William Shakespeare, a critical study

THIS BOOK

IS FROM
THE LIBRARY OF

Rev. James Leach

WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

GEORGE BRANDES

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1898

[All rifjhts

THIS Work is published in Copenhagen in
Three Volumes, represented by the Three
Books of this translation. The First Book
and half of the Second are translated by
Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER ; the last half of the
Second Book by Mr. ARCHER, assisted by
Miss MARY MORISON ; the Third Book by
Miss DIANA WHITE, also with the assistance
of Miss MORISON. The proofs of the whole
Work have been revised by Dr. BRANDES
himself. The Index has been prepared by
Miss BEATRICE M. JACKSON.

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST

CHAP. PAGE

I. A BIOGRAPHY OF SHAKESPEARE DIFFICULT BUT NOT IM
POSSIBLE . 3

II. STRATFORD— PARENTAGE— BOYHOOD 7

III. MARRIAGE— SIR THOMAS LUCY— DEPARTURE FROM STRATFORD 1 3
IV. LONDON — BUILDINGS, COSTUMES, MANNERS . . . 1 6
V. POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS— ENGLAND'S GROW
ING GREATNESS 2O

VI. SHAKESPEARE AS ACTOR AND RETOUCHER OF OLD PLAYS —

GREENE'S ATTACK 23

VII. THE " HENRY VI." TRILOGY 27

VIII. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND HIS LIFE-WORK — TITUS

ANDRONICUS 34

IX. SHAKESPEARE'S CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONS OF THE

SEXES— HIS MARRIAGE VIEWED IN THIS LIGHT— LOVE'S

LABOUR'S LOST— ITS MATTER AND STYLE— JOHN LYLY

AND EUPHUISM — THE PERSONAL ELEMENT ... 42

x. LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON : THE FIRST SKETCH OF ALL'S WELL

THAT ENDS WELL— THE COMEDY OF ERRORS— THE TWO
GENTLEMEN OF VERONA .... . . . 57

XI. VENUS AND ADONIS : DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE— THE RAPE

OF LUCRECE : RELATION TO PAINTING .... 67

XII. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM— ITS HISTORICAL CIRCUM
STANCES—ITS ARISTOCRATIC, POPULAR, COMIC, AND
SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS . .- . <• . . 76
XIII. ROMEO AND JULIET— THE TWO QUARTOS— ITS ROMANESQUE
STRUCTURE— THE USE OF OLD MOTIVES— THE CONCEP
TION OF LOVE 87

vi CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

XIV. LATTER-DAY ATTACKS UPON SHAKESPEARE— THE BACONIAN
THEORY — SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE, PHYSICAL AND

PHILOSOPHICAL * . . 104

XV. THE THEATRES— THEIR SITUATION AND ARRANGEMENTS—
THE PLAYERS— THE POETS— POPULAR AUDIENCES— THE
ARISTOCRATIC PUBLIC — SHAKESPEARE'S ARISTOCRATIC

PRINCIPLES 117

XVI. THE THEATRES CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE— DID
SHAKESPEARE VISIT ITALY ?— PASSAGES WHICH FAVOUR

THIS CONJECTURE 134

XVII. SHAKESPEARE TURNS TO HISTORIC DRAMA— HIS RICHARD

ii. AND MARLOWE'S EDWARD n.— LACK OF HUMOUR

AND OF CONSISTENCY OF STYLE— ENGLISH NATIONAL

PRIDE 141

XVIII. RICHARD III. PSYCHOLOGY AND MONOLOGUES — SHAKE
SPEARE'S POWER OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION — CONTEMPT
FOR WOMEN — THE PRINCIPAL SCENES — THE CLASSIC

TENDENCY OF THE TRAGEDY 150

XIX. SHAKESPEARE LOSES HIS SON— TRACES OF HIS GRIEF IN
KING JOHN — THE OLD PLAY OF THE SAME NAME-
DISPLACEMENT OF ITS CENTRE OF GRAVITY — ELIMINA
TION OF RELIGIOUS POLEMICS — RETENTION OF THE
NATIONAL BASIS — PATRIOTIC SPIRIT — SHAKESPEARE
KNOWS NOTHING OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
NORMANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS, AND IGNORES THE
MAGNA CHARTA l66

xx. "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW" AND "THE MERCHANT
OF VENICE" — SHAKESPEARE'S PREOCCUPATION WITH
THOUGHTS OF PROPERTY AND GAIN — HIS GROWING
PROSPERITY — HIS ADMISSION TO THE RANKS OF THE
"GENTRY"— HIS PURCHASE OF HOUSES AND LAND-
MONEY TRANSACTIONS AND LAWSUITS . . . .178

XXI. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE— ITS SOURCES — ITS CHAR
ACTERS, ANTONIO, PORTIA, SHYLOCK— MOONLIGHT AND
MUSIC— SHAKESPEARE'S RELATION TO MUSIC . . .186

CONTENTS vii

CHAP. PAGE

xxii. "EDWARD in." AND "ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM "—SHAKE
SPEARE'S DICTION— THE FIRST PART OF "HENRY IV."—
FIRST INTRODUCTION OF HIS OWN EXPERIENCES OF
LIFE IN THE HISTORIC DRAMA — WHY THE SUBJECT
APPEALED TO HIM — TAVERN LIFE — SHAKESPEARE'S
CIRCLE — SIR JOHN FALSTAFF — FALSTAFF AND THE
GRACIOSO OF THE SPANISH DRAMA — RABELAIS AND
SHAKESPEARE— PANURGE AND FALSTAFF . . . .203

XXIII. HENRY PERCY— THE MASTERY OF THE CHARACTER DRAW

ING—HOTSPUR AND ACHILLES 22O

XXIV. PRINCE HENRY— THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR SHAKE

SPEARE'S IMAGINATION— A TYPICAL ENGLISH NATIONAL
HERO — THE FRESHNESS AND PERFECTION OF THE PLAY 22Q
XXV. " KING HENRY IV.," SECOND PART— OLD AND NEW CHAR
ACTERS IN IT— DETAILS — "HENRY v.," A NATIONAL

DRAMA — PATRIOTISM AND CHAUVINISM — THE VISION OF

A GREATER ENGLAND 237

XXVI. ELIZABETH AND FALSTAFF — " THE MERRY WIVES OF
WINDSOR" — THE PROSAIC AND BOURGEOIS TONE OF

THE PIECE— THE FAIRY SCENES 244

xxvii. SHAKESPEARE'S MOST BRILLIANT PERIOD— THE FEMININE

TYPES BELONGING TO IT— WITTY AND HIGHBORN YOUNG
WOMEN— MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING— SLAVISH FAITH
FULNESS TO HIS SOURCES— BENEDICK AND BEATRICE-
SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT — THE LOW-COMEDY FIGURES . 249
XXVIII. THE INTERVAL OF SERENITY — AS YOU LIKE IT — THE
ROVING SPIRIT— THE LONGING FOR NATURE — JAQUES
AND SHAKESPEARE — THE PLAY A FEAST OF WIT . . 258

XXIX. CONSUMMATE SPIRITUAL HARMONY — TWELFTH NIGHT —
JIBES AT PURITANISM— THE LANGUISHING CHARACTERS
— VIOLA'S INSINUATING GRACE — FAREWELL TO MIRTH . 270
XXX. THE REVOLUTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S SOUL— THE GROWING
MELANCHOLY OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD— PESSIMISM,
MISANTHROPY 280

viii CONTENTS

BOOK SECOND

CHAP. PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION— THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH IN SHAKE
SPEARE'S YOUTH . . .284

ii. ELIZABETH'S OLD AGE 289

III. ELIZABETH, ESSEX, AND BACON 295

IV. THE FATE OF ESSEX AND SOUTHAMPTON .... 303
V. THE YEAR l6oi— THE SONNETS AND PEMBROKE . . -313

vi. THE "DARK LADY" OF THE SONNETS— MARY FITTON . . 327

VII. PLATONISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S AND MICHAEL ANGELO'S

SONNETS— THE TECHNIQUE OF THE SONNETS . . -341

VIII. JULIUS CAESAR — ITS FUNDAMENTAL DEFECT . . ' . . 357

IX. THE MERITS OF JULIUS C.ESAR— BRUTUS . . . -372

X. BEN JONSON AND HIS ROMAN PLAYS . . . . . 384

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

BOOK FIRST

THE same year which saw the death of Michael Angelo in Rome,
saw the birth of William Shakespeare at Stratford -on -Avon,
The great artist of the Italian Renaissance, the man who painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, was replaced, as it were, by
the great artist of the English Renaissance, the man who wrote
King Lear.

Death overtook Shakespeare in his native place on the same
date on which Cervantes died in Madrid. The two great creative
artists of the Spanish and the English Renaissance, the men to>
whom we owe Don Quixote and Hamlet, Sancho Panza and
Falstaff, were simultaneously snatched away.

Michael Angelo has depicted mighty and suffering demigods
in. solitary grandeur. No Italian has rivalled him in sombre
lyrism or tragic sublimity. \

The finest creations of Cervantes stand as monuments of a
humour so exalted that it marks an epoch in the literature of the
world. No Spaniard has rivalled him in type-creating comic
force.

Shakespeare stands co-equal with Michael Angelo in pathos,
and with Cervantes in humour. This of itself gives us a certain
standard for measuring the height and range of his powers.

It is three hundred years since his genius [attained its full
development, yet Europe is still busied with him as though
with a contemporary. His dramas are acted and'4 read wherever
civilisation extends. Perhaps, however, he exercises the strongest
fascination upon the reader whose natural bent of mind leads
him to delight in searching out the human spirit concealed and
VOL. I. A

2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

revealed in a great artist's work. " I will not let you go until
you have confessed to me the secret of your being " — these are
the words that rise to the lips of such a reader of Shakespeare.
Ranging the plays in their probable order of production, and
reviewing the poet's life-work as a whole, he feels constrained
to form for himself some image of the spiritual experience of
which it is the expression.

I

A BIOGRAPHY OF SHAKESPEARE DIFFICULT
BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE

WHEN we pass from the notabilities of the nineteenth century
to Shakespeare, all our ordinary critical methods leave us in the
lurch. We have, as a rule, no lack of trustworthy information
as to the productive spirits of our own day and of the past two
centuries. We know the lives of authors and poets from their
own accounts or those of their contemporaries; in many cases
we have their letters ; and we possess not only works attributed
to them, but works which they themselves gave to the press.
We not only know with certainty their authentic 'writings, but
are assured that we possess them in authentic form. If dis
concerting errors occur in their works, they are only misprints,
which they themselves or others happen to have overlooked.
Insidious though they may be, there is no particular difficulty
in correcting them. Bernays, for example, has weeded out not a
few from the text of Goethe.

It is otherwise with Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists of
Elizabethan England. He died in 1616, and the first biography
of him, a few pages in length, dates from 1709. This is as though
the first sketch of Goethe's life were not to be written till the year
1925. We possess no letters of Shakespeare's, and only one (a
business letter) addressed to him. Of the manuscripts of his
works not a single line is extant. Our sole specimens of his
handwriting consist of five or six signatures, three appended to
his will, two to contracts, and one, of very doubtful authenticity,
on the copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne, which is shown
at the British Museum. We do not know exactly how far several
of the works attributed to Shakespeare are really his. In the
case of such plays as Titus A ndronicu s, the trilogy of Henry VI.,
Pericles, and Henry VII I., the question of authorship presents

4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

great and manifold difficulties. In his youth Shakespeare had tc
adapt or retouch the plays of others ; in later life he sometimes
collaborated with younger men. And worse than this, with the
exception of two short narrative poems, which Shakespeare him
self gave to the press, not one of his works is known to have
been published under his own supervision. He seems never tc
have sanctioned any publication, or to have read a single proof-
sheet. The 1623 folio of his plays, issued after his death by two
of his actor-friends, purports to be printed " according to the True
Originall Copies ; " but this assertion is demonstrably false in
numerous instances in which we can test it — where the folio, thai
is to say, presents a simple reprint, often with additional blunders
of the old pirated quartos, which must have been based either or
the surreptitious notes of stenographers or on " prompt copies '
dishonestly acquired.

It has become the fashion to say, not without some show o:
justice, that we know next to nothing of Shakespeare's life. We
do not know for certain either when he left Stratford or when he
returned to Stratford from London. We do not know for certair
whether he ever went abroad, ever visited Italy. We do not knou
the name of a single woman whom he loved during all his yean
in London. We do not know for certain to whom his Sonnets arc
addressed. We can see that as he advanced in life his prevailing
mood became gloomier, but we do not know the reason. Later
on, his temper seems to grow more serene, but we cannot tel
why. We can form but tentative conjectures as to the order in
which his works were produced, and can only with the greates
difficulty determine their approximate dates. We do not know
what made him so careless of his fame as he seems to have been
We only know that he himself did not publish his dramatic works,
and that he does not even mention them in his will.

On the other hand, enthusiastic and .indefatigable research ha.s
gradually brought to light a great number of indubitable facts
which furnish us with points of departure and of guidance for ar:
outline of the poet's life. We possess documents, contracts, lega
records; we can cite utterances of contemporaries, allusions t<
works of Shakespeare's and to passages in them, quotations
fierce attacks, outbursts of spite and hatred, touching testimonie;
to his worth as a man and to the lovableness of his nature
evidence of the early recognition of his talent as an actor, of hi:

ROWE'S BIOGRAPHY OF SHAKESPEARE 5

repute as a narrative poet, and of his popularity as a dramatist.
We have, moreover, one or two diaries kept by contemporaries,
and among others the account-book of an old theatrical manager
and pawnbroker, who supplied the players with money and
dresses, and who has carefully dated the production of many
plays.

To these contemporary evidences we must add that of
tradition. In 1662 a clergyman named John Ward, Vicar of
Stratford, took some notes of information gathered from the in
habitants of the district; and in 1693 a Mr. Dowdall recorded
some details which he had learnt from the octogenarian sexton
and verger of Stratford Church. But tradition is mainly repre
sented by Rowe, Shakespeare's first tardy biographer. He refers
in particular to three sources of information. The earliest is jSir
William Davenant, Poet Laureate, who did nothing to discoun-
:enance the rumour which gave him out to be an illegitimate son
}f Shakespeare. His contributions, however, can have reached
Rowe only at second hand, since he died before Rowe was born.
Naturally enough, then, the greater part of what is related on his
mthority proves to be questionable. Rowe's second source of
nformation was Aubrey, an antiquary after the fashion of his
lay, who, half a century after Shakespeare's death, visited Strat-
brd on one of his riding-tours. He wrote numerous short
)iographies, all of which contain gross and demonstrable errors,
so that we can scarcely put implicit faith in the insignificant
mecdotes about Shakespeare preserved in his manuscript of
:68o. Rowe's most important source of information, however,
s Betterton the actor, who, about 1690, made a journey to
Warwickshire for the express purpose of collecting whatever
oral traditions with regard to Shakespeare might linger in the
listrict. His gleanings form the most valuable part of Rowe's
nography; contemporary documents subsequently discovered
lave in several instances lent them curious confirmation.

We owe it, then, to a little group of worthy but by no means
•rilliant men that we are able to sketch the outline of Shake
speare's career. They have preserved for us anecdotes of little
vvorth, even if they are true, while leaving us entirely in the
c ark as to important points in his outward history, and throwing
.ttle or no light upon the course of his inner life.

It is true that we possess in Shakespeare's Sonnets a group of

6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

poems which bring us more directly into touch with his person
ality than any of his other works. But to determine the value
of the Sonnets as autobiographical documents requires not only
historical knowledge but*critical instinct and tact, since it is by
no means self-evident that the poet is, in a literal sense, speaking
in his own name.

II

STRA TFORD—PARENTA GE—BO YHOOD

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was a child of the country. He was
born in Stratford-on-Avon, a little town of fourteen or fifteen
hundred inhabitants, lying in a pleasant and undulating tract of
country, rich in green meadows and trees and leafy hedges, the
natural features of which Shakespeare seems to have had in his
mind's eye when he wrote the descriptions of scenery in A Mid
summer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and A Winter's Tale.
His first and deepest impressions of nature he received from this
scenery; and he associated with it his earliest poetical impres
sions, gathered from the folk-songs of the peasantry, so often
alluded to and reproduced in his plays. The town of Stratford
lies upon the ancient high-road from London to Ireland, which
here crosses the river Avon. To this circumstance it owes its
name (Street-ford). A handsome bridge spanned the river. The
picturesque houses, with their gable-roofs, were either wooden
or frame-built. There were two handsome public buildings, which
still remain : the fine old church close to the river, and the Guild
hall, with its chapel and Grammar School. In the chapel, which
possessed a pleasant peal of bells, there was a set of frescoes
— probably the first and for long the only paintings known to
Shakespeare.

For the rest, Stratford-on-Avon was an insanitary place of
residence. There was no sort of underground drainage, and
street-sweepers and scavengers were unknown. The waste water
from the houses flowed out into badly kept gutters ; the streets
were full of evil-smelling pools, in which pigs and geese freely
disported themselves; and dunghills skirted the highway. The
first thing we learn about Shakespeare's father is that, in April
1552, he was fined twelvepence for having formed a great midden
outside his house in Henley Street — a circumstance which on the

8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

one hand proves that he kept sheep and cattle, and on the other
indicates his scant care for cleanliness, since the common dunghill
lay only a stone's-throw from his house. At the time of his
highest prosperity, in 1558, he, along with some other citizens, is
again fined fourpence for the same misdemeanour.

The matter is not without interest, since it is in all probability
to these defects of sanitation that Shakespeare's early death is to
be ascribed.

Both on his father's and his mother's side, the poet was
descended from yeoman families of Warwickshire. His grand
father, Richard Shakespeare, lived at Snitterfield, where he
rented a small property. Richard's second son, John Shake
speare, removed to Stratford about 1551, and went into business
in Henley Street as a tanner and glover. In the year 1557 his
circumstances were considerably improved by his marriage with
Mary Arden, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a well-to-do
yeoman in the neighbourhood, who had died a few months before.
On his death she had inherited his property of Asbies at Wilme-
cote ; and she had, besides, a reversionary interest in a larger pro
perty at Snitterfield. Asbies was valued at ,£224, and brought in
a rental of £28, or about ^140 of our modern money. The
inventory appended to her father's will gives us a good insight
into the domestic economy of a rich yeoman's family of those
days : a single bed with two mattresses, five sheets, three towels,
&c. Garments of linen they do not seem to have possessed.
The eating utensils were of no value : wooden spoons and wooden
platters. Yet the home of Shakespeare's mother was, according
to the standard of that day, distinctly well-to-do.

His marriage enabled John Shakespeare to extend his busi
ness. He had large transactions in wool, and also dealt, as occa
sion offered, in corn and other commodities. Aubrey's statement
that he was a butcher seems to mean no more than that he him
self fattened and killed the animals whose skins he used in his
trade. But in those days the different occupations in a small
English country town were not at all strictly discriminated ; the
man who produced the raw material would generally work it up
as well.

John Shakespeare gradually rose to an influential position in
the little town in which he had settled. He first (in 1557) became
one of the ale-tasters, sworn to look to the quality of bread and

STRATFORD— PARENTAGE— BOYHOOD 9

beer; in the following year he was one of the four "petty con
stables" of the town. In 1561 he was Chamberlain, in 1565
Alderman, and finally, in 1568, High Bailiff.

William Shakespeare was his parents' third child. Two
sisters, who died in infancy, preceded him. He was baptized
on the 26th of April 1564; we do not know his birthday pre
cisely. Tradition gives it as the 23rd of April ; more probably
it was the 22nd (in the new style the 4th of May), since, if
Shakespeare had died upon his birthday, his epitaph would
doubtless have mentioned the circumstance, and would not have
stated that he died in his fifty-third year \_ALtatis 53].

Neither of Shakespeare's parents possessed any school educa
tion ; neither of them seems to have been able to write his or her
own name. They desired, however, that their eldest son should
not lack the education they themselves had been denied, and
therefore sent the boy to the Free School or Grammar School
of Stratford, where children from the age of seven upwards were
grounded in Latin grammar, learned to construe out of a school-
book called Sentential Puerilcs, and afterwards read Ovid, Virgil,
and Cicero. The school -hours, both in summer and winter,
occupied the whole day, with the necessary intervals for meals
and recreation. An obvious reminiscence of Shakespeare's
schooldays is preserved for us in The Merry Wives of Windsor
(iv. i), where the schoolmaster, Sir Hugh Evans, hears little
William his Hie, Hcec, Hoc, and assures himself of his knowledge
that pulcher means fair, and lapis a stone. It even appears that
his teacher was in fact a Welshman.

The district in which the child grew up was rich in his
torical memories and monuments. Warwick, with its castle,
renowned since the Wars of the Roses, was in the immediate
neighbourhood. It had been the residence, in his day, of the
Earl of Warwick who distinguished himself at the battle of
Shrewsbury and negotiated the marriage of Henry V. The
district was, however, divided during the Wars of the Roses.
Warwick for some time sided with York, Coventry with Lan
caster. With Coventry, too, a town rich in memories of the
period which he was afterwards to summon to life on the stage,
Shakespeare must have been acquainted in his boyhood. It was in
Coventry that the two adversaries who appear in his Richard II.,
Henry Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk, had their famous

io WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

encounter. But in another respect as well Coventry must have
had great attractions for the boy. It was the scene of regular
theatrical representations, which, at first organised by the Church,
afterwards passed into the hands of the guilds. Shakespeare
must doubtless have seen the half-mediaeval religious dramas
sometimes alluded to in his works — plays which placed before the
eyes of the audience Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents,
souls burning in hell, and other startling scenes of a like nature 1
(Henry V., ii. 3 and iii. 3).

Of royal and princely splendour Shakespeare had probably
certain glimpses even in his childhood. When he was eight years
old Elizabeth paid a visit to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, in
the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford — the Sir Thomas
Lucy who was to have such a determining influence upon Shake
speare's career. In any case, he must doubtless have visited the
neighbouring castle of Kenilworth, and seen something of the
great festivities organised by Leicester in Elizabeth's honour,
during her visit to the castle in 1575. We know that the
Shakespeare family possessed a near and influential kinsman in
Leicester's trusted attendant, Edward Arden, who soon after
wards, apparently on account of the strained relations which
arose between the Queen and Leicester after the fetes, incurred
the suspicion or displeasure of his master, and was ultimately
executed.

