I—PARENTAGE AND BIRTH

Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was borne through the middle ages by residents in very many parts of England—at Penrith in Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in Yorkshire, as well as in nearly all the midland counties.  The surname had originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear. [1a]  Its first recorded holder is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at ‘Freyndon,’ perhaps Frittenden, Kent. [1b]  The great mediæval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the fifteenth century. [1c]  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than elsewhere.  The archives of no less than twenty-four towns and villages there contain notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by Shakespeare families in the seventeenth century.  Among them all William was a common Christian name.  At Rowington, twelve miles to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of the most prolific Shakespeare families of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no less than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William.  At least one other William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington.  As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous contemporaries who were identically named.

The poet’s ancestry cannot be defined with absolute certainty.  The poet’s father, when applying for a grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grandfather (the poet’s great-grandfather) received for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII. [2]  No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious.  But there is a probability that the poet came of good yeoman stock, and that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners. [3a]  Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton in 1389, seems to have been great-grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare who held land at Wroxhall in Warwickshire during the first thirty-four years (at least) of the sixteenth century.  Another Richard Shakespeare who is conjectured to have been nearly akin to the Wroxhall family was settled as a farmer at Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon, in 1528. [3b]  It is probable that he was the poet’s grandfather.  In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he died at the close of 1560, and on February 10 of the next year letters of administration of his goods, chattels, and debts were issued to his son John by the Probate Court at Worcester.  His goods were valued at £35 17s. [3c]  Besides the son John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly had a son Henry; while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage is undetermined, may have been a third son.  The son Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he engaged in farming with gradually diminishing success; he died in embarrassed circumstances in December 1596.  John, the son who administered Richard’s estate, was in all likelihood the poet’s father.

In April 1552 he was living there in Henley Street, a thoroughfare leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden, and he is first mentioned in the borough records as paying in that month a fine of twelve-pence for having a dirt-heap in front of his house.  His frequent appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was a keen man of business.  In early life he prospered in trade, and in October 1556 purchased two freehold tenements at Stratford—one, with a garden, in Henley Street (it adjoins that now known as the poet’s birthplace), and the other in Greenhill Street with a garden and croft.  Thenceforth he played a prominent part in municipal affairs.  In 1557 he was elected an ale-taster, whose duty it was to test the quality of malt liquors and bread.  About the same time he was elected a burgess or town councillor, and in September 1558, and again on October 6, 1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables by a vote of the jury of the court-leet.  Twice—in 1559 and 1561—he was chosen one of the affeerors—officers appointed to determine the fines for those offences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which no express penalties were prescribed by statute.  In 1561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the borough, an office of responsibility which he held for two years.  He delivered his second statement of accounts to the corporation in January 1564.  When attesting documents he occasionally made his mark, but there is evidence in the Stratford archives that he could write with facility; and he was credited with financial aptitude.  The municipal accounts, which were checked by tallies and counters, were audited by him after he ceased to be chamberlain, and he more than once advanced small sums of money to the corporation.

With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of assured fortune—Mary, youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the parish of Aston Cantlowe, near Stratford.  The Arden family in its chief branch, which was settled at Parkhall, Warwickshire, ranked with the most influential of the county.  Robert Arden, a progenitor of that branch, was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 (16 Hen. VI), and this sheriff’s direct descendant, Edward Arden, who was himself high sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. [6]  John Shakespeare’s wife belonged to a humbler branch of the family, and there is no trustworthy evidence to determine the exact degree of kinship between the two branches.  Her grandfather, Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitterfield, which passed, with other property, to her father Robert; John Shakespeare’s father, Richard, was one of this Robert Arden’s Snitterfield tenants.  By his first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had seven daughters, of whom all but two married; John Shakespeare’s wife seems to have been the youngest.  Robert Arden’s second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of John Hill (d. 1545), a substantial farmer of Bearley, survived him; but by her he had no issue.  When he died at the end of 1556, he owned a farmhouse at Wilmcote and many acres, besides some hundred acres at Snitterfield, with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants.  The post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on December 9, 1556, shows that he had lived in comfort; his house was adorned by as many as eleven ‘painted cloths,’ which then did duty for tapestries among the middle class.  The exordium of his will, which was drawn up on November 24, 1556, and proved on December 16 following, indicates that he was an observant Catholic.  For his two youngest daughters, Alice and Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them his executors.  Mary received not only £6. 13s. 4d. in money, but the fee-simple of Asbies, his chief property at Wilmcote, consisting of a house with some fifty acres of land.  She also acquired, under an earlier settlement, an interest in two messuages at Snitterfield. [7]  But, although she was well provided with worldly goods, she was apparently without education; several extant documents bear her mark, and there is no proof that she could sign her name.

