A Great Shakespeare Discovery

I

IF one wishes to feed a secret hope of discovering new facts about Shakespeare’s life, one is not well advised to turn for nourishment to the standard biographies. It is the business of standard biographies not to stimulate research, but to capitalize its results; and ever about such books hangs an air of regretful finality dampening to the spirits.

Not so with the occasional observations of the pioneering record searcher. His account of good hunting, and his description of promising territory to be explored, are not only fascinating but heartening.

Encouragement of this expert sort was thrown out by one who was perhaps the greatest of all discoverers of Shakespeare material — Halliwell-Phillipps. In 1884, toward the close of his active career, he published ‘for strictly private circulation ' a suggestive paper in which he said: —

That there are undiscovered notices of Shakespeare amidst the millions of papers in our national Record Office may be fairly accepted as certain. Some, unfortunately, may remain concealed for many generations, but others, it is hoped, may be unearthed by inductive methods of research, that is to say, by carefully bearing in mind the names of his friends and professional associates, his dealings with property, &c., and in that way to trace out accounts of legal proceedings in which it is likely that he was interested.

He went on to suggest that the rolls of the Court of Queen’s Bench should be sifted, both Coram Regina and Controlment Rolls.

On the strength of this hint I embarked recently on a careful search through the rolls of the Queen’s Bench for the period covered by Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the course of examining the Controlment Rolls, I was arrested by a special set of entries described as ‘petitions for sureties of the peace.’ These are brief records of proceedings on the peculiarly English plan of preventing crimes of violence — a method which obliges the person alleged to have threatened the petitioner to enter bond, which he will forfeit if he breaks the peace. Jacob’s Law Dictionary (1729) outlines the procedure as follows : —

He that demands security for the peace, must make oath before the justice of blows given [him], or that he stands in fear of his life, or some bodily hurt, or that he fears the party will burn his house, &c., and that he doth not demand the peace of him for any malice or revenge, but for his own safety.

If such sworn information were laid before a judge of the Queen’s Bench, he would thereupon command the sheriff of the appropriate county to attach and bring up the person complained of. On his appearance, the latter was required to enter, with two bondsmen or sureties, into sufficient bonds, conditioned on his keeping the peace ‘towards all her Majesty’s subjects and especially towards’ the person complaining. If he should break the peace within the period specified (usually a year), he and his friends would forfeit their bonds.

It is easy to see that fascinating quarrels may lie behind judicial records such as these. ‘For fear of death and mutilation of his limbs’ is the phrase used in the Elizabethan records; hence the entries on the Controlment Rolls, brief as they were, laid hold on my imagination. At first glance it might seem a hopeless business to search among such violent quarrels for traces of Ben Jenson’s ‘gentle Shakespeare ’ and Anthony Scoloker’s ‘friendly Shakespeare.’ But we must remember that the gentle, friendly Shakespeare, like everyone else in those days, ‘at his side wore steel’; and an Elizabethan gentleman of wit and courage had no need to be as violent in temper as Kit Marlowe to find himself at some time or other with an unsought quarrel on his hands. If Shakespeare was at some time in his life involved in a quarrel, the possible record of it in these Controlment Rolls might prove to be the outcrop of a vein which, if followed closely, might yield rich ore. I confess that the chance was slim, but it was sufficient to set me off on an extended search.

II

Pursuing my quest down through the years of Shakespeare’s early life, I came to 1596. Here, in the roll of entries for the Michaelmas term, the good angel of record searchers must have favored my rummaging in his haystack, for at length I was guided to the precious needle: —

Anglia ss Willelmus Wayte petit securitates pacis versus Willelmum Shakspere, Fran ciscum Langley, Dorotheam Soer uxorem Johannis Soer, & Annam Lee, ob metum mortis &c.

Attachiamentum vicecomiti Surreieretornabile xviii Martini.

The legal Latin may be Englished thus: —

England Be it known that William Wayte craves sureties of the peace against William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, and so forth.

Writ of attachment issued to the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the eighteenth of St. Martin [i.e. November 29, 1596, the last day of Michaelmas term].

Here was strange treasure-trove. Shakespeare, hitherto known only as a poet and player, affable and unobtrusive, now for the first time steps out from the dusty records of the past as protagonist in a turbulent scene of raw Elizabethan life. To be sure, there is here no actual fight to the death, as in the cases of his fellow playwrights, Watson, Marlowe, Jonson, Day, and Porter; nevertheless this man Wayte swears that Shakespeare and these three other persons have threatened him with death. Who is William Wayte? What made Shakespeare threaten him? Who are these three persons who were attached with Shakespeare? The two women are unknown, but in Francis Langley, the other man, we recognize a figure familiar to students of the Elizabethan stage.

Shakespeare’s senior by fourteen years, Langley was a member of the Drapers’ Company, and dealt in trade as a goldsmith. (By Elizabeth’s time the London livery companies had relaxed the strictness of the earlier rules of the craft guilds, and many a citizen of London dealt in a trade other than that of the company to which he belonged.) Langley had purchased the manor of Paris Garden in the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1589, planning no doubt to add to his sources of income by letting houses which he intended to build on his new property. In the winter of 1594-1595, as we know, he had set about building in his grounds a handsome playhouse which he named ’the Swan.’ Langley would naturally seek to let his splendid new theatre, as soon as it was ready, to a good troupe of actors. It has not, however, been known what company or companies of players made use of the Swan before Pembroke’s Men came to it in February 1597.

After this brief introduction to Francis Langley, let us return to our newly discovered document, in which he is associated with Shakespeare, and see what we can deduce from the date and place mentioned in this astonishing petition for sureties of the peace.

The writ of attachment, or order for the appearance of Shakespeare and the others in court, reveals the interesting new fact that Shakespeare, as well as Langley, was living in the bailiwick of the sheriff of Surrey in November 1596. Langley’s manor of Paris Garden adjoined the Southwark Bankside, or Liberty of the Clink, with its BearGarden and Henslowe’s playhouse, the Rose. For Shakespeare’s residence in Southwark this document is new evidence of prime importance, confirming as it does the uncorroborated statement made in 1796 by Edmund Malone, based on a source which no other scholar has seen: ’From a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear-Garden, in 1596.’

