451 



SHAKSPERE, WILLIAM. 



KHAKSPERE, WILLIAM. 



112 



and Juliet,' and had even ' corrected and augmented ' it ; the stage 

 was in possession, and the fame acknowledged, of six of his most 

 delicious comedies. 15efore the close of that century we have little 

 doubt that he had also produced 'Henry V.,' ' The Merry Wives of 

 Windsor,' and ' Much Ado about Nothing.' 



Of the plays thus produced before the close of the 16th century, 

 we would assign several (not fewer than nine, including the doubtful 

 plays) to the period from Shakspere's early manhood to 1591. Some 

 of those dramas may possibly then have been created in an imperfect 

 state, very different from that in which we have received them. If 

 the ' Titus Andronicus ' and ' Pericles ' are Shakspere's, they belong to 

 this epoch in their first state, whatever it might have been. We have 

 no doubt that the three plays, in their original form, which we now 

 call the three Parts of ' Henry VI.,' were his ; and they also belong to 

 this epoch. That ' Hamlet,' in a very imperfect state, probably more 

 imperfect even than the sketch in the possession of the Duke of 

 Devonshire, is the play alluded to by Nashe in 1589, we have little 

 doubt. In the Duke of Devonshire's copy, dated 1602, there are 

 passages, afterwards omitted, which decidedly refer to an early state of 

 the stage. Amongst the comedies, ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 

 ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' The Comedy of Errors,' and ' The Taming of the 

 Shrew,' contain very strong external evidence, especially in the structure 

 of their versification, that they belong to the poet's earliest period. 

 When the time arrived that he had fully dedicated himself to the great 

 work of his life, he rarely ventured upon cultivating the offshoots of his 

 early versification. The doggerel was entirely rejected the alternate 

 rhymes no longer tempted him by their music to introduce a measure 

 which is scarcely akin with the dramatic spirit the couplet was 

 adopted more and more sparingly and he finally adheres to the blank 

 verse which he may almost be said to have created in his hands 

 certainly the grandest as well as the sweetest form in which the highest 

 thoughts were ever unfolded to listening humanity. We have only 

 one drama to add to this cycle, and that, we believe, was ' Ronw;o and 

 Juliet ' in its original form. 



The ' Midsummer Night's Dream ; may be taken, we apprehend, as 

 a connecting link between the dramas which belong to the first cycle 

 and those which may be assigned to the remaining years of the 16th 

 century. 



We have little difficulty in determining the plays which belong to 

 Shakspere's middle period. The list of Meres, and the dates of the 

 original editions of those plays, are our best guides. The exact years 

 in which they first appeared can only be determined in one or two 

 cases ; and it is of little consequence if they could be determined. 

 The earliest of the historical plays of this cycle were those which 

 completed the great story of the wars of the Roses. 'Richard III.' 

 nrxturally terminated the eventful history of the house of York; 

 ' Richard II.' commenced the more magnificent exhibition of the 

 fortunes of the house of Lancaster. Both these plays were printed in 

 1597. The two great historical plays of ' Henry IV.' which succeeded 

 them were, no doubt, produced before 1599. ' Henry V.' undoubtedly 

 belongs to that year ; and this great song of national triumph grew 

 out of the earlier history of the " madcap Prince of Wales." The 

 three latter histories are moat remarkable for the exhibition of the 

 greatest comic power that the world has ever seen. When the genius 

 of Shakspere produced Falstaff, its most distinguishing characteristics, 

 his wit and humour, had attained their extremest perfection. There 

 is much of the same high comedy in ' King John.' This was the 

 period which also produced those comic dramas which are most dis- 

 tinguished for their brilliancy of dialogue the " fine filed phrase " 

 which Meres describes ' The Merry Wives of Windsor,' ' Much Ado 

 about Nothing,' and ' Twelfth Night.' The ' Merchant of Venice,' and 

 ' All's Well that Ends Well,' belong to the more romantic class. The 

 ' Twelfth Night ' was originally thought to have been one of Shaks- 

 pere's latest plays; but it is now proved, beyond a doubt, that it was 

 acted in the Middle Temple Hall in the Christmas of 1601. 



The close of the 16th century brings us to Shakspere's thirty-fifth 

 year. He had then been about fifteen years in London. We are not 

 willing to believe that his whole time was passed in the capital. It 

 is not necessary to believe it; for the evidence, such as it is, partly 

 gossip and partly documentary, makes for the contrary opinion. 

 Aubrey tells us "the humour of the constable in 'A Midsummer 

 Night's Dream' he happened to take at Grendon in Bucks, which is 

 the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that constable 

 about 1642, when I first camo to Oxon." The honest antiquary makes 

 a slight mistake here. There is no constable in ' A Midsummer Night's 

 Dream;' but he probably refers to the ever-famous Dogberry or 

 Verges. In the same paper Aubrey says, " he was wont to go to his 

 native country once a year." 