The poet’s birth and baptism.

John Shakespeare’s marriage with Mary Arden doubtless took place at Aston Cantlowe, the parish church of Wilmcote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church registers begin at a later date).  On September 15, 1558, his first child, a daughter, Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford.  A second child, another daughter, Margaret, was baptised on December 2, 1562; but both these children died in infancy.  The poet William, the first son and third child, was born on April 22 or 23, 1564.  The latter date is generally accepted as his birthday, mainly (it would appear) on the ground that it was the day of his death.  There is no positive evidence on the subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that he was baptised on April 26.

Some doubt is justifiable as to the ordinarily accepted scene of his birth.  Of two adjoining houses forming a detached building on the north side of Henley Street, that to the east was purchased by John Shakespeare in 1556, but there is no evidence that he owned or occupied the house to the west before 1575.  Yet this western house has been known since 1759 as the poet’s birthplace, and a room on the first floor is claimed as that in which he was born. [8]  The two houses subsequently came by bequest of the poet’s granddaughter to the family of the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, and while the eastern tenement was let out to strangers for more than two centuries, and by them converted into an inn, the ‘birthplace’ was until 1806 occupied by the Harts, who latterly carried on there the trade of butcher.  The fact of its long occupancy by the poet’s collateral descendants accounts for the identification of the western rather than the eastern tenement with his birthplace.  Both houses were purchased in behalf of subscribers to a public fund on September 16, 1847, and, after extensive restoration, were converted into a single domicile for the purposes of a public museum.  They were presented under a deed of trust to the corporation of Stratford in 1866.  Much of the Elizabethan timber and stonework survives, but a cellar under the ‘birthplace’ is the only portion which remains as it was at the date of the poet’s birth. [9]

II—CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE

In July 1564, when William was three months old, the plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford, and his father liberally contributed to the relief of its poverty-stricken victims.  Fortune still favoured him.  On July 4, 1565, he reached the dignity of an alderman.  From 1567 onwards he was accorded in the corporation archives the honourable prefix of ‘Mr.’  At Michaelmas 1568 he attained the highest office in the corporation gift, that of bailiff, and during his year of office the corporation for the first time entertained actors at Stratford.  The Queen’s Company and the Earl of Worcester’s Company each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome. [10]  On September 5, 1571, he was chief alderman, a post which he retained till September 30 the following year.  In 1573 Alexander Webbe, the husband of his wife’s sister Agnes, made him overseer of his will; in 1575 he bought two houses in Stratford, one of them doubtless the alleged birthplace in Henley Street; in 1576 he contributed twelvepence to the beadle’s salary.  But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active part in municipal affairs; he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings, and signs were soon apparent that his luck had turned.  In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the sum of fourpence for the relief of the poor or his contribution ‘towards the furniture of three pikemen, two bellmen, and one archer’ who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county.

Meanwhile his family was increasing.  Four children besides the poet—three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 13, 1566), Richard (baptised March 11, 1574), and Edmund (baptised May 3, 1580), with a daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569)—reached maturity.  A daughter Ann was baptised September 28, 1571, and was buried on April 4, 1579.  To meet his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money from his wife’s kinsfolk, and he and his wife mortgaged, on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for £40 to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden.  Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the ‘rents and profits’ of the estate.  Asbies was thereby alienated for ever.  Next year, on October 15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum apparently of £40, his wife’s property at Snitterfield. [12a]

The father’s financial difficulties.

