between the House of Stuart and Parliament, which ended, after a long and terrible civil war, in the complete victory of the latter, brought into absolute power a generation who, in their black and fiery religious fanaticism, damned as the work of the Devil all gay and worldly pleasures, all arts that adorn and soften life. The theatre was the special object of their wrath, and it was part of their system to crush it entirely. These gloomy Puritans allowed no literary activity to flourish, and thus it came about that in a relatively short time tradition concerning the life of the greatest English poet was completely wiped out. This gap could no longer be filled up when interest on the subject reawakened, and it was necessary to bridge it over, as best might be, with hypotheses, fancies, and inventions. Let us try, without allowing too much playground to these hypotheses, to sketch the life of our poct from the scanty materials left to us. It is ascertained that Shakespeare's family already possessed property in Warwickshire at the fall of the usurper Richard III. It is said, that in the battle which caused his fall, an ancestor fought on the side of Richmond, the lawful heir, and that he received a title and coat of arms as reward for his services. This title docs not, however appear to have been highly esteemed by the family, for we find the poet's father designated as plain John Shakespeare, a wool merchant, of Stratford-on-Avon. He was, however, a man of means, owning houses and land, and holding more than one honourable office in the town government. Through his marriage with Mary Arden he became connected with a noble and wealthy family. William Shakespeare, our poet, was born in Stratford, 1564, the eldest of eight children. The date of his birth cannot be fixed with absolute certainty; common consent puts it on April 23rd. He received his first instruction, and also learned Latin, in the free school of his birthplace. How far this classical education extended cannot be accurately settled. The anachronisms and historical and geographical absurdities found in his works have caused critics to suppose it was exceedingly slight. For example, he makes the Romans in Coriolanus march to the beating of drums; in Julius Cæsar he causes a clock to strike; in the Winter's Tale he gives a seacoast to Bohemia; he names the celebrated Italian artist Giulio Romano as contemporary with the oracle of Delphi. Hence some have judged Shakespeare to have been an uneducated man. The objection that has been made to these strictures, viz., that he shows by various allusions no mean knowledge of ancient history and legend, that in his Roman plays he evinces familiarity with the Roman history at the most various periods, setting them forth with striking truth to life, may be met by the explanation that he learned all this from English translations of the classics, that it was thence he drew the material for his poems, and, uneducated as he was, was unable to recognise or to correct their errors. Now it may be true that Shakespeare was too little versed in classical studies to be able to read Livy and Plutarch in their own tongue, but the notion that he lacked education must be relegated to the realm of fable. We are certainly unacquainted with the details of his education. We do not know the direction taken by his training, whether it was orderly and systematic, or whether he obtained his knowledge by means of his own unaided exertions. But it has been said, "By their fruits ye shall know them," and it seems absolutely foolish to launch such a reproach against a man who certainly betrays in his poems an excellent knowledge of history, law, and other branches of learning, and who further makes such cogent and appropriate comments on the most diverse subjects. The extract from Hamlet, the directions to the players, of itself alone is sufficient to show that Shakespeare was not merely a great genius but a refined and highly educated man. We can no more deduce that Shakespeare's anachronisms were the result of ignorance than we could accuse Schiller of ignorance because he makes Butler, in Wallenstein, use a simile drawn from a lightningconductor, which shows that he was apparently ignorant of the fact that such were unknown until Franklin discovered them in the eighteenth century. After all, Shakespeare's outrageous offences against geography, science, and history, occur in his fantastic and merry dramas, plays far removed from the soil of material reality. In other dramas, where his poetical requirements did not need such sacrifices, Shakespeare evinces most accurate acquaintance with the history and laws of his time and land, and, in innumerable cases, with the practical business of life. It is as difficult to form an accurate estimate of the truth or falsehood of the information we possess regarding the doctrine of the prosperity of the Shakespeare family, as it is to divine exactly what was the poet's intellectual training. Information exists to the effect that his father was no longer a member of the town council in 1579, and that he left behind him a very small taxable income, whence it has been inferred that he had sunk in social position. How far and in what degree this conclusion is correct cannot be certainly ascertained. Indeed, when we proceed to the account of Shakespeare's youth, we begin to enter a realm of uncertainty. Things are related which throw no favourable light upon the lad destined to become one of England's greatest men; and although some of his admirers, who cannot endure a spot on the fame of their hero, have striven to free him from these accusations, still it must be acknowledged that the boyhood of our poet was an irregular, and at times a wild one. Some believe the story of his poaching exploits to have been entirely an invention, but this can scarcely be. The tale which ran the country-side was that he had been tracked poaching in Sir Thomas Lucy's park, was caught, tried, and imprisoned, in return for which he avenged himself by nailing upon that gentleman's park gates and spreading abroad a bitter satire, spiced with allusions some of which outpassed the bounds of decency. Such tricks and irregularities as this, however, are after all not to be judged severely in a lively hot-blooded young man. Another event, however, which is also not absolutely clear in its details, is calculated to throw a darker shadow upon his fame. He married, in 1582, in his eighteenth year, Anne Hathaway, a woman six years his elder, and, as is certainly proved by documents, he evaded the lawful formalities, which would have entailed delay. There must, therefore, have been urgent grounds for the speedy celebration of the marriage, and the great difference of age between the parties impresses an impartial judge unpleasantly with regard to the whole transaction. Three children were born of this union, a daughter Susannah, early in 1583, and in the next year the twins Hamlet and Judith. Concerning the happiness or unhappiness of this curious couple no certain information can be obtained, but external and internal evidences go to show that they were probably not happy. Shakespeare left for London four years after his marriage, leaving his wife and children in Stratford. Nor did he allow his wife to join him during his stay in the capital in order to resume their married life. His will also contains ungracious expressions regarding her, in direct contradiction to the idea of a close and happy relation. The inner meaning also of Shakespeare's poems is not calculated to give a favourable idea of the poet's conjugal fidelity or of the happiness of his married life. The Sonnets, as well as his first narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, contain passages which only appear harmless if we consider them as wholly objective representations of various forms of passion, without any relation to personal experience, as is held by some literary historians. But this, as regards the Sonnets at least, is in contradiction to the innermost nature of lyric poctry, which attains its best expression when in close connection with the writer's mental and emotional life. Hence it seems most probable that the wildly passionate effusions found in the Sonnets reflect no small portion of Shakespeare's subjective life, and that inferences can be drawn from them with regard to his irregularities. It is only needful to read the following lines: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well Sonnet cxxix. Do not these lines breathe a personality that has become intoxicated with the goblet of passion, and who, after enjoyment, is seized with remorse and disgust for itself and its transgressions, and yet always flings itself anew into the torrent of excess? Venus and Adonis, too, and some of the dramas, hint at troubled and turbid experiences. One such passage occurs in Twelfth Night, and one in Venus and Adonis. The first, Twelfth Night, act ii. scene 4, runs Let still the woman take An elder than herself; so wears she to him, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, These words, which Duke Orsino says to Viola disguised as a page, sound like a melancholy reminiscence of how the poet himself had been drawn, through marriage with an older woman, into an unhappy conjugal relation. Perhaps they also contain a self-accusation at having caused this |
