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him for providing soldiers at the charge of the borough is returned, amongst similar sums of other persons, as "unpaid and unaccounted for." Finally, this unquestionable evidence of the books of the borough shows that this merciful forbearance of his brother townsmen was unavailing; for, in an action brought against him in the bailiff's court in the year 1586, he during these seven years having gone on from bad to worse, the return by the serjeants at mace upon a warrant of distress is, that John Shakspere has nothing upon which distress can be levied. There are other corroborative proofs of John Shakspere's poverty at this period brought forward by Malone. In this precise year, 1578, he mortgages his wife's inheritance of Asbies to Edmund Lambert for forty pounds; and, in the same year, the will of Mr. Roger Sadler, of Stratford, to which is subjoined a list of debts due to him, shows that John Shakspere was indebted to him five pounds, for which sum Edmund Lambert was a security," By which," says Malone, "it appears that John Shakspere was then considered insolvent, if not as one depending rather on the credit of others than his own.” It is of little consequence to the present age to know whether an alderman of Stratford, nearly three hundred years past, became unequal to maintain his social position; but to enable us to form a right estimate of the education of William Shakspere, and of the circumstances in which he was placed at the most influential period of his life, it may not be unprofitable to consider how far these revelations of the private affairs of his father support the case which Malone holds he has so triumphantly proved.

At the time in question, the best evidence is unfortunately destroyed; for the registry of the Court of Record at Stratford is wanting, from 1569 to 1585. Nothing has been added to what Malone has collected as to this precise period. It amounts therefore to this, that in 1578 he mortgages an estate for forty pounds; that he is indebted also five pounds to a friend for which his mortgagee had become security; and that he is excused one public assessment, and has not contributed to another. At this time he is the possessor of two freehold houses in Henley Street, bought in 1574. Malone, a lawyer by profession, supposes that the money for which Asbies was mortgaged went to pay the purchase of the Stratford freeholds; according to which theory, these freeholds had been unpaidfor during four years, and the "good and lawful money" was not "in hand" when the vendor parted with the premises. We hold, and we think more reasonably, that in 1578, when he mortgaged Asbies, John Shakspere became the purchaser, or at any rate the occupier, of lands in the parish of Stratford, but not in the borough; and that, in either case, the money for which Asbies was mortgaged was the capital employed in this undertaking. The lands which were purchased by William Shakspere of the Combe family, in 1601, are described in the deed as "lying or being within the parish, fields, or town of Old Stretford.” But the will of William Shakspere, he having become the heir-at-law of his father, devises all his lands and tenements "within the towns, hamlets, villages, fields, and grounds of Stratford-upon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe."

We print correct copies of these entries at the end of the Chapter. Malone's copies exhibit his usual inaccuracies.

