was the case, "viz., if the baptism were really solemnized on the
26th of May," the poet's first child would _appear_ to have
been born only six months and eleven days after the bond was
entered into. "And he then concludes that, on this assumption,"
Miss Susanna Shakspeare came into the world a little prematurely."
But this is to doubt where there never was any ground for doubting;
the baptism was _certainly_ on the 26th of May; and, in the
next place, the calculation of six months and eleven days is
sustained by substituting lunar months for calendar, and then only
by supposing the marriage to have been celebrated on the very day
of subscribing the bond in Worcester, and the baptism to have been
coincident with the birth; of which suppositions the latter is
improbable, and the former, considering the situation of Worcester,
impossible.
Strange it is, that, whilst all biographers have worked with so
much zeal upon the most barren dates or most baseless traditions in
the great poet's life, realizing in a manner the chimeras of
Laputa, and endeavoring "to extract sunbeams from cucumbers," such
a story with regard to such an event, no fiction of village
scandal, but involved in legal documents, a story so significant
and so eloquent to the intelligent, should formerly have been
dismissed without notice of any kind, and even now, after the
discovery of 1836, with nothing beyond a slight conjectural
insinuation. For our parts, we should have been the last amongst
the biographers to unearth any forgotten scandal, or, after so vast
a lapse of time, and when the grave had shut out all but charitable
thoughts, to point any moral censures at a simple case of natural
frailty, youthful precipitancy of passion, of all trespasses the
most venial, where the final intentions are honorable. But in this
case there seems to have been something more in motion than passion
or the ardor of youth. "I like not," says Parson Evans, (alluding
to Falstaff in masquerade,) "I like not when a woman has a great
peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler." Neither do we like
the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her
majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy
who had still two years and a half to run of his minority.
Shakspeare himself, looking back on this part of his youthful
history from his maturest years, breathes forth pathetic counsels
against the errors into which his own inexperience had been
insnared. The disparity of years between himself and his wife he
notices in a beautiful scene of the Twelfth Night. The Duke Orsino,
observing the sensibility which the pretended Cesario had betrayed
on hearing some touching old snatches of a love strain, swears that
his beardless page must have felt the passion of love, which the
other admits. Upon this the dialogue proceeds thus:
DUKE. What kind of woman is't?
VIOLA. Of your complexion.
DUKE. She is not worth thee then. What years?
VIOLA. I' faith, About your years, my lord.
DUKE. Too old, by heaven. _Let still the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart._
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are.
VIOLA. I think it well, my lord.
DUKE. _Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;_
For women are as roses, whose fair flower,
Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.
These counsels were uttered nearly twenty years after the event in
his own life, to which they probably look back; for this play is
supposed to have been written in Shakspeare's thirty-eighth year.
And we may read an earnestness in pressing the point as to the
_inverted_ disparity of years, which indicates pretty clearly
an appeal to the lessons of his personal experience. But his other
indiscretion, in having yielded so far to passion and opportunity
as to crop by prelibation, and before they were hallowed, those
flowers of paradise which belonged to his marriage day; this he
adverts to with even more solemnity of sorrow, and with more
pointed energy of moral reproof, in the very last drama which is
supposed to have proceeded from his pen, and therefore with the
force and sanctity of testamentary counsel. The Tempest is all but
ascertained to have been composed in 1611, that is, about five
years before the poet's death; and indeed could not have been
composed much earlier; for the very incident which suggested the
basis of the plot, and of the local scene, viz., the shipwreck of
Sir George Somers on the Bermudas, (which were in consequence
denominated the Somers' Islands,) did not occur until the year
1609. In the opening of the fourth act, Prospero formally betrothes
his daughter to Ferdinand; and in doing so he pays the prince a
well-merited compliment of having "worthily purchas'd" this rich
jewel, by the patience with which, for her sake, he had supported
harsh usage, and other painful circumstances of his trial. But, he
adds solemnly,
"If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd;"
in that case what would follow?
"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._ Therefore take heed,
As Hymen's lamps shall light you."
The young prince assures him in reply, that no strength of
opportunity, concurring with the uttermost temptation, not
"the murkiest den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion
Our worser genius can----,"
should ever prevail to lay asleep his jealousy of self-control, so
as to take any advantage of Miranda's innocence. And he adds an
argument for this abstinence, by way of reminding Prospero, that
not honor only, but even prudential care of his own happiness, is
interested in the observance of his promise. Any unhallowed
anticipation would, as he insinuates,
"take away
The edge of that day's celebration,
When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are founder'd,
Or night kept chain'd below;"
that is, when even the winged hours would seem to move too slowly.
Even thus Prospero is not quite satisfied. During his subsequent
dialogue with Ariel, we are to suppose that Ferdinand, in
conversing apart with Miranda, betrays more impassioned ardor than
the wise magician altogether approves. The prince's caresses have
not been unobserved; and thus Prospero renews his warning:
"Look thou be true: do not give dalliance
Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw
To the fire i' the blood: be more abstemious,
Or else--good night your vow."
The royal lover reassures him of his loyalty to his engagements;
and again the wise father, so honorably jealous for his daughter,
professes himself satisfied with the prince's pledges.
