cards and cracking nuts to while away the time. A boy goes up and down among them offering various qualities of tobacco for sale and furnishing lights for the smokers. The stage itself is strown with rushes; and from the jutting tiled roof of the shadow supported by a couple of stout wooden pillars, carved with satyrs at the top, hangs a curtain of tawny colored silk. This is drawn when the trumpets have sounded for the third time and an actor in a black velvet mantle with a crown of bays upon his flowing wig, struts forward, bowing to the audience. He is the Prologue. "The prologue ends. "The first act now begins. There is nothing but the rudest scenery; a battlemented city wall behind the stage, with a placard hung out upon it, indicating that the scene is Rome. As the play proceeds this figure of a town makes way for some wooden rocks and a couple of trees, to signify the Hyrcanian forest. A damsel wanders alone in the woods, lamenting her sad case. Suddenly a card-board dragon is thrust from the sides upon the stage and she takes to flight. The first act closes with a speech from an old gentleman, clothed in antique robes, whose white beard flows down upon his chest. He is the Chorus. . . . The show concludes with a prayer for the Queen's Majesty uttered by the actors on their knees." * His Youth. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. There is on Henley Street, in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, an old house, with gabled roof and low-ceilinged rooms, which every year is made the object of thousands of pilgrimages. Here William Shakespeare was born, on or about the 23d day of April, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, the son of a small farmer in the neighboring village of Snitterfield, added to his regular business of glover, sundry dealings in wool, corn, and hides, and possibly the occu * " 'Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama," by J. A. Symonds, p. 289. pation of butcher. His mother, Mary Arden, the daughter of a wealthy farmer near Stratford, was connected with one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Warwickshire. The Ardens came of both Norman and Saxon blood, and thus represented "the two great raceelements that have gone to the making of the typical modern Englishman." * The influences about Shakespeare's youth were such as growing genius instinctively appropriates to its use. Then, as now, Warwickshire was full of that abundant and peaceful beauty which has come to represent for us the ideal English landscape. In Shakespeare's day its northern part was overgrown by the great forest of Arden, a bit of primeval woodland like that which we enter in As You Like It; while southward of the river Avon, which runs diagonally across the county, stretched an open region of fertile farm land. Here were warm, sunny slopes, gay with those wildflowers that bloom forever for the world in Shakespeare's verse; low-lying pastures, where meditative cows stand knee-deep in grass, and through which wind the brimming waters of slow-flowing and tranquil streams. Stratford lies in this more southern portion; but in Shakespeare's day the forest of Arden reached to within an easy distance of it for an active youth. Near his native town. the young Shakespeare could loiter along country lanes, past hawthorn hedge-rows or orchards white with May, coming now and then on some isolated farmhouse or on the cluster of thatched cottages which marked a tiny village. There was Snitterfield, where he must have gone to visit his grandfather; Shottery, where he wooed and won Anne Hathaway. There, in the midst of this rich midland scenery, was his own Stratford; with its low wood and plaster houses and straggling streets, its mas * Vide article on "Shakespeare," by J. Spencer Baynes, in Ency. Brit., ninth ed. sive grammar school, where, as a boy, he conned his Lilly's Latin grammar. A little apart, by the glassy Avon, stood Old Trinity Church, its lofty spire rising above the surrounding elms. There is abundant evidence that Shakespeare loved Warwickshire with a depth of attachment that nothing could alter. These early surroundings entered into and became a permanent part of his life and genius, and his works are full of country sights and sounds. He shows us rural England in such scenes as that of the sheep-shearing in The Winter's Tale; he contrasts the free woodland with the court in As You Like It; he defines for us the essence of the ideal shepherd's life,* and in many a song, written to be sung in crowded London theatres, his imagination escapes to the fields and flowers of his native Warwickshire. And Shakespeare's Warwickshire added to natural beauty the charm of local legend and the traditions of a splendid past. Within easy reach of Stratford lay Warwick, with its fine old castle, once the home of the great King-maker of the Wars of the Roses. The whole region was bound by tradition and association to that great civil strife which is one of the chief themes of Shakespeare's plays on English history. Near by was Kenilworth, the castle of Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Leicester, where the Queen was received (1575) with those magnificent revels which the boy Shakespeare may have witnessed. Traveling companies of players seem to have visited Stratford during Shakespeare's early years, whose performances he doubtless witnessed. He may even have gazed at the wonders of a Miracle play at Coventry, a town some twenty miles distant, where these plays were frequently produced by the Guilds. Besides all that he gained from such surroundings and * Lines beginning "To sit upon a hill," 3" Henry VI.,” act ii. sc. 5. experiences, Shakespeare had received some instruction at School. his "small Latin and less Greek," however much that may have been. In 1578 John Shakespeare, who had been prosperous and respected, began to lose money, and it is generally supposed that, in consequence, Shakespeare was taken from school and put to some employment. We are left to conjecture concerning these years of his life; but we know that in 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than himself. A few years later, about 1585 to 1587, Shakespeare left Stratford and went up to London, as so many youthful adventurers are doing and have done, to seek his fortune. If we choose to believe a story which there seems no sufficient cause for entirely disregarding, the immediate reason for this step was Shakespeare's quarrel with a neighboring landed proprietor, Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote Hall. Shakespeare is said to have been brought before this gentleman for deer stealing. "For this," says the original authority for the story, "he was prosecuted by that gentleman (Lucy), as he thought somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge the 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 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."* This story is probably not without some foundation; but in any case, Shakespeare's establishment in London is exactly what his circumstances would lead us to expect. In 1585, he had a wife and two children to support, his father's money affairs had gone from bad to worse, and *Nicholas Rowe, “Life of Shakespeare." 2558? Shakespeare, strong as we may imagine in the hopes and confidence of youth and genius, had every reason to feel provincial Stratford too cramped for his powers. "The spirit of a youth That means to be of note, begins betimes.”* In addition to all this, James and Richard Burbage, two famous actors in the company with which Shakespeare became connected, are supposed to have been Warwickshire men. If this were the case, Shakespeare may have been encouraged by the prospect of their assistance. Shakespeare in London. When Shakespeare reached London (1587?) the drama was rapidly gaining in popular favor; clever young playwrights were giving it form, and Marlowe had recently produced his Tamburlaine. We know nothing of Shakespeare's life during his first few years in London. It is supposed that he studied French and Italian under John Florio, a noted teacher of that time. There is a story that he was first employed at a theatre in holding the horses of those who rode to the play, and that he had a number of boys to assist him. This, however, is generally distrusted. We do know that Shakespeare made a place for himself among the crowd of struggling dramatists, arousing the envy of Greene by his rapid advance in favor; and that by 1592 he was established as a successful actor and author. In some way he seems to have commended himself to the young Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first poem, the Venus and Adonis, in 1593. Shakespeare seems to have begun his work as a dramatist, by adapting and partially re-writing old plays. Titus Andronicus, a coarse and brutal tragedy, was probably one of the plays thus touched up by Shakespeare in his prentice * "Antony and Cleopatra,” act iv. sc. 4. |