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to identify the group as a whole. The rising tide of creative energy, his mounting fortunes, and the deep fascination of the spectacle of life evoked his humor and gave free play to the gayety of his nature and the buoyancy of a mind which played like lambent lightning over the whole surface of experience and knowledge. It is probable that he was at work on several plays at the same time; taking up history or comedy as it suited his mood, and giving himself the rest and refreshment which come from change of work. It is certain that some of the greater Tragedies were slowly shaping themselves in his imagination from the earliest working years. "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" had taken root in his mind while he was yet an unknown apprentice in his craft; during these fertile years the germinal ideas which were to take shape in the entire body of his work were clarifying themselves in his consciousness; while his hand was engaged with one subject his mind was dealing with many. He had already used the comedy form in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "The Comedy of Errors," and

JOHN HALL'S HOUSE

"Love's Labor's Lost," and had made it clear to his contemporaries that he possessed the genius of comedy-that rare, penetrating, radiant, sane genius which was also the possession of Homer and Cervantes, and, later, of Molière and Goethethe genius which not only looks into human experience deeply, but sees it broadly and in true perspective. It was Shakespeare's ease of mind, derived from the largeness and deep humaneness of his view, which kept him sane during the years when he was living in the heart of tragedy; and this ease of mind found expression in the comedy. The Shakespearean comedy is a comedy of life rather than of mannersa gay, sweet, high-spirited play with the weaknesses, follies, incongruities of men as these are projected against the great background of the spiritual kinship and destiny of humanity. There is no touch in Shakespeare of that scorn which is the mood of those lesser men who see the details of human character but not the totality of its experience. Shakespeare was equally at home with the tragic and comic elements in human nature, because both spring from the same root. In

dealing with the tragic forces he is always superior to them; at their worst they are rigidly limited in their destructive force; he is not the victim of their apparent finality; he sees through and beyond them to the immovable order of the world, as one sees through the brief fury of the storm to the untouched sun and unmoved earth which are hidden for a moment by the cloud. In like manner and for the same reason he laughs with men, but is saved from the cheapness of the sneer and the hard blindness of scorn. In his wide, clear, dispassionate vision he sees the contrast between the greatness of man's fortunes and the occasional littleness of his aims, the incongruities of his occupations, the exaggerations and eccentricities of his manners. He is mirthful because he loves men; it is only those who love us who can really laugh at and with us, and it is only men of great heart who have the gift of humor on a great scale. For humor, Dr. Bushnell says, "is the soul reeking with its own moisture, laughing because it is full of laughter, as ready to weep as to laugh; for the copious shower it holds is good for either. And then, when it has set the tree a-dripping,

"And hung a pearl in every cowslip's ear, the pure sun shining after will reveal no color of intention in the sparkling drop, but will leave you doubting still whether it be a drop let fall by laughter or a tear.”

Later in life, for a brief period, Shakespeare's laughter lost its ring of tenderness, its overflowing kindness; but his vision became clear again, and, although the spirit of mirth never regained its ascendency, the old sweetness returned. Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the comic spirit," writes George Meredith; "with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it were I put it to suit my present comparison-creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen-mar

velous Welshmen!-Benedict and Beatrice, Dogberry and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic."

In "The Merchant of Venice" the poet finally emancipated himself from the influence of Marlowe, and struck his own note with perfect distinctness. There is a suggestion of the "Jew of Malta" in Shylock, but the tragic figure about whom the play moves bears on every feature the stamp of Shakespeare's humanizing spirit. The embodiment of his race and the product of centuries of cruel exclusion from the larger opportunities of life, Shylock appeals to us the more deeply because he makes us feel our kinship with him. Marlowe's Jew is a monster; Shakespeare's Jew is a man misshapen by the hands of those who feed his avarice.

The comedy was produced about 1596; it was entered in the Stationers' Register two years later; and was twice published in 1600. The dramatist drew freely upon several sources. There are evidences of the existence of an earlier play; the two stories of the bond, with its penalty of a pound of flesh, and of the three caskets were already known in English literature, and had been interwoven to form a single plot. A collection of Italian novels of the fourteenth century and the well-known "Gesta Romanorum" contributed to the drama as it left Shakespeare's hands. As a play, it has obvious defects; the story is highly improbable, and, as in at least three other plays, the plot involves bad law; for the poet, although sharing the familiarity of the dramatists generally with legal terms and phrases, shows that his knowledge was second-hand, or acquired for the occasion, by his misuse of well-known words of legal import. In invention in the matter of plots and situations Shakespeare was inferior to several of his contemporaries; and he was content, therefore, to take such material as came to his hand with as much freedom as did Molière. In this case, as in every other, he at once put his private mark on the general property and made it his own. He purified the material, he put a third of the play into prose, and he imparted to the verse a beauty, a vigor, and a freedom from mannerisms which separate it at once from work of the apprentice period. He freely and boldly harmonized the tragic and comic elements; in Portia he

