Shakespeare

,

THIS BOOK

IS FROM
THE LIBRARY OF

Rev. James Leach

Stimlep Station

SHAKE SPEAKS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

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SHAKESPEARE

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1909

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY

BY ROBERT MACLEHOSB AND CO. LTD.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE

SHAKESPEARE 1

CHAPTER II

STRATFORD AND LONDON .... 38

CHAPTER III

BOOKS AND POETRY 83

CHAPTER IV

THE THEATRE 124

CHAPTER V

STORY AND CHARACTER .... 169

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST PHASE 275

INDEX 300

SHAKESPEAEE
CHAPTER I

SHAKESPEARE

EVERY age has its own difficulties in the appreciation
of Shakespeare. The age in which he lived was too
near to him to see him truly. From his contem
poraries, and those rare and curious inquirers who
collected the remnants of their talk, we learn that
" his Plays took well " ; and that he was " a hand
some, well shaped man ; very good company, and of
a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." The easy
going and casual critics who were privileged to know
him in life regarded him chiefly as a successful
member of his own class, a prosperous actor-dramatist,
whose energy and skill were given to the business
of the theatre and the amusement of the play-going
public. There was no one to make an idol of him
while he lived. The newly sprung class to which he
belonged was despised and disliked by the majority

of the decent burgesses of the City of London ; and
s. A «

2 SHAKESPEARE

though the players found substantial favour at the
hands of the Court, and were applauded and imitated
by a large following of young law-students and
fashionable gallants, yet this favour and support
brought them none the nearer to social consideration
or worshipful esteem. In the City they were enemies,
" the caterpillars of a commonwealth " ; at the Court
they were servants, and service is no heritage. It
was not until the appearance of the Folio Edition of
1623, that Shakespeare's dramatic writings challenged
the serious attention of "the great variety of readers."
From that time onward, his fame steadily advanced
to the conquest of the world. Ben Jonson in his
verses prefixed to the Folio, though he makes the
largest claims for his friend, yet invokes him first
of all as the " Soul of the Age, the applause, delight,
the wonder of our Stage." Milton, some nine years
later, considers him simply as the author of a mar
vellous book. The readers of Shakespeare took over
from the fickle players the trust and inheritance of
his fame. An early example of purely literary imita
tion, by a close student of his works, may be seen in
Sir John Suckling's plays, which are fuller of poetic
than of dramatic reminiscence. While the Eestoration
theatre mangled and parodied the tragic master
pieces, a new generation of readers kept alive the
knowledge and heightened the renown of the written

I. SHAKESPEARE 3

word. Then followed two centuries of enormous
study ; editions, annotations, treatises, huddled one
upon another's neck, until, in our own day, the plays
have become the very standard and measure of
poetry among all English-speaking peoples.

So Shakespeare has come to his own, as an English
man of letters ; he has been separated from his
fellows, and recognised for what he is : perhaps the
greatest poet of all time; one who has said more
about humanity than any other writer, and has said
it better ; whose works are the study and admiration
of divines and philosophers, of soldiers and states
men, so that his continued vogue upon the stage is
the smallest part of his immortality; who has touched
many spirits finely to fine issues, and has been for
three centuries a source of delight and understanding,
of wisdom and consolation.

The mistakes which beset our modern criticism of
Shakespeare are not likely to be the mistakes of care
lessness and undervaluation. We can hardly even
join in Ben Jonson's confession, and say that we
honour his memory " on this side idolatry." We are
idolaters of Shakespeare, born and bred. Our sin is
not indifference, but superstition — which is another
kind of ignorance. In all the realms of political
democracy there is no equality like that which a
poet exacts from his readers. He seeks for no

4 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

convertites nor worshippers, but records his ideas
and impressions of life and society in order that
the reader may compare them with his own. If
the impressions tally, sympathy is born. If not, the
courteous reader will yet find matter for thought.
The indispensable preliminary for judging and en
joying Shakespeare is not knowledge of his history,
not even knowledge of his works, but knowledge
of his theme, a wide acquaintance with human life
and human passion as they are reflected in a sensitive
and independent mind. The poets, and but few
others, have approached him from the right point
of view, with the requisite ease and sincerity. There
is no writer who has been so laden with the imper
tinences of prosaic enthusiasm and learned triviality.
There is no book, except the Bible, which has been
so misread, so misapplied, or made the subject of so
many idle paradoxes and ingenuities. The most care
less and casual lines in his plays have been twisted
and squeezed in the hope that they will yield some
medicinal secret. His poetry has been cut into
minute indigestible fragments, and used like wedding-
cake, not to eat, but to dream upon. The greatest
poet of the modern world is at this day widely
believed to have been also the most irrelevant, and
to have valued the golden casket of his verse chiefly
as a hiding-place for the odds and ends of personal

I. SHAKESPEARE 5

gossip. These are the penalties to be paid by great
poets when their works become fashionable.

Even wiser students of poetry have found it hard
to keep their balance. Since the rise of Eomantic
criticism, the appreciation of Shakespeare has become
a kind of auction, where the highest bidder, however
extravagant, carries off the prize. To love and to
be wise is not given to man; the poets themselves
have run to wild extremes in their anxiety to find
all Shakespeare in every part of him ; so that it has
come to be almost a mark of insensibility to consider
his work rationally and historically as a whole.
Infinite subtlety of purpose has been attributed to
him in cases where he accepted a story as he found
it, or half contemptuously threw in a few characters
and speeches to suit the requirements of his Eliza
bethan audience. Coleridge, for example, finds it
"a strong instance of the fineness of Shakespeare's
insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo
is introduced already love-bewildered," doting on
Rosaline. Yet the whole story of Romeo's passion
for Rosaline is set forth in Arthur Brooke's poem,
from which Shakespeare certainly drew the matter of
his play. Again, the same great critic asserts that
"the low soliloquy of the Porter" in Macbeth was
"written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps
with Shakespeare's consent"; and that "finding it

6 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise
employed, just interpolated the words— 'I'll devil-
porter it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions, that go the primrose way to
the everlasting bonfire.' Of the rest not one syllable
has the ever-present being of Shakespeare." That is
to say, Coleridge does not like the Porter's speech,
so he denies it to Shakespeare. But one sentence in
it is too good to lose, so Shakespeare must be at
hand to write it. This is the very ecstasy of criti
cism, and sends us back to the cool and manly
utterances of Dryden, Johnson, and Pope with a
heightened sense of the value of moderation and
candour.

There is something noble and true, after all, in
these excesses of religious zeal. To judge Shake
speare it is necessary to include his thought in ours,
and the mind instinctively recoils from the audacity
of the attempt. On his characters we pass judg
ment freely; as we grow familiar with them, we
seem to belong to their world, and to be ourselves
the pawns, if not the creatures, of Shakespeare's
genius. We are well content to share in this dream-
life, which is so marvellously vital, so like the real
world as we know it; and we are unwilling to be
awakened. How should the dream judge the
dreamer? By what insolent device can we raise

I. SHAKESPEARE 7

ourselves to a point outside the orbed continent
of Shakespeare's life-giving imagination 1 How shall
we speak of his character, when the very traits of
that character are themselvBs men and women?
Almost all the Komantic critics have felt the diffi
culty; most of them have refused to face it, pre
ferring to plunge themselves deeper under the spell
of the enchantment, and to hug the dream. They
have busied themselves ardently and curiously with
Shakespeare's creatures, and have satisfied their
feelings towards the creator by raising to him,
from time to time, an impassioned hymn of praise.
Yet Shakespeare was a man, and a writer : there
was no escape for him ; when he wrote, it was him
self that he related to paper, his own mind that
he revealed. Some men write so ill that their
true selves are almost completely concealed beneath
their ragged and incompetent speech. May it be
said that others write so well, with so large and
firm a grasp of men and things, that they pass
beyond our ken on the other side 3 In one sense,
perhaps, it may. There is much that we do not
know about Shakespeare, and it includes almost all
that in our daily traffic with our fellows we judge
to be significant, characteristic, illuminative. We
know so little one of another, that we are thankful
for the doubtful information given by thumb-marks

8 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

and finger-prints, tricks of gesture, and accidental
flaws in the clay. It is often by our littlenesses
that we are most familiarly known ; and here our
knowledge of Shakespeare fails us. What we do
know of him is so essential that it seems impersonal.
All this detective machinery he has made of no
account by opening his mind and heart to us. If
we desire to know how he wore his hat, or what
were his idiosyncrasies of speech, it is chiefly because
we feel that these things might be of value as signs
and indications. But a lifetime of such observa
tions and inferences could not tell us one-tenth part
of what he has himself revealed to us by the more
potent and expressive way of language. If • we
knew his littlenesses we should be none the wiser :
they would lie to us, and dwarf him. He has freed
us from the deceits of these makeshifts; and those
who feel that their knowledge of Shakespeare must
needs depend chiefly on the salvage of broken facts
and details, are his flunkeys, not his friends. " Did
these bones cost no more the breeding but to play
at loggats with 'em1?" It would be pleasant, no
doubt, to unbend the mind in Shakespeare's com
pany; to exchange the white heat of the smithy
for the lazy ease of the village-green; to see him
put off his magic garment, and fall back into the
dear inanities of ordinary idle conversation. This

I. SHAKESPEARE 9

pleasure is denied to us. But to know him as the
greatest of artisans, when he collects his might and
stands dilated, his imagination aflame, the thick-
coming thoughts and fancies shaping themselves,
under the stress of the central will, into a thing
of life— this is to know him better, not worse.
The rapid, alert reading of one of the great plays
brings us nearer to the heart of Shakespeare than
all the faithful and laudable business of the anti
quary and the commentator.

But here we are met by an objection which is
strong in popular favour and has received some
measure of scholarly support. It is denied that we
can find the man Shakespeare in his plays. He
is a dramatic poet; and poetry, the clown says,
is feigning. His enormously rich creative faculty
has given us a long procession of fictitious persons
who are as real to us as our neighbours; a large
assembly, including the most diverse characters —
Hamlet and Falstaff, Othello and Thersites, Imogen
and Mrs. Quickly, Dogberry and Julius Caesar, Cleo
patra and Audrey — and in this crowd the dramatist
conceals himself, and escapes. We cannot make him
answerable for anything that he says. He is the
fellow in the cellarage, who urges on the action of
the play, but is himself invisible.

It is a plausible objection, and a notable tribute

10 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

to Shakespeare's success in producing the illusions
which are the machinery of his art. But it would
never be entertained by an artist, and would have
had short shrift from any of the company that
assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. No man can
walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist
can create live characters save by bequeathing the
best of himself to the children of his art, scattering
among them a largess of his own qualities, giving, it
may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic
doubt, to another his love of action, to another the
simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his
own nature. There is no thrill of feeling communi
cated from the printed page but has first been alive
in the mind of the author ; there was nothing alive
in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt.
Plays like those of Shakespeare cannot be written
in cold blood; they call forth the man's whole
energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his
wealth of sympathy and experience. In the plays
we may learn what are the questions that interest
Shakespeare most profoundly and recur to his mind
with most insistence ; we may note how he handles
his story, what he rejects, and what he alters,
changing its purport and fashion ; how many points
he is content to leave dark ; what matters he chooses
to decorate with the highest resources of his romantic

I. SHAKESPEARE 11

art, and what he gives over to be the sport of
triumphant ridicule ; how in every type of character
he emphasises what most appeals to his instinct and
imagination, so that we see the meaning of character
more plainly than it is to be seen in life. We share
in the emotions that are aroused in him by certain
situations and events ; we are made to respond to
the strange imaginative appeal of certain others ;
we know, more clearly than if we had heard it
uttered, the verdict that he passes on certain
characters and certain kinds of conduct. He has
made us acquainted with all that he sees and all
that he feels, he has spread out before us the scroll
that contains his interpretation of the world ; — how
dare we complain that he has hidden himself from
our knowledge's

The main cause of these difficulties is a mis
conception of the nature of poetry, and of the work
ings of a poet's mind. Among readers of poetry
there are men and women not a few who challenge
a poet to deliver a short statement of his doctrine
and creed. To positive and rigid natures the round
ness of the world is bewildering; they must needs
have a four-square scheme of things, mapped out
in black and white ; and when they meet with any
thing that does not fit into their scheme, they do
not "as a stranger give it welcome"; they either

12 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

ignore it, or treat it as a monster. They are
perfectly at ease with general maxims and principles,
which are simple only because they are partly false.
What does not admit of this kind of statement they
incline to treat as immoral, not without some sense
of personal indignity. They ask a poet what he
believes, and the answer does not satisfy them. A
poet believes nothing but what he sees. The power
of his utterance springs from this, that all his state
ments carry with them the immediate warrant of
experience. Where dull minds rest on proverbs and
apply them, he reverses the process ; his brilliant
general statements of truth are sudden divinations
born of experience, sparks thrown out into the
darkness from the luminous centre of his own self-
knowledge. Dramatic genius, which is sometimes
treated as though it could dispense with experience,
is in truth a capacity for experience, arid for widen
ing and applying experience by intelligence and
sympathy. When we find a poet speaking con
fidently of matters that seem to lie wholly outside
the possible limits of his own immediate knowledge,
we are tempted to credit him with magic powers.
We are deceived; we forget the profusion of im
pressions that are poured in upon us, every day and
every hour, through the channels of the senses, so
that the quickest mind cannot grasp or realise a

1. SHAKESPEARE 13

hundredth part of them. A story has often been
told of an ignorant servant-girl, who in the delirium
of fever recited long screeds of Hebrew, which she
had learned, all unconsciously, from overhearing the
mutterings of the Hebrew scholar who was her
master. The fine frenzy of a poet's brain gives to
it something of the same abnormal quickness of
apprehension and memory. When the mind is
stirred by passion, or heated by the fire of imagi
nation, all kinds of trivial and forgotten things rise
to the surface and take on a new significance.

Try as we may, we can never find Shakespeare
talking in vague and general terms of that which
lay beyond his vision. He testifies of what he
knows. But if we attempt to argue backwards
and to recreate his personal history from a study
of his cosmic wisdom, we fall into a trap. There
are so many ways of learning a thing ; and so many
of the most important lessons are repeated daily.
Take any random example of Shakespeare's lore :

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds
Make deeds ill done.

Or, again :

O Opportunity, thy guilt is great ;
"Tis thou that execut'st the traitor's treason;
Thou set'st the wolf where he the lamb may get ;
Whoever plots the sin, thou point'st the season.

14 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

It is reasonable to think that there were events and
moments in Shakespeare's life which brought this
truth home to him. But who can guess what they
were? The truth itself is proved and known by
every infant. A similar insecurity attaches to almost
all inferences made from Shakespeare's writings to
the events of his life. He speaks with unmistakably
deep feeling of the faithlessness of friends, of in
equality in the marriage bond, of lightness in woman,
and of lust in man. Phantom events have been
fitted to all these utterances; and indeed many of
them do irresistibly suggest a background of bitter
personal reminiscence. But the generative moments
between experience and his soul have passed beyond
recovery, as they were doubtless many of them lost
to his own remembrance long before he died. What
remains is the child of his passion; and that child
is immortal.

There is a description in Johnson's account of
his friend Savage which might be more extensively
applied to the workings of poetic, and particularly
of dramatic, genius. "His mind," says Johnson,
"was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active.
His judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick,
and his memory so tenacious, that he was frequently
observed to know what he had learned from others,
in a short time, better than those by whom he was

I. SHAKESPEARE 15

informed ; and could frequently recollect incidents,
with all their combination of circumstances, which
few would have regarded at the present time, but
which the quickness of his apprehension impressed
upon him. He had the art of escaping from his
own reflections, and accommodating himself to every
new scene. To this quality is to be imputed the
extent of his knowledge, compared with the small
time which he spent in visible endeavours to acquire
it. He mingled in cursory conversation with the
same steadiness of attention as others apply to a
lecture ; and amidst the appearance of thoughtless
gaiety lost no new idea that was started, nor any
hint that could be improved. He had therefore
made in coffee-houses the same proficiency as others
in their closets; and it is remarkable, that the
writings of a man of little education and little read
ing have an air of learning scarcely to be found in
any other performances." Reinstate the Elizabethan
taverns in place of the coffee-houses, and every word
of this description is probably true of Shakespeare.
If we may infer anything from his writings, we
may be sure of this, that he had the art of giving
himself wholly to his company, and accommodating
himself to every new scene. This is a strong per
sonal trait in him, though it does not help us to
picture him as what is usually called a character.

16 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

He presents none of those angles and whimsicalities
which lend themselves to caricature. Those of his
contemporaries who tried to parody his style gene
rally fastened on the high strain of rhetoric which
he assigns to such a character as Hotspur—

By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon.

It cannot be denied that Shakespeare had a great
love of sumptuous rhetoric ; he had also a very
happy, humorous knack of contrasting it with reality.
Here, as elsewhere, he is found on both sides. Some
times he seems to he caught in the business and
desire of the world, and to be inviting us to commit
ourselves to a party. But he is not to be trusted ;
he will rise to his heights again, and look out on
the battle from the mount of humour and contempla
tion. Some of the most living characters in his
plays are those who prefer thus to look on life —
Biron, Falstaff, Hamlet, Prospero. They have all,
in one sense or another, failed at practical business ;
but the width and truth of their vision is never
impaired, and they are dear to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, then, was not a character in the
narrow sense of that word, or in any sense which
may be readily grasped by minds accustomed to
shorthand expressions and ridiculous simplifications
of the human problem. The study of him, in his

I. SHAKESPEARE 17

habit as he lived, would have baffled those lovers
of character who drew Sir Roger de Coverley,
Parson Adams, and Colonel Newcome. Neverthe
less, as we grow familiar with his work, we are
overwhelmed by the sense that we are in the
presence of a living man. When we read his
comedies, we catch the infection of mirth that we
know to be his. As we draw near to the awful
close of King Lear or of Othello, and feel the fibres
of our being almost torn asunder, the comfort that
comes to us when quiet falls on the desolate scene
is the comfort of the sure knowledge that Shake
speare is with us; that he who saw these things
felt them as we do, and found in the splendours
of courage and love a remedy for despair. When
he states both sides of a question, and seems to
leave the balance wavering, he is still expressing
his own mind, even by refusing the choice. Or, it
may be, our understanding is too dull, and he
counted on us rashly in leaving so much to our
sympathy and intuition. But everywhere, even
where we follow with uncertain steps, we feel the
pressure of his hand, and are aware that all the
knowledge that we gather by the way is knowledge
of him, authorised and communicated by himself.

What we learn from the poor remainder of con
temporary judgments is in perfect agreement, so far

18 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

as it goes, with what the plays tell us. The epithets
that are applied to Shakespeare and his work show
a strong family likeness; he is called "ingenious,"
"mellifluous," "silver-tongued"; his industry is
"happy and copious"; he was "honest, and of an
open and free nature"; and always he is "the
gentle Shakespeare." If we could make his living
acquaintance, we should expect to find in him one
of those well-balanced and plastic tempers which
enable men to attract something less than their due
share of observation and remark as they pass to and
fro among their fellows. Children, we feel sure, did
not stop their talk when he came near them, but
continued, in the happy assurance that it was, only
Master Shakespeare. The tradition of geniality
clings to his name like a faded perfume. Every one
was more himself for being in the company of
Shakespeare. This is not speculation, but truth :
without such a gift he could not have come by his
knowledge of mankind. Those lofty and severe
tempers who, often to their own shame, make others
feel abashed and shy, could by no possibility,
even if they were dramatically minded, collect the
materials of Shakespeare's drama. If, by a miracle,
they could come up with the women and children,
the rogues and vagabonds would evade them. Cor
delia, because she was pitiful and generous, they

I. SHAKESPEARE 19

might propitiate; but by no cunning could they
come within earshot of the soliloquy of Autolycus.
There is a kind of ingrained humility and lovable-
ness in the character of those who are not righteous
overmuch ; even a saint may miss it in the very act
of taking pains; but it was a part of the native
endowment of Shakespeare, and a chief means of
his proficiency in his craft.

It need not be said that Shakespeare was a whole
hearted lover of pleasure, in himself and in others.
His enormous zest in life makes his earlier comedies
a paradise of delight. The love of pleasure, if it be
generous, and sensitive, and quick to catch reflec
tions, is hardly distinguishable from wisdom and
tact. It has no respect for the self-torturing energies
of a vengeful and brooding mind, or for those bitter
thoughts which spend themselves in a vain agony
upon the immutable past. Shakespeare's villains
and evil characters are all self-absorbed and miser
able and retrospective. They belong to the terrible
army of cripples, who employ the best skill of their
four senses to avenge upon others the loss of a fifth.
Jealousy, born of deprivation, is a passion as common
as mud; to Shakespeare's thinking it is the core
of all uttermost evil. Deprivation sweetly taken,
with no thought of doubling the pain by invoking
a wicked justice; love that does not alter when it

20 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

finds alteration, but strengthens itself to make
amends for the defect of others— these are the
materials of the pinnacle whereon he raises his
highest examples of human goodness. His own
nature sought happiness as a plant turns to the
light and air; he pays his tribute of admiration to
all who achieve happiness by ways however strange ;
and his cult of happiness brought him his ultimate
reward in that suffused glow of light reflected from
the joy of a younger world, which illuminates his
latest plays.

If we find Shakespeare's character difficult to
understand, we may take this much comfort, that
here too Shakespeare is with us. His character was
not all of a piece, neat and harmonious and sym
metrical. The tragic conflicts which are the themes
of his greatest plays were projected by him from
the intestinal warfare and insurrections of the king
dom of his mind. One such civil strife is pre eminent
among the rest, and has left its traces deep on his
poetry. It is not the world-old struggle between
reason and affection, between the counsels of passion
and the cool dictates of prudence; although that
struggle is wonderfully illustrated in many of the
plays, and an equal justice is done to both parties.
But the central drama of his mind is the tragedy
of the life of imagination. He was a lover of clear

I. SHAKESPEARE 21

decisive action, and of the deed done. He knew and
condemned the sentiment which fondly nurses itself
and is without issue. Yet, on the other hand, the
gift of imagination with which he was so richly
dowered, the wide, restless, curious searchings of the
intelligence and the sympathies — these faculties,
strong in him by nature, and strengthened every
day by the exercise of his profession, bade fair at
times to take sole possession, and to paralyse the
will. Then he revolted against himself, and was
almost inclined to bless that dark, misfeatured
messenger called the angel of this life, " whose care
is lest men see too much at once." If for the
outlook of a God the seer must neglect the oppor
tunities and duties of a man, may not the price paid
be too high 1 It is a dilemma known to all poets, —
to all men, indeed, who live the exhausting life of
the imagination, and grapple hour by hour, in soli
tude and silence, with the creatures of their mind,
while the passing invitations of humanity, which
never recur, are ignored or repelled. Keats knew
the position well, and has commented on it, though
not tragically, in some passages of his letters.
" Men of Genius," he says, " are great as certain
ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral
intellect --but they have not any individuality, any
determined Character." And again : "A poet is the

22 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he
has no Identity — he is continually in for and filling
some other body." Keats also recognised, as well
as Shakespeare, that man cannot escape the call to
action, and it was he who said — Cl I am convinced
more and more, every day, that fine writing is, next
to fine doing, the top thing in the world." But
what if this highest call come suddenly, as it always
does, and find the man unnerved and unready, given
over to "sensations and day-nightmares," absorbed
in speculation, out of himself, and unable to respond ?
A famous English painter was once, at his own
request, bound to the mast during a storm at sea,
in order that he might study the pictorial effects
of sky and water. His help was not wanted in the
working of the ship; he was not one of the crew.
Who among men, in the conduct of his own life, dare
claim a like exemption?

Shakespeare certainly made no such claim ; but he
knew the anguish of the divided mind, and had
suffered from the tyranny of the imagination. It
can hardly be said that he was over-balanced by his
imaginative powers: they were all needed for his
matchless achievement, and it was by their most
potent aid that he won through, in the end, to
peace and security. But no one can read his plays
and not feel the fierce strain that they put upon

I. SHAKESPEARE 23

him. His pictures of the men in whom imagination
is predominant — Richard IL, Hamlet, Macbeth— are
among the most wonderful in his gallery, the
most closely studied, and intimately realised. But
not even the veil of drama can hide from us the
admiration and devotion that he feels for those
other men to whom action is easy — Hotspur, the
bastard Faulconbridge, or, chief of all, Othello.
These are the natural lords of human-kind. Shake
speare holds the balance steady : a measure of the
subtle speculative power of Hamlet might have
saved Othello from being made a murderer; it
could not have increased Shakespeare's love for
him.

The truth is that Shakespeare, by revealing his
whole mind to us, has given us just cause to com
plain that his mind is not small enough to be
comprehended with ease. It is one of man's most
settled habits, when he meets with anything that
is new and strange, to be unhappy until he has
named it, and, when he has named it, to be for ever
at rest. Science is retarded not a little by the false
sense of explanation that comes from the use of
Greek and Latin names, which, when they are
examined, prove to be nothing but laborious descrip
tions of the facts to be explained. The naming and
re-naming of Shakespeare, which has gone on merrily

24 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

for centuries under the care of sponsors good and
evil, is more mischievous than this : the names given
to him are not even fairly descriptive of a difficulty.
They are labels impudently affixed to one aspect or
another of his many-sided work. Books have been
written to prove that he was an atheist ; that he
was a Roman Catholic ; that he was an Anglican ;
that he was a man deeply imbued with the tradi
tions and sentiments of a Puritanic home— for, to
the credit of human intelligence be it recorded, no
one has yet said, in so many words, that he was
a Puritan. Party government was not invented in
his day; but much ink has been spent on the
attempt to classify his political convictions, and' to
reduce them to a type. If those attempts had been
successful, they would help us but little. A creed,
religious or political, is the voice of a community
rather than the expression of individual character:
if Shakespeare were fitted with a creed, the personal
differences which made him what he was would
remain as dark as ever. Men are the dupes of
their own games. There are writers on grave themes
who cannot dispense with metaphors drawn from
the cricket-field. There are historical and literary
philosophers to whom Whig and Tory are the alpha
and omega of criticism. Party names are exhilara
ting ; they mean a side taken, and a fight. But it is

I. SHAKESPEARE 25

perhaps not unnatural that language invented for
the practical needs of controversy should prove
wholly inadequate to illuminate the shifting phases
of the life of contemplation.

Shakespeare was that rarest of all things, a whole
man. It is only warped and stunted partisans who
are unable to see any virtue or truth on the other
side. A Catholic who finds no force in the Protestant
position, a Protestant who has never felt the fascina
tion of the Catholic ideal, — these are not the best of
their kind ; and if all were like them, the strife of
party would sink below the level of humanity. They
are "damn'd, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side."
But even among those whose width of sympathy
keeps life sweet, there are few indeed who dare court
comparison with Shakespeare's utter freedom of
thought. He will never buy favour and familiarity
with one party at the price of neglecting or mis
calling another. He loved the Court, and the
country. He believed in authority, and in liberty.
He could say, with Troilus —

I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth ;

and with Autolycus —

How bless'd are we that are not simple men !
He was at one with Isabella, in Measure for Measure,

26 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

when she gives utterance to the central truth of

Christianity :

Alas, alas :

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once,
And he that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy;

and with Gloucester, in King Lear, when from the
depths of his despair he impugns the mercy of
Heaven :

As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods ;
They kill us for their sport.

He is, in a word, a seer and a sceptic. There is no
contradiction in all this. Large minds are open and
wise, where small minds are close and cunning.
Those who have never seen more than a little dare
not express all their doubts. The blind have infinite
difficulty in determining what is visible ; and men of
robust faith laugh loud and free, where half-believers
are timid, and fearful lest they should stumble into
blasphemy. We look in vain for reticences and par
tialities in Shakespeare, little devices of shelter and
concealment ; he will not let us " nestle into a corner
of his mind and think from there " ; he keeps us out
of doors, and we find the width of his vision fatiguing,
the freedom of his movements bewildering. He is at
home in the world ; and we complain that the place
is too large for us, the visitation of the winds too

I. SHAKESPEARE 27

rough and unceremonious. Perhaps we venture even
to carp at the width of his outlook, — does it permit
a man to attend to his own affairs, does it not wrap
him in a humorous sadness, "compounded of many
simples, extracted from many objects," and unfit him
for the duty of the hour 1 But Shakespeare's apology
for his own life is more than sufficient. We know
something of what he felt and thought, for he has
told us. If we ask what he did, his answer admits
of no human retort— he wrote his plays.

The breadth and impartiality of Shakespeare's
view of things has been recognised in that great
commonplace of criticism which compares him with
Nature. The critics say many and various things;
but they all say this. On the tablet under his bust
in Stratford Church he is called " Shakespeare, with
whom quick Nature died." Ben Jonson continues
and enlarges the comparison:

Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines.

Milton celebrates his " native woodnotes wild." " He
was the man," says Dry den, " who of all modern, and
perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most com
prehensive soul. All the images of Nature were still
present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously,
but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more
than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him

28 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

to have wanted learning, give him the greater com
mendation : he was naturally learned ; he needed not
the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked
inwards, and found her there." So the figure is
handed on, and is elaborated and heightened. It
gives Pope his happiest sentence : " The Poetry of
Shakespeare was Inspiration indeed : he is not so
much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature ; and
'tis not so just to say that he speaks from her, as
that she speaks thro' him." Johnson repeats the
same theme : " Shakespeare is above all writers, at
least above all modern writers, the poet of nature ;
the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror
of manners and of life." To these formal verdicts
must be added all that wealth of metaphor which is
spent on the effort to rise to the occasion : Shake
speare's irregularities, says Pope, are like the
irregularities of "an ancient majestic piece of
Gothic Architecture, compared with a neat Modern
building"; his work, says Johnson, differs from that
of more correct writers as a forest differs from a
garden; his laugh, says Mr. Meredith, is "broad as
ten thousand beeves at pasture." Nothing less than
the visible world, in all its most various and imposing
aspects, is accepted as a synonym for Shakespeare.

In so far as these comparisons are directed to set
ting forth the catholicity and sanity of Shakespeare's

I. SHAKESPEARE 29

genius, they are just and true. The identification of
Shakespeare with Nature is, nevertheless, somewhat
extravagant, and has made way for a host of fallacies.
On a closer examination, it appears that no two of
the critics mean the same thing by that Nature whom
they invoke. Pope means originality ; and contrasts
Shakespeare, drawing direct from the life, with
Homer, whose art " came to him not without some
tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models,
of those before him." But what is here said of
Homer has been proved, by later investigation, to be
very exactly true of Shakespeare. Johnson intends
modesty and probability : Shakespeare has no heroes,
only men ; he keeps love in its proper place as an
agent in human affairs; his dialogue is level with life.
What Milton was thinking of is not very certain ; he
may be praising the spontaneity of the lyrics, or
remembering the pastoral and woodland scenes of
the comedies ; in either case he is far enough from
Pope and Johnson. Lesser critics have drawn the
comparison into a wild diversity of error. Some,
like John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, and
unlike Ben Jonson, have judged Shakespeare to be
"a natural wit, without any art at all." Others,
whose name is legion, have held that since Shake
speare is Nature, the right way to study him is the
way of the naturalist ; they have treated his work as

30 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

if it were an encyclopaedia of information, and have
parcelled it out in provinces, writing immeasurable
books on Shakespeare's divinity, Shakespeare's
heraldry, Shakespeare's law and medicine, Shake
speare's birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, — all tacitly
proceeding on the strange assumption that it was
a part of Shakespeare's purpose to impart an accurate
knowledge of those branches of learning, and that by
his success his true greatness may be judged. These
are the entomologists of criticism : to the less learned
populace the Nature simile has been an excuse for
sheer lack of criticism ; they have persisted in their
old, lazy, unimaginative habit of considering Shake
speare's men and women as the creatures of nature,
rather than of dramatic art. Let us make an end
of this, and do justice to Shakespeare the craftsman.
The great hyperbole which confuses him with his
Creator has served its original ceremonial purpose ;
it is time to remember that the King is but a man,
and that all his senses have but human conditions.

One quality which has been attributed to Shake
speare in his character of Nature, and has been used
to fortify the parallel, is certainly his by right. A
very old and persistent tradition makes him the
master of an incomparable ease and fluency. " His
mind and hand went together," say his friends and
editors, Heminge and Condell, "and what he thought,

I. SHAKESPEARE 31

he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce
received from him a blot in his papers." The credi
bility of these witnesses has been attacked, even their
good faith has been questioned, but here, at least, is
a statement which, in its main drift, every reader
of Shakespeare feels to be true. Nor does it lack
strong confirmation. " He had an excellent phan
tasy," says Ben Jonson, "brave notions and gentle
expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility,
that sometime it was necessary he should be
stopped." No one who has ever been caught in the
torrent of Shakespeare's ideas and metaphors could
mistake him for a slow, painful, and laborious writer.
The frank geniality of the man and the excitable
fervour of the talker are matched by the unchecked
exuberance of the poet. Economy is no part of his
habitual method. He does not waylay his meaning,
and capture it at a blow, but hunts it with a full
cry of hounds, attended by a gay and motley com
pany. His mind is rich in ornaments, images, and
after-thoughts. His style is full of incidents and
surprises ; when he makes an end he has commonly
told you far more than he set out to tell you. In
his later plays he is more condensed, not by the
chastening of his method, but by the crowded en
richment of his matter. Always the method is the
same ; the phrase or sentence that does not quite do

32 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

his business is retained in his service, and another
is added to compete with it and overtake it ; wave
follows wave and breaks short of the goal, until, at
the ninth time of asking, the master-wave gathers
the others into itself, and surrounds you and lifts
you. When he becomes severe and bare, as he
commonly does at the top of his tragic passion, it
is not by the excision of superfluities, but by the
very intensity of the situation, which catches his
eloquent fancy by the throat, and compels him to
put his meaning into a few broken words. Let but
the grip of facts be relaxed for a moment, his dis
cursive imagination rouses itself again, and the full
current of speech is resumed. In this way Shake
speare often gives a double expressiveness to a tragic
crisis, and alternates dramatic silence with poetic
eloquence. The high strung whispered conversation
of Macbeth with his wife, carried on in monosyllables
of question and reply, is followed at once by his
great imaginative outburst on the murder of inno
cent sleep. The parting of Troilus and Cressida
is first made beautiful by the poetic lament of
Troilus :

We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one
Injurious Time now with the robber's haste

I. SHAKESPEARE 33

Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how :

As many farewells as be stars in heaven,

With distinct breath and consign'd kisses to them,

He fumbles up into a loose adieu ;

And scants us with a single famish'd kiss,

Distasting with the salt of broken tears.

Then crude fact has its turn, and the voice of Aeneas
is heard calling —

My Lord, is the Lady ready?

It would be difficult to name any moving situation
in Shakespeare where he does not find or make an
opportunity to give a loose to his pen and to pour
out some scantling at least of the riotous wealth of
his imagination. His ease is so great, that his
wildest conceits hardly seem far-fetched. They
throng about him like poor suitors proffering their
services, and the magnificence of his generosity finds
them work to do.

For an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare we are
dependent chiefly on his book. Yet some facts of
his life are recorded in extant documents, and some
others may be accepted, without too great a risk,
from tradition and allusion. It is just possible that
the store of facts concerning him may yet be in
creased. But it is not likely ; now that antiquaries
and scholars have toiled for generations, with an

industry beyond all praise, in the search for lost
s. c

34 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

memorials. These are the diligent workers among
the ruins, who, when the fabric of our knowledge
has crumbled to atoms, still

As for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all.

The enthusiasm which keeps them at work has been
truly described by one of the chief of them, Mr.
Halliwell Phillipps. " No journey," he says, " is too
long, no trouble too great, if there is a possibility
of either resulting in the discovery of the minutest
scrap of information respecting the life of our national
poet." By these ungrudging labours all that we are
entitled to hope for has been achieved, and the Life
of Shakespeare begins to assume the appearance of
a scrap-heap of respectable size. Many, perhaps the
majority, of the facts preserved have lost their con
nection and meaning, so that, unless we are willing
to eke them out with a liberal fancy, they serve
us not at all in our effort to portray the man.
Another and a more valuable resource is left to us.
We may study the human conditions which affected
his life and work. The habits and customs, the ideas
and tendencies of his own age, make a living back
ground for him, and are everywhere reflected in his
plays. These, in a certain sense, supplied him with
his material ; and to these must be added the books
that he read, the histories that he rifled for their

I. SHAKESPEARE 35

information, and the poems arid plays that he studied
for their art. Even more important than the mate
rial of his art is the instrument, fashioned for him
by others, and only slightly modified by himself.
To become a popular playwright, which Shakespeare
certainly was, a man must adapt his treatment of
human life to the requirements of the stage on which
his plays are presented ; he must consult the abilities
of the members of his company, and fit them with
likely parts; further— let it not be thought a dis
grace to mention a condition which Shakespeare
endeavoured, with zeal and success, to fulfil— he
must study the tastes and expectations of his audi
ence, and indulge them with what they approve.
All this he must do, yet not forget the other. His
own vision of poetic beauty and his own interpre
tation of human life are to be set forth under these
rigid conditions and conventions. Here is the artist's
opportunity : to observe the convention, as he ob
serves the formalities of the sonnet, yet to make its
very restraints a means of greater triumph, to sub
due them and use them towards the accomplishment
of his own most serious meaning. In nothing is
Shakespeare's greatness more apparent than in his
concessions to the requirements of the Elizabethan
theatre, concessions made sparingly and with an ill
grace by some of his contemporaries, by him offered

36 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

with both hands, yet transmuted in the giving, so
that what might have been a mere connivance in
baseness becomes a miracle of expressive art. The
audience asked for bloodshed and he gave them
Hamlet. They asked for foolery, and he gave them
King Lear.

Lastly, to understand Shakespeare, it is necessary
to study the subtlest of his instruments — the language
that he wielded. Here the good progress made in
recent times by the science of language is of little
avail : most of the masters of that science are men
who know all that can be known about language
except the uses to which it is put. The methods of
science are invaluable, and they will prove fruitful
in the study of Shakespeare when they come to be
applied by those who understand how poetry is
made, and who join the end to the beginning.
Without a knowledge of common Elizabethan usages,
colloquial and literary, it is impossible to give Shake
speare the due share of credit for his handling of
his native speech. His amazing wealth of vocabu
lary and idiom, his coinages and violent distortions
of meaning, his freedoms of syntax and analogy,
comparable only to the freedoms that are habitual
in the "little language" of a family of children,—
all these things must be assessed, and compared with
the normal standards of his time, before they can

I. SHAKESPEARE 37

be known for a part of him. The dogmatic gram
marians, a race not yet extinct, make rules for
language as the Aristotelians made rules for the
epic poem, and impose their chill models on sub
missive decadence. Much of Shakespeare's language
is language hot from the mind, and only partially
hardened into grammar. It cannot be judged save
by those whose ease of apprehension goes some way
to meet his ease of expression.

Here, then, is matter enough and to spare. A
brief essay cannot hope to achieve much. 'Tis too
late to be ambitious. Among the topics, old and
new, which are fit for treatment, a selection must be
made, and of those selected none can be exhaustively
handled. What is chosen shall be chosen with a
single aim in view : the mind of Shakespeare is to
be seen at work; and to that end the raw material
of his craft, and the nature of the tools that he
employed, must be considered in the closest possible
connection with that marvellous body of poetry
which, by its vitality and beauty, has cast some
shadow of disesteem on the forgotten processes of
its making.

CHAPTER II

STRATFORD AND LONDON

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE came of a family of yeomen
in the county of Warwick. The name was a common
one in many parts of England, and during the six
teenth century occurs in some twenty four places
of that county alone. There were several William
Shakespeares. One was drowned in the Avert and
buried at Warwick in 1579. Another, some forty
years later, was a small farmer's agent : and perhaps
it was he, not the creator of Shy lock, who in 1604
sued Philip Rogers for £1 15s. 10d., the price of
malt supplied. A third, the son of John Shake
speare, Chamberlain of the borough, was baptized at
Stratford on the 20th of April, 1564, and lived to be
the author of the plays.