Nor was it only mediaeval mysteries that the future poet, during
his boyhood, had opportunities of seeing. The town of Stratford
showed a marked taste for secular theatricals. The first travelling
company of players came to Stratford in the year when Shake
speare's father was High Bailiff, and between 1569 and 1587 no
fewer than twenty-four strolling troupes visited the town. The
companies who came most frequently were the Queen's Men and
the servants of Lord Worcester, Lord Leicester, and Lord War
wick. Custom directed that they should first wait upon the High
Bailiff to inform him in what nobleman's service they were en
rolled ; and their first performance took place before the Town
Council alone. A writer named Willis, born in the same year
as Shakespeare, has described how he was present at such a

1 We find reminiscences of these scenes in Hamlet's expression, " He out-herods
Herod," and in the comparison of a flea on Bardolph's nose to a black soul burning
in hell-fire.

STRATFORD— PARENTAGE— BOYHOOD 1 1

representation in the neighbouring town of Gloucester, standing
between his father's knees ; and we can thus picture to ourselves
the way in which the glories of the theatre were for the first time
revealed to the future poet.

As a boy and youth, then, he no doubt had opportunities of
making himself familiar with the bulk of the old English reper
tory, partly composed of such pieces as he afterwards ridicules —
for instance, the Cambyses, whose rant Falstaff parodies — partly
of pieces which subsequently became the foundation of his own
plays, such as The Supposes, which he used in The Taming of
the Shrew, or The Troublesome Raigne of King John, or the
Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which supplied some of the
material for his Henry IV.

Probably Shakespeare, as a boy and youth, was not content
with seeing the performances, but sought out the players in the
different taverns where they took up their quarters, the " Swan,"
the " Crown," or the " Bear."

The school course was generally over when a boy reached his
fourteenth year. It appears that when Shakespeare was at this
age his father removed him from the school, having need of him
in his business. His father's prosperity was by this time on the
wane.

In the year 1578 John Shakespeare mortgaged his wife's
property, Asbies, for a sum of £40, which he seems to have
engaged to repay within two years, though this he himself denied.
In the same year the Town Council agrees that he shall be
required to pay only one-half of a tax (6s. 8d. in all) for the
equipment of soldiers, and absolves him altogether from payment
of a poor-rate levied on the other Aldermen. In the following
year he cannot pay even his half of the pikemen-tax. In 1579
he sold the reversion of a piece of land falling to him on his
mother-in-law's death. In the following year he wanted to pay
off the mortgage on Asbies ; but the mortgagee, a certain Edmund
Lambert, declined to receive the money, for the reason, or under
the pretext, that it had not been tendered within the stipulated
time, and that Shakespeare had, moreover, borrowed other sums
of him. In the course of the consequent lawsuit, John Shake
speare described himself as a person of "small wealthe, and verey
fewe frends and alyance in the countie." The result of this law
suit is unknown, but it seems as though the father, and the son

12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

after him, took it much to heart, and felt that a great injustice
had been done them. In the Induction to The Taming of the
Shrew, Christopher Sly calls himself " Old Sly's son of Burton
Heath." But Barton-on-the-Heath was precisely the place where
lived Edmund Lambert and his son John, who, after his death in
1587, carried on the litigation. And this utterance of the chief
character in the Induction is, significantly enough, one of the few
which Shakespeare added to the Induction to the old play he was
here adapting.

From this time forward John Shakespeare's position goes
from bad to worse. In the year 1586, when his son was pro
bably already in London, his goods are distrained upon, and no
fewer than three warrants are issued for his arrest ; he seems for
a time to have been imprisoned for debt. He is removed from
his position as Alderman because he has not for a long time
attended the meetings at the Guildhall. He probably dared not
put in an appearance for fear of being arrested by his creditors.
He seems to have lost a considerable sum of money by standing
surety for his brother Henry. There was, moreover, a commercial
crisis in Stratford. The cloth and yarn trade, in which most of
the citizens were engaged, had become much less remunerative
than before.

We find evidence of the painful position in which John
Shakespeare remained so late as the year 1592, in Sir Thomas
Lucy's report with reference to the inhabitants of Stratford who
did not obey her Majesty's order that they should attend church
once a month. He is mentioned as one of those who "coom not
to Churche for fear of processe for debtte."

It is probable that the young William, when his father
removed him from the Grammar School, assisted him in his
trade ; and it is not impossible that, as a somewhat dubious
allusion in a contemporary seems to imply, he was for some time
a clerk in an attorney's office. His great powers, at any rate,
doubtless revealed themselves very early ; he must have taken
early to writing verses, and, like most men of genius, must have
ripened early in every respect.

Ill

MARRIAGE— SIR THOMAS LUCY— DEPARTURE
FROM STRATFORD

IN December 1582, being then only eighteen, William Shake
speare married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a well-to-do yeoman,
recently deceased, in a neighbouring hamlet of the same parish.
The marriage of a boy not yet out of his teens, whose father
was in embarrassed circumstances, while he himself had probably
nothing to live on but such scanty wages as he could earn in his
father's service, seems on the face of it somewhat precipitate ; and
the arrangements for it, moreover, were unusually hurried. In a
document dated November 28, 1582, two friends of the Hathaway
family give a bond to the Bishop of Worcester's Court, declaring,
under relatively heavy penalties, that there is no legal impediment
to the solemnisation of the marriage after one publication of the
banns, instead of the statutory three. So far as we can gather, it
was the bride's family that hurried on the marriage, while the
bridegroom's held back, and perhaps even opposed it. This haste
is the less surprising when we find that the first child, a daughter
named Susanna, was born in May 1583, only five months and
three weeks after the wedding. It is probable, however, that a
formal betrothal, which at that time was regarded as the essential
part of the contract, had preceded the marriage.

In 1585 twins were born, a girl, Judith, and a boy, Hamnet
(the name is also written Hamlet), no doubt called after a friend
of the family, Hamnet Sadler, a baker in Stratford, who is
mentioned in Shakespeare's will. This son died at the age of
eleven.

It was probably soon after the birth of the twins that Shake
speare was forced to quit Stratford. According to Rowe he had
" fallen into ill company," and taken part in more than one deer-
stealing raid upon Sir Thomas Lucy's park at Charlecote. " For

14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, some
what too severely, and in order to revenge that ill-usage he made
a ballad upon him. ... 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 for
some time and shelter himself in London." Rowe believed this
ballad to be lost, but what purports to be the first verse of it has
been preserved by Oldys, on the authority of a very old man
who lived in the neighbourhood of Stratford. It may possibly be
genuine. The coincidence between it and an unquestionable gibe
at Sir Thomas Lucy in The Merry Wives of Windsor renders it
probable that it has been more or less correctly remembered.1
Although poaching was at that time regarded as a comparatively
innocent and pardonable misdemeanour of youth, to which the
Oxford students, for example, were for many generations greatly
addicted, yet Sir Thomas Lucy, who seems to have newly and
not over-plentifully stocked his park, deeply resented the depreda
tions of young Stratford. He was, it would appear, no favourite
in the town. He never, like the other landowners of the district,
requited with a present of game the offerings of salt and sugar
which, as we learn from the town accounts, the burgesses were in
the habit of sending him. Shakespeare's misdeeds were not at
that time punishable by law; but, as a great landowner and justice
of the peace, Sir Thomas had the young fellow in his power, and
there is every probability in favour of the tradition, preserved by
the Rev. Richard Davies, who died in 1708, that he "had him oft
whipt and sometimes imprisoned." It is confirmed by the sub
stantial correctness of Davies' further statement : " His reveng
was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate [Shallow], . . . that
in allusion to his name bore three louses rampant for his arms."
We find, in fact, that in the opening scene of The Merry Wives,
Justice Shallow, who accuses Falstaff of having shot his deer,

1 It runs : —

" A parliament member, a justice of peace,
At home a poor scare-crow, at London an asse ;
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it ;
He thinkes himself greatej
Yet an asse in his state

We allowe by his eares but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,
Sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befalle it.

DEPARTURE EROM STRATFORD 15

has, according to Slander's account, a dozen white luces (pikes)
in his coat-of-arms, which, in the mouth of the Welshman, Sir
Hugh Evans, become a dozen white louses — the word-play being
exactly the same as that in the ballad. Three luces argent were
the cognisance of the Lucy family.

The attempt to cast doubt upon this old tradition of Shake
speare's poaching exploits becomes -doubly unreasonable in face
of the fact that precisely in 1585 Sir Thomas Lucy spoke in
Parliament in favour of more stringent game-laws.

The essential point, however, is simply this, that at about the
age of twenty-one Shakespeare leaves his native town, not to
return to it permanently until his life's course is nearly run.
Even if he had not been forced to bid it farewell, the impulse to
develop his talents and energies must ere long have driven him
forth. Young and inexperienced as he was, at all events, he had
now to betake himself to the capital to seek his fortune.

Whether he left any great happiness behind him we cannot
tell ; but it is scarcely probable. There is nothing to show that in
the peasant girl, almost eight years older than himself, whom he
married at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare found the woman
who, even for a few years, could fill his life. Everything, indeed,
points in the opposite direction. She and the children remained
behind in Stratford, and he saw her only when he revisited his
native place, as he did at long intervals, probably, at first, but
afterwards annually. Tradition and the internal evidence of his
writings prove that he lived, in London, the free Bohemian life
of an actor and playwright. We know, too, that he was soon
plunged in the business cares of a theatrical manager and part-
proprietor. The woman's part in this life was not played by
Anne Hathaway. On the other hand, there can be no doubt
that Shakespeare never for a moment lost sight of Stratford, and
that he had no sooner made a footing for himself in London than
he set to work with the definite aim of acquiring land and property
in the town from which he had gone forth penniless and humi
liated. His father should hold up his head again, and the family
honour be re-established.

IV

LONDON— BUILDINGS, COSTUMES, MANNERS

So the young man rode from Stratford to London. He pro
bably, according to the custom of the poorer travellers of that
time, sold his horse on his arrival at Smithfield ; and, as Halli-
well- Phillips ingeniously suggests, he may have sold it to James
Burbage, who kept a livery stable in the neighbourhood. It may
have been this man, the father of Richard Burbage, afterwards
Shakespeare's most famous fellow-actor, who employed Shake
speare to take charge of the horses which his customers of the
Smithfield district hired to ride to the play. James Burbage
had built, and now owned, the first playhouse erected in London
(1576), known as The Theatre ; and a well-known tradition,
which can be traced to Sir William Davenant, relates that Shake
speare was driven by dire necessity to hang about the doors of the
theatre and hold the horses of those who had ridden to the play.
The district was a remote and disreputable one, and swarmed
with horse-thieves. Shakespeare won such favour as a horse-
holder, and was in such general demand, that he had to engage
boys as assistants, who announced themselves as " Shakespeare's
boys," a style and title, it is said, which long clung to them. A
fact which speaks in favour of this much-ridiculed legend is that,
at the time to which it can be traced back, well on in the seven
teenth century, the practice of riding to the theatres had entirely
fallen into disuse. People then went to the play by water.

A Stratford tradition represents that Shakespeare first entered
the theatre in the character of " servitor " to the actors, and
Malone reports " a stage tradition that his first office in the theatre
was that of prompter's attendant," whose business was to give
the players notice of the time for their entrance. It is evident,
however, that he soon rose above these menial stations.

The London to which Shakespeare came was a town of about

16

STREETS OF LONDON 17

300,000 inhabitants. Its main streets had quite recently been
paved, but were not yet lighted ; it was surrounded with trenches,
walls, and gates ; it had high-gabled, red-roofed, two-story wooden
houses, distinguished by means of projecting signs, from which
they took their names — houses in which benches did duty for
chairs, and the floors were carpeted with rushes. The streets
were usually thronged, not with wheel-traffic, for the first carriage
was imported into England in this very reign, but with people on
foot, on horseback, or in litters ; while the Thames, still blue and
clear, in spite of the already large consumption of coal, was alive
with thousands of boats threading their way, amid the watermen's
shrill cries of " Eastward hoe ! " or " Westward hoe ! " through
bevies of swans which put forth from, and returned to, the green
meadows and beautiful gardens bordering the steam.

There was as yet only one bridge over the Thames, the mighty
London Bridge, situated not far from that which now bears the
name. It was broad, and lined with buildings ; while on the
tall gate-towers heads which had fallen on the block were almost
always displayed. In its neighbourhood lay Eastcheap, the street
in which stood FalstafFs tavern.

The central points of London were at that time the newly
erected Exchange and St. Paul's Church, which was regarded

fe not only as the Cathedral of the city, but as a meeting-place and
promenade for idlers, a sort of club where the news of the day
was to be heard, a hiring-fair for servants, and a sanctuary for
debtors, who were there secure from arrest. The streets, still

\ full of the many-coloured life of the Renaissance, rang with the
cries of 'prentices inviting custom and hawkers proclaiming their
wares ; while through them passed many a procession, civil, eccle-

l siastical, or military, bridal companies, pageants, and troops of

\ crossbow-men and men-at-arms.

Elizabeth might be met in the streets, driving in her huge

{. State carriage, when she did not prefer to sail on the Thames in

|. her magnificent gondola, followed by a crowd of gaily decorated
boats.

In the City itself no theatres were tolerated. The civic autho
rities regarded them with an unfriendly eye, and had banished
them to the outskirts and across the Thames, together with the
rough amusements with which they had to compete : cock-fighting
and bear-baiting with dogs.

VOL I. B

1 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The handsome, parti-coloured, extravagant costumes of the
period are well known. The puffed sleeves of the men, the
women's stiff ruffs, and the fantastic shapes of their hooped skirts,
are still to be seen in stage presentations of plays of the time.
The Queen and her Court set the example of great and unreason
able luxury with respect to the number and material of costumes.
The ladies rouged their faces, and often dyed their hair. Auburn,
as the Queen's colour, was the most fashionable. The conve
niences of daily life were very meagre. Only of late had fireplaces
begun to be substituted for the open hearths. Only of late had
proper bedsteads come into general use ; when Shakespeare's
well-to-do grandfather, Richard Arden, made his will, in the year
1556, there was only one bedstead in the house where he lived
with his seven daughters. People slept on straw mattresses, with
a billet of wood under their heads and a fur rug over them. The
only decoration of the rooms of the wealthier classes was the
tapestry on the walls, behind which people so often conceal them
selves in Shakespeare's plays.

The dinner-hour was at that time eleven in the morning, and
it was reckoned fashionable to dine early. Those who could
afford it ate rich and heavy dishes ; the repasts would often last
an inordinate time, and no regard whatever was paid to the minor
decencies of life. Domestic utensils were very mean. So late as
1592, wooden trenchers, wooden platters, and wooden spoons
were in common use. It was just about this time that tin and silver
began to supplant wood. Table-knives had been in general use
since about 1563; but forks were still unknown in Shakespeare's
time — fingers supplied their place. In a description of five months'
travels on the Continent, published by Coryat in 1611, he tells
how surprised he was to find the use of forks quite common in
Italy : —

" I obserued a custome in all those Italian Cities and Townes
through which I passed, that is not vsed in any other country that I
saw in my trauels, neither doe I thinke that any other nation of Christen-
dome doth vse it, but only Italy. The Italian and also most strangers
that are commorant in Italy doe alwaies at their meales vse a little
forke when they cut their meate. For while with their knife which
they hold in one hand they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten
their forke which they hold in their other hand vpon the same dish,
so that whatsoeuer he be that sitting in the company of any others at

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 19

meale, should vnaduisedly touch the dish of meate with his fingers
from which all at the table doe cut, he will giue occasion of offence
vnto the company, as hauing transgressed the lawes of good manners,
in so much that for his error he shall be at the least brow-beaten, if
not reprehended in wordes. . . . The reason of this their curiosity
is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to haue his dish
touched with fingers, seing all men's fingers are not alike cleane." x

We see, too, that Coryat was the first to introduce the new
appliance into his native land. He tells us that he thought it
best to imitate the Italian fashion not only in Italy and Germany,
but " often in England " after his return ; and he relates how a
learned and jocular gentleman of his acquaintance rallied him on
that account and called him " Furcifer." In one of Ben Jonson's
plays, The Devil is an Ass, dating from 1614, the use of forks is
mentioned as lately imported from Italy, in order to save napkins.
We must conceive, then, that Shakespeare was as unfamiliar with
the use of the fork as a Bedouin Arab of to-day.

He does not seem to have smoked. Tobacco is never men
tioned in his works, although the people of his day gathered in
tobacco-shops where instruction was given in the new art of
smoking, and although the gallants actually smoked as they sat
on the stage of the theatre.

1 Coryafs Crudities, ed. 1776, vol. i. p. 1 06.

V

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS-
ENGLAND'S GROWING GREATNESS

THE period of Shakespeare's arrival in London was momentous
both in politics and religion. It is the period of England's de
velopment into a great Protestant power. Under Bloody Mary,
the wife of Philip II. of Spain, the government had been Spanish-
Catholic ; the persecutions directed against heresy brought many
victims, and among them some of the most distinguished men in
England, to the scaffold, and even to the stake. Spain made a
cat's-paw of England in her contest with France, and reaped all
the benefit of the alliance, while England paid the penalty.
Calais, her last foothold on the Continent, was lost.

With Elizabeth, Protestantism ascended the throne and be
came a power in the world. She rejected Philip's courtship ; she
knew how unpopular the Spanish marriage had made her sister.
In the struggle with the Papal power she had the Parliament on
ner side. Parliament had at once recognised her as Queen by the
law of God and the country, whilst the Pope, on her accession,
denied her right to the throne. The Catholic world took his part
against her; first France, then Spain. England supported Pro
testant Scotland against its Catholic Queen and her Scottish-
French army, and the Reformation triumphed in Scotland.
Afterwards, when Mary Stuart had ceased to rule over Scotland
and taken refuge in England, in the hope of there finding help,
it was no longer France but Philip of Spain who stood by her.
He saw his despotism in the Netherlands threatened by the
victory of Protestantism in England.

Political interest led Elizabeth's Government to throw Mary
into prison. The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth, absolved her
subjects from their oath of allegiance, and declared her a usurper
in her own kingdom. Whoever should obey her commands was

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS 21

excommunicated along with her, and for twenty years on end one
Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth treads on another's heels,
Mary Stuart being involved in almost all of them.

In 1585 Elizabeth opened the war with Spain by sending her
fleet to the Netherlands, with her favourite, Leicester, in command
of the troops. In the beginning of the following year, Francis
Drake, who in 1577-80 had for the first time circumnavigated the
world, surprised and took San Domingo and Carthagena. The
ship in which he had achieved his great voyage lay at anchor
in the Thames as a memorial of the feat; it was often visited
by Londoners, and no doubt by Shakespeare among them.

In the years immediately following, the springtide of the
national spirit burst into full bloom. Let us try to picture
to ourselves the impression it must have made upon Shake
speare in the year 1587. On the 8th of February 1587 Mary
Stuart was executed at Fotheringay, and the breach between
England and the Catholic world was thus made irreparable. On
the 1 6th of February, England's noblest knight and the flower
of her chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney, the hero of Zutphen, and the
chief of the Anglo-Italian school of poets, was buried in St. Paul's
Cathedral, with a pomp which gave to the event the character of
a national solemnity. Sidney was an ideal representative of the
aristocracy of the day. He possessed the widest humanistic
culture, had studied Aristotle and Plato no less than geometry
and astronomy, had travelled and seen the world, had read and
thought and written, and was not only a scholar but a soldier to
boot. As a cavalry officer he had saved the English army at
Gravelines, and he had been the friend and patron of Giordano
Bruno, the freest thinker of his time. The Queen herself was
present at his funeral, and so, no doubt, was Shakespeare.

In the following year Spain fitted out her great Armada and
despatched it against England. As regards the size of the ships
and the number of the troops they carried, it was the largest fleet
; that had ever been seen in European waters. And in the Nether
lands, at Antwerp and Dunkerque, transports were in readiness
for the conveyance of a second vast army to complete the de
li struction of England. But England was equal to the occasion.
Elizabeth's Government demanded fifteen ships of the city of
\ London ; it fitted out thirty, besides raising a land force of 30,000
Imen and lending the Government £52,000 in ready money.

22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Spanish fleet numbered one hundred and thirty huge
galleons, the English only sixty sail, of lighter and less cumbrous
build. The young English noblemen competed for the privilege
of serving in it. The great Armada was ill designed for defying
wind and weather in the English Channel. It manoeuvred
awkwardly, and, in the first encounters, proved itself powerless
against the lighter ships of the English. A couple of fire-ships
were sufficient to throw it into disorder; a season of storms
set in, and the greater number of its galleons were swept to
destruction.

The greatest Power in the world of that day had broken
down in its attempt to crush the growing might of England, and
the whole nation revelled in the exultant sense of victory.

VI

SHAKESPEARE AS ACTOR AND RETOUCHER OF
OLD PLAYS— GREENE'S ATTACK

BETWEEN 1586 and 1592 we lose all trace of Shakespeare. We
know only that he must have been an active member of a company
of players. It is not proved that he ever belonged to any other
company than the Earl of Leicester's, which owned the Black-
friars, and afterwards the Globe, theatre. It is proved by several
passages in contemporary writings that, partly as actor, partly as
adapter of older plays for the use of the theatre, he had, at the
age of twenty-eight, made a certain name for himself, and had
therefore become the object of envy and hatred.

A passage in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again^ re
ferring to a poet whose Muse " doth like himself heroically sound, "
may with some probability, though not with certainty, be applied
to Shakespeare. The theory is supported by the fact that the
word " gentle " is here, as so often in after-life, attached to his
personality. Against it we must place the circumstance that
the poem, although not published till 1594, seems to have been
composed as early as 1591, when Shakespeare's muse was as yet
scarcely heroic, and that Drayton, who had written under the
pseudonym of Rowland, may have been the poet alluded to.

