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WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
WILLIAM
SHAKBSPEAEE
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
GEORGE BRANDES
U / /
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1898
[All rights reserved]
THIS Work is published in Copenhagen in
Three Volumes, represented by the Three
Books of this translation. The First Book
and half of the Second are translated by
Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER ; the last half of the
Second Book by Mr. ARCHER, assisted by
Miss MARY MORISON ; the Third Book by
Miss DIANA WHITE, also with the assistance
of Miss MORISON. The proofs of the whole
Work have been revised by Dr. BRANDES
himself. The Index has been prepared by
Miss BEATRICE M. JACKSON.
PR
i/.
CONTENTS
BOOK
CHAP. PAGE
XI. HAMLET : ITS ANTECEDENTS IN FICTION, HISTORY, AND
DRAMA I
XII. HAMLET— MONTAIGNE AND GIORDANO BRUNO— TRAITS OF
DANISH MANNERS IO
XIII. THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN HAMLET 25
XIV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET 31
XV. HAMLET AS A DRAMA 40
XVI. HAMLET AND OPHELIA 47
xvii. HAMLET'S INFLUENCE ON LATER TIMES . . . . 51
XVIII. HAMLET AS A CRITIC . . . . . . . -55
xix. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL — ATTACKS ON PURITANISM . 60
XX. MEASURE FOR MEASURE 70
XXI. ACCESSION OF JAMES AND ANNE— RALEIGH'S FATE— SHAKE
SPEARE'S COMPANY BECOME HIS MAJESTY'S SERVANTS —
SCOTCH INFLUENCE 8 1
XXII. MACBETH— MACBETH AND HAMLET— DIFFICULTIES ARISING
FROM THE STATE OF THE TEXT 93
XXIII. OTHELLO— THE CHARACTER AND SIGNIFICANCE OF IAGO . 108
XXIV. OTHELLO — THE THEME AND ITS TREATMENT — A MONO
GRAPH IN THE GREAT STYLE 113
XXV. KING LEAR— THE FEELING UNDERLYING IT— THE CHRONICLE
—SIDNEY'S ARCADIA AND THE OLD PLAY . . .129
XXVI. KING LEAR— THE TRAGEDY OF A WORLD-CATASTROPHE . 134
vi CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
XXVII. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA— WHAT ATTRACTED SHAKESPEARE
TO THE SUBJECT. . I42
XXVIII. THE DARK LADY AS A MODEL— THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
A WORLD-CATASTROPHE 152
BOOK THIRD
I. DISCORD AND SCORN . 160
II. THE COURT— THE KING'S FAVOURITES AND RALEIGH . .163
III. THE KING'S THEOLOGY AND IMPECUNIOSITY — HIS DISPUTES
WITH THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 167
IV. THE CUSTOMS OF THE COURT 173
V. ARABELLA STUART AND WILLIAM SEYMOUR . . . .176
VI. ROCHESTER AND LADY ESSEX 179
VII. CONTEMPT OF WOMEN— TROILUS AND CRESSIDA . . .189
VIII. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA— THE HISTORICAL MATERIAL . . 198
IX. SHAKESPEARE AND CHAPMAN — SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER . 203
X. SCORN OF WOMAN'S GUILE AND PUBLIC STUPIDITY . .21$
XI. DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE'S MOTHER — CORIOLANUS— HATRED
OF THE MASSES 227
XII. CORIOLANUS AS A DRAMA 249
XIII. TIMON OF ATHENS— HATRED OF MANKIND .... 254
XIV. CONVALESCENCE — TRANSFORMATION — THE NEW TYPE. . 271
XV. PERICLES— COLLABORATION WITH WILKINS AND ROWLEY-
SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE .... -275
XVI. FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER .... 296
XVII. SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER — THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
AND HENRY VIII. . .... 310
XVIII. CYMBELINE — THE THEME— THE POINT OF DEPARTURE —
THE MORAL — THE IDYLL — IMOGEN — SHAKESPEARE AND
GOETHE- SHAKESPEARE AND CALDERON . -321
CONTENTS vii
CHAP. PACK
xix. WINTER'S TALE— AN EPIC TURN— CHILDLIKE FORMS— THE
PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY — SHAKESPEARE'S AESTHETIC
CONFESSION OF FAITH 346
XX. THE TEMPEST — WRITTEN FOR THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH'S
WEDDING . . . .361
XXI. SOURCES OF THE TEMPEST 37<D
XXII. THE TEMPEST AS A PLAY— SHAKESPEARE AND PROSPERO —
FAREWELL TO ART 377 \/
XXIII. THE RIDE TO STRATFORD . 389
XXIV. STRATFORD-UPON-AVON 393
XXV. THE LAST YEARS OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE . • • 398
xxvi. SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH . ... 405
XXVII. CONCLUSION 41*
INDEX 4U
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
BOOK SECOND— (Continued)
XI
HAMLET: ITS ANTECEDENTS IN FICTION, HISTORY,
AND DRAMA
MANY and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare's mind
in the year 1601. In its early months Essex and Southampton
were condemned. At exactly the same time there occurs the crisis
in the relations of Pembroke and Shakespeare with the Dark Lady.
Finally, in the early autumn, Shakespeare suffered a loss which
he must have felt deeply. The Stratford register of burials for
1 60 1 contains this line —
Septemb. 8. Mr. Johannes Shakespeare.
He lost his father, his earliest friend and guardian, whose
honour and reputation lay so near to his heart. The father pro
bably lived with his son's family in the handsome New Place,
which Shakespeare had bought four years before. He had
doubtless brought up the two girls Susannah and Judith ; he had
doubtless sat by the death-bed of the little Hamnet. Now he
was no more. All the years of his youth, spent at his father's
side, revived in Shakespeare's mind, memories flocked in upon
him, the fundamental relation between son and father pre
occupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love
and filial reverence.
VOL. II. A
2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In the same year Hamlet began to take shape in Shakespeare's
imagination.
Hamlet has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown.
Of all Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on
the largest scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are
for ever busied in Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia
and Africa, wherever European culture has made its way; and
this one never existed, at any rate in the form in which he has
become known to the world. Denmark has produced several
men of note — Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans Christian
Andersen — but none of them has attained a hundredth part of
Hamlet's fame. The Hamlet literature is comparable in extent
to the literature of one of the smaller European peoples — the
Slovaks, for instance.
As it is interesting to follow with the eye the process by which
a block of marble slowly assumes human form, so it is interest
ing to observe how the Hamlet theme gradually acquires its
Shakespearian character.
The legend first appears in Saxo Grammaticus. Fengo mur
ders his brave brother Horvendil, and marries his widow Gerutha
(Gertrude). Horvendil's son, Amleth, determines to disarm
Fengo's malevolence by feigning madness. In order to test
whether he is really mad, a beautiful girl is thrown in his way,
who is to note whether, in his passion for her, he still maintains
the appearance of madness. But a foster-brother and friend of
Amleth's reveals the plot to him ; the girl, too, has an old affec
tion for him ; and nothing is discovered. Here lie the germs of
Ophelia and Horatio.
With regard to Amleth's mad talk, it is explained that, having
a conscientious objection to lying, he so contorted his sayings
that, though he always said what he meant, people could not
discover whether he meant what he said, or himself understood
it — an account of the matter which applies quite as well to the
dark sayings of the Shakespearian Hamlet as to the nai've riddling
of the Jutish Amleth.
Polonius, too, is here already indicated — especially the scene
in which he plays eavesdropper to Hamlet's conversation with
his mother. One of the King's friends (pr&sumtwne quam solertia
abundantior) proposes that some one shall conceal himself in the
Queen's chamber. Amleth runs his sword through him and
THE AMLETH OF SAXO GRAMMATICUS 3
throws the dismembered body to the pigs, as Hamlet in the
play drags the body out with him. Then ensues Amleth's speech
of reproach to his mother, of which not a little is retained even
in Shakespeare : —
"Think'st thou, woman, that these hypocritical tears can cleanse
thee of shame, thee, who like a wanton hast cast thyself into the arms
of the vilest of nithings, hast incestuously embraced thy husband's
murderer, and basely flatterest and fawnest upon the man who has
made thy son fatherless ! What manner of creature doest thou resemble ?
Not a woman, but a dumb beast who couples at random."
Fengo resolves to send Amleth to meet his death in England,
and despatches him thither with two attendants, to whom Shake
speare, as we know, has given the names of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern — the names of two Danish noblemen whose signa
tures have been found in close juxtaposition (with the date
1577) in an album which probably belonged to a Duke of Wiir-
temberg. They were colleagues in the Council of Regency
during the minority of Christian IV. These attendants (according
to Saxo) had rune-staves with them, on which Amleth altered
the runes, as in the play he re-writes the letters.
One more little touch is, as it were, led up to in Saxo : the
exchange of the swords. Amleth, on his return, finds the King's
men assembled at his own funeral feast. He goes around with
a drawn sword, and on trying its edge against his nails he once
or twice cuts himself with it. Therefore they nail his sword fast
into its sheath. When Amleth has set fire to the hall and rushes
into Fengo's chamber to murder him, he takes the King's sword
from its hook and replaces it with his own, which the King in
vain attempts to draw before he dies.
Now that Hamlet, more than any other Dane, has made the
name of his fatherland world-famous, it impresses us strangely
to read this utterance of Saxo's : " Imperishable shall be the
memory of the steadfast youth who armed himself against false
hood with folly, and with it marvellously cloaked the splendour
of heaven-radiant wisdom. . . . He left history in doubt as to
whether his heroism or his wisdom was the greater."
The Hamlet of the tragedy, with reference to his mother's too
hasty marriage, says, " Frailty, thy name is woman ! " Saxo re
marked with reference to Amleth's widow, who was in too great
4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
a hurry to marry again : " Thus it is with all the promises of
women : they are scattered like chaff before the wind and pass
away like waves of the sea. Who then will trust to a woman's
heart, which changes as flowers shed their leaves, as seasons
change, and as new events wipe out the traces of those that went
before ? "
In Saxo's eyes, Amleth represented not only wisdom, but
bodily strength. While the Hamlet of Shakespeare expressly
emphasises the fact that he is anything but Herculean (" My
father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules "),
Saxo expressly compares his hero to the Club-Bearer whose
name is a synonym for strength: "And the fame of men shall
tell of him that, if it had been given him to live his life fortunately
to the end, his excellent dispositions would have displayed them
selves in deeds greater than those of1 Hercules, and would have
adorned his brows with the demigod's wreath." It sounds almost
as though Shakespeare's Hamlet entered a protest against these
words of Saxo.
In the year 1559 the legend was reproduced in French in
Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, and seems in this form to
have reached England, where it furnished material for the older
Hamlet drama, now lost, but to which we find frequent allusions.
It cannot be proved that this • play was founded upon Pavier's
English translation of Belleforest, or even that Shakespeare had
Pavier before him ; for the oldest edition of the translation which
has come down to us (reprinted in Collier's Shakespeare's Library,
ed. 1875, Ft- I- v°l- "• P- 224) dates from 1608, and contains
certain details (such as the eavesdropper's concealment behind the
arras, and Hamlet's exclamation of "A rat! a rat ! " before he
kills Polonius) of which there is no trace in Belleforest, and which
may quite as well have been taken from Shakespeare's tragedy,
as borrowed by him from an unknown older edition of the novel.
The earliest known allusion to the old Hamlet drama is the
phrase of Thomas Nash, dating from 1589, quoted above (vol. i.
p. 109). In 1594 the Lord Chamberlain's men (Shakespeare's
company), acting together with the Lord Admiral's men at the
Newington Butts theatre under the management of Henslow and
others, performed a Hamlet with reference to which Henslow
notes in his account-book for June 9th : " Rd. at hamlet . . .
viii s." This play must have been the old one, for Henslow would
FIRST APPEARANCE OF "HAMLET" 5
otherwise have added the letters ne (new), and the receipts would
have been much greater. His share, as we see, was only eight
shillings, whereas it was sometimes as much as nine pounds.
The chief interest of this older play seems to have centred in
a figure added by the dramatist — the Ghost of the murdered
King, which cried " Hamlet, revenge ! " This cry is frequently
quoted. It first appears in 1 596 in Thomas Lodge's Wits Miserie,
where it is said of the author that he " looks as pale as the visard
of ye ghost, which cried so miserably at ye theater like an oister-
wife, Hamlet, revenge" It next occurs in Dekker's Satiro-
mastix, 1602, where Tucca says, " My name's Hamlet, revenge!"
In 1605 we find it in Thomas Smith's Voiage and Enter tainement
in Rushia ; and it is last found in 1620 in Samuel Rowland's
Night Raven, where, however, it seems to be an inaccurate quota
tion from the Hamlet we know.
Shakespeare's play was entered in the Stationers' Register
on the 26th of July 1602, under the title "A booke called ' the
Revenge of Hamlett Prince [<?/] Denmarke ' as yt was latelie
Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantesT
That it made an instant success on the stage is almost proved
by the fact that so early as the /th of July the opposition manager
Henslow pays Chettle twenty shillings for " The Danish Tragedy,"
evidently a furbishing up of the old play.
The publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet, however, did not
take place till 1603. Then appeared the First Quarto, indubitably
a pirated edition, either founded entirely on shorthand notes, or
on shorthand notes eked out by aid of the actors' parts, and com
pleted, in certain passages, from memory. Although this edition
certainly contains a debased and corrupt text, it is impossible to
attribute to the misunderstandings or oversights of a copyist or
stenographer all its divergences from the carefully-printed quarto
of the following year, which is practically identical with the First
Folio text. The differences are so great as to exclude such a
theory. We have evidently before us Shakespeare's first sketch
of the play, although in a very defective form; and, as far as
we can see, this first sketch keeps considerably closer than the
definitive text to the old Hamlet drama, on which Shakespeare
based his play. Here and there, though with considerable un
certainty, we can even trace scenes from the old play among
Shakespeare's, and touches of its style mingling with his. It is
6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
very significant, also, that there are more rhymes in the First than
in the Second Quarto.
The most remarkable feature in the 1603 edition is a scene
between Horatio and the Queen in which he tells her of the
King's frustrated scheme for having Hamlet murdered in England.
The object of this scene is to absolve the Queen from complicity
in the King's crime; a purpose which can also be traced in
other passages of this first edition, and which seems to be a
survival from the older drama. So far as we can gather, Horatio
appears to have played an altogether more prominent part in the
old play; Hamlet's madness appears to have been wilder; and
Polonius probably bore the name of Corambis, which is prefixed
to his speeches in the edition of 1603. Finally, as we have
seen, Shakespeare took the important character of the Ghost,
not indicated in either the legend or the novel, from this earlier
Hamlet tragedy. The theory that it is the original of the German
tragedy, Der bestrafte Btudermord, published by Cohn, from a
manuscript of 1710, is unsupported by evidence.
Looking backward through the dramatic literature of England,
we find that the author of the old Hamlet drama in all probability
sought inspiration in his turn in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. It
appears from allusions in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and Bar
tholomew Fair that this play must have been written about 1584.
It was one of the most popular plays of its day with the theatre-
going public. So late as 1632, Prynne in his Histriomastix
speaks of a woman who, on her death-bed, instead of seeking the
consolations of religion, cried out : " Hieronimo, Hieronimo ! O
let me see Hieronimo acted ! "
The tragedy opens, after the fashion of its models in Seneca,
with the apparition of the murdered man's ghost, and his demand
for vengeance. Thus the Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet is
lineally descended from the spirit of Tantalus in Seneca's 77tyestest
and from the spirit of Thyestes in Seneca's Agamemnon. Hiero
nimo, who has been driven mad by sorrow for the loss of his son,
speaking to the villain of the piece, gives half-ironical, half-crazy
expression to the anguish that is torturing him : —
" Lorenzo. Why so, Hieronimo ? use me.
Hieronimo. Who ? you my lord ?
I reserve your favour for a greater honour :
This is a very toy, my lord, a toy.
KYD'S ''SPANISH TRAGEDY" 7
Lor. All's one, Hieronimo, acquaint me with it.
J-Jier. I' faith, my lord, 'tis an idle thing . . .
The murder of a son, or so —
A thing of nothing, my lord ! "
These phrases foreshadow Hamlet's speeches to the King.
But Hieronimo is really mad, although he speaks of his madness
much as Hamlet does, or rather denies it point-blank —
" Villain, thou liest, and thou dost naught
But tell me I am mad : thou liest, I am not mad.
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques ;
I'll prove it to thee ; and were I mad, how could I ? "
Here and there, especially in Ben Jonson's additions, we come
across speeches which lie very close to passages in Hamlet. A
painter, who also has lost his son, says to Hieronimo : "Ay, sir,
no man did hold a son so dear ; " whereupon he answers —
" What, not as thine ? That is a lie,
As massy as the earth : I had a son,
Whose least unvalued hair did weigh
A thousand of thy sons ; and he was murdered."
Thus Hamlet cries to Laertes : —
" I lov'd Ophelia : forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum."
Hieronimo, like Hamlet, again and again postpones his ven
geance : —
" All times fit not for revenge.
Thus, therefore, will I rest me in unrest,
Dissembling quiet in unquietness :
Not seeming that I know their villainies,
That my simplicity may make them think
That ignorantly I will let all slip."
At last he determines to have a play acted, as a means to his
revenge. The play is Kyd's own Solyman and Perseda, and in
the course of it the guilty personages, who play the chief parts,
are slaughtered, not in make-believe, but in reality.
Crude and nai've though everything still is in The Spanish
Tragedy, which resembles Titus Andronicus in style rather than
8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
any other of Shakespeare's works, it evidently, through the
medium of the earlier Hamlet play, contributed a good deal to the
foundations of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Before going more deeply into the contents of this great
work, and especially before trying to bring it into relation to
Shakespeare's personality, we have yet to see what suggestions
or impulses the poet may have found in contemporary history.
We have already remarked upon the impression which the
Essex family tragedy must have made upon Shakespeare in his
early youth, before he had even left Stratford. All England was
talking of the scandal : how the Earl of Leicester, who was
commonly suspected of having had Lord Essex poisoned, im
mediately after his death had married his widow, Lady Lettice,
whose lover no one doubted that he had been during her hus
band's lifetime. There is much in the character of King
Claudius to suggest that Shakespeare has here taken Leicester as
his model. The two have in common ambition, sensuality, an
ingratiating conciliatory manner, astute dissimulation, and com
plete unscrupulousness. On the other hand, it is quite unreason
able to suppose, with Hermann Conrad,1 that Shakespeare had
Essex in his eye in drawing Hamlet himself.
Almost as near to Shakespeare's own day as the Essex-
Leicester catastrophe had been the similar events in the Royal
Family of Scotland. Mary Stuart's second husband, Lord
Darnley, who bore the title of King of Scotland, had been
murdered in 1567 by her lover, the daring and unscrupulous
Bothwell, whom the Queen almost immediately afterwards mar
ried. Her contemporaries had no doubt whatever of Mary's
complicity in the assassination, and her son James saw in his
mother and his stepfather his father's murderers. The leaders
of the Scottish rebellion displayed before the captive Queen a
banner bearing a representation of Darnley's corpse, with her
son kneeling beside it and calling to Heaven for vengeance.
Darnley, like the murdered King in Hamlet, was an unusually
handsome, Bothwell an unusually repulsive, man.
James was brought up by his mother's enemies, and during
her lifetime, and after her death, was perpetually wavering be
tween her adherents, who had defended her legal rights, and her
adversaries, who had driven her from the country and placed
1 Prettss. Jahrbiicher, February 1895.
CONTEMPORARY PARALLELS 9
James himself upon the throne. He made one or two efforts,
indeed, to soften Elizabeth's feelings towards his mother, but
refrained from all attempt to avenge her death. His character
was irresolute. He was learned and — what Hamlet is very far
from being — a superstitious pedant ; but, like Hamlet, he was a
lover of the arts and sciences, and was especially interested in
the art of acting. Between 1599 and 1601 he entertained in
Scotland a portion of the company to which Shakespeare be
longed; but it is uncertain whether Shakespeare himself ever
visited Scotland. There is little doubt, on the other hand, that
when, after Elizabeth's death in 1603, James made his entrance
into London, Shakespeare, richly habited in a uniform of red
cloth, walked in his train along with Burbage and a few others of
the leading players. Their company was henceforth known as
" His Majesty's Servants."
Although there is in all this no lack of parallels to Hamlet's
circumstances, it is, of course, as ridiculous to take James as to
take Essex for the actual model of Hamlet. Nothing could at
that time have been stupider or more tactless than to remind the
heir-presumptive to the throne, or the new King, of the deplorable
circumstances of his early history. This does not exclude the
supposition, however, that contemporary history supplied Shake
speare with certain outward elements, which, in the moment of
conception, contributed to the picture bodied forth by the creative
energy of his genius.
From this point of view, too, we must regard the piles of
material which well-meaning students bring to light, in the artless
•belief that they have discovered the very stones of which Shake
speare constructed his dramatic edifice. People do not distinguish
between the possibility that the poet may have unconsciously
received a suggestion here and there for details of his work, and
the theory that he deliberately intended an imaginative reproduc
tion of definite historic events. No work of imagination assuredly,
and least of all such a work as Hamlet, comes into existence in
the way these theorists assume. It springs from within, has its
origin in an overmastering sensation in the poet's soul, and then,
in the process of growth, assimilates certain impressions from
without.
XII.
"HAMLET"— MONTAIGNE AND GIORDANO BRUNO-
TRAITS OF DANISH MANNERS
ALONG with motives from novel, drama, and history, impressions
of a philosophical and quasi-scientific order went to the making
of Hamlet. Of all Shakespeare's plays, this is the profoundest
and most contemplative; a philosophic atmosphere breathes around
it. Naturally enough, then, criticism has set about inquiring to
what influences we may ascribe these breedings over life and
death and the mysteries of existence.
Several students, such as Tschischwitz and Konig, have tried
to make out that Giordano Bruno exercised a preponderating
influence upon Shakespeare.1 Passages suggesting a cycle in
nature, such as Hamlet's satirical outburst to the King about
the dead Polonius (iv. 3), have directed their thoughts to the
Italian philosopher. In some cases they have found or imagined
a definite identity between sayings of Hamlet's and of Bruno's —
for instance, on determinism. Bruno has a passage in which
he emphasises the necessity by which everything is brought
about : " Whatever may be my preordained eventide, when the
change shall take place, I await the day, I, who dwell in the
night ; but they await the night who dwell in the daylight. All
that is, is either here or there, near or far off, now or after, soon
or late." In the same spirit Hamlet says (v. 2): " There is
a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis
not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be not now,
yet it will come: the readiness is all." Bruno says: "Nothing
is absolutely imperfect or evil; it only seems so in relation to
something else, and what is bad for one is good for another." In
Hamlet (ii. 2), " There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so."
1 Tschischwitz : Shakespeare- For schnngen ; Konig : Shakespea> e-Jahrbuch, xi.
GIORDANO BRUNO n
When once attention had been directed to Giordano Bruno,
not only his philosophical and more popular writings, but even
his plays were ransacked in search of passages that might have
influenced Shakespeare. Certain parallels and points of re
semblance were indeed discovered, very slight and trivial in
themselves, but which theorists would not believe to be for
tuitous, since it was known that Giordano Bruno had passed
some time in England in Shakespeare's day, and had frequented
the society of the most distinguished men. As soon as the matter
was closely investigated, however, the probability of any direct
influence vanished almost to nothing.
Giordano Bruno remained on English ground from 1 5 83 to 1 5 8 5 .
Coming from France, where he had instructed Henri III. in the
Lullian art, a mechanical, mnemotechnic method for the solution
of all possible scientific problems, he brought with him a letter of
recommendation to Mauvissiere, the French Ambassador, in whose
house he was received as a friend of the family during the whole
of his stay in London. He made the acquaintance of many lead
ing men of the time, such as Walsingham, Leicester, Burghley,
Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle, but soon went on to
Oxford in order to lecture there and disseminate the doctrines
which lay nearest his heart. These were the Copernican system
in opposition to the Ptolemaic, which still held the field at Oxford,
and the theory that the same principle of life is diffused through
everything — atoms and organisms, plants, animals, human beings,
and the universe at large. He quarrelled with the Oxford
scholars, and held them up to ridicule and contempt in his dialogue
La Cena de le Ceneri, published soon after, in which he speaks in
the most disparaging terms of the coarseness of English manners.
The dirtiness of the London streets, for example, and the habit of
letting one goblet go round the table, from which every one drank,
aroused his dislike and scorn scarcely less than the rejection of
Copernicus by the pedants of the University.
At the very earliest, Shakespeare cannot have come to London
until the year of Bruno's departure from England, and can
therefore scarcely have met him. The philosopher exercised no
influence upon the spiritual life of the day in England. Not even
Sir Philip Sidney was attracted by his doctrine, and his name
does not once occur in Greville's Life of Sidney, although Gre-
ville had seen much of Bruno. Brunnhofer, who has studied
12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the question, points out, as showing how little trace Bruno left
behind him in England, that there is not in the Bodleian a single
contemporary manuscript or document of any kind which throws
the least light upon Bruno's stay in London or Oxford.1 It has
been maintained, nevertheless, that Shakespeare must have read
his philosophic writings in Italian. It is, of course, possible ;
but there is nothing in Hamlet to prove it — nothing that cannot
be fully accounted for without assuming that he had the slightest
acquaintance with them.
The only expression in Shakespeare which, probably by acci
dent, has an entirely pantheistic ring is " The prophetic soul of
the wide world " in Sonnet cvii. ; the only passages containing an
idea, not certainly identical, but comparable with Bruno's doctrine
of the metamorphosis of natural forms are the cyclical Sonnets lix.,
cvi., cxxiii. If Giordano Bruno really had anything to do with
these passages, it must be because Shakespeare had heard some
talk about the great Italian's doctrine, which may just at that time
have been recalled to the recollection of his English acquaintances
by his death at the stake in Rome, on February 17, 1600. If
Shakespeare had studied his writings, he would, among other
things, have obtained some glimmering of the Copernican system,
of which he knows nothing. On the other hand, it is quite
conceivable that he may have picked up in conversation an
approximate and incomplete conception of Bruno's philosophy,
and that this conception may have given birth to the above-men
tioned philosophical reveries. All the passages in Hamlet which
have been attributed to the influence of Bruno really stand in
much closer relation to writers under whose literary and philo
sophical influence we know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare fell.
There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio's
translation of Montaigne's Essays, folio, London, 1603, with
Shakespeare's name written on the fly-leaf. The signature is,
I believe, a forgery ; but that Shakespeare had read Montaigne
is clear beyond all doubt.
There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Mon
taigne's Essays on English readers of that date. It was only
natural that the book should vividly impress the greatest men of
the age; for there were not at that time many such books as
Montaigne's — none, perhaps, containing so living a revelation,
1 Brunnhofer : Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung iind Verhangniss.
SHAKESPEARE, BRUNO, AND MONTAIGNE 13
not merely of an author, but of a human being, natural, many-
sided, full of ability, rich in contradictions.
Outside of Hamlet, we trace Montaigne quite clearly in one
passage in Shakespeare, who must have had the Essays lying
on his table while he was writing The Tempest. Gonzalo says
(ii. i)-
" I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ;
Letters should not be known ; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none ; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none ;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil :
No occupation, all men idle, all ;
And women too."
We find this speech almost word for word in Montaigne
(Book i. chap. 30) : " It is a nation that hath no kind of traffike,
no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of
magistrate, nor of politike superioritie ; no vse of service, of riches
or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no
occupation but idle ... no manuring of lands, no vse of wine,
corn or metal."
Since it is thus proved beyond a doubt that Shakespeare was
acquainted with Montaigne's Essays, it is not improbable that
the resemblance between passages in that book and passages in
Hamlet are due to something more than chance. When such
passages occur in the First Quarto (1603), we must assume either
that Shakespeare knew the French original, or that — as is likely
enough — he may have had an opportunity of reading Florio's
translation before it was published. It happened not infrequently
in those days that a book was handed round in manuscript among
the author's private friends five or six years before it was given
to the public. Florio's close connection with the household of
Southampton renders it almost certain that Shakespeare must
have been acquainted with him ; and his translation had been
entered in the Stationers' Register as ready for publication so
early as 1599.
Florio was born in 1545, of Italian parents, who, as Wal-
denses, had been forced to leave their country. He had become
to all intents and purposes an Englishman, had studied and given
I4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
lessons in Italian at Oxford, had been some years in the service
of the Earl of Southampton, and was married to a sister of the
poet Samuel Daniel. He dedicated each separate book of his
translation of Montaigne to two noble ladies. Among them we
find Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Sidney's daughter; Lady
Penelope Rich, Essex's sister; and Lady Elizabeth Grey, re
nowned for her beauty and learning. Each of these ladies was
celebrated in a sonnet.
Every one remembers those incomparably-worded passages in
Hamlet where the great brooder over life and death has expressed,
in terms at once harsh and moving, his sense of the ruthlessness
of the destructive forces of Nature, or what might be called the
cynicism of the order of things. Take for instance the following
(v.i):-
" Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till
he find it stopping a bung-hole ? ... As thus : Alexander died, Alex
ander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust 3 the dust is earth ; of
earth we make loam ; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted,
might they not stop a beer-barrel ?
Imperious Caesar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away :
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw ! "
Hamlet's grisly jest upon the worms who are eating Polonius
is a variation on the same theme (iv. 3) : —
" Ham. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king ;
and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
"King. What dost thou mean by this?
" Ham. Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a progress
through the guts of a beggar."
An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the
influence of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has
strikingly demonstrated,1 this theory assumes that Bruno's doc
trine was an atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pan
theism, a perpetual insistence upon the unity of God and Nature.
The very atoms, in Bruno, partake of spirit and life; it is not
their mechanical conjunction that produces life ; no, they are
1 Giordano Bruno imd Shakespeare, Oldenburg, 1889, p. 26.
SHAKESPEARE, BRUNO, AND MONTAIGNE 15
monads. While cynicism is the keynote of these utterances of
Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno's. Three passages
from Bruno's writings (De la Causa and La Cena de le Ceneri)
have been cited as coinciding with Hamlet's words as to the
transformations of matter. But in the first Bruno is speaking of
the transformation of natural forms, and of the emanation of all
forms from the universal soul ; in the second, he is insisting that
in all compound bodies there live numerous individuals who
remain immortal after the dissolution of the bodies ; in the third,
he treats of the globe as a vast organism, which, just like animals
and men, is renewed by the transformation of matter. The whole
resemblance, then, between these passages and Hamlet's bitter
outburst is that they treat of transformations of form and matter
in Nature. In spirit they are radically different. Bruno main
tains that even what seems to belong entirely to the world of
matter is permeated with soul ; Hamlet, on the contrary, asserts
the wretchedness and transitoriness of human existence.1
But precisely in these points Hamlet comes very near to
Montaigne, who has many expressions like those above quoted,
and speaks of Sulla very much as Hamlet speaks of Alexander
and Caesar.
On a close comparison of Shakespeare's expressions with
Montaigne's, their similarity is very striking. Hamlet, for example,
says that Polonius is at supper, not where he eats but where he
is eaten. " A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
Your worm is your only emperor for diet : we fat all creatures
else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots : your fat king,
and your lean beggar, is but variable service ; two dishes, but to
one table : that's the end."
Compare Montaigne, Book ii. chap. 12 : —
1 A comic analogy to Bruno's doctrine may be found in the following lines of Hot
spur's (Henry IV., Pt. I. iii. l) : —
"Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions : oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb ; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam Earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers."
But no one will seriously attribute this passage to the philosophical influence of
Giordano Bruno. Hotspur was quite capable of hitting upon this image without any
suggestion from Nola or Naples.
1 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" He [man] need not a Whale, an Elephant, nor a Crocodile, nor
any such other wilde beast, of which one alone is of power to defeat
a great number of men : seely lice are able to make Silla give over his
Dictatorship : The heart and life of a mighty and triumphant Emperor,
is but the break-fast of a seely little Worm."
We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace to
Bruno Hamlet's utterance as to the relativity of all concepts.
In reality it may rather be traced to Montaigne. Hamlet, having
remarked (ii. 2) that " Denmark is a prison/' Rosencrantz replies,
" We think not so, my lord;" whereupon Hamlet rejoins, " Why,
then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so."1 The passage in Montaigne is almost
identical (Book i. chap. 40) : —
"If that which we call evill and torment, be neither torment nor
evill, but that our fancie only gives it that qualitie, it is in us to
change it."
We have seen that an attempt has been made to trace Hamlet's
saying about death, " If it be now, 'tis not to come," &c. to Bruno's
words in the dedication of his Candelajo : " Tutto quel ch'e o e
qua o e la, o vicino o lunghi, o adessa o poi, o presso o tardi."
But the same course of thought which leads Hamlet to the con
clusion, " The readiness is all," is found, with the same conclusion,
in the nineteenth chapter of Montaigne's first book : " That to
Philosophic, is to learne how to die " — a chapter which has inspired
a great many of Hamlet's graveyard cogitations.2 Montaigne
says of death : —
"Let us not forget how many waies our joyes or our feastings be
subject unto death, and by how many hold-fasts shee threatens us and
them. ... It is uncertaine where death looks for us; let us expect
her everie where. ... I am ever prepared about that which I may
be. ... A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey. . , .
What matter is it when it commeth, since it is unavoidable ? "
Furthermore, we find striking points of resemblance between
the celebrated soliloquy, " To be or not to be," and the passage
1 This speech first occurs in the First Folio.
2 This was first pointed out (about 1860) by Otto Ludwig. See his Shakespeare-
Studten, p. 373. The relation between Shakespeare and Montaigne is dwelt upon
in an ill-arranged book by G. F. Stedefeld : Hamlet, ein Tendenz- Drama (1871).
SHAKESPEARE, BRUNO, AND MONTAIGNE 17
in Montaigne (Book iii. chap. 12) where he reproduces the sub
stance of Socrates' Apology. Socrates, as we know, suggests
several different possibilities : death is either an " amendment " of
our condition or the annihilation of our being; but even in the
latter case it is an "amendment" to enter upon a long and peaceful
night ; for there is nothing better in life than a deep, calm,
dreamless sleep. Shakespeare seems to have had no belief
in an actual amelioration of our condition at death ; Hamlet
does not even mention it as a possible contingency ; whereas
the poet makes him dwell upon the thought of an endless
sleep, and on the possibility of horrible dreams. Now and then
we seem to find traces in Hamlet of Plato's monologue, in the
vesture given to it by Montaigne. In the French text there is
mention of the joy of being free in another life from having to
do with unjust and corrupt judges; Hamlet speaks of freeing
himself from "The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con
tumely." Some lines added in the edition of 1604 remind us
forcibly of a passage in Florio's translation. Florio reproduces
Montaigne's " Si c'est un aneantissement de notre etre " by the
phrase, " If it be a consummation of one's being." Hamlet, using
a word which occurs in only two other places in Shakespeare,
says, "A consummation devoutly to be wished."
Many other small coincidences can be pointed out in the use
of names and turns of phrase, which do not, however, actually
prove anything. Where Montaigne is describing the anarchic con
dition of public affairs, his words are rendered in Florio by the
curiously poetic expression, " All is out of frame." This bears a
certain resemblance to the phrase which Hamlet, already in the
1603 edition, employs to describe the disorganisation which has
followed his father's death, "The time is out of joint." The coin
cidence may be fortuitous, but as one among many other points
of resemblance it supports the conjecture that Shakespeare had
read the translation before it was published.1
For the rest, Rush ton, in Shakespeare's Euphuism (1871), and
after him Beyersdorff, have pointed out not a few parallels to
Hamlet in Lily's Euphues, precisely at the points where critics
have sought to trace the much more improbable influence of Bruno.
Beyersdorff sometimes goes too far in trying to find in Euphues
1 Compare Jacob Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne, pp. 64-130. Beyersdorff,
Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare, p. 27 et seq.
VOL. II. B
1 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the origin of ideas which it would be an insult to suppose that
Shakespeare needed to borrow from such a source. But some
times there is a real analogy. It has been alleged that the King
must have borrowed from Bruno's philosophy the topics of con
solation whereby (i. 2) he seeks to convince Hamlet of the
unreasonableness of ''obstinate condolement" over his father's
death. As a matter of fact, the letter of Euphues to Ferardo on
his daughter's death contains precisely the same arguments : —
" Knowest thou not, Ferardo, that lyfe is the gifte of God, deathe
the due of Nature, as we receive the one as a benefitte, so must
we abide the other of necessitie," &c.
It has been suggested that where Hamlet (ii. 2) speaks of " the
satirical rogue " who, in the book he is reading, makes merry over
the decrepitude of old age, Shakespeare must have been alluding
to a passage in Bruno's Spaccio, where old men are described as
those who have " snow on their head and furrows in their brow."
But if we insist on identifying the "satirical rogue" with any
actual author (a quite unreasonable proceeding), Lily at once
presents himself as answering to the description. Again and
again in Euphues, where old men give good advice to the young,
they appear with " hoary haire and watry eyes." And Euphues
repulses, quite in the manner of Hamlet, an old gentleman whose
moralising he regards as nothing more than the envy of decrepit
age for lusty youth, and whose intellect seems to him as tottering
as his legs.
Finally, an attempt has been made to refer Hamlet's harsh
sayings to Ophelia, and his contemptuous utterances about
women in general (" Frailty, thy name is woman," &c.), to a
dialogue of Bruno's (De la Causa IV.) in which the pedant
Pollinnio appears as a woman-hater. But the resemblance seems
trifling enough when we find that in this case woman is attacked
in sound theological fashion as the source of original sin and the
cause of all our woe. Many expressions in Euphues lie infinitely
nearer to Hamlet's. " What means your lordship ? " Ophelia
asks (iii. i), and Hamlet replies, "That if you be honest and
fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty."
Compare in Euphues Ferardo's words to Lucilla : " For often
times thy mother woulde saye, that thou haddest more beautie
then was convenient for one that shoulde bee honeste," and
his exclamation, "O Lucilla, Lucilla, woulde thou wert lesse
SHAKESPEARE, BRUNO, AND MONTAIGNE 19
fayre ! " Again, Hamlet rails against women's weakness, crying,
"Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of
them ; " and we find in Euphues exactly similar outbursts : " I
perceive they be rather woe vnto men, by their falsehood, gelousie,
inconstancie. ... I see they will be corasiues (corrosives)."1
Beyersdorff, moreover, is no doubt right in suggesting that the
artificial style of Euphues is apparent in such speeches as this
of Hamlet's : " For the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can
translate beauty into his likeness."
In Hamlet and elsewhere in Shakespeare we come across traces
of a sort of atomistic-materialistic philosophy. In the last scene
of Julius Ccesar, Antony actually employs with regard to Brutus
the expression, "The elements so midd'm him." In Measure
for Measure (iii. i) the Duke says to Claudio —
"Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust."
Hamlet says (i. 2) —
" O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and dissolve itself into a dew ; "
and to Horatio (iii. 2) —
" Bless'd are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-minglgd"
It has already been pointed out how far this atomism, if we
can so regard it, differs from Bruno's idealistic monadism. But
in all probability we have here only the expressions of the domi
nant belief of Shakespeare's time, that all differences" of tempera
ment depended upon the mixture of the juices or "humours."
Shakespeare is on this point, as on many others, more popular
and less book-learned, more nai've and less metaphysical, than
book-learned commentators are willing to allow.
Writers like Montaigne and Lyly were no doubt constantly
in Shakespeare's hands while Hamlet was taking shape within
him. But it would be absurd to suppose that he consulted them
1 Beyersdorff, op. cif., p. 33. John Lyly, Evphves : The Anatomy of Wit, ed. Land-
tnann, pp. 72, 75.
20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
especially with Hamlet in view. He did consult authorities with
regard to Hamlet, but they were men, not books, and men, more
over, with whom he was in daily intercourse. Hamlet being a
Dane and his destiny being acted out in distant Denmark — a
name not yet so familiar in England as it was soon to be, when,
with the new King, a Danish princess came to the throne —
Shakespeare would naturally seize whatever opportunities lay in
his way of gathering intelligence as to the manners and customs
of this little-known country.
In the year 1585 a troupe of English players had appeared in
the courtyard of the Town-Hall of Elsinore. If we are justi
fied in assuming this troupe to have been the same which we
find in the following year established at the Danish Court, it
numbered among its members three persons who, at the time
when Shakespeare was turning over in his mind the idea of
Hamlet, belonged to his company of actors, and probably to his
most intimate circle : namely, William Kemp, George Bryan, and
Thomas Pope. The first of these, the celebrated clown, belonged
to Shakespeare's company from 1594 till March 1602, when he
went over for six months to Henslow's company ; the other two
also joined Shakespeare's company as early as 1594- It was
evidently from these comrades of his, and perhaps also from other
English actors who, under the management of Thomas Sackville,
had performed at Copenhagen in 1596 at the coronation of
Christian IV., that Shakespeare gathered information on several
matters relating to Denmark.
First and foremost, he picked up some Danish names, which
we find, indeed, mutilated by the printers in the different texts of
Hamlet, but which are easily recognisable. The Rossencraft of
the First Quarto has become Rosencraus in the second, and Rosin-
crane in the Folio ; it is clearly enough the name of the ancient
Danish family of Rosenkrans. Thus, too, we find in the three
editions the name Gilderstone, Guyldensterne, and Guildensterne,
in which we recognise the Danish Gylden stierne ; while the
names given to the ambassador, Voltemar, Voltemand, Valte-
mand, Voltumand, are so many corruptions of the Danish Valde-
mar. The name Gertrude, too, Shakespeare must have learned
from his comrades as a Danish name ; he has substituted it for
the Geruth of the novel. In the Second Quarto it is misprinted
Gertrad.
LOCAL COLOUR IN "HAMLET" 21
It is evidently in consequence of what he had learnt from
his comrades that Shakespeare has transferred the action of
Hamlet from Jutland to Elsinore, which they had visited and no
doubt described to him. That is how he comes to know of the
Castle at Elsinore (finished about a score of years earlier), though
he does not mention the name of Kronborg.
The scene in which Polonius listens behind the arras, and in
which Hamlet, in reproaching the Queen, points to the portraits
of the late and of the present King, has even been regarded as
proving that Shakespeare knew something of the interior of the
Castle. On the stage, Hamlet is often made to wear a miniature
portrait of his father round his neck, and to hold it up before
his mother; but the words of the play prove incontestably that
Shakespeare imagined life-sized pictures hanging on the wall.
Now we find a contemporary description of a "great chamber"
at Kronborg, written by an English traveller, in which occurs
this passage : " It is hanged with Tapistary of fresh coloured
silke without gold, wherein all the Danish kings are exprest in
antique habits, according to their severall times, with their armes
and inscriptions, containing all their conquests and victories."1
It is possible, then, though not very probable, that Shakespeare
may have heard of the arrangement of this room. When Polo
nius wanted to play the eavesdropper, it was a matter of course
that he should get behind the arras ; and it was easy to imagine
that portraits of the kings would hang on the walls of a royal
castle, without the least knowledge that this was actually the case
at Kronborg.
It is probable, on the other hand, that Shakespeare made
Hamlet study at Wittenberg because he knew that many Danes
went to this University, which, being Lutheran, was not frequented
by Englishmen. And it is quite certain that when, in the first
and fifth acts, he makes trumpet-blasts and the firing of cannon
accompany the healths which are drunk, he must have known
that this was a specially Danish custom, and have tried to give
his play local colour by introducing it. While Hamlet and his
friends (i. 4) are awaiting the appearance of the Ghost, trumpets
and cannon are heard " within." "What does this mean, my
lord ? " Horatio asks ; and Hamlet answers —
1 New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, p. 513. Compare Schiick, " Eng-
lische Komodianten in Skandinavien," Skandinavisclies Archiv.
22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels ;
And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge."
Similarly, in the last scene of the play, the King says —
" Give me the cups ;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,
' Now the king drinks to Hamlet ! ' "
Shakespeare must even have been eager to display his know
ledge of the intemperate habits of the Danes, and the strange
usages resulting therefrom, for, as Schiick has ingeniously re
marked, in order to bring in this piece of information, he has
made Horatio, himself a Dane, ask Hamlet whether it is the cus
tom of the country to celebrate every toast with this noise of
trumpets and of ordnance. In answer to this question Hamlet
speaks of the custom as though he were addressing a foreigner,
and makes the profound remark that a single blemish will often
mar a nation's good report, no less than an individual's, and that
its character
" Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault."
It is evident that Denmark " took corruption " from its drink
ing usages in the " censure " of the better sort of Englishmen.
In a notebook kept by " Maister William Segar, Garter King at
Armes," we read under the date July 14, 1603—
" That afternoone the King [of Denmark] went aboord the English
ship [which was lying off Elsinore], and had a banket prepared for him
vpon the vpper decks, which were hung with an Awning of cloaths of
Tissue ; every health reported sixe, eight, or ten shot of great Ordinance,
so that during the king's abode, the ship discharged 160 shot."
Of the same king's "solemne feast to the [English] embas-
sadour," Segar writes : —
" It were superfluous to tell you of all superfluities that were vsed ;
and it would make a man sick to heare of their drunken healths : vse
LOCAL COLOUR IN "HAMLET" 23
hath brought it into a fashion, and fashion made it a habit, which ill
beseemes our nation to imitate." l
The King here spoken of is Christian IV., then twenty-six
years of age. When he, three years afterwards, visited England,
it seems as though the Court, which had previously been very
sober, justified the fears of the worthy diarist by catching the
infection of Danish intemperance. Noble ladies as well as gentle
men took to over-indulgence in wine. The Rev. H. Harington,
in his Nugce Antiquce (edit. 1779, ii. 126), prints a letter from Sir
John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, giving a very humorous
description of the festivities in which the Danish King took part.
One day after dinner, he relates, " the representation of Solomon
his temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made."
But alas ! the lady who played the Queen, and who was to bring
" precious gifts to both their Majesties, forgetting the steppes
arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties
lap, and fell at his feet, though I rather think it was in his face.
Much was the hurry and confusion ; cloths and napkins were at
hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up, and would
dance with the Queen of Sheba ; but he fell down and humbled
himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber, and laid
on a bed of state ; which was not a little defiled with the presents
of the Queen which had been bestowed upon his garments ;
such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices and other good
matters." The entertainment proceeded, but most of the " pre
senters fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers."
Now there entered in gorgeous array Faith, Hope, and Charity.
Hope " did assay " to speak, but could not manage it, and with
drew, stammering excuses to the King ; Faith staggered after her ;
Charity alone succeeded in kneeling at the King's feet, and when
she returned to her sisters, she found them lying very sick in the
lower hall. Then Victory made her entrance in bright armour,
but did not triumph long, having to be led away a " silly captive "
and left to sleep upon the ante-chamber stairs. Last of all came
Peace, who "much contrary to her semblance, most rudely made
war with her olive branch upon " those who tried, from motives
of propriety, to get her out of the way.
Shakespeare, then, conceived intemperance in drinking, and
1 New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, p. 512.
24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
glorification of drunkenness as a polite and admirable accomplish
ment, to be a Danish national vice. It is clear enough, however,
that no more here than elsewhere was it his main purpose to
depict a foreign people. It was not national peculiarities that
interested him, but the characteristics common to humanity ; and
he did not need to search outside of England for the prototypes
of his Polonius, his Horatio, his Ophelia, and his Hamlet.
XIII
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN HAMLET
IN trying to bring together, as we have done, a mass of historical,
dramatic, and fictional material, fragments of philosophy, and
ethnographical details, which Shakespeare utilised during his work
upon Hamlet, or which may, without his knowing it, have hovered
in his memory, we do not, of course, mean to imply that the initial
impulse to the work came to him from without. The piecing
together of external impressions, as we have already remarked, has
never produced a work of immortal poetry. In approaching the
theme, Shakespeare obeyed a fundamental instinct in his nature ;
and as he worked it out, everything that stood in relation to it
rushed together in his mind. He might have said with Goethe :
" After long labour in piling up fuel and straw, I have often tried
in vain to warm myself . . . until at last the spark catches all
of a sudden, and the whole is wrapped in flame."
It is this flame which shines forth from Hamlet, shooting
up so high and glowing so red that to this day it fascinates all
eyes.
Hamlet assumes madness in order to lull the suspicions of
the man who has murdered his father and wrongfully usurped
his throne ; but under this mask of madness he gives evidence
of rare intelligence, deep feeling, peculiar subtlety, mordant satire,
exalted irony, and penetrating knowledge of human nature.
Here lay the point of attraction for Shakespeare. The in
direct form of expression had always allured him ; it was the
favourite method of his clowns and humourists. Touchstone
employs it, and it enters largely into the immortal wit of Falstaff.
We have seen how Jaques, in As You Like It, envied those
whose privilege it was to speak the truth under the disguise of
folly; we remember his sigh of longing for "as large a charter
as the wind to blow on whom he pleased." He it was who
25
26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
declared motley the only wear ; and in his melancholy and longing
Shakespeare disguised his own, exclaiming through his mouth—
"Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world."
In Hamlet Shakespeare put this motley coat on his own
shoulders ; he seized the opportunity of making Hamlet, in the
guise of apparent madness, speak sharp and bitter truths in a way
that would not soon be forgotten. The task was a grateful one ;
for earnestness cuts the deeper the more it sounds like jest or
triviality; and wisdom appears doubly wise when it is thrown out
lightly under the mask of folly, instead of pedantically asserting it
self as the fruit of reflection and experience. Difficult for any one
else, to Shakespeare the enterprise was merely alluring : it was,
in fact, to do what no other poet had as yet succeeded in doing —
to draw a genius. Shakespeare had not far to go for his model,
and genius would seem doubly effective when it wore the mask
of madness, now speaking through that mouthpiece, and again
unmasking itself in impassioned monologues.
It cost Shakespeare no effort to transform himself into Hamlet.
On the contrary, in giving expression to Hamlet's spiritual life
he was enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the
recent years had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He
could let this creation drink his inmost heart's blood ; he could
transfer to it the throbbing of his own pulses. Behind its fore
head he could hide his melancholy ; on its tongue he could lay
his wit; its eyes he could cause to glow and lighten with flashes
of his own spirit.
It is true that Hamlet's outward fortunes were different
enough from his. He had not lost his father by assassination ;
his mother had not degraded herself. But all these details were
only outward signs and symbols. He had lived through all of
Hamlet's experience — all. Hamlet's father had been murdered
and his place usurped by his brother ; that is to say, the being
whom he most reverenced and to whom he owed most had been
overpowered by malice and treachery, instantly forgotten and
shamelessly supplanted. How often had not Shakespeare himself
seen worthlessness strike greatness down and usurp its place !
Hamlet's mother had married her husband's murderer; in other
PERSONAL ELEMENT IN "HAMLET" 27
words, that which he had long honoured and loved and held
sacred, sacred as is a mother to her son, that on which he could
not endure to see any stain, had all of a sudden shown itself
impure, besmirched, frivolous, perhaps criminal. What a terrible
impression must it have made upon Shakespeare himself when
he first discovered the unworthiness of that which he had held
in highest reverence, and when he first saw and realised that
his ideal had fallen from its pedestal into the mire.
The experience which shook Hamlet's nature was no other
than that which every nobly-disposed youth, on first seeing the
world as it is, concentrates in the words : " Alas ! life is not what
I thought it was." The father's murder, the mother's possible
complicity, and her indecent haste in entering upon a new wed
lock, were only symptoms in the young man's eyes of the worth-
lessness of human nature and the injustice of life — only the
individual instances from which, by instinctive generalisation, he
inferred the dire disillusions and terrible possibilities of existence
— only the chance occasion for the sudden vanishing of that rosy
light in which everything had hitherto been steeped for him, and
in the absence of which the earth seemed to him a sterile promon
tory, and the heavens a pestilent congregation of vapours.
Just such a crisis, bringing with it the " loss of all his mirth,"
Shakespeare himself had recently undergone. He had lost in
the previous year the protectors of his youth. The woman he
loved, and to whom he had looked up as to a being of a rarer,
loftier order, had all of a sudden proved to be a heartless, faithless
wanton. The friend he loved, worshipped, and adored had con
spired against him with this woman, laughed at him in her arms,
betrayed his confidence, and treated him with coldness and dis
tance. Even the prospect of winning the poet's wreath had been
overcast for him. Truly he too had seen his illusions vanish
and his vision of the world fall to ruins.
In his first consternation he had been submissive, had stood
defenceless, had spoken words without a sting, had been all mild
ness and melancholy. But this was not his whole, nor his inmost,
nature. In his heart of hearts he knew himself a power — a
power ! He was incomparably armed, quick and keen of fence,
full of wit and indignation, the master of them all, and infinitely
greater than his fate. Burrow as they might, " it should go hard
but he would delve one yard below their mines." He had suffered
28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
many a humiliation ; but the revenge which was denied him in
real life he could now take incognito through Hamlet's bitter and
scathing invectives.
He had seen high-born gentlemen play a princely part in the
society of artists, players, men whom public opinion undervalued
and contemned. Now he himself would be the high-born gentle
man, would show how the truly princely spirit bore itself towards
the poor artists, and give utterance to his own thoughts about
art, and his conception of its value and significance.
He merged himself in Hamlet ; he felt as Hamlet did ; he
now and then so mingled their identities that, in placing his own
weightiest thoughts in Hamlet's mouth, as in the famous " To be
or not to be " soliloquy, he made him think, not as a prince, but
as a subject, with all the passionate bitterness of one who sees
brutality and stupidity lording it in high places. Thus it was
that he made Hamlet say—
" For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin ? "
Every one can see that this is felt and thought from below
upwards, not from above downwards, and that the words are
improbable, almost impossible, in the mouth of the Prince. But
they embody feelings and thoughts to which Shakespeare had
recently given expression in his own name in Sonnet Ixvi. : —
" Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry ;—
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill :
PERSONAL ELEMENT IN "HAMLET" 29
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."
The bright view of life which had prevailed in his youth
was overclouded ; he saw the strength of malignity, the power
of stupidity, unworthiness exalted, true desert elbowed aside.
Existence turned its seamy side towards him. Through what
experiences had he not come ! How often, in the year that had
just passed, must he have exclaimed, like Hamlet in his first
soliloquy, " Frailty, thy name is woman ! " and how much cause
had he had to say, " Let her not walk i' the sun : conception is
a blessing; but not as your daughter may conceive." So far had
it gone with him that, finding everything " weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable," he thought it monstrous that such an existence
should be handed on from generation to generation, and that ever
new hordes of miserable creatures should come into existence:
" Get thee to a nunnery ! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of
sinners ? "
The glimpse of high life which he had seen, his relations with
the Court, and the gossip from Whitehall and Greenwich which
circulated through the town, had proved to him the truth of the
couplet —
" Cog, lie, flatter, and face
Four ways in Court to win men grace."
Sheer criminals such as Leicester and Claudius flourished and
waxed fat at Court.
What did men do at Court but truckle to the great ? What
throve except wordy morality, mutual espionage, artificial wit,
double-tongued falsity, inveterate lack of principle, perpetual
hypocrisy ? What were these great ones but flatterers and lip-
servers, always ready to turn their coats according to the wind ?
And so Polonius and Osrick, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, took
shape in his imagination. They knew how to bow and cringe;
they were masters of elegant phrases ; they were members of the
great guild of time-servers. " To be honest as this world goes,
is to be one man picked out of ten thousand."
And the Danish Court was only a picture in little of all Den
mark — that Denmark in whose state there was something rotten,
and which was to Hamlet a prison. " Then is the world one ? "
says Rosencrantz ; and Hamlet does not recoil from the conclu-
30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sion : " A goodly one," he replies, "in which there are many con
fines, wards, and dungeons." The Court- world of Hamlet was
but an image of the world at large.
But if this is how matters stand, if a pure and princely nature
is thus placed in the world and thus surrounded, we are neces
sarily confronted with the great and unanswerable questions :
"How comes it?" and "Why is it?" The problem of the
relation of good and evil in this world, an unsolved riddle, in
volves further problems as to the government of the world, as to
a righteous Providence, as to the relation between the world and a
God. And thought — Shakespeare's no less than Hamlet's — beats
at the locked door of the mystery.
XIV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET
THOUGH there are in Hamlet more direct utterances of the
poet's inmost spiritual life than in any of his earlier works, he
has none the less succeeded in thoroughly disengaging his hero's
figure, and making it an independent entity. What he gave him
of his own nature was its unfathomable depth ; for the rest, he
retained the situation and the circumstances much as he found
them in his authorities. It cannot be denied that he thus in
volved himself in difficulties which he by no means entirely over
came. The old legend, with its harsh outlines, its mediaeval order
of ideas, its heathen groundwork under a varnish of dogmatic
Catholicism, its assumption of vengeance as the unquestionable
right, or rather duty, of the individual, did not very readily har
monise with the rich life of thoughts, dreams, and feelings which
Shakespeare imparted to his hero. There arose a certain dis
crepancy between the central figure and his surroundings. A
Prince who is the intellectual peer of Shakespeare himself, who
knows and declares that " no traveller returns " from beyond the
grave, yet sees and holds converse with a ghost. A royal youth
of the Renaissance, who has gone through a foreign university,
whose chief bent is towards philosophic brooding, who writes
verses, who cultivates music, elocution, and rapier-fencing, and
proves himself an expert in dramatic criticism, is at the same
time pre-occupied with thoughts of personal and bloody ven
geance. Now and then, in the course of the drama, a rift seems
to open between the shell of the action and its kernel.
But Shakespeare, with his consummate instinct, managed to
find an advantage precisely in this discrepancy, and to turn it to
account. His Hamlet believes in the ghost and — doubts. He
accepts the summons to the deed of vengeance and — delays.
Much of the originality of the figure, and of the drama as a whole,
32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
springs almost inevitably from this discrepancy between the
mediaeval character of the fable and its Renaissance hero, who is
so deep and many-sided that he has almost a modern air.
The figure of Hamlet, as it at last shaped itself in Shake
speare's imagination and came to life in his drama, is one of the
very few immortal figures of art and poetry, which, like Cervantes'
Don Quixote, exactly its contemporary, and Goethe's Faust of two
centuries later, present to generation after generation problems
to brood over and enigmas to solve. If we compare the two
great figures of Hamlet (1604) and Don Quixote (1605), we find
Hamlet undoubtedly the more enigmatic and absorbing of the
two. Don Quixote belongs to the past. He embodies the naive
spirit of chivalry which, having outlived its age, gives offence
on all hands in a time of prosaic rationalism, and makes itself a
laughing-stock through its importunate enthusiasms. He has
the firm, easily-comprehensible contours of a caricature. Hamlet
belongs to the future, to the modern age. He embodies the
lofty and reflective spirit, standing isolated, with its severely
exalted ideals, in corrupt or worthless surroundings, forced to
conceal its inmost nature, yet everywhere arousing hostility.
He has the unfathomable spirit and ever-changing physiognomy
of genius. Goethe, in his celebrated exposition of Hamlet
(Wilhelm Meister, Book iv. chap. 13), maintains that in this
case a great deed is imposed upon a soul which is not strong
enough for it : —
"There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have
borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom ; the roots expand, the jar is
shivered. A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the
strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it
cannot bear and must not cast away."
This interpretation is brilliant and thoughtful, but not entirely
just. One can trace in it the spirit of the period of humanity,
transforming in its own image a figure belonging to the Renais
sance. Hamlet cannot really be called, without qualification,
" lovely, pure, noble and most moral " — he who says to Ophelia
the penetratingly true, unforgettable words, " I am myself indif
ferent honest ; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it
were better my mother had not borne me." The light of such
a saying as this takes the colour out of Goethe's adjectives. It
PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET 33
is true that Hamlet goes on to ascribe to himself evil qualities of
which he is quite innocent ; but he was doubtless sincere in the
general tenor of his speech, to which all men of the better sort
will subscribe. Hamlet is no model of virtue. He is not simply
pure, noble, moral, &c., but is, or becomes, other things as well —
wild, bitter, harsh, now tender, now coarse, wrought up to the
verge of madness, callous, cruel. No doubt he is too weak for
his task, or rather wholly unsuited to it ; but he is by no means
devoid of physical strength or power of action. He is no child
of the period of humanity, moral and pure, but a child of the
Renaissance, with its impulsive energy, its irrepressible fulness
of life and its undaunted habit of looking death in the eyes.
Shakespeare at first conceived Hamlet as a youth. In the
First Quarto he is quite young, probably nineteen. It accords
with this age that he should be a student at Wittenberg ; young
men at that time began and ended their university course much
earlier than in our days. It accords with this age that his mother
should address him as " boy" (" How now, boy ! " iii. 4 — a phrase
which is deleted in the next edition), and that the word " young "
should be continually prefixed to his name, not merely to dis
tinguish him from his father. The King, too, in the early edition
(not in that of 1604) currently addresses him as "son Hamlet;"
and finally his mother is still young enough to arouse — or at
least to enable Claudius plausibly to pretend — the passion which
has such terrible results. Hamlet's speech to his mother —
" At your age
The hey-day of the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment,"
does not occur in the 1603 edition. The decisive proof, however,
of the fact that Hamlet at first appeared in Shakespeare's eyes
much younger (eleven years, to be precise) than he afterwards
made him, is to be found in the graveyard scene (v. i). In
the older edition, the First Gravedigger says that the skull of
the jester Yorick has lain a dozen years in the earth ; in the
edition of 1604 this is changed to twenty-three years. Here, too,
it is explicitly indicated that Hamlet, who as a child knew Yorick,
is now thirty years old ; for the Gravedigger first states that he
took to his trade on the very day on which Prince Hamlet was
born, and a little later adds : " I have been sexton here, man and
VOL. II. C
34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
boy, thirty years." It accords with this that the Player-King
now mentions thirty years as the time that has elapsed since
his marriage with the Queen, and that Ophelia (iii. i) speaks of
Hamlet as the " unmatch'd form of blown [i.e. mature] youth."
The process of thought in Shakespeare's mind is evident. At
first it seemed to him as if the circumstances of the case de
manded that Hamlet should be a youth; for thus the over
whelming effect produced upon him by his mother's prompt
forgetfulness of his father and hasty marriage seemed most
intelligible. He had been living far from the great world, in
quiet Wittenberg, never doubting that life was in fact as har
monious as it is apt to appear in the eyes of a young prince. He
believed in the realisation of ideals here on earth, imagined that
intellectual nobility and fine feelings ruled the world, that justice
reigned in public, faith and honour in private, life. He admired
his great father, honoured his beautiful mother, passionately loved
the charming Ophelia, thought nobly of humankind, and especially
of women. From the moment he loses his father, and is forced
to change his opinion of his mother, this serene view of life is
darkened. If his mother has been able to forget his father and
marry this man, what is woman worth ? and what is life worth ?
At the very outset, then, when he has not even heard of his
father's ghost, much less seen or held converse with it, sheer
despair speaks in his monologue :
" O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew :
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! "
Hence, also, his nai've surprise that one may smile and smile
and yet be a villain. He regards what has happened as a typical
occurrence, a specimen of what the world really is. Hence his
words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern : " I have of late — but
wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth." And those others :
" What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! how
infinite in faculty ! ... in action, how like an angel ! in appre
hension, how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! " These
words express his first bright view of life. But that has van
ished, and the world is no longer anything to him but a " foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours." And man ! What is this
PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET 35
"quintessence of dust" to him? He has no pleasure in man or
woman.
Hence arise his thoughts of suicide. The finer a young man's
character, the stronger is his desire, on entering life, to see his
ideals consummated in persons and circumstances. Hamlet
suddenly realises that everything is entirely different from what
he had imagined, and feels as if he must die because he cannot
set it right.
He finds it very difficult to believe that the world is so bad ;
therefore he is always seeking for new proofs of it ; therefore,
for instance, he plans the performance of the play. His joy
whenever he tears the mask from baseness is simply the joy of
realisation, with deep sorrow in the background — abstract satis
faction produced by the feeling that at last he understands the
worthlessness of the world. His divination was just — events
confirm it. There is no cold-hearted pessimism here. Hamlet's
fire is never quenched ; his wound never heals. Laertes' poisoned
blade gives the quietus to a still tortured soul.1
All this, though we can quite well imagine it of a man of
thirty, is more natural, more what we should expect, in one of
nineteen. But as Shakespeare worked on at his drama, and came
to deposit in Hamlet's mind, as in a treasury, more and more of
his own life-wisdom, of his own experience, and of his own keen
and virile wit, he saw that early youth was too slight a frame
work to support this intellectual weight, and gave Hamlet the age
of ripening manhood.2
Hamlet's faith and trust in humankind are shattered before
the Ghost appears to him. From the moment when his father's
spirit communicates to him a far more appalling insight into the
facts of the situation, his whole inner man is in wild revolt.
This is the cause of the leave-taking, the silent leave-taking,
from Ophelia, whom in letters he had called his soul's idol. His
ideal of womanhood no longer exists. Ophelia now belongs to
those " trivial fond records " which the sense of his great mission
impels him to efface from the tablets of his memory. There is
no room in his soul for his task and for her, passive and obedient
1 See Hermann Tiirck : Das psychologischc Problem in der Hamlet- Tragodie.
1890.
2 See E. Sullivan : "On Hamlet's Age." Neiv Shakspere Society's Transactions.
1880-86.
36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to her father as she is. Confide in her he cannot; she has
shown how unequal she is to the exigencies of the situation by
refusing to receive his letters and visits. She actually hands
over his last letter to her father, which means that it will be
shown and read at court. At last, she even consents to play
the spy upon him. He no longer believes or can believe in any
woman.
He intends to proceed at once to action, but too many thoughts
crowd in upon him. He broods over that horror which the Ghost
has revealed to him, and over the world in which such a thing
could happen ; he doubts whether the apparition was really his
father, or perhaps a deceptive, malignant spirit; and, lastly, he
has doubts of himself, of his ability to upraise and restore what
has been overthrown, of his fitness for the vocation of avenger
and judge. His doubt as to the trustworthiness of the Ghost
leads to the performance of the play within the play, which proves
the King's guilt. His feeling of his own unfitness for his task
leads to continued procrastination.
During the course of the play it is sufficiently proved that he
is not, in the main, incapable of action. He does not hesitate to
stab the eavesdropper behind the arras ; without wavering and
without pity he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain
death ; he boards a hostile ship ; and, never having lost sight of
his purpose, he takes vengeance before he dies. But it is clear,
none the less, that he has a great inward obstacle to overcome
before he proceeds to the decisive act. Reflection hinders him ;
his "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," as
he says in his soliloquy.
He has become to the popular mind the great type of the
procrastinator and dreamer; and far on into this century, hun
dreds of individuals, and even whole races, have seen themselves
reflected in him as in a mirror.
We must not forget, however, that this dramatic curiosity —
a hero who does not act — was, to a certain extent, demanded by
the technique of this particular drama. If Hamlet had killed the
King directly after receiving the Ghost's revelation, the play
would have come to an end with the first act. It was, therefore,
absolutely necessary that delays should arise.
Shakespeare is misunderstood when Hamlet is taken for that
entirely modern product — a mind diseased by morbid reflection,.
PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET 37
without capacity for action. It is nothing less than a freak of
ironic fate that he should have become a sort of symbol of re
flective sloth, this man who has gunpowder in every nerve, and
all the dynamite of genius in his nature.
It was undeniably and indubitably Shakespeare's intention to
give distinctness to Hamlet's character by contrasting it with
youthful energy of action, unhesitatingly pursuing its aim.
While Hamlet is letting himself be shipped off to England,
the young Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, arrives with his soldiers,
ready to risk his life for a patch of ground that "hath in it no
profit but the name. To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm
it." Hamlet says to himself (iv. 4) :
" How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge ! . . .
... I do not know
Why yet I live to say, ' This thing's to do.' "
And he despairs when he contrasts himself with Fortinbras, the
delicate and tender prince, who, at the head of his brave troops,
dares death and danger " even for an egg-shell " :
" Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour 's at the stake."
But with Hamlet it is a question of more than " honour," a con
ception belonging to a sphere far below his. It is natural that he
should feel ashamed at the sight of Fortinbras marching off to the
sound of drum and trumpet at the head of his forces — he, who
has not carried out, or even laid, any plan ; who, after having by
means of the play satisfied himself of the King's guilt, and at the
same time betrayed his own state of mind, is now writhing under
the consciousness of impotence. But the sole cause of this im
potence is the paralysing grasp laid on all his faculties by his
new realisation of what life is, and the broodings born of this
realisation. Even his mission of vengeance sinks into the back
ground of his mind. Everything is at strife within him — his duty
to his father, his duty to his mother, reverence, horror of crime,
hatred, pity, fear of action, and fear of inaction. He feels, even if
he does not expressly say so, how little is gained by getting rid of
38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
a single noxious animal. He himself is already so much more
than what he was at first — the youth chosen to execute a vendetta
He has become the great sufferer, who jeers and mocks, and
rebukes the world that racks him. He is the cry of humanity,
horror-struck at its own visage.
There is no " general meaning" on the surface of Hamlet.
Lucidity was not the ideal Shakespeare had before him while he
was producing this tragedy, as it had been when he was composing
Richard III. Here there are plenty of riddles and self-contradic
tions ; but not a little of the attraction of the play depends on this
very obscurity.
We all know that kind of well-written book which is blameless
in form, obvious in intention, and in which the characters stand
out sharply defined. We read it with pleasure ; but when we
have read it, we are done with it. There is nothing to be
read between the lines, no gulf between this passage and that,
no mystic twilight anywhere in it, no shadows in which we can
dream. And, again, there are other books whose fundamental
idea is capable of many interpretations, and affords matter for
much dispute, but whose significance lies less in what they say to
us than in what they lead us to imagine, to divine. They have
the peculiar faculty of setting thoughts and feelings in motion ;
more thoughts than they themselves contain, and perhaps of a
quite different character. Hamlet is such a book. As a piece of
psychological development, it lacks the lucidity of classical art ;
the hero's soul has all the untranspicuousness and complexity
of a real soul ; but one generation after another has thrown its
imagination into the problem, and has deposited in Hamlet's soul
the sum of its experience.
To Hamlet life is half reality, half a dream. He sometimes
resembles a somnambulist, though he is often as wakeful as a
spy. He has so much presence of mind that he is never at a loss
for the aptest retort, and, along with it, such absence of mind
that he lets go his fixed determination in order to follow up some
train of thought or thread some dream-labyrinth. He appals,
amuses, captivates, perplexes, disquiets us. Few characters in
fiction have so disquieted the world. Although he is incessantly
talking, he is solitary by nature. He typifies, indeed, that soli
tude of soul which cannot impart itself.
" His name," says Victor Hugo, " is as the name on a wood-
PSYCHOLOGY OF HAMLET 39
cut of Albert Dlirer's : Melancholia. The bat flits over Hamlet's
head ; at his feet sit Knowledge, with globe and compass, and
Love, with an hour-glass; while behind him, on the horizon,
rests a giant sun, which only serves to make the sky above him
darker." But from another point of view Hamlet's nature is that
of the hurricane — a thing of wrath and fury, and tempestuous
scorn, strong enough to sweep the whole world clean.
There is in him no less indignation than melancholy; in fact,
his melancholy is a result of his indignation. Sufferers and
thinkers have found in him a brother. Hence the extraordinary
popularity of the character, in spite of its being the reverse of
obvious.
Audiences and readers feel with Hamlet and understand him ;
for all the better-disposed among us make the discovery, when we
go forth into life as grown-up men and women, that it is not what
we had imagined it to be, but a thousandfold more terrible.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Denmark is a
prison, and the world is full of such dungeons. A spectral voice
says to us : " Horrible things have happened ; horrible things
are happening every day. Be it your task to repair the evil, to
rearrange the course of things. The world is out of joint ; it is
for you to set it right." But our arms fall powerless by our sides.
Evil is too strong, too cunning for us.
In Hamlet, the first philosophical drama of the modern era,
we meet for the first time the typical modern character, with its
intense feeling of the strife between the ideal and the actual
world, with its keen sense of the chasm between power and
aspiration, and with that complexity of nature which shows itself
in wit without mirth, cruelty combined with sensitiveness, frenzied
impatience at war with inveterate procrastination.
XV
HAMLET AS A DRAMA
LET us now look at Hamlet as a drama ; and, to get the full
impression of Shakespeare's greatness, let us first recall its purely
theatrical, materially visible side, that which dwells in the memory
simply as pantomime.1
The night-watch on the platform before the Castle of Elsinore,
and the appearance of the Ghost to the soldiers and officers there.
Then, in contrast to the splendidly-attired courtiers, the black-
robed figure of the Prince, standing apart, a living image of grief,
his countenance bespeaking both soul and intellect, but with
an expression which seems to say that henceforth joy and he
are strangers. Next, his meeting with his father's spirit; the
oath upon the sword, with the constant change of place. Then
his wild behaviour when, to hide his excitement, he feigns mad
ness. Then the play within the play ; the sword-thrust through
the arras ; the beautiful Ophelia with flowers and straw in her
hair; Hamlet with Yorick's skull in his hand; the struggle
with Laertes in Ophelia's grave, that grotesque but most signifi
cant episode. According to the custom of the time, a dumb show
foretold the poisoning in the play, and this fight in the grave is
the dumb show which foretells the mortal combat that is soon
to take place : both are presently to be swallowed up by the
grave in which they stand. Then follows the fencing-scene,
during the course of which the Queen dies by the poison which
the King destined for Hamlet, and Laertes by the stroke of the
poisoned sword also prepared for the Prince, who, with a last
great effort, kills the King, and then sinks down poisoned. This
wholesale " havock " arranged by the poet, a fourfold lying-in
state, has its gloom broken by the triumphal march of young
Fortinbras, which, in its turn, soon changes to a funeral measure.
The whole is as effective to the eye as it is great and beautiful.
1 K. Werder : Vorleswtgen iiber Hamlet, p. 3 et seq.
40
"HAMLET" AS A DRAMA 41
And now add to this ocular picturesqueness of the play the
fascination which it owes to the sympathy Shakespeare has made
us feel for its principal character, the impression he has given us
of the agonies of a strong and sensitive spirit surrounded by
corruption and depravity. Hamlet was by nature candid, en
thusiastic, trustful, loving ; the guile of others forces him to take
refuge in guile; the wickedness of others drives him to distrust
and hate ; and the crime committed against his murdered father
calls upon him from the underworld for vengeance.
His indignation at the infamy around him is heartrending,
his contempt for it is stimulating.
By nature he is a thinker. He thinks not only when he is
contemplating and planning a course of action, but also from a
passionate longing for comprehension in the abstract. Though he
is merely making use of the players to unmask the murderer, he
gives them apt and profound advice with regard to the practice of
their art. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern question him as
to the reason of his melancholy, he expounds to them in words
of deep significance his rooted distaste for life.
The feeling produced in him by any strong impression never
finds vent in straightforward, laconic words. His speeches never
take the direct, the shortest way to express his thoughts. They
consist of ingenious, far-fetched similes and witty conceits, appa
rently remote from the matter in hand. Sarcastic and enigma
tical phrases conceal his emotions. This dissimulation is forced
upon him by the very strength of his feelings : in order not to
betray himself, not to give way to the pain he is suffering, he
must smother it in fantastic and boisterous ejaculations. Thus
he shouts after having seen the apparition : " Hillo, ho, ho, boy !
come, bird, come ! " Thus he apostrophises the Ghost : " Well
said, old mole ! canst work i' the earth so fast ? " And there
fore, after the play has made the King betray himself, he cries :
" Ah, ha ! Come, some music ! come, the recorders ! " His
feigned madness is only an intentional exaggeration of this
tendency.
The horrible secret that has been discovered to him has upset
his equilibrium. The show of madness enables him to find solace
in expressing indirectly what it tortures him to talk of directly,
and at the same time his seeming lunacy diverts attention from
the real reason of his deep melancholy. He does not altogether
42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dissemble when he talks so wildly ; given his surroundings, these
fantastic and daring sarcasms are a natural enough mode of utter
ance for the wild agitation produced by the horror that has
entered into his life; "though this be madness, yet there is
method in V But the almost frenzied excitement into which he
is so often thrown by the action of others subsides at intervals,
when he feels the need for mental concentration — a craving which
he satisfies in the solitary reflections forming his monologues.
When his passions are roused, he has difficulty in controlling
them. It is nervous over-excitement that finds vent when he bids
Ophelia get her to a nunnery, and it is in a fit of nervous frenzy
that he stabs Polonius. But his passion generally strikes inwards.
Constrained as he is, or thinks himself, to employ dissimulation
and cunning, he is in a fever of impatience, and is for ever
reviling and scoffing at himself for his inaction, as though it were
due to indifference or cowardice.
Distrust, that new element in his character, makes him
cautious ; he cannot act on impulse, nor even speak. " There 's
ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark," he begins; "so great as
the King " should be the continuation ; but fear of being betrayed
by his comrades takes possession of him, and he ends with, " but
he 's an arrant knave."
He is by nature open-hearted and warm, as we see him with
Horatio ; he speaks to the sentinel on the platform as to a com
rade ; he is cordial, at first, to old acquaintances like Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern ; and he is frank, amiable, kind without con
descension, to the troupe of travelling players. But reticence has
been suddenly forced upon him by the bitterest, most agonising
experiences ; no sooner has he put on a mask, so as not to be
instantly found out, than he feels that he is being spied upon ;
even his friends and the woman he loves are on the side of his
opponents; and though he believes his life to be threatened, he
feels that he must keep silent and wait.
His mask is often enough only of gauze ; if only for the sake
of the spectators, Shakespeare had to make the madness trans
parent, that it might not pall.
Read the witty repartees of Hamlet to Polonius (ii. 2), begin
ning with, " What do you read, my lord ? " " Words, words,
words." In reality there is no trace of madness in all these keen-
edged sayings, till Hamlet at last, in order to annul their effect,
"HAMLET" AS A DRAMA 43
concludes with the words, " For yourself, sir, should be old as I
am, if, like a crab, you could go backward."
Or take the long conversation (iii. 2) between Hamlet and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the pipe he has sent for,
and asks them to play on. The whole is a parable as simple
and direct as any in the New Testament. And he points the
moral with triumphant logic in poetic form —
"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you would make of
me ! You would play upon me ; you would seem to know my stops ;
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery ; you would sound me
from my lowest notes to the top of my compass : and there is much
music, excellent music in this little organ; yet cannot you make it
speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me."
It is in order to account for such contemptuous and witty out
bursts that Hamlet says : " I am but mad north-north-west :
when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."
To outward difficulties are added inward hindrances, which he
cannot overcome. He reproaches himself passionately for this,
as we have seen. But these self-reproaches of Hamlet's do not
represent Shakespeare's view of his character or judgment of his
action. They express the impatience of his nature, his longing
for reparation, his eagerness for the triumph of the right; they do
not imply his guilt.
The old doctrine of tragic guilt and punishment, which
assumes that the death at the end of a tragedy must always be
in some way deserved, is nothing but antiquated scholasticism,
theology masking as aesthetics ; and it may be regarded as an
instance of scientific progress that this view of the matter, which
was heretical only a generation since, is now very generally
accepted. Very different was the case when the author of these
lines, in his earliest published work, entered a protest against
such an intrusion of traditional morality into a sphere from which
it ought simply to be banished.1
Some critics have summarily disposed of the question of
Hamlet's possible guilt by the assertion that his madness was
not only assumed, but real. Brinsley Nicholson, for instance,
1 Georg Brandes : sEsthetiske Stitdier. Essay "On the Concept : Tragic Fate."
44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in his essay " Was Hamlet Mad ? " (New Shakspere Society's
Transactions, 1880-86), insists on his morbid melancholy; his
strange and incoherent talk after the apparition of the Ghost ;
his lack of any sense of responsibility for the deaths of Polonius,
Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, of which he was either the direct
or indirect cause ; his fear of sending King Claudius to heaven
by killing him while he is praying ; his brutality towards Ophelia ;
his constant suspiciousness, &c., &c. But to see symptoms of
real insanity in all this is not only a crudity of interpretation,
but a misconception of Shakespeare's evident meaning. It is
true that Hamlet does not dissemble as systematically and coldly
as Edgar in the subsequent King Lear ; but that is no reason
why his state of mental exaltation should be mistaken for de
rangement. He makes use of insanity; he is not in its power.
Not that it proves really serviceable to him or facilitates his
task of vengeance; on the contrary, it impedes his action by
tempting him from the straight path into witty digressions and
deviations. It is meant to hide his secret; but after the per
formance of the play the King knows it, and, though he keeps
it up, the feigned madness is useless. It is because his secret
is betrayed that Hamlet now, in obedience to the Ghost's com
mand, endeavours to awaken his mother's sense of shame and
to detach her from the King. But having run Polonius through
the body, in the belief that he is killing his stepfather, he is put
under guards and sent away, and has still farther to postpone
his revenge.
While many critics of this century, especially Germans, such
as Kreyssig, have contemned Hamlet as a "witty weakling," one
German writer has passionately denied that Shakespeare intended
to represent him as morbidly reflective. This critic, with much
enthusiasm, with fierce onslaughts upon many of his countrymen,
but with a conception of the play which debases its whole idea
and belittles its significance, has tried to prove that the hindrances
Hamlet had to contend with were purely external. I refer to the
lectures on Hamlet delivered by the old Hegelian, Karl Werder,
in the University of Berlin between 1859 an^ I8/2.1 Their train
of thought, in itself not unreasonable, may be rendered thus : —
What is demanded of Hamlet ? That he should kill the King
immediately after the Ghost has revealed his father's fate ? Good.
1 Karl Werder: Vorlesnngen iiber Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1875.
"HAMLET" AS A DRAMA 45
But how, after this assassination, is he to justify his deed to the
court and the people, and ascend the throne ? He can produce
no proof whatever of the truth of his accusation. A ghost has
told him ; that is all his evidence. He himself is not the here
ditary supreme judge of the land, deprived of his throne by a
usurper. The Queen is " jointress to this warlike state." Den
mark is an elective monarchy — and it is not till the very end of
the play that Hamlet speaks of the King as having " popp'd in
between the election and my hopes." In the eyes of all the
characters in the play, the existing state of the government is
quite normal. And is he to overturn it with a dagger-thrust ?
Will the Danish people believe his tale of the apparition and the
murder ? And suppose that, instead of having recourse to the
dagger, he comes forward with a public accusation, can there be
any doubt that such a king and such a court will speedily make
away with him ? For where in this court are the elder Hamlet's
adherents ? We see none of them. It seems as though the old
hero-king had taken them all with him to the grave. What has
become of his generals and of his council ? Did they die before
him ? Or was he solitary in his greatness ? Certain it is that
Hamlet has no friend but Horatio, and finds no supporters at
the court.
As matters stand, the truth can be brought to light only by
the royal criminal's betraying himself. Hence Hamlet's perfectly
logical, most ingenious device for forcing him to do so. Hamlet's
object is not to take a purely material revenge for the crime, but
to reinstate right and justice in Denmark, to be judge and avenger
in one. And this he cannot be if he simply kills the king off
hand.
All this is acute, and in part correct; only it misstates the
theme of the play. Had Shakespeare had this outward difficulty
in mind, he would have made Hamlet expound, or at least allude
to it. As a matter of fact, Hamlet does nothing of the sort.
On the contrary, he upbraids himself for his inaction and sloth,
thereby indicating clearly enough that the great fundamental
difficulty is an inward one, and that the real scene of the tragedy
lies in the hero's soul.
Hamlet himself is comparatively planless, but, as Goethe has
profoundly remarked, the play is not therefore without a plan.
And where Hamlet is most hesitating, where he tries to palliate
46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his planlessness, there the plan speaks loudest and clearest.
Where, for example, Hamlet comes upon the King at his prayers,
and will not kill him, because he is not to die " in the purging of
his soul " but revelling in sinful debauch, we hear Shakespeare's
general idea in the words which, in the mouth of the hero, sound
like an evasion. Shakespeare, not Hamlet, reserves the King for
the death which in fact overtakes him just as he has poisoned
Laertes's blade, seasoned "a chalice " for Hamlet, out of cowardice
allowed the Queen to drain it, and been the efficient cause of both
Laertes's and Hamlet's fatal wounds. Hamlet thus actually
attains his declared object in allowing the King to live.
XVI
HAMLET AND OPHELIA
THERE is nothing more profoundly conceived in this play than
the Prince's relation to Ophelia. Hamlet is genius in love —
genius with its great demands and its highly unconventional
conduct He does not love like Romeo, with a love that takes
entire possession of his mind. He has felt himself drawn to
Ophelia while his father was still in life, has sent her letters
and gifts, and thinks of her with an infinite tenderness ; but
she has not it in her to be his friend and confidant. " Her
whole essence," we read in Goethe, " is ripe, sweet sensuous-
ness." This is saying too much ; it is only the songs she sings
in her madness, " in the innocence of madness," as Goethe him
self strikingly says, that indicate an undercurrent of sensual
desire or sensual reminiscence; her attitude towards the Prince
is decorous, almost to severity. Their relations to each other
have been close — how close the play does not tell.
There is nothing at all conclusive in the fact that Hamlet's
manner to Ophelia is extremely free, not only in the affecting
scene in which he orders her to a nunnery, but still more in their
conversation during the play, when his jesting speeches, as he
asks to be allowed to lay his head in her lap, are more than
equivocal, and in one case unequivocally loose. We have already
seen (vol. i. p. 58) that this is no evidence against Ophelia's
inexperience. Helena in AIVs Well that Ends Well is chastity
itself, yet Parolles's conversation with her is extremely — to our
way of thinking impossibly — coarse. In the year 1602, speeches
like Hamlet's could be made without offence by a young prince
to a virtuous maid of honour.
Whilst English Shakespearians have come forward as Ophelia's
champions, several German critics (among others Tieck, Von
Friesen, and Flathe) have had no doubt that her relations with
47
48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet were of the most intimate. Shakespeare has intentionally
left this undecided, and it is difficult to see why his readers
should not do the same.
Hamlet draws away from Ophelia from the moment when
he feels himself the appointed minister of a sacred revenge.
In deep grief he bids her farewell without a word, grasps her
wrist, holds it at arm's length from him, " peruses" her face
as if he would draw it — then shakes her arm gently, nods his
head thrice, and departs with a u piteous" sigh.
If after this he shows himself hard, almost cruel, to her, it
is because she was weak and tried to deceive him. She is a
soft, yielding creature, with no power of resistance ; a loving soul,
but without the passion which gives strength. She resembles
Desdemona in the unwisdom with which she acts towards her
lover, but falls far short of her in warmth and resoluteness of
affection. She does not in the least understand Hamlet's grief
over his mother's conduct. She observes his depression without
divining its cause. When, after seeing the Ghost, he approaches
her in speechless agitation, she never guesses that anything
terrible has happened to him; and, in spite of her compassion
for his morbid state, she consents without demur to decoy him
into talking to her, while her father and the King spy upon
their meeting. It is then that he breaks out into all those famous
speeches: "Are you honest? Are you fair?" &c. ; the secret
meaning of them being: You are like my mother! You too
could have acted as she did !
Hamlet has not a thought for Ophelia in his excitement after
the killing of Polonius ; but Shakespeare gives us indirectly to
understand that grief on her account overtook him afterwards—
" he weeps for what is done." Later he seems to forget her,
and therefore his anger at her brother's lamentations as she is
placed in her grave, and his own frenzied attempt to outdo the
" emphasis" of Laertes's grief, seem strange to us. But from
his words we understand that she has been the solace of his
life, though she could not be its stay. She on her side has
been very fond of him, has loved him with unobtrusive tender
ness. It is with pain she has heard him speak of his love for
her as a thing of the past (" I did love you once ") ; with deep
grief she has seen what she takes to be the eclipse of his bright
spirit in madness (" Oh, what a noble mind is here o'er-
" HAMLET" AND "FAUST" 49
thrown ! ") ; and at last the death of her father by Hamlet's
hand deprives her of her own reason. At one blow she has
lost both father and lover. In her madness she does not speak
Hamlet's name, nor show any trace of sorrow that it is he who
has murdered her father. Forgetfulness of this cruellest blow
mitigates her calamity; her hard fate condemns her to solitude;
and this solitude is peopled and alleviated by madness.
In depicting the relation between Faust and Gretchen, Goethe
appropriated and reproduced many features of the relation between
Hamlet and Ophelia. In both cases we have the tragic love-tie
between genius and tender girlhood. Faust kills Gretchen's
mother as Hamlet kills Ophelia's father. In Faust also there
is a duel between the hero and his mistress's brother, in which
the brother is killed. And in both cases the young girl in her
misery goes mad. It is clear that Goethe actually had Ophelia
in his thoughts, for he makes his Mephistopheles sing a song
to Gretchen which is a direct imitation, almost a translation, of
Ophelia's song about Saint Valentine's Day.1 There is, however,
a more delicate poetry in Ophelia's madness than in Gretchen's.
Gretchen's intensifies the tragic impression of the young girl's
ruin ; Ophelia's alleviates both her own and the spectator's
suffering.
Hamlet and Faust represent the genius of the Renaissance
and the genius of modern times ; though Hamlet, in virtue of his
1 OPHELIA.
" To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes
And dupp'd the chamber-door ;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more."
MEPHISTOFELES.
" Was machst Du mir
Vor Liebchens Thur
Kathrinchen, hier
Bei fruhem Tagesblicke ?
Lass, lass es sein !
Er lasst dich ein
Als Madchen ein
A Is Madchen nicht zuriicke."
VOL. II. D
50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
creator's marvellous power of rising above his time, covers the
whole period between him and us, and has a range of significance
to which we, on the threshold of the twentieth century, can fore
see no limit.
Faust is probably the highest poetic expression of modern
humanity — striving, investigating, enjoying, and mastering at last
both itself and the world. He changes gradually under his
creator's hands into a great symbol ; but in the second half of
his life a superabundance of allegoric traits veils his individual
humanity. It did not lie in Shakespeare's way to embody
a being whose efforts, like Faust's, were directed towards ex
perience, knowledge, perception of truth in general. Even when
Shakespeare rises highest, he keeps nearer the earth.
But none the less dear to us art thou, O Hamlet ! and none
the less valued and understood by the men of to-day. We love
thee like a brother. Thy melancholy is ours, thy wrath is ours,
thy contemptuous wit avenges us on those who fill the earth with
their empty noise and are its masters. We know the depth of
thy suffering when wrong and hypocrisy triumph, and oh ! thy
still deeper suffering on feeling that that nerve in thee is severed
which should lead from thought to victorious action. To us, too,
the voices of the mighty dead have spoken from the under-world.
W^e, too, have seen our mother wrap the purple robe of power
round the murderer of "the majesty of buried Denmark." We,
too, have been betrayed by the friends of our youth ; for us, too,
have swords been dipped in poison. How well do we know that
graveyard mood in which disgust and sorrow for all earthly things
seize upon the soul. The breath from open graves has set us,
too, dreaming with a skull in our hands !
XVII
HAMLETS INFLUENCE ON LATER TIMES
IF we to-day can feel with Hamlet, it is certainly no wonder that
the play was immensely popular in its own day. It is easy to
understand its charm for the cultivated youth of the period ; but
it would be surprising, if we did not realise the alertness of the
Renaissance and its wonderful receptivity for the highest culture,
to find that Hamlet was in as great favour with the lower ranks
of society as with the higher. A remarkable proof of this
tragedy's and of Shakespeare's popularity in the years immedi
ately following its appearance, is afforded by some memoranda
in a log-book kept by a certain Captain Keeling, of the ship
Dragon, which, in September 1607, lay off Sierra Leone in
company with another English vessel, the Hector (Captain
Hawkins), both bound for India. They run as follows :—
"September 5 [At "Serra Leona"]. I sent the interpreter, accord
ing to his desier, abord the Hector, whear he brooke fast, and after
came abord mee, wher we gave the tragedie of Hamlett.
" [Sept.] 30. Captain Hawkins dined with me, wher my companions
acted Kinge Richard the Second.
"31. I envited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner, and had Hamlet
acted abord me : wch I permitt to keepe my people from idlenes and
unlawfull games, or sleepe."
Who could have imagined that Hamlet, three years after its
publication, would be so well-known and so dear to English
sailors that they could act it for their own amusement at a
moment's notice ! Could there be a stronger proof of its uni
versal popularity? It is a true picture of the culture of the
Renaissance, this tragedy of the Prince of Denmark acted by
common English sailors off the west coast of Africa. It is a pity
that Shakespeare himself, in all human probability, never knew of it.
Hamlet's ever-increasing significance as time rolls on is pro-
52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
portionate to his significance in his own day. A great deal in
the poetry of the nineteenth century owes its origin to him.
Goethe interpreted and remodelled him in Wilhelm Meister, and
this remodelled Hamlet resembles Faust. The trio, Faust, Gret-
chen, Valentin, in Goethe's drama answers to the trio, Hamlet,
Ophelia, Laertes. Faust transplanted into English soil produced
Byron's Manfred, a true though far-off descendant of the Danish
Prince. In Germany, again, the Byronic development assumed
a new and Hamlet-like (or rather Yorick-like) form in Heine's
bitter and fantastic wit, in his hatreds and caprices and intellectual
superiority. Borne is the first to interpret Hamlet as the German
of his day, always moving in a circle and never able to act. But he
feels the mystery of the play, and says aptly and beautifully, " Over
the picture hangs a veil of gauze. We want to lift it to examine
the painting more closely, but find that the veil itself is painted."
In France, the men of Alfred de Musset's generation, whom he
has portrayed in his Confessions cPun Enfant du Siecle, remind us
in many ways of Hamlet — nervous, inflammable as gunpowder,
broken-winged, with no sphere of action commensurate with their
desires, and with no power of action in the sphere which lay
open to them. And Lorenzaccio, perhaps Musset's finest male
character, is the French Hamlet — practised in dissimulation, pro
crastinating, witty, gentle to women yet wounding them with cruel
words, morbidly desirous to atone for the emptiness of his evil
life by one great deed, and acting too late, uselessly, desperately.
Hamlet, who centuries before had been young England, and
was to Musset, for a time, young France, became in the 'forties,
as Borne had foretold, the accepted type of Germany. " Hamlet
is Germany," sang Freiligrath.1
Kindred political conditions determined that the figure of
Hamlet should at the same period, and twenty years later to a
still greater extent, dominate Russian literature. Its influence
can be traced from Pushkin and Gogol to GontscharofT and
1 "Deutschland 1st Hamlet ! Ernst und stumm
In seinen Thoren jede Nacht
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um,
Und winkt den Mannern auf der Wacht.
Da steht die Hohe, blank bewehrt,
Und sagt dem Zaudrer, der noch zweifelt :
' Sei mir ein Racher, zieh dein Schwert !
Man hat mir Gift in's Ohr getraufelt.' "
INFLUENCE OF " HAMLET" ABROAD 53
Tolstoi, and it actually pervades the whole life-work of Turgueneff.
But in this case Hamlet's vocation of vengeance is overlooked ;
the whole stress is laid on the general discrepancy between reflec
tion and power of action.
In the development of Polish literature, too, during this
century, there came a time when the poets were inclined to say :
" We are Hamlet; Hamlet is Poland" We find marked traits of
his character towards the middle of the century in all the imagina
tive spirits of Poland : in Mickiewicz, in Slowacki, in Krasinski.
From their youth they had stood in his position. Their world
was out of joint, and was to be set right by their weak arms.
High-born and noble-minded, they feel, like Hamlet, all the
inward fire and outward impotence of their youth ; the condi
tions that surround them are to them one great horror ; they are
disposed at one and the same time to dreaming and to action, to
over-much reflection and to recklessness.
Like Hamlet, they have seen their mother, the land that gave
them birth, profaned by passing under the power of a royal
robber and murderer. The court to which at times they are
offered access strikes them with terror, as the court of Claudius
struck terror to the Danish Prince, as the court in Krasinski's
Temptation (a symbolic representation of the court of St. Peters
burg) strikes terror to the young hero of the poem. These
kinsmen of Hamlet are, like him, cruel to their Ophelia, and
forsake her when she loves them best ; like him, they allow
themselves to be sent far away to foreign lands ; and when they
speak they dissemble like him — clothe their meaning in similes
and allegories. What Hamlet says of himself applies to them :
"Yet have I something in me dangerous." Their peculiarly
Polish characteristic is that what enervates and impedes them
is not their reflective but their poetic bias. Reflection is what
ruins the German of this type ; wild dissipation the Frenchman ;
indolence, self-mockery, and self-despair the Russian; but it is
imagination that leads the Pole astray and tempts him to live
apart from real life.
The Hamlet character presents a multitude of different aspects.
Hamlet is the doubter ; he is the man whom over-scrupulousness
or over-deliberation condemns to inactivity ; he is the creature of
pure intelligence, who sometimes acts nervously, and is sometimes
too nervous to act at all ; and, lastly, he is the avenger, the man
54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
who dissembles that his revenge may be the more effectual. Each
of these aspects is developed by the poets of Poland. There is a
touch of Hamlet in several of Mickiewicz's creations — in Wallen-
rod, in Gustave, in Conrad, in Robak. Gustave speaks the
language of philosophic aberration ; Conrad is possessed by the
spirit of philosophic brooding; Wallenrod and Robak dissemble
or disguise themselves for the sake of revenge, and the latter, like
Hamlet, kills the father of the woman he loves. In Slowacki's
work the Hamlet-type takes a much more prominent place. His
Kordjan is a Hamlet who follows his vocation of avenger, but
has not the strength for it. The Polish tendency to fantas-
ticating interposes between him and his projected tyrannicide.
And while Slowacki gives us the radical Hamlet type, so we find
the corresponding conservative Hamlet in Krasinski. The hero
of Krasinski's Undivine Comedy has more than one trait in
common with the Prince of Denmark. He has Hamlet's sensi
tiveness and power of imagination. He is addicted to monologues
and cultivates the drama. He has an extremely tender con
science, but can commit most cruel actions. He is punished for
the excessive irritability of his character by the insanity of his
wife, very much as Hamlet, by his feigned madness, leads to the
real madness of Ophelia. But this Hamlet is consumed by a
more modern doubt than that which besets his Renaissance proto
type. Hamlet doubts whether the spirit on whose behest he is
acting is more than an empty phantasm. When Count Henry
shuts himself up in " the castle of the Holy Trinity," he is not
sure that the Holy Trinity itself is more than a figment of the brain.
In other words : nearly two centuries and a half after the
figure of Hamlet was conceived in Shakespeare's imagination, we
find it living in English and French literature, and reappearing
as a dominant type in German and two Slavonic languages.
And now, three hundred years after his creation, Hamlet is still
the confidant and friend of sad and thoughtful souls in every
land. There is something unique in this. With such piercing
vision has Shakespeare searched out the depths of his own, and
at the same time of all human, nature, and so boldly and surely
has he depicted the outward semblance of what he saw, that,
centuries later, men of every country and of every race have felt
their own being moulded like wax in his hand, and have seen
themselves in his poetry as in a mirror.
XVIII
HAMLET AS A CRITIC
ALONG with so much else, Hamlet gives us what we should
scarcely have expected — an insight into Shakespeare's own ideas
of his art as poet and actor, and into the condition and relations
of his theatre in the years 1602—3.
If we read attentively the Prince's words to the players, we
see clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness
of Shakespeare's art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us
he may seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of
all bounds; in comparison with contemporary artists — not only
with the specially violent and 'bombastic writers, like the youthful
Marlowe, but with all of them — he is self-controlled, temperate,
delicate, beauty-loving as Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the
players —
"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trip
pingly on the tongue ; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do,
I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus ; but use all gently : for in the very
torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you
must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
O ! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow
tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the ground
lings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb-shows, and noise : I would have such a fellow whipped for o'er-
doing Termagant ; it out-herods Herod : pray you, avoid it.
