Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

here again we get upon debateable ground. No one knows as a fact that Shakespeare ever dabbled in the wool-stapling business. Rowe and Malone, on no better data apparently than the acquaintance which the poet has shown with legal terms, have fancied that he must have been in an attorney's office. They might as well have fancied that he had been bred a druggist, or a goldsmith, or a farrier, or an ornithologist, or a sailor, or a watchman, or any other trade under the sun; for there is no trade under the sun with the technicalities of which he does not seem familiar. The probability is (and we have nothing better than probabilities to go upon), that till within a year or two of his marriage in 1582, when he was eighteen years of age, he was at his studies; and that, if his father then "needed him at home," he gave his father such aid in his failing circumstances as he could.

An event happened in 1580 which was calculated to make a greater impression on the poet's mind than all the entries in the Glover's Ledger. The Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet," when speaking to Lady Capulet of Juliet's age, says,

""Tis since the earthquake now eleven years."

This play was written somewhere about eleven years after 1580, and on the 6th of April of that year there occurred one of the severest earthquakes ever known in England. Holinshed, whose historical writings Shakespeare apparently knew by heart, thus writes of it," On the 6th of April (1580),

being Wednesday in Easter weeke, about six of the clocke, toward evening, a sudden earthquake happening in London, and almost generallie throughout all England, caused such an amazedness among the people as was wonderfull for the time, and caused them to make their earnest praiers to Almighty God. The great clocke bell in the palace at Westminster strake of itselfe against the hammer with the shaking of the earth, as diverse other clockes and bells in the steeples of London and elsewhere did the like. The gentlemen of the Temple, being then at supper, ran from the tables, and out of their halls, with their knives in their hands. The people assembled at the plaiehouses in the fields were so amazed that, doubting the ruine of the galleries, they made haste to be gone. A piece of the Temple Church fell down; and some stones fell from St. Paul's Church, in London. The tops

of diverse chimnies in the citie fell down, the houses were so shaken. A part of the castell at Bishop Stratford, in Essex, fell doune. This earthquake indured in or about London not passing one minute of an houre, and was no more felt. But afterward in Kent, and on the sea-coast, it was felt three times; and at Sandwich, at six of the clocke, the land not only quaked, but the sea also foamed, so that the ships tottered. At Dover also, the same houre, was the like, so that a piece of the cliffe fell into the sea, with also a piece of the castell wall there."

Shakespeare had probably not lost his impression

of this earthquake when he made Othello exclaim, after the murder of Desdemona,—

"Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration."

Or when he put into Hotspur's mouth, in "King
Henry IV.," the words,—

"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth

[ocr errors]

In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth

Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd,

.

which, for enlargement striving,

Shakes the old beldame earth, and topples down

Steeples and moss-grown towers."

Or when Lennox, the morning after the murder of Duncan, utters these graphic lines,

"The night has been unruly; where we lay

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying, with accents terrible,

Of dire combustion and confus'd events,

New hatched to the woeful time.

The obscene bird

Clamour'd the livelong night: some say the earth

Was feverous and did shake."

Manhood was now dawning, and the mightiest though the tenderest of human passions was waiting in the dawn for Shakespeare.

"As on the sweetest buds

The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all."

Shottery is a picturesque hamlet about a mile distant from Stratford. In a cottage there dwelt Anne Hathaway, the daughter of Richard Hathaway, a substantial yeoman. "Shottery," says Mr. Halliwell, in his elaborate Shakespearian work, "is a little hamlet in the parish of Stratford, situated about a mile to the west of the town by a pathway across the fields. Some years ago the meadows were thoroughly rural, and so was the village. Approaching the hamlet from Stratford, at the entrance of the lane past the fields stands the Shakespeare Inn, a pleasing example of the old half-timbered house that must formerly have been common in Shottery, and of which a few lingering traces still remain, in spite of innovation. Proceeding down the lane, as we arrive in sight of Anne Hathaway's cottage, a clear and ample brook crossed the road, once traversed by means of a picturesque wooden bridge, composing a scene that the most prosaic would admit harmonized with the idea of the locality of a poet's love."

The two families had been long acquainted, for there is evidence that John Shakespeare and Richard Hathaway were friends; and William often took that path by the fields. Whether Anne was in reality beautiful we know not; but she was to be our Shakespeare's wife, and therefore she has an interest for all ages. Unfortunately, however, in the sober and unromantic matter of the lady's age surgit aliquid amari. She was eight years older than Shakespeare, for she was born in 1556, so that in the year of their marriage (1582) she was twenty-six, and he was only

eighteen. Yet let no fault be imputed to either. He was no doubt older for his years, both in physical and mental development, than any of the youth of Stratford; that he possessed great manly beauty is a tradition handed down by Aubrey, and corroborated by the fact of his success on the stage, and the lineaments of the most authentic likenesses of him that remain. The first love of a glowing and intelligent youth, who suddenly feels himself a man, is commonly older than himself. The girls with whom he has romped as a boy are to him still girls; but, impressed with the necessity of bestowing his affections somewhere, he experiences a glow of pride in finding them accepted by a full-grown woman. And how should any woman have shut her heart to Shakespeare if he chose to woo her?

They were married in November, 1582, if not earlier in the year; and there is nothing to lead us to suppose that the alliance was against the wishes of either of the families, or that it was prompted by any but disinterested motives and mutual attachment. His perfect understanding of the holiness and the virtue of a well-assorted marriage appears from many passages of his works. How finely Suffolk says, in the first part of "King Henry VI."—

"A dower, my lords! disgrace not so your king,
That he should be so abject, base, and poor,
To choose for wealth, and not for perfect love.
Henry is able to enrich his queen,

And not to seek a queen to make him rich :
So worthless peasants bargain for their wives,

« ZurückWeiter »