We have had our glimpse of the first (English) Stuart King, as he made his shambling way to the throne—beset by spoilsmen; we had our glimpse, too, of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the magic-lantern of Scott at the toilet and the draggled feathers of the pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the Scotch Nigel adventured; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose silken dresses whisked along those balusters of Crosby Hall, which brides of our day may touch reverently now; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale; and thereafter we sauntered down Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside and the Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o’ day with Ben Jonson; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes; and had a glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe Theatre.

Gosson and Other Puritans.

There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a certain Stephen Gosson[8]—well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his fellows—who had received a university education, who had written delicate pastorals and other verse, which—with many people—ranked him with Spenser and Sidney; who had written plays too, but who, somehow conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses to extremest Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against “Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”—as he called them—as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day I cited. He had called his discourse, “pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable for all that will follow Vertue.” He represented the Puritan feeling—which was growing in force—in respect to poetry and the drama; and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best loved and trusted emissaries of Satan.

But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers;—not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603—he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties—partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, he issued a proclamation—“Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church.”

Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, “moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original.”

King James’ Bible.

There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though—for anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision—it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.

It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that “it should be done by the best learned in both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the “most High, and Mighty Prince James” (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense; after thanking him as “principal mover and author of the work,” the dedication exuberantly declares that “the hearts of all your loyal and religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little tractate of his—the Basilikon Doron—not written for publication (though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions; and—saving some scornings of the “vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines”—is written in a spirit which might be safely commended to later British Princes.

Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King James’ money, none from the royal exchequer; which indeed from the King’s disorderly extravagances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low. The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of book-makers who were concerned with the printing and selling of the new Bible.

When the business of revision actually commenced it is hard to determine accurately; but it was not till the year 1611—eight years after the Hampton Conference—that an edition was published by printer Barker (who, or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version “appointed (by assemblage of Bishops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the great Bible of the English-speaking world—then, and thence-forward. And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? Their names are all of record: and yet if I were to print them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of the twoscore.[9] You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this time was writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty, and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Robert Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book The Anatomy of Melancholy—then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury—both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,[10] though he came to be Dean of St. Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may—and ought to know; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Immortality of the Soul[11] in strains that warrant our citing a few quatrains:—

This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.

And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view—which is our stand-point to-day—there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good reason to believe that—on literary lines—any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that will mend its science—that will mend its archÆology—that will mend its history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out—freighted with Christian doctrine—over all lands where Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one—in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one—it is reasonably to be presumed—can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the “higher criticism;” and no one will be henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions.

And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,[12] at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an interpolation—that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself)—“For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”

And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes; no matter what critical scholarship may do in amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their strong, old English current—burdened with tender memories—murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come—“or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.”

The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak—whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight—is overgrown, unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its support—that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe?

It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “King James’ Version” do not lie altogether in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in Jacobean felicities; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure have brought their pleasant reverberations of lingual sound all the way down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif.

A few facts about the printing and publishing of the early English Bibles it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the fatherly edicts against Bible-reading and Bible-owning in the time of Henry VIII.; but the reign of his son, Edward VI., was a golden epoch for the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the throne, fifty editions—principally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s versions—were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged in their manufacture.

Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth in ghastly wood-cut “the burning of Mr. John Rogers at the Stake, in Smithfield.” Elizabeth was coy; she set a great many prison-doors open; and when a courtier said, “May it please your Majesty, there be sundry other prisoners held in durance, and it would much comfort God’s people that they be set free.” She asked, “Whom?” And the good Protestant said, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she—young as she was—showed her monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.”

But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through Cheapside—had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and said she should “oft read that holy book”—which was easy to say, and becoming.

In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley—that John Bodley whose more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford.

In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood—of Elizabeth, on the title-page—of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year.

It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin, in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743.

But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them all, who was born upon the Avon.

Shakespeare.

I have tried—I will confess it now—to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies—whether places, or writers, or sovereigns—I said to myself—when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written—we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the delightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying—standing all athwart the Elizabethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Romances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chronicles—this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle—brimful of life—with which the lesser poets of the age contrast like so many outlying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peopled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal—that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English columbine nodding in clefts of the wall; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain-storms that drenched poor Lear; and we see Jessica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Richard raging in battle, and the Prince boy—apart in his dim tower—piteously questioning the jailer Hubert, who has brought “hot-irons” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moonlit balcony.

These are all live people to us; we know them; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and the witty, coquettish Rosalind; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give stereoscopic roundness; but the mere glimpse—allusion—is of such weight—has such hue of realness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson;—not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted—but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship.

If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James—names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best—I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better.

And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pilgrimage which he told us of in such winning numbers, make us know by a mere touch, in some unforgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Knight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath; but we do not see them insidedly; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the “FaËrie Queene,” they are phantasmic; we may admire them, but we admire them as we admire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely—they have no flesh and blood texture: and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the best-drawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain relish; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the unnatural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere; but do you know well—Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters appear, but because none of them have that vital roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities.

We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of intercourse, will so fasten upon us—maybe their pungency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all surroundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know.

Shakespeare’s Youth.

And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances? Who was he, where did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue?

And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men—poets and dramatists—who belonged to his time, and who—with a pleasant egoism—let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family “wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dekker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless—aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted—to the circumstance that most of these were university men, and had very many acquaintances among those of culture who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him; he ran out of sight of them all.

He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born—his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber-and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers—whether in wool, meats, or gloves—and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the family—in the female line[13]—toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know; but it is understood that its most characteristic features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied picturesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England;—hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feeding; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries planted in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lifting over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke; meadows with cattle browsing on them; wayside stiles; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges of coal and lumber swaying with the idle currents that swish among the sedges at the banks.

