WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
POET, DRAMATIST, AND MAN
THE ELY HOUSE PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
The original, now in the possession of the Trustees of the Birthplace at Stratford, formerly
belonged to the Bishop of Ely. It is inscribed M 39 x 1603.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
POET, DRAMATIST, AND MAN
BY
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
AUTHOR OF " MY STUDY FIRE," " UNDER THE TREES AND
ELSEWHERE," "THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT," ETC.
WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS
THIRD EDITION, WITH CORRECTIONS
gorfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1907
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY THE OUTLOOK CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1900. Reprinted December,
1900; October, jgoi; February, 1907.
ft.
I
Nortoooti
i. 9. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mas8. U.S.A.
To
MY MOTHER
and
To the Memory of
MY FATHER
ON SHAKESPEARE
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones ?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid ?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name ?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchered, in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
JOHN MILTON. 1630.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND BREEDING ....•••• 29
CHAPTER III
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY ........ 52
CHAPTER IV
MARRIAGE AND LONDON ........ 76
CHAPTER V
THE LONDON STAGE ......... I01
CHAPTER VI
APPRENTICESHIP . ........ I25
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST FRUITS ......... J48
CHAPTER VIII
THE POETIC PERIOD . • *77
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER IX
PAGE
THE SONNETS . ...... 207
CHAPTER X
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS . ..... 228
CHAPTER XI
THE COMEDIES ... ..... 24°
CHAPTER XII
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY . ....
CHAPTER XIII
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES ...... 29°
CHAPTER XIV
THE LATER TRAGEDIES . ..... 3H
CHAPTER XV
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES • 342
CHAPTER XVI
THE ROMANCES .......... 3^o
CHAPTER XVII
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD ...... 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FULL-PAGE PLATES, ETC.
THE ELY HOUSE PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Frontispiece
MARY ARDEN'S COTTAGE facing page 32
GRAMMAR SCHOOL, STRATFORD " "46
IN THE GARDEN OF ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE " "90
The figure in the foreground is the late custodian, Mrs. Baker.
SHAKESPEARE'S LONDON .... between pages 120, 121
Double page, half-tone map. Stilliard's map of the city in the reign
of Elizabeth.
STRATFORD FROM THE MEMORIAL THEATRE . facing page 17 '2
WARWICK CASTLE " " 256
THE MEMORIAL THEATRE, STRATFORD . . . u "316
From Clopton Bridge.
THE HOUSE ON HENLEY STREET, STRATFORD . . " " 348
Commonly known as the Birthplace.
THE GARDEN AT NEW PLACE, STRATFORD . u " 286
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
PAGE
A Mystery Play in York Cathedral 8
Pageants on which were given Miracle Plays . . . .12
Four Morality Players : Contemplation — Perseverance — Imagi
nation, and Free Will ........ 16
From a black-letter copy of the Morality " Hycke-Scorner."
The Talbot Inn — Chaucer's "Tabard" .... 20
Where the early players often raised their rude stage.
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Globe Theatre, Southwark 25
An Early Drawing of Shakespeare's Birthplace . . . -31
Shakespeare's Birth Record 34
The three crosses mark the line.
Font in Trinity Church, where Shakespeare was baptized . . 35
The Room in which Shakespeare was born 37
A Bit of the Wall of the Room in which Shakespeare was born . 38
Latin Room, Grammar School, Stratford ..... 43
The Approach to Holy Trinity Church 45
The Guild Chamber in the Grammar School .... 48
Guy's Cliff and the Avon 50
From an old print.
Queen Elizabeth .......... 54
Kenilworth Castle 57
From an old print, showing the castle as it appeared in 1620. The
castle was destroyed during and after the Civil War.
Mervyn's Tower 58
In which Amy Robsart was imprisoned.
The Earl of Leicester, 1588 60
The Path from the Forest of Arden to Stratford .... 63
A typical English footpath through the meadows, with hedges of haw
thorn on either side. These paths are sometimes reached by a stile,
as in this case, and sometimes by a kissing-gate.
The Forest of Arden 65
The remains of a large tract of forest which formerly stretched away
from Stratford on the west and north.
Charlecote House from the Avon 67
The Road to Hampton Lucy ....... 70
The "Bank where the Wild Thyme blows" . 73
This bank is not far from Shottery, and is the only place near Strat
ford where the wild thyme is found.
The Path to Shottery 79
Kissing-gate in foreground..
The Boar at Charlecote Gate ... 81
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XI
PAGE
Charlecote ... 83
As it appeared in the year 1722.
Sir T. Lucy . 84
Monument in Charlecote Church.
Anne Hathaway's Cottage 86
The living-room : Mrs. Baker, the custodian, who died in 1899, a
member of the Hathaway family, by the fireplace.
A View of Warwick in Shakespeare's Time . . 89
From an old print: S. John's — S.Nicolas' Church — The Castle —
S. Maria's Church — The Priorye and Grove — "The prospect of War
wick from Coventre roade on the Northeast part of the Towne."
The Crown Inn, Oxford 92
From an old print. Where, according to tradition, Shakespeare
lodged on his way to London. This inn has entirely disappeared.
The Zoust Portrait of William Shakespeare .... 94
Now in the possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye, the Grange, Wakefield.
Old London Bridge 99
From an old print.
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester 107
From a contemporary crayon sketch.
The Bankside, Southwark, showing the Globe Theatre . . 109
From Visscher's " View of London," drawn in 1616.
The Globe Theatre, Southwark 115
From a drawing in the illustrated edition of Pennant's " London," in
the British Museum.
The Bear-baiting Garden 117
This stood near the Globe Theatre, Bankside.
The Bankside, Southwark, showing the Swan Theatre . .127
From Visscher's "View of London," drawn in 1616.
The " Black Bust " of Shakespeare 123
From a plaster cast of the original terra-cotta bust owned by the
Garrick Club, L.
Queen Elizabeth enthroned 129
From a rare old print.
William Shakespeare 135
The J. Q. A. Ward statue, which stands at the entrance to the Mall,
Central Park, New York.
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Sir Philip Sidney 139
Engraving from the original of Sir Anthony More.
The Droeshout Portrait of William Shakespeare . . . .150
At present in the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford.
The Tower of London, about the Middle of the Sixteenth
Century 153
From an old print.
Sir Francis Drake 158
From the picture belonging to J. A. Hope, Esq.
Sir Walter Raleigh 162
Engraving from the original by Zucchero.
Thomas Nashe 169
From an early pen drawing.
William Shakespeare 171
The statue on the Gower Memorial, Stratford.
Michael Drayton 179
From an old and rare pen drawing.
Edmund Spenser 182
William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, Prime Minister of Queen Elizabeth . 185
From the original painting at Hatfield House.
Old Palace, Whitehall 191
From a print engraved for Lambert's " History of London."
London in 1543 . 198, 199
From Westminster to Bishopsgate and Leadenhall.
London in 1543 200
From the Tower to Greenwich Palace. This and the preceding illus
trations are after an old print in the Bodleian Library.
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Shakespeare's Friend and
Patron 213
From an engraving by T. Jenkins, after the original of Van Dyke, in
the collection of the Earl of Pembroke.
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton 223
From an engraving by R. Cooper, after the original of Mirevelt, in the
collection of the Duke of Bedford.
George Chapman •••...... 226
From an old print.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
PAGE
John Fletcher 231
From a picture in the possession of the Earl of Clarendon.
Warwick from the London Road 236
S. Peter's Chapel — The Castle Garden — The Mount — S. Marie's
Church — The Castle — The Priorye — S. Nicholas' Church.
Francis Beaumont .... .... 240
From a picture in the possession of Colonel Harcourt.
Seal of the Royal Dramatic College 244
Garden of Dr. John Hall's House 249
Greenwich Palace 261
The Hall of the Middle Temple 269
Where "Twelfth Night " was played.
The Shakespeare Monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford . 272
Ben Jonson ........... 278
From a picture in the possession of Mr. Knight.
Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex ...... 285
After the original of Walker in the collection of the Marquis of Stafford.
The American Fountain and Clock-tower, Stratford . . .291
Middle Temple Lane 294
Queen Elizabeth 300
From an old print.
Kenilworth Castle 305
From an old print, " From the old parke on the South side thereof."
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam 312
From a print by I. Houbraken, 1738.
Wilton House 320
Old Clopton Bridge 324
The Hall at Clopton 330
James I. on Horseback 337
From an old print.
Henry, Prince of Wales, Son jf James 1 343
Kenilworth Castle 353
From an old print, " The Prospect thereof upon the road from
Coventre to Warwick."
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Kenilworth Castle 357
From an old print, " The Prospect thereof upon Bull-hill neere the
road from Colehill towards Warwick."
Holy Trinity Church from the Avon 362
From a photograph.
The Guild Chapel Porch 371
Facsimile of the Title-page of the First Folio Edition of Shake
speare's " The Tempest " 381
The Signature of William Shakespeare 390
The Dining-Hall at Clopton . • . . . . . 393
The Inscription over the Grave of William Shakespeare . 396, 397
Inscription over the Grave of Shakespeare's Wife . . . 399
Poets1 Corner, Westminster 403
Shakespeare's Death Record 406
Tailpiece 408
From carving on the stalls of Holy Trinity Church.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
POET, DRAMATIST, AND MAN
William Shakespeare :
POET, DRAMATIST, AND MAN
CHAPTER I
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE
THE history of the growth of the drama is one
of the most fascinating chapters in the record of
the spiritual life of the race. So closely is it bound
up with that life that the unfolding of this art
appears, wherever one looks deeply into it, as a
vital rather than a purely artistic process. That
art has ever been conceived as the product of any
thing less rich and deep than an unfolding of life
shows how far we have been separated by historic
conditions from any first-hand contact with it, any
deep-going and adequate conception of what it is,
and what it means in the life of the race. It re
quires a great effort of the imagination to put our
selves into the attitude of those early men who had
the passions and were doing the work of men, but
who had the fresh and responsive imagination of
childhood ; who were so closely in touch with
2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
nature that the whole world was alive to them in
every sight and sound. Personification was not
only natural but inevitable to a race whose imagina
tion was far in advance of its knowledge. Such a
race would first create and then devoutly believe
the story of Dionysus : the wandering god, master
of all the resources of vitality ; buoyant, enthrall;
ing, mysterious, intoxicating; in whom the rising
passion, the deep instinct for freedom, which the
spring let loose in every imagination, found visible
embodiment; the personification of the ebbing and
rising tide of life in Nature, and, therefore, the
symbol of the spontaneous and inspirational ele
ment in life ; the personification of the mysterious
force of reproduction, and therefore the symbol of
passion and license.
The god was entirely real ; everybody knew that
a group of Tyrrhenian sailors had seized him as
he sat on a rock on the seashore, bound him with
withes, and carried him to the deck of their tiny
piratical craft ; and everybody knew also that the
withes had fallen from him, that streams of wine
ran over the ship, vines climbed the mast and hung
from the yards, garlands were twined about the
oars, and a fragrance as of vineyards was breathed
over the sea. Then suddenly a lion stood among
the sailors, who sprang overboard and were changed
into dolphins ; while the god, taking on his natural
form, ran the ship into port. Such a being, appeal
ing alike to the imagination and the passions, per-
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 3
sonifying the most beautiful mysteries and giving
form to the wildest longings of the body and the
mind, could not be worshipped save by rites and
ceremonies which were essentially dramatic.
The seed-time and harvest festivals furnished
natural occasions for such a worship ; the wor
shippers often wore goatskins to counterfeit the
Satyrs, and so gave tragedy its name. Grouped
about rude altars, in a rude chorus, they told the
story of the god's wanderings and adventures, not
with words only, but with gesture, dance, and
music. The expression of thought and feeling was
free from self-consciousness, and was like a mirror
of the emotions of the worshipper. This ballad-
dance, which Mr. Moulton describes as a kind of
literary protoplasm because several literary forms
were implicit in it and were later developed out of
it, was a free, spontaneous, natural act of worship ;
it was also a genuine drama, which unfolded by
easy gradations into a noble literary form. The
frequent repetition of the story threw its dramatic
element into more striking relief : the narrative
gradually detached itself from the choral parts and
fell to individual singers ; these singers separated
themselves frpm the chorus and gave their parts
increasing dramatic quality and distinctness ; until,
by a process of rude and almost unconscious evolu
tion, the story was acted instead of narrated, and
the dramatic poet, when he arrived, found all the
materials for a complete drama ready to his hand. It
4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is sober history, therefore, and not figurative speech,
that the drama was born at the foot of the altar.
And more than eighteen hundred years later the
drama was born again at the foot of the altar.
Whatever invisible streams of tradition may have
flowed from the days of a declining theatre at
Rome through the confused and largely recordless
life of the early Middle Ages, it may safely be
assumed that the modern drama began, as the
ancient drama had begun, in the development of
worship along dramatic lines. In the history of
fairy tales and folk-lore, the explanation of striking
similarities between the old and the new is to be
sought, probably, in the laws of the mind rather
than in the direct transmission of forms or mate
rials. When spiritual and intellectual conditions
are repeated, the action or expression of the mind
affected by them is likely to be repeated. In
every age men of a certain temperament drama
tize their own experience whenever they essay to
describe it, and dramatize whatever material comes
to their hand for the purpose of entertaining
others. The instinct which prompts men of this
temper to make a story of every happening by
selecting the most striking incidents, rearranging
them, and heightening the effect by skilful group
ing, has made some kind of drama inevitable in
every age. When the influence of Menander,
modified and adapted to Roman taste by Terence,
Plautus, and their successors, was exhausted, farces,
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 5
with music, pantomime, and humorous dialogue,
largely improvised, met the general need with the
coarse fun which suited a time of declining taste
and decaying culture. The indecency and vulgar
ity of these purely popular shows became more
pronounced as the Roman populace sank in intelli
gence and virtue ; the vigour which redeemed in
part their early license gave place to the grossest
personalities and the cheapest tricks and feats of
skill.
The mimes, or players, carried this degenerate
drama into the provinces, where taste was even less
exacting than in Rome, and the half-heathen world
was entertained by cheap imitations of the worst
amusements of the Capital. At a still later date,
in market-places, on village greens, in castle yards,
and even at Courts, strolling players recited, pos
tured, sang, danced, played musical instruments,
and broke up the monotony of life at a time when
means of communication were few, slow, and expen
sive. It is difficult for modern men to realize in
imagination the isolation of small communities and
of great castles in the Middle Ages. The stroll
ing player was welcome, not only because he was
entertaining, but because he brought the air of the
remote world with him.
The vulgarity and indecency of shows of such an
origin, everywhere adapting themselves to popular
taste at a time when popular taste was coarse to the
last degree, were inevitable. Then, as now, society
6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
had the kind of entertainment for which it asked ;
then, as now, the players were bent on pleasing the
people. The Church, having other ends in view,
tried to purify the general taste by purifying the
amusements of the people, and in the fifth century
the players of various kinds — mimes, histriones,
'joculatores — were put under formal ecclesiastical
condemnation. The Church not only condemned
the players ; she excluded them from her sacraments.
The players continued to perform in the face of
ecclesiastical disapproval, and they found audiences ;
for the dramatic instinct lies deep in men, and the
only way to shut out vulgar and indecent plays is to
replace them by plays of a better quality. The play
persists, and cannot be successfully banned. This
degenerate practice of a once noble art came into
England after the Norman Conquest, and the play
ers became, not only the entertainers of the people,
but the story-tellers and reporters of the period.
They made the monotony of life more bearable.
How much indirect influence this humble and
turbid stream of dramatic activity may have had on
the development of the English drama cannot be
determined ; the chief influence in the making of
that drama came from the Church. The Church
condemned the manifestation of the dramatic in
stinct, but it did not fall into the later error of con
demning the instinct itself ; on the contrary, it was
quick to recognize and utilize that instinct. It had
long appealed to the dramatic instinct in its wor-
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 7
shippers ; for the Mass is a dramatization of certain
fundamental ideas generally held throughout Chris
tendom for many centuries. From the sixth century
the Mass was the supreme act of worship through
out Western Europe. " In the wide dimensions
which in course of time the Mass assumed," says
Hagenbach, " there lies a grand, we are almost
inclined to say an artistic, idea. A dramatic pro
gression is perceptible in all the symbolic processes,
from the appearance of the celebrant priest at the
altar and the confession of sins, to the Kyrie Elei-
son, and from this to the grand doxology, after which
the priest turns with the Dominus vobiscum to the
congregation, calling upon it to pray. Next, we
listen to the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel.
Between the two actions or acts intervenes the
Graduate (a chant), during which the deacon as
cends the lectorium. With the Halleluia con
cludes the first act ; and then ensues the Mass in a
more special sense, which begins with the recitation
of the Creed. Then again a Dominus vobiscum
and a prayer, followed by the offertory and, accom
panied by the further ceremonies, the Consecration.
The change of substance — the mystery of myste
ries — takes place amid the adoration of the congre
gation and the prayer for the quick and the dead ;
then, after the touching chant of the Agnus Dei,
ensues the Communion itself, which is succeeded
by prayer and thanksgiving, the salutation of peace,
and the benediction."
8
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In the impressive and beautiful liturgy of the
Mass the dramatization of the central mystery of
the Christian faith was effected by action, by pan-
A MYSTERY PLAY IN YORK CATHEDRAL.
tomime, and by music. There was no purpose to
be dramatic ; there was a natural evolution of the
instinct to set forth a truth too great and mysterious
to be contained in words by symbols, which are not
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 9
only more inclusive than words but which satisfy
the imagination, and by action.
The Church did not stop with a dramatic pres
entation of the sublimest of dramatic episodes, the
vicarious death of Christ ; it went further and set
forth the fact and the truth of certain striking and
significant scenes in the New Testament. As
early as the fifth century these scenes were repro
duced in the churches in living pictures, with
music. In this manner the people not only heard
the story of the Adoration of the Magi and of the
Marriage of Cana, but saw the story in tableaux.
In course of time the persons in these tableaux
spoke and moved, and then it was but a logical step
to the representation dramatically, by the priests
before the altar, of the striking or significant events
in the life of Christ.
Worshippers were approached through every
avenue of expression : the churches in which they
sat were nobly symbolical in structure ; the win
dows were ablaze with Scriptural story ; altar-pieces,
statues, carvings, and pictures continually spoke to
them in a language of searching beauty. In some
churches the priests read from rolls upon which, as
they were unfolded toward the congregation, pic
ture after picture came to view. Christmas, Good
Friday, and Easter services inevitably took on dra
matic forms, and became beautiful in their reproduc
tion of the touching and tender scenes in the life of
Christ, and grewsome in their literal picturing of
IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his sufferings and death. The dramatic instinct
had been long at work in the development of wor
ship ; a play on the Passion, ascribed to Gregory of
Nazianzen, dated back to the fourth century. This
early drama was a succession of monologues, but it
plainly predicted the mystery drama of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries.
There was nothing forced or artificial in the
growrth of this later and more complete drama ; a
description of a Durham Good Friday service
makes us see the easy progression toward well-
defined drama : " Within the church of Durham,
upon Good Friday, there was a marvellous solemn
service, in which service time, after the Passion was
sung, two of the eldest monks took a goodly large
crucifix all of gold, of the semblance of our Saviour
Christ, nailed upon the Cross. . . . The service
being ended, the said two monks carried the Cross
to the Sepulchre with great reverence (which Sepul
chre was set up that morning on the north side of
the choir, nigh unto the High Altar, before the
service time), and then did lay it within the said
Sepulchre with great devotion."
It is easy to follow the dramatic development of
such a theme, and to understand how beautiful and
impressive worship became when the divine tragedy
was not only sung and described, but acted before
the high altar by gorgeously robed priests. Thus
the drama was born a second time at the foot of the
altar.
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE II
But the time came when the drama parted com
pany with the liturgy, and, as in its development in
Greece, took on a life of its own. The vernacular
was substituted for Latin ; laymen took parts of
increasing importance ; the place of representation
was changed from the church to the space outside
the church; the liturgical yielded to the dramatic;
humour, and even broad farce, were introduced ;
the several streams of dramatic tradition which had
come down from an earlier time were merged in
the fully developed Mystery or Miracle play.
The trade guilds had become centres of organ
ized enterprise in the towns, and the presentation of
plays, in which popular religious and social interest
was now concentrated, fell into their hands. Cities
like York, Chester, and Coventry fostered the grow
ing art with enthusiasm and generosity. By the
beginning of the fifteenth century the presentation
of the dramas was thoroughly systematized. In
some places the Mayor, by proclamation, announced
the dates of presentation ; in other places special
messengers or heralds made the round of the city
and gave public notice. The different guilds
undertook the presentation of different acts or
scenes. Two-story wagons took the place of the
stage in front of the church or in the square ; on
these wagons, or pageants, as they were called, the
rude dressing-rooms were on the lower and the
stage on the upper story. These movable theatres,
starting from the church, passed through all the
12
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
principal streets, and, at important points, the actors
went through their parts in the presence of throngs
of eager spectators in the windows, galleries, door
ways, squares, and upon temporary scaffolds. The
plays were in series and required several days for
presentation, and the town made the occasion one
of general and hilarious holiday.
PAGEANTS ON WHICH WERE GIVEN MIRACLE PLAYS.
On the pageants, handsomely decorated, the
spectators saw scenes acted, with which they had
been made familiar by every kind of teaching. The
drama in the Garden of Eden was presented with
uncompromising realism, Adam and Eve appear
ing in appropriate attire ; the devil played a great
and effective part, furnishing endless amusement
by his buffoonery, but always going in the end to
his own place. Pilate and Herod divided popular
attention by their semi-humorous or melodramatic
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 13
roles, and Noah's wife afforded an opportunity for
the play of monotonous and very obvious masculine
wit on the faults and frailty of woman. The con
struction of these semi-sacred dramas, dealing with
high or picturesque events and incidents in Biblical
story, was rude ; the mixture of the sacred and the
comic so complete that the two are constantly
merged; the frankness of speech and the grossness
almost incredible to modern taste. It would be a
great mistake, however, to interpret either the inter
mingling of the tragic and the comic or the gross-
ness of speech as indicating general corruption ;
they indicate an undeveloped rather than a cor
rupt society. The English people were morally
sound, but they were coarse in habit and speech,
after the manner of the time. There was as much
honest and sober living as to-day; the grossness
was not a matter of character, but of expression.
Men and women saw, without any consciousness
of irreverence or incongruity, the figure of Deity
enthroned on a movable stage, with Cherubim
gathered about Him, creating the world with the
aid of images of birds and beasts, with branches
plucked from trees, and with lanterns such as were
carried about the streets at night.
Religion was not a department or partial expres
sion of life ; it was inclusive of the whole range of
feeling and action. It embraced humour as readily
as it embraced the most serious conviction and the
most elevated emotion. It was, therefore, entirely
14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
congruous with the deepest piety of the time that
grotesque figures, monstrous gargoyles, broadly
humorous carvings on miserere stalls, should be
part of the structure of those vast cathedrals
which are the most sublime expressions in art of
the religious life of the race. To read into the
grossness and indecency of expression in the
fifteenth century the moral significance which such
an expression would have in the nineteenth century
is not only to do a grave injustice to many genera
tions, but to betray the lack of a sound historic
sense. The great dramatists who followed these
early unknown playwrights understood that the
humorous cannot be separated from the tragic
without violating the facts of life ; and religion, in
its later expressions, would have been saved from
many absurdities and much destructive narrowness
if the men who spoke for it had not so strangely
misunderstood and rejected one of the greatest
qualities of the human spirit — that quality of
humour which, above all others, keeps human
nature sane and sound.
To the Mysteries and Miracle plays succeeded
the Moralities. Whether these later and less
dramatic plays were developed out of the earlier
dramatic forms is uncertain ; that they were largely
modelled along lines already well defined is appar
ently well established. No line of sharp division
as regards time, theme, or manner can be drawn
between the two; although certain broad differ-
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 15
ences are evident at a glance. The mediaeval mind
dealt largely with types, and only secondarily with
individuals ; and the break in the slow and uncon
scious progression from the type to the sharply
defined person, which registers the unfolding not
only of the modern mind but of modern art, is not
inexplicable. The characters in the Mysteries and
Miracle plays were received directly or indirectly
from Biblical sources ; in the Moralities there was,
apparently, an attempt to create new figures. These
figures were more abstract and far less human than
their immediate predecessors in the pageants, but
they may have had the value of a halting and
uncertain attempt to create instead of reproduce.
The first result was, apparently, a retrogression
from the dramatic idea : the earlier plays had
shown some skill in the development of charac
ter; in the Moralities the stage was surrendered
to the personifications of abstract virtues. In place
of a very real Devil, revelling in grotesque humour,
and an equally real Herod, who gave free play to
the melodramatic element so dear to the unculti
vated in every age, appeared those very tenuous and
shadowy abstractions, the World, the Flesh, the
Devil, not as actors in the world's tragedy, but as
personifications of the principle of evil; with Genus
Humanum, Pleasure, Slander, Perseverance, and
the Seven Deadly Sins. These prolix and monot
onous plays cover a wide range of subjects, from
the popular " Everyman," which deals, not without
i6
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dignity, with the supreme experience of death, to
" Wyt and Science," which doubtless, on many a
school stage, set forth the charms of knowledge, and
presented one of the earliest pleas for athletics.
The Moralities beguiled the darkest period in the
literary history of England ; the tide of the first
dramatic energy had gone out, the tide of the second
FOUR MORALITY PLAYERS.
Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, and Free Will. —From a black-letter copy of
the Morality " Hycke-Scorner."
and greater dramatic movement had not set in.
There were freedom, spontaneity, fresh feeling,
poetic imagery, in the ballads ; but the Moralities
were mechanical, rigid, laboured, and uninspired.
The Moralities marked, however, one important
step in the development of the English drama : they
created opportunities for professional actors, and
made acting as a profession possible. The earlier
plays had been in the hands of amateurs ; men who
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 17
had, in many cases, considerable skill in acting, but
who were members of guilds, with other and differ
ent occupations. Side by side with the Mystery
and Miracle plays there had percolated through the
long period when the English drama was in the
making many kinds of shows, more or less coarse
and full of buffoonery, in the hands of roving
pantomimists, singers, comedians — a class without
habitation, standing, or character. These wander
ing performers, many of them doubtless men of
genuine gifts cast upon an unpropitious time, found
place at this period in companies supported by
noblemen and attached to great houses, or in com
panies which presented plays in various parts of the
country in the courts of inns and, on great occa
sions, in large towns and cities. For all classes
dearly loved the bravery, excitement, and diversion
of the pageant, the masque, and the play of every
kind. The parts were entirely in the hands of
men ; no woman appeared on the stage until after
the time of Shakespeare ; the female characters
were taken by boys.
The transition from the Moralities to the fully
developed play was gradual, and was not marked by
logical gradations. The tendency to allegory gave
place slowly to the tendency to character-drawing,
to the unfolding of a story, and to the humour and
liveliness of the comedy. One of the earliest forms
which comedy took Avas the Interlude — a transi
tional dramatic form with which the name of John
1 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Heywood is identified. A London boy, believed to
have sung for a time in the choir of the Chapel
Royal, Heywood studied at Oxford, was befriended
by that great Englishman, Sir Thomas More, and
early became attached to the Court of Henry the
Eighth as a player. Players were still under social
and religious interdict, but Heywood's sincerity as a
Catholic withstood the test of the withdrawal of the
royal favour at a time when a king's smile was for
tune in a most tangible form. There was a manly
integrity in the nature of John Heywood, as in that
of many of his fellow-actors. The Interlude in his
hands was less ambitious in construction than a
play; shorter, more vivacious, and much closer to
the life of the time. It was often rude, but it was
oftener racy, direct, and effective in expression ;
using the familiar colloquial speech of the day with
great effectiveness. The interest turned on a hu
morous situation, and the dialogue was enlivened
by the play of shrewd native wit. In the " Four P's "
the characters were so well known that the audience
hardly needed the stimulus of wit to awaken its
interest. The Palmer, the Poticary, the Pedlar, and
the Pardoner brought the playwright and his audi
tors into easy and immediate contact, and furnished
ample opportunity to satirize or ridicule the vices,
hypocrisies, and follies of the time. The structure
of the Interlude was simple, and its wit not too fine
for the coarse taste of the time ; but it was a true
growth of the English soil, free from foreign influ-
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 19
ence , the virility, the gayety, and the license of the
early English spirit were in it.
" Ralph Roister Doister," the earliest comedy,
was produced not later than 1550 — perhaps
twenty years after the production of the " Four
P's." Heywood had shown how to set character in
distinct outlines on the stage ; Nicholas Udall, an
Oxford student, a scholar, holding the head-master
ship first of Eton College and later of Westminster
School, brought the comedy to completeness by
adding to the interest of characters essentially
humorous the more absorbing interest of a well-
defined plot. Udall was a schoolmaster, but there
was no pedantry in him ; he felt the deep classical
influence which had swept Europe like a tide, but
he took his materials from the life about him, and
he used good native speech. He had learned from
the Latin comedy how to construct both a plot and
a play, and his training gave him easy mastery of
sound expression ; but he composed his comedies
in terms of English life. " Roister Doister " was
a type of man instantly recognized by an English
audience of every social grade ; a coward who was
also a boaster, whose wooing, like that of Falstaff,
affords ample opportunity for the same rollicking
fun. The significance of the piece lay in its fresh
ness, its freedom, and its ease — qualities which
were prophetic of the birth of a true drama.
" Gammer Gurton's Needle," a broad, coarse, but
effective picture of rustic manners, generally be-
20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
lieved to have been written by John Still, a Lin
colnshire man by birth, a Cambridge man by
education, and a Bishop by vocation, marks the
first appearance of the fully developed farce in
English, and is notable for vigorous characteriza
tion in a mass of vulgar buffoonery. That such
a piece should come from the hand of the stern
divine, with Puritan aspect, who lies at rest in
THE TALBOT INN — CHAUCER'S "TABARD."
Where the early players often raised their rude stage.
Wells Cathedral, and that it was performed before
a college audience in Cambridge, shows that the
social and intellectual conditions which permitted
so close a juxtaposition of the sacred and the vul
gar in the Mystery and Miracle plays still prevailed.
The saving grace of this early dramatic writing was
its vitality; in this, and in its native flavour and its
resistance to foreign influence, lay its promise.
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 21
The earlier development of comedy as compared
with tragedy is not difficult to account for. Trag
edy exacts something from an audience ; a certain
degree of seriousness or of culture must be pos
sessed by those who are to enjoy or profit by it.
Comedy, on the other hand, appeals to the un
trained no less than the trained man ; it collects
its audience at the village blacksmith's or the coun
try shop as readily as in the most amply appointed
theatre. Moreover, it kept close to popular life
and taste at a time when the influence of the classi
cal literatures was putting its impress on men of
taste and culture. Italy, by virtue of its immense
service in the recovery of classical thought and art,
and in the production of great works of its own in
literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture, was
the teacher of western Europe ; and such was the
splendour of her achievements that what ought to
have been a liberating and inspiring influence
became a danger to native originality and develop
ment. Italian literature came into England like a
flood, and, through a host of translations, some of
which were of masterly quality, the intellectual in
equality of a difference of more than two centuries
in culture was equalized with astonishing rapidity.
In that age of keen appetite for knowledge, the art
and scholarship of a more mature people were as
similated with almost magical ease. The traditions
of the classical stage for a time threatened the
integrity of English art, but in the end the vigour
22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the English mind asserted itself; if the classical
influence had won the day, Ben Jonson would have
secured a higher place, but Shakespeare might have
been fatally handicapped.
" Ferrex and Porrex," or, as the play is more gen
erally known, " Gorbordoc," was the earliest English
tragedy, and is chiefly interesting as showing how
the influence of Seneca and the sturdy vigour of the
English genius worked together in a kind of rude
harmony. The manner shows the Latin influence,
but the story and the spirit in which it is treated are
genuinely English. Sir Philip Sidney, whose cul
ture was of the best in point of quality, found " Gor
bordoc " full of " stately speeches and well-sounding
phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style,"
but notes the failure to comply with the traditional
unity of time. Sackville, one of the authors of this
vigorous play, stood in relations of intimacy with
the Court of Elizabeth, became Chancellor of the
University of Oxford, and Lord High Treasurer of
England. His work in " The Mirrour of Magis
trates " brings out still more clearly the deep seri
ousness of his spirit. Norton, who collaborated
with him in the writing of " Gorbordoc," was a man
of severe temper, a translator of Calvin's Institutes,
and a born reformer. Such men might be affected
by the classical influence ; they could hardly be
subdued by it. In the excess of action, the rush of
incident, the swift accumulation of horrors, which
characterize this sanguinary play, Seneca would
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 23
have found few suggestions of his own methods and
temper. The blank verse in which it is written,
however, came ultimately from Italy through the
skilful adaptation of Surrey.
The integrity of the English drama was assured
when the playwrights, now rapidly increasing in
numbers, turned to English history and produced
the long series of Chronicle plays, to which Shake
speare owed so much, and which furnished an inac
curate but liberalizing education for the whole body
of the English people. In these plays, probably cov
ering the entire field of English history, the doings
and the experiences of the English race were set
forth in the most vital fashion ; English history dra
matically presented became a connected and living
story. They developed the race consciousness,
deepened the race feeling, made love of country the
passion which found splendid expression in " Henry
V.," and prepared the way for the popular appre
ciation of the noblest dramatic works. This dra
matic use of national history made the drama the
natural and inevitable expression of the English
spirit in Elizabeth's time, and insured an art which
was not only intensely English but intensely alive.
The imagination trained by the Chronicle plays was
ready to understand " Hamlet " and " Lear."
Bale's " King Johan," " The True Tragedy of
Richard III.," "The Famous Victories of Henry
V.," " The Contention of the Two Famous Houses
of York and Lancaster," " Edward III.," and kin-
24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dred plays, not only furnished material for Shake
speare's hand, but prepared Shakespeare's audiences
to understand his work. These plays practically
cover a period of four centuries, and bring the story
of English history down to the Armada.
In close historical connection with the Chronicle
plays must be placed the long list of plays which,
like "Cardinal Wolsey," "Duchess of Norfolk,"
" Duke Humphrey," and " Hotspur," drew upon the
treasury of English biography and dramatized in
dividual vicissitude and fate ; and the plays which,
like the " Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington,"
developed the dramatic uses of legendary history.
It would not be easy to devise a more stimulating
method of educating the imagination and prepar
ing the way for a period of free and buoyant
creativeness than this visualization of history on
the rude but intensely vitalized stage of the six
teenth century.
One more step in this vital expression of the
English spirit was taken by Shakespeare's immedi
ate predecessors and by some of his older contem
poraries. Such a play as " Arden of Feversham,"
which has been credited to Shakespeare by a
number of critics, brought the dramatic form to a
stage where it needed but the hand of a poet of
genius to perfect it. There was still a long dis
tance between the plays of this period, however,
and the balance, harmony, and restraint of Shake
speare, "Arden of Feversham," and a host of
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 25
dramas of the same period, are charged with power;
but he who reads them is fed with horrors. Lyly's
comedies were acted, with one or two exceptions,
before Queen Elizabeth, and were mainly, as Mr.
Symonds suggests, elaborately decorated censers
in which incense was lavishly burned to a Queen
incredibly avid of adulation and flattery. As a
*...->
THE GLOBE THEATRE.
writer of comedies for the Court, the author of
" Euphues " influenced the language of the later
dramatists far more deeply than he influenced the
drama itself. He made an art of witty dialogue,
and repartee became in his hands a brilliant fence
of words ; it remained for Shakespeare to carry
both to perfection in " Much Ado About Nothing,"
26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
When Shakespeare reached London about 1586,
he found the art of play-writing in the hands of a
group of men of immense force of imagination and
of singularly varied gifts of expression. During the
decade in which he was serving his apprenticeship
to his art England lost Peele, Kyd, Greene, and
Marlowe ; Lodge, having become a physician, died
in 1625. Every member of this group, with the
exception of Marlowe, was born to good conditions ;
they were gentlemen in position, and scholars by
virtue of university training. They were careless
and, in some cases, violent and criminal livers; men
born out of due time, so far as adjustment between
genius and sound conditions was concerned; or
committed by temperament to unbalanced, dis
orderly, and tragical careers. Greene, after a life
of dissipation, died in extreme misery of mind
and body ; Peele involved himself in many kinds
of misfortune, and became the victim of his vices ;
Nash lived long enough to lament the waste and
confusion of his career; and the splendid genius
of Marlowe was quenched before he had reached
his thirtieth year. He who would pass a sweeping
and unqualified condemnation on this fatally en
dowed group of ardent young writers would do
well to study the times in which they lived, the
attitude of society towards the playwright, the
absence of normal conditions for the expression of
genius such as they possessed, and the perilous
combination of temperament and imagination which
THE FORERUNNERS OF SHAKESPEARE 27
seems to have been made in each. It is futile and
immoral to conceal or minimize the faults and
vices of men of genius ; but it is equally futile
and immoral to attempt to determine in any indi
vidual career the degree of moral responsibility.
Greene was a born story-teller, without having
any marked gift for the construction of strong and
well-elaborated plots ; his study of character was
neither vigorous nor convincing. Nash was, on
the other hand, a born satirist, with a coarse but
very effective method and a humour often grotesque
but always virile. Peele was preeminently a poet
of taste, with a gift for graceful and even elegant
expression, a touch of tenderness, and a sensitive
ness of imagination which showed itself in his
use of the imagery of mythology. Lodge wrote
dull plays and lightened them by the introduction
of charming songs.
Marlowe was the creative spirit of this group of
accomplished playwrights. The son of a Canter
bury shoemaker, he took his Bachelor's degree at
Cambridge, and arrived in London, " a boy in years,
a man in genius, a god in ambition." His ardent
nature, impatient of all restraint and full of Titanic
impulses, found congenial society on the stage and
congenial work in play-writing. His life was as
passionate and lawless as his art ; his plays were
written in six turbulent years, and his career was
one of brief but concentrated energy. The two
parts of " Tamburlaine," " The Massacre at Paris,"
28 WILLIAM SHAKP:SPEARE
"The Jew of Malta," "Edward II.," and " Dr
Faustus," the glowing fragment of " Hero and
Leander," and a few short compositions, among
them the exquisite " Come live with me and be
my love," evidence the depth and splendour of Mar
lowe's genius and the lack of balance and restraint
in his art. He gave English -tragedy sublimity,
intensity, breadth, and order; he freed blank verse
from rigidity and mechanical correctness, and gave
it the freedom, harmony, variety of cadence, and
compelling music which imposed it upon all later
English tragedy. Neither in his life nor in his art
did Marlowe accept the inevitable limitations of
human power in action and in creation ; he flung
himself passionately against the immovable barriers,
and grasped at the impossible. But his failures
were redeemed by superb successes. He breathed
the breath of almost superhuman life into the Eng
lish drama both as regards its content and its form ;
for he was even greater as a poet than as a drama
tist:
... his raptures were
All air and fire . . . ;
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
He left but a single step to be taken in the full
unfolding of the drama, and that step Shakespeare
took: the step from the Titan to the Olympian.
CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND BREEDING
THE charm of Stratford-on-Avon is twofold ; it
is enfolded by some of the loveliest and most char
acteristic English scenery, and it is the home of the
greatest English literary tradition. Lying in the
very heart of the country, it seems to be guarded
as a place sacred to the memory of the foremost
man of expression who has yet appeared among the
English-speaking peoples. It has become a town
of some magnitude, with a prosperous trade in malt
and corn ; but its importance is due wholly to the
fact that it is the custodian of Shakespeare's birth
place, of the school in which he was trained, of the
house in which he courted Anne Hathaway, of the
ground on which he built his own home, and of
the church in which he lies buried. The place is
full of Shakespearean associations ; of localities
which he knew in the years of his dawning intelli
gence, and in those later years when he returned
to take his place as a householder and citizen ; the
old churches with which as a child he was familiar
are still standing, substantially as they stood at the
end of the sixteenth century ; the grammar school
still teaches the boys of to-day within the walls
29
30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
that listened to the same recitations three hundred
years ago ; the houses of his children and friends
are, in several instances, still secure from the de
structive hand of time ; there are still wide stretches
of sloping hillside shaded by the ancient Forest
of Arden ; there are quaint half-timbered fronts
upon which he must have looked ; the " bank where
the wild thyme blows " is still to be found by those
who know the foot-path to Shottery and the road
over the hill; the Warwickshire landscape has the
same ripe and tender beauty which Shakespeare
knew; and the Avon flows as in the days when he
heard the nightingales singing in the level meadows
across the river from the church, or slipped silently
in his punt through the mist which softly veils it
on summer nights.
When Shakespeare was born, on April twenty-
second or twenty-third, in the year fifteen hun
dred and sixty-four, Stratford was an insignificant
hamlet, off the main highways of travel, although
within reach of important towns like Coventry,
and of stately old English homes like Warwick
and Kenilworth castles. The streets were nar
row, irregular, and, like most streets .in most
towns in that unsanitary age, badly kept and
of an evil odour; the houses were set among gar
dens or in the open, with picturesque indiffer
ence to modern ideas of community orderliness ;
the black-oak structure showing curious designs of
triangles and squares through the plaster. Thatched
BIRTH AND BREEDING 31
roofs, projecting gables, rough walls, unpaved lanes,
foot-paths through the fields, the long front of the
Guild Hall with the Grammar School, the Guild
Chapel, the Church of the Holy Trinity, the bridge
across the Avon built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the
time of Henry VII., made up the picture which
AN EARLY DRAWING OF SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHI'I.ACE.
Shakespeare saw when he looked upon the place
of his birth. On High Street, when he came back
from London to live in Stratford, he found, not far
from his house in New Place, the carved half-tim
bered front of the house in which tradition says the
mother of John Harvard was born.
32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The population of Stratford is now about nine
thousand; in 1564 it was probably less than fifteen
hundred. It was surrounded by fields which were
sometimes white with grain, and were always, in the
season, touched with the splendour of the scarlet
poppy. The villagers were sturdy English folk with
more vigour than intelligence, and with more capa
city than education. Many of them were unable to
sign their own names, and among these John Shake
speare, the father of the poet, has sometimes been
included: documents exist, however, which bear
what is believed to be his signature. There was
nothing unusual in this lack of literary training ;
comparatively few Englishmen of the station of
John Shakespeare had mastered, in that period, the
art of writing. Men who could not sign their own
names were often men of mark, substance, and
ability.
The family name was not uncommon in War
wickshire, and was borne by a good yeoman stock.
When John Shakespeare applied, in 1596, for the
right to use a coat of arms, he declared that Henry
VII. had made a grant of lands to his grandfather
in return for services of importance. The college
of heraldry has been so prolific of fictitious geneal
ogies that this claim is open to suspicion ; what
is certain is the substantial character of the poet's
ancestors, their long residence in Warwickshire,
and the fact that some of them were farmers, land-
renters, and land-owners. The grandfather of the
BIRTH AND BREEDING 33
poet was probably Richard Shakespeare, a farmer
who lived within easy walking distance of Stratford.
John Shakespeare removed to Stratford about the
middle of the sixteenth century, and became a trader
in all manner of farm produce. Then, as now, malt
and corn were staple articles of commerce in Strat
ford ; John Shakespeare dealt in these and in wool,
skins, meat, and leather. He has been called a
glover and a butcher; he was both, and had several
other vocations besides.
Henley Street was then one of the thoroughfares
of Stratford, and got its name from the fact that
it led to Henley-on-Avon, a market town of local
importance. That John Shakespeare was an active
man of affairs, with a keen instinct for business, if
not with a sound judgment, is clear, not only from
the variety and number of his business interests,
but from the frequency of the suits for the recovery
of small debts in which he appeared. His early
ventures were successful, and he soon became a
man of substance and influence. His prosperity
was increased by his marriage, in 1557, to Mary
Arden, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do farmer
of Wilmcote, not far from Stratford. She brought
her husband a house and fifty acres of land, some
money, and other forms of property. During the
year before his marriage John Shakespeare had
purchased the house, with a garden, in Henley
Street, which is now accepted as the birthplace of
the poet. In the following year his growing influ-
34
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ence was evidence! by his election as a tester of the
quality of bread and of malt liquors. Various pub
lic duties were devolved upon him. He was elected
a burgess or member of the town council ; he
became a chamberlain of the borough ; and later
******
*******
I
SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTH RECORD.
The three crosses mark the line.
was advanced to the highest position in the gift of
the municipality, that of Bailiff. There were two
daughters who died in infancy ; then came the
first son, William, who was christened, the parish
register tells us, on the 26th day of April, 1564.
The custom of the time with regard to the interval
BIRTH AND BREEDING
35
between birth and baptism was so well settled that
there seems no reason to doubt that the poet was
born on the 22d or 23d of the month. There were
then two detached houses standing in Henley
Street where the present house now stands ; tradi
tion assigns the house to the west as the place of
the poet's birth. This house finally came into the
possession, by the bequest of the poet's grand
daughter, of the family of
his sister Joan Hart, and
until 1806 was occupied by
them ; the adjoining house
to the east was let as an inn.
In 1846 both houses were
secured for preservation, re
stored as far as possible to
the condition in which they
were in the poet's time,
joined in a single structure,
and made one of the most
interesting museums in the
world. In this structure FONT 1N TRINITY CHURCH' WHERE
SHAKESPEARE WAS BAPTIZED.
there is every reason to be
lieve that Shakespeare was born. The continued
possession of the part which was once the western
house by the poet's kinsfolk was probably the basis
for a tradition which runs back for an indefinite
period.
The Birthplace, as it is called, is a cottage of plas
ter and timber, two stories in height, with dormer
36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
windows, and a pleasant garden in the rear — all
that remains of a considerable piece of land. It
stands upon the street, and the visitor passes at
once, through a little porch, into a low room, ceiled
with black oak, paved with flags, and with a fire
place so wide that one sees at a glance what the
chimney-corner once meant of comfort and cheer.
On those seats, looking into the glowing fire, the
imagination of a boy could hardly fail to kindle.
A dark and narrow stair leads to the little bare
room on the floor above in which Shakespeare was
probably born. The place seems fitted, by its very
simplicity, to serve as the starting-point for so
great a career. There is a small fireplace ; the
low ceiling is within reach of the hand ; on the nar
row panes of glass which fill the casement names
and initials are traced in irregular profusion. This
room has been a place eagerly sought by literary
pilgrims since the beginning of the century. The
low ceiling and the walls were covered, in the early
part of the century, with innumerable autographs.
In 1820 the occupant, a woman who attached great
importance to the privilege of showing the house to
visitors, was compelled to give up that privilege,
and, by way of revenge, removed the furniture and
whitewashed the walls of the house. A part of the
wall of the upper room escaped the sacrilegious
hand of the jealous custodian, and names running
back to the third decade of the last century are
still to be found there. Other and perhaps more
BIRTH AND BREEDING
37
famous names have taken the places of those which
were erased, and the walls are now a mass of hiero
glyphs. Scott, Byron, Rogers, Tennyson, Thack
eray, Dickens, have left this record of their interest
in the room. No new names are now written on
these blackened walls ; the names of visitors are
kept in a record-book on the lower floor.
THK ROOM IX WHICH SHAKKSPKARK WAS HORN".
In a small room behind the birth-room what is
known as the Stratford portrait of the poet is
shown. On the first floor, opening from the room
into which the visitor enters, is a larger room in
which are collected a number of very interesting
articles connected with the poet. There are to be
seen the deed which conveyed the property to his
father; the letter in which Richard Quiney, whose
38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
son Thomas married the poet's youngest daughter,
Judith, in 1616, asked him for a loan of money; the
seal ring on which the letters W. S. are engraved ;
the desk which stood in the Grammar School three
hundred years ago ; and many other curiosities,
memorials, documents, and books which find proper
place in such a museum. In the garden, sweet with
the fragrant breath of summer, there are pansies
A BIT OF THE WALL OF THE ROOM IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN.
and violets, columbines and rosemary, daisies and
rue — flowers which seem to belong to Shake
speare, since they bloom in the plays as if they first
struck root in the rich soil of his imagination. This
property, which remained continuously in the pos
session of Shakespeare's kin until the beginning of
the present century, is now set apart forever, with
the home of Anne Hathaway, the ground which the
BIRTH AND BREEDING 39
poet purchased in 1597, and where he built his own
home, and the adjoining house, as memorials of the
poet's life in Stratford.
John Shakespeare prospered in private fortune
and in public advancement for nearly a decade
after the birth of the poet. His means were very
considerable for the time and place, and as Bailiff
and chief Alderman he was the civic head of the
community. An ingenious attempt has been made
to prove that he was a man of Puritan temper and
associations ; but the fact that he applied for a grant
of arms, and that as Bailiff he welcomed the actors
of the Earl of Worcester's Company and the Queen's
Company to Stratford in 1568, would seem to indi
cate that, whatever his religious convictions and
ecclesiastical tendencies may have been, he did not
share the fanatical temper of some of his con
temporaries.
The child William, then four years old, may have
seen these companies, bravely dressed, with banners
flying, drums beating, and trumpeters sounding
their ringing tones, riding over Clopton bridge and
halting in the market-place where High and Bridge
Streets intersect, and where the market, with its
belfry and clock, now stands. The players of the
day led a wandering life, full of vicissitude, but, in
fair weather and a hospitable community, they
brought with them a visible if sometimes shabby
suggestion of the great London world, which made
their occasional coming into a quiet town like Strat-
40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ford an unforgettable occurrence. The horses they
rode were gayly caparisoned, the banners they
carried were splendidly emblazoned with the arms
of their patrons, their costumes were rich and
varied, and they were accompanied by grooms and
servants of all sorts. A goodly company they must
have seemed to a child's imagination, with an air
of easy opulence worn as a part of their vocation,
but as purely imitative as the parts they played to
crowds of open-mouthed rustics. Their magnifi
cence, however shabby, and their brave air, however
swaggering, made rural England feel as if it had
touched the great new world of adventure and fame
and wealth, of which stories were told in every
chimney corner.
To these companies of players Stratford appears
to have given exceptional hospitality ; the people
of the place were lovers of the drama. In the
course of two decades the town enjoyed no less
than twenty-four visits from strolling companies ;
a fact of very obvious bearing on the education of
Shakespeare's imagination and the bent of his mind
toward a vocation. In such a community there
must have been constant talk about plays and
players, and easy familiarity with the resources and
art of the actor. It follows, too, that the presence
of so many players in the little village brought boys
of an inquiring turn of mind into personal contact
with the comedians and tragedians of the day. As
a boy, Shakespeare came to know the old English
BIRTH AND BREEDING 41
plays which were the stock in trade of the travelling
companies ; he learned the stage business, and he
was undoubtedly on terms of familiarity with men
of gift and art. For the purposes of his future
work this education was far more stimulating and
formative than any which he could have secured
at Eton or Winchester during the same impres
sionable years. Scott's specific training for the
writing of the Waverley novels and the narrative
poems which bear his name was gained in his
ardent reading and hearing of old Scotch ballads,
romances, stories, and history, rather than in the
lecture-rooms of the University 'of Edinburgh.
Shakespeare has sometimes been represented as
a boy of obscure parentage and vulgar surround
ings ; he was, as a matter of fact, the son of a man
of energy and substance, the foremost citizen of
Stratford. He has often been represented as wholly
lacking educational opportunities ; he was, as a mat
ter of fact, especially fortunate in educational oppor
tunities of the most fertilizing and stimulating kind.
The singular misconception which has identified
education exclusively with formal academic training
has made it possible to hold men of the genius of
Shakespeare, Burns, and Lincoln before the world
as exceptions to the law that no art can be mastered
save through a thorough educational process. If
Burns and Lincoln were not so near us, the author
ship of " Tarn o' Shanter " and the Gettysburg
address would have been challenged on the ground
42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of inadequate preparation for such masterpieces of
expression.
These three masters of speech were exceptionally
well educated for their art, for no man becomes an
artist except by the way of apprenticeship ; but
their education was individual rather than formal,
and liberating rather than disciplinary. The two
poets were saturated in the most sensitive period
in the unfolding of the imagination with the very
genius of the people among whom they were to
work and whose deepest instincts they were to
interpret. Their supreme good fortune lay in
the fact that they were educated through the
imagination rather than through the memory
and the rationalizing faculties. A man some
times gets this kind of education in the schools,
but he oftener misses it. He is always supremely
fortunate if he gets it at all. Shakespeare re
ceived it from several sources ; one of them
being the love of the drama in the town in
which he was born, access to its records of every
sort, and acquaintanceship with the custodians
of its traditions and the practitioners of its
art.
But he was by no means lacking in educational
opportunities of a formal kind. The Grammar
School on Church Street, adjoining the Guild
Chapel and across Chapel Lane from the site of
the poet's later home, one of the oldest and most
BIRTH AND BREEDING
43
picturesque buildings now standing in Stratford,
was founded at the close of the fifteenth century.
It was part of an older religious foundation, of
which the Chapel still remains, and which once
included a hospital. After passing through many
vicissitudes, the school was reconstituted in the
time of Edward VI. The Chapel was used in con
nection with it, and, if tradition is to be accepted,
LATIN ROOM, GRAMMAR SCHOOL, STRATFORD.
was occasionally employed for school purposes.
It was built about the middle of the thirteenth
century, and is a characteristic bit of the England
which Shakespeare saw. The low, square tower
must have been one of the most familiar landmarks
of Stratford in his eyes. He saw it when he came,
a schoolboy, from his father's house in Henley
Street, and turned into High Street ; and from his
own home at New Place he must have looked at
44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
it from all his southern windows. The interior
of the Chapel has suffered many things at the
hands of iconoclasts and restorers, but remains
substantially as Shakespeare knew it. The low
ceilings and old furnishings of the Grammar School,
blackened with time, make one aware, like the
much initialed and defaced forms in the older
rooms at Eton, that education in England has a
long history.
In Shakespeare's time the Renaissance influence
was at its height, and the schools were bearing the
fruits of the new learning. Education was essen
tially literary, and dealt almost exclusively with the
humanities. Greek was probably within reach of
boys of exceptional promise as students ; but Latin
was every boy's daily food. With Plautus and
Terence, the masters of Latin comedy, with Ovid,
Virgil, and Horace, the masters of Latin poetry,
with Cicero the orator and Seneca the moralist,
Shakespeare made early acquaintance. When Sir
Hugh Evans, in the " Merry Wives of Windsor,"
listens to the recitation, so familiar to all boys of
English blood, of Hie, Hcec, Hoc, we are doubtless
sharing a reminiscence of the poet's school days.
The study of grammar and the practice of con
versation prepared the way for the reading of the
classic writers, and furnished an education which
was not only disciplinary but invigorating. With
out being in any sense a scholar, there is abundant
evidence that Shakespeare knew other languages
BIRTH AND BREEDING 45
and literatures than his own. His knowledge
was of the kind which a man of his quality of
mind and educational opportunities might be ex
pected to possess. It was entirely subordinate to
the end of furnishing the material he wished to
THE APPROACH TO HOLY TRINITY CHURCH.
use; it was vital rather than exact; it was used
freely, without any pretension to thoroughness ; it
served immediate ends with the highest intelli
gence, and is inaccurate with the indifference of
a poet who was more concerned with the sort of
46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
life led in Bohemia than with its boundary lines.
The great artists have been noted for their insight
rather than their accuracy ; not because they have
been untrained, but because they have used facts
simply to get at truth. Shakespeare could be as
accurate as a scientist when exactness served his
purpose, as the description of the Dover Cliff in
" King Lear " shows.
In the plays there are recurring evidences that
the poet knew Virgil and Ovid, and had not for
gotten Lily's grammar and the " Sententiae Pue-
riles," which the schoolboys of his time committed
to memory as a matter of course. In a number
of instances he used the substance of French and
Italian books of which English translations had
not been made in his time. The command of
French and Italian for reading purposes, to a boy
of Shakespeare's quickness of mind and power of
rapid assimilation, with his knowledge of Latin
and the widespread interest among men of his
class in the literature of both countries, was easily
acquired. It must be remembered that for thirty
years Shakespeare was on intimate terms with
men of scholarly tastes and acquirements. The
most splendid tribute among the many which he
received from his contemporaries came from the
most thoroughly trained of his fellow-dramatists;
one who stood preeminently for the classical tra
dition in the English drama. Shakespeare was
neither by instinct nor opportunity a scholar in
BIRTH AND BREEDING 47
the sense in which Ben Jonson was a scholar ; but
he had considerable familiarity with four languages;
he had access to many books ; he had read some
of them with the most vital insight; and he was
exceptionally well informed in many directions.
He knew something of law, medicine, theology,
history, trade ; and this knowledge, easily acquired,
was readily used for purposes of illustration ; some
times used inaccurately as regards details, as men
of imagination have used knowledge in all times
and are using it to-day ; but used always with
divination of its spiritual or artistic significance.
A careful study of Shakespeare's opportunities
and a little common sense in reckoning with his
genius will dissipate the confusion of mind which
has made it possible to regard him as uneducated
and therefore incapable of writing his own works.
Aubrey's statement that "he understood Latin
pretty well " is abundantly verified by the plays ;
they also furnish evidence that he understood
Italian and French.
That he studied the Bible, either in the Genevan
version or in the revision of 1568, is equally appar
ent. His references to incidents in Biblical history
and his use of Biblical phrases suggest a familiarity
acquired in boyhood rather than a habit of read
ing in maturity. The direct suggestions of the
influence of the Bible are numerous ; but there is
also the impression of a rich and frequent use of
Biblical wisdom and imagery. Mr. Locke Rich-
48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ardson has suggested that when Falstaff " babbled
of green fields " his memory was going back to
the days when, as a schoolboy, the Twenty-third
Psalm was often in his ears or on his lips; and
there are many places in the plays where Shake
speare seems to be remembering something which
he learned from the Bible in youth. No collec
tion of books could have brought him richer
THE tJUlLL) CHAMBER IN THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL.
material for his view of life and for his art, not
only as regards its content but its form.
The Grammar School, in which Cicero and
Virgil have been taught in unbroken succession
since Shakespeare's time, was a free school, taking
boys of the neighbourhood from seven years up
wards, and keeping them on the benches with gen
erous disregard of hours. There were holidays,
however, and there was time for punting on the
BIRTH AND BREEDING 49
river, for rambles across country, and for those
noisy games, prolonged far into the evening by the
long English twilight, which make the meadows
across the Avon as vocal as the old graveyard about
the church is reposeful and silent.
Boys in Shakespeare's station in life rarely went
to school after their fourteenth year, and the grow
ing financial embarrassments of John Shakespeare
probably took his son out of the Grammar School
a year earlier. The tide of prosperity had begun
to recede from the active trader some time earlier;
whether his declining fortunes were due to lack of
judgment or to the accidents of a business career
it is impossible to determine. It is clear that he
was a man of energy and versatility ; that he was
successful at an unusually early age and in an
unusual degree ; and that later, for a time at least,
he was overtaken by adversity. In 1578, when the
poet was fourteen years old, John Shakespeare
mortgaged his wife's property at Wilmcote for the
sum of forty pounds, or about two hundred dollars
— the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars
in present values. In the following year another
piece of property at Snitterfield was disposed of for
the same amount. Unsatisfied or dissatisfied credi
tors began to bring suits ; taxes went unpaid ; other
properties were sold without arresting the down
ward movement; in 1586, when the poet went up
to London to seek his fortune, John Shakespeare
had ceased to attend the meetings at Guild Hall,
50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and lost his right to wear the Alderman's gown in
consequence ; later his goods were seized by legal
process and warrants for his arrest as an insolvent
debtor were issued. There is a story of a consider
able loss through the generous act of standing as
surety for a brother; and it is known that there
GUY'S CLIFF AND THE AVON.
