English Literature
that William Shakespeare was baptized there on the twenty-sixth of April,
1564 (old style). As it was customary to baptize children on the third day
after birth, the twenty-third of April (May 3, according to our present
calendar) is generally accepted as the poet's birthday.
His father, John Shakespeare, was a farmer's son from the neighboring
village of Snitterfield, who came to Stratford about 1551, and began to
prosper as a trader in corn, meat, leather, and other agricultural
products. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer,
descended from an old Warwickshire family of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Norman
blood. In 1559 this married couple sold a piece of land, and the document
is signed, "The marke + of John Shacksper. The marke + of Mary Shacksper";
and from this it has been generally inferred that, like the vast majority
of their countrymen, neither of the poet's parents could read or write.
This was probably true of his mother; but the evidence from Stratford
documents now indicates that his father could write, and that he also
audited the town accounts; though in attesting documents he sometimes made
a mark, leaving his name to be filled in by the one who drew up the
document.
Of Shakespeare's education we know little, except that for a few years he
probably attended the endowed grammar school at Stratford, where he picked
up the "small Latin and less Greek" to which his learned friend Ben Jonson
refers. His real teachers, meanwhile, were the men and women and the
natural influences which surrounded him. Stratford is a charming little
village in beautiful Warwickshire, and near at hand were the Forest of
Arden, the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps
and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination.
Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in
Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the
littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions of the
people about him.
I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and ranked in Kent.[145]
Such passages suggest not only genius but also a keen, sympathetic
observer, whose eyes see every significant detail. So with the nurse in
_Romeo and Juliet_, whose endless gossip and vulgarity cannot quite hide a
kind heart. She is simply the reflection of some forgotten nurse with whom
Shakespeare had talked by the wayside.
Not only the gossip but also the dreams, the unconscious poetry that sleeps
in the heart of the common people, appeal tremendously to Shakespeare's
imagination and are reflected in his greatest plays. Othello tries to tell
a curt soldier's story of his love; but the account is like a bit of
Mandeville's famous travels, teeming with the fancies that filled men's
heads when the great round world was first brought to their attention by
daring explorers. Here is a bit of folklore, touched by Shakespeare's
exquisite fancy, which shows what one boy listened to before the fire at
Halloween:
She comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
* * * * *
Her chariot is an empty hazel nut
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
* * * * *
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.[146]
So with Shakespeare's education at the hands of Nature, which came from
keeping his heart as well as his eyes wide open to the beauty of the world.
He speaks of a horse, and we know the fine points of a thoroughbred; he
mentions the duke's hounds, and we hear them clamoring on a fox trail,
their voices matched like bells in the frosty air; he stops for an instant
in the sweep of a tragedy to note a flower, a star, a moonlit bank, a
hilltop touched by the sunrise, and instantly we know what our own hearts
felt but could not quite express when we saw the same thing. Because he
notes and remembers every significant thing in the changing panorama of
earth and sky, no other writer has ever approached him in the perfect
natural setting of his characters.
When Shakespeare was about fourteen years old his father lost his little
property and fell into debt, and the boy probably left school to help
support the family of younger children. What occupation he followed for the
next eight years is a matter of conjecture. From evidence found in his
plays, it is alleged with some show of authority that he was a country
schoolmaster and a lawyer's clerk, the character of Holofernes, in _Love's
Labour's Lost_, being the warrant for one, and Shakespeare's knowledge of
law terms for the other. But if we take such evidence, then Shakespeare
must have been a botanist, because of his knowledge of wild flowers; a
sailor, because he knows the ropes; a courtier, because of his
extraordinary facility in quips and compliments and courtly language; a
clown, because none other is so dull and foolish; a king, because Richard
and Henry are true to life; a woman, because he has sounded the depths of a
woman's feelings; and surely a Roman, because in _Coriolanus_ and _Julius
Cæsar_ he has shown us the Roman spirit better than have the Roman writers
themselves. He was everything, in his imagination, and it is impossible
from a study of his scenes and characters to form a definite opinion as to
his early occupation.
In 1582 Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a peasant
family of Shottery, who was eight years older than her boy husband. From
numerous sarcastic references to marriage made by the characters in his
plays, and from the fact that he soon left his wife and family and went to
London, it is generally alleged that the marriage was a hasty and unhappy
one; but here again the evidence is entirely untrustworthy. In many
Miracles as well as in later plays it was customary to depict the seamy
side of domestic life for the amusement of the crowd; and Shakespeare may
have followed the public taste in this as he did in other things. The
references to love and home and quiet joys in Shakespeare's plays are
enough, if we take such evidence, to establish firmly the opposite
supposition, that his love was a very happy one. And the fact that, after
his enormous success in London, he retired to Stratford to live quietly
with his wife and daughters, tends to the same conclusion.
About the year 1587 Shakespeare left his family and went to London and
joined himself to Burbage's company of players. A persistent tradition says
that he had incurred the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy, first by poaching deer
in that nobleman's park, and then, when haled before a magistrate, by
writing a scurrilous ballad about Sir Thomas, which so aroused the old
gentleman's ire that Shakespeare was obliged to flee the country. An old
record[147] says that the poet "was much given to all unluckiness in
stealing venison and rabbits," the unluckiness probably consisting in
getting caught himself, and not in any lack of luck in catching the
rabbits. The ridicule heaped upon the Lucy family in _Henry IV_ and the
_Merry Wives of Windsor_ gives some weight to this tradition. Nicholas
Rowe, who published the first life of Shakespeare,[148] is the authority
for this story; but there is some reason to doubt whether, at the time when
Shakespeare is said to have poached in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy at
Charlescote, there were any deer or park at the place referred to. The
subject is worthy of some scant attention, if only to show how worthless is
the attempt to construct out of rumor the story of a great life which,
fortunately perhaps, had no contemporary biographer.
Of his life in London from 1587 to 1611, the period of his greatest
literary activity, we know nothing definitely. We can judge only from his
plays, and from these it is evident that he entered into the stirring life
of England's capital with the same perfect sympathy and understanding that
marked him among the plain people of his native Warwickshire. The first
authentic reference to him is in 1592, when Greene's[149] bitter attack
appeared, showing plainly that Shakespeare had in five years assumed an
important position among playwrights. Then appeared the apology of the
publishers of Greene's pamphlet, with their tribute to the poet's sterling
character, and occasional literary references which show that he was known
among his fellows as "the gentle Shakespeare." Ben Jonson says of him: "I
loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as
any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." To judge from
only three of his earliest plays[150] it would seem reasonably evident that
in the first five years of his London life he had gained entrance to the
society of gentlemen and scholars, had caught their characteristic
mannerisms and expressions, and so was ready by knowledge and observation
as well as by genius to weave into his dramas the whole stirring life of
the English people. The plays themselves, with the testimony of
contemporaries and his business success, are strong evidence against the
tradition that his life in London was wild and dissolute, like that of the
typical actor and playwright of his time.
Shakespeare's first work may well have been that of a general helper, an
odd-job man, about the theater; but he soon became an actor, and the
records of the old London theaters show that in the next ten years he
gained a prominent place, though there is little reason to believe that he
was counted among the "stars." Within two years he was at work on plays,
and his course here was exactly like that of other playwrights of his time.
He worked with other men, and he revised old plays before writing his own,
and so gained a practical knowledge of his art. _Henry VI _(_c_. 1590-1591)
is an example of this tinkering work, in which, however, his native power
is unmistakably manifest. The three parts of _Henry VI_ (and _Richard III_,
which belongs with them) are a succession of scenes from English Chronicle
history strung together very loosely; and only in the last is there any
definite attempt at unity. That he soon fell under Marlowe's influence is
evident from the atrocities and bombast of _Titus Andronicus_ and _Richard
III_. The former may have been written by both playwrights in
collaboration, or may be one of Marlowe's horrors left unfinished by his
early death and brought to an end by Shakespeare. He soon broke away from
this apprentice work, and then appeared in rapid succession _Love's
Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona_, the first
English Chronicle plays,[151] _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Romeo and
Juliet_. This order is more or less conjectural; but the wide variety of
these plays, as well as their unevenness and frequent crudities, marks the