THE STRATFORD DAYS
"What porridge had John Keats?" asks Browning. So may we well inquire of
what blood was Shakespeare? What nice conjunction of racial strains
produced this unerring judgment, this heaven-scaling imagination, this
exquisite sensibility? for, however his manner of life may have
developed their expression, these qualities were plainly inherent in the
man.
The name Shakespeare has been found to have existed during the
thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in various
parts of England, and has been most commonly encountered in and about
Warwickshire. While it is spelt in many different ways, the commonest
form is _Shaxper_ or _Shaxpeare_, giving the _a_ in the first syllable
the same sound as in flax. Wherever Shakespeare families are found,
however, they invariably show a very great preponderance of Christian
names that are characteristically Norman: Richard, Gilbert, Hugh,
William, John, Robert, Anthony, Henry, Thomas, Joan, Mary, Isabella,
Ann, Margaret, being met with frequently. It is likely then that the
widespread and persistent use of Norman Christian names by Shakespeare
families denotes their Norman origin, and that this link with their past
was preserved by family custom long after pride of ancestry--which first
continued its use--was forgotten, as in the case of the Irish peasantry
of Norman origin in Leinster--within what was formerly known as the
Norman Pale--who have long forgotten their origin, but having Norman
patronymics still preserve also Norman Christian names.
The etymological origin of Shakespeare's name is yet unsettled: one
scholar suggests that it derives from the Anglo-Saxon, _Saexberht_. This
would imply that the Anglo-Saxon prefix _saex_ has by time been
transmuted into Shake, and that the suffix, _berht_ has become pear or
pere. The instances in which the Anglo-Saxon _sae_ have changed into the
English _sh_ are extremely rare. The modern _sh_ in English when derived
from Anglo-Saxon is almost invariably _sc_ softened, or when derived
from Danish or Norse _sh_, as, for instance, in the words _sceadu_
shade, _sceaft_ shaft, _sceacan_ shake, _sceal_ shall, _scamu_ shame,
_skapa_ shape. I cannot find a single instance in the growth of
Anglo-Saxon into English where the original _berht_ has taken on the _p_
sound and become _pear_ or _pere_. The English for _berht_ as a rule is
bert, burt, or bard.
Shakespeare's sanity of judgment and spiritual self-reliance are
qualities which we naturally associate with the Norse temperament; his
fine sensibility and unfettered imagination strike us as much more
characteristically Gallic or Celtic. It seems probable then that in his
physical and spiritual composition we have a rare admixture of these
related Aryan types. Physically he was not a large man, being, in fact,
rather below the middle stature; his hair was strong in texture and dark
reddish in colour, while his eyes were brown; his nose was large, and
his lips full, but the face relieved of sensuousness by the dominant
majesty of the brow. This is not descriptive of an Anglo-Saxon type: it
is much more distinctly French or Norman. It is probable that the blood
of the Norman ran full in Shakespeare's veins, and who was the Norman
but the racial combination of the Norseman and the Gaul? In this light,
then, I suggest that the name Shakespeare seems to be much closer to the
Norman-French _Jacquespierre_ than it is to the Anglo-Saxon _saexberht_.
In the gradual transition of Norman-French into English pronunciation,
Shakespeare, or as the name was pronounced in Elizabethan days, Shaxper,
is exactly the form which the English tongue would have given to the
name _Jacquespierre_. It is significant that Arden, his mother's name,
is also of Norman origin; that his grandfather's name Richard, his
father's name John, his own name William, and the names of all his
brothers and sisters, but one, were Norman. In view of these
indications, it is not unreasonable to assume that Norman blood held
good proportion in the veins of this greatest of all Englishmen.
Exhaustive research by interested genealogists has failed to trace
Shakespeare's forebears further into the past than to his grandfather,
Richard Shakespeare, a substantial yeoman of Snitterfield, and this
relationship, while generally accepted, is not yet definitely
established. There is no doubt, however, that John Shakespeare, butcher,
glover, woolstapler, or corndealer, or all of these things combined, of
Stratford-upon-Avon, was his father, and that the poet was baptized in
the Parish Church of that town upon 26th April, in the year 1564. He was
born on, or shortly before, 23rd April in the same year.
Shakespeare's mother was Mary Arden, the youngest of eight daughters--by
the first wife--of Robert Arden, a landed gentleman of Wilmcote, related
to the Ardens of Parkhill, at that time one of the leading families of
Warwickshire.
