William Shakespeare, the eldest son of his parents. Two daughters, who died in infancy, had been born before him. On April the 26th the child was baptized; a tradition of the last century, that Shakespeare died upon his birthday, would favour the popular opinion that he was born on April 23rd; but his monument states that he died in his fifty-third year. Attention was called by De Quincey to the fact that Shakespeare's only grandchild, Elizabeth Hall, was married to Thomas Nash on April 22nd, and he suggested that the day may have been chosen as the anniversary of her grandfather's birthday. The matter remains doubtful. April the 23rd, Old Style, corresponds with our present May 5th.

Stratford-on-Avon, in which Shakespeare spent his youth and to which he gladly returned in his elder years, was a town of gable-roofed, timber or timberand-plaster houses, containing some fourteen or fifteen hundred inhabitants. Its chief buildings were the noble church hard by the river, and the Guildhall where on occasions travelling companies of actors would present their plays. Around it in Warwickshire, "the heart of England," lay the perfection of rural landscape: in the Feldon division such pasture-lands, with a wealth of wild flowers, as Shakespeare has described in A Winter's Tale; and in the Arden division the perfection of forest scenery, such woodland glades and streams as he has imagined in the French Arden of As You Like It. During the Wars of the Roses the county was divided against itself; Coventry was Lancastrian, Warwick, for a time, Yorkist. The battle of Bosworth Field was fought near its north-eastern border. Traditions of the stirring events of those times must have lived on to Shakespeare's day, and created in his imagination a sympathy with the great historical figures of that period which he has represented with such life and force in his historical dramas.

That Shakespeare was sent to the Free School at Stratford is stated by his first biographer, Rowe, and we may reasonably assume that such was the fact. Some knowledge of reading and writing was required at entrance; the usual age of pupils when admitted was seven. When duly drilled in the Latin accidence (of which we have an amusing Shakespearian reminiscence in Sir Hugh Evans' examination of William Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor), the boy began to construe from the Sententiæ Pueriles, and, if he remained long enough at school, advanced as far as Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, and the Eclogues of Mantuanus. Much has been written on the subject of Shakespeare's learning. From Ben Jonson's scholarly point of view he may be said to have had "small Latin and less Greek." Perhaps the Greek was nothing or next to nothing; but Aubrey was probably not wrong when he stated on the authority of a Mr. Beeston that Shakespeare "understode Latine pretty well." In later years he seems to have acquired a little knowledge of French, and possibly a little knowledge of Italian.

At what age Shakespeare was withdrawn from school we cannot tell. But we know that when he was thirteen years old his father was no longer a prosperous man, and that the fortunes of his house continued for a considerable time to

decline. While John Shakespeare's means were first waxing and then rapidly waning, his family had increased in numbers. His son Gilbert, who afterwards became a haberdasher in London and who lived certainly to 1609, was born in 1566; Joan, who was married to William Hart, and whose name appears in the great dramatist's will, was born 1569; Anne, born in 1571, died in her eighth year; Richard, born in March 1573-74, lived to manhood, dying at Stratford in 1613; John Shakespeare's last child, Edmund, born in 1580, became an actor, died in September 1607, and on the morning of his burial at St. Saviour's, Southwark, a knell of the "great bell" of the church was rung, a mark of respect secured only by the payment of a considerable fee. Thus with younger brothers and a sister requiring sustenance and education, and with narrowing means in the household, William Shakespeare, at the age of thirteen may, as the tradition asserts, have been set to help his father in business. An old parish clerk of Stratford towards the close of the seventeenth century declared that Shakespeare was bound apprentice to a butcher; and according to Aubrey he performed the sacrificial rites with dramatic accompaniments, for "when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style and make a speech." According to another report he was a country schoolmaster, and Malone has argued from Shakespeare's frequent and exact use of law-terms that most probably he was for two or three years in the office of a Stratford attorney. We may indulge our imagination by picturing the future poet rather as a wool-stapler than as a butcher's lad.

