The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 40

I am inclined to accept Rowe's statement that Shakespeare was received into an actor-company at first in a very mean rank. The parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century used to tell the visitors that Shakespeare entered the playhouse as a servitor; but, however he entered it, it is pretty certain he was not long in a subordinate position.

What manner of man was William Shakespeare when he first fronted life in London somewhere about 1587? Aubrey tells us that he was "a handsome, well-shap't man, very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt." The bust of him in Stratford Church was coloured; it gave him light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. Rowe says of him that "besides the advantages of his witt, he was in himself a good-natured man, of too great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable companion."

I picture him to myself very like Swinburne--of middle height or below it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion....

I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the "beating mind."

And such talk--the groundwork of it, so to speak, very intimate-careless; but gemmed with thoughts, diamonded with wit, rhythmic with feeling: don't we know how it ran--"A hundred and fifty tattered prodigals.... No eye hath seen such scarecrows, ... discarded, unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and ostlers trade-fallen: the cankers of a calm world and a long peace."

And after the thought the humour again--"food for powder, food for powder."

Now let us consider some of his other qualities. In 1592 he published his "Venus and Adonis," which he had no doubt written in 1587 or even earlier, for he called it "the first heir of my invention" when he dedicated it to Lord Southampton. This work is to me extremely significant. It is all concerned with the wooing of young Adonis by Venus, an older woman. Now, G.o.ddesses have no age, nor do women, as a rule, woo in this sensual fas.h.i.+on. The peculiarities point to personal experience. "I, too," Shakespeare tells us practically, "was wooed by an older woman against my will." He seems to have wished the world to accept this version of his untimely marriage. Young Shakespeare in London was probably a little ashamed of being married to some one whom he could hardly introduce or avow. The apologists who declare that he made money very early in his career give us no explanation of the fact that he never brought his wife or children to London. Wherever we touch Shakespeare's intimate life, we find proof upon proof that he detested his wife and was glad to live without her.

Looked at in this light "Venus and Adonis" is not a very n.o.ble thing to have written; but I am dealing with a young poet's nature, and the majority of young poets would like to forget their Anne Hathaway if they could; or, to excuse themselves, would put the blame of an ill-sorted union upon the partner to it.

There is a certain weakness, however, shown in the whole story of his marriage; a weakness of character, as well as a weakness of _morale_, which it is impossible to ignore; and there were other weaknesses in Shakespeare, especially a weakness of body which must necessarily have had its correlative delicacies of mind.

I have pointed out in the first part of this book that sleeplessness was a characteristic of Shakespeare, even in youth; he attributes it to Henry IV. in old age, and to Henry V., a youth at the time, who probably never knew what a sleepless night meant. Shakespeare's _alter ego_, Valentine, in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," suffers from it, and so do Macbeth and Hamlet, and a dozen others of his chief characters, in particular his impersonations--all of which shows, I think, that from the beginning the mind of Shakespeare was too strong for his body. As we should say to-day, he was too emotional, and lived on his nerves. I always think of him as a s.h.i.+p over-engined; when the driving-power is working at full speed it shakes the s.h.i.+p to pieces.

One other weakness is marked in him, and that is that he could not drink, could not carry his liquor like a man--to use our accepted phrase. Hamlet thought drinking a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance; Ca.s.sius, Shakespeare's incarnation in "Oth.e.l.lo,"

confessed that he had "poor unhappy brains for drinking": tradition informs us that Shakespeare himself died of a "feavour" from drinking--all of which confirms my opinion that Shakespeare was delicate rather than robust. He was, also, extraordinarily fastidious: in drama after drama he rails against the "greasy" caps and "stinking" breath of the common people. This overstrained disgust suggests to me a certain delicacy of const.i.tution.

But there is still another indication of bodily weakness which in itself would be convincing to those accustomed to read closely; but which would carry little or no weight to the careless. In sonnet 129 Shakespeare tells us of l.u.s.t and its effects, and the confession seems to me purely personal. Here are four lines of it:

"Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad."