The first indubitable allusion to Shakespeare is of a quite dif
ferent nature. It occurs in a pamphlet written on his deathbed
by the dramatist Robert Greene, entitled A Groat's Worth of
Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (August 1592). In it
the utterly degraded and penniless poet calls upon his friends,
Marlowe, Lodge or Nash, and Peele (without mentioning their
names), to give up their vicious life, their blasphemy, and their
"getting many enemies by bitter words," holding himself up as
a deterrent example ; for he died, after a reckless life, of an ill
ness said to have been induced by immoderate eating, and in such

24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

misery that he had to borrow money of his landlord, a poor shoe
maker, while his landlord's wife was the sole attendant of his
dying hours. He was so poor that his clothes had to be sold
to procure him food. He sent his wife these lines : —

" Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules
rest, that thou wilte see this man paide ; for if hee and his wife had
not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.

"ROBERT GREENE."

The passage in which he warns his friends and fellow-poets
against the ingratitude of the players runs as follows : —

" Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart crow, beautified with
our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt 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 fac totum, is in his owne conceit
the only Shake-scene in a countrie."

The allusion to Shakespeare's name is unequivocal, and the
words about the tiger's heart point to the outburst, " Oh Tyger's
hart wrapt in a serpents hide ! " which is found in two places :
first in the play called The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of
Yorke, and the Death of the good King Henrie the Sixt, and
then (with " womans " substituted for " serpents "), in the third
part of King Henry VI., founded on the True Tragedie, and
attributed to Shakespeare. It is preposterous to interpret this
passage as an attack upon Shakespeare in his quality as an actor ;
Greene's words, beyond all doubt, convey an accusation of literary
dishonesty. Everything points to the belief that Greene and
Marlowe had collaborated in the older play, and that the former
saw with disgust the success achieved by Shakespeare's adapta
tion of their text.

But that Shakespeare was already highly respected, and that
the attack aroused general indignation, is proved by the apology
put forth in December 1592 by Henry Chettle, who had published
Greene's pamphlet. In the preface to his Kind-harfs Dreame he
expressly deplores his indiscretion with regard to Shakespeare: —

" I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because
my selfe haue scene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exelent in
the qualitie he professes. Besides, diuers of worship haue reported his
vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace
in writing, that aprooues his Art."

GREENE'S ATTACK 25

We see, then, that the company to which Shakespeare had
attached himself, and in which he had already attracted notice as
a promising poet, employed him to revise and furbish up the older
pieces of their repertory. The theatrical announcements of the
period would show us, even if we had no other evidence, that it
was a constant practice to recast old plays, in order to heighten
their powers of attraction. It is announced, for instance, that
such-and-such a play will be acted as it was last presented before
her Majesty, or before this or that nobleman. Poets sold their
works outright to the theatre for such sums as five or ten pounds,
or for a share in the receipts. As the interests of the theatre
demanded that plays should not be printed, in order that rival
companies might not obtain possession of them, they remained in
manuscript (unless pirated), and the players could accordingly do
what they pleased with the text.

None the less, of course, was the older poet apt to resent the
re-touches made by the younger, as we see from this outburst
of Greene's, and probably, too, from Ben Jonson's epigram, On
Poet-Ape, even though this cannot, with any show of reason, be
applied to Shakespeare.

In the view of the time, theatrical productions as a whole
were not classed as literature. It was regarded as dishonourable
for a man to sell his work first to a theatre and then to a book
seller, and Thomas Hey wood declares, as late as 1630 (in the
preface to his Lucretia), that he has never been guilty of this
misdemeanour. We know, too, how much ridicule Ben Jonson
incurred when, first among English poets, he in 1616 published
his plays in a folio volume.

On the other hand, we see that not only Shakespeare's genius,
but his personal amiability, the loftiness and charm of his nature,
disarmed even those who, for one reason or another, had spoken
disparagingly of his activity. As Chettle, after printing Greene's
attack, hastened to make public apology, so also Ben Jonson,
to whose ill-will and cutting allusions Shakespeare made no
retort,1 became, in spite of an unconquerable jealousy, his
true friend and admirer, and after his death spoke of him
warmly in prose, and with enthusiasm in verse, in the noble
eulogy prefixed to the First Folio. His prose remarks upon

1 He is said to have procured the production of Jonson's first play.

26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare's character are introduced by a critical observa
tion: —

" I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour
to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never
blotted out a line. My answer hath been, Would he had blotted a
thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told
posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance
to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted ; and to justify
mine own candour : for I loved the man, and do honour his memory,
on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and
of an open and full nature ; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions,
and gentle expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped : Sufflaminandus eraty
as Augustus said of Haterius."

VII

THE "HENRY VI." TRILOGY

ONE might expect that it would be with the early plays in which
Shakespeare only collaborated as with those Italian pictures of the
best period of the Renaissance, in which the connoisseur identifies
(for example) an angel's head by Leonardo in a Crucifixion of
Andrea del Verrocchio's. The work of the pupil stands out sharp
and clear, with pure contours, a picture within the picture, quite
at odds with its style and spirit, but impressing us as a promise
for the future. As a matter of fact, however, there is no analogy
between the two cases.

A mystery hangs over the Henry VI. trilogy which neither
Greene's venomous attack nor Chettle's apology enables us to
clear up.

Of all the works attributed to Shakespeare, this is certainly
the one whose origin affords most food for speculation. The
inclusion of the three plays in the First Folio shows clearly that
his comrades, who had full knowledge of the facts, regarded them
as his literary property. That the two earlier plays which are
preserved, the First Part of the Contention and the True Tragedie
(answering to the second and third parts of Henry VI.) t cannot
be entirely Shakespeare's work is evidenced both by the imprint
of the anonymous quartos and by the company which is stated
to have produced them ; for none of Shakespeare's genuine plays
was published by this publisher or played by this company. It
is proved quite clearly, too, by internal evidence, by the free and
unrhymed versification of these plays. At the period from which
they date, Shakespeare was still extremely addicted to the use of
rhyme in his dramatic writing.

Nevertheless, the great majority of German Shakespeare
students, and some English as well, are of opinion that the older

28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

plays are entirely Shakespeare's, either his first drafts or, as is
more commonly maintained, stolen texts carelessly noted do\.*i..

Some English scholars, such as Malone and Dyce, go to the
opposite extreme, and regard the second and third parts of Henry
VI. as the work of another poet. The majority of English
students look upon these plays as the result of Shakespeare's
retouching of another man's, or rather other men's, work.

The affair is so complicated that none of these hypotheses is
quite satisfactory.

Though there are doubtless in the older plays portions un
worthy of Shakespeare, and more like the handiwork of Greene,
while others strongly suggest Marlowe, both in matter, style, and
versification, there are also passages in them which cannot be by
any one else than Shakespeare. And while most of the alterations
and additions which are found in the second and third parts of
Henry VL bear the mark of unmistakable superiority, and are
Shakespearian in spirit no less than in style and versification,
there are at the same time others which are decidedly un-Shake-
spearian and can almost certainly be attributed to Marlowe. He
must, then, have collaborated with Shakespeare in the adaptation,
unless we suppose that his original text was carelessly printed
in the earlier quartos, and that it here reappears, in the Shake
spearian Henry VI., corrected and completed in accordance with
his manuscript.

I agree with Miss Lee, the writer of the leading treatise1 on
these plays, and with the commentator in the Irving Edition, in
holding that Shakespeare was not responsible for all the altera
tions in the definitive text. There are several which I cannot
possibly believe to be his.

In the old quartos there appears not a line in any foreign
language. But in the Shakespearian plays we find lines and
exclamations in Latin scattered here and there, along with one in
French.2 If the early quartos are founded on a text taken down
by ear, we can readily understand that the foreign expressions,
not being understood, should be omitted. Such foreign sentences
are extremely frequent in Marlowe, as in Kyd and the other
older dramatists ; they appear in season and out of season, but

1 New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1875-76, pp. 219-303.

2 "Tantsene animis ccelestibus irse ! — Medice, te ipsum ! — Gelidus timer occupat
artus — La fin couronne les oeuvres — Di faciant ! laudis summa sit ista tuse."

THE "HENRY VI." TRILOGY 29

always in irreconcilable conflict with the sounder taste of our
time. Marlowe would even suffer a dying man to break out in a
French or Latin phrase as he gave up the ghost, and this occurs
here in two places (at Clifford's death and Rutland's). Shake
speare, who never bedizens his work with un-English phrases,
would certainly not place them in the mouths of dying men, and
least of all foist them upon an earlier purely English text.

Other additions also seem only to have restored the older form
of the plays — those, to wit, which really add nothing new, but
only elaborate, sometimes more copiously than is necessary or
tasteful, a thought already clearly indicated. The original omis
sion in such instances appears almost certainly to have been
dictated by considerations of convenience in acting. One example
is Queen Margaret's long speech in Part II., Act iii. 2, which is
new with the exception of the first fourteen lines.

But there is another class of additions and alterations which
surprises us by being unmistakably in Marlowe's style. If these
additions are really by Shakespeare, he must have been under
the influence of Marlowe to a quite extraordinary degree. Swin
burne has pointed out how entirely the verses which open the
fourth act of the Second Part are Marlowesque in rhythm, ima
gination, and choice of W9rds ; but characteristic as are these
lines —

" And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night,"

they are by no means the only additions which seem to point to
Marlowe. We feel his presence particularly in the additions to
Iden's speeches at the end of the fourth act, in such lines as —

" Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser ;
Thy hand is but a finger to my fist ;
Thy leg a stick, compared with this truncheon ; "

and especially in the concluding speech : —

" Die, damned wretch, the curse of her that bare thee !
And as I thrust thy body in with my sword,
So wish I, I might thrust thy soul to hell.
Hence will I drag thee headlong by the heels
Unto a dunghill, which shall be thy grave,
And there cut off thy most ungracious head."

30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

There is Marlowesque emphasis in this wildness and ferocity,
which reappears, in conjunction with Marlowesque learning, in
Young Clifford's lines in the last act : —

" Meet I an infant of the house of York,
Into as many gobbets will I cut it,
As wild Medea young Absyrtus did :
In cruelty will I seek out my fame " —

and in those which, in Part III., Act iv. 2, are placed in the
mouth of Warwick : —

" Our scouts have found the adventure very easy :
That as Ulysses, and stout Diomede,
With sleight and manhood stole to Rhesus' tents,
And brought from thence the Thracian fatal steeds ;
So we, well cover'd with the night's black mantle,
At unawares may beat down Edward's guard,
And seize himself."

And as in the additions there are passages the whole style of
which belongs to Marlowe, or bears the strongest traces of his
influence, so also there are passages in the earlier text which in
every respect recall the manner of Shakespeare. For example,
in Part II., Act iii. 2, Warwick's speech : —

" Who finds the heifer dead, and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter ? "

or Suffolk's to Margaret : —

" If I depart from thee, I cannot live;

And in thy sight to die, what were it else,

But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap ?

Here could I breathe my soul into the air,

As mild and gentle as the cradle-babe,
* Dying with mother's dug between its lips."

Most Shakespearian, too, is the manner in which, in Part III.,
Act ii. I, York's two sons are made to draw their characters,
each in a single line, when they receive the tidings of their
father's death :—

" Edward. O, speak no more ! for I have heard too much.
Richard. Say, how he died, for I will hear it all."

THE "HENRY VI." TRILOGY 31

Again, we seem to hear the voice of Shakespeare when Mar
garet, after they have murdered her son before her eyes, bursts
forth (Part III., Act v. 5) :—

" You have no children, butchers ! if you had
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse."

This passage anticipates, as it were, a celebrated speech in
Macbeth. Most remarkable of all, however, are the Cade scenes
in the Second Part. I cannot persuade myself that these were
not from the very first the work of Shakespeare. It is evident
that they cannot proceed from the pen of Marlowe. An attempt
has been made to attribute them to Greene, on the ground that
there are other folk-scenes in his works which display a similar
strain of humour. But the difference is enormous. It is true
that the text here follows the chronicle with extraordinary fidelity;
but it was precisely in this ingenious adaptation of material that
Shakespeare always showed his strength. And these scenes an
swer so completely to all the other folk-scenes in Shakespeare,
and are so obviously the outcome of the habit of political thought
which runs through his whole life, becoming ever more and more
pronounced, that we cannot possibly accept them as showing only
the trivial alterations and retouches which elsewhere distinguish
his text from the older version.

These admissions made, however, there is on the whole no
difficulty in distinguishing the work of other hands in the old
texts. We can enjoy, point by point, not only Shakespeare's
superiority, but his peculiar style, as we here find it in the very
process of development ; and we can study his whole method of
work in the text which he ultimately produces.

We have here an almost unique opportunity of observing him
in the character of a critical artist. We see what improvements
he makes by a trivial retouch, or a mere rearrangement of words.
Thus, when Gloucester says of his wife (Part. II., Act ii. 4) —

" Uneath may she endure the flinty streets,
To tread them with her tender-feeling feet,"

all his sympathy speaks in these words. In the old text it is she
who says this of herself. In York's great soliloquy in the first
act, beginning " Anjou and Maine are given to the French," the
first twenty-four lines are Shakespeare's ; the rest belong to the

32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

old text. From the second "Anjou and Maine" onwards, the
verse is conventional and monotonous ; the meaning ends with
the end of each line, and a pause, as it were, ensues ; whereas
the verse of the opening passage is full of dramatic movement,
life, and fire.

Again, if we turn to York's soliloquy in the third act (sc. i) —

" Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,"

and compare it in the two texts, we find their metrical differences
so marked that, as Miss Lee has happily put it, the critic can no
more doubt that the first version belongs to an earlier stage in the
development of dramatic poetry, than the geologist can doubt that
a stratum which contains simpler organisms indicates an earlier
stage of the earth's development than one containing higher forms
of organic life. There are portions of the Second Part which no
one can believe that Shakespeare wrote, such as the old-fashioned
fooling with Simpcox, which is quite in the manner of Greene.
There are others which, without being unworthy of Shakespeare,
not only indicate Marlowe in their general style, but are now
and then mere variations of verses known to be his. Such, for
example, is Margaret's line in Part III., Act i. : —

" Stern Faulconbridge commands the narrow seas,"
which clearly echoes the line in Marlowe's Edward II. : —
" The haughty Dane commands the narrow street."

What interests us most, perhaps, is the relation between Shake
speare and his predecessor with respect to the character of
Gloucester. It cannot be denied or doubted that this character,
the Richard III. of after-days, is completely outlined in the earlier
text ; so that in reality Shakespeare's own tragedy of Richard III.,
written so much later, is still quite Marlowesque in the funda
mental conception of its protagonist. Gloucester's two great
soliloquies in the third part of Henry VI. are especially instruc
tive to study. In the first (iii. 2) the keynote of the passion is
indeed struck by Marlowe, but all the finest passages are Shake
speare's. Take, for example, the following : —

" Why then, I do but dream on sovereignty ;
Like one that stands upon a promontory,

THE "HENRY VI." TRILOGY 33

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye ;

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying — he'll lade it dry to have his way :

So do I wish the crown, being so far off,

And so I chide the means that keep me from it ;

And so I say — I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities."

The last soliloquy (v. 6), on the other hand, belongs entirely
to the old play. A thoroughly Marlowesque turn of phrase meets
us at the very beginning : —

" See, how my sword weeps for the poor king's death."

Shakespeare has here left the powerful and admirable text
untouched, except for the deletion of a single superfluous and
weakening verse, "I had no father, I am like no father/' which
is followed by the profoundest and most remarkable lines in the
play :—

" I have no brother, I am like no brother ;
And this word love, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me : I am myself alone."

VOL. I.

VIII

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND HIS LIFE-WORK-
TITUS ANDRONICUS

THE man who was to be Shakespeare's first master in the drama
— a master whose genius he did not at the outset fully under
stand — was born two months before him. Christopher (Kit)
Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, was a founda
tion scholar at the King's School of his native town; matricu
lated at Cambridge in 1580; took the degree of B.A. in 1583,
and of M.A. at the age of twenty-three, after he had left the
University; appeared in London (so we gather from an old ballad)
as an actor at the Curtain Theatre; had the misfortune to break
his leg upon the stage ; was no doubt on that account compelled
to give up acting; and seems to have written his first dramatic
work, Tamburlaine the Great, at latest in 1587. His development
was much quicker than Shakespeare's, he attained to comparative
maturity much earlier, and his culture was more systematic. Not
for nothing had he gone through the classical curriculum; the
influence of Seneca, the poet and rhetorician through whom
English tragedy comes into relation with the antique, is clearly
recognisable in him, no less than in his predecessors, the authors
of Gorboduc and Tancred and Gismunda (the former composed
by two, the latter by five poets in collaboration) ; only that the
construction of these plays, with their monologues and their
chorus, is directly imitated from Seneca, while the more inde
pendent Marlowe is influenced only in his diction and choice of
material.

In him the two streams begin to unite which have their
sources in the Biblical dramas of the Middle Ages and the later
allegorical folk-plays on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in
the Latin plays of antiquity. But he entirely lacks the comic
vein which we find in the first English imitations of Plautus and

34

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 35

Terence — in Ralph Roister Doister and in Gammer Gurtoris
Needle, acted, respectively, in the middle of the century and in
the middle of the sixties, by Eton schoolboys and Cambridge
students.

Kit Marlowe is the creator of English tragedy. He it was
who established on the public stage the use of the unrhymed
iambic pentameter as the medium of English drama. He did not
invent English blank verse — the Earl of Surrey (who died in
1547) had used it in his translation of the ^Lneid, and it had been
employed in the old play of Gorboduc and others which had been
performed at court. But Marlowe was the first to address the
great public in this measure, and he did so, as appears from the
prologue to Tamburlaine, in express contempt for "the jigging
veins of rhyming mother-wits " and " such conceits as clown-
age keeps in pay," seeking deliberately for tragic emphasis
and "high astounding terms" in which to express the rage of
Tamburlaine.

Before his day, rhymed couplets of long-drawn fourteen-
syllable verse had been common in drama, and the monotony of
these rhymes naturally hampered the dramatic life of the plays.
Shakespeare does not seem at first to have appreciated Marlowe's
reform, or quite to have understood the importance of this re
jection of rhyme in dramatic writing. Little by little he came
fully to realise it. In one of his first plays, Love's Labour's Lost,
there are nearly twice as many rhymed as unrhymed verses,
more than a thousand in all; in his latest works rhyme has
disappeared. There are only two rhymes in The Tempest, and
in A Winters Tale none at all.

Similarly, in his first plays (like Victor Hugo in his first
Odes), Shakespeare feels himself bound to make the sense end
with the end of the verse ; as time goes on, he gradually learns
an ever freer movement. In Love's Labour's Lost there are
eighteen end-stopped verses (in which the meaning ends with
the line) for every one in which the sense runs on ; in Cymbeline
and A Winter's Tale they are only about two to one. This
gradual development affords one method of determining the date
of production of otherwise undated plays.

Marlowe seems to have led a wild life in London, and to have
been entirely lacking in the commonplace virtues. He is said to
have indulged in a perpetual round of dissipations, to have been

3 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

dressed to-day in silk, to-morrow in rags, and to have lived in
audacious defiance of society and the Church. Certain it is that
he was killed in a brawl when only twenty-nine years old. He
is said to have found a rival in company with his mistress, and
to have drawn his dagger to stab him ; but the other, a certain
Francis Archer, wrested the dagger from his grasp, and thrust it
through his eye into his brain. It is further related of him that
he was an ardent and aggressive atheist, who called Moses a
juggler and said that Christ deserved death more than Barabbas.
These reports are probable enough. On the other hand, the
assertion that he wrote books against the Trinity and uttered
blasphemies with his latest breath, is evidently inspired by
Puritan hatred for the theatre and everything concerned with it.
The sole authority for these fables is Beard's Theatre of God's
Judgments (1597), the work of a clergyman, a fanatical Puritan,
which appeared six years after Marlowe's death.

There is no doubt that Marlowe led an extremely irregular
life, but the legend of his debaucheries must be much exaggerated,
if only from the fact that, though he was cut off before his thirtieth
year, he has yet left behind him so large and puissant a body of
work. The legend that he passed his last hours in blaspheming
God is rendered doubly improbable by Chapman's express state
ment that it was in compliance with Marlowe's dying request that
he continued his friend's paraphrase of Hero and Leander. The
passionate, defiant youth, surcharged with genius, was fair game
for the bigots and Pharisees, who found it only too easy to
besmirch his memory.

It is evident that Marlowe's gorgeous and violent style, espe
cially as it bursts forth in his earlier plays, made a profound
impression upon the youthful Shakespeare. After Marlowe's
death, Shakespeare made a kindly and mournful allusion to him
in As You Like It (iii. 5), where Phebe quotes a line from his
Hero and Leander: —

" Dead shepherd ! now I find thy saw of might :
< Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ? ' "

Marlowe's influence is unmistakable not only in the style and
versification but in the .sanguinary action of Titus AndronicusY
clearly the oldest of the tragedies attributed to Shakespeare.

The evidence for the Shakespearian authorship of this drama

" TITUS ANDRONICUS" 37

of horrors, though mainly external, is weighty and, it would seem,
decisive. Meres, in 1 598, names it among the poet's works, and
his friends included it in the First Folio. We know from a gibe
in Ben Jonson's Induction to his Bartholomew Fair that it
was exceedingly popular. It is one of the plays most frequently
alluded to in contemporary writings, being mentioned twice as
often as Twelfth Night, and four or five times as often as
Measure for Measure or Timon. It depicts savage deeds,
executed with the suddenness with which people of the six
teenth century were wont to obey their impulses, cruelties as
heartless and systematic as those which characterised the age
of Machiavelli. In short, it abounds in such callous atrocities
as could not fail to make a deep impression on iron nerves and
hardened natures.

These horrors are not, for the most part, of Shakespeare's
invention.

An entry in Henslowe's diary of April n, 1592, mentions for
the first time a play named Titus and Vespasian (" tittus and
vespacia "), which was played very frequently between that date
and January 1593, and was evidently a prime favourite. In its
English form this play is lost ; no Vespasian appears in our Titus
Andronicus. But about 1600 a play was performed in Germany,
by English actors, which has been preserved under the title, Eine
sehr klagliche Tragoedia von Tito A ndronico und der hoffertigen
Kay serin, darinnen denckwilrdige actiones zubefinden, and in this
play a Vespasian duly appears, as well as the Moor Aaron, under
the name of Morian; so that, clearly enough, we have here a
translation, or rather a free adaptation, of the old play which
formed the basis of Shakespeare's.

