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[Illustration: The Shakespeare Monument in the Parish Church,
Stratford-on-Avon.]
THE FACTS ABOUT
SHAKESPEARE
BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
AND
ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE, PH.D., L.H.D.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
[Illustration]
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1913. Reprinted April,
1914; July, 1915; May, November, 1916; January, 1918; February,
September, 1920; September, 1921; March, 1922; February, December, 1923;
October, 1924; June, 1926; January, December, 1927.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE BERWICK & SMITH CO.
Transcriber's Notes:
Unique page headings have been retained, marked as [Page Heading:],
and positioned at the first available paragraph break of the page or
the preceding page.
Many spelling inconsistencies exist due to the historical period of
the quoted sources. These, in addition to the original punctuation,
have been retained.
Obvious typesetting errors have been corrected and noted in the
Transcriber's Endnotes at the end of the text.
Some index entries have been re-sequenced to allow for clarity of
sub-entries. These changes are recorded in the Transcriber's
Endnotes along with a copy of the original text.
The following non-standard characters have been represented as
follows:
[oe] oe ligature
[OE] OE ligature
[~e] tilde over e. A contraction of en.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND AND LONDON 1
II. BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS AND TRADITIONS 17
III. SHAKESPEARE'S READING 50
IV. CHRONOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 67
V. THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 89
VI. THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 117
VII. THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE 131
VIII. QUESTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY 156
IX. SHAKESPEARE SINCE 1616 167
X. CONCLUSION 188
APPENDIX A. BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS AND AUTHORITIES 203
APPENDIX B. INDEX OF THE CHARACTERS IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 226
APPENDIX C. INDEX OF THE SONGS 241
APPENDIX D. BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
INDEX 265
THE FACTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
The Facts about Shakespeare
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND AND LONDON
Shakespeare lived in a period of change. In religion, politics,
literature, and commerce, in the habits of daily living, in the world of
ideas, his lifetime witnessed continual change and movement. When
Elizabeth came to the throne, six years before he was born, England was
still largely Catholic, as it had been for nine centuries; when she died
England was Protestant, and by the date of Shakespeare's death it was
well on the way to becoming Puritan. The Protestant Reformation had
worked nearly its full course of revolution in ideas, habits, and
beliefs. The authority of the church had been replaced by that of the
Bible, of the English Bible, superbly translated by Shakespeare's
contemporaries. Within his lifetime, again, England had attained a
national unity and an international importance heretofore unknown. The
Spanish Armada had been defeated, the kingdoms of England and Scotland
united, and the first colony established in America. Even more
revolutionary had been the assertion of national greatness in literature
and thought. The Italian Renaissance, following the rediscovery of Greek
and Roman literature, had extended its influence to England early in the
century, but only after the accession of Elizabeth did it bring full
harvest. The names that crowd the next fifty years represent fine native
endowments, boundless aspiration, and also novelty,--as Spenser in
poetry, Bacon in philosophy, Hooker in theology. In commerce as well as
in letters there was this same activity and innovation. It was a time of
commercial prosperity, of increase in comfort and luxury, of the growth
of a powerful commercial class, of large fortunes and large
benefactions. Whatever your status, your birth, trade, profession,
residence, religion, education, or property, in the year 1564 you had a
better chance to change these than any of your ancestors had; and there
was more chance than there had ever been that your son would improve his
inheritance. The individual man had long been boxed up in guild, church,
or the feudal system; now the covers were opened, and the new
opportunity bred daring, initiative, and ambition. The exploits of the
Elizabethan sea rovers still stir us with the thrill of adventure; but
adventure and vicissitude were hardly less the share of merchant,
priest, poet, or politician. The individual has had no such opportunity
for fame in England before or since. The nineteenth century, which saw
the industrial revolution, the triumphs of steam and electricity, and
the discoveries of natural science, is the only period that equalled the
Elizabethan in the rapidity of its changes in ideas and in the
conditions of living; and even that era of change offered relatively
fewer new impulses to individual greatness than the fifty years of
Shakespeare's life.
