Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
Shakspere, His Friends And Acquaintances.
wife : " Doll , I charge thee , by the love of our 3 'outh , ancl by my soul ' s rest , that thou Avilt see this man paid : for if he and his wife had not succoured me , I had died in the streets ! " It Avas from him that Shakspere stole ( as he at least considered it ) the plot of that Winter ' s Tale , first acted apparently at Whitehall , in 1611 , and once more , after two hundred and sixty-seven years have passed over our great and growing metropolis , reproduced at old Drury , Avith the scenery of a Beverly .
Nor must I dilate on the contemporary dramatists , Thomas Nashe , bitterest of controversialists and keenest of satirists ; of little John Lyhy , whom Meres calls " eloquent and witty , " and who Nashe said had " one of the best Avits in England ; " of Thomas Lodge , AA'I IO , after graduating at Oxford , became player , dramatist , and aftei-Avards barrister and physician , from whom Shakspere derived the plot of his As You Like It ; of Thomas Kyd , whose Jeronimo Ben Jonson declared
to be " the only best ancl judiciously penned play in Europe ; " of Dekker , and Anthony Munday , and the rest ; for these alone AA'ould supply matter for a chapter themselves . JSTor must I pause to imagine Burleigh , and Raleigh , and Sidney , and Bacon , and the other great men of the period , talking familiarly with the popular dramatist , as seems to have been the custom , and how the father of inductive philosophy would have laughed to think there could be fools in a distant age , boasting ¦ of its enlightenment , who could really , without one particle of eAidence , ascribe to him the authorship of . Shakspere ' s plays ! But , though my space is nearly exhausted , " last ,
but not least , I must briefly express the great gratitude we all ought-to feel to the dear " fellows " of the immortal bard , John Heminge ( whom Malone supposes to haA'e been also a Stratford man , as the baptismal registers of Stratford church prove that there Avas a John Heminge at Shottery in 1567 , and a Richard Heminge in 1570 ) and Henry Condell , to both of whom also the sum of twenty-six shillings and eightpence each was left in the poet ' s will , " to buy them rings " to wear in memory of him whom they Avould see on earth no more ; for to those two sharers with Shakspere in the
theatre Ave owe the first collected edition of the plays in which they had so often acted leading parts ; many of them never before published , and the others only surreptitiously . " It had been a thing , " they modestly say , " we confess , worthy to have been wished , that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings . But since it hath been ordained otherwise , and he , by death , departed from that right , we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their Care and pain to have collected
and published them ; and so to have published them , as where , before , you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies , maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them , —even those are now offered to your view cured , and perfect of their limbs ; and all the rest , absolute in their numbers , as he conceived them ; who , as he Avas a happy imitator of Nature , was a most gentle expresser of it . His mind and hand went together ; and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers . "
But for those " pious felloAvs " of the great bard , as Ben Jonson terms them , the plays of Shakspere , like those of the old Greek dramatists , might have been for the most part lost for ever , and the mental legacy he has left us—wisely estimated by Thomas Carlyle as worth much more than our whole Indian Empire—would many of them , and amongst them some of his best , have been totally unknown to us . In some future numbers of the Masonic Magazine I hope to be permitted to have
other glances with the readers at Shakspere , from various points of view , and the men who surrounded him ; for it is a subject worthy of the study of every Freemason . Rose Cottage , Stokesley .
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
Shakspere, His Friends And Acquaintances.
wife : " Doll , I charge thee , by the love of our 3 'outh , ancl by my soul ' s rest , that thou Avilt see this man paid : for if he and his wife had not succoured me , I had died in the streets ! " It Avas from him that Shakspere stole ( as he at least considered it ) the plot of that Winter ' s Tale , first acted apparently at Whitehall , in 1611 , and once more , after two hundred and sixty-seven years have passed over our great and growing metropolis , reproduced at old Drury , Avith the scenery of a Beverly .
Nor must I dilate on the contemporary dramatists , Thomas Nashe , bitterest of controversialists and keenest of satirists ; of little John Lyhy , whom Meres calls " eloquent and witty , " and who Nashe said had " one of the best Avits in England ; " of Thomas Lodge , AA'I IO , after graduating at Oxford , became player , dramatist , and aftei-Avards barrister and physician , from whom Shakspere derived the plot of his As You Like It ; of Thomas Kyd , whose Jeronimo Ben Jonson declared
to be " the only best ancl judiciously penned play in Europe ; " of Dekker , and Anthony Munday , and the rest ; for these alone AA'ould supply matter for a chapter themselves . JSTor must I pause to imagine Burleigh , and Raleigh , and Sidney , and Bacon , and the other great men of the period , talking familiarly with the popular dramatist , as seems to have been the custom , and how the father of inductive philosophy would have laughed to think there could be fools in a distant age , boasting ¦ of its enlightenment , who could really , without one particle of eAidence , ascribe to him the authorship of . Shakspere ' s plays ! But , though my space is nearly exhausted , " last ,
but not least , I must briefly express the great gratitude we all ought-to feel to the dear " fellows " of the immortal bard , John Heminge ( whom Malone supposes to haA'e been also a Stratford man , as the baptismal registers of Stratford church prove that there Avas a John Heminge at Shottery in 1567 , and a Richard Heminge in 1570 ) and Henry Condell , to both of whom also the sum of twenty-six shillings and eightpence each was left in the poet ' s will , " to buy them rings " to wear in memory of him whom they Avould see on earth no more ; for to those two sharers with Shakspere in the
theatre Ave owe the first collected edition of the plays in which they had so often acted leading parts ; many of them never before published , and the others only surreptitiously . " It had been a thing , " they modestly say , " we confess , worthy to have been wished , that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings . But since it hath been ordained otherwise , and he , by death , departed from that right , we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their Care and pain to have collected
and published them ; and so to have published them , as where , before , you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies , maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them , —even those are now offered to your view cured , and perfect of their limbs ; and all the rest , absolute in their numbers , as he conceived them ; who , as he Avas a happy imitator of Nature , was a most gentle expresser of it . His mind and hand went together ; and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers . "
But for those " pious felloAvs " of the great bard , as Ben Jonson terms them , the plays of Shakspere , like those of the old Greek dramatists , might have been for the most part lost for ever , and the mental legacy he has left us—wisely estimated by Thomas Carlyle as worth much more than our whole Indian Empire—would many of them , and amongst them some of his best , have been totally unknown to us . In some future numbers of the Masonic Magazine I hope to be permitted to have
other glances with the readers at Shakspere , from various points of view , and the men who surrounded him ; for it is a subject worthy of the study of every Freemason . Rose Cottage , Stokesley .