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Comedy of Errors was presented before a distinguished company in the hall of Gray's Inn; there had been some confusion and disturbance in the earlier part of the evening, which ceased while the spectators watched the entanglements of the twins of Syracuse and Ephesus; ever afterwards that night of Dec. 28, 1594, was remembered as the Night of Errors. Early in February, 1601-2, the benchers of the Middle Temple witnessed in their hall (which still exists) a performance of that delightful comedy Twelfth Night; the law student John Manningham records the fact in his diary, and tells us of his diversion at the odd figure of the deceived Malvolio. But of these occasional performances by Shakespeare's company the most remarkable were two which took place in the preceding year. On February 8th, 1601, the Earl of Essex, accompanied by Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland, made their rash revolt in the streets of London. On the preceding afternoon, by special arrangement between the conspirators and the Lord Chamberlain's servants, "a play of the deposing and killing of King Richard" [i.e. possibly Shakespeare's King Richard II.] was represented at the Globe Theatre.1 It was not a new play, and the actors, to provide against loss if the attendance should be small, required that the sum of forty shillings should be added by their employers to whatever might be taken at the door. Less than two years previously, in this same Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's lines in honour of Essex, then her Majesty's representative in Ireland, had been delivered as part of the prologue to the last act of King Henry V. The unfortunate earl was executed on February 25. Perhaps to make an outward show of equanimity, Elizabeth spent the evening before his execution in witnessing at Richmond Palace a dramatic performance by the same company of actors who, a few days before, had been employed to prepare the minds of the Londoners for the treasonable outbreak of the doomed favourite. When the queen died, in 1603, it was noticed in print by Henry Chettle, the former editor of Greene's pamphlet, that Shakespeare did not join in the poetical lamentations of the time.

James I. had not been many days in London before he granted a license to the members of Shakespeare's company to enact plays both in town and in the provinces. In December, 1603, while the king was a visitor at Wilton, the seat of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, they received a call to perform before the royal party. The editors of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays (1623), in the dedication of that volume, addressing William Herbert and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, refer to the great favour which these patrons of art had shown both to the author of the plays and the plays themselves. When his Majesty's long-delayed state entry into London took place, Shakespeare and his fellows appeared in the king's train: "each of them was presented with four yards and a half of scarlet cloth, the usual dress allowance to players 1 Shakespeare's play was already in print, but the earlier quartos-those published in Elizabeth's reign-do not contain the deposition scene, lines 154-318 of act iv. sc. 1. See vol. ii. p. 393.

belonging to the household. The poet and his colleagues were termed the king's servants, and took rank at court amongst the Grooms of the Chamber." We have records (copied for Malone) of the performance by the king's servants at Whitehall of Othello (Nov. 1, 1604), of Measure for Measure (Dec. 26, 1604), and of King Lear (Dec. 26, 1606). The lines in Measure for Measure (ii. 4. 24-30) which describe the troubles of a king occasioned by the over-demonstrative loyalty of his admiring subjects, and those in Macbeth which tell of the cure of the king's-evil by the royal touch, are supposed to have been meant as compliments to King James.

During the summer and early autumn months the players often itinerated. Thus in the summer of 1597 Shakespeare's company travelled through Sussex and Kent; on Sept. 3rd they acted at Dover, where, as Halliwell-Phillipps has observed, the author of Lear might have seen the samphire gatherers on the cliff, which may have served as model for Edgar's imaginary precipice. They turned westward in that year, reached Bristol, and performed at Marlborough and Bath. In the autumn of 1605 they travelled to Barnstaple, and before returning to town acted before the mayor and corporation of Oxford. In that city of spires and colleges Shakespeare probably lodged at John D'Avenant's tavern, and knew the tavern-keeper's handsome wife. Her boy, the future dramatist, Sir William D'Avenant, born in March, 1606, was reputed to be Shakespeare's godson. The gossip which named our poet as father of the boy has no real evidence to lend it support.

