THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF WILLIAM SHAKSPERE. On the 22nd of August, 1485, there was a battle fought for the crown of England, a short battle ending in a decisive victory. The battle-field was Bosworth. Was there in that victorious army of the Earl of Richmond an Englishman bearing the name of Chacksper, or Shake peyre, or Schakespere, or Schakespeire, or Schakspere, or Shakespere, or Shakspere,*—a martial name, however spelt? Of the warlike achievements of this Shakspere there is no record: his name or his deeds would have no interest for us unless there had been born, eighty years after this battle-day, a direct descendant from him Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth like himself heroically sound;"†a Shakspere, of whom it was also said "He seems to shake a lance As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance." A public document bearing the date of 1596 affirms of John Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, the father of William Shakspere, that his "parent and late antecessors were, for their valiant and faithful services, advanced and rewarded of the most prudent prince King Henry VII. of famous memory;" and it adds, "sithence which time they have continued at those parts [Warwickshire] in good reputation and credit." Another document of a similar character, bearing the date of 1599, also affirms upon "creditable report," of "John Shakspere, now of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentleman," that his "parent and great-grandfather, late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince King Henry VII. of famous memory, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements, given to him in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit." Such are the recitals of two several grants of arms to John Shakspere, confirming a previous grant made to him in 1569. The great-grandson of the faithful and approved servant of Henry VII., John Shakspere, was a burgess of the corporation of Stratford, and was in all probability born about 1530. The family had continued in those parts," by some descents;" but how they were occupied in the business of life, what was their station in society, how they branched out into other lines of Shaksperes, we have no record. In 1599 John Shakspere a second time went to the A list of the brethren and sisters of the Guild of Knowle, near Rowington, in Warwickshire, exhibits a great number of the name of Shaks ere in that fraternity, from about 1460 to 1527; and the names are spelt with the diversity here given, Shakspere being the latest. | College of Arms, and, producing his own "ancient coat of arms," said that he had "married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden, of Wellingcote:" and then the heralds say-" We have likewise upon one other escutcheon impaled the same with the ancient arms of the said Arden of Wellingcote." They add that John Shakspere, and his children, issue, and posterity, may bear and use the same shield of arms, single or impaled. The family of Arden was one of the highest antiquity in Warwickshire. Dugdale traces its pedigree uninterruptedly up to the time of Edward the Confessor. The pedigree which Dugdale gives of the Arden family brings us no nearer in the direct line to the mother of Shakspere than to Robert Arden, her great-grandfather he was the third son of Walter Arden, who married Eleanor the daughter of John Hampden, of Buckinghamshire; and he was brother to Sir John Arden, squire for the body to Henry VII. Robert's son, also called Robert, was groom of the chamber to Henry VII He married, and he had a son, also Robert, who married Agnes Webbe. Their youngest daughter was Mary. the mother of William Shakspere. High as was her desceat, wealthy and powerful as were the numerous branches of her family, Mary Arden, we doubt not, led a life of usefulness as well as innocence, within her native forest hamlet. She had three sisters, and they all, with their mother Agnes, survived their father, who died in December, 1556. His will is dated the 24th of November in the same year, and the testator styles himself "Robert Arden, of Wylmcote, in the paryche of Aston Cauntlow." Mary, his youngest daughter, from superiority of mind, or some other cause of her father's confidence, occupies the most prominent position in the will. She has an undivided estate and a sum of money; and, from the crop being also bequeathed to her, it is evident that she was considered able to continue the tillage. The estate thus bequeathed to her consisted of about sixty acres of arable and pasture, and a house; and was called Asbies. In the winter of 1556 was Mary Arden left without the guidance of a father, under this somewhat naked roof-tree, now become her own. Her sister Alice was to occupy another property in Wilmecote with her mother, provided the widow would so consent; and she did consent. And so she lived a somewhat lonely life, till a young yeoman of Stratford, who had probably some acquaintance with her father, came to sit oftener and oftener upon the wooden benches in the old hall— a substantial yeoman, a burgess of the corporation in 1557 or 1558; and then in due season Mary Arden and John Shakspere were standing before the altar of the parish church of Aston Cantlow, and the house and lands of Ashes became administered by one who took possession "by the right of the said Mary," who thenceforward abided for half a century in the good town of Stratford. There