But my intimate association with her ended in the third year of her marriage, before the dark shadows of the wings of fate had lowered on her path. She arises in my memory in all her freshness and childlike simplicity, the eldest and most brilliant daughter of proud parents, the loving and admired sister, the adored girl-wife of a chivalrous husband, the affectionate friend, and the young and happy mother. There seemed to be sunshine everywhere. The future was mercifully hidden from all eyes, and she alone, though unconsciously, felt the gathering clouds with which an inscrutable Providence darkened the high hopes sprung from so radiant a beginning. WALBURGA PAGET. SHAKESPEARE IN ORAL TRADITION I BIOGRAPHIERS did not lie in wait for men of eminence on their deathbeds in Shakespeare's epoch. To the advantage of literature, and to the less than might be anticipated disadvantage of history (for your death-bed biographer, writing under kinsfolk's tear-laden eyes, must needs be smoother-tongued than truthful), the place of the modern memoir-writer was filled in Shakespeare's day by friendly poets, who were usually alert to pay fit homage in elegiac verse to a dead hero's achievements. In that regard Shakespeare's poetic friends showed at his death exceptional energy. During his lifetime men of letters had bestowed on his 'reigning wit,' on his kingly supremacy of genius, most generous stores of eulogy. Within two years of the end a sonnetteer had justly deplored that something of Shakespeare's own power, to which he deprecated pretension, was needful to those who should praise him aright. But when Shakespeare lay dead in the spring of 1616, when, as one of his admirers topically phrased it, he had withdrawn from the stage of the world to the 'tiring-house' or dressing-room of the grave, the flood of panegyrical lamentation was not checked by the sense of literary inferiority which in all sincerity oppressed the spirits of surviving companions. One of the earliest of the elegies was a sonnet by William Basse, who gave picturesque expression to the conviction that Shakespeare would enjoy for all time an unique reverence on the part of his countrymen. In the opening lines of his poem Basse apostrophised Chaucer, Spenser, and the dramatist Francis Beaumont, three poets who had already received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey-Beaumont, the youngest of them, only five weeks before Shakespeare died. To this honoured trio Basse made appeal to 'lie a thought more nigh' one another so as to make room for the newly dead Shakespeare within their sacred sepulchre.' Then, in the second half of his sonnet, the poet developing a new thought argued that Shakespeare in right of his pre-eminence merited a burial place apart from all his fellows. With a glance at Shake speare's distant grave in the chancel of Stratford-on-Avon church, the writer exclaimed: Under this carved marble of thine own Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone. The fine sentiment found many a splendid echo. It resounded in Ben Jonson's lines of 1623 :— Milton wrote My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by a few years later, in 1630, how Shakespeare, 'sepulchred' in 'the monument' of his writings, in such pomp doth lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. Never was a glorious immortality foretold for any man with more solemn confidence than it was foretold for Shakespeare at his death by his circle of adorers. When Time, one elegist said, should dissolve his Stratford monument,' the laurel about Shakespeare's brow would wear its greenest hue. Shakespeare's critical friend, Ben Jonson, was but one of a numerous band who imagined the 'sweet swan of Avon,' 'the star of poets,' shining for ever as a constellation in the firmament. Such was the invariable temper in which literary men gave vent to their grief on learning the death of the 'beloved author,' 'the famous scenicke poet,'' the admirable dramaticke poet,' 'that famous writer and actor,' worthy master William Shakespeare' of Stratfordon-Avon. II But unqualified and sincere as was the eulogy awarded to Shakespeare, alike in his lifetime and immediately after his death, the spirit and custom of the age confided to future generations the duty of first offering him the more formal honour of prosaic and critical biography. The biographic memoir which consists of precise and duly authenticated dates and records of domestic and professional experiences and achievements was in England a comparatively late growth. It had no existence when Shakespeare died. It began to blossom in the eighteenth century, and did not flourish luxuriantly till a far more recent period. Meagre seeds of the modern art of biography were indeed sown within a few years of Shakespeare's death, but, outside the unique little field of Izaak Walton's tillage, the first sproutings were plants so different from the fully developed tree that they can with difficulty be identified with the genus. Apart from Izaak Walton's exceptional efforts, the biographical spirit first betrayed itself in England in slender, occasional pamphlets of rhapsodical froth, after the model of the funeral sermon; but its most conspicuous embodiment of early days appeared in substantial volumes that are little more than arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of distinguished names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally supplied a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few grotesque sentences of quaint, uncritical eulogy. Fuller's Worthies of England, which was begun about 1643 and was published posthumously in 1662, was the first English compendium of biography of this aboriginal pattern. Shakespeare naturally found place in Fuller's merry pages, for the author loved in his eccentric fashion his country's literature, and he had sought the society of those who had come to close quarters with literary heroes of the past generation. Of that generation his own life just touched the fringe, he being eight years old when Shakespeare died. Fuller described the dramatist as a native of Stratford-on-Avon, who 'was in some sort a compound of three eminent poets '-Martial 'in the warlike sound of his name,' Ovid for the naturalness and wit of his poetry, and Plautus alike for the extent of his comic power and his lack of scholarly training. He was, Fuller continued, an eminent instance of the rule that a poet is born not made. 'Though his genius,' he warns us, 'generally was jocular and inclining him to festivity, yet he could, when so disposed, be solemn an dserious.' His come dies Fuller adds, would rouse laughter even in the weeping philosopher Heraclitus, while his tragedies would bring tears even to the eyes of the laughing philosopher Democritus. Of positive statements respecting Shakespeare's career, Fuller is economical. He commits himself to nothing more than may be gleaned from the following sentences : Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war: master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow, in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He died anno domini 1616, and was buried at Stratfordupon-Avon, the town of his nativity. Fuller's successors did their work better in some regards, because they laboured in narrower fields. Many of them showed a welcome appreciation of a main source of their country's permanent reputation by confining their energies to the production of biographical catalogues, not of all manner of heroes, but solely of those who had distinguished themselves in poetry and the drama.1 In 1675 a biographical catalogue of poets was issued for the first time in England, and the Such a compilation had been contemplated in 1614, two years before the dramatist died, by one of Shakespeare's own associates, Thomas Heywood, and twenty-one years later, in 1635, Heywood spoke of committing to the public view' his summary Lives of the Poets, but nothing more was heard of that project. example once set was quickly followed. No less than three more efforts of the like kind came to fruition before the end of the century. In all four Shakespeare was accorded more or less imposing space. Although Fuller's eccentric compliments were usually repeated, they were mingled with far more extended and discriminating tributes. Two of the compilers designated Shakespeare the glory of the English ་ stage;' a third wrote 'I esteem his plays beyond any that have ever been published in our language,' while the fourth quoted with approval Dryden's fine phrase 'Shakespeare was the Man who of all Modern and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most comprehensive Soul.' But the avowed principles of these tantalising volumes justify no expectation of finding in them solid information. The biographical cataloguers of the seventeenth century did little more than proclaim Shakespeare and the other great poets of the country to be fit subjects for formal biography as soon as the type should be matured. That was the message of greatest virtue which these halting chroniclers delivered. In Shakespeare's case their message was not long neglected. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe, afterwards George the First's poet-laureate, published the first professed biography of the poet. The eminence of the subject justified such alacrity, and it had no precise parallel. More or less definite lives of a few of Shakespeare's great literary contemporaries followed his biography at long intervals. But the whole field was never occupied by the professed biographer. Very many distinguished Elizabethan and Jacobean authors shared the fate of John Webster, next to Shakespeare, the most eminent tragic dramatist of the era, of whom no biography was ever attempted, and no positive biographic fact survives. But this is an imperfect statement of the advantages which Shakespeare's career enjoyed above that of his fellows from the commemorative point of view. Although formal biography did not lay hand on his name for nearly a century after his death, the authentic tradition of his life and work was beginning steadily to crystallise in the minds and mouths of men almost as soon as he drew his last breath. Fuller's characteristically shadowy hint of 'wit-combats betwixt Shakespeare and Ben Jonson' and of the contrasted characters of the two combatants suggests pretty convincingly that Shakespeare's name presented to the seventeenth-century imagination and tongue a better defined personality and experience than the embryonic biographer knew how to disclose. The commemorative instinct never seeks satisfaction in biographic effort exclusively, even when the art of biography has ripened into satisfying fulness. A great man's reputation and the moving incidents in his career never live solely in the printed book or the literary word. In a great man's lifetime, and for many years after, his fame and his fortunes live most effectually on living lips. The talk of surviving kinsmen, fellowcraftsmen, admiring acquaintances, and sympathetic friends is the |