entle and affectionate, for more than once in
his career we find his friends leaving him small legacies or gifts or
tokens of their affection. These came alike from actors who had shared
with him the traffic of the stage, and from fellow-townsmen of
Stratford. Even if the recorded references are scanty enough, there is
none that may be held unflattering if we except the attack by Greene,
for which his publisher went out of his way to apologise. It is hard, if
not impossible, to estimate the value of any form of art-work in the
lifetime of the worker, and it may well be that of the thousands who
applauded Shakespeare's plays there were very few who saw them as we do
to-day. The mere fact that they were for the most part new versions of
works that were then quite familiar to playgoers would have told against
them. Theme rather than treatment was best calculated to "tickle the
groundlings."

CHAPTER XIII

STRATFORD AS IT WAS

Stratford in Shakespeare's time administered its own affairs in very
complete fashion through the medium of a Guild, which was turned into a
Municipal Corporation by Edward VI. It boasted bailiff, aldermen,
burgesses and chamberlains, and the council met every month in the Guild
Hall. Those who accepted office were liable to be heavily mulcted for
non-attendance, for attending in mufti, for declining promotion to a
more responsible office, or for telling the secrets of the council
chamber to those who had no place in it. The Chapel of the Guild, the
Guild Hall, and the Grammar School, in which boys were taught and
disciplined in fashion that would shock our humanitarian instincts
to-day, still exist. The bailiff or warden of Stratford was at one time
John Shakespeare himself, and at another a subordinate colleague, who
would have sat in judgment upon him in the days when the old man's
liabilities were beginning to get the better of his assets, and he
himself was no longer a man of importance. The rule of the City Guild or
Corporation was paternal in an Elizabethan sense. Just as the
schoolmaster did not spare the rod lest he should spoil the child, so
the magnates of the corporation regarded their fellow-citizens as men
and women to be admonished or encouraged, punished or praised, according
to their behaviour. Food prices were fixed by the corporation; the
adulteration of the people's supplies was made exceedingly difficult and
dangerous. Men who lived ill were fined or expelled from Strat