Now in all these emphatic warnings, uttering the language "of that
sad wisdom folly leaves behind," who can avoid reading, as in
subtle hieroglyphics, the secret record of Shakspeare's own nuptial
disappointments? We, indeed, that is, universal posterity through
every age, have reason to rejoice in these disappointments; for to
them, past all doubt, we are indebted for Shakspeare's subsequent
migration to London, and his public occupation, which, giving him a
deep pecuniary interest in the productions of his pen, such as no
other literary application of his powers could have approached in
that day, were eventually the means of drawing forth those divine
works which have survived their author for our everlasting benefit.
Our own reading and deciphering of the whole case is as follows.
The Shakspeares were a handsome family, both father and sons. This
we assume upon the following grounds: First, on the presumption
arising out of John Shakspeare's having won the favor of a young
heiress higher in rank than himself; secondly, on the presumption
involved in the fact of three amongst his four sons having gone
upon the stage, to which the most obvious (and perhaps in those
days a _sine qua non_) recommendation would be a good person
and a pleasing countenance; thirdly, on the direct evidence of
Aubrey, who assures us that William Shakspeare was a handsome and a
well-shaped man; fourthly, on the implicit evidence of the
Stratford monument, which exhibits a man of good figure and noble
countenance; fifthly, on the confirmation of this evidence by the
Chandos portrait, which exhibits noble features, illustrated by the
utmost sweetness of expression; sixthly, on the selection of
theatrical parts, which it is known that Shakspeare personated,
most of them being such as required some dignity of form, viz.,
kings, the athletic (though aged) follower of an athletic young
man, and supernatural beings. On these grounds, direct or
circumstantial, we believe ourselves warranted in assuming that
William Shakspeare was a handsome and even noble looking boy. Miss
Anne Hathaway had herself probably some personal attractions; and,
if an indigent girl, who looked for no pecuniary advantages, would
probably have been early sought in marriage. But as the daughter of
"a substantial yeoman," who would expect some fortune in his
daughter's suitors, she had, to speak coarsely, a little outlived
her market. Time she had none to lose. William Shakspeare pleased
her eye; and the gentleness of his nature made him an apt subject
for female blandishments, possibly for female arts. Without
imputing, however, to this Anne Hathaway any thing so hateful as a
settled plot for insnaring him, it was easy enough for a mature
woman, armed with such inevitable advantages of experience and of
self-possession, to draw onward a blushing novice; and, without
directly creating opportunities, to place him in the way of turning
to account such as naturally offered. Young boys are generally
flattered by the condescending notice of grown-up women; and
perhaps Shakspeare's own lines upon a similar situation, to a young
boy adorned with the same natural gifts as himself, may give us the
key to the result:
"Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd;
And, when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevail'd?"
Once, indeed, entangled in such a pursuit, any person of manly
feelings would be sensible that he had no retreat; _that_
would be--to insult a woman, grievously to wound her sexual pride,
and to insure her lasting scorn and hatred. These were consequences
which the gentle-minded Shakspeare could not face. He pursued his
good fortunes, half perhaps in heedlessness, half in desperation,
until he was roused by the clamorous displeasure of her family upon
first discovering the situation of their kinswoman. For such a
situation there could be but one atonement, and that was hurried
forward by both parties; whilst, out of delicacy towards the bride,
the wedding was not celebrated in Stratford, (where the register
contains no notice of such an event); nor, as Malone imagined, in
Weston-upon-Avon, that being in the diocese of Gloucester; but in
some parish, as yet undiscovered, in the diocese of Worcester.
But now arose a serious question as to the future maintenance of
the young people. John Shakspeare was depressed in his
circumstances, and he had other children besides William, viz.,
three sons and a daughter. The elder lives have represented him as
burdened with ten; but this was an error, arising out of the
confusion between John Shakspeare the glover, and John Shakspeare a
shoemaker. This error has been thus far of use, that, by exposing
the fact of two John Shakspeares (not kinsmen) residing in
Stratford-upon-Avon, it has satisfactorily proved the name to be
amongst those which are locally indigenous to Warwickshire.
Meantime it is now ascertained that John Shakspeare the glover had
only eight children, viz., four daughters and four sons. The order
of their succession was this: Joan, Margaret, WILLIAM, Gilbert, a
second Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. Three of the daughters,
viz., the two eldest of the family, Joan and Margaret, together
with Anne, died in childhood. All the rest attained mature ages,
and of these William was the eldest. This might give him some
advantage in his father's regard; but in a question of pecuniary
provision precedency amongst the children of an insolvent is nearly
nominal. For the present John Shakspeare could do little for his
son; and, under these circumstances, perhaps the father of Anne
Hathaway would come forward to assist the new-married couple. This
condition of dependency would furnish matter for painful feelings
and irritating words. The youthful husband, whose mind would be
expanding as rapidly as the leaves and blossoms of spring-time in
polar latitudes, would soon come to appreciate the sort of wiles by
which he had been caught. The female mind is quick, and almost
gifted with the power of witchcraft, to decipher what is passing in
the thoughts of familiar companions. Silent and forbearing as
William Shakspeare might be, Anne, his staid wife, would read his
secret reproaches; ill would she dissemble her wrath, and the less
so from the consciousness of having deserved them. It is no
uncommon case for women to feel anger in connection with one
subject, and to express it in connection with another; which other,
perhaps, (except as a serviceable mask,) would have been a matter
of indifference to their feelings. Anne would, therefore, reply to
those inevitable reproaches which her own sense must presume to be
lurking in her husband's heart, by others equally stinging, on his
inability to support his family, and on his obligations to her
father's purse. Shakspeare, we may be sure, would be ruminating
every hour on the means of his deliverance from so painful a
dependency; and at length, after four years' conjugal discord, he
would resolve upon that plan of solitary emigration to the
metropolis, which, at the same time that it released him from the
humiliation of domestic feuds, succeeded so splendidly for his
worldly prosperity, and with a train of consequences so vast for
all future ages.
