repeated trips to London, ostensibly to arrange for the publication of the separate parts of The Faerie Queene, but equally for the purpose of seeking preferment in London, and in a poem written near the close of his life we find him referring to himself as one whom sullein care, Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne. Prothalamion, 5–9. Spenser's greatest work, The Faerie Queene, was begun about 1580. By 1589 three books were completed and Spenser made a protracted visit to London to present them to the publisher and to have them brought to the queen's attention. We can imagine what an oasis this must have been in Spenser's life. Again he was in the midst of the society of London, a more brilliant society than ever before; again his poetry gained immediate favor; again his hopes for preferment must have risen high. It is not too much to suppose that on this trip Spenser made the acquaintance of the young but popular Shakespeare. Spenser had in Ireland cultivated the friendship of Sir Walter Raleigh and may have met Shakespeare through Raleigh's influence, or, Spenser being under the patronage at this time of the Earl of Essex and Shakespeare under that of the Earl of Southampton, their respective patrons may have brought them together. It is interesting to think of these two poets, one immortal in all literature and the other recognized as of the highest rank in English literature, meeting in those great days of England. Spenser's stay in London lasted about two years. In 1591 we find him back again at his post in Ireland. A few years later begins the love recorded in more than eighty amoretti, or sonnets. In June of 1594 his love was crowned by marriage with Elizabeth Boyle, and his joy at his success was expressed in the glorious Epithalamion. A year later he again journeyed to London, probably with his wife, to arrange for the publication of another section of The Faerie Queene and to seek preferment. This visit lasted less than a year and, so far as preferment was concerned, was as futile as his former attempts. He returned to his estate in Ireland in 1596. The closing days of his life were peculiarly terrible. In 1598 one of the rebellious mobs at tacked Kilcolman Castle and burned it to the ground. It was rumored in London that in the fire one of Spenser's children was burned alive. Spenser fled, ruined financially and broken in spirit by his loss. Again he went to London, where, either at the end of 1598 or in the early days of 1599, he died in poor lodgings. Ben Jonson is reported by Drummond to have said: "That the Irish having rob'd Spenser's goods, and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and his wyfe escaped: and after, he died for lake of bread in King Street, and refused 20 pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said, He was sorrie he had no time to spend them." The original inscription on the tomb in Westminister Abbey read as follows: “Heare lyes (expecting the second comminge of our Saviour Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the prince of poets in his tyme, whose divine spirit needs noe other witnesse than the works which he left behinde him, he was borne in London in the year 1552, and died in the yeare 1599." In a dramatic age, Spenser stands out as the one great non-dramatic poet. Removed by fortune from the influences of the English court life to the cold and uninviting environment of Ireland, he there wove the figures of his imagination into poetry He claimed Chaucer as his father in poetry, as was the fashion with many poets of the fifteenth century, but he is radically different from Chaucer. Chaucer's poetry is of the open air, fresh, bright, clear, direct, active; Spenser's is of the drawing-room, polished, refined, dreamy, imaginative. Chaucer was master of the story-teller's art, contrived his situations with dramatic foresight and carried on his plot with vigor and speed; Spenser often lost himself in the succession of rich images that floated before his mind; his story lapsed while he dreamed. Spenser is truly the poet who appeals to poets more than to the general reader. To the latter, accustomed to rapidity of plot and interesting complication of incident, the poem soon becomes tedious: the reader reads so much and goes such a little way on his journey. But to the poet, the exquisite harmony of the language and the richness of the pictures sustains the interest to the end. No English poet has been gifted with a more fertile imagination or with a more delicate ear. “He bas had more idolatry and imitation from his brethren," says Leigh Hunt, "than all the rest put together. The old undramatic poets, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, were as full of him as the dramatic were of Shakespeare. Milton studied and used him, calling him the 'sage and serious Spenser'; and adding, that he 'dared be known to think him a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.' Cowley said that he became a poet by reading him. Dryden claimed him for a master. Pope said he read him with as much pleasure when he was old, as young; Collins and Gray loved him; Thomson, Shenstone, and a host of inferior writers, expressly imitated him; Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats made use of his stanza; Coleridge eulogized him; and he is as dear to the best living poets as he was to their predecessors. Spenser has stood all the changes in critical opinion; all the logical and formal conclusions of the understanding, as opposed to imagination and lasting sympathy." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ENGLAND has the honor of contributing one name to the trio of world poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. In depth of vision, fullness of sympathy, perfection of art, and universality of appeal, in short, in all the characteristics of a true poet, these three stand foremost. William Shakespeare was baptized in the little church of his birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, April 26, 1564. He was probably two or three days old at the time, so that the date of his birth can be placed with considerable certainty as April 23, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, at the time of Shakespeare's birth seems to have been a well-to-do trader in farm produce of Stratford, a man of considerable importance in the little town, being High Bailiff in 1568; his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a landowner in the neighboring village of Wilmcote. Of Shakespeare's youth and education, we know very little. He would naturally attend the schools of the town and receive the usual drill in Latin grammar and literature, studying Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, etc. We have evidence from the records of the town to show that when Shakespeare was about ten years old his father's good fortune ceased and John Shakespeare began to sink into hopeless financial difficulties. It is fair to presume that under these circumstances the boy was taken from school to help the family fortunes. This presumption coincides with the statement of a contemporary (Aubrey, d. 1697): "I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade.” Our next certain knowledge of Shakespeare is of his marriage in the autumn of 1582 to Anne Hathaway, a woman about eight years older than he. She was the daughter of a farmer of Shottery, a near-by village. May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptized in Stratford, and February 2, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet and Judith. Some time between 1585 and 1587 Shakespeare left Stratford for London and was temporarily swallowed up in the maelstrom of the city life. When he emerged in 1592, it was as a rising young dramatist. The reasons for his leaving Stratford cannot be known with any certainty. A credible tradition states that he was prosecuted for deer-stealing in the park of the great landowner of the district, Sir Thomas Lucy, and retorted by lampooning the knight. The prosecution being thereupon pressed with extra rigor, Shakespeare was forced to flee from Stratford. There is nothing inherently improbable in this tradition, and yet we have no evidence to prove it a fact. It first appeared in full in Rowe's account of Shakespeare's life in 1709, almost a century after Shakespeare had died. If we disregard this legend, we can find logical reasons for Shakespeare leaving Stratford in the love for play-acting inspired by seeing in Stratford during his young manhood, the King's Company, the Earl of Worcester's Company, and other companies of actors, and in a natural desire to try his fortunes in the great London world when his father's failures made a prospect of success in his little village doubtful. London could not at first have looked kindly on a boy in his early twenties coming from a small country village. Such a boy would be left to starve or to fight his way as best he could. Tradition relates that his first work was as holder of horses at the theater entrances. Goldsmith alludes to an carly existence among the Axe Lane beggars, but no other foundation for this statement is known. By 1592 Shakespeare had become a member of an acting company of recognized reputation and was actually engaged in writing plays or patching up old plays for his fellow actors. We have a contemporary record to prove that his success thus early had inspired jealousy among his fellow playwrights. Robert Greene (d. September, 1592) refers to "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his conceit the only Shakescene in a countrie . . ." The expression “Tygers heart," etc., occurs in The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke and in 3 Henry VI. The point of the attack on Shakespeare (alluded to in Johannes Factotum and Shakescene) lies in the reference to his being used to work over old plays for his company. From this period his progress was rapid. In 1594 he and his company played before the queen; the dedication of his poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece shows that he had come under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton; his acting company became in 1594 the Lord Chamberlain's Company, and later, in 1603, His Majesty's Company; and from 1595 on a steady stream of pirated editions of his plays and poems, and in some cases of plays or poems never written by him, testifies to his popularity. Numerous contemporary references support the evidence just mentioned. For example, Francis Meres in his Wit's Treasury (Palladis Tamia, 1598) wrote: "... the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, etc. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage...." It is probable that in the years of Shakespeare's success his thoughts often turned back to his boyhood home. His father's affairs had become more and more involved. The records show that John Shakespeare was deeply in debt and was sued in the courts on various occasions. Even before Shakespeare had left Stratford for London, his father had lost by the foreclosure of mortgages certain farms in the near-by villages of Snitterfield and Ashbies, and by the beginning of 1586 he had no property which could be attached for debt. Suddenly, in 1596, the lawsuits stopped, so that we are led to believe that the successful son in London went to his father's aid. This deduction is further supported by the known fact that in the same year the father applied to the College of Heralds for the grant of a coat of arms. Three years later, 1599, an application for an "exemplification" of the Shakespeare coat of arms was successful, and John Shakespeare became John Shakespeare, Gent., bestowing, of course, the same distinction on his son. The researches of Professor Charles William Wallace have unearthed from the documents in the Public Record Office of London a number of papers bearing on a lawsuit in which Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord in London, was defendant and Shakespeare himself a witness. From these papers we learn that Shakespeare boarded with the Mountjoys within five minutes' walk of St. Paul's Cathedral in a highly respectable neighborhood during the years (about 1598 to 1604) when he wrote his greatest plays. Evidence of Shakespeare's prosperity during this period, in fact during his whole life from 1594 on, is not lacking. Besides his income as an actor and a playwright, he was, from about 1599, a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theater and in the Globe Theater. These investments were very profitable, probably amounting to as much as five hundred pounds a year. The 1 Cf. Shakespeare Allusion Book. J. Munro, Editor. London, 1909. records show also a number of legal and financial transactions involving sums of considerable size. At the height of his career Shakespeare may have had an income of more than twenty thousand dollars a year, reckoning according to the purchasing power of money to-day. In 1597 he purchased New Place, at that time the finest residence in Stratford. In 1602 he bought one hundred and seven acres in Old Stratford; in 1605 he bought the right to farm the Stratford tithes; in 1610 he bought the Combe estate. He, "in his elder days," writes Ward, "lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard." The Stratford records have preserved for us some knowledge of events which must have strongly affected his life during these years. In 1596 Hamnet, his only son, died at the age of eleven years; in 1601 his father died; in 1607, his eldest child, Susanna, was married to John Hale, a doctor; in 1608 his mother, Mary Arden Shakespeare, died; in 1616, February 10, his daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, a vintner. Shakespeare seems to have retired wholly from London circles and interests toward the close of his life. It is conjectured that about 1611 he sold his shares in the theater and went to live as a country gentleman of wealth in Stratford. In his house, March 25, 1616, he signed his last will and testament. And there he died April 23, 1616, and two days later was buried in the chancel of the little Stratford church. Over his remains is a flat dark tombstone with the inscription: Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare Shakespeare's main work was done in the field of the drama and his great fame rests upon the insight, breadth of sympathy, and power of expression he displayed in that field. Extracts from his plays, poetic though such extracts may appear, yet lose something of their force and pertinency by being plucked from their context. We have chosen, therefore, to represent Shakespeare's poetry by a few lyrics selected from those sprinkled through his comedies and by a baker's dozen of his Sonnets. Meres in 1598 wrote of Shakespeare's “sugred Sonnets among his private friends." Altogether there are preserved to us 154 Sonnets. The series from number 1 to 126 seems to have been addressed to a man, and from 127 to 154 to a woman. Scholars have sought to interpret the story of the Sonnets as autobiographical, but, although some of them seem to point to real incidents in his life, most of them were probably written in accordance with the sonneteering fashion of the day. The few that we have selected in the text were chosen because of