TO A.D. 16031 BEN JONSON.

DEKKER.

MARSTON

491

And nobly virtuous spirit for thy best part
Loves thee, I wish one ten with all my heart.
I make account I put up as deep share
In any good man's love which thy worth earns
As thou thyself. We envy not to see

Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesie.
No, here the gall lies, we that know what stuff
Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk

On which thy learning grows, and can give life

To thy (once dying) baseness, yet must we

Dance antics on your paper

"Horace. Fannius

"Crispinus. This makes us angry, but not envious. No, were thy warpt soul put in a new mould,

I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold."

In that spirit Dekker resolved to let his eager, positive friend Ben feel in his own person how he liked being held up to the town as the butt of satire. Jonson replied with an Epilogue to his Poetaster, and urged, as he had always urged, that his books were taught "to spare the persons and to speak the vices." But, in fact, he generously yielded, and said,

"Since the comic Muse

Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try

If tragedy have a more kind aspect.

Her favours in my next I will pursue,

When, if I prove the pleasure of but one,

So he judicious be, he shall be alone
A theatre unto me."

Thus it happened that Ben Jonson's last work in Elizabeth's reign was upon his first tragedy Sejanus.

CHAPTER

VIII.

FROM ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH.

A. REIGN OF JAMES L

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 a year or two. Thomas Sackville, the author of our first tragedy (ch. vii. § 8), now Lord Buckhurst, and aged 67,

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 (ch. vii. § 20), was living at the accession of James I., fifty years old, and had three years to live. Gabriel Harvey (ch. vii. § 24), also aged fifty, lived throughout James's reign, a Doctor of Civil Law, practising as advocate in the Prerogative Court. Thomas Lodge (ch. vii. § 42), aged forty-eight, lived on, as a physician in good practice. John Stow (ch. vii. § 82) was seventy-eight years old, and " as a recompense for his labours 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 (ch. vii. § 53), aged about fifty-eight, he died in 1618; William Camden (ch. vii. § 82), fiftytwo; Sir Walter Raleigh (ch. vii. § 84), fifty-one; Anthony Munday (ch. vii. § 54), forty-nine, he lived on until 1633; George Chapman (ch. vii. § 98), forty-six; William Warner (ch. vii. § 65), forty-five, he died in 1609; Samuel Daniel (ch. vii. § 79), fortyone; Michael Drayton (ch. vii. § 80), forty; Joseph Hall (ch. vii. § 92), twenty-nine; Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § 100), twenty-nine; and Marston, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker (ch. vii. § 100), 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, nine. 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. We have given the name of ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS only to those who wrote in the reign of Elizabeth; and we have seen these divided into two sections, the Earlier and Later Elizabethan (ch. vii. § 94). That part of the work of any of

TO A.D. 16c6] AT THE ACCESSION OF JAMES 1

493 them which was done under the Stuarts we may now place in a third section and call it Stuart-Elizabethan. Thus Marlowe's plays are Earlier Elizabethan; Shakespeare's, except his 'prentice work in the Earlier Elizabethan time, rank with the Later Elizabethan if written before March, 1603; after that date they are Stuart-Elizabethan.

Next to these will come the dramatists who wrote all their works under the Stuarts. The oldest of them, those who were born under Elizabeth, form a distinct class of ELIZABETHANSTUART DRAMATISTS. Those who were also born and bred under the Stuarts are the STUART DRAMATISTS; the Commonwealth dividing Earlier from Later Stuart. Thus the division becomes:

I. ELIZABETHAN, a. Earlier; b. Later; c. Stuart - Elizabethan.

II. ELIZABETHAN-STUART.

III. STUART, a. Earlier; b. Later.

3. Among writers with their work before them who were men or children at the accession of James i., were Lancelot Andrewes, forty-eight years old; John Donne, aged thirty; Robert Burton, twenty-seven; George Sandys, twenty-six; Edward Herbert of Cherbury, twenty-two; James Usher, twenty-three; Richard Corbet, twenty-one; John Selden, nineteen; Phineas and Giles Fletcher, twenty-one and perhaps nineteen; William Drummond of Hawthornden, eighteen ; George Wither, fifteen; Thomas Hobbes, fifteen; Thomas Carew, about fourteen; William Browne, thirteen; Robert Herrick, twelve; Francis Quarles, eleven; George Herbert, ten; and Izaak Walton, ten. For so many years had each received his training while Elizabeth was queen.