On the theory that men of great intellectual capacity inherit their
qualities from the distaff side, it might help us to realise Shakespeare
better if we know more about his mother: of her personality and
character, however, we know absolutely nothing.
The mothers depicted by Shakespeare in his plays are, as a rule,
devoted, strong, and noble characters, and are probably in some measure
spiritual reflections of the model he knew most intimately. It is
improbable that Shakespeare's childhood should not have shown some
evidence of the qualities he later displayed, and impossible that such
promise should be hidden from a mother's eye.
The wealth of Shakespeare's productiveness in the three years preceding
the end of 1594 gives ample evidence that the dark years intervening
between his departure from Stratford and the autumn of 1591 had not been
idly spent. Such mastery of his art as he displays even at this early
period was not attained without an active and interested novitiate in
his profession. It is evident that the appellation _Johannes factotum_,
which Greene in 1592 slurringly bestows upon him, had been well earned
in the six or seven preceding years of his London life for which we
possess no records.
Whatever misgivings their staid and thrifty Stratford neighbours may
have had as to the wisdom of the youthful Shakespeare's London
adventure, we may well believe that Mary Arden, knowing her son's fibre,
felt fair assurance that his success there would come near to matching
her desires, and that of the several spurs to his industry and pride of
achievement the smile of her approval was not the least. There is
possibly a backward glance to his mother's faith in him in the spirit of
Volumnia's hopes for the fame of her son:
"When yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when
youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way; when for a day of
Kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her
beholding; I--considering how honour would become such a person; that
it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown
made it not stir,--was pleased to let him seek danger where he was
like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him; from whence he
returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter--I sprang
not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in
first seeing he had proved himself a man."
Mary Arden died in 1608, at about the time the passage quoted above was
written, having lived long enough to see the fortunes of the family
restored through her son's efforts, and also to see him become one of
the most noted men in England, and returning to Stratford with his brows
crowned, if not with martial oak, with more enduring laurels.
We have no record of Shakespeare's schooldays. We know that a free
grammar school of good standard existed in Stratford during his boyhood,
and later. It is usually assumed that it was here that Shakespeare got
the elements of his education. Though he was in no sense a classical
scholar, he undoubtedly had an elementary knowledge of Latin, and may
possibly, in later years, have acquired a smattering of Greek. George
Chapman accuses Shakespeare of spreading the report that his alleged
translations of Homer from the original Greek were, in fact, made from
Latin versions. Whatever truth there may have been in Chapman's
accusation against Shakespeare in this connection, modern scholarship
has found that there were good grounds for such a report, and that
Chapman undoubtedly made free use of the Latin of Scapula in all of his
translations. Chapman's allegation, if true, seems to imply that
Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin was not so meagre but that he could,
upon occasion, successfully combat his learned opponents with weapons of
their own choice.
Once at work in London, Shakespeare wrought hard, and in view of his
immense productiveness can have had little leisure in the ten or fifteen
years following. We may infer, then, that the wealth of knowledge of
nature he displays was acquired in his boyhood and youth in the country
round about Stratford. His intimate acquaintance with animate and
inanimate life in all their forms, his knowledge of banks where wild
thyme grew, his love of flowers and of natural beauty which remained
with him all through his life, were evidently gained at that receptive
period:
"When meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common thing to (him) did seem,
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."
Though Shakespeare's schooldays were over long before he left Stratford
for London, his real education had only then begun. To his all-gleaning
eye and hungry mind every day he lived brought new accretions of
knowledge. Notwithstanding the paucity of recorded fact which exists
regarding his material life, and the wealth of intimate knowledge we may
possess regarding the lives of other writers, I doubt if, in the works
of any other author in the entire history of literature, we can trace
such evidence of continuous intellectual and spiritual growth.
While we have no light on Shakespeare's childhood, a few facts have been
gleaned from the Stratford records concerning his father's affairs and
his own youth, a consideration of which may enable us to judge the
underlying causes which led him to seek his fortunes in London.
There is something pathetic yet dignified about the figure of John
Shakespeare as we dimly sight it in what remains of the annals of his
town and time. The stage he treads is circumscribed, and his appearances
are few, but sufficient for us to apprehend a high-spirited but
injudicious man, showing always somewhat superior in spirit to his
social conditions.
