Part 2 (1/2)
But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us recapitulate the points of the story. A baronet, who has no deer and no park, is supposed to persecute a poet for stealing these aerial deer out of this aerial park, both lying in _nephelococcygia_. The poet sleeps upon this wrong for eighteen years; but at length, hearing that his persecutor is dead and buried, he conceives b.l.o.o.d.y thoughts of revenge. And this revenge he purposes to execute by picking a hole in his dead enemy's coat-of-arms. Is this coat-of-arms, then, Sir Thomas Lucy's? Why, no; Malone admits that it is not. For the poet, suddenly recollecting that this ridicule would settle upon the son of his enemy, selects another coat-of-arms, with which his dead enemy never had any connection, and he spends his thunder and lighting upon this irrelevant object; and, after all, the ridicule itself lies in a Welchman's misp.r.o.nouncing one single heraldic term--a Welchman who misp.r.o.nounces all words. The last act of the poet's malice recalls to us a sort of jest-book story of an Irishman, the vulgarity of which the reader will pardon in consideration of its relevancy. The Irishman having lost a pair of silk stockings, mentions to a friend that he has taken steps for recovering them by an advertis.e.m.e.nt, offering a reward to the finder. His friend objects that the costs of advertising, and the reward, would eat out the full value of the silk stockings. But to this the Irishman replies, with a knowing air, that he is not so green as to have overlooked _that_; and that, to keep down the reward, he had advertised the stockings as worsted. Not at all less flagrant is the bull ascribed to Shakspeare, when he is made to punish a dead man by personalities meant for his exclusive ear, through his coat-of-arms, but at the same time, with the express purpose of blunting and defeating the edge of his own scurrility, is made to subst.i.tute for the real arms some others which had no more relation to the dead enemy than they had to the poet himself.
This is the very sublime of folly, beyond which human dotage cannot advance.
It is painful, indeed, and dishonorable to human nature, that whenever men of vulgar habits and of poor education wish to impress us with a feeling of respect for a man's talents, they are sure to cite, by way of evidence, some gross instance of malignity. Power, in their minds, is best ill.u.s.trated by malice or by the infliction of pain. To this unwelcome fact we have some evidence in the wretched tale which we have just dismissed; and there is another of the same description to be found in all lives of Shakspeare, which we will expose to the contempt of the reader whilst we are in this field of discussion, that we may not afterwards have to resume so disgusting a subject.
This poet, who was a model of gracious benignity in his manners, and of whom, amidst our general ignorance, thus much is perfectly established, that the term _gentle_ was almost as generally and by prescriptive right a.s.sociated with his name as the affix of _venerable_ with Bede, or _judicious_ with Hooker, is alleged to have insulted a friend by an imaginary epitaph beginning ”_Ten in the Hundred_” and supposing him to be d.a.m.ned, yet without wit enough (which surely the Stratford bellman could have furnished) for devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is,” The _sharpness of the satire_ is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. ”We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, _Ten in the Hundred_ could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man _Three-and-a-half-per-cent_. in this present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons who built their morality upon the Jewish ceremonial law. Shakspeare himself took ten per cent. _2dly_, It happens that John Combe, so far from being the object of the poet's scurrility, or viewing the poet as an object of implacable resentment, was a Stratford friend; that one of his family was affectionately remembered in Shakspeare's will by the bequest of his sword; and that John Combe himself recorded his perfect charity with Shakspeare by leaving him a legacy of 5L sterling. And in this lies the key to the whole story. For, _3dly_, The four lines were written and printed before Shakspeare was born. The name Combe is a common one; and some stupid fellow, who had seen the name in Shakspeare's will, and happened also to have seen the lines in a collection of epigrams, chose to connect the cases by attributing an ident.i.ty to the two John Combes, though at war with chronology.
Finally, there is another specimen of doggerel attributed to Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy of him, because not equally malignant, but otherwise equally below his intellect, no less than his scholars.h.i.+p; we mean the inscription on his grave-stone. This, as a sort of _siste viator_ appeal to future s.e.xtons, is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk, who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique formula, like the vulgar record of owners.h.i.+p in books--
”Anthony Timothy Dolthead's hook, G.o.d give him grace therein to look.”
Thus far the matter is of little importance; and it might have been supposed that malignity itself could hardly have imputed such trash to Shakspeare. But when we find, even in this short compa.s.s, scarcely wider than the posy of a ring, room found for traducing the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that the leading sentiment, the horror expressed at any disturbance offered to his bones, is not one to which Shakspeare could have attached the slightest weight; far less could have outraged the sanct.i.ties of place and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever (and, according to the fiction of the case, his farewell sentiment) the sanction of a curse.
Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of this great man, have led us into a digression that might have been unseasonable in any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless biographer impute to Shakspeare the asinine doggerel with which the uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his name to be dishonored. We now resume the thread of our biography.
The stream of history is centuries in working itself clear of any calumny with which it has once been polluted.
Most readers will be aware of an old story, according to which Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some time after coming to London by holding the horses of those who rode to the play. This legend is as idle as any one of those which we have just exposed.
No custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play.
Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would a.s.suredly not expose them systematically to the injury of standing exposed to cold for two or even four hours; and persons of inferior rank would not ride on horseback in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed, stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to meet the public wants; and in some of the dramatic sketches of the day, which noticed every fas.h.i.+on as it arose, this would not have been overlooked. The story is traced originally to Sir William Davenant.
Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it from him, pa.s.sed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, Pope to Bishop Newton, the editor of Milton, and Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the fable, however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies the chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much less absurd, represents Shakspeare as having from the very first been borne upon the establishment of the theatre, and so far contradicts the other fable, but originally in the very humble character of _call-boy_ or deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon each performer according to his order of coming upon the stage.
This story, however, quite as much as the other, is irreconcileable with the discovery recently made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589 Shakspeare was a shareholder in the important property of a princ.i.p.al London theatre. It seems destined that all the undoubted facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us through the channel of legal doc.u.ments, which are better evidence even than imperial medals; whilst, on the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes, not having an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the fictions of the wonder maker. The plain presumption from the record of Shakspeare's situation in 1589, coupled with the fact that his first arrival in London was possibly not until 1587, but according to the earliest account not before 1586, a s.p.a.ce of time which leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of situation, seems to be, that, either in requital of services done to the players by the poet's family, or in consideration of money advanced by his father-in-law, or on account of Shakspeare's personal accomplishments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic works to the stage; for one of these reasons, or for all of them united, William Shakspeare, about the 23d year of his age, was adopted into the partners.h.i.+p of a respectable histrionic company, possessing a first-rate theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in which he came up to London, it seems probable enough that his immediate motive to that step was the increasing distress of his father; for in that year John Shakspeare resigned the office of alderman. There is, however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare might have gone to London about the time when he completed his twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, but not earlier.
Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest daughter Susanna, his wife lay in for a second and a _last_ time; but she then brought her husband twins, a son and a daughter. These children were baptized in February of the year 1585; so that Shakspeare's whole family of three children were born and baptized two months before he completed his majority. The twins were baptized by the names of Hamnet and Judith, those being the names of two amongst their sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, which is a remarkable name in itself, becomes still more so from its resemblance to the immortal name of Hamlet [Endnote: 17] the Dane; it was, however, the real baptismal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of Shakspeare's, about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare's son must then have been most interesting to his heart, both as a twin child and as his only boy. He died in 1596, when he was about eleven years old. Both daughters survived their father; both married; both left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the succession from the great poet. But all the four grandchildren died without offspring.
Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare the man, as distinguished from the author, there remains little more to record.
Already in 1592, Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit, had expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the following sentence: ”There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers; in his own conceit the only _Shakscene_ in a country!” This alludes to Shakspeare's office of recasting, and even recomposing, dramatic works, so as to fit them for representation; and Master Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estimation, or in his purse, by the alterations in some piece of his own, which the duty of Shakspeare to the general interests of the theatre had obliged him to make. In 1591 it has been supposed that Shakspeare wrote his first drama, the Two Gentlemen of Verona; the least characteristically marked of all his plays, and, with the exception of Love's Labors Lost, the least interesting.
From this year, 1591 to that of 1611, are just twenty years, within which s.p.a.ce lie the whole dramatic creations of Shakspeare, averaging nearly one for every six months. In 1611 was written the Tempest, which is supposed to have been the last of all Shakspeare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Campbell feelingly observes, it has ”a sort of sacredness;” and it is a most remarkable fact, and one calculated to make a man superst.i.tious, that in this play the great enchanter Prospero, in whom,” _as if conscious_, ”says Mr. Campbell,” _that this would be his last work_, the poet has been _inspired to typify himself as_ a wise, potent, and _benevolent magician_” of whom, indeed, as of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that ”within that circle”
(the circle of his own art)” none durst tread but he, ”solemnly and for ever renounces his mysterious functions, symbolically breaks his enchanter's wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his science, and his secrets,
”Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”
Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and from the voice of Prospero, issues that magnificent prophecy of the total destruction which should one day swallow up
”The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea all which it inherit.”
And this prophecy is followed immediately by a most profound e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, gathering into one pathetic abstraction the total philosophy of life:
”We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded by a sleep;”
that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish vigils, surrounded and islanded by a sh.o.r.eless ocean of sleep--sleep before birth, sleep after death.
These remarkable pa.s.sages were probably not undesigned; but if we suppose them to have been thrown off without conscious notice of their tendencies, then, according to the superst.i.tion of the ancient Grecians, they would have been regarded as prefiguring words, prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every man, such as insure along with them their own accomplishment. With or without intention, however, it is believed that Shakspeare wrote nothing more after this exquisite romantic drama. With respect to the remainder of his personal history, Dr. Drake and others have supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 to 1611, he visited Stratford often, and latterly once a year.
In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; in 1596 he had a considerable share. Through Lord Southampton, as a surviving friend of Lord Ess.e.x, who was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish politics, there can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the favor of James I.; and accordingly, on the 29th of May, 1603, about two months after the king's accession to the throne of England, a patent was granted to the company of players who possessed the Globe theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands second.