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SHAKSPERE
Personal Recollections
BY
COLONEL JOHN A. JOYCE
_Author of "Checkered Life," "Peculiar Poems," "Zig-Zag," "Jewels of
Memory," "Complete Poems," "Oliver Goldsmith," "Edgar Allan Poe,"
"Brick-bats and Bouquets," "Beautiful Washington," "Songs," etc._
Nations unborn, adown the tides of time
Shall keep thy name and fame and thought sublime,
And o'er the rolling world from age to age
Thy characters shall thrill the mimic stage!
--JOYCE.
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY
PUBLISHING COMPANY
835 BROADWAY, NEW YORK
Copyrighted, in 1904.
BY
COLONEL JOHN A. JOYCE
All Rights Reserved.
[Illustration]
_DEDICATION._
_I dedicate this book to the reader who has energy enough to borrow it,
bullion enough to buy it, and brains enough to understand its philosophy,
with the fervent hope that posterity may reap, thresh and consume the
golden grain of my literary harvest._
_J. A. J._
PREFACE.
It would be a flagrant presumption and a specimen of magnificent audacity
for any man, but myself, to attempt, to give anything new about the
personal and literary character of William Shakspere!
I speak of William as I knew him, child, boy and man, from a spiritual
standpoint, living with him in soul-lit love for three hundred and forty
years!
Those who doubt my dates, facts and veracity are to be pitied, and have
little appreciation of romantic poetry, comedy, tragedy and history!
It is well known among my intimate friends, that I sprang from the race of
Strulbugs, who live forever, originating on the island of Immortality, on
the coast of Japan--more than a million years ago.
I do not give the name of the play, act or scene, in head or foot lines, in
my numerous quotations from Shakspere, designedly leaving the reader to
trace and find for himself a liberal education by studying the wisdom of
the Divine Bard.
There are many things in this volume that the ordinary mind will not
understand, yet I only contract with the present and future generations to
give rare and rich food for thought, and cannot undertake to furnish the
reader brains with each book!
J. A. J.
CONTENTS.
Page
Sweepstakes ix
CHAPTER I.
Birth. School Days. Shows 1
CHAPTER II.
Launched. Apprentice Boy. Ambition 11
CHAPTER III.
Farm. Life. Sporting. Poaching on Lucy 19
CHAPTER IV.
In Search of Peace and Fortune 27
CHAPTER V.
London. Its Guilt and Glory 37
CHAPTER VI.
Taverns. Theatres. Variegated Society 45
CHAPTER VII.
Theatrical Drudgery. Compositions 53
CHAPTER VIII.
Growing Literary Renown. Royal Patrons 61
CHAPTER IX.
Bohemian Hours. Westminster Abbey. "Love's
Labor's Lost" 73
CHAPTER X.
Queen Elizabeth. War. Shakspere in Ireland 82
CHAPTER XI.
Rural England. "Romeo and Juliet" 91
CHAPTER XII.
"Julius Caesar" 110
CHAPTER XIII.
Two Tramps. By Land and Sea 130
CHAPTER XIV.
Windsor Park. "Midsummer Night's Dream" 156
CHAPTER XV.
The Jew. Shylock. "Merchant of Venice" 175
CHAPTER XVI.
The Supernatural. "Hamlet" 202
CHAPTER XVII.
Death of Queen Elizabeth. Coronation of King
James 233
CHAPTER XVIII.
Shakspere as Monologist. King James 244
CHAPTER XIX.
Stratford. Shakspere's Death. Patriotism Down
the Ages 270
* * * * *
FACSIMILE PAGES.
Autograph Letter of Shakspere xxiii
Autograph Poem of Shakspere 170
Autograph Letter of King James 248
Autograph Epitaph of Shakspere 280
SWEEPSTAKES.
Shakspere was the greatest delver into the mysterious mind of man and
Nature, and sunk his intellectual plummet deeper into the ocean of thought
than any mortal that ever lived, before or after his glorious advent upon
the earth. He was a universal ocean of knowledge, and the ebb and flow of
his thoughts pulsated on the shores of every human passion.
He was a mountain range of ideals, and has been a quarry of love, logic and
liberty for all writers and actors since his day and age, out of which they
have built fabrics of fame.
