It has been objected to this witness, a patriarch of more than eighty winters, that he was only three years old when Shakespeare died, and, consequently, could not speak from personal knowledge. A similar point raised a doubt in Prospero : "Canst thou remember A time before we came into this cell? I do not think thou canst; for then thou wast not And Miranda's answer is decisive,-"Certainly, I can."1 But the fact has been overlooked that the parish clerk was more than three years old in 1616, the date of Shakespeare's death, and might be even five or six; for Dowdall describes him in 1690 not as eighty, but as "above" that age. Moreover, his statement is confirmed by Aubrey, who wrote his notice of Shakespeare six years earlier, when he had himself reached a green old age, and who declares that he acquired his information "heretofore "-that is, in 1642, when he was at Oxford-from Shakespeare's neighbours. "His father," says the old antiquary, "was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade." This does not necessarily imply that he was apprenticed to his father, though Rowe, who is the next authority, gives a colour to such a conclusion, mentioning the "want of his assistance at home" as one of the reasons which induced John Shakespeare to remove him from school. But it is most likely that "he exercised his father's trade" under his successor in the business-probably the "Henry Rogers, butcher," whom we shall hereafter find a joint-defendant with John Shakespeare in the Bailiff's Court. The account of the parish clerk has never been fairly 1 The Tempest,' act i. 2. 2 The words are:-" The clerk that showed me this church is above eighty years old: he says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town, bound apprentice to a butcher." weighed. In showing the monument to Dowdall, he represented the poet as "the best of his family," clearly intimating that the family was known to him; and, in fact, George Quiney, the brother of Shakespeare's son-in-law, was curate of the parish till 1624, when the lowest estimate would make the parish clerk twelve years of age. Shakespeare's daughters were both living when he was in his thirty-seventh year, and Judith did not die till 1661, when he was nearly fifty, and probably officiated as clerk at her funeral. In any case, it is absurd to suppose that he could grow old in so small a town as Stratford without knowing all its inhabitants, particularly persons so prominent as the daughters of Shakespeare; and we must not forget that these two representatives of the poet were still living when Aubrey acquired the same information from his "neighbours." It is thus indisputable that the great dramatist began the world at fourteen as the son of a fallen man. They who have known a reverse of fortune at that age, and carry back memory to the time, need not be told that he experienced a thousand pangs in every relation of his position. The cold looks of friends, the taunts and gibes of old inferiors, the mortified pride, the stifled resentment, recur to us as wounds of yesterday. So early did Shakespeare learn endurance! The calling suddenly imposed upon him could not be to his taste, but, with all his sensibility, he could hardly regard it with loathing, as it had been always under his eye, and was associated with his early home. We know from Slender that "upon familiarity will grow more contempt." over, a boy soon adapts himself to things around, and these must be gloomy indeed, if they do not afford some scope for the spirit of youth. Shakespeare's vivacity was inexhaustible and irrepressible. Old Aubrey calls it "a natural wit"—as if it were not under his control, but burst forth 1 'Merry Wives of Windsor,' act i. 1. More spontaneously, so that it seems a logical thing for the same authority to tell us that when the young apprentice killed a calf," he would do it in high style," prefacing the slaughter · with a speech! Could we but recover one of those orations! Crude it would be, no doubt, but we should see Mind sparkling through it-the precious metal veining the quartz. We may imagine there was a flavour of Touchstone and a spice of Autolycus in the harangue, something of Jacques in the forest and something of Hamlet in the churchyard, winding up with the moral that the glutton, who to-morrow feasted on the calf, should himself be a banquet for worms. And the poor calf came in for a word of lament— The butcher takes away the calf, And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays, The nature of Shakespeare's early avocations is not to be ascertained from allusions in his works. Such evidence might be found to prove him acquainted equally with almost every calling, from divinity, law, and physic, to haberdashery and tailor-craft. His thoughts were not the fruit of his own experience, great as it was; but took the range of society, sweeping both its surface and depths. Yet, in connection with the facts we have adduced, it may not be amiss to show, for the first time, that he paid due honour to butchers, and was master of all their mysteries. As a beginning, we are carried with the drove on its way to the shambles : 66-1 And that's as easy As to set dogs on sheep." The butcher is represented sharpening his knife :"No doubt the monstrous knife was dull and blunt Till it was whetted on thy stone-hard heart, To revel in the entrails of my lambs." 3 14 King Henry VI., Part II.,' act iii. 1. 3 King Richard III.,' act iv. 4. G The sheep is brought to slaughter:— "So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece, And next his throat unto the butcher's knife." 1 The ox and the calf share the same fate :-"Then is sin struck down like an ox, and iniquity's throat cut like a calf." We hear the squeak of the pig in the like extremity : "Weke, weke,-so cries a pig prepar'd to the spit." 3 The poet shows us the interior of the slaughter-house : "Lord Bassaim lies embrued here, All on a heap, like to a slaughtered lamb."4 Even its lesser operations are touched upon :-" And this way I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart." Falstaff knows how the little Aceldama is cleaned out:-"Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher's offal." And we catch a glimpse of the shop itself, when the poet speaks of "butchers killing flies." 7 Shakespeare's duties were not restricted to the slaughterhouse and shop. It was the custom of that day, as indeed of our own, to employ apprentices in the drudgery of the household; and a citizen of 1657 relates that during his servitude he bore the water-tankard, cleaned shoes, and scraped trenchers. Shakespeare imposes similar tasks on Caliban, who, on rebelling, declares that he will no more "fetch in firing at requiring," nor engage in “ scrape tren 1 chering nor wash dish." The poet has recurred here to the days of his own apprenticeship. He may have smiled over the reminiscence, without reflecting that it told tales. But we think none the worse of King Alfred for baking cakes. The 'prentice lads of Stratford did not enjoy the dignity or possess the liberty of the London apprentices. The metropolis was just of the size to allow of such a body making itself formidable-being of sufficient magnitude to give numerical strength, and not too large for organization. Rash were the man who ventured to attack the humblest of the fraternity. At the cry of "clubs," apprentices of all trades and ages, from the boy of fourteen to the athlete of twenty, left task or bed to rush to the rescue. Stowe says that the apprentices went before their masters and mistresses at night with a lantern, and "a great long club about their necks." Though the Stratford authorities ordained that apprentices should not carry weapons-" that is to say, sword, dagger, or any weapon," the form of the prohibition, by its mention of sword and dagger, seems to imply that clubs were not forbidden, nor could there be any danger of the apprentices of a rural town being so animated by one spirit as to muster their clubs in a fray. Shakespeare makes the Porter's Man in Palace Yard "hit that woman who cried out clubs," but this cry would raise no alarm in Stratford, where it did not, as in London, correspond with the shout of "To your tents, O Israel!" The authorities of Stratford may have permitted young Will Shakespeare to go before his master at night with a lantern, and certainly were not so ungallant as to forbid this 1 Tempest,' act ii. 2. 2 Stowe's' Annals,' p. 1040. 3 Orders of the Town Council, 1st October, 1 Mary. 4 King Henry VIII.,' act v. 3. |
