And vow'd her life with favour to prolong. To this fair nymph, not earthly, but divine, Pal. To this fair queen, so beautiful and wise, Juno. To her whom Juno's looks so well become, The Queen of Heaven yields at Phoebe's doom; And glad I am Diana found the art, Without offence so well to please desert. Dia. Then mark my tale. The usual time is nigh, In robes of cheerful colours, to repair With pleasant songs this peerless nymph to greet; The music sounds, and the Nymphs within sing or solfa with voices and instruments awhile. Then enter CLOTHO, LACHESIS, and ATROPOS, singing as follows: the state being in place. TRES SIMUL. Vive diu felix votis hominumque deumque, [They lay down their properties at the Queen's feet. After the song each of the Fates makes her offering in blank verse. Diana next- Dia. And, lo, beside this rare solemnity, And sacrifice these dames are wont to do, A favour, far indeed contráry kind, This prize from heaven and heavenly goddesses! [Delivers the ball of gold to the Queen's own hands. Accept it, then, thy due by Dian's doom, Ven. So, fair Eliza, Venus doth resign Juno. So is the Queen of Heaven content likewise Pal. So Pallas yields the praise hereof to thee, THE THREE TOGETHER: Live long blest with the gifts of men In body and mind free, wisest, pure, and chaste. [They lay down their properties at the Queen's feet. Clo. Clotho her distaff at your feet. Lach. And Lachesis to you her hanging thread. Atro. And to your hands her fate enclosing steel Atropos offers. 2 ALL TOGETHER. Live long blest with gifts of men and gods, CHAPTER IV. FROM THE YEAR IN WHICH IT IS SUPPOSED THAT SHAKESPEARE CAME TO LONDON TO THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF MARLOWE.-A.D. 1586 TO A.D. 1593. WHILE the first theatres were being formed in London, William Shakespeare was a boy at Stratford, in Warwickshire. His father was John Shakespeare, a glover in Henley Street, who had married, in 1557, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, youngest of seven daughters of Robert Arden, a husbandman. Mary Arden had a little inheritance from her father, who died a month before her marriage. There were about fifty-four acres at Wilmcote, in a property called Ashbies, and some interest in other land there; also two tenements in Snitterfield, and £6 13s. 4d. in cash. There are said to have been lived, and Joan married in due time William Hart, a hatter. Two years younger than Joan was another daughter, Anne, born in September, 1571, who died in April, 1579. In that year, therefore, if the baptisms represent the number of John Shakespeare's children, William Shakespeare was fifteen years old, with a brother Gilbert aged between twelve and thirteen, a sister Joan aged between ten and eleven, and a sister Anne, whose death at the age of seven or eight was one of the sorrows of the household. At that date the Blackfriars Theatre was only three years old, and Stephen Gosson turned from the stage to write his "School of Abuse." The death of his little daughter Anne in that year was but one of the troubles of John Shakespeare. He was falling into poverty. In 1564, the year of the birth of his eldest son William, he was prosperous enough to pay a fair amount to subscriptions for ten, and known to have been eight, children of the marriage. First and second of the eight were two girls born in 1558 and 1562. Each of these died in infancy. Next came a boy, who lived and lives, William Shakespeare, born in April, 1564. He was baptised on the 26th. A MS. note of an antiquary of the eighteenth century, William Oldys, records a tradition that Shakespeare died on his birthday; and as his monument says that he died, aged fifty-three, on the 23rd of April, 1616, the 23rd of April, fairly consistent with the record of his baptism on the 26th, is assumed to be Shakespeare's birthday. But Mr. Bolton Corney has observed that if Shakespeare died on his birthday he only completed his fifty-second year, and his age could not have been said, on a monument set up in the lifetime of his wife and daughters, to be fifty-three, unless he was born at some date before the 23rd of April. There is no direct, but good presumptive, evidence, and scarcely a doubt, that Shakespeare was born in the house visited by many pilgrims, and carefully preserved as his birthplace. The next child, of whose baptism there is record, was Gilbert Shakespeare, two years and a half younger than William. Then came, five years younger than William, a daughter, who, like the dead first-born, was called Joan. Gilbert and Joan relief of the town poor. In the following year he was elected alderman. In 1568 and 1569 he was bailiff of Stratford and, by right of his office, magistrate; but he signed with his mark. When Shakespeare was born there was no English Tragedy or Comedy in print. The first Tragedy was printed when he was one year old, and when he was two years old the first Comedy. He was four or five years old at the date of the earliest record of "The Queen's Players" acting at Stratford. In 1570, when his son William was six years old, John Shakespeare rented for eight pounds Ington Meadow, near Snitterfield. In the following year he was chosen head alderman. In 1574, when his son William was ten years old, John Shakespeare gave forty pounds for two freehold houses in Henley Street, with gardens and orchards. He already had a copyhold in the same street. Four years later the records of his poverty begin. In 1578 he mortgaged his wife's property, Ashbies, for forty pounds; paid 3s. 4d. when other aldermen paid 6s. 8d., for pikemen and billmen; and in November of the same year was excused payment of any part of the fourpence a week levied for relief of the poor. In 1579, when his little daughter Anne died, John Shakespeare raised money on his wife's interest in tenements at Snitter as it can be proved that he was a lawyer, soldier, or what you will. Idle tales about him have passed current; as that of the unreasoning