Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/10

8 He speaks to us from a higher world, and far, far better is it to leave him there, a bright, aerial spirit, living insphered in regions mild of calm and serene air.

This, however, may not be. For two hundred years, since the days of Rowe, Shakespeare’s earliest biographer, numberless keen eyes have been scrutinizing Church Registers, Town Records, Court Records, Pedigrees, Family Histories, Muniment Rooms, Archives, Genealogies, Household Accounts, and Correspondence, public and private, for any scrap or ort of the record of Shakespeare’s life. Upon no throne has there beat a fiercer light, than on this peasant’s son, William Shakespeare. And with what result? Very, very little beyond what Steevens set forth a hundred and twenty years ago: “All that is known,” he said, “with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare, is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon,—married and had children there,—went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays,—returned to Stratford, made his Will, died, and was buried.” Beyond this, very little has been found, however, above the level of pounds, shillings and pence, except that he once stood as godfather to Henry Walker, and, possibly, one item discovered only within two years, namely, that in 1613, Shakespeare, with the help of his fellow-actor,, invented, for the sixth Earl of Rutland, an impresa, or heraldic crest, with a motto, and even upon this discovery doubts have been recently cast. Speculations as to the dates of his plays, however instructive, cannot be classed among the known facts of his life. All items, such as land bought, houses bought, debts sued for, tithes purchased, are all, except one, harmless enough, and are certainly valuable as showing Shakespeare’s prudent thrift, and blameless life. As proofs of how far removed he was from the squalor, vice, and misery of so many of his contemporary dramatists, they are invaluable. And yet this elevation of personal character might have been measurably inferred without all this hard-won knowledge. The solitary fact that, apart from his quality as an actor, his name nowhere appears on public records, proves how noiseless was the tenor of his way. He never narrowly escaped from having his ears cropt like Ben Jonson; or from having his nose slit, like Marston; nor was he tortured on the rack, like poor Tom Kyd; nor did he indulge in tavern brawls, like Marlowe. Will you here permit me to make a digression? The men-