No matter how often and numerous have been the "blasts" set off in his
rocky foundations, the driller, stone mason and builder of books have
failed to lessen his mammoth resources, and every succeeding age has
borrowed rough ashlers, blocks of logic and pillars of philosophy from the
inexhaustible mine of his divine understanding.
He was an exemplification and consolidation of his own definition of
greatness:
_"Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness
thrust upon them."_
The poet finds in Shakspere a blooming garden of perennial roses, the
painter finds colors of heavenly hues, the musician finds seraphic songs
and celestial aspirations, the sculptor finds models of beauty and truth,
the doctor finds pills and powders of Providence, the lawyer finds suits
and briefs of right and reason, the preacher finds prophecies superior to
Isaiah or Jeremiah, the historian finds lofty romance more interesting than
facts and the actor "struts and frets" in the Shaksperian looking-glass of
to-day, in the mad whirl of the mimic stage, with all the pomp and glory of
departed warriors, statesmen, fools, princes and kings.
Shakspere was grand master of history, poetry and philosophy--tripartite
principles of memory, imagination and reason. He is credited with composing
thirty-seven plays, comedies, tragedies and histories, as well as Venus and
Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Lovers' Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim
and one hundred and fifty-four classical sonnets, all poems of unrivaled
elegance.
What a royal troop of various and universal characters leaped from the
portals of his burning brain, to stalk forever down the center of the stage
of life, exemplifying every human passion!
Shakspere never composed a play or poem without a purpose, to satirize an
evil, correct a wrong or elevate the human soul into the lofty atmosphere
of the good and great. His villains and heroes are of royal mold, and while
he lashes with whips of scorn the sin of cupidity, hypocrisy and
ingratitude, he never forgets to glorify love, truth and patriotism.
Virtue and vice are exhibited in daily, homespun dress, and stalking abroad
through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar,
Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus,
Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers,
while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies were sneaks,
frauds and murderers.
Vice in velvet, gold and diamonds, suffered under the X-rays of his divine
phrases, while virtue was winged with celestial plumes, soaring away into
the heaven of peace and bliss. He was the matchless champion of stern
morality, and the interpreter of universal reason.
Shakspere was a multifarious man, and every glinting passion of his soul
found rapid and eloquent expression in words that beam and burn with
eternal light. The stream of time washes away the fabrics of other poets,
but leaves the adamantine structure of Shakspere erect and uninjured.
Being surcharged, for three hundred and forty years, with the spirit and
imagination of Shakspere, I shall tell the world about his personal and
literary life, and although some curious and unreasonable people may not
entirely believe everything I relate in this volume, I can only excuse and
pity their judgment, for they must know that the _Ideal_ is the _Real_!
The intellectual pyramids of his thought still rise out of the desert
wastes of literary scavengers and loom above the horizon of all the great
writers and philosophers that preceded his advent on the globe.
The blunt, licentious Saxon words and sentences in the first text of
Shakspere, have been ruthlessly expurgated by his editorial commentators,
adding, no doubt, to the beauty and decency of the plays, but sadly
detracting from their original strength.
Pope, Jonson, Steevens and even Malone have made so many minute, technical
changes in the Folio Plays of 1623, printed seven years after the death of
Shakspere, that their presumptive elucidation often drivels into obscurity.
Editorial critics, with the best intention, have frequently edited the
blood, bone and sinews of the original thought out of the works of the
greatest authors. While attempting to simplify the text for common, rough
readers, they mystify the matter by their egotistical explanation, and
while showing their superior research and classical learning, they
eliminate the chunk logic force of the real author.
For thirty years Shakspere studied the variegated book of London life, with
all the human oddities, and when spring and summer covered the earth with
primroses, flowers and hawthorn blossoms, he rambled over domestic and
foreign lands, through fields, forests, mountains and stormy seas.
With the fun of Falstaff, the firmness of Caesar, the generosity of King
Lear and the imagination of Hamlet, Shakspere also possessed the love-lit
delicacy of Ophelia, Portia and Juliet, reveling familiarly with the
spirits of water, earth and air, in his kingdom of living ghosts. He
borrowed words and ideas from all the ancient philosophers, poets and story
tellers, and shoveling them, pell-mell, into the furnace fires of his
mammoth brain, fused their crude ore, by the forced draught of his fancy,
into the laminated steel of enduring form and household utility.
