Essays on Shakespeare Book

General Books publication date: 2009
Original publication date: 1874
Original Publisher: Macmillan and Co.
Subjects: Drama / Shakespeare

Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text.
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Excerpt: SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. (1869.) Shakespeare, on his annual journeys from London to Stratford, as Anthony Wood relates on the authority of Aubrey, used regularly to lodge at the Crown Tavern, Oxford, kept by John Davenant, the father of the poet.1 This John Davenant is described as a great patron of the theatre and an admirer of Shakespeare, and his wife as ' a very beautiful woman, of a very good wit, and of conversation extremely agreeable,' to use Aubrey's words. The frequent visits of the poet and the charms of his landlady seem to have given rise to evil reports. Oldys, in repeating Wood's story, adds, on the authority of Betterton and Pope, that ' young William Davenant, at that time a schoolboy of seven or eight years of age, like his father had taken such a fancy to Shakespeare, that whenever he heard of his arrival he would leave school and run home. One day an old burgess seeing him thus running homewards, asked him why he was in such a hurry ? The boy answered, to see his godfather Shakespeare. There's a good boy, said the other, but have a care that you don't take God's name in vain.' 2 1 Athen. Oxon., ed. Bliss, iii. 802 seqq. Malone's Shakespeare, by Boswell, iii. 278. 3 Biographia Dramatica, i. 116. It cannot be denied that this anecdote looks very much like a made-up joke. In no case can Oldys and his authorities be regarded as classical witnesses, Oldys not being born till within the last years of the seventeenth century ; moreover we can hardly grant him a higher predicate than th...