The Vicar of Wakefield, and Robinson Crusoe. Dr. Glennie tells us of Byron, that in his boyhood "his reading in history and poetry was far beyond the usual standard of his age. . . . He was a great reader and admirer of the Old Testament, and had read it through and through before he was eight years old." At fifteen years of age Robert Burns had read The Spectator, Pope's works, some of Shakespeare's plays, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Allan Ramsay's works, and a number of religious books, and "had studied the English grammar and gained some knowledge of the French." Genius is a powerful predisposition, so strong that it overrules a man's whole life, from boyhood to the grave. The greatness of a mind is in proportion to its receptivity, its capacity to assimilate a vast mass of food; it is an intellectual stomach that eliminates not muscle but thought. Its power holds a due relation to its greed it is an eternal and insatiable hunger. In itself it is but an instrument. It can work only upon external material. The writer of the plays recognizes this truth. He says, speaking of Cardinal Wolsey: From his cradle He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, The commentators have tried to alter the punctuation of this sentence. They have asked, "How could he be 'a scholar from his cradle'?" What the poet meant was that the extraordinary capacity to receive impressions and acquire knowledge, which constitutes the basis of the education of the infant, continued with unabated force all through the life of the great churchThe retention of this youthful impressibility of the mind is one of the essentials of greatness. man. And again the poet says: This morning, like the spirit of a youth That means to be of note, begins betimes. How did William Shakspere, the Stratford-on-Avon boy, "begin betimes"? In his fourteenth year it is supposed he left school; but there is really no proof that he ever attended school for an hour. Henry VIII., iv, 2. 2 Antony and Cleopatra, iv, 2. White expresses the opinion that "William Shakespeare was obliged to leave school early and earn his living." At sixteen, tradition says, he was apprenticed to a butcher. Aubrey says: I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calf he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. Rowe, speaking for Betterton, says, "Upon his leaving school he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him," that of a dealer in wool. Neither the pursuit of butcher or wool-dealer could have been very favorable to the acquisition of knowledge in a rude age and a "bookless neighborhood." But perhaps the boy was of a very studious nature and his industry eked out the poor materials available? Let us see: There is a tradition of his youth setting forth that in the neighboring village of Bidford there was a society—not a literary society, not a debating club like that of which Robert Burns was a member -but a brutal crew calling themselves "The Bidford Topers," whose boast was that they could drink more beer than the "topers of any of the adjoining intellectual villages. They challenged Stratford, and among the gallant young men who accepted the challenge was William Shakspere. The "Bidford topers" were too many for the Stratford "topers," and the latter attempted to walk home again, but were so besotted that their legs gave out, and they spent the night by the roadside under a large crab-tree, which stands to this day and is known as "Shakspere's crab." As the imagination sees him, stretched sodden and senseless, beneath the crab-tree, we may apply to him the words of the real Shakespeare: O monstrous beast!- how like a swine he lies.1 The first appearance of the father is connected with a filthheap. The first recorded act of the son is this spirituelle contest. The next incident in the life of Shakspere occurred when he was nineteen years old. This was his marriage to a girl of twentyseven, that is to say, eight years older than himself. Six months after the marriage their first child was born. 1 Taming of the Shrew. But perhaps, after this inauspicious match, he settled down and devoted himself to study? Not at all. The Reverend William Fulman, an antiquary, who died in 1688, bequeathed his manuscript biographical memoranda to the Reverend Richard Davies, rector of Sapperton, in Gloucestershire, and archdeacon of Lichfield, who died in 1708. To a note of Fulman's, which barely records Shakspere's birth, death and occupation, Davies made brief additions, the principal of which is that William Shakspere was "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county, to his great advancement." The man who wrote this was probably born within little more than twenty-five years after Shakspere's death. The tradition comes to us also from other sources. The same story is told by Rowe, on the authority of Betterton, who went down to Stratford to collect materials for a life of Shakspere. Rowe says: He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely, and in order to revenge that illusage he made a ballad upon him. And although