The dogmatic grammarians, a race not yet wholly extinct, make rules for language as Aristotle made rules for the epic poem, and impose their chill models on submissive decadence. Much of Shakespeare's language is language hot from the mind, and only partially hardened into grammar. It cannot be judged save by those whose ease of apprehension goes some way to meet his ease of expression. : Here, then, is matter enough and to spare. A brief essay cannot hope to achieve much. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. Among the topics, old and new, which are fit for treatment, a selection must be made, and of those selected none can be exhaustively handled. What is chosen shall be chosen with a single aim in view the mind of Shakespeare is to be seen at work; and to that end the raw material of his craft, and the nature of the tools that he employed, must be considered in the closest possible connection with that marvellous body of poetry which, by its vitality and beauty, has cast some shadow of disesteem on the forgotten processes of its making. CHAPTER II STRATFORD AND LONDON WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE came of a family of yeomen in the county of Warwick. The name was a common one in many parts of England, and during the sixteenth century occurs in some twenty-four places of that county alone. There were several William Shakespeares. One was drowned in the Avon and buried at Warwick in 1579. Another, some forty years later, was a small farmer's agent; and perhaps it was he, not the creator of Shylock, who in 1604 sued Philip Rogers for £1, 15s. 10d., the price of malt supplied. A third, the son of John Shakespeare, Chamberlain of the borough, was baptized at Stratford on the 26th of April 1564, and lived to be the author of the plays. It seems probable that Shakespeare's grandfather was one Richard Shakespeare, a small farmer at Snitterfield, and a tenant of the Ardens of Wilmecote. Of this Richard we know nothing to the purpose; he is a name and a shadow, flitting through the records of the time. John Shakespeare, the poet's father, is the first of the stock whom it is possible to draw in outline, and to conceive as a character. He came to Stratford not later than 1552, and there traded in farm-produce as glover, dealer in wool, and butcher. The diversity of the trades assigned to him need cause no incredulity; such a combination was possible 29 enough in a town surrounded by pasture-land, and seems to testify to his restless enterprise in business. He prospered rapidly, was successful in small lawsuits, acquired property, married an heiress, and was advanced to high office, becoming, in a short series of years, ale-taster, constable, affeeror, chamberlain, alderman; lastly, when his son William was four years old, he attained the summit of his municipal ambition, and appears as Justice of the Peace and High Bailiff of the Town. Then his affairs declined; he who was wont to be plaintiff and triumphant creditor assumes the more melancholy character of defendant and insolvent debtor; he mortgages his wife's estate, absents himself from the meetings of the Town Council, is deprived of his alderman's gown, ceases to attend church and is presented as a recusant; but continues, as he began, incurably litigious. During his later years we hear no more of financial difficulties, and it has been reasonably assumed that the success of his son restored the family fortunes. At the close of the century he succeeded, after repeated applications, in obtaining the grant of a coat-of-arms; in 1601 he died, and was buried at Stratford. The bare facts, so far as they lend themselves to portraiture, seem to supply suggestions for the picture of an energetic, pragmatic, sanguine, frothy man, who was always restlessly scheming and could not make good his gains. "He spread his bread with all sorts of butter, yet none would stick thereon." We guess him to have been of a mercurial temperament, and are not surprised to find that he was a lover of dramatic shows. During his tenure of the office of High Bailiff, wandering companies of players make their first recorded appearance at Stratford, and perform before the Town Council, receiving money for their pains. In business he seems to have been fervent, unsteady, and irrepressible; in speech he may well have been excitable, sententious, and dogmatic. It is worthy of notice that Shakespeare, in his earlier plays, shows but scant regard for the wisdom of the older generation. In Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew the seniors are troublesome stage-fathers, impertinent, dull-witted, talkative, moral, and asinine. The speculation is impious, but stranger things are true, and if the father of Charles Dickens lent his likeness to Mr. Micawber, it is at least possible that some not unkindly memories of the paternal advices of John Shakespeare have been preserved for us in the sage maxims of Polonius. Some fathers of famous writers we feel to have been better men than their sons, saner, more modest, and preserved from fame not by their lack of vigour, but by their hatred of excess. Such was the father of Thomas Carlyle. Others by their very extravagances have helped to school their sons into sanity and wisdom; the fervour of their temper has passed on undiminished, but their miscarriages leave much work to do, and their failings teach self-criticism to those who succeed them. Such perhaps, was the father of William Shakespeare. His mother, Mary Arden, was a small heiress, and, what is more important, seems to have been of gentle birth. "By the spindle-side," says that excellent antiquary, Mrs. Stopes, "his pedigree can be traced. straight back to Guy of Warwick and the good King Alfred. There is something in fallen fortune that lends a subtler romance to the consciousness of a noble ancestry, and we may be sure this played no small part in the making of the poet." And this is not all. Shakespeare was "to the manner born." From the very first he has an unerringly sure touch with the character of his high-born ladies; he knows all that can neither be learned by method nor taught in words, the unwritten code of delicate honour, the rapidity and confidence of decision, the quickness of sympathy, the absolute trust in instinct, and the unhesitating freedom of speech. In Shakespeare's day the forest of Arden, stretching away to the north of the river, was more than a name; and much of his boyhood was spent in that best of schools, a wild and various country. At the Grammar School he would learn Latin, and make acquaintance with those numerous games which receive honourable mention in the plays. Doubtless, like Falstaff, he "pluckt geese, played truant, and whipt top," and "knew what 'twas to be beaten." Children's games are eternal: Hoodman-blind, Barleybreak, All hid, Dun's in the mire,-these vary from age to age in nothing but the name, and though they afford a natural outlet for activity, they are seldom the landmarks of a travelling soul. Adventures by field and forest, on the other hand, may very easily become dates in the life of a poet. Shakespeare must have wandered for whole days and nights about the countryside, and was delicately sensitive to all the shifting aspects of the pageant of Nature, to Spring and Autumn, dawn and sunset, wind and cloud. His plays abound in passages which bear all the marks of detailed reminiscence. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania describes a summer of tempest and flood which has drowned the low-lying lands near the river: The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, |