{"id":2476,"date":"2022-01-14T11:58:58","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T11:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/?p=2476"},"modified":"2022-10-26T11:29:39","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T10:29:39","slug":"biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/shakespeare\/biography\/","title":{"rendered":"William Shakespeare Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564\u20141616)<\/a>, English poet, player and playwright, was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on the 26th of April. Birth 1564.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exact date of his birth is not known. 18th-century antiquaries, William Oldys and Joseph Greene, gave it as April 23, but without quoting authority for their statements, and the fact that April 23 was the day of Shakespeare\u2019s death in 1616 suggests a possible source of error. In any case his birthday cannot have been later than April 23, since the inscription upon his monument is evidence that on April 23, 1616, he had already begun his fifty-third year. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the recently constituted corporation of Stratford, and had already filled certain minor municipal offices. From 1561 to 1563 he had been one of the two chamberlains to whom the finance of the town was entrusted. By occupation he was a glover, but he also appears to have dealt from time to time in various kinds of agricultural produce, such as barley, timber and wool. Aubrey (Lives, 1680) spoke of him as a butcher, and it is quite possible that he bred and even killed the calves whose skins he manipulated. He is sometimes described in formal documents as a yeoman, and it is highly probable that he combined a certain amount of farming with the practice of his trade. He was living in Stratford as early as 1552, in which year he was fined for having a dunghill in Henley Street, but he does not appear to have been a native of the town, in whose records the name is not found before his time; and be may reasonably be identified with the John Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who administered the goods of his father, Richard Shakespeare, in 1561. Snitterfield is a village in the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford, and here Richard Shakespeare had been settled as a farmer since 1529. It is possible that John Shakespeare carried on the farm for some time after his father\u2019s death, and that by 1570 he had also acquired a small holding called Ingon in Hampton Lucy, the next village to Snitterfield. But both of these seem to have passed subsequently to his brother Henry, who was buried at Snitterfield in. 1596. There was also at Snitterfield a Thomas Shakespeare and an Anthony Shakespeare, who afterwards moved to Hampton Corley; and these may have been of the same family. A John Shakespeare, -who dwelt at Clifford Chambers, another village close to Stratford, is clearly distinct. Strenuous efforts have been made to trace Shakespeare\u2019s genealogy beyond Richard of Snitterfield, but so far without success. Certain drafts of heraldic exemplifications of the Shakespeare arms speak, in one case of John Shakespeare\u2019s grandfather, in another of his great-grandfather, as having been rewarded with lands and tenements in Warwickshire for service to Henry VII<\/a>. No such grants, however, have been traced, and even in the 16th-century statements as to\u201d antiquity and service \u201c in heraldic preambles were looked upon with suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The name Shakespeare is extremely widespread, and is spelt in an astonishing variety of ways. That of John Shakespeare occurs 166 times in the Council Book of the Stratford corporation, and appears to take 16 different forms. The verdict, not altogether unanimous, of competent palaeographers is to the effect that Shakespeare himself, in the extant examples of his signature, always wrote \u201cShakspere.\u201d In the printed signatures to the dedications of his poems, on the title-pages of nearly all the contemporary editions of his plays that bear his name, and in many formal documents it appears as Shakespeare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This may be in part due to the martial derivation which the poet\u2019s literary contemporaries were fond of assigning to his name, and which is acknowledged in the arms that he bore. The forms in use at Stratford, however, such as Shaxpeare, by far the commonest, suggest a short pronunciation of the first syllable, and thus tend to support Dr Henry Bradley\u2019s derivation from the Anglo-Saxon personal name, Seaxberht. It is interesting, and even amusing, to\u2019 record that in 1487 Hugh Shakspere of Merton College, Oxford, changed his name to Sawndare, because his former name vile reputatum est. The earliest record of a Shakespeare that has yet been traced is in 1248 at Clapton in G]oucester~ shire, about seven miles from Stratford. The name also occurs during the ,3th century in Kent, Essex and Surrey, and durin~ the I4th in Cumberland, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex, Warwickshire and as far away as Yougbal in Ireland. Thereafter it is found in London and most of the English counties, particularly those of the midlands; and nowhere more freely than in Warwickshire. There were Shakespeares in Warwick and in Coventry, as well as around Stratford; and the clan appears to have been very numerous in a group of villages about twelve miles north of Stratford, which includes Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, Rowington, I{aseley, Hatton, Lapworth, Packwood, Balsall and Knowle. William was in common use as a personal name, and Williams from more than one other family have from time to time been confounded with the dramatist. Many Shakespeares are upon the register of the gild of St Anne at Knowle from about 1457 to about 1526. Amongst these were Isabella Shakespeare, prioress of the Benedictine convent of Wroxall, and Jane Shakespeare, a nun of the same convent. Shakespeares are also found as tenants on the manors belonging to the convent, and at the time of the Dissolution in 1534 one Richard Shakespeare was its bailiff and collector of rents. Conjectural attempts have been made on the one hand to connect the ancestors of this Richard Shakespeare with \u2018a family of the same name who held land by military tenure at Baddesley Clinton in the 14th and 15th centuries, and on usc other to ideniify him with the poet\u2019s grandfather, Richard Shakespeare of\u2019 Snitterfield. But Shakespeares are to be traced at Wroxall nearly as far back as at Baddesley Clinton, and there is no reason to suppose that Richard the bailiff, who was certainly still a tenant of Wroxall in 1556, had also since 1529 been farming land ten miles off at Snitterfield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the breaking of this link, the hope of giving Shakespeare anything more than a grandfather on the father\u2019s side must be laid aside for the present. On the mother\u2019s side he was connected with a family of some distinction. Part at least of Richard Shakespeare\u2019s land at Snitterfield was held from Robert Arden of Wilmcote in the adjoining parish of Aston Cantlow, a cadet of the Ardens of Parkhall, who counted amongst the leading gentry of Warwickshire. Robert Arden married his second wife, Agnes Hill, formerly Webbe, in 1548, and had then no less than. eight daughters by his first wife. To the youngest of these, Mary Arden, he left in 1556 a freehold in Aston Cantlow consisting of a farm of about fifty or sixty acres in extent, known as Asbies. At some date later than November 1556, and probably before the end of 1557, Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakespeare. In October 1556 John Shakespeare had bought two freehold houses, one in Greenhill Street, the other in Henley Street. The latter, known as the wool shop, was the easternmost of the two tenements now combined in the so-called Shakespeare\u2019s birthplace. The western tenement, the birthplace proper, was probably already in John Shakespeare\u2019s hands, as he seems to have been living in Henley Street in 1552. It has sometimes been thought to have been one of two houses which formed a later purchase in 1575, but there is no evidence that these were in Henley Street at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Shakespeare was not the first child. A Joan was baptized in 1558 and a Margaret in 1562. The latter was buried in 1563 and the former must also have died young, although her burial is not recorded, as a second Joan was baptized in 1569. A Gilbert was baptized in 1566, an Anne in 1571, a Richard in ~ and a~ Edmunc~l 01 1580. e~nne died in ~7o; Edmund,who like his brother became an actor, in 1607; Richard in 1613. Tradition has it that one of Shakespeare\u2019s brothers used to visit London in the 17th century as quite an old man. If so, this can only have been Gilbert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the years that followed his marriage, John Shakespeare became prominent in Stratford life. In 1565 he was chosen as an alderman, and in 1568 he held the chief municipal office, that of high bailiff. This carried with it the dignity of justice of the peace. John Shakespeare seems to have assumed arms, and thenceforward was always entered in corporation documents as \u201cMr\u201d Shakespeare, whereby he may be distinguished from another John Shakespeare, a \u201ccorviser\u201d or shoemaker, who dwelt in Stratford about 1584\u20141592. In 1571 as an ex-bailiff be began another year of office as chief alderman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One may think, therefore, of Shakespeare in his boyhood as the son of one of the leading citizens of a not unimportant Youth provincial market-town, with a vigorous life of its own, which in spite of the dunghills was probably not much unlike the life of a similar town to-day, and with constant reminders of its past in the shape of the stately buildings formerly belonging to its college and its gild, both of which had been suppressed at the Reformation. Stratford stands on the Avon, in the midst of an agricultural country, throughout which in those days enclosed orchards and meadows alternated with open fields for tillage, and not far from the wilder and wooded district known as the Forest of Arden. The middle ages had left it an heritage in the shape of a free grammar-school, and here it is natural to suppose that William Shakespeare obtained a sound enough education,i with a working knowledge of \u201cMantuan\u201d2 and Ovid in the original, even though to such a thorough scholar as Ben Jonson it might seem no more than \u201csmall Latin and less Greek.\u201d In 1577, when Shakespeare was about thirteen, his father\u2019s fortunes began to take a turn for the worse. He became irregular in his contributions to town levies, and had to give a mortgage on his wife\u2019s property of Asbies as security for a loan from her brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert. Money was raised to pay this off, partly by the sale of a small interest in land at Snitterfield which had come to Mary Shakespeare from her sisters, partly perhaps by that of the Greenhill Street house and other property in Stratford outside Henley Street, none of which seems to have ever come into William Shakespeare\u2019s hands. Lambert, however, refused to surrender the mortgage on the plea of older debts, and an attempt to recover Asbies by litigation proved ineffectual. John Shakespeare\u2019s difficulties increased. An action for debt was sustained against him in the local court, but no personal property could be found on which to distrain. He had long ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation, and as a consequence he was removed in 2586 from the list of aldermen. In this state of domestic affairs it is not likely that Shakespeare\u2019s school life was unduly prolonged. The chances are that he was apprenticed to some local trade. Aubrey says that he killed calves for his father, and \u201cwould do it in a high style, and make a speech.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever his circumstances, they did not deter him at the early age of eighteen from the adventure of marriage. Rowe Marriage recorded the name of Shakespeare\u2019s wife as Hathaway<\/a>, and Joseph Greene succeeded in tracing her to a family of that name dwelling in Shottery, one of the hamlets of Stratford. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her monument gives her first name as Anne, and her age as sixty-seven in 1623. She must, therefore, have been about eight years older than Shakespeare. Various small trains of evidence point to her identification with the daughter Agnes mentioned in the will of a Richard Hathaway of Shottery, who died in 1581, being then in possession of the farm-house now known as \u201c Anne Hathaway\u2019s Cottage.\u201d Agnes was legally a distinct name from Anne, but there can be no doubt that ordinary custom treated them as identical. The principal record of the i It is worth noting that Walter Roche, who in 1558 became fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was master of the school in 1570\u20141572, so that its standard must have been good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2 Baptista Mantuanus (1448\u20141516), whose Latin Eclogues were translated by Turberville in 1567.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

marriage is a bond dated on November 28, 1582, and executed by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, two yeomen of Stratford who also figure in Richard Hathaway\u2019s will, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a licence for the marriage of William Shakespeare and \u201cAnne Hathwey of Stratford,\u201d upon the consent of her friends, with one asking of the banns. There is no reason to suppose, as has been suggested, that the procedure adopted was due to dislike of the marriage dn the part of John Shakespeare, since, the bridegroom being a minor, it would not have been in accordance with the practice of the bishop\u2019s officials to issue the licence without evidence of the father\u2019s consent. The explanation probably lies in the fact that Anne was already with child, and in the near neighbourhood of Advent within which marriages were prohibited, so that the ordinary procedure by banns would have entailed a delay until after Christmas. A kindly sentiment has suggested that some form of civil marriage, or at least contract of espousals, had already taken place, so that a canonical marriage was really only required in order to enable Anne to secure the legacy left her by her father \u201cat the day of her marriage.\u201d But such a theory is not rigidly required by the facts. It is singular that, upon the day before that on which the bond was executed, an entry was made in the bishop\u2019s register of the issue of a licence for a marriage between William Shakespeare and\u201d Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton.\u201d Of this it can only be said that the bond, as an original document, is infinitely the better authority, and that a scribal error of \u201c Whateley \u201c for \u201cHathaway \u201c-is quite a possible solution. Temple Grafton may have been the nominal place of marriage indicated in the licence, which was not always the actual place of residence of either bride or bridegroom. There are no contemporary registers for Temple Grafton, and there is no entry of the marriage in those for Stratford-upon Avon. There is a tradition that such a record was seen during the I9th century in the registers for Luddington, a chapelry within the parish, which are now destroyed. Shakespeare\u2019s first child, Susanna, was baptized on the 26th of May 1583, and was followed on the 2nd of February 1585 by twins, Hamnet and Judith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In or after 1584 Shakespeare\u2019s career in Stratford seems to have come to a tempestuous close. An 18th-century story of a drinking-bout in a neighbouring village is of no Obsce,~~ importance, except as indicating a local impression years, that a distinguished citizen had had a wildish youth. 1584 But there is a tradition which comes from a double 1592, source and which there is no reason to reject in substance, to the effect that Shakespeare got into trouble through poaching on the estates of a considerable Warwickshire magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy, and found it necessary to leave Stratford in order to escape the results of his misdemeanour. It is added that he afterwards took his revenge on Lucy by satirizing him as the Justice Shallow, with the dozen white louses in his old coat, of The Merry Wives of Windsor. From this event until he emerges as an actor and rising playwright in 1592 his history is a blank, and it is impossible to say what experience may not have helped to fill it. Much might indeed be done in eight years of crowded Elizabethan life. Conjecture has not been idle, and has assigned him in turns during this or some other period to the occupations of a scrivener, an apothecary, a dyer, a printer, a soldier, and the like. The suggestion that he saw military service rests largely on a confusion with another William Shakespeare of Rowington. Aubrey had heard that \u201che had been in his younger years a sthoolmaster in the country.\u201d The mention in Henry IV. of certain obscure yeomen families, Visor of Woncote and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley in Gloucestershire, has been thought to suggest a sojourn in that district, where indeed Shakespeares were to be found from an early date. Ultimately, of course, he drifted to London and the theatre, where, according to the stage tradition, he found employment in a menial capacity, perhaps even as a holder of horses at the doors, before he was admitted into a company as an actor and so found his way to his true vocation as a writer of plays. Malone thought that he might have left Stratford with one of the travelling companies of players which from time to time visited the town. Later biographers have fixed upon Leicester\u2019s men, who were at Stratford in 1587, and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same company, passing with it on Leicester\u2019s death in 1588 under the patronage of Ferdinando, Lord Strange and afterwards earl of Derby, and on Derby\u2019s death in 1594 under that of the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. This theory perhaps hardly takes sufficient account of the shifting combinations and recombinations of actors, especially during the disastrous plague years of 1592 to 1594. The continuity of Strange\u2019s company with Leicester\u2019s is very disputable, and while the names of many members of Strange\u2019s company in and about 1593 are on record, Shakespeare\u2019s is not amongst them. It is at least possible, as will be seen later, that he had about this time relations with the earl of Pembroke\u2019s men, or with the earl of Sussex\u2019s men, or with both of these organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when. he was twenty-eight, he had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had evoked the jealousy of one at least of the group of 1Y scholar poets who in recent years had claimed a f1, monopoly of the stage. This was Robert Greene, who, in an invective on behalf of the play-makers against the play-actors which forms part of his Groats-worth of Wit, speaks of\u201d an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac jotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.\u201d The play upon Shakespeare\u2019s name and the parody of a line from Henry VI<\/a>. make the reference unmistakable.i The London theatres were closed, first through riots and then through plague, from June 1592 to April 1594, with the exception of about a month at each Christmas during that period; and the companies were dissolved or driven to the provinces. Even if Shakespeare had been connected with Strange\u2019s men during their London seasons of 1592 and 1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them. Other activities may have been sufficient to occupy the interval. The most important of these was probably an attempt to win a reputation in the world of non-dramatic poetry. Venus and Adonis was published about April 1593, and Lucrece about May 1594. The poems were printed by Richard Field, in whom Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance; and each has a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, a brilliant and accomplished favourite of the court, still in his nonage. A possibly super-subtle criticism discerns an increased warmth in the tone of the later dedication, which is supposed to argue a marked growth of intimacy. The fact of this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed down from Sir William Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first regular biography of Shakespeare) that Southampton gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds \u201cto enable him to go through with a purchase which he\u2019heard he had a mind to.\u201d The date of this generosity is not specified, and there is no known purchase by Shakespeare which can have cost anything like the sum named. The mention of Southampton leads naturally to the most difficult problem which a biographer has to handle, that of the Sonnets<\/a>. But this will be more conveniently taken up at a later point, and it is only necessary here to put on record the probability that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period now under discussion. There is a surmise, which is not in itself other than plausible, and which has certainly been supported with a good deal of ingenious argument, that Shakespeare\u2019s enforced leisure enabled him to make of 1593 a Wanderjahr, and in particular that the traces of a visit to northern Italy may clearly be seen in the local colouring of Lucrece as compared with Venus and Adonis, and in that of the group of plays which may be dated in or about 1594 and 1595 as compared with those that preceded. It must, however, be borne in mind that, while Shakespeare may perfectly well, at this or at some earlier time, have voyaged i It is most improbable, however, that the apologetic reference in Chettle\u2019s Kind-hart\u2019s Dream (December 1592) refers to Shakespeare. to Italy, and possibly Denmark and even Germany as well, there is no direct evidence to rely upon, and that inference from internal evidence is a dangerous guide when a writer of so assimilative a temperament as that of Shakespeare is concerned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the reopening of the theatres in the summer of 1594 onwards Shakespeare\u2019s status is in many ways clearer. He had certainly become a leading member of the Chamberlain\u2019s company by the following winter, when his name appears for the first and only time in the treasurer Chamberof the chamber\u2019s accounts as one of the recipients of lain\u2019s payment for their performances at court; and there is every reason to suppose that he continued to act with and write for the same associates to the close of his career. The history of the company may be briefly told. At the death of the lord chamberlain on the 22nd of July 1596, it passed under the protection of his successor, George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, and once more became \u201cthe Lord Chamberlain\u2019s men\u201d when he was appointed to that office on. the 17th of March 1597. James I. on his accession took this company under his patronage as grooms of the chamber, and during the remainder of Shakespeare\u2019s connexion with the stage they were \u201cthe King\u2019s men.\u201d The records of performances at court show that they were by far the most favoured of th\u2019e companies, their nearest rivals being the company known during the reign of Elizabeth as \u201cthe Admiral\u2019s,\u201d and afterwards as \u201cPrince Henry\u2019s men.\u201d From the summer of 1594 to March 1603 they appear to have played almost continuously in London, as the only provincial performances by them which are upon record were during the autumn of 1597, when the London theatres were for a short time closed owing to the interference of some of the players in politics. They travelled again during 1603 when the plague was in London, and during at any rate portions of the summers or autumns of most years thereafter. In 1594 they were playing at Newington Butts, and probably also at the Rose on Bankside, and at the Cross Keys in the city. It is natural to suppose that in. later years they used the Theatre in Shoreditch, since this was the property of James Burbage, the father of their principal actor, Richard Burbage. The Theatre was pulled down in 1598, and, after a short interval during which the company may have played at the Curtain, also in Shoreditch, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert rehoused them in the Globe on Bankside, built in part out of the materials of the Theatre. Here the profits of the enterprise were divided between the members of the company as such and the owners of the building as \u201chousekeepers,\u201d and shares in the \u201chouse\u201d were held in joint tenancy by Shakespeare and some of his leading \u201cfellows.\u201d About I6o8 another playhouse became available for the company in. the \u201cprivate\u201d or winter house of the Black Friars. This was also the property of the Burbages, but had previously been leased to a company of boy players. A somewhat similar arrangement as to profits was made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare is reported by Aubrey to have been a good actor, but Adam in As You Like It, and the Ghost in Hamlet indicate the type of part which he played. As a dramatist, however, he was the mainstay of the company for at least some fifteen years, during which Ben Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Tourneur also contributed to their repertory. On an average he must have written for them about two plays a year, although his rapidity of production seems to have been greatest during the opening years of the period. There was also no doubt a good deal of rewriting of his own earlier work, and also perhaps, at the beginning, of that of others. Occasionally he may have entered into collaboration, as, for example, at the end of his career, with Fletcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a worldly sense he clearly flourished, and about 1596, if not earlier, he was able to resume relations as a moneyed man with Stratford-on-Avon. There is no evidence to show whether he had visited the town in the interval, or whether he had brought his wife and family to London. His son Hamnet died and was buried at Stratford in 1596. During the last ten years John Shakespeare\u2019s affairs had remained unprosperous. He incurred fresh debt, partly through becoming surety for his brother Henry; and in 1592 his name was included in a list of recusants dwelling at or near Stratford-on-Avon,with a note by the commissioners that in his case the cause was believed to be the fear of process for debt. There is no reason to doubt this explanation, or to seek a religious motive in John Shakespeare\u2019s abstinence from church. William Shakespeare\u2019s purse must have made a considerable difference. The prosecutions for debt ceased, and in 1597 a fresh action was brought in Chancery for the recovery of Asbies from the Lamberts. Like the last, it seems to have been without result. Another step was taken to secure the dignity of the family by an application in the course of 1596 to the heralds for the confirmation of a coat of arms said to have been granted to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff of Stratford. The bearings were or on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, the crest a falcon his wings displayed argent supporting a spear or steeled argent, and the motto Non sanz droict. The grant was duly made, and in 1599 there was a further application for leave to impale the arms of Arden, in right of Shakespeare\u2019s mother. No use, however, of the Arden arms by the Shakespeares can be traced. In 1597 Shakespeare made an important purchase for \u00a360 of the house and gardens of New Place in Chapel Street. This was one of the largest houses in Stratford, and its acquisition an obvious triumph for the ex-poacher. Presumably John Shakespeare ended his days in peace. A visitor to his shop remembered him as\u201d a merry-cheekt old man \u201c always ready to crack a jest with his son. He died in 1601, and his wife in 1608, and the Henley Street houses passed to Shakespeare. Aubrey records that he paid annual visits to Stratford, and there is evidence that he kept in touch with the life of the place. The correspondence of his neighbours, the Quineys, in 1598 contains an application to him for a loan to Richard Quiney upon a visit to London, and a discussion of possible investments for him in the neighbourhood of Stratford. In 1602 he took, at a rent of 2S. 6d. a year, a copyhold cottage in Chapel Lane, perhaps for the use of his gardener. In the same year he invested \u00a3320 In the purchase of an estate consisting of 107 acres in the open fields of Old Stratford, together with a farm-house, garden and orchard, 20 acres of pasture and common rights; and in 1605 he spent another \u00a3440 in the outstanding term of a lease of certain great tithes in Stratford parish, which brought in an income of about \u00a360 a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 tions. for 1597 and 1598 in the parish of St Helen\u2019s, 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\u2019s men. There is evidence that in 1604 he \u201clay,\u201d 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 recently recovered note by Aubrey, if it really refers to Shakespeare (which is not quite 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, and through him from John Lacy, an actor of the king\u2019s company. It is as follows: \u201cThe more to be admired q~uod} he was not a company-keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, & if invited to court, he was in paine.\u201d Against this testimony to the correctness of Shakespeare\u2019s morals are to be placed an anecdote of a green-room amour picked up by a Middle Temple student in 1602 and a Restoration scandal which made him the father by the hostess of the Crown Inn at Oxford, where he baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir William D~venant, who was born in February 1606. His credit at court is implied by Ben Jonson\u2019s references to his flights \u201c that so did take Eliza and our James,\u201d and by stories of the courtesies which passed between him and Elizabeth while he was playing a kingly part in her presence, of the origin of The Merry Wives of Windsor in her 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 \u201chonied muse \u201cdropped no \u201csable tear\u201d to celebrate the death of the queen. Southampton\u2019s 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 company 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 0\u00b1 February 1601. The editors of the First Folio speak also of favours received by the author in his lifetime from William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, \u2018and his brother Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 1605, and in his own will he paid a F~tends. similar compliment to Richard Burbage, and to John Heminge and Henry Condeli, 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 \u2018the 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 \u201cpurge\u201d which Shakespeare gave Jonson, in return for his attack on some of his rivals in The Poetaster.i 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 \u201c Shakspeer wanted arte.\u201d But the verses which he contributed to the First Folio are generous enough to make all amends, and in his Discoveries (pub. 164,; written c. 1624 and later), while regretting Shakespeare\u2019s excessive facility and the fact that he often \u201cfell into those things, could not escape laughter,\u201d he declares him to have been \u201chonest and of an open and free nature,\u201d and says that, for his own part, \u201cI lov\u2019d the man and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any.\u201d According to the memoranda-book (1661\u20141663) 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 which he died; and Thomas Fuller (1608\u20141661), whose Worthies was published in 1662, gives an imaginative description of the wit combats, of which many took place between the two mighty contemporaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of Shakespeare\u2019s literary reputation during his lifetime there is ample evidence. He is probably neither the \u201c Willy \u201c of Spenser\u2019s Tears of the Muses, nor the \u201c Aetion \u201c of Coatemhis Cohn Clout\u2019s Come Home Again. But from the porarj\u2019 time of the publication of Venus and Adonis and i~~put~~ Lucrece honorific allusions to his work both as poet lou anddramatist, 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 Palladis Tamia, a kind of literary handbook published by Francis Meres in 1598; for Meres not only extols him as \u201cthe most excellent in both kinds comedy and tragedyl for the stage,\u201d and one of\u201d the most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love,\u201d but also takes the trouble to give a list of twelve 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 \u201chis sugred Sonnets among his private friends.\u201d Two of these sonnets were printed in 1599. I Kempe (speaking to Burbage), \u201cFew of the university 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\u2019s 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 \u2018fellow Shakespeare bath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.\u201d 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\u2019s sonnets remained unpublished until 1609.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 1610 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 retire gentleman, on friendly if satiricaJ 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 1611, or a proposed enclosure of the open fields at Welcombe in 1614, which might affect his income or his comfort. He had his garden with its mulberry-tree, and his farm in the immediate neighbourhood. His brothers Gilbert and Richard were still alive; the latter died in 1613. 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, afterwards Lady Barnard (1608\u20141670). The younger, Judith, married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, also of Stratford, two months before her father\u2019s death. At Stratford the last few of the plays may have been written, but it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare\u2019s connexion with the King\u2019s company ended when the Globe was burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII. on the 29th of June I6 13. Certainly his retirement did not imply an absolute break with London life. in 1613 he devised an impresa, or emblem, to be painted by Richard Burbage, 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 \u00a3140 a freehold house in the Blackfriars, near the Wardrobe. 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 involved Shakespeare in a lawsuit for the surrender of the title-deeds. Richard Davies, a Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the i7th century, reports that the poet \u201c died a papist,\u201d and the statement deserves more attention than it has received from biographers. There is indeed little to corroborate it; for an alleged\u201d spiritual testament \u201cof John Shakespeare is of suspected origin, and Davies\u2019s 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 corporation for drink given in 1614 to \u201ca preacher at the Newe Place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare made his will on the 25th of March 1616, apparently 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 sister Susanna Hall under a strict entail which points to a desire on the part of the testator to found a family. Shakespeare\u2019s wife, for whom other provision must have been made, is only mentioned in an interlineation, by which the \u201csecond best bed with the furniture\u201d 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\u2019s estimate of its annual value as \u00a3200 or \u00a3300 a year sounds reasonable enough, and John Ward\u2019s statement that Shakespeare spent \u00a31000 a year must surely be an exaggeration. The sum-total of his known investments amounts to \u00a3960. Mr Sidney Lee calculates that his theatrical income must have reached \u00a3600 a year; but it may be doubted whether this also is not a considerable overestimate. It must be remembered that the purchasing value of money in the 17th century is generally regarded as having been about eight times its present value. Shakespeare\u2019s interest in the \u201c houses \u201cof the Globe and Blackfriars probably determined on his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A month after his will was signed, on the 23rd of April 1616, Shakespeare died, and as a tithe-owner was buried in the chancel of the parish church. Some doggerel upon the stone that covers the grave has been assigned by local tradition to his own pen. A more elaborate monument, with a bust by the sculptor Gerard Johnson, was in due course set up on the chancel wall. D th Anne Shakespeare followed her husband on the 6th of August 1623. The family was never founded. Shakespeare\u2019s grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, made two childless marriages, the first with Thomas Nash of Stratford, the second with John, afterwards Sir John, Barnard of Abington. Manor, Northants. His daughter Judith Quiney had three sons, all of whom had died unmarried by 1639. There were, therefore, no direct descendants of Shakespeare in existence after Lady Barnard\u2019s death in 1670. Those of his sister, Joan Hart, could however still be traced in 1864. On Lady Barnard\u2019s death the Henley Street houses passed to the Harts, in\u2019 whose family they remained until 1806. They were then sold, and in 1846 were bought for the public. They are now held with Anne Hathaway\u2019s Cottage at Shottery as the Birthplace Trust. Lady Barnard had disposed of the Blackfriars house. The rest of the property was sold under the terms of her will, and New Place passed, first to the Cloptons who rebuilt it, and then to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who pulled it down in 1759. The site now forms a public recreation-ground, and hard by is a memorial building with a theatre in which performances of Shakespeare\u2019s plays are given annually in April. Both the Memorial and the Birthplace contain museums, in which books, documents and portraits of Shakespearian interest, together with relics of greater or less authenticity, are stored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No letter or other writing in Shakespeare\u2019s hand can be proved to exist, with the exception of three signatures upon his will, one upon a deposition (May II, 1612) in a lawsuit with which he was remotely concerned, and two upon deeds (March io and II, 1613) ~fl connexion with the purchase of his Blackfriars house. A copy of Florio\u2019s translation of Montaigne (1603) in the British Museum, a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses (1502) in the Bodleian, and a copy of the 1612 edition of Sir Thomas North\u2019s translation of Plutarch\u2019s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines in. the Greenock Library, have all been put forward with some plausibility as bearing his autograph name or initials, and, in the third case, a marginal note by him. A passage in the manuscript of the play of Sir Thomas More<\/a> has been ascribed to him (vide infra), and, if the play is his, might be in his handwriting. Aubrey records that he was \u201ca handsome, well-shap\u2019t man,\u201d and the lameness attributed to him by some writers has its origin only in a too literal interpretation of certain references to spiritual disabilities in the Sonnets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A collection. of Mr William Shakespeare\u2019s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies was printed at the press of William and Isaac Jaggard, and issued by a group of booksellers in I6a3. Dr s This volume is known as the First Folio. It has \u201ca\u201d dedications to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and to \u201cthe great Variety of Readers,\u201d both of which are signed by two of Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cfellows\u201d at the Globe, John Heminge and Henry Condell, and commendatory verses by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges and an unidentified I. M. The Droeshout engraving forms part of the title-page. The contents include, with the exception of Pericles, all of the thirtyseven plays now ordinarily printed in editions of Shakespeare\u2019s works. Of these eighteen were here published for the first time. The other eighteen bad already appeared in one or more separate editions, known as the Quartos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following list gives the date of the First Quarto of each such play, and also that of any later Quarto which differs materially from the First.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Quarto Editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Titus Andronicus (1594). A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream
2 Henry VI. (1594). (1600).
3 Henry VI. (1595). The Merchant of Venice (1600).
Richard II. (1597, ,6o8). Much Ado About Nothing (1600).
Richard III. (15~7). The Merry Wives of Windsor
Romeo and Juliet (,5~7, 1599). (1602).
Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost (1598). Hamlet (4603, 1604).
I Henry IV. (1598). King Lear (1608).
2 Henry IV. ~16oo). Troilus and Cressida (1609).
Henry V. (1600). Othello (1622).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entries in the Register of copyrights kept by the Company of Stationers indicate that editions of As You Like II and Anthony awl Cleopatra were contemplated but not published in 1600 and 1608 respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Quartos differ very much in character. Some of them contain texts which are practically identical with those of the First Folio; others show variations so material as to suggest that some revision, either by rewriting or by shortening for stage purposes, took place. Amongst the latter are 2, 3 Henry VI., Richard III., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and King Lear. Many scholars doubt whether the Quarto versions of 2, 3 Henry VI., which appeared under the titles of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, are Shakespeare\u2019s work at all. It seems clear that the Quartos of The Troublesome Reign of Jo\/zn King of England (1591) and Tile Taming of A Shrew (1594),although treated forcopyright purposes as identical with the plays of King John and The Taming of the Shrew, which he founded upon them, are not his. The First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V., The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet seem to be mainly based, not upon written texts of the plays, but upon versions largely made up out of shorthand notes taken at the theatre by the agents of a piratical bookseller. A similar desire to exploit the commercial value of Shakespeare\u2019s reputation probably led to the appearance of his name or initials upon the title-pages of Locr-ine (15~5), Sir John Oldcastle (1600), Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), The London Prodigal (1605), The Puritan (1607), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and Pericles (I 609). It is not likely that, with the exception of the last three acts of Pericles, he wrote any part of these plays, some of which were not even produced by his company. They were not included in the First Folio of 1623, nor in a reprint of it in 1632, known as the Second Folio; but all seven were appended to the second issue (1664) of the Third Folio (1663), and to the Fourth Folio of 1685. Shakespeare is named as joint author with John Fletcher on the title-page of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), and with William Rowley on that of The Birth of Merlin (1662); there is no reason for rejecting the former ascription or for accepting the latter. Late entries in the Stationers\u2019 Register assign to him Cardenio (with Fletcher), Henry I. and Henry II. (both with Robert Davenport), King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, and Iphis and lanthe; but none of these plays is now extant. Modern conjecture has attempted to trace his hand in other plays, of which Arden of Feversham (1592), Edward III. (1596), Mucedorus (1598), and The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608) are the most important; it is quite possible that he may have had a share in Edward III. A play on Sir Thomas More, which has been handed down in manuscript, contains a number of passages, interpolated in various handwritings, to meet requirements of the censor; and there are those who assign one of these (ii. 4~ 1-17 2) to Shakespeare. Unfortunately the First Folio does not give the\u2019 dates at which the plays contained i,n it were written or produced; and the endeavour to supply this deficiency has been one of the Dates, main preoccupations of more than a century of Shakespearian scholarship, since the pioneer essay of Edmund Malone in his An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written (1778). The investigation is not a mere piece of barren antiquarianism, for on it depends the possibility of appreciating the work of the world\u2019s greatest poet, not as if it were an articulated whole like a philosophical system, but in its true aspect as the reflex of a vital and constantly developing personality. A starting-point is afforded by the dates of the Quartos and the entries in the Stationers\u2019 Register which refer to them, and by the list of plays already in existence in 1598 which is inserted by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of that year, and which, while not necessarily exhaustive of Shakespeare\u2019s pre-1598 writing, includes The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost, A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, as well as a mysterious Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Won, which has been conjecturally identified with several plays, but most plausibly with The Taming of the Shrew. There is a mass of supplementary evidence, drawn partly from definite notices in other writings or in diaries, letters, account-books, and similar records, partly from allusions to contemporary persons and events in the plays themselves, partly from parallels of thought and expression. between each play and those near to it in point of time, and partly from considerations of style, including the so-called metrical tests, which depend upon an. analysis of Shakespeare\u2019s varying feeling for rhythm at different stages of his career. The total result is certainly not a demonstration, but in the logical sense an hypothesis which serves to colligate the facts and is consistent with itself and with the known events of Shakespeare\u2019s external life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following table, which is an attempt to arrange the original dates of production of the plays without regard to possible revisions, may be taken as fairly representing the common results of recent scholarship. It is framed on the ~assumption that, as indeed John Ward tells us was the case, Shakespeare ordinarily wrote two plays a year; but it will be understood that neither the order in which the plays are given nor the distribution of them over the years lays claim to more than approximate accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chronology of the Plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1591. 1600.
(I, 2) The Contention of York and (21) The Merry Wives of Windsor. Lancaster (2, 3 Henry VI). (22) As You Like It.
1592. 160!. (3) 1 Henry VI. (23) Hamlet. (The theatres were closed for riot (24) Twelfth Night. and plague from June to the end<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1602.
of December.) (25) Troilus and Cressida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1593.
(26) All\u2019s Well that Ends Well. (~) Richard III. (5) Edward III. (part only). 1603. (6) The Comedy of Errors. (The theatres were closed on (The theatres were closed for Elizabeth\u2019s death in March, and plague from the beginning of remained closed for plague February to the end of December.) throughout the year.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1594. 1604.
