Our long travail is almost at an end. We have watched Shakespeare
painting himself at various periods of his life, and at full length in
twenty dramas, as the gentle, sensuous poet-thinker. We have studied him
when given over to wild passion in the sonnets and elsewhere, and to
insane jealousy in “Othello”; we have seen him as Hamlet brooding on
revenge and self-murder, and in “Lear,” and “Timon” raging on the verge
of madness, and in these ecstasies, when the soul is incapable of
feigning, we have discovered his true nature as it differed from the
ideal presentments which his vanity shaped and coloured. We have
corrected his personal estimate by that “story of faults conceal'd”
which Shakespeare himself referred to in sonnet 88. It only remains for
me now to give a brief account of his life and the incidents of it to
show that my reading of his character is borne out by the known facts,
and thus put the man in his proper setting, so to speak.
On the other hand, our knowledge of Shakespeare's character will help us
to reconstruct his life-story. What is known positively of his life
could be given in a couple of pages; but there are traditions of him,
tales about him, innumerable scraps of fact and fiction concerning him
which are more or less interesting and authentic; and now that we know
the man, we shall be able to accept or reject these reports with some
degree of confidence, and so arrive at a credible picture of his life's
journey, and the changes which Time wrought in him. In all I may say
about him I shall keep close to the facts as given in his works. When
tradition seems consonant with what Shakespeare has told us about
himself, or with what Ben Jonson said of him, I shall use it with
confidence.
Shakespeare was a common name in Warwickshire; other Shakespeares
besides the poet's family were known there in the sixteenth century, and
at least one other William Shakespeare in the neighbourhood of
Stratford. The poet's father, John Shakespeare, was of farmer stock, and
seems to have had an adventurous spirit: he left Snitterfield, his
birthplace, as a young man, for the neighbouring town of Stratford,
where he set up in business for himself. Aubrey says he was a butcher;
he certainly dealt in meat, skins, and leather, as well as in corn,
wool, and malt--an adaptable, quick man, who turned his hand to
anything--a Jack-of-all-trades. He appears to have been successful at
first, for in 1556, five years after coming to Stratford, he purchased
two freehold tenements, one with a garden in Henley Street, and the
other in Greenhill Street, with an orchard. In 1557 he was elected
burgess, or town councillor, and shortly afterwards did the best stroke
of business in his life by marrying Mary Arden, whose father had been a
substantial farmer. Mary inherited the fee simple of Asbies, a house
with some fifty acres of land at Wilmcote, and an interest in property
at Snitterfield; the whole perhaps worth some £80 or £90, or, say, £600
of our money. His marriage turned John Shakespeare into a well-to-do
citizen; he filled various offices in the borough, and in 1568 became a
bailiff, the highest position in the corporation. During his year of
office, we are told, he entertained two companies of actors at
Stratford.
Mary Arden seems to have been her father's favourite child, and though
she could not sign her own name, must have possessed rare qualities; for
the poet, as we learn from “Coriolanus,” held her in extraordinary
esteem and affection, and mourned her after her death as “the noblest
mother in the world.”
William Shakespeare, the first son and third child of this couple, was
born on the 22nd or 23rd April, 1564, no one knows which day; the
Stratford parish registers prove that he was baptized on 26th April. And
if the date of his birth is not known, neither is the place of it; his
father owned two houses in Henley Street, and it is uncertain which he
was born in.
John Shakespeare had, fortunately, nothing to pay for the education of
his sons. They had free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford. The
poet went to school when he was seven or eight years of age, and
received an ordinary education together with some grounding in Latin. He
probably spent most of his time at first making stories out of the
frescoes on the walls. There can be no doubt that he learned easily all
he was taught, and still less doubt that he was not taught much. He
mastered Lyly's “Latin Grammar,” and was taken through some conversation
books like the “Sententiae Pueriles,” and not much further, for he puts
Latin phrases in the mouth of the schoolmasters, Holofernes in “Love's
Labour's Lost,” and Hugh Evans in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and all
these phrases are taken word for word either from Lyly's Grammar or from
the “Sententiae Pueriles.” In “Titus Andronicus,” too, one of Tamora's
sons, on reading a Latin couplet, says it is a verse of Horace, but he
“read it in the grammar,” which was probably the author's case. Ben
Jonson's sneer was well-founded, Shakespeare had “little Latine and
lesse Greeke.” His French, as shown in his “Henry V.,” was anything but
good, and his Italian was probably still slighter.
It was lucky for Shakespeare that his father's increasing poverty
withdrew him from school early, and forced him into contact with life.
Aubrey says that “when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade [of
butcher]; but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in high style and
make a speech.” I daresay young Will flourished about with a knife and
made romantic speeches; but I am pretty sure he never killed a calf.