He settled in Stratford twelve years previous to the birth of our poet,
and appears to have been recognised as a man of some importance soon
after his arrival. We have record that he was elected to various small
municipal offices early in his Stratford career, and also of purchases
of property from time to time, all of which evidences a growth in estate
and public regard. At about the time of Shakespeare's birth, and during
a season of pestilence, we find him prominent amongst those of his
townsmen who contributed to succour their distressed and stricken
neighbours. A year later than this we find him holding office as
alderman, and later still as bailiff of Stratford; the latter the
highest office in the gift of his fellow-townsmen. While holding this
office we catch a glimpse of him giving welcome to a travelling company
of players; an innovation in the uses of his position which argues a
broad and tolerant catholicity of mind when contrasted with the growing
Puritanism of the times. And so, for several years, we see him prosper,
and living as befits one who prospers, and, withal, wearing his village
honours with a kindly dignity. But fortune turns, and a period of
reverses sets in; we do not trace them very distinctly; we find him
borrowing moneys and mortgaging property, and, later, these and older
obligations fall due, and, failing payment, he is sued, and thereafter
for some years he fights a stubborn rearguard fight with pursuing fate
in the form of truculent creditors and estranged relatives.
In the onset of these troubles an event occurred which, we may safely
assume, did not tend to ease his worries nor add to his peace of mind.
In 1582, his son, our poet, then a youth of eighteen, brought to his
home an added care in the shape of a wife who was nearly eight years his
senior, and who (the records tell us) bore him a daughter within six
months of the date of their betrothal. All the circumstances surrounding
the marriage lead us to infer that Shakespeare's family was not
enthusiastically in favour of it, and was perhaps ignorant of it till
its consummation, and that it was practically forced upon the youthful
Shakespeare by the bride's friends for reasons obvious in the facts of
the case. About two and a half years from this date, and at a period
when John Shakespeare's affairs had become badly involved and his
creditors uncomfortably persistent, his son's family and his own care
were increased by the addition of the twins, Judith and Hamnet. The few
records we have of this period (1585-86) show a most unhappy state of
affairs; his creditors are still on the warpath, and one, owning to the
solid name of John Brown, having secured judgment against him, is
compelled to report to the court that "the defendant hath no property
whereon to levy." Shortly after this, John Shakespeare is shorn of the
last shred of his civic honours, being deprived of his office of
alderman for non-attendance at the council meetings. In this condition
of things we may realise the feelings of an imaginative and sensitive
youth of his son's calibre; how keenly he would feel the helplessness
and the reproach of his position, especially if--as was no doubt the
case--it was augmented by the looks of askance and wagging of heads of
the sleek and thrifty wise-ones of his community.
We are fairly well assured that Shakespeare did not leave Stratford
before the end of 1585, and it appears probable that he remained there
as late as 1586 or 1587. Seeing that he had compromised himself at the
age of eighteen with a woman eight years his senior, whom he married
from a sense of honour or was induced to marry by her friends, we may
infer that the three or four subsequent years he spent in Stratford were
not conducive either to domestic felicity or peace of mind. How
Shakespeare occupied himself during these years we may never know,
though it is very probable that he worked in the capacity of assistant
to his father. That these were years of introspection and remorse to one
of his spirit, however, there can be little doubt; there can be still
less doubt that they were also years of formative growth, and that in
this interval the irresponsible youth, who had given hostages to fortune
by marrying at the age of eighteen, steadied by the responsibility of a
growing family, quickly developed into some promise of the man to be.
No biographer has yet taken into consideration the effect which the
circumstances of Shakespeare's life during these four or five formative
years must necessarily have had in the development of his character.
That this exquisite poet, this builder of dreams, should in the common
affairs of life have displayed such an effectively practical bent, has
always appeared an anomaly; a partial explanation is to be found in the
incentive given to his energies by the conditions of his life, and of
his father's affairs, at this formative period. To the habitually poor,
poverty is a familiar; to the patrician who has had reverses, it may be
a foil to his spirit: he still has his pride of family and caste. To the
burgher class, in which Shakespeare moved in Stratford, the loss of
money was the loss of caste. To provide for the future of his children
and to restore the declining fortunes and prestige of his family became
now his most immediate concern, if we may form any judgment from his
subsequent activities. The history of literature has given us so many
instances of poetic genius being unaccompanied by ordinary worldly
wisdom, and so few instances of a combination of business aptitude with
poetic genius, that some so-called biographers, enamoured of the
conventional idea of a poet, seem almost to resent our great poet's
practical common sense when displayed in his everyday life, and to
impute to him as a derogation, or fault, the sound judgment in worldly
matters, without which he never could have evolved the sane and
unimpassioned philosophy of life, which, like a firm and even warp, runs
veiled through the multicoloured weft of incident and accident in his
dramas.
