"The young gallants were glad when the Play-scene was over."
_Hamlet._ He poisons him in the garden for his estate. His name's Gonzago.
[Illustration: THE PLAY-SCENE IN _HAMLET_. _Painting by W. G. Simmonds._]
Yet it might almost be averred that William Shakespeare found himself a dramatist by accident. He accepted from the first the conditions of a life despised and contemned, the life of the actor classed with rogues and vagabonds, banished with contumely into ignominious neighbourhoods. "He looked upon the half-art of acting with disdain and disgust": he saw his worst plays performed much more frequently than his best. By nature a poet _pur et simple_, of a delicate, fastidious, bookish temperament, one who continually corrected his best verses with endless pains and critical scrupulosity--he had been thrown into the rowdy pot-house company of second-rate actors, and was accused by jealous rivals of being "an upstart crow," swelled out with inordinate vanity--or gibed at, by those who professed themselves his friends, as a slovenly and careless writer--or openly contemned by the very lackeys and menials, should he receive a call to Court. And this was only one of the darker sides to the life of this gentle-natured, cheerful, seemingly successful man. The others, as we shall presently perceive, were, in some sense, infinitely more tragic.
The rehearsal over, and the hungry actors pouring forth to obtain their dinner at the nearest taverns or cookshops, Shakespeare (who had, as we know, already broken fast) re-crossed the river and paced quietly up towards St. Paul's Churchyard, to visit the booksellers' shops. The Signs of the _White Greyhound_, the _Angel_, the _Spread Eagle_, the _Green Dragon_, the _Flower de Luce_, and so on, were the recognised rendezvous for men of letters, and Shakespeare's own earlier works, such as _Venus and Adonis_, _Lucrece_, _Henry IV_, and _Richard II_, were issued at several of these shops. Here he could foregather with learned and literary friends; here he could sit and study the latest books; here, in short, he was no longer the actor, but the author. And it may be noted in passing, that Shakespeare's literary _confrères_ respected him, not as the permanent dramatist of the _Globe_, the transmuter of old lead into gold of Ophir--but as a lyrical poet, an authentic "maker" of beautiful verse. "The Muses would speak Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they could speak English," so ran the encomium of his admirers. His "sugared sonnets," they declared, were of surpassing excellence and charm. "His facetious (pleasant) grace in writing," as they termed it, "which approves (proves) his art," was that of the sonneteer, not the playwright. That state and majesty, that knowledge of human nature, which distinguish his dramatic work, seemed, to his contemporaries, quite foreign to the man they knew, the witty, gracious, graceful poet.