(7) Titus Andronicus. (27) Measure for Measure. (The theatres were closed for (28) Othello. plague during February and 1605. March.) (29) Macbeth. (8) Taming of the Shrew. (30) King Lear. (g) Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost. 1606. (1 o) Romeo and Juliet. (31) Anthony and Cleopatra. \u2018595. (32) Coriolanus. (ii) A Midsummer Night\u2019s 1607. Dream. (~~) Timon of Athens (un (12) The Two Gentlemen of Verona. finished). (13) King John. 1608.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1596.
(14) Richard II. (~~) Pericles (part only). (15) The Merchant of Venice. 1609.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1597.
(35) Cymbeline. (The theatres were closed for 1610. misdemeanour froth the end of (36) The Winter\u2019s Tale. July to October.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1611.
(16) I Henry IV. (37) The Tempest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1598. 1612.
(17) 2 Henry IV. . – (18) Much Ado About Nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1613. 1599.
(38) The Two Noble Kinsmen (io) Henry V. (part only)., (20) Julius Caesar<\/a>. (ag) Henry VIII. (part only). A more detailed account of the individual plays may now be attempted. The figures here prefixed correspond to those in the table above. 1, 2. The relation of The Contention of York and 1~ancaster to 2, 3 Henry VI. and the extent of Shakespeare\u2019s responsibility for either or both works have long been subjects of Composicontroversy. The extremes of critical opinion are to be found in a theory which regards Shakespeare as the sole author of 2, 3 Henry VI. and The Contention as a shortened and piratical version of the original plays, and in a theory which regards The Contention as written in collaboration by Marlowe, Greene and possibly Peele, and a, 3 Henry VI. as a revision of The Contention written, also in collaboration, by Marlowe and Shakespeare. A comparison of the two texts leaves it hardly possible to doubt that the differences between them are to be explained by revision rather than by piracy; but the question of authorship is more difficult. Greene\u2019s parody, in the\u201d Shakescene \u201c passage of his Groats-worth of Wit (1592), of a line which occurs both in The Contention and in 3 Henry VI., while it clearly suggests Shakespeare\u2019s connexion with the plays, is evidence neither for nor against the participation of other men, and no sufficient criterion exists for distinguishing between Shakespeare\u2019s earliest writing and that of possible collaborators on grounds of style. But there is nothing inconsistent between the reviser\u2019s work in 2, 3 Henry VI. and on the one hand Richard III. or on the other the original matter of The Contention, which the reviser follows and elaborates scene by scene. It is difficult to assign to any one except Shakespeare the humour of the Jack Cade scenes, the whole substance of which is in The Contention as well as in Henry VI. Views which exclude Shakespeare altogether may be left out of account. Hen-ry VI. is not in Meres\u2019s list of his plays, but its inclusion in the First Folio is an almost certain ground for assigning to him some share, if only as reviser, in the completed work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. A very similar problem is afforded by 1 Henry VI., and here also it is natural, in the absence of tangible evidence to the contrary, to hold by Shakespeare\u2019s substantial responsibility for the play as it stands. It is quite possible that it also may be a revised version, although in this case no earlier version exists; and if so the Talbot scenes (iv. 2-7) and perhaps also the Temple Gardens scene (ii. 4), which are distinguished by certain qualities of style from the rest of the play, may date from the period of revision. Thomas Nash refers to the representation of Talbot on the stage in his Pierce Penilesse, his Supplication to the Divell (1592), and it is probable that I Henry VI. is to be identified with the \u201cHarey the vj\u201d recorded in Henslowe\u2019s Diary to have been acted as a new play by Lord Strange\u2019s men, probably at the Rose, on the 3rd of March 1592. If so, it is a reasonable conjecture that the two parts of The Contention were originally written at some date before the beginning of Henslowe\u2019s record in the previous February, and were revised so as to fall into a series with I Henry VI. in the latter end of 1592.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. The series as revised can only be intended to lead directly up to Richard III., and this relationship, together with its style as compared with that of the plays belonging to the autumn of 1594, suggest the short winter season of 159 2\u20141593 as the most likely time for the production of Richard III. There is a difficulty in that it is not included in Henslowe\u2019s list of the plays acted by Lord Strange\u2019s men during that season. But it may quite well have been produced by the only other company which appeared at court during the Christmas festivities, Lord Pembroke\u2019s. The mere fact that Shakespeare<\/a> wrote a play, or more than one play, for Lord Strange\u2019s men during 1592\u20141594 does not prove that he never wrote for any other company during the same period; and indeed there is plenty of room for guess-work as to the relations between Strange\u2019s and Pembroke\u2019s men. The latter are not known to have existed before 1592, and many difficulties would be solved by the assumption that they originated out of a division of Strange\u2019s, whose numbers, since their amalgamation with the Admiral\u2019s, may have been too much inflated to enable them to undertake as a whole the summer tour of that year. If so, Pembroke\u2019s probably took over the Henry VI. series of plays, since The Contention, or at least the True Tragedy, -was published as performed by them, and completed it with Richard III. on their return to London at Christmas. It will be necessary to return to this theory in connexion with the discussion of Titus A ndroni.cus and The Taming of the Shrew. The principal historical source for Henry VI. was Edward Hall\u2019s The Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542), and for Richard III., -as for all Shakespeare\u2019s later historical plays, the second edition (1587) of Raphael Holinshed\u2019s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (i5l\u2019~i). An earlier play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (i5~4), seems to have contributed little if anything to Richard III.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Many scholars think that at any rate the greater part of the first two acts of Edward III., containing the story of Edward\u2019s wooing of the countess of Salisbury, are by Shakespeare; and, if so, it is to about the time of Richard III. that the style of his contribution seems to belong. The play was entered in the Stationer~\u2019 Registei on December 1, 1595. The Shakespearian scenes are based on the 46th Novel in William Paynter\u2019s Palace of Pleasure (1566). The line, \u201c Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds\u201d (ii. 1.451), is repeated verbatim in the 94th sonnet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. To the winter season of 1592\u20141593 may also be assigned with fair probability Shakespeare\u2019s first experimental comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and if his writing at one and the same time for Pembroke\u2019s and for another company is not regarded as beyond the bounds of conjecture, it becomes tempting to identify this with \u201cthe gelyous comodey\u201d produced, probably by Strange\u2019s men, for Henslowe as a new play on January 5, 1593. The play contains a reference to the wars of succession in France which would fit any date from 1589 to \u2018594. The plot is taken from the Menaethmi, and to a smaller extent from the Amphitruo of Plautus. William Warner\u2019s translation of the Menaech,ni was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on June 10, 1594. A performance of The Comedy of Errors by \u201ca company of base and common fellows\u201d (including Shakespeare?) is recorded in the Gesta Grayorum as taking place in Gray\u2019s Inn hail on December 28, 1594.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Titus Andronicus is another play in which many scholars have refused to see the hand of Shakespeare, but the double testimony of its inclusion in Meres\u2019s list and in the First Folio makes it unreasonable to deny him some part in it. This may, however, only have been the part of a reviser, working, like the reviser of The Contention, upon the dialogue rather than the structure of a crude tragedy of the school of Kyd. In fact a stage tradition is reported by Edward Ravenscroft, a late 17th-century adapter of the play, to the effect that Shakespeare did no more than give a few \u201c master-touches\u201d to the work of a \u201cprivate author.\u201d The play was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on February 6, 1594, and was published in the same year with a title-page setting out that it had been acted by the companies of Lords Derby (i.e. Strange, who had succeeded to his father\u2019s title on September 25, 1593), Pembroke and Sussex. It is natural to take this list as indicating the order in which the three companies named had to do with it, but it is probable that only Sussex\u2019s had played Shakespeare\u2019s version. Henslowe records the production by this company of Titus and A ndronicus as a new play on January 23, 1594, only a few days before the theatres were closed by plague. For the purposes of Henslowe\u2019s financial arrangements with the company a rewritten play may have been classed as new. Two years earlier he had appended the same description to a play of Tittus and Vespacia, produced by Strange\u2019s men on April II, I592. At first sight the title suggests a piece founded on the lives of the emperor Titus and Vespasian, but the identification of the play with an early version of Titus Andronicus is justified by the existence of a rough German adaptation, which follows the general outlines of Shakespeare\u2019s play<\/a>, but in which one of the sons of Titus is named Vespasian instead of Lucius. The ultimate source of the plot is unknown. It cannot be traced in any of the Byzantine chroniclers. Strange\u2019s men seem to have been still playing Titus in January 1593, and it was probably not transferred to Pembroke\u2019s until the companies were driven from London by the plague of that year. Pembroke\u2019s are known from a letter of Henslowe\u2019s to have been ruined by August, and it is to be suspected that Sussex\u2019s, who appeared in London for the first time at the Christmas of I5c13, acquired their stock of plays and transferred these to the Chamberlain\u2019s men, when the companies were again reconstituted in the summer of 1594. The revision of Titus and Vespasian into Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare may have been accomplished in the interval between these two transactions. The Chamberlain\u2019s men were apparently playing Andronicus in June. The stock of Pembroke\u2019s men probably included, as well as Titus and Vespas\u2019ian, both Henry VI. and Richard III., which also thus passed to the Chamberlain\u2019s company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. In the same way was probably also acquired an old play of The Taming of A Shrew. This, which can be traced back as far as 1589, was published as acted by Pembroke\u2019s men in 1594. In June of that year it was being acted by the Chamberlain\u2019s, but more probably in the revised version by Shakespeare, which bears the slightly altered title of The Taming of The Shrew. This is a much more free adaptation of its original than had been attempted in the case of Henry VI., and the Warwicksbire allusions in the Induction are noteworthy. Some critics have doubted whether Shakespeare was the sole author of The Shrew, and others have assigned him a share in A Shrew, but neither theory has any very substantial foundation. The origins of the play, which is to be classed as a farce rather than a comedy, are to be found ultimately in widely distributed folk-tales, and more immediately in Ariosto\u2019s I Suppositi (1509) as translated in George Gascoigne\u2019s The Supposes (1566). It may have been Shakespeare\u2019s first task for the newly established Chamberlain\u2019s company of 1594 to furbish up the old farce. Thenceforward there is no reason to think that he ever wrote for any other company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost has often been regarded as the first of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, and has sometimes been placed as early as 1589. There is, however, no proof that Shakespeare was writing before 1592 or thereabouts. The characters of Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost are evidently suggested by Henry of Navarre, his followers Biron and Longaville, and the Catholic League leader, the duc de Maine. These personages would have been familiar at any time from 1585 onwards. The absence of the play from the lists in Henslowe\u2019s Diary does not leave it impossible that it should have preceded the formation of the Chamberlain\u2019s company, but certainly renders this less likely; and its lyric character perhaps justifies its being grouped with the series of plays that began in the autumn of 1594. No entry of the play is found in the Stationers\u2019Register, and it is quite possible that the present First Quarto of 1598 was not really the first edition. The title-page professes to give the play as it was\u201d corrected and augmented\u201d for the Christmas either of 1597 or of 1598. It was again revived for that of 1604. No literary source is known for its incidents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 159l\u2019 as played by Lord Hunsdon\u2019s men, was probably produced somewhat before A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, as its incidents seem to have suggested the parody of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude. An attempt to date it in 1591 is hardly justified by the Nurse\u2019s references to an earthquake eleven years before and the fact that there was a real earthquake in London in i 580. The text seems to have been partly revised before the issue of the Second Quarto in 1599. There had been an earlier play on the subject, but the immediate source \u2018used by Shakespeare was Arthur Brooke\u2019s narrative poem Romeus and Juliet (1562).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11. A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, with its masque-like scenes of fairydom and the epithalamium at its close, has all the air of having been written less for the public stage than for some courtly wedding; and the compliment paid by Oberon to the \u201cfair vestal throned by the west\u201d makes it probable that it was a wedding at which Elizabeth was present. Two fairly plausible occasions have been suggested. The wedding of Mary countess of Southampton with Sir Thomas Heneage on the 2nd of May 1594 would fit the May-day setting of the plot; but a widowed countess hardly answers to the \u201clittle western flower \u201c of the allegory, and there are allusions to events later in 1594 and in particular to the raihy weather of June and July, which indicate a somewhat later date. The wedding of William Stanley, earl of Derby, brother of the lord Strange for whose players Shakespeare had written, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford, which took place at Greenwich on the 26th of January 1595, perhaps fits the conditions best. It has been fancied that Shakespeare was present when \u201ccertain stars shot madly from their spheres\u201d in the Kenilworth fireworks of 1575, but if he had any such entertainment in mind it is more likely to have been the more recent one given to Elizabeth by the earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591. There appears to be no special source for the play beyond Chaucer\u2019s<\/a> Knight\u2019s Tale and the widespread fairy lore of western Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12. No very definite evidence exists for the date of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, other than the mention of it in Palladis Tamia. It is evidently a more rudimentary essay in the genre of romantic comedy than The Merchant of Venice, with which it has other affinities in its Italian colouring and its use of the inter-relations of love and friendship as a theme; and it may therefore be roughly assigned to the neighbourhood of 1595. The plot is drawn from various examples of contemporary fiction, especially from the story of the shepherdess !ilismena in Jorge de Montemayor\u2019s Diana (1559). A play of Felix and Philiomena had already been given at court in 1585.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13. King John is another play for which \u2018595 seems a likely date, partly on. account of its style, and partly from the improbability of a play on an independent subject drawn from English history being interpolated in the middle\u2019 either of the Yorkist or of the Lancastrian series. It would seem that Shakespeare had before him an old play of the Queen\u2019s men, called The Troublesome Reign of King John. This was published in i~91, and again, with \u201cW. Sh.\u201d on the title-page, in 1611. For copyright purposes King John appears to have been regarded as a revision of The Troublesome Reign, and in fact the succession of incidents in. the two plays is much the same. Shakespeare\u2019s dialogue, however, owes little or nothing to that of his predecessor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

14. Richard II. can be dated with some accuracy by a comparison of the two editions of Samuel Daniel\u2019s narrative poem on The Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York<\/a>, both of which bear the date of I595 and were therefore issued between March 25, 1595 and March 24, 1596 of the modern reckoning. The second of these editions, but not the first, contains some close parallels to the play. From the first two quartos of Richard II., published in. 1597 and 1598, the deposition scene was omitted, although it was clearly part of the original structure of the play, and its removal leaves an obvious mutilation in the text. There is some reason to suppose that this was due to a popular tendency to draw seditious parallels between Richard and Elizabeth; and it became one of the charges against the earl of Essex and his fellow-conspirators in the ,abortive \u00eameute of February I60I, that they had procured a performance of a play on Richard\u2019s fate in order to stimulate their followers. As the actors were the Lord Chamberlain\u2019s men, this play can hardly have been any other than Shakespeare\u2019s. The deposition scene was not printed until after Elizabeth\u2019s death, in the Third Quarto of 1608.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

15. The Merchant of Venice, certainly earlier than July 22, 1598, on which date it was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register, and possibly inspired by the machinations of the Jew poisoner Roderigo Lopez, (who was executed in June 1594, shows a considerable advance in comic and melodramatic power over any~ of the earlier plays, and is assigned by a majority of scholars to about 1596. The various stories of which its plot is compounded are based upon common themes of folk-tales and Italian novelle. It is possible that Shakespeare may have had before him a play called The Jew, of which there are traces as early as 1579, and in which motives illustrating \u201cthe greedinesse of worldly chusers\u201d and the \u201cbloody mindes of usurers\u201d appear to have been already combined. Something may also be owing to Marlowe\u2019s play of The Jew of Malta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

16, 17. The existence of Richard II. is assumed throughout in Henry IV., which probably therefore followed it after no long interval. The first part was published in 1598, the second not until 1600, but both parts must have been in existence before the entry of the first part in the Stationers\u2019 Register on February 25th 1598, since Falstaff is named in this entry, and a slip in a speech-prefix of the second part, which was not entered in the Register until August 23rd I600, betrays that it was written when the character still bore the name of Sir John Oldcastle. Richard James, in his dedication. to The Legend of Sir John Oldcastle about 1625, and Rowe in 1709 both bear witness to the substitution of the one personage for the other, which Rowe ascribes to the intervention of Elizabeth, and James to that of some descendants of Oldcastle, one of whom was probably Lord Cobham. There is an allusion to the incident and an acknowledgment of the wrong done to the famous Lollard martyr in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV. itself. Probably Shakespeare found Oldcastle, with very little else that was of service to him, in an old play called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been acted by Tarlton and the Queen\u2019s men at least as far back as 1588, and of which an edition. was printed in. 1598. Falstaff himself is a somewhat libelous presentment of the 15th century leader, ~r John Fastolf, who had already figured in Henry VI.; but presumably Fastolf has no titled descendants alive in 1598.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

18. An entry in the Stationers\u2019 Register during 1600 shows that Much Ado About Nothing was in existence, although its publication was then directed to be\u201d stayed.\u201d It may plausibly be regarded as the earliest play not included in Meres\u2019s list. In. 1613 it was revived before James I. under the alternative title of Benedick and Beatrice. Dogberry is said by Aubrey to have been taken from a constable at Grendon in Buckinghamshire. There is no very definite literary source for the play, although some of its incidents are to be found in Ariosto\u2019s Orlando Furioso and Bandello\u2019s novelle, and attempts have been made to establish relationships between it and two early German plays, Jacob Ayrer\u2019s Die Schone Phaenicia and the Vincentius Ladiszlaus of Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

19. The completion. of the Lancastrian series of histories by Henry V. can be safely placed in or about 1599, since there is an allusion in one of the choruses to the military operations in Ireland of the earl of Essex,who crossed on March 27 and returned on September 28, 1599. The First Quarto, which was first \u201cstayed\u201d with Much Ado About Nothing and then published in. 1600, is a piratical text, and does not include the choruses. A geniune and perhaps slightly revised version was first published in the First Folio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

20. That Julius Caesar also belongs to 1599 is shown, not only by its links with Henry V. but also by an allusion to it in John Weever\u2019s Mirror of Martyrs, a work written two years before its publication in 1601, and by a notice of a performance on September 2Ist,1599 by Thomas Platter of Basel in an account of a visit to London. This was the first of Shakespeare\u2019s Roman plays, and, like those that followed, was based upon. Plutarch\u2019s Lives as translated from the French of Jacques Amyot and published by Sir Thomas North in 1580. Itwasalso Shakespeare\u2019s first tragedy since Romeo and Juliet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

21. It is reported by John Dennis, in the preface to The Comical Gallant (1702), that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the express desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love, and was finished by Shakespeare in the space of a fortnight. A date at the end of 1599 or the beginning of 1600, shortly after the completion of the historical Falstaff plays, would be the most natural one for this enterprise, and with such a date the evidence of style agrees. The play was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on January 18th, 1602. The First Q uarto of the same year appears to contain an earlier version of the text than that of the First Folio. Among the passages omitted in the revision was an allusion to the adventures of the duke of Wurttemberg and count of Mompelgard, whose attempts to secure the Garter had brought him into notice. The Windsor setting makes it possible that The Merry Wives was pro\u2019duced at a Garter feast, and perhaps with the assistance of the children of Windsor Chapel in the fairy parts. The plot has its analogies to various incidents in Italian novelle and in English adaptations of these.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

22. As You Like It was one of the plays \u201cstayed\u201d from publication in 1600, and cannot therefore be later than that year. Some trifling bits of evidence suggest that it is not earlier than 1599. The plot is based upon Thomas Lodge\u2019s romance of Rosalynde (1590), and this in part upon the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

23. A play of Hamlet was performed, probably by the Chamberlain\u2019s men, for Henslowe at Newington Butts on the oth of June 1594. There are other references to it as a revenge-play, and it seems to have been in existence in some shape as early as I 589. It was doubtless on the basis of this that Shakespeare constructed his tragedy. Some features of the so-called Ur-Hamlet may perhaps be traceable in. the German play of Der bestrafte Brudermord. There is an allusion. in Hamlet to the rivalry between the ordinary stages and the private plays given by boy actors, which points to a date during the vogue of the children of the Chapel, whose performance began late in 1600, and another to an inhibition of plays on account of a \u201clate innovation,\u201d by which the Essex rising of February 1601 may be meant. The play was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on July 26, 1602. The First Quarto was printed in 1603 and the Second Quarto in 1604. These editions contain texts whose differences from each other and from that of the First Folio are so considerable as to suggest, even. when allowance has been made for the fact that the First Quarto is probably a piratical venture, that t\u2019he play underwent an exceptional amount of rewriting at Shakespeare\u2019s hands. The title-page of the First Quarto indicates that the earliest version was acted in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as in London. The ultimate source of the plot is to be found in Scandinavian legends preserved in the H-istoria Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, and transmitted to Shakespeare or his predecessor through the Histoires tragiques (1570) of Francois de Belleforest (see HAMLET).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

24. Twelfth Night may be fairly placed in. 1601-1602, since it quotes part of a song included in Robert Jones\u2019s First Book of Songs and Airs (1600), and is recorded by John Manningham to have been seen by him at a feast in the Middle Temple hall on February 2nd, 1602. The principal source of the plot was Barnabe Riche\u2019s \u201cHistory of Apolonius and Silla\u201d in his Farewell to Military Profession (1581).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

25. Few of the plays present so many difficulties as Troilus and Cressida, and it cannot be said that its literary history has as yet been thoroughly worked out. A play of the name,\u201d as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men\u201d was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on February 7th, 1603, with a note that \u201csufficient authority \u201c must be got by the publisher, James Roberts, before he printed it. This can hardly be any other than Shakespeare\u2019s play; but it must have been. \u201c stayed, \u201c for the First Quarto did not appear until 1609, and on the 28th of January of that year a fresh entry had been made in the Register by another publisher. The text of the Quarto differs in certain respects from that of the Folio, but not to a greater extent than the use of different copies of the original manuscript might explain. Two alternative title-pages are found in copies of the Quarto. On one, probably the earliest, is a statement that,the play was printed \u201cas it was acted by the Kings Majesties seruants at the Globe \u201c; from the other th\u20acse words are omitted, and a preface is appended which hints that the \u201cgrand possessors\u201d of the play had made difficulties about its publication, and describes it as \u201cnever staled with the stage.\u201d Attempts have been made, mainly on grounds of style, to find another hand than Shakespeare\u2019s in the closing scenes and in the prologue, and even to assign widely different dates to various parts of what is ascribed to Shakespeare. But the evidence does not really bear out these theories, and the style of the whole must be regarded as quite consistent with a date in 1601 or 1602. The more probable year is 1602, if, as seems not unlikely, the description of Ajax and his humours in the second scene of the first act is Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cpurge\u201d to Jonson in reply to the Poetaster (1601), alluded to, as already mentioned, in the Return from Parnassus, a Cambridge play acted probably at the Christmas of 1602\u20141603 (rather than, as is usually asserted, 1601\u20141602). It is tempting to conjecture that Troilus and Cressida may have been played, like Hamlet, by the Chamberlain\u2019s men at Cambridge, but may never have been taken to London, and in this sense \u201cnever staled with the stage.\u201d The only difficulty of a date in 1602 ~5 that a parody of a play on Troilus and Cressida is introduced into Histriomcfstix (c. 1599), and that in this Troilus \u201c shakes his furious speare.\u201d But Henslowe had produced another play on the subject, by Dekker and Chettle, ill 1599, and probably, therefore, no allusion to Shakespeare is really intended. The material for Troilus and Cressida was taken by Shakespeare from Chaucer\u2019s Troilus and Criseyde, Caxton\u2019s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troyc, and Chapman\u2019s Homer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

26. It is almost wholly on grounds of style that All\u2019s Well that Ends Well is placed by most critics in or about 1602, and, as in the case of Troilus and Cressida, it \u2018has been argued, though with little justification, that parts of the play are of considerably earlier date, and perhaps represent the Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Won referred to by Meres. The story is derived from Boccaccio\u2019s Decameron through the medium of William Paynter\u2019s Palace of Pleasure (1566).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

27. Measure for Measure is believed to have been played at court on the 26th of December 1604. The evidence for this is to be found, partly in. an extract made for Malone from official records now lost, and partly in a forged document, which may, however, rest upon genuine information, placed amongst the account-books of the Office of the Revels. If this is correct the play was probably produced when the theatres were reopened after the plague in 1604. The plot is taken from a story already used by George Whetstone, both in his play of Promos and Cassandra (1578) and in his prose Heptame\u2019ron of Civil Discourses (1582), and borrowed by him from Giraldi Cinthio\u2019s Hecatommithi (1566).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

28. A performance at court of Othello on November 1, 1604, is noted in the same records as those quoted with regard to Measure for Measure, and the play may be reasonably assigned to the same year. An alleged performance at Harefield in 1602 certainly rests upon a forgery. The play was revived in 1610 and seen by Prince Louis\u2019of Wurttemberg at the Globe on April 30 of that year. It was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on October 6, 1621, and a First Quarto was published in. 1622. The text of this is less satisfactory than that of the First Folio, and omits a good many lines found therein and almost certainly belonging to the play as first written. It also contains some profane expressions which have been modified in the Folio, and thereby points to a date for the original production earlier than the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players passed in the spring of 1606. The plot, like that of Measure for Measure, comes from the Hecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

29. Macbeth cannot, in view of its obvious allusions to James I., be of earlier date than 1603. The style and some trifling allusions point to about 1605 or 1606, and a hint for the thememay have been given by Matthew Gwynne\u2019s entertainment of the Tres Sib yllae, with which James was welcomed to Oxford on August 27, 1605. The play was revived in 1610 and Simon Forman saw it at the Globe on April 20. The only extant text, that of the First Folio, bears traces of shortening, and has been interpolated with additional rhymed dialogues for the witches by a second hand, probably that of Thomas Middleton. But the extent of Middleton\u2019s contribution has been exaggerated; it is probably confined to act iii. sc. 5, and a few lines in act. iv. sc. I. A ballad of Macdobetli was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on August 27, 1596, but is not known. It is not likely that Shakespeare had consulted any Scottish history other than that included in Raphael Holinshed\u2019s Chronicle; he may have gathered witchlore from Reginald Scot\u2019s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) or King James\u2019s own Demonologie (1599).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

30. The entry of King Lear in the Stationers\u2019 Register on November 26, 16o7, records the performance of the play at court on December 26, 1606. This suggests 1605 or 1606 as the date of production, and this is confirmed by the publication in 5605 of the older play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which Shakespeare used as his source. Two Quartos of King Lear were published in 1608, and contain a text rather longer, but in other respects less accurate, than that of the First Folio. The material of the play consists of fragments of Celtic myth, which found their way into history through Geoffrey of Monmouth. It was accessible to Shakespeare in Holinshed and in Spenser\u2019s<\/a> Faerie Queene, as well as in the old play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

31. It is not quite clear whether Antony and Cleopatra was the play of that name entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on May 20, 1608, for no Quarto is extant, and a fresh entry was made in the Register before the issue of the First Folio.\u2019 Apart from this entry, there is little external evidence to fix the date of the play, but it is in Shakespeare\u2019s later, although not his last manner, and may very well belong to 1606.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

32. In the case of Coriolanus the external evidence available is even scantier, and all that can be said is that its closest affinities are to Antony and Cleopatra, which in all probability it directly followed or preceded in order of composition. Both plays, like Julius Caesar, are based upon the Lives of Plutarch, as Englished by Sir Thomas North.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

33. There is no external evidence as to the date of Timon of Athens, but it may safely be grouped on the strength of its internal characteristics with the plays just named, and there is a clear gulf between it and those that follow. It may be placed provisionally in 1607. The critical problems which it presents have never been thoroughly worked out. \u2018 The extraordinary incoherencies of its action and inequalities of its style have prevented modern scholars from accepting it as a finished production of Shakespeare, but there agreement ceases. It is sometimes regarded as an incomplete draft for an intended play; sometimes as a Shakespearian. fragment worked over by a second hand either for the stage or for printing in the First Folio; sometimes, but not very plausibly, as an old play by an inferior writer which Shakespeare had partly remodelled. It does not seem to have had any relations to an extant academic play of Timon which remained in manuscript until1842. The sources are to be found, partly in Plutarch\u2019s Life of Marcus Antonius, partly in Lucian\u2019s dialogue of Timon or Misanthropos, and partly in William Paynter\u2019s Palace of Pleasure (1566).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

34. Similar difficulties, equally unsolved, cling about Pericles. It was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on May 20, 1608, and published in 1609 as \u201cthe late and much admired play\u201d acted by the King\u2019s men at the Globe. The title-page bears Shakespeare\u2019s name, but the play was not included\u2019in the First Folio, and was only added to Shakespeare\u2019s collected works in the Third Folio, iii company with others which, although they also had been printed under his name or initials in quarto form, are certainly not his. In 1608 was published a prose story, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. This claims to be the history of the play as it was presented by the King\u2019s players, and is described in a \u2018dedication by George Wilkins as \u201ca poore infant of my braine.\u201d The production of the play is therefore to be put in 1608 or a little earlier. It can hardly be doubted on. internal evidence that Shakespeare is the author of the verse-scenes in the last three acts, with the exception of the doggerel choruses. It is probable, although it has been doubted, that he was also the author of the prose-scenes in those acts. To the first two acts he can. at most only have contributed a touch or two. It seems reasonable to suppose that the nonShakespearian part of the play is by Wilkins, by whom other dramatic work was produced about 1607. The prose story quotes a line or two from Shakespeare\u2019s contribution, and it follows that this must have been made by 1608. The close resemblances of the style to that of Shakespeare\u2019s latest plays make it impossible to place it much earlier. But whether Shakespeare and Wilkins collaborated in the play, or Shakespeare partially rewrote Wilkins, or Wilkins completed Shakespeare, must be regarded as yet undetermined. Unless there was an earlier Shakespearian version now lost, Dryden\u2019s statement that \u201c Shakespeare\u2019s own Muse her Pericles\u2019 first bore \u201c must be held to be an error. The story is an ancient one which exists in many versions. In all of these except the play, the name of the hero is Apollonius of Tyre. The play is directly based upon a version in Gower\u2019s Confessio Amantis, and theuse of Gower as a \u201cpresenter \u201cis thereby explained. But another version in Laurence Twine\u2019s Patterne of Painefull Adventures (c. 1576), of which a new edition appeared in 1607, may also have been consulted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

35. Cymbeline shows a further development than Pericles in the direction of Shakespeare\u2019s final style, and can hardly have come earlier. A description of it is in a note-book of Simon Forman, who died in September 1611, and describes in the same book other plays seen by him in 1610 and 1611. But these were not-necessarily new plays, and Cymbeline may perhaps be assigned<\/p>\n\n\n\n

conjecturally to 1609. The mask-like dream in act v. sc. 4 must be an interpolation by another hand. This play also is based upon a wide-spread story, probably known to Shakespeare in Boccaccio\u2019s Decameron (day 2, novel 9), and possibly also in an English book of tales called Westward for Smelts. The historical part is, as usual, from Holinshed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

38. The Winter\u2019s Tale was seen by Forman on May 15, 1611, and as it clearly belongs to the latest group of plays it may well enough have been produced in the preceding year. A document amongst the Revels Accounts, which is forged, but may rest on some authentic basis, gives November 5, 1611 as the date of a performance at court. The play is recorded to have been licensed by Sir George Buck, who began to license plays in 1607. The plot is from Robert Greene\u2019s Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

37. The wedding-mask in act iv. of The Tempest has suggested the possibility that it may have been composed to celebrate the marriage of the princess Elizabeth and Frederick V., the elector palatine, on February 14, 1613. But Malone appears to have had evidence, now lost, that the play was performed at court as early as 1611, and the forged document amongst the Revels Accounts gives the precise date of November I, 1611. Sylvester Jourdan\u2019s A Discovery of the Bermudas, containing an account of the shipwreck of Sir George Somers in 1609, was published about October r6io, and this or some other contemporary narrative of Virginian colonization probably furnished the hint of the plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

38. The tale of Shakespeare\u2019s independent dramas is now complete, but an analysis of the Two Noble Kinsmen leaves no reason to doubt the accuracy of its ascription on the title-page of the First Quarto of 1634 to Shakespeare and John Fletcher. This appears to have been a case of ordinary collaboration. There is sufficient resemblance between the styles of the two writers to render the division of the play between them a matter of some difficulty; but the parts that may probably be assigned to Shakespeare are acts i. scc. 1-4; ii. I; iii. I, 2; V. I, 3, 4. Fletcher\u2019s morris-dance in act iii. sc. 5 is borrowed from that in Beaumont\u2019s Mask of the Inner Temple and Gray\u2019s Inn, given on February 20, 1613, and the play may perhaps be dated in 1613. It is based on Chaucer\u2019s Knight\u2019s Tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

39. It may now be accepted as a settled result of scholarship that Henry VIII. is also the result of collaboration, and that one of the collaborators was Fletcher. There is no good reason to doubt that the other was Shakespeare, although attempts have been made to substitute Philip Massinger. The inclusion, however, of the play in the First Folio must be regarded as conclusive against this theory. There is some ground for suspicion that the collaborators may have had an earlier work of Shakespeare before them, and this~wou1d explain the reversion to the\u201d history\u201d type of play which Shakespeare had long abandoned. His share appears to consist of act i. scc. 1, 2~ act ii. scc. 3, 4; act iii. Sc. 2, II. 1-203; act V. sc. I. The play was probably produced in 1613, and originally bore the alternative title of All is True. It was being performed in the Globe on June 29, 1613, when the thatch caught fire and the theatre was burnt. The principal source was Holinshed, but Hall\u2019s Union of Lancaster and York, Foxe\u2019s Acts and Monuments of the Church, and perhaps Samuel Rowley\u2019s play of When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), appear also to have contributed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\u2019s non-dramatic writings are not numerous. The narrative poem of Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers\u2019 Register on April 18, 1593, and thirteen editions, dating from 1593 to 1636, are\u2019 known. The Rape of Lucrece was, entered in the Register on May 9, 1594, and the six extant editions range from 1594 to 1624. Each poem is prefaced by a dedicatory epistle from the author to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. The subjects, taken respectively from the Metamorp\/ioses and the Fasti of Ovid, were frequent in Renaissance literature. It was once supposed that Shakespeare came from Stratford\u2014on-Avon with Venus and Adonis in his pocket; but it is more likely that both poems owe their origin to the comparative leisure afforded to playwrights and actors by the plague-period of 1592\u20141594. In 1599 the stationer William Jaggard published a volume of miscellaneous verse which he called The Passionate Pilgrim, and placed Shakespeare\u2019s name on the title-page. Only two of the pieces included herein are certainly Shakespeare\u2019s, and although others may quite possibly be his, the authority of the volume is destroyed by the fact that some of its contents are without doubt the work of Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh<\/a>, Richard Barnfield and Bartholomew Griffin. In 1601 Shakespeare contributed The Phoenix and the Turtle, an elegy on an unknown pair of wedded lovers, to a volume called Love\u2019s Martyr, or Rosalin\u2019s Complaint, which was collected and mainly written by Robert Chester. The interest of all these poems sinks into insignificance beside that of one remaining\u2019 volume. The Sonnets were entered in the Register on May 20, 1609, by the stationer Thomas Thorpe, and published by him under the title S\/sake- ~mS speares Sonnets, never before Imprinted, in the same Sonne~. year. In addition to a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, the volume contains the elegiac poem, probably dating from the Venus and \u2018 Adonis period, of A Lover\u2019s Complaint. In 1640 the Sonnets, together with other poems from The Passionate Pilgrim and elsewhere, many of them not Shakespeare\u2019s, were republished by John Benson in Poems Written by Wil. Shakespeare, Gent. Here the sonnets are arranged in an altogether different order from that of 1609 and are declared by the publisher to \u201cappeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched.\u201d No Shakespearian controversy has received so much attention, especially during recent years, as that which concerns itself with the date, character, and literary history of the Sonnets. This is intelligible enough, since upon the issues raised depends the question whether these poems do or do not give a glimpse into the intimate depths of a personality which otherwise is at the most only imperfectly revealed through the plays. On the whole, the balance of authority is now in favour of regarding them as in a very considerable measure autobiographical. This view has undergone the fires of much destructive argument. The authenticity of the order in which the sonnets were printed in 1609 has been doubted; and their subject-matter has been variously explained as being of the nature of a philosophical allegory, of an effort of the dramatic imagination, or of a heartless exercise in the forms of the Petrarchan convention. This last theory has been recently and strenuouslymaintained, and may be regarded as the only one which now holds the field in opposition to the autobiographical interpretation. But it rests upon the false psychological assumption, which is disproved by the whole history of poetry and in particular of Petrarchan poetry, that the use of conventions is inconsistent with the expression of unfeigned emotions; and it is hardly to be set against the direct conviction which the sonnets carry to the most finely critical minds of the strength and sincerity of the spiritual experience out of which they were wrought. This conviction makes due allowance for the inevitable heightening of emotion itself in the act of poetic composition; and it certainly does not carry with it a belief that all the external events which underlie the emotional development are capable at this distance of time of inferential reconstruction. But it does accept the sonnets as an actual record of a part of Shakespeare\u2019s life during the years in which they were written, and as revealing at least the outlines of a drama which played itself out for once, not in his imagination but in his actual conduct in the world of men and women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no advantage to be gained by rearranging the order of the 1609 volume, even if there were any basis other than that of individual whim on which to do so. Many of the sonnets are obviously linked to those which follow or precede them; and altogether a few may conceivably be misplaced, the order as a whole does not jar against the sense of emotional continuity, which is the only possible test that can be applied. The last two sonnets, however, are merely alternative versions of a Greek epigram, and the rest fall into two series, which are more probably parallel than successive. The shorter of these two series (cxxvii.clii.) appears to be the record of the poet\u2019s relations with a mistress, a dark woman with raven brows and mourning eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the earlier sonnets he undertakes the half-playful defence of black beauty against the blonde Elizabethan ideal; but the greater number are in a more serious vein, and are filled with a deep consciousness of the bitterness of lustful passion and of the slavery of the soul to the body. The woman is a wanton. She has broken her bed-vow for Shakespeare, who on. his side is forsworn in loving her; and she is doubly forsworn. in proving faithless to him with other men. His reason condemns her, but his heart has not the power to throw off her tyranny. Her particular offence is that she, \u201ca woman coloured ill, \u201c has cast her snares not only upon him, but upon his friend, \u201ca man right fair,\u201d who is his \u201cbetter angel,\u201d and that thus his loss is double, in love and friendship. The longer series (i.-cxxvi.) is written to a man, appears to extend over a considerable period of time, and covers a wide range of sentiment. The person addressed is younger than Shakespeare, and of higher rank. He is lovely, and the son of a lovely mother, and has hair like the auburn buds of marjoram. The series falls into a number of groups, which are rarely separated by any sharp lines of demarcation. Perhaps the first group (i.-xvii.) is the most distinct of all. These sonnets are a prolonged exhortation by Shakespeare to his friend to marry and beget children. The friend is now on the top of happy hours, and should make haste, before the rose of beauty dies, to secure himself in his descendants against devouring time. In the next group (xviii.-xxv.) a much more personal note is struck, and the writer assumes the attitudes, at once of the poet whose genius is to be devoted to eternizing the beauty and the honour of his patron, and of the friend whose absorbing affection is always on the point of assuming an emotional colour indistinguishable from that of love. The consciousness of advancing years and that of a fortune which bars the triumph of public honour alike fin.d their consolation in this affection. A period of absence (xxvi.-xxxii.) follows, in which the thought of friendship comes to remedy the daily labour of travel and the sorrows of a life that is \u201cin disgrace with fortune and men\u2019s eyes\u201d and filled with melancholy broodings over the past. Then (xxxiii.-xlii.) comes an estrangement. The friend has committed a sensual fault, which is at the same time a sin against friendship. He has been wooed by a woman loved by the poet, who deeply resents the treachery, but in the en.d forgives it, and bids the friend take all his loves, since all are included in the love that has been freely given him. It is difficult to escape the suggestion that this episode of the conflict between love and friendship is the same as that which inspired some of the \u201cdark woman \u201csonnets. Another journey (xliii. -lii.) is again filled with thoughts of the friend, and its record is followed by a group of sonnets (liii.-lv.) in which the friend\u2019s beauty and the immortality which this will find in the poet\u2019s verse are especially dwelt upon. Once more there is a parting (lvi.-lxi.) and the poet waits as patiently as may be his friend\u2019s return to him. Again (lxii.-lxv.) he looks to his verse to give the friend immortality. He is tired of the world, but his friend redeems it (lxvi.-lxviii.). Then rumours of some scandal against his friend (lxix.-lxx.) reach him, and he falls (lxxi.-lxxiv.) into gloomy thoughts of coming death. The friend, however, is still (lxxv.-lxxvii.) his argument; and he is perturbed (lxxviii.lxxxvi.) by the appearance of a rival poet, who claims to be taught by spirits to write \u201cabove a mortal pitch,\u201d and with \u201cthe proud full sail of his great verse\u201d has already won the countenance of Shakespeare\u2019s patron. There is another estrangement (lxxxvii.xc.), and the poet, already crossed with the spite of fortune, is ready not only to acquiesce in the loss of friendship, but to find the fault in himself. The friend returns to him, but the relation is still clouded by doubts of his fidelity (xci.-xciii.) and by public rumours of his wantonness (xciv.-xcvi.). For a third time the poet is absent (xcvii.-xcix.) in summer and spring. Then comes an apparent interval, after which a love already three years old is renewed (c.-civ.), with even richer praises (cv.-cviii.). It is now the poet\u2019s turn to offer apologies (cix.cxii.) for offences against friendship and for some brand upon his name apparently due to the conditions of his profession. He is again absent (cxiii.) and again renews his protestations of the imperishability of love (cxiv.-cxvi.) and of his own unworthiness (cxvii.-cxxi.), for which his only excuse is in the fact that the friend was once unkind. If the friend has suffered as Shakespeare suffered, he has \u201cpassed a hell of time.\u201d The series closes with a group (cxxii.-cxxv.) in which love is pitted against time; and an envoi, not in sonnet form, warns the \u201clovely boy\u201d that in the end nature must render up her treasure. Such an analysis can give no adequate idea of the qualities in these sonnets, whereby the appeal of universal poetry is built up on a basis of intimate self-revelation. The human document is so legible, and at the same time so incomplete, that it is easy to understand the strenuous efforts which have been made to throw further light upon it by tracing the identities of those other personalities, the man and the woman, through his relations to whom the poet was brought to so fiery an ordeal of soul, and even to the borders of self-abasement. It must be added that the search has, as a rule, been conducted with more ingenuity than judgment. It has generally started from the terms of a somewhat mysterious dedication prefixed by the publisher Thomas Thorpe to the volume of 1609. This runs as follows:\u2014 \u201cTo the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T. T.\u201d The natural interpretation of this is that the inspirer or \u201cbegetter\u201d of the sonnets bore the initials W. H.; ~ and contemporary history has accordingly been ran.- w. ii.\u201d sacked to find a W. H. whose age and circumstances might conceivably fit the conditions of the problem which the sonnets present. It is perhaps a want of historical perspective which has led to the centring of controversy around two names belonging to the highest ranks of the Elizabethan nobility, those of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. There is some evidence to connect Shakespeare with both of these. To Southampton he dedicated Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and the story that he received a gift of no less than \u00a31000 from the earl is recorded by Rowe. His acquaintance with Pembroke can only be inferred from the statement of Heminge and Condell in their preface to the First Folio of the plays, that Pembroke and his brother Montgomery had \u201cprosequuted both them and their Authour living, with so much favour.\u201d The personal beauty of the rival claimants and of their mothers, their amours and the attempts of their families to persuade them to marry, their relations to poets and actors, and all other points in their biographies which do or do not fit in with the indications of the sonnets, have been canvassed with great spirit and some erudition, but with no very conclusive result. It is in Pembroke\u2019s favour that his initials were in fact W. H., whereas Southampton\u2019s can only be turned into W. H. by a process of metathesis; and his champions have certainly been. more successful than Southampton.\u2019s in. producing a dark woman, a certain Mary Fitton, who was a mistress of Pembroke\u2019s,. and was in consequence dismissed in disgrace from her post of maid of honour to Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is in favour of her having been blonde, and not \u201cblack.\u201d Moreover, a careful investigation of the sonnets, as regards their style and their relation to the plays, renders it almost impossible on chronological grounds that Pembroke can have been their subject. He was born on the 9th of April 1580, and was therefore much younger than Southampton, who was born on the 6th of October 1573. The earliest sonnets postulate a marriageable youth, certainly not younger than eighteen, an age which Southampton reached in the autumn of 1591 arid Pembroke in the spring of 1598. The writing of the sonnets may have extended over several years, but it is impossible to doubt that as a whole it is to the years 1593\u2014I 598 rather than to the years 1598\u2014I 603 that they belong. There is not, indeed, much external evidence available. Francis Meres in hisPalladis Tamia of 1598 mentions Shakespeare\u2019s \u201csugred sonnets among his private friends,\u201d1 but this allusion might come as well at
\u201cThe sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred sonnets among his private friends.\u201d the beginning as at the end of the series; and the fact that two, not of the latest, sonnets are in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599 is equally inconclusive. The only reference to an external event in the sonnets themselves, which might at first sight seem useful, is in the following lines (cvii.) :\u2014 \u201cThe mortal moon bath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age.\u201d This has been variously interpreted as referring to the death of Elizabeth and accession of James in 1603, to the relief caused by the death of Philip II. of Spain in 1598, and to the illness of Elizabeth and threatened Spanish invasion in 1596. Obviously the \u201c mortal moon\u201d is Elizabeth, but although \u201ceclipse\u201d may well mean \u201c death,\u201d it is not quite so clear that \u201c endure an eclipse \u201c can mean \u201c die.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor do the allusions to the rival poet help much. \u201cThe proud full sail of his great verse \u201c would fit, on critical grounds, with Speriser, Marlowe, Chapman, and possibly Peele, Daniel or Drayton; and the \u201caffable familiar ghost,\u201d from whom the rival is said to obtain assistance by night, might conceivably be an echo of a passage in one of Chapman\u2019s dedications. Daniel inscribed a poem to Southampton in 1603, but with this exception none of the poets named are known to have written either for Southampton or for Pembt\u2019bke, or for any other W. H. or H. W., during any year which can possibly be covered by the sonnets. Two very minor poets, Barnabe Barnes and Gervase Markham, addressed sonnets to Southampton in 1593 and 1595 respectively, and Thomas Nash composed improper verses for his delectation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even if external guidance fails, the internal evidence for 1593\u20141598 as approximately the sonnet period in Shakespeare\u2019s life is very strong indeed. It has been worked out in detail by two German scholars, Hermann Isaac (now Conrad) in the Shakes peare-Jcthrbuch for 1884, and Gregor Sarrazin in William Shakespeares Lehrjahre (1897) and Aus Shakespeares Meisterwerkstatt (1906). Isaac\u2019s work, in particular, has hardly received enough attention even from recent English scholars, probably because he makes the mistakes of taking the sonnets in Bodenstedt\u2019s order instead of Shakespeare\u2019s, and of beginning his whole chronology several years too early in order to gratify a fantastic identification of W. H. with the earl of Essex. This, however, does not affect the main force of an argument by which the affinities of the great bulk of the sonnets are shown, on the ground of stylistic similarities, parallelisms of expression, and parallelisms of theme, to be far more close with the poems and with the range of plays from Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost to Henry I V. than with any earlier or later section of Shakespeare\u2019s work. This dating has the further advantage of putting Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets in the full tide of Elizabethan sonnet-production, which began with the publication of Sidney\u2019s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 and Daniel\u2019s Delia and Constable\u2019s Diana in 1592, rather than during years f or which this particular kind of poetry had already ceased to be modish. It is to the three volumes named that the influence upon Shakespeare of his predecessors can most clearly be traced; while he seems in his turn to have served as a model for Drayton, whose sonnets to Idea were published in a series of volumes in 1594, 1599, 1602, 1605 and 1619. It does not of course follow that because the sonnets belong to 1593\u20141598 V. H. is to be identified with Southampton. On general grounds he is likely, even if above Shakespeare\u2019s own rank, to have been somewhat nearer that rank than a great earl, some young gentleman, for example, of such a family as the Sidneys, or as the Walsinghams of Chislehurst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is possible that there is an allusion to Shakespeare\u2019s romance in a poem called \u201c Willobie his Avisa,\u201d published in \u2018594 as from the pen of o~ne Henry Willoughby, apparently of West Knoyle in Wiltshire. In this Willoughby is introduced as taking counsel when in love with \u201c his familiar friend W. S. who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection.\u201d But there is nothing outside the poem to connect Shakespeare with a family of Willoughbys or with the neighbourhood of West Knoyle. Various other identifications of W. H. have been suggested, which rarely rest upon anything except a similarity of initials. There is little plausibility in a theory broached by Mr Sidney Lee, that W. H. was not the friend of the sonnets at all, but a certain William Hall, who was himself a printer, and might, it is conjectured, have obtained the \u201ccopy\u201d of the sonnets for Thorpe. It is, of course, just possible that the \u201c begetter \u201c of the title-page might mean, not the \u201cinspirer,\u201d but the \u201cprocurer for the press \u201c of the sonnets ; but the interpretation is shipwrecked on the obvious identity of the person to whom Thorpe \u201c wishes\u201d eternity with the person to whom the poet \u201cpromised\u201d that eternity. The external history of the Sonnets must still be regarded as an unsolved problem; the most that can be said is that their subject may just possibly be Southampton, and cannot possibly be Pembroke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to obtain a glimmering of the man that was Shakespeare, it is necessary to consult all the records and to read the evidence of his life-work in the plays, alike in the light of the simple facts of his external career and in The man and the that of the sudden vision of his passionate and dis- artist. satisfied soul preserved in the sonnets. By exclusive attention to any one of these sources of information it is easy to build up a consistent and wholly false conception of a Shakespeare; of a Shakespeare struggling between his senses and his conscience in the artistic Bohemianism of the London taverns; of a sleek, bourgeois Shakespeare to whom his art was no more than a ready way to a position of respected and influential competence in his native town; of a great objective artist whose personal life was passed in detached contemplation of the puppets of his imagination. Any one of these pictures has the advantage of being more vivid, and the disadvantage of being less real, than the somewhat elusive and enigmatic Shakespeare who glances at us for a perplexing moment, now behind this, now behind that, of his diverse masks. It is necessary also to lay aside Shakespeareolatry, the spirit that could wish with Hallam that Shakespeare had never written the Sonnets, or can refuse to accept Titus Andronicus on the ground that \u201cthe play declares as plainly as play can speak, \u2018I am not Shakespeare\u2019s; my repulsive subject, my blood and horrors, are not, and never were his.\u2019 \u201c The literary historian has no greater enemy than the sentimentalist. In Shakespeare we have to do with one who is neither beyond criticism as a man nor impeccable as an artist. He was for all time, no doubt; but also very much of an age, the age of the later Renaissance, with its instinct for impetuous life, and its vigorous rather than discriminating appetite for literature. When Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare lacked art,\u201d and when Milton wrote of his \u201cnative wood-notes wild,\u201d they judged truly. The Shakespearian drama is magnificent and incoherent ; it belongs to the adolescence of literature, to a period before the instrument had been sharpened and polished, and made unerring in its touch upon the sources of laughter and of tears. Obviously nobody has such power over our laughter and our tears as Shakespeare. But it is the power of temperament rather than of art; or rather it is the power of a capricious and unsystematic artist, with a perfect dramatic instinct for the exposition of the ideas, the characters, the situations, which for the moment command his interest, and a perfect disregard for the laws of dramatic psychology which require the patient pruning and subordination of all material that does not make for the main exposition. This want of finish, this imperfect fusing of the literary ore, is essentially characteristic of the Renaissance, as compared with ages in which the creative impulse is weaker and leaves room for a finer concentration of the means upon the end. There is nearly always unity of purpose in a Shakespearian play, but it often requires an intellectual effort to grasp it and does not result in a unity of effect. The issues are obscured by a careless generosity which would extend to art the boundless freedom of life itself. Hence the intrusive and jarring elements which stand in such curious incongruity with the utmost reaches of which the dramatic spirit is capable; the conventional and melodramatic endings, the inconsistencies of action and even of character, the emotional confusions of tragicomedy, the complications of plot and subplot, the marring of the give-and-take of dialogue by superfluities of description and of argument, the jest and bombast lightly thrown in to suit the taste of the groundlings, all the flecks that to an instructed modern criticism are on.ly too apparent upon the Shakespearian sun. It perhaps follows from this that the most fruitful way of approaching Shakespeare is by an analysis of his work rather as a process than as a completed whole. His outstanding positive quality is a vast comprehensiveness, a capacity for growth and assimilation, which leaves no aspect of life unexplored, and allows of no finality in the nature of his judgments upon life. It is the real and sufficient explanation and justification of the pains taken to determine the chronological order of his plays, that the secret of his genius lies in its power of development and that only by the study of its development can he be known. He was nearly thirty when, so far as we can tell, his career as a dramatist began; and already there lay behind him those six or seven unaccounted-for years since his marriage, passed no one knows where, and filled no one knows with what experience, but assuredly in that strenuous Elizabethan life with some experience kindling to his intellect and formative of his character. To the woodcraft and the familiarity with country sights and sounds which he brought with him from Stratford, and which mingle so oddly in his plays with a purely imaginary and euphuistic natural history, and to the book-learning of a provincial grammar-school boy, and perhaps, if Aubrey is right, also of a provincial schoolmaster, he had somehow added, as he continued to add throughout his life, that curious store of acquaintance with the details of the most diverse occupations which has so often perplexed and so often misled his commentators. It was the same faculty of acquisition that gave him his enormous vocabulary, so far exceeding in range and variety that of any other English writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His first group of plays is largely made up of adaptations and revisions of existing work, or at the best of essays in the conventions of stage-writing which bad already achieved popularity. In the Yorkist trilogy he takes up the burden of the chronicle play, in The Comedy of Errors that of the classical school drama and of the page-humour of Lyly, in Titus Andronicus that of the crude revenge tragedy of Kyd, and in Richard III. that of the Nemesis motive and the exaltation of the Machiavellian superman which properly belong to Marlowe. But in Richard III. be begins to come to his own with the subtle study of the actor\u2019s temperament which betrays the working of a profound interest in the technique of his chosen profession. The style of the earliest plays is essentially rhetorical; the blank verse is stiff and little varied in rhythm; and the periods are built up of parallel and antithetic sentences, and punctuated with devices of iterations, plays upon words, and other methods of securing emphasis, that derive from the bad tradition of a popular stage, upon which the players are bound to rant and force the note in order to hold the attention of a dull-witted audience. During the plague-vacations of 1592 to 1594, Shakespeare tried his hand at the ornate descriptive poetry of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece; and the influence of this exercise, and possibly also of Italian travel, is apparent in the next group of plays, with their lyric notes, their tendency to warm southern colouring, their wealth of decorative imagery, and their elaborate and not rarely frigid conceits. Rhymed couplets make their appearance, side by side with blank verse, as a medium of dramatic dialogue. It is a period of experiment, in farce with The Taming of the Shrew, in satirical comedy with Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost, in lyrical comedy with A – Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, in lyrical tragedy with Romeo and Juliet, in lyrical history with Richard II., and finally in romantic tragicomedy with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and with the masterpiece of this singular genre, The l~ferchant of Venice. It is also the period of the sonnets, which have their echoes both in the phrasing and in the themes of the plays; in the black-browed Rosaline of Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost, and in the issue between friendship and love which is variously set in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in The Merchant of Venice. But in the latter play the sentiment is already one of retrospection; the tempest of spirit has given way to the tender melancholy of renunciation. The sonnets seem to bear witness, not only to the personal upheaval of passion, but also to some despondency at the spite of fate and the disgrace of the actor\u2019s calling. This mood too may have cleared away in the sunshine of growing popularity, of financial success, and of the possibly long-delayed return to Stratford. Certainly the series of plays written next after the travels of 1597 are light-hearted plays, less occupied with profound or vexatious searchings of spirit than with the delightful externalities of things. The histories from King John<\/a> to Henry V<\/a>. form a continuous study of the conditions of kingship, carrying on the political speculations begun in Richard II. and culminating in the brilliant picture of triumphant efficiency, the Henry of Agincourt<\/a>. Meanwhile Shakespeare develops the astonishing faculty of humorous delineation of which he had given foretastes in Jack Cade, in Bottom the weaver, and in Juliet\u2019s nurse; sets the creation of Falstaff in front of his vivid pictures of contemporary England; and passes through the half-comedy, half melodrama, of Much Ado About Nothing to the joyous farce of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and to his two perfectly sunny comedies the sylvan comedy of As You Like It and the urban comedy of Twelfth Night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there comes a change of mood, already heralded by Julius Caesar, which stands beside Henry V. as a reminder that efficiency has its seamy as well as its brilliant side. The tragedy of political idealism in Brutus is followed by the tragedy of intellectual idealism in Hamlet; and this in its turn by the three bitter and cynical pseudo-comedies, All\u2019s Well That Ends Well, in which the creator of Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind and Viola drags the honourof womanhood in the dust\u2014Troilus and Cressida, in which the ideals of heroism and of romance are confounded in the portraits of a wanton and a poltroon\u2014and Measure for Measure, in which the searchlight of irony is thrown upon the paths of Providence itself. Upon the causes of this new perturbation in the soul of Shakespeare it is perhaps idle to speculate. The evidence of his profound disillusion and discouragement of spirit is plain enough; and for some years the tide of his pessimistic thought advances, swelling through the pathetic tragedy of Othello to the cosmic tragedies of Macbeth and King Lear, with their Titan-like indictments not of man alone, but of the heavens by whom man was made. Meanwhile Shakespeare\u2019s style undergoes changes no less notable than those of his subjectmatter. The ease and lucidity characteristic of the histories and comedies of his middle period give way to a more troubled beauty, and the phrasing and rhythln often tend to become elliptic and obscure, as if the thoughts were hurrying faster than speech can give them utterance. The period closes with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, in which the ideals of the love of woman and the honour of man are once more stripped bare to display the skeletons of lust and egoism, and in the latter of which signs of exhaustion are already perceptible; and with Timon of Athens, in which the dramatist whips himself to an almost incoherent expression of a general loathing and detestation of humanity. Then the stretched cord suddenly snaps. Timon is apparently unfinished, and the next play, Pericles, is in an entirely different vein, ~nd is apparently finished but not begun. At this point only in the whole course of Shakespeare\u2019s development there is a complete breach of continuity. One can. only conjecture the occurrence of some spiritual crisis, an illness perhaps, or some process akin to what in the language of religion is called conversion, which left him a new man, with the fever of pessimism behind him, and at peace once more with Heaven and the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final group of plays, the Shakespearian part of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter\u2019s Tale, The Tempest, all belong to the class of what may be called idyllic romances. They are happy dreams, in which all troubles and sorrows are ultimately resolved into fortunate endings, and which stand therefore as so many symbols of an optimistic faith in the beneficent dispositions of an ordering Providence. In harmony with this change of temper the style has likewise undergone another change, and the tense structure and marmoreal phrasing of Antony and Cleopatra have given way to relaxed cadences and easy and unaccentuated rhythms. It is possible that these plays, Shakespeare\u2019s last plays, with the unimportant exceptions of his contributions to Fletcher\u2019s Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were written in retirement at Stratford. At any rate the call of the country is sounding through them; and it is with no regret that in the last pages of The Tempest the weary magician drowns his book, and buries his staff certain fathoms deep in the earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564\u20141616), English poet, player and playwright, was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on the 26th of April. Birth 1564. The exact date of his birth is not known. 18th-century antiquaries, William Oldys and Joseph Greene, gave it as April 23, but without quoting authority for their statements, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2476"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4963,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions\/4963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}