With this new certainty in hand, we are now in a position to ask why Shakespeare migrated from the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate (where in October 1596 we know that he had been assessed five shillings on goods appraised for taxation at a value of five pounds), across the Thames to the Bankside in or before November of the same year. It was not, of course, to be near the famous Globe, his later headquarters, since that theatre was not built and ready for plays until the spring or summer of 1599. Hitherto it has been supposed that Shakespeare’s company used Burbage’s playhouse called ‘the Theatre’ in Shoreditch into the year 1597. But of this there is no proof; and if it were so, why did Shakespeare move from Bishopsgate, a district within easy reach of Burbage’s Theatre, to the Bankside in or before November 1596, and give himself a gratuitous daily journey of more than two miles each way over the water and through London to the playing place in Shoreditch?

I wish to suggest that Shakespeare went to the Bankside because he and his fellow actors had shifted their chief centre of operations from the Theatre in the autumn of 1596, and established themselves for a time in Langley’s new playhouse, the Swan, in Paris Garden.

III

We shall see that the reasons for this move were urgent. At the period of our document the inveterate opposition of the puritanical authorities of the City had been growing to a strength which threatened the livelihood of even the best-protected companies of players. In November 1594, when Langley was preparing to build the Swan, the Lord Mayor, outraged by the construction of another playhouse, had seized the opportunity to urge Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, not only to forbid Langley to proceed, but also to put down ’all other places’ of acting in and near London. In September 1595, the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen followed up their attack with a letter to the Privy Council, pressing for the final abolition of stage playing. In the deliberations of the Privy Council, Henry Lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain, who was of course at this time the patron of Shakespeare’s company, must have had no easy task to protect the interests of his players against such assaults as these.

Unhappily for Shakespeare and his fellows, on July 22, 1596, Lord Hunsdon died. On the very day that death robbed Hunsdon’s company of their powerful protector, plays were prohibited throughout London and the suburbs, ‘for that by drawing of much people together increase of sickness is feared.’ Though this was the reason given, we can find no evidence of plague. In addition to the temporary prohibition of acting in the theatres, which were all in the suburbs or in Southwark, this order meant the closing of the inn-yard playing places in the City proper, which had been important sources of revenue to the players. Once the inn yards were closed to the actors, the new balance of power in the Privy Council gave the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen the means to prevent their reopening, for Hunsdon’s successor as Lord Chamberlain, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, did not look with favor on the players.

Cut off definitively from the lucrative inn yards even when acting in the theatres was once more allowed, the troupes of players were restricted to the four playhouses in the suburbs — the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, and the Rose and the new Swan on the Surrey side. By this time two companies had risen to a dominant position in London: the Admiral’s Men, with Edward Alleyn, acting at Henslowe’s Rose, and their rivals, the late Chamberlain’s Men, with Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, who, as we have seen, had been using the Theatre. There were difficulties, however, with this house, for it had long borne the brunt of Puritan attack; and now James Burbage, its owner (father of Richard Burbage, the actor), was involved in a dispute with his ground landlord over a renewal of the lease. Burbage was nearly two years behind with his rent. Moreover, the Theatre was an old building, found to be considerably decayed when it was pulled down two years later. Altogether, in 1596 it must have been a disadvantageous and uninviting place. As for the other possible house, the Curtain in Shoreditch, there is no evidence that Shakespeare and his fellows used it in the autumn of 1596, the date of Shakespeare’s quarrel in Surrey.

On the other hand, Langley’s Swan in Paris Garden was new, well built, and was described as the largest and fairest of all the playhouses. It had the added advantage of being situated in a manor outside the limits of the borough of Southwark; and even Southwark, though attached to London, was never so strictly under the municipal control as the City proper. Southwark’s notorious contempt for the City authorities is referred to by John Donne in his first Elegy: —

To players who had tasted the bitter hostility of the City, the advantages of the Swan were obvious, Shakespeare’s fellows might well resolve to leave the older houses with their drawbacks to less important companies, such as the Queen’s Men, who had passed their prime, and seek to establish themselves in the impressive new theatre in Paris Garden.

As we have seen, although the Swan must have been finished by the middle of 1595, it has not been known what company or companies of players used it before 1597. Professor Wallace discovered that in February of the latter year a newly formed group of actors, ‘servants of the right honorable the Earl of Pembroke,’ contracted with Langley to play at the Swan for one year following. But we also learned from this discovery that these were not the first actors at the Swan, for they later testified in a suit against Langley that the house had been used for plays ‘lately afore’ February 1597. Our new document now points to Shakespeare’s fellows, the late Chamberlain’s Men, as the earlier users in question, for it indicates that Shakespeare had moved to the Bankside late in 1596 and was associated with Francis Langley, the owner of the new playhouse. The reasonable inference is that his company was then acting at the Swan.

So much of what our new document reveals is clear enough; but the mystery of the threats of violence and death remains. What was the irritating cause of them? And who was William Wayte?

IV

Before seeking light elsewhere, I thought that the Controlment Rolls, which had already given me this document, might yield something more. It was not uncommon, as I had learned, to find that the petitioner for sureties of the peace was retaliating on the person complained of for having previously sworn the peace against him. I might possibly find, therefore, that one of these persons complained of in my new document had at some previous time sworn the peace against the present complainant — that is to say, that Langley or Shakespeare might have already sworn the peace against Wayte. Other persons might be found involved, and their names be used as further clues.

Again fortune was on my side, for I now discovered that Langley had indeed previously asked for sureties of the peace against Wayte. Among the earlier entries for Michaelmas term, 1596, I turned up the following: —

Anglia ss Franciscus Langley petit securitates pacis versus Willelmum Gardener & Willelmum Wayte ob metum mortis &c.

Attachiamentum vicecomiti Surreie retornabile Crastino animarum.

England Be it known that Francis Langley craves sureties of the peace against William Gardener and William Wayte for fear of death, and so forth.

Writ of attachment issued to the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the Morrow of All Souls [November 3, 1596].

In our first document we had found Wayte testifying to his fear of Shakespeare and Langley. Now we discover that Langley, more than three weeks earlier, had already sworn that not only Wayte, but also a certain William Gardener, had first threatened him with death.

This new name, William Gardener, was another possible source of light; and, as it proved, light which was to grow in power until it illuminated the dark region of the unknown. The problem now set itself thus: I must find out the identity of these men, Gardener and Wayte, and, with this new knowledge, re-create a hitherto unknown episode in Shakespeare’s life.