We see, then, that Shakespeare himself invented only a few
of the horrors which form the substance of the play. The action,
as he presents it, is briefly this : —

Titus Andronicus, returning to Rome after a victory over the
Goths, is hailed as Emperor by the populace, but magnanimously
hands over the crown to the rightful heir, Saturninus. Titus
even wants to give him his daughter Lavinia in marriage, although
she is already betrothed to the Emperor's younger brother Bas-
sianus, whom she loves. When one of Titus's sons opposes this
scheme, his father kills him on the spot.

In the meantime, Tamora, the captive Queen of the Goths, is

38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

brought before the young Emperor. In spite of her prayers,
Titus has ordered the execution of her eldest son, as a sacrifice
to the manes of his own sons who have fallen in the war; but
as Tamora is more attractive to the Emperor than his destined
bride, the young Lavinia, Titus makes no attempt to enforce the
promise he has just made, and actually imagines that Tamora is
sincere when she pretends to have forgotten all the injuries he has
done her. Tamora, moreover, has been and is the mistress of the
cruel and crafty monster Aaron, the Moor.

At the Moor's instigation, she induces her two sons to take
advantage of a hunting party to murder Bassianus; whereupon
they ravish Lavinia, and tear out her tongue and cut off her
hands, so that she cannot denounce them either in speech or
writing. They remain undetected, until at last Lavinia unmasks
them by writing in the sand with a stick which she holds in her
mouth. Two of Titus's sons are thrown into prison, falsely
accused of the murder of their brother-in-law ; and Aaron gives
Titus to understand that their death is certain unless he ransoms
them by cutting off his own right hand and sending it to the
Emperor. Titus cuts off his hand, only to be informed by Aaron,
with mocking laughter, that his sons are already beheaded — he
can have their heads, but not themselves.

He now devotes himself entirely to revenge. Pretending
madness, after the manner of Brutus, he lures Tamora's sons to
his house, ties their hands behind their backs, and stabs them
like pigs, while Lavinia, with the stumps of her arms, holds a
basin to catch their blood. He bakes their heads in a pie, and
serves it up to Tamora at a feast given in her honour, at which
he appears disguised as a cook.

In the slaughter which now sets in, Tamora, Titus, and the
Emperor are killed. Ultimately Aaron, who has tried to save the
bastard Tamora has secretly borne him, is condemned to be buried
alive up to the waist, and thus to starve to death. Titus's son
Lucius is proclaimed Emperor.

It will be seen that not only are we here wading ankle-deep
in blood, but that we are quite outside all historical reality.
Among the many changes which Shakespeare has made in the
old play is the dissociation of this motley tissue of horrors from
the name of the Emperor Vespasian. The part which he plays in
the older drama is here shared between Titus's brother Marcus

"TITUS ANDRONICUS" 39

and his son Lucius, who succeeds to the throne. The woman
who answers to Tamora is of similar character in the old play,
but is Queen of Ethiopia. Among the horrors which Shakespeare
found ready made are the rape and mutilation of Lavinia and the
way in which the criminals are discovered, the hewing off of
Titus's hand, and the scenes in which he takes his revenge in
the dual character of butcher and cook.

The old English poet evidently knew his Ovid £nd his Seneca.
The mutilation of Lavinia comes from the Metamorphoses (the
story of Procne), and the cannibal banquet from the same
source, as well as from Seneca's Thyestis. The German version
of the tragedy, however, is written in a wretchedly flat and anti
quated prose, while Shakespeare's is couched in Marlowesque
pentameters.

The example set by Marlowe in Tamburlaine was no doubt
in some measure to blame for the lavish effusion of blood in the
play adapted by Shakespeare, which may in this respect be
bracketed with two other contemporary dramas conceived under
the influence of Tamburlaine ^ Robert Greene's Alphonsus King
of Arragon and George Peele's Battle of Alcazar. Peele's tra
gedy has also its barbarous Moor, Muley Hamet, who, like Aaron,
is probably the offspring of Marlowe's malignant Jew of Malta
and his henchman, the sensual Ithamore.

Among the horrors added by Shakespeare, there are two
which deserve a moment's notice. The first is Titus's sudden
and unpremeditated murder of his son, who ventures to oppose
his will. Shocking as it seems to us to-day, such an incident did
not surprise the sixteenth century public, but rather appealed to
them as a touch of nature. Such lives as Benvenuto Cellini's
show that even in highly cultivated natures, anger, passion, and
revenge were apt to take instantaneous effect in sanguinary
deeds. Men of action were in those days as ungovernable as
they were barbarously cruel when a sudden fury possessed
them.

The other added trait is the murder of Tamora's son. We
are reminded of the scene in Henry VI. , in which the young
Prince Edward is murdered in the presence of Queen Margaret ;
and Tamora's entreaties for her son are among those verses in
the play which possess the true Shakespearian ring.

Certain peculiar turns of phrase in Titus Andronicus remind

40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

us of Peele and Marlowe.1 But whole lines occur which Shake
speare repeats almost word for word. Thus the verses —

" She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd;
She is a woman, therefore may be won,"

reappear very slightly altered in Henry VL , Part I.: —

" She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd ;
She is a woman, and therefore to be won ; " .

while a similar turn of phrase is found in Sonnet XLI. : —

" Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed ; "

and, finally, a closely related distich occurs in Richard the Third's
famous soliloquy :

" Was ever woman in this humour woo'd ?
Was ever woman in this humour won ? "

It is true that the phrase " She is a woman, therefore may be
won/' occurs several times in Greene's romances, of earlier date
than Titus Andronicus, and this seems to have been a sort of
catchword of the period.

Although, on the whole, one may certainly say that this rough-
hewn drama, with its piling-up of external effects, has very little
in common with the tone or spirit of Shakespeare's mature
tragedies, yet we find scattered through it lines in which the
most diverse critics have professed to recognise Shakespeare's
revising touch, and to catch the ring of his voice.

Few will question that such a line as this, in the first scene of
the play —

" Romans — friends, followers, favourers of my right ! "

comes from the pen which afterwards wrote Julius Ccesar. I may
mention, for my own part, that lines which, as I read the play
through before acquainting myself in detail with English criticism,
had struck me as patently Shakespearian, proved to be precisely
the lines which the best English critics attribute to Shakespeare.

1 "Gallops the zodiac" (ii. I, line 7) occurs twice in Peele. The phrase "A
thousand deaths " (same scene, line 79) appears in Marlowe's Tamburlaine.

"TITUS ANDRONICUS" 41

To one's own mind such coincidences of feeling naturally carry
conviction. I may cite as an example Tamora's speech (iv. 4) : —

" King, be thy thoughts imperious, like thy name.
Is the sun dimm'd, that gnats do fly in it ?
The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby ;
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody.
Even so may'st thou the giddy men of Rome."

Unmistakably Shakespearian, too, are Titus's moving lament
(iii. i) when he learns of Lavinia's mutilation, and his half-dis
traught outbursts in the following scene foreshadow even in
detail a situation belonging to the poet's culminating period,
the scene between Lear and Cordelia when they are both
prisoners. Titus says to his hapless daughter:

/' Lavinia, go with me :

I'll to thy closet ; and go read with thee
Sad stories chanced in the times of old."

In just the same spirit Lear exclaims :

" Come, let's away to prison . . .

so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales."

It is quite unnecessary for any opponent of blind or exagger
ated Shakespeare-worship to demonstrate to us the impossibility
of bringing Titus Andronicus into harmony with any other than
a barbarous conception of tragic poetry. But although the play
is simply omitted without apology from the Danish translation of
Shakespeare's works, it must by no means be overlooked by the
student, whose chief interest lies in observing the genesis and
development of the poet's genius. The lower its point of de
parture, the more marvellous its soaring flight.

IX

SHAKESPEARE'S CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONS OF THE
SEXES— HIS MARRIAGE VIEWED IN THIS LIGHT —
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST— ITS MATTER AND STYLE —
JOHN LYLY AND EUPHUISM — THE PERSONAL ELE
MENT

DURING these early years in London, Shakespeare must have
been conscious of spiritual growth with every day that passed.
With his inordinate appetite for learning, he must every day have
gathered new impressions in his many-sided activity as a hard
working actor, a furbisher-up of old plays in accordance with the
taste of the day for scenic effects, and finally as a budding poet,
in whose heart every mood thrilled into melody, and every con
ception clothed itself in dramatic form. He must have felt his
spirit light and free, not least, perhaps, because he had escaped
from his home in Stratford.

Ordinary knowledge of the world is sufficient to suggest that
his association with a village girl eight years older than himself
could not satisfy him or fill his life. The study of his works
confirms this conjecture. It would, of course, be unreasonable
to attribute conscious and deliberate autobiographical import to
speeches torn from their context in different plays; but there
are none the less several passages in his dramas which may fairly
be taken as indicating that he regarded his marriage in the light
of a youthful folly. Take, for example, this passage in Twelfth
Night (ii. 4) : —

" Duke. What kind of woman is't ?
Vio. Of your complexion.

Duke. She is not worth thee then. What years, i' faith ?
Vio. About your years, my lord.

Duke. Too old, by Heaven. Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,

42

SHAKESPEARE'S CONCEPTION OF LOVE 43

So sways she level in her husband's heart :
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are.

Via. I think it well, my lord.

Duke. Then, let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent ;
For women are as roses, whose fair flower,
Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour."

And this is in the introduction to the Fool's exquisite song
about the power of love, that song which " The spinsters and the
knitters in the sun And the free maids, that weave their thread
with bones, Do use to chant " — Shakespeare's loveliest lyric.

There are passages in other plays which seem to show traces
of personal regret at the memory of this early marriage and the
circumstances under which it came about. In the Tempest, for
instance, we have Prospero's warning to Ferdinand (iv. i) : —

" If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may,
With full and holy rite, be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow, but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly,
That you shall hate it both."

Two of the comedies of Shakespeare's first period are, as we
might expect, imitations, and even in part adaptations, of older
plays. By comparing them, where it is possible, with these
earlier works, we can discover, among other things, the thoughts
to which Shakespeare, in these first years in London, was most
intent on giving utterance. It thus appears that he held strong
views as to the necessary subordination of the female to the
male, and as to the trouble caused by headstrong, foolish, or
jealous women.

His Comedy of Errors is modelled upon the Mencschmi of
Plautus, or rather on an English play of the same title dating
from 1580, which was not itself taken direct from Plautus, but
from Italian adaptations of the old Latin farce. Following the
example of Plautus in the Amp/tttruo, Shakespeare has supple-

44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

merited the confusion between the two Antipholuses by a parallel
and wildly improbable confusion between their serving-men, who
both go by the same name and are likewise twins. But it is in
the contrast between the two female figures, the married sister
Adriana and the unmarried Luciana, that we catch the personal
note in the play. On account of the confusion of persons, Adriana
rages against her husband, and is at last on the point of plunging
him into lifelong misery. To her complaint that he has not come
home at the appointed time, Luciana answers : —

" A man is master of his liberty :
Time is their master ; and, when they see time,
They'll go, or come : if so, be patient, sister.

Adriana. Why should their liberty than ours be more ?

Luciana. Because their business still lies out o' door.

Adr. Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill.

Luc. O ! know he is the bridle of your will.

Adr. There's none but asses will be bridled so.

Luc. Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe.
There's nothing situate under heaven's eye
But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky :
The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls,
Are their males' subjects, and at their controls.
Men, more divine, the masters of all these,
Lords of the wide world, and wild wat'ry seas,

Are masters to their females, and their lords :
Then, let jour will attend on their accords."

In the last act of the comedy, Adriana, speaking to the Abbess,
accuses her husband of running after other women : —

" Abbess. You should for that have reprehended him.]

Adriana. Why, so I did.

Abb. Ay, but not rough enough.

Adr. As roughly as my modesty would let me.

Abb. Haply, in private.

Adr. And in assemblies too.

Abb. Ay, but not enough.

Adr. It was the copy of our conference.
In bed, he slept not for my urging it :
At board, he fed not for my urging it ;
Alone, it was the subject of my theme ;

SHAKESPEARE'S CONCEPTION OF LOVE 45

In company, I often glanced it :

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.

Abb. And therefore came it that the man was mad :
The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
It seems, his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing,
And thereof comes it that his head is light.
Thou say'st, his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings :
Unquiet meals make ill digestions ;
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred :
And what's a fever but a fit of madness ? "

At least as striking is the culminating point of Shakespeare's
adaptation of the old play called The Taming of a Shrew. He
took very lightly this piece of task-work, executed, it would
seem, to the order of his fellow-players. In point of diction and
metre it is much less highly finished than others of his youthful
comedies ; but if we compare the Shakespearian play (in whose
title the Shrew receives the definite instead of the indefinite
article) point by point with the original, we obtain an invaluable
glimpse into Shakespeare's comic, as formerly into his tragic,
workshop. Few examples are so instructive as this.

Many readers have no doubt wondered what was Shake
speare's design in presenting this piece, of all others, in the
framework which we Danes know in Holberg's 1 Jeppe paa Bjerget.
The answer is, that he had no particular design in the matter.
He took the framework ready-made from the earlier play, which,
however, he throughout remodelled and improved, not to say re
created. It is not only far ruder and coarser than Shakespeare's,
but does not redeem its crude puerility by any raciness or power.

Nowhere does the difference appear more decisively than in
the great speech in which Katharine, cured of her own shrewish
ness, closes the play by bringing the other rebellious women to
reason. In the old play she begins with a whole cosmogony:
"The first world was a form without a form," until God, the
King of kings, " in six days did frame his heavenly work " : —

" Then to his image he did make a man,
Olde Adam, and from his side asleepe

1 Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), the great comedy-writer of Denmark, and founder
of the Danish stage. — (TRANS.)

46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make
The woe of man, so termd by Adam then,
Woman for that by her came sinne to vs,
And for her sin was Adam doomd to die.
As Sara to her husband, so should we
Obey them, loue them, keepe and nourish them
If they by any meanes doo want our helpes,
Laying our handes vnder theire feete to tread,
If that by that we might procure there ease."

And she herself sets the example by placing her hand under her
husband's foot.

Shakespeare omits all this theology and skips the Scriptural
authorities, but only to arrive at the self-same result : —

" Fie, fie ! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty ;
And, while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign ; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance ; commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe ;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands,
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband ;
And when she's froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord ? "

In these adapted plays, then, partly from the nature of their
subjects and partly because his thoughts ran in that direction, we
find Shakespeare chiefly occupied with the relation between man
and woman, and specially between husband and wife. They are
not, however, his first works. At the age of five-and-twenty or

"LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST" 47

thereabouts Shakespeare began his independent dramatic pro
duction, and, following the natural bent of youth and youthful
vivacity, he began it with a light and joyous comedy.

We have several reasons, partly metrical (the frequency of
rhymes), partly technical (the dramatic weakness of the play), for
supposing Lovers Labour's Lost to be his earliest comedy. Many
allusions point to 1589 as the date of this play in its original form.
For instance, the dancing horse mentioned in i. 2 was first exhi
bited in 1589; the names of the characters, Biron, Longaville,
Dumain (Due du Maine), suggest those of men who were promi
nent in French politics between 1581 and 1590; and, finally,
when we remember that the King of Navarre, as the Princess's
betrothed, becomes heir to the throne of France, we cannot but
conjecture a reference to Henry of Navarre, who mounted that
throne precisely in 1589. The play has not, however, reached
us in its earliest form; for the title-page of the quarto edition
shows that it was revised and enlarged on the occasion of its
performance before Elizabeth at Christmas 1597. There are not
a few places in which we can trace the revision, the original form
having been inadvertently retained along with the revised text.
This is apparent in Biron's long speech in the fourth act, sc. 3: —

" For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,
Have found the ground of study's excellence,
Without the beauty of a woman's face ?
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive :
They are the ground, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire."

This belongs to the older text. Farther on in the speech,
where we find the same ideas repeated in another and better
form, we have evidently the revised version before us : —

" For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,
In leaden contemplation have found out
Such fiery numbers, as the prompting eyes
Of beauty's tutors have enrich'd you with ?

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive :
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire ;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world ;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent."

48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The last two acts, which far surpass the earlier ones, have
evidently been revised with special care, and some details, espe
cially in the parts assigned to the Princess and Biron, now and
then reveal Shakespeare's maturer style and tone of feeling.

No original source has been found for this first attempt of the
young Stratfordian in the direction of comedy. For the first, and
perhaps for the last time, he seems to have sought for no external
stimulus, but set himself to evolve everything from within. The
result is that, dramatically, the play is the slightest he ever wrote.
It has scarcely ever been performed even in England, and may,
indeed, be described as unactable.

It is a play of two motives. The first, of course, is love —
what else should be the theme of a youthful poet's first comedy ?
— but love without a trace of passion, almost without deep per
sonal feeling, a love which is half make-believe, tricked out in
word-plays. For the second theme of the comedy is language
itself, poetic expression for its own sake — a subject round which
all the meditations of the young poet must necessarily have
centred, as, in the midst of a cross-fire of new impressions, he
set about the formation of a vocabulary and a style.

The moment the reader opens this first play of Shakespeare's,
he cannot fail to observe that in several of his characters the
poet is ridiculing absurdities and artificialities in the manner of
speech of the day, and, moreover, that his personages, as a whole,
display a certain half-sportive luxuriance in their rhetoric as
well as in their wit and banter. They seem to be speaking, not
in order to inform, persuade, or convince, but simply to relieve
the pressure of their imagination, to play with words, to worry
at them, split them up and recombine them, arrange them in
alliterative sequences, or group them in almost identical antithetic
clauses ; at the same time making sport no less fantastical with
the ideas the words represent, and illustrating them by new and
far-fetched comparisons ; until the dialogue appears not so much a
part of the action or an introduction to it, as a tournament of
words, clashing and swaying to and fro, while the rhythmic music
of the verse and prose in turns expresses exhilaration, tenderness,
affectation, the joy of life, gaiety or scorn. Although there is a
certain superficiality about it all, we can recognise in it that
exuberance of all the vital spirits which characterises the Renais
sance. To the appeal —

EUPHUISM 49

" White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee,"
comes the answer —

" Honey, and milk, and sugar : there are three."
And well may Boyet say (v. 2) : —

" The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor's edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen ;
Above the sense of sense, so sensible
Seemeth their conference ; their conceits have wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things."

Boyet's words, however, refer merely to the youthful gaiety
and quickness of wit which may be found in all periods. We
have here something more than that : the diction of the leading
characters, and the various extravagances of expression culti
vated by the subordinate personages, bring us face to face with
a linguistic phenomenon which can be understood only in the
light of history.

The word Euphuism is employed as a common designation for
these eccentricities of style — a word which owes its origin to John
Lyly's romance, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, published in 1578,
Lyly was also the author of nine plays, all written before 1589,
and there is no doubt that he exercised a very important influence
upon Shakespeare's dramatic style.

But it is a very narrow view of the matter which finds in him
the sole originator of the wave of mannerism which swept over
the English poetry of the Renaissance.

The movement was general throughout Europe. It took its
rise in the new-born enthusiasm for the antique literatures, in
comparison with whose dignity of utterance the vernacular seemed)
low and vulgar. In order to approximate to the Latin models,
men devised an exaggerated and dilated phraseology, heavy with
images, and even sought to attain amplitude of style by placing
side by side the vernacular word and the more exquisite foreign
expression for the same object. Thus arose the alto estilo, the estila
culto. In Italy, the disciples of Petrarch, with their concetti, were
dominant in poetry; in Shakespeare's own time, Marini came to the
front with his antitheses and word-plays. In France, Ronsard and
his school obeyed the general tendency. In Spain, the new style
was represented by Guevara, who directly influenced Lyly.
VOL. I. D

50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

John Lyly was about ten years older than Shakespeare. He
was born in Kent in 1553 or 1554, of humble parentage. Never
theless he obtained a full share of the literary culture of his time,
studied at Oxford, probably by the assistance of Lord Burleigh,
took his Master's degree in 1575? afterwards went to Cambridge,
and eventually, no doubt on account of the success of his Euphues,
found a position at the court of Elizabeth. For a period of ten
years he was Court Poet, what in our days would be called Poet
Laureate. But his position was without emolument. He was
always hoping in vain for the post of Master of the Revels,
and two touching letters to Elizabeth, the one dated 1590, the
other 1593, in which he petitions for this appointment, show
that after ten years' labour at court he felt himself a ship
wrecked man, and after thirteen years gave himself up to despair.
All the duties and responsibilities of the office he coveted were
heaped upon him, but he was denied the appointment itself. Like
Greene and Marlowe, he lived a miserable life, and died in 1606,
poor and indebted, leaving his family in destitution.

His book, Euphues, is written for the court of Elizabeth.
The Queen herself studied and translated the ancient authors,
and it was the fashion of her court to deal incessantly in mytho
logical comparisons and allusions to antiquity. Lyly shows this
tendency in all his writings. He quotes Cicero, imitates Plautus,
cites numberless verses from Virgil and Ovid, reproduces almost
word for word in his Euphues Plutarch's Treatise on Education,
and borrows from Ovid's Metamorphoses the themes of several
of his plays. In A Midsummer Nights Dream, when Bottom
appears with an ass's head and exclaims, " I have a reasonable
good ear for music ; let's have the tongs and the bones," we may
doubtless trace the incident back to the metamorphosis of Midas
in Ovid, but through the medium of Lyly's Mydas.

It was not merely the relation of the age to antiquity that
produced the fashionable style. The new intercourse between
country and country had quite as much to do with it. Before the
invention of printing, each country had been spiritually isolated ;
but the international exchange of ideas had by this time become
very much easier. Every European nation begins in the sixteenth
century to provide itself with a library of translations. Foreign
manners and fashions, in language as well as in costume, came
into vogue, and helped to produce a heterogeneous and motley style.

