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WILLIAM SHAKSPERE: A BIOGRAPHY.

NOTE ON AUBREY'S LIFE OF SHAKSPERE.

AUBREY'S 'Life,' as we have mentioned, is the earliest connected account of Shakspere Brief as it is, it is full of curious and characteristic matter; made up of gossip, indeed, and evidently inaccurate in one or two particulars, but still valuable as reflecting the general notion of Shakspere's career entertained by his immediate successors, with whom Aubrey was familiar. Rowe's 'Life' comes later; and the facts are so mixed up with the critical opinions of his age, which uniformly desire to represent Shakspere as an uneducated man, that we cannot regard it as so genuine a production as Aubrey's tattle, in which he told what he had heard without much regard to the inferences to be drawn from his tale. It ought to be read entire, properly to judge of its credibility; and therefore we so present it to our readers :

"Mr. William Shakespear was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick; his father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess, about 18, and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well. Now B. 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. He was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. The humour of . . . . . the constable, in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, he happened to take at Grendon,* in Bucks, which is the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish, and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men One time as he was at the tavern at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buried; he makes there this extemporary epitaph :

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He was wont to go to his native country once a-year. I think I have been told that he left 2 or 300l. per annum there and thereabout to a sister. 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 prodi gious wit, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; said Ben Jonson, I wish he had blotted out a thousand.' His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombities, that twenty years hence they will not be understood.

"Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country." †

"I think it was Midsummer night that he happened to lie there,"

From Mr. Beeston.

END OF BOOK I.

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AMONGST those innumerable by-ways in London which are familiar to the hurried pedestrian, there is a well-known line of streets, or rather lanes, leading from the hill on which St. Paul's stands to the great thoroughfare of Blackfriars Bridge. The pavement is narrow, the carriage-way is often blocked up by contending carmen, the houses are mean; yet the whole district is full of interesting associations. We have scarcely turned out of Ludgate Street, under a narrow archway, when the antiquary may descry a large lump of the ancient

city wall embedded in the lath and plaster of a modern dwelling. A little farther, and we pass the Hall of the Apothecaries who have here, by dint of long and earnest struggle, raised their original shopkeeping vocation into a science. A little onward, and the name Printing-house Yard indicates another aspect of civilization. Here was the King's printing-house in the days of the Stuarts; and here, in our own days, is the office of the Times' Newspaper, the organ of a greater power than that of prerogative. Between Apothecaries'

Hall and Printing-house Yard is a short lane, leading into an open space called Playhouse Yard. It is one of those shabby places of which so many in London lie close to the glittering thoroughfares; but which are known only to their own inhabitants, and have at all times an air of quiet which seems like desolation. The houses of this little square, or yard, are neither ancient nor modern. Some of them were probably built soon after the great fire of London; for a few present their gable fronts to the streets, and the wide casements of others have evidently been filled up and modern sashes inserted. But there is nothing here, nor indeed in the whole precinct, with the exception of the few yards of the ancient wall, that has any pretension to belong to what may be called the antiquities of London. Yet here, three centuries ago, stood the great religious house of the Dominicans, or Black Friars, who were the lords of the precinct; shutting out all civic authority, and enclosing within their four gates a busy community of shopkeepers and artificers. Here, in the hallowed dust of the ancient church, were the royal and the noble buried; and their gilded tombs proclaimed their virtues to the latest posterity. Where shall we look for a fragment of these records now? Here parliaments have sat and pulled down odious favourites; here kings have required exorbitant aids from their complaining subjects; here Wolsey pronounced the sentence of divorce on the persecuted Katharine. In a few years the house of the Black Friars ceased to exist; their halls were pulled down; their church fell into ruin. The precinct of the Blackfriars then became a place of fashionable residence. Elizabeth, at the age of sixty, here danced at a wedding which united the houses of Worcester and Bedford. In the heart of this precinct, close by the church of the suppressed monastery, surrounded by the new houses of the nobility, in the very spot which is now known as Playhouse Yard, was built, in 1575, the Blackfriars Theatre.

The history of the early stage, as it is to be deduced from statutes, and pro clamations, and orders of council, exhibits a constant succession of conflicts between the civic authorities and the performers of plays. The act of the 14th of Elizabeth, "for the punishment of vagabonds, and for relief of the poor and impotent," was essentially an act of protection for the established companies of players. We have here, for the first time, a definition of rogues and vagabonds; and it includes not only those who can "give no reckoning how he or she doth lawfully get his or her living," but "all fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes, and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realm or towards any other honourable personage of greater degree; all jugglers, pedlers tinkers, and petty chapmen; which said fencers, bearwards, common players

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