Fourthly, his two earliest original plays, The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost, contain not only amusing sketches of school-teachers, but also, embedded in the speeches of other personages, tags from school-books, and intimate echoes of the pedagogue's life. How much technical knowledge of school-books is to be found in Love's Labour's Lost will be realized only after reading Baynes' essay on the topic.1 It should not be forgotten that a young playwright at the outset of his career naturally draws material from his recent and most vivid experiences. Nor should it be overlooked that his first play, The Comedy of Errors, was directly based on two plays of Plautus which had not as yet been translated into English. As a schoolmaster he would have been called upon to teach Plautus, and it may be that his familiarity with the plays gained in this fashion enabled him to dramatize them for the public stage.

Lastly, not to exhaust the reasons that might be cited, a career as school-teacher would splendidly equip the non-university trained Shakespeare for his subsequent career as a man of letters. As every one knows, the best way to acquire a thorough education in books is to teach. If we can imagine Shakespeare as spending a few years with books in the school-room, we can better understand the correct and forcible use of language, and the sure literary sense, which mark his first attempts at composition. On the other hand, if we are forced to think of him as early snatched from school, working all day in a butcher's shop, growing up in a home devoid of books and of a literary atmosphere, and finally driven from his native town through a wild escapade with village lads, we find it hard to understand how he suddenly blossomed out as one of England's greatest men of letters with every mark of literary culture.

1 In his Shakespearean Studies, 1894, pp. 147-249.

The transformation of a school-teacher into a man of letters is common in the history of literature. Samuel Johnson, it will be recalled, left a country school with three acts of a play in his pocket, and came to London with the youthful Garrick who was ambitious of finding employment at the theatres. Possibly Shakespeare in like fashion brought with him to the metropolis a draft of his earliest play with which to recommend himself to the attention of the actors.

We have every reason, therefore, to accept Beeston's statement, made with conviction, and based on what he obviously regarded as trustworthy information; and accepting it, we may imagine Shakespeare as for some five years teaching a country school, and thus mastering the elements of grammar and composition, acquiring a thorough grounding in the best of Latin culture - Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Terence, Plautus, Seneca — and by these means securing the training that was necessary to prepare him for his sudden emergence as the chief poet of the English Renaissance.

CHAPTER VII

THE RISE OF PROFESSIONALISM IN THE DRAMA LET us leave Shakespeare teaching classical literature in his country school, and glance at the rise of the new professions of acting and of playwriting which were shortly to tempt him to the great city of London.

The earliest forms of dramatic entertainment in England, offshoots from the liturgy of the Church, were acted by clerics as a part of the religious service. After these simple representations had grown into long and complicated plays, they were taken out of the church buildings, in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and turned over to the laity for more elaborate performance. With the establishment of the Corpus Christi Festival in 1311, the various Biblical episodes of the Old and New Testament were made into separate plays, and each was intrusted to one or more of the trade guilds, which were required to assume full responsibility for its staging, and to supply from their own members suitable actors. And as the drama became generally recognized as an effective and entertaining means of religious instruction, churches, villages, schools, and miscellaneous organizations began to devise short plays dealing with the lives and miracles of their patron saints, or teaching in allegorical form the plan of salvation. Finally local history, and even secular stories, were put on the stage for the edification and amusement of audiences. But the acting of all these plays was in the hands of amateurs, and such a thing as the commercialization of the drama was virtually unknown.

Not infrequently, however, these amateur actors took

their plays to neighboring towns in order to give others the benefit of their labors, in return for which, of course, they expected to be suitably rewarded. And with the rapid increase in the popularity of the drama as a form of entertainment, there arose, especially in the larger cities, groups of men, tradesfolk for the most part, who devoted their idle time to presenting religious or semireligious stage-performances. Finding this profitable, they more firmly organized themselves, and at last began to travel, even to considerable distances, and thus to make for themselves a fair living.

In their attempts to supply the growing demand for dramatic exhibitions they were almost at once joined by another class of actors, more definitely committed to the business of entertaining the public. Throughout the Middle Ages minstrels, jugglers, tumblers, rope-walkers, sleight-of-hand artists, animal leaders, and such like strollers visited the towns and villages several times a year to amuse the citizens and take a hat-collection. As a rule they went about in small groups for comradeship or mutual protection, often sharing with one another their precarious earnings. Their reputation with the officers of the law was deservedly bad, for they were given to pilfering from the farmers, picking the purses of their spectators, and even on occasion, we are told, stealing horses, which they disposed of at the next town or fair. In the first half of the fifteenth century, as nearly as we can now determine, some of these itinerant entertainers, finding the public to be passionately fond of dramatic shows, hit upon the notion of acting a play in addition to, or it may be instead of, their stale tricks; and discovering this innovation to be more lucrative than their old trade, they banded themselves together into small troupes, and began systematically to tour the country. They performed wherever they could find accommodation, sometimes on barrel-heads at

a street-corner, sometimes in barns, but most often in the yards of public inns. A platform temporarily erected in the centre of the yard supplied the needs of the actors, the rabble stood in a circle about the stage, and the gentlefolk who might desire to see the performance occupied the galleries.

Thus acting as a profession came into being.

The plays these early troupes rendered were at first the then popular moralities, such, for example, as The Cradle of Security, the plot of which has been summarized.1 But the actors, especially those recruited from the strollers, being naturally more anxious to entertain the audience than to inculcate wholesome ethical doctrines, introduced into their performances much broad comedy and a liberal amount of gross obscenity. The text of Mankind well illustrates this. Though the play was originally designed to show how the efforts of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil to ensnare the soul of Mankind could be defeated by Mercy and divine love, as corrupted in the hands of the traveling troupe which acted it in inn-yards it may aptly be called an "immoral morality." And such plays as these professionals might themselves originate through ready extemporization were even more disreputable. Many complaints were made that the performances of the strollers were detrimental to the welfare of the public; and as the troupes rapidly increased in number, vigorous efforts were made to suppress them.

About the same time there arose a superior type of professional actor to furnish entertainment for the upper classes of society. Most of the greater noblemen of the realm maintained a host of retainers, among whom were usually four or five minstrels whose duty it was to amuse their lord and master on festive occasions with songs of knightly deeds, and with feats of activity and jugglery. 1 See above, p. 46.