A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare

1564

In July the plague broke out in Stratford, and continued to December. There died 238 in that half-year, no Shakespeares among them. John Shakespeare had had an early lesson in sanitation by way of a fine of 12d. in April 1552 for having a muck heap in front of his door in Henley Street, within a stone's-throw of one of the public stores of filth. He now contributed fairly to relieve the poor and plague-stricken; about 12d. per month.

1565

In March John Shakespeare with his former colleague made up the chamberlain's accounts from September 1563 to 1564. Neither of them could sign their names.

1566

In February he again made up these accounts, and was paid £3, 2s. 7d. "for a rest of old debt" by the corporation. On 13th October his son Gilbert was baptized.

1567

In September, Ralph Perrot, brewer, John Shakespeare, and Ralph Cawdrey, butcher, were nominated for the office of High Bailiff or Mayor. Cawdrey was elected. For the first time the name appears as "Mr." John Shakespeare.

1568

On 4th September "Mr. John Shakysper" was chosen High Bailiff. He was succeeded the next year by Robert Salisbury.

1569

On 15th April John Shakespeare's third daughter (named Joan after her deceased elder sister) was baptized.

1571

On 28th September John Shakespeare's fourth daughter Anne was baptized. William was now seven, then the usual age for the commencement of grammar-school education, the use of the Absey book and horn-book having been acquired at home. Lily's Accidence and the Sententiæ Pueriles were the usual text-books for beginners in Latin. Shakespeare had some knowledge of Latin, and a little French; all beyond this is very problematical.

1573

On 11th March, Richard, John Shakespeare's third son, was baptized.

1575

John Shakespeare bought two houses in Stratford.

1578

In January John Shakespeare paid only the amount of borough taxes paid by other aldermen. William was then fourteen, the usual age for commencing apprenticeship. There is a tradition given by Aubrey that he was apprenticed to a butcher. I believe this to be a myth, originating in the epithet "kill-cow," often applied to tragic actors. Some writers still think that the tradition may be relied on. Another story traced to the parish clerk of 1693 is that he followed his father's profession. May be so; may not be.

1579

In Easter Term Asbies was mortgaged to Edmund Lambert for £40, to revert if repayment be made before Michaelmas 1580.

On 4th July Anne Shakespeare was buried; in the chamberlain's accounts occurs this item: "For the bell and pall for Mr. Shaxper's daughter, 8d.," the highest fee in the list.

On 15th October John Shakespeare and his wife convey their interest in Snitterfield to Robert Webbe. Agnes Arden's will is dated in this year.

1580

On 3d May, Edmund, son of John Shakespeare, was baptized.

On or before 29th September, the money in discharge of the Asbies mortgage was tendered and refused unless other moneys due were also paid.

1581

On 19th January the goods of Agnes Arden, deceased, were appraised.

On 1st September Richard Hathaway of Shottery made his will.

1582

On 28th November the marriage bond between William Shagspere and Anne Hathway was given, under condition that neither party had been precontracted to another person, and that the said William Shagspere should not proceed to solemnization with the said Anne Hathway without consent of her friends. They were to be married with one asking of the banns. The bondsmen were Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, – the seal is R.H., which may be Richard Hathaway's.

1583

On May 26th Susanna their daughter was baptized. It is assumed that a precontract existed between the parents which, according to the custom of the time, "was not legally recognised, but it invalidated a subsequent union of either of the parties with any one else" (Halliwell, Outlines, p. 45). The reader must form his own opinion. Taking into consideration the low morality of the time in such matters, the fact that Anne Hathaway was twenty-six, and Shakespeare eighteen in 1582, the practice still not unknown in rural districts of cohabitation under conditional promise of marriage, should the probable birth of a child make it necessary or prudent, the fact that from 1587 to 1597 we have no evidence that Shakespeare even saw his wife, and the palpable indications in the Sonnets that during this interval he was intriguing with another woman – for my own part I cannot help adopting De Quincey's view that he was entrapped into some such conditional promise by this lady and kept his promise honourably. Compare on the precontract question the plays of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage by Wilkins, which is founded on the contemporary history of the same Calverley who is the murderer in The Yorkshire Tragedy, with Shakespeare's own views in 1604 in Measure for Measure; his opinions in Twelfth Night, ii. 4 (early part, c. 1592), and Midsummer Night's Dream, i. 1, on wives that are older than their husbands: and, by way of showing that his plays do discover sometimes his personal feelings, Valentine's resignation of Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with the story involved in the Sonnets of Shakespeare's own transfer of his illicit love.

