Shakespeare's and as yet without his name. Later his name appears with the titles, and popular plays run into six and seven editions during his lifetime, while piratical printers not only publish works that are Shakespeare's own (commonly, we may believe, against his will), but affix his name to plays with which he had nothing to do. Within the lifetime of no Elizabethan dramatist were half so many plays printed as of Shakespeare; and of no other playwright can it be said that his work was so often pirated or his name so frequently misused. This points to but one thing, the name of Shakespeare was a name to conjure with in his day; people wanted to read what they had heard of his on the boards.

We know that this repute came in the first instance from the theater. In 1595 Shakespeare is mentioned in the accounts of the Office of the Revels; his membership in the leading theatrical company of the day, the Chamberlain's, is established by record in 1594; and he is named, especially as an actor in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor in 1598. Meanwhile there is evidence of his affiliation with his home and family in Stratford and of his increase in wealth and importance. His son Hamnet strange variant of Hamletis buried at Stratford in 1596; and a draft of arms is granted, not to William, but to John Shakespeare, his father. In the next year the poet purchases the freehold of New Place, the finest house in his native town, and we hear of other purchases intended and consummated. There is correspondence as to the loan by Shakespeare of money and as to petty suits at law, brought and gained by him. Death comes to his family again, his father dying in 1601, his brother Edmund in 1607, his mother the following year. His first-born, Susanna, marries in the former year and Shakespeare becomes a grandfather. There is the purchase of more land, of property in Stratford and in London, and there are legacies of friendship left to Shakespeare. At last there is his will, executed March 25, 1616, and on April 23, traditionally considered Shakespeare's birthday, the man is no more. These are the facts in the main. Into the traditions we cannot here enter.

Books have been written on what Shakespeare learned at

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school; he learned more out of doors. Jonson said that he had little Latin and less Greek, and Aubrey gossips that he knew Latin pretty well. The two opinions tally, as Jonson and Aubrey viewed Latin from different quarters. The late Churton Collins, in a scholarly essay on the learning of Shakespeare, has quite upset the old notion that Shakespeare was unacquainted with the classical authors; but it may be suspected that Shakespeare never read a foreign book if he could obtain the matter that he wanted in translation. Shakespeare was not so learned a man as Ben Jonson, to say nothing of Camden or Bacon; but it has now long been exploded that Shakespeare was "a rude, natural-born genius," a species of inspired idiot who knew not the wise things that he was uttering. As Bagehot so happily put it: "There is clear evidence that Shakespeare received the ordinary grammar-school education of his time and that he derived from the pain and suffering of several years, not exactly an acquaintance with Latin and Greek, but like Eton boys, a firm conviction that there are such languages." Moreover the stamp of genius is on Shakespeare's life. He was not the man to submit to any real inferiority and, whatever his early deficiencies, the plays attest how he corrected them. There is no proof that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school. He could have attended no other. There is no copy of William Lilly's Grammar extant which bears Shakespeare's signature. It is unlikely that he studied any other, for this was the approved Latin book of his day and long after.

The happy and competent knowledge which Shakespeare exhibits of many subjects, some of them technical and professional, has led to a host of surmises as to his probable occupation after leaving school. He has been thought a farmer, a huntsman (which he certainly was), a lawyer, a printer, a soldier, an usher in a school, and a surgeon. Aubrey repeated an earlier tradition which made Shakespeare exercise his father's trade and added that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech." We need not believe this story; indeed, we need not believe a word of Aubrey; but it has been well observed that this idle anecdote

suggests at least the theatrical genius. Shakespeare used the picturesque Bible phrase of his time, not because he had studied for the Church, but because he was an Elizabethan with a memory for the phrase; he observed with marvelous accuracy the symptoms of insanity, not because he was an alienist but because he was observant of the psychology of man. As to his legal acquirements, Professor Raleigh remarks that "it was not for nothing that Shakespeare was his father's son": and besides, Shakespeare had lawsuits of his own. A late discovery concerning him discloses a suit in which he was the successful plaintiff in 1615.1 As to all these surmises of Shakespeare's avocations, let them remain surmises. To him who laboriously acquires a petty barony in some little kingdom of knowledge, the grasp, the sweep, the accuracy of Shakespeare's perceptions must seem supernatural, if not based on diligent studies such as his own.

Before we leave Stratford and the youth of Shakespeare it may be observed that many books have treated Shakespeare's nature-lore, his knowledge of animals, his acquaintance with birds, his insects, even his fishes. A delightful book, The Diary of Master William Silence, has shown the completeness of Shakespeare's knowledge of the contemporary nomenclature of the popular sports of hunting and hawking and his devotion to the horse. But Professor Raleigh has set us straight as to the nature-lore of Shakespeare which was clearly that of the keen but superficial observer, not that of the modern scientific devotee of nature study. Shakespeare wasted no time observing the habits of animals when men were to observe. He makes plenty of mistakes in natural history and accepts the traditional qualities of the impossible beasts of the medieval bestiary, "the toad that wears a precious jewel in his head," "the unicorn that is betrayed with trees," "the basilisk that kills at sight"; but he makes no mistakes as to his men and women: there his touch is certain as his knowledge is profound.

1See Englische Studien, xxxvi, 1906, where this discovery of Professor Wallace is most conveniently consulted. It was first communicated to The London Standard, October, 18, 1905.

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Why Shakespeare went up to London is perfectly clear; he was compelled to make a living for his family; a poaching expedition and threatened uncomfortable consequences may have hastened his departure. When he first arrived in the metropolis is not so certain. However it came about, Shakespeare was on the boards as an actor before 1590 and already done with his apprenticeship to the writing of plays. A year or two later he is one of the sharers or part owners in the most successful company of London.

When Shakespeare took his place in the lead of his profession he found the public prepared to welcome and appreciate theatrical entertainments by generations of familiarity with them; and he found, also, a secular drama already well advanced in a hardy vernacular growth, together with a stage which had passed beyond amateurishness into the beginnings of a recognized profession. Moreover, literature had all but shaken free of medievalism with its allegory and intent to instruct, to look at life steadily and yet to see that life, at need, in the transfiguring light of poetry. Shakespeare could have learned very little, except by way of warning, of Robert Wilson, who was active among the Earl of Leicester's players and the Queen's between 1574 and 1584; even although the scenes of Antonio's negotiations with Shylock have been regarded as "anticipated" in Wilson's morality, The Three Ladies of London, printed in the latter year. Equally slight for the coming master of the stage must have been Shakespeare's contact with the famous clown of his time, Richard Tarlton, whose name has been attached by way of surmise to an older play on subject-matter afterwards treated by Shakespeare in his histories on Henry IV and Henry V. And yet it was precisely stuff such as this that the young Shakespeare was set to revise. However, Shakespeare was not without examples worthy his young ambition, and in Lyly and Marlowe he found them.

Of the precise chronology of Shakespeare's plays, as of those of most of his contemporaries, we are far from certain. Except for Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, which in revision falls beyond, the plays of Shakespeare's imitative

period are either romantic comedies or dramas based on the history of English kings. We have touched sufficiently on Titus already for the purposes of this book. Let us turn first here to the earlier romantic comedies. Love's Labor's Lost is usually assigned to the earliest place among the comedies of Shakespeare (not later than 1591), and, although not published in quarto form until 1598 and then possibly revised, several features confirm this position. This comedy, with all its originality, is pronouncedly Lylian in its personages, dialogue, and in type, in that it is, like Midas or Endimion, full of personal, political, and other satirical allusions. In this and in the peculiarity that it is the only plot of all Shakespeare's plays which he appears frankly to have invented, Love's Labor's Lost stands alone. Shakespeare's knowledge of the courtly society that he attempts to depict in this comedy can not be pronounced other than amateurish This is high life as seen from without; and the frequently trivial badinage of the three courtiers and ladies, so evenly arrayed each against each, the absurdities of Holofernes, Nathaniel, and the rest, despite much promise, all serve to confirm this. Shakespeare never repeated this experiment in transplanting the allusive and satirical court drama of Lyly to the common stage. But he soon tried another experiment, in The Comedy of Errors. Here he had the example of old English plays such as Ralph Roister Doister and Gascoigne's Supposes; and it is impossible to credit him with ignorance of Plautus, whether he read the Menæchmi in some English version by William Warner or (if there are difficulties in this) in the original. The Comedy of Errors (written in 1591 if not even before), is a bustling and inventive farce of action. It redoubles the difficulties of the comedy of mistake, and produces as a result the most successful specimen of its class. It is worthy of note that among the many imitations of Roman comedy which Elizabethan drama affords, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors should have outstripped all the efforts of the scholars. But Shakespeare never returned to Plautine comedy, though many comedies of the general type, mixed with that of disguise, followed him, developing in turn through the work