gossip, John Aubrey, who wrote in the seventeenth century that Shakespeare's father was a butcher, " and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech." There is evidence of nothing until the 28th of November, 1582, which is the date of the bond preliminary to the licence of marriage with once asking the banns between William Shagspere and Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway was of Shottery, an outlying hamlet in the parish of Stratford, daughter of Richard Hathaway, husbandman, whose family had been long settled there. For as far back as William Shakespeare could remember, the Hathaways were friends of his father's, for record is found that Richard Hathaway stood as security for John Shakespeare as early as the year 1566. He had been dead a twelvemonth when his daughter Anne was married to John Shakespeare's son. According to the record of their tombs, Shakespeare died in 1616, aged fifty-three; his wife in 1623, aged sixtyseven. Her age, therefore, was sixty when her husband died, and she was seven years, or a few months more than seven years, his senior. Shakespeare's age at the time of his marriage was eighteen and seven months; Anne Hathaway's, therefore, about twenty-six. There was in those days a country custom of betrothal several months before marriage. Betrothment was a legal contract under Roman law. It remained so, and remains so yet, in various parts ment between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.. The love of a young man with thoughts and aspirations far beyond his years has not seldom rested on a woman somewhat more mature than girls of his own age, and there is not a trace of evidence that Shakespeare was not-while there is very good reason for holding that he was-happy throughout life in the wife who had his love when he was a youth of nineteen, who took him in his adversity, shared with him the prosperity he earned, and was beside him when he died. To her, I believe in his last years at Stratford, the gentle heart of Shakespeare could say, as tenderly as in the first years of marriage, To me, fair friend, you never can be old, or in the words of another of his sonnets, Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, He had that within which defied Time. "No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:" This do I vow, and this shall ever be, I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee. In 1583, on the 26th of May, William and Anne Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was christened. In 1585, on the 2nd of February, twin children of theirs, a boy and girl, were christened by the names of Hamnet and Judith, after a husband and wife who were among Shakespeare's friends, Hamnet and Judith Sadler, bakers. The friendship was life-long, for Hamnet Sadler was a witness to Shakespeare's will, and had bequeathed to him in it 26s. 8d. "to buy him a ring." In 1586 William Shakespeare, aged twenty-two, had a wife and three little ones, the eldest three years old, and the twins only at weaning time. In that year the poverty of his father was complete. In February and March he was arrested for debt, because there were no goods in his house to distrain upon. In September he was deprived of his alderman's gown. His son William, unable to assist his father, probably had at the same time so dark a prospect that he then obeyed his impulse as a poet, and resolved to try whether he could not earn a better livelihood in London than his native town promised to yield. There is an idle story that makes deer-stealing from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy, at Charlecote, the cause of Shakespeare's quitting Stratford. Charlecote had only been built by Sir Thomas Lucy in 1558, the year of Elizabeth's accession, and in 1586 there was no deer park attached to it. Shakespeare had a low opinion of Sir Thomas Lucy; but there can surely be other reasons for having a low opinion of a man than that one has stolen his goods and been whipped for it. Some critics discuss the genius of Shakespeare in the spirit of those revellers in Chaucer's "Story of Cambuscan Bold," who went out to admire and criticise the marvel of the enchanted horse that conquered space and time. They found ingenious ways of running it down critically, according to what Chaucer calls the common custom of men to disparage what they do not understand, "They demen gladly to the badder end." Desiring for some unknown reason to have it believed that Shakespeare did not love his wife, they say he did not love her because, having in his particular case chosen a wife older than himself, he allows a character in one of his plays to express with dramatic fitness the common opinion that the wife ought to be younger. Then they will have it that he did not love his wife because he did not take her to London with him. He went to London a poor adventurer, able only to afford bad lodging in an unhealthy city never wholly free from plague, and about every ten years seriously scourged with it. He had a natural affection for his native place, and all that is known of his management of his life indicates that from first to last he regarded Stratford as his home. He left his wife with her three-yearold little girl and her two babies among wholesome surroundings, physical and human, with his own kindred and friends and hers about them, and himself able to be with them whenever the theatres were closed. If he had not loved them, he might have brought them to London with a fair chance of becoming in a few years free of them all. The little ones could hardly have lived in such a London home as his poverty at first could compass, and his wife would have been taken from all the healthy surroundings of her old natural life into the companionship of wits and actors. Shakespeare's reverence for the simple ties of kindred and human fellowship, that strengthen as the child grows to the man, is manifest throughout his plays. He did not break from