SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564–1616), dramatist and poet, came of a family whose surname was borne through the middle ages by residents in very many parts of England—at Penrith in Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in Yorkshire, as well as in nearly all the midland counties. Distribution of the name. The surname had originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear (Camden, Remains, ed. 1605, p. 111; Verstegan, Restitution, 1605). Its first recorded holder is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at ‘Freyndon,’ perhaps Frittenden, Kent (Plac. Cor. 7 Edw. I, Kanc.; cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser. xi. 122). The great mediæval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the fifteenth century (cf. Reg. ed. Bickley, 1894). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than elsewhere. The archives of no less than twenty-four towns and villages there contain notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by Shakespeare families in the seventeenth century. Among them all William was a common christian name. At Rowington, twelve miles to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of the most prolific Shakespeare families of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no less than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William. At least one other William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington. As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous contemporaries who were identically named.

The poet's ancestry cannot be traced with certainty beyond his grandfather. The poet's father, The poet's ancestry. when applying for a grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grandfather and the poet's great-grandfather received for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII. No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious. But the poet undoubtedly came of good yeoman stock, and there is every probability that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners (cf. Times, 14 Oct. 1895; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 501; Genealog. Mag. May 1897). Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton in 1389, was great-grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare, who held land at Wroxhall in Warwickshire in 1525. The latter is hesitatingly conjectured to have migrated soon after that date to Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon. At Snitterfield a yeoman of the name was settled in 1535 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 207), and there is no doubt that he was the poet's grandfather. In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he was alive in 1560, and may be assumed to have died before the opening of the next year, when the Snitterfield parish registers, in which no mention is made of him, came into being. Richard of Snitterfield had at least two sons, Henry and John; the parentage of a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, is undetermined, but he may have been a third son. The son Henry remained at field all his life, and died a prosperous farmer in December 1596. John, the younger son of Richard, was the poet's father.

About 1551 John Shakespeare left Snitterfield, which was probably his birthplace,The poet's father. for the neighbouring borough of Stratford-on-Avon. There he set up as a trader in all manner of agricultural produce. Corn, wool, malt, meat, skins, and leather were soon among the commodities in which he dealt. Contemporary documents often describe him as a glover. Aubrey, Shakespeare's first biographer, reported the tradition that he was a butcher. But though both designations doubtless indicated important branches of his business, neither can be regarded as disclosing its full extent. In April 1552 he was living in Henley Street, a thoroughfare leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden, and he is first mentioned in the borough records as paying in that month a fine of twelvepence for having a dirt-heap in front of his house. His frequent appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was a keen man of business. In early life he prospered in trade, and in October 1556 purchased two freehold tenements at Stratford—one in Henley Street with a garden (it adjoins that now known as the poet's birthplace), and the other in Greenhill Street with a garden and croft. Thenceforth he played a prominent part in municipal affairs. In 1557 he was elected an ale-taster, whose duty it was to test the quality of malt liquors and bread. About the same time he was elected a burgess or town councillor, and in September 1558, and again on 6 Oct. 1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables by a vote of the jury of the court-leet. Twice—in 1559 and 1561—he was chosen one of the affeerors—officers appointed to determine the fines for those offences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which no express penalties were prescribed by statute. In 1561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the borough, an office of responsibility which he held for two years. He delivered his second statement of account to the corporation in January 1564. When attesting documents he made his mark, and there is no evidence that he could write; but he was credited with financial aptitude. The municipal accounts, which were checked by tallies and counters, were audited by him after he ceased to be chamberlain, and he more than once advanced small sums of money to the corporation.