From an old print.
was, during these years, great distress in several
branches of trade in Warwickshire.
If it cost nothing to send a boy to the Grammar
School, it cost something to keep him there ; and
by the withdrawal of his son when losses began to
press heavily upon him John Shakespeare may not
only have cut off one source of his expense, but
BIRTH AND BREEDING 51
gained some small addition to his income from the
industry of another wage-earner in the family.
After leaving school the son may have assisted his
father, as Aubrey reports, or he may have entered
the office of a lawyer, as a contemporary allusion
seems to affirm ; nothing definite is known about
his occupations between his fourteenth and eigh
teenth years. There is no reason why anything
should have been remembered or recorded ; he was
an obscure boy living in an inland village, before
the age of newspapers, and out of relation with
people of fashion or culture. During this period
as little is known of him as is known of Cromwell
during the same period ; as little, but no less. This
fact gives no occasion either for surprise or scepti
cism as to his marvellous genius ; it was an entirely
normal fact concerning boys growing up in unliter-
ary times and rural communities. That these boys
subsequently became famous does not change the
conditions under which they grew up.
CHAPTER III
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY
THE England of Shakespeare's boyhood and
youth was not only dramatic in feeling but spec
tacular in form ; the Queen delighted in those
gorgeous pageants which symbolized by their
splendour the greatness of her place and the dignity
of her person. Her vigorous Tudor temper was
thrown into bold relief by her intensely feminine
craving for personal loyalty and admiration. One
of the keenest and most adroit politicians of her
time, her instincts as a woman were sometimes
postponed to the exigencies of the State, but they
were as imperious as her temper. Denied as Queen
the personal devotion which as a woman she craved,
she fed her unsatisfied imagination on flattery and
imposing ceremonies. In the summer of 1575,
when Shakespeare was in his twelfth year, the
Queen made that memorable visit to Kenilworth
Castle which has found its record in Scott's brill
iant novel. Four years earlier, the royal presence
at Charlecote (Sir Thomas Lucy, the future Justice
Shallow, playing the part of host) had brought the
Court into the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford.
52
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 53
Kenilworth is fifteen miles distant, but the magnifi
cent pageants and stately ceremonies with which
Leicester welcomed the Queen were matters of gen
eral talk throughout Warwickshire long before the
arrival of Elizabeth.
The Queen's visit was made in July, when nature
supplemented with lavish beauty all the various
art and immense wealth which Leicester freely
drew upon for the entertainment of his capricious
and exacting mistress. Pageants and diversions of
o o
every kind succeeded one another in bewildering
variety for ten days. The Queen was addressed
by sibyls, by giants of Arthur's age, by the Lady of
the Lake, by Pomona, Ceres, and Bacchus. There
was a rustic marriage for her entertainment, and
a mock fight representing the defeat of the Danes.
Returning from the chase, Triton rose out of the
lake and, in Neptune's name, prayed for her help
to deliver an enchanted lady pursued by a cruel
knight ; and straightway the lady herself appeared,
with an escort of nymphs; Proteus, riding a dolphin,
following close behind. Then, suddenly, from the
heart of the dolphin, a chorus of ocean deities sang
the praises of the great and beautiful Queen. The
tension of these splendid mythological and alle
gorical pageants was relieved by the tricks of necro
mancers, the feats of acrobats, and by fights between
dogs and bears. The prodigality, semi-barbaric
taste, and magnificence of the age were illustrated
for a royal spectator with more than royal lavishness.
54
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
On a summer day the way from Stratford to the
Castle lies through a landscape touched with the
ripest beauty of England ; a beauty not only of line
and structure, but of depth and richness of foliage,
of ancient places slowly transformed by the tender
and patient and pious care of centuries of growth
into masses of
greenness so afflu
ent and of such
depth that it
seems as if foun
tains of life had
overflowed into
great masses of
foliage.
The summer
days were doubt
less long and
wearisome to the
boys in the Gram
mar School in
the quiet village.
The nightingale
had ceased to sing along the Avon; the fragrance
was gone from the hedges with their blossoms;
midsummer was at its height ; there was the smell
of the new-cut grass in the meadows, touched here
and there with the glory of the scarlet poppy.
Whether the coming of the Queen was made the
occasion of granting a holiday it is much too late to
QUEEN ELIZABETH.
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 55
assert or deny ; that the more adventurous took one
is more than probable. In those days even the
splendour of the wandering players paled before
that of the Queen. She had been seventeen years
on the throne. She had all the qualities of her fam
ily : the Tudor imperiousness of temper, and the
Tudor instinct for understanding her people and
winning them. The Armada was thirteen years in
the future, and the full splendour of a great reign
was still to come ; but there was something in the
young Queen which had already touched the
imagination of England; something in her spirit
and bearing which saved the poets of the time from
being mere flatterers. Elizabeth was neither beauti
ful nor gracious ; the romantic charm which cap
tivated all who came into the presence of her
unhappy contemporary Mary Stuart was not in her.
But what she lacked as woman she easily possessed
as queen ; she had the rare gift of personifying her
rank and place. The sense of sovereignty went
with her. In a time of passionate energy and lust
of life she was not only the centre of organized
society, but the symbol of unlimited opportunity,
fortune, and greatness.
Where the Queen was, there was England ; she
was not only its ruler, but the personification of its
vitality and force. When she came into Warwick
shire, the whole country was stirred with the sense
of the presence of something splendid and signifi
cant. Stories of the preparations at the Castle had
56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
been carried by word of mouth across the country
side. There were no newspapers ; no means of
rapid communication with the outer world ; there
were, for the vast majority of people, no books ;
most men never went out of their native shires ;
travellers from a distance were few. Tales of
Leicester's honours and emoluments were told and
listened to like modern fairy stories ; his rapid
advancement lent a kind of magic to the splendour
of his state ; and the Queen was the magician
whose touch made and marred all fortunes. In the
time of Elizabeth as in that of Victoria, the Queen
personified the English State and the majesty of
the English race. Through this kind of symbol
ism a deep and formative educational influence has
been silently put forth and unconsciously received.
The Queen was in many ways the incarnation of
the spirit of Shakespeare's time, and her coming into
Warwickshire was like the advent of the world-ele
ment into a life which had felt only local influences.
Chief among those influences was that of the
lovely scenery by which the poet's young imagina
tion was enfolded. Whether he was one of the
throng which waited for the Queen on some old-time
highway, or stood with the eager crowd who gath
ered about the Castle gates on the great day of the
royal visit, is of no consequence: it can hardly be
doubted that the imaginative boy of eleven did not
lose that splendid spectacle ; what is certain is his
familiarity with the Warwickshire landscape — that
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
fortunate landscape beautiful in itself and appeal
ing to every imagination because it was Shake
speare's country.
There are more striking outlooks than those
which are found between Kenilworth and Strat
ford ; there are
more fertile
and garden-
like stretches
of country;
but there is
nowhere in
England hap
pier harmony
of the typical
qualities of the
English coun
try : gentle
undulation of
wol d and
wood, groups
of ancient
trees, long
linesof hedges,
slow rivers winding under overhanging branches
and loitering in places of immemorial shade ; stately
homes rich in association with men and women
of force or craft, or possessed of the noble art of
gentleness in ungentle times ; a low, soft sky from
which clouds are rarely absent, and an atmosphere
MERVYN'S TOWER.
In which Amy Robsart was imprisoned.
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 59
which softens all outlines, subdues all sounds, and
works magical effects of light and distance. These
qualities of ripeness and repose are seen in their
perfection from the ruined Mervyn's Tower, in
which Amy Robsart was imprisoned. As far as
the eye can reach, the landscape is full of a tender
and gracious beauty. Nothing arrests and holds the
attention, for the loveliness is diffused rather than
concentrated ; it lies like a magical veil over the
whole landscape, concealing nothing and yet touch
ing everything with a modulating softness which
seems almost like a gift from the imagination. In
midsummer, when the grain stands almost as high
as a man's head, the foot-path which runs through
it can be followed for a long distance by the eye,
so sharply cut through the waving fields is it.
Those winding foot-paths, which take one away
from the highroads into the heart of the country,
are nowhere more alluring to the eye and the im
agination than in Warwickshire. They make
chances for intimacy with the landscape which the
highways cannot offer. The long-travelled roads
are old and ripe with that quiet richness of setting
which comes with age ; they rise and fall with the
gentle movement of the country; they are often
arched with venerable trees ; they wind up hill and
down in leisurely, picturesque curves and lines ;
they cross slow-moving streams ; they often loiter
in recesses of shade which centuries have conspired
to deepen and widen.
6o
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
But it is along the quiet by-paths that one comes
upon all that is essential and characteristic in War
wickshire. These immemorial ways put any man
who chooses to follow them in possession of the
landscape ; they cross the most carefully tended
fields, they penetrate the most jealously guarded
estates, they offer access to ancient places of
silence and se
clusion. The
narrow path
between the
hedges is one
of those rights
of the English
people which
evidence their
sover e i g n ty
over posses
sions the titles
to which have
been lodged for
centuries in pri
vate hands. They silently affirm that, though the
acres may be private property, the landscape is the
inalienable possession of the English people. In
May, when the hawthorn is in bloom and the night
ingale is in full song, a Warwickshire foot-path leads
one into a world as ideal as the island in " The
Tempest " or the fairy-haunted country of the " Mid
summer Night's Dream." That Shakespeare knew
THE EARL OF LEICESTER, 1588.
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 6 1
these pathways into the realm of the imagination
there is ample evidence ; that he was familiar with
these byways about Stratford is beyond a doubt.
Does not one of them still lead to Shottery?
Kenilworth, which was a noble and impressive
stronghold in Shakespeare's boyhood, ample enough
to entertain a court with long-continued and mag
nificent pageants, is not less imposing in its vast
ruins than in the day when knights rode at one
another, spears at rest, in the tilting-yard and the
Queen was received at the great gate by Leicester.
In the loveliness of its surroundings, the beauty of
its outlook, the romantic interest of its ivy-covered
ruins, and the splendour and tragedy of its historic
fortunes, it symbolizes the harmony of natural and
human association which invests all Warwickshire
with perennial charm. Much of this charm has
come since Shakespeare's time, but it was there in
quality and characteristic when he roamed afield
on summer afternoons, or, on holidays, made his
way to Kenilworth, Warwick, or Coventry. It
was in key with his own poised and harmonious
spirit; its quality is diffused through his work.
For nature in the plays is always subordinate to
the unfolding of character through action, but is so
clearly limned, so constantly in view, so much and
so significantly a part of the complete impression
which conveys not only a drama but its setting and
atmosphere, that it must have had large space in
the poet's spiritual life.
62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
There are touches of Warwickshire in all Shake
speare's work: in "The Winter's Tale" the flowers
of Warwickshire are woven together in one of the
most exquisite calendars of season and blossom in
the whole range of poetry ; in " As You Like It "
the depths and hollows and long stretches of shade
of the old Forest of Arden rise before the imagina
tion ; in " A Midsummer Night's Dream " there are
bits of landscape which are now in fairyland, but
were once good solid Warwickshire soil. The valley
of the Tweed and the mountains about the Scotch
lakes form a natural background for Scott's poetry ;
the Ayrshire landscape rises into view again and
again in the verse of Burns; the lake district of
Cumberland, with its mists and multitudinous voices
of hidden streams, lies behind Wordsworth's verse.
In like manner, Warwickshire lies always in the
background of Shakespeare's mind, and gives form,
quality, and colour to the landscape of his poetry.
Unless dramatic necessity imposes catastrophic
effects upon him, as in "Lear" and "Macbeth,"
Shakespeare's landscape is reposeful, touched with
ripe and tender beauty, happily balanced between
extremes in temperature, happily poised between
austerity and prodigality in beauty. Its loveliness
has more solidity and substance than that which the
New England poets loved so well, and the fragrance
of which, as delicate as that of the arbutus, they have
caught and preserved ; while, on the other hand, it
has not the voluptuous note, the beguiling and pas-
THK PATH FROM THE FOREST OF ARDEN TO STRATFORD.
A typical English foot-path through the meadows, with hedges of hawthorn on either
side. These paths are sometimes reached by a stile, as in this case, and sometimes
by a kissing-gate.
64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sionate sensuousness, of the Italian landscape. The
beauty of the country in which Rosalind wanders
and Jacques meditates is more harmonious with
man's spiritual fortunes and less sympathetic with
his passion than that in which Romeo and Juliet
live out the brief and ardent drama of that young
love which sees nothing in the world save the
reflection of itself. The landscape of the Forest of
Arden knows all the changes of the season, and
bends the most obsequious courtier to its condi
tions; it has a quiet and pervasive charm for the
senses,. but its deepest appeal is to the imagination;
there is in it a noble reticence and restraint which
exact much before it surrenders its ultimate loveli
ness, and in its surrender it reinvigorates instead of
relaxing and debilitating. Its beauty is as much a
matter of structure as of form ; as much a matter
of atmosphere as of colour. And this is the
charm of Warwickshire.
It does not know the roll and thunder of the sea,
which Tennyson thought were more tumultuous and
resonant on the coast of Lincolnshire than any
where else in England ; it is not overlaid with the
bloom which makes Kent a garden when the hop-
vines are in flower ; it lacks that something, half
legendary and half real, which draws to Cornwall so
many lovers of the idylls of Arthur; the noble large
ness of the Somerset landscapes is not to be found
within its boundaries; but its harmonious, balanced,
and ripe loveliness is its own and is not to be found
elsewhere.
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 65
There are many points at which one feels this
characteristic charm. From Kenilworth to Strat
ford, if one goes by the way of Warwick and Charle-
cote, it is continuous. There are sweet and homely
places along the road where the houses seem to
belong to the landscape and the roses climb as if
they longed for human intercourse ; there are
THE FOREST OF ARDEN.
The remains of a large tract of forest which formerly stretched away from Stratford
on the west and north.
stretches of sward so green and deep that one is
sure Shakespeare's feet might have pressed them;
there are trees of such girth and circumference of
shade that Queen Elizabeth might have waited
under them ; there are vines and mosses and roses
everywhere ; and everywhere also there are bits of
history clinging like old growths to fallen walls, and
densely shaded hill, and stately mansion set far back
66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in noble expanse of park. Through the trees the
low square tower guides one to an ancient church
set among ancient graves, with a sweet solemnity
enfolding it in silence and peace. The fields are
richly strewn with wild flowers, and every cliff,
stone, and bit of ruined wall is hung deep with vine
and moss, as if nature could not care enough for
beauty in a country in which men care so much for
nature.
Warwick is a busy town on court and market
days, but the old-world charm is still in its streets.
Its ancient and massive gates prepare one for its
quaint and narrow streets, on which half-timbered
houses still stand; the venerable and picturesque
Leicester hospital, founded by Lord Dudley in
•1571, rising above the narrow entrance to the town,
as one approaches it from Stratford, like a custodian
of the old-time ways and men. The stream of
sightseers which pours through the Castle cannot
lessen its impressiveness, nor dull the splendour of
the ancient baronial life which invests it with peren
nial interest. The view from the plant house, with
the lovely stretch of sward to the Avon, the old-fash
ioned garden on the left, the Castle rising in mas
sive lines, the terraces bright with flowers, the
cedars of Lebanon dark in the foreground, is one of
the loveliest in England for its setting of opulent
and dignified English life.
But the view which Shakespeare must have loved
is that from the Avon below the ruined bridge,
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY
67
whose piers, crowned with foliage, rise out of the
quiet water in monumental massiveness. It was a
fortunate hour which relieved them from the every
day work of a highway for traffic and made them
tributary to its romantic interest and beauty. The
dark tower rising from the river's brink, the long,
massive front set with a multitude of shining win
dows, the gardener's cottage blossoming with roses
to the very apex of the roof, the quiet river in
< HAKLKOn K IlOfSK, FROM THE AVON.
which, on soft afternoons, all this beauty and gran
deur seem to sink into the heart of nature — this is
Warwickshire ; where nature, legend, and history
commingle in full and immemorial stream to nour
ish and enrich an ancient and beautiful landscape.
Warwick Castle is a type of the great baronial
home ; Charlecote belongs to another and more
gracious order of architecture. It is a stately
68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
house, with the characteristic environment of a
great English estate — the long reaches of park-like
country, the fine approaches, the herd of mottled
deer feeding at a distance with that intent alertness
which shows that these shy creatures are at home
only in the deep woods. No lover of Shakespeare
can look at Charlecote or think of it without a vision
of these wild creatures grazing at high noon under
the shade of wide-spreading oaks, or stealing like
phantoms through the soft moonlight. Such a one
has no curiosity about the present ownership or
occupancy of the house ; there lived, nearly three
centuries ago, and there will always live, the immor
tal Justice Shallow. The great gates open upon
one of the loveliest roads ; opposite is the tumble
down stile, a curiosity in itself, but concerning
whose Shakespearean associations one must not
inquire too closely. The house dates back to the
year 1558, and the noble oaks, chestnuts, limes, and
elms which stand in great groups or in isolated
beauty in the park must have a still older date. In
its long, rambling structure the architecture of Eliz
abeth's time is preserved in spite of later changes.
It must be seen from the Avon if its spacious struc
ture and rich setting are to be discerned ; from the
highway it is stately and dignified, but it is not
beautiful. As one approaches it on the quiet river
it discloses itself as part of the landscape. Octago
nal towers, turrets, oriel window and belfry; the
mellow red of long-standing walls relieved by great
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 69
masses of green ; the walled terrace with great urns
which in the blossoming season are overflowing foun
tains of colour ; the quiet loveliness of the terraced
ground from the river to the house ; the broad steps
which make the Avon companionable and approach
able ; the dignity, seclusion, and stately beauty of
the landscape of which the house seems the focal
point — all these separable features sink into the
mind and leave a single rich, harmonious impres
sion of noble and characteristic English life. A
herd of deer feeding under the trees looks up star
tled and seems to melt into the deeper wood : the
river has the placidity of a stream which has never
been awakened by the clamour of trade, although
it turns a wheel here and there in its winding
course ; the note of a hidden waterfall penetrates
the silence and deepens it.
The Avon knows no gentler landscape than that
through which it passes as it glides out of the
shadow of Hampton Lucy bridge, an old mill close
at hand and a waterfall not far distant. On a sum
mer day, when the grain is ripening in the fields, it
would not be easy to find a more charming epitome
of rural England: the gray church tower rising
above a noble group of elms ; the little village
gathered about it as if for safety and companion
ship ; the murmur of the river as it drops into a
lower channel ; the wide sunlighted fields, with
glimpses of scarlet through the green and gold, and
the larks rising out of their hidden nests, mounting
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
swiftly until they become mere points against the
soft blue of the low sky or the white masses of
drifting cloud, hanging poised in mid-air and pour
ing out a flood of sweet,
clear, haunting notes,-
full of the sound of run™
ning water, of deep
woods where the sun
sets them aflame, and of
the great open spaces
of the meadows. No
other bird has a note
THE ROAD TO HAMPTON LUCY.
so jubilant with the unspent freshness of nature; a
sound in which there is no pathos of human need
or sorrow, but the overflowing joyousness of that
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 71
world in which the deep springs are fed and the
roots of flowers nourished.
Hark ! hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies ;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.
The lark's note of unforced joyousness is often
heard in Shakespeare's plays ; its buoyant music,
rising as if from inexhaustible springs, was akin to
his own fresh and effortless melody.
Between Hampton Lucy and Stratford the dis
tance is not great, but the river moves with a lei
surely indifference to time which is amply justified
by the beauty of its course. When that course lies
enfolded in green and shaded loveliness, it is doubt
ful whether any point has a more compelling charm
than the quiet graveyard where Holy Trinity keeps
watch and ward over its ancient dead. On a
moonlit night there is enchantment in the place ;
the moment one leaves the street and enters the
arching avenue of limes, the England of to-day
becomes the England of long ago. The spire of
the church, rising above the trees, seeming to bring
into more striking relief the long, narrow, dark
nave ; the graves, grass-grown and so much a part
of the place that they suggest the common mortal
ity of the race rather than solitary death or individ
ual loss ; the level common across the river, which
72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
nightingales love when the bloom of May is on the
hedges ; the deep shadows in which the river loses
itself as one looks toward the mill, and the dark
outlines and twinkling lights as one turns toward
the village : all these aspects of the place, under the
spell of one great memory, touch the imagination
and make it aware of a brooding presence which,
although withdrawn from sight, still loves and
haunts this place of quiet meditation and of a
beauty in which joy and pathos are deeply harmo
nized. Apart from the sentiment which the place
of Shakespeare's burial must inevitably evoke, there
is that in the scene itself which interprets Shake
speare's spirit and makes his genius more near and
companionable.
On such a night one turns instinctively toward
Shottery with the feeling that the poet must have
taken the same course on many another night as
silent and fragrant. The old foot-path is readily
found, and the meadows on either side are sleeping
as gently in the soft, diffused light of the mid-sum
mer night as when the poet saw them in his youth.
The little hamlet, a mile to the eastward, is soon
reached, and the cottage in which Anne Hathaway
spent her girlhood is so well impressed on the
memory of the English-reading world that it is
recognizable at a glance. The elms rise over it as
if to protect it from the harsh approaches of wind
and storm; it is so embosomed in vines that it
seems to be part of the old-time garden whose
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 73
flowers bloom to the very stepping-stones of en
trance. Its thatched roof, timbered walls, and pro
jecting eaves have preserved its ancient aspect ; and
the story of its age is told still more distinctly in
its low and blackened ceilings, its stone floors, its
broad hearth and capacious chimney-seats.
THE "BANK WHERE THE WILD THYME BLOWS."
This bank is not far from Shottery, and is the only place near Stratford where the
wild thyme is found.
To the west and north of Stratford the Forest
of Arden once covered a great stretch of territory,
and traces of its noble beauty are still to be dis
cerned in the trees which spread a deep shade
over hollow and hillside as one rambles across the
Welcombe hills. In the distance the clustered
74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
chimneys of Charlecote are seen, and the ridge
where the battle of Edge Hill was fought. The
Forest of Arden has been a place of refuge for
the imagination ever since the time when, by the
alembic of Shakespeare's genius, it was transferred
from Warwickshire to that world in which time
does not run nor age wither; enough remains of
ancient tree and shadowy silence to make its noble
beauty credible. The foot-path brings one past the
gates of Clopton — a spacious and dignified house,
with a charming outlook, fine old gardens, some
very' interesting pictures, a rich heritage of ghost
stones, and a generous host. The stone effigies
of the Cloptons now fill the ancient pew in Holy
Trinity, but they were long the foremost family
at Stratford, men of force and benefactors of the
town. Sir Hugh Clopton, who built the bridge
over the Avon, and rebuilt the Guild Chapel, be
came Lord Mayor of London ; and others who
bore the name honoured it. In the tower of the
Guild Chapel there is a quaint recital of the vir
tues and generosity of Sir Hugh : " This monu
mental table was erected A.D. 1708, at the request
of the Corporation (by Sir John Clopton, of Clop
ton, Knt, their Recorder), in memory of Sir Hugh
Clopton, Knt. (a younger branch of yt ancient
family), whose pious works were so many and
great, they ought to be had in everlasting remem
brance, especially by this town and parish, to which
he was a particular benefactor, where he gave ^"100
SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY 75
to poor housekeepers and 100 marks to twenty
poor maidens of good name and fame, to be paid
at their marriages. He built ye stone bridge over
Avon, with ye causey at ye west end ; farther mani
festing his piety to God, and love to this place of
his nativity, as ye centurion in ye Gospel did to
ye Jewish Nation and Religion, by building them
a Synagogue ; for at his sole charge, this beautiful
Chappel of ye Holy Trinity was rebuilt, temp H.
VII, and ye Cross He of ye parish Church. He
gave ^50 to ye repairing bridges and highways
within 10 miles of this town." Then follows a
recital of a number of benefactions to London
and other parts of the country, closing with the
words: "This charatable Gent died a Bachelr 15
Sept. 1496, and was buried in Saint Margaret's
Church, Lothbury, London."
In this country Shakespeare's young imagination
was unfolded ; against this background of tender
and pervasive beauty he came to consciousness,
not, perhaps, of the quality and range of his genius,
but of the nobility of form and loveliness of colour
against which the comedy and tragedy of human
life are set as upon a divinely ordered stage.
CHAPTER IV
MARRIAGE AND LONDON
THERE are traditions but no records of the
period between 1577, when Shakespeare's school
life ended, and the year 1586, when he left Strat
ford. In this age, when all events, significant and
insignificant, are reported ; when biography has
assumed proportions which are often out of all
relation to the importance or interest of those
whose careers are described with microscopic de
tail ; when men of letters, especially, are urged to
produce and publish with the greatest rapidity,
are photographed, studied, described, and charac
terized with journalistic energy and industry, and
often with journalistic indifference to perspective ;
and when every paragraph from the pen of a suc
cessful writer is guarded from the purloiner and
protected from plagiarist by laws and penalties,
it seems incredible that so little, relatively, should
be known about the daily life, the working rela
tions, the intimate associations, the habits and
artistic training, of the greatest of English poets.
And this absence of biographic material on a
scale which would seem adequate from the modern
point of view has furnished, not the ground — for
76
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 77
the word ground implies a certain solidity or basis
of fact — but the occasion, of many curious specu
lations and of some radical scepticism. Absence
of the historical sense has often led the rash and
uncritical to read into past times the spirit and
thought of the present, and to interpret the con
ditions of an earlier age in the light of existing
conditions. Taking into account the habits of
Shakespeare's time; the condition of life into
which he was born ; the fact that he was not
a writer of dramas to be read, but of plays to be
acted, and that, in his own thought and in the
thought of his contemporaries, he was a playwright
who lived by writing for the stage and not a
poet who appealed to a reading public and was
eager for literary reputation ; recalling the inferior
position which actors occupied in society, and the
bohemian atmosphere in which all men who were
connected with the stage lived, it is surprising,
not that we know so little, but that we know so
much, about Shakespeare.
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has covered this ground
with admirable clearness and precision : " In this
aspect the great dramatist participates in the fate
of most of his literary contemporaries, for if a col
lection of the known facts relating to all of them
were tabularly arranged, it would be found that
the number of the ascertained particulars of his
life reached at least the average. At the present
day, with biography carried to a wasteful and
78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ridiculous excess, and Shakespeare the idol not
merely of a nation but of the educated world, it
is difficult to realize a period when no interest
was taken in the events in the lives of authors,
and when the great poet himself, notwithstanding
the immense popularity of some of his works, was
held in no general reverence. It must be borne
in mind that actors then occupied an inferior posi
tion in society, and that in many quarters even
the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered
scarcely respectable. The intelligent appreciation
of genius by individuals was not sufficient to neu
tralize in these matters the effect of public opinion
and the animosity of the religious world, — all cir
cumstances thus uniting to banish general interest-
in the history of persons connected in any way
\vith the stage. This biographical indifference
continued for many years, and long before the
season arrived for a real curiosity to be taken in
the subject, the records from which alone a satis
factory memoir could have been constructed had
disappeared. At the time of Shakespeare's decease,
non-political correspondence was rarely preserved,
elaborate diaries were not the fashion, and no one,
excepting in semi-apocryphal collections of jests,
thought it worth while to record many of the say
ings and doings, or to delineate at any length the
characters, of actors and dramatists, so that it is
generally by the merest accident that particulars
of interest respecting them have been recovered."
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 79
History, tradition, contemporary judgments scat
tered through a wide range of books and succeeded
by a " Centurie of Prayse," the fruits of the critical
scholarship of the last half-century, the Record in
the Stationers' Register taken in connection with
the dates of the first representations of the different
plays ; and, finally, the study of Shakespeare's work
as a whole, have, however, gone a long way toward
THK PATH TO SHOTTERY.
Kissing-gate in foreground.
making good the absence of voluminous biographic
material. Enough remains to make the story of
the poet's career connected and intelligible, the
record of his growth as an artist clear and deeply
significant, and the history of his spiritual develop
ment legible and of absorbing interest.
The kind of occupation which fell to Shake
speare's hands during the five years of his adoles-
80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
cence between 1577 and 1582 is a matter of minor
interest ; the education of sense and imagination
which he received during that impressionable
period is a matter of supreme interest. That he
early formed the habit of exact observation his
work shows in places innumerable. No detail of
natural life escaped him ; the plays are not only
saturated with the spirit of nature, but they are
accurate calendars of natural events and phenom
ena ; they abound in the most exact descriptions
of those details of landscape, flora, and animal life
which a writer must learn at first hand and which
he can learn only when the eye is in the highest
degree sensitive and the imagination in the highest
degree responsive. A boy of Shakespeare's genius
and situation would have mastered almost uncon
sciously the large and thorough knowledge of trees,
flowers, birds, dogs, and horses which his work
shows. Such a boy sees, feels, and remembers
everything which in any way relates itself to his
growing mind. The Warwickshire landscape be
came, by the unconscious process of living in its
heart, a part of his memory, the background of his
conscious life. He knew it passively in number
less walks, loiterings, solitary rambles ; and he
knew it actively, for there is every reason to believe
that he participated in the sports of his time, and
saw fields and woods and remote bits of landscape
as one sees them in hunting, coursing, and fishing.
He was in a farming country, and his kin on both
MARRIAGE AND LONDON
8l
sides were landowners or farmers ; he had oppor
tunities to become acquainted not only with the
country, but with the habits of the birds and ani
mals that lived in it.
He loved action as well as meditation, and his
life was marvellously well poised when one recalls
what perilous stuff of thought, passion, and imagi
nation were
in him. It
was perhaps
through phys
ical activity
that he worked
off the fer
ment of ado
lescence, and
went through
the storm-and-
stress period without serious excess or mistake of
direction. Sport would have furnished a natural
outlet for such a nature as his at a time when self-
expression in some form was inevitable ; and the
spirit of sport, once aroused in a youth of ardent
temperament, was not careful of the arbitrary lines
which property draws across the landscape. To
the sportsman the countryside is one unbroken
field.
There may have been, therefore, some basis of
fact for the tradition which has long affirmed that
an unsuccessful poaching adventure in Charlecote
THE BOAR AT CHARLECOTE GATE.
82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Park led to the poet's departure from Stratford.
This story was told succinctly by Rowe nearly
a century after Shakespeare's death. " He had,
by a misfortune common enough to young fellows,
fallen into ill company, and, among them, some,
that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing,
engaged him with them more than once in robbing
a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of
Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prose
cuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat
too severely ; and, in order to revenge that ill-
usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though
this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost,
yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it
redoubled the prosecution against him to that
degree that he was obliged to leave his business
and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in
London."
Facts have come to light in late years which
seem to show that the deer-park at Charlecote was
not in existence until a much later date, and it has
been assumed by some, who are perhaps over
anxious for Shakespeare's reputation, that the
poaching story is entirely legendary. It rests
entirely on tradition ; but the tradition was per
sistent during many decades, and finds some sup
port in the fact that Justice Shallow is beyond
doubt a humorous study of the Sir Thomas Lucy
of prosecuting temper. No trace of the ballad
mentioned by Rowe remains. Poaching of this
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 83
kind, although punishable by imprisonment, was
not regarded at that time as a very serious offence
against good morals, although not without grave
provocation to landowners. Young men at the
universities were not unfrequently detected in the
same forbidden but fascinating sport. It is per
haps significant that Sir Peter Lucy, about this
\
CHARLECOTE.
As it appeared in the year 1722.
time, publicly advocated the passage of more strin
gent game laws.
The evidence is neither direct nor conclusive,
but, taken as a whole, it seems to confirm the
poaching tradition. It was, in any event, a much
more serious matter for the owner of Charlecote
than for the Stratford youth who fell into his
hands; for Justice Shallow has been accepted by
later generations as a portrait rather than a cari
cature ; and what Shakespeare left undone in the
way of satirizing the landowner against whom he
84
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
had offended, another poet of Warwickshire birth,
Walter Savage Landor, completed in his brilliant
" Citation and Examination of William Shake
speare." It ought not to be forgotten, however,
that the victim of the satirical genius of Shake
speare and Landor wrote these touching words for
the tomb of his wife in
Charlecote church :
"All the time of her
Lyfe a true and faithfull
servant of her good God ;
never detected of any
crime or vice ; in religion
most sound ; in love to
her husband most faithfull
and true. In friendship
most constant. To what
in trust was committed
to her most secret ; in
wisdom excelling ; in gov
erning her House and
bringing up of Youth in
the feare of God that did converse with her most rare
and singular ; a great maintainer of hospitality ;
greatly esteemed of her betters; misliked of none
unless the envious. When all is spoken that can
be said, a Woman so furnished and garnished with
Virtue as not to be bettered, and hardly to be
equalled of any ; as she lived most virtuously, so
she dyed most godly. Set down by him that best
SIR T. LUCY.
Monument in Charlecote Church.
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 85
did know what hath been written to be true,
Thomas Lucy."
Sir Thomas may have had the qualities which
Shakespeare imputed to him, but the likeness of
the author of this touching inscription can have
been caught only by the license of caricature in
Justice Shallow.
The poaching episode, if it has any historical
basis, probably took place in 1585, when Shake
speare had been three years married, and, although
barely twenty-one years old, was the father of three
children. Richard Hathaway, described as a " hus
bandman," was the owner of a small property at
Shottery, a mile distant from Stratford, and reached
not only by the highway but by a delightful foot
path through the fields. The thatched cottage, so
carefully preserved by the trustees of the Shake
speare properties, has doubtless suffered many
changes since 1582, but remains a picturesque
example of a farmhouse of Shakespeare's time. It
did not pass out of the hands of the Hathaway
family until about the middle of the present cen
tury, and Mrs. Baker, the custodian, who died in
1899, was a Hathaway by descent. Although
Shottery is in the parish of Stratford, no record of
Shakespeare's marriage to Anne, the daughter of
Richard Hathaway, has been found in the parish
register. In the Edgar Tower at Worcester, how
ever, a bit of parchment in the form of a marriage
bond furnishes conclusive contemporary evidence.
86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
By the terms of this bond, signed by Fulk Sandells
and John Richardson, husbandmen of Shottery,
it is affirmed that no impediment existed to the
marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hatha
way. The document is dated November 28, 1582
and the bondsmen make themselves responsible ir_
the sum of forty pounds in case any impediment
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE.
The living-room: Mrs. Baker, the custodian, who died in 1899, a member of the
Hathaway family, by the fireplace.
should be disclosed subsequently. The bond
stipulates that the friends of the bride shall
consent to her marriage, and, in that event, the
customary reading of banns in church may be
dispensed with and the marriage take place at
once.
In any one of the three parishes within the
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 87
diocese in which the contracting parties lived
the marriage might have taken place. The regis
ters of two of the parishes have been searched
without result ; the register of the third parish
disappeared at the time of the fire which de
stroyed the church at Luddington in which it
was kept. Marriage bonds were not uncommon
in Shakespeare's time, but they were not often
entered into by persons in Shakespeare's posi
tion ; the process was more expensive and com
plicated than the " asking of the banns," but it
offered one advantage : it shortened the time
within which the ceremony might take place. The
bridegroom in this case was a minor by three
years, and the formal assent of his parents ought
to have been secured ; the bond, however, stipulates
only that the friends of the bride shall give their
consent.
In such bonds the name of the groom or of his
father usually appears ; in this case no member
of Shakespeare's family is named ; the two bonds
men were not only residents of Shottery, but
one of them is described in the will of the bride's
father as " my trustie friende and neighbour." The
circumstances seem to suggest that the marriage
was secured, or at least hastened, by the family of
the bride ; and this surmise finds its possible con
firmation in the fact that the marriage took place
about the time of the execution of the bond on
November 28, 1582, while the poet's first child, his
88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
daughter Susannah, was christened in Holy Trinity,
at Stratford, on the 26th day of May, 1583. It has
been suggested on high authority that a formal
betrothal, of the kind which had the moral weight
of marriage, had taken place. The absence of any
reference to the groom's family in the marriage
bond makes this doubtful. These are the facts so
far as they have been discovered ; it ought to be
remembered, as part of the history of this episode
in Shakespeare's life, that he was a boy of eighteen
at the time of his marriage, and that Anne Hatha
way was eight years his senior.
That he was an ardent and eloquent lover it is
impossible to doubt ; the tradition that he was an
unhappy husband is based entirely on the assump
tion that, while his family remained in Stratford,
for twelve years he was almost continuously absent
in London, and that he seems to speak with deep
feeling about the disastrous effects of too great
intimacy before marriage, and of the importance of
a woman's marrying a man older than herself:
... let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.
This is, however, pure inference, and it is perilous
to draw inferences of this kind from phrases which
a dramatist puts into the mouths of men and
women who are interpreting, not their author's con
victions and feelings, but a phase of character, a
profound human experience, or the play of that
MARRIAGE AND LONDON
89
irony which every play
wright from ^Eschylus to
Ibsen has felt deeply.
The dramatist reveals his
personality as distinctly
as does the lyric poet, but
not in the same way.
Shakespeare's view of life,
his conception of human
d e s t i n y, his attitude
toward society, his ideals
of character, are to be
found, not in detached
passages framed and col
oured by dramatic neces
sities, but in the large and
consistent conception of
life which underlies the
entire body of his work ;
in the justice and sanity
with which the external
deed is bound to the in
ward impulse and the visi
ble penalty developed out
of the invisible sin ; in the
breadth of outlook upon
human experience, the
sanity and balance of
judgment, the clarity and
sweetness of temper which
A VIEW OF WARWICK IN
SHAKESPEARE'S TIME.
From an old print.
90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
kept an imagination always brooding over the tragic
possibilities of experience, and haunted by all man
ner of awful shapes of sin, misery, and madness,
poised in health, vigour, and radiant serenity.
It is perilous to draw any inference as to the
happiness or unhappiness which came into Shake
speare's life with his rash marriage. It is true that
he spent many years in London ; but when he had
been there only eleven years, and was still a young
man, he secured a home for himself in Stratford.
He became a resident of his native place when he
was still in middle life ; there is evidence that his
interest in Stratford and his communication with it
were never interrupted ; that his care not only for his
family but for his father was watchful and efficient;
there is no reason to doubt that, taking into account
the difficulties and expense of travel, his visits to
his home were frequent ; there is no evidence that
his family was not with him at times in London.
In this aspect of his life, as in many others, absence
of detailed and trustworthy information furnishes
no ground for inferences unfavourable to his happi
ness or his integrity.
The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's leaving
Stratford is a matter of minor importance ; the
poaching episode may have hastened it, but could
hardly have determined a career so full of the
power of self-direction. Sooner or later he must
have gone to London, for London was the one
place in England which could afford him the oppor-
Copyright, 1899, by A. W. Elson & Co., Boston
IN THE GARDEN OF ANNE HATHA WAY'S COTTAGE.
The figure in the foreground is the late custodian, Mrs. Baker.
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 91
tunity which his genius demanded. It cannot
be doubted that through all the ferment and spirit
ual unrest through which such a spirit as his must
have gone — that searching and illuminating experi
ence which is appointed to every great creative
nature — his mind had moved uncertainly but
inevitably toward the theatre as the sphere for the
expression of the rich and passionate life steadily
deepening and rising within him. The atmosphere
and temper of his time, the growing spirit of nation
ality, the stories upon which his imagination had
been fed from earliest childhood, the men whom he
knew, the instinct and impulse of his own nature —
these things determined his career, and, far more
insistently than any outward circumstance or hap
pening, drew him to London.
His daughter Susannah was born in May, 1583;
in February, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet and
Judith, were baptized. He had assumed the grav
est responsibilities, and there is no reason to doubt
that he felt their full weight. Stratford offered him
nothing which would have been anything more than
drudgery to such a nature as his. To London, there
fore, in 1586 he made his way in search of work and
opportunity.
There were two well-established routes to Lon
don in that day of few, bad, and dangerous roads ;
one ran through Banbury and Aylesbury, and the
other, which lay a little farther to the west and was
a little longer, ran through Oxford and High
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Wycombe. The journey was made in the saddle or
on foot; there were no other methods of travel.
Goods of all kinds were carried by packhorses;
THE CROWN INN, OXFORD.
Where, according to tradition, Shakespeare lodged on his way to London. From an old
print. This inn has entirely disappeared.
wagons were very rude and very rare ; it was fifty
years later before vehicles began to run regularly
as public conveyances. If Shakespeare, after the
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 93
custom of the time, bought a horse for the occasion,
he probably sold it, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps sug
gests, on reaching Smithfield, to James Burbage,
who was a livery-man in that neighbourhood — the
father of the famous actor Richard Burbage, with
whom the poet was afterwards thrown in intimate
relations. It was the custom among men of small
means to buy horses for a journey, and sell them
when the journey was accomplished. Tradition
has long affirmed that Shakespeare habitually used
the route which ran through Oxford and High
Wycombe. The Crown Inn, which stood near
Carfax, in Oxford, was the centre of many associa
tions, real or imaginary, with Shakespeare's jour
neys from the Capital to his home in New Place.
The beautiful university city was even then ven
erable with years and thronged with students.
Shakespeare's infinite wit and marvellous charm,
to which there are many contemporary testimonies,
made him later a welcome companion in one of the
most brilliant groups of men in the history of litera
ture. The spell of Oxford must have been upon
him, and volumes of biography might well be ex
changed for a brief account of one evening in the
commons room of some college when the greatest
and most companionable of English men of genius
was the guest of scholars who shared with him
the liberating power of the new age ; for Shake
speare was loved by men of gentle breeding and of
ripest culture.
94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Dickens once said that if he sat in a room five
minutes, without consciously taking note of his
surroundings, he found himself able, by the instinc-
THE ZOUST PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Now in the possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye of the Grange, Wakefield.
tive action of his mind, to describe the furnishing
of the room to the smallest detail. This faculty of
what may be called instinctive observation Shake-
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 95
speare possessed in rare degree ; he saw everything
when he seemed to be seeing nothing. It is not
impossible that, as Aubrey declares, " he happened
to take the humour of the constable in ' Midsum
mer Night's Dream ' in a little town near Oxford."
There is no constable in Shakespeare's single fairy-
play, and Aubrey was probably thinking of Dog
berry or Verges. Shakespeare was constantly
" taking the humour " of men and women wherever
he found himself, and although Oxford is connected
with his life only by a faint tradition, it may have
furnished him with more than one sketch which he
later developed into a figure full of reality and sub
stance. It would have been quite in keeping with
the breadth and freedom of his genius to find a
clown in Oxford more interesting than some of the
scholars he met ; for clowns occasionally have some
touch of individuality, some glimmer of humour,
while scholars are sometimes found without flavour,
pungency, or originality. Shakespeare's principle
of selection in dealing with men was always vital ;
he put his hand unerringly on significant persons.
In 1586 he reached London, without means, in
search of a vocation and a place in which to exer
cise it. The time was fortunate, and cooperated
with him in ways which he did not, then or later,
understand ; for, however clearly a man may com
prehend his gift and master his tools, he is too
much a part of his age to discern his spiritual
relations to it as these are later disclosed in the
96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
subtle channels through which it inspires and
vitalizes him, and he in turn expresses, interprets,
and affects it.
To the youth from the little village on the Avon,
London was a great and splendid city; but the
vast metropolis of to-day, with a population of
more than five million people, was then a town of
about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants.
The great fire which was to change it from a
mediaeval to a modern city was almost a century
distant ; and the spire of old St. Paul's was seen,
as one approached, rising over masses of red-roofed,
many-gabled houses, crowded into the smallest
space, and protected by walls and trenches. The
most conspicuous objects in the city were the
Tower, which rose beside the Thames as a symbol
of the personal authority of the monarch ; the
Cathedral, which served as a common centre of
community life, where the news of the day was
passed from group to group, where gossip was
freely interchanged, and servants were hired, and
debtors found immunity from arrest; and old
London Bridge, a town in itself, lined with build
ings, crowded with people, with high gate-towers
at either end, often ghastly with the heads that
had recently fallen from the block at the touch of
the executioner's axe.
The streets were narrow, irregular, overhung with
projecting signs which creaked on rusty hinges and,
in high winds, often came down on the heads of
MARRIAGE AND LONDON 97
unfortunate pedestrians. These highways were
still foul with refuse and evil odours ; within the
memory of men then living they had been entirely
unpaved. Their condition had become so noisome
and dangerous fifty years earlier that Henry VIII.
began the work of paving the principal thorough
fares. Round stones were used for this purpose,
and were put in position as they came to hand,
without reference to form, size, or regularity of sur
face. Walking and riding were, in consequence,
equally disagreeable. The thoroughfares were
beaten into dust in summer and hollowed out into
pools in winter ; a ditch, picturesquely called " the
kennel," ran through the road and served as a
gutter. Into these running streams, fed with the
refuse which now goes through the sewers, horses
splashed and pedestrians often slipped. The narrow
passage for foot-passengers was overcrowded, and
every one sought the space farthest away from the
hurrying pedestrians and litter-carriers and reckless
riders. Two centuries later Dr. Johnson divided
the inhabitants of London into two classes — the
peaceable and the quarrelsome, or those who " gave
the wall " and those who took it. To add to the
discomfort, great water-spouts gathered the showers
as they fell on the roofs of houses and shops, and
discharged them in concentrated form on the heads
of passers-by.
The London of that day was the relatively small
and densely populated area in the heart of the
98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
modern metropolis which is known as the City.
Its centre was St. Paul's Cathedral ; and Eastcheap,
which Falstaff loved so well, was a typical thorough
fare. A labyrinth of foul alleys and dingy, noisome
courts covered the space now penetrated by the
most crowded streets. Outside the limits of the
town stretched lonely, neglected fields, dangerous
at night by reason of footpads and all manner of
lawless persons, in an age when streets were un-
lighted and police unknown. St. Pancras, sur
rounded by its quiet fields, was a lonely place with
extensive rural views in all directions. Westmin
ster was separated from the city by a long stretch
of country known later as the Downs ; cows grazed
in Gray's Inn Fields.
The Thames was the principal thoroughfare be
tween London and Westminster, and was gay with
barges and boats of every kind, and noisy with the
cries and oaths of hundreds of watermen. The
vocabulary of profanity and vituperation was nowhere
richer ; every boat's load on its way up or down the
stream abused every other boat's load in passing;
the shouts "Eastward Ho!" or "Westward Ho!"
were deafening.
In 1586 London was responding to the impetus
which rapidly increasing trade had given the whole
country, and was fast outgrowing its ancient limits.
Neither the Tudor nor the Stuart sovereigns looked
with favour on the growth of the power of a com
munity which was never lacking in the indepen-
MARRIAGE AND LONDON
99
dence which comes from civic courage and civic
wealth. James I. said, with characteristic pedantry,
that " the growth of the capital resembleth that of
the head of a rickety child, in which an excessive
OLD LONDON BRIDGE.
From an old print.
influx of humours draweth and impoverisheth the
extremities, and at the same time generateth dis
temper in the overloaded parts." The instinct
which warned the father of Charles I. against the
growth of London was sound, as the instincts of
100 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
James often were ; but there was no power within
reach of the sovereign .which could check the growth
of the great city of the future. That growth was
part of the expansion of England ; one evidence of
that rising tide of racial vitality which was to carry
the English spirit, genius, and activity to the ends
of the earth.
CHAPTER V
THE LONDON STAGE
A YOUTH of Shakespeare's genius and charm of
nature needed only a bit of earth on which to put
his foot in the arena of struggle which London was
in that day, and still is, in order to make his way to
a secure position. That bit of ground from which
he could push his fortunes forward was probably
afforded by his friendship with Richard Field, a
Stratford boy who had bound himself, after the
custom of the time, to Thomas Vautrollier, a printer
and publisher in Blackfriars, not far from the two
theatres then in existence, The Theatre and The
Curtain. Richard was the son of " Henry ffelde of
Stratford uppon Aven in the countye of Warwick,
tanner," a friend of John Shakespeare. Young
Field, who had recently ended his apprenticeship,
came into the possession of the business by mar
riage about this time, and his name will always be
kept in memory because his imprint appears on the
earliest of Shakespeare's publications, the " Venus
and Adonis," which was first issued in 1593 and
reissued in 1594 and 1596; and on the title-page of
' The Rape of Lucrece " in 1594. The relation of
this printer and his predecessor to the poet was
101
102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
intimate in the true sense of the word : Field not
only gave to the world Shakespeare's earliest poems,
but brought out several books which deeply influ
enced the young poet ; in 1589 he printed Putten-
ham's " Arte of English Poesie " and fifteen books
of Ovid's " Metamorphoses " ; and he brought out
at least five editions of North's translation of Plu
tarch's "Lives," that "pasturage of noble minds,"
upon which Shakespeare must have fastened with
avidity, so completely did his imagination penetrate
and possess Plutarch's great stories.
The theory that Shakespeare worked for a time
in the printing establishment is pure surmise;
there is not even tradition to support it. Friend
ship with James Burbage, one of the leading actors
of the day, with whom Shakespeare became inti
mately associated, has been taken for granted on the
assumption that Burbage was a man of Stratford
birth ; and on the same ground it has been assumed
that he knew John Heminge, who became at a later
time his associate and friend ; it is improbable,
however, that either of these successful actors was a
native of Warwickshire. Nor is there good ground
for the surmise that the poet began his career as a
lawyer's clerk ; his knowledge of legal terms, con
siderable as it was, is more reasonably accounted
for on other grounds.
Tradition is doubtless to be -trusted when it con
nects Shakespeare from the beginning of his career
with the profession which he was later not only to
THE LONDON STAGE 103
follow with notable practical success, but to prac
tise with the insight and skill of the artist. His
mastery of the mechanism of the play as • well as
of its poetic resources was so complete that his
apprenticeship must have begun at once. Assum
ing that he connected himself with the theatre at
the very start, that period of preparation was amaz
ingly brief. It is highly probable that the stories
which associate him with the theatre in the hum
blest way are true in substance if not in detail. The
best known of these is that which declares that
he began by holding, during the performances, the
horses of those who rode to the theatres. It was
the custom of men of fashion to ride ; Shakespeare
lived in the near neighbourhood of both theatres;
and James Burbage, the father of Shakespeare's
friend the actor, was not only the owner of The
Theatre, but of a livery stable close at hand, and
may have given him employment. This story first
appeared in print in 1753, and it was then an old
tradition. The poet was not long in finding his way
from the outside to the inside of the theatre.
If he did not attain eminence as an actor, he knew
the stage business and the management of a theatre
from first-hand knowledge, and down to the minut
est detail. No man has ever kept the theory and
the practice of an art more thoroughly in hand or in
harmony. The plays hold the first place in poetry
to-day because their literary quality and value are
supreme; they were successful in the poet's time
104 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
largely because they showed such mastery of the
business of the playwright. Shakespeare the crafts
man and Shakespeare the artist were ideal collabo
rators. Rowe's statement that " he was received into
the company then in being at first in a very mean
rank " has behind it two credible and probable tra
ditions : the story that he entered the theatre as a
mere attendant or servitor, and the story that his
first service in his profession was rendered in the
humble capacity of a call-boy. The nature of the
work he had to do at the start was of no consequence ;
what is of importance is the fact that it gave him
a foothold; henceforth he had only to climb; and
climbing, to a man of his gifts and temper, was not
toil but play.
Shakespeare began as an actor, and did not cease
to act until toward the close of his life. His success
as a playwright soon overshadowed his reputation
as an actor, but, either as actor or shareholder, he
kept in closest touch with the practical and business
side of the theatre. He was for many years a man
of great prominence and influence in what would
to-day be known as theatrical circles; and while his
success on the stage was only respectable, his suc
cess as shareholder and manager was of the most
substantial kind. It is clear that he inherited his
father's instinct for business activity, and much more
than his father's share of sound judgment and wise
management. His good sense stands out at every
stage in his mature life in striking juxtaposition with
THE LONDON STAGE 105
his immense capacity for emotion and excess both of
passion and of brooding meditation. His poise and
serenity of spirit were shown in his dealing with
practical affairs ; and his success as a man of affairs
is not only a rare fact in the history of men of gen
ius, but stood in close relation to his marvellous
sanity of nature. He steadied his spirit by resolute
and wholesome grasp of realities.
It was a rough school in which Shakespeare found
himself in the years of his apprenticeship; the pro
fession he chose, although associated in our minds,
when we recall his time, with some of the gentlest
as well as the most ardent and gifted spirits, was not
yet reputable ; the society into which he was thrown
by it was bohemian, if not worse ; and the atmos
phere in which he worked, but which he seemed not
to breathe, was full of passion, intrigue, and license.
No occupation is so open to moral peril as that
which constantly stimulates the great passions and
evokes the great emotions ; and in Shakespeare's
time the stage hardly felt the steadying force of pub
lic opinion. Lying under a social ban, it paid small
attention to the standards and tastes of serious-
minded men and women. The theatre of Shake
speare's time owed its immense productiveness to
the closeness of its relations with English life and
the English people, but that very closeness of touch
charged it with perilous forces ; the stage was the
scene of tumultuous passions, of fierce emotions
whose tidal volume and intensity swept everything
106 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
before them; of violence, cruelty, and bloodshedding.
The intense vitality which gave the age its creative
energy in statesmanship, in adventure, in organiza
tion, and in literature, showed itself in perilous
excesses of thought and conduct ; the people,
although morally sound, were coarse in speech ; the
vices of the Italian Renaissance did not seriously
taint the English people, but they were familiar on
the English stage ; the actor was not received as a
member of society; he was still a social outcast.
Under such conditions the tragic fate of Shake
speare's immediate predecessors seems almost inevi
table ; and it is a matter of surprise that Shake
speare's friends in his profession were men, on the
whole, of orderly life.
There was ground, in the atmosphere which sur
rounded the stage in Shakespeare's youth, for the
growing opposition of the Puritan element in Lon
don to the theatre ; but fortunately for the free
expression of English genius, Elizabeth was of
another mind. She, rather than her Puritan sub
jects, represented the temper and spirit of the people.
She loved the play and was the enthusiastic patron
of the player. In 1574, twelve years before Shake
speare came to London, the Queen had given a
Royal Patent, or license, empowering Lord Leices
ter's servants to " use, exercise, and occupy the art
and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Inter
ludes, Stage-plays ... as well for the recreation of
our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure,
THE LONDON STAGE
107
when we shall think good to see them." Lord
Leicester's company had appeared at Court on
many occasions ; henceforth they called themselves
" The Queen's Majesty's Poor Players." They were
given the privilege of playing, not only in Lon
don, but through
out England ; but
the plays they
presented were in
all cases to pass
under the eye of
the Master of the
Revels, and no per
formance was to
be given " in the
time of Common
Prayer, or in the
time of great and
common Plague in
our said City of
London." Such a
license was ren
dered necessary by
an Act of Parlia
ment adopted three years earlier; without it the
players might have been apprehended as vagabonds.
The Earl of Leicester's company of players bore
his name and secured their privileges through his
influence, but were not subsidized by him. Two
years after receiving the royal license, they occupied
ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER.
From a contemporary crayon sketch.
IO8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in Shoreditch the first public theatre erected in
London ; so widespread was the popular interest,
and so ripe the moment for the development of the
drama, that at the death of Elizabeth London had
no less than fifteen or eighteen playhouses. When
Shakespeare arrived on the scene, two theatres had
been built and several companies of actors regularly
organized. Choir-boys frequently gave perform
ances, and the choirs of St. Paul's, the Chapel
Royal, and the school at Westminster were organ
ized into companies, furnished players for women's
parts, and practically served as training-schools for
the stage. Of these companies, that which bore the
name of Lord Leicester soon secured a foremost
place ; became, in the time of Elizabeth's successor,
the King's Players ; included among its members
Richard Burbage, the greatest tragedian of his time,
John Heminge and Henry Condell, who laid pos
terity for all time under lasting obligations by edit
ing the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in
1623, and Augustus Phillips — all Shakespeare's
intimate and lifelong friends. With probably not
more than two exceptions, his plays were first
brought out by this company. With this company
Shakespeare cast in his fortunes soon after his
arrival in London, when it was performing in The
Theatre, with the Curtain as its only rival ; and he
kept up his connection with it until his final retire
ment to Stratford.
The first theatres were rude in structure and
THE LONDON STAGE 1 09
bore evidence of the earlier conditions under which
plays had been presented. The courtyard of the
old English inn, with its open space surrounded on
three sides by galleries, reappeared with modifica
tions in the earliest London theatres. These
structures were built of wood, and the majority of
the audience sat in the open space which is now
known as the orchestra but was then called the
THE BANKSIDE, SOUTHWARK, SHOWING THE GLOBE THEATRE.
From Visscher's "View of London," drawn in 1616.
u yard " and later the pit, under the open sky.
The Globe, which was the most famous theatre of
Shakespeare's time, and with which his own for
tunes were closely identified, was shaped like a hexa
gon ; the stage was covered, but the private boxes,
which encircled the central space or yard, were not
roofed. The Fortune, which stood in Cripplegate
and was one of the results of the great success of
the Globe, was a square of eighty feet on each side.
The stage was nearly forty-five feet in depth ; three
tiers of boxes encircled the yard. The stage stood
I 10 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
upon pillars and was protected by a roof. The
greater part of the audience sat in the " yard " and
were called " groundlings " ; those who were able to
pay a larger fee found places in the boxes or gal
leries ; the men of fashion, with the patrons of the
drama, sat on the stage itself.
The audience in the yard was made up of citi
zens of London, apprentices, grooms, boys, and a
more dissolute and boisterous element who paid
two or three pennies for admission. If it rained,
they were wet ; if the sun shone, they were warm ;
they criticised the actors and ridiculed the dandies
on the stage ; they ate and drank and occasionally
fought one another, after the fashion of the time.
They were sometimes riotous. When the air of
the yard became disagreeable, juniper was burned
to purify it. The nobles and men of fashion paid
sixpence or a shilling for a three-legged stool on
the stage. These gentlemen, who were dressed, as
a rule, in the extreme of the prevailing mode, were
scornful of the people in the yard, and often made
themselves obnoxious to the actors, with whose exits
and entrances they sometimes interfered, and upon
whose performances they made audible and often
insulting comments. There were no women on
the stage, and few, and those usually not of the best,
in the boxes.
The performances were given at three o'clock in
the afternoon, and were announced by the hoisting
of flags and the blowing of trumpets — a custom
THE LONDON STAGE III
which has been revived in our time at Bayreuth.
Playbills of a rude kind were distributed ; if a trag
edy was to be presented, these bills were printed in
red letters. In place of the modern ushers were
boys who sold tobacco, nuts, and various edibles,
without much attention to the performance or the
performers. The stage was strewn with rushes,
and partially concealed by a curtain. When the
trumpets had been blown for the third time, this
curtain was drawn aside and an actor, clad in a mantle
of black velvet and wearing a crown of bays over
a capacious wig, came forward to recite the Pro
logue. This speech was often interrupted and
sometimes ended by the violence of the "ground
lings " or the late arrival of some rakish gentleman
upon the stage. The people in the yard were, as a
rule, more respectful to the plays and players than
those on the stage.