The rough and uncouth corn of others passed through the hoppers of
Shakspere's brain and came out fine flour, ready for use by the theatrical
bakers. With the pen of pleasure and brush of fancy he painted human life
in everlasting colors, that will not fade or tarnish with age or wither
with the winds of adversity. The celestial sunlight of his genius permeated
every object he touched and lifted even the vulgar vices of earth into the
realms of virtue and beauty.
Shakspere was an intellectual atmosphere that permeated and enlivened the
world of thought. His genius was as universal as the air, where zephyr and
storm moved at the imperial will of this Grand Master of human passions.
Principles, not people, absorbed the mammoth mind of Shakspere, who paid
little attention to the princes and philosophers of his day. Schools,
universities, monks, priests and popes were rungs in the ladder of his
mind, and only noticed to scar and satirize their hypocrisy, bigotry and
tyranny with his javelins of matchless wit. The flower and fruit of thought
sprang spontaneously from his seraphic soul.
He flung his phrases into the intellectual ocean of thought, and they still
shine and shower down the ages like meteors in a midnight sky. Like the
busy bee, he banqueted on all the blossoms of the globe and stored the
honey of his genius in the lofty crags of Parnassus.
Shakspere and Nature were confidential friends, and, while she gave a few
sheaves of knowledge to her other children, the old Dame bestowed upon the
"Divine" William the harvest of all the ages.
Shakspere's equipoise of mind, placidity of conduct and control of passion
rendered him invulnerable to the shafts of envy, malice and tyranny, making
him always master of the human midgets or vultures that circled about his
pathway.
One touch from the brush of his imagination on the rudest dramatic canvas
illuminated the murky scene and flashed on the eye of the beholder the
rainbow colors of his matchless genius.
Ben Jonson, Greene, Marlowe, Fletcher and Burbage gazed with astonishment
at the versatility of his poetic and dramatic creations, and while pangs of
jealousy shot athwart their envious souls, they knew that the Divine Bard
was soaring above the alpine crags of thought, leaving them at the
foothills of dramatic venture.
He played the role of policy before peasant, lord and king, and used the
applause and brain of each for his personal advancement, and yet he never
sacrificed principle for pelf or bedraggled the skirts of virtue in the
gutter of vice.
The Divine William knew more about everything than any other man knew about
anything! He had a carnivorous and omnivorous mind, with a judicial soul,
and controlled his temper with the same inflexible rule that Nature uses
when murmuring in zephyrs or shrieking in storms, receding or advancing in
dramatic thought, as peace or passion demanded.
He seemed at times to be a medley of contradictions, and while playing
virtue against vice, the reader and beholder are often left in doubt as to
the guilt or glory of the contending actors. He puts words of wisdom in the
mouth of a fool, and foolish phrases in the mouth of the wise, and
shuttlecocked integrity in the loom of imagination.
William was the only poet who ever had any money sense, and understood the
real value of copper, silver, gold, jewels and land. His early trials and
poverty at Stratford, with the example of his bankrupt father was always in
view, convincing him early in life that ready money was all-powerful,
purchasing rank, comfort and even so-called love.
Yet he only valued riches as a means of doing good, puncturing the bladder
of bloated wealth with this pin of thought:
_"If thou art rich, thou art poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey,
And Death unloads thee!"_
He noticed wherever he traveled that successful stupidity, although
secretly despised, was often the master of the people, while a genius with
the wisdom of the ages, starved at the castle gate, and like Mozart and
Otway, found rest in the Potter's field.
No Indian juggler could mystify the ear and eye and mind of an audience
like Shakspere, for, over the crude thoughts of other dramatic writers he
threw the glamour of his divine imagination, making the shrubs, vines and
briers of life bloom into perpetual flowers of pleasure and beauty.
_With his mystic wand he mesmerized all,
And peasants transformed to kings;
While age after age in cottage and hall,
He soars with imperial wings._
No one mind ever comprehended Shakspere, and even all the authors and
readers that sauntered over his wonderful garden of literary flowers and
fruits have but barely clipped at the hedge-rows of his philosophy, culling
a few fragmentary mementos from his immortal productions.
