The talk of surviving kinsmen, fellow-craftsmen, admiring acquaintances, and sympathetic friends is the treasure-house which best preserves the personality of the dead hero for those who come soon after him. When biography is unpractised, no other treasure-house is available.
The report of such converse moves quickly from mouth to mouth. In its progress the narration naturally grows fainter, and, when no biographer lies in wait for it, ultimately perishes altogether. But oral tradition respecting a great man whose work has fascinated the imagination of his countrymen comes into circulation early, persists long, even in the absence of biography, and safeguards substantial elements of truth through many generations. Although no biographer put in an appearance, it is seldom that some fragment of oral tradition respecting a departed hero is not committed to paper by one or other amateur gossip who comes within earshot of it early in its career. The casual unsifted record of floating anecdote is not always above suspicion. As a rule it is embodied in familiar correspondence, or in diaries, or in commonplace books, where clear and definite language is rarely met with; but, however disappointingly imperfect and trivial, however disjointed, however deficient in literary form the registered jottings of oral tradition may be, it is in them, if they exist at all with any t.i.tle to credit, that future ages best realise the fact that the great man was in plain truth a living ent.i.ty, and no mere shadow of a name.
III
When Shakespeare died, on the 23rd of April, 1616, many men and women were alive who had come into personal a.s.sociation with him, and there were many more who had heard of him from those who had spoken with him. Apart from his numerous kinsfolk and neighbours at Stratford-on-Avon, there was in London a large society of fellow-authors and fellow-actors with whom he lived in close communion. Very little correspondence or other intimate memorials, whether of Shakespeare"s professional friends or of his kinsfolk or country neighbours, survive. Nevertheless some sc.r.a.ps of the talk about Shakespeare that circulated among his acquaintances or was handed on by them to the next generation has been tracked to written paper of the seventeenth century and to printed books. A portion of these scattered memorabilia of the earliest known oral traditions respecting Shakespeare has come to light very recently; other portions have been long accessible. As a connected whole they have never been narrowly scrutinised, and I believe it may serve a useful purpose to consider with some minuteness how the ma.s.s of them came into being, and what is the sum of information they conserve.
The more closely Shakespeare"s career is studied the plainer it becomes that his experiences and fortunes were identical with those of all who followed in his day his profession of dramatist, and that his conscious aims and ambitions and practices were those of every contemporary man of letters. The difference between the results of his endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magical and involuntary working of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has exercised "as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom it pleases." Speculation or debate as to why genius bestowed its fullest inspiration on Shakespeare is no less futile than speculation or debate as to why he was born into the world with a head on his shoulders instead of a block of stone. It is enough for wise men to know the obvious fact that genius endowed Shakespeare with its richest gifts, and a very small acquaintance with the literary history of the world and with the manner in which genius habitually plays its part there, will show the folly of cherishing astonishment that Shakespeare, rather than one more n.o.bly born or more academically trained, should have been chosen for the glorious dignity. Nowhere is this lesson more convincingly taught than by a systematic survey of the oral tradition. Shakespeare figures there as a supremely favoured heir of genius, whose humility of birth and education merely serves to intensify the respect due to his achievement.
In London, where Shakespeare"s work was mainly done and his fortune and reputation achieved, he lived with none in more intimate social relations than with the leading members of his own prosperous company of actors, which, under the patronage of the king, produced his greatest plays. Like himself, most of his colleagues were men of substance, sharers with him in the two most fashionable theatres of the metropolis, occupiers of residences in both town and country, owners of houses and lands, and bearers of coat-armour of that questionable validity which commonly attaches to the heraldry of the _nouveaux riches_. Two of these affluent a.s.sociates predeceased Shakespeare; and one of them, Augustine Phillips, attested his friendship in a small legacy. Three of Shakespeare"s fellow-actors were affectionately remembered by him in his will, and a fourth, one of the youngest members of the company, proved his regard for Shakespeare"s memory by taking, a generation after the dramatist"s death, Charles Hart, Shakespeare"s grand-nephew, into his employ as a "boy" or apprentice. Grand-nephew Charles went forth on a prosperous career, in which at its height he was seriously likened to his grand-uncle"s most distinguished actor-ally, Richard Burbage. Above all is it to be borne in mind that to the disinterested admiration for his genius of two fellow-members of Shakespeare"s company we owe the preservation and publication of the greater part of his literary work.