EUPHUISM 51

In England, moreover, we have to note the very important
fact that, precisely at the time when the Renaissance began to
bear literary fruit, the throne was occupied by a woman, and one
who, without possessing any delicate literary sense or refined
artistic taste, was interested in the intellectual movement. Vain,
and inclined to secret gallantries, she demanded, and received,
incessant homage, for the most part in extravagant mythological
terms, from the ablest of her subjects — from Sidney, from Spenser,
from Raleigh — and was determined, in short, that the whole litera
ture of the time should turn towards her as its central point.
Shakespeare was the only great poet of the period who absolutely
declined to comply with this demand.

It followed from the relation in which literature stood to
Elizabeth that it addressed itself as a whole to women, and espe
cially to ladies of position. Euphues is a ladies' book. The new
style may be described, not inaptly, as the development of a more
refined method of address to the fair sex.

Sir Philip Sidney, in a masque, had done homage to Elizabeth,
then forty-five years old, as "the Lady of the May." A letter
which Sir Walter Raleigh, after his disgrace, addressed from his
prison to Sir Robert Cecil on the subject of Elizabeth, affords a
particularly striking example of the Euphuistic style, admirably
fitted as it certainly was to express the passion affected by a
soldier of forty for the maiden of sixty who held his fate in her
hands : —

"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 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."1

The German scholar Landmann, who has devoted special
study to Euphuism,2 has justly pointed out that the greatest
extravagances of style, and the worst sins against taste, of that
period are always to be found in books written for ladies, cele-

1 Raleigh, by Edmund Gosse (English Worthies Series), p. 57.

2 New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1880-86, Pt. ii. p. 241.

52 WILLIAM SL'AKESPEARE

brating the charms of the fair sex, and seeking to please by means
of highly elaborated wit.

This may have been the point of departure of the new style ;
but it soon ceased to address itself specially to feminine readers,
and became a means of gratifying the propensity of the men of
the Renaissance to mirror their whole nature in their speech,
making it peculiar to the point of affectation, and affected to the
point of the most daring mannerism. Euphuism ministered to
their passion for throwing all they said into high and highly
coloured relief, for polishing it till it shone and sparkled like real
or paste diamonds in the sunshine, for making it ring, and sing,
and chime, and rhyme, without caring whether reason took any
share in the sport.

As a slight but characteristic illustration of this tendency,
note the reply of the page, Moth, to Armado (iii. i) : —

"Moth. Master, will you win your love with a French brawl?

11 Arm. How meanest thou? brawling in French?

" Moth. No, my complete master; but to jig off a tune at the tongue's
end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids,
sigh a note, and sing a note ; sometime through the throat, as if you
swallowed love with singing love; sometime through the nose, as if
you snuffed up love by smelling love; with your hat, penthouse-like,
o'er the shop of your eyes ; with your arms crossed on your thin belly-
doublet, like a rabbit on a spit ; or your hands in your pocket, like a
man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but
a snip and away. These are complements, these are humours, these
betray nice wenches, that would be betrayed without these, and make
them men of note (do you note me ?), that most are affected to these."

Landmann has conclusively proved that John Lyly's Euphues
is only an imitation, and at many points a very close imitation, of
the Spaniard Guevara's book, an imaginary biography of Marcus
Aurelius, which, in the fifty years since its publication, had been
six times translated into English. It was so popular that one of
these translations passed through no fewer than twelve editions.
Both in style and matter Euphues follows Guevara's book, which,
in Sir Thomas North's adaptation, bears the title of The Dial of
Princes.

The chief characteristics of Euphuism were parallel and asso
nant antitheses, long strings of comparisons with real or imaginary
natural phenomena (borrowed for the most part from Pliny's

EUPHUISM 53

Natural History), a partiality for images from antique history
and mythology, and a love of alliteration.

Not till a later date did Shakespeare ridicule Euphuism pro
perly so called — to wit, in that well-known passage in Henry IV.,
Part I., where Falstaff plays the king. In his speech beginning
" Peace, good pint-pot! peace, good tickle-brain!" Shakespeare
deliberately parodies Lyly's similes from natural history. Falstaff
says : —

" Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but
also how thou art accompanied : for though the camomile, the more
it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted,
the sooner it wears."

Compare with this the following passage from Lyly (cited by
Landmann) : —

"Too much studie doth intoxicate their braines, for (say they)
although yron, the more it is used, the brighter it is, yet silver with
much wearing doth wast to nothing . . . though the Camomill, the
more it is troden and pressed downe, the more it spreadeth, yet the
Violet, the oftner it is handeled and touched, the sooner it withereth
and decay eth."

, Falstaff continues in the same exquisite strain : —

"There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is
known to many in our land by the name of pitch : this pitch, as ancient
writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou-keepest."

. This citation of " ancient writers " in proof of so recondite a
phenomenon as the stickiness of pitch is again pure Lyly. Yet
again, the adjuration, "Now I do not speak to thee in drink, but
in tears ; not in pleasure, but in passion ; not in words only, but
in woes also," is an obvious travesty of the Euphuistic style.

Strictly speaking, it is not against Euphuism itself that Shake
speare's youthful satire is directed in Love's Labour's Lost. It is
certain collateral forms of artificiality in style and utterance that
are aimed at. In the first place, bombast, represented by the
ridiculous Spaniard, Armado (the suggestion of the Invincible
Armada in the name cannot be unintentional) ; in the next place,
pedantry, embodied in the schoolmaster Holofernes, for whom
tradition states that Florio, the teacher of languages and trans
lator of Montaigne, served as a model — a supposition, however,

54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

which seems scarcely probable when we remember Florio's close
connection with Shakespeare's patron, Southampton. Further,
we find throughout the play the over-luxuriant and far-fetched
method of expression, universally characteristic of the age, which
Shakespeare himself had as yet by no means succeeded in shaking
off. Only towards the close does he rise above it and satirise it.
That is the intent of Biron's famous speech (v. 2) : —

" Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical : these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them ; and I here protest,
By this white glove, (how white the hand, God knows)
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd
In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes."

In the very first scene of the play, the King describes Armado,
in too indulgent terms, as —

" A refined traveller of Spain ;
A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain ;
One, whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony."

Holofernes the pedant, nearly a century and a half before
Holberg's Else Skolemesters,1 expresses himself very much as
she does : —

" Holofernes. The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable,
congruent, and measurable for the afternoon : the word is well culPd,
chose; sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir; I do assure."

Armado's bombast may probably be accepted as a not too
extravagant caricature of the bombast of the period. Certain
it is that the schoolmaster Rombus, in Sir Philip Sidney's Lady of
the May, addresses the Queen in a strain no whit less ridiculous
than that of Holofernes. But what avails the justice of a parody
if, in spite of the art and care lavished upon it, it remains as
tedious as the mannerism it ridicules ! And this is unfortunately
the case in the present instance. Shakespeare had not yet

1 The schoolmaster's wife in Ludvig Holberg's inimitable comedy, Barselsluen.
—(TRANS.)

1

" LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST" 55

attained the maturity and detachment of mind which could enable
him to rise high above the follies he attacks, and to sweep them
aside with full authority. He buries himself in them, circum
stantially demonstrates their absurdities, and is still too in
experienced to realise how he thereby inflicts upon the spectator
and the reader the full burden of their tediousness. It is very
characteristic of Elizabeth's taste that, even in 1598, she could
still take pleasure in the play. All this fencing with words
appealed to her quick intelligence; while, with the unabashed
sensuousness characteristic of the daughter of Henry VIII. and
Anne Boleyn, she found entertainment in the playwright's
freedom of speech, even, no doubt, in the equivocal badinage
between Boyet and Maria (iv. i).

As was to be expected, Shakespeare is here more dependent
on models than in his later works. From Lyly, the most popular
comedy-writer of the day, he probably borrowed the idea of his
Armado, who answers pretty closely to Sir Tophas in Lyly's
Endymion, copied, in his turn, from Pyrgopolinices, the Jpoastful
soldier of the old Latin comedy. It is to be noted, also, that
the braggart and pedant, the two comic figures of this play, are
permanent types on the Italian stage, which in so many ways
influenced the development of English comedy.

The personal element in this first sportive production is,
however, not difficult to recognise : it is the young poet's mirthful
protest against a life immured within the hard-and-fast rules of
an artificial asceticism, such as the King of Navarre wishes to
impose upon his little court, with its perpetual study, its vigils,
its fasts, and its exclusion of womankind. Against this life of
unnatural constraint the comedy pleads with the voice of Nature,
especially through the mouth of Biron, in whose speeches, as
Dowden has rightly remarked, we can not infrequently catch
the accent of Shakespeare himself. In Biron and his Rosaline
we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick and
Beatrice of Muck Ado About Nothing. The best of Biron's
speeches, those which are in unrhymed verse, we evidently owe
to the revision of 1598; but they are conceived in the spirit of
the original play, arid merely express Shakespeare's design in
stronger and clearer terms than he was at first able to compass.
Even at the end of the third act Biron is still combating as well
as he can the power of love : —

56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" What ! I love ! I sue ! I seek a wife !
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch'd that it may still go right ! "

But his great and splendid speech in the fourth act is like
a hymn to that God of Battles who is named in the title of the
play, and whose outpost skirmishes form its matter : —

" Other slow arts entirely keep the brain,
And therefore, finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil ;
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain,
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye ;
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind ;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd :
Love's feeling is more soft, and sensible,
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs ;
O ! then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility."

We must take Biron-Shakespeare at his word, and believe
that in these vivid and tender emotions he found, during his
early years in London, the stimulus which taught him to open
his lips in song.

X

LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON: THE FIRST SKETCH OF
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL— THE COMEDY
OF ERRORS— THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

As a counterpart to the comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, Shake
speare soon after composed another, entitled Lore's Labour's
Won. This we learn from the celebrated passage in Francis
Meres' Palladis Tamia, where he enumerates the plays which
Shakespeare had written up to that date, 1598. We know, how
ever, that no play of that name is now included among the poet's
works. Since it is scarcely conceivable that a play of Shake
speare's, once acted, should have been entirely lost, 'the only
question is, which of the extant comedies originally bore that title.
But in reality there is no question at all: the play is All's Well
that Ends Well — not, of course, as we now possess it, in a form
and style belonging to a quite mature period of the poet's life,
but as it stood before the searching revision, of which it shows
evident traces.

We cannot, indeed, restore the play as it originally issued
from Shakespeare's youthful imagination. But there are passages
in it which evidently belong to the older version, rhymed conver
sations, or at any rate fragments of dialogue, rhymed letters in
sonnet form, and numerous details which entirely correspond with
the style of Love's Labour's Lost.

The piece is a dramatisation of Boccaccio's story of Gillette of
Narbonne. Only the comic parts are of Shakespeare's invention;
he has added the characters of Parolles, Lafeu, the Clown, and the
Countess. Even in the original sketch he no doubt gave new
depth and vitality to the leading characters, who are mere outlines
in the story. The comedy, as we know, has for its heroine a
young woman who loves the haughty Bertram with an unrequited
and despised passion, cures the King of France of a dangerous

57

58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

sickness, claims as her reward the right to choose a husband from
among the courtiers, chooses Bertram, is repudiated by him, and,
after a nocturnal meeting at which she takes the place of another
woman whom he believes himself to have seduced, at last over
comes his resistance and is acknowledged as his wife.

Shakespeare has here not only shown the unquestioning ac
ceptance of his original, which was usual even in his riper years,
but has transferred to his play all its peculiarities and impro
babilities. Even the psychological crudities he has swallowed as
they stand — such, for instance, as the fact of a delicate woman
forcing herself under cover of night upon the man who has
left his home and country for the express purpose of escaping
from her.

Shakespeare has drawn in Helena a patient Griselda, that
type of loving and cruelly maltreated womanhood which reappears
in German poetry in Kleist's Kdthchen von Heilbronn — the woman
who suffers everything in inexhaustible tenderness and humility,
and never falters in her love until in the end she wins the rebel
lious heart.

The pity is that the unaccommodating theme compelled Shake
speare to make this pearl among women in the end enforce her
rights, after the man she adores has not only treated her with
contemptuous brutality, but has, moreover, shown himself a liar
and hound in his attempt to blacken the character of the Italian
girl whose lover he believes himself to have been.

It is very characteristic of the English renaissance, and of the
public which Shakespeare had in view in his early plays, that he
should make this noble heroine take part with Parolles in the long
and jocular conversation (i. i) on the nature of virginity, which is
one of the most indecorous passages in his works. This dialogue
must certainly belong to the original version of the play.

We must remember that Helena, in that version, was in all
probability very different from the high-souled woman she became
in the process of revision. She no doubt expressed herself freely,
according to Shakespeare's youthful manner, in rhyming reveries
on love and fate, such as the following (i. i) : —

" Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to Heaven : the fated sky
Gives us free scope ; only, doth backward pull
Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.

"LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON" 59

What power is it which mounts my love so high ;
That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye ?
The mightiest space in fortune Nature brings
To join like likes, and kiss like native things.
Impossible be strange attempts to those
That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose,
What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove
To show her merit, that did miss her love ? "

Or else he made her pour forth multitudinous swarms of images,
each treading on the other's heels, like those in which she fore
casts Bertram's love-adventures at the court of France (i. i) : —

" There shall your master have a thousand loves,
A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,
A phoenix, captain, and an enemy,
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear ;
His humble ambition, proud humility,
His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,
His faith, his sweet disaster ; with a world
Of pretty, fond, adoptious Christendoms,
That blinking Cupid gossips."

Love's Labour's Won was probably conceived throughout in
this lighter tone.

There can be little doubt that the figure of Parolles was also
sketched in the earlier play. It forms an excellent counterpart
to Armado in Love's Labour's Lost. And in it we have un
doubtedly the first faint outline of the figure which, seven or eight
years later, becomes the immortal Falstaff. Parolles is a humor
ous liar, braggart, and " misleader of youth," like Prince Henry's
fat friend. He is put to shame, just like Falstaff, in an ambuscade
devised by his own comrades ; and being, as he thinks, taken pri
soner, he deserts and betrays his master. Falstaff hacks the edge
of his sword in order to appear valiant ; and Parolles says (iv. i),
" I would the cutting of my garments would serve the turn, or
the breaking of my Spanish sword."

In comparison with Falstaff the character is, of course, meagre
and faint. But if we compare it with such a figure as Armado in
Love's Labour's Lost, we find it sparkling with gaiety. It was,
in all probability, touched up and endowed with new wit during
the revision.

60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

On the other hand, there is a good deal of quite youthful
whimsicality in the speeches of the Clown, especially in the first
act, which there is no difficulty in attributing to Shakespeare's
twenty-fifth year. The song which the Fool sings at this point
(i. 3) seems to belong to the earlier form, and with it the speeches
to which it gives rise : —

" Countess. What ! one good in ten ? you corrupt the song, sirrah.

" Clown. One good woman in ten, madam, which is a purifying o'
the song. Would God would serve the world so all the year ! we'd
find no fault with the tithe-woman, if I were the parson. One in ten,
quoth 'a ! an we might have a good woman born but for every blazing
star, or at an earthquake, 't would mend the lottery well."

In treating of Lovers Labour's Won, we must necessarily fall
back upon more or less plausible conjecture. But we possess
other comedies dating from this early period of Shakespeare's
career in which the improvement of his technique and his steady
advance towards artistic maturity can be clearly traced.

First and foremost we have his Comedy of Errors, which must
belong to this earliest period, even if it comes after the two Love's
Labour comedies. It is written in a highly polished, poetical style ;
it contains fewer lines of prose than any other of Shakespeare's
comedies ; but its diction is full of dramatic movement, the rhymes
do not impede the lively flow of the dialogue, and it has three
times as many unrhymed as rhymed verses.

Yet it must follow pretty close upon the plays we have just
reviewed. Certain phrases in the burlesque portrait of the fat
cook drawn by Dromio of Syracuse (iii. 2) help to put us
on the track of its date. His remark, that Spain sent whole
" armadoes of caracks " to ballast themselves with the rubies
and carbuncles on her nose, indicates a time not far remote from
the Armada troubles. A more exact indication may be found in
the answer which the servant gives to his master's question as
to where France is situated upon the globe suggested by the
cook's spherical figure. " Where France ? " asks Antipholus ; and
Dromio replies, " In her forehead ; arm'd and reverted, making
war against her heir." Now, in 1589, Henry of Navarre really
ceased to be the heir to the French throne, although his struggle
for the possession of it lasted until his acceptance of Catholicism

" COMEDY OF ERRORS" 61

in 1593. Thus we may place the date of the play somewhere
between the years 1589 and 1591.

This comedy on the frontier-line of farce shows with what
giant strides Shakespeare progresses in the technique of his art.
It has the blood of the theatre in its veins ; we can already discern
the experienced actor in the dexterity with which the threads of
the intrigue are involved, and woven into an ever more intricate
tangle, until the simple solution is arrived at. While Love's
Labour's Lost still dragged itself laboriously over the boards,
here we have an impetus and a brio in all the dramatic passages
which reveal an artist and foretell a master. Only the rough out
lines of the play are taken from Plautus; and the motive, the
possibility of incessant confusion between two masters and two
servants, is manipulated with a skill and certainty which astound
us in a beginner, and sometimes with quite irresistible whimsi
cality. No doubt the merry play is founded upon an extreme
improbability. So exact is the mutual resemblance of each pair
of twins, no less in clothing than in feature, that not a single
person for a moment doubts their identity. Astonishing re
semblances between twins do, however, occur in real life; and
when once we have accepted the premises, the consequences
develop naturally, or at any rate plausibly. We may even say
that in the art of intrigue-spinning, which was afterwards some
what foreign and unattractive to him, the poet here shows him
self scarcely inferior to the Spaniards of his own or of a later
day, remarkable as was their dexterity.

Now and then the movement is suspended for the sake of an
exchange of word-plays between master and servant; but it is
generally short and entertaining. Now and then the action
pauses to let Dromio of Syracuse work off one of his extravagant
witticisms, as for example (iii. 2) : —

"Dromio S. And yet she is a wondrous fat marriage.

" Antipholus S. How dost thou mean a fat marriage ?

" Dro. S. Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all grease ; and
I know not what use to put her to, but to make a lamp of her, and
run from her by her own light. I warrant, her rags, and the tallow in
them, will burn a Poland winter : if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn
a week longer than the whole world."

As a rule, however, the interest is so evenly sustained that

62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the spectator is held in constant curiosity and suspense as to the
upshot of the adventure.

At one single point the style rises to a beauty and intensity
which show that, though Shakespeare here abandons himself to
the light play of intrigue, it is a diversion to which he only con
descends for the moment. The passage is that between Luciana
and Antipholus of Syracuse (iii. 2), with its tender erotic cadences.
Listen to such verses as these : —

" Ant. S. Sweet mistress (what your name is else, I know not,
Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine),
Less in your knowledge, and your grace, you show not,
Than our earth's wonder ; more than earth divine.
Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak :
Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,
Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.
Against my soul's pure truth, why labour you
To make it wander in an unknown field ?
Are you a god ? would you create me new ?
Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield."

Since the play was first published in the Folio of 1623, it is, of
course, not impossible that Shakespeare may have worked over
this lovely passage at a later period. But the whole structure of
the verses, with their interwoven rhymes, points in the opposite
direction. We here catch the first notes of that music which is
soon to fill Romeo and Juliet with its harmonies.

The play which in all probability stands next on the chrono
logical list of Shakespeare's works, The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
is also one in which we catch several anticipatory glimpses of
later productions, and is in itself a promising piece of work. It
surpasses the earlier comedies in two respects : first, in the beauty
and clearness with which the two young women are outlined,
and then in the careless gaiety which makes its first triumphant
appearance in the parts of the servants. Only now and then, in
one or two detached scenes, do Speed and Launce bore us with
euphuistic word-torturings ; as a rule the}'1 are quite entertaining
fellows, who seem to announce, as with a flourish of trumpets,
that, unlike either Lyly or Marlowe, Shakespeare possesses the
inborn gaiety, the keen sense of humour, the sparkling playful
ness, which are to enable him, without any strain on his invention,

"TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA" 63

to kindle the laughter of his audiences, and send it flashing round
the theatre from the groundlings to the gods. He does not as
yet display any particular talent for individualising his clowns.
Nevertheless we notice that, while Speed impresses us chiefly
by his astonishing volubility, the true English humour makes its
entrance upon the Shakespearian stage when Launce appears,
dragging his dog by a string.

Note the torrent of eloquence in this speech of Speed's,
enumerating the symptoms from which he concludes that his
master is in love : —

" First, you have learn'd, like Sir Proteus, to wreath your arms,
like a malcontent ; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast ; to walk
alone, like one that had the pestilence ; to sigh, like a school-boy that
had lost his A B C ; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her
grandam ; to fast, like one that takes diet ; to watch, like one that fears
robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were
wont, when you laugh'd, to crow like a cock ; when you walk'd, to
walk like one of the lions ; when you fasted, it was presently after
dinner ; when you look'd sadly, it was for want of money : and now
you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that, when I look on you, I
can hardly think you my master."

All these similes of Speed's are apt and accurate ; it is only
the way in which he piles them up that makes us laugh. But
when Launce opens his mouth, unbridled whimsicality at once
takes the upper hand. He comes upon the scene with his dog : —

" Nay, 'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping ; all the kind of
the Launces have this very fault. ... I think Crab, my dog, be the
sourest-natured dog that lives : my mother weeping, my father wailing,
my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all
our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed
one tear. He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in
him than a dog; a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting:
why, my grandam, having no eyes, look you, wept herself blind at my
parting. Nay, I'll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father:
— no, this left shoe is my father ; — no, no, this left shoe is my mother; —
nay, that cannot be so, neither: — yes, it is so, it is so; it hath the worser
sole. This shoe, with the hole in it, is my mother, and this my father.
A vengeance on 't ! there 't is : now, sir, this staff is my sister ; for, look
you, she is as white as a lily, and as small as a wand : this hat is Nan,
our maid : I am the dog ; — no, the dog is himself, and I am the dog,
— O ! the dog is me, and I am myself: ay, so, so."