" i Play. I warrant your honour.
"Ham. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be
your tutor."
Here ought logically to follow a warning against the dangers of
excessive softness and sweetness. But it does not come. He
continues —
55
5 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special
observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature ; for anything
so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first
and now, was, and is, to hold, as^t were, the mirror up to nature ; to
show virtue her own feature, scorn her oivn image, and the very age
and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or
come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the
judicious grieve ; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance,
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O ! there be players, that I have
seen play, — and heard others praise, and that highly, — not to speak it
profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of
Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have
thought that some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not
made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
" i Play. I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us.
" Ham. O ! reform it altogether."
Thus, although it appears to be Hamlet's wish to caution
equally against too much wildness and too much tameness, his
warning against tameness is of the briefest, and he almost
immediately resumes his homily against exaggeration, bellowing,
what we should now call ranting declamation. It is not the danger
of tameness, but of violence, that is uppermost in Shakespeare's
mind.
As already pointed out, it is not merely his own general effort
as a dramatist which Shakespeare here formulates ; he lays down
a regular definition of dramatic art and its aim. It is noteworthy
that this definition is identical with that which Cervantes, almost
at the same time, places into the mouth of the priest in Don
Quixote. " Comedy," he says, " should be as Tullius enjoins, a
mirror of human life, a pattern of manners, a presentation of the
truth."
Shakespeare and Cervantes, who shed lustre on the same age
and died within a few days of each other, never heard of each
other's existence; but, led by the spirit of their time, both
borrowed from Cicero their fundamental conception of dramatic
art. Cervantes says so openly ; Shakespeare, who did not wish
his Hamlet to pose as a scholar, indicates it in the words, "Whose
end, both at the first and now, was, and is."
And as Shakespeare here, by the mouth of Hamlet, has ex
pressed his own idea of his art's unalterable nature and aim, he
SHAKESPEARE AND KEMP 57
has also for once given vent to his passing artistic anxieties, his
dissatisfaction with the position of his theatre at the moment.
We have already (vol. i. p. 127) noticed the poet's complaint of the
harm done to his company at this time by the rivalry of the troupe
of choir-boys from St. Paul's Cathedral playing at the Black-
friars Theatre. It is in Hamlet's dialogue with Rosencrantz that
this complaint occurs. There is a bitterness about the wording
of it, as though the company had for the time been totally worsted.
This was no doubt largely due to the circumstance that its most
popular member, its clown, the famous Kemp, had just left it (in
1602), and gone over to Henslow's troupe. Kemp had from the
beginning played all the chief low-comedy parts in Shakespeare's
dramas — Peter and Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet, Shallow in
Henry IV., Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice, Dogberry in
Mitch Ado About Nothing, Touchstone in As You Like It. Now
that he had gone over to the enemy, his loss was deeply felt.
His description of the Nine Dates Wonder, with its arrogant
dedication, has shown us how conceited he must have been.
Hamlet lets us see that he had frequently annoyed Shakespeare
by the irrepressible freedom of his "gags" and interpolations.
From the text of the plays of an earlier period which have come
down to us, we can understand that the clowns were in those
days as free to do what they pleased with their parts as the
Italian actors in the Commedia deW Arte. Shakespeare's rich
and perfect art left no room for such improvisations. Now that
Kemp was gone, the poet sent the following shaft after him from
the lips of Hamlet : —
"And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set
down for them : for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set
on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the
meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be con
sidered : that 's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool
that uses it."
This reproof is, however, as the reader sees, couched in quite
general terms ; wherefore it was allowed to stand when Kemp
returned to the company. But a far sharper and much more
personal attack, which appears in the edition of 1603, was ex
punged in the following editions (and consequently from our text
of the play), as being no longer in place after the return of the
58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
wanderer. It speaks of a clown whose witticisms are so popular
that they are noted down by the gentlemen who frequent the
theatre. A whole series of extremely poor specimens of his
burlesque sallies is given — mere circus-clown drolleries — and
then Hamlet disposes of the wretched buffoon by remarking that
he " cannot make a jest unless by chance, as a blind man catcheth
a hare."
It is notorious that an artist will more easily forgive an attack
on himself than warm praise of a rival in the same line. There
can be very little doubt that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet
praise the dead Yorick, had in view the lamented Tarlton,
Kemp's amiable and famous predecessor. If there had been no
purpose to serve by making the skull that of a jester, it might
quite as well have belonged to some old servant of Hamlet's. But
if Shakespeare, in his first years of theatrical life, had known
Tarlton personally, and Kemp's objectionable behaviour vividly
recalled by contrast his predecessor's charming whimsicality, it
was natural enough that he should combine with the attack on
Kemp a warm eulogy of the great jester.1
Tarlton was buried on the 3rd of September 1588. This date
accords with the statement in the first quarto, that Yorick has lain
in the earth for a dozen years. Not till we have these facts
before us can we fully understand the following strong outburst
of feeling : —
" Alas, poor Yorick ! — I knew him, Horatio : a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy : he hath borne me on his back a thousand
times ; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is ! my gorge rises
at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.
Where be your gibes now ? your gambols ? your songs ? your flashes of
merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar ? "
Alas, poor Yorick ! Hamlet's heartfelt lament will keep his
memory alive when his Owlglass jests recorded in print are
utterly forgotten.2 His fooling was equally admired by the popu
lace, the court, and the theatrical public. He is said to have
told Elizabeth more truths than all her chaplains, and cured her
melancholy better than all her physicians.
1 Compare New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1880-86, p. 60.
2 Tarlton's Jests and News out of Purgatory. Edited by J. O. Halliwell.
London, 1844.
"THE DANISH MARCH"
59
Shakespeare, in Hamlet, has not only spoken his mind freely
on theatrical matters; he has also eulogised the distinguished
actor after his death, and given a great example of the courteous
and becoming treatment of able actors during their lives. His
Prince of Denmark stands far above the vulgar prejudice against
them. And, lastly, Shakespeare has glorified that dramatic art
which was the business and pleasure of his life, by making the
play the effective means of bringing the truth to light and
furthering the ends of justice. The acting of the drama of
Gonzago's death is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. From
the moment when the King betrays himself by stopping the
performance, Hamlet knows all that he wants to know.
When James ascended the throne, Hamlet received, as it
were, a new actuality, from the fact that his queen, Anne, was a
Danish princess. At the splendid festival held on the occasion of
the triumphal procession of King James, Queen Anne, and Prince
Henry Frederick, from the Tower through the city, " the Danish
March " was brilliantly performed, out of compliment to the
Queen, by a band consisting of nine trumpeters and a kettledrum,
stationed on a scaffolding at the side of St. Mildred's Church.
How this march went we do not know ; but there can be little
doubt that from that time it was played in the second scene of
the fifth act of Hamlet, where music of trumpets and drums is
prescribed, and where, in our days, at the Theatre-Frangais, they
naively play, " Kong Christian stod ved hqjen Mast." J
1 The Danish national song of to-day, written by Ewald, and the music composed
by Hartmann, 1778.
XIX
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL— ATTACKS ON
PURITANISM
THE fortunes of the company having declined by reason of the
competition complained of in Hamlet, it became necessary to
intersperse a few comedies among the sombre tragedies on which
alone Shakespeare's mind was now bent.
Comedies, therefore, had to be produced. But the disposition
of mind in which Shakespeare had created A Midsummer Nighfs
Dream had long deserted him; and infinitely remote, though so
near in point of time, was the mood in which he had produced
As You Like It.
Still the thing had to be done. He took one of his old sketches
in hand again, the play called Love's Labour's Won, which has
already been noticed (vol. i. p. 57). Its original form we do not
exactly know ; all we can do is to pick out the rhymed and youth
fully frivolous passages as having doubtless belonged to the earlier
play, to whose title there is probably a reference in Helena's
words in the concluding scene : —
"This is done.
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won ? "
It is clear that Shakespeare in his young days took hold of
the subject with the purpose of making a comedy out of it. But
now it did not turn out a comedy ; the time was past when
Shakespeare's chief strength lay in his humour. We could quite
well imagine his subsequent tragedies to have been written by
his Hamlet, if Hamlet had had life before him ; and in the same
way we could imagine this and the following play, Measure for
Measure, to have been written by his Jaques.
We find many indications in All's Well that Ends Well —
most, as was natural, in the first two acts — of Shakespeare's
60
"ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL" 61
having come straight from Hamlet. In the very first scene, the
Countess chides Helena for the immoderate grief with which she
mourns her father : it is wrong to let oneself be so overwhelmed.
Just so the King speaks to Hamlet of the " obstinate condolement "
to which he gives himself up. The Countess's advice to her son,
when he is setting off for France, reminds us strongly of the ad
vice Polonius gives to Laertes in exactly the same situation. She
says, for instance : —
" Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee ; and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright ! Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none : be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key : be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech."
Compare with these injunctions those of Polonius :—
" Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel ;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel ; but, being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice."
Notice also in this comedy the numerous sallies against court
life and courtiers, which are quite in the spirit of Hamlet. The
scene in which Polonius changes his opinion according as Hamlet
thinks the cloud like a camel, a weasel, or a whale, and that in
which Osric, who "did comply with his dug before he sucked it,"
reels off his elegant speeches, seem actually to be commented on
in general terms when the Clown (ii. 2) thus discourses about the
court : —
"Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners, he may
easily put it off at court : he that cannot make a leg, put off 's cap, kiss
his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap ; and,
indeed, such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court."
62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Now and again, too, we come upon expressions which recall
well-known speeches of Hamlet's. For instance, when Helena
(ii. 3) says to the First Lord :
"Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute,"
we are reminded of Hamlet's ever-memorable last words :
" The rest is silence."
Among other more external touches, which likewise point
clearly to the period 1602-1603, may be mentioned the many
subtle, cautious sallies against Puritanism which are interwoven
in the play. They express the bitter contempt for demonstrative
piety which filled Shakespeare's mind just at that time.
Hamlet itself had treated of a hypocrite on the largest scale.
Notice, too, the stinging reference to existing conditions in Act
iii. Scene 2 : —
" Hamlet. Look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my
father died within's two hours.
" Ophelia. Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.
" Ham. So long ? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have
a suit of sables. O heavens ! die two months ago, and not forgotten
yet? 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 ; whose epitaph is, ' For,
O ! for, O ! the hobby-horse is forgot.' "
In Airs Well that Ends Well Shakespeare has his sancti
monious enemies constantly in mind. He makes the Clown jeer
at the fanatics in both the Protestant and the Catholic camp.
They may be of different faiths, but they are alike in being un
lucky husbands. The Clown says (i. 3) : —
"Young Charbon the Puritan, and old Poysam the Papist, how
soe'er their hearts are severed in religion, their heads are both one ;
they may joll horns together, like any deer i' the herd."
A little farther on he continues : —
"Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will
wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart."
"ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL" 63
When Lafeu (ii. 3) is talking to Parolles of the marvellous
cure of the King of France which Helena has undertaken, he has
a hit at those who will find matter in it for a pious treatise : —
" Lafeu. I may truly say, it is a novelty to the world.
"Parolles. It is, indeed: if you will have it in showing, you shall
read it in — what do you call there ? —
" Laf. A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor."
Shakespeare clearly took a mischievous pleasure in imitating
the title of a Puritanic work of edification.
This polemical tendency, which extends from Hamlet through
A IPs Well that Ends Well to Measure for Measure, in the form
of an increasingly marked opposition to the growing religious
strictness and sectarianism of the day, with its accompaniment of
hypocrisy, proves plainly that Shakespeare at this time shared
the animosity of the Government towards both Puritanism and
Catholicism.
Though there is little true mirth to be found in Alls Well
that Ends Well, the piece reminds us in various ways of some
of Shakespeare's real comedies. The story resembles in several
details that of The Merchant of Venice. Portia in disguise per
suades the unwilling Bassanio to give up his ring to her; and
Helena, in the darkness of night mistaken for another, coaxes
Bertram out of the ring which he had made up his mind she
should never obtain from him. In the closing scenes, both
Bertram and Bassanio are minus their rings ; both are wretched
because they have not got them ; and in both cases the knot is
unravelled by their wives being found in possession of them.
There is a more essential relation — that of direct contrast —
between the story of AlFs Well that Ends Well and that of
The Taming of the Shrew. The earlier comedy sets forth in
playful fashion how a man by means of the attributes of his sex
— physical superiority, boldness, and coolness — helped out by
imperiousness, bluster, noise, and violence, wins the devotion of
a passionately recalcitrant young woman. All's Well that Ends
Well shows us how a woman, by means of the attributes of her
sex — gentleness, goodness of heart, cunning, and finesse — conquers
a vehemently recalcitrant man. And in both cases the pair are
married before the action proper of the play begins.
Seeing that Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew followed
64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the older play on the same subject, and that he took the story
of All's Well that Ends Well from Boccaccio's Gilette of Nar-
bonne, a translation of which appeared as early as 1566 in
Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, this contrast cannot be said to have
been devised by the poet. But it is evident that one of the chief
attractions of the latter subject for Shakespeare was the opportunity
it offered him of delineating that rare phenomenon : a woman
wooing a man and yet possessing and retaining all the charm
of her sex. Shakespeare has worked out the figure of Helena
with the tenderest partiality. Pity and admiration in concert
seem to have guided his pen. We feel in his portraiture a deep
compassion for the pangs of despised love — the compassion of
one who himself has suffered — and over the whole figure of
Helena he has shed a Raphael-like beauty. She wins all, charms
all, wherever she goes — old and young, women and men — all
except Bertram, the one in whom her life is bound up. The
King and the old Lafeu are equally captivated by her, equally
impressed by her excellences. Bertram's mother prizes her as
if she were her daughter; more highly, indeed, than she prizes
her own obstinate son. The Italian widow becomes so devoted
to her that she follows her to a foreign country in order to vouch
for her statement and win her back her husband.
She ventures all that she may gain her well-beloved, and in
the pursuit of her aim shows an inventive capacity not common
among women. For the real object of her journey to cure the
King is, as she frankly confesses, to be near Bertram. As in
the tale, she obtains the King's promise that she may, if she is
successful in curing him, choose herself a husband among the
lords of his court ; but in Boccaccio it is the King who, in answer
to her question as to the reward, gives her this promise of his
own accord ; in the play it is she who first states her wish. So
possessed is she by her passion for one who does not give her a
thought or a look. But when he rejects her (unlike Gilette in the
tale), she has no desire to attain her object by compulsion ; she
simply says to the King with noble resignation —
" That you are well restored, my lord,
I'm glad ; let the rest go."
She offers no objection when Bertram, immediately after the
wedding, announces his departure, alleging pretexts which she
CHARACTER OF HELENA 65
does not choose to see through ; she suffers without a murmur
when, at the moment of parting, he refuses her a kiss. When
she has learnt the whole truth, she can at first utter nothing
but short ejaculations (iii. 2): "My lord is gone, for ever gone."
"This is a dreadful sentence!" "Tis bitter!" — and presently
she leaves her home, that she may be no hindrance to his returning
to it. Predisposed though she is to self-confidence and pride, no
one could possibly love more tenderly and humbly.
All the most beautiful passages of her part show by the
structure of the verse and the absence of rhyme that they belong
to the poet's riper period. Note, for example, the lines (i. i) in
which Helena tells how the remembrance of her dead father has
been effaced in her mind by the picture of Bertram : —
" My imagination
Carries no favour in 't but Bertram's.
I am undone : there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it ; he is so above me :
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour : to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table ; heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet fav6ur :
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics."
If we compare the style of this passage with that which pre
vails in Helena's rhymed speeches, with their euphuistic word
plays and antitheses, the difference is very striking, and we feel
what a distance Shakespeare has traversed since the days of his
apprenticeship. Here we find no glitter of wit, but the utterance
of a heart that loves simply and deeply.
Though the play as a whole was evidently not one of those
which Shakespeare cared most about, and though he has allowed
things to stand in it which preclude the possibility of a satis
factory and harmonious end, yet he has evidently concentrated
VOL. II. E
66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his whole poetic strength on the development and perfection of
Helena's most winning character. These are the terms (i. 3) in
which, speaking to Bertram's mother, she makes confession of
her love : —
" Be not offended, for it hurts not him,
That he is lov'd of me. I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit ;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him,
Yet never know how that desert should be.
I know I love in vain, strive against hope ;
Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love,
And lack not to lose still. Thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun, that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more."
There is something in her nature which anticipates the charm,
earnestness, and boundless devotion with which Shakespeare
afterwards endows Imogen. When Bertram goes off to the war,
simply to escape acknowledging her and living with her as his
wife, she exclaims (iii. 2) —
"Poor lord ! is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war ? . . .
O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim ; move the still-'pearing air,
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord !
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there ;
Whoever charges on his forward breast,
I am the caitiff that do hold him to it."
In this there is a fervour and a glow that we do not find in the
earlier comedies. When one reads these verses, one understands
how it is that Coleridge calls Helena, "Shakespeare's loveliest
character."
Pity that this deep passion should have been inspired by so
unworthy an object. It undoubtedly lessens the interest of the
play that Shakespeare should not have given Bertram some more
BERTRAM AND HELENA 67
estimable qualities along with the all too youthful and unchival-
rous ones which he possesses. The poet has here been guilty of
a certain negligence, which shows that it was only to parts of the
play that he gave his whole mind. Bertram is right enough in
refusing to have a wife thrust upon him against his will, simply
because the King has a debt of gratitude to pay. But this first
motive for refusing gives place to one with which we have less
sympathy : to wit, pride of rank, which makes him look down on
Helena as being of inferior birth, though king, courtiers, and his
own mother consider her fit to rank with the best. Even this,
however, need not lower Bertram irretrievably in our esteem ;
but he adds to it traits of unmanliness, even of baseness. For
instance, he enjoins Helena, through Parolles, to invent some
explanation of his sudden departure which will make the King
believe it to have been a necessity ; and then he leaves her, not,
as he falsely declares, for two days, but for ever. His readiness
to marry a daughter of Lafeu the moment the report of Helena's
death has reached him is a very extraordinary preparation for
the reunion of the couple at the end of the play, and reminds us
unpleasantly of the exactly similar incident in Much Ado About
Nothing (vol. i. p. 253). But, worst of all, and an indisputable
dramatic mistake, is his entangling himself, just before the final
reconciliation, in a web of mean lies with reference to the Italian
girl to whom he had laid siege in Tuscany.
It was to make Helena's position more secure, and to avoid
any suspicion of the adventuress about her, that Shakespeare
invented the character of the Countess, that motherly friend
whose affection sets a seal on all her merits. In the same way
Parolles was invented with the purpose of making Bertram less
guilty. Bertram is to be considered as ensnared by this old
" fool, notorious liar, and coward " (as Helena at once calls him),
who figures in the play as his evil genius.
Parolles in Love's Labour's Won was doubtless a gay and
purely farcical figure — the first slight sketch for FalstafF. Coming
after Falstaff, he necessarily seems a weak repetition ; but this is
no fault of the poet's. Still, it is very plain that in the re-writing
Shakespeare's attempt at gaiety missed fire. His frame of mind
was too serious ; the view of the subject from the moral stand
point displaces and excludes pure pleasure in its comicality,
'arolles, who has Falstaff's vices without a gleam of his genius,
68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
brings anything but unmixed merriment in his train. The poet
is at pains to impress on us the lesson we ought to learn from
Parolles's self-stultification, and the shame that attends on his
misdeeds. Thus the Second Lord (iv. 3), speaking of the rasca
lity he displays in his outpourings when he is blindfolded, says —
" I will never trust a man again for keeping his sword clean, nor
believe he can have everything in him by wearing his apparel neatly."
And Parolles himself says when his effrontery is crushed (iv. 3) —
" 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. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this ; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass."
The other comic figure, the Clown, witty as he is, has not the
serene gaiety of the earlier comedies. He speaks here and there,
as already noted (vol. i. p. 60), in the youthfully whimsical style
of the earliest comedies ; but as a humoristic house-fool he does
not rank with such a sylvan fool as Touchstone, a creation of a
few years earlier, nor with the musical court-fool in Twelfth
Night.
A single passage in All's Well that Ends Well has always
struck me as having a certain personal note. It is one of those
which were quite evidently added at the time of the re-writing.
The King is speaking of Bertram's deceased father, and quotes
his words (i. 2) —
"'Let me not live, '-
Thus his good melancholy oft began,
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime,
When it was out, — ' Let me not live,' quoth he,
* After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain.' . . .
This he wish'd :
I, after him, do after him wish too."
A courtier objects to this despondent utterance —
" You are lov'd, sir ;
They that least lend it you shall lack you first."
SHAKESPEARE'S MELANCHOLY 69
.Whereupon the King replies with proud humility—
"I fill a place, I know't."
These words could not have been written save by a mature
man, who has seen impatient youth pressing forward to take his
place, and who has felt the sting of its criticism. The disposition
of mind which here betrays itself foretells that overpowering
sense of the injustice of men and of things which is soon to take
possession of Shakespeare's soul.
XX
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
A COVERT polemical intention could be vaguely divined here
and there in All's Well that Ends Well. It contained, as we
have seen, some incidental mockery of the increasing Puritanism
of the time, with its accompaniment of self-righteousness, moral
intolerance, and unctuous hypocrisy. The bent of thought which
gave birth to these sallies reappears still more clearly in the
choice of the theme treated in Measure for Measure.
The plot of Alfs Well that Ends We!! turns on the incident,
familiar in every literature, of one woman passing herself off for
another at a nocturnal rendezvous, without the substitution being
detected by the man — an incident so fruitful in dramatic situations,
that even its gross improbability has never deterred poets from
making use of it.
A standing variation of this theme, also to be found in the
most diverse literatures, is as follows : — A man is condemned to
death. His mistress, his wife, or his sister implores the judge to
pardon him. The judge promises, on condition that she shall
pass a night with him, to let the prisoner go free, but afterwards
has him executed all the same.
This subject has been treated over and over again from mediae
val times down to our own days, its latest appearances, probably,
being in Paul Heyse's novel, Der Kinder Silnde der Vdter Fluch,
and in Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca. In Shakespeare's time
it appeared in the form of an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's
Hecatommithi (1565), on which an English dramatist, George
Whetstone, founded his play, The Right Excellent and Famous
History of Promos and Cassandra (1578), and also a prose story
in his Hep tamer on of Civil Discourses ', published in 1582. Whet
stone's utterly lifeless and characterless comedy is the immediate
source from which Shakespeare derived the outlines of the story.
He is indebted to Whetstone for nothing else.
70
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE" 71
What attracted Shakespeare to this unpleasant subject was
clearly his indignation at the growing Pharisaism in matters of
sexual morality which was one outcome of the steady growth of
Puritanism among the middle classes. It was a consequence of
his position as an actor and theatrical manager that he saw only
the ugliest side of Puritanism — the one it turned towards him.
Its estimable sides well deserved a poet's sympathy. Small
wonder, indeed, that independent and pious men should seek the
salvation of their souls without the bounds of the Anglican State
Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all clergymen and
state officials were bound to swear, and to which all citizens must
make submission. It was a punishable offence to use any other
ritual than the official one, or even to refuse to go to church.
The Puritans, who dreamed of leading the Christian Church back
to its original purity, and who had returned home after their
banishment during the reign of Mary with the ideal of a demo
cratic Church before their eyes, could not possibly approve of a
State Church subject to the crown, or of such an institution as
Episcopacy. Some of them looked to Scottish Presbyterianism
as a worthy model, and desired to see Church government by
laymen, the elders of the congregation, introduced into England,
in place of the spiritual aristocracy of the bishops. Others went
still farther, denied the necessity of one common form of worship
for all, and desired to have the Church broken up into independent
congregations, in which any believer might officiate as priest.
We have here the germs of the great party division in Cromwell's
time into Presbyterians and Independents.
So far as we can see, Shakespeare took no interest whatever
in any of these ecclesiastical or religious movements. He came
into contact with Puritanism only in its narrow and fanatical
hatred of his art, and in its severely intolerant condemnation and
punishment of moral, and especially of sexual, frailties. All he
saw was its Pharisaic aspect, and its often enough only simulated
virtue.
It was his indignation at this hypocritical virtue that led him
to write Measure for Measure. He treated the subject as he did,
because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of
comedy should be interwoven with the severe and sombre warp
of tragedy. But what a comedy ! Dark, tragic, heavy as the
poet's mood — a tragi-comedy, in which the unusually broad and
72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society,
cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the
positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout,
even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare's burning wrath
at the moral hypocrisy of self-righteousness underlies the whole
structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames
through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of
obligatory merriment.
And yet it is not really against hypocrisy that his attack is
aimed. At this stage of his development he is far too great a
psychologist to depict a ready-made, finished hypocrite. No, he
shows us how weak even the strictest Pharisee will prove, if only
he happens to come across the temptation which really tempts
him; and how such a man's desire, if it meets with opposition,
reveals in him quite another being — a villain, a brute beast — who
allows himself actions worse a hundredfold than those which, in
the calm superiority of a spotless conscience, he has hitherto
punished in others with the utmost severity.
It is not a type of Shakespeare's opponents that he here un
masks and brands — it is a man in many ways above the average
type, as he saw it. The chief character in Measure for Measure
is the judge of public morality, the hard and stern Censor morum,
who in his moral fanaticism believes that he can root out vice by
persecuting its tools, and imagines that he can purify and reform
society by punishing every transgression, however natural and
comparatively harmless, as a capital crime. The play shows us
how this man, as soon as a purely sensual passion takes pos
session of him, does not hesitate to commit, under the mask of
piety, a crime against real morality so revolting and so monstrous
that no expression of loathing and contempt would be too severe
for it, and scarcely any punishment too rigorous.
From its nature such a drama ought to end by appeasing in
some satisfactory manner the craving for justice awakened in
the spectator. But comedy was what Shakespeare's company
wanted ; and besides, it would have been unwise, and perhaps even
dangerous, to carry to extremities this question of the punish
ment of moral hypocrisy. So the knot in the play was summarily
loosed, without any great expenditure of pathos, by the provident
care and timely intervention of a wise and invisibly omnipresent
prince, an occidental Haroun-al-Raschid. Fastidious in his choice
''MEASURE FOR MEASURE" 73
of means this prince was not. With an ingenuity which is pro
foundly unsatisfactory to any one of the least delicacy of feeling,
he substitutes a lovable girl, whom the iniquitous judge had at
one time promised to marry, for the beautiful young woman who
is the object of his bestial desire.
The Duke, wishing to test his servants, gives out that he is
leaving Vienna on a long journey. He intrusts the regency
during his absence to Angelo, an official of high standing and
reputation.
No sooner does Angelo come into power than he begins a
regular crusade against licentiousness and all laxity in the domain
of morals. In the firstplace, he decrees that all houses of ill-fame
in the city of Viennalire to be pulled down. In the older drama
by Whetstone, which~~!5hakespeare used as a foundation for his
play, there was a whole troop of disreputable personages, pro
curesses, prostitutes, bullies, improper characters of every descrip
tion. Shakespeare retains part of this company ; he has a single
procuress, Mistress Overdone, who reminds us slightly of Doll
Tearsheet, a single bully, that very amusing personage, Pompey ;
and he adds to them an extremely entertaining character, the
utterly dissolute but witty tattler and liar, Lucio.
But the chief alteration he makes in the subject-matter of
the play is that the Duke, disguised as a friar, is witness from
the beginning of Angelo's abuse of his power as ruler and judge.
Among other advantages resulting from this modification, we must
reckon the fact that the spectators are thus reassured in advance
as to the final issue. On the Duke's disguise, moreover, depends
most of the comic effect arising out of the character of Lucio, who
is constantly repeating to him the most absurd slanders about
himself, as if he had them from the best authority. Further, the
Duke's concealed presence is essential to the other great change
made in the story, namely, that Isabella is not really required to
sacrifice herself for her brother, her place being filled, as in All's
Well that Ends Well, by a woman who has old claims on the
man concerned. In this manner the too revoltingly painful part
of the subject is avoided.
Shakespeare has imagined one of the men who were the
bitterest enemies of his art and his calling invested with absolute
power, and using it to proceed against immorality with cruel
rigour. The first step is his attack on common prostitution,
74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
which he persuades himself he can exterminate. This vain
imagination is repeatedly ridiculed. " What shall become of me ? "
says Mistress Overdone. " Come ; fear not you : good counsellors
lack no clients." In the Act ii. sc. I we read : —
" Escalus. How would you live, Pompey ? by being a bawd ? What
do you think of the trade, Pompey ? is it a lawful trade ?
"Pompey. If the law would allow it, sir.
" Escal. But the law will not allow it, Pompey ; nor it shall not be
allowed in Vienna.
" Pomp. Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of
the city.
"Escal. No, Pompey.
"Pomp. Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to't then."
And Lucio (iii. 2) also ridicules Angelo's severity as fruit
less : —
"Lucio. A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in him :
something too crabbed that way, friar.
"Duke. It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it.
" Lucio. Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred : it is well
allied ; but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking
be put down. They say, this Angelo was not made by man and woman,
after this downright way of creation : is it true, think you ? "
But besides taking strict proceedings against actual debauchery,
Angelo revives an old law which has long been in disuse — accord
ing to the Duke for fourteen, according to Claudio for nineteen
years — making death the punishment of all sexual commerce
without marriage ; and by this law young Claudio is condemned
to death for his relation to Juliet.
It was an innocent relation. He says (i. 3) : —
" She is fast my wife
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order : this we came not to,
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends."
But this avails nothing. An example is to be made. It is in
vain that even the highly respectable Provost feels compassion
for him, and says (ii. 2) :—
" All sects, all ages smack of this vice, and he
To die for it ! "
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE" 75
The young men of the town cannot explain this insane severity
in any other way than by the supposition that Lord Angelo is a
man with " snow-broth " in his veins in place of blood.
It soon appears, however, that he is not the man of ice he is
taken to be.
Escalus, an old, honourable nobleman, bids him bear in mind
that though his own virtue be of the straitest, it has, perhaps,
never been tempted ; had it been exposed to temptations, it might
not have stood the test better than that of others. Angelo answers
haughtily that to be tempted is one thing, to fall another. But
now comes Claudio's sister, Isabella, young, charming, and intel
ligent, and beseeches him to spare her brother's life (ii. 2) :—
" Good, good my lord, bethink you :
Who is it that hath died for this offence ?
There's many have committed it."
He is inexorable. She shows the unreason of punishing so
stringently the errors of love :
" Isab. Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder ; nothing but thunder. —
Merciful heaven !
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,
Than the soft myrtle."
And she continues in such a strain, that we cannot but hear the
poet's voice through hers : —
" But man, proud man !
Brest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he 's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, — like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep ; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal."
And she appeals to his own self-knowledge : —
" Go to your bosom ;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault."
76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He invites her to come again the next day ; and hardly is she
gone when, in a monologue, he reveals his hateful passion, and
even hints at his still more hateful purpose of forcing her to
gratify it in payment for her brother's release.
He makes her his proposal. She is appalled ; she now sees,
like Hamlet, what life can be, what undreamt-of horrors can
happen, to what a pitch villainy can be carried, even on the
judgment-seat : —
" O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned'st body to invest and cover
In princely guards ! Dost thou think, Claudio? —
If I would yield him my virginity,
Thou mightst be freed."
She cannot even denounce him, for, as he himself points out to
her, no one will believe her; his stainless name, his strict life
and high rank, will stifle the accusation if she dares to make it.
Feeling himself safe, he is doubly audacious. Thus, when, at
the conclusion of the play (v. 3), she lays her indictment before
the reinstated Duke, Angelo says brazenly, " My lord, her wits,
I fear me, are not firm." Then follows, as if in continuation of
Isabella's just-quoted speech, the fiery protest springing from the
poet's intensest conviction :—
" Make not impossible
That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible,
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo."
(See vol. i. p. 282.)
But the protest has no immediate result. Isabella is, for the
time being, sent to prison for slandering a man of unblemished
honour. And the irony is kept up to the last. The Duke, in his
character as a friar, has learnt bitter lessons ; amongst others,
that there is hardly enough honesty in the world to hold society
together. But when he himself, in his disguise, relates what he
has witnessed, his own faithful servants are on the point of
sending him also to prison. In his role of Haroun-al-Raschid,
he has seen and realised that law is made to serve as a screen for
might. Thus he says —
" My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE" 77
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o'er-run the stew : laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,
As much in mock as mark.
Escal. Slander to the state ! Away with him to prison."
As a play, Measure for Measure rests entirely on three scenes :
the one in which Angelo is tempted by Isabella's beauty ; that
in which he makes the shameless proposal that she shall give
her honour in exchange for rierTbrofriers life ; and, thirdly, that
most dramatic one in which Claudio, .. after first hearing with
fortitude and indignation wfelt -his sister has to tell him of
Angelo's baseness, breaks down, and, like Kleist's Prince of
Homburg two centuries later, begins meanly to beg for his life.
Round these principal scenes are grouped the many excellent and
vigorously realistic comic passages, treated in a spirit which
afterwards revived in Hogarth and Thackeray ; and other scenes
designed solely to retard the dramatic wheel a little, which,
therefore, jar upon us as conventional. It is, for example,
an entirely unjustifiable experiment which the Duke tries on
Isabella in the fourth act, when he falsely assures her that her
brother's head has already been cut off and sent to Angelo. This
is introduced solely for the sake of an effect at the end.
In this very unequally elaborated play, it is evident that
Shakespeare cared only for the main point — the blow he was
striking at hypocrisy. And it is probable that he here ventured
as far as he by any means dared. It is a giant stride from the
stingless satire on Puritanism in the character of Malvolio to this
representation of a Puritan like Angelo. Probably for this very
reason, Shakespeare has tried in every way to shield himself.
The subject is treated entirely as a comedy. There is a threat of
executing first Claudio, then the humorous scoundrel Barnardine,
whose head is to be delivered instead of Claudio's ; Barnardine is
actually brought on the scene directly before execution, and the
spectators sit in suspense ; but all ends well at last, and the head
of a man already dead is sent to Angelo. A noble maiden is
threatened with dishonour; but another woman, Mariana, who
was worthy of a better fate, keeps tryst with Angelo in her stead,
and this danger is over. Finally, threats of retribution close
round Angelo, the villain, himself; but after all he escapes
78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
unpunished, being merely obliged to marry the amiable girl whom
he had at an earlier period deserted. In this way the play's
terrible impeachment of hypocrisy is most carefully glozed over,
and along with it the pessimism which animates the whole.
For it is remarkable how deeply pessimistic is the spirit of
this play. When the Duke is exhorting Claudio (iii. i) not to fear
his inevitable fate, he goes farther in his depreciation of human
life than Hamlet himself when his mood is blackest : —
" Reason thus with life : —
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep ; a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That do this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death's fool ;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still.
Happy thou art not ;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,
And what thou hast, forgett'st. Thou art not certain ;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor ;
For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friends hast thou none ;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both ; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld : and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this,
That bears the name of life ? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths • yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even."
Note with what art and care everything is here assembled
that can confound and abash the normal instinct that makes for
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE" 79
life. Here for the first time Shakespeare anticipates Schopen
hauer.
It is clear that in this play the poet was earnestly bent on
proving his own standpoint to be the moral one. In hardly any
other play do we find such persistent emphasis laid, with small
regard for consistency of character, upon the general moral.
For example, could there be a more direct utterance than the
Duke's monologue at the end of Act iii. : —
" He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe ;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go ;
More nor less to others paying,
Than by self-offences weighing.
Shame to him whose cruel striking
Kills for faults of his own liking !
Twice treble shame on Angelo,
To weed my vice, and let his grow ! "
Similarly, and in a like spirit, the moral pointer comes into
play wherever there is an opportunity of showing how apt princes
and rulers are to be misjudged, and how recklessly they are dis
paraged and slandered.
Thus the Duke says towards the close of Act iii. : —
" No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure scape : black-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue ? "
And later (iv. i), again : —
" O place and greatness ! millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings."
It is quite remarkable how this dwelling on baseless criticism
by subjects is accompanied by a constant tendency to invoke the
protection of the sovereign, or, in other words, of James I., who
had just ascended the throne, and who, with his long-accumulated
bitterness against Scottish Presbyterianism, was already showing
himself hostile to English Puritanism. Hence the politic insist-
So WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ence, at the close, upon a point quite irrelevant to the matter of
the play : all other sins being declared pardonable, save only
slander or criticism of the sovereign. Lucio alone, who, to the
great entertainment of the spectators, has told lies about the
Duke, and, though only in jest, has spoken ill of him, is to be
mercilessly punished. To the last moment it seems as if he were
to be first whipped, then hanged. And even after this sentence
is commuted in order that the tone of comedy may be preserved,
and he is commanded instead to marry a prostitute, it is expressly
insisted that whipping and hanging ought by rights to have been
his punishment. " Slandering a prince deserves it," says the
Duke, at the beginning of the final speech.
This attitude of Shakespeare's presents an exact parallel to
that of Moliere in the concluding scene of Tartuffe, sixty years
later. The prince, in accordance with James of Scotland's
theories of princely duty, appears as the universally vigilant
guardian of his people ; he alone chastises the hypocrite, whose
lust of power and audacity distinguish him from the rest. The
appeal to the prince in Measure for Measure answers exactly
to the great Deus-ex-machina speech in Tartuffe, which relieves
the leading characters from the nightmare that has oppressed
them : —
" Nous vivons sous un prince, ennemi de la fraude,
Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les co3urs
Et que ne peut tromper tout 1'art des imposteurs."
In the seventeenth century kings were still the protectors of art
and artists against moral and religious fanaticism.
XXI
ACCESSION OF JAMES AND ANNE — RALEIGH'S FATE —
SHAKESPEARE'S COMPANY BECOME HIS MAJESTY'S
SERVANTS— SCOTCH INFLUENCE.
IN Measure for Measure it is not only the monarchical tone of
the play, but some quite definite points, that mark it out as hav
ing been produced at the time of James's accession to the throne
in 1603. In the very first scene there is an allusion to the new
king's nervous dislike of crowds. This peculiarity, which caused
much surprise on the occasion of his entrance into England, is
here placed in a flattering light. The Duke says : —
" I'll privily away : I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it."
It is also with unmistakable reference to James's antipathy
for a throng that Angelo, in Act ii. sc. 4, describes the crowd
ing of the people round a beloved sovereign as an inadmissible
intrusion : —
" So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons,
Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive : and even so
The general, subject to a well-wish'd king,
Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence."
Elizabeth had breathed her last on the 24th of March 1603.
On her deathbed, when she could no longer speak, she had made
VOL. ii. 8l F
82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the shape of a crown above her head with her hands, to signify
that she chose as her successor one who was already a king.
Her ministers had long been in secret negotiation with James VI.
of Scotland, and had promised him the succession, in spite of a
provision in Henry VIII. 's will which excluded his elder sister's
Scottish descendants from the throne. This had to be set aside ;
for there was not in the younger line any personage of sufficient
distinction to be at all eligible. There was obvious advantage,
too, in uniting the crowns of England and Scotland on one head ;
too long had the neighbour kingdoms wasted each other's ener
gies in mutual feuds. All parties in the nation agreed with the
ministers in looking to James as Elizabeth's natural successor.
The Protestants felt confidence in him as a Protestant ; the
Catholics looked for better treatment from the son of the Catholic
martyr-queen ; the Puritans hoped that he, as a new and peace-
loving king, would sanction such alterations in the statutory form
of worship as should enable them to take part in it without
injury to their souls. Great expectations greeted him.
Hardly was the breath out of Queen Elizabeth's body when
Sir Robert Carey, a gentleman on whom she had conferred many
benefits, but who, in his anxiety to ensure the new King's favour,
had post-horses standing ready at every station, galloped off to
be the first to bring the news to James in Edinburgh. On the
way he was thrown from his horse, which kicked him on the
head; but in spite of this he reached Holyrood on the evening
of the 26th of March, just after the King had gone to bed. He
was hurriedly conducted into the bed-chamber, where he knelt
and greeted James by the title of King of England, Scotland,
France, and Ireland. " Hee gave mee his hand to kisse," writes
Carey, " and bade me welcome." He also promised Carey a place
as Gentleman of the Bed-Chamber, and various other things, in
reward for his zeal ; but forgot all these promises as soon as he
stood on English ground.
In London all preparations had been carefully made. A pro
clamation of James as King had been drawn up by Cecil during
Elizabeth's lifetime, and sent to Scotland for James's sanction.
This the Prime Minister read, a few hours after the Queen's
death, to an assembly of the Privy Council and chief nobility,
and a great crowd, of the people, amidst universal approbation.
Three heralds with a trumpeter repeated the proclamation in the
JAMES -I. 83
Tower, "whereof as well prysoners as others rejoyced, namely,
the Earle of Southampton, in whom all signes of great gladnesse
appeared." Not without reason; for almost the first order James
gave was that a courier should convey to Southampton the King's
desire that he should at once join him and accompany him on his
progress through England to London, where he was to receive
the oath of allegiance and to be crowned.
On the 5th of April 1603, James I. of Great Britain left
Edinburgh to take possession of his new kingdom. His royal
progress was a very slow one, for every nobleman and gentleman
whose house he passed invited him to enter; he accepted all
invitations, spent day after day in festivities, and rewarded hos
pitality by distributing knighthoods in unheard-of and excessive
numbers. One of his actions was unequivocally censured. At
Newark " was taken a cutpurse doing the deed," and James had
him hanged without trial or judgment. The displeasure shown
made it plain to him that he could not thus assume superiority
to the laws of England. In Scotland there had been a general
demand for a strong monarchy, which could hold the nobles and
the clergy in check ; in England the day for this was over, and
the new King's successors learned to their cost the futility of
trying to carry on the traditions of despotism on English soil.
James himself was received with the nai've, disinterested joy
with which the mass of the people are apt to greet a new monarch,
of whose real qualities nothing is yet known, and with the less
disinterested flatteries by which every one who came into contact
with the King sought personal favour in his eyes.
There was nothing kingly or even winning in King James's
exterior. Strange that the handsome Henry Darnley and the
beautiful Mary Stuart should have had such an insignificant and
ungainly son ! He was something over middle height, indeed,
but his figure was awkward, his head lumpish, and his eyes
projecting. His language was the broadest Scotch, and when he
opened his mouth it was rather to spit out the words than to
speak ; he hustled them out so that they stumbled over each other.
He talked, ate, and dressed like a peasant, and, in spite of his ap
parently decorous life, was addicted to the broadest improprieties
of talk, even in the presence of ladies. He walked like one who
has no command over his limbs, and he could never keep still,
even in a room, but was always pacing up and down with clumsy,
84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sprawling movements. His muscles were developed by riding
and hunting, but his whole appearance was wanting in dignity.
The shock inflicted on his mother during her pregnancy, by
Rizzio's assassination, probably accounts for his dread of the
sight of drawn steel. The terrorism in which he was brought
up had increased his natural timidity. While he was yet but
a youth, the French ambassador, Fontenay, summed up his de
scription of him thus : " In one word, he is an old young
man."
Now, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, he was a learned
personage, full of prejudices, wanting neither in shrewdness nor
in wit, but with two absorbing passions — the one for conversation
on theological and ecclesiastical matters, and the other for hunting
expeditions, to which he sometimes gave up so much as six
consecutive days. He had not Elizabeth's political instinct ; she
had chosen her councillors among men of the most different
parties ; he admitted to his council none but those whose opinions
agreed with his own. But his vanity was quite equal to hers.
He had the pedant's boastfulness ; he was fond of bragging, for
instance, that he could do more work in one hour than others
in a day; and he was especially proud of his learning. Some
Shakespeare students have, as already observed, seen in him the
prototype of Hamlet. He was certainly no Hamlet, but rather
what Alfred Stern somewhere calls him — a Polonius on the
throne. We have a description by Sir John Harington of an
audience James gave him in 1604. The King " enquyrede muche
of lernynge " in such a way as to remind him of " his examiner at
Cambridge aforetyme," quoted scraps of Aristotle which he hardly
understood himself, and made Harington read aloud part of a
canto of Ariosto. Then he asked him what he " thoughte pure
witte was made of," and whom it best became, and thereupon
inquired whether he did not think a king ought to be "the
beste clerke" in his country. Farther, "His Majestic did much
presse for my opinion touchinge the power of Satane in matter
of witchcraft, and . . . why the Devil did worke more with
anciente women than others." This question Sir John boldly
and wittily answered by reminding him of the preference for
"walking in dry places" ascribed in Scripture to the Devil.
James then told of the apparition of "a bloodie heade dancinge
in the aire," which had been seen in Scotland before his mother's
MARRIAGE OF JAMES I. 85
death, and concluded : " Now, sir, you have seen my wisdome in
some sorte, and I have pried into yours. I praye you, do me
justice in your reporte, and, in good season, I will not fail to add
to your understandinge, in suche pointes as I may find you lacke
amendmente." Perhaps only one European sovereign since James
has so plumed himself on his own omniscience.
James's relations with England during Elizabeth's reign had
not been invariably friendly. Nourishing a lively ill-will to the
Presbyterian clergy, who were always trying to interfere in
matters of state, he had in 1584, at the age of eighteen, appealed
to the Pope for assistance for himself and his imprisoned mother.
But the very next year, in consideration of the payment of a
pension of £4000 a year, he concluded a treaty with Elizabeth.
When this was ratified in 1586, his mother disinherited him and
nominated Philip II. her successor. At the very time when the
trial of Mary Stuart was going on, James made application to
have his title as heir to the throne of England acknowledged.
This unworthy, unchivalrous proceeding made it impossible for
him in any way to interfere with the carrying out of whatever
sentence the English Government chose to pronounce in his
mother's case. Nevertheless her execution naturally affected
him painfully, and it was his resentment that made him hasten
on his long-planned marriage with the Danish princess Anne,
daughter of Frederick II. — an alliance which he knew to be
disagreeable to Elizabeth. He gained a political advantage by
it, Denmark waiving her claim to the Orkney Islands.
His bride, born at Skanderborg towards the close of 1574,
was at the time of her marriage not fifteen years old — a pretty,
fair-skinned, golden-haired girl. Daughter of a Lutheran father
and the Lutheran Sophia of Mecklenburg, she had been brought
up in Lutheran orthodoxy. She had received some instruction in
chemistry from Tycho Brahe ; but her education, on the whole,
had been rather that of a spoilt child. Great ideas had been in
stilled into her of what it meant to belong to the royal house of
Denmark, so that she agreed with her future husband in a con
viction of the importance of kingly state. Other features of her
character were good-humour, inborn wit, and a superficial gaiety
which sometimes went to unguarded lengths. Her behaviour,
only three years after her marriage, gave rise to a scandal —
public opinion (doubtless unjustly) making James accessory to
86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the assassination of the Earl of Murray, whom it was supposed
that he had good reasons for wishing out of the way.
The difficulties which beset Anne's voyage from Denmark to
Scotland in 1589 are well known. A storm, for raising which
many Danish " witches " and no fewer than two hundred luckless
Scottish crones had to suffer at the stake, drove the bride to Oslo
in Norway. The impatient bridegroom then undertook the one
romantic adventure of his life and set off in search of her. He
found her at Oslo, was married there, and spent the winter in
Denmark.
As Queen of Scotland, Anne already showed herself possessed
by the same mania for building which characterised her brother,
Christian IV. As Queen of England she aroused dissatisfaction
by her constant coquetting with Roman Catholicism. By her
own wish, the Pope sent her gifts of all sorts of Catholic gim-
cracks ; they were taken from her, and the bearer was consigned
to the Tower. She showed a certain amiable independence in
the sympathy and good-will which she displayed towards Sir
Walter Raleigh, whom her husband imprisoned in the Tower;
but on the whole she was an insignificant woman, pleasure-
loving and pomp-loving (consequently a patroness of those poets
who, like Ben Jonson, wrote masques for court festivals), and, in
contrast to the economical Elizabeth, so extravagant that she was
always in debt. Very soon after her arrival in England, she
owed enormous sums to jewellers and other merchants.
The new King soon disappointed the hopes which Puritans
and Catholics had cherished as to his tolerance. Even during
the course of his journey from Edinburgh to London numerous
petitions for the better treatment of Dissenters had been handed
to him, and he seemed to give good promises to both parties.
But as early as January 1604, on the occasion of a conference he
summoned at Hampton Court, there was a rupture between him
and the Puritans — the very mention of the word " Presbyter "
making him furious. The formula, " No bishop, no king," though
not invented by him, expressed his principles. And when the
House of Commons favoured measures of a Puritan tendency, he
retaliated by proroguing Parliament, after rebuking the House
in undignified and boastful terms. He complained in this
speech that whereas in Scotland he had been regarded " not
only as a king but as a counsellor," in England, on the contrary,
SIR WALTER RALEIGH 87
there was " nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find
fault with his propositions." "There all things warranted that
came from me. Here all things suspected," &c. &c. The Puritan
clergy, who refused to accept the Anglican ritual, were driven
from their livings.
The Catholics fared still worse. James had at first intended
to lighten the heavy penalties to which they were subject, but the
discovery of Catholic conspiracies led him to change his mind.
The Catholic priests and the pupils of the Jesuit schools were
banished. After the discovery of Guy Fawkes's great Gunpowder
Plot in 1605, the position of the Catholics naturally became as
bad as possible.
One of the most marked traits in James's political character
was his eagerness to bring about and preserve peace with Spain.
While yet on the way to London, he ordered a cessation of all
hostilities, and by 1604 he had concluded peace. One of the
reasons for his at once assuming a hostile attitude towards
Raleigh was that he was well acquainted with Raleigh's hatred
of Spain and disinclination to peace with that country; and
Raleigh increased the King's displeasure during the following
months by constantly urging upon him a war policy. But there
were other and less impersonal reasons for the King's hostility.
Raleigh had been Elizabeth's favourite, and had in 1601 presented
to her a state-paper drawn up by himself on " The Dangers of a
Spanish Faction in Scotland," the rumoured contents of which
had so alarmed James that he offered Elizabeth the assistance of
three thousand Scottish troops against Spain. Raleigh had been
an opponent of Essex, who had sought support from James and
attached himself to his fortunes. And what was worse, he had
an enemy, though he scarcely knew it, in the person of a man
who had opposed Essex much more strongly than he, but who
had, even before the Queen's death, assured James of his absolute
devotion. This was Robert Cecil, who feared Raleigh's ambition
and ability.
Raleigh was in the West of England when the Queen died,
and could not at once join in the great rush northwards to meet
King James, which emptied London of all its nobility. By the
time he started, with a large retinue, to wait on the King, he had
already received a kind of command not to do so, in the shape
of one of the orders dispensing the recipient from attendance on
88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the King, which James had sent in blank to Cecil, to be filled
in with the names of those whom Cecil thought he should keep
at a distance. James received Raleigh ungraciously, and at once
told him, with a bad pun on his name, that he had been prejudiced
against him : " On my soul, man, I have heard but rawly of thee."
A few weeks later he was deprived (though not without compensa
tion) of the office of Captain of the Guard, which was given to a
Scotchman, Sir Thomas Erskine ; and within the same month he
was ordered immediately to give up to the Bishop of Durham the
town palace of that See, which he had occupied, and on which he
had spent great sums of money.
At last, one day in July 1603, as he was standing ready to
ride out with the King, he was arrested and imprisoned on a
charge of high treason. This was the beginning of a long series
of base proceedings against this eminent man, who had deserved
so well of his country. He was a prisoner in the Tower for
thirteen years, and the persecution ended only with the judicial
murder which was committed when, in 1618, after making the
most beautiful speech ever heard from the scaffold, he laid his
head on the block with incomparable courage and calm dignity.
It is difficult for us to-day to understand how a man of
Raleigh's worth could at that time be the best-hated man in
England. For us he is simply, as Gardiner has expressed it,
" the man who had more genius than all the Privy Council put
together;" or, as Gosse has called him, "the figure which takes
the same place in the field of action which Shakespeare takes in
that of imagination and Bacon in that of thought." But that he
was generally hated at the time of his imprisonment is certain.
Many disliked him as the enemy of Essex. It was said that
in Essex's last hours Raleigh had jeered at him. Raleigh him
self wrote in 1618: —
" It is said I was a persecutor of my Lord of Essex ; that I puffed
out tobacco in disdain when he was on the scaffold. But I take God
to witness I shed tears for him when he died. I confess I was of a
contrary faction, but I knew he was a noble gentleman. Those that
set me up against him [evidently Cecil] did afterwards set themselves
against me."
But what mattered the falseness of the accusation if it was
believed ? And there were other, much less reasonable, grounds
SIR WALTER RALEIGH 89
of hatred. From one of Raleigh's letters, written in the last days
of Queen Elizabeth, we learn that the tavern-keepers throughout
the country held him responsible for a tax imposed on them,
which was in fact due solely to the Queen's rapacity. In this
letter he prays Cecil to prevail on Elizabeth to remit the tax, for,
says he : "I cannot live, nor show my face out of my doors,
without it, nor dare ride through the towns where these taverners
dwell." It seems as if his very greatness had marked him out
for universal hatred ; and, being conscious of his worth, he would
not stoop to a truckling policy.
There was much that was popularly winning about the tall,
vigorous, rather large-boned Raleigh, with his bright complexion
and his open expression ; but, like a true son of the Renaissance,
he challenged dislike by his pride and magnificence. His dress
was always splendid, and he loved, like a Persian Shah or Indian
Rajah of our day, to cover himself, down to his shoes, with the
most precious jewels. When he was arrested in 1603, he had
gems to the value of .£4000 (about ^"20,000 in modern money) on
his breast, and when he was thrown into prison for the last time
in 1618, his pockets were found full of jewels and golden orna
ments which he had hastily stripped off his dress.
He was worshipped by those who had served under him ;
they valued his qualities of heart as well as his energy and
intellect. But the crowd, whom he treated with disdain, and the
courtiers and statesmen with whom he had competed for Elizabeth's
favour, saw nothing in him but matchless effrontery and unscrupu-
lousness. In spite of the favour he enjoyed, his rivals prevented
his ever attaining any of the highest posts. On those naval
expeditions in which he most distinguished himself, his place was
always second in command. He was baulked even in the desire
which he cherished during Elizabeth's later years for a place in
the Privy Council.
He was now over fifty, and aged before his time. His untrust
worthy friend, Lord Cobham, was suspected of complicity in
Watson's Catholic plot ; and this suspicion extended to Raleigh,
who was thought to have been a party to intrigues for the
dethronement of James in favour of his kinswoman, Arabella
Stuart. He was tried for high treason ; and as the law then
stood in England, any man accused of such a crime was as good
as lost, however innocent he might be. "A century later,"
90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
says Mr. Gardiner, " Raleigh might well have smiled at the
evidence which was brought against him." Then the law was
as cruel as it was unjust. The accused was considered guilty
until he proved his innocence ; no advocate was allowed to plead
his cause ; unprepared, at a moment's notice, he had to refute
charges which had been carefully accumulated and marshalled
against him during a long period. That a man should be sus
pected of such an enormity as desiring to bring Spanish armies
on to the free soil of England was enough to deprive him at once
of all sympathy. Little wonder that Raleigh, a few days after
his indictment, tried to commit suicide. His famous letter to his
wife, written before the attempt, gives consummate expression to
a great man's despair in face of a destiny which he does not fear,
yet cannot master.
While this tragedy was being enacted in the Tower, London
was making magnificent preparations for the state entrance of
King James and Queen Anne into their new capital. Seven
beautiful triumphal arches were erected; "England's Caesar," as
Henry Petowe in his coronation ode with some little exaggeration
entitled James, was exalted and glorified by the poets of the day
with as great enthusiasm as though his exploits had already
rivalled those of "mightiest Julius."
Henry Chettle wrote The SJiepheards Spring Song for the
Entertainment of King James, our most potent Sovereign ;
Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatory to the Kings
Majestic ; Michael Drayton, To the Majestie of King James, a
Gratulatorie Poem. The actor Thomas Greene composed A
Poet's Vision and a Prince's Glorie. Dedicated to the high and
mightie Prince James, King of England, Scotland, France and
Ireland ; and scores of other poets lifted up their voices in song.
Daniel wrote a masque which was acted at Hampton Court ;
Dekker, a description of the King's " Triumphant Passage," with
poetic dialogues ; Ben Jonson, a similar description ; and Drayton,
a Pcean Triumphall. Ben Jonson also produced a masque called
Penates, and another entitled The Masque of Blackness ; while
a host of lesser lights wrote poems in the same style. The
unobtrusive, mildly flattering allusions to James, which we have
found and shall presently find in Shakespeare's plays of this
period, produce an exceedingly feeble, almost imperceptible effect
amid this storm of adulation. To have omitted them altogether,
JAMES I.'S ENTRY INTO LONDON 91
or to have made them in the slightest degree less deferential,
would have been gratuitously and indefensibly churlish, in view
of the favour which James had made haste to extend to Shake
speare's company.
It is most interesting to-day to read the programme of the
royal procession from the Tower to Whitehall in 1604, in which
all the dignitaries of the realm took part, and all the privileged
classes, court, nobility, clergy, royal guard, were fully represented.
In the middle of the enormous procession rides the King
under a canopy. Immediately before him, the dukes, marquises,
eldest sons of dukes, earls, &c. &c. Immediately behind him
comes the Queen, and after her all the first ladies of the king
dom — duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, viscountesses, &c.
Among the ladies mentioned by name is Lady Rich, with the
note, "by especiall comandement." At the foot of the page,
another note runs thus : " To go as a daughter to Henry Bourchier,
Earl of Essex." James desired to honour in her the memory
of her ill-fated brother. Among the lawyers in the procession
Sir Francis Bacon has a place of honour; he is described as
" the King's Counsell at Lawe." Bacon's learning and obsequious
pliancy, James's pedantry and monarchical arrogance, quickly
brought these two together. But among " His Majesty's Ser
vants," at the very head of the procession, immediately after the
heralds and the Prince's and Queen's men-in-waiting, William
Shakespeare was no doubt to be seen, dressed in a suit of red
cloth, which the court accounts show to have been provided for
him.
James was a great lover of the play, but Scotland had neither
drama nor actors of her own. Not long before this, in 1599, he
had vigorously opposed the resolution of his Presbyterian Council
to forbid performances by English actors.
As early as May 17, 1603, he had granted the patent Pro
Laurentio Fletcher et Willielmo Shakespeare et a/us, which pro
moted the Lord Chamberlain's company to be the King's own
actors.
The fact that Lawrence Fletcher is named first gives us a clue
to the reasons for this proceeding on the part of the King. In
the records of the Town Council of Aberdeen for October 1601,
there is an entry to the effect that, by special recommendation of
the King, a gratuity was paid to a company of players for their
92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
performances in the town, and that the freedom of the city was
conferred on one of these actors, Lawrence Fletcher. There
can be hardly any doubt that Charles Knight, in spite of Elze's
objections in his Essays on Shakespeare, is correct in his opinion
that this Fletcher was an Englishman, and that he was closely
connected with Shakespeare ; for the actor Augustine Philipps,
who, in 1605, bequeaths thirty shillings in gold to his "fellowe"
William Shakespeare, likewise bequeaths twenty shillings to his
"fellowe" Lawrence Fletcher.
James arrived in London on the 7th of May 1603, removed
to Greenwich on account of the plague on the I3th, and, as
already mentioned, dated the patent from there on the i/th. It
can scarcely be supposed that, in so short a space of time, the
Lord Chamberlain's men should not only have played before
James, but so powerfully impressed him that he at once advanced
them to be his own company. He must evidently have known
them before ; perhaps he already, as King of Scotland, had some
of them in his service. This supposition is supported by the fact
that, as we have seen, some members of Shakespeare's company
were in Aberdeen in the autumn of 1601. It is even probable
that Shakespeare himself was in Scotland with his comrades.
In Macbeth, he has altered the meadow-land, which Holinshed
represents as lying around Inverness, into the heath which is
really characteristic of the district ; and the whole play, with its
numerous allusions to Scottish affairs, bears the impress of
having been conceived on Scottish soil. Possibly Shakespeare's
thoughts were hovering round the Scottish tragedy while he
passed along in the procession with the royal arms on his red
dress.1
1 S. R. Gardiner : History of England, vol. i. Thomas Milner : The History of
England. Alfred Stern : Geschichte der Revolution in England. Gosse : Raleigh.
J. Nicols : The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James
the First, vol. i. Disraeli : An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of
fames the First. Dictionary of National Biography : James, Anne. Nathan Drake :
Shakespeare and his Times.
XXII
MACBETH— MACBETH AND HAMLET— DIFFICULTIES
ARISING FROM THE STATE OF THE TEXT
DOWDEN somewhere remarks that if Shakespeare had died at
the age of forty, posterity would have said that this was certainly
a great loss, but would have found comfort in the thought that
Hamlet marked the zenith of his productive power — he could
hardly have written another such masterpiece.
And now follow in rapid succession Macbeth, Othello, King
Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the rest. Hamlet was not the
conclusion of a career ; Hamlet was the spring-board from which
Shakespeare leaped forth into a whole new world of mystery and
awe. Dowden has happily compared the tragic figures that glide
one after the other across his field of vision between 1604 and
1610 with the bloody and threatening apparitions that pass before
Macbeth in the witches' cavern.
The natural tendency of his youth had been to see good
everywhere. He had even felt, with his King Henry, that " there
is some soul of goodness in things evil." Now, when the misery
of life, the problem of evil, presented itself to his inward eye, it
was especially the potency of wickedness that impressed him as
strange and terrible. We have seen him brooding over it in
Hamlet and Measure for Measure. He had of course recog
nised it before, and represented it on the grandest scale ; but in
Richard III. the main emphasis is still laid on outward history ;
Richard is the same man from his first appearance to his last.
What now fascinates Shakespeare is to show how the man into
whose veins evil has injected some drops of its poison, becomes
bloated, gangrened, foredoomed to self-destruction or annihila
tion, like Macbeth, Othello, Lear. Lady Macbeth's ambition,
lago's malice, the daughters' ingratitude, lead, step by step, to
irresistible, ever-increasing calamity.
93
94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It is my conviction that Macbeth was the first of these subjects
which Shakespeare took in hand. All we know with certainty,
indeed, is that the play was acted at the Globe Theatre in 1610.
Dr. Simon Forman, in his Booke of Plaies and Notes thereon,
gave a detailed account of a performance of it at which he was
present on the 2Oth of April of this year. But in the comedy of
The Puritan, dating from 1607, we find an unmistakable allusion
to Banquo's ghost; and the lines in the play itself (iv. i) —
" And some I see
That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry,"
— a reference to the union of England and Scotland, and their
conjunction with Ireland under James — would have had little
effect unless spoken from the stage shortly after the event. As
James was proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland on the
2Oth of October 1604, we may conclude that Macbeth was not
produced later than 1604-1605.
At James's accession a breath of Scottish air blew over
England ; we feel it in Macbeth. The scene of the tragedy is
laid in the country from which the new king came, and most
true to nature is the reproduction in this dark drama of Scot
land's forests and heaths and castles, her passions and her poetry.
There is much to indicate that an unbroken train of thought
led Shakespeare from Hamlet to Macbeth. The personality of
Macbeth is a sort of counterpart to that of Hamlet. The
Danish prince's nature is passionate, but refined and thoughtful.
Before the deed of vengeance which is imposed upon him he
is restless, self-reproachful, and self-tormenting; but he never
betrays the slightest remorse for a murder once committed,
though he kills four persons before he stabs the King. The
Scottish thane is the rough, blunt soldier, the man of action.
He takes little time for deliberation before he strikes; but im
mediately after the murder he is attacked by hallucinations both
of sight and hearing, and is hounded on, wild and vacillating and
frenzied, from crime to crime. He stifles his self-reproaches and
falls at last, after defending himself with the hopeless fury of the
"bear tied to the stake."
Hamlet says : —
" And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
MACBETH AND HAMLET 95
Macbeth, on the contrary, declares (iv. i) —
" From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand."
They stand at opposite poles — Hamlet, the dreamer; Macbeth,
the captain, " Bellona's bridegroom." Hamlet has a super
abundance of culture and of intellectual power. His strength
is of the kind that wears a mask ; he is a master in the art of
dissimulation. Macbeth is unsophisticated to the point of clumsi
ness, betraying himself when he tries to deceive. His wife has
to beg him not to show a troubled countenance, but to "sleek
o'er his rugged looks."
Hamlet is the born aristocrat : very proud, keenly alive to his
worth, very self-critical — too self-critical to be ambitious in the
common acceptation of the word. To Macbeth, on the contrary,
a sounding title is honour, and a wreath on the head, a crown
on the brow, greatness. When the Witches on the heath, and
another witch, his wife in the castle, have held up before his
eyes the glory of the crown and the power of the sceptre, he
has found his great goal — a tangible prize in this life, for which
he is willing to risk his welfare in "the life to come." Whilst
Hamlet, with his hereditary right, hardly gives a thought to the
throne of which he has been robbed, Macbeth murders his king,
his benefactor, his guest, that he may plunder him and his sons
of a chair with a purple canopy.
And yet there is a certain resemblance between Macbeth
and Hamlet. One feels that the two tragedies must have been
written close upon each other. In his first monologue (i. 7)
Macbeth stands hesitating with Hamlet-like misgivings : —
" If it were done, when 't is done, then 't were well
It were done quickly : if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success ; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, —
We'd jump the life to come. — But in these cases
We still have judgment here."
Hamlet says: Were we sure that there is no future life,
we should seek death. Macbeth thinks : Did we not know that
96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
judgment would come upon us here, we should care little about
the life to come. There is a kinship in these contradictory re
flections. But Macbeth is not hindered by his cogitations. He
pricks the sides of his intent, as he says, with the spur of ambi
tion, well knowing that it will o'erleap itself and fall. He cannot
resist when he is goaded onward by a being superior to himself,
a woman.
Like Hamlet, he has imagination, but of a more timorous and
visionary cast. It is through no peculiar faculty in Hamlet that
he sees his father's ghost ; others had seen it before him and see
it with him. Macbeth constantly sees apparitions that no one
else sees, and hears voices that are inaudible to others.
When he has resolved on the king's death he sees a dagger
in the air : —
" Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand ? Come, let me clutch thee : —
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight ? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain ? "
Directly after the murder he has an illusion of hearing : —
" Methought I heard a voice cry, ' Sleep no more !
Macbeth does murder sleep.' "
And, very significantly, Macbeth hears this same voice give
him the different titles which are his pride : —
" Still it cried, ' Sleep no more ! ' to all the house :
' Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more ! ' '
Yet another parallel shows the kinship between the Danish
and the Scottish tragedy. It is in these dramas alone that the
dead leave their graves and reappear on the scene of life ; in them
alone a breath from the spirit-world reaches the atmosphere of the
living. There is no trace of the supernatural either in Othello or
in King Lear.
No more here than in Hamlet are we to understand by the
introduction of supernatural elements that an independently-
THE BELIEF IN WITCHES 97
working superhuman power actively interferes in human life ;
these elements are transparent symbols. Nevertheless the super
natural beings that make their appearance are not to be taken as
mere illusions; they are distinctly conceived as having a real
existence outside the sphere of hallucination. As in Hamlet, the
Ghost is not seen by the prince alone, so in Macbeth it is not
only Macbeth himself who sees the Witches ; they even appear
with their queen, Hecate, when there is no one to see them
except the spectators of the play.
It must not be forgotten that this whole spirit- and witch-
world meant something quite different to Shakespeare's con
temporaries from what it means to us. We cannot even be
absolutely certain that Shakespeare himself did not believe in
the possible existence of such beings. Great poets have seldom
been consistent in their incredulity — even Holberg believed that
he had seen a ghost. But Shakespeare's own attitude of mind
matters less than that of the public for whom he wrote.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century the English people
still believed in a great variety of evil spirits, who disturbed the
order of nature, produced storms by land and sea, foreboded
calamities and death, disseminated plague and famine. They were
for the most part pictured as old, wrinkled women, who brewed
all kinds of frightful enormities in hellish cauldrons ; and when
such beldams were thought to have been detected, the law took
vengeance on them with fire and sword. In a sermon preached
in 1588, Bishop Jewel appealed to Elizabeth to take strong
measures against wizards and witches. Some years later, one
Mrs. Dyer was accused of witchcraft for no other reason than
that toothache had for some nights prevented the Queen from
sleeping. In the small town of St. Osees in Essex alone, seventy
or eighty witches were burnt. In a book called "The Discoverie
of Witchcraft," published in 1584, Reginald Scott refuted the
doctrine of sorcery and magic with wonderful clearness and
liberal-mindedness ; but his voice was lost in the chorus of the
superstitious. King James himself was one of the most prominent
champions of superstition. He was present in person at the trial
by torture of two hundred witches who were burnt for occasioning
the storm which prevented his bride's crossing to Scotland. Many
of them confessed to having ridden through the air on broomsticks
or invisible chariots drawn by snails, and admitted that they were
VOL. II. G
98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
aole to make themselves invisible — an art of which they, strangely
enough, did not avail themselves to escape the law. In 1597 James
himself produced in his Dcemonologie a kind of handbook or text
book of witchcraft in all its developments, and in 1598 he caused
no fewer than 600 old women to be burnt. In the Parliament of
1604 a bill against sorcery was brought in by the Government and
passed.
Shakespeare produced wonderful effects in Hamlet by drawing
on this faith in spirits ; the apparition on the castle platform is
sublime in its way, though the speech of the Ghost is far too
long. Now, in Macbeth, with the Witches' meeting, he strikes the
keynote of the drama at the very outset, as surely as with a
tuning-fork; and wherever the Witches reappear the same note
recurs. But still more admirable, both psychologically and sceni-
cally, is the scene in which Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost sitting
in his own seat at the banquet-table. The words run thus : —
" Rosse. Please it your highness
To grace us with your royal company ?
Macbeth. The table's full.
Lennox. Here is a place reserv'd, sir.
Macb. Where?
Len. Here, my good lord. What is't that moves your highness ?
Macb. Which of you have done this ?
Lords. What, my good lord ?
Macb. Thou canst not say I did it : never shake
Thy gory locks at me."
The grandeur, depth, and extraordinary dramatic and theatrical
effect of this passage are almost unequalled in the history of the
drama.
The same may be said of well-nigh the whole outline of this
tragedy — from a dramatic and theatrical point of view it is
beyond all praise. The Witches on the heath, the scene before
the murder of Duncan, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth — so
potent is the effect of these and other episodes that they are burnt
for ever on the spectator's memory.
No wonder that Macbeth has become in later times Shake
speare's most popular tragedy — his typical one, appreciated even
by those who, except in this instance, have not been able to value
him as he deserves. Not one of his other dramas is so simple in
DEFECTIVE TEXT 99
composition as this, no other keeps like this to a single plane.
There is no desultoriness or halting in the action as in Hamlet,
no double action as in King Lear. All is quite simple and ac
cording to rule: the snowball is set rolling and becomes the
avalanche. And although there are gaps in it on account of
the defective text, and although there may here and there be
ambiguities — in the character of Lady Macbeth, for instance —
yet there is nothing enigmatic, there are no riddles to perplex
us. Nothing lies concealed between the lines ; all is grand and
clear — grandeur and clearness itself.
And yet I confess that this play seems to me one of Shake
speare's less interesting efforts; not from the artistic, but from the
purely human point of view. It is a rich, highly moral melo
drama ; but only at occasional points in it do I feel the beating
of Shakespeare's heart.
My comparative coolness of feeling towards Macbeth may
possibly be due in a considerable degree to the shamefully muti
lated form in which this tragedy has been handed down to us.
Who knows what it may have been when it came from Shake
speare's own hand ! The text we possess, which was not printed
till long after the poet's death, is clipped, pruned, and compressed
for acting purposes. We can feel distinctly where the gaps occur,
but that is of no avail.
The abnormal shortness of the play is in itself an indication
of what has happened. In spite of its wealth of incident, it is
distinctly Shakespeare's shortest work. There are 3924 lines in
Hamlet, 3599 in Richard III., &c., &c., while in Macbeth there
are only 1993.
It is plain, moreover, that the structure of the piece has been
tampered with. The dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff
(iv. 3), which, strictly speaking, must be called superfluous from
the dramatic point of view, is so long as to form about an eighth
part of the whole tragedy. It may be presumed that the other
scenes originally stood in some sort of proportion to this; for
there is no other instance in Shakespeare's work of a similar
disproportion.
In certain places omissions are distinctly felt. Lady Macbeth
(i. 5) proposes to her husband that he shall murder Duncan. He
.gives no answer to this. In the next scene the King arrives. In
the next again, Macbeth's deliberations as to whether or not he
ioo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is to commit the murder are all over, and he is only thinking how
it can be done with impunity. When he wavers, and says to his
wife, " I dare do all that may become a man ; who dares do more
is none," her answer shows how much is wanting here : —
" When you durst do it, then you were a man ;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both."
We spectators or readers know nothing of all this. There has
not even been time for the shortest conversation between husband
and wife.
Shakespeare took the material for his tragedy from the
same source on which he drew for all his English histories —
Holinshed's Chronicle to wit. In this case Holinshed, at no
time a trustworthy historian, simply reproduced a passage of
Hector Boece's Scotorum Histories. Macdonwald's rebellion and
Sweno's Viking invasion are fables ; Banquo and Fleance, as
founders of the race of Stuart, are inventions of the chroniclers.
There was a blood-feud between the house of Duncan and the
house of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, whose real name was Gruoch,
was the granddaughter of a king who had been killed by Malcolm
II., Duncan's grandfather. Her first husband had been burnt
in his castle with fifty friends. Her only brother was killed by
Malcolm's order. Macbeth's father also, Finlegh or Finley, had
been killed in a contest with Malcolm. Therefore they both had
the right to a blood-revenge on Duncan. Nor did Macbeth sin
against the laws of hospitality in taking Duncan's life. He
attacked and killed him in the open field. It is further to be
observed that by the Scottish laws of succession he had a better
right to the throne than Duncan. After having seized the throne
he ruled firmly and justly. There is a quite adequate psycho
logical basis for the real facts of the year 1040, though it is much
simpler than that underlying the imaginary events of Holinshed's
Chronicle, which form the subject of the tragedy.
Shakespeare on the whole follows Holinshed with great
exactitude, but diverges from him in one or two particulars.
According to the Chronicle, Banquo was accessory to the murder
of Duncan ; Shakespeare alters this in order to give King James
a progenitor of unblemished reputation. Instead of using the
SHAKESPEARE AND MIDDLETON 101
account of the murder which is given in the Chronicle, Shake
speare takes and applies to Duncan's case all the particulars
of the murder of King Duffe, Lady Macbeth's grandfather, as
committed by the captain of the castle of Forres, who " being
the more kindled in wrath by the words of his wife, determined
to follow her advice in the execution of so heinous an act." It is
hardly necessary to remark that the finest parts of the drama,
such as the appearance of Banquo's ghost and Lady Macbeth's
sleep-walking scene, are due to Shakespeare alone.
Some sensation was made in the year 1778 by the discovery
of the manuscript of The Witch, a play by Shakespeare's contem
porary Middleton, containing in their entirety two songs which
are only indicated in Macbeth by the quotation of their first lines.
These are "Come away, come away " (iii. 5), and "Black spirits,
&c." (iv. i). A very idle dispute arose as to whether Shakespeare
had here made use of Middleton or Middleton of Shakespeare.
The latter is certainly the more probable assumption, if we must
assume either to have borrowed from the other. It is likely
enough, however, that single lines of the lesser poet have here
and there been interpolated in the witch scenes of Shakespeare's
text as contained in the Folio edition.
Shakespeare has employed in the treatment of this subject a
style that suits it — vehement to violence, compressed to conges
tion — figures treading upon each other's heels, while general
philosophic reflections occur but rarely. It is a style eminently
fitted to express and to awaken terror; its tone is not altered,
but only softened, even in the painfully touching conversation be
tween Lady Macduff and her little son. It is sustained through
out with only one break — the excellent burlesque monologue of
the Porter.
The play centres entirely round the two chief characters,
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ; in their minds the essential action
takes place. The other personages are only outlined.
The Witches' song, with which the tragedy opens, ends with
that admirable line, in which ugliness and beauty are confounded : —
" Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
And it is significant that Macbeth, who has not heard this refrain,
recalls it in his very first speech : —
" So foul and fair a day I have not seen.''
102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It seems as if these words were ringing in his ears ; and this
foreshadows the mysterious bond between him and the Witches.
Many of these delicate consonances and contrasts may be noted
in the speeches of this tragedy.
After Lady Macbeth, who is introduced to the spectator
already perfected in wickedness, has said to herself (i. 5) —
" The raven himself is hoarse,
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements,"
the next scene opens serenely with the charming pictures of the
following dialogue : —
" Duncan. This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Banquo. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his lov'd mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here : no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle :
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd
The air is delicate."
Then the poet immediately plunges anew into the study of this
lean, slight, hard woman, consumed by lust of power and splen
dour. Though by no means the impassive murderess she fain
would be, she yet goads her husband, by the force of her far
stronger will, to commit the crime which she declares he has
promised her : —
" I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me :
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from its boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."
So coarsely callous is she ! And yet she is less hardened than
she would make herself out to be ; for when, just after this, she has
laid the daggers ready for her husband, she says : —
" Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done V
EPISODE OF THE PORTER 103
The absolutely masterly, thrilling scene between husband and
wife after the murder, is followed, in horrible, humoristic contrast,
by the fantastic interlude of the Porter. He conceives himself to
be keeping watch at hell-gate, and admitting, amongst others, an
equivocating Jesuit, with his casuistry and reservatio mentalis ;
and his soliloquy is followed by a dialogue with Macduff on the
influence of drink upon erotic inclination and capacity. It is
well known that Schiller, in accordance with classical prejudices,
omitted the monologue in his translation, and replaced it by a
pious morning-song. What seems more remarkable is that an
English poet like Coleridge should have found its effect disturb
ing and considered it spurious. Without exactly ranking with
Shakespeare's best low-comedy interludes, it affords a highly
effective contrast to what goes before and what follows, and is
really an invaluable and indispensable ingredient in the tragedy.
A short break in the action was required at this point, to give
Macbeth and his wife time to dress themselves in their night-
clothes ; and what interruption could be more effective than the
knocking at the castle gate, which makes them both thrill with
terror, and gives occasion to the Porter episode ?
Another of the gems of the play is the scene (iv. 2) between
Lady Macduff and her wise little son, before the murderers come
and kill them both. All the witty child's sayings are interest
ing, and the mother's bitterly pessimistic speeches are not only
wonderfully characteristic of her, but also of the poet's own pre
sent frame of mind : —
" Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where, to do harm,
Is often laudable ; to do good, sometime,
Accounted dangerous folly : why then, alas !
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm ? "
Equally despairing is MacdufFs ejaculation when he learns of
the slaughter in his home : " Did heaven look on, and would not
take their part ? " The beginning of this lengthy scene (iv. 3), with
its endless dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, which Shake
speare has transcribed literally from his Holinshed, is weak and
flagging. It presents hardly any point of interest except the far
fetched account of King Edward the Confessor's power of curing
104 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the king's evil, evidently dragged in for the sake of paying King
James a compliment which the poet knew he would value, in the
lines —
" Tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction."
But the close of the scene is admirable, when Rosse breaks the
news to Macduff of the attack on his castle and the massacre
of his family : —
" Macd. My children too ?
Rosse. Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.
Macd. And I must be from thence !
My wife kill'd too ?
Rosse. I have said.
Mai. Be comforted :
Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
Macd. He has no children. — All my pretty ones ?
Did you say, all?— O hell-kite !— All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop ?
Mai. Dispute it like a man.
Macd. I shall do so ;
But I must also feel it as a man :
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. — Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part V
The voice of revolt makes itself heard in these words, the
same voice that sounds later through the despairing philosophy
of King Lear : "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods:
They kill us for their sport." But immediately afterwards Macduff
falls back on the traditional sentiment : —
''Sinful Macduff!
They are all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls."
Among these horror-stricken speeches there is one in parti
cular that gives matter for reflection — Macduff's cry, " He has no
THE CHILDREN OF MACBETH 105
children." At the close of the third part of Henry VI. there is a
similar exclamation of quite different import. There, when King
Edward, Gloucester, and Clarence have stabbed Margaret of
Anjou's son before her eyes, she says : —
" You have no children, butchers ! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr'd up remorse."
Many interpreters have attributed the same sense to Mac-
duff's cry of agony ; but their mistake is plain ; for the context
undeniably shows that the one thought of the now childless father
is the impossibility of an adequate revenge.
But there is another noticeable point about this speech, " He
has no children," which is, that elsewhere we are led to believe
that he has children. Lady Macbeth says, " I have given suck,
and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me ; " and
we have neither learned that these children are dead nor that
they were born of an earlier marriage. Shakespeare never
mentions the former marriage of the historical Lady Macbeth.
Furthermore, not only does she talk of children, but Macbeth
himself seems to allude to sons. He says (iii. i) : —
"Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If 't be so,
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind."
If he had no children of his own, the last line is meaningless.
Had Shakespeare forgotten these earlier speeches when he wrote
that ejaculation of MacdufT 's ? It is improbable; and, in any
case, they must have been constantly brought to his mind again at
rehearsals and performances of the play. We have here one of
the difficulties which would be solved if we were in possession of
a complete and authentic text.
The crown which the Witches promised to Macbeth soon
becomes his fixed idea. He murders his king — and sleep. He
slays, and sees the slain for ever before him. All that stand
between him and his ambition are cut down, and afterwards raise
their bloody heads as bodeful visions on his path. He turns
Scotland into one great charnel-house. His mind is "full of
scorpions ; " he is sick with the smell of all the blood he has
io6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
shed. At last life and death become indifferent to him. When,
on the day of battle, the tidings of his wife's death are brought to
him, he speaks those profound words in which Shakespeare has
embodied a whole melancholy life-philosophy : —
" She should have died hereafter :
There would have been a time for such a word. —
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time ;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow ; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
This is the final result arrived at by Macbeth, the man who
staked all to win power and glory. Without any underlining on
the part of the poet, a speech like this embodies an absolute
moral lesson. We feel its value all the more strongly, as Shake
speare's study of humanity in other parts of this play does not
seem to have been totally unbiassed, but rather influenced by the
moral impression which he desired to produce on the audience.
The drama is even a little marred by the constant insistence on
the fabula docet, the recurrent insinuation that " such is the
consequence of grasping at power by the aid of crime." Macbeth,
not by nature a bad man, might in the drama, as in real life, have
tried to reconcile the people to that crime, which, after all, he had
reluctantly committed, by making use of his power to rule well.
The moral purport of the play excludes this possibility. The
ice-cold, stony Lady Macbeth might be conceived as taking the
consequences of her counsel and action as calmly as the high
born Locustas of the Renaissance, Catherine de' Medici, or the
Countess of Somerset. But in this case we should have missed
the moral lesson conveyed by her ruin, and, what would have
been worse, the incomparable sleep-walking scene, which —
whether it be perfectly motived or not — shows us in the most
admirable manner how the sting of an evil conscience, even
though it may be blunted by day, is sharpened again at night,
and robs the guilty one of sleep and health.
THE MORAL LESSON 107
In dealing with the plays immediately preceding Macbeth, we
observed that Shakespeare at this period frequently gives a
formal exposition of the moral to be drawn from his scenes.
Possibly there is some connection between this tendency of his
and the steadily-growing animosity of public opinion to the stage.
In the year 1606, an edict was issued absolutely prohibiting the
utterance of the name of God on the profane boards of the theatre.
Not even a harmless oath was to be permitted. In view of the
state of feeling which produced such an Act of Parliament, it
must have been of vital importance to the tragic poet to prove
as clearly as possible the strictly moral character of his works.
XXIII
OTHELLO— THE CHARACTER AND SIGNIFICANCE
OF I AGO
WHEN we consider how Macbeth explains life's tragedy as the
result of a union of brutality and malignity, or rather of brutality
envenomed by malignity, we feel that the step from this to Othello
is not a long one. But in Macbeth the treatment of life's tragedy
as a whole, of wickedness as a factor in human affairs, lacks
firmness, and is not in the great style.
In a very much grander and firmer style do we find the same
subject treated in Othello.
Othello is, in the popular conception, simply the tragedy of
jealousy, as Macbeth is simply the tragedy of ambition. Naive
readers and critics fancy in their innocence that Shakespeare, at
a certain period of his life, determined to study one or two
interesting and dangerous passions, and to put us on our guard
against them. Following out this intention, he wrote a play on
ambition and its dangers, and another of the same kind on
jealousy and all the evils that attend it. But that is not how
things happen in the inner life of a creative spirit. A poet does
not write exercises on a given subject. His activity is not the
result of determination or choice. A nerve in him is touched,
vibrates, and reacts.
What Shakespeare here attempts to realise is neither jealousy
nor credulity, but simply and solely the tragedy of life ; whence
does it arise ? what are its causes ? what its laws ?
He was deeply impressed with the power and significance of
evil. Othello is much less a study of jealousy than a new and
more powerful study of wickedness in its might. The umbilical
cord that connects the master with his work leads, not to the
character of Othello, but to that of lago.
Simple-minded critics have been of opinion that Shakespeare
108
CHARACTER OF I AGO 109
constructed lago on the lines of the historic Richard III. — that is
to say, found him in literature, in the pages of a chronicler.
Believe me, Shakespeare met lago in his own life, saw portions
and aspects of him on every hand throughout his manhood, en
countered him piecemeal, as it were, on his daily path, till one
fine day, when he thoroughly felt and understood what malignant
cleverness and baseness can effect, he melted down all these
fragments, and out of them cast this figure.
lago — there is more of the grand manner in this figure than
in the whole of Macbeth. ( lago — there is more depth, more
penetrating knowledge of human nature1 in this one character
than in the whole of Macbeth. lago is the very embodiment of
the grand manner.
He is not the principle of evil, not an old-fashioned, stupid
devil; nor a Miltonic devil, who loves independence and has
invented firearms; nor a Goethe's Mephistopheles, who talks
cynicism, makes himself indispensable, and is generally in the
right. Neither has he the magnificently foolhardy wickedness
of a Caesar Borgia, who lives his life in open defiance and reck
less atrocity.
lago has no other aim than his own advantage. It is the
circumstance that not he, but Cassio, has been appointed second
in command to Othello, which first sets his craft to work on
subtle combinations. He coveted this post, and he will stick at
nothing in order to win it. In the meantime, he takes advan
tage of every opportunity of profit that offers itself; he does not
hesitate to fool Roderigo out of his money and his jewels. He is
always masked in falsehood and hypocrisy; and the mask he has
chosen is the most impenetrable one, that of rough outspokenness,
the straightforward, honest bluntness of the soldier who does not
care what others think or say of him. He never flatters Othello
or Desdemona, or even Roderigo. He is the free-spoken, honest
friend.
He does not seek his own advantage without side-glances at
others. He is mischievousness personified. He does evil for
the pleasure of hurting, and takes active delight in the adversity
and anguish of others. He is that eternal envy which merit or
success in others never fails to irritate — not the petty envy which
is content with coveting another's honours or possessions,
or with holding itself more deserving of another's good fortune.
no WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
No; he is an ideal personification. He is blear-eyed rancour
itself, figuring as a great power — nay, as the motive force — in
human life. He embodies the detestation for others' excellences
which shows itself in obstinate disbelief, suspicion, or contempt ;
the instinct of hatred for all that is open, beautiful, bright, good,
and great.
Shakespeare not only knew that such wickedness exists ; he
seized it and set his stamp on it, to his eternal honour as a
psychologist.
Every one has heard it said that this tragedy is magnificent
in so far as the true and beautiful characters of Othello and
Desdemona are concerned ; but lago — who knows him ? — what
motive underlies his conduct ? — what can explain such wicked
ness ? If only he had even been frankly in love with Desdemona
and therefore hated Othello, or had had some other incentive of a
like nature !
Yes, if he had been the ordinary amorous villain and slanderer,
everything would undoubtedly have been much simpler; but, at
the same time, everything would have sunk into banality, and
Shakespeare would here have been unequal to himself.
No, no ! precisely in this lack of apparent motive lies the
profundity and greatness of the thing. Shakespeare understood
this. ( lago in his monologues is incessantly giving himself
reasons for his hatred. Elsewhere, in reading Shakespeare's
monologues, we learn what the person really is ; he reveals him
self directly to us; even a villain like Richard III. is quite honest
in his monologues. Not so lago. This demi-devil is always try
ing to give himself reason for his malignity, is always half fooling
himself by dwelling on half motives, in which he partly believes,
but disbelieves in the main. Coleridge has aptly designated
this action of his mind : " The motive-hunting of a motiveless
malignity." Again and again he expounds to himself that he
believes Othello has been too familiar with his wife, and that he
will avenge the dishonour. He* now and then adds, to account
for his hatred of Cassio, that he suspects him too of tampering
with Emilia.1 He even thinks 4t worth while to allege, as a
1 He says (i. 3) :—
" I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets
'Has done my office. I know not if 't be true ;
CHARACTER OF IAGO in
secondary motive, that he himself is enamoured of Desdemona.
His words are (ii. i) : —
" Now, I do love her too ;
Not out of absolute lust, (though, peradventure,
I stand accountant for as great a sin,)
But partly led to diet my revenge,
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap'd into my seat."
These are half-sincere attempts at self-understanding, sophis
tical self-justifications. Yellow-green, venomous envy has always
a motive in its own eyes, and tries to make its malignity towards
the better man pass muster as a desire for righteous vengeance.
But lago, who, a few lines before, has himself said of Othello
that he is " of a constant, loving, noble nature," is a thousand
times too clever to believe that he has been wronged by him.
The Moor is, to his eyes, transparent as glass.
An ordinary human capacity for love or hatred springing from
a definite cause would degrade and detract from lago's supremacy
in evil. In the end, he is sentenced to torture, because he will
not vouchsafe a word of explanation or enlightenment. Hard and,
in his way, proud as he is, he will certainly keep his lips tightly
closed under the torture ; but even if he wanted to speak, it would
not be in his power to give any real explanation. ( He has slowly,
steadily poisoned Othello's nature. We watch the working of
the venom on the simple-hearted man, and we see how the very
success of the poisoning process brutalises and intoxicates lago
more and more. But to ask whence the poison came into lago's
soul would be a foolish question, and one to which he himself
could give no answer. The serpent is poisonous by nature; it
gives forth poison as the silkworm does its thread and the violet
its fragrance.
Towards the close of the tragedy (iv. 2) there occurs one
of its profoundest passages, which shows us how Shakespeare
must have dwelt upon and studied the potency of evil during
But I for mere suspicion in that kind
Will do as if for surety."
He adds (ii. 7) : —
" I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb,
For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too."
H2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
these years. After Emilia has witnessed the breaking out of
Othello's mad rage against Desdemona, she says —
" EmiL I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devis'd this slander ; I'll be hang'd else.
Jago. Fie ! there is no such man : it is impossible.
Des. If any such there be, Heaven pardon him !
EmiL A halter pardon him, and hell gnaw his bones ! "
All three characters stand out in clear relief in these short
speeches. But lago's is the most significant. His " Fie ! there
is no such man ; it is impossible/' expresses the thought under
shelter of which he has lived and is living : other people do not
believe that such a being exists.)
Here we meet once more in Shakespeare the astonishment of
Hamlet at the paradox of evil, and once more, too, the indirect
appeal to the reader which formed the burden, as it were, of
Hamlet and Measure for Measure, the now thrice-repeated, " Say
not, think not, that this is impossible ! " The belief in the im
possibility of utter turpitude is the very condition of existence
of such a king as Claudius, such a magistrate as Angelo, such
an officer as lago. Hence Shakespeare's " Verily I say unto
you, this highest degree of wickedness is possible in the world."
It is one of the two factors in life's tragedy. Stupidity is the
other. On these two foundations rests the great mass of all this
world's misery.
XXIV
OTHELLO— THE THEME AND ITS TREATMENT—
A MONOGRAPH IN THE GREAT STYLE
A MANUSCRIPT preserved in the Record Office, of doubtful date,
but probably copied from an authentic document, contains the
following entry : —
The plaiers 1605 The Poets wch
By the Kings Hallamas Day being the mayd the plaies
Maties plaiers first of November A play
in the Banketing house Shaxberd.
att withall called the
Moore of Venis.
Thus Othello was probably produced in the autumn of 1605.
After this we have no proof of its performance till four and a half
years later, when we hear of it again in the journal of Prince
Ludwig Friedrich of Wiirtemberg, written by his secretary, Hans
Wurmsser. The entry for the 3<Dth of April 1610 runs thus: —
" Lundi, 30. S. E[minence] alia au Globe, lieu ordinaire ou 1'on
Joue les Commedies, y fut represente 1'histoire du More de Venise."
In face of these data it matters nothing that there should
appear in Othello, as we have it, a line that must have been
written in or after 1611. The tragedy was printed for the first
time in a quarto edition in 1622, for the second time in the
Folio of 1623. The Folio text contains an additional 160 lines
(proving that another manuscript has been made use of), and
all oaths and mentions of the name of God are omitted. It is
not only possible, but certain, that this line must have been a
late interpolation. Its entire discordance with its position in
the play shows this clearly enough, and seems to me to render
it doubtful whether it is by Shakespeare at all.
VOL. II. "3 H
H4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In the scene where Othello bids Desdemona give him her
hand, and loses himself in reflections upon it (iii. 4), he makes
this speech : —
" A liberal hand : the hearts of old gave hands ;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts."
Here there is an allusion, which could only be understood
by contemporaries, to the title of Baronet, created and sold by
James, which gave its possessors the right of bearing in their
coat-of-arms a bloody hand on a field argent. Most naturally
Desdemona replies to this irrelevant remark : " I cannot speak
of this."
In Cinthio's Italian collection of tales, where he had found
the plot of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare at the same time
(in Decade 3, Novella 7) came upon the material for Othello.
The story in the Hecatommitti runs as follows : A young
Venetian lady named ( Disdemona falls in love with a Moor, a
military commander—" not from feminine desire," but because
of his great qualities-;— and marries him in spite of the opposition
of her relatives. They live in Venice in complete happiness ;
" no word ever passed between them that was not loving."
When the Moor is ordered to Cyprus to take command there,
his one anxiety is about his wife ; he is equally unwilling to
expose her to the dangers of the sea voyage and to leave her
alone. She settles the question by declaring that she will rather
follow him anywhere, into any danger, than live in safety apart
from him ; whereupon he rapturously kisses her, with the ejacula
tion : " May God long preserve you so loving, my dearest wife ! "
Thus the (perfect initial harmony between the pair\vhicri Shake
speare depicts is suggested by his original.
The Ensign undermines their happiness. He is described as
remarkably handsome, but "as wicked by nature as any man
that ever lived in the world." He was dear to the Moor, "who
had no idea of his baseness." For although he was an arrant
coward, he managed by means of proud and blusterous talk,
aided by his fine appearance, so to conceal his cowardice that
he passed for a Hector or Achilles. His wife, whom he had
taken with him to Cyprus, was a fair and virtuous young woman,
much beloved by Disdemona, who spent the greater part of the
day in her company. The Lieutenant (il capo di squadrd] came
ORIGIN OF " OTHELLO" 115
much to the Moor's house, and often supped with him and his
wife.
The wicked Ensign is passionately in love with Disdemona,
but all his attempts to win her love are entirely unsuccessful, as
she has not a thought for any one but the Moor. The Ensign,
however, imagines that the reason for her rejection of him must
be that she is in love with the Lieutenant, and therefore deter
mines to rid himself of this rival, while his love for Disdemona
is changed into the bitterest hatred. From this time forward,
his object is not only to bring about the death of the Lieutenant,
but to prevent the Moor from finding the pleasure in Disdemona's
love which is denied to himself. He goes to work as in the
drama, though of course with some differences of detail. In the
novel, for example, the Ensign steals Disdemona's handkerchief
whilst she is visiting his wife, and playing with their little girl.
Disdemona's death-scene is more horrible in the tale than in the
tragedy. By command of the Moor, the Ensign hides himself in
a room adjoining Othello's and Disdemona's bedchamber. He
makes a noise, and Disdemona rises to see what it is ; whereupon
the Ensign gives her a violent blow on the head with a stocking
filled with sand. She calls to her husband for help, but he
answers by accusing her of infidelity ; she in vain protests her
innocence, and dies at the third blow of the stocking. The
murder is concealed, but the Moor now begins to hate his Ensign,
and dismisses him. The Ensign is so exasperated by this, that
he lets the Lieutenant know who is responsible for the night
assault that has just been made upon him. The Lieutenant
accuses the Moor before the council, and Othello is put to torture.
He refuses to confess, and is sent into banishment. The wicked
Ensign, who has brought a false accusation of murder against
one of his comrades, is himself in turn accused by the innocent
man, and subjected to torture until he dies.
To the characters in the novel, Shakespeare has added two,
Brabantio and Roderigo. Only one of the names he uses is
found in the original. Disdemona, which seems made to designate
the victim of an evil destiny, Shakespeare has changed into the
sweeter-sounding Desdemona. The other names are of Shake
speare's own choosing. Most of them are Italian (Othello itself
is a Venetian noble name of the sixteenth century) ; others, such
as lago and Roderigo, are Spanish.
u6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
With his customary adherence to his original, Shakespeare,
like Cinthio, calls his protagonist a Moor ; but it is quite unrea
sonable to suppose from this that he thought of him as a negro.
It was, of course, inconceivable that a negro should attain the
rank of general and admiral in the service of the Venetian Repub
lic ; and lago's mention of Mauritania as the country to which
Othello intends to retire, shows plainly enough that the "Moor"
ought to be represented as an Arab. It is no argument against
this that men who hate and envy him apply to him epithets that
would befit a negro. Thus(Roderigo in the first scene of the play
calls him "thick-lips," and lago, speaking to Brabantio, calls him
"an old black ram." But a little later lago compares him with
" a Barbary horse " — that is to say, an Arab from North Africa.
It is always animosity and hate that exaggerate the darkness of
his hue, as when Brabantio talks of his "sooty bosom. "^ That
Othello calls himself black only means that he is dark. In this
very play lago says of dark women :
" If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She'll find a white that shall her blackness fit."
And we have seen how, in the Sonnets and in Love's Labours
Lost, " black " is constantly employed in the sense of dark-com
plexioned. As a Moor, Othello has a complexion sufficiently
swarthy to form a striking contrast to the white and even blonde
Desdemona, and there is also a sufficiently marked race-contrast
between him, as a Semite, and the Aryan girl. It is quite conceiv
able, too, that a Christianised Moor should reach a high position
in the army and fleet of the Republic.
It ought further to be noted that the whole tradition of the
Venetian " Moor " has possibly arisen from a confusion of words.
Rawdon Browne, in 1875, suggested the theory that Giraldi had
founded his tale on the simple misunderstanding of a name. In
the history of Venice we read of an eminent patrician, Christoforo
Moro byname, who in 1498* was Podesta of Ravenna, and after
wards held similar office in Faenza, Ferrara, and the Romagna;
then became Governor of Cyprus; in 1508 commanded fourteen
ships ; and later still was Proveditore of the army. When this
man was returning from Cyprus to Venice in 1508, his wife (the
third), who is said to have belonged to the family of Barbarigo
(note the resemblance to Brabantio), died on the voyage, and
CHARACTER OF OTHELLO 117
there seems to have been some mystery connected with her death.
In 15*5 ne took as his fourth wife a young girl, who is said to
have been nicknamed Demonio bianco — the white demon. From
this the name Desdemona may have been derived, in the same
way as Moor from Moro.
The additions which Shakespeare made to the story as he
found it in Cinthio — Desdemona's abduction, the hurried and
secret marriage, the accusation, to us so strange, but in those
days so natural and common, of the girl's heart having been won
by witchcraft — these all occur in the history of Venetian families
of the period.
