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§1. THE life of Shakespeare has been threefold the external life of good and evil fortune wh lived as a youth in Stratford, as a player and wright in London, and again as an honoured i tant of his native town; secondly, the inner his spirit, the wide-orbing movement of his in and imagination of which we can read someth his marvellous series of poetical creations, ar conjecture more; and last, the life which h lived during three hundred years in the hist the national mind of England, or rather we say the mind of humanity, the life of posth influence which he has exercised, and exerc the present day, on the generations of ma Of each of these it will be our endeavour to

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§2. "All that is known with any degree of cer concerning Shakespeare is-that he was b Stratford-upon-Avon-married and had ch

there

went to London, where he commenced and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stra made his will, died and was buried." So Steevens a century ago, and De Quincey at a

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INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE.

more recent date is even briefer in his summing-up of the facts: "That he lived, and that he died, and that he was 'a little lower than the angels'—these make up pretty nearly the amount of our undisputed report". Having spoken of the perplexity which we are likely to feel on finding the materials for the biography of a transcendent writer so meagre and so few, De Quincey goes on to solve the difficulty by an elaborate argument intended to prove that the parliamentary war and the local feuds engendered by it extinguished those traditions and memorials of Shakespeare which, he says, must have been abundant up to that era. In truth there is no great cause for wonder or perplexity. More is known of Shakespeare's life than Steevens and De Quincey allege. More is known of Shakespeare's life than of the lives of many of his dramatic contemporaries. Far less has been ascertained respecting the life of Marlowe, whose fame stood so high in Elizabethan days, and whose personality was undoubtedly a striking one. Far less has been ascertained respecting the life of Webster or the life of Ford, although these dramatists flourished at a later time, and one of them was a gentleman of position. The materials for John Fletcher's biography are of the scantiest kind; it is not certain whether he went to Cambridge; it is not certain whether he lived and died unmarried; from 1593 to 1607 his history is a complete blank. Yet Fletcher was highly honoured by his contemporaries; he survived till the opening of the reign of Charles I.; his father was the Bishop of London. The Elizabethan age was not an age of literary biography; a playwright,

ance with the facts of his outward historyfounded on tradition, partly on documentsto the zeal of lovers of the great dramatist, fr actor Betterton to the latest and most indefa of investigators, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. We hope that much additional light will ever be The facts which we possess are enough to us that the greatest of poets conducted his m life, after, perhaps, some errors of his ardent wisely and well to a prosperous issue. Th enough to prove his good sense and discreet in worldly affairs.

§3. Richard Shakespeare, the poet's grand was a Warwickshire farmer, renting land at S field, a village some three or four miles from ford-on-Avon. His son John, evidently ar some enterprise and energy, settled at St about 1551, and did business in Henley St a fellmonger and glover. According to Aub was a butcher, and it may be that he slaug the beasts whose skins he converted into ga and leggings; according to Rowe he was siderable dealer in wool, and it is certain t had transactions in corn and in timber. I he greatly improved his position by his ma with Mary, the youngest and the favourite da of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer, lately ded of the neighbouring hamlet of Wilmecote.

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INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE.

these Ardens were connected with an ancient family of gentlefolk of that name has been asserted, and may be true, but the statement cannot be proved. Mary Arden inherited from her father an estate of some sixty acres, known as Asbies, at Wilmecote, together with the reversion to part of a larger property at Snitterfield, on which Snitterfield property her father-in-law, Richard Shakespeare, held land as a tenant. From this date John Shakespeare became a person of some importance at Stratford, and he rose year by year in the esteem of his fellowtownsmen. Appointed at first by the corporation one of the officers whose duty it was to supervise malt liquors and bread, he became in 1561 a chamberlain of the borough, in 1565 an alderman, and in 1568 he was elected to the most important official position in the town, that of high bailiff. It is true that he could not write even his name, but the accomplishment of penmanship was rare among the members of the corporation. He was certainly a successful man of business and a skilful accountant.

§4. In the house in Henley Street towards the close of April, 1564, was born 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

Stratford-on-Avon, in whicп Shakespeare his youth and to which he gladly returned elder years, was a town of gable-roofed, tim timber-and-plaster houses, containing some fo or fifteen hundred inhabitants. Its chief buil were the noble church hard by the river, an Guildhall where on occasions travelling comp of actors would present their plays. Around Warwickshire, "the heart of England", lay th fection of rural landscape: in the Feldon di such pasture-lands, with a wealth of wild flow Shakespeare has described in A Winter's Tale in the Arden division the perfection of scenery, such woodland glades and streams has imagined in the French Arden of As You It. During the Wars of the Roses the count divided against itself; Coventry was Lancas Warwick, for a time, Yorkist. The battle of worth Field was fought near its north-ea border. Traditions of the stirring events of times must have lived on to Shakespeare's day created in his imagination a sympathy with the historical figures of that period which he has 1 sented with such life and force in his hist dramas.

That Shakespeare was sent to the Free Sch Stratford is stated by his first biographer, I and we may reasonably assume that such wa