What cannot be doubted is that his father had passed from wealth to comparative poverty. In 1578 he effected a large mortgage on the estate of Asbies; when he tendered payment in the following year it was refused until other sums due had been repaid; the money designed for the redemption of Asbies had been obtained by the sale of his wife's reversionary interest in the Snitterfield property. His taxes were lightened, nor was he always able to pay those which were still claimed. He dropped off from attendance at the town-council, and in consequence was ultimately deprived of his alderman's gown (1586). He fell into debt, and was tormented with legal proceedings. A commission appointed to inquire respecting Jesuits, priests, and recusants reported his name in 1592 among those of persons who "come not to church for fear of process for debt." It does not appear, however, that he was obliged to part with his house in Henley Street, and, as we shall see, his eldest son was careful, when prosperity came to him in his dramatic career, to restore the fallen fortunes of his father.

Before he was nineteen years old Shakespeare had a new and a powerful motive for trying to better himself in the world; he had taken to himself a wife. A bond given before the marriage, for the security of the bishop in licensing the marriage after once asking of the banns, is preserved in the registry at Worcester. It is dated November 28, 1582. The bride, Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a substantial yeoman, lately deceased, of Shottery hamlet in the parish of Strat

ford, was between seven and eight years older than her husband. The sureties of the bond were friends of the Hathaway family, and the seal of Anne's father was used on the occasion, whence it has been inferred that the Shottery folk rather than those of Henley Street were desirous of the match. Whether the consent of Shakespeare's parents was or was not given we have no means of ascertaining. Shakespeare's eldest child-Susanna-was baptized on May 26, 1583, just six months after the bond, preliminary to marriage, had been signed. The ceremony of wedlock may have been preceded by precontract, which according to the custom of the time and place would have been looked on as having the validity of marriage, though as yet unsanctified by ecclesiastical rites. Halliwell-Phillipps has aptly pointed out that when Shakespeare's maternal grandfather, Robert Arden, "settled part of an estate on his daughter Agnes, on July the seventeenth, 1550, he introduces her as nunc uxor Thome Stringer, ac nuper uxor Johannis Hewyns, and yet the marriage was not solemnized until three months afterwards." It may be added that the words "wedded wife" were at this time in no way tautological; a woman duly espoused might be a wife though the priestly benediction of wedlock had not yet been bestowed.

The marriage of a boy of eighteen with a woman eight years his senior, of humbler rank than his own and probably uneducated, cannot be called prudent; but we have no evidence to prove that the union was unhappy. Shakespeare remained in Stratford with his wife until he went to seek his fortune in London. Although he did not bring her and her children to the capital, he certainly from time to time visited his home. He looked forward to returning to his native town, and living henceforth by her side, and he actually carried that long-contemplated purpose into effect. It may be, as Shakespeare's Sonnets seem to indicate, that for a season his heart was led astray by the intellectual fascination of a woman who possessed all those qualities of brilliance and cultured grace which perhaps were lacking in his wife; but if so, Shakespeare perceived his error, and in due time returned to the companion of his youth. In his will he leaves her only his "second best bed with the furniture," and this as an afterthought, for the words occur as an interlineation; but without special bequest she was sufficiently provided for by free-bench and dower; the best bed, as Mr. HalliwellPhillipps suggests, was probably that reserved for strangers, the second best may have been that of the master and mistress of the house. We cannot suppose that the wife of his early choice, the daughter of a husbandman, could have followed Shakespeare in his poetical mountings of mind or in his profound dramatic studies of character, but there is a wide field for mutual sympathy and help in the common joys and sorrows and daily tasks of household life, and the greatest of men are sometimes they who can best value the qualities of homely goodness. We cannot think of Shakespeare's marriage as a rare union of perfect accord, but we are not justified in speaking of it as unfortunate. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Lysander has a reference to love "misgraffed in respect

VOL. VIII.

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of years;" in Twelfth Night the Duke warns Viola, when disguised in the garb of a youth, against the danger of an unequal marriage:—

Let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,

So sways she level in her husband's heart.—(ii. 4. 30–32.)

