luding to himself as a "wanderer from the British world of fashion. where I like other 'dogs have had my day,'” mentioning "the Duke of Dash who was a duke, Ay, every inch a duke,'" or straining rhetoric where Juan "drops his salt tears into the salt sea-'sweets to the sweet'" (he "liked so much to quote "), or raising to the sublime as he "bends him o'er"

6

"that chill changeless brow,

Where cold obstruction's' apathy

Appalls the gazing mourners heart "

everywhere and under all circumstances he had Shakespeare ever with him, and was always willing to utilize his works. It was his "heart of heart" that cried out in "The Blues "

"Come, a truce with all tartness-the joy of my heart

Is to see Nature's triumph o'er all that is art.
Wild Nature! Grand Shakespeare!

HERBERT M. HAGERMAN.

SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST PRINTER.

In view of the certainty that Shakespeare was only sought for by publishers, when, by hard work, he had become successful, it might have been expected that some exceptional appeal may have been made to procure the reading of his first manuscript. And such indeed appears to have been the fact.

In 1592 there died, in Stratford-upon-Avon, one Henry Field, a tanner, leaving a will and inventory of personal property, but whose estate, for some reason, required the services of an appraiser to settle. The Court of Probate (or Consistory Court, as it was then called) appointed John Shakespeare such appraiser, and he qualified, discharged his duties and duly filed his report in August, 1592. Now, this Henry Field had a son, named Richard, who, like young Shakespeare, had found his way to London in search of employment, in or about 1579. Just about this time it happened that a journeyman printer named Thomas Vautroillier came from France and settled in his trade in London. He did better and neater work than the London printers, or the Dutch printers who had domiciled there, and so found plenty of employment, as the development of the love of literature correspondingly developed a taste for better and cleaner typography. In 1564 Vautroillier was admitted to the exclusive and aristocratic Stationers' Company, and selected Blackfriars as his place of business, his patent reading Typographus Londoniensis in claustro vulgo Blackfriars commorans, while, as was the custom, certain books were made over by the Company to him as his exclusive privilege to print. As it hap

pened, this young Richard Field found employment in Vautroillier's establishment, but did not remain there long, finding more favorable employment with another printer named George Bishop, to whom, at Michaelmas, 1579, he (Field) was apprenticed for seven years. No sooner, however, was he out of his time than, in 1588, he returned to Vautroillier's office. On Vautrollier's death, in that year, Field mar-. ried his daughter and succeeded to his business of stationer and printer. Here, then, we have a fellow-townsman and neighbor of William Shakespeare's, a printer, stationer and publisher, at his very elbow in London.

It seems to me that-the above being matters of easy verification -we may proceed to judge the drift of circumstances, then, as pretty much as it would follow in course to-day. Given a young man with literary aspirations, a poet-what is the dearest object which would. present itself to his heart? Clearly, the object of finding a publisher and getting into print. And we may, I think, be pretly confident that the lad had not been very long in London without haunting the publishers with his manuscripts under his arm. Probably young William Shakespeare sought the older and better-known publishers first; those who had more capital and a larger establishment than his townsman Richard Field, and no doubt young Shakespeare went to one and all of them. Possibly he might for a long time have studiously avoided Field, knowing that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country or to his own countrymen. But an unknown poet has small chance, and manuscripts are not inviting objects to look at, nor are publishers over-willing to wade into thick piles of close chirography. So let us imagine that young Shakespeare finally, in despair, was forced by sheer necessity to have recourse to his fellow-Stratfordian; prevailed upon him to put his verses into print, so that he could at last secure readers, and thereafter rise or fall on his merits as a poet and not on his success as a securer of publishers. Let us see how probable or improbable such a theory would now become, in the face of the records.

By consulting the Quartos and the Stationers' Registers we find that whereas no other printer ever touched a Shakespearian manuscript until 1597, Richard Field did in 1593 print a first edition of the Venus and Adonis, and again, only the year after, a second edition. thereof, and a new poem, the Lucrece (pretty fair proof that he did not lose by the Venus and Adonis, however dubiously he might have touched it). The standard theory as to how Shakespeare first "got into print" is that he won the innermost friendship of Lord Southampton, and that the two-peer and peasant-went thereafter arm in arm, a story which has no warrant in any record, and which, as I have elsewhere shown,* is of the highest improbability, resting, indeed, upon

*Introduction to Vol. VII. of the Bankside Shakespeare, pp. 58, 59.

the simple fact of the two dedications, which, while not uncommon evidences of young Lord Southampton's desire to pose as a patron of literature by the gracious acceptance of the rôle of nominal patron to poets willing to print at their own-at any rate at somebody else's than Southampton's-expense, certainly prove nothing, by any known rule, but themselves. Shakespeare went with good company, as is

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE
Henrie VVriothefley, Earle of Southampton,

R

and Baron of Titchfield.

