mark. of his name. unmarried and before their mother; who, having 17 reached her 77th year, expired in February, 1661-2 personal history of Shakspeare is weighty with genWhatever is in any degree associated with the -being buried on the 9th of that month. She ap-eral interest. The circumstance of his birth can pears either not to have received any education, or impart consequence even to a provincial town; and not to have profited by the lessons of her teachers, we are not unconcerned in the past or the present for to a deed, still in existence, she affixes her fortunes of the place, over which hovers the glory the last three or four years of his life, and in which he terminated his mortal labours, is still more enBut the house, in which he passed gaging to our imaginations, as it is more closely and personally connected with him. Its history, there fore, must not be omitted by us; and if in some re. spects, we should differ in it from the narrative of Malone, we shall not be without reasons sufficient to justify the deviations in which we indulge. New Place, then, which was not thus first named by Shakspeare, was built in the reign of Henry VII., by Sir Hugh Clopton, Kt., the younger son of an old family resident near Stratford, who had filled in succession the offices of Sheriff and of Lord Mayor of London. In 1563 it was sold by one of the Clopton family to William Bott; and by him it was again sold in 1570 to William Underhill, (the purchaser and the seller being both of the rank of esquires) from whom it was bought by our Poet in 1597. By him it was bequeathed to his daughter, Susanna Hall; from whom it descended to her only child, Lady Barnard. In the June of 1643, this Lady, with her first husband Mr. Nash, entertained, for nearly three weeks, at New Place, Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I., when, escorted by Prince Rupert and a large body of troops, she was on her progress to meet her royal consort, and to proceed with him to Oxford. On the death of Lady Barnard without children, New Place was sold, in 1675,† to Sir Edward Walker, Kt., Garter King at Arms; by whom it was left to his only child, Barbara, married to Sir John Clopton, Kt., of Clopton in the parish of Stratford. On his demise, it became the property of a younger son of his, Sir Hugh Clopton, Kt., (this family of the Cloptons seems to have been peculiarly prolific in the breed of knights,) by whom it was repaired and decorated at a very large expense. Malone affirms that it was pulled down by him, and its place supplied by a more sumptuous edifice. If this statement were correct, the crime of its subsequent destroyer would be greatly extenuated; and the hand which had wielded the axe against the hallowed mulberry tree, would be ablegious violence. But Malone's acccount is, unsolved from the second act, imputed to it, of sacriquestionably, erroneous. Hugh entertained Garrick, Macklin, and Delany under the shade of the Shakspearian mulberry. On In the May of 1742, Sir the demise of Sir Hught in the December of 1751, New Place was sold by his son-in-law and executor, Henry Talbot, the Lord Chancellor Talbot's brother, to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire; by whom, on some quarrel with the magistrates on the subject of the parochial assessments, it was razed to the ground, and its site abandoned to vacancy. On this completion of his outrages against the memory of Shakspeare, which his unlucky possession of wealth enabled him to said, with any of the vitality of genius. For this infor mation I am indebted to Mr. Charles Fellows, of Nottingham; who with the characteristic kindness of his most estimable family, sought for the intelligence which was required by me, and obtained it. We have already mentioned the dates of the birth, marriage, and death of Susanna Hall. She left only one daughter, Elizabeth, who was baptized on the 21st of February, 1607-8, eight years before her grandfather's decease, and was married on the 22d of April, 1626, to Mr. Thomas Nash, a country gentleman, as it appears, of independent fortune. Two years after the death of Mr. Nash, who was buried on the 5th of April, 1647, she married on the 5th of June, 1649, at Billesley in Warwickshire, Sir John Barnard, Knight, of Abington, a small village in the vicinity of Northampton. She died, and was buried at Abington, on the 17th of February, 1669-70; and, as she left no issue by either of her husbands, ner death terminated the lineal descendants of Shakspeare. His collateral kindred have been indulged with a much longer period of duration; the descendants of his sister, Joan, having continued in a regular succession of generations even to our days; whilst none of them, with a single exception, have broken from that rank in the community in which their ancestors, William Hart and Joan Shakspeare united their unostentatious fortunes in the year 1599. The single exception to which we allude is that of Charles Hart, believed, for good reasons, to be the son of William the eldest son of William and Joan Hart, and, consequently, the grand-nephew of our Poet. At the early age of seventeen, Charles Hart, as lieutenant in Prince Rupert's regiment, fought at the battle of Edgehill: and, subsequently betaking himself to the stage, he became the most renowned tragic actor of his time. "What Mr. Hart delivers," says