curled up on the window seat

[Art Neuendorffer]

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http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/

<<Sir Kenneth Clark wrote of the Eleventh Edition [of the Encyclopedia
Britannica]: "One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much
by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the
facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopedia in the tradition of
Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only
when it is slightly colored by prejudice. When T.S. Eliot wrote
'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopedia'
he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition.">>
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SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564-1616), English poet, player and playwright,
was baptized in the parish church of Stratford- upon-Avon in
Warwickshire on the 26th of April Birth 1564. The exact date of his
birth is not known. Two par~entage. 18th-century antiquaries, William
Oldys and Joseph Greene, gave it as April 23, but without quoting
authority for their statements, and the fact that April 23 was the day
of Shakespeares death in 1616 suggests a possible source of error. In
any case his birthday cannot have been later than April 23, since the
inscription upon his monument is evidence that on April 23, 1616, he had
already begun his fifty-third year. His father, John Shakespeare, was a
burgess of the recently constituted corporation of Stratford, and had
already filled certain minor municipal offices. From 1561 to 1563 he had
been one of the two chamberlains to whom the finance of the town was
entrusted. By occupation he was a glover, but he also appears to have
dealt from time to time in various kinds of agricultural produce, such
as barley, timber and wool. Aubrey (Lives, 1680) spoke of him as a
butcher, and it is quite possible that he bred and even killed the
calves whose skins he manipulated. He is sometimes described in formal
documents as a yeoman, and it is highly probable that he combined a
certain amount of farming with the practice of his trade. He was living
in Stratford as early as 1552, in which year he was fined for having a
dunghill in Henley Street, but he does not appear to have been a native
of the town, in whose records the name is not found before his time; and
be may reasonably be identified with the John Shakespeare of
Snitterfield, who administered the goods of his father, Richard
Shakespeare, in 1561. Snitterfield is a village in the immediate
neighborhood of Stratford, and here Richard Shakespeare had been settled
as a farmer since 1529. It is possible that John Shakespeare carried on
the farm for some time after his fathers death, and that by 1570 he had
also acquired a small holding called Ingon in Hampton Lucy, the next
village to Snitterfield. But both of these seem to have passed
subsequently to his brother Henry, who was buried at Snitterfield in.
1596. There was also at Snitterfield a Thomas Shakespeare and an Anthony
Shakespeare, who afterwards moved to Hampton Corley; and these may have
been of the same family. A John Shakespeare, -who dwelt at Clifford
Chambers, another village close to Stratford, is clearly distinct.
Strenuous efforts have been made to trace Shakespeares genealogy beyond
Richard of Snitterfield, but so far without success. Certain drafts of
heraldic exemplifications of the Shakespeare arms speak, in one case of
John Shakespeares grandfather, in another of his great-grandfather, as
having been rewarded with lands and tenements in Warwickshire for
service to Henry VII. No such grants, however, have been traced, and
even in the 16th-century statements as to antiquity and service in
heraldic preambles were looked upon with suspicion. The name Shakespeare
is extremely widespread, and is spelt in an astonishing variety of ways.
That of John Shakespeare occurs 166 times in the Council Book of the
Stratford corporation, and appears to take 16 different forms. The
verdict, not altogether unanimous, of competent palaeographers is to the
effect that Shakespeare himself, in the extant examples of his
signature, always wrote Shakspere. In the printed signatures to the
dedications of his poems, on the title-pages of nearly all the
contemporary editions of his plays that bear his name, and in many
formal documents it appears as Shakespeare.

This may be in part due to the martial derivation which the poets
literary contemporaries were fond of assigning to his name, and which is
acknowledged in the arms that he bore. The forms in use at Stratford,
however, such as Shaxpeare, by far the commonest, suggest a short
pronunciation of the first syllable, and thus tend to support Dr Henry
Bradleys derivation from the Anglo-Saxon personal name, Seaxberht. It is
interesting, and even amusing, to record that in 1487 Hugh Shakspere of
Merton College, Oxford, changed his name to Sawndare, because his former
name vile reputatum est. The earliest record of a Shakespeare that has
yet been traced is in 1248 at Clapton in G]oucester~ shire, about seven
miles from Stratford. The name also occurs during the ,3th century in
Kent, Essex and Surrey, and durin~ the I4th in Cumberland, Yorkshire,
Nottinghamshire, Essex, Warwickshire and as far away as Yougbal in
Ireland. Thereafter it is found in London and most of the English
counties, particularly those of the midlands; and nowhere more freely
than in Warwickshire. There were Shakespeares in Warwick and in
Coventry, as well as around Stratford; and the clan appears to have been
very numerous in a group of villages about twelve miles north of
Stratford, which includes Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, Rowington,
I{aseley, Hatton, Lapworth, Packwood, Balsall and Knowle. William was in
common use as a personal name, and Williams from more than one other
family have from time to time been confounded with the dramatist. Many
Shakespeares are upon the register of the gild of St Anne at Knowle from
about 1457 to about 1526. Amongst these were Isabella Shakespeare,
prioress of the Benedictine convent of Wroxall, and Jane Shakespeare, a
nun of the same convent. Shakespeares are also found as tenants on the
manors belonging to the convent, and at the time of the Dissolution in
1534 one Richard Shakespeare was its bailiff and collector of rents.
Conjectural attempts have been made on the one hand to connect the
ancestors of this Richard Shakespeare with a family of the same name who
held land by military tenure at Baddesley Clinton in the 14th and 15th
centuries, and on usc other to ideniify him with the poets grandfather,
Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield. But Shakespeares are to be traced
at Wroxall nearly as far back as at Baddesley Clinton, and there is no
reason to suppose that Richard the bailiff, who was certainly still a
tenant of Wroxall in 1556, had also since 1529 been farming land ten
miles off at Snitterfield.

With the breaking of this link, the hope of giving Shakespeare anything
more than a grandfather on the fathers side must be laid aside for the
present. On the mothers side he was connected with a family of some
distinction. Part at least of Richard Shakespeares land at Snitterfield
was held from Robert Arden of Wilmcote in the adjoining parish of Aston
Cantlow, a cadet of the Ardens of Parkhall, who counted amongst the
leading gentry of Warwickshire. Robert Arden married his second wife,
Agnes Hill, formerly Webbe, in 1548, and had then no less than. eight
daughters by his first wife. To the youngest of these, Mary Arden, he
left in 1556 a freehold in Aston Cantlow consisting of a farm of about
fifty or sixty acres in extent, known as Asbies. At some date later than
November 1556, and probably before the end of 1557, Mary Arden became
the wife of John Shakespeare. In October 1556 John Shakespeare had
bought two freehold houses, one in Greenhill Street, the other in Henley
Street. The latter, known as the wool shop, was the easternmost of the
two tenements now combined in the so-called Shakespeares birthplace. The
western tenement, the birthplace proper, was probably already in John
Shakespeares hands, as he seems to have been living in Henley Street in
1552. It has sometimes been thought to have been one of two houses which
formed a later purchase in 1575, but there is no evidence that these
were in Henley Street at all.

William Shakespeare was not the first child. A Joan was baptized in 1558
and a Margaret in 1562. The latter was buried in 1563 and the former
must also have died young, although her burial is not recorded, as a
second Joan was baptized in 1569.

A Gilbert was baptized in 1566, an Anne in 1571, a Richard in ~ and a~
Edmunc~l 01 1580. e~nne died in ~7o; Edmund, who like his brother became
an actor, in 1607; Richard in 1613. Tradition has it that one of
Shakespeares brothers used to visit London in the 17th century as quite
an old man. If so, this can only have been Gilbert.

During the years that followed his marriage, John Shakespeare became
prominent in Stratford life. In 1565 he was chosen as an alderman, and
in 1568 he held the chief municipal office, that of high bailiff. This
carried with it the dignity of justice of the peace. John Shakespeare
seems to have assumed arms, and thenceforward was always entered in
corporation documents as Mr Shakespeare, whereby he may be distinguished
from another John Shakespeare, a corviser or shoemaker, who dwelt in
Stratford about 1584-1592. In 1571 as an ex-bailiff be began another
year of office as chief alderman.

One may think, therefore, of Shakespeare in his boyhood as the son of
one of the leading citizens of a not unimportant Youth provincial
market-town, with a vigorous life of its own, which in spite of the
dunghills was probably not much unlike the life of a similar town
to-day, and with constant reminders of its past in the shape of the
stately buildings formerly belonging to its college and its gild, both
of which had been suppressed at the Reformation. Stratford stands on the
Avon, in the midst of an agricultural country, throughout which in those
days enclosed orchards and meadows alternated with open fields for
tillage, and not far from the wilder and wooded district known as the
Forest of Arden. The middle ages had left it an heritage in the shape of
a free grammar-school, and here it is natural to suppose that William
Shakespeare obtained a sound enough education,i with a working knowledge
of Mantuan [Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), whose Latin Eclogues were
translated by Turberville in 1567] and Ovid in the original, even though
to such a thorough scholar as Ben Jonson it might seem no more than
small Latin and less Greek. In 1577, when Shakespeare was about
thirteen, his fathers fortunes began to take a turn for the worse. He
became irregular in his contributions to town levies, and had to give a
mortgage on his wifes property of Asbies as security for a loan from her
brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert. Money was raised to pay this off, partly
by the sale of a small interest in land at Snitterfield which had come
to Mary Shakespeare from her sisters, partly perhaps by that of the
Greenhill Street house and other property in Stratford outside Henley
Street, none of which seems to have ever come into William Shakespeares
hands. Lambert, however, refused to surrender the mortgage on the plea
of older debts, and an attempt to recover Asbies by litigation proved
ineffectual. John Shakespeares difficulties increased. An action for
debt was sustained against him in the local court, but no personal
property could be found on which to distrain. He had long ceased to
attend the meetings of the corporation, and as a consequence he was
removed in 1586 from the list of aldermen. In this state of domestic
affairs it is not likely that Shakespeares school life was unduly
prolonged. The chances are that he was apprenticed to some local trade.
Aubrey says that he killed calves for his father, and would do it in a
high style, and make a speech.

Whatever his circumstances, they did not deter him at the early age of
eighteen from the adventure of marriage. Rowe Marriage recorded the name
of Shakespeares wife as Hathaway, and Joseph Greene succeeded in tracing
her to a family of that name dwelling in Shottery, one of the hamlets of
Stratford. Her monument gives her first name as Anne, and her age as
sixty-seven in 1623. She must, therefore, have been about eight years
older than Shakespeare. Various small trains of evidence point to her
identification with the daughter Agnes mentioned in the will of a
Richard Hathaway of Shottery, who died in 1581, being then in possession
of the farm-house now known as Anne Hathaways Cottage. Agnes was legally
a distinct name from Anne, but there can be no doubt that ordinary
custom treated them as identical. The principal record of the marriage
is a bond dated on November 28, 2582, and executed by Fulk Sandells and
John Richardson, two yeomen of Stratford who also figure in Richard
Hathaways will, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a licence
for the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathwey of Stratford,
upon the consent of her friends, with one asking of the banns. There is
no reason to suppose, as has been suggested, that the procedure adopted
was due to dislike of the marriage dn the part of John Shakespeare,
since, the bridegroom being a minor, it would not have been in
accordance with the practice of the bishops officials to issue the
licence without evidence of the fathers consent. The explanation
probably lies in the fact that Anne was already with child, and in the
near neighborhood of Advent within which marriages were prohibited, so
that the ordinary procedure by banns would have entailed a delay until
after Christmas. A kindly sentiment has suggested that some form of
civil marriage, or at least contract of espousals, had already taken
place, so that a canonical marriage was really only required in order to
enable Anne to secure the legacy left her by her father at the day of
her marriage. But such a theory is not rigidly required by the facts. It
is singular that, upon the day before that on which the bond was
executed, an entry was made in the bishops register of the issue of a
licence for a marriage between William Shakespeare and Annam Whateley de
Temple Grafton. Of this it can only be said that the bond, as an
original document, is infinitely the better authority, and that a
scribal error of Whateley for Hathaway -is quite a possible solution.
Temple Grafton may have been the nominal place of marriage indicated in
the licence, which was not always the actual place of residence of
either bride or bridegroom. There are no contemporary registers for
Temple Grafton, and there is no entry of the marriage in those for
Stratford-uponAvon. There is a tradition that such a record was seen
during the I9th century in the registers for Luddirigton, a chapelry
within the parish, which are now destroyed. Shakespeares first child,
Susanna, was baptized on the 26th of May 1583, and was followed on the
2nd of February 1585 by twins, Hamnet and Judith.

In or after 1584 Shakespeares career in Stratford seems to have come to
a tempestuous close. An 18th-century story of a drinking-bout in a
neighboring village is of no Obsce,~~ importance, except as indicating a
local impression years, that a distinguished citizen had had a wildish
youth. 1584 But there is a tradition which comes from a double 1592,
source and which there is no reason to reject in substance, to the
effect that Shakespeare got into trouble through poaching on the estates
of a considerable Warwickshire magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy, and found it
necessary to leave Stratford in order to escape the results of his
misdemeanour. It is added that he afterwards took his revenge on Lucy by
satirizing him as the Justice Shallow, with the dozen white louses in
his old coat, of The Merry Wives of Windsor. From this event until he
emerges as an actor and rising playwright in 1592 his history is a
blank, and it is impossible to say what experience may not have helped
to fill it. Much might indeed be done in eight years of crowded
Elizabethan life. Conjecture has not been idle, and has assigned him in
turns during this or some other period to the occupations of a
scrivener, an apothecary, a dyer, a printer, a soldier, and the like.
The suggestion that he saw military service rests largely on a confusion
with another William Shakespeare of Rowington. Aubrey had heard that he
had been in his younger years a sthoolmaster in the country. The mention
in Henry IV. of certain obscure yeomen families, Visor of Woncote and
Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley in Gloucestershire, has been
thought to suggest a sojourn in that district, where indeed Shakespeares
were to be found from an early date. Ultimately, of course, he drifted
to London and the theatre, where, according to the stage tradition, he
found employment in a menial capacity, perhaps even as a holder of
horses at the doors, before he was admitted into a company as an actor
and so found his way to his true vocation as a writer of plays. Malone
thought that he might have left Stratford with one of the travelling
companies of players which from time to time visited the town. Later
biographers have fixed upon Leicesters men, who were at Stratford in
1587, and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same
company, passing with it on Leicesters death in 1588 under the patronage
of Ferdinando, Lord Strange and afterwards earl of Derby, and on Derbys
death in 1594 under that of the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord
Hunsdon. This theory perhaps hardly takes sufficient account of the
shifting combinations and recombinations of actors, especially during
the disastrous plague years of 1592 to 1594. The continuity of Stranges
company with Leicesters is very disputable, and while the names of many
members of Stranges company in and about 1593 are on record,
Shakespeares is not amongst them. It is at least possible, as will be
seen later, that he had about this time relations with the earl of
Pembrokes men, or with the earl of Sussexs men, or with both of these
organizations.

What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when. he was twenty-eight,
he had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had evoked the jealousy of
one at least of the group of 1Y scholar poets who in recent years had
claimed a f1, monopoly of the stage. This was Robert Greene, who, in an
invective on behalf of the play-makers against the play-actors which
forms part of his Groats-worth of Wit, speaks of 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 Johannes fac jotum, is in his owne conceit the
onely Shake-scene in a countrie. The play upon Shakespeares name and the
parody of a line from Henry VI. make the reference unmistakable.i The
London theatres were closed, first through riots and then through
plague, from June 1592 to April 1594, with the exception of about a
month at each Christmas during that period; and the companies were
dissolved or driven to the provinces. Even if Shakespeare had been
connected with Stranges men during their London seasons of 1592 and
1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them. Other activities may
have been sufficient to occupy the interval. The most important of these
was probably an attempt to win a reputation in the world of non-dramatic
poetry. Venus and Adonis was published about April 1593, and Lucrece
about May 1594. The poems were printed by Richard Field, in whom
Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance; and each has
a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, a brilliant and
accomplished favorite of the court, still in his nonage. A possibly
super-subtle criticism discerns an increased warmth in the tone of the
later dedication, which is supposed to argue a marked growth of
intimacy. The fact of this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed
down from Sir William Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first
regular biography of Shakespeare) that Southampton gave Shakespeare a
thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which
heheard he had a mind to. The date of this generosity is not specified,
and there is no known purchase by Shakespeare which can have cost
anything like the sum named. The mention of Southampton leads naturally
to the most difficult problem which a biographer has to handle, that of
the Sonnets. But this will be more conveniently taken up at a later
point, and it is only necessary here to put on record the probability
that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period now under
discussion. There is a surmise, which is not in itself other than
plausible, and which has certainly been supported with a good deal of
ingenious argument, that Shakespeares enforced leisure enabled him to
make of 1593 a Wanderjahr, and in particular that the traces of a visit
to northern Italy may clearly be seen in the local coloring of Lucrece
as compared with Venus and Adonis, and in that of the group of plays
which may be dated in or about 1594 and 1595 as compared with those that
preceded. It must, however, be borne in mind that, while Shakespeare may
perfectly well, at this or at some earlier time, have voyaged to Italy,
and possibly Denmark and even Germany as well, there is no direct
evidence to rely upon, and that inference from internal evidence is a
dangerous guide when a writer of so assimilative a temperament as that
of Shakespeare is concerned.

From the reopening of the theatres in the summer of 1594 onwards
Shakespeares status is in many ways clearer. He had certainly become a
leading member of the Chamberlains company by the following winter, when
his name appears for the first and only time in the treasurer Chamberof
the chambers accounts as one of the recipients of lains payment for
their performances at court; and there is every reason to suppose that
he continued to act with and write for the same associates to the close
of his career. The history of the company may be briefly told. At the
death of the lord chamberlain on the 22nd of July 1596, it passed under
the protection of his successor, George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, and once more
became the Lord Chamberlains men when he was appointed to that office
on. the 17th of March 1597. James I. on his accession took this company
under his patronage as grooms of the chamber, and during the remainder
of Shakespeares connection with the stage they were the Kings men. The
records of performances at court show that they were by far the most
favored of the companies, their nearest rivals being the company known
during the reign of Elizabeth as the Admirals, and afterwards as Prince
Henrys men. From the summer of 1594 to March 1603 they appear to have
played almost continuously in London, as the only provincial
performances by them which are upon record were during the autumn of
1597, when the London theatres were for a short time closed owing to the
interference of some of the players in politics. They travelled again
during 1603 when the plague was in London, and during at any rate
portions of the summers or autumns of most years thereafter. In 1594
they were playing at Newington Butts, and probably also at the Rose on
Bankside, and at the Cross Keys in the city. It is natural to suppose
that in. later years they used the Theatre in Shoreditch, since this was
the property of James Burbage, the father of their principal actor,
Richard Burbage. The Theatre was pulled down in 1598, and, after a short
interval during which the company may have played at the Curtain, also
in Shoreditch, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert rehoused them in
the Globe on Bankside, built in part out of the materials of the
Theatre. Here the profits of the enterprise were divided between the
members of the company as such and the owners of the building as
housekeepers, and shares in the house were held in joint tenancy by
Shakespeare and some of his leading fellows. About I6o8 another
playhouse became available for the company in. the private or winter
house of the Black Friars. This was also the property of the Burbages,
but had previously been leased to a company of boy players. A somewhat
similar arrangement as to profits was made.