Ight Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolisht lines to your Lordship,nor how the worlde vvill cenfure mee for choosing fo Strong a proppe to fuppert fo vveake a burthen, onelye if your Honour feeme but pleafed, I acCount my felfe highly praised, and vome to take aduantage of all idle houres,till I haue honoured you vvith fome grauer labour. But if the first heire of my inuention proue deformed,I fhall be forie it had fo noble a god-father and neuer after eare fo barrena land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a harueft, 1 leaue it to your Honou rable furuey,and your Honor to your hearts content,vvhichIrish may alvvaies anfvvere your ovvne vvish, and the vvorlds hopefull expectation.

Your Honors in all dutie,

William Shakespeare.

SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST LETTER DEDICATORY.

proved by his intimacy with John D'Avenant, who was at one time. Mayor of Oxford, and at whose inn, "The Crown," Shakespeare was always a welcome guest. But the "thousand pounds" gift must, I fear, travel to oblivion along with the Southampton friendship story: "a thousand pounds" was in those days an enormous sum, fully equal to twenty-five thousand dollars to-day, and Southampton was not a rich man. Is seems to me that, had the story of the gift been authentic, it would have been rather fuller in detail, and something of the sources where Southampton got the money, or of the uses to which Shakespeare put it, have been supplied. Shakespeare only paid Will

iam Underhill sixty pounds for New Place-the most princely residence then in Stratford-upon-Avon, with its outhouses, messuages, orchards, and great barns filled with corn, covering three-quarters of an acre of ground-which was twenty pounds more than Underhill himself had paid for it a few years before; and we have a rather plentiful record of his other purchases of real estate. But altogether they do not account for "a thousand pounds." If Southampton, and not Shakespeare, had procured the printing of these two earliest poems of Shakespeare's, it is a little queer that Southampton should have sent Shakespeare, out of all of the scores of publishers in London, to Shakespeare's own fellow-townsman, and for those two poems only. Any publisher would have been eager to have executed an order for Lord Southampton. And it is queer, again, that-if Southampton had selected Field-Field, who made Shakespeare's reputation by first bringing him out, should never have been allowed to print any of Shakespeare's works when they became lucrative and every bookseller in London was struggling for them. By consulting the list we find that the Venus and Adonis was so profitable that in 1636 it actually had reached a thirteenth edition, printed by Francis Coules. As early as 1596 the poem had passed to John Harrison, who turned it over for its fourth edition to William Leake (though, of course, this might be accounted for by supposing that Field had sold the poem at a profit, or that he had died meanwhile, for we know nothing of Field's career except the items above stated). But the great difficulty is that, if Southampton's own publisher, or selection of a publisher, had first taken up Shakespeare, that publisher, protected by the name of a powerful lord, would have remained in possession of the monopoly, and the reign of Elizabeth was a reign of monopolies such as has never been seen before or since. Indeed, I doubt if another instance than that of the Shakespeare plays can be mentioned, in which literary matter of the date was not assigned, by the Stationers' Company, to some single member of their body to be a perpetual right and property in himself and his successors. I do not think much ought to be predicated from the gratitude for favors received expressed by Shakespeare in his second dedication (that of the Lucrece) to Southampton: commoners, especially when they were poor poets, were apt to speak extravagantly of favors, however small, conferred upon them by peers, and the young and unknown Shakespeare possibly considered that the permission to dedicate poems to a noble lord was in itself a kindness to be grateful for. It was still a long way, in the punctilious Tudor days, from peasant to peer.

At any rate-to an age which cares nothing about Southampton and a great deal about Shakespeare it ought to be, it seems to me, a pleasant reflection that William Shakespeare owed his first appearance in the custody of "the art preservative," not to the nods of a gilded

youth who was amusing himself, but to a fellow-townsman, perhaps a playmate; and that the tranquil little town on the silvery Avon may

AND ADONIS

Vilia miretur vulgus: mibi flauus Apollo
Pocula Caftalia plena miniftret aqua.

Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be fold at
the figne of the white Greyhound in
Paules Church-yard.

1593.

claim to be not only the birthplace of the poet, but of the man who launched him on his high road to immortality. (From Mr. Morgan's Introduction to Vol. XIV. of THE BANKSIDE SHAKESPEARE.)