Shakspere's chirography was almost as variable as his mind, and when he sat
down to compose plays for the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, in his room
adjacent to the Miter Tavern, he dashed off chunks of thought for pressing
and waiting actors and managers, piecing them together like a cabinet
joiner or machinist.
In all his compositions he used, designedly, a pale blue ink that
evaporated in the course of a year, and the cunning actors and publishers,
who knew his secret, copied and memorized and printed his immortal
thoughts. He kept a small bottle of indelible ink for ideals on parchment
for posterity.
I have often found his room littered and covered with numbered sheets of
scenes and acts, ready for delivery to actors for recital, and many times
the sunset over London would run its round to sunrise and find William at
his desk in the rookery, hammering away on the anvil of thought, fusing
into shape his divine masterpieces.
Shakspere's bohemian life was but an enlarged edition of his rural vagabond
career through the fields and alehouses of Warwickshire. He only needed
about four hours' sleep in twenty-four, but when composition on occasion
demanded rapidity, he could work two days and rise from his labor as fresh
as a lark from the flowery bank of Avon.
Most of the great writers of antiquity patterned after greater than
themselves, but Shakspere evolved from the illuminated palace of his soul
the songs and sentiments that move the ages and make him the colossal
champion of beauty, mercy, charity, purity, courage, love and truth.
There are more numerous nuggets of thought in the works of Shakspere than
in all the combined mass of ancient and modern literature.
The various bibles, composed and manufactured by man, cannot compare in
variety, common sense and eloquence, with the productions of the Immortal
Bard.
All the preachers, bishops, popes, kings, and emperors that have ever
conjured up texts and creeds for dupes, devotees and designers to swallow
without question, have never yet sunk the plummet of reason so deep in the
human heart as the butcher boy of Stratford!
Shakspere was the most industrious literary prospector and miner of any
land or time, throwing his searchlight of reason into the crude mass of
Indian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Frank, German, Russian
and Briton lore, and forthwith appropriated the golden beauties of each
nation, leaving behind the dross of vice and vulgarity.
Marlowe, Burbage, Peele, Chapman, Greene and Jonson composed many fine
physical and licentious dramas, pandering to the London groundlings,
bloated wealth and accidental power; but Shakspere threw a spiritual
radiance over their brutal, sordid phrases and elevated stage characters
into the realm of romantic thought, pinioned with hope, love and truth. His
sublime imagination soared away into the flowery uplands of Divinity, and
plucked from the azure wings of angels brilliant feathers of fancy that
shall shine and flutter down the ages.
He flung his javelin of wit through the buckler of ignorance, bigotry and
tyranny, exposing their rotten bodies to the ridicule and hate of mankind.
In lordly language he swept over the harp strings of the heart with
infinite expression and comprehension of words, leaving in his intellectual
wake a multifarious heritage of brain jewels. He flew over the world like a
swarm of bees, robbing all the fields of literature of their secret sweets,
storing the rich booty of Nature in the honeycomb of his philosophic hive.
Through his brain the variegated paraphernalia of Nature, in field, forest,
vale, mount, river, sea and sky were illuminated with a divine radiance
that shall shine forever and grow greater as mankind grows wiser.
Shakspere has paid the greatest tribute of respect of any writer to women.
While he gives us a few scolding, licentious, cruel, criminal women, like
Dame Quickly, Katharina, Tamora, Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, he gives us the
beautiful, faithful, loving characters of Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona,
Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia and Cordelia, whose love-lit
words and phrases shine out in the firmament of purity and devotion like
morning stars in tropic skies.
Shakspere studied all trades and professions he encountered in daily
contact with mankind. He thought what he was and was what he thought! To
him a sermon was a preacher, a writ a lawyer, a pill a doctor, a sail a
sailor, a sword a soldier, a button a tailor, a nail a carpenter, a hammer
a blacksmith, a trowel a stone mason, a pebble a geologist, a flower a
botanist, a ray of light an astronomer, and even a _word_ gave him ample
suggestion to build up an empire of thought.
He sailed upon the tides and currents of the human heart, and steered
through the cliffs and caverns of the brain with greater glory than those
who sought the golden "fleece" among the enchanting waters of Ionian isles.