Rymer, (I adopt the citation from the page of Malone,) "every one takes upon content: their eyes are prepossessed and charmed by his action before aught of the poet's can approach their ears; and to the most wretched of characters he gives a lustre and brilliancy, which dazzles the sight that the deformities in the poetry cannot be perceived." "Were I a poet," (says another contemporary writer,) "nay a Fletcher or a Shakspeare, I would quit my own title to immortality so that one actor might never die. may modestly say of him (nor is it my particular This I opinion, but the sense of all mankind) that the best tragedies on the English stage have received their lustre from Mr. Hart's performance: that he has left such an impression behind him, that no less than the interval of an age can make them appear again with half their majesty from any second hand." This was a brilliant eruption from the family of Shakspeare; but as it was the first so it appears to have been the last; and the Harts have ever since, as far at least as it is known to us, “pursued the noiseless tenor of their way," within the precincts of their native town on the banks of the soft-flowing Avon.* By intelligence, on the accuracy of which I can rely, and which has only just reached me, from the birthplace of Shakspeare, I learn that the family of the Harts, after a course of lineal descents during the revolution of two hundred and twenty-six years, is now on the verge of extinction; an aged woman, who retains in single blessedness her maiden name of Hart, being at this time (Nov. 1825) its sole surviving representative. For some years she occupied the house of her ancestors, in which Shakspeare is reported to have first seen the light; and here she obtained a comfortable subsistence by showing the antiquities of the venerated mansion to the numerous strangers who were attracted to it. Being dispossessed of this residence by the rapaciousness of its proprietor, she settled herself in a dwelling nearly opposite to it. Here she still lives; and continues to exhibit some relics, not reputed to be genuine, of the mighty bard, with whom her maternal ancestor was nourished in the same womb. She regards herself also as a dramatic poet; and, in support of her pretensions, she produces the rude sketch of a play, uninformed, as it is 3 Malone gives a different account of some of the was a barrister at law; and died in the December of tion of the relics of genius; not, indeed, of genius 18 When God was pleased, the world unwilling yet. commit, Francis Gastrell departed from Stratford, | ing epitaph, attributed, certainly not on its interna hooted out of the town, and pursued by the execra- evidence, to our Poet. Its subject was, probably tions of its inhabitants. The fate of New Place the member of a family with the surname of James, has been rather remarkable. After the demolition which once existed in Stratford. of the house by Gastrell, the ground, which it had occupied, was thrown into the contiguous garden, and was sold by the widow of the clerical barbarian. Having remained during a certain period, as a portion of a garden, a house was again erected on it; and, in consequence also of some d'spute about the parish assessments, that house, like its predecessor, was pulled down; and its site was finally abandoned to Nature, for the production of her fruits and her flowers: and thither may we imagine the little Elves and Fairies frequently to resort, to trace the footsteps of their beloved poet, now obliterated from the vision of man; to throw a finer perfume on the violet; to unfold the first rose of the year, and to tinge its cheek with a richer blush; and, in their dances beneath the full-orbed moon, to chant their harmonies, too subtle for the gross ear of mortality, to the fondly cherished memory of their darling, THE SWEET SWAN OF AVON. Of the personal history of William Shakspeare, as far as it can be drawn, even in shadowy existence, from the obscurity which invests it, and of whatever stands in immediate connection with it, we have now exhibited all that we can collect; and we are not conscious of having omitted a single circumstance of any moment, or worthy of the attention of our readers. We might, indeed, with old Fuller, speak of our Poet's wit-combats, as Fuller calls them, at the Mermaid, with Ben Jonson: but then we have not one anecdote on record of either of these intellectual gladiators to produce, for not a sparkle of our Shakspeare's convivial wit has travelled down to our eyes; and it would be neither instructive nor pleasant to see him represented as a light skiff, skirmishing with a huge galleon, and either evading or pressing attack as prudence suggested, or the alertness of his movements emboldened him to attempt. The lover of heraldry may, perhaps, censure us for neglecting to give the blazon of Shakspeare's arms, for which, as it appears, two patents were issued from the herald's office, one in 1569 or 1570, and one in 1599; and by him, who will insist on the transcription of every word which has been imputed on any authority to the pen of Shakspeare, we may be blamed for passing over in silence two very indifferent epitaphs, which have been charged on him. We will now, therefore, give the arms which were accorded to him; and we will, also, copy the two epitaphs in question. We may then, without