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Worcester, maiden, may lawfully solemnize mriony, and in the same afterwards remaine and continew like man and wife, according unto the laws in that case provided; and moreov, if there be not at this psent time any action, suit, quarrel, or demand, moved or depending before any iudge ecclesiastical or temporall for and concerning any suche lawfull lett or impediment. And moreov, if the said Willm Shagspere do not pceed to solemnizacon of marriadg with the said Ann Hathwey without the consent of hir frinds. And also if the said Willm do upon his own pper costs and expences defend and save harmles the Right Revend Father in God Lord John Bushop of Worcester and his offycers, for licensing them, the said Willm and Anne, to be maried together wth once asking of the bannes of mriony betwene them and for alle other causes wch may ensue by reason or occasion thereof, that then the said obligacon to be voyd and of none effeet, or else to stand and abide in fulle force and vertue."

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In the Life of Shakspeare' by Mr. de Quincey the following observations are appended to an abridgment of the Marriage-Licence. The view thus taken is entirely opposed to our own, principally because it goes on to assume that the marriage of the young poet was unhappy-that his wife had not his respect and that this unhappiness drove him from Stratford. All this appears to us to be gratuitous assumption, and altogether inconsistent with this undeniable fact, that Shakspere is especially the poet who has done justice to the purity and innocence of the female character. It is not, we think, to be lightly inferred that his own peculiar experience would have offered him an example throughout his life of the opposite qualities. It would be unfair, however, not to give the opinion which is thus opposed to our own :

"What are we to think of this document? Trepidation and anxiety are written upon its face. The parties are not to be married by a special licence, not even by an ordinary licence; in that case no proclamation of banns, no public asking at all, would have been requisite. Economical scruples are consulted, and yet the regular movement of the marriage' through the bell-ropes' is disturbed. Economy, which retards the marriage, is here evidently in collision with some opposite principle which precipitates it. How is all this to be explained? Much light is afforded by the date when illustrated by another document. The bond bears date on the 28th day of November, in the 25th year of our lady the queen, that is, in 1582. Now, the baptism of Shakspeare's eldest child, Susanna, is registered on the 26th of May in the year following. **** Strange it is, that, whilst all biographers have worked with so much zeal upon the most barren dates or most baseless traditions in the great poet's life, realising in a manner the chimeras of Laputa, and endeavouring' to extract sunbeams from cucumbers,' such a story with regard to such an event, no fiction of village scandal, but involved in legal documents,-a story so significant and so eloquent to the intelligent,should formerly have been dismissed without notice of any kind; and even now, after the discovery of 1836, with nothing beyond a slight conjectural insinuation. For our parts, we should have been the last amongst the biographers to unearth any forgotten scandal. * *** But in this case there seems to have been something more in motion than passion or the ardour of youth. 'I like not,' says Parson Evans (alluding to Falstaff in masquerade), 'I like not when a woman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who had still two years and a half to run of his minority."

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"THIS William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well. Now Ben Jonson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor. He began early to make Essays at Dramatic Poetry, which at that time was very low, and his plays took well." So writes honest Aubrey, in the year 1680, in his Minutes of Lives' addressed to his "worthy friend, Mr. Anthony à Wood, Antiquary of Oxford." Of the value of Aubrey's evidence we may form some opinion from his own statement to his friend :-" "T is a task that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it; which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffeehouses in this great city, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, I

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might add that I come of a longævous race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high.' It must not be forgotten that Aubrey's account of Shakspere, brief and imperfect as it is, is the earliest known to exist. Rowe's Life' was not published till 1707; and although he states that he must own a particular obligation to Betterton, the actor, for the most considerable part of the passages relating to this life -"his veneration for the memory of Shakspeare having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name for which he had so great a veneration”—we have no assistance in fixing the date of Betterton's inquiries. Betterton was born in 1635. From the Restoration, until his retirement from the stage, about 1700, he was the most deservedly popular actor of his time; "such an actor," says The Tatler,' "as ought to be recorded with the same respect as Roscius among the Romans." He died in 1710; and, looking at his busy life, it is probable that he did not make this journey into Warwickshire until after his retirement from the theatre. Had he set about these inquiries earlier, there can be little doubt that the Life' by Rowe would have contained more precise and satisfactory information, if not fewer idle tales. Shakspere's sister was alive in 1646; his eldest daughter, Mrs. Hall, in 1649; his second daughter, Mrs. Quiney, in 1662; and his grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, in 1670. The information which might be collected in Warwickshire, after the death of Shakspere's lineal descendants, would necessarily be mixed up with traditions, having for the most part some foundation, but coloured and distorted by that general love of the marvellous which too often hides the fact itself in the inference from it. Thus, Shakspere's father might have sold his own meat, as the landowners of his time are reproached by Harrison for doing, and yet in no proper sense of the word have been a butcher. Thus, the supposition that the poet had intended to satirize the Lucy family, in an allusion to their arms, might have suggested that there was a grudge between him and the knight; and what so likely a subject of dispute as the killing of venison? the tradition might have been exact as to the dispute; but the laws of another century could alone have suggested that the quarrel would compel the poet to fly the country. Aubrey's story of Shakspere's coming to London is a simple and natural one, without a single marvellous circumstance about it:-" This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London." This, the elder story, appears to us to have much greater verisimilitude than the later:-" He was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some‍time, and shelter himself in London." Aubrey, who has picked up all the gossip" of coffeehouses in this great city," hears no word of Rowe's story, which would certainly have been handed down amongst the traditions of the theatre to Davenant and Shadwell, from whom he does hear something:-"I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say, that he had a most prodigious wit." Neither does he say, nor indeed any one else till two centuries and a quarter after Shakspere is This letter, which accompanies the 'Lives,' is dated London, June 15, 1680.