created the first of those enchanting women for whom no adjective has yet been found save the word Shakespearean, for they are a group by themselves; and he set on the stage the first of his great tragic figures. In 1596 the Jew was contemptible in the mind of western Europe; he was the personification of greed and subtlety, and he was under suspicion of deeds of fiendish cruelty. He was robbed upon the slightest pretext, stoned on the streets, and jeered at on the stage. His sufferings were food for mirth. In 1594, a Jew, who was acting as physician to the Queen, had been accused of attempting to poison Elizabeth, and had been hanged at Tyburn, and popular hate against the race was at fever-heat when Shakespeare put on the stage the Jew who has since been accepted as typical of his race. It is not probable that the dramatist definitely undertook to modify the

popular conception of the

Jew; his attention may

have been directed to the

dramatic possibilities of the

noblest creative work to the work of revision and adaptation. The earlier play gave him the idea of the Induction and the characteristic passages between Petruchio and Catharine, but was an inferior piece of work, full of rant, bathos, and obvious imitation of Marlowe; the plot was followed, but the construction and style are new; the story of Bianca and her lovers was worked in as a subsidiary plot, and, although the play sometimes passes over into the region of farce, it is charged with the comedy spirit.

ir entrances, & one man in his time plays many parts

worlds a stage, & all the men & women merely players:

This comedy carries the reader back to the poet's youth, to Stratford and to Warwickshire. It is rich in local allusions, as are also "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and the second part of "Henry IV." There is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare's intercourse with Stratford was unbroken through these earlier years, though the difficulties and expense of travel may have prevented frequent visits. Now that prosperity and reputation were bringing him ease and means, his relations with his old home became more intimate and active. There are many evidences of his interest in Stratford and in his father's affairs, and it is evident that the son shared his rising fortunes with his father. The latter had known all the penalties of business failure; he was often before the local courts as a debtor. He seems to have had a fondness for litigation, which was shared by his son. In the dramatist's time the knowledge of legal phrases among intelligent men outside the legal profession was much more general than it has been at any later time, but there is reason to believe that Shake

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SEAL OF THE ROYAL DRAMATIC COLLEGE

character by the trial and execution of Dr. Lopez; and when he dealt with the material at hand, he recast it in the light of his marvelous imagination, and humanized the central figure. Shylock was a new type, and he was not understood at first. For many years the part was played in a spirit of broad and boisterous farce, and the audiences jeered at the lonely and tragic figure. At every point in "The Merchant of Venice" the poet shows clearer insight than in his earlier work, deeper wisdom, greater freedom in the use of his material, and fuller command of his art.

Shakespeare had an older play before him when he wrote "The Taming of the Shrew," and he followed its main lines of story so closely that the play as we now have it is an adaptation rather than an original work. That the dramatist was thinking of the theater and not of the public or of posterity is shown by the readiness with which he passed from the

speare knew many legal processes at first hand. He bought and sold land, brought various actions for the recovery of debts, filed bills in chancery, made leases, and was engaged in a number of litigations.

In 1596, after an absence of ten years from Stratford, the poet reappears in his native place as a purchaser of valuable lands and a rebuilder of his father's

shattered fortunes. In that year his only
son, Hamnet, a boy of eleven, died and
was buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard.
In the same year John Shakespeare made
application to the College of Heralds for
the privilege of using a coat of arms.
The claim was based on certain services
which the ancestors of the claimant were
declared to have rendered "the most
prudent prince King Henry the Seventh
of famous memorie." The ancestral dis-
tinction put forward on behalf of John
Shakespeare was not more apocryphal
than the services set forth in many similar
romances formally presented to the College
of Arms as records of fact. The statement
that the applicant's wife, Mary, heiress of
Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, was the daugh-
ter of a gentleman was sober history. The
application was granted three years later,
and the Garter King of Arms assigned to
John Shakespeare a shield: "gold, on a
bend sable, a spear of the first, and for
his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings
displayed argent, standing on a wreath of
his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled
as aforesaid." The motto, 66
'Non Sans
Droict," appears in a sketch or draft of the
crest. Two years later the dramatist was
styled "gentleman " in a legal document.

enlarged its grounds by considerable purchases of land. At his death it passed into the possession of his daughter, Susannah, the wife of Dr. John Hall, and in July, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria was entertained for three days under its roof. Upon the death of Mrs. Hall, six years later, New Place became the property of her only child, Elizabeth, at that time the wife of Thomas Nashe, later the wife of Sir John Barnard, of Abingdon. Lady Barnard was the last of Shakespeare's direct descendants.