The costumes were often rich, and the stage was
not devoid of gorgeous properties; but the scenery
was of the simplest and rudest description, and the
stage devices were elementary and transparent.
The stage was narrow, projected into the audience,
was partly rilled by spectators, and was open to
view on all sides save at the back. There were
crude representations of rocks, trees, animals, cities.
A placard on the walls of one of these wholly unde-
ceptive cities announced that it was Verona or
Athens or Rome ; the audience needed nothing
more ; a hint to the imagination was enough.
H2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
"You shall have Asia of the one side, and
Africka of the other," writes Sir Philip Sidney,
" and so many other under-kingdoms, that the
Plaier when he comes in, must ever begin with tell
ing where hee is, or else the tale will not be con
ceived. Now shall you have three Ladies walke to
gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage
to be a garden. By and by we heare newes of ship-
wracke in the same place, then wee are to blame if
we accept it not for a rocke ; ... in the meane
time two armies flie in, represented with foure
swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart
will not receive it for a pitched field ? "
Against a background so meagre, heroes rode in
on hobby-horses, and young women, whose chins
were not always as closely shaven as they might
have been, were frightened by pasteboard dragons
of the simplest devices ; and yet no one was made
ridiculous, and the disparity between the stage and
the action was not perceived ! The imagination is
more subtle than the most skilful stage carpenter,
and more vividly creative than the greatest stage
artist. " The recitation begins," wrote Emerson ;
" one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with
invitations to its own inaccessible homes."
This absence of visible scenery imposed on the
dramatist the task not only of creating the plot and
action, but the background of his play ; and much
of the most exquisite poetry in our language was
THE LONDON STAGE 113
written to set before the imagination that which the
theatre could not set before the eye. The narrow
stage with its poor devices was but the vantage-
ground from which the poet took possession of the
vast stage, invisible but accessible, of the imagina
tion of his auditors ; on that stage alone, in spite of
modern invention and skill, the plays of Shake
speare are adequately set.
The theatre was the channel through wrhich the
rising life of the people found expression, and accu
rately reflected the popular taste, feeling, and cul
ture ; it was the contemporary library, lecture-room,
and newspaper, and gave expression to what was
uppermost in the life of the time. The drama was
saturated with the spirit of the age; it was passionate,
reckless, audacious, adventurous; indifferent to tra
dition but throbbing with vitality ; full of sublimity
when a great poet was behind it, and of rant and
bluster when it came from a lesser hand ; it was
insolent, bloody, vituperative, coarse, and indecent ;
it was noble, pathetic, sweet with all tenderness and
beautiful with all purity ; there was no depth of
crime and foulness into which it did not descend ;
there was no height of character, achievement, sacri
fice, and service to which it did not climb with easy
and victorious step. At its best and its worst it
was intensely alive ; and because it was so intensely
alive it became not only the greatest expression of
English genius, but the mirror of English spiritual
and social life.
114 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" Rude as the theatre might be, all the world was
there," writes Green. " The stage was crowded
with nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens
thronged the benches in the yard below. The
rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigor
ous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy,
the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the
racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the sub
limity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors
and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over
all classes of society, the intimacy with the foulest
as well as the fairest developments of human temper,
which characterized the English stage. The new
drama represented " the very age and body of the
time, his form and pressure." The people itself
brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards.
No stage was ever so human, no poetic life so
intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of all past tradi
tions, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration,
but the people itself."
This vital relationship between the English peo
ple and the English drama explains the growing
interest in the stage during Shakespeare's career as
actor and dramatist, and the prosperity which
attended many theatrical ventures and notably his
own venture. When he joined Lord Leicester's
company at The Theatre, which stood in Shoreditch,
in the purlieus of the City, the Curtain, which was
a near neighbour, was the only rival for popular
THE LONDON STAGE 115
patronage. But these houses were not long in
possession of the field. The Rose was built on
Bankside, Southwark, not far from the tavern from
THE GLOBE THEATRE.
From a drawing in the illustrated edition of " Pennant's London," in the British Museum.
which Chaucer's pilgrims set out on their immortal
pilgrimage. To this theatre Shakespeare's com
pany ultimately removed, and it is probable that on
Il6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
its narrow stage he began to emerge from obscurity
both as an actor and a playwright. He had gone a
long way on the road to fame and fortune when
Richard Burbage built the Globe Theatre in the
neighbourhood of the Rose. Here his fortunes of
every kind touched their zenith, and, by reason of
his intimate association with its early history, the
Globe has become and is likely to remain the most
famous theatre in the annals of the English drama.
In the management of the Globe Shakespeare came
to hold a first place, with a large interest in its prof
its. It soon secured, and held until it was destroyed
by fire in 1613, the first place in the hearts of the
London public. Edward Alleyn was the greatest
actor of his time outside the company with whom
Shakespeare associated himself ; for a time the com
pany known as the Admiral's Men, with whom he
acted, combined with Shakespeare's company and
gave what must have been the most striking repre
sentations which English audiences had ever seen.
The two companies soon separated, however, and
the Fortune was built to furnish suitable accommo
dation for the Admiral's Men, of whom Alleyn was
the star; Shakespeare's company, now generally
known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, being its
chief competitor, with Richard Burbage as its lead
ing actor, supported by Heminge, Condell, Phillips,
and Shakespeare. The Blackfriars Theatre, built
by the elder Burbage on the site now occupied
by the offices of the London Times in Victoria
THE LONDON STAGE
Street, was probably not occupied by the Lord
Chamberlain's Men until the close of Shakespeare's
life in London.
Shakespeare's name appears on many lists of
principal actors in his own plays, and in at least
THE BEAR-BAITING GARDEN.
This stood near the Globe Theatre, Bankside.
two of Ben Jonson's plays ; according to Rowe,
his most notable role was that of the Ghost in
" Hamlet"; one of his brothers, in old age, remem
bered the dramatist's rendering of the part of Adam
in "As You Like It"; he is reported to have
"played some kingly parts in sport." The stage
Il8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tradition, as expressed by an actor at a later period,
declared that he "did act exceeding well." That he
was not a great actor is evident; it was fortunate for
him and for the world that his aptitude for dealing
with the theatre was sufficient to give him ease and
competence, but not enough to divert him from the
drama. His experience as actor and manager put
him in a position to do his work as poet and
dramatist. He learned stage-craft, which many
dramatists never understand ; his dramatic instinct
was reenforced by his experience as an actor.
He must have been an intelligent and careful
actor, studious of the subtleties and resources of
his art, keenly sensitive to artistic quality in voice,
intonation, gesture, and reading. His address to
the players in " Hamlet " is a classic of dramatic
criticism.
That Shakespeare kept in intimate relation with
the theatre as actor and manager until 1610 or 161 1
there is no question ; his interest as shareholder was
probably kept up until his death. In 1596, when
he had gained some reputation, he was living in
Southwark, not far from the theatres. The theatre
of the day was crude and elementary in arrange
ment, scenery, and the sense of order and taste;
but there was a vital impulse behind it ; popular
interest was deepening in the face of a rising oppo
sition ; and it offered opportunities of moderate for
tune. The companies into which actors organized
themselves were small, often numbering only eight
THE LONDON STAGE 119
persons, and rarely exceeding twelve. The men
who took the inferior and subordinate parts were
called hirelings, and were paid small fixed sums as
wages ; the actors were usually partners in the en
terprise, managing the theatres and sharing the
profits according to an accepted scale of relative
importance and value.
The modern London society season was still in
the future, but there seems to have been, even at
that early day, some easing of work and activity
during the summer months, and the various com
panies made journeys to the smaller towns. The
records show that in successive seasons Shake
speare's company visited, among other places, Ox
ford, Shrewsbury, Coventry, Dover, Bristol, Bath,
Rye, Folkestone. There is every reason to believe
that Shakespeare travelled with his company on
these tours, and that he became, in this way, per
sonally familiar with many of the localities which
are described in the plays.
The claim, more than once vigorously urged, that
Shakespeare visited Scotland with his company, and
breathed the air of Inverness, and felt the loneliness
of the Highland heaths, which gave, by their wild-
ness, a new note of strange and awful tragedy to the
fate of Macbeth, does not rest on convincing evi
dence. There is more solid ground for the belief,
advocated with persuasive force by Mr. George
Brandes, that Shakespeare travelled in Italy and
knew at first hand the background of life and land-
120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
scape against which many of his most characteristic
plays, both tragic and comic, are projected. Then
as now foreign tours were sometimes made by Eng
lish actors, and during the poet's life the best works
of the English drama were seen in France, Germany,
Holland, Denmark, and other countries ; the chief
patrons of the visiting artists being found at the
various courts.
Italy rilled a great place in the imagination of
contemporary Englishmen ; it was the birthplace of
the Renaissance, the mother of the New Learning,
the home of the young as of the older arts. Its
strange and tragic history, repeated in miniature in
the lives of many of its rulers, artists, poets, and men
of affairs, threw a spell over the young and ardent
spirit of a country just emerging into clear con
sciousness of its own spirit and power; while its
romantic charm, its prodigal and lavish self-surren
der to passion, stirred the most sensitive and gifted
Englishmen of the time to the depths. What Eu
rope is to-day, in its history, art, literature, ripeness
of landscape, and social life, to the young American,
Italy was to the young Englishman of Shakespeare's
time, and for several later generations.
Chaucer had gone to Italy for some of his most
characteristic tales; Wyatt and Surrey had learned
the poetic art at the hands of Italian singers; the
immediate predecessors of Shakespeare were deeply
touched by this searching influence, and his im
mediate successors, Webster and Cyril Tourneur
THE LONDON STAGE 121
especially, gave dramatic form to those appalling vio
lations of the most sacred laws and relations of
life which are the most perplexing aspect of the
psychology of the Renaissance ; and it was from
Italy, where his imagination was rapidly expanding
in a genial air, that the young Milton was called
home when the clouds of civil strife began to
darken the close of that great day of which Shake
speare was the master mind.
This home of beauty, history, art, romance, pas
sion, and tragedy must have had immense attractive
ness for Shakespeare, whose boyhood studies, earliest
reading, and first apprentice work as a playwright
brought him into close contact with it. Many men
of Shakespeare's acquaintance had made the jour
ney, and were constantly making it ; it was a
difficult but not a very expensive journey ; to visit
Italy must have seemed as necessary to Shakespeare,
as to visit Germany has seemed necessary to the
American student of philosophy and science, and to
visit France and the Italy of to-day to the student
of art.
Mr. Brandes bases his belief that Shakespeare
made this journey on the facts that there were, in
his time, none of those guide-books and manuals
of various kinds which spread a foreign country as
clearly before the mind of an intelligent student at
home as a map spreads it before the eye ; that, at
the time " The Merchant of Venice " appeared,
no description of the most fascinating of cities had
122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
seen the light in England ; that the familiarity with
localities, names, characteristics, architecture, man
ners, and local customs shown in " The Merchant
of Venice " and in " The Taming of the Shrew "
could have been gained only by personal acquaint
ance with the country and the people.
On the other hand, as Mr. Brandes frankly con
cedes, there are mistakes in " Romeo and Juliet," in
" The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and in " Othello "
which are not easy to reconcile with first-hand
knowledge of the localities described. It must be
remembered, too, that the poet had immense capa
city for assimilating knowledge and making it his
own ; that a social or moral fact was as full of sug
gestion to him as a bone to a naturalist ; that he
lived with men whose acquaintance with other coun
tries he was constantly drawing upon to enlarge his
own information ; and that he had access to books
which gave the freshest and most vivid descriptions
of Italian scenery, cities, and manners. Many of the
striking and accurate descriptions of localities to be
found in literature were written by men who never
set foot in the countries with which they seem to
show the utmost familiarity. One of the most
charming of American pastorals describes, with com
plete accuracy of detail as well as with the truest
feeling for atmospheric effect, a landscape which
the poet never saw. On a fortunate day he brought
into his library a man who knew no other country
so well. He faced his visitor to the north. " You
THE "BLACK BUST" OF SHAKESPEARE.
From a plaster cast of the original terra-cotta bust owned by the Garrick Club, London.
124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
are now," he said, "standing by the blacksmith's
forge and looking to the north : tell me everything
you see." The visitor closed his eyes and described
with loving minuteness a country with which he
had been intimate all his conscious life. When he
had finished, he was turned successively to the
west, the south, and the east, until his graphic vision
had surveyed and reported the distant and beautiful
world which was to furnish the background for the
poem. The process and the result are incompre
hensible to critics and students who are devoid of
imagination, but perfectly credible to all who under
stand that such an imagination as Shakespeare pos
sessed carries with it the power of seeing with the
eyes not only of the living but even of the dead.
Shakespeare may have visited Italy during the
winter of 1592 or the spring of 1593, when Lon
don was stricken with the plague and the theatres
were closed as a precaution against the spread of
the disease by contagion, but there is no direct
evidence of such a visit ; his name does not appear
on any existing list of actors who made foreign
tours. It is a fact of some significance in this con
nection that the actors who made professional
journeys to the Continent were rarely men of im
portance in their profession.
CHAPTER VI
APPRENTICESHIP
PROBABLY no conditions could have promised less
for the production of great works of art than those
which surrounded the theatre in Shakespeare's time
-conditions so unpromising that the bitter antag
onism of the Puritans is easily understood. It
remains true, nevertheless, that in their warfare
against the theatre the Puritans were not only con
tending with one of the deepest of human instincts,
but unconsciously and unavailingly setting them
selves against the freest and deepest expression of
English genius and life. The story of the growth
of the drama in the Elizabethan age furnishes a strik
ing illustration of the difficulty of discerning at any
given time the main currents of spiritual energy,
and of separating the richest and most masterful
intellectual life from the evil conditions through
which it is often compelled to work its way, and
from the corrupt accessories which sometimes sur
round it. The growth of humanity is not the
unfolding of an idea in a world of pure ideality ; it
is something deeper and more significant : it is an
outpouring of a vast energy, constantly seeking new
channels of expression and new ways of action, pain
fully striving to find a balance between its passion-
125
126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ate needs and desires and the conditions under
which it is compelled to work, and painfully adjust
ing its inner ideals and spiritual necessities to out
ward realities.
It is this endeavour to give complete play to the
force of personality, and to harmonize this incalcu
lable spiritual energy with the conditions which
limit and oppose free development, which gives the
life of every age its supreme interest and tragic sig
nificance, and which often blinds the courageous
and sincere, who are bent on immediate righteous
ness along a few lines of faith and practice, rather
than on a full and final unfolding of the human
spirit in accordance with its own needs and laws, to
the richest and most fruitful movement of contem
porary life. The attempt to destroy a new force or
form in the manifold creative energy of the human
spirit because it was at the start allied with evil con
ditions has often been made in entire honesty of pur
pose, but has been rarely successful ; for the vital
force denied one channel, finds another. The thea
tre in Shakespeare's time was a product of a very
crude and coarse but very rich life ; it served, not to
create evil conditions, but to bring those already
existing into clear light. The Puritans made the
familiar mistake of striking at the expression rather
than at the cause of social evils ; they laid a heavy
hand on a normal and inevitable activity instead of
fastening upon and stripping away the demoralizing
influences which gathered about it.
APPRENTICESHIP
127
Shakespeare came at the last hour which could
have made room for him ; twenty-five years later he
would have been denied expression, or his free and
comprehensive genius would have suffered serious
distortion. The loveliness of Milton's earlier lyrics
reflects the joyousness and freedom of the golden
age of English dramatic poetry. The Puritan tem
per was silently or noisily spreading through the
whole period of Shakespeare's career ; within twenty-
five years after his death it had closed the theatres
and was making a desperate fight for the right to
THE BANKSIDE, SOUTHWARK, SHOWING THE SWAN THEATRE.
From Visscher's " View of London,'.' drawn in 1616.
live according to conscience. Shakespeare arrived
on the stage when the great schism which was to
divide the English people had not gone beyond the
stage of growing divergence of social and religious
ideals ; there was still a united England.
The London theatres stood in suburbs which
would to-day be called slums ; when complaint was
made of the inconvenience of these outlying situa-
128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tions, it was promptly affirmed that " the remedy
is ill-conceived to brinQ^ them into London ; " in
o
regard to the regulation that performances should
not be given during prayer-time, "it may be noted
how uncomely it is for youth to run straight from
prayers to plays, from God's service to the Devil's."
The theatres had come into existence under the
most adverse conditions, but they had established
themselves because there was a genuine force
behind them. They had already touched the Eng
lish spirit with definite influences. In the reign of
Elizabeth's reactionary sister the freedom with
which the stage, the predecessor of the newspaper
as a means of spreading popular opinion and dis
cussing questions of popular interest, had spoken
had brought first more rigid censorship and finally
suppression of secular dramas throughout England.
The court and the nobles reserved the privilege of
witnessing plays in palaces and castles, but the
play was too frank, in the judgment of many, to
be allowed to speak to the people. The people
were not, however, to be denied that which the
higher classes found essential ; regulations were
eluded or disregarded, and plays were given
secretly.
When Elizabeth came to the throne, the rules
imposed on players were regulative rather than
prohibitory; for Elizabeth had no mind to put
under royal ban one of the chief means of easing
the popular feeling by giving it expression, and
APPRENTICESHIP
129
of developing true English feeling by the presenta
tion of the chief figures and the most significant
events in English history. Companies were organ
ized and licensed
under the patronage
of noblemen; theatres
were built, and the
drama became a rec
ognized form of
amusement in Lon
don. But from the
beginning the theatre
was opposed and de
nounced. Archbishop
Grindall fought it
vigorously, on the
ground that actors
were " an idle sort
of people, which had
been infamous in all
good common-
wealths," and that
the crowds which at
tended the perform
ances spread the
plague by which Lon
don was ravaged for
a number of years, and of which there was great
and well-founded dread. In spite of the Queen's
favour and of Leicester's patronage, theatres were
QUEEN ELIZABETH ENTHRONED.
From a rare old print.
130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
compelled to take refuge in the suburbs. The strug
gle between the players, backed by the Queen, and
the City authorities was long and bitter. The Cor
poration was determined to exclude players from the
City, and to prevent them from giving performances
during service hours, on holidays, or during the prev
alence of the plague. Bitter as the struggle was,
however, neither side was willing to carry it to a de
cisive issue. The Queen, who knew to a nicety how
far she could go in asserting the royal prerogatives,
had no desire to antagonize a community of grow
ing importance and power, and exceedingly jealous
of its rights and privileges ; the City had no wish
to set itself in final opposition to that which a pow
erful sovereign evidently had very much at heart.
The players ceased to give regular performances
within the City limits, but became, in consequence
of this opposition, a permanent feature of the life
of the metropolis by building permanent buildings
within easy reach of the City.
And the theatre throve in the face of an opposi
tion which ceased to be official only to become
more general and passionate. The pamphlet,
which was soon to come from the press in great
numbers and to do the work of the newspaper,
began to arraign it in no measured tones; the Puri
tan preachers were unsparing in their denuncia
tions. " It is a woful sight," said one of these
pamphleteers, " to see two hundred proud players
jet in their silks, when five hundred poor people
APPRENTICESHIP 131
starve in the streets." It does not appear to have
occurred to this critic of the play that whatever
force his statement had, weighed equally on the
court, the nobility, and the very respectable but also
very prosperous burghers who jostled the same
poor on their way to church. There is more point
in the frank oratory of a London preacher in 1586,
the year of Shakespeare's arrival in London: "Woe
is me ! the playhouses are pestered, where churches
are naked ; at the one it is not possible to get a
place, at the other void seats are plenty. When
the bell tolls to the Lecturer, the trumpets sound
to the stages."
The opposition of the City to the theatres was
later merged into the opposition of the Puritan
party ; and when that party became dominant, the
theatre was suppressed, with all other forms of
amusement and recreation which the hand of
authority could touch ; for the Puritan, bent on
immediate righteousness and looking with stern
and searching eye at present conditions, did not
discern the significance of the drama as an art, and
as an expression of the genius of the English peo
ple. With the Puritan party the vital character
and force of the English people for a time allied
themselves, and the right to live freely and accord
ing to individual conscience was finally secured ;
but, as often happens, the arts of peace, giving full
play to the spiritual life in the large sense, were
misunderstood, denied, and largely suppressed dur-
132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ing the long and bitter strife of opposing parties
and conflicting principles. The surroundings and
accessories of the theatre were open to the charges
brought against them and to the judgment which
the Puritans pronounced upon them ; but it would
have been an incalculable disaster if Puritanism
had come into power in time to thwart or chill the
free and harmonious unfolding of Shakespeare's
genius.
The evils which earnest-minded Englishmen saw
in the theatre were largely in its surroundings and
accessories ; on the stage, life was interpreted for
the most part with consistent sanity of insight and
portrayal. When the appalling vices which devas
tated the moral life of Italy during the later Renais
sance are taken into account, and the fascination of
Italian scholarship and genius are recalled, it is sur
prising that the English drama remained essentially
sound and wholesome. The English dramatists
studied the tree of the knowledge of evil, of the
fruit of which the Italians had partaken with an
appetite sharpened by a long denial of the ele
mental instincts of the body and the mind, but
they refused to eat of it. In Shakespeare's later
years and after his death, when the sky had per
ceptibly darkened, the tragic genius of Webster and
Tourneur seemed to turn instinctively to the crimes
of the Renaissance rather than to its vivacity, variety,
passionate interest in life, and vast range of spirit
ual activity ; and such dramas as " The Duchess
APPRENTICESHIP 1 33
of Malfi" and "The Atheist's Tragedy" record
the effect on the serious English mind of the
almost superhuman energy of the Renaissance
when it became an assertion of absolute individual
ism, a passionate defiance of all law, human or
divine. Italy was both the liberator and the
teacher of modern Europe ; in recovering the love
of beauty, the freedom of spirit, the large and noble
humanity of the Greek and Roman ideals, she ren
dered the modern world an incalculable service ;
but in the tremendous ferment through which she
passed, and the radical reaction against the mediae
val conceptions in which she had lived for centuries
which followed, her moral life was well-nigh sacri
ficed. The immense resources which she recov
ered for mankind, the splendour of her genius, the
range and depth of human experience which she
made her own, and which she shared with the
world in her stories and dramas, gave her an
influence on the English imagination which was not
diminished until long after Milton's time, and which
was searching and almost overwhelming when
Shakespeare began to write. The profanity, the
cruelty, the excesses of passion, the use of crime,
intrigue, and lust as dramatic motives, which re
pelled and alarmed the Puritans, were due largely
to the influence and example of the Italian drama,
and to the material furnished by the Italian novelle,
or tales of love and intrigue; but these tragic themes,
though often presented with repulsive frankness,
134
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
were almost always moralized in treatment. If the
crimes were appalling, the punishments were ade
quate ; the sin was not detached from the penalty
by the subtlety of a corrupt imagination, nor was
the deed separated from its inevitable consequences
by that dexterity, so characteristic of the Italian
Renaissance, of a mind marvellously trained but
smitten with ethical blindness. Compared with the
contemporaneous Italian and French dramas, the
early English plays show distinct moral health ;
they are more manly, virile, and wholesome. They
are often coarse ; they touch upon forbidden things
at times with evident enjoyment ; they occasionally
show an inordinate curiosity concerning unnatural
relations and offences ; but they are, as a whole,
morally sound in the exact sense of the words ; and
when the moral and intellectual conditions under
which they were produced and the social influences
which surrounded them are taken into account, they
are remarkably clean and sane.
The English language, in which strength, beauty,
and compass of expression were combined, had
become a well-defined and highly developed national
speech when Shakespeare began to use it, but was
still the language of life rather than of literature ;
its freshest and most beguiling combinations of
sound and sense were still to be made ; it was still
warm from the moulds in which it had been cast ; it
was still plastic to the touch of the imagination.
The poet had learned its most intimate familiar
APPRENTICESHIP
135
symbols of homely, domestic, daily life among the
people at Strat
ford ; he had
drunk of its
ancient classi
cal springs in
the grammar
school ; and, in
London, among
men of gift,
quality, and
knowledge of
the world, he
came quickly to
master the vo
cabulary of the
men of action,
adventure, and
affairs. The
drama as a liter
ary form was at
the same criti
cal stage ; it
was well de
fined, its main
lines were dis
tinctly marked,
but it had not
hardened into WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
/- . 1 r The J. Q. A. Ward statue, which stands at the entrance to tLc
tinal lOrmS. Mall, Central Park, New Yorb.
136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The genius of Marlowe had brought to its de
velopment the richness of diction and the imagi
native splendour of great poetry. It remained for
Shakespeare to harmonize both language and art
with the highest individual insight and gift of song,
and to blend in forms of ultimate beauty and power
the vitality of his age, the quality of his genius, a
great philosophy of life, and the freedom and flexi
bility of a language of noble compass both of
thought and music.
The stage offered both the form and the field for
a great popular literature ; a literature capacious
enough to receive and conserve the largest thought
concerning human destiny, to disclose and to employ
the finest resources of poetry, and yet to use a speech
which was part of every Englishman's memory and
experience. The drama was the one great oppor
tunity of expression which the age offered, and
Shakespeare turned to it instinctively. The meas
ure of his genius was the measure of his sensitive
ness, and his imagination ran into dramatic channels
by the spiritual gravitation of his whole nature.
It is true, the drama was not yet recognized as a form
of literature ; and in this fortunate fact lies one of
the secrets of Shakespeare's freshness and freedom ;
he wrote neither for the critics of his own time nor
for that vague but inexorable posterity which is the
final judge of the artist's work. He poured his
genius, with a sublime indifference to the verdict of
the future, into the nearest, the most capacious, and
APPRENTICESHIP 137
the most vital forms. It is doubtful if he ever differ
entiated in his own mind the different kinds of work
which fell to his hand ; he was actor, manager, and
playwright, after the fashion of his time, without
literary self-consciousness and without literary ambi
tions in the modern sense of the word ; doing his
work as if the eyes of the whole world were to read it,
but doing it for the immediate reward of crowded
audiences and the satisfaction of his own artistic con
science. Shakespeare reached London about 1586,
when he was twenty-two years old ; five years later,
in 1591, he was revising or writing plays; and in
1612 his work was done. In about twenty years
he wrote the thirty-six or thirty-seven five-act plays
which bear his name ; " Venus and Adonis," " The
Rape of Lucrece," " A Lover's Complaint," " The
Phoenix and Turtle "; the sequence of sonnets which
of themselves would have put him in the front rank
of lyric poets ; and he made important contributions
to the composite and surreptitiously printed " The
Passionate Pilgrim." There is no probability that
the date from which the indentures of his apprentice
ship to the arts of poetry and play-writing ran will
ever be known ; it is known that not later than 1591
his hand was beginning to make itself felt. The
time was prodigal of great men and great work.
Greene, who died the following year, was starving
in a garret which was in no sense traditional ; Mar
lowe met his untimely death in 1593; the final
issues of Lyly's "Euphues" were being widely read;
138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sidney's "Arcadia," which had been handed about
in manuscript, after the fashion of a time when
the publisher and the reading public were more than
a century in the future, could be read from a well-
printed page ; the first books of the " Faerie Queene"
had come out of Ireland; Sidney's " Apologie for
Poetrie," written in defence of the stage, appeared
in 1595, eight years after his death on the bloody
field of Zutphen ; Webb's " Discourse of English
Poetrie " had come to light in the year of Shake
speare's introduction to London, and Puttenham's
"Arte of English Poesie " had followed it three years
later. Criticism did not lag behind the beautiful
lyrical and rich dramatic productiveness of the age.
Men of action and men of letters were equally astir,
and the names of Spenser and Raleigh, of Drake
and Sidney, of Granville and Marlowe, were heard
on all sides among the men with whom Shakespeare
lived. The Armada was fresh in the memory of a
generation upon which a multitude of new and stim
ulating interests were playing ; life was a vast fer
ment, and literature was on such intimate terms with
experience that it became the confidant of life and
the repository of all its secrets.
That Shakespeare felt the full force of the intoxi
cating vitality of the air in which he lived cannot be
doubted ; but his first attempts at play-writing were
timid and tentative. The stages of the growth of
his mind and art are distinctly marked in the form
and substance of his work; he was in no sense a
APPRENTICESHIP
139
miracle, in no way an exception to the universal law
of growth through experience, of spiritual ripening
by the process of living, and of the development of
skill through
apprenticeship.
He had to
learn his trade
as every man
of parts had
to learn it be
fore him, and
will have to
learn it to the
end of time.
His first steps
were uncer
tain ; they did
not lead him
out of the
green room
where the
stock of plays
was kept.
These plays
were drawn
from many
sources ; they were often composite ; in many cases
individual authorship had been forgotten, if it had
ever been known ; no sense of personal proprietor
ship attached to them ; they belonged to the theatre ;
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
Engraving from the original of Sir Anthony More.
140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
many of them had been revised so many times by so
many hands that all semblance of their first forms
had disappeared ; they were constantly changed by
the actors themselves. These plays were, in some
instances, not even printed; they existed only as
unpublished manuscripts ; in many cases a play did
not exist as an entirety even in manuscript; it ex
isted only in parts with cues for the different actors.
The publication of a play was the very last thing
desired by the writer, or by the theatre to which it
was sold and to which it belonged, and every pre
caution was taken to prevent a publicity which was
harmful to the interests of author and owner. The
exclusive ownership of successful plays was a large
part of the capital of the theatres. Shorthand writ
ers often took down the speeches of actors, and in
this way plays were stolen and surreptitiously
printed ; but they were full of all manner of inac
curacies, the verse passages readily becoming prose
in the hands of unimaginative reporters, and the
method was regarded as dishonourable. Reputable
playwrights, having sold a work to a theatre, did
not regard it as available for publication.
It is easy to understand, therefore, the uncertainty
about the text of many of the Elizabethan dramas,
including that of the Shakespearian plays. Having
sold a play, the writer, as a rule, expected no further
gain from it, and was chiefly concerned to protect it
from mutilation by keeping it out of print. For this
reason most of the plays acted in the reign of Eliza-
APPRENTICESHIP 1 4 1
beth and in that of her successor are lost beyond
recovery. In order to understand Shakespeare's
attitude towards his work it is necessary to reverse
contemporary literary conditions, under which au
thors are constantly urged to publish and the sense
of individual ownership in literary work is intensi
fied by all the circumstances of the literary life.
Plays were sometime published in Shakespeare's
time by the consent of the theatres to which they
had been sold ; but the privilege was rarely applied
for. When Ben Jonson treated his plays as litera
ture by publishing them in 1616 as his "Works,"
he was ridiculed for his pretensions ; and Webster's
care to secure correctness in the printing of his trage
dies laid him open to a charge of pedantry. At a
later time the popular interest in plays for reading
purposes opened an unsuspected source of income to
play-writers, and publication became customary ; of
the thirty-seven plays commonly credited to Shake
speare, only sixteen were published during the life of
the poet, and these were probably printed without
his authorization, certainly without his revision.
There was no copyright law, and the author could
not protect himself against imperfect reproduc
tions of his own works. Shakespeare's income
came from the sale of plays and from the patron
age by the public of the theatres in which he
was interested; from every point of view he was,
therefore, averse to the publication of his dramas.
If he had set his heart on publicity, the theatre
142 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
was the most effective form of publication which
the times offered.
The prices paid for plays ranged from five to ten
pounds sterling, or from twenty-five to fifty dollars,
Ben Jonson receiving the larger sum as a minimum.
These plays, having become the absolute property
of the theatre, were treated with the utmost freedom
and were made over from time to time to suit the
popular taste; they were often the products of col
laboration between two or more authors, and the
feeling of the writer for his work was so slight that
many of the plays appeared without a name.
In The Theatre or The Rose Shakespeare found
a library of such plays which were the property, not
of their writers, but of the owners of the theatre, and
which were regarded not as literature but as the
capital of the company, to be recast, rewritten, re
vised, and made over to fit the times and suit the
audience, which was sometimes to be found at the
Palace, sometimes in the Inns of Court, and regu
larly in the rude wooden structures in which the
different groups of players had finally established
themselves. These plays drew freely upon history,
tradition, legend, and foreign romance and tale ; the
soiled and tattered manuscripts bore the visible
marks of the handling of many actors and prompt
ers, and the invisible traces of a multitude of histo
rians, poets, romancers, and dramatists whose work
had been freely and frankly drawn upon ; each suc
cessive playwright using what he needed, and dis-
APPRENTICESHIP 143
carding what seemed to him antiquated or ineffective.
When Shakespeare became familiar with this mass
of material, he found, among other themes, the story
of the fall of Troy, the death of Caesar, and various
incidents in the lives of Plutarch's men, a collection
of tales from Italy with the touch of the Boccaccian
license and gayety on them, stories of adventure
from Spanish sources, dark, half-legendary narra
tives from northern Europe, and a long list of plays
based on English history from the days of Arthur
to those of Henry VIII. and the great Cardinal.
These plays were, for the most part, without order
or art ; they were rude in structure, crude in form,
violent in expression, full of rant and excess of feel
ing and action, crowded with incident, and blood
curdling in their realistic presentation of savage
crime ; but there was immense vitality in them.
They were the raw material of literature. They
were as full of colour and as boldly contemporaneous
as a street ballad ; there was enough history in them
to make them vitally representative of English life
and character ; but the facts were handled with such
freedom as to give the widest range to the genius of
the individual playwright.
This was the material which Shakespeare found
ready to his hand when he began to feel the crea
tive impulse stirring within him ; and he used this
material as his fellow-craftsmen used it. As an
actor he knew these plays at first hand, and with a
critical comprehension of their strong and weak
144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
points. He probably mended the loose and defec
tive lines in his own roles ; all actors of any origi
nality revised their lines freely. When he became
familiar with the practical requirements of the stage,
and gained confidence in his own skill and judg
ment, he set himself to working over some of the
more popular plays which were in constant use.
This was his journey-work, and in doing it he
served his apprenticeship. The earlier plays which
bear his name are, for this reason, his only in part.
They show his touch, as yet largely untrained, but
already marvellously sure, and with something of
magic in it ; but they do not disclose the higher
qualities of his genius, nor the large and beautiful
art which he mastered after a few brief years of
apprenticeship.
While it is true that the exact order in which
Shakespeare wrote his plays is still uncertain, and
is likely to remain undetermined, there is very little
doubt regarding the general order in which they
were given to the public. Evidence both external
and internal has at length made possible a chronol
ogy of the plays which may be accepted as conclu
sive in indicating the large lines of Shakespeare's
growth in thought and art. The external evidence
is furnished by the dates of the earliest publication
of some of the plays in quarto editions, the entries
in the Register of the Stationers' Company, and the
references to the plays in contemporaneous books
and manuscripts; to these must be added allusions,
APPRENTICESHIP 145
or supposed allusions, in some of the plays to con
temporaneous conditions, events, and persons. The
internal evidence is derived from a critical study of
Shakespeare's versification ; a study which has been
sufficiently fruitful to make the application of what
is known as the metrical or verse-test possible.
The blank verse in the early plays conforms rig
idly to the rule which required a pause at the end
of each line ; in the early verse rhyming couplets
are in constant use. As the poet gained confi
dence and skill he handled his verse with increas
ing ease and freedom, expanding metrical usage,
varying the pause, discarding rhyme and introduc
ing prose ; and there is an evident tendency to
exclude the verbal conceits with which the drama
tist entertained himself in his earlier work. The
growing habit, revealed in the later plays, of ending
a line with a preposition or conjunction furnishes
material for a very minute and valuable study of
what have become known as " weak endings." All
these variations and peculiarities of style throw light
on the chronology of the plays.
The first touches of Shakespeare's hand are found
in the first part of " Henry VI., " " The Comedy of
Errors," " The Two Gentlemen of Verona," " Love's
Labor's Lost," and " Romeo and Juliet." The play
of " Titus Andronicus " is usually included among
the Shakespearian dramas, but there is little evi
dence of its Shakespearian authorship, and there
are many reasons for doubting Shakespeare's con-
146 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
nection with it. It was regarded as his work by
some of his contemporaries, and included in the
first complete edition of the plays in 1623; but
sixty years after his death, Edward Ravenscroft,
who edited the play in 1678, said: "I have been
told by some anciently conversant with the stage
that it was' not originally his, but brought by a
private author to be acted, and he only gave some
master touches to one or two of the principal parts
or characters." This tradition is probably in accord
with the fact ; the repulsiveness of the plot, the
violence of the tragic motive, and the absence of
humour from the play are essentially foreign to
Shakespeare's art and mind. He may have re
touched it here and there ; he can hardly have done
more.
And yet " Titus Andronicus," with its succession
of sanguinary scenes and massing of moral atroci
ties, may well find a place at the beginning of
Shakespeare's work, so admirably does it illustrate
the kind of tragedy which the early Elizabethan
stage presented to its auditors. The theatre was
then in what may be called its journalistic stage;
it was reserved for Marlowe and Shakespeare to
advance it to the stage of literature. It was to the
last degree sensational and sanguinary, presenting
feasts of horrors to the " groundlings," as the worst
sort of sensational journals of to-day spread before
their readers, in crudest description, the details of
the most repulsive crimes and the habits of the
APPRENTICESHIP 1 47
vilest criminals. Elizabethan audiences delighted
in bloody scenes and ranting declamation, and both
are still to be found in the sensational press, with
this difference : the early theatre reached relatively
few people, but the modern journal of the worst sort
reaches an uncounted multitude. This taste for
horrors and this exaggeration of speech were glori
fied by Marlowe's genius but remained essentially
unchanged by him ; it was left for Shakespeare's
serene and balanced spirit, deeper insight, and
larger art to discard the repulsive elements of the
tragedy without sacrificing its power. In " Lear,"
" Macbeth," " Hamlet," and " Othello " there are,
however, traces of the older drama. Shakespeare
did not wholly escape the influence of his time in
this respect. " Titus Andronicus " is not without
power, but it is too gross and redolent of the sham
bles even for Shakespeare's most immature art ; if
he touched it at all, it must have been in a purely
imitative way, and in the mere details of expression.
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST FRUITS
WHETHER touched and strengthened by Shake
speare or not, " Titus Andronicus " serves as a con
necting link between the drama as Shakespeare
found it and his own work. It is not possible to
determine the exact order in which the separate
plays in the earliest group which record his period
of apprenticeship appeared ; but of the chronology
of the group as a group there is no doubt. The
first play which found its way into print appeared
in 1597, when "Romeo and Juliet," u Richard II.,"
and " Richard III." were published; but it was not
until the following year that Shakespeare's name
appeared on the title-page of a drama. As early
as 1592, however, lines from his hand had been
heard on the stage ; and he had begun the work
of adaptation and revision still earlier. Among the
plays which Shakespeare found in the library of
The Theatre, many belonged to a class of dramas
dealing with subjects and scenes in history —
dramas which were probably more popular with
the people who sat in the yard and in the boxes
than any other plays which were presented to
them. These plays appealed to the deepest in-
148
THE FIRST FRUITS 149
stincts of men to whom the defeat of the Armada
was a matter of very recent history, and in whom
the race-consciousness was rapidly developing into
a passionate conviction of the power and greatness
of England. There was much in these plays
which appealed to the imagination as well as to
that thirst of action which was characteristic of
the time. They brought before the eye and the
mind the most commanding figures among the
earlier kings and king-makers, and the most ex
citing and dramatic incidents in the life of the
nation ; there was a basis of fact ample enough to
give the mimic representations that sense of reality
which the English mind craves, and yet there was
scope for that play of the imagination which has
kept the English from the rigidity, hardness, and
spiritual sterility which are the fruits of too great
emphasis on the bare facts of history ; there was
always that touch of tragedy which invests a drama
with dignity and nobility, and yet there was an
abundance of that humour which is the necessity
of healthy minds, because, by introducing the
normal contrasts of life, it maintains that external
balance which is essential to spiritual sanity.
These chronicle plays were, moreover, thor
oughly representative of English society; kings,
nobles, statesmen, ecclesiastics, and the lords of
war were always conspicuous in the foreground,
but in the middle and background there were those
comic or semi-comic figures in whose boastings,
150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
blunderings, wit, and coarse vitality the common
people took a perennial interest. These chronicles,
crudely dramatized, were a rich mine of materials
DROESHOUT PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
for a dramatic genius of Shakespeare's breadth and
vitality, and they must be placed, by force of the
direct and indirect service they rendered him, with
the three or four chief streams of influence which
THE FIRST FRUITS 151
fed his creative activity. Their direct service was
rendered in the material which they furnished him
so abundantly; their indirect service was rendered
in the revelation of the possibilities for dramatic
use of historical records which they made clear to
him, and which sent him, with marvellous insight,
to read the pages of Holinshed's " Chronicles " and
North's translation of Plutarch's " Lives." In the
arrangement of the thirty-seven plays according
to subject-matter and treatment, the Histories fill
a place hardly second to the Tragedies in impor
tance. The hold which these old plays had upon
the mind of the English people was immensely
deepened by Shakespeare's large and effective
handling of historical characters and situations ;
and he must be regarded as one of the prime
forces in the development of that intense and
deeply practical patriotism which knits the widely
scattered parts of the modern empire into a vital
racial unity.
It was to this rich mass of material that Shake
speare turned at the very beginning of his career
as a writer of plays. His vocation was probably
not yet clear to him; he was groping his way
toward free expression, but he did not find it in
a day. No man of genius comes to complete self-
consciousness save as the result of vital experience
and a good deal of practical experimenting with
such tools as are at hand. Shakespeare began, not
as a creator of individual works of art, but as an
152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
adapter and reviser of the work of other men, or
as a collaborator with his fellow-craftsmen. There
have been a number of instances of conspicuously
successful collaboration among dramatists ; in
Shakespeare's time, when the end in view was not
the writing of a piece of literature, but the mak
ing of a successful acting play, cooperation among
playwrights \vas customary.
The three parts of " Henry VI." register Shake
speare's earliest contact with the material afforded
by the chronicles, and illustrate both the method
of using existing material in vogue at the time and
the results of collaboration on the part of two or
three contemporary writers who combined their
various gifts in order to secure higher efficiency.
Malone came to the conclusion, after long study of
this three-part play, that out of 6043 lines 1711
were written by some author or authors preceding
Shakespeare, 2373 were modified and changed by
him, and 1899 written by his own hand. This
mathematical exactness is more impressive than
conclusive; it has this value, however: it brings
into clear view the composite character of the
play, and shows how Shakespeare learned his art.
The poet was not bent on creative work, but on
mastering the technical part of play-writing. Mar
lowe, Greene, and Peele have been credited with
participation in the authorship of the play, but the
passages assigned to them, and to an earlier drama
tist who furnished a common foundation for these
THE FIRST FRUITS
153
later playwrights, have been selected upon internal
evidence and rest upon conjecture. Shakespeare's
connection with the play is, fortunately, beyond
question ; whether he did much or little is of small
consequence so long as we have in the play the
material upon which he began to work. The
THE TOWER OF LONDON, ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
From an old print.
sources of the play are to be found in Holinshed's
" Chronicles " and Hall's " Chronicle."
The presentation of " Henry VI." in its three
parts at the Rose Theatre in the spring of 1592 was
a notable event in the history of the early London
stage. It was successful apparently, from the first
performance, and the impression which it produced
on men of intelligence is reflected in the words of
one of Shakespeare's most successful contempora
ries : " How it would have joyed brave Talbot,"
wrote Nash : " to thinke that after he had lyne two
154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
hundred yeares in his Tombe hee should triumphe
againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe
embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spec
tators at least (at severall times) who, in the
Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they
behold him fresh bleeding." It is significant that
the scenes in which Talbot appears as the leading
figure in the first part are now assigned to Shake
speare by common consent. It is as difficult to
doubt the hand of the coming master in the power
ful delineation of this great English soldier and his
sturdy son as it is to find that hand in the cheap
and coarse presentation of Joan of Arc. In the
most immature stage of his development as an
artist Shakespeare was incapable of so vulgar a
misreading of a great career; his insight would
have saved him from so gross a blunder. In the
heroic figure of Talbot the typical Englishman of
action, with his superb energy, his dauntless
courage, and his imperturbable poise, appears for
the first time on Shakespeare's stage and predicts a
long line of passionate, daring, and effective leaders.
The scene in the Temple Garden, where the red
and white roses are plucked from their fragrant
seclusion to become the symbols of contending
factions on bloody fields, is unmistakably Shake
spearian ; and so also are some of the scenes in
which Jack Cade and his mob appear.
Shakespeare's part in " Henry VI." brought him
immediate recognition. He was twenty-seven years
THE FIRST FRUITS 155
old, and had been in London six years. His com
petitors remembered that a very little time before
he had been holding horses outside the theatres or
performing the very humble duties of a call-boy.
He had come up from Stratford without influential
friends, a university education, or technical training
for play-writing, at a time when all the successful
dramatists were university-bred, scholars, wits, and
men whose social advantages, however lost or mis
used, had been considerable. A small group of
these writers were in possession of the craft and
business of supplying the stage with plays. To
men of the experience and temper of Marlowe,
Greene, Nash, Peele, and Lodge, the sudden popu
lar success of a youth with so little to aid and so
much to retard him in external conditions must
have seemed like an intrusion. They were men
of loose lives, irregular habits, and broken fortunes.
Robert Greene, the son of a well-to-do citi
zen of Norwich, was then in his forty-third year.
When he left the university in 1578, he went
abroad. " For being at the University of Cam
bridge," he wrote toward the close of his ill-spent
life, " I light among wags as lewd as myself, with
whom I consumed the flower of my youth ; who
drew me to travel into Italy and Spain, in which
places I saw and practised such villainy as is
abominable to declare." The story of his later
life, as told by himself, is pitiful in its moral
degradation. On his death-bed — friendless, de-
156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
serted, penniless, and consumed with remorse — he
wrote an appeal to his old associates, full of bitter
ness, sound advice, and malice. " A Groats-worth
of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance,"
written in 1592 after the striking success of " Henry
VI.," urges Marlowe, Peele, and Nash or Lodge to
give up vice, blasphemy, and bitterness of speech.
" Base-minded men all three of you," he writes, " if
by my misery y€ be not warned ; for unto none of
you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave — those
puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths, those
antics garnished in our colours. . . . There is an
upstart Crow, beautiful with our feathers, that with
his Tygers heart wrapt up in a players hide sup
poses he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke
verse as the best of you ; and being an absolute
Johannes factotum is, in his own conceit, the only
shake-scene in a countrie. O that I might intreate
your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable
courses : and let these Apes imitate your past
excellence and never more aquaint them with your
admired inventions."
This tirade against Shakespeare brings into
clear relief the curious blending of remorse and
jealousy which, even on his death-bed, was charac
teristic of Greene. Having wasted great talents and
an adequate opportunity, he turned, with the hand
of death upon him, with a malignant thrust upon
the young poet who was already making friends by
the charm of his temperament, as he was putting
THE FIRST FRUITS 157
new dramatic value into old and conventionally
treated material by sheer force of genius. Mr.
Symonds interprets this onslaught upon the rising
playwright in this fashion : " We, gentlemen and
scholars, have founded the Drama in England, and
have hitherto held a monopoly of the theatres.
Those puppets, antics, base grooms, buckram gen
tlemen, peasants, painted monsters — for he calls
the players by these names in succession — have
now learned, not only how to act their scenes, but
how to imitate them, and there is one among them,
Shakespeare, who will drive us all to penury."
The fight against the new order which Shake
speare represented was useless, as such fights always
are ; but Greene had very little insight into the
nature of his art and its relation to the age, and he
had already suffered one notable defeat. When he
came to London, fresh from his university studies
and his foreign travel, plays written in rhyme held
the stage and were the special delight of theatre
goers, and Greene soon developed marked skill and
facility in giving the public precisely what it liked.
When he had gained the public and felt that the
stage was practically in his hands, Marlowe brought
out the tremendous drama of " Tamburlaine,"
written in blank verse, and effected a sudden and
decisive revolution in public taste. Greene broke
out into violent abuse of dramatists who were
willing to stoop so low as to use blank verse ; and
three years before the appearance of " Henry VI.,"
158
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Nash, who had been drawn into the fight by
Greene, poured out his contempt on the " idiot art-
masters, that intrude themselves as the alchemists
of eloquence, and think to outbrave better pens
with the swell
ing bombast of
bragging blank
verse, . . . the
spacious volu
bility of a drum
ming decasylla-
bon."
It was not
long before
Greene was try
ing to make
peace with the
public by imi
tating the new
style which
Marlowe had
brought into
vogue. He
made a truce
with the author
of " Tamburlaine," and the little group of scholar-
dramatists controlled the business of play-writing.
At the moment when their hold seemed most secure,
Shakespeare appeared as a competitor. As Greene
had fought Marlowe, so he fought Shakespeare;
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.
From the picture belonging to J. A. Hope, Esq.
THE FIRST FRUITS 159
but in the case of Shakespeare there must have
been something more than professional jealousy ;
men on their death-beds, as a rule, are not con
cerned to protect from fresh competition a busi
ness in which they have lost interest; they are
often eager, however, to pay off a grudge. The
cause of Greene's hatred is to be found, probably,
in the perception of the contrast between his wild
and wasted youth and the singular promise and
sanity of Shakespeare's early career. There is
abundant evidence that there was something win
ning in the young poet's personality, as there was
something compelling in his genius. Men were
drawn to him by the irresistible attraction of his
radiant and lovable temperament, with its magical
range of sympathetic expression. Penniless, de
serted, and smitten with a remorse which tortured
without purifying him, Greene shot his last arrow
of malicious satire at the rising reputation of his
youngest competitor, and shot in vain.
Henry Chettle, who published his rancorous
attack, followed it in December, 1592, three months
after Greene's death, with a public apology which
contains a few words of great value as indicating
the feeling Shakespeare was evoking from his fellow-
workers : " Myself have seen his demeanour no less
civil than he excellent in the quality he professes ;
besides, divers of worship have reported his upright
ness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his
facetious grace in writing that approves his art."
160 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The sensitive mind of Shakespeare felt keenly
the dominant influences of his time, and his earlier
work reflects those influences. Brilliant as that
work is, it is mainly, with touches of imitation,
tentative, registering the response of the poet's
imagination to the different masters of his art.
" Titus Andronicus," if it came from Shakespeare's
hand, betrays the influence of Marlowe ; if this
sanguinary drama is excluded from the canon of
Shakespeare's dramas, then the reflection of Mar
lowe's powerful genius is to be found in " Richard
II." and " Richard III." These plays were written
a little later in time, but they belong within the
first period of the poet's creative activity. Marlowe
was then at the height of his fame and popularity,
and Shakespeare could no more have escaped the
spell of his splendid genius than a sensitive young
poet of romantic temper in the decade between
1820 and 1830 could have escaped the influence of
Byron. The three parts of " Henry VI.," with their
series of pictorial tableaux, disclose the hold which
the chronicle plays had taken upon Shakespeare's
imagination.
The comedy " Love's Labour's Lost " betrays the
influence of John Lyly, and of his famous " Euphues,
the Anatomy of Wit," which appeared in London
about the time Shakespeare left the Grammar School
at Stratford. The writer was a young man of
twenty-six years, a member of Magdalen College,
Oxford, and extremely sensitive to the subtleties
THE FIRST FRUITS l6l
and refinements of sentiment and language. His
talent was neither deep nor vital, but he was one
of those fortunate men who arrive on the scene at
the very moment when their gifts receive the most
liberal reinforcement from the passion, the convic
tion, or the taste of the hour. Lyly had little to
say, but he was a sensitive instrument ready to the
hand of his time, and his time made the most of
him. He made himself the fashion of the decade
by fastening as if by instinct on its affectations,
excesses, and eccentricities of taste. The Renais
sance had made Europe, in intellectual interests at
least, a community ; and intellectual impulses passed
rapidly from one country to another. By virtue
of her recovery of classical literature and of her
creative energy, Italy was the leader of culture, the
exponent of the new freedom and the higher taste.
To Italy men turned for the models and standards
of literary art, as later they turned to France for
manners and dress. The Italians were still near
enough to mediaeval ways and habits to find de
light in wiredrawn definitions, in distinctions so fine
that they were almost invisible, and in allegories
and symbolism. The schoolmen were quibblers by
tradition and training, and quibbling passed on
into polite society when the New Learning came,
and became the pastime and amusement of the
cultivated and fashionable. Directness of speech
went out of fashion ; affectation of the most extreme
type marked the man of superior refinement. Fed-
162
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
antry, quibbling, verbal juggling, the use of far
fetched similes and classical allusions, allegories and
conceits, became the marks of elegance and culture.
England, Spain, and France, eager to emulate the
Italians in the newly opened field of scholarship and
art, fastened, after
the manner of imi
tators, upon the
worst mannerisms
of the Italians,
imported them,
and made them, if
possible, more arti
ficial and extrava
gant.
In every age,
from the time of
Surrey to that of
Pater, English lit
erature, has shown
the presence of a
tendency to pre
ciosity — an over-
SIR WALTER RALEIGH. • l r
curious study or
Engraving from the original by Zucchero. i -, i '11
words and a skill
in using them somewhat too esoteric. In Shake-
peare's youth this tendency was both a fashion and
a passion, and John Lyly was its most successful
exponent. He caught the rising tide, and was car
ried to a great height of popularity. " Euphues " was
THE FIRST FRUITS 163
a romance with a minimum of story interest and
a maximum of reflections on love, manners, and
morals, written in a style which was in the last
degree ornate, elaborate, high-flown, and affected.
There were no libraries or newspapers ; books were
few; the modern journal of fashion and well-
diluted romance had not been born ; time hung
heavily on the hands of many women. Lyly knew
his audience, and wrote for it with singular success.
" Euphues," he wrote, " had rather lie shut in a
lady's casket than open in a scholar's study." It
found its way into a prodigious number of such
caskets. The first part, originally published in
1579, was reprinted nine times in fifty years. The
word Euphuism remains a lasting memorial of a
tendency which was felt by nearly all the writers of
Shakespeare's time, and which has left traces in all
our later literature.
The Court found in this fastidious and extrava
gant style a highly developed language of homage
and flattery, and men of affairs used it freely as
poets. When Sir Walter Raleigh was forty years
old and Queen Elizabeth sixty, the brilliant but
unfortunate gentleman wrote these words from his
cell in the Tower to Sir Robert Cecil : " While she
was yet nigher at hand, that I might hear of her
once in two or three days, my sorrows were the
less ; but even now my heart is cast into the depth
of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding
like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like
1 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about
her pure cheeks like a nymph ; sometime sitting in
the shade like a goddess ; sometime singing like an
angel ; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the
sorrow of this world ! Once amiss, hath bereaved
me of all."
There was much in Shakespeare's mind which
not only made him sensitive to the attractions of
Euphuism in certain of its aspects, but stimulated
the play of his own ingenuity. When he gave free
rein to his fancy, no writer surpassed him in quips,
quibbles, conceits, puns, the use of images, allusions,
and comparisons. He could be as whimsical, fan
tastic, and affected as the greatest literary fop of his
time, and this not by the way of satire but for his
own pleasure. His earlier plays are often disfigured
by this vicious verbal dexterity; mere jugglery
with words, which has no relation to art. " Love's
Labour's Lost" was first published in Quarto form
in 1598, with this title-page : "A Pleasant Conceited
Comedy called Loues Labors Lost." Shakespeare's
name appears for the first time on this title-page.
The play was probably written several years earlier.
It was played before the Queen during the Christ
mas festivities of 1597. It is a very characteristic
piece of apprentice work ; full of prophecy of the
method of the mature dramatist, but full also of
evidences of immaturity. The young poet was try
ing his hand at comedy for the first time, and his
keen perception of the extravagances, affectations,
THE FIRST FRUITS 165
and foibles of London life had already supplied him
with a fund of material for satiric portrayal of con
temporary manners. The wealth of vitality and
achievement which was characteristic of the age
ran to all manner of excess and eccentricity of
dress and speech. These were the most obvious
aspects of the life he saw about him ; its deeper
issues were still beyond his experience. The quick
eye of the young observer took in at a glance the
brilliance and show of the age, the dress of which
was rich and elaborate to the last degree. " We
use many more colours than are in the rainbow,"
says a contemporary English writer; "all the most
light, garish, and unseemly colours that are in the
world. . . . We wear more fantastical fashions
than any nation under the sun doth, the French
only excepted."
The passion for travel was general among men of
fashion, and western Europe was laid under con
tribution for novelties in manners, dress, and speech.
" Farewell, monsieur traveller," writes Shakespeare ;
" look you lisp, and wear strange suits ; disable all
the benefits of your own country ; be out of love
with your nativity, and almost chide God for mak
ing you that countenance you are, or I will scarce
think you have swam in a gondola." The language
of the day was as ornate and composite as the
dress ; men spoke to one another in the most flow
ery speech, and the language was strained to fur
nish compliments for women. The allusions to the
1 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Queen read like fulsome flattery, but women of
lesser rank received the same homage of exagger
ated arid high-flown tribute. This splendour of
bearing, often forced and unnatural, marked the
endeavour of the age to live on a level with the
greatness of life as it was brought home to the im
agination by heroic and romantic achievements.
When she had become a wrinkled old woman, the
Queen was discovered practising a new dance-step
in the solitude of her closet !
The plot of " Love's Labour's Lost " is slight and
of minor importance ; its sources have not been dis
covered; the play lives in its dialogue and satire.
The influence of Lyly is apparent not only in the
extravagance and fastidiousness of speech which
are satirized with ready skill, but in the give and
take of the conversation and the quickness of rep
artee which first appeared in the English drama
in Lyly's court plays.
In this comedy of manners Shakespeare makes
admirable sport of the high-flown speech of the
time, touching with a light but sure hand its ambi
tious pedantry in Holof ernes, the fantastic excesses
of the latest fashion in learning in Armado, and the
perils of Euphuism, as he recognized them in his
own art, in Biron, who probably speaks the poet's
mind when he puts by forever
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.
THE FIRST FRUITS 167
The youthful ness of the writer of the play is shown
by the great preponderance of lines that rhyme,
and by its marked lyrical character, which stamps it
as the work of a brilliant poet rather than of an
experienced dramatist. Three sonnets and a song
are introduced, not because they are necessary parts
of the drama, but because they are the natural
forms of expression for a young poet ; and Mr.
Pater has called attention to the fact that the open
ing speech on the immortality of fame, spoken by
the King, and the more striking passages spoken
by Biron, have " something of the monumental
style of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without
their conceits of thought and expression."
The stock figures with which the stage was
familiar are prominent in the play; the chief actors
are sketched with a free hand rather than carefully
drawn and strongly individualized after the poet's
later manner; and the play contains several charac
ters which, in the light of later plays, are seen to
be first studies of some of the most notable por
traits of riper years. The note of youthfulness is
distinct also in the extravagance of speech which
runs through it, and which was not only satirical
but full of attractiveness for the poet. Indeed, the
comedy may be regarded as an attempt on the
poet's part to free himself from artistic peril by
giving his mind, on its dexterous side, full play.