All Shakespearean biographers now agree in dating his hegira from
Stratford not later than the year 1587. Early in 1585 his twin children,
Judith and Hamnet, were born. The fact that no children were born to him
later is usually advanced in favour of the assumption that he left
Stratford shortly after this date. In the next eleven years we have but
one mention of him in the Stratford records. Towards the end of 1587 his
name, in conjunction with his father's, appears upon a legal form
relating to the proposed cancellation of a mortgage upon some property
in which he held a contingent interest. This, however, does not
necessarily indicate his presence in Stratford at that time.
At the present time the most generally accepted hypothesis regarding the
beginning of Shakespeare's theatrical career is that he joined the Earl
of Leicester's company of players upon the occasion of their visit to
Stratford-upon-Avon, either in the year 1586 or 1587. Upon the death of
the Earl of Leicester in 1588, when this company was disrupted, it is
thought probable that in company with Will Kempe, George Bryan, and
Thomas Pope (actors with whom he was afterwards affiliated for years),
he joined Lord Strange's players, with which company under its various
later titles he continued to be connected during the remainder of his
theatrical career. I shall prove this theory to be erroneous and adduce
evidence to show that of whatever company, or companies, he may later
have been an active member, his theatrical experience had its inception
in a connection as theatrical assistant with the interests of the
Burbages; with whose fortunes he thereafter continued to be connected
till the end of his London career.
In judging of the youthful Shakespeare, of whom we can only conjecture,
we may reasonably draw inferences from the character of the man we find
revealed in his life's work. I am convinced that Shakespeare's departure
from Stratford was deliberate, and that when he went to London he did so
with a definite purpose in view. Had Shakespeare's father been a
prosperous man of business, in all probability the world would never
have heard of his son; though the local traditions of Stratford might
have been enriched by the proverbial wit and wisdom of a certain
anonymous sixteenth-century tradesman.
Unconfirmed legend, originating nearly a hundred years after the alleged
event, is the sole basis for the report that Shakespeare was forced to
leave his native town on account of his participation in a poaching
adventure. It is possible that Shakespeare in his youth may have
indulged in such a natural transgression of the law, but supposing it to
be a fact that he did so, it does not necessarily brand him as a
scapegrace. A ne'er-do-well in the country would probably remain the
same in the city, and would be likely to accentuate his characteristics
there, especially if his life was cast, as was Shakespeare's, in
Bohemian surroundings. Instead of this, what are the facts? Assuming
that Shakespeare left Stratford in 1586 or 1587, and became, as
tradition reports, a servitor in the theatre at that period, let us look
ten years ahead and see how he has fared.
We know that he had already returned to Stratford in 1597 and purchased
one of the most important residences in the town. From the fact that
John Shakespeare's creditors from this time forward ceased to harass
him, we may assume that he had also settled his father's affairs. We
have record that in 1596 he had, through his father, applied for the
confirmation of an old grant of arms, which was confirmed three years
later, and that he thereafter was styled "William Shakespeare, Gentleman
of Stratford-upon-Avon." At this period he had also produced more than
one-third of his known literary work, and was acknowledged as the
leading dramatist of the time. All of this he had attained working in
the same environment in which other men of about his own age, but of
greater education and larger opportunities, had found penury, disgrace,
and death. Marlowe, his confrère, at the age of thirty, in 1593, was
killed in a tavern brawl. A year earlier, Greene, also a university man,
would have died a beggar on the street but for the charity of a
cobbler's wife who housed him in his dying hours. Spenser, breathing a
purer atmosphere, but lacking the business aptitude of Shakespeare, died
broken-hearted in poverty in 1599. George Peele, another university man,
at about the same date, and at the age of thirty-four, we are told by
Meres, died from the results of an irregular life. And those of his
literary contemporaries who lived as long as, or outlived, Shakespeare,
what were their ends, and where are their memories? Unknown and in most
cases forgotten except where they live in his reflected light. Matthew
Roydon lived long and died in poverty, no one knows when or where.
George Chapman outlived his great rival many years, and died as he had
lived, a friendless misanthropist.
Though Shakespeare won to fame and fortune over the temptations and
vicissitudes of the same life and environments to which so many of his
fellows succumbed, we have proof that this was not due to any inherent
asceticism or native coldness of blood.
No man in Shakespeare's circumstances could have attained and
accomplished what he did during those early years living at haphazard or
without a controlling purpose in life. Whatever may have been the
immediate accident of fate that turned his face Londonwards, we may rest
assured that he went there with the purpose of retrieving his good name
in his own community and rehabilitating the fortunes of his family.
Shakespeare's literary history does not show in him any evidence of
remarkable precocity. Keats was famous and already gathered to the
immortals at an age at which Shakespeare was still in the chrysalid
stage of the actual buskin and sock. It may reasonably be doubted that
Shakespeare produced any of his known poems or plays previous to the
years 1590-91. Though his genius blossomed late his common sense and
business capacity developed early, forced into being, no doubt, by a
realisation of his responsibilities, as well as by the deplorable
condition into which his father's affairs had fallen. So, between the
years 1583, when he was married, and 1591-92, when we first begin to get
some hints of his literary activities, his Pegasus was in harness
earning bread and butter and, incidentally, gleaning worldly wisdom.
"Love's young dream" is over; the ecstatic quest of the "not impossible
she," almost at its inception, has ended in the cold anticlimax of an
enforced marriage.
We may dismiss the deer-stealing rumour as referring to this period. The
patient industry, sound judgment, and unusual business capacity
exhibited by Shakespeare from the time we begin to get actual glimpses
of his doings until the end of his career, belie the stupid and belated
rumour of his having been forced to leave Stratford as a fugitive from
justice on account of his participation in a poaching adventure upon Sir
Thomas Lucy's preserves. While it is apparent that this bucolic Justice
of the Peace is caricatured as Justice Shallow in _Henry IV., Part II._,
it is still more clear that this play was not written until the end of
the year 1598. When Shakespeare's methods of work are better understood
it will become evident that he did not in 1598 revenge an injury from
ten to twelve years old. Whatever may have been his animus against Sir
Thomas Lucy it undoubtedly pertained to conditions existent in the year
1598. In 1596 John Shakespeare's application for arms was made, but was
not finally granted until late in 1598, or early in 1599. It was still
under consideration by the College of Heralds, or had very recently been
granted when Shakespeare wrote _Henry IV., Part II._, late in 1598. It
is not likely that such a grant of arms would be made even by the most
friendly disposed authorities without consultation with, or reference
to, the local magistracy or gentry regarding the character and social
standing of the applicant. It is quite likely then that the rustic
squire resented--what such a character would undoubtedly have regarded
as a tradesman's presumption, and that Shakespeare, becoming cognizant
of his objections, answered them in kind by caricaturing the Lucy arms.
The critical student of Shakespeare's works will find that wherever a
reflection of a topical nature is palpable in his plays, that the thing,
or incident, referred to is almost invariably a matter of comparatively
recent experience. If it is a reflection of, or a reference to, another
writer we may be assured that Shakespeare has recently come from a
perusal of the writer in question. If the allusion is of a social or
political nature it will refer to some recent happening or to something
that is still of public interest. Should such an allusion be in any
sense autobiographical and pertaining to his own personal interests or
feelings, it is still more likely to refer to recent experience.
Whatever may have been the reason for his caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy,
its cause was evidently of a later date than his departure from
Stratford. It was no shiftless runagate nor fugitive from justice who
went to London in, or about, 1585-87; neither was it a wrathful
Chatterton, eating out his heart in bitter pride while firing his
imagination to
"Paw up against the light
And do strange deeds upon the clouds."
It was a very sane, clear-headed, and resourceful young man who took
service with the Players, one, as yet, probably unconscious of literary
ability or dramatic genius, but with a capacity for hard work; grown
somewhat old for his years through responsibility, and with a slightly
embittered and mildly cynical pose of mind in regard to life.
An early autobiographical note seems to be sounded in Falconbridge's
soliloquy in _King John_, Act II. Scene ii., as follows:
"And why rail I on this commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet;
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand,
When his fair angels would salute my palm;
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee."
