We have had our glimpse of the first (English) Stuart King, as he made his
shambling way to the throne--beset by spoilsmen; we had our glimpse, too,
of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory
all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the
magic-lantern of Scott at the toilet and the draggled feathers of the
pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the
Scotch Nigel adventured; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before
ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose
silken dresses whisked along those balusters of Crosby Hall, which brides
of our day may touch reverently now; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into
Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale; and thereafter we
sauntered down Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside and the
Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o’ day with Ben
Jonson; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes; and had a
glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all
the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe
Theatre.
_Gosson and Other Puritans._
There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a
certain Stephen Gosson[8]--well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his
fellows--who had received a university education, who had written delicate
pastorals and other verse, which--with many people--ranked him with
Spenser and Sidney; who had written plays too, but who, somehow
conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses
to extremest Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against “_Poets,
Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth_”--as he
called them--as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes
whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day I cited. He had called his
discourse, “_pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable
for all that will follow Vertue_.” He represented the Puritan
feeling--which was growing in force--in respect to poetry and the drama;
and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best
loved and trusted emissaries of Satan.
But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were
wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking
and of thinkers;--not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not
neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have
ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English
Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the
first year of his reign, 1603--he having passed a good part of the summer
in hunting up and down through the near counties--partly from his old love
of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged
London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I
say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, he
issued a proclamation--“_Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the
determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church._”
Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604.
Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On
no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great
outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of
Oxford, “moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the
Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth
of the Original.”
_King James’ Bible._
There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London,
venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed,
there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may
well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would
flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would
make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous
conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural
revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of
the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though--for
anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the
revision--it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’
tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.
It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt
completion of the work, and that “it should be done by the best learned in
both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to
the “most High, and Mighty Prince James” (which many a New England boy of
fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon)
were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were
immense; after thanking him as “principal mover and author of the work,”
the dedication exuberantly declares that “the hearts of all your loyal and
religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very
name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and
they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, under
God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great
reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little
tractate of his--the _Basilikon Doron_--not written for publication
(though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for
the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to
the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions; and--saving
some scornings of the “vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines”--is written in a
spirit which might be safely commended to later British Princes.
“When yee reade the Scripture [says the King] reade it with a
sanctified and chast hart; admire reverentlie such obscure places as
ye understand not, blaming only your own capacitie; reade with
delight the plaine places, and study carefully to understand those
that are somewhat difficile: preasse to be a good textuare; for the
Scripture is ever the best interpreter of itselfe.”
Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and
elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King
James’ money, none from the royal exchequer; which indeed from the King’s
disorderly extravagances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low.
The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in
Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some
few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a
stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of
book-makers who were concerned with the printing and selling of the new
Bible.
When the business of revision actually commenced it is hard to determine
accurately; but it was not till the year 1611--eight years after the
Hampton Conference--that an edition was published by printer Barker (who,
or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job
for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version “appointed
(by assemblage of Bishops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the
great Bible of the English-speaking world--then, and thence-forward. And
now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old
translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a
reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into
their own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of
Literature? Their names are all of record: and yet if I were to print
them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of
the twoscore.[9] You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this
time was writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the
King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not
find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty,
and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You
would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing
much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Robert
Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book _The Anatomy of
Melancholy_--then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of
Sir Thomas Overbury--both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet
would one find mention of John Donne,[10] though he came to be Dean of St.
Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may--and ought to know; nor, yet again,
is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself
specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on
the _Immortality of the Soul_[11] in strains that warrant our citing a few
quatrains:--
“At first, her mother Earth she holdeth dear,
And doth embrace the world and worldly things:
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings.
“Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be:
“For who, did ever yet, in honor, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health?
Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind?
“Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall,
Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay;
She lights on that and this, and tasteth all,
But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away!”
This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our
translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or
churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and
scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary
aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was
a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the
structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted
English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his
turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.
And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in
highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view--which is our
stand-point to-day--there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good
reason to believe that--on literary lines--any other will ever supplant
it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be
versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that
will mend its science--that will mend its archæology--that will mend its
history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that
orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early
English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing
out--freighted with Christian doctrine--over all lands where Saxon speech
is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one--in respect
for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek,
and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one--it is reasonably to
be presumed--can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid
of this scholarship and of the “higher criticism;” and no one will be
henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who
scorns the recent revisions.
