William 1564-1616 Shakespeare

London Associations.

Meanwhile London remained his headquarters. Here Malone thought that he had evidence, now lost, of his residence in Southwark as early as 1596, and as late as 1608. It is known that payments of subsidy were due from him in 1597 and 1599 in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and that an arrear was ultimately collected in the liberty of the Clink. He had no doubt migrated from Bishopsgate when the Globe upon Bankside was opened by the Chamberlain's men. There is evidence that about 1604 he "lay," temporarily or permanently, in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a tire-maker of French extraction, at the corner of Silver street and Monkwell street in Cripplegate. A note by Aubrey, if it really refers to Shakespeare (which is almost certain), is of value as throwing light not only upon his abode, but upon his personality. Aubrey seems to have derived it from William Beeston the actor. It is as follows: "The more to be admired q[uod] he was not a company keeper, lived in Shoreditch, wouldn't be debauched, & if invited to court ; he was in paine." Against this testimony to the correctness of Shakespeare's morals are to be placed an anecdote of a tiring house amour picked up by a Middle Temple student in 16o2 and a Restoration scandal which made him the father by the hostess of the Crown tavern at Oxford, where he baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir William Davenant, who was born in Feb. 16o6. His credit at court is implied by Ben Jonson's references to his flights "that so did take Eliza and our James," and by stories of the origin of The Merry Wives of Windsor in Elizabeth's desire to see Falstaff in love, and of an autograph letter written to honour him by King James. It was noticed with some surprise by Henry Chettle that his "honied muse" dropped no "sable tear" to celebrate the death of the queen. Southampton's patronage may have introduced him to the brilliant circle that gathered round the earl of Essex, but there is no reason to suppose that he or his com pany were held personally responsible for the performance of Richard II. at the command of some of the followers of Essex as a prelude to the disastrous rising of Feb. i6o1. The editors of the First Folio speak also of favours received by the author in his lifetime from William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery.

He appears to have been on cordial terms with his fellows of the stage. One of them, Augustine Phillips, left him a small legacy in 16o5, and in his own will he paid a similar compliment to Richard Burbadge, and to John Heminge and Henry Con dell, who afterwards edited his plays. His relations with Ben Jonson, whom he is said by Rowe to have introduced to the world as a playwright, have been much canvassed. Jests are preserved which, even if apocryphal, indicate considerable intimacy between the two. This is not inconsistent with occasional passages of arms. The anonymous author of The Return from Parnassus ( 2nd part : 1602), for example, makes Kempe, the actor, allude to a "purge" which Shakespeare gave Jonson, in return for his attack on some of his rivals in The Poetaster.' It has been conjectured that this purge was the description of Ajax and his humours in Troilus and Cressida. Jonson, on the other hand, who was criticism incarnate, did not spare Shakespeare either in his prologues or in his private conversation. He told Drummond of Hawthornden that "Shaks perr wanted arte." But the verses which he contributed to the First Folio are generous enough to make all amends, and in his Discoveries (1623-37), while regretting Shakespeare's excessive facility and the fact that he often "fell into those things, could not escape laughter," he declares him to have been "honest and of an open, and free nature," and says that, for his own part, "I lov'd the man and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any." According to a memorandum-book (1661-63) of the Rev. John Ward (who became vicar of Stratford in 1662), Jonson and Michael Drayton, himself a Warwickshire poet, had been drinking with Shakespeare when he caught the fever of 'Kempe (speaking to Burbadge), "Few of the university men pen plays well. They smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer (sic) Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down ; aye, and Ben Jonson too. 0 that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare bath given him a purge that made him beray his credit." which he died; and Thomas Fuller (16o8-61), whose Worthies was published in 1662, gives an imaginative description of the wit combats, of which many took place between the two mighty contemporaries.

Contemporary Reputation.

Of Shakespeare's literary repu tation during his lifetime there is ample evidence. He is prob ably neither the "Willy" of Spenser's Tears of the Muses, nor the "Aetion" of his Colin Clout's Come Home Again. But from the time of the publication of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece honorific allusions to his work both as poet and dramatist, and often to himself by name, come thick and fast from writers of every kind and degree. Perhaps the most interesting of these from

the biographical point of view are those contained in the Pal ladis Tamia, a kind of literary handbook published by Francis Meres in 1598; for Meres not only extols him as "the most ex cellent in both kinds (i.e., comedy and tragedy) for the state," and one of "the most passionate among us to bewaile and be moane the perplexities of Love," but also takes the trouble to give a list of 12 plays already written, which serves as a starting-point for all modern attempts at a chronological arrangement of his work. It is moreover from Meres that we first hear of "his sugred sonnets among his private friends." Two of these sonnets were printed in 1599 in a volume of miscellaneous verse called The Passionate Pilgrim. This was ascribed upon the title-page to Shakespeare, but probably, so far as most of its contents were concerned, without justification. The bulk of Shakespeare's son nets remained unpublished until 1609.

About i6io Shakespeare seems to have left London, and entered upon the definite occupation of his house at New Place, Stratford. Here he lived the life of a retired gentleman, on friendly if satiri cal terms with the richest of his neighbours, the Combes, and interested in local affairs, such as a bill for the improvement of the highways in 161i, or a proposed enclosure of the open fields at Welcombe in 1614, which might affect his income or his com fort. He had his garden with its mulberry tree, and his farm in the immediate neighbourhood. His brothers Gilbert and Richard were still alive. His sister Joan had married William Hart, a hatter, and in 1616 was dwelling in one of his houses in Henley street. Of his daughters, the eldest, Susanna, had married in 1607 John Hall (d. 1635), a physician of some reputation. They dwelt in Stratford, and had one child, Elizabeth, born in i6o8. The younger, Judith, married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, also of Stratford, two months before her father's death. At Stratford the last few of the plays may have been written, but it is rea sonable to suppose that Shakespeare's connection with the king's company ended when the Globe was burnt down during a per formance of Henry VIII. on June 29, 1613. Certainly his re tirement did not imply an absolute break with London life. In 1613 he devised an impress, or emblem, to be painted by Richard Burbadge, and worn in the tilt on Accession day by the earl of Rutland, who had been one of the old circle of Southampton and Essex. In the same year he purchased for f140 a freehold house in the Blackfriars, near the Wardrobe, once a gate-house to the lodging of the prior of "Blackfriars. This was conveyed to trustees, apparently in order to bar the right which his widow would otherwise have had to dower. In 1615 this purchase in volved Shakespeare in a lawsuit to obtain the surrender of the title-deeds. Richard Davis, a Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the 17th century, reports that the poet "died a papist," and the statement deserves more attention than it has received from biographers. There is indeed little to corroborate it ; for an alleged "spiritual testament" of John Shakespeare is of doubtful origin, and Davis's own words suggest a late conversion rather than an hereditary faith. On the other hand, there is little to refute it beyond an entry in the accounts of Stratford corpora tion for drink given in 1614 to "a preacher at the Newe Place." Will.—Shakespeare made his will on March 25, 1616, appar ently in some haste, as the executed deed is a draft with many erasures and interlineations. There were legacies to his daughter Judith Quiney and his sister Joan Hart, and remembrances to friends both in Warwickshire and in London ; but the real estate was left to his daughter Susanna Hall under a strict entail which points to a desire on the part of the testator to found a family. Shakespeare's wife, who had of course dower in most of the real estate, is only mentioned in an interlineation, by which the "sec ond best bed with the furniture" was bequeathed to her. Much nonsense has been written about this, but it seems quite natural. The best bed was an important chattel, which would go with the house. The estate was after all not a large one. Aubrey's esti mate of its annual value as £200 or £300 a year sounds reason able enough, and John Ward's statement that Shakespeare spent ,000 a year must surely be an exaggeration. The sum-total of his known investments amounts to £960. Sir Sidney Lee calcu lates that his theatrical income must have reached £600 a year, but this is a considerable overestimate; it can hardly have been more than about £200. It must be remembered that the purchas ing value of money in the 17th century was many times greater than at present. Shakespeare's interest in the "houses" of the Globe and Blackfriars probably determined on or before his death.