CHAPTER ONE.

CONCERNING OTHER "LIVES OF

SHAKESPEARE."

Like most men of my generation, I have never been able from any one volume to obtain a clear idea of Shakespeare:* with the works bearing that name I could and did become reasonably familiar and greatly pleased, but of the man who wrote them I was for a long time ignorant. Naturally, I turned for information to the biographies of the poet-actor. But I was doomed to a disappointment. For there, in the welter of quoted, copied, and sometimes photographed documents, among "allusions" that alluded to Shakespeare and "allusions" that did not allude to him at all, in the confusion of skilfully deployed adverbs implying various degrees of uncertainty in the mind of the biographer (as, "doubtless," "probably,"

credibly," and their kind), in the tangle of arguments supporting now one theory of authorship and now another, I felt myself strangely lost, like a person who searches in vain through

* Throughout this book I have adopted the lazy expedient of spelling Shakespeare in this fashion. I am aware that William Shakespeare of Stratford is not known to have employed this orthography, and I am aware that many of the plays and poems appeared with the hyphenated signature, which, as far as I can discover, William Shakespeare of Stratford never employed. It seemed best, all in all, to adhere to a simple convention.

a volume for something which the title-page has promised to include, but which he cannot find. At the end of an armful of books I was, if anything, farther away from the man Shakespeare than when I began.

What, for example, did Shakespeare do when he was a boy? Where did he go to school, not where did he "doubtless" go, but where really? Who were his chums, and later his friends; and why no letters from him to them? Why did he not publish his own plays, or at least prevent wholesale piracy and the despair of modern editors? How could a man be so careful about his second-best bed and so careless about his poetry? I can never be certain whether the young man of the sonnets was Mary Fitton or Mr. W. H.-there are arguments for both-or whether Mr. W. H. was one whose initials, as some insist, were not W. H. at all, but out of quite another part of the alphabet.

In lieu of reconciling all the divergent and vigorously debated opinions about Shakespeare, it became my amusement to test each new biography of the poet on one subject: Did Shakespeare poach? Are we this year, or are we not, to believe the story? On the face of it, it is extremely probable that a countryman of twenty odd years should steal deer and be thrashed for it. But, on the face of it, again, it is extremely improbable that the greatest and most learned poet in the language should, a married man with a growing family, fall into

such ways. Still, who can tell? What have the biographers done with the story?

My experience is that the authenticity of the yarn depends on the biography of the moment. One is reminded of a clever Frenchman who, discussing certain phases of the Shakespeare sonnets, remarked in the Revue des Deux Mondes:

"Enfin M. Gerald Massey ... soulagea d'un grand pois la conscience Anglaise en désinfectant, c'est lui-même qui s'en vante, les sonnets de Shakespeare. Le procédé de désinfection consistait, tout simplement à diviser arbitrairement les sonnets en personnels et en dramatiques. Étaient personnels tous ceux qui, d'après le code moral de M. Massey, étaient compatibles avec la dignité et la vertu de Shakespeare. Tous les autres étaient dramatiques. . . . Ainsi s'expliquait l'énigme, ainsi tombait le scandale. Shakespeare était rendu blanc comme neige à la pieuse admiration des Anglais."

Very similar is the case with the "deer stealing prank." It has always, strangely enough, been considered one offence. The sources agree in giving the impression that it was more than one, if not several. It may be "doubtless" true that Shakespeare was caught but once, if at all, but it is equally clear that the word 'prank" should be made plural. Let us look into the origin of the story.

Nicholas Rowe was a play-writer of Queen Anne's time. In 1709 he published an account of the life of Shakespeare. His information, he

says, came mainly from the actor Betterton. About 1690 (?) (Shakespeare died in 1616) Betterton went down to Warwickshire to learn what he could about Shakespeare. Now Rowe, who had obtained his information from Betterton, who in turn had obtained his in Warwickshire at a time when every one who had personally known Shakespeare was either seventy-four years old, older, or dead, wrote as follows:*-(1)

"He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park belonging to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot [sic], near Stratford. For this he was persecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him."

This story received what a more recent biographer calls an important because independent corroboration in some notes written between 1690 and 1708 by Richard Davies, a rector in Gloucestershire. William Fulman, whoever he was, bequeathed to Davies some scraps of writing, little more than the dates of birth and death, about Shakespeare. The parson augmented these notes by adding (where he learned these items I do not know): "Much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and

* The numerals in parentheses refer, by chapters, to the corresponding numerals in the Bibliography at the back of the book.