Shakespeare's career enjoyed above that of his fellows from the
commemorative point of view. Although formal biography did not lay
hand on his name for nearly a century after his death, the authentic
tradition of his life and work began steadily to crystallise in the
minds and mouths of men almost as soon as he drew his last breath.
Fuller's characteristically shadowy hint of "wit-combats betwixt
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson" and of the contrasted characters of the
two combatants, suggests pretty convincingly that Shakespeare's name
presented to the seventeenth-century imagination and tongue a better
defined personality and experience than the embryonic biographer knew
how to disclose. The commemorative instinct never seeks satisfaction
in biographic effort exclusively, even when the art of biography has
ripened into satisfying fulness. A great man's reputation and the
moving incidents of his career never live solely in the printed book
or the literary word. In a great man's lifetime, and for many years
after, his fame and his fortunes live most effectually on living lips.
The talk of surviving kinsmen, fellow-craftsmen, admiring
acquaintances, and sympathetic friends is the treasure-house which
best preserves the personality of the dead hero for those who come
soon after him. When biography is unpractised, no other treasure-house
is available.
The report of such converse moves quickly from mouth to mouth. In its
progress the narration naturally grows fainter, and, when no
biographer lies in wait for it, ultimately perishes altogether. But
oral tradition respecting a great man whose work has fascinated the
imagination of his countrymen comes into circulation early, persists
long, even in the absence of biography, and safeguards substantial
elements of truth through many generations. Although no biographer put
in an appearance, it is seldom that some fragment of oral tradition
respecting a departed hero is not committed to paper by one or other
amateur gossip who comes within earshot of it early in its career. The
casual unsifted record of floating anecdote is not always above
suspicion. As a rule it is embodied in familiar correspondence, or in
diaries, or in commonplace books, where clear and definite language is
rarely met with; but, however disappointingly imperfect and trivial,
however disjointed, however deficient in literary form the registered
jottings of oral tradition may be, it is in them, if they exist at all
with any title to credit, that future ages best realise the fact that
the great man was in plain truth a living entity, and no mere shadow
of a name.
III
When Shakespeare died, on the 23rd of April, 1616, many men and women
were alive who had come into personal association with him, and there
were many more who had heard of him from those who had spoken with
him. Apart from his numerous kinsfolk and neighbours at
Stratford-on-Avon, there was in London a large society of
fellow-authors and fellow-actors with whom he lived in close
communion. Very little correspondence or other intimate memorials,
whether of Shakespeare's professional friends or of his kinsfolk or
country neighbours, survive. Nevertheless some scraps of the talk
about Shakespeare that circulated among his acquaintances or was
handed on by them to the next generation has been tracked to written
paper of the seventeenth century and to printed books. A portion of
these scattered memorabilia of the earliest known oral traditions
respecting Shakespeare has come to light very recently; other portions
have been long accessible. As a connected whole they have never been
narrowly scrutinised, and I believe it may serve a useful purpose to
consider with some minuteness how the mass of them came into being,
and what is the sum of information they conserve.
The more closely Shakespeare's career is studied the plainer it
becomes that his experiences and fortunes were identical with those of
all who followed in his day his profession of dramatist, and that his
conscious aims and ambitions and practices were those of every
contemporary man of letters. The difference between the results of his
endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magical and
involuntary working of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has
exercised "as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom it
pleases." Speculation or debate as to why genius bestowed its fullest
inspiration on Shakespeare is no less futile than speculation or
debate as to why he was born into the world with a head on his
shoulders instead of a block of stone. It is enough for wise men to
know the obvious fact that genius endowed Shakespeare with its richest
gifts, and a very small acquaintance with the literary history of the
world and with the manner in which genius habitually plays its part
there, will show the folly of cherishing astonishment that
Shakespeare, rather than one more nobly born or more academically
trained, should have been chosen for the glorious dignity. Nowhere is
this lesson more convincingly taught than by a systematic survey of
the oral tradition. Shakespeare figures there as a supremely favoured
heir of genius, whose humility of birth and education merely serves to
intensify the respect due to his achievement.
In London, where Shakespeare's work was mainly done and his fortune
and reputation achieved, he lived with none in more intimate social
relations than with the leading members of his own prosperous company
of actors, which, under the patronage of the king, produced his
greatest plays. Like himself, most of his colleagues were men of
substance, sharers with him in the two most fashionable theatres of
the metropolis, occupiers of residences in both town and country,
owners of houses and lands, and bearers of coat-armour of that
questionable validity which commonly attaches to the heraldry of the
_nouveaux riches_. Two of these affluent associates predeceased
Shakespeare; and one of them, Augustine Phillips, attested his
friendship in a small legacy. Three of Shakespeare's fellow-actors
were affectionately remembered by him in his will, and a fourth, one
of the youngest members of the company, proved his regard for
Shakespeare's memory by taking, a generation after the dramatist's
death, Charles Hart, Shakespeare's grand-nephew, into his employ as a
"boy" or apprentice. Grand-nephew Charles went forth on a prosperous
career, in which at its height he was seriously likened to his
grand-uncle's most distinguished actor-ally, Richard Burbage. Above
all is it to be borne in mind that to the disinterested admiration for
his genius of two fellow-members of Shakespeare's company we owe the
preservation and publication of the greater part of his literary work.
