"The whimsical, delightful, happy-go-lucky humour which he has put into the mouths of so many merry folk."
Clown. Well, God give them wisdom, that have it; and
those that are fools, let them use their talents.
(Twelfth Night).
Shakespeare did not linger over his dinner. Naturally no great eater, and by the robust, full-blooded Elizabethans considered a very poor drinker, he was lost in thought. That customary flow of scintillating wit, which made him the life and centre of a crowd – that nervous, excitable, impatient brilliance which often characterized him in company – seemed awhile to have forsaken him. To the irrelevant ups and downs of the artistic temperament he was singularly subject. Various familiar friends passed in and out, with loud and jolly greetings: Mr. Will Shakespeare was hail-fellow-well-met with all men, from carters to courtiers. But to-day Mr. Will Shakespeare only smiled at them with a humorous, pensive air, and retired yet further into himself.
What was saddening and silencing him? Had a sudden distaste for his occupation seized upon his sensitive mind? Had some slight been put upon him by careless young nobles, such as my lords Pembroke or Southampton, who take up a man one day and drop him the next? Had he received ill news from Stratford, as when the tidings arrived, three years ago, of the death of his only little son? Or was he simply cogitating one of his "sugared sonnets"?
Thus the quidnuncs of the Mermaid questioned among themselves: and there was much surmising, and putting of heads together, and wagering upon the thoughts of Master Shakespeare's melancholy: for of a surety he had lost his wonted flow of spirits. But only one or two men guessed truly at the secret troubles that sat heavy on his cheerful, mercurial mind.
Seventeen years ago, at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare had made a hasty and ill-assorted marriage. Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, his inferior in position, was no fit mate for the impetuous, ambitious youth. A father at nineteen, with neither employment nor source of income, he had chafed and fretted for five years against the consequences of his own rash folly: at twenty-three, he found the position intolerable. He quitted Stratford, and had never returned, save for brief and flying visits. Nor had he ever brought up his wife and children to London. He was maintaining them in comfort, he was purchasing a fine house in Stratford, whither he would eventually retire and play the parts of husband and father. But – blame him or not, as you will – there are limits beyond which human nature cannot be forced: and the illiterate, ill-tempered, incompatible Anne Hathaway was the skeleton in Shakespeare's cupboard: not to be explained away – the thought of whom left a bitter taste at the bottom of every pleasure.
So far, things were bad enough; but there was even worse to follow. The lad whose calf-love had flung him into ill-considered matrimony was now a mature man – and two years ago he discovered, for the first time, what the love of mature manhood can be like. With equal folly, equal recklessness, to his first affair, he had conceived a desperate and hopeless affection for a woman who exactly reversed the previous conditions – for she was very much younger than himself, better educated, and of much superior rank. The "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets, upon whom he lavished all his golden wealth of phrase, laying open the most intimate secrets of human love, and scorn, and anguish – was (in all probability) Mary Fitton, a girl of nineteen, maid of honour to the Queen. Proud, high-spirited, vivacious – unquestionably beautiful, although "in the old age black was not counted fair" – aristocratic, grande dame to the finger-tips: in every respect the antithesis of countrified, shrewish, repellent Anne Hathaway – yet the "dark lady" was inherently wanton, false, and faithless. Shakespeare recognised this, but it made no difference to the strength and intensity of his passion:
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
In sonnet after sonnet he expressed his despair, his patience of contempt or injury. No such sounding of the whole diapason of love – no such revealing of a tortured human heart – has ever been put before the world.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
And he depicted various features of this woman, in various rôles, in play after play: he could not shut her out. Whether he pilloried her dark beauty as Cressida or Cleopatra – whether he masked her wit and spirit under the name of Beatrice or Rosalind – whether he alternately implored or inveighed against her in the Sonnets – he was enthralled by so magnetic a fascination that it influenced his art at all points. Shakespeare the man – Shakespeare the artist – was obsessed by – bound fast in – a hopeless infatuation for a woman whom he knew to be unworthy.
Here, indeed, was sufficient matter for musing. But the poet's unhappy reveries were cut short by the appearance of a young man – his brother Edmund, who had recently arrived in London and obtained a small acting post at the Blackfriars Theatre. He addressed the older man with a mixture of respect and boyish naïveté. "Good Will, lend me a groat or so – ere I perish of sheer hunger. Six long hours have I laboured at their plaguy rehearsal, and I have not a penny to my pocket. In faith, I never starved like this in Stratford. I swear I will repay thee two days hence!"
The elder brother, with his easy, tolerant air waved the lad to a seat, and shouted for the drawer, or waiter. "Anon, anon, Sir!" and that functionary hastened up. The Mermaid was emptying now, and the attendants were less hurried and flurried. Shakespeare ordered in a second dinner – for, little though he had eaten, the food was cold: and, patting his brother affectionately on the shoulder, slipped a handful of money into his hand. "Ay, marry, thou hast a good Warwickshire hunger and thirst, Ned," said he, "let it not cry out upon thee in vain. For me, I am away to the Globe. They play Hamlet there to-day, and needs must I be present." He did not wait for thanks, but, with his peculiarly pleasant smile, slipped out of the Mermaid, and made haste towards his theatre.
"Like the three wanderers in Arden, against the bole of a huge oak."
Touchstone. The more fool I, to be in Arden!
(As You Like It).
The Globe was already crowded when he arrived, although the play did not begin till three (there were no evening performances in those days, except in noblemen's private theatres). Burbage, the favourite tragedian, as Hamlet, drew a great following: but the humble part played by the author himself as Rosencrantz was a succès d'estime rather than a genuine one – for Mr. William Shakespeare was no very wonderful actor. "A fellowship in a cry of players" held little glamour for him. The man who could imagine, with every vivid circumstance of detail, the sinister and foreboding atmosphere of Elsinore, had little admiration for the "strutting and bellowing" of the players who interpreted his visions…