Such, we are persuaded, was the real course of Shakspeare's
transition from school-boy pursuits to his public career. And upon
the known temperament of Shakspeare, his genial disposition to
enjoy life without disturbing his enjoyment by fretting anxieties,
we build the conclusion, that had his friends furnished him with
ampler funds, and had his marriage been well assorted or happy,
we--the world of posterity--should have lost the whole benefit and
delight which we have since reaped from his matchless faculties.
The motives which drove him _from_ Stratford are clear enough;
but what motives determined his course _to_ London, and
especially to the stage, still remains to be explained.
Stratford-upon-Avon, lying in the high road from London through
Oxford to Birmingham, (or more generally to the north,) had been
continually visited by some of the best comedians during
Shakspeare's childhood. One or two of the most respectable
metropolitan actors were natives of Stratford. These would be well
known to the elder Shakspeare. But, apart from that accident, it is
notorious that mere legal necessity and usage would compel all
companies of actors, upon coming into any town, to seek, in the
first place, from the chief magistrate, a license for opening a
theatre, and next, over and above this public sanction, to seek his
personal favor and patronage. As an alderman, therefore, but still
more whilst clothed with the official powers of chief magistrate,
the poet's father would have opportunities of doing essential
services to many persons connected with the London stage. The
conversation of comedians acquainted with books, fresh from the
keen and sparkling circles of the metropolis, and filled with racy
anecdotes of the court, as well as of public life generally, could
not but have been fascinating, by comparison with the stagnant
society of Stratford. Hospitalities on a liberal scale would be
offered to these men. Not impossibly this fact might be one
principal key to those dilapidations which the family estate had
suffered. These actors, on _their_ part, would retain a
grateful sense of the kindness they had received, and would seek to
repay it to John Shakspeare, now that he was depressed in his
fortunes, as opportunities might offer. His eldest son, growing up
a handsome young man, and beyond all doubt from his earliest days
of most splendid colloquial powers, (for assuredly of _him_ it
may be taken for granted),
"Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre,"
would be often reproached in a friendly way for burying himself in
a country life. These overtures, prompted alike by gratitude to the
father, and a real selfish interest in the talents of the son,
would at length take a definite shape; and, upon, some clear
understanding as to the terms of such an arrangement, William
Shakspeare would at length, (about 1586, according to the received
account, that is, in the fifth year of his married life, and the
twenty-third or twenty-fourth of his age,) unaccompanied by wife or
children, translate himself to London. Later than 1586 it could not
well be; for already in 1589 it has been recently ascertained that
he held a share in the property of a leading theatre.
We must here stop to notice, and the reader will allow us to notice
with summary indignation, the slanderous and idle tale which
represents Shakspeare as having fled to London in the character of
a criminal, from the persecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot.
This tale has long been propagated under two separate impulses.
Chiefly, perhaps, under the vulgar love of pointed and glaring
contrasts; the splendor of the man was in this instance brought
into a sort of epigrammatic antithesis with the humility of his
fortunes; secondly, under a baser impulse, the malicious pleasure
of seeing a great man degraded. Accordingly, as in the case of
Milton, [Endnote: 16] it has been affirmed that Shakspeare had
suffered corporal chastisement, in fact, (we abhor to utter such
words,) that he had been judicially whipped. Now, first of all, let
us mark the inconsistency of this tale. The poet was whipped, that
is, he was punished most disproportionately, and yet he fled to
avoid punishment. Next, we are informed that his offence was
deer-stealing, and from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. And it has
been well ascertained that Sir Thomas had no deer, and had no park.
Moreover, deer-stealing was regarded by our ancestors exactly as
poaching is regarded by us. Deer ran wild in all the great forests;
and no offence was looked upon as so venial, none so compatible
with a noble Robin-Hood style of character, as this very trespass
upon what were regarded as _ferae naturae_, and not at all as
domestic property. But had it been otherwise, a trespass was not
punishable with whipping; nor had Sir Thomas Lucy the power to
irritate a whole community like Stratford-upon-Avon, by branding
with permanent disgrace a young man so closely connected with three
at least of the best families in the neighborhood. Besides, had
Shakspeare suffered any dishonor of that kind, the scandal would
infallibly have pursued him at his very heels to London; and in
that case Greene, who has left on record, in a posthumous work of
1592, his malicious feelings towards Shakspeare, could not have
failed to notice it. For, be it remembered, that a judicial
flagellation contains a twofold ignominy. Flagellation is
ignominious in its own nature, even though unjustly inflicted, and
by a ruffian; secondly, any judicial punishment is ignominous, even
though not wearing a shade of personal degradation. Now a judicial
flagellation includes both features of dishonor. And is it to be
imagined that an enemy, searching with the diligence of malice for
matter against Shakspeare, should have failed, six years after the
event, to hear of that very memorable disgrace which had exiled him
from Stratford, and was the very occasion of his first resorting to
London; or that a leading company of players in the metropolis,
_one of whom_, and a chief one, _was his own townsman_,
should cheerfully adopt into their society, as an honored partner,
a young man yet flagrant from the lash of the executioner or the
beadle?