any further impediment, proceed to the more agreeable portion of our labours,-the notice of our author's works. The armorial bearings of the Shakspeare family are, or rather were,-Ör, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, headed argent. Crest, A falcon displayed, argent, supporting a spear in pule, or. Among the monuments in Tonge Church, in the county of Salop, is one raised to the memory of Sir Thomas Stanley, Knt., who is thought by Malone to have died about the year 1600. With the prose inscription on this tomb, transcribed by Sir W. Dugdale, are the verses which I am about to copy, said by Dugdale to have been made by William Shakspeare, the late famous tragedian. ON THE EAST END OF THE TOMB. Ask who lies here, but do not weep: ON THE WEST END. Not monumental stone preserves our fame: As the great works of Shakspeare have engaged the attention of an active and a learned century since they were edited by Rowe, little that is new on the subject of them can be expected from a pen of the present day. It is necessary, however, that we should notice them, lest our readers should be compelled to seek in another page than ours for the common information which they might conceive themselves to be entitled to expect from us. Fourteen of his plays were published separately, in quarto copies, during our Poet's life; and, seven years after his death, a complete edition of them was given to the public in folio by his theatric fellows, Heminge and Condell. Of those productions of his, which were circulated by the press while he was yet living, and were all surreptitious, our great author seems to have been as utterly regardless as he necessarily was of those which appeared when he was mouldering in his grave.* We have already * In his essay on the chronological order of Shak the title-page of the earliest edition of Hamlet, which he speare's plays, Malone concludes very properly from believed then to be extant, that this edition (published in 1604) had been preceded by another of a less correct and In a MS. volume of poems, by William Herrick less perfect character. A copy of the elder edition, in and others, preserved in the Bodleian, is the follow-question, has lately been discovered; and is, indeed, far more remote from perfection than its sucessor, which equally hallowed with that of which we have been was collated by Malone. It obviously appears to have speaking, for Nature has not yet produced a second been printed from the rude draught of the drama, as it Shakspeare; but of genius, which had conversed with was sketched by the Poct from the first suggestions of the immortal Muses, which had once been the delight of his mind. But how this rude and imperfect draught the good and the terror of the bad. I allude to the vio- could fall into the hands of its publisher, is a question lation of Pope's charming retreat, on the banks of the not easily to be answered, Such, however, is the au Thames, by a capricious and tasteless woman, who thority to be attached to all the early quartos. They has endeavoured to blot out every memorial of the great were obtained by every indirect mean; and the first inand moral poet from that spot, which his occupation correct MS., blotted again and again by the pens of ighad made classic, and dear to the heart of his country.norant transcribers, and multiplied by the press, was In the mutability of all human things, and the inevitable suffered, by the apathy of its illustrious author, to be shiftings of property, "From you to me, from me to circulated, without check, among the multitude Hence Peter Walter," these lamentable desecrations, which the grossest anomalies of grammar have been consider mortify our pride and wound our sensibilities, will of ed, by his far-famed restorers, as belonging to the dianecessity sometimes occur. The site of the Tusculan lect of Shakspeare; and the most egregious infractions of Cicero may become the haunt of banditti, or be dis-of rhythm, as the tones of his honey-tongued muse, The graced with the walls of a monastery. The residences variations of the copy of Hamlet immediately before us, of a Shakspeare and a Pope may be devastated and de- which was published in 1603, from the perfect drama, filed by a Parson Gastrell and a Baroness Howe. We as it subsequently issued from the press, are far too nu can only sigh over the ruin when its deformity strikes merous to be noticed in this place, if indeed this place, upon our eyes; and execrate the hands by which it has could properly be assigned to such a purpose. I may, boen savagoly accomplished. however, just mention that Cerambis and Montano are observed on the extraordinary,-nay wonderful m- view cured and perfect of their limbs; and all the difference of this illustrious man toward the offspring rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived of his fancy; and we make it again the subject of them." But notwithstanding these professions, our remark solely for the purpose of illustrating the and their honest resentment against impostors and cause of those numerous and pernicious errors surreptitious copies, the labours of these sole pos➡ which deform all the early editions of his plays. sessors of Shakspeare's MSS. did not obtain tho He must have known that many of these, his intel- credit which they arrogated; and they are charged lectual children, were