John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiliation of having parted, although as he hoped only temporarily, with his wife’s property of Asbies, and in the autumn of 1580 he offered to pay off the mortgage; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none.  The negotiation, which was the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive.  Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which distraint could be levied. [12b]  On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman’s gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings. [12c]

Education.

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons.  They were entitled to free tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI.  The eldest son, William, probably entered the school in 1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577.  The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature.  From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles’ and Lily’s grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace.  The eclogues of the popular renaissance poet, Mantuanus, were often preferred to Virgil’s for beginners.  The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama. [13]

Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ‘Essay on Shakespeare’s Learning’ (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations.  But several of the books in French and Italian whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas—Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques,’ Ser Giovanni’s ‘Il Pecorone,’ and Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi,’ for example—were not accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted.  A boy with Shakespeare’s exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature of France and Italy.

With the Latin and French languages, indeed, and with many Latin poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his writings openly acknowledged his acquaintance.  In ‘Henry V’ the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic.  In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and Sir Hugh Evans in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ Shakespeare placed Latin phrases drawn directly from Lily’s grammar, from the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles,’ and from ‘the good old Mantuan.’  The influence of Ovid, especially the ‘Metamorphoses,’ was apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic, and is discernible in the ‘Tempest,’ his latest play (v. i. 33 seq.)  In the Bodleian Library there is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (1502), and on the title is the signature W^m. Sh^e., which experts have declared—not quite conclusively—to be a genuine autograph of the poet. [15]  Ovid’s Latin text was certainly not unfamiliar to him, but his closest adaptations of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ often reflect the phraseology of the popular English version by Arthur Golding, of which some seven editions were issued between 1565 and 1597.  From Plautus Shakespeare drew the plot of the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ but it is just possible that Plautus’s comedies, too, were accessible in English.  Shakespeare had no title to rank as a classical scholar, and he did not disdain a liberal use of translations.  His lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the ‘small Latin and less Greek’ with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson.  But Aubrey’s report that ‘he understood Latin pretty well’ need not be contested, and his knowledge of French may be estimated to have equalled his knowledge of Latin, while he doubtless possessed just sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of an Italian poem or novel. [16]

Shakespeare and the Bible.

Of the few English books accessible to him in his schooldays, the chief was the English Bible, either in the popular Genevan version, first issued in a complete form in 1560, or in the Bishops’ revision of 1568, which the Authorised Version of 1611 closely followed.  References to scriptural characters and incidents are not conspicuous in Shakespeare’s plays, but, such as they are, they are drawn from all parts of the Bible, and indicate that general acquaintance with the narrative of both Old and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays.  Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history.  But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles’ and secular works whence he drew his plots.  As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency of the mind in a stage of early development rather than close and continuous study of the Bible in adult life. [17a]

Withdrawal from school.

Shakespeare was a schoolboy in July 1575, when Queen Elizabeth made a progress through Warwickshire on a visit to her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, at his castle of Kenilworth.  References have been detected in Oberon’s vision in Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (II. ii. 148-68) to the fantastic pageants and masques with which the Queen during her stay was entertained in Kenilworth Park.  Leicester’s residence was only fifteen miles from Stratford, and it is possible that Shakespeare went thither with his father to witness some of the open-air festivities; but two full descriptions which were published in 1576, in pamphlet form, gave Shakespeare knowledge of all that took place. [17b]  Shakespeare’s opportunities of recreation outside Stratford were in any case restricted during his schooldays.  His father’s financial difficulties grew steadily, and they caused his removal from school at an unusually early age.  Probably in 1577, when he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes.  ‘I have been told heretofore,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade,’ which, according to the writer, was that of a butcher.  It is possible that John’s ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business.  His son may have been formally apprenticed to him.  An early Stratford tradition describes him as ‘a butcher’s apprentice.’ [18]  ‘When he kill’d a calf,’ Aubrey proceeds less convincingly, ‘he would doe it in a high style and make a speech.  There was at that time another butcher’s son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

The poet’s marriage.

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father’s anxieties.  He married.  His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years.  Rowe states that she ‘was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.’

Richard Hathaway of Shottery.  Anne Hathaway.