Be this as it may, when Shakespeare proceeds to the treat
ment of the subject, he arranges all the conditions and circum
stances, so that they present the most favourable field for lago's
operations, and he so fashions Othello as to render him more
susceptible than any other man would be to the poison which lago
(like Lucianus in the play-scene in Hamlet] drops into his ear.
Then he lets us trace the growth of the passion from its first
germ, through every stage of its development, until it blasts and
shatters the victim's whole character.
( Othello's is an inartificial soul, a simple, straightforward, sol
dier nature. He has no worldly wisdom, for he has lived his
whole life in camps : )
"And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle."
A good and true man himself, he believes in goodness in others,
especially in those who make a show of outspokenness, bluffhess,
undaunted determination to blame where blame is due — like lago,
who characteristically says of himself to Desdemona :
" For I am nothing if not critical."
And Othello not only believes in lago's honesty, but is inclined
to take him for his guide, as being far superior to himself in
knowledge of men and of the world.
Again, Othello belongs to the noble natures that are never
preoccupied with the thought of their own worth. He is devoid
of vanity. He has never said to himself that such exploits, such
heroic deeds, as have won him his renown, must make a far
deeper impression on the fancy of a young girl of Desdemona's
n8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
disposition than the smooth face and pleasant manners of a
Cassio. He is so little impressed with the idea of his greatness
that it almost at once appears quite natural to him that he should
be scorned.
Othello is the man of despised race, with the fiery African
temperament. In comparison with Desdemona he is old — more
of an age with her father than with herself. He tells himself that
he has neither youth nor good looks to keep her love with, not
even affinity of race to build upon. lago exasperates Brabantio
by crying :
" Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe."
Othello's race has a reputation for low sensuality, therefore
Roderigo can inflame the rage of Desdemona's father by such
expressions as " gross clasps of a lascivious Moor."
That she should feel attracted by him must have seemed to
outsiders like madness or the effect of sorcery. For, far from
being of an inviting, forward, or coquettish nature, Desdemona is
represented as more than ordinarily reserved and modest. Her
father calls her (i. 3) :
" A maiden never bold ;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush'd at herself."
She has been brought up as a tenderly-nurtured patrician child
in rich, happy Venice. The gilded youth of the city have fluttered
around her daily, but she has shown favour to none of them.
Therefore, her father says (i. 2) :
" For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage, that she shunn'd
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou."
Shakespeare, who knew everything about Italy, knew that the
Venetian youth of that period had their hair curled, and wore a
lock down on the forehead.
CHARACTER OF OTHELLO 119
Othello, on his part, at once feels himself strongly drawn to
Desdemona. And it is not merely the fair, delicate girl in her
that allures him. Had he not loved her, her only, with burning
passion, he would never have married her ; for he has the fear
of marriage that belongs to his wild, freedom-loving nature, and
he in no wise considers himself honoured and exalted by this
connection with a patrician family. He is descended from the
princes of his country (i. 2) :
" I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege ; "
And he has shrunk from binding himself:
" But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth."
Truly there is magic in it — not the gross and common sorcery
which the others believe in and suppose to have been employed —
not the "foul charms" and "drugs or minerals that weaken
motion," to which her father alludes — but the sweet, alluring
magic by which a man and a woman are mysteriously enchained.
Othello's speech of self-vindication in the council chamber,
in which he explains to the Duke how he came to win Desde-
mona's sympathy and tenderness, has been universally admired.
Having gained her father's favour, he was often asked by him
to tell the story of his life, of its dangers and adventures. He
told of sufferings and hardships, of hairbreadth 'scapes from
death, of imprisonment by cruel enemies, of far-off strange
countries he had journeyed through. (The fantastic catalogue,
it may be noted, is taken from the fabulous books of travel of the
day.) Desdemona loved to listen, but was often called away by
household cares, always returning when these were despatched
to follow his story with a greedy ear. He " found means " to
draw from her a request to tell her his history, not in fragments,
but entire. He consented, and often her eyes were filled with
tears when she heard of the distresses of his youth. With
innocent candour she bade him at last, if ever he had a friend
that loved her, to teach him how to tell her Othello's story —
" and that would woo her."
120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In other words, she is not won through the eye, though we
must take Othello to have been a stately figure, but through the
ear — " I saw Othello's visage in his mind." She becomes his
through her sympathy with him in all he has suffered and
achieved : —
" She lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I lov'd her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have us'd.
Duke. I think, this tale would win my daughter too."
Such, then, is the relation in which the poet has decreed that
these two shall stand to each other. This is no love between
two of the same age and the same race, whom only family enmity
keeps apart, as in Romeo and Juliet. Still less is it a union of
hearts like that of Brutus and Portia, where the perfect harmony
is the result of tenderest friendship in combination with closest
kinship, added to the fact that the wife's father is her husband's
hero and ideal. No, in direct contrast to this last, it is a union
which rests on the attraction of opposites, and which has every
thing against it — difference of race, difference of age, and the
strange, exotic aspect of the man, with the lack of self-confidence
which it awakens in him.
lago expounds to Roderigo how impossible it is that this
alliance should last. Desdemona fell in love with the Moor
because he bragged to her and told her fantastical lies; does
any one believe that love can be kept alive by prating ? To
inflame the blood anew, " sympathy in years, manners, and
beauties" is required, "all which the Moor is defective in."
The Moor himself is at first troubled by none of these reflec
tions. And why not ? Because Othello is not jealous.
This sounds paradoxical, yet it is the plain truth. Othello
not jealous ! It is as though one were to say water is not wet
or fire does not burn. But Othello's is no jealous nature ; jealous
men and women think very differently and act very differently.
He is unsuspicious, confiding, and in so far stupid — there lies the
misfortune ; but jealous, in the proper sense of the word, he is not.
When lago is preparing to insinuate his calumnies of Desdemona,
he begins hypocritically (iii. 3) :
" O beware, my lord, of jealousy ;
It is the green-eyed monster. ..."
CHARACTER OF OTHELLO 121
Othello answers :
" 'Tis not to make me jealous,
To say — my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well ;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous :
Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear, or doubt of her revolt ;
For she had eyes, and chose me."
Thus not even his exceptional position causes him any uneasi
ness, so long as things take their natural course. But there is
no escaping the steady pursuit of which he, all unwitting, is the
object. He becomes as suspicious towards Desdemona as he
is credulous towards lago — " Brave lago ! " " Honest lago ! "
Brabantio's malison recurs to his mind — "She has deceived her
father, and may thee; " and close on it crowd lago's reasons :
" Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have ; or, for I am declin'd
Into the vale of years ; — yet that's not much."
And the torment seizes him of feeling that one human being is a
sealed book to the other — that it is impossible to control passion
and appetite in a woman, though the law may have given her into
one's hand — until at last he feels as if he were stretched on the
rack, and lago can exult in the thought that not all the drowsy
syrups of the world can procure him the untroubled sleep of
yesterday. Then follows the mournful farewell to all his previous
life, and on this sadness once more follows doubt, and despair at
the doubt : —
" I think my wife be honest and think she is not ;
I think that thou art just and think thou art not,"
— until all his thoughts are centred in the craving for revenge
and blood.
( Not naturally jealous, he has become so through the working
of the base but devilishly subtle slander which he is too simple
to penetrate and spurn.
In these masterly scenes (the third and fourth of the third
act) there are more reminiscences of other poets than we find
elsewhere in Shakespeare within such narrow compass ; and they
122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
are of interest as showing us what he knew, and what his mind
was dwelling upon in those days.
In Berni's Orlando Innamorato (Canto 51, Stanza i), we
come upon lago's declaration : —
"Who steals my purse, steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands ;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed."
The passage in Berni runs thus :—
" Chi ruba un corno, un cavallo, un anello,
E simil cose, ha qualche discrezione,
E potrebbe chiamarsi ladroncello ;
Ma quel che ruba la riputazione
E de 1'altrui fatiche si fa bello
Si pub chiamare assassino e ladrone."
A reminiscence also lies hidden in Othello's exquisite farewell to
a soldier's life : —
" O now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content !
Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue ! O, farewell !
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war ! "
It is clear that there must have lurked in Shakespeare's mind
a reminiscence of an apostrophe contained in the old play,
A Pleasant Comedie called Common Conditions, which he must,
doubtless, have seen as a youth in Stratford. In it the hero
says : —
" But farewell now, my coursers brave, attrapped to the ground.
Farewell, adieu, all pleasures eke, with comely hawk and hound !
Farewell, ye nobles all ! Farewell, each martial knight !
Farewell, ye famous ladies all, in whom I did delight ! "
The study of Ariosto in Italian has also left its trace. It is
where Othello, talking of the handkerchief, says : —
CHARACTER OF OTHELLO 123
" A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work."
In Orlando Furioso (Canto 46, Stanza 80) we read : —
" Una donzella della terra d'llia,
Ch'avea il furor profetico congiunto
Con studio di gran tempo, e con vigilia
Lo fece di sua man di tutto punto."
The agreement here cannot possibly be accidental. And what
makes it still more certain that Shakespeare had the Italian text
before him is that the words prophetic fury, which are the same
in Othello as in the Italian, are not to be found in Harington's
English translation, the only one then in existence. He must
thus, whilst writing Othello, have been interested in Orlando, and
had Berni's and Ariosto's poems lying on his table.
Desdemona's innocent simplicity in these scenes rivals the
boundless and actually tragic simplicity of Othello. ( In the first
place, she is convinced that the Moor, whom she sees wrought
up to the verge of madness, cannot possibly suspect her, and is
unassailable by jealousy, j
" Emilia. Is he not jealous ?
Desdemona. Who ? he ! I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him."
o she acts with foolish indiscretion, continuing to tease Othello
about Cassio's reinstatement, although she ought to feel that it is
her harping on this topic that enrages him.
Then follow lago's still more monstrous lies : the confession
he pretends to have heard Cassio make in his sleep; the story
that she has presented the precious handkerchief to Cassio ; and
the pretence that Desdemona is the subject of the words which
Othello, from his hiding-place, hears Cassio let fall as to his
relations with the courtesan, Bianca. To hear his wife, his
beloved, thus derided, stings the Moor to frenzy.
It is such a consistently sustained imposture that there is,
perhaps, only one at all comparable to it in history — the intrigue
of the diamond necklace, in which Cardinal de Rohan was as
utterly duped and ruined as Othello is here.
124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
And now Othello has reached the stage at which he can no
longer think coherently, or speak except in ejaculations (iv. i) : —
" lago. Lie with her.
"Othello. With her?
" lago. With her, on her, what you will.
" Othello. Lie with her ! lie on her ! — We say, lie on her when they
belie her. Lie with her! that's fulsome. — Handkerchief, — confessions,
—handkerchief. — To confess, and be hanged for his labour. — First, to
be hanged, and then to confess. ... It is not words, that shakes me
thus. — Pish ! — Noses, ears, and lips. — Is it possible ? — Confess !—
Handkerchief !— O devil ! "
With the mind's eye he sees them in each other's arms.1 He
is seized with an epileptic fit and falls.
This is not a representation of spontaneous but of artificially
induced jealousy ; in other words, of credulity poisoned by malig
nity. Hence the moral which Shakespeare, through the mouth
of lago, bids the audience take home with them :
"Thus credulous fools are caught;
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach."
It is not Othello's jealousy, but his credulity that is the prime
cause of the disaster ; and even so must Desdemona's noble sim
plicity bear its share in the blame. Between them they render
possible the complete success of a man like lago.
When Othello bursts into tears before Desdemona's eyes,
without her suspecting the reason (iv. 2), he says most touchingly
that he could have borne affliction and shame, poverty and cap
tivity — could even have endured to be made the butt of mockery
1 The development of ihis passage exactly corresponds to Spinoza's classic defi
nition of jealousy, written seventy years later. See Ethices, Pars ///., Propositio
XXXV., Scholium : " Pneterea hoc odium erga rem amatam majus erit pro ratione
Lsetitise, qua Zelotypus ex reciproco rei amatse Amore solebat affici, et etiam pro
ratione affectus, quo erga ilium, quem sibi rem amatam jungere imaginatur, afifectus
erat. Nam si eum oderat, eo ipso rem amatam odio habebit, quia ipsam id, quod
ipse odio habet, Laetitia afficere imaginatur ; et etiam ex eo, quod rei amatae imaginem
imagini ejus, quem odit, jungere cogitur, quse ratio plerumque locum habet in Amore
erga fceminam ; qui enim imaginatur mulierem, quam amat, alteri sese prostituere,
non solum ex eo, quod ipsius appetitus coercetur, contristabitur, sed etiam quia rei
amatge maginem pudendis et excrementis alterius jungere cogitur, eandem aversatur."
CHARACTER OF DESDEMONA 125
and scorn — but that he cannot bear to see her whom he wor
shipped the object of his own contempt. He does not suffer most
from jealousy, but from seeing " the fountain from the which his
current runs" a dried-up swamp, or "a cistern for foul toads to
knot and gender in." This is pure, deep sorrow at seeing his
idol sullied, not mean frenzy at the idol's preferring another
worshipper.
And with that grace which is an attribute of perfect strength,
Shakespeare has introduced as a contrast, directly before the
terrible catastrophe, Desdemona's delicate little ditty of the willow-
tree — of the maiden who weeps because her lover is untrue to
her, but who loves him none the less. Desdemona is deeply
touching when she pleads with her cruel lord for but a few
moments' respite, but she is great in the instant of death, when
she expires with the sublime lie, the one lie of her life, upon her
lips, designed to shield her murderer from his punishment.
Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia — what a trefoil ! Each has her
characteristic features, but they resemble one another like sisters ;
they all present the type which Shakespeare at this point loves
and most affects. Had they a model ? Had they perhaps one
and the same model ? Had he about this time encountered a
young and charming woman, living, as it were, under a cloud of
sorrow, injustice, misunderstanding, who was all heart and ten
derness, without any claims to intellect or wit ? We may suspect
this, but we know nothing of it.
The figure of Desdemona is one of the most charming Shake
speare has drawn. She is more womanly than other women, as
the noble Othello is more manly than other men. So that after
all there is a very good reason for the attraction between them ;
the most womanly of women feels herself drawn to the manliest
of men.
The subordinate figures are worked out with hardly less skill
than the principal characters of the tragedy. Emilia especially is
inimitable — good-hearted, honest, and not exactly light, but still
sufficiently the daughter of Eve to be unable to understand Desde
mona's nai've and innocent chastity.
At the end of Act iv. (in the bedroom scene)( Desdemona
asks Emilia if she believes that there really are women who do
what Othello accuses her of. Emilia answers in the affirmative.
Then her mistress asks again: "Would'st thou do such a deed
126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
for all the world ? " and receives the jesting answer, "The world
is a huge thing ; 'tis a great price for a small vice :
" Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures
of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition ;
but, for the whole world ! . . . Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the
world ; and, having the world for your labour, 'tis a wrong in your
own world, and you might quickly make it right."
In passages like this a mildly playful note is struck in the
very midst of the horror. And according to his habit and the
custom of the times, Shakespeare also introduces, by means of
the Clown, one or two deliberately comic passages; but the
Clown's merriment is subdued, as Shakespeare's merriment at
this period always is.
The composition of Othello is closely akin to that of Macbeth.
In these two tragedies alone there are no episodes ; the action
moves onward uninterrupted and undissipated. But the beautiful
proportion of all its parts and articulations gives Othello the
advantage over the mutilated Macbeth which we possess. Here
the crescendo of the tragedy is executed with absolute maestria ;
the passion rises with a positively musical effect ; lago's devilish
plan is realised step by step with consummate certainty; all
details are knit together into one firm and well-nigh inextricable
knot; and the carelessness with which Shakespeare has treated
the necessary lapse of time between the different stages of the
action, has, by compressing the events of months and years into
a few days, heightened the effect of strict and firm cohesion which
the play produces.
There are some inaccuracies in the text as we have it. At
the close of the play there is a passage, to account for which we
must almost assume that part of a vitiated text, adapted to some
special performance, has been interpolated. In the full rush of
the catastrophe, when only Othello's last speeches are wanting,
Lodovico volunteers some information as to what has happened,
which is not only superfluous for the spectator, but quite out of
the general style and tone of the play :
" Lodovico, Sir, you shall understand what hath befall'n,
Which, as I think, you know not. Here is a letter,
"OTHELLO" A MONOGRAPH 127
Found in the pocket of the slain Roderigo ;
And here another : the one of them imports
The death of Cassio to be undertook
By Roderigo.
Othello. O villain !
Cassio. Most heathenish and most gross !
Lod. Now, here's another discontented paper,
Found in his pocket too," &c., &c.
These speeches, and yet a third, are all aimed at making Othello
understand how shamefully he has been deceived; , but they are
nerveless and feeble and detract from the effect of the scene.
This passage ought to be expunged; it is not Shakespeare's,
and it forms a little stain on his flawless work of art.
For flawless it is. I not only find several of Shakespeare's
greatest qualities united in this work, but I see hardly a fault
in it.
It is the only one of Shakespeare's tragedies which does not
treat of national events, but is a family tragedy, — what was later
known as tragedie domestique or bourgeoise. But the treatment is
anything but bourgeois ; the style is of the very grandest. One
gets the best idea of the distance between it and the tragedie
bourgeoise of later times on comparing with it Schiller's Kabale
tmd Liebe, which is in many ways an imitation of Othello.
We see here a great man who is at the same time a great
child ; a noble though impetuous nature, as unsuspicious as it is
unworldly. We see a young woman, all gentleness and nobility
of heart, who lives only for him she has chosen, and who dies
with solicitude for her murderer on her lips. And we see these
two elect natures ruined by the simplicity which makes them an
easy prey to wickedness.
A great work Othello undoubtedly is, but it is a monograph.
It lacks the breadth which Shakespeare's plays as a rule pos
sess. It is a sharply limited study of a single and very special
form of passion, the growth of suspicion in the mind of a lover
with African blood and temperament — a great example of the
power of wickedness over unsuspecting nobility. Taken all in
all, this is a restricted subject, which becomes monumental only
by the grandeur of its treatment.
No other drama of Shakespeare's had been so much of a
128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
monograph. He assuredly felt this, and with the impulse of the
great artist to make his new work a complement and contrast to
the immediately preceding one, he now sought and found the
subject for that one of his tragedies which is least of all a mono
graph, which grew into nothing less than the universal tragedy —
all the great woes of human life concentrated in one mighty
symbol.
He turned from Othello to Lear.
XXV
KING LEAR— THE FEELING UNDERLYING IT— THE
CHRONICLE — SIDNEY'S ARCADIA AND THE
OLD PLAY
IN King Lear, Shakespeare's vision sounded the abyss of horror
to its very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddi
ness, nor faintness at the sight.
On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over
one, as on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-
frescoes by Michael Angelo — only that the suffering here is far
more intense, the wail wilder, the harmonies of beauty more
definitely shattered by the discords of despair.
Othello was a noble piece of chamber-music — simple and easily
apprehended, powerfully affecting though it be. This work, on
the other hand, is the symphony of an enormous orchestra — all
earth's instruments sound in it, and every instrument has many
stops.
King Lear is the greatest task Shakespeare ever set himself,
the most extensive and the most imposing — all the suffering and
horror that can arise from the relation between a father and his
children, expressed in five acts of moderate length.
No modern mind has dared to face such a subject ; nor could
any one have grappled with it. Shakespeare did so without even
a trace of effort, by virtue of the overpowering mastery which he
now, in the meridian of his genius, had attained over the whole
of human life. He handles his theme with the easy vigour that
belongs to spiritual health, though we have here scene upon
scene of such intense pathos that we seem to hear the sobs of
suffering humanity accompanying the action, much as one hears
by the sea-shore the steady plash and sob of the waves.
Under what conditions did Shakespeare take hold of this
subject? The drama tells plainly enough. He stood at the
turning-point of human life ; he had lived about forty-two years ;
VOL. II. 129 I
130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ten years of life still lay before him, but of these certainly not
more than seven were intellectually productive. He now brought
that which makes life worse than death face to face with that which
makes life worth living — the very breath of our lungs and Cordelia-
like solace of our suffering — and swept them both forward to a
catastrophe that appals us like the ruin of a world.
In what frame of mind did Shakespeare set himself to this
work ? What was seething in his brain, what was moaning in
his breast, at the time he chanced upon this subject ? The drama
tells plainly enough. Of all the different forms of cruelty, coarse
ness, and baseness with which life had brought him into contact,
of all the vices and infamies that embitter the existence of the
nobler sort of men, one vice now seemed to him the worst — stood
out before him as the most abominable and revolting of all — one
of which he himself, no doubt, had again and again been the
victim — to wit, ingratitude. He saw no baseness more wide
spread or more indulgently regarded.
Who can doubt that he, immoderately enriched by nature,
he whose very existence was, like that of Shelley's cloud, a
constant giving, an eternal beneficence, a perpetual bringing of
"fresh showers to the thirsting flowers" — who can doubt that
such a giver on the grandest scale must again and again have
been rewarded with the blackest ingratitude? We see, for
instance, how Hamlet, so far his greatest work, was received
with instant attack, with what Swinburne has aptly called "the
jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which a careful ear may catch
some far, faint echo even yet — the fearful and furtive yelp from
beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule." x His life passed
in the theatre. We can very well guess, where we do not know,
how comrades to whom he gave example and assistance; stage
poets, who envied while they admired him; actors whom he
trained and who found in him a spiritual father ; the older men
whom he aided, the young men whom he befriended — how all
these would now fall away from him, now fall upon him ; and
each new instance of ingratitude was a shock to his spiritual life.
For years he kept silence, suppressed his indignation, locked it
up in his own breast. But he hated and despised ingratitude
above all vices, because it at once impoverished and belittled
his soul.
1 Swinburne: A Study of Shakespeare^ p. 164.
SOURCES OF "KING LEAR" 131
His was certainly not one of those artist natures that are
free-handed with money when they have it, and confer benefits
with good-natured carelessness. He was a competent, energetic
business man, who spared and saved in order to gain an in
dependence and restore the fallen fortunes of his family.
But none the less he was evidently a good comrade in practical,
a benefactor in intellectual, life. And he felt that ingratitude
impoverished and degraded him, by making it hard for him to
be helpful again, and to give forth with both hands out of the
royal treasure of his nature, when he had been disappointed
and deceived so often, even by those for whom he had done
most and in whom he believed most. He felt that if there were
any baseness which could drive its victim to despair, to madness,
it was the vice of black ingratitude.
In such a frame of mind he finds, one day, when he is
as usual turning over the leaves of his Holinshed, the story
of King Lear, the great giver. In the same temper he reads
the old play on the subject, dating from 1593-4, and entitled
Chronicle History of King Leir. Here he found what he needed,
the half-worked clay out of which he could model figures and
groups. Here, in this superficially dramatised chronicle of
appalling ingratitude, was the very theme for him to develop.
So he took it to his heart and brooded over it till it quickened
and came to life.
We can determine without difficulty the period during which
Shakespeare was working at King Lear. Were it not clear from
other reasons that the play cannot have been written before 1603,
we should know it from the fact that in this year was published
Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, from which he took
the names of some of the fiends mentioned by Edgar (iii. 4).
And it cannot have been produced later than 1606, for on the
26th December of that year it was acted before King James.
This we know from its being entered in the Stationers' Register
on the 26th of November 1607, with the addition "as yt was
played before the kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct
Stephens night at Christmas last." But we can get still nearer
than this to the time of its composition. When Gloucester (i. 2)
speaks of "these late eclipses," he is doubtless alluding to the
eclipse of the sun in October 1605. And the immediately
following remarks about " machinations, hollowness, treachery,
132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and all ruinous disorders " prevailing at the time, refer in all
probability to the great Gunpowder Plot of November 1605.
Thus it was towards the end of 1605 that Shakespeare began
to work at King Lear.
The story was old and well known. It was told for the first
time in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Britonum,
for the first time in English by Layamon in his Brut about 1205.
It came originally from Wales and bears a distinctly Celtic
impress, which Shakespeare, with his fine feeling for all national
peculiarities, has succeeded in retaining and intensifying.
He found all the main features of the story in Holinshed.
According to this authority, Leir, son of Baldud, rules in Britain
" at what time Joash reigned as yet in Juda." His three daughters
are named Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla. He asks them how
great is their love for him, and they answer as in the tragedy.
Cordeilla, repudiated and disinherited, marries one of the princes
of Gaul. When the two elder daughters have shamefully ill-
treated Leir, he flees to Cordeilla. She and her husband raise
an army, sail to England, defeat the armies of the two sisters,
and reinstate Leir on his throne. He reigns for two more years ;
then Cordeilla succeeds to the throne — and this happens " in the
yeere of the world 3155, before the bylding of Rome 54, Uzia
then reigning in Juda and Jeroboam over Israeli." She rules
the kingdom for five years. Then her husband dies, and her
sisters' sons rise in rebellion against her, lay waste a great
part of the country, take her prisoner, and keep her strictly
guarded. This so enrages Cordeilla, who is of a masculine
spirit, that she takes her own life.
The material Shakespeare found in this tradition did not
suffice him. The thoughts and imaginings which the story set
astir within him led him to seek for a supplement to the action
in the tale of Gloucester and his sons, which he took from Sir
Philip Sidney's Arcadia, a book not yet twenty years old. With
the story of the great giver, who is recompensed with ingratitude
by his wicked daughters after he has banished his good daughter,
he entwined the story of the righteous duke, who, deceived by
slander, repudiates his good son, and is hurled by the bad one
into the depths of misery, until at last his eyes are torn out of
his head.
According to Sidney, some princes are overtaken by a storm
SOURCES OF "KING LEAR" 133
in the kingdom of Galacia. They take refuge in a cave, where
they find an old blind man and a youth, whom the old man in
vain entreats to lead him to the top of a rock, from which he may
throw himself down, and thus put an end to his life. The old
man had formerly been Prince of Paphlagonia, but the " hard
hearted ungratefulness " of his illegitimate son had deprived him
not only of his kingdom but of his eyesight. This bastard had
previously had a fatal influence over his father. By his permission
the Prince had given orders to his servants to take his legitimate
son out into a wood and there kill him. The young man, however,
escaped, went into foreign military service, and distinguished him
self; but when he heard of the evils that had befallen his father,
he hastened back to be a support to his hapless age, and is now
heaping coals of fire upon his head. The old man begs the
foreign princes to make his story known, that it may bring
honour to the pious son, — the only reward he can expect.
The old drama of King Leir had kept strictly to Holinshed's
chronicle. It is instructive reading for any one who is trying to
mete out the compass of Shakespeare's genius. A childish work,
in which the rough outlines of the principal action, as we know
them from Shakespeare, are superficially reproduced, it compares
with Shakespeare's tragedy as the melody of Schiller's "An die
Freude," played with one finger, compares with Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. And even this comparison does rather too
much honour to the old drama, in which the melody is barely
suggested.
XXVI
KING LEAR— THE TRAGEDY OF A WORLD-
CATASTROPHE
I IMAGINE that Shakespeare must, as a rule, have worked early
in the morning. The division of the day at that time would
necessitate this. But it can scarcely have been in bright morning
hours, scarcely in the daytime, that he conceived King Lear.
No ; it must have been on a night of storm and terror, one of
those nights when a man, sitting at his desk at home, thinks of
the wretches who are wandering in houseless poverty through
the darkness, the blustering wind, and the soaking rain — when
the rushing of the storm over the house-tops and its howling in
the chimneys sound in his ears like shrieks of agony, the wail
of all the misery of earth.
For in King Lear, and King Lear alone, we feel that what we
in our day know by the awkward name of the social problem, in
other words, the problem of extreme wretchedness and want,
existed already for Shakespeare. On such a night he says with
Lear (iii. 4) : —
" Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these ? "
And he makes the King add :—
" O ! I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp ;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may'st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just."
134
CONSTRUCTION OF "KING LEAR" 135
On such a night was Lear conceived. Shakespeare, sitting at his
writing-table, heard the voices of the King, the Fool, Edgar, and
Kent on the heath, interwoven with each other, contrapuntally
answering each to each, as in a fugue ; and it was for the sake
of the general effect, in all its sublimity, that he wrote large por
tions of the tragedy which, in themselves, cannot have interested
him. The whole introduction, for instance, deficient as it is in any
reasonable motive for the King's behaviour, he took, with his usual
sovereign indifference in unessential matters, from the old play.
With Shakespeare we always find that each work is connected
with the preceding one, as ring is linked with ring in a chain.
In the story of Gloucester the theme of Othello is taken up again
and varied. The trusting Gloucester is spiritually poisoned by
Edmund, exactly as Othello's mind is poisoned by lago's lies.
Edmund calumniates his brother Edgar, shows forged letters from
him, wounds himself in a make-believe defence of his father's life
against him — in short, upsets Gloucester's balance just as lago did
Othello's. And he employs the very same means as Schiller's
Franz Moor employs, two centuries later, to blacken his brother
Karl in their old father's estimation. Die Rduber is a sort of
imitation of this part of King Lear ; even the father's final blind
ness is copied.
Shakespeare moves all this away back into primeval times,
into the grey days of heathendom ; and he welds the two origin
ally independent stories together with such incomparable artistic
dexterity that their interaction serves to bring out more forcibly
the fundamental idea and feeling of the play. He skilfully con
trives that Gloucester's compassion for Lear shall provide Edmund
with means to bring about his father's utter ruin, and he ingeni
ously invents the double passion of Regan and Goneril for Edmund,
which leads the two sisters to destroy each other. He fills the
tame little play of the earlier writer with horrors such as he had
not presented since his youthful days in Titus Andronicus, not
even shrinking from the tearing out of Gloster's eyes on the
stage. He means to show pitilessly what life is. "You see how
this world goes," says Lear in the play.
Shakespeare has nowhere else shown evil and good in such
immediate opposition — bad and good human beings in such
direct conflict with each other; and nowhere else has he so
deliberately shunned the customary and conventional issue of
136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the struggle — the triumph of the good. In the catastrophe, blind
and callous Fate blots out the good and the bad together.
Everything centres in the protagonist, poor, old, stupid, great
Lear, king every inch of him, and every inch human. Lear's is a
passionate nature, irritably nervous, all too ready to act on the
first impulse. » At heart he is so lovable that he arouses the
unalterable devotion of the best among those who surround him ;
and he is so framed to command and so accustomed to rule, that
he misses every moment that power which, in an access of
caprice, he has renounced. For a brief space at the beginning
of the play the old man stands erect; then he begins to bend.
And the weaker he grows the heavier load is heaped upon him,
till at last, overburdened, he sinks. He wanders off, groping his
way, with his crushing fate upon his back. Then the light of his
mind is extinguished ; madness seizes him.
And Shakespeare takes this theme of madness and sets it for
three voices — divides it between Edgar, who is mad to serve a
purpose, but speaks the language of real insanity ; the Fool, who
is mad by profession, and masks the soundest practical wisdom
* under the appearance of insanity; and the King, who is bewildered
/ and infected by Edgar's insane talk — the King, who is mad with
misery and suffering.
As already remarked, it is evident from the indifference with
""-which Shakespeare takes up the old material to make a beginning
and set the play going, that all he really cared about was the
essential pathos of the theme, the deep seriousness of the funda
mental emotion. The opening scenes are of course incredible.
It is only in fairy-tales that a king divides the provinces of his
kingdom among his daughters, on the principle that she gets
the largest share who can assure him that she loves him most ;
and only a childish audience could find it conceivable that old
Gloucester should instantly believe the most improbable calumnies
against a son whose fine character he knew. Shakespeare's in
dividuality does not make itself felt in such parts as these ; but
it certainly does in the view of life, its course and character, which
bursts upon Lear when he goes mad, and which manifests itself
here and there all through the play. And Shakespeare's intellect
has now attained such mastery, every passion is rendered with
such irresistible power, that the play, in spite of its fantastic,
unreal basis, produces an effect of absolute truth.
INDICTMENT OF LIFE 137
" Lear. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look
with thine ears : see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief.
Hark, in thine ear : change places ; and, handy-dandy, which is the
justice, which is the thief? — Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a
beggar ?
" Gloster. Ay, sir.
'"Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There thou might'st
behold the great image of authority : a dog's obey'd in office."
And then follow outbursts to the effect that the punisher is
generally worse than the punished ; the beadle flogs the loose
woman, but the rascally beadle is as lustful as she. The idea
here answers to that in Measure for Measure : the beadle should
flog himself, not the woman. And then come complaints that the
rich are exempt from punishment : dress Sin in armour of gold-
plate, and the lance of Justice will shiver against it. Finally, he
concentrates his indictment of life in the words: —
" When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools."
We hear a refrain from Hamlet running through all this. But
Hamlet's criticism of life is here taken up by many voices ; it
sounds louder, and awakens echo upon echo.
The Fool, the best of Shakespeare's Fools, made more con
spicuous by coming after the insignificant Clown in Othello, is
such an echo — mordantly witty, marvellously ingenious. He is
the protest of sound common-sense against the foolishness of
which Lear has been guilty, but a protest that is pure humour ;
he never complains, least of all on his own account. Yet all his
foolery produces a tragic effect. And the words spoken by one
of the knights, " Since my young lady's going into France, sir,
the fool hath much pined away," atone for all his sharp speeches
to Lear. Amongst Shakespeare's other master-strokes in this
play must be reckoned that, of exalting the traditional clown,
the buffoon, into so high a* .'Sphere that he becomes a tragic
element of the first order.
In no other play of Shakespeare's has the Fool so many
proverbial words of wisdom. Indeed, the whole piece teems with
such words : Lear's " ' Ay ' and ' no/ too, was no good divinity ; "
Edgar's " Ripeness is all;" Kent's "To be acknowledged, madam,
is o'erpaid."
138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Whilst the elder daughters have inherited and over-developed
Lear's bad qualities, Cordelia has fallen heir to his goodness of
heart ; but he has also transmitted to her a certain obstinacy
and pride, but for which the conflict would not have arisen. , His
first question to her, and her answer to it, are equally wanting in
tact. But as the action proceeds, we find that her obstinacy has
melted away ; her whole being is goodness and charm.
How touching is the passage where Cordelia finds her brain
sick sire, and tends him until, by aid of the healing art, and sleep,
and music, he slowly regains his health. Everything is beautiful
here, from the first kiss to the last word. Lear is borne sleep
ing on to the stage. The doctor orders music to sound, and
Cordelia says (iv. 7) : —
" Cor. O my dear father ! Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms, that my two sisters
H ave in thy reverence made !
Kent. Kind and dear princess !
Cor. Had you not been their father, these white flakes
Had challeng'd pity of them. Was this a face
To be oppos'd against the warring winds ?
Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire."
He awakes, and Cordelia says to him : —
" Cor. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?
Lear. You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss ; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead."
Then he comes to himself, asks where he has been, and where
he is ; is surprised that it is " fair daylight ; " remembers what
he has suffered : —
" Cor. O look upon me, sir,
And hold your hands in benediction o'er me.—
No, sir, you must not kneel."
LEAR AND CORDELIA 139
Notice this last line. It has its history. In the old drama of
King Leir this kneeling was made a more prominent feature.
There the King and his faithful Perillus (so Kent was called in
the old play) are wandering about, perishing with hunger and
thirst, when they fall in with the King of Gaul and Cordelia, who
are spying out the land disguised as peasants. The daughter
recognises her father, and gives the starving man food and
drink; then, when he is satisfied, he tells her his story in deep
anguish of spirit : —
" Leir. O no men's children are vnkind but mine.
Cordelia. Condemne not all, because of others crime,
But looke, deare father, looke, behold and see
Thy louing daughter speaketh vnto thee.
(She kneeles].
Leir. O, stand thou vp, it is my part to kneele,
And aske forgiueness for my former faults.
(He kneeles\"
The scene is beautiful, and there is true filial feeling in it, but it
would be impossible on the stage, where two persons kneeling
to each other cannot but produce a comic effect. The incident,
indeed, actually occurs in some of Moliere's and Holberg's comedies.
Shakespeare understood how to preserve and utilise this (with all
other traits of any value in his predecessor's work) in such a
manner that only its delicacy remains, while its external awk
wardness disappears. Lear says to Cordelia, when they have
fallen into the hands of their enemies : —
" Come, let's away to prison :
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage :
When thou dost ask me blessing, Pll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news."
The old play ends naively and innocently with the triumph of
the good. The King of Gaul and Cordelia conduct Leir home
again, tell the wicked daughters sharp truths to their faces, and
thereupon totally rout their armies. Leir thanks and rewards
all who have been faithful to him, and passes the remainder of
140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his days in agreeable leisure under the care of his daughter and
son-in-law.
Shakespeare does not take such a bright view of life. Accord
ing to him, Cordelia's army is defeated, and the old King and his
daughter are thrown into prison. But no past and no present
adversity can crush Lear's spirit now. In spite of everything,
in spite of the loss of power, of self-reliance, and for a time of
reason, in spite of defeat in the decisive battle, he is as happy as
an old man can be. He has his lost daughter again. Age had
already isolated him. In the peace that a prison affords he will
live not much more lonely than great age is of necessity, shut in
with the object, now the sole object, of his love. It seems for
a moment as though Shakespeare would say: " Happy is that
man, even though he may be in prison, who in the last years of
his life has the darling of his heart beside him."
But this is not the conclusion to which Shakespeare leads
us. Edmund commands that Cordelia shall be hanged in prison,
and the murderer executes his order.
The tragedy does not culminate till Lear enters with Cordelia
dead in his arms. After a wild outburst of grief, he asks for
a looking-glass to see if she still breathes, and in the pause that
ensues Kent says : —
" Is this the promised end ? "
And Edgar : —
" Or image of that horror? "
Lear is given a feather. He utters a cry of joy — it moves — she
is alive ! Then he sees that he has been mistaken. Curses
follow, and after them this exquisite touch of characterisation : —
" Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman."
Then the disguised Kent makes himself known, and Lear learns
that the two criminal daughters are dead. But his capacity for
receiving new impressions is almost gone. He can feel nothing
but Cordelia's death : " And my poor fool is hang'd ! No, no, no
life ! " He faints and dies.
" Kent. Vex not his ghost : O let him pass ! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer."
A TITANIC TRAGEDY 141
That this old man should lose his youngest daughter — this is
the catastrophe which Shakespeare has made so great that it
is with reason Kent asks : " Is this the promised end ? Is this
the end of the world ? " In the loss of this daughter he loses
all ; and the abyss that opens seems wide enough and deep
enough to engulph a world.
The loss of a Cordelia — that is the great catastrophe. We
all lose, or live under the dread of losing, our Cordelia. The
loss of the dearest and the best, of that which alone makes
lrfe"~worth living — that is the tragedy of life.V Hence the question :
Is this the end of the world ? Yes, it is. /Each of us has only
his world, and lives with the threat of its destruction hanging
over him. And in the year 1606 Shakespeare was in no mood
to write other than dramas on the doom of worlds.
For the end of all things seems to have come when we see
the ruin of the moral world — when he who is noble and trustful
like Lear is rewarded with ingratitude and hate; when he who
is honest and brave like Kent is punished with dishonour; when
he who is merciful like Gloucester, taking the suffering and /
injured under his roof, has the loss of his eyes for his reward ; (
when he who is noble and faithful like Edgar must wander about
in the semblance of a maniac, with a rag round his loins ; when,
finally, she who is the living emblem of womanly dignity and of
filial tenderness towards an old father who has become as it were
her child — when she meets her death before his eyes at the hands
of assassins ! What avails it that the guilty slaughter and poison
each other afterwards ? None the less is this the titanic tragedy
of human life ; there rings forth from it a chorus of passionate,
jeering, wildly yearning, and desperately wailing voices.
Sitting by his fire at night, Shakespeare heard them in the
roar of the storm against the window-pane, in the howling of
the wind in the chimneys — heard all these terrible voices contra-
puntally inwoven one with another as in a fugue, and heard in
them the torture-shriek of suffering humanity.
XXVII
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA— WHAT ATTRACTED
SHAKESPEARE TO THE SUBJECT
IF it is the last titanic tragedy of human life that has now been
written, what is there more to add ? There is nothing left to
write. Shakespeare may lay down his pen.
So it would seem to us. But what is the actual course of
events ? what do we see ? That for years to come, work follows
work in uninterrupted succession. It is with Shakespeare as
with all other great, prolific geniuses ; time and again we think,
" Now he has done his best, now he has reached his zenith, now
he has touched the limit of his power, exhausted his treasury,
made his crowning effort, his highest bid," — when behold ! he
takes up a new work the day after he has let go the old ; takes it
up as if nothing had happened, unexhausted, unwearied by the
tremendous task he has accomplished, fresh as if he had just
arisen from repose, indefatigable as though he were only now
setting forth with his name and fame yet to be won.
King Lear makes a sensation among Shakespeare's impres
sionable audience ; crowds flock to the theatre to see it ; the book
is quickly sold out — two quarto editions in 1608; all minds are
occupied with it; they have not nearly exhausted its treasures
of profundity, of wit, of practical wisdom, of poetry — Shakespeare
alone no longer gives a moment's thought to it ; he has left it be
hind and is deep in his next work.
A world-catastrophe ! He has no mind now to write of
anything else. What is sounding in his ears, what is filling his
thoughts, is the crash of a world falling to ruin.
For this music he seeks out a new text. He has not far to
seek; he has found it already. Since the time when he wrote
Julius Ccesar, Plutarch has never been out of his hands. In his
first Roman drama he depicted the fall of the world-republic ; but
143
RUIN OF THE ROMAN WORLD 143
in that world, as a whole, fresh, strong forces were still at work.
Caesar's spirit dominated it. We heard more of his greatness
than we saw of it ; but we could infer his true significance from
the effects of his disappearance from the scene. And the republic
still lived in spirits proud like Brutus, or strong like Cassius,
and did not expire with them. By Brutus's side stood Cato's
daughter, delicate but steadfast, the tenderest and bravest of
wives. In short, there were still many sound elements in the
body politic. The republic fell by historical necessity, but there
was no decadence of mind, no degeneracy, no ruin.
But Shakespeare read on in his Plutarch and came to the
life of Marcus Antonius. This he read first out of curiosity, then
with attention, then with eager emotion. For here, here was the
real downfall of the Roman world. Not till now did he hear the
final, fatal crash of the old world-republic. The might of Rome,
stern and austere, shivered at the touch of Eastern voluptuous
ness. Everything sank, everything fell — character and will,
dominions and principalities, men and women. Everything was
worm-eaten, serpent-bitten, poisoned by sensuality — everything
tottered and collapsed. Defeat in Asia, defeat in Europe, defeat
in Africa, on the Egyptian coast; then self-abandonment and
suicide.
Again a poisoning-story like that of Macbeth. In Macbeth's
case the virus was ambition, in Antony's it was sensuality. But
the story of Antony, with its far-reaching effects, was a very
much weightier and more interesting subject than the story
of the little barbarian Scottish king. Macbeth was spiritually
poisoned by his wife, a woman ambitious to bloodthirstiness, an
abnormal woman, more masculine than her husband, almost a
virago. She speaks of dashing out the brains of babes as of one
of those venial offences which one may commit on an emergency
rather than break one's word, and she undertakes without a
tremor to smear the faces of the murdered King's servants with
his blood. What is Lady Macbeth to us ? What's Hecuba to
us ? And what was this Hecuba now to Shakespeare !
In a very different and more personal way did he feel himself
attracted by Cleopatra. She poisons slowly, half-involuntarily,
and in wholly feminine fashion, the faculty of rule, the general
ship, the courage, the greatness of Antony, ruler of half the
world — and her, Cleopatra, he, Shakespeare, knew. He knew
144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
her as we all know her, the woman of women, quintessentiated
Eve, or rather Eve and the serpent in one — " My serpent of old
Nile," as Antony calls her. Cleopatra — the name meant beauty
and fascination — it meant alluring sensuality combined with
finished culture. — it meant ruthless squandering of human life
and happiness and the noblest powers. Here, indeed, was the
woman who could intoxicate and undo a man, even the greatest ;
uplift him to such happiness as he had never known before, and
then plunge him into perdition, and along with him that half of
the world which it was his to rule.
Who knows ! If he himself, William Shakespeare, had met
her, who knows if he would have escaped with his life ? And
had he not met her ? Was it not she whom in bygone days he
had met and loved, and by whom he had been beloved and be
trayed ? It moved him strongly to find Cleopatra described as
so dark, so tawny. His thoughts dwelt upon this. He too had
stood in close relation to a dark, ensnaring woman — one whom in
bitter moments he had been tempted to call a gipsy ; " a right
gipsy," as Cleopatra is called in this play, by those who are
afraid of her or angry with her. She of whom he never thought
without emotion, his black enchantress, his life's angel and fiend,
whom he had hated and adored at the same time, whom he had
despised even while he sued for her favour — what was she but
a new incarnation of that dangerous, ensnaring serpent of the
Nile ! And how nearly had his whole inner world collapsed like
a soap-bubble in his association with, and separation from, her !
That would indeed have been the ruin of a world ! How he had
revelled and writhed, exulted and complained in those days !
played ducks and drakes with his life, squandered his days and
nights ! Now he was a maturer man, a gentleman, a landed
proprietor and tithe- farmer ; but in him still lived the artist-
Bohemian, fitted to mate with the gipsy queen.
Three times in Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4, and
Antony and Cleopatra, i. I, and iv. 12) Cleopatra is slightingly
called gipsy, probably from the word's resemblance in sound to
Egyptian. But there was a certain significance in this word-play ;
for the high-mindedness of the princess and the fickleness of the
gipsy were mysteriously combined in her nature. And how well
he knew this combination ! The model for the great Egyptian
queen stood living before his eyes. With the same palette which
CORDELIA AND CLEOPATRA 145
he had used not many years before to sketch the " dark lady "
of the Sonnets, he could now paint this monumental historical
portrait.
This figure charmed him, attracted him strongly. He came
fresh from Cordelia. He had built up that whole titanic tragedy
of King Lear as a pedestal for her. And what is Cordelia ?
The ideal which one's imagination reads on a young girl's white
brow, and which the young girl herself hardly understands, much
less realises. She was the ray of white light — the great, clear
symbol of the purity and nobility of heart which were expressed
in her very name. He believed in her ; he had looked into her
innocent eyes, whose expression inspired him with the idea of her
character ; he had chanced upon that obstinate, almost ungracious
truthfulness in young women, which seems to augur a treasure of
real feeling behind it ; but he had not known or associated with
Cordelia in daily life.
Cleopatra, on the contrary, O Cleopatra ! He passed in suc
cession before his eyes the most feminine, and therefore the most
dangerous, women he had known since he gained a footing in
London, and he gave her the grace of the one, the caprices of
the other, the teasing humour of a third, a fourth's instability ;
but deep in his heart he was thinking of one only, who had been
to him all women in one, a mistress in the art of love and of
awakening love, inciting to it as no other incited, and faithlessly
betraying as no other betrayed — true and false, daring and frail,
actress and lover without peer !
There were several earlier English dramas on the subject of
Antony and Cleopatra, but only one or two of them are worth
mentioning. There was Daniel's Cleopatra of 1594, founded
partly on Plutarch's Lives of Antonius and Pompeius, partly on
a French book called the " History of the Three Triumvirates."
Then there was a play entitled The Tragedie of Antonie, trans
lated from the French by the Countess of Pembroke, the mother
of Shakespeare's friend, in the year 1595. Shakespeare does
not seem to have been indebted to either of these works, nor
to any of the numerous Italian plays on the subject. He had
none of them before him when he sat down to write his drama,
which appears to have been acted for the first time shortly before
the 20th of May 1608, on which day it is entered in the Stationers'
Register as "a booke called Anthony and Cleopatra" by Edward
VOL. II. K
146 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Blount, one of the publishers who afterwards brought out the
First Folio. It is probable, therefore, that the play was written
during the course of the year 1607.
The only source, probably, from which Shakespeare drew, and
from which he drew largely, was the Life of Marcus Antonius,
in North's translation of Plutarch. It was on the basis of what
he read there that he planned and executed his work, even where,
as in the first act, he writes without in every point adhering to
Plutarch. The farther the drama progresses the more closely
does he keep to Plutarch's narrative, ingeniously and carefully
making use of every touch, great or small, that appears to him
characteristic. It is evident, indeed, that several traits are
included merely because they are true, or rather because
Shakespeare thinks they are true. At times he introduces quite
unnecessary personages, like Dolabella, simply because he will
not put into the mouth of another the message which Plutarch
assigns to him ; and it is very seldom that he permits himself even
the most trifling alteration.
Shakespeare ennobled the character of Antony to a certain
extent. Plutarch depicts him as a Hercules in stature, and
inclined to ape the demigod by certain affectations of dress ; a
hearty, rough soldier, given to praising himself and making game
of others, but capable, too, of enduring banter as well as praise.
His inclination to prodigality and luxurious living made him
rapacious, but he was ignorant of most of the infamies that were
committed in his name. There was no craft in his nature, but he
was brutal, recklessly profligate, and devoid of all sense of decency.
A popular, light-hearted, free-handed general, who sat far too
many hours at table — indifferent whether it were with his own
soldiers or with princes — who showed himself drunken on the
public street, and would " sleepe out his drunkennesse " in the
light of day, degraded himself by the lowest debauchery, ex
hausted whole treasuries on his journeys, travelled with priceless
gold and silver plate for his table, had chariots drawn by lions,
gave away tens of thousands of pounds in a single gift ; but in
defeat and misfortune rose to his full height as the inspiriting
leader who uncomplainingly renounced all his own comforts and
kept up the courage of his men. Calamity always raised him above
himself — a sufficient proof that, in spite of everything, he was not
without a strain of greatness. There was something of the stage-
PLUTARCH'S ANTONY 147
king in him, something of the Murat, a touch of Skobeloff, and a
suggestion of the mediaeval knight. What could be less antique
than his twice challenging Octavius to single combat ? And in
the end, when misfortune overwhelmed him, and those on whom
he had showered benefits ungratefully forsook him, there was
something in him that recalled Timon of Athens nursing his
melancholy and his bitterness. He himself recognised the
affinity.
Women, according to Plutarch, were Antony's bane. After a
youth in which many women had had a share, he married Fulvia,
the widow of the notorious tribune, Clodius. She acquired the
mastery over him, and bent him to all her wishes, so that from
her hand he passed into Cleopatra's, ready broken-in to feminine
dominion.
According to Plutarch, moreover, Antony was endowed with a
considerable flexibility of character. He was fond of disguising
himself, of playing practical jokes. Once, for instance, on returning
from a campaign, he, dressed as a slave, delivered to his wife,
Fulvia, a letter telling of his own death, and then suddenly em
braced her as she stood terror-struck. This was only one of
many manifestations of his power of self-metamorphosis. Some
times he would seem nerveless, sometimes iron-nerved ; sometimes
effeminate, sometimes brave to foolhardiness ; now avid of honour,
now devoid of honour; now revengeful, now magnanimous.
This undulant diversity and changeableness in Antony fascinated
Shakespeare. Yet he did not accept the character exactly as he
found it in Plutarch. Hewthrew into relief the brighter sides of
it, building upon the foundation of Antony's inborn magnificence,
the superb prodigality of his nature, his kingly generosity,
and that reckless determination to enjoy the passing moment,
which is a not uncommon attribute both of great rulers and
great artists.
There was a crevice in this antique figure through whicli
Shakespeare's soul could creep in. He had no difficulty in
imagining himself into Antony's moods ; he was able to play him
just as, in his capacity of actor, he could play a part that was
quite in his line. Antony possessed that power of metamorphosis
which is the essence of the artist nature. He was at one and the
same time a master in the art of dissimulation— see his funeral
oration \M Julius Ccesar, and in this play the manner in which he
148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
takes Octavia to wife — and an open, honest character ; he was
in a way faithful, felt closely bound to his mistress and to his
comrades-in-arms, and was yet alarmingly unstable. In other
words, his was an artist-nature.
Among his many contradictory qualities two stood out pre
eminent : the bent towards action and the bent towards enjoyment.
Octavius says in the play that these two propensities are equally
strong in him, and this is perhaps just about the truth. If, with
his immense bodily strength, he had been still more voluptuously
inclined, he would have become what in later history Augustus the
Strong became, and Cleopatra would have been his Aurora von
Konigsmarck. If energy had been more strongly developed in
him, then generalship and love of drink and dissipation would
have combined in him much as they did in Alexander the Great,
and Antony in Alexandria would have presented a parallel to
Alexander in Babylon. The scales hung evenly balanced for a
long time, until Antony met his fate in Cleopatra.
Shakespeare has endowed them both with extreme personal
beauty, though neither of them is young. Antony's followers see
in him a Mars, in her a Venus. Even the gruff Enobarbus (ii. 2)
declares that when he saw her for the first time, she " o'erpictured
that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature." She is the
enchantress whom, according to Antony, " everything becomes "
— chiding, laughing, weeping, as well as repose. She is "a
wonderful piece of work." Antony can never leave her, for, as
Enobarbus says (ii. 2 ; compare Sonnet Ivi.) : —
» " Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies ; for vilest things
Become themselves in her."
What matters it that Shakespeare pictures her to himself dark as
an African (she was in reality of the purest Greek blood), or that
she, with some exaggeration, calls herself old ? She can afford to
jest on the subject of her complexion as on that of her age : —
" Think on me
That am with Phoebus amorous pinches black,
And wrinkled deep in time,"
CHARACTER OF ANTONY 149
She is what Antony calls her when he (viii. 2) exclaims in ecstasy,
" O thou day o' the world ! "
In person and carriage Antony is as if created for her. It is
not only Cleopatra's passion that speaks when she says of Antony
(v. 2):-
" I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony . . .
His face was as the heavens ..."
And to the beauty of his face answers that of his voice : —
" Propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder."
She prizes his rich, generous nature : —
" For his bounty,
There was no winter in't ; and autumn 'twas,
That grew the more by reaping :
In his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets ; realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket."
And just as Enobarbus maintained that Cleopatra was more
beautiful than that pictured Venus in which imagination had
surpassed nature, Cleopatra, in her exaltation after Antony's
death, maintains that his glorious humanity surpassed what fancy
can invent : —
" Cleopatra. Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
Dolabella. Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be, or ever were, one such,
It's past the size of dreaming : nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite."
Not of an Antony should we speak thus now-a-days, but of a
Napoleon in the world of action, of a Michael Angelo, a Beethoven,
or a Shakespeare in the world of art.
150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
But the figure of Antony had to be one which made such a
transfiguration possible in order that it might be worthy to stand
by the side of hers who is the queen of beauty, the very genius
of love.
Pascal says in his Pensees : " Si le nez de Cleopatre eut ete
plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait change." But her nose
was, as the old coins show us, exactly what it ought to have
been ; and in Shakespeare we feel that she is not only beauty
itself, but charm, except in one single scene, where the news of
Antony's marriage throws her into a paroxysm of un beautiful
rage. Her charm is of the sense-intoxicating kind, and she has,
by study and art, developed those powers of attraction which she
possessed from the outset, till she has become inexhaustible in
inventiveness and variety. She is the woman who has passed
from hand to hand, from her husband and brother to Pompey,
from Pompey to the great Caesar, from Caesar to countless others.
She is the courtesan by temperament, but none the less does she
possess the genius for a single, undivided love. She, like Antony,
is complex, and being a woman, she is more so than he. Vir
duplex, femina triplex.
From the beginning and almost to the end of the tragedy she
plays the part of the great coquette. What she says and does
is for long only the outcome of the coquette's desire and power to
captivate by incalculable caprices. She asks where Antony is, and
sends for him (i. 2). He comes. She exclaims : " We will not
look upon him," and goes. Presently his absence irks her, and
again she sends a messenger to remind him of her and keep him
in play (i. 3) :—
" If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing ; if in mirth, report
That i am sudden sick ..."
He learns of his wife's death. She would have been beside
herself if he had shown grief, but he speaks with coldness of the
loss, and she attacks him because of this : —
" Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see
In Fulvia's death how mine received shall be."
This incalculably, this capriciousness of hers extends to the
smallest matters. She invites Mardian to play a game of billiards
CLEOPATRA'S LOVE OF ANTONY 151
with her (an amusing anachronism), and, finding him ready, she
turns him off with : " I'll none now."
But all this mutability does not exclude in her the most real,
most passionate love for Antony. The best proof of its strength
is the way in which she speaks of him when he is absent (i. 5):
"OCharmian!
Where think'st thou he is now ? Stands he, or sits he ?
Or does he walk ? or is he on his horse ?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony !
Do bravely, horse, for wott'st thou whom thou mov'st ?
The demi- Atlas of this earth, the arm
And burgonet of men."
So it is but the truth she is speaking when she tells with what
immovable certainty and trust, with what absolute assurance for
the future, love filled both her and Antony when they saw each
other for the first time (i. 3) : —
" No going then ;
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent ; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven."
Nor is it irony when Enobarbus, in reply to Antony's com
plaint (i. 2), "She is cunning past man's thought," makes
answer, "Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but
the finest part of pure love." This is literally true — only that the
love is not pure in the sense of being sublimated or unegoistic,
but in the sense of being quintessential erotic emotion, chemically
free from all the other elements usually combined with it.
And outward circumstances harmonise with the character and
vehemence of this passion. He lays the kingdoms of the East at
her feet; with reckless prodigality, she lavishes the wealth of
Africa on the festivals she holds in his honour.
XXVIII
THE DARK LADY AS A MODEL— THE FALL OF THE
REPUBLIC A WORLD-CATASTROPHE
ASSUMING that it was Shakespeare's design in Antony and
Cleopatra, as in King Lear, to evoke the conception of a world-
catastrophe, we see that he could not in this play, as in Macbeth
or Othello, focus the entire action around the leading characters
alone. He could not even make the other characters completely
subordinate to them; that would have rendered it impossible for
him to give the impression of majestic breadth, of an action em
bracing half of the then known world, which he wanted for the
sake of the concluding effect.
He required in the group of figures surrounding Octavius
Caesar, and in the groups round Lepidus, Ventidius, and Sextus
Pompeius, a counterpoise to Antony's group. He required the placid
beauty and Roman rectitude of Octavia as a contrast to the volatile,
intoxicating Egyptian. He required Enobarbus to serve as a sort
of chorus and introduce an occasional touch of irony amid the high-
flown passion of the play. In short, he 'required a throng of per
sonages, and (in order to make us feel that the action was not
taking place in some narrow precinct in a corner of Europe, but
upon the stage of the world) he required a constant coming and
going, sending and receiving of messengers, whose communications
are awaited with anxiety, heard with bated breath, and not in
frequently alter at one blow the situation of the chief characters.
The ambition which characterised Antony's past is what de
termines his relation to this great world ; the love which has now
taken such entire possession of him determines his relation to the
Egyptian queen, and the consequent loss of all that his ambition
had won for him. Whilst in a tragedy like Goethe's Clavigo,
ambition plays the part of the tempter, and love is conceived as
the good, the legitimate power, here it is love that is reprehensible,
152
MODEL OF CLEOPATRA 153
ambition that is proclaimed to be the great man's vocation and
duty.
Thus Antony says (i. 2) :
" These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage."
We saw that one element of Shakespeare's artist-nature was of
use to him in his modelling of the figure of Antony. He himself
had ultimately broken his fetters, or rather life had broken them
for him ; but as he wrote this great drama, he lived through again
those years in which he himself had felt and spoken as he now
made Antony feel and speak :
" A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another's neck, do witness bear,
Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place."
— (Sonnet cxxxi. )
Day after day that woman now stood before him as his model
who had been his life's Cleopatra — she to whom he had written
of " lust in action " :
" Mad in pursuit, and in possession so ;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme ;
A bliss in proof, — and prov'd, a very woe."
— (Sonnet cxxix.)
He had seen in her an irresistible and degrading Delilah, the
Delilah whom De Vigny centuries later anathematised in a famous
couplet.1 He had bewailed, as Antony does now, that his beloved
had belonged to many :
" If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,
Be anchor'd in the bay where all men ride,
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world's common place ? ''
— (Sonnet cxxxvii.)
He had, like Antony, suffered agonies from the coquetry she
would lavish on any one she wanted to win. He had then burst
1 " Toujours ce compagnon dont le coeur n'est pas sur,
La Femme — enfant malade et douze fois impur."
154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
forth in complaint, as Antony in the drama breaks out into
frenzy :
" Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere ; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside :
What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o'er-pressed defence can 3bide?;J
— (Sonnet cxxxix.)
Now he no longer upbraided her; now he crowned her with a
queenly diadem, and placed her, living, breathing, and in the largest
sense true to nature, on that stage which was his world.
As in Othello he had made the lover-hero about as old as he
was himself at the time he wrote the play, so now it interested
him to represent this stately and splendid lover who was no
longer young. In the Sonnets he had already dwelt upon his
age. He says, for instance, in Sonnet cxxxviii. :
" When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue."
When Antony and Cleopatra perished with each other, she was in
her thirty-ninth, he in his fifty-fourth year. She was thus almost
three times as old as Juliet, he more than double the age of Romeo.
This correspondence with his own age pleases Shakespeare's
fancy, and the fact that time has had no power to sear or wither
this pair seems to hold them still farther aloof from the ordinary
lot of humanity. The traces years have left upon the two have
only given them a deeper beauty. All that they themselves in
sadness, or others in spite, say to the contrary, signifies nothing.
The contrast between their age in years and that which their
beauty and passion make for them merely enhances and adds
piquancy to the situation. It is in sheer malice that Pompey
exclaims (ii. i):
" But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip ! "
This means no more than her own description of herself as
"wrinkled." And it is on purpose to give the idea of Antony's
CHARACTER OF ANTONY 155
age, of which in Plutarch there is no indication, that Shakespeare
makes him dwell on the mixed colour of his own hair. He says
(iii. 9) :
" My very hairs do mutiny; for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them
For fear and doting."
In the moment of despair he uses the expression (iii. 11): "To
the boy Caesar send this grizzled head." And again, after the last
victory, he recurs to the idea in a tone of triumph. Exultingly he
addresses Cleopatra (iv. 8) :
" What, girl ! though grey
Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha' we
A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can
Get goal for goal of youth."
With a sure hand Shakespeare has depicted in Antony the mature
man's fear of letting a moment pass unutilised : the vehement /
desire to enjoy before the hour strikes when all enjoyment must/
cease. Thus Antony says in one of his first speeches (i. i) :
" Now, for the love of Love and her soft hours. . . .
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now."
Then he feels the necessity of breaking his bonds. He makes
Fulvia's death serve his purpose of gaining Cleopatra's consent
to his departure ; but even then he is not free. In order to bring
out the contrast between Octavius the statesman and Antony the
lover, Shakespeare emphasises the fact that Octavius has reports
of the political situation brought to him every hour, whilst Antony
receives no other daily communication than the regularly arriving
letters from Cleopatra which foment the longing that draws him
back to Egypt.
As a means of allaying the storm and gaining peace to love
his queen at leisure, he agrees to marry his opponent's sister,
knowing that, when it suits him, he will neglect and repudiate her.
Then vengeance overtakes him for having so contemptuously
thrown away the empire over more than a third of the civilised
world — vengeance for having said as he embraced Cleopatra
(i. i):
" Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall ! Here is my space."
156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Rome melts through his fingers. Rome proclaims him a foe to
her empire, and declares war against him. And he loses his
power, his renown, his whole position, in the defeat which he so
contemptibly brings upon himself at Actium. In Cleopatra flight
was excusable. Her flight in the drama (which follows Plutarch
and tradition) is due to cowardice; in reality it was prompted
by tactical, judicious motives. But Antony was in honour bound
to stay. He follows her in the tragedy (as in reality) from brain
less, contemptible incapacity to remain when she has gone ; leaving
an army of 112,000 men and a fleet of 450 ships in the lurch,
without leader or commander. Nine days did his troops await
his return, rejecting every proposal of the enemy, incapable of
believing in the desertion and flight of the general they admired
and trusted. When at last they could no longer resist the con
viction that he had sunk his soldier's honour in shame, they went
over to Octavius.
After this everything turns on the mutual relation of Antony
and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare has admirably depicted its
ecstasies and its revulsions. Never before had they loved each
other so wildly and so rapturously. Now it is not only he who
openly calls her " Thou day o' the world ! " She answers him
with the cry, " Lord of lords ! O infinite virtue ! " (iv. 8).
Yet never before has their mutual distrust been so deep.
She, who was at no time really great except in the arts of love
and coquetry, has always felt distrustful of him, and yet never
distrustful enough ; for though she was prepared for a great deal,
his marriage with Octavia overwhelmed her. He, knowing her
past, knowing how often she has thrown herself away, and under
standing her temperament, believes her false to him even when
she is innocent, even when, as with Desdemona, only the vaguest
of appearances are against her. In the end we see Antony
develop into an Othello.
Here and there we come upon something in his character which
seems to indicate that Shakespeare had been lately occupied with
Macbeth. Cleopatra stimulates Antony's voluptuousness, his sen
suality, as Lady Macbeth spurred on her husband's ambition ; and
Antony fights his last battle with Macbeth's Berserk fury, facing
with savage bravery what he knows to be invincibly superior
force. But in his emotional life after the disaster of Actium it is
Othello whom he more nearly resembles. He causes Octavius's
DECEITFLJLNESS OF CLEOPATRA 157
messenger, Thyreus, to be whipped, simply because Cleopatra at
parting has allowed him to kiss her hand. When some of her
ships take to flight, he immediately believes in an alliance between
her and the enemy, and heaps the coarsest invectives upon her,
almost worse than those with which Othello overwhelms Desde-
mona. And in his monologue (iv. 10) he raves groundlessly
like Othello :
"Betray'd lam.
O this false soul of Egypt ! this grave charm, —
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end, —
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss."
They both, though faithless to the rest of the world, meant to
be true to each other, but in the hour of trial they place no trust
in each other's faithfulness. And all these strong emotions have
shaken Antony's judgment. The braver he becomes in his mis
fortune, the more incapable is he of seeing things as they really
are. Enobarbus closes the third act most felicitously with the
words :
" I see still
A diminution in our captain's brain
Restores his heart : when valour preys on reason
It eats the sword it fights with."
To tranquillise Antony's jealous frenzy, Cleopatra, who always
finds readiest aid in a lie, sends him the false tidings of her death.
In grief over her loss, he falls on his sword and mortally wounds
himself. He is carried to her, and dies. She bursts forth :
" Noblest of men, woo't die ?
Hast thou no care of me ? shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty ? — O ! see, my women,
The crown o' the earth doth melt."
In Shakespeare, however, her first thought is not of dying her
self. She endeavours to come to a compromise with Octavius,
hands over to him an inventory of her treasures, and tries to trick
him out of the larger half. It is only when she has ascertained
that nothing, neither admiration for her beauty nor pity for her
misfortunes, moves his cold sagacity, and that he is determined
158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to exhibit her humiliation to the populace of Rome as one of the
spectacles of his triumph, that she lets " the worm of Nilus " give
her her death.
In these passages the poet has placed Cleopatra's behaviour
in a much more unfavourable light than the Greek historian,
whom he follows as far as details are concerned; and he has
evidently done so wittingly and purposely, in order to complete
his home-thrust at the type of woman whose dangerousness he
has embodied in her. In Plutarch all these negotiations with
Octavius were a feint to deceive the vigilance with which he
thought to prevent her from killing herself. Suicide is her one
thought, and he has baulked her in her first attempt. She pre
tends to cling to her treasures only to delude him into the belief
that she still clings to life, and her heroic imposture is successful.
Shakespeare, for whom she is ever the quintessence of the she-
animal in woman, disparages her intentionally by suppressing the
historical explanation of her behaviour.1
The English critic, Arthur Symons, writes: "Antony and
Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's
plays, and it is so mainly because the figure of Cleopatra is
the most wonderful of Shakespeare's women. And not of
Shakespeare's women only, but perhaps the most wonderful of
women."
This is carrying enthusiasm almost too far. But thus much
is true : the great attraction of this masterpiece lies in the unique
figure of Cleopatra, elaborated as it is with all Shakespeare's
human experience and artistic enthusiasm. But the greatness
of the world-historic drama proceeds from the genius with which
he has entwined the private relations of the two lovers with the
course of history and the fate of empires. Just as Antony's ruin
results from his connection with Cleopatra, so does the fall of the
Roman Republic result from the contact of the simple hardihood
of the West with the luxury of the East. Antony is Rome,
Cleopatra is the Orient. When he perishes, a prey to the volup
tuousness of the East, it seems as though Roman greatness and
the Roman Republic expired with him.
1 Goethe has a marked imitation of Shakespeare's Cleopatra in the Adelheid
of Gotz von Berlichingen. And he has placed Weislingen between Adelheid and
Maria as Antony stands between Cleopatra and Octavin — bound to the former and
marrying the latter.
A WORLD-CATASTROPHE 159
Not Caesar's ambition, not Caesar's assassination, but this
crumbling to pieces of Roman greatness fourteen years later
brings home to us the ultimate fall of the old world-republic, and
impresses us with that sense of universal annihilation which in
this play, as in King Lear, Shakespeare aims at begetting.
This is no tragedy of a domestic, limited nature like the con
clusion of Othello ; there is no young Fortinbras here, as in
Hamlet, giving the promise of brighter and better times to come ;
the victory of Octavius brings glory to no one and promises
nothing. No ; the final picture is that which Shakespeare was
bent on painting from the moment he felt himself attracted by this
great theme — the picture of a world-catastrophe.
BOOK THIRD
DISCORD AND SCORN
OUT of tune — out of tune !
Out of tune the instrument whereon so many enthralling
melodies had been played— glad and gay, plaintive or resentful,
full of love and full of sorrow. Out of tune the mind which had
felt so keenly, thought so deeply, spoken so temperately, and
stood so firmly " midst passion's whirlpool, storm, and whirl
wind." His life's philosophy has become a disgust of life, his
melancholy seeks the darkest side of all things, his mirth is
grown to bitter scorn, and his wit is without shame.
There was a time when all before his eyes was green — vernally
green, life's own lush, unfaded colour. This was followed by a
period of gloom, during which he watched the shadows of life
spread over the bright and beautiful, blotting out their colours.
Now it is black, and worse than black ; he sees the base mire
cover the earth with its filth, and heeds how it fills the air with
its stench.
Shakespeare had come to the end of his first great circum
navigation of life and human nature : an immense disillusion
ment was the result. Expectation and disappointment, yearning
and content, life's gladness and holiday-making, battle mood and
triumph, inspired wrath and desperate vehemence — all that once
had thrilled him is now fused and lost in contempt.
Disdain has become a persistent mood, and scorn of mankind
flows with the blood in his veins. Scorn for princes and people ;
for heroes, who are but fellow-brawlers and braggarts after all ;
and for artists, who are but flatterers and parasites seeking
possible patrons. Scorn for old age, in whose venerableness he
sees only the unction or hypocrisy of an old twaddler. Scorn for
160
THE PERIOD OF GLOOM 161
youth, wherein he sees but profligacy, slackness, and gullibility,
while all enthusiasts are impostors, and all idealists fools. Men
are either coarse and unprincipled, or so weakly sentimental
as to be under a woman's thumb; and woman's distinguishing
qualities are feebleness, voluptuousness, fickleness, and falsehood ;
a fool he who trusts himself to them or lets his actions depend
upon them.
This mood has been growing on Shakespeare for some time.
We have felt it grow. It shows first in Hamlet, but is harmless
as yet in comparison with the scathing bitterness of later times.
There is a breath, a whisper, in the "Frailty, thy name is
Woman ! " addressed to Hamlet's mother. Ophelia is rather futile
than specially weak ; she is never false, still less faithless. Even
the inconstant Queen Gertrude can scarcely be called false.
There was malignity and temper in that challenge of moral
hypocrisy, Measure for Measure, and enough earnestness to
overpower the comic, although not sufficient bitterness to make
the peaceful conclusion impossible. The tragedy of Macbeth was
brought to a consoling end ; the powers of good triumphed at the
last. There was only one malign character in Othello, evil indeed,
but solitary. Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, &c., are all good at
neart. There is no bitterness in Lear, no scorn of mankind, but
sympathy and a wonderful compassion pervading and dominating
all. Shakespeare has divided his own Ego among the characters
of this play, in order to share with them the miseries and suffer
ing of life on this earth ; he has not gathered himself up to judge
and despise.
It is from thenceforward that the undertone of contempt first
begins to be felt. A period of some years follows, in which his
being narrows and concentrates itself upon an abhorrence of
human nature, accompanied, so far as we can judge, by a cor
respondingly enormous self-esteem. It is as though he had for
a moment felt such a scorn for his surroundings of court and
people, friends and rivals, men and women, as had nearly driven
him wild.
We see the germs of it in Antony and Cleopatra. What a
fool is this Antony, who puts his reputation and a world-wide
dominion in jeopardy in order to be near a cold-blooded coquette,
who has passed from hand to hand, and whose caprice puts on
all the colours of the rainbow. We find it in full bloom in
VOL. II. L
1 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida. What a simpleton this Troilus, who,
credulous as a child, devotes himself body and soul to a Cressida;
a typical classic she, treachery in woman's form, as false and
flighty as foam upon the waves, whose fickleness has become a
by-word.
Shakespeare has now reached that point of departure where
man feels the need of stripping woman of the glamour with which
romantic naivete and sensual attraction have surrounded her, and
finds a gratification in seeing merely the sex in her. Sympathy
with love, and a conception of woman as an object worthy of
love, goes the way of all other sympathies and illusions at this
stage. "All is vanity," says Kohelet, and Shakespeare with him.
As in all artist souls, there was in his a peculiar blending of
enthusiast and cynic. He has now parted with enthusiasm for a
time, and cynicism is paramount.
Such an all-pervading change in the disposition and temper of
a great personality was not without its reasons, possibly its one
first cause. We can trace its workings without divining its origin,
but we may seek to orient ourselves with regard to its conditions.
Leverier came to the conclusion in 1846 that the disturbances in
the path of Uranus were caused by something behind the planet
which neither he nor anybody else had ever seen. He indicated
its probable position, and three weeks afterwards Galle found
Neptune on the very spot. Unfortunately, Shakespeare's history
is so very obscure, and such fruitless search in every direction
has been made after fresh documents, that we have no great hope
of finding any new light.
We can but glance around the horizon of his life, and note
how English circumstances and conditions grouped themselves
about him. Material for cheering or depressing reflections can
be found at all times, but the mind is not always equally prone
to assimilate the cheering or depressing. Certain it is that Shake
speare has now elected to seek out and dwell upon the ugly
and sorrowful, the unclean and the repulsive. His melancholy
finds its nourishment therein, and his bitterness has learned to
suck poison from every noxious plant which borders his path
through life. His contempt of mankind and his weariness of
existence swell and grow with each experience, and in the events
and conditions of those years there was surely matter enough
for abhorrence, rancour, and scorn.
II
THE COURT— THE KING'S FAVOURITES
AND RALEIGH
UNDER the circumstances Shakespeare could do nothing but
keep as close to King and Court as possible, even though the
King's dreary, and the Court's profligate qualities grew year by
year. James aspired to a comparison with Solomon for wisdom ;
he certainly resembled him in prodigality, and Henry III. of
France in his susceptibility to manly beauty. His passion for
his various favourites recalls that of Edward II. for Gaveston in
Marlowe's drama. He was, says a chronicle of the time, as
susceptible as any schoolgirl to handsome features and well-
formed limbs in a man. The parallels his contemporaries drew
between him and his predecessor on this score did not work out
to his advantage. Elizabeth, they said, who was unmarried,
loved only individuals of the opposite sex, all eminent men,
whom, even then, she never allowed to rule her. James, on the
contrary, was married, and yet entertained a passion for one
mignon after another, giving the most exalted positions in the
country to these men, who were worthless and arrogant, and by
whom he was entirely led. In our day Swinburne has charac
terised James as combining with "northern virulence and ped
antry ... a savour of the worst qualities of the worst Italians
of the worst period of Italian decadence." Was he, in truth, of
Scotch descent on both sides ? His exterior recalled little of his
mother's charms, and still less those of the handsome Darnley.
His contemporaries doubted. They neither believed that Darn-
ley's jealousy was groundless, nor the modern embellishment that
the Italian singer and private secretary's ugly face made any tender
feeling on Mary Stuart's side quite impossible. The Scottish
Solomon was invariably alluded to by the outspoken, jest-loving
Henry IV. of France as " Solomon, the son of David " (Rizzio).
The general enthusiasm which greeted King James on his
163
1 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
accession speedily gave way to a very decided unpopularity.
Again and again, upon a score of different points, did he offend
English national pride, sense of justice, and decency.
The lively Queen, who romped through the court festivities,
and spent her days in dressing herself out for masquerades, had
her favourites, much as the King had his. At one time, indeed,
the same family served them both. The Queen set her affection
on the elder brother, the Earl of Pembroke, and the King
bestowed his upon the younger, whom he made Earl of Mont
gomery and Knight of the Garter. Whether he did not find
the harmony of disposition for which he had looked, or whether
the impression Montgomery made upon him was displaced by
another and stronger, certain it is that no later than 1603 he
was already violently infatuated with a youth of twenty, who
afterwards became the most powerful man in Great Britain.
This was a young Scot, Robert Carr, who first attracted the
King's attention by breaking his leg in a tourney at which James
was present. He had as a lad been one of the King's pages at
home in Scotland, had since pursued his fortunes in France, and
was now in service with Lord Hay. The King gave special
orders that he should be nursed at the castle, sent his own doctor
to him, visited him frequently during his illness, and made him
Knight and Gentleman of the Bedchamber as soon as he was
convalescent. He kept him constantly about his person, and
even took the trouble to teach him Latin. Step by step the
young man was advanced until he stood among the foremost
ranks of the country.
It was his nationality which specially offended the people, for
Scottish adventurers swarmed about the King, and the Scots were
still regarded as stranger-folk in England. The new title of
Great Britain had also caused great discontent. Was the glori
ous name of England no longer to distinguish them ? Scotch
moneys were made current on English soil, and English ships
were compelled to carry the cross of St. Andrew, with that of
St. George upon their flags. Englishmen found themselves
slighted, and were fearful that the Scot would creep into English
lordships and English ladies' beds, as a contemporary writing
expresses it. The conflicts in Parliament concerning the exten
sion of national privileges to the Scotch were incessant. Bacon
undertook the King's cause, and discreet and biblical objections
FAVOURITISM OF THE KING 165
were made that things would fall out as they did with Lot and
Abraham. Families combined together, or were set at variance
among themselves; and it grew to a case of, "Go you to the
right ? I go to the left."
In 1607 James observed that he intended to "give England
the labour and the sweat, Scotland the fruit and the sweet ; " and
it was a notorious fact, that where his passions were concerned,
the Scotch were persistently preferred to the English.
James, having meanwhile found it necessary to provide his
favourite with estates, procured them in the following manner.
When Raleigh came to grief, he had secured the revenues of his
estate, Sherborne, to Lady Raleigh, and his son as heir to it
after his death. A few months later the King's lawyers discovered
a technical error in the deed of conveyance which rendered it
invalid. Raleigh wrote from his prison to Salisbury, entreating
the King not to deprive his family of their subsistence for the
sake of a copyist's blunder. The King made many promises, and
assured Raleigh that a new and correct deed should be drawn up.
The imprisoned hero had begun, at about this time, to entertain
renewed hope of freedom, for he believed that Christian IV., then
on a visit to England, 1606, would intercede for him. But when
Lady Raleigh, under this impression, threw herself on her knees
before James at Hampton Court, the King passed her by without
a word. From the year 1607 the King had resolved upon seizing
Sherborne for his favourite. In 1608 Raleigh was required to
prove right and title thereunto, and he possessed only the faulty
document. At Christmastide, taking her two little sons by the
hand, Lady Raleigh cast herself a second time before James, and
implored him for a new and accurate deed. The only reply she
obtained was a broad Scotch, " 1 maun hae the lond — I maun
hae it for Carr." It is said that the high-spirited woman lost all
patience upon this, and springing to her feet called upon God to
punish the despoiler of her property. Raleigh, on the 2nd of
January 1609, tried the more politic method of writing to Carr,
entreating him not to aspire to the possession of Sherborne. He
received no answer, and upon the loth of the same month the
estate was handed over to the favourite as a gift. It is to be
regretted that Raleigh, who had never concealed his opinion of
the King's favourites, should have lowered himself by writing to
Carr as "one whom I know not, but by honourable fame."
166 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Lady Raleigh accepted a sum of money in compensation,
which bore no relation to the real value of Sherborne, and
Raleigh was left in the Tower. It is a highly characteristic
feature that he remained there year after year until he succeeded
(in 1616) in arousing his kingly gaoler's cupidity afresh. In the
hope of his rinding the anticipated gold-mines in Guiana his
prison doors were opened for a while (1616-17), and his failure
to discover them was made a pretext for his execution.1
1 "Sir Walter Raleigh was freed out of the Tower the last week, and goes up and
down, seeing sights and places built or bettered since his imprisonment," — Letter
from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 27th March 1616 ("The Court and
Times of James the First").
Gardiner's "History of England," ii. 43; Gosse, "Raleigh," 172.
Ill
THE KING'S THEOLOGY AND IMPECUNIOSITY—HIS
DISPUTES WITH THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
THE King's interest in parsons and theological discussions was
not a whit inferior to his passion for his favourites. He con
stantly gave public expression to a superstition which diverted
even contemporary culture. It is jestingly alluded to in a letter
from Sir Edward Hoby to Sir Thomas Edmondes, dated Nov.
19, 1605. "His Majesty in his speech observed one principal
point, that most of all his best fortunes had happened unto him
upon the Tuesday ; and particularly he repeated his deliverance
from Gowry [the brothers Ruthven] and this [Gunpowder Plot],
in which he noted precisely that both fell upon the fifth day of
the month : and therefore concluded that he made choice that
the next sitting of Parliament might begin upon a Tuesday." If
James supported the claims of the clergy, it was less on religi
ous grounds than because his own kingly power was thereby
strengthened, and he disseminated, to the best of his ability, the
doctrine that all questions must finally be referred to his personal
wisdom and insight. Relations between the temporal and the
spiritual jurisdictions were already strained. The secular judges
frequently objected that the Spiritual Court entered into certain
lawsuits before making sure that the case appertained to them.
The clergy resisted, asserting that the two courts were indepen
dent of one another, and that their spiritual prerogatives emanated
direct from the Crown. In 1605 the Archbishop of Canterbury
complained of the secular judges to the King, and they, in their
turn, appealed to Parliament. Fuller, a member of Parliament,
and one of the principal advocates of the Puritan party, defended
two of the accused who had been shamefully mishandled by the
Spiritual Court (the High Commission), and he denied this
" Popish authority," as he called it, any right to impose fines or
167
1 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
inflict imprisonment. For these reckless utterances he was sent
to gaol, and kept there until he retracted. The question of the
supremacy of temporal jurisdiction over the spiritual began to
ferment in the public mind. The King held by the latter, because
it exercised an authority which Parliament was powerless to
control, while Lord Chief Justice Coke stood by the former. On
the latter giving vent, however, to the opinion, in the King's
presence, that the sovereign was bound to respect the law of the
land, and to remember that spiritual jurisdiction was extraneous,
James clenched angry fists in his face, and would have struck
him, had not Coke, alarmed, fallen on his knees and entreated
pardon.
The King's ardent orthodoxy prompted him next to appear as
a theological polemist. A certain professor of theology at Ley-
den, Conrad Vorstius by name, had, according to James's ideas,
been guilty of heresy. It was of so slight a nature that, in spite
of the rigid orthodoxy of the greater part of the Dutch theologians,
it had raised no protest in Holland, since statesmen, nobles, and
merchants were all agreed upon tolerance in matters of religion.
James, however, made such a vindictive assault upon them, that,
for fear of forfeiting their English alliance, they were compelled
to give Vorstius his dismissal.
At the precise moment of James's full polemical heat against
Vorstius, two unlucky Englishmen, Edward Wrightman and
Bartholomew Legate, were convicted of holding heretical opinions.
The latter admitted that he was an Aryan, and had not prayed
to Jesus for many years. James was fire and flame. Elizabeth
had burnt two heretics. Why shouldn't he ? Public opinion
saw no cruelty, but merely righteousness in such a proceeding,
and they were both accordingly burned alive in March 1612.
It was one of the clerkly James's customs to issue proclamations.
Among the first of these was a warning issued against the en
croachments of the Jesuits, advising them of a date by which
they must have decamped from his kingdom and country.
Another very forcibly recommended unanimity of religion — that
is to say, complete uniformity of ceremony. A bold priest,
Burgess by name, preached a sermon in the King's presence,
soon after this, on the insignificance of ceremonies. They re
sembled, he said, the glass of the Roman Senator, which was not
worth a man's life or subsistence. Augustus, having been invited
UNJUST PROCLAMATIONS 169
to a feast by this Senator, was greeted on his arrival by terrible
cries. A slave, who had broken some costly glass, was about to
be thrown into the fishpond. The Emperor bade them defer the
punishment until he had inquired of his host whether he had
glass worth a man's life. Upon the Senatorkanswering that he
possessed glass worth a province, Augustus asked to see it, and
smashing it into fragments, remarked, " Better that it should all
perish than that one man should die." " I leave the application
to your Majesty."
The proclamations continued undiminished, however, and it
became a favourite amusement of James to issue edicts forbidding
lawful trades. This was the cause of much discontent, and
appeal was made to the Lord Chief Justice. In 1610 two ques
tions were laid before Coke : whether the King could prohibit the
erection of new houses in London by proclamation (a nai've noti
fication had been issued with a view to preventing the " over
development " of the capital), or forbid the manufacture of starch
(in allusion to a manifesto limiting the uses of wheat to purposes
of food). The answer was returned that the King had neither
'power to create offences by proclamation, nor make trades, which
did not legally subject themselves to judicial control, liable to
punishment by the Star Chamber. After this ensued a temporary
respite from edicts levying fines or threatening imprisonment.
The dissensions between King and People became so violent
that they soon led to a complete rupture between James and
the House of Commons, which would not submit to his high
handed levying and collecting of taxes in order to squander the
money on his own pleasures and caprices. James, who required
;£5°o>ooo to pay his debts, was made to endure a speech in
Parliament concerning the prodigality of himself and favourites.
An insulting rumour added that it had been said in the House
that the King must pack all the Scots in his household back to
the country whence they came. James, losing all patience, pro
rogued Parliament, and finally dissolved it in February 1611.
This was the beginning of a conflict between the Crown and
the People which lasted throughout James's lifetime, causing the
Great Revolution under his son, and being only finally extinguished
seventy-eight years afterwards by the offer from both Houses of
the Crown to William of Orange.
It was to no purpose that the King's revenues were in-
1 70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
creased year by year, by illegal taxation too : nothing sufficed.
In February 1611 he divided .£34,000 among six favourites, five
of whom were Scotch. In the March of the same year he made
Carr Viscount Rochester and a peer of England. For the first
time in English history a Scot took his seat in the House of
Lords, and a Scot, moreover, who had done his best to inflame
the King against the Commons.
To relieve its pecuniary distress the Court hit upon the ex
pedient of selling baronetcies. Every knight or squire possessed
of money or estates to the value of a hundred a year could become
a baronet, provided he were willing to disburse ;£io8o (a sum
sufficient to support thirty infantry-men in Ireland for three
years) in three yearly payments to the State coffers. This
contrivance brought no very great relief, however. Either the
extravagance was too reckless, or the seekers after titles were not
sufficiently numerous.
Things had gone so far in 1614, that, in spite of the hitherto
unheard-of sale of Crown property, James was at his wits' end for
want of money. He owed ^"680,000, not to mention a yearly
deficit of .£200,000. The garrisons in Holland were on the
point of mutinying for their pay, and the fleet was in much the
same condition. Fortresses were falling into ruins for want of
repair, and English Ambassadors abroad were fruitlessly writing
home for money. It was once more decided to summon Parlia
ment. In spite of the most shameless packing, however, the
Commons came in with a strong Opposition ; and they had much
to complain of. The King, among other things, had given Lord
Harrington the exclusive right of coining copper money, in return
for his having lent him .£300,000 at his daughter's wedding. He
had also granted a monopoly of the manufacture of glass, and had
given the sole right of trade with France to a single company.
The Upper House declined to meet the Lower on a common
ground of procedure, and when Bishop Neile, one of the greatest
sycophants the royal influence possessed in the Lords, permitted
himself some offensive strictures on the Commons, such a storm
broke loose among the latter that one member (an aristocrat),
abused the courtiers as "spaniels" towards the King and " wolves"
towards the people, and another went so far as to warn the Scotch
favourites that the Sicilian Vespers might find a parallel in
England.
ENFORCED LOANS 171
James, who, in a lengthy peroration, had attempted to
influence the Commons in his favour, saw that he had nothing
to hope from them and dissolved Parliament in the following
year.
In order to free him from debt, and to contrive, if possible,
some means of supplying the sums swallowed up by the Govern
ment and Court, a scheme was devised of inducing private citizens
to send money to the King, apparently of their own free will.
The bishops inaugurated it by offering James their Church plate
and other valuables. This example was followed by all who
hoped or expected favours from the court ; and a great number
of people sent money to the Treasury at Whitehall. Thus
the idea obtained that James should issue a summons for all
England to follow this example. It seemed, at first, as if this
self-taxation would bring in a good round sum. The King asked
the city for a loan of .£100,000, and it replied (very differently to
the response it had made to Elizabeth) that they would rather
give .£10,000 than lend .£100,000. In the course of little over a
month ;£34,ooo came in, but with that the stream ceased. Gov
ernment wrote fruitlessly to all the counties and their officials,
&c., to renew the summons. The sheriffs unanimously replied
that if the King were to summon Parliament he would experience
no difficulty in getting money. During two whole months only
.£500 came in. Fresh appeals were made and renewed pressure
attempted without obtaining the desired results.
The luckless Raleigh, who had heard of these things in his
prison, but was without adequate information from the outside
world, wrote a pamphlet on the prerogatives of Parliament, full
of good advice to the King, whom he assumed to be personally
guiltless of the abuses his ministers practised in his name. He
nai'vely looked for his freedom in return for the tract, which
naturally was suppressed.
The notorious Peckham case was another cause of popular
ill-humour. In the course of this trial, a man who had been
greatly exasperated by clerical and official demeanour, and had
expressed himself indiscreetly thereon, was subjected to repeated
torture on the pretext of a sermon which had never been
preached or printed, but which an examination of his house had
brought to light. Bacon degraded himself by urging on the
executioners at the rack — a form of torture which had been
172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
abolished in common law, but was still considered legitimately
applicable in political cases.
That James was personally cruel is shown, amongst other
things, by his frequent pardons on the scaffold. He kept such
men as Cobham, Grey, and Markham waiting two hours with the
axe hanging over their heads, undergoing all the tortures of death,
before they were informed that their execution had been deferred.
The times, however, were as cruel as he. Through all the pub
lished letters of that period runs incessant mention of hanging,
racking, breaking on the wheel, half hanging, and executions,
without the least emotion being expressed. Any death gave
invariable rise to suspicions of poison. Even when the King
lost his eldest son, it was stubbornly believed that he had rid
himself of him from jealousy of his popularity. As every death
was attributed to foul play, so every disease or sickness was
assigned to witchcraft. Sorcerers and witches were condemned
and despised, but believed in, nevertheless, even by such men as
Philip Sidney's friend, Fulk Greville, Lord Brook and Chancellor
of the Exchequer under James. He obviously fully credits the
witchcraft of which he speaks so disdainfully in his work, " Five
Years of King James's Government."
IV
THE CUSTOMS OF THE COURT
THE tone of the Court was vicious throughout. Relations
between the sexes were much looser than would have been ex
pected under a king who, in general, troubled himself little about
women. We find a description in Sir Dudley Carleton's letters
of a bridal adventure, which ended in the King going in night-
gear to awaken the bride next morning and remaining with her
some time, " in or upon the bed, chuse which you will believe."
James spoke of the Queen in public notices as " Our dearest
bedfellow." In the half-imbecile, half-obscene correspondence
between James and Carr's successor, Buckingham, the latter
signs himself, " Your dog," while James addresses him as "Dog
Steenie." The King even calls the solemn Cecil, " little beagle ; "
and the Queen, writing to Buckingham to beg him intercede with
the King for Raleigh's life, addresses him as " my kind dog."
With personal dignity, all decency also was set aside. Even
the elder Disraeli, James's principal admirer and apologist,
acknowledges that the morals of the Court were appalling, and
that these courtiers, who passed their days in absolute idleness
and preposterous luxury, were stained by infamous vices. He
quotes Drayton's lines from the " Mooncalf," descriptive of a lady
and gentleman of this circle —
"He's too much woman, and she's too much man."
Neither does he deny the contemporary Arthur Wilson's account
of many young girls of good family, who, reduced to poverty by
their parents' luxurious lives, looked upon their beauty as so
much capital. They came up to London in order to put them
selves up for sale, obtained large pensions for life, and ultimately
married prominent and wealthy men. They were considered
sensible, well-bred women, and were even looked upon as esprits
173
174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
forts. The conversation of the men was so profligate, that the
following sentiment, less decently expressed, must have been
frequently heard : " I would rather that one should believe I
possessed a lady's favours, though I did not, than really possess
them when none knew thereof."
Gondomar, the Spanish envoy, played an important part at
the Court of King James. Don Diego Sarmiento de Acufia,
Count of Gondomar, was one of the first diplomatists of Spain.
He must have lacked the intuitions of a statesman, in so far as he
flattered himself that England could be brought back to Roman
Catholicism, but he was a past-master in the art of managing
men. He knew how to awe by rare firmness of decision and how
to win by exemplary suppleness ; he knew when to speak and
when to be silent ; and, finally, he understood how to further his
master's aims by the most intelligent means. He had as free
access to James as any English courtier, having acquired it by
lively sallies and by talking bad Latin, in order to give the King
an opportunity of correcting him.
Ladies of rank crowded on to their balconies to attract
this man's attention as "he rode or drove to his house ; and it
appears, says Disraeli, that any one of them would have sold
her favours for a good round sum. Noticeable among these
ladies of title, says Wilson, were many who owned some pre
tensions to wit, or had charming daughters or pretty nieces,
whose presence attracted many men to their houses. The follow
ing anecdote made considerable noise at the time, and has been
variously repeated. In Drury Lane, Gondomar, one day, passed
the house of a charming widow, a certain Lady Jacob. He
saluted her, and was amazed to find that in return to his greeting
she merely moved her mouth, which she opened, indeed, to a
very great extent. He was profoundly astonished by this lack of
courtesy, but reflected that she had probably been overtaken by
a fit of the gapes. The same thing occurring, however, on the
following day, he sent one of his retinue to inform her that
English ladies were usually more gracious than to return his
greeting in such an outrageous manner. She replied, that being
aware that he had acquired several good graces for a handsome
sum, she had wished to prove to him that she also had a mouth
which could be stopped in the same fashion. Whereupon he took
the hint, and immediately despatched her a present.
ENGLISHMEN IN SPANISH PAY 175
In .all this, however, the women merely followed the example
of the men. The English Ambassador at Madrid had long been
aware of, and profited by, the possibility of buying the secrets of
the Spanish Government at comparatively reasonable prices. In
May 1613, however, he discovered that Spain, in the same manner,
annually paid large sums to a whole series of eminent persons
in England. He saw, to his disgust, the name of the English
Admiral, Sir William Monson, among the pensioners of Spain,
and learned, to his consternation, that the late Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Lord Salisbury, had been in her pay up to the
moment of his death. In the following December he obtained
a complete list of men enjoying Spanish pay, and was thunder
struck on reading the names of men whose integrity he had never
doubted, and who were filling the highest offices of state. Not
daring to trust the secret to paper, correspondence by no means
being considered inviolable in those days, he applied for per
mission to bring the disgraceful information to James in person.
V
ARABELLA STUART AND WILLIAM SEYMOUR
AN event occurring in the royal family (concerning which Gardi
ner observes that, in our day, such a thing would rouse the wrath
of the British people from one end of the kingdom to the other)
serves to illustrate both the heartlessness of the King and the
lawless condition of the people.
Arabella Stuart, who was King James's cousin, had pos
sessed her own appanage from the time of Queen Elizabeth.
She had her apartments in the Palace, and associated with the
Queen's ladies. Her letters show a refined and lovable woman's
soul, absolutely untroubled by any political ambition. She says
in a letter to her uncle Shrewsbury that she wishes to refute the
apparent impossibility of a young woman's being able to preserve
her purity and innocence among the follies with which a court
surrounds her. She is alluding, amongst other things, to one of
the eternal masquerades through which the Queen and her ladies
racketed, attired, upon this occasion, tl as sea nymphs or nereids,
to the great delight of all beholders " (Arthur Wilson's " History
of Great Britain," 1633). She kept apart as much as possible
from this whirl of gaiety, and the various foreign potentates who
applied for her hand were all dismissed. She would not, she
said, wed a man whom she did not know. Nevertheless it was
rumoured that she intended to marry some foreign prince who
would enforce her rights to the English throne. James sent her
to the Tower at Christmas 1609 on account of this report, and
summoned the Council. The misunderstanding was cleared up,
and she was hastily set at liberty, James expressly assuring her
that he would have no objection to her marrying a subject.
A few weeks after she learned to know and love the man to
whom she devoted herself with a passion and fidelity which re
calls that of Imogen for Posthumus in Shakespeare's Cymbeline.
176
ARABELLA STUART AND WILLIAM SEYMOUR 177
This was young William Seymour, a son of Lord Beauchamp,
one of the first noblemen in England. He was received in her
apartments, and obtained her promise in February, the King's
assurance to Arabella giving them every security for the future.
Nevertheless, the young Princess's choice could not have fallen
more unfortunately. Lord Beauchamp was the son of the Earl
of Hertford and Catherine Grey, the inheritress of the Suffolk
rights to the throne. The Earl's eldest son was still alive, and
William Seymour had no claim to the crown at the moment ; but
the fact that his brother might die childless made him an always
possible pretender. The Suffolk claims had been recognised by
Act of Parliament, and the Parliament which had acknowledged
James was powerless to change the succession. In the face of
this notorious fact, James ignored the consideration that neither
Seymour and Arabella, nor any one else, wanted to deprive him
of the throne in favour of the young pair. Both were summoned
before the Council and examined.
Seymour was made to renounce all thought of marriage with
Arabella, and the young couple did not see each other for three
months. In May 1610, however, they were secretly married.
When the news reached James's ears in July, he was furious.
Arabella was detained in custody at Lambeth, and Seymour was
sent to the Tower.
Arabella strove in vain to touch the King's heart. Great
sympathy was felt in London, however, for the young couple,
and secret meetings were permitted them by their gaolers. When
the correspondence between them was discovered, Arabella was
commanded to travel to Durham and put herself under the care
of its Bishop. On her refusal to quit her apartments, she was
carried away by force. Falling ill on the journey, she was given
permission to pause by the way, and, attiring herself like one
of Shakespeare's heroines, she seized the opportunity to escape.
She drew on a pair of French trousers over her skirt, put on a
man's coat and high boots, wore a manly wig with long curls
over her hair, set a low-flapped black hat upon her head, threw a
short cloak around her, and fastened a small sword at her side.
Thus disguised, she fled by horse to Blackwall, where a French
ship awaited her and Lord Seymour, the latter having arranged
his escape for the same time. An accident prevented their meet
ing, and Arabella's friends, growing impatient, insisted, in spite
VOL. II. M
1 78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of her protests, on setting out at once. When Seymour arrived
next day, he learned to his disappointment, that the ship had set
sail. He succeeded, however, in getting put over to Ostend.