Shakspere conjured the characters of his plays from elemental principles,
measures not men, breathing and acting in his divine atmosphere. It is
strange and marvelous that he never wrote a line about the great men that
lived and wrote in his day and age, although Cervantes, Rubens, Camoens,
Bruno, Drake, Raleigh, Calderon, Corneille, Rembrandt, Kepler, Galileo,
Montaigne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Ben Jonson
were contemporaneous authors, poets, dramatists, navigators, soldiers,
astronomers and philosophers.
Licentious phrases and actions were universal in Shakspere's time, and from
the corrupt courts of King Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth and King James, to
the cot of the peasant and trail of the tavern, morality hid her modest
head and only flourished among the puritans and philosophers who kept alive
the flame of love and liberty.
Dryden, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe and Jonson infected literature with a
species of eloquent vulgarity, and Shakspere, willing to please, readily
infused into his various plays sensuous phrases to catch the rabble cheers
and purpled applause. While he worshiped nature, he never failed to bend
the knee for ready cash, and often paid fulsome tribute to lords and
ladies, who flattered his vanity and ministered to his "itching palm."
Physical passion, mental license and social tyranny ruled in home, church
and state, where Rome and Reformation struggled viciously for the mastery.
There are nuggets of golden thought still scattered through the plays of
Shakspere that no author or actor has ever discovered, and although they
have read and repeated his lines, for more than three hundred years, there
has been no brain able and brilliant enough to delve into or explain the
secret caves of Shaksperian wit. Human sparrows cannot know the eagle
flights of divine philosophy.
The golden gilt of imagination decorated his phrases and the lambent light
of his philosophy shone like the rosy dawn upon a field of variegated wild
flowers. The hut and the cottage were transformed into lordly castles while
the rocks and the hills became ranges of mountain, whose icy pinnacles
reflected back the shimmering light of suns and stars.
Shakspere was a man of universal moods and like a chameleon took color and
force from every object he touched. The draughts he took from the deep
flowing wells of nature made no diminution in the volume of his thought,
that rushed through his seething brain like an underground cataract filled
from eternal springs.
Fresh from the mint of his mind fell the clinking, golden coin of universal
value, bearing the glowing stamp of his genius, unrivaled in the annals of
time. Since he wrote and acted, no man ever understood the depths of his
wit and logic, or the height of his imagination and philosophy. The human
mackerel cannot know the human whale.
Shallow, presumptive college bookworms, arrogant librarians and classical
compilers, have attempted to explain his plays and sonnets, in footnotes,
but they have only been entangled in the briers and flowers of his fancy,
finding themselves suffocated at last, in the luxurious fields of his
eloquent rhetoric and universal wisdom.
School-teachers, professors, priests, preachers, popes, and princes are
brushed aside by the cutting phrases of Shakspere and go down to earth like
grass before the scythe of this rustic reaper. They are dumfounded by his
matchless mysterious logic. Religion, law and medicine are pitchforked
about by the Divine William on the threshing floor of his literary granary,
where he separates wheat from chaff, instanter, leaving the beholder
mystified by the splendid result.
Viewing the great minds of the world from Homer to Humboldt, Shakspere
never had an equal or superior, standing on the pinnacle of the pyramid of
human renown, and lifting his mammoth mental form above the other
philosophers of the earth as Mount St. Elias soars above its brother peaks.
Distance lends a wizard enchantment to his lofty form and down the rolling
ages his glory will grow greater until the whole universe is luminous with
the dazzling lights of his eternal fame.
_Such god-like men shall never die;
They shine as suns in tropic sky,
And thrill the world with truth and love
Derived from nature far above._
Shakspere's mind was pinioned with celestial imagination, and his rushing
flight circled the shores of omnipotence. He taught us that ignorance was a
crime, a murky night without a single star to light the traveler on his
weary way.
Those who have attempted to fathom the depths of the Shaksperian ocean of
thought, have only rounded the rim or skimmed over the surface of its
illimitable magnificence. Tossed about by the billows of Shakspere's brain,
for three hundred and forty years mankind like a ship in a storm, still
wonders and runs on the reefs of his understanding, to be wrecked in their
vain calculation of his divine wisdom.