On September 1, 1581, Richard Hathaway, ‘husbandman’ of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Stratford, made his will, which was proved on July 9, 1582, and is now preserved at Somerset House.  His house and land, ‘two and a half virgates,’ had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances.  His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of her eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned.  Six other children—three sons and three daughters—received sums of money; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were each allotted £6 13s. 4d, ‘to be paid at the day of her marriage,’ a phrase common in wills of the period.  Anne and Agnes were in the sixteenth century alternative spellings of the same Christian name; and there is little doubt that the daughter ‘Agnes’ of Richard Hathaway’s will became, within a few months of Richard Hathaway’s death, Shakespeare’s wife.

No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare’s marriage survives.  Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject.  A local tradition, which seems to have come into being during the present century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish registers now exist.  But one important piece of documentary evidence directly bearing on the poet’s matrimonial venture is accessible.  In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, ‘husbandmen of Stratford,’ bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of £40, to free the bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment—‘by reason of any precontract’ [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity—be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.  On the assumption that no such impediment was known to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her ‘friends,’ the marriage might proceed ‘with once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.’

Bonds of similar purport, although differing in significant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century.  They were obtainable on the payment of a fee to the bishop’s commissary, and had the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law.  But they were not common, and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by ‘thrice asking of the banns.’  Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare’s marriage differs in important respects from that adopted in all other known examples. [21]  In the latter it is invariably provided that the marriage shall not take place without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and bridegroom.  In the case of the marriage of an ‘infant’ bridegroom the formal consent of his parents was absolutely essential to strictly regular procedure, although clergymen might be found who were ready to shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run the risk of solemnising the marriage of an ‘infant’ without inquiry as to the parents’ consent.  The clergyman who united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway was obviously of this easy temper.  Despite the circumstance that Shakespeare’s bride was of full age and he himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shakespeare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the bride’s ‘friends,’ and ignored the bridegroom’s parents altogether.  Nor was this the only irregularity in the document.  In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the bridegroom’s father figures as one of the two sureties, and is mentioned first of the two.  Had the usual form been followed, Shakespeare’s father would have been the chief party to the transaction in behalf of his ‘infant’ son.  But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery, the bride’s native place.  Sandells was a ‘supervisor’ of the will of the bride’s father, who there describes him as ‘my trustie friende and neighbour.’

Shakespeare’s apologists have endeavoured to show that the public betrothal or formal ‘troth-plight’ which was at the time a common prelude to a wedding carried with it all the privileges of marriage.  But neither Shakespeare’s detailed description of a betrothal [23] nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support.  Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it highly improbable that Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal preliminaries of a betrothal.  In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom’s parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet’s matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one ‘William Shakespeare,’ to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton.  The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare’s wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to assume that the bishop’s clerk, when making a note of the grant of the license in his register, erred so extensively as to write Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton’ for ‘Anne Hathaway of Shottery.’  The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet.  He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester.  Had a license for the poet’s marriage been secured on November 27, [24] it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ‘against impediments,’ the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was wholly supererogatory after the grant was made.

III—THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

Anne Hathaway’s greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy augury.  Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare’s dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage ‘an elder than herself,’ [25a] and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ‘barren hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord,’ suggest a personal interpretation. [25b]  To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet’s case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience.  Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2.  All the evidence points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw little of wife or children for eleven years.  Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596—an interval which synchronises with his first literary triumphs—there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Stratford records.  In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare’s name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund’s son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying £20.  But the deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the transaction. [26]

Poaching at Charlecote.

Shakespeare’s early literary work proves that while in the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs.  All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless as a youth practised many field sports.  Sympathetic references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early plays and poems. [27]  And his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits.  A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native place.  ‘He had,’ wrote Rowe in 1709, ‘by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford.  For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London.’  The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare ‘was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.’  The law of Shakespeare’s day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months’ imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century.  But Sir Thomas Lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and owned at Charlecote a warren in which a few harts or does doubtless found an occasional home.  Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied in his ‘Views on the Warwickshire Avon,’ 1795, an engraving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest.  An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare’s ‘deer-barn,’ but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy’s property in Elizabeth’s reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention. [28]