And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, sweet, literary quality,
will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that
the Doxology,[12] at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an
interpolation--that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I
believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and
tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the
rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the
times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself)--“For thine is the Kingdom,
and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”
And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted
book of Ecclesiastes; no matter what critical scholarship may do in
amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away
the marvellous graces of their strong, old English current--burdened with
tender memories--murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come--“or
ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the
pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.”
The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak--whose cooling
shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight--is overgrown,
unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss,
and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make
it clear that these things are needless for its support--that they cover
and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away,
and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic
growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental
view; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem;
and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of
religious awe?
It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “King James’
Version” do not lie altogether in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in
Jacobean felicities; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure
have brought their pleasant reverberations of lingual sound all the way
down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif.
A few facts about the printing and publishing of the early English Bibles
it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the
fatherly edicts against Bible-reading and Bible-owning in the time of
Henry VIII.; but the reign of his son, Edward VI., was a golden epoch for
the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the
throne, fifty editions--principally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s
versions--were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged
in their manufacture.
Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant
illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth
in ghastly wood-cut “the burning of Mr. John Rogers at the Stake, in
Smithfield.” Elizabeth was coy; she set a great many prison-doors open;
and when a courtier said, “May it please your Majesty, there be sundry
other prisoners held in durance, and it would much comfort God’s people
that they be set free.” She asked, “Whom?” And the good Protestant said,
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she--young as she was--showed her
monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.”
But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through
Cheapside--had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and
said she should “oft read that holy book”--which was easy to say, and
becoming.
In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in
England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for
printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley--that John Bodley whose
more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known
Bodleian Library at Oxford.
In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called
Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker,
fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its
supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood--of Elizabeth, on
the title-page--of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of
Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the
Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of
Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues
of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year.
It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American
(English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin,
in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German
language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743.
But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come
back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them
all, who was born upon the Avon.
_Shakespeare._
I have tried--I will confess it now--to pique the reader’s curiosity, by
giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and
by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of
him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks
respecting English worthies--whether places, or writers, or sovereigns--I
said to myself--when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the
world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written--we
will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men
beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome
journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of
English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great
British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying--standing all
athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From
far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were
told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old
chronicles--this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our
front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will
not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are
fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great
castle--brimful of life--with which the lesser poets of the age contrast
like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and
measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this
Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who
are real, yet unreal--that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear
around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not
drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner
of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts
of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the
chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor
Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his
greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince
boy--apart in his dim tower--piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who
has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame
Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit
balcony.
These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and
Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the
poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this
latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere
glimpse--allusion--is of such weight--has such hue of realness, that it
buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred
and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of
Tennyson;--not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination
chased down and poetically adopted--but as an historic actuality we have
met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old
acquaintanceship.
If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and
James--names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best--I
will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and
characters you know better.
And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that
went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real
characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in
that Canterbury Pilgrimage which he told us of in such winning numbers,
make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer
aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish
Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and
Gloriana, and Britomart, of the “Faërie Queene,” they are phantasmic; we
may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing
airily, delightsomely--they have no flesh and blood texture: and if I were
to name to you a whole catalogue of the best-drawn characters out of
Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know
them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of
Massinger, because “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain
relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish
greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well--Sejanus, or
Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or
Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because
we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters
appear, but because none of them have that vital roundness, completeness,
and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once
they have shown their qualities.
We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week,
or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us--maybe their
pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine
attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively
there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special
significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals,
whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out
color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any
strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway,
what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people
Shakespeare makes you know.
_Shakespeare’s Youth._
And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination,
has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where did
he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or
his family retinue?
And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less
positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller
men--poets and dramatists--who belonged to his time, and who--with a
pleasant egoism--let drop little tidbits of information about their
personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of;
he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such
quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family
“wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and
Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their
associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with
Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless--aside from the pleasant
egoism at which I have hinted--to the circumstance that most of these were
university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who
kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of
Shakespeare ever kept track of _him_; he ran out of sight of them all.