With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of assured fortune—Mary, youngest daughterThe poet's mother. of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the parish of Aston Cantlowe, near Stratford. The Arden family in its eldest branch ranked among the most influential of the county. Robert's great-grandfather has been identified with Robert Arden (d. 1452), who was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 (16 Hen. VI), and the latter's descendant, Edward Arden [q. v.], who was high sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth (French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, pp. 458 seq.) John Shakespeare's wife belonged to a younger branch of the family (ib. pp. 465 seq.) Her grandfather, Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitterfield, which passed, with other property, to her father Robert, and John Shakespeare's father, Richard, was one of Robert Arden's Snitterfield tenants. By his first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had seven daughters, of whom all but two married; John Shakespeare's wife seems to have been the youngest. Robert Arden's second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of John Hill (d. 1545), a substantial farmer of Bearley, survived him; but by her he had no issue. When he died at the end of 1556 he owned a farmhouse at Wilmcote and many acres of land, besides some hundred acres of land at Snitterfield, with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants. The post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on 9 Dec. 1556, shows that he had lived in comfort; his house was adorned by as many as eleven ‘painted cloths,’ which then did duty for tapestries among the middle classes. The exordium of his will, which was drawn up on 24 Nov. 1556, and proved on 16 Dec. following, indicates that he was an observant catholic. For his two youngest daughters, Alice and Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them his executors. Mary received not only 6l. 13s. 4d. in money, but the fee-simple of Asbies, his chief property at Wilmcote, which consisted of a house with some fifty acres of land. She also acquired, under an earlier settlement, an interest in two messuages at Snitterfield (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 179). But however well she was provided for, she was only able, like her husband, to make her mark in lieu of signing her name.

John Shakespeare's marriage with Mary Arden doubtless took place at Aston Cantlowe, the parish church of Wilmcote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church registers begin at a later date). On 15 Sept. 1558 his first child, a daughter, Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford. A second child, another daughter, Margaret, was baptised on 2 Dec. 1562; but both these children died in infancy. The poet The poet's birth and baptism.William, the first son and third child, was born on 22 or 23 April 1564. The latter date is generally accepted as his birthday, mainly (it would appear) on the ground that it was the day of his death. There is no positive evidence on the subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that he was baptised on 26 April.

Some doubt is justifiable as to the ordinarily accepted scene of his birth. Of two adjoining houses forming a detached building on the north side of Alleged birthplace.Henley Street, that to the east was purchased by John Shakespeare in 1556, but there is no evidence that he owned or occupied the house to the west before 1575. Yet this western house has been known since 1759 as the poet's birthplace, and a room on the first floor is claimed as that in which he was born (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Letter to Elze, 1888). The two houses subsequently came by bequest of the poet's granddaughter to the family of the poet's sister, Joan Hart, and while the eastern tenement was let out to strangers for more than two centuries, and by them converted into an inn, the so-called birthplace was until 1806 occupied by the Harts, who latterly carried on there the trade of butcher. The fact of its long occupancy by the poet's collateral descendants accounts for the identification of the western rather than the eastern tenement with his birthplace. Both houses were purchased in behalf of subscribers to a public fund in 1846, and, after extensive restoration, were converted into a single domicile for the purposes of a public museum. They were presented under a deed of trust to the corporation of Stratford in 1866. Much of the Elizabethan timber and stone work survives, but a cellar under the so-called birthplace is the only portion which remains as it was at the date of the poet's birth (cf. documents and sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377–94).

In July 1564, when William was three months old, the plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford, and his father liberally contributed to the relief of its poverty-stricken victims. Fortune still favoured him. On 4 July 1565 he reached the dignity of an alderman. From 1567 onwards he was accorded in the corporation archives the honourable prefix of ‘Mr.’ At Michaelmas 1568 he attained the highest office in the corporation gift, that of bailiff, and during his year of office the corporation for the first time entertained actors at Stratford. The queen's company and the Earl of Worcester's company each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome. On 5 Sept. 1571 he was chief alderman, a post which he retained till 3 Sept. of the following year. In 1573 Alexander Webbe, the husband of his wife's sister Agnes, made him overseer of his will; in 1575 he bought two houses in Stratford, one of them doubtless the alleged birthplace in Henley Street; in 1576 he contributed twelve pence to the beadle's salary. But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active part in municipal affairs; he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings, and signs were soon apparent that his luck had turned. In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the sum of fourpence for the relief of the poor, or his contribution ‘towards the furniture of three pikemen, two bellmen, and one archer,’ who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county. Meanwhile his family was increasing. A daughter Ann (bapt. 28 Sept. 1571)Brothers and sisters. was buried on 4 April 1579; but four children besides the poet—three sons, Gilbert (bapt. 13 Oct. 1566), Richard (bapt. 11 March 1574), and Edmund (bapt. 3 May 1580), with a daughter Joan (bapt. 15 April 1569)—reached maturity. To meet his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money from his wife's kinsfolk, and he and his wife mortgaged, on 14 Nov. 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for 40l. to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden. Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the ‘rents and profits’ of the estate. Asbies was thereby alienated for ever. Next year, on 15 Oct. 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum of 4l., his wife's property at Snitterfield (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 407–8). John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiliationThe father's financial difficulties. of having parted, although as he hoped only temporarily, with his wife's property of Asbies, and in the autumn of 1580 offered to pay off the mortgage; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none. The negotiation, which proved the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive. Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had nothing on which distraint could be levied (ib. ii. 238). On 6 Sept. 1586 John was deprived of his alderman's gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings.