[Page Heading: Tudor England]
Shakespeare's England was an agricultural country of four or five
million inhabitants. It fed itself, except when poor harvests compelled
the importation of grain, and it supplemented agriculture by grazing,
fishing, and commerce, chiefly with the Netherlands, but growing in many
directions. The forests were becoming thin, but the houses were still of
timber; the roads were poor, the large towns mostly seaports. The
dialects spoken were various, but the speech of the midland counties had
become established in London, at the universities, and in printed books,
and was rapidly increasing its dominance. The monasteries and religious
orders were gone, but feudalism still held sway, and the people were
divided into classes,--the various ranks of the nobility, the gentry,
the yeomen, the burgesses, and the common people. But changes from one
class to another were numerous; for many lords were losing their
inheritances by extravagance, while many business men were putting their
profits into land. In spite of persecutions, occasional insurrections,
and the plague which devastated the unsanitary towns, it was a time of
peace and prosperity. The coinage was reformed, roads were improved,
taxes were not burdensome, and life in the country was more comfortable
and secure than it had been. Books and education were spreading.
Numerous grammar schools taught Latin, the universities made provision
for poor students, and there were now many careers besides that of the
church open to the educated man.
Stratford, then a village of some two thousand inhabitants, somewhat off
the main route of traffic, was far more removed from the world than most
towns of similar size in this day of railways, newspapers, and the
telegraph. With the nearby country, it made up an independent community
that attended to its own affairs with great thoroughness. The
corporation, itself the outgrowth of a medieval religious guild,
regulated the affairs of every one with little regard for personal
liberty. It was especially severe on rebellious servants, idle
apprentices, shrewish women, the pigs that ran loose in the streets, and
(after 1605) persons guilty of profanity. Regular church attendance and
fixed hours of work were required. The corporation frequently punished
with fines (the poet's father on one occasion) those who did not clean
the street before their houses; and it was much occupied in regulating
the ale-houses, of which the village possessed some thirty. Like all
towns of this period, Stratford suffered frequently from fire and the
plague. Trade was dependent mainly on the weekly markets and semi-annual
fairs, and Stratford was by no means isolated, being not far from the
great market town of Coventry, near Kenilworth and Warwick, and only
eighty miles from London.
[Page Heading: Sports and Plays]
Shakespeare's England was merry England. At least, it was probably as
near to deserving that adjective as at any time before or since. There
was plenty of time for amusement. There were public bowling-greens and
archery butts in Stratford, though the corporation was very strict in
regard to the hours when these could be used. Every one enjoyed hunting,
hawking, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, dancing, until the Puritans found
such enjoyments immoral. The youthful Shakespeare acquired an intimate
knowledge of dogs and horses, hunting and falconry, though this was a
gentleman's sport. The highways were full of ballad singers, beggars,
acrobats, and wandering players. Play-acting of one kind or another had
long been common over most of rural England. Miracle plays were given at
Coventry up to 1580, and bands of professional actors came to Stratford
frequently, and on their first recorded appearance received their
permission to act from the bailiff, John Shakespeare (1568-1569). There
was many a Holofernes or Bottom to marshal his pupils or
fellow-mechanics for an amateur performance; and Shakespeare may have
seen the most famous of the royal entertainments, that at Kenilworth in
1575, when Gascoigne recited poetry, and Leicester, impersonating Deep
Desire, addressed Elizabeth from a bush, and a minstrel represented
Arion on a dolphin's back. The tradition may be right which declares
that it was the trumpets of the comedians that summoned Shakespeare to
London.
In the main, life in the country was not so very different from what it
is now in the remoter places. Many a secluded English village, as
recently as fifty years ago, jogged on much as in the sixteenth century.
Opportunity then as now dwelt mostly in the cities, but the city of the
sixteenth century bore slight resemblance to a city of to-day.