Leaving the beaten paths of oriental and middle age writers, he dashed deep
into the forest of nature and surveyed for himself a new dominion of
thought, that has never been occupied before or since his birth. Like a
comet of universal light, he shines over the world with the warm glow of
celestial knowledge.
With the tuning key of his matchless genius he struck the chords of sorrow
to their inmost tone and played on the heart strings of joy with the tender
vibrations of an aeolian harp, trembling with melodious echoes among the
wild flowers of ecstatic passion.
And to clap the climax and fathom the logic of love, he eloquently
exclaims:
"Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds!"
J. A. J.
[Illustration]
Shakspere: Personal Recollections
CHAPTER I.
BIRTH. SCHOOL DAYS. SHOWS.
_"One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin."_
William Shakspere was born on the 23d of April, 1564, at the town of
Stratford, on the river Avon, Warwickshire County, England; and died in the
same town on the 23d of April, 1616, exactly fifty-two years of age, the
date of his birth being the date of his death, a remarkable coincidence of
spiritual assimilation.
For several centuries, his ancestors served their king and crown in war and
peace; and were noted in their day and age as country "gentlemen," a term
much more significant then than now, when even dressed up "dandy" frauds
may lay claim to this much-abused title.
The grandfather of Shakspere fought on Bosworth Field with King Henry the
Seventh, and was rewarded for his military service, leaving to his son
John, the father of the "Divine" William, influence enough to secure the
position of a country squire and made him bailiff and mayor of the town of
Stratford.
John Shakspere, in addition to his judicial duties, dabbled in trade as a
wool dealer and glove maker, and when he lost influence and office he
resorted to the business of a butcher to secure bread, meat and shelter for
his large family.
He married the youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a very beautiful girl of
Wilmcote, a small village three miles from Stratford. When Arden died,
Mary, his favorite daughter, was bequeathed thirty-six dollars, and a small
farm of fifty acres, near the town of Snitterfield. Good inheritance for
that age.
The Arden family were strict Roman Catholics; and Edward Arden, high
sheriff of Warwickshire, was executed in 1583, for plotting against her
majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Those were lively days, when the followers of the
Pope and King Henry the Eighth, banished, burned and hung presumptive
heretics for opinion's sake! The lechery and greed of King Hal was the
primary cause of his separation from papal authority, augmenting the
Reformation by licentious royalty.
John Shakspere and Mary, his good wife, did not seem to have much of an
education, for in signing deeds of conveyance, they only made their mark
like thousands of the yeomanry of England.
Shakspere was a very common name in Warwickshire and the surrounding
counties, and while the "Divine" William glorified the whole race, there
were others of his name who fought for king and crown.
John Shakspere had ten children, with the affectionate assistance of Mary
Arden. Seven daughters and three boys, William being the third child and
the most active and robust. Several of the flock died, thereby reducing the
trials and expenses of the household; the "old man" seeming to be one of
those ancient "Mulberry Sellers," that was forever making "millions" in his
mind, and chasing gold bags at the west end of rainbows!
For many years he persistently applied to the College of Heralds for a
"coat of arms;" and finally in the year of 1599, a picture of a "shield"
with a "spear" and "falcon," rampant, was awarded to the Shakspere family,
all through the growing influence of the actor and author William, who had
become famous and wealthy. John Shakspere did not enjoy the glory of his
"coat of arms" very long, for we find that he died in September, 1601, and
was buried on the 8th of that month, at the old church in Stratford, and
his brave old wife, the mother of William Shakspere, followed him to the
tomb on the 9th of September, 1608.
I first met Will Shakspere on the 23d of April, 1571, at the old log and
board schoolhouse at the head of Henley street, Stratford, on the river
Avon. It was a bright, sunny day, and Mr. Walter Roche, the Latin master,
was the autocrat of the scholastic institution, afterwards succeeded by
Thomas Hunt.
Will Shakspere and myself happened to be born on the same day, and our
first entrance at the temple of knowledge marked exactly the seventh
milestone of our fleeting years.