1585

February 2. Hamnet and Judith, Shakspeare's twin children, were baptized at Stratford-on-Avon. By April 26th he had certainly attained his majority, and his apprenticeship had probably expired.

1585-7

Three or four years after his union with Anne Hathaway, he had, says Rowe, "by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, amongst 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 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." Whether this tradition be well founded or no, we are compelled by subsequent events to place the date of Shakespeare's leaving Stratford in or about 1587; and whether there be any truth in the story traced to Davenant or not, that he held horses at the play-house door, while their owners were witnessing performances inside, it is certain that he was very soon connected with the stage, first as actor, then as dramatic writer. It becomes therefore of importance to ascertain if possible the specific company with which he originally joined.

In the latter part of 1585 there were two regular theatres existing in London, the Theater and the Curtain. It clearly appears from a report by Recorder Fleetwood preserved in the Lansdown MSS. that at Whitsuntide 1584 these were occupied by the Queen's players and those of Lord Arundel. It is not clear that a third company, that of Lord Hunsdon, acted at the Theater: although Mr. J. O. H. Phillipps (whom I most usually refer to under his former and better known name of Halliwell) assures us that it is so. It is true that the "owner of the Theater," whom he takes to be a temporary occupier of that building, but whom I regard as the ground landlord, Giles Alleyn, is called a servant of Lord Hunsdon's, and that a company of actors, called Lord Hunsdon's men, acted at Court 27th December 1582; but it does not follow that these men were occupiers of the Theater. In fact the only companies anyhow known to us as in London in 1585 are the two already mentioned. It is by no means likely à priori, nor would it agree with the passages hereafter to be referred to in the writings of Greene and Nash, that Shakespeare should immediately on his appearance in London obtain employment in either. But there was a third company not noticed in Collier's Annals of the Stage, into which he may easily have obtained admittance. When the Queen's company was formed in 8th March 1582-3, by the selection of twelve players from the companies of the two Dudleys, Earls of Leicester and Warwick, there must have been sufficient men left unemployed to form another company. These were probably still retained by the Earl of Leicester: for in a letter from Sir Philip Sidney, dated Utrecht, 24th March 1575-6, mention is made of "Will, the Earl of Leicester's jesting player," who had gone with the Earl to the Netherlands in December 1575. Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors, 1612, tells us that "The King of Denmark, father to him that now reigneth, entertained into his service a company of English comedians, commended unto him by the honourable Earl of Leicester." This King of Denmark, Frederick II., died in 1588, and the exact date of the transaction is fixed by documents dated October 1586, in which we find that five of these actors had been transferred from the service of Frederick II. of Denmark to that of Christian I., Duke of Saxony. I am far from wishing to adopt the conjecture of Mr. Bruce that "jesting Will" was Shakespeare; but when among the names of these five actors – Thomas King, Thomas Stephen, George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Robert Persie – we find two, Pope and Bryan, that are identical with those of two actors in the very first list extant of the first company with which we can positively connect Shakespeare as an actor; when we find this same company acting at Stratford in 1587, at the very time that Shakespeare's disappearance from all known connection with that town for nine years commences; when we find among a list of plays that had been acted by the English in Germany Hester and Ahasuerus, Titus Andronicus [and Vespasian], both of which we shall trace to Shakespeare's company; when we also find a version of the Corambis Hamlet existing early in the same country – then I think we are justified in saying that there is great likelihood of this company having been the one in which Shakespeare found his first employment. If so, he accompanied it in all its fortunes, and never (as we shall see) forsook it for another.