This tale is fabulous, and rotten to its core; yet even this does
less dishonor to Shakspeare's memory than the sequel attached to
it. A sort of scurrilous rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so
loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression,
that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been
imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe.
The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir
Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let
there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a
goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a production
of Charles II.'s reign, and applied to a Sir Thomas Lucy, not very
far removed, if at all, from the age of him who first picked up the
pecious filth. The phrase "parliament _member_" we believe to
be quite unknown in the colloquial use of Queen Elizabeth's reign.
But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous
calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its
final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit
this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation
of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us
recapitulate the points of the story. A baronet, who has no deer
and no park, is supposed to persecute a poet for stealing these
aerial deer out of this aerial park, both lying in
_nephelococcygia_. The poet sleeps upon this wrong for
eighteen years; but at length, hearing that his persecutor is dead
and buried, he conceives bloody thoughts of revenge. And this
revenge he purposes to execute by picking a hole in his dead
enemy's coat-of-arms. Is this coat-of-arms, then, Sir Thomas
Lucy's? Why, no; Malone admits that it is not. For the poet,
suddenly recollecting that this ridicule would settle upon the son
of his enemy, selects another coat-of-arms, with which his dead
enemy never had any connection, and he spends his thunder and
lighting upon this irrelevant object; and, after all, the ridicule
itself lies in a Welchman's mispronouncing one single heraldic
term--a Welchman who mispronounces all words. The last act of the
poet's malice recalls to us a sort of jest-book story of an
Irishman, the vulgarity of which the reader will pardon in
consideration of its relevancy. The Irishman having lost a pair of
silk stockings, mentions to a friend that he has taken steps for
recovering them by an advertisement, offering a reward to the
finder. His friend objects that the costs of advertising, and the
reward, would eat out the full value of the silk stockings. But to
this the Irishman replies, with a knowing air, that he is not so
green as to have overlooked _that_; and that, to keep down the
reward, he had advertised the stockings as worsted. Not at all less
flagrant is the bull ascribed to Shakspeare, when he is made to
punish a dead man by personalities meant for his exclusive ear,
through his coat-of-arms, but at the same time, with the express
purpose of blunting and defeating the edge of his own scurrility,
is made to substitute for the real arms some others which had no
more relation to the dead enemy than they had to the poet himself.
This is the very sublime of folly, beyond which human dotage cannot
advance.
It is painful, indeed, and dishonorable to human nature, that
whenever men of vulgar habits and of poor education wish to impress
us with a feeling of respect for a man's talents, they are sure to
cite, by way of evidence, some gross instance of malignity. Power,
in their minds, is best illustrated by malice or by the infliction
of pain. To this unwelcome fact we have some evidence in the
wretched tale which we have just dismissed; and there is another of
the same description to be found in all lives of Shakspeare, which
we will expose to the contempt of the reader whilst we are in this
field of discussion, that we may not afterwards have to resume so
disgusting a subject.
This poet, who was a model of gracious benignity in his manners,
and of whom, amidst our general ignorance, thus much is perfectly
established, that the term _gentle_ was almost as generally
and by prescriptive right associated with his name as the affix of
_venerable_ with Bede, or _judicious_ with Hooker, is
alleged to have insulted a friend by an imaginary epitaph beginning
"_Ten in the Hundred_" and supposing him to be damned, yet
without wit enough (which surely the Stratford bellman could have
furnished) for devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a
supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The
_sharpness of the satire_ is said to have stung the man so
much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the
tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail
is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, _Ten
in the Hundred_ could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any
more than to call a man _Three-and-a-half-per-cent_. in this
present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons
who built their morality upon the Jewish ceremonial law. Shakspeare
himself took ten per cent. _2dly_, It happens that John Combe,
so far from being the object of the poet's scurrility, or viewing
the poet as an object of implacable resentment, was a Stratford
friend; that one of his family was affectionately remembered in
Shakspeare's will by the bequest of his sword; and that John Combe
himself recorded his perfect charity with Shakspeare by leaving him
a legacy of 5L sterling. And in this lies the key to the whole
story. For, _3dly_, The four lines were written and printed
before Shakspeare was born. The name Combe is a common one; and
some stupid fellow, who had seen the name in Shakspeare's will, and
happened also to have seen the lines in a collection of epigrams,
chose to connect the cases by attributing an identity to the two
John Combes, though at war with chronology.
Finally, there is another specimen of doggerel attributed to
Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy of him, because not
equally malignant, but otherwise equally below his intellect, no
less than his scholarship; we mean the inscription on his
grave-stone. This, as a sort of _siste viator_ appeal to
future sextons, is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk,
who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique
formula, like the vulgar record of ownership in books--
"Anthony Timothy Dolthead's hook,
God give him grace therein to look."
Thus far the matter is of little importance; and it might
have been supposed that malignity itself could hardly have imputed
such trash to Shakspeare. But when we find, even in this short
compass, scarcely wider than the posy of a ring, room found for
traducing the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that the
leading sentiment, the horror expressed at any disturbance offered
to his bones, is not one to which Shakspeare could have attached
the slightest weight; far less could have outraged the sanctities
of place and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever (and,
according to the fiction of the case, his farewell sentiment) the
sanction of a curse.
Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of this great man,
have led us into a digression that might have been unseasonable in
any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver
his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never
more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless
biographer impute to Shakspeare the asinine doggerel with which the
uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his
name to be dishonored. We now resume the thread of our biography.
The stream of history is centuries in working itself clear of any
calumny with which it has once been polluted.
Most readers will be aware of an old story, according to which
Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some time after coming to
London by holding the horses of those who rode to the play. This
legend is as idle as any one of those which we have just exposed.
No custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play.
Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would assuredly not expose
them systematically to the injury of standing exposed to cold for
two or even four hours; and persons of inferior rank would not ride
on horseback in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed,
stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to meet the
public wants; and in some of the dramatic sketches of the day,
which noticed every fashion as it arose, this would not have been
overlooked. The story is traced originally to Sir William Davenant.
Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it from him,
passed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, Pope to Bishop Newton, the
editor of Milton, and Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the
fable, however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies the
chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much less absurd,
represents Shakspeare as having from the very first been borne upon
the establishment of the theatre, and so far contradicts the other
fable, but originally in the very humble character of
_call-boy_ or deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon
each performer according to his order of coming upon the stage.
This story, however, quite as much as the other, is irreconcileable
with the discovery recently made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589
Shakspeare was a shareholder in the important property of a
principal London theatre. It seems destined that all the undoubted
facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us through the channel of
legal documents, which are better evidence even than imperial
medals; whilst, on the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes, not
having an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the fictions
of the wonder maker. The plain presumption from the record of
Shakspeare's situation in 1589, coupled with the fact that his
first arrival in London was possibly not until 1587, but according
to the earliest account not before 1586, a space of time which
leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of situation,
seems to be, that, either in requital of services done to the
players by the poet's family, or in consideration of money advanced
by his father-in-law, or on account of Shakspeare's personal
accomplishments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic works to
the stage; for one of these reasons, or for all of them united,
William Shakspeare, about the 23d year of his age, was adopted into
the partnership of a respectable histrionic company, possessing a
first-rate theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in
which he came up to London, it seems probable enough that his
immediate motive to that step was the increasing distress of his
father; for in that year John Shakspeare resigned the office of
alderman. There is, however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare
might have gone to London about the time when he completed his
twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, but not earlier.
Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest daughter Susanna,
his wife lay in for a second and a _last_ time; but she then
brought her husband twins, a son and a daughter. These children
were baptized in February of the year 1585; so that Shakspeare's
whole family of three children were born and baptized two months
before he completed his majority. The twins were baptized by the
names of Hamnet and Judith, those being the names of two amongst
their sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, which is a
remarkable name in itself, becomes still more so from its
resemblance to the immortal name of Hamlet [Endnote: 17] the Dane;
it was, however, the real baptismal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of
Shakspeare's, about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare's
son must then have been most interesting to his heart, both as a
twin child and as his only boy. He died in 1596, when he was about
eleven years old. Both daughters survived their father; both
married; both left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the
succession from the great poet. But all the four grandchildren died
without offspring.
Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare the man, as
distinguished from the author, there remains little more to record.
Already in 1592, Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit,
had expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the following
sentence: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers;
in his own conceit the only _Shakscene_ in a country!" This
alludes to Shakspeare's office of recasting, and even recomposing,
dramatic works, so as to fit them for representation; and Master
Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estimation, or in
his purse, by the alterations in some piece of his own, which the
duty of Shakspeare to the general interests of the theatre had
obliged him to make. In 1591 it has been supposed that Shakspeare
wrote his first drama, the Two Gentlemen of Verona; the least
characteristically marked of all his plays, and, with the exception
of Love's Labors Lost, the least interesting.
From this year, 1591 to that of 1611, are just twenty years, within
which space lie the whole dramatic creations of Shakspeare,
averaging nearly one for every six months. In 1611 was written the
Tempest, which is supposed to have been the last of all
Shakspeare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Campbell feelingly
observes, it has "a sort of sacredness;" and it is a most
remarkable fact, and one calculated to make a man superstitious,
that in this play the great enchanter Prospero, in whom," _as if
conscious_, "says Mr. Campbell," _that this would be his last
work_, the poet has been _inspired to typify himself as_ a
wise, potent, and _benevolent magician_" of whom, indeed, as
of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that "within that circle"
(the circle of his own art)" none durst tread but he, "solemnly and
for ever renounces his mysterious functions, symbolically breaks
his enchanter's wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his
science, and his secrets,
"Deeper than did ever plummet sound."
Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and from the voice of
Prospero, issues that magnificent prophecy of the total destruction
which should one day swallow up
"The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit."
And this prophecy is followed immediately by a most profound
ejaculation, gathering into one pathetic abstraction the total
philosophy of life:
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep;"
that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish vigils,
surrounded and islanded by a shoreless ocean of sleep--sleep before
birth, sleep after death.
These remarkable passages were probably not undesigned; but if we
suppose them to have been thrown off without conscious notice of
their tendencies, then, according to the superstition of the
ancient Grecians, they would have been regarded as prefiguring
words, prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every man,
such as insure along with them their own accomplishment. With or
without intention, however, it is believed that Shakspeare wrote
nothing more after this exquisite romantic drama. With respect to
the remainder of his personal history, Dr. Drake and others have
supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 to 1611, he
visited Stratford often, and latterly once a year.