Justice Shallow

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive.  No authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning ‘A parliament member, a justice of peace,’ which were represented to be Shakespeare’s on the authority of an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703.  But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakespearean drama.  Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of Charlecote.  According to Archdeacon Davies of Saperton, Shakespeare’s ‘revenge was so great that’ he caricatured Lucy as ‘Justice Clodpate,’ who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as ‘a great man,’ and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy’s name, ‘three louses rampant for his arms.’  Justice Shallow, Davies’s ‘Justice Clodpate,’ came to birth in the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ (1598), and he is represented in the opening scene of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate.  The ‘three luces hauriant argent’ were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys, and the dramatist’s prolonged reference in this scene to the ‘dozen white luces’ on Justice Shallow’s ‘old coat’ fully establishes Shallow’s identity with Lucy.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing from Lucy’s persecution, at once sought an asylum in London.  William Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ‘in his younger years,’ and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village.  The suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, a band of youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name. [30]  The knowledge of a soldier’s life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect by force of his imagination.

IV—ON THE LONDON STAGE

To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on foot during 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe. [31a]  Tradition points to that as Shakespeare’s favoured route, rather than to the road by Banbury and Aylesbury.  Aubrey asserts that at Grendon near Oxford, ‘he happened to take the humour of the constable in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”’—by which he meant, we may suppose, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’—but there were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself.  The Crown Inn, (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of his resting-places.

Richard Field, his townsman.

To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have been known previously. [31b]  Richard Field, a native of Stratford, and son of a friend of Shakespeare’s father, had left Stratford in 1579 to serve an apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier, the London printer.  Shakespeare and Field, who was made free of the Stationers’ Company in 1587, were soon associated as author and publisher; but the theory that Field found work for Shakespeare in Vautrollier’s printing-office is fanciful. [32a]  No more can be said for the attempt to prove that he obtained employment as a lawyer’s clerk.  In view of his general quickness of apprehension, Shakespeare’s accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the attention that has been paid it, may be attributable in part to his observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved, and in part to early intercourse with members of the Inns of Court. [32b]

Theatrical employment.

Tradition and common-sense alike point to one of the only two theatres (The Theatre or The Curtain) that existed in London at the date of his arrival as an early scene of his regular occupation.  The compiler of ‘Lives of the Poets’ (1753) [32c] was the first to relate the story that his original connection with the playhouse was as holder of the horses of visitors outside the doors.  According to the same compiler, the story was related by D’Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton communicated it, made no use of it.  The two regular theatres of the time were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of The Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield.  There is no inherent improbability in the tale.  Dr. Johnson’s amplified version, in which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the purpose of tending visitors’ horses, sounds apocryphal.

There is every indication that Shakespeare was speedily offered employment inside the playhouse.  In 1587 the two chief companies of actors, claiming respectively the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford.  Two subordinate companies, one of which claimed the patronage of the Earl of Essex and the other that of Lord Stafford, also performed in the town during the same year.  Shakespeare’s friends may have called the attention of the strolling players to the homeless youth, rumours of whose search for employment about the London theatres had doubtless reached Stratford.  From such incidents seems to have sprung the opportunity which offered Shakespeare fame and fortune.  According to Rowe’s vague statement, ‘he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.’  William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor.  Malone recorded in 1780 a stage tradition ‘that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter’s attendant’ or call-boy.  His intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.

Shakespeare’s earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor’s profession till near the end of his life.  By an Act of Parliament of 1571 (14 Eliz. cap. 2), which was re-enacted in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4), players were under the necessity of procuring a license to pursue their calling from a peer of the realm or ‘personage of higher degree;’ otherwise they were adjudged to be of the status of rogues and vagabonds.  The Queen herself and many Elizabethan peers were liberal in the exercise of their licensing powers, and few actors failed to secure a statutory license, which gave them a rank of respectability, and relieved them of all risk of identification with vagrants or ‘sturdy beggars.’  From an early period in Elizabeth’s reign licensed actors were organised into permanent companies.  In 1587 and following years, besides three companies of duly licensed boy-actors that were formed from the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel Royal and from Westminster scholars, there were in London at least six companies of fully licensed adult actors; five of these were called after the noblemen to whom their members respectively owed their licenses (viz. the Earls of Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the Lord Admiral, Charles, lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them whose actors derived their license from the Queen was called the Queen’s Company.

