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

have seen that it did not require a very extensive stock of learning to constitute a schoolmaster in that age; but even this, the only tradition of his life which points to anything even akin to scholarly accomplishments, must be abandoned.

Lord Campbell says:

Unfortunately, however, the pedagogical theory is not only quite unsupported by evidence, but it is not consistent with established facts. From the registration of the baptism of Shakespeare's children, and other well authenticated circumstances, we know that he continued to dwell in Stratford, or the immediate neighborhood, till he became a citizen of London: there was no other school in Stratford except the endowed grammar school, where he had been a pupil; of this he certainly never was master, for the unbroken succession of masters from the reign of Edward VI. till the reign of James I. is of record; . . . and there is no trace of there having been any usher employed in this school.1

Only a miracle of studiousness could have acquired, in a few years, upon a basis of total ignorance and bad habits, the culture and refinement manifested in the earliest plays; and but a few years elapsed between the time when he fled scourged from Stratford and the time when the plays began to appear, in his name, in London. Put plays, now believed to have been written by the same hand that wrote the Shakespeare plays, were on the boards before he left Stratford. The twins, Judith and Hamnet, were born in February, 1585, Shakspere being then not yet twenty-one years of age, and we will see hereafter that Hamlet appeared for the first time in 1585 or 1587. If he had shown, anywhere in his career, such a trait of immense industry and scholarly research, some tradition would have reached us concerning it. We have traditions that he was the father of another man's supposed son (Sir William Davenant); and we are told of a licentious amour in which he outwitted Burbage; and we hear of wet-combats in a tavern; but not one word comes down to us of books, or study, or industry, or art.

XV. THE "VENUS AND ADONIS."

"The first heir of his invention," he tells us, was "the Venus and Adonis," published in 1593; and many think that this means that he wrote it before any of the plays, and even before he left Stratford. Richard Grant White says:

In any case, we may be sure that the poem [Venus and Adonis] was written some years before it was printed; and it may have been brought by the young poet

1 Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, p. 19.

from Stratford in manuscript, and read by a select circle, according to the custom of the time, before it was published.

But here is a difficulty that presents itself: the people of Warwickshire did not speak the English of the London court, but a patois almost as different from it as the Lowland Scotch of Burns is to-day different from the English of Westminster.

To give the reader some idea of the kind of language used by Shakspere during his youth, and by all the uneducated people of his county, I select, at random, a few words from the Warwickshire dialect:

Let any one read the Venus and Adonis, and he will find it written in the purest and most cultured English of the age, without a word in it of this Warwickshire patois.

Halliwell-Phillipps says:

It is extremely improbable that an epic so highly finished, and so completely devoid of patois, could have been produced under the circumstances of his then domestic surroundings.'

In fact, if we except the doggerel libel on Sir Thomas Lucy, with its "volke" (and the authenticity of even this is denied by the commentators), Shakspere never wrote a line impregnated with the dialect of the people among whom he lived from childhood to manhood. All attempts to show the peculiar phraseology of Warwickshire in his writings have failed. A few words have been found that were used in Warwickshire, but investigation has shown that they were also used in the dialects of other portions of England.

White says:

As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue; but then the speech of the cultivated

1Outlines Life of Shak., p. 71.

people of Middlesex and vicinity had become for all England the undisputed standard: Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire, might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of these counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, and the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology.1

White seems to forget that the jargon of Warwickshire was well nigh as uncouth and barbarous as that of Northumberland or Cornwall.

Appleton Morgan says:

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant, this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When he came to London and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire, without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke—the language of his own fireside.?

And Shakespeare prefaced the Venus and Adonis with a Latin quotation from the Amores of Ovid. Halliwell-Phillipps, an earnest Shaksperean, says:

It is hardly possible that the Amores of Ovid, whence he derived his earliest motto, could have been one of his school books.3

No man can doubt that the Venus and Adonis was the work of a scholar in whom the intellectual faculties vastly preponderated over the animal. Coleridge notices

The utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst.

Says Dowden:

The subjects of these poems did not possess him and compel him to render them into art. The poet sat himself down before each to accomplish an exhaustive study of it.

Hazlitt says:

These poems appear to us like a couple of ice houses. They are about as hard, as glittering and as cold.

It is not possible for the human mind to bring these beautiful poems, written in such perfect English, so cold, so passionless, so 2 The Shakespeare Myth, p. 41.

1 Life and Genius of Shak., p. 202.

3 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 63.

cultured, so philosophical, so scholastic, into connection with the first inventions of the boy we have seen lying out drunk in the fields, poaching, rioting, whipped, imprisoned, and writing vulgar doggerel, below the standard of the most ordinary intellect. Compare for one instant:

with

A Parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scare-crow, at London an asse.
He thinks himself great, yet an ass is his state,
Condemned for his ears with asses to mate.

Oh, what a sight it was wistly to view
How she came stealing to the wayward boy!
To note the fighting conflict of her hue!
How white and red each other did destroy!
But now her cheek was pale, and by and by
It flashed forth fire, as lightning from the sky.1

Can any one believe that these two passages were born in the same soul and fashioned in the same mind?

A rough but strong genius, coming even out of barbarian training, but thrown into daily contact with dramatic entertainments, might have begun to imitate the works he was familiar with; might gradually have drifted into play-making. But here we learn that the first heir of his invention was an ambitious attempt at a literary performance based on a classical fable, and redolent of the air of the court and the schools. It is incomprehensible.

Even Hallam, years ago, was struck by the incongruity between Shakspere's life and works. He says:

If we are not yet come to question his [Shakespeare's] unity, as we do that of "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle "-(an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity), we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theater, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.?

Emerson says:

Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those skiey sentences-aerolites — which seem to have fallen out of heaven, . . . and tell me if they match.3

The Egyptian verdict of the Shakesperean societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man in wide contrast. . . . This man of men, he who gave the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity

...

1 Venus and Adonis. 2 Introduction to Literature of Europe. 3 Rep. Men, p. 205.