London, with less than 200,000 inhabitants, was still a medieval city in
appearance, surrounded by a defensive wall, guarded by the Tower, and
crowned by the cathedral. The city proper lay on the north of the
Thames, and the wall made a semicircle of some two miles, from the Tower
on the east to the Fleet ditch and Blackfriars on the west. Seven gates
pierced the wall to the north, and the roads passing through them into
the fields were lined with houses. Westward along the river were great
palaces, behind which the building was practically continuous along the
muddy road that led to the separate city of Westminster. The Thames,
noted for its fish and swans, was the great thoroughfare, crowded with
many kinds of boats and spanned by the famous London Bridge. By one of
the many rowboats that carried passengers hither and thither, or on foot
over the arches of the bridge, between the rows of houses that lined it,
and under the heads of criminals which decorated its entrance, you
might cross the Thames to Southwark. Turning west, past St. Saviour's
and the palace of the Bishop of Winchester, you were soon on the
Bankside, a locality long given over to houses of ill fame and rings for
the baiting of bulls and bears. The theaters, forbidden in the city
proper, were built either in the fields to the north of the walls, or
across the river close by the kennels and rings. Here, as Shakespeare
waited for a boatman to ferry him across to Blackfriars, the whole city
was spread before his eyes, in the foreground the panorama of the
beautiful river, beyond it the crowded houses, the spires of many
churches, and the great tower of old St. Paul's.
[Page Heading: Tudor London]
It was a city of narrow streets, open sewers, wooden houses, without an
adequate water supply or sanitation, in constant danger from fire and
plague. But dirt and disease were no more prevalent than they had been
for centuries; in spite of them, there was no lack of life in the
crowded lanes. The great palaces were outside the city proper, and there
were few notable buildings within its precincts except the churches. The
dismantled monasteries still occupied large areas, but were being made
over to strange uses, the theaters eventually finding a place in
Blackfriars and Whitefriars. The Strand was an ill-paved street running
behind the river palaces, past the village of Charing Cross, on to the
royal palace of Whitehall and to the Abbey and Hall at Westminster. The
walls and surrounding moat had ceased to be of use for defense, and
building constantly spread into the fields without. These fields were
favorite places for recreation and served the purpose of city parks. The
Elizabethans were fond of outdoor sports and spent little daytime
indoors. The shops were open to the street, and the clear spaces at
Cheapside and St. Paul's Church-yard seem to have been always crowded.
St. Paul's, although still used for religious services, had become a
sort of city club or general meeting place. Mules and horses were no
longer to be found there as in the reign of Mary, but the nave was in
constant use as a place for gossip and business. The churchyard was the
usual place for holding lotteries, and here were the shops of a majority
of the London booksellers. In its northeast corner was Paul's Cross, the
famous pulpit whence the wishes of the government were announced and
popularized by the Sunday preachers. And here the variety of London life
was most fully exhibited. The processions and entertainments at court,
the ambassadors from afar, the law students from the Temple, the old
soldiers destitute after service in Flanders, the seamen returned from
plundering the Spanish gold fleet, the youths from the university come
to the city to earn their living by their wits, the bishop and the
puritan, who looked at each other askance, the young squire come to be
gulled of his lands by the roarers of the tavern, the solid merchant
with his chain of gold, the wives who aped the court ladies with their
enormous farthingales and ruffs, the court gallant with his dyed beard
and huge breeches, the idle apprentices quick to riot, the poor poets in
prison for debt--these and how many more are familiar to every reader of
the Elizabethan drama. As often in periods of commercial prosperity,
luxury became fantastic. Men sold their acres to put costly garments on
their backs. Clothing was absurd and ran to extreme sizes of ruffs,
farthingales, and breeches, or to gaudy colors and jewels. Enormous sums
were spent on feasts, entertainments, and masques, especially in the
reign of James I. Cleanliness did not thrive, perfumes took the place of
baths, and rushes, seldom renewed, covered the floor even of the
presence chamber of Elizabeth. But the comforts and luxuries of life
increased and spread to all classes. Tobacco, potatoes, and forks were
first introduced in Shakespeare's time. Building improved, streets were
widened, and coaches became so common as to excite much animadversion
and complaint. If some poets spent much time in the debtors' prison,
others lived well, and some actors gained large fortunes.