have been endless theories, old and new, affirmations, contradictions, as to the worldly calling of John Shakspere. There are ancient registers in Stratford, minutes of the Common Hall, proceedings of the Court-leet, pleas of the Court of Record, writs, which have been hunted over with unwearied diligence, and yet they tell us nothing, or next to nothing, of John Shakspere. When he was elected an alderman in 1565, we can trace out the occupations of his brother aldermen, and readily come to the conclusion that the municipal authority of Stratford was vested, as we may naturally suppose it to have been, in the bands of substantial tradesmen, brewers, bakers, butchers, grocers, victuallers, mercers, woollen-drapers. Prying into the secrets of time, we are enabled to form some notion of the literary acquirements of this worshipful body. On rare, very rare occasions, the aldermen and burgesses constituting the town council affixed their signatures, for greater solemnity, to some order of the court; and on the 29th of September, in the seventh of Elizabeth, upon an order that John Wheler should take the office of bailiff, we have nineteen names subscribed, aldermen and burgesses. There is something in this document which suggests a motive higher than mere curiosity for calling up these dignitaries from their happy oblivion, saying to each, “Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest plain-dealing man?" Alas! out of the nineteen seven only can answer, "I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name." It is a matter of controversy whether John Shakspere was one of the more clerkly corporators. We think he was; others believe he was not. In 1556, the year that Robert, the father of Mary Arden, died, John Shakspere was admitted at the court-leet to two copyhold estates in Stratford. The jurors of the leet present that George Turnor had alienated to John Shakspere and his heirs one tenement, with a garden and croft, and other premises, in Grenehyll-street, held of the lord at an annual quit-rent; and John Shakspere, who is present in court and does fealty, is admitted to the same. The same jurors present that Edward West has alienated to John Shakspere one tenement and a garden adjacent in Henley Street, who is in the same way admitted, upon fealty done to the lord. Here then is John Shakspere, before his marriage, the purchaser of two copyholds in Stratford, both with gardens, and one with a croft, or small enclosed field. In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenance, called Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds. This rent, equivalent to at least forty pounds of our present money, would indicate that the appurtenance included a house.-and a very good house. This meadow of Ingon forms part of a large property known by that name near Cloptonhouse. When John Shakspere married, the estate of Asbies, within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his possession. With these facts before us, scanty as they are. can we reasonably doubt that John Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when tillage was becoming rapidly profitable, --so much so that men of wealth very often thought it better to take the profits direct than to share them with the tenant? And is all this, it may be said, of any importance in looking at the life of William Shakspere-a man who stands above all other individual men, above all ranks of men; in comparison with whom, in his permanent influence upon mankind, generations of nobles, fighting men, statesmen, princes, are but as dust? It is something, we think. It offers a better, because a more natural, explanation of the circumstances connected with the early life of the great poet than those stories which would make him of obscure birth and servile employments. Take old Aubrey's story, the shrewd learned gossip and antiquary, who survived Shakspere some eighty years:-" Mr. William Shakspere was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young." The story, however, has a variation. There was at Stratford, in the year 1693, a clerk of the parish church, eighty years old,—that is, he was three years old when William Shakspere died,—and he, pointing to the monument of the poet, with the pithy remark that he was the "best of his family," proclaimed to a member of one of the Inns of Court that "this Shakespere was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher, but that be ran from his master to London." His father was a butcher, says Aubrey; he was apprenticed to a butcher, says the parish clerk. Akin to the butcher's trade is that of the dealer in wool. It is upon the authority of Betterton, the actor, who, in the beginning of the last century, made a journey into Warwickshire to collect anecdotes relating to Shakspere, that Rowe tells us that John Shakspere was a dealer in wool :-" His family, as appears by the regis ter and public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment." Tradition is here, we think, becoming a little more assimilated with the truth. The considerable dealer in wool might very well have been the landed proprietor, the cultivator, that we believe John Shakspere to have been. Nor indeed was the incidental business even of a butcher, a slayer and seller of carcasses, incompatible with that occupation of a landholder. Harrison (1590), who mingles laments at the increasing luxury of the farmer with somewhat contradictory denouncements of the oppression of the tenant by the landlord, holds that the landlord is monopolising the tenant's profits:- Must sorrowful of all to understand, that men of great pest There is an entry in the Bailiff's Court of Stratford, in 1555, which shows us one John Shakspere, a glover. It does not follow that if this record be of the father of William Shakspere, a young man in 1555, that he was always a glover. If he were a glover in 1555, he was subsequently a holder of land—a land proprietor.