Williant Jhakespere Biography. THE HE darkness, uncertainty, and error that long hung around the biography of Shakespeare, and our still very imperfect knowledge of the most interesting parts of his literary and domestic life, in spite of all the more recent discoveries of several acute and indefatigable English antiquarians, present one of the most curious and inexplicable phenomena of literary history. Shakespeare, for the last twenty years of his life, if not much longer, was among the most celebrated men of his day in England, and was admired and esteemed by men of all classes in London, and in his native town. As an actor, manager, man of business, as well as an author, he was much in the public view, and his associations must of course have been extensive and various. He was a personal favorite of the great as well as of the public; and as a man certainly of social, perhaps of convivial tastes, he is known to have been in habits of familiar intercourse and social pleasure with his brother poets and dramatists. His professional associates, Burbage, Heminge, and Condell, appear to have been on,terms of close intimacy and friendship with him: the two last were the first editors of his plays. But we have not only no biography of him, however brief, by any contemporary hand, but the notices of him by the authors of his own age, while sufficient to show the high esteem and admiration in which he was held, are exceedingly slight and unsatisfactory. In the succeeding generation, while many of his contemporaries were still living, he was by far the most admired of English authors. Among the most fervent of his admirers may be numbered Fuller and Milton, two of the greatest of their times, who may be said to have divided his genius between them-Milton inheriting the high poetical portion, and Fuller the wit, acuteness, originality, and knowledge of mankind. Yet neither they nor any of their contemporaries add anything to our knowledge of the great Poet, except that Fuller's professed account of him, (Fuller's "Worthies of England,") in addition to his place of birth and burial, and the date of his death, has preserved the memory of "the wit-combats between him and Ben Jonson." Nearly a century after his death, in 1709, or not long before, Rowe, with the assistance of Betterton, the actor, then advanced in years, first undertook to collect the traditions of Warwickshire, and of the London stage, to form a regular biography. One would have thought that such a traditional biography of such a man could not but be in substance correct. But some of the anecdotes related by Rowe appeared from the first improbable on the face of them, and others are inconsistent with the facts even then known of the great Poet's literary and dramatic life; while every subsequently discovered and well authenticated fact has tended more or less to shake the authenticity of Rowe's traditions. Still that narrative was for many years received as authentic, and as containing all that could be known of the Poet's life, until the era of Capell and Malone, from whose time down to our own days, a minute, laborious, and learned examination of public records, legal proceedings, corporation records, the Stationers' Register, and old contemporary manuscripts, has been carried on, gradually disinterring one insulated fact after another relating to Shakespeare and his family. Of this school Malone was the most efficient and successful inquirer in the last generation, as Mr. Collier has been in our own day. All the facts thus ascertained have been embodied by Mr. Collier in the life prefixed to his late edition of SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS. In order to make the present American edition as complete as may be, it has been thought proper to re-print the old traditional life by Rowe, just as it was read and believed by our ancestors; omitting, however, the comments since added by Stevens and by Malone, which appear in most of the modern editions, as that matter is all incorporated in Collier's life. Mr. Collier's narrative, curiously minute in its researches, sometimes digresses into collateral matter that throws no light upon the great dramatist's history; and the biographer's style is often so diffuse as to admit of great compression without any loss. I have, therefore, taken the liberty to abridge Mr. Collier's "Life of Shakespeare," by some omissions of the sort just referred to, and a good deal of compression of language; but have otherwise left him to give his narrative substantially in his own words, and to express his own opinions. Some of these opinions in regard to the succession of the plays, the character and value of some early editions, etc., differ from those of the present editor as expressed elsewhere in this edition. In these two lives, as thus given, the reader will find as well all the facts that have ever been generally believed or plausibly conjectured, as well all that have been certainly ascertained, respecting the life of Shakespeare. It seems to be a kind of respect due to the memory of excellent men, especially of those whom their wit and learning have made famous, to deliver some account of themselves, as well as their works, to posterity. For this reason, how fond do we see some people of discovering any little personal story of the great men of antiquity! their families, the common accidents of their lives, and even their shape, make, and features, have been the subject of critical inquiries. How trifling soever this curiosity may seem to be, it is certainly very natural; and we are hardly satisfied with an account of any remarkable person, till we have heard him described even to the very clothes he wears. As for what relates to men of letters, the knowledge of an author may sometimes conduce to the better understanding his book; and though the works of Shakespeare may seem to many not to want a comment, yet I fancy some little account of the man himself may not be thought improper to go along with them. He was the son of Mr. John Shakespeare, and was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 1564. His family, as appears by the register and public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment. He had bred him, it is true, for some time at a free-school, where it is probable he acquired what Latin he was master of; but the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home, forced his father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily prevented his further proficiency in that language. It is without controversy, that in his works we scarce find any traces of any thing that looks