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ОглавлениеCHAPTER IX.
Shakespeare
It is very essential that the public speaker should have a knowledge of human character. No one can hope for success in any calling to-day without this knowledge of human nature.
For a knowledge of history Shakespeare’s historical dramas give history in a vital and attractive form. His portrayal of many of the characters of ancient times, as Caesar, Brutus, Coriolanus and others, is exceedingly vivid. In English history our debt to Shakespeare is still greater. Carlyle said: “Nearly all the English history that I know I learned from Shakespeare.”
For training in expression, the art of speaking, writing, literature and in business, to see clearly and to see the whole, Shakespeare is a model of clearness. He uses a larger vocabulary than any other writer.
For culture implying growth, the unfolding of the heart and mind that comes from contact with what is best, no one can commune with Shakespeare’s characters and think Shakespeare’s thoughts after him without receiving an access of culture. It is always best before beginning to study an author to know something about his personality, his life. We are far more interested in a work written by a friend than a stranger. You imagine you hear him speaking and you read his pages with far more pleasure and intelligence. With this end in view the following brief synopsis of Shakespeare’s life is divided into seven periods, the important events capitalized so that the pupil can easily form a chain and memorize the same by the Dickson Method of Memory.
SHAKESPEARE
I. Who he Was—When and Where he Lived—Parents—Station in Life—Friends.
WM. SHAKESPEARE, the most famous name in English literature, was born APRIL 23, 1564, in the little town of STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, WARWICKSHIRE COUNTY, ENGLAND. His father, JOHN SHAKESPEARE, a merchant and one of the mayors of Stratford, had married an heiress, MARY ARDEN, whose family had figured in the courtly and warlike annals of the past, and thus in the veins of the great poet and dramatist of humanity ran the blood inherited from both the aristocratic and popular portion of the community. He was married to ANNE HATHAWAY when eighteen years old, and three years afterwards left his native place for LONDON, where he became successively actor, author and dramatist, and one of the proprietors of the Globe Theatre. BEN JOHNSON was his intimate friend, and he had the personal acquaintance of QUEEN ELIZABETH, JAMES I., and LORD SOUTHAMPTON, to whom he dedicated his first literary work, the poem VENUS AND ADONIS, published in 1593, and who is said to have expressed his admiration for the worth and genius of the poet by making him the princely gift of a thousand pounds. Through succeeding years his prosperity and fame increased and he DIED in his native place on the anniversary of his birth, APRIL 23, 1616, in the 52nd year of his age.
II. The England of Shakespeare’s Youth.
2. The development of Shakespeare’s genius was largely dependent upon his surroundings. He was born and lived for twenty years at STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, and it is certain that all the physical and moral influences of that picturesque and richly stored midland district of England melted as years went by into the full current of his blood, became, indeed, the very breath of life his expanding spirit breathed. Stratford derived its name from the ford where the road or street from London through Oxford to Birmingham crossed the Avon at the point of the stone bridge built before Shakespeare was born, still spans the stream.
WARWICKSHIRE was known in the poet’s own day as the heart of England. This expression was suggested by the central situation of the county, being about equidistant from the eastern, western and southern shores of the Island. It was the middle shire of the Midlands, where the two great Roman roads crossing Britain from north to south and east to west met.
It will readily be seen that from its historical, romantic and legendary interest Warwickshire was a fitting region for the birth and education of a great national poet, historian and dramatist. Warwickshire was also prominent in the history of the English drama. COVENTRY was one of the places where the Mediaeval plays were kept up even to Shakespeare’s own day, and the youthful Shakespeare no doubt was an eye-witness to the very last of these MIRACLE PLAYS, performed for centuries by the grey friars in their great monasteries. This is evident from the many allusions in his plays to Herod, blustering about the stage, to the Devil, Termagant, and other characters from these old miracle plays.
III. Early Education—Trials and Difficulties.
3. We first find the youthful Shakespeare at the free grammar school of Stratford, where, as far as is known, he received the elements of an English training with some admixture of Latin, and possibly French and Italian. Tradition has it that he made a partial study and practice of law, and even played the role of a village schoolmaster. Early in his teens the financial stress under which his father was suffering forced him from school to the more practical concerns of life. His marriage to Anne Hathaway in his eighteenth year was a venturesome undertaking, and in order to better his condition, a few years after his marriage he made his plans for removal to London.
IV. How He Reached Fame.
4. Passing over the legendary history of the great dramatist, we find him in LONDON from 1585 to 1612, varied with frequent visits to his rural home in Stratford. Very probably his first appearance in London was as an ACTOR, and according to tradition he afterwards acted the ghost in “Hamlet,” and Old Adam in “As You Like It.” His advice through Hamlet to the players, “to hold the mirror up to nature,” etc., clearly shows that he had the right view as to the dramatic art, and the function of the actor. His comrade, Richard Burbage, was the first masterly actor of the great tragic characters, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, and was no doubt coached in those roles by the great master.
Shakespeare was a most prolific dramatist, being the author and adapter of thirty-seven plays. If all his PLAYS were staged at the same time it would require seven hundred actors to play the different roles, no two of which are alike. In this vast throng would be found ancient Greeks, Romans, Britains, Kings, Queens, Dukes, Duchesses, Lords, Ladies, Soldiers, Sailors, Doctors, Lawyers, Merchants, Sages and Clowns, Priests and Cutthroats; Age and Infancy, learned Magicians and degraded Calibans, all ages and conditions of men. He not only peopled the earth, but the air and sea as well. In Macbeth witches and hags hover through the fog and filthy air. In the Tempest, Ariel and the fairies follow the sunshine around the earth. All elf-land is revealed in the depths of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. So we can see there is a Shakespeare of the heaven as well as of the earth.
V. What Shakespeare has Taught Us—The Lesson of His Life.
5. Shakespeare has taught us that the GOOD LAWS OF THIS WORLD ARE STRICT AND INEXORABLE. He is stern and exact, for he resolves to see facts on both sides, but he is at the same time infinitely tolerant because he perceives the infinite variety of human character and can enter into sympathy with each. He knows that I am not a law for you, nor are you a law for me. Each individual is a single, separate entity, possessing all the rights of an individual. But over and above each and all are the everlasting laws without which this “goodly frame, the earth, and its brave o’er-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, would be a chaos, a fire and pestilent congregation of vapors.” The two principal rules and lessons of life which George Eliot gave to a young friend, were first, “BE ACCURATE,” and second, “My dear child, the great lesson of life is ‘TOLERANCE’. ” Both these lessons, liberally taught, are also the lessons of Shakespeare.
VI. End of Life.
6. Shakespeare returned to his native place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1612, and it is a strange coincidence in the great dramatist’s career that when he left London the local theatres were closed by law, players being paid not to perform.
He passed away April 23, 1616, the anniversary of his birth, at the age of 52, a man, as Mrs. Browning writes in her “Visions of Poets”:
“On whose forehead climb the crowns of the world.”
He was buried in the chancel of Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. The inscription on his tomb is of singular import:
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here;
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.”
VII. How Esteemed and Why.
7. Of all authors Shakespeare must be known personally, must be communed with in secret by the reader himself, must be asked to reveal himself, if so he may in some adequate way understand what God did for the English people and the world when he gave them a man and a poet of such superhuman endowment. Although it is three hundred years since his genius attained to its full development, yet Europe is still busy with him as though with a contemporary. His dramas are acted and read wherever civilization extends, and there will never come a time when they will cease to move the heart, or irradiate the imagination of the world.
