small addition to his income from the industry of another wage-earner in the family. After leaving school the son may have assisted his father, as Aubrey reports, or he may have entered the office of a lawyer, as a contemporary allusion seems to affirm; nothing definite is known about his occupations between his fourteenth and eighteenth years. There is no reason why anything should have been remembered or recorded; he was an obscure boy living in an inland village, before the age of newspapers, and out of relation with people of fashion or culture. During this period as little is known of him as is known of Cromwell during the same period; as little, but no less. This fact gives no occasion either for surprise or scepticism as to his marvellous genius; it was an entirely normal fact concerning boys growing up in unliterary times and rural communities. That these boys subsequently became famous does not change the conditions under which they grew up.

CHAPTER III

SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY

THE England of Shakespeare's boyhood and youth was not only dramatic in feeling but spectacular in form; the Queen delighted in those gorgeous pageants which symbolized by their splendour the greatness of her place and the dignity of her person. Her vigorous Tudor temper was thrown into bold relief by her intensely feminine craving for personal loyalty and admiration. One of the keenest and most adroit politicians of her time, her instincts as a woman were sometimes postponed to the exigencies of the State, but they were as imperious as her temper. Denied as Queen the personal devotion which as a woman she craved, she fed her unsatisfied imagination on flattery and imposing ceremonies. In the summer of 1575, when Shakespeare was in his twelfth year, the Queen made that memorable visit to Kenilworth Castle which has found its record in Scott's brilliant novel. Four years earlier, the royal presence at Charlecote (Sir Thomas Lucy, the future Justice Shallow, playing the part of host) had brought the Court into the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford. Kenilworth is fifteen miles distant, but the magnificent pageants and stately ceremonies with which Leicester welcomed the Queen were mat

ters of general talk throughout Warwickshire long before the arrival of Elizabeth.

The Queen's visit was made in July, when nature supplemented with lavish beauty all the various art and immense wealth which Leicester freely drew upon for the entertainment of his capricious and exacting mistress. Pageants and diversions of every kind succeeded one another in bewildering variety for ten days. The Queen was addressed by sibyls, by giants of Arthur's age, by the Lady of the Lake, by Pomona, Ceres, and Bacchus. There was a rustic marriage for her entertainment, and a mock fight representing the defeat of the Danes. Returning from the chase, Triton rose out of the lake and, in Neptune's name, prayed for her help to deliver an enchanted lady pursued by a cruel knight; and straightway the lady herself appeared, with an escort of nymphs; Proteus, riding a dolphin, following close behind. Then, suddenly, from the heart of the dolphin, a chorus of ocean deities sang the praises of the great and beautiful Queen. The tension of these splendid mythological and allegorical pageants was relieved by the tricks of necromancers, the feats of acrobats, and by fights between dogs and bears. The prodigality, semi-barbaric taste, and magnificence of the age were illustrated for a royal spectator with more than royal lavishness.

On a summer day the way from Stratford to the Castle lies through a landscape touched with the ripest beauty of England; a beauty not only of line and structure, but of depth and richness of foliage,

of ancient places slowly transformed by the tender and patient and pious care of centuries of growth into masses of greenness so affluent and of such depth that it seems as if fountains of life had overflowed into great masses of foliage.

The summer days were doubtless long and wearisome to the boys in the Grammar School in the quiet village. The nightingale had ceased to sing along the Avon; the fragrance was gone from the hedges with their blossoms; midsummer was at its height; there was the smell of the new-cut grass in the meadows, touched here and there with the glory of the scarlet poppy. Whether the coming of the Queen was made the occasion of granting a holiday it is much too late to assert or deny; that the more adventurous took one is more than probable. In those days even the splendour of the wandering players paled before that of the Queen. She had been seventeen years on the throne. She had all the qualities of her family: the Tudor imperiousness of temper, and the Tudor instinct for understanding her people and winning them. The Armada was thirteen years in the future, and the full splendour of a great reign was still to come; but there was something in the young Queen which had already touched the imagination of England; something in her spirit and bearing which saved the poets of the time from being mere flatterers. Elizabeth was neither beautiful nor gracious; the romantic charm which captivated all who came into the presence of her unhappy contemporary Mary Stuart was not in her. But what she lacked as woman she easily pos

sessed as queen; she had the rare gift of personifying her rank and place. The sense of sovereignty went with her. In a time of passionate energy and lust of life she was not only the centre of organized society, but the symbol of unlimited opportunity, fortune, and greatness.

Where the Queen was, there was England; she was not only its ruler, but the personification of its vitality and force. When she came into Warwickshire, the whole country was stirred with the sense of the presence of something splendid and significant. Stories of the preparations at the Castle had been carried by word of mouth across the countryside. There were no newspapers; no means of rapid communication with the outer world; there were, for the vast majority of people, no books; most men never went out of their native shires; travellers from a distance were few. Tales of Leicester's honours and emoluments were told and listened to like modern fairy stories; his rapid advancement lent a kind of magic to the splendour of his state; and the Queen was the magician whose touch made and marred all fortunes. In the time of Elizabeth as in that of Victoria, the Queen personified the English State and the majesty of the English race. Through this kind of symbolism a deep and formative educational influence has been silently put forth and unconsciously received. The Queen was in many ways the incarnation of the spirit of Shakespeare's time, and her coming into Warwickshire was like the advent of the world-element into a life which had felt only local influences.