Traditions, seemingly well-founded, show that William was withdrawn from school in consequence of his father's reverses, and apprenticed to a butcher. Old Aubrey says, "When he killed a calf, he would do it in high style and make a speech"! Very likely. No distress could check the buoyancy of so elastic a spirit. The torrent, dammed by temporary obstacles, becomes irresistible. I recognize in Shakespeare, as in most men of the highest genius, a singular force and intensity. More than any other writer, he loads words with meaning till they sink under the weight; vivifies nouns into verbs; injects his fiery emotion, incapable of cooling, through the rifts of granitic thought; vitalizes and incarnates the shadows of fiction, till no historic characters seem so real.

Yet one blunder, great and almost fatal, stands out in bold relief. At eighteen, having no visible means of supporting a family, he marries Anne Hathaway, a woman of twenty-six. Before he is twenty-one, three little Shakespeares are crying for bread!

To these embarrassments, which would have driven a small man to despair, a bad man to crime, a great man to sublime effort, there was added a yet deeper shadow. His marriage brought him little comfort. At twenty-one, or thereabouts, he quitted his wife, and for many years afterwards he rarely or never visited her. Do we have a casual negative hint of his home-misery in Twelfth Night?

"Let still the woman take

An elder than herself: so wears she to him ;

So sways she level in her husband's heart."

However this may be, in his last will and testament he omits all mention of his wife at first, and finally, on second thought, interlines this "item," "I give unto my wife my second best bed.” It is sad to lift the veil that hides this woe; but all mankind are probably the gainers. The love of this great soul, that might have blessed her alone, went to the drama instead.

"You have a wife already whom you love,
Your social theory,"

says Aurora Leigh. Shakespeare was married, not to a woman, but "to immortal

verse."

We are told by tradition that young Shakespeare became a school-master, a statement not likely to have been a sheer fabrication. Unfavorable rumors of one's conduct are easily generated, usually exaggerated, willingly believed, and safely transmitted to posterity. Not so with the good which men do. Alas, we do not like to hear Aristides called "The Just!" We hug the aphorism, "No man is wholly good, or wholly bad," for it brings down the lofty, and perhaps lifts us. But how could a report that Shakespeare was a school-master originate and gain credence in Warwickshire, unless founded on fact? "He understood Latin pretty well, for he had been many years a school-master in the country," says Aubrey. Some confirmation may be found in the prominence which Shakespeare gives to school exercises, and in the marvellous fluency with which he uses those words and illustrations which are the stock-in-trade of Latin school-masters.

But the hum of pedagogy by day, or the monotony of hard study by night in a room where three babes exercise their musical prerogatives unquestioned, is dull experience for a youth conscious of gigantic powers and determined to scale the highest heaven of thought. The bow forever bent will either break, or lose its elasticity. As he had probably been inveigled into matrimony, he is supposed by White and other critics to have been drawn by some of his wild companions into the robbery of Sir Thomas Lucy's deer park, three miles from Stratford. Caught in the act, William and his young fellow-poachers show fight. The story runs that they were arrested for the trespass, and that William was obliged to leave town. The first scene in Merry Wives of Windsor is supposed to be partially founded on this incident.

We find him next in London; but for several years his history is a blank. Tradition fills it with vague reports of his joining the theatre, at first in a very humble capacity. It may have been.

After seven or eight years from the time of his arrival in the metropolis, he publishes what he styles "The first heir of my invention," the poem called Venus and Adonis. Brilliant and beautiful as much of it is, he should have burnt it; for the trail of the serpent" is over it all. It ministers to the lowest appetite. A year later he publishes his second long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to the same patron, Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, in language of remarkable significance: "What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours." The tradition is that Southampton had presented him a thousand pounds.

About this time we find him joint owner in the new Globe Theatre, perhaps investing here the money that the earl had given or loaned him. In 1594, too, the greatest of then living poets, Edmund Spenser, names him with high commendation, and speaks of the heroic sound of his warrior name, the only recognition of him by any illustrious contemporary, if we except Ben Jonson's encomium written many years after Shakespeare's death. Spenser's lines are,

“And then, though last, not least is Ætion.

A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found;
Whose name, full of high thought's invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound."

This seems the place to mention his one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, though some of them were evidently written later in life. It is difficult, in reading them, to avoid the impression of a mysterious and profound sorrow, possessing his whole being. They contain few aspirations after anything noble; but there are vivid pictures of earthly love, strange flashes of ambition, a boundless exuberance of fancy, sublime premonitions of immortality; and revelations, too, it must be confessed, of conduct not creditable to any man's moral character. All of them are of love, and all of them could well have been omitted without damage to his fame.