1586

Meanwhile in London the plague had prevailed to such an extent that the theatres were shut up during 1586. It was not then during this year that Shakespeare held horses at stage-doors, or obtained employment in London theatres. But at the end of the year Lord Leicester's players returned to England, and in January 1586-87 are mentioned together with the Queen's, the Admiral's, and the Earl of Oxford's, in a letter to Walsingham from a spy of his, which is preserved in the Harleian MSS.

1587

This same company, the Earl of Leicester's men, visited Stratford-on-Avon in 1587. I have not been able to trace their previous presence there since 1576, although other companies paid frequent visits to this town. It is singular that in this year, the only one in which this company visited Stratford during the twelve years intervening between the birth and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, we find also the only record of the poet's presence in the place of his nativity. I give this in the words of Mr. Halliwell. "In 1578 his parents had borrowed the sum of £40 on the security of his mother's estate of Asbies, from their connexion, Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath. The loan remaining unpaid, and the mortgage dying in March 1587, his son and heir John was naturally desirous of having the matter settled. John Shakespeare being at that time in prison for debt, and obviously unable to furnish the money, it was arranged shortly afterwards that Lambert should, on cancelling the mortgage and paying also the sum of £20, receive from the Shakespeares an absolute title to the estate. His offer would perhaps not have been made had it not been ascertained that the eldest son William had a contingent interest, derived no doubt from a settlement, and that his assent was essential to the security of a conveyance. The proposed arrangement was not completed, but" the poet's sanction to it is recorded. I believe that immediately after this, in 1587, Shakespeare left Stratford either with or in order to join Lord Leicester's company.

1588

The Earl of Leicester died on 4th September 1588. Previously to this date the company of players acting under his patronage had played in London, probably at the Cross-Keys in Bishopsgate Street, and more frequently had travelled in the country. At the death of Dudley, they had of course to seek for a new patron, and no doubt found one in Ferdinando, Lord Strange, whose company (containing as we shall see some of the actors already known as Leicester's men) are first traceable in 1589. An earlier company bearing the title of Lord Strange's men, c. 1582, seem to have been merely acrobats or posture-mongers. But before entering on the history of this company under its new name, of which we know Shakespeare to have been a member, we must note some particulars regarding other dramatists, especially Marlowe, Greene, and Nash, which indirectly concern Shakespeare, and have hitherto been wrongly interpreted.

In 1587, when the Admiral's men re-opened after the plague, they produced, in what succession we need not here determine, Greene's Orlando and Alphonsus of Arragon, Peele's Battle of Alcazar, and Marlowe's Tamberlaine. Those plays are enumerated in Peele's Farewell, 1589, as —

"Mahomet's pow, and mighty Tamberlaine,King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest."

"Mahomet's pow" is the head of Mahomet in Alphonsus; King Charlemagne was probably a character in the complete play of Orlando, of which only a mutilated copy has come down to us; Tom Stukeley is the hero of The Battle of Alcazar; and "the rest" most likely indicate Lodge's Marius and Sylla and Marlowe's Faustus. Greene and Peele wrote no more for this company, but in 1587 removed to the Queen's men, who had been travelling in the country. On 29th March 1588 Greene's Perimedes the Blacksmith was entered on the Stationers' Registers. In the introduction Greene attacks Marlowe and Lodge, who had remained with the Admiral's men, in a passage worth quoting: "I keep my old course still to palter up something in prose, using mine old posy still, omne tulit punctum; although lately two gentlemen poets made two madmen of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers, and had it in derision, for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow-bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamberlaine or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun. But let me rather openly pocket up the ass at Diogenes' hand than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry. Such mad and scoffing poets that have poetical spirits as bred of Merlin's race, if there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hot-house (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits." For the fuller understanding of this satire it may be noted that no "priest of the sun" is known in an early play except in The Looking-glass for London and England by Lodge and Greene, which is certainly of later date than Perimedes, yet may indicate Lodge's liking for that character; that Diogenes is the name assumed by Lodge in his Catharos, 1591, and that Marlowe's name was written Merlin as often as Marlowe. There can be no doubt as to the persons aimed at, nor of the effect of the satire, for both of them left off writing for the Admiral's men; and Marlowe during the next two years produced The Jew of Malta, which can be traced to the Queen's company, and together with Greene, Lodge, and Peele produced the plays of The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The First Part of York and Lancaster on which 2 Henry VI. is founded. The internal evidence for the authorship of these last-mentioned plays is very strong: they were, however, published anonymously.