The personal fascination of "so worthy a friend and fellow as was our
Shakespeare" bred in all his fellow-workers an affectionate pride in
their intimacy.
Such men were the parents of the greater part of the surviving oral
tradition of Shakespeare, and no better parentage could be wished for.
To the first accessible traditions of proved oral currency after
Shakespeare's death, the two fellow-actors who called the great First
Folio into existence pledged their credit in writing only seven years
after his death. They printed in the preliminary pages of that volume
these three statements of common fame, viz., that to Shakespeare and
his plays in his lifetime was invariably extended the fullest favour
of the court and its leading officers; that death deprived him of the
opportunity he had long contemplated of preparing his literary work
for the press; and that he wrote with so rapidly flowing a pen that
his manuscript was never defaced by alteration or erasure.
Shakespeare's extraordinary rapidity of composition was an especially
frequent topic of contemporary debate. Ben Jonson, the most intimate
personal friend of Shakespeare outside the circle of working actors,
wrote how "the players" would "often mention" to him the poet's
fluency, and how he was in the habit of arguing that Shakespeare's
work would have been the better had he devoted more time to its
correction. The players, Ben Jonson adds, were wont to grumble that
such a remark was "malevolent," and he delighted in seeking to
vindicate it to them on what seemed to him to be just critical
grounds.
The copious deliverances of Jonson in the tavern-parliaments of the
London wits, which were in almost continuous session during the first
four decades of the seventeenth century, set flowing much other oral
tradition of Shakespeare, whom Jonson said he loved and whose memory
he honoured "on this side idolatry as much as any." One of Jonson's
remarks which seems to have lived longest on the lips of
contemporaries was that Shakespeare "was indeed honest and [like his
own Othello] of an open and free nature,[11] had an excellent
phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with
that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."
[Footnote 11: Iago says of Othello, in _Othello_ I., iii. 405: "The
Moor is _of a free and open nature_."]
To the same category of oral tradition belongs the further piece which
Fuller enshrined in his slender biography with regard to Shakespeare's
alert skirmishes with Ben Jonson in dialectical battle. Jonson's
dialectical skill was for a long period undisputed, and for gossip to
credit Shakespeare with victory in such conflict was to pay his
memory even more enviable honour than Jonson paid it in his own
_obiter dicta_.
There is yet an additional scrap of oral tradition which, reduced to
writing about the time that Fuller was at work, confirms Shakespeare's
reputation for quickness of wit in everyday life, especially in
intercourse with the critical giant Jonson. Dr Donne, the Jacobean
poet and dean of St Paul's, told, apparently on Jonson's authority,
the story that Shakespeare, having consented to act as godfather to
one of Jonson's sons, solemnly promised to give the child a dozen good
"_Latin_ spoons" for the father to "translate." _Latin_ was a play
upon the word "latten," which was the name of a metal resembling
brass. The simple quip was a good-humoured hit at Jonson's pride in
his classical learning. Dr Donne related the anecdote to Sir Nicholas
L'Estrange, a country gentleman of literary tastes, who had no
interest in Shakespeare except from the literary point of view. He
entered it in his commonplace book within thirty years of
Shakespeare's death.
IV
Of the twenty-five actors who are enumerated in a preliminary page of
the great First Folio, as filling in Shakespeare's lifetime chief
rôles in his plays, few survived him long. All of them came in
personal contact with him; several of them constantly appeared with
him on the stage from early days.
The two who were longest lived, John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, came at
length to bear a great weight of years. They were both Shakespeare's
juniors, Lowin by twelve years, and Taylor by twenty; but both
established their reputation before middle age. Lowin at twenty-seven
took part with Shakespeare in the first representation of Ben Jonson's
_Sejanus_ in 1603. He was an early, if not the first, interpreter of
the character of Falstaff. Taylor as understudy to the great actor
Burbage, a very close ally of Shakespeare, seems to have achieved some
success in the part of Hamlet, and to have been applauded in the rôle
of Iago, while the dramatist yet lived. When the dramatist died, Lowin
was forty, and Taylor over thirty.
