By E. Tallmadge Root [This act of Acacius. Bishop of Amida (the modern Diarbekr), in A.D., 422, helped forward negotiations of peace between Varahran V. and Theodosius, Emperor of the East; and was the more remarkable since the war had been undertaken to save Armenian Christians from "Persia's bigot king." See Rawlinson's "Seven Monarchies," Vol. III., p. 399.] Poet, Dramatist, and Man By HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIB Copyright, 1900, Hamilton W. Mabie. All rights reserved. Part IV.— Marriage T HERE are traditions but no records of the period between 1577, when Shakespeare's school life ended, and the year 1586, when he left Stratford. In this age, when all events, significant and insignificant, are reported; when biography has assumed proportions which are often out of all relation to the importance or interest of those whose careers are described with microscopic detail; when men of letters, especially, are urged to produce and publish with the greatest rapidity, are photographed, studied, described, and characterized with journalistic energy and industry, and often with journalistic indifference to perspective; and when every paragraph from the pen of a successful writer is guarded from the purloiner and protected from plagiarist by laws and penalties, it seems incredible that so little, relatively, should be known about the daily life, the working relations, the intimate associations, the habits and artistic training, of the greatest of English poets. THE BOAR AT CHARLECOTE GATE And this absence of biographic material on a scale which would seem adequate from the modern point of view has furnished, not the ground-for the word ground implies a certain solidity or basis of fact-but the occasion, of many curious speculations and of some radical skepticism. Absence of the historical sense has often led the rash and uncritical to read into past times the spirit and thought of the present, and to interpret the conditions of an earlier age in the light of existing conditions. Taking into account the habits of Shakespeare's time; the condition of life into which he was born; the fact that he was not a writer of dramas to be read, but of plays to be acted, and that, in his own thought and in the thought of his contemporaries, he was a playwright who lived by writing for the stage and not a poet who appealed to a reading public and was eager for literary reputation; recalling the inferior position which actors occupied in society, and the bohemian atmosphere in which all men who were connected with the stage lived, it is surprising, not that we know so little, but that we know so much, about Shakespeare. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, one of the highest authorities in this field, has covered this ground with admirable clearness and precision: "In this aspect the great dramatist participates in the fate of most of his literary contemporaries, for if a collection of the known facts relating to all of them were tabularly arranged, it would be found that the number of the ascertained particulars of his life reached at leas: the average. At the present day, with biography carried to a wasteful and ridiculous excess, and Shakespeare the idol not merely of a nation but of the educated world, it is difficult to realize a period when no interest was taken in the events in the lives of authors, and when the great poet himself, notwithstanding the immense popularity of some of his works, was held in no general reverence. It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable. The intelligent appreciation of genius by individuals was not sufficient to neutralize in these matters the effect of public opinion and the animosity of the religious world; all circumstances thus uniting to banish general interest in the history of persons connected in any way with the stage. This biographical indifference continued for many years, and long before the season arrived for a real curiosity to be taken in the subject, the records from which alone a satisfactory memoir could have been constructed had disappeared. At the time of Shake speare's decease, non-political correspond ence was rarely preserved, elaborate diaries were not the fashion, and no one, excepting in semi-apocryphal collections of jests, thought it worth while to record many of the sayings and doings, or to delineate at any length the characters, of actors and dramatists, so that it is generally by the merest accident that particulars of interest respecting them have been recovered." History, tradition, contemporary judgments scattered through a wide range of books and succeeded by a "Centurie of Prayse," the fruits of the critical scholarship of the last half-century, the record in the Stationers' Register taken in connec tion with the dates of the first representations of the different plays; and, finally, the study of Shakespeare's work as a whole, have, however, gone a long way toward making good the absence of voluminous biographic material. Enough remains to make the story of the poet's career connected and intelligible, the record of his growth as an artist clear and deeply significant, and the history of his spiritual development legible and of absorbing interest. The kind of occupation which fell to Shakespeare's hands during the five years of his adolescence between 1577 and 1582 is a matter of minor interest; the education of sense and imagination which he received during that impressionable period is a matter of supreme interest. That he early formed the habit of exact observation his work shows in places innumerable. No detail of natural life escaped him; the plays are not only saturated with the spirit of nature, but they are accurate calendars of natural events and phenomena; they abound in the most exact descriptions of those details of landscape, flora, and animal life which a writer must learn at first THE PATH TO SHOTTERY Photographed for The Outlook by Douglas NcNeille. Kissing-gate in foreground. ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE At Shottery, about a mile and a half from Stratford. A good example of an Elizabethan farm-house. hand and which he can learn only when the eye is in the highest degree sensitive and the imagination in the highest degree responsive. A boy of Shakespeare's genius and situation would have mastered almost unconsciously the large and thorough knowledge of trees, flowers, birds, dogs, and horses which his work shows. Such a boy sees, feels, and remembers everything which in any way relates itself to his growing mind. The Warwickshire landscape became, by the unconscious process of living in its heart, a part of his memory, the background of his conscious life. He knew it passively in numberless walks, loiterings, solitary rambles; and he knew it actively, for there is every reason to believe that he participated in the sports of his time, and saw fields and woods and remote bits of landscape as one sees them in hunting, coursing, and fishing. He was in a farming country, and his kin on both sides were landowners or farmers; he had opportunities to become acquainted not only with the country, but with the habits of the birds and animals that lived in it. He loved action as well as meditation, and his life was marvelously well poised when one recalls what perilous stuff of thought, passion, and imagination were in him. It was perhaps through physical |