Against these enemies, and against others who were embittered by the nascent asceticism that was at last to be triumphant in Puritanism, the players were protected by the favour and personal tastes of the sovereign and the ingenious, ardent and vivacious aristocracy that at that time animated the English court. In Shakespeare's tenth year (1574) the Earl of Leicester obtained a patent for James Burbage and four others, authorizing them "to use, exercise and occupy the art and faculty of playing tragedies, comedies, &c. as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them," and this was to apply “as well within our city of London and liberties of the same, as throughout our realm of England." As if this were scarcely enough, within three months after a letter from the Privy Council enjoined the Lord Mayor to "admit the comedy players within the city of London, and to be otherwise favourably used." The response to this seems to have been an act of the Common Council the next year, assuming the right of licensing theatrical exhibitions within the city, and making the condition of a license the contribution of half receipts to charitable purposes. Thus beset, James Burbage availed himself of the immunity from civic authority of the precinct of the suppressed religious houses of Dominicans, the Black Friars, and purchased and converted certain rooms abutting there on the very city wall, into a common playhouse, and in spite of hostile petition made good his ground, and established the stage which was to be that of Shakespeare.

in the meantime affairs at Stratford,-the private affairs of the family of Shakespeare,—were taking that turn to which tradition ascribed, probably with some truth as its basis, his adoption of the profession of the stage. The proofs of his father's narrowing circumstances follow on continuously from the year that William Shakespeare was thirteen, till he was twenty-three; ten years' experience of a straitened home, at the opening of life,-insufficient, however, to subdue the buoyancy of his

spirits, to depress either his ardour or his energies. The details may be concisely told.

In 1577, John Shakespeare is for the first time found irregular in his attendance as Alderman; the next year he is excused half charge for the furniture of pikemen and bill men, and entirely excused from the weekly pay ment of his brother Aldermen of 4d. towards the relief of the poor, rendered necessary by one of the occasional visits of the plague. In 1579, the sum due from him towards purchase of armour and weapons is returned, “unpaid and unaccounted for." He and his wife sell her share of property at Snitterfield for £4,—he is styled "yeoman" in the deed, and marks with a cross instead of the cipher resembling a capital A that he formerly used: they also mortgage the estate of Asbyes for £40 to Edmund Lambert, brother-in-law of Mary Shakespeare.

In 1580, the list of debts appended to the will of Roger Sadler, baker, shows John Shakespeare as owing him £5, for which he appears to have had credit only on the guarantee of Edmund Lambert and another. This was in or before January; in May of the same year John Shakespeare has a son baptized Edmund, probably after his uncle by marriage, whose assistance therefore was accepted and considered to be offered, in good part and good faith. According to the terms of the deed, the mortgage of Asbyes was to be a sale, unless the money were repaid by the feast of St. Michael the Archangel in this the ensuing year (29th September). They seem to have counted upon being able to effect this by the falling in of Mary Shakespeare's reversionary interest in Snitterfield property, by the anticipated death of Mary Arden, her step-mother. This, death did not occur till December, and they had then sold the interest, still reversionary only, to R. Webbe, for £40; and this sum, according at least to their own averment in later proceedings, they duly tendered in redemption of Lambert's mortgage. Lambert declined to accept the money in that sense, unless other sums due to him were acquitted at the same time, and thus he retained the property until

proceedings in Chancery were instituted at a later date, with what effect is not known. These proceedings, from their date, were no doubt undertaken with the advice of William Shakespeare, and as they correspond in time with the production of Henry IV., first part, I have no doubt that Edmund Lambert, or rather his representative and heir, John Lambert, was the spiteful or fraudu lent occupant of land sought by the poet, who according to Sir William Bishop's tradition, was the original of Falstaff.

On the other side of the account there is the qualifying fact, that John Shakespeare never parted with his houses in Henley Street, which descended to his son; and whatever, therefore, may have been his embarrassmente, they by no means amounted to destitution. In fact, the records of the bailiff's court, that prove his difficulties in meeting demands upon him, show him by other entries of the same date, suing debtors for monies owing.

