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career by working over the plays of other men. No mention is made of the author of the "most lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe," the rehearsal and performance of which give a humorous travesty of the ordinary stage methods. We see the manager allotting his parts, arranging his properties, instructing the slower wits; we see the self-assertive actor who is anxious to be " in the limelight"; apparently the playwright was a nonentity-except when he was also an actor or interested in the management. In himself, the dramatist had hardly more dignity than the actor. Even the industrious Ben Jonson found the theatre a poor support and the writing of masques more profitable. The Bohemian lives of Marlowe, Peele, and Greene are an index of the playwright's position twenty years earlier.

The Audience. The performance of a play in one of the public theatres was advertised by bills, posted in public places and outside the door of the theatre. It usually took place in the afternoon, beginning about three o'clock. The audience assembled early, and would spend the time of waiting in card-playing, at dice, or in rowdy horseplay; smoking and drinking were allowed; and doubtless people brought other helps to conviviality. Free criticism followed every point in the performance; if the play did not please the groundlings it was promptly hissed off the stage. The "dotages of Ben Jonson suffered this fate, and even in his successful time Ben wrote contemptuously of playgoers who did not endure a thoughtful drama and demanded melodramatic impossibilities. The public paid to be amused, and its sense of humour was not, any more than it is now, of the intellectual sort. Hence the universal presence of "comic stuff" even in tragedy. But, whereas this is a ruinous intrusion in most plays, in Shakespeare it is responsible for Shallows and Fluellens and for a mighty group of wonderful fools, with Lear's fool as their king. A rougher element enters into such men as Dekker and Middleton; it is often enough indecent, but usually it is genuine and humanly interesting. The playwrights responded to their audiences, and the result was not always clean. Yet the melodrama of Marlowe enshrines the poetry of Faustus; the vox populi working in the genius of Shakespeare produced Falstaff. Many crudities of structure and finish in the Elizabethan drama must be ascribed to the conditions of its performance. But on the whole it was a full-blooded imaginative thing; and the men who made it, men who must needs often struggle for a livelihood amid the scum of society, were a remarkable body.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Shakespeare's England, Vol. II. (Clarendon Press, 1916).—WARD, Sir A. W.: History of English Dramatic Poetry, Vol. I. (Macmillan, 1899).--LEE, Sir S.: Shakespeare's Life and Works (last ed., Murray, 1922).

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CHAPTER 3. SHAKESPEARE

Marlowe and the other "university wits" had invaded the public theatre and taught it a great lesson. But the theatre had a lesson of its own which could only be learnt by one who lived and worked within its walls. English drama was brought to perfection, not by a scholar but by an actor. The actor was William Shakespeare.

Life. Thanks to the world's insatiable curiosity and the patient research of students, more biographical facts have been collected about the greatest of English poets than about any of his literary contemporaries except Ben Jonson. Yet, when all is said, these facts, which are for the most part details of purchases and lawsuits, can be printed upon two sides of a sheet of notepaper, and learned volumes labelled The Life of William Shakespeare are of necessity replete with unverified tradition and "nice conjecture." The meagreness of this skeleton, together with the hypothetical "life" which has been built up round it—a structure now grown into something like an orthodox legend-has given rise to the insane, though not unnatural, heresies which fasten the authorship of the plays upon Francis Bacon, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Oxford, or any other nobleman of the time who may take the heretic's fancy. The soil upon which such weeds flourish is the assumption, to which the orthodox subscribe, that Shakespeare was an ill-educated rustic who did not leave Stratford until he was twenty-three years of age. This assumption is a mere guess, and not even a probable one. The truth is that we know practically nothing about Shakespeare before his thirtieth year. We know that he was christened William at Stratford on April 26, 1564, his parents being Mary, daughter of Robert Arden a well-to-do farmer of the neighbourhood, and John Shakespeare, general storekeeper of the little town, who became mayor in 1568; we know that he married Anne Hathaway towards the end of 1582; we know that she bore him a daughter, Susanna, six months later, and a twin boy and girl about a year and eight months from that date; and that is all we know before 1592. We do not know how or where he was educated, when he joined the stage, or at what period he went to London. Almost any conceivable interpretation may be placed upon these slender data. Beyond the fact that he wrote the old "English" hand, which suggests that he learnt his letters from an old-fashioned (and possibly provincial) scribe, there is not a tittle of evidence to support the generally accepted idea that he received his education at the free grammar school of Stratford. Moreover, seeing that the mature Shakespeare had demonstrably picked up as good an education in life and the world's concerns as any man before or since, it is well to remember that in his day there were alternatives to the grammar school, which would be fitter nurseries for dramatic genius and more in keeping with that

passion for music which we know he possessed, namely, employment as a boy with a troupe of actors or service as a singer in the retinue of some nobleman. The dates of his marriage and the birth of his three children tell us nothing about the time of

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his departure from Stratford. All that they prove is that he must have been at home about August 1582, nine months before the birth of Susanna; again for his marriage

in November; and once again in the summer of 1584, nine months before the birth of the twins. Now it so happens that the years 1582-4 saw the greatest plague of Elizabeth's reign, during which all the theatres were closed. If, therefore, the young Shakespeare were already connected with the stage at that period, his entanglement with Anne Hathaway and what followed therefrom exactly synchronize with two years of idleness for the acting profession, when he would be most likely to be kicking his heels at home.

