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Transcriber's note
Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. Obvious
printer errors have been corrected, and are listed at the end.
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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
BY JOHN MASEFIELD
LONDON
WILLIAMS & NORGATE
HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK
CANADA: WM. BRIGGS, TORONTO
INDIA: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
OF
MODERN KNOWLEDGE
_Editors:_
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT.,
LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(Columbia University, U.S.A.)
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
AUTHOR OF "THE TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT," "MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE,"
"LOST ENDEAVOUR," "CAPTAIN MARGARET," "THE TRAGEDY OF NAN," ETC.
NEW AND REVISED EDITION
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE 9
II THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES 18
III THE PLAYS 23
Love's Labour's Lost 24
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 34
The Comedy of Errors 43
Titus Andronicus 49
King Henry VI, Part I 51
" " " " II 54
" " " " III 60
A Midsummer Night's Dream 63
Romeo and Juliet 67
King John 75
King Richard II 86
King Richard III 93
The Merchant of Venice 102
The Taming of the Shrew 105
King Henry IV, Part I 109
" " " " II 114
King Henry V 120
The Merry Wives of Windsor 123
As You Like It 128
Much Ado About Nothing 133
Twelfth Night 138
All's Well that Ends Well 144
Julius Caesar 149
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 157
Troilus and Cressida 168
Measure for Measure 174
Othello, the Moor of Venice 180
King Lear 186
Macbeth 195
Antony and Cleopatra 202
Coriolanus 208
Timon of Athens 214
Pericles, Prince of Tyre 218
Cymbeline 223
The Winter's Tale 226
The Tempest 231
King Henry VIII 235
WORK ATTRIBUTED TO SHAKESPEARE 238
THE POEMS:
Venus and Adonis 241
The Rape of Lucrece 242
The Passionate Pilgrim 244
The Sonnets 244
The Phoenix and the Turtle 249
AUTHOR'S NOTE 250
INDEX 253
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER I
THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE
Stratford-on-Avon is cleaner, better paved, and perhaps more populous
than it was in Shakespeare's time. Several streets of mean red-brick
houses have been built during the last half century. Hotels, tea rooms,
refreshment rooms, and the shops where the tripper may buy things to
remind him that he has been where greatness lived, give the place an air
at once prosperous and parasitic. The town contains a few comely old
buildings. The Shakespeare house, a detached double dwelling, once the
home of the poet's father, stands on the north side of Henley Street. A
room on the first floor, at the western end, is shown to visitors as the
room in which the poet was born. There is not the slightest evidence to
show that he was born there. One scanty scrap of fact exists to suggest
that he was born at the eastern end. The two dwellings have now been
converted into one, which serves as a museum. New Place, the house where
Shakespeare died, was pulled down in the middle of the eighteenth
century. For one museum the less let us be duly thankful.
The church in which Shakespeare, his wife, and little son are buried
stands near the river. It is a beautiful building of a type common in
the Cotswold country. It is rather larger and rather more profusely
carved than most. Damp, or some mildness in the stone, has given much of
the ornament a weathered look. Shakespeare is buried seventeen feet down
near the north wall of the chancel. His wife is buried in another grave
a few feet from him.
The country about Stratford is uninteresting, pretty, and well watered.
A few miles away the Cotswold hills rise. They have a bold beauty, very
pleasant after the flatness of the plain. The wolds towards Stratford
grow many oaks and beeches. Farther east, they are wilder and barer.
Little brooks spring up among the hills. The nooks and valleys are
planted with orchards. Old, grey Cotswold farmhouses, and little, grey,
lovely Cotswold villages show that in Shakespeare's time the country was
prosperous and alive. It was sheep country then. The wolds were sheep
walks. Life took thought for Shakespeare. She bred him, mind and bone,
in a two-fold district of hill and valley, where country life was at its
best and the beauty of England at its bravest. Afterwards she placed him
where there was the most and the best life of his time. Work so calm as
his can only have come from a happy nature, happily fated. Life made a
golden day for her golden soul. The English blessed by that soul have
raised no theatre for the playing of the soul's thanksgiving.
Legends about Shakespeare began to spring up in Stratford as soon as
there was a demand for them. Legends are a stupid man's excuse for his
want of understanding. They are not evidence. Setting aside the legends,
the lies, the surmises and the imputations, several uninteresting things
are certainly known about him.