In 1586 a crisis came; it was returned to a writ of distraint on the 19th of January, "quod prædictus Johannes Shackspere nihil habet unde distringi potest,""that the said John Shakespeare has nothing on which the distraint can be executed." A month later a capias was issued, and then another capias in March; his municipal standing also declined, and in September this same year the books of the corporation show this entry by the town clerk. "At this hall William Smith and Richard Court are chosen to be Aldermen in the place of John Wheler and John Shaxpere; for that Mr. Wheler doth desire to be put out of the Company, and Mr. Shaxpere doth not come to the halls when they be warned, nor hath not done of a long time." For the time present there may have been an obstruction known, but not mentioned, for in the ensuing March, 1587, is recorded a writ of habeas corpus, which seems to imply that John Shakespeare had been in custody, or imprisoned for debt. To finish these notices at once, it may be added, that another distringas was issued against him in 1593, evidently no mere matter of form, for in the pre

vious year his absence from church-attendance is accounted for in a return made by Sir Thomas Lucy of recusants and others, as probably owing to fear of process for debt; and it is not till 1595, only two years before his son's purchase of New Place, that he ceases to appear as a party in petty actions, which bear at least the colour of pertinacity.

In 1582 William Shakespeare became a married man, at the age of eighteen years and a half. Rowe's account runs thus :—“ Upon his leaving school he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him (the wool-trade seems implied), and in order to settle in the world after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young: his wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford." The marriage is not recorded in the Stratford register, and must have been celebrated elsewhere; but a few years since, Rowe's tradition was confirmed by the discovery of a marriage bond at Worcester, the metropolis of the diocese, which was given by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, of Stratford, in order to obtain license for William Shakespeare to marry Ann Hathaway, maiden, of Stratford, with once asking of the banns. The bond is dated the 28th of November.

It is sufficiently proved that Anne was the daughter of Richard Hathaway, of Shottery, adjoining and in the parish of Stratford, and who is traced in an acquaintance not only with the two sureties, but with John Shake. speare, who was security for him in the poet's birth year.

They sign their names with marks, the whole set of them, and are styled in deeds and instruments, agricolæ or husbandmen, like Robert Arden, but they have dwellings of their own, appointed as a yeoman's should be,— that of Richard Hathaway yet stands, though now divided into cottages, and is occupied by a descendant,— and have goods, and cattle and land too, to divide by will among their children. Richard Hathaway died in September, 1581, the year before the marriage: his will

mentions other children, but not Anne; as her identity seems indisputable, it is possible that she was passed over as not unprovided for, and thus came not quite portionless to her husband.

Anne Hathaway, by the evidence of her epitaph, was between seven and eight years older than her youthful bridegroom; their first child, Susannah, was baptized at Stratford, 26th of May, 1583; the obvious inference from comparison of dates is confirmed by the shortened banns and the celebration of the marriage elsewhere than at Stratford. The conclusion has been variously but vigorously fenced with by biographers. One (Mr. Halliwell) says vaguely, "the espousals of the lovers were celebrated in the summer- (to wit, 28th of November), 1582,” and others are prompt to magnify the virtue and dignity of an assumed "troth-plight." That Shakespeare himself repudiates the apology, by the expressions he assigns to Prospero monitory to the betrothed Ferdinand, and to Claudio in his assertion of his own respect for himself and his betrothed, dispenses with the necessity for considering it. The presumption as the evidence stands is not to be escaped from, and it is more to the honour of Shakespeare to note his timely reparation, and how superior he was to the egotism of allowing his own lapse, if such there were, to pervert his moral judgment in his writings, than to falsify biography, not to say morals, for a false apology.

To be swayed or surprised by passion in youth, and even later, has ever been the besetting liability of the poet, and without allowing much value to scandalous tradition I cannot but recognize in some of the sonnets a personal recognition of weakness, and also the weakness itself struggling with the admission, and almost becoming-never quite becoming, strong enough to brave it :

"Love is too young to know what conscience is:
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?"

On the 2nd of February, 1584-5, were baptized at Stratford, Hamnet and Judith, twin children of William