walking through the commu- with printing from those very quartos, on which nity in a state of gross disease, with their limbs they had heaped so much well-merited abuse. They spotted, as it were, with the leprosy or the plague. printed, as there cannot be a doubt, from their But he looked on them without one parental feeling, prompter's book, (for by what temptation could they and stretched not out his hand for their relief. They be enticed beyond it?) but then, from the same had broken from the confinement of the players, to book, were transcribed many, perhaps, of the surwhose keeping he had consigned them; and it was reptitious quartos; and it is not wonderful that their business and not his to reclaim them. As for transcripts of the same page should be precisely the rest of his intellectual progeny, they were where alike. These editors, however, of the first folio, he had placed them; and he was utterly uncon-have incurred the heavy displeasure of some of our cerned about their future fate. How fraught and modern critics, who are zealous on all occasions to glowing with the principle of life must have been depreciate their work. Wherever they differ from their nature to enable them to subsist, and to force the first quartos, which, for the reason that I have themselves into immortality under so many circum- assigned, they must in general very closely resem stances of evil! ble, Malone is ready to decide against them, and The copies of the plays, published antecedently to defer to the earlier edition. But it is against the to his death, were transcribed either by memory editor of the second folio, published in 1632, that from their recitation on the stage; or from the sepa- he points the full storm of his indignation. He rate parts, written out for the study of the particu- charges this luckless wight, whoever he may be, lar actors, and to be pieced together by the skill of with utter ignorance of the language of Shakspeare's the editor; or, lastly, if stolen or bribed access time, and of the fabric of Shakspeare's verse; and could be obtained to it, from the prompter's book he considers him and Pope as the grand corrupters itself. From any of these sources of acquisition of Shakspeare's text. Without reflecting that to the copy would necessarily be polluted with very be ignorant of the language of Shakspeare's time flagrant errors; and from every edition, through was, in the case of this hapless editor, to be ignowhich it ran, it would naturally contract more pol- rant of his own, for he who published in 1632 could lution and a deeper stain. Such of the first copies hardly speak with a tongue different from his who as were fortunately transcribed from the prompter's died only sixteen years before, Malone indulges in book, would probably be in a state of greater rela- an elaborate display of the unhappy man's ignotive correctness: but they are all, in different de- rance, and of his presumptuous alterations. He grees, deformed with inaccuracies; and not one of (the editor of the second folio) did not know that the them can claim the right to be followed as an au- double negative was the customary and authorized thority. What Steevens and Malone call the re- dialect of the age of Queen Elizabeth; (God help storing of Shakspeare's text, by reducing it to the him, poor man! for if he were forty years old when he reading of these early quartos, is frequently the re-edited Shakspeare, he must have received the first storing of it to error and to nonsense, from which it had luckily been reclaimed by the felicity of conjectural criticism. One instance immediately occurs to me, to support what I have affirmed; and it may be adduced instead of a score, which might be easíly found, of these vaunted restorations. In that fine scene between John and Hubert, where the monarch endeavours to work up his agent to the royal purposes of murder, the former says, -If thou couldst I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts, &c. &c. The passage thus stood in one of these old copies of authority: but Pope, not able to discover any meaning in the epithet, brooded, most happily substituted "broad-eyed" in its stead. As the compound was poetic and Shakspearian (for Shakspeare has dull-eyed and fire-eyed,) and was also most peculiarly suited to the place which it was to fill, the substitution for a while was permitted to remain; till Steevens, discovering the reading of the old copy, restored brooded to the station whence it had been rudiments of his education in the reign of the maiden queen ;) and thus egregiously ignorant (ignorant, by the bye, where Shakspeare himself was ignorant, for his Twelfth Night, the clown says, 68 If your four negatives make your two affirmatives -why then the worse for my friends and the better for my foes," &c.) but thus egregiously ignorant, instead of "Nor to her bed no homage do I owe." this editor has stupidly printed, "Nor to her bed a homage do I owe." further," this blockhead of an editor has substituted Again, in "As you Like It," for "I cannot go no "I can go no further." In "Much Ado about Nothing," for "There will she hide her To listen our purpose." this corrupting editor has presumed to relieve the halting metre by printing, "There will she hide her felicitously expelled, and abandoned the line once In these instances, I feel convinced