He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford,
where he was born--his father being fairly placed there among the honest
tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is
still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his
customers--whether in wool, meats, or gloves--and in the upper front
chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago,
when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down
which had served some descendant of the family--in the female
line[13]--toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of
meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of
the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most
characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and
church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either
of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their
quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily
approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are
Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose
scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The
country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of
Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that
belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;--hawthorn hedges, smooth
roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are
quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them,
and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out
little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them;
wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges
of coal and lumber swaying with the idle currents that swish among the
sedges at the banks.
On the north, toward Warwick, are the Welcombe hills, here and there
tufted with great trees, which may have mingled their boughs, in some
early time, with the skirts of the forest of Arden; and from these
heights, looking southwest, one can see the packed gray and red roofs of
the town, the lines of lime-trees, the elms and the willows of the river’s
margin, out of which rises the dainty steeple of Stratford church; while
beyond, the eye leaps over the hazy hollows of the Red-horse valley, and
lights upon the blue rim of hills in Gloucestershire, known as the
Cotswolds (which have given name to one of the famous breeds of English
sheep). More to the left, and nearer to a south line of view, crops up
Edgehill (near to Pilot-Marston), an historic battle-field--wherefrom
Shakespeare, on his way to London may have looked back--on spire, and
alder copse, and river--with more or less of yearning. To the right,
again, and more westerly than before, and on the hither side of the
Red-horse valley and plain, one can catch sight of the rounded thickets of
elms and of orcharding where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Thence
Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hathaway, she being well toward
the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet
nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a family at this time,
we cannot now say; nor could his father-in-law tell then; on which score
there was--as certain traditions run--some vain demurral. He may have been
associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover;
doubtless was; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling; doubtless was
at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling
players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories
too--of lesser authenticity--that he was over-familiar with the game in
the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner.
We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote
House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and
its delightful park, and picturesque mossy walls--dappled with patches of
shadow and with ivy leaves--look charmingly innocent of any harm their
master could have done to William Shakespeare; but certain it is that the
neighborhood grew too warm for him; and that he set off one day (being
then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune.
_Family Relations._
His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact--and it may as well
be said here--they always stayed behind. It does not appear that
throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare
was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with
him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately
following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special
whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in
connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most
noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was
tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country
expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we
cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s
death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a
well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very
likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people--grieving over his lost
boy, whom he can have seen but little--perhaps putting some of the color
of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the
tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh, my love,
Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered; Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
Why art thou yet so fair?”
His two daughters lived to maturity--both marrying; the favorite and elder
daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established
physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who
became his executor. Shakespeare was--so far as known--watchful and tender
of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was
otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor
of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it
does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not
_prima-facie_ evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often
promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a
sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that
would be inevitable.
It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s
marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof
entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and
mother--both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and
with whom--specially the mother--most affectionate relations are
undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings
could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic
indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home
visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.
But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all
the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause--or
both--may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden
blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s
death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences
of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his
family and towns-people.
His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by
way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more
likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and
thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest,
which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so
by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these
names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason
that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from
Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and
lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly
have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of
wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his
verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:--
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;”
or those others, telling how the gentle day
“Dapples the drowsy East with spots of gray.”
Again, there was delightful outlook for
“----a bank whereon the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;”
or, perhaps it was the
“Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves”
that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which,
Like prisoners overgrown with hair
Put forth disordered twigs;
and these flanked by some
“----even mead, which erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover.”
What a wondrous light upon all the landscape along all the courses of his
country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once
made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to
Stratford--past Long Compton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Royal
George”)--past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks,
and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose
shimmering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows
clearly distinguishable, and throwing afternoon shadows on the silvery
stretch of the Avon; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge,
over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the
twilight; coming thus, by a traveller’s chance, into the court of the
Red-Horse Tavern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one
was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book”
(its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the
rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was
quartered twenty odd years before, and was occupying, for the nonce, the
very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, made a sceptre of
the poker, and enjoyed the royalties of “mine inn.”
_Shakespeare in London._
But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there?
We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established
in the city; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not
introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to
the favor of the Queen. He has no literary backing of the colleges, or of
degrees, or of learned associates; nay, not being so high placed, or so
well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their
heads at mention of him.