* and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers | precious gift to a loving boy was granted, a sister, who to have any gain at all, that they themselves become grew up with him. Then came another sister, who graziers, BUTCHERS, tanners, SHEEPMASTERS, wood- faded untimely. When he was ten years old he had men, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich them- another brother to lead by the hand into the green measelves, and bring all the wealth of the country into dows. When he was grown into youthful strength, a boy their own hands, leaving the commonalty weak, or as of sixteen, his youngest brother was born. William, an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in time Gilbert, Joan, Richard, Edmund, constituted the whole of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity of the family amongst whom John Shakspere was to shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." Has share his means of existence. Rowe, we have already not Harrison solved the mystery of the butcher, and ex- seen, mentions the large family of John Shakspere plained the tradition of the woolman? "ten children in all." Malone has established very satisfactorily the origin of this error into which Rowe has fallen. In later years there was another John Shakspere in Stratford. In the books of the corporation the name of John Shakspere, shoemaker, can be traced in 1586; in the register in 1584 we find him married to Margery Roberts, who dies in 1587; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589, 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569—“ Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597 it is set forth that John Shaksper and his wife Mary, in the 20th Elizabeth, 1577, mort gaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, without the honourable addition. of Master, were also her children; for in 1599, when William Shakspere is an opulent man, application is made to the College of Arms, that John Shakspere, and his issue and posterity, might use a "shield of arms," impaled with the arms of Shakspere and Arden. This application would in all probability have been at the instance of John Shakspere's eldest son and heir. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reasonably be expected. The Register of Baptisms of the parish of Stratfordpon-Avon shows that William, the son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 26th April, 1564. And when born? The want of such information is a defect in all parish-registers. Baptism so immediately followed birth in those times, when infancy was surrounded with greater dangers than in our own days of improved medical science, that we may believe that William Shakspere first saw the light only a day or two previous to this legal record of his existence. There is no direct evidence that he was born on the 23rd of April, according to the cominon belief. But there was probably a tradition to that effect; for some years ago the Rev. Joseph Greene, a master of the grammar-school at Stratford, in an extract which he made from the Register of Shakspere's baptism, wrote in the margin, "Born on the 23rd." We turn back to the first year of the registry, 1558, and we find the baptism of Joan, daughter to John Shakspere, on the 15th of September. Again, in 1562, on the 2nd of December, Margaret, daughter to John Shakspere, is baptized. In the entry of burials in 1563 we find, under date of April 30, that Margaret closed a short life in five months. We look forward, and in 1566 find the birth of another son registered :-Gilbert, son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 13th of October of that year. In 1569 there is the registry of the baptism of a daughter, Joan, daughter of John Shakspere, on the 15th of April. Thus, the registry of a second Joan leaves no reasonable doubt that the first died, and that a favourite name was preserved in the family. In 1571 another daughter was born,-Anne, daughter of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 28th of September. In 1574 another son was baptized, -Richard, son of Master John Shakspere, on the 11th of March. The register of sorrow and blighted hope shows that Anne was buried on the 4th of April, 1579. The last entry, which determines the extent of John Shakspere's family, is that of Edmund, son of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 3rd of May, 1580. Here, then, we find that two sisters of William were removed by death, probably before his birth. In two years and a half another son, Gilbert, came to be his playmate; and when he was five years old that most * See page 1044 The year of William Shakspere's birth was a fearful year for Stratford. The plague raged with terrific violence in the little town. It was the same epidemic which ravaged Europe in that year; which in the previous year had desolated London, and still continued there. The red cross was probably not on the door of John Shakspere's dwelling. "Fortunately for mankind," says Malone, "it did not reach the house where the infant Shakspere