MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. A LTHOUGH William Shakespeare was a popular actor and author, and the friend of many persons of distinction in his day, few particulars of his personal life have come down to posterity. Tradition and the allusions of his contemporaries furnish us with little information in regard to him; and much of that little we owe to the reverential care of another actor, Thomas Betterton, who visited Shakespeare's native place, probably between 1670 and 1675, for the express purpose of gathering materials for his biography. All that he learned was probably embodied by Nicholas Rowe in the account of the poet's life which appeared in Rowe's edition, published in 1709. The laborious investigations of Malone and others during the succeeding century and a half have added to our little stock of knowledge upon this interesting subject. But what we know, what is probable, and the poet's own works, may enable us to trace, at least, the general course of his life's uneventful story. Warwickshire, in Old England, seems to have been the favorite haunt, if it were not the ancestral soil, of a family whose name more than any other in our tongue sounds of battle and tells of knightly origin. It is possi ble, indeed, that Shakespeare is a corruption of some name of more peaceful meaning, and therefore mayhap (so bloody was ambition's very lowest step of old) of humbler derivation; for in the irregular, phonographic spelling of antiquity it appears sometimes as Chacksper and Shaxpur. But upon such an uncertain foundation it is hardly safe even to base a doubt; and as the martial accents come down to us from the verge of the fourteenth century, we may safely assume that a name thus spoken in chivalric days was not without chivalric significance.* The Shakespeares, however, seem never to have risen to the rank of heraldic gentry, or to have established themselves firmly among the landholders of the county. An old register of the Guild of Saint Anne of Knolle in Warwickshire, which goes back to 1407, shows that among many Shakespeares, in whose eternal welfare the brothers and sisters were led to concern themselves, The manner in which the name is spelled in the old records varies almost to the extreme capacity of various letters to produce a sound approximating to that of the name as we pronounce it. It appears as Chacksper, Shaxpur, Shaxper, Schaksper, Schakesper, Schakspere, Schakespeire, Schakespeyr, Shagspere, Saxpere, Shaxpere. Shaxpeare, Shaxsper, Shaxspere, Shaxespere, Shakspere, Shakspear, Shakspeere, Schakspear, Shackspeare, Shackespeare, Shackespere, Shakspeyr, Shaksper, Shakespere, Shakyspere, Shakeseper, Shakespire, Shakespeire, Shakespear, Shakespeare, Shakaspeare; and there are even other varieties of its orthography. But Shakespeare himself, and his careful friend Ben Jonson, when they printed the name, spelled it Shake-speare, the hyphen being often used; and in this form it is found in almost every book of their time in which it appeared. The final e is mere superfluity, and might with propriety be dropped; but then we should also drop it from Greene, Marlowe, Peele, and other names in which it appears. There seems, therefore, to be no good reason for deviating from the orthography to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries gave a kind of formal recognition. As to the superior martial significance of this name to all others, we have, indeed, Breakspeare, Winspeare, Shakeshaft, Shakelance, Brise lance, Drawswerde, Curtlemace, and some others of that sort; but in this regard they all must yield to that which was an attribute of Mars himself as long ago as Homer « Μ ιίνετο δ', ὡς ὅτ' Αρης ἐγχέσπαλος.” Iliad, O. 605. there was a Prioress Isabella, whose soul was prayed for in 1505 (did player William know it when he wrote Measure for Measure?), and a Lady (“ Domina") Joan, who seems to have been living in 1527; but these trifling distinctions are the highest which have been discovered in connection with the name. Little need we care, however, what was the condition of those Shakespeares who were mouldering in the earth before he without whom they would never have been heard of appeared upon it. Who his paternal grandfather was, we do not surely know; but there is little doubt that he was one Richard Shakespeare, farmer, of Snitterfield, a village near Stratford on Avon. This Richard Shakespeare was a tenant of Robert Arden, a gentleman of ancient family but moderate estate, who lived at Wilmecote, three miles from Stratford, and who tilled a part of his patrimonial fields, and let a part to humbler husbandmen. The Ardens had been high among the gentry of Warwickshire since a time long before the Conquest, at which period Turchill de Arden was military governor, vice-comes (or viscount, then not an hereditary dignity) of Warwick Castle. The family took its name from the wooded country, called Arden or Ardern, which lay in the northern and western part of that county, of which at one time they had no small part in their possession.* Robert Arden's branch of this family held lands in Snitterfield as far back, at least, as the early part of the fifteenth century; and he inherited his property there in direct succession. Two of the family had held places of some honor and responsibility in the household of King Henry VII.: Sir John The name Ardern, or Wood, was given at first to a forest-covered tract, which extended from the Avon to the Trent on the north, and the Severn on the west; but it was retained at a very early period only by that part which lay within Warwickshire. |