On the north, toward Warwick, are the Welcombe hills, here and there tufted with great trees, which may have mingled their boughs, in some early time, with the skirts of the forest of Arden; and from these heights, looking southwest, one can see the packed gray and red roofs of the town, the lines of lime-trees, the elms and the willows of the river’s margin, out of which rises the dainty steeple of Stratford church; while beyond, the eye leaps over the hazy hollows of the Red-horse valley, and lights upon the blue rim of hills in Gloucestershire, known as the Cotswolds (which have given name to one of the famous breeds of English sheep). More to the left, and nearer to a south line of view, crops up Edgehill (near to Pilot-Marston), an historic battle-field—wherefrom Shakespeare, on his way to London may have looked back—on spire, and alder copse, and river—with more or less of yearning. To the right, again, and more westerly than before, and on the hither side of the Red-horse valley and plain, one can catch sight of the rounded thickets of elms and of orcharding where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Thence Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hathaway, she being well toward the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a family at this time, we cannot now say; nor could his father-in-law tell then; on which score there was—as certain traditions run—some vain demurral. He may have been associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover; doubtless was; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling; doubtless was at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories too—of lesser authenticity—that he was over-familiar with the game in the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner. We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and its delightful park, and picturesque mossy walls—dappled with patches of shadow and with ivy leaves—look charmingly innocent of any harm their master could have done to William Shakespeare; but certain it is that the neighborhood grew too warm for him; and that he set off one day (being then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune.

Family Relations.

His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact—and it may as well be said here—they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people—grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little—perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.”

His two daughters lived to maturity—both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was—so far as known—watchful and tender of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable.

It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother—both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and with whom—specially the mother—most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.

But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause—or both—may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people.

His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:—

or those others, telling how the gentle day

Again, there was delightful outlook for

or, perhaps it was the

that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which,

and these flanked by some

What a wondrous light upon all the landscape along all the courses of his country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to Stratford—past Long Compton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Royal George”)—past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks, and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose shimmering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows clearly distinguishable, and throwing afternoon shadows on the silvery stretch of the Avon; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge, over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the twilight; coming thus, by a traveller’s chance, into the court of the Red-Horse Tavern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book” (its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was quartered twenty odd years before, and was occupying, for the nonce, the very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, made a sceptre of the poker, and enjoyed the royalties of “mine inn.”

Shakespeare in London.

But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there? We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established in the city; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to the favor of the Queen. He has no literary backing of the colleges, or of degrees, or of learned associates; nay, not being so high placed, or so well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their heads at mention of him.

But he has heard the strolling players; perhaps has journeyed up in their trail; he has read broadsides, very likely, from London; we may be sure that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went courting to the Hathaway cottage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with them; precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows from the universities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing plays of their own; but lacking Shakespeare’s instinct as to what will take hold of the popular appetite, or rather—let us say—what will touch the human heart.

There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight.

Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs:

It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought.

I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:—

Work and Reputation.

And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His Venus and Adonis[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his Lucrece; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

He had no coterie behind him; he was hail-fellow with Jonson; probably knew Peele and Marlowe well; undoubtedly knew Drayton; he went to the Falcon and the Mermaid; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that he ever saw much of Raleigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years after he came to London. It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the Faery Queene knew him at all. Sidney he probably never saw; nor did he ever go, so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil.

His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere scholastic learning—apprehending everywhere, in places where studious ones were blind. I can imagine that Oxford men—just up in town or those who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show of learning as he made;—call it cheap erudition—call it result of cramming—as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah, what a gift of cramming! What a gift of apprehension! What a swift march over the hedges that cramp schools! What a flight, where other men walked, and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways of knowledge and of wisdom!

Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar things, coarse things—things we want to skip and do skip—things that make us wonder if he ever wrote them; perhaps some which in the mendings and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there; and yet he was capable of saying coarse things; he did have a shrewd eye for the appetites of the groundlings; he did look on all sides, and into all depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out; and even his commonest utterances, have, after all, a certain harmony, though in lowest key, with the general drift. He is not always, as some of his dramatic compeers were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high.

Then, too, like Chaucer—his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy—he steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever in human history he can find them, to work into his purposes. But even the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands.

As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare talks of

and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.

“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers—Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized—you and I perhaps; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp—so full—so suggestive—so marrowy—so keen—so poignant—so enthralling.

No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape.

His Thrift and Closing Years.

Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd, thrifty man; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and sixpences that go into the till of the Globe Theatre; he makes money. Where he lived in London,[19] we do not definitely know; at one time, it is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,[20] but never ostentatiously; very likely sharing chambers with his brother Edmond, who was much time an actor there;[21] he buys a house and haberdasher’s shop somewhere near Blackfriars; and he had previously bought, with his savings—even before Queen Elizabeth was dead—a great house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying lands—a hundred acres at one time, and twenty and more at another. He has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road (on horseback probably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the boards; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins, to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own.

I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we could find even a two-page letter which he may have written to Ben Jonson, in London, telling how his time passed; but there is nothing—positively nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or so after his return to Stratford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his favorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of consequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon.

He died at the age of fifty-three. No descendant of his daughter Susanna is alive; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.[22] The great new home which he had built up in Stratford is torn down; scarce a vestige of it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward, where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative festival, is gone, root and branch.

Shakespeare—an old county guide-book tells us stolidly—is a name unknown in that region. Unknown! Every leaf of every tree whispers it; every soaring skylark makes a carol of it; and the memory of it flows out thence—as flows the Stratford river—down through all the green valley of the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out to farthest seas, whose “multitudinous waves” carry it to every shore.