The Facts About Shakespeare.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 20, 17 November 1909, Page 47

The Facts About Shakespeare.

BY

JOHN CORBIN.

INSTEAD OF BEING A DIVINITY “OUT-TOPPING KNOWLEDGE,” THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN DRAMATIST IS ONE OF THE CLEAREST-OUT FIGURES IN LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.

IT has often been said that we know nothing of Shakespeare’s life, except that he was born at Stratford, wrote plays in London, and died at Stratford at the age of fifty-two. His character as a man and as an artist it has been the fashion to regard as inscrutable. Others abide our question—thou art free. We ask and asl:—thou smilest, and art still. Out-topping knowledge. To the romantic view of the nineteenth century, which Matthew Arnold thus voices, the great Elizabethan playwright was divine. Many distorted shadows have been cast by the priestly fires of poet-worship-pers. One of them is the idea that no unschooled rustic, no mere actor-play-wright, could have been all that Shakespeare’s votaries make him out, and so weak minds weave mares’ nests of Baconian theory. Another is that to subject him to the “question” of scientific biography and criticism is a sacrilege; and so grandiose platitudes have taken the place of unadorned truth. Arnold closes his profession of ignorance by crying “Better so!” —proclaiming Shakespeare not so much a man as the supreme and final embodiment of human thought and feeling. The plain fact is that the authentic records of Shakespeare’s life fill a volume; and, together with frequent selfrevelations in the plays and poems, make up a portrait which is strikingly clear-cut, and by all odds the most interesting in literary biography. One of the stumbling-blocks in the path of plain truth has been the fact that in its outward aspect Shakespeare’s life was normal, even to the verge of the commonplace. Mankind is unwilling, perhaps unable, to believe in the quiet simplicity of intellectual and spiritual greatness. Always the cry is for a sign. If the accompaniment of salutes is loud enough, and the fireworks sufficiently bizarre, any quack can gain the public ear. Petty and impotent souls proclaim that art is above morality. Science itself has laboured of late to show that genius is the child of insanity. But common sense tells us that the creative spirit is great in proportion as it is at one with nature: and nature in her most powerful moments of creation is most silent. It is her destructive energies that shake, the earth and shatter the oak. Shakespeare descended from a prolific family of yeomen. “Sturdy” yeomen they may have been, but no evidence of especial sturdiness has survived. Certainly they were not marked out, except in his ease, by fame or fortune. His father’s greatest distinction was that for a short time he was bailiff of Stratford. Then he lost his money and with it his prominence. His son was educated at the Stratford grammarschool, learning there the “small Latin and less Greek” with which in after years Ben Jonson credited him. His education, as it seems, was cut short by his father’s declining fortunes, and he entered the paternal shop. The only acts of imprudence in a life distinguished for thrift date from these early years and are of the kind most easily forgiven to youth. At the age of eighteen, when his father was chafing under a burden of debt, he married Anne Hathaway, an all but portionless woman eight years older than himself. A few months afterward a daughter was born. The records of the manner in which the marriage was brought about indicate only too clearly that the boy was forced to the altar by the bride’s relatives and probably without his own father's consent. We must not exaggerate all this. It has often been remarked that young men of intelligence and temperament are prone to fall in love with older women; and moral standards in Tudor

England were very different from those of to-day. Yet it seems certain that Shakespeare’s after-relations with his wife were not happy. Several passages in his plays reveal a strong sense of the unwisdom of marriages ill-proportioned in years, and of prenuptial intimacy. In the records of one of his many real estate transactions it is evident that he ■went about to debar his wife from her dower right in the property! and among many thoughtful bequests to his family and friends the only one he made to her was his second-best bed. It must be remembered, however, that one third of the btdk of the estate was secured to her by law; that at the time the will was made she was 60; and that the eldest daughter and her husband were in all probability better able to manage property. Moreover, the secondbest bed was doubtless the one endeared by whatever conjugal sentiment existed between the pair. The story of Shakespeare’s early poaching, and of his being whipped and imprisoned by his victim. Sir Thomas Lucy, has stuck in the gorge of the poetworshippers: but it is certain that ia

Justice Shallow, who appears in both “Henry IV” and “The Merry Wives,” IShakespeare caricatures Sir Thomas. Like Lucy, Shallow had luces—a kind of fish—on his coat of arms, and was a mighty prosecutor of poachers. There is also extant a ballad attributed to Shakespeare, which lampoons Lucy, the chief point of it turning on the fact that “luce” and “louse” were pronounced alike in rustic dialect. This ballad, again, poet-worshippers have repudiated, mainly, as it seems, on the ground that it is unworthy of their divinity. But there is a tradition of utmost likelihood that Shallow was represented on the stage with “ three louses rampant for his arms.” Whoever wrote the ballad, it is certain that the stripes administered to the young vagabond's Ikvcll' still smarted in the soul of the great playwright twelve years later, and were revenged in identical terms.

