Shakspere, Personal Recollections | Page 9

performances, and at the conclusion of one of the
plays--"Virtue Victorious," Queen Elizabeth called up William and a
purple page named Francis Bacon, patted them on the head with her
royal digits, and said they would soon be great men!

I must acknowledge that I felt a little envious at the encomium, not so
much to William, as to the proud peacock, Bacon, who came in the
train of the Queen.
At sunrise of the 27th of July, 1575, the festivities closed, and the royal
cavalcade with a following of ten thousand loyal subjects, accompanied
the ruling monarch to the borders of Warwickshire, with universal
shouts and ovations on her triumphal march to London.
"I would applaud thee to the very echo, That should applaud again."
"All that glitters is not gold, Often you have heard that told; Many a
man his life hath sold But my outside to behold!"
CHAPTER II.
LAUNCHED. APPRENTICE BOY. AMBITION.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Stars, But in ourselves that we are
underlings."
Will Shakspere and myself left school when we were fourteen years of
age. Our parents being reduced in worldly circumstances, needed the
financial fruits of our labor.
Shakspere was bound to a butcher named John Bull, for a term of three
years, while I was put at the trade of stone-cutting with Sam Granite for
the same period.
Will was one of the finest looking boys in the town of Stratford,
aristocratic by nature, large and noble in appearance, and the pride of
all the girls in the county of Warwick; for his fame as a runner, boxer,
drinker, dancer, reciter, speaker, hunter, swimmer and singer was well
known in the surrounding farms and villages, where he had occasion to
drive, purchase and sell meat animals for his butcher boss, John Bull.
Shakspere's father assisted Bull in selling hides and buying wool.
In the winter of 1580, Will and myself joined a new thespian society,

organized by the boys and girls of Stratford, with a contingent of
theatrical talent from Shottery, Snitterfield, Leicester, Kenilworth and
Coventry.
Strolling players, chartered by Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of
Leicester, often visited Stratford and the surrounding towns, infusing
into the young, and even the old, a desire for that innocent fun of tragic
or comic philosophy that wandering minstrels and circus exhibitions
generate in the human heart.
Plays of Roman, Spanish and German origin, as well as those of Old
Albion, were enacted on our rural stage, and although we had not the
paraphernalia and scenery of the London actors, we made up in frantic
enthusiasm what we lacked in artistic finish, and often in our amateur
exhibitions at balls, fairs, races and May Day Morris dances, we
"astonished the natives," who paid from a penny to sixpence to see and
hear the "Stratford Oriental Theatrical Company."
Shakspere always took a leading part in every play, poem and
declamation, but when an encore was given and a demand for a
recitation on love, Will was in his natural element and gave the eager
audience dashes from Ovid's Metamorphoses or Petrarch's Sonnets.
The local company had a large assortment of poetic and theatrical
translations, and many of the boys and girls who had passed through
the Latin school, could "spout" the rhythmic lines of Ovid, Virgil,
Horace or Petrarch in the original language. And strange to say, the
Warwickshire audience would cheer the Latin more than the English
rendition, on the principle that the least you know about a thing the
more you enjoy it! Thus pretense and ignorance make a stagger at
information, and while fooling themselves, imagine that they fool their
elbow neighbor!
Shakspere had a most marvelous memory, and his sense of taste, smell,
feeling, hearing and particularly seeing was abnormally developed, and
constant practice in talking and copying verses and philosophic
sentences made him almost perfect in his deductions and conclusions.
He was a natural orator, and impressed the beholder with his

superiority.
He had a habit of copying the best verses, dramatic phrases and
orations of ancient authors, and then to show his superiority of
epigrammatic, incisive style, he could paraphrase the poems of other
writers into his own divine sentences, using the crude ore of Homeric
and Platonic philosophy, resolving their thoughts into the best form of
classic English, lucid, brave and blunt!
I have often tested his powers of lightning observation with each of us
running by shop windows in Stratford, Oxford or London, and betting a
dinner as to who could name the greatest number of objects, and he
invariably could name correctly three to my one. In visiting country
farmers in search of cattle, sheep or pigs he could mount a stone fence
or climb a hedge row gate, and by a glance over the field