The personal fascination of "so worthy a friend and fellow as was our Shakespeare" bred in all his fellow-workers an affectionate pride in their intimacy.
Such men were the parents of the greater part of the surviving oral tradition of Shakespeare, and no better parentage could be wished for.
To the first accessible traditions of proved oral currency after Shakespeare"s death, the two fellow-actors who called the great First Folio into existence pledged their credit in writing only seven years after his death. They printed in the preliminary pages of that volume these three statements of common fame, viz., that to Shakespeare and his plays in his lifetime was invariably extended the fullest favour of the court and its leading officers; that death deprived him of the opportunity he had long contemplated of preparing his literary work for the press; and that he wrote with so rapidly flowing a pen that his ma.n.u.script was never defaced by alteration or erasure.
Shakespeare"s extraordinary rapidity of composition was an especially frequent topic of contemporary debate. Ben Jonson, the most intimate personal friend of Shakespeare outside the circle of working actors, wrote how "the players" would "often mention" to him the poet"s fluency, and how he was in the habit of arguing that Shakespeare"s work would have been the better had he devoted more time to its correction. The players, Ben Jonson adds, were wont to grumble that such a remark was "malevolent," and he delighted in seeking to vindicate it to them on what seemed to him to be just critical grounds.
The copious deliverances of Jonson in the tavern-parliaments of the London wits, which were in almost continuous session during the first four decades of the seventeenth century, set flowing much other oral tradition of Shakespeare, whom Jonson said he loved and whose memory he honoured "on this side idolatry as much as any." One of Jonson"s remarks which seems to have lived longest on the lips of contemporaries was that Shakespeare "was indeed honest and [like his own Oth.e.l.lo] of an open and free nature,[11] had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."
[Footnote 11: Iago says of Oth.e.l.lo, in _Oth.e.l.lo_ I., iii. 405: "The Moor is _of a free and open nature_."]
To the same category of oral tradition belongs the further piece which Fuller enshrined in his slender biography with regard to Shakespeare"s alert skirmishes with Ben Jonson in dialectical battle. Jonson"s dialectical skill was for a long period undisputed, and for gossip to credit Shakespeare with victory in such conflict was to pay his memory even more enviable honour than Jonson paid it in his own _obiter dicta_.
There is yet an additional sc.r.a.p of oral tradition which, reduced to writing about the time that Fuller was at work, confirms Shakespeare"s reputation for quickness of wit in everyday life, especially in intercourse with the critical giant Jonson. Dr Donne, the Jacobean poet and dean of St Paul"s, told, apparently on Jonson"s authority, the story that Shakespeare, having consented to act as G.o.dfather to one of Jonson"s sons, solemnly promised to give the child a dozen good "_Latin_ spoons" for the father to "translate." _Latin_ was a play upon the word "latten," which was the name of a metal resembling bra.s.s. The simple quip was a good-humoured hit at Jonson"s pride in his cla.s.sical learning. Dr Donne related the anecdote to Sir Nicholas L"Estrange, a country gentleman of literary tastes, who had no interest in Shakespeare except from the literary point of view. He entered it in his commonplace book within thirty years of Shakespeare"s death.
IV
Of the twenty-five actors who are enumerated in a preliminary page of the great First Folio, as filling in Shakespeare"s lifetime chief roles in his plays, few survived him long. All of them came in personal contact with him; several of them constantly appeared with him on the stage from early days.
The two who were longest lived, John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, came at length to bear a great weight of years. They were both Shakespeare"s juniors, Lowin by twelve years, and Taylor by twenty; but both established their reputation before middle age. Lowin at twenty-seven took part with Shakespeare in the first representation of Ben Jonson"s _Seja.n.u.s_ in 1603. He was an early, if not the first, interpreter of the character of Falstaff. Taylor as understudy to the great actor Burbage, a very close ally of Shakespeare, seems to have achieved some success in the part of Hamlet, and to have been applauded in the role of Iago, while the dramatist yet lived. When the dramatist died, Lowin was forty, and Taylor over thirty.
Subsequently, as their senior colleagues one by one pa.s.sed from the world, these two actors a.s.sumed first rank in their company, and before the ruin in which the Civil War involved all theatrical enterprise, they were acknowledged to stand at the head of their profession.[12] Taylor lived through the Commonwealth, and Lowin far into the reign of Charles the Second, ultimately reaching his ninety-third year. Their last days were pa.s.sed in indigence, and Lowin when an octogenarian was reduced to keeping the inn of the "Three Pigeons," at Brentford.
[Footnote 12: Like almost all their colleagues, they had much literary taste. When public events compulsorily retired them from the stage, they, with the aid of the dramatist Shirley and eight other actors, two of whom were members with them of Shakespeare"s old company, did an important service to English literature. In 1647 they collected for first publication in folio Beaumont and Fletcher"s plays; only one, _The Wild Goose Chase_, was omitted, and that piece Taylor and Lowin brought out by their unaided efforts five years later.]
Both these men kept alive from personal knowledge some oral Shakespearean tradition during the fifty years and more that followed his death. Little of their gossip is extant. But some of it was put on record, before the end of the century, by John Downes, the old prompter and librarian of a chief London theatre. According to Downes"s testimony, Taylor repeated instructions which he had received from Shakespeare"s own lips for the playing of the part of Hamlet, while Lowin narrated how Shakespeare taught him the theatrical interpretation of the character of Henry the Eighth, in that play of the name which came from the joint pens of Shakespeare and Fletcher.
Both Taylor"s and Lowin"s reminiscences were pa.s.sed on to Thomas Betterton, the greatest actor of the Restoration, and the most influential figure in the theatrical life of his day. Through him they were permanently incorporated in the verbal stage-lore of the country.
No doubt is possible of the validity of this piece of oral tradition, which reveals Shakespeare in the act of personally supervising the production of his own plays, and springs from the mouths of those who personally benefited by the dramatist"s activity.
Taylor and Lowin were probably the last actors to speak of Shakespeare from personal knowledge. But hardly less deserving of attention are sc.r.a.ps of gossip about Shakespeare which survive in writing on the authority of some of Taylor"s and Lowin"s actor-contemporaries. These men were never themselves in personal relations with Shakespeare, but knew many formerly in direct relation with him. Probably the seventeenth century actor with the most richly stored memory of the oral Shakespearean tradition was William Beeston, to whose house in Hog Lane, Sh.o.r.editch, the curious often resorted in Charles the Second"s time to listen to his reminiscences of Shakespeare and of the poets of Shakespeare"s epoch.
Beeston died after a busy theatrical life, at eighty or upwards, in 1682. He belonged to a family of distinguished actors or actor-managers. His father, brothers, and son were all, like himself, prominent in the profession, and some of them were almost as long-lived as himself. His own career combined with that of his father covered more than a century, and both sedulously and with pride cultivated intimacy with contemporary dramatic authors.
