Hero Tales from History — Shakespeare, The Greatest Maker of Plays

FOUR LEADERS IN THE OLD WORLD

SHAKESPEARE, THE GREATEST MAKER OF PLAYS

Perhaps there is no one who has done so much for the world, yet about whose life so little is known, as William Shakespeare.

His father was a farmer and market man, and his mother was Mary Arden, a prosperous farmer’s daughter.

The father was so highly respected that he was made high bailiff, or mayor, of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Shakespeare family lived.

It was one of the father’s duties to give out licenses to players or actors who went from town to town performing their plays.

Sometimes they gave their shows out of doors; and when theaters were built they were galleries around a space of ground.

The people who paid the most stood or sat in the galleries and the poor people saw the play from the ground, called the pit.

Strolling players were looked upon in those days almost as tramps are to-day.

They had to have licenses like street bands nowadays.

They often gave their shows in a town square and took up a collection for their pay.

John Shakespeare was fond of these shows, and there is no doubt that his son William was taken to see them before he went to the Stratford Grammar School when he was seven years old.

Here the boy is said to have studied Latin, writing, and arithmetic.

Judging from the specimens that are still to be seen of William Shakespeare’s penmanship, it was not a great success.

One of the great [Illustration: SHAKESPEARE AMONG HIS FRIENDS IN LONDON.

_From the painting by John Ford_] play-writers of Shakespeare’s time wrote that Will had learned “small Latin and less Greek” at school.

But Latin was the chief study in the schools of that time.

It was sung and spoken in church, and it was thought necessary for even a farmer’s son to study that language.

When William was thirteen his father was unfortunate in business, and the boy had to leave school to earn his living.

There is a legend that he started in to learn the butcher’s trade, but it seems more likely that he worked as a lawyer’s boy and clerk.

If all accounts are true, he must have been a mischievous lad, for the story goes that he was once taken up for poaching, or shooting a deer, in the park of one of the great men in the county.

When he was eighteen Will Shakespeare married a farmer’s daughter eight years older than himself.

By the time he was twenty-one the young father had three children.

Two of these, Hamnet and Judith, were twins.

Hamnet died before he grew to manhood, and about all that is known of Judith Shakespeare is that she, like her mother, never learned to read.

It was not thought necessary then for farmers’ wives and daughters to read and write.

A lawyer’s clerk with five mouths to feed could hardly find enough to do in Stratford to earn a living, so William Shakespeare went to London to seek his fortune.

It is said that he began life in the great city by holding horses in front of one of the theaters, as they did not have hitching-posts in Shakespeare’s days.

Then he was promoted to be prompter’s boy.

One of his duties was to tell the actors when it was time for them to go on the stage and play their parts.

Nothing is really known of what the young man from Stratford was doing for six or seven years.

He made his living in one way or another in connection with the theaters.

At the end of that time a dying actor left some bitter lines about Will “Shake-scene.

” But another actor at this time called Shakespeare a good man, a graceful actor, and a witty writer of plays.

Shakespeare seems not to have been a leading actor.

It is said that he took the part of the Ghost in his own play of “Hamlet.

” He became so successful as a writer that he was “commanded” to bring his company and produce a play before Queen Elizabeth in one of her palaces.

It is recorded that Shakespeare was paid from thirty to seventy-five dollars for one of his plays.

While it is true that thirty dollars would buy as much then as three hundred dollars to-day, yet that was a very small price to pay for the greatest dramas ever written.

But the real value of the greatest things of the world cannot be measured by money.

Every one is said to have at least one great chance in life.

Shakespeare’s Door of Opportunity was the door of a theater.

He did not wait for it to open; he opened it himself.

Shakespeare’s life showed that “poets are born, not made.

” He had the keenest insight into the human heart and life of all the writers who ever lived.