1589

Before the entry of Greene's Menaphon on the Stationers' Registers on 23d August 1589, Hamlet and The Taming of a Shrew must have been represented by Pembroke's men, and Marlowe must have left the Queen's company. As Menaphon is accessible in Professor Arber's reprint to the general reader, it will be sufficient to refer to it here without quoting passages in full. That Greene refers so satirically to Marlowe as to prevent our supposing that at this date they could be writing jointly for the same theatre, is clear from a hitherto unnoticed passage in p. 54: "Whosoever descanted of that love told you a Canterbury tale; some prophetical fullmouth, that, as he were a Cobler's eldest son, would by the last tell where another's shoe wrings." Marlowe or Merlin was a shoemaker's son of Canterbury. That Doron in the story is meant for the author of The Taming of a Shrew was shown by Mr. R. Simpson by comparing Doron's speech in p. 74: "White as the hairs that grow on Father Boreas' chin," and the passage in Nash's introduction, p. 5, about mechanical mates, servile imitators of vain-glorious tragedians, who think themselves "more than initiated in poet's immortality if they but once get Boreas by the beard," with the words of the play itself: "whiter than icy hair that grows on Boreas' chin." Mr. Simpson was, however, entirely wrong in identifying Doron with Shakespeare, and did not notice that Doron's entire speech parodies one of Menaphon's in p. 31, just as The Taming of a Shrew parodies Marlowe's plays, or "the mechanical mates" alluded to by Nash imitate the "idiot art-masters" in the "swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse," or the "spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon." The name Menaphon is taken from Marlowe's Tamberlaine. In these passages Greene and Nash satirise Kyd, then writing for Pembroke's company. In another paragraph, p. 9, Nash speaks of "a sort of shifting companions" that "leave the trade of Noverint whereto they were born," who get their aphorisms from translations of Seneca and can "afford you whole Hamlets of tragical speeches." This passage is familiar to all students of Shakespeare; and yet no one has, I think, pointed out that Nash identifies these "famished followers" of Seneca with the "Kidde in Æsop, who, enamoured with the Fox's newfangles, forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation." This pun in a tractate containing similar allusions to the names Greene, Lyly, and Merlin is equivalent to a direct attribution of the authorship of Hamlet as produced in 1589 to Kyd, and is also a refutation of those who have seen in the whole passage an allusion to Shakespeare.

Very shortly after Greene's Menaphon Nash issued his Anatomy of Absurdities, which had been entered on the Stationers' Registers 19th September 1588, and which contains much of the same satirical matter as his address in Menaphon.