The patron’s functions in relation to the companies seem to have been mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors’ licenses.  Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company’s history.  But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named—that under the nominal patronage of the Earl of Leicester—passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September 25, 1592.  When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as patron and licenser was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain (d. July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in March 1597.  After King James’s succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the King’s players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy which, under its successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.

When Shakespeare became a member of the company it was doubtless performing at The Theatre, the playhouse in Shoreditch which James Burbage, the father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, had constructed in 1576; it abutted on the Finsbury Fields, and stood outside the City’s boundaries.  The only other London playhouse then in existence—the Curtain in Moorfields—was near at hand; its name survives in Curtain Road, Shoreditch.  But at an early date in his acting career Shakespeare’s company sought and found new quarters.  While known as Lord Strange’s men, they opened on February 19, 1592, a third London theatre, called the Rose, which Philip Henslowe, the speculative theatrical manager, had erected on the Bankside, Southwark.  At the date of the inauguration of the Rose Theatre Shakespeare’s company was temporarily allied with another company, the Admiral’s men, who numbered the great actor Edward Alleyn among them.  Alleyn for a few months undertook the direction of the amalgamated companies, but they quickly parted, and no further opportunity was offered Shakespeare of enjoying professional relations with Alleyn.  The Rose Theatre was doubtless the earliest scene of Shakespeare’s pronounced successes alike as actor and dramatist.  Subsequently for a short time in 1594 he frequented the stage of another new theatre at Newington Butts, and between 1595 and 1599 the older stages of the Curtain and of The Theatre in Shoreditch.  The Curtain remained open till the Civil Wars, although its vogue after 1600 was eclipsed by that of younger rivals.  In 1599 Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert demolished the old building of The Theatre and built, mainly out of the materials of the dismantled fabric, the famous theatre called the Globe on the Bankside.  It was octagonal in shape, and built of wood, and doubtless Shakespeare described it (rather than the Curtain) as ‘this wooden O’ in the opening chorus of ‘Henry V’ (1. 13).  After 1599 the Globe was mainly occupied by Shakespeare’s company, and in its profits he acquired an important share.  From the date of its inauguration until the poet’s retirement, the Globe—which quickly won the first place among London theatres—seems to have been the sole playhouse with which Shakespeare was professionally associated.  The equally familiar Blackfriars Theatre, which was created out of a dwelling-house by James Burbage, the actor’s father, at the end of 1596, was for many years afterwards leased out to the company of boy-actors known as ‘the Queen’s Children of the Chapel;’ it was not occupied by Shakespeare’s company until December 1609 or January 1610, when his acting days were nearing their end. [38a]

Place of residence in London.

In London Shakespeare resided near the theatres.  According to a memorandum by Alleyn (which Malone quoted), he lodged in 1596 near ‘the Bear Garden in Southwark.’  In 1598 one William Shakespeare, who was assessed by the collectors of a subsidy in the sum of 13s. 4d. upon goods valued at £5, was a resident in St. Helen’s parish, Bishopsgate, but it is not certain that this taxpayer was the dramatist. [38b]

Shakespeare’s alleged travels.  In Scotland.

The chief differences between the methods of theatrical representation in Shakespeare’s day and our own lay in the fact that neither scenery nor scenic costume nor women-actors were known to the Elizabethan stage.  All female rôles were, until the Restoration in 1660, assumed in the public theatres by men or boys. [38c]  Consequently the skill needed to rouse in the audience the requisite illusions was far greater then than at later periods.  But the professional customs of Elizabethan actors approximated in other respects more closely to those of their modern successors than is usually recognised.  The practice of touring in the provinces was followed with even greater regularity then than now.  Few companies remained in London during the summer or early autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could reckon on at least one visit from travelling actors between May and October.  A rapid examination of the extant archives of some seventy municipalities selected at random shows that Shakespeare’s company between 1594 and 1614 frequently performed in such towns as Barnstaple, Bath, Bristol, Coventry, Dover, Faversham, Folkestone, Hythe, Leicester, Maidstone, Marlborough, New Romney, Oxford, Rye in Sussex, Saffron Walden, and Shrewsbury. [40a]  Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his sonnets were doubtless reminiscences of early acting tours.  It has been repeatedly urged, moreover, that Shakespeare’s company visited Scotland, and that he went with it. [40b]  In November 1599 English actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin, and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the king. [41a]  Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earlier.  Shakespeare’s company never included an actor named Martin.  Fletcher repeated the visit in October 1601. [41b]  There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare’s company.  In like manner, Shakespeare’s accurate reference in ‘Macbeth’ to the ‘nimble’ but ‘sweet’ climate of Inverness, [41c] and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths, have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and the theatres after James I’s accession.

