{149b} _Court and Times of James I_, I. i. 7.
{149c} See Appendix IV.
{152} The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
adopts expressions in Barnes's vituperative sonnet (No xlix.), where,
after denouncing his mistress as a 'siren,' the poet incoherently
ejaculates:
From my love's limbeck [_sc._ have I] still [di]stilled tears!
Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded
from time to time in Petrarch's sonnets. Tasso in _Scelta delle Rime_,
1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning 'Vinca fortuna homai, se
sotto il peso') which adumbrates Shakespeare's Sonnets xxix. ('When in
disgrace with fortune and men's eyes') and lxvi. ('Tired with all these,
for restful death I cry'). Drummond of Hawthornden translated Tasso's
sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond's Sonnets xxv.
('What cruel star into this world was brought') and xxxii. ('If crost
with all mishaps be my poor life') are pitched in the identical key.
{153a} Sidney's _Certain Sonnets_ (No. xiii.) appended to _Astrophel and
Stella_ in the edition of 1598. In _Emaricdulfe_: _Sonnets written by E.
C._, 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning 'O lust, of sacred love the foul
corrupter,' even more closely resembles Shakespeare's sonnet in both
phraseology and sentiment. E. C.'s rare volume is reprinted in the
_Lamport Garland_ (Roxburghe Club), 1881.
{153b} Even this sonnet is adapted from Drayton. See Sonnet xxii. in
1599 edition:
An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still . . .
Thus am I still provoked to every evil
By this good-wicked spirit, sweet Angel-Devil.
But Shakespeare entirely alters the point of the lines by contrasting the
influence exerted on him by the woman with that exerted on him by a man.
{155} The work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his _Occasional Issues_,
1880, and extracts from it appear in the New Shakspere Society's
'Allusion Books,' i. 169 seq.
{157} W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them
made some reputation in Shakespeare's day. There was a dramatist named
Wentworth Smith (see p. 180 _infra_), and there was a William Smith who
published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called _Chloris_ in 1595. A
specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter's
identity with Willobie's counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has
the better claim.
{161} No edition appeared before 1600, and then two were published.
{162} _Oberon's Vision_, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society),
1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth _fetes_, by George Gascoigne and
Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576.
{163} Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844.
{164} All these details are of Shakespeare's invention, and do not
figure in the old play. But in the crude induction in the old play the
nondescript drunkard is named without prefix 'Slie.' That surname,
although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was
borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance
in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to
prove that the old play was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no
other names or references in the old play that can be associated with
Warwickshire.
{165} Mr. Richard Savage, the secretary and librarian of the Birthplace
Trustees at Stratford, has generously placed at my disposal this
interesting fact, which he lately discovered.
{167} It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598.
{168a} The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot.
Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted
reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding editors.
{168b} These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden
in his _Diary of Master Silence_, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt's
_Dursley and its Neighbourhood_, Huntley's _Glossary of the Cotswold
Dialect_, and Marshall's _Rural Economy of Cotswold_ (1796).
{170} First adopted by Theobald in 1733; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii.
257.
{172a} _Remarks_, p. 295.
{172b} Cf. Shakespeare Society's reprint, 1842, ed. Halliwell.
{172c} This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to
have been published in 1603, although no edition earlier than 1620 is now
known. The 1620 edition of _Westward for Smelts_, _written by Kinde Kit
of Kingston_, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf.
_Shakespeare's Library_, ed. Hazlitt, I. ii. 1-80.
{174} _Diary_, p. 61; see p. 167.
{175} Nichols, _Progresses of Elizabeth_, iii. 552.
{176a} Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol.
cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of Domestic State Papers,
1598-1601, pp. 575-8.
{176b} Cf. Gilchrist, _Examination of the charges_ . . . _of Jonson's
Enmity towards Shakspeare_, 1808.
{177} Latten is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in _Merry Wives
of Windsor_ (I. i. 165) likens Slender to a 'latten bilbo,' that is, a
sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. _Anecdotes and Traditions_, edited
from L'Estrange's MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society, p. 2.