them, but cherished them, kept his wife and children part of them, and held by them himself till death. When Shakespeare, aged about twenty-two, came to London, poor and unknown, joined the Blackfriars company, and, ready to be useful in any way, as actor or adapter of old plays, began his apprenticeship to his art and his study of life in the great resorts of men, a youth of his own age, born in the same year 1564, Christopher Marlowe, suddenly leaped into fame as a dramatist. Marlowe's career was short, for he died by violence in 1593, when his age was but a few months over twenty-nine. The few years of his brilliant success were the years, so to speak, of Shakespeare's apprenticeship. When Marlowe died, having brought the drama to the highest point then reached, Shakespeare was master of his art, and there were none left to compete with him. Christopher Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, and was only two months older than William Shakespeare. Marlowe was baptised in 1564, on the 26th of February; Shakespeare on the 26th of April. From the King's School at Canterbury a way was made for young Marlowe, probably by help of a patron, to Benet College, Cambridge. In 1583 he graduated as B.A., and became M.A. in 1587. He was known as a poet at his university, and at that date had already achieved success as a dramatist by his play of "Tamburlaine the Great," which probably was acted in 1586, and of which a second part soon followed the first. "Tamburlaine" was first printed in 1590. The hero of this playTimour the Tartar-was the Scythian shepherd who, in the fourteenth century, swept over kingdom after kingdom with gathering force, was crowned at Samarcand in 1370, invaded Persia, took Bagdad, spread fear of his arms as far as Moscow, entered India, made triumphal entry into Delhi, attacked, after return to Samarcand, the Ottoman Sultan Bajazet, and in 1402, after a famous battle, made the Sultan his prisoner. He was on his way to invade China, when he died in 1405. This was the hero of Marlowe's first play, in which the stage hero might strut and fume and utter grand extravagance, to the delight of the spectators who saw him first in shepherd's dress and saw him rise to be the Scourge of Kings. Both parts of "Tamburlaine" are stories of war and conquest, and of the growing pride of a successful warrior. The only gentler interest in the first part arises from the love of Tamburlaine to his captive, the daughter of the Soldan of Egypt, whom he has chosen for his bride before he besieges her father in Damascus. His custom is on the first day of a siege to march in white, on the second day in red, on the third day in black. If a besieged king yield to the white tents, So shall he have his life, and all the rest; Be once advanced on my vermilion tent, He dies, and those who keep us out so long: And when they see me march in black array, With mournful streamers hanging down their heads, He is detained until the day of "black array before Damascus. Interest therefore centres in the question, How will the pitiless warrior deal with the father and the kindred of his chosen bride? The first part of the play ends with the triumph of his love. He suffers Zenocrate to free her father, and then crowns her as his queen. In the second part of the play, called from Marlowe by the great success of the first, the setting forth of the career of conquest is continued, the death of Zenocrate being the only softer theme. The play ends with the death of Tamburlaine, who, with pride of success, rises to the topmost height of boastfulness. In the first line of his short prologue to this play, Marlowe began his career as a dramatist by renouncing rhyme. The whole play is in resonant blank verse, and, abiding by this measure in later plays, Marlowe gave it the predominance it had acquired before his death as the fit verse for dramatic poetry. It was he also who developed this measure to the best form it attained before it was perfected by Shakespeare. In the second line of his prologue Marlowe repudiated for his drama the customary intrusion of rough jesting by the clown. This was Christopher Marlowe's prologue to his "Tamburlaine." From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, Once entered successfully upon the career of a dramatist, Marlowe settled in London, became, like Shakespeare, an actor, and seems once to have been hurt by an accident upon the stage of the Curtain in Shoreditch. "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" was the play of Marlowe's that soon followed the "Second Part of Tamburlaine," and maintained its author's credit with another great success. The legend of Dr. Faustus had been gathered, in 1587, about recent traditions of a real person who is said to have died in the year 1538. The book published in 1587 at Frankfort on the Main, which first gave to Europe the history of Dr. Faustus, attracted wide attention and was immediately fastened upon by Marlowe as good matter for a play, which seems to have been written in 1588. 1 In this figure of the clown, and in the sketch given, at the end of the last chapter, of properties of the Vice and Fool of the old plays, observe that the fool's cap is crested with a cock's-comb, to which a figure of the whole head of the cock was sometimes added. Thence the word corcomb as equivalent to one who acts the fool. The bells on the fool's cap and dress, the bladder for noisy banging about, and the pouch (represented also in Elizabeth's time by wide slops, as of the modern clown) to hold his baggings, need no comment. The stick with the fool's head and ass's ears carved on it was the bauble (Italian "babbola," a child's plaything). The clown used this as his badge of office, and, as represented in the sketch above, often had whimsical discourse with the fool's head upon it. It was to this familiar s age property that Cromwell referred when he said of the mace of the Parliament, in 1653, "Take away that bauble!" |