A few English actors in Shakespeare’s day occasionally combined to make professional tours through foreign lands, where Court society invariably gave them a hospitable reception.  In Denmark, Germany, Austria, Holland, and France, many dramatic performances were given before royal audiences by English actors between 1580 and 1630. [42a]  That Shakespeare joined any of these expeditions is highly improbable.  Actors of small account at home mainly took part in them, and Shakespeare’s name appears in no extant list of those who paid professional visits abroad.  It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the continent of Europe in either a private or professional capacity.  He repeatedly ridicules the craze for foreign travel. [42b]  To Italy, it is true, and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment.  But the fact that he represents Valentine in the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (I. i. 71) as travelling from Verona to Milan by sea, and Prospero in ‘The Tempest’ as embarking on a ship at the gates of Milan (I. ii. 129-44), renders it almost impossible that he could have gathered his knowledge of Northern Italy from personal observation. [43a]  He doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled friends or to books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising.

Shakespeare’s rôles.

The publisher Chettle wrote in 1592 that Shakespeare was ‘exelent in the qualitie [43b] he professes,’ and the old actor William Beeston asserted in the next century that Shakespeare ‘did act exceedingly well.’ [43c]  But the rôles in which he distinguished himself are imperfectly recorded.  Few surviving documents refer directly to performances by him.  At Christmas 1594 he joined the popular actors William Kemp, the chief comedian of the day, and Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor, in ‘two several comedies or interludes’ which were acted on St. Stephen’s Day and on Innocents’ Day (December 27 and 28) at Greenwich Palace before the Queen.  The players received ‘xiiili. vjs. viiid. and by waye of her Majesties rewarde vili. xiiis. iiijd., in all xxli. [44a]  Neither plays nor parts are named.  Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list of those who took part in the original performances of Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour’ (1598).  In the original edition of Jonson’s ‘Sejanus’ (1603) the actors’ names are arranged in two columns, and Shakespeare’s name heads the second column, standing parallel with Burbage’s, which heads the first.  But here again the character allotted to each actor is not stated.  Rowe identified only one of Shakespeare’s parts, ‘the Ghost in his own “Hamlet,”’ and Rowe asserted his assumption of that character to be ‘the top of his performance.’  John Davies of Hereford noted that he ‘played some kingly parts in sport.’ [44b]  One of Shakespeare’s younger brothers, presumably Gilbert, often came, wrote Oldys, to London in his younger days to see his brother act in his own plays; and in his old age, when his memory was failing, he recalled his brother’s performance of Adam in ‘As you like it.’  In the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Works’ his name heads the prefatory list ‘of the principall actors in all these playes.’

Alleged scorn of an actor’s calling.

That Shakespeare chafed under some of the conditions of the actor’s calling is commonly inferred from the ‘Sonnets.’  There he reproaches himself with becoming ‘a motley to the view’ (cx. 2), and chides fortune for having provided for his livelihood nothing better than ‘public means that public manners breed,’ whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5).  If such self-pity is to be literally interpreted, it only reflected an evanescent mood.  His interest in all that touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active.  He was a keen critic of actors’ elocution, and in ‘Hamlet’ shrewdly denounced their common failings, but clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improvement.  His highest ambitions lay, it is true, elsewhere than in acting, and at an early period of his theatrical career he undertook, with triumphant success, the labours of a playwright.  But he pursued the profession of an actor loyally and uninterruptedly until he resigned all connection with the theatre within a few years of his death.