I began my search with Gardener’s name as a key. Turning to the rich and conveniently indexed series of State Papers for Elizabeth’s reign, I found his name under the date 15841585, connected with the report of a search in a certain suspected house for ‘papists and papistical books.’ The search had been made by the constable and bailiff of Paris Garden, and the report was taken and signed by ‘William Gardiner, Esquire.’ Evidently this Gardiner was my man; and I suspected from this document that he was a Surrey justice of the peace, with jurisdiction over the Bankside and Paris Garden.

My suspicion was confirmed by a glance at the Acts of the Privy Council. Here was the minute of the well-known letters dated July 28, 1507 (sent by the Privy Council to the justices of the peace for Middlesex and Surrey): orders elicited by the ‘lewd matters’ contained in Tom Nashe’s Isle of Days, a play recently acted by Pembroke’s Men at Langley’s theatre, the Swan. And among the Surrey justices who are hereby ordered to take harsh steps to suppress the playhouses on the Bankside we read the name of ‘William Gardyner.’ Not only, therefore, is our William Gardener here proved a justice, but we find him ordered to cause the stage of the Swan to be torn down by its owner, Langley: Langley, with whom, as our second document shows. Justice Gardiner had had a violent quarrel in the autumn preceding.

Our business at present is not with the brush between Justice Gardiner and Francis Langley in 1597 over the Isle of Dogs and the Privy Council’s order, but with their quarrel in 1596 involving Wayte and Shakespeare. Thus far I had shed more light on Langley, and established the identity of Gardiner, but Wayte remained a tertium quid. It seemed from the document that he should be connected somehow with Justice Gardiner.

In search of evidence in this direction I had recourse to the records of the equity side of the Exchequer, which in due time gratified me by yielding a suit dated 1591, brought by Thomas Heron, gentleman, an under-marshal of the Court of Exchequer, against William Gardiner of Southwark, Surrey, and William Wayte. Gardiner is described in Heron’s bill of complaint as ’a justice of the peace,’ and Wayte is slightingly set down as ‘a certain loose person of no reckoning or value, being wholly under the rule and commandment of the said Gardiner.’ This unflattering description of Wayte simplified the situation for me. As a hanger-on and tool of Gardiner’s, Wayte now took a properly subordinate position in the picture. Evidently the central figures in the quarrel were Gardiner on the one side and Langley and Shakespeare on the other: local justice of the peace against theatre owner and player. Thus defined, the problem emerged not only absorbing but challenging. I should have no rest until it was solved.

V

At this point the proper move seemed to be to go through the chief scries of judicial records for 1596 in search of some clue to the quarrel. The courts of Queen’s Bench and Common Pleas, because of the richness of their materials, commended themselves for this purpose, and I plunged hopefully into their docket rolls. Once more I was not disappointed, for they led me to no less than three separate suits, all of which Justice Gardiner brought against Francis Langley, for slander.

All three suits were recorded in Michaelmas term, 1596, the very term of the already-discovered petitions for sureties of the peace. Two of these actions were entered in the Queen’s Bench and one in the Common Pleas. In the Queen’s Bench suits Gardiner alleges that on two separate occasions in the preceding spring, May 21 and May 22, at Croydon, Surrey, Langley publicly and slanderously said of him, ‘He is a false knave, and a false perjured knave; and I will prove him so.’ Gardiner asserts that his reputation has been damaged by these remarks to the value of a thousand pounds each. In the suit in the Common Pleas, Langley is alleged to have said of Gardiner, again at Croydon, but on June 1, ‘He is a false knave; a false, forsworn knave, and a perjured knave.’ For this Gardiner demands two hundred pounds damages.

Langley’s defense to each of the three charges is the same. He maintains, adducing records to prove his statement, that in a suit in the Court of Wards, a few years before, Gardiner, in giving false testimony under oath, has committed willful and corrupt perjury. Consequently it is no slander to call him a false, perjured knave, and Gardiner’s action will not lie — that is to say, be valid in a court of judicature. In reply Gardiner insists that Langley’s words were not occasioned by this alleged perjury, but by ‘his own wrong’; and that he should therefore have his action for slander. It is to be noted, however, that none of these three suits was prosecuted to a trial. Evidently Gardiner was ‘slandered with matter of truth.’ No doubt when Langley brought forward his evidence of Gardiner’s perjury on record his angry opponent felt less confident of the strength of his suits for slander, and did not care to risk a jury trial, with its public airing of the evidence as to his character. He abandoned his claims for £2200 damages.

We are not told what made Langley so incensed with Justice Gardiner in the spring of 1596 as to stigmatize him publicly and repeatedly as a false perjured knave. But we do know that he successfully roused Gardiner’s spleen against him. By the autumn, irritation had mounted to such a pitch, as we have seen by our new documents, that threats of violence were bandied between Gardiner, joined with his henchman Wayte, and Langley and Shakespeare.

Whatever may have started the quarrel, it is fair to infer that in the autumn of 1596 Gardiner, to get some satisfaction for the vile name he had been given, was doing his best to revenge himself on Langley. The City’s attack on the playhouses was at its height. Langley’s most vulnerable point was therefore his position as owner of a theatre. Using his power as justice of the peace in Southwark, and seconded by the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen, Gardiner could pitilessly persecute Langley and Shakespeare and his fellow actors at the Swan. The latter, however, though deprived of their strong support in the Privy Council, had nevertheless a present protector in their new patron. Sir George Carey, now Lord Hunsdon after his father’s death. As for the wealthy and energetic Langley, he was far from defenseless. Whenever, therefore, Justice Gardiner may have descended on them in person, or through the medium of his man Wayte, in an attempt to put the Swan out of business, they were prepared to resist him.

The ‘ false knave,’ Justice Gardiner, and the ‘loose person,’ William Wayte, by their assault on the embattled Langley and Shakespeare, took on an absorbing interest. I set out eagerly to learn everything I could about these fascinating enemies of our men of the theatre; and with every new-found fact their interest grew.

VI

The life of Justice Gardiner, as I have woven it together from new documents, stands forth as a tissue of greed, usury, fraud, cruelty, and perjury— of crime, in short, enough to make him a marked man even in the Elizabethan age. To grow rich rapidly was his only concern, He lent money at ten in the hundred, defrauded his wife’s family, his son-in-law, and his stepson, oppressed his neighbors, and rack-rented his poor tenants. By these and similar means he amassed great wealth, and in the end died detested by all who knew him.

