A London Bride.

One other little bit of high light upon the every-day ways of London living, in the early years of King James, we are tempted to give. It comes out in the private letter of a new-married lady, who was daughter and heiress of that enormously rich merchant, Sir John Spencer, who was Lord Mayor of London; and who, in Elizabeth’s time (as well as James’), lived in Crosby Hall, still standing in the thick of London city, near to where Thread and Needle Street, at its eastern end, abuts upon Bishopsgate. Every voyaging American should go to see this best type of domestic architecture of the fifteenth century now existing in London; and it will quicken his interest in the picturesque old pile to know that Richard III., while Duke of Gloucester, passed some critical days and nights there, and that for some years it was the home of Sir Thomas More. The Spencer heiress, however—of whom we began to make mention—brightened its interior at a later day; there were many suitors for her hand; among them a son of Lord Compton—not looked upon with favor by the rich merchant—and concealing his advances under the disguise of a baker’s boy, through which he came to many stolen interviews, and at last (as tradition tells) was successful enough to trundle away the heiress, covertly, in his baker’s barrow. Through the good offices of Queen Elizabeth, who stood god-mother to the first child, difficulties between father and son-in-law were healed; and when, later, by the death of Sir John Spencer, the bridegroom was assured of the enormous wealth inherited by his bride, he was—poor man—nearly crazed.

Among the curative processes for his relief may be reckoned the letter from his wife to which I have made allusion, and which runs thus:—

Happy husband!

Ben Jonson again.

We must not forget our literature; and what has become of our friend Ben Jonson in these times? He is hearty and thriving; he has written gratulatory and fulsome verses to the new sovereign. He is better placed with James than even with Elizabeth. If his tragedy of “Sejanus” has not found a great success, he has more than made up the failing by the brilliant masques he has written. The pedantic King loves their pretty show of classicism, which he can interpret better than his courtiers. He battens, too, upon the flattery that is strown with a lavish hand:—

This is the strain; no wonder that the poet comes by pension; no wonder he has “commands,” with goodly fees, to all the fêtes in the royal honor. Yet he is too strong and robust and learned to be called a mere sycophant. The more I read of the literary history of those days the more impressed I am by the predominance of Ben Jonson;—a great, careless, hard-living, hard-drinking, not ill-natured literary monarch. His strength is evidenced by the deference shown him—by his versatility; now some musical masque sparkling with little dainty bits which a sentimental miss might copy in her album or chant in her boudoir; and this, matched or followed by some labored drama full of classic knowledge, full of largest wordcraft, snapping with fire-crackers of wit, loaded with ponderous nuggets of strong sense, and the whole capped and booted with prologue and epilogue where poetic graces shine through proudest averments of indifference—of scorn of applause—of audacious self-sufficiency.

It was some fifteen years after James’ coming to power that Ben Jonson made his memorable Scotch journey—perhaps out of respect for his forebears, who had gone, two generations before, out of Annandale—perhaps out of some lighter caprice. In any event it would have been only a commonplace foot-journey of a middle-aged man, well known over all Britain as poet and dramatist, with no special record of its own, except for a visit of a fortnight which he made, in the north country, to Drummond of Hawthornden:—this made it memorable. For this Drummond was a note-taker; he was a smooth but not strong poet; was something proud of his Scotch lairdship; lived in a beautiful home seated upon a crag that lifts above the beautiful valley of Eskdale; its picturesque irregularities of tower and turret are still very charming, and Eskdale is charming with its wooded walks, cliffs, pools, and bridges; Roslin Castle is near by, and Roslin Chapel, and so is Dalkeith.

The tourist of our time can pass no pleasanter summer’s day than in loiterings there and thereabout. Echoes of Scott’s border minstrelsy beat from bank to bank. Poet Drummond was proud to have poet Jonson as a guest, and hospitably plied him with “strong waters;” under the effusion Jonson dilated, and Drummond, eagerly attentive, made notes. These jottings down, which were not voluminous, and which were not published until after both parties were in their graves, have been subject of much and bitter discussion, and relate to topics lying widely apart. There is talk of Petrarch and of Queen Elizabeth—of Marston and of Overbury—of Drayton and Donne—of Shakespeare (all too little)—of King James and Petronius—of Jonson’s “shrew of a wife” and of Sir Francis Bacon; and there are more or less authentic stories of Spenser and Raleigh and Sidney. Throughout we find the burly British poet very aggressive, very outspoken, very penetrative and fearless: and we find his Scotch interviewer a little overawed by the other’s audacities, and not a little resentful of his advice to him—to study Quintillian.

An Italian Reporter.