Now, this is not the ordinary man's experience of pa.s.sion and its effects. "Past reason hunted," such an one might say, but he would certainly not go on "No sooner had, Past reason hated." He is not moved to hate by enjoyment, but to tenderness; it is your weakling who is physically exhausted by enjoyment who is moved to hatred. This sonnet was written by Shakespeare in the prime of manhood at thirty-four or thirty-five at latest.

Shakespeare was probably healthy as a young man, but intensely sensitive and highly strung; too finely const.i.tuted ever to have been strong. One notices that he takes no pleasure in fighting; his heroes are, of course, all "valiant," but he shows no loving interest in the game of fighting as a game. In fact, we have already seen that he found no wonderful phrase for any of the manly virtues; he was a neuropath and a lover, and not a fighter, even in youth, or Fulk Sandells might have rued his interference.

The dominating facts to be kept ever in mind about Shakespeare are that he was delicate in body, and over-excitable; yielding and irresolute in character; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to the pleasures of love.

How would such a man fare in the world of London in 1587? It was a wild and wilful age; eager English spirits were beginning to take a part in the opening up of the new world; the old, limiting horizons were gone; men dared to think for themselves and act boldly; ten years before Drake had sailed round the world--the adventurer was the characteristic product of the time. In ordinary company a word led to a blow, and the fight was often brought to a fatal conclusion with dagger or sword or both. In those rough days actors were almost outlaws; Ben Jonson is known to have killed two or three men; Marlowe died in a tavern brawl.

Courage has always been highly esteemed in England, like gentility and a university training. Shakespeare possessed none of these pa.s.sports to public favour. He could not shoulder his way through the throng. The wild adventurous life of the time was not to his liking, even in early manhood; from the beginning he preferred "the life removed" and his books; all given over to the "bettering of his mind" he could only have been appreciated at any time by the finer spirits.

Entering the theatre as a servitor he no doubt made such acquaintances as offered themselves, and spent a good deal of his leisure perforce with second-rate actors and writers in common taverns and studied his Bardolph and Pistol, and especially his Falstaff at first hand. Perhaps Marlowe was one of his _ciceroni_ in rough company. Shakespeare had almost certainly met Marlowe very early in his career, for he worked with him in the "Third Part of Henry VI.," and his "Richard III." is a conscious imitation of Marlowe, and Marlowe was dissipated enough and wild enough to have shown him the wildest side of life in London in the '80's. It was the very best thing that could have happened to delicate Shakespeare, to come poor and unknown to London, and be soused in common rowdy life like this against his will by sheer necessity; for if left to his own devices he would probably have grown up a bookish poet--a second Coleridge. Fate takes care of her favourites.

It was all in his favour that he should have been forced at first to win his spurs as an actor. He must have been too intelligent, one would think, ever to have brought it far as a mummer; he looked upon the half-art of acting with disdain and disgust, as he tells us in the sonnets, and if in Hamlet he condescends to give advice to actors, it is to admonish them not to outrage the decencies of nature by tearing a pa.s.sion to tatters. He had at hand a surer ladder to fame than the mummer's art. As soon as he felt his feet in London he set to work adapting plays, and writing plays, while reading his own poetry to all and sundry who would listen, and I have no doubt that patrons of the stage, who were also men of rank, were willing to listen to Shakespeare from the beginning. He was of those who require no introductions.

In 1592, four or five years after his arrival in London, he had already come to the front as a dramatist, or at least as an adapter of plays, for Robert Greene, a scholar and playwright, attacked him in his "Groatsworth of Wit" in this fas.h.i.+on:

"There is an upstart Crow, beautified in our feathers that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country. Oh, that I might intreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions."

It is plain from this weird appeal that Shakespeare had already made his mark.

There are further proofs of his rapid success. One of Chettle's references to Shakespeare (I take Chettle to be the original of Falstaff) throws light upon the poet's position in London in these early days. Shortly after Greene had insulted Shakespeare as "Shake-scene"

Chettle apologized for the insult in these terms:

"I am as sorry," Chettle wrote, "as if the original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seen his (_i.e._, Shakespeare's) demeanour no less civill than he (is) exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of wors.h.i.+p have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art."