The early ripening of artistic instinct into artistic
knowledge is evidenced by the discernment of the
1 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
danger and the well-devised remedy. Biron inter
prets the young poet's self-consciousness as an
artist clearly and decisively ; he shows us Shake
speare's insight into the methods and means of
securing the freest expression of his thought, and
his deliberate selection of right approaches to his
art and his deliberate rejection of the most seduc
tive errors of his time. In this comedy his mind
was at play ; its natural agility, alertness, keenness,
love of paradox, delight in the dexterous handling
of words, were allowed full scope, and the disease
of his time came fully to the surface and never
again seriously attacked him. With his magical
quickness of mental action and command of lan
guage, he might have succumbed to the temptation
to be a marvellously keen and adroit manipulator of
words instead of a great creative artist ; he might
easily have been a fastidious writer for experts in
the bizarre, the curious, and the esoteric in style,
instead of becoming the full-voiced, large-minded,
deep-hearted poet of humanity. This peril he
escaped by discerning it and, in the very act of
satirizing it, giving his mind opportunity to indulge
a passion which all men of artistic feeling shared.
The play dealt more freely with contemporaneous
events and was more deeply embedded in contem
porary conditions than any other of his dramas ;
for this reason it became very popular with Eliza
bethan audiences, but is the least interesting of
Shakespeare's works to modern readers. There is
THE FIRST FRUITS
169
in it a preponderance of the local and a minimum
of the universal elements.
But Shakespeare could not satirize the extrava
gances and follies of his time without suggesting
the larger view of life which was always in his
thought; he could not touch the smallest detail
of manners without bringing the man into view.
In this early and
sportive work, with
its incessant and
often metallic fence
of words, the young
poet disclosed his
resolute grasp of
the realities of life
as opposed to pass
ing theories and
individual experi
ments. The arti
ficial asceticism to
which the King
commits himself
and his court, with
its fasts, vigils, studies, and exclusion of women, is a
gay but futile attempt to interfere with normal hu
man emotions, needs, and habits ; it breaks down
under the first strain to which it is subjected, and is
driven out of beclouded minds with the gayest of
womanly laughter and the keenest of womanly wit.
The satire of the play assails false ideas of the place
THOMAS NASHE.
From an early pen drawing.
I 70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of knowledge, false uses of speech, and false con
ceptions of life ; it discloses the mind of the poet
already at work on the problem which engaged him
during the whole of his productive life, and in the
working out of which all the plays are involved :
the problem of the right relation of the individual
to the moral order, to the family, and to the State.
The breadth of view and sanity of temper which
are at once the most striking characteristics of
Shakespeare's mind and the secret of the reality
and range of his art find in " Love's Labour's Lost "
their earliest illustration. And in this play are to
be found also the earliest examples of his free and
expressive character-drawing ; for Biron and Rosa
line are preliminary studies for Benedict and Bea
trice ; the play of wit throughout the drama predicts
" Much Ado About Nothing " ; the love-making of
Armado and Jaquenetta is the earliest example of
a by-play of comedy which reaches perfection in
" As You Like It." As a piece of apprentice work
"Love's Labour's Lost" is quite invaluable; so
clearly does it reveal the early processes of the
poet's mind and his first selection of themes,
motives, human interests, and artistic methods.
" The Comedy of Errors " belongs to this period
of tentative work, and is interesting as showing
Shakespeare's familiarity with the traditional form
of comedy and as marking the point of his depar
ture from it. It was first published in the Folio of
1623, but it was presented as early as the Christ-
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
The statue on the Gower Memorial at Stratford-on-Avon.
172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
mas season of 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn; and
its production was accompanied by considerable
disorder in the audience, which must have been
composed chiefly of benchers and their guests.
This disturbance is mentioned by a chronicler in
the same year in these words : " After much sport,
a Comedy of Errors was played by the players ; so
that night began and continued to the end, in noth
ing but confusion and errors ; whereupon it was
ever afterwards called the 'Night of Errors.'" The
main, although not the only, source of the plot was
the Menaechmi of Plautus, in which the Latin come
dian develops the almost unlimited possibility of
blunders which lies in mistakes of identity — then
as now a popular device with playwrights and story
tellers. Shakespeare may have read the comedy in
the original, or in a translation by William Warner,
which was not published until the year following the
presentation of the " Comedy of Errors," but which
was probably in existence in manuscript much ear
lier. In this form many pieces of prose and verse
which later became famous were passed from hand
to hand; writing was practised chiefly for the pleas
ure of the writer and his friends, and publication was
secondary, and usually an afterthought.
In turning to Plautus, Shakespeare paid tribute
to the classical tradition which dominated Italy and
was never without witnesses in England ; a tradi
tion which cannot be disregarded without serious
loss of artistic education, nor accepted without
THE FIRST FRUITS 173
sacrifice of original power. Whenever the classical
tradition has secured complete possession of the
stage, a new and vital drama has been impossible ;
whenever it has been entirely discarded, unregu
lated individualism has degenerated into all manner
of eccentricities of plot and form. With character
istic insight, Shakespeare escaped both dangers;
he knew the classical manner, and was not unre
sponsive to its order, balance, and genius for pro
portion, but he refused to be enslaved or hampered
by it. English tragedy had secured complete free
dom, and was fast becoming the richest and most
adequate expression of the English genius; Eng
lish comedy had been fighting the same battle, and
" The Comedy of Errors " marks the decisive tri
umph of the national genius. In this play Shake
speare conformed to the ancient requirements that
the action should take place in a single day and
within the limits of a single locality — the time-
honoured unities ; but he changed the classical into
the romantic spirit by the introduction of greater
complexity of characters and therefore of greater
perplexity of plot, and by the infusion of a vein of
pathos which is alien to the Latin comedy.
The ease with which the difficult plot is handled
shows that Shakespeare had already gone far in his
education as a playwright. A comparison with
Plautus's play brings out his essential and funda
mental cleanness of imagination. He was a man of
his time, and his time was incredibly frank and
174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
coarse of speech ; but whenever he could escape
into a purer speech he rarely lost the opportunity.
The coarseness and occasional obscenity in his
work were the dust of the road along which he
travelled ; among the men of his age and voca
tion he was singularly refined in taste and clean
in speech. Moral sanity is one of Shakespeare's
most characteristic qualities ; he is ethically sound
throughout the entire body of his work. His
insight holds him true at all points to the inexora
ble play of law. He offends the taste of a more
fastidious age, but he is far more wholesome than
many modern writers of irreproachable vocabulary.
On this whole matter Coleridge has spoken the
final word : —
" Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no inter
esting incests, no virtuous vice ; he never renders
that amiable which religion and reason alike teach
us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of vir
tue like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of
the day. Shakespeare's fathers are roused by
ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness ;
in him, in short, the affections are wounded in
those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let
the morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that
of the writers of his own or the succeeding age, or
of those of the present day who boast of their supe
riority in this respect. No one can dispute that the
result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of
Shakespeare ; even the letters of women of high
rank in his age were often coarser than his own writ
ings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of deli
cacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites
THE FIRST FRUITS 175
nor flatters passion, in order to degrade the subject
of it ; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty pur
pose, nor carry on warfare against virtue, by caus
ing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through
the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfor
tunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twi
light; nothing is purposely out of its place; he in
verts not the order of nature and propriety — does
not make every magistrate a drunkard or a glutton,
nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate."
In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" another
tie with the past and another point of departure
are discovered. The play seems to have been
derived mainly from the Portuguese novelist and
poet Montemayor, whose " Story of the Shepherd
ess Filismena " was well known in English through
various translations of the pastoral romance of
which it was part, and is reminiscent of the plays
based chiefly on Italian love-stories which were
popular before Shakespeare's time. This comedy
of love and friendship, conceived in the romantic
spirit, is slight and ineffective in construction, but
full of beauty in detail. It is the work of a poet
who was not yet a dramatist. There are lines in it
which predict the magical verses of the later plays ;
Julia and Lucetta are hasty, preliminary studies of
Portia and Nerissa; while Launce and Speed are the
forerunners of a long succession of serving-men
whose conceits, drolleries, whims, and far-fetched
similes place them among the most original of the
poet's creations.
176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare's apprentice work, even when it was
limited to adaptation or recasting of existing mate
rials, is clearly discriminated from his more mature
work both by its structure and its style : but it is
tentative rather than imitative, and full of germs
which were to find perfection of growth in the
dramas of a later period.
CHAPTER VIII
THE POETIC PERIOD
DURING the decade between 1590 and 1600
Shakespeare's productivity was continuous, and
covered a wide field of poetic expression ; the nine
teen or twenty plays which were written during
this period included eight or nine comedies, one
tragedy, and a group of historical dramas. To
these must be added the two long lyrical pieces
which bear his name, the few short pieces incor
porated in " The Passionate Pilgrim," " A Lover's
Complaint," " The Phoenix and the Turtle," and
the lyrical poem on friendship and love which took
the form of a sequence of one hundred and fifty-
four sonnets. The apprentice work of the young
dramatist may be said to end with the creation of
the " Midsummer Night's Dream " and " Romeo
and Juliet," though in neither of these beautiful
dramas does his genius reach full maturity. At
the end of six or seven years after his arrival in
London he had become sufficiently known and
successful to awaken envy ; he had tried various
dramatic forms with success ; he had learned the
practical side of play-writing, and he had gone a
long way towards mastering its theory; he had
N I77
178 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
become an actor of intelligence, if not of marked
gifts ; and he had established himself in his pro
fession.
It must have been a period of deep and eager
spiritual striving and unfolding. Some of the
poet's devout students in Germany, to whom his
fame owes much, and who have enriched Shake
spearian scholarship for all time with the fruits of
loving study and of fruitful insight, find evidence
that during this time the poet passed through a
storm-and-stress period. There are many indica
tions, however, that this phase of the dramatist's
spiritual life came later, and was coincident with
tragic events which touched him to the quick.
His earlier work shows a sunny nature, a sensitive
mind, a gay and eager interest in many forms of
experience and art.
If " Titus Andronicus " was written by Shake
speare, and at the beginning of his career, it was
so purely external and imitative, so evidently out
side the dramatist's life, that it does not count as a
document in his spiritual history. The extraordi
nary accuracy of description, the resolute and
unfailing grasp of the concrete, which stamp the
very earliest work from his hand, show him at the
start more absorbed in seeing than in meditating,
more engrossed by the marvellous spectacle of the
world than concerned with its spiritual order. It
is true, he could not see without thinking, and
Shakespeare was always of a meditative temper;
THE POETIC PERIOD
179
but his first contact with the world called forth his
full power of observation, and the emphasis of his
thought fell, for a time, outside his own personality.
As he saw many sides of experience, so he felt
the charm of various masters, and was drawn
toward Lyly,
Peele, and
Marlowe ; he
came under
the Italian in
fluence, and
he was not in
different to
classical mod
els and ima
gery. Neither
in his work nor
in his con
sciousness had
he come into
full possession
of himself.
The poet in
him took prec
edence, in the order of development, of the drama
tist ; and it is as a poet that his earliest artistic suc
cesses were secured. From the beginning he had
that freshness of feeling which is the peculiar and
characteristic quality of the artist of every kind ; he
had also the sensitive imagination and the ear for
MICHAEL DRAYTON.
From an old and rare pen-drawing.
l8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
melody. The world was reflected in his mind as
in a magical mirror ; its large outlines and its more
delicate shadings lying clear and luminous before
him. But he did not fully discern as yet the
interior relations of spirit and form, the interde
pendence of individuality and the institutional
order, the reaction of the act upon the actor, the
unfolding of personality through action, the inevi
table infolding of the tragic temperament by the
tragic circumstance, and the final identification of
character with destiny. The deeper insights, the
creative grasp of the forces of life, and the master
ful revelation of the laws which govern then:
through all the processes of history, which were
to make him the first of dramatists, were growing
within him, but they were not yet in possession of
his spirit and his art ; he was still primarily a poet.
The earlier plays do not reveal the evolution of
character, the action and reaction of circumstances
and forces within the circle of movement, the
subordination of incident to action, and the hus
banding of action in character, which give the
dramas cf his maturity their reality and authority.
The poet was concerned chiefly with the beauty,
the variety, and the humour of the spectacle. He
was full of the charm of the show of things and of
pleasure in the action of his own mind. He
delighted in rhyme for its own sake ; in classical
allusions, not because, like torches held in the air,
they illumine the path of his thought, but because
THE POETIC PERIOD l8l
they please his fancy ; he gave his mind license in
the use of puns, conceits, verbal dexterities of every
kind ; he pushed wit to the very limits of its
rational meaning, and sometimes beyond ; he
exhausted imagery in the endeavour to drain it
of its suggestiveness instead of leaving it to do its
own work with the imagination. He kept comedy
and tragedy apart, and simplified the drama at the
expense of its manifold and deeper meaning. His
eye was marvellously keen and his hand magically
skilful, but he was not yet the master of the
secrets of art and life ; he was an ardent and
impressionable young poet, playing with the prob
lems of experience rather than closing with them
in a life-and-death struggle, presenting their lighter
aspects externally rather than penetrating to their
heart and laying bare the fates which sleep in
motive and passion.
It is easy to imagine the eager joy of the young
playwright when he became conscious of the pos
session of the poet's insight and faculty. In his
ardent imagination the great new world of the
Renaissance, with the recovery of classical art in
one hemisphere and the discovery of America in
the other, lay in all its splendour of spiritual and
material suggestiveness ; and in this vast territory,
in which the human spirit seemed to have acquired
a new freedom as well as an enlarged authority, he
came swiftly to feel at home. He had the con
sciousness of great powers ; the sonnets show that
1 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
clearly enough. A member of a profession which
was under the ban not only of institutional religion
but of society, and excluded from the chief paths of
preferment and fame, he had, nevertheless, the
supreme joy of discovering the beauty of the world
and the infinite variety of human experience and
fate, and of giving this manifold loveliness and
moving show
of life order,
consistency,
and form.
The con
sciousness of
the possession
of creative
power is never
born in an
hour ; it comes
like the break
ing of the
day ; but, from
the first gleam
of light on the horizon, it stirs all the sleeping
forces of the nature, and the adolescence of genius
breeds an exaltation, an enthusiasm, a glow along
the horizons of the future, born of a sudden awaken
ing of passion, imagination, thought, and physical
energy. To the young poet the world is as full of
gods as it was to the myth-makers, and light flashes
from it as if the order and splendour of the universe
EDMUND SPENSER.
THE POETIC PERIOD 183
were being disclosed for the first time. For adoles
cence is the individual and personal discovery of
life and the world ; the young explorer is as much
alone in his experience and exaltation of spirit as if
a thousand thousand earlier discoverers had not
traversed the same seas and made the same journeys
before him.
In "Henry VI." and "Titus Andronicus," if he
did more than touch the latter play in the most
perfunctory way, Shakespeare was doing purely
experimental apprentice work ; in the " Comedy of
Errors " he indulged his exuberant humour to the
full ; in " Love's Labour's Lost " he lightly but
keenly satirized the foibles and extravagances of his
time in learning, speech, and style ; in " The Two
Gentlemen of Verona " he made a slender plot
bear the weight of his dawning imagination in
image and phrase ; in " Venus and Adonis " and
" The Rape of Lucrece " he surrendered himself to
the lyric impulse ; and in the " Midsummer Night's
Dream " and " Romeo and Juliet "his poetic genius
rose to its full height. In these two dramas, which
belong in the front rank of English poetry, fancy
and imagination are seen in that creative play with
the materials of experience and of ideality which
fashions worlds as substantial as that on which we
live, and yet touched with a beauty of form and a
lucidity of meaning which we search for in vain in
the world of reality.
The stages of Shakespeare's growth as a poet are
184 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
as clearly marked as the stages of his growth as a
dramatist. Between " Venus and Adonis " and
" Romeo and Juliet " there intervened several years
of experience, observation, experimentation, and
unfolding. The freedom of movement, the fulness
of imagination, the firm grasp of subject, and the
masterly handling of material of all kinds which
are characteristic of the later work did not come at
call in Shakespeare's case; he was subject to the
law of development and dependent upon education
for the full possession of himself and the free use of
his powers. In the earlier poems there are
passages of unsurpassed beauty, but in construc
tion and style the hand of the apprentice is mani
fest. As he had gone to school to the older
playwrights when he set about the business of
writing plays, so he went to school to the older
poets when he began to write poetry. The spell
of the classical ideal of beauty was on all sensitive
minds when Shakespeare was young; those who
emancipated themselves from the classical tradition
of poetic and dramatic form did not detach them
selves from the poetic conceptions and the beautiful
world of imagery which Europe recovered in the
Renaissance. The joy of release from mediaeval
rigidity and repression found its natural expression
in reverence for the models and standards of classi
cal art. Man had been born again into conscious
freedom; personality had once more secured space
and light for development ; to the monotony of the
THE POETIC PERIOD
185
type in the arts had succeeded the range and
variety of individuality; love of nature and joy in
her presence had returned ; confidence in the
human spirit had been restored when the shadows
of a world lying under the ban of heaven had been
banished ; an immense exhilaration of imagination,
a great libera
tion of per
sonal force,
were the fruits
of the freedom
of mind and
soul which the
Renaissance
secured. Look
ing back across
the Middle
Ages, associ
ated in the
minds of the
men of the new
time with spir
itual repres
sion and intel
lectual bondage, the classical world lay clear, beauti
ful, and free in a light that was almost dazzling after
the long gloom of mediaevalism. It is true mediaeval-
ism had its lights, its humour, its beauty of devotion,
its deep-rooted and noble art ; but the men of the
Renaissance were in reaction against its repression
WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURLEIGH, PRIME MINISTER OF
QUEEN ELIZABETH.
From the original painting at Hatfield House.
1 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of natural instincts, its curtailment of natural
activities, and they saw the classical world in the
high light of sharp contrast. That world is mar
vellously beautiful to the imagination of the nine
teenth century, which constantly recalls it in every
art and strives with passionate eagerness to recover
its lost perfection of taste, of order, of workman
ship ; to the imagination of the sixteenth century
it was the golden age of the arts and of the spirit
which fashions them — a lost but immortal world
of freedom, joy, beauty, and creativeness.
Shakespeare had known this older world from
boyhood. He was not subjugated by it, as were
many of his contemporaries, for beneath the sensi
tive surface of his mind there was a vigorous and
self-sustaining individuality ; but he felt its spell and
discerned its educational uses. He knew his Ovid
early enough to people the Forest of Arden with
the older dreams of poetry ; but it was characteris
tic of his genius that he did not confuse the one
with the other. In " Venus and Adonis " the great
passages are not those which describe the beautiful
goddess or the shy and radiant youth, but those
which describe figures, landscapes, and incidents
which he must have seen or known in the country
about Stratford in his youth.
His earliest poetic experiments were in the classi
cal vein; for he knew the classical background of
modern poetry as intimately as did Keats. He
began his poetic career under the tutelage of one of
THE POETIC PERIOD 187
the most imaginative of the Roman poets. In the
early summer of 1593, with the imprint of his friend
and fellow-townsman, Richard Field, on the title-
page, Shakespeare made his first appeal to the read
ing public of his time, and his first venture in what
he and his contemporaries recognized as literature.
He had already made some reputation as a play
wright ; but plays were not then regarded as litera
ture. Columbus died in ignorance that he had
discovered a new world, so possessed was his mind
with the conviction that he had touched the out
lying islands of Asia. Shakespeare died in igno
rance of the fact that he had made himself the
foremost man in literature, so far apart in his
thought and the thought of his time were plays
and literature. The text of " Venus and Adonis "
was carefully read, and is notably accurate ; it was
printed under the eye of the poet. The plays were
either stolen or published in many cases without
authorization, and are, for that reason, full of inac
curacies and difficult or questionable passages.
It is interesting to recall the fact, already re
ported, that four years earlier Richard Field had
brought out the " Metamorphoses " of Ovid ; and
it is also worth recalling that in the year before the
appearance of the " first heir " of Shakespeare's
invention his father had made an appraisal of the
goods of Field's father in Stratford.
" I know not how I shall offend," wrote Shake
speare in the dedication of the poem to the Earl
1 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of Southampton, "in dedicating my unpolished
lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will
censure me for choosing so strong a prop to sup
port so weak a burden, only if your Honour seem
but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and
vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have
honoured you with some graver labour. But if the
first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall
be sorry it had so noble a godfather." Shake
speare was twenty-nine years old, and the Earl of
Southampton was in his twentieth year — a young
man of brilliant parts and of striking beauty; well
educated ; with a fortune more than adequate to
his rank ; a great favourite in the Court circle ; a
lover of literature and of the drama; a generous
and appreciative friend of men of letters ; and a
representative man in a great and brilliant period.
The two young men had been brought together
by those manifold affinities which in youth ripen
casual acquaintance swiftly into devoted friend
ship ; the glow of the time was on them both,
although the dawn of the noble was to be quenched
in the darkness of premature night, while that of
the playwright broadened into a day which is likely
to know no shadow of evening.
There has been wide difference of opinion re
garding Shakespeare's meaning in describing the
poem as " the first heir " of his invention. It has
been urged that the words should be taken literally,
and that the poem was probably composed at Strat-
THE POETIC PERIOD 189
ford and carried to London, as Johnson carried,
almost two centuries later, the tragedy of " Irene."
Or the poet may have meant that it was his first
attempt to write lyrical or narrative verse. When
it appeared, no plays of his had been printed ; the
plague was raging in London, the theatres were
closed, and the poem may have been composed at
this time. It belongs, in any event, to his earliest
productive period, and is the first fruit of his con
scious artistic life.
" Venus and Adonis " shows plainly the influence
of Ovid, as do some of the earlier plays ; but it is
free from mere imitation. Shakespeare felt the
charm of the Latin poet, and reflected that charm,
but he used his materials with freedom and individ
ual skill. Ovid was followed only so far as Shake
speare found it profitable to follow. The older
poet had told the story of the love of Venus for
Adonis when Cupid's arrow pierced her by acci
dent ; how the goddess forsook all and followed
him ; how she warned him against his favourite
pastime of hunting wild beasts ; how she beguiled
him in shady places with the tale of the help she
gave Hippomenes when he outran Atalanta, and
then, as a penalty for his ingratitude, brought bitter
misfortune upon them ; how the hunted boar gave
Adonis his death-wound ; how Venus brought the
anemone — the sensitive and delicate wind-flower
— from his blood.
On the framework of this classical tale the young
IQO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
poet wrought his careful, well-compacted, and thor
oughly constructed poem. There is no reason to
doubt that he had read the story without the aid
of a translation, although Golding's version ap
peared in his childhood. The story was passionate,
and the young poet did nothing to disguise or
diminish the passion ; on the contrary, he height
ened it by setting the coldness of Adonis in sharp
contrast with it. The poem is too frankly passion
ate and too naked for modern taste ; since it was
written Puritan influence, by its tremendous em
phasis on righteousness, has compelled us to strike
a balance between the freedom of the Greek genius
and the moral insight of the Hebrew spirit, and the
problem of modern art is to harmonize freedom,
beauty, and joy with moral sanity, order, and
power. The love of beauty and the frank abandon
ment to its charms, which were characteristic of
the Renaissance, are the dominant notes of this
poem of a very young poet who was under the
spell of the Renaissance spirit. It offends by its
frankness rather than by its warmth ; for it is curi
ously cool and restrained in tone. It is full of
striking lines, but the subject does not seem to
inflame the poet's imagination ; he works as calmly
as if he were not dealing with the most dangerous
stuff in the world. His personality is as com
pletely hidden as in the plays ; the treatment is
wholly objective. " Venus and Adonis " belongs
to the same period as Marlowe's glowing version
THE POETIC PERIOD 19!
of the memorable story of " Hero and Leander,"
but there could hardly be a greater contrast than
that which is presented by the two poems. In
Marlowe the current is deep and swift, and bears
one on in a tumultuous rush of passion ; in " Venus
and Adonis " the movement is deliberate and lei
surely, and the genius of the poet is seen, not in his
OLD PALACE, WHITEHALL.
From a print engraved for Lambert's " History of London."
general treatment, but in the recurring pictures and
descriptions with which the poem abounds. In the
marvellous exactness of his drawing the accuracy
of his observation is shown, and in the mellow
euphony of many of its lines the magic of his later
style is predicted. The hunted hare is so true to
life that he must have been studied upon some
hill about Stratford; and all the glimpses of nature
are touches of genius. The noble realism of the
192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
dramatist is predicted again and again in lines
which are not only suffused with beauty, but cut
in outline as clearly as with a graver's tool.
" The Rape of Lucrece " appeared in the follow
ing year with the imprint of Richard Field, and
the announcement that it was to be sold at "the
sign of the White Greyhound in Paules Church
yard"; a neighbourhood which has been haunted by
publishers and authors from that day until the
last decade, when the makers of books have been
seeking quarters in other sections of London. Ovid
was still in the young poet's mind, although the
pathetic story of Lucretia's fidelity had long been
familiar in prose and verse. " Lucretia," Wharton
tells us, " was the grand example of conjugal fidelity
throughout the Gothic ages." Chaucer had set
her in noble company in his " Legend of Good
Women," and Sidney had recalled her in his
beautiful " Apologie." Other English poets had
felt the poetic power of the Roman matron's purity,
and the theme had not escaped the attention of
the balladists. The seven-line stanza in which the
poem is written had been brought from France by
Chaucer, and its capacity for serious subjects had
been developed before Shakespeare used it. The
Earl of Southampton's name appears on the page
of dedication, as in the " Venus and Adonis " of
the previous year; but the friendship between the
two men had apparently ripened in the intervening
months. The language of dedications is rarely to
THE POETIC PERIOD 193
be taken literally, and in Shakespeare's time, as in
Johnson's, it was more notable for adulation than
for sincerity; but, although Shakespeare uses the
speech of the courtier in addressing his friend,
there is a note of sincerity in both dedications.
The second is more intimate and affectionate than
its predecessor. " The love I dedicate to your
Lordship is without end," he writes; "... the
warrant I have of your Honourable disposition,
not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it
assured of acceptance."
The subject would have permitted the most in
tense dramatic feeling, but, like the story in " Venus
and Adonis," it is presented not only with entire
objectivity but with a certain coolness and aloofness ;
as if the poet had chosen his theme rather than
been chosen by it. His imagination was stimulated
but not possessed by it ; it is an impressive poetic
exercise from the hand of a great poet rather than
an original and characteristic expression of poetic
genius. There are vivid impressions, scenes that
stand out as if cut with the chisel, striking reflec
tions, and, at intervals, the inimitable Shakespearian
note, that magical harmony of sound and sense
that rings like a bell in one's memory :
For Sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell,
Once set on ringing with his own weight goes.
But the poet is practising, not creating; learning
his art, not enlarging it. It is in detached passages,
194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
not in the completed work, that we must look for
the poet of " Romeo and Juliet." In " The Rape
of Lucrece " there is, however, a distinct advance
in seriousness and dignity; there is not only greater
ease in the use of verse, but there is finer insight
and higher ideality :
Who loves chaste life, there's Lucrece for a teacher :
Coleridge laid his finger on the characteristic quality
of "Venus and Adonis " when he pointed out the
fact that the reader of the poem is told nothing ;
he sees and hears everything. The dramatic element
was too pronounced in Shakespeare's nature, even
at a time when the poetic impulse was in the as
cendant, to permit of the highest success in purely
narrative verse ; in any event, he did not stamp
these poems with that finality of form which he
put on many of the plays and on a large group of
the sonnets. The earliest pieces of his original
work betray the immaturity of his genius and art;
they show him under the spell of the Renaissance
spirit ; they deal with passion without being pas
sionate. Their significance in the history of his
development has been discerned by Coleridge in
a passage memorable in Shakespearian criticism:
" The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow
the display of the deeper passions. But the story
of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their
intensest workings. And yet we find in Shake
speare's management of the tale neither pathos nor
THE POETIC PERIOD 195
any other dramatic quality. There is the same
minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem,
in the same vivid colours, inspired by the same
impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and
contracting with the same activity of the assimila
tive and of the modifying faculties ; and with a yet
larger display, and a wider range of knowledge and
reflection : and lastly, with the same perfect domin
ion, often domination, over the whole world of lan
guage. What, then, shall we say ? Even this, that
Shakespeare, no mere child of nature, no automaton
of genius, no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed
by the spirit, not possessing it, first studied patiently,
meditated deeply, understood minutely, till know
ledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself
to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to
that stupendous power, by which he stands alone,
with no equal or second in his own class ; to that
power which seated him on one of the two glory-
smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Mil
ton as his compeer, not rival."
It is impossible, even in work distinctly sensuous
in imagery, not to discern the idealist in Shake
speare. Dealing with the physical aspects of beauty
in " Venus and Adonis," he is bent on the ideal
beauty. With Plato and Michael Angelo, he is
driven by the appearance of beauty to that invisible
and eternal reality which is at once the inspiration
and justification of religion and poetry. In his
earliest thought the future writer of the sonnets
discerned the reality of which all beautiful faces,
aspects, and images are the passing reflections, the
fleeting remembrances and prophecies.
196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The publication of these poems gave Shakespeare
another constituency and a new group of friends,
and brought him recognition and reputation. In
the eight years which followed its appearance no
less than seven editions of " Venus and Adonis "
were issued, and " The Rape of Lucrece" was in
its fifth edition when the poet died. In exchanging
the writing of plays for the writing of poems the
poet passed from an occupation which shared to a
considerable extent the social indifference or con
tempt which attached to the actor's profession to one
in which gentlemen were proud to engage. He
became, for the time being, a man of letters ; he
thought of readers rather than of hearers ; he gave
his work the care and finish of intentional author
ship. He had become known to the theatre-going
people as an actor of skill and an adapter of plays
of uncommon parts ; he now became known as a
poet. Writing four years later, Richard Barnfield
comments on " the honey-flowing vein " of Shake
speare,
Whose " Venus " and whose " Lucrece," sweet and chaste,
Thy name in fame's immortal book have plac't ;
and in an oft-quoted passage, which appeared in the
same year, Francis Meres, in his " Comparative
Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek,
Latin, and Italian Poets," uses these striking words,
expressive at once of the impression which Shake
speare had made upon his contemporaries and of
THE POETIC PERIOD 197
his association in their minds with the Latin poet
upon whom he had drawn freely in both poems:
" As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in
Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives
in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare ;
witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sug
ared sonnets among his private friends. ..." A
year later John Weever calls Shakespeare " honie-
tongued." At Cambridge in the same year St. John's
College heard a fellow-playwright declare, " I'll wor
ship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and, to honour him,
will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow."
That Shakespeare had become so well known that
the readers of his poems and the hearers of his
plays were divided on the question of the relative
importance of his works is shown, a little later, by
these words of Gabriel Harvey written, Mr. Gollancz
tells us, on the fly-leaf of a Chaucer folio: "The
younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis ; but his Lucrece, and his Tragedy
of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to
please the wiser sort." These references, and
others of similar import, show the young poet with
the earliest light of fame upon him. Life and art,
friends and fame, opportunity and work, were al
ready his. And he had been in London less than
fourteen years.
The poets of his own time — Drayton, Brooke,
Weever — were under the spell of his genius ; and
there is good reason to believe Spenser was think-
198
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
LONDON IN 1543. FROM WESTMINSTER TO
ing of him when he wrote in " Colin Clouts come
home againe " :
And then, though last not least in Action ;
A gentler shepheard may no where be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.
In the Christmas season of 1594 he acted at
court before Queen Elizabeth, and the fact that his
plays were repeatedly presented in her presence
indicates her liking for his work and her purpose
to show him favour. A playwright upon whose
words crowds hung in the Rose and the Globe;
whose great passages were recited again and again
in the palaces at Greenwich, Richmond, and White-
chapel ; whose poems, having passed from hand to
hand among his friends, appeared in rapidly sue-
THE POETIC PERIOD
199
^%
BISHOPSGATE AND LEADENHALL. (See also on the next page.)
ceeding editions ; to whom many contemporary
writers paid glowing tribute; and who counted
among his friends some of the most brilliant and
influential men of his time, can hardly be regarded
as having escaped the notice of his age, or as so
obscure as to raise the question of his authorship
of the work which bears his name.
The lyrical period in the growth of Shakespeare's
mind and art culminated about 1597 or 1598, and
bore its highest fruits in two dramas which hold a
place by themselves ; plays essentially poetic in
quality and form, and singularly complete in their
disclosure of the resources of his imagination and
his art. The tragic story of Romeo and Juliet had
attracted him at a very early date ; there is evi
dence that he was brooding over this pathetic tale
200
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
LONDON IN 1543. FROM THE TOWER TO GREENWICH PALACE.
This and the two preceding illustrations are after an old print in the Bodleian Library.
in 1591, although the play, in the form in which it
has come down to us, probably did not appear
before 1596. It was published in quarto form,
probably without the dramatist's consent, in the fol
lowing year, and the sub-title declared that it had
been publicly played often and with great applause.
The poet found the material for his first tragedy in
several quarters, and drew upon these sources with
the freedom characteristic of the time. The story
has been traced as far back as the Greek romances
of the early Christian centuries, but long before
Shakespeare's imagination fastened upon it the
congenial soil of Italy had given it new and more
vigorous life. The tragic fate of the two lovers
who were destined to become the typical lovers of
THE POETIC PERIOD 2OI
Western literature was set forth at length by Luigi
da Porto in a novel published about 1535 ; it had
been sketched sixty years earlier by Masuccio, and
it reappeared in later years in various forms; its
popularity and its rich material tempting several
succeeding story-tellers. Chief among these was
Bandello, who made it the theme of a novellain the
decade before Shakespeare's birth. Two years
before that event, an English poet, Arthur Brooke,
told it in English verse, and five years later another
English writer, William Painter, gave a prose ver
sion of the old story in his " Palace of Pleasure."
The main line of development of the tragedy is to
be found in Bandello, Brooke, and Shakespeare ;
the dramatist following quite closely the plot as it
came to him from the English poet, but transform
ing and transfiguring both material and form by
his insight, his dramatic skill, and, above all, by
turning upon the passion of love for the first time
the full splendour of his imagination.
"Romeo and Juliet" is the consummate flower
of Shakespeare's poetic genius, the complete dis
closure of his purely poetic gifts. The dramatic
insight and skill with which the materials are rear
ranged ; the brilliancy of characterization, as in the
splendid figure of Mercutio ; the rising tide of emo
tion which bears the ill-fated lovers to their death,
do not make us blind to the fact that this beautiful
and appealing play, fragrant with the breath of the
young summer, bathed in the soft radiance of the
202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Italian night, touched with the imperishable charm
of youth and passion, is primarily poetic and only
secondarily dramatic. The characteristics of the
early work of the poet are found in it : the frequent
use of rhymes and the tendency to play with words ;
above all, the essentially lyrical quality of the play.
Passages of pure and unsurpassed singing quality
abound, and several verse-forms which were familiar
to the mediaeval poets and were in use in Shake
speare's time are found in perfection. The first
meeting of the lovers in Capulet's house is described
in sonnet form ; Juliet's prayer in her father's
orchard for the coming of night is reminiscent of
the Evening-song, and has all the qualities of the
Epithalamium ; while the parting of the lovers, when
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,
remains the most tender and beautiful Morning-
song in the language. Caught in the tragic move
ment of a family feud, the lovers live out their
romance in five passionate days, during which the
drama steadily deepens and sweeps towards its end
with tumultuous current; and at the supreme
moment, with characteristic insight, death ushers
in a final peace. It is this vision of reconciliation
which made Shakespeare a master of human expe
rience in its widest scope and significance. While
exhibiting the fatality of individual struggle against
the social order, he continually makes us aware
THE POETIC PERIOD 203
of the deep and radical changes which spring out
of tragic resistance and defiance ; the searching
reaction of the assertion of individuality on the
social order.
Shakespeare's joy in the possession of the poetic
gift, and his earliest delight in life, found radiant
expression in " A Midsummer Night's Dream," a
masterpiece of poetic fancy, and the gayest and
most beautiful of poetic comedies. Rich as this
drama is in humorous effects, it is so essentially
lyrical in spirit that it stands alone in English
poetry ; an exquisite expansion of the masque or
festival poem into a drama of pure fancy and daring
imagination. It was probably composed for some
marriage celebration, though it has not been con
nected as yet with any wedding among the poet's
friends or in the court circle.
Written about 1596, hints of the play appear to
have been drawn from many sources. The modern
reader finds such hints in Plutarch's " Life of The
seus," in Chaucer's " Knight's Tale," in Ovid's
" Metamorphoses," and in the old French romance
of " Huon of Bordeaux," of which an English trans
lation appeared in the decade between 1530 and
1540. Shakespeare's real indebtedness, however, was
to the poetic imagination of the Germanic race to
which he belonged, which still kept alive, in folk
lore and fairy tale, in every hamlet in England, the
magical world of fairy folk ; so near to the world of
men, and so intimately associated with that world,
204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and yet invisible to all save those who saw with the
imagination. Especially were these elusive elves
concerned with the mysteries of love and marriage ;
and in the magic mirror in which the poet shows
them they not only associate Theseus and Hippol-
yta with the sweetest traditions of English field
and fireside, but show forth, as in a parable, the
magic properties of love when love touches the
whole gamut of feeling and sets the whole nature
vibrating from the passions to the imagination.
There are evident connections in the play with the
aspects of life and character which interested the
poet and with which he had already dealt in " The
Comedy of Errors," in " Love's Labour's Lost," and
in " The Two Gentlemen of Verona," while its
exquisite lyrical quality affiliates it with " Romeo
and Juliet"; but, both as regards older sources of
incident and his own earlier work, " A Midsummer
Night's Dream " stands in complete and radiant
individuality. It discloses the original and spon
taneous force of the poet's genius ; his ability to
use, fuse, and recast the most diverse materials with
entire freedom and yet with unerring artistic in
stinct. He is equally at home with the classical
tradition nobly presented in the figure of Theseus,
with the most extravagant rustic humour set in the
mouths of the inimitable clowns, and with the tra
ditional lore of childhood — the buoyant play of the
popular imagination — in Titania and Oberon and
Puck. His mastery of the verse-form which Eng-
THE POETIC PERIOD 205
lish tragedy has adopted is equally clear and strik
ing. The iambic pentameter, with which his genius
has almost identified English blank verse, finds in
" A Midsummer Night's Dream " the full develop
ment of its melodic power. The line of five feet,
each accented following an unaccented syllable,
without rhyme, is freed, in Shakespeare's hands,
from the stiffness and rigidity which characterized
it before Marlowe's time, and becomes soft as a flute
in its lighter notes and resonant and full-toned as a
bell in great passages :
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded ; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew ;
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,
Each unto each. A cry more tuneable
Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn,
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.
One hears in these lines that clear " chime of the
vowels" which gives English verse its most pene
trating and magical melody.
The fairies and the clowns made an irresistible
appeal to the crowds in the theatre, and " A Mid
summer Night's Dream " enjoyed almost a century
of popularity ; it was imitated and pilfered from ;
when it lost its hold upon the generation of the
Restoration, it reappeared as opera and operetta.
In Germany its fortunes touched their highest pros
perity ; Wieland recalled its elves in his " Oberon,"
206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Goethe drew upon it in a striking scene in
" Faust," and Mendelssohn, in song and overture,
interpreted it with delicate insight and sym
pathy. It is the supreme masterpiece in the
world of fairy lore.
CHAPTER IX
THE SONNETS
THE poetic period in Shakespeare's development
coincided with a devotion to sonnet-writing which
rose to the height of a passion from which few Eng
lish poets escaped during the closing decade of the
sixteenth century. The sonnet was the favourite
verse-form for the expression of friendship, love,
personal devotion, admiration of beauty ; it engaged
the interest of the greatest poets and of the most
mechanical and commonplace verse-makers ; it was
the chosen instrument for the most delicate and
poetic worship of individual women or of abstract
virtues, and for the grossest and most obvious
flattery.
At a time when an author had practically no
ownership in his own work and when the business
of publishing was carried on largely in defiance of
or complete indifference to his wishes, and gener
ally to his harm, a great mass of literary work was
circulated in manuscript, and a goodly number of
people found occupation in multiplying copies of
these unpublished pieces for private circulation
among the friends and admirers of authors. Dur-
207
208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ing the decade between 1590 and 1600 thousands
of sonnets of every degree of merit passed from
hand to hand, and were read, known, and talked
about almost as widely, in some cases, as printed
books. The reputation of certain groups of sonnets
soon extended beyond the circle of the writer's
friends, and general interest and curiosity made it
worth while for some printer or publisher to secure
copies of the poems and publish them, not only
without the consent and revision of the writer, but
often without his knowledge.
This appears to have been the case with a group
of sonnets written by Shakespeare between 1593
and 1598, when the lyrical mood was dominant.
The Sonnets were published in May, 1609, by
Thomas Thorpe, who appears to have turned the
absence of protection to authors to his own profit
by obtaining and printing unpublished works which
had secured wide reading in manuscript form. The
popularity of Shakespeare's Sonnets doubtless
attracted his attention, and, having secured copies
of them, he sent them to the press without the
poet's consent and probably without his knowledge.
That many of these poems had been in existence
more than ten years before the publication by
Thorpe is proven by the fact that two of them
appeared in " The Passionate Pilgrim," published
in 1599, and that Meres, in the " Palladis Tamia,"
published a year earlier, referred to Shakespeare's
"sug'r'd Sonnets among his private friends." Allu-
THE SONNETS 2OQ
sions and lines in the Sonnets made it possible to
assign them at least proximate dates. They can
hardly have been written before 1594 nor later than
1598. They belong, therefore, to the period of
" Romeo and Juliet " and the " Midsummer Night's
Dream," and, with " Venus and Adonis " and the
" Rape of Lucrece," which they followed at a short
interval, they constitute Shakespeare's contribution
to lyrical poetry. Their extraordinary beauty of
thought, sentiment, and form has given them a
foremost place in English poetry, while their possi
ble significance as a record of the poet's experience
or an expression of his emotions has evoked an
immense body of comment.
Surrey and Wyatt brought the sonnet as a liter
ary form from Italy, where Petrarch was its ac
knowledged master ; but they did not slavishly
reproduce the Petrarchian model ; they followed a
sound instinct in giving the sonnet greater simplic
ity. The Italian sonnet consists of an octave and
sestet — a group of eight decasyllabic lines followed
by a group of six decasyllabic lines ; the sonnet of
Shakespeare consists of three quatrains, or groups
of four lines, with a concluding couplet. Precisians
have held that the Shakespearian Sonnets are not
sonnets, but fourteen-line poems. But Shakespeare
did not originate the sonnet-structure which he
used ; it had been made ready to his hand by a long
line of English poets. His supreme skill gave final
authority to what had hitherto been an experiment.
210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Fifty-two years before the publication of Shake
speare's Sonnets, a group of sonnets by Surrey and
another group by Wyatt had been published, many
of them being translations from Petrarch. The vol
ume containing these sonnets was reprinted six or
seven times before Shakespeare left Stratford. It
was followed in 1582 by Watson's " Centurie of
Love"; in 1591 by Sidney's "Astrophel and
Stella"; in 1592 by Daniel's "Delia" and Consta
ble's "Diana"; in 1593 by Fletcher's " Licia,"
Barnes's " Parthenophil," and Lodge's "Phillis";
in 1594 by Spenser's "Amoretti" and Drayton's
" Idea." To these collections of sonnets must be
added probably as many more, the impulse expend
ing itself apparently about 1597. The culminating
point of this passion for sonnet-writing was probably
reached about 1594, and its highest point of achieve
ment was attained by Shakespeare. While there is
much that is interesting and even important, from
the standpoint not only of literary development but
artistic excellence, in the work of this large group
of sonneteers, Shakespeare alone gave his work
universal significance and original and enduring
beauty.
He did not originate a new form of sonnet, as he
did not originate a new form of drama ; he took the
form which he found ready to his hand and gave it
freedom, flexibility, a new compass, and a capacity
for musical expression which the earlier English
poets had predicted but had not unfolded. He con-
THE SONNETS 211
tinued and completed the modification of the sonnet
as Petrarch left it which had been effected by the
English sonneteers since the time of Surrey and
Wyatt; surrendering something of the sustained
fulness of tone of the Italian sonnet, but securing
a sweetness, a flow of pure melody, which were be
yond the compass of the earlier English sonneteers.
The decasyllabic lines in groups of four, the alternate
lines rhyming, and closing with a couplet, imposed
rigid limitations on the poet but did not prevent
him from securing some noble melodic effects.
The one hundred and fifty-four poems which
make up the " Book Called Shakespeare's Son-
nettes " form a sonnet-sequence, as clearly as do
Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese," or
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's " House of Life " ; they
deal with two leading themes in an order which is
not necessarily historical, but which discloses an
interior principle of arrangement ; to borrow a com
parison from music, they consist of variations on
two dominating motives or themes. The order in
which they were presented in the edition of 1609
has been generally accepted, although nothing is
known with regard to the principle or method of
arrangement followed by the publisher. This order
has been accepted because it has, in the judgment
of a majority of students, the justification of a logi
cal and intelligible grouping. In the poet's time,
sonnets were often written in sequence ; the sepa
rate poems presenting, when read as a whole, a
212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
many-sided but connected treatment of a single
theme or of a group of relating themes. The sepa
rate sonnets, written from time to time as expres
sions of diverse moods, as Tennyson wrote " In
Memoriam," disclosed, when brought together, a
unity, not only of manner, but of theme or thought.
There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare
wrote the Sonnets at intervals during a period of
four or five years ; the Sonnets show that during
this period his mind was constantly reverting to two
kinds of emotional experience, which he approached
from many different points of view and in many
diverse moods, but which held a first place in his
interest and moved him to expression.
The one hundred and fifty-four poems in Shake
speare's sonnet-sequence have for their general
themes a deep and highly idealized love or friendship
for a young man of extraordinary beauty and charm
of nature, and a passionate love for a " dark woman."
These two unknown persons and the poet are
the actors in a drama which may have been subjec
tive in its origin, but which is definitely objective in
its presentation. The spiritual motive is suggested
in the one hundred and forty-fourth sonnet:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still ;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour' d ill.
The friend to whom the first one hundred and
twenty-six sonnets are addressed was noble in na-
THE SONNETS
2I3
ture, station, and fortune, endowed with all manly
qualities, and possessed of a winning beauty of fea
ture and charm of manner ; the remaining twenty-
eight are ad
dressed to or
describe rela
tions with a
woman who
was plain of
feature, pale,
dark, treach-
e ro u s, and
stained, but
the mistress of
a potent fasci
nation. If the
sonnets are
read in their
present order
as forming
WILLIAM HERBERT, EARL OF PEMBROKE, SHAKE-
a connected SPEARE,S 'FRIEND AND PATRON;
poem, the pOet, From an engraving by T. Jenkins, after the original of Van
i • r • _j i Dyke, in the collection of the Earl of Pembroke.
the dark woman enact a drama of love, the acts of
which are recorded in the emotions and meditations
of the poet. The entire sequence may be broken
into smaller groups, each of which conveys with
more or less defmiteness and completeness some
phase of the drama or some aspect of the poet's
experience.
214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The sonnet-sequence opens with a celebration of
the beauty and perfections of the noble youth whom
the poet loves, dwelling with an idealizing delicacy
and subtlety, after the manner of the Elizabethan
sonneteer, on his separate and numerable charms,
and urging him to marry in order that the marvel
lous beauty which has been given him may be repro
duced in his children. Failing to secure for posterity
copies of his friend's beauty by marriage, the poet
offers to give it immortality in his verse. With the
twenty-seventh sonnet a note of sadness and pain,
foreshadowing a change in the harmony between the
poet and his friend, is sounded; and the thoughts
which come in absence and separation rise in the
poet's mind and are set in exquisite form before the
imagination in " sessions of sweet silent thought."
The modulations of this theme are marvellously
varied and beautiful, covering the whole range of
sadness, longing, regret, loneliness, misgiving, fore
boding, and despair.
So far no shadow save that of separation has
rested upon the friendship between the two men,
but now the dark woman enters. The poet in the
forty-second sonnet describes himself as her lover,
and his sorrow gets its deepest pang from the fact
that his friend has robbed him of his mistress :
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss ;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain
And both for my sake lay on me this cross :
THE SONNETS 215
But here's the joy : my friend and I are one ;
Sweet flattery ! then she loves but me alone.
Loneliness, disillusion, pain, self-denial, renuncia
tion, and forgiveness are the notes of this phase of
the poet's experience, rationalized and illuminated by
meditation. There is no bitterness in his thought
of his friend, estranged from him by the woman he
loves and thus bringing him a double loss ; his love
and admiration triumph over his sense of injustice
and injury. This feeling gives the episode of shat
tered friendship its tenderest note, and has left its
record in a sonnet which registers Shakespeare's
highest achievement in the field of lyric poetry :
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west ;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
In the forty-eighth sonnet the entrance of a rival
poet is recorded, and the charms which have hith
erto been celebrated by the writer of the Sonnets
inspire " the travail of a mightier pen." The rival
singer, whose advent gives a wound to the son-
2l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
neteer's self-love, has been identified by different
students of the Sonnets with Chapman, Marlowe,
Drayton, and Daniel. In the light of rejection and
disillusion the poet comments with unflinching
frankness on the meanness of the player's occupa
tion, the lowliness of his own station in life, and the
frequent supremacy of evil in the world. Through
all these phases of his humiliation and sorrow his
love for his friend remains unmoved, and he finds a
deep consolation in the sense of power which his
art gives him. Through art the beauty of his
friend shall be the joy of posterity, as it has been
the poet's inspiration.
There is a touching cry of farewell in the eighty-
seventh sonnet ; but after an interval of silence the
poet takes up again the old themes, with more as
surance and with a new note of hope and faith.
This note becomes dominant in the one hundred
and sixteenth sonnet, which may be regarded as the
highest point of vision attained in the sequence :
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove :
Oh, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken ;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come ;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom,,
THE SONNETS 21 7
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Of the second general group of the Sonnets,
beginning with the one hundred and twenty-sev
enth, seventeen are addressed to the woman whose
dark fascinations have woven a spell over the poet's
senses without beguiling his intellect, and have
estranged his friend ; while of the remaining eleven
sonnets, nine are given up, for the most part, to
the regret, repentance, and humiliation which his
fatuous passion has brought to him. There is
neither evasion nor self-deception in these striking
confessions ; they are charged with the bitterness
of sincere and unflinching self-discovery and self-
revelation :
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win !
The two concluding sonnets serve as a postlude
to the group, and at the very end of the sequence
touch with the glow and heat of " love's fire " the
long story of the poem.
For many years the Sonnets shared the general
indifference to Shakespeare which, perhaps as dis
tinctly as any other sign of the times, measured the
distance in taste and feeling between the age of
Elizabeth and that of Queen Anne and her imme
diate successors. During the century now closing
no part of Shakespeare's work has been more
2l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
patiently or eagerly studied, and concerning none
has there been greater divergence of opinion.
It has been held by some students that the Son
nets are to be regarded chiefly as poetic exercises,
and Mr. Sidney Lee has not only reenforced this
view, but made a substantial contribution to liter
ary scholarship by a thorough examination of the
attitude and methods of English sonneteers in Shake
speare's time and of sonnet-writing on the Conti
nent. Whatever interpretation is put upon the
Sonnets, the background of poetic habit and con
vention which Mr. Lee has put behind sonnet-writ
ing at the close of the sixteenth century must be
taken into account ; for Shakespeare was preemi
nently an opportunist so far as the use of materials
and methods were concerned ; with his poetic sensi
tiveness and thrift in invention he could not have
failed to share the passion for sonnet-writing and
the conventional attitude toward the art as a highly
specialized form of lyric poetry.
This means that it would have been a natural
exercise of Shakespeare's poetic faculty to idealize
a patron ; to give to a friendship for a man of great
station the warmth and emotion of a deep personal
love ; to comment upon the frailty of women, the
treachery of friends, and the hardness of the world
as if these things had come within the compass of
the poet's experience ; to address elaborate apostro
phes to abstract virtues ; to make an imaginary
woman the object of a passion and the shaping
THE SONNETS 2 19
spirit of an intrigue which should have the sem
blance of reality without having any more sub
stantial basis than the fancy of an Elizabethan 1
sonneteer.
This is what Shakespeare may have done ; but it
is highly improbable that the key to the Sonnets is
to be found in a comparative study of sonnet-writ
ing in Shakespeare's time. The great majority of
students have been forced to the conclusion that,
while the conventional spirit and method of con
temporary sonneteers had a distinct influence upon
the poet so far as form and manner were concerned,
the content of the Sonnets had a vital relation to his
own experience. This conclusion is based upon
the fact that a note of reality seems to be distinctly
sounded in the series ; that they tell a story or
reveal an experience which is definitely outlined
notwithstanding the mask of conventional imagery
and phraseology which the poet employed ; that
throughout the entire body of his dramatic work he
uniformly and consistently keeps in touch with real
ity, using historic material whenever he can find it
adaptable for his purpose, and allying himself,
apparently by instinct as well as by intention, with
the force which resides in real things or in the deep
and rich deposit of the imagination dealing, as in
such figures as Hamlet or Prospero, with the great
est realities of experience ; that in the sensitiveness,
the capacity for devotion, the power of passion,
which the Sonnets reveal they so entirely express
220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the nature of Shakespeare that they must be
accepted as, in a true sense, autobiographic.
Those who regard the Sonnets as pure and
deliberate autobiography, containing a definite con
fession to be literally interpreted, probably stray as
far from the truth as those who dissociate the poet
entirely from his work and regard the Sonnets as
technical exercises only. The habit of the age and
the marked and consistent objectivity of Shake
speare's mode of expression make it highly improb
able that he laid his heart bare by putting in
historic order and with entire fidelity of detail a
passional experience which had searched his spirit
as with a lighted torch held aloft in the darkest
recesses of his nature.
The truth probably lies between these two
extremes of interpretation ; it seems probable that
the Sonnets are disclosures of the poet's experience
without being transcriptive of his actual history ;
that they embody the fruits of a great experience
without revealing that experience in its historic
order. Literal, consecutive recitals of fact the Son
nets are not, but they are autobiographic in the
only way in which a poet of Shakespeare's spirit
and training, living in his period, could make his
art the vehicle of autobiography: they use the
material which experience had deposited in Shake
speare's nature, but they hide the actual happenings
in his life behind the veil of an elaborate art and
of a philosophy with which the thought of western
THE SONNETS 221
Europe was saturated in his time. The Sonnets
may be read as the poetic record of an emotional
experience which left lasting traces behind it, and
as a disclosure of the mind of the poet ; but they
cannot be safely read as an exact record of fact.
The poet, as Shelley suggests, was willing to
intrust his secret to those who had the wit to
understand it.
The dedication of the Sonnets was written, not
by their author, but by their publisher, and has fur
nished material for one of the most extensive of
the many controversies which have centred about
Shakespeare :
TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF .
THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .
M? W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE .
AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .
PROMISED .
BY .
OVR . EVER - LIVING . POET .
WISHETH .
THE . WELL - WISHING .
ADVENTVRER . IN .
SETTING .
FORTH .
T. T.
In these words Thomas Thorpe, not Shake
speare, addressed a patron whom the research and
acumen of many decades of investigation and spec
ulation have not been able to identify to the satis
faction of a majority of students. For many years
the claims of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
were urged with great ingenuity and with consid-
222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
arable success. This young nobleman was a rep
resentative man of the close of the Elizabethan
epoch. Clarendon describes him as " very well
bred, and of excellent parts, and a graceful speaker
upon any subject, having a good proportion of
Learning, and a ready Wit to apply it and enlarge
upon it ; of a pleasant and facetious humour, and a
disposition affable, generous, and magnificent."
The " dark lady " was identified with Mary Fitton,
who was a Maid of Honour to the Queen, of a gay
and pleasure-loving disposition, on very friendly
terms with some of the players of Shakespeare's
company, of free manners and easy morals, who was
finally driven from the Court by the results of her
intimacy with the Earl of Pembroke. The claims
of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,
the brilliant and popular courtier, scholar, soldier,
and patron of the theatre, to whom Shakespeare
dedicated " Venus and Adonis " and " The Rape of
Lucrece," have been presented with much force.
Many facts in the careers of the Earl of South
ampton and of the Earl of Pembroke meet the
requirements of the few and uncertain biographical
data furnished by the Sonnets ; but the acceptance
of either of these noblemen as the " W. H." of the
dedication raises almost as many questions as it
answers.
It is highly improbable that a dedication written
by the publisher of a collection of poems, which he
was about to issue without authorization, would dis-
THE SONNETS
223
close the identity of the chief figure in the drama of
passion guarded in its record by the most highly
conventionalized poetic form of the age. It is more
probable that
such a dedica
tion would be
addressed to a
possible patron
of the volume
or to a personal
friend of the
publisher —
some such per-
son as the
'printer, Will
iam Hall, whose
claims to the
mysterious ini
tials "W. H."
Mr. Lee has
brought for-
HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON.
mOSt recent From an engraving by R. Cooper, after the original of Mirevelt,
, ••! , • in the collection of the Duke of Bedford.
contribution to
a discussion which will never, in all probability, be
finally settled, and which turns, in any event, upon
a matter which is solely one of intelligent curiosity.
The supreme value of the Sonnets lies in their
beauty and completeness as works of art. They dis
close marked inequalities of inspiration and of work-
224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
manship ; in some cases they are prime examples of
the strained imagery, the forced fancy, the artificial
style, of the Elizabethan sonneteer ; but again and
again in the noble sequence the poet blends experi
ence, philosophy, and the most sorely over-used
poetic form of his time in a harmonious whole
which appeals with equal power to the intellect and
to the sense of beauty. The artificial frame of
fourteen lines becomes fluid in his hand ; the
emotion which penetrates and irradiates it rises out
of the depths of his nature ; and both are touched
with the inimitable magic of the poet's imagination.
The volume in which the Sonnets were published
in 1609 contained a detached poem of forty-nine
stanzas in the metre of " The Rape of Lucrece," in*
which the sorrows of a young girl, betrayed and
deserted by her lover, are set forth in the gentle,
tender, melodious manner of Spenser. Of " A
Lover's Complaint " nothing further is known than
this fact. It has no relationship with the Sonnets,
and is in a wholly different key ; but there is no
reason why Shakespeare should not have written it
in the early lyrical period. Its appearance with the
Sonnets makes it highly probable that it was in
circulation among Shakespeare's friends in manu
script and was secured by Thorpe in the same way
in which copies of the Sonnets were obtained. The
poem is in the manner of the conventional pastoral
so popular at the same time, and is pervaded by an
air of quiet melancholy and gentle beauty. Com-
THE SONNETS 225
plaints were sung in many keys by the Elizabethan
poets, and " A Lover's Complaint " was probably an
early experiment in an imitatiye mood.
Robert Chester's " Love's Martyr ; or, Rosalin's
Complaint," published in 1601, contained, accord
ing to the preface, " diverse poetical essays on ...
the Turtle and Phoenix, done by the best and chief-
est of our modern writers." Shakespeare's contri
bution to this collection of verse was " The Phoenix
and the Turtle," the most enigmatical of his works.
