The age-herald., 1901-02-10
HE ONLY DAILY NEWSPAPER IN ALABAMA
Freedom Gave Us Shakespeare.
Freedom Gave Us Shakespeare.


 Shakespeare was a gift to the world at favorable moment, rather than at a favorable age or period. He came in the nick of time. He went up to London without money in his purse, leaving a wife and three children be- hind in Stratford, a young man of 22, with an eye to a living, not to glory. He went to London in order to earn money. He turned to the theater be- cause there were connected with it other persons Stratford born. and he stayed with it because it brought him the money he needed. He was neither stage-struck nor moon-struck. His boise, his sanity, his good sense was never absent, and if he had not found an opportunity to earn money through work in and for the theater he would have turned to something else-to the livery stable, perhaps, which his Strat- ford friend, James Burbage, kept.
 Anu Cllo 10 IhC pOlhC III haho' II uC had gone to London in the reign of Mary, Elizabeth's reactionary sister, who went about cutting heads from Protestants, he would have found no theater, for Mary had closed them, be- lieving them inventions of the Evil One. And before Shakespeare's death Puri- tanism began to gain the ascendancy, so much so that in Stratford itself, to which Shakespeare had returned, the town council had passed a resolution declaring that plays were unlawful and "against the example of other well-gov- erned cities and boroughs," and impos- ing penalty on players. This was in 1912, and the poet was then living in retirement in Stratford His own son. in-law, Dr. Hall, was in sympathy at least with Puritanism. Shakespeare lived until 1916, and in the course of a few years afterwards Puritan senti- ment so dominated England that all thesters were closed. Force and quick results suited the Puritan temper better than art and moral suasion.
 Shakespeare came between reaction and the Puritan. He came in the days of Queen Bess, when the freedom of poet and playwright was boundless and glorious. Spencers lines, if not Mil tons, show this as we'll as Shake speare's. Queen Elizabeth did, it is true, establish Professionalism, but her religious views were as broad and lib commanding. She really liked the stage. It was the forerunner of the newspaper, which had not yet arrived on the scene of action, and the theater was in close touch with the English people. And Shakespeare came in it's ripening season-in the season of play wrights like Marlowe, and Fletcher and Beaumont, and Ben Jonson and Greene, and Peele and dozen more-in the season of excellent actors, too. Richard Burbridge was the Edwin Booth of those days, and with him and with Hen- nige and Condell and Phillips Shake speare was closely connected, number ing them among his lifelong friends. Henninge and Condell were faithful to the poets memory while they lived. It was in this season of freedom of thought that Shakespeare went up to London, then a town not much larger than Atlanta considers itself, where he found two theaters, and where he worked twenty-five years, gaining what he went for, and living to see nearly twenty theaters established where he found at first but two. They were in the slums; they were without standing; they were queer in the fullest sense of the word, but the people sought them, . and the Globe alone accommodated two thousand spectators. The times and the poet had met, and the wonderful brain filled the opportune field with wealth of wisdom, imagery and joyous ness.