Killing a calf is not the easiest part of a butcher's business; nor a
task which Shakespeare at any time would have selected. The tradition is
simply sufficient to prove that the town folk had already noticed the
eager, quick, spouting lad.
Of Shakespeare's life after he left school, say from thirteen to
eighteen, we know almost nothing. He probably did odd jobs for his
father from time to time; but his father's business seems to have run
rapidly from bad to worse; for in 1586 a creditor informed the local
Court that John Shakespeare had no goods on which distraint could be
levied, and on 6th September of the same year he was deprived of his
alderman's gown. During this period of steadily increasing poverty in
the house it was only to be expected that young Will Shakespeare would
run wild.
The tradition as given by Rowe says that he fell “into low company, and
amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged
him with them more than once in robbing the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of
Charlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman,
as he then thought somewhat too severely, and in order to revenge that
ill-usage he made a ballad upon him.”
Another story has it that Sir Thomas Lucy got a lawyer from Warwick to
prosecute the boys, and that Shakespeare stuck his satirical ballad to
the park gates at Charlecot. The ballad is said to have been lost, but
certain verses were preserved which fit the circumstances and suit
Shakespeare's character so perfectly that I for one am content to accept
them. I give the first and the last verses as most characteristic:
SONG
“A parliament member, a Justice of peace,
At home a poor scarecrow, in London an asse,
If Lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it.
He thinks himself greate
Yet an asse in his state,
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it
Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
- - - - - - - - - -
“If a juvenile frolick he cannot forgive,
We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live,
And Lucy, the lowsie, a libel may calle it
Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
He thinks himself greate
Yet an asse in his state,
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it
Sing lowsie Lucy, Whatever befalle it.”
The last verse, so out of keeping in its curious impartiality with the
scurrilous refrain, appears to me to carry its own signature. There can
be no doubt that the verses give us young Shakespeare's feelings in the
matter. It was probably reading ballads and tales of “Merrie Sherwood”
that first inclined him to deer-stealing; and we have already seen from
his “Richard II.” and “Henry IV.” and “Henry V.” that he had been led
astray by low companions.
In his idle, high-spirited youth, Shakespeare did worse than break
bounds and kill deer; he was at a loose end and up to all sorts of
mischief. At eighteen he had already courted and won Anne Hathaway, a
farmer's daughter of the neighbouring village of Shottery. Anne was
nearly eight years older than he was. Her father had died a short time
before and left Anne, his eldest daughter, £6 13_s_. 4_d_.,
or, say, £50 of our money. The house at Shottery, now shown as Anne
Hathaway's cottage, once formed part of Richard Hathaway's farmhouse,
and there, and in the neighbouring lanes, the lovers did their courting.
The wooing on Shakespeare's side was nothing but pastime, though it led
to marriage.
His marriage is perhaps the first serious mistake that Shakespeare made,
and it certainly influenced his whole life. It is needful, therefore, to
understand it as accurately as may be, however we may judge it. A man's
life, like a great river, may be limpid-pure in the beginning, and when
near its source; as it grows and gains strength it is inevitably sullied
and stained with earth's soilure.
The ordinary apologists would have us believe that the marriage was
happy; they know that Shakespeare was not married in Stratford, and,
though a minor, his parents' consent to the marriage was not obtained;
but they persist in talking about his love for his wife, and his wife's
devoted affection for him. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the bell-wether of
the flock, has gone so far as to tell us how on the morning of the day
he died “his wife, who had smoothed the pillow beneath his head for the
last time, felt that her right hand was taken from her.” Let us see if
there is any foundation for this sentimental balderdash. Here are some
of the facts.
In the Bishop of Worcester's register a licence was issued on 27th
November, 1582, authorizing the marriage of William Shakespeare with
Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton. On the very next day in the register of
the same Bishop there is a deed, wherein Fulk Sandells and John
Richardson, farmers of Shottery, bound themselves in the Bishop's court
under a surety of £40 to free the Bishop of all liability should a
lawful impediment--“by reason of any pre-contract or consanguinity”--be
subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in
contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.