By reckoning his years as given in his funeral certificate, we learn that he was born about 1531, the younger son of William Gardiner, a yeoman who farmed Bermondsey Grange on the borders of Southwark. Our first document brings him into view in 1555, on the wrong side of a lawsuit; for he was convicted and heavily fined in that year for breaking a fence and pasturing his cattle on a neighbor’s land. Shortly after this, on the death of his brother Richard, William Gardiner succeeded to his father’s very substantial estate in Bermondsey, a property which he promptly increased by marriage in 1558.

His wife was Frances, widow of the late Edmund Wayte, a prosperous leatherseller of Bermondsey, and eldest daughter of another rich leatherseller, Robert Luce or Lucy, gentleman, of London. By this marriage Gardiner secured to himself the estates of these two wealthy citizens, for on her mother’s death Frances (Luce) Wayte administered her father’s property. By her first husband, Edmund Wayte, she had had two sons, the elder of whom in 1558 was fourteen years old, and his father’s heir. This son must have died, for we learn by a later document that his rights passed to William Wayte (now discovered as Shakespeare’s adversary), a younger brother, born about 1555.

Space does not permit me to give here a detailed account of Gardiner’s sharp practices or to set forth a complete record of the fraudulent lawsuits in which he seems to have been almost continuously engaged. Suffice it to say that he bent all his energies on the gainful activity of scraping riches to himself. The list of his acquisitions of large pieces of landed property, as I find it in the records, grows steadily with the years. He went back and forth between the city and his suburban Bermondsey, and it is clear that to his predatory activity among his business associates he added raids on the pocketbooks of his neighbors and tenants in Bermondsey. In the course of time his knavish tricks drew down upon him the execrations of all with whom he had dealings, and his name became a byword of ill repute.

In spite of his local reputation, the money with which Gardiner was gilded covered his glaring vices, and in the summer of 1580 we find that he rose from gentleman to esquire on being included in the royal commission for Surrey as a justice of the peace. His district was Brixton Hundred, which comprised Southwark, Paris Garden, Bermondsey, Camberwell, and neighboring places. The following year saw his name pricked or chosen as one of the quorum — the select body of justices ‘eminent for learning or prudence,’ the presence of two or more of whom was necessary before felonies and other misdemeanors could be inquired of and determined. From the records we learn that Gardiner continued in the quorum until his death in 1597. An examination of the files of the Surrey clerk of the peace reveals him as by far the busiest justice in the county. Judicial duties, however, were never suffered to stand in the way of our crooked justice’s lease-mongering and money-mongering; exacting the full penalty of bonds if payments were delayed a day beyond their date, he frequently ‘fatted his fingers with many rich forfeitures.’

Some of Gardiner’s most foul and unchristian enterprises were reserved, I have found, for his own relatives. In his cormorant-like fishing for fools, family ties were no obstacle: those nearest to him were, without any compunction, expeditiously devoured. His treatment of his stepson, William Wayte, was a characteristic example of his predatory methods. Wayte was systematically swindled throughout his whole association with Gardiner — almost forty years — and apparently was kept dangling in continued hope of better days.

By the death of his elder brother, as we have seen, William Wayte had fallen heir to his father’s estate. This occurred not long after his mother’s marriage to Gardiner in 1558. It is now clear from later documents that, though the father had died wealthy, Gardiner kept young William out of his inheritance and even employed him as a servant to further his own ends; further, we find that the justice married his kinsman to an heiress about the year 1580, only to gull him of the property she brought with her.

After such experiences as these at Gardiner’s hands, there is something pitiful in Wayte’s hanging on in the belief that his stepfather would perhaps keep a promise and some day do him some sort of right. Gardiner must have assured the long-suffering gull that by his will he would restore something of what he had stolen. He even went so far, we find, as to put his stepson into his will for a modest bequest of £66:13:4, together with a lease of some land that should have come to Wayte from his father, adding legacies of £50 apiece for Wayte’s young children. Before he died, however, the crafty old churl made a new will which excluded Wayte entirely and reduced the children’s portions to £40 apiece.

To be cut off without a farthing — this was William Wayte’s reward after long years spent in subserving the covetous ends of his stepfather, in whose thankless service in 1596, as our newly discovered Shakespeare document shows, he may have earned a blow or two from Francis Langley or William Shakespeare, or both. And yet at Gardiner’s funeral, a fortnight after the will had been proved and the disinherited Wayte had learned how he had been cheated of every last penny, we meet him walking in solemn black, bearing with pathetic pomp the pennon of Gardiner’s arms. No doubt his mind had been so completely subjected to Gardiner’s that, even if he knew his kinsman for a scamp and a cheat, the justice would always be for his weak stepson a great rich scamp and a worshipful cheat.

VII

I have found that Gardiner’s brotherin-law, John Luce, and his sisters-inlaw, Sara (Luce) Manley and Elizabeth (Luce) Bullard, also fell a prey to his rapacity. It will be recalled that his wife was Frances, the daughter of Robert Luce or Lucy, and that on her mother’s death she took administration of her father’s estate. From the records it is clear that Gardiner persuaded her to attempt to defraud her father’s creditors; and it is also evident that Gardiner managed to hold Luce’s money even after his wife Frances Gardiner’s death in 1576, thereby excluding the above-named surviving children of Luce from their rightful inheritance. That Gardiner had robbed the heirs of Robert Luce is corroborated by a Bermondsey grocer, Richard Ryther, who later deposed in another connection that he had heard by report that Gardiner owed Luce’s children ‘of their own right, three times £1100,’ and also that Gardiner ‘by shameful falsehood defeated the said children of great sums of money,’ and had troubled them ‘in lands, body, or goods, by one subtle device or another.’

It would take far too much space to detail here all the devious dealings of Justice Gardiner’s that I have found. It is only too evident that he had richly earned the reputation of being ‘the subtlest knave in all the country where he dwelleth.’ We may be sure that in 1596, the year of our newly discovered Shakespeare document, the theatre owner, Francis Langley, felt himself on firm ground in reiterating these words about old Gardiner: ‘He is a false knave, a false, forsworn knave, and a perjured knave.’

