speare imputed to him, but the likeness of the author of this touching inscription can have been caught only by the license of caricature in Justice Shallow.

The poaching episode, if it has any historical basis, probably took place in 1585, when Shakespeare had been three years married, and, although barely twenty-one years old, was the father of three children. Richard Hathaway, described as a "husbandman," was the owner of a small property at Shottery, a mile distant from Stratford, and reached not only by the highway but by a delightful footpath through the fields. The thatched cottage, so carefully preserved by the trustees of the Shakespeare properties, has doubtless suffered many changes since 1582, but remains a picturesque example of a farmhouse of Shakespeare's time. It did not pass out of the hands of the Hathaway family until about the middle of the present century, and Mrs. Baker, the custodian, who died in 1899, was a Hathaway by descent. Although Shottery is in the parish of Stratford, no record of Shakespeare's marriage to Anne, the daughter of Richard Hathaway, has been found in the parish register. In the Edgar Tower at Worcester, however, a bit of parchment in the form of a marriage bond furnishes conclusive contemporary evidence. By the terms of this bond, signed by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, husbandmen of Shottery, it is affirmed that no impediment existed to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. The document is dated November 28, 1582, and the bondsmen make themselves responsible in the sum of forty

pounds in case any impediment should be disclosed subsequently. The bond stipulates that the friends of the bride shall consent to her marriage, and, in that event, the customary reading of banns in church may be dispensed with and the marriage take place at

once.

Three parishes within the diocese in which the contracting parties lived are, in accordance with the law and custom of the time, named in the bond, in any one of which the marriage might have taken place. The registers of two of the parishes have been searched without result; the register of the third parish disappeared at the time of the fire which destroyed the church at Luddington in which it was kept. Marriage bonds were not uncommon in Shakespeare's time, but they were not often entered into by persons in Shakespeare's position; the process was more expensive and complicated than the "asking of the banns," but it offered one advantage: it shortened the time within which the ceremony might take place. The bridegroom in this case was a minor by three years, and the formal assent of his parents ought to have been secured; the bond, however, stipulates only that the friends of the bride shall give their consent.

In such bonds the name of the groom or of his father usually appears; in this case no member of Shakespeare's family is named; the two bondsmen were not only residents of Shottery, but one of them is described in the will of the bride's father as "my trustie friende and neighbour." The circumstances seem to suggest that the marriage was secured, or at

least hastened, by the family of the bride; and this surmise finds its possible confirmation in the fact that the marriage took place about the time of the execution of the bond on November 28, 1582, while the poet's first child, his daughter Susannah, was christened in Holy Trinity, at Stratford, on the 26th day of May, 1583. It has been suggested on high authority that a formal betrothal, of the kind which had the moral weight of marriage, had taken place. The absence of any reference to the groom's family in the marriage bond makes this doubtful. These are the facts so far as they have been discovered; it ought to be remembered, as part of the history of this episode in Shakespeare's life, that he was a boy of eighteen at the time of his marriage, and that Anne Hathaway was eight years his senior.

That he was an ardent and eloquent lover it is impossible to doubt; the tradition that he was an unhappy husband is based entirely on the assumption that, while his family remained in Stratford, for twelve years he was almost continuously absent in London, and that he seems to speak with deep feeling about the disastrous effects of too great intimacy before marriage, and of the importance of a woman's marrying a man older than herself:

let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.

This is, however, pure inference, and it is perilous to draw inferences of this kind from phrases which a

dramatist puts into the mouths of men and women who are interpreting, not their author's convictions and feelings, but a phase of character, a profound human experience, or the play of that irony which every playwright from Eschylus to Ibsen has felt deeply. The dramatist reveals his personality as distinctly as does the lyric poet, but not in the same way. Shakespeare's view of life, his conception of human destiny, his attitude toward society, his ideals of character, are to be found, not in detached passages framed and coloured by dramatic necessities, but in the large and consistent conception of life which underlies the entire body of his work; in the justice and sanity with which the external deed is bound to the inward impulse and the visible penalty developed out of the invisible sin; in the breadth of outlook upon human experience, the sanity and balance of judgment, the clarity and sweetness of temper which kept an imagination always brooding over the tragic possibilities of experience, and haunted by all manner of awful shapes of sin, misery, and madness, poised in health, vigour, and radiant serenity.

It is perilous to draw any inference as to the happiness or unhappiness which came into Shakespeare's life with his rash marriage. It is true that he spent many years in London; but when he had been there only eleven years, and was still a young man, he secured a home for himself in Stratford. He became a resident of his native place when he was still in middle life; there is evidence that his interest in Stratford and his communication with it were never interrupted;

that his care not only for his family but for his father was watchful and efficient; there is no reason to doubt that, taking into account the difficulties and expense of travel, his visits to his home were frequent; there is no evidence that his family was not with him at times in London. In this aspect of his life, as in many others, absence of detailed and trustworthy information furnishes no ground for inferences unfavourable to his happiness or his integrity.

The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's leaving Stratford is a matter of minor importance; the poaching episode may have hastened it, but could hardly have determined a career so full of the power of selfdirection. Sooner or later he must have gone to London, for London was the one place in England which could afford him the opportunity which his genius demanded. It cannot be doubted that through all the ferment and spiritual unrest through which such a spirit as his must have gone that searching and illuminating experience which is appointed to every great creative nature — his mind had moved uncertainly but inevitably toward the theatre as the sphere for the expression of the rich and passionate life steadily deepening and rising within him. The atmosphere and temper of his time, the growing spirit of nationality, the stories upon which his imagination had been fed from earliest childhood, the men whom he knew, the instinct and impulse of his own nature these things determined his career, and, far more insistently than any outward circumstance or happening, drew him to London.