Shakespeare is reported by Aubrey to have been a good actor, but Adam in
As You Like It, and the Ghost in Hamlet indicate the type of part which
he played. As a dramatist, however, he was the mainstay of the company
for at least some fifteen years, during which Ben Jonson, Dekker,
Beaumont and Fletcher, and Tourneur also contributed to their repertory.
On an average he must have written for them about two plays a year,
although his rapidity of production seems to have been greatest during
the opening years of the period. There was also no doubt a good deal of
rewriting of his own earlier work, and also perhaps, at the beginning,
of that of others. Occasionally he may have entered into collaboration,
as, for example, at the end of his career, with Fletcher.

In a worldly sense he clearly flourished, and about 1596, if not
earlier, he was able to resume relations as a moneyed man with
Stratford-on-Avon. There is no evidence to show whether he had visited
the town in the interval, or whether he had brought his wife and family
to London. His son Hamnet died and was buried at Stratford in 1596.
During the last ten years John Shakespeares affairs had remained
unprosperous. He incurred fresh debt, partly through becoming surety for
his brother Henry; and in 1592 his name was included in a list of
recusants dwelling at or near Stratford-on-Avon,with a note by the
commissioners that in his case the cause was believed to be the fear of
process for debt. There is no reason to doubt this explanation, or to
seek a religious motive in ~ John Shakespeares abstinence from church.
William Shakespeares purse must have made a considerable difference. The
prosecutions for debt ceased, and in 1597 a fresh action was brought in
Chancery for the recovery of Asbies from the Lamberts. Like the last, it
seems to have been without result. Another step was taken to secure the
dignity of the family by an application in the course of 1596 to the
heralds for the confirmation of a coat of arms said to have been granted
to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff of Stratford. The bearings were
or on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, the crest a falcon his
wings displayed argent supporting a spear or steeled argent, and the
motto Non sanz droict. The grant was duly made, and in 1599 there was a
further application for leave to impale the arms of Arden, in right of
Shakespeares mother. No use, however, of the Arden arms by the
Shakespeares can be traced. In 1597 Shakespeare made an important
purchase for 60 of the house and gardens of New Place in Chapel Street.
This was one of the largest houses in Stratford, and its acquisition an
obvious triumph for the ex-poacher. Presumably John Shakespeare ended
his days in peace. A visitor to his shop remembered him as a
merry-cheekt old man always ready to crack a jest with his son. He died
in 1601, and his wife in 1608, and the Henley Street houses passed to
Shakespeare. Aubrey records that he paid annual visits to Stratford, and
there is evidence that he kept in touch with the life of the place. The
correspondence of his neighbors, the Quineys, in 1598 contains an
application to him for a loan to Richard Quiney upon a visit to London,
and a discussion of possible investments for him in the neighborhood of
Stratford. In 1602 he took, at a rent of 2S. 6d. a year, a copyhold
cottage in Chapel Lane, perhaps for the use of his gardener. In the same
year he invested 320 In the purchase of an estate consisting of 107
acres in the open fields of Old Stratford, together with a farm-house,
garden and orchard, 20 acres of pasture and common rights; and in 1605
he spent another 440 in the outstanding term of a lease of certain great
tithes in Stratford parish, which brought in an income of about 60 a
year.

Meanwhile London remained his headquarters. Here Malone thought that he
had evidence, now lost, of his residence in Southwark as early as 1596,
and as late as 1608. It is known that payments of subsidy were due from
him tions. for 1597 and 1598 in the parish of St Helens, Bishopsgate,
and that an arrear was ultimately collected in the liberty of the Clink.
He had no doubt migrated from Bishopsgate when the Globe upon Bankside
was opened by the Chamberlains men. There is evidence that in 1604 he
lay, temporarily or permanently, in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a
tire-maker of French extraction, at the corner of Silver Street and
Monkwell Street in Cripplegate. A recently recovered note by Aubrey, if
it really refers to Shakespeare (which is not quite certain), is of
value as throwing light not only upon his abode, but upon his
personality. Aubrey seems to have derived it from William Beeston the
actor, and through him from John Lacy, an actor of the kings company. It
is as follows: The more to be admired q~uod} he was not a
company-keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, & if
invited to court, he was in paine. Against this testimony to the
correctness of Shakespeares morals are to be placed an anecdote of a
green-room amour picked up by a Middle Temple student in 1602 and a
Restoration scandal which made him the father by the hostess of the
Crown Inn at Oxford, where he baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir
William D~venant, who was born in February 1606. His credit at court is
implied by Ben Jonsons references to his flights that so did take Eliza
and our James, and by stories of the courtesies which passed between him
and Elizabeth while he was playing a kingly part in her presence, of the
origin of The Merry Wives of Windsor in her desire to see Falstaff in
love, and of an autograph letter written to honor him by King James. It
was noticed with some surprise by Henry Chettle that his honied muse
dropped no sable tear to celebrate the death of the queen. Southamptons
patronage may have introduced him to the brilliant circle that gathered
round the earl of Essex, but there is no reason to suppose that he or
his company were held personally responsible for the performance of
Richard II. at the command of some of the followers of Essex as a
prelude to the disastrous rising 0 February 1601. The editors of the
First Folio speak also of favors received by the author in his lifetime
from William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip Herbert,
earl of Montgomery.

He appears to have been on cordial terms with his fellows of the stage.
One of them, Augustine Phillips, left him a small legacy in 1605, and in
his own will he paid a F~tends. similar compliment to Richard Burbage,
and to John Heminge and Henry Condeli, who afterwards edited his plays.
His relations with Ben Jonson, whom he is said by Rowe to have
introduced to the world as a playwright, have been much canvassed. Jests
are preserved which, even if apocryphal, indicate considerable intimacy
between the two. This is not inconsistent with occasional passages of
arms. The anonymous author of The Return from Parnassus (2nd part;
1602), for example, makes Kempe, the actor, allude to a purge which
Shakespeare gave Jonson, in return for his attack on some of his rivals
in The Poetaster.i It has been conjectured that this purge was the
description of Ajax and his humours in Troilus and Cressida. Jonson, on
the other hand, who was criticism incarnate, did not spare Shakespeare
either in his prologues or in his private conversation. He told Drummond
of Hawthornden that Shakspeer wanted arte. But the verses which he
contributed to the First Folio are generous enough to make all amends,
and in his Discoveries (pub. 164,; written c. 1624 and later), while
regretting Shakespeares excessive facility and the fact that he often
fell into those things, could not escape laughter, he declares him to
have been honest and of an open and free nature, and says that, for his
own part, I lovd the man and do honor his memory (on this side idolatry)
as much as any. According to the memoranda-book (1661-1663) of the Rev.
John Ward (who became vicar of Stratford in 1662), Jonson and Michael
Drayton, himself a Warwickshire poet, had been drinking with Shakespeare
when he caught the~ fever of which he died; and Thomas Fuller
(1608-1661), whose Worthies was published in 1662, gives an imaginative
description of the wit combats, of which many took place between the two
mighty contemporaries.

Of Shakespeares literary reputation during his lifetime there is ample
evidence. He is probably neither the Willy of Spensers Tears of the
Muses, nor the Aetion of Coatemhis Cohn Clouts Come Home Again. But from
the porarj time of the publication of Venus and Adonis and i~~put~~
Lucrece honorific allusions to his work both as poet lou.

anddramatist, and often to himself by name, come thick and fast from
writers of every kind and degree. Perhaps the most interesting of these
from the biographical point of view are those contained in the Palladis
Tamia, a kind of literary handbook published by Francis Meres in 1598;
for Meres not only extols him as the most excellent in both kinds comedy
and tragedyl for the stage, and one of the most passionate among us to
bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love, but also takes the trouble
to give a list of twelve plays already written, which serves as a
starting-point for all modern, attempts at a chronological arrangement
of his work. It is moreover from Meres that we first hear of his sugred
Sonnets among his private friends. Two of these sonnets were printed in
1599

I Kempe (speaking to Burbage), Few of the university pen plays well.
They smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer (sic)
Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why heres
our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson too. 0
that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace giving the
Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare bath given him a purge that
made him beray his credit.

in a volume of miscellaneous verse called The Passionate Pilgrim. This
was ascribed upon the title-page to Shakespeare, but probably, so far as
most of its contents were concerned, without justification. The bulk of
Shakespeares sonnets remained unpublished until 1609.

About 1610 Shakespeare seems to have left London, and entered upon the
definite occupation of his house at New Place, Stratford. Here he lived
the life of a retired ~ gentleman, on friendly if satiricaJ terms with
the richest of his neighbors, the Combes, and interested in local
affairs, such as a bill for the improvement of the highways in 1611, or
a proposed enclosure of the open fields at Welcombe in 1614, which might
affect his income or his comfort. He had his garden with its
mulberry-tree, and his farm in the immediate neighborhood. His brothers
Gilbert and Richard were still alive; the latter died in 1613. His
sister Joan had married William Hart, a hatter, and in 1616 was dwelling
in one of his houses in Henley Street. Of his daughters, the eldest,
Susanna, had married in 1607 John Hall (d. 1635), a physician of some
reputation. They dwelt in Stratford, and had one child, Elizabeth,
afterwards Lady Barnard (1608-1670). The younger, Judith, married Thomas
Quiney, a vintner, also of Stratford, two months before her fathers
death. At Stratford the last few of the plays may have been written, but
it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeares connection with the Kings
company ended when the Globe was burnt down during a performance of
Henry VIII. on the 29th of June I6 13. Certainly his retirement did not
imply an absolute break with London life. in 1613 he devised an impresa,
or emblem, to be painted by Richard Burbage, and worn in the tilt on
Accession day by the earl of Rutland, who had been one of the old circle
of Southampton and Essex. In the same year he purchased for 140 a
freehold house in the Blackfriars, near the Wardrobe. This was conveyed
to trustees, apparently in order to bar the right which his widow would
otherwise have had to dower. In 1615 this purchase involved Shakespeare
in a lawsuit for the surrender of the title-deeds. Richard Davies, a
Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the i7th century, reports that
the poet died a papist, and the statement deserves more attention than
it has received from biographers. There is indeed little to corroborate
it; for an alleged spiritual testament of John Shakespeare is of
suspected origin, and Daviess own words suggest a late conversion rather
than an hereditary faith. On the other hand, there is little to refute
it beyond an entry in the accounts of Stratford corporation for drink
given in 1614 to a preacher at the Newe Place.

Shakespeare made his will on the 25th of March 1616, apparently in some
haste, as the executed deed is a draft with many erasures and
interlineations. There were legacies to his daughter Judith Quiney and
his sister Joan Hart, and remembrances to friends both in Warwickshire
and in London; but the real estate was left to his sister Susanna Hall
under a strict entail which points to a desire on the part of the
testator to found a family. Shakespeares wife, for whom other provision
must have been made, is only mentioned in an interlineation, by which
the second best bed with the furniture was bequeathed to her. Much
nonsense has been written about this, but it seems quite natural. The
best bed was an important chattel, which would go with the house. The
estate was after all not a large one. Aubreys estimate of its annual
value as 200 or 300 a year sounds reasonable enough, and John Wards
statement that Shakespeare spent 1000 a year must surely be an
exaggeration. The sum-total of his known investments amounts to 960. Mr
Sidney Lee calculates that his theatrical income must have reached 600 a
year; but it may be doubted whether this also is not a considerable
overestimate. It must be remembered that the purchasing value of money
in the 17th century is generally regarded as having been about eight
times its present value. Shakespeares interest in the houses of the
Globe and Blackfriars probably determined on his death.

A month after his will was signed, on the 23rd of April 1616,
Shakespeare died, and as a tithe-owner was buried in the chancel of the
parish church. Some doggerel upon the stone that covers the grave has
been assigned by local tradition to his own pen. A more elaborate
monument, with a bust by the sculptor Gerard Johnson, was in due course
set up on the chancel wall. D th Anne Shakespeare followed her husband
on the 6th ~ of August 1623. The family was never founded. Shakespeares
grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, made two childless marriages, the first
with Thomas Nash of Stratford, the second with John, afterwards Sir
John, Barnard of Abington. Manor, Northants. His daughter Judith Quiney
had three sons, all of whom had died unmarried by 1639. There were,
therefore, no direct descendants of Shakespeare in existence after Lady
Barnards death in 1670. Those of his sister, Joan Hart, could however
still be traced in 1864. On Lady Barnards death the Henley Street houses
passed to the Harts, in whose family they remained until 1806. They were
then sold, and in 1846 were bought for the public. They are now held
with Anne Hathaways Cottage at Shottery as the Birthplace Trust. Lady
Barnard had disposed of the Blackfriars house. The rest of the property
was sold under the terms of her will, and New Place passed, first to the
Cloptons who rebuilt it, and then to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who
pulled it down in 1759. The site now forms a public recreation-ground,
and hard by is a memorial building with a theatre in which performances
of Shakespeares plays are given annually in April. Both the Memorial and
the Birthplace contain museums, in which books, documents and portraits
of Shakespearian interest, together with relics of greater or less
authenticity, are stored.

No letter or other writing in Shakespeares hand can be proved to exist,
with the exception of three signatures upon his will, one upon a
deposition (May II, 1612) in a lawsuit with which he was remotely
concerned, and two upon deeds (March io and II, 1613) ~fl connection
with the purchase of his Blackfriars house. A copy of Florios
translation of Montaigne (1603) in the British Museum, a copy of the
Aldine edition of Ovids Metamorphoses (1502) in the Bodleian, and a copy
of the 1612 edition of Sir Thomas Norths translation of Plutarchs Lives
of the Noble Grecians and Romaines in. the Greenock Library, have all
been put forward with some plausibility as bearing his autograph name or
initials, and, in the third case, a marginal note by him. A passage in
the manuscript of the play of Sir Thomas More has been ascribed to him
(vide infra), and, if the play is his, might be in his handwriting.
Aubrey records that he was a handsome, well-shapt man, and the lameness
attributed to him by some writers has its origin only in a too literal
interpretation of certain references to spiritual disabilities in the
Sonnets.

A collection. of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and
Tragedies was printed at the press of William and Isaac Jaggard, and
issued by a group of booksellers in I6a3. Dr s This volume is known as
the First Folio. It has a dedications to the earls of Pembroke and
Montgomery, and to the great Variety of Readers, both of which are
signed by two of Shakespeares fellows at the Globe, John Heminge and
Henry Condell, and commendatory verses by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland,
Leonard Digges and an unidentified I. M. The Droeshout engraving forms
part of the title-page. The contents include, with the exception of
Pericles, all of the thirtyseven plays now ordinarily printed in
editions of Shakespeares works. Of these eighteen were here published
for the first time. The other eighteen bad already appeared in one or
more separate editions, known as the Quartos.

The following list gives the date of the First Quarto of each such play,
and also that of any later Quarto which differs materially from the
First.

The Quarto Editions.

Titus Andronicus (1594). A Midsummer Nights Dream 3 Henry VI. (1595).
The Merchant of Venice (1600).

Richard II. (1597, ,6o8). Much Ado About Nothing (1600).

Richard III. (15~7). The Merry Wives of Windsor Romeo and Juliet (,5~7,
1599). (1602).

Loves Labors Lost (1598). Hamlet (4603, 1604).

I Henry IV. (1598). King Lear (1608).

2 Henry IV. ~16oo). Troilus and Cressida (1609).

Henry V. (1600). Othello (1622).

Entries in the Register of copyrights kept by the Company of Stationers
indicate that editions of As You Like II and Anthony awl Cleopatra were
contemplated but not published in 1600 and 1608 respectively.

The Quartos differ very much in character. Some of them contain texts
which are practically identical with those of the First Folio; others
show variations so material as to suggest that some revision, either by
rewriting or by shortening for stage purposes, took place. Amongst the
latter are 2, 3 Henry VI., Richard III., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry
Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and King Lear. Many scholars doubt whether the
Quarto versions of 2, 3 Henry VI., which appeared under the titles of
The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York
and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, are
Shakespeares work at all. It seems clear that the Quartos of The
Troublesome Reign of Jo/zn King of England (1591) and Tile Taming of A
Shrew (1594),although treated forcopyright purposes as identical with
the plays of King John and The Taming of the Shrew, which he founded
upon them, are not his. The First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V.,
The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet seem to be mainly based, not upon
written texts of the plays, but upon versions largely made up out of
shorthand notes taken at the theatre by the agents of a piratical
bookseller. A similar desire to exploit the commercial value of
Shakespeares reputation probably led to the appearance of his name or
initials upon the title-pages of Locr-ine (15~5), Sir John Oldcastle
(1600), Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), The London Prodigal (1605), The
Puritan (1607), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and Pericles (I 609). It is
not likely that, with the exception of the last three acts of Pericles,
he wrote any part of these plays, some of which were not even produced
by his company. They were not included in the First Folio of 1623, nor
in a reprint of it in 1632, known as the Second Folio; but all seven
were appended to the second issue (1664) of the Third Folio (1663), and
to the Fourth Folio of 1685. Shakespeare is named as joint author with
John Fletcher on the title-page of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), and
with William Rowley on that of The Birth of Merlin (1662); there is no
reason for rejecting the former ascription or for accepting the latter.
Late entries in the Stationers Register assign to him Cardenio (with
Fletcher), Henry I. and Henry II. (both with Robert Davenport), King
Stephen, Duke Humphrey, and Iphis and lanthe; but none of these plays is
now extant. Modern conjecture has attempted to trace his hand in other
plays, of which Arden of Feversham (1592), Edward III. (1596), Mucedorus
(1598), and The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608) are the most important;
it is quite possible that he may have had a share in Edward III. A play
on Sir Thomas More, which has been handed down in manuscript, contains a
number of passages, interpolated in various handwritings, to meet
requirements of the censor; and there are those who assign one of these
(ii. 4~ 1-17 2) to Shakespeare.

