1897, has endeavoured to show that John Shakespeare was a puritan in
religious matters, inclining to nonconformity. He deduces this inference
from the fact that, at the period of his prominent association with the
municipal government of Stratford, the corporation ordered images to be
defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571). These
entries merely prove that the aldermen and councillors of Stratford
strictly conformed to the new religion as by law established in the first
years of Elizabeth's reign. Nothing can be deduced from them in regard
to the private religious opinions of John Shakespeare. The circumstance
that he was the first bailiff to encourage actors to visit Stratford is,
on the other hand, conclusive proof that his religion was not that of the
contemporary puritan, whose hostility to all forms of dramatic
representations was one of his most persistent characteristics. The
Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim's _Display of Heraldrie_
(1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with
his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of
arms. (Cf. _infra_, p. 187 seq.)
{12a} The sum is stated to be 4 pounds in one document
(Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and 40 pounds in another (_ib._ p. 179);
the latter is more likely to be correct.
{12b} _Ib._ ii. 238.
{12c} Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of
Shakespeare's father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve
little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name
is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for
ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of
Master of the Shoemakers' Company in 1592--a certain sign of pecuniary
stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, 137-40).
{13} James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between
expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded
the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a
_Grace et Latine_ edition. I believe Lowell's parallelisms to be no more
than curious accidents--proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any
indebtedness on Shakespeare's part. In the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which
is akin in its leading motive to _Hamlet_, the Chorus consoles Electra
for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as
that with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him. In
_Electra_, are the lines 1171-3:
[Greek text]
(_i.e._ 'Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal.
Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us
has this debt of suffering to be paid'). In _Hamlet_ (I. ii. 72 sq.) are
the familiar sentences:
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die.
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.
Cf. Sophocles's _OEdipus Coloneus_, 880: [Greek text] ('In a just cause
the weak vanquishes the strong,' Jebb), and 2 _Henry VI_, iii. 233,
'Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.' Shakespeare's
'prophetic soul' in _Hamlet_ (I. v. 40) and the _Sonnets_ (cvii. I) may
be matched by the [Greek text] of Euripides's _Andromache_, 1075; and
Hamlet's 'sea of troubles' (III. i. 59) by the [Greek text] of
AEschylus's _Persae_, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and
Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and AEschylus's Clytemnestra, who 'in man's
counsels bore no woman's heart' ([Greek text], _Agamemnon_, II), most
closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemblance
attests no knowledge of AEschylus on Shakespeare's part, but merely the
close community of tragic genius that subsisted between the two poets.
{15} Macray, _Annals of the Bodleian Library_, 1890, pp. 379 seq.
{16} Cf. Spencer Baynes, 'What Shakespeare learnt at School,' in
_Shakespeare Studies_, 1894, pp. 147 seq.
{17a} Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his _Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use
of the Bible_ (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which
Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But the Bishop's
deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare's piety are strained.
{17b} See p. 161 _infra_.
{18} Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (published
in 1838).
{21} These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents
in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of consent
on the part of parents to their children's marriages are also extant
there among the sixteenth-century archives.
{23} _Twelfth Night_, act v. sc. i. ll. 160-4:
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Seal'd in my [_i.e._ the priest's] function by my testimony.
In _Measure for Measure_ Claudio's offence is intimacy with the Lady
Julia after the contract of betrothal and before the formality of
marriage (cf. act i. sc. ii. l. 155, act iv. sc. i. l. 73).
{24} No marriage registers of the period are extant at Temple Grafton to
inform us whether Anne Whately actually married _her_ William Shakespeare
or who precisely the parties were. A Whateley family resided in
Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple Grafton was
connected with it. The chief argument against the conclusion that the
marriage license and the marriage bond concerned different couples lies
in the apparent improbability that two persons, both named William
Shakespeare, should on two successive days not only be arranging with the
Bishop of Worcester's official to marry, but should be involving
themselves, whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends,
in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to
the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese
covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families
of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately
was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which
marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted
assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare of the marriage
bond with the William Shakespeare of the marriage license, a romantic
theory has been based to the effect that 'Anne Whateley of Temple
Grafton,' believing herself to have a just claim to the poet's hand,
secured the license on hearing of the proposed action of Anne Hathaway's
friends, and hoped, by moving in the matter a day before the Shottery
husbandmen, to insure Shakespeare's fidelity to his alleged pledges.
{25a} _Twelfth Night_, act ii. sc. iv. l. 29:
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.
