tranquil course. His name is mixed up in no literary quarrel;
and, but for the malicious allusions of the envious Ben Jonson,
scarcely would a single criticism be associated with the
panegyrics which bear witness to his superiority. All the
documents which we possess exhibit Shakspeare to us placed at
last in the position which he was rightfully entitled to occupy,
and valued as much for the charm of his character as for the
brilliancy of his talents, and the admiration due to his genius.
A glance, too, at the affairs of the poet will prove that he was
beginning to introduce into the details of his existence that
order and regularity which are essential to respectability. We
find him successively purchasing, in his native town, a house and
various portions of land, which soon formed a sufficient estate
to insure him a competent income. The profits which he derived
from the theatre, in his double capacity of author and actor,
have been estimated at two hundred pounds a year, a very
considerable sum at that time; and if the liberalities of Lord
Southampton were added to the economy of the poet, we may
conclude that, at least, they were not unwisely employed.
{112}
Rowe, in his Life of Shakspeare, seems to think that the gifts of
Queen Elizabeth also had some share in building up the fortune of
her favorite poet. The grant of an escutcheon which was made, or
rather confirmed to his father in 1599, proves a desire to bestow
honor on his family. But there is nothing to indicate that
Shakspeare obtained from Elizabeth and her court any marks of
distinction superior, or even equal to those conferred by Louis
XIV. upon Molière, like himself an actor and a poet. If we except
his intimacy with Lord Southampton, Shakspeare, like Molière,
chose his habitual acquaintance chiefly among men of letters,
whose social condition he had probably contributed to elevate.
The Mermaid Club, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, and of which
Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and many others were
members, was long celebrated for the brilliant "wit-combats,"
which took place there between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, and in
which the vivacity of the former gave him an immense advantage
over the laborious slowness of his opponent. The anecdotes which
are quoted on this point are not worthy of being collected at the
present day. Few _bons-mots_ are sufficiently good to
survive for two centuries.
{113}
Who would not suppose that a life which had become so honorable
and pleasant would long have retained Shakspeare in the midst of
society conformable to the necessities of his mind, and upon the
theatre of his glory? Nevertheless, in 1613, or 1614 at the
latest, three or four years after having obtained from James I.
the direction of the Blackfriars Theatre, without having
apparently incurred the displeasure of the king to whom he was
indebted for this new mark of favor, or of the public for whom he
had just produced "Othello" and "The Tempest," Shakspeare left
London and the stage to take up his residence at Stratford, in
his house at New Place, in the midst of his fields. Had he become
anxious to taste the joys of family life? He might have brought
his wife and children to London. Nothing seems to indicate that
he was greatly grieved at separation from them. During his
residence in London, he used, it is said, to make frequent
journeys to Stratford; but he has been accused of having found,
on the road, pleasures of a kind which may have consoled him, at
least, for the absence of his wife; and Sir William Davenant used
loudly to boast of the poet's intimacy with his mother, the
pretty and witty hostess of the Crown, at Oxford, where
Shakspeare always stopped on his way to Stratford. If
Shakspeare's sonnets were to be regarded as the expression of his
dearest and most habitual feelings, we might reasonably be
astonished at not finding in them a single allusion to his native
place, to his children, or even to the son whom he lost at twelve
years of age. And yet Shakspeare could not have been ignorant of
the power of paternal love. He who, in "Macbeth," has described
pity as "a naked, new-born babe;" he who has put these words into
the mouth of Coriolanus,
"Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see;"
he who has so well depicted the tender puerilities of maternal
affection, could not have looked upon his own children without
experiencing the fond emotions of a father's heart.
{114}
But Shakspeare, as his character presents itself to our mind, had
long been able to find, in the distractions of the world, enough
to occupy the place, in his soul and life, which he was capable
of giving up to family affections. However this may be, it is
more difficult to discern the causes which led to his departure
from London, than to perceive those which might have tended to
prolong his residence in that city. Perhaps the arrival of
infirmities may have warned him of the necessity of repose; and
perhaps, also, the very natural desire of showing himself in his
native place, under circumstances so different from those in
which he had left it, made him hasten the moment of renouncing
labors which no longer had the pleasures of youth for their
compensation.