Meanwhile, Arabella, a few miles from Calais, induced the cap
tain to lay-to for an hour or so to give Seymour an opportunity
of overtaking them. They were here surprised by an English
cruiser, which had been sent from Dover to capture the fugitives,
and Arabella was brought back to the Tower. When she im
plored pardon, James brutally replied that she had eaten forbidden
fruit, and must pay the price of her disobedience. Despair
deprived her of her reason, and she died miserably, after five
years of imprisonment. Not until after her death was her
husband permitted to return to England.
VI
ROCHESTER AND LADY ESSEX
IT was Rochester who was the real ruler of England all this time.
He was the acknowledged favourite ; to him every suitor applied
and from him came every reward. He was made head of the
Privy Council after the death of Lord Dunbar, and was nominated
Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, a title which gave him great
prestige in his native country. He was also made Baron Brand-
spech, and, in accordance with the general expectation, Viscount
Rochester and Knight of the Garter. The only decided opposition
he had to encounter was that of young Prince Henry, the nation's
darling, who could not endure his arrogant way, and was, more
over, his rival in fair ladies' favours. After the death of the
Prince, Rochester was more powerful than ever. As principal
Secretary, Carr managed all the King's correspondence, and on
more than one occasion he answered letters without consulting
either King or Council. The King, if he was aware of this, had
reached such a pitch of infatuation that he submitted to every
thing. Carr was given a new title in 1613 and the Viscount
Rochester was made Earl of Somerset. In 1614 the King made
him Lord Chamberlain " because he loved him better than all men
living." In the interim he had been appointed Keeper of the
Seals and Warden of the Cinque Ports.
It was from such a height as this that he fell, and the circum
stances of his overthrow form perhaps the most interesting
events, from a psychological point of view, of James' reign. They
made a great impression on contemporary minds, and occupy a
large space in the letters of the period — letters in which Shake
speare's name is never mentioned and of whose very existence
their historico-polemical writers do not seem to have been aware.
It was one of James's ambitions on his coming to England to
put an end to the feuds and dissensions which were rife among
179
i So WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the great families. To this end he arranged a match between
Essex's son, and a daughter of the house which had ruined his
father and driven him to death. In January 1608, accordingly,
the fourteen-year-old Earl was married to the Lady Frances
Howard, just thirteen years of age, and he thus became allied
with the powerful houses of Howard and Cecil. Mr. Pory wrote
to Sir Robert Cotton on the occasion of the marriage, " The bride
groom carried himself as gravely and as gracefully as if he were
of his father's age."
The Church in those times sanctioned these marriages between
children, but every sense of fitness demanded that they should be
immediately parted. Young Essex was sent on foreign travel,
and did not return to claim his bride until he was eighteen. He
was a solidly built youth, possessed of a heavy and imperturbably
calm disposition. Frances, on the other hand, was obstinately
and stormily passionate in both her likes and dislikes. She had
been brought up by a coarse and covetous mother, and early cor
rupted by contact with the vices of the Court. She took a deep
dislike to her youthful bridegroom from the first and refused to live
with him. Her relations, however, compelled her to accompany
him to his estate, Chartley.
She had previously attracted the attention of both Prince Henry
and the favourite Rochester. Expecting more from Rochester,
as a contemporary document explains, than from the unprofitable
attentions of the Prince, she chose the former, a fact which can
hardly have failed to augment the ill-will already existing between
the King's son and the King's friend. From the moment of her
choice all the passionate intensity of her nature was concentrated
upon avoiding any intercourse with her husband and in assuring
Rochester that his jealousy on that score was groundless.
She chose for her confidante a certain Mrs. Turner, a doctor's
widow, who, after leading a dissipated life, was settling down to a
reputation for witchcraft. Lady Essex begged some potion of her
which should chill the Earl's ardour, and this not working to her
satisfaction, she wrote the following letter to her priestess, which
was later produced at the trial and made public by Fulk Greville : —
" Sweet Turner, as thou hast been hitherto, so art thou all my
hopes of good in this world. My Lord is lusty as ever he was,
and hath complained to my brother Howard, that hee hath not
layne with mee, nor used mee as his wife. This makes me mad,
DR. FORMAN 181
since of all men I loath him, because he is the only obstacle and
hindrance, that I shall never enjoy him whom I love."
Upon the Earl's complaining a second time, the two applied
to a Dr. Forman, quack and reputed sorcerer, for some means of
causing an aversion (frigidity quoad hanc) in the Earl. The
mountebank obligingly performed all manner of hocus-pocus with
wax dolls, &c., and these in their turn failing, Lady Essex wrote
to him : —
" Sweet Father, although I have found you ready at all times
to further mee, yet must I still crave your helpe; wherefore I
beseech you to remember that you keepe the doores close, and
that you still retaine the Lord with mee and his affection towards
mee. I have no cause but to be confident in you, though the
world be against mee ; yet heaven failes mee not ; many are the
troubles I sustaine, the doggednesse of my Lord, the crossenesse
of my enemies, and the subversion of my fortunes, unlesse you
by your wisdome doe deliver mee out of the midst of this wilder-
nesse, which I entreat for God's sake. From Chartley. — Your
affectionate loving daughter, FRANCES ESSEX."
In the beginning of the year 1613, a woman named Mary
Woods accused Lady Essex of attempting to bribe her to poison
the Earl. The accusation came to nothing, however, and the
Countess soon afterwards tried a new tack. It was now three
years since her husband's return from abroad, and if she could
succeed in convincing the Court that the marriage had never been
consummated there was some chance of its being declared void.
Having won her father and her utterly unscrupulous uncle, the
powerful Lord Northampton, to her side, she induced the latter,
who played Pandarus to this Cressida, to represent the situation
to the King. James, loving Rochester as much as ever, and taking
a pleasure in completing the happiness of those he loved, lent a
willing ear. Northampton and Suffolk both took the matter up
warmly, clearly seeing how advantageous an alliance with Carr,
whom they had hitherto regarded as an enemy, would be to their
plans. A meeting between the relatives of both parties was
arranged. It consisted of the Earls of Northampton and Suffolk
on Lady Essex's side, and the Earl of Southampton and Lord
Knollys on her husband's. Essex, while resolved not to make any
declaration which might prove an obstacle to his marrying again,
fully conceded that he was not qualified to be this particular
1 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
lady's husband. A commission of clergy and lawyers was
therefore appointed to inquire into the matter.
A committee was nominated of six midwives and ten God
fearing matrons of rank, who had all borne children, to ascertain
if Lady Essex was, as she asserted, a virgin. The lady's modesty
insisted upon being closely veiled during the examination, which
naturally gave rise to a rumour that another woman had been
substituted.
The examination, which terminated in favour of the plaintiff,
convinced none but those who had undertaken it, and was the
occasion of much coarse-grained jesting.
With considerable impudence, Lady Essex maintained that her
husband had been deprived of his manhood by witchcraft; but
she was careful not to mention either Dr. Forman or herself as
the instigators of this sorcery. Several members of the com
mission were prepared beforehand to declare the marriage void,
it having been made worth their while to fall in with the wishes
of the King and his favourite. Archbishop Abbot, however, an
independent spirit, insisted from the first that it was utterly im
probable that witchcraft could produce the assigned result, and
urged that in accommodating the Countess they were establishing
a precedent of which any childless wife could take advantage.
The votes being equal, Abbot petitioned the King to allow his
withdrawal. James, however, appointed two new members, both
bishops, instead, and thus made the votes 7 to 5 in favour of
" nullity." Abbot, as the result of his protest, became for a while
the most popular man in England. Bishop Neile, who had always
been despised, sank still lower in the public esteem, and Bishop
Bilson of Winchester, of whom better things had been expected,
was overwhelmed with ridicule. His son, whom the King knighted
in order to reward his father, was acclaimed by general consent,
Sir Nullity Bilson.
Throughout his whole career, and in his late relations with
Lady Essex, Rochester had been guided by an intimate and cap
able adviser, Sir Thomas Overbury. He had assisted Rochester
in the composition of his love-letters to the Countess, and he
knew a great deal too much about the secret meetings, which he
had himself arranged, between the lovers at Paternoster Row,
Hammersmith, &c. When he learned that Rochester intended
to supplement the connection by marriage, he strove by every
SIR THOMAS OVERBURY 183
means in his power to prevent it. He had been accustomed
to dictate to his master in everything, but Rochester had now
grown restive, and was resolved, by fair means or foul, on freeing
himself from this control. To this end the King was given to
understand that it was a common jest that Rochester managed
the King, but Overbury ruled Rochester. In order to get rid of
him in an honourable manner, he was appointed to some official
post abroad. Overbury, however, whose ambition bound him to
England, detected that this was but a mild form of banishment,
and strove to excuse himself, finally declining outright. This
was considered a breach of a subject's duty by James, and, upon
the advice of the favourite, Overbury was sent to the Tower.
Rochester now began to play a double game, and while assuring
the prisoner that he was doing his utmost to obtain his release,
he was, in reality, concentrating all his influence upon keeping
him where he was. It was necessary to befool Overbury into
thinking he had reason to be grateful to him, in case the prisoner
should one day be released, and should wish to reveal all that
Rochester was most anxious to keep concealed.
It was commanded from the first that Overbury should have
no contact whatever with the outside world, an order which speaks
for itself. When, however, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir
William Wood, interpreted these directions so literally that he
refused Rochester's own messengers access, it became necessary
to replace him by the more amenable Sir Gervase Helwys.
Lady Essex, who was not the woman for half measures, pre
ferred to make certain of Overbury once for all, and was deter
mined that he should never leave the Tower alive. For this
purpose she again applied to Mrs. Turner, who was well supplied
with means serviceable to the occasion. The first thing necessary
was to assure themselves of the man to whose immediate care
the prisoner was intrusted. Lady Essex applied to Sir Thomas
Monson, Master of the Tower Armoury, and through his influence
Helwys was induced to dismiss Overbury's attendant and sup
ply his place with Richard Weston, a former servant of Anne
Turner.
This man was instructed by Mrs. Turner to meet Lady Essex
at Whitehall, and to receive from her a little phial whose contents
were to be mixed with the prisoner's food. Meeting Helwys on
his way to Overbury's cell, and supposing him to be initiated into
1 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the secret, Weston consulted him as to the best way of adminis
tering the poison. Helwys, horror-stricken, prevailed upon him
to throw away the contents of the phial. He was in too much
awe of the Howard family to venture an accusation, and Weston
at his instigation told Lady Essex that the poison had been duly
administered, and that the prisoner's health was failing in con
sequence. Overbury was, in truth, suffering greatly from the
frustration of his hopes of release, and he naively requested
Rochester to send him an emetic in order that the King, hearing
of his sickness, might be moved to compassion. It is not known
what kind qf medicament Rochester sent, nor whether he was
aware of Lady Essex's attempt, but he seems to have played his
own hand on this occasion.
On finding that Overbury, in spite of his steadily failing
health, still. continued to live, Lady Frances renewed her activity.
Rochester was sending sweetmeats, jellies, and wines to the
prisoner, and Lady Essex mixed poison with all these condiments,
quite unconscious of the fact that Helwys, now upon the alert,
took care that none of them should reach the prisoner. Losing
all patience, she looked round for some more certain means than
this poison, which worked with such astonishing and irritating
deliberation. Learning that the apothecary Franklin was attend
ing Overbury, she bribed his boy to give the sick man a poisoned
injection. This was done, and the prisoner died in the Tower on
the following day. Northampton immediately spread about a
report that Sir Thomas Overbury had by no means led such a
secluded life in the Tower as was generally supposed, but had by
his dissolute life there contracted a disease of which he died. The
rumour was generally believed, but that some suspicions were
entertained can be seen in the letters of the times. John Cham
berlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton on the I4th October 1613,
speaks of Overbury's death as being caused by this disease, "or
something worse."
Thus the last obstacle was cleared from the path which led
this brilliant pair to the altar. Lady Frances was happy, and much
farther removed from any feeling of remorse than Lady Macbeth.
The King was full of affection for her, and, in order that she might
not be wanting her title of Countess, Rochester was made Earl of
Somerset. The wedding was celebrated with inordinate pomp on
the 26th December 1613. The bride had the assurance to appear
ROCHESTER'S WEDDING 185
with maidenly hair unbound upon her shoulders. John Chamber
lain, writing to Mrs. Alice Carleton, December 3<Dth, says, " She
was married in her hair, and led to the chapel by her bridemen,
a Duke of Saxony that is here, and the Earl of Northampton, her
great-uncle." The wedding was celebrated in the Chapel Royal,
in the same place and by the same bishop who had solemnised
the previous marriage. King, Queen, and Archbishop were all
present, not to mention those of the nobility who wished to
stand well with the King and his favourite, and rich gifts were
brought by all. Gondomar, wishing to show himself attentive to
so highly favoured a pair, sent them some magnificent jewels.
The City of London, the Merchant Adventurers, the East India
Company, and the Customs sent each their present of precious
metals of great value. Gold, silver, and jewels were showered upon
them throughout the first half of January 1614. Bacon, though
personally no admirer of Somerset, naturally did not hold back.
It is very significantly remarked in a letter from John Chamber
lain to Sir Dudley Carleton, December 23, 1613, "Sir Francis
Bacon prepares a masque to honour the marriage, which will
stand him in about -£2000, and though he have been offered some
help by the House, and especially by Mr. Solicitor, Sir Henry
Yelverton, who would have sent him ^500, yet he would not
accept it, but offers them the whole charge with the honour." A
few years later it is Bacon who conducts the poisoning case
against Rochester.
The day following the wedding the King sent a message to
the Lord Mayor, inviting him to arrange a fete for Lord and Lady
Somerset. The City vainly endeavoured to excuse itself on the
ground of insufficient space, but the King himself suggested a
remedy, and it was arranged that the guests should go in pro
cession from Westminster to the City, the gentlemen on horse
back and the ladies in carriages. The bride was pleased to
consider her carriage suitable to the occasion, but not being satis
fied with her horses, she sent to borrow Lord Winwood's. He,
replying that it did not beseem so great a lady to borrow, gallantly
begged her acceptance of the horses as a gift.
Macaulay has likened this Court to that of Nero, and Swin
burne has added that these celebrations recall the bridals of
Sporus and Locusta. Chapman had already inscribed to
Rochester two of the dedicatory sonnets which accompanied
1 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the last books of his translation of the Iliad, and filled them with
absurdly exaggerated praise of the Viscount's ''heroic virtues."
He now wrote his " Andromeda Liberata " in glorification of the
nuptials, and on his being attacked on that score, he retorted
with his exceedingly nai've " Defence of Perseus and Andromeda."
Life with Lady Frances could have no beneficial effect upon
Somerset's character. Nothing was magnificent enough for him,
and he was constantly importing new fashions in order to please
his master and his wife. That ingenuously moralising historian,
Arthur Wilson, complains bitterly of his appearance, his curled
and perfumed locks, smooth shaven face and bare neck, and the
golden embroideries lavished upon his attire. His only occupation
was to solicit estates and money of the King. The subjects
supplied him handsomely, for every petitioner paid tribute to
Somerset. How much he received in this manner is uncertain,
but he spent not less than .£90,000 a year. It may be said to his
credit, that he never, as did the later favourites, sought to tamper
with the law, and he now and then displayed some generosity,
but it was the exactions of his Howard connections which ruined
him. The Council's most honourable members, amongst whom
was Shakespeare's patron, Pembroke, saw with indignation that
he predisposed the King in favour of their rivals.
His successor appeared in 1614. George Villiers, a young,
handsome man of lively disposition, was promoted step by step,
yet not too hastily, for fear of wounding Somerset's feelings.
His presence at Court, however, was exceedingly disagreeable to
the latter, who treated his rival with cold insolence, and seized
every opportunity of humbling him. Somerset's passionate tem
per and arrogant disposition soon betrayed him into treating the
King with similar superciliousness. He was rebuked by James,
and a temporary reconciliation was effected; but how far Carr
was from the enjoyment of a clear conscience is shown by his
soliciting a general pardon, such as Wolsey had received from
Henry VIII., from the King at this time, which was to include
every possible offence, not forgetting murder. This, he pointed
out to James, was in case his enemies should attempt to destroy
him by false accusations after the King's death. James was
willing, but Lord Ellesmere refused to apply the great seal to the
document in question. The King's wrath was great but unavail
ing. Ellesmere fell upon his knees, but refused to affix the seal.
CONFESSION OF THE MURDER 187
Soon after this Somerset experienced the need of this compre
hensive absolution which he had failed to secure. The apothe
cary's boy, who had administered the injection to Overbury, fell
dangerously ill at Flushing, and, wishing to ease his burdened
soul, confessed the murder to Lord Winwood. Helwys was exa
mined, Weston was examined, and Lord and Lady Somerset
were soon implicated in the case. As soon as Somerset heard
that he was accused, he quitted the King, with whom he was
staying at Royston, and started for London in order to clear
himself. The King, by this time, was profoundly weary of his
old favourite, and entirely taken up by his new. To give some
idea of James's dissimulation, we will quote Sir Anthony Weldon's
account, as an eye-witness, of the parting between the King and
Somerset. " The Earle when he kissed his hand, the King hung
about his neck, slabbering his cheeks, saying, ' For God's sake,
when shall I see thee again ? On my soul, I shall neither eat
nor sleep until you come again.' The Earle told him, on Monday
(this being on the Friday). ' For God's sake, let me,' said the
King. < Shall I, shall I ; ' then lolled about his neck. ' Then, for
God's sake, give thy lady this kiss for me.' In the same manner
at the stayres' head, at the middle of the stayres, and at the
stayres' foot. The Earl was not in his coach when the King
used these very words, ' I shall never see his face more.' "
Short work was made of the subordinate culprits. Mrs.
Turner, Weston, Helwys, and the apothecary Franklin, were
all declared guilty and hanged. The Countess bore testimony
to her husband's innocence, and he went to the Tower with
the collar of the Garter and the George about his neck. He
threatened that if he were brought to trial he would betray
secrets which contained an accusation against the King — con
temporary letters show that this was understood to mean that
he would confess to having poisoned Prince Henry at the King's
instigation ; but he abandoned this accusation later, and con
ducted his defence with dignity, denying all complicity in the
murder. The Countess was less self-possessed. The judgment
hall was filled with spectators, and the Earl of Essex amongst
them was seated exactly opposite her. As the accusation was
read, she trembled and turned pale, and when Weston 's name
was reached, she covered her face with her fan. When, accord
ing to custom, she was asked if she acknowledged herself guilty,
1 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
she could but answer, Yes. She was condemned to death, and
to the question whether she had anything further to add, replied
that she would say nothing to palliate her guilt, but prayed the
King's mercy. Somerset was also unanimously declared guilty.
The King pardoned them both. He could hardly send to the
scaffold the man who had so long been his most intimate friend,
neither could he well despatch thither the daughter of his Chan
cellor of the Exchequer. But although Somerset steadily main
tained his innocence, both he and his wife were sent to the Tower.
In the letters written at the time of the trial, as much mention
is made of Sir George Villiers as of Somerset. The new favourite
has been ill for some time, "not without suspicion of smallpox,
which if it had fallen out actum erat de amicitia. But it proves
otherwise, and we say there is much casting about how to make him
a great man, and that he shall now be made of the Garter," &c.
He was soon made Cupbearer, Chamberlain, Master of the
Horse, Marquis of Buckingham, and Keeper of the Great Seal,
and he retained his pernicious influence well into the reign of
Charles the First. It is highly characteristic of James that he
was now as anxious to procure Villiers Raleigh's old estate,
Sherborne, from the imprisoned Somerset as he had been to
wrest it from the imprisoned Raleigh for Somerset. He must
have regarded it as a lawful " morrowing gift," so inextricably
had it become associated with a rising favourite in his mind.
Somerset was given to understand that he would obtain a free
pardon, together with the restitution of the rest of his properties,
if he would secure the now all-powerful Villiers' protection by re
linquishing Sherborne in his favour. On his obstinately refusing,
he and Lady Somerset were left to languish for six long years in
the Tower.1
1 Arthur Wilson : "The History of Great Britain, being the Life and Reign of
James the First," 1653. Sir A. Weldon : " A Cat may look upon a King," London,
1652. The author of "Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea" : "The Court and Times of
James the First, illustrated by Authentic Letters," 2 vols., London, 1848. Fulk
Greville : " The Five Years of King James." " Secret History of the Court of James
the First," edited by Sir Walter Scott, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1811. "An Inquiry into
the Literary and Political Character of James the First," by the author of "Curio
sities of Literature," London, 1816. Samuel R. Gardiner: "History of England
from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War," vol. ii., London,
1883. Edmond Gosse : "Raleigh," London, 1886. "The Court and Character of
King James, Written and taken by Sir A. W(eldon), being an Eye and Ear Witness,"
London, 1650. Aulicus Coquinarise : "A Vindication in Answer to a Pamphlet
entitled ' The Court and Character of King James,' " London, 1650.
VII
CONTEMPT OF WOMEN— TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
IN order to give a complete picture, it was necessary to trace
events down to the years in which external happenings ceased to
work upon Shakespeare's mind. He died in the same year that
the Lady Arabella perished in the Tower, and when the scandal
of the Somerset trial was beginning to fade from the public mind.
It is obviously impossible to point to any one cause which could
have made an especially deep impression on his inner life. All
we can say with certainty is, that the general atmosphere of the
times, of the corrupt condition of morals here described, could
hardly fail to leave some mark on a disposition which, just at
this time, was susceptible and irritable to the highest degree.
If, as we maintain, there now ensued a period during which his
melancholy was prone to dwell upon the darkest side of life ; if he
shows, in these years, a sickly tendency to imbibe poison from
everything ; and if all his observation and experience seem to result
in a contempt of mankind, so did the general condition of society
afford ample nourishment for the mood of scorn for human nature.
In the merely external, Shakespeare's life cannot at this time
have undergone any great catastrophe. He was now (1607) forty-
three years of age. As soon as the play was over, between five
and six of an afternoon, he stepped into one of the Thames boats
and was set across the river to his house, where his books and
work awaited him. He studied much, making himself familiar
with the works of his cotemporaries, plunging anew into Plutarch,
reading Chaucer and Go wer, and pondering over More's Utopia.
He worked as hard as ever. Neither the rehearsal in the morn
ing nor the play at mid-day had power to weary him. He read
through old dramatic manuscripts to see if new treatment could
revive them into use, and returned to long-laid-by manuscripts of
his own to work upon them afresh.
He attended to business at the same thrie, received the rents
189
190 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of his houses at Stratford, collected his tithes from the same place,
and watched the lawsuits in which the purchase of these tithes
had involved him. He had obtained the object of his existence,
so far as the possession of property was concerned ; but never had
he been so downcast and dispirited, never had he felt so keenly
the emptiness of life.
So long as Shakespeare was young, the general condition of
society and the ways and worth of men had troubled him less.
Then, except for the feeling of belonging to a despised caste and
the increasing spread of Puritanism, he was at peace with his
surroundings. Now he saw more sharply the true outlines of
his times and his world, and perceived more clearly that eternal
infirmity of human nature, which at all times only waits for a
propitious climate in order to develop itself.
The last work which had lain ready on his table was Antony
and Cleopatra. He had there, for the second time, given his im
pression of the subversion of a world.
There was a pendant to this war of the East (which was in
reality waged for Cleopatra's sake), a war fought by all the
countries of the Mediterranean for the possession of a loose
woman; the most famous of all wars, the old Trojan war, set
going by a " cuckold and carried on for a whore," so it will
shortly be described by a scandalous buffoon, whom Shakespeare
uses, so to speak, in his own name. Here was stuff for a tragi
comedy of right bitter sort.
From childhood he, and every one else, had been filled with
the fame and glory of this war. All its heroes were models of
bravery, magnanimity, wisdom, friendship, and fidelity, as if such
things existed ! For the first time in his life he feels a desire
to mock — to shout " Bah ! " straight out of his heart — to turn the
wrong side out, the true side.
Menelaus and Helen — what a ridiculous couple ! The wretched
head of horned cattle moves heaven and earth, causes thousands
of men to be slain, and all that he may have his damaged beauty
back again.1 Menelaus stood too low for his satire, however.
Shakespeare himself had never felt thus. Neither was it in his
1 Heine, some hundreds of years later, expresses the same feeling in his
" O Konig Wiswamatra,
O welch ein Ochs bist du,
Dass du so viel kampfest und briissest
Und Alles fiir eine Kuh ! "
CRESSIDA 191
humour to portray a woman who, like Helen, had openly left
one man for another, a husband for a lover — there was none oi
woman's special duplicity in that. The transfer from one to another,
which alone was of interest to him, in her case was already past
and gone. Helen's destiny is settled before the drama begins.
There is no play, no inner variety in her character, no dramatic
situation between her in Troy and Menelaus without.
But in the old legends of Troy which sagas and folk-tales had
handed down to him, he found, in miniature, the plot whereon
the whole war turned. Cressida, a rejuvenated Helen ; Troilus,
the simpleton who loved her, and whom she betrayed ; and round
about them grouped all those archetypes of subtlety, wisdom, and
strength — that venerable old twaddler Nestor, and that sly fox
Ulysses, &c. Here was something which urged him on to repre
sentation. Here was a plot which chimed in with his mood.
Shakespeare had no interest in delineating that bellatre,
Prince Paris ; he had felt him as little as he had Menelaus. But
he had many a time felt as Troilus did — the honest soul, the
honourable fool, who was simple enough to believe in a woman's
constancy. And he knew well, too well, that Lady Cressida, with
the alluring ways, the nimble wit, the warm blood, speaking
lawful passion with (to not too true an ear) the lawful modesty
of speech. She would rather be desired than confer, would
rather be loved than love, says "yes" with a "no" yet upon her
lips, and flames up at the least suspicion of her truth. Not that
she is false. Oh, no ! why false ? We believe in her as her
lover believes in her, and as she believes in herself — until she
leaves him for the Greek camp. Then she has scarcely turned
her back upon him than she loses her heart to the first she meets,
and her constancy fails at the first proof to which it is put.
All his life through these two forms had preoccupied his
imagination. In Lucretia, he coupled Troilus with Hector among
Trojan heroes. In the fourth act of the Merchant of Venice, he
made Lorenzo say :
" In such a night
Troilus, rethinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay."
In Henry F., Pistol included Doll Tearsheet among "Cressid's
kind," making Doll doubly ridiculous by classing her with the
192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Trojan maid of far-famed charm. In Much Ado About Nothing,
(Act v.), Benedict called Troilus " the first employer of Pandars."
In As You Like It (Act iv.),- Rosalind jested about him, and yet
yielded him a certain recognition. Protesting that no man ever
yet died for love, she said, " Troilus had his brains dashed out
with a Grecian club, yet did what he could to die before, and he is
one of the patterns of love" In Twelfth Night and in All's Well
that Ends Well, the Fool and Lafeu both jested about Pandarus
and his ill-famed zeal in bringing Troilus and Cressida together.
Slowly, like the Hamlet tradition, this subject had been grow
ing ripe in Shakespeare's mind. It had hitherto lived in his
imagination in much the same form in which it had been handled
by his compatriots. By Chaucer, first and foremost, who in his
Troilus and Cressida (about 1360) had translated, elaborated,
and enlarged Boccaccio's beautiful poem, Filostrato. But neither
Chaucer nor any other Englishman who had translated or repro
duced the subject (such as Lydgate, 1460, who restored Guido
delle Columne's Historia Trojana, or Caxton, who in 1471 pub
lished a translation of Raoul le Fevre's Recueil des Histoires de
Troyes] had found in it any material for satire. Especially had
none of its earlier elaborators found any fault with the character
of Cressida. Not the poets once. Chaucer founded his heroine
in all essentials upon Boccaccio's. He, who was the first to
gather the material into a poetic whole, had no intention of pre
senting his heroine in an unfavourable light. He wished to give
expression, as he openly declares, to his own devotion to his lady
love in his description of Troilus's passion for Cressida. The old
Trouvere, Benoit de St. Maure, and his Histoire de la Guerre de
Troie (about 1 160), was undoubtedly his model. It is from him
he received the impression that Griseida (into whom he trans
forms Benoit's Briseida) gradually falls a victim to the seductions
of Diomedes, in whose company she leaves Troy, and little by
little grows untrue to Troilus. He adds a stanza to this effect,
on the inconstancy of women.1 It was not to be expected that
1 " Giovine donna e mobile, e vogliosa
E hegli amanti molti, e sua bellezza
Estima piii che allo specchio, e pomposa
Ha vanagloria di sua giovinezza ;
La qual quanto place vole e vezzosa
E piii, cotanto piii seco 1'apprezza
Virtu non sente, ne conoscimento,
Volubil sempre come foglia al vento."
CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO 193
Boccaccio should kneel before women with the platonic love and
devout worship of Dante and Petrarch. Beatrice is a mystical,
Laura an earthly ideal. Griseida is a young lady from the Court
of Naples, such as it was then. A young, lovable, and frail
woman of flesh and blood. But only frail, never base, and very
far from being a coquette. Boccaccio never forgets that he has
dedicated the poem to his love and that she also left the place
where they had dwelt together, for one where he durst not follow
her. He says clearly that in the portrayal of Griseida's charms
he has drawn a picture of his love, but he refrains with consum
mate tact from driving the comparison further.
Chaucer, as little as Boccaccio, found anything in the relations
of the lovers to satirise. He intends, to the best of his abilities,
to prove their love as innocent and lawful as possible. He paints
it with a nai've and enraptured simplicity, which proves how far
he is from mockery.1 He does not even rave over Cressida's
faithlessness to Troilus ; she is excused, she trembles and hesi
tates before she falls. Inconstancy is forced upon her by the
overwhelming might of hard circumstance.
There is nothing in these two poets that can compare with the
passionate heat and hatred, the boundless bitterness with which
Shakespeare delineates and pursues his Cressida. His mood is
the more remarkable that he in no wise paints her as unlovable
or corrupt ; she is merely a shallow, frivolous, sensual, pleasure-
loving coquette. %
She does little, on the whole, to call for such severity of
judgment. She is a mere child and beginner in comparison with
Cleopatra, for instance, who, for all that, is not so unmercifully
condemned. But Shakespeare has aggravated and pointed every
circumstance until Cressida becomes odious, and rouses only
aversion. The change from love to treachery, from Troilus to
Diomedes, is in no earlier poet effected with such rapidity.
Whenever Shakespeare expresses by the mouth of one or another
of his characters the estimate in which he intends his audience
to hold her, one is astounded by the bitterness of the hatred he
1 " Her armes smale, her streghte bak and softe,
Her sides long, fleshly, smothe, and white,
He gan to stroke ; and good thrift bad ful oft.
Her snowish throte, her brestes round and lite :
Thus in this hevene he gan him to delite,
And then withal a thousand times her kiste
That what to dou for joie unnethe he wiste."
VOL. II. N
194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
discloses. It is especially noticeable in the scene (Act iv.) in
which Cressida comes to the Greek camp and is greeted by the
kings with a kiss.
At this point Cressida has as yet offended in nothing. She
has, out of pure, vehement love for him, passed such a night with
Troilus as Juliet did with Romeo, persuaded to it by Pandarus, as
Juliet was by her nurse. Now she accepts and returns the kiss
wherewith the Greek chieftains bid her welcome. We may re
mark, in parenthesis, that at that time there was no impropriety
in such a greeting. In William Brenchley Rye's " England as
seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the
First," are found, under the heading " England and Englishmen,"
the following notes by Samuel Riechel, a merchant from Ulm : —
" Item, when a foreigner or an inhabitant goes to a citizen's house
on business, or is invited as a guest, and having entered therein,
he is received by the master of the house, the lady, or the
daughter, and by them welcomed ; he has even the right to take
them by the arm and kiss them, which is the custom of the
country; and if any one does not do so, it is regarded and
imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part."
For all that, Ulysses, who sees through her at the first glance,
breaks out on occasion of this kiss which Cressida returns :
" Fie, fie upon her,
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lips,
Nay, her foot speaks, her wanton spirit looks out
At every joint and motive of her body.
Oh, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give occasion welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader ! Set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity,
And daughters of the game."
So Shakespeare causes his heroine to be described, and doubt
less it is his own last word about her. Immediately before her
he had portrayed Cleopatra. When we remember the position
occupied in his drama by the Egyptian queen, whom he, for all
that, has stamped as the most dangerous of all dangerous co
quettes, we can only marvel at the distance his spiritual nature
has traversed since then.
SHAKESPEARE'S MISOGYNY 195
There was in Shakespeare's disposition, as we have already
remarked, a deep and extraordinary tendency to submissive ad
miration and worship. Many of his flowing lyrics spring from
this source. Recall his humility of attitude before the objects of
this admiration, before Henry V., for example, and his adora
tion for the friend in the Sonnets. We still find this need of
giving lyrical and ecstatic expression to his hero-worship in
Antony and Cleopatra. He by no means undertakes a defence
of the desolating temptress, but with what glamour he surrounds
her ! What eulogies he lavishes upon her ! She stands in an
aureole of the adulation of all the other characters in the drama.
At the time Shakespeare wrote this great tragedy, he had still
so much of romantic enthusiasm remaining to him that he found
it natural to let her live and die gloriously. Let be that she was
a sorceress, still she fascinates.
What a change ! Shakespeare, who had hitherto worshipped
women, has become a misogamist. This mood, forgotten since
his early youth, rises up again in hundredfold strength, and his
very soul overflows in scorn for the sex.
What is the cause ? Has anything befallen him — anything
new ? Upon what and whom does he think ? Does he speak
out of new and recent experience, or is it the old sorrow from the
time of the Sonnets, of which he made use in the construction
of Cleopatra's character, and is this the same grief which has
taken new shape in his mind and is turning sour? is it this
which has grown increasingly bitter until it corrodes ?
There are two types of artist soul. There is the one which
needs many varying experiences and constantly changing models,
and which instantly gives a poetic form to every fresh incident.
There is the other which requires amazingly few outside elements
to fertilise it, and for which a single life circumstance, inscribed
with sufficient force, can furnish a whole wealth of ever-changing
thought and modes of expression. Soren Kierkegaard among
writers, and Max Klinger among painters, are both great examples
of the latter type.
To which did Shakespeare belong ? His many-sidedness and
fertility is incontrovertible, and every particular points to the use
of a multiplicity of models. But for all that, his groups of feminine
characters can frequently be traced back to an original type, and
therefore, most likely, to a single model. When one momentous
196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
incident of a poet's life is known, we are very apt to relate to it
everything in his works which could possibly have any connection
with it. In this manner the French literary and critical world
most obstinately found traces of Alfred de Musset's life with
George Sand in every expression of melancholy or complaint of
desolation in his poems. In his biography of his brother, how
ever, Paul de Musset has revealed the fact that the " December
Night," which seems so obvious a supplement to the " May
Night " that turns upon George Sand, was really written in quite
another spirit, to a totally different woman. Also, the character
delineated in the " Letter to Lamartine," which was generally
believed to be that of the famous poetess, had in reality nothing
whatever to do with her.
It is quite possible, therefore, that this last woman's character,
instead of being only a variant of the Cleopatra type, was a
product of a new, fiery, and scorching impression of feminine
inconstancy and worthlessness. We are too entirely ignorant
of the circumstances of the poet's life to venture any decided
opinion, all we can say is, that incidents and novel experiences
are not absolutely necessary as an explanation. There is a
remote possibility that the first sketch of the play was already
written in 1603, in which case it would be more than likely that
the dark lady was once more his prototype. On the other hand,
it may be, as already suggested, that in a productive soul one
circumstance will take the place of many, and an experience
which at first seemed wholly tragic may, in the rapid inner
development of genius, come to wholly change its character.
He has suffered under it; it has sucked his heart's blood and
left him a beaten man on his path through life. He has sought
to embody it in serious and worthy forms, until suddenly it
stands before him as a burlesque. His misery no longer seems
a cruel destiny, but a well-merited punishment for immoderate
stupidity, and this bitter mood has sought relief in such scornful
laughter as that whose discord strikes so harshly in Troilus and
Cressida.
We can imagine that Shakespeare began by worshipping his
lady-love, complaining of her coldness and hardness, celebrating
her fingers in song, cursing her faithlessness, and feeling him
self driven nearly wild with grief at the false position in which
she had placed him ; this is the standpoint of the Sonnets. In
STANDPOINT OF "TROILUS AND CRESSIDA" 197
the course of years the fever had stormed itself out, but the
memory of the enchantment was still visibly fresh, and his mind
pictured the loved one as a marvellous phenomenon, half queen,
half gipsy, alluring and repellant, true and false, strong and weak,
a siren and a mystery; this is the standpoint of Antony and
Cleopatra. Then, possibty, when life had sobered him down,
when he had cooled, as we all do cool in the hardening ice of
experience, he suddenly and sharply realised the insanity of an
exotic enthusiasm for so worthless an object. He looks upon this
condition, which invariably begins with self-deception and must of
necessity end in disillusionment, as a disgraceful and tremendous
absurdity; and his wrath over wasted feelings and wasted time
and suffering, over the degradation and humiliation of its self-
deception, and ultimately the treason itself, seeks final and supreme
relief in the outburst, " What a farce !" which is in itself the germ
of Troilus and Cressida.
VIII
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA—THE HISTORICAL
MATERIAL.
IN the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad Homer makes his solitary
mention of Troilus as a son whom Priam had lost before the
opening of the poem. The old King says :
" O me, accursed man,
All my good sons are gone, my light the shades Cimmerian
Have swallowed from me. I have lost Mestor, surnamed the Fair,
Troilus, that ready knight at arms, that made his field repair
Ever so prompt and joyfully."
This is all the great old world poet says of the king's son,
whose fame in the Middle Ages outshone Hector's own. This brief
mention of an early death stirred the imagination and set fancy at
work. The cyclic poets expanded the hint and developed Troilus
into a handsome youth who fell by Achilles' lance. It had become
the custom under Imperial Rome to derive the empire from the
Trojans, and the theory gave birth to many fabrications, professing
to emanate from eye-witnesses of the war.
Yet it was not before the time of Constantine the Great, that
a description was given which quite displaced Homer during
the Middle Ages. This was Dictys Cretensis' book, De Bello
Trojano} translated from the original Greek into Latin. The
translator, a certain Quintus Septimius, informs us that Dictys
was a brother in arms of Idomeneus, and at his prince's sug
gestion wrote this book in Phoenician characters, and after
wards caused it to be buried with him. An earthquake in the
time of Nero brought it to light. The translator is evidently
simple enough to believe in the truth of this account. A more
daring forgery was issued about 635, after the fall of the Western
Empire of Rome. The author is supposed to be a certain Dares
198
BENOIT DE ST. MAURE 199
Phrygius, who was one of Hector's counsellors, and who wrote
the Iliad before Homer. The title of this book also is De Bello
Trojano, and it professes to have been translated into Latin by
Cornelius Nepos, who is said to have found the manuscript at
Athens, "where, in his day, Homer was considered half mad"
because he had depicted gods and men as carrying on a war with
one another. Troilus is the most prominent hero of the book,
which is a wretched compilation of far-fetched reminiscences.
Dares, however, became the fountain-head for all mediaeval
storytellers, first and foremost among them being Benoit de St.
Maure, troubadour to Henry II. of England. Of his poem, con
taining 30,000 verses, only fragments have ever been printed.
As a genuine Trouvere of the early half of the twelfth century,
he has adorned his ancient material with sumptuous descriptions
of towns, palaces, and accoutrements. He enters, so far as he
is able, into the spiritual life of his hero, and supplies him with
what, according to the notions of his times, he could not pos
sibly lack — a love motive. He represents Briseis, Achilles' vaunted
love, as the daughter of Kalchas, whom, following the example of
Dares, he makes a Trojan. Briseida, who is beloved by Troilus,
returns to Troy after her father goes over to the Greeks. When
Kalchas wishes to regain his daughter, she is exchanged, as in
Shakespeare's drama, for the prisoner Antenor. Diomedes is sent
by the Greeks to escort her, and Briseida falls a victim to his
seductive arts. Many of the incidents in Shakespeare's play are
to be found in Benoit — that Diomedes is experienced in women,
for example ; that Briseis gives him a favour wherewith to adorn
his lance; that he dismounts Troilus and sends his horse to his
lady-love, and that Troilus inveighs against her broken faith, &c.
Now it can be traced how, in the further development of the
theme, one writer after another adds some feature which Shake
speare in his turn still further elaborates. Guido de Colonna (or
delle Columne), a judge at Messina in 1287, retranslates Benoit
de St. Maure into barbarous Latin, making no acknowledgment
of his source, and transforming Achilles into a raw, bloodthirsty
barbarian.
Boccaccio, who prefers significant names, and the title of
whose poem, Filostrato, signifies " one struck to earth by love,"
changes Briseida into Cryseida (thus in old editions), in order
that her name may mean "the golden," and he it is who adds
200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pandarus, the " all-giver," who aids Troilus in his love affairs. He
is Cryseida's kinsman and is evidently sympathetic all through.1
It is Chaucer who first submits the character of Pandarus to an
important change, and makes it the transition point of the Pandarus
we find in Shakespeare. In his poem Troilus's young friend has
become the elderly kinsman of Creseyde, and he brings the young
pair together, mostly out of looseness. It is he who persuades the
young maiden and leads her astray by means of lying impostures.
It was not Chaucer's intention, as it was Shakespeare's, to make
the old fellow odious. His role is not carried out with the cynical
and repulsive lowness of Shakespeare's character. Chaucer en
deavours to ward off any painful impression by making the shame
less old rascal the wit of his poem. He did not achieve his
object; his readers saw only the procurer in Pandarus, whose name
became thenceforward a by-word in the English language, and it
was as such that Shakespeare drew the character in downright,
unmistakable disgust.2
We have yet other sources, Latin, French, and English, for the
details of the drama. From Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example
(which Shakespeare must have known from childhood), he took
the idea of making Ajax almost an idiot in his conceited stupidity.
It is in the third book of the Metamorphoses that Ulysses, fighting
with Ajax for Achilles' weapon, overwhelms his opponent with
biting sarcasms.3 Shakespeare found the name of Thersites in
the same book, with a word concerning his role as lampooner of
princes.
We may doubt whether Shakespeare knew Lydgate's Book oj
1 Troilus says to him :
" Non m'hai piccola cosa tu donata
Ne me a piccola cosa donato hai
La vita mia ti fia sempre obligata
In Thai da morte in via suscitata."
2 [ahrbuch der Deutsche n Shakespearegesellschafl, iii. 252, andvi. 169. Francesco
de Sanctis : Historia della letterature italiana, i. 308.
3 " Huic modo ne prosit, quod, uti est, hebes esse, videtur.
Artis opus tantse rudis et sine pectore miles
Indueret ?
Ajacis stolidi Danais Sollertia prosit
Tu vires sine mente geris, mihi cura futuri
Tu pugnare potes, pugnandi tempora mecum
Eligit Atrides. In tantum corpore prodes."
Met. xiii. 135, 290, 327, 360.
.
OLD DRAMAS 201
Troy. Most of his details with regard to the siege are taken
from an old writing translated from the French and published by
Wynkyn de Worde in 1503. Here, for example, is the parade of
heroes, the talk of King Neoptolemus being no son of Achilles,
and the corrupted names of the six gates of Troy — Dardane,
Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troyen, and Antenorides. Here also
he would find the name of Hector's horse, Galathea, the archer
who calls upon the Greeks, the bastard Margarelon, Cassandra's
warning to Hector, the glove Cressida gives away, and Troilus's
idea that a man is not called upon to be merciful in war, but
should take a victory as he may.1
We cannot tell if Shakespeare was further indebted to some
old dramatic writings, whereof only the names have survived to
us. In 1515, a " Komedy " called the Story of Troylus and
Pandor was played before Henry VIII. On New Year's
Day, 1572, a play about Ajax and Ulisses was performed at
Windsor Castle, and another in 1584 concerning Agamemnon
and Ulisses.2 In Henslowe's Daybook for April and May 1599
we see that the poets Dekker and Henry Chettle (Dickers and
Harey Cheattel, in his amusing orthography) wrote a piece, at his
invitation, for the Lord Admiral's troupe, Troeyles and creasse-
day. In May he lends them a sum of money on it, changing its
title to A tragedy about Agamemnon. It is finally entered at
the Stationers' Hall in February 1603 as a piece entitled Troilns
and Cresseda, " as it was played by the Lord Chamberlain's men " 3
(Shakespeare's company). The fact that in Shakespeare's drama,
as we have it, rhyme is introduced in various parts of the dialogue,
and several other details of versification, seems to point to the
possibility that the so-called piece was in reality Shakespeare's
first sketch of the play. It is one of Fleay's tediously worked out
theories that the drama was produced in three different parts,
with an interval of from twelve to thirteen years between each.
1 Halliwell-Phillips : Memoranda on'Troilus and Cressida. 1880. (Only twenty
copies.)
2 " Ajax and Ulisses shoven on New Yeares day at nighte by the children of
Wynsor. — The history of Agamemnon and Ulisses presented and enacted before her
Majestic by the Earle of Oxenford his boyes on St. Johns daie at night at Grenewiche,
1584."
3 " Entred for his (Master Robertas') copie in full court holden this day to print
when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt the Booke of Troilus and Cresseda, as
it is acted by my Lord Chamberlen's men."
202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He is quite regardless of the fact that the parts are absolutely
inseparable, and is evidently entirely innocent of the manner of
growth of poems. He also totally ignores such important evi
dence as that of the preface to the oldest edition, 1609, which
positively asserts that the piece has never hitherto been played.
It is, of course, possible that this edition, like most of its kind,
was unauthorised, but even then the writer of the preface would
scarcely lie about a fact which could be so easily verified, and
which, moreover, he was not in the least interested in falsifying.
IX
SHAKESPEARE AND CHAPMAN— SHAKESPEARE
AND HOMER
WE have now apparently exhausted the literary sources of this
mysterious and so little understood work. But we have not, for
all that, solved the fundamental question which has occupied so
many brains and pens. Was it Shakespeare's intention to ridicule
Homer ? Did he know Homer ?
To a Dane, Troilus and Cressida recalls the mockery Holberg's
Ulysses von Ithacia makes of the Homeric material, just as the
Ulysses reminds us of Shakespeare's play. Troilus and Cressida
seems to have represented to the English poet much what Hoi-
berg's play did to him, a satire, namely, on the absurdities the
Gothic and Anglo-Saxon understanding (i.e. narrow-mindedness)
found in Homer. It is sufficiently remarkable that Shakespeare
should have written a travesty which could, in spite of many
reservations, be classed with Ulysses von Ithacia. As far as
Holberg is concerned, the explanation is simple enough. His is
the taste of the enlightened age, and the ancient civilisation's
noble naivete viewed in the light of dry rationalism, filled him
with amazement and laughter. But what has Shakespeare to do
with rationalism ? His was the very time of the renaissance of
that old world civilisation, the moment of its resurrection. How
came he to scorn it ?
The general working of the public mind towards the ancient
Greeks had prompted Elizabeth to write a commentary on Plato
and to translate the Dialogues of Socrates; but Shakespeare's
knowledge of Greek was defective, and thus it was that he, as play
wright, represented the popular trend, in contradistinction to the
numerous other poets, who, like Ben Jonson, prided themselves
on their erudition.
Moreover, like the Romans, and subsequently the Italians and
203
204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
French, the Englishmen of his day believed themselves to be
descended from those ancient Trojans, whom Virgil, as true
Roman, had glorified at the expense of the Greeks. The England
of Shakespeare's time took a pride in her Trojan forefathers, and
we find evidence in other of his works that he, as English patriot,
sided .with the Trojans in the old battles of Ilion, and was, con
sequently, prejudiced against the Greek heroes. In my opinion,
however, all this has little to do with the point at issue. We
have already found it probable that Chapman was the poet whose
intimacy with Pembroke roused Shakespeare's jealousy, making
him feel slighted and neglected, and causing him so much melan
choly suffering. I am not ignorant of the arguments which have
been brought forward in support of the theory that the rival poet
was not Chapman but Daniel, nor of what Miss Charlotte Stopes
and G. A. Leigh have to say on the subject of Minto and Tyler.1
I do not, however, consider that they have been able to refute
the strong evidence in favour of its being no other than Chapman
who was the poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets 78-86.
In the year 1598 Chapman had just published the first seven
books of his Iliad, namely, the first, second, seventh, eighth, ninth,
tenth, and eleventh of Homer. The remaining books, followed
by a complete Odyssey, were not published until 1611, two years
after the first appearance of Troihts and Crcssida. To render the
comparatively unknown Homer into good English verse was an
achievement worthy of the acknowledgments Chapman received.
His translation is to this day, in spite of its faults, the best that
England possesses. Keats himself has written a sonnet in praise
of it.
How great a reputation Chapman enjoyed as a dramatist may
be seen in the dedication of John Webster's tragedy The White
Divel (1612), at the close of which he says: "Detraction is the
sworn friend to ignorance. For mine owne part, I have ever truly
cherisht my good opinion of other men's worthy labours, especially
of that full and haightened stile of Maister Chapman. The
labour'd and understanding workes of Maister Johnson : The no
less worthy composures of the both worthy and excellent Maister
Beamont and Maister Fletcher: and lastly (without wrong last
to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Mr. Shake
^ Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakcspcaregesdhchaft> xxv. p. 196 ; Westminster Review,
Feb. 1897.
SHAKESPEARE AND CHAPMAN 205
speare, Mr. Decker and Mr. Heywood." As will have been
noticed, Chapman's name heads the list, while Shakespeare's comes
at the bottom in conjunction with such insignificant men as Decker
and Heywood !
Nevertheless (or possibly on that account) there is little doubt
that Shakespeare found Chapman personally antipathetic. His
style was unequalled for arrogance and pedantry; he was in
sufferably vain of his learning, and not a whit less conceited of
the divine inspiration he, as poet, must necessarily possess.
Even the most ardent of his modern admirers admits that his
own poems are both grotesque and wearisome, and Shakespeare
must certainly have suffered under the miserable conclusion Chap
man added to Marlowe's beautiful Hero and Leander, a poem
that Shakespeare himself so greatly admired. Take only the
fragment of introductory prose which prefaces his translation of
Homer, and try to wade through it. Short as it is, it is impos
sible. Read but the confused garrulity and impossible imagery
of the dedication in 1598, and could a more shocking collection
of mediaeval philology be found outside the two pages he writes
about Homer ?
Swinburne, who loves him, says of his style : " Demosthenes,
according to report, taught himself to speak with pebbles in his
mouth ; but it is presumable that he also learnt to dispense with
their aid before he stood up against ^Eschines or Hyperides on
any great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic poet, on
the other hand, before addressing such audience as he may find,
is careful always to fill his mouth till the jaws are stretched well-
nigh to bursting with the largest, roughest, and most angular of
polygonal flintstones that can be hewn or dug out of the mine of
language ; and as fast as one voluminous sentence or unwieldy
paragraph has emptied his mouth of the first batch of barbarisms,
he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to a fresh de
livery." 1 The comparison is strikingly exact.
It is this incomprehensible style which made Chapman's
readers so few in number, and caused his frequent complaints of
being slighted and neglected. As Swinburne jestingly says of him :
" We understand a fury in his words,
But not his words."
1 A. C. Swinburne : Essay on Chapman.
206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Evenjn his fine translation of Homer, he is unable to forego his
tendency to obscurity, and constrained and inflated expression.
It is universally admitted that even a translation must take some
colouring from its translator, and no man in England was less
Hellenic than Chapman. Swinburne has rightly observed that
his temperament was more Icelandic than Greek, that he handled
the sacred vessels of Greek art with the substantial grasp of the
barbarian, and when he would reproduce Homer he gave rather
the stride of a giant than the step of a god.
In all probability it was the grief Shakespeare felt at seeing
Chapman selected by Pembroke, added to the ill-humour caused
by the elder poet's arrogance and clumsy pedantry, which goaded
him into wanton opposition to the inevitable enthusiasm for the
Homeric world and its heroes.
And so he gave his bitter mood full play.
He touches upon the Iliad's most beautiful and most powerful
elements, Achilles' wrath, the friendship between Achilles and
Patroclus, the question of Helen being delivered to the Greeks,
the attempt to goad Achilles into renewing the conflict, Hector
and Andromache's farewell, and Hector's death, but only to pro
fane and ridicule all.
It was a curious coincidence that Shakespeare should lay
hands on this material just at the most despondent period of his
life ; for nowhere could we well receive a deeper impression
of modern crudeness and decadence, and never could we meet
with a fuller expression of German-Gothic innate barbarism in
relation to Hellenism than when we see this great poet of the
Northern Renaissance make free with the poetry of the old world.
Let us recall, for instance, the friendship, the brotherhood,
existing between Achilles and Patroclus as it is drawn by Homer,
and then see what an abomination Shakespeare, under the in
fluence of his own times, makes of it. x He causes Thersites to
1 "Patroclus. No more words, Thersites; peace !
" Thersites. I will hold my peace when Achilles' brach bids me, shall I?"
(Act ii. sc. i.)
" Thersites. Prithee, be silent, boy ; I profit not by thy talk : thou art thought to
be Achilles' male varlet.
" Patroclus. Male varlet, you rogue ! What's that ?
" Thersites. Why, his masculine whore. Now the rotten diseases of the South,
the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o' gravel i' the back, lethargies, cold
palsies, raw eyes, dirt rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of impostume,
sciaticas, lime-kilns i' the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivalled fee-simple of
the tetter, take and take again all such preposterous discoveries." (Act v. sc. 2.)
SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER 207
spit upon the connection, and by not allowing any one to protest,
so full of loathing for humanity has he become, leaves us to
suppose his version to be correct.
How refined and Greek is Homer's treatment of Helen's
position. There is no hint there of the modern ridicule of
Menelaus; he is equally worthy, equally " beloved by the gods,"
and still the same mighty hero, if his wife has been abducted.
Nor is there any scorn for Helen, only worship for her marvellous
beauty, which even the old men upon the walls turn their heads
to watch, only compassion for her fate and sympathy with her
sufferings. And now, here, this eternal mockery of Menelaus as
a deserted husband, these endless good and bad jests on his lot,
this barbaric laughter over Helen as unchaste !
Thersites is made the mouthpiece of most of it. Shakespeare
found his name in Ovid, and a description of his person in Homer,
in one of the books first translated by Chapman : —
" All sate, and audience gave,
Thersites only would speak all. A most disordered store
Of words he foolishly poured out, of which his mind held more
Than it could manage ; anything with which he could procure
Laughter, he never could contain. He should have yet been sure
To touch no kings ; t' oppose their states becomes not jesters' parts,
But he the filthiest fellow was of all that had deserts
In Troy's brave siege. He was squint-eyed, and lame of either foot ;
So crook-backed that he had no breast; sharp-headed where did
shoot
(Here and there spersed) thin mossy hair. He most of all envied
Ulysses and ^Eacides, whom yet his spleen would chide."
The argument which has been brought forward to prove that
Shakespeare could not have known this description creating
the character of Thersites is worthless. It has been considered
impossible that he, who knew so well how to turn all material
to account, should not have profited, in that case, by the famous
scene where Odysseus beats Thersites. As a matter of fact,
Shakespeare did so, and with much humour, only it is Ajax who
is the chastiser, while Thersites exclaims (Act ii. sc. 3) : " He
beats me, and I rail at him. O worthy satisfaction ! would it
were otherwise ; that I could beat him, while he railed at me."
Clearly enough, the character of the witty, malicious lam-
208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
pooner made an impression upon Shakespeare, and he, probably
following the example of earlier plays, transformed him into a
clown, and made him act as chorus accompanying the action of
the play. Such, obviously, was the Fool in Lear ; but how
different is the melancholy, emotional satire to which King Lear's
faithful companion in distress gives vent from the flaying, scorch
ing scorn, the stream of fierce invective wherewith Thersites
overwhelms every one and everything.
One cannot but see that these lampoons of Menelaus and
Helen represent Shakespeare's own feeling, partly because
Thersites is undoubtedly used as a kind of Satyr-chorus, and
partly because the dispassionate and unprejudiced characters of
the drama express themselves in harmony with him.
Notice, for instance, this reply of Thersites (Act ii. sc. 3) :
" After this, the vengeance upon the whole camp ! or, rather, the
bone-ache ! for that, methinks, is the curse upon those that war for
a placket "
" Here is such patchery, such juggling, and such knavery ! all the
argument is a cuckold and a whore ; a good quarrel to draw emulous
factions and bleed to death upon. Now the dry serpigo on the subject !
and war and lechery confound all ! "
Or read this description of Menelaus (Act v. sc. i) :
"And the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother the
bull, the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds ; a thrifty
shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg — to what form but
that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit,
turn him to ? To an ass, were nothing ; he is both ass and ox ; to an ox,
were nothing ; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a
fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I
would not care ; but to be Menelaus ! I would conspire against destiny.
Ask me not what I would be if I were not Thersites ; for I care not to
be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus."
One can by no means accept this as merely the outburst of a
brawling slave's hatred of his superiors, for the entirely unpre
judiced Diomedes expresses himself in the same spirit to Paris
(Act iv. sc. i) :
" Paris. And tell me, noble Diomede, faith, tell me true,
Even in the soul of sound good fellowship,
SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER 209
Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen best,
Myself or Menelaus.
Diomedes. Both alike :
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge ;
And you as well to keep her, that defend her,
Not palating her dishonour,
With such a costly load of wealth and friends :
He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up
The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece ;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors :
Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more ;
But he as he, the heavier for a whore.
Paris. You are too bitter to your countrywoman.
Diomedes. She's bitter to her country : hear me, Paris :
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk ; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain : since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As for her Greeks and Trojans have suffered death."
In the Iliad these forms represent the outcome of the imagina
tion of the noblest people of the Mediterranean shores, unaffected
by religious terrors and alcohol ; they are bright, glad, reverential
fantasies, born in a warm sun under a deep blue sky. From
Shakespeare they step forth travestied by the gloom and bitter
ness of a great poet of a Northern race, of a stock civilised by
Christianity, not by culture ; a stock which, despite all the efforts
of the Renaissance to give new birth to heathendom, has become,
once for all, disciplined and habituated to look upon the senses
as tempters which lead down into the mire ; to which the pleasur
able is the forbidden and sexual attraction a disgrace.
How significant it is that Shakespeare only sees Greek love
as scourged by the lash of venereal diseases. Throughout the
entire play a pestilential breath of innuendo is blown with out
bursts of cursing, all centering on a contagion which first showed
itself some thousand years after the Homeric times. As Homeric
friendships are bestialised, so is Greek love profaned to suit
VOL. II. O
210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
modern circumstances. To Thersites, the Greek princes are,
every one of them, scandalous rakes. " Here's Agamemnon, an
honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not as
much brain as earwax " (Act v. sc. i). " That same Diomed's a
false-hearted rogue, a most unjust knave. . . . They say he keeps
a Trojan drab and uses the traitor Calchas' tent. — Nothing but
lechery ; all incontinent varlets " (Act v. sc. i). Achilles, that " idol
of idiot worshippers," that " full dish of fool," has Queen Hecuba's
daughter as a concubine, and has treacherously promised her to
leave his fellow-countrymen in the lurch. " Patroclus will give
me anything for the intelligence of this whore : the parrot will not
do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery,
lechery still, nothing else holds fashion." Of Menelaus and Paris,
"cuckold and cuckold-maker," enough has already been said.
Helen has been sternly condemned, and of Cressida with her two
adorers, Troilus and Diomedes, " How the devil luxury, with his
fat rump and potato-fingers, tickles these two together! Fry
lechery, fry " (Act v. sc. 2).
It is clear that the Christian conception of faithlessness in love
has displaced the old Hellenic innocence and naivete. How fer
vent is Achilles' love for Briseis in Homer; how honest, warm, and
indignant he is when he asks Agamemnon's messengers if among
the children of men only the Atrides love their wives, and he
himself answers that every man who is brave and of good under
standing loves and shelters his wife, as he of his inmost heart
loved and would shelter Briseis, prisoner of war though she was.
None the less does Homer tell us how immediately after Achilles
has ended his speech and dismissed his guests, he stretches him
self upon his couch, " in the inner room of his tent, richly wrought,
and that fair lady by his side that he from Lesbos brought, bright
Diomeda." It never occurs to the Greek poet that this implies
any faithlessness to the absent Briseis, but Shakespeare's standard
is thoroughly and mediaevally rigorous.
On two points the comparison between Homer and Shake
speare is inevitable. The first is the farewell between Hector
and Andromache. There is nothing finer in Greek poetry (which
is to say, any poetry) than this tragic idyl, so profoundly human
and movingly beautiful as it is. The pure womanliness which
out of deep grief and pain utters a complaint without weakness,
and expresses without sentimentality a boundless love poured out
SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER 211
upon this one object: "Thy life makes still my father be, my
mother, brother, and besides thou art my husband too. Most
loved, most worthy."
In contrast to this womanliness stands the man's strength,
untouched by harshness, stirred by the deepest tenderness, but
fixed in immovable determination. The picture of the child, too,
frightened by the nodding plumes upon his father's helm, until
Hector sets the casque upon the ground and kisses the tears from
the eyes of his boy. The scene takes place in the sixth book of
the Iliad, and could not have been known to Shakespeare, inas
much as it was as yet untranslated by Chapman. See what he
sets in its place :
" Andromache. Unarm, unarm, and do not fight to-day.
Hector. You train me to offend you : get you in :
By all the everlasting gods I'll go !
Andromache. My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day.
Hector. No more, I say."
This is the harshness of a mediaeval duke; the golden dust
is brushed from the wings of the Greek Psyche. If Harald
Hardrada, as chieftain of the Varangians, ever gave a thought
to the spirit of Greek art, as he passed with his troops through
the streets of Constantinople, he must have looked upon it thus,
despising the ancient Hellenes because he found the modern
cowardly and effeminate.
Shakespeare had no particular place and no particular people
in his mind when he wrote this play; he simply robbed the finest
scenes of their beauty, because his mind, at that time, had elected
to dwell upon the lowest and basest side of human nature.
The second point is the mission to Achilles, told in the ninth
book of the Iliad. It was translated and published by Chapman
in 1598, and must certainly have been known to Shakespeare.1
This book is one of the few finished works of art which have
been produced upon this earth. The Greek Epos itself contains
nothing more consummate than its delineation of character, the
contrast between the arrogant and the intellectual, the polished
and the humorous, the interplay of personality from the highest
pathos to the reiterated twaddle of the old man. Achilles' wrath,
1 The expression "by Jove multi potent," Act iv., sc. 5, is taken from Chapman.
This is the only time it is used by Shakespeare.
212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Nestor's experience, Odysseus' subtle tact, Phoenix's good-natured
rambling, the wounded pride of the Hellenic emissaries, are all
gathered together in the endeavour to induce Achilles to quit
his tent.
Contrast this with the burlesque attempt to provoke that
cowardly snob and raw dunce of an Achilles out of his exclusive-
ness, by passing him by without returning his greeting or
seeming conscious of his existence ; this same Achilles, who falls
upon Hector with his myrmidons and scoundrelly murders him,
just as the hero, wearied by battle, has taken off his helmet and
laid aside his sword. It reads like the invention of a mediaeval
barbarian. But Shakespeare is neither mediaeval nor a barbarian.
No, he has written it down out of a bitterness so deep that he
has felt hero-worship, like love, to be an illusion of the senses.
As the phantasy of first love is absurd, and Troilus's loyalty
towards its object ridiculous, so is the honour of our forefathers
and of war in general a delusion. Shakespeare now suspects the
most assured reputations ; he believes that if Achilles really lived
at all, he was most probably a stupid and vainglorious boaster,
just as Helen must have been a hussy by no means worthy of
the turmoil which was made about her.
As he distorted Achilles into an absurdity, so he wrenched all
other personalities into caricatures. Gervinus has justly re
marked that Shakespeare here acts very much as his Patroclus
does when he mimics Agamemnon's loftiness and Nestor's weak
ness, for Achilles' delectation (Act i. sc. 3). We feel in the
delineation of Nestor that Anglo-Saxon master-hand which seizes
upon the unsightly details which the Greek ignores :
" He coughs and spits,
And with a palsy fumbling on his gorget,
Shakes in and out the rivet."
And we recognise in the allusion to the mimicry of Agamem
non that cheap estimate of an actor's profession, which, with a
contempt for the whole guild of poets, is discernible throughout
Shakespeare's works, in spite of his efforts to raise both callings
in the eyes of the public.1
1 " And, like a strutting player, whose conceit
Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich
SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER 213
Nestor is overwhelmed with ridicule, and is made to declare,
at the close of the first act, that he will hide his silver beard in
a golden beaver, and will maintain in duel with Hector that his
own long-dead wife was as great a beauty and as chaste a wife
as Hector's — grandmother.
Ulysses, who is intended to represent the wise man of the
play, is as trivial of mind as the rest. There was a certain
amount of grandeur in the way lago handled Othello, Rodrigo,
and Cassio, as though they were mere puppets in his hands ; but
there is none in the sport Ulysses makes of those swaggering
numskulls, Achilles and Ajax. The bitterness which breathes
out of all that Shakespeare writes at this period has found grati
fication in making Ulysses not one whit more sublime than the
fools with whom he plays.
Amongst German critics, Gervinus has characterised Troilus
and Cressida as a good-naturedly humorous play. No descrip
tion could be more unlikely. Seldom has a poet been less good-
natured than Shakespeare here. No less impossible is the theory
(also nourished in Gervinus' imagination) that the poet of the
English Renaissance was offended by the loose ethics of Homeric
poetry. Shakespeare most certainly was never so moral as this
moralising German critic (and what German critic is not moralis
ing) would have him to be. It is not a sense of the ethics of
Homer, but a feeling for his poetry that is lacking. In Shake
speare's time men took too much pleasure in classical culture to
appreciate the antique naivete. It was not until the beginning of
the nineteenth century, when popular poetry once more began to be
universally honoured, that Homer displaced Virgil in the popular
estimation. Even Goethe preferred Virgil to Homer. Gervinus
is equally wide of the mark when, in his anxiety to prove Troilus
and Cressida a purely literary satire, he hazards the assertion
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound
'Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage,
Such to be pitied and o'er-wrested seeming
He acts thy greatness in."
And the passage previously quoted from Macbeth :
" Life's but a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more."
Also the noth Sonnet.
214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
that Shakespeare never intended here to " hold up a mirror to his
times ; " l for it is precisely his own times, and no other, that were
in his mind when he wrote this play.
1 " Sein gutmlithiges humoristisches Spiel." — " So kann allerdings aus der ganzen
Darstellung die naheliegende Wahrzeit gezogen warden : dass die erhabenste Dich-
tung ohne streng sittlichen Grundlagen nicht das sei, wozu sie befahigt und berufen
ist." — " Gewiss wiirde er dies Stuck nicht unter die rechnen wollen, die der Zeit
einen Spiegel vorhalten." — Gervinus : Shakespeare, iv. 22, 31, 32.
X
SCORN OF WOMAN'S GUILE AND PUBLIC
STUPIDITY
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA first appeared in 1609 in two editions,
one of which is introduced by a remarkable and diverting preface,
entitled "A never writer to an ever reader, News." It says: —
" Rternall reader, you have heere a new play, never stal'd with the
stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the Vulgar, and yet
passing full of the palme comicall ; for it is a birth of your brain, that
never undertooke anything comicall, vainely : And were but the vaine
names of commedies changde for the titles of Commodities, or of
Playes for Pleas ; you should see all those grand censors, that now stile
ihem such vanities, flocke to them for the maine grace of their gravities :
especially this author's Commedies, that are so framed to the life, that
they serve for the most common Commentaries, of all the actions of
our lives, shewing such a dexteritie, and power of witte, that the most
displeased with playes are pleased with his comedies. And all such
dull and heavy-witted worldlings, as were never capable of the witte of
a commedie, coming by report of them to his representations, have
found that witte there, that they never found in themselves, and have
parted better witted than they came : feeling an edge of witte set upon
them, more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So
much and such sauvred salt of witte is in his Commedies, that they
seem (for their height of pleasure) to be borne in that sea that brought
forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this. And
had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs it not
(for so much as will make you think your testerne well bestowed), but
for so much worth, as ever poore I know to be stuft in it. It deserves
such a labour, as well as the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus.
And believe this, that when he is gone, and his Commedies out of sale,
you will scramble for them and set up a new English inquisition.
Take this for a warning, and at the perrill of your pleasures losse, and
judgements, refuse not nor like this the less for not being sullied with
the smoaky breath of the multitude ; but thanke fortune for the scape
215
X
216 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
it hath made amongst you. Since by the grand possessors wills I
believe you should have prayed for them rather than been prayed.
And so I leave all such to be prayed for (for the state of their witte's
health) that will not praise it. VALE."
How remarkable a comprehension of Shakespeare's work this
old-time preface shows, how clear-sighted an enthusiasm, and how
just a perception of his position in the future.
The play was again published in 1623 in folio, and under
conditions which betray the publisher's perplexity as to its classi
fication. It is altogether missing from the list of contents, in
which the plays are arranged under three headings, comedies,
histories, and tragedies. It is thrust, unpaged, into the middle
of the book, between the histories and the tragedies, between
Henry VIIL and Coriolanus, probably because the editor mis
takenly deemed it to contain more of history and of tragedy than
of comedy. Of all Shakespeare's works, it is Troilus and Cressida
which most nearly approaches the Don Quixote of Cervantes.
It is a proof of the stultifying effect of the too close attention
of philological critics to metrical peculiarities (peculiarities which
a poet can always accommodate as he thinks proper) upon the
finer psychological sense, that either the whole or a greater part
of Troilus and Cressida has been taken for the work of Shakes
peare's youth, and has been attributed to the Romeo and Juliet
period. This view has been taken by L. Moland and C. d'Hericault
in their Nouvelles Fran^aises du 14™ Siecle, and not a few undis-
cerning biographers of Shakespeare.
The contrast between the two plays is remarkable and in
structive. Romeo and Juliet is a genuine work of youth, a pro
duct of truth and faith. Troilus and Cressida is the outcome of
the disillusionment, suspicion, and bitterness of ripe manhood.
The critics have been deceived by the apparently astonishing
youthfulness of parts of Troilus and Cressida, some upon the
ground of its occasional euphuisms and bombast (evidently sati
rical), others by the enthusiasm of youth and absorption in love
which some of Troilus's replies express ; for instance :
" I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid's love : thou answer'st ' She is fair,'
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice," £c.
"TROILUS AND CRESSIDA" 217
In his most ardent raptures there sounds a note of ridicule.1
All this is a complete inversion of Romeo and Juliet. His
youthful tragedy portrayed a woman so staunchly true in love
that she is driven thereby to a bitter death. Troilus and Cressida
deals with a woman whose constancy fails at the first proof.
There is no abyss between the soul and the senses in Romeo
and Juliet ; the two melt into one in fullest harmony. But it is
the lower side of love's ideal nature which is parodied in Troilus
and Cressida, and causes it to resemble the flippant accompani
ment to the serenade in Mozart's Don Juan, which caricatures the
sentimentality of the text.
It is true that there is a chivalrous fine feeling and sensual
tenderness in Troilus's love, which seems to foreshadow, as it were,
that which some centuries later found such full expression in
Keats. But the melancholy of Shakespeare's matured perception
sets its iron tooth in everything at this period of his life, and he
looks upon absorption in love as senseless and laughable. He
shows us how blindly Troilus runs into the snare, giddy with
happiness and uplifted to the heavens, and how the next moment
he awakes from his intoxication, betrayed ; but he shows it without
sympathy, coldly. Therefore, the play never once arouses any
true emotion, since Troilus himself never really interests. The
piece blazes out, but imparts no warmth. Shakespeare wrote it
thus, and therefore, while Troilus and Cressida will find many
readers who will admire it, few will love it.
Shakespeare deliberately made Cressida sensually attractive,
but spiritually repulsive and unclean. She has desire for Troilus,
but no love. She is among those who are born experienced ; she
knows how to inflame, win, and keep men enchained, but the
honourable love of a man is useless to her. At the same time
she is one of those who easily find their master. Any man
who is not imposed upon by her airs, who sees through her
1 Troilus's euphuisms : —
" I was about to tell thee : when my heart
As wedged with a sigh, would rive in twain,
Lest Hector or my father should perceive me,
x I have, as when the sun doth light a storm,
Buried this sigh in wrinkle of a smile " (Act i. sc. i).
" O gentle Pandarus,
From Cupid's shoulder pluck his painted wings,
And fly with me to Cressid " (Act iii. sc. 2).
218 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
mock-prudish rebuffs, subdues her without difficulty. All her
sagacity amounted to, after all, was that Troilus would continue
ardent so long as she said "No;" that men, in short, value
the unattainable and what is won with difficulty, — the wisdom of
any commonplace coquette. Never has Shakespeare represented
coquetry as so void of charming qualities.
Cressida is never modest even when she is most prudish ; she
understands a jest, even bold and libertine ones, and she will
bandy them with enjoyment. With all her kittenish charm she
is uninteresting, and, in spite of her hot blood, she betrays the
coldest selfishness. She is neither ridiculous nor unlovely, but
as little is she beautiful ; in no other of Shakespeare's characters
is the sensual attraction exercised by a woman so completely shorn
of its poetry.
Her uncle Pandarus is as experienced as she is in the art of
exciting by alternately thrusting forward and holding back. He
has been named a demoralised Polonius, and the epithet is good.
He is an old voluptuary, who finds his amusement in playing the
spy and go-between, now that more active pleasures are denied to
him. The cynical enjoyment with which Shakespeare (in spite of
his contempt for him) has drawn him is very characteristic of this
period of his life. Pandarus is clever enough, and often witty, but
there is no enjoyment of his wit; he is as comical, base, and shame
less as Falstaff himself, but he never calls forth the abstract
sympathy we feel for the latter. Nothing makes amends for his
vileness, nor for that of Thersites, nor for that of any other charac
ter in the whole play. Here, as in other plays, Timon of Athens
in particular, is shown that deep-seated Anglo-Saxon vein which,
according to the popular estimate, Shakespeare entirely lacked,—
that vein in which flows the life-blood of Swift's, Hogarth's, and
even some of Byron's principal works, and it shows how, after
all, there was some sympathy between the Merrie England of
those days and the later Land of Spleen.
We have noticed the harsh strength of Ulysses' judgment of
Cressida, and in the decisive scene, in which Troilus is the unseen
witness of Cressida's perfidy, are written words so weighty and
so full of emotion that we feel Shakespeare's very soul speaks
in them.
Diomedes begs Cressida for the scarf which Troilus has given
her.
"TROILUS AND CRESSIDA" 219
" Diomedes. I had your heart before, this follows it.
Troilus (aside). I did swear patience.
Cressida. You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not :
I'll give you something else.
Diomedes. I will have this : whose was it ?
Cressida. It is no matter.
Diomedes. Come, tell me whose it was ?
Cressida. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
But, now you have it, take it."
And the bit of feminine psychology which Shakespeare has
given in Cressida's farewell to Diomedes :
" Good-night : I prithee, come.
Troilus, farewell ! one eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, poor our sex ! This fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind."
And the terrible words Shakespeare puts into Troilus's mouth
when he tries so desperately to shake off the impression, and
deny the possibility of what he has seen :
" Ulysses. Why stay we, then ?
Troilus. To make a recordation to my soul
Of every syllable that here was spoken.
But if I tell how these two did co-act,
Shall I not lie in publishing this truth ?
Sith yet there is a credence in my heart.
An esperance so obstinately strong,
That doth invert the attest of eyes and ears,
As if those organs had deceptious functions
Created only to calumniate.
Was Cressid here ?
Ulysses. I cannot conjure, Trojan.
Troilus. She was not, sure.
Ulysses. Most sure she was.
Troilus. Why, my negation hath no taste of madness.
Ulysses. Nor mine, my lord. Cressid was here but now.
Troilus. Let it not be believed for womanhood !
Think, we had mothers : do not give advantage
To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme,
220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
For depravation, to square this general sex
By Cressid's rule ; rather think this not Cressid.
Ulysses. What hath she done, prince, that can soil our
mothers ?
Troilus. Nothing at all, unless that that were she."
Not only Troilus, but the whole play has here become per
meated by Ulysses' conception of Cressida, and in this despairing
outburst, " Think, we had mothers," is the pith of the piece
uttered forth with terrible clearness.
Yet Troilus and Cressida by no means represent the whole of
the play. In order to counterbalance the slightness of the action,
the bombastic speech, the railing abuse, and the heavy bitter
Juvenal-like satire of his drama, Shakespeare has interpolated
some serious and thoughtful utterances in which some of the
fruits of his abundant experience are expressed in weighty and
concise form.
Achilles, and more especially Ulysses, give vent to profound
political and psychological reflections, entirely regardless of the
fact that the one is a thoughtless blockhead, and the other is a
crafty and unsympathetic nature, the mere negative pole of
Troilus, cold as he is warm, cunning as he is naive. These
remarkable and thoughtful utterances, not in the least in harmony
with their characters, stand in direct contradiction to the whole
play and its farcical treatment, but they are none the less notable
for that. This singular inconsistency is one of the many in which
this incongruous play is so rich, and it is these very contradictions
which make it attractive, insomuch as they reveal the conflicting
moods from which it sprang. They arrest the attention like the
irregular features of a face whose expression varies between irony,
satire, melancholy, and profundity.
Ulysses, who is represented as the sole statesman among the
Greeks, degrades himself by low flattery of the idiotic Ajax,
servilely referring to him as " this thrice worthy and right valiant
lord," who should not soil the victory he has won by going as
messenger to Achilles' tent, and he persuades the princes to pass
Achilles by without greeting him. On this occasion Achilles,
who is otherwise but a braggart, dolt, coward, and scoundrel,
surprises us by a succession of outbursts, in each of which he
gives voice to as deep and bitter knowledge of human nature as
does Timon of Athens himself.
ULYSSES 221
" What, am I poor of late?
'Tis certain greatness once fall'n out with Fortune
Must fall out with men too : what the declined is
He shall as soon read in the eyes of others,
As feel in his own fall.
And not a man, for being simply man,
Hath any honour, but honour for those honours
That are without him, as place, riches, favour,
Prizes of accident as oft as merit :
Which when they fall, as being slippery standers,
The love that leaned on them is slippery too,
Do one pluck down another, and together
Die in the fall."
Ulysses now enters upon a thoughtful conversation with
Achilles, calling his attention to the fact that no man, however
highly advanced he may be, has any real knowledge of his worth
until he has received the judgment of others and observed their
attitude towards him. Achilles answers him a happy and per
tinent analogy on principles of pure philosophical reasonings, and
Ulysses continues :
" That no man is the lord of anything
Till he communicate his parts to others ;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they're extended : who like an arch reverberates
The voice again, or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heart."
Achilles interrupts a long discourse, ending with a thrust at
Ajax, with the question "What, are my deeds forgot?" and the
remarkable answer he receives reveals, to an observant reader, one
of the sources of the bitterness and pessimism of the play. It
can scarcely be doubted that Shakespeare at this time felt himself
ousted from the popular favour by younger and less worthy men :
we know that immediately after his death he was eclipsed by
Fletcher. He is absorbed by a feeling of the ingratitude of man
and the injustice of what is called the way of the world. We
found the first traces of this feeling in the words of Bertram's
222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dead father, quoted by the King in All's Well that Ends Well,
and here it breaks out in full force in a reply whose very weak
pretext is that of showing Achilles how ill advised he is to rest
upon his laurels :
" Time hath, my lord, a wallet on his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes :
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done : perseverance dear, my lord,
Keeps honour bright : to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way ;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where but one goes abreast : keep then the path ;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue : if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entered tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost ;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'errun and trampled on : then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours ;
For time is like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer ; welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. Oh, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was ;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past ;
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More land than gilt o'erdusted."
How plainly is one of the sources betrayed here of the black
waters of bitterness which bubble up in Troilus and Cressida, a
ULYSSES 223
bitterness which spares neither man nor woman, war nor love, hero
nor lover, and which springs in part from woman's guile, in part
from the undoubted stupidity of the English public. In the latter
part of the conversation between Ulysses and Achilles the former
has some renowned words on the direction of the state — its ideal
government, that is to say. The incongruity between the circum
stance of utterance and the utterance itself is nowhere more
striking in this play than here. Ulysses tells Achilles that they
all know why he refuses to take part in the battle ; every one is
well aware that he is in love with Priam's daughter ; and when
Achilles exclaims in amazement at finding the secrets of his
private life disclosed, Ulysses, with a solemnity inconsistent with
the triviality of the subject and the grim ways of espionage, gives
the almost mystical and too profound answer :
" Is that a wonder?
The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Pluto's gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost, like the gods,
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.
There is a mystery — with whom relation
Durst never meddle — in the soul of state ;
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expression to."
He then turns abruptly to the subject of Achilles's amours
with Polyxena being common talk, and seeks to provoke the
lover into joining the combat by telling him that it has become
a common jest that Achilles has conquered Hector's sister, but
that Ajax has subdued Hector himself, and then ends his speech
with the following obscure allusion to the relation between Achilles
and Ajax : —
" Farewell, my lord. I as your lover speak :
The fool slides o'er the ice that you should break." 1
1 F. Halliwell- Phillips has published, concerning these last two lines, a minia
ture book, The Fool and the Ice, London, 1883. He explains that a whole little
history lies behind this curious simile. When Lord Chandos's Company played at
Evesham, near Stratford (before 1600), a country fool there, Jack Miller by name,
became so infatuated with their clown that he wanted to run away with them, and
had, consequently, to be locked up. He saw from the window, however, that the
224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In spite of the strange inconsistency of all these political
allusions, they are of the greatest interest to us, inasmuch as
they so clearly indicate Shakespeare's next great work, the
Roman tragedy of Coriolanus (1608).
Ulysses makes steady protest against the vulgar error that
it is the gross work, and not the guiding spirit, which is decisive
in war and politics. He complains of the abuse Achilles and
Thersites heap upon the leaders of the campaign (Act i. sc. 3) :
" They tax our policy and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war,
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand : the still and mental parts
That do contrive how many hands shall strike
When fitness calls them on, and know by measure
Of their observant toil the enemies' weight —
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity," &c.
It is, of course, Thersites who has taken the lead ; the light wit
and deep humour of the earlier clowns is displaced in him by the
frantic outbursts of a contemptible scamp. Throughout, Thersites
is intended as a caricature of the envious and worthless (if sharp-
sighted) plebeian, of whose wit Shakespeare has need for the
complete scourging of an arrogant and corrupt aristocracy, but
whose politics are the subject of his utter disgust and scorn.
As the haughty intelligence of Ulysses seems to foreshadow
Prospero, but without his bright supernatural clearness, so does
Thersites seem to be a preliminary sketch for Caliban, barring
his heavy, earthy, grotesque clumsiness. The character more
immediately allied to that of Thersites, however, is not Caliban,
but that grim cynic Apemantus in Timon of Athens.
Still more significant than the previously quoted lines is the
speech in which Ulysses (Act i. sc. 3) develops a political view
which was obviously Shakespeare's own, and which is soon to be
proclaimed in Coriolanus. Its point of view proceeds from the
conviction, expressed in our day by Nietzsche, that the distance
company was preparing to depart, and springing out, sped, in spite of the danger,
over forty yards of ice so thin that it would not bear a piece of brick which was
laid upon it. (First told in a little book by the player Robert Arnim, afterwards one
of Shakespeare's colleagues. It was published in 1603 under the title " Foole upon
Foole, or Sixe Sortes of Sottes, by Colonnico del Mondo Snuffe," clown at the Globe
Theatre.)
ULYSSES 225
between man and man must on no account be bridged over, and
is introduced by a half-astronomical, half-astrological explanation
of the Ptolemaic system :
"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order ;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the others ; whose med'cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check to good and bad : but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents ! what mutiny !
What raging of the sea ! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture."
The remainder of the passage has become a fixed ingredient
of English Shakespearian anthologies, and carries us on directly
into Coriolanus :
" Oh, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick. . . .
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy : the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe :
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike the father dead.
Force should be right ; or rather right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
VOL. II. P
226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It hath to climb. The general's disdained
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath. . . ,
... It grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation."
Shakespeare has so often emphasised the superiority of real
merit to outside show, that he needs no vindication from a charge
of worship of mere rank and station. What he here expresses is
merely that inherently aristocratic point of view which we recog
nised in his early works, and which has intensified with increas
ing years. It was from the first founded upon a conviction that
only among an hereditary aristocracy, under a well-established
monarchy, was any patronage of his art and profession possible,
and the opinion, steadily nourished by the enmity of the middle
classes, will soon be expressed with extraordinary vehemence in
Coriolanus.
Troilus and Cressida, then, which seems at first sight to be
a romantic play founded on an old world subject, is in reality,
despite its embellishments, a satire on the ancient material, and
a parody of romanticism itself. It cannot therefore be classed
with the attempts made by other great poets to resuscitate
the old Greek personalities. Racine's Iphigenia in Aulis and
Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris, were written in serious earnestness,
although neither of them approximated closely to the old world
of tradition. Racine's Greeks are courtly Frenchmen from the
salons, and Goethe's are German princes and princesses, of
humane and classic culture, who attitudinise like the figures in
a painting by Raphael Mengs. It may be said that Shakespeare's
Hector, who quotes Aristotle, and his Lord Achilles, with his
spurs and long sword, are as much noblemen of the Renaissance
as Racine's Seigneur Achilles is a courtier in periwig and red-
heeled shoes. But Racine meant no satire, while Shakespeare
most deliberately caricatured. All turns to discord under his
touch ; love is betrayed, heroes are murdered, constancy ridi
culed, levity and coarseness triumph, and no gleam of better
things shines out at the end. The play closes with an indecent
jest of the loathsome Pandar's.
XI
DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE'S MOTHER— CORIOLANUS
—HATRED OF THE MASSES
SHAKESPEARE'S mother was buried on the 9th of September
1608. He had travelled about the country of late, playing with
his company, from the middle of May until far into the autumn,
during which period court and aristocracy were absent from the
capital. It is not certain whether he had returned to London at
this time or not, but he hastened to Stratford on hearing of his
mother's death, and must have stayed some time on his property,
" New Place," after attending her funeral ; for we find him still
at Stratford on the 1 6th of October. On that day he stands
godfather to the son of a friend of his youth, Henry Walker, an
alderman of the borough, who is mentioned in Shakespeare's will.
The death of a mother is always a mournfully irreparable loss,
often the saddest a man can sustain. We can realise how deeply
it would go to Shakespeare's heart when we remember the capacity
for profound and passionate feeling with which nature had blessed
and cursed him. We know little of his mother ; but judging
from that affinity which generally exists between famous sons
and their mothers, we may suppose that she was no ordinary
woman. Mary Arden, who belonged to an old and honourable
family, which traced its descent (perhaps justly) back to the days
of Edward the Confessor, represented the haughty patrician ele
ment of the Shakespeare family. Her ancestors had borne their
coat of arms for centuries, and the son would be proud of his
mother for this among other reasons, just as the mother would be
proud of her son.
In the midst of the prevailing gloom and bitterness of his
spirit, this fresh blow fell upon him, and, out of his weariness of
life as his surroundings and experiences showed it to him, re
called this one mainstay to him — his mother. He remembered
227
228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
all she had been to him for forty-four years, and the thoughts of
the man and the dreams of the poet were thus led to dwell upon
the significance in a man's life of this unique form, comparable to
no other — his mother.
Thus it was that, although his genius must follow the path it
had entered upon and pursue it to the end, we find, in the midst
of all that was low and base in his next work, this one sublime
mother-form, the proudest and most highly-wrought that he has
drawn, Volumnia.
The Tragedy of Coriolanus was first published in 1623, in
folio edition, but 1608 is the generally accepted date of its pro
duction, partly because a speech in Ben Jonson's The Silent
Woman (1609) seems to indicate a reminiscence of Coriolanus y
and partly because many different critics concur in the opinion
that its style and versification point to that year.
How came this work to emerge from the depths of all the
discontent, despondency, hatred of life, and contempt for humanity
which went at this time to make up Shakespeare's soul? He
was angry and soured, and the sources of his embittered feelings
are embodied in his plays, seeking outlet, now under one, now
under another form. In Troilus and Cressida it was the relation
of the sexes ; here it is social conditions and politics.
His point of view is as personal as it well could be. Shake
speare's aversion to the mob was based upon his contempt for
their discrimination, but it had its deepest roots in the purely
physical repugnance of his artist nerves to their plebeian at
mosphere. It was obvious in Troilus and Cressida that the
irritation with public stupidity was at its height. He now, for
the third time, finds in his Plutarch a subject which not only
responds to the mood of the moment, but also gives him an
opportunity for portraying a notable mother ; and he is irresistibly
drawn to give his material dramatic style.
It is the old traditional story of Coriolanus, great man and
great general, who, in the remote days of Roman antiquity, be
came involved in such hopeless conflict with the populace of his
native city, and was so roughly dealt with by them in return,
that he was driven, in his bitterness, to reckless deeds.
Plutarch, however, was by no means prejudiced against the
people, and the subject had to be entirely re-fashioned by Shake
speare before it would harmonise with his mood. The historian
CORIOLANUS 229
may be guilty of serious contradictions in matters of detail, but
he endeavours, to the best of his ability, to enter into the circum
stances of times which were of hoary antiquity, even to him.
The main drift of his narrative is to the effect that Coriolanus
had already attained to great authority and influence in the city,
when the Senate, which represented the wealth of the community,
came into collision with the masses. The people were overridden
by usurers, the law was terribly severe upon debtors, and the
poor were subjected to incessant distraint ; their few possessions
were sold, and men who had fought bravely for their country
and were covered with honourable scars were frequently im
prisoned. In the recent war with the Sabines the patricians had
been forced to promise the people better treatment in the future,
but the moment the war was over they broke their word, and
distraint and imprisonment went on as before. After this the
plebeians refused to come forward at the conscription, and the
patricians, in spite of the opposition of Coriolanus, were compelled
to yield.
Shakespeare was evidently incapable of forming any idea of
the free citizenship of olden days, still less of that period of fer
ment during which the Roman people united to form a vigorous
political party, a civic and military power combined, which proved
the nucleus round which the great Roman Empire eventually
shaped itself — a power of which J. L. Heiberg's words on
thought might have been predicted : " It will conquer the world,
nothing less."
Much the same thing was occurring in Shakespeare's own
time, and, under his very eyes, as it were, the English people
were initiating their struggle for self-government. But they who
constituted the Opposition were antagonistic to him and his art,
and he looked without sympathy upon their conflict. Thus it
was that those proud and self-reliant plebeians, who exiled them
selves to Mons Sacer sooner than submit to the yoke of the
patricians, represented no more to him than did that London mob
which was daily before his eyes. To him the Tribunes of the
People were but political agitators of the lowest type, mere per
sonifications of the envy of the masses, and representatives of
their stupidity and their brute force of numbers. Ignoring every
incident which shed a favourable light upon the plebeians, he
seized upon every instance of popular folly which could be found
230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in Plutarch's account of a later revolt, in order to incorporate it
in his scornful delineation. Again and again he insists, by means
of his hero's passionate invective, on the cowardice of the people,
and that in the face of Plutarch's explicit testimony to their
bravery. His detestation of the mass thrived upon this reiterated
accentuation of the wretched pusillanimity of the plebeians,
which went hand -in -hand with a rebellious hatred for their
benefactors.
Was it Shakespeare's intention to allude to the strained
relations existing between James and his Parliament ? Does
Coriolanus represent an aristocratically-minded poet's side-glance
at the political situation in England ? I fancy it does. Heaven
knows there was little resemblance between the amazingly craven
and vacillating James and the haughty, resolute hero of Roman
tradition, who fought a whole garrison single-handed. Nor was
it personal resemblance which suggested the comparison, but a
general conception of the situation as between a beneficent power
on the one hand and the people on the other. He regarded the
latter wholly as mob, and looked upon their struggle for freedom
as mutiny, pure and simple.
It is hard to have to say it, but the more one studies Shake
speare with reference to contemporary history, the more is one
struck by the evident necessity he felt, in spite of the undoubted
disgust with which King and Court inspired him, for seeking the
support of the kingly power against his adversaries. Many are
the unmistakable, though discreet and delicate, compliments he
addresses to the monarch.
It was even before his accession that we detected, in Hamlet,
the first glance in the direction of James. The accentuation of
Hamlet's relations with the players is not without its acknow
ledgments and appeal to the Scottish monarch. In Measure for
Measure the stress laid upon the Duke's doubly careful watch
over all that transpires in Vienna during the apparent neglect of
his absence was undoubtedly intended to excuse James's some
what cowardly desertion of London, immediately after his coro
nation, for the whole time the plague raged there. We find this
feeling again in Coriolanus, and again in The Tempest, which
was written for the wedding festivities of the Princess Elizabeth
and the Elector Palatine, and which contains, under cover of the
sagacious Prospero, many subtle and dainty, but utterly unde-
DATE OF PRODUCTION 231
served, compliments to the wise and learned King James. There
is a striking analogy between the relations of MolieTe to Louis
XIV. and those of Shakespeare to his king. Both great men had
the religious prejudices of the people against them; both, as poets
of the royal theatre, had to make some show of subservience, but
Moliere could feel a more sincere admiration for his Louis than
could Shakespeare for his James.
In an otherwise masterly review of The Tempest in the Uni
versal Review for 1889, Richard Garnett has called Coriolanus
a reflection of a Conservative's view of James's struggle with the
Parliament. This is an exaggeration, which leads him to raise
the question as to whether the play owed its origin to the first
conflict with the House, or the second in 1614. He pronounces
for the latter, and thus arrives at an opinion, held by himself
alone, that Coriolanus was Shakespeare's last work.
The argument on which he bases this view proves, on closer
inspection, to be entirely worthless. Some lines in the fifth Act
(sc. 5) run as follows :
"Think with thyself
How much more unfortunate than all living women
Are we come thither."
In the older editions of North's translations of Plutarch (1595
and 1603) it stands thus: " How much more unfortunately than
all the women living," the form unfortunate of the tragedy not
appearing until the edition of 1612. This circumstance was
detected by Halliwell-Phillips, and led him and Garnett to the
conclusion that Shakespeare used the edition of 1612, and cannot
therefore have written his drama before that year. When we
consider how very slight the deviation is, and how it was practi
cally necessitated by the metre, we see what a poor criterion it
is of the date of production. Moreover, precisely the opposite
conclusion might be drawn from a comparison of North's trans
lation with other details of the play. In the fourth Act (sc. 5")
we find, for example :
" For if
I had feared death, of all men i' the world
I would have Voided thee ; but in mere spite
To be quit of those my banishers
Stand I before thee here."
232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In the 1579 and 1595 editions of North it stands thus: "For
if I had feared death, I would not have come thither to have put
myself in hazard, but prickt forward with spite"
In all later editions the italicised words are omitted, " with
desire to be revenged " being substituted in their stead. According
to this method, a very much earlier date might be assumed for
Coriola/iuSj but both arguments are equally worthless.
We have, therefore, no occasion to abandon 1608 on that
ground, and we have certainly no need to do so for the sake of
a fanciful approximation of the position of Coriolanus to that of
James at the dissolution of Parliament in 1614.
Thus much, at any rate, can be declared with absolute cer
tainty, that the anti-democratic spirit and passion of the play
sprang from no momentary political situation, but from Shake
speare's heart of hearts. We have watched its growth with the
passing of years. A detestation of the mob, a positive hatred of
the mass as mass, can be traced in the faltering efforts of his
early youth. We may see its workings in what is undoubtedly
Shakespeare's own description of Jack Cade's rebellion in the
Second Part of Henry VI., and we divine it again in the con
spicuous absence of all allusion to Magna Charta displayed in
King John.
We have already stated that Shakespeare's aristocratic con
tempt for the mob had its root in a purely physical aversion for
the atmosphere of the " people." We need but to glance through
his works to find the proof of it. In the Second Part of
Henry VL (Act iv. sc. 7) Dick entreats Cade " that the laws of
England may come out of his mouth ; " whereupon Smith remarks
aside : " It will be stinking law ; for his breath stinks with eating
toasted cheese." And again in Casca's description of Caesar's
demeanour when he refuses the crown at the Lupercalian festival :
" He put it the third time by, and still he refused it; the rabble-
ment hooted and clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their
sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath
because Caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked
Caesar ; for he swooned and fell down at it : and for mine own
part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving
the bad air " (Julius Cczsar, Act i. sc. 2).
Also the words in which Cleopatra (in the last scene of the
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MASSES 233
play) expresses her horror of being taken in Octavius Caesar's
triumph to Rome :
" Now, Iras, what thinkest thou ?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome as well as I : mechanic slaves,
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall
Uplift us to the view ; in their thick breaths^
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclosed
And forced to drink their vapour"
All Shakespeare's principal characters display this shrinking
from the mob, although motives of interest may induce them to
keep it concealed. When Richard II., having banished Boling-
broke, describes the latter's farewell to the people, he says
(Richard II. , Act i. sc. 4) :
" Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green,
Observed his courtship to the common people.;
How did he seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As 'twere to banish their effects with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,
A brace of draymen bid God-speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With ' Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends.' "
The number of these passages proves that it was, in plain
words, their evil smell which repelled Shakespeare. He was the
true artist in this respect too, and more sensitive to noxious fumes
than any woman. At the present period of his life this particular
distaste has grown to a violent aversion. The good qualities and
virtues of the people do not exist for him ; he believes their
sufferings to be either imaginary or induced by their own faults.
Their struggles are ridiculous to him, and their rights a fiction ;
their true characteristics are accessibility to flattery and ingrati
tude towards their benefactors ; and their only real passion is an
innate, deep, and concentrated hatred of their superiors ; but all
these qualities are merged in this chief crime : they stink.
" Cor. For the mutable rank-scented many, let them
Regard me as I do not flatter, and
Therein behold themselves" (Act iii. sc. i).
234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" Brutus. I heard him swear,
Were he to stand for consul, never would he
Appear i' the market-place, nor on him put
The napless vesture of humility ;
Nor, showing as the manner is, his wounds
To the people, beg their stinking breaths" (Act ii. sc. i).
When Coriolanus is banished by the people, he turns upon
them with the outburst :
" You common cry of curs ! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt my air" (Act iii. sc. 3).
When old Menenius, Coriolanus's enthusiastic admirer, hears
that the banished man has gone over to the Volscians, he says to
the People's Tribunes :
" You have made good work,
You and your apron-men : you that stood so much
Upon the voice of occupation and
The breath of garlic-eaters ! " (Act iv. sc. 6).
And a little farther on :
" Here come the clusters.
And is Aufidius with him ? You are they
That made the air unwholesome when you cast
Your stinking greasy caps up, hooting at
Coriolanus' exile."
If we seek to know how Shakespeare came by this non-political
but purely sensuous contempt for the people, we must search for
the reason among the experiences of his own daily life. Where
but in the course of his connection with the theatre would he
come into contact with those whom he looked upon as human
vermin ? He suffered under the perpetual obligation of writing,
staging, and acting his dramas with a view to pleasing the Great
Public. His finest and best had always most difficulty in making
its way, and hence the bitter words in Hamlet about the " ex
cellent play " which " was never acted, or, if it was, not above
once ; for the play, I remember, pleased not the million"
Into this epithet, "the million," Shakespeare has condensed
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MASSES 235
his contempt for the masses as art critics. Even the poets, and
they are many, who have been honest and ardent political demo
crats, have seldom extended their belief in the majority to a faith
in its capacity for appraising their art. The most liberal-minded
of them all well know that the opinion of a connoisseur is worth
more than the judgment of a hundred thousand ignoramuses.
