good offices of friends, we may be sure that he looked more to his townsman, Greene the attorney, than to his other townsman, Greene the actor. But in that case, considering how shy attorneys are apt to be of the sort of young man who steals deer and writes verses, it is not at all surprising that the player proved to be the more serviceable acquaintance.

Many circumstances combine to show that it was in 1586 that William Shakespeare became connected with the London stage; a few months' variation and there cannot be more in the date, one way or the other, is of small importance. Betterton heard that "he was received into the company at first in a very mean rank," and the octogenarian parish clerk of Stratford, before mentioned, told Dowdall, in 1693, that he "was received into the play-house as a serviture." These stories have an air of truth. What claim had this raw Stratford stripling to put his foot higher than the first round of the ladder? In those days that round was apprenticeship to some well-established actor; and as such a servitor William Shakespeare probably began his theatrical career. There is a story that his first occupation in London was holding horses at the play-house door; but it was not heard of until the middle of the last century, and is unworthy of serious attention. The river was the usual thoroughfare in those days from one part of London to the other, and, besides, gentlemen would hardly leave their horses in the care of boys during a whole afternoon's performance. Shakespeare, too, was, as we have seen, not without means of access to employment inside the theatre.

Tradition and the custom of the time concur in assuring us that Shakespeare's first connection with the stage was as an actor; and an actor he continued to be

for twenty years or more. But although Aubrey tells us that "he did act exceeding well," he seems never to have risen high in this profession. Betterton, or perhaps Rowe, heard that the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet; and Oldys tells a story that one of his younger brothers, who lived to a great age, being questioned as to William, said that he remembered having seen him act the part, in one of his own comedies, of a long-bearded, decrepit old man, who was supported by another person to a table, where they sat among other company, one of whom sang a song. If this were true, Shakespeare played Adam in As You Like It. And it is consistent with all that we know of him that he should play such parts as this and the Ghost, which required judgment and intelligent reading rather than passion and lively simulation. It is not probable that Shakespeare, when he had found that he could labor profitably in a less public walk of his calling, ever strove for distinction or much employment as an actor. We know from one of his sonnets how bitter the consciousness of his position was to him, and that he cursed the fortune which had consigned him to a public life If he ever had comfort on the stage it must have been in playing kingly parts, which are assigned to him in the lines of Davies.†

But although Shakespeare began his London life as a player, it was impossible that he should long remain without writing for the stage; and so it happened. With what company he became first connected, there is no direct evidence; but his earliest dramatic employment seems to have been as a co-worker with Greene, Marlowe, and Peele for the Earl of Pembroke's players. There are good reasons for believing that, in conjunction

with one or more of these play-wrights, he labored on The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, A Pleasant Conceited History of the Taming of a Shrew, Titus Andronicus, an early form of Romeo and Juliet, of which there are some remains in the quarto edition of 1597, and probably some other pieces which have been lost. It would have been strange, indeed almost unprecedented, if a young adventurer going up to London had immediately found his true place, and taken firm root therein. But little as we know of Shakespeare's period of trial and vicissitude, we do know that it was brief, and that within about three years from the time when he left his native place he attached himself to the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon's company (previously known as the Earl of Leicester's), of which the Burbadges, father and son, were prominent members, and that he became a shareholder in this company, and remained an active member of it until he finally retired to Stratford.

Shakespeare immediately showed that unmistakable trait of a man organized for success in life, which is so frequently lacking in men who are both gifted and industrious, the ability to find his work, and to settle down quickly to it, and take hold of it in earnest. He worked hard, did every thing that he could turn his hand to, acted, wrote, helped others to write, seeing through men and things as he did at a glance, he was in those early years somewhat over-free of his criticism and his advice, and, what was less endurable by his rivals, too ready to illustrate his principles of art successfully in practice. He came soon to be

and

* See the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII., and the Introduction to Titus Andronicus, Vol. IX., The Tuming of the Shrew, Vol IV., and Romeo and Juliet, Vol. X.

regarded, by those who liked and needed him, as a most useful and excellent fellow, a very factotum, and a man of great promise; while those who disliked him and found him in their way, and whose ears were wounded by his praises, set him down as an officious and conceited upstart. Elation at his success, and a perception of the coarseness and inflated feebleness of the dramas then in vogue, seem to have tempted him into a little good-natured ridicule, of which we find traces in his works. This could not but have envenomed the jealousy of his rivals. But in any case he was doomed to suffer the resentment always visited upon those who offend by unexpected excellence.

That such was Shakespeare's lot we are not left to conjecture, hardly to infer. One of the play-wrights whom he found in high favor when he reached London, and with whom, as a youthful assistant, he began his dramatic labors, stretched out his hand from beyond the grave to leave a record of his hate for the man who had supplanted him, and who, he saw, would supplant his companions, as a writer for the stage. The drunken debauchee, Robert Greene, dying in dishonorable need, left behind him a pamphlet written on his death bed, and published after his burial. It was called A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, and was better named than its author or its editor, Henry Chettle, probably supposed. But Greene, though repentant, with the repentance of sordid souls when they are cast down, was not so changed in heart that he could resist the temptation of discharging from his stiffening hand a Parthian shaft, barbed with envy and malice, and winged with little wit, against young Shakespeare. In the pretended interests of truth and friendship, he warned his companions and co-workers, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, that the players who had all

been beholding to them, as well as to him, would forsake them for a certain upstart crow, beautified with their feathers, who supposed that he was able to write blank verse with the best of them, and who, being in truth a Johannes Factotum, was in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.* Greene was right, as his surviving friends ere long discovered. Their sun had set; and it was well for them that they all died soon after. They could not forgive Shakespeare his superiority; but he forgave one of them at least his envy; for when, a few years after, he wrote As You Like It, he made Phebe say of Marlowe, quoting a line from Hero and Leander,

"Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,
'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?""

Greene sank into his grave, his soul eaten up with envy
as his body with disease; but he was spared the added
pang of foreseeing that his own name would be pre-
served in the world's memory only because of his indi-
rect connection with the man at whom he sneered, and
that he would be chiefly known as his slanderer. Had
he lived to see his book published, he would have
enjoyed such base and pitiful satisfaction as can be
given by revenge.
His little arrow reached its mark,
and the wound smarted. As the venom of a sting often
inflicts more temporary anguish than the laceration of a
fatal hurt, such wounds always smart, but rarely injure ;
and few men are wise and strong enough to bear their
suffering in dignity and silence. Whether, if Greene had
been alive, Shakespeare would have publicly noticed his
attack, can only be conjectured; but I feel sure that

* See the passage in question, given verbatim and in full, and its significance with regard to Shakespeare's early labors set forth, in the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII. pp. 408-412.