Dryasdust, of course, argues that there is no connection whatever
between these two events. He is able to persuade himself easily that the
William Shakespeare who got a licence to marry Anne Whately, of Temple
Grafton, on 27th November, 1582, is not the same William Shakespeare who
is being forced to marry Anne Hathaway on the next day by two friends of
Anne Hathaway's father. Yet such a coincidence as two William
Shakespeares seeking to be married by special licence in the same court
at the same moment of time is too extraordinary to be admitted. Besides,
why should Sandells and Richardson bind themselves as sureties in £40 to
free the Bishop of liability by reason of any pre-contract if there were
no pre-contract? The two William Shakespeares are clearly one and the
same person. Sandells was a supervisor of the will of Richard Hathaway,
and was described in the will as “my trustie friende and neighbour.” He
showed himself a trusty friend of the usual sort to his friend's
daughter, and when he heard that loose Will Shakespeare was attempting
to marry Anne Whately, he forthwith went to the same Bishop's court
which had granted the licence, pledged himself and his neighbour,
Richardson, as sureties that there was no pre-contract, and so induced
the Bishop, who no doubt then learned the unholy circumstances for the
first time, to grant a licence in order that the marriage with Anne
Hathaway could be celebrated, “with once asking of the bannes” and
without the consent of the father of the bridegroom, which was usually
required when the bridegroom was a minor.
Clearly Fulk Sandells was a masterful man; young Will Shakespeare was
forced to give up Anne Whately, poor lass, and marry Anne Hathaway, much
against his will. Like many another man, Shakespeare married at leisure,
and repented in hot haste. Six months later a daughter was born to him,
and was baptized in the name of Susanna at Stratford Parish Church on
the 26th of May, 1583. There was, therefore, an importunate reason for
the wedding, as Sandells, no doubt, made the Bishop understand.
The whole story, it seems to me, is in perfect consonance with
Shakespeare's impulsive, sensual nature; is, indeed, an excellent
illustration of it. Hot, impatient, idle Will got Anne Hathaway into
trouble, was forced to marry her, and at once came to regret. Let us see
how far these inferences from plain facts are borne out from his works.
The most important passages seem to have escaped critical scholarship. I
have already said that the earliest works of Shakespeare, and the
latest, are the most fruitful in details about his private life. In the
earliest works he was compelled to use his own experience, having no
observation of life to help him, and at the end of his life, having said
almost everything he had to say, he again went back to his early
experience for little vital facts to lend a colour to the fainter
pictures of age. In “The Winter's Tale,” a shepherd finds the child
Perdita, who has been exposed; one would expect him to stumble on the
child by chance and express surprise; but this shepherd of Shakespeare
begins to talk in this way:
“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that
youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but
getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.
Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and
two-and-twenty hunt this weather?”
Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor with the
shepherd's occupation; nor is it at all characteristic of a shepherd
boy. Between ten and three-and-twenty a poor shepherd boy is likely to
be kept hard at work; he is not idle and at a loose end like young
Shakespeare, free to rob the ancientry, steal, fight, and get wenches
with child. That, in my opinion, is Shakespeare's own confession.
Of course, every one has noticed how Shakespeare again and again in his
plays declares that a woman should take in marriage an “elder than
herself,” and that intimacy before marriage is productive of nothing but
“barren hate and discord.” In “Twelfth Night” he says:
“Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.”
In “The Tempest” he writes again:
“If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.”
These admonitions are so far-fetched and so emphatic that they plainly
discover personal feeling. We have, besides, those quaint, angry
passages in the “Comedy of Errors,” to which we have already drawn
attention, which show that the poet detested his wife.
The known facts, too, all corroborate this inference: let us consider
them a little. The first child was born within six months of the
marriage; twins followed in 1585; a little later Shakespeare left
Stratford not to return to it for eight or nine years, and when he did
return there was probably no further intimacy with his wife; at any
rate, there were no more children. Yet Shakespeare, one fancies, was
fond of children. When his son Hamnet died his grief showed itself in
his work--in “King John” and in “The Winter's Tale.” He was full of
loving kindness to his daughters, too, in later life; it was his wife
alone for whom he had no affection, no forgiveness.
There are other facts which establish this conclusion. While Shakespeare
was in London he allowed his wife to suffer the extremes of poverty.
Sometime between 1585 and 1595 she appears to have borrowed forty
shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's
shepherd. The money was still unpaid when Whittington died, in 1601, and
he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet, and
distribute it among the poor of Stratford. Now Shakespeare was rich when
he returned to Stratford in 1595, and always generous. He paid off his
father's heavy debts; how came it that he did not pay this trifling debt
of his wife? The mere fact proves beyond doubt that Shakespeare disliked
her and would have nothing to do with her.
Even towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from increasing
weakness, which would have made most men sympathetic, even if it did not
induce them completely to relent, Shakespeare shows the same aversion to
his poor wife. In 1613, when on a short visit to London, he bought a
house in Blackfriars for £140; in the purchase he barred his wife's
dower, which proceeding seems even to Dryasdust “pretty conclusive proof
that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his
possessions after his death.”
In the first draft of his will Shakespeare did not mention his wife. The
apologists explain this by saying that, of course, he had already given
her all that she ought to have. But if he loved her he would have
mentioned her with affection, if only to console her in her widowhood.