like an imitation of the ancients. The delicacy of his taste, and the natural bent of his own great genius, (equal, if not superior, to some of the best of theirs,) would certainly have led him to read and study them with so much pleasure, that some of their fine images would naturally have insinuated themselves into, and been mixed with his own writings; so that his not copying at least something from them, may be an argument of his never having read them. Whether his ignorance of the ancients were a disadvantage to him or no, may admit of a dispute; for though the knowledge of them might have made him more correct, yet it is not improbable but that the regularity and deference for them, which would have attended that correctness, might have restrained some of that fire, impetuosity, and even beautiful extravagance, which we admire in Shakespeare; and I believe we are better pleased with those thoughts, altogether new and uncommon, which his own imagination supplied him so abundantly with, than if he had given us the most beautiful passages out of the Greek and Latin poets, and that in the most agreeable manner that it was possible for a master of the English language to deliver them. Upon his leaving school, he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him; and in order to settle in the world after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young. His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford. In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of forced him both out of his country and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seemed at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry. He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and among them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London. It is at this time, and upon this accident, that he is said to have made his first acquaintance in the playhouse. He was received into the company then in being, at first in a very mean rank; but his admirable wit, and the natural turn of it to the stage, soon distinguished him, if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent writer. His name is printed, as the custom was in those times, among those of the other players, before some old plays, but without any particular account of what sort of parts he used to play; and though I have inquired, I could never meet with any further account of him this way, than that the top of his performance was the ghost in his own HAMLET. I should have been much more pleased to have learned from some certain authority which was the first play he wrote; it would be without doubt a pleasure to any man, curious in things of this kind, to see and know what was the first essay of a fancy like Shakespeare's. Perhaps we are not to look for his beginnings, like those of other authors, among their least perfect writings; art had so little, and nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best. I would not be thought by this to mean, that his fancy was so loose and extravagant, as to be independent on the rule and government of judgment; but that what he thought was commonly so great, so justly and rightly conceived in itself, that it wanted little or no correction, and was immediately approved by an impartial judgment at the first sight. But though the 1 The highest date of any I can yet find, is ROMEO AND JULIET, in 1597, when the author was thirty-three years old; and RICHARD II., and RICHARD III., in the next year-viz. the thirty-fourth year of his age. order of time in which the several pieces were written be generally uncertain, yet there are passages in some few of them which seem to fix their dates. So the Chorus, at the end of the fourth act of HENRY V., by a compliment very handsomely turned to the Earl of Essex, shows the play to have been written when that lord was general for the Queen in Ireland. And his eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, and her successor King James, in the latter end of his HENRY VIII., is a proof of that play's being written after the accession of the latter of those two princes to the crown of England. Whatever the particular times of his writing were, the people of his age, who began to grow wonderfully fond of diversions of this kind, could not but be highly pleased to see a genius arise among them of so pleasurable, so rich a vein, and so plentifully capable of furnishing their favourite entertainments. Besides the advantages of his wit, he was in himself a good-natured man, of great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable companion; so that it is no wonder if with so many good qualities he made himself acquainted with the best conversations of those times. Queen Elizabeth had several of his plays acted before her, and without doubt gave him many gracious marks of her favour: it is that maiden princess plainly, whom he intends by "a fair vestal, throned by the west." (Midsummer Night's Dream.) And that whole passage is a compliment very properly brought in, and very handsomely applied to her. She was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff, in the two parts of HENRY IV., that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love. This is said to be the occasion of his writing the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. HOW well she was obeyed, the play itself is an admirable proof. Upon this occasion it may not be improper to observe, that this part of Falstaff is said to have been written originally under the name of Oldcastle; some of that family being then remaining, the Queen was pleased to command him to alter it; upon which he made use of Falstaff. The present offence was indeed avoided; but I do not know whether the author may not have been somewhat to blame in his second choice, since it is certain that Sir John Falstaff, who was a knight of the garter, and a lieutenant-general, was a name of distinguished merit in the wars in France, in the times of Henry V. and Henry VI. What grace soever the Queen conferred upon hlm, it was not to her only he owed the fortune which the reputation of his wit made. He had the honour to meet with many great and uncommon marks of favour and friendship from the Earl of Southampton, famous in the histories of that time for his friendship to the unfortunate Earl of Essex. It was to that noble Lord that he dedicated his poem of VENUS AND ADONIS. There is one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's, that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted, that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds, to enable him to go 1 See the Epilogue to HENRY IV |