It seems probable that Shakespeare's grandfather
was one Richard Shakespeare, a small farmer at
Snitterfield, and a tenant of the Ardens of Wilme-
cote. Of this Richard we know nothing to the
purpose; he is a name and a shadow, flitting through

CHAP. ii. STRATFORD AND LONDON 39

the records of the time. John Shakespeare, the
poet's father, is the first of the stock whom it is
possible to draw in outline, and to conceive as a
character. He came to Stratford not later than
1552, and there traded in farm-produce as glover,
dealer in wool, and butcher. The diversity of the
trades assigned to him need cause no incredulity ;
such a combination was possible enough in a town
surrounded by pasture-land, and seems to testify to
his restless enterprise in business. He prospered
rapidly, was successful in small law-suits, acquired
property, married an heiress, and was advanced to
high office, becoming, in a short scries of years, ale-
taster, constable, affeeror, chamberlain, alderman ;
lastly, when his son William was four years old,
he attained the summit of his municipal ambition,
and appears as Justice of the Peace and High Bailiff
of the Town. Then his affairs declined ; he who
was wont to be plaintiff and triumphant creditor
assumes the more melancholy character of defen
dant and insolvent debtor; he mortgages his wife's
estate, absents himself from the meetings of the
Town Council, is deprived of his alderman's gown,
ceases to attend church and is presented as a re
cusant; but continues, as he began, incurably liti
gious. During his later years we hear no more of
financial difficulties, and it has been reasonably

40 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

assumed that the success of his son restored the
family fortunes. At the close of the century he
succeeded, after repeated applications, in obtaining
the grant of a coat-of-arms ; in 1601 he died, and
was buried at Stratford. The bare facts, so far as
they lend themselves to portraiture, seem to supply
suggestions for the picture of an energetic, pragmatic,
sanguine, frothy man, who was always restlessly
scheming and could not make good his gains. " He
spread his bread with all sorts of butter, yet none
would stick thereon." We guess him to have been
of a mercurial temperament, and are not surprised
to find that he was a lover of dramatic shows.
During his tenure of the office of High Bajliff,
wandering companies of players make their first
recorded appearance at Stratford, and perform before
the Town Council, receiving money for their pains.
In business he seems to have been fervent, unsteady,
and irrepressible ; in speech he may well have been
excitable, sententious, and dogmatic. It is worthy
of notice that Shakespeare, in his earlier plays, shows
but scant regard for the wisdom of the older genera
tion. In Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the
Shrew the seniors are troublesome stage-fathers, im
pertinent, dull-witted, talkative, moral, and asinine.
The speculation is impious, but stranger things are
true, and if the father of Charles Dickens lent his

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 41

likeness to Mr. Micawber, it is at least possible that
some not unkindly memories of the paternal advices
of John Shakespeare have been preserved for us in
the sage maxims of Polonius. Some fathers of
famous writers we feel to have been better men
than their sons, saner, more modest, and preserved
from fame not by their lack of vigour, but by their
hatred of excess. Such was the father of Thomas
Carlyle. Others by their very extravagances have
helped to school their sons into sanity and wisdom ;
the fervour of their temper has passed on un-
diminished, but their miscarriages leave much work
to do, and their failings teach self-criticism to those
who succeed them. Such, perhaps, was the father
of William Shakespeare.1

His mother, Mary Arden, was a small heiress,
and, what is more important, seems to have been

lrrhe allusion to John Shakespeare which Mr. Andrew
Clark recently discovered in the Plume MSS. at Maldon
seems to favour this view. The glover is there described,
by one who saw him in his shop, as "a merry-cheekt old
man, that said 'Will was a good honest fellow, but he
darest have crackt a jesst with him att any time.'" The
saying, as it stands, is somewhat obscure; if for "darest"
we read "durst," the glover boasts that at jesting he is
more than a match for his immortal son. If we read "dare
not," the sense is only slightly altered; Will, we know,
could enjoy a jest well enough, but he was early burdened
with the fortunes of the family, and was compelled, it seems,
to discountenance the irresponsible levity of his father. It
is a familiar situation.

42 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of gentle birth. "By the spindle-side," says that
excellent antiquary, Mrs. Stopes, "his pedigree can
be traced straight back to Guy of Warwick and
the good King Alfred. There is something in fallen
fortune that lends a subtler romance to the con
sciousness of a noble ancestry, and we may be sure
this played no small part in the making of the poet."
And this is not all. Shakespeare was " to the
manner born." From the very first he has an un
erringly sure touch with the character of his high
born ladies ; he knows all that can neither be learned
by method nor taught in words, — the unwritten code
of delicate honour, the rapidity and confidence, of
decision, the quickness of sympathy, the absolute
trust in instinct, and the unhesitating freedom of
speech.

In Shakespeare's day the forest of Arden, stretch
ing away to the north of the river, was more than
a name ; and much of his boyhood was spent in that
best of schools, a wild and various countrj7". At the
Grammar School he would learn Latin, and make
acquaintance with those numerous games which re
ceive honourable mention in the plays. Doubtless,
like Falstaff, he "pluckt geese, played truant, and
whipt top," and "knew what 'twas to be beaten."
Children's games are eternal: Hoodman-blind, Barley-
break, All hid, Dun's in the mire,— these vary from

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 43

age to age in nothing but the name, and though
they afford a natural outlet for activity, they are
seldom the landmarks of a travelling soul. Adven
tures by field and forest, on the other hand, may
very easily become dates in the life of a poet.
Shakespeare must have wandered for whole days
and nights about the countryside, and was delicately
sensitive to all the shifting aspects of the pageant
of Nature, to Spring and Autumn, dawn and sun
set, wind and cloud. His plays abound in passages
which bear all the marks of detailed reminiscence.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania describes a
summer of tempest and flood which has drowned
the low-lying lands near the river :

The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green coin
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain'd a beard ;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field ;
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock ;
The Nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

Puck, in the same play, illustrates the flight of the
panic-stricken rustics, when they behold their trans
figured chief, by a familiar incident of the Stratford
fields :

As wild-geese, that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

44 SHAKESPEARE

Eising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly.

But the deep impression made on Shakespeare by
his early memories of Stratford may be best seen
in passages where they are associated with the
moods and fancies of his own mind. To a poet,
Nature is not a collection of things, but an influence,
a reflection, a counterpart to the drama of his soul.
.Now it is the course of true love that suggests the
flow of quiet midland streams :

The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st being stop'd, impatiently doth rage ;

But when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with th' enamel'd stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage.

Or, again, he remembers

the pleached bower,

Where honey-suckles ripened by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter;

and his mind wanders off to the ingratitude of
princes' favourites. His memories of Nature, of
" the uncertain glory of an April day," of the sun
"gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy," of
the ugly rack of clouds that steal across his face,
of the "canker in the fragrant rose," and of the
ruin of autumn,

H. STRATFORD AND LONDON 45

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

— all these things are utterly unlike the laborious
notes of a descriptive writer ; they have put on
immortality in metaphor, and come readily to hand
because they are a part of his own life, and have
been taught to speak the language of his own
thought.

To a lover of human drama, the moving incidents
of life in the country, and the excitements of sport
and the chase, must have been full of interest.
There can be no doubt that Shakespeare was
minutely acquainted with all the lore of field-
sports, — the hunt of the hare and the stag, and
the capture of smaller game by the falcon. His
knowledge of these things, as Mr. Vice-Chancellor
Madden has shown, would have done credit to an
old huntsman. It is true that here also he uses his
knowledge by way of illustration, and so seems to
appeal to an audience well versed in the terms of
sport. Even Juliet is perfectly accomplished in the
tongue :

Hist, Romeo, hist ! O for a falconer's voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again !

In her beautiful invocation to Night, the quick flush
ing of her cheeks, as she waits for the sun to set,
suggests a whole parable of hawking, and of taming,

46 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

or " manning," wild hawks, as they " bate," or flutter
on the perch, by the use of a velvet hood :

Hood ray unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle ; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
There is no play of Shakespeare's without some of
these allusions, and he is as familiar with the points
of a horse and the kinds and qualities of hounds
and deer as with the forgotten science of falconry.
But it would seem that some part, at least, of his
knowledge is the knowledge of an onlooker rather
than a huntsman. He is true here to his own wide
sympathy, and cannot forget the quarry in the chase,
— true also, perhaps, to his earliest memories. Two
of his most wonderful pictures are, first, the descrip
tion, in As You Like It, of the anguish of the
sequestered stag, wounded by the hunters ; and, yet
more vivid, the picture drawn in Venus and Adonis
of poor Wat, the hare, standing erect, in a passion
of apprehension, listening for the distant cry of the
hounds :

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way ;
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay :
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low, never reliev'd by any.
Is not this a description of the hunt as it might

"• STRATFORD AND LONDON 47

be seen by a boy playing truant from school, and
choosing a brake near a hill-top as a vantage-ground
for observation and concealment?

As for Natural History in the modern sense,
Shakespeare knew little about it, and cared even
less. The social life of the humbler creatures did
not engage his attention. It has been truly said
that he was "curiously unobservant of animated
Nature." The habits of birds and beasts and fishes
seem to come immediately under his eye only when
they touch the daily interests of average humanity.
When he wants an illustration from animal life for
the figurative exposition of his thought, he is con
tent, as often as not, to make use of the commodious
lies of picturesque tradition. The toad that wears
a precious jewel in his head, the unicorn that is
betrayed with trees, the basilisk that kills at sight,
the bear-whelp that is licked into shape by its
mother, the pelican that feeds her young with her
own blood, the phoenix of Arabia, the serpent of
Egypt, and the Hyrcan tiger,— all these he accepts
without question for the decoration of his style.
When he deals with creatures nearer home he
follows the same plan, and adopts all those popular
prejudices which have imbedded themselves in the
phrases of daily speech. "Dog"— except when the
dog helps in the chase — he commonly uses as a term

48 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of vituperation. Cats are " creatures we count not
worth the hanging." In these usages he is merely
taking words as he finds them, and refusing to
impoverish the language of abuse by a forlorn pro
test on behalf of the goose, the ass, the ape, the
dog, or the cat. When Launce's dog, Crab, makes
his bodily appearance on the stage, in The Two Gentle
men of Verona, these ancient prejudices are discarded,
and the dog is admitted to fellowship with man.
But the wild creatures of the fields and the wroods,
because they have never run the risk of familiarity
with slanderous man, are for the most part outside
this argument of rhetorical usage ; and are outside
the circle of Shakespeare's sympathetic observation.
The encyclopaedic and naturalist critics have made
plentiful assertions to the contrary ; Dr. Brandes,
accepting the myth, has praised Shakespeare for his
"astonishing store of natural knowledge," and his
inexhaustible familiarity with the habits of animals.
The following are the examples invoked for proof :
Shakespeare knew that the greyhound's mouth
catches ; that pigeons feed their young ; that herrings
are bigger than pilchards; that trout are caught
with tickling; that the lapwing runs close to the
ground; that the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests
of other birds ; that the lark resembles the bunting.
Many a city-bred boy knows all this and more. And

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 49

these statements are cited because, in the main, they
are true. Shakespeare's errors would make a longer
tale. His nightingale and his cuckoo are creatures
falsified out of all knowledge by the accumulated
fables of tradition. The famous passage on the bees,
in Henry F., is glittering poetry ; but " as a descrip
tion of a hive," says a critic of knowledge and parts,
" it is utter nonsense, with an error of fact in every
other line, and instinct throughout with a total
misconception of the great bee par-able." Virgil
knew something of the bee; Shakespeare little or
nothing.

Let this suffice : it would be a tedious task to
attempt to demolish all the foolish piles that have
been erected with intent to honour the poet. Shake
speare was a master of language, and a profound
student of the human mind. His comparative ignor
ance of Natural History does him no discredit. There
is a story of Canning, which John Hookham Frere
told one day to his nephew. " I remember," he said,
"going to consult Canning on a matter of great
importance to me, when he was staying down near
Enfield. We walked into the woods to have a quiet
talk, and as we passed some ponds I was surprised to
find it was a new light to him that tadpoles turned
into frogs. Now," said the teller of the tale, " don't

you go and repeat that story of Canning to the next
s. D

50 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

fool you meet. Canning could rule, and did rule, a
great and civilised nation ; but in these days people
are apt to fancy that any one who does not know the
natural history of frogs must be an imbecile in the
treatment of men."

If Shakespeare made no minute study of the cat,
the nightingale, and the bee, he had the quickest eye
for the habits of the vagrant, the watchman of a
town, and the schoolmaster. He has left us a very
realistic picture of an Elizabethan Latin-lesson in
that scene of The Merry JVives where Sir Hugh Evans
examines little William on his knowledge of Lilly's
Grammar. The three head-masters who reigned at
Stratford from 1570 to 1580 were Walter Eoche,
Thomas Hunt, and Thomas Jenkins ; and Sir Hugh
Evans may perhaps bear some resemblance to the
last of these. The more elaborately drawn and
pedantic Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, and Pinch,
schoolmaster and conjurer, in The Comedy of Errors,
occurring, as they do, in very early plays, probably
owe some hints to the schoolmaster whom Shake
speare knew best, and may thus preserve for us a
savour of the ideas and apprehensions " begot in the
ventricle of memory, and delivered upon the mellow
ing of occasion " by Master Thomas Hunt. Holofernes
is the complete academic grammarian. But the ex
treme gauntness of his visage, so boisterously ridiculed

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 51

by the courtiers, is only one of many indications
that Shakespeare had a lean actor in his early
company.

At the Grammar School much time was " bestowed
on the tongues," and there is no reason to reduce
Shakespeare's "small Latin" to the mere repetition
of a grammar. A working knowledge of the Latin
language was commoner in that age than in this,
arid it is certain that he could read Latin when he
was so minded. The ordinary school course would
take a boy, by the time he was fourteen years of
age, through parts at least of Ovid, Virgil, Horace,
Juvenal, Plautus, Seneca, arid Cicero, besides intro
ducing him to the elements of Grammar, Logic, and
Rhetoric. Yet, for all that, Shakespeare was no
Latin scholar, and in his maturer years we find him
using a translation, wherever there was one to be
had, in preference to the original. The most popular
Latin author of his age was Ovid ; and he certainly
knew Ovid, for he quotes him in the original more
than once, and chooses a motto for Femts and Adonis
from the Elegies. But his more elaborate borrow
ings from Ovid come, for the most part, by way of
Arthur Golding's translations in doggerel verse. He
studied the classics, that is to say, not chiefly for
their form, but for their matter ; Ovid he valued as
a story-teller who revealed a new and enchanting

52 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

world of fable and imagination. It is possible, but
not likely, that he had a smattering of Greek ; if he
had, it was so little as to make the question hardly
worth a minute investigation. The formal study of
Logic and Rhetoric left a deeper impression on his
mind, and gave him keen delight. Love's Labour's
Lost is a carnival of pedantry ; and just as a good
clown must needs be a good acrobat, so he who shows
such skill in deriding these gymnastics of the intellect
proves himself to have been carefully exercised in
them. To the end of his life Shakespeare never
uses the mechanical processes of Logic and Rhetoric
without lending them a touch of delightful absurdity.
His syllogisms and classifications, his figures • and
distinctions, his formal devices whereby set proposi
tions are amplified and confirmed — all bear witness
to his studies.

He hath prosperous art
When he will play with reason and discourse.

His very " argal " prepares us for laughter. He riots
in the multiplication of processes to attain a simple
end, and, while comedy is his business, will never
refuse to climb o'er the house to unlock the little
gate. "It is a figure in Rhetoric," says Touchstone,
" that drink, being pour'd out of a cup into a glass,
by filling the one doth empty the other." Beyond
these voices of pedants and jesters we hear the

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 53

verdict of the dramatist, and the conclusion of the
whole matter, uttered in a single sentence :

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself.

If he learned little Latin at school, it is the more
to be regretted ; he certainly learned little else. For
a knowledge of modern history he was dependent on
his own reading, on conversation, and tradition. He
would hear much, though hardly in open discussion,
of the Protestant Reformation and the religious
troubles. These were things to be spoken of warily :
as for writing — " Whosoever," says Sir Walter
Kaleigh, "in writing a modern History, shall follow
truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his
teeth." Among those earlier events which had
already, in the time of his childhood, passed outside
the heat of controversy, the Wars of the Eoses
loomed incomparably the largest, and appealed most
to the popular imagination. That great civil strife
was no further removed in time from the boyhood of
Shakespeare than is the battle of Trafalgar from the
children of to-day ; and the force of tradition was
then far more potent than it can ever be in an age of
primers. It was still the fashion, in winter's tedious
nights, to sit by the fire with good old folks, and
listen to their tales

Of woful ages long ago betid.

54 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

The rivalry of the houses of York and Lancaster
had been the destroyer of mediaeval England and the
creator and upholder of the Tudor monarchy, which
was founded on the memory of those internecine
horrors, and was strengthened by the fear of their
recurrence. To prevent another disputed succession
England was willing to go all lengths, even to the
bringing in of the Stuart dynasty. Shakespeare's
great historical epic shows a familiarity with the
struggle in all its phases such as can hardly have
been acquired solely from books. This was the
school where he learned his politics ; by this light
he read Roman history, and interpreted the feuds of
Italian cities. The moral, which he is never tire,d of
repeating, is the moral of the chronicler Hall ; the
English historical plays are written " so that all men,
more clearer than the sun, may apparently perceive
that as by discord great things decay and fall to
ruin, so the same by concord be revived and erected."
The bastard Faulconbridge, in his triumphant perora
tion at the close of King John, speaks to the same
effect; and the woful prophecy in Richard II., spoken
by the Bishop of Carlisle at the very beginning of
the long strife, is in reality a retrospect of the
miseries that were not yet faded from the memory
or forgotten in the daily talk of children's children.

Old tradition and the inherent probabilities of the

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 55

case agree in withdrawing Shakespeare from school
at a comparatively early age. What employment
he followed when he left school we cannot certainly
know. Aubrey reports, on good authority, that he
had been "in his younger years, a schoolmaster in
the country." There is nothing conclusive to be said
against this ; and nothing to object to Aubrey's
other statement that " when he was a boy, he exer
cised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf,
he would do it in a high style, and make a speech."
Imaginative children are wont to decorate many a
less worthy occasion with play-acting. We need not
suppose that he found employ in a lawyer's office.
He certainly has a remarkable knowledge of the
processes and technicalities of the law : he was not
the eldest son of his father for nothing. It seems
almost certain, at least, that these years were passed
in his native place, and that

While other men of slender reputation
Put forth their sons to seek preferment out :
Some to the wars, to try their fortune there ;
Some to discover islands far away ;
Some to the studious Universities ;

the son of John Shakespeare was still, perhaps
against his inclination, a home keeping youth. But
the spirit of adventure is not to be denied. We
are the sons of women ; we cannot cross the cause

56 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

why we are born. It would be difficult to conceive
of Shakespeare as resting content with the beaten
round, and rejecting all the enticements of young
blood. " I would there were no age between ten
and three-and-twenty," says the Shepherd in The
Winter's Tale, " or that youth would sleep out the
rest; for there is nothing, in the between, but get
ting wenches with child, wronging the Ancientry,
stealing, fighting." When next we hear of Shake
speare, in 1582, he is to be married, not without
circumstances of irregularity and haste, to Anne
Hathaway, a woman some eight years his senior ;
six months thereafter his eldest child, Susanna, is
born; in 1585 the twins, Hamnet and Judith, are
added to his family; about the same time, or not
much later, he is involved in serious trouble with
Sir Thomas Lucy, the chief landowner of the place,
and leaves Stratford for London, there to seek his
fortune. When he comes into notice again, in 1592,
the playwrights of the London stage are already
beginning to find him a formidable rival.

The early traditions are agreed in attributing the
departure from Stratford to a poaching affray and
its consequences. He was " much given," says one
early collector of gossip, " to all unluckiness in steal
ing venison and rabbits." Eowe, in his Amount of
the Life &c, of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), gives a

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 57

fuller version of the story. Shakespeare joined with
some companions in robbing a park that belonged
to Sir Thomas Lucy; for this he was prosecuted,
and retorted in lampoons with such effect that the
prosecution was redoubled, and he was driven from
his home. All this is perfectly credible ; the evi
dence that remains to us is unanimous in its favour ;
the allusions in the plays bear it out ; and there
is no solid argument against it. Yet some anti
quaries of the nineteenth century have felt free to
reject it, and to substitute for it an account of how
things must have happened. If we follow them
here, we must reject the whole body of tradition;
and it is worth remarking that the Shakespeare
traditions which have come down to us are, in the
main, good traditions. They are not tainted in
origin, and were not collected or published by any
one who had a case to prove. Most of them derive
from one or other of two sources : the common
places of local gossip at Stratford, or the stories
remembered and repeated by those who had to do
with the theatre. Shakespeare in his later years
was a well-known man at Stratford ; his daughters
passed their lives there, Susanna dying in 1649
and Judith in 1662; and when Betterton made a
pilgrimage to the place in order to collect the mate
rials which were subsequently used by Rowe, there

5& SHAKESPEARE

must have been many old inhabitants who had
known them well. A certain John Dowdall talked
at Stratford, in the year 1693, with an old parish
clerk who was born some years before Shakespeare
died, and who told him " that this Shakespeare was
formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher,
but that he ran from his master to London, and
there was received into the play-house as a servitor,
and by this means had an opportunity to be what
he afterwards proved. He was the best of his
family." The tales told to Aubrey by the aged
William Beeston, who belonged to an old-established
family of play-actors, and the notes made, not later
than 1663, by the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Strat
ford, are no less deserving of belief ; and if all
these accounts be compared, they display no serious
inconsistencies. It is the very vanity of scepticism to
set all these aside in favour of a tissue of learned
fancies.

The stage -tradition was no doubt grievously inter
rupted by the closing of the theatres and the
dispersal of the actors under the Long Parliament.
Yet though many of the actors died fighting for the
King, some few survived to play a part on the Restor
ation stage ; and Sir William Davenant, who in his
boyhood had known Shakespeare, and in his early
manhood had been intimate with Shakespeare's

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 59

friends and fellows, carried on the unbroken line of
theatrical tradition. When interest in the life of
Shakespeare was first awakened, towards the close
of the seventeenth century, there was no lay-figure
of the dramatist, to which the facts must needs be
fitted, and none of that regard for his supposed
dignity, which has been allowed, in this half-educated
age of critical theory, to distort the outlines of a
plain tale.

Some pieces of information with regard to the
plays come to us casually from these same traditional
sources. It is from Drydcn we learn that " Shake
speare showed the best of his skill in his Mercutio ;
and he said himself that he was forced to kill him
in the Third Act, to prevent being killed by him."
It is by Dennis we are told that The Merry Wives
of Windsor was written in fourteen days at the com
mand of Queen Elizabeth, who desired to see Falstaff
in love. These are welcome additions to our scanty
store, and they fit in with what we know.

In London Shakespeare is said to have found
" mean employment " : a late and not flawless tra
dition gives him work as a holder of horses at the
doors of the suburban theatres. He must have
rapidly gained a footing within the theatre, so that his
first steps to fortune are of the less account. Gold
smith, who hardly ever mentioned his own early

60 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

struggles, once made a passing allusion to the days
when he lived among the beggars in Axe Lane.
Those days were days fruitful to him in ex
perience; and Shakespeare's early years in London
must have been alive with novelty and excitement,
yielding him the richest part of his harvest of
observation. The city was small, and not much
unlike what it had been in Chaucer's day. Its
main highway of traffic was still to be found where

clear and sweet and strong,

Thames' stream, scarce fettered, bore the bream along
Unto the bastioned bridge, its only chain.

The walls held the city compact ; to the fields im
mediately beyond them the people resorted- for
pastime, or crossed the river to Southwark, there
to see bear-baiting and fencing. Artillery practice
was carried on in a field enclosed with a brick wall
in Bishopsgate Without. In these same liberties,
outside the jurisdiction of the Corporation, two
theatres, at least, had already been erected. Within
the walls, though the open fields surrounded them,
a motley and crowded population struggled and
surged. Cheapside was as full of life and noise
as it is to-day, and fuller of diversity of colour
and costume. In this city Shakespeare passed his
dramatic apprenticeship, ever hungry to see and
to hear, learning his craft, making acquaintance,

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 61

as he began to feel his feet under him, with the
life of the town, comparing notes, it may be, with
fellow-poets and fellow-adventurers whose names
have long since sunk into oblivion, working at the
odd jobs given him by the theatrical companies,
dining at the ordinary of the taverns, gazing on
courtly processions and spectacles, seeing new types
of character and hearing new stories day by day.
In the life of every artist there are certain golden
years when the soul is pliable, years of exultant
discovery and unfailing response to new impressions.
Later in life, when self-assurance and stability have
corne with success, a man may keep all his energy,
and may better his craftsmanship, or middle age
would be a tedious mockery ; but the magic of
freshness and adventure is gone beyond recall.
During these crucial years, when the world flows
in upon the mind, Shakespeare's takings were
enormous at Stratford and in London. We cannot
trace the history of his experience ; and Elizabethan
society is known to us chiefly through his works,
so that we are at a disadvantage if we try to check
the picture by the original. In his plays he took
a story from anywhere, and gave his characters
Italian or French or Roman names. But for realism
and vitality he was dependent on his observation
of the life around him. Anachronism was nothing

62 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

to him; verisimilitude everything. He did not
travel to collect "local colour." One household is
enough, says Juvenal, for him who wishes to study
the habits of the human race; and Shakespeare
was satisfied with the household of his own people.
There are clocks in Julius Caesar-, a paper-mill and
printing in Henry VI.; Italian fashions in Cymbeline ;
indeed, except in the Eoman plays, Shakespeare
takes leave to fill in all the movement and detail
of the play from his own world.

A few illustrations will serve to show how the
incidents and characters of his plays were gathered
from the life around him. Harrison, in the Descrip
tion of England added to Holinshed's Chronicles, gives
an exact account of the usual method of highway
robberies. "Seldom," he says, "are any wayfaring
men robbed without the consent of the chamberlain,
tapster, or ostler where they bait and lie, who,
feeling at their alighting whether their capcases
or budgets be of any weight or not, do by-and-by
give intimation to some one or other attendant
daily in the yard or house, or dwelling hard by,
whether the prey be worth the following or no.
If it be for their turn, then the gentleman per-
adventure is asked which way he travelleth, and
whether it please him to have another guest to bear
him company at supper, who rideth the same way

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 63

in the morning that he doth, or not. And thus
if he admit him, or be glad of his acquaintance,
the cheat is half wrought. , . . And these are
some of the policies of such shrews or close-booted
gentlemen as lie in wait for fat booties by the
highways, and which are most commonly practised
in the winter season, about the feast of Christmas,
when serving-men and unthrifty gentlemen want
money to play at the dice and cards." This was
the method of the famous robbery in Henry IV.
In the dark inn-yard at Rochester Gadshill is found
in earnest conversation with the chamberlain of the
inn, who tells him of the Kentish franklin and his
three hundred marks in gold ; while the unthrifty
gentlemen (one of whom is fat, and grows old) lie
in wait by the roadside till news is brought them
by their faithful "setter."

In another passage of his book Harrison describes
the dealings of persons of fashion with their tailor.
"How curious, how nice also, are a number of men
and women, and how hardly can the tailor please
them in making it fit for their bodies ! How many
times must it be sent back again to him that made
it ! What chafing, what fretting, what reproachful
language, doth the poor workman bear away ! "
Such was the fact as it was observed by William
Harrison, - as it was observed also by William

64 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Shakespeare, and imaginatively presented, with all
colloquial vivacity, in the scene between Petruchio
and the tailor.

The character of Dogberry, says Aubrey, was
studied from a live original. "The humour of
the constable in a Midsummer's Night's Dream"
(Aubrey was no sure guide among the plays) "he
happened to take at Grendon in Bucks, which is
the road from London to Stratford, and there was
living that constable about 1642, when I first came
to Oxon." However this may be, that constable
was living in many another place, and was adorned,
not created, by Shakespeare's imagination. There
is extant a letter, dated 1586, from Lord Burghley to
Sir Francis Walsingham, complaining of the absurd
behaviour of the persons appointed to arrest the
conspirators in Babington's plot. Burghley tells
how he was travelling from London to Theobalds
in his coach, and noticed at every town's end some
ten or twelve men standing conspicuously, in groups,
armed with long staves. They stood under pent
houses, and he conceived them to be avoiding the
rain, or waiting to drink at an alehouse. But
coming upon a dozen at Enfield, where there was
no rain, it occurred to him that these were the
watchmen appointed to waylay and arrest the con
spirators against the life of the Queen. "There-

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 65

upon," he says, "I called some of them to me
apart, and asked them wherefore they stood there.
And one of them answered, 'To take three young
men.' And demanding how they should know the
persons, one answered with these words : ' Marry,
my lord, by intelligence of their favour.' 'What
mean you by that ? ' quoth I. ' Marry,' said they,
'one of the parties hath a hooked nose.' 'And
have you,' quoth I, 'no other mark1?' 'No,' saith
they. And then I asked who appointed them ; and
they answered one Bankes, a Head Constable, whom
I willed to be sent to me."

The tricks of the sharpers and thieves of London
are minutely described by Greene in his inimitable
pamphlets. The Second Part of Connie-Catching (1591)
tells a story, newly reported to Greene while he
was writing, of a trick put upon a country farmer,
in the walks of St. Paul's, by a company of foists, or
cut-purses. The farmer kept his hand in his pocket,
and his purse in his hand, so that it was impossible
to do any good with him, whether by jostling him,
or claiming acquaintance and offering to shake him
by the hand. Then two of the foists concocted a
plan, and one of them "went to the farmer and
walked directly before him, and next him, three or
four turns: at last, standing still, he cried, 'Alas,

honest man, help me, I am not well ! ' and with
s. E

66 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

that sunk down suddenly in a swoon. The poor
farmer, seeing a proper young gentleman, as he
thought, fall dead afore him, stepped to him, held
him in his arms, rubbed him and chafed him; at
this there gathered a great multitude of people
about him ; and the whilst the foist drew the
farmer's purse and away." This is the identical
trick put upon the clown by Autolycus, who, being
a doctor of the mystery, scorns the aid of an accom
plice, and carries out his purpose single-handed, with
many refinements of humorous audacity.

Even Falstaff, though he is of Shakespeare's
making, was not made out of nothing. It is vain
and foolish to seek for a single original, whether in
the dramatist, Henry Chettle, "sweating and blow
ing by reason of his fatness," or in any of his con
temporaries. We may boldly say of Falstaff, as
another of Shakespeare's highest creations says of
himself, "There is no such man: it is impossible."
So illimitable a body of vitality, steeped in so much
wit, is not in Nature; and if it were, a great
dramatist does not work in servile fashion from
individual models. But Falstaff is pure Elizabethan;
and here and there in the all too scanty human
records of that time we meet with a comic exploit
that seems to remind us of our old friend, or are
caught by a trick of speech that comes to us with

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 67

a strangely familiar ring. Falstaff was never at the
end of his resources; and if he had chosen to in
veigh against his own manner of life, not without
some sidelong depreciation of his companions, might
he not have spoken after this fashion : " Now, Lord !
what a man is he; he was not ashamed, being a
Gentleman, yea, a man of good years, and much
authority, and the head Officer of a Duke's house,
to play at Dice in an Ale house with boys, bawds
and varlets. It had been a great fault to play at
so vile a game among such vile persons, being no
Gentleman, being no Officer, being not of such years;
but being both a man of fair lands, of an ancient
house, of great authority, an Officer of a Duke, yea,
and to such a Duke, and a man of such years that
his white hairs should warn him to avoid all such
folly, to play at such a game with such Roysters
and such Varlets, yea, and that in such an house
as none comes thither but Thieves, Bawds, and
Ruffians ; now before God, I cannot speak shame
enough on him"? This speech, which is given as
an example in Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric
(1553), has not Falstaff s wit, but it has the rhetorical
syntax which he borrows when he rides the high
horse. And something of his wit, too, was to be
found among the knights of the road. Thomas
Harman, the Kentish Justice of the Peace, tells of

68 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

an adventure that befell an old man, a tenant of
his own, who was wont to go marketing twice a
week to London. On one of these journeys this
old man overtook two " rufflers," or broken soldiers
of fortune who had taken to the highway, riding
together quietly, the one carrying the other's cloak,
like master and man. They talked pleasantly with
him till they came to a lonely part of the road ;
then they led his horse into a wood and asked him
how much money he had in his purse. He con
fessed that he had just seven shillings. But when
the robbers came to search, they found, besides the
seven shillings, an angel which the old man had
charged his wife to keep safely for him, but she
had forgotten it, and left it in his purse. Then
the gentleman-thief began to bless himself, saying,
" Good Lord, what a world is this ! How may a
man believe or trust in the same? See you not,"
quoth he, "this old knave told me that he had
but seven shillings; and here is more by an angel.
What an old knave and a false knave have we
here," quoth this ruffler; "Our Lord have mercy
on us, will this world never be better1?"— and with
that they went their way. This speech is in the
very vein of Falstaff; it was spoken near Shooter's
Hill, in the neighbourhood of Blackheath about
1560 A.D.

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 69

Illustrations of this kind are not beside the mark.
Shakespeare lived in an age of glitter and pageantry,
of squalor and wickedness, of the lust of the eye
and the pride of life, — an age of prodigality, adven
ture, bravery, and excess. All this life has passed,
leaving us a heap of dusty legal documents, and a
small library of books, written, for the most part,
by quiet students who took refuge in literature from
the rush and turmoil of the age. We make much
of the books, and patiently search them through
and through for the genesis of Shakespeare's ideas.
But the secret is not to be found among these
deposits : the life that surrounded him has vanished ;
the stream of movement has ceased; and we are
left raking for chance memorials in the dried and
deserted channel.

The plays give abundant evidence of his know
ledge of the town. Tavern-life counted for much
in that day. At inns or taverns a newly arrived
stranger would pick up his earliest acquaintance;
and later, would meet the company of his friends.
In The Taming of the Shrew the disguised pedant
claims acquaintance with Baptista on the ground
that twenty years agone they had been fellow-
lodgers at the Pegasus in Genoa. The sea captain
in Twelfth Night lodges "in the south suburbs, at
the Elephant." In The Comedy of Errors there are

70 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

many inns— the Centaur, the Tiger, and the Por-
pentine. Of London taverns, the Boar's Head in
East Cheap has been made famous for ever by the
patronage of Falstaff and his crew ; as the Mermaid
was famous for the club of wits, established by
Raleigh and Marlowe, honoured by Shakespeare,
and superseded by the later gatherings in the Apollo
room of the Devil Tavern, where Ben Jonson pre
sided. In that age of symbol and emblem private
houses and shops bore a sign, which might either
serve as a proper name, to identify the house, or
might indicate the business of the tenant. Benedick,
in Much Ado, speaks of the sign of blind Cupid " at
the door of a brothel-house." An allusion to 'this
sign enhances the force of King Lear's speech, when,
in his terrible passion against the generation of man
kind, he says to Gloucester, "Dost thou squiny at
me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid; I'll not love."
Measure for Measure, and the Fourth Act of Pericles
(which no pen but his could have written), prove
Shakespeare's acquaintance with the darker side of
the life of the town, as it might be seen in Pickt-
hatch or the Bankside. He does not fear to expose
the purest of his heroines to the breath of this
infection; their virtue is not ignorance; "'tis in
grain : 'twill endure wind and weather." In nothing
is he more himself than in the little care that he

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 71

takes to provide shelter for the most delicate
characters of English fiction. They owe their edu
cation to the larger world, not to the drawing-room.
Even Miranda, who is more tenderly guarded than
Isabella or Marina, is not the pretty simpleton that
some later renderings have made of her; when
Prospero speaks of the usurping Duke as being no
true brother to him, she replies composedly :

I should sin

To think but nobly of my grandmother :
Good wombs have borne bad sons.

Shakespeare's heroines are open-eyed ; therein re
sembling himself, who turned away from nothing
that bears the human image. He knew those
"strong houses of sorrow," the prisons of London
— as indeed they were easy to be known when
Master Caper, or any other ill-starred young man,
might find himself inside one of them, at the instance
of a usurer, " for a commodity of brown paper and
old ginger." He marked the fashions of the youth ;
the gallants and military adventurers,

Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries,

With ladies' faces, and fierce dragons' spleens ;

the "demure and peace-loving young gentlemen,
"lisping hawthorn-buds, that come like women in
men's apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in simple-
time " ; and those more hardened fortune-seekers who

72 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

were waiting in the river-side resorts for a chance
to put to sea, " that their business might be every
thing, and their intent everywhere." He watched
with gently critical humour the goings and comings
of the "douce folk that lived by rule," the sober
tradespeople of the City, who, with their wives and
daughters, were puritanically given, and shunned
the theatre. He touches on Puritanism, from time
to time, with the lightest of hands, but not so lightly
as to leave any room for mistake. This people, who
sang psalms to hornpipe tunes, and were willing to
make trading profits out of the theatre which they
condemned, had no enemy in Shakespeare ; but he
knows them, and knows their besetting weaknesses,
and smiles. Their preciseness of speech appears in
Parolles, who, when he is told that his lord and
master is married, answers with a pious reservation
— "He is my good Lord; whom I serve above is
my Master." The audience at the Globe Theatre in
the suburb of the Bankside understood the allusion
very well when the clown, in Measure for Measure,
announces that all houses of ill repute in the suburbs
of Vienna must be plucked down; as for those in
the city, "they shall stand for seed: they had 'gone
down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them."
From the high-priest of Baal, Master William Shake
speare, his precise brethren might have had that

STRATFORD AND LONDON 73

"schooling in the pleasures" which they most needed;
they might have learnt that "though Honesty be
no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt." But they
denied themselves the opportunity.

After some years of life and work as an obscure
adventurer, Shakespeare emerged from the ranks,
and set his foot firmly on the ladder of fame. The
great and immediate success of his Venus and Adonis
(1593), which he dedicated to the Earl of South
ampton, was in all likelihood the beginning of his
good fortune. Plays had no patrons save the
managers and the public ; a poem, if it found
acceptance, might win for its author admission to
the society of men of rank and influence. Not long
after this we hear of Shakespeare acting at Green
wich Palace before the Queen ; and thenceforward
he probably found easy access to the highest courtly
circles, and observed them as closely as he had
observed the life of the streets. He sees the pro
blem of government from many points of view, but
most readily and habitually from the point of view
of the ruling classes. Royalty was gracious to him.
Ben Jonson speaks of

those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James ;

and there are many indications and traditions of
the favour that he enjoyed under both monarchs.

74 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

He did not disdain to play the courtier. He cele
brated the praises of both his sovereigns, choosing
for commendation those gifts and graces on which
they most prided themselves. Elizabeth is praised
for her virgin estate; James for his supernatural
powers of healing, and his strange gift of prophecy.
The Merry Wives was written out of compliment to
the one ; the subject of Macbeth was probably chosen
to gratify the other. Of the nobility, we may infer
that Shakespeare was in friendly personal relations
with Southampton, who is said to have given him
a thousand pounds " to enable him to go through
with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to " ;
with Essex, who is lauded in Henry V. \ and -with
the " incomparable pair of brethren," William, Earl
of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, to
whom the First Folio is dedicated in recognition of
the favour they had shown to the author when
living. Some of the plays— A Midsummer Night's
Dream, The Tempest, Cymbeline, Henry Fill, -were
obviously performed on special courtly occasions;
those that include a masque could not have been
presented with due elaboration on the public stage.
All that we know testifies to Shakespeare's familiarity
with the life of the Court; he had been present
at state ceremonies, when great clerks greeted
Royalty with premeditated welcomes, which broke

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 75

down under the weight of the occasion ; he delighted
in that quickness of witty retort which was culti
vated in courtly speech, and in that graciousness
and urbanity of bearing which is sometimes found
in his princely men, and always in his great ladies.
In Love's Labour's Lost the Princess, and the Princess
alone, is considerate and kindly to "poor Macca-
baeus" and "brave Hector"; in Twelfth Night the
Countess Olivia treats her drunken kinsman and his
foolish friend with a certain charming protective
care, and attends to Malvolio's wrongs before quietly
accepting, for herself, the hand of Sebastian.

Of the incidents of his life in London nothing
is known. One anecdote, belonging to the earlier
years of that life, is recorded — just such an anecdote
as young law students might be expected to tell of
a popular actor-manager, and not deserving repeti
tion, were it not the single piece of gossip concerning
Shakespeare which was set down on paper during
his residence in London and has survived. The
Diary of John Marmingham, barrister-at-law, tells,
under the year 1601, how, once upon a time, a City
dame, infatuated with Burbage in the part of
Richard in., made an assignation with him for the
evening. Shakespeare, overhearing their conversa
tion, was beforehand with Burbage, and was kindly
entertained. " Then message being brought that

76 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Richard the Third was at the 4oor> Shakespeare
caused return to be made that William the Con
queror was before Eichard the Third." Of a quarter
of a century of life and experience this one small
doubtful jest is all that has been chronicled ; and
Hamlet may point the moral.

From the evidence of the plays it has been
argued that Shakespeare must have travelled.
Doubtless he often went with his company of actors
on their summer tours among provincial towns. It
is unlikely that he ever crossed the Channel, or
visited Scotland. Certain of his allusions in Hamlet
and the Italian plays, show some detailed local
knowledge of Elsinore and of Italy. The name
Gobbo, for instance, which he gives to the clown in
The Merchant of Venice, is the name of an ancient
stone in the market-place of that city ; and when he
speaks of the common ferry as " the tranect," the
word seems to be a mistaken or misprinted adapta
tion of the Italian word traghetto. But this is
nothing : Venice, in her ancient glory, attracted
crowds of travellers ; and, without troubling himself
to put a question, Shakespeare must have heard
innumerable stories and memories from that centre
of life and commerce. In this age of cheap printed
information we are too apt to forget how large a
part of his knowledge he must have gathered in

II. STRATFORD AND LONDON 77

talk. Books were licensed and guarded ; but in talk
there was free trade. He must often have listened
to tales, like those told by Othello, of the wonders
of the New World. He must often have seen the
affected traveller, described in King John, dallying
with his tooth-pick at a great man's table, full of
elaborate compliment,

And talking of the Alps and Apennines,
The Pyrenean and the river Po.

The knowledge that he gained from such talk, if
it was sometimes remote and curious, was neither
systematic nor accurate ; and this is the knowledge
reflected in the plays.