It was probably William Beeston"s grandfather, also William Beeston, to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593, with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash laughed at his patron"s struggles with syntax in his efforts to write poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his red nose. But, in spite of Nash"s characteristic frankness, he greeted the first William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his entertainment of threadbare scholars. Christopher Beeston, this man"s son, the father of the Shakespearean gossip, had in abundance the hereditary taste for letters. He was at one time Shakespeare"s a.s.sociate on the stage. Both took part together in the first representation of Ben Jonson"s _Every Man in His Humour_, in 1598. His name was again linked with Shakespeare"s in the will of their fellow-actor, Augustine Phillips, who left each of them a legacy as a token of friendship at his death in 1605. Christopher Beeston left Shakespeare"s company of actors for another theatre early in his career, and his closest friend among the actor-authors of his day in later life was not Shakespeare himself but Thomas Heywood, the popular dramatist and pamphleteer, who lived on to 1650. This was a friendship which kept Beeston"s respect for Shakespeare at a fitting pitch.
Heywood, who wrote the affectionate lines:
Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose inchanting Quill Commanded Mirth or Pa.s.sion, was but _Will_,
enjoys the distinction of having published in Shakespeare"s lifetime the only expression of resentment that is known to have come from the dramatist"s proverbially "gentle lips." Shakespeare (Heywood wrote) "was much offended" with an unprincipled publisher who "presumed to make so bold with his name" as to put it to a book of which he was not the author. And Beeston had direct concern with the volume called _An Apology for Actors_, to which Heywood appended his report of these words of Shakespeare. To the book the actor, Beeston, contributed preliminary verses addressed to the author, his "good friend and fellow, Thomas Heywood." There Beeston briefly vindicated the recreation which the playhouse offered the public. Much else in Christopher Beeston"s professional career is known, but it is sufficient to mention here that he died in 1637, while he was filling the post that he had long held, of manager to the King and Queen"s Company of Players at the c.o.c.kpit Theatre in Drury Lane. It was the chief playhouse of the time, and his wife was lessee of it.
Christopher"s son, William Beeston the second, was his father"s coadjutor at Drury Lane, and succeeded him in his high managerial office there. The son encountered difficulties with the Government through an alleged insult to the King in one of the pieces that he produced, and he had to retire from the c.o.c.kpit to a smaller theatre in Salisbury Court. Until his death he retained the respect of the play-going and the literature-loving public, and his son George, whom he brought up to the stage, carried on the family repute to a later generation.
William Beeston had no liking for dissolute society, and the open vice of Charles the Second"s Court pained him. He lived in old age much in seclusion, but by a congenial circle he was always warmly welcomed for the freshness and enthusiasm of his talk about the poets who flourished in his youth. "Divers times (in my hearing)," one of his auditors, Francis Kirkman, an ardent collector, reader, and publisher of old plays, wrote to him in 1652--"Divers times (in my hearing), to the admiration of the whole company you have most judiciously discoursed of Poesie." In the judgment of Kirkman, his friend, the old actor, was "the happiest interpreter and judg of our English stage-Playes this Nation ever produced; which the Poets and Actors these times cannot (without ingrat.i.tude) deny; for I have heard the chief, and most ingenious of them, acknowledg their Fames and Profits essentially sprung from your instructions, judgment, and fancy." Few who heard Beeston talk failed, Kirkman continues, to subscribe "to his opinion that no Nation could glory in such Playes" as those that came from the pens of the great Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. "Glorious John Dryden" shared in the general enthusiasm for the veteran Beeston, and bestowed on him the t.i.tle of "the chronicle of the stage"; while John Aubrey, the honest antiquary and gossip, who had in his disorderly brain the makings of a Boswell, sought Beeston"s personal acquaintance about 1660, in order to "take from him the lives of the old English Poets."
It is Aubrey who has recorded most of such spa.r.s.e fragments of Beeston"s talk as survive--how Edmund "Spenser was a little man, wore short hair, little bands, and short cuffs," and how Sir John Suckling came to invent the game of cribbage. Naturally, of Shakespeare Beeston has much to relate. In the shrewd old gossip"s language, he "did act exceedingly well," far better than Jonson; "he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country;" "he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit;" he and Ben Jonson gathered "humours of men daily wherever they came." The ample testimony to the excellent influence which Beeston exercised over "the poets and actors of these times" leaves little doubt that Sir William D"Avenant, Beeston"s successor as manager at Drury Lane, and Thomas Shadwell, the fashionable writer of comedies, largely echoed their old mentor"s words when, in conversation with Aubrey, they credited Shakespeare with "a most prodigious wit," and declared that they "did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers."[13]
[Footnote 13: Aubrey"s _Lives_, being reports of his miscellaneous gossip, were first fully printed from his ma.n.u.scripts in the Bodleian Library by the Clarendon Press in 1898. They were most carefully edited by the Rev. Andrew Clark.]
John Lacy, another actor of Beeston"s generation, who made an immense reputation on the stage and was also a successful writer of farces, was one of Beeston"s closest friends, and, having been personally acquainted with Ben Jonson, could lend to many of Beeston"s stories useful corroborative testimony. With Lacy, too, the gossip Aubrey conversed of Shakespeare"s career.
At the same time, the popularity of Shakespeare"s grand-nephew, Charles Hart, who was called the Burbage of his day, whetted among actors the appet.i.te for Shakespearean tradition, especially of the theatrical kind. Hart had no direct acquaintance with his great kinsman, who died fully ten years before he was born, while his father, who was sixteen at Shakespeare"s death, died in his son"s boyhood. But Hart"s grandmother, the poet"s sister, lived till he was twenty-one, and Richard Robinson, the fellow-member of Shakespeare"s company who first taught Hart to act, survived his pupil"s adolescence. That Hart did what he could to satisfy the curiosity of his companions there is a precise oral tradition to confirm. According to the story, first put on record in the eighteenth century by the painstaking antiquary, William Oldys, it was through Hart that some actors made, near the date of the Restoration, the exciting discovery that Gilbert, one of Shakespeare"s brothers, who was the dramatist"s junior by only two years, was still living at a patriarchal age. Oldys describes the concern with which Hart"s professional acquaintances questioned the old man about his brother, and their disappointment when his failing memory only enabled him to recall William"s performance of the part of Adam in his comedy of _As You Like It_.
It should be added that Oldys obtained his information of the episode, which deserves more attention than it has received, from an actor of a comparatively recent generation, John Bowman, who died over eighty in 1739, after spending "more than half an age on the London theatres."
V
Valuable as these actors" testimonies are, it is in another rank of the profession that we find the most important link in the chain of witnesses alike to the persistence and authenticity of the oral tradition of Shakespeare which was current in the middle of the seventeenth century. Sir William D"Avenant, the chief playwright and promoter of theatrical enterprise of his day, enjoyed among persons of influence and quality infinite credit and confidence. As a boy he and his brothers had come into personal relations with the dramatist under their father"s roof, and the experience remained the proudest boast of their lives. D"Avenant was little more than ten when Shakespeare died, and his direct intercourse with him was consequently slender; but D"Avenant was a child of the Muses, and his slight acquaintance with the living Shakespeare spurred him to treasure all that he could learn of his hero from any who had enjoyed fuller opportunities of intimacy.
To learn the manner in which the child D"Avenant and his brothers came to know Shakespeare is to approach the dramatist through oral tradition at very close quarters. D"Avenant"s father, a melancholy person who was never known to laugh, long kept at Oxford the Crown Inn in Carfax.
Gossip which was current in Oxford throughout the seventeenth century, and was put on record before the end of it by more than one scholar of the university, establishes the fact that Shakespeare on his annual journeys between London and Stratford-on-Avon was in the habit of staying at the elder D"Avenant"s Oxford hostelry. The report ran that "he was exceedingly respected" in the house, and was freely admitted to the inn-keeper"s domestic circle. The inn-keeper"s wife was credited with a mercurial disposition which contrasted strangely with her husband"s sardonic temperament; it was often said in Oxford that Shakespeare not merely found his chief attraction at the Crown Inn in the wife"s witty conversation, but formed a closer intimacy with her than moralists would approve. Oral tradition speaks in clearer tones of his delight in the children of the family--four boys and three girls. We have at command statements on that subject from the lips of two of the sons. The eldest son, Robert, who was afterwards a parson in Wiltshire, and was on familiar terms with many men of culture, often recalled with pride for their benefit that "Mr William Shakespeare" had given him as a child "a hundred kisses" in his father"s tavern-parlour.
