THE BENEDICT.
The course of events connected with our story has necessarily obliged us
to deviate from the locality in which we have heretofore progressed. We
must, however, now again, after such brief excursion, return to the spot
from whence we started, and as the sun shines brightly upon park and
field, and wooded glade, once more look upon fair and fertile
Warwickshire.
Sweet Stratford-upon-Avon! those who know thee, and know thee well--who
have lingered in thy old-world streets, and wandered in thy
neighbourhood, breathing the scented air which smells so wooingly
amongst the shadowy groves and unfrequented glades around, will
acknowledge that there is no place in England, for situation and beauty,
thy superior.
There is a freshness in thy neighbourhood, a quiet beauty in thy
streets, a cozy comfort in many of thy dwellings, and a venerable and
impressive grandeur in thy religious edifices, belonging alone to an
English town of good and ancient descent. Was a stranger to be dropped
suddenly in the centre of this town, whilst he looked around, and noted
the sweet aspect of the locality he had so suddenly arrived in,
methinks he would say to himself that he had reached a spot noted and
celebrated in the world's esteem beyond most others in the kingdom. Yes,
in this rural picture we think the stranger might find all these
peculiar features characteristic of the old haunts in which Englishmen
of a former age dwelt so happily. Those verdant villages, which made the
English, however much they loved military adventure the whilst they
formed the hosts of kings in the vasty fields of France, look back from
the splendour of the tented field upon their own pleasant woodlands and
quiet homes with fond yearning.
Tuck of drum might sound, the horn's sweet note be carried by the
evening breeze, as it floated over some stricken field during those
splendid wars of the Edwards and Henries. The gonfalon might flutter,
and the knight, with all his train, ride stately amidst the white range
of tents; the archer might lean upon his bow and gaze upon the splendour
of the host. But the noble, and the knight, and the peasant-born soldier
of England, alike sighed in his heart of hearts for the hour that was to
see his foreign marches over, and himself amidst the scenes of his
island home.
"That England hedged in with the main,
That precious gem set in the silver sea."
If then our readers love fair Warwickshire, and admire the grandeur and
beauty of its scenery as we do, they will scarce be angry with us for
again leading them back toward Stratford-upon-Avon.
And Shakespeare is married. One great event of his life is passed. He
dwells with his wife in his native town; beyond the precincts of which
he is comparatively unknown, or, being known, but little regarded.
He is scarcely more than eighteen years of age, and his wife is
four-and-twenty. Their means are small, and their comforts few. The
prospect before them is not of the brightest, but they are young, and in
youth all seems beautiful because all is new. A female, however, of
twenty-four, wedded to a youth of eighteen--_a mere boy_, as she terms
him--will be likely to have her own way in everything; at least she will
try to have it, and that is almost as bad. We fear, too, the blooming
Anne is a "little shrew." She hath a high spirit withal, and we opine
that her tastes and dispositions are not in exact accordance with those
of her youthful husband. He is all imagination--all fire, energy, and
spirit; whilst she is more matter of fact. The gods have certainly not
made her poetical, and she thanks the gods therefore. And then her age.
Beautiful as she is in face and form, she is not matched in respect of
years, and she knows it.
"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."[12]
[Footnote 12: "Twelfth Night."]
William Shakespeare had married in opposition to the advice of his
parents. The handsome Anne had done the same in regard to her's. Such
cases are by no means rare in their walk of life. The present is all
that is considered, the future unthought of. Old folks do sometimes,
however, know more than young ones give them credit for; and in this
instance they prognosticated the match would not be a happy one.
That the youthful poet felt some sort of disappointment when he found
how widely his disposition and tastes differed from the companion he had
chosen, there can be little doubt.
His extraordinary flights of genius, his wondrous conceptions, she had
no part in. She, indeed, could scarce understand them; and that which
she could not comprehend she looked upon as the rhapsodizing of a boy.
Even those beautiful descriptions, and the music of his honeyed vows,
for Shakespeare, although married, was still a lover, were now listened
to without the smile of appreciation. "Alas!" he said to himself, "maids
are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives."
In short, the youthful poet found that he had matched unhappily. There
was little sympathy in feeling, although there might have been in
choice; and so their loves passed
"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night."
They dwelt in Henley Street, in the house next to that in which the
youth's parents inhabited; and he occasionally assisted his father in
his business as a dealer in wool.
In Stratford, at this time, there was a knot of young fellows celebrated
for little else beside their idleness, their wit, and their reckless
daring. One or two of these were apprenticed to different trades in the
town. One had made the voyage, and returned a reckless desperado,
although a jovial and most amusing companion; another had served for a
brief space in the Low Countries, "the land of pike and caliver," where
finding hard knocks more plentiful than either pay or promotion, and his
courage none of the greatest, he had deserted his colours, and returned
home with a marvellous capacity for imbibing strong liquors, and
relating wondrous stories of his own exploits whilst a soldier:--
"Of healths _five_ fathom deep,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
And all the current of the heady fight."
With these youths young Shakespeare had before been in the habit of
associating. Their eccentricity amused him; there was a kind of
character in their lives which he loved to contemplate. Before his
marriage he had loved however to indulge his thoughts a good deal alone,
to wander and meditate amidst the delicious scenery in the
neighbourhood. Now it was somewhat different, he had home and its duties
to attend to, besides matters connected with his father's business, to
keep him from so continually excursionizing as heretofore.
