Shakespeare's will was proved by John Hall on June 22, 1616. New Place and all the Stratford properties, except the tenement in Chapel Lane, were bequeathed to Susanna Hall, who also received the house in London. The younger daughter, Judith Quiney, received the tenement in Chapel Lane and £300 in money, also his great silver-gilt bowl; the rest of the plate went to his granddaughter Elizabeth. His brother Gilbert is not mentioned. There were bequests to his sister Joan, to his godson, to the poor of the town, and to numerous friends, the only ones of interest to us being 26s. 8d. each to his old colleagues Burbage, Heminge, and Condell, for rings. John and Susanna Hall were made residuary legatees.

There is no mention of any shares in the Globe or Blackfriars theatres. Some writers have animadverted on the absence of all allusion to books or manuscripts. There were probably some books at New Place; but Shakespeare's was a creative not a studious mind, and he may have possessed hardly more books than Homer did. It is not probable that he owned any of his manuscripts, even of the later plays; when a play was finished he would naturally take it to London and pass it over to Heminge and Condell. No one felt any curiosity for original autographs in those days, even for Shakespeare's, Spenser's, Sidney's, Bacon's, or Fletcher's; and all alike have disappeared. Some of Shakespeare's may have been destroyed when the Globe Theatre was burnt in 1613; many of his contemporaries' works are known to have perished entirely in the fire at Drury Lane, 1617.

For some years after his death a few of the older publications were reprinted, with the one important addition of Othello in 1622. At last a syndicate of publishers arranged with Heminge and Condell to publish the whole of Shakespeare's works in folio-a formidable undertaking, and a sufficient proof of Shakespeare's reputation. Thus finally, in November, 1623, appeared Mr. William Shakespears Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies.

The Folio, despite the editors' protestations of accuracy, was carelessly printed, and the usual list of errata was missing. A reprint was called for only nine years later, but the text was worse than before. Pericles, which had been in the hands of a low publisher who probably would not come to terms with the original promoters, was added with six spurious plays, to the third impression in 1664; and to the fourth, which appeared in 1685. By this time Shakespeare's reputation was so established in England that Rowe, in 1709, published an edition with a biographical introduction, and now the text began to be edited in a scholarly manner. But the

works have required so much labour in emendation of blunders, and elucidation of obscurities, and illustration from bygone manners, that "Shakespeare" has become a practising-ground for casuistry. Let it be always remembered that he was an actor, writing his plays to be publicly acted before a popular audience.

HENRY DAVEY.

BEN JONSON'S VIEWS ON SHAKESPEARE'S ART.

O

N the summit of the Elizabethan Parnassus the man who stood nearest Shakespeare by his genius was Ben Jonson, and the man who stood furthest by his temper, his literary principles, his conception of life was Ben Jonson.

Jonson was a romantic in his actions, and a classic in his works. Personally he was ever ready to encounter dangers and quarrels, to risk adventures, and enjoy the unexpected. The tame life of a conservative bourgeois was repellent to him. But he proved a conservative in his plays, and a close observer of realities; an "empyric," a "sponge," said his contemporaries;1 to admit there, by exception, the unexpected and the wonderful, he must have historical proofs and the unimpeachable authority of classical authors. He quoted them, referring the reader to chapter and page, in order to make it quite plain that Fancy had no part in his works: they were made up of conscientious observation and accurate knowledge; they were the fruit of patient labour.

With him, the domain of Fancy is his own real life. She causes him to follow an erratic and changeful career, now a day labourer, now a soldier, now a poor actor, "ambl[ing] by a play-waggon, in the highway," now a stately author, and man, or rather king, of letters; sometime a protestant, then a catholic, then again a protestant. He fights well in Flanders. "True soldiers," he could write later,

I love

Your great profession, which I once did prove,
And did not shame it with my actions then.3

He challenges and kills Gabriel Spencer "cum quodam gladio de ferro et calibe vocat[o] a Rapiour," is sent, or goes to prison a first time, then a second, then a third, in danger of having his thumb

1Returne from Pernassus, Part 2, I. ii; Poetaster, IV. i. 2Dekker, Satiro-Mastix, 1602, Works, 1873, Vol. I. p. 229.

3Epigr. cviii.

marked and his ears cropped, "almost at the gallowes" on one occasion. He is in love with that "Castalian liquor," as he calls itcanary wine-gets not "nobly wild," but "dead drunk" in the Paris streets, and apparently elsewhere also, comes to actual blows with Marston and takes "his pistoll from him," mixes in the dangerous politics of his day, follows the Court at times in its journeys, as familiarly admitted among the great as among the habitués of the

tavern:

I . . . live and have lived twenty year
Where I may handle silk as free and near
As any mercer, or the whale-bone man
That quilts those bodies I have leave to span;
Have eaten with the beauties and the wits,
And braveries of Court, and felt their fits
Of love and hate.3

He alternately befriends, fights, befriends again, and sometimes fights again, Dekker, Marston, Overbury, Inigo Jones and others, associates with a company of actors, quarrels with it, makes up the quarrel, ever ready to resume the fray. Fights and quarrels have for him an irresistible attraction, they give zest and interest to his life. As he has fixed opinions on everybody and everything, as they are usually severe, and as he expresses them ever in the loudest tones, occasions for quarrelling never fail him. To keep accounts, to save, to introduce order into his life, is for him an impossibility; his plays will be as well-ordered as he can make them, not his life. He fears nothing, neither physical nor moral danger, nor poverty: "At last they upbraided my poverty. I confess she is my domestic; sober of diet, simple of habit, frugal, painful, a good counsellor to

me."4

His usual attitude is one of defiance; he can be sweet, tender, elegiac, but is so on rare occasions only; he is more especially known as an ever ready critic dipping into "gall" a "porcupins quill,"

'Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond, ed. Laing, Shakesp. Soc., 1842, p. 19. "A good meal among players" was for him a peerless diversion; and "when his belly is well ballassed and his brain rigged a little, he sails away withal, as though he would work wonders when he comes home."-Every Man out of his Humour, Induction. The year before his death, when supposed to be very poor, we still find him offering his literary friends a "solemne supper," with "good company, excellent chear, choice wines, and jovial welcom," and all very pleasant until "B[en] began to engross all the discourse" and "to vapour extremely of himself."-James Howell, Familiar Letters, April 5, 1636.

3Underwoods, lx.

Timber or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter,

by Ben: Johnson, 1641; ed. Gollancz, Temple Classics, c. p. 69, or ed. Schelling, Boston, 1892. Part of Jonson's Discoveries "flow'd out of his daily readings," part out of his own brains. The importance is the same in both cases as showing us the views and principles he adopted or rejected.

"Howell to Jonson, May 3, 1635; Familiar Letters (Second ed. 1650), p. 208.