It was in the very year of Ben Jonson’s return from the north that a masque of his—“Pleasure is Reconciled to Virtue”—was represented at Whitehall; and it so happens that we have a lively glimpse of this representation from the note-book of an Italian gentleman who was chaplain to Pietro Contarini, then ambassador from Venice, and who was living at Sir Pindar’s home in Bishopsgate Street (a locality still kept in mind by a little tavern now standing thereabout called “Sir Pindar’s Head”).

This report of Busino, the Italian gentleman of whom I spoke, about his life in London, was buried in the archives of Venice, until unearthed about twenty years since by an exploring Englishman.[5] So it happens, that in this old Venetian document we seem to look directly through those foreign eyes, closed for two hundred and seventy years, upon the play at Whitehall.

This puts Busino in an ill humor (there was no good-will between Italy and Spain in those days); but he admires the women—“all so many queens.”

There was Bacchus on a car, followed by Silenus on a barrel, and twelve wicker-flasks representing very lively beer bottles, who performed numerous antics; then a moving Mount Atlas, as big as the stage would permit; scores of classic affectations and astonishing mythologic mechanism; and at last, with a great bevy of pages, twelve cavaliers in masques—the Prince Charles (afterward Charles I.) being chief of the revellers.

What a light this little touch of the old gentleman’s choleric spirit throws upon the court manners of that time!

Then Buckingham, the favorite, whom Scott introduces in Nigel as Steenie—comes forward to placate the King, and cuts a score of lofty capers with so much grace and agility as not only to quiet the wrathy monarch but to delight everybody. Afterward comes the banquet, at which his most sacred majesty gets tipsy, and amid a general smashing of Venetian glass, continues the Italian gentleman, “I went home, very tired, at two o’clock in the morning.”

Ah, if we could only unearth some good old play-going chaplain’s account of how Shakespeare appeared—of his dress—of his voice—and with what unction of manner he set before the little audience at the Globe, or Blackfriars, his part of Old Adam (which there is reason to believe he took), in his own delightful play of “As You Like It.” What would we not give to know the very attitude, and the wonderful pity in his look, with which he spoke to his young master, Orlando:—

Shakespeare and the Globe.

Neither our Italian friend, however, nor Ben Jonson have given us any such glimpse as we would like to have of that keen-witted Warwickshire actor and playwright who, in the early years of James’ reign, is living off and on in London; having bought, within a few years—as the records tell us—a fine New Place in Stratford, and has won great favor with that King Jamie, who with all his pedantry knows a good thing when he sees it, or hears it. Indeed, there is some warrant for believing that the King wrote a commendatory letter to the great dramatist, of which Mr. Black, in our time, makes shadowy use in that Shakespearean romance of his,[6] you may have encountered. The novelist gives us some very charming pictures of the Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch and engaging; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon; and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that have hampered him; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that belonged to his treatment of things among the Hebrides. But to return to “Judith’s father”—he is part proprietor of the Globe Theatre, taking in lots of money (old cronies say) in that way; was honored by the Queen, too, before her death, and had written that “Merry Wives of Windsor,” tradition says, to show Queen Bess how the Fat Falstaff would carry his great hulk as a lover.

We might meet this Shakespeare at that Mermaid Tavern we spoke of; but should look out for him more hopefully about one of the playhouses. Going from the Mermaid, supposing we were putting up there in those days, we should strike across St. Paul’s Churchyard, and possibly taking Paul’s Walk, and so down Ludgate Hill; and thence on, bearing southerly to Blackfriars; which locality has now its commemoration in the name of Playhouse Yard, and is in a dingy quarter, with dingy great warehouses round it. Arrived there we should learn, perhaps by a poster on the door, that the theatre would not open till some later hour. Blackfriars[7] was a private theatre, roofed over entirely and lighted with candles; also, through Elizabeth’s time, opening generally on Sundays—that being a popular day—hours being chosen outside of prayer or church-time; and this public dramatic observance of Sunday was only forbidden by express enactment after James came to the throne. At her palace, and with her child-players, Sunday was always Queen Elizabeth’s favorite day.