But he has heard the strolling players; perhaps has journeyed up in their
trail; he has read broadsides, very likely, from London; we may be sure
that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went
courting to the Hathaway cottage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which
there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the
Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with
them; precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to
be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and
dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and
splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows
from the universities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing
plays of their own; but lacking Shakespeare’s instinct as to what will
take hold of the popular appetite, or rather--let us say--what will touch
the human heart.
There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his,
dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken,
and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or
ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely
attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from
Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight.
Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first
heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is
hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the
Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs:
“Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear.
“For there, his smell, with others being mingled,
The hot-scent snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled
With much ado, the cold fault clearly out;
Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies
As if another chase were in the skies.
“By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening fear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be comparéd well
To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.”
It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and
played, though not published until some years after. It may have been
“Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no
matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of
his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly
agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart
was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet
this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating
his feeling to his thought.
I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into
the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:--
“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of Death;
When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time,
The endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor, which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge
And make us heirs of all Eternity!”
_Work and Reputation._
And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked
upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His _Venus and
Adonis_[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his _Lucrece_; but
Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn
twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”
He had no coterie behind him; he was hail-fellow with Jonson; probably
knew Peele and Marlowe well; undoubtedly knew Drayton; he went to the
Falcon and the Mermaid; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that
he ever saw much of Raleigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years
after he came to London. It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the _Faery
Queene_ knew him at all. Sidney he probably never saw; nor did he ever go,
so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without
doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil.
His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with
school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere
scholastic learning--apprehending everywhere, in places where studious
ones were blind. I can imagine that Oxford men--just up in town or those
who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show
of learning as he made;--call it cheap erudition--call it result of
cramming--as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and
outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah,
what a gift of cramming! What a gift of apprehension! What a swift march
over the hedges that cramp schools! What a flight, where other men walked,
and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways
of knowledge and of wisdom!
Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar
things, coarse things--things we want to skip and do skip--things that
make us wonder if he ever wrote them; perhaps some which in the mendings
and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there; and yet he
was capable of saying coarse things; he did have a shrewd eye for the
appetites of the groundlings; he did look on all sides, and into all
depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out; and even his commonest
utterances, have, after all, a certain harmony, though in lowest key, with
the general drift. He is not always, as some of his dramatic compeers
were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high.
Then, too, like Chaucer--his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy--he
steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever
in human history he can find them, to work into his purposes. But even
the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified
are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands.
As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains
and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk,
could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare
talks of
“That undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,”
and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and
caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.
“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can
point you out scores of like similes in older writers--Erasmus among the
rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but
with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous
related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to
us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic,
fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his
soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in
forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized--you and I perhaps; but
never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp--so full--so
suggestive--so marrowy--so keen--so poignant--so enthralling.
No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little
geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest
road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of
death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals
in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to
men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by
intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them
into new and glorified shape.
_His Thrift and Closing Years._
Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd,
thrifty man; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and
sixpences that go into the till of the Globe Theatre; he makes money.
Where he lived in London,[19] we do not definitely know; at one time, it
is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,[20] but
never ostentatiously; very likely sharing chambers with his brother
Edmond, who was much time an actor there;[21] he buys a house and
haberdasher’s shop somewhere near Blackfriars; and he had previously
bought, with his savings--even before Queen Elizabeth was dead--a great
house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying
lands--a hundred acres at one time, and twenty and more at another. He
has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and
sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road
(on horseback probably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note
every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of
brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a
return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break
away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its
best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the
boards; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins,
to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own.
I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we
could find even a two-page letter which he may have written to Ben Jonson,
in London, telling how his time passed; but there is nothing--positively
nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last
illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or
so after his return to Stratford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his
favorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book
containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of
consequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning
this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon.
He died at the age of fifty-three. No descendant of his daughter Susanna
is alive; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.[22] The great new
home which he had built up in Stratford is torn down; scarce a vestige of
it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward,
where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative
festival, is gone, root and branch.
Shakespeare--an old county guide-book tells us stolidly--is a name unknown
in that region. Unknown! Every leaf of every tree whispers it; every
soaring skylark makes a carol of it; and the memory of it flows out
thence--as flows the Stratford river--down through all the green valley of
the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out
to farthest seas, whose “multitudinous waves” carry it to every shore.