But we^have more trustworthy evidence than that of John Aubrey 

 for believing that Shakspere, however indispensable a protracted resi- 

 dence in London might be to his interests and those of his family, 

 never cast aside the link which bound him to his native town. In 

 1596 his only son died, and in Stratford he was buried. The parochial 

 register gives us the melancholy record of this loss. This event, 

 afflicting as it must have been, did not render the great poet's native 

 towa lees dear to him. There his father and mother, there his wife 

 and daughters, there his sister still lived. In 1597 he purchased the 

 principal house in Stratford. It was built by Sir Hugh Clopton, in 



the reign of Henry VII., and was devised by him under the name of 

 the great house. Dugdale describes it as "a fair house built of brick 

 and timber." It appears to have been sold out of the Clopton family 

 before it was purchased by Shakspere. In the poet's will it is described 

 as " all that capital messuage or tenement, with the appurtenances, 

 in Stratford aforesaid, called the 'New Place." The London residence 

 of Shakspere at this period is stated to have been in Southwark, near 

 the Bear Garden. It is now incontestably proved that in the year 

 previous to 1596 Shakspere held a much more important rank as a 

 sharer in the Blackfriars theatre than in 1589 ; and that the Globe 

 theatre also belonged to the body of proprietors of which he was one. 

 A petition to the privy council, presented in 1596, was found in the 

 State Paper Office a few years ago, in which the names of the petitioners 

 stand as follows : 



" The humble petition of Thomas Pope, Richard Burbage, John 

 Hemmings, Augustine Phillips, William Shakespeare, William Kempe, 

 William Sly, Nicholas Tooley, and others, servants to the Right 

 Honourable the Lord Chamberlain to her Majesty." 



There is a tradition that the valuable estate of New Place was pur- 

 chased by Shakspere through the munificent /assistance of Lord 

 Southampton. It is pleasant to believe such a tradition ; but it is not 

 necessary to account for Shakspere's property in the theatres, or even 

 for his purchase of New Place at Stratford, that we should imagine 

 that some extraordinary prodigality of bounty had been lavished on 

 him. He obtained his property iu the theatre by his honest labours, 

 steadily exerted, though with unequalled facility, from bis earliest 

 manhood. The profits which he received not only enabled him to 

 maintain his family, but to create an estate ; and his was not a solitary 

 case. Edward Alleyn, who was a contemporary of Shakspere, a player 

 and a theatrical proprietor, realised a fortune ; and he founded Dulwich 

 College. 



It has been held, especially by the German critics, that the 'Sonnets ' 

 of Shakspere have not been sufficiently regarded as a store of materials 

 for his biography ; and it has been very ingeniously attempted by a 

 recent writer, Mr. Brown, to show that the whole of these, with a few 

 slight exceptions, are to be taken as a continuous poem or poems. He 

 calls them Shakspere's ' Autobiographical Poems.' But we would ask, 

 can these 154 Sonnets be received as a continuous poem upon any 

 other principle than that the author had written them continuously '! 

 If there are some parts which are acknowledged interpolations, may 

 there not be other parts that are open to the same belief ? If there 

 are parts entirely different in their tone from the bulk of thess Sonnets, 

 may we not consider that one portion was meant to be artificial and 

 another real that the poet sometimes spoke in an assumed character, 

 sometimes in a natural one ? This theory we know could not hold it' 

 the poet had himself arranged the sequence of these verses ; but as it 

 is manifest that two stanzas have been introduced from a poem printed 

 ten years earlier that others are acknowledged to be out of order 

 and others positively dragged in without the slightest connection 

 may we not carry the separation still further, and believing that the 

 'begetter' (by which name some W. H. is honoured by the bookseller hi 

 a dedication) the getter-up of these sonnets had levied contributions 

 upon all Shakspere's "private friends" assume that he was indifferent 

 to any arrangement which might make each portion of the poem tell 

 its own history ? We do not therefore take up these poems to " seize 

 a clue which innumerable passages give us, and suppose that they 

 allude to a youth of high rank as well as personal beauty and accom- 

 plishment, in whose favour and intimacy, according to the base pre- 

 judices of the world, a player and a poet, though he were the author 

 of ' Macbeth,' might be thought honoured ;" and we do not feel " the 

 strangeness of Shakspeare's humiliation in addressing him as a being 

 before whose feet he crouched whose frown he feared whose injuries, 

 and those of the most insulting kind, he felt and bewailed without 

 resentment." (Hallam's 'Hist, of Europe.') 



The view which we take of the probable admixture of the artificial 

 and the real in the Sonnets, arising from their supposed original frag- 

 mentary state, necessarily leads to the belief that some are accurate 

 illustrations of the poet's situation and feelings. It is collected from 

 these Sonnets, for example, that his profession as a player was disagree- 

 able to him ; and this complaint, be it observed, might bo addressed 

 to any one of his family, or some honoured friend, such as Lord 

 Southampton, as well as to the principal object of so many of those 

 lyrics which contain a " leading idea, with variations : " 



" O, for my sake'do you with Fortune chide 

 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

 That did not better for my life provide 

 Than public means, which public manners breeds. 

 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 

 And almost thence my nature is subdued 

 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 



But if from his professional occupation his nature was felt by him to 

 be subdued to what it worked in if thence his name received a brand 

 if vulgar scandal sometimes assailed him he had high thoughts to 

 console him, such as were never before imparted to mortal. This 

 was probably written in some period of dejection, when his heart was 

 ill at ease, and be looked upon the world with a slight tinge of indif- 

 ference, if not of dislike. Every man of high genius has felt something 



