PREFACE.

The object of this volume is to form a manual for the use chiefly of those who, not being possessed of a voluminous annotated edition, are fain to content themselves with the simple text. But even those who have a perfect Shakespeare library cannot well dispense with it; for my original corrections, which are very numerous, are nowhere else to be found.

It was originally intended to form the complement to my Edition of the Plays, and as such I had announced its immediate appearance. Why it did not appear has been explained in Notes and Queries (3 S. vii. 175), and the statement there made was incontrovertible; for it was the simple truth. The delay, however, has been no injury, but rather a benefit to it. Its relation to the Edition now is that, while it is perfectly independent and suited to any edition, the Edition without it is somewhat like what a Euclid would be without diagrams or demonstrations, as the reader will meet with numerous alterations of the text, and be quite ignorant of how or why they were made. Moreover the errors and oversights which escaped me in it will be found here all corrected.

To my own Edition I regard it, then, as indispensable; and if I were to mention any other to which it is peculiarly adapted, I should say that which is named the Globe; for it contains a copious and excellent Glossary—that in mine, which is not by me, is scanty—which, with the Notes and Index of this volume, will leave little unexplained.

It is certainly very disheartening to those who devote their time and labour to the elucidation of our Classic authors to find how small the number is of those readersiv who are at all anxious to understand them perfectly. The great majority, in fact, are quite satisfied if they can get at the general meaning of a difficult or obscure passage, and so glide over it. Still I am not without hope that among the tens of thousands who buy, and I presume read, these Plays, there may be found a few, a very few, hundreds who may wish to understand what they read, and will therefore possess themselves of this volume. Profit is not dreamed of, but it is hoped that loss may not be incurred.

When I was preparing my Edition of Milton's Poems, I fell into the habit of correcting the text of our old writers. Hence I have corrected copies of Chaucer, Spenser, the dramatists and others, which mayhap may prove useful to future editors. The corrections of Shakespeare proved so numerous as to form the present volume; but the idea of editing his works never entered my mind till it was proposed to me, when I fear my vanity became interested. I had been confessedly the best editor of Milton, I might perchance stand in the same relation to Shakespeare. My wish had been to be to the Faerie Queen what I had been to Paradise Lost; and I may yet, perhaps, communicate some remarks on it in the pages of Notes and Queries.

It was on the first edition of Collier's Shakespeare that I made my corrections, and of previous emendations, if not noticed there, I knew nothing. I afterwards read the Variorum and later editions; hence I shall often be found saying that I had been anticipated. This was always a source of pleasure to me, as a proof of the correctness of my emendation. Porson, we are told, actually shed tears of joy when on meeting with a copy of Aristophanes with MS. notes by Bentley, he found his corrections had so frequently been anticipated. His delight was still greater when on the discovery of the Ravenna MS. he saw so many of his readings confirmed.

I must confess that experience has given me a good deal of confidence in my own critical powers, and I amv apt to fancy that when I cannot conquer a difficulty it is nearly insuperable. Hence I have been little anxious about learning what has been written by late critics.

At the risk, or rather I should say with the certainty, of being charged with egotism, I will here state the following fact; for why should truth be concealed? As I was one day, many years ago, discussing some points in my 'Tales and Popular Fictions' with the late Mr. Douce, he suddenly exclaimed "Oh, that you had but my knowledge! What discoveries you would make!" I believe he was right, and that, under more favourable circumstances, I should have done much; but it was not to be.

I have endeavoured to grapple with every difficulty, to leave, if possible, no knot unloosed. Some of my corrections must (many, I think, probably will) be admitted into the text. At the same time, I freely confess that some of these emendations are merely desperate remedies for desperate diseases; and it may be that future critics may have more success than I have had. I have, I believe, advanced the criticism of Shakespeare some stages; and if succeeding critics follow the path I have traced, the Plays will perhaps be, ere long, brought as near their original state as is possible.

I regard the Introduction to the Notes as the most valuable part of this volume, as I have there endeavoured to reduce emendatory criticism to rule and law. I would earnestly recommend the reader to make himself master of it before using the Notes. It would also perhaps be well to do the same with the Index. The chief object of the Life, I may add, is to remove suspicion respecting the poet's private character.

The portions of the text given in the Notes are always that of the original editions, unless when it is otherwise expressed. I have made them as brief as possible, as this book will, of course, only be read in conjunction with the Plays themselves. I have only occasionally given the metrical arrangement; those who would enjoy the pleasure of reading the Plays invi perfect metric order must read them in my Edition. Finally, in very obvious corrections I have not deemed it necessary to state that I had been anticipated.

This is the last of my works; my literary life here terminates. I am fast approaching the utmost limit set to human life by the Psalmist, my powers are necessarily on the decline, and prudence counsels obedience to the precept:

T. K.

Belvedere, Kent,

December 20, 1866.

