Shakespeare and the Modern Stage / with Other Essays

by Sir Sidney Lee

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of the most precise and valuable pieces of oral tradition which directly owed currency to D'Avenant was the detailed story of the generous gift of £1000, which Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, made the poet, "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recorded this particular on the specific authority of D'Avenant, who, he pointed out, "was probably very well acquainted with the dramatist's affairs." At the same time it was often repeated that D'Avenant was owner of a complimentary letter which James the First had written to Shakespeare with his own hand. A literary politician, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckinghamshire, who survived D'Avenant nearly half a century, said that he had examined the epistle while it was in D'Avenant's keeping. The publisher Lintot first printed the Duke's statement in the preface to a new edition of Shakespeare's Poems in 1709.

D'Avenant's devotion did much for Shakespeare's memory; but it stimulated others to do even more for the after-generations who wished to know the whole truth about Shakespeare's life. The great actor of the Restoration, Thomas Betterton, was D'Avenant's close associate in his last years. D'Avenant coached him in the parts both of Hamlet and of Henry the Eighth, in the light of the instruction which he had derived through the medium of Taylor and Lowin from Shakespeare's own lips. But more to the immediate purpose is it to note that D'Avenant's ardour as a seeker after knowledge of Shakespeare fired Betterton into making a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to glean oral traditions of the dramatist's life there. Many other of Shakespeare's admirers had previously made Stratford Church, where stood his tomb, a place of pilgrimage, and Aubrey had acknowledged in hap-hazard fashion the value of Stratford gossip. But it was Betterton's visit that laid the train for the systematic union of the oral traditions of London and Stratford respectively.

It was not until the London and Warwickshire streams of tradition mingled in equal strength that a regular biography of Shakespeare was possible. Betterton was the efficient cause of this conjunction. All that Stratford-on-Avon revealed to him he put at the disposal of Nicholas Rowe, who was the first to attempt a formal memoir. Of Betterton's assistance Rowe made generous acknowledgment in these terms:?