Unfortunately the First Folio does not give the dates at which the plays
contained i,n it were written or produced; and the endeavour to supply
this deficiency has been one of the Dates, main preoccupations of more
than a century of Shake spearian scholarship, since the pioneer essay of
Edmund Malone in his An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the
Plays of Shakespeare were Written (1778). The investigation is not a
mere piece of barren antiquarianism, for on it depends the possibility
of appreciating the work of the worlds greatest poet, not as if it were
an articulated whole like a philosophical system, but in its true aspect
as the reflex of a vital and constantly developing personality. A
starting-point is afforded by the dates of the Quartos and the entries
in the Stationers Register which refer to them, and by the list of plays
already in existence in 1598 which is inserted by Francis Meres in his
Palladis Tamia of that year, and which, while not necessarily exhaustive
of Shakespeares pre-1598 writing, includes The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
The Comedy of Errors, Loves Labors Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, The
Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John,
Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, as well as a mysterious Loves
Labors Won, which has been conjecturally identified with several plays,
but most plausibly with The Taming of the Shrew. There is a mass of
supplementary evidence, drawn partly from definite notices in other
writings or in diaries, letters, account-books, and similar records,
partly from allusions to contemporary persons and events in the plays
themselves, partly from parallels of thought and expression. between
each play and those near to it in point of time, and partly from
considerations of style, including the so-called metrical tests, which
depend upon an. analysis of Shakespeares varying feeling for rhythm at
different stages of his career. The total result is certainly not a
demonstration, but in the logical sense an hypothesis which serves to
colligate the facts and is consistent with itself and with the known
events of Shakespeares external life.

The following table, which is an attempt to arrange the original dates
of production of the plays without regard to possible revisions, may be
taken as fairly representing the common results of recent scholarship.
It is framed on the ~assumption that, as indeed John Ward tells us was
the case, Shakespeare ordinarily wrote two plays a year; but it will be
understood that neither the order in which the plays are given nor the
distribution of them over the years lays claim to more than approximate
accuracy.

Chronology of the Plays.

1591. 1600.

(I, 2) The Contention of York and (21) The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Lancaster (2, 3 Henry VI). (22) As You Like It.

1592. 160!.

(3) 1 Henry VI. (23) Hamlet.

(The theatres were closed for riot (24) Twelfth Night.

and plague from June to the end 1602.

of December.) (25) Troilus and Cressida.

1593. (26) Alls Well that Ends Well.

(~) Richard III.

(5) Edward III. (part only). 1603.

(6) The Comedy of Errors. (The theatres were closed on (The theatres
were closed for Elizabeths death in March, and plague from the beginning
of remained closed for plague February to the end of December.)
throughout the year.)

1594. 1604.

(7) Titus Andronicus. (27) Measure for Measure.

(The theatres were closed for (28) Othello.

plague during February and 1605.

March.) (29) Macbeth.

(8) Taming of the Shrew. (30) King Lear.

(g) Loves Labors Lost. 1606.

(1 o) Romeo and Juliet. (31) Anthony and Cleopatra.

595. (32) Coriolanus.

(ii) A Midsummer Nights 1607.

Dream. (~~) Timon of Athens (un (12) The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
finished).

(13) King John. 1608.

1596.

(14) Richard II. (~~) Pericles (part only).

(15) The Merchant of Venice. 1609.

1597. (35) Cymbeline.

(The theatres were closed for 1610.

misdemeanour froth the end of (36) The Winters Tale.

July to October.) 1611.

(16) I Henry IV. (37) The Tempest.

1598. 1612.

(17) 2 Henry IV. . -

(18) Much Ado About Nothing. 1613.

1599. (38) The Two Noble Kinsmen (io) Henry V. (part only).,

(20) Julius Caesar. (ag) Henry VIII. (part only).

A more detailed account of the individual plays may now be attempted.
The figures here prefixed correspond to those in the table above.

1, 2. The relation of The Contention of York and 1~ancaster to 2, 3
Henry VI. and the extent of Shakespeares responsibility for either or
both works have long been subjects of Composicontroversy. The extremes
of critical opinion are to be found in a theory which regards
Shakespeare as the sole author of 2, 3 Henry VI. and The Contention as a
shortened and piratical version of the original plays, and in a theory
which regards The Contention as written in collaboration by Marlowe,
Greene and possibly Peele, and a, 3 Henry VI. as a revision of The
Contention written, also in collaboration, by Marlowe and Shakespeare. A
comparison of the two texts leaves it hardly possible to doubt that the
differences between them are to be explained by revision rather than by
piracy; but the question of authorship is more difficult. Greenes
parody, in the Shakescene passage of his Groats-worth of Wit (1592), of
a line which occurs both in The Contention and in 3 Henry VI., while it
clearly suggests Shakespeares connection with the plays, is evidence
neither for nor against the participation of other men, and no
sufficient criterion exists for distinguishing between Shakespeares
earliest writing and that of possible collaborators on grounds of style.
But there is nothing inconsistent between the revisers work in 2, 3
Henry VI. and on the one hand Richard III. or on the other the original
matter of The Contention, which the reviser follows and elaborates scene
by scene. It is difficult to assign to any one except Shakespeare the
humour of the Jack Cade scenes, the whole substance of which is in The
Contention as well as in Henry VI. Views which exclude Shakespeare
altogether may be left out of account. Hen-ry VI. is not in Meress list
of his plays, but its inclusion in the First Folio is an almost certain
ground for assigning to him some share, if only as reviser, in the
completed work.

3. A very similar problem is afforded by 1 Henry VI., and here also it
is natural, in the absence of tangible evidence to the contrary, to hold
by Shakespeares substantial responsibility for the play as it stands. It
is quite possible that it also may be a revised version, although in
this case no earlier version exists; and if so the Talbot scenes (iv.
2-7) and perhaps also the Temple Gardens scene (ii. 4), which are
distinguished by certain qualities of style from the rest of the play,
may date from the period of revision. Thomas Nash refers to the
representation of Talbot on the stage in his Pierce Penilesse, his
Supplication to the Divell (1592), and it is probable that I Henry VI.
is to be identified with the Harey the vj recorded in Henslowes Diary to
have been acted as a new play by Lord Stranges men, probably at the
Rose, on the 3rd of March 1592. If so, it is a reasonable conjecture
that the two parts of The Contention were originally written at some
date before the beginning of Henslowes record in the previous February,
and were revised so as to fall into a series with I Henry VI. in the
latter end of 1592.

4. The series as revised can only be intended to lead directly up to
Richard III., and this relationship, together with its style as compared
with that of the plays belonging to the autumn of 1594, suggest the
short winter season of 159 21593 as the most likely time for the
production of Richard III. There is a difficulty in that it is not
included in Henslowes list of the plays acted by Lord Stranges men
during that season. But it may quite well have been produced by the only
other company which appeared at court during the Christmas festivities,
Lord Pembrokes. The mere fact that Shakespeare wrote a play, or more
than one play, for Lord Stranges men during 1592-1594 does not prove
that he never wrote for any other company during the same period; and
indeed there is plenty of room for guess-work as to the relations
between Stranges and Pembrokes men. The latter are not known to have
existed before 1592, and many difficulties would be solved by the
assumption that they originated out of a division of Stranges, whose
numbers, since their amalgamation with the Admirals, may have been too
much inflated to enable them to undertake as a whole the summer tour of
that year. If so, Pembrokes probably took over the Henry VI. series of
plays, since The Contention, or at least the True Tragedy, -was
published as performed by them, and completed it with Richard III. on
their return to London at Christmas. It will be necessary to return to
this theory in connection with the discussion of Titus A ndroni.cus and
The Taming of the Shrew. The principal historical source for Henry VI.
was Edward Halls The Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of
Lancaster and York (1542), and for Richard III., -as for all
Shakespeares later historical plays, the second edition (1587) of
Raphael Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (i5l~i).
An earlier play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (i5~4), seems to
have contributed little if anything to Richard III.

5. Many scholars think that at any rate the greater part of the first
two acts of Edward III., containing the story of Edwards wooing of the
countess of Salisbury, are by Shakespeare; and, if so, it is to about
the time of Richard III. that the style of his contribution seems to
belong. The play was entered in the Stationer~ Registei on December 1,
1595. The Shakespearian scenes are based on the 46th Novel in William
Paynters Palace of Pleasure (1566). The line, Lilies that fester smell
far worse than weeds (ii. 1.451), is repeated verbatim in the 94th
sonnet.

6. To the winter season of 1592-1593 may also be assigned with fair
probability Shakespeares first experimental comedy, The Comedy of
Errors, and if his writing at one and the same time for Pembrokes and
for another company is not regarded as beyond the bounds of conjecture,
it becomes tempting to identify this with the gelyous comodey produced,
probably by Stranges men, for Henslowe as a new play on January 5, 1593.
The play contains a reference to the wars of succession in France which
would fit any date from 1589 to 594. The plot is taken from the
Menaethmi, and to a smaller extent from the Amphitruo of Plautus.
William Warners translation of the Menaech,ni was entered in the
Stationers Register on June 10, 1594. A performance of The Comedy of
Errors by a company of base and common fellows (including Shakespeare?)
is recorded in the Gesta Grayorum as taking place in Grays Inn hail on
December 28, 1594.

7. Titus Andronicus is another play in which many scholars have refused
to see the hand of Shakespeare, but the double testimony of its
inclusion in Meress list and in the First Folio makes it unreasonable to
deny him some part in it. This may, however, only have been the part of
a reviser, working, like the reviser of The Contention, upon the
dialogue rather than the structure of a crude tragedy of the school of
Kyd. In fact a stage tradition is reported by Edward Ravenscroft, a late
17th-century adapter of the play, to the effect that Shakespeare did no
more than give a few master-touches to the work of a private author. The
play was entered in the Stationers Register on February 6, 1594, and was
published in the same year with a title-page setting out that it had
been acted by the companies of Lords Derby (i.e. Strange, who had
succeeded to his fathers title on September 25, 1593), Pembroke and
Sussex. It is natural to take this list as indicating the order in which
the three companies named had to do with it, but it is probable that
only Sussexs had played Shakespeares version. Henslowe records the
production by this company of Titus and A ndronicus as a new play on
January 23, 1594, only a few days before the theatres were closed by
plague. For the purposes of Henslowes financial arrangements with the
company a rewritten play may have been classed as new. Two years earlier
he had appended the same description to a play of Tittus and Vespacia,
produced by Stranges men on April II, I592. At first sight the title
suggests a piece founded on the lives of the emperor Titus and
Vespasian, but the identification of the play with an early version of
Titus Andronicus is justified by the existence of a rough German
adaptation, which follows the general outlines of Shakespeares play, but
in which one of the sons of Titus is named Vespasian instead of Lucius.
The ultimate source of the plot is unknown. It cannot be traced in any
of the Byzantine chroniclers. Stranges men seem to have been still
playing Titus in January 1593, and it was probably not transferred to
Pembrokes until the companies were driven from London by the plague of
that year. Pembrokes are known from a letter of Henslowes to have been
ruined by August, and it is to be suspected that Sussexs, who appeared
in London for the first time at the Christmas of I5c13, acquired their
stock of plays and transferred these to the Chamberlains men, when the
companies were again reconstituted in the summer of 1594. The revision
of Titus and Vespasian into Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare may have
been accomplished in the interval between these two transactions. The
Chamberlains men were apparently playing Andronicus in June. The stock
of Pembrokes men probably included, as well as Titus and Vespasian, both
Henry VI. and Richard III., which also thus passed to the Chamberlains
company.

8. In the same way was probably also acquired an old play of The Taming
of A Shrew. This, which can be traced back as far as 1589, was published
as acted by Pembrokes men in 1594. In June of that year it was being
acted by the Chamberlains, but more probably in the revised version by
Shakespeare, which bears the slightly altered title of The Taming of The
Shrew. This is a much more free adaptation of its original than had been
attempted in the case of Henry VI., and the Warwicksbire allusions in
the Induction are noteworthy. Some critics have doubted whether
Shakespeare was the sole author of The Shrew, and others have assigned
him a share in A Shrew, but neither theory has any very substantial
foundation. The origins of the play, which is to be classed as a farce
rather than a comedy, are to be found ultimately in widely distributed
folk-tales, and more immediately in Ariostos I Suppositi (1509) as
translated in George Gascoignes The Supposes (1566). It may have been
Shakespeares first task for the newly established Chamberlains company
of 1594 to furbish up the old farce. Thenceforward there is no reason to
think that he ever wrote for any other company.

9. Loves Labors Lost has often been regarded as the first of
Shakespeares plays, and has sometimes been placed as early as 1589.
There is, however, no proof that Shakespeare was writing before 1592 or
thereabouts. The characters of Loves Labors Lost are evidently suggested
by Henry of Navarre, his followers Biron and Longaville, and the
Catholic League leader, the duc de Maine. These personages would have
been familiar at any time from 1585 onwards. The absence of the play
from the lists in Henslowes Diary does not leave it impossible that it
should have preceded the formation of the Chamberlains company, but
certainly renders this less likely; and its lyric character perhaps
justifies its being grouped with the series of plays that began in the
autumn of 1594. No entry of the play is found in the StationersRegister,
and it is quite possible that the present First Quarto of 1598 was not
really the first edition. The title-page professes to give the play as
it was corrected and augmented for the Christmas either of 1597 or of
1598. It was again revived for that of 1604. No literary source is known
for its incidents.

10. Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 159l as played by Lord
Hunsdons men, was probably produced somewhat before A Midsummer Nights
Dream, as its incidents seem to have suggested the parody of the Pyramus
and Thisbe interlude. An attempt to date it in 1591 is hardly justified
by the Nurses references to an earthquake eleven years before and the
fact that there was a real earthquake in London in i 580. The text seems
to have been partly revised before the issue of the Second Quarto in
1599. There had been an earlier play on the subject, but the immediate
source used by Shakespeare was Arthur Brookes narrative poem Romeus and
Juliet (1562).

11. A Midsummer Nights Dream, with its masque-like scenes of fairydom
and the epithalamium at its close, has all the air of having been
written less for the public stage than for some courtly wedding; and the
compliment paid by Oberon to the fair vestal throned by the west makes
it probable that it was a wedding at which Elizabeth was present. Two
fairly plausible occasions have been suggested. The wedding of Mary
countess of Southampton with Sir Thomas Heneage on the 2nd of May 1594
would fit the May-day setting of the plot; but a widowed countess hardly
answers to the little western flower of the allegory, and there are
allusions to events later in 1594 and in particular to the raihy weather
of June and July, which indicate a somewhat later date. The wedding of
William Stanley, earl of Derby, brother of the lord Strange for whose
players Shakespeare had written, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the
earl of Oxford, which took place at Greenwich on the 26th of January
1595, perhaps fits the conditions best. It has been fancied that
Shakespeare was present when certain stars shot madly from their spheres
in the Kenilworth fireworks of 1575, but if he had any such
entertainment in mind it is more likely to have been the more recent one
given to Elizabeth by the earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591. There
appears to be no special source for the play beyond Chaucers Knights
Tale and the widespread fairy lore of western Europe.

12. No very definite evidence exists for the date of The Two Gentlemen
of Verona, other than the mention of it in Palladis Tamia. It is
evidently a more rudimentary essay in the genre of romantic comedy than
The Merchant of Venice, with which it has other affinities in its
Italian coloring and its use of the inter-relations of love and
friendship as a theme; and it may therefore be roughly assigned to the
neighborhood of 1595. The plot is drawn from various examples of
contemporary fiction, especially from the story of the shepherdess
!ilismena in Jorge de Montemayors Diana (1559). A play of Felix and
Philiomena had already been given at court in 1585.

13. King John is another play for which 595 seems a likely date, partly
on. account of its style, and partly from the improbability of a play on
an independent subject drawn from English history being interpolated in
the middle either of the Yorkist or of the Lancastrian series. It would
seem that Shakespeare had before him an old play of the Queens men,
called The Troublesome Reign of King John. This was published in i~91,
and again, with W. Sh. on the title-page, in 1611. For copyright
purposes King John appears to have been regarded as a revision of The
Troublesome Reign, and in fact the succession of incidents in. the two
plays is much the same. Shakespeares dialogue, however, owes little or
nothing to that of his predecessor.

14. Richard II. can be dated with some accuracy by a comparison of the
two editions of Samuel Daniels narrative poem on The Civil Wars Between
the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, both of which bear the date of
I595 and were therefore issued between March 25, 1595 and March 24, 1596
of the modern reckoning. The second of these editions, but not the
first, contains some close parallels to the play. From the first two
quartos of Richard II., published in. 1597 and 1598, the deposition
scene was omitted, although it was clearly part of the original
structure of the play, and its removal leaves an obvious mutilation in
the text. There is some reason to suppose that this was due to a popular
tendency to draw seditious parallels between Richard and Elizabeth; and
it became one of the charges against the earl of Essex and his
fellow-conspirators in the ,abortive meute of February I60I, that they
had procured a performance of a play on Richards fate in order to
stimulate their followers. As the actors were the Lord Chamberlains men,
this play can hardly have been any other than Shakespeares. The
deposition scene was not printed until after Elizabeths death, in the
Third Quarto of 1608.

15. The Merchant of Venice, certainly earlier than July 22,

1598, on which date it was entered in the Stationers Register, and
possibly inspired by the machinations of the Jew poisoner Roderigo
Lopez, (who was executed in June 1594, shows a considerable advance in
comic and melodramatic power over any~ of the earlier plays, and is
assigned by a majority of scholars to about 1596. The various stories of
which its plot is compounded are based upon common themes of folk-tales
and Italian novelle. It is possible that Shakespeare may have had before
him a play called The Jew, of which there are traces as early as 1579,
and in which motives illustrating the greedinesse of worldly chusers and
the bloody mindes of usurers appear to have been already combined.
Something may also be owing to Marlowes play of The Jew of Malta.