His meetings with these choice and master spirits, these jolly
companions who "daffed the world aside, and bid it pass," were,
therefore, for the most part, in after hours, and when the business of
the day was over.
Besides these lads of mettle, there was another person whose company
young Shakespeare had of late much affected, and in whose society he
found a perfect fund of entertainment, a feeling which was quite mutual,
as this friend was of a capacity as fully to appreciate the
extraordinary talents and delightful society of the juvenile poet, as
the latter was to enjoy the wit and humour of his entertainer.
This person, who was a resident at Stratford, although not a native
there, was a most singular compound. He was possessed of some property
in the town; but his expenditure was generally greater than his means
warranted, and he was consequently obliged often to eke out his funds by
laying his companions under contribution. He was ever in difficulties,
and yet ever jovial, hospitable, and with his friends around him. His
eccentricity, his wit, and his follies were a continual feast to young
Shakespeare; his absurdities, and the scrapes he got into, a continual
tax upon his intimates to get him respectably clear of. By the sober and
puritanical of the townsfolk he was detested, for he made them the
subject of his biting jests. By the respectable citizen he was feared as
an intimate, for his tongue was a continual libel upon all his
acquaintance. By the more light-hearted and careless, who laughed _with_
him and _at_ him, he was tolerated, and even sought after, for his
amusing qualities.
In his person, the man was its singular as in his disposition--fat, and
unwieldy in figure; he was upwards of six feet in height, with a round
ruddy face, in which the laughing features were lost amidst the
puffed-out cheeks and double chin--a sort of figure and face, which
looked as if the owner had been fat and full of jollity at the time of
his birth, and gone on increasing up to his present age.
What was the history of his former life none could tell, for he had come
a stranger to the town. Some said, however, that in his youth he had
been engaged in the wars of the Netherlands, and cashiered for
cowardice; others affirmed that he was the discarded steward of some
noble, dismissed for arrant knavery and dishonest practices; whilst by
others, again, he was said to have been the host of a low tavern,
situated in the purlieus of Whitefriars of London, and, that having
amassed a small competency, he had since pretty well dissipated it, and
was now living at Stratford to be out of the way.
Be that, however, as it may, at the period of our story he resided at a
sort of tavern or hostel, situated in the suburbs of the town, and which
hostel himself and yoke fellows principally occupied, leading a roaring,
rollicking life, to the great scandal of the more steady portions of the
community.
In this society young Shakespeare heard many things which considerably
augmented his store of knowledge. The soldier described "the toil o' the
war," and the abuses of the service he had been in, where "preferment
went by letter and affection." The adventurer told of seas, "whose
yeasty waves confound and swallow navigation up;" of islands full of
noises, and peopled by strange monsters; and the fat host spoke of the
"cities usuries," "the art o' the Court," and the adventures and
intrigues himself had been the hero of in various localities from his
youth upwards.
In proportion to the pleasure young Shakespeare took in this society,
was the dislike entertained for it by his wife; for the character of the
presiding genius of the tavern she was well aware of, together with his
loudness for, and capacity of, imbibing strong liquors, and carrying
them steadily. His professed libertinism, and light opinion of the whole
sex,--his impudent boast of favours received from several of the good
dames of the town, and the various cudgellings he had received from
their husbands--each and all of those matters had been industriously
poured into her ear by her female gossipers, with the additional
information, that the unwieldy gentleman, notwithstanding his unfitness
for such exploits, was much given to walking, or rather riding, by
moonlight; and, with his more active friends, making free with a stray
haunch occasionally, at the expense of the neighbouring gentry. Nay, it
was even affirmed, that some of the midnight excursions of himself and
followers had not been entirely for the purpose of coney-catching and
deer-stealing, but that more than once they had stopped certain
travellers between Coventry and Warwick, and eased them of their cash.
As he was, however, well known to be one of the most arrant cowards that
ever buckled on a rapier, this latter story was for the most part
disbelieved, as far as he was concerned.
Be that as it may, the companionship of the eccentric John Froth, and
his yoke-fellows was not likely to lead a youth of the free,
unsuspicious, and generous disposition of young Shakespeare into any
good employment, and that his wife well knew and as roundly told him of.
Had her advice been well-timed, and gently given, perhaps it might have
produced its effect; but unhappily, the fair Anne possessed a shrewd
temper and little tact.
"In bed he slept not for her urging it,
At board he fed not, for her urging it,
Alone, it was the subject of her theme;
In company she often glanced at it."
And therefore came it that the man was wretched. In short, his sleep was
hindered by her railings; his head made light, and his meat sauced with
her upbraidings; so that he was driven, for relief, to associate the
more with the very companions his wife was so jealous of.
"Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy--
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
The venom clamours of a jealous woman,
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth."
Perhaps one great charm young Shakespeare felt in the society of his fat
friend, was the faculty he seemed to possess of enjoying every moment of
his life to the utmost. He turned everything to mirth. Nothing could for
a moment damp his spirits, unless his fears for his own personal safety
were aroused; and, even then, he was the more amusing, from the very
absurdity of his apprehensions, labouring, as he did, to persuade those
who so well knew his infirmity, of the heroic nature of his
disposition.
It was, indeed, in consequence of the amusement to be derived from this
latter failing, that he had been once or twice invited by his companions
to join in several of their poaching expeditions. The state of alarm he
had been in, and the difficulties his associates had led him into,
having furnished, even himself, with an endless theme of amusement after
the exploit was over.