Will was a very lusty, rollicking boy and was as full of innocent mischief
as a pomegranate is of seeds. He was handsome and bright, wearing a thick
suit of auburn curls, that rippled over his shoulders like a waterfall in
the sunshine. His eyes were very large, a light hazel hue, that glinted
into blue when his soul was stirred by passion. His forehead was broad and
high, even as a boy, rounding off into that "dome of thought" that in later
years, when a six-foot specimen of splendid manhood caused him to conjure
up such a universal group of immortal characters.
His nose was long and high, but symmetrical, and his distended nostrils,
when excited at play, would remind you of a Kentucky racehorse in motion.
His voice was sonorous and musical, and when stirred by passion or pleasure
it rose and fell like the sound of waves upon a stormy or summer sea. His
lips were red and full, marked by Nature, with the "bow of beauty," and
when his luminous countenance was flushed with celestial light, he shot the
arrows of love-lit glances around the schoolroom and fairly magnetized the
boys, and particularly the girls, with the radiant influence of his
unconscious genius.
Will was a constant source of anxiety and wonder to the teacher, who often
marked him as the scapegoat to carry off the surface sins of sneaking and
cowardly pupils. Corporal punishment was part of school discipline, and
William and myself got our share of the rule and rod.
Through all the centuries, in youth and age, private and public, the
scapegoat has been the real hero in all troubles and misfortunes. He seems
to be a necessary mortal, but while persecution relentlessly pursues him,
he almost invariably triumphs over his enemies, and when even devoted to
the prison, the stake or the scaffold, as a martyr, he triumphs over the
grave and is monumented in the memory of mankind for his bravery and
silent self-sacrifice!
For seven school years Will and myself were daily companions. Spring, with
its cowslips and primroses, and hawthorn blossoms, found us rambling
through the woods and fields, and angling for the finny tribe disporting in
the purling waters of the crystal Avon.
Summer brought its grain and fruits, with boys and girls scrambling over
hedges, fences, stiles and brooks, in search of berries and ripe apples;
autumn with its nuts, birds and hares, invited us to hunting grounds, along
the rolling ridges and the dense forest of Arden, even poaching on the
domain of Sir Thomas Lucy and the royal reaches of Warwick Castle, and old
winter with his snowy locks and whistling airs brought the roses to our
young cheeks, skipping and sporting through his fantastic realm like the
snow birds whirling in clumps of clouds across the withered world.
Looking back over the fields, forests and waters of the past through the
variegated realms of celestial imagination, I behold after the lapse of
more than three centuries of human wrecks, the brilliant boys and glorious
girls I played with in childhood years--still shining as bright and fresh
as the flowers and fruits of yesterday!
_"For we are the same our fathers have been,
We see the same sights our fathers have seen,
We drink the same streams and view the same sun,
And run the same course our fathers have run!"_
I remember well the first time Will and myself attended a theatrical
performance. It was on the first of April, 1573, when we were about nine
years of age.
A strolling band of comic, and Punch and Judy players had made a sudden
invasion of Stratford and established themselves in the big barn of the old
Bear Tavern on Bridge street.
The town was alive with expectation and the school children were wild to
behold the great play of "The Scolding Wife," which was advertised through
the streets, in the daytime, by a cartload of bedizened harlequins,
belaboring each other with words and gestures, the wife with bare arms,
short dress and a bundle of rods, standing rampant over the prostrate form
of a drunken husband.
Fifes, drums and timbrels kept up a frantic noise, filling the bylanes and
streets of Stratford with astonished country louts and tradesmen, until the
fantastic parade ended in the wagon yard of the tavern.
The old barn had been rigged up as a rustic playhouse, the stage covering
one end, elevated about three feet from the threshing floor. Curtains with
daub pictures were strung across the stage, separated in the center and
shifted backward and forward, as the varying scenes of the family play were
presented for the hisses or cheers of the variegated audience.
The play consisted of three acts, showing the progress of courtship and
marriage at the altar, country and town life with growing children, work,
poverty, and final windup of the husband driven from home by the scolding
wife, bruised in an alehouse, dead and followed to the graveyard by the
Beadle, undertaker and a brindle dog.
The climax scene of the play exhibited the wife with a bundle of rods,
surrounded by ragged children, driving out into a midnight storm the
husband of her bosom, while peals of thunder and flashes of lightning
brought goose pimples and shivers to the frightened audience.