[Page Heading: Commercial Prosperity]
The industrious apprentice who refused the allurements of pageants,
theaters, tailors, and taverns, was sure to have his reward. It was a
time of commercial expansion, such as the last generation has witnessed
in Germany and the United States. Bankers, brokers, and merchants gained
great fortunes and managed to protect them. Industry, thrift, and
shrewdness were likely to win enough to buy a knighthood. The trade of
the old East and the new West came to the London wharves, and every one
was ready to take a risk. The merchants of London had furnished support
to the policies of Henry VIII and were rich enough to fit out the
expedition against Flanders and to pay for a third of the fleet that met
the Armada. It was a time, too, for great enterprises and benefactions
to charity. Sir Thomas Gresham built the Exchange, Sir Hugh Middleton
paid for the New River water supply, and there were many gifts to
hospitals. With all this increase in wealth, the various professions
prospered, especially that of law. The inns of court were crowded with
students, not a few of whom forsook the courts for the drama. The age of
chivalry was over, that of commerce begun. No one gained much glory by a
military career in the days of Elizabeth. The church, the law, banking,
commerce, even politics and literature, offered better roads to wealth
or fame.
The importance of the court in Elizabethan London is not easy to realize
to-day. It dominated the life of the small city. Its nobles and their
retainers, its courtiers and hangers-on, made up a considerable portion
of the population; its shows supplied the entertainment, its gossip the
politics of the hour. It was the seat of pageantry, the mirror of
manners, the patron or the oppressor of every one. No one could be so
humble as to escape coming somehow within its sway, and some of the
greatest wrecked their lives in efforts to secure its approval. It is no
wonder that the plays of Shakespeare deal so largely with kings,
queens, and their courts. Under the Tudors, and still more under the
Stuarts, the court aimed at increasing the central authority so as to
bring every affair of its subjects under its direct control. In London,
however, this effort at centralization met with strong opposition. The
government was in the hands of the guilds representative of the wealth
of the city, and was coming face to face with many of the problems of
modern municipalities. The corporation was in constant clash with the
court; and in the end the city, which had supported Henry VIII and
Elizabeth against powerful nobles, became the Puritan London that aided
in ousting the Stuarts.
[Page Heading: The City and the Court]
This conflict between city and court is illustrated in the regulation of
the theaters and companies of actors. The actors had a legal status only
as the license of some nobleman enrolled them as his servants, and they
relied on the protection of their patron and the court against the
opposition of the city authorities. The fact that they were employed to
give plays before the Queen was, indeed, about the only argument that
won any consideration from the corporation. This opposition was based in
part on moral or puritan grounds, but was determined still more by the
fear of three menaces, fire, sedition, and the plague. Wooden buildings
were already discouraged by statute, and the danger of fire from the
wooden theaters is shown by the burning of the Globe and the Fortune.
The gathering of crowds was feared by every property holder, and the
theaters were frequently the scenes of outbreaks of the apprentices. The
danger of the plague from the crowd at plays was the greatest of all.
London was hardly ever free from it, and suffered terrible devastation
in the years 1593 and 1603. For these reasons the theaters were
forbidden within the city's jurisdiction, and were driven into the
outskirts. The best companies appeared frequently at court, and on the
accession of James I they were licensed directly as servants of various
members of the royal family. The actors were thereafter under the
immediate control of the court, and certain "private" theaters were
established within the city. But this triumph of the court over the long
opposition of the city was not an unmixed blessing for the drama.
