formed tastes, of their authors had imperfectly described. But as the love of theatricals became general, and the principles of dramatic composition better understood, the adaptation of the early plays to the more modern stage was a common practice. Encouraged by an easy acquisition of pecuniary reward, for no comparison existed between the task of revisal and the labour of original composition, authors of the highest talents did not disdain the employment. Decker, Rowley, Hayward, Jonson, and others, were frequently thus engaged in conferring value on the works of others, and to this ungrateful task the first efforts of Shakspeare were modestly confined. The second and third parts of Henry VI., (with the first part, Shakspeare had undoubtedly little, if any thing to do,) are vast improvements upon preceding dramatic productions by no means destitute of merit, and their success was such as to embolden the bard to risk a higher flight. The utmost efforts of industry, seconded by a prudence too seldom found among the votaries of the Muses, were barely adequate to the supply of nature's simplest wants. The price paid by the managers for a new play was twenty nobles, or 67. 13s. 4d., for which consideration the author surrendered all property whatever in the piece. If, as was sometimes the case, the play was not absolutely purchased by the theatre, the poet looked for remuneration from the profits of a third night's representation, the precarious produce of the sale of his play, when published, at sixpence a copy, and the hardearned fee of forty shillings for an adulatory dedication to a patron. The sums given for the alteration of old plays varied extremely, and were, doubtless, regulated by the quantity of new matter furnished, and the success attendant upon the revival: as little as ten shillings was sometimes paid, and the highest remuneration was short of what was given for a new play. Dramatic writers were, therefore, generally poor: they were bound to theatrical managers either by favours past, existing debts, or the perpetual dread of one day needing their assistance. Their wants often compelled them to solicit, nay, their very existence appears sometimes to have depended on, advances on the embryo productions of their brains, and the labours of to-day were devoted to cancel the obligation which the necessities of yesterday had contracted. It is truly pitiable to find the great Ben Jonson soliciting from Henslowe, the advance of a sum so paltry as "five In 1592 Shakspeare was well known as a writer for the stage, but no point of the poet's history is involved in greater obscurity than the time of his commencing original dramatic author, and every attempt to connect with certainty so interesting a circumstance with any one of his numerous dramas has ended in disappointment. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Comedy of Errors have been pointed out, but others might, with equal propriety, have been selected. The combination of the profession of a dramatic writer with the occupation of a player must have lightened the pecuniary difficulties of Shakspeare, but could afford him little prospect of emerging from the poverty in which almost every writer for the stage was then involved. But if he reaped no great pecuniary advantage from his labours as an actor and author, yet in his latter character he advanced in worldly consideration. The actors, in his day, were both denominated and regarded as servants, and when the comedian's duty summoned him to attendance at the mansion of his noble patron, the buttery was the place to which he was admitted. But the society of dramatic writers was courted by the opulent; the nobility adopted them as acquaintances, and made them at once the objects of their bounty and esteem. And thus it happened to Shakspeare and the ac Sir Thomas complished Lord Southampton. Heminge, his Lordship's father-in-law, was treasurer of the chambers to the Queen, and the rewarding of the actors at the court was part of his office. The theatre and actors, therefore, were almost necessarily forced upon the attention of the young nobleman, and the effect of the early impression is sufficiently marked at still later periods of Lord Southampton's life by his neglect of the court for a daily attendance at the theatre; his entertainment of Cecil with "plaies"; and his causing the tragedy of Richard the Second to be acted, for the double purpose of sedition and of amusement, on the night previous to Essex's rebellion.* At the theatre, then, commenced that connection between himself and Shakspeare which is first intimated by the poet's dedication to his Lordship of the poem of Venus and Adonis, in 1593, when Lord Southampton was just twenty years of age. Their mutual satisfaction was testified, and their growing friendship cemented, by Shakspeare's repetition of the compliment on the publication of the Rape of Lucrece in 1594. It is reported of Lord Southampton that he at one time gave to Shakspeare a thousand pounds to * Letter from Sir Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney in the Sidney papers, and Lord Bacon's works. enable him to complete a purchase*; and the assertion is strongly corroborated by the opulence in which Shakspeare is found a very few years after his arrival in London, -an opulence far too considerable to have accrued from his emoluments of actor and writer for the stage. Some of his plays could only have entitled him to the smaller recompence paid for the alteration of an old drama. His original pieces were sold absolutely to the theatre: the gain upon them, therefore, is ascertainable with tolerable precision, as he neither derived advantage from their publication nor from their dedication to the opulent.† In 1597, Shakspeare bought New Place, one of the best houses in his native town, which he repaired and adorned. In the following year, apparently as a man of known property, he was applied to by a brother townsman for the loan of thirty pounds ‡; and, about the same time, he expressed himself as not unwilling to advance, on adequate security, money for the use of the town of Stratford. The poet's still increasing * Rowe, on the authority of Davenant. + Fourteen plays of Shakspeare were printed during his lifetime, but without advantage to him, as they were surreptitious publications, alike fraudulent on him, on the managers of the Globe, and on the public. Letter from Richard Quyney to Shakspeare. |