{25b} Tempest, act iv. sc. i. ll. 15-22:
If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion 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.
{26} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11-13.
{27} Cf. Ellacombe, _Shakespeare as an Angler_, 1883; J. E. Harting,
_Ornithology of Shakespeare_, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare's
knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his
entertaining and at the same time scholarly _Diary of Master William
Silence_: _a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport_, 1897.
{28} Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, _Shakespeare no Deerstealer_, 1862;
Lockhart, _Life of Scott_, vii. 123.
{30} Cf. W. J. Thoms, _Three Notelets on Shakespeare_, 1865, pp. 16 seq.
{31a} Cf. Hales, _Notes on Shakespeare_, 1884, pp. 1-24.
{31b} The common assumption that Richard Burbage, the chief actor with
whom Shakespeare was associated, was a native of Stratford is wholly
erroneous. Richard was born in Shoreditch, and his father came from
Hertfordshire. John Heming, another of Shakespeare's actor-friends who
has also been claimed as a native of Stratford, was beyond reasonable
doubt born at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Greene, a popular
comic actor at the Red Bull Theatre early in the seventeenth century, is
conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that deserve
attention; Shakespeare was in no way associated with him.
{32a} Blades, _Shakspere and Typography_, 1872.
{32b} Cf. Lord Campbell, _Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements_, 1859.
Legal terminology abounded in all plays and poems of the period, e.g.
Barnabe Barnes's _Sonnets_, 1593, and _Zepheria_, 1594 (see Appendix IX.)
{32c} Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, but written by Robert
Shiels and other hack-writers under Cibber's editorship.
{38a} The site of the Blackfriars Theatre is now occupied by the offices
of the 'Times' newspaper in Queen Victoria Street, E.C.
{38b} Cf. _Exchequer Lay Subsidies City of London_, 146/369, Public
Record Office; _Notes and Queries_, 8th ser. viii. 418.
{38c} Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women's
parts when he makes Rosalind say laughingly to the men of the audience in
the epilogue to _As you like it_, '_If I were a woman_, I would kiss as
many,' etc. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in _Antony and
Cleopatra_, V. ii. 220 seq., laments:
the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.
Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks. Flute is bidden by
Quince play Thisbe 'in a mask' in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ (I. ii. 53).
In French and Italian theatres of the time women seem to have acted
publicly, but until the Restoration public opinion in England deemed the
appearance of a woman on a public stage to be an act of shamelessness on
which the most disreputable of her sex would hardly venture. With a
curious inconsistency ladies of rank were encouraged at Queen Elizabeth's
Court, and still more frequently at the Courts of James I and Charles I,
to take part in private and amateur representations of masques and short
dramatic pageants. During the reign of James I scenic decoration,
usually designed by Inigo Jones, accompanied the production of masques in
the royal palaces, but until the Restoration the public stages were bare
of any scenic contrivance except a front curtain opening in the middle
and a balcony or upper platform resting on pillars at the back of the
stage, from which portions of the dialogue were sometimes spoken,
although occasionally the balcony seems to have been occupied by
spectators (cf. a sketch made by a Dutch visitor to London in 1596 of the
stage of the Swan Theatre in _Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Buhne von
Karl Theodor Gaedertz_. _Mit der ersten authentischen innern Ansicht der
Schwans Theater in London_, Bremen, 1888). Sir Philip Sidney humorously
described the spectator's difficulties in an Elizabethan playhouse,
where, owing to the absence of stage scenery, he had to imagine the bare
boards to present in rapid succession a garden, a rocky coast, a cave,
and a battlefield (_Apologie for Poetrie_, p. 52). Three flourishes on a
trumpet announced the beginning of the performance, but a band of
fiddlers played music between the acts. The scenes of each act were
played without interruption.
{40a} Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps's _Visits of Shakespeare's Company of
Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England_ (privately printed,
1887). From the information there given, occasionally supplemented from
other sources, the following imperfect itinerary is deduced:
1593. Bristol and Shrewsbury.
1594. Marlborough.
1597. Faversham, Bath, Rye, Bristol, Dover and Marlborough.
1603. Richmond (Surrey), Bath, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Mortlake, Wilton
House.
1604. Oxford.
1605. Barnstaple and Oxford.
1606. Leicester, Saffron Walden, Marlborough, Oxford, Dover and
Maidstone.