In the year of his violent quarrel with Langley and Shakespeare, Gardiner was sixty-five. Remarkable only for the number and variety of his misdeeds, he was growing old in sin. Yet right up to his death we find him showing no weariness in ill-doing. On November 26, 1597, to the general relief, he died, having amassed through his evil ways a hoard sufficient to leave his four children, and the grandson who was his heir, wealthy.

His will makes extraordinary reading, disposing as it does of the goods ‘wherewith it has pleased God to bless me.’ There are pious bequests to the poor of the Southwark parishes, the hospitals, and the prisoners in the Southwark Compter, the White Lion, Marshalsea, and King’s Bench prisons. Gardiner even leaves ten marks to the churchwardens of his parish church, St. Mary Magdalen’s, Bermondsey, ‘to buy a communion cup,’ and the same amount to ‘John Luce my brother in law,’ whom, with the other children of Robert Luce, he had cheated of hundreds of pounds.

Gardiner’s body lay in his house from November 26 to December 22, while the pomp of the funeral was being prepared under the direction of Ben Jonson’s friend, William Camden. The certificate prepared by Camden gives us the details of the funeral: —

The said William Gardiner, being of the age of three score years and six, departed this transitory life at his house at Bermondsey Street in the county of Surrey aforesaid, on Saturday the 26th of November 1597, from whence he was very worshipfully accompanied unto the parish church of Bermondsey the 22th of December following. The preacher was Doctor Mountfort. The pennon of his arms was borne by William Wayte, his kinsman. The helm and crest, by Thomas Lant, Windsor Herald. The coat of arms by William Camden, Clarenceux King of Arms, who directed the said funeral. The body borne by six of his own servants. The chief mourner, Thomas Gardiner, his second son. The two assistants, William Gardiner, third son, and Nicholas Smyth.

So passed William Gardiner, esquire, justice of the peace and of the quorum; but his execrable memory hung on in the minds of those whom he had oppressed and ruined. Time will no doubt shed still more light upon him; enough has already been thrown to show that his neighbors in London, Bermondsey, and Southwark had good reason for considering him a notorious knave. It was this avaricious cheat, liar, and heartless toady who had jurisdiction over the Bankside, and who came, in the autumn of 1596, into violent collision with Francis Langley and William Shakespeare.

Langley, as we have seen, put his opinion of Gardiner into words, and promptly found himself with three suits for slander on his hands. Did Shakespeare perhaps have something less actionable to say of William Gardiner, esquire, in the county of Surrey, justice of peace and quorum?

VIII

Some scholars have supposed that Shakespeare’s figure of Justice Shallow, in the first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor, contains a satirical hit at Sir Thomas Lucy, the dramatist’s much respected neighbor in Warwickshire. Accepting the late tradition that Shakespeare as a youth had poached Lucy’s deer and was punished by the knight, they believe that the poet took his revenge in the Merry Wives, a dozen years or more after the date of the legendary deer-stealing. Their ground for seeing such a tardy hit at Sir Thomas Lucy is Slender’s flattering reference to the ‘white luces,’ or heraldic fishes, blazoned in Justice Shallow’s coat of arms. It is common knowledge that Sir Thomas bore as his arms ‘ Gules, semée of crosserosslets Or, three luces haurient Argent’: in language less technical, ‘on a red field strewn with small golden crosses, three silver [white] luces [large fish of the pike family] placed perpendicularly.’ Because of the presence of the luces in the two coats, the identification of Shallow with Lucy has been held to be inevitable.

So firmly has this notion been planted in some minds that it has become the central prop of the belief in the deerstealing tradition. In his admirable edition of the play (Arden, 1904), H. C. Hart sums up the matter as follows: ‘The probability of the truth of the tradition appears to me to hinge upon the passages in Merry Wives.' And although he is loath to swallow the tradition whole, Hart justly observes: ‘ If we had no tradition, what should we make of the coat of arms passage? It would be utterly unmeaning.’ There is the case in a nutshell. Those of us who reject both the tradition and the ShallowLucy equation have never been able to supply a satisfactory meaning for the passage in question.

It suddenly occurred to me that the newly reconstituted life of Shakespeare’s enemy, Justice Gardiner, held the essential clue. Gardiner’s first wife, I had found, was Frances, the widow of Edmund Wayte. But we remember that she was born Frances Luce or Lucy, the daughter of Robert Luce or Lucy, gentleman. Lucy! Here was the clue. If Robert Luce had a coat of arms, his daughter would have a right to bear his arms, and her husband could impale them — that is to say, marshal them with his own on one shield. A tremendous possibility opened before me. What if Robert Luce’s arms had contained the white luces, and Justice Gardiner perhaps bore them side by side with his own? Could this be the true significance of the coat-of-arms passage in the Merry Wives? Was the Justice Shallow of the play a caricature of Justice Gardiner?

No time was to be lost in speculation. The question demanded an answer at once, and I ‘ made sudden speed ’ to the Manuscript Room of the British Museum. Once there, I called for the formidable collections of Elizabethan heraldry, — the grants, alphabets, trickings, and blazons of arms, — a gorgeous gallery, through which I dashed at an undignified rate.

For a long time I met little but disappointment. I ran upon several sketches or trickings of the Gardiner coat: ‘Azure, a griffin passant Or,’ to which was sometimes added his crest, ‘a lion passant guardant Argent.’ It satisfied one’s sense of fitness to find the griffin, that twi-formed monster in nature, as the armorial bearings of the raptorial Gardiner. Thomas Lodge’s description of the character of the griffin is in point: —

This bird is like unto an Eagle both in head and wings, and in all other parts of his body he is like unto a Lion. . . . He slayeth and destroyeth all men that dwell about him, neither is his insatiable covetousness ever satisfied.

Though very suitable for Gardiner, griffins were not precisely what I was after. I pursued my search.

At last, and suddenly, came the reward. In a volume of quartcrings of arms, Harley Manuscript 5849, — for me easily the greatest treasure of the Museum, — wild surmise was turned into certainty. Here was the proof before my eyes: ’Gardiner impaling Lucy ’ — a sketch of the golden griffin side by side with the three white luces; and beneath, the legend ‘William Gardener.’ I drew a long breath. Shakespeare seemed to stand at my very elbow, unlocking the age-old mystery of the scene in the Merry Wives.

