CHAPTER VI. SHAKSPERE AT STRATFORD. BROWNING, in his well-known poem At the Mermaid pronounces judgement, in picturesque and forcible fashion, upon a question which is raised at the very threshold of any inquiry into Shakspere's career. The great dramatist is represented as 'taking his ease at his inn' with Ben Jonson and other kindred wits, and protesting to them, while the sherris goes round, that his plays are no index to his real self. 'Here's my work: does work discover Did I live man's hater, lover? Leave the world at peace, at strife? Blank of such a record, truly, Here's the work I hand, this scroll, Mine remains the unproffered soul.' Does the speaker in Browning's poem say truth? Is the man, William Shakspere, something entirely apart from and outside of his plays? Are they really 'blank' of any 'record' of his life? Is the pursuit of his personality through their pages only a wild-goose chase, from which every self-respecting student will hold aloof? To these momentous questions diametrically opposite answers have been given. Browning's view is strongly upheld by Halliwell-Phillipps, who asserts that 'determined care' must be taken to avoid the temptation of endeavouring to illustrate [Shakspere's] history by his writings, or to decipher his character and sensibilities through their media.’ Dowden, on the other hand, declares that if we could watch [Shak spere's] writings closely, and observe their growth, the laws of that growth would be referable to the nature of the man, and to the nature of his environment. And we might even be able to refer to one and the other of these two factors producing a common resultant, that which is specially due to each. Fortunately the succession of Shakspere's writings is sufficiently ascertained to enable us to study the main features of the growth of Shakspere as an artist and as a man.' Between these conflicting views there opens a via media, possibly less attractive but more secure. The denial of any discoverable relationship between Shakspere's plays and his life is unconvincing, when pushed to extremes. No writer, be he dramatist or not, can cut himself entirely adrift from the general influences of his age, and from his special personal experiences. It is wholly inconceivable that his works should not reveal something of his individuality, or that changes in their general tone should be quite uncoloured by his own vicissitudes of mind and fortune. Thus it is obvious that comedies like Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor contain reminiscences of country society and surroundings such as would have been under the poet's eyes during his early days in Stratford. Again, the remarkable difference between the comedies written during the closing years of the sixteenth century and the tragedies which belong to the first decade of the seventeenth, suggests that Shakspere had at this period gone through some bitter affliction of soul, and it will be shown that there is strong confirmatory evidence of this. Or, once again, the general political principles that underlie the whole group of historical plays, the ardent patriotism, the zeal for monarchy when worthily represented, the conservative distrust of violent social change, the undisguised contempt for demagogues and their dupes-all these are not only what we should naturally expect in an Elizabethan citizen ancestrally connected with the higher yeoman class, and brought in his professional capacity into connexion with the Court, but they are further in complete accordance with Shakspere's ambition to become a landowner, as clearly evidenced by his repeated purchases of property at Stratford. It is not too much to say that only literary partisan ship can overlook the significance of these and similar points of contact between Shakspere's writings and his personal career. But are we, therefore, warranted in going further, and endeavouring, by a combination of references from the plays with our comparatively slight knowledge of the external facts of the dramatist's life, to recreate the history of his development both as an artist and a man? Such attempts have an abiding fascination, and when undertaken with scholarly judgement they attain to results that certainly express a measure of truth. But when so much has ungrudgingly been admitted, the broad fact remains that these endeavours to reconstruct the poet's biography from a mixture of external and internal evidence must always be unsatisfactory. The links between the two sets of data are so few and fragmentary that it is impossible to piece them together in a consistent whole. Thus to say that the man William Shakspere, the native of Stratford, the actor and playwright, the purchaser of New Place, passed successively in his own mental history through the experiences of a Romeo, a Hamlet, and a Timon, may be quite conceivably true, but in the comparative dearth of facts to throw light on such changes of mood, a statement of the kind is of little service to the poet's biography. Shakspere has left us no prose pamphlets like those of Greene, giving a key to his inner history. Indeed, any reference to the earlier dramatist should serve as a caution against hasty deductions from Shakspere's works to his life. To judge from the purity of Greene's plays and novels, and their delight in innocent country joys, no one would take their author to have been a debauchee of the Town, and