*** I have also contributed to English literature:—

The Poems of John Milton with Notes. Two vols. 8vo, 21s.

An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton, with an Introduction to Paradise Lost. 8vo, 10s. 6d.

Errata.

Page 122, "If thou engrossest," etc. This note should come after the two next.

Page 302, line 2, for pulling read putting.

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE.

A FAMILY of the name of Shakespeare—pronounced, it would seem, Shǎkspěr—was numerous in Warwickshire during the middle ages. About the middle of the sixteenth century John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, a farmer residing at Snitterfield in that county, was settled at Stratford-on-Avon, and was—though it appears he could neither read nor write—a leading member of the Corporation. Various accounts are given of his trade and occupation. We have proof that in 1556 he was a glover; he was afterwards a farmer or yeoman; Aubrey says he was a butcher; and according to Rowe, he was "a considerable dealer in wool." He would seem in fact to have been one who was ready to turn to any honest occupation by which money might be made.

In 1557 John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote, a man of good landed property, and belonging to a family of no mean note in the county of Warwick. By her he had either eight or ten children, of whom we need only notice William, the third, who was baptized April 26th, 1564; but the exact date of his birth is unknown. As his father was a member of the Corporation, it is highly probable that, as Rowe asserts, he was sent to the Free School of the town. How long he continued at it, and what he learned there, are matters on which we have no2 certain information. He had probably an ordinary English education, and he certainly, as his writings show, had learned some Latin; but he does not seem to have got beyond the elementary books, and of Greek, if it was taught in the school, he learned nothing whatever. We are told by one authority that he acted as an assistant in the school; by another that his father took him away early to assist in his own business of wool-stapling or, as the former, namely Aubrey, says, of

butchering, who adds that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech,"—of course a mere figment. Malone conjectures—and in my opinion not without a show of probability—from the frequent occurrence of law-terms in his dramas, and his correct appreciation of their meaning, that he may have been for some time in the office of an attorney in Stratford. This, however, is all uncertainty; but at all events, judging from the turn of his mind, I should be inclined to say that, beside his accurate observation of men and manners, he read all the books he could obtain in his native town.

In the registry of the diocese of Worcester is preserved a document bearing date November 28, 1582, securing the Bishop against injury in the case of his licensing certain persons to be married with once asking of the banns. These persons are William Shakespeare, then in his nineteenth year, and Anne Hathaway, then apparently aged twenty-six years; for she died in 1623 at the age of sixty-seven years: she was therefore about eight years her husband's senior. When their marriage was celebrated we are unable to learn; but the baptism of Susanna, their first child, took place on the 26th of May, 1583, just six months after the date of the document quoted above. The natural inference is obvious. Shakespeare, like Burns, knew his wife before the law had made her his; and, like him, he acted honourably towards her.

This, perhaps the only imprudent act of Shakespeare's life, has been variously judged. Nothing, we know, is3 more common than for young men to fall in love with women older than themselves; and among the class of society to which both parties belonged, instances were, and are, not uncommon of the rules of prudence being transgressed in moments of weakness, while the moral principle remains untainted. We know that Burns's "Bonnie Jean" proved a most exemplary wife; and one of the most truly virtuous and unaffectedly modest women I ever knew was one who had acted thus imprudently. The bride of the future poet was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a husbandman, or substantial yeoman, of Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford, an intimate friend, it would appear, of John Shakespeare's; and hence we may presume that an intimacy prevailed also between the two families, and the not unlikely result was what has been stated.

We now have Shakespeare, at the commencement of his twentieth year, a married man, and the father of a child. On the 2nd of February, 1584-85, before he had completed his twenty-first year, were baptized Hamnet and Judith, twins. We hear of no more children of William and Anne Shakespeare; and soon after—most probably in 1586—Shakespeare left Stratford, and set out to seek his fortune in the metropolis. According to Rowe, he fled to escape from the persecution of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote-park, near Stratford, from whose park he and some other young men had stolen deer—a not unusual, and not very discreditable practice in those days. The knight, we are told, was indignant and vindictive, and the transgressor took his revenge by writing and affixing to the gate of Charlecote-park a satirical ballad, of which the first stanza has been preserved, and which, if genuine, is mere doggrel and utterly unworthy of Shakespeare. He may, however, have so written it on purpose. This is said to have added oil to the fire of the knight's rage, and to escape

from it the author fled to London. His biographers in general are of opinion that his resentment against his persecutor did not die out, and that after his death and4 the lapse of many years he ridiculed him in the character of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this was little in the character of "gentle" Shakespeare; and the whole theory is refuted by the fact that the allusion to "the dozen white luces" in the Justice's coat-armour, on which it is founded, does not occur in the original form of that play. It may have been made afterwards by way of joke, and without any malignity.

There is certainly no inherent improbability in this narrative; and it may have had its effect in determining Shakespeare to quit Stratford. But that it should have been the sole cause of his doing so is what I am disposed to question. We must recollect that Shakespeare was a man endowed with genius of the very highest order, and that he must have aspired to a wider field for its exercise than his native town could afford, that he had a family, and that his circumstances were very slender, while those of his father, as we have sufficient evidence, had been greatly reduced. Nor does it appear that he—who, as has been already observed, except in the case of his marriage, was always prudent—set out for London without having a definite object in view.

Now various companies of players, as we learn, were in the habit of visiting Stratford, like other country towns, and performing there in the Guildhall. It can be hardly doubted that Shakespeare, in whom dramatic genius was inborn, must have been excited by these performances, however low the merit of the pieces—perhaps even have felt that he was capable of producing something superior to them of the same kind. He probably then made the acquaintance of the players, one of whom, Burbage, was, it is supposed, a native of the town, and some others, natives of the county, and proposed embracing their profession. He was young, handsome, of animated and even brilliant conversation. There can be little doubt, then, that he met with encouragement, and was readily received among them. This was, it is most likely, in the year 1586, when he was two-and-twenty. Rowe says "he was received5 into the company at first in a very mean rank;" and in 1693 the parish-clerk of Stratford, a man eighty years of age, told a person named Dowdall, that he "was received

into the playhouse as a serviture." Of course, like almost every other actor, he began at the bottom, having as it were to serve his apprenticeship. This, then, seems to be all true enough; not so another tradition, related by Johnson as coming from Pope and Rowe, namely, that his first occupation in London was holding gentlemen's horses at the door of the playhouse, in which business he succeeded so well that he hired boys to act under him. How little like Shakespeare this is need hardly be said.

A question which cannot be answered very satisfactorily is, What did Shakespeare at this time do with his wife and children? The probability would seem to be, that he left them at Stratford, and, as is most likely, at his father's, till he should see what success he was likely to meet with in London.

It would seem that for the first few years he was merely an actor; and if the Ellesmere Papers, published by Mr. Collier, be genuine, he had in 1589 become a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre. Before this date he may have begun to try his hand at making additions and alterations in the plays of others. Of these we seem to have examples in the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.; and there is a manifest allusion to this practice of his in the following passage of Green's Groat's Worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, published after his death in 1592. Green is addressing his fellow dramatists Marlow, Peele, and others; and he says, "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygre's heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Here the allusion to Shakespeare's name is quite plain, and the line in italics is a parody on one in one of the plays6

which he appears to have thus treated. As this allusion seems to have caused just offence, Chettle, who had given Green's work to the world, took occasion shortly after in a work of his own, his Kind-hart's Dream, to make an apology, in which he says of Shakespeare, "Myself have seen his demeanour, no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art." We thus see that Shakespeare was regarded as an excellent player (for quality then answered to profession at the present time), as an elegant writer (facetious being employed in its classic sense), and as an upright and honourable man, and further, perhaps, as moving in what we should term good society.

Moreover this work of Chettle's, published at the end of 1592 or beginning of 1593, furnishes what I regard as a proof that Shakespeare had not at that time brought an original piece on the stage; for speaking of Green he says, "He was of singular pleasance, the very supporter, and—to no man's disgrace be this intended—the only comedian of a vulgar writer in this country;" of which last words the plain meaning is, that Green had as yet been the only tolerable writer of English comedy. Now we have sufficient means for judging of Green's comic powers; and surely no man in his senses would have ventured to write these words, had he been ever so prejudiced, if Shakespeare had already produced the Comedy of Errors or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We may therefore venture to assert that neither of these plays was acted earlier than 1593.

We may here, by the way, notice some curious coincidences between Shakespeare and the great comic poet of France, Molière. There is some reason to suppose that both of them were originally connected with the law; they both went on the stage at, we may say, the age of twenty, or a little later. Shakespeare was in his thirtieth year when he produced his first original play,7 Molière in his thirty-second when he wrote L'Etourdi; but he had previously given some short pieces. Finally, the former died at the close, the latter at the commencement of his fifty-second year.

The allusion to the poet's literary character in Kindhart's Dream was in all probability to his Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593, but which may, as was the custom in those days, have previously circulated in manuscript among his "private friends;" or it may have been to his Sonnets, which, as we shall presently see, thus circulated at this time. It is impossible to say when this poem was written; but there certainly is no necessity for supposing, with Mr. Collier, that it was composed at Stratford. Shakespeare's mind easily retained the requisite rural imagery; and with his power of rapid composition and command of language, a very few weeks would suffice at any time for its production. This poem, which he terms his "unpolished lines," and "the first heir of my invention," was dedicated to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton. It met with general applause, and was followed, in 1594, by Lucrece, also dedicated to the same accomplished nobleman. The dedication, commencing with "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end," would seem to intimate some