16, 17. The existence of Richard II. is assumed throughout in Henry IV.,
which probably therefore followed it after no long interval. The first
part was published in 1598, the second not until 1600, but both parts
must have been in existence before the entry of the first part in the
Stationers Register on February 25th 1598, since Falstaff is named in
this entry, and a slip in a speech-prefix of the second part, which was
not entered in the Register until August 23rd I600, betrays that it was
written when the character still bore the name of Sir John Oldcastle.
Richard James, in his dedication. to The Legend of Sir John Oldcastle
about 1625, and Rowe in 1709 both bear witness to the substitution of
the one personage for the other, which Rowe ascribes to the intervention
of Elizabeth, and James to that of some descendants of Oldcastle, one of
whom was probably Lord Cobham. There is an allusion to the incident and
an acknowledgment of the wrong done to the famous Lollard martyr in the
epilogue to 2 Henry IV. itself. Probably Shakespeare found Oldcastle,
with very little else that was of service to him, in an old play called
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been acted by Tarlton
and the Queens men at least as far back as 1588, and of which an
edition. was printed in. 1598. Falstaff himself is a somewhat libelous
presentment of the 15th century leader, ~r John Fastolf, who had already
figured in Henry VI.; but presumably Fastolf has no titled descendants
alive in 1598.

18. An entry in the Stationers Register during 1600 shows that Much Ado
About Nothing was in existence, although its publication was then
directed to be stayed. It may plausibly be regarded as the earliest play
not included in Meress list. In. 1613 it was revived before James I.
under the alternative title of Benedick and Beatrice. Dogberry is said
by Aubrey to have been taken from a constable at Grendon in
Buckinghamshire. There is no very definite literary source for the play,
although some of its incidents are to be found in Ariostos Orlando
Furioso and Bandellos novelle, and attempts have been made to establish
relationships between it and two early German plays, Jacob Ayrers Die
Schone Phaenicia and the Vincentius Ladiszlaus of Duke Henry Julius of
Brunswick.

19. The completion. of the Lancastrian series of histories by Henry V.
can be safely placed in or about 1599, since there is an allusion in one
of the choruses to the military operations in Ireland of the earl of
Essex,who crossed on March 27 and returned on September 28, 1599. The
First Quarto, which was first stayed with Much Ado About Nothing and
then published in. 1600, is a piratical text, and does not include the
choruses. A geniune and perhaps slightly revised version was first
published in the First Folio.

20. That Julius Caesar also belongs to 1599 is shown, not only by its
links with Henry V. but also by an allusion to it in John Weevers Mirror
of Martyrs, a work written two years before its publication in 1601, and
by a notice of a performance on September 2Ist,1599 by Thomas Platter of
Basel in an account of a visit to London. This was the first of
Shakespeares Roman plays, and, like those that followed, was based upon.
Plutarchs Lives as translated from the French of Jacques Amyot and
published by Sir Thomas North in 1580. Itwasalso Shakespeares first
tragedy since Romeo and Juliet.

21. It is reported by John Dennis, in the preface to The Comical Gallant
(1702), that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the express
desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love, and was
finished by Shakespeare in the space of a fortnight. A date at the end
of 1599 or the beginning of 1600, shortly after the completion of the
historical Falstaff plays, would be the most natural one for this
enterprise, and with such a date the evidence of style agrees. The play
was entered in the Stationers Register on January 18th, 1602. The First
Q uarto of the same year appears to contain an earlier version of the
text than that of the First Folio. Among the passages omitted in the
revision was an allusion to the adventures of the duke of Wurttemberg
and count of Mompelgard, whose attempts to secure the Garter had brought
him into notice. The Windsor setting makes it possible that The Merry
Wives was produced at a Garter feast, and perhaps with the assistance of
the children of Windsor Chapel in the fairy parts. The plot has its
analogies to various incidents in Italian novelle and in English
adaptations of these.

22. As You Like It was one of the plays stayed from publication in 1600,
and cannot therefore be later than that year. Some trifling bits of
evidence suggest that it is not earlier than 1599. The plot is based
upon Thomas Lodges romance of Rosalynde (1590), and this in part upon
the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn.

23. A play of Hamlet was performed, probably by the Chamberlains men,
for Henslowe at Newington Butts on the oth of June 1594. There are other
references to it as a revenge-play, and it seems to have been in
existence in some shape as early as I 589. It was doubtless on the basis
of this that Shakespeare constructed his tragedy. Some features of the
so-called Ur-Hamlet may perhaps be traceable in. the German play of Der
bestrafte Brudermord. There is an allusion. in Hamlet to the rivalry
between the ordinary stages and the private plays given by boy actors,
which points to a date during the vogue of the children of the Chapel,
whose performance began late in 1600, and another to an inhibition of
plays on account of a late innovation, by which the Essex rising of
February 1601 may be meant. The play was entered in the Stationers
Register on July 26, 1602. The First Quarto was printed in 1603 and the
Second Quarto in 1604. These editions contain texts whose differences
from each other and from that of the First Folio are so considerable as
to suggest, even. when allowance has been made for the fact that the
First Quarto is probably a piratical venture, that the play underwent an
exceptional amount of rewriting at Shakespeares hands. The title-page of
the First Quarto indicates that the earliest version was acted in the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as in
London. The ultimate source of the plot is to be found in Scandinavian
legends preserved in the H-istoria Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, and
transmitted to Shakespeare or his predecessor through the Histoires
tragiques (1570) of Francois de Belleforest (see HAMLET).

24. Twelfth Night may be fairly placed in. 1601-1602, since it quotes
part of a song included in Robert Joness First Book of Songs and Airs
(1600), and is recorded by John Manningham to have been seen by him at a
feast in the Middle Temple hall on February 2nd, 1602. The principal
source of the plot was Barnabe Riches History of Apolonius and Silla in
his Farewell to Military Profession (1581).

25. Few of the plays present so many difficulties as Troilus and
Cressida, and it cannot be said that its literary history has as yet
been thoroughly worked out. A play of the name, as yt is acted by my
Lord Chamberlens men was entered in the Stationers Register on February
7th, 1603, with a note that sufficient authority must be got by the
publisher, James Roberts, before he printed it. This can hardly be any
other than Shakespeares play; but it must have been. stayed, for the
First Quarto did not appear until 1609, and on the 28th of January of
that year a fresh entry had been made in the Register by another
publisher. The text of the Quarto differs in certain respects from that
of the Folio, but not to a greater extent than the use of different
copies of the original manuscript might explain. Two alternative
title-pages are found in copies of the Quarto. On one, probably the
earliest, is a statement that,the play was printed as it was acted by
the Kings Majesties seruants at the Globe ; from the other thse words
are omitted, and a preface is appended which hints that the grand
possessors of the play had made difficulties about its publication, and
describes it as never staled with the stage. Attempts have been made,
mainly on grounds of style, to find another hand than Shakespeares in
the closing scenes and in the prologue, and even to assign widely
different dates to various parts of what is ascribed to Shakespeare. But
the evidence does not really bear out these theories, and the style of
the whole must be regarded as quite consistent with a date in 1601 or
1602. The more probable year is 1602, if, as seems not unlikely, the
description of Ajax and his humours in the second scene of the first act
is Shakespeares purge to Jonson in reply to the Poetaster (1601),
alluded to, as already mentioned, in the Return from Parnassus, a
Cambridge play acted probably at the Christmas of 1602-1603 (rather
than, as is usually asserted, 1601-1602). It is tempting to conjecture
that Troilus and Cressida may have been played, like Hamlet, by the
Chamberlains men at Cambridge, but may never have been taken to London,
and in this sense never staled with the stage. The only difficulty of a
date in 1602 ~5 that a parody of a play on Troilus and Cressida is
introduced into Histriomcfstix (c. 1599), and that in this Troilus
shakes his furious speare. But Henslowe had produced another play on the
subject, by Dekker and Chettle, ill 1599, and probably, therefore, no
allusion to Shakespeare is really intended. The material for Troilus and
Cressida was taken by Shakespeare from Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde,
Caxtons Recuyell of the Historyes of Troyc, and Chapmans Homer.

26. It is almost wholly on grounds of style that Alls Well that Ends
Well is placed by most critics in or about 1602, and, as in the case of
Troilus and Cressida, it has been argued, though with little
justification, that parts of the play are of considerably earlier date,
and perhaps represent the Loves Labors Won referred to by Meres. The
story is derived from Boccaccios Decameron through the medium of William
Paynters Palace of Pleasure (1566).

27. Measure for Measure is believed to have been played at court on the
26th of December 1604. The evidence for this is to be found, partly in.
an extract made for Malone from official records now lost, and partly in
a forged document, which may, however, rest upon genuine information,
placed amongst the account-books of the Office of the Revels. If this is
correct the play was probably produced when the theatres were reopened
after the plague in 1604. The plot is taken from a story already used by
George Whetstone, both in his play of Promos and Cassandra (1578) and in
his prose Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), and borrowed by him
from Giraldi Cinthios Hecatommithi (1566).

28. A performance at court of Othello on November 1, 1604, is noted in
the same records as those quoted with regard to Measure for Measure, and
the play may be reasonably assigned to the same year. An alleged
performance at Harefield in 1602 certainly rests upon a forgery. The
play was revived in 1610 and seen by Prince Louisof Wurttemberg at the
Globe on April 30 of that year. It was entered in the Stationers
Register on October 6, 1621, and a First Quarto was published in. 1622.
The text of this is less satisfactory than that of the First Folio, and
omits a good many lines found therein and almost certainly belonging to
the play as first written. It also contains some profane expressions
which have been modified in the Folio, and thereby points to a date for
the original production earlier than the Act to Restrain Abuses of
Players passed in the spring of 1606. The plot, like that of Measure for
Measure, comes from the Hecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio.

29. Macbeth cannot, in view of its obvious allusions to James I., be of
earlier date than 1603. The style and some trifling allusions point to
about 1605 or 1606, and a hint for the thememay have been given by
Matthew Gwynnes entertainment of the Tres Sib yllae, with which James
was welcomed to Oxford on August 27, 1605. The play was revived in 1610
and Simon Forman saw it at the Globe on April 20. The only extant text,
that of the First Folio, bears traces of shortening, and has been
interpolated with additional rhymed dialogues for the witches by a
second hand, probably that of Thomas Middleton. But the extent of
Middletons contribution has been exaggerated; it is probably confined to
act iii. sc. 5, and a few lines in act. iv. sc. I. A ballad of
Macdobetli was entered in the Stationers Register on August 27, 1596,
but is not known. It is not likely that Shakespeare had consulted any
Scottish history other than that included in Raphael Holinsheds
Chronicle; he may have gathered witchlore from Reginald Scots Discoverie
of Witchcraft (1584) or King Jamess own Demonologie (1599).

30. The entry of King Lear in the Stationers Register on November 26,
16o7, records the performance of the play at court on December 26, 1606.
This suggests 1605 or 1606 as the date of production, and this is
confirmed by the publication in 5605 of the older play, The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, which Shakespeare used as his source.
Two Quartos of King Lear were published in 1608, and contain a text
rather longer, but in other respects less accurate, than that of the
First Folio. The material of the play consists of fragments of Celtic
myth, which found their way into history through Geoffrey of Monmouth.
It was accessible to Shakespeare in Holinshed and in Spensers Faerie
Queene, as well as in the old play.

31. It is not quite clear whether Antony and Cleopatra was the play of
that name entered in the Stationers Register on May 20, 1608, for no
Quarto is extant, and a fresh entry was made in the Register before the
issue of the First Folio. Apart from this entry, there is little
external evidence to fix the date of the play, but it is in Shakespeares
later, although not his last manner, and may very well belong to 1606. -

32. In the case of Coriolanus the external evidence available is even
scantier, and all that can be said is that its closest affinities are to
Antony and Cleopatra, which in all probability it directly followed or
preceded in order of composition. Both plays, like Julius Caesar, are
based upon the Lives of Plutarch, as Englished by Sir Thomas North.

33. There is no external evidence as to the date of Timon of Athens, but
it may safely be grouped on the strength of its internal characteristics
with the plays just named, and there is a clear gulf between it and
those that follow. It may be placed provisionally in 1607. The critical
problems which it presents have never been thoroughly worked out. The
extraordinary incoherencies of its action and inequalities of its style
have prevented modern scholars from accepting it as a finished
production of Shakespeare, but there agreement ceases. It is sometimes
regarded as an incomplete draft for an intended play; sometimes as a
Shakespearian. fragment worked over by a second hand either for the
stage or for printing in the First Folio; sometimes, but not very
plausibly, as an old play by an inferior writer which Shakespeare had
partly remodelled. It does not seem to have had any relations to an
extant academic play of Timon which remained in manuscript until1842.
The sources are to be found, partly in Plutarchs Life of Marcus
Antonius, partly in Lucians dialogue of Timon or Misanthropos, and
partly in William Paynters Palace of Pleasure (1566).

34. Similar difficulties, equally unsolved, cling about Pericles. It was
entered in the Stationers Register on May 20, 1608, and published in
1609 as the late and much admired play acted by the Kings men at the
Globe. The title-page bears Shakespeares name, but the play was not
includedin the First Folio, and was only added to Shakespeares collected
works in the Third Folio, iii company with others which, although they
also had been printed under his name or initials in quarto form, are
certainly not his. In 1608 was published a prose story, The Painful
Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. This claims to be the history of
the play as it was presented by the Kings players, and is described in a
dedication by George Wilkins as a poore infant of my braine. The
production of the play is therefore to be put in 1608 or a little
earlier. It can hardly be doubted on. internal evidence that Shakespeare
is the author of the verse-scenes in the last three acts, with the
exception of the doggerel choruses. It is probable, although it has been
doubted, that he was also the author of the prose-scenes in those acts.
To the first two acts he can. at most only have contributed a touch or
two. It seems reasonable to suppose that the nonShakespearian part of
the play is by Wilkins, by whom other dramatic work was produced about
1607. The prose story quotes a line or two from Shakespeares
contribution, and it follows that this must have been made by 1608. The
close resemblances of the style to that of Shakespeares latest plays
make it impossible to place it much earlier. But whether Shakespeare and
Wilkins collaborated in the play, or Shakespeare partially rewrote
Wilkins, or Wilkins completed Shakespeare, must be regarded as yet
undetermined. Unless there was an earlier Shakespearian version now
lost, Drydens statement that Shakespeares own Muse her Pericles first
bore must be held to be an error. The story is an ancient one which
exists in many versions. In all of these except the play, the name of
the hero is Apollonius of Tyre. The play is directly based upon a
version in Gowers Confessio Amantis, and theuse of Gower as a presenter
is thereby explained. But another version in Laurence Twines Patterne of
Painefull Adventures (c. 1576), of which a new edition appeared in 1607,
may also have been consulted.

35. Cymbeline shows a further development than Pericles in the direction
of Shakespeares final style, and can hardly have come earlier. A
description of it is in a note-book of Simon Forman, who died in
September 1611, and describes in the same book other plays seen by him
in 1610 and 1611. But these were not-necessarily new plays, and
Cymbeline may perhaps be assigned conjecturally to 1609. The mask-like
dream in act v. sc. 4 must be an interpolation by another hand. This
play also is based upon a wide-spread story, probably known to
Shakespeare in Boccaccios Decameron (day 2, novel 9), and possibly also
in an English book of tales called Westward for Smelts. The historical
part is, as usual, from Holinshed.

38. The Winters Tale was seen by Forman on May 15, 1611, and as it
clearly belongs to the latest group of plays it may well enough have
been produced in the preceding year. A document amongst the Revels
Accounts, which is forged, but may rest on some authentic basis, gives
November 5, 1611 as the date of a performance at court. The play is
recorded to have been licensed by Sir George Buck, who began to license
plays in 1607. The plot is from Robert Greenes Pandosto, the Triumph of
Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia (1588).

37. The wedding-mask in act iv. of The Tempest has suggested the
possibility that it may have been composed to celebrate the marriage of
the princess Elizabeth and Frederick V., the elector palatine, on
February 14, 1613. But Malone appears to have had evidence, now lost,
that the play was performed at court as early as 1611, and the forged
document amongst the Revels Accounts gives the precise date of November
I, 1611. Sylvester Jourdans A Discovery of the Bermudas, containing an
account of the shipwreck of Sir George Somers in 1609, was published
about October r6io, and this or some other contemporary narrative of
Virginian colonization probably furnished the hint of the plot.

38. The tale of Shakespeares independent dramas is now complete, but an
analysis of the Two Noble Kinsmen leaves no reason to doubt the accuracy
of its ascription on the title-page of the First Quarto of 1634 to
Shakespeare and John Fletcher. This appears to have been a case of
ordinary collaboration. There is sufficient resemblance between the
styles of the two writers to render the division of the play between
them a matter of some difficulty; but the parts that may probably be
assigned to Shakespeare are acts i. scc. 1-4; ii. I; iii. I, 2; V. I, 3,
4. Fletchers morris-dance in act iii. sc. 5 is borrowed from that in
Beaumonts Mask of the Inner Temple and Grays Inn, given on February 20,
1613, and the play may perhaps be dated in 1613. It is based on Chaucers
Knights Tale.

39. It may now be accepted as a settled result of scholarship that Henry
VIII. is also the result of collaboration, and that one of the
collaborators was Fletcher. There is no good reason to doubt that the
other was Shakespeare, although attempts have been made to substitute
Philip Massinger. The inclusion, however, of the play in the First Folio
must be regarded as conclusive against this theory. There is some ground
for suspicion that the collaborators may have had an earlier work of
Shakespeare before them, and this~wou1d explain the reversion to the
history type of play which Shakespeare had long abandoned. His share
appears to consist of act i. scc. 1, 2~ act ii. scc. 3, 4; act iii. Sc.
2, II. 1-203; act V. sc. I. The play was probably produced in 1613, and
originally bore the alternative title of All is True. It was being
performed in the Globe on June 29, 1613, when the thatch caught fire and
the theatre was burnt. The principal source was Holinshed, but Halls
Union of Lancaster and York, Foxes Acts and Monuments of the Church, and
perhaps Samuel Rowleys play of When You See Me, You Know Me (1605),
appear also to have contributed.