New pleasures could not fail to spring up for Shakspeare in his
retirement. A natural disposition to enjoy every thing heartily
rendered him equally adapted to delight in the calm happiness of
a tranquil life, and to find enjoyment in the vicissitudes of an
agitated existence. The first mulberry-tree introduced into the
neighborhood of Stratford was planted by Shakspeare's hands, in a
corner of his garden at New Place, and attested for more than a
century the gentle simplicity of the occupations in which his
days were spent. A competent fortune seemed to unite with the
esteem and friendship of his neighbors to promise him that best
crown of a brilliant life, a tranquil and honored old age, when,
on the 23d of April, 1616, the very day on which he attained his
fifty-second year, death carried him off from that calm and
pleasant position, the happy leisure of which he would doubtless
not have consecrated to repose alone.
{115}
We have no information regarding the nature of the disease to
which he fell a victim. His will is dated on the 25th of March,
1616; but the date of February, effaced to make way for that of
March, gives us reason to believe that he had commenced it a
month previously. He declares that he had written it in perfect
health; but the precaution taken thus opportunely, at an age
still so distant from senility, leads to the presumption that
some unpleasant symptom had awakened within him the idea of
danger. There is no evidence either to confirm or to set aside
this supposition; and Shakspeare's last days are surrounded by an
obscurity even deeper, if possible, than that which enshrouds his
life.
His will contains nothing very remarkable, with the exception of
a new proof of the little estimation in which he held the wife
whom he had so hastily married. After having appointed his
daughter Susannah, who had married Mr. Hall, a physician at
Stratford, his chief legatee, he bequeaths tokens of friendship
to various persons, among whom he does not include his wife, but
mentions her afterward, in an interlineation, merely to leave to
her his "second best bed." A similar piece of forgetfulness,
repaired in the same manner, is remarkable in reference to
Burbage, Heminge, and Condell, the only ones of his theatrical
friends of whom he makes mention; to each of these he bequeaths,
also in an interlineation, thirty-six shillings, "to buy them
rings." Burbage, the best actor of his time, had contributed
greatly to the success of Shakspeare's plays; Heminge and
Condell, seven years after his death, published the first
complete edition of his dramatic works.
This singular omission of the name of Shakspeare's wife, repaired
in so slight a manner, probably indicates something more than
forgetfulness; and we are tempted to regard it as the sign of an
aversion or dislike, the manifestation of which the poet was
induced to modify, in a slight degree, by the approach of death
alone.
{116}
Shakspeare's second daughter, Judith, had married a vintner, and
received a much smaller share of her father's inheritance than
her sister, Mrs. Hall. Was it in her quality of eldest daughter,
or in consequence of some special predilection, that Shakspeare
thus distinguished Susannah? An epitaph engraved upon her tomb,
at her death in 1649, represents her as "witty above her sex," in
which she had "something of Shakspeare," hut more because she was
"wise to salvation," and "wept for all." About Judith we know
nothing, except that she could not write; which fact is
established by a deed still existing, to which she has affixed a
cross, or some analogous sign, indicated by a marginal note as
"Judith Shakspeare, her mark." Judith left three sons, who died
childless. Susannah had one daughter, who married, first, Thomas
Nash, and afterward Sir John Barnard, of Abington. No child was
born of either of these marriages, and thus Shakspeare's
posterity became extinct in the second generation.
It is somewhat remarkable that Shakspeare died on the same day as
his great contemporary, Cervantes.