With Shakespeare, however, his artist's scorn for the capacity
of the many did not confine itself to the sphere of Art, but
included the world beyond. As, year after year, his glance fell
from the stage upon the flat caps covering the unkempt hair
of the crowding heads down there in the open yard which
constituted the pit, his sentiments grew increasingly contemp
tuous towards " the groundlings." These unwashed citizens,
"the understanding gentlemen of the ground," as Ben Jonson
nicknamed them, were attired in unlovely black smocks and
goatskin jerkins, which had none too pleasant an odour. They
were called " nutcrackers " from their habit of everlastingly
cracking nuts and throwing the shells upon the stage. Tossing
about apple-peel, corks, sausage ends, and small pebbles was
another of their amusements. Tobacco, ale, and apple vendors
forced their way among them, and even before the curtain was
lifted a reek of tobacco-smoke and beer rose from the crowd
impatiently waiting for the prima donna to be shaved. The
fashionable folk of the stage and boxes, whom they hated, and
with whom they were ever seeking occasion to brawl, called
them stinkards. Abuse was flung backwards and forwards
between them, and the pit threw apples and dirt, and even went
so far as to spit on to the stage. In the Gull's Hornebooke(\£>Qg}
Dekker says : " The stage, like time, will bring you to most
perfect light and lay you open : neither are you to be hunted
from thence, though the scarecroivs in the yard hoot at you, hiss
at you, spit on you." As late as 1614 the prologue to an old
comedy, The Hog has lost his Pearl, says :
" We may be pelted off for what we know,
With apples, eggs, or stones, from those below"
Who knows if Shakespeare was better satisfied with the less
rowdy portion of his audience ? Art was not the sole attraction
of the theatre. We read in an old book on English plays : —
" In the play-houses at London it is the fashion of youthes to
236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
go first into the yarde and carry their eye through every gallery ;
then, like unto ravens, when they spy the carrion, thither they
fly and press as near to the fairest as they can." l These fine
gentlemen, who sat or reclined at full length on the stage, were
probably as much occupied with their ladies as the less well-
to-do theatre-goers. We know that they occasionally watched
the play as Hamlet did, with their heads in their mistresses'
laps, for the position is described in Fletcher's Queen of Corinth
(Act i. sc. 2) :
" For the fair courtier, the woman's man,
That tells my lady stories, dissolves riddles,
Ushers her to her coach, lies at her feet
At solemn masques, applauding what she laughs at."
Dekker (Guilds Hornebooke) informs us that keen card-playing
went on amongst some of the spectators, while others read,
drank, or smoked tobacco. Christopher Marlowe has an epigram
on this last practice, and Ben Jonson complains in his Bartho
lomew Fair of " those who accommodate gentlemen with tobacco
at our theatres." He gives an elaborate description in his play,
The Case is Altered, of the manner in which capricious lordlings
conducted themselves at the performance of a new piece : —
" And they have such a habit of dislike in all things, that they
will approve nothing, be it never so conceited or elaborate; but
sit dispersed, making faces and spitting, wagging their upright
ears, and cry, filthy, filthy ; simply uttering their own condition,
and using their wryed countenances instead of a vice, to turn
the good aspects of all that shall sit near them, from what they
behold " (Act ii. sc. 6).
The fact that women's parts were invariably played by young
men may have contributed to the general rowdyism of the play-
going public, although, on the other hand, it must have been
conducive to greater morality on the part of those directly con
nected with the theatre. It was surely a real amelioration of
Shakespeare's fate that the difficulties with which he had to
struggle were not increased by that enthralling and ravishing
evil which bears the name of actress.2
1 Plays confuted in Five several Actions, by Stephen Gosson, 1580.
2 It is therefore a droll error into which the otherwise admirable writer, Professor
Fr. Paulson, falls in his essay, Hamlet die Tragedie des Pessimismns (Deutsche
THE FIRST ACTRESS 237
The notion of feminine characters being taken by a woman
was so foreign to England that the individual who ascertained
the use of forks in Italy, discovered the existence of actresses at
the same time and in the same place. Coryate writes from
Venice in July 1608 : — " Here I observed certaine things that I
never saw before ; for I saw women act, a thing I never saw
before, though I have heard that it hath been sometimes used in
London ; and they performed it with as good a grace, action,
gestures, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as I ever saw
any masculine actor." It was not until forty-four years after
Shakespeare's death that a woman stepped on to the English
stage. We know precisely when and in what play she appeared.
On the. 8th of December 1660 the part of Desdemona was taken
by an Englishwoman. The prologue read upon this occasion is
still in existence.1
A theatrical audience of those days was, to Shakespeare's
eyes at any rate, an uncultivated horde, and it was this crowd
which represented to him "the people." He may have looked
upon them in his youth with a certain amount of goodwill and
forbearance, but they had become entirely odious to him now.
It was undoubtedly the constant spectacle of the " understandtrs"
and the atmosphere of their exhalations, which caused his scorn
to flame so fiercely over democratic movements and their leaders,
and all that ingratitude and lack of perception which, to him,
represented "the people."
With his necessarily slight historical knowledge and insight,
Shakespeare would look upon the old days of both Rome and
Rundschau, vol. lix. p. 243), when he remarks as a proof of the sensuality of
Hamlet's nature : " Man erinnere sich nur seiner Intimitat mit den Schauspielern ;
als sie ankommen, fallt sein Blick sogleich auf die Fusse der Schauspielerin.n
1 "A Prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act on this stage, in
the tragedy called The Moor of Venice : " —
" I come unknown to any of the rest
To tell you news ; I saw the lady drest.
The woman plays to day ; mistake me not,
No man in gown or page in petticoat :
A woman to my knowledge, yet I can't
If I should die, make affidavit on't. . . .
'Tis possible a virtuous woman may
Abhor all sorts of looseness and yet play,
Play on the stage when all eyes are upon her.
Shall we count that a crime, France counts an honour !"
238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
England in precisely the same light in which he saw his own
times. His first Roman drama testifies to his innately anti
democratic tendencies. He seized with avidity upon every in
stance in Plutarch of the stupidity and brutality of the masses.
Recall, for example, the scene in which the mob murders Cinna,
the poet, for no better reason than its fury against Cinna, the
conspirator (Julius Ccesar, Act iii. sc. 3) :
" Third Citizen. Your name, sir, truly.
" Cinna. Truly my name is Cinna.
" First Citizen. Tear him to pieces ; he's a conspirator.
" Cinna. I am Cinna the poet. I am Cinna the poet.
"Fourth Citizen. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his
bad verses.
u Cinna. I am not Cinna the conspirator.
" fourth Citizen. It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his
name out of his heart, and turn him going.
" Third Citizen. Tear him, tear him ! "
All four citizens are alike in their bloodthirsty fury. Shake
speare displays the same aristocratic contempt for the fickle
crowd, whose opinion wavers with every speaker ; witness its
complete change of front immediately after Antony's oration. It
was this feeling, possibly, which was at the bottom of his want
of success in dealing with Caesar. He probably found Caesar
antipathetic, not on the ground of his subversion of a republican
form of government, but as leader of the Roman democracy.
Shakespeare sympathised with the conspiracy of the nobles
against him because all popular rule — even that which was
guided by genius — was repugnant to him, inasmuch as it was
power exercised, directly or indirectly, by an ignorant herd.
This point of view meets us again and again in Coriolanus ;
and whereas, in his earlier plays, it was only occasionally and, as
it were, accidentally expressed, it has now grown and strengthened
into deliberate utterance.
I am aware that, generally speaking, neither English nor
German critics will agree with me in this. Englishmen, to whom
Shakespeare is not only their national poet, but the voice of
wisdom itself, will, as a rule, see nothing in his poetry but a love
of all that is simple, just, and true. They consider that due
attention, on the whole, has been paid to the rights of the people
CORIOLANUS AND THE PEOPLE 239
in this play ; that it contains the essence, as it were, of all that
can be urged in favour of either democracy or aristocracy, and
that Shakespeare himself was impartial. His hero is by no
means, they say, represented in a favourable light ; he is ruined
by his pride, which, degenerating into unbearable arrogance,
causes him to commit the crime of turning his arms against his
country, and brings him to a miserable end. His relations with
his mother represent the sole instance in which the inhuman,
anti-social intractability of Coriolanus' character relaxes and
softens; otherwise he is hard and unlovable throughout. The
Roman people, on the other hand, are represented as good and
amiable in the main ; they are certainly somewhat inconstant, but
Coriolanus is no less fickle than they, and certainly less excusable.
That plebeian greed of plunder which so exasperated Marcius at
Corioli is common to the private soldier of all times. No, they
say, Shakespeare was totally unprejudiced, or, if he had a prefer
ence, it was for old Menenius, the free-spoken, patriotic soul who
always turns a cheerfully humorous side to the people, even when
he sees their faults most plainly.
I am simply repeating here a view of the matter actually
expressed by eminent English and American critics — a view
which, presumably therefore, represents that of the English-
speaking public in general.1
In Germany also — more particularly at the time when Shake
speare's dramas were interpreted by liberal professors, who in
voluntarily brought them into harmony with their own ideas and
those of the period — many attempts were made to prove that
Shakespeare was absolutely impartial in political matters. Some
even sought to make him a Liberal after the fashion of those who,
early in this century, went by that name in Central Europe.
We have no interest, however, in re-fashioning Shakespeare.
It is enough for us if our perception is fine and keen enough to
recognise him in his works, and we must actually put on blinders
not to see on which side Shakespeare's sympathies lie here. He
is only too much of one mind with the senators who say that
"poor suitors have strong breaths," and Coriolanus, who is never
refuted or contradicted, says no more than what the poet in his
own person would endorse.
1 See Shakespeare's Tragedy of Coriolamts, by the Rev. Henry N. Hudson,
Professor of Shakespeare at Boston University. Boston, 1881.
240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In the first scene of the play, immediately following Menenius'
well-known parable of the belly and the other members of the
body, Marcius appears and fiercely advocates the view Menenius
has humorously expressed :
" He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs,
That like not peace nor war? He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares ;
Where foxes, geese ; you are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,
Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is
To make him worthy whose offence subdues him,
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness,
Deserves your hate ; and your affections are
A sick man's appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his coil . . .
. . . Hang ye ! Trust ye !
With every minute you do change a mind ;
And call him noble that was now your hate,
Him vile that was your garland."
The facts of the play bear out every statement here made by
Coriolanus, including the one that the plebeians are only brave
with their tongues, and run as soon as it comes to blows. They
turn tail on the first encounter with the Volscians.
" Marcius, All the contagion of the south light on you,
You shames of Rome ! You herd of— Boils and plagues
Plaster you o'er ! that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infest another
Against the wind a mile ! You souls of geese,
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat ! Pluto and hell !
All hurt behind ; backs red and faces pale
With flight and agu'd fear ! " (Act i. sc. 4).
By dint of threatening to draw his sword upon the runaways,
he succeeds in driving them back to the attack, compels the
enemy to retreat, and forces himself single-handed, like a demi
god or very god of war, through the gates of the town, which
close upon him before his comrades can follow. When he comes
forth again, bleeding, and the town is taken, his wrath thunders
CORIOLANUS AND THE PEOPLE 241
afresh on finding that the only idea of the soldiery is to secure
as much booty as possible :
" See here these movers, that do prize their hours
At a crack'd drachm ! Cushions, leaden spoons,
Irons of a doit, doublets that hangmen would
Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves,
Ere yet the fight be done, pack up : — Down with them ! "
As far as Coriolanus is concerned the popular party is simply
the body of those who " cannot rule nor ever will be ruled" (Act
iii. sc. i). The majority of nobles are too weak to venture to
oppose the people's tribunes as they should, but Coriolanus,
perceiving the danger of allowing these men to gain influence in
the government of the city, courageously, if imprudently, braves
their hatred in order to thwart and repress them (Act iii. sc. i).
"First Senator. No more words, we beseech you.
Coriolanus. How ! no more ?
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay, against those measels,
Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them."
He further asserts that the people had not deserved the
recent distribution of corn, for they had attempted to evade the
summons to arms, and during the war they chiefly displayed
their courage in mutinying. They had brought groundless
accusations against the senate, and it was contemptible to allow
them, out of fear of their numbers, any share in the government.
His last words upon the subject are :
" . . . This double worship,
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason ; where gentry, title, wisdom,
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance, — it must omit
Real necessities, and give way the while
To unstable slightness : purpose so barr'd it follows,
Nothing is done to purpose. ..."
So, in Troilus and Cressida, would Ulysses, who represents
all that is truly wise in statesmanship, have spoken. There is no
VOL. II. Q
242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
humane consideration for the oppressed condition of the poor, no
just recognition of the right of those who bear the burden to
have a voice in its distribution. That Shakespeare held the same
political views as Coriolanus is amply shown by the fact that
the most dissimilar characters approve of them in every par
ticular, excepting only the violent and defiant manner in which
they are expressed. Menenius' description of the tribunes of the
people is not a whit less scathing than that of Marcius.
"Our very priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter
such ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto
the purpose, it is not worth the wagging of your beards ; and
your beards deserve not so honourable a grave as to stuff a
butcher's cushion, or to be entombed in an ass's pack-saddle.
Yet you must be saying, Marcius is proud, who, in a cheap esti
mation, is worth all your predecessors since Deucalion " (Act ii.
sc. i).
When Coriolanus's freedom of speech has procured his banish
ment, Menenius exclaims in admiration (Act iii. sc. i):
" His nature is too noble for this world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for 's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth."
Thus he is exiled for his virtues, not for his failings, and at heart
they all agree with Menenius. When Coriolanus has gone over
to the enemy, and their one anxiety is to appease his wrath,
Cominius expresses the same view of the culpability of people
and tribunes towards him (Act iv. sc. 4) :
"Who shall ask it?
The tribunes cannot do 't for shame ; the people
Deserve such pity of him as the wolf
Does of the shepherd."
Even the voice of one of the two serving-men of the Capitol exalts
Coriolanus and justifies his scorn for the love or hatred of the
people, the ignorant, bewildered masses —
"... So that, if they love, they know not why, they hate upon no
better a ground : therefore for Coriolanus neither to care whether they
love or hate him manifests the true knowledge he has of their dis
positions ; and out of his noble carelessness lets them plainly see 't "
(Act ii. sc. 2).
CORIOLANUS AND THE PEOPLE 243
This is almost too well expressed for a servant ; we perceive that
the poet has taken no particular pains to disguise his own voice.
The same man tells how well Coriolanus has deserved of his
country ; he did not rise, as some do, by standing hat in hand
and bowing himself into favour with the people :
"... But he hath so planted his honours in their eyes and his
actions in their hearts, that for their tongues to be silent and not con
fess so much were a kind of ungrateful injury; to report otherwise
were a malice, that giving itself to lie, would pluck reproof and rebuke
from every ear that heard it."
This uncultured mind bears the same testimony as that of the
most refined and intelligent patricians to the greatness of the hero.
It is not difficult, I think, to follow the mental processes from
which this work evolved. When Shakespeare came to reflect on
what had constituted his chief gladness here on earth and made
his melancholy life endurable to him, he found that his one lasting,
if not too freely flowing, source of pleasure had been the friend
ship and appreciation of one or two noble and nobly-minded
gentlemen.
For the people he felt nothing but scorn, and he was now,
more than ever, incapable of seeing them as an aggregation of
separate individualities, they were merged in the brutality which
distinguished them in the mass. Humanity in general was to him
not millions of individuals, but a few great entities amidst millions
of non-entities. He saw more and more clearly that the existence
of these few illustrious men was all that made life worth living,
and the belief gave impetus to that hero-worship which had been
characteristic of his early youth. Formerly, however, this wor
ship had lacked its present polemical quality. The fact that
Coriolanus was a great warrior made no particular impression on
Shakespeare at this period; it was quite incidental, and he in
cluded it simply because he must. It was not the soldier that he
wished to glorify but the demigod. His present impression of
the circumstances and conditions of life is this : there must of
necessity be formed around the solitary great ones of this earth a
conspiracy of envy and hatred raised by the small and mean. As
Coriolanus says, "Who deserves greatness, deserves your hate."
Owing to this turn of thought, Shakespeare found fewer
heroes to worship ; but his worship became the more intense,
244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and appears in this play in greater force than ever before. The
patricians, who have a proper understanding of his merit, regard
Coriolanus with a species of lover-like enthusiasm, a sort of
adoration. When Marcius's mother tells Menenius that she has
had a letter from her son, and adds, "And I think there's one at
home for you," Menenius cries :
\
" I will make my very house reel to-night : a letter for me !
" Virgilia. Yes, certain, there's a letter for you ; I saw't.
"Menenius. A letter for me ! It gives me an estate of seven years'
health ; in which time I will make a lip at the physician : the most
sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic, and, to this preserva
tive, of no better report than a horse-drench" (Act ii. sc. i).
So speaks his friend ; we will now listen to his bitterest enemy,
Aufidius, the man whom he has defeated and humiliated in battle
after battle, who hates him, and vows that neither temple nor prayer
of priest, nor any of those things which usually restrain a man's
wrath, shall prevail to soften him. He has sworn that wherever
he may find his enemy, be it even on his own hearth, he will
wash his hands in his heart's blood. But when Marcius forsakes
Rome, and repairing to the Volscians, actually seeks Aufidius in
his own home, upon his own hearth, we hear only the admiration
and genuine enthusiasm which the sound of his voice and the
mere majesty of his presence calls forth in the adversary who
would gladly hate him, and still more gladly despise him if he
could.
" O Marcius, Marcius !
Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart
A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter
Should from yond cloud speak divine things,
And say ' 'Tis true,' I'd not believe them more
Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,
And scarred the moon with splinters : here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love,
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married ; never man
SHAKESPEARE'S POSITION 245
Sighed truer breath ; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing ! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold " (Act iv. sc. 5).
We have, then, in this play an almost wildly enthusiastic
hero-worship upon a background of equally unqualified contempt
for the populace. It is something different, however, from the
humble devotion of his younger days to alien greatness (as in
Henry V.), and is founded rather on an overpowering and defiant
consciousness of his own worth and superiority.
The reader must recall the fact that his contemporaries looked
upon Shakespeare not so much as a poet who earned his living
as an actor, but as an actor who occasionally wrote plays. We
must also remember that the profession of an actor was but
lightly esteemed in those days, and the work of a dramatist was
considered as a kind of inferior poetry, which scarcely ranked as
literature. Probably most of Shakespeare's intimates considered
his small narrative poems — his Venus and Adonis, his Lucretia,
&c. — his real claim to notoriety, and they would regret that for
the sake of money he had joined the ranks of the thousand and
one dramatic writers. We are told in the dedication of Histrio
Mastix (1634), that the playwrights of the day took no trouble
with what they wrote, but covetously pillaged from old and new
sources, "chronicles, legends, and romances."
Shakespeare did not even publish his own plays, but submitted
to their appropriation by grasping booksellers, who published them
with such a mutilation of the text, that it must have been a perfect
terror to him to look at them. This mishandling of his plays would
be so obnoxious to him, that it was not likely he would care to
possess any copies. He was in much the same position in this
respect as the modern author, who, unprotected by any law of
international copyright, sees his works mangled and mutilated in
foreign languages.
He would doubtless enjoy a certain amount of popularity, but
he remained to the last an actor among actors (not even then in
the first rank with Burbage) and a poet among poets. Never
once did it occur to any of his contemporaries that he stood
alone, and that all the others taken together were as nothing in
comparison with him.
246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He lived and died one of the many.
That his spirit rose in silent but passionate rebellion against
this judgment is obvious. Were there moments in which he
clearly felt and keenly recognised his greatness ? It must have
been so, and these moments had grown more frequent of late.
Were there also times when he said to himself, " Five hundred, a
thousand years hence, my name will still be known to mankind
and my plays read "? We cannot say ; it hardly seems probable,
or he would surely have contended for the right to publish his
own works. We cannot doubt that he believed himself worthy
at this time of such lasting fame, but he had, as we can well
understand, no faith at all that future generations would see
more clearly, judge more truly, and appraise more justly than
his contemporaries. He had no idea of historical evolution,
his belief was * rather that the culture of his native country
was rapidly declining. He had watched the growth of narrow-
minded prejudice, had seen the triumphant progress of that
pious stupidity which condemned his art as a wile of the devil ;
and his detestation of the mass of men, past, present, and to
come, made him equally indifferent to their praise or blame.
Therefore it pleased him to express this indifference through the
medium of Coriolanus, the man who turns his back upon the
senate when it eulogises him, and of whom Plutarch tells us that
the one thing for which he valued his fame was the pleasure it
gave his mother. Yet Shakespeare makes him say (Act i. sc. 9):
" My mother,
Who has a charter to extol her blood,
When she does praise me grieves me."
Shakespeare has now broken with the judgments of mankind.
He dwells on the cold heights above the snow-line, beyond human
praise or blame, beyond the joys of fame and the perils of
celebrity, breathing that keen atmosphere of indifference in which
the soul hovers, upheld by scorn.
Some few on this earth are men, the rest are spaivn, as Mene-
nius calls them ; and so Shakespeare sympathises with Coriolanus
and honours him, endowing him with Cordelia's hatred of unworthy
flattery, even placing her very words in his mouth (Act ii. sc. 2) :
" But your people
I love them as they weigh."
SHAKESPEARE AND CORIOLANUS 247
Therefore it is he equips his hero with the same stern devotion
to truth with which, later in the century, Moliere endows his
Alceste, but, instead of in the semi-farcical, it is in the wholly
heroic manner (Act iii. sc. 3) :
" Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day. I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word."
We see Shakespeare's whole soul with Coriolanus when he can
not bring himself to ^ask the Consulate of the people in requital
of his services. Let them freely give him his reward, but that he
should have to ask for it — torture !
When his friends insist upon his conforming to custom and
appearing in person as applicant, Shakespeare, who has hitherto
followed Plutarch step by step, here diverges, in order to repre
sent this step as being excessively disagreeable to Marcius.
According to the Greek historian, Coriolanus at once proceeds
with a splendid retinue to the Forum, and there displays the
wounds he has received in the recent wars; but Shakespeare's
hero cannot bring himself to boast of his exploits to the people,
nor to appeal to their admiration and compassion by making an
exhibition of his wounds :
" I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them,
For my wounds' sake, to give their suffrage : please you
That I may pass this doing " (Act ii. sc. 2).
He finally yields, but has hardly set foot in the Forum before
he begins to curse at the position in which he has placed him
self:
"What must I say?
' 1 pray, sir ' — Plague upon't ! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace : — ' Look, sir, my wounds !
I got them in my country's service when
Some certain of your brethren roared and ran
From the noise of our own drums ' " (Act ii. sc. 3).
He makes an effort to control himself, and, turning brusquely
to the nearest bystanders, he addresses them with ill-concealed
248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
irony. On being asked what has induced him to stand for the
Consulate, he hastily and rashly replies :
" Mine own desert.
" Second Citizen. Your own desert !
" Coriolanus. Ay, but not mine own desire.
" Third Citizen. How not your own desire ?
" Coriolanus. No, sir, 'twas never my desire to trouble the poor with
begging."
Having secured a few votes in this remarkably tactless
manner, he exclaims :
" Most sweet voices !
Better to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve."
When the intrigues of the tribunes succeed in inducing the
people to revoke his election, he so far forgets himself in his fury
at the insult that they are enabled to pronounce sentence of
banishment against him. He then bursts into an outbreak of
taunts and threats: "You common cry of curs! I banish you!"
— which recalls how some thousand years later another chosen
of the people and subsequent object of democratic jealousy, Gam-
betta, thundered at the noisy assembly at Belleville : " Cowardly
brood ! I will follow you up into your very dens."
The nature of the material and the whole conception of the
play required that the pride of Coriolanus should occasionally be
expressed with repellant arrogance. But we feel, through all the
intentional artistic exaggeration of the hero's self-esteem, how
there arose in Shakespeare's own soul, from the depth of his
stormy contempt for humanity, a pride immeasurably pure and
steadfast.
XII
CORIOLANUS AS A DRAMA
THE tragedy of Coriolanus is constructed strictly according
to rule ; the plot is simple and powerful, and is developed, with
steadily increasing interest, to a logical climax. With the excep
tion of Othello ) Shakespeare has never treated his material in a
more simply intelligible fashion. It is the tragedy of an inviol
ably truthful personality in a world of small-minded folk; the
tragedy of the punishment a reckless egoism incurs when it is
betrayed into setting its own pride above duty to state and
fatherland.
Shakespeare's aristocratic sympathies did not blind him to
Coriolanus' unjustifiable crime and its inevitable consequences.
Infuriated by his banishment, the great soldier goes over to the
enemies of Rome and leads the Volscian army against his native
city, plundering and terrifying as he goes. He spurns the
humble entreaties of his friends, and only yields to the women
of the city when, led by his mother and his wife, they come to
implore mercy and peace.
Coriolanus' fierce outburst when the name of traitor is flung
at him proves that Shakespeare did not look upon treason as a
pardonable crime :
" The fires of the lowest hell fold in your people !
Call me their traitor ! — Thou injurious tribune !
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutched as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say
1 Thou liest,' unto thee, with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods " (Act iii. sc. 3).
Immediately after this his outraged pride leads him to commit
the very crime he has so wrathfully disclaimed. No considera
tion for his country or fellow-citizens can restrain him. The
249
250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
forces which arrest his vengeance are the mother he has wor
shipped all his life and the wife he tenderly loves. He knows
that it is himself he is offering up when he sacrifices his rancour
on the altar of his family. The Volscians will never forgive him
for delivering up their triumph to Rome after he had practically
delivered up Rome to them. And so he perishes, finally over
taken by Aufidius' long-accumulated jealousy acting through the
disappointed rage of the Volscians. In Plutarch Shakespeare
found his plot and the chief characters of his play ready to hand.
He added the individuality of the tribunes and of Menenius (with
the exception of the parable of the belly). Virgilia, who is little
more than a name in the original, Shakespeare has transformed
by one of his own wonderful touches into a woman whose chief
charm lies in the quiet gentleness of her nature. " My gracious
silence, hail!" thus Marcius greets her (Act ii. sc. i), and she
is exhaustively defined in the exclamation. Her principal utter
ances, as well as Volumnia's most important speeches, are mere
versifications of Plutarch's prose, and this is why these women
have so much genuinely Roman blood in their veins. Volumnia
is the true Roman matron of the days of the Republic. Shake
speare has wrought her character with special care, and her rich
and powerful personality is not without its darker side. Her
kinship with her son is perceptible in all her ways and words.
She is more prone, as a woman, to employ, or at least approve
of, dissimulation, but her nature is not a whit less defiantly
haughty. Her first thought may be Jesuitical ; her second is
always violent :
" Vol. Oh, sir, sir, sir,
I would have had you put your power well on,
Before you had worn it out.
Cor. Let go.
Vol. You might have been enough the man you are,
With striving less to be so : lesser had been
The thwartings of your dispositions, //
You had not showed them how ye were disposed
Ere they lacked power to cross you.
Cor. Let them hang.
Vol. Ay, and burn too" (Act iii. sc. 2).
When matters come to a climax, she shows no more discretion
in her treatment of the tribunes than did her son, but displays
VOLUMNIA 251
precisely the same power of vituperation. On reading her
speeches we realise the satisfaction and relief it was to Shake
speare to vent himself in furious invectives through the medium
of his dramatic creations :
" Vol. . . . Hadst thou foxship
To banish him that struck more blows for Rome
Than thou hast spoken words ?
Sic. O blessed heavens !
Vol. More noble blows, than ever thou wise words ;
And for Rome's good. I'll tell thee what ; yet go :
Nay, but thou shalt stay too : I would my son
Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him,
His good sword in his hand " (Act iv. sc. 2).
A comparison between Volumnia's final appeal to her son
in the last act and the speech as it is given in Plutarch is of
the greatest interest. Shakespeare has followed his author step
by step, but has enriched him by the addition of the most
artlessly human touches :
" There's no man in the world
More bound to's mother ; yet here he lets me prate
Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life
Showed thy dear mother any courtesy ;
When she, (poor hen !) fond of no second brood,
Has clucked thee to the wars and safely home,
Loaden with honour " (Act v. sc. 3).
How the stern, soldierly bearing of the woman is softened
by these touches with which Shakespeare has embellished her
portrait !
The diction both here and throughout the play is that of
Shakespeare's most matured period ; but never before had he
used bolder similes, shown more independence in his method of
expression, nor condensed so much thought and feeling into so
few lines. We have already drawn attention to the masterly
handling of his material — a handling, however, which by no
means precludes the intrusion of several extravagances, some
heroic, some simply childish.
The hero's bodily strength and courage, for example, are
strained to the mythical. He forces his way single-handed into
a hostile town, holds his own there against a whole army, and
finally makes good his retreat, wounded but not subdued. Even
252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Bible tradition, in which divine aid comes to the rescue, cannot
furnish forth such deeds. Neither Samson's escape from Gaza
(Judges xvi.) nor David's from Keilah (i Sam. xxiii.) can compare
with this amazing exploit.
Equally unlikely is the foolishly defiant and arrogant attitude
assumed by the senate, and more especially by Coriolanus,
towards the plebeian party. Upon what do the nobles rely to
support them in such an attitude ? They have already been com
pelled to yield the political power of tribuneship, and it never
even occurred to them to defy the sentence of banishment pro
nounced by these same tribunes. How comes it then that they
seize every opportunity to taunt and scorn ? How is it that
these patricians, who have spoken so many brave words, make
so poor a show of resistance when the Volscians are at their
gates ? They are so steeped in party spirit that their first
thought, when defeat comes upon them, is to rejoice in the con
fusion and discomfiture the plebeians have brought upon them
selves, and finally, abandoning all self-respect, they crawl to the
feet of their exasperated conqueror.
The confusion of Shakespeare's authority in this part of the
story would account for much.1 According to Plutarch, Corio
lanus, in the course of his victorious march from one Latin town
to another, plunders the plebeians, but spares the patricians.
A sudden change of public opinion occurs in Rome during his
siege of Lavinium, and the popular party desires to recall Corio
lanus, but the senate refuses — why, we are not told. The enemy
is close upon them before a parley is agreed upon. Coriolanus
offers easy terms, the admission of the Volscians to the Latin
Federation being the chief stipulation. Despite the general feeling
of discouragement in Rome, the senate answers haughtily that
Romans will never yield to fear, and the Volscians must first lay
down their arms if they desire to obtain a " favour." Directly
after this defiance they make the most abject submission, and
send their women as suppliants to the hostile camp.
While Shakespeare's Coriolanus has none of this consideration
for his former friends, his patricians are as cowardly and incap
able as the historian's. Cominius, Titus Lartius, and the others,
who are originally represented as valiant men, make a very poor
1 The matter is interestingly discussed in Kreyssig's instructive and sympathetic
work : Vorlesungen iiber Shakespeare, 1859, vol. ii. p. no.
INCONSISTENCIES IN CORIOLANUS 253
show at the end. Several, in short, of Plutarch's abundant con
tradictions have found their way into Shakespeare's play ; they
mark the beginning of a certain inconsequence which hencefor
ward betrays itself in his work. From this point onwards his
plays are no longer as highly finished as formerly.
I am not alluding here to the inconsistencies of his hero, for
they only serve to give life and truth to his character, and the
poet either represented them unconsciously, or was too ingenuous
to avoid them ; witness the reflection made by Coriolanus at the
very moment of his rebellious disinclination to ask the suffrages
of the people :
" Custom calls me to't ;
What custom wills, in all things should we do't,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o'er-peer " (Act ii. sc. 3).
Coriolanus is utterly unconscious that this speech of his
strikes at the very root of that ultra-conservatism which he
affects. The very thing he has refused to understand is, that
if we invariably followed custom, the follies of the past would
never be swept away, nor the rocks which hinder our progress
burst asunder. To Coriolanus, what is customary is right, and
he never realises the fact that his disdain for the tribunes and
people has led him into a politically untenable position. We are
by no means sure that Shakespeare's perceptions in this case were
any keener than his hero's ; but, consciously or unconsciously, it
is this very inconsistency in Coriolanus' character which makes
it so vividly lifelike.
Troilus and Cressida overflowed with contempt for the femi
nine sex as such, for love as a comical or pitiable sensuality,
for mock heroics and sham military glory. Coriolanus is brim
ful of scorn for the masses ; for the stupidity, fickleness, and
cowardice of the ignorant, slavish souls, and for the baseness of
their leaders.
But the passionate disdain possessing Shakespeare's soul is
destined to a stronger and wilder outburst in the work he next
takes in hand. The outbreak in Timon is against no one sex, no
one caste, no one nation or fraction of humanity ; it is the result
of an overwhelming contempt, which excepts nothing and no one,
but embraces the whole human race.
XIII
TIM ON OF ATHENS— HATRED OF MANKIND
TlMON OF ATHENS has come down to us in a pitiable condition.
The text is in a terrible state, and there are, not only between
one scene and another, but between one page and another, such
radical differences in the style and general spirit of the play as to
preclude the possibility of its having been the work of one man.
The threads of the story are often entirely disconnected, and
circumstances occur (or are referred to) for which we were in no
way prepared. The best part of the versification is distinctly
Shakespearian, and contains all that wealth of thought which
was characteristic of this period of his life; but the other parts
are careless, discordant, and desperately monotonous. The prose
dialogue especially jars, thrust as it is, with its long-winded
straining after effect, into scenes which are otherwise compact
and vigorous.
All Shakespeare students of the present day concur in the
opinion that Timon of Athens, like Pericles, is but a great frag
ment from the master-hand.
The Lyfe of Timon of Athens was printed for the first time
in the old folio edition of 1623. Careful examination shows us
that the first pages of the play of Timon (which is inserted
between Romeo and Juliet and Julius Ccesar) are numbered 80,
8l, 82, 8 1, instead of 78, 79, 80, 81, and end at page 98. The
names of the actors, for which in no other case is more than the
necessary space allowed, here occupy the whole of page 99, and
page IOO is left blank. Julius Cczsar begins upon the next page,
which is numbered 109. Fleay noticed that Troilus and Cressida,
which, as we remarked, is unnumbered, would exactly fill the
pages 78 to 1 08. By some error, which furnishes us with an
other hint, the second and third pages of this play are numbered
79 and 80, Obviously it was the publisher's original intention to
354
SOURCES OF "TIMON OF ATHENS" 255
include Troilus and Cressida among the tragedies. On its being
subsequently observed that there was nothing really tragic about
the play, they cast about, since Julius Ccesar was already printed,
for another tragedy which would as nearly as possible fill the
vacant space.
Shakespeare found the material for Timon of Athens in the
course of his reading for Antony and Cleopatra. There is, in
Plutarch's " Life of Antony," a brief sketch of Timon and his mis
anthropy, his relations with Alcibiades and the Cynic Apemantus,
the anecdote of the fig-tree, and the two epitaphs. The subject
evidently attracted Shakespeare by its harmony with his own
distraught and excited frame of mind at the time. He was
soon absorbed in it, and in some form or another he made
acquaintance with Lucian's hitherto untranslated dialogue
Timon, which contained many incidents giving fulness to the
story, and from which he appropriated the discovery of the
treasure, the consequent return of the parasitic friends, and
Timon's scornful treatment of them.
Shakespeare probably found these details in some old play
on the same subject. Dyce published, in 1842, an old drama on
Timon which had been found in manuscript, and was judged by
Steevens to date from 1600, or thereabouts. It seems to have
been written for some academic circle, and in it we find the
faithful steward and the farewell banquet with which the third
act closes. In the older drama, instead of warm water, Timon
throws stones, painted to resemble artichokes, at his guests.
Some trace of these stones may be found in these lines in
Shakespeare's play :
" Second Lord. Lord Timon's mad.
Third Lord. I feel't upon my bones.
Fourth Lord. One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones."
In the old play, when Timon finds the gold, and his faithless
mistress and friends flock around him once more, he repulses
them, crying :
" Why vexe yee me, yee Furies ? I protest,
and all the Gods to witnesse invocate,
I doe abhorre the titles of a friende,
of father, or companion. I curse
the aire yee breathe, I lothe to breathe that air."
256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He nai'vely intimates a change of mind in the epilogue :
" I now am left alone : this rascall route
hath left my side. What's this ? I feele through out
a sodeine change : my fury doth abate,
my hearte grows milde and lays aside its hate ; "
and concludes with a still more ingenuous appeal for applause :
" Let loving hands, loude sounding in the ayre,
cause Timon to the citty to repaire."
We have no proof that Shakespeare was acquainted with this
particular work. He probably used some other contemporary
play, belonging to the theatre, which had proved a failure in its
original form, and which both his company and his own inclina
tions urged him to thoroughly recast. It was not so entirely
rewritten, however, that we can look upon the play as actually
the work of Shakespeare — there are too many traces of another
and a feebler hand ; but the vital, lyrical, powerful pathos is his,
and his alone.
There are two theories on this subject. Fleay, in his well-
known and thorough investigation of the matter, endeavours to
prove that the original scheme was Shakespeare's, but that some
inferior hand amplified it for acting purposes. Fleay selected all
the indubitably Shakespearian portions, and had them printed as
a separate play, contending that it not only included all that was
of any value (which will scarcely be disputed), but that, on the
score of intelligibility, none of the rejected speeches were needed.1
Swinburne, who scarcely ever agrees with Fleay, also shares the
belief that Shakespeare used no ready-made groundwork for his
play. His first opinion was that Timon of Athens was inter
rupted by Shakespeare's premature death, but later he inclined
to the theory that, after working upon it for some time, the poet
laid it aside as being little suited to dramatic treatment. Swin
burne does not undervalue the work done by Shakespeare on that
account, but remarks, on the contrary, that, had Juvenal been
gifted with the inspiration of ^Eschylus, he might have written
just such another tragedy as the fourth act of the drama.2
The theory that Shakespeare made use of a finished play
1 New Shakespeare Society's Transactions, 1874, pp. 130-194.
2 Swinburne: A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 212-215.
SHAKESPEARE'S PART IN "T1MON OF ATHENS" 257
which he only partially rewrote, leaving the rest in its clumsy
imperfection, was originally propounded by the English critics
Sympson and Knight. It was first attacked and afterwards
eagerly supported by Delius, who gives the reasons for his
change of opinion at great length.1 H. A. Evans, the commen
tator of the Irving edition, also shares this latter view. There
is no dispute between the two parties concerning the portions
written by Shakespeare ; the contention is simply this : Did
Shakespeare remodel another man's play, or did another man
complete his ?
As Fleay's attempt to construct a connected and intelligible
play from the Shakespearian fragments failed, because a great
part of the weak and spurious matter is absolutely necessary to
the coherence of the whole, it certainly seems more reasonable
to accept Shakespeare as the reviser. Some of the English critics
incline to the opinion that the inferior scenes were the work of
the contemporary poets George Wilkins and John Day.
After a lapse of nearly 300 years it is impossible to give any
decided opinion on the matter, more especially for a critic whose
mother tongue is not English. In these days of occultism and
spiritualism the simplest way out of the difficulty would be for
some of those favoured individuals, who hold communion with
the other world by means of small tables and pencils, to induce
Shakespeare himself to settle the matter once for all. Meanwhile
we must be content with probabilities. To those who only know
the work through translations, or to those who, like Gervinus and
Kreyssig, the German critics, have not devoted sufficient atten
tion to the language, the necessity of assuming a second writer
may not be so obvious. It is not impossible, of course, that the
feeble, prosy, and longwinded parts were written by Shakespeare,
roughly sketched in such a fit of despondency and utter indiffer
ence to detail that he could not force himself to revise, re-write,
and condense ; but the possibility is an exceedingly remote one.
We know how finely Shakespeare generally constructed his plays,
even in the first rough draft.
The drama, as it stands, presents the picture of a thought
lessly and extravagantly open-handed nature, whose one unfailing
pleasure is to give. King Lear only gave away his possessions
once, and then in his old age and to his daughters ; but Timon
1 Jar buck der deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft, iii. pp. 334~36l-
VOL. II. R
258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
daily bestows money and jewels upon all and sundry. At the
opening of the play he is, without appearing to be personally
luxurious, living in the midst of all the voluptuousness with
which a Maecenas, in the gayest of all the world's gay capitals,
could surround himself. Artists and merchants flock round the
generous patron who pays them more than they ask. A chorus
of sycophants sing his praises day and night. It is but natural
that, under those circumstances, a carelessly good-natured tempera
ment should look upon society as a circle for the exchange of
friendly services, which it is equally honourable to render or
receive.
He pays no heed to the faithful steward who warns him that
this life cannot last. He no more disturbs himself about the
melting of his money from his coffers than if he were living in
a communistic society with the general wealth at his disposal.
At last the tide of fortune turns. His coffers are empty ; the
steward is no longer able to find him money to fling away, and
Timon must go a borrowing in his turn. Almost before the
report of his ruin has had time to spread, bills come pouring in,
and his impatient creditors, yesterday his comrades, send mes
sengers for their money. All his requests for a loan are refused
by his former friends — one on the ground of his own poverty,
while another professes to be offended because he was not applied
to in the first instance, and a third will not even lend a portion of
the large sums Timon has but lately lavished upon him.
Timon has hitherto been one of fortune's favourites, but now
the true nature of the world is suddenly revealed to him, as it
was to Hamlet and King Lear. Like theirs, but far more harshly
and bitterly, his former confiding simplicity is replaced by frantic
pessimism. Wishing to show his false friends all the contempt
he feels for them, Timon invites them to a final banquet, and they,
supposing that he has recovered his wealth, attend with excuses
on their lips for their recent behaviour. The table is sumptuously
spread, but the covered dishes contain only warm water, which
Timon disdainfully flings in the faces of his guests.
He cuts himself adrift from all intercourse with mankind, and
retreats to the woods to lead the solitary life of a Stoic. The
half-jesting retirement of Jaques in As You Like It, and his
dismissal of all who trouble his solitude, are here carried out in
grim earnest.
TIMON AND CORIOLANUS 259
It is not for long that he remains poor, for he has hardly
begun to dig for the roots on which he lives than he finds
treasure buried in the earth. Unlike Lucian's misanthrope,
who rejoices in the possession of gold as a means of securing
a life free from care, Shakespeare's Timon sickens at the sight
of his wealth. Neither does he care for the honourable amends
made by his countrymen. We learn it so late in the day that
we can scarcely believe that Timon was formerly a skilful general,
who had done good service to his country. This feature is taken
from Lucian, and the character of the luxurious Maecenas would
have gained in interest and nobility if this trait had been im
pressed upon us earlier in the play. The senate, meanwhile,
being threatened with war, offers Timon the sole command.
He proudly rejects the overtures made by these misers and
usurers in purple, and even remains unsoftened by the faithful
devotion of his steward. He anathematises every one and all
things, and returns to his cave to die by his own hand.
The non-Shakespearian elements of the play do not prevent his
genius and master-hand from pervading the whole, and it is easy
to see how this work grew out of the one immediately preceding
it, to trace the connecting links between the two plays.
When Coriolanus is exasperated by the ingratitude of the
plebeians, he joins the enemies of his country and people, and
becomes the assailant of his native city. When Timon falls a
victim to the thanklessness of those he has loaded with benefits,
his hatred embraces the whole human race. The contrast is
very suggestive. The despair of Coriolanus is of an active kind,
driving him to deeds and placing him at the head of an army.
Timon's is of the passive sort : he merely curses and shuns
mankind. It is not until the discovery of the treasure determines
him to use his wealth in spreading corruption and misery that
his hatred takes a semi-practical form. This contrast was not an
element of the drama until Shakespeare made it so.
The whole conduct of his Alcibiades forms a complete parallel
to that of Coriolanus, and here again the connection between the
two plays is obvious. Shakespeare found a brief account of the
mutual relations of Timon and Alcibiades in North's translation
of Plutarch's "Life of Antony," together with a description of
Timon's good-will towards the general on account of the cala
mities that he foresaw he would bring upon the Athenians. The
260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
name of Alcibiades would not recall to Shakespeare, as it does to
us, the most glorious period of Greek culture, and such names
as Pericles, Aristophanes, and Plato — he generally gives Latin
names to his Greeks, such as Lucius, Flavius, Servilius, &c. ;
nor did it represent to him the unrivalled subtlety, charm, insta
bility, and reckless extravagance of the man. He would read
Plutarch's comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, in which the
Greek and Roman generals are considered homogeneous, and for
Shakespeare Alcibiades was merely the soldier and commander ;
on that account he let him occupy much the same relation to
Timon that Fortinbras did to Hamlet.
Where Timon merely hates, Alcibiades seizes his weapons;
and when Timon curses indiscriminately, Alcibiades punishes
severely but deliberately. He does not tear down the city walls
and put every tenth citizen to the sword, as he is invited to do ;
he only seeks vengeance on his personal enemies and those whom
he considers guilty. But Timon, like Hamlet, generalises his
bitter experiences, and loathes everything that bears the form or
name of man. When Athens sends to entreat him to take the
command and save the city from the violence of Alcibiades, he is
harder and colder, and a hundred times more bitterly relentless,
than Coriolanus, who, after all, could bow to entreaty, or than
Alcibiades, who is satisfied with a strictly limited vengeance.
Timon's loathing of life and hatred of humanity is consistent
throughout.
Like Coriolanus^ this play was undoubtedly written in a frame
of mind which prompted Shakespeare less to abandon himself to
the waves of imagination than to dwell upon the worthlessness
of mankind, and the scornful branding of the contemptible.
There is even less inventiveness here than in Coriolanus: the
plot is not only simple, it is scanty — more appropriate to a
parable or didactic poem than a drama. Most of the charac
ters are merely abstractly representative of their class or pro
fession, e.g. the Poet, the Painter, the servants, the false friends,
the flatterers, the creditors and mistresses. They are simply
employed to give prominence to the principal figure, or rather, to
a great lyrical outburst of bitterness, scorn, and execration.
In the poet's description of his work in the first scene of the
play, Shakespeare has indicated his point of view with unusual
precision :
SHAKESPEARE'S PURPOSE 261
" I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man
Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug
With amplest entertainment. . . .
. . . His large fortune,
Upon his good and gracious nature hanging,
Subdues and properties to his love and tendance
All sorts of hearts."
He unfolds an allegory in which Fortune is represented as
enthroned upon a high and pleasant hill, from whose base all
kinds of people are struggling upwards to better their condition :
" Amongst them all
Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fixed,
One do I personate of lord Timon's fame,
Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her ;
Whose present grace to present slaves and servants
Translates his rivals."
The Painter justly observes that the allegory of the hill and
the enthroned Fortune could be equally well expressed in a
picture as a poem, but the Poet continues :
" When Fortune, in her shift and change of mood,
Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,
Which laboured after him to the mountain's top,
Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down,
Not one accompanying his declining foot."
Shakespeare has defined his purpose here as clearly as did
Daudet, some hundreds of years later, in the first chapter of his
Sappho, in which the whole course of the story is symbolised in
the ever-increasing difficulty with which the hero mounts the
stairs, carrying the heroine to the highest story of the house in
which he lives. The bitterness of Shakespeare's mood is shown
in the distinct indication that the Poet and the Painter, rogues
and toadies as they are, stand in the first ranks of their profes
sions, and cannot, therefore, claim the excuse of poverty. It is
significant of the dramatist's low opinion of his fellow-craftsmen
— not one of them is mentioned in his will — that he should make
his Poet most eloquent in condemnation of his own peculiar
faults. Hence Timon's ejaculation in the last act :
" Must thou needs stand for a villain in thine own work
Wilt thou whip thine own faults in other men ? "
262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In Timon, as in Coriolanus, Shakespeare put his own thoughts
and feelings into the mouths of the various characters of the
play. Falseness and ingratitude are the subjects of the most
frequent allusion. They were uppermost in the poet's mind at
the time, and the changes are rung upon these vices by the
Epicurean and the Cynic, by servants and strangers, before and
after the climax. Even the fickle Poet serves, as we have seen,
as spokesman for the all-prevailing idea; and the Painter, who
is every whit as worthless, says with droll irony (Act v. sc. i) :
" Promising is the very air o' the time : it opens the eyes of expec
tation : performance is ever the duller for his act ; and, but in the
plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of
use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable : performance is a
kind of will or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judg
ment that makes it."
If there was one thing Shakespeare loathed above another, it
was the lifeless ceremony which disguises hollowness and fraud.
Early in the play (Act i. sc. 2) Timon says to his guests :
" Nay, my lords,
Ceremony was but devised at first
To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown ;
But where there is true friendship, there needs none."
Although Apemantus is the converse of Timon at every point —
coarse where he is refined, mean where he is generous, and base
where he is noble — yet in his first monologue the Cynic also
strikes the keynote of the piece (Act i. sc. 2) :
" We make ourselves fools, to disport ourselves ;
And spend our flatteries, to drink those men
Upon whose age we void it up again,
With poisonous spite and envy.
Who lives, that's not depraved or depraves ?
Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves
Of their friend's gift?"
The first stranger says in a speech, whose monotony betrays
the fact that it was not entirely Shakespeare's although he has
retouched it in several places (notably the italicised lines) :
" Who can call him
His friend that dips in the same dish? for, in
THE NON-SHAKESPEARIAN ELEMENTS 263
My knowing, Timon hath been this lord's father,
And kept his credit with his purse ;
Supported his estate ; nay, Timon's money
Has paid his men their wages : he nder drinks,
But Timon's silver treads upon his lip ;
And yet, (oh, see the monstrousness of man
When he looks out in an ungrateful shape !)
He does deny him in respect of his,
What charitable men afford to beggars " (Act iii. sc. 2).
Finally, like the serving-man in the Capitol, who expresses
his approval of Coriolanus' self-conceit, Timon's servant, when
his application for a loan is refused, says :
" The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic ; he
crossed himself by 't : and I cannot think but, in the end, the villainies
of men will set him clear. How fairly this lord strives to appear foul !
takes virtuous copies to be wicked ; like those that, under hot, ardent
zeal, would set whole realms on fire"
This direct, unmistakable attack upon Puritanism has a re
markable effect coming from the lips of a Grecian servant, and
we may gather from it some idea of the general aim of all these
outbursts against hypocrisy.
We must now, with a view to defining the non-Shakespearian
elements of the play, devote some attention to its dual authorship.
In the first act it is particularly the prose dialogues between
Apemantus and others which seem unworthy of Shakespeare.
The repartee is laconic but laboured — not always witty, though
invariably bitter and disdainful. The style somewhat resembles
that of the colloquies between Diogenes and Alexander in Lyly's
Alexander and Campaspe. The first of Apemantus' conversa
tions might have been written by Shakespeare — it seems to
have some sort of continuity with the utterances of Thersites in
Troilus and Cressida — but the second has every appearance of
being either an interpolation by a strange hand, or a scene which
Shakespeare had forgotten to score out. Flavius's monologue
(Act i. sc. 2) never came from Shakespeare's pen in this form.
Its marked contrast to the rest shows that it might be the
outcome of notes taken by some blundering shorthand writer
among the audience.
The long conversation, in the second act, between Apemantus,
264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the Fool, Caphis, and various servants, was, in all probability,
written by an alien hand. It contains nothing but idle chatter
devised to amuse the gallery, and it introduces characters who
seem about to take some standing in the play, but who vanish
immediately, leaving no trace. A Page comes with messages and
letters from the mistress of a brothel, to which the Fool appears
to belong, but we are told nothing of the contents of these letters,
whose addresses the bearer is unable to read.
In the third act there is much that is feeble and irrelevant,
together with an aimless unrest which incessantly pervades the
stage. It is not until the banqueting scene towards the end of
the act that Shakespeare makes his presence felt in the storm
which bursts from Timon's lips. The powerful fourth act dis
plays Shakespeare at his best and strongest ; there is very little
here which could be attributed to alien sources. I cannot under
stand the decision with which English critics (including a poet
like Tennyson) have condemned as spurious Flavius's monologue
at the close of the second scene. Its drift is that of the speech
in the following scene, in which he expresses the whole spirit of
the play in one line : " What viler things upon the earth than
friends ! " Although there is evidently some confusion in the
third scene (for example, the intimation of the Poet's and Painter's
appearance long before they really arrive), I cannot agree with
Fleay that Shakespeare had no share in the passage contained
between the lines, " Where liest o' nights, Timon ? " and " Thou
art the cap of all the fools alive."
One speech in particular betrays the master-hand. It is that
in which Timon expresses the wish that Apemantus's desire to
become a beast among beasts may be fulfilled :
" If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee : if thou wert
the lamb, the fox would eat thee : if thou wert the fox, the lion would
suspect thee when, perad venture, thou wert accused by the ass : if thou
wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee : and still thou livedst
but as a breakfast to the wolf : if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness
would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner."
There is as much knowledge of life here as in a concentrated
essence of all Lafontaine's fables.
The last scenes of the fifth act were evidently never revised
by Shakespeare. It is a comical incongruity that makes the
"TIMON" AND "KING LEAR" 265
soldier who, we are expressly told, is unable to read, capable of
distinguishing Timon's tomb, and even of having the forethought
to take a wax impression of the words. There is also an amal
gamation of the two contradictory inscriptions, of which the first
tells us that the dead man wishes to remain nameless and un
known, while the last two lines begin with the declaration, " Here
lie I, Timon." Notwithstanding the shocking condition of the
text, the repeatedly occurring confusion of the action, and the
evident marks of an alien hand, Shakespeare's leading idea and
dominant purpose is never for a moment obscured. Much in
Timon reminds us of King Lear, the injudiciously distributed
benefits and the ingratitude of their recipients are the same, but
in the former the bitterness and virulence are tenfold greater,
and the genius incontestably less. Lear is supported in his
misfortunes by the brave and manly Kent, the faithful Fool, that
truest of all true hearts, Cordelia, her husband, the valiant King
of France. There is but one who remains faithful to Timon,
a servant, which in those days meant a slave, whose self-sacri
ficing devotion forces his master, sorely against his will, to except
one man from his universal vituperation. In his own class he
does not meet with a single honestly devoted heart, either man's
or woman's ; he has no daughter, as Lear ; no mother, as Corio-
lanus ; no friend, not one.
How far more fortunate was Antony ! It is a corrupt world
in the process of dissolution that we find in Antony and Cleopatra.
Most of it is rotten or false, but the passion binding the two
principal characters together by its magic is entirely genuine.
Perdican's profound speech in De Musset's " On ne badine pas
avec r amour " applies both to them and the whole play : " Tous
les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards, hypocrites,
orgueilleux; toutes les femmes sont artificieuses, perfides, vani-
teuses ; le monde n'est qu'un egout sans fond ; mais il y au monde
une chose sainte et sublime, c'est 1'union de deux de ces etres
imparfaits." This simple fact, that Antony and Cleopatra love
one another, ennobles and purifies them both, and consoles us,
the spectators, for the disaster their passion brings upon them.
Timon has no mistress, no relation with the other sex, only con
tempt for it.
There is a significant revelation of the crudity and stupidity
with which, even before the end of the seventeenth century,
266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare's admirers made free with him, in an adaptation
which Shadwell published in 1678 under the title " The History
of Timon the Man Hater into a Play." In this Timon is repre
sented as deserting his mistress Evandra, by whom he is
passionately loved to the last. This introduction of a sym
pathetic woman's character naturally secured the play a success
which was never attained by Shakespeare's hero, a solitary
misanthrope alone with his bitterness. Shakespeare has inten
tionally veiled the defects of nature and judgment which deprive
Timon to some extent of our sympathy, both in his prosperity
and his misfortunes. He had never in his bright days attached
himself so warmly to any heart that he felt it beat in unison with
his own. Had he ever been powerfully drawn to a single friend,
he would not have squandered his possessions so lightly on all
the world. Because he only loved mankind in the mass, he now
hates them in the mass. He never, now as then, shows any
powers of discrimination.
Shakespeare merely used him as a well-known example of the
punishment simple-minded trustfulness brings upon itself; his
indiscretion is the outcome of native nobility, and his wrath is
perfectly justifiable. We feel that Timon possesses the poet's
sympathy and compassion, even when his abhorrence of humanity
passes the bounds of hatred, and becomes a passion for its
annihilation. Timon turns hermit in order to escape from the
sight of human beings, and this misanthropy is no mere mask
worn to conceal his despair at the loss of this world's goods,
since it stands the test of the finding of the treasure. He no
longer looks upon wealth as the means of procuring pleasure, but
only as an instrument of vengeance. It is for that, and that alone,
that he rejoices when the " yellow glittering, precious gold" falls
into his hands :
" Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
. . . Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation
With senators on the bench ; this is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again ;
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again " (Act iv. sc. 3).
TIMON AND ALCIBIADES 267
When Alcibiades, who was formerly on friendly terms with
him and has retained some kindly feeling towards him, disturbs
his solitude by a visit, Timon receives him with the exclamation :
" The canker gnaw thy heart
For showing me again the eyes of man !
Alcibiades. What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee
That art thyself a man ?
Timon. I am Misanthropes, and hate mankind.
For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog
That I might love thee something " (Act iv. sc. 3).
So might old Schopenhauer, with his loathing for men and
his love for dogs, have expressed himself. Timon explains this
hatred- as the result of a dispassionate insight into the worthless-
ness of human nature :
" For every guise of fortune
Is smoothed by that below : the learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool : all is oblique ;
There's nothing level in our cursed natures
But direct villany."
When Alcibiades, who appears in company with two hetaerae,
addresses Timon in friendly fashion, the latter turns to abuse one
of the women, declaring that she carries more destruction with
her than the soldier does in his sword. She retorts, and he rails
at her in the fashion of Troilus and Cressida. In his eyes the
wanton woman is merely the disseminator of disease, and he
expresses the hope that she may bring many a young man to
sickness and misery. Alcibiades offers to serve him :
" Noble Timon,
What friendship may I do thee ?
Timon. None, but to maintain my opinion.
Alcibiades. What is it, Timon ?
Timon. Promise me friendship, but perform none."
When Alcibiades informs him that he is leading his army
against Athens, Timon prays that the gods will give him the
victory, in order that he may exterminate the people root and
branch, and himself afterwards. He gives him gold for his war,
and conjures him to rage like a pestilence :
" Let not thy sword skip one :
Pity not honoured age for his white beard ;
268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He is an usurer : strike me the counterfeit matron,
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself s a bawd : let not the virgin's cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword ; for those milk paps
That through the window bars bore at men's eyes
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors : spare not the babe,
Whose dimpled smile from fools exhaust their mercy ;
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut,
And mince it sans remorse : swear against objects ;
Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes ;
Whose proofs, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes,
Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding,
Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay thy soldiers :
Make large confusion : and, thy fury spent,
Confounded be thyself" (Act iv. sc. 3).
The women, seeing his wealth, immediately beg him for gold,
and he answers, " Hold up, you sluts, your aprons mountant."
They are not to swear, for their oaths are worthless, but they are
to go on deceiving, and being " whores still," they are to seduce
him to attempts to convert them, and to deck their own thin hair
with the hair of corpses, that of hanged women preferably ; they
are to paint and rouge until they themselves lie dead : " Paint
till a horse may mire upon your face."
They shout to him for more gold ; they will " do anything for
gold." Timon answers them in words which Shakespeare, for all
the pathos of his youth, has never surpassed, words whose frenzied
scathing has never been equalled :
" Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of men : strike their sharp shins,
And mar men's spurring ; crack the lawyer's voice,
That he may never more false title plead,
Nor sound his quillets shrilly : hoar the flamen,
That scolds against the quality of flesh,
And not believes himself : down with the nose,
Down with it flat : take the bridge quite away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal : make curled-pate ruffians bald,
And let the unscarred ruffians of the war
Derive some pain from you : plague all ;
SHAKESPEARE'S BITTERNESS 269
That your activity may defeat and quell
The source of all erection. There's more gold :
Do you damn others, and let this damn you,
And ditches grave you all.
Phrynia and Timandra. More counsel with more gold,
bounteous Timon."
The passion in this is overpowering. One need only compare
it with Lucian to realise the fire that Shakespeare has put into
the old Greek, whose reflections are only savage in substance,
being absolutely tame in expression — "The name of misan
thrope shall sound sweetest in my ears, and my characteristics
shall be peevishness, harshness, rudeness, hostility towards
men," &c. Compare this scene with the latter part of Plutarch's
Alcibiades } to which we know Shakespeare had referred, and
see what the poet's acrimony has made of Timandra, the faithful
mistress who follows Alcibiades to Phrygia. They are together
when his murderess sets fire to the house, and it is Timandra
who enshrouds his body in the most costly material she possesses,
and gives him as splendid a funeral as her isolated position can
secure.
Apemantus follows close upon Alcibiades, and after he is
driven away, two bandits appear, attracted by the report of the
treasure. Timon welcomes them, crying, " Rascal thieves, here's
gold." He adds good advice to the money. They are to drink
wine until it drives them mad, so they may, perchance, escape hang
ing; they are to put no trust in physicians, whose antidotes are
poisons ; when they can, they are to kill as well as steal. Theft
is universal, the law itself being only made to conceal robbery :
" Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats.
All that you meet are thieves : to Athens go ;
Break open shops ; nothing can you steal
But thieves do lose it"
The worthy Proudhon himself has not set forth more plainly
his axiom, " Property is theft."
When the Senate appeals to Timon for his assistance as
general and statesman, he first professes sympathy, then cries :
" If Alcibiades kill my countrymen,
Let Alcibiades know this of Timon,
That Timon cares not."
270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He may sack Athens, pull old men by the beard, and give the
sacred virgins over to the mercies of the soldiery. Timon cares
as little as the soldier's knife recks of the throats it cuts. The
most worthless blade in Alcibiades' camp is more valued by him
than any life in Athens. All feeling for country, home, even for
the helpless, has utterly perished.
Shakespeare borrows a final touch from Plutarch, which, in
his hand, becomes a masterpiece of bloodthirsty irony. He
declares he does not, as they suppose, rejoice in the general
desolation ; his countrymen shall once more enjoy his hospitality.
A fig-tree grows by his cave, which it is his intention to cut
down ; but before it is felled, any friend of his, high or low, who
wishes to escape the horrors of a siege, is welcome to come and
hang himself. He next announces that his grave is prepared, and
they that seek him may come thither and find an oracle in his
tombstone, then :
" Lips, let sour words go by and language end :
What is amiss, plague and infection mend !
Graves only be man's works and death their gain !
Sun, hide thy beams ! Timon hath done his reign."
These are his last words. May pestilence rage amongst men !
May it infect and destroy so long as there is a man left to dig a
grave ! May the world be annihilated as Timon is about to anni
hilate himself. The light of the sun will presently be extin
guished for him ; let it be extinguished for all !
This is not Othello's sorrow over the power of evil to wreck
the happiness of noble hearts, nor King Lear's wail over the
ever-threatening possibilities and the heaped-up miseries of life :
it is an angry bitterness, caused by ingratitude, which has
grown so great that it darkens the sky of life and causes the
thunder to roll with such threatening peals as we have never
heard even in Shakespeare. All that he has lived through in
these last years, and all that he has suffered from the baseness of
other men, is concentrated in this colossal figure of the desperate
man-hater, whose wild rhetoric is like a dark essence of blood
and gall drawn off to relieve suffering.
XIV
CON VA LESCENCE—TRA NSFORMA TION—
THE NEW TYPE
THE last, wildest words of this bitter outbreak had been spoken.
The dark cloud had burst and the skies were slowly clearing.
It seems as though the blackest of his griefs had been lightened
in the utterance, and now that the steady crescendo had burst into
its most furious forte, he breathed more freely again. He had
said his say ; Timon had called for the extinction of humanity by
plague, sexual disease, slaughter, and suicide. The powers of
cursing could go no farther.
'Shakespeare has shouted himself hoarse and his fury is spent.
The fever is over and convalescence has set in. The darkened
sun shines out once more, and the gloomy sky shines blue again.
How and why ! Who shall say ?
In all the obscurity of Shakespeare's life-history, nowhere do
we feel our ignorance of his personal experiences more acutely
than here. Some have sought an explanation in the resignation
which comes with advancing years, and of which we certainly
catch glimpses in his latest works. But Shakespeare neither was,
nor felt himself, old at forty-five; and the word resignation is
meaningless in connection with this marvellous softening of his
long exasperated mood. It is more than a mere reconciliation ; it
is a revival of that free and lambent imagination which has lain
so long in what seemed to be its death-swoon. There is no play
of fancy in resignation.
Once more he finds life worth living, the earth beautiful, en-
chantingly, fantastically attractive, and those who dwell upon it
worthy of his love.
In the purely external circumstances no change has occurred.
The political outlook in England is the same, and it is not likely
that he would be greatly stirred by events such as the assassina-
272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tion of Henry IV. of France in 1610 and the consequent expulsion
of the Jesuits from Great Britain. Details — like the decree for
bidding English Catholics (Recusants) from coming within ten
miles of the Court, and James's removal of his mother's bones and
their pompous re-interment in Westminster Abbey — could have
little effect upon Shakespeare.
What has personally befallen him that has had such power to
re-attune his spirit and lead it back from discord to the old melody
and harmony ? Surely we are now brought face to face with one
of the decisive crises of his life.
Let us anticipate the works yet to be written — Pericles, Cym-
beline. Winter s Tale, and The Tempest.
In this last splendid period of his life's glowing September,
his dramatic activity, bearing about it the clear transparent atmos
phere of early autumn, is more richly varied now than it has ever
been.
What figures occupy the most prominent place in the poet's
sumptuous harvest-home but the young, womanly forms of Marina,
Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda. These girlish and forsaken crea
tures are lost and found again, suffer grievous wrongs, and are in
no case cherished as they deserve ; but their charm, purity, and
nobility of nature triumph over everything.
They must have had their prototypes or type.
A new world has opened out to Shakespeare, but it would be
profitless to spend much time on more or less probable conjectures
concerning how and by whom it was revealed. We will, there
fore, only lightly touch upon the possibility that Shakespeare,
after and during the violent crisis of his loathing for humanity,
was gradually reconciled to life by some young and womanly
nobility of soul, and by all the poetry which surrounds it and
follows in its train.
All these youthful women are akin, and are sharply separated
from the heroines of his former plays. They are half-real, half-
imaginary. The charm of youth and fantastic romance shines
round them like a halo ; the foulness of life has no power to defile
them. They are self-reliant without being endowed with the
buoyant spirit of his earlier adventurous maidens, and they are
gentle without being overshadowed by the pathetic mournfulness
of his sacrificial victims. Not one comes to a tragic end, and not
one ever utters a jest, but all are holy in the poet's eyes.
SHAKESPEARE'S WOMEN 273
The situations of Marina and Perdita are very similar; both
are castaways, apparently fatherless and motherless, left solitary
amidst dangerous or pitiable circumstances. Imogen is suspected
and her life threatened, like Marina's, and although she is sus
pected and sentenced to death by her nearest and dearest, her
strength never falters, and even her love for her unworthy husband
is unimpaired.
Miranda is deprived of her rank and condemned to the solitude
of a desert island, but is sheltered even there by a father's watch
ful care. There is indeed a half-fatherly tenderness in the delinea
tion of Miranda, and the conception of the native charm of a
young girl as a wonderful mystery of nature. Neither Moliere's
Agnes nor Shakespeare's Miranda have ever looked upon the face
of a young man before they meet the one they love, but Agnes
possesses only the artificially-preserved ignorance and innocence
which disappear like dew before the sun of love. To Shakespeare,
Miranda appears like a being from another world, an ideal of pure
spiritual womanhood and maidenly passion, before which he almost
kneels in worship.
Let us glance back at Shakespeare's gallery of women.
There are the viragoes of his youth, bloodthirsty women like
Tamora, guilty and powerful ones like Margaret of Anjou, and
later, Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan ; there are feeble women
like Anne in Richard III., and shrews like Katharine and Adriana,
in whom we seem to detect a reminiscence of the wife at Stratford.
Then we have the passionately loving, like Julia in Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Venus, Titania, Helena in All's Well that
Ends Well, and, above all, Juliet. There are the charmingly
witty and often frolicsome young girls, like Rosaline in Love's
Labours Lost, Portia in the Merchant of Venice, Beatrice, Viola,
and Rosalind.
Then the simply-minded, deeply-feeling, silent natures, with
an element of tragedy about them, pre-ordained to destruction —
Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. After these come the merely
sensual types of his bitter mood — Cleopatra and Cressida.
And now, lastly, the young girl, drawn with the ripened man's
rapture over her youth, and a certain passion of admiration.1
1 In Mrs. Jameson's charming old book, Shakespeare's Female Characters, she
has grouped his women in an arbitrary manner. Disregarding all chronological
sequence, she divides twenty-three characters into four groups :— I. Characters of
VOL. II. S
274 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
She had been lost to him, as Marina to her father Pericles, and
Perdita to her father Leontes. He feels for her the same fatherly
tenderness which his last incarnation, the magician Prospero, feels
for his daughter Miranda.
He had taken a greater burden of life upon himself in the past
than he well could bear, and he now lays its heaviest portion
aside. No more tragedies ! No more historical dramas ! No
more of the horrors of realism ! In their stead a fantastic reflec
tion of life, with all the changes and chances of fairy-tale and
legend ! A framework of fanciful poetry woven around the
charming seriousness of the youthful woman and the serious
charm of the young girl.
It works like a vision from another world, an enchantment set
in surroundings as dream-like as itself. A ship in the open sea
off Mitylene ; a strange, delightful, ocean-encircled Bohemia ; a
lonely, magically-protected island ; a Britain, where kings of the
Roman period and Italians of the sixteenth century meet young
princes who dwell in woodland caves and have never seen the face
of woman.
Thus he gradually returns to those brighter moods of his youth
from which the fairy dances of the Midsummer Nighfs Dream
had evolved, or that unknown Forest of Arden in which cypresses
grew and lions prowled, and happy youth and mirthful maiden
hood carelessly roamed. Only the spirit of frolic has departed,
while free play is given to a fancy unhampered by the laws of
reality, and much earnest discernment lies behind the untram
melled sport of imagination. He waves the magician's wand and
reality vanishes, now, as formerly. But the light heart has grown
sorrowful, and its mirth is no more than a faint smile. He offers
the daydreams of a lonely spirit now, rich but evanescent visions,
occupying in all a period of from four to five years.
Then Prospero buries his magic wand a fathom deep in the
earth for ever.
Intellect. 2. Characters of Passion and Imagination. 3. Characters of the Affec
tions. 4. Historical characters. Heine characterises forty-five feminine figures in
his Shakespeare's Madchtn und Frauen, but the last twenty-one are only distin
guished by a few quotations, and he makes no attempt at any deeper interpretation,
historical or psychological.
XV
PERICLES— COLLABORATION WITH WILKINS AND
ROWLEY— SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE
SEVENFOLD darkness surrounds Shakespeare's productions in
that transition period during which morbid distrust was giving
way to the brighter view of life we find in his later plays. We
possess a brief series of plays: Timon of Athens and Pericles,
which are plainly only partially his work, and Henry VIII. and
The Two Noble Kinsmen , of which we may confidently assert
that Shakespeare had nothing to do with them beyond the inser
tion of single important speeches and the addition of a few valu
able touches.
He had not adapted other men's work since his novitiate,
neither had he blended his own intellectual produce with alien
and inferior efforts. What is the reason of such an association
suddenly and repeatedly occurring now ? I will state my view of
the matter without any circumlocution or criticism of the opinion
of others. We noticed in Coriolanus that Shakespeare's changed
attitude towards humanity had also affected his attitude towards
his art. A certain carelessness of execution had made itself felt.
His steadily increasing despair of finding any virtue or worth in
the world, and the ever-growing resentment against the coarse
ness and thanklessness of men, were accompanied by his corre
sponding indifference and negligence as a dramatist.
We have followed Shakespeare through his early struggles and
youthful happiness to the great and serious epoch of his life, and
through the anything but brief period of gloom to its crisis in the
wild outburst of Timon of Athens ; after which we recognised the
first symptoms of convalescence. A perspective of not too pro
foundly serious nor realistic dramas has opened out before us,
whose freely playing fantasy proves that Shakespeare is once
more reconciled to life.
2/6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It stands to reason that this reconciliation was not effected
by any sudden change, and Shakespeare would not immediately
return to the old striving after perfection in his profession — did
not do so, in fact, until that very last work in which he laid aside
his art for ever. We saw that he had strained too much at life,
and he now realises that he has done the same with art. Either
he no longer taxes his strength to the uttermost when he writes,
or he has lost that power for which no task was too heavy, no
horror too terrible to depict. From this moment we feel a fore
boding that this mighty genius will lay down his pen some years
before his life is to end, and we realise that his mind is being
gradually withdrawn from the theatre. He has already ceased to
act ; soon he will have ceased to write for the stage. He longs
for rest, for solitude, away from the town, far into the country;
away from his life's battlefield to the quietude of his birthplace,
there to pass his remaining years and die.
He may have reasoned thus : For whom should he write ?
Where were they for whom he had written the plays of his
youth ? They were dead or far away; he had lost sight of them
and they of him — how long does any warm sympathy with a
productive intellect usually last ? With his ever-increasing indif
ference to fame, he shrank more and more from the exertion
entailed by laborious planning and careful execution, and as little
did he care whether the work he did was known by his or another
man's name. In his utter contempt for what the crowd did or
did not believe about him, he allowed piratical booksellers to
publish one worthless play after another with his immortal name
upon the title-page — Sir John Oldcastle in 1600, The London
Prodigal \n 1605, A Yorkshire Tragedy in 1608, Lord Cromwell
in 1613 — and he either obscured or permitted others to obscure his
work by associating it with the feeble or affected productions of
younger and inferior men. We saw in Timon, as we shall pre
sently see in Pericles and other plays, how the lines drawn by his
master-hand have been blurred by others, traced by clumsy and
unsteady fingers. It is not always easy to distinguish whether
it was Shakespeare who began the play and wearied of his work
half-way through, as Michael Angelo so frequently did, carelessly
looking on at its completion by another hand, or whether he had
the attempts of others lying before him and hid his own poetical
strength and greatness in these fungus growths of childish versi-
"PERICLES" 277
fication and unhealthy prose, leaving it to chance whether the
future generations, to whom he never gave much thought, would
be able to distinguish his part in them. It may be that he treated
his work for the theatre much as a modern author does when he
makes over his ideas to a collaborator, or writes anonymously in
a newspaper or periodical. He believes that among his friends
are three or four who will recognise his style, and if they do not
(as frequently happens) it is no great matter.
On the title-page of the first quarto edition of Pericles ; in 1609,
are these words : " The late, and much admired play called Peri
cles, Prince of Tyre. . . . By William Shakespeare." " The late"
— the play cannot have been acted before 1608, for there is
no contemporary mention of it before that date, whereas from
1609 onwards it is frequently noticed. "The much admired
play" — everything witnesses to the truth of these words.1
Many contemporary references testify to the favour the play
enjoyed. In an anonymous poem, Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap
(1609), Pericles is mentioned as the new play which gentle and
simple crowd to see :
" Amazde I stood, to see a Crowd
Of civill Throats stretched out so lowd
(As at a New Play). All the Roomes
Did swarm with Gentiles mix'd with Groomes,
So that I truly thought all These
Came to see Shore or Pericles"
The previously mentioned prologue (vol. ii. p. 235) to Robert
Tailor's The Hog has Lost his Pearl (1614) cannot wish the
play anything better than that it may succeed as well as Pericles :
" And if it prove so happy as to please,
Weele say 'tis fortunate like Pericles."
1 The complete title runs thus:— "The late, and much admired Play, called
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with the true Relation of the whole History, adventures,
and fortunes of the said Prince : As also, The no lesse strange and worthy accidents,
in the Birth and Life of his Daughter MARIANA. As it hath been diuers and sundry
times acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Bancside. By William
Shakespeare. Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the
Signe of the Sunne in Paternoster Row. 1609."
278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In 1629, Ben Jonson, exasperated by the utter failure of his
play The New Inn, affords evidence, in the ode addressed to him
self which accompanies the drama, of the persistent popularity of
Pericles :
" No doubt some mouldy tale
Like Pericles, and stale
As the shrieves crusts and nasty as his fish —
Scraps out of every dish
Thrown forth and raked into the common tub,
May keep up the Play-club."
In Sheppard's poem, The Times displayed in Six Sestyads.
Shakespeare is said to equal Sophocles and surpass Aristophanes,
and all for Pericles' sake :
" With Sophocles we may
Compare great Shakespeare : Aristophanes
Never like him his Fancy could display,
Witness the Prince of Tyre, his Pericles"
This play was not included in the First Folio edition, probably
because the editors could not come to an agreement with the
original publisher; for these pirates were protected by law as
soon as the book was entered at Stationers' Hall. During Shake
speare's lifetime and after his death it was one of the most
popular of English dramas.
Pericles was formerly considered one of Shakespeare's earliest
works, an opinion held strangely enough by Karl Elze in our own
day. But all English critics now believe, what Hallam was the
first to discover, that the language of such parts of it as were
written by Shakespeare belongs in style to his latest period, and
it is unanimously declared to have been written somewhere about
the year 1608, after Antony and Cleopatra and before Cymbeline
and The Tempest. (See, for example, P. Z. Round's introduction
to the Irving edition, or Furnival's Triar Table of the order of
Shakespeare's Plays, reprinted in Dowden and elsewhere.) My
own opinion of course is, that Pericles follows naturally upon Corio-
lanus and Timon of Athens, and forms an appropriate overture
to the succeeding fantastically idyllic plays. The reader will have
noticed that, unlike Dowden and Furnivall, I have not been able
to assign so early a date for the whole series of pessimistic dramas
SHAKESPEARE'S SHARE IN "PERICLES" 279
as 1608 would imply.1 I assume that certain portions of Pericles
were forming in Shakespeare's mind even in the midst of the
venom to which he was giving vent for the last time in Timon of
Athens. In such periods of violent upheaval there may be an
undercurrent to the surface-current in the mind of a poet as well
as in another man's, and it is this undercurrent which will pre
sently gain strength and become the prevalent mood.
The intelligent reader will have realised that all this dating
of Shakespeare's pessimistic works can only be approximate. I
am inclined to advance them a year, because I fancy I can trace a
connection between Coriolanus and Shakespeare's own thoughts
of his mother, who died in 1608. But a son does not only think
of his mother at the moment she is taken from him, and the fear
of losing her in the illness which probably preceded her death
may have recalled his mother's image to Shakespeare's mind with
special force long before he actually lost her. Here, s in all
cases where it is not expressly mentioned, the reader is requested
to see an underlying Perhaps or Possibly, and to add one where he
feels the need of it. Only the main lines of the sequence are at
all certain. Where external criterions are missing, the internal
alone cannot determine the question of a year or a month. As far
as Pericles is concerned, we do possess some guide, for it is most
unlikely that Shakespeare's share in the play would be added
after it was performed in 1608, especially in the face of the assu
rance on the title-page.
The work as it has come down to us is not in reality a drama
at all, but an incompletely dramatised epic poem. We are taken
back to the childhood of dramatic art. The prologue to each act
and the various explanatory passages interpolated throughout the
play are supposed to be spoken by the old English poet John
Gower, who had treated the subject in narrative verse about the
year 1390. He introduces the play to the audience and explains
it, as it were, with his pointer. Anything that cannot well be
acted he narrates, or has represented in dumb-show. He speaks
1 The Triar Table determines their order thus : —
Troilus and Cressida 1606-7
Antony and Cleopatra 1606-7
Coriolanus 1607-8
Timon of Athens 1607-8
280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in the old octosyllabic rhymed iambics, which, as a rule, however,
do not rhyme :
" To sing a song that old was sung
From ashes ancient Gower has come,
Assuming man's infirmities,
To glad your ears and please your eyes"
And in the last lines of the prologue to the fourth act :
" Dionyza doth appear,
With Leonine a murderer"
He jestingly alludes to the fact that the play includes nearly
the whole of Pericles' life, from youth to old age. Marina is born
at the beginning of the third act, and is about to be married at
the close of the fifth. Nothing could well be farther from that
unity of time and place which was attempted in France at a later
period. The first act is laid at Antioch, Tyre, and Tarsus ; the
second in Pentapolis, on the sea-shore, in a corridor of Simonides'
palace, and lastly in a hall of state. The third act opens on board
ship and continues in the house of Cerimon at Ephesus. The
fourth act begins with an open place near the sea-shore and ends
in a brothel at Mitylene ; the fifth, on Pericles' ship off Mitylene,
ending in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. There is as little
unity of action as of time and place about the play ; its discon
nected details are merely held together by the individuality of the
principal characters, and there is neither rhyme nor reason in its
various incidents ; pure chance seems to rule all. The reader will
seek in vain for any intention — I do not mean moral, but any
fundamental idea in the play. Gower certainly institutes a con
trast between an immoral princess at the beginning of the play
and a virtuous one at the close, but this moral contrast has no
connection with the intermediate acts.
Pericles was an old and very popular subject. Its earliest
form was probably that of a Greek romance of the fifth century,
of which a Latin translation is still extant. It was translated into
various languages during the Middle Ages, and one version has
found its way into the Gesta Romanorum. In the twelfth century
it was incorporated by Godfrey of Viterbo in his great Chronicle.
John Gower, who adapts it in the eighth book of his Confessio
GEORGE W1LKINS 281
Amantis, gives Godfrey as his authority. The Latin tale was
translated into English by Lawrence Twine in 1576, under the
title of The Patterne of Paynfull Aduentures, a second edition of
which was published in 1607. In all but the English adaptations
the hero's name is given as Apollonius of Tyre. There can be
no doubt that Shakespeare's play was based upon the 1607 edi
tion, and this in itself is sufficient to refute the antiquated notion
that his part in it belonged to his youthful period. It was on the
substance of this play, and doubtless also upon Shakespeare's
share in it, that George Wilkins founded the romance he pub
lished in 1608 under the title of The Painfull Aduentures of
Pericles Prince of Tyre, Being the true history of the Play of
Pericles as it was lately presented by the ivorthy and ancient John
Gower. The fact that Wilkins, in the dedication of his book,
which is a mere abstract of Twine and the play, calls it " a poor
infant of my braine," and the still more remarkable similarity of
the style and metrical structure of the first act of Pericles with
Wilkins' own play, The Miseries of enforced Marriage, would
seem to point to him as the author of the extraneous portions of
Pericles. In both dramas a quantity of disconnected material
has been brought together in a long-drawn-out play, destitute of
dramatic situations or interest, and in both we find the same
jarring and awkward inversions of words. The incidents of
the Enforced Marriage recall some of the non-Shakespearian
elements of Timon ; here, also, we are shown a spendthrift,
evidently in possession of the sympathies of his author, by whom
he is considered a victim. The mingling of prose, blank
verse, and clumsily-introduced couplets with the same rhymes
constantly recurring, reminds us of those acts and scenes in
which Shakespeare had no part. Fleay observes that 195
rhymed lines occur in the two first acts of Pericles, and only
fourteen in the last three, so marked is the contrast of style
between the two parts, and he notices that this frequency of
rhyme corresponds closely to the method of George Wilkins'
own work. Both he and Boyle agree with Delius, who was the
first to express the opinion, that Wilkins is the author of the
first two acts. By dint of comparisons of style, Fleay came to
the conclusion that Gower's two speeches in five-footed iambics,
before and after Scenes 5 and 6 (which differ so markedly in
form and language from his other monologues), were written by
282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Rowley, who had been associated in the previous year
with Wilkins and Day in the production of a wretched melo
drama, The Travels of Three English Brothers. His attempt,
however, to ascribe to Rowley the two prose scenes which take
place in the brothel is made more on moral than aesthetic grounds,
and can have very little weight. My own opinion is that they
were entirely written by Shakespeare. They are plainly pre
supposed in certain passages which are unmistakably Shake
spearian ; they accord with that general view of life from which
he is but now beginning to escape, and they markedly recall the
corresponding scenes in Measure for Measure.
It is impossible to ascertain the precise circumstances under
which the play was produced. Some critics have maintained that
it originally began with what is now the third act, and that
Shakespeare, having lain it aside, gave Wilkins and Rowley per
mission to complete it for the stage. But in reality the two men
wrote the play in collaboration and disposed of it to Shake
speare's company, which in turn submitted it to the poet, who
worked upon such parts as appealed to his imagination. As the
play now belonged to the theatre, and Wilkins was not at liberty
to publish it, he forestalled the booksellers by bringing it out as
a story, taking all the credit of invention and execution upon
himself.
Never was a drama contrived out of more unlikely material.
The name of the knightly Prince of Tyre is changed, probably
because it did not suit the metre, from Apollonius to Pericles,
which was corrupted from the Pyrocles of Sidney's Arcadia. He
comes to Antioch to risk his life on the solution of a riddle.
According to his success or failure he is to be rewarded by the
Princess's hand or death. The riddle betrays to him the abomin
able fact that the Princess is living in incest with her own father.
He withdraws from the contest, and flies from the country to
escape the wrath of the wicked prince, who is even more certain
to slay him for success than for failure. He returns to Tyre, but
feeling insecure even there, he falls into a state of melancholy,
and quits his kingdom to escape the pursuit of Antiochus.
Arriving at Tarsus at a time when its inhabitants are suffering
from famine, he succours them with corn from his ships. Soon
afterwards he is wrecked off Pentapolis and cast ashore. His
armour is dragged out of the sea in fishermen's nets, and
PERICLES 283
Pericles takes part in a knightly tournament. The king's
daughter, Thaisa, falls in love with him at first sight, as did
Nausicaa with Odysseus. She ignores all the young knights
around her for the sake of this noble stranger, who has suffered
shipwreck and so many other misfortunes. She will marry
him or none ; he shines in comparison with the others as a
precious stone beside glass. Pericles weds Thaisa, and bears her
away with him on his ship. They are overtaken by a storm,
during which Thaisa dies in giving birth to a daughter. 'The
superstition of the sailors requires that her corpse shall be im
mediately thrown into the sea. The coffin drifts ashore at
Ephesus, where Thaisa reawakes to life unharmed. The new
born child is left by Pericles to be nursed at Tarsus. As Marina
grows up, her foster-mother determines to kill her because she
outshines her daughter. Pirates land and prevent the murder;
carrying off Marina, they sell her to the mistress of a brothel
in Mitylene. She preserves her purity amidst these horrible
surroundings, and, finding a protector, gains her release. She
is taken on board Pericles' ship that she may charm away his
melancholy. A recognition ensues, and, in obedience to a sign
from Diana, they sail to Ephesus ; the husband is reunited to his
wife and the newly-found daughter to her mother.
This is the dramatically impossible canvas which Shakespeare
undertook to retouch and finish. That he should have made the
first sketch of the play, as Fleay so warmly maintains, seems very
improbable upon a careful study of the plot. To write such a
beginning to an already finished end would have been an almost im
possible task for Wilkins and his collaborator, involving a terribly
active vigilance ; for the setting of the Shakespearian scenes,
Gower's prologues, interludes, and epilogues, &c., is a frame of
their own making. Everything favours the theory that it was
Shakespeare who undertook to shape a half- or wholly-finished
piece of patchwork.
He hardly touched the first two acts, but they contain some
traces of his pen — the delicacy with which the incest of the
Princess is treated, for example, and Thaisa's timid, almost mute,
though suddenly-aroused love for him who at first glance seems
to her the chief of men. The scene between the three fishermen,
with which the second act opens, owns some turns which speak
of Shakespeare, especially where a fisherman says that the avari-
284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
cious rich are the whales "o' the land, who never leave gaping
till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and
all," and another replies, " But, master, if I had been the sexton,
I would have been that day in the belfry."
" Second Fisherman. Why, man?
" Third Fisherman. Because he should have swallowed me too : and
when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a jangling of the
bells, that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church,
and parish up again."
It is not impossible, however, that these gleams of Shake
spearian wit are mere imitations of his manner. But, on the
other hand, the obvious mimicry of the Midsummer Night's
Dream in Gower's prologue to the third act is commonplace
and clumsy enough :
" Now sleep y slaked hath the rout ;
No din but snores the house about.
The cat, with eyne of burning coal,
Now couches fore the mouse's hole ;
And crickets sing at the oven's mouth,
E'er the blither for their drouth."
Compare this with Puck's :
" Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud," &c.
An awkwardly introduced pantomime interrupts the prologue,
which is tediously renewed ; then suddenly, like a voice from
another world, a rich, full tone breaks in upon the feeble drivel,
and we hear Shakespeare's own voice in unmistakable and royal
power :
" Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell ; and thou, that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep ! Oh, still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders ; gently quench
Thy nimble, sulphurous flashes ! — Oh, how, Lychorida,
How does my queen ? — Thou stormest venomously :
Wilt thou spit all thyself? The seaman's whistle
Is as a whisper in the ears of death,
Unheard." .
PERICLES 285
The nurse brings the tiny new-born babe, saying:
" Here is a thing too young for such a place,
Who, if it had conceit, would die, as I
Am like to do : take in your arms this piece
Of your dead queen.
Pericles. How, how Lychorida !
Lychorida. Patience, good sir ; do not assist the storm.
Here's all that is left living of your queen,
A little daughter : for the sake of it,
Be manly and take comfort."
The sailors enter, and, after a brief, masterly conversation,
full of the raging storm and the struggle to save the ship, they
superstition sly demand that the queen, who has but this instant
drawn her last breath, should be thrown overboard. The king
is compelled to yield, and turning a last look upon her, says :
" A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear ;
No light, no fire : the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly ; nor have I time
To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze ;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And e'er-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o'erwhelm thy corse,
Lying with simple shells."
He gives orders to change the course of the ship and make
for Tarsus, because " the babe cannot hold out to Tyrus." There
is so mighty a breath of storm and raging seas, such rolling of
thunder and flashing of lightning in these scenes, that nothing
in English poetry, not excepting Shakespeare's Tempest itself,
nor Byron's and Shelley's descriptions of Nature, can surpass it.
The storm blows and howls, hisses and screams, till the sound
of the boatswain's whistle is lost in the raging of the elements.
These scenes are famous and beloved among that seafaring folk
for whom they were written, and who know the subject-matter
so well.
The effect is tremendously heightened by the struggles of
human passion amidst the fury of the elements. The tender and
strong grief expressed in Pericles' subdued lament for Thaisa is
286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
not drowned by the storm; it sounds a clear, spiritual note of
contrast with the raging of the sea. And how touching is
Pericles' greeting to his new-born child :
" Now, mild may be thy life !
For a more blustrous birth had never babe :
Quiet and gentle thy conditions, for
Thou art the rudeliest welcomed to this world
That ever was prince's child. Happy what follows !
Thou hast as chiding a nativity
As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make,
To herald thee from the womb." . . .
Although Wilkins' tale follows the course of the play very
faithfully, there are but two points in which the resemblance
between them extends to a similarity of wording. The first of
these occurs in the second act, which was Wilkins' own work,
and the second here. In his tale Wilkins says :
" Poor inch of nature ! Thou art as rudely welcome to the world
as ever princess' babe was, and hast as chiding a nativity as fire, air,
earth, and water can afford thee."
Even more striking than the identity of words is the excla
mation " Poor inch of nature ! " It is so entirely Shakespearian
that we are tempted to believe it must have been accidentally
omitted in the manuscripts from which the first edition was
printed.
It is not until the birth of Marina in the third act that
Shakespeare really takes the play in hand. Why ? Because it
is only now that it begins to have any interest for him. It is
the development of this character, this tender image of youthful
charm and noble purity, which attracts him to the task.
How Shakespearian is the scene in which Marina is found
strewing flowers on the grave of her dead nurse just before
Dionyza sends her away to be murdered; it foreshadows two
scenes in plays which are shortly to follow — the two brothers
laying flowers on the supposed corpse of Fidelio in Cymbeline,
and Perdita, disguised as a shepherdess, distributing all kinds of
blossoms to the two strangers and her guests in The Winter's
Tale.
PERICLES AND ULYSSES 287
Marina says (Act iv. sc. i):
" No, I will rob Tellus of her weed
To strew thy green with flowers : the yellows, blues,
The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave
While summer-days do last. — Ay me ! poor maid,
Born in a tempest, when my mother died,
This world to me is like a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends."
The words are simple, and not especially remarkable in them
selves, but they are of the greatest importance as symptoms.
They are the first mild tones escaping from an instrument which
has long yielded only harsh and jarring sounds. There is nothing
like them in the dramas of Shakespeare's despairing mood.
When, weary and sad, he consented to re-write parts of this
Pericles, it was that he might embody the feeling by which he is
now possessed. Pericles is a romantic Ulysses, a far-travelled,
sorely tried, much-enduring man, who has, little by little, lost all
that was dear to him. When first we meet him, he is threatened
with death because he has correctly solved a horrible riddle of
life. How symbolic this ! and he is thus made cautious and in
trospective, restless and depressed. There is a touch of melan
choly about him from the first, accompanied by an indifference
to danger ; later, when his distrust of men has been aroused, this
characteristic despondency becomes intensified, and gives an
appearance of depth of thought and feeling. His sensitive nature,
brave enough in the midst of storm and shipwreck, sinks deeper
and deeper into a depression which becomes almost melancholia.
Feeling solitary and forsaken, he allows no one to approach him,
pays no heed when he is spoken to, but sits, silent and stern,
brooding over his griefs (Act iv. sc. i). Then Marina comes into
his life. When she is first brought on board, she tries to attract
his attention by her sweet, modest play and song; then she
speaks to him, but is rebuffed, even angrily repulsed, until the
gentle narrative of the circumstances of her birth and the mis
fortunes which have pursued her arrests the king's attention.
The restoration of his daughter produces a sudden change from
anguished melancholy to subdued happiness.
So, as a poet, had Shakespeare of late withdrawn from the
288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
world, and in just such a manner he looked upon men and their
sympathy until the appearance of Marina and her sisters in his
poetry.
It is probable that Shakespeare wrote the part of Pericles
for Burbage, but there is much of himself in it. The two men
had more in common than one would be apt to suppose from
the only too well-known story of their rivalry on a certain intimate
occasion. It is just such trivial anecdotes as this that make their
way and are remembered.
Shakespeare has spiritualised Pericles ; Marina, in his hands,
is a glorified being, who is scarcely grown up before her charm
and rare qualities rouse envy and hatred. We first see her
strewing flowers on a grave, and immediately after this we listen
to her attempt to disarm the man who has undertaken to murder
her. She proves herself as innocent as the Queen Dagmar of
the ancient ballad. She " never spake bad word nor did ill turn
to any living creature." She never killed a mouse or hurt a
fly ; once she trod upon a worm against her will and wept for it.
No human creature could be cast in gentler mould, and truth
and nobility unite with this mildness to shed, as it were, a halo
round her.
When, after rebuffing and rejecting her, Pericles has gradually
softened towards Marina, he asks her where she was born and
who provided the rich raiment she is wearing. She replies that
if she were to tell the story of her life none would believe her,
and she prefers to remain silent. Pericles urges her :
" Prithee, speak :
Falseness cannot come from thee ; for thou look'st
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace
For the crowned Truth to dwell in ; I will believe thee.
Tell thy story ;
If thine considered prove the thousandth part
Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I
Have suffered like a girl : yet thou dost look
Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
Extremity out of act."
All this rich imagery brings Marina before us with the
nobility of character which is so fitly expressed in her outward
SHAKESPEARE'S CONVALESCENCE 289
seeming. It is Pericles himself who feels like a buried prince,
and it is he who has need of her patient sympathy, that the vio
lence of his grief may be softened by her smile. It is all very
dramatically effective. The old Greek tragedies frequently relied
on these scenes of recovery and recognition, and they never failed
to produce their effect. The dialogue here is softly subdued, it
is no painting in strong burning colours that we are shown, but
a delicately blended pastel. In order to gain an insight into
Shakespeare's humour at the time As You Like It and Twelfth
Night were written, the reader was asked to think of a day on
which he felt especially well and strong and sensible that all his
bodily organs were in a healthy condition, — one of those days in
which there is a festive feeling in the sunshine, a gentle caress in
the air.
To enter into his mood in a similar manner now you would
need to recall some day of convalescence, when health is just
returning after a long and severe illness. You are still so weak
that you shrink from any exertion, and, though no longer ill, you
are as yet far from being well ; your walk is unsteady, and the
grasp of your hand is weak. But the senses are keener than
usual, and in little much is seen ; one gleam of sunshine in the
room has more power to cheer and enliven than a whole land
scape bathed in sunshine at another time. The twitter of a bird
in the garden, just a few chirps, has more meaning than a whole
chorus of nightingales by moonlight at other moments. A single
pink in a glass gives as much pleasure as a whole conservatory
of exotic plants. You are grateful for a trifle, touched by friend
liness, and easily moved to admiration. He who has but just
returned to life has an appreciative spirit.
As Shakespeare, with the greater susceptibility of genius, was
more keenly alive to the joyousness of youth, so more intensely
than others he felt the quiet, half-sad pleasures of convalescence.
Wishing to accentuate the sublime innocence of Marina's
nature, he submits it to the grimmest test, and gives it the
blackest foil one could well imagine. The gently nurtured girl
is sold by pirates to a brothel, and the delineation of the inmates
of the house, and Marina's bearing towards them and their cus
tomers, occupies the greater part of the fourth act.
As we have already said, we can see no reason why Fleay
should reject these scenes as non-Shakespearian. When this
VOL. II. T
290 WILLIAM- SHAKESPEARE
critic (whose reputation has suffered by his arbitrariness and in
consistency) does not venture to ascribe them to Wilkins, and yet
will not admit them to be Shakespeare's, he is in reality pandering
to the narrow-mindedness of the clergyman, who insists that any
art which is to be recognised shall only be allowed to overstep
the bounds of propriety in a humorously jocose manner. These
scenes, so bluntly true to nature in the vile picture they set before
us, are limned in just that Caravaggio colouring which distin
guished Shakespeare's work during the period which is now about
to close. Marina's utterances, the best he has put into her mouth,
are animated by a sublimity which recalls Jesus' answers to his
persecutors. Finally, the whole personnel is exactly that of Mea
sure for Measure, whose genuineness no one has ever disputed.
There is also an occasional resemblance of situation. Isabella, in
her robes of spotless purity, offers precisely the same contrast to
the world of pimps and panders who riot through the play that
Marina does here to the woman of the brothel and her servants.
After all that he had suffered, it was hardly possible Shake
speare would relapse into the romantic, mediaeval worship of
woman as woman. But his natural rectitude of spirit soon led
him to make exceptions from the general condemnation which he
was inclined for a time to pass upon the sex ; and now that his
soul's health was returning to him, he felt drawn, after having
dwelt solely upon women of the merely sensual type, to place a
halo round the head of the young girl, and so he brings her
with unspotted innocence out of the most terrible situations.
When she sees that she is locked into the house, she says :
" Alack, that Leonine was so slack, so slow !
He should have struck, not spoke ; or that these pirates,
Not enough barbarous, had but o'erboard thrown me
For to seek my mother !
Bawd. Why lament you, pretty one ?
Marina. That I am pretty.
Bawd. Come, the gods have done their part in you.
Marina. I accuse them not.
Bawd. You are 'light into my hands, where you are like to
live.
Marina. The more my fault
To 'scape his hands where I was like to die.
. . . Are you a woman ?
MARINA 291
Bawd. What would you have me be, an I be not a woman?
Marina. An honest woman, or not a woman."
The governor Lysimachus seeks the house, and is left alone
with Marina. He begins :
" Now, pretty one, how long have you been at this trade?
Marina. What trade, sir?
Lysimachus. Why, I cannot name't but I shall offend.
Marina. I cannot be offended with my trade. Please you to
name it.
Lysimachus. How long have you been of this profession ?
Marina. E'er since I can remember.
Lysimachus. Did you go to't so young ? Were you a gamester at
five or at seven ?
Marina. Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.
Lysimachus. Why, the house you dwell in proclaims you to be a
creature of sale.
Marina. Do you know this house to be a place of such resort, and
will come into't ? I hear say you are of honourable parts, and are the
governor of this place.
Lysimachus. Why, hath your principal made known unto you who
I am?
Marina. Who is my principal ?
Lysimachus. Why, your herb-woman ; she that sets seeds and roots
of shame and iniquity. Oh, you have heard something of my power,
and so stand aloof for more serious wooing. . . . Come, bring me to
some private place : come, come.
Marina. If you were born to honour, show it now ;
If put upon you, make the judgment good
That thought you worthy of it."
Lysimachus is arrested by her words and his purpose changed.
He gives her gold, bids her persevere in the ways of purity, and
prays the gods will strengthen her. She succeeds in obtaining
her freedom and in supporting herself by her talents. The lasting
impression she had made on the governor in her degradation is
proved by his sending for her to charm King Pericles' melancholy,
and later he aspires to her hand.
The scenes quoted do not give an intellectual equivalent for
all that has been dared in order to produce them, but they
bear witness to the desire Shakespeare felt of painting youthful
womanly purity shining whitely in a very snake-pit of vice, and
292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the spirit in which it is accomplished is that of both Shakespeare
and the Renaissance.
At a somewhat earlier period such a subject would have
assumed, in England, the form of a Morality ', an allegorical reli
gious play, in which the steadfastness of the virtuous woman
would have triumphed over Vice. At a somewhat later period,
in France, it would have been a Christian drama, in which
heathen wickedness and incredulity were put to confusion by
the youthful believer. Shakespeare carries it back to the days
of Diana; his virtue and vice are alike heathen, owning no
connection with church or creed.
Thirty-seven years later, during the minority of Louis XIV.,
Pierre Corneille made use of a very similar subject in his but
little-known tragedy, Theodore, Vierge et Martyre. The scene
is laid in the same place in which Pericles begins, in Antioch
during the reign of Diocletian.
Marcella, the wicked wife of the governor of the province,
determines that her daughter Flavia shall marry the object of
her passion, Placidus. He, however, has no thought but for
the Princess Theodora, a descendant of the old Syrian kings.
Theodora is a Christian, and these are the times of Christian
persecution. In order to revenge herself upon the young girl
and estrange Placidus from her, Marcella causes her to be
confined in just such another house as that into which Marina
was sold.
The dramatic interest would naturally lie in the development
of Theodora's feelings when she finds herself abandoned to her
fate. But the chaste young girl will not, and cannot, express in
words the horror she must feel; and in any case the laws of
propriety would not allow her to do so on the French stage.
Corneille avoided the difficulty by exchanging action for narrative.
Various false or incomplete accounts of what has taken place keep
the audience in anxious expectation.
Placidus is told that Theodora's sentence has been commuted
to one of simple banishment. He breathes again. Then he
hears that Theodora has actually been taken to the house ;
that Didymus, her Christian admirer, bribed the soldiers to
allow him to enter first, and that shortly afterwards he re
turned, covering his face with his cloak as though ashamed.
He is furious. The third announcement informs him that it
SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE 293
was Theodora who came out disguised in Didymus's clothes.
Placidus' rage now gives way to agonising jealousy. He believes
that Theodora has yielded willingly to Didymus, and he suffers
tortures. Finally we learn the truth. Didymus himself tells how
he rescued Theodora unharmed ; he is a Christian, and expects to
die. "Live thou without jealousy," he says to Placidus; "I can
endure the death penalty." "Alas!" answers Placidus, "how can
I be other than jealous, knowing that this glorious creature owes
more than life to thee. Thou hast given thy life to save her
honour ; how can I but envy thy happiness ! " Both Theodora
and Didymus are martyred, and the pagan lover, who did nothing
to help his love, is left alone with his shame.
The sole contrast intended here is between the noble qualities
developed by the ^Christian faith and that baseness which was
considered inseparable from heathendom.
Two things arrest our attention in this comparison: firstly,
the superiority of the English drama, which openly represents
all things on the stage, even such subjects as are only passingly
alluded to by society; and, secondly, the marked difference in
the spirit of that Old England of the Renaissance from the all-
pervading Christianism of the early classic period in " most
Christian " France.
The calm dignity of Marina's innocence has none of that taint
of the confessional which was plainly obnoxious to Shakespeare,
and which neither the mediaeval plays before him, nor Corneille
and Calderon after, could escape. Corneille's Theodora is a saint
by profession and a martyr from choice. She gives herself up to
her enemies at the end of the play, because she has been assured
by supernatural revelation that she will not again be imprisoned
in the house from which she has just escaped. Shakespeare's
Marina, the tenderly and carefully outlined sketch of the type
which is presently to wholly possess his imagination, is purely
human in her innate nobility of nature.
It is deeply interesting to trace in this sombre yet fantasti
cally romantic play of Pericles the germs of all his succeeding
works.
Marina and her mother, long lost and late recovered by a
sorrowing king, are the preliminary studies for Perdita and
Hermione in A Winter's Tale. Perdita, as her name tells us,
is lost and is living, ignorant of her parentage, in a strange
294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
country. Marina's flower-strewing suggests Perdita's distribu
tion of blossoms, accompanied by words which reveal a profound
understanding of flower-nature, and Hermione is recovered by
Leontes as is Thaisa by Pericles.
The wicked stepmother in Cymbeline corresponds to the wicked
foster-mother in Pericles. She hates Imogen as Dionyza hates
Marina. Pisanio is supposed to have murdered her as Leonine is
believed to have slain Marina, and Cymbeline recovers both sons
and daughter as Pericles his wife and child.
The tendency to substitute some easy process of explanation,
such as melodramatic music or supernatural revelation, in the
place of severe dramatic technique, which appears at this time,
betrays a certain weariness of the demands of the art. Diana
appears to the slumbering Pericles as Jupiter does to Posthumus
in Cymbeline.
But it is for The Tempest that Pericles more especially pre
pares us. The attitude of the melancholy prince towards his
daughter seems to foreshadow that of the noble Prospero towards
his child Miranda. Prospero is also living in exile from his home.
But it is Cerimon who approaches more nearly in character to
Prospero. Note his great speech :
" I held it ever,
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches : careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend ;
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god. Tis known I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o'er authorities, I have,
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me and to my aid the blest infusions
That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones ;
And I can speak of the disturbances
That Nature works, and of her cures ; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death " (Act iii. sc. 2).
The position in which Thaisa and Pericles stand in the second
act towards the angry father, who has in reality no serious
"PERICLES" AND "THE TEMPEST" 295
objection to their union, closely resembles that of Ferdinand and
Miranda before the feigned wrath of Prospero. Most notable of
all is the preliminary sketch we find in Pericles of the tempest
which ushers in the play of that name. Over and above the
resemblance between the storm scenes, we have Marina's descrip
tion of the hurricane during which she was born (Pericles, Act iv.
sc. i), and Ariel's description of the shipwreck (Tempest, Act i.
sc. 2).
Many other slight touches prove a relationship between the
two plays. In The Tempest (Act ii. sc. i), as in Pericles (Act v.
sc. i), we have soothing slumbrous music and mention of harpies
(Tempest, Act iii. sc. 3, and Pericles, Act iv. sc. 3). The words
"virgin knot," so charmingly used by Marina:
" If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep" (Act iv. sc. 2),
are also employed by Prospero in reference to Miranda in The
Tempest (Act iv. sc. i); and it will be observed that these are the
only two instances in which they occur in Shakespeare.
Thus the germs of all his latest works lie in this unjustly
neglected and despised play, which has suffered under a double
disadvantage : it i-s not entirely Shakespeare's work, and in such
portions of it as are his own there exist, in the dark shadow cast
by her hideous surroundings about Marina, traces of that gloomy
mood from which he was but just emerging. But for all that,
whether we look upon it as a contribution to Shakespeare's
biography or as a poem, this beautiful and remarkable fragment,
Pericles, is a work of the greatest interest.1
1 Delius : Ueber Shakespeare^ s Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Jahrbttch tier deutschen
Shakespeare- Gesellschaft, iii. 175-205; F. G. Fleay : On the Play of Pericles. The
New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, 195-254 ; Swinburne : A Study of
Shakespeare, p. 206; Gervinus : Shakespeare, vol. i. 187, and Elze : Shakespeare,
p. 409, still believe Pericles to be a work of Shakespeare's youth.
XVI
FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER
IT was a comparatively easy task to distinguish Shakespeare's
part in Timon of Athens and Pericles, for it consisted of all that
was important in either play. The identity of the men who col
laborated with him seems to have been decided by pure chance,
and is of little interest to us now-a-days. It is a different matter,
however, in the case of two other dramas of this period which have
been associated with Shakespeare's name — The Two Noble Kins
men and Henry VIII. — for his part in them is unimportant, in
one almost imperceptible, in fact. Their real author was a young
man just coming into notice, who afterwards became one of the
most famous dramatists of the day, and can hardly have been in
different to Shakespeare. The question, therefore, of their mutual
relations and the origin of their collaboration is one of the greatest
interest.
A drama entitled Philaster had been played at the Globe
Theatre in 1608 with extraordinary success. It was the joint
work of two young men, Francis Beaumont, aged 22, and John
Fletcher, aged 28. The play made their reputation, and they
found themselves famous from the moment of its representation.
A would-be amusing, but in reality rather dull play of Fletcher's,
The Woman-Hater, had been put on the stage in 1606-7. It
contained some good comic parts, but nothing that gave promise
of the poet's later works.
After this triumph with Philaster, the two friends produced in
1610 or 1611 their masterpiece, The Maid's Tragedy, and their
scarcely less admired A King and no King. This joint activity
continued until the death of Beaumont in 1615. During the re
maining ten years of his life Fletcher wrote alone, with the single
exception of a play produced in collaboration with Rowley, and
attained to a fame which probably eclipsed Shakespeare's in these
296
FRANCIS BEAUMONT
297
last years of his life, as it certainly did immediately after his death.
Dry den remarks, in his well-known Essay of Dramatic Poetry
(1668), " Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent
entertainments of the stage, two of them being acted through the
year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." This statement seems
somewhat exaggerated if we compare it with the entries in Pepys'
Diary; still, we know that Shakespeare's fame was completely
eclipsed towards the end of the century by that of Ben Jonson.
Samuel Butler not only prefers the latter, but speaks as though
his superiority was universally admitted. 1
The two new poets were neither learned proletaires, like Peele,
Greene, and Marlowe, nor of the middle classes, like Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson, but were both of good family. Fletcher's father
was a high-placed ecclesiastic, much experienced in the courts of
Elizabeth and James, and Beaumont was the son of a Justice of
Common Pleas, and related to families of some standing. One
great source of their popularity lay in the fact that they were thus
enabled to reproduce to perfection the manners of the fine gentle
man, his general dissipation, and his quick repartee.
Francis Beaumont was born somewhere about the year 1586,
at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire. His family numbered among
those of the legal aristocracy, and many of its members were noted
for poetical propensities and abilities ; there were no fewer than
three poets by name of Beaumont living at the time of Francis'
death. The future dramatist was entered at ten years of age as a
gentleman-commoner at Broadgate Hall, Oxford. He early left
the university for London, where he was made a member of the
Inner Temple. His legal studies appear to have sat lightly upon
him, and he seems to have devoted himself principally to the com
position of those plays and masques which were so frequently per
formed by the various legal colleges of those days. In 1613 he
wrote the masque which was performed by the legal institutions
of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn in honour of the Princess
Elizabeth's marriage with the Elector-Palatine.
It seems to have been a mutual enthusiasm for Jonson's Volpone
(1605) which brought Beaumont and Fletcher together, and united
them in a brotherly friendship and fellowship in work of which
history affords few parallels. Aubrey, to whom we are indebted
for a number of anecdotes about Shakespeare, gives the following
1 See Richard Garnett : The Age of Dryden, p. 249.
298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
vivid picture of their life : " They lived together on the Bankside,
not far from the playhouse ; both batchelors lay together, had one
wench in the house between them, which they did so admire ; the
same cloathes and cloake, etc., between them."
The two friends soon set to work, and appear to have planned
out the dramas together, each finally working out the scenes most
suited to his talents. An anecdote related by Winstanley seems
to indicate such a method. One day while they were thus appor
tioning their parts in a tavern they frequented, a man standing
at the door overheard the exclamation, " I will undertake to kill
the king ; " suspecting some treasonable conspiracy, he gave in
formation, with the result that both poets were arrested. In
support of the veracity of this anecdote, George Darley observes
that a similar incident occurs in Fletcher's Woman-Hater (Act v.
sc. 2). Great bitterness is certainly expressed in this play on the
subject of informers ; witness the very unflattering sketch of their
ways and manners in the third scene of the second act.
In whatsoever fashion The Ttvo Noble Kinsmen may have
originally been written, the joint-authors must have finally re
vised it in company and obliterated to the best of their ability the
distinguishing marks of their very different styles. Otherwise it
would not offer, now that we are in possession of works executed
by each separately, the present difficulty of apportioning to each
the honour due to him.
There was no lack of difference, especially of a metrical nature,
about their styles. As far as we can judge, Beaumont's was the
gift for tragedy; he had less wit and less skill than Fletcher, but
he was more genuinely inspired, richer in feeling, and more daring
in invention than his brother poet. His noble head is encircled
by a halo of sadness, for, like Marlowe and Shelley, two of
England's greatest poets, he died before he had completed his
thirtieth year.
Beaumont was a devoted admirer of Ben Jonson, and a
constant frequenter of that " Mermaid Tavern " whose literary
and social gatherings have been celebrated in his poetical epistle
to the object of his admiration. His passionate regard for the
author of Volpone is shown in a poem addressed to him upon the
subject, in which he exalts Jonson's art and the charm of his
comedy above all that any other poet (thereby including Shake
speare) had ever produced for the English stage. Jonson replies
JOHN FLETCHER 299-
with his ode " To Mr. Francis Beaumont," in which he recipro
cates the admiring attention by a declaration of the warmest
affection, and expresses himself "not worth the least indulgent
thought thy pen drops forth," assuring his friend that he envies
him his greater talent. According to Dryden, Jonson submitted
everything he wrote to Beaumont's criticism as long as the young
man was alive, and even gave him his manuscripts to correct.
While Beaumont's name is thus associated with Jonson,.
Fletcher's forms a constellation in conjunction with that of
Shakespeare.
John Fletcher was born in December 1579, at Rye in Sussex,
and was therefore fifteen years younger than the great poet with
whom he is said to have collaborated more than once. His
father, the Dean of Peterborough, was successively promoted
through the bishoprics of Bristol and Worcester to that of
London. He was a handsome, eloquent man, with a luxurious
temperament, inclined to display and pleasure of all kinds.
Every inch a courtier, all his thoughts were concentrated upon
gaining, retaining, or recovering the royal favour.
One episode of his life of an impressively dramatic and his
toric interest, calculated to make the strongest impression on the
imagination of an embryo tragic poet, must have been often
related by him to his young son. Dr. Richard Fletcher was the
divine appointed by Government to attend on Mary Stuart at
the time of her execution, and was therefore both spectator and
participator in the closing scene of the Scottish Cleopatra's life.
When he approached the Queen in the great hall hung with
black, and invited her, as he was in duty bound to do, to unite
with him in prayer, she turned her back upon him.
" Madam," he began with a low obeisance, " the Queen's
most excellent majesty. Madam, the Queen's most excellent
majesty." Thrice he commenced his sentence, wanting words to
pursue it. When he repeated the words a fourth time she cut
him short.
"Mr. Dean," she said, "I am a Catholic, and must die a
Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers
will avail me little."
"Change your opinion, madam," he cried, his tongue being
loosed at last. " Repent of your sins, settle your faith in Christ,
by Him to be saved."
300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
"Trouble not yourself further, Mr. Dean/' she answered.
" I am settled in my own faith, for which I mean to shed my
blood."
" I am sorry, madam," said Shrewsbury, " to see you so
addicted to Popery I"1
Slowly and carefully her ladies removed her veil so as not to
disturb the arrangement of her hair. They took off her long
black robe, and she stood then in a skirt of scarlet velvet ; they
removed the black bodice, and revealed one of scarlet silk.
Sobbing, they drew on her scarlet sleeves and placed scarlet
slippers upon her feet. It was like a transformation scene in a
theatre when the proud woman stood suddenly dressed in scarlet
in the black funeral hall. When her women wept and wailed
she said to them, " Ne criez pas vousy j'ai promts pour vous.
Adieu, au revoir, and praying in a loud voice, In te Domine
confido, she laid her head upon the block. It was impossible
that Richard Fletcher should ever forget the inflexible resolution
and indomitable courage displayed by the great actress, nor was
he likely to forget the terrible mingling of horror with pure
burlesque in the final scene. In his agitation, the executioner
missed his aim, and a weak blow fell upon the handkerchief with
which the Queen's eyes were bound, inflicting a slight wound
upon her cheek. The second blow left the severed head hanging
by a piece of skin, which the executioner cut as he drew back
the axe. Then Dr. Fletcher witnessed a second transformation,
as marvellous as any ever produced by a magician's wand : the
great mass of thick false hair fell from the head. The Queen
who had knelt before the block possessed all the ripened charm
and dignified beauty of maturity; the head held up by the
executioner to the gaze of the little company was that of a grey,
wrinkled, old woman.2 Could anything in the world have given
young Fletcher a keener insight into the horrors of tragic catas
trophe, the solemnity of death, and the blending of the terrible
with the utterly grotesque which life's most supreme moments
occasionally produce ? It must have acted like a call and incite
ment to the creation of tragic and burlesque theatrical effect.
John Fletcher was educated at Cambridge, and probably came
to London shortly before Beaumont, to try his fortune as a dra-
1 Froude : History of England, vol. xii. p. 254.
2 J. St. Loe Strachey : Beaumont and Fletcher ; vol. i. p. xv.
PHILASTER 301
matic writer. His first success was with Philaster, or Love lies
Bleeding, in 1608. Shakespeare must have witnessed its trium
phant performance with strangely mingled feelings, for it could
but strike him as being in many ways an echo of his own work.
In so far as he is wrongfully deprived of his throne, Prince Philas-
ter occupies much the same position as Hamlet, and several of his
speeches to the king are markedly in the style of the Danish
Prince of Shakespeare's play. Thus, in the opening scene of the
first act :
" King. Sure he's possess'd.
Philaster. Yes, with my father's spirit : It's true, O king !
A dangerous spirit. Now he tells me, king,
I was a king's heir, bids me be a king ;
And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.
Tis strange he will not let me sleep, but dives
Into my fancy, and there gives me shapes that kneel
And do me service, cry me ' King.'
But I'll oppose him, he's a factious spirit,
And will undo me. Noble sir, your hand,
I am your servant.
King. Away, I do not like this," &c.
The king, however, has nothing to fear from Philaster, for the
prince loves and is beloved by the monarch's daughter, Arethusa,
whom her father intends to wed to that arrogant braggart, Prince
Pharamond of Spain. Philaster, all unknown to himself, is beloved
by Euphrasia, the daughter of the courtier Cleon. Disguised as
a page she enters the prince's service under the name of Bellario,
and displays a devotion which no trial can shake, not even that
of carrying love-letters between Philaster and Arethusa, nor of
being transferred to the service of the latter that she may be at
hand in case of need. Euphrasia's situation and feelings resemble
those of Viola in Twelfth Night, but the comedy of Shakespeare's
play here becomes serious and romantic tragedy. Philaster must
have reminded Shakespeare yet more forcibly of another of his
plays, and one to which the second half of the title, i.e., Love lies
Bleeding, would have been applicable, for in the course of the
piece Philaster and Arethusa are brought into a situation which is
a counterpart of that of Othello and Desdemona.
It happens in the following manner. The princess treats
Pharamond with as much coldness as she dares, allowing her
302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
betrothed none of the privileges which he may claim after mar
riage. Pharamond, who naively confides to the audience that his
temperament will not stand such treatment, is sympathised with
by an exceedingly accommodating court lady. Her name is Megra ;
she is one of those wanton fair ones whom Fletcher excelled in
portraying, and is closely akin to the Chloe of his charming play
The Faithful Shepherd. The time and place of this assignation
being betrayed, the king, enraged at the insult offered to his
-daughter, breaks in upon them and overwhelms Megra with cruel
.and coarse abuse. She, on her part, threatens that if her name is
publicly disgraced, she will reveal all she knows of a much too
tender friendship between the princess and a handsome page lately
taken into her service.
The king, finding that Bellario is actually attendant upon
Arethusa, believes the slander and insists upon his instant dis
missal. The courtiers, who, in common with the people, love
Philaster and look to him to dethrone the king and rule in his
stead, have watched this obstacle of his passion for the princess
with no great favour. They hasten to report the rumour to him.
Dion, Euphrasia-Bellario's own father, mendaciously asserts that
he has surprised the lovers together. No use is made of this
incident, nor of any of the opportunities offered by Euphrasia's
disguise, which remains a secret even from the audience until the
last scene of the play. Philaster in a jealous frenzy draws his
sword upon Bellario and drives him away. The page instinctively
guesses that Philaster is caught in the meshes of some intrigue,
but does not divine its nature. Her parting words might have
been addressed by Desdemona to Othello :
" But through these tears,
Shed at my hopeless parting, I can see
A world of treason practised upon you,
And her, and me."
Just as Desdemona, suspecting nothing, warmly pleads
'Cassio's cause with Othello, so Arethusa laments to Philaster
that she has been forced to dismiss his cherished messenger
•of love :
" O cruel !
Are you hard-hearted too ? Who shall now tell you
How much I loved you? Who shall swear it to you,
PHILASTER 303
And weep the tears I send ? Who shall now bring you
Letters, rings, bracelets ? lose his health in service ?
Wake tedious nights in stories of your praise ? " (Act iii. sc. 2).
Philaster suffers the same agonies as the Moor of Venice, but
being of a naturally gentle disposition, he only answers her in
terms hardly to be surpassed for mournful and pathetic beauty.
Later, coming upon the princess and her page, who have met by
chance in a wood, he is so carried away by jealousy that he draws
his sword first upon Arethusa and then upon Bellario. The page
takes the blow without a murmur, and goes willingly to prison
in place of Philaster for the attempt upon the princess's life.
The devotion of Desdemona is thus reproduced in both these
maidens, and finds in both a striking expression. All comes
right eventually. A revolution places Philaster upon the throne,
the women who love him recover from their wounds, and the
discovery of Bellario's sex puts an end to all scandal. Philaster
marries his beloved, and she, even more magnanimous than the
queen in De Musset's Carmosine, closes the play with an invitation
to Bellario- Euphrasia to share their life :
" Come, live with me ;
Live free as I do. She that loves my lord,
Cursed be the wife that hates her."
In spite of its many echoes from his own plays, Shakespeare
cannot have failed to appreciate the talent displayed in this
drama. The gentleness and charm of the women in the works of
both young poets must have appealed to him, offering as they
did so marked a contrast to those of Chapman and Marlowe,
neither of whom had any appreciation of womanliness or power
to depict it. The best of Chapman's tragedies can have con
tained little that would attract Shakespeare. The Conspiracy and
Tragedy {of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, was
rather a ten-act epic than a drama. His comedies, too, even
Eastward Hoe, with its wonderful picture of the London of the
day to which Ben Jonson and Marston contributed their share,
must have repelled him by a realism which he always avoided in
his own work. Beaumont and Fletcher laid their scenes in Sicily,
or rather in some imaginary country, whose abstract poetry, more
in accordance with the Rcmance nation's manner of representing
304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
men and their passions, cannot have been unsympathetic to
Shakespeare, especially at this period of his life.
A King and no King, the play which in all probability im
mediately succeeded Philaster^ contains the same merits and
defects as the latter, and here also Shakespeare might find re
miniscences of his own work. When the king's mother kneels
before her son, and is raised by him (Act iii. sc. i), we are
reminded of Volumnia kneeling to Coriolanus, and we feel that
the same scene was in the mind of the two young poets. The
comic character of the play is one Bessus, a soldier by profession,
and an arrant coward in spite of his captaincy. He is a braggart,
liar, and, if occasion offers, a pander, being equally diverting in
all these capacities. Considerable humour is displayed in the
elaboration of his character, but the mighty figure of Falstaff is
plainly discernible in the background. The authors even go to
the length of appropriating some distinctly Falstaffian expressions.
A fencing-master says of Bessus (Act iv. sc. 3) :
" It showed discretion, the better part of valour." *
In Philaster we were shown a strong passion consumed by
groundless jealousy. In A King and no King we have a still
stronger passion, that of the young Arbaces for Princess Panthea,
leading to confusion and disaster. Throughout the whole play
Arbaces never doubts for a moment that they are brother and
sister. The secret of his birth is not discovered until the last
scene, just as Bellario's sex is not made known until the end of
Philaster. Spaconia discovers that King Tigranes, who is as her
very life to her, is in love with Panthea ; whereupon she assumes
much the same position towards him that Euphrasia did towards
her love. But there is profounder study of character in the
new play. Arbaces, a mixture of vanity and boastfulness with
really excellent qualities, makes an extremely complex personality,
though not an unnatural or unsympathetic one, and we are given
a study of complicated passion in no way inferior to that
in Racine's Phedre, the instinct of love violently and irresistibly
aroused, but constantly met by the fear and horror of incest.
1 It is Falstaff who says in the First Part of Henry IV. (Act v. sc. 4), " The
better part of valour is discretion." This parallel has been overlooked both in
Ingleby's Shakespeare's Century of Praise and in Furnivall's Fresh Allusions to
Shakespeare.
"THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS." 305
The subject is treated with great pathos and power of lan
guage. l
In 1609-10 Fletcher reached the zenith of his fame as sole
author and as collaborator with Beaumont. That sweet and fresh
pastoral play The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher's unassisted work,
must have been written before the spring of 1610, for Sir William
Skipworth, to whom, amongst others, it is dedicated, died in the
May of that year. The theme was peculiarly suited to the fresh
and delicate grace of Fletcher's lyrical gift, and here again Shake
speare may have perceived a distinct imitation of his Midsummer
Night's Dream. Here also the lovers are metamorphosed, and
Peri got embraces Amaryllis in the form of Amoret, believing her
to be his love; he also wounds Amoret as Philaster wounds
Arethusa. A still earlier version of the play may be found in
Spenser's Shepherds Calendar. Darley has observed that Fletcher
imitated several lines from the same source, and among them,
oddly enough, some which had been appropriated by Spenser
1 " Know I have lost
The only difference betwixt man and beast,
My reason.
PANTHEA.
Heaven forbid !
ARBACES.
Nay, it is gone,
And I am left as far without a bound
As the wide ocean that obeys the winds ;
Each sudden passion throws me where it lists,
And overwhelms all that oppose my will.
I have beheld thee with a lustful eye ;
My heart is set on wickedness, to act
Such sins with thee as I have been afraid
To think of. ....
I have lived
To conquer men, and now am overthrown
Only by words, brother and sister. Where
Have those words dwelling ? I will find 'em out
And utterly destroy 'em ; but they are
Not to be grasped
Accursed man !
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate ;
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules, where every beast is free ;
What is there that acknowledges a kindred
But wretched man ? Who ever saw the bull
Fearfully leave the heifer that he liked
Because they had one dam ? "
VOL. II. U
3o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
from Chaucer, whose verses greatly surpass either of the later
poets in charm. In The Faithful Shepherdess, for example, we
have (v. 5) :
" Sort all your shepherds from the lazy clowns
That feed their heifers in the budded brooms."
In Spenser's Shepherds Calendar it stands :
" So loytering live you, little herd grooms,
Keeping your beasts in the budded brooms."
But in Chaucer's House of Fame we find the following verse
" And many a floite and litlyng home
And pipis made of grene corne
As have these litel herde-groomes
That kepen bestis in the bromes."
Fletcher's principal source, however, was, as the title tells us,
Guarini's Pastor Fido.
The Faithful Shepherdess is a charming idyl, too airy and
delicate to have an immediate success with his own generation,
but it may be read with pleasure to this day, and has secured
lasting fame to its author. Ben Jonson's later but also admirable
pastoral play, The Sad Shepherd, is the English poem of that
period which most resembles it.
Immediately after the production of this little tragi-comedy,
Fletcher offered to the Globe Theatre the most remarkable work
which had resulted from the combined labours of himself and
Francis Beaumont — The Maids Tragedy.
The first act opens with the preparations for a wedding festi
vity. The king has commanded the worthy and distinguished
Lord Amintor to break off his engagement to the gentle and de
voted Aspasia and to marry Evadne, the beautiful sister of his
dearest friend and comrade, the great general Melantius. Amintor,
to whom the king's command is sacred, and who is, moreover,
strongly attracted by Evadne, breaks with Aspasia, dear as she
is to him. We witness Aspasia's deep grief, the outburst of rage
on the part of her father (the cowardly Calianax), and the per
formance of the masque on the eve of the wedding, in which some
of the poets' sweetest lyrics are to be found.
"THE MAID'S TRAGEDY" 307
The second act represents the wedding-night. The disrobing
of the bride by her friends, and all the fun and banter attendant
on the occasion, form the introduction. Then follows, between
bridegroom and bride, the first great scene of the play, as boldly
dramatic as any written by Shakespeare before or Webster after
this date. Amintor approaches Evadne with tender words, she
gently repulses him. He strives to disarm what he supposes to
be her bashfulness, but she tells him calmly and coldly that she
will never be his. Still he does not understand, and now urges
her with impatient desire. Then she rises, like a serpent about
to sting, and coldly hisses that she is, and will continue to be, the
king's mistress, that the marriage has merely been arranged by
him as a screen for his relations with her. The fury and thirst
for revenge which seizes Amintor when he realises this outrage
gives way to a desperate comprehension that it is the king who
has dishonoured him; to a subject the person of the king is
inviolable.
The third act opens with an audacious visit from the king on
the following morning. With cool patronage he asks Amintor if
the night has given him satisfaction. Amintor replies composedly,
and answers the king's more particular inquiries quite in the
style of the happy husband. It is now the king's turn to be dis
concerted. He sends for Evadne and violently accuses her of
treachery, against which she, of course, passionately protests.
The king, beside himself with rage, sends for Amintor; he is
furiously attacked by Evadne for his falsehoods, and the king
brutally explains the situation and the part the husband is expected
to play. This double scene is written in a masterly fashion, with
a strong sense of dramatic effect, but the rest of the act is worth
less, being chiefly composed of dialogues between Amintor and
Melantius, who learns the truth about his sister from his friend.
The two are perpetually drawing upon each other and sheathing
their swords again ; firstly, because Melantius will not believe in
his sister's shame; secondly, because Amintor will not allow
Melantius to seek any revenge which will reveal his dishonour.
It all reads like a weak imitation of the Spanish dramatists before
Calderon.
The fourth act presents another series of effective scenes.
The brother accuses the sister of her infamy, and when she coldly
denies everything he threatens her with his sword, until she vows
308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
that she will take bloody vengeance on the cruel and vicious
king who has brought about her degradation. Then the suddenly
converted Evadne falls upon her knees and implores her husband's
forgiveness, which he, seeing how bitterly she repents the life she
has been living, accords. This is followed by a particularly well-
imagined scene, in which the ridiculous old Calianax, who hates
Melantius, denounces him to the king for his attempt to persuade
him, Calianax, to give up the city he held for the monarch. In
spite of its truth, Melantius listens to the accusation quite imper-
turbably, and succeeds in giving it the appearance of being merely
the ramblings of an old dotard.
In the fifth act is a skilfully prepared Judith scene — the second
great scene of the play. Evadne goes to the king's chamber,
passing through the anteroom, which resounds with the profligate
jests of the courtiers. The authors linger with a certain volup
tuous cruelty over the scene between the king, who does not
awake from his sleep until his hands have been tied to the bed,
and the woman who has been his mistress, and who now tortures
him with scathing words before she murders him. The remaining
scenes are marred by their excessive sensationalism. Aspasia,
disguised as her brother, seeks Amintor, from whom she can no
longer be separated. He receives her with warm cordiality, but
she taunts, strikes, and even kicks him, wishing to attain, if
possible, the happiness of dying by his hand. He finally loses
patience and draws his sword upon her, seeing too late that it is
his beloved whom he has slain. Evadne now appears, red-handed
and glowing with love, but Amintor repulses her with horror, she
is stained with that greatest of all crimes, regicide. She kills
herself in despair, and Amintor also dies by his own hand.
Aspasia is the perpetually slighted young woman who appears,
always resigned and gentle, in all Beaumont and Fletcher's plays.
The old coward Calianax is another of their standing characters.
The brotherhood between Melantius and Amintor possesses, in
spite of its occasional artificiality, some interest for us, as does
the corresponding friendship in the Two Noble Kinsmen, from
the fact that the mutual relations between the authors evidently
served as the prototype in both cases. Evadne's character, if not
completely intelligible, is entirely hors ligne, and most admirably
suited to dramatic treatment. The play indeed is a model of
everything which dramatic and theatrical treatment requires, and
SHIRLEY'S ADDRESS TO THE READER 309
was well calculated to impress an audience for whom Shake
speare's art was too refined.
We cannot, therefore, be surprised that the friend and fellow-
craftsman of the two poets, who was the first to publish a collected
edition of their works after their death, should write the following
words without fear of contradiction : "But to mention them is to
throw a cloud upon all former names and benight posterity ; this
book being, without flattery, the greatest monument of the scene
that time and humanity have produced, and must live, not only
the crown and sole reputation of our own, but the stain of all
other nations and languages " (Shirley's address to the reader).
XVII
SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER— THE TWO NOBLE
KINSMEN AND HENRY VIII.
IN the year 1684 a drama was published for the first time under
the following title :
" The Two Noble Kinsmen ; presented at the Blackfriars, by the
King's Maiesties Servants, with great applause. Written by the me-
,,,,,,. r , • ^ f Mr. John Fletcher and ) ^
morable Worthies of their time ] Mr_ ->mmam shakesfeare \ Gent:
Printed at London by Tho. Cotes for John Waterson^ and are to be
sold at the signe of the Crown in Paul's Churchyard."
This play was not included in the First Folio edition of Beau
mont and Fletcher (1647), but it appeared in the second (1679).
Even supposing the editors of the First Folio edition of Shake
speare's works to have entertained no doubt of his share in it,
it would probably remain in Fletcher's possession until his death
in 1625, and would therefore be inaccessible to them.
The play is of no particular value; it is far inferior to
Fletcher's best work, and not to be compared with any of
Shakespeare's completed dramas. Nevertheless, many eminent
critics of this century have found distinct traces in this play
of the styles of both greater and lesser poet.
Like that of Troilus and Cressida, the theme found its way
from the pages of an old-world poet, Statius' Thebaide in this
case, into those of Boccaccio, and through him it came to Chaucer.
Under the form given it by the latter it proved the foundation
of several dramas of the reigns of Elizabeth and James.1 Most of
the essential details of The Two Noble Kinsmen may be found in
Boccaccio's La Teseide.
1 A careful study of the plot may be found in Theodor Bierfreund's book :
Palamon og Arcite, 1891.
310
"THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN" 311
It is a tale of two devoted friends, both suddenly seized by a
romantic passion for a woman whom they have watched walking
in a garden from the window of the tower in which they are held
prisoners of war. Their friendship is shattered, each claiming
the exclusive right to the affections of this lady, who is the
Duke's sister Emilia. One of the friends is set at liberty upon
the express condition of his quitting the country for ever. His
irresistible longing for the fair one, however, draws him back to
live disguised in her neighbourhood. The second friend escapes
from prison, and meeting the first, engages him in a duel, which
is interrupted by Duke Theseus. They explain their position to
him, and their passion for his sister. The Duke arranges a
formal tournament between the suitors; Emilia's hand is to
reward the victor, and the vanquished is to suffer death. The
conqueror, however, is fatally injured by a fall from his horse,
and it is the defeated man who marries the princess.
There can be no reasonable question of the traces of Fletcher's
hand in this play, for in it we find not only his easily recognised
metrical style, but many features peculiar to his poorer work —
the lax composition which permits of two plots running side by
side with no connection between them, a tendency to merely
theatrical effect and entirely motiveless action, contrived to sur
prise the audience at the cost of psychology, and finally his con
ception of virtue and vice in the relations between man and
woman. To Fletcher, chastity meant entire abstinence, and side
by side with this "chastity" he places, and delineates with relish,
an immodest and purely sensual passion. Thus Emilia talks of
her "chastity," and the jailer's daughter alludes to her passion
for Palamon in terms which are repulsively shameless. When
Shakespeare's women love, they are neither chaste in this fashion
nor passionate in this fashion. They are sympathetically and
reverentially drawn as loving only one man and loving him faith
fully, whereas the affections of Fletcher's heroines veer round
as suddenly as we saw Evadne's veer in The Maid's Tragedy.
Therefore it is possible for him to portray such women as
Emilia, who during the tournament loves first one and then
the other of her suitors as his chances of victory are in the
ascendant. That it contains many reminiscences of Shakespeare
is no argument against Fletcher's responsibility for the greater
part of the play, but quite the contrary; we have already seen
312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
how many of these traces are to be found even among his best
works. In the Two Noble Kinsmen we find echoes from The
Midsummer Night's Dream, from Julius Ccesar (the quarrel
between 'Brutus and Cassio), and, above all, a tasteless and
offensive imitation of Ophelia's madness, when the jailer's
daughter goes crazy for fear while seeking Palamon in the
wood at night, and in her raving and singing later in the play.
Shakespeare never repeated without excelling, and certainly
never parodied himself in this fashion.1
Shakespeare evidently had no part in the planning of the
play. There is no originality in it, and if we do obtain a
glimpse of some sort of life's philosophy, it is certainly not his.
Swinburne's surmise that the play was sketched by Shakespeare
and completed by Fletcher, can therefore hardly be correct.
Among other arguments, we may mention that the part in
which, according to Swinburne's own opinion, Shakespeare's hand
is most traceable, is the conclusion, which is hardly likely to have
been written first.
Can any part of the play be ascribed to Shakespeare ? Gar
diner and Delius believe not, and the Danish critics a few years
ago shared the same scarcely justifiable opinion. Bierfreund is
uninfluenced by the fact that many of the most eminent English
critics hold a contrary view, but such a circumstance should im
pose the very closest study of the play on the part of foreign
critics. In my case this has led me to the conclusion that although
the drama was planned and the greater part executed by Fletcher,
he had Shakespeare's assistance in finishing the work. We can
hardly imagine that Shakespeare vouchsafed his help from any
motive but that of interest in, and a friendly feeling for, the younger
poet, who had submitted his work to him and appealed for his
assistance.
It would but weary the reader to go through the work from
beginning to end to show how the seal of Shakespeare's style is
stamped upon it. The traces of his pen are most frequent in the
opening act ; the appeal of the first queen to Theseus (" We are
three queens," &c.), in the introductory scene, for example. These
lines possess all the rhythm peculiar to the productions of the last
years of the poet's life ; and how boldly figurative and genuinely
1 A similar opinion is skilfully maintained by Bierfreund, but I cannot agree with
his main contention that Shakespeare had no part in this play whatever.
IMITATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE'S STYLE 313
Shakespearian in expression is the same queen's fanciful ex
pression :
" Dowagers, take hands ;
Let us be widows to our woes ; delay
Commends us to a famishing hope."
Theseus' last speech in this act (the summing up of the situa
tion and circumstances) reminds us of Hamlet's monologue, "The
whips and scorns of life, the oppressors' wrongs," &c.f and Ulysses'
beauty, wit, high birth," &c.
" Since I have known frights, fury, friends' behests,
Love's provocations, zeal, a mistress' task,
Desire of liberty, a fever, madness." . . .
Mere imitations must not be confounded with Shakespeare's
own style, however. The passage in which Emilia speaks of the
ardent and tender friendship that united her to her dead friend
Flavina, which in England has been mistakenly admired as Shake
speare's work, is in reality a poor copy of the passage in the Mid
summer Nighfs Dream (Act iii. sc. 2) where Helena describes
the love between herself and Hermia. The unhealthy affection
here set forth bears Fletcher's stamp upon it, and is made parti
cularly unpleasant by the use Emilia makes of the word "in
nocent."
We are again sensible of Shakespeare's touch in the monologue
spoken by the jailer's daughter, which constitutes the second scene
of the third act. Note the picturesque expression, " In me has
grief slain fear," and many others. From the moment she goes
out of her mind down to the last word she utters, Shakespeare
has neither part nor lot in those speeches whose uncouth imitation
of his style must have been singularly offensive to him.
The greater part of the first scene of the fifth act is undoubtedly
Shakespeare's. Theseus' first speech is superb, and Arcite's address
to the knights and invocation of Mars is delightful. The lines at
the close of the play have also a Shakespearian ring about them,
especially the words so much admired by Swinburne:
" That nought could buy
Dear love but loss of dear love."
But there is no deeper, no intellectual interest for us in all this.
314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare had nothing to do with the psychology, or rather
want of it, in this play.1
Had he any greater share in Henry VIII. ? The play was
first published in the Folio edition of 1623, where it closes the
series of Historical Plays. The first four acts are founded on
Holinshed's Chronicle, and the last upon Fox's Acts and Monu
ments of the Church, commonly known as the Book of Martyrs.
The authors were also directly or indirectly indebted to a book
which at that date only existed in manuscript, George Cavendish's
Relics of Cardinal Wolsey, which had been largely drawn upon
by Holinshed and Hall. The earliest reference to a play of Henry
VIII. may be found in the Stationers' Hall Registry for the I2th
of February 1604-5, where the " Enterlude for K. Henry VIII."
is entered ; but this refers to Rowley's worthless and fanatically
Protestant play " When you see mee you know mee" The next
mention of such a drama occurs in the well-known oft-quoted
letters concerning the burning of the Globe Theatre on the 29th
of June 1613. In an epistle from Thomas Larkin to Sir Thomas
Pickering, dated "This last of June 1613," we read: "No longer
since than yesterday, while Burbege's company were acting at the
Globe the play of Henry VIII., and there shooting off certain
chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and there burnt so
furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less than two
hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves." Also
Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to his nephews, dated the 6th of July
1613, writes : "Now let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you
at the present with what happened at the Bankside. The king's
players had a new play, called All is True, representing some prin
cipal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII., which was set forth with
many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the
matting of the stage ; the knights of the Order, with their Georges
and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats and the like ;
sufficient, in Truth, within a while to make greatness very familiar
if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a masque at the Car
dinal Wolsey's House, and certain canons being shot off at his
entrance, some of the paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them
was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first
1 Compare Hickson, Fleay, and Furnivall upon the subject of The Two Noble
Kinsmen. New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874. R. Boyle maintains that
he can trace Massinger's hand in the play.
"HENRY VIII." 315
but an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it
kindled inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming within
less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds."
The emphatic and thrice repeated assertion of the prologue
that all that is about to be represented is the truth, taken in con
junction with other details, proves that the play described is our
Henry VIII., and at that date, therefore, a new work.
Although never very highly esteemed, it was not until some
where about the year 1850 that it was ever doubted that Henry
VIII. was entirely written by Shakespeare. It would now be
impossible to find any one holding such an opinion ; some of the
most competent critics, indeed, maintain that Shakespeare had
nothing whatever to do with it.1
That keen observer, Emerson, alluding to Henry VIII. in
his book Representative Men draws attention to the two entirely
different rhythms of its verse — one that is Shakespearian, and
another much inferior. Almost simultaneously, Spedding pub
lished an article in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1856
(afterwards reprinted under the title "Who Wrote Shakespeare's
Henry VIII?"), in which he points out these differing rhythms,
affirming one of them to be Fletcher's. Furnivall and Fleay de
clared themselves of the same opinion in 1874. To understand this
criticism, the reader must bear in mind the following simple evolu
tion of English five-footed iambics. The language does not possess
what Scandinavians call feminine rhymes, alternating and contrast
ing with the masculine. The first attempt to break the monotony
of the blank verse simply consisted in the addition of an extra
syllable to the original ten — double ending. The proportion
of these lengthened lines in Shakespeare's Henry V. is 18 in
100. Ben Jonson long adhered to the old regular construction,
but finally yielded to the newer fashion. Fletcher constantly
1 In his prefatory treatise to the Leopold Shakspere (136 quarto pages),
F. J. Furnivall has dealt with this play as being in part Shakespeare's. Now he is
of a different opinion, and in a copy of the book presented by him to me, he has
written on the margin against Henry VIII. "Not Shakspere's." Arthur Symons,
who edits and prefaces the play in the Irving edition, told me that he now inclines,
on account of its metrical structure, to the belief that Shakespeare had no share in it.
P. A. Daniels, the erudite editor of so many Shakespearian quartos, said that he had
arrived at no decision respecting its authorship, and characteristically added that the
identity was a matter of indifference to him so long as the play was good. This is
not the psychological standpoint.
3i6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
used the eleven-syllabled lines, employing them indeed so regu
larly and consciously that he is betrayed into a certain mono
tonous mannerism. Instance the following from The Wild Goose
Chase :
" I would I were a woman, sir, to fit you,
As there be such, no doubt, may engine you too,
May with a countermine blow up your valour.
But in good faith, sir, we are both too honest ;
And the plague is, we cannot be persuaded ;
For look you, if we thought it were a glory
To be the last of all your lovely ladies." . . .
This will also show that Fletcher did not, as a rule, allow the idea
to overlap from one line to the next.
In Shakespeare's later works the proportion of eleven-syllabled
lines is 33 in 100; in Massinger it is 40, and in Fletcher 50 to
80, or even more. Again, Shakespeare made use, with ever-
increasing frequency, of enjambement or " run on " lines. This
style is particularly noticeable in the passionate dramas of his
bitter period, and the growing habit of employing them led to the
more and more frequent appearance of lines ending with an ad
verb, article, or preposition (light and weaking endings). There
may be a hundred such in his later plays ; there are, for in
stance, 130 in Cymbeline. This feature became an extravagance
with his successors. Massinger, whose dramas are considerably
shorter than Shakespeare's, has from 150 to 170 of these weak
endings in each play.
In comparison with Shakespeare's work there is an effemi
nate ring about Fletcher's verse, and his was the Corinthian,
if Shakespeare's was the Ionic style. Separate and unalloyed, it
would be impossible to mistake them, but it is a very different
matter when they are blended together in one and the same
work as in Henry VIII. And here again the problem offered
by the Two Noble Kinsmen presents itself. Did Shakespeare
leave the play unfinished, and was it completed by Fletcher after
his death ? or did he help Fletcher by writing or re -writing
certain scenes of his play ? The first supposition is an utter
impossibility, as far as I am concerned. The planning of the
drama was not Shakespeare's ; never in his life did anything so
shapeless come from his pen. Is any part of the play due to
him ? In spite of the verdicts of Furnivall and Symons, I think
SHAKESPEARE AND " HENRY VIII." 317
so. In the first place, we are not justified in ignoring the testi
mony borne by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio edition.
We have always hitherto taken for granted that they were better
qualified to judge of the authenticity of a play than we of the
present day; not one of the plays accepted by them has since
been rejected by posterity, and we need a very good reason for
making an exception of Henry VIII. The sole pretext we can
offer is the weakness of the whole play, including those portions
of which we are in doubt. But this weakness cannot in any
way be considered as decisive. Here, working with another
man, Shakespeare did not put forth his full strength, exercise
all his powers, nor give free play to his imagination. Of this,
Henry VIII. is not the only example. Moreover, there are
strong points of resemblance between those parts of the play
which the majority of English critics ascribe to him and works
of the same period which were unmistakably his and his alone.
So far back as 1765, Samuel Johnson, who never doubted
that the whole play was due to Shakespeare, remarked that the
poet's genius seemed to rise and set with Queen Katharine, and
that any one might have invented and written the rest. In 1850
James Spedding, moved thereto by some suggestive criticism by
Tennyson, came to the conclusion already mentioned, that only
certain parts were written by Shakespeare, and that the re
mainder was due to Fletcher. This opinion was confirmed by
Samuel Hickson, who remarked that he had arrived at the same
decision three or four years previously, and even with the same
results as far as the separate scenes were concerned. This
theory was, after a careful examination of the metrical structure,
still further corroborated by Fleay.
That the general scheme of the drama was not due to
Shakespeare is self-evident. Spedding observed how utterly
ineffective the play is as a whole, how the interest collapses
instead of increasing, and how the sympathy aroused in the
audience is in steady opposition to the actual development of
events. The centre of interest in the first act is undeniably
Queen Katharine, and, although the deference due to so recent
a king as Elizabeth's father forbade too plain speaking, the
audience is clearly given to understand that the monarch's pas-
kion for Anne Boleyn was really at the bottom of his conscientious
icruples concerning the wedlock in which he had lived for twenty
3i8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
years. Notwithstanding this, the spectators are expected to feel
joy and satisfaction when Anne is solemnly crowned queen, and
actual triumph when she gives birth to a daughter. In the last
act we have the impeachment of Archbishop Cranmer, his ac
quittal by the king, and his appointment to the godfathership of
Elizabeth, all of which has no connection whatever with the real
action of the play. Wolsey, one of the two chief characters, the
evil principle in opposition to the good Queen Katharine, dis
appears before her, not even surviving the close of the third
act. The whole play, in fact, resolves itself into a succession of
spectacular effects, processions, songs, dances, and music. We
are shown a great assembly of the State Council in connection
with Buckingham's trial ; a great festival in Wolsey's palace,
with masquerade and dance ; the great trial scene, with England's
queen at the bar; a great coronation scene, with canopy, crown
jewels, and flourish of trumpets ; the dying Katharine's vision of
dancing angels, with golden vizards and palm branches in their
hands ; and lastly, the great christening scene in the palace, with
another procession of canopy, trumpets, and heralds.
An invisible writing inscribes on every page the words
Written to order. In all probability it was a hurriedly written
piece, hastily put together for performance at the court gaieties
in honour of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage. It was for those
festivities that Beaumont's little play, The Masque of the Inner
Temple and Gray's Inn, and Shakespeare's own masterpiece, The
Tempest, were written. Shakespeare's part in Henry VIII. is
limited to Act i. sc. I and 2, Act ii. sc. 3 and sc. 4, Act iii. sc. 2
as far as Wolsey's first monologue, "What should this mean,"
and Act v. sc. I and 4.
This play cannot be classed with Shakespeare's other histori
cal dramas, for, as we have already observed, its events were of
too recent occurrence to allow of a strictly veracious treatment.
How was it possible to tell the truth about Henry VIIL, that
coarse and cruel Bluebeard, with his six wives ? Did he not
inaugurate the Reformation, and was he not the father of Queen
Elizabeth ? As little could the material interests which furthered
the Reformation be represented on the stage, or the various reli
gious and political aspects of the Reformation itself. Fettered
and bound as he was by a hundred different considerations,
Shakespeare acquitted himself of his difficult task with tact and
KATHARINE OF ARRAGON 319
skill. When Henry, immediately after his encounter with the
beauteous court lady, began, after all those years, to feel scruples
on the score of his marriage with his brother's wife, Shakespeare,
without making him a hypocrite, allows us to perceive how the
new passion acted as a spur to his conscience. The character of
Wolsey is founded upon the Chronicle, and the clever parvenu's
bold, unscrupulous, yet withal self-controlled nature, is indicated
by a few light touches. Fletcher has spoiled the character by the
introduction of the badly-written monologues uttered by Wolsey
after his fall. We recognise the voice of the clergyman's son in
their feeble, pastoral strain. The picture of Anne Boleyn, deli
cately outlined by Shakespeare, was also put out of drawing later
in the play by Fletcher. All the light of the piece, however, is
concentrated around the figure of the repudiated Catholic queen,
Katharine of Arragon, for in her (as he found her character in the
Chronicle) Shakespeare recognised a variant of his present all-
absorbing type — the noble and neglected woman. She closely
resembles the misjudged Queen Hermione, so unjustly separated
from her husband and thrown into prison in the Winter's Tale.
As in Cymbeline Imogen still loves Posthumus although he has
cast her off, so Katharine continues to love the man who has
wronged her.
Shakespeare has hardly put a word into the mouth of the
Queen which may not be found in the Chronicle, but he has
created a character of mingled charm and distinction, a union of
Castilian pride with extreme simplicity, of inflexible resolution
with gentlest resignation, and of a quick temper with a sincere
piety, through which the temper sometimes shows. He has
drawn with a caressing touch the figure of a queen neither beau
tiful nor brilliant, but true — true to the core, proud of her birth
and queenly rank, but softer than wax in the hands of her royal
lord, whom she loves after twenty-four years of married life as
dearly as on her wedding-day. Her letters show how devoted
and lovable she was, and in them she addresses Henry as " Your
Grace, my husband, my Henry," and signs herself " Your humble
wife and true servant." In those scenes in which it has fallen to
Fletcher's lot to represent the Queen, he has adhered faithfully to
Shakespeare's conception of her, which was virtually that of the
Chronicle. Even in the hour of her death, Katharine does not
forget to rebuke and punish the messenger who has failed in due
320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
respect by omitting to kneel; but she forgives her enemy the
Cardinal and sends the King this last greeting :
" Remember me
In all humility unto his highness :
Say his long trouble now is passing
Out of the world : tell him in death I bless'd him,
For so I will. — Mine eyes grow dim."
Her stately dignity resembles that of Hermione, but she differs
from the latter in her pride of race and piety. Hermione is
neither pious nor proud ; neither was Shakespeare. We find a
little proof of his detestation of sectarianism even in the pompous
play of Henry VIII. In the third scene of the fifth act the porter
exclaims of the inquisitive multitude crowding to watch the chris
tening procession :
" There are the youths that thunder at the playhouse and fight for
bitten apples ; that no audience but the Tribulation of Tower Hill or
the limbs of Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure."
Limehouse was an artisan house in London; there also the
foreigners settled, and it resounded with the strife of religious
sects. It is amusing to note how Shakespeare contrived to have
a fling at his detested groundlings and his Puritan enemies at
one and the same time.
As we all know, the drama closes with Cranmer's lengthy and
flattering prediction of the greatness of Elizabeth and James, which
is marred by the monotony of Fletcher's worst mannerisms. Shake
speare clearly had no share in this tirade, which makes all the
more strange the part it has played in the discussions which have
been carried on with so little psychology relative to Shakespeare's
religious and denominational standpoint. How many times has
the prophecy that under Elizabeth "God shall be truly known"
been quoted in support of the great poet's firmly Protestant con
victions ? Yet the line was evidently never written by him, and
not a single turn of thought in the whole of this lengthy speech
owns any suggestion of his pathos and style. It is only here and
there in the play that we obtain a glimpse of Shakespeare, and
then he is fettered and hampered by collaboration with another
man and by an uncongenial task, to which only a great exertion
of his genius could here and there impart any dramatic interest.
XVIII
CYMBELINE—THE THEME— THE POINT OF DEPARTURE—
THE MORAL — THE IDYLL — IMOGEN — SHAKESPEARE
AND GOETHE— SHAKESPEARE AND CALDERON
IN Cymbeline Shakespeare is once more sole master of his
material, and he works it up into such a many-coloured web as no
loom but his can produce. Here, ;too, we find a certain offhand
carelessness of technique. The exposition is perfunctory; the
preliminaries of the action are conveyed to us in a scene of pure
narrative. The comic passages are, as a rule, weak, the mirth-
moving device being for one of the other characters to ridicule or
parody in asides the utterances of the coarse and vain Prince
Cloten. In the middle of the play (iii. 3), a poorly- written mono
logue gives us a sort of supplementary exposition, necessary to
the understanding of the plot. Finally, the dramatic knot is loosed
by means of a deus ex machina, Jupiter, "upon his eagle back'd,"
appearing to the sleeping Posthumus, and leaving with him an
oracular " label," in which, as though to bear witness to the poet's
" small Latin," the deity childishly derives mutter from mollis aer>
or "tender air." But, in spite of all this, Shakespeare is here
once more at the height of his poetic greatness ; the convalescent
has recovered all his strength. He has thrown his whole soul
into the creation of his heroine, and has so enchased this Imogen,
this pearl among women, that all her excellences show to the best
advantage, and the setting is not unworthy of the jewel.
As in Cleopatra and Cressida we had woman determined solely
by her sex, so in Imogen we have an embodiment of the highest
possible characteristics of womanhood — untainted health of soul,
unshaken fortitude, constancy that withstands all trials, inex
haustible forbearance, unclouded intelligence, love that never
wavers, and unquenchable radiance of spirit. She, like Marina,
is cast into the snake-pit of the world. She is slandered, and not,
VOL. II. 3« X
322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
like Desdemona, at second or third hand, but by the very man
who boasts of her favours and supports his boast with seemingly
incontrovertible proofs. Like Cordelia, she is misjudged; but
whereas Cordelia is merely driven from her father's presence
along with the man of her choice, Imogen is doomed to death
by her cruelly-deceived husband, whom alone she adores; and
through it all she preserves her love for him unweakened and
unchanged.
Strange — very strange ! In Imogen we find the fullest, deepest
love that Shakespeare has ever placed in a woman's breast, and
that although Cymbeline follows close upon plays which were filled
to the brim with contempt for womankind. He believed, then, in
such love, so impassioned, so immovable, so humble — believed in
it now ? He had, then, observed or encountered such a love —
encountered it at this point of his life ?
Even a poet has scant enough opportunities of observing love.
Love is a rare thing, much rarer than the world pretends, and
when it exists, it is apt to be sparing of words. Did he simply
fall back on his own experiences, his own inward sensations, his
knowledge of his own heart, and, transposing his feelings from the
major to the minor key, place them on a woman's lips ? Or did
he love at this moment, and was he himself thus beloved at the
end of the fifth decade of his life ? The probability is, doubtless,
that he wrote from some quite fresh experience, though it does
not follow that the experience was actually his own. It is not
often that women love men of his mental habit and stature with
such intensity of passion. The rule will always be that a Moliere
shall find himself cast aside for some Comte de Guiche, a Shake
speare for some Earl of Pembroke. Thus we cannot with any
certainty conclude that he himself was the object of the passion
which had revived his faith in a woman's power of complete and un
conditional absorption in love for one man, and for him alone. In
the first place, had the experience been his own, he would scarcely
have left London so soon. Yet the probability is that he must
just about this time have gained some clear and personal insight
into an ideal love. In the public sphere, too, it is not unlikely that
Arabella Stuart's undaunted passion for Lord William Seymour,
so cruelly punished by King James, may have afforded the model
for Imogen's devotion to Leonatus Posthumus in defiance of the
will of King Cymbeline.
" CYMBELINE " 323
Cymbeline was first printed in the Folio of 1623. The earliest
mention of it occurs in the Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof kept
by the above-mentioned astrologer and magician, Dr. Simon Forman.
He was present, he says, at a performance of A Winter's Tale
on May 15, 1611, and at the same time he sketches the plot of
Cymbeline, but unfortunately does not give the date of the per
formance. In all probability it was quite recent; the play was
no doubt written in the course of 1610, while the fate of Arabella
Stuart was still fresh in the poet's mind. Forman died in
September 1611.
In depth and variety of colouring, in richness of matter, pro
fundity of thought, and heedlessness of conventional canons,
Cymbeline has few rivals among Shakespeare's plays. Fascinating
as it is, however, this tragi-comedy has never been very popular
on the stage. The great public, indeed, has neither studied nor
understood it.
In none of his works has Shakespeare played greater havoc
with chronology. He jumbles up the ages with superb indiffer
ence. The period purports to be that of Augustus, yet we are
introduced to English, French, and Italian cavaliers, and hear them
talk of pistol-shooting and playing bowls and cards. The list of
characters ends thus — " Lords, ladies, Roman senators, tribunes,
apparitions, a soothsayer, a Dutch gentleman, a Spanish gentle
man, musicians, officers, captains, soldiers, messengers, and other
attendants." Was there ever such a farrago ?
What did Shakespeare mean by this play ? is the question
that now confronts us. My readers are aware that I never, in the
first instance, try to answer this question directly. The funda
mental point is, What impelled him to write ? how did he arrive
at the theme ? When that is answered, the rest follows almost
as a matter of course.
Where, then, is the starting-point of this seeming tangle ? We
find it on resolving the material of the play into its component
parts.
There are three easily distinguishable elements in the action.
In his great storehouse of English history, Holinshed, Shake
speare found some account of a King Kymbeline or Cimbeline,
who is said to have been educated at Rome, and there knighted
by the Emperor Augustus, under whom he served in several
campaigns. He is stated to have stood so high in the Emperor's
324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
favour that "he was at liberty to pay his tribute or not" as he
chose. He reigned thirty-five years, was buried in London, and left
two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. The name Imogen occurs in
Holinshed's story of Brutus and Locrine. In the tragedy of
Locrine, dating from 1595, Imogen is mentioned as the wife of
Brutus.
Although Cymbeline, says Holinshed, is declared by most
authorities to have lived at unbroken peace with Rome, yet some
Roman writers affirm that the Britons having refused to pay
tribute when Augustus came to the throne, that Emperor, in the
tenth year after the death of Julius Caesar, "made prouision to
passe with an armie ouer into Britaine." He is said, however,
to have altered his mind ; so that the Roman descent upon
Britain under Cains Lucius is an invention of the poet's.
In Boccaccio's Decameron, again (Book II. Novel 9), Shake
speare found the story of the faithful Ginevra, of which this is the
substance : — At a tavern in Paris, a company of Italian merchants,
after supper one evening, fall to discussing their wives. Three
of them have but a poor opinion of their ladies' virtue, but one,
Bernabo Lomellini of Genoa, maintains that his wife would resist
any possible temptation, however long he had been absent from
her. A certain Ambrogiuolo lays a heavy wager with him on the
point, and betakes himself to Genoa, but finds Bernabo's con
fidence fully justified. He hits upon the scheme of concealing
himself in a chest which is conveyed into the lady's bedroom. In
the middle of the night he raises the lid. " He crept quietly forth,
and stood in the room, where a candle was burning. By its light,
he carefully examined the furnishing of the apartment, the pictures,
and other objects of note, and fixed them in his memory. Then
he approached the bed, and when he saw that both she and a
little child who lay beside her were sleeping soundly, he uncovered
her and beheld that her beauty in nowise consisted in her attire.
But he could not discover any mark whereby to convince her
husband, save one which she had under the left breast ; it was a
birth-mark around which there grew certain yellow hairs." Then
he takes from one of her chests a purse and a night-gown, together
with certain rings and belts, and conceals them in his own hiding-
place. He hastens back to Paris, summons the merchants together,
and boasts of having won the wager. The description of the room
makes little impression on Bernabo, who remarks that all this he
CYMBELINE 325
may have learnt by bribing a chambermaid ; but when the birth
mark is described, he feels as though a dagger had been plunged
into his heart. He despatches a servant with a letter to his wife,
requesting her to meet him at a country-house some twenty miles
from Genoa, and at the same time orders the servant to murder
her on the way. The lady receives the letter with great joy, and
next morning takes horse to ride with the servant to the country-
house. Loathing his task, the man consents to spare her, gives
her a suit of male attire, and suffers her to escape, bringing his
master false tidings of her death, and producing her clothes in
witness of it. Ginevra, dressed as a man, enters the service of a
Spanish nobleman, and accompanies him to Alexandria, whither
he goes to convey to the Sultan a present of certain rare falcons.
The Sultan notices the pretty youth in his train, and makes him
(or rather her) his favourite. In the market-place of Acre she
chances upon a booth in the Venetian bazaar where Ambrogiuolo
has displayed for sale, among other wares, the purse and belt he
stole from her. On her inquiring where he got them, he replies
that they were given him by his mistress, the Lady Ginevra. She
persuades him to come to Alexandria, manages to bring her hus
band thither also, and makes them both appear before the Sultan.
The truth is brought to light and the liar shamed; but he does
not escape so easily as lachimo in the play. He who had falsely
boasted of a lady's favour, and thereby brought her to ruin, is, with
true mediaeval consistency, allotted the punishment he deserves :
" Wherefore the Sultan commanded that Ambrogiuolo should be
led forth to a high place in the city, and should there be bound to a
stake in the full glare of the sunshine, and smeared all over with
honey, and should not be set free till his body fell to pieces by
its own decay. So that he was not alone stung to death in un
speakable torments by flies, wasps, and hornets, which greatly
abound in that country, but also devoured to the last particle of
his flesh. His white bones, held together by the sinews alone, stood
there unremoved for a long time, a terror and a warning to all."
These two tales — of the wars between Rome and heathen
Britain, and of the slander, peril, and rescue of Ginevra — were
in themselves totally unconnected. Shakespeare welded them
by making Ginevra, whom he calls Imogen, a daughter of King
Cymbeline by his first marriage, and therefore next in succession
to the crown of Britain.
326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
There remains a third element in the play — the story of Belarius,
his banishment, his flight with the king's sons, his solitary life in
the forest with the two youths, the coming of Imogen, and so
forth. All this is the fruit of Shakespeare's free invention,
slightly stimulated, perhaps, by a story in the Decameron (Book
II. Novel 8). It is in this invented portion, studied in its relation
of complement and contrast to the rest, that we shall find an un
mistakable index to the moods, sentiments, and ideas under the
influence of which he chose this subject and shaped it to his ends.
I conceive the situation in this wise : the mood he has been
living through, the mood which has left its freshest impress on
his mind, is one in which life in human society seems unendurable,
and especially life in a large town and at a court. Never before
had he felt so keenly and indignantly what a court really is.
Stupidity, coarseness, weakness, and falsehood flourish in courts,
and carry all before them. Cymbeline is stupid and weak, Cloten
is stupid and coarse, the queen is false.
Here the best men are banished, like Belarius and Posthumus;
here the best woman is foully wronged, like Imogen. Here the
high-born murderess sits in the seat of the mighty — the queen
herself deals in poisons, and demands deadly " compounds " of
her physicians. Corruption reaches its height at courts ; but in
great towns as a whole, wherever multitudes of men are gathered
together, it is impossible even for the best to keep himself above
reproach. The weapons used against him — lies, slanders, and
perfidy — force him to employ whatever means he can in self-
defence. Let us then turn our backs on the town, and seek an
idyllic existence in the country, in the lonely woodland places.
This note recurs persistently in all the works of Shakespeare's
latest period. Timon longed to escape from Athens and make
the solitudes echo with his invectives. Here Belarius and the
king's two sons live secluded in a romantic wilderness ; and we
shall presently find Florizel and Perdita surrounded by the autumnal
beauty of a rustic festival, and Prospero dwelling with Miranda
on a lovely uninhabited island.
When Shakespeare, in early years, had conjured up visions of
a fantastic life in sylvan solitudes, it was simply because it amused
him to place his Rosalinds and Celias in surroundings worthy of
their exquisiteness, ideal Ardennes, or perhaps we should say
ideal Forests of Arden like that in which, as a boy, he had learnt
SHAKESPEARE AND THE COUNTRY 327
to read the secrets of Nature. In these regions, exempt from the
cares of the working-day world, young men and maidens passed
their days together in happy idleness, pensive or blithesome,
laughing or loving. The forest was simply a republic created by
Nature herself for a witty and amorous elite of the most brilliant
cavaliers and ladies he had known, or rather had bodied forth in
his own image that he might live in the company of his peers.
The air resounded with songs and sighs and kisses, with word
plays and laughter. It was a dreamland, a paradise of dainty
lovers.
How differently does he now conceive of the solitude of the
country ! It has become to him the one thing in life, the refuge,
the sanctuary. It means for him an atmosphere of purity, the
home of spiritual health, the stronghold of innocence, the one safe
retreat for whoso would flee from the pestilence of falsehood
and perfidy that rages in courts and cities.
There no one can escape it. But now, we must observe,
Shakespeare no longer regards this contagion of untruth and
urifaith with the eyes of a Timon. He now looks down from
higher and clearer altitudes.
It is true that no one can keep his life wholly free from false
hood, deceit, and violence towards others. But neither falsehood
nor deceit, nor even violence is always and inevitably a crime ; it
is often a necessity, a legitimate weapon, a right. At bottom,
Shakespeare had always held that there were no such things as
unconditional duties and absolute prohibitions. He had never,
for example, questioned Hamlet's right to kill the king, scarcely
even his right to run his sword through Poloiiius. Nevertheless
he had hitherto been unable to conquer a feeling of indignation
and disgust when he saw around him nothing but breaches of the
simplest moral laws. Now, on the other hand, the dim divina
tions of his earlier years crystallised in his mind into a coherent
body of thought to this effect : no commandment is unconditional ;
it is not in the observance or non-observance of an external fiat
that the merit of an action, to say nothing of a character, consists ;
everything depends upon the volitional substance into which the
individual, as a responsible agent, transmutes the formal impera
tive at the moment of decision.
In other words, Shakespeare now sees clearly that the ethics
of intention are the only true, the only possible ethics.
328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Imogen says (iv. 2) :
"If I do lie, and do
No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope
They'll pardon it."
Pisanio says in his soliloquy (iii. 5) :
" Thou bidd'st me to my loss : for, true to thee,
Were to prove false, which I will never be
To him that is most true."
And he hits the nail on the head when he characterises him
self in these words (iv. 3) :
" Where'in I am false, I am honest ; not true, to be true."
That is to say, he lies and deceives because he cannot help
it; but his character is none the worse, nay, all the better on
that account. He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his
gratitude ; he hoodwinks Cloten, and therein he does well.
In the same way, all the nobler characters fly in the face of
accepted moral laws. Imogen disobeys her father and braves
his wrath, and even his curse, because she will not renounce the
husband of her choice. So, too, she afterwards deceives the
young men in the forest by appearing in male attire and under
an assumed name — untruthfully, and yet with a higher truth,
calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. So, too, the upright
Belarius robs the king of both his sons, but thereby saves
them for him and for the country ; and during their whole boy
hood he puts them off, for their own good, with false accounts
of things. So, too, the honest physician deceives the queen,
whose wickedness he has divined, by giving her an opiate in
place of a poison, and thereby baffling her attempt at murder.
So, too, Guiderius acts rightly in taking the law into his own
hands, and answering Cloten's insults by killing him at sight
andt cutting off his head. He thus, without knowing it, prevents
the brutish idiot's intended violence to Imogen.
Thus all the good characters commit acts of deception,
violence, and falsehood, or even live their whole life under false
colours, without in the least derogating from their moral worth.
THE TRUE MORALITY 329
They touch evil without defilement, even if they suffer and now
"and then feel themselves insecure in their strained relations to
truth and right.
Beyond all doubt, it must have been actual and intimate
experience that first darkened Shakespeare's view of life, and
then opened his eyes again to its brighter aspects. But it is
the ide" which he here indirectly expresses that seems to have
played the essential and decisive part in uplifting his spirit above
the mood of mere hatred and contempt for humanity : the realisa
tion that the quality of a given act depends rather on the agent
than on the act itself. Although it be true, for example; that
falsehood and deceit encounter us on every hand, it does not
necessarily follow that human nature is utterly corrupt. Neither
deceit nor any other course of action in conflict with moral law
is absolutely and unconditionally wrong. The majority, indeed, of
those who speak falsely and act unlawfully are an ignoble crew ;
but even the best, the noblest, may systematically transgress the
moral law and be good and noble still. This is the meaning
of moral self-government; the only true morality consists in
following out our own ends, by our own means, and on our own
responsibility. The only real and binding laws are those which
we lay down for ourselves, and it is the breach of these laws
alone that degrades us.
Seen from this point of view, the world puts on a less gloomy
aspect. The poet is no longer impelled by a spiritual necessity
to bring down his curtain to the notes of the trump of doom,
to make all voyages end in shipwreck, all dramas issue in annihila
tion, or even to leaven the tragedy of life with consistent scorn
and execration for humanity at large.
In his present frame of mind there is a touch of weary toler
ance. He no longer cares to dwell upon the harsh realities of
life ; he seeks distraction in dreaming. And he dreams of retribu
tion, of the suppression of the utterly vile (the queen dies, Cloten
is killed), of letting mercy season justice in the treatment of
certain human beasts of prey (lachimo), and of preserving a little
circle, a chosen few, whom neither the errors into which passion
has led them, nor the acts of deceit and violence they have
committed in self-defence, render unworthy of our sympathies.
Life on earth is still worth living so long as there are women
like Imogen and men like her brothers. She, indeed, is an ideal,
330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and they creatures of romance ; but their existence is a condition-
precedent of poetry.
It is to this fertilising mist of feeling, this productive trend
of thought, that the play owes its origin.
Shakespeare has so far taken heart again that he can give us
something more and something better than poetical fragments or
plays which, like his recent ones, produce a powerful but harsh
effect. He will once more unroll a large, various, and many-
coloured panorama.
The action of Cymbeline, like that of Lear, is only nominally
located in pre-Christian England. There is not the slightest
attempt at representation of the period, and the barbarism
depicted is mediaeval rather than antique. For the rest, the
starting-point of Cymbeline vaguely resembles that of Lear.
Cymbeline is causelessly estranged from Imogen, as Lear is from
Cordelia; there is something in Cymbeline's weakness and folly
that recalls the unreason of Lear. But in the older play every
thing is tragically designed and in the great manner, whereas
here the whole action is devised with a happy end in view.
The consort of this pitiful king is a crafty and ambitious
woman, who, by alternately flattering and defying him, has got
him entirely under her thumb. She says herself (i. 2) : —
" I never do him wrong
But he does buy my injuries to be friends,
Pays dear for my offences."
In other words, she knows that she can always find her profit in
a scene of reconciliation. Her object is to make Imogen the wife
of Cloten, her son by a former marriage, and thus to secure for
him the succession to the throne. This scheme of hers is the
original source of all the misfortunes which overwhelm the
heroine. For Imogen loves Posthumus, in spite of his poverty
a paragon among men, and cannot be induced to renounce the
husband she has chosen. Therefore the play opens with the
banishment of Posthumus.
The characters and incidents of Shakespeare's own invention
give perspective to the play, the underplot forming a parallel to
the main action, as the story of Gloucester and his cruel son forms
a parallel to that of Lear and his heartless daughters. Belarius,
a soldier and statesman, has twenty years ago fallen into unmerited
THE DUAL CONTRAST 331
disgrace with Cymbeline, who, listening to the voice of calumny,
has outlawed him with the same unreasoning passion with which
he now sends Posthumus into exile. In revenge for this wrong,
Belarius has carried off Cymbeline's two sons, who have ever
since lived with him in a lonely place among the mountains,
believing him to be their father. To them comes Imogen in
her hour of need, disguised as a boy, and is received with the
utmost warmth and tenderness by the brothers, who do not know
her, and whom she does not know. One of them, Guiderius,
kills Cloten, who insulted and challenged him. Both the young
men take up arms to meet the Roman invaders, and, together
with Belarius and Posthumus, they save their father's kingdom.
Gervinus has acutely and justly remarked that the fundamental
contrast expressed in their story, as in Cymbeline's political situa
tion, in Imogen's relation to Posthumus and Pisanio's relation to
them both, is precisely the dual contrast expressed in the English
words true and false — true meaning at once "veracious" and
" faithful " (ideas which, in the play, shade off into each other),
while false, in like manner, means both "mendacious" and
" faithless."
Life at court is beset with treacherous quicksands. The king
is stupid, passionate, perpetually misguided; the queen is a wily
murderess ; and between them stands her son, Cloten, one of
Shakespeare's most original figures, a true creation of genius,
without a rival in all the poet's long gallery of fools and dullards.
His stupid inefficiency and undisguised malignity have nothing in
common with his mother's hypocritical and supple craft; he takes
after her in worthlessness alone.
For the sake of an inartistic stage effect, Shakespeare has en
dowed him with a bodily frame indistinguishable from that of the
handsome Posthumus, leaving it to his head alone to express the
world-wide difference between them. But how admirably has the
poet characterised the dolt and boor by making him shoot forth
his words with an explosive stammer ! With profound humour
and delicate observation, he has endowed him with the loftiest
notions of his own dignity, and given him no shadow of doubt as
to his rights. There are no bounds to his vanity, his coarseness,
his bestiality. If words could do it, not a word of his but would
wound others to the quick. And not only his words, but his
intents are of the most malignant ; he would outrage Imogen at
332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Milford Haven and "spurn her home" to her father. His stupi
dity, fortunately, renders him less dangerous, and with delicate
art Shakespeare has managed to make him from first to last pro
duce a comic effect, thereby softening the painful impression of
the portraiture. We take pleasure in him as in Caliban, whom
he foreshadows, and who had the same designs upon Miranda as
he upon Imogen. We might even describe Caliban as Cloten
developed into a type, a symbol.
It is such personages as these that compose the world which
Belarius depicts to Guiderius and Arviragus (iii. 3), when the two
youths repine against the inactivity of their lonely forest life, and
yearn to plunge into the social turmoil and " drink delight of
battle with their peers : "
" How you speak !
Did you but know the city's usuries,
And felt them knowingly : the art o' the court,
As hard to leave as keep ; whose top to climb
Is certain falling, or so slippery, that
The fear's as bad as falling : the toil o' the war,
A pain that only seems to seek out danger
I' the name of fame and honour ; which dies i' the search,
And hath as oft a slanderous epitaph
As record of fair act ; nay, many times
Doth ill deserve by doing well ; what's worse,
Must court'sy at the censure. — O boys ! this story
The world may read in me."
Amid these surroundings two personages have grown up
whom Shakespeare would have us regard as beings of a loftier
order.
He has taken all possible pains, from the very first scene of
the play, to inspire the spectator with the highest conception of
Posthumus. One nobleman speaks of him to another in terms such
as, in bygone days, the poet had applied to Henry Percy :
" He liv'd in court
(Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd ;
A sample to the youngest, to the more mature
A glass that feated them ; and to the graver
A child that guided dotards."
POSTHUMUS 333
A little farther on, lachimo says of him to Imogen (i. 6) :
" He sits 'mongst men like a descended god ;
He hath a kind of honour sets him off
More than a mortal seeming ; "
and finally, at the close of the play (v. 5), " He was the best of all,
amongst the rar'st of good ones" — an appreciation which it is a
pity lachimo did not arrive at a little sooner, as it might have pre
vented him from committing his villainies. Shakespeare throws
into relief the dignity and repose of Posthumus, and his self-
possession when the king denounces and banishes him. We see
that he obeys because he regards it as unavoidable, though he has
set at naught the king's will in relation to Imogen. In the com
pulsory haste of his leave-taking, he shows himself penetrated
with a sense of his inferiority to her, and appeals to us by the
way in which he tempers the loftiness of his bearing towards the
outer world with a graceful humility towards his wife. It is rather
surprising that he never for a moment seems to think of carrying
Imogen with him into exile. This passivity is probably explained
by her reluctance to take any step not absolutely forced upon her,
that should render more difficult an eventual reconciliation. He
will wait for better times, and long and hope for them.
As he is on the point of departure, Cloten forces himself upon
him, insults and challenges him. He remains unruffled, ignores
the challenge, contemptuously turns his back upon the oaf, and
calmly leaves him to entertain the courtiers with boasts of his
own valour and the cowardice of Posthumus, well knowing that
no one will believe him.
The character, then, is well sketched out. But his mediaeval
fable compelled Shakespeare to introduce traits which, in the light
of our humaner age, seem inconsistent and inadmissible. No man
with any decency of feeling would in our days make such a wager
as his ; no man would give a stranger, and one, moreover, who is
to all appearance a vain and quite unscrupulous woman-hunter,
the warmest and most insistent letter of recommendation to his
wife ; and still less would any one give the same man an unwritten
license to employ every means in his power to shake her virtue,
simply in order to enjoy his discomfiture when all his arts shall
have failed. And even if we could forgive or excuse such con-
334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
duct in Posthumus, we cannot possibly extend our tolerance to his
easy credulity when lachimo boasts of his conquest, his insane
fury against Imogen, and the base falsehood of the letter he sends
her in order to facilitate Pisanio's murderous task. Even in the
worst of cases we do not admit a man's right to have a woman
assassinated because she has forgotten her love for him. They
thought otherwise in the days of the Renaissance ; they did not
look so closely into the plots of the old novelle, and were content,
in the domain of romance, with traditional views of right and
duty.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare has done what he could to miti
gate the painful impression produced by Posthumus's conduct.
Long before he knows that lachimo has deceived him, he re
pents of his cruel deed, bitterly deplores that Pisanio has (as
Jie thinks) obeyed him, and speaks in the warmest terms of
Imogen's worth. He says, for instance (v. 4) :
" For Imogen's dear life take mine ; and though
Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life."
He imposes upon himself the sternest penance. He comes to
England with the Roman army, and then, nameless and dis
guised as a peasant, fights against the invaders. Together
with Belarius and the king's sons, he is instrumental in staying
the flight of the Britons, freeing Cymbeline, who has already
been taken prisoner, winning the battle, and saving the king
dom. This done, he once more assumes his Roman garb, and
seeks death at the hands of his countrymen, whose saviour he
has been. He is taken prisoner and brought before the king,
when all is cleared up.
From the moment he sets foot on English ground, there is in
his course of action a more high-pitched and overstrained idealism
than we are apt to find in Shakespeare's heroes — a craving for
self-imposed expiation. Still the character fails to strike us as
the perfect whole the poet would fain make of it. Posthumus
impresses us, not as a favourite of the gods, but as a man whose
penitence is as unbridled and excessive as his blind passion.
Far other is the case of Imogen. In her perfection is indeed
attained. She is the noblest and most adorable womanly figure
Shakespeare has ever drawn, and at the same time the most
CHARACTER OF IMOGEN 335
various. He has drawn spiritual women before her — Desdemona,
Cordelia — but the secret of their being could be expressed in two
words. He has also drawn brilliant women — Beatrice, Rosalind
— whereas Imogen is not brilliant at all. Nevertheless she is
designed and depicted as incomparable among her sex — " she is
alone the Arabian bird." We see her in the most various situa
tions, and she is equal to them all. We see her exposed to trial
after trial, each harder than the last, and she emerges from them
all, not only scatheless, but with her rare and enchanting qualities
thrown into ever stronger relief.
At the very outset she gives proof of perfect self-command in
her relation to her weak and passionate father, her false and
venomous stepmother. The treasure of tenderness that fills her
soul betrays itself in her parting from Posthumus, in her passion
ate regret that she could not give him one kiss more, and in the
fervour with which she reproaches Pisanio for having left the
shore before his master's ship had quite sunk below the horizon.
During his absence her thoughts are unceasingly fixed on him.
She repels with firmness the advances of her clownish wooer,
Cloten. Brought face to face with lachimo, she first receives
him graciously, then sees through him at once when he begins
to speak ill of Posthumus, and finally treats him with princely
dignity when he has excused his offensive speeches as nothing
but an ill-timed jest.
Next comes the bedroom scene, in which she falls asleep, and
lachimo, as she slumbers, paints for us her exquisite purity.
Then we have her disdainful dismissal of Cloten ; her reception
of the letter from Posthumus; her calm confronting (as it seems)
of certain death ; her exquisite communion with her brothers ;
her death-like sleep and horrorstruck awakening beside the body
which she takes to be her husband's ; her denunciations of Pisanio
as the supposed murderer ; and, finally, the moment of reunion —
all scenes which are pearls of Shakespeare's art, the rarest jewels
in his diadem, never outshone in the poetry of any nation.
He depicts her as born for happiness, but early inured to
suffering, and therefore calm and collected. When Posthumus
is banished, she acquiesces in the separation ; she will live in the
memory of her love. Every one commiserates her ; herself, she
scarcely complains. She wishes no evil to her enemies; at the
end, when the detestable queen is dead, she laments her father's
336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
bereavement, little dreaming that nothing but the death of the
murderess could have saved her father's life.
Only one relation in life can stir her to passionate utterance—
her relation to Posthumus. When she takes leave of him she
says (i. 2) :
" You must be gone ;
And I shall here abide the hourly shot
Of angry eyes ; not comforted to live,
But that there is this jewel in the world,
That I may see again."
And to his farewell she replies :
" Nay, stay a little.
Were you but riding forth to air yourself,
Such parting were too petty."
When he is gone she cries :
" There cannot be a pinch in death
More sharp than this is."
Her father's upbraidings leave her cold :
" I am senseless of your wrath'; a touch more rare
Subdues all pangs, all fears."
To his continued reproaches she only replies with a rapturous
eulogy of Posthumus :
" He is
A man worth any woman ; overbuys me
Almost the sum he pays."
And her passion deepens after her husband's departure. She
envies the handkerchief he has kissed ; she laments that she
could not watch his receding ship ; she would have " broke her
eye-strings " to see the last of it. He has been torn away from
her while she had yet "most pretty things to say;" how she
would think of him and beg him to think of her at three fixed
hours of every day ; and she would have made him swear not to
forget her for any " she of Italy." He was gone before she could
give him the parting kiss which she had set u betwixt two charm
ing words."
She is devoid of ambition. She would willingly exchange her
CHARACTER OF IMOGEN 337
royal station for idyllic happiness in a country retreat such as that
for which Shakespeare is now longing. When Posthumus has
left her she exclaims (i. 2) :
" Would I were
A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus
Our neighbour shepherd's son ! "
In other words, she sighs for the lot in life which we shall find
in The Winter's Tale apportioned to Prince Florizel and Princess
Perdita. In the same spirit she reflects before the coming of
lachimo (i. 7) :
" Blessed be those,
How mean soe'er, that have their honest wills,
Which seasons comfort."
And then when lachimo (" little lago") slanders Posthumus to
her, as he will presently slander her to Posthumus, how different
is her conduct from her husband's ! She has turned pale at his
entrance, at Pisanio's mere announcement of a nobleman from
Rome with letters from her lord. To lachimo's first whispers of
Posthumus's infidelity, she merely answers :
" My lord, I fear,
Has forgot Britain."
But when lachimo proceeds to draw a gloating picture of her
husband's debaucheries, and offers himself as an instrument for
her revenge upon the faithless one, she replies with the ex
clamation :
"What, ho, Pisanio!"
She summons her servant; she has seen all she wants of this
Italian.
Even when she says nothing she fills the scene, as when,
having gone to rest, she lies in bed reading, dismisses her
attendant, closes the book and falls asleep. How wonderfully
has Shakespeare brought home to us the atmosphere of purity
in this sleeping-chamber by means of the passionate words he
places in the mouth of lachimo (ii. 2) :
"Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom'st thy bed ! fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets ! That I might touch !
VOL. II. Y
338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
But kiss ; one kiss ! — Rubies unparagon'd,
How dearly they do't ! — Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus."
The influence of this scene — interpreting as it does the
overpowering impression that emanates even from the material
surroundings of exquisite womanhood, the almost magical glamour
of purity and loveliness combined — may in all probability be
traced in the rapture expressed by Goethe's Faust when he and
Mephistopheles enter Gretchen's chamber. lachimo is here the
love-sick Faust and the malign Mephistopheles in one. Re
member Faust's outburst :
" Willkommen, siisser Dammerschein,
Der Du dies Heiligthum durchwebst
Ergreif mein Herz, du siisse Liebespein,
Die Du vom Thau der Hoffnung schmachtend lebst !
Wie athmet hier Gefiihl der Stille."
Despite the difference between the two situations, there can be
no doubt that the one has influenced the other.1
As though in ecstasy over this incomparable creation, Shake
speare once more bursts forth into song. Once and again he
pays her lyric homage ; here in Cloten's morning song, " Hark,
hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings," and afterwards in the
dirge her brother's chant over what they believe to be her dead
body.
Shakespeare makes her lose her self-control for the first time
when Cloten ventures to speak disparagingly of her husband,
calling him a " base wretch," a beggar " foster'd with cold dishes,
with scraps o' the court," "a hilding for a livery," and so on.
1 Scarcely any poet has been more followed in modern times than Shakespeare.
We have already drawn attention to the by no means accidental resemblances in
Voltaire, Goethe, and Schiller, and we have further instances. Schiller's Die Jung-
frau von Orleans is markedly indebted to the first part of Henry VI. The scene
between the maid and the Duke of Burgundy (ii. 10) is fashioned after the corre
sponding scene in Shakespeare (iii. 3), and that between the maid and her father in
Schiller (iv. 1 1) answers to Shakespeare's (v. 4). The apothecary in Oehlenschlager's
Aladdin is borrowed from the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. In Bjornstj erne's
Bjornson's Maria Stuart (ii. 2) Ruthven rises from a sick bed to totter into the
conspirators with Knox, and take the more eager share in the plot to murder Rizzio,
as the sick Ligarius makes his way to Brutus {Julius C&sar, ii. i) to join the conspiracy
to murder Caesar.
CHARACTER OF IMOGEN 339
Then she bursts forth into words of more than masculine
violence, and almost as opprobrious as Cloten's own (ii. 3) :
" Profane fellow !
Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more
But what thou art besides, thou wert too base
To be his groom : thou wert dignified enough,
Even to the point of envy, if 't were made
Comparative for your virtues, to be styl'd
The under-hangman of his kingdom, and hated
For being preferr'd so well."
It is in the same flush of anger that she speaks the words
which first sting Cloten to comic fury, and then inspire him with
his hideous design. Leonatus' meanest garment, she says, is
" dearer in her respect " than Cloten's whole person — an expres
sion which rankles in the mind of the noxious dullard, until at
last it drives him out of his senses.
New charm and new nobility breathe around her in the scene
in which she receives the letter from her husband, designed to lure
her to her death. First all her enthusiasm, and then all her
passion, blaze forth and burn with the clearest flame. Hear this
(iii.2):
" Pisanio. Madam, here is a letter from my lord.
Imogen. Who ? thy lord ? that is my lord : Leonatus.
O learn'd indeed were that astronomer
That knew the stars as I his characters ;
He'd lay the future open. — You good gods,
Let what is here contain'd relish of love,
Of my lord's health, of his content, — yet not,
That we two are asunder, — let that grieve him :
Some griefs are medicinable ; that is one of them,
For it doth physic love : — of his content,
All but in that ! — Good wax, thy leave. — Bless'd be
You bees, that make these locks of counsel ! "
She reads that her lord appoints a meeting-place at Milford
Haven, little dreaming that she is summoned there only to be
murdered :
" O for a horse with wings ! — Hear'st thou, Pisanio ?
He is at Milford Haven : read, and tell rne
340 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs
May plod it in a week, why may not I
Glide thither in a day ? — Then, true Pisanio,
(Who long'st, like me, to see thy lord ; who long'st, —
O let me 'bate ! — but not like me ; — yet long'st, —
But in a fainter kind : — O not like me,
For mine's beyond beyond) say, and speak thick,
(Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing,
To the smothering of the sense), how far it is
To this same blessed Milford : and, by the way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
To inherit such a haven : but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence ; and, for the gap
That we shall make in time, from our hencegoing
And our return, to excuse : but first, how get hence :
Why should excuse be born or e'er begot ?
We'll talk of that hereafter. . . . Prithee, speak,
How many score of miles may we well ride
'Twixt hour and hour ?
Pis. One score, 'twixt sun and sun,
Madam's, enough for you : \_Aside\ and too much too.
Imo. Why, one that rode to 's execution, man,
Could never go so slow ; I have heard of riding wagers,
Where horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i' the clock's behalf. But this is foolery :
Go bid my woman feign a sickness."
These outbursts are beyond all praise ; but quite on a level
with them stands her answer when Pisanio shows her Posthu-
rnus's letter to him, denouncing her with the foulest epithets, and
the whole extent of her misfortune becomes clear to her. It is
then she utters the words (iii. 4) which Soren Kierkegaard ad
mired so deeply :
" False to his bed ! what is it to be false ?
To lie in watch there and to think on him ?
To weep 'twixt clock and clock ? if sleep charge nature
To break it with a fearful dream of him
And cry myself awake ? that's false to's bed, is it ?_'"
It is very characteristic that she never for a moment believes
that Posthumus can really think it possible she should have given
CHARACTER OF IMOGEN 341
herself to another. She seeks another explanation for his inex
plicable conduct :
" Some jay of Italy,
Whose mother was her painting, hath betray'd him."
This is scant comfort to her, however, and she implores
Pisanio, who would spare her, to strike, for life has now lost all
value for her. As she is baring her breast to the blow, she speaks
these admirable words :
" Come, here's my heart :
Something's afore 't : — soft, soft ! we'll no defence ;
Obedient as the scabbard. — What is here ?
The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus,
All turn'd to heresy ? Away, away,
Corrupters of my faith ! you shall no more
Be stomachers to my heart."
With the same intentness, or rather with the same tenderness,
has Shakespeare, all through the play, imbued himself with her
spirit, never losing touch of her for a moment, but lovingly filling
in trait upon trait, until at last he represents her, half in jest, as
the sun of the play. The king says in the concluding scene :
" See,
Posthumus anchors upon Imogen ;
And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye
On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting
Each object with a joy : the counterchange
Is severally in all."
Early in the play Imogen expressed the wish that she were a
neatherd's daughter, and Leonatus a shepherd's son. Later, when,
clad in manly attire, she chances upon the lonely forest cave in
which her brothers dwell, she feels completely at ease in their
neighbourhood, and in the primitive life for which she has always
longed — as Shakespeare longs for it now. The brothers are
happy with her, and she with them. She says (Act iii. sc. 6) :
"Pardon me, gods !
I'd change my sex to be companions with them,
Since Leonatus's false."
342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
And later (Act iv. sc. 2) :
"These are kind creatures. Gods ! what lies I have heard !
Our courtiers say all's savage but at court."
Belarius exclaims in the same spirit (Act iii. sc. 3) :
"Oh, this life
Is nobler than attending for a check,
Richer than doing nothing for a bauble,
Prouder than rustling in unpaid for silk."
The princes, in whom the royal soldierly blood asserts itself in a
thirst for adventure, reply in a contrary strain :
" Guiderius. Haply this life is best
If quiet life be best ; sweeter to you
That have a sharper known ; well corresponding
With your stiff age ; but unto us it is
A call of ignorance, travelling a-bed ;
A prison for a debtor, that not dares
To stride a limit."
And his brother adds :
" What should we speak of
When we are as old as you ? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December. . . .
We have seen nothing ;
We are beastly."
Shakespeare has diffused a marvellous poetry throughout this
forest idyl ; a matchless freshness and primitive charm pervade
the whole. In this period of detestation for the abortions of cul
ture, the poet has beguiled himself by picturing a life far from all
civilisation, an innately noble youth in a natural state, and he
depicts two young men who have seen nothing of life and never
looked upon the face of woman ; whose days have been passed in
the pursuit of game, and who, like the Homeric warriors, pre
pared and cooked with their own hands the spoil procured by
their bows and arrows. But their race shines through, and they
prove of better stock than we should have looked for in the sons
of the contemptible Cymbeline. Their instincts all tend towards
the noble and princely ideal.
SHAKESPEARE AND THE SPANISH DRAMA 343
In the Spanish drama, which twenty-five years later received
such an impetus under Calderon, it became a leading motive to
portray young men and women brought up in solitude without
having seen a single being of the other sex, and without know
ledge of their rank and parentage. Thus in Calderon's Life
is a Dream (La vida es suefto) of 1635, we are shown a king's
son leading a solitary life in utter ignorance of his royal descent.
He is seized by a passionate love on his first meeting with man
kind, and is crudely violent in the face of any opposition, but,
like the princes in Cymbeline, the seeds of majesty are lying
dormant and the princely instincts spring readily into life. In
the play En esta vida todo as verdad y todo es mentira of 1647, a
faithful servant carries off the emperor's son from the pursuit of a
tyrant, and seeks refuge in a mountain cave of Sicily. He also
takes charge of a base-born son of the tyrant, and the two lads
are brought up together. They see no one but their foster-father,
are clad in the skins of animals and live upon game and fruit.
When the tyrant appears to claim his child and slay the emperor's
son, none can tell him which is which, and neither threats nor
entreaties can prevail upon the servant to yield the secret. Here,
as in Life is a Dream, the first glimpse of a woman rouses
instant love in both young men. In A Daughter of the Air
(La hija del ay re) of 1664, Semiramis is brought up by an old
priest, as Miranda is by Prospero in The Tempest. Like all
these beings reared in solitude remote from the turmoil of life,
Semiramis nourishes an impatient longing to be out in the world.
In the two plays of 1672, Eco y Narciso and El monstruo de
los jardines, Calderon employs a variation of the same idea.
Narcissus in the one and Achilles in the other are brought up
in solitude in order that we may see all the emotions aroused,
especially those of love and jealousy, in a being so primitive that
it cannot even name its own sensations.
In this episode, and throughout this last period of his poetry,
Shakespeare entered a realm which the imagination of the Latin
races immediately seized upon and made their own. But in all
their dramatic poetry of this nature they never surpassed that
of the English poet.
He refrained entirely from the erotic in this idyl, and instead
of the demands of a lover's passion, he portrayed unconscious
brotherly love offered to a sister disguised as a boy. Imogen
344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and the two strong-natured, high-minded youths dwell charmingly
together, but their companionship is destroyed in the bud when
Imogen, after having drunk the narcotic supplied by the physician
to the queen instead of poison, lies as one dead. A gently
touching element is introduced into this moving play when
the two brothers bear her forth and sing over her bier. We
witness a burial without rites or ceremonies, requiems or church
formalities, an attempt being made to fill their place with spon
taneous natural symbols. A similar attempt was made by Goethe
in the double chorus sung over Mignon's body in Wilhelm
Meister (Book VIII. chap. viii.). Imogen's head is laid towards
the east', and the brothers sing over her the beautiful duet which
their father had taught them at the burial of their mother. Its
rhythm contains the germ of all that later became Shelley's
poetry.
The first verse runs :
" Fear no more the heat of sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages ;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages :
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweeper, come to dust."1
The concluding verses, in which the voices are heard first in solo
and then in duets, form a wonderful harmony of metric and
poetic art.
This idyl, in which he found and expressed his reawakened
love for the heart of Nature, has been worked out by Shakespeare
with especial tenderness. He by no means intended to represent
a flight from scorn of mankind as a thing desirable in itself, but
merely to depict solitude as a refuge for the weary, and existence
in the country as a happiness for those who have done with
life.
As a drama, Cymbeline contains more of the nature of intrigue
than any earlier play. There is no little skill displayed in the
way Pisanio misleads Cloten by showing him Posthumus's letter,
and where Imogen takes the headless Cloten, attired in Posthumus's
clothes, for her murdered husband. The mythological dream
1 It is somewhat remarkable that Guiderius and Arviragus should know anything
about chimney-sweepers.
ERRORS OF JUDGMENT
345
vision seems to have been interpolated for use at court festivities.
The explanatory tablet left by Jupiter, and the king's joyful out
burst in the last scene, " Am I a mother to the birth of three ? "
prove that even at his fullest and ripest Shakespeare was never
securely possessed of an unfailing good taste, but such trifling
errors of judgment are more than counterbalanced by the over
flowing richness of the fairylike poetry of this drama.
XIX
WINTER'S TALE — AN EPIC TURN — CHILDLIKE FORMS—
THE PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY — SHAKESPEARE'S
AESTHETIC CONFESSION OF FAITH
WE are now about to see Shakespeare enthralled and reinspired
by the glamour of fairy tale and romance.
The Winter s Tale was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but,
as we have already mentioned, an entry in Dr. Simon Forman's
diary informs us that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre on
the l$th of May 1611. A notice in the official diary of Sir Henry
Herbert, Master of the Revels, goes to prove that at that date the
play was quite new. " For the king's players. An olde playe
called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke,
and likewyse by mee on Mr. Hemmings his word that nothing
profane was added or reformed, though the allowed book was
missinge; and therefore I returned itt without fee this 1 9th of
August 1623." The Sir George Bucke mentioned here did not
receive his official appointment as censor until August 1610.
Therefore it was probably one of the first performances of the
Winter's Tale at which Forman was present in the spring
of 1611.
We have already drawn attention to Ben Jonson's little fling
at the play in the introduction to his Bartholomew s Fair in 1614.
The play was founded on a romance of Robert Greene's,
published in 1588 under the title of " Pandosto, the Triumph
of Time," and was re-named half-a-century later " The Historic
of Dorastus and Fawnia." So popular was it, that it was printed
again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in
all likelihood there were more.