In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; in 1596 he had a
considerable share. Through Lord Southampton, as a surviving friend
of Lord Essex, who was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish
politics, there can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the
favor of James I.; and accordingly, on the 29th of May, 1603, about
two months after the king's accession to the throne of England, a
patent was granted to the company of players who possessed the
Globe theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands second.
This patent raised the company to the rank of his majesty's
servants, whereas previously they are supposed to have been simply
the servants of the Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps it was in grateful
acknowledgment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in
1606, paid that sublime compliment to the house of Stuart, which is
involved in the vision shown to Macbeth. This vision is managed
with exquisite skill. It was impossible to display the whole series
of princes from Macbeth to James I.; but he beholds the posterity
of Banquo, one "gold-bound brow" succeeding to another, until he
comes to an eighth apparition of a Scottish king,
"Who bears a glass
Which shows him many more; and some he sees
Who twofold balls and treble sceptres carry;"
thus bringing down without tedium the long succession to the very
person of James I., by the symbolic image of the two crowns united
on one head.
About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had become rich
enough to purchase the best house in Stratford, called _The Great
House_, which name he altered to _New Place_; and in 1602
he bought one hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a
sum (320L) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of modern money.
Malone thinks that he purchased the house as early as 1597; and it
is certain that about that time he was able to assist his father in
obtaining a renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and
therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's fortunes. Ten
years of well-directed industry, viz., from 1591 to 1601, and the
prosperity of the theatre in which he was a proprietor, had raised
him to affluence; and after another ten years, improved with the
same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or
(according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L,
per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope
the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain,
has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom,
if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or
five latter years of his life Shakspeare passed in dignified ease,
in profound meditation, we may be sure, and in universal respect,
at his native town of Stratford; and there he died, on the 23d of
April, 1616. [Endnote: 18]
His daughter Susanna had been married on the 5th of June of the
year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, [Endnote: 19] a physician in
Stratford. The doctor died in November, 1635, aged sixty; his wife,
at the age of sixty-six, on July 11, 1640. They had one child, a
daughter, named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 1626, to
Thomas Nashe, Esq., left a widow in 1647, and subsequently
remarried to Sir John Barnard; but this Lady Barnard, the sole
grand-daughter of the poet, had no children by either marriage. The
other daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten weeks
before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas Quincy of Stratford,
by whom she had three sons, Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith
was about thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage; and
living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in February, 1662,
at the age of seventy-seven. Her three sons died without issue; and
thus, in the direct lineal descent, it is certain that no
representative has survived of this transcendent poet, the most
august amongst created intellects.
After this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes our duty to take
a summary survey of his works, of his intellectual powers, and of
his station in literature, a station which is now irrevocably
settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast
overbalance of favorable suffrages, as by acclamation; not so much
by the _voices_ of those who admire him up to the verge of
idolatry, as by the _acts_ of those who everywhere seek for
his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and
crave them as they do their daily bread; not so much by eulogy
openly proclaiming itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the
endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us; not so much by
his own compatriots, who, with regard to almost every other author,
[Endnote: 20] compose the total amount of his _effective_
audience, as by the unanimous "all hail!" of intellectual
Christendom; finally, not by the hasty partisanship of his own
generation, nor by the biassed judgment of an age trained in the
same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself,--but by the
solemn award of generation succeeding to generation, of one age
correcting the obliquities or peculiarities of another; by the
verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed
since the very _latest_ of his creations, or of two hundred
and forty-seven years if we date from the earliest; a verdict which
has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched,
vexed, by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and
intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile
which feeble heads and great ignorance could suggest when
cooperating with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities; a verdict,
in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of
writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever
before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he
who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian.
It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish
publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased
authors by forged writings, that he was "among the new terrors of
death." But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare,
that he is among the modern luxuries of life; that life, in fact,
is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare has
extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark
frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even
suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are)
by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance,--a single
instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation,
--the possible beauty of the female character had not been seen as
in a dream before Shakspeare called into perfect life the radiant
shapes of Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of
Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier
by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized
portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and
unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let
not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this
field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The
_Antigone_ and the _Electra_ of the tragic poets are the
two leading female characters that classical antiquity offers to
our respect, but assuredly not to our impassioned love, as
disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge
our admiration, severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial
duty, cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old man; or
of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of a brother under
circumstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect
self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming
before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report
of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic
fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies
of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous
gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely
descent, and that she herself was "a lady in the land." These are
fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breathing realities
of Shakspeare; there is "no speculation" in their cold marble eyes;
the breath of life is not in their nostrils; the fine pulses of
womanly sensibilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And
besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony
reflexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the
true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must he observed that the
Antigones, &c. of the antique put forward but one single trait of
character, like the aloe with its single blossom. This solitary
feature is presented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated
quality; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the
_concrete_; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, as
by some effort of an anatomical artist; but embodied and imbedded,
so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex
system of a human life; a life in which all the elements move and
play simultaneously, and with something more than mere simultaneity
or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other, nay,
even acting by each other and through each other. In Shakspeare's
characters is felt for ever a real _organic_ life, where each
is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole is for each
and in each. They only are real incarnations.