Yet even as I sat in a daze of realization, something told me that I must not rest here. This quarry held out the promise of more corroborative material. Casting about for a fresh scent, I thought of the heraldic notes of funerals of important persons, often kept by the officers of the College of Arms who directed the ceremonies. We had seen that William Camden, Clarenceux king-of-arms, had been in charge of Gardiner’s funeral at Bermondsey. A search under the word ‘Funerals’ in the catalogue of manuscripts guided me to several volumes of such notes; and on the first leaf of one of them — Stowe Manuscript 587 — I ran down my quarry: a record of Justice Gardiner’s funeral, with the impaled arms in trick as before, — the golden griffin beside the three white luces, — but with the memorandum ‘Lucy’ written above the impalement of the three white luces.¹

Here was rich finding. Then of a sudden came another thought. I recalled the clause in Gardiner’s will by which he left ten marks to the wardens of his parish church, St. Mary Magdalen’s, Bermondsey, ‘to buy a communion cup.’

What of this cup? Did it still exist? And if it did, might it be ornamented, by any chance, with Gardiner’s arms? And would the white luces be there? I found myself forging a chain of shadowy but fascinating possibilities.

Before leaving the Museum, I went to the Reading Room, and taking the Surrey volumes of the Victoria County History from the shelf, I opened to the description of the Bermondsey church as it stands to-day. My excitement grew, for among the plate of the church there was said to be an ancient cup, given by ‘William Gardner,’ and engraved with his arms. A letter dispatched to the Reverend Arthur Sinker, rector of Bermondsey, brought a kind invitation to view the cup. Hastening to the scene of Justice Gardiner’s ancient tyrannies, I entered the church; and there in the vestry Mr. Sinker put the silver cup into my trembling hands. He must have wondered at my visible emotion, for on the side of the cup I beheld the engraving of the achievement of Gardiner’s arms, quartering the three white luces. Below ran the inscription: ‘The gifte of William Gardner Esquier.’

From this chalice the parishioners of Bermondsey still take Holy Communion every Sunday. The cup has no doubt been in regular use for more than three centuries. After all these years of service and continual polishings, the coat of arms still stands out distinctly. The Elizabethan engraver did his work well.

IX

Equipped as we now are with a knowledge which, though common property in Shakespeare’s time, has lain lost for three hundred years, let us turn to the first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor: —

Shallow. Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.

Slender. In the county of Gloucester, justice of peace and ‘Coram.’

Shallow. Ay, cousin Slender, and ‘Custalorum.’

Slender. Ay, and ‘Ratolorum’ too; and a gentleman born, master parson, who writes himself ‘Armigero’ in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation — ‘Armigero.'

Shallow. Ay, that I do, and have done any time these three hundred years.

Slender. All his successors gone before him hath done’t: and all his ancestors that come after him may: they may give the dozen white luces in their coat.

On the assumption that Shakespeare was here taking enough material from the life about him to make a series of humorous hits at the men who had annoyed him, let us ask what the London audience of his day might see in this scene.

Nothing could be closer, to begin with, than the parallel between the description of Robert Shallow and that of William Gardiner, esquire (Latin, armiger), justice of peace and of the quorum for the county of Surrey. The next bit, ‘Custalorum and Ratolorum,’ with its intentional scrambling of the words Custos Rotulorum, is, of course, satire: the county office of Custos Rotulorum, or Keeper of the Records, was a high one to which few men of Gardiner’s or Shallow’s rank could aspire. Proceeding to boast of his uncle’s heraldic honors, Slender avers that Shallow’s ‘ancestors that come after him ’ may display the luces on their shield. Gardiner had added the luces to his arms by marriage: his descendants by Frances Luce could therefore quarter the Lucy arms.

Coincidences can be remarkable; but it seems to me that there are here too many of them to be set down as accidents. Esquire, justice of peace and of the quorum, a coat with heraldic luces

— it all fits the enemy of Langley and Shakespeare like a glove.

Meanwhile the scene in the Merry Wives continues with Shallow’s plan for marrying kinsman Slender advantageously: —

Evans. . . . there is also another device in my prain, which peradventure prings goot discretions with it: — there is Anne Page, which is daughter to Master Thomas Page, which is pretty virginity.

Slender. Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small like a woman.

Evans. It is that fery person for all the ’orld, as just as you will desire, and seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire, upon his death’s bed

— Got deliver to a joyful resurrections! — give, when she is able to overtake seventeen years old. It were a goot motion if we leave our pribbles and prabbles, and desire a marriage between Master Abraham and Mistress Anne Page.

Shallow. Did her grandsire leave her seven hundred pound?

Evans. Ay, and her father is make her a petter penny.

Shallow. I know the young gentlewoman. She has good gifts.

Evans. Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is goot gifts.

Shallow. Well, let us see honest Master Page.

An important episode in the lives of Justice Gardiner and his stepson Wayte discloses a startling commentary on this passage. We have it from the complaint, already mentioned, of Thomas Heron, an under-marshal of the Court of Exchequer, which alleges that Gardiner, by means of spurious bonds, was dishonestly attempting to make him pay money he never owed. In the course of his complaint, Heron informs the judge, Lord Burghley, that in 1574 Robert Mote, a wealthy Southwark gentleman, died, leaving his property to his next of kin, a young girl named Joan Tayler. During Joan’s minority the estate was administered by William Wilson, one of the overseers of Mote’s will. Having thus control over Joan and her property, Wilson conspired with Justice Gardiner ‘between them both to enjoy the goods and lands of the said Joan Tayler.’ And to this end Heron’s complaint continues: —

By compact between them, they married the said Joan to one William Wayte, a certain loose person of no reckoning or value, being wholly under the rule and commandment of the said Gardiner. After which marriage being performed, the said Gardiner (having the said Wayte at his commandment) procured the said William Wayte, and the said Joan his wife by the hard dealing of the said Wayte, for small or no consideration to convey the lands of the said Joan unto the children of the said Gardiner. Whereupon the said Joan Tayler, seeing her goods and lands to be gotten from her, consumed and wasted, not long after died; after whose death the said Gardiner procured a letter of administration of the goods and debts of the said Robert Mote unadministered, to be committed unto the said William Wayte, as an instrument by whom he hoped to make some profit.

I have found this letter of administration; it is dated 1590 — six years before Shakespeare’s quarrel with Wayte.

