe, to the the whole of this period, had unquestionably con- free-school of Stratford; and was stationed there formed to the rites of the Church of England. The in the course of his education, till, in consequence asserted fact seemed not to be very probable; and of the straitened circumstances of his father, he the document in question, which, drawn up in a was recalled to the paternal roof. As we are not testamentary form and regularly attested, zealously told at what age he was sent to school, we car.not professes the Roman faith of him in whose name it form any estimate of the time during which he respeaks, having been subjected to a rigid examina-mained there. But if he was placed under his tion by Malone, has been pronounced to be spurious. The trade of John Shakspeare, as well as his reli- | * Act iii. sc. master when he was six years old, he might have | he continued in this situation whilst he remained m continued in a state of instruction for seven or even his single state, has not been told to us, and cannot for eight years; a term sufficiently long for any therefore at this period be known. But in the abDoy, not an absolute blockhead, to acquire some-sence of information, conjecture will be busy; and thing more than the mere elements of the classical will soon cover the bare desert with unprofitable languages. We are too ignorant, however, of dates vegetation. Whilst Malone surmises that the young in these instances to speak with any confidence on Poet passed the interval, till his marriage, or a the subject; and we can only assert that seven or large portion of it, in the office of an attorney, eight of the fourteen years, which intervened be- Aubrey stations him during the same term at the tween the birth of our Poet in 1564 and the known head of a country school. But the surmises of period of his father's diminished fortune in 1578, Malone are not universally happy; and to the might very properly have been given to the advan- assertions of Aubrey* I am not disposed to attach tages of the free-school. But now the important more credit than was attached to them by Anthony question is to be asked-What were the attainments Wood, who knew the old gossip and was compeof our young Shakspeare at this seat of youthful tent to appreciate his character. It is more probainstruction? Did he return to his father's house in ble that the necessity, which brought young Shaka state of utter ignorance of classic literature? or speare from his school, retained him with his was he as far advanced in his school-studies as father's occupation at home, til the acquisition of a boys of his age (which I take to be thirteen or four-wife made it convenient for him to remove to a teen) usually are in the common progress of our separate habitation. It is reasonable to conclude public and more reputable schools? That his scho- that a mind like his, ardent, excursive, and "all lastic attainments did not rise to the point of learn- compact of imagination," would not be satisfied ing, seems to have been the general opinion of his with entire inactivity; but would obtain knowledge contemporaries; and to this opinion I am willing where it could, if not from the stores of the anto assent. But I cannot persuade myself that he cients, from those at least which were supplied to was entirely unacquainted with the classic tongues; him by the writers of his own country. or that, as Farmer and his followers labour to con- In 1582, before he had completed his eighteenth vince us, he could receive the instructions, even for year, he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter, as three or four years, of a school of any character, Rowe informs us, of a substantial yeoman in the and could then depart without any knowledge be- neighbourhood of Stratford. We are unacquainted yond that of the Latin accidence. The most ac- with the precise period of their marriage, and with complished scholar may read with pleasure the the church in which it was solemnized, for in the poetic versions of the classic poets; and the less register of Stratford there is no record of the event; advanced proficient may consult bis indolence by and we are made certain of the year, in which it applying to the page of a translation of a prose occurred, only by the baptism of Susanna, the first classic, when accuracy of quotation may not be produce of the union, on the 26th of May, 1583. required: and on evidences of this nature is sup- As young Shakspeare neither increased his fortune ported the charge which has been brought, and by this match, though he probably received some which is now generally admitted, against our im- money with his wife, nor raised himself by it in the mortal bard, of more than school-boy ignorance. community, we may conclude that he was induced He might, indeed, from necessity apply to North to it by inclination, and the impulse of love. But for the interpretation of Plutarch; but he read the youthful poet's dream of happiness does not Golding's Ovid only, as I am satisfied, for the en- seem to have been realized by the result. The tertainment of its English poetry. Ben Jonson, bride was eight years older than the bridegroom; who must have been intimately conversant with his and whatever charms she might possess to fascinate friend's classic acquisitions, tells us expressly that, the eyes of her boy-lover, she probably was defi"He had small Latin and less Greek." But, cient in those powers which are requisite to impose according to the usual plan of instruction in our a durable fetter on the heart, and to hold "in sweet schools, he must have traversed a considerable ex- captivity" a mind of the very highest order. No tent of the language of Rome, before he could charge is intimated against the lady but she is left touch even the confines of that of Greece. He in Stratford by her husband during his long resi must in short have read Ovid's Metamorphoses, dence in the metropolis; and on his death, she is and a part at least of Virgil, before he could open found to be only slightly, and, as it were, casually the grammar of