The Facts About Shakespeare Part 2

A certain John Dowdall left a short account of places he visited in Warwicks.h.i.+re in 1693. He describes the monument and tombstone, giving inscriptions, and adds, "The clarke that shew'd me this church is above 80 years old; he says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this towne bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he run from his master to London, and there was received into the play-house as a serviture, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards prov'd. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one for feare of the curse abovesaid dare touch his gravestone, tho his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be leyd in the same grave with him."

The traditional explanation of the curse as reported by William Hall, has already been given (p. 35).

[Page Heading: Rowe's Biography]

The first regular biography of Shakespeare is that by Nicholas Rowe, written as a preface to his edition of the plays which, issued in 1709, stands at the beginning of modern Shakespearean interpretation. Though compiled nearly a century after the poet's death, Rowe's life has claims upon our credit more substantial than might be expected. His chief source of information was the great actor Betterton, a Shakespeare enthusiast, who had himself taken pains to acc.u.mulate facts concerning his hero. Much of Betterton's material came to him through John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, two actors who had been colleagues of Shakespeare's and who lived into the Restoration period. According to John Downes, a theatrical prompter in the end of the seventeenth century, these veterans brought to the new generation the actual instruction they had received from the dramatist himself on the playing of the parts respectively of Henry VIII and Hamlet. Theatrical and other traditions reached Rowe also through Sir William D'Avenant, the leading figure in the revival of the stage after 1660. D'Avenant's father was host of the Crown Inn at Oxford, where, according to the statements of Aubrey and of Anthony Wood in 1692, Shakespeare was accustomed to put up on his journeys between London and Stratford. Wood reports that the elder D'Avenant was a "man of grave and saturnine disposition, yet an admirer of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare," and that Mrs.

D'Avenant was "a very beautiful woman, of a good wit and conversation."

William D'Avenant was generally reputed to be Shakespeare's G.o.dson, and Aubrey, whose gossip must be accepted with great hesitation, says that he was not averse to being taken as his son. In spite of the fact of this scandal's appearance in various seventeenth century anecdotes, the more careful account of the D'Avenants by Wood points to its rejection.

The story is usually linked with another recorded by the lawyer Manningham in his Diary, March 13, 1602, that Burbage, who had been playing Richard III, was overheard by Shakespeare making an appointment with a lady in the audience. When the tragedian arrived at the rendez-vous, he found Shakespeare in possession; and on knocking was answered that "William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."

To return to the D'Avenants, the elder son, Robert, used to tell that when he was a child Shakespeare had given him "a hundred kisses." Sir William was Rowe's authority for the statement that the Earl of Southampton once gave the poet 1000 "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to"; but no purchase of this magnitude by Shakespeare is recorded. D'Avenant himself was said to own a complimentary letter written to Shakespeare by James I, and the publisher Lintot says that the Duke of Buckinghams.h.i.+re claimed to have examined the doc.u.ment. The story about Shakespeare's first connection with the theater consisting in his holding horses outside, told first in a ma.n.u.script note preserved in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, 1748, is also credited to D'Avenant. According to this tradition, frequently repeated, the future dramatist organized a regular corps of boys and monopolized the business, so that "as long as the practice of riding to the play-house continued the waiters that held the horses retained the appellation of Shakespeare's Boys."

[Page Heading: Further Traditions]

Many of the natural inferences to be drawn from the data in the first part of the chapter are given by Rowe as facts. Thus he states positively that Shakespeare attended a free school, from which he was withdrawn owing to "the narrowness of his circ.u.mstances, and the want of a.s.sistance at home." He repeats the deer-stealing anecdote, with further detail. As to his acting, Rowe reports, "Tho' I have inquir'd, I could never meet with any further account of him this way than that the top of his performance was the ghost in his own Hamlet." He corroborates the general contemporary opinion of Shakespeare's fluency and spontaneity in composition. As to his personality, he says, "Besides the advantages of his wit, he was in himself a good-natur'd man, of great sweetness in his manners and a most agreeable companion." Rowe credits Shakespeare with having prevented his company from rejecting one of Jonson's plays at a time when Jonson was altogether unknown, and is inclined to consider the latter ungenerous in his critical remarks on Shakespeare.

William Oldys, in his ma.n.u.script _Adversaria_, now in the British Museum, reports a few further fragments of gossip, the chief of which is that Shakespeare's brother Gilbert was discovered still living about 1660 and was questioned by some actors as to his memory of William. All he could give them was a vague recollection of his having played the part of Adam in _As You Like It_.

Such are the most significant details which tradition, unauthenticated but often plausible, has added to our knowledge of the doc.u.ments. There exists also a very considerable amount of literary allusion to Shakespeare's productions from 1594 onwards, which is easily accessible in collected form. The most notable of these are the comments of his friend and contemporary, Ben Jonson. Besides the splendid eulogy prefixed to the First Folio, Jonson talked of Shakespeare's lack of art to Drummond of Hawthornden, and expressed himself with affection and discrimination in the famous pa.s.sage in _Timber_.

After all allowances have been made for the inaccuracies of oral tradition, we may safely gather from those concerning Shakespeare some inferences which help to clothe the naked skeleton of the doc.u.mented facts. It is clear that, within a generation after Shakespeare's death, common opinion both in Stratford and London recognized that in the actor and dramatist a great man had pa.s.sed away, that he had been in a worldly sense highly successful, though starting from unpropitious beginnings, that he wrote with great swiftness and ease, and that in his personal relations he was gentle, kindly, genial, and witty. That the bailiff's son who returned to his native town as a prosperous gentleman, is to be identified with the actor and shareholder of the London theaters, and with the author of the plays and poems, it is difficult to see how there can remain any reasonable doubt; and, though the facts which prove this ident.i.ty contain little to illuminate the vast intellect and soaring imagination which created Hamlet and Lear, they contain nothing irreconcilable with the personality, which these creations imply rather than reveal.

[Page Heading: Evidence of the Sonnets]

One further source of information about Shakespeare's personality has figured largely in some biographies. The _Sonnets_ were published in 1609, evidently without Shakespeare's cooperation or consent, with a dedication by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to a Mr. W. H., "the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets." All attempts to identify this Mr. W.

H. have failed. He may have been merely the person who procured the ma.n.u.script for Thorpe, though the language of the dedication seems to imply that he was the young gentleman who is the subject of a considerable number of the poems. Of this young gentleman and of a dark lady who seems to have been the occasion of other of the sonnets, much has been written, but no facts of Shakespeare's life have been established beyond those which are obvious to every reader: that Shakespeare wrote admiring and flattering sonnets to a young man who is urged to marry (and who may have been the Earl of Southampton, or an unknown Mr. W. H., or another); and that he treats of an intrigue with some unknown woman. The identification of the young man of the first seventeen sonnets with other friends who are praised in later sonnets is not certain, though in some cases probable; and much research and conjecture have entirely failed to make clear the relations between the poet, the rival poet, the lady, and the friend. The _Sonnets_ furnish us with no knowledge of Shakespeare's personal affairs, and only a meager basis even for gossip as to some of his experiences with men and women.

Another kind of inquiry has sought to discover in the sonnets not facts or incidents of Shakespeare's life, but indications of his emotional experiences. The results of such inquiry are manifestly outside the scope of this chapter. For their discussion, the reader must be referred to Professor Alden's introduction to the Tudor edition of the _Sonnets_.

Shakespeare's personality as it is reflected from his works will also be considered in the concluding chapter of this volume. So much stress, however, has been placed on interpretations of the sonnets, and these have so often occupied an exaggerated place in his biography, that it may be worth while to remark that whether these lyrical poems are genuine and personal or are conventional and literary, and whether they make the poet more clearly discernible or not, they must certainly be taken not alone by themselves, but in connection with the dramas as affording us an impression of the man who wrote them. Of the sonnets, it may be said in almost the same words just now used of the doc.u.ments and traditions, that whether they contain much or little to illuminate the vast intellect and soaring imagination which created Hamlet and Lear, they contain nothing irreconcilable with the personality which these creations imply rather than reveal.

CHAPTER III

SHAKESPEARE'S READING

We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than "The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in which Ben Jonson stated that the poet had "small Latin and less Greek,"

it is evident from the allusions throughout the plays that Shakespeare was a reader rather than a scholar. In other words, he used books for what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemans.h.i.+p, politics, and other fields; but such works are usually the products of enthusiasts in single subjects, who are apt to forget how much a man of acute mind and keen observation can pick up of a technical matter that interests him for the time, and how intelligently he can use it. The cross-examination of an expert witness by an able lawyer is an everyday ill.u.s.tration; and in the literature of our own day this kind of versatility is strikingly exemplified in the work of such a writer as Mr. Kipling.

[Page Heading: School-Books]

How Shakespeare learned to read and write his own tongue we do not know; that he did learn hardly needs to be argued. The free grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, like other schools of its type, was named from its function of teaching Latin grammar; and we may make what is known of the curricula of such schools in the sixteenth century the basis for our inferences as to what Shakespeare learned there.

The accidence, with which the course began, was studied in Lily's Grammar, and clear echoes of this well-known work are heard in the conversation between Sir Hugh Evans and William Page in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, IV. i, in _1 Henry IV_, II. i. 104, in _Much Ado_, IV. i.

22, in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii. 82 (and perhaps, V. i. 10 and 84), in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 2, in _The Taming of the Shrew_, I. i.

167,--a line of Terence altered by Lily,--and in _t.i.tus Andronicus_, IV.

ii. 20-23, where Demetrius reads two lines from Horace, and Chiron says,

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well.

I read it in the grammar long ago.

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes and Nathaniel in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably due to some elementary phrase-book no longer to be identified. It is to be noted how prominently this early comedy figures in the list of evidences of his school-day memories.

Among the first pieces of connected Latin prose read in the Elizabethan schools was _aesop's Fables_, a collection which, after centuries of rewriting and re-compiling for adults, had come in the sixteenth century to be regarded chiefly as a school-book, but allusions to which are everywhere to be found in the literature of the day. In _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 343, and _Richard II_, III. ii. 129, we find references to the fable of "The Countryman and a Snake"; in _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 69, and _Timon of Athens_, II. i. 28, to "The Crow in Borrowed Feathers"; in _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 77, to "The Wolf in the Sheep's Skin"; in _King John_, II. i. 139, to "The a.s.s in the Lion's Skin"; in _Henry V_, IV.

iii. 91, to "The Hunter and the Bear"; in _As You Like It_, I. i. 87, to "The Dog that Lost his Teeth"; in _All's Well_, II. i. 71, to "The Fox and the Grapes"; besides a number of slighter and less definite allusions. The most detailed fable in Shakespeare, that of "The Belly and the Members," in _Coriola.n.u.s_, I. i. 99, is derived, not from _aesop_, but from Plutarch's _Life of Coriola.n.u.s_.

The traces of the well-known collection of sayings from various writers called _Sententiae Pueriles_, and of the so-called _Distichs of Cato_, both of which were commonly read in the second and third years, are only slight. Battista Spagnuoli Mantua.n.u.s, whose _Eclogues_, written about 1500, had become a text-book, is honored with explicit mention as well as quotation in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii. 95. Cicero, who was read from the fourth year, has left his mark on only a phrase or two, in spite of his importance in Renaissance culture; but Ovid is much more important. The motto on the t.i.tle-page of _Venus and Adonis_ is from the _Amores_, and the matter of the poem is from _Metamorphoses_, X. 519 ff., with features from the stories of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (_Meta._ IV. 285 ff.), and the hunting in Calydon (_Meta._ VIII. 270 ff.). Ovid is quoted in Latin in three early plays; and even where a translation was available, the phrasing of Shakespeare's allusions sometimes shows knowledge of the original. Most of Ovid had been translated into English before Shakespeare began to write, and Golding's version of the _Metamorphoses_ (1567) was used for the references to the Actaeon myth in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, IV. i. 107 ff., and for a famous pa.s.sage in _The Tempest_, V. i. 33. Livy, who had been translated in 1545 according to Malone, seems to have been the chief source of _Lucrece_, with some aid from Ovid's _Fasti_, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in _t.i.tus Andronicus_; to the Medea myth in four or five pa.s.sages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of cla.s.sical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ gives but a slight basis for proving literary relations.

[Page Heading: Ovid]

Virgil followed Ovid in the fifth year, and with Virgil, Terence. Of direct knowledge of the latter the plays bear no trace, but of the former there seems to be an influence in the description of the painting of Troy in _Lucrece_, 1366 ff., and in two short Latin sentences in _2 Henry VI_, II. i. 24, and IV. i. 117. Horace, Plautus, Juvenal, Persius, and Seneca were the new authors taken up in the last years in school.

All the Horace in the plays may have been taken from other works, like the pa.s.sage already quoted from Lily's Grammar. Juvenal and Persius have left no mark. The _Menaechmi_ and _Amphitruo_ of Plautus furnish the basis for _The Comedy of Errors_, and no English translation of either of these is known before that of the _Menaechmi_ in 1595, which some critics think Shakespeare may have seen in ma.n.u.script. But no verbal similarities confirm this conjecture, and there is no reason why the dramatist should not have known both plays at first hand.

The influence of Seneca is dramatically the most important among the cla.s.sical authors. All the plays that go by his name had been translated into English in the first part of Elizabeth's reign; he was the main channel through which the forms of cla.s.sical tragedy reached the Renaissance; and when Shakespeare began to write he was the dominant force in the field of tragedy. This makes it hard to say whether the Senecan features in _t.i.tus Andronicus_, _Richard III_, and even _Hamlet_, are due to Seneca directly, or to the tradition already well established among Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries.

[Page Heading: Results of Schooling]

The impression which the evidence from the textbooks as a whole leaves on one is that Shakespeare took from school enough Latin to handle an occasional quotation[3] and to extract the plot of a play, but that he probably preferred to use a translation when one was to be had. The slight acquaintance shown with authors not always read at school, Caesar, Livy, Lucan, and Pliny, does not materially alter this impression. Much more conclusive as to the effect of his Latin training than the literary allusions are the numerous words of Latin origin either coined by Shakespeare, or used in such a way as to imply a knowledge of their derivation. The discovery of a lost translation may modify our views as to whether a particular author was used by him in the original, but the evidence from his use of Romance words gives clear proof that his schooling was no unimportant element in his mastery of speech.

[3] See the list in the appendix to Schmidt's _Lexicon_.

Greek was occasionally begun in the Elizabethan grammar school, but we do not know whether this was the case in Stratford. Certainly we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare could read Greek, as all his knowledge of Greek authors could have been obtained from translations, and only two Greek words, _misanthropos_ and _threnos_, occur in his writings. Yet no single author was so important in providing material for the plays as the Greek Plutarch. His _Lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Antonius_, and _Caius Martius Coriola.n.u.s_, in Sir Thomas North's translation, are the direct sources of the great Roman tragedies, and in a less important way the _Lives of Antonius_ and _Alcibiades_ were used in _Timon of Athens_. Homeric elements are discoverable in _Troilus and Cressida_, which derives mainly from the medieval tradition. As the Trojan story was already familiar on the stage, these need not have come from Chapman's Homer. The knowledge of Lucian which seems implied in _Timon_ was probably not gained from the Greek original. The late Greek romances, which were popular in translation, may have been read by Shakespeare, since the reference to the "Egyptian thief" in _Twelfth Night_, V. i. 120, is from the _aethiopica_ of Heliodorus, translated in 1569. Attempts have been made by the a.s.sembling of parallel pa.s.sages to prove a knowledge of Greek tragedy on the part of Shakespeare, but such parallelisms are more naturally explained as coincidences arising from the treatment of a.n.a.logous themes and situations.

Of modern languages, French was the easiest for an Elizabethan Englishman to acquire, and the French pa.s.sages and scenes in _Henry V_ make it fairly certain that Shakespeare had a working knowledge of this tongue. Yet, as in the case of Latin, he seems to have preferred a translation to an original when he could find it. Montaigne, whose influence some have found pervasive in Shakespeare, he certainly used in Gonzalo's account of his ideal commonwealth in _The Tempest_, II. i.

143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here.

Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in _As You Like It_, III, ii. 238, and the great humorist is possibly the inspirer of some of Sir Andrew's nonsense in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century, and it is thought that in some cases Shakespeare shows direct acquaintance with Ronsard. He was thus acquainted with the three greatest French writers of his century, and French may well have been the medium through which he reached authors in other languages.

[Page Heading: French and Italian]

The cla.s.s of Italian literature with which Shakespeare shows most acquaintance is that of the _novelle_, though there is no proof that he could read the language. The _Decameron_ of Boccaccio contains the love-story of _Cymbeline_, though there may have been an intermediary; the plot of _All's Well_ came from the same collection, but had been translated by Painter in his _Palace of Pleasure_; and the story of the caskets in _The Merchant of Venice_ is found in a form closer to Shakespeare's in the English translation of the _Gesta Romanorum_ than in the _Decameron_. Thus we cannot conclude that the poet knew this work as a whole. Similarly with Bandello and Cinthio. The plot of _Much Ado_ is found in the former, and is translated by Belleforest into French, but at least one detail seems to come from Ariosto, and here again an intermediary is commonly conjectured. The novel from Cinthio's _Hecatommithi_ which formed the basis of _Oth.e.l.lo_ existed in a French translation; and his form of the plot of _Measure for Measure_ came to Shakespeare through the English dramatic version of George Whetstone.

The version of the bond story in _The Merchant of Venice_ closest to the play is in _Il Pecorone_ of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, but the tale is widespread. Incidents in _The Merry Wives_ have sources or parallels in the same work, in Straparola's _Piacevoli Notti_, and in Bandello, but in both cases English versions were available. A ma.s.s of Italian and French prototypes lies behind the plot of _Twelfth Night_, but most of the details are to be found in the English _Apolonius and Silla_ of Barnabe Riche, and there is reason to conjecture a lost English play on the subject. _The Taming of the Shrew_, based on an extant older play, draws also on Gascoigne's version of Ariosto's _I Suppositi_; and the echoes of Petrarch in the Sonnets may well have come through French and English imitators. The introduction of stock types from the Italian drama, such as the pedant and the braggart-soldier, can be accounted for by the previous knowledge of these in England, and does not imply a first-hand reading of Italian literature. The negative position is still stronger in the case of Spanish, where the use of episodes from George of Montemayor's _Diana_ in _The Two Gentlemen_, _Twelfth Night_, and _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, can be supposed to be due to the author's having access to Yonge's translation in ma.n.u.script, especially since there is no other trace of Spanish influence.

[Page Heading: Early English]

The conclusion with regard to Italian and Spanish, then, seems to be that Shakespeare in his search for plots was aware of the riches of the _novelle_, but that he found what he wanted as a rule in English or French versions; and that we have no evidence of his knowledge of anything but fiction from these literatures.

Turning now to English, we find Shakespeare's knowledge of books in his own tongue beginning after the Conquest. The romances of the Middle Ages were in the Elizabethan time rapidly undergoing the process of degradation that was soon to end in the chap-books, but the material was still widely known. The particular versions read by the dramatist can rarely be determined on account of the slight nature of most of the references, but we find allusions to the Arthurian romances, to _Guy of Warwick_, _Bevis of Hampton_, _The Squire of Low Degree_, Roland and Oliver, and to _Huon of Bordeaux_, from which last came the name of Oberon as king of the fairies. Among popular ballads, those of Robin Hood are frequently alluded to; the story of _King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid_ appears in no fewer than five plays; Hamlet knew a ballad on Jephtha's daughter, and Sir Toby one on the chaste Susanna. A large number of popular songs appear in fragments; and rimes and spells, current jests and anecdotes, combine with the fairy-lore of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, _Romeo and Juliet_, and _The Merry Wives_ to a.s.sure us that Shakespeare was thoroughly versed in the literature and traditions of the people.

His acquaintance with more formal letters begins with Chaucer, whose _Knight's Tale_ contributed some details to _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, and the main plot of _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, in which Shakespeare is now usually supposed to have had a hand. This story had, however, been already dramatized by Richard Edwardes. More certainly direct is his knowledge of Chaucer's _Troilus_, which, with Caxton's _Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye_, is the main source of _Troilus and Cressida_. The references to the leprosy of Cressida are due to Henryson's _Testament of Creseide_, a Scots sequel to Chaucer's poem, printed in the sixteenth century editions of the older poet's works. In the _Legend of Good Women_ he may have found the story of Pyramus, and a version of the tragedy of Lucrece, to supplement his main sources in Livy and Ovid.

Chaucer's contemporary Gower contributed to his stock the story of Florent (_Taming of the Shrew_, I. ii. 69) from the _Confessio Amantis_, and from the same collection a version of the tale of _Apollonius of Tyre_, dramatized by Shakespeare and another in _Pericles_.

[Page Heading: Contemporary Literature]

With the non-dramatic literature produced by Shakespeare's contemporaries, we naturally find most evidence of his acquaintance in the case of those books which provided material for his plays. Thus the otherwise obscure Arthur Brooke, whose poem _Romeus and Juliet_ is the chief source of the tragedy, is much more prominent in such an enumeration as the present than he probably was in Shakespeare's view of the literature of the day. Painter, whose version of the same story in his _Palace of Pleasure_ cannot be shown to have been used much, if at all, by the dramatist, seems nevertheless to have been known to him; and we hardly need evidence that Shakespeare must have kept a watchful eye on similar collections of stories, such as Whetstone's, Riche's, and Pettie's. Of the greater writers of imaginative literature there is none missing from the list of those he knew, though, as has been implied, the evidence is not always proportionate to the greatness; and some prominent figures in other fields, such as Hooker and Bacon, do not appear. Spenser, who is supposed to have alluded to Shakespeare in _Colin Clout's come home again_ and, less probably, in _The Teares of the Muses_, is in turn alluded to in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, V. i.

52; and his version of the story of Lear in _The Faerie Queene_, II. x, is believed to have given Shakespeare his form of the name Cordelia.

Evidence is more abundant in the case of Sir Philip Sidney. The under-plot of _King Lear_ is based on the story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in the _Arcadia_, and Sidney's sonnets, along with those of Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Watson, and Barnes, formed the main channel through which the French and Italian influences reached Shakespeare's.

However we may estimate the original element in his sonnets, and in our opinion it is very great, there is no question of the author's having had a thorough familiarity with contemporary sonnetteers.