In 1592, then, Shakespeare was most "civill in demeanour," and had won golden opinions from people of importance.

Actors and poets of that time could not help knowing a good many of the young n.o.bles who came to the theatre and sat round the stage listening to the performances. And Shakespeare, with his aristocratic sympathies and charming sweetness of nature, must have made friends with the greatest ease. Chettle's apology proves that early in his career he had the art or luck to win distinguished patrons who spoke well of him.

While still new to town he came to know Lord Southampton, to whom he dedicated "Venus and Adonis"; the fulsome dedication of "Lucrece" to the same n.o.bleman two years later shows that deference had rapidly ripened into affectionate devotion; no wonder Rowe noticed the "too great sweetness in his manners." Thinking of his intimacy with Southampton on the one hand and Bardolph on the other, one is constrained to say of Shakespeare what Apemantus says of Timon:

"The middle of humanity thou never knewest, But the extremity of both ends."

In the extremes characters show themselves more clearly than they do in the middle cla.s.ses; at both ends of society speech and deed are unrestrained. Falstaff and Bardolph and the rest were free of convention by being below it, just as Ba.s.sanio and Mercutio were free because they were above it, and made the rules. The young lord did what he pleased, and spoke his mind as plainly as the footpad. Life at both ends was the very school for quick, sympathetic Shakespeare. But even in early manhood, as soon as he came to himself and found his work, one other quality is as plain in Shakespeare as even his humour--high impartial intellect with sincere ethical judgement. He judges even Falstaff severely, to the point of harshness, indeed; as he judged himself later in En.o.barbus. This high critical faculty pervades all his work. But it must not be thought that his conduct was as scrupulous as his principles, or his will as sovereign as his intelligence. That he was a loose-liver while in London is well attested. Contemporary anecdotes generally hit off a man's peculiarities, and the only anecdote of Shakespeare that is known to have been told about him in his lifetime ill.u.s.trates this master trait of his character. Burbage, we are told, when playing Richard III., arranged with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance. Shakespeare overheard the rendezvous, antic.i.p.ated his fellow's visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the jibe that "William the Conqueror came before Richard III." The lightness is no doubt as characteristic of Shakespeare as the impudent humour.

There is another fact in Shakespeare's life which throws almost as much light on his character as his marriage. He seems to have come to riches very early and very easily. As we have seen, he was never able to paint a miser, which confirms Jonson's testimony that he was "of an open and free nature." In 1597 he went down to Stratford and bought New Place, then in ruinous condition, but the chief house in the town, for 60; he spent at least as much more between 1597 and 1599 in rebuilding the house and stocking the barns with grain. In 1602 we find that he purchased from William and John Combe, of Stratford, a hundred and seven acres of arable land near the town, for which he paid 320; in 1605, too, he bought for 440 a moiety of the t.i.thes of Stratford for an unexpired term of thirty-one years, which investment seems to have brought him in little except a wearisome lawsuit.

Now, how did the poet obtain this thousand pounds or so? English apologists naturally a.s.sume that he was a "good business man"; with delicious unconscious irony they one and all picture the man who hated tradesmen as himself a sort of thrifty tradesman-soul--a master of practical life who looked after the pennies from the beginning. These commentators all treat Shakespeare as the Hebrews treated G.o.d; they make him in their own likeness. In Shakespeare's case this practice leads to absurdity. Let us take the strongest advocate of the accepted view.