{179} This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the
date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of
Shakespeare as Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with 'sugred tongues' in
his _Epigrams_ of 1595. In the _Return from Parnassus_ (1601?)
Shakespeare is apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare.' Milton did
homage to the tradition by writing of 'sweetest Shakespeare' in
_L'Allegro_.
{180} A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing thirteen
plays, none of which are extant, for the theatrical manager, Philip
Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603. _The Hector of Germanie_, an extant
play 'made by W. Smith' and published 'with new additions' in 1615, was
doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by him that
has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory
that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for
Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials
'W.S.' was not due to the publishers' belief that Wentworth Smith was the
author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief
that the plays were by Shakespeare.
{181} Cf. p. 258 infra.
{182} There were twenty pieces in all. The five by Shakespeare are
placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two--'If music
and sweet poetry agree' (No. viii.) and 'As it fell upon a day' (No.
xx.)--were borrowed from Barnfield's _Poems in divers Humours_ (1598).
'Venus with Adonis sitting by her' (No. xi.) is from Bartholomew
Griffin's _Fidessa_ (1596); 'My flocks feed not' (No. xvii.) is adapted
from Thomas Weelkes's _Madrigals_ (1597); 'Live with me and be my love'
is by Marlowe; and the appended stanza, entitled 'Love's Answer,' by Sir
Walter Ralegh (No. xix.); 'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together'
(No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by the Elizabethan dramatists.
Nothing has been ascertained of the origin and history of the remaining
nine poems (iv. vi. vii. ix. x. xiii. xiv. xviii.)
{184} A unique copy of Chester's _Love's Martyr_ is in Mr.
Christie-Miller's library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original
edition in 1611 with a new title, _The Annals of Great Brittaine_, a copy
(also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original
edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in
his series of 'Occasional Issues.' It was also printed in the same year
as one of the publications of the New Shakspere Society. Matthew Roydon
in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, appended to Spenser's _Colin Clouts
Come Home Againe_, 1595, describes the part figuratively played in
Sidney's obsequies by the turtle-dove, swan, phoenix, and eagle, in
verses that very closely resemble Shakespeare's account of the funereal
functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to
Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may
be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior
significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre
and phraseology by Fletcher in his _Mad Lover_ in the song 'The Lover's
Legacy to his Cruel Mistress.'
{187} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186.
{188a} There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the
poet's heraldry in _Herald and Genealogist_, i. 510. Facsimiles of all
the documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in _Miscellanea
Genealogica et Heraldica_, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps
prints imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599
(_Outlines_, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the
negotiation of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later
year.
{188b} It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an
applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application
should be made in the father's name, and the transaction conducted as if
the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind
that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below.
{189} In a manuscript in the British Museum (_Harl. MS._ 6140, f. 45) is
a copy of the tricking of the arms of William 'Shakspere,' which is
described 'as a pattent per Will'm Dethike Garter, principale King of
Armes;' this is figured in French's _Shakespeareana Genealogica_, p. 524.
{190} These memoranda, which were as follows, were first written without
the words here enclosed in brackets; those words were afterwards
interlineated in the manuscript in a hand similar to that of the original
sentences:
'[This John shoeth] A patierne therof under Clarent Cookes hand in
paper. xx. years past. [The Q. officer and cheffe of the towne]
[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or
xvj. years past.
That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance [500
li.]
That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent. of worship.]'
{191} 'An exemplification' was invariably secured more easily than a new
grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without
examination, the applicant's statement that his family had borne arms
long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the
obligation of close inquiry into his present status.
{192a} On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare's elder son-in-law,
the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall.
{192b} French, _Genealogica Shakespeareana_, p. 413.
{193} The details of Brooke's accusation are not extant, and are only to
be deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to Brooke's
complaint, two copies of which are accessible: one is in the vol. W-Z at
the Heralds' College, f. 276; and the other, slightly differing, is in
Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the _Herald and
Genealogist_, i. 514.
{194a} _Notes and Queries_, 8th ser. v. 478.