We have now to pass from the private quarrel of Greene and Nash, as representing the Queen's men at the Theater, with Marlowe and Kyd, the writers for Pembroke's company, to a much more important controversy in which many of the same dramatists were concerned. Between October 1588 and October 1589 the Martinists published their Puritan controversial tracts; in opposition to them various writings had appeared, whose authors were Cooper, formerly schoolmaster, afterwards Bishop; Lyly the Euphuist; Nash the satirist; and Elderton "the bibbing fool" ballad-maker. They had also been ridiculed on the stage, in April 1589, at the Theater, most likely by Greene; at the Paul's school probably by Lyly; and either in ballad or interlude by Antony Munday, even at that early date a dramatic writer. As the anti-Martinist plays were on the side of the clergy and of secular authority they were not interfered with. But in November 1589, in consequence of certain players in London handling "matters of Divinity and State without judgment or decorum" – in other words, having the impertinence to suppose that there could be two sides to a question, Mr. Tylney, the Master of the Revels, suddenly becomes awake to the danger of allowing such discussions on public stages, and writes to Lord Burleigh that he "utterly mislikes all plays within the city." Lord Burleigh sends a letter to the Lord Mayor to "stay" them. The Theater and Curtain, where the Queen's men and Pembroke's were playing, were without the city, so that the anti-Martinist plays were not interfered with; the Paul's boys were for the nonce not regarded as a company of players: so that the Mayor could only "hear of" the Admiral's men, who on admonishment dutifully forbore playing, and Lord Strange's, who departed contemptuously, "went to the Cross-Keys and played that afternoon to the great offence of the better sort, that knew they were prohibited." The Mayor then "committed two of the players to one of the compters." These players, however, gained their end, for all plays on either side of the controversy were forthwith suppressed, and commissioners were appointed to examine and licence all plays thenceforth "in and about" the city played by any players "whose servants soever they be."

It is pleasing to find Shakespeare's company acting in so spirited a manner in defence of free thought and free speech: it would be more pleasing to be able to identity him personally as the chief leader in movement. And this I believe he was. The play of Love's Labour's Lost, in spite of great alteration in 1597, is undoubtedly in the main the earliest example left us of Shakespeare's work: and the characters in the underplot agree so singularly even in the play as we have it with the anti-Martinist writers in their personal peculiarities that I have little doubt that this play was the one performed in November 1589. If the absence of matter of State be objected, I reply that it would be easy for malice to represent the loss of Love's labour in the main plot as a satire on the love's labour in vain of Alençon for Elizabeth. We must also remember that it is most likely that for some years at the beginning of his career Shakespeare wrote in conjunction with other men, and that in those plays that were revived by him at a later date their work was replaced by his own. In the case of the present play, as the revision was for a Court performance, we may be sure that great care would be taken to expunge all offensive matter: the only ground for surprise is that enough indications remain to enable us to identify the characters at all.

1590

Love's Labour's Lost would no doubt be closely followed by Love's Labour's Won, which play I for other reasons attribute to this year.

We must now again refer to Greene. His Farewell to Folly had been entered on the Stationers' Registers, 11th June 1587, but was not published till after his Mourning Garment, the entry of which dates 2d November 1590. In the introduction, which was certainly written at the time of publication, although the body of the work had been lying by for some three years and more, Greene distinctly alludes to Fair Em and accuses its author of "simple abusing of Scripture," because "two lovers on the stage arguing one another of unkindness, his mistress runs over him with this canonical sentence 'a man's conscience is a thousand witnesses'; and her knight again excuseth himself with that saying of the Apostle, 'Love covereth the multitude of sins.'" The exact words in the play are "Love that covers multitude of sins" and "thy conscience is a thousand witnesses." Greene, says Mr. R. Simpson, who first drew attention to this allusion to Fair Em in a paper unfortunately spoiled by an absurd attempt to identify Mullidor,4 of "great head and little wit," with Shakespeare, has parallel plots to those of Fair Em in his Tully's Love (1589) and Never Too Late (before 2d November 1590). To me the connexion seems closer between this satire, by Greene the profligate parson, based on Scriptural grounds, of a play written for Lord Strange's company, and the persecution they had just endured for venturing to present a play in favour of the Martinists. And as if to emphasise his intention in this direction, Greene says in his Dedication of his tract, "I cannot Martinize." That Fair Em was the production of R. Wilson will I think be evident to those who will read it with careful remembrance.