cient for the operation of corn-mills meandered through the town. This general humidity intensified the evils arising from the want of scavengers, or other effective appliances for the preservation of cleanliness. House-slops were recklessly thrown into ill-kept channels that lined the sides of unmetaled roads; pigs and geese too often reveled in the puddles and ruts, while here and there were small middens, ever in the course of accumulation, the receptacles of offal and of every species of nastiness. A regulation for the removal of these collections to certain specified localities, interspersed through the borough and known as common dung hills, appears to have been the extent of the interference that the authorities ventured or cared to exercise in such matters. Sometimes when the nuisance was thought to be sufficiently flagrant, they made a raid on those inhabitants who had suffered their refuse to accumulate largely in the highways. On one of these occasions, in April, 1552, John Shakespeare was fined the sum of twelve pence for having amassed what was no doubt a conspicuous sterquinarium before his house in Henley Street, and under these unsavory circumstances does the history of the poet's father commence in the records of England. It is sad to be compelled to admit that there was little excuse for his negligence, one of the public stores of filth being within a stone's throw of his residence.1 The people of Stratford were densely ignorant. At the time of Shakspere's birth, only six aldermen of the town, out of nineteen, could write their names; and of the thirteen who could not read or write, Shakspere's father, John Shakspere, was one. Knight says: We were reluctant to yield our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name in this document. But subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used two marks—one something like an open pair of compasses, the other the common cross. III. SHAKSPERE'S FAMILY TOTALLY UNEDUCATED. Shakspere's whole family were illiterate. He was the first of his race we know of who was able to read and write. His father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and cousins-all signed their names, on the few occasions when they were obliged to sign them, with crosses. His daughter Judith could not read or write. The whole population around him were in the same condition. The highest authority upon these questions says: Exclusive of Bibles, church services, psalters and educational manuals, there were certainly not more than two or three dozen books, if so many, in the whole town. The copy of the black-letter English History, so often depicted as well thumbed by Shakespeare, in his father's parlor, never existed out of the imagination.3 1 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 18. Knight's Shak. Biography, p. 17. 3 Halliwell-Phillipps, Life of Shak., p. 42. Goadby says: The common people were densely ignorant. They had to pick up their mother tongue as best they could. The first English grammar was not published until 1586. [This was after Shakspere had finished his education.] It is evident that much schooling was impossible, for the necessary books did not exist. The horn-book for teaching the alphabet would almost exhaust the resources of any common day schools that might exist in the towns and villages. LITTLE IF ANY ENGLISH WAS TAUGHT EVEN IN THE LOWER CLASSES OF THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.1 Prof. Thorold Rogers says: Sometimes perhaps, in the days after the Reformation, a more than ordinarily opulent ecclesiastic, having no family ties, would train up some clever rustic child, teach him and help him on to the university. But, as a rule, since that event, there was no educated person in the parish beyond the parson, and he had the anxieties of a narrow fortune and a numerous family. The Rev. John Shaw, who was temporary chaplain in a village in Lancashire in 1644, tells of an old man of sixty years of age, whose whole knowledge of Jesus Christ had been derived from a miracle play. ""Oh, sir,' said he, 'I think I heard of that man you speak of once in a play at Kendall called Corpus Christi Play where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.'" IV. THE UNIVERSITIES OF THAT DAY. Even the universities were not such schools as the name would to-day imply. The state of education was almost as unsettled as that of religion. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford were thronged with poor scholars, and eminent professors taught in the schools and colleges. But the Reformation had made sad havoc with their buildings and libraries, and the spirit of amusement had affected their studies.3 The students turned much more readily to dissipation than to literature. In the year 1570, the scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge, consumed 2,250 barrels of beer!' The knowledge of Greek had sensibly declined, but Latin was still cultivated with considerable success.5 The number of scholars of the university fit for schoolmasters was small. "Whereas they make one scholar they marre ten," averred Peacham, who describes one specimen as whipping his boys on a cold morning "for no other purpose than to get himself a heate." 6 The country swarmed to such an extent with scholars of the universities, who made a living as beggars, that Parliament had to interfere against the nuisance. By the act of 14th Elizabeth, "all 1 Goadby, England of Shak., p. 101. Goadby, England, p. 97. + Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 97. • Ibid., p. 99. scholars of the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of said universities," are declared "vagabonds," and punishable as such. V. "A BOOKLESS NEIGHBORHOOD." If this was the condition of the two great "twins of learning," sole centers of light in the darkness of a barbarous age, we can readily conceive what must have been the means of public education in the dirty little hamlet of Stratford, with its fifteen hundred untaught souls, its two hundred and fifty householders, and its illiterate officials. It was, as Halliwell-Phillipps has called it, "a bookless neighborhood." We have the inventory of the personal property of Robert Arden, Shakspere's mother's father, and the inventory of the personal property of Agnes Arden, his widow, and the