Before the will was signed he inserted a bequest to her of his
“second-best bed,” and the apologists have been at pains to explain that
the best bed was kept for guests, and that Shakespeare willed to his
wife the bed they both occupied. How inarticulate poor William
Shakespeare must have become! Could the master of language find no
better word than the contemptuous one? Had he said “our bed” it would
have been enough; “the second-best bed” admits of but one
interpretation. His daughters, who had lived with their mother, and who
had not been afflicted by her jealousy and scolding tongue, begged the
dying man to put in some mention of her, and he wrote in that
“second-best bed”--bitter to the last. If his own plain words and these
inferences, drawn from indisputable facts, are not sufficient, then let
us take one fact more, and consider its significance; one fact, so to
speak, from the grave.
When Shakespeare died he left some lines to be placed over his tomb.
Here they are:
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare
To Digg the dust enclosed heare.
Blessed be ye man yt spares thes stones
And Curst be ye yt moves my bones.”
Now, why did Shakespeare make this peculiar request? No one seems to
have seen any meaning in it. It looks to me as if Shakespeare wrote the
verses in order to prevent his wife being buried with him. He wanted to
be free of her in death as in life. At any rate, the fact is that she
was not buried with him, but apart from him; he had seen to that. His
grave was never opened, though his wife expressed a desire to be buried
with him. The man who needs further proofs would not be persuaded though
one came from the dead to convince him.
The marriage was an unfortunate one for many reasons, as an enforced
marriage is apt to be, even when it is not the marriage of a boy in his
teens to a woman some eight years his senior. Shakespeare takes trouble
to tell us in “The Comedy of Errors” that his wife was spitefully
jealous, and a bitter scold. She must have injured him, poisoned his
life with her jealous nagging, or Shakespeare would have forgiven her.
There is some excuse for him, if excuse be needed. At the time the
marriage must have seemed the wildest folly to him, seething as he was
with inordinate conceit. He was wise beyond his years, and yet he had
been forced to give hostages to fortune before he had any means of
livelihood, before he had even found a place in life. What a position
for a poet--penniless, saddled with a jealous wife and three children
before he was twenty-one. And this poet was proud, and vain, and in love
with all distinctions.
But why did Shakespeare nurse such persistent enmity all through his
life to jealous, scolding Anne Hathaway? Shakespeare had wronged her;
the keener his moral sense, the more certain he was to blame his partner
in the fault, for in no other way could he excuse himself.
It was overpowering sensuality and rashness which had led Shakespeare
into the noose, and now there was nothing for it but to cut the rope. He
had either to be true to his higher nature or to the conventional view
of his duty; he was true to himself and fled to London, and the world is
the richer for his decision. The only excuse he ever made is to be found
in the sonnet-line:
“Love is too young to know what conscience is.”
For my part I do not see that any excuse is needed: if Shakespeare had
married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a
play. Shakespeare's hatred of his wife and his regret for having married
her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It
was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was
forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am
sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was
needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these
extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was
measureless, was a part of his own self-esteem, and his self-esteem was
founded on snobbish non-essentials for many years, if not, indeed,
throughout his life.
There is a tradition preserved by Rowe that before going to London young
Shakespeare taught school in the country; it may be; but he did not
teach for long, we can be sure, and what he had to teach there were few
scholars in the English country then or now capable of learning. Another
tradition asserts that he obtained employment as a lawyer's clerk,
probably because of the frequent use of legal phrases in his plays. But
these apologists all forget that they are speaking of men like
themselves, and of times like ours. Politics is the main theme of talk
in our day; but in the time of Elizabeth it was rather dangerous to show
one's wisdom by criticizing the government: law was then the chief
staple of conversation: every educated man was therefore familiar with
law and its phraseology, as men are familiar in our day with the jargon
of politics.
When did Shakespeare fly to London? Some say when he was twenty-one, as
soon as his wife presented him with twins, in 1585. Others say as soon
as Sir Thomas Lucy's persecution became intolerable. Both causes no
doubt worked together, and yet another cause, given in “The Two
Gentlemen of Verona,” was the real _causa causans_. Shakespeare was
naturally ambitious; eager to measure himself with the best and try his
powers. London was the arena where all great prizes were to be won:
Shakespeare strained towards the Court like a greyhound in leash. But
when did he go? Again in doubt I take the shepherd's words in “The
Winter's Tale” as a guide. Most men would have said from fourteen to
twenty was the dangerous age for a youth; but Shakespeare had perhaps a
personal reason for the peculiar “ten to twenty-three.” He was, no
doubt, astoundingly precocious, and probably even at ten he had learned
everything of value that the grammar school had to teach, and his
thoughts had begun to play truant. Twenty-three, too, is a significant
date in his life; in 1587, when he was twenty-three, two companies of
actors, under the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester,
returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited
Stratford. In Lord Leicester's company were Burbage and Heminge, with
whom we know that Shakespeare was closely connected in later life. It
seems to me probable that he returned with this company to London, and
arrived in London, as he tells us in “The Comedy of Errors,” “stiff and
weary with long travel,” and at once went out to view the town and
“peruse the traders.”