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons.Education. They were entitled to free tuition at the free grammar school of Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. The eldest son, William, probably entered the school in 1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577. The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles’ and Lily's grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. The eclogues of the popular mediæval poet, Mantuanus, were often preferred to Virgil's for beginners. The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and those in Shakespeare's plays seem due to accident, and not to any study by Shakespeare while at school or elsewhere of the Athenian drama. With the Latin language and with many Latin poetsThe poet's classical equipment. of the school curriculum, on the other hand, Shakespeare openly acknowledged his acquaintance. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ and Sir Hugh Evans in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ he placed phrases drawn directly from Lily's grammar, from the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles,’ and from ‘the good old Mantuan;’ Plautus was the source of his ‘Comedy of Errors,’ and the influence of Ovid, especially the ‘Metamorphoses,’ was apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic. In the Bodleian Library is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses’ (1502), and on the title is the signature ‘Wm. She.,’ which experts have declared—not quite conclusively—to be a genuine autograph of the poet (Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, 1890, pp. 379 seq.). Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ‘Essay on Shakespeare's Learning’ (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations. But by no means all the books in French and Italian whence Shakespeare is positively known to have derived the plots of his dramas—Belleforest's ‘Histoires Tragiques’ and Cinthio's ‘Hecatommithi,’ for example—were accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in the Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature of Rome, France, and modern Italy. He had no title to rank as a classical scholar, and his lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the ‘small Latin and less Greek’ with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson. But Aubrey's report that ‘he understood Latin pretty well’ cannot be reasonably contested (cf. Spencer Baynes, ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq.).

His father's financial difficulties doubtless caused Shakespeare's removal from school at an unusually early age. Probably in 1577, when he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes. ‘I have been told heretofore,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade,’ which, according to the writer, was that of a butcher. It is possible that John's ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business. His son may have been formally apprenticed to him. An early Stratford tradition describes him as ‘a butcher's apprentice’ (Dowdall). ‘When he kill'd a calf,’ Aubrey proceeds less convincingly, ‘he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half yearsThe poet's marriage. old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father's anxieties. He married. His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years. Rowe states that she ‘was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.’

On 1 Sept. 1581 Richard Hathaway, ‘husbandman’ of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Stratford, made his will, which was proved on 9 July 1582, and is preserved in the prerogative court of Canterbury. His house and land, ‘two and a half virgates,’ had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances. His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of her eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned. Six other children—three sons and three daughters—received sums of money; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were each allotted 6l. 13s. 4d., ‘to be paid at the day of her marriage,’ a phrase common in wills of the period. Anne Hathaway.Anne and Agnes were in the sixteenth century alternative spellings of the same christian name; and there is little doubt that the daughter ‘Agnes’ of Richard Hathaway's will became, within a few months of his death, Shakespeare's wife.

The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway's cottage, and reached from Stratford by field-paths, undoubtedly once formed part of Richard Hathaway's farmhouse, and, despite numerous alterations and renovations, still preserves many features of a thatched farmhouse of the Elizabethan period. The house remained in the Hathaway family till 1838, although the male line became extinct in 1746. It was purchased in behalf of the public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892.

