of the heroic rôles specially created for him, to the pinnacle of histrionic fame. And within a few years the sharers in the Company - including Shakespeare - had acquired such affluence as to draw down upon them the abuse of many satirists.

The Elizabethan playwright, Thomas Randolph, in discussing the power of money, exclaimed: "Did not... Shakespeare therefore write his comedy?" And many years later Alexander Pope cynically declared:

Shakespeare (whom you, and every playhouse bill,
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despight."

In this statement, no doubt, there is a grain of truth; but it would be fairer to say that Shakespeare labored for gain and glory, with the added comment that in pursuing both he lifted his plays from the level of the mercenary and ephemeral to the heights of enduring art. And surely we, who are the heirs of his "glory," have no right to begrudge him the relatively small "gain" to which he was justly entitled.

Yet perhaps he himself at times regretted his inability to devote his genius to what were regarded as nobler forms of literature to the making, let us say, of some great epic like the Faerie Queene. In one of his Sonnets he exclaims:

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.

And he may occasionally have felt that his nature was "subdued to what it works in." If, however, he had such

1 Plutophthalmia Plutogamia, or Hey for Honesty, I, ii. The play was written after Shakespeare's death.

The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace.

moments of regret, they must have been fleeting, for his whole life, with all of its interests, was now centred in the theatre; and we cannot doubt that he was happy in the companionship of his "friends and fellows," who seem to have loved him only "this side idolatry," and that he rejoiced in the success his company was able to attain under his rapidly developing powers as a dramatist. Nor could he have been unmoved by the applause of the public in the "thronged theatres," thus described by his contemporary playwright Drayton:

In pride of wit, when high desire of fame
Gave life and courage to my lab'ring pen,
And first the sound and virtue of my name
Won grace and credit in the ears of men,
With those the thronged theatres that press,
I in the circuit for the laurel strove,
Where the full praise, I freely must confess,
In heat of blood a modest mind might move;
With shouts and claps at every little pause,

When the proud round on every side hath rung.1

Such applause, we know, Shakespeare gained in abundant measure. As Leonard Digges exclaimed:

Oh how the audience

Were ravish'd! With what wonder they went thence!

And it was no mean thing for him to ravish the audiences then, and since, as no one else has been able to do. We might like to have from his pen a great epic like the Faerie Queene, dealing, let us say, with the Trojan War, a theme which always fascinated him; on the other hand, we should not be willing to pay the price by giving up Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, which he could have produced only as a result of years of painstaking effort in dramatic composition. After all, is it not enough that he has won from the

1 Idea (1605), Sonnet 47.

world such praise as is thus expressed by Browning?

"Shakespeare"!-to such name's sounding, what succeeds
Fitly as silence? Falter forth the spell,

Act follows word, the speaker knows full well,
Nor tampers with its magic more than needs.

Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads

With his soul only: if from lips it fell,

Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven, and hell,
Would own, "Thou didst create us!" Naught impedes
We voice the other name, man's most of might,
Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love

Mutely await their working, leave to sight
All of the issue as — below

above

CHAPTER XI

LONDON RESIDENCES AND ACTOR FRIENDS

Now that Shakespeare, after some uncertainty, had found his permanent place in the world, and had settled down into the regular existence he was thenceforth to lead, we may turn to consider his more personal affairs. His first residence in London, so far as our knowledge goes, was in the Parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, near the Theatre where his company was acting, and close by the homes of his friends the Burbages. From the Subsidy Rolls we learn that in 1595-96 (how much earlier is not indicated) he was a householder in this parish, and that upon his goods the tax collectors had set the very respectable assessment of £5. In the same Rolls, Richard Burbage, who had inherited property from his father in addition to what he had accumulated as a successful actor, was assessed only £3; and his brother Cuthbert, the owner of the Theatre, and a prosperous man of affairs, who with his family was occupying the dwelling his father had erected in Holywell, was assessed only £4. That Shakespeare as a householder was assessed more than either of these men indicates that he was living in better circumstances than they, and suggests that he had with him in London his wife, Anne, and his three children, Susanna, Judith, and Hamnet.

But his home in St. Helen's was soon to be broken up, as is shown by the following facts. In 1593 Parliament had voted to Queen Elizabeth three subsidies,1 each of 25. 8d. in the pound on personal assessment. The third subsidy (for the year 1595) was divided into two install1 For a reprint of these records see The Athenæum, March 26, 1904.

ments, the first, of Is. 8d. in the pound, due on or before February 1, 1596, the second, of Is. in the pound, due on or before February 1, 1597. In preparing to collect this second installment the officers of St. Helen's, in October, 1596, made up their usual list of subsidy-payers, and set Shakespeare down as owing 5s. on his original assessment of £5. But when they came to collect the sum early in 1597 they did not find him at his former address; and in their report, dated November, 1597, they entered his name among the defaulters: "William Shakespeare, vli. — vs." The inference is that he had moved away from the Parish of St. Helen's at some date between February, 1596, when the previous installment had been paid, and February, 1597, when the second installment was due. And this inference is verified by Malone, who had in his possession a document showing that at some date in 1596 Shakespeare was a resident of the Bankside in Southwark: "From a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear Garden, in 1596.”1

Presumably, if he had his family with him, he broke up housekeeping, probably early in the summer of 1596, and sent his wife and children to live in Stratford. For this there may have been good reasons. The crowded housing conditions of London, as well as the unwholesome marshes of Moorfields close by, might have rendered it desirable for him to rear his children in the fresh air and open life of Warwickshire. In this connection, too, it may be significant that in August, 1596, his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven and a half, died in Stratford. As a twin-child he was possibly not strong physically; and his declining

1 Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Shakespeare Papers, 1796. The document, like many others once belonging to Alleyn, is now lost, but the integrity of Malone is above suspicion, and we may safely accept the authenticity of the document in his hands, especially in view of the evidence to follow.