There is a tradition that when he came to London in 1587 he held horses
outside the doors of the theatre. This story was first put about by the
compiler of “The Lives of the Poets,” in 1753. According to the author
the story was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom
Betterton must have told it, does not transmit it. Rowe was perhaps
right to forget it or leave it out; though the story is not in itself
incredible. Such work must have been infinitely distasteful to
Shakespeare, but necessity is a hard master, and Greene, who talks of
him later as “Shake-scene,” also speaks in the same connection of these
“grooms.” The curious amplified version of the story that Shakespeare
organized a service of boys to hold the horses is hardly to be believed.
The great Doctor was anything but a poet, or a good judge of the poetic
temperament.
The Shakespeares of this world are not apt to take up menial employs,
and this one had already shown that he preferred idle musings and
parasitic dependence to uncongenial labour. Whoever reads the second
scene of the second act of “The Comedy of Errors,” will see that
Shakespeare, even at the beginning, had an uncommonly good opinion of
himself. He plays gentleman from the first, and despises trade; he snubs
his servant and will not brook familiarity from him. In “The Two
Gentlemen of Verona,” he tells us that he left the country and came to
London seeking “honour,” intending, no doubt, to make a name for himself
by his writings. He had probably “Venus and Adonis” in his pocket when
he first reached London. This would inspire a poet with the
self-confidence which a well-filled purse lends to an ordinary man.
I am inclined to accept Rowe's statement that Shakespeare was received
into an actor-company at first in a very mean rank. The parish clerk of
Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century used to tell the
visitors that Shakespeare entered the playhouse as a servitor; but,
however he entered it, it is pretty certain he was not long in a
subordinate position.
What manner of man was William Shakespeare when he first fronted life in
London somewhere about 1587? Aubrey tells us that he was “a handsome,
well-shap't man, very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant
smooth witt.” The bust of him in Stratford Church was coloured; it gave
him light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. Rowe says of him that
“besides the advantages of his witt, he was in himself a good-natured
man, of too great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable
companion.”
I picture him to myself very like Swinburne--of middle height or below
it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to
reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid
eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to
kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking
face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion....
I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor
voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now
dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the “beating mind.”
And such talk--the groundwork of it, so to speak, very
intimate-careless; but gemmed with thoughts, diamonded with wit,
rhythmic with feeling: don't we know how it ran--“A hundred and fifty
tattered prodigals.... No eye hath seen such scarecrows, ... discarded,
unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters,
and ostlers trade-fallen: the cankers of a calm world and a long peace.”
And after the thought the humour again--“food for powder, food for
powder.”
Now let us consider some of his other qualities. In 1592 he published
his “Venus and Adonis,” which he had no doubt written in 1587 or even
earlier, for he called it “the first heir of my invention” when he
dedicated it to Lord Southampton. This work is to me extremely
significant. It is all concerned with the wooing of young Adonis by
Venus, an older woman. Now, goddesses have no age, nor do women, as a
rule, woo in this sensual fashion. The peculiarities point to personal
experience. “I, too,” Shakespeare tells us practically, “was wooed by an
older woman against my will.” He seems to have wished the world to
accept this version of his untimely marriage. Young Shakespeare in
London was probably a little ashamed of being married to some one whom
he could hardly introduce or avow. The apologists who declare that he
made money very early in his career give us no explanation of the fact
that he never brought his wife or children to London. Wherever we touch
Shakespeare's intimate life, we find proof upon proof that he detested
his wife and was glad to live without her.
Looked at in this light “Venus and Adonis” is not a very noble thing to
have written; but I am dealing with a young poet's nature, and the
majority of young poets would like to forget their Anne Hathaway if they
could; or, to excuse themselves, would put the blame of an ill-sorted
union upon the partner to it.
There is a certain weakness, however, shown in the whole story of his
marriage; a weakness of character, as well as a weakness of
_morale_, which it is impossible to ignore; and there were other
weaknesses in Shakespeare, especially a weakness of body which must
necessarily have had its correlative delicacies of mind.