We know that he was the first son and third child of John Shakespeare, a
country trader settled at Stratford, and of Mary his wife; that he was
baptised on the 26th April, 1564; and that in 1582 he got with child a
woman named Anne or Agnes Hathaway, eight years older than himself. Her
relatives saw to it that he married her. A daughter (Susanna) was born
to him in May 1583, less than six months after the marriage. In January
1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet, who died in 1596) and a
daughter (Judith).
At this point he disappears. Legend, written down from a hundred to a
hundred and sixty years after the event, says that he was driven out of
the county for poaching, that he was a country school-master, that he
made a "very bitter" ballad upon a landlord, that he tramped to London,
that he held horses outside the theatre doors, and that at last he was
received into a theatrical company "in a very mean rank." This is all
legend, not evidence. That he was a lawyer's clerk, a soldier in the Low
Countries, a seaman, or a printer, as some have written books to attempt
to show, is not evidence, nor legend, but wild surmise. It might be
urged, with as great likelihood, that he became a king, an ancient
Roman, a tapster or a brothel keeper.
It is fairly certain that the company which first received him was the
Earl of Leicester's company, then performing at The Theatre in
Shoreditch. The company changed its patron and its theatre several
times, but Shakespeare, having been admitted to it, stayed with it
throughout his theatrical career. He acted with it at The Theatre, at
the Rose and Globe Theatres, at the Court, at the Inns of Court, and
possibly on many stages in the provinces. For many years he professed
the quality of actor. Legend says that he acted well in what are called
"character parts." Soon after his entrance into the profession he began
to show a talent for improving the plays of others.
Nothing interesting is known of his subsequent life, except that he
wrote great poetry and made money by it. It is plain that he was a
shrewd, careful, and capable man of affairs, and that he cared, as all
wise men care, for rank and an honourable state. He strove with a noble
industry to obtain these and succeeded. He prospered, he bought New
Place at Stratford, he invested in land, in theatre shares and in
houses. During the last few years of his life he retired to New Place,
where he led the life of a country gentleman. He died there on the 23rd
April, 1616, aged fifty-two years. The cause of his death is not known.
His wife and daughters survived him.
Little is known of his human relationships. He is described as "gentle."
Had he been not gentle we should know more of him. Ben Jonson "loved
the man," and says that "he was, indeed, honest and of an open and free
nature." John Webster speaks of his "right happy and copious industry."
An actor who wrote more than thirty plays during twenty years of
rehearsing, acting, and theatre management, can have had little time for
mixing with the world.
That we know little of his human relationships is one of the blessed
facts about him. That we conjecture much is the penalty a nation pays
for failing to know her genius when he appears.
Three portraits--a bust, an engraving, and a painting--have some claim
to be considered as genuine portraits of Shakespeare. The first of these
is the coloured half-length bust on the chancel wall in Stratford
Church. This was made by one Gerard Janssen, a stonemason of some
repute. It was placed in the church within seven years of the poet's
death. It is a crude work of art; but it shows plainly that the artist
had before him (in vision or in the flesh) a man of unusual vivacity of
mind. The face is that of an aloof and sunny spirit, full of energy and
effectiveness. Another portrait is that engraved for the title page of
the first folio, published in 1623. The engraving is by Martin
Droeshout, who was fifteen years old when Shakespeare died, and
(perhaps) about twenty-two when he made the engraving. It is a crude
work of art, but it shows plainly that the artist had before him the
representation of an unusual man.
It is possible that the representation from which he engraved his plate
was a painting on panel, now at Stratford. This painting (discovered in
1840) is now called "the Droeshout portrait." It is supposed to
represent the Shakespeare of the year 1609. In the absence of proof, all
that can be said of it is that it is certainly a work of the early
seventeenth century, and that it looks as though it were the original of
the engraving. No other "portrait of Shakespeare" has any claim to be
considered as even a doubtful likeness.
There are, unfortunately, many graven images of Shakespeare. They are
perhaps passable portraits of the languid, half-witted, hydrocephalic
creatures who made them. As representations of a bustling, brilliant,
profound, vivacious being, alive to the finger tips, and quick with an
energy never since granted to man, they are as false as water.