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HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

Copyright, 1900, Hamilton W. Mabie. All rights reserved.

Chapter XV. The Last Years at Stratford

I'

T is impossible to overlook the recurrence of certain incidents and the reappearance of certain figures in the Romances. "Pericles," "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and the "Tempest" are all dramas of reconciliation; tragic events occur in each of these plays and tragic forces are set in motion, but the tragic movement is arrested by confession and repentance and the tragic forces are dissipated or turned to peaceful ends by mediation and reconciliation. Coming close upon the long-sustained absorption in tragic motives, the singular unity of the Romances in organizing conception, in serenity of mood, and in faith in purity and goodness and love as soìvents of the problems of life, make it impossible to escape the conclusion that the later plays record and express the final. attitude of the poet towards the ultimate questions of life.

The chief figures in the Romances are men and women who have borne heavy sorrows-Prospero, Hermione, Imogen, Pericles, and the fair young creatures whose purity and sweetness typify the immortal qualities of youth-Marina, Miranda, Perdita, Florizel, Ferdinand, and the brothers of Imogen. Behind these suffering or radiant figures there is, in each play, a pastoral background of exquisite loveliness; a landscape so noble and serene that it throws the corruption of courts and of society into striking relief.

In each play there is a trace of the old fairy story-the story of the lost prince or princess, condemned to exile, disguise, or servitude; and in the end the lost are found, disguises are thrown off, evil plots are exposed and evil plotters brought to repentance; suffering is recognized and finds its sweet reward in the rebuilding of its shattered world on a sure foundation, and youth finds eager expectation merged in present happiness. Prospero does not break his magic staff or drown his book until he has reknit the order of life shattered in the Tragedies, and reunited the wisdom of long observation and mature knowledge with the fresh heart and the noble idealism of youth.

In such a mood Shakespeare returned to Stratford about 1611. He was fortyseven years of age, and therefore at the full maturity of his great powers. From the standpoint of to-day he was still a young man ; but men grew old much earlier three centuries ago. The poet had been in London twenty-five years, and had written thirty-six or thirty-seven plays, and a group of lyric poems. He was still in his prime, but he had lived through the whole range of experience, he was a considerable fortune, and he had a wholesome ambition to become a country gentleman, with the independence, ease, and respect with which landed proprietorship has always been regarded in England.

His sources of income had been his

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THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL THEATER AT STRATFORD Gower Monument in foreground.

plays, which were paid for, in his earlier years, at rates varying from twenty-five to sixty dollars-equivalent in present values to two hundred and fifty and six hundred dollars; his salary as an actor, which was probably not less than five hundred dollars a year, or about three thousand dollars in present values; the returns from the sale of his poems, which ran through many editions, and the profits of which his publisher undoubtedly shared with him on some acceptable basis; and, most important of all, his revenue from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe Theaters.

were

The Globe Theater provided room for an audience of about two thousand people, and for a number of years before its destruction by fire in 1613 was almost continuously prosperous. The transference of public interest to the boy actors, though long enough to send Shakepeare's company into the provinces, was comparatively short-lived. It is estimated. that the annual receipts of the Globe Theater did not fall below the very considerable sum of two hundred thousand dollars in current values. After providing for the maintenance of the theater there must have remained a substantial profit. This profit was divided among the shareholders, among whom Shakespeare, Burbage, Condell, Heminge, and Philips; all were actors and members of the company, and combined personal interest and practical knowledge in the atrical management. The profits of the Blackfriars Theater were smaller. Shakespeare's great popularity after 1598 or 1600 probably enabled him to secure much larger returns from the sale of new plays than were paid to the majority of play wrights; while the fees always distributed at Court performances must have amounted, in his case, to a very considerable sum. From these various sources Shakespeare probably received, during the later years of his life, not less than fifteen thousand dollars a year in current values. Mr. Lee, who has made a thorough investigation of the subject, thinks there is no inherent improbability in the tradition, reported by a vicar of Stratford in the following century, that Shakespeare "spent at the rate of a thousand a year."

The poet had become the owner of various properties at Stratford or in its

neighborhood. The houses in Henley Street had come into his possession. The house at New Place, in which he took up his residence, was a commodious and substantial building; and the grounds, with the exception of a thin wedge of land on Chapel Lane, extended to the Avon. His circumstances were those of a country gentleman of ample income.

When Shakespeare left London, he probably withdrew from participation in the management of the two theaters in which he was a shareholder, but his plays continued to be presented. His popularity suffered no eclipse until the fortunes of the stage began to yield to the rising tide of Puritan sentiment. During the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth seven of his plays were presented at Whitehall. That he made the three days' journey to London at short intervals and kept up his old associations is practically certain.

The

His son Hamnet had died in the summer of 1596; his father died in the early autumn of 1601, and his mother in September, 1608. When he took up his residence in Stratford in 1611, his wife and two daughters constituted his family. The eldest daughter, Susannah, had married, in June, 1607, Dr. John Hall, a physician of unusual promise, who became at a later day a man of very high standing and wide acquaintance in Warwickshire. house in which he lived is one of the most picturesque buildings which have survived from the Stratford of Shakespeare's time. Dr. Hall's daughter, Elizabeth, the only granddaughter of the poet, was born in 1608. Mrs. Hall made her home in her later years at New Place; there, in 1643, she entertained Queen Henrietta Maria; and there, in 1649. she died. In the inscription on her grave in the churchyard of Holy Trinity both her father and husband are described as "gentlemen." Of her it was written:

Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but

this

Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse. Her daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Nashe, a Stratford man of education, and, after his death, John Barnard, who was knighted by Charles II. soon after the Restoration, Lady Barnard, who was the

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INSCRIPTION ON SHAKESPEARE'S TOMB IN HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD

last direct descendant of the poet, died in 1670. She had come into possession, by various bequests, of New Place, the Henley Street houses, the land in the neighborhood of Stratford, and a house in Blackfriars purchased by Shakespeare in 1613. The houses in Henley Street passed at her death into the possession of the grandson

of Shakespeare's sister Joan, and remained in the family, as reported in a previous chapter, until the present century. New Place was sold after Lady Barnard's death, and subsequently came again into the hands of the Clopton family.

Judith Shakespeare married, shortly before her father's death in 1616, Thomas Quiney, a wine-dealer of Stratford, and lived for thirty-six years in a house still standing at the southeast corner of High and Bridge Streets in Stratford. It was known at that time as The Cage, because it had been used at an earlier period as a prison. The foundation walls of this ancient house are four feet in thickness; books and Shakespearean souvenirs of every kind are now sold in the shop on the ground floor. Judith Shakespeare had three sons, all of whom died in infancy or early youth. She survived her family and her sister Susannah, and died in 1661, at the age of seventy-six.

The records show that after his retirement to Stratford Shakespeare continued to give careful attention to his affairs and to take part in local movements. In 1613 he bought the house in Blackfriars, not far from the theater, which subsequently passed into the possession of Lady Barnard. The deeds of conveyance, bearing Shakespeare's signature, are still in existence. Comment has sometimes been made on the fact that the poet spelled his name in two ways, and that other people spelled it with complete disregard of consistency, and it has been inferred that he must have been, therefore, an ignorant person. A little investigation would have shown that in the poet's time there was great variation in the spelling of proper names. Men of the eminence of Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, and Dekker were guilty of the same latitude of practice in this matter, and even Bacon, on one occasion at least, spelled his name Bakon.

Shakespeare's friend John Combe, at his death in 1614, left the poet a small bequest of money and a legal entangle

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