Shakspeare was buried in Stratford church, in which his tomb
still exists. It represents the poet of the size of life, sitting
under an arch, with a cushion before him, and a pen in his right
hand. Like many other monuments of the time, the figure was
originally colored after the life; the eyes being painted light
brown, with hair and beard of a deeper tinge. The doublet was
scarlet, and the gown black. The colors having become faded by
time, were restored, in 1748, by Mr. John Ward, the grandfather
of Mrs. Siddons and of Kemble, out of the profits of a
performance of "Othello." But in 1793, Mr. Malone, one of the
principal commentators upon Shakspeare, covered the statue with a
thick coat of white paint; being doubtless led to do this by that
exclusive prejudice in favor of modern customs which has so
frequently led him into error in his commentaries.
{117}
An indignant traveler, in some lines written in the Album of
Stratford church, has called down the malediction of the poet
upon Malone,
"Whose meddling zeal his barb'rous taste displays,
And smears his tombstone, as he marred his plays."
Without giving an absolute assent to these harsh expressions of
legitimate anger, we can not refrain from a smile at observing,
in Mr. Malone's coat of white paint, a symbol of the spirit which
dictated his commentaries, as well as a type of the general
character of the eighteenth century, held in servitude by its own
tastes, and incapable of comprehending any thing that did not
enter into the sphere of its ordinary habits and ideas.
Although this injudicious reparation effected a great change in
the physiognomy of the portrait of Shakspeare, it was not able
altogether to efface that expression of gentle serenity which
appears to have characterized the countenance as well as the soul
of the poet. On the sepulchral stone below the monument, the
following inscription is engraved:
"Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.
Bless'd be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones."
These lines are said to have been composed by Shakspeare himself,
and were the cause which prevented the transference of his tomb
to Westminster, as had once been intended. Some years ago, an
excavation by the wall of Stratford church exposed to view the
grave in which his body had been laid; and the sexton, who, in
order to prevent the sacrilegious depredations of curiosity or
admiration, kept guard by the opening until the vault had been
repaired, having attempted to look inside the tomb, saw neither
bones nor coffin, but only dust. "It seems to me," says the
traveler who relates this circumstance, "that it was something to
have seen the dust of Shakspeare."
{118}
This tomb now remains in sole possession of the honors which it
once shared with Shakspeare's mulberry-tree. About the middle of
last century, the Rev. Mr. Gastrell, a man of large fortune,
became the proprietor of New Place. This house, which had
remained for some time in the possession of the Nash family, had
afterward passed through several hands, and undergone many
alterations; but the mulberry-tree remained standing, the object
of the veneration of the curious. Mr. Gastrell, annoyed at the
number of visitors which it attracted, had it cut down, with a
savage brutality in which indifference would probably not have
indulged, but which frequently characterizes that furious pride
of liberty and property which would deem itself compromised if it
yielded in the slightest degree to public opinion. A few years
afterward, this same Mr. Gastrell, in consequence of a dispute
which he had had with the town of Stratford regarding a slight
tax which he was required to pay on his house, swore that
_that_ house should never be taxed again, and he therefore
had it pulled down, and sold the materials. As for the
mulberry-tree, part of it was saved from the fire to which it had
been consigned by Mr. Gastrell, by a clock-maker of Stratford, a
man of sense, who gained a great deal of money by making it into
snuff-boxes, toys, and other articles. The house in which
Shakspeare was born still exists at Stratford, and is still shown
as an object of interest to travelers, who may always see, and,
it is said, are constantly able to purchase, either the chair or
the sword of the poet, the lantern which he used in performing
the part of Friar Lawrence in "Romeo and Juliet," or pieces of
the arquebuse with which he killed the deer in Sir Thomas Lucy's
park.