No record of Shakespeare's marriage survives. Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject. A baseless tradition assigns the ceremony to the village of Luddington, of which neither the church nor parish registers exist. But in the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant by which Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, ‘husbandmen of Stratford,’ bound themselves in the bishop's consistory court, on 28 Nov. 1582, in sureties of 40l. each, to disclose any lawful impediment—‘by reason of any precontract’ [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity—to the marriage of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway. In the absence of such impediment (the deed continued), and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her friends, the marriage might proceed ‘with once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.’ The effect of the deed would be to expedite the ceremony, while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law. The two sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery. Sandells was a ‘supervisor’ of the will of Anne's father, who there describes him as ‘my trustie friende and neighbour.’ He and Richardson, representing the lady's family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friends' daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place a few weeks after the signing of the deed. Within six months, in May 1583, a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in the name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.

Shakespeare's apologists have endeavoured to show that the formal betrothal or ‘troth-plight’ which was at the time a common prelude to a wedding carried with it all the privileges of marriage. But neither Shakespeare's detailed description of a betrothal (Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. ll. 160–4) nor his frequent notices of the solemn verbal contract that usually preceded marriage lend the contention much support (Measure for Measure, act i. sc. ii. 1. 155, act iv. sc. i. 1. 73); while the exceptional circumstance that the lady's friends alone were parties to the bond renders it improbable that Shakespeare had previously observed any of the more ordinary formalities.

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet's matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one ‘William Shakespeare,’ to whom, according to an entry in the bishop of Worcester's register, a license was issued on 27 Nov. 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet. He may well have been one of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the parishes in the neighbourhood of Stratford. The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare's wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to assume that the bishop's clerk, when making out a license, erred so extensively as to write ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton’ for ‘Anne Hathaway of Shottery.’ Had a license for the poet's marriage been secured on 27 Nov., it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ‘against impediments.’

Anne Hathaway's seniority and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy augury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare's dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage an ‘elder than herself’ (‘Twelfth Night,’ act ii. sc. iv. l. 29), and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ‘barren hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord,’ suggest a personal interpretation (‘Tempest,’ act iv. sc. i. ll. 15–22). To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet's case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on 2 Feb. All the extant evidence points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw little of wife or children for eleven years. Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596—an interval which synchronises with his first literary triumphs—there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Stratford records. In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare's name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund's son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying 20l. But the deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the transaction (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11–13).

Shakespeare's early literary work proves that while in the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs. All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless as a youth practised many field-sports. Sympathetic references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early plays and poems (cf. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883; J. E. Harting, Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872). But his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits. A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native place. ‘He had,’ wrote Rowe, ‘by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them morePoaching at Charlecote. than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London.’ The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare ‘was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.’ The law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and owned at Charlecote a warren in which a few hares or does doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel Ireland [q. v.] was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied in his ‘Views on the Warwickshire Avon,’ 1795, an engraving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare's ‘deer-barn,’ but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention (cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Poacher, 1862; Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 123).

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive. No authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning ‘A parliament member, a justice of peace,’ which were represented to be Shakespeare's on the authority of an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703. But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakespearean drama. Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of Charlecote. Justice Shallow. According to Davies of Saperton, Shakespeare's ‘revenge was so great that’ he caricatured Lucy as ‘Justice Clodpate,’ who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as ‘a great man,’ and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy's name, ‘three louses rampant for his arms.’ Justice Shallow, who came to birth in the ‘Second Part of Henry IV,’ is represented in the opening scene of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate. The ‘three luces hauriant argent’ were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys, and the dramatist's prolonged reference in this scene to the ‘dozen white luces’ on Shallow's ‘old coat’ finally establishes Shallow's identity with Lucy.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned whetherThe flight from Stratford. Shakespeare, on fleeing from Lucy's persecution, at once sought an asylum in London. William Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ‘in his younger years,’ and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village. The suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, some youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name (cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 116 sq.). The knowledge of a soldier's life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising life in almost every aspect by force of his imagination.

To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on foot duringThe journey to London. 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe (cf. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1–24). Tradition points to that as Shakespeare's favourite route, rather than to the road by Banbury and Aylesbury. Aubrey asserts that at Grendon, near Oxford, ‘he happened to take the humour of the constable in “Midsummer Night's Dream”’—by which he meant, we may suppose, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’—but there were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself. The Crown Inn (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of his resting-places.

