Could we but read its vast similitudes, The wisdom of its ancient pages con, Life's morning hymn, through all its interludes How might we hear-see, where but darkness broods, Enough to know around me not in vain The troubled tides of being darkly press; Grief, care, want, hope deferred, love's ache and strain, The passions' stress; So grows the soul immortal, wrought through pain Into all comeliness. THE YOUTH OF SHAKESPEARE. BY E. P. EVANS. seems strange, at first sight, that the greatest the shortest biographies. Homer is wholly a myth, a pale shadow in the dim distance; a heroic, disembodied voice. Of all the ancient philosophers, Plato's name is most familiar to us. It has become the nucleus of countless fables; yet, all that we really know of Plato personally could be written on a sheet of foolscap. His eighty-one years of common life are swallowed up in the vastness of his intellectual life. Biography is only distilled and sublimated gossip, the concentration of what this or that garrulous contemporary has said. Great men, however, are apt to dwell apart from these peeping, loquacious contemporaries, and thus cut off all possibility of successful eaves-dropping, even though a Boswell should creep and crawl to get near them. Nevertheless, they have a tenacious hold on universal curiosity merely as men. Societies and clubs are formed for no other purpose than to ransack old garrets and search moldy chests for some biographical incident, some faint trace of their personality; and when the chronicles fail we try to read backwards their lives in their works. The tourist in foreign galleries of painting searches the faces of Raphael's Madonnas in order to catch some glimpse of the Fornarina. We eagerly seize upon the remotest allusions which these men make to themselves, and thus endeavor to fix their image as the Lilliputians fastened Gulliver, pinning him to the earth by his own hair and beard. The well-authenticated facts of Shakespeare's outer life are few. They form a little island on the bosom of a bound less sea, and each new adventurer must needs explore and know for himself how it is that a realm so small, measured in geometric feet, can be the source of such exhaustless wealth. In the parish church of Stratfordupon-Avon, there is a long, narrow book, with leaves of finest vellum, containing, among other records, these four words, which have saved the volume from oblivion: "Gulielmus filius Johannis Shakspere." It is the baptismal register of William, son of John Shakespeare, and bears the date April 26, 1564. On the north side of the beautiful chancel stands the poet's tomb, and underneath the epitaph on the tablet we read that he died April 23, 1616. Tradition connects these two records, and tells that the anniversary of his birth was the day of his death. Thus we learn indirectly that the child William Shakespeare was born April 23, 1564, O. S., the year in which Michael Angelo died. Shakespeare sprang from a race of warriors, as his name indicates. Spenser alludes to this fact in speaking of the bard: "Whose muse full of high thought's invention, Doth like himself heroically sound." One of his ancestors fought on the field of Bosworth, where Richard III. lost his crown and his life, and where the Earl of Richmond carved with his sword his way to the throne as Henry VII. Truly, as the chroniclers inform us, the sturdy yeoman did shake his spear on that day to some good purpose, for we find that he was rewarded for "valiant and faithful services," "with lands and tenements" in the shire of Warwick. William, the poet, was of the fourth generation in direct descent from this fortunate soldier of Bosworth, whose lineage quietly culti vated their estates, and belonged to the class of thrifty gentlemen of whom the Earl of Warwick in Henry VI., says to the king: "In Warwickshire I have true-hearted friends, The mother of Shakespeare was Mary Arden, whose very name seems to breathe gentleness and poetry. The Arden family was of great respectability and high antiquity in Warwickshire. It could trace its pedigree back to the time of Edward the Confessor. The Ardens, as well as the Shakespeares, were devotedly attached to the House of Tudor. Robert Arden was groom of the chamber to Henry VII., and his uncle, Sir John, held the responsible office of squire for the body of the same monarch. These dignities were not then merely honorary and titular, as they are at the present day; for we are told that it was the duty of the groom of the chamber to preserve and present to the squire for the body "all the king's stuff, as well his shoon as his other gear," and that it was the office of said squire to draw them on, he alone being permitted to "set hand on the king." Thus we may easily imagine that whilst an Arden was ministering to the personal comfort and elegance of His Majesty within the palace, a Shakespeare, as Captain of the guard, was watching over his personal safety without, each magnifying his office, and little suspecting that from the union of their blood, a century later, there would arise one for whose sake their names have not been utterly forgotten. Robert Arden, the king's Chamberlain, retired from court on the death of Henry VII. His son, also called Robert, seems not to have sought public station, but lived and died on his estates in Warwickshire, bequeathing the bulk of his property to his youngest and favorite daughter, Mary. After the death of her father, Mary lived almost alone in the old homestead, the long hours enlivened only by the society of a young yeoman, who had acquired the habit of often wandering over the wild moors toward the peaceful hamlet of Wilmecote, a habit which strangely grew upon him, until the fair maiden consented to change her residence to Henly street, in Stratford-uponAvon. This event happened in 1558, the year in which another Mary died and Elizabeth ascended the English throne. The young yeoman alluded to was John Shakespeare, a substantial citizen of Stratford, where, during a course of twelve years, he had enjoyed all the municipal honors within the gift of his townsmen, from ale-taster and juryman of the court-leet to the diguities of alderman and high bailiff of the borough. His literary acquisitions were superior to those of his fellow-officials, and although it has been a burning question among antiquarians whether he could write his name, (Dryasdust having generally maintained the negative of this proposition,) I think there is little doubt that if he had been summoned before Jack Cade, in the famous sessions upon Blackheath, his ignorance of the chirographic art would not have been sufficiently evident to save him from being hanged with "his pen and ink-horn about his neck." Knight, in his fine edition of Shakespeare, has published a fac-simile of a corporation deed signed by nineteen members of the council, and if the question were put to each of these aldermen and burgesses, "Dost thou use to write thy name or hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest, plaindealing man?" only seven could have answered with the clerk of Chatham, "Sir, I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name." John Shakespeare is one of these seven. It was no discredit, however, to the wealth or gentility of a man in those days that he should be so deficient in education as not to be able to write his name. The mark after the signature was a kind of seal or sign-manuel, a heraldic symbol of aristocratic birth. The century that followed the wars of the Roses was full of turmoil and civil strife and mob tyranny; so that ignorance was often the best safe-guard, and a man felt a sense of security in not being able to read or write. There were many low-born adventurers who, like Jack Cade the clothier, became ambitious to dress the commonwealth and turn it and set a new map upon it," and who made it much safer to "go in clouted shoon," like Dick the butcher, than to "ride on a foot-cloth," like Lord Say. But we feel little interest in John Shakespeare's literary attainments, his social rank, and the long or short catalogue of his goods and chattels, any further than they may have influenced the character and determined the direction of the poet's mind. When we are reading Shakespeare's plays, it seems as if he had served in all trades and professions, and taken color from every phase of public and private life. The lawyer wonders at the accuracy of his legal knowledge, as displayed in judicial phrases and forensic allusions. The physician, who has spent a lifetime in ministering to minds diseased," does not exhibit a more perfect familiarity with all the perplexing phenomena of insanity. The gardener, who reads in "Winter's Tale" the description of Perdita's flowers, and of the "art which does mend Nature" by marrying 66 "A gentle scion to the wildest stock," feels assured that King Polixenes belongs to the horticultural craft. The masterly maneuvering of the ship in "The Tempest," the nautical language of the mariners, and the graphic pic ture in Henry the Fourth's soliloquy of the "ruffian billows" and the "slippery shrouds," win the heart of every Jack Tar, from the admiral to the ship-boy, and convince them, at least, that the author must have been "bred to the sea." The words in which Henry VI. expresses his grief for Gloster, the victim of Queen Margaret's wiles, "And as the butcher takes away the calf, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, does not this prove that the poetical butcher boy, of whom Gaffer Aubrey says that when he "killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," was also a maker of skewers in his youth, and that he had learned the apprentice work of rough-hewing them, even if he had never acquired the finer knack of shaping their ends? "Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?" But our nimble Proteus is not to be caught in any of these traps. The plenitude of Shakespeare's genius reveals itself in this, that he discloses to all classes of men the secrets of their several conditions without identifying himself with any one of them. He did not need to pass through each of the lower stages in order that he might survey them all from the summit of his intellectual supremacy. He is like his own Prince Hal, whose wisdom Canterbury was at his wit's end to explain: "Hear him but reason in divinity, And all admiring, with an inward wish, You would say it hath been all in all his study: The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears, The fact that John Shakespeare was a landed proprietor is sufficient to account for the traditions which make him a glover, a butcher and a wool stapler. In those times there was no nicely systematized division of labor. Every farmer turned his cattle, wool and labor to the best account, and became a kind of shop-keeper—a state of things which we find still existing in many parts of Italy, where barons and counts become wine merchants and green grocers on their own estates, without thereby dimming in the least the lustre of their titles. Of William Shakespeare's boyhood we know little that can be relied on, except that at the age of seven years he entered the free grammar school of Thomas Hunt, a worthy curate and a model schoolmaster, who had the happy faculty of governing his pupils with a simple olive branch more effectually than others could do with a whole forest of birch. A reminiscence of this period is doubtless the scene in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," where Sir Hugh questions William Page "in his accidence," with a running commentary by Mrs. Page. Here he acquired the "small Latin and less Greek" of which Ben Jonson speaks. It is said that he was prematurely withdrawn from the school owing to the sudden impoverishment of his father, and that he afterwards became a schoolmaster in the country. If this be true, he must have conceived a hearty disgust for his occupation, or he would never have portrayed Holferner and Pinch as representative pedagogues. Perhaps this aversion arose from a consciousness that he could do better with his brains than to dilute them into intellectual pulp and dispense them with bib and pap-spoon for the nurture of infant minds. There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare's childhood passed away under the kindly influences of home instruction, rather than as "The whining school-boy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school." Like Akenside, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, he suffered from a physical defect, of which he complains in sonnets thirty-seven and eighty-nine. This infirmity, however slight it may have been, would naturally awaken a mother's tender solicitude. A natural deformity, or an accidental injury would check the physical energy of the child and cherish in him a love of books and solitude. All his dramas show that his boyhood fed upon ancient and medieval tales of romance, the chronicles that told of mail-clad knights and of the cunning archers and bold billmen who fought at Poitiers and Tewkesbury; the merry songs and poetic readings that came side by side with many a "devoute and gostely treatise" from the press of the genial Caxton. Tradition reports that he learned Latin from Lilly's grammar; and a quotation which he makes, not as it is in Terence but as it is in Lilly, would seem to confirm the supposition. If so, we can easily believe that he was attracted not so much by the paradigms as by the frontispiece representing boys climbing into a tree after the golden fruits of knowledge, an allegorical picture which, by reason of a too literal interpretation, has always contributed less to the acquisition of learning than to the spoilation of neighboring or chards. Life, too, in Shakespeare's youth, was full of poetry; it was the period when the twilight of the Middle |