Shakespeare's occupations in youth

in Shakespeare's education must not be overlooked-the English Bible, which in the Genevan or the Bishops' version would be diligently read in the school. Shylock's speech, "When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep," shows Shakespeare's intimate acquaintance with Scripture narrative.

John Shakespeare was probably a man of many occupations, and among them may well have been that of a butcher. The Stratford tradition preserved by Aubrey that young Shakespeare assisted his father in this business is con

Shakespeare's Birthplace as restored at the present day
From a photograph

firmed by a minute detail. "When he killed a calf," says Aubrey, "he
would do it in a high style and make a speech." The lad would not yet be
old enough to slaughter an ox, but would be fully up to a calf. If, as Aubrey
proceeds to inform us-and there is no reason to discredit a tradition which
there could be no motive for inventing-" there was at that time another
butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural
wit, but died young," it follows that Shakespeare himself must have been
regarded as a "natural wit " beyond the common. The funeral orations upon
the calves, interesting prefigurements of the future discourses composed for
Mark Antony, may have served for a time as a vent for the juvenile ferment
of a poetical soul, but Shakespeare is not likely to have continued long at
the trade of butchering. It is a tribute to the universality of his genius that
almost every possible secular occupation has been conjectured for him upon

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the strength of what has been deemed the internal testimony of his own writings. The only external testimony worth anything, and its value is not slight, is the tradition that he was for some time an assistant in a school. This would be exactly the profession which a well-educated young man at a loss for a livelihood would be likely to follow; and the truth of the statement is strongly confirmed by the scholastic scenes in Love's Labour's Lost, which certainly seem to proceed from one who had not

merely learned but taught the accidence. It further explains the remarkable familiarity with legal technicalities which has led many to believe that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer. A schoolmaster would be very likely to be employed by attorneys in copying documents. A word may be added respecting Shakespeare's handwriting, which has been made an argument against his authorship of the works ascribed to him. All the undoubted autographs of Shakespeare appear on legal documents, and are written in the hand appropriate to business matters. This affords no proof that he could not write the Italian script if he thought fit. Leaving the literary side of the question out of sight, he must, as actor and manager, have continually received letters in the Italian character, and it would be surprising if he could not write what he must have been well able to read. "Methinks we do know the sweet Roman hand."

Shakespeare's marriage

Shakespeare's

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 .nne 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 removal from would hardly have penned them if he had not felt that he had missed domestic Stratford 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

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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 "was 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 virtually determined. To our confusion, these momentous years are an absolute course of 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

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 Phoebus 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 and Leicester 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-draiia of real life.