the more ancient, and copious, and remembered in his will. Her second pregnancy, complex dialect. This I conceive to be a fair state- which was productive of twins, (Hamnet and Jument of the case in the question respecting Shak-dith, baptized on the 2d of February, 1584–5,) terspeare's learning. Beyond controversy he was not minated her pride as a mother; and we know no a scholar; but he had not profited so little by the thing more respecting her than that, surviving her hours, which he had passed in school, as not to be illustrious consort by rather more than seven years, able to understand the more easy Roman authors she was buried on the 8th of August, 1623, being, without the assistance of a translation. If he him- as we are told by the inscription on her tomb, of self had been asked, on the subject, he might have the age of sixty-seven. Respecting the habits of parodied his own Falstaff and have answered, "In-life, or the occupation of our young Poet by which deed I am not a Scaliger or a Budæus, but yet no he obtained his subsistence, or even the place of his blockhead, friend." I believe also that he was not residence, subsequently to his marriage, not a floatwholly unacquainted with the popular languages of ing syllable has been wafted to us by tradition for France and Italy. He had abundant leisure to ac- the gratification of our curiosity; and the history quire them; and the activity and the curiosity of of this great man is a perfect blank till the occurhis mind were sufficiently strong to urge him to rence of an event, which drove him from his native their acquisition. But to discuss this much agita- town, and gave his wonderful intellect to break out ted question would lead me beyond the limits which in its full lustre on the world. From the frequent are prescribed to me; and, contenting myself with allusions in his writings to the elegant sport of faldeclaring that, in my opinion, both parties are conry, it has been suggested that this, possibly, wrong, both they who contend for our Poet's learn- might be one of his favourite amusements: and noing, and they who place his illiteracy on a level thing can be more probable, from the active season with that of John Taylor, the celebrated waterpoet, I must resume my humble and most deficient What credit can be due to this Mr. Aubrey, who narrative. The classical studies of William Shak-picked up information on the highway and scattered it speare, whatever progress he may or may not have every where as authentic? who whipped Milton at Cammade in them, were now suspended; and he was making our young Shakspeare a butcher's boy, could |bridge in violation of the university statutes; and who, replaced in his father's house, when he had attained embrue his hands in the blood of calves, and represent his thirteenth or fourteenth year, to assist with his him as exulting in poetry over the convulsions of the hand in the maintenance of the family. Whether dying animals Fertur pudicæ conjugis osculum, Torvus humi posuisse, vultum, &c. of his life, and his fixed habitation in the country, | fant offspring. The world was spread before him, than his strong and eager passion for all the plea- like a dark ocean, in which no fortunate isle could sures of the field. As a sportsman, in his rank of be seen to glitter amid the gloomy and sullen tide. life, he would naturally become a poacher; and But he was blessed with youth and health; his then it is highly probable that he would fall into the conscience was unwounded, for the adventure for acquaintance of poachers; and, associating with which he suffered, was regarded, in the estimation them in his idler hours, would occasionally be one of his times, as a mere boy's frolick, of not greater of their fellow-marauders on the manors of their guilt than the robbing of an orchard; and his mind, rich neighbours. In one of these licentious excur- rich beyond example in the gold of heaven, could sions on the grounds of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charle- throw lustre over the black waste before him, and cote, in the immediate vicinity of Stratford, for the could people it with a beautiful creation of her own. purpose, as it is said, of stealing his deer, our We may imagine him, then, departing from his young bard was detected; and, having farther irri- home, not indeed like the great Roman captive as tated the knight by affixing a satirical ballad on him he is described by the poetto the gates of Charlecote, he was compelled to fly before the enmity of his powerful adversary, and to seek an asylum in the capital. Malone, who is prone to doubt, wishes to question the truth of this whole narrative, and to ascribe the flight of young Shakspeare from his native country to the embarrassment of his circumstances, and the persecution of his creditors. But the story of the deer-stealing rests upon the uniform tradition of Stratford, and is confirmed by the character of Sir T. Lucy, who is known to have been a rigid preserver of his game, by the enmity displayed against his memory by Shakspeare in his succeeding life; and by a part of the offensive balladf itself, preserved by a Mr. Jones of Tarbick, a village near to Stratford, who obtained it from those who must have been quainted with the fact, and who could not be biased by any interest or passion to falsify or misstate it. Besides the objector, in this instance, seems not to be aware that it was easier to escape from the resentment of an offended proprietor of game, than from the avarice of a creditor: that whilst the former might be satisfied with the removal of the delinquent to a situation where he could no longer infest his parks or his warrens, the latter would pursue his debtor wherever bailiffs could find and writs could attach him. On every account, therefore, I believe the tradition, recorded by Rowe, that our Poet retired from Stratford before the exasperated power of Sir T. Lucy, and found a refuge in London, not possibly beyond the reach of the arm, but beyond the hostile purposes of his provincial antagonist. but touched with some