Dryasdust is at pains to prove that Shakespeare's emoluments, even as an actor in the '90's, were not likely to have fallen below a hundred a year; but even Dryasdust admits that his large earnings came after 1599, from his shares in the Globe Theatre, and is inclined "to accept the tradition that Shakespeare received from the Earl of Southampton a large gift of money." As Southampton came of age in 1595, he may well out of his riches have helped the man who had dedicated his poems to him with servile adulation. Moreover, the statement is put forward by Rowe, who is certainly more trustworthy than the general run of gossip-mongers, and his account of the matter proves that he did not accept the story with eager credulity, but as one compelled by authority. Here is what he says:

"There is one story so singular in magnificence of this patron of Shakspeare that if I had not been a.s.sured that the story was handed down by Sir Wm. D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to insert that my lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase to which he heard he had a mind. A bounty very great, and very rare at any time, almost equal to that profuse generosity the present age has shown to French dancers and Italian Eunuchs."

It seems to me a great deal more likely that this munificent gift of Southampton was the source of Shakespeare's wealth than that he added coin to coin in saving, careful fas.h.i.+on. It may be said at once that all the evidence we have is in favour of Shakespeare's extravagance, and against his thrift. As we have seen, when studying "The Merchant of Venice," the presumption is that he looked upon saving with contempt, and was himself freehanded to a fault. The Rev. John Ward, who was Vicar of Stratford from 1648 to 1679, tells us "that he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard."

It is impossible to deny that Shakespeare got rid of a great deal of money even after his retirement to Stratford; and men accustomed to save are not likely to become prodigal in old age.

On the 10th March, 1613, Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars for 140; the next day he executed another deed, now in the British Museum, which stipulated that 60 of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage until the following Michaelmas; the money was unpaid at Shakespeare's death, which seems to me to argue a certain carelessness, to say the least of it.

Dryasdust makes out that Shakespeare, in the years from 1600 to 1612, was earning about six hundred a year in the money of the period, or nearly five thousand a year of our money, and yet he was unable or unwilling to pay off a paltry 60.

After pa.s.sing the last five years of his life in village Stratford, where he could not possibly have found many opportunities of extravagance, he was only able to leave a little more than one year's income. He willed New Place to his elder daughter, Susanna Hall, together with the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, all together equal, at the most, to five or six hundred pounds; and to his younger daughter, Judith, he bequeathed the tenement in Chapel Lane, 150 in money, and another 150 to be paid if she was alive three years after the date of the will. Nine hundred pounds, or so, of the money of the period, would cover all he possessed at death. When we consider these things, it becomes plain, I think, that Shakespeare was extravagant to lavishness even in cautious age. While in London he no doubt earned and was given large sums of money; but he was free-handed and careless, and died far poorer than one would have expected from an ordinarily thrifty man. The loose-liver is usually a spendthrift.

There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit that Shakespeare was a sn.o.b of the purest English water. Aristocratic tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596, his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village, and while he was there he most probably paid his father's debts, and certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a "wors.h.i.+pful"

family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may have been that the father's pecuniary position became known to the College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties; but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the Earl of Ess.e.x became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds' College, and the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of Ess.e.x, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Ess.e.x. The Shakespeares'

second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new form. They a.s.serted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of 1596 had been a.s.signed to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were asked to give him a "recognition" of it. At the same time John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his "ancient coat of arms" that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife's family. But this was going too far, even for a friend of Ess.e.x. To grant such a request might have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwicks.h.i.+re family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was "recognized,"

and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.

Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman--a very pitiful ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.

But his sn.o.bbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he never got to know the middle cla.s.ses in England. True, even in his time they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity, Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in pa.s.sing, is very significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a "false seemer,"

Malvolio was a "chough." The peculiar virtues of the English middle cla.s.s, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for duties; its religious sense and c.o.c.ksure narrow-mindedness, held no attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in sn.o.bbishness, he utterly missed what a knowledge of the middle cla.s.ses might have given him.

Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d'Arc, the n.o.blest being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he did not write the first part of "Henry VI.," it is certain that it pa.s.sed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade, as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood.

Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern world. Shakespeare's "universal sympathy"--to quote Coleridge--did not include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face of serving the Babylonish Wh.o.r.e. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the n.o.ble faith of the sonnet to "Toussaint l'Ouverture" was quite beyond him. He could never have written:

"Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies; There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature.

But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering sensuality, and thrown in the mire.

CHAPTER XV. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE--continued