The Facts About Shakespeare | Page 6

and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of
1688. In Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement
toward fixity of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert

others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a
breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike,
but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in a
freedom from ancient precedent. In this era of flux the modern drama
found its panorama of novel and varied experience making and marring
character.
Shakespeare lived peaceably in the heyday of this change, nearly of an
age with Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe. Like Marlowe in
the soliloquies of Barabbas and Faust, he recognized the new
possibilities that the age opened through money or ideas. He made
much out of the commercial prosperity of the day, gained such profits
as were possible from his profession, raised his estate, and acquired
wealth. He gave his mind not to any cause or party but to the study of
men. The drunkards of the London inn, the yokels of Warwickshire,
and the finest gentlewomen of the land alike came under the scrutiny of
the creator of Falstaff, Dogberry, and Rosalind. And like his great
contemporaries, he triumphed over incongruities, for he translated his
studies of the human mind into verse of immortal beauty that yet
delighted the public stage which was located halfway between the bear
dens and the brothels.
CHAPTER II
BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS AND TRADITIONS
In the time of Shakespeare, the fashion of writing lives of men of letters
had not yet arisen. The art of biography could hardly be said to be even
in its infancy, for the most notable early examples, such as the lives of
Wolsey by Cavendish and of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law in the
sixteenth century, and Walton's handful in the seventeenth, are far from
what the present age regards as scientific biography. The preservation
of official records makes it possible for the modern scholar to
reconstruct with considerable fullness the careers of public men; but in
the case of Shakespeare, as of others of his profession, we must needs
be content with a few scrappy documents, supplemented by oral
traditions of varying degrees of authenticity. About Shakespeare

himself it must be allowed that we have been able to learn more than
about most of his fellow dramatists and actors.
In a matter which has been the subject of so much controversy, it may
be an aid to clearness if the facts established by contemporary
documents be first related, and the less trustworthy reports added later.
The first indubitable item is trivial and unsavory enough. In April, 1552,
a certain John Shakespeare, residing in Henley Street,
Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, was fined twelvepence
for failing to remove a heap of filth from before his door. This John,
who shared his surname with a multitude of other Shakespeares in the
England and especially in the Warwickshire of his time, appears,
without reasonable doubt, to have been the father of the poet. He is
described in later tradition as a glover and as a butcher; the truth seems
to be that he did a miscellaneous business in farm products. For twenty
years or more after this first record he prospered, rising through various
petty municipal offices to the position of bailiff, or mayor, of the town
in 1568. His fortunes must have been notably improved by his marriage,
for the Mary Arden whom he wedded in 1557 was the daughter of a
well-to-do farmer, Robert Arden, who bequeathed her £6 13s. 4d. in
money and a house with fifty acres of land.
To John and Mary Shakespeare was born a son William, whose
baptism was registered in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford on
April 26, 1564. He was their eldest son, two daughters previously born
being already dead. Their other children were Gilbert, Joan, Anna,
Richard, and Edmund. The precise day of William's birth is unknown.
The monument over his grave states that at his death on April 23, 1616,
he was "Ætatis 53," which would seem to indicate that he must have
been born at least as early as April 22; and, since in those days baptism
usually took place within a very few days of birth, there is no reason for
pushing the date farther back.
[Page Heading: Marriage]
Of the education of the poet we have no record. Stratford had a free
grammar school, to which such a boy as the bailiff's son would be sure
to be sent; and the inference that William Shakespeare was a pupil

there and studied the usual Latin authors is entirely reasonable. About
1577 his father began to get into financial difficulties, and it is reported