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faint tradition, it may have furnished him with more than one sketch which he later developed into a figure full of reality and substance. It would have been quite in keeping with the breadth and freedom of his genius to find a clown in Oxford more interesting than some of the scholars he met; for clowns occasionally have some touch of individuality, some glimmer of humour, while scholars are sometimes found without flavour, pungency, or originality. Shakespeare's principle of selection in dealing with men was always vital; he put his hand unerringly on significant persons.

In 1586 he reached London, without means, in search of a vocation and a place in which to exercise it. The time was fortunate, and coöperated with him in ways which he did not, then or later, understand; for, however clearly a man may comprehend his gift and master his tools, he is too much a part of his age to discern his spiritual relations to it as these are later disclosed in the subtle channels through which it inspires and vitalizes him, and he in turn expresses, interprets, and affects it.

To the youth from the little village on the Avon, London was a great and splendid city; but the vast metropolis of to-day, with a population of more than five million people, was then a town of about one • hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The great fire which was to change it from a mediæval to a modern city was almost a century distant; and the spire of old St. Paul's was seen, as one approached, rising over masses of red-roofed, many-gabled houses,

crowded into the smallest space, and protected by walls and trenches. The most conspicuous objects in the city were the Tower, which rose beside the Thames as a symbol of the personal authority of the monarch; the Cathedral, which served as a common centre of community life, where the news of the day was passed from group to group, where gossip was freely interchanged, and servants were hired, and debtors found immunity from arrest; and old London Bridge, a town in itself, lined with buildings, crowded with people, with high gate-towers at either end, often ghastly with the heads that had recently fallen from the block at the touch of the executioner's axe.

The streets were narrow, irregular, overhung with projecting signs which creaked on rusty hinges and, in high winds, often came down on the heads of unfortunate pedestrians. These highways were still foul with refuse and evil odours; within the memory of men then living they had been entirely unpaved. Their condition had become so noisome and dangerous fifty years earlier that Henry VIII. began the work of paving the principal thoroughfares. Round stones were used for this purpose, and were put in position as they came to hand, without reference to form, size, or regularity of surface. Walking and riding were, in consequence, equally disagreeable. The thoroughfares were beaten into dust in summer and hollowed out into pools in winter; a ditch, picturesquely called "the kennel," ran through the road and served as a gutter. Into these running streams, fed with the refuse which now goes through

the sewers, horses splashed and pedestrians often slipped. The narrow passage for foot-passengers was overcrowded, and every one sought the space farthest away from the hurrying pedestrians and litter-carriers and reckless riders. Two centuries later Dr. Johnson divided the inhabitants of London into two classes the peaceable and the quarrelsome, or those who "gave the wall" and those who took it. To add to the discomfort, great water-spouts gathered the showers as they fell on the roofs of houses and shops, and discharged them in concentrated form on the heads of passers-by.

The London of that day was the relatively small and densely populated area in the heart of the modern metropolis which is known as the City. Its centre was St. Paul's Cathedral; and Eastcheap, which Falstaff loved so well, was a typical thoroughfare. A labyrinth of foul alleys and dingy, noisome courts covered the space now penetrated by the most crowded streets. Outside the limits of the town stretched lonely, neglected fields, dangerous at night by reason of footpads and all manner of lawless persons, in an age when streets were unlighted and police unknown. St. Pancras, surrounded by its quiet fields, was a lonely place with extensive rural views in all directions. Westminster was separated from the city by a long stretch of country known later as the Downs; cows grazed in Gray's Inn Fields.

The Thames was the principal thoroughfare between London and Westminster, and was gay with barges and boats of every kind, and noisy with the cries and oaths

of hundreds of watermen.

The vocabulary of profan

ity and vituperation was nowhere richer; every boat's load on its way up or down the stream abused every other boat's load in passing; the shouts "Eastward Ho!" or "Westward Ho !" were deafening.

In 1586 London was responding to the impetus which rapidly increasing trade had given the whole country, and was fast outgrowing its ancient limits. Neither the Tudor nor the Stuart sovereigns looked with favour on the growth of the power of a community which was never lacking in the independence which comes from civic courage and civic wealth. James I. said, with characteristic pedantry, that "the growth of the capital resembleth that of the head of a rickety child, in which an excessive influx of humours draweth and impoverisheth the extremities, and at the same time generateth distemper in the overloaded parts." The instinct which warned the father of Charles I. against the growth of London was sound, as the instincts of James often were; but there was no power within reach of the sovereign which could check the growth of the great city of the future. That growth was part of the expansion of England; one evidence of that rising tide of racial vitality which was to carry the English spirit, genius, and activity to the ends of the earth.

CHAPTER V

THE LONDON STAGE

A YOUTH of Shakespeare's genius and charm of nature needed only a bit of earth on which to put his foot in the arena of struggle which London was in that day, and still is, in order to make his way to a secure position. That bit of ground from which he could push his fortunes forward was probably afforded by his friendship with Richard Field, a Stratford boy who had bound himself, after the custom of the time, to Thomas Vautrollier, a printer and publisher in Blackfriars, not far from the two theatres then in existence, The Theatre and The Curtain. Richard was the son of " Henry ffelde of Stratford uppon Aven in the countye of Warwick, tanner," a friend of John Shakespeare. Young Field, who had recently ended his apprenticeship, came into the possession of the business by marriage about this time, and his name will always be kept in memory because his imprint appears on the earliest of Shakespeare's publications, the "Venus and Adonis," which was first issued in 1593 and reissued in 1594 and 1596; and on the title-page of "The Rape of Lucrece" in 1594. The relation of this printer and his predecessor to the poet was intimate in the true sense of the word:

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