there may well have been similar points of antithesis between the writings and the personal career of his great successor. It thus seems advisable, while recognizing the interest and relative value of the alternative method, to state what is known about William Shakspere, apart from any evidence that his plays may be supposed to furnish. Exception may, however, be made of a few passages which are introduced without any special dramatic propriety, and which appear to have some personal application. It is evident also that the plays must throw light on the poet's reading and general culture. The authorities which remain for biographical purposes are contemporary notices, later tradition embodied in various lives,' legal and other documents still extant bearing upon his career, and, finally, his non-dramatic writings. The value of the first and third groups of evidence is obvious: that of the fourth will be discussed below. It therefore only remains to say a few words upon those early memorials of Shakspere's career which have formed the basis of all succeeding biographies. First in date come some entries in a note-book of the Rev. J. Ward, who was appointed vicar of Stratford-on-Avon in 1662, and who was thus in a position to know the local traditions current in the poet's native town within a comparatively recent period after his death. Less trust is to be given to a narrative compiled about the same time by another antiquary, John Aubrey, who visited Stratford, and left a somewhat gossipping account of what he heard, though he can scarcely have been mistaken as to main facts. A further record of local belief has been handed down by a traveller who made a pilgrimage to Stratford Church in 1693, and drew what information he could from William Castle, the parish clerk and sexton. But the first attempt at a detailed biography dates from the early years of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe published a life of the poet, the materials for which were contributed chiefly by Betterton, the celebrated Restoration actor. 'I must own,' says Rowe, 'a particular obligation to him for the most considerable part of the passages relating to his life which I have here transmitted to the public, his veneration for the memory of Shakspere having engaged him to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great value.' Thus Rowe's account claims to be based on special inquiry, and though the accuracy of many of its statements has often been questioned, it bears upon it intrinsic evidence of good faith, and in several points it has been strikingly verified by modern research. In the acceptance of tradition scepticism may be pushed to a point where it is little less of a historical vice than uncritical credulity, and because some of Rowe's anecdotes are picturesque they are not therefore necessarily untrue. In any case, for long afterwards, extremely little was added to the scanty memorials of Shakspere's career, and, though during the present century heroic efforts have been made to fill up the gaps in our knowledge, yet their success has lain more in shedding fresh light upon the state of the Elizabethan stage, and of society in Stratford and London, than in substantially increasing our information about the poet's personal history. This is indeed a matter of rejoicing to the school of critics, with whom an interest in Shakspere's private life ranks merely as an undesirable form of inquisitiveness. Against such a view it is impossible to argue the all-sufficient answer is Honi soit qui mal y pense. The majority of students will feel guilty of no irreverence in their regret that so many secrets of the career of the greatest of Englishmen are drowned, like Prospero's book, 'deeper than did ever plummet sound.' Even the exact date of William Shakspere's1 birth is uncertain, but we know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. He was the eldest son of John Shakspere, whose father was a farmer of Snitterfield, a small Warwickshire village, but who had left his home some time before 1552, and had settled in the ancient and thriving borough of Stratford-on-Avon. The history of the town is in itself of great interest, and some slight acquaintance with its main features is essential to a thorough understanding of the conditions among which the early life of the dramatist was passed 2. Its origin dates probably as far back as 691, when Ethelred, king of Mercia, granted the monastery of Stratford with three thousand acres of adjacent land to the Bishop of Worcester. This gift was confirmed by subsequent rulers in 781 and 845. Of the monastery nothing is afterwards heard, but the township thus grew up in dependence on the midland see, and became one of its most valuable manors, under which head it is set down in the Domesday Survey. All the inhabitants On the spelling and pronunciation of the dramatist's name see Elze's William Shakspere, Appendix I. Of the two forms which can claim authority, 'Shakspere' and 'Shakespeare,' I have chosen the former, as the one used most frequently by the dramatist in the only unquestionably genuine signatures of his that have come down to us, the three on his will and the two on his Blackfriars conveyance and mortgage of 1613. 2 For the main facts in this and the following paragraph I am indebted to Mr. Sidney Lee's Stratford-on-Avon from the earliest times till the death of Shakspere. |