Biographical Essays

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"Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd;
And, when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevail'd?"

Once, indeed, entangled in such a pursuit, any person of manly
feelings would be sensible that he had no retreat; _that_
would be--to insult a woman, grievously to wound her sexual pride,
and to insure her lasting scorn and hatred. These were consequences
which the gentle-minded Shakspeare could not face. He pursued his
good fortunes, half perhaps in heedlessness, half in desperation,
until he was roused by the clamorous displeasure of her family upon
first discovering the situation of their kinswoman. For such a
situation there could be but one atonement, and that was hurried
forward by both parties; whilst, out of delicacy towards the bride,
the wedding was not celebrated in Stratford, (where the register
contains no notice of such an event); nor, as Malone imagined, in
Weston-upon-Avon, that being in the diocese of Gloucester; but in
some parish, as yet undiscovered, in the diocese of Worcester.

But now arose a serious question as to the future maintenance of
the young people. John Shakspeare was depressed in his
circumstances, and he had other children besides William, viz.,
three sons and a daughter. The elder lives have represented him as
burdened with ten; but this was an error, arising out of the
confusion between John Shakspeare the glover, and John Shakspeare a
shoemaker. This error has been thus far of use, that, by exposing
the fact of two John Shakspeares (not kinsmen) residing in
Stratford-upon-Avon, it has satisfactorily proved the name to be
amongst those which are locally indigenous to Warwickshire.
Meantime it is now ascertained that John Shakspeare the glover had
only eight children, viz., four daughters and four sons. The order
of their succession was this: Joan, Margaret, WILLIAM, Gilbert, a
second Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. Three of the daughters,
viz., the two eldest of the family, Joan and Margaret, together
with Anne, died in childhood. All the rest attained mature ages,
and of these William was the eldest. This might give him some
advantage in his father's regard; but in a question of pecuniary
provision precedency amongst the children of an insolvent is nearly
nominal. For the present John Shakspeare could do little for his
son; and, under these circumstances, perhaps the father of Anne
Hathaway would come forward to assist the new-married couple. This
condition of dependency would furnish matter for painful feelings
and irritating words. The youthful husband, whose mind would be
expanding as rapidly as the leaves and blossoms of spring-time in
polar latitudes, would soon come to appreciate the sort of wiles by
which he had been caught. The female mind is quick, and almost
gifted with the power of witchcraft, to decipher what is passing in
the thoughts of familiar companions. Silent and forbearing as
William Shakspeare might be, Anne, his staid wife, would read his
secret reproaches; ill would she dissemble her wrath, and the less
so from the consciousness of having deserved them. It is no
uncommon case for women to feel anger in connection with one
subject, and to express it in connection with another; which other,
perhaps, (except as a serviceable mask,) would have been a matter
of indifference to their feelings. Anne would, therefore, reply to
those inevitable reproaches which her own sense must presume to be
lurking in her husband's heart, by others equally stinging, on his
inability to support his family, and on his obligations to her
father's purse. Shakspeare, we may be sure, would be ruminating
every hour on the means of his deliverance from so painful a
dependency; and at length, after four years' conjugal discord, he
would resolve upon that plan of solitary emigration to the
metropolis, which, at the same time that it released him from the
humiliation of domestic feuds, succeeded so splendidly for his
worldly prosperity, and with a train of consequences so vast for
all future ages.

Such, we are persuaded, was the real course of Shakspeare's
transition from school-boy pursuits to his public career. And upon
the known temperament of Shakspeare, his genial disposition to
enjoy life without disturbing his enjoyment by fretting anxieties,
we build the conclusion, that had his friends furnished him with
ampler funds, and had his marriage been well assorted or happy,
we--the world of posterity--should have lost the whole benefit and
delight which we have since reaped from his matchless faculties.
The motives which drove him _from_ Stratford are clear enough;
but what motives determined his course _to_ London, and
especially to the stage, still remains to be explained.
Stratford-upon-Avon, lying in the high road from London through
Oxford to Birmingham, (or more generally to the north,) had been
continually visited by some of the best comedians during
Shakspeare's childhood. One or two of the most respectable
metropolitan actors were natives of Stratford. These would be well
known to the elder Shakspeare. But, apart from that accident, it is
notorious that mere legal necessity and usage would compel all
companies of actors, upon coming into any town, to seek, in the
first place, from the chief magistrate, a license for opening a
theatre, and next, over and above this public sanction, to seek his
personal favor and patronage. As an alderman, therefore, but still
more whilst clothed with the official powers of chief magistrate,
the poet's father would have opportunities of doing essential
services to many persons connected with the London stage. The
conversation of comedians acquainted with books, fresh from the
keen and sparkling circles of the metropolis, and filled with racy
anecdotes of the court, as well as of public life generally, could
not but have been fascinating, by comparison with the stagnant
society of Stratford. Hospitalities on a liberal scale would be
offered to these men. Not impossibly this fact might be one
principal key to those dilapidations which the family estate had
suffered. These actors, on _their_ part, would retain a
grateful sense of the kindness they had received, and would seek to
repay it to John Shakspeare, now that he was depressed in his
fortunes, as opportunities might offer. His eldest son, growing up
a handsome young man, and beyond all doubt from his earliest days
of most splendid colloquial powers, (for assuredly of _him_ it
may be taken for granted),

"Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre,"

would be often reproached in a friendly way for burying himself in
a country life. These overtures, prompted alike by gratitude to the
father, and a real selfish interest in the talents of the son,
would at length take a definite shape; and, upon, some clear
understanding as to the terms of such an arrangement, William
Shakspeare would at length, (about 1586, according to the received
account, that is, in the fifth year of his married life, and the
twenty-third or twenty-fourth of his age,) unaccompanied by wife or
children, translate himself to London. Later than 1586 it could not
well be; for already in 1589 it has been recently ascertained that
he held a share in the property of a leading theatre.

We must here stop to notice, and the reader will allow us to notice
with summary indignation, the slanderous and idle tale which
represents Shakspeare as having fled to London in the character of
a criminal, from the persecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot.
This tale has long been propagated under two separate impulses.
Chiefly, perhaps, under the vulgar love of pointed and glaring
contrasts; the splendor of the man was in this instance brought
into a sort of epigrammatic antithesis with the humility of his
fortunes; secondly, under a baser impulse, the malicious pleasure
of seeing a great man degraded. Accordingly, as in the case of
Milton, [Endnote: 16] it has been affirmed that Shakspeare had
suffered corporal chastisement, in fact, (we abhor to utter such
words,) that he had been judicially whipped. Now, first of all, let
us mark the inconsistency of this tale. The poet was whipped, that
is, he was punished most disproportionately, and yet he fled to
avoid punishment. Next, we are informed that his offence was
deer-stealing, and from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. And it has
been well ascertained that Sir Thomas had no deer, and had no park.
Moreover, deer-stealing was regarded by our ancestors exactly as
poaching is regarded by us. Deer ran wild in all the great forests;
and no offence was looked upon as so venial, none so compatible
with a noble Robin-Hood style of character, as this very trespass
upon what were regarded as _ferae naturae_, and not at all as
domestic property. But had it been otherwise, a trespass was not
punishable with whipping; nor had Sir Thomas Lucy the power to
irritate a whole community like Stratford-upon-Avon, by branding
with permanent disgrace a young man so closely connected with three
at least of the best families in the neighborhood. Besides, had
Shakspeare suffered any dishonor of that kind, the scandal would
infallibly have pursued him at his very heels to London; and in
that case Greene, who has left on record, in a posthumous work of
1592, his malicious feelings towards Shakspeare, could not have
failed to notice it. For, be it remembered, that a judicial
flagellation contains a twofold ignominy. Flagellation is
ignominious in its own nature, even though unjustly inflicted, and
by a ruffian; secondly, any judicial punishment is ignominous, even
though not wearing a shade of personal degradation. Now a judicial
flagellation includes both features of dishonor. And is it to be
imagined that an enemy, searching with the diligence of malice for
matter against Shakspeare, should have failed, six years after the
event, to hear of that very memorable disgrace which had exiled him
from Stratford, and was the very occasion of his first resorting to
London; or that a leading company of players in the metropolis,
_one of whom_, and a chief one, _was his own townsman_,
should cheerfully adopt into their society, as an honored partner,
a young man yet flagrant from the lash of the executioner or the
beadle?

This tale is fabulous, and rotten to its core; yet even this does
less dishonor to Shakspeare's memory than the sequel attached to
it. A sort of scurrilous rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so
loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression,
that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been
imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe.
The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir
Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let
there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a
goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a production
of Charles II.'s reign, and applied to a Sir Thomas Lucy, not very
far removed, if at all, from the age of him who first picked up the
pecious filth. The phrase "parliament _member_" we believe to
be quite unknown in the colloquial use of Queen Elizabeth's reign.

But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous
calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its
final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit
this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation
of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us
recapitulate the points of the story. A baronet, who has no deer
and no park, is supposed to persecute a poet for stealing these
aerial deer out of this aerial park, both lying in
_nephelococcygia_. The poet sleeps upon this wrong for
eighteen years; but at length, hearing that his persecutor is dead
and buried, he conceives bloody thoughts of revenge. And this
revenge he purposes to execute by picking a hole in his dead
enemy's coat-of-arms. Is this coat-of-arms, then, Sir Thomas
Lucy's? Why, no; Malone admits that it is not. For the poet,
suddenly recollecting that this ridicule would settle upon the son
of his enemy, selects another coat-of-arms, with which his dead
enemy never had any connection, and he spends his thunder and
lighting upon this irrelevant object; and, after all, the ridicule
itself lies in a Welchman's mispronouncing one single heraldic
term--a Welchman who mispronounces all words. The last act of the
poet's malice recalls to us a sort of jest-book story of an
Irishman, the vulgarity of which the reader will pardon in
consideration of its relevancy. The Irishman having lost a pair of
silk stockings, mentions to a friend that he has taken steps for
recovering them by an advertisement, offering a reward to the
finder. His friend objects that the costs of advertising, and the
reward, would eat out the full value of the silk stockings. But to
this the Irishman replies, with a knowing air, that he is not so
green as to have overlooked _that_; and that, to keep down the
reward, he had advertised the stockings as worsted. Not at all less
flagrant is the bull ascribed to Shakspeare, when he is made to
punish a dead man by personalities meant for his exclusive ear,
through his coat-of-arms, but at the same time, with the express
purpose of blunting and defeating the edge of his own scurrility,
is made to substitute for the real arms some others which had no
more relation to the dead enemy than they had to the poet himself.
This is the very sublime of folly, beyond which human dotage cannot
advance.

It is painful, indeed, and dishonorable to human nature, that
whenever men of vulgar habits and of poor education wish to impress
us with a feeling of respect for a man's talents, they are sure to
cite, by way of evidence, some gross instance of malignity. Power,
in their minds, is best illustrated by malice or by the infliction
of pain. To this unwelcome fact we have some evidence in the
wretched tale which we have just dismissed; and there is another of
the same description to be found in all lives of Shakspeare, which
we will expose to the contempt of the reader whilst we are in this
field of discussion, that we may not afterwards have to resume so
disgusting a subject.

This poet, who was a model of gracious benignity in his manners,
and of whom, amidst our general ignorance, thus much is perfectly
established, that the term _gentle_ was almost as generally
and by prescriptive right associated with his name as the affix of
_venerable_ with Bede, or _judicious_ with Hooker, is
alleged to have insulted a friend by an imaginary epitaph beginning
"_Ten in the Hundred_" and supposing him to be damned, yet
without wit enough (which surely the Stratford bellman could have
furnished) for devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a
supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The
_sharpness of the satire_ is said to have stung the man so
much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the
tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail
is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, _Ten
in the Hundred_ could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any
more than to call a man _Three-and-a-half-per-cent_. in this
present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons
who built their morality upon the Jewish ceremonial law. Shakspeare
himself took ten per cent. _2dly_, It happens that John Combe,
so far from being the object of the poet's scurrility, or viewing
the poet as an object of implacable resentment, was a Stratford
friend; that one of his family was affectionately remembered in
Shakspeare's will by the bequest of his sword; and that John Combe
himself recorded his perfect charity with Shakspeare by leaving him
a legacy of 5L sterling. And in this lies the key to the whole
story. For, _3dly_, The four lines were written and printed
before Shakspeare was born. The name Combe is a common one; and
some stupid fellow, who had seen the name in Shakspeare's will, and
happened also to have seen the lines in a collection of epigrams,
chose to connect the cases by attributing an identity to the two
John Combes, though at war with chronology.

Finally, there is another specimen of doggerel attributed to
Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy of him, because not
equally malignant, but otherwise equally below his intellect, no
less than his scholarship; we mean the inscription on his
grave-stone. This, as a sort of _siste viator_ appeal to
future sextons, is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk,
who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique
formula, like the vulgar record of ownership in books--

"Anthony Timothy Dolthead's hook,
God give him grace therein to look."

Thus far the matter is of little importance; and it might
have been supposed that malignity itself could hardly have imputed
such trash to Shakspeare. But when we find, even in this short
compass, scarcely wider than the posy of a ring, room found for
traducing the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that the
leading sentiment, the horror expressed at any disturbance offered
to his bones, is not one to which Shakspeare could have attached
the slightest weight; far less could have outraged the sanctities
of place and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever (and,
according to the fiction of the case, his farewell sentiment) the
sanction of a curse.

Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of this great man,
have led us into a digression that might have been unseasonable in
any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver
his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never
more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless
biographer impute to Shakspeare the asinine doggerel with which the
uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his
name to be dishonored. We now resume the thread of our biography.
The stream of history is centuries in working itself clear of any
calumny with which it has once been polluted.

Most readers will be aware of an old story, according to which
Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some time after coming to
London by holding the horses of those who rode to the play. This
legend is as idle as any one of those which we have just exposed.
No custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play.
Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would assuredly not expose
them systematically to the injury of standing exposed to cold for
two or even four hours; and persons of inferior rank would not ride
on horseback in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed,
stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to meet the
public wants; and in some of the dramatic sketches of the day,
which noticed every fashion as it arose, this would not have been
overlooked. The story is traced originally to Sir William Davenant.
Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it from him,
passed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, Pope to Bishop Newton, the
editor of Milton, and Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the
fable, however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies the
chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much less absurd,
represents Shakspeare as having from the very first been borne upon
the establishment of the theatre, and so far contradicts the other
fable, but originally in the very humble character of
_call-boy_ or deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon
each performer according to his order of coming upon the stage.
This story, however, quite as much as the other, is irreconcileable
with the discovery recently made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589
Shakspeare was a shareholder in the important property of a
principal London theatre. It seems destined that all the undoubted
facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us through the channel of
legal documents, which are better evidence even than imperial
medals; whilst, on the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes, not
having an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the fictions
of the wonder maker. The plain presumption from the record of
Shakspeare's situation in 1589, coupled with the fact that his
first arrival in London was possibly not until 1587, but according
to the earliest account not before 1586, a space of time which
leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of situation,
seems to be, that, either in requital of services done to the
players by the poet's family, or in consideration of money advanced
by his father-in-law, or on account of Shakspeare's personal
accomplishments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic works to
the stage; for one of these reasons, or for all of them united,
William Shakspeare, about the 23d year of his age, was adopted into
the partnership of a respectable histrionic company, possessing a
first-rate theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in
which he came up to London, it seems probable enough that his
immediate motive to that step was the increasing distress of his
father; for in that year John Shakspeare resigned the office of
alderman. There is, however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare
might have gone to London about the time when he completed his
twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, but not earlier.
Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest daughter Susanna,
his wife lay in for a second and a _last_ time; but she then
brought her husband twins, a son and a daughter. These children
were baptized in February of the year 1585; so that Shakspeare's
whole family of three children were born and baptized two months
before he completed his majority. The twins were baptized by the
names of Hamnet and Judith, those being the names of two amongst
their sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, which is a
remarkable name in itself, becomes still more so from its
resemblance to the immortal name of Hamlet [Endnote: 17] the Dane;
it was, however, the real baptismal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of
Shakspeare's, about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare's
son must then have been most interesting to his heart, both as a
twin child and as his only boy. He died in 1596, when he was about
eleven years old. Both daughters survived their father; both
married; both left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the
succession from the great poet. But all the four grandchildren died
without offspring.

Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare the man, as
distinguished from the author, there remains little more to record.
Already in 1592, Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit,
had expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the following
sentence: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers;
in his own conceit the only _Shakscene_ in a country!" This
alludes to Shakspeare's office of recasting, and even recomposing,
dramatic works, so as to fit them for representation; and Master
Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estimation, or in
his purse, by the alterations in some piece of his own, which the
duty of Shakspeare to the general interests of the theatre had
obliged him to make. In 1591 it has been supposed that Shakspeare
wrote his first drama, the Two Gentlemen of Verona; the least
characteristically marked of all his plays, and, with the exception
of Love's Labors Lost, the least interesting.

From this year, 1591 to that of 1611, are just twenty years, within
which space lie the whole dramatic creations of Shakspeare,
averaging nearly one for every six months. In 1611 was written the
Tempest, which is supposed to have been the last of all
Shakspeare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Campbell feelingly
observes, it has "a sort of sacredness;" and it is a most
remarkable fact, and one calculated to make a man superstitious,
that in this play the great enchanter Prospero, in whom," _as if
conscious_, "says Mr. Campbell," _that this would be his last
work_, the poet has been _inspired to typify himself as_ a
wise, potent, and _benevolent magician_" of whom, indeed, as
of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that "within that circle"
(the circle of his own art)" none durst tread but he, "solemnly and
for ever renounces his mysterious functions, symbolically breaks
his enchanter's wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his
science, and his secrets,

"Deeper than did ever plummet sound."

Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and from the voice of
Prospero, issues that magnificent prophecy of the total destruction
which should one day swallow up

"The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit."

And this prophecy is followed immediately by a most profound
ejaculation, gathering into one pathetic abstraction the total
philosophy of life:

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep;"

that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish vigils,
surrounded and islanded by a shoreless ocean of sleep--sleep before
birth, sleep after death.

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