I have new evidence to show that this play was composed by Shakespeare
in 1591, and though it was revised in about 1596, the passage quoted
above, which exhibits the affected cynicism of youth, pertains to the
earlier period. Aside from the leading of the natural bent of his genius
it is evident that the greater pecuniary reward to be attained from the
writing rather than from the acting of plays would be quickly apparent
to a youth who in this spirit has left home to make London his oyster.
As research and criticism advance and we are enabled, little by little,
more intimately to apprehend the personality of Shakespeare and to
construct a more definite chronology of his doings, the shifting lights
of evidence in the form of tradition and legend, which in the past have
dazed, or misled, searchers, either disappear or take on new values.
When we remember that Shakespeare, when he went to London, was about
twenty-three years old, the father of a family, and the son of an
ex-bailiff of the not unimportant town of Stratford, we may dismiss as
a fanciful distortion the story of his holding horses at the theatre
doors for stray pennies; and in the added embellishment of the story
which describes this Orpheon, yet thrifty street Arab, as organising for
this purpose a band of his mates who, to prove their honesty when
soliciting the care of a horse, would claim to be "Shakespeare's boys,"
we may find a clue to the actual facts of the case. We have hitherto had
no definite record of, nor recognised allusion to, Shakespeare between
the year 1587, when his name is mentioned with his father's in a legal
document, and the year 1592, when we have the well-known allusions of
Robert Greene. Greene's references in this latter year reveal
Shakespeare as having already entered upon his literary career, and at
the same time, in the phrases "upstart crow beautified with our
feathers" and "the onlie Shake-scene in the country," seem to point to
him as an actor; the expression "_Johannes factotum_" seems still
further to widen the scope of his activities and to indicate the fact
that Shakespeare wrought in several capacities for his masters during
his earlier theatrical career. Part of his first work for his employers,
it is possible, consisted in taking charge of the stabling arrangements
for the horses of the gentlemen and noblemen who frequented the Theatre.
The expression "rude groome," which Greene uses in his attack upon
Shakespeare, is evidently used as pointing at his work in this capacity.
The story of the youths who introduced themselves as "Shakespeare's
boys" seems to indicate that he was the recognised representative of the
theatrical proprietors who provided accommodations for this purpose. It
is to be assumed then that Shakespeare, having charge of this work,
would upon occasions come personally in contact with the noblemen and
gentry who frequented Burbage's Theatre, which was situated in the
parish of Shoreditch, then regarded as the outskirts of the City.
Of the several records concerning this alleged incident in Shakespeare's
early London experience, that which is simplest and latest in date seems
to bear the greatest evidence of truth when considered in connection
with established facts and coincident circumstantial evidence.
Traditions preserved in the poet's own family would in essentials be
likely to be closer to the truth than the bibulous gossip of Sir William
Davenant, from which source all the other records of this story are
derived. In the monthly magazine of February 1818 the story is told as
follows: "Mr. J.M. Smith said he had often heard his mother state that
Shakespeare owed his rise in life and his introduction to the theatre to
his accidentally holding the horse of a gentleman at the door of the
theatre on his first arriving in London; his appearance led to inquiry
and subsequent patronage." The "J.M. Smith" mentioned here was the son
of Mary Hart, a lineal descendant of Joan Hart, Shakespeare's sister.
While it is clearly impossible that Shakespeare owed his introduction to
the theatre to Southampton, there can be little doubt, in the light of
data to follow, that his rise in life was much enhanced by his
friendship and patronage. What truth there may be in this story is
evidently a distorted reflection of Shakespeare's earlier work in the
Theatre at Shoreditch and of his later acquaintance with the Earl of
Southampton. We have no record, hint, or suggestion of his personal
acquaintance or business connection with any noblemen or gentlemen other
than Southampton, and possibly Sir Thomas Heneage, at this early period.
It shall later be shown that Southampton first became identified with
London and Court life in October 1590. I am led by good evidence to the
belief that Shakespeare's acquaintance with this nobleman had its
inception very soon after this date, and that he, and the theatrical
company to which he was attached at that time, attended the Earl of
Southampton at Cowdray House and at Tichfield House in August and
September 1591, upon the occasion of the Queen's progress to, and
sojourn at, these places.