MEMOIRS OF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

THE

HE name and the works of William Shakespeare were widely known and highly thought of by his contemporaries. Unlike Homer's, his figure does not loom vaguely from the obscurity of a pre-historic period; unlike Dante's, it is not revealed by fitful and lurid light amid the convulsions of society upon the verge of the dark ages. From early manhood to maturity he lived, and labored, and throve, in the chief city of a prosperous and peaceful country, at a period of high intellectual and moral development. His life was passed before the public in days when the pen recorded scandal in the diary, and when the press, though the daily newspaper did not yet exist, teemed with personality. Yet of Dante, driven in haughty wretchedness from city to city, and singing his immortal hate of his pursuers as he fled, we know more than we do of Shakespeare; the paucity of whose personal memorials is so extreme, that he has shared with the almost mythi

cal Homer the fortune of having the works which make his fame immortal pronounced medleys, in the composition of which he was but indirectly and partially concerned; and two enthusiasts, one in the Old England and the other in the New, have even maintained that they were written by the great philosophers and statesmen of his day, who used his name as a stalking horse with which to conceal themselves and mislead the public.*

Two generations had not followed that which gave to the world the great poet of our race and of mankind, when Thomas Betterton, the most celebrated London actor of his day, journeyed from the scene of Shakespeare's metropolitan distinction to that of his rustic youth and his rural retirement, in the hope of finding in the latter those traces of his private life which had been so entirely obliterated in the former. The grateful and reverential player, who had gained competence and reputation chiefly by performing Shakespeare's characters, gathered and preserved a few fading but important traditions; to these the assiduous investigation of more than a century and a half has added the records of a few other facts

* The accomplished and gifted lady who broached this theory on this side of the ocean in Putnam's Magazine for January, 1856, was then, doubtless, suffering from that mental aberration which soon after consigned her to the asylum in which she died. The Transatlantic critics are, I believe, without a similar excuse for the strange fancy of her British rival, which they were so quick to condemn in her as a trait of "American" extravagance.

of hardly more significance, and confirmation of some of those traditions; and this is all the faint and uncertain light which falls from the past upon the man whose works cast such a blaze of everbrightening glory upon our literature. There have been issued, indeed, to us of the present generation, pamphlets professing to give new particulars of the life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even more pretentious titles. But from all these there has been but small satisfaction, save to those who can persuade themselves that, by knowing what Shakespeare might have done, they know what he did, or that a reflex of his daily life can be seen in parchments beginning, "This indenture made," or "Noverint universi per præsentes." It is with no disrespect, nay, it is rather with thankfulness and sorrowing sympathy, that the devotee of Shakespeare, after examining the fruit of the laborious researches of men who have wasted sunlight and candles, and worn good eyes, in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments on which they are written, and as dry as the dust which covered. them, will reluctantly decide that all this mousing has been almost in vain. It has incidentally resulted in the diffusion of a knowledge of the times and circumstances in which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity; but only those who have the taste of the literary antiquary can accept these documents, which

have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly printed, extracts from parish registers and old account-books, inventories, including lists of the knives and spoons and pots and pans of the guzzling aldermen of Stratford, last wills and testaments, leases, deeds, bonds, declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters, -as having aught to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. They have, most of them, told us nothing, and only serve to mark and mock our futile efforts. For, although we do know something of Shakespeare's life, yet, compared with what we long to know, and what it would seem that we should be able to discover, our knowledge is, as knowledge often is, only the narrow boundary which marks the limit of a wide waste of ignorance. We do not know positively the date of Shakespeare's birth, or the house in which he first saw the light, or a single act of his life from the day of his baptism to the month of his obscure and suspicious marriage. We are equally ignorant of the date of that event, and of all else that befell him from its occurrence until we find him in London; and when he went there we are not sure, or when he finally returned to Stratford. That he wrote the plays which bear his name we know; but, except by inference, we do not know the years in which they were written, or even that in which either of them was first performed. We do not know that he laid his father