that the editor is more to the nonsense of the first editor. In 1623, the first complete edition of our author's dramatic works was published in folio by his comrades of the theatre, Heminge and Condell; and in this we might expect a text tolerably incorrupt, if not perfectly pure. The editors denounced the copies which had preceded their edition as "stolen and surreptitious copies, mained and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors, that exposed them; even those are now offered to your the names given in this copy to the Polonius and Reynaldo of the more perfect editions; and the young lord, Osrick, is called in it only a braggart gentleman. right, and consequently that the critic is the blockhead who is wrong. In what follows also, I am decidedly of opinion that the scale inclines in favour of the former of these deadly opposites. The double comparative is common in the plays of Shakspeare, says Malone :-true, as I am willing to allow; but always, as I am persuaded, in consequence of the illiteracy or the carelessness of the first transcriber: for why should Shakspeare write more ar sinalous English than Spenser, Daniel, Hooker, and i acon or why in his plays should he be guilty e barba * Act v. sc. L. tiems with which those poems of his, that were | plement is as beneficial to the sense, as i printed under his own immediate eye, are altoge-cessary to the rhythm. Malone's line is, ther unstained? But, establishing the double com- "And with the brands fire the traitors' houses:" parative as one of the peculiar anomalies of Shak speare's grammar, Malone proceeds to arraign the the editor's unfortunate editor as a criminal, for substituting, in "And with the brands fire all the traitors' houses." "I would while it was smiling in my face a passage of Coriolanus, more worthy for more wor- The next charge, brought against the editor, may thier; in Othello-for, "opinion, a sovereign mis-be still more easily repelled. In a noted passage tress, throws a more safer voice on you," "opinion, of Macbeth&c. throws a more safe voice on you;" and, in Hamlet, instead of "Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify this to the doctor," "Your wisdom should show itself more rich to signify this to the doctor." Need I express my conviction that in these passages the editor has corrected the text into what actually fell from Shakspeare's pen? Can it be doubted also that the editor is accurate in his printing of the following passage in "A Midsummer Night's Dream?" As adopted by Malone it stands. "So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, i. e., says the critic, to give sovereignty to, &c.-To "So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, "Not perceiving," says Malone, "that 'sworn' Having now sufficiently demonstrated the editor's ignorance of Shakspeare's language, let us proceed with his critic to ascertain his ignorance of Shak-with fire, sire, &c. and as it is possible, though, speare's metre and rhythm. In "The Winter's Tale," says Malone, we find, "What wheels, racks, fires; what flaying, boiling In leads and oils!" with reference to the fine ear of Shakspeare, Í think most improbable, that it might sometimes be made to occupy the place of two syllables, I shall pass over the instance from "Richard II." in which Malone triumphs, though without cause, over his "All's Well that End's Well," in which a defecadversary; as I shall also pass over that from tive line has been happily supplied by our editor, Not knowing that 'fires' was used as a dissyllable, the editor added the word burning, at the end of the line (I wish that he had inserted it before boil-in consequence of his not knowing that'sire' was ing') "What wheels, racks, fires; what flaying, boiling, burning." It is possible that fires may be used by Shakspeare as a dissyllable, though I cannot easily persuade myself that, otherwise than as a monosyllable, it would satisfy an ear, attuned as was his, to the finest harmonies of verse; yet it may be employed as a dissyllable by the rapid and careless bard; and I am ready to allow that the defective verse was not happily supplied, in that place at least, with the word, burning, yet I certainly believe that Shakspeare did not leave the line in question as Malone has adopted it, and that some word has been omitted by the carelessness of the first transcriber. In the next instance, from Julius Cæsar, I feel assured that the editor is right, as his sup In his "Venus and Adonis," and his "Rape of Lucrece," printed under his immediate inspection; and in his 154 Sonnets, printed from correct MSS., and no doubt with his knowledge, are not to be found any of these barbarous anomalies. "The Passionate Pilgrim," and "The Lover's Complaint," are, also, free from them. Worser and lesser may sometimes occur in these poems: but the last of these improprieties will occasionally find a place in the page of modern composition. In the "Rape of Lucrece," the only anomaly of the double negative, which I have been able to discover, is the following: "She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks." and the same impropriety may be found in three or four Instances in the Sonnets. And substituted for nor would restore these few passages to perfect grammar. employed as a dissyllable. In the first part of "Orleans the bastard, Charles, and Burgundy." |