lay; for not one of that name appears on the dead list." The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Streethouses which still exist. Nine years before William Shakspere was born, his father had also purchased two copyhold tenements in Stratford – -one in Greenhill Street, one in Henley Street. The copyhold house in Henley Street, purchased in 1555, was unquestionably not one of the freehold houses in the same street, pur meaning; and thus to render the previous lame and "For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give.” chased in 1574; yet, from Malone's loose way of stating that in 1555 the lease of a house in Henley Street was assigned to John Shakspete, it has been conjectured that he purchased in 1574 the house he had occupied for many years. As he purchased two houses in 1555 in different parts of the town, it is not likely that he occupied both; he might not have occupied either. Before he purchased the two houses in Henley Street, in 1571, he occupied fourteen acres of meadow-land, with appurtenances, at a very high rent; the property is called Ingon meadow in the "Close Rolls." Dugdale calls the place where it was situated "Inge;" Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure—that, it saying that it was a member of the manor of Old Strat- Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same ford, "and signifyeth in our old English a meadow or low ground, the name well agreeing with its situation." series of verses that have suggested this belief that he It is about a mile and a quarter from the town of was lame also show that he was a horseman. His Stratford, on the road to Warwick. William Shakspere, entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nathen, might have been born at either of his father's ture, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which copyhold houses, in Greenhill Street, or in Henley is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not Street; he might have been born at Ingon; or his impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental father might have occupied one of the two freehold injury, may have modified the energy of such a child, houses in Henley Street at the time of the birth of his and have cherished in him that love of books, and traTradition says that William Shakspereditionary lore, and silent contemplation, without which eldest son. was born in one of these houses; tradition points out the very room in which he was born. Let us not disturb the belief. To look upon that ancient houseperhaps now one of the oldest in Stratford-pilgrims have come from every region where the name of Shakspere is known. The property passed into a younger branch of the poet's family; the descendants of that branch grew poorer and poorer; they sold off its orchards and gardens; they divided and subdivided it into smaller tenements; it became partly a butcher's shop, partly a little inn. The external appearance was greatly altered, and its humble front rendered still humbler. The windows in the roof were removed; and the half which had become the inn received a new brick casing. The central portion is that which is now shown as the birth-place of the illustrious man-" the myriad-minded." There is a passage in one of Shakspere's Sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude : Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, Again, in the 37th Sonnet: "As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, These lines have been interpreted to mean that William his intellect could not have been nourished into its wondrous strength. But we cannot imagine William Shakspere a petted child, chained to home, not breathing the free air upon his native hills, denied the boy's privilege to explore every nook of his own river. We would imagine him communing from the first with Nature, as Gray has painted him— “The dauntless child Stretch'd forth his little arms and smil'd." The only qualifications necessary for the admission of a boy into the Free Grammar School of Stratford were, that he should be a resident in the town, of seven years of age, and able to read. The Grainmar School was essentially connected with the Corporation of Stratford; and it is impossible to imagine that, when the son of John Shakspere became qualified by age for admission to a school where the best education of the time was given, literally for nothing, his father, in that year, being chief alderman, should not have sent him to the school. We assume, without any hesitation, that William Shakspere did receive in every just sense of the word the education of a scholar; and as such education was to be had at his own door, we also assume that he was brought up at the Free Grammar School of his own town. His earlier instruction would therefore be a preparation for this school, and the probability is that such instruction was given him at home. A question arises, did William Shakspere receive his elementary instruction in Christianity from the books sanctioned by the Reformed Church? It bas been maintained that his father belonged to the Roman Catholic persuasion. This belief rests upou the following foundation. In the year 1770, Thomas Hart, who then inhabited one of the tenements in Henley Street which had been bequeathed to his family by William Shakspere's granddaughter, employed a bricklayer to new tile the house; and this bricklayer, by name Mosely, found hidden between the rafters and the tiling a manuscript consisting of sx leaves stitched |