The third son, William, was more expansive in his reminiscences. It was generally understood at Oxford in the early years of the seventeenth century that he was the poet"s G.o.dson, as his Christian name would allow, but some gossips had it that the poet"s paternity was of a less spiritual character. According to a genuine anecdote of contemporary origin, when the boy, William D"Avenant, in Shakespeare"s lifetime, informed a doctor of the university that he was on his way to ask a blessing of his G.o.dfather who had just arrived in the town, the child was warned by his interlocutor against taking the name of G.o.d in vain. It is proof of the estimation in which D"Avenant held Shakespeare that when he came to man"s estate he was "content enough to have" the insinuation "thought to be true." He would talk freely with his friends over a gla.s.s of wine of Shakespeare"s visits to his father"s house, and would say "that it seemed to him that he wrote with Shakespeare"s very spirit." Of his reverence for Shakespeare he gave less questionable proof in a youthful elegy in which he represented the flowers and trees on the banks of the Avon mourning for Shakespeare"s death and the river weeping itself away. He was credited, too, with having adopted the new spelling of his name D"_Aven_ant (for Davenant), so as to read into it a reference to the river Avon.
In maturer age D"Avenant sought out the old actors Taylor and Lowin, and mastered their information respecting Shakespeare, their early colleague on the stage. With a curious perversity he mainly devoted his undoubted genius in his later years to rewriting in accordance with the debased taste of Charles the Second"s reign the chief works of his idol; but until D"Avenant"s death in 1668 the unique character of Shakespeare"s greatness had no stouter champion than he, and in the circle of men of wit and fashion, of which he was the centre, none kept the cult alive with greater enthusiasm. His early friend Sir John Suckling, the Cavalier poet, who was only seven years old when Shakespeare died, he infected so thoroughly with his own affectionate admiration that Suckling wrote of the dramatist in familiar letters as "my friend Mr William Shakespeare," and had his portrait painted by Vandyck with an open volume of Shakespeare"s works in his hand. Even more important is Dryden"s testimony that he was himself "first taught" by D"Avenant "to admire" Shakespeare.
One of the most precise and valuable pieces of oral tradition which directly owed currency to D"Avenant was the detailed story of the generous gift of 1000, which Shakespeare"s patron, the Earl of Southampton, made the poet, "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." Rowe, Shakespeare"s first biographer, recorded this particular on the specific authority of D"Avenant, who, he pointed out, "was probably very well acquainted with the dramatist"s affairs." At the same time it was often repeated that D"Avenant was owner of a complimentary letter which James the First had written to Shakespeare with his own hand. A literary politician, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckinghamshire, who survived D"Avenant nearly half a century, said that he had examined the epistle while it was in D"Avenant"s keeping.
The publisher Lintot first printed the Duke"s statement in the preface to a new edition of Shakespeare"s Poems in 1709.
D"Avenant"s devotion did much for Shakespeare"s memory; but it stimulated others to do even more for the after-generations who wished to know the whole truth about Shakespeare"s life. The great actor of the Restoration, Thomas Betterton, was D"Avenant"s close a.s.sociate in his last years. D"Avenant coached him in the parts both of Hamlet and of Henry the Eighth, in the light of the instruction which he had derived through the medium of Taylor and Lowin from Shakespeare"s own lips. But more to the immediate purpose is it to note that D"Avenant"s ardour as a seeker after knowledge of Shakespeare fired Betterton into making a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to glean oral traditions of the dramatist"s life there. Many other of Shakespeare"s admirers had previously made Stratford Church, where stood his tomb, a place of pilgrimage, and Aubrey had acknowledged in hap-hazard fashion the value of Stratford gossip. But it was Betterton"s visit that laid the train for the systematic union of the oral traditions of London and Stratford respectively.
It was not until the London and Warwickshire streams of tradition mingled in equal strength that a regular biography of Shakespeare was possible. Betterton was the efficient cause of this conjunction. All that Stratford-on-Avon revealed to him he put at the disposal of Nicholas Rowe, who was the first to attempt a formal memoir. Of Betterton"s a.s.sistance Rowe made generous acknowledgment in these terms:--
I must own a particular Obligation to him [_i.e._, Betterton] for the most considerable part of the Pa.s.sages relating to his [_i.e._, Shakespeare"s] Life, which I have here transmitted to the Publick; his veneration for the Memory of Shakespear having engag"d 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 Value.
VI
The contemporary epitaph on Shakespeare"s tomb in Stratford-on-Avon Church, which acclaimed Shakespeare a writer of supreme genius, gave the inhabitants of the little town no opportunity of ignoring at any period the fact that the greatest poet of his era had been their fellow-townsman. Stratford was indeed openly identified with Shakespeare"s career from the earliest possible day, and Sir William Dugdale, the first topographer of Warwickshire, writing about 1650, noted that the place was memorable for having given "birth and sepulture to our late famous poet Will Shakespeare." But the obscure little town produced in the years that followed Shakespeare"s death none who left behind records of their experience, and such fragments of oral tradition of Shakespeare at Stratford as are extant survive accidentally, with one notable exception, in the ma.n.u.script notes of visitors, who, like Betterton, were drawn thither by a veneration acquired elsewhere.
The one notable exception is John Ward, a seventeenth-century vicar of Stratford, who settled there in 1662, at the age of thirty-three, forty-six years after Shakespeare"s death. Ward remained at Stratford till his death in 1681. He is the only resident of the century who wrote down any of the local story. Ward was a man of good sentiment.
He judged that it became a vicar of Stratford to know his Shakespeare well, and one of his private reminders for his own conduct runs--"Remember to peruse Shakespeare"s plays, and bee much versed in them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter."
Ward was a voluminous diarist and a faithful chronicler as far as he cared to go. Shakespeare"s last surviving daughter, Judith Quiney, was dying when he arrived in Stratford; but sons of Shakespeare"s sister, Mistress Joan Hart, were still living in the poet"s birthplace in Henley Street. Ward seems, too, to have known Lady Barnard, Shakespeare"s only grandchild and last surviving descendant, who, although she only occasionally visited Stratford after her second marriage in 1649 and her removal to her husband"s residence at Abington, near the town of Northampton, retained much property in her native place till her death in 1670. Ward reported from local conversation six important details, viz., that Shakespeare retired to Stratford in his elder days; that he wrote at the most active period of his life two plays a year; that he made so large an income from his dramas that "he spent at the rate of 1000 a year"; that he entertained his literary friends Drayton and Jonson at "a merry meeting" shortly before his death, and that he died of its effects.
Oxford, which was only thirty-six miles distant, supplied the majority of Stratford tourists, who, before Betterton, gathered oral tradition there. Aubrey, the Oxford gossip, roughly noted six local items other than those which are embodied in Ward"s diary, or are to be gleaned from Beeston"s reminiscences, viz., that Shakespeare had as a lad helped his father in his trade of butcher; that one of the poet"s companions in boyhood, who died young, had almost as extraordinary a "natural wit"; that Shakespeare betrayed very early signs of poetic genius; that he paid annual visits to his native place when his career was at its height; that he loved at tavern meetings in the town to chaff John Combe, the richest of his fellow-townsmen, who was accused of usurious practices; and finally, that he died possessed of a substantial fortune.