The Greek poets could not exhibit any approximations to
_female_ character, without violating the truth of Grecian
life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. The drama with the
Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of
human life; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely
be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were
secluded from the society of men. The conventual sequestration of
the hareem, or female apartment [Endnote: 22] of the house, and
the Mahommedan consecration of its threshold against the ingress of
males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of
years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus
barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develop or
express any character by word or action. Even to _have_ a
character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of
feminine excellence; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too
little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to
_express_ a character was impossible under the common tenor of
Grecian life, unless when high tragical catastrophes transcended
the decorums of that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the
curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women
play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the
paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (_OEdipus
Tyrannus_ of Sophocles), there is virtually no woman at all; for
Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the
self-murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contributions to the
fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says
spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not
address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by
shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen. And hence followed,
not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but
also a second result still more favorable to the sense of a new
power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever the common law of Grecian
life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending
force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a
moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even
the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot,
and would call some of them into action. But which? Precisely those
of energetic and masculine minds; the timid and feminine would but
shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened,
that such female characters as _were_ exhibited in Greece,
could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene
appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic sister
Antigone, (and chiefly, perhaps, by way of drawing out the fiercer
character of that sister,) she was soon dismissed as unfit for
scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but,
moreover, of these few the majority were but repetitions of
masculine qualities in female persons. Female agency being seldom
summoned on the stage, except when it had received a sort of
special dispensation from its sexual character, by some terrific
convulsions of the house or the city, naturally it assumed the
style of action suited to these circumstances. And hence it arose,
that not woman as she differed from man, but woman as she resembled
man--woman, in short, seen under circumstances so dreadful as to
abolish the effect of sexual distinction, was the woman of the
Greek tragedy. [Endnote: 23] And hence generally arose for
Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect
novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere
varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or
Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the
tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty
of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive,
but woman "after her kind"--the other hemisphere of the dramatic
world; woman, running through the vast gamut of womanly loveliness;
woman, as emancipated, exalted, ennobled, under a new law of
Christian morality; woman, the sister and coequal of man, no longer
his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel." It is a far cry
to Loch Awe; "and from the Athenian stage to the stage of
Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True; but
prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The
Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put
out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphitheatre, just as a
candle is made pale and ridiculous by daylight. Those who were
fresh from the real murders of the bloody amphitheatre regarded
with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too
coarse and too intense had its usual effect in making the
sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who
abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that
time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of
death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of
Shakspeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries
and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euripides, the last of the
surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor
of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are
next neighbors to America, although three thousand watery columns,
each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other.
A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective
power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast
which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let
us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was
not primarily to develop human _character_, whether in men or
in women: human _fates_ were its object; great tragic
situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly
descried at intervals, and brooding over human life by mysterious
agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the
representative of an august _will_, man the passion-puppet of
fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character,
which is a distinction between man and man, emanating originally
from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the
large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of
character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the
dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That
explanation will sufficiently clear up the reason why marked or
complex variety of character was slighted by the great principles
of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand
drama of Greece with feeling,--that drama, so magnificent, so
regal, so stately,--and who has thoughtfully investigated its
principles, and its difference from the English drama, will
acknowledge that powerful and elaborate character, character, for
instance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that profound
analysis which has been applied to Hamlet, to Falstaff, to Lear, to
Othello, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full
development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much
wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind
agencies of fate, just in the same way as it would injure the
shadowy grandeur of a ghost to individualize it too much. Milton's
angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with
differences of character; but they are such differences, so simple
and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the
reproach applied to Virgil's "_fortemque Gyan, forlemque
Cloanthem;_" just sufficient to make them knowable apart. Pliny
speaks of painters who painted in one or two colors; and, as
respects the angelic characters, Milton does so; he is
_monochromatic_. So, and for reasons resting upon the same
ultimate philosophy, were the mighty architects of the Greek
tragedy. They also were monochromatic; they also, as to the
characters of their persons, painted in one color. And so far there
might have been the same novelty in Shakspeare's men as in his
women. There _might_ have been; but the reason why there is
_not_, must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of
History, had there even been no such muse as Melpomene, would have
forced us into an acquaintance with human character. History, as
the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful
delineations of character in its chief agents, that is, in men; and
therefore it is that Shakspeare, the absolute creator of female
character, was but the mightiest of all painters with regard to
male character. Take a single instance. The Antony of Shakspeare,
immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the
primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the
expansion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered
fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian,
&c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art. The
situation and the scenic circumstances belong to history, but the
character belongs to Shakspeare.