May 26 Enfarma daughter to Brilliam Shafspent

dead, that," after four years' conjugal discord, he would resolve upon that plan of solitary emigration to the metropolis, which, at the same time that it released him from the humiliation of domestic feuds, succeeded so splendidly for his worldly prosperity, and with a train of circumstances so vast for all future ages."* It is certainly a singular vocation for a writer of genius to bury the legendary scandals of the days of Rowe, for the sake of exhuming a new scandal, which cannot be received at all without the belief that the circumstance must have had a permanent and most evil influence upon the mind of the unhappy man who thus cowardly and ignominiously is held to have severed himself from his duty as a husband and a father. We cannot trace the evil influence, and therefore we reject the scandal. It has not even the slightest support from the weakest tradition. It is founded upon an imperfect comparison of two documents, judging of the habits of that period by those of our own day; supported by quotations from a dramatist of whom it would be difficult to affirm that he ever wrote a line which had strict reference to his own feelings and circumstances, and whose intellect in his dramas went so completely out of itself that it almost realizes the description of the soul in its first and pure nature—that it "hath no idiosyncrasies; that is, hath no proper natural inclinations which are not competent to others of the same kind and condition."+ In the baptismal register of the parish of Stratford for the year 1583 is the entry of the birth of Susanna. This record necessarily implies the residence of the wife of William Shakspere in the parish of Stratford. Did he himself continue to reside in this parish? There is no evidence of his residence. His name appears in no suit in the Bailiff's Court at this period. He fills no municipal office such as his father had filled before him. But his wife continues to reside in the native place of her husband, surrounded by his relations and her own. His father and his mother no doubt watch with anxious solicitude over the fortunes of their first son. He has a brother, Gilbert, seventeen years of age, and a sister of fourteen. His brother Richard is nine years of age; but Edmund is young enough to be the playmate of his little Susanna. In 1585 there is another entry in the parochial register :Encyclopædia Britannica.

February 2. Hamnet & Fudeth forne & daughter to williä Shabsporo

Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages concerning the Præ-existence of Souls. By the Rev. Joseph Glanvil.

William Shakspere has now nearly attained his majority. While he is yet a minor he is the father of three children. The circumstance of his minority may perhaps account for the absence of his name from all records of court-leet, or bailiff's court, or common-hall. He was neither a constable, nor an ale-conner, nor an overseer, nor a jury-man, because he was a minor. We cannot affirm that he did not leave Stratford before his minority expired; but it is to be inferred, that, if he had continued to reside at Stratford after he was legally of age, we should have found traces of his residence in the records of the town. If his residence was out of the borough, as we have supposed his father's to have been at this period, some trace would yet have been found of him, in all likelihood, within the parish. Just before the termination of his minority we have an undeniable record that he was a second time a father within the parish. It is at this period, then, that we would place his removal from Stratford; his flight, according to the old legend; his solitary emigration, according to the new discovery. That his emigration was even solitary we have not a tittle of evidence. The only fact we know with reference to Shakspere's domestic arrangements in London is this: that as early as 1596 he was the occupier of a house in Southwark. "From a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear-garden, in 1596.” * Chalmers suggests that this house might have been occupied by Edmund Shakspere, forgetting that in 1596 he was only sixteen years of age. But his theory is at least a charitable one. "It can admit of neither controversy nor doubt, that Shakspere in very early life settled in a family way where he was bred. Where he thus settled, he probably resolved that his wife and family should remain through life; although he himself made frequent excursions to London, the scene of his profit, and the theatre of his fame." But it is nevertheless remarkable that Shakspere, who was unquestionably a prudent man, should have encumbered himself with a large house in London for his reception upon these " frequent excursions." It has been shown beyond doubt, by a brief note taken out of the Poor's Book of the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, that the house in which " Mr. Shakspere" there resided, as late as the year 1609, was assessed at the very highest rate to a weekly payment for the relief of the poor, at the rate of sixpence, being one of five assessed at this highest rate, while even "the Ladye Buckley paid only fourpence.† His occupation as an actor both at the Blackfriars and the Globe, the one a winter, the other a summer theatre, continued till 1603 or 1604. His interest as a proprietor of both theatres existed in all probability till 1612. In 1597 Shakspere became the purchaser of the largest house in Stratford, and he resided there with his family till the time of his death in 1616. The circumstance, therefore, of his being the occupier of a large house in London, as well as at Stratford, would indicate that he was not its

* Malone, Inquiry, &c., p. 215.

The document is amongst Henslowe's papers in Dulwich College. See Mr. Collier's' Memoirs of Alleyn,' p. 91.

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