Shakespeares non-dramatic writings are not numerous. The narrative poem
of Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers Register on April 18,
1593, and thirteen editions, dating from 1593 to 1636, are known. The
Rape of Lucrece was, entered in the Register on May 9, 1594, and the six
extant editions range from 1594 to 1624. Each poem is prefaced by a
dedicatory epistle from the author to Henry Wriothesley, earl of
Southampton. The subjects, taken respectively from the Metamorp/ioses
and the Fasti of Ovid, were frequent in Renaissance literature. It was
once supposed that Shakespeare came from Stratfordon-Avon with Venus and
Adonis in his pocket; but it is more likely that both poems owe their
origin to the comparative leisure afforded to playwrights and actors by
the plague-period of 1592-1594. In 1599 the stationer William Jaggard
published a volume of miscellaneous verse which he called The Passionate
Pilgrim, and placed Shakespeares name on the title-page. Only two of the
pieces included herein are certainly Shakespeares, and although others
may quite possibly be his, the authority of the volume is destroyed by
the fact that some of its contents are without doubt the work of
Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Barnfield and Bartholomew Griffin.
In 1601 Shakespeare contributed The Phoenix and the Turtle, an elegy on
an unknown pair of wedded lovers, to a volume called Loves Martyr, or
Rosalins Complaint, which was collected and mainly written by Robert
Chester.

The interest of all these poems sinks into insignificance beside that of
one remaining volume. The Sonnets were entered in the Register on May
20, 1609, by the stationer Thomas Thorpe, and published by him under the
title S/sake- ~mS speares Sonnets, never before Imprinted, in the same
Sonne~. year. In addition to a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, the
volume contains the elegiac poem, probably dating from the Venus and
Adonis period, of A Lovers Complaint. In 1640 the Sonnets, together with
other poems from The Passionate Pilgrim and elsewhere, many of them not
Shakespeares, were republished by John Benson in Poems Written by Wil.
Shakespeare, Gent. Here the sonnets are arranged in an altogether
different order from that of 1609 and are declared by the publisher to
appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched.
No Shakespearian controversy has received so much attention, especially
during recent years, as that which concerns itself with the date,
character, and literary history of the Sonnets. This is intelligible
enough, since upon the issues raised depends the question whether these
poems do or do not give a glimpse into the intimate depths of a
personality which otherwise is at the most only imperfectly revealed
through the plays. On the whole, the balance of authority is now in
favor of regarding them as in a very considerable measure
autobiographical. This view has undergone the fires of much destructive
argument. The authenticity of the order in which the sonnets were
printed in 1609 has been doubted; and their subject-matter has been
variously explained as being of the nature of a philosophical allegory,
of an effort of the dramatic imagination, or of a heartless exercise in
the forms of the Petrarchan convention. This last theory has been
recently and strenuouslymaintained, and may be regarded as the only one
which now holds the field in opposition to the autobiographical
interpretation. But it rests upon the false psychological assumption,
which is disproved by the whole history of poetry and in particular of
Petrarchan poetry, that the use of conventions is inconsistent with the
expression of unfeigned emotions; and it is hardly to be set against the
direct conviction which the sonnets carry to the most finely critical
minds of the strength and sincerity of the spiritual experience out of
which they were wrought. This conviction makes due allowance for the
inevitable heightening of emotion itself in the act of poetic
composition; and it certainly does not carry with it a belief that all
the external events which underlie the emotional development are capable
at this distance of time of inferential reconstruction. But it does
accept the sonnets as an actual record of a part of Shakespeares life
during the years in which they were written, and as revealing at least
the outlines of a drama which played itself out for once, not in his
imagination but in his actual conduct in the world of men and women.

There is no advantage to be gained by rearranging the order of the 1609
volume, even if there were any basis other than that of individual whim
on which to do so. Many of the sonnets are obviously linked to those
which follow or precede them; and altogether a few may conceivably be
misplaced, the order as a whole does not jar against the sense of
emotional continuity, which is the only possible test that can be
applied. The last two sonnets, however, are merely alternative versions
of a Greek epigram, and the rest fall into two series, which are more
probably parallel than successive. The shorter of these two series
(cxxvii.clii.) appears to be the record of the poets relations with a
mistress, a dark woman with raven brows and mourning eyes.

In the earlier sonnets he undertakes the half-playful defence of black
beauty against the blonde Elizabethan ideal; but the greater number are
in a more serious vein, and are filled with a deep consciousness of the
bitterness of lustful passion and of the slavery of the soul to the
body. The woman is a wanton. She has broken her bed-vow for Shakespeare,
who on. his side is forsworn in loving her; and she is doubly forsworn.
in proving faithless to him with other men. His reason condemns her, but
his heart has not the power to throw off her tyranny. Her particular
offence is that she, a woman colored ill, has cast her snares not only
upon him, but upon his friend, a man right fair, who is his better
angel, and that thus his loss is double, in love and friendship. The
longer series (i.-cxxvi.) is written to a man, appears to extend over a
considerable period of time, and covers a wide range of sentiment. The
person addressed is younger than Shakespeare, and of higher rank. He is
lovely, and the son of a lovely mother, and has hair like the auburn
buds of marjoram. The series falls into a number of groups, which are
rarely separated by any sharp lines of demarcation. Perhaps the first
group (i.-xvii.) is the most distinct of all. These sonnets are a
prolonged exhortation by Shakespeare to his friend to marry and beget
children. The friend is now on the top of happy hours, and should make
haste, before the rose of beauty dies, to secure himself in his
descendants against devouring time. In the next group (xviii.-xxv.) a
much more personal note is struck, and the writer assumes the attitudes,
at once of the poet whose genius is to be devoted to eternizing the
beauty and the honor of his patron, and of the friend whose absorbing
affection is always on the point of assuming an emotional color
indistinguishable from that of love. The consciousness of advancing
years and that of a fortune which bars the triumph of public honor alike
fin.d their consolation in this affection. A period of absence
(xxvi.-xxxii.) follows, in which the thought of friendship comes to
remedy the daily labor of travel and the sorrows of a life that is in
disgrace with fortune and mens eyes and filled with melancholy broodings
over the past. Then (xxxiii.-xlii.) comes an estrangement. The friend
has committed a sensual fault, which is at the same time a sin against
friendship. He has been wooed by a woman loved by the poet, who deeply
resents the treachery, but in the en.d forgives it, and bids the friend
take all his loves, since all are included in the love that has been
freely given him. It is difficult to escape the suggestion that this
episode of the conflict between love and friendship is the same as that
which inspired some of the dark woman sonnets. Another journey (xliii.
-lii.) is again filled with thoughts of the friend, and its record is
followed by a group of sonnets (liii.-lv.) in which the friends beauty
and the immortality which this will find in the poets verse are
especially dwelt upon. Once more there is a parting (lvi.-lxi.) and the
poet waits as patiently as may be his friends return to him. Again
(lxii.-lxv.) he looks to his verse to give the friend immortality. He is
tired of the world, but his friend redeems it (lxvi.-lxviii.). Then
rumours of some scandal against his friend (lxix.-lxx.) reach him, and
he falls (lxxi.-lxxiv.) into gloomy thoughts of coming death. The
friend, however, is still (lxxv.-lxxvii.) his argument; and he is
perturbed (lxxviii.lxxxvi.) by the appearance of a rival poet, who
claims to be taught by spirits to write above a mortal pitch, and with
the proud full sail of his great verse has already won the countenance
of Shakespeares patron. There is another estrangement (lxxxvii.xc.), and
the poet, already crossed with the spite of fortune, is ready not only
to acquiesce in the loss of friendship, but to find the fault in
himself. The friend returns to him, but the relation is still clouded by
doubts of his fidelity (xci.-xciii.) and by public rumours of his
wantonness (xciv.-xcvi.). For a third time the poet is absent
(xcvii.-xcix.) in summer and spring. Then comes an apparent interval,
after which a love already three years old is renewed (c.-civ.), with
even richer praises (cv.-cviii.). It is now the poets turn to offer
apologies (cix.cxii.) for offences against friendship and for some brand
upon his name apparently due to the conditions of his profession. He is
again absent (cxiii.) and again renews his protestations of the
imperishability of love (cxiv.-cxvi.) and of his own unworthiness
(cxvii.-cxxi.), for which his only excuse is in the fact that the friend
was once unkind. If the friend has suffered as Shakespeare suffered, he
has passed a hell of time. The series closes with a group (cxxii.-cxxv.)
in which love is pitted against time; and an envoi, not in sonnet form,
warns the lovely boy that in the end nature must render up her treasure.

Such an analysis can give no adequate idea of the qualities in these
sonnets, whereby the appeal of universal poetry is built up on a basis
of intimate self-revelation. The human document is so legible, and at
the same time so incomplete, that it is easy to understand the strenuous
efforts which have been made to throw further light upon it by tracing
the identities of those other personalities, the man and the woman,
through his relations to whom the poet was brought to so fiery an ordeal
of soul, and even to the borders of self-abasement. It must be added
that the search has, as a rule, been conducted with more ingenuity than
judgment. It has generally started from the terms of a somewhat
mysterious dedication prefixed by the publisher Thomas Thorpe to the
volume of 1609. This runs as follows: To the onlie begetter of these
insuing sonnets Mr W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by
our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting
forth T. T. The natural interpretation of this is that the inspirer or
begetter of the sonnets bore the initials W. H.; ~ and contemporary
history has accordingly been ran.- w. ii. sacked to find a W. H. whose
age and circumstances might conceivably fit the conditions of the
problem which the sonnets present. It is perhaps a want of historical
perspective which has led to the centring of controversy around two
names belonging to the highest ranks of the Elizabethan nobility, those
of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of
Pembroke. There is some evidence to connect Shakespeare with both of
these. To Southampton he dedicated Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape
of Lucrece in 1594, and the story that he received a gift of no less
than 1000 from the earl is recorded by Rowe. His acquaintance with
Pembroke can only be inferred from the statement of Heminge and Condell
in their preface to the First Folio of the plays, that Pembroke and his
brother Montgomery had prosequuted both them and their Authour living,
with so much favor. The personal beauty of the rival claimants and of
their mothers, their amours and the attempts of their families to
persuade them to marry, their relations to poets and actors, and all
other points in their biographies which do or do not fit in with the
indications of the sonnets, have been canvassed with great spirit and
some erudition, but with no very conclusive result. It is in Pembrokes
favor that his initials were in fact W. H., whereas Southamptons can
only be turned into W. H. by a process of metathesis; and his champions
have certainly been. more successful than Southampton.s in. producing a
dark woman, a certain Mary Fitton, who was a mistress of Pembrokes,. and
was in consequence dismissed in disgrace from her post of maid of honor
to Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is in favor of her
having been blonde, and not black. Moreover, a careful investigation of
the sonnets, as regards their style and their relation to the plays,
renders it almost impossible on chronological grounds that Pembroke can
have been their subject. He was born on the 9th of April 1580, and was
therefore much younger than Southampton, who was born on the 6th of
October 1573. The earliest sonnets postulate a marriageable youth,
certainly not younger than eighteen, an age which Southampton reached in
the autumn of 1591 arid Pembroke in the spring of 1598. The writing of
the sonnets may have extended over several years, but it is impossible
to doubt that as a whole it is to the years 1593I 598 rather than to the
years 1598I 603 that they belong. There is not, indeed, much external
evidence available. Francis Meres in hisPalladis Tamia of 1598 mentions
Shakespeares sugred sonnets among his private friends,1 but this
allusion might come as well at The sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in
mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis,
his Lucrece, his sugred sonnets among his private friends.

the beginning as at the end of the series; and the fact that two, not of
the latest, sonnets are in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599 is equally
inconclusive.

The only reference to an external event in the sonnets themselves, which
might at first sight seem useful, is in the following lines (cvii.) :
The mortal moon bath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their
own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace
proclaims olives of endless age.

This has been variously interpreted as referring to the death of
Elizabeth and accession of James in 1603, to the relief caused by the
death of Philip II. of Spain in 1598, and to the illness of Elizabeth
and threatened Spanish invasion in 1596. Obviously the mortal moon is
Elizabeth, but although eclipse may well mean death, it is not quite so
clear that endure an eclipse can mean die.

Nor do the allusions to the rival poet help much. The proud full sail of
his great verse would fit, on critical grounds, with Speriser, Marlowe,
Chapman, and possibly Peele, Daniel or Drayton; and the affable familiar
ghost, from whom the rival is said to obtain assistance by night, might
conceivably be an echo of a passage in one of Chapmans dedications.
Daniel inscribed a poem to Southampton in 1603, but with this exception
none of the poets named are known to have written either for Southampton
or for Pembtbke, or for any other W. H. or H. W., during any year which
can possibly be covered by the sonnets. Two very minor poets, Barnabe
Barnes and Gervase Markham, addressed sonnets to Southampton in 1593 and
1595 respectively, and Thomas Nash composed improper verses for his
delectation.

But even if external guidance fails, the internal evidence for 1593-1598
as approximately the sonnet period in Shakespeares life is very strong
indeed. It has been worked out in detail by two German scholars, Hermann
Isaac (now Conrad) in the Shakes peare-Jcthrbuch for 1884, and Gregor
Sarrazin in William Shakespeares Lehrjahre (1897) and Aus Shakespeares
Meisterwerkstatt (1906). Isaacs work, in particular, has hardly received
enough attention even from recent English scholars, probably because he
makes the mistakes of taking the sonnets in Bodenstedts order instead of
Shakespeares, and of beginning his whole chronology several years too
early in order to gratify a fantastic identification of W. H. with the
earl of Essex. This, however, does not affect the main force of an
argument by which the affinities of the great bulk of the sonnets are
shown, on the ground of stylistic similarities, parallelisms of
expression, and parallelisms of theme, to be far more close with the
poems and with the range of plays from Loves Labors Lost to Henry I V.
than with any earlier or later section of Shakespeares work. This dating
has the further advantage of putting Shakespeares sonnets in the full
tide of Elizabethan sonnet-production, which began with the publication
of Sidneys Astrophel and Stella in 1591 and Daniels Delia and Constables
Diana in 1592, rather than during years f or which this particular kind
of poetry had already ceased to be modish. It is to the three volumes
named that the influence upon Shakespeare of his predecessors can most
clearly be traced; while he seems in his turn to have served as a model
for Drayton, whose sonnets to Idea were published in a series of volumes
in 1594, 1599, 1602, 1605 and 1619. It does not of course follow that
because the sonnets belong to 1593-1598 \V. H. is to be identified with
Southampton. On general grounds he is likely, even if above Shakespeares
own rank, to have been somewhat nearer that rank than a great earl, some
young gentleman, for example, of such a family as the Sidneys, or as the
Walsinghams of Chislehurst.

It is possible that there is an allusion to Shakespeares romance in a
poem called Willobie his Avisa, published in 594 as from the pen of o~ne
Henry Willoughby, apparently of West Knoyle in Wiltshire. In this
Willoughby is introduced as taking counsel when in love with his
familiar friend W. S. who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the
like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection. But
there is nothing outside the poem to connect Shakespeare with a family
of Willoughbys or with the neighborhood of West Knoyle. Various other
identifications of W. H. have been suggested, which rarely rest upon
anything except a similarity of initials. There is little plausibility
in a theory broached by Mr Sidney Lee, that W. H. was not the friend of
the sonnets at all, but a certain William Hall, who was himself a
printer, and might, it is conjectured, have obtained the copy of the
sonnets for Thorpe. It is, of course, just possible that the begetter of
the title-page might mean, not the inspirer, but the procurer for the
press of the sonnets ; but the interpretation is shipwrecked on the
obvious identity of the person to whom Thorpe wishes eternity with the
person to whom the poet promised that eternity. The external history of
the Sonnets must still be regarded as an unsolved problem; the most that
can be said is that their subject may just possibly be Southampton, and
cannot possibly be Pembroke.

In order to obtain a glimmering of the man that was Shakespeare, it is
necessary to consult all the records and to read the evidence of his
life-work in the plays, alike in the light of the simple facts of his
external career and in The man and the that of the sudden vision of his
passionate and dis- artist.

satisfied soul preserved in the sonnets. By exclusive attention to any
one of these sources of information it is easy to build up a consistent
and wholly false conception of a Shakespeare; of a Shakespeare
struggling between his senses and his conscience in the artistic
Bohemianism of the London taverns; of a sleek, bourgeois Shakespeare to
whom his art was no more than a ready way to a position of respected and
influential competence in his native town; of a great objective artist
whose personal life was passed in detached contemplation of the puppets
of his imagination. Any one of these pictures has the advantage of being
more vivid, and the disadvantage of being less real, than the somewhat
elusive and enigmatic Shakespeare who glances at us for a perplexing
moment, now behind this, now behind that, of his diverse masks. It is
necessary also to lay aside Shakespeareolatry, the spirit that could
wish with Hallam that Shakespeare had never written the Sonnets, or can
refuse to accept Titus Andronicus on the ground that the play declares
as plainly as play can speak, I am not Shakespeares; my repulsive
subject, my blood and horrors, are not, and never were his. The literary
historian has no greater enemy than the sentimentalist. In Shakespeare
we have to do with one who is neither beyond criticism as a man nor
impeccable as an artist. He was for all time, no doubt; but also very
much of an age, the age of the later Renaissance, with its instinct for
impetuous life, and its vigorous rather than discriminating appetite for
literature. When Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare lacked art, and when
Milton wrote of his native wood-notes wild, they judged truly. The
Shakespearian drama is magnificent and incoherent ; it belongs to the
adolescence of literature, to a period before the instrument had been
sharpened and polished, and made unerring in its touch upon the sources
of laughter and of tears. Obviously nobody has such power over our
laughter and our tears as Shakespeare. But it is the power of
temperament rather than of art; or rather it is the power of a
capricious and unsystematic artist, with a perfect dramatic instinct for
the exposition of the ideas, the characters, the situations, which for
the moment command his interest, and a perfect disregard for the laws of
dramatic psychology which require the patient pruning and subordination
of all material that does not make for the main exposition. This want of
finish, this imperfect fusing of the literary ore, is essentially
characteristic of the Renaissance, as compared with ages in which the
creative impulse is weaker and leaves room for a finer concentration of
the means upon the end. There is nearly always unity of purpose in a
Shakespearian play, but it often requires an intellectual effort to
grasp it and does not result in a unity of effect. The issues are
obscured by a careless generosity which would extend to art the
boundless freedom of life itself. Hence the intrusive and jarring
elements which stand in such curious incongruity with the utmost reaches
of which the dramatic spirit is capable; the conventional and
melodramatic endings, the inconsistencies of action and even of
character, the emotional confusions of tragicomedy, the complications of
plot and subplot, the marring of the give-and-take of dialogue by
superfluities of description and of argument, the jest and bombast
lightly thrown in to suit the taste of the groundlings, all the flecks
that to an instructed modern criticism are on.ly too apparent upon the
Shakespearian sun. It perhaps follows from this that the most fruitful
way of approaching Shakespeare is by an analysis of his work rather as a
process than as a completed whole. His outstanding positive quality is a
vast comprehensiveness, a capacity for growth and assimilation, which
leaves no aspect of life unexplored, and allows of no finality in the
nature of his judgments upon life. It is the real and sufficient
explanation and justification of the pains taken to determine the
chronological order of his plays, that the secret of his genius lies in
its power of development and that only by the study of its development
can he be known. He was nearly thirty when, so far as we can tell, his
career as a dramatist began; and already there lay behind him those six
or seven unaccounted-for years since his marriage, passed no one knows
where, and filled no one knows with what experience, but assuredly in
that strenuous Elizabethan life with some experience kindling to his
intellect and formative of his character. To the woodcraft and the
familiarity with country sights and sounds which he brought with him
from Stratford, and which mingle so oddly in his plays with a purely
imaginary and euphuistic natural history, and to the book-learning of a
provincial grammar-school boy, and perhaps, if Aubrey is right, also of
a provincial schoolmaster, he had somehow added, as he continued to add
throughout his life, that curious store of acquaintance with the details
of the most diverse occupations which has so often perplexed and so
often misled his commentators. It was the same faculty of acquisition
that gave him his enormous vocabulary, so far exceeding in range and
variety that of any other English writer.

