A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

WILLIAM

OF

SHAKESPEARE.

Patron Saint of England. His parents had to tremble for his life when he was no more than two months old; for the plague broke out at Stratford, raging there with fatal effect from June to December, and carrying off more than a seventh part of the population, calculated to have been about fourteen hundred inhabitants. But the baby Shakespeare escaped; and the world, with his father and mother, had cause to bless God and rejoice. Three months after his little son had completed his first year, John Shakespeare was elected one of the fourteen aldermen of his native village town; and he gradually advanced in rank and municipal im

A MAN who held no higher rank than glover, a the 23d, St George's Day, the festival of the simple villager, with a plain yeoman name,-, John Shakespeare,-had so much of intrinsic, worth and attraction as to gain the heart and hand of Mary Arden, daughter to a man of good landed estate and ancient family, who was grand- | nephew to a Sir John Arden, esquire of the body to Henry VII. Something originally and innately fine about these Shakespeares! The marriage may be believed to have taken place somewhere in 1557; and Joan, the first child, was baptized in the church of Stratford-upon-Avon, on the 15th September 1558. A sweet English village, this Stratford! seated on the edge of a silvery river, green with turfy banks and woody slopes, picturesque with cottage houses and cot-portance, until he received the highest distinctage gardens; crowned with a village church, ivy clad, surrounded by moss-grown graves, approached by a lime-tree avenue, and its slender spire tapering towards heaven. In this same pleasant village John Shakespeare bought him two houses, one of which, in Henley Street, he made his residence, and brought home thither his wife. A homely tenement, one story high, few rooms on a floor, plastered walls and beamed roof; but in an upper chamber of this small house, Mary Arden Shakespeare gave birth to two daughters, (Joan and Margaret, both of whom died in infancy,) and then to a SON. The faint first cry of her new-born boy gave but the token of joy common to all happy mothers that her babe lived, and might still live to bless her in his future life. She could then have had no thrill of consciousness as to what would be to the world the hereafter utterances of him who now drew his first breath. Could she at that moment have beheld in beatific prevision the immortal destiny awaiting her child, no dreams vouchsafed to mortal travail-worn woman might equal hers. At the font he received the name of William, being christened on the 26th April 1564; and as it was then the custom to have infants baptized at an early period, there is great probability that the day of his birth was

tion in the power of his fellow-townsmen to bestow-being elected Bailiff of Stratford-uponAvon in 1568. He was thus, ex officio, a magistrate. When William was two years old he had a brother born, Gilbert, baptized 13th October 1566; and by the time he reached the age of five years, he had a sister born, Joan, baptized 15th April 1569. She had the same name given to her as her parents' first-born; and this was probably owing to the fact of there being an Aunt Joan, who, in all likelihood, stood godmother on both occasions. This "Aunt Joan" was sister to the mother, Mary (Arden) Shakespeare, and had married Edward Lambert.

During the year 1569 there were theatrical performances by "The Queen's Players," in Stratford-upon-Avon; and perhaps "Aunt Joan" may have taken the little five-year-old fellow for a treat to the play. Certain it is, that in the following twelvemonth, John Shakespeare became possessed of a field called "Ingon Meadow;" and here doubtless little William ran about to gather "daisies pied and violets blue," -a "boy pursuing summer butterflies." Next year he had another sister born, Anne, baptized 28th September 1571; and now probably commenced his schoolboy time, when, "with satchel and shining morning face," he sallied forth, even

Stratford stripling, who would be sure to find means of making acquaintance with them.