(ACTOR, MANAGER, AND PLAYWRIGHT. Improvident in love and reckless in •port, disgraced alike in his private life and in the court of local justice, young Shakespeare must have felt cribbed and confined by the bourgeois atmosphere of Stratford. He presently turns up in London. His father had been the first bailiff of the village to Ibreak through the prejudice against strolling players by licensing their performances; and the son seems to have gravitated naturally to the playhouse. Art for art’s sake, however, had little attraction for him. Still less was he betrayed by the license of theatrical life Into a continuation of his youthful.wildness. If he had resolved on a total reformation he could not have been more steady and thrifty than he proved. Six years after the hegira from Stratford an elder fellow-playwright, Robert Greene, ■utilized him as “an absolute Johannes

factotum.’’ Call-boy, actor, playwright, and manager, he turned his hand to all employment that came his way. But far from being a Jack-of-all-trades, he was a master of all. Then, as now, the nearest way to wealth in the playhouse lay in financial management. The pay of the dramatist was small, ranging from four to eleven pounds for a play—equivalent now to about eight times as much. Actors were better paid; but though the tradition is that Shakespeare ‘“did act exceedingly well,” it is also recorded that the Ghost in “Hamlet” was “the top of his performance.” Shakespeare presently appears as partowner in the leading company of London. that playing at the Globe. Small as has always been the price paid for plays, however, they are the only sure foundation for managerial success; so for twenty years Shakespeare provided pieces for his company at the rate of

almost two a year. Ibsen takes about two years, Pinero a year and a half, for a single piece. Elizabethan playwrights wrote faster; but when we consider the call, on Shakespeare’s time for rehearsals, performances, tours of the provinces, and the general duties of management, it is evident that not the least of his virtues was a capacity for steady, hard work. He was conscious of no high mission, no intellectual or spiritual message to deliver. He would have sympathised entirely with the mood in which Scott said that he didn’t give a damn for the things he wrote. To publish his plays would have been to give away the most valuable asset of his company, so he paid no heed to the permanence of his fame, The foible of originality never touched him. With the single exception of “Love’s Labour Lost,” the earliest and slenderest of his plays, he took his plots from others. Many even of his masterpieces, notably “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “The Merchant of Venice,” are mere revisions of plays by obscure predecessors. Scenes and characters he took entire. Long passages .of dialogue, jests, and poetic figures, he incorporated with only such changes as his literary- and dramatic sense suggested. In “ The Winter’s Tale,” his practical sense went the length of taking in toto the plot of a novel by his early detractor, Greene—then dead.

Supreme as was his genius, the chronology of the Elizabethan drama shows that he studied the changes of taste in his audiences, and was content to follow into new fields under the head of others. Perfecting so much, he originated next to nothing. In all this there was little question of plagiarism. When Moliere said that he Took his own wherever he found it, he voiced the practise of centuries. In ail times great writers have cared to do beautiful things rather than to gain the credit of originality. How deeply 'Shakespeare eared to do beautiful things is a matter of record for all asres~; but it is equally evident that in doing them he maintained to the outward view the upmost sobriety and thrift. " Doubtless Shakespeare was as facile as he was prolific; but the tradition which Ben Jonson related on the authorin' of the players, that he “never blotteg”—that Is, erased—-“a line,” is misleading. Little as has survived in the wreckage of time to show how he worked, two different versions of “Romeo and Juliet” ‘have come down to us, and three of “Hamlet”—each a reworking of the preceding. There is every reason for believing that he kept a close eye on the

performances of his plays, and enhanced their theatric value whenever he saw ths chance. Certain is it that he throve in worldly goods. A calculation based upon pretty certain data shows that when he was in his early thirties, and had been only a decade in London, his average income for acting, writing, and his share in the company, was one hundred and thirty pounds—of which the modern equivalent would be fully £ 1000. Later, his income reached six hundred pounds a year, equal to £4BOO to-day. This money he shrewdly invested in real estate in London and in his native Warwickshire. Like his father, he was frequently engaged in lawsuits, and stanchly defended his right in the most trifling sum. One transaction—and this of his later years—reveals, in addition to the shrewdest of instincts for the main chance, a willingness to enclose the Stratford common lands for his own profit. Many, will rejoice that he did not succeed. Like Scott, again, he seems to have cared deeply for the. opinion of his fellow citizens. In conjunction with his father he made repeated and, in the end, successful efforts to secure from the Harald’s College a coat of arms (ta which, strictly speaking, he had no claim. When he returned to Stratford, he occupied the chief residence of the town, and was recognised as its leading citizen. If, as his satire on Sir Thomas