feelings of natural sorrow, yet with an unfaltering step, and with hope vigour despair; and if he indulged in sanguine expectaous at his heart. It was impossible that he should tion, the event proved him not to be a visionary. In the course of a few years, the exile of Stratford became the associate of wits, the friend of nobles, the favourite of monarchs; and in a period which still left him not in sight of old age, he returned to his birth-place in affluence, with honour, and with the plaudits of the judicious and the noble resounding in his ears. stage; to which his access, as it appears, was easy. His immediate refuge in the metropolis was the Stratford was fond of theatrical representations, which it accommodated with its town or guildhall and had frequently been visited by companies of players when our Poet was of an age, not only to enjoy their performances, but to form an acquaintance with their members. Thomas Greene, who sidered by some writers as a kinsman of our auwas one of their distinguished actors, has been conthor's; and though he, possibly, may have been confounded by them with another Thomas Greene, a barrister, who was unquestionably connected with the Shakspeares, he was certainly a fellow townsman of our fugitive bard's; whilst Heminge and Burbage, two of the leaders of the company in question, belonged either to Stratford or to its immediate neighbourhood. With the door of the theatre thus open to him, and under the impulse of his own natural bias, (for however in after life he may have lamented his degradation as a professional actor, it must be concluded that he now felt a strong attachment to the stage,) it is not wonderful that young Shakspeare should solicit this asylum in his distress; or that he should be kindly received by men who knew him, and some of whom were connected, if not with his family, at least with his native town. The company, to which he united At this agitating crisis of his life, the situation of himself, was the Earl of Leicester's or the Queen's; young Shakspeare was certainly, in its obvious which had obtained the royal license in 1574. The aspect, severe and even terrific. Without friends place of its performances, when our Poet became to protect or assist him, he was driven, under the enrolled among its members, was the Globe on the frown of exasperated power, from his profession; Bankside; and its managers subsequently purfrom his native fields; from the companions of his chased the theatre of Blackfriars, (the oldest theachildhood and his youth; from his wife and his in-tre in London,) which they had previously rented The time of this eventful flight of the great bard of England cannot now be accurately determined: but we may somewhat confidently place it between the years 1585 and 1588; for in the former of these we may conclude him to have been present with his family at the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith; and than the latter of them we cannot well assign a later date for his arrival in London, since we know that before 1592 he had not only written two long poems, the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, but had acquired no small degree of celebrity as an actor and as a dramatic writer. for some years; and at these two theatres, the first of which was open in the centre for summer representations, and the last covered for those of winter, were acted all the dramatic productions of Shakspeare. That he was at first received into the company in a very subordinate situation, may be regarded not merely as probable, but as certain: that he ever carried a link to light the frequenters of the theatre, or ever held their horses, must be rejected as an absurd tale, fabricated, no doubt, by the lovers of the marvellous, who were solicitous to obtain a contrast in the humility of his first to the pride of his subsequent fortunes. The mean and servile occupation, thus assigned to him, was incompatible with his circumstances, even in their present afflicted state: and his relations and connec tions, though far from wealthy, were yet too remote | departure from Stratford and his becoming the ob from absolute poverty, to permit him to act for a mo-ject of Greene's malignant attack, constituted a ment in such a degrading situation. He was certainly, busy and an important period of his life. Within therefore, immediately admitted within the theatre; this term he had conciliated the friendship of the but in what rank or character cannot now be known. young Thomas Wriothesly, the liberal, the high This fact, however, soon became of very little con- souled, the romantic Earl of Southampton: a sequence; for he speedily raised himself into con- friendship which adhered to him throughout his life; sideration among his new fellows by the exertions and he had risen to that celebrity, as a poet and a of his pen, if not by his proficiency as an actor. dramatist, which placed him with the first wits of the When he began his career as a dramatic writer; age, and subsequently lifted him to the notice and or to what degree of excellence he attained in his the favour of Elizabeth and James, as they succespersonation of dramatic characters, are questions sively sate upon the throne of England. which have been frequently agitated without any At the point of time which our narrative has now satisfactory result. By two publications, which reached, we cannot accurately determine what appeared toward the end of 1592, we know, or at dramatic pieces had been composed by him: but least we are induced strongly to infer, that at that we are assured that they were of sufficient excelperiod, either as the corrector of old or as the writer lence to excite the envy and the consequent hostiof original dramas, he had supplied the stage with a lity of those who, before his rising, had been the copiousness of materials. We learn also from the luminaries of the stage. It would be gratifying to same documents that, in his profession of actor, he curiosity if the feat were possible, to adjust with trod the boards not without the acquisition of ap- any