At a later period the property came once more into the hands of the Clopton family, and was subsequently sold to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, a vicar in Cheshire, who appears to have been a person of considerable fortune, dull perception, and irritable temper. He resented the interest which visitors were beginning to show in the place; in order to break up the growing habit of sitting under the mulberrytree, which was intimately associated with the dramatist he cut the tree to the ground in 1756. This attitude towards the one great tradition of the town brought the owner of New Place into a disfavor with his fellow-townsmen which took on aggressive forms. The Stratford officials charged with the laying and collection of taxes made use of their power to secure the uttermost farthing from Mr. Gastrell, and that gentleman, in order to relieve himself of further taxes, pulled down the house, sold the materials, and left Stratford amid execrations which have been echoed in every succeeding generation. The house adjoining New Place was the property of one of the poet's friends, and now serves as a residence for the custodian and as a museum of Shakespearean relics. The adjoining house was the home of Shakespeare's friend, Julius Shaw, who was one of the witnesses to his will, and, after various changes, is still standing. New Place is to-day a green and fragrant garden; the fragments of the original foundation are enfolded in a lawn of velvet-like texture; the mulberry-tree has survived the vandalism of a hundred and fifty years ago; behind the old site there is a small but perfectly kept park where many flowers of Shakespearean association may be found, where the air seems always fragrant and the place touched with abiding peace. Shakespeare restored New Place, and The tower of Guild Chapel rises close at

This effort to rehabilitate his father was followed, a year later, by the purchase of New Place-a conspicuous property at the northeast corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, opposite the Guild Chapel, in Stratford, upon which stood what was probably the largest house in the town. This substantial house, built of timber and brick by Sir Hugh Clopton in the previous century, had probably been long neglected, and was fast going to decay.

No clear account of the appearance of the house has been preserved; but enough remains to show its considerable size and substantial structure. The walls of the larger rooms and probably the ceilings were covered with sunken panels of oak, some of which have been preserved. Nothing else now remains of the building save a few timbers which projected into the adjoining house, now used as a residence for the custodian of the Shakespeare properties, a fragment of the north wall, the well, pieces of the foundation, which are guarded by screens, the lintel, and an armorial stone.

hand; in the near distance is the spire of Holy Trinity; the Avon is almost within sight; the earlier and the later associations of Shakespeare's life cluster about the place which he saw every day as a school-boy, to which he returned in his prime, where he gathered his friends about him, and where he found reconciliation and, at last, peace.

The purchase and restoration of New Place made Shakespeare a man of consequence among neighbors who could understand the value of property, however they might miss the significance of literature. In a letter, still extant, dated October 25, 1598, Richard Quiney, whose son Thomas subsequently married Judith Shakespeare, appealed to the poet for a loan; and there are other evidences that he was regarded as a man whose income afforded a margin beyond his own needs.

The poet's acquaintance with country life in its humblest forms; with rural speech, customs, and festivals; with sports and games; with village taverns and their frequenters, was so intimate and extensive that he used it with unconscious freedom and ease. No other contemporary dramatist shows the same familiarity with manners, habits, and people; an intimacy which must have been formed by a boy who made his first acquaintance with life in Warwickshire. These reminiscences of boyhood, reinforced by the later and deliberate attention of a trained observer, continually crop out in many of the plays, as the formations of an earlier geologic period often show themselves through the structure of a later period.

The fertility of resource which gives the two parts of "Henry IV." such overflowing vitality made the writing of "The Merry Wives of Windsor " inevitable. It was quite impossible for the dramatist to leave a character so rich in the elements of comedy as Falstaff without further development under wholly different conditions. In the Epilogue to "Henry IV." the dramatist promised to "continue the story with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France;" but "Henry V." contained no reference to the old knight save the brief but inimitable account of his death. Almost a century after the death of the Queen three writers reported almost simultaneously the tradition, apparently current at the time and

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probably of long standing, that Elizabeth was so delighted with the humor of Falstaff in "6 Henry IV." that she commanded Shakespeare to continue the story and show Falstaff in love. "I knew very well," wrote Dennis, by way of introducing an adaptation of the play in 1702, "that it had pleas'd one of the greatest queens that ever was in the world. This comedy was written at her command and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days." Seven years later Rowe added the further information that "she was so well pleased with the admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV.' that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love." The tradition apparently had been long accepted, and there are intrinsic evidences which make it credible. "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is the kind of play which such a command would have secured. It is a comedy which continually runs into broad farce; there is no touch of pathos in it; it deals with contemporaneous middle-class people, in whom the dramatist shows very little interest; it is laid in Windsor, and contains references to the castle which must have been very acceptable to the Queen. ground was evidently familiar to the dramatist, and there are references of a realistic character, not only to Windsor, but to Stratford. Moreover, the play, although admirable in construction, is below the level of Shakespeare's work of this period in intellectual quality, and lacks those inimitable touches of humor and poetry which are the ineffaceable marks of his genius when it is working freely and spontaneously.

66

The

The play owes little in the way of direct contribution to earlier sources, though various incidents used in it are to be found in Italian and other stories. It was probably written about 1599, and the Queen, according to tradition, was very well pleased with the representation." The plot is essentially Italian; the introduction of the fairies was a revival of the masque; but the atmosphere of the play is entirely English; it reflects the hearty, healthy, bluff spirit and manner of middle-class life in an English village. It is the only play dealing with the English life of his

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