{119}
It is not from the death of Shakspeare that we must date, in
England, that worship, the devotedness of which, after having
been maintained with such fervor for sixty years, seems now to
have diffused a reflection of its heat over several countries of
Europe. Though Shakspeare was dead, Ben Jonson still lived; and
though Beaumont had lost his friend Fletcher, he still possessed
his talent, the effects of which had been weakened, rather than
fortified, by Fletcher. The necessities of curiosity too often
overcome those of taste; and the pleasure of going again to
admire Shakspeare could not fail to yield to the keener interest
of going to judge the newest productions of his competitors. It
was not to his dramatic pedantry that Ben Jonson was then
indebted for the empire which, in Shakspeare's lifetime, he did
not venture to aspire to share. The triumphs of classical taste
were confined, in his case, to the unanimous eulogies of the
literary men of his time, who were easily satisfied on the score
of regularity, and were always glad of an opportunity to avenge
science upon the disdain of the vulgar; but the tragedies and
comedies of Ben Jonson were not the less coolly received by the
public, and were sometimes even rejected with an irreverence for
which he afterward took his revenge in his prefaces. But his
masques, a kind of opera, obtained general success; and the more
Ben Jonson and the erudite strove to render tragedy and comedy
tiresome, the more strongly did the public fall back upon masques
for their amusement. Several poets of Shakspeare's school also
endeavored to satisfy the taste of the public for the kind of
pleasure to which he had accustomed them.
{120}
Their efforts, attended with varying success, but maintained with
untiring activity, kept up that taste for the drama which
survives the epoch of its master-pieces. About five hundred and
fifty dramas, without reckoning those of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, were printed before the Restoration of
Charles II. Of these only thirty-eight can date from times
anterior to Shakspeare; and it has been seen that, during his
life, the custom was not to print those plays which were intended
for representation on the stage. From 1640 to 1660, the Puritans
closed nearly all the theatres; and most of these productions,
therefore, belong to the twenty-five years which elapsed between
the death of Shakspeare and the commencement of the civil wars.
This was the weight beneath which the popularity of England's
first dramatic poet succumbed for a time.
His memory, however, did not perish. In 1623, Heminge and Condell
published the first complete edition of his dramas, thirteen of
which only had been printed during his lifetime. His name was
still held in respect; but for a finished reputation to inspire
something beside respect, time must come to its aid, and must at
first efface and suppress it, to give it at some future time the
attraction of a neglected glory, and to stimulate the self-love
and curiosity of inquiring minds to give it new life by a new
examination, and to find in it the charm of a new discovery. A
great writer rarely obtains, in the generation succeeding his
own, the homage which posterity will lavish upon him. Sometimes
even long spaces of time are necessary for the revolution
commenced by a superior man to accomplish its course, and to
bring the world to perceive its merits. Several causes combined
to prolong the interval during which Shakspeare's works were
regarded with coldness, and almost utterly forgotten.
{121}
The civil wars and the triumph of Puritanism occurred first, not
only to interrupt all dramatic performances, but to destroy, as
far as possible, every trace of amusement of this kind. The
Restoration afterward introduced into England a foreign taste,
which did not, perhaps, pervade the nation, but which held sway
over the court. English literature then assumed a character which
was not effaced by the new revolution of 1688; and French ideas,
made honorable by the literary glory of the seventeenth century,
and sustained by that of the eighteenth, retained in England a
youthful and vigorous influence which had been lost by the old
glories of Shakspeare. Fifty years after his death, Dryden
declared that his idiom was a little "out of use." At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, Lord Shaftesbury complained
of his "natural rudeness, his unpolished style, and his
antiquated phrase and wit;" and Shakspeare was then, for these
reasons, excluded from several collections of the modern poets.
In fact, Dryden did not understand Shakspeare, grammatically
speaking; of this fact we have several proofs, and Dryden himself
has proved, by recasting his pieces, that poetically he
comprehended him as little. But not only was Shakspeare not
understood, he soon became no longer known. In 1707, a poet named
Tate produced a work entitled "King Lear," the subject of which,
he said, he had borrowed from an obscure piece of the same name,
recommended to his notice by a friend. This obscure piece was
Shakspeare's "King Lear."
Distinguished writers, however, had not altogether ceased to
allow Shakspeare a share in the literary glory of their country;
but it was timidly and by degrees that they shook off the yoke of
the prejudices of their time. If, in concert with Davenant,
Dryden had recast the works of Shakspeare, Pope, in the edition
which he published in 1725, contented himself with omitting all
that he could not bring himself to regard as the work of the
genius to whom he paid at least this homage.