Old Stratford is a local denomination, essentially different from Bishopton or Welcombe; and, therefore, whilst the lands purchased by the son in 1601 might be those recited in the will as lying in Old Stratford, he might have derived from his father the lands of Bishopton and Welcombe, of the purchase of which by himself we have no record. But we have a distinct record that William Shakspere did derive lands from his father, in the same way that he inherited the two freeholds in Henley Street. Mr. Halliwell prints, without any inference, a "Deed of Settlement of Shakespeare's Property, 1639;" that deed contains a remarkable recital, which appears conclusive as to the position of the father as a landed proprietor. The fine for the purpose of settlement is taken upon; 1, a tenement in Blackfriars; 2, a tenement at Acton; 3, the capital messuage of New Place; 4, the tenement in Henley Street; 5, one hundred and twenty-seven acres of land purchased of Combe; and 6, "all other the messuages, lands, tenements and hereditaments whatsoever, situate lying and being in the towns, hamlets, villages, fields and grounds of Stratford-upon-Avon, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe, or any of them in the said county of Warwick, which heretofore were the INHERITANCE of William Shakspere, gent., deceased.” The word inheritance could only be used in one legal sense; they came to him by descent, as heir-at-law of his father. It would be difficult to find a more distinct confirmation of the memorandum upon the grant of arms in the Heralds' College to John Shakspere, "he hath lands and tenements, of good wealth and substance, 500l." The lands of Bishopton and Welcombe are in the parish of Stratford, but not in the borough. Bishopton was a hamlet, having an ancient chapel of ease. We hold, then, that in the year 1578 John Shakspere, having become more completely an agriculturist—a yeoman as he is described in a deed of 1579-ceased, for the purposes of business, to be an occupier within the borough of Stratford. Other aldermen are rated to pay towards the furniture of pikemen, billmen, and archers, six shillings and eight-pence; whilst John Shakspere is to pay three shillings and four-pence. Why less than other aldermen? The next entry but one, which relates to a brother alderman, suggests an answer to the question:"Robert Bratt, nothing IN THIS PLACE." Again, ten months after," It is ordained that every alderman shall pay weekly, towards the relief of the poor, four-pence, save John Shakspere and Robert Bratt, who shall not be taxed to pay any thing." Here John Shakspere is associated with Robert Bratt, who, according to the previous entry, was to pay nothing in this place; that is, in the borough of Stratford, to which the orders of the council alone apply. The return, in 1579, of Mr. Shakspere as leaving unpaid the sum of three shillings and three-pence, was the return upon a levy for the borough, in which, although the possessor of property, he might have ceased to reside, or have only partially resided, paying his assessments in the parish. The Borough of Stratford, and the Parish of Stratford, are essentially different things, as regards entries of the Corporation and of the Court of Record. The Report from Commissioners of Municipal Corporations says, "The limits of the borough extend over a space of about half a mile in breadth, and rather more in length ***. ***. The mayor, recorder, and senior aldermen of the borough have also jurisdiction, as justices of the peace, over a small town or suburb adjcining the Church of Stratford-upon-Avon, called Old

Stratford, and over the precincts of the church itself." We shall have occasion to revert to this distinction between the borough and the parish, at a more advanced period in the life of Shakspere's father, when his utter ruin has been somewhat rashly inferred from certain obscure registers.

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Seeing, then, that at any rate, in the year 1574, when John Shakspere purchased two freehold houses in Stratford, it was scarcely necessary for him to withdraw his son William from school, as Rowe has it, on account of the narrowness of his circumstances (the education at that school costing the father nothing), it is not difficult to believe that the son remained there till the period when boys were usually withdrawn from grammar-schools. In those days the education of the university commenced much earlier than at present. Boys intended for the learned professions, and more especially for the church, commonly went to Oxford and Cambridge at eleven or twelve years of age. If they were not intended for those professions, they probably remained at the grammar-school till they were thirteen or fourteen; and then they were fitted for being apprenticed to tradesmen, or articled to attorneys, a numerous and thriving body in those days of cheap litigation. Many also went early to the Inns of Court, which were the universities of the law, and where there was real study and discipline in direct connection with the several Societies. To assume that William Shakspere did not stay long enough at the grammarschool of Stratford to obtain a very fair "proficiency in Latin," with some knowledge of Greek, is to assume an absurdity upon the face of the circumstances; and it could never have been assumed at all, had not Rowe, setting out upon a false theory, that, because in the works of Shakspere "we scarce find any traces of anything that looks like an imitation of the ancients," held that therefore "his not copying at least something from them may be an argument of his never having read them." Opposed to this is the statement of Aubrey, much nearer to the times of Shakspere: "he understood Latin pretty well.” Rowe had been led into his illogical inference by the "small Latin and less Greek" of Jonson; the "old mother-wit" of Denham; the "his learning was very little" of Fuller; the "native wood-notes wild" of Milton,-phrases, every one of which is to be taken with considerable qualification, whether we regard the peculiar characters of the utterers, or the circumstances connected with the words themselves. The question rests not upon the interpretation of the dictum of this authority or that; but upon the indisputable fact that the very earliest writings of Shakspere are imbued with a spirit of classical antiquity; and that the allusive nature of the learning that manifests itself in them, whilst it offers the best proof of his familiarity with the ancient writers, is a circumstance which has misled those who never attempted to dispute the existence of the learning which was displayed in the direct pedantry of his contemporaries. "If," said Hales of Eton, "he had not read the classics, he had likewise not stolen from them." Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and all the early dramatists, overload their plays with quotation and mythological allusion. According to Hales, they steal, and therefore they have read. He who uses his knowledge skilfully is assumed not to have read.

