have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly printed, extracts from parish registers and old account-books, inventories, including lists of the knives and spoons and pots and pans of the guzzling aldermen of Stratford, last wills and testaments, leases, deeds, bonds, declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters, as having aught to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. They have, most of them, told us nothing, and only serve to mark and mock our futile efforts. For, although we do know something of Shakespeare's life, yet, compared with what we long to know, and what it would seem that we should be able to discover, our knowledge is, as knowledge often is, only the narrow boundary which marks the limit of a wide waste of ignorance. We do not know positively the date of Shakespeare's birth, or the house in which he first saw the light, or a single act of his life from the day of his baptism to the month of his obscure and suspicious marriage. We are equally ignorant of the date of that event, and of all else that befell him from its occurrence until we find him in London; and when he went there we are not sure, or when he finally returned to Stratford. That he wrote the plays which bear his name we know; but, except by inference, we do not know the years in which they were written, or even that in which either of them was first performed. We do not know that he laid his father

or his mother in the grave, or stood by the dying bedside of his only son, or that he gave the sanction of his presence to the marriage of his bestloved daughter. Hardly a word that he spoke has reached us, and not a familiar line from his hand, or the record of one interview at which he was present. Yet from the few facts which have been ascertained, and the vague and sometimes incongruous traditions which have been preserved concerning him, from the circumstances in which he must have been placed, and the mention of and allusion to him by some of his contemporaries, we may discover what manner of man this player-poet was, and learn, though imperfectly, his life's almost 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 possible, 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

* 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, Skaksper, 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, Briselance, Hackstaff, Drawswerde, Curtlemace, Battleman, 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 when Homer wrote:

Μαίνετο δ', ὡς ὅτ' Αρης ἐγχέσπαλος.

Iliad, O. 605.

Shakespeares in whose eternal welfare the brothers and sisters were led to concern themselves, 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 hardly a 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. Ardens had been high among the gentry of Warwickshire since a time long before the Conquest, at which period Turchill de Arden was military governer, 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

The

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 Arden, who was squire of the body, and his nephew Robert, who was page of the bedchamber, to that shrewd and thrifty monarch, in whose service they both prospered. This John Arden did not escape great peril of marriage in his youth. For when he was about eighteen years old he was carried off bodily by a certain Richard Bracebridge of Kingsbury, who threatened him with his daughter Alice. As to which proposition, indeed, the lad's father had no small difference with the lady's. "Howbeit," says Dugdale, who tells the story, "at length, by a reference to Sir Simon Mountfort of Colshill, Knight, and Sir Richard Bingham (the Judge who then lived at Middleton), it was determined that the marriage should be solemnized betwixt them, and, in consideration of two hundred marks portion, a convenient jointure settled; and also that, for the trespass done by the same Richard Brace

* The name Ardern, or Wood, was given at first to a forestcovered 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 by that part only which lay within Warwickshire.