His first group of plays is largely made up of adaptations and revisions
of existing work, or at the best of essays in the conventions of
stage-writing which bad already achieved popularity. In the Yorkist
trilogy he takes up the burden of the chronicle play, in The Comedy of
Errors that of the classical school drama and of the page-humour of
Lyly, in Titus Andronicus that of the crude revenge tragedy of Kyd, and
in Richard III. that of the Nemesis motive and the exaltation of the
Machiavellian superman which properly belong to Marlowe. But in Richard
III. be begins to come to his own with the subtle study of the actors
temperament which betrays the working of a profound interest in the
technique of his chosen profession. The style of the earliest plays is
essentially rhetorical; the blank verse is stiff and little varied in
rhythm; and the periods are built up of parallel and antithetic
sentences, and punctuated with devices of iterations, plays upon words,
and other methods of securing emphasis, that derive from the bad
tradition of a popular stage, upon which the players are bound to rant
and force the note in order to hold the attention of a dull-witted
audience. During the plague-vacations of 1592 to 1594, Shakespeare tried
his hand at the ornate descriptive poetry of Venus and Adonis and
Lucrece; and the influence of this exercise, and possibly also of
Italian travel, is apparent in the next group of plays, with their lyric
notes, their tendency to warm southern coloring, their wealth of
decorative imagery, and their elaborate and not rarely frigid conceits.
Rhymed couplets make their appearance, side by side with blank verse, as
a medium of dramatic dialogue. It is a period of experiment, in farce
with The Taming of the Shrew, in satirical comedy with Loves Labors
Lost, in lyrical comedy with A - Midsummer Nights Dream, in lyrical
tragedy with Romeo and Juliet, in lyrical history with Richard II., and
finally in romantic tragicomedy with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and
with the masterpiece of this singular genre, The l~ferchant of Venice.
It is also the period of the sonnets, which have their echoes both in
the phrasing and in the themes of the plays; in the black-browed
Rosaline of Loves Labors Lost, and in the issue between friendship and
love which is variously set in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in The
Merchant of Venice. But in the latter play the sentiment is already one
of retrospection; the tempest of spirit has given way to the tender
melancholy of renunciation. The sonnets seem to bear witness, not only
to the personal upheaval of passion, but also to some despondency at the
spite of fate and the disgrace of the actors calling. This mood too may
have cleared away in the sunshine of growing popularity, of financial
success, and of the possibly long-delayed return to Stratford. Certainly
the series of plays written next after the travels of 1597 are
light-hearted plays, less occupied with profound or vexatious searchings
of spirit than with the delightful externalities of things. The
histories from King John to Henry V. form a continuous study of the
conditions of kingship, carrying on the political speculations begun in
Richard II. and culminating in the brilliant picture of triumphant
efficiency, the Henry of Agincourt. Meanwhile Shakespeare develops the
astonishing faculty of humorous delineation of which he had given
foretastes in Jack Cade, in Bottom the weaver, and in Juliets nurse;
sets the creation of Falstaff in front of his vivid pictures of
contemporary England; and passes through the half-comedy, half
melodrama, of Much Ado About Nothing to the joyous farce of The Merry
Wives of Windsor, and to his two perfectly sunny comedies the sylvan
comedy of As You Like It and the urban comedy of Twelfth Night.

Then there comes a change of mood, already heralded by Julius Caesar,
which stands beside Henry V. as a reminder that efficiency has its seamy
as well as its brilliant side. The tragedy of political idealism in
Brutus is followed by the tragedy of intellectual idealism in Hamlet;
and this in its turn by the three bitter and cynical pseudo-comedies,
Alls Well That Ends Well, in which the creator of Portia, Beatrice,
Rosalind and Viola drags the honorof womanhood in the dustTroilus and
Cressida, in which the ideals of heroism and of romance are confounded
in the portraits of a wanton and a poltroonand Measure for Measure, in
which the searchlight of irony is thrown upon the paths of Providence
itself. Upon the causes of this new perturbation in the soul of
Shakespeare it is perhaps idle to speculate. The evidence of his
profound disillusion and discouragement of spirit is plain enough; and
for some years the tide of his pessimistic thought advances, swelling
through the pathetic tragedy of Othello to the cosmic tragedies of
Macbeth and King Lear, with their Titan-like indictments not of man
alone, but of the heavens by whom man was made. Meanwhile Shakespeares
style undergoes changes no less notable than those of his subjectmatter.
The ease and lucidity characteristic of the histories and comedies of
his middle period give way to a more troubled beauty, and the phrasing
and rhythln often tend to become elliptic and obscure, as if the
thoughts were hurrying faster than speech can give them utterance. The
period closes with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, in which the
ideals of the love of woman and the honor of man are once more stripped
bare to display the skeletons of lust and egoism, and in the latter of
which signs of exhaustion are already perceptible; and with Timon of
Athens, in which the dramatist whips himself to an almost incoherent
expression of a general loathing and detestation of humanity. Then the
stretched cord suddenly snaps. Timon is apparently unfinished, and the
next play, Pericles, is in an entirely different vein, ~nd is apparently
finished but not begun. At this point only in the whole course of
Shakespeares development there is a complete breach of continuity. One
can. only conjecture the occurrence of some spiritual crisis, an illness
perhaps, or some process akin to what in the language of religion is
called conversion, which left him a new man, with the fever of pessimism
behind him, and at peace once more with Heaven and the world.

The final group of plays, the Shakespearian part of Pericles, Cymbeline,
The Winters Tale, The Tempest, all belong to the class of what may be
called idyllic romances. They are happy dreams, in which all troubles
and sorrows are ultimately resolved into fortunate endings, and which
stand therefore as so many symbols of an optimistic faith in the
beneficent dispositions of an ordering Providence. In harmony with this
change of temper the style has likewise undergone another change, and
the tense structure and marmoreal phrasing of Antony and Cleopatra have
given way to relaxed cadences and easy and unaccentuated rhythms. It is
possible that these plays, Shakespeares last plays, with the unimportant
exceptions of his contributions to Fletchers Henry VIII. and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, were written in retirement at Stratford. At any rate the
call of the country is sounding through them; and it is with no regret
that in the last pages of The Tempest the weary magician drowns his
book, and buries his staff certain fathoms deep in the earth.

(E. K. C.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Shakespeare-Bacon Theory.

In view of the continued promulgation of the sensational theory that the
plays, and presumably the poems also, so long associated with the name
of Shakespeare, were not written by the man whose biography is sketched
above, but by somebody else who used this pseudonymand especially that
the writer was Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans
(1561-1626)it appears desirable to deal here briefly with this question.
No such idea seems to have occurred to anybody till the middle of the
19th century (see Bibliography below), but having once been started it
has been elaborated in certain quarters by a variety of appeals, both to
internal evidence as disclosed by the knowledge displayed in
Shakespeares works and by their vocabulary and style, and to external
evidence as represented by the problems connected with the facts of
Shakespeares known life and of the publication of the plays. To what may
be called ingenious inferences from data of this sort have even been
added attempts to show that a secret confession exists which may be
detected in a cipher or cryptogram in the printing of the plays. It must
suffice here to say that the contentions of the Americans, Mr Donnelly
and Mrs Gallup, on this score are not only opposed to the opinion of
authoritative bibliographers, who deny the existence of any such cipher,
but have carried their supporters to lengths which are obviously absurd
and impossible. Lord Penzance, a great lawyer whose support of the
Baconian theory may be found in his judicial summing-up, published in
1902, expressly admits that the attempts to establish a cipher totally
failed; there was not indeed the semblance of a cipher. Sir Edwin
Durning-Lawrence, in his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910), goes still farther
in an attempt to prove the point by cryptographic evidence. According to
him the classical long word cited in Loves Labors Lost,
honorificabilitudinitatibus, is an anagram for hi mdi F. Baconis nati
tuiti orbi (these plays F. Bacons offspring preserved for the world);
and he juggles very curiously with the numbers of the words and lines in
the page of the First Folio containing this alleged anagram. He also
cites the evidence of (more or less) contemporary illustrations to
books, which he explains as cryptographic, in confirmation. These
interpretations are in the highest degree speculative. But perhaps his
argument is exposed in its full depth of incredibility when he counts up
the letters in Ben Jonsons verses To the Reader, describing the
Droeshout portrait in the First Folio, and, finding them to be 287
(taking each w as two vs ), concludes (by adding 287 to 1623, i.e. the
date of the First Folio) that Bacon intended to reveal himself as the
author in the year 1910! This sort of argument makes the plain mans head
reel. On similar principles anything might prove anything. What may be
considered the more reasonable way of approaching the question is shown
in Mr G. Greenwoods Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908), in which the
alleged difficulties of the Shakespearian authorship are competently
presented without recourse to any such extravagances.

The plausibility of many of the arguments used by Mr Greenwood and those
whom he follows depends a good deal upon the real obscurity which, for
lack of positive evidence, shrouds the biography of Shakespeare and our
knowledge of the precise facts as to the publication of the works
associated with his name; and it has been assisted by the dogmatism of
some modern biographers, or the differences of opinion between them,
when they attempt to interpret the known facts of Shakespeares life so
as to account for his authorship. But it must be remembered that, if
Shakespeate (or Shakspere) wrote Shakespeares works, it is only possible
to reconcile our view of his biography with our knowledge of the works
by giving some interpretation to the known facts or accepting some
explanation of what may have occurred in the obscure parts of his life
which will be consistent with such an identification. That different
hypotheses are favored by different orthodox critics is therefore no
real objection, nor that some may appear exceedingly speculative, for
the very reason that positive evidence is irrecoverable and that
speculationconsistent with what is possibleis the only resource. In so
far as evidence is to be twisted and strained at all, it is right, in
view of the long tradition and the prima facie prestimptive evidence, to
strain it in any possible direction which can reasonably make the
Shakespearian authorship intelligible. As a matter of fact the evidence
is strained alike by one side and the other; but as between the two it
has to be remembered that the onus lies, on the opponent of the
Shakespearian authorship to show, first that there is no possible
explanation which would justify the tradition, and secondly that there
is positive evidence which can upset it and which will saddle the
authorship of Shakespeares works on Bacon or some one else. The contempt
indiscriminately thrown on supporters of the Baconian theory by orthodox
critics is apt to be expressed in terms which are occasionally
unwarranted. But even if we leave out of account the lunatics and
fabricators who have been so prominently connected with it, the
adventurous amateurhowever eminent as a lawyer or however acute as a
critic of everyday affairsmay easily be too ingenious in his endeavours
to solve a literary problem in which judgment largely depends on a
highly trained and subtle sense of literary style and a special
knowledge of the conditions of Elizabethan England and of the early
drama. In such an exposition of what may be called the anti-Shaksperian
case as Mr Greenwoods, many points appear to make for his conclusion
which are really not more than doubtful interpretations of evidence; and
though these interpretations may be derived from orthodox
Shakespeariansorthodox, that is to say, so far at all events as their
view of Shakespearian authorship is concernedthere have been a good many
such interpreters whose zeal has outrun their knowledge. The fact
remains that the most competent special students of Shakespeare, however
they may differ as to details, antI also the most authoritative special
students of Bacon, are unanimous in upholding the traditional view. The
Baconian theory simply stands as a curious illustration of the dangers
which, even in the hands of fair judges of ordinary evidence, attend
certain methods of literary investigation.

There is one simple reason for this: in order to establish even a prima
facie case against the identification of the man Shakespeare (however
the name be spelt) with the author of Shakespeares works, the Baconian
must clearly account for the positive contemporary evidence in its
favor, and this cannot well be done; it is highly significant that it
was not attempted or thought of for centuries. It is comparatively easy
to point to certain difficulties, which are due to the gaps in our
knotvledge. As already explained, the orthodox biographer, armed with
the results of accurate scholarship and prolonged historical research,
attempts to reconstruct the life of the period so as to offer possible
or probable explanations of these difficulties. But he does so backed by
the unshaken tradition and the positive contemporary evidence that the
Stratford boy and man, the London actor, the author of Venus and Adonis
and Lucrece, and the dramatist (so far at least as criticism upholds the
canon of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare), were one and the same.

It may be useful here to add to what has been written in the preceding
article some of the positive contemporary allusions to Shakespeare which
establish this presumption. The evidence of Francis Meres in Palladis
Tamia (1598) has already been referred to. It is incredible that Ben
Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon intimately, who himself
dubbed Shakespeare the swan of Avon, and who survived Bacon for eleven
years, could have died without revealing the alleged secret, at a time
when there was no reason for concealing it. Much has been made of
Jonsons varying references to Shakespeare, and of certain
inconsistencies in his references to both Shakespeare and Bacon; but
these can be twisted in more than one direction and their explanation is
purely speculative. His positive allusions to Shakespeare are
inexplicable except as the most authoritative evidence of his
identification of the man and his works. Richard Barnfield (1598) speaks
of Shakespeare as honey-flowing, and says that his Venus and Lucrece
have placed his name in Fames immortal book. John Weever (1599) speaks
of honeytongued Shakespeare, admired for rose-checked Adonis, and Romeo,
Richard, more whose names I know not. John Davies of Hereford (1610)
calls him our English Terence, Mr Will Shakespeare. Thomas Freeman
(1614) writes to Master W. Shakespeare: Who loves chaste life, theres
Lucrece for a teacher Who list read lust theres Venus and Adonis . . . I
Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander. Other contemporary
allusions, all treating Shakespeare as a great poet and tragedian, are
also on record.

Finally, it may be remarked that although many problems in connection
with Shakespeares authorship can only be solved by the answer that he
was a genius, the Baconian view that genius by itself could not confer
on Shakespeare, the supposed Stratford rustic, the positive knowledge of
law, &c., which is revealed in his works, depends on a theory of his
upbringing, and career which strains the evidence quite as much as
anything put forward by orthodox biographers, if not more. As shown in
the preceding article, it is by no means improbable that the Stratford
rustic was quite well educated, and that his rusticity is a gross
exaggeration. We know very little about his early years, and, in so far
as we are ignorant, it is legitimate to draw inferences in favor of what
makes the remainder of his career and achievements intelligible. The
Baconian theory entirely depends on straining every assumption in favor
of Shakespeares nof having had any opportunity to acquire knowledge
which in any case it would require genius to absorb and utilize; and
this method of argument is directly opposed to the legitimate procedure
in approaching the undoubted difficulties. ,Isolated phrases, such as
Ben Jonsons dictum as to his small knowledge of Latin and Greek, which
may well be purely comparative, the contemptuous expression of a
university scholar for one who had no academic training, can easily be
made too much of. The extreme inferences as to his illiteracy, drawn
from his handwriting, depend on the most meagre data. The preface to the
First Folio says that what he thought he uttered with that easiness that
we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers ; whereas Ben
Jonson, in his Discoveries, says, I remember the players often mentioned
it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned,
he never blotted a line. My answer had been, would he had blotted a
thousand!which they thought a malevolent speech. Reams have been written
about these two sayings, but we do not know the real circumstances which
prompted either, and the non-existence of any of the Shakespeare
manuscripts leaves us open, unfortunately, to the wildest conjectures.
That there were such manuscripts (unless Ben Jonson and the editors of
the First Folio were liars) is certain; but there is nothing peculiar in
their not having survived, though persons unacquainted with the history
of the manuscripts of printed works of the period sometimes seem to
think so.

We know so little of the composition of Shakespeares works, and the
stages they went through, or the influence of other persons on him,
that, so far as technical knowledge is concerned (especially the legal
knowledge, which has given so much color to the Baconian theory),
various speculations are possible concerning the means which a dramatic
genius may have had to inform his mind or acquire his vocabulary. The
theatrical and social milieu of those days was small and close; the
influence of culture was immediate and mainly oral. We have no positive
knowledge indeed of any relations between Shakespeare and Bacon; but,
after all, Bacon was a great contemporary, personally interested in the
drama, and one would expect the contents of his mind and the same sort
of literary expression that we find in his writings to be reflected in
the mirror of the stage; the same phenomenon would be detected in the
drama of to-day were any critic to take the trouble to inquire. Assuming
the genius of Shakespeare, such a poet and playwright would naturally be
full of just the sort of matter thatwould represent the culture of the
day and the interests of his patrons. In the purlieus of the Temple and
in literary circles so closely connected with the lawyers and the court,
it is just the dramatic genius who would be familiar with anything that
could be turned to account, and whose works, especially plays, the
vocabulary of which was open to embody countless sources, in the
different stages of composition, rehearsal, production and revision,
would show the imagination of a poet working upon ideas culled from the
brains of others. Resemblances between phrases used by Shakespeare and
by Bacon, therefore, carry one no farther than the fact that they were
contemporaries. We cannot even say which, if either, originated the
echo. So far as vocabulary is concerned, in every age it is the writer
whose record remains and who by degrees becomes its representative; the
truth as to the extent to which the intellectual milieu contributed to
the education of the writer, or his genius was assisted by association
with others, is hard to recover in after years, and only possible in
proportion to our knowledge of the period and of the individual factors
in operation.

(H. Cn.)

THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKESPEARE

The mystery that surrounds much in the life and work of Shakespeare
extends also to his portraiture. The fact that the only two likenesses
of the poet that can be regarded as carrying the authority of his
co-workers, his friends, and relations yet neither of them a
life-portraitdiffer in certain essential points, has opened the door to
controversy and encouraged the advance and acceptance of numerous wholly
different types. The result has been a swarm of portraits which may be
classed as follows: (1) the genuine portraits of persons not Shakespeare
but not unlike the various conceptions of him; (2) memorial portraits
often based on one or other of accepted originals, whether those
originals are worthy of acceptance or not; (3) portraits of persons
known or unknown, which have been fraudulently faked into a resemblance
of Shakespeare; and (4) spurious fabrications especially manufactured
for imposition upon the public, whether with or without mercenary
motive. It is curious that some of the crudest and most easily
demonstrable frauds have been among those which have from time to time
been, and still are, most eagerly accepted and most ardently championed.
There are few subjects which have so imposed upon the credulous,
especially those whoseintelligence might be supposed proof against the
chicanery practised upon them. Thus, in the past, a president of the
Royal Academy in England, and many of the leading artists and
Shakespearian students of the time, were found to support the
genuineness, as a contemporary portrait of the poet, of a picture which,
in its faked Shakespeare state, a few months before was not even in
existence. This, at least, proves the intense interest taken by the
world in the personality of Shakespeare, and the almost passionate
desire to know his features. It is desirable, therefore, to describe
those portraits which have chief claim to recollection by reason either
of their inherent interest or of the notoriety which they have at some
time enjoyed; it is to be remarked that such notoriety once achieved
never entirely dies away, if only because the art of the engraver, which
has usually perpetuated them either as large plates, or as illustrations
to reputable editions of the works, or to commentaries or biographies,
sustains their undeserved credit as likenesse6 more or less authentic.

Exhaustive study of the subject, extended over a series of years, has
brought the present writer to the conclusionidentical with that
entertained by leading Shakespearian authorities that two portraits only
can be accepted without question as authentic likenesses: the bust
(really a half-length statue) with its structural wall-monument in the
choir of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, and the copper-plate
engraved by Martin Droeshout as frontispiece to the First Folio of
Shakespeares works (and used for three subsequent issues) published In
1623, although first printed in the previous year.

The Stratford bust and monument must have been erected on the N. wall of
the chancel or choir within six years after Shakespeares death in 1616,
as it is mentioned in the prefatory memorial lines by Leonard Digges in
the First Folio. The design in its general aspect was one often adopted
by the tombe-makers of the period, though not originated by them, and
according to Dugdale was executed by a Fleming resident in London since
1567, Garratt Johnson (Gerard Janssen), a denizen, who was occasionally
a collaborator with Nicholas Stone. The bust is believed to have been
commissioned by the poets son-in-law, Dr John Hall, and, like the
Droeshout print, must have been seen by and likely enough had the
approval of Mrs Shakespeare, who did not die until August 1623. It is
thought to have been modelled from either a life or death mask, and
inartistic as it is has the marks of facial individuality; that is to
say, it is a portrait and not a generalization such as was common in
funereal sculpture. According to the practice of the day, especially at
the hands of Flemish sculptors of memorial figures, the bust was
colored; this is sufficient to account for the technical summariness of
the modelling and of the forms. Thus the eyebrows are scarcely more than
indicated by the chisel, and a solid surface represents the teeth of the
open mouth; the brush was evoked to supply effect and detail. To the
color, as reapplied after the removal of the white paint with which
Malone had the bust covered in 1793, must be attributed a good deal of
the wOoden appearance which is now a shock to many. The bust is of soft
stone (not alabaster, as incorrectly stated by the accurate Dugdale ),
but a careful examination of the work reveals no sign of the alleged
breakage and restoration or reparation to which some writers have
attributed the apparently inordinate length of the upper lip. As a
matter of fact the lip is not long; it is less than. seven-eighths of an
inch:

the appearance is to a great extent an optical illusion, the result
partly of the smallness of the nose and, especially, of the thinness of
the moustache that shows the flesh above and below. Some repair was made
to the monument in 1649, and again in 1748, but there is no mention in
the church records of any meddling with the bust itself. Owing, however,
to the characteristic inaccuracy of the print by one of Hollars
assistants in the illustration of Dugdales Antiquities of Warwickshire
(p. 688), the first edition of which was published in 1656, certain
writers have been misled into the belief that the whole monument and
bust were not merely restored but replaced by those which we see to-day.
As other prints in the volume depart grossly from the objects
represented, and as Dugdale, like Vertue (whose punctilious accuracy has
also been baselessly extolled by Walpole), was at times demonstrably
loose in his descriptions and presentments, there is no reason to
believe that the bust and the figures above it are other than. those
originally placed in position. Other engravers, following the Dugdale
print, have further stultified the original, but as they (Vertue,
Grignion, Foudrinier, and others) differ among themselves, little
importance need be attached to the circumstance. A

warning should be uttered against many of the so-called casts of the
busts. George Bullock took a cast in 1814 and Signor A. Michele another
about forty years after, but those attributed to W. R. Kite, W. Scoular,
and others, are really copies, departing from the original in important
details as well as in general effect. It is from these that many persons
derive incorrect impressions of the bust itself.

Mention should here be made of the Kesselstadt Death Mask, now at
Darmstadt, as that has been claimed as the true death-mask of
Shakespeare, and by it the authenticity of other portraits has been
gauged. It is not in fact a death-mask at all, but a cast from one and
probably not even a direct cast. In three places on the back of it is
the inscription+A~D~i 1616:

and this is the sole actual link with Shakespeare. Among the many
rapturous adherents of the theory was William Page, the American
painter, who made many measurements of the mask and found that nearly
half of them agreed with those of the Stratford bust; the greater number
which do not he conveniently attributed to error in the sculptor. The
cast first came to light ~fl 1849, having been searched for by Dr.
Ludwig Becker, the owner of a miniature in oil or parchment representing
a corpse crowned with a wreath, lying in bed, while on the background,
next to a burning candle, is the date Ao 1637. This little picture was
by tradition asserted to be Shakespeare, although the likeness, the
death-date, and the wreath all point unmistakably to the poet-laureate
Ben Jonson. Dr Becker had purchased it at the death-sale at Mainz of
Count Kesselstadt in 1847, in which also a plaster of Paris cast (with
no suggestion of Shakespeare then attached to it) had appeared. This he
found in a brokers rag-shop, assumed it to be the same, recognized in it
a resemblance to the picture (which most persons cannot see) and so came
to attribute to it the enormous historical value which it would, were
his hypothesis correct, unquestionably possess. In searching for the
linjm of evidence necessary to be established, through the Kesselstadt
line to England and Shakespeare, a theory has been elaborated, but
nothing has been proved or carried beyond the point of bare conjecture.
The arguments against the authenticity of the cast are strong and cogent
the chief of which is the fact that the skull reproduced is
fundamentally of a different form and type from that shown in. the
Droeshout printthe forehead is receding instead of upright. Other
important divergencies occur. The handsome, refined, and pleasing aspect
of the mask accounts for much of the favor in which it has been held. It
was believed in by Sir Richard Owen and was long on view in. the BrItish
Museum, and was shown in the Stratford Centenary Exhibition In. 1864.

The Droeshout print derives its importance from its having been executed
at the order of Heminge and Condell to represent, as a frontispiece to
the Plays, and put forth as his portrait, the man and friend to whose
memory they paid the homage of their risky enterprise. The volume was to
be his real monument, and the work was regarded by them as a memorial
erected in a spirit of love, piety, and veneration. Mrs Shakespeare must
have seen the print; Ben Jonson extolled it. His dedicatory verses,
however, must be regarded in the light of conventional approval as
commonly expressed in that age of the performances of portrait-engravers
and habitually inscribed beneath them. It is obvious, therefore, that in
the circumstances an authentic portrait must necessarily have been. the
basis of the engraving; and Sir George Scharf, judging from the
contradictory lights and shadows in the head, concluded that the
original must have been a limningmore or less an outline drawingwhich
the youthful engraver was required to put into chiaroscuro, achieving
his task with but very partial success. That this is the case is proved
by the so-called unique proof discovered by Halliwell-Phiffips, and now
in America. Another copy of it, also an early proof but not in quite the
same state, is in the Bodleian Library. No other example is known. In
this plate the head is far more human. The nose is here longer than in
the bust, but the bony structure corresponds. In the proof, moreover,
there is a thin, wiry moustache, much widened in the print as used; and
in several other details there are important divergencies. In this
engraving by Droeshout the head is far too large for the body, and the
dressthe costume of well-to-do persons of the timeis absurdly out of
perspective:

an additional argument that the unpractised engraver had only a drawing
of a head to work from, for while the head shows the individuality of
portraiture the body is as clearly done de c/sic. The first proof is
conclusive evidence against the contention that the Flower Portrait at
the Shakespeare Memorial Museum, Stratford-on-Avonthe gift of Mrs
Charles Flower (1895) and boldly entitled the Droeshout original is the
original painting from which the engraving was made, an.d is therefore
the actual life-portrait for which Shakespeare sat. This view was
entertained by many connoisseurs of repute until it was pointed out that
had that been the case the first proof, if it had been engraved from it,
would have resembled it in all particulars, for the engraver would have
merely copied the picture before him. Instead of that, we find that
several details in the proofthe incorrect illumination, the small
moustache, the shape of the eyebrow and of the deformed ear, &c.have
been corrected in the painting, in which further improvements are also
imported. The conclusion is therefore irresistible. At the same time the
picture may possibly be the earliest painted portrait in existence of
the poet, for so far as we can judge of it in its present condition (it
was to some extent injured by fire at the Alexandra Palace)

it was probably executed in the earlier half of the I 7th century. The
inscriptionWillsi Shakespeare, 1609is suspect on. account of being
written in cursive script, the only known example at the date to which
it professes to belong. If it were authentic it might be taken as
showing us Shakespeares appearance seven years before his death, and
fourteen years before the publication of the Droeshout print. The former
attribution of it to Cornelis Janssens brush has been abandonedit is the
work of a comparatively unskilful craftsman. The pictures pedigree
cannot definitely be traced far back, but that is of little import-~
ance, as plausible pedigrees have often been manufactured to bolster up
the most obvious impostures. The most interesting of the copies or
adaptations of this portrait is perhaps that by William Blake now in the
Manchester Corporation Art Gallery. One of the cleverest imitations, if
such it be, of an old picture is the Buttery or Ellis portrait, acquired
by an American collector in I9c~2. This small picture, on panel, is very
poor judged as a work of art, but it has all the appearance of age. In
this case the perspective of the dress has been corrected, and
Shakespeares shield is shown. on the background. The head is that of a
middle-aged man; the moustache, contrary to the usual type, is drooping.
It is curious that theThurston miniature done from the Droeshout print
gives the moustache of the proof.

Two other portraits of the same character of head and arrangement are
the Ely Palace portrait and the Felton portrait, both of which in their
time have had, and still have, convinced believers. The Ely Palace
portrait was discovered in 1845. in a brokers shop, and was bought by
Thomas Turton, bishop of Ely, who died in 1864, when it was bought by
Henry Graves and by him was presented to the Birthplace. An
unsatisfactory statement of its history, similar to that of many other
portraits, was put forth; the picture must be judged on its merits. It
bears the inscription ~ 39 + 1603, and it shows a moustache and a right
eyebrow identical with those in the Droeshout proof. It was therefore
hailed by many competent judges as the original of the print; by others
it was dismissed as a make-up :

at the same time it is very far from being a proved fraud. Supposing
both it and the Flower portrait to be genuine, this picture, which came
to light long before the latter, antedates it by six years. Judged by
the test of the Droeshout proof it must have preceded and not followed
it. The Felton portrait, which made its first appearance in 1792, had
the valiant championship of the astute and cynical Steevens, of Britton,
Drake, and other authorities, as the original of the Droeshout print,
while a fewthose who believed in the Chandos portrait denounced it as a
rank forgery. On the back of the panel was boldly traced in a florid
hand Gui. Shakespear 159~ R.B. (by others read R.N.). If RB. is correct,
it is contended the initials indicate Richard Burbage, Shakespeares
fellow-actor. Traces of the writing may still he detected. Boadens copy,
made in 1792, repeating the inscription on the back, has Guil.
Shakspeare 1587 RN. The spelling of Shakespeares namewhich in succeeding
ages has been governed by contemporary fashionhas a distinct bearing on
the authenticity of the panel. At the first appearance of the Felton
portrait in a London sale-room it was bought by Samuel Felton of
Drayton, Shropshire, for five pounds, along with a pedigree which
carried its refutation along with it. Nevertheless, it bears evidence of
being an honest painting done from life, and is probably not a make-up
in the sense that most of the others are. It fell into the hands of
Richardson the printseller, who issued fraudulent engravings of it by
Trotter and others (by which it is best known), causing the
characteristic lines of the shoulders to be altered, so that it is set
upon a body attired in the Droeshout costume, which does not appear in
the picture; and then, arguing from this falsely-introduced costume, the
publisher maintained that the work was the original of the Droeshout
print and therefore a life-portrait of Shakespeare. Thus foisted on the
public it enjoyed for years a great reputation, and no one seems to have
recognized that with its down-turned moustache it agrees with the
inaccurate print after the Droeshout engraving which was published as
frontispiece to Ayscoughs edition of Shakespeare in 1790, i.e. two years
before the discovery of the Felton portrait I The Napier portrait, as
the excellent copy by John Boaden is known, has recently been presented
to the Shakespeare Memorial. Josiah Boydell also made a copy of the
picture for George Steevens in 797. Quite a number of capital miniatures
from it are in existence. With these should be mentioned a picture of a
similar type discovered by Mr M. H. Spielmann in 1905. Finding a
wretched copy of the Chandos portrait executed on a panel about three
hundred years old, he had the century-old paint cleaned off in order to
ascertain the method of the forger. On the disappearance of the Chandos
likeness under the action of the spirit another portrait of Shakespeare
was found beneath, irretrievably damaged but obviously painted in the
17th century. At the time of the fake only portraits of the Chandos type
were saleable, and this would account for the wanton destruction of an
interesting work which was probably executed for a publisherlikely
enough for Jacob Tonsonbut not used. Early as it is in date it can make
no claim to be a life-portrait.

The Janssen or Somerset portrait is in many respects the most
interesting painted likeness of Shakespeare, and undoubtedly the finest
of all the paintings in the series. It is certainly a genuine as well as
a very beautiful picture of the period, and bears the inscription~i~6but
doubt has been expressed whether the 6 of 46 has not been tampered with,
and whether it was not originally an o and altered to fit Shakespeares
age. It was made known through Earloms rare mezzotint of it, but the
public knowledge of it has been mainly founded on Coopers and Turners
beautiful but misleading mezzotint plates until a photograph of the
original was published for the first time in 1909 (in The Connoisseur)
by permission of the owner, the Lady Guendolen Ramsden, daughter of the
duke of Somerset, the former owner of the picture. The resemblance to
the main forms of the death-mask is undoubted; but that is of little
consequence as confirmation unless the mask itself is supported by
something beyond vague conjectures. Charles Jennens, the wealthy and
eccentric amateur editor o~ the poor edition of King Lear issued in
1770, was the first known owner, but vouchsafed no information of its
source and shrank from the challenge to produce the picture. Of the
beauty, excellence, and originality of this portrait there is no
question; it is more than likely that Janssen was the author of it; but
that it was intended to represent Shakespeare is still to be proved. A
number of good copies of it exist, all but one (which enjoys a longer
pedigree) made in the 18th century: the Croker J anssen now lost, unless
it be that of Lord Darnleys; the Staunton Janssen, the Buckston Janssen,
the Marsden Janssen, and the copy in the possession of the duke of
Anhalt. These are all above the average merit of such work.

The portrait which has made the most popular appeal is that called the
Chandos, formerly known as the dAvenant, the Stowe, and the Ellesmere,
according as it passed from hand to hand; it is now in the National
Portrait Gallery. Tradition, tainted at the outset, attributes the
authorship of it to Richard Burbage, although it is impossible that the
painter of the head in the Dulwich Gallery could have produced a work so
good in technique; and Burbage is alleged to have given it to his
fellow-actor Joseph Taylor, who bequeathed it to Sir William dAvenant,
Shakespeares godson. As a matter of fact, Taylor died intestate.
Thenceforward, whether or not it belonged to dAvenant, its history is
clear. At the great Stowe sale of the effects of the duke of Buckingham
and Chandos (who had inherited it) the earl of Ellesmere bought it and
then presented it to the nation. Many serious inquirers have refused to
accept this romantic, swarthy, Italian-looking head here depicted as a
likeness of Shakespeare of the Midlands, if only because in every
important physiognomical particular, and in face-measurement, it is
contradicted by the Stratford bust and the Droeshout print. It is to be
noted, however, that judged by the earlier copies of itwhich agree in.
the main points some of the swarthiness complained of may be due to the
restorer. Oldys, indifferent to tradition, attributed it to Janssen, an
unallowable ascription. This, except the Lumley portrait,, the Burdett
Coutts portrait, and the admitted fraud, the Dunford portrait, is the
only picture of Shakespeare executed before the end of the 18th century
which represents the poet with earringsthe wearing of which, it should
be noted, either simple gold circles or decorated with jewel-drops, was
a fashion that extended over two centuries, in England mainly, if not
entirely, affected by nobles and exquisites. Contrary to the general
belief, the picture has not been subjected to very extensive repair.
That it was not radically altered by the restorer is proved by the fine
copy painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and by him presented to John
Dryden. The poet acknowledged the gift in his celebrated Fourteenth
Epistle, written after 1691 and published in 1694, and containing the
passage beginning, Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight; With
awe I ask his blessing ere I write. DAvenant had died in 1668, and so
could not, as tradition contends was the case, have been the donor. In
Malones time the picture was already in the possession of the earl
Fitzwffliam. This at least proves the esteem in which the Chandos
portrait was held so far back as the end of the 17th century, only
three-quarters of a century after Shakespeares death.

