The People for whom Shakespeare Wrote | Page 5

slaughters and
devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613,
in Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs,
four arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other
behind, like the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that
presaged the birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a
carpenter, lying in bed with his wife and a young child, "was himself
and the childe both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire
appearing outwardly upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of
almost three days till he was quite consumed to ashes." This year the
Globe playhouse, on the Bankside, was burned, and the year following
the new playhouse, the Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence
of a candle, clean burned down to the ground." In this year also, 1614,
the town of Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events,
however, happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed
Sir Thomas Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is
reported for a certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of
an hour after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In
1580 a strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score
personages all clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that
beheld them; "and after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they
vanished away, but immediately another strange company, in like
manner, color, and number appeared in the same place, and they

encountered one another and so vanished away. And the third time
appeared that number again, all in bright armour, and encountered one
another, and so vanished away. This was examined before Sir George
Norton, and sworn by four honest men that saw it, to be true." Equally
well substantiated, probably, was what happened in Herefordshire in
1571: "A field of three acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees and Fences,
moved from its place and passed over another field, traveling in the
highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed." Herefordshire was a
favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature. In 1575 the little town
of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: "On the seventeenth of
February at six o'clock of the evening, the earth began to open and a
Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise,
which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a great height, and
began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that grew upon it, the
Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the same time. In the
place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty
foot broad, and forescore Ells long; the whole Field was about twenty
Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way,
removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West into
the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds,
Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned
Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the
evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still." It seems not improbable
that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.
It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such
prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents,
that Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful
mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every
Englishman of his time.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on
the throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty
spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, "with great
solemnity, but with greater lamentation." Old Baker, who says of
himself that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's,
condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men

of note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms,
than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished
with the statesmen ("an exquisite statesman for his own ends was
Robert Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill,
Lord Burleigh"), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned
gentlemen and writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime
been schoolmaster to Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in
gaming and cock- fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned
divines and preachers, he concludes: "After such men, it might be
thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in
the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is
recorded in History with such