This poem of thirteen stanzas of four lines each,
concluding with a Threnos in five stanzas of three
lines each, is a poetical requiem for the Phoenix and
the Turtle, whose love " was married chastity."
Among the contributors to the collection were
Shakespeare's great contemporaries, Jonson, Chap
man, Marston ; but neither the purpose nor the
occasion of the publication has yet been discovered,
nor has any light been shed from any quarter on
the allegory whose meaning Shakespeare seems to
have hidden from posterity in this bafHing poem.
Emerson suggested that a prize be offered for
an essay which " should explain, by a historical
research into the poetic myths and tendencies of the
age in which it was written, the frame and allusions
of the poem ; " but although much research has
been devoted to this object and many metaphysical,
political, ecclesiastical, and historical interpretations
have been suggested, " The Phcenix and the Turtle "
remains an unsolved enigma.
Q
226
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In 1599 William Jaggard, who, like Thorpe, laid
hands upon any unpublished writing which had
secured popularity and promised success to a
venturesome publisher, issued a small anthology of
contemporary verse under the title of " The Pas
sionate Pilgrim.
By W. Shake
speare." The
first two selec
tions were Son
nets by Shake
speare hitherto
unpublished,
and there were
three poems
taken from
"Love's La
bour's Lost,"
which appeared
in 1591. The
collection was
rep ri n ted in
1612 with the
addition of two
poems by Thomas Heywood. Shakespeare appears
to have borne the affront in silence, but Heywood
protested, in a dedicatory epistle which appeared in
that year, against the injury done him, and declared
that Shakespeare was much offended " with Mr.
Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed
THE SONNETS 227
to make so bold with his name." This protest was
not without effect, for a new title-page was issued
from which Shakespeare's name was omitted. Of
the twenty-one pieces which make up " The Pas
sionate Pilgrim," only five can be ascribed to
Shakespeare. The collection was a miscellany,
" a rag-picker's bag of stolen goods," put together
without authority from the poets whose work was
stolen, and the use of Shakespeare's name is one
evidence of its weight with readers.
CHAPTER X
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS
THE period of Shakespeare's apprenticeship
ended about 1596; the succeeding four or five
years show him in full possession of his art and his
material, though the deeper phases of experience
were still before him and the full maturity of his
genius was to be coincident with the searching of
his spirit in the period of the Tragedies. The last
half-decade of the sixteenth century were golden
years in the life of the rising dramatist. He had
made his place in the world ; he had learned his
craft ; he had come to clear self-consciousness ; the
intoxication of the possession of the poetic imagina
tion and the gift of poetic expression was upon him ;
he had immense zest in life, and life was at full-tide
in his veins and in the world about him. The
Queen was at the height of her splendid career;
the country had grown into clear perception of its
vital force and the possible greatness of its fortunes ;
English energy and courage were preparing the
new soil of the new world for the seeds of a greater
England at the ends of the earth ; London was full
of brilliant and powerful personalities, touched with
228
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 2 29
the vital impulse of the age, and alive in emotion,
imagination, and will. It was a time of great works
of art and of action ; in the two worlds of thought
and of affairs the tide of creative energy was at the
flood.
The genius of Spenser bore its ripest fruit
in " Colin Clout," the " Epithalamium," and the
concluding books of the " Faerie Queene." Sid
ney's noble " Apologie for Poesie," which was in the
key not only of the occupations and resources of his
mind but of his life, appeared in 1595, and a group
of Bacon's earlier essays in 1597. Chapman's
" Homer " and Fairfax's " Tasso " enriched the
English language with two masterpieces of transla
tion. Hooker and Hakluyt were writing and pub
lishing. Among the playwrights are to be found
the great names of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton,
Heywood, Marston, and Chapman. The men who
had possession of the stage when the poet came up
from Stratford — Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge,
Nash, Kyd, and Lyly — had been succeeded by
Shakespeare's generation. That he should have
detached himself from this great group and made a
distinct impression on his contemporaries is not the
least among the many evidences of his extraordinary
power. English literature was in one of its noblest
periods, and Shakespeare shared an impulse which,
like a great tide, carried men of every kind of power
to the furthest limits of their possible achievement.
At no period of his life was Shakespeare more
230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
keenly observant, more intellectually alert, more
inventive, more joyous in spirit, more spontaneous
and poetic. He had solved the problem of his rela
tion to his time by discovering his gift, acquiring
his tools, and discerning his opportunity; he had
ease of mind and openness of imagination. He
gave himself up to the joy of life, and lived in
its full tide with immense delight. He was not
only in the world but of it. Even in this eager and
golden period so meditative a mind could not escape
those previsions of tragedy and fate which are never
far off ; and sorrow did not pass by the house
hold at Stratford, for in August, 1596, accord
ing to the parish record, Hamnet, Shakespeare's
only son, was buried. In this year " King John "
was written, and it has been surmised that in the
pathetic and beautiful character of Arthur, which is
essentially unhistoric, the poet was portraying his
own son, and in the touching lament of Constance
giving voice to his own sorrow. This loss, which
must have been poignant, was apparently the only
shadow on these prosperous years when the poet
was in his earliest prime.
History and comedy absorbed the imagination
and divided the creative energy of Shakespeare
from 1596 to 1600. Of the ten plays founded on
English history, " King John " serves as a prelude,
with " Richard II.," the two parts of " Henry IV.,"
" Henry V.," the three parts of " Henry VI.," and
"Richard III." as a chronicle play on a great
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS
23I
scale; while " Henry VIII." may be taken as an
epilogue. The plays were not, however, written
in historical sequence, nor did Shakespeare have
any intention at the start of making a connected
treatment of a stirring and dramatic period in
English his
tory. He found
the old plays
dealing with
Henry VI.
ready to his
hand, as has
been noted, and
used them as
material, touch
ing " Henry
VI." very light
ly and probably
only in the way
of adaptation
and revision,
and the inter
polation of a
few characteristic scenes and passages. " Richard
III." came a little later in time, and is so evidently
modelled after Marlowe that its Shakespearian au
thorship has been questioned by very competent
critics. It is full of echoes and reminiscences of
Marlowe's manner; it is tempestuous, turbulent,
and violent ; it is history dramatized rather than
JOHN FLETCHER.
From a picture in the possession of the Earl of Clarendon.
232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
a true historical drama ; but the figure of Richard
which dominates the play and charges it with vital
ity, is as clearly realized and as superbly drawn as
any character in the whole range of the plays. The
lack of artistic coherence in the play is due to the
inharmonious elements in it — the attempt to com
bine the method of Marlowe and the spirit of Shake
speare. The framework of the play was conven
tional even in Shakespeare's time ; the manner
is so lyrical that it is a tragic poem rather than
a dramatic tragedy ; nevertheless, Richard is drawn
with a hand so firm, a realism so modern, that
a play of very inferior construction becomes
immensely effective for stage purposes, and has
been almost continuously popular from its first
representation. Shakespeare followed Holinshed
and Marlowe in writing "Richard III."; but he
put into the play that element of ethical purpose
which stamps all his work and separates it in
fundamental conception from the work of Marlowe.
The parallelisms between " Richard II." and
Marlowe's "Edward II." are so obvious that it
is impossible to escape the inference that Shake
speare was still under the spell of the tremendous
personality of the author of " Tamburlaine " ; but
there are signs of liberation. There is a change of
subject from the fortunes of the House of York
to those of the House of Lancaster ; blank verse,
to which Marlowe rigidly adhered, gives place to
frequent use of rhyme ; and the atmosphere in
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 233
which the action takes place is softened and clari
fied. The weak king's eloquence often betrays
Shakespeare's inimitable touch, and the superb
eulogy on England spoken by John of Gaunt is
a perfect example of Shakespeare's use of the
grand manner. Still following Holinshed, and
under the influence of Marlowe, the dramatist
was swiftly working out his artistic emancipation.
To this period belongs " King John," which was
probably completed about 1595, and which was a
recast of the older play of " The Troublesome
Raigne of John, King of England," published in
1591. The conventional construction was not
greatly modified by -Shakespeare, but the play
marks the transition from the chronicle play to
the true drama; in which incidents and characters
are selected for their dramatic significance, a
dramatic motive introduced, dramatic movement
traced, and a climax reached. The older play
wrights, dealing with the events of a whole reign,
would have given the play an epical or narrative
quality ; Shakespeare selected, compressed, fore
shortened, and grouped events and figures in such
a way as to secure connected action, the develop
ment of character, and a final catastrophe which is
impressive, if not intrinsically dramatic. He in
stinctively omitted certain coarse scenes which were
in the older play; he brought into clear light and
consistency certain characters which were roughly
sketched in the earlier work ; in the scene between
234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hubert and Arthur he struck a new note of tender
ness and pathos ; while in giving marked promi
nence to the humour of Faulconbridge he opened
the way for that blending of comedy with tragedy
and history which is one of the marks, not only of
his maturity, but of his greatness. The play has
no hero, and is not free from the faults of the long
line of dramas from which it descended and to which
it belongs, but Shakespeare's creative energy is dis
tinctly at work in it.
The growth of the poet's mind and art was rapid,
and, in its large lines, is readily followed ; but it was
a vital, not a logical, development, and it was not,
therefore, entirely orderly and harmonious. In his
later work he sometimes returned to his earlier
manner ; at his maturity he more than once took
up existing material, and was content to retouch
without reconstructing it. The plays vary greatly
in quality and insight ; it would not be easy to find
in the work of any other poet of the first rank more
marked inequalities. Many of the sonnets touch
the very limits of perfection ; others are halting,
artificial, full of the conceits and forced imagery of
the day. The early historical plays are often pano
ramic rather than dramatic ; " Henry IV.," on the
other hand, is sustained throughout its wide range
of interest and action by the full force of Shake
speare's genius. This inequality in the plays, the
irregularities of growth which often present them
selves, and the occasional reversions to the conven-
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 235
tional construction which Shakespeare inherited
from his predecessors or to his own earlier man
ner, humanize the poet, bring his work well within
the range of the literary evolution of his time, and,
while leaving the miracle of his genius unexplained,
make his career and his achievement intelligible and
explicable.
The brilliant years between 1596 and 1600 or
1601 were divided between history and comedy;
between the splendid show and pageant of society
as illustrated in the story of the English kings, and
the variety, the humour, the inconsistency of men, as
these qualities are brought out in social life. The
"Taming of the Shrew," and the "Merchant of
Venice," in which the genius of the dramatist
shines in full splendour, probably antedated by a few
months the writing of the two parts of " Henry IV."
and of " Henry V.," but these plays are so nearly
contemporaneous that their exact order of produc
tion is unimportant. The historical plays may be
grouped together for convenience, keeping in mind
the fact that the dramatist was apparently finding
relief from dealing with great matters of state and
great historical personages by turning from time to
time to comedy, and perhaps by writing comedy
simultaneously with history.
The first part of " Henry IV." was written not
later than 1597; the second part followed it after
an interval of not more than two years. The
sources of the play are to be found in Holinshed
236
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and an earlier chronicle play of little merit but
marked popularity, " The Famous Victories of
Henry V." The play fol
lows history with devia
tions, the most important
being the bold stroke of
making the Prince and
Hotspur of the same age ;
in the earlier drama the
hints of the rich humour,
the inimitable comic ac
tion of Shakespeare's
work, are also found. But
that which came into the
hands of the dramatist as
crude ore left it pure
gold, stamped with inef
faceable images. In the
use of this raw material,
Shakespeare came to his
own and made it his own
by virtue of searching in
sight into its ethical sig
nificance and complete
mastery of its artistic re
sources. Other plays show
the poet in higher moods,
but none discloses so
completely the full range
of his power; construe-
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 237
tion, characterization, pathos, humour, wit, dramatic
energy, and the magical Shakespearian touch are
found in " Henry IV." in free and harmonious unity
of dramatic form. In no other play is there greater
ease in dealing with apparently discordant elements;
nor is there elsewhere a firmer grasp of circum
stances, events, and persons in dramatic sequence
and action. The play has a noble breadth of inter
est and action, a freedom of movement and vitality
of characterization, which give it the first place
among the historical dramas.
The humour of Falstaff and the greed and vul
garity of his ragged, disreputable but immortal fol
lowers reenforce the dignity of the play, which is
sustained throughout at a great height. Nothing
which is human escapes the clear, piercing, kindly
gaze of this young master of character and destiny;
he sees so broadly and deeply that nothing repels
him which has any touch of reality or soundness in
it. In his hands, and preeminently in this play,
the drama broadens to compass the full range of
humour and character and experience ; and the
tragic and humorous are blended, as in life, without
incongruity or violation of the essential unities of
human action and knowledge. Henry IV. and
Hotspur are not blurred in outline, nor is the sig
nificance of their struggle obscured by the roister
ers and thieves who are at the heels of Falstaff.
The heroic note of the old ideals of chivalry is
sounded as distinctly as if the broad, rollicking
238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
humour of Falstaff had no existence. Falstaff is
one of the most marvellous of Shakespeare's crea
tions ; a gross braggart, without conscience, and as
simply and naturally unmoral as if there were no
morals, Shakespeare has drawn him with such
matchless vitality that, although the stage is
crowded with great figures, he holds it as if it were
his own. Sir John Oldcastle, whose character un
doubtedly gave Shakespeare a rough sketch of
Falstaff, and whose name was originally used by
Shakespeare, appears in the earlier play which the
poet had before him ; in deference to the objections
of the descendants of Sir John, the name was
changed in the printed play, and became Falstaff,
but there is reason to believe that the earlier name
was retained in the acting play. There was ground
for the objection to its use, for Sir John Oldcastle
was a Lollard and a martyr.
Shakespeare created a kind of English Bacchus
at a time when every kind of fruit or grain that
could be made into a beverage was drunk in vast
quantities ; and sack, which was FalstafFs native
element, was both strong and sweet. Falstaff is
saved by his humour and his genius ; he lies, steals,
boasts, and takes to his legs in time of peril, with
such superb consistency and in such unfailing good
spirits that we are captivated by his vitality. It
would be as absurd to apply ethical standards to
him as to Silenus or Bacchus ; he is a creature of
the elemental forces ; a personification of the vitality
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 239
which is in bread and wine ; a satyr become human,
but moving buoyantly and joyfully in an unmoral
world. And yet the touch of the ethical law is on
him ; he is not a corrupter by intention, and he is
without malice ; but as old age brings its searching
revelation of essential characteristics, his humour
broadens into coarseness, his buoyant animalism
degenerates into lust; and he is saved from con
tempt at the end by one of those exquisite touches
with which the great-hearted poet loves to soften
and humanize degeneration.
" Henry IV." is notable not only for the range and
variety of types presented, but also for the freedom
of manner which the poet permits himself. About
half the first part is written in prose. Shakespeare
was not alone among his contemporaries in break
ing with the earlier tradition which imposed verse
as the only form upon the drama ; Jonson, Beau
mont and Fletcher used both prose and verse in
the same drama ; but Shakespeare alone showed
equal mastery over both forms. His prose is as
characteristic and as perfect as his verse ; he turns
indifferently from one to the other and is at ease
with either. He makes the transition in many
places for the sake of securing variety and height
ening certain effects which he wishes to produce,
as he often introduces humorous passages into the
most tragic episodes.
Mr. Sill makes the interesting suggestion that
verse being the natural form of expression for emo-
240
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tion, Shakespeare instinctively turned to prose when
he was presenting ideas detached from emotion, when
he wished to be
logical rather
than moving,
and practical or
jocular rather
than philosoph
ical or serious ;
and, verse be
ing essentially
based on order
and regularity,
the poet turned
to prose when
ever he wished
to give expres
sion to frenzy
or madness.
There would
have been essential incongruity in putting blank
verse into the mouths of clowns, fools, drunkards,
and madmen. These suggestions are of special
interest when they are applied to " Hamlet."
In " Henry IV.," as in " The Merry Wives of
Windsor " and " The Taming of the Shrew," the
references to Warwickshire are unmistakable ; the
dramatist was still too near his youth to have
forgotten persons and localities known in his boy
hood.
FRANCIS BEAUMONT.
From a picture in the possession of Colonel Harcourt.
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 241
" Henry V.," drawn from the same sources, is a
continuation of " Henry IV.," and presents in the
splendid maturity of the king one of Shakespeare's
great men of action ; a type in which his own time
was rich, and in the delineation of which, being
himself a man of reflection and expression, the
poet found infinite satisfaction. In this play
the events of a reign are grouped for dramatic
effectiveness, and war is dramatized on a great
scale. The material is essentially epical, but the
treatment is so vigorous that the play, while not
dramatic in the deepest sense, has the dignity and
interest of a drama. The introduction of the
Chorus, in which the dramatist speaks in person,
shows how deeply he had meditated on his art, and
how deliberately he had rejected the conventional
unities of time, place, and action for the sake of the
higher and more inclusive unity of vital experience.
No other play so nobly expresses the deepening of
the national consciousness at the end of the sixteenth
century, and the rising tide of national feeling.
The play is a great national epic ; and the secret
of the expansion and authority of the English
race is to be found in it. It was presented in the
last year of the century, and probably in the Globe
Theatre, then recently opened.
"King Henry VIII." was written at least ten
years later, and is distinctly inferior to the historical
plays of the decade which closed with the produc
tion of " Henry V.," and is generally regarded as
242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
a piece of composite work, Fletcher probably com
pleting that which Shakespeare had planned, but
of which he had written only the first two acts.
The historical plays belong, as a whole, to Shake
speare's earliest period of productiveness ; they keep
the record of his apprenticeship ; they find their
place in the first stage of his development. This
was due only in a subordinate way to accident ;
there was reason for it in the psychology of his
art. The material for these plays was ready to his
hand in the earlier chronicle plays in the libraries
of the theatres, and in the records of Holinshed
and Hall ; and there was ample stimulus for their
production in their popularity. But other and
deeper sources of attraction are not far to seek.
These plays mark the transition from the epic to
the drama ; from the story of events and persons
as shaped by fate to the story of events and persons
as they disclose the fashioning of character by
action and the reaction of character on events,
knitting men and actions together in a logical
sequence and a dramatic order. The historical
plays find their logical place in the order of devel
opment between the old plays dealing with histori
cal subjects and the masterpieces of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries ; and in the unfolding of
Shakespeare's art they hold the same middle place.
These plays preserve the characteristics of the
older plays and predict the fully developed drama ;
they do not reveal the full play of the poet's genius
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 243
nor the perfect maturity of his art, although the
plays which deal with Henry IV. and Henry V.
reveal the full range of his interests and his gifts.
In these plays the young poet put himself in
deepest touch with the life of his race, and, in
bringing to clear consciousness the race spirit,
brought out with the utmost distinctness the racial
qualities of his own genius. He is preeminently
the English poet, not only by virtue of his suprem
acy as an artist, but by virtue of the qualities of
his mind; and these qualities were developed and
thrown into striking relief by the historical plays.
His greatest work was in other fields, but through
no other work has he impressed himself so deeply
on the imagination of the men of his own race.
He vitalized a great section of English history,
and has made it live before the eyes of ten gener
ations ; he set the figures of great Englishmen
on so splendid a stage that they personify finally
and for all time the characteristics of the English
race ; he so exalted liberty as represented by the
English temper and institutions that, more than
any statesman, he has made patriotism the deepest
passion in the hearts of Englishmen. No other
poet has stood so close to the English people or
affected them so deeply; and from the days when
the earliest popular applause welcomed " Henry
VI." on the stage of The Theatre, The Rose, and
The Globe, to these later times when Irving's
Wolsey crowds the stalls of the Lyceum, Shake-
244
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
speare has been the foremost teacher of English
history. There are many who, if they were
as frank as Chatham, would confess that they
learned their history chiefly from him.
In these plays,
moreover, the
young poet trained
himself to be a
dramatist by deal
ing with men under
historical condi
tions ; with men in
action. The es
sence of the drama
as distinguished
from other literary
forms is action, and
in the historical
plays action is
thrown into the
most striking re
lief; sometimes at
the sacrifice of
the complete devel
opment of the actors. Before taking up the pro-
foundest problems of individual destiny or entering
into the world of pure ideality, Shakespeare studied
well the world of actuality. On a narrower stage,
but in a higher light, he dealt with the relation of
the individual to the political order, and showed
SEAL OF THE ROYAL DRAMATIC COLLEGE.
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 245
on a great scale the development of character in
relation to practical ends. The depths of his
spiritual insight and the heights of his art are to
be found in the Tragedies ; but the breadth, com
prehensiveness, and full human sympathy of his
genius are to be found in the historical plays ; and
in these plays, at the very beginning of his career,
appeared that marvellous sanity which kept him
poised in essential harmony between the divergent
activities and aspects of life, gave him clearness of
vision and steadiness of will, and made him the
master of the secrets of character and destiny. The
play of the divine law, which binds the deed to the
doer, and so moralizes experience and makes it
significant, is nowhere more clearly exhibited than
in these many-sided dramas, with their rich diver
sity of character and their wide range of action.
Shakespeare is one of the greatest of ethical
teachers, not by intention, but by virtue of the
depth and clearness of his vision. The historical
plays reveal the justice of God working itself out
through historical events and in the lives of histori
cal persons ; with the constant perception that no
man is wholly good or evil ; that out of things evil
good often flows ; that sin turns often, through
the penitence of humility and service, into blessed
ness ; and that about the certain and evident play
of the divine justice there is a mercy which is a
constant mediation, and hints, at times, at a re
demption as inclusive as humanity.
246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Schlegel has well said of the historical plays that
they are " a mirror for kings." In no other litera
ture is there so complete a portraiture of the gran
deur of the kingly office and the uncertainty of
the kingly character; the pathos of the contrast
between the weak man and the great place is often
searching to the verge of irony. Shakespeare never
permits his kings to forget that they are men, and
the splendour of their fortunes sometimes serves
to bring into ruthless light the inadequacy of their
natural gifts for the great responsibilities laid upon
them. The trappings of royalty heighten the crimi
nality of John and Richard III.; the eloquent senti
mentality of Richard II. and the ineffective saintli-
ness of Henry VI. are thrown into high relief by the
background of royal position; the well-conceived and
resolute policy of Henry IV. and the noble energy
and decision of Henry V. — Shakespeare's typical
king and the personification of the heroic, virile,
executive qualities of the English nature — take on
epical proportions from the vantage-ground of the
throne.
The contrast between the man and the king some
times deepens into tragedy when the desires and
passions of the man are brought into collision with
the duties of the king; for the king is always con
ceived as the incarnation of the State, the personi
fication of society. His deed reacts, not only upon
himself, but upon the community of which he is the
head, and whose fortunes are inextricably bound up
THE HISTORICAL PLAYS 247
with his fortunes. In the plays dealing with histor
ical subjects Shakespeare exhibits the divine order
as that order is embodied in the State, and the trag
edies which occupy the great stage of public life
arise from the collision of the individual with the
State, of the family with the State, and of the
Church with the State. The political insight and
wisdom shown in this comprehensive ethical grasp
of the relation of the individual to society in institu
tional life are quite beyond the achievements of any
statesman in the range of English history; for
statecraft is everywhere, in the exposition of the
dramatist, the application of universal principles of
right and wise living to the affairs of State. Thus,
on the great stage of history, Shakespeare, in the
spirit of the poet and in the manner of the drama
tist, dramatized the spirit of man working out its
destiny under historic conditions.
CHAPTER XI
THE COMEDIES
DURING these prosperous five or six years Shake
speare's hand turned readily from history to com
edy and from comedy to history; the exact order
in which the plays of the period were written is
unimportant so long as we are able to identify the
group as a whole. The rising tide of creative
energy, his mounting fortunes, and the deep fasci
nation of the spectacle of life evoked his humour
and gave free play to the gayety of his nature
and the buoyancy of a mind which played like
lambent lightning over the whole surface of
experience and knowledge. It is probable that
he was at work on several plays at the same time ;
taking up history or comedy as it suited his
mood, and giving himself the rest and refresh
ment which come from change of work. It is
certain that some of the greater Tragedies were
slowly shaping themselves in his imagination
from the earliest working years. " Romeo and
Juliet" and "Hamlet" had taken root in his
mind while he was yet an unknown apprentice
in his craft ; during these fertile years the germinal
ideas which were to take shape in the entire body
248
THE COMEDIES
249
of his work were clarifying themselves in his
consciousness ; while his hand was engaged with
one subject his mind was dealing with many.
He had already used the comedy form in " The
Two Gentlemen of Verona," " The Comedy of
Errors," and " Love's Labour's Lost," and had
GARDEN OF DR. JOHN HALL'S HOUSE.
made it clear to his contemporaries that he pos
sessed the genius of comedy — that rare, pene
trating, radiant, sane genius which was also the
possession of Homer and Cervantes, and, later,
of Moliere and Goethe — the genius which not
only looks into human experience deeply, but
sees it broadly and in true perspective. It was
Shakespeare's ease of mind, derived from the
250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
largeness and deep humaneness of his view,
which kept him sane during the years when he
was living in the heart of tragedy; and this ease
of mind found expression in the comedy. The
Shakespearian comedy is a comedy of life rather
than of manners — a gay, sweet, high-spirited play
with the weaknesses, follies, incongruities of men
as these are projected against the great back
ground of the spiritual kinship and destiny of
humanity. There is no touch in Shakespeare
of that scorn which is the mood of those lesser
men who see the details of human character but
not the totality of its experience. Shakespeare
was equally at home with the tragic and comic
elements in human nature, because both spring
from the same root. In dealing with the tragic
forces he is always superior to them ; at their worst
they are rigidly limited in their destructive force ;
he is not the victim of their apparent finality ; he
sees through and beyond them to the immovable
order of the world, as one sees through the brief
fury of the storm to the untouched sun and un
moved earth which are hidden for a moment by
the cloud. In like manner and for the same rea
son he laughs with men, but is saved from the
cheapness of the sneer and the hard blindness of
scorn. In his wide, clear, dispassionate vision he
sees the contrast between the greatness of man's
fortunes and the occasional littleness of his aims,
the incongruities of his occupations, the exaggera-
THE COMEDIES 251
tions and eccentricities of his manners. He is
mirthful because he loves men ; it is only those
who love us who can really laugh at and with us,
and it is only men of great heart who have the gift
of humour on a great scale. For humour, Dr.
Bushnell says, " is the soul reeking with its own
moisture, laughing because it is full of laughter,
as ready to weep as to laugh ; for the copious
shower it holds is good for either. And then,
when it has set the tree a-dripping,
" And hung a pearl in every cowslip's ear,
the pure sun shining after will reveal no colour of
intention in the sparkling drop, but will leave you
doubting still whether it be a drop let fall by
laughter or a tear."
Later in life, for a brief period, Shakespeare's
laughter lost its ring of tenderness, its overflowing
kindness; but his vision became clear again, and,
although the spirit of mirth never regained its
ascendency, the old sweetness returned. " Shake
speare is a well-spring of characters which are
saturated with the comic spirit," writes George
Meredith ; " with more of what we will call blood-
life than is to be found anywhere out of Shake
speare ; and they are of this world, but they are of
the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination,
and by great poetic imagination. They are, as it
were — I put it to suit my present comparison —
creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled
252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
towns, not grouped and toned to pursue a comic
exhibition of the narrower world of society. Jaques,
Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of
Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen
— marvellous Welshmen ! — Benedict and Beatrice,
Dogberry and the rest, are subjects of a special
study in the poetically comic."
In " The Merchant of Venice " the poet finally
emancipated himself from the influence of Marlowe,
and struck his own note with perfect distinctness.
There is a suggestion of the "Jew of Malta " in
Shylock, but the tragic figure about whom the
play moves bears on every feature the stamp of
Shakespeare 's humanizing spirit. The embodiment
of his race and the product of centuries of cruel
exclusion from the larger opportunities of life, Shy-
lock appeals to us the more deeply because he
makes us feel our kinship with him. Marlowe's
Jew is a monster; Shakespeare's Jew is a man
misshapen by the hands of those who feed his
avarice.
The comedy was produced about 1596; it was
entered in the Stationers' Register two years later,
and was twice published in 1600. The dramatist
drew freely upon several sources. There are evi
dences of the existence of an earlier play; the two
stones of the bond, with its penalty of a pound of
flesh, and of the three caskets were already known
in English literature, and had been interwoven to
form a single plot. A collection of Italian novels
THE COMEDIES 253
of the fourteenth century and the well-known
" Gesta Romanorum " contributed to the drama as
it left Shakespeare's hands. As a play, it has
obvious defects ; the story is highly improbable,
and, as in at least three other plays, the plot in
volves bad law ; for the poet, although sharing the
familiarity of the dramatists generally with legal
terms and phrases, shows that his knowledge was
second-hand, or acquired for the occasion, by his
misuse of well-known words of legal import. In
invention in the matter of plots and situations
Shakespeare was inferior to several of his contem
poraries; and he was content, therefore, to take
such material as came to his hand with as much
freedom as did Moliere. In this case, as in every
other, he at once put his private mark on the
general property and made it his own. He puri
fied the material, he put a third of the play into
prose, and he imparted to the verse a beauty, a
vigour, and a freedom from mannerisms which
separate it at once from work of the apprentice
period. He freely and boldly harmonized the
tragic and comic elements ; in Portia he created
the first of those enchanting women for whom no
adjective has yet been found save the word Shake
spearian, for they are a group by themselves ; and
he set on the stage the first of his great tragic
figures. In 1596 the Jew was contemptible in the
mind of western Europe; he was the personifica
tion of greed and subtlety, and he was under sus-
254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
picion of deeds of fiendish cruelty. He was
robbed upon the slightest pretext, stoned on the
streets, and jeered at on the stage. His sufferings
were food for mirth. In 1594, a Jew, who was
acting as physician to the Queen, had been accused
of attempting to poison Elizabeth, and had been
hanged at Tyburn, and popular hate against the
race was at fever-heat when Shakespeare put on
the stage the Jew who has since been accepted as
typical of his race. It is not probable that the
dramatist definitely undertook to modify the popu
lar conception of the Jew ; his attention may have
been directed to the dramatic possibilities of the
character by the trial and execution of Dr. Lopez ;
and when he dealt with the material at hand, he
recast it in the light of his marvellous imagination,
and humanized the central figure. Shylock was a
new type, and he was not understood at first. For
many years the part was played in a spirit of broad
and boisterous farce, and the audiences jeered at
the lonely and tragic figure. At every point in
" The Merchant of Venice " the poet shows clearer
insight than in his earlier work, deeper wisdom,
greater freedom in the use of his material, and
fuller command of his art.
Shakespeare had an older play before him when
he wrote " The Taming of the Shrew," and he
followed its main lines of story so closely that the
play as we now have it is an adaptation rather than
an original work. That the dramatist was thinking
THE COMEDIES 255
of the theatre and not of the public or of posterity is
shown by the readiness with which he passed from
the noblest creative work to the work of revision
and adaptation. The earlier play gave him the
idea of the Induction and the characteristic passages
between Petruchio and Catharine, but was an
inferior piece of work, full of rant, bathos, and
obvious imitation of Marlowe ; the plot was followed,
but the construction and style are new ; the story
of Bianca and her lovers was worked in as a sub
sidiary plot, and, although the play sometimes
passes over into the region of farce, it is charged
with the comedy spirit.
This comedy carries the reader back to the poet's
youth, to Stratford and to Warwickshire. It is rich
in local allusions, as are also " The Merry Wives of
Windsor" and the second part of "Henry IV."
There is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare's
intercourse with Stratford was unbroken through
these earlier years, though the difficulties and
expense of travel may have prevented frequent
visits. Now that prosperity and reputation were
bringing him ease and means, his relations with his
old home became more intimate and active. There
are many evidences of his interest in Stratford and
in his father's affairs, and it is evident that the son
shared his rising fortunes with his father. The
latter had known all the penalties of business failure ;
he was often before the local courts as a debtor.
He seems to have had a fondness for litigation,
256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
which was shared by his son. In the dramatist's
time the knowledge of legal phrases among intelli
gent men outside the legal profession was much
more general than it has been at any later time, but
there is reason to believe that Shakespeare knew
many legal processes at first hand. He bought and
sold land, brought various actions for the recovery
of debts, filed bills in chancery, made leases, and
was engaged in a number of litigations.
In 1596, after an absence of ten years from Strat
ford, the poet reappears in his native place as a
purchaser of valuable lands and a rebuilder of his
father's shattered fortune. In that year his only
son, Hamnet, a boy of eleven, died and was buried
in Holy Trinity Churchyard. In the same year
John Shakespeare made application to the College
of Heralds for the privilege of using a coat of arms.
The claim was based on certain services which the
ancestors of the claimant were declared to have ren
dered " the most prudent prince King Henry the
Seventh of famous memorie." The ancestral distinc
tion put forward on behalf of John Shakespeare was
not more apocryphal than the services set forth in
many similar romances formally presented to the
College of Arms as records of fact. The statement
that the applicant's wife, Mary, heiress of Robert
Arden, of Wilmcote, was the daughter of a gentle
man has not been verified. The application was
granted three years later, and the Garter King of
Arms assigned to John Shakespeare a shield: "gold,
THE COMEDIES 257
on a bend sable, a spear of the first, and for his
crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed
argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, sup
porting a 'spear gold steeled as aforesaid." The
motto, " Non Sans Droict," appears in a sketch or
draft of the crest. Two years later the dramatist
was styled " gentleman " in a legal document.
This effort to rehabilitate his father was followed,
a year later, by the purchase of New Place — a con
spicuous property at the northeast corner of Chapel
Street and Chapel Lane, opposite the Guild Chapel,
in Stratford, upon which stood what was probably
the largest house in the town. This substantial
house, built of timber and brick by Sir Hugh Clop-
ton in the previous century, had probably been
long neglected, and was fast going to decay.
No clear account of the appearance of the house
has been preserved ; but enough remains to show
its considerable size and substantial structure.
The walls of the larger rooms and probably the
ceilings were covered with sunken panels of oak,
some of which have been preserved. Nothing else
now remains of the building save a few timbers
which projected into the adjoining house, now used
as a residence for the custodian of the Shakespeare
properties, a fragment of the north wall, the well,
pieces of the foundation, which are guarded by
screens, the lintel, and an armorial stone.
Shakespeare restored New Place, and enlarged
its grounds by considerable purchases of land. At
258
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his death it passed into the possession of his daugh
ter, Susannah, the wife of Dr. John Hall, and in
July, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria was entertained
for three days under its roof. Upon the death of
Mrs. Hall, six years later, New Place became the
property of her only child, Elizabeth, at that time
DR. JOHN HALL'S HOUSE AT STRATFORD.
the wife of Thomas Nashe, later the wife of Sir
John Barnard, of Abingdon. Lady Barnard was
the last of Shakespeare's direct descendants.
At a later period the property came once more
into the hands of the Clopton family, and was sub
sequently sold to the Rev. Francis Gastrell, a vicar
in Cheshire, who appears to have been a person of
considerable fortune, dull perception, and irritable
THE COMEDIES 259
temper. He resented the interest which visitors
were beginning to show in the place ; in order to
break up the growing habit of sitting under the
mulberry tree, which was intimately associated with
the dramatist, he cut the tree to the ground in 1756.
This attitude towards the one great tradition of the
town brought the owner of New Place into a disfa
vour with his fellow-townsmen which took on aggres
sive forms. The Stratford officials charged with
the laying and collection of taxes made use of their
power to secure the utmost farthing from Mr. Gas-
trell, and that gentleman, in order to relieve himself
of further taxes, pulled down the house, sold the
materials, and left Stratford amid execrations which
have been echoed in every succeeding generation.
The house adjoining New Place was the property
of one of the poet's friends, and now serves as a
residence for the custodian and as a museum of
Shakespearian relics. The adjoining house was
the home of Shakespeare's friend, Julius Shaw, who
was one of the witnesses to his will ; and, after
various changes, it is still standing. New Place is
to-day a green and fragrant garden ; the fragments
of the original foundation are infolded in a lawn o^
velvet-like texture ; the mulberry tree has survived
the vandalism of a hundred and fifty years ago ;
behind the old site there is a small but perfectly
kept park where many flowers of Shakespearian
association may be found, where the air seems
always fragrant and the place touched with abiding
260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
peace. The tower of Guild Chapel rises close at
hand ; in the near distance is the spire of Holy
Trinity; the Avon is almost within sight; the
earlier and the later associations of Shakespeare's
life cluster about the place which he saw every day
as a schoolboy, to which he returned in his prime,
where he gathered his friends about him, and
where he found reconciliation and, at last, peace.
The purchase and restoration of New Place
made Shakespeare a man of consequence among
neighbours who could understand the value of
o
property, however they might miss the signifi
cance of literature. In a letter, still extant, dated
October 25, 1598, Richard Quiney, whose son
Thomas subsequently married Judith Shakespeare,
appealed to the poet for a loan ; and there are
other evidences that he was regarded as a man
whose income afforded a margin beyond his own
needs.
The poet's acquaintance with country life in its
humblest forms ; with rural speech, customs, and
festivals; with sports and games; with village
taverns and their frequenters, was so intimate
and extensive that he used it with unconscious
freedom and ease. No other contemporary drama
tist shows the same familiarity with manners,
habits, and people ; an intimacy which must have
been formed by a boy who made his first acquaint
ance with life in Warwickshire. These reminis
cences of boyhood, reenforced by the later and
THE COMEDIES 26 I
deliberate attention of a trained observer, con
tinually crop out in many of the plays, as the
formations of an earlier geologic period often show
themselves through the structure of a later period.
The fertility of resource which gives the two
parts of " Henry IV." such overflowing vitality
made the writing of " The Merry Wives of Wind
sor " inevitable. It was quite impossible for the
GREENWICH PALACE.
dramatist to leave a character so rich in the
elements of comedy as Falstaff without further
development under wholly different conditions.
In the Epilogue to " Henry IV." the dramatist
promised to " continue the story with Sir John
in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine
of France"; but "Henry V." contained no refer
ence to the old knight save the brief but inimitable
account of his death. Almost a century after the
death of the Queen three writers reported almost
262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
simultaneously the tradition, apparently current
at the time and probably of long standing, that
Elizabeth was so delighted with the humour of
Falstaff in " Henry IV." that she commanded
Shakespeare to continue the story and show
Falstaff in love. " I knew very well," wrote
Dennis, by way of introducing an adaptation of
the play in 1702, "that it had pleas'd one of the
greatest queens that ever was in the world. . . .
This comedy was written at her command and by
her direction, and she was so eager to see it acted
that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen
days." Seven years later Rowe added the further
information that " she was so well pleased with the
admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts
of ' Henry IV.' that she commanded him to con
tinue it for one play more, and to show him in
love." The tradition apparently has been long
accepted, and there are intrinsic evidences which
make it credible. " The Merry Wives of Wind
sor " is the kind of play which such a command
would have secured. It is a comedy which con
tinually runs into broad farce ; there is no touch
of pathos in it; it deals with contemporaneous
middle-class people, in whom the dramatist shows
very little interest ; it is laid in Windsor, and con
tains references to the castle which must have
been very acceptable to the Queen. The ground
was evidently familiar to the dramatist, and there
are references of a realistic character, not only
THE COMEDIES 263
to Windsor, but to Stratford. Moreover, the play,
although admirable in construction, is below the
level of Shakespeare's work of this period in intel
lectual quality, and lacks those inimitable touches
of humour and poetry which are the ineffaceable
marks of his genius when it is working freely and
spontaneously.
The play owes little in the way of direct con
tribution to earlier sources, though various inci
dents used in it are to be found in Italian and
other stories. It was probably written about
1599, and the Queen, according to tradition, was
" very well pleased with the representation." The
plot is essentially Italian ; the introduction of the
fairies was a revival of the masque ; but the atmos
phere of the play is entirely English ; it reflects
the hearty, healthy, bluff spirit and manner of
middle-class life in an English village. It is the
only play dealing with the English life of his own
time which Shakespeare wrote, and it undoubtedly
reproduces conditions, manners, and habits which
he had known at first hand in Stratford. Fal-
staff shows a great decline in spontaneity, fresh
ness, and humour; he has become gross, heavy,
and dull ; he easily falls a victim to very obvious
devices against his dignity ; he has sunk so low
that he has become the butt of practical jokers.
It is probable that this particular development
of Falstaff was suggested to Shakespeare by
Elizabeth rather than forced upon him by the
264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
expansive vitality of the character. As a whole
the play shows breadth of characterization and
genuine humour, while Windsor and the country
about it are sketched with unusual fidelity to
detail, but with characteristic freshness of feeling
for fields and woods.
This homely comedy of middle-class English
country life, with its boisterous fun, its broad hu
mour, and its realistic descriptive passages, was
probably written not long before " Much Ado
About Nothing," but the two plays present the
most striking contrasts of method and manner. The
Italian play is in an entirely different key ; it is
brilliant, spirited, charged with vivacity, and spar
kling with wit ; it is a masterpiece of keen character
ization, of flashing conversation, of striking contrasts
of type, and of intellectual energy, playing freely
and buoyantly against a background of exquisite
beauty. The dramatist was now completely eman
cipated from his earlier teachers, and had secured
entire command of his own genius and of the re
sources of comedy as a literary form. In this
splendid creation of his happiest mood in his most
fortunate years, the prophecy of sustained and flash
ing interchange of wit in Lyly's court plays is am
ply fulfilled, and the promise of individual power of
characterization clearly discerned in Biron and
Rosaline is perfectly realized in Benedict and Bea
trice ; while Dogberry and Verges mark the perfec
tion of Shakespeare's skill in drawing blundering
THE COMEDIES 265
clowns. In this play the blending of the tragic and
humorous or comic is so happily accomplished that
the two contrasting elements flow together in a vital
and exquisite harmony of experience, full of tender
ness, loyalty, audacity, and brilliancy ; the most com
prehensive contrast of character is secured in Hero
and Claudio, Benedict and Beatrice, as chief actors
in the drama, with Dogberry and Verges as centres
of interest in the minor or subsidiary plot. Hazlitt
declares with reference to this play that perhaps
" the middle point of comedy was never more nicely
hit, in which the ludicrous blends with the tender,
and our follies, turning round against themselves in
support of our affections, retain nothing but their
humanity." In "The Merry Wives of Windsor"
Shakespeare drew with a free hand the large and
rather coarse qualities of English middle-class life ;
in " Much Ado About Nothing " he presented a
study of life in the highest stage of the social order,
touched at all points with distinction of insight,
characterization, and taste. The gayety and brill
iancy of the great world as contrasted with the little
world of rural and provincial society are expressed
with a confidence and consistency which indicate
that the poet must have known something of the
court circle and of the accomplished women who
moved in it.
Written probably about 1599, and drawing appar
ently for some features of the plot and comic inci
dents upon the inexhaustible Bandello and upon one
266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the greatest works of Italian genius, the " Orlando
Furioso" of Ariosto, " Much Ado About Nothing"
marks the highest point of Shakespeare's creative
activity in comedy, and perhaps the most brilliant
and prosperous hour in this prolific and fortunate
period of his life.
In the same year Shakespeare created his master
piece of poetic pastoral drama, " As You Like It."
He was still in the sunlight, but the shadows were
approaching ; his mood was still gay and his spirits
buoyant, but the one was touched with premonitions
of sadness and the other tempered by a deepening
sense of the complexity of life and its mystery of
good and evil. In the form and background of the
play he was in touch with the love of pastoral life
shared by many of the poets of his time ; by Lodge
and Gre.ene, by Spenser and Sidney. The Arcadia
of literature was in his imagination, but the deep
shadows and wide spaces of the Forest of Arden in
Warwickshire were before his eye ; he knew the
affected passion for flowering meads and gentle
shepherds which were the stock-in-trade of many
contemporaries, but he also felt that fresh and un
forced delight in nature which brings him in touch
with the modern poets. He knew how to use the
conventional poetic speech about nature, but he saw
nature with his own eyes as clearly as Burns and
Wordsworth saw her two centuries later. The plot
of "As You Like It" was probably taken from
Lodge's " Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacie,"
THE COMEDIES 267
an old-fashioned, artificial, pastoral romance, full of
affectations and unrealities, based upon the much
older " Tale of Gamelyn," which appeared in the
fourteenth century and was handed down in several
manuscripts of Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales," and
was probably intended for use in a tale which the
poet left unwritten. This old story belongs to the
cycle of the Robin Hood ballads ; and Shakespeare
had this origin of the story in mind when he wrote :
" They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and
a many merry men with him ; and there they live
like the old Robin Hood of England."
The woodland world of Arden, in which sonnets
are affixed to ancient trees, and lovers, courtiers, and
moralists live at ease, has much in common with
the pastoral backgrounds of Spenser and Lodge ;
but its artificiality is redeemed by its freshness of
spirit, its out-of-door freedom, and its enchanting
society. Rosalind and Orlando are the successors
of a long line of pastoral lovers, but they, alone
among their kind, really live. In Rosalind purity,
passion, and freedom are harmonized in one of the
most enchanting women in literature. In her
speech love finds a new language, which is continu
ally saved from extravagance by its vivacity and
humour. In Audrey and Corin the passion of
Orlando and Rosalind is gently parodied ; in
Touchstone the melancholy humour of Jaques is
set out in more effective relief. There are threaten-
ings of tragedy in the beginning of the play, but
268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
they are dissolved in an air in which purity and
truth and health serve to resolve the baser designs
of men into harmless fantasies. In Jaques, how
ever, there appears for the first time the student of
his kind who has pierced the illusions of place and
power and passion, and touched the underlying
contradiction between the greatness of man's desires
and the uncertainty and inadequacy of his achieve
ments. This sadness is touched with a not unkindly
irony ; for Shakespeare's vision was so wide that he
was rarely able to look at life from a single point ;
its magnitude, its complexity, the rigour of its law,
and at the same time the apparent caprice with
which its diverse fortunes were bestowed, were
always within his view. At the best, we seem to
hear him say in this mood :
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
Jaques must not be taken too seriously, but
there are hints of Hamlet's mood in his brooding
meditation ; and through the whole play there is a
vein of sadness which, mingled with its gayety and
poetic loveliness, gives it a deep and searching
beauty.
In the Christmas season of 1601 "Twelfth
Night " was presented in the noble hall of the Middle
Temple. "At our feast," writes John Manningham,
a member, in his diary, " we had a play called
'Twelfth Night; or, What You Will.' Much like
THE COMEDIES
269
the * Comedy of Errors ' or ' Menaechmi ' in Plautus ;
but most like and near to that in Italian called
' Inganni.' A good practise in it to make the
steward believe his lady widowe was in love with
him, by counterfeiting as from his lady in general
THE HALL OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE.
Where " Twelfth Night" was played.
terms, telling him what she liked best in him, and
prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, etc.,
and then when he came to practise making him
believe they took him to be mad." This charming
comedy, so characteristic of Shakespeare's genius
270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
at play, was probably acted by the Lord Chamber
lain's servants, the company with which Shake
speare was associated, before the Court in the old
palace at Whitehall during the same season.
The ultimate source of the play was probably
Bandello's " Novelle," though the Italian plays to
which Manningham refers (there were several plays
with the title Inganni) may have furnished incidents ;
but Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Ague-
cheek, Maria, and, above all, Viola, as they live in
the comedy are Shakespearian to the heart. The
framework of the play is essentially serious, a
beautiful vein of poetic feeling runs through it, and,
intermingled with these, the most unforced and
uproarious fun. In inventiveness in the comic
type and in freedom in handling it, as well as in
grouping of diverse materials and fusing them into
a harmonious and captivating whole, this comedy
was never surpassed by the dramatist. He parted
with the muse of comedy at the very moment when
he had mastered the art of touching the weaknesses,
follies, and minor sins of men with a touch which
was keen with the wisdom of a great knowledge of
the world, and gentle with the kindness of one who
loved his kind for what they had lost rather than
for what they had won.
CHAPTER XII
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY
WITH the advent of the seventeenth century,
Shakespeare entered the greatest period of his life
as an artist — the period of the Tragedies. During
eight eventful years he was brooding over the deep
est problems of human experience, and facing, with
searching and unfaltering gaze, the darkest aspects
of life. That this absorption in themes which bore
their fruit in the Tragedies was due primarily to a
prolonged crisis in his own spiritual life is rendered
practically certain by the persistence of the sombre
mood, by the poet's evident sensitiveness to and
dependence upon conditions and experience, and
by a series of facts of tragical import in the lives of
some of his friends. His development in thought
and art was so evidently one of definite progression,
of the deepening of feeling and broadening of vision
through the unfolding of his nature, that it is impos
sible to dissociate the marked change of mood which
came over him about 1600 from events which touched
and searched his own spirit.
Until about 1595 Shakespeare had been serving
his apprenticeship by doing work which was to a
considerable extent imitative, and to a larger extent
271
272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
experimental ; he had tried his hand at several kinds
of writing, and had revealed unusual power of ob-
THE SHAKESPEARE MONUMENT IN TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD.
servation, astonishing dexterity of mind, and signal
skill in making the traditional characters of the
drama live before the eyes and in the imagination
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 273
of the theatre-goers who made up his earliest con
stituency. From about 1594 to 1600 he had grown
into harmonious and vital relations with his age, he
had disclosed poetic genius of a very high order,
and he had gone far in his education as a dramatist.
He had written the Sonnets, and he had created
Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Juliet, Romeo, Mercutio,
Benedict, Henry V., Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, and
Dogberry. If he had died in 1600, his place would
have been secure. His reputation was firmly estab
lished, and he had won the hearts of his contempo
raries by the charm of his nature no less than by the
fascination of his genius.
His serenity, poise, and sweetness are evidenced
not only by his work but by the representations of
his face which remain. Of these the bust in the
chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford, made
by Gerard Jonson, a native of Amsterdam, and a
stone-mason of Southwark in the poet's time, and
the Droeshout portrait, which appeared on the title-
page of the First Folio edition of the poet's works,
issued in 1623, were accepted by his friends and
contemporaries, and must present at least a general
resemblance to the poet's features. They are so
crude in execution that they cannot do justice to
the finer lines of structure or to the delicacy of
colouring of Shakespeare's face and head, but they
make the type sufficiently clear. They represent a
face of singular harmony and regularity of feature,
crowned by a noble and finely proportioned head.
274 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The eyes were hazel in colour, the hair auburn ; the
expression, deeply meditative and kindly, was that
of a man of thoughtful temper, genial nature, and
thorough self-control. In figure Shakespeare was
of medium stature and compactly built.
It is significant that, after the first outburst of
jealousy of the young dramatist's growing popu
larity in Greene's " A Groatsworth of Wit Bought
with a Million of Repentance," the expressions
of Shakespeare's contemporaries indicate unusual
warmth of personal regard, culminating in a mag
nificent eulogy from his greatest rival, and one who
had reason to fear him most.
That he was of a social disposition, and met men
easily and on pleasant terms, is evident from the
extraordinary range of his knowledge of men and
manners in the taverns of his time — those prede
cessors of the modern club. That he enjoyed the
society of men of his own craft is evident both from
his own disposition and from the fact that he stood
so distinctly outside the literary and theatrical
quarrels of his time. The tradition which asso
ciates him with the Mermaid Tavern which stood
in Bread Street, not far from Milton's birthplace, is
entirely credible. There he would have found many
of the most brilliant men of his time. Beaumont's
well-known description inclines one to believe that
under no roof in England has better talk been heard :
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid ? heard words that have been
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 275
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
The age was eminently social in instinct and
habit ; society, in the modern sense of the word,
was taking shape ; and men found great attraction
in the easy intercourse and frank speech of tavern
meetings. Writing much later, but undoubtedly
reporting the impression of Shakespeare's contem
poraries, Thomas Fuller says, in his " Worthies " :
" Which two I beheld like a Spanish great gallion
and an English man-of-war: Master Jonson (like
the former) was built far higher up in learning;
solid, but slow in his performances. Shake-spear,
with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but
lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack
about, and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and invention."
At the end of the sixteenth century Shakespeare
was on the flood-tide of a prosperous life ; at the
very beginning of the seventeenth century a deep
and significant change came over his spirit. In
external affairs his fortunes rose steadily until his
death ; but in his spiritual life momentous expe
riences changed for a time the current of his
thought, and clouded the serene skies in the light
of which nature had been so radiant and life so
absorbingly interesting to him. While it is highly
276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
improbable that the Sonnets record in chrono
logical order two deep and searching emotional
experiences, the autobiographic note in them is un
mistakable ; it is impossible to avoid the conclusion
that they express, if they do not literally report, a
prolonged emotional experience culminating in a
crisis which shook the very bases of his nature ;
which brought him in the beginning an intense
and passionate joy, slowly dissolving into a great
and bitter agony of spirit; and issuing at last,
through the moralization of a searching insight,
in a larger and deeper harmony with the order of
life. This experience, in which friendship and love
contended for supremacy in his soul ; in which he
entered into a new and humiliating consciousness
of weakness in his own spirit, and in which he knew,
apparently for the first time, that bitterness of dis
enchantment and disillusion which to a nature of
such sensitiveness and emotional capacity as his
is the bitterest cup ever held to the lips, found him
gay, light-hearted, buoyant, full of creative energy,
and radiant with the charm and the dreams of
youth ; it left him saddened in spirit, burdened
with the consciousness of weakness, face to face
with those tragic collisions which seem at times
to disclose the play of the irony of fate, but out
of which, in agony and apparent defeat, the larger
and more inclusive harmony of the individual with
the divine and the human order of society is secured
and disclosed.
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 277
Shakespeare drank deep of the cup of suffering
before he set in the order of art, with a hand at
once stern and tender, the colossal sorrows of his
kind. Like all artists of the deepest insight, the
keenest sensitiveness to beauty, and that subtle and
elusive but magical spiritual sympathy which we
call genius, which puts its possessor in command
of the secret experience of his kind, Shakespeare's
art waited upon his experience for its full capacity
of thought and feeling, and touched its highest
points of achievement only when his own spirit
had sounded the depths of self-knowledge and of
self-surrender. In the great Tragedies life and art
are so completely merged that they are no longer
separable in thought; these dramas disclose the
ultimate harmony between spirit and form.
This searching inward experience was contempo
raneous in Shakespeare's life at the beginning of
the seventeenth century with fierce dissensions be
tween his personal friends in his own profession,
with growing bitterness of feeling and sharper antag
onism between the two great parties in England,
and with a gradual but unmistakable overshadowing
of the splendours of the " spacious days of great
Elizabeth." What is known as "The War of
the Theatres" was at its height between 1598 and
1602; the chief combatants being Ben Jonson on
one side, and Dekker and Marston on the other;
the weapons of warfare, satirical plays. Thirteen
or fourteen dramas are enumerated as having their
278
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
origin in the antagonism between the rival play
wrights, the best known and most important of these
plays being Jonson's striking and characteristic
comedy " Every Man in His Humour," and his
" Poetaster." Dekker's " Satiromastrix " and Mars-
ton's " What
You Will "are
chiefly inter
esting as form
ing part of the
record of this
vociferous war,
and " The Re
turn from Par-
n a s s u s " on
account of one
interesting but
obscure refer
ence to Shake
speare which
it contains:
" Few of the
University pen
plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid,
and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much
of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow
Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson
too. O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he
brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but
our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge
BEN JONSON.
From a picture in the possession of Mr. Knight.
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 279
that made him be ray his credit." These words
were put into the mouth of the actor Kempe and
spoken to the well-known actor Burbage, and Mr.
Ward suggests that their meaning may be put into
plain speech : " Our fellow, Shakespeare, ay, and
Ben Jonson, too, puts down all the university play-
writers."
The reference to a purge administered by Shake
speare to Jonson has led to much speculation regard
ing Shakespeare's part in this professional quarrel,
and " Troilus and Cressida " has sometimes been
placed among the plays which contributed either
light or heat to the discussion ; many of Shake
speare's characters have been identified by differ
ent critics with the leading combatants and with
others among his contemporaries ; in no case, how
ever, has any speculation in this field secured a
proper basis of proof. This very fact, taken in con
nection with Shakespeare's long and cordial rela
tions with Jonson, make it more than probable that
the dramatist stood outside the arena, maintaining
a friendly attitude toward both parties to the strife.
The relations between Jonson and Shakespeare
are in the highest degree creditable to both ; but it
is probable that Shakespeare's sweetness of nature
was the chief element in holding them on so high a
plane. By gifts, temperament, difference of early
opportunity, methods of work, conceptions of art,
the two were for many years rivals for supremacy
in the playwright's field. The contrast between
280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
them could hardly have been more marked. Jonson
was nine years the junior of Shakespeare, having
been born in 1573. His grandfather had been a
clergyman, and he was the descendant of men of
gentle blood. He was city born and bred ; at West
minster he came under the teaching of a man of
great learning, William Camden, who made him a
student and put the stamp of the scholar on his
mind. He became a devout lover of the classics
and a patient and thorough intellectual worker.
Poverty forced him to work with his hands for a
time, and when the War of the Theatres was at its
height, his antagonists did not hesitate to remind
him that he had been a bricklayer in his step
father's employ. From this uncongenial occupation
he found escape by taking service in the Nether
lands, where he proved his courage by at least one
notable exploit. He returned to London, and mar
ried at about the age at which Shakespeare took
the same important step. He was a loyal and
affectionate father, and a constant if not an ador
ing husband; he described his wife many years
after his marriage as "a shrew, yet honest."
Like Shakespeare, he turned to the theatre as a
means of support; appeared as an actor; revised
and, in part, rewrote older plays ; collaborated with
other playwrights. He lacked the faculty of adap
tation, the capacity for practical affairs, and the per
sonal charm which made Shakespeare successful as
a man of business; but, through persistent and
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 281
intelligent work, he placed himself at the head of
his profession.
He was of massive build ; his face strong rather
than sensitive or expressive ; his mind vigorous,
orderly, and logical, rather than creative, vital, and
spontaneous ; he was, by instinct, habit, and con
viction, a scholar ; saturated with the classical spirit,
absolutely convinced of the fixed and final value of
the classical conceptions and methods in art ; with
a touch of the scholar's contempt for inaccuracy,
grace, ease, flexibility. He was a poet by intention,
as Shakespeare was a poet by nature; a follower
and expounder of the classic tradition, as Shake
speare was essentially a romanticist; he achieved
with labour what Shakespeare seemed to accomplish
by magic ; he wrought out his plots with the most
scrupulous care for unity and consistency, while
Shakespeare appeared to take whatever material
came to hand with easy-going indifference to the
niceties of craftsmanship. To a man of Jonson's
rugged and somewhat sombre temper, the success
and love which Shakespeare evoked with such ease
must have seemed out of proportion to his desert ;
while Shakespeare's methods of work must have
seemed to him fundamentally defective and super
ficial. It was a case of great dramatic intelligence
matched against great dramatic genius. When it
is remembered that the two men were working in
the same field and for the same audience, the inten
sity of their rivalry, and the provocations to jealousy
282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and ill feeling which would naturally rise out of it,
become very clear.
Shakespeare's generous nature, reenforced by his
breadth of vision, apparently kept him free all his
life from any touch of professional jealousy or ani
mosity. Jonson saw his rival pass him in the race
for popular favour, and could hardly have been blind
to the fact that Shakespeare distinctly distanced
him in artistic achievement. He was a conscien
tious man, standing loyally for the ideals of his art ;
he was a scholar, to whom accuracy in every detail
was a matter of artistic morals ; but as the immense
vitality of the age seemed to penetrate to the very
source of his massive intellect and lift it above its
laborious methods of work into the region of art,
and to turn its painstaking patience into lyrical
ease and grace, so Jonson's essential integrity of
nature and largeness of mind forced upon him a
recognition of his rival's greatness. It is true he
sometimes criticised Shakespeare; he commented
sharply on certain passages in " Julius Caesar,"
where Shakespeare was on his own ground ; he
declared that Shakespeare had " small Latine and
less Greek"; that he "wanted art"; that he ought
to have " blotted a thousand " lines ; that he " had.
an excellent fancy ; brave notions and gentle
expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility
that sometimes it was necessary he should be
stopped ; " but all these adverse opinions, for which
there was, from Jonson's point of view, substantial
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 283
ground, fall into true perspective and are evidences
of discriminating judgment rather than uncritical
eulogy when the passage in which they stand is
taken in its entirety, to say nothing of the noble
lines which appear in the First Folio. " I loved
the man," wrote Jonson, " and do honour his mem
ory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was
indeed honest, and of an open and free nature ; had
an excellent fancy ; brave notions and gentle expres
sions. . . . There was more in him to be praised
than pardoned."
That there were occasional outbursts of impa
tience with Shakespeare's ease, spontaneity, and
indifference to the taste and standards of men who
were primarily scholars and only secondarily poets,
is highly probable; it could hardly have been other
wise. To men of plodding temper, of methodical
habits of work, of trained faculties rather than of
force and freedom of imagination, the facility of
the man of genius often seems not quite normal
and sound ; it is incomprehensible to them, and
therefore they regard it with a certain suspicion.
It is greatly to Jonson's credit, when his temper
and circumstances are taken into account, that he
judged Shakespeare so fairly and recognized his
genius so frankly.
There is good reason to believe that Shakespeare
kept aloof from the professional quarrels of his time
among his fellow-craftsmen, and that he was a kind
of peacemaker among them ; his kindliness went
284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
far to disarm the hostility of those who differed
with him most widely on fundamental questions of
art. It is an open question, which has been dis
cussed with ability on both sides, whether Jonson
had Shakespeare in mind in a striking passage in
" The Poetaster " ; it is quite certain that he could
hardly have described Shakespeare's genius more
aptly :
His learning labours not the school-like gloss
That most consists of echoing words and terms,
And soonest wins a man an empty name ;
Nor any long or far-fetch'd circumstance
Wrapp'd in the curious generalities of arts,
By a direct and analytic sum
Of all the worth and first effects of art.
And for his poesy, 'tis so ramm'd with life,
That it shall gather strength of life with being,
And live hereafter more admired than now.
Deeper matters than occasional references to his
lack of scholarship, and sharp antagonisms among
the men with whom he worked and among whom
he lived, pressed on Shakespeare's mind and heart
in the opening years of the seventeenth century.
The reign of Elizabeth was drawing to its close,
under a sky full of ominous signs. The splendour
of the earlier years, which has given the reign a
place among the most magnificent epochs in the
annals of royalty, had suffered, not an eclipse, but
a slow clouding of the sky, a visible fading of the
day. The Queen had become an old and exacting
woman, craving a love which she knew was not
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY
285
given her, and an admiration which she could no
longer evoke. She still held her place, but she
understood how eagerly many who surrounded her
with service and protestations of devotion were
waiting for the
end and the
chances of pro
motion in a
new court.
While they
were praising
her immortal
youth, they
were writing
to James in
Scotland that
she was aging
rapidly and
that the end
was at hand.
There were
faces, too, that
must have
been missed by the lonely sovereign as she looked
about her. When she signed the death-warrant of
Essex, she ended the career of one of the most
brilliant men of the age, and one of her most
devoted servants. Southampton was sentenced to
death at the same time, but his sentence was com
muted to imprisonment for life. The people firmly
ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX.
After the original of Walker in the collection of the Marquis of
Stafford.
286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
believed in Essex's innocence of any designs upon
the Queen, and her haughty refusal to listen to the
pleas made in his behalf turned their hearts against
her. The Earl of Southampton was not a man of
sound judgment or of cool temper; but there were
in him a generosity of spirit, a loyalty to his friends,
and a charm of temper and manners which bound
men to his person and his fortunes.
Through him there is every reason to believe
that Shakespeare was drawn into close relations
with Essex, who was, like Southampton, a man
who lacked the qualities of character necessary for
success in a period of conflicting movements and
sharp antagonistic influences, but who had a win
ning personality. In the prologue to the fifth act
of " Henry V." Shakespeare made an unmistakable
allusion to Essex, and one which showed how near
Southampton's friend was to his heart :
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in the good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him !
Later, when the plot against the ruling party at the
court was on the point of execution, the play of
"Richard II." was put on the stage of the Globe
Theatre and elsewhere for the purpose of awaken
ing and giving direction to popular indignation
against the men about the Queen. It is probable
that the play produced under these circumstances,
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 287
and at the instigation of the organizers of the
ill-fated enterprise, was Shakespeare's well-known
drama. This play never had the approval of the
Queen, who disliked its theme. There is no evi
dence beyond this fact to connect Shakespeare with
the plot which sent Essex to the block. It is highly
improbable that so rash an enterprise would have
secured his support. It was not necessary that he
should follow Essex's fortunes in order to love him.
Deficient in strength and ability both as a soldier
and a politician, Essex knew how to charm not
only the crowd but those who stood near him.
His face has that touch of distinction which is far
more, captivating than many more solid qualities.
He had the gracious air of a benefactor ; there was
an atmosphere of romance and adventure about
him ; he was a lover of the arts and the friend and
patron of writers, who recognized and rewarded his
generosity in a flood of dedications full of melodious
praise. The temper of the age was personified in
these two ardent, passionate, adventurous, brilliant
personalities far more truly than in many men of
cooler temper and more calculating spirit. It is
significant that the representative men of the
Elizabethan period rarely husbanded the fruits of
their genius and perils ; they lived too much in the
imagination to secure those substantial gains which
men of lesser ability but greater prudence laid up
for themselves. Drake, Raleigh, Sidney, Essex,
Spenser, were splendid spenders of energy, time,
288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
genius, and opportunity, rather than hoarders of
money, influence, and power. Shakespeare gave
full value to sagacity, prudence, and poise of char
acter, but he loved the adventurers because the
light of the imagination was on their careers and
the touch of tragedy on their fortunes.
It is easy to understand, therefore, how deeply
the fate of Essex and Southampton weighed upon
his heart. In their downfall the iron entered
his own soul. When Elizabeth died in 1603, he
remained silent while the chorus of poets filled the
air with plaintive eulogy. Chettle complained that
" the silver-tongued Melicert," as he called Shake
speare, did not " drop from his honied muse one
sable tear."
The temper of the time had changed, and there
were unmistakable signs of the approaching storm.
The deep cleavage which was to divide the English
people for many decades began to be visible. The
Puritan spirit was steadily rising under the pressure
of restriction and persecution ; the deep springs of
gayety in the English .nature, which ran to the sur
face in all manner of festivals and merry-making, in
a passion for music and an almost universal know
ledge of the art, in the habit of improvising songs
and a general appreciation of the singing quality
which gave English literature almost a century of
spontaneous and captivating song-writing, were
beginning to flow less freely and with diminished
volume.
THE APPROACH OF TRAGEDY 289
It was not, therefore, a matter of accident, or as
a result of deliberate artistic prevision, that, about
1 60 1, Shakespeare began to write tragedies, and
continued for seven or eight years to deal with the
most perplexing and sombre problems of character
and of life. He had passed through an emotional
experience which had evidently stirred his spirit to
the depths ; the atmosphere in which he lived was
disturbed by bitter controversies ; men whom he
honoured and loved had become the victims of a
tragic fate ; and the age was troubled with forebod
ings of coming strife. The poet was entering into
the anguish of suffering and sharing the universal
experience of loss, surrender, denial, and death.
He had buried his only son, Hamnet, in the sum
mer of 1596; in the autumn of 1601 his father, in
whose fortunes he had manifested a deep inter
est, died at Stratford, and was buried in the quiet
churchyard beside the Avon. The poet had learned
much of life ; he was now to learn much of death
also.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES
THE order of the appearance of the Tragedies
has not been definitely settled ; they were written,
however, in the same period, and that period began
about 1 60 1 and ended about 1609. The poet was
at work on these masterpieces during the closing
years of the reign of Elizabeth and the early years
of the reign of James First. While he was medi
tating upon or writing " Julius Caesar," Essex and
-Southampton had embarked upon their ill-planned
conspiracy, and one had gone to the block and the
other was lying in the Tower; soon after finishing
" Coriolanus," the poet left London and returned to
Stratford. The first decade of the seventeenth
century was, therefore, his " storm and stress "
period. Its chief interest lies in its artistic prod
uct, but the possible and probable relations of his
artistic activity to his personal experience have
been indicated. Those relations must not be in
sisted upon too strenuously ; in a sense they are
unimportant; the important aspect of the work of
this decade lies in the continuity of mood and
of themes which it represents, and in the mastery
of the dramatic art which it illustrates.
290
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES
291
During these days Shakespeare dealt continu
ously with the deepest problems of character with
the clearest insight and the most complete com-
THE AMERICAN FOUNTAIN AND CLOCK-TOWER, STRATFORD.
mand of the resources of the dramatic art. It is
significant of the marvellous harmony of the expert
craftsman with the poet of superb imagination that
the plays of this period have been at the same time
the most popular of all the Shakespearian dramas
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
with theatre-goers and the most deeply studied by
critical lovers of the poet in all parts of the world.
Shakespeare had read Holinshed and Hall with
an insight into historic incident and character quite
as marvellous in its power of laying bare the sources
of action and of vitalizing half-forgotten actors in
the drama of life as the play of the faculty of in
vention, and far more fruitful ; he now opened the
pages of one of the most fascinating and stimulating
biographers in the whole range of literature. It
is doubtful if any other recorder of men's lives
has touched the imagination and influenced the
character of so many readers as Plutarch, to whom
the modern world owes much of its intimate and
vital knowledge of the men who not only shaped
the destinies of Greece and Rome, but created the
traditions of culture which influenced Shakespeare's
age and contemporaries so deeply. Part of Plu
tarch's extraordinary influence has been due to the
inexhaustible interest of his material and part to
the charm of his personality. He was and will
remain one of the great interpreters of the classical
to the modern world ; a biographer who breathed
the life of feeling and infused the insight of the
imagination into his compact narratives. It has
well been said of his work that it has been " most
sovereign in its dominion over the minds of great
men in all ages"; and the same thought has been
suggested in another form in the description of
that work as " the pasturage of great minds."
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 293
Sir Thomas North's English version of " The
Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by
that grave learned philosopher and historiographer
Plutarke, of Chaeronia, translated out of Greek
into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Belloxane,
Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's Privy Coun
cil, and great Amner of France, and now out of
French into English by Thomas North," was pub
lished in 1579, while Shakespeare was coming to
the end of his school days in the Grammar School
at Stratford ; and it forms one of that group of
translations, including Chapman's " Homer," Florio's
" Montaigne," and Fairfax's " Tasso," which, in their
influence, must be ranked as original contributions
to Elizabethan literature. Plutarch is not only the
foremost biographer in the history of Letters, he
had the further good fortune to attract a reader
who, more than any other, has disclosed the faculty
of grasping the potential content of a narrative, as
well as mastering its record of fact. It is one of
Plutarch's greatest honours that he was the chief
feeder of Shakespeare's imagination during the
period when his genius touched his highest mark
of achievement; for it was in Plutarch that the
poet found the material for three of the greatest of
the Tragedies, " Julius Caesar," " Antony and Cleo
patra," and " Coriolanus," and, in part, for " Timon
of Athens." Not only did he find his material in
Plutarch, but he found passages so nobly phrased,
whole dialogues sustained at such a height of dig-
294
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
nity, force, or eloquence, that he incorporated them
into his work with essentially minor changes.
Holinshed furnished only the bare outlines of
movement for
"Richard II."
and "Richard
III.," but Plu
tarch supplied
traits, hints, sug
gestions, ph rases,
and actions so
complete in
themselves that
the poet needed
to do little but
turn upon the bi
ographer's prose
his vitalizing and
organizing imag
ination. The dif
ference between
the prose biog
rapher and the
dramatist re
mains, however, a difference of quality so radical as
to constitute a difference of kind. The nature and
extent of Shakespeare's indebtedness to the works
upon which he drew for material may be most clearly
showrn by placing in juxtaposition Mark Antony's
famous oration over Caesar's body as Shakespeare
MIDDLE TEMPLE LANE.
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 295
found it and as he left it : " When Caesar's body,"
writes Plutarch, " was brought into the market
place, Antonius making his funeral-oration in
praise of the dead, according to the ancient custom
of Rome, and perceiving that his words moved the
common people to compassion, he framed his elo
quence to make their hearts yearn the more, and
taking Caesar's gown all bloudy in his hand, he
layed it open to the sight of them all, shewing what
a number of cuts and holes it had in it. There
with all the people fell presently into such a rage
and mutinie that there was no more order kept
among the common people."
A magical change has been wrought in this nar
rative when it reappears in Shakespeare's verse in
one of his noblest passages :
You all do know this mantle : I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on ;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii :
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through ;
See what a rent the envious Casca made ;
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd ;
And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar follow'd it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd, or no ;
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel :
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him !
This was the most unkindest cut of all ;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitor's arms,
Quite vanquish'd him : then burst his mighty heart :
296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
And, in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.
"Julius Caesar" probably appeared in 1601.
Many facts point to this date, among them the oft-
quoted passage from Weever's " Mirror of Mar
tyrs," which was printed in that year :
The many-headed multitude were drawn
By Brutus' speech, that Caesar was ambitious.
When eloquent Mark Antonie had shewn
His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious?
A little later, in a still greater play, Polonius, recall
ing his life at the University, said:
I did enact Julius Caesar : I was killed i' the Capitol :
Brutus killed me.
The story, like many others with which Shake
speare dealt, was popular, and had been presented
on the stage at an earlier date. Shakespeare's
rendering was so obviously superior to all its prede
cessors that it practically put an end to further
experiments with the same theme.
In the English historical plays the dramatist
never entirely broke with the traditional form and
spirit of the Chronicle play; in his first dealing
with a Roman subject he took the final step from
the earlier drama to the tragedy. " Julius Caesar "
is not, it is true, dominated by a single great char
acter, as are the later Tragedies, but it reveals a
rigorous selection of incidents with reference to
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 297
their dramatic value, and a masterly unfolding of
their significance in the story. The drama was not
misnamed; although Caesar dies at the beginning
of the dramatic movement, his spirit dominates it
to the very end. At every turn he confronts the
conspirators in the new order which he personified,
and of which he was the organizing genius. Cas-
sius dies with this recognition on his lips :
Caesar, thou art revenged,
Even with the sword that kill'd thee.
And when Brutus looks on the face of the dead
Cassius he, too, bears testimony to a spirit which
was more potent than the arms of Octavius and
Antony :
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet !
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
This new order in the Roman world, personified
by Caesar, is the shaping force of the tragedy ;
Octavius represents without fully understanding it,
and Brutus and Cassius array themselves against
it without recognizing that they are contending
with the inevitable and the irresistible. At a later
day, the eloquent and captivating Antony, a man
of genius, enthusiasm, and personal devotion, but
without the coordinating power of character, flings
himself against this new order in the same blank
inability to recognize a new force in the world, and
dies as much a victim of his lack of vision as
Brutus and Cassius. Nowhere else is Shakespeare's
298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sense of reality, his ability to give facts their full
weight, more clearly revealed than in " Julius Caesar."
Brutus is one of the noblest and most consistent
of Shakespearian creations; a man far above all
self-seeking and capable of the loftiest patriotism ;
in whose whole bearing, as in his deepest nature,
virtue wears her noblest aspect. But Brutus is an
idealist, with a touch of the doctrinaire; his pur
poses are of the highest, but the means he employs
to give those purposes effect are utterly inadequate ;
in a lofty spirit he embarks on an enterprise doomed
to failure by the very temper and pressure of the
age. "Julius Caesar" is the tragedy of the conflict
between a great nature, denied the sense of reality,
and the world-spirit. Brutus is not only crushed,
but recognizes that there was no other issue of his
untimely endeavour.
The affinity between Hamlet and Brutus has
often been pointed out. The poet was brooding
over the story of the Danish prince probably before
he became interested in Roman history ; certainly
before he wrote the Roman plays. The chief actors
in both dramas were men upon whom was laid the
same fatal necessity; both were idealists forced to
act in great crises, when issues of appalling magni
tude hung on their actions. Their circumstances
were widely different, but a common doom was on
both ; they were driven to do that which was against
their natures.
In point of style "Julius Caesar" marks the cul-
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 299
mination of Shakespeare's art as a dramatic writer.
The ingenuity of the earlier plays ripened in a rich
and pellucid flexibility ; the excess of imagery gave
place to a noble richness of speech ; there is deep-
going coherence of structure and illustration; con
structive instinct has passed on into the ultimate
skill which is born of complete identification of
thought with speech, of passion with utterance, of
action with character. The long popularity of the
play was predicted by Shakespeare in the words of
Cassius :
How many ages hence
Shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over
In States unborn and accents yet unknown.
The great impression made by " Julius Caesar"
in a field which Jonson regarded as his own prob
ably led to the writing of " Sejanus," which ap
peared two years later, and of " Catiline," which
was produced in 1611. A comparison of these
plays dealing with Roman history brings into clear
relief the vitalizing power of Shakespeare's imagina
tion in contrast with the conscientious and scholarly
craftsmanship of Jonson. In " Sejanus " almost every
incident and speech, as Mr. Knight has pointed
out, is derived from ancient authorities, and the
dramatist's own edition of the play was packed
with references like a text-book. The characters
speak with admirable correctness after the manner
of their time ; but they do not live. Brutus, Cas
sius, Antony, Portia, on the other hand, talk and act
300
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
like living creatures, and the play is saturated with
the spirit and enveloped in the atmosphere of Rome.
The story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, like
that of Dr. Faustus, had a long and wide popularity
before it found
place among
the classics.
There was
much in both
tales which ap
pealed to the
popular imagi
nation ; there
was a touch of
the supernatu
ral in both, and
the Renais
sance mind
still loved the
supernatural ;
there was in
both an abun
dance of hor
rors, and the
age of Shake
speare craved strong incitements of the imagina
tion ; and in both there was a combination of story
and psychologic interest which appealed from the
beginning to the crowds who frequented the thea
tres, and, later, to the greatest of modern poets. In
ELIZABETH.
From an old print.
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 30!
this fusion of immediate human interest with the
very highest and most complex problems of charac
ter and destiny these two stories are unique ; and it
is due to the presence of these qualities that, in
their final versions, these stories hold the first place
among those dramas which deal with the ultimate
questions of life.
Saxo Grammaticus, who lived about the year 1 200,
midway between the earliest crusades and the dis
covery of America, was, as his name suggests, a
man of unusual learning. He was the earliest
Danish writer of importance, and his Latin style
evoked the admiration of so competent an authority
as Erasmus, who expressed his surprise that a Dane
of that age should be able to command such a " force
of eloquence." The great work of this brilliant
Latinist was the Historia Danica, or " History of
the Danes " ; written, there is reason to believe, with
Livy as a model. This history, like all other histo
ries of that age, was largely made up of mythical
and legendary tales chiefly illustrative of heroic
persons and incidents. One of the most striking
of these hero stories is that which relates the tragi
cal experiences of Hamlet; in his origin possibly
one of those mythical figures who typified the forces
of nature in the Norse mythology. The roots of
great works of art are sunk deep in the soil of
human life ; and a creation of the magnitude of the
Hamlet of Shakespeare always rests on a broad,
solid foundation of prehistoric myth, or legend, or
302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
semi-historic tradition. Characters of such world
wide significance and such typical experience as
Hamlet and Faust are, in a sense, the children of
the race and are born in those fertile ages when the
imagination plays freely and creatively upon the ex
ternal world and upon the facts of human experi
ence. In the pages of Saxo Grammaticus, Hamlet
is a veritable man, caught in a network of tragical
circumstances, feigning madness to protect himself
from an uncle who has killed his father, seized the
throne, and married Hamlet's mother, and who
seeks to entrap Hamlet by many ingenious devices.
A crafty old courtier plays the eavesdropper; a
young girl is put forward as part of the plot against
Hamlet ; he is sent to England and secret orders to
put him to death are sent with him. In the end
Hamlet's feigning saves him ; he kills the usurper,
explains his deed in an address to the people, and is
made king.
This group of incidents constitute the story of
Hamlet in its earliest recorded form, which was prob
ably the survival of earlier and mythical forms. In
the fifteenth century the story was widely known
throughout Northern Europe, where it had the
currency of a popular folk-tale. About 1570 it was
told in French in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiqucs.
That there was an English play dealing with Ham
let as early as 1589 is now generally believed. In
that year Greene made an unmistakable reference
to such a play ; and seven years later Lodge wrote
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 303
of " the wisard of a ghost, which cried so miserably
at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet revenge"
That startling cry of the ghost appears to have made
a deep impression on the imagination of the time,
and was heard on the stage again and again in later
plays.
This earlier English version of Hamlet has dis
appeared, but the probabilities point to Thomas
Kyd, whose " Spanish Tragedy " was one of the
most popular plays of the age, as its author ; there
are obvious similarities between the plays. The
introduction of the ghost was in keeping with the
traditions of the English stage and the temper of
the time. This earlier version of the tragedy was
probably a very rough study, so far as action
was concerned, of Shakespeare's work ; some frag
ments of it may have been used by the dramatist
in the earlier sketches of his own version ; and
some remnants of it are to be found, perhaps,
in a German version, which is probably a copy of
a translation used in that country by English actors
not much later than Shakespeare's time. It is
probable that both the author of the lost version
and Shakespeare read the story in Belleforest's
French version.
There are very perplexing questions connected
with the text of " Hamlet " as it is found in differ
ent editions; the probability is that Shakespeare
worked his material over more than once, revising
and, in part, recasting it. There is reason to
304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
believe also that the story found a lodgement in his
imagination at an early day, and that it slowly took
shape, widening in its significance with his experi
ence, and striking deeper root in the psychology of
the human spirit as his insight into life deepened.
This was the history of the growth of the Faust
idea in Goethe's mind. The play probably ap
peared in 1602. In that year the edition known as
the First Quarto was published, with the announce
ment on the title-page that the piece had been
" acted divers times in the city of London, as also
in the two Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and
elsewhere." Although the longest of the Shake
spearian plays, and farthest removed from the
ordinary interests of theatre-goers, " Hamlet " has
not only been critically studied and widely com
mented upon, but has been put upon the stage of
every civilized country and has awakened an unfail
ing popular interest. The dramatic movement is
much slower than in most of the dramas ; the plot
unfolds very gradually ; there are a number of
scenes in which the interest is almost wholly psy
chological ; but the spell of the play has been felt as
keenly by the unlearned as by the cultivated, and
the story has appealed as directly to the crowds
before the footlights as to students and critics.
There is no higher evidence of Shakespeare's
genius than this presentation of a great spiritual
problem in a form so concrete and with such mar
vellous distinctness of characterization that " Ham-
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES
305
let " as a great world-drama and " Hamlet "
engrossing stage play may be seen on the
stage on the same night.
The rough sketch upon
which Shakespeare worked
had all the characteristics of
the Elizabethan play ; it was
sanguinary, noisy, full of move
ment, action, crime ; it was
written for the groundlings.
Upon this elemental basis,
with its primary and immedi
ate elements of human inter
est, Shakespeare built up a
drama of the soul, which never
for a moment loses touch with
reality, and never for a mo
ment loses its universal sig
nificance. In the pathetic
figure of Hamlet, with his gifts
of genius and personal charm,
every generation has recog
nized the protagonist of hu
manity. The concentration of
interest, the intensity of feel
ing, the hushed passion, which
characterize the play, make us
feel that it had some excep
tionally close relation to the
poet's experience, and that in
as an
same
306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
an unusual degree his personality pervades it. There
is nothing to connect it with the happenings of his
own life and the development of his own spirit save
the fact that it falls within the tragic period and
that it immediately precedes two of his most som
bre dramas. The authenticity of an autograph of
Shakespeare on a fly-leaf of a copy of Florio's
Montaigne in the British Museum is doubted, but
there are passages in " Hamlet " which are reminis
cent of Montaigne's speculations and reflections.
It was in his own nature, however, that Shake
speare found the questionings, the perplexities,
the deep and almost insoluble contradictions, which
are presented with such subtle suggestiveness in
" Hamlet."
No play has called forth so vast a literature or
has been the subject of so much criticism and inter
pretation. The problem presented by Hamlet is
so many-sided that it will evoke the thought and
ingenuity of every successive generation of students.
Much has been done, however, in removing obscuri
ties, and discussion has cleared the air of some
confusing mists. That Hamlet was sane is the
conviction of the great majority of the students of
the play; an insane Hamlet would rob the drama
of its spiritual significance and destroy its authority
as a work of art. That in his long feigning Hamlet
sometimes lost for the time the clear perception of
the difference between reality and his own fancies
is probable; but he is at all times a responsible
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 307
actor in the drama of which he is the central figure.
Goethe's exposition of his nature and his fate
remains one of the classics of Shakespearian criti
cism, so clear and definite is its insight into one
aspect of Hamlet's character.
"The time is out of joint ; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right !
" In these words, I imagine, is the key to Hamlet's
whole procedure, and to me it is clear that Shake
speare sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul
unequal to the performance of it. In this view I
find the piece composed throughout. Here is an
oak tree planted in a costly vase, which should have
received into its bosom only lovely flowers ; the
roots spread out, the vase is shivered to pieces.
"A beautiful, pure, and most moral nature, with
out the strength of nerve which makes the hero,
sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear
nor throw off; every duty is holy to him — this too
hard. The impossible is required of him — not the
impossible in itself, but the impossible to him.
How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances, and re
coils, ever reminded, ever reminding himself, and at
last almost loses his purpose from his thoughts, with
out ever again recovering his peace of mind. . . .
" It pleases, it flatters us greatly, to see a hero who
acts of himself, who loves and hates us as his heart
prompts, undertaking and executing, thrusting aside
all hinderances, and accomplishing a great purpose.
Historians and poets would fain persuade us that so
proud a lot may fall to man. In u Hamlet " we are
taught otherwise ; the hero has no plan, but the
piece is full of plan. . . .
" Hamlet is endowed more properly with sentiment
than with a character ; it is events alone that push
308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
him on ; and accordingly the piece has somewhat
the amplification of a novel. But as it is Fate that
draws the plan, as the piece proceeds from a deed
of terror, and the hero is steadily driven on to a
deed of terror, the work is tragic in its highest
sense, and admits of no other than a tragic end."
This interpretation leaves other aspects of Ham
let unexplained. This subjective condition must be
supplemented by taking into account the objective
world in which Hamlet found himself. Sensitive
alike in intellect and in his moral nature, he was
placed in a corrupt society, in which every relation
was tainted. The thought of his mother, which
ought to have been a spring of sweetness and
strength, was unendurable. He was surrounded
by false friends and paid spies. Upon him was laid
the appalling task of reasserting moral order in a
loathsome household and a demoralized kingdom ;
and the only way open to him was by the perpetra
tion of a deed of vengeance from which his whole
nature drew back in revolt. The tragic situation
was created by the conflict against the State and
the family to which he was committed by the know
ledge of his father's death, his uncle's crime, and his
mother's lust, and the conflict within himself be
tween the duty of revenge and the horror of blood-
shedding. If to these considerations is added the
fact that he was an idealist, with a deep and irre
sistible tendency to the meditation and subtle specu
lation which feel in advance all the possible results
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 309
of action so keenly that the responsibility for acting
becomes almost unbearable, the character of Ham
let becomes intelligible, if not entirely explicable.
The weight of evidence shows, as has been sug
gested, that in the "war of the theatres" which
raged at the end of the sixteenth and the begin
ning of the seventeenth century Shakespeare took
no active part ; he was by nature free from the nar
rowness of partisanship, and there are indications
that he was on friendly terms with men of all
shades of literary opinion. In " Hamlet," however,
he distinctly takes sides with the adult actors
against the growing prominence of boys on the
stage. The relation of boy choirs, and especially
that of the Chapel Royal, to the theatre in Shake
speare's time was pointed out in an earlier chapter.
These choirs were, in an informal way, training-
schools for the stage at a time when all women's
parts were taken by boys, and there was, in conse
quence, constant need of their services. About the
time of the appearance of " Julius Caesar " there was
a sharp rivalry between adult and boy actors, the
public espousing warmly the performances of the
boys. The development of this rivalry cannot be
traced, but in 1601 the theatre-going public had
become partisans of the boys and were deserting
the theatres in which adults held the stage. This
preference had become so pronounced that Shake
speare's company was driven into the provinces. In
their travels the members of the company appeared
310 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
at Cambridge, and it was probably on this visit
that the new play of " Hamlet " was presented.
The popularity of the boys not only jeopardized
the fortunes of the regular companies, but seriously
impaired the quality of the performances. When
the Children of the Chapel were able to secure for
their own use the new theatre in Blackfriars, which
Burbage had recently built, the Globe company
began to feel the competition very keenly ; and, for
a time, so marked was the popularity of the boys,
their prospects and those of the art of acting were
dark indeed.
Shakespeare was at work on "Hamlet" in this
crisis in his own fortunes and those of the theatre,
and stated his position in the controversy with
entire clearness. In answer to Hamlet's question
why the tragedians travel when it was better both
for reputation and profit that they should stay in
the city, Rosencrantz replies that their retirement
into the provinces has been caused by the "late
innovation " :
" Do they hold the same estimation they did when
I was in the city ? Are they so followed ?
" No, indeed, are they not.
"How comes it? [continues Hamlet]; do they
grow rusty ?
" Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace ;
but there is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases,
that cry out on the top of the question, and are most
tyrannically clapped for't : these are now the fash
ion, and so berattle the common stages — so they
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 311
call them — that many wearing rapiers are afraid of
goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.
" What, are they children ? who maintains 'em ?
how are they escoted ? Will they pursue the
quality no longer than they can sing ? will they not
say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to
common players — as is most like, if their means
are no better — their writers do them wrong, to
make them exclaim against their own succession ?
" 'Faith, there has been much to do on both sides ;
and the nation holds it no sin to tarre them to con
troversy ; there was, for a while, no money bid for
argument, unless the poet and the player went to
cuffs in the question.
" Is't possible ?
" O, there has been much throwing about of
brains.
" Do the boys carry it away ?
" Ay, that they do, my lord ; Hercules and his
]oad too."
This conversation between Hamlet and Rosen-
crantz is significant of the close touch with the
realities of life which Shakespeare never lost for a
moment, even when dealing with the greatest
themes or creating works of pure imagination.
To this period, in its final form, at least, belongs
the play of "All's Well that Ends Well," to
which Meres, in his " Palladis Tamia," probably
refers when he includes among the plays ascribed
to Shakespeare " Love's Labour's Won." It was
probably sketched and perhaps fully written at a
much earlier date than its final revision. The plot
is derived from a group of stories in Boccaccio's
312
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" Decameron," which narrate the fortunes of lovers
who surmount obstacles and gain the rewards of
love only after great or persistent effort; a phase
of experience which is beyond doubt the keynote of
the play. The
story was
translated by
Paynter and
appeared in
English in
" The Palace
of Pleasure "
in 1566 or
1567. Shake
speare depart
ed widely from
the story in its
earlier form by
the greater
prominence
given to the
part of Hel
ena and the singular sweetness and devotion which
irradiate her whole course. Coleridge thought her
Shakespeare's loveliest creation. The portraiture of
her character is touched throughout with exquisite
delicacy and skill. Helena suffers, however, from
the atmosphere of the play, which is distinctly
repellent; it is difficult to resist the feeling that,
conceding all that the play demands in concentra-
FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM.
From a print by I. Houbraken, 1738.
THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES 313
tion of interest upon the single end to be achieved,
Helena cheapens the love she finally wins by a
sacrifice greater than love could ask or could afford
to receive. And when the sacrifice is made and
the end secured, the victory of love is purely external ;
there is no inward and deathless unity of passion
between the lovers like that which united Post-
humus and Imogen in life and Romeo and Juliet in
death.
The play must be interpreted broadly in the
light of Shakespeare's entire work ; in this light it
finds its place as the expression of a passing mood
of deep and almost cynical distrust; it is full of that
searching irony which from time to time finds
utterance in the poet's work and was inevitable in
a mind of such range of vision. It is well to
remember, also, that in this play the poet, for the
sake of throwing a single quality into the highest
relief, secured entire concentration of attention by
disregarding or ignoring other qualities and relations
of equal importance and authority. This was what
Browning did in his much misunderstood poem
" The Statue and the Bust." It is always a perilous
experiment, because it involves so much intelligent
cooperation on the part of the reader. It is a
triumph of Shakespeare's art that Helena's purity
not only survives the dangers to which she exposes
it, but takes on a kind of saintly whiteness in the
corruption in which she plays her perilous part.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LATER TRAGEDIES
SHAKESPEARE was now in the depths of the deep
stirring of his spirit which has left its record in
the Tragedies. The darkest mood was on him,
apparently, when " Hamlet " and the three succeed
ing plays were written, — the mood in which the
sense of evil in the world almost overpowered his
belief in the essential soundness of life, and the
mystery of evil pressed upon the imagination with
such intensity that he was tempted to take refuge
in fundamental cynicism. It is in the plays of this
period that Shakespeare gives place to the deep-
going irony which pervaded the Greek drama, and
which at times obscures the essential freedom and
shaping power of personality. In his darkest mood,
however, the sanity and largeness of the poet's
mind asserted themselves and kept the balance
against the temptation to narrow the vision by
tingeing the world with the colour of a mood, or by
substituting for clear, direct, dispassionate play of
the mind on the facts of life the easy process of
reading universal history in the light of personal
experience.
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 315
How completely Shakespeare escaped a danger
which would have been fatal to him is seen in the
changes he wrought in the story which forms the
basis of " Measure for Measure." This play, like
"All's Well that Ends Well" and " Troilus and
Cressida," is painful and repellent; it is tinged
with an irony which has a corrosive quality ; it is
touched with a bitterness of feeling which seems
foreign to Shakespeare. The evil of life was evi
dently pressing upon his imagination so heavily
that it had become a burden on his heart. In
" Hamlet " he had portrayed a rotten society ; in
" Measure for Measure " he depicted a state full
of iniquity and a group of men corrupted by the
very air they breathed ; in " Troilus and Cressida "
the same vileness was personified in the most loath
some characters.
In the great Tragedies we breathe an air which
is charged with fate, and feel ourselves involved
in vast calamities which we are powerless to con
trol ; in the plays which have been named we
breathe an atmosphere which is fetid and impure,
and human nature becomes unspeakably mean and
repulsive. This is, perhaps, the effect of the terrible
strain of the tragic mood on Shakespeare's spirit ;
and these plays are to be accepted as expressions
of a mood of depression verging upon despair.
They are often classed with the Comedies, but
they belong with the Tragedies, not only in temper,
but in time.
316 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Even in this blackness of thick darkness the
poet's sanity is never lost. In a dull play by
George Whetstone, published in 1587, called " Pro
mos and Cassandra " and based on an Italian novel
by Cinthio, who also worked it into a tragedy,
Shakespeare found the plot of " Measure for Meas
ure " ; the story was told in prose by Whetstone
four years later in a collection of tales which he
called " Heptameron of Civil Discourses." In the
title of the play the earlier dramatist affirmed that it
showed in the first part " the unsufferable abuse of
a lewd magistrate ; the virtuous behaviour of a chaste
lady ; the uncontrolled lewdness of a favoured cour
tesan ; and the undeserved estimation of a perni
cious parasite." Shakespeare's modifications of the
plot are highly significant : in the older versions
Isabella surrenders her virtue as the price of her
brother's life ; in " Measure for Measure " her im
pregnable purity gives the whole play a saving
sweetness. To Shakespeare's imagination is due
also the romantic episode of the moated grange
and the pathetic figure of Mariana. In the murky
atmosphere of this painful drama Isabella's stain
less and incorruptible chastity invests purity with
a kind of radiancy, and she finds her place in the
little company of adorable women in whom Shake
speare's creative imagination realized and personi
fied the eternal feminine qualities.
" Measure for Measure " was probably produced
about 1603, and " Troilus and Cressida " belongs,
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 317
in its final form, to the same year. The problems
presented by the different versions are not more
difficult than those presented by the play itself,
which has been described as " a history in which
historical verisimilitude is openly set at naught,
a comedy without genuine laughter, a tragedy
without pathos." The editors of the First Folio
were so uncertain about its essential character that
they evaded the necessity of classifying it by plac
ing it between the Histories and the Tragedies.
In temper, spirit, and probably in time, it belongs
with the Tragedies, where it is now generally
printed. It is the only play in which Shakespeare
drew upon the greatest stream of ancient story
and the materials for which he found in many
forms in the literature of his time. Chief among
these was Chaucer's noble rendering of the ancient
romance, to which may be added Chapman's
' Homer," Lydgate's " Troy Book," and probably
Robert Greene's version of the story which ap
peared in 1587.
In this play Shakespeare was dealing with mate
rial which had generally been regarded as heroic
and which was rich in heroic qualities; his treat
ment is, however, essentially satirical, with touches
of unmistakable cynicism. This attitude was not,
however, entirely new to Shakespeare's auditors ;
the great Homeric story had already been handled
with a freedom which bordered on levity. Shake
speare shows little regard for the proprieties of
318 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
classical tradition ; this satirical attitude did not,
however, blur his insight into the nature of the
men whom he portrayed.
The drama brings into clear light the irony of
human fate ; but it is not a blind fate which the
dramatist invokes as the shaping power in the
drama; it is a fate set in motion by the funda
mental qualities or defects of the chief actors. The
special aspect of irony which the play presents is
the confusion brought into private and public
affairs by lawless or fatuous love. Thersites goes
to the heart of the matter when, with brutal direct
ness, he characterizes the struggle as a " war for a
placket." Helen,
A pearl,
Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships,
involves Greece and Troy in measureless disaster,
while Cressida's cheap duplicity makes Troilus the
fool of fortune.
This play, it will be remembered, has been
regarded by some critics as a contribution to the
"war of the theatres," and as containing direct
references, not only to the matters at issue, but
to the characteristics and works of the chief com
batants. Mr. Fleay has made a thorough study
of the play from this point of view, and has pre
sented his case with great acumen and skilful
arrangement of facts and inferences. It is diffi
cult to find in the play, in its present form,
adequate basis for the supposition that it was
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 319
written as an attack on Jonson, or that one of
Shakespeare's contemporaries is portrayed in Ther-
sites. Shakespeare may have touched humorously
on some of the extravagances of that bloodless but
vociferous combat ; but the drama must have had
a deeper root. Unsatisfactory and repellent as it
is in some aspects, " Troilus and Cressida " has
very great interest as a document in Shakespeare's
history as a thinker and an artist. It is remark
able for its range of style, reproducing as it does
his earlier manner side by side with his later
manner. It is notable also for its knowledge of
life, expressed in a great number of sententious
and condensed phrases ; for its setting aside of
the dramatic mask and direct statement of the
truth which the dramatist means to convey. And
it is supremely interesting because in the person
of Ulysses, the real hero of the drama, Shake
speare seems to present his own view of life.
The ripest wisdom of the dramatist speaks through
the lips of this typical man of experience, whose
insight has been corrected by the widest contact
with affairs, whose long familiarity with the world
has made him a master of its diseases, and whose
speech has the touch of universality in its dis
passionateness, breadth, and clarity of vision. This
tragedy of disillusion has at least the saving-
quality of a rich and many-sided knowledge of
life.
Queen Elizabeth died in March, 1603, while
320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare was absorbed in the problems pre
sented in the Tragedies. His silence when the
chorus of elegies filled the air has already been
noted ; his friendship for Southampton and Essex
had probably estranged him from the Queen.
Shortly after his accession to the throne, James I.
showed his favour to a group of nine actors,
WILTON HOUSE.
among whom were Shakespeare and Burbage, by
granting them a special license of a very liberal
character, and giving them the right to call them
selves the King's Servants. The plays of Shake
speare were repeatedly presented before the King
at various places ; among them, Wilton House,
the residence of the Earl of Pembroke, which
stands in a charming country about three miles
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 32!
from Salisbury, and in which Sidney wrote the
"Arcadia." The whole region is touched with
literary associations of the most diverse kinds.
The course of travel taken by Shakespeare's com
pany makes it probable that he saw the noble
Cathedral in its beautiful close as Dickens saw it
when he laid the scene of " Martin Chuzzlewit "
in that neighbourhood, and that he passed the
little church where holy George Herbert lived
five years of his beautiful life a quarter of a cen
tury later. In the following year, wearing the
scarlet robe presented for the occasion, Shake
speare, in company with other actors, walked in
the procession which formally welcomed the King
to London. Mr. Lee agrees with Mr. Halliwell-
Phillipps in the belief that Shakespeare and his
fellow-actors of the King's Company were present
at Somerset House by royal order, and took part
in the magnificent ceremonies with which the
Spanish ambassador, who came to England to
ratify the treaty of peace between the two coun
tries, was entertained at midsummer in the same
year. And during the succeeding autumn and
winter the records show that Shakespeare's com
pany appeared before the King at Whitehall on
at least eleven occasions. Much as the King
loved the society of prelates and the amenities of
theological discussion, it is clear that he was not
indifferent to the charms of the stage.
One of the plays which the King saw was
322
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
" Othello." In " Hamlet " Shakespeare spoke for
and to the Germanic consciousness ; in " Romeo
and Juliet," and still more directly in " Othello,"
he spoke for and to the Latin consciousness.
" Othello " is one of the simplest, most direct,
conventional, and objective of the plays. In its
main lines it is an old-fashioned drama of blood-
shedding, saved by the penetrating insight with
which the motives of the chief characters are
revealed, and by the vitalizing skill with which
the situations are related to the plot and the
plot rooted in the moral necessities of the human
nature within the circle of movement. The thread
of the story was clearly traced by Cinthio in the
series of novels from which " Measure for Meas
ure " was also derived. The Italian romancer
furnished nearly all the incidents, but Shake
speare breathed the breath of dramatic life into
them, made Othello and Desdemona the central
figures, and developed the subtle deviltry of lago.
It is Othello's open and generous nature which,
like the idealism of Brutus, makes him the victim
of men smaller than himself. Desdemona loves
him for the dangers he has passed, and, like
Helena, surrenders herself without question or
hesitation to her passion. The audacity of her
surrender is heightened by the difference of race
between her and Othello — a difference so wide
and deep that to cross it almost inevitably created
a tragic situation. From the very beginning the
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 323
play is touched with a certain violence of emotion
and action which bears in itself the elements of
disaster. lago, keeping himself in the background
and striking blowr after blow, is one of the most
significant and original of Shakespeare's crea
tions — a malicious servant of a fate compounded
of his devilish keenness of insight into the weak
nesses of noble natures and of their unsuspi
cious trustfulness. The basis of tragedy in Othello
was his ready belief in lago and his quickly
awakened distrust of Desdemona. In the end,
lago, after the manner of those who invoke the
tragic forces for their own evil ends, is destroyed
by the tempest of passion he has let loose in the
world.
By reason of its simplicity, its rapidity of move
ment, and its dramatic interest, " Othello " has long
been one of the popular Shakespearian plays on the
stage. Its chief characteristic is perhaps its pathos ;
the deep and penetrating appeal which the spectacle
of the defeat of two noble natures by pure villany
makes to the imagination. Wordsworth declared
that " the tragedy of Othello, Plato's records of the
last scenes in the career of Socrates, and Izaak
Walton's ' Life of George Herbert ' are the most
pathetic of human compositions."
Shakespeare was now swiftly mounting to the
sublimest heights of dramatic creation, penetrating
farther and farther into the depths of the human
spirit, and steadily bringing the tragic movement
324
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
home to the soul of the tragic hero. In " Romeo
and Juliet" the family and social forces are more
powerful than the passion and devotion of the ill-
fated lovers; in "Julius Caesar" the interest fast
ens upon Brutus, while the dead Imperator remains
in the background as the personification of a new
OLD CLOFfON BRIDGE.
order in society ; in " Hamlet " the time, which was
out of joint, must be taken into account if the chief
actor is to be made comprehensible. In " Othello "
the essential movement is wholly within the circle
of the character of the protagonist ; the tragic action
springs out of Othello's nature; the drama issues
out of the heart of the hero and is centred in him.
This marks the culmination of Shakespeare's art
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 325
as a dramatist; every element in the play — char
acter, action, incident, background — is strictly sub
ordinated to the unity and totality of the movement,
and the concentrated energy and vitality of the
dramatist's genius bear the drama swiftly forward to
the dramatic crisis.
In " Macbeth," which takes rank with " Hamlet,"
" Lear," and " Othello " as the dramatic masterpieces
of Shakespeare, the same breadth and unity of in
terest are notable. It is one of the shortest of the
plays ; there is almost no relief from humour or a
subsidiary plot ; the style is broad and firm, almost
sketchy in the largeness of outline and the indiffer
ence to detail. The brevity and condensation of the
play have raised the question whether it is not an
abridgment. There is no question, however, regard
ing the definiteness and completeness of impression
which it conveys — an impression of massive and
inevitable tragedy. The sources of " Macbeth " are
to be found in Holinshed's " Chronicle of England
and Scotland " ; suggestions for the witch scenes
may have been found in Scot's " Discoverie of
Witchcraft " which appeared not long before the
poet left Stratford. The play was completed about
1606, and the Scottish background suggests that
the interest of the King in the scenic and historic
associations of the drama may have directed Shake
speare's attention to the subject.
" Macbeth " presented the poet with a new motive
or theme of dramatic interest. Up to this point the
326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tragic heroes had committed deeds of violence, but
Lear spoke for them all when he said :
I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.
Macbeth does not belong in this company of the
children of fate ; he deliberately sets in motion the
tragic forces which sweep the stage ; he becomes a
criminal on a colossal scale ; he kills his king under
his own roof, uses murder as if it were a legitimate
political method, and converts all the opportunities
of usurpation into a consistent practice of tyranny.
He fills the stage ; the whole drama is rooted in his
nature; and, criminal as he is, he commands unwill
ing admiration and breathless interest by the mas
sive simplicity of his character, the concentration of
"his purpose, and the directness of his action. The
play moves with unusual rapidity, and presents no
elements which withdraw the attention for a mo
ment from the central figures or the swift and defi
nite movement.
The weird sisters on the blasted heath had long
been part of the Macbeth legend. In Shakespeare's
version of the story these supernatural beings were
neither the creations of Macbeth 's brain nor the
masters of his destiny ; they had objective reality,
but they were not the ministers of fate. Macbeth's
fate was in his own hands. The sisters spoke to
Banquo as directly as to Macbeth, but Banquo's
clear vision and deep integrity gave their word no
lodgement. Whether they speak truth or falsehood,
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 327
they leave his fate untouched ; in Macbeth's mind,
on the other hand, they find a quick soil for evil
suggestion.
It has been urged by several critics that some
parts of " Macbeth " were interpolated at a later day
by Thomas Middleton, chiefly on the ground that
these passages are un-Shakespearian in character,
that there are obvious resemblances between the
witch scenes in the play and Middleton's play
" The Witch," which appeared in 1610, and that two
songs to which allusion is made in the stage-direc
tions of " Macbeth " appear in " The Witch." Charles
Lamb long ago pointed out the marked differences
between the witches of Shakespeare and those of
Middleton ; the resemblances between the plays are
most readily explained by the assumption that
Middleton had Shakespeare too much in his mind.
The two songs beginning " Come away, come away,"
and " Black spirits and white," may have been
written by Middleton and interpolated in the acting
version of " Macbeth " at a later date, or they may
have been written by Shakespeare and revised or
modified by Middleton. The scene in which the
porter speaks after the murder was long regarded
as questionable. Coleridge found the introduction
of the comic element too abrupt, and failed to per
ceive the deepening of the tragic impression which
the scene produces by its startling contrast with the
awful atmosphere of crime which pervades the castle.
This point was finally settled by the keen instinct
328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of De Quincey, in one of the most famous passages
in Shakespearian criticism :
" Another world has stept in ; and the murderers
are taken out of the region of human things, human
purposes, human desires. They are transfigured :
Lady Macbeth is ' unsexed ' ; Macbeth has forgot
that he was born of a woman ; both are conformed
to the image of devils ; and the world of devils is
suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed
and made palpable? In order that a new world
may step in, this world must for a time disappear.
The murderers and the murder must be insulated
— cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordi
nary tide and succession of human affairs — locked
up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must
be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is
suddenly arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked into
a dread armistice; time must be annihilated, relation
to things abolished ; and all must pass self- withdrawn
into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly pas
sion. Hence it is that, when the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the
world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in
the clouds ; the knocking at the gate is heard ; and
it makes known audibly that the reaction has com
menced ; the human has made its reflux upon the
fiendish ; the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again ; and the reestablishment of the goings-on
of the world in which we live first makes us pro
foundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them."
Dr. Simon Forman has left an account of a per
formance of " Macbeth " which he saw at the Globe
Theatre in the spring of 1611. The play finds its
place in the front rank of tragedies ancient or mod-
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 329
ern ; and its massive structure, its boldness of con
ception, the largeness of its outlines, have inclined
some critics to give it the first place. It is pervaded
by an atmosphere of tragedy, but it is free from the
irony of blind fate. Macbeth is not the victim of
a fate which is imposed upon him from* without ;
he invokes the fate which pursues him, and " life
becomes a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing," because he has violated
its laws and wilfully evoked its possibilities of
disaster.
In " Macbeth " the epic element mingled with
the dramatic; in " King Lear" the tragic element
is supreme and unmixed, and the tragic art of
Shakespeare touches its sublimest height. There
is no more tragic figure in literature than that of
the old king, accustomed to rule and flung out into
the night by the children among whom he has
divided his power; intensely affectionate and wil
fully irrational ; with all the majesty of a king
joined to the passionateness of a child ; his illu
sions destroyed, his reason unseated ; with no
companionship save that of the fool, wandering
shelterless in the storm, symbolical of the shatter
ing of his life in the awful tempest of passion.
This Titanic drama, which ranks with the sub
limest work of /Eschylus and Sophocles and stands
alone in modern literature, was performed before
the King at Whitehall, at Christmas-tide, 1606.
The story, in a condensed form, is found in Geoffrey
330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of Monmouth's " Historia Britonum," and was de
rived from an old Welsh chronicle ; some of the
motives introduced into the legend -appear in a
wide range of folk tales. Like " Hamlet," the
formative conception in " King Lear " has its foun-
THE HALL AT CLOFTON.
dations deep in the vital experience of the race. It
is Celtic in its origin; but it found its setting in
literature at the hands of the old English chroniclers,
Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert of Brunne,
and, finally, of Holinshed, in whose pages Shake
speare read it. The story of Cordelia was told in verse
in " The Mirrour for Magistrates " and in " The Faerie
Queene," and had been dramatized at least fifteen
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 331
years before Shakespeare dealt with it. The poet's
attention may have been definitely drawn to the
dramatic possibilities of this old story by a rude
play which appeared in 1605, entitled "The True
Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three
Daughters — Gondrill, Ragan, and Cordelia"; a
version which, in the opinion of Dr. Ward, seemed
only to await the touch of such a hand as Shake
speare's to become " a tragedy of sublime effective
ness." This was precisely what Shakespeare, by
omitting irrelevant parts, by a free use of all the
material, and by entirely reorganizing it, made of
the old folk story.
Appalling as is the presentation of the play of
elemental forces and passions in " King Lear," and
completely as it seems to break away from all
relation to a spiritual order, and to exhibit men as
the sport of fate, it is, nevertheless, rooted in the
character of the men and women who are tossed
about in its vast movements as by some shoreless
sea. Gloucester, the putting out of whose eyes
perhaps surpasses in horror any other incident in
the plays, is not so blind that he cannot read the
story of his own calamities in the sin of his youth.
We are reminded of this relation between present
misery and far-off offences when Edgar says :
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us ;
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The play is Titanic not only in force and gran
deur, but in the elemental character of the passions
and ideas which contribute to the catastrophe.
Such a nature as Lear's — passionate, wilful, un
disciplined, dominated by a colossal egoism — could
not escape a conflict of appalling dimensions. When
the world which Lear had organized about him by
the supremacy of his own will was shattered, he
could neither recognize nor accept a new order, but
must fling himself in a blind passion of revolt against
the new conditions which he had unwittingly brought
into being. His madness grew out of his irrational
attitude towards his family.
Lear's sufferings are heightened by interweaving
with them the sufferings of Gloucester. " Were
Lear alone to suffer from his daughters," wrote
Schlegel, " the impression would be limited to the
powerful compassion felt by us for his private mis
fortunes. But two such unheard-of examples taking
place at the same time have the appearance of a
great commotion in the moral world ; the picture
becomes gigantic, and fills us with such alarm as
we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly
bodies might one day fall from their appointed
orbits." To still further deepen this impression,
the Fool, the very soul of pathos in humorous dis
guise, strikes into clear light not only the King's
misfortunes, but his faults as well.
In " King Lear," as clearly as in the other trage
dies, men reap what they sow, and the deed returns
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 333
to the doer with inexorable retribution; but the play
is not to be explained by any easy and obvious
application of ethical principles. It lifts the curtain
upon the most appalling facts of life, and makes no
attempt to rationalize them. In this revelation of
the ultimate order of life, which is inexplicable by
the mind in its present stage of development, the
play takes its place with the Book of Job, with the
great trilogy of ^Eschylus, or with the sublime
" CEdipus Tyrannus," of which Shelley thought it
the modern equivalent. Its sublimity lies in the
vastness of its presentation of the great theme of
human suffering, and in the nobility of its method.
Such a theme could have been touched only by a
man of the first magnitude ; and such a man could
not go beyond its dramatic presentation ; to have
attempted the solution would have cheapened the
work. The end of art is not to solve the problems
of existence, but to deepen and freshen the sense of
life ; when this sense is deep and fresh, these prob
lems are so dealt with that, as in the Book of Job,
their very vastness and mystery suggest the only
adequate and satisfying answer. In " King Lear," the
greatest dramatic achievement of our race, the poet
so enlarges the field of observation and dilates the
imagination of the reader that the postponement of
the ultimate solution of the problem of the tragedy
is not only inevitable, but is the only outcome
which would be tolerated by the reader.
In " Timon of Athens," which probably followed
334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
close upon " King Lear " in point of time, the poet
turned once more from the lofty severity of tragedy,
full of pity and of terror, to the easier, narrower,
and less noble attitude of the satirist, in whose com
ment there is a touch of corrosive bitterness. In
style, in treatment, and in attitude this play is so
full of inconsistencies and, in parts, so essentially
un-Shakespearian, that it is now generally regarded
as a sketch made by the poet, but elaborated and
put into its present form by other and later hands.
This conclusion seems more probable than the
hypothesis that it is an old drama worked over by
Shakespeare, or that it was the product of collabo
ration with another playwright. It is not certain
that any play on the subject was known to Shake
speare, who found the story of Timon in Plutarch's
" Life of Antonius," and also in the version of the
story in that repository of old stories, Paynter's
" Palace of Pleasure." It seems probable that the
author of the play was familiar with Lucian's dia
logue on Timon.
The character of Timon relates itself in various
ways to that of Lear. Both confided blindly; both
were generous without measure or reason ; there
was in both an element of irrationality; and in
both the reaction was excessive and akin to mad
ness. There were in both the elements of simple
and kindly goodness ; and both were lacking in
perception and penetration. In both the seeds of
tragic calamity lay very near the surface. The
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 335
irony of Timon lies not so much in the reaction of
his irrational prodigality upon his fortunes and
character as in the fierce light thrown upon those
who had benefited by his lavish mood. Timon
hates mankind upon a very narrow basis of per
sonal experience ; Apemantus hates mankind be
cause he is a cynic by nature. Timon is blind
alike to the good and the evil in mankind ; he fails
to recognize the loyal devotion of his steward Fla-
vius, after misfortunes have overtaken him, as he
failed to heed his warnings in the days of prodigal
ity. In this blindness his calamities are rooted ; it
is this which turns all the sweetness of his nature
into acid when the world forsakes him ; and it is
this which makes his judgment of that world value
less save as an expression of his own mood. " Ti
mon" is a study of temperament, not a judgment
upon life.
There could hardly have been a greater contrast
of subject and material than that which Shake
speare found when he turned from " King Lear " or
" Timon " to " Antony and Cleopatra " ; a tragedy
almost incredibly rich in variety and range of char
acter and in splendour of setting. He had recourse
again to Plutarch's " Life of Antonius," fastening
this time riot upon an episode, but upon the nature
and fate of one of the most fascinating figures on
the stage of the antique world. That world he
re-created in its strength and weakness, in its luxury
and magnificence, in a drama which brought before
336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the imagination with equal firmness of touch the
power of Rome, personified in the disciplined and
far-seeing Octavius, the voluptuous temperament of
the East in Cleopatra, and the tragic collision of
two great opposing conceptions of life in Mark
Antony — a man born with the Roman capacity for
action and the Eastern passion for pleasure. In
Caesar's house in Rome, in newly contracted alli
ance with Octavius, Antony's heart is in Egypt:
I' the East my pleasure lies.
The style marks the transition to the poet's latest
manner ; rhyme almost disappears, and " weak end
ings," or the use of weak monosyllables at the end
of the lines, become very numerous. The poet had
secured such conscious mastery of his art that he
trusted entirely to his instinct and taste. The
story in Plutarch's hands has a noble breadth and
beauty, and is full of insight into the ethical rela
tions of the chief actors in this world-drama. The
full splendour of Shakespeare's genius has hardly
done more than bring .out dramatically the signifi
cance of these great words of the Greek biogra
pher:
"Antonius being thus inclined, the last and ex-
tremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love of
Cleopatra) lighted on him, who did waken and stir
up many vices yet hidden in him, and were never
seen to any ; and if any spark of goodness or hope
of rising were left him, Cleopatra quenched it straight
and made it worse than before."
THE LATER TRAGEDIES
337
Again and again Shakespeare touched upon this
great theme and showed how tragic disaster issues
out of unregulated passion and infects the coolest
nature with madness ; but nowhere else is that
tragedy set on so great a stage and so magnificently
enriched with
splendid gifts
of nature,
noble posses
sions, and al
most limitless
opportunities
of achieve
ment.
It is the
drama of the
East and West
in mortal col
lision of ideals
and motives,
and the East
succumbs to
the superior fibre and more highly organized char
acter of the West. Cleopatra is the greatest of the
enchantresses. She has wit, grace, humour; the
intoxication of sex breathes from her; she unites
the passion of a great temperament with the fathom
less coquetry of a courtesan of genius. She is pas
sionately alive, avid of sensation, consumed with
love of pleasure, imperious in her demands for that
338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
absolute homage which slays honour and saps man
hood at the very springs of its power. This superb
embodiment of femininity, untouched by pity and
untroubled by conscience, has a compelling charm,
born in the mystery of passion and taking on the
radiance of a thousand moods which melt into one
another in endless succession, as if there were no
limit to the resources of her temperament and the
sorceries of her beauty. Of her alone has the
greatest of poets dared to declare that " age can
not wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."