From among the innumerable copies and adaptations of the Chandos
portrait a few emerge as having a certain importance of their own. That
which Sir Joshua Reynolds is traditionally said to have made for the use
of Roubiliac, then engaged in his statue of Shakespeare for David
Garrick (flow in the British Museum), and another alleged to have been
done for Bishop Newton, are now lost. That by Ranelagh Barret was
presented in 779 to Trinity College Library, Cambridge, by the
Shakespearian commentator Edward Capell. Dr Matthew Maty, principal
librarian of the British Museum, presented his copy to the museum in
1760. There are also the smooth but rather original copy (with drapery
added) belonging to the earl of Bath at Longleat; the Warwick Castle
copy; the fair copy known as the Lord St Leonards portrait; the large
copy in colored crayons, formerly in the Jennens collection and now
belonging to Lord Howe, by van der Gucht, which seems to be by the same
hand as that which executed the pastel portrait of Chaucer in the
Bodleian Library; the Clopton miniature attributed to John Michael
Wright, which formed the basis of the drawing by Arlaud, by whose name
the engravings of this modified type are usually known; the Shakespeare
Hirst picture, based on Houbrakens engraving; the full-size chalk
drawing by Ozias Humphry, R.A., at the Birthplace, which Malone
guaranteed to be a perfect transcript, but which more resembles the late
W. P. Frith, R.A., than Shakespecre. Humphry also, adhering to his
modified type, executed three beautiful but inaccurate miniatures from
the picture, one of which is in the Garrick Club, and the others in
private hands.

The Lumley portrait is in type a curious blend of the faces in the
Chandos portrait and the Droeshout print, with a dash of the Auriol
miniature (see later). It represents a heavy-jowled man with pursed-up
flps, and with something of the expression but little of the vitality of
the Chandos. Although it is thought to be indicated though not actually
mentioned in the Lumley sale catalogues of 1785 and 1807, it was only
when it came into the possession of George Rippon, presumably about the
year 1848, that it was brought to the notice of the world, and
additional attention was secured by the owners contention that it was
the original of the Chandos. It is claimed that the picture originally
belonged to the portrait collector John, Lord Lumley, of Lumley castle,
Durham, who died in 1609, and descended to Richard, the 4th earl of
Scarborough, and George Augustus, the 5th earl, at whose respective
sales at the dates mentioned it was put up to auction. On the first
occasion it was bought in, and on the second it was acquired by George
Walters. It is to be observed, however, that it does not appear by name
in the early inventory, and it is unconvincingly claimed that it was
mistakenly entered as Chaucer, a portrait of whom is mentioned. When in
the possession of George Rippon the picture was so superbly
chromo-lithographed by Vincent Brooks that copies of it, mounted on old
panel or canvas, and varnished, have often changed hands as original
paintings. It is clear that if the picture was indeed in possession of
John, Lord Lumley, we have here a contemporary portrait of Shakespeare,
and the fact that it is an amateur performance would in no way
invalidate the claim. It is thinly painted and scarcely looks the age
that is claimed for it; but it is an interesting work, which, in 1875,
entered the collection of the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

To Frederigo Zuccaro are attributed three of the more important
portraits now to be mentioned; upon him also have been foisted several
of the more impudent fabrications herein named. The Bath or Archer
portrait it having been in the possession of the Bath Librarian, Archer,
when attention was first drawn to it in 1859is worthy of Zuccaros brush.
It is Italian in feeling, with an inscription ( W. Shakespear ) in an
Italian but apparently more modern hand. The type of head, too, is
Italian, and it is curious that in certain respects it bears some
resemblance not only to the Chandos, and to the Droeshout and Janssen
portraits, but also to the death-mask; yet it differs in essentials from
all. Certain writers have affirmed that Reynolds in one of his
Discourses expressed his faith in the picture; but the alleged passage
cannot be identified. This eloquent, refined, and well-bred head
suggests an Italian noble, or, if an English poet, a man of the type of
Edmund Spenser; a lady-love shoe-string, or twist (often used to tie on
a jewel), threads the ear and a fine lace ruff frames the head. The
whole picture is beautifully painted by a highly accomplished artist. If
this portrait represents Shakespeare at about the age of 30, that is to
say in 1594, the actor-dramatist had made astonishing progress in the
world, and become well-todo, and had adopted the attire of a dandy. But
Zuccaro came to England in 1574, and as his biographers state did not
stay long, and returned to Florence to complete the work at the Duomo
there begun by Vasari. The conclusion appears to be definite. The
picture was acquired for the Baroness BurdettCoutts by W. H. Wills.

Stronger objection applies to the Boston Zuccaro or Joy portrait, now in
Boston, U.S.A. A Mr Benjamin Joy, who emigrated from London to Boston,
owned a picture with a doubtful pedigreetransparently a manufactured
tradition. R. S. Greenough, the American sculptor, used it along with
other authentic portraits to produce his bust. In parts it has been
viciously restored, but it is in very fair condition and appears to be a
good picture of the Flemish school. In the vague assertion that it was
found in the Globe Tavern which was frequented by Shakespeare and his
associates, no credence can be placed, if only because no such tavern is
known to have existed.

The Cosway Zuccaro portrait is now in America; but the reproduction of
it exists in England in the miniature of it by Cosways pupil, Charlotte
Jones, as well as in tile rare mezzotint by Hanna Greene. The picture is
alleged to have disappeared from the possession of Richard Cosway; it
was sold in his sale, however, and passed through the hands of Lionel
Booth and of Augustin Daly. No one would imagine that it is intended for
a portrait of the poet. It is far more like Shelley (somewhat
caricatured, especially as to the cat-like eyes and the Mephistophelian
eyebrows) or Torquato Tasso. The attribution to Zuccaro is absurd, yet
Cosway and Sir Charles Eastlake believed in it. The inscription on the
back, Guglielm:

Shakespear, with its mixture of Italian and English, resembles in
wording and spelling that adopted in the case of several admitted fakes.
No attempt at discovering the history of the picture was ever made, but
there is no doubt that at the beginning of the ,9th century it was
widely credited; Wivell and others attributed it to Lucas Franchois. It
is said to be well painted, but the copies show that it is ill drawn.
The miniature by Charlotte Jones, a fashionable artist in her day, is
pretty and weak, but well executed; it was painted in 1823.

Of the Burdett-Coutts portrait (the fourth interesting portrait of
Shakespeare in the possession of Mr Burdett-Coutts) there is no history
whatever to record. No name has been suggested for the artist, but the
hands and accessories of dress strongly resemble those in the portrait
of Elizabeth Hardwick, countess of Shrewsbury, in the National Portrait
Gallery. The ruff, painted with extreme care, reveals a pentimento. The
picture is admirably executed, but the face is weak and is the least
satisfactory part of it; especially feeble is the ear with the ring.
Shakespeares shield, crest, with red mantling, which appear co-temporary
with the rest, and the figures 37 beneath it, appear on the background,
in the n~nner adopted in 17thcentury portraits. From this picture the
Craven. portrait seems to have been faked.

Equally striking is the Ashbourne portrait, well known through G. F.
Storms engraving of it. It is sometimes called the Kilgston portrait as
the first known ownerof it was the Rev. Clement U. Kingston, who issued
the engraving in 1847. It is an important three-quarter length,
representing a figure in black standing beside a table at the corner of
which is a skull whereon the figure rests his right forearm. It is an
acceptable likeness of Shakespeare, in the manner of Paul van Somer,
apparently pure except in the ruff. The inscription ~ETATIS svAE. 47. A
1611, and the decoration of cross spears on a book held by the right
hand, are also raised from the ground, so that it would be injudicious
to decide that these are not of a later date yet at the same time
ancient additions. It is the only pictureif we disregard the
inadmissible Hampton Court portrait in which Shakespeare is shown
wearing a swordbelt and a thumb-ring, and holding a gauntleted glove.
The type is that of a refined, fresh-colored, fair-haired English
gentleman. There is no record of the picture before Mr Kingston bought
it from a London dealer.

More famous, but less reputable, is the Stratford or Hunt portrait,
amusingly exhibited in an iron safe in the Birthplace at Stratford, to
which it was presented by W. 0. Hunt, town clerk, in 1867. It had been
in the Hunt family for many years and represented a black-bearded man.
Simon Collins, the picture cleaner and restorer who had cleansed the
Stratford bust of Malones white paint and restored its colors, declaring
that another picture was beneath it, was engaged to exercise himself
upon it. He removed the top figure from the dilapidated canvas with
spirit and found beneath it the painted version of the Stratford bust.
At that time Mr Rabones copy, now at Birmingham, was made; it is
valuable as evidence. Then Collins, always a suspect in this matter,
proceeded with the restoration, and by treatment of the hair made the
portrait more than ever like the bust; and the owner, and not a few
others, proclaimed the picture to be the original from which the bust
was made. No judge of painting, however, accepts the picture as dating
further back than the latter half of the 18th centurywhen it was
probably executed, among a score of others, about the time of the
bicentenary of Shakespeares birth, an event which gave rise to much
celebration. The ingenious but entirely unconvincing explanations
offered to account for the state in which the picture was found need not
be recounted here.

The Duke of Leeds portrait, now at Hornby castle, has been for many
years in the family, but the circumstances of its provenance are
unknown. It has been. thought possible that this is the lost portrait of
which John Evelyn. speaks as having been in the collection of Lord
Chancellor Clarendon, the companion picture to that of Chaucer; but no
evidence has been adduced to support the conjecture. It represents a
handsome, fair man, with auburn beard, with an expression recalling the
Janssen portrait; the nose, however, is quite different. He wears a
standing wired band, as in the Droeshout print. It is a workmanlike
piece of painting, but there is nothing in the picture to connect it
with Shakespeare. The same maybe said of the Welcombe portrait, which
was bought by Mark Philips of Welcombe and descended to Sir George
Trevelyan. It is a fairly good picture, having some resemblance to the
Boston Zuccaro with something of the Chandos. The figure, a half-length,
wears a falling spiked collar edged with lace, and from the ear a
love-lace, the traces of which only are left. Two other portraits at the
Shakespeare Memorial should be named. The Venice portrait, which was
bought in Paris and is said to have come from Venice, bears an Italian
undecipherable inscription. on the back; it seems to have no obvious
connection with Shakespeare apart from its exaggeration of the general
aspect of the Chandos portrait; it is a weak thing. The Tonson portrait,
inscribed on the frame The Jacob Tonson Picture, 1735, a small oval,
with the attributes of comedy and tragedy, is believed to have been
executed for Tonsons 4th edition of Shakespeare, but not used.

The Soest portrait (often called Zoust or Zoest), formerly known as the
Douglas, the Lister Kaye or the Clarges portrait, according to the owner
of the moment, was for many years a public favorite, mainly through j.
Simons excellent mezzotint. The picture, a short half-length within an
oval, is manifestly meant for Shakespeare, but the head as nearly
resembles the bead of Christ at Lille by Charles Delafosse (1636 1716)
who also painted pictures in England. Gerard Soest was not born until
1637, and according to Granger the picture was painted in Charles II.s
reign. It is a pleasing but weak head, possibly based on the Chandos.
The whereabouts of the picture is unknown., unless it is that in. the
possession of the earl of Craven. A numbef of copies exist, two of which
are at the Shakespeare Memorial. Simons print was the first announcement
of the existence of the picture, which at that time belonged to an
obscure painter, F. Wright of Covent Garden.

The Charlecote portrait, which was exhibited publicly at Stratford in
1896, represents a burly, bull-necked man, whose chief resemblance to
Shakespeare lies in his baldness and hair, and in the wired band he
wears. The former possession of the picture by the Rev. John Lucy has
lent it a sort of reputation; but that gentleman bought it as recently
as 1853.

Similarly, the Hampton Court portrait derives such authority as it
possesses from the dignity of its owner and its habitat. William IV.
bought it as a portrait of Shakespeare, but without evidence, it is
suggested, from the de Lisles. This gorgeously attired officer in an
elaborate tunic of green and gold, with red bombasted trunks, with fine
worked sword and dagger pendent from the embroidered belt, and with a
falling ruff and laces from his ear, bears some distant resemblance to
the Chandos portrait. Above is inscribed, i~ltat. suae. 34. It appears
to be the likeness of a blue-eyed soldier; but it has been suggested
that the portrait represents Shakespeare in stage dressa frequent
explanation for the strange attire of quaintly alleged portraits of the
poet. A copy of this picture was made by H. Duke about 1860. Similarly
unacceptable is theH. Danby Seymour portrait which has disappeared since
it was lent to the National Portrait Exhibition of 1866. This is a fine
three-quarter length in the Miervelt manner. The dignified bald-headed
man has a light beard, brown hair, and blue eyes, and wears white
lace-edged falling collars and cuffs over a doublet gold-embroidered
with points; and in the left hand holds a black hat. The Lytton
portrait, a royal gift made to Lord Lytton from Windsor Castle, is
mainly interesting as having been copied by Miller in his original
profile engraving of Shakespeare. The Rendelsham and Crooks portraits
also belong to the category of capital paintings representing some one
other than Shakespeare; and the same may be hazarded of the Grafton or
Winston portrait, the Sanders portrait, the Gilliland portrait (an old
mans head impudently advanced), the striking Thorne Court portrait, the
Aston Cantlow portrait, the Burn portrait, the Gwennet portrait, the
Wilson portrait and others of the class.

Miniature-painting has assumed a certain importance in relation to the
subject. The Welbeck Abbey or Harleian miniature, is that which Walpole
caused to be engraved by Vertue for Popes edition of Shakespeare
(1723-1725), but which Oldys declared, incorrectly, to be a juvenile
portrait of James I. According to Scharf, it belonged to Robert Harley,
1st earl of Oxford, but it is more likely that it was bought by his son
Edward Harley in the fathers lifetime. It already was in his collection
in 1719, but whence it ,came is not known. It has been denounced as a
piece of arrant sycophancy that Pope consented to adopt this very
beautiful but entirely unauthenticated portrait, which bears little
resemblance to any other accepted likeness (more, however, to the
Chandos than to the rest) simply in order to please the aristocratic
patron of his literary circle. It measures 2 in. high; Vertues exquisite
engraving, executed in 1721, enlarged it to 53/4, and became the
authority for numerous copies, British and foreign. The Somerville or
Hilliard miniature, belonging to Lord and Lady Northcote, is claimed to
have descended from Shakespeares friend, Somerville of Edstone,
grandfather of the poet William Somerville. It was first publicly spoken
of in 1818 when it was in the possession of Sir James Bland Burges. It
is certainly by Hilliard, but although Sir Thomas Lawrence and many
distinguished painters anti others agreed that it was an original
lifeportrait of the poet, few will be disposed to give adherence to the
theory, in view of its complete departure from other portraits. It
represents a pale man with flaxen hair and beady eyes; yet in it B urges
found a general resemblance to the best busts (sic) of Shakespeare, and
an attempt was made to prove a relationship between the Ardens and the
Somervillesan untenable theory. The miniature has frequently been
exhibited and has figured in important collections on its own merits.
The well-known Auriol miniature, now in America, is one of the least
sympathetic and the least acceptable of the Shakespeare miniatures,
excellent though it is in technique. It has the forehead and hair)of the
Chandos, but it is utterly devoid of the Shakespeare expression. In the
background appears~ ~Ef 33. The costume is that worn by the highest in
the land. It first appeared in its present character ,in 1826, but it
had been known for a few years before, as being in the collection of Dog
Jennings, and ultimately it came into the hands of the collector,
Charles Auriol. Its early history is unknown. The other principal
miniatures of interest, but lacking authority, are the Waring miniature,
the Tomkinson miniature (which, like the Hilliard anti the Auriol, was
formerly in the Lumsden Propert collection), the doubtful Isaac Oliver
miniature (alleged to have been in the Jaffe collection at Hamburg), the
Mackey and Glen miniatures, and those presented to the Shakespeare
Memorial by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, T. Kite, and Henry Graves.
These are all contemporary or early works. Miniature copies of
recognized portraits are numerous and many of them of high excellence,
but they do not call for special enumeration. That, however, by Mary
Anne Nichols, an imitative cameo after Roubiliac, exhibited in the Royal
Academy, 1848, claims notice. In this category are a number of enamels
by accomplished artists, the chief of them Henry Bone, R.A., H. P. Bone,
and W. Essex.

Several recorded painted portraits have disappeared, other than those
already mentioned; these include the Earl of Oxford portrait and the
Challis portrait. The Countess of Zetlands portrait, which had its
adherents, was destroyed by fire. (M. H. S.)
--------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer

[bookburn]

"Art Neuendorffer" <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:18qdnVnWFK7...@comcast.com...

| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/
|
| <<Sir Kenneth Clark wrote of the Eleventh Edition [of the
Encyclopedia
| Britannica]: "One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as
much
| by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by
the
| facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopedia in the tradition
of
| Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only
| when it is slightly colored by prejudice. When T.S. Eliot wrote
| 'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopedia'
| he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition.">>

(snip)

Some editions of the 11th are leather-bound, sometimes available in
thrift stores for cheap because the bulky sets are little read or
recognized, and you can get it on CD or access it on the Perseus
Project.

The "Shakespeare" article seems to have been written by M.H.S.. Can
you identify who this is? S/he seems to have had the opinion that
Susanna was S's sister--another grotesquery in the Oxfordian
labyrinth? bb

(quote)

| Shakespeare made his will on the 25th of March 1616, apparently in
| some haste, as the executed deed is a draft with many erasures and
| interlineations. There were legacies to his daughter Judith Quiney
and
| his sister Joan Hart, and remembrances to friends both in
Warwickshire

| and in London; but the real estate was left to HIS SISTER SUSANNA
| HALL under a strict entail which points to a desire on the part of

the
| testator to found a family.

(unquote)

[Art Neuendorffer]

> "Art Neuendorffer" <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote

> | ---------------------------------------------------------------
> | http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/
> |
> | <<Sir Kenneth Clark wrote of the Eleventh Edition [of the
> Encyclopedia
> | Britannica]: "One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as
> much
> | by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by
> the
> | facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopedia in the tradition
> of
> | Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only
> | when it is slightly colored by prejudice. When T.S. Eliot wrote
> | 'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopedia'
> | he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition.">>

"bookburn" <book...@yahoo.com> wrote

> Some editions of the 11th are leather-bound, sometimes available in
> thrift stores for cheap because the bulky sets are little read or
> recognized, and you can get it on CD or access it on the Perseus
> Project.
>
> The "Shakespeare" article seems to have been written by M.H.S.. Can
> you identify who this is? S/he seems to have had the opinion that
> Susanna was S's sister--another grotesquery in the Oxfordian
> labyrinth? bb

--------------------------------------------------
It was probably a typo made in going from
Chambers Britannica article to the internet copy.
--------------------------------------------------
There are three parts:

SHAKESPEARE (E. K. C.)
The Shakespeare-Bacon Theory. (H. Cn.)
THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKESPEARE (M. H. S.)
-----------------------------------------