Shakespeare had adapted Lodge's Rosalynde in his earlier
pastoral play, As You Like It, very soon after its publication
in 1590. It is significant that this other tale, with its peculiar
346
SHAKESPEARE AND GREENE 347
blending of the pathetic and idyllic, should only now, though it
must have long been familiar to him, strike him as suitable for
dramatic treatment. Karl Elze's theory that Shakespeare had
adapted the story in some earlier work, which Greene had in
his mind when he wrote his famous and violent accusation of
plagiarism, cannot be considered as more than a random con
jecture. Greene's attack was sufficiently accounted for by that
remodelling and adaptation of older works which was practised
by the young poet from the very first, and it clearly aimed at
Henry VI.
Shakespeare, who could not, of course, use Greene's title,
called his play A Winters Tale ; a title which would convey
an impression, at that time, of a serious and touching or excit
ing story, and he plainly strove for a dream-like and fantastic
effect in his work. Mamillius says, when he begins his little
story (Act ii. sc. i), "A sad tale's best for winter," and in three
different places the romantic impossibility of the plot is impressed
upon the audience. In the description of the discovery of Perdita
we are warned that " this news, which is called true, is so like
an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion " (Act v.
sc. 2).
The geographical extravagances are those of the romance ; it
was Greene who surrounded Bohemia with the sea and trans
ferred the Oracle of Delphi to the Island of Delphos. But Shake
speare contributed the anachronisms ; it was he who made the
oracle exist contemporaneously with Russia as an empire, who
made Hermione a daughter of a Russian Emperor and caused
her statue to be executed by Giulio Romano. The religion of
the play is decidedly vague, the very characters themselves seem
to forget at times what they are, one moment figuring as Chris
tians, and the next worshipping Jupiter and Proserpina. In the
same play in which a pilgrimage is made to Delphi to obtain an
oracle, a shepherd lad says there is " but one puritan amongst
them, and he sings songs to hornpipes " (Act iv. sc. 2). All this
is unintentional, no doubt, but it greatly adds to the general
fairy tale effect.
We do not know why Shakespeare transposed the localities.
In Greene's book the tragedy of the play occurs in Bohemia, and
the idyllic part in Sicily ; in the drama the situations are reversed.
It might be that Bohemia seemed to him a more suitable country
348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
for the exposure of an infant than the better known and more
thickly populated island of the Mediterranean.
All the main features of the play are drawn from Greene, first
and foremost the king's unreasonable jealousy because his wife,
at his own urgent request, invites Polixenes to prolong his stay
and speaks to him in friendly fashion. Among the grounds of
jealousy enumerated by Greene was the naive and dramatically
unsuitable one that Bellaria, in her desire to please and obey her
husband by showing every attention to his guest, frequently
entered his bed-chamber to ascertain if anything was needed
there.1 Greene's queen really dies when she is cast off by the
king in his jealous madness, but this tragic episode, which
would have deprived him of his reconciliation scene, was not
adopted by Shakespeare. He did, however, include and amplify
the death of Mamillius, their little son, who pines away from
sorrow for the king's harsh treatment of his mother. Mamillius
is one of the gems of the play ; a finer sketch of a gifted, large-
hearted child could not be. We can but feel that Shakespeare,
in drawing this picture of the young boy and his early death,
must once again have had his own little son in his mind, and
that it was of him he was thinking when he makes Polixenes
say of his young prince (Act i. sc. 2) :
" If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter ;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy ;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all :
He makes a July's day short as December ;
And with his varying childness, cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood."
Leontes. So stands this squire
Offic'd with me."
The father's tone towards little Mamillius is at first a jesting
one.
" Mamillius, art thou my boy ? "
Mamillius. Ay, my good lord.
Leontes. Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutch'd
thy nose ?
They say it is a copy out of mine."
1 The Historic of Dorastus and Fawnia. Shakespeare's Library. T. P. Collins.
Vol. i. p. 7.
MAMILLIUS 349
Later, when jealousy grows upon him, he cries :
" Come, sir page,
Look on me with your welkin eye : sweet villain !
Most dear'st ! my collop ! — Can thy dam ? — may'st be ? "
The children of the French poets of the middle and end of
that century were never childlike. They would have made a little
prince destined to a sad and early death talk solemnly and ma
turely, like little Joas in Racine's Athelie; but Shakespeare had
no hesitation in letting his princeling talk like a real child. He
says to the lady-in-waiting who offers to play with him :
" No, I'll none of you.
ist Lady. Why, my sweet lord?
Mamillius. You'll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if
I were a baby still."
He announces that he likes another lady better because her eye
brows are black and fine ; and he knows that eyebrows are most
becoming when they are shaped like a half-moon, and look as
though drawn with a pen.
" 2nd Lady. Who taught you this?
Mamillius. I learn'd it out of women's faces. Pray, now,
What colour are your eyebrows ?
ist Lady. Blue, my lord.
Mam. Nay, that's a mock ; I have seen a lady's nose
That has been blue, but not her eyebrows."
The tale he is about to tell is cut short by the entrance of the
furious king.
During the trial scene, which forms a parallel to that in Henry
VIII., tidings are brought of the prince's death (Act iii. sc. i) :
" whose honourable thoughts
(Thoughts too high for one so tender) cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish fire
Blemished his gracious dam."
In Greene's tale the death of the child causes that of his mother,
but in the play, where it follows immediately upon the king's
defiant rejection of the oracle, it effects a sudden revulsion of
feeling in him as a punishment direct from Heaven. Shakespeare
350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
allowed Hermione to be merely reported dead because his mood at
this time required that the play should end happily. That Mami-
lius seems to pass entirely out of every one's memory is only
another proof of a fact we have already touched upon, namely,
Shakespeare's negligent style of work in these last years of his
working life. The poet, however, is careful to keep Hermione
well in mind; she is brought before us in the vision Antigonus
sees shortly before his death, and she is preserved during sixteen
years of solitude that she may be restored to us at the last. It is,
indeed, chiefly by her personality that the two markedly distinct
parts of this wasp-waisted play are held together.
Although, as in Pericles, there is more of an epic than a drama
tic character about the work, it possesses a certain unity of tone
and feeling. As a painting may contain two comparatively un
connected groups which are yet united by a general harmony of
line and colouring, so, in this apparently disconnected plot, there
is an all-pervading poetic harmony which we may call the tone or
spirit of the play. Shakespeare was careful from the first that
its melancholy should not grow to such an incurable gloom as to
prevent our enjoyment of the charming scenes between Florizel and
Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival, or the thievish tricks of the
rascal Autolycus. The poet sought to make each chord of feeling
struck during the play melt away in the gentle strain of reconcilia
tion at the close. If Hermione had returned to the king at once,
which would have been the most natural course of events, the play
would have ended with the third act. She therefore disappears,
finally returning to life and the embrace of the weeping Leontes
in the semblance of a statue.
Looked upon from a purely abstract point of view, as though
it were a musical composition, the play might be considered in the
light of a soul's history. Beginning with powerful emotions, sus
pense and dread ; with terrible mistakes entailing deserved and
undeserved suffering, it leads to a despair which in turn gradually
yields to forgetfulness and levity ; but not lastingly. Once alone
with its helpless grief and hopeless repentance, the heart still finds
in its innermost sanctuary the memory which, death-doomed and
petrified, has yet been faithfully guarded and cherished unscathed
until, ransomed by tears, it consents to live once more. The play
has its meaning and moral just as a symphony may have, neither
more nor less. It would be absurd to seek for a psychological
PAULINA 351
reason for Hermione's prolonged concealment. She reappears
at the end because her presence is required, as the final chord
is needed in music or the completing arabesque in a drawing.
Among Shakespeare's additions in the first part of the play we
find the characters of the noble and resolute Paulina and her
weakly good-natured husband. Paulina, who has been over
looked by both Mrs. Jameson and Heine in their descriptions of
Shakespeare's feminine characters, is one of the most admirable
and original figures he has put upon the stage. She has more
courage than ten men, and possesses that natural eloquence and
power of pathos which determined honesty and sound common
sense can bestow upon a woman. She would go through fire and
water for the queen whom she loves and trusts. She is untouched
by sentimentality; there is as little of the erotic as there is of
repugnance in her attitude towards her husband. Her treatment
of the king's jealous frenzy reminds us of Emilia in Othello, but
the resemblance ends there. In Paulina there is a vein of that
rare metal which we only find in excellent women of this not
essentially feminine type. We meet it again in the nineteenth
century in the character of Christiana Oehlenschlager as we see
it in Hauch's beautiful commemorative poem.
The rustic fete in the second part of the play, with the conver
sations between Florizel and Perdita, is entirely Shakespeare's
work; above all is the diverting figure of Autolycus his own
peculiar property.
In Greene's tale the king falls violently in love with his daughter
when she is restored to him a grown woman, and he kills himself
in despair when she is wedded to her lover. Shakespeare rejected
this stupid and ugly feature ; his ending is all pure harmony.
Here, as in Cymbeline, we see the poet compelled by the
nature of his theme to dwell upon the disastrous effects of jealousy.
This is the third time he treats of such suspicions driving to
madness. Othello was the first great example, then Posthumus,
and now Leontes.
The case of Leontes is so far unique that no one has suggested
causes of jealousy, nor slandered Hermione to him. His own
coarse and foolish imaginings alone are to blame. This variation
of the vice was evidently intended to darken the background
against which womanly high-mindedness and blamelessness were
to shine forth.
352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Mrs. Jameson has charmingly said that Hermione combines
such rare virtues as "dignity without pride, love without pas
sion, and tenderness without weakness." As queen, wife, and
mother, there is a majestic lovableness about her, a grand and
gracious simplicity, a natural self-control, the proverb, " Still
waters run deep," being eminently applicable to her. Her
gentle dignity contrasts well with Paulina's enthusiastic intre
pidity, and her noble reticence with Paulina's free outspoken
ness. Her attitude and language during the trial scene are
superb, far outshining Queen Katherine's on a similar occasion.
Her nature, the ideal Englishwoman's nature, all meekness and
submissiveness, rises in dignified protest. She is brief in her
self-defence; life has no value for her since she has lost her
husband's love, since her little son has been removed from her
as though she were plague- stricken, and her new-born daughter
"from her breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth,
haled out to murder." Her only desire is to vindicate her honour,
yet the first words of this cruelly accused and shamefully treated
woman are full of pity for the remorse which Leontes will some
day suffer. Her language is that of innocent fortitude. When
about to be taken to prison she says :
"There's some ill planet reigns :
I must be patient till the heavens look
With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords,
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities : but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown."
She bids her women not weep until she has deserved imprison
ment ; then indeed their tears will have cause to flow.
In the second half of the Winter's Tale we are surrounded by
a fresh and charming country, and shown a picture of rustic
happiness and well-being. No one was less influenced by the
sentimental vagaries of the fantastic pastorals of the day than
Shakespeare. He had drawn in Corin and Phebe, in As You
Like It, an extremely natural, and therefore not particularly
poetical, shepherd and shepherdess ; and the herdsmen in the
Winter's Tale are no beautiful languishing souls. They do not
write sonnets and madrigals, but drink ale and eat pies and
AUTOLYCUS 353
dance. The hostess serves her guests with a face that is " o'
fire with labour and the thing she took to quench it" The
clowns' heads are full of the prices of wool ; they have no thought
for roses and nightingales, and their simplicity is rather comical
than touching. They are more than overmatched by the light-
fingered Autolycus, who educates them by means of ballads, and
eases them of their purses at the same time. He is a Jack-of-all-
trades, has travelled the country with a monkey, been a process-
server, bailiff, and servant to Prince Florizel ; he has gone about
with a puppet-show playing the Prodigal Son ; finally, he marries
a tinker's wife and settles down as a confirmed rogue. He is the
clown of the piece — roguish, genial, witty, and always master of
the situation. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare seized every
opportunity to flout the lower classes, that he always gave a
satirical and repellent picture of them as a mass, yet their natural
wit, good sense, and kind-heartedness are always portrayed in his
clowns with a sympathetic touch. Before his time, the buffoon
was never an inherent part of the play ; he came on and danced
his jig without any connection with the plot, and was, in fact,
merely intended to amuse the uneducated portion of the audience
and make them laugh. Shakespeare was the first to incorporate
him into the plot, and to endow him, not merely with the jester's
wit, but with the higher faculties and feelings of the Fool in Lear,
or the gay humour of the vagabond pedlar, Autolycus.
The clown in the Winter s Tale is the drollest and sharpest
of knaves, and is employed to unravel the knot in the story. He
it is who transports the old shepherd and his son from Bohemia
to the court of King Leontes in Sicily.
The ludicrous features of rustic society, however, are quite
overpowered by the kind-heartedness which stamps every word
coming from the lips of these worthy country folk, and prepares
us for the appearance of Perdita in their midst.
She has been adopted out of compassion, and, with her gold,
proves a source of prosperity to her adoptive parents. Thus she
grows up without feeling the pressure of poverty or servitude.
She wins the prince's heart by the beauty of her youth, and
when we first see her she is attired in all her splendour as
queen of a rural festival. Modest and charming as she is, she
shows the courage of a true princess in face of the difficulties
and hardships she must encounter for the sake of her love.
VOL. II. Z
354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
She is one of Shakespeare's cherished children, and he has
endowed her with his favourite trait — a distaste for anything
artificial or unnatural. Not even to improve the flowers in her
garden will she employ the art of special means of cultivation.
She will not have the rich blooms of " carnations and streaked
gillyflowers" there; they do not thrive and she will not plant
them. When Polixenes asks why she disdains them, she replies
(Act iv. sc. 3) :
" For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature."
To which Polixenes makes the profound response :
" Say there be ;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean : so over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race ; this is an art
Which does mend nature, — change it rather ; but
The art itself is nature."
These are the most profound and subtle words that could well be
spoken'on the subject of the relations between nature and culture ;
the clearest repudiation of that gospel of naturalism against which
the figure of Caliban and the ridicule cast upon Gonzalo's Utopia
in The Tempest are protests. Perdita herself is one of those
chosen flowers which are the product of that true culture which
preserves and ennobles nature.
They are also words of genuine wisdom on the relative posi
tions of nature and art. Shakespeare's art was that of nature
itself, and in this short speech we possess his aesthetic confession
of faith.
His ideal was a poetry which strayed neither in matter nor
manner from what Hamlet calls "the modesty of nature." Al
though he did not wholly succeed in escaping its infection, Shake
speare invariably pursued the artificial taste of the times with
gibes. From the days when he made merry at the expense of
Euphuisms in Loves Labours Lost and Falstaff, until now, when
SHAKESPEARE AND EUPHUISMS 355
he puts such affectedly poetical language in the mouths of his
courtiers in the Winters Tale, he has always ridiculed it vigorously.
In the first scene of the play Camillo says in praise of Mamil-
lius :
"They that went on crutches before he was born desire still their
life to see him a man.
Whereupon Archidamus sarcastically inquires :
" Would they else be content to die ? "
and Camillo is forced to laughingly confess :
j^" Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live."
Still more absurd is the style in which the Third Gentleman
describes, in the last scene of the play, the meeting between the
king and his long-lost daughter and the aspect of the spectators.
He says of Paulina :
r " She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another
elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.1
This comical diction reaches a climax in the following ex
pressions :
" One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine
eyes, caught water though not the fish, was when at the relation of the
queen's death, with the manner how she came to't, bravely confessed
and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter ;
till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an ' Alas,' I would
fain say, bleed tears, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was
most marble there changed colour ; some swooned, all sorrowed : if all
the world could have seen 't the woe had been universal"
That Shakespeare's aesthetic sense did not sanction such ex
pressions as these of the Third Gentleman scarcely needs stating.
Perdita's language is that of nature itself. So great is her dislike of
1 Julius Lange positively asserts that these expressions are not to be taken as an
intentional jest on the part of Shakespeare, but are to be regarded as part of his style
(" said in sober earnest," to quote his own words), and he makes them the pretext of an
attack upon the "then, as now, idolised Shakespeare — in whose works, after all, we
find more high-sounding and highly-coloured words than any meaning or real under
standing of life." (Tilskueren, 1895, p. 699.)
356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
artificiality, that she will not even plant gardener's flowers in her
garden, saying:
" No more than were I painted I would wish
This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me."
Nowhere is Shakespeare's knowledge of nature more charm
ingly displayed than in her speeches. It is not only the poetic
expression that is so wonderful in Perdita's distribution of flowers;
it is the intimacy shown with their habits. She says (Act iv. sc. 3) :
" Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram ;
The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun
And with him rises weeping."
How well she knows that in England the daffodils bloom as early
as February and March, while the swallow does not come till
April :
" O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou lett'st fall
From Dis's waggon ! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength — a malady
Most incident to maids ; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial ; lilies of all kinds,
The' flower-de-luce being one ! Oh, these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er !
Florizel. What, like a corse ?
Perdita. No, like a bank for love to lie and play onj:
Not like a corse ; or if, not to be buried,
But quick and in mine arms." . . .
Florizel's answer describes her with a lover's eloquence :
" What you doj
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever : when you sing,
PERDITA 357
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too." . . .
Her charm is equalled by her pride and resolution. When
the king threatens to have her " beauty scratched with briars " if
she dares retain her hold upon his son, although she believes all
is lost, she says :
" I was not much afraid ; for once or twice
I was about to speak and tell him plainly,
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike." . . .
The delineation of the love between Florizel and Perdita is
marked by certain features not to be found in Shakespeare's youth
ful works, but which reappear with Ferdinand and Miranda in The
Tempest. There is a certain remoteness from the world about it,
a tenderness for those who are still yearning and hoping for hap
piness and a renunciation of any expectation as far as himself is
concerned. He stands outside and beyond it all now. In the old
days the poet stood on a level, as it were, with the love he was
portraying; now he looks upon it from above with a fatherly eye.
As in Cymbeline, the court is here placed in contrast with
idyllic life, and shown as the abode of cruelty, stupidity, and vice.
Even the better of the two kings, Polixenes, is rough and harsh,
and Leontes, whom we are not to look upon as criminal, but
only as misled by his miserable suspicions, offers a true picture
of the princely attitude and princely behaviour of the time of the
Renaissance, during the sixteenth century in Italy and about a
century later in England. It was with good reason that Belarius
said in Cymbeline (Act iii. sc. 3) :
" And we will fear no poison, which attends
In place of greater state."
We see that the thoughts of the king immediately turn to
poison when he believes that his wife has deceived him, and we also
see that the courtier in whom he confides has all the means ready
to hand (Act i. sc. 2) :
" And thou . . .
. . . might'st bespice a cup,
358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
To give mine enemy a lasting wink ;
Which draught to me were cordial.
Camilla. Sir, my lord,
I could do this, and that with no rash potion,
But with a lingering dram that should not work
Maliciously like poison."
When, to escape committing this crime, Camillo takes flight with
Polixenes, and the king has to be content with wreaking his
vengeance on the hapless Hermione and her infant, he returns
again and again to the thought of having them burned :
" Say that she were gone,
Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest
Might come to me again."
Then the command with regard to the child :
" Hence with it, and, together with the dam,
Commit them to the fire ! " (Act ii. sc. 3).
Paulina shall share their fate for daring to oppose him :
" I'll ha' thee burnt ! "
When she is gone, he repeats his order for the burning of the
infant :
" Take it hence
And see it instantly consumed with fire. . . .
... If thou refuse,
And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so ;
The bastard brains with these my proper hands
Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire ! "
We can see that Shakespeare had no intention of allowing the
drama to become mawkish by giving too free scope to the
humours of a pastoral play.
The resemblance between the sufferings of the infant Perdita,
put ashore on the coast of Bohemia during a tempest, and those
of the infant Marina, born during a storm at sea, is accentuated
by lines which markedly recall a well-known passage in Pericles.
In the Winters Tale we have (Act iii. sc. 3) :
ATMOSPHERE OF FAIRY TALE 359
" Thou'rt like to have
A lullaby too rough : I never saw
The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour ! " l
The impression designedly produced upon the audience, that all
this is not serious earnest, enables Shakespeare to approach more
nearly to tragic dissonance than would otherwise be permissible
in a work of this kind. The atmosphere of fairy tale, so skilfully
breathed here and there throughout the play, carries with it a
certain playfulness of expression which gives a touch of raillery
to incidents which would otherwise be horrible. Playfulness it is,
and we once more obtain a glimpse of this quality which has so
long deserted Shakespeare. It would be difficult to find a more
roguish bit of drollery than the old shepherd's monologue on
finding the child (Act iii. sc. 3) :
" A pretty one ; a very pretty one : sure, some 'scape : though I am
not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the 'scape. This
has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work :
they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here."
The same tone is preserved in the young shepherd's account
of how he saw Antigonus torn to pieces by a bear. Impossible to
feel horror-stricken or solemn over this :
"And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his
shoulder-bone ; how he cried to me for help, and said his name was
Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make an end of the ship, to see how
the sea flap-dragoned it ; but first how the poor souls roared, and the
sea mocked them ; and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear
mocked him, both roaring louder than sea or weather."
It does not seem very likely that the unfortunate man's chief
anxiety while the bear was tearing him to pieces would be to
inform the shepherd of his name and rank. He forgot to add
his age, although, through a slip on Shakespeare's part, the old
shepherd knows without being told that Antigonus was aged.
Shakespeare did not concentrate his whole strength on this
play either. He took no great pains to reduce his scattered
1 In Pericles :
" For thou'rt the rudliest welcome to this world
That e'er was prince's child."
360 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
materials to order, and, as if in defiance of those classically
cultivated people who demanded unity of time and place, he
allowed sixteen years to elapse between two acts, leaving us
on the voyage between Sicily and Bohemia, between reality and
wonderland. In other words, he has freely improvised on his
instrument upon a given poetic theme; he has painted purely
decoratively, content with a general harmony of colour and unity
of tone, without giving much thought to any ultimate meaning.
XX
THE TEMPEST— WRITTEN FOR THE PRINCESS
ELIZABETH'S WEDDING
IT is a different matter with that rich, fantastic wonder-poem, The
Tempest, on which Shakespeare concentrated for the last time all
the powers of his mind. Everything here is ordered and concise,
and so inspired with thought that we seem to be standing face to
face with the poet's idea. In spite of all its boldness of imagina
tion, the dramatic order and condensation are such that the whole
complies with the severest rules of Aristotle, the action of the
entire play occupying in reality only three hours.
Owing to a notice by the Master of the Revels concerning a
performance of the play at Whitehall in 1611, the date 1610-11
was long accepted as the year of its production. This memor
andum is, however, a forgery, and the sole bit of reliable infor
mation we possess of The Tempest, before its appearance in the
Folio edition of 1613, is a notice in Vertue's Manuscripts of a per
formance at court in February 1613, as one of the festivities cele
brating the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. We can prove that this
was its first performance and that it was written expressly for the
occasion.
The Princess Elizabeth had been educated at Combe Abbey,
far from the impure atmosphere of the court, under the care of
Lord and Lady Harrington, an honourable and right-minded
couple. When returned to her parents at the age of fifteen,
she was distinguished by a charm and dignity beyond her years,
and soon became the special favourite of her brother Henry,
then seventeen years of age. Claimants for her hand were not
long in appearing. The Prince of Piedmont was among the first,
but the Pope would not consent to a marriage between a Catholic
potentate and a Protestant princess. The next wooer was no
less a person than Gustavus Adolphus, and his suit was rejected
361
362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
because James refused to bestow his daughter upon the enemy
of his friend and brother-in-law, Christian IV. of Denmark. As
early as December 1611 negotiations were entered upon on behalf
of Prince Frederick V., who had just succeeded his father as
Elector of the Palatinate. There was much to be said in favour
of an alliance with a son of the man who had stood at the
head of the Protestant League in Germany, and in May 1612
a preliminary contract of betrothal was signed. In the August
of the same year an ambassador from the young Elector came
to England. Meanwhile the first suitor, strongly supported by
the Queen's Catholic sympathies, had reappeared. The King
of Spain had also made some overtures, but they had fallen
through on account of their implying the conversion of the
Princess to the Catholic faith. It was the Elector Frederick,
therefore, who was finally victorious in the contest, and matters
were soon so far settled that he could set out on his journey
to England. He was very popular there by reason of his Pro
testantism, and he arrived at Gravesend amid general rejoicing.
He sailed up to Whitehall on the 22nd of October, and was
enthusiastically greeted by the crowd. King James received him
warmly, and presented him with a ring worth eighteen hundred
pounds. He was ardently supported by the young Prince of
Wales, who announced his intention of following his sister on
her wedding-tour to Germany, where it was his secret purpose
to look for a bride for himself, regardless of political intrigue.
The Elector Palatine was a remarkably handsome and pre
possessing young man. Born on the i6th of August 1596, he
was at this time just sixteen years of age, and nothing in
his conduct suggested the unmanly and contemptible character
he displayed eight years later, when he, as King of Bohemia,
lost the battle of Prague through a drunken revel. The con
temporary English accounts of him abound with his praise. He
made an excellent impression everywhere, and we read of his
dignified and princely behaviour in a letter from John Chamberlain
to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated 22nd October 1612: " He hath
a train of very sober and well-fashioned gentlemen, his whole
number is not above 170, servants and all, being limited by the
King not to exceed." The condition of the exchequer would
not permit of any unnecessary extravagance, and in less than a
month after the wedding the whole retinue appointed to attend
PRINCE HENRY 363
on the Prince during his stay in England was dismissed — a slight
which the young Princess took very much to heart.
The much beloved Prince Henry was far from well at the
time of his future brother-in-law's arrival in London. He had
injured himself by violent bodily exercise during the unusually
hot summer, and had ruined his digestion by eating great
quantities of fruit. We now know that the illness by which he
was attacked was typhus fever, and it appears that not many days
after he was convalescent he incurred a severe relapse by playing
tennis in the cold open air with no more clothing on the upper
part of his body than a shirt.
High-minded, enlightened, and honourable as he was, Prince
Henry was the idol and hope of the English nation. Queen
Anne had taken the Prince, while he was yet a boy, to visit
Raleigh at the Tower, soon after the illustrious prisoner had
been forced to abandon those hopes of the Admiralship of the
Danish fleet which he had based on the visit of Christian the
Fourth to England. Prince Henry had been intimate with
Raleigh since 1610, and is reported to have said, "No man but
my father would have kept such a bird in a cage ! " He had,
with great difficulty, obtained from the King a promise that
Raleigh should be released at Christmas 1612 — a promise which
was never kept.
On the morning of the 6th of November the Prince's condition
was declared hopeless. The Queen sent to the Tower for a bottle
of Raleigh's famous cordial, which she believed to have once
saved her own life, and in which Raleigh himself placed the
greatest faith. He despatched it with a message that it would
save the Prince's life, unless he were dying of poison. It only
availed to ease his death struggles, however, and, barely nineteen
years of age, he died before the day was out.
Never before in the history of England had such hopes been
fixed and such affection lavished on an heir-apparent, and we can
realise how great would be the grief of the entire nation for his
loss. According to the manner of the times, it was generally
supposed that he had been poisoned. John Chamberlain, writing
to Sir Dudley Carleton, says that grave doubts were entertained,
but adds that no traces of poison were found when the body was
opened on the second day. The editor of these letters, however
(author of the Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea), remarks : " There
364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is nothing conclusive in this ; for, in the first place, there were
poisons which left no trace of their presence; and, in the next,
if the effects of poisoning had been visible, the physicians would
have been afraid to say so. More than one writer has ventured
to assert that the atrocious crime was perpetrated with the con
nivance of the king, whose notorious jealousy of the popular
young prince at this period, and foolish fondness for his brother
Charles, induced a wretch well known to have been guilty of
similar practices — the King's favourite, Viscount Rochester — to
cause the prince to be secretly put out of the way." It was
hoped by all who objected to the marriage of the Princess to the
German Elector that Prince Henry's death would stand in the
way of the wedding, for it could hardly be celebrated at a time
of such deep mourning. The Elector, however, had come over
to England on purpose to be married, and it was not possible
to delay the ceremony long. The final marriage contract was
signed by the King on the 1 7th of November, and the formal
betrothal took place on the 2/th of the same month. The
wedding was postponed, but only until February. Sir Thomas
Lake writes on the 6th of January that mourning is given up,
and the wedding festivities are arranged.
The bride of seventeen was solemnly united to the bridegroom
of sixteen to the general gratification of the court, on the I4th of
February, in the presence of many spectators. On the 1 8th of the
same month John Chamberlain writes to Mrs. Carleton : " The
bridegroom and bride were both in a suit of cloth of silver, richly
embroidered with silver, her train carried up by thirteen young
ladies, or lord's daughters at least, besides five or six more that could
not come near it. These were all in the same livery with the bride,
though not so rich. The bride was married in her hair, that hung
down long, with an exceeding rich coronet on her head, which the
King valued at a million of crowns."
The bridegroom, with the King and Prince Charles, took part
in a tournament of the wedding, and earned great applause in the
evening by a display of his splendid horsemanship (Court and
Times of James the First). In Wilson's Contemporary His
tory (p. 64) we read of the bride : " Her vestments were white,
the emblem of Innocency, her hair dishevel'd, hanging down her
back at length, an ornament of Virginity ; a crown of pure gold
upon her head, the cognizance of Majesty, being all beset with
"THE TEMPEST" 365
precious gems, shining liking a constellation, her train supported
by twelve young ladies in white garments, so adorned with jewels
that her passage looked like a milky way."
Among the various plays chosen for performance at court
during these wedding festivities was The Tempest, and we shall
see that it was written expressly for the occasion.
It is hardly necessary to confute Hunter's theory, argued at
great length, that the play dates from 1596. One fact alone will
sufficiently prove its absurdity, namely, that use is made in the
play of a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne, which
was not published until 1603. Nor is there any foundation for
Karl Elze's opinion (also lengthily set forth) that The Tempest was
written by 1604. The metre shows that it belongs to Shake
speare's latest" period. It has a proportion of 33 in the 100 of
eleven-syllabled lines, whereas Antony and Cleopatra, written
long after 1604, nas but 25, and As You Like It, of the year
1600, only 12 in the 100.
We have another fragment of internal evidence against the
play having been written before 1610. In May 1609 Sir George
Somer's fleet was scattered by a storm in mid-ocean while on its
way to Virginia. The admiral's ship, driven out of its course,
was blown by the gale unto the Bermudas. After all hope had
been abandoned, the vessel was saved by being stranded between
two rocks in just such a bay as that to which Ariel guides the
king's ship in The Tempest. A little book was written on the
subject of this shipwreck, and the adventures connected with it,
by Sylvester Jourdan, and was published in 1610 under the title,
" Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called, The Isle of Devils."
The storm and the peril of the admiral's ship are described ; the
vessel had sprung a leak, and the sailors were falling asleep at the
pumps out of sheer exhaustion when she grounded. They found
the island (hitherto regarded as enchanted) uninhabited, the air
mild, and the soil remarkably fertile.
Shakespeare borrowed several details from this book, the name
of Bermoothes, mentioned by Ariel in the first act, for instance ;
and his only reason for not following the narrative in detail was
his desire to lay the scene in an island of the Mediterranean.
The play, then, was written for the royal wedding in 1613.
This date was first surmised by Tieck, and later declared probable
by Johan Meissner, being finally confirmed by Richard Garnett in
366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the Universal Review of 1889. The latter maintains and proves
that The Tempest was written for a private audience on the occa
sion of a wedding ; that the nature of the audience and the iden
tity of the wedding are determined by unmistakable references to
the personality of the bridegroom, to the early death of Prince
Henry, and to the qualities which King James prided himself on
possessing, and for which he loved to be praised. Over and above
all this, there is internal evidence for the year 1613, anc* none for
any other date.
The play is much shorter than the generality of Shakespeare's
•dramas, there being only 2000 lines in The Tempest against the
average 3000. It was not permitted to take up too much of the
King's time nor of that of his guests ; moreover, the play had to be
written and learned and put on the stage all within the course
•of, at most, a few months. Thus there was every inducement to
make it short.
Not being written for performance in an ordinary theatre, it
was desirable to have as few changes of scene as possible, and in
this respect The Tempest is unique among Shakespeare's plays.
After the opening scene on the deck of the ship, no change of scen
ery whatever is necessary, although the action transpires on diffe
rent parts of the island. The occasion of the play made it equally
desirable to avoid change of costume, and of this there is actually
none, except where Prospero attires himself in ducal robes at the
•close of the play, and even this he effects on the stage with the
assistance of Ariel. We have already referred to the compression
of the play, which, instead of extending, as is usual with Shake
speare, over a long period, or even (as in Pericles and The Win
ter's Tale) over a whole lifetime, merely occupies three hours, not
much longer than was required for the performance of the play.
In spite of its brevity, two masques, of the kind generally re
presented before royalty on such occasions, are introduced into
the play.
The pantomime and ballet, with its transformations, are much
more elaborate than would have been necessary if the scene was
only there for its own sake. " Enter several strange Shapes,
bringing in a banquet; they dance about it with gentle actions
of salutation; and inviting the king, &c., to eat, they depart.
Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy; claps his
Avings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet
A WEDDING PLAY 367
vanishes." King James had, as we know, a fancy for all manner
of stage machinery, and Inigo Jones contrived quantities of it for
use at court festivities.
Still more suggestive is the great wedding masque, which,
with its mythological figures, Juno, Ceres, and Iris, occupies
nearly the whole of the fourth act. If it were not that The
Tempest was written for a bridal performance, this masque
would be condemned, so extraneous is it to the plot, as a later
interpolation, and as such, indeed, it was considered by Karl
Elze. Without it, however, the fourth act dwindles to nothing,
and the ballet is obviously required to give it its proper length.
Moreover, masque and play are inseparably connected by the
famous lines, "and like the baseless fabric of this vision," &c.
It has been attributed, without sufficient reason, to Beaumont;
but even supposing him to have composed it, it must have been
planned by the author of the play and written to his order, and
it affords unmistakable proof that The Tempest was composed as
an occasional play for the diversion of princes and courtiers. The
audience must have been in possession of circumstances justifying
the introduction of the masque, and those circumstances could not
be anything but a wedding. We may now assert with absolute
certainty that The Tempest was performed on the occasion of
the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. They would not revive an old
play, originally written for the stage, for such a purpose, still less
would they use one which had been composed for a previous
wedding. Shakespeare would never allow anything unsuitable
to be performed ; moreover, at no former marriage would such a
play have been appropriate. The fact that it was one of the
king's musicians who composed the music for Ariel's songs, " Full
fathom five " in the first act, and " Where the bee sucks " in the
last, renders it still more probable that this of the court was its first
performance. Everything indicates a royal wedding.
We find many flattering allusions in this play to King James,
who could not possibly be neglected on such an occasion as that
of his daughter's bridal. When Prospero, explaining his position
to his daughter (Act i. sc. 2), tells how he was foremost among all
the dukes for dignity and knowledge of the liberal arts, his special
study, and how, absorbed in secret studies, he grew a stranger to
his state, his speech conveys that interpretation of James's posi
tion and character which he himself favoured, and implies, at the
368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
same time, that the possession of these qualities was the cause of
his unpopularity. Possibly there was a touch of well-concealed
irony in all this. Garnett, indeed, finds an intentional dramatic
satire in the crustiness and self-sufficiency of the character, proving
that even the development of the highest human qualities is atten
ded by drawbacks. But this is carrying the parallel between the
characteristics of Prospero and James too far. Garnett can truly
say, however, that just such a prince as Prospero, wise, humane,
peace-loving, pursuing distant aims which none but he could realise
or fathom ; independent of counsellors and more than a match for
his enemies in sagacity, holding himself in reserve until the deci
sive moment and then taking effective action, a devoted student of
every lawful science but a sworn foe to the black art, did James
imagine himself to be, and as such did he love to be represented.
We have seen with what mingled feelings the King and court
would prepare for the Princess's wedding. The grief for Prince
Henry's death was still so fresh that all rejoicing must be over
shadowed by it. A noisy joyous play would have been out of
place, while, upon the other hand, it would not do to destroy all
festive feeling by directly recalling the loss the royal family and
the nation had so lately sustained. Shakespeare performed this
difficult task with admirable tact and good feeling. He alluded to
the death of the Prince, but in such a manner that grief was lost
in joy. Until the last act of the play the youthful Prince Ferdinand
is believed by his father and the courtiers to be dead, and frequent
expression is given to their sorrow over their supposed loss. The
Prince is not the son of Prospero, but of Alonso, and the sonless
Duke finds a son in Ferdinand, as James found one in the Elector
Palatine.
The fact that these guarded allusions to Prince Henry's death
are found throughout the play prove that it must have been written
after the 6th of November, and, since it was evidently performed
before the wedding, which was celebrated on the I4th of February,
we may see how little time was needed by Shakespeare in which
to produce a work actually brimming over with genius, and how
far he was from being enfeebled or exhausted when, in this play,
he bade farewell for ever to his art and his position in London.
The entire drama is permeated by the atmosphere of that age
of discovery and struggling colonists. It has been admirably
shown by Watkins Lloyd that all the topics and problems it
COLONISATION OF VIRGINIA 369
deals with correspond to the colonisation of Virginia — the marvels
brought to light by the discovery of new countries and new races ;
by the wonderful falsehoods, and still more wonderful truths, of
travellers concerning natural phenomena and the superstitions
arising from them. Sea perils and shipwreck, the power that lies
in such calamities to provoke remorse for crimes committed ; the
quarrels and mutinies of colonists, the struggles of their leaders
to preserve their authority; theories on the civilisation and govern
ment of new countries, the reappearance of old world vices on a
new soil, the contrast between the reasoning powers of man and
those of the savage; and lastly, all the demands made upon the
activity, promptitude, and energy of the conquerors.
The date of the first Virginian settlement was May 1607, and
it then consisted of 107 colonists. The Virginia Company was
not founded until 1609 and very little was known about it before
1610. Not before 1612 could they write home, " Our colony
is now seven hundred strong." These circumstances all seem to
point to 1612-13 as the period during which The Tempest was
produced.
VOL. II. 2 A
XXI
SOURCES OF THE TEMPEST
WE possess no knowledge of any one particular source from
which The Tempest might have been drawn, but it seems probable
that Shakespeare constructed his drama upon some already exist
ing foundation. A childishly old-fashioned play by Jacob Ayrer,
Comedia von der schonen Sidea, seems to have been founded
upon a variant of the story used by Shakespeare.1 Ayrer died
in 1605, and his work, therefore, cannot have owed anything
to that of the great dramatist. The similarity between the two
plays is confined to the relations between Prospero and Alonso,
and Ferdinand and Miranda. In the German play we have a
banished sovereign, his daughter, and a captive prince, who is
compelled to atone for his audacity in making love to the daughter
by carrying and cutting firewood. He promises his beloved she
shall be queen, and attempting to draw his sword upon his father-
in-law, is rendered powerless by magic. There is no real resem
blance between the dramas. It is, of course, possible that
Dowland, or some other English actor, might have introduced
the Sidea from Germany, but Shakespeare did not know German,
and in any case the play was too poor a one to interest him.
Moreover, since we know that Ayrer did occasionally copy
English works, we may safely conclude that both dramatists
were indebted to some earlier English source. There is nothing
specially original about the above incidents. In Greene's Friar
Bacony four men make fruitless efforts to draw swords held in
their scabbards by magic, and The Tempest would naturally
possess traits in common with other plays representing sorcery
upon the stage. In Marlowe's drama, Dr. Faustus, for instance,
the hero punishes his would-be murderers by making them
wallow in filth (Faustus, Act iv. sc. 2), just as Prospero drives
1 Jacob Ayrer : Opera Theatricum. Nurnburg, 1618. L. Tieck : Deutsches
Theater^ i. p. 323. Albert Cohn : Shakespeare in Germany, ii. pp. 1-75.
370
MATERIALS FOR "THE TEMPEST" 371
Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano into the marsh and leaves them
there up to their chins in mire (Tempest, Act iv.).
It is a most arbitrary and unreasonable supposition of
Meissner's that Shakespeare borrowed his wedding masque
from the one performed at Prince Henry's christening, in which
also Juno, Ceres, and Iris appear. Shakespeare was never
so lacking in inventive power that he needed to unearth a
description of an old play which had been acted before King
James at Stirling Castle some nineteen years previously. We
know that the masque itself was not yet in print.
It was an early and correct observation that various minor
details of The Tempest were taken from different books of travel.
Shakespeare found the name of Setebos, and, possibly, the first
idea of Caliban himself, in an account of Magellan's voyage to the
south pole in Eden's History e of Travaile in East and West
Indies (1577). From Raleigh's Discovery of the large, rich, and
bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596) he took the fable of the men
whose heads stood upon their breasts. Raleigh writes that, though
this may be an invention, he is inclined to believe it true, because
every child in the provinces of Arromai and Canuri maintains
that their mouths were in the middle of their breasts.1 (See
Gonzalo's speech in The Tempest, Act iii. sc. 2.)
It was Hunter who first suggested that Shakespeare might
have taken some hints from Ariosto. It is possible that he had
in mind some stanzas from the 43rd canto of Orlando Furioso.
The 1 5th and I4th contain a faint foreshadowing, as it were, of
Prospero and Miranda, and the 1 87th stanza alludes to the power
of witchcraft to raise storms and calm seas again. The Orlando
had been translated into English by Harrington, but, as we have
already observed, Shakespeare was fully qualified to read it in
the original. Too much, however, has already been made of
these trivial, nay, utterly insignificant coincidences.2
1 " Or that there were such men
Whose heads stood in their breasts ? which now we find,
Each putter-out of five for one will bring us
Good warrant of."
2 We read of the old man :
" Nella nostra cittade era un uom saggio
Di tutte 1' arti oltre ogni creder dotto."
Of his arrangements for his daughter, due to the bad character of his wife, we
are told :
372 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It is far more remarkable that the famous and beautiful
passage (Act iv.) proclaiming the transitoriness of all earthly
things — a passage which seems to be a mournful epitome of the
philosophy of Shakespeare's last years of productiveness — may
be an easy adaptation of an inferior and quite unknown poet
of his day. When the spirit play conjured up by Prospero has
vanished he says :
" 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-capp'd 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."
In Count Stirling's tragedy of Darius, published in London,
1604, the following verses occur :
" Let Greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt,
Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruis'd, soon broken ;
And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant,
All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.
Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,
With furniture superfluously fair,
Those stately courts, those sky-encount'ring walls,
Evanish all like vapours in the air."
History could scarcely afford a more striking proof that* in
art the style is all, subject and meaning being of comparatively
" Fuor del commercio popolo la invola,
Ed ove piu solingo il luogo vede,
Questo amplo e bel palagio e ricco tanto
Fece fare a demonj per incanto."
Of the storm, which, by the way, is not raised by the said old man, but by
hermit, we are merely told :
" E facea alcuno effetto soprumano
Fermare il vento ad un segno di croce
E far tranquillo il mar quando e piu atroce."
MARCO POLO 373
small importance. Stirling's verses are by no means bad, nor
even poor, and their decidedly pleasing rhymes express, in very
similar words, exactly the same idea we find in Shakespeare's
lines, and were, moreover, their precursors. Nevertheless, both
they and the name of their author would be utterly forgotten long
since if Shakespeare had not, by a marvellous touch or two,
transformed them into a few lines of blank verse which will hold
their own in the memory of man as long as the English language
lasts.
As Meissner1 pointed out, Shakespeare was indebted to
Frampton's translation of Marco Polo (1579) for one or two
suggestive hints. For example, we read in Frampton of the
desert of Lob in Asia : " You shall heare in the ayre, the
sound of Tabers and other instruments, to putte the travellers in
feare, and to make them lose their way, and to depart their com
pany and loose themselves : and by that meanes many doe die,
being deceived so, by evill spirits, that make these soundes, and
also doe call diverse of the travellers by their names" Compare
this with Caliban's words in The Tempest (Act iii. sc. 2):
" The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices."
And Trinculo's subsequent jesting remark, which evidently refers
to the accompaniment of a clown's morris dance : " I would I
could see this tabourer ; he lays it on." Compare also Alonso's
lament (Act iii. sc. 3) :
"Oh, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it ;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prospero : it did bass my trespass."
Shakespeare may have found the first suggestions of Caliban
and Ariel in Greene's Friar Bacon. In the ninth scene of this
play, two necromancers, Bungay and Vandermast, dispute as to
which possess the greater power, the py romantic (fire) spirits or
1 Johan Meissner : tfntersttchttngen ilber Shakespeare's Sturm.
374 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the geomantic (earth) spirits. The fire spirits, says Bungay, are
mere transparent shadows that float past us like heralds, while
the spirits of earth are strong enough to burst rocks asunder.
Vandermast maintains that earth spirits are dull, as befits their
place of abode. They are coarse and earthly, less intelligent
than other spirits, and thus it is they are at the service of
jugglers, witches, and common sorcerers. But the fine spirits
are mighty and swift, their power is far-reaching.
A more direct suggestion of Ariel's charming ways was
probably found by Shakespeare at the close of the already
mentioned Faithful Shepherdess, written by his young friend
Fletcher. In it the satyr offers his services to the beautiful
Corin in terms which recall Ariel's speech to Prospero (Act i.
sc. 2) :
" All hail, great master ! grave sir, hail ! I come
To answer thy best pleasure ; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality."
Fletcher's satyr makes the same offer :
" Tell me, sweetest,
What new service now is meetest
For a satyr ? Shall I stray
In the middle air, and stay
The sailing rack, or nimbly take
Hold by the moon, and gently make
Suit to the pale queen of night
For a beam to give thee light ?
Shall I dive into the sea,
And bring thee coral, making way
Through the rising waves that fall
In snowy fleeces ? " £c.
But a much more striking example of Shakespeare's taste and
talent for adaptation is presented by Prospero's farewell speech
to the elves (Act v. sc. l), "Ye elves of hills, brooks," &c.
Warburton was the first to draw attention to the fact that this
speech, in which Shakespeare bids farewell to his art, and tells,
through the medium of Prospero's marvellous eloquence, of all
that he has accomplished, was founded upon the great incanta-
OVID'S "METAMORPHOSES" 375
tion in Ovid's Metamorphoses (vii. 197-219), where, after the
conquest of the golden fleece, Medea, at Jason's request, invokes
the spirits of night to obtain the prolongation of his old father's
life. A comparison of the text plainly proves Shakespeare's in
debtedness to Golding's translation of the Latin work :
" Ye Ayres and Windes : ye Elues of Hilles, of Brooks, of Woods
alone.
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everyone
Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the
thing)
/ haue compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.
By charm es I make the calme seas rough, and make the rough seas
playne,
And cover all the Skie with clouds and chase them thence againe.
By charmes I raise and lay the windes and burst the Viper's iaw,
And from the bowels of the earth both stones and trees do draw.
Whole woods and Forrests I remoouve : I make the Mountains shake,
And euen the earth it selfe to grone and fearefully to quake.
I call up dead men from their graues, and thee, O lightsome Moone,
I darken oft, though beaten brass abate thy perill soone.
Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at
Noone.
Among the earth-bred brothers you a mortall warre did set
And brought asleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes were neuer shet."
The corresponding lines in The Tempest run :
" Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back ; you
by whose aid —
Weak masters though ye be — / have bedimirfd
The noontide sun, call' d forth the mutinous winds,
And twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war : to the dread-rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt : the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake ; and by the spurs pluck 'd up
The pine and cedar : graves at my command
Have watid their sleepers, op'd and let 'em forth
By my so potent art."
376 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The words employed in addressing the elves are actually the
same. Medea's power to raise and calm the waves becomes the
elfin chase of and flight from the advancing and retreating
billows. Both Medea and Prospero proclaim their power to
overcloud the sky and darken the sun, to raise winds and shatter
trees, tearing them up by the roots. They can make the very
mountains tremble, and can compel the grave to give up its
dead.
The names Prospero and Stephano may be found in Ben
Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (1595). Prospero was also
the name of a riding-master well known in the London of Shake-
peare's day.
Malone has suggested that the name " Caliban " was derived
from "cannibal." Although the creature displays no tendency
towards cannibalism, it is possible that Shakespeare had this
term for a man-eater in his mind when he invented the name;
it is even probable, seeing that the passage in Montaigne from
which he drew Gonzalo's Utopia is contained in a chapter headed
" Les Cannibales." Furness, who has inaugurated such an admir
able edition of Shakespeare, considers this surmise an improbable
one. He and Th. Elze incline to the belief that the name was
derived from Calibia, a town in the neighbourhood of Tunis, but
the connection is scarcely more obvious. Shakespeare found the
name Ariel in Isaiah xxix. I, the name of a city in which David
dwelt, and he doubtless appropriated it on account of its similarity
in sound to both English and Latin words for air.
We now seem to have exhausted all the available literary
sources of The Tempest, and we need only add that Dryden and
Davenant, in their abominable adaptation of the play (published
in London 1670), made free use of Calderon's already mentioned
" En esta vida todo es vertad y todo es mentira," and thus pro
vided the Miranda, who has never seen a young man, with a
counterpart in Hippolyto, who has never seen the face of woman.
XXII
THE TEMPEST AS A PLAY— SHAKESPEARE AND
PROSPERO— FAREWELL TO ART
ALTHOUGH, taken from the point of view of a play, The Tempest
is lacking in dramatic interest, the entire work is so marvellously
rich in poetry and so inspired by imagination, that it forms a
whole little world in itself, and holds the reader captive by that
power which sheer perfection possesses to enthrall.
If the ordinary being desires to obtain a salutary impression
of his own insignificance and an ennobling one of the sublimity
of true genius, he need only study this last of Shakespeare's
masterpieces. In the majority of cases the result will be pros
trate admiration.
Shakespeare gave freer rein to his imagination in this play
than he had allowed himself since the days of the Midsummer
Night's Dream and the First Part of Henry IV. He felt able,
indeed compelled to do this ; and, in spite of the restraint imposed
upon him by the occasion for which it was written, he devoted his
whole individuality to the task with greater force than he had
done for years. The play contains far more of the nature of a
confession than was usual at this period. Never, with the excep
tion of Hamlet and Timon} had Shakespeare been so personal.
It may be said that, in a manner, The Tempest was a con
tinuation of his gloomy period; once again he treated of black
ingratitude and cunning and violence practised upon a good
man.
Prospero, Duke of Milan, absorbed in scientific study, and
finding his real dukedom in his library, imprudently intrusted
the direction of his little state to his brother Antonio. The
latter, betraying his trust, won over to his side all the officers
of state appointed by Prospero, entered into an alliance with the
Duke's enemy, Alonso, King of Naples, and reduced the hitherto
377
378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
free state of Milan to a condition of vassalage. Then, with the
assistance of Alonso and his brother Sebastian, Antonio attacked
and dethroned Prospero. The Duke, with his little three-year-
old daughter, was carried out some leagues to sea, placed in a
rotten old hull, and abandoned. A Neapolitan noble, Gonzalo,
compassionately supplied them with provisions, clothes, and,
above all, the precious books upon which Prospero's supernatural
powers depended. The boat was driven ashore upon an island
whose one inhabitant, the aboriginal Caliban, was reduced to
subjection by means of the control exercised over the spirit world
by the banished man. Here, then, Prospero dwelt in peace
and solitude, devoting himself to the culture of his mind, the
enjoyment of nature, and the careful education of his daughter
Miranda, who received such a training as seldom falls to the lot
of a princess.
Twelve years have passed, and Miranda is just fifteen when
the play begins. Prospero is aware that his star has reached its
zenith and that his old enemies are in his power. The King of
Naples has married his daughter, Claribel, to the King of Tunis,
and the wedding has been celebrated, oddly enough, at the home
of the bridegroom ; but then it was probably the first time in his
tory that a Christian King of Naples had bestowed his daughter
upon a Mohammedan. Alonso, with all his train, including his
brother and the usurper of Milan, is on his homeward voyage
when Prospero raises the storm which drives them on his island.
After being sufficiently bewildered and humiliated, they are finally
forgiven, and the King's son, purified by the trials through which
he has passed, is, as Prospero has all along intended that he should
be, united to Miranda.
It was evidently Shakespeare's intention in The Tempest to give
a picture of mankind as he now saw it, and we are shown some
thing quite new in him, a typical representation of the different
phases of humanity.
In Caliban we have the primitive man, the aboriginal, the
animal which has just evolved into the first rough stages of the
human being. In Prospero we are given the highest development
of Nature, the man of the future, the superhuman man of spirit.
We have seen that Shakespeare roughly planned such a charac
ter some years back, in the faintly outlined sketch of Cerimon in
Pericles (vol. ii. p. 294). Prospero is the fulfilment of the promise
PROSPERO 379
contained in Cerimon's principal speech, a man, namely, who can
compel to his uses all the beneficent powers dwelling in metals,
stones, and plants. He is a creature of princely mould, who has
subdued outward Nature, has brought his own turbulent inner self
under perfect control, and has overpowered the bitterness caused
by the wrongs he has suffered in the harmony emanating from
his own richly spiritual life.
Prospero, like all Shakespeare's heroes and heroines of this last
decade — Pericles, Imogen, and Hermione no less than Lear and
Timon — suffers grievous wrong. He is even more sinned against
than Timon, has suffered more and lost more through ingratitude.
He has not squandered his substance like the misanthrope, but,
absorbed in occupations of a higher nature, he has neglected his
worldly interests and fallen a victim to his own careless trust
fulness.
The injustice offered to Imogen and Hermione was not so
detestable in its origin as that suffered by Prospero ; the wrong
done them sprang from misguided love, and was therefore easier
to condone. The crime against the Duke was actuated by such
low motives as envy and covetousness.
Tried by suffering, Prospero proves its strengthening qualities.
Far from succumbing to the blow, it is not until it has fallen that
he displays his true, far-reaching, and terrible power, and becomes
the great irresistible magician which Shakespeare himself had so
long been. His power is not understood by his daughter, who is
but a child, but it is felt by his enemies. He plays with them as
he pleases, compels them to repent their past treatment of him,
and then pardons them with a calmness of superiority to which
Timon could never have attained, but which is far from being that
all-obliterating tenderness with which Imogen and Hermione for
give remorseful sinners.
There is less of charity towards the offenders in Prospero's
absolution than that element of contempt which has so long and
so exclusively filled Shakespeare's soul. His forgiveness, the
oblivion of a scornful indifference, is not so much that of the
strong man who knows his power to crush if need be, as that of
the wisdom which is no longer affected by outward circumstance.
Richard Garnett aptly observes, in his critical introduction to
the play in the " Irving Edition," that Prospero finds it easy to
forgive because, in his secret soul, he sets very little value on the
380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dukedom he has lost, and is, therefore, roused to very little indig
nation by the treachery which deprived him of it. His daughter's
happiness is the sole thing which greatly interests him now, and
he carries his indifference to worldly matters so far that, without
any outward compulsion, he breaks his magic wand and casts his
books into the sea. Resuming his place among the ranks of
ordinary men, he retains nothing but his inalienable treasure of
experience and reflection. I quote the following passage from
Garnett on account of its remarkable correspondence with the
general conception of Shakespeare's development set forth in this
book.
"That this Quixotic height of magnanimity should not sur
prise, that it should seem quite in keeping with the character,
proves how deeply this character has been drawn from Shake-
peare's own nature. Prospero is not Shakespeare, but the play
is in a certain measure autobiographical. ... It shows us more
than anything else what the discipline of life had made of Shake
speare at fifty — a fruit too fully matured to be suffered to hang
much longer on the tree. Conscious superiority untinged by
arrogance, genial scorn for the mean and base, mercifulness into
which contempt entered very largely, serenity excluding pas
sionate affection while admitting tenderness, intellect overtopping
morality but in no way blighting or perverting it — such are the
mental features of him in whose development the man of the world
kept pace with the poet, and who now shone as the consummate
perfection of both."
In other words, it is Shakespeare's own nature which over
flows into Prospero, and thus the magician represents not merely
the noble-minded great man, but the genius, imaginatively de
lineated, not, as in Hamlet, psychologically analysed. Audibly
and visibly does Prospero's genius manifest itself, visible and
audible also the inward and outward opposition he combats.
The two figures in which this spiritual power and this resist
ance are embodied are the most admirable productions of an
artist's powers in this or any other age. Ariel is a supernatural,
Caliban a bestially natural being, and both have been endowed
with a human soul. They were not seen, but created.
Prospero is the master-mind, the man of the future, as shown
by his control over the forces of Nature. He passes as a magician,
and Shakespeare found his prototype, as far as external acces-
ARIEL 381
series were concerned, in a scholar of mark and man of high prin
ciples, Dr. Dee, who died in 1607. This Dr. Dee believed himself
possessed of powers to conjure up spirits, good and bad, and on
this account enjoyed a great reputation in his day. A man owning
but a small share of the scientific knowledge of our times would
inevitably have been regarded as a powerful magician at that date.
In the creation of Prospero, therefore, Shakespeare unconsciously
anticipated the results of time. He not merely gave him a magic
wand, but created a poetical embodiment of the forces of Nature as
his attendant spirit. In accordance with the method described in
the Midsummer Night's Dream he gave life to Ariel :
"The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven :
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends the bringer of that joy."
Ariel is just such a harbinger of joy; from the moment he ap
pears we are content and assured of pleasurable impressions. In
the whole record of poetry he is the one good spirit who arrests and
affects us as a living being. He is a non-christian angel, a sprite,
an elf, the messenger of Prospero's thought, the fulfiller of his
will through the elementary spirits subject to the great magician's
power. He is the emblem of Shakespeare's own genius, that
" affable, familiar ghost " (as Shakespeare expresses it in his 86th
sonnet) which Chapman boasted of possessing. His longing for
freedom after prolonged servitude has a peculiar and touching
significance as a symbol of the yearning of the poet's own genius
for rest.
Ariel possesses that power of omnipresence and all those con
stantly varying forms which are the special gift of imagination.
He skims along the foam, flies on the keen north wind, and
burrows in the frozen earth. Now he is a fire spirit spreading
terror as he flashes in cloven flame, encircling the mast and
playing about the rigging of the vessel, or as one great bolt hurls
himself to strike with all the power and speed of lightning. Now
382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
again, he is a mermaid, seen in fitful glimpses, and chanting
alluring songs. He sounds the magic music of the air, he mimics
the monotonous splashing of the waves, or barks like a dog and
crows like a cock. In every essence of his nature as well as
name he is a spirit of the air, a mirage, a hallucination of light
and sound. He is a bird, a harpy, and finds his way through the
darkness of night to fetch dew from the enchanted Bermudas.
Faithful and zealous servant of the good, he terrifies, bewilders,
and befools the wicked. He is compounded of charm and delicacy,
and is as swift and bright as lightning.
He was formerly in the service of the witch Sycorax, but, in
curring her displeasure, was imprisoned by her in the rift of a
cloven pine. There he was held in suffering many years, until
delivered at last by Prospero's supernatural powers. He serves
the magician in return for his release, but never ceases to long
for his promised freedom. Although a creature of the air, he is
capable of compassion, and can understand a sentiment of devotion
which he does not actually feel. His subject condition is painful
to him, and he looks forward with joy to the hour of liberty.
Spirit of fire and air as he is, his essence exhales itself in music
and mischievous pranks.
Caliban, on the other hand, is of the earth earthy, a kind of
land-fish, a being formed of heavy and gross materials, who was
raised by Prospero from the condition of an animal to that of a
human being, without, however, being really civilised. Prospero
made much of the creature at first, caressed him and gave him to
drink of water mixed with the juice of berries ; taught him the art
of speech and how to name the greater and the lesser light, and
lodged him in his cell. But from the moment Caliban's savage
instinct prompted him to attempt the violation of Miranda, Prospero
treated him as a slave and made him serve as such. Strangely
enough, however, Shakespeare has made him no prosaically raw
being, untouched by the poetry of the enchanted island. The
vulgar new-comers, Trinculo and Stephano, speak in prose, but
Caliban's utterances are always rhythmic ; indeed, many of the
most exquisitely melodious lines in the play fall from the lips of
this poor animal. They sound like an echo from the time he lived
within the magic circle and was the constant companion of
Prospero and Miranda.
But since, from being their fellow, he has been degraded to
CALIBAN 383
their slave, all gratitude for former benefits has disappeared from
liis mind ; and he now employs the language they have taught
him in cursing the master who has robbed him, the original in
habitant, of his birthright. His is the hatred of the savage for
his civilised conquerors.
We have seen that the abhorrence Shakespeare felt for the
vices of the court and fashionable life inclined him during these
later years to dream of some natural life far from all civilisation
(Cymbeline). But his instinct was too sure and his judgment too
sound to allow of his ever believing, with the Utopists of his day,
that the natural primitive state of man was one of innocence and
nobility of soul in the golden age of prehistoric times. Caliban
is a protest against this very theory, and Shakespeare distinctly
ridicules all such fanaticism in the lines copied from Montaigne,
and placed in Gonzalo's mouth, concerning the organisation of an
ideal commonwealth ; without commerce, law, or letters, without
riches or poverty, without corn, oil, or wine, and without work of
any kind, but a happy idleness for all.
Caliban represents the primitive, the prehistoric man ; yet,
such as he is, a poetically inclined philosopher of our day has
discovered in him the features of the eternal plebeian. It is
instructive to witness with how few reservations Renan was
enabled to modernise the type, and shown how, tidied up and
washed and interpreted as the dull fickle democracy, Caliban
was as capable as the old aristocratic -religious despotism of
sounding a conservative note, of protecting the arts and graciously
patronising the sciences, &c.
Shakespeare's Caliban was the offspring of Sycorax and be
gotten by the Devil himself. With such a pedigree he could
hardly be expected to rise to any height of angelic goodness and
purity. He is, in reality, more of an elemental power than a
human being; and therefore rouses neither indignation nor con
tempt in the mind of the audience, but genuine amusement. In
vented, and drawn with masterly humour, he represents the
savage natives found by the English in America, upon whom they
bestowed the blessings of civilisation in the form of strong drink.
There is not only wit but profound significance in the scene
(Act ii. sc. 2) in which Caliban, who at first takes Trinculo and
Stephano for two spirits sent by Prospero to torment him, allows
himself to be persuaded that Trinculo is the Man in the Moon,
384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
shown to him by Miranda on beautiful moonlight nights,£ and
forthwith worships him as his god, because he alone possesses
the bottle with the heavenly liquor which has been put to the
creature's lips, and given him his first taste of the wonderful
intoxication produced by fire-water.
Midway between these symbols of the highest culture and of
Nature in its crudest form Shakespeare has placed a young girl,
as noble in body and soul as her father, and yet so purely and
simply a child of Nature that she unhesitatingly follows her in
stincts, including that of love. She is the counterpart of the
masculine ideal in Prospero, being all that is admirable in woman ;
hence her name, Miranda. To preserve her absolutely unspotted
and fresh, Shakespeare has made her almost as young as his
Juliet; and to still further accentuate the impression of maidenly
immaculateness, she has grown up without seeing a single youth
of the other sex, a trait which was used and abused by the
Spaniards later in the same century. Hence the wondering ad
miration of the first meeting between Ferdinand and Miranda :
" What ! is't a spirit ?
Lord, how it looks about ! Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit."
When her father denies this she says :
" I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble."
And Ferdinand :
" My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder !
If you be maid or no ? "
It is Prospero, whose greatness shows no less in his power
over human beings than over the forces of Nature, who has
brought these two together, and who, although assuming dis
pleasure at their mutual attraction, causes all which concerns
them to follow the exact course his will has marked out.
He sees into the soul of mankind with as sure an eye as
Shakespeare himself, and plays the part of Providence to his
FERDINAND AND MIRANDA 385
surroundings as incontestably as did the poet to the beings of
his own creation.
When Prospero shows the young people to his guests, they
are playing chess, and there would seem to be a touch of symbol
in the fact that they are playing, not only because they wish to
do so, but because they must. There is, moreover, something
almost personal in the way Prospero trains and admonishes the
loving couple. Garnett is inclined to infer from the repeated
exhortations to Ferdinand to restrain the impulse of his blood
until the wedding-hour has struck, that the play was acted some
days before the royal wedding ceremony. But if these warnings
were intended for the Elector in his capacity of bridegroom, they
were a piece of tasteless impertinence. No, it is far more likely
that, as before suggested, they contain a melancholy confession,
a purely personal reminiscence. Shakespeare cannot be accused
of any excessive severity in such questions of morals. We saw
in Measure for Measure that he considered the connection be
tween the two lovers, for which they are to be so severely punished,
was to the full as good as marriage, although entered upon with
out ceremonies. It was no mere formalism which spoke here,
but bitter experience. Now that he was already, in thought, on
his way back to Stratford, and was living in anticipation of what
awaited him there, Shakespeare was reminded of how he and
Anne Hathaway forestalled their ceremonial union, and he spoke
of the punishment following on such actions as a curse, which
he knew :
" Barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both " (Act iv. sc. i).
As already observed, Shakespeare appropriated from some
source or another the incident of the youthful suitor being ob
liged to submit to the trial of carrying and piling wood. It
almost seems that his motive in including such an incident was
to show that it is man's great and noble privilege to serve out
of love. To Caliban all service is slavery ; throughout the whole
play he roars for freedom, and never so loudly as when he is
drunk.. For Ariel, too, all bondage, even that of a higher being,
is mere torment. Man alone finds pleasure in the servitude of
VOL. II. 2 B
386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
love. Thus Ferdinand bears uncomplainingly, and even gladly,
for Miranda's sake, the burden laid upon him (Act iii. sc. i) :
" I am in my condition
A prince, Miranda, I do think, a king.
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service ; there resides
To make me slave to it."
She shares this feeling :
" I am your wife if you will marry me !
If not, I'll die your maid ; to be your fellow
You may deny me ; but I'll be your servant
Whether you will or no."
It is a feeling of the same nature which impels Prospero to return
to Milan to fulfil his duty towards the state whose government he
has so long neglected.
There are certain analogies between The Tempest and the
Midsummer Nighfs Dream. In both we are shown a fantastic
world in which heavenly powers make sport of earthly fools.
Caliban discovering a god in the drunken Trinculo reminds us of
Titania's amorous worship of Bottom. Both are wedding-plays,
and yet what a difference! The Midsummer Nighfs Dream
was one of Shakespeare's earliest independent poetical works,
written at the age of twenty-six, and his first great success.
The Tempest was written as a farewell to art and the artist's
life, just before the completion of his forty-ninth year, and every
thing in the play bespeaks the touch of autumn.
The scenery is autumnal throughout, and the time is that of
the autumn equinox with its storms and shipwrecks. With notice
able care all the plants named, even those occurring merely in
similes, are such flowers and fruit, &c., as appear in the fall of
the year in a northern landscape. The climate is harsh and
northerly in spite of the southern situation of the island and the
southern names. Even the utterances of the goddesses, the
blessing of Ceres, for example, show that the season is late
September — thus answering to Shakespeare's time of life and
frame of mind.
No means of intensifying this impression are neglected. The
utter sadness of Prospero Js famous words describing the trackless
SHAKESPEARE AND PROSPERO 387
disappearance of all earthly things harmonises with the time of
year and with his underlying thought — "We are such stuff as
dreams are made on : " a deep sleep, from which we awaken to
life, and again, deep sleep hereafter. What a personal note it is
in the last scene of the play where Prospero says :
'•' And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave."
How we feel that Stratford was the poet's Milan, just as Ariel's
longing for freedom was the yearning of the poet's genius for
rest. He has had enough of the burden of work, enough of
the toilsome necromancy of imagination, enough of art, enough
of the life of the town. A deep sense of the vanity of all things
has laid its hold upon him, he believes in no future and expects
no results from the work of a lifetime.
" Our revels now are ended. These our actors
were all spirits and
are melted into air, into thin air."
Like Prospero, he had sacrificed his position to his art, and, like
him, he had dwelt upon an enchanted island in the ocean of life.
He had been its lord and master, with dominion over spirits, with
the spirit of the air as his servant, and the spirit of the earth as
his slave. At his will graves had opened, and by his magic art
the heroes of the past had lived again. The words with which
Prospero opens the fifth act come, despite all gloomy thoughts of
death and wearied hopes of rest, straight from Shakespeare's own
lips :
" Now does my project gather to a head ;
My charms crack not ; my spirits obey ; and time
Goes upright with his carnage."
All will soon be accomplished and Ariel's hour of deliverance is
nigh. The parting of the master from his genius is not without
a touch of melancholy :
" My dainty Ariel ! / shall miss thee,
But yet thou shalt have freedom."
Prospero has determined in his heart to renounce all his magical
powers :
" To the elements
Be free, and fare thee well ! "
388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He has taken leave of all his elves by name, and now utters words
whose personal application has never been approached by any
character hitherto set upon the stage by Shakespeare :
" But this rough service
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book."
Solemn music is heard, and Shakespeare has bidden farewell to
his art.
Collaboration in Henry VIII. and the production and staging
of The Tempest were the last manifestations of his dramatic ac
tivity. In all probability he only waited for the close of the court
festivities before carrying out his plan of leaving London and
returning to Stratford ; and Ben Jonson's foolish thrust at those
who beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries ', would not find
him in town. When we drew attention to his efforts to increase
his capital, and his purchase of houses and land at Stratford,
we showed that, even at that early period, he hoped eventually
to quit the metropolis, to give up the theatre and literature
and to spend the last years of his life in the country. Even
supposing him to have delayed his departure until after the
performance of The Tempest, an event which happened only four
months later would have supplied the final inducement to leave.
In the month of June 1613 a fire broke out, as we know, at the
Globe Theatre during a performance of Henry VIII., and the
whole building was burned to the ground. Thus the scene of
his activity for so many long years disappeared, as it were, in
smoke, leaving no trace behind. He was probably part owner
of the stage properties and costumes, which were all consumed.
In any case, the flames devoured all the manuscripts of his plays
then in the possession of the theatre, a priceless treasure — for
him surely a painful, and for us an irreparable, loss.
XXIII
THE RIDE TO STRATFORD
THAT must have been a momentous day in Shakespeare's life on
which, after giving up his house in London, he mounted his horse
and rode back to Stratford-on-Avon to take up his abode there
for good.
He would recall that day in 1585 when, twenty-eight years
younger, with his life lying before him veiled in the mists of expec
tation and uncertainty, he set out from Stratford to London to try his
fortunes in the great city. Then his heart beat high, and he must
have felt towards his horse much as the Dauphin did in Henry V.
(Act iii. sc. 7) when he said, " When I bestride him I soar, I am
a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it, the
basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."
Life lay behind him now. His hopes had been fulfilled in
many ways ; he was famous, he had raised himself a degree in
the social scale, above all he was rich, but for all that he was
not happy.
The great town, in which he had spent the better part of a
lifetime, had not so succeeded in attaching him to it that he would
feel any pain in leaving it. There was neither man nor woman
there so dear to him as to make society preferable to solitude,
and the crowded life of London to the seclusion of the country
and an existence passed in the midst of family and Nature.
He had toiled enough, his working days were over, and now,
at last, the cloud should be lifted from his name which had so
long been cast upon it by his profession. It was nine years
since he had actually appeared upon the stage, since he had
made over his parts to others, and now he had ceased to take
any pleasure in his pen. None of those were left for whom he
had cared to write plays and put them upon the stage; the new
generation and present frequenters of the theatre were strangers
390 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to him. There was no one in London who would heed his leaving
it, no friends to induce him to stay, no farewell banquet to be
given in his honour.
He would remember his first arrival in London, and how, ac
cording to the custom of all poor travellers, he sold his horse at
Smithfield. He could, if he wished, keep many horses now, but
no power could renew the joyous mood of twenty-one. Then the
wind had played with the long curls hanging below his hat, now
he was elderly and bald.
The journey from London to Stratford took three days. He
would put up at the inns at which he was accustomed to stay on
his yearly journey to and fro, and where he was always greeted
as a welcome guest, and given a bed with snow-white sheets, for
which travellers on foot were charged an extra penny, but which he,
as rider, enjoyed gratis. The hostess at Oxford, pretty Mistress
Davenant, would give him a specially cordial greeting. The two
were old and good friends. Little William, born in 1606, and
now seven years old, possessed a certain, perhaps accidental, re
semblance of feature to the guest.
As Shakespeare rode on, Stratford, so well known and yet, as
settled home, so new, would (as Hamlet says) rise " before his
mind's eye." A life of daily companionship with his wife was to
begin afresh after a break of twenty-eight years. She was now
fifty-seven, and consequently much older, in proportion, than her
husband of forty-nine than when they were lovers and newly
married, the one under and the other somewhat over twenty.
There could be no intellectual bond between them after so long
a separation, and their married life was but an empty form.
Of their two daughters, Susanna, the elder, was now thirty,
and had been married for six years to Dr. John Hall, a respected
physician at Stratford. Judith, the younger daughter, was twenty-
eight and unmarried.
The Halls, with their little five-year-old daughter, lived in a
picturesque house in Old Stratford, at that time surrounded by
woods. Mrs. Shakespeare and Judith lived at New Place, and
the spirit prevailing in both establishments was not the spirit of
Shakespeare.
Not only the town of Stratford, but his own home and family
were desperately pious and puritanical. That power which had
been most inimical to him in London, which had dishonoured his
SHAKESPEARE AND THE PURITANS 391
profession, and with which he had been at war during all the
years of his dramatic activity ; that very power against which he
had striven, sometimes by open attack, more often by cautious
insinuation, had triumphed in his native town behind his back
and taken complete possession of his only home.
The closing of the theatre, which did not occur in London
until the Puritans had completely gained the upper hand many
years later, had already been anticipated in Stratford. The per
formance of those plays at which Shakespeare in his youth had
made acquaintance with the men, his future brother professionals,
with whom he sought refuge in London, was strictly forbidden.
So long ago as 1602 the town council had carried a resolution
that no performance of play or interlude should be permitted in
the Guildhall, that long, low building with its eight small-paned
windows. It was the only place in Stratford suitable for such
a purpose, and was connected with many of Shakespeare's
memories. Directly above the long narrow hall, on the first
floor, was the school which he had attended daily as a child.
Into the hall itself he had awesomely penetrated the da}' the
glories of a theatre were first displayed before his childish eyes.
And now eleven years had passed since that wise Council had
decreed that any alderman or citizen giving his consent to the
representation of plays in this building should be fined ten
shillings for every infringement of the prohibition. This not
proving a sufficient deterrent, the fine was raised in 1612 from
ten shillings to the extravagant sum of £10, equivalent to about
£50 in our day. Fifty pounds for allowing a play to be performed
in the only hall in the town suitable for the purpose ! This was
rank fanaticism !
Moreover, it was a fanaticism which had found its way into
his own home. That strong tendency to Puritanism which was
so marked among his descendants until the race died out, had
already developed in his family. His wife was extremely reli
gious, as is often the case with women whose youthful conduct
has not been too circumspect. When she captured her boy hus
band of eighteen, her blood was as warm as his, but now she was
vastly his superior in matters of religion. Neither could he look
for any real intellectual companionship from his daughters.
Susanna was pious, her husband still more so. Judith was as
ignorant as a child. Thus he must pay the penalty of his long
392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
absence from home and his utter neglect of the education of his
girls.
It was to no happy harmony of thought and feeling, therefore,
that the poet could look forward as he rode away from his drama
tic fairyland to the simplicities of domestic life. The only at
tractions existing for him there were his position as a gentleman,
the satisfaction of no longer being obliged to act and write for
money, and the pleasure of living on and roaming about his own
property. The very fact that he did go back to Stratford with
the little there was to attract him there proves how slight a hold
London had taken upon him, and with what a feeling of loneliness,
and (now that the bitterness was past) with what indifference, he
bade farewell to the metropolis, its inhabitants and its pleasures.
It was the quietude of Stratford which attracted him, its
leisure, the emptiness of its dirty streets, its remoteness from the
busy world. What he really longed for was Nature, the Nature
with which he had lived in such intimate companionship in his
early youth, which he had missed so terribly while writing As
You Like It and its fellow-plays, and from which he had so long
been separated.
Far more than human beings was it the gardens which he had
bought and planted there which drew him back to his native
town — the gardens and trees on which he looked from his windows
at New Place.
XXIV
STRA TFORD-UPON-A VON
HE was home again. Home once more, where he knew every
road and path, every house and field, every tree and bush. The
silence of the empty streets struck him afresh as his footsteps
echoed down them, and the river Avon shone bright and still
between the willows bending down to the water's edge. He had
shot many a deer in the neighbourhood of that stream, and it
was by its banks that Jaques, in As You Like It} had sat as
he watched the wounded stag that sighed as though its leathern
coat would burst, while the big round tears coursed down its
innocent nose. The fine arched bridge was erected in the time
of Henry VIII. by the same Sir Hugh Clopton who had built
New Place, the house which Shakespeare had bought, and been
obliged to restore before his family could live in it.
Close by the river stood the avenue leading to the beautiful
Gothic church of the Holy Trinity, with its slender spire and
handsome windows. Within were the graves and monuments
of the neighbouring gentry, and there, so much sooner than he
could possibly have dreamed, was Shakespeare himself to lie.
Passing through Church Street, he would come upon the
Guild Chapel, a fine square building, from whose tower rang
the weekly bells calling to Sunday-morning service. He re
membered those bells from of old, and now they would be con
stantly sounding in his ears, for New Place lay just across
the road. Soon they would be tolling his own funeral knell.
Directly adjoining the chapel stood the timbered building which
represented both Guildhall and school. Once it had seemed
large and spacious ; how small and mean it looked now ! It
was more satisfactory to glance on to the corner where his
large garden and green lawns stood, and his eye would rest
affectionately upon the mulberry-tree his own hands had planted.
393
394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Ten steps from his door lay the tavern, quaint and low, and how
familiar ! Not the first time would it be that he had sat at that
table, the largest, it was said, that had ever been cut in England
from a single piece of wood. He would at least find something
to drink there, and a game of draughts or dice. With a sigh he
realised that this tavern was likely to prove his chief refuge from
his loneliness.
Every spot was rich in memories. Five minutes' walk would
bring him to Henley Street, where he had played as a child, and
where stood the old house in which he was born. He would
enter ; there was the kitchen, which had been the living room as
well in his parents' time ; near the entry was the woman's store
room, and above, the sleeping-room in which he was born. How
little he dreamed that this spot was to become a place of pil
grimage for the whole Anglo-Saxon race — nay, for the whole
civilised world.
He would take the road to Shottery, along which he had
walked times out of number in his youth — for had not he and
Anne Hathaway kept their trysts there ? Right and left rose
the high hedges separating the fields. Trees, standing singly or
in groups, were scattered about the country, and the road, lined
with elms, beeches, and willows, wound its way through the
undulating country lying between Stratford and Shottery. Half-
an-hour's walk would bring him to Anne Hathaway's cottage,
with the moss-grown roof. He would enter, and look once more
upon the wooden bench in the chimney-corner on which he and
she had sat in their ardent youth. How long ago it all seemed !
There was the old fifteenth-century bed in which Anne's parents
had slept, with her, as a child, at their feet. The mattress was
nothing but a straw palliasse, but the bedstead was beautifully
carved with figures in the old style. When, a year or two later,
he bequeathed to his wife " the second best bed," did he remem
ber that this bed was already hers, I wonder ?
Another day he would make his way as far as Warwick and
its castle. The town was not unlike that of Stratford ; it had
the same timbered houses, but here the two great towers of the
castle rose and predominated over the beautiful scenery. How
vividly the past would rise up before him as he stood on the
bridge and gazed up at the castle. He would remember his own
youthful dreams concerning it, and the forms he had conjured up
EARLY MEMORIES 395
from their graves to people it afresh. There was the Earl of
Warwick, who enumerated all the proofs of Gloucester's violent
death in Henry VI., and that other Earl in the Second Part of
Henry IV. (Act iii. sc. i) into whose mouth he had put words
whose truth he was now proving :
" There is a history in all men's lives
Figuring the nature of the times deceased."
Charlcote House he would see too. He had stood as a culprit
before its master once, and had suffered the bitterest humiliation
of his life, one so deep that it had driven him away from home,
and had thus been the means of leading him to success and
prosperity in London.
How strange it was to be here again where every one knew
and greeted him. In London he had been swallowed up in
the crowd. How familiar, too, the homely provincial version
of his name, with the abbreviated first syllable. In town that
first syllable was always long, a pronunciation which left no
doubt as to the etymology of the name.1 It was on account of
these differing pronunciations that he had, while in London,
changed the spelling of his name. He had always written it
ShaksperC) but in town it had from the first (the dedication of
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) been printed Shake
speare: a spelling always followed by the various publishers of
the quarto editions of his dramas, only one adopting the ortho
graphy Shakspeare?
Every one knew him, and he must exchange a word with all —
with the ploughman in the field, the farmer's wife in her poultry-
yard, the mason on the scaffolding, the fish-dealer at his stall, the
cobbler in his workshop, and the butcher in the slaughter-house.
How well he could talk to each, for no human occupation, how-
1 In 1875 Charles Mackay made an attempt, in the Athenaeum^ to prove a Celtic
origin for the name, deriving it from seac = dry, and speir — shanks, thus dry or long
shanks. If we take into consideration the numerous other names and nicknames
of the day which began with Shake — Shake-buckler, Shake-launce, Shake-shaft, &c.,
this explanation does not seem very probable. Another argument in favour of its
Anglo-Saxon origin and simple meaning, Spearshaker, is the contemporaneous existence
of the Italian surname Crollalanza.
2 It may be mentioned that there were no less than fifty-five different ways of
writing the name at that time. It is well known that such spellings were quite
arbitrary. In Shakespeare's wedding contract, for example, we have the version
Shagspere.
396 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ever humble, was unfamiliar to him. He had a thorough acquaint
ance from of old with the butcher's trade. It had formed a part
of his father's business, and his early tragedies contain many a
proof of his familiarity with it. The Second and Third Parts
of Henry VI. are full of similes drawn from it.1
There was hardly any trade, calling, or position in life which he
did not understand as if he had been born to it. Doubtless the
simple folk of his native town respected him as much for his
sound judgment and universal knowledge as for his wealth and
property. It would be too much to expect that they should recog
nise anything more and greater in him.
Many years ago, at the outset of his career as a dramatist, he
had made a defeated king praise a country life for its simplicity
and freedom from care (Third Part of Henry F/., ii. 5) :
" O God ! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain ;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete ;
How many hours bring about the day ;
1 ' ' And as the butcher takes away the calf,
And binds the wretch and beats it when it strays,
Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house" (II. iii. l).
" Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter" (II. iii. 2).
"Holland. And Dick the butcher.
4 ' Bevis. Then is sin struck down like an ox and iniquity's throat cut like a calf "
(II. iv. 2).
" Cade. They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behavedst thyself as
if thou hadst been in thine own slaughter-house " (II. iv. 3).
" So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece,
And next his throat unto the butcher's knife " (III. v. 6).
In As You Like It (ii. 2) Rosalind says, using a simile drawn from the same
trade : " This way will I take upon me to wash your liver clean as a sound sheep's
heart, that there shall be not one spot of love in it."
See Alfred C. Calmon, who in Fact and Fiction about Shakespeare has been very
successful in pointing out the numerous reminiscences of Stratford to be found in
Shakespeare's plays.
THE COUNTRY 397
How many days will finish up the year ;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times :
So many hours must I tend my flock ;
So many hours must I take my rest ;
So many hours must I contemplate ;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young ;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean ;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece :
So minutes, hours, days, months and years,
Passed over to the end they were created/
Would bring white hairs and a quiet grave."
In just such a regular monotony were Shakespeare's own
days now to pass.
XXV
THE LAST YEARS OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
DID Shakespeare find that peace and contentment at Stratford
which he sought? From one thing and another we are almost
forced to conclude he did not. His own family seem to have
looked upon him in the light of a returned artist-bohemian, of
a man whose past career and present religious principles were
anything but a credit to them. Elze and others believe, indeed,
that, like Byron's descendants at a later date, Shakespeare's
family considered him a stain upon their reputation. This sur
mise may be correct, but there is no very great foundation for it.
It has long been inferred, from the fact that he made her
his heiress, that Susanna was Shakespeare's favourite daughter.
She was probably the individual to whom he felt most drawn
in Stratford; but we must not conclude too much from a testa
mentary disposition. It was plainly the poet's intention to entail
his property, and his original desire was that his little son
Hamnet, as bearer and continuer of the name, should succeed
to everything. Upon the death of the son, the elder daughter
would naturally take his place.
It is not conceivable that Susanna could have any real under
standing of, or sympathy with, her father. Her very epitaph
places her in direct contrast with him in matters of religion,
distinctly maintaining that though she was gifted above her sex,
which she owed partly to her father, she was also wise with
regard to her soul's salvation, and that was entirely due to Him
whose happiness she was now sharing. Shakespeare had none
of the credit for that.1 Her natural inclination to bigoted piety
1 "Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."
398
SHAKESPEARE'S DAUGHTERS 399
was confirmed and augmented by the influence of her husband,
whose sectarian zeal and narrow-minded hatred of Catholicism
are plainly shown in such of his journals and books as have
been preserved. We can fancy how Shakespeare's depth and
delicacy of feeling must have suffered under all this. It is even
possible that Susanna and her husband may have burned, en
the score of what they considered his irreligious principles, any
papers that Shakespeare left behind, as Byron's family destroyed
his memoirs. This would explain their total disappearance,
which, after all, is no more strange than the utter absence of
any manuscripts belonging to Beaumont or Fletcher, or any
other dramatic writer of the period.
The younger daughter, Judith, could not even write her own
name, and signed her mark with a quaint little flourish when she
was married. It is clearly impossible, therefore, that she could
have taken any interest in her father's manuscripts. In the
seventeenth century it was no very liberal education that a poet's
daughter received ; even Milton's eldest daughter, at a much
later period, was unable to write. Susanna could just inscribe
her own name, but that seems to have been the limit of her
literary accomplishments. Her utter indifference to all such
matters would sufficiently account for the destruction of her
father's papers, and this surmise is confirmed by a remarkable
statement made in his preface by Dr. John Cooke, the editor of
her husband's papers. Whilst serving as army surgeon during
the Civil War, he was stationed at Stratford to defend the bridge
over the Avon. One of his men, lately an assistant of Dr. Hall's,
told him that the books and manuscripts left by the doctor were
still in existence, and offered to accompany him to the widow's
house in search of them. Cooke examined the books, and Mrs.
Hall informed him that she had others which had belonged to
her husband's partner, and had cost a considerable sum. He
replied that if the books pleased him he would be willing to pay
the original price. She then produced them, and they proved to
be the very book from which we are quoting, and some others'
all ready for printing. Cooke, who knew Dr. Hall's handwriting,
told her that at least one of these books was her husband's, and
showed her the writing. She denied it, and finding that his per
sistence was giving offence, he paid the sum she named and
carried off the books.
400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
This extract proves that Susanna neither knew her husband's
handwriting nor recognised his own books. So entirely lacking
was she in any interest in intellectual matters, that she, a rich
woman, set no greater value on her husband's works than to sell
them for a trifle on the first opportunity that offered.
We can draw a tolerably reliable inference from this anecdote
of the interest she was likely to take in any written or printed
papers left by her father. In all probability she did not even
take the trouble to burn them, but either threw them away or sold
them as waste paper.
If we reflect that Susanna, born in better circumstances and
better educated than her mother, must have been decidedly her
superior, we can see how little Shakespeare's wife, now well
stricken in years, could have understood or appreciated her
husband. She undoubtedly preferred sermons to plays, and both
her heart and house were always open to itinerant Puritan
preachers. Of this we possess reliable information.
Shakespeare returned to London during the winter of 1614.
Letters have been preserved from his cousin Thomas Greene, the
town-clerk, proving that he was in the capital on the 1 6th of
November and the 23rd of December. This visit of his is inte
resting in two ways, for we know that Shakespeare, capable man
of business as he was, was defending the rights of his fellow-
citizens against the country gentry; and we also know the use
his family made of his absence.
The town records of Stratford show that Shakespeare's family
was entertaining a travelling Puritan preacher just at this time,
for, according to custom, the town presented this man with a
quart of sack and a quart of claret, and we read in the municipal
accounts : ' ' Item, for one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine
geven to a preacher at the New Place, xxd"
It is a significant fact that his family should be entertaining a
member of the sect Shakespeare held to be peculiarly inimical
to himself whilst he, the master of the house, was absent on
business.
Probably his family never saw one of his plays performed, nor
even read such of them as were printed in the pirated editions.
Anne Hathaway's cottage, which stands unchanged, though the
roof is gradually falling in, was visited by the present writer in
1895. An old woman lived in it, the last of the Hathaways. She
ANNE HATH AW AY'S COTTAGE 401
was sitting on a chair opposite the courtship bench, on which,
according to tradition, the lovers used to sit. In the family Bible,
lying open before her, she pointed with pride to a long list of
names inscribed by the Hathaways during hundreds of years, and
forming a kind of genealogical tree. The room was filled with all
manner of pictures of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway,
with relics of the poet, and of famous actors and critics of his
plays. The old woman, who lived among and by these com
paratively valueless treasures, explained the meaning and story
of each thing, but to the cautiously ventured inquiry whether
she had ever read anything by this same Shakespeare who
surrounded her on every side, and on whose memory she was
actually living, she returned the somewhat astonished reply,
" Read anything of him ! No, I read my Bible." If this
female Hathaway has never read anything of Shakespeare, was
Anne, who must have been far behind this last scion of her
race in general and certainly Shakespearian culture, likely ever
to have done so ?
Seeing that his own family had no great opinion of him, we
can hardly be surprised that, in spite of his wealth and his oft-
mentioned kindliness of disposition, he was hardly appreciated by
the upper ten of Stratford's 1500 citizens. Although he was one
of its richest inhabitants, he was never appointed to one of the
public offices of the town during the years of his residence there.
There were few with whom he could associate in the little
town. The most frequently alluded to of his Stratford acquaint
ances was a certain John Combe (steward of Ambrose, Earl of
Warwick), a man of low repute as tax-collector and worse as
money-lender and usurer. That he figured as a philanthropist in
his will does not prove very much, but he must have been better
than his reputation, or he would surely never have been one of
Shakespeare's companions. Tradition tells that the poet and
Combe not only spent much time together in their own houses,
but were also in the habit of passing their evenings in the tavern
(now called the Falcon) which lay just across the road. Here,
then, the mighty genius, stranded in a little country town, sat at
the same great table which stands there to-day, tossing dice and
emptying his glass in company with a country bumpkin of doubt
ful reputation.
Tradition further adds that it was one of Shakespeare's few
VOL. II. 2 C
402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
amusements to compose ironical epitaphs for his acquaintances,
and he is said to have written an exceedingly contemptuous one
upon John Combe in his character of usurer and extortioner.
This epitaph, however, which has survived to us in various forms,
is proved to have been printed, with its many variations, as early
as 1608. It was probably only assigned to Shakespeare in the
same manner that all the Danish witticisms of the following
century were attributed to Wessel. John Combe died in 1614,
leaving Shakespeare a legacy of five pounds. If he was the best
of Shakespeare's Stratford associates, we can figure to ourselves
the rest.
His chief companionship must have been that of Nature.
Wiser and more profound than any other in Voltaire's Candide
is its closing utterance, " // faut cultiver notre jardin" Candide
and his friends, at the end of the story, come across a Turk who,
absolutely indifferent to all that is occurring in Constantinople, is
entirely absorbed in the cultivation of his garden. The only
communication he holds with the capital is to send thither for sale
the fruit that he grows. This Turk's philosophy of life makes a
great impression upon Voltaire's hero, who has known and
experienced the dangers and difficulties of nearly every human
lot, and his constant refrain throughout the last pages of the book
is, " Je sais qdil faut cultiver notre jardin" "You are right,"
answers another character; "let us work and give up brooding;
only work makes life bearable." When Pangloss undertakes, for
the last time, to prove how wonderfully everything is linked
together in this best of all possible worlds, Candide adds the final
apostrophe, " Well said ! but we must cultivate our gardens."
This was the thought which was now singing its meagre, sad
little melody in Shakespeare's soul.
His two gardens stretched from New Place down to the Avon;
the larger had one fault — it only communicated by a narrow
lane with the bit of ground that lay directly round the house, two
small properties on the Chapel Lane side intervening between
house and garden. The smaller garden was probably given up
to flowers, the larger to the cultivation of fruit. Warwickshire is
especially noted for its apples.
Thus Shakespeare could now improve the quality of his own
fruit by that process of grafting which Polixenes had so lately
taught Perdita in the Winter's Tale. He could now, as did the
THE MULBERRY TREE 403
gardener long ago in Richard II., bid his assistants bind up the
dangling apricots and prop the bending branches.
He had planted the famous mulberry-tree with his own hand,
and it stood until the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who owned New
Place in 1756, cut it down in a fit of exasperation with the crowds
who requested admission to see it. Any one who has visited
Stratford knows of the endless pieces of furniture and little boxes
which were made from its wood. Garrick, who revived Shake
speare upon the stage, sat under it in 1744; and when, in 1769,
he was presented with the freedom of the city, the casket in
which the charter was enclosed was made from a portion of the
tree. In the same year, when, on the occasion of Shakespeare's
Jubilee, he sang his song, Shakespeare1 s Mulberry-Tree, he held
in his hand a goblet made from its wood.
A serious attempt was made in Shakespeare's time to intro
duce the breeding of silkworms at Stratford, and the planting
of the mulberry-tree may have had some connection with this
experiment.
Not even the ruins of New Place are in existence to-day, but
only the site where the house once stood, and the old well in the
yard, which is so overgrown with ivy that the windlass looks like
a handle of greenery. The foundation-stones of the boundary
wall are covered with earth and grass, and form a sort of embank
ment towards the road. The gardens, however, are much as they
were in Shakespeare's day ; the larger is spacious and beautiful.
Wandering there of an autumn afternoon, when the leaves are
beginning to turn faintly golden, a strange feeling conies over one
— a feeling belonging to the place, from which it is very difficult
to tear oneself away.
One seems to see him walking with grave stateliness there,
clad in scarlet, with the broad white collar falling over the sleeve
less black tunic. We see the hand which has written so many
ill-understood and insufficiently appreciated masterpieces binding
up branches or lopping off stray tendrils, while the sunlight
sparkles on the plain gold signet ring with its initials, W.S.,
which is still in our possession.
The numerous portraits and the famous death-masque dis
covered in Germany are all forgeries. The only genuine like
nesses are the bad engraving by Droeshout prefixed to the first
Folio and the poorly executed coloured bust by the Dutchman
404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Gerhard Johnson on the monument in the Church of the Holy
Trinity, which was probably done from a death-masque. It may
be added that a painting was discovered at Stratford eight years
ago, which purports to be the original of Droeshout's engraving,
and the genuineness of which is still a matter of dispute.1
It holds us captive, this head with the healthy, full, red lips,
the slight brownish moustache, the fine, high, poet's brow, with
the reddish hair growing naturally and becomingly at the sides.
The expression is speaking ; Shakespeare must surely have looked
like this. Even if the painting should prove a forgery, an imita
tion of Droeshout's work instead of its original, it will still retain
an artistic and psychological value possessed by none of the other
portraits. As he looks out at us from the canvas, we seem to see
him as he was in those last years at Stratford, chatting with the
townsfolk and " cultivating his garden." 2
1 In the Halliwell-Phillips collection of Shakespearian rarities, stored at the
Safe Deposit, Chancery Lane, there was a copy of the print which, according to the
catalogue of the collection, is in its original proof condition, before it was altered by
"an inferior hand." As traces of what is called the "inferior hand "are to be
found in the painting, it would seem that the latter was copied from the print. (See
John Corbin : Two Undescribed Portraits of Shakespeare. Harper's New Monthly
Magazine. )
2 R. E. Hunter : Shakespeare and Stratford. 1864. Halliwell-Phillips : Brief
Guide to the Gardens. 1863. G. L. Lee : Shakespeare's Home and Rural Life.
1874. W. H. H. : Stratford-upon-Avon. Historic Stratford. 1893. The Home
and Haunts of Shakespeare ', with an Introduction by H. H. Furness. 1892. Karl
Elze : Shakespeare, chap. viii.
XXVI
SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH
ON the 9th of July 1614 a terrible calamity fell upon the little
town in which Shakespeare dwelt, and a great fire destroyed no
less than fifty-four houses, besides various barns and stables. In
spite of a prohibitive law, the houses of most of the poorer citizens
were thatched with straw, which proved, of course, highly in
flammable. Doubtless Shakespeare, whose house was spared,
contributed generously towards the alleviation of the general
distress.
In March 1 612, Shakespeare, jointly with Will Johnson, a wine
merchant, John Jackson, and his friend and editor John Heminge,
bought a house at Blackfriars in London. The deed of purchase
which is still in existence in the British Museum, bears Shake
speare's authentic signature written above the first of the appended
seals. His name above and in the body of the document has a
different spelling. This property must have necessitated a certain
amount of attention, and probably occasioned more than one
journey up to town. The already mentioned sojourn there at the
close of the year 1614 was not one of these, however. Shake
speare's object then was the fulfilment of a commission intrusted
to him by his fellow-townsfolk.
For more than a century past, the great families had been
enclosing all the land they could seize, and their parks and pre
serves began to usurp the old common lands and hunting-grounds,
their object being to crush the mediaeval custom of the whole com
munity's joint interest in agriculture and cattle-rearing. A steady
withdrawal of land from agricultural purposes went on, and the
peasant classes were growing gradually poorer as the large land
owners arbitrarily raised the prices of meat and wool. Under
these circumstances the country people naturally did their best to
prevent the enclosure of land.
405
406 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In 1614 Shakespeare's native town was agitated by a proposal
to enclose and parcel out the common land of Old Stratford and
Welcombe. That Shakespeare was averse to this plan and deter
mined to oppose it we learn from an utterance of his preserved in
the memoranda of his cousin, Thomas Greene, which have been
published by Halliwell-Phillips. According to these, Shakespeare
said to his cousin that he was not able to bear the enclosing of
Welcombe. We also learn that he concluded an agreement on the
28th of October, on behalf of his cousin and himself, with a
certain William Replingham of Great Harborough, an ardent
supporter of the enclosure project. Replingham thereby pledged
himself to indemnify the persons concerned for any loss or injury
entailed upon them by the enclosure. Shakespeare was also
induced to plead the cause of his fellow-townsmen in London,
the Stratford town council sending Thomas Greene thither to
beg him to use all his influence for the benefit of the town,
which had already suffered grievous loss through the fire.
That Greene fulfilled his commission is proved by his letter to
the council of the 1 7th of November 1614, in which he says he
received reassuring intelligence from Shakespeare, and that both
the poet and his son-in-law, Dr. Hall, believe that the dreaded
plan will never be carried into execution.1
They were right. In 1618, in answer to a petition from the
corporation, Government decreed that no enclosure was to be
made, and gave orders that any fences already erected for that
purpose were to be pulled down.
The year 1615 seems to have passed quietly enough in that
country solitude and peace which Shakespeare had so long
desired.
He must have been taken seriously ill in January 1616, for
above the actual date of his will, March 2$tk, stands that of
January, as though he had begun to draw it up, and then, feeling
better, had postponed his intention of making a will.
The last event of any importance in Shakespeare's life took
1 The passage runs : " My cosen Shakespeare comyng yesterday to town, I went
to see him, how he did. He told me that they assured him they ment to inclose no
further than to Gospell Bush, and so upp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to
the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedg, and take in Salisburyes peece ; and that they
mean in Aprill to survey the land, and then to give satisfaccion, and not before ; and
he and Mr. Hall say they think ther will be nothyng done at all."
Also C. M. Ingleby: Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures^ 1883.
JUDITH'S MARRIAGE 407
place on the loth of February 1616; on that day his daughter
Judith was married. She was no longer quite young, being thirty-
one, and it was no very brilliant match she made. The bride
groom, Thomas Quiney, was a tavern-keeper and vintner in
Stratford, and a son of the Richard Quiney who applied eighteen
years before to his " loving countryman," William Shakespeare,
for a loan of £30. Thomas Quiney was four years younger than
his bride, therefore the maxim of Twelfth Night \ " Let still the
woman take an elder than herself," was as little heeded in his
daughter's case as it had been in Shakespeare's own. A vintner
in a town the size of Stratford is not likely to have been either
a very wealthy man or one of such education that Shakespeare
would take any pleasure in his society.
The last wedding festivity in which Shakespeare had taken
part was the ideally royal marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda.
What a contrast was this of Judith and her vintner ! It was prose
after poetry.
Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton are supposed to have come
down for the wedding, but of this we have no certain information.
The supposition rests entirely on the following brief statement,
written at least fifty years afterwards by the rector of Stratford,
John Ward. " Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson had a
merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare
died of a feavour there contracted." He does not say that this
merry meeting was held at the time of the wedding, but the
probabilities are that it was. Drayton was a Warwickshire man,
and possessed intimate friends in the neighbourhood of Stratford.
Ben Jonson may have been invited in return for his having
asked Shakespeare to stand as godfather to one of his children.
There are good grounds for the surmise that in any case the wine
was supplied by the son-in-law, and that the silver-gilt bowl
bequeathed to Judith was used upon this occasion.
It was childish of the cleric to connect this little drinking
party with Shakespeare's illness. The tradition of Shakespeare's
liking for a good glass was rife in Stratford as late as the
eighteenth century. Numerous pictures of the crab-apple tree
preserve the legend that Shakespeare started off for Bidford one
youthful day for the sake of the lively topers he had heard dwelt
there, and the tale runs that he drank so hard he had to lie down
under the crab- tree on his way home, and sleep for several hours.
408 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The story repeated by Ward probably originated in these reports.
All we know for certain is that some days after the wedding
Shakespeare was taken ill.
Several circumstances tend to prove that the poet was attacked
by typhus fever. Stratford, with its low, damp situation and its
filthy roads, was a regular typhus trap in those days. H alii well-
Phillips has published a list of enactments and penalties promul
gated by the magistrates with a view to the clearing of the streets.
They extend into the latter half of the eighteenth century, and
that there are none for the years in question is accounted for by
the fact that the documents for 1605-1646 are missing. Even
so late as the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, Garrick, who was
feted by the town on this occasion, described it as " the most
dirty, unseemly, ill-pav'd, wretched-looking town in all Britain."
Chapel Lane, towards which Shakespeare's house fronted, was
one of the unhealthiest streets in the town. It hardly possessed
a house, being but a medley of sheds and stables with an open
drain running down the middle of the street. It was small
wonder that the place was constantly visited by pestilential
epidemics, and little was known in those days of any laws of
hygiene, and as little of any treatment for typhus. Shake
speare's son-in-law, who was probably his doctor, knew of no
remedy for it, as his journals prove.
Shakespeare drew up his will on the 25th of March. As we
have already said, it is still in existence, and is reproduced in
facsimile in the twenty-fourth volume of the German Shakespeare
Year-book.
The fact that it was dictated, and the extreme shakiness of the
signature at the foot of the three lengthily detailed folio pages,
prove that Shakespeare was very ill when his will was made.
His daughter Susanna is the principal heiress. Judith re
ceives ^"150 ready money and £150 more after the lapse of three
years, under certain conditions. These are the principal bequests.
Joan Hart, his sister, is remembered in various ways. She is
to receive five pounds in ready money and all his clothes. Her
three sons are separately mentioned, although Shakespeare can
not remember the baptismal name of the second, and are to have
five pounds each. To his granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, he
leaves his silver plate. Ten pounds is to go to the poor of Strat
ford, and his sword to Thomas Combe. Various good burghers
SHAKESPEARE'S WILL 409
of the town, including Hamlet Sadler, after whom Shakespeare's
son was named, are left twenty-six shillings and eightpence each,
wherewith to buy a ring in memory of the deceased. A line
inserted later bequeaths a similar sum for a similar purpose to
the three actors with whom Shakespeare was most intimately
associated in his late company, and whom he calls " my com
rades " — John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell.
As is well known, it is to the first and last of these three that we
owe the first Folio edition, containing nineteen of Shakespeare's
plays which would otherwise have been lost to us.
A peculiar psychological interest attaches to the following
features of the will.
In the first place, the much discussed and remarkable fact that
in making his last will Shakespeare apparently entirely forgot his
wife. Not until it was completed and read aloud to him did
he remember that she, who would receive, of course, the legal
widow's share, should at least be named ; and then, between the
last lines, he has inserted : " Item, I gyve unto my wief my second
best bed with the furniture" The poverty of the gift is the more
obvious when we recall how Shakespeare's father-in-law remem
bered his wife in his will.
It is also significant, more especially as it was contrary to the
custom of the times, that not a single member of Mrs. Shake
speare's family was mentioned in the will. The name Hathaway
does not occur, although it is frequently mentioned in the wills of
Shakespeare's descendants ; in that of Thomas Nash, for instance,
and of Susanna's daughter Elizabeth, who became Lady Barnard
by her second marriage. The inference is plain, that Shakespeare
was on very unfriendly terms with his wife's family.
The next peculiarity is that Shakespeare never refers to his
position as a dramatic writer, nor makes any allusion to books,
manuscripts, or papers of any kind, as forming part of his pro
perty. This absence of all concern for his poetical reputation is
in complete accord with the sovereign contempt for posthumous
fame which we have already observed in him.
Finally, it is not without significance that there was neither
poet nor author mentioned among those to whom Shakespeare
left money for the purchase of that ordinary token of friendship,
a ring to be worn as a memento. It would seem as though he
felt himself under no obligation to any of his fellow-authors, and
410 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
had nothing to thank them for. This neglect is quite in harmony
with the contempt he always displayed for his brother craftsmen
when he had occasion to represent them upon the stage. He
may have been willing enough to drink in company with Ben
Jonson, the honest and envious friend of so many years' standing,
but he had no more depth of affection for him than for any other
of the dramatists and lyric poets among whom his lot had been
cast. As Byron says of Childe Harold — he was one among
them, not of them.
He lingered on for four weeks, and then he died.
He had probably completed his fifty-second year the day before,
thus dying at the same age as Moliere and Napoleon. He had
lived long enough to finish his work, and the mighty turbulent
river of his life came to an end among the sands, in the daily
drop, drop, drop.1
A monument was erected by his family in Stratford church
before the year 1623. Below the bust is an inscription, probably
of Dr. Hall's composition. The first two lines liken him, in badly
constructed Latin, to a Nestor for judgment, a Socrates for genius,
and a Virgil for art.2
We could imagine a more appropriate epitaph.
1 It is not altogether correct to say that Shakespeare died on the same day as
Cervantes. True, they both died on the 23rd of April 1616, but the Gregorian
calendar was then in use in Spain, while England was still reckoning by the Julian ;
there is an actual difference of ten days therefore.
2 " Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, populus moeret, Olympus habet."
XXVII
CONCLUSION
EVEN a long human life is so brief and fugitive that it seems
little short of a miracle that it can leave traces behind which
endure through centuries. The millions die and sink into
oblivion and their deeds die with them. A few thousands so
far conquer death as to leave their names to be a burden to
the memories of school-children, but convey little else to posr
terity. But some few master-minds remain, and among them
Shakespeare ranks with Leonardo and Michael Angelo. He was
hardly laid in his grave than he rose from it again. Of all the
great names of this earth, none is more certain of immortality
than that of Shakespeare.
An English poet of this century has written :
" Revolving years have flitted on,
Corroding Time has done its worst,
Pilgrim and worshipper have gone
From Avon's shrine to shrines of dust ;
But Shakespeare lives unrivall'd still
And unapproached by mortal mind,
The giant of Parnassus' hill,
The pride, the monarch of mankind."
The monarch of mankind ! they are proud words those, but
they do not altogether over-estimate the truth. He is by no
means the only king in the intellectual world, but his power
is unlimited by time or space. From the moment j his life's
history ceases his far greater history begins. We find its first
records in Great Britain, and consequently in North America;
then it spread among the German-speaking peoples and the
whole Teutonic race, on through the Scandinavian countries to
the Finns and the Sclavonic races. We find his influence in
412 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
France, Spain, and Italy; and now, in the nineteenth century,
it may be traced over the whole civilised world.
His writings are translated into every tongue and all the
languages of the earth do him honour.
Not only have his works influenced the minds of readers
in every country, but they have moulded the spiritual lives of
thinkers, writers and poets ; no mortal man, from the time of
the Renaissance to our own day, has caused such upheavals and
revivals in the literatures of different nations. Intellectual revolu
tions have emanated from his outspoken boldness and his eternal
youth, and have been quelled again by his sanity, his moderation,
and his eternal wisdom.
It would be far easier to enumerate the great men who have
known him and owed him nothing than to reckon up the names
of those who are far more indebted to him than they can say.
All the real intellectual life of England since his day has been
stamped by his genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their
life's nourishment from his works. Modern German intellectual
life is based, through Lessing, upon him. Goethe and Schiller
are unimaginable without him. His influence is felt in France
through Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Ludovic
Vitet and Alfred de Musset were from the very first inspired by
him. Not only the drama in Russia and Poland felt his influence,
but the inmost spiritual life of the Sclavonic story-tellers and
brooders is fashioned after the pattern of his imperishable crea
tions. From the moment of the regeneration of poetry in the
North he was reverenced by Ewald, Oehlenschlager, Bredahl,
and Hauch, and he is not without his influence upon Bjornson
and Ibsen.
This book was not written with the intention of describing
Shakespeare's triumphant progress through the world, nor of
telling the tale of his world-wide dominion. Its purpose was to
declare and prove that Shakespeare is not thirty-six plays and a
few poems jumbled together and read pele-mele, but a man who
felt and thought, rejoiced and suffered, brooded, dreamed, and
created.
Far too long has it been the custom to say, " We know nothing
about Shakespeare ; " or, " An octavo page would contain all our
knowledge of him." Even Swinburne has written of the intangi
bility of his personality in his works. Such assertions have been
SHAKESPEARE'S PRESENCE IN HIS WORKS 413
carried so far that a wretched group of dilettanti has been bold
enough, in Europe and America, to deny William Shakespeare
the right to his own life-work, to give to another the honour due
to his genius, and to bespatter him and his invulnerable name
with an insane abuse which has re-echoed through every land.
It is to refute this idea of Shakespeare's impersonality, and to
indignantly repel an ignorant and arrogant attack upon one of
the greatest benefactors of the human race, that the present
attempt has been made.
It is the author's opinion that, given the possession of forty-
five important works by any man, it is entirely our own fault if
we know nothing whatever about him. The poet has incorpo
rated his whole individuality in these writings, and there, if we
can read aright, we shall find him.
The William Shakespeare who was born at Stratford-on-Avon
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived and wrote in London
in her reign and that of James, who ascended into heaven in his
comedies and descended into hell in his tragedies, and died at the
age of fifty-two in his native town, rises a wonderful personality
in grand and distinct outlines, with all the vivid colouring of life
from the pages of his books, before the eyes of all who read them
with an open, receptive mind, with sanity of judgment and simple
susceptibility to the power of genius.
INDEX
AARON the Moor in 'Titus Andronicus,'
i- 38, 39
Abbess in ' Comedy of Errors,' i. 44
Abbot, Archbishop, ii. 182
Achilles in 'Troilus and Cressida,' i. 131,
226; ii. 114, 198-201,206,210-213,
220-224, 226
' Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare,' by John
Weever (1595), i. 151
Adam in 'As You Like It,' i. 128, 265
Adriana in ' Comedy of Errors,' i. 44, 157,
250 ; ii. 273
'^neid,'i. 35, 73
yEschylus, i. 68, 240
'Agamemnon,' by Seneca, ii. 6
Agamemnon in ' Troilus and Cressida,'
ii. 210, 212
Agincourt, Battle of, in ' Henry V.,' i.
123, 131, 229, 241
Ajax in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 200,
207, 213, 220, 221, 223
Alceste, Moliere's, i. 260, 261 ; ii. 247
Alcibiades in ' Timon of Athens,' ii. 255,
259, 260, 267, 269, 270
'Alexander and Campaspe,' by Lyly, ii.
263
'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's
Labour's Won' (1602-1603), chief
characters in — Attack on Puritanism
in, i. 57-60, 65, in, 218, 282; ii.
47, 60-70, 73, 192, 222, 273
Alonso in the ' Tempest,' ii. 368, 370, 373,
377, 378 _
' Alphonsus King of Arragon,' by Robert
Greene, i. 39
Ambrogiuolo in Boccaccio's 'Decameron,'
ii. 324, 325
Amintor in ' Maid's Tragedy,' by Beau
mont and Fletcher, ii. 306-308
Amleth in ' Saxo Grammaticus,' ii. 2-4
' Amores,' by Ovid, i. 68
' Amoretti,' by Spenser, i. 315, 343
' Amphitruo,' by Plautus, i. 43
Andromache in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
206, 210, 211
Angelo in ' Measure for Measure,' i. 282 ;
ii. 72-79, 81, 112
Angiers in ' King John,' i. 172, 174
Anne Boleyn in 'Henry VIII.,' ii. 317-
319
Anne in 'Richard III.,' i. 157-159, 163,
165 ; ii. 273
Anne, James I.'s queen, ii. 59, 85, 86, 90,
91, 164, 173, 176, 185, 363
Antenor in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 199
Antigonus in ' Winter's Tale,' ii. 350, 359
Antiochus in ' Pericles,' ii. 282
Antipholus of Syracuse in 'Comedy of
Errors,' i. 44, 60-62
Antonio in —
' Merchant of Venice,' i. 183, 189, 190,
192-195, 198
' Tempest,' ii. 377, 378
'Twelfth Night, 'i. 278
Antony, Mark, in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 283,
358, 360-362, 374, 376, 378-380,
382, 398 ; ii. 19, 238
' Antony and Cleopatra,' i. 283, 362, 384 ;
ii. 93, 161, 190, 195, 197, 255, 265,
278, 279, 365
Attractions for Shakespeare in — Sources
of, ii. 142-151
' Dark Lady ' as model in — Fall of the
Republic as a world-catastrophe,
ii. 152-159
Apemantus in ' Timon of Athens,' ii. 224,
255, 262-264, 269
Apothecary in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 88,
95 ; "• 338
Appleton Morgan's 'Shakespearean
Myth,' i. no
Arbaces in 'King and No King,' by
Beaumont and Fletcher, ii. 304, 305
'Arcadia,' by Philip Sidney, i. 347;
ii. 132, 282
Archbishop of Canterbury in ' Henry V.,'
i. 115, 241
Archidamus in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 355
Arden, Edward, i. 10
Mary, mother of William Shake
speare, i. 8, II, 182; ii. 227, 228,
279
Robert, grandfather of Shakespeare,
414
INDEX
415
' Arden of Feversham,' i. 204, 206
Arethusa in ' Philaster,' by Beaumont
and Fletcher, ii. 301-303, 305
Ariel in the 'Tempest,' i. 84; ii. 295,
365-367, 373. 374, 376, 380-382,
385, 387
Ariosto's ' Orlando Furioso/ i. 252 ; ii.
122, 123, 371
Aristotle, i. 21, 113 ; ii. 84, 361
Armada, Spanish, i. 21, 22, 53, 60, 290,
295
Armado in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 52-
Artemidorus in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 361
Arthur in 'King John,' i. 166-170, 172-
176, 397
Arviragus in 'Cymbeline,' ii. 324, 326,
328-332, 334, 335, 338, 341-344
'As You Like It' (1600), Shakespeare's
roving spirit and longing for nature —
Wit and chief characters in, i. 7, 36,
IIO, 128, 138, 189, 202, 213, 258-
270, 273, 274, 276, 362 ; ii. 25, 57,
60, 192, 258, 289, 346, 352, 365,
392, 393, 396
Asbies at Wilmecote, i. 8, n, 182
Aspasia in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beau
mont and Fletcher, ii. 306, 308
'Athelie,' Racine's, ii. 349
Aubrey, i. 5, 8, 230, 324 ; ii. 297
Audrey in 'As You Like It,' i. 259, 269
Aufidius in 'Coriolanus,' ii. 234, 244,
250
Augustus in Ben Jonson's ' Poetaster,'
i. 392-394
Aumerle in 'Richard II.,' i. 144
Autolycus in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 350, 351,
'Axel and Valborg,' by Oehlenschlager,
i- 93
Ayrer's, Jacob, ' Comedia von der shonen
Sidea,' ii. 370
BACON, Anthony, patronised by Essex,
i. 297, 304, 307
Delia, Miss, supporting the Baco
nian Theory (1856), i. 106, 107
Francis, i. 135, 181, 285, 286, 296-
298, 303, 304, 306, 307, 309-311,
325 ; ii. 88, 91, 164, 171
Baconian Theory concerning
Shakespeare's plays, i. 105-
108, 112-114, 371
Balthasar in —
'Merchant of Venice,' i. 137
' Romeo and Juliet,' ii. 57
Bandello, i. 87, 252, 272, 360
Banquo's ghost in 'Macbeth,' i. 124;
ii. 94, 98, 100-102, 105
Barabas in C. Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta,'
i. 178, 179, 197
Bardolph in —
' Henry IV.,' i. 10, 209
* Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 245, 248
Barnabe Rich's translation of Cinthio's
' Hecatomithi ' (1581), i. 272
Barnadine in 'Measure for Measure,' ii.
77
' Bartholomew Fair, ' by Ben Jonson (1614),
i- 37, 337- 402 ; ii. 6, 236, 346
Basianus in ' Titus Andronicus,' i. 37, 38
Bassanio in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. 190,
191, 194, 201, 248 ; ii. 63
Bates in ' Henry V.,' i. 243
' Battle of Alcazar,' by George Peele, i.
39, 238
Bear Garden, i. 119, 121
Beard's 'Theatre of God's Judgements'
(1597), i- 36
Beatrice in 'Much Ado about Nothing,'
i. 55, in, 252, 254-256, 266, 273,
278, 280, 332 ; ii. 273, 335
Beaumont's, Francis, plays and career,
i. 210; ii. 204, 296-299, 301-310,
3i8, 367, 399
Belarius in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 326, 328, 330-
332, 334, 342, 357
Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques,' i. 272 ;
ii. 4
' Ben Jonson,' by Symonds, i. 400
Benedick in ' Much Ado About Nothing,'
i. 55, no, 201, 209, 254-256, 266,
273 ; ii. 192
Benoit de St. Maure's 'Histoire de la
Guerre de Troie ' (1160), ii. 192, 199
Benvolio in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 97
Bernabo in Boccaccio's ' Decameron,' ii.
324, 325
Berni's ' Orlando Innamorato, n. 122,
123
Bertram in
All's Well that Ends Well,'
i. 57-59; ii. 61, 63-68, 221, 222
Beyersdorff's, Robert, 'Giordano Bruno
und Shakespeare,' ii. 14, 17, *9
Bianca in 'Othello,' ii. 123
Bierfreund, Theodor, ii. 310, 312
Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 47,
48, 54-56, 100, 327, 328
Bishop of Ely in ' Henry V.,' i. lip
Blackfriars Theatre, i. 127, 320 ; ii. 57
Blade's 'Shakespeare and Typography,'
i. no
Blanch in 'King John,' i. 174, 175
Boaden, i. 315, 316
Boccaccio's plays, i. 57 ; ii. 64, 192, 193,
199, 310, 324-326
Boece's, Hector, ' Scotorum Histonae,
ii. 100
Bolingbroke in ' Richard II.,' i. 9, 144,
146-149 ; ii. 233
' Book of Martyrs,' Fox's, ii. 314
' Book of Troy,' Lydgate's, ii. 200, 201
416
INDEX
' Booke of Ayres ' (1601), i. 272
' Booke of Plaies, and Notes thereon,' by
Dr. Simon Forman, ii. 94, 323, 346
Bosworth Field in 'Richard III.,' i. 161
Bottom in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 50, 81, 83
Boyet in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 49, 55
Brabantio in 'Othello,' ii. 115, 116, 118,
119, 121
Briseida in Benoit's ' Histoire de la Guerre
de Troie' (1160), ii. 192, 199
Brown's, C. A., ' Shakespeare's Autobio
graphical Poems,' i. 136
Browne's, Sir Thomas, ' Religio Medici '
(1642), i. 343
Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence
over Shakespeare, ii. 10-19, 21
'Brut,' by Layamon (1205), ii. 132
Brutus, Junius, in ' Coriolanus,' ii. 234
Marcus, in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 112,
281, 358-363, 369-383; »• 19,
120, 143, 312, 338
Buckingham, Duke of, in 'Richard III.,'
i. 160, 161
Bucknill, Dr., on Shakespeare's Medical
Knowledge, i. in
Burbage, James, i. 16, 120
Richard, actor, i. 16, 126, 179, 180,
209, 230, 352; ii. 9, 245, 288,
3H> 409
Burghley, Lord, i. 257, 284, 292, 296,
320; ii. II
Butler, Samuel, ii. 297
Byron, i. 271, 346 ; ii. 52, 218, 285, 398,
399, 4io
CADE, Jack, in ' Henry VI.,' i. 132, 133 ;
ii. 232, 396
'Oesar's Fall' (1602), i. 358
Caius Lucius in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 324
Calchas in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 210
Calderon, i. 212, 213 ; ii. 293, 307, 343,
376
Calianax in ' Maid's Tragedy,' by Beau
mont and Fletcher, ii. 306, 308
Caliban in the ' Tempest,' i. 201, 402 ; ii.
224, 332, 354, 371, 373, 376, 378,
380, 382-385 .
Calphurnia in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 361
'Cambyses,' i. II, 84, 217
Camillo in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 355, 358
Campbell's, Lord, 'Shakespeare's Legal
Acquirements,' i. 109
1 Candelajo,' by Giordano Bruno, ii. 16
' Candide,' by Voltaire, ii. 402
Caphis in ' Timon of Athens, ' ii. 264
Capulet in 'Romeo and Juliet,' i. 89, 97,
loo, 101, 103
Carleton, Sir Dudley, ii. 1 66, 173, 184,
185, 362, 363
' Carmosine,' by De Mussel, ii. 303
Carr, Robert, Viscount Rochester and
Earl of Somerset, James I.'s favourite
— Lady Essex's marriage with —
Crime and fall of, ii. 164, 165, 170,
173, 179-189, 364
Casca in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 368, 381 ; ii.
232
Cassio in 'Othello,' i. 136; ii. 109-111,
115, 118, 123, 127, 213, 302
Cassius in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 201, 281, 358,
361-363, 365, 368, 369, 372, 373^
375, 380-382; ii. 143, 312
Catesby, Sir William, in ' Richard III.,'
i. 160, 162
'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson, i. 358, 369,
384, 389, 398, 399
Cato, i. 369, 370, 377, 389; ii. 143
Cavalieri, Tommaso de', i. 343-345, 349,
359
Cavendish's, George, ' Relics of Cardinal
Wolsey,' ii. 314
Cecil, Sir Robert, i. 51, 289, 290, 292,
296, 297, 305, 309, 323, 331 ; ii. 82,
. 87-89, 173, 180
Celia in 'As You Like It,' i. no, 213,
258, 259, 264, 266 ; ii. 326
Ceres in the 'Tempest,' ii. 367, 371, 386
Cerimon in 'Pericles,' ii. 280, 294, 378,
379
Cervantes' 'Don Quixote,' ii. 32, 56, 216
Chamberlain, John, i. 308 ; ii. 166, 184,
185, 362-364
Chapman, i. 36, 209, 324, 325, 387, 402 ;
ii. 185, 204-207, 211, 303, 381
Charlcote, i. 10, 13-15, 260; ii. 395
Charmian in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii.
15*
Chaucer, ii. 189, 192, 193, 200, 306, 310
Chettle, Henry, i. 24, 25, 27, 211, 293 ;
ii. 5, 90, 201
Chief-justice in 'Henry IV.,' i. 208, 212,
231, 237, 238, 241
Christopher Sly in ' Taming of the
Shrew,' i. 124, 138, 216
' Chronicle History of King Leir,' ii. 131
Cicero, i. 50, 310, 366-369, 390, 398,
399 J »• S6
Cinna in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 365 ; ii. 238
Cinthio, i. 272, 360 ; ii. 70, 114, n 6, 117
Clarence, George Duke of, in ' Richard
III.,'i. 157, 159, 160
Claudio in —
' Measure for Measure,' ii. 19, 74-78
' Much Ado About Nothing,' i. 252-254
'Clavigo,' by Goethe, i. 154 ; ii. 152
Cleopatra in 'Antony and Cleopatra,'
i. 362; ii. 143-145, 147-158, 161,
190, 193-197, 232, 265, 273, 321
'Cleopatra,' by Daniel (1594), ii. 145
Clifford, Lord, in ' Henry VI., 'i. 29, 30,
164
INDEX
417
' Cloaca Maxima,' i. 213
Cloten in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 321, 326, 328-
333. 335. 338, 339, 344
Clown in —
' All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's
Labour's Won,' i. 57, 60 ; ii. 61,
62, 68
'Othello,' ii. 126, 137
'Twelfth Night,' i. no, 271, 272, 274,
276, 277 ; ii. 192
Cobham, Lord, i. 305, 322 ; ii. 89, 172
Cobweb in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i- 77, ?3
Coleridge, ii. 66, 103, no
' Colin Clouts Come Home Again,' by
Spenser, i. 23
Collier's ' Shakespeare's Library,' ii. 4
' Comedia von der shonen Sidea,' by
Jacob Ayrer, ii. 370
'Comedy of Errors' (1589-1591), i. 43,
60-62, 96, 157, 274
Cominius in ' Coriolanus,' ii. 242, 252
' Commedia dell' Arte,' ii. 57
' Comus,' by Milton, i. 99
Condell, i. 106 ; ii. 317, 409
' Confessio Amantis,' by John Gower, ii.
280
' Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle,' by
Alfred de Musset, ii. 52
' Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles,
Duke of Byron,' by Chapman, ii. 303
Constance in 'King John,' i. 168, 171,
173, 174
' Contemporary History,' Wilson's, ii.
364
Cordelia in 'King Lear,' i. 41, 250; ii.
125, 13°, 132, 138-141, 145, 246,
265, 273, 322, 330, 335
Corin in ' As You Like It,' i. 265 ; ii.
352
'Coriolanus,' i. 112, 283, 381; ii. 216,
259-263, 265, 275, 278, 279, 304
Date of production — Shakespeare's
hatred of the masses, ii. 224-226,
228-248
Dramatic power of — Inconsistencies
in, ii. 249-253
Corneille, i. 232 ; ii. 292, 293
Coryat, i. 18, 135, 137; ii. 237
Costard in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 85
Countess in ' All's Well that Ends Well,'
i. 57, 60 ; ii. 61, 64, 66, 67
Cranmer in 'Henry VIII.,' ii. 318, 320
Cressida in 'Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
162, 181, 191-196, 201, 210, 216-
220, 273, 321
Crispinus in ' Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson,
i. 392, 393, 401
4 Cymbeline ' (1610), Shakespeare s
country idyll and conception of
morality in — Dual contrast and chief
VOL. II.
characters in, i. 35, 138; ii. 176,
272, 278, 286. 294, 316, 319, 321-
345, 35i, 357, 383
Cynthia in Lyly's ' Endymion,' i. 79, 80
' D/EMONOLOGIE,' by James I., ii. 98
Dame Quickly in —
' Henry IV.,' i. 209
' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 245, 246,
250
Daniel, Samuel, i. ij5, 209, 318, 320,
324, 343, 3545 ». 14, 90, 145, 204
Dares Phrygius' ' De Bello Trojano,' ii.
198, 199
' Darius,' Count Stirling's, ii. 372, 373
' Dark Lady,' or Mary Fitton (see that
title)
Darley, George, ii. 298, 305
Darnley, Lord, ii. 8, 83, 163
Daudet's ' Sappho,' ii. 261
' Daughter of the Air' (1664), ii. 343
Dauphin in —
' Henry V.,' ii. 389
'King John,' i. 174, 175
Davenant, Mrs., courted by Shakespeare,
i. 231, ii. 390
Sir William, probable son of W.
Shakespeare, i. 5, 16, 181, 231 ;
". 376, 390
Davison's ' Poetical Rhapsody,' i. 324
' Day of the Seven Sleepers,' by T. L.
Heiberg, i. 83
' De Amicitia,' by Cicero, i. 310
' De Analogia,' by Julius Caesar, i. 368
' De Bello Trojano,' by Dares Phrygius,
ii. 199
' De Bello Trojano,' by Dictys Cretensis,
ii. 198
'De la Causa,' by Giordano Bruno, ii.
15, 18
' Decameron,' by Boccaccio, ii. 324-326
Decius in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 361
'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' by
Harsnet, ii. 131
' Defence of Poesy,' by Sir Philip Sidney
(1583), i. 122
Dekker, i. 211 ; ii. 5, 90, 201, 235, 236,
353, 384, 385, 387, 392
'Delia,' by Daniel, i. 343
Demetrius in ' Midsummer Night's
Dream,' i. 85
' Der bestrafte Brudermond,' ii. 6
' Der junge Tischermeister,' by Tieck, i.
124
' Der Kinder Sunde der Vater Fluch,' by
Paul Heyse, ii. 70
Desdemona in 'Othello,' i. 124, 202, 250;
ii. 48, 109-112, 114-121, 123-125,
127, 156, 157, 161, 237, 273, 301-
303, 322, 335
' Dial of Princes,' by Guevara, i. 52
2 D
4i8
INDEX
'Diana,' by Montemayor (1520-1562), i.
64
Diana in ' Pericles,' ii. 283, 294
Dick in 'Henry VI.' (2nd Part), ii.
232
'Dictionary of National Biography,' by
Robert Devereux, i. 309
Dictys Cretensis' 'De Bello Trojano,' ii.
198
' Die Rauber,' by Schiller, ii. 135
Diomedes in —
Benoit's ' Histoire de la Guerre de
Troie,' ii. 192, 199
'Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 193, 208-
210, 218, 219
Dionyza in ' Pericles,' ii. 280, 286, 294
'Discour sur la Tragedie,' by Voltaire, i.
38i
' Discoveries,' by Ben Jonson, i. 401
'Discovery of the Large, Rich, and
Beautiful Empire of Guiana ' (1596),
ii. 371
Doctor Caius in ' Merry Wives of
Windsor,' i. 246, 247
' Dr. Faustus,' by Marlowe, ii. 370
Dogberry in ' Much Ado About Nothing,'
i. 257 ; ii. 157
Dolabella in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii.
146, 149
Doll Tearsheet in 'Henry IV.,' i. 209,
250 ; ii. 73, 191
' Doll's House,' i. 254
Don John in ' Much Ado About Nothing,'
i. 252, 253
'Don Juan,' by Byron, i. 271
Mozart's, ii. 217
Don Pedro in ' Much Ado About No
thing,' i. 253, 255
' Don Quixote,' by Cervantes, ii. 32, 56,
216
Douglas in ' Henry IV.,' i. 220, 225,
232
Dovvden, i. 55, 97, 245, 316, 360, 375 ;
ii. 93, 278
Drake, Sir Francis, i. 209, 292, 315
Drayton, i. 23, 108, 209, 318, 346, 359;
ii. 90, 173, 407
Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare, i.
128 ; ii. 403, 4°4
Dromio of Syracuse in 'Comedy of
Errors,' i. 60, 61
Dryden, i. 390 ; ii. 297, 299, 376
Duke in —
'As You Like It,' i. 259, 261, 262
'Measure for Measure,' ii. 19, 73, 74>
76-81, 230
'Othello,' ii. 119, 120
'Twelfth Night,' i. 42, 189, 202, 274,
275, 277, 278
Dumain in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 47
Durer's, Albert, ' Melancholia,' ii. 39
' EASTWARD Ho ! ' by Chapman, i. 387,
402 ; ii. 303
Eden's ' Historye of Travaile in East
and West Indies' (1577), ii. 371
Edgar in 'King Lear,' ii. 44, 131, 135-
1^7, 140, 141
Edmund in ' King Lear,'i. 156, 171, 253 ;
ii. 135, 140
'Edward II.,' by C. Marlowe, i. 32, 98,
142-145, 148
' Edward III.,' authorship of, i. 203, 204
Edward IV. in—
'Henry VI.,' i. 30, 164; ii. 105
' Richard III.,' i. 160, 163, 164
Edward V., son of Edward IV., in ' Richard
III.,' i. 160, 163, 164
Edward, Prince of Wales, in ' Henry VI.,'
i- 39, 157, 159, 164; ii. 105
£1 Principe Constante,' i. 212
' El Secreto a Voces,' i. 212
Elizabeth, Princess, her marriage with the
Elector Palatine, ' Tempest ' written
for, ii. 170, 230, 297, 318, 361-368,
377, 385
Queen, i. 10, 17, 20, 21, 47, 5°> 51.
54, 55, 76, 79-Si, n8, 121, 126,
128, 129, 131, 134, 144, 148, 176,
177, 191, 199, 200, 243-245, 257,
281, 284-290, 292-305, 307-312,
315, 319. 322, 323, 329, 330, 337,
338, 359, 372, 390 ; "• i, 9, H,
58, 81, 82, 84-87, 89, 97, 163,
168, 171, 176, 203, 297, 310, 317,
318, 320, 413
Queen of Edward IV., in ' Richard
III.,' i. 159, 160, 165
' Elves,' by J. L. Heiberg, i. 83
Elze, Karl, i. 137-139, 199, 211, 315, 342;
ii. 92, 278, 347, 365, 367, 398, 404
Emerson's 'Representative Men,' ii. 315
Emilia in —
'Othello,' ii. no, 112, 123, 125, 161,
35i
'Two Noble Kinsmen,' ii. 311, 313
' Endymion,' by John Lyly, i. 55, 79, 80
Enobarbus in 'Antony and Cleopatra,'
ii. 148, 149, 151, 152, 157
Escalus in 'Measure for Measure,' ii. 74,
75, 77
' Essay of Dramatic Poetry,' by Dryden,
i. 390 ; ii. 297
Essex, Earl of, i. 76, 79-81, 121, 130, 148,
181, 209, 240, 243, 252, 281, 285,
286, 289, 290, 293, 294-312, 319,
322, 323, 359; ii. i, 14, 87, 88,91
Lady Frances, afterwards Lady
Somerset, ii. 180-189
Lettice, Countess of, i. 76, 80, 298 ;
ii. 8
Eiphrasea or Bellario in 'Philaster,' by
Beaumont and Fletcher, ii. 301-304
INDEX
419
' Euphues,' by Lyly, i. 49-53, 209, 343 ; ii.
17-19, 354
Evadne in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont
and Fletcher, ii. 306-308, 311
Evans, Sir Hugh, in ' Merry Wives of
Windsor,' i. 9, 15, 246
' Every Man in his Humour' (1595), by
Ben Jonson, i, 128, 386, 401 ; ii. 376
' Every Man out of his Humour' (1599),
by Ben Jonson, i. 210, 237, 272, 386,
401
' FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS,' by Fletcher,
ii. 302, 305, 306, 374
Falstaff in —
'Henry IV.,' i. 53, 59, 101, 207-209,
211-220, 231-233, 236-238, 242,
244, 245, 256; ii. 25, 67, 218,
3°4, 354
' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 125, 244-
248
' Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,
containing the Honorable Battell of
Agin-court,'i. n, 207, 208, 229, 256,
360
' Fasti,' by Ovid, i. 73
Faulconbridge in 'King John/ i. 168, 170-
173, 176, 223
' Faust,' ii. 32, 49, 50, 52, 338
Feis', Jacob, ' Shakespeare and Mon
taigne,' i. 402 ; ii. 17
Fenton in ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i.
246, 248
Ferdinand in ' Tempest,' i. 43 ; ii. 295,
357, 368, 370, 378, 384-386, 407
' Filostrato,' by Boccaccio, ii. 192, 193,
199
Florentine's, Ser Giovanni, ' II Pecorone '
(1558), i. 187, 247
Fitton's, Mary, relations with Shake
speare and Earl of Pembroke —
Addressed in the Sonnets as the
'Dark Lady,' i. 317, 322, 323, 327-
341, 347, 349, 351 ; ii. i, 27, 144,
145, 153, 154, 158, 195-197
Flavina in ' Two Noble Kinsmen,' ii.
313
Flavius in —
'Julius Caesar,' i. 357
' Timon of Athens,' ii. 258-260, 263,
264
Fleance in ' Macbeth,' ii. 100
Fleay, i. 174 ; ii. 201, 254, 256, 257, 264,
281, 283, 289, 295, 314, 315, 317
Fletcher's, John, plays and career, ii.
204, 221, 236, 296-317, 319, 320,
374, 399
Florio, i. 53, 54, 209 ; ii. 12-14, 17, 365
Florizel in ' Winter's Tale,' ii. 326, 337,
350, 351, 353, 356, 357
Fluellen in ' Henry V.,' i. 241, 243, 246
Fool in 'King Lear,' i. in ; ii. 135-137,
208, 265, 353
Ford, Master and Mistress, in ' Merry
Wives of Windsor,' i. 246, 247
Forest of Arden in 'As You Like It,'
i. 259, 260, 269 ; ii. 274, 326
Forman, Dr., ii. 94, 181, 182, 323,
346
Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, in ' Ham
let,' ii. 37, 40, 159, 260
' Fortunate Shipwreck,' i. 263
Frampton's translation of Marco Polo
(1579), "• 373
Frederick in * As You Like It,' i. 259,
266
' Friar Bacon,' by Greene, ii. 370, 373
Friar Lawrence in 'Romeo and Juliet,' i.
87, 88-90, 93-95, 103, 139
Fuller, i. 210, 211 ; ii. 167, 168
Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, ii. 147,
150, 155
Furnivall, i. 394 ; ii. 278, 279, 304, 314-
316
GALLUS in Ben Jonson's ' Poetaster,' i.
392, 394
' Gammer Gurton's Needle,' i. 35
Gardiner, ii. 88, 90, 176, 188, 312
Garnett, Richard, ii. 231, 297, 365, 368,
379, 38o, 385
Garnier's ' Henriade,' i. 264
Gaveston in C. Marlowe's ' Edward II..'
i. 142 ; ii. 163
Gerutha in Saxo Grammaticus, ii. 2, 3
Gervinus, i. 96, 97, 315, 363 ; ii. 212-214,
257, 295, 33i
' Gesta Romanorum,' i. 188 ; ii. 280
Ghost in ' Hamlet,' i. 128; ii. 5, 6, 21,
31, 34-36, 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 96-98
' Gilette of Narbonne,' Boccaccio's story
of, i. 57 ; ii. 64
Giordano Bruno. See Bruno
Glendower in ' Henry IV.,' i. 205, 225,
232
Globe Theatre, i. 120, 121, 127, 263,
305, 357 ; ". 94, 296, 306, 314, 346,
388
Gloucester, Duke of, in —
'Henry VI.,' i. 31 ; ii. 395
'King Lear,' i. 124 ; ii. 131, 132, 135-
137, Hi
Gloucester, Richard, Earl of, in 'Henry
VI.,' afterwards Richard III., i. 30,
32 ; H. 105
Gobbo in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. 136,
137
Goethe, i. 94, 113, 154, 206, 375, 386;
ii. 25, 32, 45, 47, 49, 52, 109, 152,
158, 213, 226, 338,344, 412
Gogol's ' Revisor,' i. 389
Gondomar, Count of, ii. 174, 185
42O
INDEX
Goneril in 'King Lear,' i. 282; ii. 132,
135, 138-140, 273
Gonzago in ' Hamlet,' ii. 59
( ionzalo in the ' Tempest,' ii. 13, 354, 371,
376,378,383
Gosse, i. 299, 309 ; ii. 88, 92, 166, 188
Gosson, Stephen, i, 189, 358 ; ii. 236
Gower, John, ii. 189, 279-281, 283, 284
'Gracioso,' i. 212, 213
Gravedigger in ' Hamlet,' ii. 33
Greene, Robert, plays of, i. 39, 40, 50,
79, I35> !39, 217 ; ". 297, 346-
349, 351. 370,373; Shakespeare
attacked by, i. 23-25, 27, 21 1
Thomas, Shakespeare's cousin, ii.
400, 406
Gremio in ' Taming of the Shrew,' i.
136
Gretchen in Goethe's ' Faust,' ii. 49, 52,
338
Greville, Fulk, ii. n, 172, 180, 188
Griseida or Cryseida in Boccaccio's ' Filo-
strato,' ii. 192, 193, 199, 200
' Groat's Worth of Wit bought with a
Million of Repentance,' by Greene
(1592), i. 23, 211
Guarini's ' Pastor Fido,' i. 402 ; ii. 306
Guiderius in 'Cymbeline,' ii. 324, 326,
328-332, 334, 335, 338, 341-344
Guido delle Columne, ii. 192, 199
Guildenstern in ' Hamlet,' ii. 3, 20, 29, 34,
36, 41-44
' Gull's Hornebooke' (1609), byDekker,
ii. 235, 236
Gunpowder Plot, ii. 87, 132, 167
HALL, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's grand
daughter, ii. 408, 409
John, Dr., husband of Susanna
Shakespeare, ii. 390, 391, 399, 400,
406, 408, 410
Halliwell-Phillips, i. 16, 88, 203, 231 ;
ii. 201, 223, 231, 404, 406, 408
' Hamlet,' i. 10, 75, So, 84, 101, 107-109,
124, 128, 130, 138, 146, 152, 153,
185, 189, 210, 215, 260, 263, 264,
281-283, 338, 358-360, 362, 372-
376, 382, 383, 385, 402 ; ii. 60-63,
76, 78, 84,93-99, 112, 117, 130,
137, 159, 161, 230, 234, 236, 258,
260, 301, 313, 327, 354, 377, 380
Antecedents in fiction, history, and
drama — Parallels to circumstances
in, ii. 2-9
Criticism on dramatic art in — Shake
speare's attack on Kemp and
eulogy of Tarlton — Danish March
played in, ii. 55-59
Dramatic features of, ii. 40-46
Influence of ' Hamlet ' on foreign litera
ture, ii. 51-54
Local colour in, ii. 20-24
Montaigne's and Giordano Bruno's
influence over Shakespeare —
Parallels in Lyly's ' Euphues ' to
'Hamlet,' i. 10-19
Ophelia's relations with Hamlet, com
pared with 'Faust,' ii. 47-50
Personal element in, ii. 25-30
Psychology of, ii. 31-39
Harington, Sir John, i. 304 ; ii. 23, 84
Lord, ii. 123, 170, 361, 371
Harrison, Rev. W. A., i. 330, 338
Harsnet's ' Declaration of Popish Im
postures,' ii. 131
Hart, Joan, Shakespeare's sister, ii.
408
Hart's attack on Shakespeare in 1848,
i. 105
Harvey, i. 112, 113, 135
Hastings, Lord, in 'Richard III./ i. 160,
165
Hathaway, Anne, her marriage with
Shakespeare — Children of, i. 13, 15,
42, 43, 46 ; ii. i, 385, 39Q-392, 394,
398-401, 407-409
Hecate in ' Macbeth,' ii. 97
' Hecatomithi,' by Giraldi Cinthio (1565),
i. 272 ; ii. 70, 114
Hector, ii. 114, 198, 201
Hector in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 206,
210-213, 217, 223, 226
Heiberg, J. L., i. 83, 152 ; ii. 229
Heine, Heinrich, i. 74, 250, 262 ; ii. 52,
190, 274, 351
Helen in 'Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 190,
191, 206-210, 212
Helena in —
1 All's Well that Ends Well,' i. 58 ;
ii. 47, 60, 61, 63-67, 273
' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i. 82,
85,96; ii. 313
Helwys, Sir Gervase, ii. 183, 184, 187
Heminge, i. 106 ; ii. 317, 409
' Henriade.' by Gamier, i. 264
'Henry IV.' (1597), chief characters
and scenes in — Freshness and
perfection of the play, i. ii, 128,
141, 244, 256
First Part, i. 53, 201, 205-209, 211-
237,377; "• '5.304
Second Part, i. 114, 207, 215, 218,
221, 232, 237-241, 245 ; ii. 57,
'Henry V.,' or Prince of Wales in
'Henry IV.' (1599), as a national
drama — Patriotism and Chauvinism
of — Vision of a greater England in —
' Henry V.' as typical English hero,
i. 10, 115, 123, 131, 141, 207, 208,
214-220, 223, 225-236, 240-248, 256,
359; ii. 191, 195, 245, 315, 389
INDEX
421
* Henry VI.' :—
First Part, i. 40, 364 ; ii. 338
Second Part, i. 112, 132, 150, 155;
ii. 232, 396
Third Part, i. 24, 39, 150, 155 ; ii.
105, 396
Trilogy — Greene attacking Shake
speare on — Shakespeare's author
ship of, i. 3, 27-33, 123, HI,
142, 158, 195 ; ii. 347, 395
'Henry VIII.,' Shakespeare's part in, i.
3, 141 ; ii. 216, 275, 296, 314-320,
349, 3.88
Henry, Prince, son of James L, ii. 180,
187, 361, 363, 364, 366, 368
Henslow, i. 37, 125, 358, 385-387 ; ii.
4, 5, 20, 57, 201
' Heptameron of Civil Discourses,' by
George Whetstone (1582), ii. 70
Herbert, William. See Earl of Pem
broke
Hericault, C. d', ii. 216
Hermann, Conrad, i. 317 ; ii. 8
Hermia in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 82, 85, 86; ii. 313
Hermione in ' Winter's Tale,' ii. 293, 294,
319, 320, 347-352, 357, 358, 379
Hero and Leander,' by C. Marlowe
(1598), i. 36, 258, 268; ii. 205
'Hero and Leander,' or 'Touchstone of
True Love,' by Ben Jonson,i. 337, 402
Hero in ' Much Ado About Nothing,' i.
in, 252, 253, 266
Heyse's, Paul, 'Der Kinder Siinde der
Vater Fluch,' ii. 70
Hippolyta in ' Midsummer Night's
Dream,' i. 77, 84, 96
' Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160),
by Benoit de St. Maure, ii. 192, 199
'Histoires Tragiques,' by Belleforest, i.
272 ; ii. 4
'Historia Trojana,' by Guido delle
Columne, ii. 192
' History of the Rebellion,' by Clarendon,
i. 321
' Historye of Travaile in East and West
Indies' (1577), by Eden, ii. 371
' Histriomastix,' by Prynne, i. 117; ii.
6, 245
Hogarth, ii. 77, 218
Holberg; i. 45, 54, 74, 181, 216, 263, 271 ;
ii. 97, 139, 203
Holinshed's Chronicle, i. 132, 143, 151,
153, 155, 156, 159, 207, 235, 360;
ii. 92, 100, 101, 103, 131-133, 314,
319, 323, 324
Holofernes in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i.
53, 54 .
Homer's ' Iliad ' compared with ' Troilus
and Cressida,' i. 131 ; ii. 198, 199,
203-214
Horace, i. 318, 352, 353, 386, 387, 390-
395
Horatio in ' Hamlet,' i. 362 ; ii. 2, 6, 19,
21, 22, 24, 42, 45, 58
Hotspur or Henry Percy in ' Henry IV.'
— Mastery of the character-drawing
— Achilles compared with, i. 172,
201, 205, 206, 219-228, 231, 232,
234, 377 ; ". 15, 332
' House of Fame,' by Chaucer, ii. 306
Hubert de Burgh in ' King John,' i. 166,
167, 169, 170, 175, 397
Hunsdon, Lord, i. 88, 259, 292
' Hysteria novellamente ritrovata di dui
nobili Amanti,' by Luigi da Porta,
i. 87
IACHIMO in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 325, 329,
333-335, 337, 338
lago in 'Othello,' i. 136, 156, 253, 282 ;
ii. 93, ic8-H2, 114-118, 120-124,
126, 135, 213
i Idea,' by Dray ton, i. 346
Iden in ' Henry VI.,' i. 29
Ides of March in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 361,
370
' II Pecorone,' by Ser Giovanni Floren
tine (1558), i. 187, 188, 247
' Iliad,' i. 324, 325 ; ii. 198, 199, 204, 206,
209, 211
Imogen in 'Cymbeline,' i. 267; ii. 66,
176, 272, 273, 294, 319, 321, 322,
324-326, 328-534, 379
' Inganni,' i. 272
Ingleby, i. 394 ; ii. 304, 406
Inigo Jones, i. 122, 135, 324; ii. 367
' Iphigenia in Aulis,' by Racine, ii. 226
' Iphigenia in Tauris,' by Goethe, ii. 226
Iras in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii. 233
Iris in the ' Tempest,' ii. 367, 371
Isabella in ' Measure for Measure,' ii. 73,
75-77, 290
Italy visited by Shakespeare, i. 4, 134-
140
JAMES I. of England and VI. of Scotland,
i. 243, 290, 292, 308, 322-325 ; ii.
8, 9, 59, 79-92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 104,
114, 131, 163-167, 169-189, 23 -
232, 297, 310, 320, 362-364, 366,
367, 371, 413
Jameson, Mrs., ii. 273, 351, 352
Jamy in ' Henry V.,' i. 242, 243
Jaques in ' As You Like It,' i. 189, 202,
259-264, 269 ; ii. 25, 60, 258, 393
' Jeppe paa Bjerget,' by Ludwig Holberg,
i. 45, 216
Jessica in 'Merchant of Venice,' i. 186,
194, 196, 197, 199-201
'Jew of Malta,' by C. Marlowe, i. 39,
178, I95-J97
422
INDEX
Joan of Arc or La Pucelle in ' Henry VI.,'
i- 195, 364
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in
'Richard II.,' i. 144, 145
Jonson, Ben, his career, plays, and learn
ing — Shakespeare compared with,
i. 19, 25, 37, 106, 108, 128, 186, 209,
210, 237, 263, 272, 324, 337, 352,
353, 357, 35*. 369, 384-403; & 6,
7, 86, 90, 203, 204, 228, 235, 236,
278, 297-299, 303, 306, 315, 346,
376, 388, 407, 410
Julia in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' i.
64, 65, 199 ; ii. 273
Juliet in —
' Measure for Measure,' ii. 74
'Romeo and Juliet,' i. 88-92, 94, 95,
97-102, 124, 191 ; ii. 154, 194, 217,
273' 384
'Julius Csesar ' (1601), Plutarch's Lives
forming material for — Defective re
presentation of Caesar's character —
Characters of Brutus and Portia —
Anthony's Oration, i. 40, 73, 78, II 2,
281, 357-384, 396, 398, 399; ". 19,
142, 147, 232, 238, 254, 255, 312,
338
Juno in the ' Tempest,' ii. 367, 371
Jupiter in 'Cymbeline,' ii. 294, 321, 345
' KABALE UND LIEBE,' by Schiller, ii. 127
'Kathchen von Heilbronn,' by Kleist, i.
58
Kntherine in —
'Henry V.,' i. 242
' Henry VIII.,' ii. 317-320, 352
'Taming of the Shrew,' i. 45, 136, 158,
250, 254 ; ii. 273
Kemp, William, actor, i. 126, 180, 209,
337-339, 352 ; ii. 20, 57, 58
Kent, Earl of, in 'King Lear,' ii. 135,
I37-I4I, 265
' Kind-hart's Dreame,' i. 24
King in ' Love's Labour's Lost.' i. 327, 328
' King and no King,' by Beaumont and
Fletcher, ii. 296, 304
King Claudius in ' Hamlet,' i. 374, 375,
382; ii. 2, 6-8, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25,
26, 29, 33, 36, 37, 40-42, 44-46, 48,
53, 59, 61, 94, 112
King Duncan in 'Macbeth,' ii. 95, 96,
98-102, 105, 143
'King John,' Shakespeare's sorrow at
death of Hamnet — Old play basis for
— Patriotism and chief characters in,
i. 141, 166-177, 360, 397 ; ii. 232
'King Lear,' i. 41, 107, in, 156, 171,
200, 282, 283, 360 ; ii. 44, 93, 96,
99, 104, 134-142. 145, 152, 159,
161, 208, 257, 258, 265, 270, 330,
353, 379
Ingratitude denounced by Shakespeare
in — Sources of, ii. 128-133
Titanic tragedy of human life — Con
struction of, ii. 134-141
King of France in —
' All's Well that Ends Well,' or ' Love's
Labour's Won,' ii. 63, 64, 67-69,
222
'King John,' i. 168, 172
'King Lear,' ii. 265
' Kitchen-Stuff Woman,' by W. Kemp,
i- 338
Kleist, i. 58 ; ii. 77
Knight, i. 136, 139 ; ii. 92, 257
'Knight's Conjuring' (1607), by Dekker,
i. 211
Kohelet, i. 290, 351 ; ii. 162
Krasinksi's ' Undivine Comedy,' ii. 53, 54
Kreyssig, i. 375 ; ii. 44, 257
Kronborg, i. 101 ; ii. 21
Kyd, i. 28, 84, 385 ; ii. 6, 7
' LA CENA DE LE CENERI,' by Giordano
Bruno, ii. ii, 15
' La Dama Duende,' i. 212
' La Gran Cenobia,' i. 212
' La Hija del Ayre,' i. 212
' La Princesse d' Elide,' by Moliere, i.
212
' La Puente de Mantible,' i. 212
' La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi
amanti,' by Bandello. i. 87
' La Teseide,' by Boccaccio, ii. 310
' La Tosca,' by Victorien Sardon, ii. 70
' La Vida es Sueno,' i. 213
' Lady of the May,' by Sir Philip Sidney,
i- 51, 54, 76
Laertes in ' Hamlet,' ii. 7, 35, 40, 46, 48,
52,6i
Lafeu in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or
'Love's Labour's Won,' i. 57, in ;
ii. 63, 64, 67, 192
Lambert, Edmund, i. ii, 12
John, i. 12, 182
Launce in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,'
i. 62, 63
Launcelot in 'Merchant of Venice,' i.
196, 198 ; ii. 57
Lavinia in 'Titus Andronicus,' i. 37-39,
41
Layamon's 'Brut ' (1205), ii. 132
Le Beau in 'As You Like It,' i. no
Leanderin Marlowe's ' Hero and Leander,'
i. 258, 268
Leicester, Earl of, i. 10, 21, 23, 76-80,
107, 118, 143, 285, 29 j, 298, 299 ;
ii. 8, n, 29
Lennox in ' Macbeth,' ii. 98
Leonato in ' Much Ado About Nothing,'
i. 252-254
Leonine in ' Pericles,' ii. 280, 290, 294
INDEX
423
Leontes in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 274, 294,
348-353, 355. 357, 358
Lepidus in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii. 152
'Life is a Dream,' by Calderon (1635),
ii. 343
Limoges in ' King John,' i. 171, 173
Lion in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i.
84,85
' Locrine,' ii. 324
Lodge, Thomas, i. 258, 259 ; ii. 5, 346
' London Prodigal' (1605), ii. 276
Longaville in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 47
' Lord Cromwell ' (1613), ii. 276
Lord Mayor of London in 'Richard III.,'
i. 1 60
Lorenzo in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. 196,
199-202, 209; ii. 191
' Los Empenos de un Acaso,' i. 212
'Love's Labour's Lost' (1589), matter,
style, and motives of, i. 35, 47-49,
52-57, 59, 61, 96, ioo, 251, 327-
330; ii. 1 1 6, 273, 354
'Love's Labour's Won,' or 'All's Well
that Ends Well ' (see that title)
Lucentio in 'Taming of the Shrew,' i.
200
Lucetta in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,'
i. 65, 199
Luciana in ' Comedy of Errors,' i. 44, 62
Lucio in ' Measure for Measure,' ii. 73,
74,8o
Lucius in —
' Julius Caesar,' i. 378
'Timon of Athens,' ii. 260
' Titus Andronicus,' i. 38, 39
' Lucrece,' relation to painting in, i. 68,
71-76, 215, 319; ii. 191, 245, 395
Lucy, Sir Thomas, Shakespeare's rela
tions with, i. 10, 12, 13-15, 180, 244,
260 ; ii. 389, 395
Ludovico in 'Othello,' ii. 126, 127
Lupercal Feast in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 361 ;
ii. 232
Lychorida in ' Pericles,' ii. 284-286
Lydgate, ii. 192, 200, 201
Lyly, John, i. 49-53, 55, 62, 79, 80, 82,
83, 135, 209, 217, 255, 343 ; ii. 17-
19, 263
Lysander in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
1.85
Lysimachus in 'Pericles,' ii. 291
'MACBETH' (1604-1605), similarity be
tween ' Hamlet ' and ' Macbeth '
— Belief in witches — Defective
text — Macbeth's children — Moral
lesson, i. 31, 124, 282, 346, 373 ;
ii. 92-109, 126, 143, 152, 156, 161,
213
Lady, in ' Macbeth,' i. 282 ; ii. 93,
98-103, 105, 106, 143, 156, 184, 273
Macduff in 'Macbeth,' ii. 99, 103-105
— Lady, in 'Macbeth,' ii. 101, 103
Macmorris in ' Henry V.,' i. 242, 243
Magna Charta ignored by Shakespeare,
i. 176. 177
' Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and
Fletcher, ii. 296, 306-309, 311
Malcolm in 'Macbeth,' ii. 99, 103, 104
' Malcontent,' by Marston, i. 387
Malvolio in 'Twelfth Night,' i. 111,
271-273, 275, 276; ii. 77
Mamillius in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 347-350,
352, 355
Manningham, John, i. 230, 272, 352,
Marco Polo, Frampton's translation of
(1579), "• 373
Mardian in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii.
150
Margaret in ' Much Ado About Nothing,'
i. no
Henry VI. 's widow, in 'Richard
III.,' i. 164, 165
of Anjou in ' Henry VI.,' i. 29, 31,
32, 39, 142, 157, 158, 164, 250;
ii. 105, 273
Maria in —
' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 55
'Twelfth Night,' i. in, 271, 274, 275,
277
Mariana in ' Measure for Measure,' ii.
73, 77, 78
Marina in 'Pericles,' ii. 272-274, 280,
283, 285-295, 321, 358
Marlowe, Christopher, English tragedy
created by — Shakespeare influenced
by Marlowe, i. 28-36, 39, 40, 50,
62, 68, 98, 103, 142-145, 148, 150,
178, 195-197, 203, 238, 258, 268 ; ii.
55, 163, 205, 236, 298, 303, 370
Marston, John, i. 209, 210, 353, 384,
387, 392, 401, 402; ii. 303
Marullus in 'Julius Caesar,' i. 357
' Masque of Blackness,' by Ben Jonson,
ii. 90
' Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's
Inn,' by Beaumont, ii. 318
Massinger, i. 324; ii. 314, 316
' Maydes Metamorphosis,' by Lyly, i.
82,83
' Measure for Measure,' chief characters
and scenes in — Pessimism and mon
archical tone of, i. 37, 109, 214, 282 ;
ii. 19, 60, 63, 70-81, 93, 112, 114,
137, 161, 230, 282, 290, 385
Meissner, Johan, ii. 365, 371, 373
' Melancholia,' by Albert Diirer, ii. 39
Melantius in ' Maid's Tragedy,' by Beau
mont and Fletcher, ii. 306-308
Menelaus in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
190, 191, 207-210
424
INDEX
Menenius in ' Coriolanus,' i. 112 ; ii. 234,
239, 240, 242, 244, 246, 250
' Mencechmi ' of Plautus, i. 43, 96, 272
Mephistopheles in ' Faust,' ii. 49, 338
'Merchant of Venice' (1596-1598),
Shakespeare's craving for wealth and
position — Sources of — Chief charac
ters in — Shakespeare's love of music
shown in, i. 65, 134-137, 178, 179,
183, 185-202, 205, 208, 247 ; ii. 63,
191, 273
Mercutio in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 77-
89, 91, 100. 103, 209, 255
Meres (1598), i. 37, 57, 69, 187, 258,
313, 3*7, 3i8, 402
' Mermaid' Tavern, i. 209, 210, 391 ; ii.
298
' Merry Wives of Windsor ' ( 1 599), prosaic
and bourgeois tone of— Fairy scenes
in, i. 9, 14, 121, 125, 126, 244-248,
250
' Metamorphoses,' Ovid's, i. 39, 50, 68,
82 ; ii. 200, 375
Michael Angelo, i. 68, 115, 343-345,
349, 350; ii. 129, 149, 276, 411
Middleton, i. 359 ; ii. 101
' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i. 7, 50, 65,
76-86, 92, 93, 96, 97, 123, 246, 249,
286; ii. 60, 274, 284, 305, 312, 313,
. 377, 38i, 386
'Miles Gloriosus,' i. 212
Milton, i. 99 ; ii. 399
Miranda in the ' Tempest,' i. 272-274, 294,
295, 326, 332, 343, 357, 367, 370,
371, 376, 378-380, 382, 384-386,
407
* Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and
Death of Sir lohn Oldcastle Knight,
Lord Cobham,' by John Weever, i.
358
4 Mirrour of Policie ' ( 1 598), i. 358
'Miseries of Enforced Marriage,' by
George Wilkins, ii. 281
Mistress Overdone in ' Measure for
Measure,' ii. 73, 74
'Mitre' Tavern, i. 209, 210
Moliere, i. 77, 212, 213, 246, 260, 265,
271, 282, 389 ; ii. 80, 139, 231, 247,
273, 322, 410
Montague in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 97
Montaigne, i. 53, 343, 402; ii. 12-19,
365, 376, 383
Montemayor's ' Diana, ' i. 64
Moonshine in 'Midsummer Night's
Dream,' i. 84
More's * Utopia,' ii. 189
' Mort de Cesar,* by Voltaire, i. 369,
381
Mortimer in ' Henry IV.,' i. 201, 205,
234
Moth in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 52.
'Much Ado About Nothing,' i. 55, no,
in, 251-258, 273; ii. 57, 67, 192
Muley Hamet or Muley Mahomet in G.
Peek's 'Battle of Alcazar,' i. 39,
238
Munday, i. 135, 187, 358
Musset, Alfred de, i. 334; ii. 52, 196,
265, 303, 412
Mustard-seed in ' Midsummer Night's
Dream,' i. 77, 83
' Mydas,' by John Lyly, i. 50
NASH, Thomas, i. 109, 135, 209 ; ii. 4,
409
' Natural History,' by Pliny, i. 53
'Natural History of the Insects men
tioned by Shakespeare,' by R. Pater-
son (1841), i. no
Navarre, King of, in ' Love's Labour's
Lost,' i. 47, 55
Neile, Bishop, ii. 170, 182
Nerissa in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. 65,
193
Nestor in 'Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 191,
212, 213
'New Inn,' by Ben Jonson, ii. 278
'New Shakspere Society's Transactions,'
i. 28, 51, 82, 151 ; ii. 21, 23, 35, 44,
58, 256, 295, 314
'News of Purgatory,' by Tarlton, i. 247
Niels Steno on Geology, i. 114
Nietzsche, i. 351 ; ii. 224
'Night Raven,' by Samuel Rowland, ii. 5
'Nine Daies Wonder,' by Kemp, i. 337-
339 ; »• 57
Norfolk, Duke of, in—
'Richard II.,' i. 9, 144
'Richard II I. ,' i. 162
North, i. 52, 360, 361 ; ii. 146, 231, 232,
259
Northampton, Lord, ii. 181, 184, 185
Northumberland, Earl of, in—
'Henry IV.,' i. 206, 220, 226, 232
'Richard II.,' i. 148
'Nouvelles Fran9aises du I4me Siecle,' ii.
216
' Nugse Antiquae,' by Rev. H. Harington
(1779), ii. 23
Nurse in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 88-91,
101, 103 ; ii. 194
' Nutcrackers,' by J. L. Heiberg, i. 83
Nym in ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 245
OBERON in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 76, 79-82, 96
Octavia in ' Antony and Cleopatra, 11.
148, 152, 155, 156, 158
Octavius Csesar in ' Antony and Cleo
patra,' ii. 147, 148, IS2, I55-T59>
233
' Odyssey,' ii. 204
INDEX
425
Oehlenschlager, i. 93, 266 ; ii. 351
Oldcastle, Sir John. See Falstaff
Oldys, i. 14, 230, 231
Oliver in ' As You Like It,' i. 259, 267
Olivia in ' Twelfth Night,' i. 65, 274, 275,
277, 278
' On Poet-Ape,' by Ben Jonson, i. 25
Ophelia in' Hamlet, 'i. in, 185,202,250,
402; ii. 2, 7, 1 8, 24, 32, 34-36, 40,
42, 44, 47-49, 52-54, 62, 125, 161,
273, 312
Orlando in 'As You Like It,' i. 259, 265,
266-268
' Orlando Furioso,' Ariosto's, i. 252 ; ii.
123, 371
' Orlando Innamorato,' by Berni, ii. 122
Osrick in 'Hamlet,' ii. 29, 61
'Othello' (1605), i. 134, 139, 156, 201,
210,282 ; ii. 93, 96, 135, 137, 152,
154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 213, 249,
270, 301-303, 351
lago's character and significance, ii.
108-112
Theme and origin of — Othello as a
monograph, ii. 113-129
Overbury, Sir Thomas, ii. 182-184, ^7
Ovid, i. 39, 50, 68, 71, 73, 82, 318, 362,
386, 390, 392 ; ii. 200, 207, 375
' P^;AN TRIUMPHALL,' by Drayton, ii. 90
Page, Mr., Mrs., and Anne, in * Merry
Wives of Windsor,' i. 246, 248
* Palace of Pleasure,' by Paynter, ii. 64
Palamon in * Two Noble Kinsmen,' ii.
3", 312
* Palladis Tamia,' by Francis Meres
(1598), i. 57, 3.13, 3i8
Pandarus in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
181, 192, 194, 200, 217, 218, 226
Pandulph in ' King John,' i. 168, 169
* Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the King's
Majestic,' by Samuel Daniel, ii. 90
Panurge compared with Sir John Fal
staff, i. 213, 214
Paris in —
' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 101
' Troilus and Cressida,' ii. 191, 208-210
Parolles in ' Love's Labour's Won,' or
'All's Well that Ends Well,' i. 57-
59, 218 ; ii. 47, 63, 67, 68
Pascal, i. 150, 234
* Passionate Pilgrim' (1599), i. 200, 314,
31?
' Pastor Fido,' by Guarini, i. 402 ; ii. 306
Patroclus in ' Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
206, 210, 212
' Patterne of Paynfull Adventures,' by
Lawrence Twine, ii. 281
Patterson's, R., ' Natural History of the
Insects mentioned by Shakespeare '
(1841), i. no
Paulina in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 351, 352,
355, 358
Paynter's ' Palace of Pleasure,' ii. 64
Pease-blossom in ' Midsummer Night's
Dream,' i. 77, 83
Peele, George, i. 39, 40, 238 ; ii. 297
Pembroke, Lady Mary, i. 319, 320, 322,
324 ; ii- 145
William Herbert, Earl of, passion
ately loved by Shakespeare — Son
nets addressed to — Mary Fitton's
relations with — Career of, i. 121,
184, 250, 288, 289, 316-326, 329,
331, 332, 336, 337, 341-343, 345-
352, 354, 355, 398; ii. 127, 145.
186, 195, 204, 206, 322
' Penates,' by Ben Jonson, ii. 90
' Pensees,' by Pascal, ii. 150
Percy, Henry. See Hotspur
Lady, wife of Hotspur, in ' Henry
IV.,' i. 220-226, 232, 377
Perdita in 'Winter's Tale,' ii. 272-274,
286, 293, 294, 326, 337, 347, 348,
350-359, 402
' Pericles,' Shakespeare's collaboration
with Wilkins and Rowley — Cor-
neille compared with Shakespeare —
Shakespeare's restoration to happi
ness, i. 3, 123, 138, 402; ii. 254,
272-296, 350, 358, 359, 366, 378,
379
' Persas ' of ^Eschylus, i. 240
Peter in 'Romeo and Juliet,' i. 130; ii.
57
Petrarch, i. 49, 98 ; ii. 193
Petruchio in ' Taming of the Shrew,5 i.
136, 178, 254
Phebe in ' As You Like It,' i. 274, 275 ;
»• 352
' Phedre,' by Racine, ii. 304, 305
'Philaster,' or 'Love lies Bleeding,' by
Beaumont and Fletcher, ii. 296,
301-305
Phrynia in ' Timon of Athens,' ii. 268,
269
'Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap' (1609), ii.
277
Pisanio in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 294, 328, 33 1 ,
334, 335, 337, 339-341. 344
Pistol in —
* Henry IV.,' i. 237, 238
'Henry V.,' i. 242 ; ii. 191
' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 245, 248
Plato, i. 21 ; ii. 17, 203
Platonism in Shakespeare's Sonnets, i.
342-345, 349-351
Plautus, i. 43, 50, 61, 96, 272
Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,'
by John Davies, i. 179
1 Pleasant Comedie called Common Con
ditions,' ii. 122
426
INDEX
Pliny's 'Natural History,' i. 52
Plutarch, i. 50, 360-364, 369, 371, 372,
375, 377-38o, 382; ii. 142, 143,
145-147, 155, 156, 158, 189, 228,
230, 238, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253,
255, 259, 260, 269, 270
' Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson (1601), i. 353,
384, 386, 387, 389, 392-395* 401
' Poetical Rhapsody,' by Davison, i. 324
' Poet's Vision and a Prince's Glorie,' by
Thomas Greene, ii. 90
Poins in ' Henry IV.,' i. 248
Polixenes in ' Winter's Tale,' ii. 348,
354, 357, 358; 402
Polonius in ' Hamlet,' i. 338 ; ii. 2, 4, 6,
10, 14, 15, 21, 24, 29, 36, 42, 44,
48, 49, 61, 84, 218, 327
Pompey in ' Measure for Measure,' ii. 73,
74
Pompey the Great, i. 366, 368, 369, 381,
3995 "• 150
Porter in ' Macbeth,' ii. 101, 103
Portia in —
'Julius Caesar,' i. 112, 267, 361, 373,
377, 378; ii. 120, 143
'Merchant of Venice,' i. 65, 137. 187-
194, 199, 201, 251 ; ii. 63, 273
Posthumus in ' Cymbeline,' ii. 176, 294,
319, 321, 322, 326, 328, 330-341,
,344, 351
' Precieuses Ridicules,' i. 92
Priam in 'Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
223
Princess in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 47,
48,85
Prospero in the ' Tempest,' i. 43 ; ii. 224,
230, 274, 294, 295, 326, 343, 366-
368, 370-388
Proteus in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,'
i. 64, 65, 96
Provost in ' Measure for Measure,' ii. 74
Prynne's ' Histriomastix, ' i. 117; ii. 6,
245
' Psyche,' by Moliere, i. 77
Puck in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i.
76, 7 7, 84; ii. 284
Puritanism hated and attacked by Shake
speare, i. 214, 270, 271, 281, 282,
370; ii. 62, 63, 70, 71, 73, 77, 79,
263, 320. 390, 391, 398, 400
Pyramus in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 77, 84, 96
Pyrgopolinices, i. 55, 212
QUEEN in —
'Cymbeline,' i. 328-331 ; ii. 326, 335,
336
' Hamlet,' ii. 2, 6, 20, 21, 26, 27, 33,
34, 37, 40, 45, 46, 48, 62, 161
'Queen of Corinth,' by Fletcher, ii.
Quince in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 84
Quiney, Adrian, i. 183
Richard, i. 182, 183 ; ii. 407
Thomas, husband of Judith Shake
speare, i. 182 ; ii. 407, 408
RABELAIS compared with Shakespeare,
i. 213, 214
Racine, ii. 226, 304, 305, 349
' Raigne of King Edward Third' (1596)
i. 203
Raleigh, Sir Walter, career of— Accusa
tions against — Fate of, i. 51, 81, 129,
209, 285-287, 289, 293, 295, 298,
299, 305, 309, 3H, 325, 388; ii.
86-90, 165, 166, 171, 173, 1 88, 363,
371
' Ralph Roister Doister,' i. 35
Raoul le Fevre's ' Recueil des Histoires
de Troyes,' ii. 192
' Ratsey's Ghost,' i. 180
Regan in 'King Lear,' i. 282; ii. 132,
135, 138-140, 273
'Relics of Cardinal Wolsey,' by George
Cavendish, ii. 314
' Religio Medici,' by Sir Th. Browne, i.
343
'Representative Men,' by Emerson, ii.
315
' Return from Parnassus' (1606), by Ben
Jonson, i. 180, 352, 395
' Reviser,' by Gogol, i. 389
Rich, Lady Penelope, i. 322, 331 ; ii. 14,
9i
'Richard II.,' C. Marlowe's 'Edward
II.' used by Shakespeare as model
for, i. 9, 141-150, 152, 169, 222,233,
239, 305 ; ii- 51. 233, 403
' Richard III.,' principal scenes and
classic tendency of, i. 32, 40, 108,
141, 150-165, 209, 230, 235, 256,
362, 372; ii. 38, 93, 99, 109, 1 10
Richard of York. See York and Glou
cester
' Right Excellent and Famous History of
Promos and Cassandra' (1578), by
George Whetstone, ii. 70
Rivers, Earl, in ' Richard III.,' i. 165
Rizzio, ii. 84, 163
Rochester, Viscount. See Robert Carr
Roderigo in ' Othello,' ii. 109, 115, 116,
118, 120, 127, 213
Romano, Giulio, in 'Winter's Tale,' i.
139, 140
' Romeo and Juliet ' (1591), Romanesque
structure of — Conception of love in,
i. 62, 70, 77, 86-103, 124, 130, 134,
139, 215,354, 372; ii. 47, 57, 120,
144, 154, 194, 216, 217, 249, 254,
338
INDEX
427
Rosalind in ' As You Like It,' i. 1 10, 213,
259, 266-270, 274, 278, 280, 332,
362 ; ii. 192, 273, 326, 335, 396
Rosaline in —
' Love's Labour's Lost,' i. 55, 100, 251,
327-330 ; ii. 273
'Romeo and Juliet,' i. 100, 327
' Rosalynde,' by Lodge, ii. 346
Rosencrantz in 'Hamlet,' i. 127, 129;
ii. 3, 16, 20, 29, 34, 36, 41-44, 57
Rosse in ' Macbeth,' ii. 98, 104
Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, i.
5, 13, 14, 244, 386
Rowland's, Samuel, 'Night Raven,' ii. 5
Rowley, William, ii. 282, 296, 314
Rushton's ' Shakespeare's Euphuism '
(1871), ii. 17
Rutland, Lord, i. 121, 297, 301, 306
Rutland's death in * Henry VI.,' i. 29,
164
' SAD SHEPHERD, THE,' by Ben Jonson,
i. 389 ; ii. 306^
Sadler, Hamlet, Shakespeare's friend,
ii. 409
Sallust in 'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson, i.
390, 398, 399
' Sappho,' by Daudet, ii. 261
Sardou's, Victorien, ' La Tosca,' ii. 70
' Satiromastix,' by Marston and Dekker,
i- 353, 387;."- 5
Saturninus in 'Titus Andronicus,' i. 37
Saxo Grammaticus, ii. 2—4
Schiller, 1.64 ; ii. 103, 127, 133, 135,338,
412
' School of Abuse,' by Stephen Gosson
(1579), i- 189, 358
Schopenhauer, ii. 79, 267
' Scotorum Historic,' by Hector Boece,
ii. 100
' Seasons of Shakspere's Plays,' i. 82
Sebastian in —
* Tempest,' ii. 378
' Twelfth Night,' i. 274, 275, 278
' Sejanus,' by Ben Jonson (1603), i. 384,
395-398, 400
Seneca, poet. i. 34, 39, 164, 218, 390 ; ii.6
' Sententise Pueriles,' i. 9
Servilius in ' Timon of Athens,' ii. 260
Seven Ages of Man, Shakespeare's speech
in ' As You Like It,' i. 263
Sextus in ' Rape of Lucrece,' i. 73
Sextus Pompeius in ' Antony and Cleo
patra,' ii. 152, 154
Seymour's, Lord William, marriage with
Arabella Stuart, ii. 177, 178, 322, 323
' Shadow of the Night,' by Chapman
(1594), i. 325
Shakespeare, John, father of William
Shakespeare, i. 8, 11-13, J5> IQ6,
180-182, 184 ; ii. i, 27, 396
Shakespeare, Richard, grandfather of
William Shakespeare, i. 8
William, Anne Hathaway's mar
riage with — Shakespeare's concep
tion of relation of the sexes, i. 13,
15. 42, 43, 46 ; ii. 385, 390, 391,
394, 400, 401, 409
Aristocratic principles of — Shake
speare's hatred of the masses, i.
130-133 5 »• 226, 232-243, 246,
248, 249, 320, 353
Associates of, i. 211
Attacks upon— The Baconian Theory,
i. 104-108, 112-114, 371
Biographies of, i. 3-6
Bohemian life and dissipation of, i.
229-231, 352
Brilliant and happiest period of — Femi
nine types belonging to it, i. 189,
249-251, 258, 264, 270, 273, 279-
281, 332 ; ii. 29, 60, 93, 275
Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence
over, ii. 10-19
Corneille, Pierre, compared with, i.
292, 293
Davenant, Mrs., courted by, i. 231 ; ii.
390
Death of, i. 8 ; ii. 256, 406-410, 413
Diction of, i. 204-206; ii. 251
Dramatic art, Shakespeare's conception
of, ii. 55, 56, 59
Elizabeth, Queen, cause of Shake
speare's coolness towards, i. 293
Elizabethan England in the youth of,
i. 129, 131, 144, 284-288
Euphuism and pedantry ridiculed by —
Traces of John Lyly's ' Euphues '
in ' Hamlet, ' i. 48-55; ii. 17-19,
354, 355
Fitton, Mary, or the ' Dark Lady,'
loved by, i. 317, 322, 323, 327-
341, 347, 349, 351 ; ii. i, 27, 144,
145, 153- 154, 158, i95-'.97
Greene's, Robert, attack on, i. 23-25,
27,211; ii. 347
Hamnet, son of, Shakespeare's sorrow
at death of, i. 13, 166, 168, 174,
383 ; ii. i, 348, 398, 409
Italy visited by— Discussion on, i. 4,
134-140
James I.'s patronage of — Relations
between, ii. 90-92, 131, 230, 231,
367
Jonson, Ben, compared with — Rela
tions between, i. 384-403
Judith, daughter of, i. 13, 182; ii. i,
390-392, 399, 407, 408
Kemp's, actor, relations with, ii. 57, 58
Knowledge of, physical and philo
sophical, i. 109-116, 371; ii.
396
428
INDEX
London, Shakespeare's first arrival in —
Buildings, costumes, manners —
Political and religious conditions
of the period, i. 16-22, 250; ii.
390
Lucy's, Sir Thomas, relations with —
Shakespeare's consequent depar
ture from Stratford, i. 4, 10, 13-15,
42, 1 80, 244, 260; ii. 389, 395
Marlowe's, C., influence on, i. 28-33, 35»
36, 39, 40, 1 42- 1 45 , 148, 150
Melancholy, pessimism, and misan
thropy of, causes of — Shakespeare's
restoration to happiness, i. 179,
189, 208, 251, 260-264, 269, 273,
279-283, 294, 312, 313, 34-, 348,
352» 353, 359 ; ii- 26-29, 60, 69,
78, 93, 103, 106-162, 189, 190,
206, 211, 213, 217, 221-223, 227>
228, 257, 271-275, 278, 279, 287,
289, 290, 295, 316, 321, 329, 330,
377, 392
Montaigne's influence over, i. 402 ; ii.
12-19, 365, 376, 383
Morality — Shakespeare's conception of
true morality, ii. 327-330
Music, Shakespeare's love of, i. 199-202
Nature and solitude, Shakespeare's
love and longing for, i. 259, 260 ;
ii. 326, 327, 337, 341, 344, 383,
392, 396, 398, 402, 406
Painting described by, i. 72, 73
Parentage and boyhood of Shakespeare
at Stratford, i. 7-12, 72, 106, 246 ;
ii. 122, 391, 394, 396
Pembroke, \\illiam Herbert, Earl of,
passionately loved by — Shake
speare's Platonism and idolatry in
friendship, i. 121, 184, 250, 288,
316-326, 329, 331, 332, 336, 337,
341-343, 345-352, 354, 355. 398 ;
ii. i, 27, 145, 1 86, 195, 204-206,
322
Position of, ii. 245, 246
Prosperity and wealth of — Shake
speare's purchase of New Place,
houses, and land — Money trans
actions and lawsuits, i. 15, 179-
185, 264, 386; ii. I, 131, 190,
227, 338-390, 392, 393» 396, 401-
403» 405
Puritanism hated and attacked by, i.
214, 270, 271, 281, 282, 370; ii.
62, 63, 70, 71, 73, 77, 79, 263,
320, 390, 391, 398, 400
Rabelais compared with, i. 213, 214
Return of Shakespeare to Stratford —
Surroundings of — Visit of Shake
speare to London — Last years of
his life, ii. 385, 387-396, 398,
400-408
Rivalry, Shakespeare's sense of, i. 74,
Self - transformation, Shakespeare's
power of, i. 154, 155
Susanna, daughter of, i. 13 ; ii. i, 390-
392, 398-400, 408, 409
Tarlton eulogised by, ii. 58
Tavern life of, i. 209, 210
Theatres in time of, situation and ar
rangements of — Costumes, players,
and audiences, i. 117-130, 357;
ii. 235-237
Will of, i. 113 ; ii. 227, 394, 398, 406,
408, 409
Womanhood, Shakespeare's ideal of,
i. 191
Women, Shakespeare's contempt for,
i. 157, 158; ii. 195, 322
' Shakespeare and Montaigne,' by Jacob
Feis, i. 402 ; ii. 17
' Shakespeare and Typography,' by
Blades, i. 1 10
' Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems,'
by C. A. Brown, i. 136
' Shakespeare's Century of Praise,' by
Ingleby, i. 394 ; ii. 304
'Shakespeare's Euphuism,' by Rushton
(1871), ii. 17
' Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of
the Bible,' by Bishop Charles Words
worth, i. 1 10
' Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements,' by
Lord Campbell, i. 109
' Shakespeare's Library.' Collier's, ii. 4
' Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree,' sung by
Garrick, ii. 403
' Shakespearean Myth,' by Appleton
Morgan, i. no
Shallow in —
'Henry IV.,' i. 237 ; ii. 57
' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 245, 247
Sheffield, Countess of, i. 79, 80
Shelley, i. 77, 262 ; ii. 130, 285, 298, 344
' Shepheard's Spring Song for the Enter
tainment of King James,' by Henry
Chettle, ii. 90
' Shepherdess Felismena,' i. 64
' Shepherd's Calendar,' by Spenser, ii.
305. 396
Sheppard, i. 400 ; ii. 278
Sherborne, ii. 165, 166, 188
Shirley's Eulogy of Beaumont and
Fletcher, ii. 309
Shottery, Anne Hatha way's cottage at,
i. 183 ; ii. 394
Shrewsbury, battlefield in 'Henry IV.,
i. 219
Shylock in 'Merchant of Venice, i. 137.
179, 183, i86: 189, 190, 192, 194-
198, 201
Sicinius in ' Coriolanus,' ii. 251
INDEX
429
Sidney, Sir Philip, i. 21, 51, 54, 76, 122,
251, 284, 285, 295, 301, 318, 324,
33i, 343, 347, 3545 "• n, M, 132,
172, 282
Silence, Justice, in ' Henry IV.,' i. 237
; Silent Woman, The,' by Ben Jonson
(1609), ii. 228
Silvayn's, Alexander, ' Orator,' i. 187
Silvia in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' i.
66
Simonides in ' Pericles,' ii. 280
Simpson, Mr. Richard, i. 139, 353
Sir Andrew Aguecheek in 'Twelfth
Night,' i. 245, 271, 272, 276, 277
1 Sir John Oldcastle' (1600), ii. 276
Sir Toby Belch in 'Twelfth Night,' i.
271, 272, 274,276, 277
Slender in 'Merry Wives of Windsor,' i.
245, 246
Slowacki, ii. 53, 54
Smith in 'Henry VI.,' i. 132; ii. 232
Smith, William, founding the Baconian
Theory (1856), i. 105
Smith's, Thomas, 'Voiage and Enter-
tainement in Rushia,' ii. 5
Snug in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i.
85
Socrates' Apology, ii. 17
' Solyman and Perseda,' by Kyd, ii. 7
Somer, Sir George, ii. 365
Somerset, Earl of. See Robert Carr
Sonnets (1601), melancholy and sadness
of — Date of — Pembroke and Mary
Fitton addressed in — Shakespeare's
Platonism, idolatry in friendship,
and inner life shown in — Form and
poetic value of, i. 4, 5, 40, 65, 109,
179, 203, 208, 229, 230, 249, 280,
3I3-356>4°2; ii. 12, 28, 116, 145,
148, 153, 154, 195, 196, 204, 213
Soren Kierkegaard, i. 234 ; ii. 340
Southampton, Earl of, Shakespeare's
patron — Conspiracy of, i. 54, 67, 71,
121, 131, 148, 181, 243, 250, 281,
286, 293, 294, 296, 301, 305-308,
311, 312, 315, 316, 319, 322, 325,
359, 372; ii. i, 13, 14, 83, 181
Southwell, Elizabeth, i. 298, 322
' Spaccio,' by Giordano Bruno, ii. 18
' Spanish Tragedy,' by Kyd, i. 84, 385 ;
ii. 6, 7
Spedding, James, i. 107, 151, 296, 309;
ii.315,317
Speed in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' i.
62,63
Spenser, i. 23, 51, 67, 77, 79, 285, 315,
3I8» 343, 3545 "• 305, 306
Stanley, Lord, in ' Richard III.,' i. 162
Statius' 'Thebaide,' ii. 310
Stephano in the 'Tempest,' ii. 371, 376,
382, 383
Stern, Alfred, ii. 84, 92
Stirling's, Count, 'Darius,' ii. 372, 373
'Story of Troylus and Pandor' (1515),
ii. 201
Stow's ' Summarie of the Chronicles of
England,' i. 133
Straparola's ' Two Lovers of Pisa,' i. 247
Stratford on Avon : —
Birth of Shakespeare at — Description
of town and Shakespeare's boy
hood at, i. 7-12, 72, 106, 246 ; ii.
122, 391, 394, 396
Departure of Shakespeare from, i. 4,
13-15, 42; ii. 389, 395
Property bought by Shakespeare at —
Shakespeare restoring position and
prosperity of his family at, i. 15,
180-185; ii. i, 190, 227, 390,
392, 393, 401-405
Return of Shakespeare to — Surround
ings of— Visit of Shakespeare to
London — Last years of his life at,
ii. 385, 387-396, 398, 400-408
Stuart, Arabella, ii. 89, 176-178, 189,
322, 323
Mary, mother of James I., i. 21 ; ii.
8, 83-85, 163, 272, 299, 300
' Study of Shakespeare,' by Swinburne,
i. 204 ; ii. 130, 256
Sturley, Abraham, i. 182, 183
Suffolk, Duke of, in ' Henry VI.,' L 30,
142, 164
' Summarie of the Chronicles of England,'
by Stow, i. 133
Surrey, Henry, Earl of, i. 35, 353, 354
'Swan' Theatre, i. 120, 124
Swinburne, i. 29, 142, 144, 203, 204,
372; ii. 130, 163, 185, 205, 206,
256, 295, 312, 313,412
Sycorax in the ' Tempest,' ii. 382, 383
Sylvia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' i.
64-66
Symonds, Arthur, i. 279, 395, 400 ; ii.
158, 3r5, 3i6
Syren, literary club founded by Sir
Walter Raleigh, i. 209
' TAGELIED,' i. 97
Tailor's, Robert, 'Hog has Lost his
Pearl '(1614), ii. 235, 277
Taine, i. 94, 97, 236, 260, 391
' Tamburlaine the Great,' by C. Marlowe,
i- 34, 35, 39, 238
'Taming of the Shrew' (1596), i. II, 12,
45, 124, 134-136, 138, 158, 178,
182, 200, 246, 360 ; ii. 63
Tamora in 'Titus Andronicus,' i. 37-39,
. 41, 158, 250; ii. 273 ^
' Tancred and Gismunda,' i. 34
Tarlton, actor, Shakespeare's eulogy of,
i. 247 ; ii. 58
430
INDEX
'Tartuffe,' by Moliere, i. 271, 282;
ii. So
' Tears of Fancie,' by Watson, i. 343
'Tears of the Muses,' by Spenser, i. 79
'Tempest' (1612-1613), i. 35, 43, 84,
138, 200, 402; ii. 13, 230, 231,
272, 278, 285, 294, 295, 318, 343,
354, 357
Dramatic value of — Chief characters in
— Shakespeare's farewell to Art,
ii- 377-388
Sources of. ii. 370-376
Wedding of Princess Elizabeth cele
brated by, ii. 230, 318, 361, 365-
369, 377, 385
' Temptation,' by Krasmski, 11. 53
Thaisa in ' Pericles,' ii. 283, 285, 287,
293, 294
' The Case is Altered,' by Ben Jonson, ii.
236
' The Hog has Lost his Pearl ' (1614), by
Robert Tailor, ii. 235, 277
'The Orator,' by Alexander Silvayn, i.
187
'The Prince,' i. 156
' The Puritan' (1607), ii. 94
'The Supposes,' i. ii
'The Theatre,' first play-house erected
in London and owned by James
Burbage, i. 16, 120
'The Witch,' by Middleton, ii. 101
' Theatre of God's Judgements ' (1597), i.
36
•Theatrum Licentia' in ' Laquei Ridicu-
losi' (1616), i. 180
' Thebaide,' by Statins, ii. 310
' Theodore, Vierge et Martyre,' by Pierre
Corneille, ii. 292, 293
Thersites in ' Troilus and Cressida,' i.
210, 218, 224, 263 ; ii. 200, 206-
208
Theseus in —
' Midsummer Night's Dream,' i. 76-79,
84,96
'Two Noble Kinsmen,' ii. 311-313
' Third Blast of Retraite from Plaies '
(1580),!. 358
Thisbe in ' Midsummer Night s Dream,'
i. 77, 84, 96
Thorpe, Thomas, i. 314, 341
Thorvaldsen, i. 74 ; ii. 2
' Thyestes,' by Seneca, i. 39 ; ii. 6
Thyreus in ' Antony and Cleopatra, ' ii.
157
Tiberius in ' Sejanus,' by Ben Jonson, i.
391, 395. 397
Tibullus in Ben Jonson's ' Poetaster,' i.
392, 394
Tieck, i. 83, 84, 273 ; ii. 365, 370
Timandra in ' Timon of Athens,' ii. 268,
269 j
Timbreo of Candona, Bandello's story of,
i. 252
' Times displayed in Six Sestyads,' by
Sheppard, i. 400 ; ii. 278
' Timon of Athens,' sources of — Shake
speare's part and purpose in — Cori-
olanus compared with Timon —
Non - Shakespearian elements in —
Shakespeare's bitterness and hatred
of mankind, i. 37, 78, 261, 282, 283,
376; ii. 147, 218, 220, 224, 225-
271, 275-279, 281, 296, 326, 327,
377, 379
1 itania in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 81, 82, 96; ii. 273
' Titus and Vespasian ' (1592), i. 37
' Titus Andronicus,' Shakespeare's author
ship of, i. 3, 36-41, 70, 103, 158;
ii. 7, 135
Titus Lartius in 'Coriolanus,' ii. 252
' To the Majestic of King James, a Gratu-
latorie Poem,' by Michael Drayton,
ii. 90
Tophas, Sir, in John Lyly's 'Endymion,'
i- 55
'Tottel's Miscellany' (1557), i. 353
' Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem,' motto
on sigh of Globe Theatre, Shake
speare's allusion to, i. 263
Touchstone in 'As You Like It,' i. 259,
262, 264, 265, 269, 276; ii. 25,
57,68
'Touchstone of True Love,' or 'Hero
and Leander,' by Ben Jonson (see
that title)
'Tragedie of Antonie,' ii. 145
' Tragicall Historye of Romeus and
Juliet,' &c., &c., i. 87
' Travels of Three English Brothers,' ii.
282
' Treatise on Education,' by Plutarch, i. 50
'Triar Table of the Order of Shake
speare's Plays,' by Furnival, ii. 278,
279
Trinculo in the 'Tempest,' ii. 371, 373,
382-384
'Troilus and Cressida' (1609), i. 113,
114, 268, 283; ii. 162, 191-194,
210, 212, 216-220, 241, 254, 255,
263, 267, 279,310
Contempt for women portrayed in
Cressida's character, ii. 190-197,
253
Historical material for, i. 192, 193,
198-202
Homer's ' Iliad ' compared with, i.
203-214
Scorn of woman's guile and public
stupidity in, ii. 215-226, 228
' Troilus and Cressida,' by Chaucer (1630),
ii. 192, 193, 200
INDEX
431
' Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, with the discouerie of King
Richard Cordelions Base sonne
(vulgarly named The Bastard Faw-
conbridge) : also the death of King
John at Swinstead Abbey,' i. II, 168,
169, 172, 174-176
Troy, destruction of, i. 72, 73, 131
' True Tragedie of Richard Duke of
Yorke, and the Death of the good
King Henrie the Sixt,' i. 24, 27
'True Tragedy of Richard III.' (1594),
i. 150, 151
Tubal in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. 194
'Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the Fail-
Greek,' by George Peele, i. 238
Turner, Mrs., ii. 180, 183, i>7
'Twelfth Night' (1601), gibes at Puri
tanism, and chief characters in —
Melancholy tone of, i. 37, 42, 64,
65, 1 10, in, 189, 202, 214, 245,
271-279, 282, 401 ; ii. 68, 192, 289,
301, 407
Twine's. Lawrence, 'Patterne of Payn-
full Adventures,' ii. 281
' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' i. 62-66,
96, 134, 139, 199; ii. 273
'Two Lovers of Pisa,' by 'Straparola, i.
247
' Two Noble Kinsmen,' Shakespeare's
and Fletcher's parts in, ii. 275, 296,
298, 308, 310-314, 316
Tybalt in ' Romeo and Juliet,' i. 88,
9i, 97
Tycho Brahe, ii. 2, 8$
Tyler, Mr. Thomas, i. 316, 318, 319, 321,
322, 326, 329, 330, 331, 346, 352
Tyrone's, O'Neil, Earl of, rebellion in
Ireland, i. 299, 300, 303
ULYSSES in 'Troilus and Cressida,' ii.
191, 194, 200, 213, 218-221, 223,
224, 241
'Ulysses von Ithacia,' by Holberg, ii.
203
' Undivine Comedy,' by Krasinski, ii.
54
'Utopia,' More's, ii. 189
VALENTINE in ' Two Gentlemen of
Verona,' i. 65, 66, 96, 139
Venice, i. 135-137, 186-188
Ventidius in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ii.
J52
'Venus and Adonis' (1590-1591), de
scriptions of nature in, i. 67-71, 76,
109, 215, 317, 342, 354 ; ii. 245, 273,
395
Vere, Bridget, i. 320, 347
Verges in ' Much Ado About Nothing,' i.
257
Vernon, Lady Elizabeth, Earl of South
ampton's marriage with, i. 293
Sir Richard, in ' Henry IV.,' i. 228
Verona, i. 103, 135, 139
Vespasian in 'Titus and Vespasian,' i.
37,38
Victor Hugo, i. 207 ; ii. 38, 412
' Vidushakus,' i. 212
Vigny, Alfred de, ii. 153, 412
Villiers, Sir George, James I.'s favourite,
ii. 186-188
Viola in 'Twelfth Night,' i. 42, 65, no,
202, 267, 274-278 ; ii. 273, 301
Virgil in 'Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson, i.
362, 390, 393-395 ; "• 204, 213
Virgilia in ' Coriolanus,' ii. 244, 249, 250
'Vittoria Corombona,' by Webster, i.
121
' Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia,'
by Th. Smith, ii. 5
' Volpone,' by Jonson, i. 186, 389, 402 ;
ii. 297, 298
Voltaire, i. 97, 175, 181, 368, 369, 381 ;
ii. 338, 402. 412
Voltimand in ' Hamlet,' ii. 20
Volumnia in 'Coriolanus,' ii. 228, 239,
244, 246, 249-251, 265, 304
Vorstius, Conrad, ii. 168
WALKER, Henry, ii. 227
Wall in ' Midsummer Night's Dream,'
i. 84
Walsingham, i. 292 ; ii. 1 1
Ward, John, Vicar of Stratford, i. 5 ; ii.
407, 408
Warner, i. 318
Warwick, Earl of, in —
'Edward III.,' i. 203
' Henry IV.,' i. 239 ; ii. 395
' Henry VI.,' i. 30, 112 ; ii. 395
Watkins, Lloyd, ii. 368
Watson's ' Tears of Fancie,' i. 343
Webster, John, i. 121, 359 ; ii. 204, 307
Weever, John, i. 69, 151
' Mirrors of Martyrs, or The Life
and Death of Sir lohn Oldcastle
Knight, Lord Cobham,' i. 358
Weldon, Sir Anthony, ii. 187, 188
Weston, Richard, ii. 183, 184, 187
Whetstone, George, ii. 70, 73
' White Divel' (1612), by John Webster,
ii. 204
Whyte, Roland, i. 301, 320, 322
Widow of Florence in 'All's Well that
Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's
Won,' ii. 64
' Wild Goose Chase,' by Fletcher, ii. 316
' Wilhelm Meister,' by Goethe, ii. 32, 52,
344
Wilkins, George, ii. 257, 281-283, 286,
290
432
INDEX
William in —
* As You Like It,' i. 265
' Merry Wives of Windsor,' i. 9
Williams in ' Henry V.,' i. 241
Willoughby, Ambrose, i. 293
Wilmecote, i. 8
Wilson, Arthur, i. 143 ; ii. 173, 174, 176,
186, 188, 364
Wilton, i. 322, 325
Winstanley, ii. 298
Winter, Sir Edward, i. 323
* Winter's Tale,' Greene supplying
material for — Euphuism ridiculed in
— Chief characters in, i. 7, 35, 139,
402; ii. 272, 286, 293, 319, 323,
337, 346-360, 366, 402
Win wood, Lord, ii. 185, 187
Witches in ' Macbeth,' ii. 95, 97, 98, 101,
102, 105
' Wits Miserie,' by Thomas Lodge, ii. 5
Witt, Jan de, i. 124
Wittenberg, ii. 21, 33, 34
Wolsey in ' Henry VIII.,' ii. 318-320
' Woman- Hater,' by Fletcher, ii. 296-298
Worcester in ' Henry IV.,' i. 205, 220
Wordsworth, i. no, 248, 355, 356
' Worthies,' by Fuller, i. 210
Wotton, Sir Henry, ii. 314
Wrightman, Edward, ii. 168
Wurmsser, Hans, ii. 113
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, i. 353
Wynkyn de Worde, ii. 201
YONG'S, Bartholomew, translation of
* D«jana,' i. 64
Yorick in ' Hamlet,' ii. 33, 40, 52, 58
York in ' Richard II.,' i. 144
Duchess of, mother of Edward IV.,
in ' Richard III.,' i. 165
Duke of, father of Edward IV., in
' Henry VI.,' i. 30, 31, 155, 164
Edward of. See Edward IV.
Edward of, son of Edward IV. See
Edward V.
Richard of, afterwards Earl of
Gloucester and Richard III. See
Gloucester
'Yorkshire Tragedy' (1608), ii. 276
o
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON &» Co.
Edinburgh dr3 London
X
V
\
PR
2898
D3B7
1898
v.2
cop. 3
Brandies, Georg Morris Cohen
William Shakespeare
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