In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the interpreter of the
shifting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable
planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the
first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic
oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind,
_this_ is one great field of his power. The supernatural
world, the world of apparitions, _that_ is another. For
reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the
gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, [Endnote: 24] no
Roman, could have conceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the
protesting apparition, the awful projection of the human
conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all Christendom,
who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare has found the power for
effectually working this mysterious mode of being? In summoning
back to earth "the majesty of buried Denmark," how like an awful
necromancer does Shakspeare appear! All the pomps and grandeurs
which religion, which the grave, which the popular superstition had
gathered about the subject of apparitions, are here converted to
his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought
into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn; the trumpet of
resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the
crowing of the cock, (a bird ennobled in the Christian mythus by
the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting "as a
guilty thing" placed in opposition to its majestic expression of
offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels;
its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house; its
ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence; its aerial substance,
yet clothed in palpable armor; the heart-shaking solemnity of its
language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the
ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few
gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night,--what a mist, what a
_mirage_ of vapor, is here accumulated, through which the
dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger
proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and
left naked of this circumstantial pomp! In the _Tempest_,
again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet far as the poles
from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in antithesis to
Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of
air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a
bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal
monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among
the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his
intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote:
25] In the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, again, we have the old
traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified
by Shakspeare's eternal talisman. Oberon and Titania remind us at
first glance of Ariel. They approach, but how far they recede. They
are like--"like, but, oh, how different!" And in no other
exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and
forest-lawns, are the circumstantial proprieties of fairy life so
exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between
Oberon and Titania is, of itself, and taken separately from its
connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that
literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of
supernatural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to
disenchant are alike portentous. The circumstances of the blasted
heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the
mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath,
are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and
which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the
_positive_ of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and
look to the _negative_. At a time when the trials of witches,
the royal book on demonology, and popular superstition (all so far
useful, as they prepared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's
serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas
of these mysterious beings by many mean associations, Shakspeare
does not fear to employ them in high tragedy, (a tragedy moreover
which, though not the very greatest of his efforts as an
intellectual whole, nor as a struggle of passion, is _among_
the greatest in any view, and positively _the_ greatest for
scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach
of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to
introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which
Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women,
concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque
peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,--that although potent
over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet
stood in awe of the constable,--yet relying on his own supreme
power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to
uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the
power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of
martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty
its compass!
A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming
fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone
might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest,
subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally
intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the
particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same
time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under
all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But
this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so
eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely
and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot
wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow
limits, than simply noticing it as one of the emblazonries upon
Shakspeare's shield.
Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case,
_barely_ indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to
offer any inadequate illustrations) one mode of Shakspeare's
dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not attracted any special
or separate notice. We allude to the forms of life, and natural
human passion, as apparent in the structure of his dialogue. Among
the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian
drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds
always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, but
never modified in its several openings by the momentary effect of
its several terminal forms immediately preceding. Now, in
Shakspeare, who first set an example of that most important
innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or
rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form
of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of
ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion; every form of
hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been
evaded; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words;
every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short,
all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn,
impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb
or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement,
--these are as rife in Shakspeare's dialogue as in life itself; and
how much vivacity, how profound a verisimilitude, they add to the
scenic effect as an imitation of human passion and real life, we
need not say. A volume might be written illustrating the vast
varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one field of
improvement; another volume might be dedicated to the exposure of
the lifeless and unnatural result from the opposite practice in the
foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that were
Shakspeare distinguished from them by this single feature of nature
and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great
immortality.
The dramatic works of Shakspeare generally acknowledged to be
genuine consist of thirty-five pieces. The following is the
chronological order in which they are supposed to have been
written, according to Mr. Malone, as given in his second edition of
Shakspeare, and by Mr. George Chalmers in his Supplemental Apology
for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers:
Chalmers. Malone.
1. The Comedy of Errors, 1591 1592
2. Love's Labors Lost, 1592 1594
3. Romeo and Juliet, 1592 1596
4. Henry VI., the First Part, 1593 1589
5. Henry VI., the Second Part, 1595 1591
6. Henry VL, the Third Part, 1595 1591
7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595 1591
8. Richard III., 1596 1593
9. Richard II, 1596 1593
10. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1596 1601
11. Henry IV., the First Part, 1597 1597
12. Henry IV., the Second Part, 1597 1599
13. Henry V., 1597 1599
14. The Merchant of Venice, 1597 1594
15. Hamlet, 1598 1600
16. King John, 1598 1596
17. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1598 1594
18. The Taming of the Shrew, 1599 1596
19. All's Well that Ends Well, 1599 1606
20. Much Ado about Nothing, 1599 1600
21. As you Like It, 1602 1599
22. Troilus and Cressida, 1610 1602
23. Timon of Athens, 1611 1610
24. The Winter's Tale, 1601 1611
25. Measure for Measure, 1604 1603
26. King Lear, 1605 1605
27. Cymbeline, 1606 1609
28. Macbeth, 1606 1606
29. Julius Caesar, 1607 1607
30. Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 1608
31. Coriolanus, 1619 1610
32. The Tempest, 1613 1611
33. The Twelfth Night, 1613 1607
34. Henry VIII., 1613 1603
35. Othello, 1614 1604
Pericles and Titus Andronicus, although inserted in all the late
editions of Shakspeare's Plays, are omitted in the above list, both
by Malone and Chalmers, as not being Shakspeare's.
The first edition of the Works was published in 1623, in a folio
volume, entitled Mr. William Shakspeare's Comedies, Histories, and
Tragedies. The second edition was published in 1632, the third in
1664, and the fourth in 1685, all in folio; but the edition of 1623
is considered the most authentic. Rowe published an edition in
seven vols. 8vo, in 1709. Editions were published by Pope, in six
vols. 4to, in 1725; by Warburton, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1747; by
Dr. Johnson, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1765; by Stevens, in four vols.
8vo, in 1766; by Malone, in ten vols. 8vo, in 1789; by Alexander
Chalmers, in nine vols. 8vo, in 1811; by Johnson and Stevens,
revised by Isaac Reed, in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1813; and the
Plays and Poems, with notes by Malone, were edited by James
Boswell, and published in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1821. Besides
these, numerous editions have been published from time to time.