Subsequently, as their senior colleagues one by one passed from the
world, these two actors assumed first rank in their company, and
before the ruin in which the Civil War involved all theatrical
enterprise, they were acknowledged to stand at the head of their
profession.[12] Taylor lived through the Commonwealth, and Lowin far
into the reign of Charles the Second, ultimately reaching his
ninety-third year. Their last days were passed in indigence, and Lowin
when an octogenarian was reduced to keeping the inn of the "Three
Pigeons," at Brentford.
[Footnote 12: Like almost all their colleagues, they had much literary
taste. When public events compulsorily retired them from the stage,
they, with the aid of the dramatist Shirley and eight other actors,
two of whom were members with them of Shakespeare's old company, did
an important service to English literature. In 1647 they collected for
first publication in folio Beaumont and Fletcher's plays; only one,
_The Wild Goose Chase_, was omitted, and that piece Taylor and Lowin
brought out by their unaided efforts five years later.]
Both these men kept alive from personal knowledge some oral
Shakespearean tradition during the fifty years and more that followed
his death. Little of their gossip is extant. But some of it was put
on record, before the end of the century, by John Downes, the old
prompter and librarian of a chief London theatre. According to
Downes's testimony, Taylor repeated instructions which he had received
from Shakespeare's own lips for the playing of the part of Hamlet,
while Lowin narrated how Shakespeare taught him the theatrical
interpretation of the character of Henry the Eighth, in that play of
the name which came from the joint pens of Shakespeare and Fletcher.
Both Taylor's and Lowin's reminiscences were passed on to Thomas
Betterton, the greatest actor of the Restoration, and the most
influential figure in the theatrical life of his day. Through him they
were permanently incorporated in the verbal stage-lore of the country.
No doubt is possible of the validity of this piece of oral tradition,
which reveals Shakespeare in the act of personally supervising the
production of his own plays, and springs from the mouths of those who
personally benefited by the dramatist's activity.
Taylor and Lowin were probably the last actors to speak of Shakespeare
from personal knowledge. But hardly less deserving of attention are
scraps of gossip about Shakespeare which survive in writing on the
authority of some of Taylor's and Lowin's actor-contemporaries. These
men were never themselves in personal relations with Shakespeare, but
knew many formerly in direct relation with him. Probably the
seventeenth century actor with the most richly stored memory of the
oral Shakespearean tradition was William Beeston, to whose house in
Hog Lane, Shoreditch, the curious often resorted in Charles the
Second's time to listen to his reminiscences of Shakespeare and of
the poets of Shakespeare's epoch.
Beeston died after a busy theatrical life, at eighty or upwards, in
1682. He belonged to a family of distinguished actors or
actor-managers. His father, brothers, and son were all, like himself,
prominent in the profession, and some of them were almost as
long-lived as himself. His own career combined with that of his father
covered more than a century, and both sedulously and with pride
cultivated intimacy with contemporary dramatic authors.
It was probably William Beeston's grandfather, also William Beeston,
to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593,
with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel
Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash
laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write
poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his
red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted
the first William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his
entertainment of threadbare scholars. Christopher Beeston, this man's
son, the father of the Shakespearean gossip, had in abundance the
hereditary taste for letters. He was at one time Shakespeare's
associate on the stage. Both took part together in the first
representation of Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_, in 1598. His
name was again linked with Shakespeare's in the will of their
fellow-actor, Augustine Phillips, who left each of them a legacy as a
token of friendship at his death in 1605. Christopher Beeston left
Shakespeare's company of actors for another theatre early in his
career, and his closest friend among the actor-authors of his day in
later life was not Shakespeare himself but Thomas Heywood, the popular
dramatist and pamphleteer, who lived on to 1650. This was a friendship
which kept Beeston's respect for Shakespeare at a fitting pitch.
Heywood, who wrote the affectionate lines:
Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose inchanting Quill
Commanded Mirth or Passion, was but _Will_,
enjoys the distinction of having published in Shakespeare's lifetime
the only expression of resentment that is known to have come from the
dramatist's proverbially "gentle lips." Shakespeare (Heywood wrote)
"was much offended" with an unprincipled publisher who "presumed to
make so bold with his name" as to put it to a book of which he was not
the author. And Beeston had direct concern with the volume called _An
Apology for Actors_, to which Heywood appended his report of these
words of Shakespeare. To the book the actor, Beeston, contributed
preliminary verses addressed to the author, his "good friend and
fellow, Thomas Heywood." There Beeston briefly vindicated the
recreation which the playhouse offered the public. Much else in
Christopher Beeston's professional career is known, but it is
sufficient to mention here that he died in 1637, while he was filling
the post that he had long held, of manager to the King and Queen's
Company of Players at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane. It was the
chief playhouse of the time, and his wife was lessee of it.