This Blackfriars was at only a little remove down the Thames from that famous Whitefriars region of which there is such melodramatic account in Scott’s story of Nigel, where Old Trapbois comes to his wild death. If we went to the Globe Theatre, we should push on down to the river—near to a point where Blackfriars Bridge now spans it—then, a clear stream free from all bridges, save only London Bridge, which would have loomed, with its piles of houses, out of the water on our left. At the water-side we should take wherry (fare only one penny) and be sculled over to Southwark, landing at an open place—Bankside—near which was Paris Garden, where bear-baiting was still carried on with high kingly approval; and thereabout, on a spot now swallowed in a gulf of smoked and blackened houses—just about the locality where at a later day stood Richard Baxter’s Chapel, rose the octagonal walls of the Globe Theatre, in which Mr. Shakespeare was concerned as player and part proprietor. There should be a flag flying aloft and people lounging in, paying their two-pence, their sixpences, their shillings, or even their half-crowns—as they chose the commoner or the better places. Only the stage is roofed over; perhaps also a narrow space all round the walls; from all otherwheres within, one could look up straight into the murky sky of London. There is apple-eating, nut-cracking, and some vender of pamphlets bawling “Buy a new booke;” such a one perhaps as that Horne Booke of Gulls—which I told you of, written by Dekker—would have been a favorite for such venders. Or, possibly through urgence of the Court Chamberlain, King James’ Counterblaste to Tobacco may be put on sale there, to mend manners; or Joshua Sylvester’s little poem to the same end, entitled Tobacco battered and the Pipes shattered about their Eares that idly idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, by a Volley of hot shot, thundered from Mount Helicon.

But hot as this sort of shot might have been, we may be sure that some fast fellows, the critics and æsthetes of those days, will have their place on the stage, sprawling there upon the edge, before the actors appear; criticising players and audience and smoking their long pipes; may be taking a hand at cards, and if very “swell,” tossing the cards over to people in the pit when once their game is over—a showy and arrogant largess.

Perhaps Ben Jonson will come swaggering in, having taken a glass, or two, very likely, or even three, in the tap-room of the Tabard Tavern—the famous Tabard of Chaucer’s tales—which is within practicable drinking distance; and Will Shakespeare, if indeed there, may greet him across two benches with, “Ah, Ben,” and he—tipsily in reply, with “Ah, my good fellow, Will.” Those prim young men, Beaumont and Fletcher, who are just now pluming their wings for such dramatic flights as these two older men have made, may also be there. And the play will open with three little bursts of warning music; always a prologue with a first representation; and it may chance that the very one we have lighted upon, is some special exhibit of that great military spectacle of “Henry V.” which we know, and all the times between have known; and it may be that this Shakespeare, being himself author and in a sense manager of these boards, may come forward to speak the prologue himself; how closely we would have eyed him, and listened:—

And then the play begins and we see them all: Gloucester and the brave king, and Bedford, and Fluellen, and the pretty Kate of France (by some boy-player), and Nym, and Pistol, and Dame Quickly; and the drums beat, and the roar of battle breaks and rolls away—as only Shakespeare’s words can make battles rage; and the French Kate is made Queen, and so the end comes.

All this might have happened; I have tried to offend against no historic data of places, or men, or dates in this summing up. And from the doors of the Globe, where we are assailed by a clamor of watermen and linkboys, we go down to the river’s edge—scarce a stone’s-throw distant—and take our wherry, on the bow of which a light is now flaming, and float away in the murky twilight upon that great historic river—watching the red torch-fires, kindling one by one along the Strand shores, and catching the dim outline of London houses—the London of King James I.—looming through the mists behind them.

In our next chapter I shall have somewhat more to say of the Stratford man—specially of his personality; and more to say of King James, and of his English Bible.

CHAPTER II.

We have had our glimpse of the first (English) Stuart King, as he made his shambling way to the throne—beset by spoilsmen; we had our glimpse, too, of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the magic-lantern of Scott at the toilet and the draggled feathers of the pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the Scotch Nigel adventured; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose silken dresses whisked along those balusters of Crosby Hall, which brides of our day may touch reverently now; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale; and thereafter we sauntered down Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside and the Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o’ day with Ben Jonson; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes; and had a glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe Theatre.

Gosson and Other Puritans.

There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a certain Stephen Gosson[8]—well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his fellows—who had received a university education, who had written delicate pastorals and other verse, which—with many people—ranked him with Spenser and Sidney; who had written plays too, but who, somehow conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses to extremest Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against “Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”—as he called them—as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day I cited. He had called his discourse, “pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable for all that will follow Vertue.” He represented the Puritan feeling—which was growing in force—in respect to poetry and the drama; and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best loved and trusted emissaries of Satan.

But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers;—not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603—he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties—partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, he issued a proclamation—“Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church.”

Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, “moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original.”

King James’ Bible.

There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though—for anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision—it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.

It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that “it should be done by the best learned in both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the “most High, and Mighty Prince James” (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense; after thanking him as “principal mover and author of the work,” the dedication exuberantly declares that “the hearts of all your loyal and religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little tractate of his—the Basilikon Doron—not written for publication (though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions; and—saving some scornings of the “vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines”—is written in a spirit which might be safely commended to later British Princes.

Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King James’ money, none from the royal exchequer; which indeed from the King’s disorderly extravagances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low. The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of book-makers who were concerned with the printing and selling of the new Bible.