{122}
With regard to that which he was obliged to leave, Shakspeare,
says Pope, "having at his first appearance no other aim in his
writings than to procure a subsistence," wrote "for the people,"
without seeking to obtain "patronage from the better sort." In
1765, Johnson, waxing bolder, and gaining encouragement from the
dawn of a return to the national taste, vigorously defended the
romantic liberties of Shakspeare against the pretensions of
classical authority; and though he made some concessions to the
contempt of a more polished age for the vulgarity and ignorance
of the old poet, he at least had the courage to remark that, when
a country is "unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the
vulgar."
Shakspeare's works, then, were reprinted and commentated; but the
mutilations alone obtained the honors of the stage. The
Shakspeare amended by Dryden, Davenant, and others, was the only
one which actors ventured to perform; and the "Tattler," having
to quote some lines from "Macbeth," copied them from Davenant's
amended edition. It was Garrick who, finding nowhere so fully as
in Shakspeare means to supply the requirements of his own talent,
delivered him from this disgraceful protection, lent to his
ancient glory the freshness of his own young renown, and restored
the poet to possession of the stage as well as of the patriotic
admiration of the English.
Since that period, national pride has daily extended and
redoubled this admiration. It nevertheless remained barren of
results, and Shakspeare, to use the language of Sir Walter Scott,
"reigned a Grecian prince over Persian slaves, and they who
adored him did not dare attempt to use his language."
{123}
A new impulse can not be entirely due to old recollections; and
an old epoch, that it may bear new fruit, needs to be again
fertilized by a movement analogous to that which gave it its
first fertility.
This movement has made itself felt in Europe, and England also is
beginning to feel its impulse, as Sir Walter Scott's novels
sufficiently demonstrate. But England will not be the only
country indebted to Shakspeare for the new direction which is
manifesting itself in her drama, as well as in other branches of
her literature. In the literary movement by which it is now
agitated, Continental Europe turns its eyes toward Shakspeare.
Germany has long adopted him as a model rather than as a guide;
and thereby it has, perhaps, suspended in their course those
vivifying juices which impart their vigor and freshness only to
fruits of native growth. Nevertheless, the path on which Germany
has entered is leading to the discovery of true wealth; and if
she will but work her own mines, a rich and fertile vein will not
be wanting. The literature of Spain, a natural fruit of her
civilization, already possesses its own original and distinct
character. Italy alone and France, the fatherlands of modern
classicism, are not yet recovered from their astonishment at the
first shock given to those opinions which they have established
with the rigor of necessity, and maintained with the pride of
faith. Doubt presents itself to us as yet only as an enemy whose
attacks we are beginning to fear; it seems as though discussion
bears a threatening aspect, and that examination can not probe
without undermining and overturning. In this position we
hesitate, as if about to destroy that which will never be
replaced; we are afraid of finding ourselves without law, and of
discovering nothing but the insufficiency or illegitimacy of
those principles upon which we were formerly wont to rely without
disquietude.
{124}
This disturbance of mind can not cease so long as the question
remains undecided between science and barbarism, the beauties of
order and the effects of disorder; so long as men persist in
seeing, in that system of which the first outlines were traced by
Shakspeare, nothing but an allowance of unrestrained liberty and
undefined latitude to the flights of the imagination, as well as
to the course of genius. If the romantic system has beauties, it
necessarily has its art and rules. Nothing is beautiful, in the
eyes of man, which does not derive its effects from certain
combinations, the secret of which can always be supplied by our
judgment when our emotions have attested its power. The knowledge
or employment of these combinations constitutes art. Shakspeare
had his own art. We must seek it out in his works, examine into
the means which he employs, and the results to which he aspires.
Then only shall we possess a true knowledge of his system; then
we shall know how far it is capable of increased development,
according to the nature of dramatic art, considered in its
application to modern society.