It is this magnificence which invests Cleopatra's
criminality with a kind of sublimity, so vast is the
scale of her being and so tremendous the force of
her passions.
The depth of Shakespeare's poetic art and the
power of his imagination are displayed in their full
compass in " Antony and Cleopatra." The play is
vitalized as by fire, so radiant is it in energy and
beauty of expression. Not only are the chief
figures realized with historical fidelity, but they
breathe the very atmosphere of the East.
In " Julius Caesar" there is Roman massiveness
of construction and severity of outline ; " Antony
and Cleopatra " is steeped in the languor and lux
ury of the East. The Roman play has the definite-
ness and solidity of sculpture ; the Egyptian play
has the glow and radiancy of painting.
The study of classical subjects bore final fruit at
the end of this period in Shakespeare's life as an
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 339
artist in " Coriolanus," the tragedy of a great na
ture wrecked by pride. Written about 1609, and
closely related to the magnificent drama of the East
and West, the poet turned for the last time to the
pages of Plutarch, who told this story, as he told
the story of Antony, with a noble dignity and beauty
which were not lost at the hands of the English
translator. The motive of the play is so admirably
set forth in a few phrases in the " Life of Corio
lanus " that it is impossible to avoid quoting them :
" He was a man too full of passion and choler, and
too much given over to self-will and opinion, as one
of a high mind and great courage, that lacked the
gravity and affability that is gotten with judgment
of learning and reason, which only is to be looked
for in a governor of State ; and that remembered
not how wilfulness is the thing of the world, which
a governor of a commonwealth, for pleasing, should
shun, being that which Plato called ' solitariness ' ;
as, in the end, all men that are wilfully given to a
self opinion and obstinate mind, and who will never
yield to other's reason but to their own, remain with
out company and forsaken of all men. For a man
that will live in the world must needs have patience,
which lusty bloods make but a mock at. So Mar-
cius, being a stout man of nature, that never yielded
in any respect, as one thinking that to overcome
always and to have the upper hand in all matters,
was a token of magnanimity and of no base and
faint courage, which spitteth out anger from the
most weak and passioned part of the beast, much
like the matter of an impostume : went home to his
house, full freighted with spite and malice against
the people."
34-O WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The humorous scenes which give the play vari
ety were entirely contributed by Shakespeare ; and
the presentation of the mob is highly characteristic.
The poet hated the irrationality and violence of
untrained men. Coriolanus never for a moment
conceals his contempt for them :
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.
This is quite in accord with Casca's contempt for
the " rabblement " which " hooted, and clapped their
chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty night
caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath,"
because Caesar refused the crown. This contempt
finds its most satiric expression in Jack Cade's
manifesto :
" Be brave then ; for your captain is brave, and
vows reformation. There shall be, in England,
seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny ; the three-
hooped pot shall have ten hoops ; and I will make
it felony to drink small beer; all the realm shall be
in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go
to grass."
In complete contrast with this conception of the
common people as a mere rabble, full of passion and
devoid of ideas, stands Coriolanus — atypical aris
tocrat, with the virtues of the aristocrat : courage,
indifference to pain, scorn of money, independence
THE LATER TRAGEDIES 341
of thought, command of eloquence, and natural apti
tude for leadership. These great qualities are neu
tralized by colossal egotism, manifesting itself in a
pride so irrational and insistent that, sooner or later,
by the necessity of its nature, it must produce the
tragic conflict. Coriolanus, in spite of his great
faults, has heroic proportions, and fills the play with
the sense of his superiority ; he lives and dies like a
true tragic hero.
CHAPTER XV
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES
MR. DENTON SNIDER, who has interpreted Shake
speare with breadth of view and keenness of insight,
and has brought out with convincing clearness the
poet's conception of life and art from the institu
tional point of view, describes the Shakespearian
drama as " the grand Mystery Play of humanity."
The essence of the mystery play was the disclosure
of a divine power at work in the world dealing
directly with human affairs ; the interior union of
the seen with the unseen, of the temporal with the
eternal, of the human with the divine, was set out
in childlike simplicity in these dramas of mediaeval
faith and genius. In Shakespeare this disclosure
of an invisible background against which human life
is set and from the order of which it cannot escape
without setting tragic forces in motion, took on a
new and deeper form in the Tragedies which came
from his hand in uninterrupted succession after
1 60 1. In these dramas all the elements of power
and art which were present in germ in the Mystery,
the Morality, and the Interlude were unfolded and
harmonized in the spirit of freedom and with the
342
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 343
feeling for beauty which were the gifts of the
Renaissance to the greatest of its children.
Shakespeare was preeminently a poet, and it is
highly improbable, therefore, that he thought out
in advance the philosophical bearings of his art and
worked out for
himself a sys
tematized con
ception of life.
Even Goethe,
whose insight
into the princi
ples of art pro
ductivity was as
clear and final
as his creative
genius was di
rect and spon
taneous, was
primarily a poet
and secondarily
a critic Or phi- HENRY» PRINCE OF WALES, SON OF JAMES i.
losopher. There is every reason to believe that
Shakespeare's view of life came to him through the
gradual disclosure of an experience which was
rationalized and interpreted by habitual meditation.
A nature of such sensitiveness and receptivity as
his would feel the beauty of the world and the
variety, the interest, and the humour of life as he
felt these things in the years when he was serving
344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his apprenticeship and, a little later, writing the
Comedies. Such a nature, constantly fed by that
vital sympathy with men which is part of the gift of
genius, steadily deepened and clarified by experience
and illumined by the insight of genius, would
inevitably pass through the show of things to the
moral order behind them, and discern more and
more clearly the significance of character in the
fortunes and fates of men, as Shakespeare did in the
period of the historical and purely poetic dramas.
If at this stage a deep and searching crisis were to
occur in his spiritual life, misfortune overtake the
men whom he loved and who personified for him
the spirit and genius of his time, and that time, so
splendid in its earlier promise and performance, be
come overclouded like a day fast hastening to night,
his vision would insensibly widen and deepen, as
did Shakespeare's when he entered upon the period
of the Tragedies. Through all the earlier years in
London he was steadily approaching the mystery
of life ; in the years of the Tragedies he entered
into that mystery and was enfolded by it. He
wrote the Tragedies as he had written the Come
dies, because the creative impulse was on him and
play-writing was his vocation ; but the order of the
world which comes to light in them, giving sig
nificance to human striving and suffering, was not
less clearly seen nor less authoritatively revealed
because Shakespeare did not definitely set it before
him as the object of his artistic endeavour. The
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 345
poet is a more impressive witness to the ethical
order of life than the moralist, because his discovery
of that order is, in a sense, incidental and uninten
tional ; he sees it, not because he set out to discover
it, but because it is there and he cannot avoid
seeing it.
That Shakespeare deliberately, and in a spirit of
philosophic detachment from life, studied, after the
manner of a psychologist, the phenomena of expe
rience, and formulated a system of interpreting
those phenomena, is incredible in the exact degree
in which one comprehends his nature ; that he was
blind to this great order, that he did not discern
what he saw nor understand what he said, that his
mind was simply a mirror in which was caught up
the reflection of a world which he never realized in
consciousness, is still more incredible. When he
laid aside the dramatic mask, as he did at times in
the Sonnets and more than once in the plays, and
notably in " Troilus and Cressida," he made it plain
that he understood the significance of his own
thought, and that his attitude toward the great
matters with which he deals was intelligent and
deliberate, if not at all moments self-conscious.
It was his rare good fortune as an artist to pluck
the fruits of the most searching scrutiny of the
facts of life without losing that free and captivating
spontaneity which is the joy of art; to command
the knowledge of the psychologist without losing
the magic of the poet ; to be at the same time one
346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the most penetrating of thinkers and the most
beguiling of poets, with a clear vision of the deepest
realities of existence and a voice full of the careless,
rapturous melody of birds under the free sky.
In the period of the Tragedies Shakespeare set
forth with perfect clearness his view of man's place
and meaning in the world. His whole conception
of the authority and significance of human nature
rests on personality — the master word of the
thought of the Western world and the source of its
formative ideas of freedom, responsibility, beauty,
democracy, the reality of experience, the dignity of
individual effort, and personal immortality. In the
Tragedies Shakespeare worked out in dramatic
form this central conception about which Western
thought, since Plato, has organized itself. He
exhibits the individual man as shaping his destiny
largely by his own will ; as fashioning himself
chiefly through action, by means of which ideas
and emotions are transmuted into character and
re-form the man. The problem of life, as it is pre
sented in the Shakespearian dramas, is to bring the
individual will into harmony with the institutional
life of society, organized in the family, the Church,
and the State ; and to bring these institutions into
harmony with the immutable principles of righteous
ness. This result is brought about in the Trage
dies by the collision of the individual with the
established order, either to his own hurt or to the
betterment of the order itself ; and the moment of
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 347
collision is the moment of tragedy. It is at this
moment, when the inner subjective force of the
man sweeps into light through action, becomes
objective and begins to affect others, to set in
motion reactions upon himself and to change the
order of things about him, that Shakespeare fastens
attention upon the tragic character; and, through
the collision between his will and the order of
society or of life, reveals as by a lightning flash
the soul of the man and the visible or invisible
order in which his life is set.
As clearly as does Dante, though in a very dif
ferent fashion, he shows the inevitable reaction of
the deed upon the doer, and so strikes into sudden
light the massive and all-embracing moral order of
life. He swept away the last lingering shadows
of the pagan conception of fate by showing that
character is destiny, and that " character is the only
definition we have of freedom and power."
In the word character — the organization of
impulse, emotion, will, and deed into a permanent,
self-conscious personality, which becomes a shaping
force in the world — is to be found the key to
Shakespeare's conception *of life and of the function
of dramatic art. If he made plays which were suited
to the taste of his age and were skilfully adapted to
the limitations and possibilities of the stage in his
day, he also made dramas which disclosed the most
searching study of human experience, and the most
adequate and ultimate interpretation and represen-
348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tation of that experience in the forms of art. He
was at once a trained and practical playwright, with
a first-hand knowledge of his business and of his
constituency ; and he was also a thinker and an
artist of the first order ; and there was no contra
diction between the man of skill and the man of
genius in the same personality. The difficulty in
understanding and accepting the many-sidedness of
Shakespeare and the happy balance of spontaneity
and reflection in him has its roots, not in the
limited potentialities of the human spirit, but in
the lack of imagination on the part of his readers.
The miracle of genius — that magical insight which
is apparently independent of character in its origin,
but largely dependent on character for harmonious
and adequate expression ; which never originates
in any kind of education, but is largely conditioned
upon education for its free and full development —
is incredible to those who strive to reduce life and
its arts to a set of formulae, and to divide men
arbitrarily into types which are consistent through
out. Shakespeare is not to be explained by a
formula nor to be studied as a type of mind formed
by a rigid method ; he was neither an irresponsible
genius, to whom great thoughts, unerring insights,
and moments of inspired speech came without
sequence or relation to his inner life, nor was he
a systematically trained, intensely self-conscious
workman, whose happiest strokes were planned
with the nicest sense of craftsmanship, and whose
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 349
consistent and coherent view of life was thoroughly
thought out before the first studies were put on
paper.
He was primarily and always a poet ; it was as a
poet that he first won recognition, and it was in
the poetic temper and view of things that he found
refuge and peace after the period of the Tragedies
was passed ; and during the years when the dra
matic instinct and impulse dominated him and
shaped his work, his methods, his spirit, and his
relations to his vocation were those of a poet. As a
poet he saw with the clearness of direct vision and felt
with the freshness and power of spontaneous emo
tion, and he instinctively passed behind the fact to
the truth which it suggested or illustrated ; but this
spontaneous action of his nature was broadened,
deepened, and brightened by quick and sensitive
perception of the value and uses of methods, tools,
and instruments of every kind, and by habitual
meditation on the spectacle of life as it lay in his
imagination. It is impossible to separate the poetic
and the philosophic in his nature, to mark the
points at which the process of observation ends
and the free play of the imagination begins; to
sever that which was acquired from that which was
creative in him ; to divide the conscious from the
unconscious elements in his power and his life ;
to distinguish between the thinker and the poet in
his work. His work reveals with the utmost clear
ness a coherent and profound view of life, consist-
350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ently set forth in a long series of dramas ; every
page bears the unmistakable stamp of the thinker;
but the mind behind this varied and splendid work
is the mind of a poet, and the personality which
shapes all this material into forms of beauty is that
of the artist. When this point of view is taken,
Shakespeare's genius does not cease to be marvel
lous, but it does cease to be incredible.
The fate of the critic who attempts to slip the
net of logical definition over this elusive spirit was
charmingly portrayed by Heine in a passage which
students of the dramatist will do well to keep in
mind:
" I fell asleep and dreamed," writes Heine —
" dreamed that it was a starry night, and I swam
in a small boat in a wide, wide sea, where all kinds
of barks filled with masks, musicians, and torches
gleaming, music sounding, many near or afar, rowed
on. There were costumes of all countries and
ages, old Greek tunics, mediaeval knightly coats,
Oriental turbans, shepherds' hats with fluttering
ribbons, masks of beasts wild or tame — now and
then I thought I saw a well-known face, sometimes
I heard familiar greetings — but all passed quickly
by and far away, and the merry music grew softer
and fainter, when, instead of the gay fiddling, I
heard near me the mysterious, melancholy tones
of hunters' horns from another part. Sometimes
the night wind bore the strains of both to my ear,
and then the mingled melody made a happy har-
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 351
mony. The water echoed ineffably sweet sounds
and burned as with a magical reflection of the
torches, and the gayly-pennoned pleasure boats with
their wondrous masquerades swam in light and
music. A lovely woman, who stood by the rudder
of one of the barks, cried to me in passing, ' Is it
not true, friend, thou wouldst have a definition of
the Shakespearian comedy ? ' I know not whether
I answered ' Yes,' but in that instant the beautiful
woman dipped her hand in the water and sprinkled
the ringing sparks in my face, so that there was a
general laughter, and I awoke."
Many students and critics who have forgotten
that Shakespeare is first and always a poet, and
have approached him as if he were primarily a
philosopher, have shared Heine's disaster without
the consolation of Heine's vision.
In the Tragedies Shakespeare touched the
highest point of his power and his art ; more
adequately than the Histories, Comedies, or
Romances they give that impression of final author
ity which issues only from the greatest work of the
greatest minds, and which has its roots in the per
ception that in these masterpieces the study of
character is most searching and its portraiture most
convincing. If the view of life and art which lies
at the heart of the thought and action of the
Western races is. sound, Shakespeare becomes, in
these great plays, their foremost interpreter. It is
in these dramas that the function of action is
352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
revealed in a full, clear, adequate way almost for the
first time in literature, and the process of historic
development is set forth not as an intellectual but
as a vital evolution. The problem of existence is
not to be solved by the action of the mind alone ;
men deal with life primarily not as thinkers but as
men, with all the resources of a complex nature ;
with instincts, appetites, passions ; with emotion,
thought, and will. By means of action, impulse
and thought pass out of the region of pure subjec
tivity into the world of actuality and become
definite, concrete, potential ; through action, they
react on the actor and reform or transform existing
conditions and institutions. They create a human
world against the background of the natural world ;
they exhibit the human spirit in this world by giv
ing external form to its inward and hidden nature ;
men cease to be mere observers and reflectors ;
they become creative, and through action they enter
into history and shape its movement. This action
may not always justify itself in its positive results,
but it always reveals man to himself and to his
fellows ; it evokes his power, liberates him from the
limitations of his own experience by setting him in
a universal order ; develops his personality ; gives,
in a word, free play to the human spirit, makes it
conscious of its place in the order of life, and pro
vides an educational process which makes life
intelligible, gives it moral significance, dramatic
interest, and invests it with immortal hopes. In
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 353
these dramas the ultimate truths of life and the
deepest secrets of experience are organized into
forms of the highest beauty, and a great light
suddenly shines in the heart
of man; for all true art is the
illumination of experience.
The vital quality of Shake
speare's work, its living force,
its convincing reality, are
rooted in the closeness of its
relation to experience, in the
directness with which life fed
the springs of his nature and
the sources of his art. The
conception of life, as revealed
in the vast range of human
action reacting on character,
not only gives the ethical sig
nificance of his work convinc
ing authority, but stretches and
expands indefinitely the nor
mal and wholesome range of
human interest beyond the ar
bitrary and shifting limits set
by different schools and suc
cessive generations of moral
ists. Shakespeare's ethical
view of life was rooted in real
ities and had the large, vigor
ous vitality of an elemental
354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
order, spacious enough to admit of the full, free,
and normal development of the human spirit on all
sides. To a mind of such breadth of view and
deep vitality as his any kind of asceticism was not
only a violation of instinct but of the nature of
man ; any kind of denial of the dignity of the body
was as truly atheistic as any kind of denial of the
reality of the experiences of the spirit. Into the
region of pure spiritual impulse and ultimate
spiritual relationship Shakespeare did not pene
trate ; in that fact lies his limitation. If to his other
gifts had been added the spiritual insight of Dante,
he would have been not only the foremost but the
ultimate interpreter of the life of the race. In the
region of action, however, where spiritual impulses
and convictions are worked into character, Shake
speare is a master of observation and of interpreta
tion. He sees the facts, and he sets them in their
ethical order. In this field, therefore, his freedom,
his range, and the vast variety of his interests are
significant of the breadth and compass of normal
human living.
It is needless to prove that he was not a Puritan,
to quote " I had as lief be a Brownist as a politi
cian," or " Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it
will be no hurt ; it will wear the surplice of humility
over the black gown of a big heart ; " by the very
constitution of his mind Shakespeare was set apart
for another service to his kind, and committed to a
different view of life. The Puritan, with all his
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 355
devotion and greatness of soul, was the master of a
crisis, the man of a period, the representative of a
phase of human development ; Shakespeare was the
master of the universal movement of life, the man
of all time, the exponent of the full and free play of
all the forces of personality. He stands, therefore,
not for the occasional altitudes of human experi
ence, but its broad, general, productive movement ;
for large, varied, many-sided, fertile life, with full
play of instinct, passion, emotion, thought, and will ;
for freedom in an ordered world, in which all normal
human faculties and desires are to find normal ex
pression and use ; in which, however, law and
proportion and harmony between different parts of
the nature are to be preserved, the lower is to be
subordinated to the higher, the individual kept in
his place in the social order, and the institutional
life of society sustained at any private cost.
In such a world what was universal and endur
ing in the Puritan view was kept; what was pro
visional and divisive rejected. It was a world in
which the Greek and the man of the Renaissance
temper could live as freely as the man of the
Hebrew spirit. It follows, therefore, that the ethi
cal order of Shakespeare's world must be found
in the structure of that world, not in conventional
or sectarian interpretations or expositions of its
order. Shakespeare's morality is the morality of
fundamental law, not of provisional rules ; his
righteousness is the righteousness of sane, whole-
356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
some, ordered living, not of conventional good
behaviour.
To a mind of Shakespeare's breadth of view no
conception of the ethical constitution of things less
fundamental was possible ; he saw too far to accept
any local standards of right action or any provi
sional views of human duties. In the wide range
of his vision of the fortunes of men the rigid and
fixed bounds set to moral responsibility by sectarian
moralists of every school lost their authority; the
vast complexity of experience, the immense range
of conditions, the influence of institutions on char
acter, the pathetic and often tragic enfolding of a
soul by circumstances which leave their stain and
stamp upon it, the antagonistic ' elements which are
at war in the noblest character — all these things
touched Shakespeare's judgments with a great com
passion, and, while unflinching in his disclosure of
the penalty which lies in the heart of the evil deed,
made him slow to measure out moral condemnation
to the evil-doer. He could not fail to be aware,
with all men of imagination and insight, of the
vaster movement which enfolds the obvious ethical
order of life. Like Goethe in " Faust," and Haw
thorne in "The Marble Faun," he had glimpses of
" a soul of goodness in things evil," divinations of a
diviner reconciliation between conflicting elements
than is accomplished on the narrow stage of the
world. This deep mystery he could not probe ; no
man has sounded it; it enfolds us like an element
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 357
of which we suspect the existence, but which our
instruments of observation are not sensitive enough
to discover. Its presence does not diminish the
authority of the ethical order
under which we live and from
which no man escapes, but it
ought to make us more tolerant,
compassionate, and patient in
judgment and in punishment.
" The web of our life is of a
mingled yam, good and ill to
gether," says the dramatist in
one of the group of plays which
are most perplexing to the mor
alist who lacks this vision of a
larger order ; " our virtues would
be proud if our faults whipped
them not ; and our crimes would
despair if they were not cher
ished by our virtues."
This largeness of view gave
Shakespeare the highest insight
of the great tragic writer: the
clear perception of the presence
of a mediating element in life.
Without this perception the
highest form of tragedy is im
possible of realization ; for trag
edy is not only an exhibition of
tragic events, but an interpre-
358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
tation of their significance. Without this inter
pretation these events are blind happenings, — mere
brutalities of fate, without order, meaning, or im-
pressiveness. If Shakespeare's view of life was too
broad to permit of a judgment of men from the
standpoint of conventional morality, his insight was
too deep and searching to rest in the violent colli
sions of contending principles, forces, and persons.
He could not stop short of some kind of harmony ;
violence in its destructive aspect had only a minor
interest for him ; he cared for the storm because it
cleared the air and prepared the way for a new and
higher order of things. The deed reacts on the
doer and brings doom with it, , but the penalty is
not inflicted as a matter of vengeance ; it opens the
door to a reorganization of character. For the evil
doer, the violator of the order of society, the real
tragedy is to be found in the offence, not in the
penalty; and the greatest disaster comes not when
the punishment is borne, but when it is evaded. In
this consistent representation of the inevitableness
and necessity of the tragic disaster Shakespeare is
in harmony with the soundest religious view of life
and with the most intelligent psychology. As soon
as personality is set free in society, directed by
inward intelligence, will, or impulse, put under the
necessity of subordinating impulse to intelligence,
appetite to law, individual desire to the good of
society, a series of tragic collisions is set in motion
and a world of conflict rises into view. These con-
ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES 359
flicts are precipitated when individual passion, pref
erence, or love is set in opposition to the family, as
in "Romeo and Juliet" and "King Lear"; and
when individual will, interest, or passion is set in
opposition to the State, as in the historical plays,
and in " Coriolanus," " Julius Caesar," and " Mac
beth." These are the two great classes of tragic
conflict with which Shakespeare deals ; and his
point of view is consistent throughout. Society is
striving, in a rude and halting fashion, toward the
attainment of harmony ; its institutions are often
based on unrighteousness, they are perverted in
their uses or they are outgrown ; in each case some
kind of conflict is inevitable and that conflict takes
a tragic form. These institutions impose order
upon society ; to that order each individual must
adjust himself, and in it he must find his place ; if
he sets his will against the general will as organized
in these institutions he precipitates a conflict and be
comes a tragic figure. These conflicts are not casual
and accidental; they represent the working out of the
moral and institutional order, and they must, there
fore, find their ultimate issue in a deeper harmony.
This is the Shakespearian interpretation of the
tragic collisions of society. It is the clearness with
which Shakespeare sees and represents this prin
ciple of mediation, this process of reconciliation,
which gives the Tragedies their authority as works
of art and sets the dramatist among the masters of
the knowledge of life.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ROMANCES
IT was characteristic of Shakespeare that during
the years in which the Tragedies were written, and
while he was meditating upon the baffling problem
of evil in the world, he was conducting his affairs
with prudence and sagacity. The sanity of his
nature, which held him to the great highways of
human interest and rational human living, kept his
genius in touch with reality at all points and con
tributed not a little to the richness and range of his
creative activity. The assumption that the man of
imagination cannot be a man of practical wisdom,
and that there is an inherent antagonism between
genius and sound judgment, has been disproved
many times in the history of all the arts, and per
sists in the face of convincing historic refutation.
There have been many rnen of rare and beautiful
gifts who have lacked the capacity to deal strongly
or intelligently with the practical side of life, and
who have, therefore, been unable to make that
adjustment to conditions and realities which is part
of the problem of life and a chief part of its educa
tion. For this reason many men of noble imagina-
360
THE ROMANCES 361
tion have missed the full unfolding of their genius
and the complete harvesting of its fruits. Shake
speare was not one of those pathetic figures who,
through some defect in spiritual organization, make
splendid tragic failures — figures with whom his
imagination was always busy, and who appear in
nearly all the plays. He was the sounder and
therefore the greater poet because in his life, as in
his art, he held the balance between reality and
ideality ; mounting into high heaven with effortless
wing, like the lark in the meadows about Stratford,
but returning with unerring instinct to the familiar
and solid earth.
During the decade between 1600 and 1610,
Shakespeare was adding to his properties at Strat
ford, he was making various investments, he was
seeking to recover by suits at law moneys loaned
to others, and he was steadily increasing his income
from various sources. His purchase of New Place
has been noted ; upon the death of his father the
houses in Henley Street came into his possession,
and in one of them his mother probably lived until
her death in 1608. He enlarged by purchase the
grounds of New Place ; he acquired a property of
nearly a hundred and fifty acres in the neighbour
hood of Stratford ; he purchased an interest in the
tithes of Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton ; and,
both at Stratford and in London, he brought suits
for the recovery of small debts. Like his father, he
appears to have had no aversion to litigation ; but,
362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
on the other hand, there is nothing in the various
records of the legal proceedings which he inaugu
rated, to show that he was oppressive or unjust to
those with whom he had business dealings. In
practical affairs he was sagacious, orderly, and busi
nesslike. That a poet collected a debt which was
due him hardly furnishes rational ground for the
theory that he must therefore have been a hard
and grasping person.
To the Tragedies succeeded a group of three
plays which Dr. Dowden has happily classed as
Romances, which completed Shakespeare's work
as a dramatist and which hold a place by them
selves. It is true that " Henry VIII." came at
the very end, but this spectacular play is Shake
speare's only in part, and is hardly to be counted
among his representative and original works.
A new note was struck in the romances, and
that note is distinctly sounded in " Pericles," a play
which is of Shakespearian authorship only in its
most poetic passages. It seems to predict " The
Tempest," " Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," as
" The Two Gentlemen of Verona " predicts
"Twelfth Night." Marina is of the same exqui
site order of womanhood as Miranda and Perdita.
The poet's work on this drama was done when
the period of tragedy was drawing to a close but
was not yet at an end. The play probably appeared
about 1607, and was probably completed by some
playwright of inferior taste and ability. The
364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
plot was derived from various sources ; the story
being one of great antiquity and having been
very widely popular for several centuries before
Shakespeare's time. It had been read on the Con
tinent in the " Gesta Romanorum," and in England
in Gower's " Confessio Amantis " ; and it was retold
in a prose romance by Lawrence Twine, which
appeared in England in 1576. There is now sub
stantial agreement that the repellent parts of " Peri
cles " were written by another hand than Shake
speare's, and that to his genius is due the exquis
ite episode and romance of Marina, conceived and
worked out with a delicacy of feeling, a refinement
of sentiment, and a pervading atmosphere of poetry
which are unmistakably Shakespearian.
" Cymbeline " was included among the Tragedies
by the editors of the First Folio ; but its pervading
spirit and its peaceful and happy ending place it
among the Romances. Shakespeare had passed
through the period of tragedy into a deep and abid
ing peace, but the gayety of the earlier mood of the
Comedies was no longer possible. However serene
and calm the spirit of the poet, he could never
again look at life without seeing the element of
tragedy at work in it. That element became sub
ordinate and served chiefly to bring out certain
gracious and beautiful qualities of nature, certain
pure and almost spiritual personalities, but it was
henceforth part of the mysterious experience of life
to one who had sounded the depths of Hamlet's
THE ROMANCES 365
solitary melancholy and been abroad when all the
fury of the elemental passions burst upon the head
of Lear. In « Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale,"
and " The Tempest,'1 the tragic motive is intro
duced, and the tragic conflict would have worked
out its inevitable wreckage if these later dramas
had not been plays of reconciliation ; plays, that is,
in which the movement of the tragic forces is
arrested by repentance, by the return, through peni
tence, to the true order of life. In these conclud
ing dramas the destructive forces, which run their
course in the Tragedies, are set in motion in order
that they may furnish a background for the pres
entation of the healing and restoring power of
remorse, penitence, reconciliation, forgiveness, and
atonement. The dewy freshness of the world in
" The Winter's Tale " and " The Tempest " is more
penetrating in its unstained purity because the
lightning still plays from the clouds which are fast
dissolving along the horizon.
Shakespeare was a dramatist during the period
when his work touched its highest points of achieve
ment, and it betrays the absence of even rudimen
tary critical instinct to identify a dramatist with the
wide range of characters which his imagination cre
ates in a purely objective mood. There are indi
vidual plays from which it would be an impertinence
to attempt to infer the ethical attitude or the per
sonality of Shakespeare. On the other hand, it
must also be remembered that Shakespeare was a
366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
poet before and after the dramatic period ; that the
mask was not so consistently worn during the period
of the Sonnets and of the Romances as during that
of the Tragedies ; that he left a large body of work
behind him, and that through this work there run
certain consistent and fundamental conceptions of
life and character ; that this work, conceding uncer
tainty with regard to the exact chronology of each
play, can be divided into four distinct periods.
These facts have a bearing on the nature of Shake
speare's personality and experience which it is as
uncritical to disregard as it is uncritical to hold
Shakespeare morally responsible for any sentiment
put in the mouths of lago and Richard III. How
ever much or little the facts in Shakespeare's ex
perience may have had to do with his work as a
creative artist, it is beyond question that he passed
through distinct stages of artistic and intellectual
unfolding; and, accepting the psychology of genius,
the history of the man of genius as it has been re
corded in every art, and the revelation of the man
of genius as it has been made by himself, Goethe
serving as an example, it is rational to believe that
the man and the artist in Shakespeare were in vital
relationship from the beginning to the end.
In his life of sustained productivity Shakespeare
passed through four periods : a period of appren
ticeship, when he was learning both his trade and
his art ; a period of joyous and many-sided contact
with the world and with men, during which he made
THE ROMANCES 367
his approach to life ; the period of the Tragedies,
when he entered into life, sounded its depths of
experience, and faced its problems ; and a period of
reconciliation or mediation, when the tragic ele
ments found their place in a comprehensive and
beneficent order. Out of this rich and vital con
tact with life the poet came at last into a mood at
once serene, grave, and tender; he looked upon
men with a deep and beautiful pity ; fortitude under
calamity, charity for human weakness, faith in the
power of human sweetness and purity, pervade the
Romances and give them an interior beauty of which
the exquisite poetry in which they are steeped seems
only an outward vesture. That beauty was the re
flection of a nature of great richness, which, through
deep and searching experience, had at last found
peace in a wide vision, a catholic spirit, and a rev
erent faith in purity, goodness, and truth.
In these latest plays the poet shows also a great
sense of freedom ; a consciousness of inward power
matched with outward skill which justifies him in
becoming a law unto himself. The style is subor
dinated to the thought; rhyme almost disappears;
weak endings increase in number ; the iambic regu
larity of the blank verse is varied by new flexibility ;
the harmony of the line is subordinated to that of
the paragraph, and the music of the verse gains a
richer and fuller movement ; and there is complete
indifference to the traditional unities of time and
place. These traditions had been modified or dis-
368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
carded at an early date, but in the Romances a new
kind of unity is introduced, or at least illustrated, in
an art so convincing that the mind accepts the new
order of construction as if it were the order of na
ture. " The ideality of space which characterized
the English stage of that time," writes Professor
Ten Brink, " and of which the ideality of time was a
necessary corollary, the ability of the prevailing
drama to include a long chain of events throughout
its entire course, permitted Shakespeare in tragedy
to follow his inner bent, which impelled him to the
psychological side of his subject. It permitted him
to represent, as he loved to do, the evolution of a
passion from its first beginnings to its climax ; and
not seldom reaching still further back, to show us
the soil in which it was to take root. It permitted
him to show us a character unfolding before our
eyes under the reciprocal influence of deed and
experience, of action and environment. It enabled
him thus in his tragedies to lay the chief weight
upon the connection between the character and the
acts of the tragic hero, or, what is the same thing,
to devote the best part of his powers and endeav
ours to the dramatic unfolding of his characters."
In the Tragedies this loosening of the bonds of
time and place enabled Shakespeare to lay bare the
very heart of the tragic conflict ; in the Romances
it made it possible to bring together, for the full
disclosure of the drama of mediation, distant coun
tries and times ; to bring within the compass of a
THE ROMANCES 369
play the most exquisite poetry and the most rugged
prose ; to set on the same stage Perdita and Autoly-
cus, Miranda and Caliban.
" Cymbeline " marks the end of the period of
tragedy, and the dominance of a new mood. It
probably appeared about 1609. Dr. Forman, to
whom reference has already been made, who com
bined the arts of a quack with the taste of a thea
tre-goer, and whose brief diary is an interesting
contemporary record, saw the play at the Globe
Theatre, but made no record of the date. The plot
was drawn from various sources, and these diverse
materials were fused and combined by the dramatist
with a free hand.
The story of Cymbeline and of his two sons was
taken from Holinshed ; the story of Imogen from
Boccaccio's " Decameron " ; while some details of
the plot suggest that Shakespeare drew upon well-
known and oft-used motives of current fairy tales.
To this source he was probably indebted for some
of the most delicate and poetic touches in the life of
Imogen with her brothers in the cave of Belarius.
This rude but hospitable home, full of kingly grace
and nobleness in woodland disguise, is set in strik
ing contrast to the court from which Imogen has
fled. In this secluded cavern courage and integrity
are preserved and trained against the day when
they must bring in the new order, of which Imogen
is the stainless and appealing protagonist. No
lovelier image of chaste, self-sacrificing womanhood
2B
370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is to be found in the whole range of poetry. The
poet has invested her with purity as with a garment
which she wears without consciousness either of its
value or its perishableness. It is so much a part of
her nature that she could not separate it from her
self. Her presence touches the rough lives of her
brothers, and all their virtues shine through the
disguise they wear. She mediates between her
father and Belarius ; and she reconciles Cymbeline
and Posthumus. Her gentleness is emphasized by
the savage temper, the hard spirit, which run
through the play, and which at the end, with exqui
site skill, are resolved into harmony by her spirit.
Among all Shakespeare's lyrics there is none more
noble than " Fear no more the heat of the sun,"
which is set like a gem in this drama of a woman's
constancy.
Robert Greene had done what he could, when
Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, to ar
rest the growing reputation of the young dramatist,
and had failed. A " Groatsworth of Wit bought
with a Million of Repentance " is of interest now
chiefly because of the reference to the poet which
was meant to do him harm, but which has served to
settle some interesting questions of time, and to
show that he had been successful enough to awaken
envy. In 1588, five years before the attack on
Shakespeare, Greene brought out a story which,
under the unattractive title of " Pandosto : the
Triumph of Time," became one of the most popular
THE ROMANCES
371
novels of the day, passing through at least fourteen
editions. Its claims upon the interest of readers
THE GUILD CHAPEL PORCH.
were set forth on the title-page : " Wherein is dis
covered by a pleasant history, that although by the
means of sinister fortune, Truth may be concealed,
yet by Time in spite of fortune it is most manifestly
3/2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
revealed : pleasant for age to avoid drowsy thoughts,
profitable for youth to eschew other wanton pas
times, and bringing to both a desired content.
Temporis filia veritas" Time, if not in itself a
mediating principle, is a necessary element in the
work of mediation ; and this old-fashioned romance
furnished both the tragic introduction and the
happy and peaceful issue upon which Shakespeare's
mind fastened after the period of the Tragedies.
His hand saved Greene's story from oblivion ; it will
always be remembered as the source from which
" The Winter's Tale " was largely drawn. The
tale in the " Decameron," in which Shakespeare
had found suggestions for parts of " Cymbeline,"
was also laid under contribution in " The Winter's
Tale." Autolycus was the last of a long list of
jesters who had no literary progenitors and have
left no successors ; they are the creatures of the
play and overflow of Shakespeare's humour, his
perception of the comic, his delight in contrasts
and contradictions, with touches at times — as in
the Fool in "King Lear" -of fathomless pathos.
So far as the name is concerned, Autolycus was
of historic ancestry.
The witty thief could claim divine ancestry,
and Shakespeare may have found this representa
tive rascal in the pages of his Ovid. From these
hints of classical characterization the poet expanded
the rustic knavery, shrewdness, and inimitable
THE ROMANCES 373
self-assurance of this picturesque picker-up of
other people's savings at country festivals and
fairs.
Shakespeare accepted Greene's geography with
delightful indifference to its accuracy, and so fell
into the historic blunder of giving Bohemia a sea-
coast. Ben Jonson was quick to fall upon this
mistake, not so much from malice or ill-feeling,
probably, as from the natural irritation of a
careful and exact mind with a person of such
marvellous spontaneity and such semi-humorous
indifference to details as Shakespeare. " Shake
speare wanted art and sometimes sense," Drum-
mond of Hawthornden reports him as saying;
"for Shakespeare in a play brought in a number
of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in
Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some
hundred miles." Shakespeare may have known
this fact as definitely as Jonson knew it; or he
may have been as ignorant of it as were many
other well-informed men of his time. His interest,
it is clear, was fastened upon facts of another order,
and in a play in which the unity of time was set at
naught by an interval of sixteen years between two
acts, and the congruities of history are quietly
ignored in order to secure a free field for a masterly
drama of the imagination, geographical accuracy
was a small matter.
The play was produced about 1611. It was put
374 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
upon the stage of the Globe Theatre on the i5th
of May in that year, on which occasion Dr. Forman
was present and described it at some length in his
" Book of Plays and Notes thereof." In November
of the same year it was performed before the Court
in the palace at Whitehall ; and two years later it
was one of the plays chosen for presentation in the
elaborate festivities with which the marriage of the
Princess Elizabeth was celebrated.
The early popularity of the play among theatre
goers has not been revived in modern times. Its
essentially poetic quality has made " The Winter's
Tale," to modern taste, a reading rather than an
acting play; a drama of the .imagination rather than
of real life. The pastoral world in which Perdita
moves was the last of those lovely pastoral worlds
which Shakespeare created as refuges from the
world of reality and places of reconciliation between
the ideals and hopes of beautiful natures and the
actualities which surrounded them.
Perdita is half woman and half creature of fairy
land ; in her rare and exquisite spirit there is a
subtle affiliation with nature which allies her with the
flowers, whose succession she has set in an immor
tal calendar; in her sweet and patient devotion she
personifies that spirit of goodness which in the end
binds the shattered parts of her world into unity
once more. In her speech, with its beguiling mel
ody and its enchanting imagery, she is the personi-
THE ROMANCES 375
fication of poetry. Among the Shakespearian
women she represents the " eternal feminine " in its
most poetic aspect ; for she mediates, not only
between conflicting persons, but between nature
and man.
In power of pure invention, of creating plots, sit
uations, and episodes, Shakespeare was inferior to
several of his contemporaries ; and if invention and
originality were synonymous, as they are often
taken to be, his rank would be below that of Jon-
son, Fletcher, Marston, or Middleton. The fac
ulty of invention is, however, of small importance
unless it be sustained by force of mind and inspired
and directed by imagination. Many playwrights
of the third or fourth rank have shown more
fertility in inventing fresh situations and inci
dents than Shakespeare ; none of them has ap
proached him in originality. For originality does
not consist in invention, but in insight, grasp, selec
tion, arrangement, and, above all, in vitalization.
The creative faculty does not disclose itself in dex
terity or multiplicity of invention, but in the play of
free, elemental power. " The great merit, it seems
to me, of the old painters," wrote Mr. Lowell, " was
that they did not try to be original." " To say
a thing that everybody has said before," said
Goethe, " as quietly as if nobody had ever said it,
that is originality."
Throughout his entire productive life, Shake
speare kept himself in closest touch with the expe-
3/6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
rience of the race as that experience lies written in
history and biography, and with the imaginative life
of the race as that life has expressed itself in strik
ing and significant figures, and in stories full of
deep human feeling for humour or for poetry.
He knew the two chroniclers who were most
popular in his time ; he was familiar with Plutarch
and with some of the notable contemporary trans
lators ; he had intimate acquaintance with such
collections of stories as Paynter's " Palace of Pleas
ure " ; and he read the novels or tales of his age
with an artist's feeling for the truth of life or of
poetry which they contained. He lived freely and
deeply in his time ; indifferent to conventionalities
save as they conformed to 'his conception of sane
living, and to literary traditions save as they har
monized with his artistic instinct and intelligence.
His greatness as a poet lies in his extraordinary
genius for seeing the concrete fact, and in his unri
valled power of irradiating that fact with the insight
and vision of the imagination. No man of his time
exhibited such fertility and audacity of imagination,
and no man so firmly based his artistic work on
clear, uncompromising perception of actualities.
He was at the same time the closest observer and
the most daring idealist of his age. Through each
successive period of his productive career he
touched phase after phase of experience and pre
sented a long succession of characters. Beginning
with the old chronicle plays, which he read with
THE ROMANCES 377
the truest historical perception and feeling, he
passed on to the humorous aspects of life, and
thence to a study of its most appalling aspects ; and
at each stage he laid hold upon some human docu
ment in history, legend, tradition, or romance. He
never lost his touch with the realities of life ; and
he found so much that was of supreme significance
that he rarely had occasion to use invention. The
race in many lands and at many periods of time
had been at work storing up the raw material of
poetry for him ; he entered into partnership with
the race, and, by rationalizing its experience and
giving it the beauty and order of art, repaid the
race a thousand fold for the material of every sort
which had been placed in his hands. In this mas
terful dealing, not with images of his own making,
but with the actualities of human experience, is to
be found his originality — an originality identical
in its method and operation with the originality of
Homer, Dante, and Goethe, who share with him
the splendid loneliness of supreme literary achieve
ment.
In " The Tempest " Shakespeare used existing
material only in the remotest way; the play fash
ioned itself largely in his imagination. In the earlier
dramas he had dealt entirely with past conditions
and incidents ; the " Merry Wives of Windsor " is
the only one of his works which may be said to
deal with contemporary society and manners. " The
Tempest," however, so far as it was rooted in real-
378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ity, was drawn by suggestion from stirring events
in his own time. The poet, more than any of his
contemporaries, personified the freedom, vitality,
keen sense of reality, and wide discursive interests
of the Elizabethan age ; in " The Tempest " he
touched the new world of wonder, adventure, and
achievement fast coming to the knowledge of the
old world. Strange tidings of new countries and
peoples were coming up from time to time from the
far seas, and marvellous stories of strange lands and
perilous voyages were told by quiet English fire
sides. In the autumn of 1610 a great sensation
was made in London by the arrival of a company
of .sailors who had been wrecked off the Bermudas,
until that moment undiscovered. These sailors,
like all men of their occupation, were lovers of mar
vels and spinners of strange tales ; they had found
the climate of the Bermudas charming, and they
had heard many inexplicable sounds in the islands.
These experiences were not dulled in colour by the
homeward voyage ; on the contrary, they gained in
marvellous and mysterious accompaniments of sight
and sound as the distance lengthened between the
place where they befell the wrecked crew and the
places in which they were heard with eager and
uncritical ears.
The wreck of the Sea-Venture, Sir George
Somers commanding, was described at length by
several survivors, the most important of these
accounts being that entitled " A Discovery of the
THE ROMANCES 379
Bermudas, otherwise called the lie of Divels,"
which was reenforced by several pamphlets. Ac
cording to these reports the island of Bermudas
had never been " inhabited by any Christian or
heathen people " ; it was reported " a most pro
digious and enchanted place," " still-vexed " with
" monstrous thunder-storms and tempests." On
the night the ship was wrecked the Admiral
himself " had an apparition of a little, round light,
like a faint star, trembling and streaming along
with a sparkling blaze, half the height above the
main-mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud
to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any
of the four shrouds."
The stories of this marvellous voyage were
undoubtedly heard by Shakespeare, and he cer
tainly read these narratives before writing of the
" still-vexed Bermoothes," of the climate of the
Island in " The Tempest," and of the spirits which
frequented it. Traces of the reading of other
books of travel are found in the play. It is pos
sible also that Shakespeare may have heard from
English actors, who had performed at Nuremberg
a few years before this time, the plot of a comedy
written by Jacob Ayrer, of that city, under the
title " Die Schone Sidea." It is also possible
that there may have been an earlier play or novel
of a somewhat similar plot, which has entirely
disappeared. The famous description of an ideal
commonwealth which is put in the mouth of Gon-
380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
zalo was suggested to Shakespeare by an essay
of Montaigne's which he read in Florio's transla
tion ; while the Invocation of Prospero may owe
something to one of Ovid's " Metamorphoses,"
with which the poet had long been familiar.
After recognizing his indebtedness for certain
details to various earlier and contemporary sources,
" The Tempest " remains preeminently the crea
tion of Shakespeare's imagination. In certain
respects it is his masterpiece. As a drama it
falls far below his earlier work ; as a poem, cast
in a dramatic form, it is one of the most beautiful
creations in English poetry. The profound medi-
tativeness and rich intellectual quality of " Ham
let " are fused in it with the lovely fancy of the
" Midsummer Night's Dream," while in deep and
sustained play of imagination, fashioning the play
in its structure, shaping its parts to one high end,
touching it everywhere with a kind of ultimate
beauty, it stands alone not only in Shakespeare's
work but in modern poetry. The nobleness of
conception is matched throughout with a kindred
nobleness of style ; while the songs are full of the
deep, spontaneous melody which issues out of
the heart of the poet when sound and sense are
perfectly mated in his imagination.
The profound seriousness of temper which per
vades the play, the clearness with which its ethical
bearings are disclosed, the deep philosophy which
underlies it, convey an irresistible impression of
THE ROMANCES
THE
TEMPEST.
«jl 'dufpnnnts , Sccnaprim*.
fall
'. I pray now keepebelow.
jimh. Where is the Matter, Bofon ?
frf^rDoyounothrarehitn ? you marrc our labour,
Kecpeyour Cabines :you dojrfsift theftorme. '
CVwii. Nay, good be patient.
Bfttf, When the Sea is : hence, what cares thefe roa
rers for the name of King ? to CabiiKj lllence : trouble
v«ri»t.
CT#w. Good, yet reniririber whom then haft aboord.
Botef. None that I more loue then my felrc. You are
a Counfcllor,ifyou can command thcfeElementsto fi-
lence, and worke the peace of the prcfcnt, wee will not
hand a rope more, vfe your authorities If vou cannot,
giue thankcsyou haueliu'dfo long, and" make your
(elfe rcadie in your Cabinc for the mifchancc of the
houre, if it fohap. Cheerely good hearts : out of our
way I fav. Exit.
Gtn. I haue great comfort from this fcllow:mcthinks
he hath no drowning markevpon him, his complexion
i>perfe<3 Gallowcs : ftandfaft good Fatetohis ban-
gmg, make the rope of his deftiny our cable, forotir
owne doth little aduantagc: Ifhcbenotbonic to bee
hang'd, out cafe ii miferable. Exit.
Enter foltflfame.
BetetO owne with the top-Maft :yarc,lo\ver,lower,
bring her to Try with Ma'mc-courfc. A plague —
Acr] within. Enter Sik*ftt<vt,sintbcai6 d' Cjanula.
ig: they arc lewder then the weather,
t jgainc ? U'lut do you beerc* Shal we
i wnc.hauv you a mindc to l;nke ?
ftiijf. A poxe o'your throjj,you bawling, bJafphc-
mout inrhari table Dog.
'Buief. Worke you then.
Anth. Hing cur.hang.you whorcfon infolerit Noyfe.
ground, maker.we are Idle afraid to be drowndc,then thou art.
K.\:r. Cftuix,. He warrant him for drowning, though the
| Ship were no ftronger then i Nutt-fhcll, and as lesky as
• my harts: I an vnvranched wench.
-h'Mallers Botff. Lay hera hold.a hold , fet hcrtwo courfrs eft"
roome e - to Sea againe,lay her off.
Enter Manners rrt-t.
Jltjn. All loft,to prayers,to prayer$,all loft.
'Brief. What muft our mouths be cold t
<jfl»z..The King,and Pi-'mce,at pritycrjjet'j aililt them,
for our cafe is as theirs.
Se6*f. Tarn out of patience.
An. We are mecrly cheated of our lines by firunltsrds,
This wide-chopt-rafcall, would thou mightftlyc drow
ning tliewafhing of ten Tides.
Go**,. Hee'l be hang'd yet,
Though euery drop of wiser f \veare again!1, it.
And gape at widft to glut him. A funfujtd nejfi w.il'm.
Metcy on vs.
Wefplit.wefplit , Farewell my wife, and children,
Farewell brother : v.-e fplit.we lplit}wc fplit.
Ami,. Let's all fmke with' King
Set. Let's take leaue of him. Fjcit.
O'o«t. Now would I giue a thoufand furlongs of Sea,
for an Acre of barren ground: Long heath, Browne
r;rrs , any thing: the wills abotie be done, but 1 would
faine dye i dry death. Ent.
ScenaSecunda.
Enter
M,rj. If by your Art(niv dccrttt fatherj you haue
Put the wild wateri in this Kore;«lay them:
The fkye it i'e«rnes would powrc down ftinkingpitch,
But that the Sea.mounting to th' welkins chccke,
Da(hes the fire out. Oh ! I haue Offered
With thofe that 1 faw fuflfer: A bnue veflell
A r\vho
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF "THE TEMPEST" IN THE FOLIO OF 1623.
382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
something personal in the theme and the treat
ment. It is impossible to read " The Tempest "
without a haunting sense of secondary meaning.
Caliban, Miranda, and Prospero have been inter
preted from many points of view; a final and con
vincing interpretation will never be made, but the
instinctive feeling of Shakespeare's readers and
lovers that in this last play from his hand the poet
was bidding farewell to his art is probably sound.
As a rule, critics err rather in diminishing than
expanding the significance of great works of art.
"The Tempest" appeared about 1611. Shake
speare was then forty-seven years of age, and had
nearly completed his . work. When he set the
noble figure of Prospero on the unknown island,
and made him master of spirits and of men, with
a knowledge of life which was so great that it
easily passed on into magical art, he could not
have been oblivious of the spiritual significance
of the work, nor of its deep and vital symbolism
in the development of his own mind and art.
The success of " The Tempest " appears to. have
been great ; it was presented at Court, and was one
of the plays performed during the marriage festivi
ties of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613. One
source of this popular interest was probably the
charm of .the songs which gave the movement
pause and relief. There is good reason to believe
that these songs were set to music by Robert
Johnson, a popular composer of the day, and
THE ROMANCES 383
that two of them had been preserved in Wil
son's " Cheerful Ayres and Ballads set for Three
Voices."
Shakespeare completed no more plays after the
appearance of " The Tempest," but he had a shap
ing .hand in " Henry VIII.," which appeared about
1612 and is included among his works. This
very uneven and very spectacular drama is based
upon material found in Hall and Holinshed, in
a life of Wolsey by George Cavendish, then in
manuscript, and in Foxe's " Acts and Monu
ments of the Church." Its performance on June 29,
1613, led to the burning of the Globe Theatre
— an event of which there are several contem
porary accounts. The play was presented with
unprecedented elaboration in scenery and dress —
a first attempt, apparently, in the direction of the
splendour of appointments which characterizes the
modern stage. " Now King Henry making a
Masque at the Cardinal Woolsey's House," writes
Wotton, " and certain Canons being shot off at his
entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith
one of them was stopped, did light on the Thatch,
where being thought at first but an idle smoak,
and their eyes more attentive to the show, it
kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, con
suming within less than an hour the whole House
to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of
that virtuous fabrique ; wherein yet nothing did
perish, but wood and straw and a few forsaken
384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
cloaks." And the old chronicler of this first of
many similar catastrophes adds with naive humour:
" Only one man had his breeches set on fire, that
would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by
the benefit of a provident wit put out with bottle
ale. "
Attention was directed in the last century to cer
tain peculiarities of versification in " Henry VIII.,"
but it was not until the middle of the present cen
tury that Mr. Spedding set forth at length the
theory that the play was Shakespeare's in part
only, and that many passages were in the manner
of Fletcher. It is interesting that these differences
in style were recognized clearly, not by scholars,
but by two men of sensitive literary feeling, Tenny
son and Emerson. The English poet first made
the suggestion to Mr. Spedding. Emerson's com
ments on the matter are full of insight :
" In Henry VIII. I think I see plainly the crop
ping out of the original work on which his own
finer stratum was laid. The first play was written
by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear.
I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence.
See Wolsey's soliloquy,, and the following scene
with Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of
Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought con
structs the tune, so that reading for the sense will
bring out the rhythm — here the lines are con
structed on a given tune, and the verse has even a
trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains
THE ROMANCES 385
through all its length unmistakable traits of Shake-
peare's hand, and some passages, as the account of
the coronation, are like autographs."
The view, presented with great skill by Mr. Sped-
ding, that Shakespeare intended to make a " great
historical drama on the subject of Henry VIII.,
which would have included the divorce of Katha
rine, the fall of Wolsey, the rise of Cranmer, the
coronation of Anne Bullen, and the final separation
of the English from the Roman Church ; " that
he worked on the two first acts, and that, for some
unknown reason the manuscript was passed on to
Fletcher, who expanded it into the play as .we now
have it, has been accepted by many students of the
play. The three chief figures — the King, Queen
Katharine, and the Cardinal — are unmistakably
Shakespeare's in conception ; and the trial scene
is certainly his.
There are traces of Shakespeare's hand in the
" Two Noble Kinsmen," which the title-page de
clares was written by " Mr. John Fletcher and
Mr. William Shakespeare, Gentlemen," and the
play appears in some editions of the poet's works.
It is impossible, however, to decide with any cer
tainty the extent of Shakespeare's contribution to a
drama which in many parts is clearly the produc
tion of another hand. It is not improbable, as has
been suggested by some authorities, that when
Shakespeare withdrew from active work in his pro
fession he may have left some preliminary sketches
2C
386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
for half-finished dramas behind him, and that it fell
to the lot of Fletcher or some other contemporary
dramatist to work over and complete what the poet
had begun. With the writing of " Cymbeline " and
" The Tempest " Shakespeare's work ended.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD
IT is impossible to overlook the recurrence of cer
tain incidents and the reappearance of certain figures
in the Romances. " Pericles," " Cymbeline," " The
Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest" are all dramas
of reconciliation ; tragic events occur in each of
these plays and tragic forces are set in motion, but
the tragic movement is arrested by confession and
repentance and the tragic forces are dissipated or
turned to peaceful ends by meditation and reconcil
iation. Coming close upon the long-sustained
absorption in tragic motives, the singular unity of
the Romances in organizing conception, in serenity
of mood, and in faith in purity and goodness and
love as solvents of the problems of life, make it
impossible to escape the conclusion that the later
plays record and express the final attitude of the
poet towards the ultimate questions of life.
The chief figures in the Romances are men and
women who have borne heavy sorrows — Prospero,
Hermione, Imogen, Pericles, and the fair young
creatures whose purity and sweetness typify the
immortal qualities of youth — Marina, Miranda,
388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Perdita, Florizel, Ferdinand, and the brothers of
Imogen. Behind these suffering or radiant figures
there is, in each play, a pastoral background of ex
quisite loveliness ; a landscape so noble and serene
that it throws the corruption of courts and of soci
ety into striking relief. In each play there is a trace
of the old fairy story — the story of the lost prince
or princess, condemned to exile, disguise, or servi
tude ; and in the end the lost are found, disguises
are thrown off, evil plots are exposed and evil plot
ters brought to repentance ; suffering is recognized
and finds its sweet reward in the rebuilding of its
shattered world on a sure foundation, and youth
finds eager expectation merged in present happi
ness. Prospero does not break his magic staff or
drown his book until he has reknit the order of life
shattered in the Tragedies, and reunited the wisdom
of long observation and mature knowledge with the
fresh heart and the noble idealism of youth.
In such a mood Shakespeare returned to Strat
ford about 1611. He was forty-seven years of age,
and therefore at the full maturity of his great pow
ers. From the standpoint of to-day he was still a
young man ; but men grew old much earlier three
centuries ago. The poet had been in London
twenty-five years, and had written thirty-six or
thirty-seven plays, and a group of lyric poems. He
was still in his prime, but he had lived through the
whole range of experience, he was a man of consid
erable fortune, and he had a wholesome ambition to
THE LAST VEARS AT STRATFORD 389
become a country gentleman, with the independence,
ease, and respect with which landed proprietorship
has always been regarded in England.
His sources of income had been his plays, which
were paid for, in his earlier years, at rates varying
from twenty-five to sixty dollars — equivalent in
present values to two hundred and fifty and six
hundred dollars ; his salary as an actor, which was
probably not less than five hundred dollars a year,
or about three thousand dollars in present values ;
the returns from the sale of his poems, which ran
through many editions, and the profits of which his
publisher undoubtedly divided with him on some
acceptable basis ; and, most important of all, his
revenue from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe
theatres.
The Globe Theatre provided room for an audi
ence of about two thousand people, and for a num
ber of years before its destruction by fire in 1613
was almost continuously prosperous. The trans
ference of public interest to the boy actors, though
long enough to send Shakespeare's company into
the provinces, was comparatively short-lived. It is
estimated that the annual receipts of the Globe
Theatre did not fall below the very considerable sum
of two hundred thousand dollars in current values.
After providing for the maintenance of the theatre,
there must have remained a substantial profit.
This profit was divided among the shareholders,
among whom were Shakespeare, Burbage, Condell,
390
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Heminge, and Philips ; all were actors and mem
bers of the company, and combined personal interest
and practical knowledge in theatrical management.
The profits of the Blackfriars Theatre were smaller.
Shakespeare's great popularity after 1598 or 1600
probably enabled him to
L J
secure much larger re
turns from the sale of
new plays than were paid
to the majority of play
wrights ; while the fees
always distributed at
Court performances must
have amounted, in his
case, to a very consider
able sum. From these
various sources Shake
speare probably received,
during the later years of
his life, not less than
fifteen thousand dollars
a year in current values.
Mr. Lee, who has made a
thorough investigation of the subject, thinks there
is no inherent improbability in the tradition, re
ported by a vicar of Stratford in the following
century, that Shakespeare " spent at the rate of a
thousand a year."
The poet had become the owner of various prop
erties at Stratford or in its neighbourhood. The
SHAKESPEARE'S SIGNATURE.
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 391
houses in Henley Street had come into his posses
sion. The house at New Place, in which he took
up his residence, was a commodious and substantial
building; and the grounds, with the exception of a
thin wedge of land on Chapel Lane, extended almost
to the Avon. His circumstances were those of a
country gentleman of ample income.
When Shakespeare left London, he probably
withdrew from participation in the management of
the two theatres in which he was a shareholder, but
his plays continued to be presented. His popularity
suffered no eclipse until the fortunes of the stage
began to yield to the rising tide of Puritan senti
ment. During the festivities attending the marriage
of the Princess Elizabeth, seven of his plays were
presented at Whitehall. That he made the three
days' journey to London at short intervals and kept
up his old associations is practically certain.
His son Hamnethad died in the summer of 1596;
his father died in the early autumn of 1601, and
his mother in September, 1608. When he took up
his residence in Stratford in 1611, his wife and two
daughters constituted his family. The eldest
daughter, Susannah, had married, in June, 1607,
Dr. John Hall, a physician of unusual promise, who
became at a later day a man of very high standing
and wide acquaintance in Warwickshire. The
house in which he lived is one of the most
picturesque buildings which have survived from
the Stratford of Shakespeare's time. Dr. Hall's
392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
daughter, Elizabeth, the only granddaughter of the
poet, was born in 1608. Mrs. Hall made her home
in her later years at New Place ; there, in 1643, srie
entertained Queen Henrietta Maria ; and there, in
1649, she died. In the inscription on her grave in
the churchyard of Holy Trinity both her father and
husband are described as "gentlemen." Of her it
was written :
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.
Her daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Nashe, a
Stratford man of education, and, after his death,
John Barnard, who was knighted by Charles II.
soon after the Restoration. Lady Barnard, who
was the last direct descendant of the poet, died in
1670. She had come into possession, by various
bequests, of New Place, the Henley Street houses,
the land in the neighbourhood of Stratford, and a
house in Blackfriars purchased by Shakespeare in
1613. The houses in Henley Street passed at her
death into the possession of the grandson of Shake
speare's sister Joan, and remained in the family, as
reported in a previous chapter, until the present
century. New Place was sold after Lady Barnard's
death, and subsequently came again into the hands
of the Clopton family.
Judith Shakespeare married, shortly before her
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD
393
father's death in 1616, Thomas Quiney, a wine-
dealer of Stratford, and lived for thirty-six years in
a house still standing at the southeast corner of
High and Bridge streets in Stratford. It was
known at that time as The Cage, because it had
THE DINING-HALL AT CLOPTON.
been used at an earlier period as a prison. The
foundation walls of this ancient house are four feet
in thickness ; books and Shakespearian souvenirs
of every kind are now sold in the shop on the
ground floor. Judith Shakespeare had three sons,
all of whom died in infancy or early youth. She
394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
survived her family and her sister Susannah, and
died in 1661, at the age of seventy-six.
The records show that after his retirement to
Stratford Shakespeare continued to give careful
attention to his affairs and to take part in local
movements. In 1613 he bought the house in
Blackfriars, not far from the theatre, which subse
quently passed into the possession of Lady Barnard.
The deeds of conveyance, bearing Shakespeare's
signature, are still in existence. Comment has
sometimes been made on the fact that the poet
spelled his name in different ways, and that other
people spelled it with complete disregard of consist
ency, and it has been inferred that he must have
been, therefore, an ignorant person. A little investi
gation would have shown that in the poet^s time
there was great variation in the spelling of proper
names. Men of the eminence of Sidney, Spenser,
Jonson, and Dekker were guilty of the same latitude
of practice in this matter, and even Bacon, on one
occasion "at least, spelled his name Bakon.
Shakespeare's friend John Combe, at his death
in 1614, left the poet a small bequest in money and
a legal entanglement. The attempt of Combe's
son to enclose certain fields at Welcombe which
had long been common was vigorously opposed by
the corporation of Stratford. Both as the owner of
neighbouring property and as joint owner of the
tithes of old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton,
Shakespeare had an interest in the matter which
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 395
arrayed him at the start in active opposition to the
plan to enclose the property. A record in the
diary of Thomas Greene, the town clerk of Strat
ford, shows that Shakespeare was an influential
person in the dispute, and that he was in London
in the autumn of 1614.
There is reason to believe that Puritanism had
gained many adherents in Stratford, and that the
poet's son-in-law, Dr. Hall, was in sympathy with
the movement. The town records indicate that
in 1614 a clergyman was entertained at New
Place ; the entry is suggestive of hospitality : " Item,
for one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine
geven to a preacher at New Place, xxd." It is
probable that the preacher was a Puritan, but the
fact furnishes no clew to Shakespeare's ecclesiastical
leanings. Aside from the bent of his mind and his
view of life, so clearly disclosed in the plays, he
could hardly have been in sympathy with the Puri
tan attitude towards his own profession. The
temper of Stratford had changed greatly since the
days when, as a boy, he saw the companies of
players receive open-handed hospitality at the hands
of the town officials. Two years earlier, in 1612,
the town council had passed a resolution declaring
that plays were unlawful and " against the example
of other well-governed cities and boroughs," and
imposing a penalty on players.
Early in 1616 Shakespeare had a draft of his will
prepared, and this document, after revision, was
396
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
signed in March. On Tuesday, April 23, he died;
and two days later he was buried inside the chancel
of Holy Trinity Church, near the northern wall.
Over his grave were cut in the stone lines that
have become familiar throughout the English-speak
ing world :
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare ;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
THE INSCRIPTION OVER THE
William Hall, who visited Stratford in 1694, de
clared that these words were written by the poet to
protect his dust from clerks and sextons, " for the
most part a very ignorant set of people," who might
otherwise have consigned that dust to the charnel-
house which was close at hand. The verse, by
whomever written, has accomplished its purpose,
and the sacred dust has never been disturbed.
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 397
With a single exception, the line of graves which
extends across the chancel pavement is given up
to members of the poet's family. His wife, his
daughter Susannah and her husband, and his
granddaughter Elizabeth's first husband, Thomas
Nashe, lie together behind the chancel rail in the
venerable church which has become, to the English-
speaking world, the mausoleum of its greatest poet.
Shakespeare's father and mother were buried within
the church, but their graves have not been located.
GRAVE OF WILLIAM SHAKESI'KARK.
His daughter Judith and his son Hamnet undoubt
edly lie within the walls of the church or of the ancient
burying-ground which surrounds it. H is brother Ed
mund, who was a player, was buried in St. Saviour's
Church, Southwark, in the heart of modern London.
His brother Richard, who died in his early prime at
Stratford in 1613, was probably buried in the
churchyard of Holy Trinity. His brother Gilbert
398 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
lived to a good age, and no record of his death
or burial has been discovered.
Shakespeare's will, written on three sheets of
paper, and signed at the bottom of each page,
begins with the conventional phrases, bears a
number of erasures and interlineations, and the
three signatures indicate great weakness. Under
its provisions the poet's wife received his second-
best bed with its furnishings ; his daughter Susannah
inherited the greater part of the estate, including
New Place, the properties in the neighbourhood of
Stratford, and the house in Blackfriars, London ;
and she and her husband were made executors and
residuary legatees. To his younger daughter Judith,
who married Thomas Quiney earlier in the same
year, he left a small property on Chapel Lane and
money to an amount equal to about eight thousand
dollars in current values, and certain pieces of plate.
Bequests were made to his sister Joan and her
three sons. To several of his Stratford friends,
and to his old associates or "fellows" in London,
John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Con-
dell, small sums of money were bequeathed for the
purchase of memorial rings. His godson, William
Walker, was remembered, and a sum of money
equivalent to about three hundred dollars in pres
ent values was left to the poor of Stratford. The
omission of Shakespeare's wife from the distribution
of his estate under the terms of his will has been
accepted by some writers as evidence of the poet's
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD
399
waning regard; the most reasonable inference from
his action is that Dr. Hall, who was a man of un
usual capacity, could be trusted to care for his
wife's mother with more assurance than she could
be left to manage her own affairs. She survived
her husband seven years, dying on August 6, 1623.
The Latin verses inscribed upon her tomb are
affectionate in tone, and were probably written by
Dr. Hall.
lEERE LYETH JNTERRT-D TFE BOljEf ,OF NN^yfft
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WHO DErrib THIS LIFE TH
3AY Of AvGVltCxl BEING OF TH; AGE OF-&7-YEARES
^Bera r.f u niateitu lac; vrtani^ decti . -
pe* rmfii : pro fanfo muuere saxa dabo '.^ ^
Quam '-maJIem;"ATnoueat lapideiii, bonus Aiigl? ore
£xeat .chrisii- corpus Tima^o tu>r '-men. $
Sed^^voiA^yalent^venic-vs cito Cnnbte/reiufsef
Ckttfi licit tumulo mater :et Ast FA petet,
INSCRIPTION OVER THE GRAVE OF SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE.
On the north wall of the chancel of Holy Trinity,
at some time prior to 1623, the half-length bust of
Shakespeare by Gerard Jonson, to which reference
has been made, was erected. The poet is repre
sented in the act of writing, and the inscription
reads as follows :
Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem
Terra tegif, populus m&ret, Olympus habet.
Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast ?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast
400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Within this monument : Shakespeare : with whome
Quick Nature dide ; whose name doth deck ye tombe
Far more than cost ; sieth all yt he hath writt
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt.
Obiit Ano. Dot. 1616. &tatis jj. Die 23. Ap,
The bust was originally coloured, and was probably
copied from a mask taken after death. The dress
includes a scarlet doublet under a loose, sleeveless
black gown. As a work of art the bust has no
merit ; its interest lies in the fact that, despite its
crude workmanship, it was accepted and placed
in position by Shakespeare's children. It was
whitewashed at the close of the last century, but
the colours have been restored as far as possible.
The most important of the various portraits of
the poet is that made by Martin Droeshout, and
printed on the title-page of the First Folio in 1623.
The engraver was a man of Flemish blood, born
in London, and still in his boyhood when Shake
speare died. It is not probable that he ever saw
the poet. This representation, crude as it is, was
accepted by Shakespeare's friends and received the
commendation of Ben Jonson. When Droeshout
executed the engraving, he probably had before
him a painting, and there is reason to believe that
this painting was recently brought to light and now
hangs in the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford.
It is almost a facsimile of the Droeshout engraving,
but shows some artistic skill and feeling.
A much more attractive portrait is that known
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 40!
as the " Ely House " portrait, which now hangs in
the Birthplace at Stratford, and was formerly the
property of a Bishop of Ely. It was probably
painted early in the seventeenth century. The
well-known Chandos portrait, which hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery in London, shows im
portant variations from the bust and the Droeshout
engraving, and was probably painted not many
years after the poet's death from descriptions fur
nished by his friends and more or less imaginative
in their details. Its origin is unknown, but its
history has been traced. It was at one time the
property of D'Avenant, whose father was landlord
of the Crown Inn at Oxford in Shakespeare's time,
and, later, of Betterton, Mrs. Barry, and the Duke
of Chandos, becoming the property of the nation
about the middle of the present century. The Jan-
sen portrait came to light about 1770, the Zoust
portrait about 1725, and the Felton portrait about
1792; all show radical variations from the authen
ticated portraits. The portrait bust of terra-cotta
now in the possession of the Garrick Club was
found in 1845 in a wall which was put up on the
site of the Duke's Theatre built by D'Avenant.
Its general resemblance to other portraits furnishes
the only basis for the claim that it reproduces the
features of Shakespeare. The Kesselstadt death-
mask, found in a junk-shop in Mayence in 1849,
resembles a portrait in the possession of the Kessel
stadt family, but neither the portrait nor the mask
2D
402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
has been satisfactorily identified as a representation
of the poet. The monument in the Poets' Corner
in Westminster Abbey was placed in position by
popular subscription in 1741.
The most enduring memorial of Shakespeare
was the complete edition of his works, known as
the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after
his death. His early narrative poems, " Venus and
Adonis " and " The Rape of Lucrece," were pub
lished under his direction and with his revision ;
the Sonnets were printed without his sanction ;
the " Passionate Pilgrim " was fraudulently issued
as from his hand ; while of the sixteen plays which
were published in quarto form before his death, it
is believed that none was issued with his consent
or revision. These publications were speculative
ventures, and the text presented was made up
either from reports of plays taken down in short
hand in the theatres, from separate parts, or com
plete plays surreptitiously secured, and hurried
through the press without correction. Under these
conditions the opportunities for errors of all kinds
were practically without number; and a further
and prolific source of error was found in the cus
tom which prevailed in the old printing-houses of
reading the matter to be set up to the printers
instead of placing it before them. The surprising
fact about the text of the Shakespearian plays, when
these circumstances are taken into consideration,
is not that the difficulties, obscurities, and uncer-
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 403
tainties are so many, but that they are so few
relatively to the magnitude of his work.
POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER.
In 1623 the poet's friends and fellow-actors, John
Heminge and Henry Condell, at the suggestion of
a small group of printers and publishers, brought
together thirty-six plays under the three divisions
404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. " Pericles "
was omitted. The title-page declared that the
plays were printed " according to the true originall
copies " ; the text was probably that of the acting
versions in the possession of the company with
which Shakespeare had been associated, in which
there were great variations from the dramatist's
original work. For this reason the text of the
First Folio is in many places inferior to that of
the sixteen quartos, which, although surreptitiously
issued, gave the text of acting versions in use at an
earlier date. The Droeshout portrait was engraved
on the title-page of the First Folio, and the edition
was dedicated to William Herbert, Earl of Pem
broke, and to his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of
Montgomery. The editors declared that their
object in issuing the plays in this form was to
" keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and
fellow alive as was our Shakespeare." " I doubt,"
writes Mr. Lowell, " if posterity owes a greater debt
to any two men living in 1623 than to the two
obscure actors who in that year published the first
folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. But for them
it is more than likely that such of his works as had
remained to that time unprinted would have been
irrevocably lost, and among them were 'Julius
Ccesar,' ' The Tempest,' and ' Macbeth.' "
The noble eulogy with which Ben Jonson enriched
the First Folio was in the key of the entire body
of contemporary comment on Shakespeare's nature
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 405
and character. The adjective " sweet " was com'
monly applied to him ; he was described as
"friendly," as having "a civil demeanour" and
" an open and free nature " ; and tradition later
affirmed that he was " very good company, and of
a very ready and pleasant smooth wit." The two
or three vague traditions of irregularity of life may
be dismissed as unsubstantiated. The standards of
his time, the habits of his profession, the circum
stances of his early life, and the autobiographic
note in the Sonnets make it probable that in his
youth, at least, he was not impeccable. That he
was essentially a sound man, living a normal, whole
some life, is rendered practically certain by his
success in dealing with practical affairs, and by his
long-sustained power of producing great works of
art on the highest levels of thought and workman
ship. Such industry, sagacity, and thrift as Shake
speare showed are never associated with disorderly
living; while the consistent objectivity of his atti
tude toward life is impossible to any man whose
moral or intellectual sanity is seriously impaired.
Shakespeare's resources, both material and spirit
ual, were harvested with a steady hand. While
many men of his profession wasted their means and
their strength in disorderly living, he invested the
money earned in London in building up the fortunes
of his family in Stratford. Generous by nature and
richly endowed with imagination and passion, he was
never prodigal either of his genius or his estate.
406 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Early in his career he laid the foundations of a solid
prosperity, and when he had secured a competence
he retired from active work to enjoy the harvest of
a diligent and well-ordered life.
Among the many great qualities which combined
to make him a master of life and of art, sanity must
be given a first place ; and sanity is as much a mat
ter of character as of mind. When one takes into
account the power of passion that was in him, and
SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH-RECORD.
the license and extravagance of his time, his poise
and balance become as marvellous as his genius.
He avoided as if by instinct those eccentricities of
taste, interest, subject, and manner to which many
of his contemporaries fell victims, and which men
of sensitive imagination often mistake for evidences
and manifestations of genius.
Shakespeare kept resolutely to the main high
ways of life, where the interest of the great human
movement is always deepest and richest if one has
adequate range of vision. He dealt with the ele
mental and universal experiences in broad, simple,
THE LAST YEARS AT STRATFORD 407
vital forms, and in a language which was familiar
and yet of the largest compass. There was nothing
esoteric in his thought or his method ; he was too
great to depend upon secret processes, or to con
tent himself with any degree of knowledge short
of that which had the highest power of diffusion.
Although the keenest of practical psychologists, he
did not concern himself with curious questions of
mental condition, nor with spiritual problems which
-are elusive and subtle rather than vital and pro
found. He was too great an artist to mistake psy
chological analysis, however skilful and interesting,
for literature.
As he studied life and passed through its experi
ences he saw with increasing clearness the moral
order of the world, the ethical relation of the indi
vidual to society and to his environment, the signifi
cance of character as the product of will, and the
gradation of qualities in a scale of spiritual values.
His work as an artist deepened and widened as he
grew in the wisdom of life. Such wisdom, and its
expression in work of sustained power, come to
those only whose natures are harmonious with the
fundamental laws of life, and who keep themselves
in wholesome relations with their kind.
Too great in himself to become a cynic, and of a
vision too broad and penetrating to rest in any kind
of pessimism, Shakespeare grew in charity as he in
creased in knowledge. He loved much because he
knew men so well. A deep and tender pity was
408
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
distilled out of his vast experience, and his last
work was the ripe fruit of the beautiful humaniza-
tion of his genius accomplished in him by the disci
pline and the revelation of life in his personal history.
" The Tempest" and " The Winter's Tale," coming
at the end of a long and arduous career, are the
convincing witnesses of the harmony of life and art
in which resides the secret of Shakespeare's noble
fertility and sustained power. The path which led
from " Titus Andronicus " to " The Tempest " must
have been one of gradual but unbroken ascent. To
keep in one's soul the freshness of perception and
imagination which touches " The Tempest " with
the light that never fades, one must be great in
heart and in life as well as in creative power.
When Prometheus brought the arts of life to men,
he did not leave them skill without inspiration ; he
brought them hope also. Shakespeare's genius,
shining on the darkest ways, seems to touch the
sky beyond the horizon with light.
CARVING FROM STALLS OF HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD.
INDEX
Actor, Shakespeare as an, 104, 118.
Actors, professional, created by the
Moralities, 16 ; their position by the
middle of the sixteenth century, 78 ;
Elizabeth a patron of, 106 ; Leicester's
company of, 106-108, 114; a perform
ance described, 109-111 ; Shakespeare's
name on lists of, 117; the address to,
in " Hamlet," 118 ; opposition of the
City to, 128-131 ; in the "War of the
Theatres," 277-280, 310; boys as, 108,
309-312,389; reference in "Hamlet"
to the strife between boy and adult,
310.
Adam, in "As You Like It" played by
Shakespeare, 117.
Adaptation of his own plays, 205, 262.
Adaption of Plays by Shakespeare, 137,
139-144, 148.
Alleyne, Edward, the star of the Admi
ral's Men, 116.
" All's Well that Ends Well," source of
its plot, 311-313; alluded to, 315.
"A Lover's Complaint" alluded to
among the poetical writings of Shake
speare, 137, 177; published with the
Sonnets, but little else is known of it,
224.
" A Midsummer's Night's Dream," War
wickshire in, 62; alluded to, 60, 95,
177, 183, 381 ; sources of, 203 ; metre,
205 ; the great popularity of, 205.
Analysis of special characters in Shake
speare's plays: Talbot, 154; Biron,
168 ; Falstaff, 237-239, 263 ; Shylock,
252-254; Jaques, 268; Hamlet, 306-
310; Helena, 312, 313; Othello, 322;
Macbeth, 326-329; Lear, 332, 333;
Timon, 334; Coriolanus, 340.
Angelo, Michael, alluded to, 195.
" Antony and Cleopatra," alluded to, 304 ;
the source of, 293, 335-338.
Arden, Mary. See Shakespeare, Mary.
Arden, Robert, of Wilmcote, grandfather
of the poet, 33, 256.
" Arden of Feversham," credited to
Shakespeare by some critics, 24.
Armada, the, alluded to, 24, 138.
Armado in " Love's Labour's Lost," 166.
" Arte of English Poesie," by Puttenham,
102, 138.
"As You Like It," Warwickshire in, 62,
266; Shakespeare as Adam in, 117,-
its plot, etc., 266-268; alluded to.
170.
Aubrey, authority for the report that
Shakespeare assisted his father after
leaving school, 51 ; quoted, 95.
Autographs of the poet, 394.
Ayrer, Jacob, 379; his "Die Schone
Sidea " very similar in plot to " The
Tempest," 379.
Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam, portrait,
312; alluded to, 394.
Baker, Mrs., late custodian of the Birth
place, 85.
Bale, — , author of " King Johan " and
other Chronicle plays, 23.
Ballad-dance, the, 3.
Bandello, the story of Romeo and Juliet
in a " nouvclle" by, 201; some of the
plot of " Much Ado about Nothing "
due to, 265; the ultimate source of
" Twelfth Night," 270.
Barnard, Sir John, of Abingdon, second
husband of Elizabeth Hall, the poet's
granddaughter, 258, 392.
Barnfield, Richard, lines by, on Shake
speare's " Venus " and " Lucrece," 196.
Bear-baiting Garden, the, illustration,
117.
Beaumont, Francis, alluded to, 239 ; por
trait of, 240 ; lines by, on the Mermaid
Tavern, 274.
Belleforest, the story of Hamlet in the
Histoires 'Jragiques of, 302.
Bermudas, the, and "The Tempest,"
378, 379-
Bible, Shakespeare's study of the, 47.
409
4io
INDEX
Birthplace, the, of Shakespeare, illustra
tion, 31 ; detailed description of, 35-
37; inherited by Shakespeare, 361,
391; by his daughter, 392; by his sis
ter's grandson, 35, 392.
Blackfriars, Vautrollier a publisher in,
101 ; Shakespeare's house in, 392, 394,
397-
Blackfriars Theatre, built by the elder
Burbage, 116; secured for the use of
the Children of the Chapel, 310;
Shakespeare's income from, 389.
Boccaccio, the source of " All's Well
that Ends Well," 312; and of " Cym-
beline," 369.
Bond, the marriage, of Shakespeare and
Anne Hathaway, 85, 86.
Boy actors, 108 ; the strife between adults
and, 309-312, 389; the reference to in
" Hamlet," 310.
Brandes, Mr. Georg, on Shakespeare's
visiting Italy, 119-122.
Brooke, Arthur, author of a poetical
version of the story of " Romeo and
Juliet," 200.
Burbage, James, actor and a liveryman
in the neighbourhood of Smithneld, 93,
103; a Stratford man by birth, 102:
owner of The Theatre, 103 ; builder of
Blackfriars Theatre, 116, 310.
Burbage, Richard, son of James, 93, 103;
a member of the King's Players,
108 ; of Shakespeare's company, 116 ;
builder of the Globe Theatre, 116,
398 (?) ; alluded to, 279.
Bushnell, Dr., quoted, 251.
Camden, William, 280.
Cavendish, George, 383.
Cecil, Sir Robert, Raleigh's letter to,
163.
Chamberlain, the Lord, his company of
players, 116, 270.
Chapman, George, portrait, 226 ; his
Homer, 229, 293, 317 ; alluded to, 216,
225.
Charlecote, illustration of, 67; descrip
tion of, 67-70; alluded to, 52, 65, 74,
82, 83.
Charlecote Church, the Lucy monument
in, 84.
Charlecote Park, 82.
Charles I., alluded to, 99.
Chaucer, alluded to, 20, 115, 192; the
seven-line stanza brought from France
by, 192 ; his " Canterbury Tales," 267,
^317-
Chester, Robert, his " Love's Martyr,"
containing Shakespeare's " The Phoe
nix and the Turtle," 225.
Chettle, Henry, publishes Greene's attack
on Shakespeare, and later an apology,
159; complains of the poet's silence
after the death of Queen Elizabeth,
288.
Children of the Chapel, 310.
Chronicle plays, 23; practically cover a
period of four centuries of English his
tory, 24; thoroughly representative in
character, 149; alluded to, 230, 236,
296.
Chronology, the, of Shakespeare's plays,
144, 148.
Church, the, its attitude toward the play
ers of the Middle Ages, 6; its own
appeal to the dramatic instinct, 7 ; its
Mass such an appeal, 7, 8 ; its tableaux
of New Testament scenes, 9 ; neglected
for the theatre, 131.
Cinthio, the plot of " Measure for Meas
ure " in a novel by, 316, 322.
City, the, opposes theatres, 130.
Classical stage, the, in its effect on Eng
lish art, 21, 172.
Clopton, 74.
Clopton Bridge, 31, 39,324 (illustration).
Clopton, Sir Hugh, 31, 74, 257.
Clopton, Sir John, 74.
Coleridge, quoted on Shakespeare's mo
rality, 174; on "Venus and Adonis,"
193-195 ; on " Macbeth," 327.
Combe, John, 394.
Comedy, the earliest English, 19; its
earlier development as compared to
tragedy accounted for, 21 ; and history,
alternation of in the poet's productions,
235, 248 ; Shakesperian, denned, 250.
Comedies of Shakespeare, the, 248, 250;
" The Merry Wives of Windsor," 261-
265 ; " Much Ado about Nothing," 264-
266; "As You Like It," 266-268;
"Twelfth Night," 268-270; alluded to,
315. 344-
Condell, Henry, one of the editors of the
First Folio, 108, 403; Shakespeare's
bequest to, 398 ; alluded to, 116.
" Coriolanus," 290, 339-341; source of,
339-
Court, the poet's relations to, 198, 286, 320.
Crown Inn, the, at Oxford, 92, 93, 401.
INDEX
411
Curtain Theatre, one of the two in exist
ence in 1586, 101 ; the only rival of
The Theatre, 108, 114.
" Cymbeline " included among Tragedies
in the First Folio, 364, 365 ; source of,
364, 369, 372; alluded to, 363, 387.
Daniel, 216.
D'Avenant, 401.
" Decameron," the, source of the plot of
" All's Well that Ends Well," 312 ; of
" Cymbeline," 369.
Dekker, 229, 394.
Dennis, John, quoted, concerning " The
Merry Wives of Windsor," 262.
De Quincey on " Macbeth," 328.
Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 285-
288, 290; portrait, 285; alluded to in
" Henry V.," 286.
Dionysus, growth of the myth, 2.
" Discourse of English Poetrie," 138.
" Downfall of Robert, Earl of Hunting-
ton," 24.
Drake, Sir Francis, 138.
Drama, the early, first steps in its growth,
i ; the myth, 2; the ballad-dance, 3;
begins in worship, 4; inevitable in
every age, 4 ; grew vulgar as the Ro
man populace sank, 5 ; condemned by
the Church, 6; developed by the ap
peal of the Church to the dramatic
instinct, 7 ; developed also by scrip
tural tableaux, 9.
Drama, early English, the Church the
chief influence in making, 6; the earli
est Passion play, 10; the Mystery or
Miracle play, n, 12; the realism of
the semi-sacred play, 12, 13 ; the Mo
ralities, 14-16; the Interlude, 17, 18;
the earliest comedies, 19; the com
parative development of comedy and
tragedy, 21 ; Chronicle plays, 23, 149 ;
Lyly's comedies, 25, 162, 163 ; the im
mediate predecessors and older con
temporaries of the poet in, 24, 155 ; its
condition about 1585, 26, 105-118;
tragedy, 28.
Drama, Elizabethan, the, 105-118; full of
the spirit of the age, 113 ; growth of, 114,
125 ; surprisingly wholesome in view of
the influence of the Italian Renaissance,
132-134; as a literary form, 135; as
an opportunity of expression, 136; un
certainty of the text of, 140; the ethical
significance of Shakespearian, 342-
359. See Histories, Comedies, and
Tragedies of Shakespeare.
Drayton, Michael, portrait of, 179; al
luded to, 197, 216.
Droeshout, Martin, portrait of Shake
speare by, 150, 273, 400, 401.
Drummond of Hawthornden, 373.
" Duchess of Norfolk," 24.
" Duke Humphrey," 24.
Earl of Worcester's Company of Play
ers, 39.
Eastcheap, 98.
Edgar Tower, the, at Worcester, 85.
Editions of Shakespeare's works. See
under First Folio.
Education, not necessarily academic, 41,
42; formal literary, in Shakespeare's
time, 44 ; the poet's early, 46-51.
"Edward III.," 23.
Elizabeth, Princess, the marriage of, 374,
382, 391.
Elizabeth, Queen, her delight in pageants,
52 ; visits Warwickshire, 52-56 ; diver
sions at Kenilworth in honour of, 53 ;
the splendour of, 55 ; a patron of the
theatre, 106; her enjoyment of Falstaff,
262 ; at the opening of the seventeenth
century, 284, 290; her death, 320.
English Language, the, when Shake
speare began to use it, 134.
Essex. See Devereux.
" Euphues," 25, 137.
Fairfax, his " Tasso," 229, 293.
Falstaff, his fondness for Eastcheap, 98;
the humour of, 237 ; at first named Sir
John Oldcastle, 238 ; the character of,
developed in "The Merry Wives of
Windsor," by order of Elizabeth, 262,
263.
"Ferrex and Porrex,"or "Gorbordoc,"22.
Field, Richard, 101 ; publisher of the
earliest of Shakespeare's publications,
101, 187, 191 ; of other influential works,
102, 187.
Fleay, 318.
Fletcher, John, alluded to, 239, 384, 385,
386; his portrait, 231.
Florio, John, his " Montaigne," 293 306
381.
Folio, the First, alluded to, 381, 364; the
editors of, 402, 404.
Forest of Arden, 30, 62, 64, 73, 74, 186,
266, 267.
412
INDEX
Forman, Dr. Simon, 328, 369, 374; his
" Book of Plays," 374.
Fortune Theatre, 109, 116.
French, Shakespeare's knowledge of, 46,
47-
Fuller, Thomas, quoted as comparing
Jonson and Shakespeare, 275.
" Gammer Gurton's Needle," 19.
Gastrell, Rev. Francis, 258.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, his " Historia
Britonum," 330.
Ghost, the, in Hamlet played by Shake
speare, 117.
'G.obe Theatre, illustration of, 25, 115;
described, 109; built by Richard Bur-
bage, 116; "Richard II." at the, 286;
"Macbeth" at the, 328; the burning
of the, 383; its receipts, 389; the Globe
company, 310; alluded to, 198, 241,
369- 374-
Gollancz, quoting Gabriel Harvey, 197.
G;;unmar School, the, of Stratford, 31,
38; described, 42-44; a free school,
48 ; Shakespeare's early leaving, 49,
51 ; alluded to, 54, 160, 293.
Grammaticus, Saxo, 301.
Granville, 138.
Grave, the, of Shakespeare, and the lines
above it, 396-398 : of Anne Hathaway
and its inscription, 399.
Gray's Inn Fields, 98.
Green, on the Elizabethan Theatre, 114.
Greene, Robert, one of Shakespeare's
older contemporaries, 26; a born story
teller, 27 ; credited with part author
ship of " Henry VI.," 152; his history,
155 ; his fight against the new order,
157 ; his attack on Marlowe, 158 ; his
attack on Shakespeare, 159; his "A
Groatsworth of Wit," 156, 274, 370 ;
his reference to an early Hamlet, 302;
his " Pandasto," 370; alluded to, 137,
229, 266, 372, 373.
Greene, Thomas, town clerk of Stratford,
395-
Greenwich Palace, 261.
" Groatsworth of Wit," Greene's pam
phlet, 156, 274, 370.
Guild Chapel, the, at Stratford, 31, 42, 43,
74, 257, 260.
Hagenbach, quoted, 7.
Hall of the Middle Temple, 268 ; illus
tration, 269.
Hall, Dr. John, 258, 391, 395, 399.
Hall, Elizabeth, 258, 391, 392, 396.
Hall, Mrs. Susannah. See Shakespeare,
Susannah.
Hall, William, 223, 242, 292.
Halliwell-Phillipps quoted, 77, 93.
Hamlet, the character, compared to
Brutus, 298 ; origin of his story, 300-
302 ; aspects of his character, 306-308.
" Hamlet," 23 ; the Ghost, Shakespeare's
most notable role, 117 ; shows traces of
the older drama, 147 ; sources of, 300-
. 303 ; first published, 304 ; problems of,
306; alluded to, 118, 240, 248, 298, 315,
381.
Hampton Lucy, the road to, 69-72.
Hampton Lucy bridge, 70.
Hart, Joan, 35. See Shakespeare, Joan.
Harvey, Gabriel, 197.
Hathaway, Anne, alluded to, 29, 38, 85 ;
her marriage bond, 86-88; her hus
band's senior, 88 ; her children, 85, 87,
91; her death, 399; lines over her
grave, 399.
Hathaway, Richard, 85; father-in-law oi
Shakespeare, 85.
Hazlitt, on " Much Ado about Nothing,"
265.
Heine, Heinrich, 350, 351.
Heminge, John, one of Shakespeare's
friends, 102, 398 ; one of the editors of
the First Folio, 108, 403 ; one of the
Lord Chamberlain's Men, 116.
Henley Street, Stratford, Shakespeare's
birthplace a cottage on, 33, 35, 36;
alluded to, 43, 361, 391, 392.
Henrietta Maria, Queen, entertained at
New Place in 1643, 258.
Henry, Prince of Wales, son of James I.,
portrait, 343.
"Henry IV.," 230, 234, 235, 237, 239-
241, 261, 262; the second part, 255.
" Henry V.," 23, 230, 235, 236, 241, 261,
286.
" Henry VI.," Part I., 145 ; its three parts,
152-154, 156, 157, 160, 183, 230, 243.
"Henry VIII.," 231, 241, 363, 383-385;
source, 383 ; its first night, 383.
Herbert, Philip, Earl of Montgomery,
404.
Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke,
221, 222, 320, 404; portrait, 213.
" Hero and Leander," 28, 191.
Heywood, John, 18, 19.
Heywood, Thomas, 227, 229.
INDEX
413
Histories, the, among Shakespeare's
plays, 228-231; the material of, 143,
149, 151, 242; " Richard II.," 232;
" King John," 233 ; " Henry IV.," 234-
240; "Henry V.," 241 ; " Henry VI.,"
153, 243; " Henry VIII.," 241 ; hardly
second to the Tragedies in importance,
151-
Holinshed's " Chronicles," the indebted
ness of Shakespeare to, 151, 242, 292,
369 ; the source of " Henry VI.," 153 ;
followed in " Richard II." and " Rich
ard III.," 232, 233, 294; the source oi
"Henry IV.," 235; suggested "Mac
beth," 325 ; and " King Lear," 330.
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, 31 ; illus
tration, 45; alluded to, 71, 74, 88, 260;
bust of Shakespeare in, 272, 273, 399,
400.
Holy Trinity Churchyard, 256, 392, 397.
" Hotspur," 24.
Inferences from a dramatist's work dan
gerous, 88-90.
Interlude, the, 17, 18.
Italian, Shakespeare's knowledge of, 46,
47-
Italy, the teacher of Western Europe,
21 ; its influence on England in the
sixteenth century, 120, 121 ; possible
visit of Shakespeare to, 119, 124; its
influence on Chaucer and others, 120,
and on the English imagination, 132-
134; its general influence on Europe,
161, 162, 209.
Jaggard, William, 226.
James I. on the growth of London, 99;
a patron of the stage, 320, 329; por
trait, 337; alluded to, 290.
Jew, the, in 1596, 253, 254.
Johnson, Robert, 382.
Jonson, Ben, ridiculed for including plays
among his " Works," 141 ; prices paid
for his plays, 142; his " Irene," 189; a
contributor to Chester's " Love's Mar
tyr," 225 ; portrait, 278 ; a combatant
in the " War of the Theatres," 277-
279; a sketch of the life of, 280-284;
his personal appearance, 281 ; his char
acter, 281, 282; his criticism of Shake
speare's lack of scholarship, 282; his
tribute to Shakespeare, 283; the " Poet
aster," 284; his " Sejanus " and " Cati
line," 299; the spelling of his name,
394 ; his Eulogy of Shakespeare in the
First Folio, 404; alluded to, 47, 229,
239, 375-
Jonson, Gerard, 273, 399.
"Julius Caesar," criticised by Jonson,
282; political situation when it was
written, 290; source of, in Plutarch,
293; modification of the original in,
294, 295 ; publication of, 296 ; analysis
of the play, 296, 299, 338 ; preserved in
the First Folio, 404.
Kempe, 279.
Kenilworth Castle, 52; the entertain
ment of Queen Elizabeth at, 53, 56;
old drawing of, 57; alluded to, 58, 65 ;
Mervyn's Tower, 58, 59 ; the loveliness
of its ruins, 61.
" King Johan," 23.
" King John," the prelude of the histori
cal plays, 230 ; completed about 1595,
233 ; a recast, 233 ; has no hero, 234.
" King Lear," description of Dover cliff
in, 46; its landscape exceptional, 62;
the sublimest height of the poet's tragic
art, 329; performed before the King,
329 ; sources of, 330, 331 ; analysis of,
331-335; alluded to, 23, 325, 372.
King's servants, the, 320, 321.
Kyd, Thomas, one of Shakespeare's
immediate predecessors as a play
wright, 26, 229 ; his " Spanish Tragedy,"
303-
Landor, Walter Savage, his " Citation
and Examination of William Shake
speare," 84.
Landscape, influence of, on the verse of
Scott, Burns, Wordsworth, 62; the
Italian, 64.
Latin, Shakespeare's knowledge of, 44, 46.
Law, Shakespeare's knowledge of, 47.
Lee, Sidney, on Shakespeare's Sonnets,
218 ; on his acting before King James,
321 ; on his expenditures, 390.
Leicester, the Earl of, his entertainment
of Queen Elizabeth, 53, 56, 61 ; por
trait, 1588, 60 ; his company of players,
106-108, 114.
Leicester Hospital, 65.
Lodge, his death in 1625, 26; his plays,
27 ; one of the group in possession of
the stage on the arrival of Shake
speare, 25, 155, 229; his " Rosalynde"
the source of the plot of " As You Like
414
INDEX
it," 266 ; his allusion to an early Ham
let, 302 ; alluded to, 156, 267.
London, Shakespeare's journey to, 91 ;
in the sixteenth century, 96; streets,
97 ; the city, 98 : its growth, 98-100; in
1543, 198-200 ; alluded to, 90, 160.
London Bridge, 96, 99.
" Lord Chamberlain's Men," the, 116,
270.
" Love's Labour's Lost," the first touches
of the poet's hand shown in among
others, 145 ; betrays the influence of
Lyly, 160, 166; played before the
Queen, 164; satirizes the times, 165,
183; betrays the youth of the writer,
166; analysis of, 167-170 ; three poems
from, in " The Passionate Pilgrim,"
226; alluded to, 204, 249.
" Love's Labour's Won," mentioned by
Meres, probably the same as "All's
Well that Ends Well," 311.
Lucy, Sir Peter, 83.
Lucy, Sir Thomas, of Charlecote, 52, 82,
83- 85.
Lydgate, his Troy Book, 317.
Lyly, John, a sketch of, 160-163; n^s
influence on Shakespeare's " Love's
Labour's Lost," 160, 166, 179; one
of the group in possession of the stage
on Shakespeare's arrival in London,
229; his " Euphues," 25, 137, 163.
Lyrical poetry, Shakespeare's contribu
tion to, 209.
" Macbeth," contrast of landscape in this
and other plays, 62 ; contains traces of
the older drama, 147 ; sources of, 325 ;
analysis of, 326; parts of, said to be
by Middleton, 327; De Quincey on
the introduction of the comic element,
328 ; Dr. Forman's account of the per
formance of, in 1611, 328; unprinted
until in the First Folio, 404.
Magdalen College, Oxford, 160.
Malone, on the authorship of "Henry
VI." 152.
Manningham, John, quoted, 268, 270.
Marlowe, Christopher, leader of the
group of men who controlled the
stage at the time of Shakespeare's
arrival in London, 26, 138, 155, 229;
a sketch of, 27 ; his writings, 28 ; his
influence on English poetry, 136, 146,
147 ; his death, 137 ; credited with part
authorship of "Henry VI.," 152; at
tacked by Greene, 157, 158 ; his influ
ence shown in some of Shakespeare's
plays, 160, 179, 231, 233, 252; identified
by some with the poet's " rival singer"
of the Sonnets, 216; the parallelism
between his " Edward II." and Shake
speare's "Richard II.," 232; his "Dr.
Faustus," 28 ; his " Hero and Lean-
der," 190; his "Jew of Malta," 252;
his " Tamburlaine," 27, 157, 158, 232.
Marston, 225, 229.
Mass, the, a dramatization of certain
fundamental ideas, 7; of the central
mystery of the Christian faith, 8.
Masuccio, the story of Romeo and Juliet
sketched by, 201.
" Measure for Measure," Shakespeare's
modifications of the story of, 315, 316;
sources of, 316, 322; produced about
1603, 316.
Menaechmi of Plautus, the, probable
source of the plot of " The Comedy
of Errors," 172; said to be like
" Twelfth Night " by John Manning-
ham, 269.
Meredith, George, quoted on the comic
characters of Shakespeare, 251.
Meres, Francis, on Shakespeare's poetry,
196; his " Palladis Tamia," 311; his
mention of " Love's Labour's Won,"
3«-
Mervyn's Tower, Kenilworth Castle, 58,
59-
Middle Ages, isolation of castles and
communities in the, 5.
Middle Temple Lane, illustration, 294.
Middleton, Thomas, 229, 327.
Milton, alluded to, 121.
Mimes, or players, in th<j Middle Ages,
5; condemned by the Church, 6.
Miracle play, n; its realism, 12; com
pared with the Moralities, 15 ; alluded
to, 20.
" Mirrour of Magistrates," 22.
Moralities, the, 14; compared to the
Mystery and Miracle plays, 15 ; the
important step in dramatic develop
ment marked by, 16; gradual transi
tion to the fully developed play from,
17-
More, Sir Thomas, 18.
" Much Ado about Nothing," the perfec
tion of witty dialogue and repartee, 25 ;
its contrast to "The Merry Wives of
Windsor," 264 ; date and sources, 265.
INDEX
415
Mystery play, the, foreshadowed in the
fourth century Passion play, 10; in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, n; its
realism in the fifteenth century, 12;
compared with the Moralities, 15;
alluded to, 20.
Nash, Thomas, one of the playwrights
controlling the stage just before the
arrival of Shakespeare in London, 26,
229; his character, 27, 155 ; addressed
by Greene in "A Groatsworth of
Wit," 156; drawn into the "War of
the Theatres " by Greene, 158 ; his
comment on " Henry VI.," 153.
Nashe, Thomas, marries Elizabeth Hall,
the granddaughter of Shakespeare, 258,
397 ; his wife, 258, 392 ; portrait of,
169.
New Place, Stratford, Shakespeare's
home in, 31, 93; the purchase of, 257,
361; now a garden, 259; a commodi
ous building, 391.
North, Thomas, his translation of Plu
tarch, 102, 151, 293.
Norton, collaborator with Sackville in
" Gorbordoc," 22.
Old Clopton Bridge, 31, 39; illustration,
324.
"Othello," mistakes in, 122; contains
traces of the older drama, 147 ; sources,
322; played before the King, 322;
analysis of characters, 322-325 ; the
great popularity of, 323.
Oxford, 93, 95.
Pageants, in the fifteenth century, n, 12.
" Passionate Pilgrim, the," piratical pub
lication of Shakespeare's poems in,
208, 226; Shakespeare's name omitted
from the title-page of the second edi
tion of, 227.
Passion play, in the fourth century, 10.
Pater, Mr., 162, 167.
Paynter, his " Palace of Pleasure," 312,
334, 376.
Peele, one of the playwrights just preced
ing Shakespeare on the Elizabethan
stage, 26, 155, 229; his characteristics,
27; credited with part authorship in
" Henry VI.," 152; addressed by Greene
in "A Groatsworth of Wit," 156 ; Shake
speare drawn to, 179.
Pembroke, Earl of. See Herbert.
"Pericles," a new note struck in, 362;
sources, 364 ; a drama of reconciliation,
387 ; omitted from the First Folio, 404.
Personification inevitable to an imagina
tive race, 2.
Petrarch, the master of sonnet form in
Italy, 209; Surrey and Wyatt's trans
lations of sonnets by, 210; Shake
speare's modification of the sonnet
form used by, 211.
Phillips, Augustus, 108, 116.
Plague, in London, 124.
Plautus, the source of the plot of " The
Comedy of Errors," 172, 173, 269;
Shakespeare's acquaintance with, 44.
Player, the strolling, in the Middle Ages,
5 ; condemned by the Church, 6; his
position in England after the Conquest,
6 ; the professional, created by the
Moralities, 16; in Shakespeare's time,
39. See Actor.
Plays, in Shakespeare's time, 139; fre
quently altered, 140; property of the
theatre, 139-141 ; rarely published, 141.
Plutarch, his influence on Shakespeare,
292, 376 ; North's translation of, 102,
151, 293 ; the story of Timon from, 334 ;
the story of Antony from, 335; the
story of "Coriolanus" from, 339.
Poaching, Rowe's story of Shakespeare's,
82.
Portraits of Shakespeare, 273, 400-402;
the " Ely House " portrait, frontis
piece; the Stratford portrait, 37; the
Zoust portrait, 94; the Black Bust,
owned by the Garrick Club, 123 ; the
J. Q. A. Ward statue in Central
Park, New York, 135 ; the JDroeshout
engraving, 150; the statue on the
Gower Memorial, 171 ; the monument
in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford,
272.
Puritan party, in opposition to theatres,
106, 125, 130-133; Shakespeare not a
member of the, 354, 395.
Queen's Company of Players, the, 39.
Quiney, Richard, 37, 260.
Quiney, Thomas, 38, 260, 393.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 138, 163.
" Ralph Roister Doister," 19.
Ravenscroft, Edward, 146.
Register of the Stationers Company, 79,
144, 252.
416
INDEX
Religion in the fifteenth century, 13, I
14.
Renaissance influence, the, at its height
in Shakespeare's time, 44 ; Italy the
birthplace of, 120; surprisingly whole
some considering the moral life of
Italy at the time, 132-134; made
Europe a community in intellectual
interests, 161 ; the suggestiveness of,
181; freedom secured by, 184, 185,
343. 355 I l°Vt' °f beauty a character
istic of, 190, 343.
"Richard II.," published in 1597, 148;
reflects the genius of Marlowe, 160,
230. 232 1 revived at the Globe, 286 ;
its outline taken from Holinshed, 294.
" Richard III.," published in 1597, 148;
reflects the genius of Marlowe, 160,
231, 232; Holinshed followed in, 232,
294.
Richardson, Locke, 48.
Robsart, Amy, imprisoned in Mervyn's
Tower, 58, 59.
Romances, the, 363, 366, 368, 387 ; " Peri
cles," 363, 364 ; " Cymbeline," 364, 365 ;
"The Winter's Tale," 372-375; "The
Tempest," 377-383-
Rome, the theatre of, 4, 5.
"Romeo and Juliet," mistakes in, 122;
shows among the first touches of the
poet's hand, 145; published in 1597,
148 ; in the front rank of English
poetry, 183 ; shows the poet's develop
ment, 184 ; sources, 200, 201 ; analysis
of, 201-203 ; affiliated to " A Midsum
mer Night's Dream " in lyric quality,
204 ; alluded to, 324.
Rose, the.jis, 116, 142, 198; production
of" Henry VI." at, 153, 243.
Rowe, his story of Shakespeare's poach
ing, 82; quoted again, 104, 117, 262.
Sackville, one of the authors of " Gor-
bordoc," 22.
Sandells, Fulk, 86.
Schlegel, quoted, on the historical plays,
246.
Sea- Venture, the, 378.
Shakespeare, Edmund, 397.
Shakespeare, Gilbert, 397.
Shakespeare, Hamnet, 91 ; his death,
230, 256, 290, 391 ; his grave, 397.
Shakespeare, Joan, sister of William, 35,
392, 398 ; the grandson of, 392 ; three
sons of, 398. See Hart.
Shakespeare, John, 32; his marriage to
Mary Arden,33; his public offices, 34;
his children, 34; his means, 39; finan
cial embarrassments, 49, 50, 255;
alluded to, 101, 256; his coat-of-arms,
32, 256, 257; his death, 289, 391.
Shakespeare, Judith, the poet's youngest
daughter, 38, 391 ; baptized, 91 ; mar
ried Thomas Quiney, 38, 260, 393, 398 ;
her sons, 393; bequest to, in the poet's
will, 398; her death, 394; her grave,
397-
Shakespeare, Mary, the poet's mother,
wife of John, 33; heiress of Robert
Arden of Wilmcote, 256 ; death of,
39i.
Shakespeare, Richard, 33, 397.
Shakespeare, Susannah, first child of
William, 87, 91, 391, 393, 396, 397;
marriage of, 391, 392; verse written
of, 392.
Shakespeare, William, development of
the English drama before his time, 16-
28 ; the dramatic form all but per
fected by his forerunners, 24; his
immediate predecessors and older con
temporaries, 27, 155, 229 ; his birth and
birthplace, 30-35 ; at four years old,
39; his formal education, 42-51 ; after
leaving school, 51, 77; our knowledge
of his life, 77, 80 ; characteristics of his
youth, 80, 81 ; his departure from
Stratford, 82, 90; his marriage and
marriage bond, 85-88; his children,
85, 87, 91, 256, 258, 260, 391-394; his
journey to London, 91, 93; his arrival,
95 ; early association with theatres a
matter of tradition, 103; joins Lord
Leicester's Players, 108 ; in the com
pany of " Lord Chamberlain's Men,"
as actor and manager, 116-118; tours
of his company, 119; his knowledge
of Italy, 119-124; order of composi
tion of his plays, 144; his versification,
145 ; earliest touches of his hand, 145-
147 ; his first play in print, 148 ; his
part in " Henry VI.," 152, 154 ; attacked
by Greene, 156-159; " Love's Labour's
Lost," 161-170; "The Comedy of
Errors," 170-174; "The Two Gentle
men of Verona," 175; the poetic
period, 177-227; stages of his poetic
growth, 184 ; the publication of" Venus
and Adonis," 187, 195; of "The Rape
of Lucrece," 191, 195; culmination
INDEX
417
of the lyrical period, 199 ; " Romeo
and Juliet," 199-203 ; " A Midsummer
Night's Dream," 203-206; the Sonnets,
207-224 ; " The Rape of Lucrece," 224 ;
" A Lover's Complaint," 224, 225 ;
"The Phoenix and the Turtle," 225;
" The Passionate Pilgrim," 226, 227; the
Histories, 228-247 > l^e Comedies, 248-
255, 261-270; his return to Warwick
shire, 256, 290, 388; the purchase of
New Place by, 257, 362 ; its restoration,
258-260, 361 ; the approach of tragedy,
271-289; portraits of, 273, 400, 401;
social disposition of, 274 ; the " War
of the Theatres," 277-280, 310; the
earlier Tragedies, 290-314; the later
Tragedies, 314-341; ethical significance
of the Tragedies, 342-359 ; his view of
man's place in nature, 346; his study
of character in the Tragedies, 347-349 ;
as a poet, 349-351 ; the Tragedies the
highest point of his art, 351 ; his ethi
cal view of life, 353; his relations to
the Puritan party, 354, 395 ; his large
ness of view, 357-359 ; the Romances :
"Pericles, 363, 364; " Cymbeline,"
364, 365 ; " The Winter's Tale," 372-
375; "The Tempest," 377-383; his
greatness as a poet, 376 ; his share
in "Henry VIII.," 384-385; attitude
toward life of the Romances, 387 ; his
last years in Stratford, 388 ; his income,
389; his general circumstances, 390,
391 ; his family, 391-394 ; the spelling
of his name, 394 ; his religion unknown,
395; his will, 395, 397-399; his death,
395; lines over his grave, 397, 398;
the Stratford bust and other portraits
of, 399-402; the First Folio, 402-404;
his personal character, 404-407.
Shallow, Justice, 52, 68, 82, 83, 85.
Shaw, Julius, 259.
Shottery, 30, 61 , 72, 86, 87 ; the path to, 79.
Sidney, Sir Philip, his "Arcadia," and
"Apologie for Poesie," 138, 229, 321;
portrait, 139; alluded to, 22, 266, 287,
394-
Sill, Mr., quoted, 239.
Snider, Denton, quoted, 342,
Somers, Sir George, and the Sea- Venture,
378.
Sonnets, a favorite poetic form in the
closing decade of the sixteenth century,
207, 208; introduced from Italy by
Surrey and Wyatt, 209 ; their transla
tions of Petrarch's, 210; other collec
tions of, 210; modern sequences of,
211.
Sonnets of Shakespeare, the, 207 ; pub
lished, 208; a sequence, 211; analysis
of, 214; interpretations of, 218-220;
alluded to, 273, 345, 366, 405.
Sonnetteers of Shakespeare's time, 210.
Southampton, Earl of. See Wriothes-
ley.
Spedding, Mr., 384, 385.
Spenser, Edmund, a well-known name
in Shakespeare's time, 138, 229 ; Shake
speare's love of pastoral life shared by,
266, 267 ; his laxity in spelling of
names, even his own, 394; his "Colin
Clout," 229; his" Epithalamium," 229 ;
alluded to, 287.
Still, John, 20.
St. Pancras, 98.
St. Paul's Cathedral, 96, 98.
St. Paul's Churchyard, 191.
Stratford-on-Avon, its charm, 29; Shake
spearian associations, 29 ; in 1564, 30 ;
its population, 32; Henley Street, 33-
37 ; its love of the drama, 40 ; the
Grammar School and Guild Chapel,
43, 74; the landscape between Kenil-
worth and, 54, 58, 65; the byways
about, 60, 61 ; Warwick from, 66;
between Hampton Lucy and, 71;
events which led to the poet's departure
from, 82-85, 9°'. men from, among
Shakespeare's friends, 101, 102, 187;
touches of, in the poems or plays of
Shakespeare, 186, 255; Shakespeare's
return to, 256, 290, 388 ; his restoration
of New Place in, 257, 361 ; later history
of New Place, 258-260, 391, 392, 398;
the bust of Shakespeare in the church
at, 272, 273 ; the poet's property at, 361,
390-393-
Stuart, Mary, 55.
Surrey, 120, 162, 209-211.
Symonds, quoted, 157.
Tableaux of New Testament scenes in
the fifth century, 9.
Talbot Inn, Chaucer's " Tabard," illus
tration, 20 : alluded to, 115.
Ten Brink, quoted, 368.
Thames, the principal thoroughfare, 98.
" The Atheist's Tragedy," 133.
Theatre, the, 101, 103, 108, 114, 243; the
library of, 142, 148.
418
INDEX
Theatre of Rome. 4 ; increasingly vulgar
as the populace sank, 5.
Theatres of London in Shakespeare's
time, 101, 108; their character, 105,
113; opposition of the Puritan element
to, 106, 125 ; support of Queen Eliza
beth, 106; arrangements of, 109-111;
costume and scenery, in, 112; attend
ance on, 114; location of, 127; oppo
sition of the City to, 130; of the
Puritan party, 131.
"The Comedy of Errors," shows some
of the first touches of the poet's hand,
145 ; first published, 170 ; presented
at Gray's Inn, 172; sources of, 172;
comparison with the play of Plautus,
173; moral sanity of, 174; humour of,
183; alluded to, 204, 249.
"The contention of the two famous
houses of York and Lancaster," 23.
"The Duchess of Amalfi," 133.
" The Massacre at Paris," 27.
" The Merchant of Venice," evidence of
Shakespeare's foreign travel, 121, 122;
produced about 1596, 252 ; sources of,
253 ; modification of the original mate
rial, 253 ; the poet's treatment of the
Jew in, 252-254.
" The Passionate Pilgrim," 137, 177, 226,
227.
"The Phoenix and Turtle," 137, 177,
225.
"The Rape of Lucrece," 101, 137, 183,
I9I-I97, 2O9, 222, 224.
" The Taming of the Shrew," allusions
in, evidence of the poet's foreign travel,
122; unmistakable references to War
wickshire in, 240, 255 ; based on an
older play, 254.
" The Tempest," predicted by" Pericles,"
freshness of, 365; sources, 377; the
wreck of the Sea-Venture, 378, 379;
analysis of, 380-382 ; title-page of, 381 ;
probably his last play, 383, 386, 409 ;
not published before the First Folio
appeared, 404; alluded to, 60, 387.
" The True Tragedy of Richard III.," 23.
" The Two Gentlemen of Verona," mis
takes of locality in, 122; shows some
of the first touches of the poet's hand,
145 ; sources of, 175 ; slender in plot,
183 ; in certain of its aspects of life con
nected with "A Midsummer Night's
Dream," 204; comedy form of, 249;
alluded to, 362.
" The Winter's Tale," flowers of War-
wickshire in, 62; alluded to, 362; its
freshness, 365 ; sources of, 370-372 ;
produced about 1611, 374; its popu
larity, 374; analysis of, 374; alluded
to, 387, 408.
" Titus Andronicus," included among
Shakespeare's plays, 145, 146, 148, 178,
183 ; a characteristic Elizabethan play.
146, 147 ; analysis of, 178.
Tourneur, Cyril, alluded to, 120, 132.
Tower of London, the, 96.
Trade-guilds, centres of organized pres
entation of Miracle plays, n.
Tragedy, English, 28.
Tragedies of Shakespeare, the, 245, 248,
271, 278, 290, 314, 320, 360, 363, 364,
366-369, 388 ; " Julius Caesar," 293-299
"Hamlet," 300-311; "All's Well that
Ends Well," 311-313; "Measure for
Measure," 315, 316; " Troilus and
Cressida," 316-320; "Othello," 322-
325; "Macbeth," 325-329; "King
Lear," 329-333 ; " Timon of Athens,"
333. 334 1 " Antony and Cleopatra,"
335-338 ; " Coriojanus," 339-341 ; ethi
cal significance of, 342-359 ; the high
est point of Shakespeare's art, 351 ; the
great insight of, due to Shakespeare's
largeness of view, 358.
"Troilus and Cressida," supposed to
have had a part in the "War of the
Theatres," 279 ; painful and repellent,
315; belongs to the year 1603, 316;
sources, 317; analysis of, 317-319;
alluded to, 345.
"Twelfth Night," produced, 1601, 268;
source of, 269, 270; analysis of, 270;
alluded to, 362.
Twine, Lawrence, 364.
Udall, Nicholas, 19.
Vautrollier, Thomas, 101.
" Venus and Adonis," 101, 137, 183, 184,
186-197.
Walker, William, godson to Shake
speare, 398.
" War of the Theatres," the, 277, 280,
309- 318.
Warner, William, 172.
Warwick, the town of, 66; from the Cov
entry road, 89 ; from the London road,
236-
INDEX
419
Warwick Castle, 67.
Warwickshire landscape, the, 54, 56, 58-
75 ; Shakespeare's familiarity with, 57,
61, 80, 260; in midsummer, 59; the
footpaths in, 59-61 ; touches of, in all
Shakespeare's work, 62; its special
charm, 64 ; along the Avon below the
bridge, 67 ; references to, in " Henry
VI.," 240; in "The Merry Wives of
Windsor " and " The Taming of the
Shrew," 255.
Webster, alluded to, 120, 132.
Weevei, John, 196, 197.
Whitehall, the old Palace at, 270; acting
before the King at, 321, 329, 374.
Wilmcote, 33, 49.
Wilson, his " Cheerful Ayres and Bal
lads," 383.
Wilton House, 320.
Wotton, on the Masque at Cardinal
Wolsey's, 383.
Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southamp
ton, 188, 192, 222, 285-288, 291; por
trait, 223.
Wyatt, 120, 20y-2ii.
PR Mabie, Hamilton Wright
289^ William Shakespeare
M3 3d ed., with corrections
1907
cop. 2
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