Through all the years of his strenuous life in
London his affections were still constant to the place
of his birth, which seems to have remained the home
of his family. When money came to him, it was
spent on acquiring property at Stratford. In 1597
he bought and repaired New Place, the stateliest
house in the town, and to this he added from time to
time by large purchases of arable land, pasture land,
and tithes. "He was wont," says Aubrey, "to go
to his native country once a year." " He frequented
the plays all his younger time," says Ward, "but
in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied
the stage with two plays every year, and for that
had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate

78 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of a thousand a year, as I have heard." For many
years before he retired he was probably much at
Stratford, and his greatest plays, Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth and others, were probably written during
the summer season at New Place, as they were cer
tainly acted on the boards of the Globe Theatre in
Southwark. The parish register of Stratford has
preserved for us the record of some of the chief
events of his private life. In 1596 his only son,
Hamnet, died ; and those who seek in the plays for
a reflection of his personal history are perhaps
justified in finding some shadow of his sorrow ex
pressed in the pathetic fate of Arthur and the
passionate grief of Constance, in King John. In 1607
his eldest daughter, Susanna, was married to John
Hall, a doctor of medicine; in the following year
his mother died. During the last three or four
years of his life he is reported to have lived wholly
at Stratford, in retirement; on the 10th of February,
1616, his daughter Judith was married to Thomas
Quiney, vintner ; on the 25th of March he signed his
will ; on the 23rd of April he died, and was buried
in the chancel of Stratford Church.

His will makes a fairly regular and normal dis
position of his property among his family and kins
folk. The only professional friends mentioned are
his " fellows," John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 79

Henry Condell, who receive twenty-six shillings and
eightpenee apiece to buy them rings. Of these
Richard Burbage was the actor of the great tragic
parts in the plays ; the other two were subsequently
the editors of the first collected edition. The affec
tionate bequest to them in the will, taken in connec
tion with their own statements in the preface to the
Folio of 1623, gives them high authority as editors ;
even though their work is deformed, in parts, by
serious blunders. A legitimate inference from the
recorded facts, and from the strangely varying merits
of the texts of the several plays, as printed in the
Folio, is that Shakespeare before his death had begun
to make preparations for a collected edition. Some
few plays he probably had by him in autograph;
some he had scored and corrected on playhouse
transcripts or on the faulty quarto copies which had
been printed during his lifetime ; many others had
received no revision at his hands. The collection of
his dramatic " papers," such as it was, passed into
the care of Heminge and Condell ; and they dis
charged their trust. Where the Folio differs materi
ally from earlier quarto versions, the taste of modern
editors may prefer the one or the other, but there
can be no question which comes to us with the
higher authority. The earlier editions preserve
many passages, undoubtedly by Shakespeare, which

80 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

are omitted in the Folio ; but Shakespeare was first
of all a playwright, and the omissions often improve
the play. Most modern editions include all the
matter which was omitted in the Folio, and retain
all the matter which made its first appearance there.
This plan has advantages, especially for those who
make use of Shakespeare's work as a lexicon of
speeches and sentiments. But it has one grave dis
advantage : it presents us with some of the plays
in a form which was not, and cannot have been,
authorised by Shakespeare at any time in his career.
There is no escape from the Folio : for twenty of
the plays it is our sole authority ; for most of. the
remainder it is the best authority that we shall ever
know.

In the latest plays the country life of Stratford
re-asserts itself. After all our martial and political
adventures, our long-drawn passions and deadly
sorrows, we are back in Perdita's flower-garden, and
join in the festivities of a sheep-shearing. A new
type of character meets us in these plays ; a girl,
innocent, frank, dutiful, and wise, cherished and
watched over by her devoted father, or restored to
him after long separation. It is impossible to escape
the thought that we are indebted to Judith Shake
speare for something of the beauty and simplicity
which appear in Miranda and Perdita, and in the

n. STRATFORD AND LONDON 81

earlier sketch of Marina. In his will Shakespeare
bequeaths to Judith a "broad silver-gilt bowl," —
doubtless the bride-cup that was used at her
wedding. There were many other girls within
reach of his observation, but (such are the limita
tions of humanity) there were few so likely as his
own daughter to exercise him in disinterested
sympathy and insight, or to touch him with a sense
of the pathos of youth.

These speculations may very easily be carried too
far; and they bring with them this danger, that
prosaic minds take them for a key to the plays, and
translate the most exquisite works of imagination
into dull chronicles and gossip. Perhaps we do best
to abide by the bare facts, and the straightforward
tale that they tell. So great is the power of Shake
speare's name to stimulate unbridled curiosity that
whole volumes have been filled with the discussion
of questions which, even if he were now alive, we
could not answer. What was his religious creed1?
He was baptized, and had his children baptized,
according to the rites of the Church of England.
Was he happily married ? If he had lived in a
town of a hundred newspapers, all treasured and
consulted, there would still be no evidence to satisfy
us on this point. The broad outlines of his life are
not obscure. He went to London to seek his fortune,

S. F

82 SHAKESPEARE CHAP. II.

and when he had found it there, returned to Strat
ford, and established himself with his wife and family
in peace and prosperity. It is as simple as a fairy
tale. If we must needs look closer, and read the
plays into the life, there is nothing to alter in the
story. We know that he went through deep waters,
no man deeper, and came out on the other side.
The simple pieties of life were at all times dearest to
him. He was never uprooted from the place of his
nativity, nor deceived by the spirits of his own
raising. His attachment to his birthplace, his family,
and his early friends might be fairly expressed in
the subtle metaphor of the greatest of his younger
contemporaries— a metaphor in which he would' have
found nothing extravagant or absurd. The vast
circle of his experience was kept true by the stability
of his first affections, as the motion of a pair of
compasses is controlled from the fixed centre.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot obliquely run.
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

CHAPTER III

BOOKS AND POETRY

IT is safe to assert that Shakespeare was a poet
before he was a dramatist. Of his first steps in the
practice of poetry nothing is known ; but the study
of his plays and poems has thrown some light on his
dealings with literature. Books served him in two
ways ; as a mine, and as a school : he lifted from
them the tales that he rehandled, and he learned
from them some part of his poetic and dramatic
method.

His literary sources have been so carefully identi
fied and so exhaustively studied, that it is possible
to make a long catalogue of the books that he read
or consulted. The slow-footed and painstaking
pursuit of him by the critics through ways that
he trod so carelessly and lightly would furnish a
happy theme for his own wit and irony. The world
lay open to him, and he had small patience with the
tedious processes of minute culture. He was a
hungry and rapid reader; and has expressed, with

84 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

something of a witty young man's intolerance, his
contempt for more laborious methods :

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,

That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks ;

Small have continual plodders ever won

Save base authority from others' books.

In Stratford he can have had no great choice of
books, though we may assume that he read most
of those he could lay his hands on. There is extant
a private account-book containing an inventory of
the furniture and books belonging to Sir William
More, of Loseley, in the last year of the reign of
Queen Mary, some seven years before Shakespeare
was born. This list has nothing to do with Shake
speare, but it serves to show what books were to
be found in the library of a country gentleman of
literary tastes and easy, though not ample, means.
There is a selection of the Latin classics, including
works by Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Suetonius, Apuleius,
and a volume of extracts from Terence. Cicero's
Offices, and Thucydides, occur in the English transla
tions of Whittington and Nicolls. In Italian there
are Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavel, and the Book of
the Courtier. Mediaeval literature is represented by
the Golden Legend, Albertus De Secretis, and Cato's
Precepts; the Revival of Learning by More (the
Utopia), Erasmus (the Adages and the Praise of

"I- BOOKS AND POETRY 85

Folly), and Marcellus Palingenius. There is a fair
number of Chronicles, including Higden, Fabyan,
Harding, and Froissart. The English list includes
works by Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, John Hey wood,
Skelton, Alexander Barclay, and a liberal allowance
of books of Songs, Proverbs, Fables, and Ballads.
An English Bible, copies of the New Testament in
Latin, French, and Italian, Elyot's Latin Dictionary,
an Italian Dictionary, some books on law, physic,
and land-surveying, "a book of the Turk," and "a
treatise of the newe India," make up the list. Last,
and never to be forgotten in estimating the poetic
influences of the time, in the parlour there was a
pair of virginals, a lute, and a gittern. This is a
richer collection of books than Shakespeare was
likely to find in Stratford, and it is noticeable that,
except the Latin poets whom he read at school,
none of the authors occurring in the above list
influenced him in any marked fashion. He was a
child of the English Renaissance, and it was the
books of his own age that first caught him in their
toils. Even Chaucer, who never lost popularity,
lost esteem with the younger generation of Eliza
bethans, and suffered from the imputation of rusti
city. But the translations and imitations of the
classics, which poured from the press during the
second half of the century, the poems and love-

86 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

pamphlets and plays of the University wits, the
tracts and dialogues in the prevailing Italian taste
—all these were the making of the new age and
the favourite reading of Shakespeare, who can
hardly have become intimate with them until he
first set foot in London. No doubt he ranged up
and down the bookstalls of Paul's Churchyard,
browsing among "the innumerable sorts of English
books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets "
wherewith, according to a contemporary, "this
Country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every
study furnished." Here for a few shillings he may
have bought books printed by Caxton and • his
pupils, and so made acquaintance with Gower, whom
he read, and with Malory, some of whose phrases
he seems to echo. Here, no doubt, he tore the
heart, at a single reading, out of many a pamphlet
and many a novel. He was no bibliophile, though
he gives utterance, with curious frequency, to the
opinion that a good book should have a good bind
ing. He read the works of his contemporaries as
they appeared. Marlowe, his master in the drama,
he has honoured in the most unusual fashion by
direct quotation :

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might :
"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"

From Greene's story of Dorastus and Fawnia he took

ni. BOOKS AND POETRY 87

the plot of The Winter's Tale ; and it is permissible to
think that he commemorated the unhappy life and
early death of Greene, who had died reviling him,
in those lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream which
describe

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death
Of Learning late deceas'd in beggary.

On Thomas Lodge's novel Rosalynde he based his play
of As You Like It. He read Euphues, of course ;
borrowed from it, and in Henry IV. ridiculed its
affectations. He read Sidney's Arcadia, and perhaps
took from it the underplot of Gloucester and his sons
in King Lear. And apart from these famous instances,
there is hardly a pamphlet, in that age of pamphlets,
which the student can read in the certainty that
Shakespeare has not been before him. The names of
the devils in King Lear seem to be borrowed from an
obscure Protestant tract, of 1603, called A Declara
tion of egregious Popish Impostures. The arguments of
Shylock, in his speeches before the Duke, have been
supposed to owe something to Silvayn's Orator, a
book of declamations translated in 1596 from the
French ; while a very close parallel to Portia's reply
has been found in the prose of Seneca. These are
instances which might be multiplied a hundredfold;
and although few are certain cases of debt, their
cumulative effect is irresistible. Shakespeare was

88 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

one of those swift and masterly readers who know
what they want of a book ; they scorn nothing that
is dressed in print, but turn over the pages with
a quick discernment of all that brings them new
information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles
their fancy. Such a reader will perhaps have done
with a volume in a few minutes, yet what he has
taken from it he keeps for years. He is a live man ;
and is sometimes wrongly judged by slower wits to
be a learned man.

Among the publications of his own age, some few
stand out pre-eminent as books that were of more
than passing interest to Shakespeare, books that he
ransacked from cover to cover for the material of
his plays. The books that served him best for his
dramatic plots were Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles,
Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives,
and the Italian novelists, in many translations, chief
among which must be reckoned Painter's Palace of
Pleasure, containing a selection of the choicest novels
of the great Italian masters. These books, one would
say, he must have owned. The novelists supplied
him, either directly, or through the medium of some
earlier play, with much of the material of his comedy.
From Holinshed he took the substance of his English
historical plays ; and his study of the book acquainted
him also with those ancient British legends which he

in. BOOKS AND POETRY 89

transfigured in King Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline.
The Italian novels and the English chronicle his
tory cannot compare, in the world's literature, with
the thrice-renowned Lives of Plutarch ; yet all
three were worthy to be read arid studied by
Shakespeare.

An examination of the use that he makes of these,
his principal sources, shows that he did not pay the
same measure of respect to them all. The novels he
treats with the utmost freedom, altering them, or
adding to them, to suit his fancy. He brings them
out of the languid realm of romance by inventing
new realistic characters, who give something of the
diversity of life to the story, and save it from swoon
ing into sheer convention. Orlando and Rosalind
must run the gauntlet of criticism at the hands of
Touchstone and Jaques; the love-affair of Romeo
and Juliet is seen in its more prosaic aspects through
the eyes of Mercutio arid the Nurse. In the interests
of comedy he does away with much of the pain and
squalor of his originals. In Greene's novel Bellaria,
the original of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, dies ;
in Shakespeare's play she is kept alive, by strange
means, for the final reconciliation. In Twelfth Night,
again, the story, as it is told by Barnabe Riche, from
whose novel of Apollonius and Silla Shakespeare seems
to have taken the main incidents of the play, has in

90 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

it strong elements of pain and tragedy. Viola, in
Kiche's story, has been wronged and deserted by
the Duke \ Olivia, in the course of the intrigue, is
betrayed by Sebastian. These ugly features of the
story were altered by Shakespeare ; and the result is
a pure comedy of fancy, a world of romantic incident
seen through a golden haze of love and mirth. So
he moulded a story to his liking, turning it, as seemed
good to his mood and judgment, into tragedy, or
comedy, or romance. In the plays that deal with
English history he was compelled to keep closer to
his sources ; but he was fortunate in the authors that
he used. The Chronicles of Holinshed, unlike more
modern histories, are dramatic in essence ; they leave
constitutional problems on one side and make the
most of striking events and characters. The very
title page of Hall's Chronicle is a fair enough descrip
tion of Shakespeare's theme : " The Union of the two
Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York,
being long in continual dissension for the crown of
this noble realm, with all the acts done in both the
times of the princes both of the one lineage and of
the other, beginning at the time of King Henry the
Fourth, the first author of this division, and so
successively proceeding to the reign of the high and
prudent prince King Henry the Eight, the undubitate
flower and very heir of both the said lineages."

in- BOOKS AND POETRY 91

That irony of kingship, which Mr. Pater conceives it
is Shakespeare's main purpose to set forth, is already
present in the mind of the prose chronicler, who thus
comments on the fate of King Richard n. : " What
trust is in this world, what surety man hath of his
life, and what constancy is in the unstable com
monalty, all men may apparently perceive by the
ruin of this noble prince, which being an undubitate
king, crowned and anointed by the spiritualty,
honoured and exalted by the nobility, obeyed and
worshipped of the common people, was suddenly
deceived by them which he most trusted, betrayed
by them whom he had preferred, and slain by them
whom he had brought up and nourished : so that all
men may perceive and see that fortune weigheth
princes and poor men all in one balance." Sometimes
Shakespeare follows his authority so tamely that he
versifies whole speeches from the chronicler, working,
as it would seem, with the book open before him.
The discussion on the Salic Law in Henry V., and
the long dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, in
the Fourth Act of Macbeth, are taken directly from
Holirished, and are very imperfectly dramatised. It
is to passages like these that Dryden alludes when
he speaks of Shakespeare falling " into a carelessness,
and, as I may call it, a lethargy of thought, for whole
scenes together." But when a crisis calls for treat-

92 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

ment, when his imagination takes fire, or his sense of
humour is touched, he gives over borrowing, and
coins from his own mint. Every word spoken by
Falstaff is a word of life, for Falstaff was unknown to
the chroniclers. The character of Lady Macbeth is
represented in Holinshed by a single sentence : "But
specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the
thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in
unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen."
From this bare hint Shakespeare created his mur
deress, her narrow practical intensity, her heroic
courage and fierce will, holding imagination at bay,
soothing and supporting her husband, making light
of the deed to be done, until human nature avenges
itself on her, and she too falls a victim to air-drawn
fancies, and hears voices in her sleep. The most
famous of the freedoms taken with Holinshed is to be
found in King Lear. In the chronicle version Cordelia
survives her misfortunes, regains her kingdom, and
comforts the declining years of her father ; but before
Shakespeare reached the close of his play he had
wound the tragedy up to such a pitch that a happy
ending, as it is called, was unthinkable; a deeper
peace than the peace of old age by the fireside was
needed to compose that heartrending storm of passion.
In this as in other cases Holinshed was used by
Shakespeare as a kind of mechanical aid to start his

Hi. BOOKS AND POETRY 93

imagination on its flight and launch it into its own
domain.

With Plutarch the case is far different. The Lives
of the Noble Grecians and Romans was the only
supremely great literary work which Shakespeare set
himself to fashion into drama. There are a hundred
testimonies to the power and influence of this book
of the ages. It has been the breviary of soldiers,
statesmen, and orators, and has fascinated readers so
diverse as Henry of Navarre and Miss Hannah More.
In Plutarch Shakespeare found some of the most
superb passages of the history of the world, great
deeds nobly narrated, and great characters worthily
drawn. Moreover, his material was already more than
half shaped to his hand, for Plutarch writes lives,
not annals, and pays more attention to the character
of men, even in its humblest manifestations, than to
the general and philosophic causes of events. "They
who write lives," says Montaigne, "by reason that
they take more notice of counsels than events, more
of what proceeds from within doors than of what
happens without, are the fittest for my perusal ; and
therefore, of all others, Plutarch is the man for me."
Plutarch was the man for Shakespeare, and in
Plutarch alone he sometimes met his match. Some
of the finest pieces of eloquence in the Roman plays
are merely Sir Thomas North's splendid prose strung

94 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

into blank verse. Shakespeare follows his authority
phrase by phrase and word by word, not, as with
Holinshed, because his interest flagged, but because
he knew when to let well alone. It may even be
said that in some places he has fallen short of his
original. There is a passage in Plutarch's Life of
Anthony, tremulous with suspense and dim fore
bodings, wherein is described how the god Hercules,
on the night before the last surrender, forsook the
cause of Antony. " The self-same night within little
of midnight, when all the city was quiet, full of
fear and sorrow, thinking what would be the issue
and end of this war; it is said that suddenly they
heard a marvellous sweet harmony of sundry sorts
of instruments of music, with the cry of a multitude
of people, as they had been dancing, and had sung
as they use in Bacchus' feasts, with movings and
turnings after the manner of the Satyrs : and it
seemed that this dance went through the city unto
the gate that opened to the enemies, and that all
the troop, that made this noise they heard, went
out of the city at that gate. Now such as in reason
sought the depth of the interpretation of this
wonder, thought that it was the god unto whom
Antonius bare singular devotion, to counterfeit and
resemble him, that did forsake them." Shakespeare
desired to preserve this effect; and in the Fourth

ni. BOOKS AND POETRY 95

Act of Antony and Cleopatra he introduces a music
of hautboys under the stage, and makes the sentries
discuss its meaning. But this is a poor substitute
for Plutarch's description. The death of Cleopatra,
again, as it is described in Plutarch, is a combina
tion of the intensity and minuteness of realism with
the dignity and reserve of the best classic art. " Her
death was very sudden. For those whom Caesar
sent unto her ran thither in all haste possible,
and found the soldiers standing at the gate, mis
trusting nothing nor understanding of her death.
But when they opened the doors, they found Cleo
patra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired
and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two
women, which was called Iras, dead at her feet ; and
the other woman, called Charmian, half dead, and
trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra
ware upon her head. One of the soldiers seeing her
angrily said unto her : ' Is that well done, Char
mian 1 ' l Very well,' said she again, ' and meet for
a Princess descended from the race of so many noble
Kings.' She said no more, but fell down dead, hard
by the bed." Here the drama falls short ; perhaps
because so much of the effect of the narrative
depends on those moving little touches of description
— the unconscious sentries, the trembling hand
maiden—which must perforce be omitted in the

96 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

drama, or expressed in a more trivial and coarser
fashion by the gestures of the players.

There is evidence to show how strong a hold
the stories and characters of Plutarch laid upon
Shakespeare's imagination. He must have searched
the book carefully for tragic subjects during the last
years of the sixteenth century, some time before
he wrote Julius Caesar. From that time onward
memories of his reading constantly recur to him,
and intrude upon his other plays. When Horatio
reminds the companions of his watch how

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets,

the Danish courtier is borrowing his history from
Plutarch. When Banquo, on the sudden disappear
ance of the witches, exclaims —

Were such things here as we do speak about,
Or have we eaten on the insane root,
That takes the reason prisoner?

the Scottish thane is remembering his Plutarch.
Botanists have, as usual, given their cheerful help
to determine the name of the insane root. Their
opinions would have enlightened Shakespeare, for
the fact is that he did not know its name. There
lingered in his memory a passage from Plutarch's

in. BOOKS AND POETRY 97

Life of Antony describing how the Roman soldiers
in the Parthian war were forced by hunger " to
taste of roots that were never eaten before, among
the which there was one that killed them, and made
them out of their wits." In Cymbeline the bed
chamber of Imogen is hung with tapestry representing
the picture of

Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman,
And Cydnus swell'd above the banks, or for
The press of boats, or pride.

And the very subject of Timon of Athens was pro
bably suggested by the short description of Timon
which is given in the Life of Antony. North's
Plutarch did more than supply Shakespeare with
matter for his plays ; it excited his imagination and
possessed his thought.

The question of his Biblical knowledge has been
discussed in many treatises, and involved in a net
work of wire-drawn arguments. Some critics have
maintained that his reading was in the Bishops'
Bible; others hold for the Genevan version. Both
succeed in establishing their case ; indeed, it would
be strange if he had not known something of both
versions. The Bishops' Bible was read in the
churches ; the Genevan Bible was more widely cir
culated in portable editions. He has references to

Pilate washing his hands; to the Prodigal Son, to
s. G

98 SHAKESPEARE CHAP-

Jacob and Laban, to Lazarus and Dives, and the
like. But it cannot be inferred from this that he
was a deep student of the Bible. The phraseology
of his age, like that of later ages, was saturated with
Biblical reminiscence. The Essays of Elia are a tissue
of Biblical phrase; and Shakespeare's knowledge of
the Bible, which may fairly be likened to Charles
Lamb's, was probably acquired in casual and desul
tory fashion.

Of modern French and Italian writers it is clear
that those whom he knew best he knew in trans
lation. From the plays it may be gathered that he
had a certain colloquial knowledge of French, and,
at the least, a smattering of Italian. The plots of
Measure far Measure and Otlidlo are taken from the
Hecatommithi, a collection of Italian novels, published
in 1566, by Giambattista Giraldi, commonly called
Cinthio. The plot of The Merchant of Venice is taken,
in the main, from another collection called //
Pecorone, by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. The Measure
for Measure story had already been dramatised by
George Whetstone under the title of Promos and
Cassandra (1578), and there are traces of an earlier
dramatic handling of the Merchant of Venice story,
in a lost play called The Jew. But no intermediate
form has been found for the Othello story; which
therefore remains the chief argument for Shake-

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 99

speare's direct use of Italian authors. A man of less
than his ability could learn in a few weeks enough
Italian for a purpose like this, so that no great
significance attaches to the discussion. He was not
influenced by the works of Machiavel, as Marlowe
was ; nor by those of Pietro Aretino, as Nashe was.
An incident taken from Ariosto, whom Spenser knew
so well, occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, but there
is no reason to suppose that he went further for it
than Sir John Harington's translation of 1591. If
he had studied Ariosto, we might expect to find
more numerous and intimate marks of acquaintance ;
and the same argument applies to Rabelais. There
are substances which have the property of igniting
each other; and the fact that they never did is
proof enough that they never came into contact.
Celia's allusion, in As You Like It, to the size of
Gargantua's mouth is plainly a reminiscence of a lost
Elizabethan chap book which gave to English readers
the shell of Rabelais' fable without the vivifying
soul ; and some few Rabelaisian turns of speech, which
are found on the lips of lago and others, even if they
are original in Rabelais, probably came borne to
Shakespeare upon the tide of talk. He was well
acquainted, through the translation of Florio, with
Montaigne, that other great pioneer of the modern
spirit. It has been argued that a certain deeper

100 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

vein of scepticism and questioning, which makes its
appearance in his mature tragic work, was borrowed
from Montaigne. Certainly it would not be difficult
to gather from Montaigne's Essays an anthology of
passages which speak with the very voice of Hamlet ;
but the similarity seems to spring from the natural
kinship of questioning minds. " Man has nothing
properly his own," says Montaigne, "but the use
of his opinions " ; and Hamlet echoes the thought.
It is not likely that Shakespeare was dependent for
so ancient a discovery on the labours of Florio.
Was the widow, in The Taming of the Shrew, a pupil
of Montaigne's1? In her raillery of Petruchio she
utters the text upon which Montaigne's work' may
be said to be one long commentary : " He that is
giddy thinks the world turns round," Was Biron
indebted to Montaigne ? He teaches the same doc
trine when he remarks that " every man with his
affects is born." The only passage of importance
which Shakespeare certainly borrowed directly from
Montaigne bears no witness to discipleship in
thought. In his essay Of Cannibals Montaigne
gravely argues for the superiority of the savage
state, and drives the argument to its full conclusion :
in The Tempest Shakespeare borrows the description
of the unsophisticated commonwealth, and plays with
the idea only to ridicule it. Their differences are

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 101

absolute : Montaigne is at ease, not to say exultant,
in his doubt ; his business is to spy out human weak
nesses and to put all human life to the question :
Shakespeare does not withhold the question, but his
eye and heart are at a mortal war, and in the end
the gentlemen of the inquisition find that he belongs
to the other party. His ultimate sympathies are
with human frailty, human simplicity, human un
reason; and it is to these that he gives the last
word. He has, what Montaigne shows no trace of,
a capacity for tragic thought.

The careful study of Shakespeare's sources, though
it throws some light on his dramatic methods, does
not bring us much nearer to the heart of the matter.
Its results are mainly negative. The stress of our
interpretation must not be laid upon those parts of
his story which he borrowed from others arid pre
served unaltered. What he added to the story was
himself ; and a comparison of what he found with
what he left forces us to the conclusion that his
choice of books was largely accidental. If these had
not come to his hand, others would have served as
well. Subjects fit for his uses lay all around him.
He read Holinshed, and happened on the stories of
King Lear and Macbeth. There is nothing in these
stories, as he found them, to awaken more than a
languid interest. He could have made as good a

102 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

tragedy of the story of Bluebeard— and the English
critics would have suspected him of a covert refer
ence to Leicester. He could have made an enthral
ling romance of the story of Cinderella— and the
German critics would have found the inner meaning
of the play in the Kantian doctrine of time. The
craft and experience which were the making of
the plays are not taken from the books. Plutarch
stands alone ; partly because in Plutarch, at a time
when his interest was attracted to politics, he found
the best political handbook in the world; and not
less because Plutarch was near enough to the crisis
of Roman history to catch a measure of the thrilling
and convincing quality of things seen and heard.

The literature which influenced Shakespeare most
habitually, and left its mark everywhere on his
plays, is literature of another kind—a kind which
is hardly entitled to the formal dignity of the name,
and may perhaps be more truly considered as an
aspect of social life. His plays are extraordinarily
rich in the floating debris of popular literature —
scraps and tags and broken ends of a whole world
of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs.
In this respect he is notable even among his con
temporaries; few of them can match him in the
wealth that he caught out of the air or picked up
by the roadside. Edgar and lago, Petruchio and

m. BOOKS AND POETRY 103

Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear
and the Gravedigger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and
Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs, which
are introduced not idly, to fill up the time or
entertain the audience, but dramatically, to help the
situation. From the Comedies alone a fair collection
of proverbs might be gathered. Who said " Blessing
of your heart, you brew good ale " 1 What dramatic
situations suggested the following — " Still swine eats
all the draff"; "God sends a curst cow short
horns " ; " You have the grace of God, Sir, and he
hath enough"; "Thus must I from the smoke into
the smother " ; " Black men are pearls in ladies'
eyes " ; " There's small choice in rotten apples " ?
These were reminiscences of a humble kind, all the
fitter for the purposes of a dramatist in that they
were not stolen from books, but plucked out of life,
where they never lack the aid of a vivid dramatic
setting.

There is thus no difficulty in crediting Shake
speare with ample opportunities for acquiring the
stock-in-trade of a playwright. The strange thing,
or the thing made by our ignorance to seem strange,
is that his earliest published works reveal him in a
character wholly undramatic, as an elegiac narrative
poet of the polite school. No biography, however
well-informed and minute, can lay bare the processes

104 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of a poet's initiation in his craft, which are in their
nature far more obscure than the history of his
life and opinions. His education in the use of his
native tongue, and in the appreciation of its beauties
and cadences, begins at his birth, and is far advanced
long before biography can lay hold of him. We
are content to believe that the poetic impulse was
imparted to Cowley, and to Keats, instantaneously,
by the chance reading of Spenser. We must be
content with less knowledge of Shakespeare's be
ginnings. The song and dance and music of that
age of licensed hilarity certainly did not leave
Stratford un visited. The more elaborate kinds, of
poetry, ennobled by a recognised ancestry, belonged
to a single stock, and haunted courtly and metro
politan circles. It was at the Court of Anne Boleyn
that the poetry of the sixteenth century was born ;
it was the cousin of Anne Boleyn, the Earl of
Surrey, who became the master of all sonneteering
lovers and all new-fangled writers of blank verse.
The strength of the school of Surrey lay in its songs,
which never miss the essentials of verse that is to
be wedded to music. Even the dullest of the poets
of that school understands a lyrical movement, while
the best of them can breathe such strains as Wyatt's
ravishing song, with the burden " My lute, be still,
for I have done," or Gascoigne's beautiful Lullaby.

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 105

But the school was unlucky even in its cradle.
Protestant psalmody, which was born in the same
Court, and countenanced by the same kingly favour,
took possession of its simpler measures and degraded
them to doggerel for the use of the populace. The
Psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins commanded a far
larger audience than the courtly poets, and shaped
the national prosody for almost half a century. The
monotonous emphasis of the universal "poulter's
measure," with its shorter and longer swing, as of a
rocking-horse, made delicacy of diction impossible ;
and the only resource left to the oppressed poets
was to double the monotony by a free use of
alliteration. From the tyranny of this metre the
country was delivered by the pens of the University
wits. They maintained the lyrical tradition in all
its fulness ; for the other purposes of poetry they
abandoned the hobbling measures of Sternhold and
Hopkins, Phaer and Twyne, and reverted to the
old ten-syllable metre, which they rescued from the
hands of pedants, and inspired with a various and
subtle melody. In the form of blank verse Marlowe
proved its declamatory and dramatic powers; in
stanza form Peele and Greene and Lodge and the
poets of the Song-books gave it a new fluidity and
sweetness, which sometimes ripples into lyric, some
times sinks again into the quiet cadences of deliberate

106 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

speech. The reform of verse was accompanied and
stimulated, as it always is, by a sudden enrichment
of the matter which verse is shaped to express.
Even in England, the poetry of the Renaissance
ceased, for a time, to concern itself with man as
a being under authority, begirt with duties and
responsibilities, and doomed to old age and death ;
it turned from the consideration of magistrates and
husbandmen to feast its eyes on that naked and
primal world revealed by the classical mythology,
where passion ran free, restrained by no law save
the law of beauty. The revival of classical myth,
which in ordinary court circles was no more than
a fashionable craze, or a fresh opportunity for ,the
tailor, to Marlowe and his fellows was a new inter
pretation of life and a new warrant given to desire.
These poets, and their master Ovid, were the
masters of Shakespeare; when he graduated in
poetry it was in this school ; and it is not easy to
see how the new poetic impulse could have come
to him in Stratford.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which
were published in 1593 and the following year, are,
first of all, works of art. They are poetic exercises
by one who has set himself to prove his craftsman
ship upon a given subject. If traces of the prentice
hand are visible, it is not in any uncertainty of

III. BOOKS AND POETRY 107

execution, nor in any failure to achieve an absolute
beauty, but rather in the very ostentation of artistic
skill. There is no remission, at any point, from
the sense of conscious art. The poems are as
delicate as carved ivory, and as bright as burnished
silver. They deal with disappointment, crime,
passion, and tragedy, yet are destitute of feeling
for the human situation, and are, in effect, painless.
This painlcssness, which made Hazlitt compare them
to a couple of ice-houses, is due not to insensibility
in the poet, but to his preoccupation with his art.
He handles life from a distance, at two removes,
and all the emotions awakened by the poems are
emotions felt in the presence of art, not those
suggested by life. The arts of painting and rhetoric
are called upon to lend to poetry their subjects and
their methods. From many passages in the plays
it may be inferred that Shakespeare loved painting,
and was familiar with a whole gallery of Renais
sance pictures. Portia's elaborate comparison of
Bassanio to

young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster,

is only one of many allusions which can be nothing
but reminiscences of pictures ; and in the Induction
to The Taming of the Shrew the servants submit to

108 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Christopher Sly a catalogue which is the best possible
commentary on Shakespeare's early poems :

We will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.

We'll show thee lo as she was a maid,
And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,
As lively painted as the deed was done :

Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs, that one shall swear she bleeds ;
And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn.

Here is the very theme of Venus and Adonis, -and
another theme closely akin to The Rape of Lucrecc.
It would not be rash to say outright that both the
poems were suggested by pictures, and must be
read and appreciated in the light of that fact. But
the truth for criticism remains the same if they took
their sole origin from the series of pictures painted
in words by the master hand of Ovid. "So work-
manly the blood and tears are drawn."

The rhetorical art of the poems is no less manifest.
The tirades and laments of both poems, on Love
and Lust, on Night, and Time, and Opportunity,
are exquisitely modulated rhetorical diversions ;
they express rage, sorrow, melancholy, despair ; and

ni. BOOKS AND POETRY 109

it is all equally soothing and pleasant, like listening
to a dreamy sonata. Lucrece, at the tragic crisis of
her history, decorates her speech with far-fetched
illustrations and the arabesques of a pensive fancy.
And as if her own disputation of her case were
not enough, the poet pursues her with " sentences,"
conveying appropriate moral reflections. She is
sadder than ever when she hears the birds sing;
and he is ready with the poetical statutes that apply
to her case :

'Tis double death to drown in ken of shore ;
He ten times pines that pines beholding food ;
To see the salve doth make the wound ache more ;
Great grief grieves most at that would do it good.

There is no morality in the general scheme of these
poems ; the morality is all inlaid, making of the
poem a rich mosaic. The plays have to do with
a world too real to be included in a simple moral
scheme ; the poems with a world too artificial to be
brought into any vital relation with morality. The
main motive prompting the poet is the love of
beauty for beauty's sake, and of wit for the exercise
of wit.

It is at this point that Shakespeare was touched
by the new spirit of the Renaissance. That great
movement of the mind of man brought with it the
exhilaration of an untried freedom and the zest of an

110 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

unlimited experiment; but it took the human soul
from its station in a balanced and rounded scheme
of things, to deliver it over to every kind of dan
ger and excess. The wonderful system of Catholic
theology gave man his place in the universe ; it
taught him his duties, allowed for his weaknesses,
and at all times exhibited him in so complex a
scheme of fixed relations, mundane and celestial,
extending beyond the very bounds of thought, that
only a temper of absolute humility could carry the
burden lightly, or look without terror down those
endless vistas of law and providence. From his
servant's estate in this great polity he was released
by the Renaissance, and became his own master in
chaos, free to design and build and inhabit for him
self. The enormous nature of the task, which after
three centuries is> still hardly begun, did not at first
oppress him ; he was like a child out of school, try
ing his strength and resource in all kinds of fantastic
and extravagant attempts. It was an age of new
philosophies, new arts, new cults; none of them
modest or sober, all full of the spirit of bravado,
high-towering but not broad-based, erected as monu
ments to the skill and prowess of the individual.
That arrogance and self-sufficiency of craft which by
the men of the Renaissance was called virtue is
found in many different guises; and Shakespeare

in. BOOKS AND POETRY 111

did not wholly escape the prevalent infection.
What the love of power was to Marlowe, the love
of beauty was to him. In these early poems the
Venus of the Renaissance takes him captive,

Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain.

The devout religion of the eye and ear is all-in-all
to him : his world is a world of gleaming forms and
beautiful speech. He exhibits beauty as Marlowe
exhibits power, freed from all realistic human con
ditions. Only here and there in the poems a note
of observation, a touch of homely metaphor, remind
us that he is not out of reach of the solid earth that
is hereafter to be his empire. This passionate cult
of beauty was transformed, rather than superseded,
by the intrusion of thought and sorrow ; so that the
much talked of phases, or stages, in Wordsworth's
love of nature are paralleled by similar stages in
Shakespeare's love of humanity. If the poems were
lost, we should know all too little of his apprentice
ship, when human life was to him

An appetite, a feeling, and a joy,
That had no need of a remoter charm ;

when his delight in the shows and exercises of the
world left him no leisure for unintelligible problems
or unwelcome cares.

His early play of Titus Andronicus, which is like

112 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the poems, shows how strangely hard-hearted this
love of beauty can be, and makes it easy to under
stand how he was fascinated and dominated, for a
time, by Marlowe. Yet even in Venus and Adonis
there is evidence that he has outgrown Marlowe, and
is on the way to a serener and wiser view of things.
The protest of Adonis, beginning " Call it not love,"
is unlike anything in Marlowe, and sounds the knell
of violent ambitions and desires.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain ;

Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done ;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies ; ,
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.

These early exercises in description and moralisa-
tion served him well in his dramatic work. The
same skill that described the hare hunt and the
escape of Adonis' horse is seen in the minutely drawn
picture of the apothecary's shop in Romeo and Juliet ;
but the detail in this later picture subserves the
human drama, and testifies to the quickening of all
Romeo's faculties by the sudden excitement of grief.
It is not always so; the poet in Shakespeare some
times forgets the dramatist, and interjects a fanciful
description, elaborated for its own sake, and assigned,
without ceremony, to be spoken by the nearest

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 113

stander-by. The description of the little princes in
the Tower, "their lips like four red roses on a stalk,"
is put into the mouths of their murderers ; and the
landscape of Ophelia's death, as it is sketched by
the Queen, is a wonderful piece of poetry, but has
no dramatic value in relation to the speaker.

After The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare, so far as
we can tell, published no more, neither poem nor
drama. In 1609 there was issued a small quarto
volume entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets, Never before
Imprinted. Its price, at that time, was sixpence,
and it was introduced by a dedication, which ran
as follows : To the onlie begetter of these in-suing Sonnets
Mr. W. H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by
our ever-living poet ivisheth the well-wishing adventurer
in setting forth. T. T.

This is not the place nor the time for the dis
cussion of all the attempts that have been made
to unravel the most tangled problem of Shakespeare
criticism. There are many footprints around the
cave of this mystery, none of them pointing in the
outward direction. No one has ever attempted a
solution of the problem without leaving a book
behind him ; and the shrine of Shakespeare is thickly
hung with these votive offerings, all withered and
dusty. No one has ever sought to gain access

to this heaven of poetry by a privileged and
S. H

114 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

secret stairway, without being blown ten thousand
leagues awry, over the backside of the world,
into the Paradise of Fools. The quest remains
unachieved.

Many books have been written on the dedication
alone. Among recent adventurers, Mr. Sidney Lee
has revived the theory of Boswell and Chalmers,
which, by taking "begetter" in the sense of "pro
curer," reduces the dedication to perfect insignifi
cance. The writer of the dedication, and owner of
the copyright, was one Thomas Thorpe, who held
an obscure position in the bookselling and publish
ing world of London. Shakespeare's Sonnets, as we
know from the allusion to them, in 1598, by Francis
Meres, were circulated in manuscript "among his
private friends." According to Mr. Lee, copies of
them were privily obtained, through some unknown
channel, by one William Hall, acting as the humble
jackal of the obscure Thorpe, and were delivered
by him to his master, who rewarded him with a
facetious dedication, couched in terms of piratical
generosity. This theory cannot be proved, but
there is nothing in it to stagger belief. There are
grave difficulties in accepting it, but perhaps they
are not insuperable, and it has one immense ad
vantage : it makes waste-paper of all the acrostic
literature which has gathered round the initials of

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 115

Mr. W. H., and leaves us free to consider the
Sonnets apart from the dedication.

Shakespeare, it is generally held, did not authorise
the publication ; neither, so far as appears, did he
protest, or take any steps to leave the world an
amended version. The bulk of the Sonnets were
written before 1599, when two of them, which involve
the whole story shadowed forth in many of the others,
appeared in a piratical publication. The order which
they follow in Thorpe's edition has never been
bettered, and in most places cannot be disturbed, for
they often fall into natural groups of ten, twelve, or
fourteen, closely connected by the sense. Some of
them are addressed to a man, and some to a woman.
They are intensely personal in feeling, and run
through many moods. Some explain themselves ;
others certainly contain allusions and references to
events of which we have no record. No more won
derful or beautiful expressions of affection exist in
the English language, and it has never been seriously
questioned that all the Sonnets are by Shakespeare.

Are they autobiographical 1 Professor Dowden has
replied to the question in modest and guarded words.
" I believe," he says, " that Shakespeare's Sonnets
express his own feelings in his own person." It is
true that the autobiographical interpretation, driven
too far, has assumed all kinds of extravagant forms ;

116 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

and poetical metaphors have been forced to prove
that Shakespeare was lame, that there was an attempt
to assassinate him, and so forth. But these Sonnets,
by general consent, were private documents; they
were not intended by Shakespeare for our perusal,
but were addressed to individuals. To say that they
do not " express his own feelings in his own person,"
is as much as to say that they are not sincere. And
every lover of poetry who has once read the Sonnets
knows this to be untrue. It is not chiefly their skill
that takes us captive, but the intensity of their quiet
personal appeal. By virtue of this they hold their
place with the greatest poetry in the world ; they are
rich in metaphor and various in melody, but 'these
resources of art have been subdued to the feeling
that inspires them, and have given us poems as simple
and as moving as the pleading voice of a child.

All who love poetry love it because in poetry the
profoundest interests of life are spoken of directly,
nakedly, and sincerely. No such habitual intimacy
of expression is possible in daily speech. In poetry
it is possible, because the forms and conventions and
restraints of art give dignity and quiet to the tur
bulent feelings on which they are imposed, and make
passion tolerable. Without the passion there is no
poetry ; to recognise great poetry is to hear the
authentic voice. Poetry is a touchstone for insin-

In- BOOKS AND POETRY 117

cerity ; if any one does not feel that which he desires
to express, he may make a passable oration ; he will
never make a great poem.

No one whose opinion need be considered will
maintain that Shakespeare's Sonnets are destitute of
feeling. Some, whose opinions claim respect, main
tain that the feeling which inspires them has nothing
to do with their ostensible occasions ; that they are
free exercises of the poetic fancy, roaming over the
dramatic possibilities of life, and finding deep ex
pression for some of its imagined crises. Those who
hold this view have not taken the trouble to explain
how some of the sonnets came to be addressed or
sent to any one. If it was a patron who received all
these protests of inalterable and unselfish devotion,
couched in language which, ever since, has been
consecrated to pure love, would he readily under
stand that these were the flatteries of a client, skilled
in verse and lost to self-respect, hungry for favours
to come 1 Might he not take the poet at his word,
and make embarrassing inroads upon the time and
energies of a busy man 1 Among the private friends
who were favoured with these "sugar'd sonnets," what
lady was it who took pleasure in so dramatic a compli
ment, so free an exercise of the poetic fancy, as this —

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night?

118 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

If the sonnets were never sent, how did Thorpe get
hold of them1? If they were circulated among dis
interested lovers of poetry, would not some of them,
which deal not with general themes, but with personal
relations quite inadequately explained, be as unintel
ligible to contemporary readers as they are to us1?
These are not self-contained poems, like Daniel's
sonnet on Sleep, or Sidney's sonnet on the Moon •
they are a commentary on certain implied events. If
the events had no existence, and the sonnets are
dramatic poems, it is surely essential to good
drama that the situation should be made clear.
Moreover, the sonnet-form was used by the Eliza
bethans, who followed their master Petrarch, ex
clusively for poems expressive of personal feeling,
not for vague dramatic fantasies. The greater poets —
Sidney, Spenser, Drayton — reflect in their sonnets the
events of their own history. Shakespeare's sonnets
are more intense than these; and less explicable, if
they be deprived of all background and occasion in
fact. Like Sidney, Shakespeare is always protesting
against the misreading which would reduce his passion
to a mere convention. He desires to be remembered
not for his style, but for his love. He disclaims the
stock figures of the conventional sonneteers ;

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 119

He does not fear homely metaphor ; and none of the
sonnets is more convincing in its pathos than that in
which he compares himself to an infant, set down
by its mother, while she chases one of the feathered
creatures that has escaped from the fowl-yard :

So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind ;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind.

The situations shadowed are unlike the conventional
situations described by the tribe of sonneteers, as
the hard-fought issues of a law-court are unlike the
formal debates of the Courts of Love. Some of them
are strange, wild, and sordid in their nature ; themes
not chosen by poetry, but choosing it, and making
their mark on it by the force of their reality. All
poetry, all art, observes certain conventions of form.
These poems are sonnets. There is nothing else con
ventional about them, except their critics.

The facts which underlie them, and give to some of
them their only possible meaning, cannot, save in
the vaguest and most conjectural fashion, be recon
structed. The names of the persons involved are
lost. Two of these persons are described, a beautiful
wanton youth, and a dark faithless woman. With
one or other of these two characters most of the
sonnets, if not all of them, are concerned. The story

120 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

that unrolls itself, too dimly to be called dramatic,
too painfully to be mistaken for the pastime of a
courtly fancy, is a story of passionate friendship, of
vows broken and renewed, of love that triumphs over
unkind ness, of lust that is a short madness and turns
to bitterness and remorse. The voice of the poet is
heard in many tones, now pleading with his friend,
now railing against the woman that has ensnared
him ; here a hymn of passionate devotion, there a
strain of veiled innuendo — clear-sighted, indecent,
cynical. The discourse passes, by natural transitions,
from the intimacies of love and friendship to those
other feelings, not less intimate and sincere, but now
grown pale by contrast with the elemental human
passions : the poet's hope of fame, or his sense of
degradation in ministering to the idle pleasures of
the multitude. The workings of his mind are laid
bare, and reveal him, in no surprising light, as subject
to passion, removed by the width of the spheres
from those prudent and self-contained natures whom
he has sketched with grave irony in the ninety-fourth
sonnet :

They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow :
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband Nature's riches from expense ;

in. BOOKS AND POETRY 121

They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

It would help us but little to know the names of
the beautiful youth and the dark woman; no public
records could reflect even faintly those vicissitudes
of experience, exaltations and abysses of feeling,
which have their sole and sufficient record in the
Sonnets.

Poetry is not biography; and the value of the
Sonnets to the modern reader is independent of
all knowledge of their occasion. That they were
made from the material of experience is certain :
Shakespeare was not a puny imitative rhymster.
But the processes of art have changed the tear to a
pearl, which remains to decorate new sorrows. The
Sonnets speak to all who have known the chances
and changes of human life. Their occasion is a
thing of the past; their theme is eternal. The
tragedy of which they speak is the topic and in
spiration of all poetry ; it is the triumph of Time,
marching relentlessly over the ruin of human am
bitions and human desires. It may be read in all
nature and in all art ; there are hints of it in the
movement of the dial-hand, in the withering of
flowers, in the wrinkles on a beautiful face ; it
comes home with the harvests of autumn, and
darkens hope in the eclipses of the sun and moon ;

122 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the yellowing papers of the poet and the crumb
ling pyramids of the builder tell of it ; it speaks in
the waves that break upon the shore, and in the
histories that commemorate bygone civilisations.
All things decay ; the knowledge is as old as time,
and as dull as philosophy. But what a poignancy
it takes from its sudden recognition by the heart :

Then of thy beauty do I question make,
Thcat thou among the wastes of time must go.

The poet considers all expedients that promise
defence against the tyrant, or reprieve from his
doom. With a magniloquence that is only half
hearted he promises his friend a perpetuity of life
"where breath most breathes, even in the mouths
of men." But he knows this to be a vain hope;
the monuments and memorials that have been
erected against the ravages of Time are of no effect,
save to supply future ages with new testimonies
to his omnipotence. It is best to make terms with
the destroyer, and, while submitting to him, to
cheat him of the fulness of his triumph by handing
on the lamp of life:

For nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence,
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

This is a mitigation and a postponement of the
universal doom, but it gives no sure ground for
defiance. In the last resort the only stronghold

HI. BOOKS AND POETRY 123

against the enemy is found in the love which is its
own reward, which consoles for all losses and dis
appointments, which is not shaken by tempests nor
obscured by clouds, which is truer than the truth of
history, and stronger than the strength of corruption.
Love alone is not Time's fool. So the first series of
the Sonnets comes to an end ; and there follows a
shorter series, some of them realistic and sardonic
and coarse, like an anti-Masque after the gracious cere
monial Masque of the earlier numbers. In this series
is painted the history of lust, its short delights, its
violence, its gentler interludes, its treachery, and
the torments that reward it. There is little relief
to the picture ; the savage deceits of lust work out
their own destiny, and leave their victim enlightened,
but not consoled :

For I have sworn fchee fair ; more perjured I,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie !

The Poems of Shakespeare in no way modify
that conception of his character and temper which
a discerning reader might gather from the evidence
of the plays. But they let us hear his voice more
directly, without the intervening barrier of the
drama, and they furnish us with some broken hints
of the stormy trials and passions which helped him
to his knowledge of the human heart, and enriched
his plays with the fruits of personal experience.

CHAPTER IV

THE THEATRE

IN the Sonnets Shakespeare gave expression to his
own thoughts arid feelings, shaping the stuff of his
experience by the laws of poetic art, to the ends
of poetic beauty. In the drama the same experience
of life supplied him with his material, but the
conditions that beset him were more complex. When
he came to London he had his way to make.
"Lowliness is young ambition's ladder," and the
only way to success was by conforming to the
prevalent fashions and usages. Later, when he had
won success, he was free to try new experiments and
to modify custom. But he began as an apprentice
to the London stage; his early efforts as a play
wright cannot be truly judged except in relation
to that stage ; and even his greatest plays show a
careful regard for the strength and weakness of
the instruments that lay ready to his hand. The
world that he lived in, the stage that he wrote
for, these have left their mark broad on his plays,

CHAP. IV. THE THEATRE 125

so that those critics who study him in a philosophical
vacuum are always liable to err by treating the
fashions of his theatre as if they were a part of
his creative genius. He was not a lordly poet who
stooped to the stage and dramatised his song; he
was bred in the tiring room and on the boards; he
was an actor before he was a dramatist.

The dramatic opportunities of Stratford counted
for something in his history. Primitive drama
flourishes everywhere in children's games. The rural
communities of Elizabethan England did not leave
the drama to children, but enlivened the festivals of
the year with ancient plays and pastimes, which
served to break the dull round of country life. The
Morris dance was a kind of drama; Shakespeare
knew it well, and alludes to Maid Marian and the
hobby-horse. The rustic play of St. George has
lasted in quiet districts down to our own day;
Shakespeare had often been entertained by this un
couth kind of acting, and preserves memories of it
in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or, better, in Love's
Labour's Lost. The Pageant of the Nine Worthies,
presented by the schoolmaster, the curate, the un
lettered Costard, and the refined traveller from
Spain, is a fair specimen of the dramatic art as it
was practised in villages. The chief business of each
actor is to dress himself up and explain in doggerel

126 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

rhyme who he is. Sir Nathaniel, who is a foolish,
mild man, and a good bowler, is something over
weighted with the part of Alexander. But he puts
on his armour and speaks his lines:

When in the world I liv'd, I was the world's Com
mander ;

By East, West, North, and South I spread my
conquering might :

My Scutcheon plain declares that I am Alisander.

Here he is interrupted by Biron's jests, and, after
a feeble attempt to regain the thread of his discourse
by beginning all over again, he is driven off the
stage by Costard. The whole pageant, so grievously
flouted and interrupted, is probably a very close
study from the life, down to its very speeches, which,
being written by the schoolmaster, are full of classi
cal allusion, and make some attempt at epigram.
Another type of drama, more ambitious and poetic,
was not hard to come at in Shakespeare's childhood.
The cycles of Miracle Plays were still presented, in
the early summer, by the trade -guilds of many
towns; and it may be that Shakespeare was taken
by his father to see them at Coventry. But this
is hardly likely, for his trivial allusions to them
bear no witness to the deep impression which must
have been made upon an imaginative child by that
strange and solemn pageant, dragging its slow

IV. THE THEATRE 127

length along, and exhibiting in selected scenes the
whole drama of man, his creation, his fall, and his
redemption.

Spectacles and diversions of this kind belonged to
the age that was passing away, and had in them
none of the intellectual excitement of a new move
ment. It was otherwise with the plays and interludes
presented by the companies of travelling players
who certainly visited Stratford. These men be
longed to the new order; their plays savoured of
modern wit and modern classical enthusiasm. The
manner of their performances is very exactly
recorded by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's
Dream. They would present themselves to the
steward of a great house, or to the officer of a cor
poration, and submit a list of their pieces, with a
request to be allowed to perform. Just as Hamlet
compels the actors, on their arrival, to give him a
specimen of their skill, so Philostrate, who is simply
an Elizabethan Master of the Kevels, takes care,
when the rustics come with their play, to hear it
over before proposing it to his master. Then he
recites to Theseus a list of the entertainments pro
vided to beguile the time between supper and bed.
The plays are all mythological in subject, after the
newest mode. The battle with the Centaurs, the
death of Orpheus, the lament of the Muses, and

128 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

last, the ever-memorable " tedious brief scene " of
Pyramus and Thisbe, are the items on the bill.
Theseus having made his choice, there is a flourish
of trumpets ; the Prologue enters, bespeaks the good
will of the audience, presents to them each of the
various characters who are to appear in the play,
and, for their better understanding, briefly sum
marises the plot. Then he withdraws, taking with
him Thisbe, the Lion, and Moonshine, who are not
immediately required, while Pyramus and the Wall
are left behind to begin the play. Thus were plays
performed at the court of Duke Theseus of Athens ;
thus also were they given in the town hall of Strat
ford, before the magistrates and citizens of ' the
borough. The habit of introducing each character
to the audience has persisted in those modern plays
where the business of the drama is suspended in
order that a popular player may make an effective
entrance, and establish friendly personal relations
with the audience. The actors of Shakespeare's time
were no more willing than their successors to lose
themselves in the play.

The true beginnings of the Elizabethan drama are
to be found in these wandering companies of noble
men's servants. Even in Elizabeth's reign, a great
country house, like Sir Christopher Hatton's at
Holdenby in Northamptonshire, with its array of

IV- THE THEATRE 129

tenants and retainers, was a self-contained com
munity ; and the business of supplying merriment on
festive occasions fell to those of the servants and
dependants who had any special skill or aptitude in
the arts of music, dancing, and recitation. Origi
nally these amateur actors and musicians were
content with their occasional performances, and did
not travel. But the decay of feudalism, which is
the key to most of the political and literary history
of Tudor and Stuart times, explains the sudden good
fortunes of the drama. The gradual disappearance
of feudal tenures, the growth of towns, the enclosure
of lands, the dissolution of the monasteries — all
these changes undermined the old life of the country,
and made it impossible for noblemen to maintain their
enormous retinue of servants and beneficiaries. The
literature of the sixteenth century resounds with the
complaints of those who were thrown out of a liveli
hood, and with the not less bitter complaints of
those who suffered at the hands of lawless and
masterless men. Meantime, the court and the town
offered new attractions and new opportunities to
gentle and simple alike. A story told in The Serving-
man's Com/mi, a pamphlet of 1598, puts the position
in a nutshell. A certain Earl once presented himself
at the court of King Henry VIIL, clad in a jerkin

of frieze and hose of country russet, with a following
s. i

130 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of a hundred and twenty men, all well horsed and
gallantly furnished. The King reproved him for
his base and unseemly apparel. When he next
came to court he wore a gown of black velvet, the
sleeves set with aglets of gold, a velvet cap with
a feather and gold band, bordered with precious
stones, a suit of cloth of gold, and a girdle and
hangers richly embroidered and set with pearl. He
was attended with one man and a page. "Now,"
said the King, " you are as you should be ; but
where is your goodly train of men and horse1?"
"If it may like your Grace," answered the good
Earl, throwing down his cap, " here is twenty men
and twenty horse " ; then, throwing off his gown,
" here lies forty men and forty horse more " ; and
so he continued until, in the end, he offered the
King a choice between the men and the gay
apparel. Buckingham in Henry VIII. expresses the
same dilemma:

O many

Have broke their backs with laying manors on them

For this great journey.

Here is an epitome of the Renaissance on its social
side. Money was taken out of landed estates to be
put into the chief speculative investment of that
age, gorgeous personal attire. The yeoman's son
turned adventurer and went to London. The servants

IV- THE THEATRE 131

of a noble house, if they could act and sing, made a
profession of their pastime, and wandered over the
country, ministering to the rapidly growing taste for
pageants, interludes, and music. In London they
found their best market. For many years they acted
wherever they could find accommodation, in gardens,
halls, and inn-yards. Then the opposition of the
City authorities drove them outside the walls ; in
the playing-fields of the suburbs they found it easy
to attract a concourse of people; about 1576 they
erected two permanent enclosed stages in Finsbury
Fields, and the Elizabethan drama had found its
birthplace.

It was with these companies of actors that Shake
speare from the first had to deal ; and already, before
he knew them, they had attained a high degree of
proficiency in their business. They were encouraged
by their own masters, applauded by the populace,
and favoured by the Court. The history of Richard
Tarlton, the most famous of Elizabethan comic actors,
who died in 1588, shows that before Shakespeare's
time diligent search was made for likely talent to re
inforce the profession. Tarlton, according to Fuller's
account, was born at Condover in Shropshire, and
" was in the field, keeping his father's swine, when a
servant of Robert, Earl of Leicester, passing this way
to his Lord's lands in his Barony of Denbighe, was so

132 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

highly pleased with his happy unhappy answers, that
he brought him to Court, where he became the most
famous jester to Queen Elizabeth." The actors long
retained the double position; like his even more
famous predecessor, Will Summer, Tarlton was a
servant of Eoyalty, but, unlike Will Summer, he was
also a professional actor, and catered for the public
in the newly built theatres of London. The jesters
were, without doubt, the bright particular stars of
the companies to which they belonged, the most
popular of the actors, and the best remunerated.
They were able to entertain an audience without
assistance from others, and Tarlton's pipe and tabor,
his monologues and impromptus and jigs, were the
delight of the public at the time when Shakespeare
came to London. One of these jigs, wherein each of
the short verses was satirically directed at this or
that member of the audience, has the refrain "So
pipeth the crow, Sitting upon a wall, — Please one,
and please all." This refrain is quoted by Malvolio
in Twelfth Night, — " it is with me as the very true
Sonnet is : Please one, and please all." When Tarlton
died, Will Kemp, whom we know to have been the
impersonator of Dogberry, succeeded almost at once
to his place in popular favour, while only less famous
than Kemp were Cowley, Armin, and many others.
A good illustration of the extraordinary mimetic

IV. THE THEATRE 133

skill displayed by these comic actors may be found
in Twelfth Night, where the Clown, to deceive Mal-
volio in the prison, first assumes the voice of the
parson, Sir Topas, and then carries on a dialogue, in
two voices, between the parson and himself. The
same clown contributes almost all of the exquisite
songs, romantic and comic, which fill the play with
music.

The question of the mixture of Tragedy and
Comedy in the Elizabethan drama is therefore very
simple : it was a question not of propriety and
classical precedent, but of necessity. The people
would have their favourites ; and when the old
variety entertainments of the early London stages
gave place to serious drama, room had to be made
for the most famous actors. If Shakespeare held any
high and dry theories of the drama, his thoughts can
only have been a pain to him. He made a virtue of
necessity, and in some of his plays — The Merchant
of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, King Lear —
he gave a magnificent largess to the professional
clown. But there arc not wanting signs that be was
troubled by the exorbitance of his comedians, who
had climbed into popular favour by their jests and
ditties, their grimaces and impromptus. " Let those
that play your clowns," says Hamlet, "speak no
more than is set down for them : for there be of

134 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

them, that will themselves laugh, to set on some
quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in
tho meantime some necessary question of the play be
then to be considered : that's villainous, and shows a
most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it." It is
not likely that this counsel of perfection was observed
by the actors. Some of the tags spoken at the close
of scenes by the Fool in King Lear are directed at
the audience, and are quite irrelevant and worthless ;
these are either unlicensed interpolations which have
crept into the text, or a contemptuous alms thrown
to the Fool, to be spoken when, being alone upon the
stage, he could do but little hurt to the necessary
business of the play. In some of the plays the Fool
is isolated, to avoid the risk of his interference.
Peter, in Romeo and Juliet, is free to disport himself
with the musicians downstairs, or to attend the Nurse
in Juliet's absence. The Clown in Othello has so poor
a part, in a single scene with Cassio, that a comic
actor of ability could hardly be expected to refrain
from eking it out with invention. The Porter in
Macbeth gets the like hard measure ; he is not allowed
to play the fool anywhere but at his own gate.
Shakespeare was often severe with his clowns ; and
it is plain that he recognised those advantages of
tragic simplicity which were sometimes denied to
him by the very conditions of his work.

IV. THE THEATRE 135

When the first regular theatres were built, they
were used not only for the playing of interludes, but
for all those activities which had previously been dis
played either on raised scaffolds or within improvised
spaces in the fields. The citizens delighted in exhibi
tions of juggling, tumbling, fencing, and wrestling;
and these also were provided by the drama. Shake
speare is profuse in his concessions to the athletic
interest. The wrestling-match in As You Like It, the
rapier duels in Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet, the
broadsword fight in Macbeth,— these were real dis
plays of skill by practised combatants. The whole
First Act of Coriolanus is so full of alarums and
excursions and hand-to-hand fighting, with hard blows
given and taken, that it is tedious to Shakespeare's
modern admirers, but it gave keen pleasure to the
patrons of the Globe. The Co-medy of Errors is noisy
with beatings and the outcries of the victims. All
these things, though it discolour the complexion of
his greatness to acknowledge it, were imposed upon
Shakespeare by the tastes and habits of his patrons
and by the fashions of the primitive theatre. It was
on this robust stock that his towering thought and
his delicate fancy were grafted.

When he first arrived in London, the drama was
at the crisis of its early history. Acting had
flourished, throughout the reign of Elizabeth, in

136 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

many places and in the most diverse kinds. The
performance of plays written in imitation of Seneca
for tragedy, and of Plautus for comedy, had the
approval of scholars, and was a recognised enter
tainment at the universities and the Inns of Court.
In still higher circles, comedies based on mytho
logical and classical themes were acted chiefly by
companies of singing boys — the Children of Paul's,
or the Children of the Chapel Royal. The native
comic tradition was unbroken from the earliest
times, and even in these courtly comedies room was
made for the antics of the Vice and the Clown. But
tragedy was a new thing in England, little under
stood, and not much relished. It had found the
dreariest of models in Seneca, who values tragic
situation only as a peg on which to hang the com
mentaries of a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy.
The first English tragedy, GorbodiLC, is an academic
debate on certain problems of conduct arising out
of an ancient story ; and the same Senecan model
was placidly followed by Samuel Daniel and Fulke
Greville, Lord Brooke, long after the rise of the
newer school. But for the accident of genius,
tragedy in England might have continued as an
imitative exercise, practised chiefly by argumentative
philosophers.

What happened is so well known that it has

IV. THE THEATRE 137

almost lost its wonder. A band of young men from
the universities threw away their academic pride,
and invaded the popular stages, which had hitherto
been chiefly catered for by clowns and jugglers and
players of short comic interludes. They were not
scholars, in any strict sense of that word : Marlowe,
Peele, Greene, and Lodge belong to that numerous
class who, in the words of Anthony & Wood, "did
in a manner neglect academical studies." But they
had been caught by the Latin poets, and were eager
students of the new literature of the Renaissance
in Italy, France, and Spain. In London, as at
Oxford and Cambridge, the more regular avenues
of preferment were closed to them, and they were
put to their shifts for a livelihood. To write for
the booksellers, supplying them with poems, love-
pamphlets, and translations, was the obvious re
source ; the hard-earned gains of authorship might
be handsomely increased by any one who was lucky
enough to find a generous patron. But before they
had been long in London they must have made
acquaintance with a newly risen class of men, who
lived at an easier rate. Those "glorious vagabonds,"
the stage-players, were conspicuous in the streets
of the town,

Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
And pages to attend their masterships.

138 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit^ tells how he was
first invited to write for the stage. A player, mag
nificently dressed, like a gentleman of great living,
overheard him repeating some verses, and offered
him lodging and employment. The player, by his
own account, was both actor and dramatic author.
Besides playing the King of the Fairies, he had
borne a part in The Twelve Labours of Hercules, and
in a piece called The Devil on the Highway to Heaven.
His own works were Morality plays, suitable for
country audiences; the two that he mentions were
entitled The Moral of Man's Wit and The Dialogue of
Dives. But these educational plays, he said, had
fallen out of esteem, and there was room for the
newer inventions of a scholar. Greene went along
with him; and, lodging "at the town's end, in a
house of retail," soon became famous as "an arch
play-making poet," and learned to associate with
the lewdest persons in the land.

There is no reason to doubt the autobiographical
truth of this account. But Greene was not the first,
nor the greatest, of the innovators. The credit of
transforming the popular drama belongs chiefly to
Marlowe. Before his arrival Lyly had shown the
way to make classical mythology engaging, and
Peele had used blank verse so that it rang in the
ear and dwelt in the memory. The work of these

IV. THE THEATRE 139

men was designed for select courtly circles, and left
the wider public untouched. Marlowe appealed to
the people. He brought blank verse on to the
public stage and sent it echoing through the town.
He proved that classical fable needs no dictionary
to make it popular. Above all, he imagined great
and serious actions, and created the heroic character.
His play of Tamburlaine, produced about 1587, made
subtle appeal to the national interests, to the love of
adventure in far countries, and to the indomitable
heart of youth. The success of this play is perhaps
the greatest event in our literary history. It
naturalised tragedy in England, and put an end,
at a blow, to all the futilities of the theorists.
More important still, it vindicated audacity, and
taught poets to believe in the conquest of the
world. Like all great and original works which
catch the happy moment, it was multiplied in its
echoes, and rapidly became a school. Marlowe's
friends and fellows accepted his lead, recognised his
triumph, and abandoned their own less fortunate
experiments to claim a share in his success. Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy almost vied with Tamburlaine in
popular favour, and the most extravagant ventures
of Peele and Greene and Nashe were carried to
victory on the same tide. While his companions
imitated his earliest work Marlowe put it behind

140 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

him, and advanced to new triumphs. During the
few remaining years of his short life he produced
Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. — not
to speak of his poems and unfinished plays. He
died in 1593, the year of the publication of Shake
speare's Venus and Adonis.

During the last seven years or so of Marlowe's
life Shakespeare was learning his business in London.
No hint or fragment of a record remains to instruct
us concerning his professional doings until near the
end of this period. Many fanciful histories of these
years have been written, rich in detail, built on
guesses and inferences. The broad facts of the case
have too often been hidden under these speculative
structures; and they are worth remembering, for
though they lend themselves to no sectarian con
clusions, and lead to no brilliant discoveries, they
set a vague and half -obliterated picture in a true
perspective.

Shakespeare's beginnings were not courtly, but
popular. He was plunged into the wild Bohemian
life of actors and dramatists at a time when nothing
was fixed or settled, when every month brought
forth some new thing, and popularity was the only
road to success. There was fierce rivalry among the
companies of actors to catch the public ear. Tragedy
acknowledged one man for master ; and a new school

IV. THE THEATRE 141

of actors was growing up to meet the demand for
poetic declamation. Comedy, the older foundation,
was unchanged, and remained in the hands of the
professional jesters. No new comic genius had
arisen to share supremacy with Marlowe. Those
who supplied the public with plays endeavoured to
combine as many as possible of the resources of the
stage in a single dramatic work. Their reward was
found in crowded theatres, not in literary reputation.
Force, stridency, loud jesting and braggart decla
mation carried the day, and left no room for the
daintiness of the literary conscience. The people,
intoxicated with the new delight, craved incessantly
for fresh stimulants ; a play ran for but a few days,
then it was laid aside and a new one was hastily
put together out of any material that came to hand.
History and fiction were ransacked for stories ; old
plays were refurbished and patched with no regard
to their authorship ; a play written by one man and
found to be lacking in some element of popular
success was altered and supplemented by another
man. If Ben Jonson had made his first acquaintance
with the stage at the time when Shakespeare came
to London, he would probably have withdrawn in
disgust from the attempt to impose dignity and
order on this noisy, motley world ; he would have
sought refuge with the pedants and academicians,

142 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

and the national drama would have lost him.
Shakespeare accepted the facts, and subdued his
hand to what it worked in. When he first comes
into notice as a dramatist, in 1592, he is accused
by the dying Greene of gaining credit for himself
by vamping the plays of better men. In the attempt
to make mischief between his fellow-dramatists and
Shakespeare, Greene uses language which proves
that Shakespeare was in closer touch with the
players than the University wits had ever been.
" Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow,
beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's
heart wrapt in a Player's hide, supposes he is as
well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best
of you : and being an absolute Johannes factotum,
is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a
country." The line from Henry VI. which is here
parodied by Greene points his railing against that
play, and gives us our first sure date in Shakespeare's
dramatic history.

If now we turn to the collection of Shakespeare's
plays in the Folio, we find that the conditions under
which his work was done are only too faithfully
reflected in that volume. More than one or two
of these plays, as they stand in the Folio, are, to
put it bluntly, bad plays; poor and confused in
structure, or defaced with feeble writing. Some of

IV. THE THEATRE 143

them contain whole scenes written in Shakespeare's
most splendid manner, and fully conceived characters
drawn with all his vigour, while other scenes and
other characters in the same play pass the bounds of
inanity. There is an attractive simplicity about the
criticism which attributes all that is good to Shake
speare, and all that is bad to " an inferior hand."
On this principle Titus Andronicus has been stoutly
alleged to contain no single line of Shakespeare's
composing. But if once we are foolishly persuaded
to go behind the authority of Heminge and Condell
(reinforced, in the case of Titus, by the testimony of
Francis Meres), we have lost our only safe anchorage,
and are afloat upon a wild and violent sea, subject
to every wind of doctrine. No critical ear, however
highly respected, can safely set itself up against the
evidence of Shakespeare's friends. It is wiser to
believe that the plays in the Folio were attributed
to Shakespeare cither because they were wholly his,
or because they were recast and rewritten by him, or,
lastly, because they contain enough of his work to
warrant the attribution. Even so, there is a wide
margin for conjecture, and the case would be des
perate were it not for one significant consolation.
None of the plays which have been shown to belong
to the middle period of Shakespeare's career, in
cluding his maturer histories and comedies, and most

144 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of the great tragedies, has ever been challenged. On
the other hand, the plays of his early period, and a
good many of those belonging to his later period
from Macbeth and Timon onwards, are involved in
controversy. The conclusions generally accepted by
criticism may be broadly stated. At the beginning
of his career Shakespeare made very free use of the
work of other men, and, moreover, sometimes re
shaped his own work, so that it is often difficult
to assess the extent of his rights in the play as we
have it. Towards the end of his career his work is
once more found mixed with the work of other men,
but this time there is generally reason to suspect
that it is these others who have laid him under
contribution, altering his completed plays, or com
pleting his unfinished work by additions of their
own. Yet a third case of difficulty arises when a
play which bears throughout the strongest marks of
Shakespeare's workmanship is disparate in its parts,
and hangs ill together. Further questions spring
from these. How far have we to reckon with will
ing collaboration, early and late 1 Who were the
authors of the anonymous plays that he used as
the basis of some of his own early work ? To what
extent were his dramas modified for representation
on the stage during the years intervening between
their first appearance and the publication of the

IV. THE THEATRE 145

Folio ; and in how many cases were these modified
versions printed by the editors of the Folio1?

To answer these questions in detail is the business
of Shakespeare criticism. The results obtained by
the most laborious scholars command no general
assent, and depend, for the most part, on a chain
of ingenious hypotheses. If marks of interrogation
were inserted in all treatises on Shakespeare at all
the points where modesty demands them, the syntax
of these works would be sadly broken. To keep the
mind open when there is no sufficient warrant for
closing it is the rarest of human achievements. The
difficult task shall here be attempted; and a few
brief illustrations of the nature of these knotty prob
lems must serve in place of a more ambitious edifice.

The Taming of the Shrew was first printed in the
Folio. There are no contemporary references to it,
and it contains no allusions which can be used to
determine its date, but it has many of the charac
teristics of Shakespeare's early work. The plot is
double, combining two stories from different sources.
That part of the play which tells the story of Bianca
and her lovers has, for very flimsy reasons, been
denied by some critics to Shakespeare. The scenes
wherein Catherine and Petruchio appear are un
doubtedly his ; and these scenes are exactly modelled

on an extant comedy of 1594, called The Taming of
s. K

146 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

a Shrew. This earlier play is hasty and vigorous in
execution ; it has not the full flow of Shakespeare's
eloquence; its language is rude in the comic parts,
and the more serious speeches are written in a
parody of the style of Marlowe, which, by some sly
touches of exaggeration, is delightfully adapted to
the purposes of comedy. The play is nevertheless a
work of comic genius ; and contains, without excep
tion, all the ludicrous situations which are the
making of Shakespeare's comedy. The wild be
haviour of Petruchio at his wedding, the tantalising
of the hungry bride with imaginary meats, and the
riotous scene with the tailor, are essentially the same
in both plays, and give occasion for many identical
turns of wit. In the earlier play, as in the later,
Katherine submits to her lord by accepting his
opinion on the question of the sun and moon, and
when he indulges his humour by pretending that an
old man is a young budding virgin, she falls in with
his mad fancy and outgoes him in gaiety. "Fair
Lady," she says to the greybeard,

Wrap up thy radiations in some cloud,
Lest that thy beauty make this stately town
Inhabitable, like the burning zone,
With sweet reflections of thy lovely face.

Further, the whole business of the Induction and the
humours of Christopher Sly are already full-grown

IV. THE THEATRE 147

in the earlier play, which contains some passages
worthy of Shakespeare yet omitted in the later
version. When the Duke, in the course of the
action, orders two of the characters to be taken to
prison, Sly wakes up, at the word, from his drunken
sleep, and protests : "I say we'll have no sending to
prison." In vain the Lords remind him that this is
but a play, acted in jest ; he is firm in his resolve :
"I tell thee, Sim, we'll have no sending to prison,
that's flat : why, Sim, am not I Don Christo Vary 1
Therefore I say they shall not go to prison." When
at last he is assured that they have run away, he is
mollified, calls for some more drink, orders the play
to proceed, and resumes his slumbers.

If the Bianca scenes are not his, Shakespeare is
thus left with nothing but a reviser's share in the
stronger part of the play. But who wrote the play
of 1594? Among the authors who were then writing
for the stage we know of only one man who was
certainly capable of writing it, and that man is
Shakespeare himself. If his authorship of it could
be proved, it would be a document of the very
highest value as a sample of the work that he did
in his early time. In the absence of such proof, the
assumption that he wrote it could only serve as a
new sandy site for the fabric of conjecture. The
play, whoever wrote it, helps us to a knowledge of

148 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the early London theatre. It is not much more than
half as long as Shakespeare's later version, and was
acted by the Earl of Pembroke's servants. Its
author, writing at a time when the bragging blank
verse of Marlowe had become the common theatrical
jargon, yet shows himself conscious of the unfitness
of these heroics for the portrayal of daily life, and
gently topples them over into absurdity. He has
a firm hold on reality, a rich store of colloquial
speech, and a wonderful fertility in the invention
of comic situation. In all these respects he re
sembles Shakespeare, who gradually freed himself
from the influence of Marlowe and indulged Jiis
own more humane genius, until the style made
fashionable by Marlowe's imitators is found at
last, in Hamlet, to be fit only for the ranting
speeches of the players, and the admiring criticism
of Polonius.

The questions that arise in connection with Shake
speare's later work may be well illustrated by the
case of Timon of. Athens. This play also occurs only
in the Folio, and cannot be exactly dated. It is
usually placed after the four great tragedies, and
immediately before Antony and Cleopatra — that is to
say, about the year 1607. In one respect it is
utterly unlike these neighbours. There is no other
play of Shakespeare's with so simple a plot. Timon

IV. THE THEATRE 149

of Athens is the exhibition of a single character in
contrasted situations. Timon is rich and generous,
which is matter for the First Act ; his riches and his
friends fail him in the Second and Third Acts ; he
retires to a desert place outside the city, curses man
kind, and dies, which climax is the theme of the
Fourth and Fifth Acts. There is nothing in all
Shakespeare's work more stupendous than the
colossal figure of Timon, raining his terrible impreca
tions on the littleness and falsehood of mankind.
Yet the play as a whole is unsatisfying, because the
cause is inadequate to produce the effect. No one
can read the play and believe that Shakespeare
intended a satire on misanthropy : Timon's passion
is heartrending and awe-inspiring; desolation and
despair never spoke with more convincing accents.
Yet when we examine the events that lead up to
the crisis, and the characters who are grouped around
Timon, they seem like excuses and shadows, hastily
sketched as a kind of conventional framework for the
great central figure. The machinery is carelessly put
together, and the writing, in these outlying parts
of the play, is often flat. The critics have been busy
with this case, and have called in the inevitable
collaborator. Some of them generously allow Shake
speare two helpers (Rowley is always a useful supple
mentary name), and divide up the play line by line,

150 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

assigning their exact portions to the lion, the ape,
arid the beast of burden. The problem is a very
difficult one, and these conjectures are ingenious,
but have not led to a convincing result. They are
vitiated by the superstition which refuses to assign
to Shakespeare any hasty or careless work. Yet he
was a purveyor to the public stage, and surely must
have been pressed, as the modern journalist is
pressed, to supply needed matter. Many authors
who have suffered this pressure have settled their
account with their conscience by dividing their work
into two kinds. Some of it they do frankly as
journey-work, making it as good as time and cir
cumstances permit. The rest they keep by them,
revising and polishing it to satisfy their own more
exacting ideals. Shakespeare did both kinds of work,
and the bulk of his writing has come down to us
without distinction made between the. better and
the worse. This consideration should be kept in
mind by those who profess ability to recognise his
style. The style of an author and the changes in
his style are fairly easy to recognise when we have to
do only with a sequence of works carefully written,
and put forth over his own name. The problem
would be enormously complicated if his most care
less talk and his most hurried business letters were
included in the account. And the problem has been

IV. THE THEATRE 151

complicated in Shakespeare's case by the pressure of
theatrical conditions.

These conditions are visible in their results. There
is good reason to think that many of his comedies
are recasts of his own earlier versions, now lost to us.
It is wrong to suppose that these earlier versions
were revised from motives of literary pride. The
early Taming of a Shrew and the first version of
Hamlet point the way to a more likely conclusion.
When the theatre came to its maturity, complete
five-act plays, with two plots and everything hand
some about them, were required to fill the afternoon.
The earlier and slighter plays and interludes were
then enlarged and adapted to the new demands. It
was not easy, even for Shakespeare, to supply his
best work, freshly wrought from fresh material, at
the rate of two plays a year. For certain marvellous
years he almost did it ; and, as likely as not, the
effort killed him. The Vicar of Stratford says that
he died of a drinking-bout, but a drinking-bout
seldom gives more than the amp de grdce. No man,
not even one who was only a little lower than the
angels, could live through the work that Shakespeare
did, from Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra, without
paying for it in health. He must have bowed under
the strain, " unless his nerves were brass or hammered
steel." But the theatre, having devoured the pro-

152 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

ducts of his intense labour, was as hungry as ever,
and unremitting in its demands. In Timon of Athens
we see how these demands were met. The close
likeness between Timon and King Lear has often
been noticed, so that it is not unfair to say that in
King Lear Shakespeare treated the very theme of
Timon, and treated it better, with all added circum
stances of likelihood. The passion of the lonely old
king on the heath passes by degrees into the fiercest
misanthropy, but it carries our sympathy with it, for
we have watched it from its beginning, and have been
made to feel the cruelty of the causes that provoked
it. After King Lear, nothing new could be made of
the same figure in a weaker setting. But if, as seems
likely, Timon is a first sketch of King Lear, set aside
unfinished because the story proved intractable and .
no full measure of sympathy could be demanded for
its hero, the position is explained. Shakespeare, the
artist, had no further use for Timon ; Shakespeare,
the popular playwright, laid his hand on the dis
carded fragment of a play, and either expanded it
himself, or, more probably, permitted another to
expand it, to the statutory bulk of five acts.

This conclusion might be strengthened by several
parallel instances, which justify us in believing that
Shakespeare sometimes made more than one attempt
at the treatment of a dramatic theme, and that his

IV. THE THEATRE 153

failures, so to call them, were subsequently pieced
out with other matter, to meet the demands of the
theatre. One instance must suffice. Incomparably
the most popular love-story of the earlier sixteenth
century was the story of Troilus and Cressida. To a
young man seeking for a dramatic subject this theme
could not fail to occur. It is handled by Shakespeare
in one of his later plays, which was printed in 1609,
and had been acted, before that time, at the Globe
theatre. The play of Troilus and Cressida is the
despair of all critics who seek in it for unity of
purpose or meaning. It is a bad play, crowded with
wonders and beauties. The love-story is written, for
the most part, in the style of Romeo and Juliet and
the early comedies, with many similar phrases and
jests. The political parts are in Shakespeare's full-
armoured mature style, laden with thought, and
richly decorated with eloquence. Love and politics
are made to engage our ardent sympathies in turn,
without any interaction, and are both turned to
mockery by a chorus of sensualist and cynic, Pan-
darns and Thersites. The general impression left by
the play is unpleasant only because it is hopelessly
confused. The lyrical rapture of Troilus and the
resonant wisdom of Ulysses are not effectively put to
shame; they rise here and there above the din of
traffickers and brawlers ; but the play is not theirs ;

154 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

they cry out in the market-place, and no man regards
them. Dryden comments on the faults inherent in
the play, and states that Shakespeare composed it
"in the apprenticeship of his writing." It is not
credible that the speeches of Ulysses belong to this
early time. On the other hand, it is hard to believe
that the love-passages of the Third Act, which are
untouched by the spirit of satire, and show Cressida
pure and simple, were written after Romeo and Juliet
— a mere repetition. In the absence of any other
intelligible theory, it may be surmised that Shake
speare at first took up Chaucer's story with the intent
of making it into a tragedy. But the story is, not
outwardly tragic ; the chief persons, as Dryden
remarks, are left alive ; and the events of their
history were too notorious to be altered by a play
wright. Chaucer in his long narrative poem achieves
the impossible ; he keeps the reader in sympathy
with the love-lorn Troilus, with the faithless Cressida,
and with his own reflections on the vanity of earthly
desire. These are the miracles of a story-teller; they
may well have misled even Shakespeare, until he
tried to transfer them to the stage, and found that
the history of Troilus and Cressida is not a fit theme
for a lyrical love-drama. He wrote Romeo and Juliet
instead, and retained the go-between in the character
of the Nurse, who is twin-sister to Pandarus even in

IV. THE THEATRE 155

tricks of speech, and derives from the same great
original. Later on, when a play was required, and
the time was short, he chose the romance of Troy, in
its larger aspects, as the theme of a political drama,
and eked it out with the earlier incomplete play.
The failure and miscarriage of everything through
human lust and human weakness is the only principle
of coherence in the composite play, and accordingly
Thersites is its hero. Yet Thersites is made odious ;
so that we are left with the impression that the
author, after mocking at love and war and statecraft,
mocks also at his own disaffection. In no other
instance does he come so near to the restlessness of
egotism ; but his poetry is irrepressible ; in single
passages the play is great, and by these it is
remembered.

All this doubtful speculation as to the genesis of
particular plays may be fairly dispensed with in con
sidering the works of Shakespeare's prime. At an
early period of his career he attached himself to the
Lord Chamberlain's company of players, which on the
accession of James I. became the King's company,
and he seems to have remained constant to it there
after. For this company the Globe theatre was built
on the Bankside in 1599 ; as the Fortune theatre in
Cripplegate was built, at about the same time, for
their chief rivals, the Lord Admiral's company.

156 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

There can be no doubt that Shakespeare was, from
the first, in high authority at the Globe. The date
of its building coincides with the beginning of his
greatest dramatic period, when he abandoned the
historical and comic themes which had won him
popularity, and set himself to teach English tragedy
a higher flight. His tragedies and Roman plays, it
is safe to assume, were brought out at this theatre
under his own supervision ; the actors were probably
instructed by himself j the very building was possibly
designed for his requirements. The plays of his
maturity were therefore produced, as few dramatists
can hope to see their plays produced, in exact con
formity with the author's intentions. His chief
tragic actor, Richard Burbage, to judge from those
faint echoes of opinion which are an actor's only
memorial, was among the greatest of English tra
gedians, and at least had this inestimable advantage
over Betterton and Garrick, that the author was at
hand to offer criticism and counsel. We know enough
of Shakespeare's views on acting to be sure that an
unfamiliar quiet reigned at the Globe ; the aspiring
tragedian was taught to do his roaring gently; the
strutting player, —

whose conceit

Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound
Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage,—

IV. THE THEATRE 157

was subdued to a more temperate behaviour; and
the poetry of the long speeches was recited, as it has
not very often been recited since, with care given
first to melody and continuity of discourse.

The stage at these early theatres was a raised bare
platform, jutting out some considerable distance
among the audience, so that the groups of players
were seen from many points of view, and had to aim
at statuesque rather than pictorial effect. The central
part of the theatre, into which the stage protruded,
was unroofed ; and plays were given by the light of
day. There was no painted scenery. At the back
of the stage a wooden erection, hollow underneath,
and hung with some kind of tapestry, served many
purposes. It was Juliet's tomb, and the canopy of
Desdemona's bed, and the hovel where poor Tom in
Lear is found taking refuge from the storm. The
top of the structure was used as occasion demanded,
for the battlements of Flint Castle in Richard 11.,
or for the balcony in Romeo and Juliet, or for the
window in Shylock's house whence Jessica throws
the casket, or for Cleopatra's monument, to which
the dying Antony is raised to take his farewell
of Egypt. No women appeared on the public
stage, and the parts of women were taken by boys.
This last is perhaps the most startling feature in
the usage of the Elizabethan stage. When Cleopatra

158 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

describes the ignominy of being led to Eome, she

alludes to it:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels : Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.

It is strange to remember that a boy spoke these
lines. And the same irony of situation must surely
have become almost dangerous in the speech of
Volumnia, the Roman matron :

Think with thyself,

How more unfortunate than all living women
Are we come hither.

So too with Shakespeare's favourite device of putting
his heroines into boy's dress. The boys who acted
Rosalind, Viola, and Julia, had the difficult task of
pretending to be girls disguised as boys. In spite of
all this, it may be doubted whether Shakespeare has
not suffered more than he has gained by the genius
of latter-day actresses, who bring into the plays a
realism and a robust emotion which sometimes
obscure the sheer poetic value of the author's con
ception. The boys were no doubt very highly
trained, and amenable to instruction; so that the
parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have
been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which

IV. THE THEATRE 159

served as a transparent medium for the author's wit
and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when
it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own
talent and passion by those who are its ministers.
With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic
drama died in England, and it has had no second
life.

The effects of the poetic imagination are wrought
largely by suggestion ; and the bare stage, by sparing
the audience a hundred irrelevant distractions, helped
poetry to do its work. Besides poetry, the resources
that lay to Shakespeare's hand were costume, gesture,
dramatic grouping of the actors, procession, music,
dancing, and all kinds of bodily activity. The rude
architectural background supplied by the stage was
not felt to be insufficient; much of the business of
life was transacted by Elizabethans, as it still is by
Orientals, "in an open place." Costume was some
thing more than idly decorative ; it was a note of
rank, profession, or trade, and so helped to tell the
story. The necessary outlay on costume was the
heaviest part of theatrical expense, and the chief
actors were furnished with a varied and splendid
wardrobe. Shakespeare's plays are written with un
failing care for these externals. He entertained the
spectators with unceasing movement, and a feast of
colours, and the noise of trumpets and cannon and

160 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

shouting, and endless song and dance. Sometimes a
whole scene is given over to pageantry, like that
scene in As You Like It, where Jaques and the Lords,
clad as foresters, bear the deer in triumph, and
crown the conquerer with the deer's horns. They
form a procession, and pass round the stage, singing
a lusty song:

Take thou no scorn to wear the horn ;
It was a crest ere thou wast born.

The horn was a jest long before the time of Shake
speare, and he took no scorn to repeat it everlastingly,
for the delight of a simple-minded audience. But
the chief purpose of the scene is explained by
Jaques, who calls for the song, and adds : " 'Tis no
matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough."

The vigilance of Shakespeare's stage-craft may be
best seen by an illustration. In the Second Act of
Julius Caesar the conspiracy against Caesar is hatched.
The act opens with the appearance of Brutus, who
comes into his orchard to call for his servant. We
are to know that it is night, and we are told at
once; Brutus speaks of the progress of the stars, and,
being unable to sleep, orders a light to be set in his
study. His servant, returning, brings him a paper,
found in the study-window ; it is a message from the
conspirators, and he opens it and reads it. But we
are not to forget that it is dark, and he explains:

IV. THE THEATRE 161

The exhalations whizzing in the air

Give so much light that I may read by them.

From the talk of Brutus and his servant we have
learned that it is the night before the Ides of March,
that Brutus is sleepless and troubled, and that the
air is full of portents. Before this talk is ended,
it may be assumed that a hush has fallen upon the
audience; the murmur of voices and the cracking
of nuts have ceased. Then comes a knocking at
the gate, and Cassius is admitted with his fellow-
conspirators, who wear their hats plucked about their
ears, and are so muffled up that Brutus cannot
identify them. He is introduced to them, one by
one, arid Cassius draws him aside for a long whis
pered colloquy. Meantime the others discuss the
points of the compass :

Decius. Here lies the East : doth not the day break
here ?

Casca. No.

Cinna. O, pardon, Sir, it doth ; and yon grey lines,
That fret the clouds, are messengers of day.

Casca. You shall confess that you are both deceiv'd ;
Here, as I point my sword, the Sun arises,
Which is a great way growing on the South,
Weighing the youthful season of the year.
Some two months hence up higher toward the North
He first presents his fire, and the high East
Stands, as the Capitol, directly here.
S. L

162 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

The muffled figures are grouped at one corner of the
protruding stage, behind Casca, who points at the
imagined Capitol with his sword. Brutus and Cassius
watch them, and the dramatic group breaks up at a
word from Brutus :

Give me your hands all over, one by one.
Then follows a discussion of the plot against Caesar,
until the clock strikes three, and the conspirators
part. Brutus, left alone, finds that his servant has
gone to sleep. The whole scene is heavy with the
sense of night and the darkness of conspiracy, yet
the effect is produced by nothing but the spoken
words and the gestures of the players.

Not only was Shakespeare's stage bare, but the
story of the play was often unknown beforehand to
his audience. The background and environment of
his principal characters had to be created in the
imagination of the spectators, worked upon and
excited by his poetry. His opening scenes are there
fore all-important; besides explaining preliminaries
they often strike the keynote of the whole play.
Twelfth Night, a play compact of harmony, opens
with the strains of music; and, when the music
ceases, the wonderful speech of the Duke, on love
and imagination, is a summary of all that follows. In
Borneo and Juliet, before either of the lovers is heard
of, we witness a quarrel between the servants of

*V- THE THEATRE 163

the rival houses. The first words spoken in Hamlet
are a challenge to the sentry who guards the royal
castle of Elsinore; Macbeth begins with a thunder
storm, and rumours of battle, and the ominous tryst
of the witches. Not less wonderful than these is
the opening of Othello ; the subdued voices, talking
earnestly in the street, of money, and preferment,
and ancient grudges, are the muttering of the storm
which breaks with tropical violence in the sudden
night-alarm, and is lulled into quiet again in the
Council Chamber of the Duke. But this cloud is
only the vanguard of the darkness that is to follow,
and of the winds that are to blow till they have
wakened death. The development of Shakespeare's
greater plays is curiously musical in its logic ; the
statement and interweaving of the themes, the varia
tions and repetitions, the quiet melodies that are
heard in the intervals, and the gradual increase
of complexity until the subtle discourse of the
earlier scenes is swallowed up in the full blare
of the reunited orchestra— all this ordered beauty
was made possible by the strict subordination of
stage effects to the needs and the methods of
poetry.

No detail of the business of a playwright escaped
his attention. His management of entrances deserves
careful study. The actors came on at the back of

1 64 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the stage, and had some way to go before they could
begin to speak. He allows time for this, and " Look
where he comes" — the common formula of intro
duction — is usually spoken by one of the characters
who is drawn a little aside, watching another come
forward. So in Othello, when lago's poison has begun
to work :

lago. Look where he comes. Not poppy, nor man-

dragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow'dst yesterday.

This superb incantation is uttered by the high-priest
of evil over the unconscious Othello as he comes
moodily down the stage. Many modern editions
of Shakespeare postpone the entrance of Othello
until lago's speech is finished, whereby they ruin
the dramatic effect. The habitual shifting of the
entrances to suit the requirements of the modern
stage, where most of the characters must come on
from the wings, is an evil departure from the old
copies, and a wrong done to Shakespeare. On his plat
form stage he often introduces independent groups
of actors, and makes one group serve as a commen
tary on the other. At the beginning of Antony and
Cleopatra Demetrius and Philo are discussing the
dotage of their great general. There is a flourish ;

IV. THE THEATRE 165

Antony and Cleopatra, with their trains, and eunuchs
fanning her, come slo\vly down the stage on the
other side. Then Philo continues :

Look where they conie.

Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool : behold and see.

By this time the procession has come forward and
we overhear the talk of the lovers. Throughout
the scene Demetrius and Philo have no share in
the action ; they stand aside and play the part of a
chorus ; their conversation interprets to the audience
the meaning of what is going forward on the stage.
Where the action is so complex as it commonly
is in Shakespeare's plays, a great part of it must
necessarily be set forth in report or narration. He
divides the ancient functions of the messenger like
those of the chorus, among the characters of the play.
Many of his most memorable scenes — the wedding
of Petruchio, the death of Ophelia, the interview of
Hotspur, on the field of battle, with the popinjay
lord, — are narrated, not exhibited. Yet for all his
use of this indirect method, Shakespeare puts too
much on his stage, and sometimes violates the
modesty of art. To his audience he must have
seemed notable for restraint; they were inured to
horrors; and he gave them no hangings, and no

166 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

slow deaths by torture. Titus Andronicus may be
left out of the account, as a work of youthful
bravado. But the blinding of Gloucester on the
stage, though casuistry has been ready to defend
it, cannot be excused. This is the chief of his
offences ; in comparison with this the bringing in
of the hot irons, in King John, and the murder of
MacdufFs young son, in Macbeth, are venial trans
gressions, which may be happily slurred over in the
acting.

The day for discussing the notorious unities in
connection with Shakespeare's drama is long past.
Eomantic poetry created its own drama, and acknow
ledges no unity save that which is equally binding
on a poem or a prose story — the unity of impres
sion. Nowhere is the magic of Shakespeare's art
greater than here. He reduces a wild diversity of
means to a single purpose; and submits the wealth
of his imagination and knowledge to be judged by
this one test. His landscape, his moonlight and
sunlight and darkness, his barren heaths and ver
durous parks, are all agents in the service of dramatic
poetry. " It is almost morning," says Portia, at the
close of The Merchant of Venice, — and the words have
an indescribable human value. When Claudio, in
Much Ado, has paid his last tribute to the empty
tomb of Hero, and all things are arranged for

IV. THE THEATRE 167

the final restoration of happiness, Don Pedro
speaks :

Good morrow, masters: put your torches out.

The wolves have prey'd, and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about

Dapples the drowsy East with spots of grey.

But the best instance of this alliance of poetry with
the drama is to be found in As You Like It. The
scene is laid, for the most part, in the forest of
Arden. A minute examination of the play has given
a curious result. No single bird, or insect, or flower,
is mentioned by name. The words " flower " and
"leaf" do not occur. The trees of the forest are
the oak, the hawthorn, the palm-tree, and the olive.
For animals, there are the deer, one lioness, and one
green and gilded snake. The season is not easy to
determine ; perhaps it is summer ; we hear only of
the biting cold and the wintry wind. " But these
are all lies," as Rosalind would say, and the dramatic
truth has been expressed by those critics who speak
of "the leafy solitudes sweet with the song of birds."
It is nothing to the outlaws that their forest is
poorly furnished with stage-properties ; they fleet
the time carelessly in a paradise of gaiety and indol
ence, and there is summer in their hearts. So Shake
speare attains his end without the bathos of an
allusion to the soft green grass, which must needs

168 SHAKESPEARE CHAP. IV.

have been represented by the boards of the theatre.
The critical actuaries are baffled, and find nothing
in this play to assess ; Shakespeare's dramatic estate
cannot be brought under the hammer, for it is rich
in nothing but poetry.

CHAPTER V

STORY AND CHARACTER

IN the Folio Shakespeare's work is divided into
three kinds— Comedy, History, and Tragedy. The
classification of the plays under these headings is
artificial and misleading. Cymbeline appears among
the Tragedies; while Measure for Measure, a play
much more tragic in temper, is numbered with the
Comedies. Richard II. is a History ; Julius Caesar
is a Tragedy. Troilus and Cressida, in consequence
of some typographical mishap, was inserted, with
the pages unnumbered, between the Histories and
the Tragedies.

The section headed Histories contains the his
torical plays dealing with English kings. This sort
of play, the Chronicle History, flourished during the
last fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, and owed its
popularity to the fervour of Armada patriotism.
The newly awakened national spirit made the people
quick to discern a topical interest in the records
of bygone struggles against foreign aggression and

170 SHAKESPEARE CHA3>.

civil disunion. In writing plays of this kind Shake
speare was following the lead of others ; and the
plays themselves, because they are based to a large
extent on earlier dramatic handlings of the same
themes, and frequently sacrifice the truth of history
to the exigencies of the drama, are a less faithful
record of facts than the Roman plays which derive
solely from Plutarch. Doubtless where national
memories were concerned, the audience at the
theatre was content with a comparatively diffuse
style of play ; and this looseness of structure, which
is found in the weaker Histories, is the sole justifi
cation for the new name. But the threefold division
has no value for dramatic criticism. The Histories
were an accident of fashion, and claimed some
measure of exemption, by virtue of their political
interest, from the severer canons of art. At least
they told a story, and the playgoers asked no
more.

Even the time-honoured distinction of Tragedy
and Comedy gives no true or satisfying division of
Shakespeare's plays. Othello is a tragedy; As Ym
Like It is a comedy: so much may be admitted.
But between the most marked examples of the two
kinds there is every degree and variety of tragic
and comic interest, exhibited in rich confusion ; so
that the plays might be best arranged on a graduated

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 171

scale; comedy shades into tragedy by imperceptible
advances, and he would be a bold man who should
presume to determine the boundary. The crude test
of life or death gives no easy criterion ; in The
Winter's Tale Mamillius, heir to the throne of Sicily,
only son to Hermione, and one of the most delightful
of Shakespeare's children, dies of grief and fear.
Romeo and Juliet die, Troilus and Cressida survive.
In some of the comedies the gravest infidelities and
sufferings are lightly huddled up in a happy ending.
Further, Shakespeare has no two styles for the two
kinds of play. The echoes that pass from the one
to the other would make a strange collection.
Benedick and Hamlet speak the same tongue. " If
a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere
he dies, he shall live no longer in monuments, than
the bell rings and the widow weeps." So says
jesting Benedick, at the height of his new-found
happiness with Beatrice. "Oh Heavens!" says
Hamlet, in the bitterness of his soul, "die two
months ago, and not forgotten yet1? Then there's
hope a great man's memory may outlive his life
half a year: but by'r lady, he must build churches
then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with
the hobby-horse." If Hamlet is a philosopher, so
is Benedick. " Is it not strange," he says of music,
"that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's

172 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

bodies'?" Another of these echoes passes from
Justice Shallow to King Lear. "'Tis the heart,
Master Page," says the thin-voiced little justice ;
"'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the time, with
my long sword, I would have made you four tall
fellows skip like rats." How like to these are the
words spoken by Lear, when he carries Cordelia dead
in his arms ; yet how unlike in effect :

I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion,
I would have made them skip : I am old now,
And these same crosses spoil me.

All the materials and all the methods of Shake
speare's Tragedy are to be found dispersed in. his
Comedy. Most of his themes are indifferent, and
no one could predict which of them he will choose
for a happy ending. Nor is there reason to suppose
that the public called at one time for comic stories,
at another time for tragic, and that his plots were
adapted to suit the demand. The real difference is
in his own mood; the atmosphere and impression
which give to each play its character are reflected
from his own thought, and cannot be ranged under
two heads to meet the mechanical requirements of
criticism.

It is this which gives importance to the deter
mination of the chronological order of the plays.
Endless labour has been spent on the task; and

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 173

although, in this question, as in all others connected
with Shakespeare, there is a tendency to overstate
the certainty of the results, yet results of value have
been obtained. Plays of the same type have been
shown to fall within the same period of his life. His
early boisterous Comedies and his prentice -work on
history are followed by his joyous Comedies and
mature Histories ; these again by his Tragedies and
painful Comedies ; and last, at the close of his
career, he reverts to Comedy, but Comedy so unlike
the former kind, that modern criticism has been
compelled to invent another name for these final
plays, and has called them Romances. There is
no escape from the broad lines of this classification.
No single play can be proved to fall out of the
company of its own kind. The fancies of those
critics who amuse themselves by picturing Shake
speare as the complete tradesman have no facts to
work upon. "One wonders," says Mr. Halliwell-
Phillipps, "what Heminge and Condell would have
thought if they had applied to Shakespeare for a
new comedy, and the great dramatist had told them
that he could not possibly comply with their wishes,
he being then in his Tragic Period." What they
would have thought may admit a wide conjecture ;
what they got is less doubtful. If they asked for
a comedy when he was writing his great tragedies

174 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

they got Measure for Measure or Trattus and Cressida ;
if they asked for a tragedy when he was writing
his happiest works of wit and lyric fantasy, they
got Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare's Comedy is akin to his Tragedy,
and does not come of the other house. The kind
of Comedy which has been most famous and most
influential in the world's history is satirical Comedy,
which takes its stand on the best social usage, and
laughs at the follies of idealists. Its feet are planted
firmly on the earth beneath, and it pays no regard
to the heavens above, nor to the waters that are
under the earth. Socrates and the founders of
modern science are laughed out of court along with
the half-witted fops and the half-crazy charlatans.
But this is not Shakespeare's Comedy. His imagi
nation is too active to permit him to find rest in
a single attitude. His mind is always open to the
wider issues, which reach out on all sides, into
fantasy or metaphysic. He can study the life of
his fellows as a man might study life on ship
board, and can take delight in the daily intrigues
of the human family ; but there is a background
to the picture; he is often caught thinking of the
sea, which pays no attention to good sense, and of
the two-inch plank, which may start at any moment.
Wit and good sense there is in plenty; and there

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 175

is a woman, or a humourist, to show that wit and
good sense are insufficient. Even in Love's Labour's
Lost, Biron, the apostle of wit and good sense, is
sent to jest for a twelvemonth in a hospital. In
The Merchant of Venice the whole action of the
play passes on the confines of tragedy, and is
barely saved from crossing into the darker realm.
On the leaden casket is engraved the motto of
Shakespeare's philosophy : " Who chooseth me must
give and hazard all he hath." Bassanio is not
called upon to pay the full debt; but the voice of
tragedy has been heard, as it is heard again in
the passion of Shylock. The first breathings of
tragic feeling, which are found even in the gayest
of the early comedies, steadily increase in volume
and intensity, until the storm rises, and blows all
laughter out of the plays, except the laughter of
the fool. It is as if Shakespeare were carried into
tragedy against his will ; his comedies, built on
the old framework of clever trick and ludicrous
misunderstanding, become serious on his hands ;
until at last he recognises the position, cuts away
all the mechanical devices whereby the semblance
of happiness is vainly preserved, and goes with open
eyes to meet a trial that has become inevitable.

The classic apparatus of criticism is not very well
adapted to deal with this case. There is not a

176 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

particle of evidence to show that Shakespeare held
any views on the theory of the drama, or that the
question was a live one in his mind. The species of
play that he most affected in practice has been well
described by Polonius ; it is the " tragical-comical-
historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem un
limited." His first care was to get hold of a story
that might be shaped to the needs of the theatre.
It is possible, no doubt, for a dramatist, as it is
for a novelist, to go another way to work. He
may conceive living characters, and devise events
to exhibit them ; or he may start with a moral, a
philosophy of life, an atmosphere, a sentiment, and
set his puppets to express it. But Shakespeare kept
to the old road, and sought first for a story. Some
of his characters were made by his story, as
characters are made by the events of life. Others
he permits to intrude upon the story, as old friends,
or new visitors, intrude upon a plan and disorder
it. His wisdom of life grew, a rich incrustation,
upon the events and situations of his fable. But
the story came first with him, — as it came first with
his audience, as it comes first with every child.

Those who have studied Shakespeare's plays with
an eye to their making will ask for no proof of this.
If proof were needed, it could be found in the
incommodities and violences which are sometimes

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 177

put upon him by the necessity of keeping to the
story when the characters have come alive and are
pulling another way. He spent no great care, one
would say, on the original choice of a theme, but
took it as he found it, if it looked promising. Then
he dressed his characters, and put them in action, so
that his opening scenes are often a kind of postulate,
which the spectator or reader is asked to grant.
At this point of the play improbability is of no
account ; the intelligent reader will accept the situa
tion as a gift, and will become alert and critical only
when the next step is taken, and he is asked to
concede the truth of the argument — given these
persons in this situation, such and such events will
follow. Let it be granted that an old king divides
his realm among his three daughters, exacting from
each of them a profession of ardent affection. Let it
be granted that a merchant borrows money of a Jew
on condition that if he fail to repay it punctually he
shall forfeit a pound of his own flesh. Let it be
granted that a young prince sees a ghost, who tells
him that his uncle, the reigning king, and second
husband of his mother, is a murderer. The hypo
thetical preambles of King Lear, The Merchant of
Venice, and Hamlet are really much more elaborate
than this, but this may serve to illustrate Shake
speare's method. Before appealing to the sympathies
M

178 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

and judgment of his audience he has to acquaint
them with the situation. Until the situation is
created he cannot get to work on his characters.
His plays open with a postulate ; then the characters
begin to live, and, as Act follows Act, come into
ever closer and more vital relation to the course
of events ; till at last the play is closed, sometimes
triumphantly and inevitably, by exhibiting the
result of all that has gone before ; at other times
feebly and carelessly, by neglecting the new interests
that have grown around the characters, and dragging
the story back into its predestined shape.

If this be so, it makes some kinds of criticism idle.
Why, it is often asked, did not Cordelia humour her
father a little1? She was too stubborn and rude,
where tact and sympathetic understanding might,
without any violation of truth, have saved the situa
tion. It is easy to answer this question by enlarging
on the character of Cordelia, and on that touch of
obstinacy which is often found in very pure and
unselfish natures. But this is really beside the
mark; and those who spend so much thought on
Cordelia are apt to forget Shakespeare. If Cordelia
had been perfectly tender and tactful, there would
have been no play. The situation would have been
saved, and the dramatist who was in attendance to
celebrate the sequel of the situation might have

STORY AND CHARACTER 179

packed up his pipes and gone home. This is not
to say that the character of Cordelia is drawn care
lessly or inconsistently. But it is a character invented
for the situation, so that to argue from the character
to the plot is to invert the true order of things in
the artist's mind. To go further, and discuss Cor
delia's childhood as a serious question of criticism, is
to lose all hold on the real dramatic problem, and
to fall back among the idle people, who ask to be
deceived, and are deceived. It would be as reason
able to attempt to judge a picture by considering all
those things which might possibly have been included
in it if the frame had been larger. The frame, which
to the uninstructed gazer is a mere limitation and
obstacle, hindering his wider view of reality, is to
the painter the beginning and foundation and condi
tion of all that appears within it.

In the great tragedies story and character are
marvellously adapted to each other; hardly any
thing is forced or twisted to bring it within the
limits of the scheme. By the time that he wrote
Lear and Othello, Shakespeare was a master crafts
man, deeply acquainted with life, which had to be
portrayed, and thoroughly exercised, by long practice,
in the handling of all those dramatic schemes and
patterns which had to be filled. But in his early
comedies, and also, strangely enough, in his latest

180 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

plays, the adaptation of story and character is less
perfect. How lightly troubles find their solution in
the comedies ! In The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Proteus, if we are to judge him by his deeds, is
shallow and fickle, and false both to Valentine his
friend, and to Julia, his affianced love. He is con
verted by being found out, at the end of the Fifth
Act. A play must have an end, and this play is
a comedy, so he makes an acceptable penitent.
" My shame and guilt confounds me," he says, when
Valentine has rescued Silvia from his violence. A
few lines later he returns to his old love, and
philosophises on inconstancy : -_:•

What is in Silvia's face but I may spy
More fresh in Julia's with a constant eye?

If he had thought of this before, it would have
ruined the play. What hard heart will quarrel with
an ending which gives us a double marriage,

One feast, one house, one mutual happiness?

In Twelfth Night Viola alone, of all who fall in love,
is honoured by being married to the first object
of her affections; and it may perhaps be said, in
Shakespeare's defence, that she alone deserves this
particular honour. The rest are married, or kept
single, much as silken strands are disposed in a gay
pattern. These plays, after all, are comedies of

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 181

intrigue ; the pattern is very elaborate ; and it would
be ridiculous to discuss the characters seriously, were
it not that Shakespeare has worked so much of real
and living character into the scheme, that we are
emboldened thereby to ask him for the impossible.
If all the characters are to live, the plot would have
to be simpler and less symmetrical. All are, at
least, most happily adapted to the light uses of
comedy. The world in which they move is a rain
bow world of love in idleness. The intensities and
realities of life shimmer into smoke and film in that
delicate air. The inhabitants are victims of love-
fancy which is engendered in the eyes, youths and
maidens who dally with the innocence of Love,
votaries of Love,

Who kissed his wings that brought him yesterday,
And praise his wings to-day that he is flown.

In what other world were there ever so many witty
lovers? In what other world were melancholy, and
contempt, and anger, ever made to look so beautiful 1
When Shakespeare has no further use for a
character, he sometimes disposes of him in the most
unprincipled and reckless fashion. Consider the
fate of Antigonus in The Winter's Tale. Up to the
time of his sudden death Antigonus has served his
maker well; he has played an important part in
the action, and by his devotion and courage has

1 82 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

won the affection of all the spectators. It is he
who saves the daughter of Hermione from the mad
rage of the king. " I'll pawn the little blood which
I have left," he says, "to save the innocent." He
is allowed to take the child away on condition that
he shall expose her in some desert place, and leave
her to the mercy of chance. He fulfils his task, and
now, by the end of the Third Act, his part in the
play is over. Sixteen years are to pass, and new
matters are to engage our attention ; surely the aged
nobleman might have been allowed to retire in peace.
Shakespeare thought otherwise ; perhaps he felt it
important that no news whatever concerning the child
should reach Leontes, and therefore resolved to make
away with the only likely messenger. Antigonus
takes an affecting farewell of the infant princess ;
the weather grows stormy ; and the rest must be
told in Shakespeare's words :

Antigonus. Farewell ;

The day frowns more and more : thou'rt like to have
A lullaby too rough : I never saw
The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour !
Well may I get aboard. This is the chase,
I am gone for ever ! [Exit pursued by a bear.

This is the first we hear of the bear, and would be
the last, were it not that Shakespeare, having in this
wise disposed of poor Antigonus, makes a thrifty use

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 183

of the remains at the feast of Comedy. The clown
comes in to report, with much amusing detail, how
the bear has only half-dined on the gentlCman, and
is at it now. It is this sort of conduct, on the part
of the dramatist, that the word Romance has been
used to cover. The thorough-paced Romantic critic
is fully entitled to refute the objections urged
by classic censors against Shakespeare's dramatic
method ; but if he profess to be unable to under
stand them, he disgraces his own wit.

The plot must be carried on, the interest and
movement of the story maintained, at all costs, even
if our sympathies are outraged by the wild justice
that is done in the name of Comedy. The principal
characters in All's Well that Eiuls Well are designed
for their parts in the intrigue, but not even Shake
speare's skill can unite the incompatible, and teach
them how to do their dramatic work without
weakening their claim on our sympathies. "I can
not reconcile my heart," says Johnson, " to Bertram,
a man noble without generosity, and young without
truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves
her as a profligate; when she is dead by his un-
kindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is
accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends
himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness."
And Claudio, in Much Ado, is a fair companion for

184 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

him, a very ill-conditioned, self-righteous young fop,
who is saved from punishment by the virtues of
others and the necessities of the plot. It is a comfort
to hear old Antonio speak his mind on him and his
like:

What, man ! I know them, yea
And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple,
Scambling, out-facing, fashion-mongering boys,
That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander.

Nor does Beatrice leave her opinion doubtful.

But these are creatures judging a fellow-creature.
What would the great artificer of them all have
said, if he had been compelled to reply to Johnsons
repeated accusation 1 " He sacrifices virtue," says
Johnson again, "to convenience, and is so much
more careful to please than to instruct, that he
seems to write without any moral purpose." Would
not Shakespeare have defended his characters with
something of the large humorous tolerance displayed
by Falstaff towards his ragged regiment1? "Tell
me, Jack," says the Prince, " whose fellows are these
that come after?" "Mine, Hal, mine," says Fal
staff, with wary geniality. " I did never see such
pitiful rascals," says the Prince, who was a frank
and fearless commentator. And then Falstaff, with
one of those sudden reaches of imagination which
disconcert the adversary by forcing him off the

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 185

narrow ground of his choice — "Tut, tut; good
enough to toss ; food for powder, food for powder ;
they'll fill a pit as well as better : tush, man, mortal
men, mortal men." Might not Shakespeare have
replied in the same fashion to a critic of heroic
leanings? His profligates and coxcombs fill a plot
as well as better, and, when all is said, they are
mortal men. Shakespeare's carelessness is a part of
his magnanimity, and a testimony to his boundless
resource.

If we sometimes find it hard to forgive him, it is
partly because we are dissatisfied with the govern
ment of the world, and call out for " poetic justice,"
a narrow arid rigid apportionment of rewards and
punishments according to the dictates of the moral
sense. Shakespeare moves in a larger scheme of
things, where the sun rises on the evil and on the
good. He finds it easy, therefore, to accept his
story as a kind of providence, and to abide by its
surprising awards. Why did he create so exquisite
a being as Imogen for the jealous and paltry Post-
humus? He has the precedent of nature, which
makes many strangely -assorted matches ; and he
does not greatly care what we think of Posthumus.
In the cases where he does care, where ill deeds
are assigned by the story to one who must be kept
dear and honourable, he rouses himself to magni-

186 SHAKESPEARE CHAi>.

ficent effort. The story of Othello involved false
suspicions, entertained by Othello on the testimony
of slander, against his young and innocent wife, who
had left her home and her country to follow him.
If these suspicions grew in the normal fashion, and
were nurtured by jealousy, there would be no
tragedy, only another Winter's Tale. Shakespeare
played for the higher stakes. From the first he
makes Othello a man after his own heart, tender,
generous, brave, and utterly magnanimous. At the
opening of the play, when the Senator Brabantio
appears, with officers and torches, to take him, and
the followers on both sides draw their weapons, -the
character of Othello is given, with thrilling effect,
in a few words :

Othello. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will

rust them.

Good Signior, you shall more command with years,
Than with your weapons.

Fearlessness and the habit of command, pride that
would be disgraced by a street brawl, respect for
law and humanity, reverence for age, laconic speech,
and a touch of contempt for the folly that would
pit itself, with a rabble of menials, against the
General of the Eepublic and his bodyguard — all this
is expressed in two lines. Everything that follows,
up to the crisis of the play, helps to raise Othello to

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 187

the top of admiration, and to fix him in the affec
tions of the reader. Scene follows scene, and in
every one of them, it might be said, Shakespeare
is making his task more hopeless. How is he to
fill out the story, and yet save our sympathies for
Othello *? The effort must be heroic : and it is. He
invents lago. The greatness of lago may be mea
sured by this, that Othello never loses our sympathy.
By slow and legitimate means, never extravagant,
circumstance is added to circumstance, until a net is
woven to take Othello in its toils. But circumstance
is not his undoing. Left to himself, even when the
toils were closing in upon him, Othello would have
rent them asunder, and shaken them off. When he
grows impatient, and seems likely to break free, lago
is at hand, to keep him still, and compel him to
think. On matters like these Othello cannot think ;
he is accustomed to impulse, instinct, and action ;
these tedious processes of arguing on dishonour
are torture to him ; and when he tries to think,
he thinks wrong. His own account of himself is
true :

A man not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme.

There is not another of Shakespeare's plays which
is so white-hot with imagination, so free from doubt
ful or extraneous matter, and so perfectly welded, as

188 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Othello. Macbeth has some weak scenes ; Hamlet and
King Lear are cast in a more variegated mould, so
that the tension is sometimes relaxed and the heat
abated; Antony and Cleopatra approaches, in some
of its scenes, to the earlier chronicle manner. In
general, it is true to say that Shakespeare cheerfully
burdens himself with a plot which is either very
complex, or very artificial, or both, and then goes
to work to make a living thing of it. His care for
probability is least in his latest plays. Towards the
beginning of his career he wrote The Comedy of
Errors, which is a story of two pairs of twin brothers,
each pair so exactly alike that no one can tell them
apart. Towards the close he wrote Cymbeline, of
which Johnson speaks truly and moderately when
he says : " This play has many just sentiments, some
natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they
are obtained at the expense of much incongruity.
To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity
of the conduct, the confusion of the names and
manners of different times, and the impossibility
of the events in any system of life, were to waste
criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults
too evident for detection, and too gross for aggra
vation."

The best and highest part of Shakespeare's imagi
nation was not concerned, one is tempted to say,

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 189

with plot-architecture. Any plot is good enough for
him, if it leads him, by unlikely and tortuous ways,
to a real situation ; and no sooner is he confronted
with a real situation than his characters, invented,
it may be, only to fill a place in the story, become
live and convincing. Many a poet who pays more
regard to proportion and verisimilitude finds that his
characters, though they do and suffer nothing that
does not arise simply and naturally from the develop
ment of the plot, have no breath in them, and lie
dead upon his hands. Unity, severity of structure,
freedom from excess, the beauties of simplicity and
order, — these may be learned from the Greeks. But
where can this amazing secret of life be learned 1
It is the miracle of Nature — not the Nature exalted
by the schools as a model of thrift and restraint,
but the true Nature, the goddess of wasteful and
ridiculous excess, who pours forth without ceasing,
at all times and in the most unlikely places, her
enormous and extravagant gift of life. The story
may be shapeless, grotesque, inanimate, like a stone
rejected by the curious builders who seek for severity
of form. But Nature does not despise it.
How long does it lie,
The bad and barren bit of stuff you kick,
Before encroached on and encompassed round
With minute moss, weed, wild-flower — made alive
By worm and fly and foot of the free bird?

190 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

It is thus that Shakespeare works on a story, con
cealing its barren ugliness under the life of his
own creation. It is impossible to say when he will
suddenly put forth his vital power, and take away
the breath of his readers by some astonishing piece
of insight which defeats all expectation. He is most
natural when he upsets all rational forecasts. We
are accustomed to anticipate how others will behave
in the matters that most nearly concern us ; we
seem to know what we shall say to them, and to
be able to forecast what they will say in answer.
We are accustomed, too, to find that our anticipation
is wrong; what really happens gives the lie to the
little stilted drama that we imagined, and we recog
nise at once how poor and false our fancy was,
how much truer and more surprising the thing that
happens is than the thing that we invented. So it
is in Shakespeare. His surprises have the same
convincing quality ; the word once said is known to
have been inevitable, and the character ceases to be
a character of fiction, controlled by the plot. We
are watching the events of real life ; from our hidden
vantage ground we see into the mystery of things,
as if we were God's spies.

It will not be out of place to call to remembrance
a few only of these splendid divinations.

Cleopatra has fallen into the power of Caesar,

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 191

after the death of Antony. Caesar, in the measured
terms of magnanimity befitting a professional con
queror, advises her to do nothing violent, and
promises that she shall be honoured and consulted.
" My master, and my lord ! " says the Queen ; to
which Caesar makes gracious response, " Not so ;
Adieu," and goes out with his attendants. Then
Cleopatra turns to her women :

He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself.

And Iras, who sees the real situation no less truly,
replies,

Finish, good lady ; the bright day is clone,
And we are, for the dark.

These brief speeches, coming at the end of the long
diplomatic interview, are like flashes of lightning
discovering the perils of travellers among the Alps.
Desdemona has suddenly had revealed to her,
beyond all hope of mistake, what it is that Othello
believes. He has " laid such despite and heavy terms
upon her as true hearts cannot bear," and has left her.
Emilia, grieved and solicitous, stays by her mistress :

JSmil. How do you, Madam ? How do you, my good

Lady?

Des. Faith, half asleep.

Emit. Good Madam, what's the matter with my Lord ?
Des, With who?

192 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Emil. Why, with my Lord, Madam.

Des. Who is thy Lord?

Emil. He that is yours, sweet Lady.

Des. I have none : do not talk to me, Emilia :

I cannot weep : nor answers have I none

But what should go by water.

Macbeth, brought to bay within his castle, hears
that the Queen is dead :

Macbeth. She should have died hereafter ;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Othello, coming into the bedchamber of his
sleeping wife, looks upon that picture of innocence
and beauty, and, lest he should be overcome by
it, clutches at his failing resolve :

Othello. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul ;
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars ;
It is the cause.

So swift and certain is Shakespeare's insight,
that he has often puzzled his licensed interpreters.
The actor Fechter, finding no sense in these words,
caused Othello to take up a toilet-glass, fallen from
Desdemona's hand, and gazing therein on the image
of his bronzed face, to exclaim, "It is the cause."
Garrick himself, with no better understanding, wrote
a dying speech for Macbeth, beginning,

'Tis done ; the scene of life will quickly close ;
and delivered it, with suitable death-agonies, to

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 193

thronged audiences. This sort of thing makes every
lover of Shakespeare willing, so far as the great
tragedies are concerned, to forswear the theatre
altogether.

The truth is that his best things are not very
effective on the stage. These packed utterances are
glimpses merely of the hurry of unspoken thought ;
they come and are gone; they cannot be delivered
emphatically, nor fully understood in the pause that
separates them from the next sentence; and when
they are understood, the reader feels no desire to
applaud ; he is seized by them, his thoughts are
set a-working, and he is glad to be free from the
importunacy of spectacle and action. Tragedy has
no monopoly of them ; wherever the situation be
comes tense, the surprises of reality intrude. Falstaff
is cast off, publicly disgraced and banished, by his
old companion, now King Henry v. He stands
among the crowd at the Coronation ceremony, by
the side of Justice Shallow, whom he has cheated
of money, duped with promises of Royal favour,
and despised; he listens to the severe judgment
of the King, and, when it is ended, watches the
retreating procession. What trick, what device, has
he now, to hide him from this open and apparent
shame1? If we did not know it from Shakespeare,
we could never have guessed how Falstaff would

N

194 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

take the rebuff. He turns quite simply to his com
panion, and says, "Master Shallow, I owe you a
thousand pound." It is something to be a humourist,
trained by habit to recognise the incongruity of facts.
No less convincing is the acquiescence of Parolles,
when his cowardice and treachery are brought home
to him :

Yet am I thankful ; if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this : Captain I'll be no more,
But I will eat, and drink, and sleep as soft
As Captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.

Shakespeare dared to follow his characters .into
those dim recesses of personality where the hunted
soul stands at bay, and proclaims itself, naked as
it is, for a greater thing than law and opinion.

Perhaps the vitalising power of Shakespeare is
best seen in the loving care that he sometimes spends
on subsidiary characters, whose connection with the
plot is but slight. The young Osric, in Hamlet,
has no business in the play except to carry Laertes'
challenge to Hamlet. Shakespeare draws his portrait;
we learn that he is a landowner, and perceive that
he is an accomplished courtier. Hamlet and Horatio
discuss him at some length, and his own speech
shows how seriously he is preoccupied with all the
etiquette and formality of Court life. He exists,

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 195

it cannot be doubted, merely as a foil for Hamlet's
wit and melancholy. When the mind is wholly taken
up with tragic issues, when it is brooding on a
great sorrow, or foreboding a hopeless event, the
little daily affairs of life continue unaltered; tables
are served, courtesies interchanged, and the wheels
of society revolve at their accustomed pace. Osric
is the representative of society; his talk is of gen
tility, skill in fencing, and the elegance of the
proffered wager. How distant and dream-like it all
seems to Hamlet, and to those who are in his
secret ! But this trivial society is real and necessar}7,
and strong with the giant strength of custom and
institution. Shakespeare demonstrates its reality
by showing us a live inhabitant. He might have
entrusted the challenge to a walking-gentleman, and
concluded the business in a few lines. By making
a scene of it, he adds a last touch of pathos to the
loneliness of Hamlet, and gives a last opportunity
for the display of that incomparable vein of irony.
A stranger testimony to the wealth of his creative
genius may be found in its superfluous creations.
Some of his characters incommode him by their
vitality, and even refuse the duties for which they
were created. Barnardine, in Measure for Measure,
is one of these rebels. In the Italian original of
the story Isabella, to save the life of her brother,

196 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

yields to the wicked deputy, who thereupon breaks
his promise, and causes Claudio to be executed in the
prison. George Whetstone, who handled the story
before Shakespeare, mitigated one of these atrocities;
in his version the gaoler is persuaded to substitute
the head of a newly executed criminal for the head of
Claudio. In Shakespeare's play we find, along with
Claudio, a prisoner called Barnardine, who is under
sentence of death, and is designed to serve as Claudio's
proxy. He is a Bohemian born, "a man that appre
hends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken
sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past,
present, or to come ; insensible of mortality) and
desperately mortal." All arrangements are made for
the substitution, and Barnardine is called forth to his
death. Then a strange thing happens. Barnardine,
a mere detail of the machinery, comes alive, and so
endears himself to his maker, that his execution is felt
to be impossible. Even the murderer of Antigonus
has not the heart to put Barnardine to death. A way
out must be found ; the disguised Duke suggests that
Barnardine is unfit to die, and the Provost comes in
with the timely news that a pirate -called Eagozine,
who exactly resembles Claudio, has just died in the
prison of a fever. So Barnardine, who was born to be
hanged, is left useless in his cell, until at the close
of the play he is kindly remembered and pardoned.

v. STORY AND CHARACTER 197

The plot is managed without him; yet, if he were
omitted, he would be sadly missed. He is a fine
example of the aristocratic temper. In that over
heated atmosphere of casuistry and cowardice he
alone is self-possessed and indifferent. He treats the
executioner like his valet : " How now, Abhorson 1
What's the news with you 3" His decision of
character is absolute: "I will not consent to die
this day, that's certain." Those who speak to him,
Duke and tapster alike, assume the deprecating tone
of inferiors. "But hear you— " says the Duke,
and is interrupted: "Not a word: if you have
anything to say to me, come to my ward ; for
thence will not I to day." So the Bohemian goes
back, to hold his court in the straw. It is a won
derful portrait of the gentleman vagabond, and is
presented by Shakespeare to his audience, a perfect
gratuity.

Some of the most famous characters in the plays
are in a like case with Barnardine; Shakespeare
loves them, and portrays them so sympathetically
that they engage the interest of the audience beyond
what is required (almost beyond what is permitted)
by the general trend of the story. The diverse
interpretations given by notable actors to the part
of Shylock have their origin in a certain incongruity
between the story that Shakespeare accepted and

198 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the character of the Jew as it came to life in his
hands. Some actors, careful for the story, have
laid stress on revenge, cunning, and the thirst for
innocent blood. Others, convinced by Shakespeare's
sympathy, have presented so sad and human a figure
that the verdict of the Court is accepted without
enthusiasm, Portia seems little better than a clever
trickster, and the actor of Gratiano, who is com
pelled to exult, with jibe and taunt, over the lonely
and broken old man, forfeits all favour with the
audience. The difficulty is in the play. The Jew
of the story is the monster of the medieval imagi
nation, and the story almost requires such a monster,
if it is to go with ringing effect on the stage. Shy-
lock is a man, and a man more sinned against than
sinning. He is one of those characters of Shake
speare whose voices we know, whose very tricks of
phrasing are peculiar to themselves. Antonio and
Bassanio are pale shadows of men compared with
this gaunt, tragic figure, whose love of his race is
as deep as life ; who pleads the cause of a common
humanity against the cruelties of prejudice; whose
very hatred has in it something of the nobility of
patriotic passion ; whose heart is stirred with tender
memories even in the midst of his lament over the
stolen ducats; who, in the end, is dismissed, un-
protesting, to insult and oblivion.

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 199

I pray you give me leave to go from hence :
I ain not well. Send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.

So ends the tragedy of Shylock, and the air is heavy
with it long after the babble of the love-plot has
begun again. The Fifth Act of The Merchant of
Venice is an exquisite piece of romantic comedy ; but
it is a welcome distraction, not a full solution. The
revengeful Jew, whose defeat was to have added
triumph to happiness, keeps possession of the play,
and the memory of him gives to these beautiful
closing scenes an undesigned air of heartless frivolity.
The chief case of all is Falstaff, who was originally
intended, so far as we can judge from the part
assigned to him in the development of the plot,
to be a coarse, fat, tavern rogue, dissolute, scurrilous,
and worthless. But Shakespeare lent him all his
own wit and some of his own metaphysic, and
Falstaff became so potent in charm that we are
bewitched with the rogue's company, and are more
than half inclined to adopt his view of the titular
hero of the epic, Prince Henry. "A good shallow
young fellow," says Falstaff; "'a would have made
a good pantler; 'a would have chipped bread well."
This view, accepted, makes nonsense of the whole
structure of the play; and Shakespeare comes very
near to making nonsense of it for the glorification

200 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of Falstaff. He saves himself by forcible, not to
say violent, means, after preparing the way in the
unnatural and pedantic soliloquy of the Prince :

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyok'd humour of your idleness :
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

— and so on, for twenty lines or more, like the
induction of a bald Morality play. Truly, a plot
is in a poor case when it sets up defences like this
against the artillery of FalstafFs criticism and
humour, and the insidious advances of his good-
fellowship.

In these great instances Shakespeare's fecundity
of imagination somewhat confuses the outlines of
the design, and distracts the sympathies of the
audience. Without direction given to sympathy, a
play is not a play, but a chaos or patchwork. The
Greeks secured unity by means of the Chorus, which
mediates between the actors and the spectators, be
speaking attention, interpreting events, and guiding
the feelings. Shakespeare had no Chorus, but he
attains the same end in another way. In almost
all his plays there is a clear enough point of view;
there is some character, or group of characters,
through whose eyes the events of the play must
be seen, if they are to be seen in right perspective.
Some of his creatures he keeps nearer to himself

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 201

than others. The meaning of Love's Labour's Lost
cannot be read through the eyes of Armado, nor
that of Twelfth Night through the eyes of Malvolio.
What comes of regarding the play of Hamlet from
the point of view of Polonius? A hundred critical
essays and dissertations on the symptoms of madness ;
but no understanding, and no sympathy with Shake
speare. Moreover, the point of view gradually shifts
as the years pass by. It would be vain to attempt
to read Romeo and Juliet from the standpoint of
Lady Capulet; even so calm and experienced a
guide as Friar Laurence cannot lead us to the heart
of the play. On the other hand, The Tempest, or
The Winter's Tale, cannot be read aright by those
whose sympathies are concentrated on Miranda and
Ferdinand, or on Florizel and Perdita. Heine,
speaking of Juliet and Miranda, likens them to
the sun and moon. Moonlight, it may be added,
is reflected sunlight; and the ethereal quality of
Miranda's beauty is the quality belonging to a
reflection. We sympathise with Miranda and Ferdi
nand, but it is not their passion that we feel, rather
it is the benevolence and wisdom of Prospero re
joicing in their passion. Miranda, that is to say,
is Prospero's Miranda. No woman ever appeared
thus to her lover— so completely unsophisticated, so
absolutely simple. She is compact, says Mrs. Jame-

202 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

son, of the very elements of womanhood; and it is
this elemental character which appeals, more than
anything individual or distinctive, to the imagination
of mature age.

Shakespeare's plays are works of art, not chronicles
of fact. There is always a centre of interest. Some
of the characters are kept in the full light of this
area of perfect vision. Others, moving in the outer
field of vision, have no value save in relation to
this centre. His habit of over-crowding his canvas
is sometimes detrimental to the main impression.
Edmund's love-intrigues, for instance, in King Lear,
— who does not find them a tedious piece of
machinery1? They belong to the story, but they
do not help the play. For the most part, and in
the most carefully ordered of the plays, the sub
sidiary characters and events are used to enhance
the main impression. They have no full and inde
pendent existence; they are seen only in a limited
aspect, and have just enough vitality to enable them
to play their allotted part in the action.

A great part of the character- study which is so
much in vogue among Shakespeare critics is vitiated
by its neglect of this consideration. The critics
must needs be wiser than Shakespeare, and must
finish his sketches for him, telling us more about
his characters than ever he knew. They treat each

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 203

play as if it were a chessboard, and work out
problems that never entered into his imagination.
They alter the focus, and force all things to illustrate
this detail or that. They plead reverence for Shake
speare's omniscience, and pay a very poor compliment
to his art. A play is like a piano ; if it is tuned to
one key, it is out of tune for every other. The
popular saying which denies all significance to the
play of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left
out, shows a just sense of this. Yet the study of
the lesser characters, conceived in relation, not to
Hamlet, but to one another, continues to exercise
the critics. The King in Hamlet is little better
than a man of straw. He is sufficiently realised
for Shakespeare's purpose; we see him through
Hamlet's eyes, and share Hamlet's hatred of him.
His soliloquy in the scene where Hamlet discovers
him praying is merely plausible; its rhyming tag
would lose nothing if it were spoken by a chorus
and addressed to the audience :

His words fly up, his thoughts remain below :
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

His murder of his brother, his usurpation, and his
wooing of the Queen, are all shown to us as they
affected Hamlet after the event; to discuss them in
any other light is idle. When Shakespeare intended
a full-length portrait of a murderer, he wrote Macbeth,

204 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

in which play Malcolm arid Donalbain, the lawful
heirs to the crown, fall into the background and
are subordinated to the central interest.

Even in the comedies, where the interest is less
concentrated than in Hamlet or Macbeth, some of the
chief figures are no more than accessory. Bassanio,
for instance, in The Merchant of Venice, must not be
judged by critical methods which are fair when
applied to Romeo. There is barely room for him
in the central part of the picture. He is sketched
lightly and sufficiently in his twofold aspect, as
Antonio's friend and Portia's suitor. He is a care
less and adventurous young gallant; the type was
familiar, and was easy to suggest by a few outlines.
Wealth is the burden of his wooing dance, as it
was of Petruchio's. Only in the casket scene does
he put on a fuller semblance of thought and emotion,
and this, no doubt, was the dramatist's tribute to
Portia, whose surrender of herself is made in words
so beautiful and moving that the situation would
become almost painful if Bassanio were not fur
nished with his response from the same rich store
of poetry. His character, his motives, his merits
and defects as Portia's husband — these will continue
to be the theme of countless essays. The embroidery
of Shakespeare has become a national industry,
harmless enough so long as it is not mistaken for

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 205

criticism. But even good critics sometimes permit
themselves the dangerous assumption that Shake
speare's meaning is not written broad on the play :

And thus do they of wisdom and of reach
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.

What they fail to remark is that in the very act of
rescuing buried meanings, alleged to be all-important,
they are condemning the work of the playwright.
Shakespeare is subtle, fearfully and wonderfully
subtle ; and he is sometimes obscure, lamentably
obscure. But in spite of all this, most of his plays
make a distinct and immediate impression, by which,
in the main, the play is to be judged. The impression
is the play.

The analysis and illustration of Shakespeare's
characters, considered separately, has had so long
a vogue, and has produced work so memorable, that
we are in some danger of forgetting how partial
such a method must be. The heroines of the several
plays are often taken out of their dramatic setting to
be compared one with another. There was never a
more delightful pastime. But let it be remembered
how we come by our knowledge of these characters.
Rosalind we know in the sweet vacancy of the forest
of Arden : we see Isabella only at the direst crisis of
her history. Portia and Julia are overheard talking

206 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

to their maids : Ophelia has no confidential friend,
unless the brotherly lecture of Laertes be regarded as
an invitation to confidence. Hermia and Helena in
A Midsummer Night's Dream are the sport of the
fairies ; Katherine, in The Taming of the Shrew, is the
victim of human experiment. The marvellous art of
Shakespeare presents each of these in so natural a
guise that we forget the slightness of our acquaint
ance, and the exceptional nature of our opportunities.
We seem to know them all, and to be able to predict
how each of them will act in trials to which she
cannot be exposed. What if Desdemona had been
Lear's daughter, and Cordelia Othello's wife 1 Would
not the sensitive affection of the one and the proud
sincerity of the other have given us a different result 1
So we are lured further and further afield, until we
find ourselves arguing on questions that have no
meaning for criticism, and no existence save in
dreams. It is well to go back to Shakespeare ; and
to remember the conditions imposed upon him,
whether by the story of his choice, or by the neces
sities of dramatic presentment. No attempt can here
be made to do more than select a few samples of his
enormous riches, a few portraits from his gallery of
character and a few topics from his treasury of
thought. In either case the laws of the drama, which
govern both, must not be neglected, even where they

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 207

seem to relax their force. Some of his characters, it
has been shown, tend to escape from their dramatic
framework, and to assert their independence. In the
same fashion, some of his favourite topics are treated
with greater fullness and insistence than dramatic
necessity can be proved to require, and so seem to
reveal to us the preoccupations of his own mind.
The thought that pleases him recurs in many settings.
But the dramatic scheme comes first ; for except in
cases where it serves as a mere excuse, the scheme is
the language of a playwright. As he grew in power,
Shakespeare made his scheme more and more adequate
to express his thought, so that in his great tragedies
there is no escape from it. Comedy, History, Tragedy,
the old order of the plays, gives a true enough state
ment of the development of his art and the progress
of his mind. What remains to say may therefore be
loosely arranged in this order.

In the Comedies much is sacrificed to the story,
and the implements of Shakespeare's comic stage—
the deceits and mistakes and cross -pur poses— are
used to maintain suspense and prolong the interest.
Criticism of human life occurs incidentally, but can
hardly be said to dictate the plot, which, especially
in the earlier Comedies, is sometimes as symmetrical
and artificial as the plot of a comic opera. The
audience, it is clear, were concerned chiefly with the

208 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

event, and in his effort to hold their attention he
often introduces a new complication when the main
story has reached its natural close. So, in The
Merchant of Venice, when happiness is full in sight,
we are thrown back into uncertainty by the question
of the rings. When the plot against Hero, in Much
Ado, is successfully unravelled, she is not restored at
once to Claudio; a new trick is devised, there is a
scene of solemn lament for Hero, whom we know to
be alive, and Claudio is offered, and accepts, the hand
of another lady, who proves, in the last scene of all,
to be his injured love. Those whose sympathies
have been captured by the human situation may well
feel some impatience with Shakespeare's habitually
delayed solutions. It is an unpardonable indignity
that is put upon Isabella, in Measure for Measure,
when the disguised Duke, who is by way of being
the good angel of the piece, deludes her into think
ing that her brother is dead, and keeps her crying
her complaints in the street, in order that he may
play a game of cat and mouse with the wicked
deputy. All this is done, he alleges, that the case
against Angelo may proceed

By cold gradation and well-balanced form ;
but the true reason for it is dramatic ; the crisis must
be kept for the end. So Isabella, who deserved to
hear the truth, is sacrified to the plot.

v. STORY AND CHARACTER 209

The stories chosen for the plots of the Comedies
are such as are found in great plenty in the novels of
the time. Some of them, as for instance the story
of the Comedy of Errors or of The Merry Wives, do not
differ in their main outlines from the witty anecdotes
of the Jest books. Men and women are exhibited as
the victims of mirthful experiment, or of whimsical
accident. The trickery and practical jesting which
abound in these plays would hardly work out to a
happy conclusion in real life. A joke in action too
often leads to unexpected results, sometimes tragic,
sometimes merely squalid. It is the expense of spirit
in a waste of discomfort. Shakespeare supplies the
good wit of the Hundred Merry Tales with live
characters and a real setting, yet escapes the imputa
tion of heartlessness. He so bathes his story in the
atmosphere of poetry and fantasy, his characters are
so high-spirited and good-tempered and resourceful,
the action passes in such a tempest of boisterous
enjoyment, and is mitigated by so many touches of
human feeling, that the whole effect remains gracious
and pleasant, and the master of the show is still
the gentle Shakespeare. The characters of the pure
Comedies are so confident in their happiness that
they can play with it, and mock it, and put it to
trials that would break fragility. They are equal to

circumstance, and the most surprising adventures do
s. O

210 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

not disconcert nor depress them. In a sense they too,
like the tragic heroes and heroines, are the antagonists
of Fate. But Fate, in the realm of Comedy, appears
in the milder and more capricious character of Fortune,
whose wheel turns and turns again, and vindicates
the merry heart. " Who can control his Fate ? " says
Othello. "Tis but Fortune; all is Fortune/' says
Malvolio, when he believes himself to stand in favour
with Olivia ; " Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he
is to be thanked." Olivia, ensnared by the beauty
of the disguised Viola, gives voice to the same
creed :

I do I know not what, and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind :
Fate, show thy force ; ourselves we do not owe ;
What is decreed, must be ; and be this so.

And Viola, in like fashion, trusts to the event :

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I ;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie.

The impulses and passions that shape man's life to
happy or unhappy ends seem to owe their power to
something greater than man, and refuse his control.
Shakespeare gives them an independent life, and often
embodies them in the supernatural beings who are
exhibited on his stage. His witches and ghosts and
fairies do not come uncalled ; they are the shadows
and reflections of the human mind, creatures of the

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 211

mirror, who, by a startling and true psychology, are
brought alive, released from the dominion of man's
will, and established as his masters. . Macbeth, excited
by the dark hints of ambition, falls in with the
witches, and thereafter is carried with fearful speed
into an abyss of crime. Hamlet, saddened by the
death of his father and tortured by the infidelity of
his mother, receives the message of the ghost, which
brings his suspicions and broodings to a point, and
makes him thenceforward an instrument in the hands
of destiny. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the
inexplicable whims and changes of inconstant love
seem to be the work of the fairies, sporting, not
malevolently, with human weakness. The desire of
the eyes, which is the motive power of Shakespeare's
earlier romantic plays, is exhibited in many beautiful
and fanciful guises, transforming itself into passion
or caprice, and irresistibly leading its victims to
unexpected goals. It creates its own values, and
has no commerce with reason. The doctrine of this
youthful love, in its lighter aspects, is set forth by
Helena in A Midsummer Nights Dream :

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity ; —

and is illustrated by the infatuation of Titania. It
is expounded once more by the Duke in Twelfth

Night :

212 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

O spirit of Love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Eeceiveth as the sea, nought enters there
Of what validity and pitch so e'er
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute ; so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high-fantastical.

But perhaps the best commentary on these younger
plays is to be found in the famous lines wherein
Marlowe, describing how Leander first saw Hero,
pays his tribute to the "force and virtue of an
amorous look."

It lies not in our power to love or hate,

For will in us is over-ruled by Fate.

When two are stripped, long ere the course begin

We wish that one should lose, the other win ;

And one especially do we affect

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect.

The reason no man knows ; let it suffice

What we behold is censured by our eyes.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight ;

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

The summons is as inevitable and unforeseen as that
of death; it comes to all, clown and courtier, way
ward youth and serious maiden, leading them forth
on the dance of Love through that maze of happy
adventure which is Shakespeare's Comedy. None
refuses the call, none is studious to reckon the cost.
Young gallants, with no intent to turn husband, go

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 213

on the slightest errand to* the Antipodes, and run
to meet their fate. Delicate girls, brought up in
seclusion and luxury, put on hose and doublet and
follow their defaulting lovers to the wild-wood, or
to the court of a foreign potentate. The disguises
and mistaken identities which are a stock device
of the Comedies do not recur in the Tragedies.
Youth is eager to multiply events, and to quicken
the pace of life. But the world, which seemed so
slow to start, when once it is set a-going moves all
too fast. " I would set up my tabernacle here," says
Charles Lamb in the gravest of his essays ; " I am
content to stand still at the age to which I am
arrived ; I, and my friends ; to be no younger, no
richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned
by age, or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into
the grave." These are the words of a man who
knew the tragedy of life. When Shakespeare, in
the fullness of his powers, came to close grips with
reality, he put away all those mechanical expedients
wherewith he had enlivened his early Comedies. He
too learned that in the duel with Fate man is not
the hunter, but the game, and that a losing match
nobly played is his only possible victory. The poet
of Lear and Othello was the fitter for the contest in
that he had known the illimitable happiness and
buoyancy of youth. "0 God," cries Hamlet, "I

214 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself
a King of infinite space ; were it not that I have bad
dreams." The dream of the Midsummer Night was
not one of these. The perfect temper of the earlier
Comedies gives the warrant of reality to the later
and darker plays; we are saved from the suspicion
that the discords in the music are produced by some
defect in the instrument, or that the night which
descends on the poet is the night of blindness. His
tragedies become more solemn when we remember
that this awful vision of the world was shown to
a man cast in the antique mould of humanity,
equable, alert, and gay.

When the gaiety spent itself, and Shakespeare's
mind was centred on tragic problems, the themes
of his later and darker Comedies were still drawn
from the old inexhaustible source. The Italian
Novel, in its long and brilliant history from the
thirteenth to the sixteenth century, foreshadowed
the development and change which is seen in Shake
speare's Comedies. It began with witty and fantastic
anecdote, borrowed, in large part, from the scurrilities
of French minstrels. By the genius of Boccaccio it
was brought into closer touch with life. He retained
many of the world-old jests, gross and impossible,
but he intermixed them with another type of story,
wherein he moves to pity and wonder by narrating

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 215

memorable histories of passion. His chief sixteenth
century disciples, to both of whom Shakespeare
owed much, were Bandello and Cinthio. These
men carried the novel still further in the direction
of realism. Bandello asserts that all his novels
record events which happened in his own time ;
Cinthio also claims to base his stories on fact, and
so handles them that they set forth difficult problems
of human conduct. Novelists are much in the habit
of pretending a moral purpose ; but the plea of these
Renaissance writers was primarily scientific. They
claim to add to the materials for a science of human
nature, which science may find later application in
practice. They are the Machiavels of private life.
In the new-found freedom of that age men were
voyagers upon a treacherous unknown sea, and were
glad to make acquaintance, in the chart supplied by
the novelists, with the extreme possibilities of good
and evil fortune, crime and disaster, heroism and
attainment For a life full of accident and adventure
these stories furnished a body of precedent and case-
law. Geoffrey Fenton, the English translator of
Bandello, defends them on this ground. He calls
the novels "that excellent treasury and full library
of all knowledge," and says that they yield us "pre
cedents for all cases that may happen ; both for
imitation of the good, detesting the wicked, avoiding

216 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

a present mischief, and preventing any evil afore it
fall." " By the benefit of stories," he goes on, " pre
senting afore our eyes a true calendar of things of
ancient date, by the commendation of virtuous and
valiant persons and acts, we be drawn by desire to
tread the steps of their renown. And, on the other
side, considering the sinister fortune and horrible
cases which have happened to certain miserable souls,
we behold both the extreme points whereunto the
frail condition of man is subject by infirmity; and
also are thereby taught, by the view of other men's
harms, to eschew the like inconveniences in our
selves." These more serious aspects of the Italian
novel are reflected in Shakespeare's graver Comedies,
especially in All's Well that Ends Well, which is
based on a story of Boccaccio, and in Measure for
Measure, which borrows its plot from Cinthio. In
these plays, as in The Merchant of Venice, questions
of casuistry are at the root of the plot, and Shake
speare uses his theme in such a way as to suggest
the lessons of his own subtle and profound morality.
Both plays have been treated with some distaste by
good critics, who have perhaps been repelled rather
by the plots than by Shakespeare's handling of them.
Of Measure for Measure Hazlitt says : " This is a play
as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an
original sin in the nature of the subject, which

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 217

prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. ...
There is in general a want of passion ; the affections
are at a stand ; our sympathies are repulsed and
defeated in all directions." The feeling of repulsion
is caused in part, no doubt, by the well-nigh in
tolerable dilemma which is the subject of the play.
Of the alternatives presented to Isabella neither can
be a matter for triumph ; and Shakespeare himself
evades the consequences of the choice. But it is also
true that in this play, as in some others, Shakespeare
is too wide and strong, too catholic in his sympathies
and too generous in his acceptance of facts, for the
bulk of his readers. His suburbs are not their
suburbs ; nor is his morality their morality. Hazlitt
himself, in the best word ever spoken on Shake
speare's morals, has given the explanation. " Shake
speare," he says, "was in one sense the least moral
of all writers ; for morality (commonly so called) is
made up of antipathies ; and his talent consisted in
sympathy with human nature in all its shapes,
degrees, depressions, and elevations." This is indeed
the everlasting difficulty of Shakespeare criticism,
that the critics are so much more moral than Shake
speare himself, and so much less experienced. He
makes his appeal to thought, and they respond to
the appeal by a display of delicate taste. Most of
those who have written on Measure for Measure are

218 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of one mind with the " several shabby fellows " of
Goldsmith's comedy; they are in a concatenation
with the genteel thing, and are unable to bear any
thing that is low. They cannot endure to enter
such and such a place. They turn away their eyes
from this or that person. They do not like to
remember this or that fact. Their morality is made
up of condemnation and avoidance and protest.
What they shun in life they shun also in the drama,
and so shut their minds to nature and to Shake
speare. The searching, questioning thought of the
play does not find them out, and they are deaf to
the commentary of the Duke :

Thou art not noble,

For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nurs'd by baseness. . . . Thou art not thyself,
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust.

The ready judgments which are often passed on
Shakespeare's most difficult characters and situations
are like the talk of children. Childhood is amazingly
moral, with a confident, dictatorial, unflinching
morality. The work of experience, in those who
are capable of experience, is to undermine this early
pedantry, and to teach tolerance, or at least suspense
of judgment. Nor is this an offence done to virtue;
rather virtue becomes an empty name, or fades into

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 219

bare decorum, where sin is treated as a dark and
horrible kind of eccentricity.

In criticisms of Measure for Measure, we are com
monly presented with a picture of Vienna as a
black pit of seething wickedness; and against this
background there rises the dazzling, white, and
saintly figure of Isabella. The picture makes a
good enough Christmas card, but it is not Shake
speare. If the humorous scenes are needed only,
as Professor Dowden says, " to present without dis
guise or extenuation a world of moral licence and
corruption," why are they humorous ? The wretches
who inhabit the purlieus of the city are live men,
pleasant to Shakespeare. Abhorson, the public
executioner, is infamous by his profession, and is
redeemed from infamy by his pride in it. When
Pompey, who has followed a trade even lower in
esteem, is offered to him as an assistant, his dignity
rebels : " A bawd, Sir ? Fie upon him, he will dis
credit our mystery." Pompey himself, the irrelevant,
talkative clown, half a wit and half a dunce, is one
of those humble, cheerful beings, willing to help in
anything that is going forward, who are the main
stay of human affairs. Hundreds of them must do
their daily work and keep their appointments, before
there can be one great man of even moderate dimen
sions. Elbow, the thick-witted constable, own cousin

220 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

to Dogberry, is no less dutiful. Froth is an amiable,
feather-headed young gentleman — to dislike him
would argue an ill nature, and a small one. Even
Lucio has his uses ; nor is it very plain that in his
conversations with the Duke he forfeits Shakespeare's
sympathy. He has a taste for scandal, but it is a
mere luxury of idleness ; though his tongue is loose,
his heart is simply affectionate, and he is eager to
help his friend. Lastly, to omit none of the figures
who make up the background, Mistress Overdone
pays a strict attention to business, and is carried
to prison in due course of law. This world of
Vienna, as Shakespeare paints it, is not a black
world ; it is a weak world, full of little vanities and
stupidities, regardful of custom, fond of pleasure,
idle, and abundantly human. No one need go far
to find it. On the other side, over against the
populace, are ranged the officers of the government,
who are more respectable, though hardly more
amiable. The Duke, a man of the quickest intelli
gence and sympathy, shirks his public duties, and
plays the benevolent spy. He cannot face the odious
necessities of his position. The law must be enforced,
and the man who enforces it, putting off all those
softer human qualities which are dearest to him,
must needs maim himself, for the good of the social
machine. So the Duke, like many a head of a family

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 221

or college, tries to keep the love of the rebels by
putting his ugly duties upon the shoulders of a
deputy, and goes into exile to watch the case secretly
from the opposition side. Shakespeare does not
condemn him, but permits him to learn from the
careless talk of Lucio that he has gained no credit
by his default of duty. In his place is installed the
strong man, the darling and idol of weak govern
ments. The Lord Deputy, Angelo, is given sole
authority, and is prepared to put down lust and
licence with a firm hand, making law absolute, and
maintaining justice without exception. His defence
of the strict application of law, as it is set forth in
his speeches to his colleague, Escalus, contains some
of the finest and truest things ever said on that
topic. He has no misgivings, and offers a convincing
proof of the need for severity.

So the train is laid. Quietly and naturally, out of
ordinary human material, by the operation of the
forces of every day, there is raised the mount on
which Claudio and Isabella are to suffer their agony.
A question of police suddenly becomes a soul's
tragedy. Claudio is in love with Juliet. Her
friends are opposed to the match, and there has been
no marriage ceremony : meantime, the lovers have
met secretly, and Juliet is with child by him. The
solution offered by Isabella is short and simple :

222 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

" 0, let him marry her." But the new and stricter
reign of law has begun, old penalties have been
revived, and Claudio must die. There is no appeal
possible to the Duke, who has disappeared; and
the one hope left is that Isabella may move the
deputy to take pity on her brother. What she has
to say is no answer to the reasons which have
convinced Angelo that strict administration of the
law is needful. The case contemplated has arisen,
that is all. If, from tender consideration for the
sinner, the law is to be defeated, will not the like
considerations arise in every other case ? It is worth
remarking that Shakespeare hardly makes use- of
the best formal and casuistical arguments employed
by Cinthio's heroine. After pleading the youth and
inexperience of her brother, and discoursing on
the power of love, the lady of the novel takes up
the point of legality. The deputy, she says, is the
living law; if his commands are merciful, they will
still be legal. But the pleading of Isabella is for
mercy as against the law. The logic of Angelo
stands unshaken after her most eloquent assaults.
He believes himself to be strong enough to do his
duty ; he has suppressed in himself all sensual pity,
but sense is not to be denied, and it overcomes
him by an unexpected attack from another quarter.
The beauty and grace of Isabella, pleading the cause

v. STORY AND CHARACTER 223

of guilty love, stir desire in him ; and he propounds
to her the disgraceful terras whereby Claudio's life
is to be saved at the expense of her honour. She
does not, even in thought, entertain the proposal
for an instant, but carries it to her brother in the
prison, that her refusal may be reinforced by his.
At the first blush, he joins in her indignant rejection
of it. But when his imagination gets to work on
the doom that is now certain, he pleads with her
for his life. This is the last horror, and Isabella, in
a storm of passion, withers Claudio by her contempt.
"Let me ask my sister pardon," he says, when at
last the Duke enters; "I am so out of love with
life that I will sue to be rid of it." The rest of
the play is mere plot, devised as a retreat, to save
the name of Comedy.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, this one comes nearest
to the direct treatment of a moral problem. What
did he think of it all ? He condemns no one, high
or low. The meaning of the play is missed by
those who forget that Claudio is not wicked, merely
human, and fails only from sudden terror of the
dark. Angelo himself is considerately and mildly
treated ; his hypocrisy is self-deception, not cold and
calculated wickedness. Like many another man, he
has a lofty, fanciful idea of himself, and his public
acts belong to this imaginary person. At a crisis,

224 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the real man surprises the play-actor, and pushes
him aside. Angelo had under-estimated the possi
bilities of temptation:

O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint
With saints dost bait thy hook !

After the fashion of King Claudius in Hamlet, but
with more sincerity, he tries to pray. It is useless ;
his old ideals for himself are a good thing grown
tedious. While he is waiting for the interview with
Isabella, the blood rushes to his heart, like a crowd
round one who swoons, or a multitude pressing to
the audience of a king. The same giddiness is felt by
Bassanio in the presence of Portia, and is described
by him in almost the same figures. When the
wickedness of Angelo is unveiled, Isabella is willing
to make allowances for him:

I partly think

A due sincerity governed his deeds,
Till he did look on me.

But he is dismayed when he thinks of his fall, and
asks for no allowance :

So deep sticks it in my penitent heart,

That I crave death more willingly than mercy ;

'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

Shakespeare, it is true, does not follow the novel
by marrying him to Isabella, but he invents Mariana
for him, and points him to happiness.

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 225

Is the meaning of the play centred in the part
of Isabella ? She is severe, and beautiful, and white
with an absolute whiteness. Yet it seems that even
she is touched now and again by Shakespeare's irony.
She stands apart, and loses sympathy as an angel
might lose it, by seeming to have too little stake
in humanity :

Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die ;
More than our brother is our chastity.

Perhaps it is the rhyming tag that gives to this a
certain explicit and repulsive calmness : at the end
of his scenes Shakespeare often makes his most
cherished characters do the menial explanatory work
of a chorus. He treats Cordelia no better, without
the excuse, in this case, of a scene to be closed:

For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down ;
Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown.

When we first make acquaintance with her, Isabella
is on the eve of entering a cloister; we overhear
her talking to one of the sisters, and expressing
a wish that a more strict restraint were imposed
upon the order. She is an ascetic by nature, and
some of the Duke's remarks on the vanity of self-
regarding virtue, though they are addressed to
Angelo, seem to glance delicately at her. Shake
speare has left us in no doubt concerning his own

226 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

views on asceticism ; his poems and plays are full
of eloquent passages directed against self-culture
and the celibate ideal. In a wonderful line of A
Midsummer Nighfs Dream he pictures the sisterhood
of the cloister —
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.

There is a large worldliness about him which makes
him insist on the doctrine of usury. Virtue, he
holds, is empty without beneficence:

No man is the lord of anything,
Till he communicate his parts to others.

He goes further, and, in a great passage of Troilus
and Cressida, teaches how worth and merit may not
dare to neglect or despise their reflection in the
esteem of men. No man can know himself save as
he is known to others. Honour is kept bright by
perseverance in action : love is the price of love.
It is not by accident that Shakespeare calls Isabella
back from the threshold of the nunnery, and after
passing her through the furnace of trial, marries her
to the Duke. She too, like Angelo, is redeemed for
worldly uses; and the seething city of Vienna had
some at least of Shakespeare's sympathy as against
both the true saint and the false.

In this play there is thus no single character
through whose eyes we can see the questions at

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 227

issue as Shakespeare saw them. His own thought is
interwoven in every part of it ; his care is to main
tain the balance, and to show us every side. He
stands between the gallants of the playhouse and the
puritans of the city ; speaking of charity and mercy
to these; to those asserting the reality of virtue in
the direst straits, when charity and mercy seem to
be in league against it. Even virtue, answering to
a sudden challenge, alarmed, and glowing with indig
nation, though it is a beautiful thing, is not the
exponent of his ultimate judgment. His attitude is
critical and ironical, expressed in reminders, and
questions, and comparisons. When we seem to be
committed to one party, he calls us back to a feeling
of kinship with the other. He pleads for his crea
tures, as he pleads in the Sonnets for his friend :

For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense ;
Thy adverse party is thy Advocate.

Measure for measure : the main theme of the play is
echoed and re-echoed from speaker to speaker, and
exhibited in many lights. '* Plainly conceive, I love
you," says Angelo ; and quick as lightning comes
Isabella's retort :

My brother did love Juliet; and you tell me
That he shall die for't.

The law is strict ; but the offence that it condemns
is knit up with humanity, so that in choosing a

228 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

single victim the law seems unjust and tyrannical.
Authority and degree, place and form, the very
framework of human society, are subjected to the
same irony :

Eespect to your great place ; and let the devil
Be sometime honour'd for his burning throne.

The thought that was painfully working in Shake
speare's mind reached its highest and fullest expression
in the cry of King Lear :

None does offend, none, I say none ; I'll able 'em ;
Take that of me, my friend, who have the power
To seal th' accuser's lips.

Many men make acquaintance with Christian mora
lity as a branch of codified law, and dutifully adopt
it as a guide to action, without the conviction and
insight that are the fruit of experience. A few, like
Shakespeare, discover it for themselves, as it was
first discovered, by an anguish of thought and sym
pathy ; so that their words are a revelation, and the
gospel is born anew.

This wonderful sympathy, which, more than any
other of his qualities, is the secret of Shakespeare's
greatness, answers at once to any human appeal.
With Lafeu, in All's Well, it says to Parolles,
" Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat."
It takes the road with the lighter-hearted hedgerow
knave, Autolycus, and rejoices in his gains : " I see

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 229

this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive."
It travels backwards through the ages, and revives
the solemn heroic temper of the Roman world. It
crosses the barrier of sex, and thinks the thoughts,
and speaks the language, of women.

Shakespeare's characters of women, as they are
drawn even in his earliest plays, take us into a
world unknown to his master Marlowe, with whom
women are prizes or dreams. The many excellent
essays that have been written on this topic make too
much, perhaps, of individual differences among the
heroines of the Comedies. Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice,
Viola, are at least as remarkable for their similarities
as for their differences. The hesitancy of Silvia, in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when she returns his
letter to Valentine, anticipates the sky speech of
Portia to Bassanio, or of Beatrice to Benedick : " It
were as possible for me," says Beatrice, " to say I
loved nothing so well as you, but believe me not,
and yet I lie not, I confess nothing, nor I deny
nothing, I am sorry for my cousin." The scene, in
the same play, where Julia makes a catalogue of her
lovers for the criticism of Lucetta, is an earlier and
fainter sketch of the conversation between Portia
and Nerissa. Pope remarked that "every single
character in Shakespeare is as much an individual
as those in life itself ; it is as impossible to find any

230 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

two alike. Had all the speeches," he continues,
"been printed without the very names of the per
sons, I believe one might have applied them with
certainty to every speaker." The remark is almost
true as regards any single play; but it would be
a difficult task indeed to appropriate to their
speakers all the wit-sallies of Beatrice and Rosalind,
or to distinguish character in every line of their
speeches. Yet all alike are women ; hardly anything
that they speak in their own characters could have
been spoken by men. It is possible to extract from
the plays some kind of general statement which, if
it be not universally true of women, is at least true
of Shakespeare's women. They are almost all prac
tical, impatient of mere words, clear-sighted as to
ends and means. They do not accept the premises
to deny the conclusion, or decorate the inevitable
with imaginative lendings. "Never dream on in
famy, but go," says the practical Lucetta to her
mistress. When the steward in All 's Well comes to
the Countess with a long tale about the calendar
of his past endeavours, and the wound done to
modesty by those who publish their own deservings,
she cuts through his web of speech at a blow :
" What does this knave here 1 Get you gone, sirra :
the complaints I have heard of you I do not all
believe ; 'tis my slowness that I do not." The same

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 231

quickness of apprehension is seen in those many
passages where Shakespeare's women express their
contempt for all the plausible embroidery of argu
ment. Hermione, like Volumnia, feels it a disgrace
to be compelled " to prate and talk for life and
honour." Imogen, persecuted by the attentions of
Cloten, and compelled repeatedly to answer him,
offers a dainty apology :

I am much sorry, Sir,
You put me to forget a lady's manners,
By being so verbal.

Virgilia is addressed by Coriolanus as " my gracious
silence." Rosalind, Portia, Viola, though they are
rich in witty and eloquent discourse, are frank and
simple in thought; never deceived by their own
eloquence. " I'll do my best," says Viola to the
Duke,

To woo your Lady ; yet a barful strife,
Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.

Helena in All's Well— the chief example of the pur
suing woman who so often figures in the plays — has
forfeited, by her practical energy and resource, the
esteem of some sentimental critics. But she gains,
in the end, the love of her husband and the admira
tion of her maker.

To multiply instances would be tedious. Shake
speare's men cannot, as a class, compare with his

232 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

women for practical genius. They can think and
imagine, as only Shakespeare's men can, but their
imagination often masters and disables them. Self-
deception, it would seem, is a male weakness. The
whole controversy is summarised in the difference
between Macbeth and his wife. She knows him well,
and has no patience with his scruples and dallyings :

What thou wouldst highly,

That wouldst thou holily : wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.

For her, all the details and consequences of the
crime are accepted with the crime itself. Her mind
refuses to go behind the first crucial decision, or 'to
waste precious time by speculating on the strange
ness of things. But he, though he bends up each
corporal agent to the terrible feat, cannot thus con
trol the activities of his mind, or subdue them to
a single practical end. His imagination will not
be denied its ghastly play ; he sees the murder as
a single incident in the moving history of human
woe, or forgets the need of the moment in the
intellectual interest of his own sensations. When
he acts, he acts in a frenzy which procures him
oblivion.

Because they do not ask questions of life, and do
not doubt or deliberate concerning the fundamental
grounds for action, Shakespeare's women are, in the

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 233

main, either good or bad. The middle region of
character, where mixed motives predominate, belongs
chiefly to the men. The women act not on thought,
but on instinct, which, once it is accepted, admits of
no argument. The subtlety and breadth of Shake
speare's knowledge of feminine instinct cannot be
overpraised. Celia, in As Ymi Like It, is lightly
sketched, yet how demure and tender she is, and
how worldly-wise. "When her cousin complains of
the briars that fill this working-day world, she is
ready with a feminine moral : " If we walk not in
the trodden paths, our very petticoats will catch
them." Rosalind's easy grace and voluble wit do
not hide from sight those more delicate touches of
nature, as when she half turns back to the victorious
Orlando — " Did you call, Sir ? " — or breaks down, in
the forest, at the sight of the blood-stained hand
kerchief, and utters the cry of a child : " I would
I were at home." It is by small indications of this
kind that Shakespeare convinces us of his knowledge.
He has no general theory; his women are often
witty and daring, but they are never made all of
wit and courage. Even Lady Macbeth's courage
fails her when the affections of her childhood strike
across her memory :

Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't.

234 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Though she is magnificently rational and self-con
trolled at the crisis of the action, the recoil of the
senses, which she had mastered in her waking
moments, comes over her again in sleep : " Here's the
smell of the blood still ; all the perfumes of Arabia
will not sweeten this little hand." So unerring is
Shakespeare's intuition that he can supplement even
Plutarch's narrative with wonderful additions of his
own devising. There is nothing in the speech of
Volumnia, the Roman matron, more convincing and
lifelike than the remonstrance which Shakespeare

interpolates :

Thou hast never in thy life

Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy ;
When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,
Has cluck'd thee to the wars, and safely home
Loaden with honour.

There is nothing in the behaviour of Cleopatra, the
eternal courtesan, more characteristic than the de
liberate frowardness of mood which Shakespeare, in
direct opposition to Plutarch's account, invents for

If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing ; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick.

When Charmian remarks that to gain and keep
Antony's love it were better to cross him in nothing,
Cleopatra impatiently retorts :

Thou teachest like a fool : the way to lose him.

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 235

Yet neither is Cleopatra a type ; she is her own
unparalleled self. Some distant relatives she has
among the other plays. The lesson that she teaches
to Charmian is a lesson which Oessida and Doll
Tearsheet also know by instinct :

O foolish Cressid : I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

But Cressida is weaker, lighter, more wavering, than
the tragic Queen who, when she hears that Antony
has married Octavia, is wounded to the quick, and

cries out :

Pity me, Charmian ;
But do not speak to me.

And Doll Tearsheet, with only a small measure of
the same craft, has the wealth of homely affection
and plebeian good fellowship which belongs to a
lowlier world : " Come, I'll be friends with thee,
Jack; thou art going to the wars, and whether I
shall ever see thee again or no, there is nobody
cares." Shakespeare, like Nature, is careful of the
type; but, unlike Nature, he cares even more for
the life of the individual.

With Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, his art is yet
more wonderful, for it works in fewer words. None
of these characters is theorised; none belongs to a
type. Each is, in a sense, born of the situation, and
inspired by it. The deserted maiden, the loyal wife,

236 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the daughter who becomes her father's protector —
none of them has a thought or a feeling that forgets
the situation and her own part in it, so that all of
them win the love of the reader by their very
simplicity and intensity. If Shakespeare had been
called on to draw generic portraits of these three
types, he would have despised the attempt. On his
theatre, as in life, character is made by opportunity,
and welded to endurance by the blows of Fate. The
most beautiful characters of his creation depend for
their beauty on their impulsive response to the need
of the moment. " Through the whole of the dialogue
appropriated to Desdemona," says Mrs. Jameson,
"there is not one general observation. Words are
with her the vehicle of sentiment, and never of
reflection." It may well be doubted whether Shake
speare was fully conscious of this. He worked from
the heart outwards ; and his instinct fastened on
the right words. An elaborate metaphor on Desde-
mona's lips would have shocked his sense of fitness,
as, now that we know her, it would shock ours.
The first greeting that she exchanges with Othello,
when he lands at Cyprus, is of a piece with all that
she says. " 0, my fair warrior," says Othello, whose
imagination, as well as his heart, is in her service.
For Desdemona the unadorned truth is enough ; and
she replies : " My dear Othello." Cordelia's most

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 237

moving speeches are as simple as this. Ophelia is
so real that differences of critical opinion concerning
her throw light on nothing but the critics. Coleridge
thought her the purest and loveliest of Shakespeare's
women ; some other critics have cried out on her
timidity and pettiness. If she could be brought to
life, and introduced to her judges, these differences
would no doubt persist. Fortunately, they are of
comparatively little account; when a fixed verdict
on one of his characters is essential to Shakespeare's
dramatic purpose, he does not leave his readers in
doubt.

The comparative simplicity of character which
distinguishes Shakespeare's women from his men is
maintained throughout the plays. Cleopatra, unlike
Antony, is at one with herself, and entertains no
divided counsels. Regan and Goneril do not go
motive-hunting, like lago; they are hard and cruel
and utterly self-assured. They have the certainty
and ease in action that Hamlet coveted:

With wings as swift

As meditation, or the thoughts of love,

They sweep to their revenge.

A similar confidence inspires the beautiful company
of Shakespeare's self-devoted heroines. There is no
Hamlet among them, no Jaques, no Biron. Their
wit is quick and searching ; but it is wholly at the

238 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

command of their will, and is never employed to
disturb or destroy. Love and service are as natural
to them as breathing. They are the sunlight of
the plays, obscured at times by clouds and storms
of melancholy and misdoing, but never subdued or
defeated. In the Comedies they are the spirit of
happiness; in the Tragedies they are the only
warrant and token of ultimate salvation, the last
refuge and sanctuary of faith. If Othello had died
blaspheming Desdemona, if Lear had refused to be
reconciled with Cordelia, there would be good reason
to talk of Shakespeare's pessimism. As it is, there
is no room for such a discussion ; in the wildest und
most destructive tempests his sheet-anchors hold.

The Historical plays occupy a middle place in
the Folio, and, in the process of Shakespeare's de
velopment, are a link between Comedy and Tragedy.
Plays founded on English history were already
popular when Shakespeare began to write; and
while he was still an apprentice, their tragic possi
bilities had been splendidly demonstrated in Mar
lowe's Edward II. He very early turned his hand
to them, and the exercise that they gave him
steadied his imagination, and taught him how to
achieve a new solidity and breadth of representation.
By degrees he ventured to intermix the treatment
of high political affairs with familiar pictures of

v. STORY AND CHARACTER 239

daily life, so that what might otherwise have seemed
stilted and artificial was reduced to ordinary stan
dards, and set against a background of verisimilitude
and reality. His Comedy, timidly at first, and at
last triumphantly, intruded upon his History; his
vision of reality was widened to include in a single
perspective courts and taverns, kings and highway
men, diplomatic conferences, battles, street brawls,
and the humours of low life. He gave us the
measure of his own magnanimity in the two parts
of Henry IF"., a play of incomparable ease, and
variety, and mastery. Thence, having perfected
himself in his craft, he passed on to graver themes,
and, with Plutarch for his text-book, resuscitated
the world-drama of the Romans; or breathed life
into those fables of early British history which he
found in Holinshed. His studies in English history
determined his later dramatic career, and taught
him the necromancer's art —

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates
Of death and Lethe, where confused lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality.

He revived dead princes and heroes, and set them in
action on a stage crowded with life and manners.

That love of incongruity and diversity which is
the soul of a humourist had already manifested itself

240 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

in his early comedies. The gossamer civilisation of
the fairies is judged by Bottom the Weaver, who,
in his turn, along with his rustic companions, must
undergo the courtly criticism of Duke Theseus and
the Queen of the Amazons. In Love's Labour's Lost,
Rom,eo and Juliet, and As You Like It, to name no
others, affairs of political import colour, by their
neighbourhood, the affections and fortunes of the
lovers. But it is in the Historical plays that comedy
is first perfectly blended with serious political
interest. Shakespeare's instinct for reality, his sus
picion of all that will not bear to be brought into
contact with the gross elements, made him willing
to use comedy and tragedy as a touchstone the one
for the other. Nothing that is real in either of them
can be damaged by the contact. It is the sham
solemnity of grief that is impaired or broken by
laughter, and the empty heartless jest that is made
to seem inhuman by contrast with the sadness of
mortal destiny. The tragic and the comic jostle
each other in life : their separation is the work of
ceremony, not of nature. A political people like the
Greeks, with their passionate belief in the State, will
impose their sense of public decorum upon the
drama; but the more irresponsible modern temper
is not content to forego the keen intellectual pleasure
of paradox and contrast. The description of a funeral

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 241

in Scott's Journal is a picture after the modern
manner: "There is such a mixture of mummery
with real grief— the actual mourner perhaps heart
broken, and all the rest making solemn faces, and
whispering observations on the weather and public
news, and here and there a greedy fellow enjoying
the cake and wine. To me it is a farce full of most
tragical mirth." Shakespeare keeps the mirth and
the tragedy close together, with no disrespect done
to either. He narrates serious events, and portrays
great crises in history, to the accompaniment of a
comic chorus. He admits us to the King's secret
thoughts, and lets us overhear the grumbling of the
carriers in the inn-yard at Rochester. We witness
the Earl of Northumberland's passion over the death
of his son, and sit in Justice Shallow's garden to
talk of pippins and carraways. War is shown in its
double aspect, as it appears to the statesman and
to the recruiting-sergeant. For a last reach of bold
ness, the same characters are hurried through many
diverse scenes, and the same events are exhibited
in their greater and lesser effects. The fortunes
of the kingdom call the revellers away from the
tavern. The Prince's royalty is not obscured
under his serving-man's costume, nor is Sir John
Falstaff's wit abated in the midst of death and

battle.

S. Q

242 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

In Shakespeare's earlier historical work a certain
formality and timidity of imagination make them
selves felt. His bad kings, Richard the Third and
John, are not wholly unlike the villains of melodrama.
King Richard is an explanatory sinner :

Therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain.

King John, in his murderous instructions to Hubert,
expresses a wish for the fitting stage effects, dark
ness, and the churchyard, and the sound of the
passing-bell. All this is far enough removed from
the sureness of Shakespeare's later handling of similar
themes. From the first he gave dramatic unity to
his Histories by building them round the character
of the king. To those who lived under the rule of
Elizabeth, and whose fathers had been the subjects
of Henry VIII., it would have seemed a foolish paradox
to maintain that the character of the ruler was a
cause of small importance in the making of history.
But these kings of the earlier plays are seen dis
tantly, through a veil of popular superstition; the
full irony of the position is not yet realised ; as if it
were so easy to be a good king that nothing but a
double dose of original sin can explain the failure.
It was a great advance in method when Shakespeare,
in Richard //., brought the king to the ordinary

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 243

human level, and set himself to conceive the position
from within.

Richard II. is among the Histories what Romeo and
Juliet is among the Tragedies, an almost purely
lyrical drama, swift and simple. Richard is possessed
by the sentiment of royalty, moved by a poet's delight
in its glitter and pomp, and quick to recognise the
pathos of its insecurity. There is nothing that we
feel in contemplating his tragic fall which is not
taught us by himself. Our pity for him, our sense of
the cruelty of fate, are but a reflection of his own
moving and subtle poetry. Weakness there is in
him, but it hardly endears him the less ; it is akin to
the weakness of Hamlet and of Falstaff, who cannot
long concentrate their minds on a narrow practical
problem ; cannot refuse themselves that sudden
appeal to universal considerations which is called
philosophy or humour. Like them, Richard juggles
with thought and action : he is a creature of impulse,
but when his impulse is foiled, he lightly discounts
it at once by considering it in relation to the stars
and the great scheme of things. What is failure, in
a world where all men are mortal1? Sometimes
the beating of his own heart rouses him to fitful
activity :

Proud Bolingbroke, I come
To change blows with thee for our day of doom.

244 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Then again he relapses into the fatalistic mood of
thought, which he beautifies with humility :

Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?
Greater he shall not be : if he serve God,
We'll serve him too, and be his fellow so.

The language of resignation is natural to him ; his
weakness finds refuge in the same philosophic creed
which is uttered defiantly, on the scaffold, by the
hero of Chapman's tragedy :

If I rise, to heaven I rise ; if fall,
I likewise fall to heaven : what stronger faith
Hath any of your souls?

It is difficult to condemn Richard without taking
sides against poetry. He has a delicate and prolific
fancy, which flowers into many dream-shapes in the
prison ; a wide and true imagination, which expresses
itself in his great speech on the monarchy of Death ;
and a deep discernment of tragic issues, which gives
thrilling effect to his bitterest outcry :

Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.

The mirror-scene at the deposition— -which, like the
sleep-walking scene in Macbeth, seems to have been
wholly of Shakespeare's invention— is a wonderful
summary and parable of the action of the play. The

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 245

mirror is broken against the ground, and the armed
attendants stand silent, waiting to take Richard to
the Tower.

For all the intimacy and sympathy of the por
traiture, we are not permitted to lose sight of
Richard's essential weakness. The greater part of
the Third Act is devoted to showing, with much
emphasis and repetition, how helpless and unstable
he is at a crisis. If Richard was Shakespeare, as
some critics have held, he was not the whole of
Shakespeare. Even while the play was writing, the
design for a sequel and contrast was beginning to
take shape. The matter of the plays that were to
follow is foreshadowed in the Queen's lamenting
address to Richard :

Thou most beauteous inn,

Why should hard-favour'd Grief be lodg'd in thee,
When Triumph is become an ale-house guest?

Over against Richard it was Shakespeare's plan to
set, not the crafty and reserved Bolingbroke, but his
son, King Henry V., the darling of the people, a lusty
hero, open of heart and hand, unthrifty and dissolute
in his youth, in his riper age the support and glory
of the nation. The academy where the hero was to
graduate was to be Shakespeare's own school, the life
of the tavern and the street.

It was a contrast of brilliant promise, and, if a

246 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

choice must be made, it is not hard to determine on
which side Shakespeare's fuller sympathies lay. The
king who was equal to circumstance was the king for
him. Yet Henry v., it may be confessed, is not so
inwardly conceived as Richard II. His qualities are
more popular and commonplace. Shakespeare plainly
admires him, and feels towards him none of that
resentment which the spectacle of robust energy
and easy success produces in weaker tempers. If
Henry v., as Prince and King, seems to fall short
in some respects of the well-knit perfection that was
intended, it is the price that he pays for incautiously
admitting to his companionship a greater than him
self, who robs him of his virtue, and makes him a
satellite in a larger orbit. Less tragic than Richard,
less comic than Falstaff, the poor Prince is hampered
on both sides, and confined to the narrower domain
of practical success.

From his first entrance Falstaff dominates the
play. The Prince tries in vain to be even with him :
Falstaff, as Hazlitt has said, is the better man of the
two. He speaks no more than the truth when he
makes his claim : "I am not only witty in myself,
but the cause that wit is in other men." All the
best wit in the play is engineered and suggested by
him ; even the Prince, when he tries to match him,
falls under the control of the prime inventor, and

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 247

makes the obvious and expected retorts, which give
occasion for a yet more brilliant display of that sur
prising genius. It is the measure of the Prince's
inferiority that to him Falstaff seems "rather
ludicrous than witty," even while all the wit that
passes current is being issued from Falstaffs mint,
and stamped with the mark of his sovereignty. The
disparity between the two characters extends itself
to their kingdoms, the Court and the Tavern. The
one is restrained, formal, full of fatigues and neces
sities and ambitions; the other is free and natural,
the home of zest and ease. There are pretences in
both, but with what a difference ! In the one there
is real, hard, selfish hypocrisy and treachery ; in the
other a world of make-believe and fiction, all invented
for delight. It is no wonder that Falstaff attracts to
himself the bulk of our sympathies, and perverts the
moral issues. One critic, touched to the heart by
the casting-off of Falstaff, so far forgets his morality
as to take comfort in the reflection that the thou
sand pounds belonging to Justice Shallow is safe in
Falstaff' s pocket, and will help to provide for his
old age.

Yet the Prince, if he loses the first place in our
affections, makes a brave fight for it. Shakespeare
does what he can for him. He is valorous, generous,
and high-spirited. When Falstaff claims to have slain

248 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

Percy in single fight, he puts in no word for his own
prowess :

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

He has some tenderness, and a deeply conceived sense
of his great responsibilities. Even his wit would be
remarkable in any other company, and his rich vocabu
lary of fancy and abuse speaks him a ready learner.
If his poetry tends to rhetoric, in his instinct for prose
and sound sense he almost matches the admirable
Rosalind — " To say to thee that I shall die, is true ;
but for thy love, by the Lord, no ; yet I love thee,
too " It is all in vain ; his good and amiable qualities
do not teach him the way to our hearts. The " noble
change " which he hath purposed, and of which we
hear so much, taints him in the character of a boon-
companion. He is double-minded : he keeps back a
part of the price. Falstaff gives the whole of himself
to enjoyment, so that the strivings and virtues of
half-hearted sinners seem tame and poor beside him.
He bestrides the play like a Colossus, and the young
gallants walk under his huge legs and peep about to
find themselves honourable graves. In all stress of cir
cumstance, hunted by misfortune and disgrace, he rises
to the occasion, so that the play takes on the colour
of the popular beast-fable ; our chief concern is that
the hero shall never be outwitted ; and he never is.

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 249

There is more of Shakespeare in this amazing
character than in all the poetry of Richard II. Fal-
staff is a comic Hamlet, stronger in practical resource,
and hardly less rich in thought. He is in love with
life, as Hamlet is out of love with it ; he cheats and
lies and steals with no hesitation and no afterthought;
he runs away or counterfeits death with more courage
than others show in deeds of knightly daring. The
accidents and escapades of his life give ever renewed
occasion for the triumph of spirit over matter, and
show us the real man, above them all, and aloof from
them, calm, aristocratic, fanciful, scorning opinion,
following his own ends, and intellectual to the finger
tips. He has been well called "a kind of military
freethinker." He will fight no longer than he sees
reason. His speech on honour might have been
spoken by Hamlet— with what a different conclusion !
He is never for a moment entangled in the web of
his own deceits ; his mind is absolutely clear of cant ;
his self-respect is magnificent and unfailing. The
judgments passed on him by others, kings or justices,
affect him not at all, while there are few of these
others who can escape with credit from the severe
ordeal of his disinterested judgment upon them. The
character of Master Shallow is an open book to that
impartial scrutiny. " It is a wonderful thing," says
Falstaff, " to see the semblable coherence of his men's

250 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

spirits and his : they, by observing of him, do bear
themselves like foolish justices ; he, by conversing
with them, is turn'd into a justice-like serving-man."
Yet, for all his clarity of vision, Falstaff is never
feared ; there is no grain of malevolence in him ;
wherever he comes he brings with him the pure
spirit of delight.

How was a character like this to be disposed oil
He had been brought in as an amusement, and had
rapidly established himself as the chief person of the
play. There seemed to be no reason why he should
not go on for ever. He was becoming dangerous.
No serious action could be attended to while every
one was waiting to see how Falstaff would take it.
A clear stage was needed for the patriotic and war
like exploits of King Harry ; here was to be no place
for critics and philosophers. Shakespeare disgraces
Falstaff, and banishes him from the Court. But this
was not enough ; it was a part of FalstafFs magna
nimity that disgrace had never made the smallest
difference to him, and had often been used by him
as a stepping-stone to new achievement. Even in
banishment he was likely to prove as dangerous as
Napoleon in Elba. There was nothing for it ; in the
name of the public safety, and to protect him from
falling into bad hands, Falstaff must be put to death.
So he takes his last departure, " an it had been any

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 251

christom child," and King Harry is set free to pursue
the life of heroism.

With the passing of Falstaff Shakespeare's youth
was ended. All that wonderful experience of London
life, all those days and nights of freedom and
adventure and the wooing of new pleasures, seem
to be embodied in this great figure, the friend and
companion of the young. We can trace his history,
from his first boyhood, when he broke Scogan's head
at the court gate, to his death in the second child
hood of delirium. He was never old. "What, ye
knaves," he cries, at the assault on the Gadshill
travellers, "young men must live." "You that are
old," he reminds the Chief Justice, " consider not the
capacities of us that are young." The gods, loving
him, decreed that he should die as he was born, with
a white head and a round belly, in the prime of his
joyful days.

He was brought to life again, by Royal command,
in The Merry Wives of Windsor; but his devoted
admirers have never been able to accept that play for
a part of his history. The chambering and wanton
ness of amorous intrigue suits ill with his indomitable
pride of spirit. It is good to hear the trick of his
voice again ; and his wit has not lost all its bright
ness. But he is fallen and changed ; he has lived
to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of

252 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

English, and is become the butt of citizens and their
romping wives. Worst of all, he is afraid of the
fairies. Bottom the weaver never fell so low —
"Scratch my head, Peaseblossom." Shakespeare has
an ill conscience in this matter, and endeavours to
salve it by a long apology. " See now," says Falstaff,
" how wit may be made a Jack a-lent, when 'tis upon
ill employment." But such an apology is worse
than the offence. It presents Falstaff to us in the
guise of a creeping moralist.

The historical plays, English and Roman, have
often been used as evidence of their author's political
opinions. These opinions have, perhaps, been' too
rashly formulated ; yet it cannot be denied that
certain definite and strong impressions have been
made by the plays on critics of the most diverse
leanings. It is safe to say that Shakespeare had
a very keen sense of government, its utility and
necessity. If he is not a partisan of authority, he is
at least a passionate friend to order. His thought
is everywhere the thought of a poet, and he views
social order as part of a wider harmony. When his
imagination seeks a tragic climax, the ultimate dis
aster and horror commonly presents itself to him as
chaos. His survey of human society and of the laws
that bind man to man is astronomical in its rapidity
and breadth. So it is in the curse uttered by Timon :

v- STORY AND CHARACTER 253

Piety, and fear,

Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood.
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live.

So it is also in the great speech of Ulysses, and
in half a score of passages in the Tragedies. He
extols government with a fervour that suggests a
real and ever-present fear of the breaking of the
flood-gates ; he delights in government, as painters
and musicians delight in composition and balance.

As to the merits of differing forms of govern
ment, that question was hardly a live one in the
reign of Elizabeth, and seems not to have exercised
Shakespeare's thought. In Julius Caesar, where the
subject gave him his chance, he accepts Plutarch for
his guide, and does not digress into political theory.
It has often been said that he dislikes and distrusts
crowds. Certainly the common people, in Henry FL,
and Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, are made ludicrous
and foolish. But after all, a love for crowds and
a reverence for mob orators are not so often found
among dispassionate thinkers as to make Shake
speare's case strange; and it is always to be
remembered that he was a dramatist. His point
of view was given him by the little group of his

254 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

principal characters, and there was no room for the
people save as a fluctuating background or a passing
street-show. We do not see Cade at home. Where
the feelings of universal humanity fall to be ex
pressed, caste and station are of no account , Macduff,
a noble, bereaved of his children, speaks for all
mankind.

Nevertheless, the impression persists, that here,
and here alone, Shakespeare exhibits some partiality.
It was natural enough that his political opinions
should take their colour from his courtly companions,
whose business was politics ; nor was his own pro
fession likely to alter his sympathies. Who should
know the weaknesses and vanities of the people
better than a theatrical manager ] There is no great
political significance in the question ; the politics
of the plays were never challenged till America
began to read human history by the light of her
own self -consciousness. It is true that Shakespeare
is curiously impatient of dullness, and that he pays
scant regard, and does no justice, to men of slow
wit. He never emancipated himself completely from
the prejudices of verbal education : to be a stranger
to all that brilliant craftsmanship and all those subtle
dialectical processes which had given him so much
pleasure was to forfeit some hold on his sympathy.
His clowns and rustics are often the merest

V- STORY AND CHARACTER 255

mechanisms of comic error and verbose irrelevance.
In this respect he is worlds removed from Chaucer,
who understands social differences as Shakespeare
never did, and to whom, therefore, social differences
count for less. How wholly real and human Dog
berry or Verges, Polonius or Lady Capulet, would
have been in Chaucer's way of handling ! The
Reeve, in the Canterbury Tales, is a man of the
people, an old man and a talkative, but his simple
philosophy of life has a breadth and seriousness that
cannot be matched among Shakespeare's tradesfolk.
Yet, even here, some allowance must be made for
the necessities of dramatic presentation, and for the
time-honoured conventions of romantic method. The
eternal truths of human nature are not the less true
because they are illustrated in the person of a king.
In the great Tragedies Shakespeare comes at last
face to face with the mystery and cruelty of human
life. He had never been satisfied with the world of
romance, guarded like a dream from all external
violence ; and his plays, when they are arranged in
order, exhibit the gradual progress of the invasion
of reality. At first he gently and humorously sug
gests the contrast: the most lifelike characters in

o

the earlier plays are often those which are invented
and added by himself. Jaques and Touchstone,
Mercutio and the Nurse, Sir Toby Belch and Mai-

256 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

volio, represent the encroachments of daily life, in
all its variety, on the symmetry of a romantic plot.
The bastard Faulconbridge and Falstaff are the spirit
of criticism, making itself at home among the for
malities of history. But in the great Tragedies the
most fully conceived characters are no longer super
numeraries ; they are the heart of the play. Hamlet
is both protagonist and critic. The passion of Lear
and Othello and Macbeth is too real, too intimately
known, to gain or lose by contrast : the very citadel
of life is shaken and stormed by the onslaught of
reality. We are no longer saved by a mere trick,
as in The Merchant of Venice or Measure far Meagre ;
there is no hope of a reprieve ; the worst that can
befall has happened, and we are stretched on the
rack, beyond the mercy of narcotics, our eyes open
and our senses preternaturally quickened, to endure
till the end.

There was a foreboding of this even in the happiest
of the early plays, a gentle undertone of melancholy,
which added poignancy to the happiness by reminding
us of the insecurity of mortal things. The songs
sung by the Clown in Twelfth Night are an exquisite
example :

What is love ? 'Tis not hereafter ;
Present mirth hath present laughter:
What's to come is still unsure.

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 257

Translated into the language of tragedy, these lines
tell the story of Antony and Cleopatra. The conclud
ing song —

When that I was and ta little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,—

has some of the forlorn pathos of King Lear. The
rain that raineth every day, the men who shut their
gates against knaves and thieves, the world that
began a great while ago, arc like disconnected dim
memories, or portents, troubling the mind of a child.
In the Tragedies they come out of the twilight, and
are hard and real in the broad light of day. We
have been accustomed to escape from these miseries
by waking, but now the last terror confronts us : our
dream has come true.

When Shakespeare grappled with the ultimate
problems of life he had the help of no talisman or
magic script. Doctrine, theory, metaphysic, morals,
how should these help a man at the last en
counter? Men forge themselves these weapons, and
glory in them, only to find them an encumbrance
at the hour of need. Shakespeare's many allusions
to philosophy and reason show how little he trusted
them. It is the foolish Master Slender and the
satirical Benedick who profess that their love is
governed by reason.

The will of man is by his reason sway'd,
S. R

258 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

says Lysander, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, even
while he is the helpless plaything of the fairies.
Where pain and sorrow come, reason is powerless,
good counsel turns to passion, and philosophy is put
to shame :

I pray thee, peace ! I will be flesh and blood ;
For there was never yet Philosopher
That could endure the tooth-ache patiently,
However they have writ the style of Gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.

It is therefore vain to seek in the plays for a
philosophy or doctrine which may be extracted and
set out in brief. Shakespeare's philosophy was the
philosophy of the shepherd Corin : he knew that
the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is, that
the property of rain is to wet, and of fire to burn.
King Lear, when he came by the same knowledge,
saw through the flatteries and deceits on which he
had been fed — "They told me I was everything;
'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof." All doctrines and
theories concerning the place of man in the universe,
and the origin of evil, are a poor and partial busi
ness compared with that dazzling vision of the pitiful
estate of humanity which is revealed by Tragedy.

The vision, as it was seen by Shakespeare, is so
solemn, and terrible, and convincing in its reality,
that there ar£ few, perhaps, among his readers who

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 259

have not averted or covered their eyes. " I might
relate," says Johnson, " that I was many years ago
so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not
whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes
of the play till I undertook to revise them as an
editor." For the better part of a century the feel
ings of playgoers were spared by alterations in
the acting version. With readers of the play other
protective devices have found favour. These events,
they have been willing to believe, are a fable
designed by Shakespeare to illustrate the possible
awful consequences of error and thoughtlessness.
Such things never happened ; or, if they happened,
at least we can be careful, and they never need
happen again. So the reader takes refuge in mora
lity, from motives not of pride, but of terror, because
morality is within man's reach. The breaking of a
bridge from faulty construction excites none of the
panic fear that is produced by an earthquake.

But here we have to do with an earthquake, and
good conduct is of no avail. Morality is not denied ;
it is overwhelmed and tossed aside by the inrush of
the sea. There is no moral lesson to be read, except
accidentally, in any of Shakespeare's tragedies. They
deal with greater things than man; with powers
and passions, elemental forces, and dark abysses of
suffering; with the central fire, which breaks through

260 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

the thin crust of civilisation, and makes a splendour
in the sky above the blackness of ruined homes.
Because he is a poet, and has a true imagination,
Shakespeare- knows how precarious is man's tenure
of the soil, how deceitful are his quiet orderly habits
and his prosaic speech. At any moment, by the
operation of chance, or fate, these things may be
broken up, and the world given over once more to
the forces that struggled in chaos.

It is not true to say that in these tragedies char
acter is destiny. Othello is not a jealous man • he is
a man carried off his feet, wave-drenched and blinded
by the passion of love. Macbeth is not a murderous
politician; he is a man possessed. Lear no doubt
has faults ; he is irritable and exacting, and the price
that he pays for these weaknesses of old age is that
they let loose hell. Hamlet is sensitive, thoughtful,
generous, impulsive, — "a pure, noble, and most
moral nature " — yet he does not escape the extreme
penalty, and at the bar of a false criticism he too is
made guilty of the catastrophe. But Shakespeare,
who watched his heroes, awestruck, as he saw them
being drawn into the gulf, passed no such judgment
on them. In his view of it, what they suffer is out
of all proportion to what they do and are. They
are presented with a choice, and the essence of the
tragedy is that choice is impossible. Coriolanus has

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 261

to choose between the pride 01 his country and the
closest of human affections. Antony stands poised
between love and empire. Macbeth commits a foul
crime ; but Shakespeare's tragic stress is kid on the
hopelessness of the dilemma that follows, and his
great pity for mortality makes the crime a lesser
thing. Hamlet fluctuates between the thought which
leads nowhither and the action which is narrow
and profoundly unsatisfying. Brutus, like Corio-
lanus, has to choose between his highest political
hopes and the private ties of humanity. Lear's mis
doing is forgotten in the doom that falls upon him ;
after his fit of jealous anger he awakes to find that
he has no further choice, and is driven into the
wilderness, a scapegoat for mankind. Othello — but
the story of Othello exemplifies a further reach of
Shakespeare's fearful irony— Othello, like Hamlet,
suffers for his very virtues, and the noblest qualities
of his mind are made the instruments of his cruci
fixion. A very brief examination of these two plays
must serve in place of a fuller commentary.

The character of Hamlet has been many times dis
cussed, and the opinions expressed may, for the most
part, be ranged in two opposing camps. Some critics
have held, with Goethe and Coleridge, that Hamlet
is Shakespeare's study of the unpractical tempera
ment ; the portrait of a dreamer. Others, denying

262 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

this, have called attention to his extraordinary cour
age and promptitude in action. He follows the
Ghost without a moment's misgiving, in spite of
his companions' warnings. He kills Polonius out of
hand, and, when he finds his mistake, brushes it
aside like a fly, to return to the main business. He
sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death
with cool despatch, and gives them a hasty epitaph :

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

In the sea-fight, we are told, he was the first to board
the pirate vessel. And nothing in speech could be
more pointed, practical, and searching, than his rapid
cross-examination of Horatio concerning the appear
ance of the Ghost. Some of those who lay stress on
these things go further, and maintain that Hamlet
succeeds in his designs. His business was to con
vince himself of the King's guilt, and to make open
demonstration of it before all Denmark. When
these things are done, he stabs the King, and though
his own life is taken by treachery, his task is accom
plished, now that the story of the murder cannot be
buried in his grave.

Yet when we read this or any other summary of
the events narrated, we feel that it takes us far from
the real theme of the play. A play is not a collec-

v. STORY AND CHARACTER 263

tion of the biographies of those who appear in it.
It is a grouping of certain facts and events round
a single centre, so that they may be seen at a glance.
In this play that centre is the mind of Hamlet. We
see with his eyes, and think his thoughts. When
once we are caught in the rush of events we judge
him no more than we judge ourselves. Almost all
that has ever been said of his character is true ;
his character is so live and versatile that it presents
many aspects. What is untrue is the common
assumption that his character is a chief cause of the
dramatic situation, and that Shakespeare intends us
to judge it by the event— that the play, in short,
is a Moral Play, like one of Miss Edge worth's
stories. A curiously businesslike vein of criticism
runs through essays and remarks on Hamlet. There
is much talk of failure and success. A ghost has
told him to avenge the murder of his father; why
does he not do his obvious duty, and do it at once,
so that everything may be put in order 1 His delay,
it has sometimes been replied, is justified by his
desire to do his duty in a more effective and
workmanlike fashion. The melancholy Prince has
certainly not been able to infect all who read his
story with his own habit of thought.

If the government of the State of Denmark were
one of the issues of the play, there would be a better

264 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

foothold for those practical moralists. But the State
of Denmark is not regarded at all, except as a
topical and picturesque setting for the main interest.
The tragedy is a tragedy of private life, made con
spicuous by the royal station of the chief actors in
it. Before the play opens, the deeds which make
the tragedy inevitable have already been done.
They are revealed to us only as they are revealed
to Hamlet. His mother's faithlessness has given
him cause for deep unrest and melancholy; he dis
trusts human nature arid longs for death. Then the
murder is made known to him. He sees the reality
beneath the plausible face of things, and thenceforth
the Court of Elsinore becomes for him a theatre
where all the powers of the universe are contending :

0 all you host of Heaven ! O Earth ! What else ?
And shall I couple Hell ? O fie : hold, my heart ;
And you, rny sinews, grow not instant old,

But bear me stiffly up.

It is no wonder that his friends and companions
think him mad; he has seen and known what they
cannot see and know, and a barrier has risen between
him and them :

1 hold it fit that we shake hands and part ;
You, as your business and desires shall point you ;
For every man has business and desire,

Such as it is : and for mine own poor part,
Look you, I'll go pray.

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 1>G5

The world has become a mockery under the glare
of a single fact. The idea of his mother's perfidy
colours all his words and thoughts. The very word
"mother" is turned into a name of evil note: "O
wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother." So
also in Troilus and Cressida, the springs of humanity
are poisoned for Troilus by the falseness of Cressida
—"Think, we had mothers." The slower imagina
tion of Ulysses cannot follow the speed of this
argument. When he asks, "What hath she done,
Prince, that can soil our mothers?" Troilus replies,
with all the condensed irony of Hamlet, "Nothing
at all, unless that this were she." To Hamlet, in the
bitterness of his discovery, the love of Ophelia is a
snare; yet there is a tragic touch of gentleness in
his parting from her. The waters of destruction are
out; she may escape them, if she will. She is
innocent as yet, why should she be a breeder of
sinners 1 Let her flee from the wrath to come—" To
a nunnery, go ! "

It is observed by Coleridge that in Hamlet the
equilibrium between the real and the imaginary
worlds is disturbed. Just such a disturbance, so to
call it, is produced by any great shock given to feel
ing, by bereavement or crime breaking in upon the
walled serenity of daily life and opening vistas into
the infinite expanse, where only the imagination

266 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

can travel. The horizon is widened far beyond the
narrow range of possible action ; the old woes of
the world are revived, and pass like shadows before
the spellbound watcher. What Hamlet does is of
little importance; nothing that he can do would
avert the tragedy, or lessen his own agony. It is
not by what he does that he appeals to us, but by
what he sees and feels. Those who see less think
him mad. But the King who, in a different manner,
has access to what is passing in Hamlet's mind,
knows that he is dangerously sane.

The case of Hamlet well illustrates that old-
fashioned psychology which divided the mind of
man into active and intellectual powers. Every one
who has ever felt the stress of sudden danger must
be familiar with the refusal of the intellect to sub
ordinate itself wholly to the will. Even a drowning
man, if report be true, often finds his mind at leisure,
as though he were contemplating his own struggles
from a distance. Action and contemplation are
usually separated in the drama, for the sake of clear
ness, and are embodied in different persons. But
they are not separated in life, nor in the character
of Hamlet. His actions surprise himself. His reason,
being Shakespeare's reason, is superb in its outlook,
and sits unmoved above the strife. Thus, while all
that he says is characteristic of him, some of it is

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 267

whimsical, impulsive, individual, a part of the action
of the play, while others of his sayings seem to
express the mind that he shares with his creator, and
to anticipate the reflections of an onlooker.

It is not from the weakness of indecision that
Hamlet so often pays tribute to the forces which lie
beyond a man's control. Of what he does rashly ho

And praised be rashness for it, let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our dear plots do pall ; and that should teach

us,

There's a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

When Horatio tries to dissuade him from the
fencing-match, he replies: "Not a whit; we defy
augury; there's a special Providence in the fall of
a sparrow." In these comments he speaks the mind
of the dramatist. A profound sense of fate underlies
all Shakespeare's tragedies. Sometimes he permits
his characters, Romeo or Hamlet, to give utterance
to it; sometimes he prefers a subtler and more
ironical method of exposition. lago and Edmund,
alone among the persons of the great tragedies, be
lieve in the sufficiency of man to control his destinies.
"Virtue! a fig!" says lago; "'tis in ourselves that
we are thus or thus." It is " the excellent foppery
of the world," says Edmund, that " we make guilty

268 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars."
The event is Shakespeare's only reply to these two
calculators. His criticism is contained in the event,
which often gives a thrill of new meaning to the
speeches of the unconscious agents. This classical
irony, as it is called, which plays with the ignorance
of man, and makes him a prophet in spite of himself,
is an essential part of Shakespeare's tragic method.
The voice of the prophecy is heard in Borneo's speech
to the Friar:

Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare;
It is enough I may but call her mine.

It is heard again in the last words ever spoken by
Juliet to her lover :

Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb ;
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look'st pale.

It runs all through Othello, so that only a repeated
reading of the play can bring out its full meaning.
The joyful greetings of Othello and Desdemona in
Cyprus are ominous in every line. "If it were now
to die," says Othello, "'twere now to be most happy."
His words are truer than he knows.

Without this sense of fate, this appreciation of the
tides that bear man with them, whether he swim this
way or that, tragedy would be impossible. Othello

V- STORY AND CHARACTER 2G9

is in many ways Shakespeare's supreme achievement
— in this among others, that he gives tragic dignity
to a squalid story of crime by heightening the
characters and making all the events inevitable. The
moralists have been eager to lay the blame of these
events on Othello, or Desdemona, or both ; but the
whole meaning of the play would vanish if they
were successful. Shakespeare is too strong for them ;
they cannot make headway against his command of
our sympathies. In Othello he portrays a man of a
high and passionate nature, ready in action, generous
in thought. Othello has lived all his life by faith,
not by sight. He cannot observe and interpret
trifles; his way has been to brush them aside and
ignore them. He is impatient of all that is subtle
and devious, as if it were a dishonour. Jealousy
and suspicion, as Desdemona knows, are foreign to
his nature ; he credits others freely with all his own
noblest qualities. He hates even the show of con
cealment ; when lago urges him to retire, to escape
the search party of Brabantio, he replies :

Not I: I must be found.

My parts, my title, and my perfect soul

Shall manifest me rightly.

If he were less credulous, more cautious and alert
and observant, he would be a lesser man than he is,
and less worthy of our love.

270 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

His unquestioning faith in Desdemona is his life —
what if his faith fail him1? The temptation attacks
him on his blind side. He knows nothing of those
dark corners of the mind where the meaner passions
germinate. The man who comes to him is one
whom he has always accepted for the soul of honesty
and good comradeship, a trusted friend and familiar,
reluctant to speak, quite disinterested, free from
passion, highly experienced in human life, all honour
and devotion and delicacy, — for so lago appeared.
The game of the adversary was won when Othello
first listened. He should have struck lago, it may
be said, at the bare hint, as he smote the tur-
ban'd Turk in Aleppo. lago was well aware of this
danger, and bent all the powers of his mind to the
crisis. He gives his victim no chance for indignation.
Any one who would take the measure of Shake
speare's almost superhuman skill when he rises to
meet a difficulty should read the Third Act of
Othello. The quickest imagination ever given to
man is there on its mettle, and racing. There
is a horrible kind of reason on Othello's side when
he permits lago to speak. He knew lago, or so he
believed; Desdemona was a fascinating stranger.
Her unlikeness to himself was a part of her attrac
tion ; his only tie to her was the tie of instinct
and faith.

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 271

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life !

Once he begins to struggle with thought, he is in the
labyrinth of the monster, and the day is lost.

If Othello is simple as a hero, Desdemona is
simple as a saint. From first to last, while she is
unconsciously knotting the cords around her, there
is no trace, in any speech of hers, of caution or self-
regard. She is utterly trustful ; she gives herself
away, as the saying is, a hundred times. She is
insistent, like a child ; but she never defends herself,
and never argues. To the end, she simply cannot
believe that things are beyond recovery by the power
of love ; after the worst scene of all she still trusts
the world, and sleeps. Those misguided and unhappy
formalists who put her in the witness box of a police-
court, and accuse her of untruth, should be forbidden
to read Shakespeare. She was heavenly true.' Her
answer concerning the handkerchief — " It is not
lost : but what and if it were ? " — is a pathetic and
childlike attempt to maintain the truth of her rela
tion to her husband. How can she know that she is
at the bar before a hostile judge, and that her answer
will be used against her? If she knew, she would
refuse to plead. Othello's question is false in all its
implications, which appear vaguely and terribly in
his distraught manner. The mischief is already

272 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

done : in her distress and bewilderment she clutches
at words which express one truth at least, the truth
that she has done him no wrong. Sir Walter Scott,
it may be remembered, with infinitely less at stake,
used almost Desdemona's form of words in reply to
the question whether he was the author of the
Waverley Novels.

If Desdemona had accepted the inhumanity of the
position, and, on general grounds of principle, had
replied by a statement of the bare fact, she might be
a better lawyer in her own cause, but she would
forfeit her angel's estate. So also, at those many
points in the play where a cool recognition of her
danger and a determination to be explicit might
have saved her, we cannot wish that she should so
save herself. She is tactless, it is said, in her
solicitations on behalf of Cassio ; but it is the
tactlessness of unfaltering faith. When anger and
suspicion intrude upon her paradise she cannot deal
with them reasonably, as those can who expect them.
She is a child to chiding, as she says to Emilia ; and
a child that shows tact and calmness in managing its
elders is not loved the better for it.

The simplicity and purity of these two characters
gives to lago the material of his craft. The sove
reign skill of that craft, and his artist's delight in it,
have procured him worship, so that he has been

V. STORY AND CHARACTER 273

enthroned as a kind of evil God. But if no such
man ever existed, yet the elements of which he is
composed are easy to find in ordinary life. All the
cold passions of humanity are compacted in his heart.
His main motives are motives of every day — pride in
self, contempt for others, delight in irresponsible
power. In any human society it may be noted how
innocence and freedom win favour by their very ease,
and it may be noted also how they arouse a certain
sense of hostility in more difficult and grudging
spirits. lago is not an empty dream. But if good
ness is sometimes stupid, so is wickedness. lago can
calculate, but he takes no account of the self-forgetful
passions. He is surprised by Othello's great burst
of pity ; when Desdemona kneels at his feet and
implores his help to regain her husband's affection,
his words seem to betoken some embarrassment, and
he makes haste to end the interview. He does not
understand any one with whom he has to deal ; not
Othello, nor Desdemona, nor Cassio, nor his own
wife Emilia, and this last misunderstanding involves
him in the ruin of his plot.

Shakespeare flinches at nothing : he makes Desde
mona kneel to lago, and sends her to her death
without the enlightenment that comes at last to
Othello when he discovers his hideous error. She
could bear more than Othello, for her love had not
s. s

274 SHAKESPEARE CHAP. v.

wavered. There is a strange sense of triumph even
in this appalling close. Shakespeare's treatment of
the mystery does not much vary from tragedy to
tragedy. In Othello the chances were all against the
extreme issue ; at a dozen points in the story a slip
or an accident would have brought lago's fabric
about his ears. Yet out of these materials, Shake
speare seems to say, this result may be wrought;
and the Heavens will permit it. He points to no
conclusion, unless it be this, that the greatest and
loveliest virtues, surpassing the common measure,
are not to be had for nothing. They must suffer for
their greatness. In life they suffer silently, without
fame. In Shakespeare's art they are made known to
us, and wear their crown. Desdemona and Othello
are both made perfect in the act of death, so that the
idea of murder is lost and forgotten in the sense of
sacrifice.

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST PHASE

IN the plays of Shakespeare's closing years there is a
pervading sense of quiet and happiness which seems
to bear witness to a change in the mind of their
author. In these latest plays — CynMine, The Winter's
Tale, The Tempest — the subjects chosen are tragic in
their nature, but they arc shaped to a fortunate
result. Imogen and Hermione arc deeply wronged,
like Desdemona ; Prospero, like Lear, is driven from
his inheritance ; yet the forces of destruction do not
prevail, and the end brings forgiveness and reunion.
There is no reversion to the manner of the Comedies;
this new-found happiness is a happiness wrung from
experience, and, unlike the old high-spirited gaiety,
it does not exult over the evil-doer. An all-embracing
tolerance and kindliness inspires these last plays.
The amiable rascal, for whom there was no place
in the Tragedies, reappears. The outlook on life is
widened; and the children— Perdita and Florizel,
Miranda and Ferdinand, Guiderius and Arviragus —

276 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

are permitted to make amends for the faults and
misfortunes of their parents. There is still tragic
material in plenty, and there are some high-wrought
tragic scenes ; but the tension is soon relaxed ; in
two of the plays the construction is loose and
rambling; in all three there is a free rein given
to humour and fantasy. It is as if Shakespeare were
weary of the business of the drama, and cared only
to indulge his whim. He was at the top of his
profession, and was no longer forced to adapt him
self to the narrower conventions of the stage. He
might write what he liked, and he made full use of
his hard-earned liberty.

The sense of relief which comes with these last
plays, after the prolonged and heightened anguish
of the Tragedies, seems to suggest the state of con
valescence, when the mind wanders among happy
memories, and is restored to a delight in the simplest
pleasures. The scene is shifted, for escape from the
old jealousies of the Court, to an enchanted island,
or to the mountains of Wales, or to the sheep-walks
of Bohemia, where the life of the inhabitants is a
peaceful round of daily duties and rural pieties. The
very structure of the plays has the inconsequence of
reverie : even The Tempest, while it observes the
mechanical unities, escapes from their tyranny by
an appeal to supernatural agencies, which in a single

VI- THE LAST PHASE 277

day can do the work of years. All these character
istics of matter and form point to the same conclusion,
that the darkness and burden of tragic suffering gave
place, in the latest works that Shakespeare wrote for
the stage, to daylight and ease.

The Tragedies must be reckoned his greatest
achievement, so that it may sound paradoxical to
speak of the sudden change from Tragedy to Romance
as if it betokened a recovery from disease. Yet no
man can explore the possibilities of suffering, as
Shakespeare did, to the dark end, without peril to
his own soul. The instinct of self-preservation keeps
most men from adventuring near to the edge of the
abyss. The inevitable pains of life they will nerve
themselves to endure, but they are careful not to
multiply them by imagination, lest their strength
should fail. For many years Shakespeare took upon
himself the burden of the human race, and struggled
in thought under the oppression of sorrows not his
own. That he turned at last to happier scenes, and
wrote the Romances, is evidence, it may be said, that
his grip on the hard facts of life was loosened by
fatigue, and that he sought refreshment in irrespon
sible play. And this perhaps is true ; but the marvel
is that he ever won his way back into a world where
play is possible. He was not unscathed by the ordeal :
the smell of the fire had passed on him. There are

278 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

many fearful passages in the Tragedies, where the
reader holds his breath, from sympathy with Shake
speare's characters and apprehension of the madness
that threatens them. But there is a far worse terror
when it begins to appear that Shakespeare himself is
not aloof and secure ; that his foothold is precarious
on the edge that overlooks the gulf. In King Lear
and Timon of Athens and Hamlet there is an unmis
takable note of disgust and disaffection towards the
mere fact of sex; and the same feeling expresses
itself faintly, with much distress and uncertainty,
in Measure for Measure. It is true that the dramatic
cause of this disaffection is supplied in each case;
Lear's daughters have turned against him, Timon's
curses are ostensibly provoked by special instances
of ingratitude and cruelty and lust, Hamlet's mind is
preoccupied with the horror of his mother's sin. But
the passion goes far beyond its occasion, to condemn,
or to question, all the business and desire of the race
of man. The voice that we have learned to recognise
as Shakespeare's is heard, in its most moving accents,
blaspheming the very foundations of life and sanity.
Those who cannot find in the Sonnets any trace of
personal feeling may quite well maintain that here
too the passion is simulated ; but the great majority
of readers, who, holding no theories, are yet vaguely
aware of Shakespeare's presence and control, will

VI- THE LAST PHASE 279

recognise what is meant by this worst touch of fear.
Some, recognising it, have conceived of Shakespeare
as a man whose mind was unbalanced by an excess
of emotional sensibility. The excess may be allowed ;
it is the best part of his wealth ; but it must not be
taken to imply defect arid poverty elsewhere. We
do not and cannot know enough of his life even to
guess at the experiences which may have left their
mark on the darkest of his writings. We do know
that only a man of extraordinary strength and
serenity of temper could have emerged from these
experiences unspoilt. Many a life has been wrecked
on a tenth part of the accumulated suffering which
finds a voice in the Tragedies. The Romances are
our warrant that Shakespeare regained a perfect
calm of mind. If Timon of Athens had been his last
play, who could feel any assurance that he died at
peace with the world?

The retirement to Stratford cut him off from the
society of writers of books; and, incidentally, cut us
off from our last and best opportunity of overhearing
his talk. If he had continued in London, and had
gathered a school of younger men around him, we
should have heard something of him from his disciples.
He preferred the more homely circle of Stratford ;
and he founded no school. Doubtless, when he
was giving up business, he made over some of his

280

SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

unfinished work to younger men, with liberty to piece
it out. It has been confidently asserted that he
collaborated with John Fletcher both in Henry VIII.,
which appears in the Folio, and in The Two Noble
Kinsmen, which was published as Fletcher's work.
For this partnership of Shakespeare's the evidence,
though it consists wholly of a comparison of styles, is
stronger than for any other ; and Fletcher was as apt
a pupil as could have been found for so impossible a
master. But the master must have known that he
had nothing to teach which could be effectively
learned. Schools are founded by believers in method ;
he trusted solely to the grace of imagination, ' and
indulged himself, year by year, in wilder and more
daring experiments. His work, when it is not in
spired, is not even remarkable. Artists of his kind,
if they are so unfortunate as to find a following,
attract only superstitious and weak-kneed aspirants,
who cannot understand that every real thing is liker
to every other real thing than to the closest and most
reverent imitation of itself. Shakespeare baffled all
imitators by his speed and inexhaustible variety.
His early comedies might perhaps be brought within
the compass of a formula, though the volatile essence
which is their soul would escape in the process. His
historical plays observe no certain laws, either of
history or of the drama. The attempt to find a

VI. THE LAST PHASE 281

theoretic basis for the great tragedies has never been
attended with the smallest success : man is greater
than that mode of his thought which is called
philosophy, as the whole is greater than a part;
and the Shakespearean drama is an instrument of
expression incomparably fuller and richer than the
tongs and the bones of moralists and metaphysicians.
In his last plays, so far from relaxing the energy of
his invention, he outwent himself in fertility and
reach. These are the plays which are described in
Johnson's eulogy :

Each change of many-coloured life ho drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new ;
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toiled after him in vain.

The brave new world of his latest invention is rich in
picture and memory— shipwreck, battle, the simple
funeral of Fidele, the strange adventures of Autoly-
cus, the dances of shepherdesses on the rustic lawn,
and of fairies on the yellow sands— but the boldest
stroke of his mature power is seen in his creation of
a new mythology. In place of the witches and good
people of the popular belief, who had already played
a part in his drama, he creates spirits of the earth
and of the air, the freckled hag-born whelp Caliban,
the beautiful and petulant Ariel, both of them sub
dued to the purposes of man, who is thus made

282 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

master of his fate and of the world. The brain
that devised The Tempest was not unstrung by
fatigue.

The style of these last plays is a further develop
ment of the style of the Tragedies. The thought is
often more packed and hurried, the expression more
various and fluent, at the expense of full logical
ordering. The change which came over Shakespe ire's
later work is that which Dryden, at an advanced age,
perceived in himself. " What judgment I had," he
says, in the Preface to the Fables, "increases rather
than diminishes ; and thoughts, such as they are,
come crowding in so fast upon me, that my 'only
difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into
verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose."
The bombasted magniloquence of the early rhetorical
style has now disappeared. The very syntax is the
syntax of thought rather than of language; con
structions are mixed, grammatical links are dropped,
the meaning of many sentences is compressed into
one, hints and impressions count for as much as full
blown propositions. An illustration of this latest
style may be taken from the scene in The Tempest,
where Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, tries to
persuade Sebastian to murder his brother Alonso,
and to seize upon the kingdom of Naples. Ferdinand,
the heir to the kingdom, is believed to have perished

VL THE LAST PHASE 283

in the shipwreck, and Antonio points to the sleeping
king :

Ant. Who's the next heir of Naples?

Seb. Claribel.

Ant. She that is Queen of Tunis ; she that dwells
Ten leagues beyond man's life ; she that from Naples
Can have no note, unless the Sun were post,
(The man i' th' moon's too slow) till new-born chins
Be rough and razorable ; she that from whom
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again,
And by that destiny to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue ; what to conic
In yours and my discharge.

Here is a very huddle of thoughts, tumbled out as
they present themselves, eagerly and fast. This
crowded utterance is not proper to any one character;
Leontcs in his jealous speculations, Imogen in her
questions addressed to Pisanio, Prospero in his narra
tive to Miranda, all speak in the same fashion,
prompted by the same scurry of thought. It would
be right to conclude, from the mere reading, that
there was no blot in the papers to which these
speeches were committed.

This later style of Shakespeare, as it is seen in the
Tragedies and Romances, is perhaps the most wonder
ful thing in English literature. From the first he
was a lover of language, bandying words like tennis-
balls, adorning his theme " with many holiday and

284 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

lady terms," proving that a sentence is but a cheveril
glove to a good wit, so quickly the wrong side may
be turned outward. He had a mint of phrases in
his brain, an exchequer of words ; he had fed of the
dainties that are bred in a book; his speech was a
very fantastical banquet. This early practice gave
him an assured mastery, so that when his thoughts
multiplied and strengthened, he was able to express
himself. There has never been a writer who came
nearer to giving adequate verbal expression to the
subtlest turns of consciousness, the flitting shadows
and half-conceived ideas and purposes which count
for so much in the life of the mind — which determine
action, indeed, although they could not be rationally
formulated by a lawyer as a plea for action. His
language, it is true, is often at its simplest when the
thought is most active. So in Macbeth's question :

But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?
I had most need of blessing, a,nd Amen
Stuck in my throat.

So in Othello's reply to Desdemona's plea for respite
— " Being done, there is no pause " — a reply which,
better than a long discourse, explains that the crisis
in Othello's mind is over, and the deed itself is a
mere consequence of that agony. But where the
situation allows of it, Shakespeare's wealth of expres
sion is bewildering in its flow and variety. Ideas,

V1- THE LAST PHASE 285

metaphors, analogies, illustrations, crowd into his
mind, and the pen cannot drive fast enough to give
them full expression. He tumbles his jewels out in
a heap, and does not spend labour on giving to any
of them an elaborate setting. " His mind and hand
went together," but his mind went the faster.

His was the age before the Academies, when the
processes of popular and literary education had not
yet multiplied definitions and hardened usages. There
is truth in the common saying that the English
language was still fluid in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
No man, even if he had the mind to do it, would
now dare to write like Shakespeare. The body of
precedent has been enormously increased; science and
controversy have been busy, year after year, limiting
and distinguishing the meanings of words, for the
sake of exactness and uniformity. Hence, although
even the most original of writers cannot very seri
ously modify the language that he uses, Shakespeare
enjoyed a freedom of invention unknown to his
successors. He coins words lavishly, and assigns
new meanings to old forms. He knows nothing of
the so-called parts of speech ; where he lacks a verb
he will make it from the first noun or adjective that
comes to hand. The more or less precise significa
tions which are now attached to certain Latin prefixes
and suffixes are all disordered and mixed in his use

286 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

of them. He violates almost every grammatical rule,
and, in accordance with what is, after all, the best
English usage, neglects formal concord in the interests
of a vaguer truth of impression. The number and
person of a verb, in his English, are regulated by the
meaning of the subject, not by its grammatical form.
His language is often too far-fetched, and owes too
much to books, to be called colloquial ; but the syntax
and framework of his sentences have all the freedom
of the most impulsive speech.

A few examples, the first that present themselves,
may serve to illustrate these general remarks. A
sufficient treatise on Shakespeare's English is still to
seek, and the New English Dictionary, which has done
more than any other single work to supply the need,
is not yet complete. Moreover, although the first
recorded occurrence of a word or meaning often be
longs to Shakespeare, it is impossible, in any given
case, to prove that he was the first inventor. But
the cumulative evidence for his inventive habit is
irresistible. He calls a nun a " cloy stress," and a
party of seekers "questrists" or "questants." Ter
minations are fitted as they come; "ruby," "rubied,"
and " rubious " are all used adjectivally ; " irregular "
is varied by " irregulous," " temporal " by " tem
porary," "distinction" by "distinguishment," and
" conspirator " by " conspirer." " Stricture," " promp-

VI- THE LAST PHASE 287

ture," and "expressure" are used severally to
mean what would now be conveyed by " strict
ness," "prompting," and "expression." He strikes
out, at a sudden need, words like " opposeless "
and " vastidity," " uprighteously " and " inaidible."
He coins diminutives as he needs them, " smilets "
and "crownets." He borrows words from the
French, like " esperance " and " ocillade " (boldly
Anglicised as " eliad "), and from the German, as
where he speaks of Ophelia's virgin " crants." Per
haps this last word was unintelligible to the audience;
it occurs in the Quarto, but is altered in the Folio to
"rites." There are no earlier recorded occurrences
of "allottery" (in the sense of "portion"), " for-
getive," " confixed," "eventful," and very many other
words. The meaning that he assigns to words seems
often to be a meaning of his own devising. " Un
questionable " he uses in the sense of averse to
conversation. In Measure for Measure, Angelo, affianced
to Mariana, is spoken of as " her combinate husband."
The Duke, when he excuses his failure to appear
against Angelo, says that he is " combined by a sacred
vow," and so must needs be absent. Sometimes
Shakespeare misuses a word from mistaking its
etymology : he uses " fedary " or " federary " in the
sense of confederate, not of vassal. He obtains a
wonderful expressiveness even from his wildest licence.

288 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

A good many instances might be gathered from his
work to illustrate his curiously impressionist use of
language; he tested a word, it seems, by the ear,
and, if it sounded right, accepted it without further
scrutiny. lago, in his advice to Roderigo, speaking
of Desdemona's affection to the Moor, says : " It was
a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see
an answerable sequestration ; put but money in thy
purse." What does he mean by " sequestration " ?
No doubt the main part of his meaning is the natural
and right meaning of separation, divorce. But the
sentence is antithetically constructed, and "seques
tration " serves well enough, from its accidental
suggestion of " sequence " and " sequel," to set
over against "commencement." This is not a
scholar's use of language; but it has a magic of
its own.

A like brilliant effect is often obtained by the
coinage of verbs. What could be more admirable
than Cleopatra's description of Octavia ?

Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes,
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour
Demuring upon me.

Or, for a last instance of the triumph of wilfulness,
it will suffice to take any of the familiar nouns which
are used as verbs by Shakespeare. He twice uses
"woman" as a verb, but not twice in the same

VI- THE LAST PHASE 289

sense. Cassio, in Othello, orders Bianca to leave

him :

I do attend here on the General,

And think it no addition, nor my wish,

To have him see me woruan'd.

The Countess, in All's Well, says :

I have felt so many quirks of joy and grief,
That the first face of neither, on the start,
Can woman me unto't.

The word " child " is used with the same freedom ;
Lear is sympathetically described by Edgar — " he
childed as I father'd " ; the autumn is " the childing
autumn"; Polixenes in The Winter's Tale tells how
his son,

With his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

The build of Shakespeare's earlier verse, with its
easy flow of rhythm and observance of the pause at
the end of the line, favoured clear syntax. Yet there
are instances in the earlier plays of that confused
and condensed manner which obscures a simple
thought by overlaying it with the metaphors that it
happens to suggest. This acceptance of all that
passes through the mind became more and more
characteristic of Shakespeare's style: he avoids it,
at his best, not by careful revision, and rejection on
a second reading, but by heating his imagination till

290 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

it refuses what cannot be perfectly assimilated on
the instant. Where he is deliberate and languid, he
is often obscure. This is how the King, in Love's
Labour's Lost, expresses the not very complex idea that
decisions are often forced upon us by the lapse of time :

The extreme parts of time extremely forms
All causes to the purpose of his speed,
And often at his very loose decides
That which long process could not arbitrate.

Gratiano, in The Merchant of Venice, is entangled in
his effort to say that silence is often mistaken for
wisdom :

O my Antonio, I do know of these

That therefore only are reputed wise,

For saying nothing ; when, I am very sure,

If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,

Which hearing them would call their brothers fools.

Even worshippers of Shakespeare will agree that
this is no way to write English. In the later plays
elliptical syntax becomes commoner, though the
meaning is usually tighter packed. When Polixenes,
in The Winter's Tale, is pressed by Leontes to prolong
his visit, he excuses himself in this fashion :

I am question'd by my fears, of what may chance,
Or breed upon our absence, that may blow
No sneaping winds at home, to make us say,
This is put forth too truly.

No grammatical analysis of this sentence is possible,

VL THE LAST PHASE 291

yet its meaning is hardly doubtful. The fears of the
first line are made to imply hopes in the second, and,
in the fourth, are alluded to in the singular number
as a feeling of apprehension. Passages like this are
legion, and are, for the most part, easily understood
at a first glance. He who runs may read, when he
who stands and ponders is strangled by the gram
matical intricacies. In their slow-witted efforts to
regularise the text of Shakespeare, the grammarians
have steadily corrupted it, even while they have
heaped scorn on the heads of the first editors for
presenting them with what Shakespeare wrote.

If there is one mark which more than another dis
tinguishes Shakespeare's mature style from all other
writing whatsoever, it is his royal wealth of metaphor.
He always loved the high figurative fashion, and in
his early writing he was sometimes patient with a
figure, elaborating it with care, to make it go upon
all fours. So Thurio, in The Two Gentlemen, explains
to Proteus, by a simile taken from the spinning of
flax, how Silvia's love may be transferred from
Valentine to himself:

Therefore, as you unwind her love from him,
Lest it should ravel, and be good to none,
You must provide to bottom it on me :
Which must be done by praising me as much
As you in worth dispraise Sir Valentine.

292 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

When a figure is thus carefully worked out in detail,
it becomes cold and conceited : things are not so like
one another as to be fitted in all their parts, and the
process of fitting them takes the attention away from
the fact to be illustrated, which would remain signifi
cant, even if the world furnished no comparison for
it. Something of this chill mars the speeches of
Arthur, in King John, when he pleads with Hubert
for his life. The fire, he says, is dead with grief :

There is no malice in this burning coal ;

The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out,

And strew'd repentant ashes on his head.

When Hubert offers to revive it, Arthur continues :

And if you do, you will but make it blush,
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert ;
Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes ;
And, like a dog that is compelPd to fight,
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on.

In Shakespeare's mature work elaborated figures of
this kind do not occur. His thought presses on from
metaphor to metaphor, any one of them more than
good enough for a workaday poet ; he strings them
together, and passes them rapidly before the eye,
each of them bringing its glint of colour and sugges
tion. His so-called mixed metaphors are not mixed,
but successive ; the sense of mixture is produced by

V1- THE LAST PHASE 293

a rapidity of thought in the writer which baffles the
slower reader, and buries him under the missiles that
he fails to catch. There are often two or three
metaphors in a single sentence. When lago recom
mends Roderigo to wear a false beard, he does it in
these words :

Defeat thy favour with an usurp d beard.
When Lady Macbeth reproaches Macbeth for his
inconstant mind, her scorn condenses itself in what
seems to be, but is not, a mixture of metaphor :

Was the hope drunk
Wherein you drest yourself ?

When Antony's friends desert him, his thoughts run
through many comparisons :

All come to this? The hearts
That pannelled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar ; and this pine is barkt
That overtopp'd them all. Betray'd I am.
If they had understood the workings of Shake
speare's imagination, his later editors would not have
attempted to amend his figures by reducing them to
a dull symmetry. When Macbeth says,
My way of life

Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf :
he speaks like Shakespeare. Those who read "my
May of life" make him speak like Pope. An even

294 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

more prosy emendation has been allowed, in many
editions, to ruin one of the finest of Cleopatra's

speeches :

'Tis paltry to be Caesar :
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will : and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change ;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's.

The substitution of "dug" for "dung" robs the poet
of his sudden vision of the whole earth nourishing
the race of man on its own corruption and decay,
and robs him without compensation.

Accustomed as he is to deal with concrete reality
and live movement, Shakespeare seems to do his very
thinking in metaphor. He is generally careful to
make his metaphors appropriate to the speaker of
them; and his highest reaches of imagination are
often seen in a single figure. What a wonderful
vitality and beauty the word "ride" gives to his
description of Beatrice :

Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes.
No other speech gives us so horrible a glimpse into
the pit of lago's soul as his own speech of reassurance
to Roderigo, with its summer gardening lore :

Dost not go well ? Cassio hath beaten thee,
And thou by that small hurt hast cashier'd Cassio :

VI- THE LAST PHASE 295

Though other things grow fair against the sun,
Yet fruits that blossom first will first be ripe :
Content thyself awhile.

The vivid pictorial quality of Shakespeare's imagi
nation causes him to be dissatisfied with all forms of
expression which are colourless and abstract. He
makes sonorous use of the Latin vocabulary to ex
pound and define his meaning ; and then he adds the
more homely figurative word to convert all the rest
into picture. His words are often paired in this
fashion ; one gives the thought, the other adds the
image. So he speaks of "the catastrophe and heel
of pastime " ; the " snuff and loathed part of
Nature " ; " the descent and dust below thy foot " ;
"the force and road of casualty"; "a puifd and
reckless libertine"; "a malignant and a turban'd
Turk." It is this sort of writing that was in Gray's
mind when he said, " Every word in him is a picture."

The very qualities which have made Shakespeare
impossible as a teacher have also made him the
wonder of the world. He breaks through grammar
only to get nearer to the heart of things. The
human mind is without doubt a very complicated
mystery, alive in all its fibres, incalculable in many
of its processes. How should it express itself in
grammatical sentences, which are a creaking con
trivance, made up of two parts, a subject and a

296 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

predicate1? Yet it dares the attempt; and Shake
speare by his freedom, and spontaneity, and resource,
has succeeded, perhaps better than any other writer,
in giving a voice and a body to those elusive
movements of thought and feeling which are the
life of humanity.

These questions of style and grammar have been
allowed, perhaps too easily, to intrude upon a greater
theme. It is time to return to Shakespeare, and
to make an end.

The Tempest was probably his last play — in this
sense, at least, that he designed it for his farewell
to the stage. The thought which occurs at once
to almost every reader of the pky, that Prospero
resembles Shakespeare himself, can hardly have
been absent from the mind of the author. By his
most potent art he had bedimmed the noontide
sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and plucked
up the giant trees of the forest. Graves at his
command had waked their sleepers, oped, and let
them forth. When at last he resolved to break
the wand of his incantations and to bury his magic
book, he was shaken, as all men in sight of the
end are shaken, by the passion of mortality. But
there was no bitterness in the leave-taking. He
looked into the future, and there was given to
him a last vision ; not the futile panorama of

VI- THE LAST PHASE 297

industrial progress, but a view of the whole world,

shifting like a dream, and melting into vapour like

a cloud. His own fate and the fate of his book were

as nothing against that wide expanse. What was it

to him that for a certain term of years men should

read what he had written? The old braggart promises

of the days of his vanity could not console him now.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

So he had written in the Sonnets. AY hen the end
drew near, his care was only to forgive his enemies,
and to comfort the young, who are awed and
disquieted by the show of grief in their elders.
Miranda and Ferdinand watch Prospero, as he
struggles in the throes of imagination. Then he
comes to himself and speaks :

You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort
As if you were disruay'd. Be cheerful, sir :
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air ;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind : we are such stuff
As dreams are made on ; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

298 SHAKESPEARE CHAP.

In all the work of Shakespeare there is nothing
more like himself than those quiet words of parting —
"Be cheerful, sir; our revels now are ended."

Yet they are not ended; and the generations
who have come after him, and have read his book,
and have loved him with an inalterable personal
affection, must each, as they pass the way that he
went, pay him their tribute of praise. His living
brood have survived him, to be the companions
and friends of men and women as yet unborn. His
monument is still a feasting presence, full of light.
When he was alive he may sometimes have smiled
to think that the phantoms dancing in his brain
were as real to him as the sights and sounds of
the outer world. The population of that delicate
shadowland seemed to have but a frail hold on
existence. The one was taken, and the other
left; this character served for a play, that phrase
or sentence fitted a speech ; the others died in their
cradles, or lived a moment upon the air, and were
dissolved. Those that found acceptance were made
over to the tender mercies of the players, for a
week's entertainment of the populace. But now
three centuries have passed since King Lear was
written ; and we begin to rub our eyes, and wonder.
"Change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the
ghost, which is the man?" Is the real man to be

V! THE LAST PHASE 299

sought in that fragmentary story of Stratford and
London, which, do what we will to revive it, has
long ago grown faint as the memory of a last year's
carouse? That short and troubled time of his
passage, during which he was hurried onward at
an ever-increasing pace, blown upon by hopes and
fears, cast down and uplifted, has gone like a dream,
and has taken him bodily along with it. But his
work remains. He wove upon the roaring loom of
Time the garment that we see him by ; and the
earth at Stratford closed over the broken shuttle.

INDEX

A

Account of the Life cfec. of

Mr. William Shakespear

(1709), Howe, 56.
All's Well that Ends Well,

183, 194; basis of, 216;

228-231, 289.
Antony and Cleopatra, 95,

148, 151, 164-5, 190-1, 257,

294.
Apollonius and Silla (Barnabe

Riche), 89.

Arcadia (Sidney), 87.
Arden, Forest of, 42.
Arden, Mary (mother), 41 ;

death of, 78.
Ariosto, 99.
As You Like It, 46 ; basis of,

87, 99, 133, 135, 167, 170,

233, 240.
Aubrey, 55, 58, 64, 77.

B

Bandello, 215.

Beeston, William, 58.

Betterton, 57, 156.

Boccaccio, 84, 214, 216.

Books, List of, in a private
library of period, 84.

Boy players, 157-158.

Brandes, Dr., 48.

Brooke, Arthur, 5.

Burbage, Richard (acted chief
tragic parts in Shake
speare's plays), 75, 78, 156.

Burghley, Lord, 64.

C

Canning, a story of, 49.
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer),

255.

Chapman, George, 244.
Chronicles (Raphael Holin-

shed), 62, 88, 90, 101, 239.
Cinthio (Giambattista Gir-

aldi), 98, 215, 216, 222.
Coleridge, 5, 237, 261, 265.
Comedies (Shakespeare's),

criticisms on, 207-216, 275.
Comedy of Errors, The, 50,

69, 135, 188, 209.
Condell, Henry, 30, 79, 143,

173. See Heminge.
Coriolanus, 135, 253, 261.
Critics, Romantic, 5, 201 ;

character studies by, 202-6 ;

236, 261, 296.
Cymbeline, 62, 74, 97, 169,

185 ; Johnson's criticism

on, 188 ; 275.

Davenant, Sir William, 58.

Declaration of egregious Po
pish Impostures, A (1603),
87.

Description of England (Har
rison), 62.

Devil on the Highway to
Heaven, The, 138.

Dialogue of Dives, The, 138.

Dorastus and Fawnia
(Greene), 86.

INDEX

301

Dowdall, John, 58.
Dowden, Prof., 115, 219.
Dr. Fauatiis (Marlowe), 140.
Dryden, 27, 59, 91, 282.

E

Edward II. (Marlowe), 140,

238.

Elizabeth (Queen), 73.
Elizabethan actors, versatility

of, 132.
- drama, beginnings of,

128 ; crisis of, 135.
Essays of Elia, The (Lamb),

98.

Essex, Earl of, 74.
Euphues (Lyly), 87.

Fate, 210-13, 236, 297. •
Fechter, the actor, in Othello,

192.

Fenton, Geoffrey, 215.
Fletcher, John, 280.
Fortune theatre, 155.

G

Garrick, David, 156, 192.
Giraldi, Giambattista. See

Cinthio.
Globe theatre (Southwark),

72, 78, 135, 153 ; built

(1599), 155, 156.
Goethe, 261.
Gorboduc, first English tra

gedy, 136.
Gray, Thomas, 295.
Greene, Robert, 137- 138, 142.
Greenwich Palace, 73.
Groatsworth of Wit (Greene),

138.

H

Hall (chronicler), 54, 90.
Hall, John (son-in-law), 78.
Hall, William, 114.
Halliwell-Phillipps, Mr., 34,

173.

Hamlet, 9, 23, 30, 70, 103, 113,
127, 133, 148, 151, 163, 171,
177, 18S, 194-5,203-4, 211,
213, 224, 243, 260, 261 ;
criticisms on, 263, 278, 287.

Harman, Thomas, 67.

Hathaway, Anne (wife), 56.

Ha/litt, 107, 216, 240.

Hecatommithi, The (Cinthio),
98.

Heminge, John, 30, 79, 143,
173. See Condell.

Henry IV., 03, 87, 184-5, 193,
199, 239, 241 ; Falstaff in,
240-51.

Henry V., 49, 74, 91, 193,
245-6.

Henry VI., 62 ; parodied,
142, 253.

Henry VIII., 74, 130.

Historical Plays (Shake
speare's), 238, 240; dra
matic unity of, 242; politics
in, 238 ; 280.

// Pecorone (Ser Giovanni

Florentine), 98.
Irony, dramatic, 261, 267.

James I., 73-74.

Jameson, Mrs., 201-2, 236.

Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe),
140.

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, descrip
tion of Savage, 14 ; appre
ciation by, 28 ; 29, 184, 259,
281.

Jonson,Ben,2,3,27,31,70,73.

Juliu* Caesar, 9, 62, 96, 160,
169, 253.

Keats, 21.

King John, 64, 78, 166, 242,
292.

302

INDEX

King Lear, 17, 26, 36, 70, 78,
87, 89, 92, 101, 133, 152,
177-179, 228, 257,278, 298.

Kyd, Thomas, 139.

Lamb, Charles, 98, 213.

Lee, Mr. Sidney, 114.

Lives of the Noble Grecians
and Romans, The (Plu
tarch), 93, 239.

Lodge, Thomas, 137.

London, City of, 1, 56, 59, 61,
68, 75, 135.

taverns in, 10, 69.

theatres, 135, 148; de
scription of stage, 155-6.
See Fortune and Globe.

Love's Labour's Lost, 50, 52,
75, 125, 175, 290.

Lucy, Sir Thomas, 56.

M

Macbeth, 5, 23, 32, 74, 78, 89,
91, 92, 101, 135, 163, 166,
188, 192, 211, 232, 244,
260-1, 284, 293.

Machiavel, 84, 99, 215.

Madden, Mr. Vice-Chancellor,
45.

Manningham, John (Diary],

Marlowe, 86, 105-6, 111-12,
138, 140, 148, 212, 229.

Measure for Measure, 25, 70,
72 ; derivation of plot, 98 ;
169, 174, 195-7, 208 ; criti
cism of, 216-19, 256, 278,
287.

Merchant of Venice, 76 ; deri
vation of, 98 ; 133, 166, 175,
177, 199, 204, 208, 216,
224, 256, 290.

Meredith, George, 28.

Meres, Francis, 114, 143.

Merry Wives, The, 50 ; origin

of, 59 ; 74, 209 ; Falstaff in,

251-2.
Midsummer Night's Dream,

43-5, 64, 74,' 125, 127-8,

206, 211, 226, 240, 258.
Milton, 2, 29.
Miracle Plays, 126.
Montaigne, 100-1.
Montgomery, Philip, Earl of,

Moral of Man's Wit, The,l3S.
Morality Plays, 138.
More, Hannah, 93.
Morris dance, The, 125.
Much Ado About Nothing, 70,
99, 166, 183, 208, 294.

H

New English Dictionary, 286.
Nine Worthies, The Pageant
of the, 125.

O

Of Cannibals (Montaigne),
'100.

Orator (Silvayn), 87.

Othello, 9, 17, 23, 78; deriva
tion of plot, 98 ; 134, 163-4,
170, 179, 186-7, 191-2, 210,
213, 260, 261, 268-71, 284,
289, 293, 294.

Ovid, 51, 106, 108.

Palace of Pleasure (Painter),

88.

Pater, Walter, 91.
Peele, 105, 139.
Pembroke, William, Earl of,

74.

Pericles, 70.
Plays (Shakespeare's), First

Folio edition of, 2, 74, 79 ;

misleading division of, 169 ;

280, 287; jesters in, 132-4;

genesis of, 142-55.
Poetry of the period, 104-5.

INDEX

303

Pope, appreciation by, 28,

Promos and Cassandra
(George Whetstone), 98.

Proverbs in Shakespeare's
plays, 102, 103.

Q

Quiney, Thomas (son-in-law),

78.

R

Rabelais, 99.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 53.
Rape of Lucrece, The, 106-9,

113.

Renaissance writers, 215.
Rhetoric, Art of (Thomas

Wilson), 67.

Richard II. , 23, 54, 242-5, 249.
Richard III., 76, 242.
" Romances "(Shakespeare's),

211, 277, 279.
Romeo and Juliet, 5, 40, 45,

89, 112, 134-5, 153, 154,

162, 171, 174, 201, 243, 268.
Roaalynde (Thomas Lodge),

87.

S
Scott, Sir Walter, Journal of,

241, 272.

Second Part of Connie-Catch
ing, The, 65.
Seneca, English tragedy

modelled on, 136.
Serving-man's Comfort, The,

129.
Shakespeare, Hamnet (only

son), 56, 78.

John (father), 39, 41.

Judith (daughter), 56,

57, 78, 80.
Richard (grandfather),

38.
Susanna (daughter), 56,

57, 78.
William, appearance, 1 ;

as man and writer, 2, 7-11,

14, 25 ; personal character.
16-21 ; religion, 24, 81-2,
228; politics, 25, 252-4 ; epi-
taph, 27 ; ancestry, 38, 41 ;
education, 42, 50-4, 254 ;
ignorance of Natural His
tory, 47-51 ; youth, 55, 58 ;
marriage (1582), 56; chil
dren, 56 ; leaves Stratford
for London (1585). 56-57;
early years in London.
59-00, 76-76 ; knowledge of
the town, 69-70; of the
people, 71-2; friends, 73;
beginning of fame, 73 ;
before royalty, 73; famili
arity with court life, 74 ;
acquires property at Strat
ford, 77 ; annual visits to,
77 ; retires to, 78, 279 ;
death and burial, 78, 151 ;
his will, 78, 81 ; reading,
83 ; favourite books, 85 ;
Biblical knowledge, 97 ;
linguistic knowledge, 98 ;
first noticed as dramatist
(1592), 142; attached to
king's company of players,
155.

Dramatic writings : Folio
edition (1623), 2; width of
outlook in, 27, 174, 185,
217, 226-7, 238; contrasted
with Homer, 29; craftsman
ship in, 30 ; materials and
methods, 34-7, 61, 176-94,
206-7, 277 ; poet before
dramatist, 83 ; sources of
suggestion, 87-103, 214 ;
compared with Montaigne,
100-1 ; touched by spirit of
Renaissance, 109-10; cult
of beauty, 111; influence of
Marlowe on, 111-12; early
efforts, 124; popular, not
courtly, 140; accused of
plagiarism, 142; style, 31,

304

INDEX

149, 283, 296; rate of
literary production, 151 ;

freatest dramatic period,
56; stagecraft, 159-65;
chief artistic offence, 166 ;
imity of impression, 166 ;
comedy akin to tragedy,
172-5 ; in contact with,
240 ; creative genius, 195 ;
compared with Chaucer,
255 ; allusions to philo
sophy, 257-8 ; last phase,
274 ; collaborates with J.
Fletcher, 280; wealth of
expression, 284-295 ; last
play, 296 ; parting words,
298-299. See Critics and
Plays.

Shakespeare'' 8 Sonnets, Never
before Imprinted (1609),
112-123.

Southampton, Earl of, 73.

Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 139.

St. George (rustic play), 125.

Stopes, Mrs., 42.

Stratford, 38, 64, 77-8 ; dra
matic opportunities of, 125-
127.

Suckling, Sir John, 2.

Surrey, Earl of, 104. .

Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 139.
Taming of a Shrew, The, 145-

46 ; by whom written,

147-8, 151.
Taming of the Shrew, The,

40, 69, 107, 145, 206.
Tarlton, Richard, 131-2.
Tempest, The, 71, 74, 100,

275, 276, 282-3, 296.

, Thorpe, Thomas, 114, 115,

118.
Timon of Athens, 97, 148-9,

152, 252, 279.
Titus Andronicus, 111, 143,

166.
Tragedies (Shakespeare's),

criticism on, 255-274, 277-

279.
Troilus and Cressida, 32 ;

style of, 153; 171, 174,226,

265.
Twelve Labours of Hercules,

The, 138.

Twelfth Night, 69, 75 ; deri
vation of, 89; 132,133,162,

180-1, 210, 211, 256.
Two Gentlemen of Verona,

The, 48, 180, 229, 291.
Two Noble Kinsmen,' The

(Fletcher), 280.

U

University Wits, 105, 137,

142.

V
Venus and Adonis, 46, 51 ;

success of, 73 ; 106-12.

W

Ward, John, 29, 58, 77.
Whetstone, George, 98, 196.
Winter's Tale, The, 56 ; basis

of plot, 87, 89, 171, 181,

186, 275, 290.
Women in Shakespeare's

plays, 42, 109, 178-9, 201-2.

205-6, 221-6, 229-238, 271-

4 ; none on public stage,

157.
Wordsworth, 111.

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