1607. Oxford.
1608. Coventry and Marlborough.
1609. Hythe, New Romney and Shrewsbury.
1610. Dover, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1612. New Romney.
1613. Folkestone, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1614. Coventry.
{40b} Cf. Knight's _Life of Shakespeare_ (1843), p. 41; Fleay, _Stage_,
pp. 135-6.
{41a} The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so
marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The
English agent, George Nicolson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch
dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote: 'The four Sessions of
this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletcher and
Mertyn [_i.e._ Martyn], with their company), and not knowing the King's
ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted [that] their flocks
[were] to forbear and not to come to or haunt profane games, sports, or
plays.' Thereupon the King summoned the Sessions before him in Council
and threatened them with the full rigour of the law. Obdurate at first,
the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their hostile references to
the actors. Finally, Nicolson adds, 'the King this day by proclamation
with sound of trumpet hath commanded the players liberty to play, and
forbidden their hinder or impeachment therein.' _MS. State Papers_, Dom.
Scotland, P. R. O. vol. lxv. No. 64.
{41b} Fleay, _Stage_, pp. 126-44.
{41c} Cf. Duncan's speech (on arriving at Macbeth's castle of
Inverness):
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
_Banquo_. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his lov'd mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here. (_Macbeth_, 1. vi. 1-6).
{42a} Cf. Cohn, _Shakespeare in Germany_, 1865; Meissner, _Die
englischen Comodianten zur Zeit Shakespeare's in Oesterreich_, Vienna,
1884; Jon Stefansson on 'Shakespeare at Elsinore' in _Contemporary
Review_, January 1896; _Notes and Queries_, 5th ser. ix. 43, and xi. 520;
and M. Jusserand's article in the _Nineteenth Century_, April 1898, on
English actors in France.
{42b} Cf. _As you like it_, IV. i. 22-40.
{43a} Cf. Elze, _Essays_, 1874, pp. 254 seq.
{43b} 'Quality' in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the
'actor's profession.'
{43c} Aubrey's _Lives_, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226.
{44a} Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121; Mrs. Stopes in _Jahrbuck der
deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq.
{44b} _Scourge of Folly_, 1610, epigr. 159.
{47} One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert
Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two
companies. 'Ask the Queen's players,' his accuser bade him in Cuthbert
Cony-Catcher's _Defence of Cony-Catching_, 1592, 'if you sold them not
_Orlando Furioso_ for twenty nobles [_i.e._ about 7 pounds], and when
they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral's men for
as many more.'
{48} The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the
belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of
the theatre. A very small proportion of plays acted in Elizabeth's and
James I's reign consequently reached the printing press, and most of them
are now lost. But in the absence of any law of copyright publishers
often defied the wishes of the owner of manuscripts. Many copies of a
popular play were made for the actors, and if one of these copies chanced
to fall into a publisher's hands, it was habitually issued without any
endeavour to obtain either author's or manager's sanction. In March 1599
the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher
who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of _Patient Grissell_ by
Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton to abandon the publication of it by
offering him a bribe of 2 pounds. The publication was suspended till
1603 (cf. Henslowe's _Diary_, p. 167). As late as 1633 Thomas Heywood
wrote of 'some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have
them [_i.e._ plays] come into print.' (_English Traveller_, pref.)
{49} W. S. Walker in his _Shakespeare's Versification_, 1854, and
Charles Bathurst in his _Difference in Shakespeare's Versification at
different Periods of his Life_, 1857, were the first to point out the
general facts. Dr. Ingram's paper on 'The Weak Endings' in _New
Shakspere Society's Transactions_ (1874), vol. i., is of great value.
Mr. Fleay's metrical tables, which first appeared in the same society's
_Transactions_ (1874), and have been reissued by Dr. Furnivall in a
somewhat revised form in his introduction to Gervinus's _Commentaries_
and in his _Leopold Shakspere_, give all the information possible.
{51} The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is
laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and
Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of
the real King of Navarre (Biron's later career subsequently formed the
subject of two plays by Chapman, _The Conspiracie of Duke Biron_ and _The
Tragedy of Biron_, which were both produced in 1605). The name of the
Lord Dumain in _Love's Labour's Lost_ is a common anglicised version of
that Duc de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in
popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre's movements
that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe
or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French
ambassador who was long popular in London; and, though he left England in
1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after
_Love's Labour's Lost_ was written. In Chapman's _An Humourous Day's
Mirth_, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King
of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in
Shakespeare's play, suggests much punning on the word 'mote.' As late as
1602 Middleton, in his _Blurt_, _Master Constable_, act ii. scene ii.
line 215, wrote:
Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.