X

When the question of marrying the youthful heiress, Anne Page, who will come into her property ‘when she is able to overtake seventeen years old,’ is broached to Slender, he exhibits a complete subjection to his Uncle Shallow’s wishes in the matter.

Shallow. Will you, upon good dowry, marry her?

Slender. I will do a greater thing than that, upon your request, cousin, in any reason.

Shallow. Nay, conceive me, conceive me, sweet coz: what I do is to pleasure you, coz: can you love the maid?

Slender. I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another; I hope upon familiarity will grow more contempt; but if you say ‘marry her’ I will marry her — that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.

According to Thomas Heron, when Joan Tayler had been married to William Wayte at Gardiner’s suggestion, and had more occasion to know him and his rascally stepfather, her love of life decreased so much that she died not many years after.

When confronted, the similarities between the figures of Justice Shallow and his foolish nephew Slender, and those of Shakespeare’s adversaries in Southwark, Justice Gardiner and his stepson, the ‘loose person’ Wayte, are in the last degree striking. Robert Shallow, esquire, in the county of Gloucester justice of peace and coram (quorum), bears a coat of arms in which white luces ‘agree well, passant.’ He owns a park with a keeper’s lodge. He boasts of his youthful prowess with the sword. He endeavors to marry his nephew Slender to a young heiress, Anne Page. William Gardiner, esquire, in the county of Surrey justice of peace and quorum, bears a coat of arms in which white luces are blazoned beside a griffin passant. He owns a park with a gatehouse. In his youth he was fined for drawing blood in a fight. He married his stepson Wayte to a young heiress, Joan Tayler.

In the Merry Wives, little is actually made of the character of Justice Shallow. But Shakespeare had already drawn him in delightful detail in Henry IV, Part TWo. We have there the humorous portrait of a wealthy and niggardly old pagan, sufficiently corrupt in administering his office to countenance the arrant knave Visor against the honest Clement Perkes of the hill. He makes much of Falstaff, hoping to benefit by Sir John’s supposed influence with the Prince. The fat knight improves the occasion to extract a loan of a thousand pounds from him; yet it is almost beyond Falstaff’s endurance to listen to the old reprobate’s gilded lies.

In their cumulative force these parallels are overwhelming. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that in these two Falstaff plays Shakespeare drew material from the contemporary scene in Southwark. Justice Gardiner and his inconsiderable stepson had willynilly forced themselves on his attention; and, as an economical artist, he used what he saw. What is more, Gardiner and Wayte had put him to trouble and expense at law. Why not make them pay for themselves with a contribution toward the stuff for a couple of plays? Poetic justice!

It was not very clever of Langley to call the justice a perjured knave, and throw himself open to actions tor slander. Shakespeare was wiser. He saw that Gardiner throve on execration: the chorus of curses was a sincere acknowledgment of his successes as a cheat. To beknave him was to compliment him. But to stage the cunning justice as an imbecile fit only for inextinguishable laughter would flick him on the raw. And in safety, too; for to call a man a fool is held no slander, since the term implies no crime. In Henry IV, Part Two, Shakespeare therefore aggravated the old knave’s style with the outrageous addition of fool. In the Merry Wives he played upon the weaker vessel Wayte. Retaining enough of their peculiar features to give a Southwark audience supreme delight, he led the precious pair gently by the nose to a permanent place on the great stage of fools.

XI

The foregoing discoveries, and the conclusions to which they lead, at once raise the question: When did Shakespeare write the Merry Wives? Recent scholarship has offered conjectural dates ranging from 1598 to 1601. The new light now at hand should help us to a delimitation more precise.

If Shakespeare, as we have seen, introduced unmistakable hits at William Gardiner into his plays, Henry IV, Part Two, and the Merry Wives, he did it during the justice’s lifetime. The cream of the jest would pass with the disappearance of the butt. Justice Gardiner died on November 26, 1597. This date, therefore, gives us our later limit for the composition of the Merry Wives. For the earlier, we can hardly place it before Shakespeare’s removal to Southwark and the quarrel of Gardiner and Wayte with Shakespeare and Langley, in October and November, 1596. In the year which lies between these two Novembers, then, Shakespeare wrote his two plays introducing Justice Shallow.

In the case of the Merry Wives it will be seen from what follows that we may be able to fix limits more narrow still. According to a plausible and wellaccepted tradition, Shakespeare wrote the Merry Wives in obedience to what amounted to a royal command. Queen Elizabeth, it is said, was so pleased with the fat knight in the two parts of Henry IV that she desired a sequel, to show Falstaff in love. We are further told that the piece was written in a hurry — fourteen days only being allowed for its composition. Whether or not we can believe that the fluent Shakespeare actually finished this jolly farce in a fortnight’s time, it is certain that, the play bears the earmarks of hasty writing.

For what occasion in 1596-1597, we may now ask, was the Merry Wives ordered to be prepared in such posthaste? Let us look to the play for a suggestion. Although Shallow is a Gloucestershire justice and Falstaff a denizen of London, we see them both brought by the author to Windsor. Now Windsor was of course the headquarters of the Order of the Garter and the scene of the brilliant ceremonies of installing the new Knights of the Garter; Master Doctor Caius is represented as hastening to la grande affaire at Court; and in the last scene of the play a graceful and appropriate compliment is paid to Queen Elizabeth in her quality as Sovereign of the Order. These indications lead us to suspect, with Sir Edmund Chambers and other scholars, that the play was written for some Feast of the Order of the Garter. The natural question, for which particular Feast, has, however, received no satisfactory answer; and I think I can now point to the very occasion which satisfies all the conditions.

XII

The Garter Feast celebrated at the palace of Westminster on St. George’s Day, April 23, 1597, was of exceptional splendor and solemnity. Four years had elapsed since the last election of Knights to the Order; and St. George’s Day, 1597, witnessed the creation of five new Knights: Frederick, Duke of Württemberg; Thomas Lord Howard de Walden; George Carey, Lord Hunsdon; Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy; and Sir Henry Lee.

A well-known and amusing story lies behind the election of Frederick, Duke of Württemberg. Five years earlier, as Count of Mömpelgart, and just before he succeeded to the dukedom, Frederick had come on a visit to England. Elizabeth, who had her political reasons for securing his future support in the German States, made him welcome. He failed, however, to gain the general good will, and there was an unmistakable disposition to laugh at him. During his stay he nevertheless conceived a great desire to be made a Knight of the Garter, and before leaving England he extracted from Elizabeth an assurance that he might expect the honor.

