of Shakespeare's fellow-actor, the great tragedian, Richard Burbage. James Burbage kept liverystables close by Smithfield, and it is an ingenious suggestion of Halliwell-Phillipps that, on arriving in London, Shakespeare may have sold at Smithfield the horse on which he rode up to town, may then and there have made the acquaintance of James Burbage, and may have been employed by him to take care of the horses of Burbage's Smithfield customers who visited the theatre. The tradition adds that Shakespeare made himself popular, and soon had to hire lads to assist him, who, "when Will Shakespeare was summoned were immediately to present themselves, 'I am Shakespeare's boy, sir'"; whence the young lackeys, after their master's fortune had raised him to higher employment, continued to be known as "Shakespeare's Boys". An old parish-clerk of Stratford, towards the close of the seventeenth century, informed visitors that the dramatist was first received into the playhouse as a serviture", that is, as an attendant on the players. The stage-tradition of a hundred years ago was that he acted as the prompter's assistant, giving the performers notice to be ready when their presence was required on the stage. § 9. It is not surprising that Shakespeare's early years in connection with the theatre should have left no record behind them. We know that he did not cut himself adrift from Stratford and his own family, for in 1587 he joined his father in an effort to assign the title of the Asbies property to John Lambert in consideration of the cancelling of the previous mortgage and the payment of £20. But beyond this fact we know nothing for certain until 1592, when he was an author and an actor, and of importance in both capacities to his dramatic company. A year before this, in 1591, was published Spenser's poem, The Tears of the Muses, in which Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, laments the cessation from authorship of some creator of general mirth whom Spenser names "our pleasant Willy": And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late. It would be pleasant to suppose that the author of the Faerie Queene here spoke of his great contemporary; but it is much more probable that Spenser's friend, the dramatist John Lyly, is meant.1 If Spenser ever refers to Shakespeare, it is in his Colin Clouts Come Home Again, in lines which describe some high poet under the name of "Aetion", the eaglet (from ȧerós, an eagle). Colin Clouts was not published until 1594, but probably was written in whole or in part in 1591. The true name of "Aetion" had, says Spenser, a heroic sound, which agrees well with the name Shakespeare; the epithet "gentle❞ seems to be one to which our poet had almost a peculiar right: And there, though last not least, is Aetion, A gentler shepheard may no where be found: 1 Halliwell-Phillipps identifies "our pleasant Willy" with the comic actor Richard Tarlton (died 1588); Professor Minto supposes him to be Sir Philip Sidney. These lines, if written as early as 1591, were hardly meant for Shakespeare; they may, however, be a later insertion. But it seems not unlikely that Drayton was intended, who had written under the poetical name of "Rowland", and whose Idea, as some have thought, may be pointed to (though to myself the notion appears far-fetched) by the choice of the name Action (ιδεά = αἴτιον). § 10. There can be no mistake that Shakespeare is the object of Greene's attack in the pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, written by the unhappy poet as he lay dying in a mean house in Dowgate, attended by a shoemaker's wife, his kind hostess and nurse. The pamphlet must have been written in August, 1592. Having warned his friends Marlowe, Peele, and "young Juvenal" (probably Lodge) against the inconstancy of the players, he proceeds: "Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie". The travestied line Oh tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide, is found in Richard, Duke of York, and also in the Third Part of Henry VI., which is founded on Richard, Duke of York. In the old play Marlowe and Greene had probably been collaborateurs, and it would seem that Greene bitterly resented Shakespeare's rehandling of his work, and felt indignant at the success SHAKESPEARE AS AN ACTOR. 19 of one whom he looked on as an unlettered rival. Greene's pamphlet was seen through the press by Henry Chettle, and in December of the same year he entered on the Stationers' Books his own prose tract Kind-Hart's Dreame, in the preface to which he apologizes to Shakespeare for Greene's unworthy attack. He expresses his regret for not having used his discretion in moderating the writer's warmth; he is as sorry, he says, as if the original fault were his own, "because my selfe have seene his [Shakespeare's] demeanour no less civil than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious [i.e. felicitous] grace in writing, that approves his Art". The word "quality" in this passage of Chettle's "Address to the Gentlemen Readers" of his pamphlet has a special reference to the profession of an actor, as it has in Hamlet's inquiry respecting the boy-performers: "Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing?" We may infer from Chettle's words that Shakespeare was at least a respectable actor. According to Rowe, "the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet," a part requiring an actor of good delivery though not a great artist. There is some ground for thinking that he played the part of Old Knowell in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, in the representation of which comedy he certainly appeared. And there is a confused tradition handed down by Oldys which makes it probable that he was the Adam of his own As You Like It. Whether he excelled or not in his practice as an actor, Shakespeare certainly had a cultivated knowledge of the principles of the histrionic art; the instructions given to the players by Hamlet could have come from no one who had not carefully studied the merits and the defects of the actor on the boards; the writer of the words assigned to Hamlet assuredly knew the grace of moderation and reserve in the rendering of passion, and at the same time knew the error of languor or inertness. The latest express mention of Shakespeare as having taken a part in the performance of a play is in connection with Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which was performed at the Globe Theatre in 1603 or 1604. But in a document of 1610 the Burbages speak of placing Shakespeare as an actor among others at Blackfriars Theatre. His name, however, does not appear in a list of the actors of The Alchemist (1610), in which, if he were then performing, he might naturally have taken a part among his fellows. SII. No doubt it was perceived at an early date in Shakespeare's dramatic company that he could aid them more by his pen than by his voice. As we learn from the charges and insinuations of Greene, part of Shakespeare's early work as a writer for the stage was that of revising and adapting the work of his predecessors or early contemporaries. It was an excellent way of apprenticeship to his dramatic craft. He learned to distinguish between what is effective and ineffective on the stage; he acquired the art of carrying on the action of a piece without falling into tedious speech-making, he Istudied the links and transitions of the dramatic events, he came to see how these should be manipulated, he learned how to develop a dramatic char |