APPENDIX

I

THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE AND WORK

abundant.

THE scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare's career Contemhas been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over porary two centuries has brought together a mass of detail which far records exceeds that accessible in the case of any other contemporary professional writer. Nevertheless, some important links are missing, and at some critical points appeal to conjecture is inevitable. But the fully ascertained facts are numerous enough to define sharply the general direction that Shakespeare's career followed. Although the clues are in some places faint, the trail never altogether eludes the patient investigator.

Fuller, in his Worthies' (1662), attempted the first biogra- First phical notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, in his efforts in gossiping 'Lives of Eminent Men,' based his ampler information biography. on reports communicated to him by William Beeston (d. 1682), an aged actor, whom Dryden called 'the chronicle of the stage,' and who was doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. A few additional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the Rev. John Ward (1629-81), vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book written between 1661 and 1663 (ed. C. A. Severn, 1839); by the Rev. William Fulman, whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with valuable interpolations made before 1708 by the Rev. Richard Davies, vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire); by John Dowdall, who recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 1693 (London, 1838); and by William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Hall's letter among the Bodleian MSS.). Phillips in his 'Theatrum Poetarum' (1675), and Langbaine in his English Dramatick Poets' (1691), confined themselves to elementary criticism. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious memoir than had yet been attempted, and

Biogra-
phers
of the
nine-
teenth
century.

embodied some hitherto unrecorded Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton supplied him. A little fresh gossip was collected by William Oldys, and was printed from his manuscript 'Adversaria' (now in the British Museum) as an appendix to Yeowell's 'Memoir of Oldys,' 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the narratives of their predecessor, Rowe.

In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and especially in that of 1821, there was embodied a mass of fresh information derived by Edmund Malone from systematic researches among the parochial records of Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated by the actor Alleyn at Dulwich, and official papers of state preserved in the public offices in London (now collected in the Public Record Office). The available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was thus greatly extended. John Payne Collier in his History of English Dramatic Poetry' (1831), in his 'New Facts' about Shakespeare (1835), his 'New Particulars' (1836), and his 'Further Particulars' (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe's 'Diary' and the 'Alleyn Papers' for the Shakespeare Society, while occasionally throwing some further light on obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare's biography a series of ingeniously forged documents, against which the student is warned. Joseph Hunter in New Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1845) and George Russell French's 'Shakspeareana Genealogica (1869) occasionally supplemented Malone's researches. James Orchard Halliwell (afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps) printed separately, between 1850 and 1884, in various privately issued publications, all the Stratford archives and extant legal documents bearing on Shakespeare's career, many of them for the first time. In 1881 Halliwell-Phillipps began the collective publication of materials for a full biography in his 'Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare'; this work was generously enlarged in successive editions until it acquired massive proportions; in the seventh edition of 1887, which embodied the author's final corrections and additions, it reached near 1000 pages. (There have been three subsequent editions the tenth and last being dated 1898-which reprint the seventh edition without change.) Mr. Frederick Gard Fleay, in his 'Shakespeare Manual' (1876), in his 'Life of Shakespeare' (1886), in his History of the Stage' (1890), and his Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama' (1891), adds much useful information respecting stage history and Shakespeare's relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries; but unfortunately many of Mr. Fleay's statements and conjectures are un

authenticated. For notices of Stratford, R. B. Wheler's 'His- Stratford tory and Antiquities' (1806), John R. Wise's 'Shakespere, his topograBirthplace and its Neighbourhood' (1861), the present writer's phy. 'Stratford-on-Avon to the Death of Shakespeare' (1890), and Mrs. C. C. Stopes's 'Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries' (1897), may be consulted. Wise appends to his volume a tentative 'glossary of words still used in Warwickshire to be found in Shakspere.' The parish registers of Stratford have been edited by Mr. Richard Savage for the Parish Registers Society (1898-9). Nathan Drake's Shakespeare and his Times (1817) and G. W. Thornbury's 'Shakespeare's England' (1856) collect much material respecting Shakespeare's social environment.

6

studies

in biogra

The chief monographs on special points in Shakespeare's Specialbiography are Dr. Richard Farmer's 'Essay on the Learning ised of Shakespeare' (1767), reprinted in the Variorum editions Bishop Wordsworth's Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of phy. the Bible' (4th ed. 1892); Octavius Gilchrist's 'Examination of the Charges of Ben Jonson's Enmity towards Shakespeare' (1808); W. J. Thoms's Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?' (1849), a study based on an erroneous identification of the poet with another William Shakespeare; Lord Campbell's 'Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements considered' (1859); John Charles Bucknill's Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare' (1860) C. F. Green's 'Shakespeare's Crab-tree, with its Legend (1862); C. H. Bracebridge's 'Shakespeare no Deer-stealer' (1862); Ellacombe's Shakespeare as an Angler' (1883); J. E. Harting's Ornithology of Shakespeare' (1872); William Blades's Shakspere and Typography' (1872); and D. H. Madden's 'Diary of Master William Silence (Shakespeare and Sport),' 1897. A full epitome of the biographical information Useful accessible at the date of publication is supplied in Karl Elze's epitomes. 'Life of Shakespeare' (Halle, 1876; English translation, 1888), with which Elze's 'Essays' from the publications of the German Shakespeare Society (English translation, 1874) are worth studying. A less ambitious effort of the same kind by Samuel Neil (1861) is seriously injured by the writer's acceptance of Collier's forgeries. Professor Dowden's 'Shakspere Primer' (1877) and his Introduction to Shakspere' (1893), and Dr. Furnivall's 'Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere,' are all useful summaries of leading facts.