It is not our intention to enter upon a general examination of the various opinions that have been held as to the learning of Shakspere, and the tendency of those opinions to show that he was without learning.* We only desire to point out, by a very few observations, that the learning manifested in his early productions does not bear out the assertion of Rowe that his proficiency in the Latin language was interrupted by his early removal from the free-school of Stratford. His youthful poem, Venus and Adonis, the first heir of his invention, is upon a classical subject. The Rape of Lucrece is founded upon a legend of the beginnings of Roman history. Would he have ventured upon these subjects had he been unfamiliar with the ancient writers, from the attentive study of which he could alone obtain the knowledge which would enable him to treat them with propriety? His was an age of sound scholarship. He dedicates both poems to a scholar, and a patron of scholars. Does any one of his contemporaries object that these classical subjects were treated by a young man ignorant of the classics? Will the most critical examination of these poems detect anything that betrays this ignorance? Is there not the most perfect keeping in both these poems,--an original conception of the mode of treating these subjects, advisedly adopted with the full knowledge of what might be imitated, but preferring the vigorous painting of nature to any imitation? Love's Labour 's Lost, undoubtedly one of the earliest comedies, showsupon the principle laid down by Coleridge, that "a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits"-that the habits of William Shakspere "had been scholastic, and those of a student." The Comedy of Errors is full of those imitations of the ancients in particular passages which critics have. in all cases been too apt to take as the chief evidences of learning. The critics. of Shakspere are puzzled by these imitations; and when they see with what skill he adopts, or amends, or rejects, the incidents of the Menæchmi' of Plautus, they have no resource but to contend that his knowledge of Plautus was derived from a wretched translation, published in all probability eight or ten years after the Comedy of Errors was written. The three Parts of Henry VI. are the earliest of the historical plays. Those who dispute the genuineness of the First Part affirm that it contains more allusions to mythology and classical authors than Shakspere ever uses; but, with a most singular inconsistency, in the passages of the Second and Third Parts which they have chosen to pronounce as the additions of Shakspere to the original plays of another writer or writers, there are to be found as many allusions to mythology and classical writers as in the part which they deny to be his. We have remarked upon these passages that they furnish the proof that, as a young writer, he possessed a competent knowledge of the ancient authors, and was not unwilling to display it; "but that, with that wonderful judgment which was as remarkable as the prodigious range of his imaginative powers, he soon learnt to avoid the pedantry to which inferior men so pertinaciously clung in the pride of their scholarship."

*This question is further touched upon in our History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere.'-Section I.

See our Essay on Henry VI. and Richard III. Histories, Vol. II. page 432.

Ranging over the whole dramatic works of Shakspere, whenever we find a classical image or allusion, such as in Hamlet,

"A station like the herald Mercury,

New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,"

the management of the idea is always elegant and graceful; and the passage may sustain a contrast with the most refined imitations of his contemporaries, or of his own imitator, Milton. In his Roman plays he appears co-existent with his wonderful characters, and to have read all the obscure pages of Roman history with a clearer eye than philosopher or historian. When he employs Latinisms in the construction of his sentences, and even in the creation of new words, he does so with singular facility and unerring correctness. And then, we are to be told, he managed all this by studying bad translations, and by copying extracts from grammars and dictionaries; as if it was reserved for such miracles of talent and industry as the Farmers and the Steevenses to read Ovid and Virgil in their original tongues, whilst the dull Shakspere, whether schoolboy or adult, was to be contented through life with the miserable translations of Arthur Golding and Thomas Phaer.* We believe that his familiarity at least with the best Roman writers was begun early, and continued late; and that he, of all boys of Stratford, would be the least likely to discredit the teaching of Thomas Hunt and Thomas Jenkins, the masters of the grammar-school from 1572 till 1580.

The happy days of boyhood are nearly over. William Shakspere no longer looks for the close of the day when, in that humble chamber in Henley Street, his father shall hear something of his school progress, and read with him some

* See a series of learned and spirited papers by Dr. Maginn on Farmer's Essay, printed in Frazer's Magazine. 1839.

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