As Actor and Playwright. But let us pass on to dates and references which stand out like rocks from the sea of conjecture, and rocks upon which we can build with some assurance. Whatever may have been Shakespeare's previous career, by 1592 he had already won fame both as a player and a dramatist. The evidence for this is all the more striking in that it comes to us from an unfriendly quarter-the most prolific dramatist of the old school, whose plays Shakespeare was rendering obsolete, partly by the effective method of rewriting them. Shortly before his squalid death on September 3, 1592, Robert Greene wrote a pamphlet entitled A Groatsworth of Wit, in the course of which he advised his "fellow Schollers about this Cittie," in particular Marlowe, Peele, and a "young Juvenal" who is generally identified with Nashe, to surrender the vain art of play-making, "for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out blanke verse as the best of you and being an absolute Iohannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." The obvious pun in Shake-scene" and the parody of the line "O Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide" (3 Henry VI., I. IV. 137) leave no doubt that Shakespeare is meant, and it is interesting to note that the attack was unpleasing to a certain section of the public, if we may judge from the apology which Henry Chettle, the publisher of the pamphlet, printed later in the same year. The words of this apology are a significant tribute to Shakespeare's position at this date. "I am as sory," writes Chettle, "as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanour no less ciuill then he excelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers of worship haue reported his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooues his art." The character of these "divers of worship” may be gleaned from the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1593 and 1594 respectively-the only books which Shakespeare ever saw personally through the press. Both are addressed to the young Earl of Southampton, the first in terms of respect, the second in language which breathes affection and intimacy. By 1594 Shakespeare was clearly persona grata, to say the least, to Southampton and his circle, of which Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Essex, was the most distinguished member. It can hardly be doubted, therefore, that the dramatist was seen at court. His earliest recorded performance before the queen took place at Christmas 1594, his name being mentioned with those of Kempe and

Burbage as one of the three leading men. It is not likely, however, that this was his first appearance in Elizabeth's presence. Indeed, there was more than personal rancour in Greene's deathbed outburst. The triumph of Shakespeare was the triumph of the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company to which he belonged, over the Queen's Men for whom Greene wrote. From their formation in 1583 the Queen's Men were constant performers at court until Christmas 1591; the Children of Paul's, Lyly's company, being their only serious rival. After 1591, however, their place is taken in the records by a new company, namely, Lord Strange's Men, who, on the death of their patron in 1594, became the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The genesis of this company and its rapid rise into favour are surprising and mysterious. They played nine times before the queen between Christmas 1591 and January 1593, and it is very tempting to suppose that their success was due to Shakespeare, though there is no actual proof that he was a member of the company before 1594.

In any event by 1594, the thirtieth year of his age, Shakespeare had already, professionally speaking, attained the height of his ambitions. He was a leading man of his company, a member of the most brilliant of court circles, a famous poet, and a dramatist of such acknowledged power that the dying Greene, in effect, advised his fellow-scholars to give up trying to compete with him. The highest position in the land open to a man of his birth and gifts was won; and it only remained to consolidate it by further dramatic triumphs, by the acquisition of property, and by obtaining the right to sign himself " William Shakespeare, Gentleman." consolidation rapidly followed. In 1598 the critic Meres described him as the best dramatist of the time both in comedy and tragedy; in 1597 Shakespeare had begun his purchases of land in Stratford by buying New Place, the largest house in the town; in 1596 he made application, in his father's name, to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, which he obtained in 1599. His career was very English, and, outwardly at any rate, differed little from that of thousands of other sons of middleclass parents gifted with brains. But history, whose pages are often blank when we are most anxious to read them, tells us nothing of the struggles which preceded the day of his success.

Dramatic Career.-In his dedicatory epistle, Shakespeare describes Venus and Adonis as "the first heir of my invention." Everything points to the conclusion that his early dramatic efforts were not the heirs of his invention, but revisions of other men's work. Greene's gibe at the "upstart crow beautified with our feathers" was only an inversion of the truth; the beautiful feathers were the upstart's, the crows were the plays of Greene and his fellow-scholars. Not that such revision was in any way reprehensible, or, in that age, unusual. Manuscript plays were entirely within the control of the company which purchased them, its own dramatist being free to make what alterations seemed good to him. The years 1591-4 were another season of bad plague, not so serious as that of 1582-4, but nevertheless involving the players in many difficulties. The history of the acting companies at this period is still very

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