Biographical Essays | Page 8

be so utterly overwhelmed in oblivion? No poet of a

high order could be more popular.
The answer we believe to be this: Twenty-six years after Shakspeare's
death commenced the great parliamentary war. This it was, and the
local feuds arising to divide family from family, brother from brother,
upon which we must charge the extinction of traditions and memorials,
doubtless abundant up to that era. The parliamentary contest, it will be
said, did not last above three years; the king's standard having been first
raised at Nottingham in August, 1642, and the battle of Naseby (which
terminated the open warfare) having been fought in June, 1645. Or
even if we extend its duration to the surrender of the last garrison, that
war terminated in the spring of 1646. And the brief explosions of
insurrection or of Scottish invasion, which occurred on subsequent
occasions, were all locally confined, and none came near to
Warwickshire, except the battle of Worcester, more than five years
after. This is true; but a short war will do much to efface recent and
merely personal memorials. And the following circumstances of the
war were even more important than the general fact.
First of all, the very mansion founded by Shakspeare became the
military headquarters for the queen in 1644, when marching from the
eastern coast of England to join the king in Oxford; and one such
special visitation would be likely to do more serious mischief in the
way of extinction, than many years of general warfare. Secondly, as a
fact, perhaps, equally important, Birmingham, the chief town of
Warwickshire, and the adjacent district, the seat of our hardware
manufactures, was the very focus of disaffection towards the royal
cause. Not only, therefore, would this whole region suffer more from
internal and spontaneous agitation, but it would be the more frequently
traversed vindictively from without, and harassed by flying parties
from Oxford, or others of the king's garrisons. Thirdly, even apart from
the political aspects of Warwickshire, this county happens to be the
central one of England, as regards the roads between the north and
south; and Birmingham has long been the great central axis, [Endnote:
9] in which all the radii from the four angles of England proper meet
and intersect. Mere accident, therefore, of local position, much more
when united with that avowed inveteracy of malignant feeling, which

was bitter enough to rouse a re-action of bitterness in the mind of Lord
Clarendon, would go far to account for the wreck of many memorials
relating to Shakspeare, as well as for the subversion of that quiet and
security for humble life, in which the traditional memory finds its best
nidus. Thus we obtain one solution, and perhaps the main one, of the
otherwise mysterious oblivion which had swept away all traces of the
mighty poet, by the time when those quiet days revolved upon England,
in which again the solitary agent of learned research might roam in
security from house to house, gleaning those personal remembrances
which, even in the fury of civil strife, might long have lingered by the
chimney corner. But the fierce furnace of war had probably, by its local
ravages, scorched this field of natural tradition, and thinned the
gleaner's inheritance by three parts out of four. This, we repeat, may be
one part of the solution to this difficult problem.
And if another is still demanded, possibly it may be found in the fact,
hostile to the perfect consecration of Shakspeare's memory, that after
all he was a player. Many a coarse-minded country gentleman, or
village pastor, who would have held his town glorified by the
distinction of having sent forth a great judge or an eminent bishop,
might disdain to cherish the personal recollections which surrounded
one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the
illiberal law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation attached
both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous
appellation of "play-book," served as readily to degrade the mighty
volume which contained Lear and Hamlet, as that of "play-actor," or
"player-man," has always served with the illiberal or the fanatical to
dishonor the persons of Roscius or of Garrick, of Talma or of Siddons.
Nobody, indeed, was better aware of this than the noble-minded
Shakspeare; and feelingly he has breathed forth in his sonnets this
conscious oppression under which he lay of public opinion,
unfavorable by a double title to his own pretensions; for, being both
dramatic author and dramatic performer, he found himself heir to a
twofold opprobrium, and at an era of English society when the weight
of that opprobrium was heaviest. In reality, there was at this period a
collision of forces acting in opposite directions upon the estimation of
the stage and scenical art, and