will of the same Agnes Arden, and any number of other wills, but in them all, in the midst of a plentiful array of "oxenne," "kyne," "sheepe," "pigges," "basons," "chafyng dyches," "toweles and dyepers," "shettes," "frying panes," "gredyerenes," "barrelles," "hansaws," "knedyng troghs," "poringers," "sawcers," "pott-hookes," and "linkes," we do not find reference to a single book, not even to a family Bible or a prayer-book. Everything speaks of a rude, coarse and unintellectual people. Here is an extract from the will of Agnes Arden, Shakspere's grandmother: I geve to the said Jhon Hill my best platter of the best sort, and my best platter of the second sorte, and j poringer, one sawcer and one best candlesticke. And I also give to the said Jhon one paire of sheetes. I give to the said Jhon my second pot, my best pan, . . . and one cow with the white rump. "One John Shakspeare, of Budbrook, near Warwick, considered it a sufficient mark of respect to his father-in-law to leave him 'his best boots.' VI. A GROSS IMPROBABILITY. It would indeed be a miracle if out of this vulgar, dirty, illiterate family came the greatest genius, the profoundest thinker, the broadest scholar that has adorned the annals of the human race. It is possible. It is scarcely probable. 1 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 183. Professor Grant Allen, writing in the Science Monthly of March, 1882 (p. 591), and speaking of the life of Sir Charles Lyell, says: Whence did he come? What conditions went to beget him? From what stocks were his qualities derived, and why? These are the questions that must henceforth always be first asked when we have to deal with the life of any great man. For we have now learned that a great man is no unaccountable accident, no chance result of a toss-up on the part of nature, but simply the highest outcome and final efflorescence of many long ancestral lines, converging at last toward a single happy combination. Herbert Spencer says: If you assume that two European parents may produce a negro child, or that from woolly-haired prognathous Papuans may come a fair, straight-haired infant of Caucasian type, you may assume that the advent of the great man can occur anywhere and under any circumstances. If, disregarding these accumulated results of experience which current proverbs and the generalizations of psychologists alike express, you suppose that a Newton might be born in a Hottentot family; that a Milton might spring up among the Andamanese; that a Howard or a Clarkson might have Fiji parents: then you may proceed with facility to explain social progress as caused by the actions of the great man. But if all biological science, enforcing all popular belief, convinces you that by no possibility will an Aristotle come from a father and mother with facial angles of fifty degrees; and that out of a tribe of cannibals, whose chorus in preparation for a feast of human flesh is a kind of rhythmical roaring, there is not the remotest chance of a Beethoven arising: then you must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. And it is to this social state, to this squalid village, that the great thinker of the human race, after association, as we are told, with courts and wits and scholars and princes, returned in middle life. He left intellectual London, which was then the center of mental activity, and the seat of whatever learning and refinement were to be found in England, not to seek the peace of rural landscapes and breathe the sweet perfumes of gardens and hedge-rows, but to sit down contentedly in the midst of pig-sties, and to inhale the malarial odors from reeking streets and stinking ditches. To show that this is no exaggeration, let me state a few facts. Henry Smith, of Stratford, in 1605, is notified to "plucke downe his pigges cote, which is built nere the chapple wall, and the house of office there." And John Sadler, miller, is fined for bringing feed and feeding his hogs in "chapple lane." In 1613 John Rogers, the vicar, erected a pig-sty immediately opposite the back court of Shakspere's residence. For one hundred and fifty years after Shakspere's death, Chapel Ditch, which lay next to the New Place ཀ་ Garden, "was a receptacle for all manner of filth that any person chose to put there." It was four or five feet wide and filled for a foot deep with flowing filth. More than one hundred years after Shakspere's death, to-wit, in 1734, the Court Leet of Stratford presented Joseph Sawbridge, in Henley Street, "for not carring in his muck before his door."" The houses were thatched with reeds.3 The streets were narrow, irregular and without sidewalks; full of refuse, and lively with pigs, poultry and ravenous birds.* The highways were "foule, long and cumbersome.' Good bridges were so rare that in some cases they were ascribed to the devil. There was no mail service except between London and a few principal points. The postage upon a letter from Lynn to London was 26s. 8d., equal in value to about $30 of our money to-day. The stage wagons moved at the rate of two miles an hour. Places twelve miles apart were then practically farther removed than towns would now be one hundred miles apart. There was little or no intercourse among the common people. Men lived and died where they were born. There were no carriages. The Queen imported a Dutch coach in 1564, the sight of which "put both man and horse in amazement," remarks Taylor, the water poet. "Some said it was a great crab-shell, brought out of China, and some imagined it to be one of the pagan temples, in which the cannibals adored the devil." There were few chimneys; dining-room and kitchen were all one; "each one made his fire against the reredrosse in the hall where he dined and dressed his meat," says Harrison. The beds were of straw, with wooden bolsters (like the Chinese); the people ate out of wooden platters with wooden spoons. The churches were without pews and full of fleas." VII. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. We The people were fierce, jovial, rude, hearty, brutal and pugnacious. They were great eaters of beef and drinkers of beer. find them accurately described in the Plays: 1 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 429. 2 Ibid., p. 205. 3 Goadby's England of Shak., p. 16. 5 Ibid. • Ibid., p. 75. D |