From Stuttgart he wrote at intervals, reminding the Queen of her promise. With characteristic subtlety, in her replies to ‘Our Cousin Mumpellgart,’Elizabeth kept him hoping for several years, and thus cheaply retained his devotion to her interests. By 1597, however, she thought it best to humor his wish, and therefore had him elected to the Order in absentia; but she did not inform him of the fact until later, and put off the expense of sending him the insignia to an indefinite future. Elizabeth’s methods were well understood by her Court. The German duke was to be used, and not taken too seriously. His election was a necessary nuisance.

‘Our Cousin Mumpellgart’s ’ unpopular and somewhat comic character would make a small hit at the absent duke’s expense relished at the Garter Feast in 1597. The Merry Wives contains such a sly reference, detected by Charles Knight in 1840. As part of the plan of Evans and Caius to be revenged on mine Host of the Garter for the scurvy trick he has played them, they encourage some rogues to pose as followers of an imaginary German duke, and so make off with three of mine Host’s horses. And further to point up the amusing absence of Frederick from the pomp of the Garter election for which he had labored and longed, Doctor Caius puts his head in at mine Host’s door with the brisk announcement : —

. . . it is tell-a me dat you make grand preparation for a duke de Jarmany: by my trot, dere is no duke, dat de court is know to come: I tell you for good vill: adieu. As a result of the investigations detailed in these pages, a number of interesting additions have been made to the sum of our knowdedge of Shakespeare’s life, of the dates of his works, and of his dramatic methods.

The Duke of Württemberg being thus cheerfully allowed to be absent, the four Englishmen remained to be invested with their golden Garters and ‘massy gold’ collars, or Georges, by their Sovereign’s own hands.

As we have seen, the election of Lord Hunsdon and the rest took place at the Court at Westminster on St. George’s Day, April 23, the Feast of the Garter. The final ceremony of installing the four new Knights at Windsor was set for a month later, May 24. Following her general custom, Elizabeth did not attend this latter ceremony, but appointed the Lord Admiral to act for her. I discover that in the month which intervened Lord Hunsdon’s preparations for a brilliant following in the great riding to Windsor were carried forward with the most lavish expenditure, outdoing his fellow Knights in a competition of extravagance. On May 14, Rowland Whyte wrote to Sir Robert Sidney: —

Upon Monday come sennight the four new Knights are to be installed. It was agreed upon between themselves that they would have but fifty men apiece; but now I hear that my Lord Chamberlain [Lord Hunsdon] will have three hundred, and Sir Henry Lee two hundred. The other two hold their first purpose, but they shall all be gentlemen.

No one seems to have recognized the illuminating fact that Shakespeare and his fellows, as the Lord Chamberlain’s servants, were a part of the gallant cavalcade of three hundred that escorted Lord Hunsdon from the Court — which had by this time moved to Greenwich — down to Windsor.

If his play of the Merry Wives was written to be acted before the Queen, as tradition has it, the question now puts itself: Did Lord Hunsdon order it to be acted on April 23 before the Queen at Westminster, on the occasion of the Garter election and Feast, or at Greenwich just before his cavalcade set off on Monday, May 23, for the installation at Windsor?

The earlier date seems far more probable. Hunsdon must have known well before April 23 that his election was assured, and, being master of the company which played most frequently before Elizabeth, could pass on to his servant Shakespeare the Queen’s wishes for a play to make them merry after the Feast. The reasonable conclusion to which these pieces of evidence point is therefore that Lord Hunsdon’s servants presented the hastily prepared Merry Wives before the Queen at Westminster at the Feast of the Garter on April 23, 1597.²

XIII

We learn, first, that by the end of October or the beginning of November, 1596, he had moved across the Thames to Southwark. And finding him in close association with Francis Langley, the owner of the Swan in Paris Garden, we conclude that his company was acting in Langley’s playhouse. We see the actor, Shakespeare, and his associate, the theatre owner, seriously annoyed by the notoriously corrupt local justice, William Gardiner, and that unconsidered trifle, his stepson Wayte — so seriously annoyed that Wayte swears that the gentle Shakespeare put him in terror of his life.

Next, we recognize this pair of vexatious interlopers by a scries of unmistakable hits in Henry IV, Part Two, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. This disclosure gives the coup de grâce to the moribund notion that Shakespeare, in drawing the figure of Justice Shallow, was thinking of his worthy neighbor in Warwickshire, Sir Thomas Lucy.

By combining our discoveries with the annals of Queen Elizabeth’s Court and with the internal evidence of the comedy itself, we have been enabled to fix the date of production of the Merry Wives on April 23, 1597 — a date earlier than recent scholarship has suspected. And since it is generally agreed that Henry IV, Part Two, preceded the Merry Wives, the two parts of Henry IV must now be pushed back into the season of 1596-1597. Except, for the touching account of Falstaff’s death in Henry V, it is now clear that Shakespeare had completed his portraiture of the fat knight by the spring of the year 1597.

More important, however, than the fresh light on the external life of Shakespeare, more significant than the alteration in the dates of his plays, is the ocular demonstration now given us of his dramatic use of some of the life he knew: unique evidence of his use of persons, to quote Ben Jonson,

When we consider the true history of Justice Gardiner, and the local world’s opinion of him, the figure of Justice Shallow appears as a new triumph of the dramatist. Shakespeare is here revealed for the first time as a master of personal satire, taking with devastating humor a satisfactory revenge for himself, his associates of the theatre, and Gardiner’s victims in Southwark. A few months after the production of the Merry Wives, exit Gardiner from the Elizabethan scene into a well-merited oblivion, carrying with him the bitter sting of the contemporary caricature.

As children see nothing more in Gulliver than the fascinating story, so the playgoing world to-day sees in the Justice Shallow scenes no more than inoffensive folly in a care-free atmosphere of perennial comedy. Shakespeare’s magic has transmuted a sordid Southwark into a rural Gloucestershire or an ideal Windsor, set in a pleasant England where knaves are fools, and to live is to laugh them out of countenance. We can forgive Gardiner his crimes: did he not give us Justice Shallow? And as for Wayte, it was an act of sublime inspiration in him to pick a quarrel with Shakespeare; for out of it was born that most exquisite of ninnies, Abraham Slender.