Lucy indicates, he took to heart his early ill-repute at Stratford, his rehabilitation in local esteem was triumphant. THE PERSON MATY OF SHAKESPEARE. More baffling than the normality and sobriety of Shakespeare’s life is the peculiar cast of his genius, which renders it difficult, perhaps impossible, to gather much from the plays as to the personal bias of the man. So wonderful was his mastery of technicalities that books have been written to show that he was learned in the profession of law and of medicine, that he was an original investigator in science, that he was an extensive traveller. His was the type of mind which we may, without disrespect, call journalistic. He had the faculty of seeing into the heart of things at a glance, and of writing about them with as much accuracy as the most accomplished specialist, and with more spirit. Other great men have been similarly endowed. According to John Fiske, Herbert Spencer was Shakespeare’s equal in this respect. Kipling has written a eharming essay describing Sliakespeare's methods in gaining information as similar to those wci know to be his own. {Shakespeare’s catholicity of judgment

Iras as great as his information —and here he differs from Kipling. His was typically the dramatic genius. He laboured not to advocate this or that, but to present impartially, and with a well poised soul, the conflicts of will and passion which are the essence of true drama. Arguments, equally cogent, have been written to show that he was a Catholic and a Protestant. There are many passages in the plays which have Jed critics to conclude that he sympathised with the aristocracy as against the people. But there are others, generally neglected, which reveal a sense of the miseries and the wrongs of the poor verging upon socialism. King Lear himself, in the height of his misery and exposure, exclaims:

Poor, naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you From seasons such as these? And he rises to the conclusion — Take physic, pomp I Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayest shake the superflux to them. And show the heavens more just. The one judgment as to his personal character which we may safely draw from his plays is that his sympathies were line, sincere, and broad; and all that his contemporaries witnessed of him bears out the view’. Such testimony offers a grateful offset to that of legal documents and records—in which, in the nature of things, few men appear at their best. At the outset of his career, in an apology for Greene’s harsh attack, the publisher Ghettle praised his “ civil demeanour ” and witnessed his reputation for “uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty”—and the word “honesty” then had a connotation of refinement and elevation of spirit which it has since lost. “Sweet,” “gentle,” “friendly” — these are the epithets iwith which he is habitually described. Ben Jonson, who, like lago, was nothing if not critical, wrote, after Shakespeare was dead, “I Joved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this sij e idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open, free nature.” This mention of idolatry has led the irrepressible Bernard Shaw to assert that the worship of Shakespeare began in his lifetime. If so, it was directed as much to the man as to his works. The antiquary Aubrey records traditions to tire effect that he was “very good company, •rid of a very ready and pleaaant smooth wit.” Qne description of his tavern conversation pictures Jonson in the sinpU-

tude of a Spanish galleon, and Shakespeare in that of an English ship. Jonson was built higher in classical learning, but was slow in manoeuvre. Shakespeare ■was lighter and quicker of movement, and carried off the victory by delivering blows adroitly where they were least expected. Modern praises of Shakespeare’s genius have not always been wise; but nothing can alter the faet that neither art nor history bears record of a soul that equals his in sanity, sympathy, breadth, and elevation.”

THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKESPEARE. Of the portraits of Shakespeare only two are beyond question authentic, and these are disappointing. The print by Martin Droeshout, prefixed to the Folio, and vouched for as a likeness by Ben Jonson, in a poem on the opposite page, is a poor specimen of the work of a minor engraver. The bust over the

grave at Stratford wa<s doubtless executed by order of the poet’s family; but it is the work not of a sculptor, but of * “maker of tombs,” and it is believed that an accident to the nose resulted in making that salient member shorter and the upper lip proportionately longer. In other respects, these two portraits, allowing for an obvious difference of age, are strikingly alike. Of all the painted portraits the ona which has the most claim to credit, and which is by all odds the most artistic and interesting, is by the Ely Palace portrait, now in the so-called Birthplace at

Stratford. That it dates from the early seventeenth century has not been disputed. The inscription, “ AE 39 X 1603,” corresponds to Shakespeare’s age at that, date; and though, in common with the

lower part <rf the face, it has been sligntr ly retouched,-it i« in the main apparently genuine. Though suniewbat defective in drawing, it bears so striking a resemblance to the Droeshout print as to suggest that it may have been the original. The sensitive beauty of the facet and the dreamy look in the eyes app ar very imperfectly in photographs, which emphasise the crudities of the drawing. Aubrey reports that Shakespeare was “a handsome, well-shap't man”; and th* faet that he played the Ghost of Buried Denmark, besides sin "kingly part*

in sport” suggests that he was tall and straight. The original pigments of ■bust have been taken as evidence that* his hair was brown and his eyee har-el;; but successive repaintings have madq them hard to determine, e<peciallv in the; ease of the eyes; and it is r. well-known fact that in the course of time paint alters colour radically. The eyes of the Ely Palace portrait are grey, which is, said to be the colour most common in men of genius. It must always be a subject of keen regret that Shakespeare did not live to be painted by Vandyke; but since bet did not, tile advice of Ben Jonson is ol looting value: Reader, look. Not on hrs picture, but his book.