this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter himself in London. A pretended specimen of the ballad has come down to us, a rude and vulgar thing: A parliament member, a justice of peace, At home a poor scare-crow, at London an asse. If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it. He thinks himself great, Yet an ass is his state; We allow by his ears but with asses to mate. If Lucy is lowsie as some volke miscalle it, Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befall it. And touching this Sir Thomas Lucy, Richard Grant White, after visiting Stratford and Charlecote, speaks as follows: This was a truly kindly nature, we may almost say a noble soul. I am with Sir Thomas in this matter, and if Shakespeare suffered any discipline at his hands, I believe that he deserved it.1 XI. SHAKSPERE GOES TO LONDON. He proceeded to London "somewhere about 1586 or 1587," say his biographers. His twin children, Hamnet and Judith, had been born in February, 1585. We can readily conceive his condition. His father was bankrupt; his own family rapidly increasing his wife had just been delivered of twins; his home was dirty, bookless and miserable; his companions degraded; his pursuits low; he had been whipped and imprisoned, and he fled, probably penniless, to the great city. As his admirer, Richard Grant White, says, "we may be sure he had never seen half a dozen books other than his horn-book, his Latin accidence, and a Bible." There is indeed no certainty that he had ever seen even the last work, for neither father nor mother could read or write, and had no use for, and do not seem to have possessed, a Bible. Says Halliwell-Phillipps : Removed prematurely from school; residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighborhood; thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress, it is difficult to believe that when he left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments. To London fled all the adventurers, vagabonds and paupers of the realm. They gathered around the play-houses. These were rude structures, open to the heavens-sometimes the roofless yard of a tavern served as the theater, and a rough scaffold as the stage. Here the ruffians, the thieves, the vagabonds, the apprentices, the pimps and the prostitutes assembled a stormy, dirty, quarrelsome multitude. Here William Shakspere came. He was, we will concede, bright, keen and active, intent on getting ahead in the world, fond of money, but poor as poverty and ignorant as barbarism. What could he do? XII. HE BECOMES A HORSE-HOLDER. He took to the first thing that presented itself, holding horses at the door of the play-house for the young gentlemen who came to witness the performance. And this, tradition assures us, he did. 1England Without and Within, p. 514. * Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines Life of Shak., F. 63. He proved trustworthy, and the youthful aristocrats would call, we are told, for Will Shakspere to hold their horses. Then his business faculty came into play, and he organized a band of assistants, who were known then, and long afterward, as "Shakspere's boys." Gradually he worked his way among the actors. XIII. HE BECOMES A CALL-BOY, AND THEN AN ACTOR. Betterton heard that "he was received into the company at first in a very mean rank;" and the octogenarian parish clerk of Stratford told Dowdall, in 1693, that he "was received into the playhouse as a serviture"- that is, as a servant, a supernumerary, or "supe." Tradition says he was the prompter's call-boy, his duty being to call the actors when it was time for them to go upon the stage. In time he rose a step higher: he became an actor. He never was a great actor, but performed, we are told, insignificant parts. "He seems," says White, "never to have risen high in this profession. The Ghost in Hamlet, and old Adam in As You Like It, were the utmost of his achievements in this direction." It must have taken him some time, say a year or two at the very least, to work up from being a vagabond horse-holder to the career of a regular actor. We will see, when we come to discuss the chronology of the plays, that they began to appear almost as soon as he reached London, if not before, although Shakspere's name was not connected with them for some years thereafter. And the earliest plays, as we shall see, were the most scholarly, breathing the very atmosphere of the academy. XIV. NO TRADITION REFERS TO HIM AS A STUDENT OR SCHOLAR. There was certainly nothing in his new surroundings in London akin to Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and Danish studies;, there was nothing akin to medical, musical and philosophical researches. And assuredly his life in Stratford, reckless, improvident, dissipated, degraded, does not represent the studious youth who, in some garret, would pore over the great masters, and fill his mind with information, and his soul with high aspirations. There is not a single tradition which points to any such element in his character. Aubrey asserts that, from the time of leaving school until his departure for Warwickshire, Shakspere was a schoolmaster. We |