This taste for theatricals and the society of actors may have been indulgences snatched between whiles, during holiday visits to his native

ourselves of the idea that Shakespeare may have had a portion of college education during the three years when he was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age. Although John Shakespeare's income was at that time peculiarly restricted, yet it was not impossible that William may have been a scholar upon the foundation at one of the universities, a sizer or servitor; in which case, his collegiateship would have been no expense to his father. We have always fancied that it was during one of these joyous summer holidays at his Stratford home, that, strolling through the pleasant lanes of Shottery, a young fellow of eighteen, his eye first encountered the sweet face and debonair figure of Anne Hathaway, then in the full bloom of womanhood, and of an age most likely to captivate the imagination of a lad-lover-buxom five-andtwenty. No surer enslaver of an imagination of eighteen, glowing with ideals of womanly perfection, than richly-gifted, accomplished, femininely-crowned five-and-twenty. In the girl of fifteen or sixteen, the youth sees but timidity, insipidity, immaturity; but in womanly five

then, perchance, marking some others his companions "creeping, like snail, unwillingly to school;" for we cannot fancy him averse from his book. The masters of the Free GrammarSchool about that period were, successively, Walter Roche, Thomas Hunt, and Thomas Jen-place; for we have never been able to divest kins; and the latter name irresistibly suggests that he was the prototype of the Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans: while we behold, as a pictureverity, Mary (Arden) Shakespeare leading her young son by the hand through Stratford streets, as Mrs Page leads his little namesake, William, through Windsor streets, till they meet with the schoolmaster, who is to "ask him some questions in his accidence." Then we see William bid to hold up his head, answer his master, and be not afraid. We see the boyish sunny eye glance up, look in the old man's face, take minute gauge of its every peculiarity, speak with a roguish affectation of demureness, and be all the while engaged in half-unconsciously registering present characteristic items for future delineation. In 1573, when William was nine years old, his brother Richard was born, being baptized March 11th; and as John Shakespeare's family increased, so did his worldly prosperity; for in the following year he purchased of Edmund and Emma Hall two freehold houses, with gardens and orchards, in Henley Street, Stratford-uponAvon, for the sum of £40, equal to £200 of our present money. But after this period, his cir-and-twenty he beholds a something to worship, cumstances gradually declined during the next to idolize, to inspire him with all lofty aspirathree years, until, in 1578, at a Borough-hall tions, to emulate him to highest endeavour. meeting, he was permitted to pay but 3s. 4d., as His own diffidence feels assured in the contemhis share of a levied contribution. He also mort-plation of her supremacy; and his own sense of gaged some property belonging to his wife by inheritance,-a small estate called Asbyes,-and, being unable to afford poor-rates, was left untaxed. In 1580 the youngest son, Edmund, was born, and baptized May 3d; while William had attained the age of sixteen years. Meantime there were not wanting events that may have helped to foster in the youth the poetic and dramatic bias of his genius. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth was entertained by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle, where masques, pageants, and entertainments of the most gorgeous description were enacted for her majesty's delectation; and it is by no means unlikely that the lad of eleven years old, with heart and brain on fire with accounts of what was in prospect at a place only fourteen miles off, found means to get over there to witness these princely shows. Besides this, there were occasional theatrical perform ances at Stratford-upon-Avon itself, by eminent travelling companies of actors from the metropolis; and many of these actors were natives of William's own birthplace and its neighbour-year-old father to bethink of some means of suphood. The names of Burbage, Slye, Heminge, Tooley, and Greene-all players afterwards connected with Shakespeare's dramatic careerare those of men more or less owing their origin to the county of Warwickshire, and very probably were objects of boyish admiration to the

deficiency takes pride in and reposes on her entire excellence. We can believe that Shakespeare, at eighteen, beheld in Anne Hathaway, at five-and-twenty, the breathing embodiment of all that his young poet-brain had conceived prophetically possible in a Helena, a Rosalind, an Imogen; and to make her his own became the scope of his ambition. Shakespeare a suitor, a pleader, a lover; with his burning words, his ardour, his irresistible impetuosity, his intensity, his vital eloquence, his witchery of playfulness, his vivacity, his power of persuasion! Like his own Master Fenton, "he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May: he will carry 't! he will carry 't!"

The plain prose of facts and events gives ample evidence how Shakespeare wooed and won. In 1582, a "preliminary bond" to the solemnisation of matrimony between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway was dated November 28th; and on May 26th of the following year their first child, Susanna, was baptized. It behoved the nineteen

porting his wife and child; and it is probably at this period that Shakespeare found employment as a teacher at the grammar-school, (mayhap he was usher, under his old master, Thomas Jenkins,) according to some traditions; or as a lawyer's clerk, according to the conjecture of