I have pointed out in the first part of this book that sleeplessness was
a characteristic of Shakespeare, even in youth; he attributes it to
Henry IV. in old age, and to Henry V., a youth at the time, who probably
never knew what a sleepless night meant. Shakespeare's _alter ego_,
Valentine, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” suffers from it, and so do
Macbeth and Hamlet, and a dozen others of his chief characters, in
particular his impersonations--all of which shows, I think, that from
the beginning the mind of Shakespeare was too strong for his body. As we
should say to-day, he was too emotional, and lived on his nerves. I
always think of him as a ship over-engined; when the driving-power is
working at full speed it shakes the ship to pieces.
One other weakness is marked in him, and that is that he could not
drink, could not carry his liquor like a man--to use our accepted
phrase. Hamlet thought drinking a custom more honoured in the breach
than in the observance; Cassius, Shakespeare's incarnation in “Othello,”
confessed that he had “poor unhappy brains for drinking”: tradition
informs us that Shakespeare himself died of a “feavour” from
drinking--all of which confirms my opinion that Shakespeare was delicate
rather than robust. He was, also, extraordinarily fastidious: in drama
after drama he rails against the “greasy” caps and “stinking” breath of
the common people. This overstrained disgust suggests to me a certain
delicacy of constitution.
But there is still another indication of bodily weakness which in itself
would be convincing to those accustomed to read closely; but which would
carry little or no weight to the careless. In sonnet 129 Shakespeare
tells us of lust and its effects, and the confession seems to me purely
personal. Here are four lines of it:
“Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.”
Now, this is not the ordinary man's experience of passion and its
effects. “Past reason hunted,” such an one might say, but he would
certainly not go on “No sooner had, Past reason hated.” He is not moved
to hate by enjoyment, but to tenderness; it is your weakling who is
physically exhausted by enjoyment who is moved to hatred. This sonnet
was written by Shakespeare in the prime of manhood at thirty-four or
thirty-five at latest.
Shakespeare was probably healthy as a young man, but intensely sensitive
and highly strung; too finely constituted ever to have been strong. One
notices that he takes no pleasure in fighting; his heroes are, of
course, all “valiant,” but he shows no loving interest in the game of
fighting as a game. In fact, we have already seen that he found no
wonderful phrase for any of the manly virtues; he was a neuropath and a
lover, and not a fighter, even in youth, or Fulk Sandells might have
rued his interference.
The dominating facts to be kept ever in mind about Shakespeare are that
he was delicate in body, and over-excitable; yielding and irresolute in
character; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to
the pleasures of love.
How would such a man fare in the world of London in 1587? It was a wild
and wilful age; eager English spirits were beginning to take a part in
the opening up of the new world; the old, limiting horizons were gone;
men dared to think for themselves and act boldly; ten years before Drake
had sailed round the world--the adventurer was the characteristic
product of the time. In ordinary company a word led to a blow, and the
fight was often brought to a fatal conclusion with dagger or sword or
both. In those rough days actors were almost outlaws; Ben Jonson is
known to have killed two or three men; Marlowe died in a tavern brawl.
Courage has always been highly esteemed in England, like gentility and a
university training. Shakespeare possessed none of these passports to
public favour. He could not shoulder his way through the throng. The
wild adventurous life of the time was not to his liking, even in early
manhood; from the beginning he preferred “the life removed” and his
books; all given over to the “bettering of his mind” he could only have
been appreciated at any time by the finer spirits.
Entering the theatre as a servitor he no doubt made such acquaintances
as offered themselves, and spent a good deal of his leisure perforce
with second-rate actors and writers in common taverns and studied his
Bardolph and Pistol, and especially his Falstaff at first hand. Perhaps
Marlowe was one of his _ciceroni_ in rough company. Shakespeare had
almost certainly met Marlowe very early in his career, for he worked
with him in the “Third Part of Henry VI.,” and his “Richard III.” is a
conscious imitation of Marlowe, and Marlowe was dissipated enough and
wild enough to have shown him the wildest side of life in London in the
'80's. It was the very best thing that could have happened to delicate
Shakespeare, to come poor and unknown to London, and be soused in common
rowdy life like this against his will by sheer necessity; for if left to
his own devices he would probably have grown up a bookish poet--a second
Coleridge. Fate takes care of her favourites.
It was all in his favour that he should have been forced at first to win
his spurs as an actor. He must have been too intelligent, one would
think, ever to have brought it far as a mummer; he looked upon the
half-art of acting with disdain and disgust, as he tells us in the
sonnets, and if in Hamlet he condescends to give advice to actors, it is
to admonish them not to outrage the decencies of nature by tearing a
passion to tatters. He had at hand a surer ladder to fame than the
mummer's art. As soon as he felt his feet in London he set to work
adapting plays, and writing plays, while reading his own poetry to all
and sundry who would listen, and I have no doubt that patrons of the
stage, who were also men of rank, were willing to listen to Shakespeare
from the beginning. He was of those who require no introductions.
In 1592, four or five years after his arrival in London, he had already
come to the front as a dramatist, or at least as an adapter of plays,
for Robert Greene, a scholar and playwright, attacked him in his
“Groatsworth of Wit” in this fashion:
“There is an upstart Crow, beautified in our feathers
that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes
he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as
the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes fac
totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a
country. Oh, that I might intreat your rare wits to be
employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes
imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint
them with your admired inventions.”
It is plain from this weird appeal that Shakespeare had already made his
mark.
There are further proofs of his rapid success. One of Chettle's
references to Shakespeare (I take Chettle to be the original of
Falstaff) throws light upon the poet's position in London in these early
days. Shortly after Greene had insulted Shakespeare as “Shake-scene”
Chettle apologized for the insult in these terms:
“I am as sorry,” Chettle wrote, “as if the original
fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seen his
(_i.e._, Shakespeare's) demeanour no less civill than he (is)
exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of
worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which
argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that
aprooves his art.”
In 1592, then, Shakespeare was most “civill in demeanour,” and had won
golden opinions from people of importance.
Actors and poets of that time could not help knowing a good many of the
young nobles who came to the theatre and sat round the stage listening
to the performances. And Shakespeare, with his aristocratic sympathies
and charming sweetness of nature, must have made friends with the
greatest ease. Chettle's apology proves that early in his career he had
the art or luck to win distinguished patrons who spoke well of him.
While still new to town he came to know Lord Southampton, to whom he
dedicated “Venus and Adonis”; the fulsome dedication of “Lucrece” to the
same nobleman two years later shows that deference had rapidly ripened
into affectionate devotion; no wonder Rowe noticed the “too great
sweetness in his manners.” Thinking of his intimacy with Southampton on
the one hand and Bardolph on the other, one is constrained to say of
Shakespeare what Apemantus says of Timon:
“The middle of humanity thou never knewest,
But the extremity of both ends.”
In the extremes characters show themselves more clearly than they do in
the middle classes; at both ends of society speech and deed are
unrestrained. Falstaff and Bardolph and the rest were free of convention
by being below it, just as Bassanio and Mercutio were free because they
were above it, and made the rules. The young lord did what he pleased,
and spoke his mind as plainly as the footpad. Life at both ends was the
very school for quick, sympathetic Shakespeare. But even in early
manhood, as soon as he came to himself and found his work, one other
quality is as plain in Shakespeare as even his humour--high impartial
intellect with sincere ethical judgement. He judges even Falstaff
severely, to the point of harshness, indeed; as he judged himself later
in Enobarbus. This high critical faculty pervades all his work. But it
must not be thought that his conduct was as scrupulous as his
principles, or his will as sovereign as his intelligence. That he was a
loose-liver while in London is well attested. Contemporary anecdotes
generally hit off a man's peculiarities, and the only anecdote of
Shakespeare that is known to have been told about him in his lifetime
illustrates this master trait of his character. Burbage, we are told,
when playing Richard III., arranged with a lady in the audience to visit
her after the performance. Shakespeare overheard the rendezvous,
anticipated his fellow's visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the
jibe that “William the Conqueror came before Richard III.” The lightness
is no doubt as characteristic of Shakespeare as the impudent humour.
There is another fact in Shakespeare's life which throws almost as much
light on his character as his marriage. He seems to have come to riches
very early and very easily. As we have seen, he was never able to paint
a miser, which confirms Jonson's testimony that he was “of an open and
free nature.” In 1597 he went down to Stratford and bought New Place,
then in ruinous condition, but the chief house in the town, for £60; he
spent at least as much more between 1597 and 1599 in rebuilding the
house and stocking the barns with grain. In 1602 we find that he
purchased from William and John Combe, of Stratford, a hundred and seven
acres of arable land near the town, for which he paid £320; in 1605,
too, he bought for £440 a moiety of the tithes of Stratford for an
unexpired term of thirty-one years, which investment seems to have
brought him in little except a wearisome lawsuit.
Now, how did the poet obtain this thousand pounds or so? English
apologists naturally assume that he was a “good business man”; with
delicious unconscious irony they one and all picture the man who hated
tradesmen as himself a sort of thrifty tradesman-soul--a master of
practical life who looked after the pennies from the beginning. These
commentators all treat Shakespeare as the Hebrews treated God; they make
him in their own likeness. In Shakespeare's case this practice leads to
absurdity. Let us take the strongest advocate of the accepted view.
Dryasdust is at pains to prove that Shakespeare's emoluments, even as an
actor in the '90's, were not likely to have fallen below a hundred a
year; but even Dryasdust admits that his large earnings came after 1599,
from his shares in the Globe Theatre, and is inclined “to accept the
tradition that Shakespeare received from the Earl of Southampton a large
gift of money.” As Southampton came of age in 1595, he may well out of
his riches have helped the man who had dedicated his poems to him with
servile adulation. Moreover, the statement is put forward by Rowe, who
is certainly more trustworthy than the general run of gossip-mongers,
and his account of the matter proves that he did not accept the story
with eager credulity, but as one compelled by authority. Here is what he
says:
“There is one story so singular in magnificence of this patron of
Shakspeare that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down
by Sir Wm. D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his
affairs, I should not have ventured to insert that my lord Southampton,
at one time, gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with
a purchase to which he heard he had a mind. A bounty very great, and
very rare at any time, almost equal to that profuse generosity the
present age has shown to French dancers and Italian Eunuchs.”
It seems to me a great deal more likely that this munificent gift of
Southampton was the source of Shakespeare's wealth than that he added
coin to coin in saving, careful fashion. It may be said at once that all
the evidence we have is in favour of Shakespeare's extravagance, and
against his thrift. As we have seen, when studying “The Merchant of
Venice,” the presumption is that he looked upon saving with contempt, and
was himself freehanded to a fault. The Rev. John Ward, who was Vicar
of Stratford from 1648 to 1679, tells us “that he spent at the rate of a
thousand a year, as I have heard.”
It is impossible to deny that Shakespeare got rid of a great deal of
money even after his retirement to Stratford; and men accustomed to save
are not likely to become prodigal in old age.
On the 10th March, 1613, Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars for
£140; the next day he executed another deed, now in the British Museum,
which stipulated that £60 of the purchase-money was to remain on
mortgage until the following Michaelmas; the money was unpaid at
Shakespeare's death, which seems to me to argue a certain carelessness,
to say the least of it.
Dryasdust makes out that Shakespeare, in the years from 1600 to 1612,
was earning about six hundred a year in the money of the period, or
nearly five thousand a year of our money, and yet he was unable or
unwilling to pay off a paltry £60.
After passing the last five years of his life in village Stratford,
where he could not possibly have found many opportunities of
extravagance, he was only able to leave a little more than one year's
income. He willed New Place to his elder daughter, Susanna Hall,
together with the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except
the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, all
together equal, at the most, to five or six hundred pounds; and to his
younger daughter, Judith, he bequeathed the tenement in Chapel Lane,
£150 in money, and another £150 to be paid if she was alive three years
after the date of the will. Nine hundred pounds, or so, of the money of
the period, would cover all he possessed at death. When we consider
these things, it becomes plain, I think, that Shakespeare was
extravagant to lavishness even in cautious age. While in London he no
doubt earned and was given large sums of money; but he was free-handed
and careless, and died far poorer than one would have expected from an
ordinarily thrifty man. The loose-liver is usually a spendthrift.
There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and
extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit
that Shakespeare was a snob of the purest English water. Aristocratic
tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate
sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the
outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire
of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596,
his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August
in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village,
and while he was there he most probably paid his father's debts, and
certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position
of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College
of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father
was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a “worshipful”
family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may
have been that the father's pecuniary position became known to the
College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties;
but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the
Earl of Essex became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds' College, and
the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as
Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of
Essex, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was
indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Essex. The Shakespeares'
second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new
form. They asserted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of
1596 had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the
heralds were asked to give him a “recognition” of it. At the same time
John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his “ancient coat of
arms” that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife's family. But this was
going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might
have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire
family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was “recognized,”
and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.
Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from
his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs
down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some
years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his
father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman--a very pitiful
ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a
gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.
But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he
never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time
they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to
speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity,
Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but
his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very
significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a “false seemer,”
Malvolio was a “chough.” The peculiar virtues of the English middle
class, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for
duties; its religious sense and cocksure narrow-mindedness, held no
attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in snobbishness, he utterly
missed what a knowledge of the middle classes might have given him.
Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of
fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man
as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague
conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and
higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it
seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d'Arc, the noblest
being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he
did not write the first part of “Henry VI.,” it is certain that it
passed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw
nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of
women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade,
as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his
fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of
justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men
for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of
devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood.
Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he
studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For
the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern
world. Shakespeare's “universal sympathy”--to quote Coleridge--did not
include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face
of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan
instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the
Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The
best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have
understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to
“Toussaint l'Ouverture” was quite beyond him. He could never have
written:
“Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.”
It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and
sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same
time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took
habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in
the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was
always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature.
But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared
again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering
sensuality, and thrown in the mire.