- rence of significant events, all pointing in the latter direction. In the same year when his fellow-aldermen assessed themselves 6s. 8d. each towards the equipment of pikemen, billmen, and an archer, he is set down as to pay only 3s. 4d. Again in that year when the aldermen paid 4d. each a week for the relief of the poor, it was ordered that John Shakespeare should not be taxed to pay anything. In March, 1578-9, the inhabitants of Stratford having been assessed for the purchase of arms, he failed to contribute his quota. In October, 1579, he sold his wife's share in the Snitterfield property, and in 1580 a reversionary interest in the same, the latter for forty pounds. Six years afterwards his little wealth had found such wings that, a distraint having been issued against him, the return made upon it was, that he had nothing upon which to distrain; whereupon a writ of capias was issued against his person, - he who as high bailiff had but a short time before issued such writs against others.* He seems even to have been in hiding about this time; for the town records show that in 1586 he was deprived of his alderman's office, the reason given being that "Mr. Shaxpere dothe not come to the halles when they be warned, nor hathe not done of longe tyme"; and it appears, on the same authority, that he had thus absented him *The Shakespeare Society of London was in possession of two such writs. self for seven years. But before March of the next year he had been arrested, and was imprisoned or in custody, doubtless for debt, according to the barbarous and foolish practice of which our brethren in the mother country have not yet rid themselves. This we know by his suing out a writ of habeas corpus in the Stratford Court of Record. Perhaps he suffered this indignity on account of his kindness to his brother Henry, before mentioned, who had much money trouble, and for whom he became surety to one Nicholas Lane for ten pounds. Henry not having duly paid this sum, Lane sued John Shakespeare for it in February, 1587. To follow his sad fortunes yet further, in 1592 a commission, upon which were Sir Thomas Lucy and Sir Fulke Greville with six others, which had been appointed to inquire into the conformity of the people of Warwickshire to the established religion, with a special eye to Jesuits, priests, and recusants, reported many persons "for not comming monethlie to the churche, according to hir Majestie's lawes"; and among them was John Shakespeare. But the commissioners specially note as to him. and eight others, that "it is sayd that these last nine coom not to churche for fear of processe for debtte." Thus low in fortune and estate had sunk the once prosperous high bailiff of Stratford, in the veins of whose children ran the blood of men who had owned half the county through which he skulked, a bailiff-hunted debtor. Those very children added largely to his anxiety and his cares. For since Margaret's death six had been born to him: William; Gilbert, born in 1566; a second Joan, in 1569; Anne, in 1571; Richard, in 1573-4; and Edmund, in 1580. Rowe, upon Betterton's authority, says that John Shakespeare had "ten children in all." But Betterton only reported tradition; and the Stratford parish register, better authority on such a point, records the baptism of no more than eight, two of whom, as we have seen, died before their father reached the height of his prosperity; and Anne died at the beginning of his troubles. At her burial there were both pall and bell, for which it has been discovered that eight pence were paid, while other children buried in the same year (1579) were honored with only half the ceremony, the bell, at half the price. This has been accepted as evidence that John Shakespeare had money to spare. He doubtless meant that it should be so regarded; and he deceived even posterity. As long as funeral ceremonies are deemed important, they will be the last as to which poverty will compel retrenchment. In 1579 John Shakespeare had not abandoned the struggle to keep up appearances. Had his purse been fuller, or his position lower, he might have been willing to save the four pence. But a few years later five little mouths to feed, five little backs to clothe, were quite enough to harass the poor man who could not keep his own body out of a debtor's prison, and to cause him to abandon any ambitious projects which he might have formed for his eldest son, and call him from his studies to contribute something to his own support, and perhaps to that of the family. The traditions of the townsfolk upon this subject were surely therefore in the main well. founded, though in their particulars they were discordant. Rowe, speaking for Betterton, says, that "upon his leaving school he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him," which, according to the same authority, was that of a dealer in wool. Gossiping John Aubrey, who says that John Shakespeare was a butcher, adds: "I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade; but when he kill'd a calfe he wold doe it in a high style, and make a speeche." Aubrey, who died about 1700, probably received this precious information from the same source through which an old parish clerk of Stratford, who was living in 1693, and was then more than eighty years old, derived a similar story, that Shakespeare had been "bound apprentice to a butcher." Aubrey also records, on the authority of an unknown Mr. Beeston, that William Shakespeare "understode Latin pretty well, for he had been many years a schoolmaster in the country.” The only point upon which these loose traditions are of importance is that upon which they all conform to probability, that William Shakespeare was obliged to leave school early and earn his living.* * Isolated passages in Shakespeare's plays have been gravely brought forward to sustain each of these traditions as to his early occupation, surely a wise and penetrative method of getting at the truth in such a matter. Let us see. When we read a passage like this in King Henry the Sixth, "Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by the butcher with an axe, But will suspect 't was he that made the slaughter?" what way to avoid concluding that the writer had been himself a butcher? Consider, too, the profound inner significance of this passage in Love's Labour's Lost, in which Holofernes describes Sir Nathaniel: "He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it. . . . He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's art, as well as of the art of rhetoric, compressed into that last sentence by the power of Shakespeare's genius? And is it not thus made clear that he was practically initiated into the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, one of the earliest of his plays? But, again, ponder the following lines in King Henry the Sixth, written when the memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see evidence that both these traditions were well founded: "So, first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece, Certainly these lines could have been written only by a man who was both the son of a considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher, who killed calves in high style, making a speech. Who, appreciating rightly the following passage in Hamlet, can have a doubt about this matter? |