{194b} The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry tree was not
put on record till it was cut down in 1758. In 1760 mention is made of
it in a letter of thanks in the corporation's archives from the Steward
of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him
with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of
old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his _Life of Shakespeare_, 1790,
p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since
Shakespeare's lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a
Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry trees
through the midland counties by order of James I, who desired to
encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 134,
411-16).
{197a} I do not think we shall over-estimate the present value of
Shakespeare's income if we multiply each of its items by eight, but it is
difficult to state authoritatively the ratio between the value of money
in Shakespeare's time and in our own. The money value of corn then and
now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life--meat, milk, eggs,
wool, building materials, and the like--were by comparison ludicrously
cheap in Shakespeare's day. If we strike the average between the low
price of these commodities and the comparatively high price of corn, the
average price of necessaries will be found to be in Shakespeare's day
about an eighth of what it is now. The cost of luxuries is also now
about eight times the price that it was in the sixteenth or seventeenth
century. Sixpence was the usual price of a new quarto or octavo book
such as would now be sold at prices ranging between three shillings and
sixpence and six shillings. Half a crown was charged for the best-placed
seats in the best theatres. The purchasing power of one Elizabethan
pound might be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and
luxuries as equivalent to that of eight pounds of the present currency.
{197b} Cf. Henslowe's _Diary_, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq. After the
Restoration the receipts at the third performance were given for the
author's 'benefit.'
{199a} _Return from Parnassus_, V. i. 10-16.
{199b} Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]'s _Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for
Woodcocks_, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed 'Theatrum Licencia:'
Cotta's become a player most men know,
And will no longer take such toyling paines;
For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gaines:
That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs,
Since Greene's _Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs.
Greens _Tu Quoque_ was a popular comedy that had once been performed at
Court by the Queen's players, and 'Garlicke Jigs' alluded derisively to
drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem
from patrons of the smaller playhouses.
{200} The documents which are now in the Public Record Office among the
papers relating to the Lord Chamberlain's Office, were printed in full by
Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19.
{202} In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation,
charged for a drama as much as 25 pounds. _Alleyn Papers_, ed. Collier,
p. 65.
{203} Ten pounds was the ordinary fee paid to actors for a performance
at the Court of James I. Shakespeare's company appeared annually twenty
times and more at Whitehall during the early years of James I's reign,
and Shakespeare, as being both author and actor, doubtless received a
larger share of the receipts than his colleagues.
{204a} Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19; Fleay, _Stage_, pp. 324-8
{204b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19.
{206a} See p. 195.
{206b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80.
{208} _Accounts of the Revels_, ed. Peter Cunningham (Shakespeare
Society), p. 177; _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, iii. 406.
{210a} It was reproduced by the Hakluyt Society to accompany _The
Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator_, ed. Captain A. H.
Markham, 1880. Cf. Mr. Coote's note on the _New Map_, lxxxv-xcv. A
paper on the subject by Mr. Coote also appears in _New Shakspere
Society's Transactions_, 1877-9, pt. i. 88-100.
{210b} _Diary_, Camden Soc. p. 18; the Elizabethan Stage Society
repeated the play on the same stage on February 10, 11 and 12, 1897.
{210c} Bandello's _Novelle_, ii. 36.
{211a} First published in 1579; 2nd edit. 1595.
{211b} _Hamlet_, III. ii. 109-10.
{213a} On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to
the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex
expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the
number of playhouses in accordance with 'our order set down and
prescribed about a year and a half since.' But nothing followed, and no
more was heard officially of the Council's order until 1619, when the
Corporation of London remarked on its practical abrogation at the same
time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the
Blackfriars Theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from
the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, 307-9.
{213b} The passage, act ii. sc. ii. 348-394, which deals in ample detail
with the subject, only appears in the folio version of 1623. In the
First Quarto a very curt reference is made to the misfortunes of the
'tragedians of the city:'
'Y' faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away,
For the principal publike audience that
Came to them are turned to private playes
And to the humours of children.'
'Private playes' were plays acted by amateurs, with whom the 'Children'
might well be classed.
{214a} All recent commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the 'late
innovation' as the Order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting
the number of the London playhouses to two; but that order, which was
never put in force, in no way affected the actors' fortunes. The First
Quarto's reference to the perils attaching to the 'noveltie' of the boys'
performances indicates the true meaning.
{214b} _Hamlet_, II. ii. 349-64.
{215} At the moment offensive personalities seemed to have infected all
the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the
attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by
the actors of the 'Curtain' at gentlemen 'of good desert and quality,'
and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were
produced (_Privy Council Register_). Jonson subsequently issued an
'apologetical dialogue' (appended to printed copies of the _Poetaster_),
in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players:
'Now for the players 'tis true I tax'd them
And yet but some, and those so sparingly
As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned,
Had they but had the wit or conscience
To think well of themselves. But impotent they
Thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe;
And much good do it them. What they have done against me
I am not moved with, if it gave them meat
Or got them clothes, 'tis well; that was their end,
Only amongst them I am sorry for
Some better natures by the rest so drawn
To run in that vile line.'
{217} See p. 229, note I, _ad fin_.
{218} The proposed identification of Virgil in the 'Poetaster' with
Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman's literary work did not
justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play.
{220} The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on
any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in _Julius Caesar_,
and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is
fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other
considerations. 'Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his
_Timber_, 'hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter:
As when hee said in the person of _Caesar_, one speaking to him [_i.e._
Caesar]; _Caesar_, _thou dost me wrong_. Hee [_i.e._ Caesar] replyed:
_Caesar did never wrong_, _butt with just cause_: and such like, which
were ridiculous.' Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the
induction to _The Staple of News_ (1625): 'Cry you mercy, you did not
wrong but with just cause.' Possibly the words that were ascribed by
Jonson to Shakespeare's character of _Caesar_ appeared in the original
version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism
they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has
reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson's quotation
are Caesar's remark:
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied
(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion
after the word 'wrong' of the phrase 'but with just cause,' which Jonson
needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's
admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare's
_Julius Caesar_ in the theatre to Ben Jonson's Roman play of _Catiline_,
in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in
the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's _Poems_):
So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius--oh, how the audience
Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.
{221} I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ (vol. xxxi.): 'The argument in favour
of Kyd's authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject
of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his
preface to _Menaphon_] the typical literary hack, who at almost every
point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments
"he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical
speeches." Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date
prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who
cried repeatedly, "Hamlet, revenge!" and that this expression took rank
in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd's
sanguinary tragedy of] _Jeronimo_, such as "What outcry calls me from my
naked bed," and "Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by." The resemblance
between the stories of _Hamlet_ and _Jeronimo_ suggests that the former
would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In _Jeronimo_ a father
seeks to avenge his son's murder; in _Hamlet_ the theme is the same with
the position of father and son reversed. In _Jeronimo_ the avenging
father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a
play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son,
and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of _Hamlet_ with
a similar play-scene. Shakespeare's debt to the lost tragedy is a matter
of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his _Hamlet_
read like intentional parodies of Kyd's bombastic efforts in _The Spanish
Tragedy_, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by
an almost identical episode in a lost _Hamlet_ by the same author.'
Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in
the mouth of Kit Sly in the _Taming of the Shrew_ the current phrase 'Go
by, Jeronimy,' from _The Spanish Tragedy_. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a
line from the same piece in _Much Ado about Nothing_ (I. i. 271): 'In
time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;' but Kyd practically borrowed
that line from Watson's _Passionate Centurie_ (No. xlvii.), where
Shakespeare may have met it.
{222} Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, _Hamlet-Quellen_, Leipzig, 1881. The
story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. _Ambales-Saga_,
edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.
{224} Cf. _Hamlet_--parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and
first folio--ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; _The Devonshire Hamlets_,
1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins;
_Hamlet_, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.
{226a} Arber's _Transcript of the Stationers' Registers_, iii. 226.
{226b} _Ib._ iii. 400.