He now (1587) entered upon his threefold career of dramatic author, actor, and manager. He wrote, or re-wrote (from 1587 to 1613), for it is not certain that he wholly originated any one of his plays, fourteen comedies, eleven tragedies, and ten histories.*

As to the seeds and sources of these plays, we find five comedies, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, All's Well that Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, and Measure for Measure, Italian; two, Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, classical; two, Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It, mediæval; one, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Spanish; one, Merry Wives of Windsor, English; one, Love's Labor's Last, probably French; two, Winter's Tale and Tempest, unknown. We find, among the tragedies, four, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and Antony and Cleopatra, classical; two, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, Italian; two, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, mediæval; three, Cymbeline, Lear, and Macbeth, from the legendary history of Britain. The ten histories are called by the names of the English kings, Henry IV. (Parts 1. and II.), Henry V., Henry VI. (Parts 1., II., III.), King John, Richard II., Richard III., and Henry VIII.

His earliest plays were probably Love's Labor's Lost, Comedy of Errors, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Between these youthful productions and the fruits of his maturer genius, an amazing progress is evident. Hamlet, written in or about the year 1600, may be taken as the dividing point between the first half and the last half of his dramas. Composed at the age at which Milton wrote his Areopagitica, it may be con

*I omit Pericles and Titus Andronicus.

sidered, like the latter, as a peculiarly representative piece. Midsummer Night's Dream and Merchant of Venice, the two most popular of his comedies, came before Hamlet; Macbeth and Lear, the two sublimest of his tragedies, after it.

The struggles and distresses of his early years had taught him, most impressively, the value of money, and it is pretty clear that the lesson was not forgotten. Records exist of lawsuits brought by him to collect petty debts, even while he was growing rich. In 1602, he purchases one hundred and seven acres of land in Old Stratford. In 1605, he buys the moiety of a lease of all the tithes in Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe, paying therefor £440.

Between 1610 and 1612, he resumed his residence at Stratford. Once or twice afterwards he visited London for a few days. On the twenty-fifth of March, 1616, he executed his will. On the twenty-third of the following April, probably the anniversary of his birth, he breathed his last. Of the cause of his death we have only a feeble tradition, recorded half a century after his death by John Ward, A. M., vicar of Stratford. Ward's language is, "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merrymeeting, and, it seems, drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever then contracted. We can hardly bring ourselves to believe that he fell a victim to intemperance, though such a catastrophe has befallen many a lesser genius.

By common consent his is one of the greatest names, in literature. We recognize the following points in his intellectual supremacy:

1. His profound philosophical insight; his knowledge of human nature enabling him to seize unerringly upon the governing principle or master passion of a man or class of men.*

2. The creativeness of his imagination; exemplified in the multitude of striking characters, embodiments of the laws his intuition has detected. He names more than a thousand, each of whom expresses the thought or sentiment in fitting language and conduct.

3. The skillful grouping of characters, arrangement of scenes, construction and development of plots.

4. His style; that marvellous copiousness and felicity of speech, whereby is brought down to our midst the Shakespearian world, as perceived by an eye at once telescopic and microscopic, by an ear keenly sensitive to all harmonies and discords, by a mind at once the most piercing and the most comprehensive, by a heart tenderer than a mother's, yet stouter than that of Leonidas.

5. His wit and humor. Falstaff is the most comic character ever invented; yet he is but one of a multitude.

6. His power of portraying deep emotion. Others may have equalled him in single instances, but their successes in this particular are few to his.

Yet Shakespeare was but a half man, rarely looking beyond the uses of the theatre. Prince of dramatists, master of the revels to all mankind, chief caterer to human amusement-this is something: it is even noble. But it is not enough. Great intellectual, moral, and political movements are in progress in England and on the Continent during the whole of his career. Shall not the most consummate of artists play the man? Shall the foremost intellect of the race be insignificant in action and loose in conduct? see nothing but from the stand-point of his theatre ? say nothing but as an actor on the stage? do nothing to lead the struggling millions to a higher life? But let us not judge hastily. We may be pardoned for the perhaps excessive charity of believing that, if his days had been prolonged, he would have atoned for the indifference or idleness of the past. Cut off suddenly at the age of fifty-two, what plans for human improvement may not have been buried with him! Given thirty years more,

*We must not, however, look to him for portraits that are in exact accordance with his torical facts. His Julius Cæsar, for example, is a caricature.