Shakespeare's marriage

Shakespeare's removal from

Stratford

If Shakespeare at any time taught school it will be a question whether this preceded or followed, or both, one of the most important events of his life, his marriage, about November 1582, with Anne or Agnes Hathaway, daughter, as is most probable, of Richard Hathaway, a yeoman of Shottery, then lately deceased. The register of the marriage, doubtless celebrated in the neighbourhood, has not been found, but the date is approximatively ascertained by a singular document dated November 28, 1582, and preserved in the registry of the diocese of Worcester, by which two Stratford husbandmen undertake to bear the bishop harmless in the event of any irregularity being found to exist in the marriage then about to be contracted. As it is provided that the banns shall only be asked once, as the consent of the bride's friends is stipulated for while the bridegroom's parents are ignored, and as the birth of a daughter in May 1583 discloses the existence of a pre-nuptial intimacy, the affair had evidently some very unsatisfactory features, not the least of which was that the bride was eight years older than her husband. Shakespeare has given the world the benefit of his experience when he says in Twelfth Night :

Let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.

And in Prospero's impressive varning to Ferdinand:

If thou dost break her virgin knot before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may

With full and holy rite be ministered,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

To make this contract grow,

And again in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, written while his wound was fresh:

As the most forward bud

Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the fair and tender wit
Is turned to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.

There is no dramatic necessity for any of these speeches, and Shakespeare would hardly have penned them if he had not felt that he had missed domestic happiness by disregard of precepts which he afterwards found to be wise. With Milton, Coleridge, and Shelley he must be enumerated among those who have contracted unhappy marriages out of mere precipitancy. No external proof of incompatibility can be given; the estranged pair did not part with or without mutual consent, as in the cases of Shelley and Coleridge, nor did Mrs. Shakespeare convert her husband to the lawfulness and expediency of divorce, like Mrs. Milton. They lived together for a time; twins, a son and a daughter, were born about January 1585; but in the course of that year, as most probable, Shakespeare bade adieu to his family and his native place, neither of which, so far as is known, did he see again for eleven years. Family unhappiness may well have conduced to this exodus, as well as pecuniary embarrassment and the misfortunes of Shakespeare's parents. These reasons

SHAKESPEARE AT LARGE

66

was

197 would amply suffice without the deer-stealing adventure in Sir Thomas Lucy's park traditionally related of Shakespeare, which, nevertheless, there is no sufficient reason to disbelieve. We have it on the highly respectable authority of Archdeacon Davies in the seventeenth century that Shakespeare much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits." A scurrilous ballad against the Lucys, attributed to him, is undoubtedly spurious; but the ridicule of the family in Henry IV. and The Merry Wives of Windsor is too palpable to be explained away. It is observable, however, that these attacks are not made until after Shakespeare's return to Stratford, as though the cause of resentment was not so much the original prosecution, now twelve years old, as some fresh affront. The Lucys must have been disagreeably surprised to see the banished poacher returning, and by no means in the guise of the proverbial bad shilling, but rather as gold tried in the fire.

We are now upon the threshold of the most important era of Shakespeare's

Kenilworth Castle in the Seventeenth Century

From a print by Hollar in Dugdale's "Antiquities of Warwickshire," 1656

life, the period when his genius took its bent and his subsequent career was Probable course of virtually determined. To our confusion, these momentous years are an absolute Shakespeare's blank for the biographer. Except for one mention of his name in a legal life document, there is no trace of him from 1585 to 1592. This at least evinces the vanity of denying him the character of an author on the ground of his imputed want of culture, ignorant as we are what influences may have affected him during this blank interval, or what opportunities of culture may have fallen in his way. But his saner and more responsible biographers also appear to us to err in too readily consenting to suppose him all this time a denizen of London, and for most of it practising the player's art or following some employment of even less social repute. It seems to us certain that he must have seen far more of the world and mingled with associates of a much higher class. Nothing is more remarkable in his earliest productions than their perfect polish and urbanity. The principal characters in Love's Labour's Lost are princes and nobles, true to the models which he might have found in contemporary society. The young patricians in The Two Gentlemen of Verona have in every respect the ideas and manners of their class. The creator of such personages must have been in better company and enjoyed a wider outlook upon society than can easily be believed attainable by an actor or a

and Leicester

resident in a single city. Had this been otherwise, Shakespeare must have winced when he wrote in what, perhaps, was his first play, "Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits" but we feel confident that he had "seen the wonders of the world abroad." Three pieces of evidence may be adduced in favour of this opinion: The implied assertion of his adversary Greene, that he had not even in 1592 followed the theatrical profession very long,' since in that year, though doubtless with more direct reference to his authorship than to his acting, he calls him "an upstart crow;" the idiomatic ease of the French scenes in Henry V., indicating that he had acquired the language where it was habitually spoken; thirdly, and most important, his familiarity with the moods and aspects of the sea. One passage, in particular, affords, if we do not err, the key to the time and occasion of Shakespeare's foreign travel. It is the passage in the Chorus's speech in the third act of Henry V., describing the departure of a great naval armament :

Suppose that you have seen

The well-appointed king at Hampton pier
Embark his royalty; and his brave fleet

With silken streamers the young Phœbus fanning.

