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SHA a year or so after the birth of his twins. But this is mere hypothesis. For any evidence that has reached us, it is equally probable that he departed the following month, or many months before, or that he did not leave for two years after that event. We know that he was in London a few years subsequently, and that is all we know with respect to the period of his removal. We have even to learn whether the migration was solitary, as it is usually represented to have been, or whether any portion of his family accompanied him; and we have scarcely any clue to the motives which led to a change so marvellous in its consequences to humanity at large. Our own opinion is, that he quitted his native town shortly before or very soon after Hamnet and Judith were born; that he left it in the first instance unaccompanied by any of his family; and that his two brothers, Richard and Edmund, followed him to London and made the stage their profession, many years afterwards, when the poet had won a position which enabled him to secure them occupation in his own company of actors. Here we stop. Of the circumstances which induced him to leave his home, his parents, his wife, children, and other relatives, all is vague tradition or uncertain speculation. Aubrey, in his Minutes of Lives, 1680, tells us that "this William being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, and was an actor, and did act exceedingly well." And there is nothing unreasonable in the surmise that, his father's course of life being distasteful to him, and a small provincial town like Stratford being looked upon as too narrow a field for the exercise of his abilities, his translation was an affair of family agreement. A tradition, however, has come down to us from three or four independent sources that Shakespeare's departure was a flight—that he left his home in hot baste to escape the consequences of certain invasions which he had been detected in making with other youngsters, upon the preserves of his powerful neighbour, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. The earliest written testimony concurrent with this tradition, is found in a note attached to an article headed Shakspeare among Fulman's Collections for the Lives of the Poets, in the library of Corpus Christi college, Oxford. The note is by the Rev. Richard Davies, to whom Fulman left his manuscripts, and says that Shakespeare was "much given to all unluckiness [mischievousness] in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement; but his reveng was so great that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three louses rampant for his arms." Rowe's account of the story, which he derived, there is no doubt, from Betterton, who visited Stratford for the express purpose of gathering information regarding Shakespeare, is this:—"He had, 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 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 persecution 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."—(Some  Account of the Life of Shakspeare, 1709, p. 5.) There is yet another version of the tale, which professes to be prior in point of date to either of the others, but this must be received with caution. According to Oldys, as quoted by Steevens, a gentleman of the name of Jones of Turbich, Worcestershire, who died at the age of ninety, remembered hearing from several old people in that town the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park. Mr. Jones would repeat a stanza of the stinging ballad which the young scapegrace affixed to the knight's gate; and this stanza was preserved in writing by a friend of Mr. Jones. It ran thus:—

The world will probably never know exactly what were the grounds for this tradition; but when to the relations of Davies and Rowe—to say as little as possible of the Oldys-Steevens' version and its suspicious pasquinade—we add the unmistakable hostility which the poet manifests towards Sir Thomas Lucy in identifying him with Justice Shallow, we find it impossible to reject the anecdote as a sheer fabrication. It should always be borne in mind, when this passage of the poet's early life is canvassed, that deer-stealing was then reckoned rather as a wilful frolic than an ignominious crime. Writing to his countess concerning her son Charles Cavendish, the earl of Shrewsbury, in the reign of Elizabeth, says—"I would have you provide for Charles, your son; he is easily led to folly; for within two nights after you went from me, his man Morton enticed his master. Blithe, and my armourer, to go a stealing into Staveley park in the night; and I would wish you to advise him from these doings, lest some mischief might come thereby to his harm and your grief." Of Shakespeare's movements for some years after he is believed to have quitted Stratford, we know literally nothing. Upon the faith of a nondescript memorial, purporting to be addressed by the players of the Blackfriars' theatre to some person of authority in 1589, which Mr. Collier published as a document found among Lord Ellesmere's papers at Bridgewater house, he would appear to have at once joined the chief theatrical company in London, and at the date of the petition to have been a sharer or proprietor therein. It is not at all improbable that Shakespeare joined the company in question very soon after reaching London, and it is possible that he obtained a share in it as early as 1589; but the document we refer to can no longer be received as evidence to any events in his career, since our best paleographers have pronounced it to be a modern forgery. The document pretends to be a certificate of certain sharers in the Blackfriars' theatre, of whom Shakespeare is one, deprecating the attempts at that period to put down the theatres, and runs as follows:—"These are to sertifie yor right honorable Ll that her Mate's poore playeres, James Burbidge, Richard Burbidge, John Laneham, Thomas Greene, Robert Wilson, John Taylor, Anth. Wadeson, Thomas Pope, George Peele, Augustine Phillippes, Nicholas Towley, William Shakespeare, William Kempe, William Johnson, Baptiste Goodale, and Robert Armyn, being all of them sharers in the Blacke Fryers playehouse, have never given cause of displeasure, in that they have brought into their playes maters of state and religion, unfitt to be handled by them, or to be presented before lewde spectators; neither hath anie complainte in that kinde ever beene preferred against them or anie of them. Wherefore they truste most humblie in yor Ll consideracon of their former good behaviour, beinge at all tymes readie and willing to yeelde obedience to anie comaund whatsoever your Ll in your wisedome maye thinke in such case meete, &c.—Nov., 1589."

The silly story first printed by Shiels in his Lives of the Poets, 1753, of Shakespeare having maintained himself for some time at the outset of his career in the metropolis "by taking care of the gentlemen's horses who came to the play," may be dismissed at once as a contemptible figment. The association of actors which he is understood to have joined was that called the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, or the Queen's Players, who some years before had obtained a license "to use, exercise, and occupie the art and faculty of playeing comedies, tragedies, interludes, &c., in the city of London, as well as elsewhere." Upon obtaining this privilege they took premises in the precincts of the dissolved Blackfriars' monastery—a spot still called Playhouse Yard—and converted them into the rude theatre where many of Shakespeare's pieces were first performed. His original connection with the stage was doubtless as an actor, but of his qualifications in this art we are uninformed. The earliest allusion to him in his capacity of poet yet discovered is believed to be in Spenser's Teares of the Muses, published in 1591. In this poem, Thalia is introduced as mourning the decline of the theatre. After expressing her sorrow that the "delights of learning's treasure;" that—

and that "ugly Barbarisme" and "brutish Ignorance" usurp the stage where she with Laughter and Delight were wont to reign, the Muse proceeds—