The impression made upon the mind of William and myself did not give us a
very hopeful view of married life, and while the haphazard working,
drinking habits of the husband seemed to deserve all the punishment he
received, the modesty, benevolence and beauty of woman was shattered in our
young souls.
On our way home from the country-tragedy performance we were gladdened by
the thought, that although the rude, vulgar, criminal passions of mankind
were portrayed and enacted day by day all over the globe, we could look up
into the star-lit heavens and see those glittering lamps of night shining
with reflected light on the murmuring bosom of the Avon, as it flowed in
peaceful ripples to the Severn and from the Severn to the sea. Nature
soothed our young hearts, and soon, in the mysterious realms of sleep, we
forgot the sorrows and poverty of earth, tripping away with angelic
companions through the golden fields of celestial dreams.
_"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy."_
I shall never forget the great shows and pageants that took place in
Warwickshire County, in July, 1575. All England was alive to the grand
entrance of Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth Castle, as the royal guest of her
favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Proclamation had gone forth
that all work be suspended, while yeoman, trader, merchant, doctor, lawyer,
minister, lords and earls should pay a pilgrimage to Kenilworth and pay
tribute to the Virgin Queen.
Stratford and the surrounding villages were aflame with enthusiasm, and as
John Shakspere, the alderman and mayor, took great interest in theatricals
and particularly those festivities inaugurated for the entertainment of
royalty, he led a great concourse of devoted patriots through the forests
of Arden, blooming parks of Warwick Castle on to the grand surroundings of
Kenilworth, where the people _en masse_ camped, sang, danced, took part in
country plays, feasted and went wild for eighteen days, over the
illustrious daughter of Henry the Eighth.
William and myself were among the enthusiastic revelers, and for boys of
twelve years of age, we felt more cheer than any of the lads and lasses
from Stratford, because our parents furnished us with milk white ponies, to
pay tribute, and typify the virtue and chastity of the "Virgin Queen!" We
did not particularly care about virtue or virginity, so we shared in the
cakes and ale that were lavished in profusion to the rural multitude.
A high grand throne made out of evergreens and wild flowers was erected in
the central park of Kenilworth, rimmed in by lofty elms, oaks and
sycamores.
There, through the fleeting days and nights, the Queen and her royal suite
of a thousand purpled cavaliers and bejeweled maids of honor, held court
and viewed the ever-changing, living panorama evolved for their
entertainment. The Queen looked like a wilderness of lace and variegated
velvet, irrigated with a shower of diamonds.
On the 9th of July Queen "Bess" and her illuminated suite entered the
Castle of Kenilworth, and the hands of the clock in the great tower pointed
to the hour of two, where they remained until her departure, as invitation
to a continual banquet.
The Earl expended a thousand pounds a day for the fluid and food
entertainment of his guests, while woodland bowers and innumerable tents
were scattered through the royal domain generously donated to man and maid
by night and day. We boys and girls seldom went to bed.
Companies of circus performers, and theatrical artists, from London and
other towns were brought down to the heart of Old Albion to swell the
pleasure of the reigning Queen. Continual plays were going on, while horn,
fife, bugle and drum lent music to the kaleidoscopic revel.
Dancing, hunting, hawking and archery parties, through the day, lent their
antics to the scene, and when night came with bright Luna showing her
mystic face, forest fires, rockets and illuminated balloons filled the air
with celestial wonder, vieing with the stars in an effort to do universal
honor to the "Virgin Queen!" That's what they called "Bess."
William and myself took part in several of the joint circus and theatrical
performances, and at the conclusion of one of the plays--"Virtue
Victorious," Queen Elizabeth called up William and a purple page named
Francis Bacon, patted them on the head with her royal digits, and said they
would soon be great men!
I must acknowledge that I felt a little envious at the encomium, not so
much to William, as to the proud peacock, Bacon, who came in the train of
the Queen.
At sunrise of the 27th of July, 1575, the festivities closed, and the royal
cavalcade with a following of ten thousand loyal subjects, accompanied the
ruling monarch to the borders of Warwickshire, with universal shouts and
ovations on her triumphal march to London.
_"I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again."_
_"All that glitters is not gold,
Often you have heard that told;
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold!"_