but not certain, that the son's education in school now came to an end. Until his eighteenth year we hear nothing of him; but we then (1582) find him married to Anne Hathaway, who was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer near Stratford, and seven years her husband's senior. In 1583 a child, and in 1585, twins were born to the young couple. In 1587 we hear of him in London, where he lived until 1611. Though this quarter century is the period of his greatest literary activity, we know scarcely anything definite of his life except that by playwriting, acting, and managing theaters and investing his earnings in them, the country-bred boy amassed what was for his time a very respectable fortune and achieved what is universally admitted to be the most exalted position in ours or in any other literature. In 1597 he bought "New Place," a fine house in Stratford, and later purchased a tract of farm land near by. About 1612, he left London and took up his residence at Stratford, where he died in 1616.

Except for the dates of the publication and acting of his plays, the foregoing paragraph comprises most of the authentic significant facts of the poet's life. Tradition and conjecture, no less than scholarship, have naturally been busy with so illustrious a subject; and the student will miss a rare pleasure if he fails to read in connection with his study of Shakespeare's plays, some such standard life of the great dramatist as, say, Sidney Lee's "A Life of William Shakespeare."

So greatly did the playhouse of Shakespeare's time differ from the theater of ours that our understanding and, to some extent, our enjoyment of his dramas depends upon our conception of the stage for which he wrote.

The buildings were of stone and wood; round, octagonal, or square; three or four stories in height, and roofless, except for a narrow pentshed extending inward from the top of the walls. The stage was unsheltered from the weather, as it projected from the wall into the open central space. Around it stood on the ground (in the "pit") the part of the audience (the "groundlings") who paid for "standing room only"; those who could afford to pay for seats occupied the balconies which ran around the building, one above the other; and the gallants and rufflers of the day bought the best seats in the house, viz., those upon the outer edge of the stage. To us, however, the most surprising feature is the almost entire absence of scenery, a painted board usually denoting the location of the action; and the only approach to our modern complex of sets, drops, wings, flies, etc., was a simple curtain which separated the front part of the stage from the rear, and which, being drawn aside, "discovered" scenes or characters. The actors were men and boys; no women were permitted to appear upon the stage until the Restoration. On the other hand, the costuming was as elaborate and gorgeous as the mechanical apparatus was crude and meager.

This remarkable playhouse tells us very strongly a number of things about the Elizabethans; but it says nothing else so emphatically as that the plays presented under such severe limitations had to please all sorts and conditions of men, and, as a corollary, that the actors of those days had to know how

to act.

The comparative newness of the English theater; the consequent uncertainty of its social position—it was practically permitted only in the suburbs; the nature of the audiences

drawn largely from the unlettered on the one hand and the idle rich on the other, with women neither as actors nor as patrons; the stirring times; and the growing importance of London among the world's great seaports a fact which attracted to the city men of every sort-all these combined to make Shakespeare's productive years the golden age of the English drama.

In no other period have playwrights been obliged to study so carefully what would please their audiences, or have audiences so unmistakably demonstrated their pleasure or disapproval of the play before them. If the spectators were displeased with the playwright, he bade fair to be whipped or, at least, to be tossed in a blanket; if they considered the acting poor, often they simply mobbed the stage and beat the actors. This is partly accounted for when we remember that to the typical Englishman of that day, attendance upon the theater was more than a mere means of amusement; it was his sole means of education-his newspaper, his novel, his history; it broadened his mind, it fired his imagination, and it fixed his patriotism. As has been shown above, the writers and actors of the playsand the writers were almost always actors were never permitted to forget that they were writing principally for Englishmen, and for Englishmen living in England's most glorious age, who knew what they wanted and would not have what they did not want; and what they demanded above all else was a story interesting enough to swing them off into the other world of the imagination, and well enough acted to tally with their everyday experience of men.

This rigorous discipline, then, and the severe limitations of the playhouses themselves, will help us to understand the appear

ance, during the latter part of the 16th century and the early part of the 17th, of the most illustrious group of dramatists our literature has known. Most of them are worthy of serious study; many are still read for their sheer excellence of one kind or another; and several, by universal consent, rank with the greatest who have written in other countries and other times. But it was perhaps the misfortune of his contemporaries to have lived and worked when Shakespeare did; for he so far surpassed them that whereas, except to the student or the scholarly reader, their works are hardly known, his plays are universally read, acted, studied, quoted, and-final test of human approbation-loved.

NOTE. For a simple, sympathetic, and extremely interesting account of the whole Elizabethan period, the student is referred to Chapter IV of Halleck's "History of English Literature," or to Chapter IV of C. F. Johnson's "History of English and American Literature."

66

For the position of As You Like It" among Shakespeare's works,

see pages 103-104.

SCENE: Oliver's house; Duke Frederick's court; and the Forest of Arden.

ACT I.

SCENE I. Orchard of Oliver's House.

Enter ORLANDO and ADAM.

Orlando. As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion: he bequeathed me by will but poor a1 thousand crowns, and, as thou say'st, charg'd my brother, on his blessing, to breed me well; and there begins my sadness. My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit;2 for my part,

1 This transposition of the indefinite article occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare.

2 Proficiency.