precision the order in which his wonderful plause. The two publications, to which I allude, productions issued from his brain. But the atare Robert Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit bought tempt has more than once been made, and never with a Million of Repentance," and Henry Chet- yet with entire success. We know only that his tle's "Kind Hart's Dream." In the former of connection with the stage continued for about twen these works, which was published by Chettle sub- ty years, (though the duration even of this term sequently to the unhappy author's decease, the cannot be settled with precision,) and that, within writer, addressing his fellow dramatists, Marlowe, this period he composed either partially, as workPeele, and Lodge, says, "Yes! trust them not," ing on the ground of others, or educing them alto (the managers of the theatre;) "for there is an gether from his own fertility, thirty-five or (if that upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, wretched thing, Pericles, in consequence of Drywith his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, den's testimony in favour of its authenticity, and supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank of a few touches of THE GOLDEN PEN being discoverse as the best of you; and, being an absolute verable in its last scenes, must be added to the Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only number) thirty-six dramas; and that of these it is Shake-scene in a country." As it could not be probable that such as were founded on the works doubtful against whom this attack was directed, we of preceding authors were the first essays of his cannot wonder that Shakspeare should be hurt by dramatic talent; and such as were more perfectly it or that he should expostulate on the occasion his own, and are of the first sparkle of excellence, rather warmly with Chettle as the editor of the of were among the last. While I should not hesitate, fensive matter. In consequence, as it is probable, therefore, to station "Pericles," the three parts of of this expression of resentment on the part of "Henry VI.," (for I cannot see any reason for Shakspeare, a pamphlet from the pen of Chettle throwing the first of these parts from the protection called "Kind Hart's Dream" issued from the press of our author's name,) "Love's Labour Lost," before the close of the same year (1592,) which had "The Comedy of Errors," "The Taming of he witnessed the publication of Greene's posthumous Shrew," "King John," and "Richard II.," among work. In this pamphlet, Chettle acknowledges his his earliest productions, I should, with equal conficoncern for having edited any thing which had given dence, arrange 66 Macbeth," ," "Lear," "Othello," pain to Shakspeare, of whose character and accom- "Twelfth Night," and "The Tempest," with his plishments he avows a very favourable opinion. latest, assigning them to that season of his life, Marlowe, as well as Shakspeare, appears to have when his mind exulted in the conscious plenitude been offended by some passages in this production of power. Whatever might be the order of succesof poor Greene's: and to both of these great drama-sion in which this illustrious family of genius sprang tic poets Chettle refers in the short citation which into existence, they soon attracted notice, and we shall now make from his page: "With neither speedily compelled the homage of respect from of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with those who were the most eminent for their learnone of them" (concluded to be Marlowe, whose ing, their talents, or their rank. Jenson, Selden, moral character was unhappily not good) "I care Beaumont, Fletcher, and Donne, were the associ not if I never be. The other," (who must neces-ates and the intimates of our Poet: the Earl of sarily be Shakspeare,) "whom at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had; for that, as I have moderated the hate of living authors, and might have used my own discretion, (especially in such a case, the author being dead,) that I did not I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault: because myself have seen his demeanor no less civil than he is excellent in the quality 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 art." Shakspeare was now twenty-eight years of age; and this testimony of a contemporary, who was acquainted with him, and was himself an actor, in favour of his moral and his professional excellence, must be admitted as of considerable value. It is evident that he had now written for the stage; and before he entered upon dramatic composition, we are certain that he had completed, though he had not published his two long and laboured poems of Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece. We cannot, therefore, date his arrival in the capital Vater than 1588, or, perhaps, than 1587; and the four or five years which interposed between his Southampton was his especial friend: the Earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery were avowedly his admirers and patrons: Queen Elizabeth distinguished him with her favour; and her successor, James, with his own hand, honoured the great dramatist with a letter of thanks for the compliment paid in Macbeth to the royal family of the Stuarts.* The circumstance which first brought the two lords of the stage, Shakspeare and Jonson, into that embrace of friendship which continued indissoluble, as there is reason to believe, during the permission of mortality, is reported to have been the kind assistance given by the former to the lat ter, when he was offering one of his plays (Every Man in his Humour) for the benefit of representation. The manuscript, as it is said, was on the point of being rejected and returned with a rude answer, when Shakspeare, fortunately glancing his eye over its pages, immediately discovered its serted on the authority of Sheffield Duke of Bucking The existence of this royal letter of thanks is asham, who saw it in the possession of Davenant. The cause of the thanks is assigned on the most probable conjecture |