Play with your fancies, and in them behold

Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;

Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give

To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,

Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,

Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea,
Breasting the lofty surge.

It cannot be believed that the author of these lines had not seen what he describes. Many great fleets sailed from England in Elizabeth's reign, but Shakespeare mostly on distant or dangerous expeditions, in which Shakespeare could not have taken part. There was one memorable exception, and this an expedition in which he might well have been thought to have been concerned, apart from any evidence of acquaintance on his part with Courts, or camps, or navies. In December 1585, Leicester sailed from Harwich at the head of a great force, to assume the government of the United Provinces in their war with Spain. The year is that in which Shakespeare disappears from observation, and in which there is every reason to suppose him to have quitted Stratford. Leicester was the great lord of his part of the country, to whose protection he would naturally have recourse, and to whom it would be easy for him to obtain a recommendation. A band of youths from Warwickshire did, we know, follow Leicester, and few Warwickshire youths can have had more cogent reasons for making one of their number than William Shakespeare. It is not necessary to suppose that his entry into Leicester's service followed immediately upon the deer-stealing adventure. He may well have betaken himself to London, where he would be likely to find at least one friend in a Stratford youth of his own age, Richard Field, son of a tanner at Stratford, and then apprentice

1 The supposed reference to "W. S. " as the old player" in Willobia's Avisa (1594) has no reference to the theatrical profession, but to the part which the person thus designated had sustained in a love-drama

of real life.

LEICESTER'S EXPEDITION TO HOLLAND

199

to the eminent printer Vautrollier, whose daughter he afterwards married, Vautrollier being then an exile in Edinburgh, but still carrying on business in London, his future son-in-law, whose term of apprenticeship had nearly expired, was in a more independent and responsible position than usual with apprentices, and may have been able to give Shakespeare substantial assistance; and the rather as his master had dedicated books to Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew and associate in his expedition. Certain it is, at all events, that Shakespeare would have eagerly embraced the opportunity of accompany

ing Leicester's expedition if it had presented itself, and there is good reason to think that it actually may have done so. Leicester took a company of actors with him to the Low Countries, and Shakespeare may have been a member of it, but it is quite as likely that he served in some other capacity. Without question the new scene which would open upon him, the magnificent shows and triumphs with which Leicester was received, the view of tented fields and leaguers, the daily talk of war and statecraft, the association with all sorts and conditions of men, would go far to bestow that knowledge of good society, and create that easy and confident attitude towards mankind which appears in Shakespeare's plays from the first, and which (we must concede this much to the Baconians) are so unlike what might have been

Shakespeare and Bacon

expected from a Stratford rustic or a London actor. The opportunities opened up to such a man by a Continental visit in Leicester's train would be infinite none can say what adventures he may not have experienced, what personages he may not have encountered, or upon what missions he may not have been employed. Some slight and very possibly fallacious indications of acquaintance with widely separate parts of the Continent are nevertheless too interesting to be omitted. Mr. Stefansson (Contemporary Review, vol. 69) has, in our opinion, proved that Shakespeare, before writing Hamlet, had obtained from some source an intimate knowledge of the Castle of Elsinore. The hypothesis of a personal visit is nevertheless unnecessary, for Leicester sent actors to Copenhagen in 1585, among whom were three who subsequently belonged to Shakespeare's own company, and from whom he might easily obtain any information he desired. Although, however, this supersedes the necessity for Shakespeare's visit, it does not demonstrate that it never took place and nothing would so well fit in with the long voyage which he certainly must have made at some time or other of his life. The other apparent point of contact between Shakespeare and the Continent is the

Nicholas Rowe

special knowledge which he seems to possess of Venice. Here, again, there is not sufficient evidence of actual ocular inspection. If, however, Shakespeare ever visited Germany either on a confidential errand or as a member of one of the numerous troops of English actors who at that time ranged the country, it is quite conceivable that the troubled state of France and the Netherlands might compel him to return by way of Venice.

As already remarked, the existence of a long unknown interval in Shakespeare's life, during which he may have been subjected to influences making for high culture, disposes of the only plausible argument adduced by the advocates of the Baconian authorship of his plays and poems. Even were the case otherwise, it ought to be evident that, whoever the author might