WHEN Shakespeare first went to London he had a hard life.  He found no better work to do than that of holding horses outside the theater doors.  In those days the plays took place in the afternoon, and as many of the fine folk who came to watch them rode on horseback, some one was needed to look after the horses until the play was over.  But poor though this work was, Shakespeare seems to have done it well, and he became such a favorite that he had several boys under him who were long known as “Shakespeare’s boys.”  Their master, however, soon left work outside the theater for work inside.  And now began the busiest years of his life, for he both acted and wrote.  At first it may be he only altered and improved the plays of others.  But soon he began to write plays that were all his own.  Yet Shakespeare, like Chaucer, never invented any of his own stories.  There is only one play of his, called Love’s Labor’s Lost, the story of which is not to be found in some earlier book.  That, too, may have been founded on another story which is now lost.

When you come to know Shakespeare’s plays well you will find it very interesting to follow his stories to their sources.  That of King Lear, which is one of Shakespeare’s great romantic historical plays, is, for instance, to be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, in Wace’s Brut, and in Layamon’s Brut.  But it was from none of these that Shakespeare took the story, but from the chronicle of a man named Holinshed who lived and wrote in the time of Queen Elizabeth, he in his turn having taken it from some one of the earlier sources.

For, after all, in spite of the thousands of books that have been written since the world began, there are only a certain number of stories which great writers have told again and again in varying ways.  One instance of this we saw when in the beginning of this book we followed the story of Arthur.

But although Shakespeare borrowed his plots from others, when he had borrowed them he made them all his own.  He made his people so vivid and so true that he makes us forget that they are not real people.  We can hardly realize that they never lived, that they never walked and talked, and cried and laughed, loved and hated, in this world just as we do.  And this is so because the stage to him is life and life a stage.  “All the world’s a stage,” he says,

    “And all the men and women merely players: 
    They have their exits and their entrances: 
    And one man in his time plays many parts,
    His acts being seven ages."*

    As You Like It.

And again he tells us: 

    “Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more."*

    Macbeth.

It is from Shakespeare’s works that we get the clearest picture of Elizabethan times.  And yet, although we learn from him so much of what people did in those days, of how they talked and even of how they thought, the chief thing that we feel about Shakespeare’s characters is, not that they are Elizabethan, but that they are human, that they are like ourselves, that they think, and say, and do, things which we ourselves might think, and say, and do.