Armado, 'the fantastical Spaniard' who haunts Navarre's Court, and is
dubbed by another courtier 'a phantasm, a Monarcho,' is a caricature of a
half-crazed Spaniard known as 'fantastical Monarcho' who for many years
hung about Elizabeth's Court, and was under the delusion that he owned
the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard
wrote a poem called _Fantasticall Monarcho's Epitaph_, and mention is
made of him in Reginald Scott's _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, 1584, p. 54.
The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588.
Braggardino in Chapman's _Blind Beggar of Alexandria_, 1598, is drawn on
the same lines. The scene (_Love's Labour's Lost_, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in
which the princess's lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians
follows a description of the reception by ladies of Elizabeth's Court in
1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the
ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey's _Travels_, ed.
E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.) For further indications of topics of the day
treated in the play, see A New Study of "Love's Labour's Lost,"' by the
present writer, in _Gent. Mag_, Oct. 1880; and _Transactions of the New
Shakspere Society_, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the
schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and
lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 85 n).
{53} Cf. Fleay, _Life_, pp. 188 seq.
{55a} The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance _Anthia
and Abrocomas_ by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century,
seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio in
his _Novellino_ (No. xxxiii.: cf. Mr. Waters's translation, ii. 155-65).
It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel, _La
Giulietta_, 1535, and by Bandello in his _Novelle_, 1554, pt. ii., No.
ix. Bandello's version became classical; it was translated in the
_Histoires Tragiques_ of Francoisde Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre
Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. At the
same time as Shakespeare was writing _Romeo and Juliet_, Lope de Vega was
dramatising the tale in his Spanish play called _Castelvines y Monteses_
(_i.e._ Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope's play, which
ends happily, see _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, xxi. 451-60.
{55b} Cf. _Originals and Analogues_, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New
Shakspere Society.
{56} Cf. _Parallel Texts_, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society;
Fleay, _Life_, pp. 191 seq.
{60} Cf. Fleay, _Life_, pp. 235 seq.; _Trans. New Shakspere Soc_., 1876,
pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, _Study_, pp. 51 seq.
{62} In later life Shakespeare, in _Hamlet_, borrows from Lyly's
_Euphues_ Polonius's advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded
the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the
affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage
in I _Henry IV_, II. iv. 445: 'For though the camomile, the more it is
trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the
sooner it wears.'
{65} Henslowe, p. 24.
{66a} Cf. Cohn, _Shakespeare in Germany_, pp. 155 et seq.
{66b} Arber, ii. 644.
{66c} Cf. W. G. Waters's translation of _Il Pecorone_, pp. 44-60 (fourth
day, novel 1). The collection was not published till 1558, and the story
followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but
the original Italian.
{68} Lopez was the Earl of Leicester's physician before 1586, and the
Queen's chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with
friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the
Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II's
persecution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to
stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as
the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A
quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London
offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that
he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted
of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his
death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial and
execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the
London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time.
That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of the ruin alike of
the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the
Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was
the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on Roderigo Lopez in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_; 'The Original of Shylock,' by the
present writer, in _Gent. Mag._ February 1880; Dr. H. Graetz, _Shylock in
den Sagen_, _in den Dramen and in der Geschichte_, Krotoschin, 1880; _New
Shakspere Soc. Trans._ 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158-92; 'The Conspiracy of
Dr. Lopez,' by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in _English Historical Review_
(1894), ix. 440 seq.
{70} _Gesta Grayorum_, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript.
A second performance of the _Comedy of Errors_ was given at Gray's Inn
Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895.
{72a} Cf. Swinburne, _Study of Shakspere_, pp. 231-74.
{72b} See p. 89.
{73} Cf. Dodsley's _Old Plays_, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8.
{74} See Appendix, sections iii. and iv.
{75a} See Ovid's _Amores_, liber i. elegy xv. ll. 35-6. Ovid's
_Amores_, or Elegies of Love, were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and
were first printed without a date on the title-page, probably about 1597.
Marlowe's version had probably been accessible in manuscript in the eight
years' interval. Marlowe rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus:
Let base conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs!
{75b} _Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Lodge's Scillaes
Metamorphosis_, by James P. Reardon, in 'Shakespeare Society's Papers,'
iii. 143-6. Cf. Lodge's description of Venus's discovery of the wounded
Adonis:
Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere,
Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke,
Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere,
Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke;
How on his senseles corpse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying.