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principal highway to Wales, and contained several important hostels. William Shakespeare, lad or man grown, was not shut out from the great world; he would witness stately cavalcades riding on the high road, and stopping at the Bear or Crown; and would see and hear much more of all grades of social life than would be possible in a small or large town of the present time. The great nobles, even the Warden of the Marches, with their imposing trains of servingmen, the squire with falconer or huntsman following, the travelling judge and his guard, the merchant, the preacher, the wayfarer, all alike had to pass in full view through Stratford town and over the bridge. Shakespeare's eyes and ears would be as attentive to remark these human diversities as to note the details of organic and inorganic nature, so far as Warwickshire and Gloucestershire display them.

One thing seems to have been lacking; a germen of literary ambition. Shakespeare apparently remained deficient in the wish to "leave something so written, to after times, as they should not willingly let it die." If we knew the circumstances, we might learn that the deficiency was only apparent, that it was not Shakespeare's fault that we have received so mangled a version of his works. What we actually know leads only to the conclusion that Shakespeare, bred among folk who could hardly have known that such a thing as literary fame existed, remained all his life careless to perpetuate his labours. His colleagues wished his popular dramas should be kept from the printers; and he let them have their will, alas!

CHAPTER II.

MARRIAGE, AND DEPARTURE FROM STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

MATERIALS:

Marriage Bond in the diocesan registers of Worcester, dated November 28, 1582. Two farmers of Shottery guaranteed the bishop in the sum of £40, against any trouble which might arise from a special permission granted "William Shagspere" to marry "Anne Hathwey of Stratford" with once asking of the banns. (Full text in Halliwell-Phillipps' Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare: Domestic Records VI.)

Dowdall's account: "The clerke that shew'd me this church is above 80 years old; he says that this Shakespear was formerly in this towne bound apprentice to a butcher, but he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the playhouse as a serviture." (Notes of a Visit to Stratford, 1693.)

Archdeacon Davies's account: "Much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sr... Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement." (Notes, made before 1708.) Rowe's account: "Upon his leaving school, he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father propos'd to him; and in order to settle in the world after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young. His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford. In this kind of settlement he continu'd for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of forc'd him both out of his country and that way of living which he had taken up and tho' it seem'd at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily prov'd the occasion of exerting one of the greatest genius's that ever was known in dramatick poetry. He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London. It is at this time, and upon this accident, that he is said to have made his first acquaintance in the playhouse." (Founded on traditions gathered at Stratford-on-Avon by Betterton.)

W

ILLIAM Shakespeare married early. Cohabitation began before marriage, as was then not uncommon after formal betrothal. Advent, when marriages were not celebrated, was near; and accordingly permission was sought for hastening the ceremony. The bride, Anne Hathaway, was eldest daughter of Richard Hathaway of Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford.

He had died a few months earlier, leaving Anne (or "Agnes") £6. 13s. 4d. If the inscription on her tomb states correctly, she was eight years older than her husband. Absolutely nothing is recorded of her personality. Marriage bonds, such as the one quoted, were common in Elizabethan times; and there is nothing exceptional in the circumstances of this marriage, except the absence of allusion to the bridegroom's parents. As John Shakespeare was then in poverty, he could not offer himself as security, whether he favoured the marriage or not. But by a very singular coincidence, on the very day next preceding the date of the bond, on Nov. 27, the bishop licensed "William Shakespeare" to marry Anne Whately of Temple Grafton! There were so many William Shakespeares in the county that curious theories need not be fabricated.

Record of the ceremony is not known; there is a tradition that Luddington chapel, the curate of which had been schoolmaster at Stratford, was the scene. The poet's first child, Susanna, was baptized six months later, May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy and girl, were baptized Feb. 2, 1585, and were named Hamnet and Judith, which indicates that Hamnet Sadler, a baker, and his wife, Judith, were sponsors. The boy died in 1596; the two girls grew up, married, and survived their father. No other children were born to the Shakespeares, so far as is known; certainly none who lived to be mentioned in his will.

For seven years after the baptism of the twins we are without any documentary information of the poet's life. Nothing is proved by the appearance of his name in a Bill which his parents filed against Lambert in 1589. If ever he were a schoolmaster or a lawyer's clerk, this must have been the time; but there is no reason to believe that he was. Aubrey, I suspect, in his abbreviations intended to read "in his younger years (under) a schoolmaster"; and Aubrey's guess that Shakespeare was "about eighteen" when he went to London, sufficiently disproves the idea of his having been a schoolmaster. His knowledge of law, however accurate, is not singular among Elizabethan writers; and both his father and himself were so frequently concerned in legal transactions that he could have picked up quite casually all the law terms employed in his dramas and sonnets.

Shakespeare next appears established in London. Why did he leave his native town?

The deer-stealing anecdotes are not contemporary, nor does Aubrey mention the matter, but perhaps he suppressed his knowledge of discreditable doings. The best evidence is the mocking at Sir Thomas Lucy in The Merry Wives of Windsor, gibes which

we should not appreciate if the deer-stealing tradition had perished. Malone's contention that the regular deer park at Charlecote was not established till later, is not conclusive; a local belief, that Fulbroke Park was the scene, is challenged by the fact that Sir Thomas Lucy did not own it; but a confirmed poacher would not content himself with the plunder from a single estate. The stories tell us not of a single offence, but of many; and Sir Thomas Lucy was a very strict game-preserver, moving Parliament in 1585 for severer laws against poachers. He was also strait-laced and puritanical, probably a genuine prototype of Butler's Hudibras as well as of the Justice Shallow of 2 Henry IV and the first scene of the Merry Wives. The tradition must be accepted; the young genius, son of parents fallen from a good estate, with three babies of his own, strayed among a rout of ill-conditioned fellows, and brought on himself virulent persecution, till at last he sought safety in flight. One stanza, beginning "A parliament member, a justice of peace," was said on seventeenth century testimony to have been the beginning of Shakespeare's ballad upon Sir Thomas Lucy.

It might seem natural that the man who had so unparalleled a gift for dramatic poetry, with frequent opportunities of seeing dramatic performances, should make his way to the place where he could exercise that gift, not requiring any external stimulus to leave his native place. But what says Carlyle?—

"I think always, so great, quiet, complete, and self-sufficing is this Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for deerstealing we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford, these had been enough for this man.'

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Shakespeare had to acquire the dramatic power, even the poetic power. Keats, with small Latin and no Greek, but with English models before him, finished his career at the age of 25; Shakespeare's own contemporary, Marlowe, did not live to be 30; nor did Shelley; the ploughman Burns issued a volume of poems when 27; Byron found himself a famous poet at 24; Milton wrote Comus before he was 26; most wonderful of all, Chatterton ended his career at 18. Compared with these and many others Shakespeare, like Molière, was late in arriving at his goal.

Biographers have commonly calculated that the deer-stealer fled from Stratford-on-Avon to London about 1586. We have no evidence of the date, nor of the direction of his flight. He may, for all we know, have traversed the "high wild hills and rough uneven ways" of the Cotswolds, which he so frequently names, have gone through "Woncot" to Berkley Castle, "by yon tuft of trees,"

and taken ship at Bristol. His knowledge of the seashore appears in sonnets and early dramas; but only in later dramas does he speak with raptures of the broad ocean. Many have suspected that he visited Venice; he may have trod "that pleasant country's earth," and have observed "far-off mountains turn'd to clouds," before he settled in London, but we have no proof. And Shakespeare was singularly ignorant of geography. His mistakes about Bohemia, copied from Greene, were repeatedly ridiculed by contemporaries; and his blunders about Verona, Milan, Mantua, and Bergamo, are singular. His conception of travel was invariably a sea-voyage; Russians journeying to Navarre turn sea-sick; Verona is a seaport; Milan is a seaport; Mantua has shipping; Bergamo, sailmakers. One might almost assert that foreign countries presented themselves to Shakespeare's mind much as they do to the Englishman who has once taken a day trip to Boulogne, and ever after thinks of "abroad" as a seaport.

The probabilities are in favour of the literal accuracy of Rowe's account, that through the Squire of Charlecote's persecution Shakespeare fled alone, and went to London. One biographer gravely argued that the poet fled from his scolding wife, not from Sir Thomas Lucy; continual domestic broils drove him to a "solitary migration." There is not the slightest evidence that she was deserted; she she may have followed him to London with the children as soon as he was settled. For all we know to the contrary, she may have borne him other children who died young in London. One fact points to the conclusion that she was at some time alone and in distress. Thomas Whittington, once her father's shepherd, died in 1601, and in his will directed that a debt of £2 owed him by Anne Shakespeare should be recovered from her husband. As the Shakespeares were then in full prosperity, the natural explanation is that Anne had borrowed the 2 in some earlier distress, and had forgotten or evaded payment. But we know nothing positively.

The sum total of our knowledge of this momentous period in the poet's life amounts only to this:-William Shakespeare was married and had three children; he fell into disreputable courses, turned poacher, was unrelentingly prosecuted by a local magnate, and had to leave Stratford-on-Avon at some date between 1584 and 1592. He probably went straight to London, and not later than 1590.

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