alderman, a post which he retained till September 30 the following year. In 1573 Alexander Webbe, the husband of his wife's sister Agnes, made him overseer of his will; in 1575 he bought two houses in Stratford, one of them doubtless the alleged birthplace in Henley Street; in 1576 he contributed twelvepence to the beadle's salary. But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active part in municipal affairs; he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings, and signs were soon apparent that his luck had turned. In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the sum of fourpence for the relief of the poor or his contribution 'towards the furniture of three pikemen, two bellmen, and one archer' who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county. Brothers Meanwhile his family was increasing. Four children besides the poet-three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 13, 1566), Richard (baptised March and sisters. II, 1574), and Edmund (baptised May 3, 1580), with a daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569) -reached maturity. A daughter Ann was baptised September 28, 1571, and was buried on April 4, 1579. To meet his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money from his wife's kinsfolk, and he and his wife visit Stratford is, on the other hand, conclusive proof that his religion was not that of the contemporary puritan, whose hostility to all forms of dramatic representations was one of his most persistent characteristics. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim's Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. infra, p. 187 seq.) mortgaged, on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for 40%. to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden. Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the 'rents and profits' of the estate. Asbies was thereby alienated for ever. Next year, on October 15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum apparently of 40%, his wife's property at Snitterfield.' father's financial John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiliation of having parted, although as he hoped The only temporarily, with his wife's property of Asbies, and in the autumn of 1580 he offered difficulties. to pay off the mortgage; but his brother-inlaw, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none. The negotiation, which was the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive. Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which distraint could be levied. On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman's gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings.3 The sum is stated to be 47. in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and 40/. in another (ib. p. 179); the latter is more likely to be 2 Ib. ii. 238. correct. • Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of Shakespeare's father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of Master Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons. They were entitled to free tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. The eldest son, William, Education. probably entered the school in 1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577. The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the 'Sententiæ Pueriles' and Lily's grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. The eclogues of the popular renaissance poet, Mantuanus, were often preferred to Virgil's for beginners The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama.1 of the Shoemakers' Company in 1592-a certain sign of pecuniary stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 137-40). 1 James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a Græcè et Latinè edition. I believe Lowell's parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents-proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare's part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same com Dr. Farmer enunciated in his Essay on Shakespeare's Learning' (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations. But several of the books in French and Italian whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas-Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques,' Ser Giovanni's 'Il Pecorone,' and Cinthio's Hecatommithi,' for example monplace argument as that with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra, are the lines 1171-3: Θνητοῦ πέφυκας πατρός, Ηλέκτρα, φρόνει· (i.e. 'Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal. Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us has this debt of suffering to be paid '). In Hamlet (1. ii. 72 sq.) are the familiar sentences: Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die. . . But you must know, your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his . . . But to persèver Of impious stubbornness. Cf. Sophocles's Edipus Coloneus, 880: Toîs Toi dikalois xa' ßpaxùS VIKậ μéyav ('In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,' Jebb), and 2 Henry VI, iii. 233, Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.' Shakespeare's' prophetic soul' in Hamlet (1. v. 40) and the Sonnets (cvii. 1) may be matched by the póμavtis Ovμós of Euripides's Andromache, 1075; and Hamlet's 'sea of troubles' (111. i. 59) by the kakŵν wéλayos of Æschylus's Persæ, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and Æschylus's Clytemnestra, who in man's counsels bore no woman's heart' (yvvainds åvdpóßovλov TíÇov réap, Agamemnon, 11), most closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemblance attests no knowledge of Æschylus on Shakespeare's part, but merely the close community of tragic genius that subsisted between the two poets. -were not accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature of France and Italy. With the Latin and French languages, indeed, and with many Latin poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his writings openly acknowledged his acquaintance. In 'Henry V' the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost 'and Sir Hugh Evans in Merry Wives of The poet's classical Windsor,' Shakespeare placed Latin phrases equipment. drawn directly from Lily's grammar, from the Sententiæ Pueriles,' and from the good old Mantuan.' The influence of Ovid, especially the 'Metamorphoses,' was apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic, and is discernible in the 'Tempest,' his latest play (v. i. 33 seq.) In the Bodleian Library there is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses' (1502), and on the title is the signature Wm. Sh., which experts have declared-not quite conclusively to be a genuine autograph of the poet.1 Ovid's Latin text was certainly not unfamiliar to him, but his closest adaptations of Ovid's Metamorphoses' often reflect the phraseology of the popular English version by ་ Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq. |