The playhouse in which Shakespeare first acted, if not "The Theatre" which belonged to James Burbage, must have been that named "The Curtain,” which stood not far off in a division of the parish of Shoreditch known as the Liberty of Halliwell (holy well). Here, on the edge of the great city, the country had actually begun; we read of a prentice in the year 1584 sleeping on the grass "very nere the Theatre or Curten." In 1598 The Theatre had ceased to be suitable for the requirements of the time, and in the winter of that year (Dec.Jan. 1598-99) the timber of which it was built was removed to Southwark with a view to its forming part of a new and better structure. This building, known as The Globe, from its sign of Hercules or Atlas carrying his load, stood not far from London Bridge, a little westward, and close to the river on the Southwark side. Upon a circular substructure rose two wooden stories, which included the galleries and boxes. These, and the stage, were roofed with thatch; the pit or yard was open to the weather. In the profits of this theatre Shakespeare was a sharer. Blackfriars Theatre, with which also Shakespeare's name is associated, was converted into a building for dramatic performances from a large house purchased by the elder Burbage in 1596. The inhabitants of Blackfriars petitioned the privy-council without success against the establishment of the theatre, setting forth in their memorial the various dangers and annoyances to which they would 1 Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. 212.

be subjected by its presence in the neighbourhood. For a time it was leased by the Burbages to one Evans for the performances of the boy-actors, Her Majesty's Children of the Chapel. When they quitted it Shakespeare's company took their place, and in the later days of his dramatic career the great poet himself may have appeared on the boards of Blackfriars. Dryden informs us that The Tempest was represented at this theatre and was well received.

The theatrical company which produced a play in Elizabethan days had no wish to see the work in print, its publication necessarily detracting from the novelty of the piece. But from the year 1597 onwards several of Shakespeare's dramas were placed in the hands of the booksellers, and were printed, each singly, in quarto form. The first to appear was King Richard II. (1597), from which the deposition scene was omitted. It was speedily followed by King Richard III. A pirated copy of Romeo and Juliet, made up from fragments of manuscript, eked out by notes taken during the performance, and by recollected lines and speeches, appeared in the same year (1597). In 1598 King Henry IV. and the revised version of Love's Labour's Lost were published. Hardly a year, indeed, passed from this date until that of Shakespeare's death without the appearance in quarto of some new tragedy, history, or comedy, or the republication of one which had already issued from the press. The popularity of Shakespeare's two chief non-dramatic poems was of remarkable continuance, as is attested by the number of successive editions. Occasionally plays or poems by other writers were foisted on the public by unscrupulous publishers with the attractive name or initials of William Shakespeare on the title-page. A list of his works, most valuable from the light it throws on their chronology, appears in a "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets," which is printed near the end of a little volume named Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres, a Master of Arts of both universities. The chapter was written in the summer of 1598, and it bears remarkable testimony to the high rank held by Shakespeare both as a narrative and a dramatic poet. "As the soule of Euphorbus," says Meres, "was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.-As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.-As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English." The Love's Labour's Won which Meres names may be a lost play of Shakespeare,

or possibly, as has been conjectured, All's Well that Ends Well in an earlier form may have borne this title. The "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" may be some of those printed afterwards (1609) in the quarto edition of "Shakespeare's Sonnets." Two of these sonnets, with a different text, were included among the poems of "The Passionate Pilgrim," 1599, a slender volume made up of pieces of verse, many of which are certainly not by Shakespeare, though his name is placed upon the fraudulent title-page. A theory most skilfully worked out by Mr. Tyler, with some assistance from Mr. Harrison, which identifies the young friend addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnets with William Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, and the raven-haired lady with Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour, Mrs. Mary Fitton, places the first acquaintance of the poet with Herbert, then a youth of eighteen, in the spring of the year 1598. While several other theories of Shakespeare's Sonnets are amusing from their absurdity, this is highly interesting from its ingenuity; and yet it seems to me to remain doubtful whether Herbert and his mistress are in any way connected with these perplexing poems, which endlessly invite the reader and endlessly baffle his attempts to read their biographical meanings clear. Whether Shakespeare formed the acquaintance of William Herbert in this year or not, we may believe that it became memorable through the beginning of another friendship, which, with some possible brief interruption, seems to have been life-long. In September, 1598, Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour was brought out by the Lord Chamberlain's company. According to Rowe the comedy was on the point of being rejected, when Shakespeare, casting his eye over the manuscript, perceived its merit, and on reading it through exerted his influence to secure its performance. "I loved the man," wrote Jonson after the death of Shakespeare, "and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any." It was inevitable that Jonson, with his classical training and strict ideas on literary style, should be of the opinion that Shakespeare often wronged his genius by careless writing: "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that, in his writing, whatsoever he penn'd he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand." The noble memorial verses by Jonson prefixed to the First Folio Shakespeare exalt our poet to a place beside his greatest predecessors in the literature of Greece and Rome, and do honour not only to his natural gifts but to his art. Of the personal relations of the two great dramatists we have a well-known and delightful record in Fuller's Worthies, where he tells of their many witcombats: "Which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention."

Hours of brilliant wit combat in the London tavern did not cause Shakespeare

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to forget his Stratford home. We have seen that in the spring of 1597 he became the purchaser of New Place, a large house standing on nearly an acre of ground. The death of his son Hamnet, in August of the preceding year, left him without male issue; but his purpose to occupy a strong and dignified position in his native town was not turned aside by this grief, which, nevertheless, he must have keenly felt. The draft of a grant of coat-armour to John Shakespeare, dated October, 1596, is in existence. We cannot doubt that the real mover in the matter was John Shakespeare's prosperous son; and the grant not having been made, it was again sought three years later. From 1598 onwards we are to think of the great poet as "William Shakespeare of Straford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentleman," although his time was mainly spent in the metropolis or on his professional tours through the provinces. He is returned as holding ten quarters of corn in the Chapel Street Ward of Stratford, in February, 1598. He seems already to have looked forward to enjoying the pleasures of a country life. He laid out part of his garden as a fruit orchard, and at a later date it was he, according to a well-authenticated tradition, who was the first to introduce the mulberry-tree among his townsfolk. attempt was made (1597) by the family towards the recovery of the mortgaged estate of Asbies, but, as far as we are aware, without success. Abraham Sturley of Stratford, writing to his brother-in-law, Richard Quiney, in London (24th Jan. 1597-98), mentions that "Mr. Shaksper is willinge to disburse some monie upon some od yarde land or other at Shotterie or near about us," and urges his correspondent to move Mr. Shakespeare "to deal in the matter of our tithes." To purchase this tithe-lease from the corporation would advantage both Shakespeare and his neighbours: "by the friends he can make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to shoot at;-it obtained would advance him indeed and would do us much good." "If you bargain with William Shakespeare," writes Richard Quiney's father (late in 1598 or early in 1599), "or receive money therefor, bring your money home that you may." Richard Quiney was negotiating in the metropolis matters of importance for the Stratford Corporation. The only letter addressed to Shakespeare which is known to exist-and it is doubtful whether the letter was ever delivered-is one from this Quiney, himself a wellto-do Stratford mercer (Oct. 1598), asking for a loan of thirty pounds. We learn at the same time from a letter of Sturley's (4th Nov. 1598) that Shakespeare had undertaken to negotiate an advance of money to the corporation. These details are of interest not only as evidence of Shakespeare's growing prosperity and influence, but also as showing that he kept in close relations with the men of Stratford and had a part in the public concerns of the town.

In the autumn of 1601 Shakespeare lost his father; the funeral took place

1 Malone supposed that the lamentations of Constance in King John for the loss of her boy may bave derived some of their intensity of expression from Shakespeare's personal grief. But King John was probably written before 1596.

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