When the business of revision actually commenced it is hard to determine accurately; but it was not till the year 1611—eight years after the Hampton Conference—that an edition was published by printer Barker (who, or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version “appointed (by assemblage of Bishops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the great Bible of the English-speaking world—then, and thence-forward. And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? Their names are all of record: and yet if I were to print them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of the twoscore.[9] You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this time was writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty, and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Robert Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book The Anatomy of Melancholy—then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury—both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,[10] though he came to be Dean of St. Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may—and ought to know; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Immortality of the Soul[11] in strains that warrant our citing a few quatrains:—

This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.

And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view—which is our stand-point to-day—there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good reason to believe that—on literary lines—any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that will mend its science—that will mend its archæology—that will mend its history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out—freighted with Christian doctrine—over all lands where Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one—in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one—it is reasonably to be presumed—can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the “higher criticism;” and no one will be henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions.

And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,[12] at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an interpolation—that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself)—“For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”

And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes; no matter what critical scholarship may do in amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their strong, old English current—burdened with tender memories—murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come—“or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.”

The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak—whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight—is overgrown, unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its support—that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe?

It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “King James’ Version” do not lie altogether in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in Jacobean felicities; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure have brought their pleasant reverberations of lingual sound all the way down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif.

A few facts about the printing and publishing of the early English Bibles it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the fatherly edicts against Bible-reading and Bible-owning in the time of Henry VIII.; but the reign of his son, Edward VI., was a golden epoch for the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the throne, fifty editions—principally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s versions—were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged in their manufacture.

Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth in ghastly wood-cut “the burning of Mr. John Rogers at the Stake, in Smithfield.” Elizabeth was coy; she set a great many prison-doors open; and when a courtier said, “May it please your Majesty, there be sundry other prisoners held in durance, and it would much comfort God’s people that they be set free.” She asked, “Whom?” And the good Protestant said, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she—young as she was—showed her monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.”

But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through Cheapside—had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and said she should “oft read that holy book”—which was easy to say, and becoming.

In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley—that John Bodley whose more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford.

In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood—of Elizabeth, on the title-page—of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year.

It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin, in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743.

But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them all, who was born upon the Avon.

Shakespeare.

I have tried—I will confess it now—to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies—whether places, or writers, or sovereigns—I said to myself—when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written—we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying—standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles—this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle—brimful of life—with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal—that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy—apart in his dim tower—piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony.

These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse—allusion—is of such weight—has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson;—not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted—but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship.

If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James—names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best—I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.

And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pilgrimage which he told us of in such winning numbers, make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the “Faërie Queene,” they are phantasmic; we may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely—they have no flesh and blood texture: and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the best-drawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well—Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters appear, but because none of them have that vital roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities.

We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us—maybe their pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know.

Shakespeare’s Youth.

And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue?

And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men—poets and dramatists—who belonged to his time, and who—with a pleasant egoism—let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family “wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless—aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted—to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him; he ran out of sight of them all.

He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born—his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers—whether in wool, meats, or gloves—and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family—in the female line[13]—toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;—hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them; wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges of coal and lumber swaying with the idle currents that swish among the sedges at the banks.

On the north, toward Warwick, are the Welcombe hills, here and there tufted with great trees, which may have mingled their boughs, in some early time, with the skirts of the forest of Arden; and from these heights, looking southwest, one can see the packed gray and red roofs of the town, the lines of lime-trees, the elms and the willows of the river’s margin, out of which rises the dainty steeple of Stratford church; while beyond, the eye leaps over the hazy hollows of the Red-horse valley, and lights upon the blue rim of hills in Gloucestershire, known as the Cotswolds (which have given name to one of the famous breeds of English sheep). More to the left, and nearer to a south line of view, crops up Edgehill (near to Pilot-Marston), an historic battle-field—wherefrom Shakespeare, on his way to London may have looked back—on spire, and alder copse, and river—with more or less of yearning. To the right, again, and more westerly than before, and on the hither side of the Red-horse valley and plain, one can catch sight of the rounded thickets of elms and of orcharding where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Thence Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hathaway, she being well toward the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a family at this time, we cannot now say; nor could his father-in-law tell then; on which score there was—as certain traditions run—some vain demurral. He may have been associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover; doubtless was; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling; doubtless was at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories too—of lesser authenticity—that he was over-familiar with the game in the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner. We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and its delightful park, and picturesque mossy walls—dappled with patches of shadow and with ivy leaves—look charmingly innocent of any harm their master could have done to William Shakespeare; but certain it is that the neighborhood grew too warm for him; and that he set off one day (being then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune.

Family Relations.

His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact—and it may as well be said here—they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people—grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little—perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.”