their inherent nobleness of thought and beauty of expression rather than because of their possible autobiographical interpretation. ROBERT HERRICK THE luxury and splendor of the Elizabethan age, based on a proud consciousness of increasing wealth and power and held within bounds by a wise queen, decayed rapidly under Elizabeth's immediate successors. Vice and profligacy came to the fore with few redeeming traces of genius, until with a remarkable convulsion the whole rotten system was swept aside for a while and replaced with the austerities of Puritanism. The literature that had reflected so brilliantly the life and spirit of the Elizabethan age, reflected later the corruption of the Jacobean and Caroline ages that followed. The drama, through which medium the greatest geniuses had expressed themselves, went to the last extremes in portraying the contemporary ways of life and thought and was finally checked by the closing of the theatres by the Puritans. Even persons of no Puritan cast of mind must agree that the check was necessary. Although with the accession of the Puritans to power, the whole character of government, society, and literature seems to have undergone a volte-face, it was undoubtedly a fact that England remained at heart deeply devoted to its royalist ideals. The memories of English glory and renown were too recent and too intimately bound up with royalty to be extinguished at once. In literature of the day the majority of names is made up of Cavalier poets, in whose opinion the happy phrase or the quick turn of thought in a short lyric was but an accomplishment of the cultivated gentlemen. We have, then, side by side with the stern Puritan writers, at whose head stood Milton, a group of talented, polished gentlemen whose work in literature has survived to the present day. Lovelace, Suckling, Carew, Davenant, Herrick, all belong to the Cavalier poets; their lives were bound up with the royalist cause and their poetry reflected their ideals. Greatest of the poets of these sympathies was Robert Herrick. In the period when the drama was decaying, Herrick developed the lyric to heights never before reached and seldom since surpassed; removed by fate from the political struggles that preceded Charles's execution and settled in a little Devonshire pastorate, he spent his time in writing his little songs to imaginary inamorata. With the delicate artistry of a goldsmith, Herrick was carving cherry-stones, while his contemporary Milton was adorning the Doric and Ionic columns of literature. Says Swinburne: "The last of his line, he is and will probably be always the first in rank and station of English song-writers. We have only to remember how rare it is to find a perfect song, good to read and good to sing, combining the merits of Coleridge and Shelley with the capabilities of Tommy Moore and Haynes Bayly, to appreciate the unique and unapproachable excellence of Herrick." Robert Herrick, born in London and baptized August 24, 1591, was a descendant of a family well known in Leicestershire from early in the fourteenth century. His grandfather, John Eyrick, or Herrick, was a freeman in Leicester in 1535 and later was twice the Lord Mayor of the town; his father, Nicholas Herrick, was a goldsmith of London who died November 9, 1592, fifteen months after the poet's birth, from the effects of a fall from an upper window. Nicholas Herrick left an estate which realized upwards of £5000, which in modern values would equal about £30,000. Robert, with the other children, was left by the terms of his father's will to the guardianship of William Heyrick (Herrick), his uncle, one of the wealthiest goldsmiths of the time. Of Herrick's youth we know little for certain. Frequent references to "beloved Westminster" have led to the belief that he was educated at this school. In 1607, when he was sixteen years old, he was bound apprentice for ten years to his uncle, then become Sir William Herrick. The indentures of his apprenticeship were apparently waived later by his uncle, for we have record of his matriculation as a fellow commoner at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1614. A number of letters from him to his uncle, written during his residence at college, are extant. Most of them are requests for remittances, as, for example: Sir, my dutie remember to yourself and Lady; the cause essentiall is this: That I would entreat you to paye to this bringer to Mr. Adrian Marius, bookseller, in the Black Friers, the some of XI. The which my tutor hath receaved, to be payde at London... Your ever obse quious, R. Hearick. CAMBRIDGE, 11th of October. And again: ... The essence of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, bookseller, in Paule's Churchyard, the ordinarie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as much sceleritie you maye, though I could wish chardges had leaden wings and tortice feet to come upon me; sed votis puerilibus opto. . . . Thus I salute your vertues. CAMBR., April, 1617.1 HOPEFULL R. HEARICK. 1 From letters selected by Mr. Nichols and published in his History of Leicestershire. |