The theaters in 1590 represented the public on which they depended for
support; by 1616 they were far less representative of the nation or
London, and more dependent on the court and its following. The
Blackfriars theater, before which gathered the crowd of coaches that
annoyed the puritans of the neighborhood, was a symptom of the growth of
wealth and luxury, and of the increased power of the monarchy; the
protests of the puritan neighborhood were an indication of the growth of
a large class hostile alike to an arbitrary court, luxury, and the
theater.
Shakespeare's lifetime, however, saw little of this sharp division into
parties or of that narrow moral consistency which Puritanism came to
require. Looking back on his age in contrast with our own, we are
perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of
dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely
display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear
or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies
of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so
brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet
set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant
could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man
presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon
or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and
fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no
occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets--Surrey, Wyatt,
Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson--and of these, only Spenser
and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The
student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger
contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and
sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with
imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and moral grandeur.
[Page Heading: Elizabethan Incongruities]
The Italian Renaissance, with its mingled passions for beauty, art,
blood, lust, and intellect, seems for a time transferred to London and
dwelling alongside of commerce and Puritanism. Yet these incongruities
of character, manners, and motives that seem so striking to us to-day
may probably be explained by conditions already described. The
opportunities created by the changes in church and religion, the new
education and prosperity, the new America, and the revived classics, all
tended to create a new thirst for experience. This thirst for experience
led to excess and incongruity, but it also furnished an unparalleled
range of human motive for a poet's observation and imitation.
In the wide range of our poet's survey, there is, however, one notable
omission. The reign of Elizabeth, like those of her three predecessors,
was one of religious controversy, change, and persecution. But all this
strife, all this debate, repression, persecution, and all of this great
turmoil working in the minds of Englishmen, find little reflection in
Shakespeare's plays, and little in the whole Elizabethan drama.
Religious controversy had played a part in the drama of the reign of
Edward and Mary, but it rarely enters the Elizabethan drama, and then
mainly in the form of ridicule for the puritan. Shakespeare's plays seem
almost to ignore the most momentous facts of his time. They treat pagan,
Catholic, and Protestant with cordiality and only smile at the puritan
or Brownist. His England of the merry wives or Falstaff's justices seems
strangely untroubled by questions of faith or ritual. There is, to be
sure, plenty of religion and controversy in the literature of the time,
but the drama as a whole is singularly non-religious. It reflects
rather that freedom from restraint, that buoyancy of spirit, that lively
interest in experience, which had their full course in the few years
when the old garment was off and the new not quite fitted. The immense
intellectual and imaginative activity of the period consists precisely
in this freedom from restrictions, partisanship, dogmas, or caste.
Things had lost their labels and some time and argument were required to
find new ones. Ideas were free and not bound to any school, party, or
cause. You grasped an idea without knowing whether it made you realist,
romanticist, or classicist; papist, puritan, or pagan. After centuries
of imprisonment, individuality had its full chance in the world of ideas
as elsewhere.
[Page Heading: An Age of Freedom]
In a few years this was all over, and your sphere of life and the ideas
proper to that sphere were prescribed for you. By another century,
England had fought out the issues of creed and government with expense
of blood and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of 1688. In
Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity
of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their
ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell
in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual,
and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a freedom from ancient
precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama found its panorama of
novel and varied experience making and marring character.
Shakespeare lived peaceably in the heyday of this change, nearly of an
age with Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe. Like Marlowe in the
soliloquies of Barabbas and Faust, he recognized the new possibilities
that the age opened through money or ideas. He made much out of the
commercial prosperity of the day, gained such profits as were possible
from his profession, raised his estate, and acquired wealth. He gave his
mind not to any cause or party but to the study of men. The drunkards of
the London inn, the yokels of Warwickshire, and the finest gentlewomen
of the land alike came under the scrutiny of the creator of Falstaff,
Dogberry, and Rosalind. And like his great contemporaries, he triumphed
over incongruities, for he translated his studies of the human mind into
verse of immortal beauty that yet delighted the public stage which was
located halfway between the bear dens and the brothels.