Christopher's son, William Beeston the second, was his father's
coadjutor at Drury Lane, and succeeded him in his high managerial
office there. The son encountered difficulties with the Government
through an alleged insult to the King in one of the pieces that he
produced, and he had to retire from the Cockpit to a smaller theatre
in Salisbury Court. Until his death he retained the respect of the
play-going and the literature-loving public, and his son George, whom
he brought up to the stage, carried on the family repute to a later
generation.
William Beeston had no liking for dissolute society, and the open vice
of Charles the Second's Court pained him. He lived in old age much in
seclusion, but by a congenial circle he was always warmly welcomed for
the freshness and enthusiasm of his talk about the poets who
flourished in his youth. "Divers times (in my hearing)," one of his
auditors, Francis Kirkman, an ardent collector, reader, and publisher
of old plays, wrote to him in 1652--"Divers times (in my hearing), to
the admiration of the whole company you have most judiciously
discoursed of Poesie." In the judgment of Kirkman, his friend, the old
actor, was "the happiest interpreter and judg of our English
stage-Playes this Nation ever produced; which the Poets and Actors
these times cannot (without ingratitude) deny; for I have heard the
chief, and most ingenious of them, acknowledg their Fames and Profits
essentially sprung from your instructions, judgment, and fancy." Few
who heard Beeston talk failed, Kirkman continues, to subscribe "to his
opinion that no Nation could glory in such Playes" as those that came
from the pens of the great Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and
Ben Jonson. "Glorious John Dryden" shared in the general enthusiasm
for the veteran Beeston, and bestowed on him the title of "the
chronicle of the stage"; while John Aubrey, the honest antiquary and
gossip, who had in his disorderly brain the makings of a Boswell,
sought Beeston's personal acquaintance about 1660, in order to "take
from him the lives of the old English Poets."
It is Aubrey who has recorded most of such sparse fragments of
Beeston's talk as survive--how Edmund "Spenser was a little man, wore
short hair, little bands, and short cuffs," and how Sir John Suckling
came to invent the game of cribbage. Naturally, of Shakespeare Beeston
has much to relate. In the shrewd old gossip's language, he "did act
exceedingly well," far better than Jonson; "he understood Latin pretty
well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the
country;" "he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and
of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit;" he and Ben Jonson gathered
"humours of men daily wherever they came." The ample testimony to the
excellent influence which Beeston exercised over "the poets and actors
of these times" leaves little doubt that Sir William D'Avenant,
Beeston's successor as manager at Drury Lane, and Thomas Shadwell, the
fashionable writer of comedies, largely echoed their old mentor's
words when, in conversation with Aubrey, they credited Shakespeare
with "a most prodigious wit," and declared that they "did admire his
natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers."[13]
[Footnote 13: Aubrey's _Lives_, being reports of his miscellaneous
gossip, were first fully printed from his manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library by the Clarendon Press in 1898. They were most carefully
edited by the Rev. Andrew Clark.]
John Lacy, another actor of Beeston's generation, who made an immense
reputation on the stage and was also a successful writer of farces,
was one of Beeston's closest friends, and, having been personally
acquainted with Ben Jonson, could lend to many of Beeston's stories
useful corroborative testimony. With Lacy, too, the gossip Aubrey
conversed of Shakespeare's career.
At the same time, the popularity of Shakespeare's grand-nephew,
Charles Hart, who was called the Burbage of his day, whetted among
actors the appetite for Shakespearean tradition, especially of the
theatrical kind. Hart had no direct acquaintance with his great
kinsman, who died fully ten years before he was born, while his
father, who was sixteen at Shakespeare's death, died in his son's
boyhood. But Hart's grandmother, the poet's sister, lived till he was
twenty-one, and Richard Robinson, the fellow-member of Shakespeare's
company who first taught Hart to act, survived his pupil's
adolescence. That Hart did what he could to satisfy the curiosity of
his companions there is a precise oral tradition to confirm. According
to the story, first put on record in the eighteenth century by the
painstaking antiquary, William Oldys, it was through Hart that some
actors made, near the date of the Restoration, the exciting discovery
that Gilbert, one of Shakespeare's brothers, who was the dramatist's
junior by only two years, was still living at a patriarchal age. Oldys
describes the concern with which Hart's professional acquaintances
questioned the old man about his brother, and their disappointment
when his failing memory only enabled him to recall William's
performance of the part of Adam in his comedy of _As You Like It_.
It should be added that Oldys obtained his information of the episode,
which deserves more attention than it has received, from an actor of
a comparatively recent generation, John Bowman, who died over eighty
in 1739, after spending "more than half an age on the London
theatres."
V