Ch. 10: The Traditional Shakspere - Page 2

told me nothing. A white-haired College servant said that "Mr. Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman."

Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty years after Shakspere's death,--a Civil War and the Reign of the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened,--and ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere's early brilliance, a century before, survived at Stratford.

A very humble parallel may follow. Some foolish person went seeking early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick. From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucestershire and Oxford. But about me the inquiring literary snipe only heard that "Andra was aye the stupid ane o' the fam'ly." Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine gloria! Even THAT was forgotten.

Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow townsman's youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from sixty to a hundred years after date. It is not in human nature that what was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the grandson. Go to "Thrums" and ask for literary memories of the youth of Mr. Barrie.

Yet {198a} the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink taken (WHERE, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant places. Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben? Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant bourgade, where, however, the "wit" of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649. See the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.

You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661-3), who has heard that the actor was "a natural wit," and contracted and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can scarcely believe that THESE were local traditions. How could these rustauds have an opinion about "natural wit," how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?

When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare's death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition. As has been stated, Beeston, "the chronicle of the Stage" (died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering; Beeston being the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend of Shakespeare, who died eleven years before that player. The story of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare "knowing Latin pretty well," is of no value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of Latin, as he must have had, if he were