Even if the lines were non-dramatic, they would prove no more than that the writer with good sense admitted as a rule that to which his own experience may have been the exception. One other passage from the plays has been cited as bearing on Shakespeare's marriage, that passage in The Tempest where Prospero, after he has given his daughter to Ferdinand as his future bride, cautions the Prince against "breaking her virgin-knot" before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may

With full and holy rite be minister'd.—(iv. 1. 16, 17.)

The Tempest was probably written to grace some noble wedding, and Shakespeare's mature wisdom of life, uttering itself through Prospero, recognized the fact that the sanctity of marriage can hardly be guarded with too great jealousy. Having closed the series of his dramatic works, perhaps with the very play in which this passage occurs, he returned to his home to find the happiness of his elder years in company with her whom he had loved in boyhood.

For three or four years after his marriage Shakespeare continued to reside at Stratford, and in 1585 his wife gave birth to twins, a boy and girl, baptized (Feb. 2) Hamnet and Judith, doubtless after Hamnet Sadler, a baker of Stratford, and Judith his wife. For this Hamnet Sadler, presumably sponsor for the boy, who, to the grief of his father, died before he had reached the age of twelve (buried August 11, 1596), Shakespeare retained a regard to the close of his life. He is remembered in the great dramatist's will, where the name appears in the form "Hamlett" Sadler, receiving a bequest of one pound six and eightpence "to buy him a ringe."

In what employments and with what recreations these years at Stratford, growing years of early manhood, went by we can but conjecture. How they came to a close we are told by Shakespeare's first biographer, Rowe: "He had by a misfortune, common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London." According to Archdeacon Davies, vicar of Sapperton in the county of Gloucester, who died in

1708, Sir Thomas Lucy had the young poacher "oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned," in revenge for which Shakespeare afterwards made him "his Justice Clodpate [Justice Shallow: clodpate meaning foolish] and calls him a great man, and that in allusion to his name bore three louses rampant for his The first stanza of the ballad which Rowe speaks of as lost is given by Oldys on the authority of "a very aged gentleman living in the neighbourhood of Stratford," and it contains the same offensive play on the name Lucy—“O lowsie Lucy❞—as that in the passage to which Davies refers.

We can hardly doubt that there is a kernel of truth in these traditions. Malone endeavoured to disprove the deer-stealing story by showing that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park at Charlcote; but he may have had deer there; or the scene of the adventure, instead of Charlcote, may have been the adjoining sequestered estate of Fulbroke, over which Sir Thomas, as a local magnate devoted to the crown, may have kept watch and ward. It has been suggested that he may have felt some animosity against the Shakespeare family as possibly having sympathy with the old religion, for Sir Thomas was not only a game preserver but a zealous Protestant. The offence of poaching was commonly regarded at the time by those who did not suffer from it as a venial frolic of youth; "the students of Oxford, the centre of the kingdom's learning and intelligence," says HalliwellPhillipps, "had been for many generations the most notorious poachers in all England." There can be no doubt that Shakespeare retained some ill-will against the Lucy family. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Justice Shallow fumes with violent indignation against Sir John Falstaff, whom he charges with having beaten his men, killed his deer, and broken open his lodge. We are informed by Slender that in the Shallow coat of arms are a "dozen white luces," translated by Evans, the Welsh parson, with unconscious humour, into "a dozen white louses" which "do become an old coat well." Sir Thomas was a member of that strong Protestant commission which reported that Shakespeare's father did not attend church in 1592 for fear of process for debt, a circumstance which might have kept the early soreness of feeling from subsiding. If it is any satisfaction. to us we have some reason to believe that the barb prepared for Sir Thomas Lucy struck home, and that the family did not forget the mockery of their old coat. A copy of the 1619 Quarto edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor was discovered not very long since among the family records, the only copy of any one of Shakespeare's plays in the early editions found at Charlcote.

In what year Shakespeare quitted Stratford we cannot tell; it can hardly have been earlier than 1585, and may have been a year or two later. Nor can we say with certainty how he came to join himself to a company of players. From early childhood he had opportunities of seeing dramatic performances. Perhaps he inherited from his father a taste for the drama; theatrical entertainments, as has been noticed by Halliwell-Phillipps, are first heard of at Stratfordon-Avon during the year of John Shakespeare's bailiffship. While the players