4. 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. The children of the chapel, who had acted Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and the Poetaster at the Blackfriars' Theatre, became at the same time Children of his Majesty's Revels, and usually acted at Blackfriars when the King's Servants were at the Globe. The plays produced by Shakespeare in the reign of James I., and their probable dates, were Othello, perhaps ;-it was played at Court November 1, 1604;-and Measure for Measure, possibly in December, 1604; Macbeth, early in 1606; King Lear, acted before James, December 26, 1606 (first printed. 1608); Pericles

(on work by another hand), 1607 or 1608 (first printed, 1609);
Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 [in this year Milton was born];
Troilus and Cressida, early in 1609 (two editions were printed
in that year, one of them before the play had been acted).
There were no more of Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto
during his life.
Cymbeline was probably first acted about 1609;
Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, 1610. The earliest notice of
a performance of the Tempest is of 1611. It is one of Shake-
speare's latest plays, perhaps his last, and there may be a
reference to this in Prospero's breaking of his wand, burning of
his books, and departure from the magic island. The notion of
the play is, indeed, that man, supreme in intellect, master of
the powers of earth and air, yet yearns for and needs the natural
life with its affections. Bad as the world might be, and ill as it
had used him, Prospero brought it to his island, with all its
incidental treacheries and all its incidental grossness, bound
himself with it again, and went home to it. Shakespeare felt
only more keenly than his neighbours all the ties of home and
kindred. He had been using the profits from his art to make
himself a home at Stratford, and while he had still power to
enjoy the home life that he had denied himself in part while he
was earning, he broke his magic rod, and went home finally to
his wife and children when his age was about forty-eight. King
Henry VIII. was the play being acted when the Globe Theatre
was burnt down, June 29, 1613, by the discharge of "chambers"
in Act i. sc. 4. Because Sir Henry Wotton speaks of the
play then acted as “a new play, called All is True," some
think that Shakespeare's career closed with the production of
Henry VIII, in 1613. It has been said also that Shakespeare's
versification falls into three periods: an early period, in which
he seldom took liberties with the metre of his ten-syllabled line;
a second period, in which eleven-syllabled lines are more
frequent; and a late period, in which he used much greater
freedom. In Henry VIII. extra syllables are more frequent
than in any other play, and so distinctly marked, that they are
not seldom monosyllables. This peculiarity was introduced
deliberately. It is strongly marked in the most characteristic
passages, as in the speech of Buckingham before his execution,
and in Wolsey's farewell to his greatness. The pomp of the
heroic line is broken at its close, and falls succeed each other
making a sad music, in harmony with the feeling of the scene
and of the play. For the whole play is a lesson on the changing

!

A.D. 1616]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

495

fortunes of men and their one trust in God. Henry VIII. stands in the centre as the earthly Fortune, by whose smile or frown earthly prosperity is gained or lost; scene after scene shows rise and fall of human fortunes as of waves of the great sea, and each fall-Buckingham's, Katherine's, Wolsey's-leads to the same thought

"Farewell

The hopes of Court! My hopes in heaven do dweil."

The play is as true as any sermon could be to such a text on the world and its pomps as this from the 39th Psalm, "Man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope: truly my hope is even in thee."

Shakespeare had prepared for retirement by an investment which would cause him to draw even a main part of his income from his native place. This was the purchase, in 1605, of a moiety of a lease granted in 1544 for 92 years—therefore, with 31 years yet to run-of the tithes, great and small, of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. The price paid. for this was £440, and the tithes would produce him £60 a year, an income with the buying power of, say £300 or £400 a year at the present value of money. in 1607, on the 5th of June, Shakespeare married his elder daughter, Susanna, to John Hall, a prosperous medical practitioner at Stratford. In February, 1608, the birth of Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, made Shakespeare a grandfather; and in September of that year his mother died. In 1612, at which time probably Shakespeare had retired to New Place, he was engaged in a lawsuit arising out of his share of the tithes. His brother Richard died in February, 1613. A month afterwards he bought a house near the Blackfriars Theatre for £140, paying £80 and mortgaging for the rest, then paying the mortgage off, and leasing the house to John Robinson. In June of the same year, 1613, the Globe Theatre was burnt down while Henry VIII. was being acted, but he seems then to have had no share in the property. In 1614 Shakespeare was active, with others of his neighbourhood, in protecting the rights to common lands near Stratford against an enclosure scheme. In 1615 he was still interested in the enclosure question. In 1616, he married his other daughter, Judith, to Thomas Quiney, a vintner and wine merchant at Stratford, who was four years younger than herself. Shakespeare had given directions for his will in the preceding