6

Francis Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1807, new edit. 1839), 'Shakespeare's Library' (ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt, 1875), Shakespeare's Plutarch' (ed. Skeat, 1875), and Shakespeare's Holinshed' (ed. W. G. BoswellStone, 1896) are of service in tracing the sources of Shakespeare's plots. Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon ' (1874) and Dr. E. A. Abbott's 'Shakespearian Grammar' (1869,

6

Aids to study of plots and

texts.

Modern editions of the Sonnets, and the theories

new edit. 1893) are valuable aids to a study of the text. W. Sidney Walker (1795-1846), sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, deserves special mention among textual critics of the present century. He was author of two valuable works: 'Shakespeare's Versification and its apparent Irregularities explained by Examples from Early and Late English Writers' (1854), and A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, with Remarks on his Language and that of his Contemporaries, together with Notes on his Plays and Poems' (1860, 3 vols.). Walker's books were published from his notes after his death, and are ill arranged and unindexed, but they constitute a rich quarry, which no succeeding editor has neglected without injury to his work.

The chief editions of the Sonnets that have appeared of late years with critical apparatus are those of Professor Dowden (1875, reissued 1896), Mr. Thomas Tyler (1890), and Mr. George Wyndham, M.P. (1898). Professor Dowden and Mr. Wyndham treat the identification of the young patron of the Sonnets with respecting the Earl of Pembroke as a prima facie possibility. Mr. Thomas Tyler, in his edition of the 'Sonnets,' not only advocated that theory with much earnestness, but ingeniously if unconvincingly advanced a claim to identify the dark lady' of the 'Sonnets' with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke's mistress.

them.

The history of the Pembroke theory is curious. It owes its origin to an erroneous and hasty guess that the Earl of Pembroke was known in youth as 'Mr. William Herbert,' and might therefore be the 'Mr. W. H.' of the publisher Thorpe's dedicatory preface. The Earl of Pembroke was solely known as 'Lord Herbert' until he succeeded to the title, and there is no evidence of Shakespeare's intimacy with him (cf. p. 73). James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to hazard publicly the guess identifying Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' with the Earl of Pembroke in a letter to the 'Gentleman's Magazine' in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion thirteen years earlier, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the theory in a volume on 'Shakespeare's Sonnets' which he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter accepted it in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare,' in 1845, but significantly pointed out (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, who included critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone and George Steevens. The Pembroke theory during the halfcentury that followed enjoyed a curiously wide vogue, but during the past five years it has undergone new, minute, and

impartial examination, and has been generally acknowledged to rest on foundations of sand.

The opposing theory that most of the Sonnets were addressed to the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's undoubted patron, was first fully stated by Nathan Drake in 1817 in Shakespeare and His Times,' ii. 1-73. It was revived with somewhat fantastic amplifications in 1866 in Mr. Gerald Massey's 'Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets,' which appeared in a second revised edition in 1888 (the text of the poems with a diffuse discussion). The Southampton theory strictly accords with the known facts of Shakespeare's life and work.

Useful concordances to the Plays have been prepared by ConMrs. Cowden-Clarke (1845), to the poems by Mrs. H. H. cordances. Furness (Philadelphia, 1875), and to Plays and Poems, in one volume, with references to numbered lines, by John Bartlett (London and New York, 1895). A 'Handbook Index' by J. O. Halliwell (privately printed 1866) gives lists of obsolete words and phrases, songs, proverbs, and plants mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. An unprinted glossary prepared by Richard Warner between 1750 and 1770 is at the British Museum (Addit. MSS. 10472-542). Extensive bibliographies Bibliograare given in Lowndes's 'Library Manual' (ed. Bohn; in Franz phies. Thimm's Shakespeariana' (1864 and 1871); in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edit. (skilfully classified by Mr. H. R. Tedder); and in the 'British Museum Catalogue' (the Shakespearean entries in which, comprising 3,680 titles, were separately published in 1897).

The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the Critical New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare- studies. Gesellschaft, comprising contributions alike to the aesthetic, textual, historical, and biographical study of Shakespeare, are noticed above (see pp. 187, 195). To the critical studies, on which comment has already been made (see p. 187)—viz. Coleridge's 'Notes and Lectures' (1883), Hazlitt's 'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays' (1817), Professor Dowden's 'Shakspere: his Mind and Art' (1875), and Mr. A. C. Swinburne's 'A Study of Shakespeare' (1879)- there may be added the essays on Shakespeare's heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885; Dr. Ward's 'English Dramatic Literature' (1875, new edit. 1898); Richard G. Moulton's 'Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist' (1885); 'Shakespeare Studies by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893); F. S. Boas's 'Shakspere and his Predecessors' (1895), and Georg Brandes's 'William Shakespeare'—an elaborately critical but somewhat fanciful study-in Danish (Copenhagen, 1895, 8vo), in German (Leipzig, 1895), and in English (London, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo).