# A Life of William Shakespeare/Preface to the New and Revised Edition

PREFACE TO THE NEW AND REVISED EDITION
some newly discovered references to shakespeare
More than ten years have now elapsed since this work was published for the first time in this country. In the present reissue errors have been corrected, the bibliographies have been brought up to date, and some additions of importance have been made to the bibliographical information. I hope that, with the additions and corrections that are now incorporated into the text or notes, the volume embodies the results of all recent researches into Shakespeare's life, or into the biographical or bibliographical aspects of his work, about which the student of the poet's biography is entitled to expect information from the poet's biographer.
A few references to Shakespeare have lately come to light for the first time in contemporary manuscripts. I have not found it practicable to note these discoveries in detail in the body of the revised book without disturbing the balance of the chapters. I have therefore contented myself with a cursory mention of the discoveries in the text, and devote this ​preface to a fuller account of these fruits of recent research. None of the 'new' references to Shakespeare are of the first importance. But every early documentary mention of Shakespeare justly claims the biographical student's respectful attention.
I place these new notices before my readers in the chronological order which they naturally take among the previously recorded events of Shakespeare's life.
I
Although heredity, as far as the results of present investigation go, fails to account for the birth of supreme poetic genius, the biographer of Shakespeare has often deplored the absence of any reference to the personal character of Shakespeare's father. A glimmer of light has now been shed on this theme. The Rev. Andrew Clark, rector of Great Leighs, Chelmsford, who has won a deserved reputation by his researches into the history of Oxford University, examined some five years since a seventeenth-century collection of books and papers which were bequeathed to the town of Maldon, in Essex, by a patriotic native, Thomas Plume. The testator was for nearly fifty years Vicar of Greenwich, and was also Archdeacon of Rochester. He is now only remembered as founder ​of the Plumean Professorship of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge.
Archdeacon Plume's bequest to the town of Maldon included a manuscript pocket-book in which, round about the year 1656, he was in the habit, like many of his contemporaries, of writing down anecdotes which amused him in the conversation of his friends. The stories concerning literary men which figure in Plume's pocket-book have a high claim to consideration, because they embody, albeit at second-hand, the talk of no less a personage than Ben Jonson. Among Plume's acquaintances was John Hacket, an eminent Bishop of Lichfield, who was interested in the drama, and was long on very friendly terms with Ben Jonson. The latter's comments on life and literature circulated widely, and some of the tales which Plume associated with him in his pocket-book on Hacket's authority are recorded elsewhere. But one or two fragments of Jonson's talk which have found their way into the Maldon MS. seem peculiar to it. Plume's notes, which are scrappily written in an abbreviated script, supply two new statements in regard to Shakespeare, of which only one calls for special notice here.
​Plume writes that the poet 'was a glover's son,' a well-worn statement which calls for no comment. He proceeds thus (I expand the abbreviations): 'S[i]r John Mennes saw once his old f[athe]r in h[is] shop—a merry checked old man th[a]t s[ai]d "Will was a g[oo]d Hon[est] Fellow, but he darest h[ave] crackt a jeast w[i]th him at any time."'
This entry requires some annotation. It is not easy to identify Sir John Mennes. Chronology seems to differentiate him from Sir John Mennes, the admiral and versifier of Charles the First's reign, who was only two years old when Shakespeare's father died in 1601. But it may well be that the story was related by Sir John Mennes, who mingled freely in literary society in the generation following Shakespeare's death, and that Plume hastily and inaccurately credited him with an experience which was in Sir John's conversation assigned to some other. At any rate, Plume's note preserves a personal description ​of the poet's father which belongs to nearly contemporary gossip, and is the only personal reminiscence of him that has yet been discovered. That John Shakespeare should have been 'a merry cheeked old man' fully harmonises with all we know of the son's faculty for gaiety. That father and son should have cracked jests with one another, and that the older man should have reckoned himself a match in repartee for the younger, sets their mutual relations. in an amiable light. There is testimony of a sort to the poet's character in his father's reported description of him as 'a good honest fellow.'
II
The second new reference concerns the earlier years of Shakespeare's sojourn in London. Early in March 1904 a more thorough search at the Public Record Office than had yet been undertaken into the accounts of the Commissioners for the collection in London of a subsidy granted to Queen Elizabeth by one of her later Parliaments, revealed a new mention of Shakespeare's name in the capacity of taxpayer, and finally settled a doubt as to his early place of residence in the metropolis. A document was already known, showing that one William Shakespeare, inhabitant of a tenement in the parish of St. Helen's, in Bishopsgate, stood indebted to the tax-collectors in October 1598 to the amount of 13s. 4d., which sum was levied on goods valued at 5l. ​But there was nothing in that paper to identify this defaulter with the dramatist, who, according to other information, was living at the time in Southwark. A newly discovered entry in the Subsidy Rolls, dated November 15, 1597, now proves that the same William Shakespeare was returned at an earlier period, in October 1596, as a defaulter for another, and a smaller, tax of 5s., which had also been levied on his goods in St. Helen's. The 'new' record bears, moreover, an annotation, of a little later date, to the effect that the defaulter had removed from Bishopsgate to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, of which the supreme landlord was the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishopsgate levy of October 1596, as well as that of October 1598, is now shown, moreover, to have been based on an assessment made as early as 1593 or 1594. Payment was obviously sought at the later dates in ignorance of the fact that Shakespeare had by that time left St. Helen's long since for South London. It would seem from the 'new' evidence that the attention of the Bishop of Winchester's officials was directed to the default by the Bishopsgate tax-collector, and that through them Shakespeare, with great magnanimity, ultimately paid, after he had crossed the Thames, all that was claimed in respect of his Bishopsgate lodging. There has never been any question that ​at the midmost period of his London career the dramatist resided in Southwark, which was then the chief centre of theatrical life. It is now placed beyond reasonable doubt that he migrated thither from St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, a district within easy walking distance of Shoreditch, which preceded Southwark as the leading theatrical quarter of London.
III
The third 'new' reference concerns that apparently paradoxical endeavour on the part of Shakespeare's father to obtain, when his affairs were much embarrassed, the unremunerative luxury of a coat-of-arms. It is obvious that the inspirer of the transaction, which involved an unremunerative outlay, was the dramatist, the old man's eldest son. Echoes of the storm of contempt which assailed the Heralds' College on account of its easy-going complacency in granting this and like applications are heard in the pages of Shakespeare's biography. But some manuscript indictments of the college in Shakespeare's day, which have not been hitherto known or consulted, define with greater precision than before the allegations aimed at Shakespeare's heraldic venture, and suggest more plainly its predisposing causes.
​Two manuscripts on the subject have been courteously lent me for my perusal by Messrs. Pearson & Co., of Pall Mall Place. Both may confidently be ascribed to the year 1599. The first of them bears this title: 'A brieff Discourse of ye causes of Discord amongst ye Officers of arms and of the great abuses and absurdities com[m]ited by [heraldic] painters to the great prejudice and hindrance of the same office.'
This little paper book of eighteen leaves is an elaborate exposure of current heraldic scandals in the handwriting of William Smith, Rouge Dragon. The writer dedicates his work to Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, K.G., a Commissioner for the office of Earl-Marshal, the chief controller of the College of Arms. Smith makes no mention of Shakespeare; but he pertinently illustrates the strange negotiation with the Heralds' College, in which Shakespeare took part. Smith does not ridicule Shakespeare himself, but he points his scornful finger at two of Shakespeare's closest professional associates, Augustine Phillipps and Thomas Pope, comedians of repute, whose names figure in the prefatory list of 'the principal actors in Shakespeare's plays in the First. Folio. Both these actors, Smith tells us, had outraged truth and decency in endeavours to secure heraldic badges of gentility. On leaf 8a of his pamphlet, Smith writes: 'Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S$^r$ W$^m$ Phillipp, ​Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph's cote quartred, which I shewed to Mr York [i.e. Ralph Brooke, a rigorous champion of heraldic orthodoxy], at a small graver's shopp in Foster Lane.' Lower down, on the same page, appear these words, 'Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of S$^r$ Tho. Pope, Chancelor of ye Augmentations.'
Player Phillipps's fraudulently adopted ancestor, 'Sir William Phillipp,' won renown at Agincourt in 1415. Doubtless the old warrior's title of Lord Bardolf or Bardolph received satiric commemoration at Shakespeare's hands when the dramatist bestowed on Falstaff's red-nosed companion the name of his actor-friend's imaginary progenitor. But Shakespeare's affectionate relations with player Phillipps were only interrupted by the latter's death in 1605, when he bequeathed 'to my fellowe, William Shakespeare, a thirty-shilling piece of gold.' Player Pope's alleged sponsor in heraldry, Sir Thomas Pope, was the courtier and Privy Councillor, who died without issue in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, after founding Trinity College, Oxford. Shakespeare's claim in his own heraldic application to descent from unspecified persons who did 'valiant and faithful service' in Henry the Seventh's time is thus seen to be comparatively modest. The discovery of the charges which Smith brought against two of the dramatist's leading colleagues is clear proof that Shakespeare's petition to ​the Heralds' College strictly accorded with the contemporary etiquette and aspiration of the theatrical profession.
The second of the two heraldic manuscripts which came into my hands was a paper book of seventeen leaves, containing desultory notes grants of arms which (it was urged with satiric vehemence) had been erroneously made by Sir William Dethick, Garter King, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Two handwritings figure in these pages, one of which I have not succeeded in identifying but the other is the autograph of Ralph Brooke, York Herald, who was repeatedly exposing alleged malpractices of his colleagues. At the lefthand corner of the outside page is a list in Brooke's handwriting of the surnames of twenty-three persons whom he charged with having received coats-of-arms on false pretences. Fourth on the list stands the surname of 'Shakespeare,' and twelfth on the list stands that of 'Cowley,' who may be identified with Shakespeare's actor-friend, Richard Cowley, the creator of Verges in Much Ado about Nothing. Unluckily the alleged heraldic offences are only described at length in the case of thirteen recent grants, and Shakespeare is not one of those persons whose delinquencies are set out in full. Details are missing of the strictures passed on the claims which Shakespeare advanced to gentility. But such indictments as are unabridged supply pertinent suggestion of the ​grounds on which Shakespeare's title to coat armour was questioned by contemporary criticism.
The censor's general allegation is that men of low birth and undignified employment were corruptly suffered by the heralds to credit themselves with noble or highly aristocratic descent, and to bear, in consideration of large money payments, coat armour of respectable antiquity. In one case Brooke avers that an embroiderer, calling himself Parr, who failed to give proof of his right to that surname and was unquestionably the son of a pedlar, received permission to use the crest and coat of Sir William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, who died in 1571, 'the last male of his house.' Three other men, who were accused of bribing the college into forging pedigrees, are credited with the occupations respectively of a seller of stockings, a haberdasher, and a stationer or printer, while a fourth offender is stated to be an alien. In some instances Garter is charged with having pocketed his fee, and then with having prudently postponed the formal issue of the promised grant of arms until the applicant was dead. One feels regret that Shakespeare's name should (in Brooke's neat script) ornament the first leaf of this manuscript treasury of scandal. The dramatist's negotiation with the Heralds' College clearly involved him in a widely distributed notoriety. He identified himself with the bourgeois ambitions of his day so thoroughly as to invite challenge from prosaic minds of his true title to fame.
IV
The fourth 'new' contemporary reference is probably the most interesting of all. It concerns the dramatist in his declining years. In 1613 he had retired, as far as our existing knowledge goes, from professional life to enjoy a dignified repose in his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. The only facts hitherto assigned with absolute confidence by his biographers to that year are his purchase of a house near the theatre in Blackfriars, by a decd dated the 10th of March, and his mortgaging of a part of the property next day. To these pieces of documentary evidence, each of which bears Shakespeare's autograph signature, another of almost identical date, although of a different significance, is now to be added. On March 31, 1613, the steward of the sixth Earl of Rutland paid the dramatist the sum of 'forty-four shillings in gold,' for a semi-professional service. The circumstance is set forth in the Earl's account or household-books for the years 1612 and 1613, which are preserved at Belvoir Castle, and have been lately examined and described for the first time by Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, and Mr. W. H. Stevenson, the his​torical scholar, who have calendared them for the Historical Manuscripts Commission. The entry concerning Shakespeare in the Belvoir Household Book for 1612-3 runs thus: 'Item 31 Martij [1613] to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso xliiijs. To Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiijs. [Total] iiij$^{ll}$ viij$^s$.' It thus appears that the dramatist joined with his friend and actor-colleague, Richard Burbage, in designing for the Earl of Rutland an 'impresa,' i.e. a semi-heraldic pictorial badge with an attached motto, by which men of fashion set at the time much store.
Elizabethan men of letters, in imitation of their Italian contemporaries, habitually applied their ingenuity to the invention of such fantastic devices for their patrons and for themselves. Ben Jonson was proud of an 'impresa' that he had designed for himself. Sir Philip Sidney was reckoned an expert in the pursuit. Samuel Daniel translated an Italian treatise on it, with abundance of original illustration. English essays on the theme came from the pens of the scholarly antiquary, William Camden, and of the Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden. No Elizabethan writer deemed it beneath his dignity to identify himself with the prevailing taste, and the great dramatist in his declining days made his obeisance to the accepted vogue. Previously he had only betrayed a knowledge of 'imprese' by mentioning in his play of Richard II, III. i. 25, that they were ​occasionally emblazoned in the stained-glass windows of noblemen's houses.
The sixth Earl of Rutland, in whose behalf Shakespeare professionally turned his genius in this curious direction, has not hitherto figured among the associates of the dramatist. But the Earl was a friend of Shakespeare's patron the Earl of Southampton. He belonged to a cultivated section of the nobility which patronised poetry and drama with consistent enthusiasm and generosity, and the disclosure of a direct link between him and the poet can excite no surprise.
When Francis Manners, the sixth Earl of Rutland, consulted 'M$^r$ Shakspeare' about his 'impresa,' he had only enjoyed the title nine months. He had lately succeeded to the earldom on the death, without issue, of his elder brother Roger, the fifth Earl, June 26, 1612. The latter was a peculiarly close friend of the Earl of Southampton. There had been talk of a marriage between Southampton and the Earl's sister Lady Bridget Manners. The two earls were constant visitors together to the London theatres. at the end of the sixteenth century, and both suffered imprisonment together in the Tower of London for complicity in the Earl of Essex's plot early in 1601. The fifth Earl's wife was daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and she assiduously cultivated the society of men of letters, constantly entertaining Ben ​Jonson and Francis Beaumont and corresponding with them.
The sixth Earl of Rutland, who also joined the Earl of Southampton and his own elder brother in the Earl of Essex's plot and had endured imprisonment with them, gave early proof of a resolve to maintain a traditional magnificence and hospitality during his tenure of the earldom. Barely two months after his succession he entertained King James and the Prince of Wales with regal splendour at his house of Belvoir Castle. It was some six months later that he solicited the aid of Shakespeare and Burbage in order to enhance the dignity of his equipment at a ceremonial of the Court. The 'impresa' in the design of which he enlisted Shakespeare's service was intended to adorn his shield at a spectacular tournament in which courtiers were to engage at Whitehall on March 24, 1613. Sir Henry Wotton, who was present on the occasion, noted, in a letter to a friend, the brilliance of the noble jousters' 'imprese,' and offers an interesting illustration of their symbolic subtlety and obscurity. Unluckily neither Wotton nor anyone else described the details of Shakespeare's invention for the Earl of Rutland. This is Wotton's description of the ceremony, which he sent to his friend Sir Edmund Bacon from London on March 31, 1613. 'The day fell out wet, to the disgrace of many fine plumes . . . The two Riches [i.e. Sir Robert Rich and Sir Henry Rich, brothers of the first Earl ​of Holland] only made a speech to the King. The rest [of whom the Earl of Rutland is mentioned by name as one] were contented with bare imprese, whereof some were so dark that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be understood. The two best to my fancy were those of the two earl brothers [i.e. the Earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery]. The first a small, exceeding white pearl, and the words solo candore valeo. The other, a sun casting a glance on the side of a pillar, and the beams reflecting with the motto Splendente refulget, in which device there seemed an agreement: the elder brother to allude to his own nature, and the other to his fortune.'
Some other points of interest are suggested by the entry of Shakespeare's name in the Belvoir Household books. Shakespeare's associate, Burbage, the actor-painter, was clearly held at Belvoir in 1613 to be of inferior social rank to Shakespeare, the dramatist. The prefix 'Mr.,' the accepted mark of gentility, stands in the Earl of Rutland's account-book before the dramatist's name alone. According to Sir Thomas Smith's 'Commonwealth of England,' 1594, 'Master is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen.' The dramatist enjoyed the ​right to that title since he obtained in 1599 from the College of Arms a recognition of his claim to a coat-of-arms and to the title of 'gentleman.' It is worthy of notice, at the same time, that the respective services rendered to the Earl of Rutland by Shakespeare and his friend Burbage were reckoned of precisely the same pecuniary value. Each was remunerated with 44 shillings 'in gold.' Payment was obviously made in the new gold pieces called 'jacobuses,' each of which was worth about 22s.
Abundant literary evidence is already accessible of Burbage's repute as a painter, in addition to the authentic specimen of his brush which belonged to Edward Alleyn, the actor and founder of Dulwich College, and may still be seen at the Dulwich College Gallery. But the financial statement among the Duke of Rutland's manuscripts shows the actor for the first time in the guise of a professional artist, who put his skill at the services of a noble patron in return for a money payment. That the result of Burbage's labour in 'painting and making' the 'impresa' which Shakespeare suggested to him was wholly satisfactory to the Earl of Rutland is amply proved. Another entry in the Duke of Rutland's household books brings to light that Burbage was employed on a like work by the earl three years later. On March 25, 1616, the Earl again took part ​in a tilting-match at Court on the anniversary of James I's accession. On that occasion, too, his shield was entrusted to Burbage for armorial embellishment, and the actor-artist received for his new labour the enhanced remuneration of 4l. 18s. The entry runs 'Paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lorde's shelde and for the embleance, 4l. 18s.' Shakespeare was no longer Burbage's associate, for a mournful reason. At the moment that the actor-painter earned this large reward, his lifelong associate, of whose greatest creations he was the original interpreter on the stage, lay on what proved to be his deathbed at Stratford-on-Avon.
V
The fifth 'new' reference to Shakespeare concerns his last year of life, and it sheds a new flicker of light on Shakespeare's experience as owner of property in Blackfriars where he bought a house two years before. Mr. C. W. Wallace, a professor of the American University of Nebraska, discovered in the autumn of 1905, at the Public Record Office in London, three previously unknown documents in a Chancery suit touching the ownership of lands and houses in Blackfriars. In two of these official papers Shakespeare's name figures as that of plaintiff, together with six ​other persons, all of whom were of good social standing. The papers belong to a subsidiary or complemental stage of some litigation of which the full story is still to seek. The earliest of the three 'new' documents is dated April 26, 1615—one year lacking three days before the poet's death; it is 'a bill of complaint' or petition addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Chancellor, by 'Willyam Shakespere gent' (jointly with Sir Thomas Bendish, baronet, Edward Newport and William Thoresbie, esquires, Robert Dormer, esquire, and Marie his wife and Richard Bacon, citizen of London); the Chancellor's 'orators' pray him to compel one Matthew Bacon to deliver up to them a number of 'letters patent, deeds, evidences, charters and writings,' which, it is alleged, are wrongfully detained by him and concern their title to various houses and lands 'within the precinct of Blackfriars in the City of London or county of Middlesex.' The second document, which is dated the 15th of May, is the answer of the defendant Matthew Bacon; he does not dispute the right of Shakespeare and the six other complainants to the property in question, and he admits that a collection of deeds came into his hands on the recent death of his mother; but he denies precise knowledge of their contents and all obligation to part with them. The final document, which is dated the 22nd of May, is the decree of the court directing the surrender of the papers to Sir ​Thomas Bendish, Edward Newport, and the other petitioners. The houses and lands involved in the dispute are sufficiently described for legal purposes; but specific detail, which would render their exact sites identifiable, is wanting. It is uncertain whether Shakespeare were a party to the litigation in respect of property owned by the acting company at Blackfriars Theatre, of which he was long a leading member and shareholder, or in regard to that house in the neighbourhood which he privately acquired in 1613. But Mr. Wallace's discovery makes it clear that Shakespeare's retirement from the active business of life in his last years was less complete than has been hitherto assumed. He could not have been a party to this suit against Matthew Bacon without his specific consent and some active correspondence with his co-plaintiffs.
Sidney Lee.
February 1, 1909.
* ↑ The account given here of the new references is partly reprinted from an article contributed by the author to The Nineteenth Century and After (May 1906) under the title 'The Future of Shakespearean Research.'
* ↑ Plume's second mention of Shakespeare may be relegated to a footnote. It shows the poet in a frivolous and undignified mood, which can be readily paralleled in other anecdotal reminiscences of him. There is plenty of evidence that it was a common sport for wits at social meetings of the period to suggest impromptu epitaphs for themselves and their companions. Ben Jonson gave his Scottish friend, Drummond of Hawthornden, examples of how the unimpressive game was played at his own expense. When recording Jonson's conversation, Drummond relates that one of the epitaphs suggested for Jonson at a social gathering ran, according to his own account, thus:Here lyes honest BenThat had not a beard on his chen. Plume independently quotes on Hacket's authority another of the mock epitaphs on Ben to like effect:Here lies Benjamin . . . w[it]h littl hair up[on] his chinWho w[hi]l[e] he lived w[as] a slow th[ing], and now he is d[ea]d is noth[ing]. This, of course, is the very false gallop of verses, but Plume asserts that the foolish effusion was an impromptu jest of Jonson's friend, 'Shakesp[ea]r[e].'
* ↑ These discoveries were due to Messrs. Montague S. Giuseppi, R. E. G. Kirk, and E. F. Kirk, of the Public Record Office. They were first publicly described by Professor J. W. Hales, in a letter to the Athenæum for March 16, 1904.
* ↑ This discovery was first announced in the London Times newspaper on December 27, 1905. The entry concerning Shakespeare is printed in The Historical Manuscripts Commission's Report on the Historical Manuscripts of Belvoir Castle, vol. iv. p. 494.
* ↑ See pp. 392, 399, infra.
* ↑ Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, by Logan Pearsall-Smith, Oxford, 1907, vol. ii. p. 17.
* ↑ Cf. Merchant of Venice, II. ii. 45 et seq., where Launcelot Gobbo, on being called Master Launcelot, persistently disclaims the dignity. 'No master, sir (he protests), but a poor man's son.'
* ↑ Full copies were printed in the London Standard newspaper on October 18, 1905, and again in Englische Studien for April 1906.