CHAPTER IV.

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: DRAMATIC LITERATURE: SHAKESPEARE, HIS CONTEMPORARIES, AND IMMEDIATE SUCCES

SORS.

1. English Writers in the Early Years of the Century.-2. William Shakespeare.3. Ben Jonson. 4. Beaumont and Fletcher.-5. George Chapman; Thomas Heywood.-6. Thomas Middleton. - 7. Thomas Dekker.-8. John Marston.9. William Alexander.— 10. Cyril Tourneur.-11. William Rowley. - 12. Nathaniel Field. — 13. Philip Massinger; John Webster.-14. John Ford; James Shirley.-15. Thomas May.-16. Jasper Mayne.-17. Thomas Randolph. 18. Sir William Davenant.

1. WHEN Elizabeth died, on the 24th of March, 1603, and James VI. of Scotland became James I. of England, Shakespeare was thirty-nine years old, and Bacon forty-two. Spenser had been dead about four years, Richard Hooker three. Robert Greene had been dead about eleven years, and Christopher Marlowe ten. George Peele was dead, and Thomas Nash had been dead about three years. Thomas Sackville, the author of our first tragedy, now Lord Buckhurst, aged sixty-seven, was one of those who, after the queen's death, administered the affairs of the kingdom, and proclaimed King James. A year later Sackville was created Earl of Dorset, and he died in 1608. John Lyly, author of "Euphues," was living at the accession of James I., fifty years old, and had three years to live. Gabriel Harvey, aged about forty-eight, lived throughout James's reign, a Doctor of Civil Law, practising as advocate in the Prerogative Court. Thomas Lodge, aged forty-five, lived on, as a physician in good practice. John Stow was about seventy-eight years old, and "as a recompense for his labors and travel of forty-five years in setting forth the chronicles of England, and eight years taken up in the survey of the cities of London and Westminster, towards his relief now in his old age," he asked for, and obtained, the king's letters-patent empowering him "to gather the benevolence of well-disposed people within this realm of England; to ask, gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects." He lived only till 1605 on this boundless reward of his enthusiasm.

Among men who had written in the past reign there also were still alive: Richard Stanihurst, aged about fifty-eight; William Camden,

fifty-two; Sir Walter Raleigh, fifty-one; Anthony Munday, fifty; George Chapman, forty-six; William Warner, forty-five; Samuel Daniel, fortyone; Michael Drayton, forty; Joseph Hall, twenty-nine; Ben Jonson, thirty; and Marston, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker, of about Ben Jonson's age.

Among the dramatists born in the reign of Elizabeth who began to write under the Stuarts, there were, at the accession of James I.: John Fletcher, twenty-seven years old; Francis Beaumont, seventeen; John Webster, perhaps twenty-three; Cyril Tourneur, perhaps twenty; Philip Massinger, nineteen; John Ford, seventeen; James Shirley, seven. These were Stuart dramatists, and not Elizabethan. But they were born in Elizabeth's reign, and their plays retain much of the Elizabethan character.

2. William Shakespeare was the great living writer at the accession of James I., when his company became that of the King's Players instead of the Lord Chamberlain's. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in April, 1564; perhaps on the 23d of April, for he was baptized on the 26th. There is a tradition that he died on his birthday, and he died on the 23d of April, 1616. His father was John Shakespeare, a glover in Henley Street, and probably the son of Richard Shakespeare, farmer, at Snitterfield. Probably in 1557 John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, "husbandman." Her father had died a month before the marriage, leaving to Mary by his will a small property at Wilmcote, called Ashbies, of about fifty-four acres, with two houses, and interest in other land at Wilmcote; also two tenements at Snitterfield, and £6 13s. 4d. in cash. That was Mary Arden's fortune, and it helped John Shakespeare for some years; but he was an unprosperous man, and during all the years of the boyhood and youth of his illustrious son he was sinking steadily into debt and poverty. In 1582, that son then eighteen years old, apparently with no means of gaining a livelihood, was married to Anne Hathaway, then twenty-six years old, the daughter of a husbandman of the neighborhood who had been dead about a year. There is no evidence whatever that this marriage was other than a happy one. In the year 1586, when William Shakespeare was twenty-two, he had a wife and three children to support. How could he best maintain them? He was a poet. Players had been to Stratford.

He would go to London, and would seek his fortune by steady work in association with the rising power of the stage.

His wife and babies he would not take with him into the unwholesome atmosphere of the great town, or bring into contact with the wild life of the playhouse wits. The children would be drawing health from the fresh breezes of Stratford; the wife would be living a wholesome life among her old friends, neighbors, and relations; while he worked hard for them where money could be earned, took holiday rests with them when theatres were closed, and hoped that he might earn enough to enable him to come home for good before he was very old, and live a natural and happy life among the quiet scenes of his birthplace, among relatives who loved him, and among the old friends of his childhood and his youth. The man of highest genius is the man also of highest sanity. In lower minds unusual excitement of the brain may lead to bold or eccentric forms of expres sion, with half-bred resemblance to originality and energy of thought. Ephemeral and even lasting reputations may be founded on this form of wit; but the greatest among poets, a Chaucer or a Shakespeare, is calm and simply wise. He is greatest of poets not because he does not, but because he does feel, and that more intensely and more truly than his neighbors, the natural ties of life. He has keen happiness in the home circle, in the scenes associated with his childhood, in the peaceful fellowship of man. His old friends, Judith and Hamnet Sadler, the bakers, were more, not less, to the author of "King Lear" than they would be to the citizen with less perception of the harmonies of life. Of all that it is natural and fit for common men to say and do, Shakespeare had, because of his transcendent genius, only a simpler, truer sense than any of his neighbors.

Shakespeare came to London, then, in or about the year 1586; and, Shakespeare though he was, he did not leap to instant fame, but worked his way to a front place in his profession by six years of patient industry. He was so ready to do any honest work, that at the end of six years we have the first indication of his rise in the complaint of a competitor, that he is a Johannes Factotum (Jack of all Trades). This was the posi