To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have been known previously. Richard Field, a native of Stratford, and son of a friend of Shakespeare's father, had left Stratford in 1579 to serve an apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier [q. v.], the London printer. Shakespeare and Field, who was made free of the Stationers' Company in 1587, were soon associated as author and publisher, but the theory that Field found work for Shakespeare in Vautrollier's printing-office is fanciful (Blades, Shakspeare and Typography). No more can be said for the attempt to prove that Shakespeare obtained employment as a lawyer's clerk. In view of his general quickness of apprehension, his accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the attention that has been paid it, may be attributable in part to his observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved, and in part to early intercourse with members of the inns of court (cf. Lord Campbell, Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, 1859; W. L. Rushton, Shakespeare as a Lawyer, 1858, and Shakespeare's Testamentary Language, 1869).

Tradition and common-sense alike point to one of the only two theatres (The TheatreTheatrical employment. or The Curtain) that existed in London at the date of his arrival as an early scene of his regular occupation. The compiler of ‘Lives of the Poets’ (1753), assigned to Theophilus Cibber [q. v.], was the first to relate the story that his original connection with the playhouse was as holder of the horses of visitors outside the doors. According to the compiler, the story was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton communicated it, made no use of it. The two regular theatres of the time were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of the Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield. There is no inherent improbability in the tale. Dr. Johnson's amplified version, in which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the purpose of tending visitors' horses, sounds apocryphal.

There is every indication that Shakespeare was speedily offered employment inside the playhouse. In 1587 the two chief companies of actors, the queen's and Lord Leicester's, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford. Two subordinate companies, who claimed the patronage of the Earl of Essex and Lord Stafford, also performed in the town during the same year. From such incidents doubtless sprang the opportunity which offered Shakespeare fame and fortune. According to Rowe's vague statement, ‘he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.’ William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor. Malone recorded in 1780 a stage tradition ‘that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter's attendant’ or call-boy. His intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers, were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.

Shakespeare's earliest reputation was made as an actor, and although his work as a dramatist Joins the Lord Chamberlain's company.soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor's profession till near the end of his life. In 1587 and following years, besides three companies of boy-actors formed from the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Chapel Royal and from Westminster scholars, there were at least six companies of adult London actors; five of these were called after noble patrons (the Earls of Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the lord admiral, Charles, lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them was called after the queen. Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company's history. But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named—that under the patronage of the Earl of Leicester—passed on his death in September 1588 under the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on 25 Sept. 1592. When the Earl of Derby died on 16 April 1594, his place as patron was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, lord chamberlain (d. 23 July 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became lord chamberlain in March 1597. After King James's succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the king's players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy which, under successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.

It is fair to infer that this was the company that Shakespeare originally joined. Documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in December 1594; in May 1603 he was one of its leaders. Four of its chief members—Richard Burbage [q. v.], the greatest tragic actor of the day, John Heming [q. v.], Henry Condell [q. v.], and Augustine Phillips—were among Shakespeare's lifelong friends. Under the same company's auspices, moreover, Shakespeare's plays first saw the light. Only two of the plays claimed for him, ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘3 Henry VI,’ seem to have been performed by other companies (the Earl of Sussex's men in the one case and the Earl of Pembroke's in the other).

At first the company performed at the Theatre, but while known as Lord Strange's men, and when under the temporary management of the great actor, Edward Alleyn (of the Admiral's company), they opened on 19 Feb. 1592 a new theatre, called the Rose, which Philip Henslowe had erected on the Bankside, Southwark. The Rose was doubtless the earliest scene of Shakespeare's successes alike as actor and dramatist. Subsequently he frequented the older stage of the Curtain in Shoreditch. Early in 1599 Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert built on the Bankside a theatre called the Globe. It was octagonal in shape, and built of wood, and doubtless Shakespeare described it (rather than the Curtain) as ‘this wooden O,’ in the opening chorus of ‘Henry V’ (l. 13). After 1599 the Globe was mainly occupied by Shakespeare's company, and in its profits he acquired a share. The Blackfriars Theatre, which was created out of a dwelling-house by James Burbage [q. v.], the actor's father, at the end of 1596, was for many years afterwards leased out to the company of boy actors, known as ‘the queen's children of the chapel;’ it was not occupied by Shakespeare's company until December 1609 or January 1610, when his acting days were nearing their end.