64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Here we have nothing but joyous nonsense, and yet nonsense
of a highly dramatic nature. That is to say, here reigns that
youthful exuberance of spirit which laughs with a childlike grace,
even where it condescends to the petty and low ; exuberance as
of one who glories in the very fact of existence, and rejoices to
feel life pulsing and seething in his veins; exuberance such as
belongs of right, in some degree, to every well-constituted man
in the light-hearted days of his youth — how much more, then, to
one who possesses the double youth of years and genius among-
a people which is itself young, and more than young : liberatedy
emancipated, enfranchised, like a colt which has broken its tether
and scampers at large through the luxuriant pastures.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona — which, by the way, is
Shakespeare's first declaration of love to Italy — is a graceful,
entertaining, weakly constructed comedy, dealing with faithful
and faithless love, with the treachery of man and the devotion
of woman. Its hero, a noble and wrongfully-banished youth,
comes to live the life of a robber captain, like Schiller's Karl von
Moor two centuries later, but without a spark of his spirit of
rebellion. The solution of the imbroglio, by means of the instant
and unconditional forgiveness of the villain, is so naive, so sense
lessly conciliatory, that we feel it to be the outcome of a joyous,
untried, and unwounded spirit.

Shakespeare has borrowed part of his matter from a novel
entitled Diana, by the Portuguese Montemayor (1520-1562).
The translation, by Bartholomew Yong, was not printed until
1598, but the preface states that it had then been completed for
fully sixteen years, and manuscript copies of it had no doubt
passed from hand to hand, according to the fashion of the time.
On comparing the essential portion of the romance1 with 7*he Two
Gentlemen of Verona, we find that Proteus's infidelity and Julia's
idea of following her lover in male attire, with all that comes of itr
belong to Montemayor. Moreover, in the novel, Julia, disguised
as a page, is present when Proteus serenades Sylvia (Celia in the
original). She also goes to Sylvia at Proteus's orders to plead
his cause with her; but in the novel the fair lady falls in love
with the messenger in male attire — an incident which Shake
speare reserved for Twelfth Night. We even find in Diana a

1 The Shepherdess Felismena in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, Pt. I. vol. i.
ed. 1875.

"TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA" 65

sketch of the second scene of the first act, between Julia and
Lucetta, in which the mistress, for appearance' sake, repudiates
the letter which she is burning to read. »

One or two points in the play remind us of Love's Labour's

Won, which Shakespeare had just completed in its original form;

for example, the journey in male attire in pursuit of the scornful

loved one. Many things, on the other hand, point forward to

Shakespeare's later work. The inconstancy of the two men in

A Midsummer Nighfs Dream is a variation and parody of

Proteus's fickleness in this play. The beginning of the second

scene of the first act, where Julia makes Lucetta pass judgment

on her different suitors, is the first faint outline of the masterly

scene to the same effect between Portia and Nerissa in The

Merchant of Venice. The conversation between Sylvia and Julia,

which brings the fourth act to a close, answers exactly to that

between Olivia and Viola in the first act of Twelfth Night.

Finally, the fact that Valentine, after learning the full extent of

his false friend's treachery, offers to resign to him his beautiful

betrothed, Sylvia, in order to prove by this sacrifice the strength

of his friendship, however foolish and meaningless it may appear

in the play, is yet an anticipation of the humble renunciation of

the beloved for the sake of the friend and of friendship, which s

impresses us so painfully in Shakespeare's Sonnets.

In almost every utterance of the young women in this comedy
we see nobility of soul, and in the lyric passages a certain pre-
Raphaelite grace. Take, for example, what Julia says of her love
in the last scene of the second act : —

" The current, that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ;
But, when his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage.

• •••••

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
And make a pastime of each weary step,
Till the last step have brought me to my love ;
And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,
A blessed soul doth in Elysium."

And although the men are here of inferior interest to the
VOL. I. E

66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

women, we yet find in the mouth of Valentine outbursts of great
lyric beauty. For example (iii. i): —

" Except I be by Silvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale ;
Unless I look on Silvia in the day,
There is no day for me to look upon.
She is my essence ; and I leave to be,
If I be not by her fair influence
Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive."

Besides the strains of passion and of gaiety in this light
acting play, a third note is clearly struck, the note of nature.
There is fresh air in it, a first breath of those fragrant midland
memories which prove that this child of the country must many a
time have said to himself with Valentine (v. 4) : —

" How use doth breed a habit in a man !
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns."

In many passages of this play we are conscious for the first
time of that keen love of nature which never afterwards deserts
Shakespeare, and which gives to some of the most mannered of
his early efforts, as, for example, to his short narrative poems,
their chief interest and value.

XI

VENUS AND ADONIS: DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE
— THE RAPE OF LUCRECE .• RELATION TO
PAINTING

ALTHOUGH Shakespeare did not publish Venus and Adonis until
the spring of 1593, when he was twenty-nine years old, the poem
must certainly have been conceived, and probably written, several
years earlier. In dedicating it to the Earl of Southampton, then
a youth of twenty, he calls it " the first heire of my invention ; "
but it by no means follows that it is literally the first thing he
ever wrote. The expression may merely imply that his work for
the theatre was not regarded as an independent exercise of his
poetic talent. But the over-luxuriant style betrays the youthful
hand, and we place it, therefore, among Shakespeare's writings of
about 1590-91.

He had at this period, as we have seen, won a firm footing as
an actor, and had made himself not only useful but popular as
an adapter of old plays and an independent dramatist. But the
drama of that time was not reckoned as literature. There was
all the difference in the world between a " playwright " and a real
poet. When Sir Thomas Bodley, about the year 1600, extended
and remodelled the old University Library, and gave it his name,
he decreed that no such " riffe-raffes " as playbooks should ever
find admittance to it.

Without being actually ambitious, Shakespeare felt the highly
natural wish to make a name for himself in literature. He wanted
to take his place among the poets, and to win the approval of the
young noblemen whose acquaintance he had made in the theatre.
He also wanted to show that he was familiar with the spirit of
antiquity.

Spenser (born 1553) had just attracted general attention by
publishing the first books of his great narrative poem. What

68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

more natural than that Shakespeare should be tempted to measure
his strength against Spenser, as he already had against Marlowe,
his first master in the drama ?

The little poem of Venus and Adonis, and its companion-
piece, The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared in the following year,
have this great value for us, that here, and here only, are we cer
tain of possessing a text exactly as Shakespeare wrote it, since he
himself superintended its publication.

Italy was at this time the centre of all culture. The lyric
and minor epic poetry of England were entirely under the influ
ence of the Italian style and taste. Shakespeare, in Venus and
Adonis, aims at the insinuating sensuousness of the Italians.
He tries to strike the tender and languorous notes of his Southern
forerunners. Among the poets of antiquity, Ovid is naturally his
model. He takes two lines from Ovid's Amores as the motto of
his poem, which is, indeed, nothing but an expanded version of a
scene in the Metamorphoses.

The name of Shakespeare, like the names of ^Eschylus,
Michael Angelo, and Beethoven, is apt to ring tragically in our
ears. We have almost forgotten that he had a Mozartean vein
in his nature, and that his contemporaries not only praised his
personal gentleness and " honesty," but also the " sweetness " of
his singing.

In Venus and Adonis glows the whole fresh sensuousness of
the Renaissance and of Shakespeare's youth. It is an entirely
erotic poem, and contemporaries aver that it lay on the table of
every light woman in London.

The conduct of the poem presents a series of opportunities
and pretexts for voluptuous situations and descriptions. The
ineffectual blandishments lavished by Venus on the chaste and
frigid youth, who, in his sheer boyishness, is as irresponsive as a
bashful woman — her kisses, caresses, and embraces, are depicted
in detail. It is as though a Titian or Rubens had painted a
model in a whole series of tender situations, now in one attitude,
now in another. Then comes the suggestive scene in which
Adonis's horse breaks away in order to meet the challenge of a
mare which happens to wander by, together with the goddess's
comments thereupon. Then new advances and solicitations,
almost inadmissibly daring, according to the taste of our day.

An element of feeling is introduced in the portrayal of Venus's

"VENUS AND ADONIS" 69

anguish when Adonis expresses his intention of hunting the boar.
But it is to sheer description that the poet chiefly devotes himself
— description of the charging boar, description of the fair young
body bathed in blood, and so forth. There is a fire and rapture
of colour in it all, as in a picture by some Italian master of a
hundred years before.

Quite unmistakable is the insinuating, luscious, almost
saccharine quality of the writing, which accounts for the fact
that, when his immediate contemporaries speak of Shakespeare's
diction, honey is the similitude that first suggests itself to
them. John Weever, in 1595, calls him " honey-tongued," and
in 1598 Francis Meres uses the same term, with the addition of
"mellifluous."

There is, indeed, an extraordinary sweetness in these strophes.
Tenderness, every here and there, finds really entrancing utter
ance. When Adonis has for the first time harshly repulsed
Venus, in a speech of some length : —

" ' What ! canst thou talk ? ' quoth she, * hast thou a tongue ?

O, would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing !

Thy mermaid's voice hath done me double wrong ;

I had my load before, now press'd with bearing :
Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh-sounding,
Ear's deep-sweet music, and heart's deep-sore wounding.' "

But the style also exhibits numberless instances of tasteless
Italian artificiality. Breathing the " heavenly moisture" of
Adonis's breath, she

"Wishes her cheeks' were gardens full of flowers,
So they were dew'd with such distilling showers."

Of Adonis's dimples it is said : —

" These lovely caves, these round enchanting pits,
Open'd their mouths to swallow Venus' liking."

" My love to love," says Adonis, " is love but to disgrace it."
Venus enumerates the delights he would afford to each of her
senses separately, supposing her deprived of all the rest, and
concludes thus : —

" ' But, O, what banquet wert thou to the taste,
Being nurse and feeder of the other four

70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Would they not wish the feast might ever last,

And bid Suspicion double-lock the door,
Lest Jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest,
Should, by his stealing in, disturb the feast ? ' '

Such lapses of taste are not infrequent in Shakespeare's early
comedies as well. They answer, in their way, to the riot of
horrors in Titus Andronicus — analogous mannerisms of an as
yet undeveloped art.

At the same time, the puissant sensuousness of this poem is
as a prelude to the large utterance of passion in Romeo and Juliet,
and towards its close Shakespeare soars, so to speak, symbolically,
from a delineation of the mere fever of the senses to a forecast of
that love in which it is only one element, when he makes Adonis
say:-

" ' Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done :
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies ;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.' "

It would, of course, be absurd to lay too much stress on these
edifying antitheses in this unedifying poem. It is more important
to note that the descriptions of animal life — for example, that of
the hare's flight — are unrivalled for truth and delicacy of observa
tion, and to mark how, even in this early work, Shakespeare's
style now and then rises to positive greatness.

This is especially the case in the descriptions of the boar and
of the horse. The boar — his back " set with a battle of bristly
pikes," his eyes like glow-worms, his snout " digging sepulchres
where'er he goes," his neck short and thick, and his onset so
fierce that

" The thorny brambles and embracing bushes,
As fearful of him, part ; through which he rushes "

— this boar seems to have been painted by Snyders in a hunting-
piece, in which the human figures came from the brush of Rubens.
Shakespeare himself seems to have realised with what mastery
he had depicted the stallion ; for he says : —

" Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportion'd steed,

"LUCRECE" 71

His art with nature's workmanship at strife,

As if the dead the living should exceed ;
So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone."

We can feel Shakespeare's love of nature in such a stanza as
this :—

" Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide :

Look, what a horse should have, he did not lack,

Save a proud rider on so proud a back."

How consummate, too, is the description of all his movements : —

" Sometime he scuds far off, and there he stares ;
Anon he starts at stirring of a feather."

We hear "the high wind singing through his mane and tail."
We are almost reminded of the magnificent picture of the horse
at the end of the Book of Job : " He swalloweth the ground with
fierceness and rage. . . . He smelleth the battle afar off, the
thunder of the captains, and the shouting." So great is the com
pass of style in this little poem of Shakespeare's youth : from
Ovid to the Old Testament, from modish artificiality to grandiose
simplicity.

Lucrece, which appeared in the following year, was, like Venus
and Adonis, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, in distinctly
more familiar, though still deferential terms. The poem is de
signed as a counterpart to its predecessor. The one treats of
male, the other of female, chastity. The one portrays ungovern
able passion in a woman ; the other, criminal passion in a man.
But in Lucrece the theme is seriously and morally handled. It
is almost a didactic poem, dealing with the havoc wrought by
unbridled and brutish desire.

It was not so popular in its own day as its predecessor, and it
does not afford the modern reader any very lively satisfaction.
It shows an advance in metrical accomplishment. To the six-
line stanza of Venus and Adonis a seventh line is added, which
heightens its beauty and its dignity. The strength of Lucrece
lies in its graphic and gorgeous descriptions, and in its sometimes

72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

microscopic psychological analysis. For the rest, its pathos con
sists of elaborate and far-fetched rhetoric.

The lament of the heroine after the crime has been committed
is pure declamation, extremely eloquent no doubt, but copious
and artificial as an oration of Cicero's, rich in apostrophes and
antitheses. The sorrow of " Collatine and his consorted lords "
is portrayed in laboured and quibbling speeches. Shakespeare's
knowledge and mastery are most clearly seen in the reflections
scattered through the narrative — such, for instance, as the follow
ing profound and exquisitely written stanza on the softness of the
feminine nature : —

" For men have marble, women waxen minds,
And therefore are they form'd as marble will ;
The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds
Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill :
Then call them not the authors of their ill,
No more than wax shall be accounted evil,
Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil."

In point of mere technique the most remarkable passage in the
poem is the long series of stanzas (lines 1366 to 1568) describing
a painting of the destruction of Troy, which Lucrece contemplates
in her despair. The description is marked by such force, fresh
ness, and naivete as might suggest that the writer had never seen
a picture before : —

" Here one man's hand leaned on another's head,
His nose being shadowed by his neighbour's ear."

So dense is the throng of figures in the picture, so deceptive the
presentation,

" That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Grip'd in an armed hand : himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.

A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head.

Stood for the whole to be imagined."

Here, as in all other places in which Shakespeare mentions
pictorial or plastic art, it is realism carried to the point of illusion
that he admires and praises. The paintings in the Guild Chapel
at Stratford were, doubtless, as before mentioned, the first he ever
saw. He may also, during his Stratford period, have seen works

RELATION TO PAINTING 73

of art at Kenilworth Castle or at St. Mary's Church in Coventry.
In London, in the Hall belonging to the Merchants of the Steel-
Yard, he had no doubt seen two greatly admired pictures by
Holbein which' hung there. Moreover, there were in London at
that time not only numerous portraits by Dutch masters, but also
a few Italian pictures. It appears, for example, from a list of
" Pictures and other Works of Art " drawn up in 1613 by John
Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, that there hung at Whitehall a
painting of Julius Caesar, and another of Lucretia, said to have
been " very artistically executed." This picture may possibly
have suggested to Shakespeare the theme of his poem. Larger
compositions were no doubt familiar to him in the tapestries of
the period (the hangings at Theobald's presented scenes from
Roman history) ; and he may very likely have seen the excellent
Dutch and Italian pictures at Nonsuch Palace, then in the height
of its glory.

His reflections upon art led him, as aforesaid, to the conclusion
that it was the artist's business to keep a close watch upon nature,
to master or transcend her. Again and again he ranks truth to
nature as the highest quality in art. He evidently cared nothing
for allegorical or religious painting; he never so much as men
tions it. Nor, with all his love for " the concord of sweet sounds,"
does he ever allude to church music.

The description of the great painting of the fall of Troy is no
mere irrelevant decoration to the poem ; for the fall of Troy sym
bolises the fall of the royal house of Tarquin as a consequence of
Sextus's crime. Shakespeare did not look at the event from the
point of view of individual morality alone; he makes us feel that
the honour of a royal family, and even its dynastic existence, are
hazarded by criminal aggression upon a noble house. All the
conceptions of honour belonging to mediaeval chivalry are trans
ferred to ancient Rome. " Knights, by their oaths, should right
poor ladies' harms," says Lucrece, in calling upon her kinsmen to
avenge her.

In his picture of the sack of Troy, Shakespeare has followed
the second book of Virgil's ALneid; for the groundwork of his
poem as a whole he has gone to the short but graceful and
sympathetic rendering of the story of Lucretia in Ovid's Fasti
(ii. 685-852).

A comparison between Ovid's style and that of Shakespeare

74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

certainly does not redound to the advantage of the modern poet.
In opposition to this semi-barbarian, Ovid seems the embodiment
of classic severity. Shakespeare's antithetical conceits and other
lapses of taste are painfully obtrusive. Every here and there we
come upon such stumbling-blocks as these : —

" Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,

And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd ; "
or,

" If children pre-decease progenitors,
We are their offspring, and they none of ours."

This lack of nature and of taste is not only characteristic of the
age in general, but is bound up with the great excellences and
rare capacities which Shakespeare was now developing with such
amazing rapidity. His momentary leaning towards this style
was due, in part at least, to the influence of his fellow-poets, his
friends, his rivals in public favour — the influence, in short, of
that artistic microcosm in whose atmosphere his genius shot up
to sudden maturity.

We talk of " schools " in literature, and it is no exaggeration
to say that every period of rich productivity presupposes a school
or schools. But the word " school," beautiful in its original Greek
signification, has been narrowed and specialised by modern usage.
We ought to say " forcing-house " instead of " school " — to talk
of the classic and the romantic forcing-house, the Renaissance
forcing-house,1 and so forth. In very small communities, where
there is none of that emulation which alone can call forth all an
artist's energies, absolute mastery is as a rule unattainable. Under
such conditions, a man will often make a certain mark early in
life, and find his success his ruin. Others seek a forcing-house
outside their native land — Holberg in Holland, England, and
France; Thorvaldsen in Rome; Heine in Paris. The moment
he set foot in London, Shakespeare was in such a forcing-house.
Hence the luxuriant burgeoning of his genius.

He lived in constant intercourse and rivalry with vivid and
daringly productive spirits. The diamond was polished in diamond
dust.

The competitive instinct (as Riimelin has rightly pointed out)

1 The author's idea is, I think, best rendered by this literal translation ; but the
Danish word Drivhus is much less cumbrous than its English equivalent. — TRANS.

SENSE OF RIVALRY 75

was strong in the English poets of that period. Shakespeare
could not but strive from the first to outdo his fellows in strength
and skill. At last he comes to think, like Hamlet : however deep
they dig —

" it shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines "

— one of the most characteristic utterances of Hamlet and of /
Shakespeare.

This sense of rivalry contributed to the formation of Shake
speare's early manner, both in his narrative poems and in his
plays. Hence arose that straining after subtleties, that absorption
in quibbles, that wantoning in word-plays, that bandying to and
fro of shuttlecocks of speech. Hence, too, that state of over
heated passion and over-stimulated fancy, in which image begets
image with a headlong fecundity, like that of the low organisms
which pullulate by mere scission.

This man of all the talents had the talent for word-plays and
thought-quibbles among the rest ; he was too richly endowed to
be behind-hand even here. But there was in all this something
foreign to his true self. When he reaches the point at which his
inmost personality begins to reveal itself in his writings, we are
at once conscious of a far deeper and more emotional nature than
that which finds expression in the teeming conceits of the narra
tive poems and the incessant scintillations of the early comedies.

XII

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM— ITS HISTORICAL
CIRCUMSTANCES— ITS ARISTOCRATIC, POPULAR,
COMIC, AND SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS

IN spite of the fame and popularity which Venus and Adonis and
Lucrece won for Shakespeare, he quickly understood, with his
instinctive self-knowledge, that it was not narrative but dramatic
poetry which offered the fullest scope for his powers.

And now it is that we find him for the first time rising to the
full height of his genius. This he does in a work of dramatic
form ; but, significantly enough, it is not as yet in its dramatic
elements that we recognise the master-hand, but rather in the
rich and incomparable lyric poetry with which he embroiders a
thin dramatic canvas.

His first masterpiece is a masterpiece of grace, both lyrical
and comic. A Midsummer Night's Dream was no doubt written
as a festival-play or masque, before the masque became an estab
lished art-form, to celebrate the marriage of a noble patron ; pro
bably for the May festival after the private marriage of Essex
with the widow of Sir Philip Sidney in the year 1590. In
Oberon's great speech to Puck (ii. 2) there is a significant
passage about a throned vestal, invulnerable to Cupid's darts,
which is obviously a flattering reference to Elizabeth in relation
to Leicester ; while the lines about a little flower wounded by the
fiery shaft of love mournfully allude, in the like allegorical fashion,
to Essex's mother and her marriage with Leicester, after his court
ship had been rejected by the Queen. Other details also point to
Essex as the bridegroom typified in the person of Theseus.

How is one to speak adequately of A Midsummer Nighfs
Dream ? It is idle to dwell upon the slightness of the character-
drawing, for the poet's effort is not after characterisation; and,

whatever its weak points, the poem as a whole is one of the

76

"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" 77

tenderest, most original, and most perfect Shakespeare ever
produced.

It is Spenser's fairy-poetry developed and condensed; it is
Shelley's spirit-poetry anticipated by more than two centuries.
And the airy dream is shot with whimsical parody. The frontiers
of Elf-land and Clown-land meet and mingle.

We have here an element of aristocratic distinction in the
princely couple, Theseus and Hippolyta, and their court. We
have here an element of sprightly burlesque in the artisans' per
formance of Pyramus and Thisbe, treated with genial irony and
divinely felicitous humour. And here, finally, we have the ele
ment of supernatural poetry, which soon after flashes forth again
in Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio describes the doings of
Queen Mab. Puck and Pease-blossom, Cobweb and Mustard-
seed — pigmies who hunt the worms in a rosebud, tease bats,
chase spiders, and lord it over nightingales — are the leading actors
in an elfin play, a fairy carnival of inimitable mirth and melody,
steeped in a midsummer atmosphere of mist-wreaths and flower-
scents, under the afterglow that lingers through the sultry night.
This miracle of happy inspiration contains the germs of innumer
able romantic achievements in England, Germany, and Denmark,
more than two centuries later.

There is in French literature a graceful mythological play of
somewhat later date — Moliere's Psyche- — in which the exquisite
love-verses which stream from the heroine's lips were written by
the sexagenarian Corneille. It is, in its way, an admirable piece
of work. But read it and compare it with the nature-poetry of
A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and you will feel how far the
great Englishman surpasses the greatest Frenchmen in pure un-
rhetorical lyrism and irrepressibly playful, absolutely poetical
poetry, with its scent of clover, its taste of wild honey, and its
airy and shifting dream-pageantry.

We have here no pathos. The hurricane of passion does not
as yet sweep through Shakespeare's work. No; it is only the
romantic and imaginative side of love that is here displayed, the
magic whereby longing transmutes and idealises its object, the
element of folly, infatuation, and illusion in desire, with its con
sequent variability and transitoriness. Man is by nature a being
with no inward compass, led astray by his instincts and dreams,
and for ever deceived either by himself or by others. This Shake-

;8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

speare realises, but does not, as yet, take the matter very tragi
cally. Thus the characters whom he here presents, even, or
rather especially, in their love-affairs, appear as anything but
reasonable beings. The lovers seek and .avoid each other by
turns, they love and are not loved again ; the couples attract each
other at cross-purposes ; the youth runs after the maiden who
shrinks from him, the maiden flees from the man who adores her ;
and the poet's delicate irony makes the confusion reach its height
and find its symbolic expression when the Queen of the Fairies,
in the intoxication of a love-dream, recognises her ideal in a
journeyman weaver with an ass's head.

it is the love begotten of imagination that here bears sway.
Hence these words of Theseus (v. i) : —

" Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact."

And then follows Shakespeare's first deliberate utterance as to
the nature and art of the poet. He is not, as a rule, greatly con
cerned with the dignity of the poet as such. Quite foreign to him
is the self-idolatry of the later romantic poets, posing as the
spiritual pastors and masters of the world. Where he introduces
poets in his plays (as in Julius Ccesar and Timori), it is generally
to assign them a pitiful part. But here he places in the mouth of
Theseus the famous and exquisite words : —

" The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination."

When he wrote this he felt that his wings had grown.

As A Midsummer Night's Dream was not published until
1600, it is impossible to assign an exact date to the text we
possess. In all probability the piece was altered and amplified
before it was printed.

"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" 79

Attention was long ago drawn to the following lines in
Theseus's speech at the beginning of the fifth act : —

" The thrice three Muses mourning for the death
Of Learning, late deceased in beggary.
This is some satire, keen and critical."

Several commentators have seen in these lines an allusion to
the death of Spenser, which, however, did not occur until 1599,
so late that it can scarcely be the event alluded to. Others have
conjectured a reference to the death of Robert Greene in 1592.
The probability is that the words refer to Spenser's poem, The
Tears of the Muses, published in 1591, which was a complaint of
the indifference of the nobility towards the fine arts. If the play,
as we have so many reasons for supposing, was written for the
marriage of Essex, these lines must have been inserted later, as
they might easily be in a passage like this, where a whole series
of different subjects for masques is enumerated.

The important passage (ii. 2) where Oberon recounts his vision
has already been mentioned. It follows Oberon's description of
the mermaid seated on a dolphin's back —

" Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That certain stars shot madly from their spheres,"

— an allusion, not, as some have supposed, to Mary Stuart, who was
married to the Dauphin of France, but to the festivities and fire
work displays which celebrated Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth in
1575. The passage is interesting, among other reasons, because
we have here one of the few allegories to be found in Shakespeare

an allegory which has taken that form because the matters to

which it alludes could not be directly handled. Shakespeare is
here referring back, as English criticism has long ago pointed out,1
to the allegory in Lyly's mythological play, Endymion. There can
be no doubt that Cynthia (the moon-goddess) in Lyly's play stands
for Queen Elizabeth, while Leicester figures as Endymion, who is
represented as hopelessly enamoured of Cynthia. Tellus and
Floscula, of whom the one loves Endymion's " person," the other
his " virtues," represent the Countesses of Sheffield and Essex,
who stood in amatory relations to Leicester. The play is one

1 N. J. Halpin : Oberoii's Vision in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, illustrated
by a Comparison with Ly lie's Endymion, 1842.

8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

tissue of adulation for Elizabeth, but is so constructed as at the
same time to flatter and defend Leicester. In defiance of the
actual fact, it exhibits the Queen as entirely inaccessible to her
adorer's homage, and Leicester's intrigue with the Countess of
Sheffield as a mere mask for his passion for the Queen ; in other
words, it represents these relations as the Queen would wish to
have them understood by the people, and Leicester by the Queen.
The Countess of Essex, who was afterwards to play so large a part
in Leicester's life, plays a very small part in the drama. Her love
finds expression only in one or two unobtrusive phrases, such as
her cry of joy on seeing Endymion, after the forty years' sleep in
which he has grown an old man, rejuvenated by a single kiss from
Cynthia's lips.

The relation between Leicester and Lettice, Countess of Essex,
must certainly have made a deep impression upon Shakespeare.
By Leicester's contrivance, her husband had been for a long time
banished to Ireland, first as commander of the troops in Ulster,
and afterwards as Earl-Marshal; and when he died, in 1576 —
commonly thought, though without proof, to have been poisoned
— his widow, after a lapse of only a few days, went through a secret
marriage with his supposed murderer. When Leicester, twelve
years later, met with a sudden death, also, according to popular
belief, by poison, the event was regarded as a judgment on a great
criminal. In all probability, Shakespeare found in these events
one of the motives of his Hamlet. Whether the Countess Lettice
was actually Leicester's mistress during her husband's lifetime
is, of course, uncertain ; in any case, the Countess's relation to
Robert, Earl of Essex, her son by her first marriage, was always
of the best. She was, however, punished by the Queen's dis
pleasure, which was so vehement that she was forbidden to show
herself at court.

Shakespeare has retained Lyly's names, merely translating
them into English. Cynthia has become the moon, Tellus the
earth, Floscula the little flower ; and with this commentary, we
are in a position to admire the delicate and poetical way in which
he has touched upon the family circumstances of the supposed
bridegroom, the Earl of Essex : —

" Oberon. That very time I saw (but thou couldst not),
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" 81

Cupid all arm'd : a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell :

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it Love-in-idleness."

It is with the juice of this flower that Oberon makes every one
upon whose eyes it falls dote upon the first living creature they
happen to see.

The poet's design in the flattery addressed to Elizabeth — one
of the very few instances of the kind in his works — was no doubt U>
dispose her favourably towards his patron's marriage, or, in other
words, to deprecate the anger with which she was in the habit
of regarding any attempt on the part of her favourites, or even of
ordinary courtiers, to marry according to their own inclinations.
Essex in particular had stood very close to her, since, in 1587, he
had supplanted Sir Walter Raleigh in her favour ; and although
the Queen, now in her fifty-seventh year, was fully thirty-four
years older than her late adorer, Shakespeare did not succeed
in averting her anger from the young couple. The bride was-
commanded "to live very retired in her mother's house."

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first consummate and
immortal masterpiece which Shakespeare produced.

The fact that the pairs of lovers are very slightly individualised,
and do not in themselves awaken any particular sympathy, is a
fault that we easily overlook, amid the countless beauties of
the play. The fact that the changes in the lovers' feelings are
entirely unmotived is no fault at all, for Oberon's magic is simply
a great symbol, typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination.
There is deep significance as well as drollery in the presentation
of Titania as desperately enamoured of Bottom with his ass's-
head. Nay, more; in the lovers' ever-changing attractions and
repulsions we may find a whole sportive love-philosophy.

The rustic and popular element in Shakespeare's genius here
VOL. I. F

82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

appears more prominently than ever before. The country-bred
youth's whole feeling for and knowledge of nature comes to the
surface, permeated with the spirit of poetry. The play swarms
with allusions to plants and insects, and all that is said of them
is closely observed and intimately felt. In none of Shakespeare's
plays are so many species of flowers, fruits, and trees men
tioned and characterised. H. N. Ellacombe, in his essay on
The Seasons of Shaksperds Plays?- reckons no fewer than
forty-two species. Images borrowed from nature meet us on
every hand. For example, in Helena's beautiful description of
her school friendship with Hermia (iii. 2), she says : —

" So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition ;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."

When Titania exhorts her elves to minister to every desire of
her asinine idol, she says (iii. i): —

"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman :
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes ;
Feed him with apricocks, and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise ;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."

The popular element in Shakespeare is closely interwoven
with his love of nature. He has here plunged deep into folk
lore, seized upon the figments of peasant superstition as they
survive in the old ballads, and mingled brownies and pixies with
the delicate creations of artificial poetry, with Oberon, who is of
French descent (" Auberon," from Vaube du jour), and Titania, a
name which Ovid gives in his Metamorphoses (iii. 173) to Diana
as the sister of the Titan Sol. The Maydes Metamorphosis, a
play attributed to Lyly, although not printed till 1600, may be

1 New Shakspere Society's Transactions •, 1880-86, p. 67.

"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" 83

older than A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. In that case Shake
speare may have found the germ of some of his fairy dialogue in
the pretty fairy song which occurs in it. There is a marked
similarity even in details of dialogue. For example, this con
versation between Bottom and the fairies (iii. i) reminds us of
Lyly':-

"Bot. I cry your worship's mercy, heartily. — I beseech your worship's
name.

" Cob. Cobweb.

" Bot I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb.
If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you. Your name, honest
gentleman ?

"Peas. Pease-blossom.

" Bot. I pray you, commend me to Mistress Squash, your mother,
and to Master Peascod, your father. Good Master Pease-blossom, I
shall desire you of more acquaintance too. — Your name, I beseech
you, sir.

"Mus. Mustard-seed.

" Bot. Good Master Mustard-seed, I know your patience well : that
same cowardly, giant -like oxbeef hath devoured many a gentleman of
your house. I promise you, your kindred hath made my eyes water
ere now. I desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Mustard-
seed."

The contrast between the rude artisans' prose and the poetry
of the fairy world is exquisitely humorous, and has been fre
quently imitated in the nineteenth century: in Germany by Tieck ;
in Denmark by J. L. Heiberg, who has written no fewer than
three imitations of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream — The Elves,
The Day of the Seven Sleepers, and The Nutcrackers.

The fairy element introduced into the comedy brings in its
train not only the many love-illusions, but other and external
forms of thaumaturgy as well. People are beguiled by wandering
voices, led astray in the midnight wood, and victimised in many
innocent ways. The fairies retain from first to last their grace

1 The passage in The Maydes Metamorphosis runs as. follows : —

" Mopso. I pray you, what might I call you ?
\st Fairy. My name is Penny.
Mopso. I am sorry I cannot purse you.
Frisco. I pray you, sir, what might I call you ?
2nd Fairy. My name is Cricket.
Frisco. I would I were a chimney for your sake."

84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and sportiveness, but the individual physiognomies, in this stage
of Shakespeare's development, are as yet somewhat lacking in
expression. Puck, for instance, is a mere shadow in comparison
with a creation of twenty years later, the immortal Ariel of The
Tempest.

Brilliant as is the picture of the fairy world in A Midsummer
NigJit's Dream, the mastery to which Shakespeare had attained
is most clearly displayed in the burlesque scenes, dealing with
the little band of worthy artisans who are moved to represent the
history of Pyramus and Thisbe at the marriage of Theseus and
Hippolyta. Never before has Shakespeare risen to the sparkling
and genial humour with which these excellent simpletons are
portrayed. He doubtless drew upon childish memories of the
plays he had seen performed in the market-place at Coventry and
elsewhere. He also introduced some whimsical strokes of satire
upon the older English drama. For instance, when Quince says
(i. 2), " Marry, our play is — The most lamentable comedy, and
most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby," there is an obvious
reference to the long and quaint title of the old play of Cambyses :
"A lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth,"1 &c.

Shakespeare's elevation of mind, however, is most clearly appa
rent in the playful irony with which he treats his own art, the art
of acting, and the theatre of the day, with its scanty and imper
fect appliances for the production of illusion. The artisan who
plays Wall, his fellow who enacts Moonshine, and the excellent
amateur who represents the Lion are deliciously whimsical types.

It was at all times a favourite device with Shakespeare, as
with his imitators, the German romanticists of two centuries later,
to introduce a play within a play. The device is not of his own
invention. We find it already in Kyd's Spanish Tragedie (per
haps as early as 1584), a play whose fustian Shakespeare often
ridicules, but in which he nevertheless found the germ of his own
Hamlet. But from the very first the idea of giving an air of
greater solidity to the principal play by introducing into it a
company of actors had a great attraction for him. We may
compare with the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes in this play the

1 The passion for alliteration in his contemporaries is satirised in these lines of
he prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe : —

" Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast."

"A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM" 85

appearance of Costard and his comrades as Pompey, Hector,
Alexander, Hercules, and Judas Maccabseus in the fifth act of
Love's Labour's Lost. Even there the Princess speaks with a
kindly tolerance of the poor amateur actors : —

" That sport best pleases, that doth least know how :
Where zeal strives to content, and the contents
Die in the zeal of them which it presents,
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth ;
When great things labouring perish in their birth."

Nevertheless, there is here a certain youthful cruelty in the
courtiers' ridicule of the actors, whereas in A Midsummer Night's
Dream everything passes off in the purest, airiest humour. What
can be more perfect, for example, than the Lion's reassuring
address to the ladies ? —

" ' You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,
May now, perchance, both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know, that I, one Snug the joiner, am
No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam :
For, if I should as lion come in strife
Into this place, 't were pity on my life.' "

And how pleasant, when he at last comes in with his roar,
is Demetrius' comment, of proverbial fame, "Well roared,
lion ! "

It is true that A Midsummer Night's Dream is rather to be
described as a dramatic lyric than a drama in the strict sense of
the word. It is a lightly-flowing, sportive, lyrical fantasy, dealing
with love as a dream, a fever, an illusion, an infatuation, and
making merry, in especial, with the irrational nature of the in
stinct. That is why Lysander, turning, under the influence of
the magic flower, from Hermia, whom he loves, to Helena, who
is nothing to him, but whom he now imagines that he adores, is
made to exclaim (ii. 3) : —

" The will of man is by his reason sway'd,
And reason says you are the worthier maid."

Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the
poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an ex-

86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

pression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is
only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining
factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much
wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life,
and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the un
conscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in
the wayward love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

And it is now that Shakespeare, on the farther limit of early
youth, and immediately after writing A Midsummer Nights
Dream, for the second time takes the most potent of youthful
emotions as his theme, and treats it no longer as a thing of
fantasy, but as a matter of the deadliest moment, as a glowing,
entrancing, and annihilating passion, the source of bliss and
agony, of life and death. It is now that he writes his first inde
pendent tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, that unique, imperishable
love-poem, which remains to this day one of the loftiest summits
of the world's literature. As A Midsummer Nights Dream is
the triumph of grace, so Romeo and Jidiet is the apotheosis of
pure passion.

„

XIII

ROMEO AND JULIET — THE TWO QUARTOS — ITS
ROMANESQUE STRUCTURE— THE USE OF OLD
MOTIVES— THE CONCEPTION OF LOVE

Romeo and Juliet, in its original form, must be presumed to date
from 1591, or, in other words, from Shakespeare's twenty-seventh
year.

The matter was old ; it is to be found in a novel by Masuccio
of Salerno, published in 1476, which was probably made use of
by Luigi da Porta when, in 1530, he wrote his Hystoria novella-
mente ritrovata di dui nobili Amanti. After him came Bandello,
with his tale, La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti ;
and upon it an English writer founded a play of Romeo and
Juliet, which seems to have been popular in its day (before 1562),
but is now lost.

An English poet, Arthur Brooke, found in Bandello's Novella
the matter for a poem : The tragicall Historye of Romeus and
Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell and now in Englishe
by Ar. Br. This poem is composed in rhymed iambic verses of
twelve and fourteen syllables alternately, whose rhythm indeed
jogs somewhat heavily along, but is not unpleasant and not too
monotonous. The method of narration is very artless, loquacious,
and diffuse ; it resembles the narrative style of a clever child, who
describes with minute exactitude and circumstantiality, going into
every detail, and placing them all upon the same plane.1

Shakespeare founded his play upon this poem, in which the

1 Here is a specimen. Romeo says to Juliet —

" Since, lady, that you like to honor me so much .

As to accept me for your spouse, I yeld my selfe for such.
In true witness whereof, because I must depart,
Till that my deed do prove my woord, I leave in pawne my hart.
Tomorrow eke bestimes, before the sunne arise,
To Fryer Lawrence will I wende, to learne his sage advise."
87

88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

two leading characters, Friar Laurence, Mercutio, Tybalt, the
Nurse, and the Apothecary, were ready to his hand, in faint
outlines. Romeo's fancy for another woman immediately before
he meets Juliet is also here, set forth at length; and the action
as a whole follows the same course as in the tragedy.

The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1597,
with the following title : An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo
and Juliet. A s it hath been often (with great applause) plaid
publiquely, by the right Honourable tJie L. of Huns don his Ser-
uants. Lord Hunsdon died in July 1596, during his tenure of
office as Lord Chamberlain ; his successor in the title was ap
pointed to the office in April 1597; in the interim his company
of actors was not called the Lord Chamberlain's, but only Lord
Hunsdon's servants, and it must, therefore, have been at this
time that the play was first acted.

Many things, however, suggest a much earlier origin for it,
and the Nurse's allusion to the earthquake (i. 3) is of especial
importance in determining its date. She says —

" 'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;"
and a little later —

" And since that time it is eleven years."

There had been an earthquake in England in the year 1580. But
we must not, of course, take too literally the babble of a garrulous
old servant.

But even if Shakespeare began to work upon the theme in
1591, there is no doubt that, according to his frequent practice,
he went through the play again, revised and remoulded it, some
where between that date and 1599, when it appeared in the
Second Quarto almost in the form in which we now possess it.
This Second Quarto has on its title-page the words, " newly cor
rected, augmented and amended." Not until the fourth edition
does the author's name appear.

No one can doubt that Tycho Mommsen and that excellent
Shakespeare scholar Halliwell-Phillips are right in declaring the
1597 Quarto to be a pirated edition. But it by no means follows
that the complete text of 1599 already existed in 1597, and was
merely carelessly abridged. In view of those passages (such as

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 89

the seventh scene of the second act) where a whole long sequence
of dialogue is omitted as superfluous, and where the old text is
replaced by one totally new and very much better, this impres
sion will not hold ground.

We have here, then, as elsewhere — but seldom so indubitably
and obviously as here — a play of Shakespeare's at two different
stages of its development.

In the first place, all that is merely sketched in the earlier
edition is elaborated in the later. Descriptive scenes and speeches,
which afford a background and foil to the action, are added. The
street skirmish in the beginning is much developed ; the scene
between the servants and the scene with the musicians are added.
The Nurse, too, has become more loquacious and much more
comic; Mercutio's wit has been enriched by some of its most
characteristic touches ; old Capulet has acquired a more lifelike
physiognomy; the part of Friar Laurence, in particular, has
grown to almost twice its original dimensions ; and we feel in
these amplifications that care on Shakespeare's part, which
appears in other places as well, to prepare, in the course of
revision, for what is to come, to lay its foundations and fore
shadow it. The Friar's reply, for example, to Romeo's vehement
outburst of joy (ii. 6) is an added touch : —

" These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumphs die : like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume."

New, too, is his reflection on Juliet's lightness of foot : —

" A lover may bestride the gossamer
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall ; so light is vanity."

With the exception of the first dozen lines, the Friar's
splendidly eloquent speech to Romeo (iii. 3) when, in his despair,
he has drawn his sword to kill himself, is almost entirely new.
The added passage begins thus: —

" Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth ?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once, which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie ! thou sham'st thy shape, thy love, thy wit ;
Which, like an usurer, abound'st in all,

90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And usest none in that true use indeed

Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit."

New, too, is the Friar's minute description to Juliet (iv. i) of
the action of the sleeping-draught, and his account of how she
will be borne to the tomb, which paves the way for the masterly
passage (iv. 3), also added, where Juliet, with the potion in her
hand, conquers her terror of awakening in the grisly underground
vault.

But the essential change lies in the additional earnestness, and
consequent beauty, with which the characters of the two lovers
have been endowed in the course of the revision. For example,
Juliet's speech to Romeo (ii. 2) is inserted : —

" And yet I wish but for the thing I have.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep ; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite."

In the passage (ii. 5) where Juliet is awaiting the return of
the Nurse with a message from Romeo, almost the whole expres
sion of her impatience is new ; for example, the lines : —

" Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,
She'd be as swift in motion as a ball ;
My words would bandy her to my sweet love,
And his to me :

But old folks, many feign as they were dead ;
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead."

In Juliet's celebrated soliloquy (iii. 2), where, with that mixture
of innocence and passion which forms the groundwork of her
character, she awaits Romeo's first evening visit, only the four
opening lines, with their mythological imagery, are found in the
earlier text : —

"Jut. Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging : such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately."

Not till he put his final touches to the work did Shakespeare
find for the young girl's love-longing that marvellous utterance
which we all know : —

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 91

" Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night !
That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd-of, and unseen !

Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle ; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night ! come, Romeo ! come, thbu day in night ! "

Almost the whole of the following scene between the Nurse
and Juliet, in which she learns of Tybalt's death and Romeo's
banishment, is likewise new. Here occur some of the most
daring and passionate expressions which Shakespeare has placed
in Juliet's mouth : —

" Some word there was, worser than Tybalt's death,
That murder'd me. I would forget it fain.

That * banished,' that one word ' banished,'
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death
Was woe enough, if it had ended there :
Or, — if sour woe delights in fellowship,
And needly will be rank'd with other griefs,—
Why follow'd not, when she said — Tybalt's dead,
Thy father, or thy mother, nay, or both,
Which modern lamentation might have mov'd ?
But, with a rearward following Tybalt's death,
* Romeo is banished ! ' — to speak that word,
Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,
All slain, all dead."

To the original version, on the other hand, belong not only
the highly indecorous witticisms and allusions with which Mer-
cutio garnishes the first scene of the second act, but also the
majority of the speeches in which the conceit-virus rages. The
uncertainty of Shakespeare's taste, even at the date of the revision,
is apparent in the fact that he has not only let all these speeches
stand, but has interpolated not a few of equal extravagance.

So little did it jar upon him that Romeo, in the original text,
should thus apostrophise love (i. i^ —

" O heavy lightness ! serious vanity !
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms !

92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health !
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is ! "

that in the course of revision he must needs place in Juliet's
mouth these quite analogous ejaculations (iii. 2) : —

" Beautiful tyrant ! fiend angelical !
Dove-feather'd raven ! wolvish-ravening lamb !
Despised substance of divinest show ! "

Romeo in the old text indulges in this deplorably affected
outburst (i. 2) : —

" When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires ;
And these, who, often drown'd, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars."

In the old text, too, we find the barbarously tasteless speech
in which Romeo, in his despair, envies the fly which is free to
kiss Juliet's hand (iii. 2) : —

" More validity,

More honourable state, more courtship lives
In carrion flies, than Romeo : they may seize
On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand,
And steal immortal blessing from her lips ;
Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,
Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin \
But Romeo may not ; he is banished.
Flies may do this, but I from this must fly :
They are free men, but I am banished."

It is astonishing to come upon these lapses of taste, which are
not surpassed by any of the absurdities in which the French
Prtcieuses Ridicules of the next century delighted, side by side
with outbursts of the most exquisite lyric poetry, the most brilliant
wit, and the purest pathos to be found in the literature of any
country or of any age.

Romeo and Juliet is perhaps not such a flawless work of art
as A Midsummer Nights Dream. It is not so delicately, so abso
lutely harmonious. But it is an achievement of much greater
significance and moment ; it is the great and typical love-tragedy
of the world.

It soars immeasurably above all later attempts to approach it.

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 93

The Danish critic who should mention such a tragedy as Axel
and Valborg in the same breath with this play would show more
patriotism than artistic sense. Beautiful as Oehlenschlager's
drama is, the very nature of its theme forbids us to compare it
with Shakespeare's. It celebrates constancy rather than love;
it is a poem of tender emotions, of womanly magnanimity and
chivalrous virtue, at war with passion and malignity. It is
not, like Romeo and Juliet, at once the paean and the dirge of
passion.

Romeo and Juliet is the drama of youthful and impulsive love-
at-first-sight, so passionate that it bursts every barrier in its path,
so determined that it knows no middle way between happiness
and death, so strong that it throws the lovers into each other's
arms with scarcely a moment's pause, and, lastly, so ill-fated that
death follows straightway upon the ecstasy of union.

Here, more than anywhere else, has Shakespeare shown in
all its intensity the dual action of an absorbing love in filling
the soul with gladness to the point of intoxication, and, at the
same time, with despair at the very idea of parting.

While in A Midsummer Night's Dream he dealt with the
imaginative side of love, its fantastic and illusive phases, he here
regards it in its more passionate aspect, as the source of rapture
and of doom.

His material enabled Shakespeare to place his love-story in
the setting best fitted to throw into relief the beauty of the
emotion, using as his background a vendetta between two noble
families, which has grown from generation to generation through
one sanguinary reprisal after another, until it has gradually in
fected the whole town around them. According to the traditions
of their race, the lovers ought to hate each other. The fact that,
on the contrary, they are so passionately drawn together in
mutual ecstasy, bears witness from the outset to the strength
of an emotion which not only neutralises prejudice in their own
minds, but continues to assert itself in opposition to the prejudices
of their surroundings. This is no peaceful tenderness. It flashes
forth like lightning at their first meeting, and its violence, under
the hapless circumstances, hurries these young souls straight to
their tragic end.

Between the lovers and the haters Shakespeare has placed
Friar Laurence, one of his most delightful embodiments of reason.

94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Such figures are rare in his plays, as they are in life, but ought
not to be overlooked, as they have been, for example, by Taine
in his somewhat one-sided estimate of Shakespeare's great
ness. Shakespeare knows and understands passionlessness ; but
he always places it on the second plane. It comes in very
naturally here, in the person of one who is obliged by his age
and his calling to act as an onlooker in the drama of life. Friar
Laurence is full of goodness and natural piety, a monk such as
Spinoza or Goethe would have loved, an undogmatic sage, with
the astuteness and benevolent Jesuitism of an old confessor —
brought up on the milk and bread of philosophy, not on the fiery
liquors of religious fanaticism.

It is very characteristic of the freedom of spirit which Shake
speare early acquired, in the sphere in which freedom was then
hardest of attainment, that this monk is drawn with so delicate
a touch, without the smallest ill-will towards conquered Catholi
cism, yet without the smallest leaning towards Catholic doctrine
— the emancipated creation of an emancipated poet. The poet
here rises immeasurably above his original, Arthur Brooke, who,
in his naively moralising " Address to the Reader," makes the
Catholic religion mainly responsible for the impatient passion of
Romeo and Juliet and the disasters which result from it.1

It would be to misunderstand the whole spirit of the play if
we were to reproach Friar Laurence with the not only romantic
but preposterous nature of the means he adopts to help the lovers
— the sleeping-potion administered to Juliet. This Shakespeare
simply accepted from his original, with his usual indifference to
external detail.

The poet has placed in the mouth of Friar Laurence a tranquil
life-philosophy, which he first expresses in general terms, and
then applies to the case of the lovers. He enters his cell with a
basket full of herbs from the garden. Some of them have curative
properties, others contain death-dealing juices; a plant which has
a sweet and salutary smell may be poispnous to the taste; for
good and evil are but two sides to the same thing (ii. 3) : —

1 "A coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselves to vnhonest desire, neglect
ing the authoritie and aduise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall
counsels with dronken gossyppes and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instru-
mentes of unchastitie), attemptyng all aduentures of peryll for thattaynyng of their
wished lust, vsyng auriculer confession (the key of whoredom and treason). ..."

" ROMEO AND JULIET" 95

" Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometimes 's by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this sweet flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power :
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part ;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, — grace, and rude will ;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant."

When Romeo, immediately before the marriage, defies sorrow
and death in the speech beginning (ii. 6) —

"Amen, Amen ! but come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight,"

Laurence seizes the opportunity to apply his view of life. He
fears this overflowing flood-tide of happiness, and expounds his
philosophy of the golden mean — that wisdom of old age which is
summed up in the cautious maxim, "Love me little, love me long."
Here it is that he utters the above-quoted words as to the violent
ends ensuing on violent delights, like the mutual destruction
wrought by the kiss of fire and gunpowder. It is remarkable
how the idea of gunpowder and of explosions seems to have
haunted Shakespeare's mind while he was busied with the fate of
Romeo and Juliet. In the original sketch of Juliet's soliloquy in
the fifth scene of the second act we read : —

" Loue's heralds should be thoughts,
And runne more swift, than hastie powder fierd,
Doth hurrie from the fearfull cannons mouth."

When Romeo draws his sword to kill himself, the Friar says
(Hi. 3) :—

" Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask,
Is set a-fire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence."

Romeo himself, finally, in his despair over the false news of
Juliet's death, demands of the apothecary a poison so strong that

96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" the trunk may be discharg'd of breath
As violently, as the hasty powder fir'd,
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb."

In other words, these young creatures have gunpowder in tneir
veins, undamped as yet by the mists of life, and love is the fire
which kindles it. Their catastrophe is inevitable, and it was
Shakespeare's deliberate purpose so to represent it ; but it is
not deserved, in the moral sense of the word : it is not a
punishment for guilt. The tragedy does not afford the smallest
warranty for the pedantically moralising interpretation devised
for it by Gervinus and others.

Romeo and Juliet, as a drama, still represents in many ways
the Italianising tendency in Shakespeare's art. Not only the
rhymed couplets and stanzas and the abounding concetti betray
Italian influence : the whole structure of the tragedy is very
Romanesque. All Romanesque, like all Greek art, produces its
effect by dint of order, which sometimes goes the length of actual
symmetry. Purely English art has more of the freedom of life
itself; it breaks up symmetry in order to attain a more delicate
and unobtrusive harmony, much as an excellent prose style shuns
the symmetrical regularity of verse, and aims at a subtler music
of its own.

The Romanesque type is apparent in all Shakespeare's earlier
plays. He sometimes even goes beyond his Romanesque models.
In Love's Labour's Lost the King with his three courtiers is
opposed to the Princess and her three ladies. In The Two
Gentlemen of Verona the faithful Valentine has his counterpart in
the faithless Proteus, and each of them has his comic servant. In
the Men&chmi of Plautus there is only one slave; in The Comedy of
Errors the twin masters have twin servants. In A Midsummer
Night's Dream the heroic couple (Theseus and Hippolyta) have
as a counterpart the fairy couple (Oberon and Titania) ; and,
further, there is a complex symmetry in the fortunes of the
Athenian lovers, Hermia being at first wooed by two men, while
Helena stands alone and deserted, whereas afterwards it is
Hermia who is left without a lover, while the two men centre
their suit upon Helena. Finally, there is a fifth couple in
Pyramus and Thisbe, represented by the artisans, who in bur
lesque and sportive fashion complete the symmetrical design.

The French critics who have seen in Shakespeare the anti-

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 97

thesis to the Romanesque principle in art have overlooked these
his beginnings. Voltaire, after more careful study, need not have
expressed himself horrified ; and if Taine, in his able essay, had
gone somewhat less summarily to work, he would not have found
everywhere in Shakespeare a fantasy and a technique entirely
foreign to the genius of the Latin races.

The composition of Romeo and Juliet is quite as symmetrical
as that of the comedies, indeed almost architectural in its equi
poise. First, two of Capulet's servants enter, then two of Mon
tague's ; then Benvolio, of the Montague party ; then Tybalt, of
the Capulets ; then citizens of both parties ; then old Capulet and
his wife ; then old Montague and his ; and finally, as the " key
stone of the arch," the Prince, the central figure around whom all
the characters range themselves, and by whom the fate of the
lovers is to be determined.1

But it is not as a drama that Romeo and Juliet has won all
hearts. Although, from a dramatic point of view, it stands high
above A Midsummer NigJifs Dream, yet it is in virtue of its
exquisite lyrism that this erotic masterpiece of Shakespeare's
youth, like its fantastic predecessor, has bewitched the world.
It is from the lyrical portions of the tragedy that the magic
of romance proceeds, which sheds its glamour and its glory over
the whole.

The finest lyrical passages are these : Romeo's declaration of
love at the ball, Juliet's soliloquy before their bridal night, and
their parting at the dawn.

Gervinus, a conscientious and learned student, in spite of his.
tendency to see in Shakespeare the moralist specially demanded
by the Germany of his own day, has followed Halpin in pointing
out that in all these three passages Shakespeare has adopted age-
old lyric forms. In the first he almost reproduces the Italian
sonnet; in the second he approaches, both in matter and form,
to the bridal song, the Epithalamium ; in the third he^. takes as
his model the mediaeval Dawn-Song, the Tagelied. But we may
be sure that Shakespeare did not, as the commentators think,,
deliberately choose these forms in order to give perspective to
the situation, but instinctively gave it a deep and distant back
ground in his effort to find the truest and largest utterance] for
the emotion he was portraying.

1 See Dowden : Shakspere : his Mind and Art, p. 60.
VOL. I. G

98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The first colloquy between Romeo and Juliet (i. 5), being
merely the artistic idealisation of an ordinary passage of ball
room gallantry, turns upon the prayer for a kiss, which the
English fashion of the day authorised each cavalier to demand
of his lady, and is cast in a sonnet form more or less directly
derived from Petrarch. But whereas Petrarch's style is simple
and pure, here we have far-fetched turns of speech, quibbling
appeals, and expressions of admiration suggested by the intellect
rather than the feelings. The passage opens with a quatrain of
unspeakable tenderness : —

"Romeo. If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this ;
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."

And though the scene proceeds in the somewhat artificial style of
the later Italians —

" Romeo. Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg'd.

[Kissing her.~\
Juliet. Then have rny lips the sin that they have took.

Rom. Sin from my lips ? O trespass sweetly urg'd !

Give me my sin again.
Jul. You kiss by the book "

— yet so much soul is breathed into the Italian love-fencing that
under its somewhat affected grace we can distinguish the pulse-
throbs of awakening desire.

Juliet's soliloquy before the bridal night (iii. 2) lacks only
rhyme to be, in good set form, an epithalamium of the period.
These compositions spoke of Hymen and Cupid, and told how
Hymen at first appears alone, while Cupid lurks concealed, until,
at the door of the bridal chamber, the elder brother gives place to
the younger.

It is noteworthy that the mythological opening lines, which
belong to the earlier form of the play, contain a clear reminiscence
of a passage in Marlowe's King Edward II. Marlowe's

" Gallop apace, bright Phoebus, through the sky ! "
reappears in Shakespeare in the form of

"Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging ! "

" ROMEO AND JULIET" 99

The rest of the soliloquy, as we have seen above, ranks among
the loveliest things Shakespeare ever wrote. One of its most
delicately daring expressions is imitated in Milton's Comus ; and
the difference between the original and the imitation is curiously
typical of the difference between the poet of the Renaissance and
the poet of Puritanism. Juliet implores love-performing night
to spread its close curtain, that Romeo may leap unseen to her
arms; for —

" Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties : or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night."

Milton annexes the thought and the turn of phrase ; but the part
played by beauty in Shakespeare, Milton assigns to virtue : —

" Virtue could see to do what virtue would
By her own radiant light."

There is in Juliet's utterance of passion a healthful delicacy
that ennobles it ; and it need not be said that the presence of this
very passion in Juliet's monologue renders it infinitely more chaste
than the old epithalamiums.

The exquisite dialogue in Juliet's chamber at daybreak (iii. 5)
is a variation on the motive of all the old Dawn-Songs. They
always turn upon the struggle in the breasts of two lovers who
have secretly passed the night together, between their reluctance
to part and their dread of discovery — a struggle which sets them
debating whether the light they see comes from the sun or the
moon, and whether it is the nightingale or the lark whose song
they hear.

How gracefully is this motive here employed, and what
added depth is given to the situation by our knowledge that
the banished Romeo's life is forfeit if he lingers until day ! —

" Juliet. Wilt thou be gone ? it is not yet near day :
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear ;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree :
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale : look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east."

Romeo is a well-born youth, richly endowed by nature, enthu-

ioo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

siastic and reserved. At the beginning of the play we find him
indifferent as to the family feud, and absorbed in his hopeless
fancy for a lady of the hostile house, Capulet's fair niece, Rosaline,
whom Mercutio describes as a pale wench with black eyes. The
Rosaline of Love's Labours Lost is also described by Biron,
at the end of the third act, as

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,"

so that the two namesakes may not improbably have had a
common model.

Shakespeare has retained this first passing fancy of Romeo's,
which he found in his sources, because he knew that the heart is
never more disposed to yield to a new love than when it is bleed
ing from an old wound, and because this early feeling already
shows Romeo as inclined to idolatry and self-absorption. The
young Italian, even before he has seen the woman who is to
be his fate, is reticent and melancholy, full of tender longings
and forebodings of evil. Then he is seized as though with an
overwhelming ecstasy at the first glimpse of Rosaline's girl^-kins-
woman.

Romeo's character is less resolute than Juliet's ; passion
ravages it more fiercely; he, as a youth, has less control over
himself than she as a maiden. But none the less is his whole
nature elevated and beautified by his relation to her. He finds
expressions for his love for Juliet quite different from those he
had used in the case of Rosaline. There occur, indeed, in the
balcony scene, one or two outbursts of the extravagance so natural
to the rhetoric of young love. The envious moon is sick and
pale with grief because Juliet is so much more fair than she ;
two of the fairest stars, having some business, do entreat her eyes
to twinkle in their spheres till they return. But side by side
with thes.e conceits we find immortal lines, the most exquisite
words of love that ever were penned : —

"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls;

For stony limits cannot hold love out . . ."
or —

" It is my soul that calls upon my name :
How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears ! "

His every word is steeped in a sensuous-spiritual ecstasy.

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 101

Juliet has grown up in an unquiet and not too agreeable
home. Her testy, unreasonable father, though not devoid of
kindliness, is yet so brutal that he threatens to beat her and turn
her out of doors if she does not comply with his wishes ; and her
mother is a cold-hearted woman, whose first thought, in her rage
against Romeo, is to have him put out of the way by means of
poison. She has thus been left for the most part to the care
of the humorous and plain-spoken Nurse, one of Shakespeare's
most masterly figures (foretelling the FalstafF of a few years
later), whose babble has tended to prepare her mind for love in
its frankest manifestations.

Although a child in years, Juliet has the young Italian's
mastery in dissimulation. When her mother proposes to have
Romeo poisoned, she agrees without moving a muscle, and thus
secures the promise that no one but she shall be allowed to mix
the potion. Her beauty must be conceived as dazzling. I saw
her one day in the streets of Rome, in all the freshness of her
fourteen years. My companion and I looked at each other, and
exclaimed with one consent, " Juliet ! " Romeo's exclamation on
first beholding her —

" Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear,"

conveys an instant impression of nobility, high mental gifts, and
unsullied purity, combined with the utmost ardour of tempera
ment. In a few days the child ripens into a heroine.

We make acquaintance with her at the ball in the palace of
the Capulets, and in the moonlit garden where the nightingale
sings in the pomegranate-tree — surroundings which harmonise as
completely with the whole spirit and tone of the play as the biting
wintry air on the terrace at Kronborg, filled with echoes of the
King's carouse, harmonises with the spirit and tone of Hamlet.
But Juliet is no mere creature of moonshine. She is practical.
While Romeo wanders off into high-strung raptures of vague
enthusiasm, she, on the contrary, promptly suggests a secret
marriage, and promises on the instant to send the Nurse to him
to make a more definite arrangement. After .the killing of her
kinsman, it is Romeo who despairs and she who takes up the
battle, daring all to escape the marriage with Paris. With a firm
hand and a steadfast heart she drains' the sleeping-potion, and

102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

arms herself with her dagger, so that, if all else fails, she may
still be mistress of her own person.

How shall we describe the love that indues her with all this
strength ?

Modern critics in Germany and Sweden are agreed in regard
ing it as a purely sensual passion, by no means admirable —
nay, essentially reprehensible. They insist that there is a total
absence of maidenly modesty in Juliet's manner of feeling, think
ing, speaking, and acting. She does not really know Romeo,
they say ; is there anything more, then, in this unbashful love
than the attraction of mere bodily beauty ? l

As if it were possible thus to analyse and discriminate ! As if,
in such a case, body and soul were twain ! As if a love which,
from the first moment, both lovers feel to be, for them, the arbiter
of life and death, were to be decried in favour of an affection
founded on mutual esteem — the variety which, it appears, " our
age demands."

Ah no ! these virtuous philosophers and worthy professors
have no feeling for the spirit of the Renaissance : they are alto
gether too remote from it. The Renaissance means, among many
other things, a new birth of warm-blooded humanity and pagan
innocence of imagination.

It is no love of the head that Juliet feels for Romeo, no ad
miring affection that she reasons herself into ; nor is it a senti
mental love, a riot of idealism apart from nature. But still less
is it a mere ferment of the senses. It is based upon instinct, the
infallible instinct of the child of nature, and it is in her, as in him,
a vibration of the whole being in longing and desire, a quivering

1 Edward von Hartmann, from the lofty standpoint of German morality, has
launched a diatribe against Juliet. He asserts her immeasurable moral inferiority to
the typical German maiden, both of poetry and of real life. Schiller's Thekla has
undeniably less warm blood in her veins.

A Swedish professor, Henrik Schiick, in an able work on Shakespeare, says of
Juliet : "On examining into the nature of the love to which she owes all this strength,
the unprejudiced reader cannot but recognise in it a purely sensual passion. ... A
few words from the lips of this well-favoured youth are sufficient to awaken in its
fullest strength the slumbering desire in her breast. But this love possesses no
psychical basis ; it is not founded on any harmony of souls. They scarcely know
each other. . . . Can their love, then, be anything more than the merely sensual
passion aroused by the contemplation of a beautiful body ? ... So much I say with
confidence, that the woman who, inaccessible to the spiritual element in love, lets
herself be carried away on this first meeting by the joy of the senses . that
woman is ignorant of the love which our age demands."

"ROMEO AND JULIET" 103

of all its chords, from the highest to the lowest, so intense that
neither he nor she can tell where body ends and soul begins.

Romeo and Juliet dominate the whole tragedy; but the two
minor creations of Mereutio and the Nurse are in no way inferior
to them in artistic value. In this play Shakespeare manifests for
the first time not only the full majesty but the many-sidedness of
his genius, the suppleness of style which is equal at once to the
wit of Mercutio and to the racy garrulity of the Nurse. Titus
Andronicus was as monotonously sombre as a tragedy of Mar
lowe's. Romeo and Juliet is a perfect orb, embracing the twin
hemispheres of the tragic and the comic. It is a symphony so
rich that the strain from fairyland in the Queen Mab speech har
monises with the note of high comedy in Mercutio' s sparkling,
cynical, and audacious sallies, with the wanton flutings of farce
in the Nurse's anecdotes, with the most rapturous descants of
passion in the antiphonies of Romeo and Juliet, and with the
deep organ - tones in the soliloquies and speeches of Friar
Laurence.

How intense is the life of Romeo and Juliet in their environ
ment ! Hark to the gay and yet warlike hubbub around them,
the sport and merriment, the high words and the ring of steel in
the streets of Verona ! Hark to the Nurse's strident laughter,
old Capulet's jesting and chiding, the low tones of the Friar, and
the irrepressible rattle of Mercutio's wit ! Feel the magic of the
whole atmosphere in which they are plunged, these embodiments
of tumultuous youth, living and dying in love, in magnanimity,
in passion, in despair, under a glowing Southern sky, softening
into moonlight nights of sultry fragrance — and realise that Shake
speare had at this point completed the first stage of his triumphal
progress !

XIV

LATTER-DAY ATTACKS UPON SHAKESPEARE— THE
BACONIAN THEORY — SHAKESPEARE'S KNOW
LEDGE, PHYSICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL

IN one of his sonnets Robert Browning says that Shakespeare's
name, like the Hebrew name of God, ought never to be taken in
vain. A timely monition to an age which has seen this great
name besmirched by American and European imbecility !

It is well known that in recent days a troop of less than half-
educated people have put forth the doctrine that Shakespeare lent
his name to a body of poetry with which he had really nothing
to do — which he could not have understood, much less have
written. Literary criticism is an instrument which, like all delicate
tools, must be handled carefully, and only by those who have a
vocation for it. Here it has fallen into the hands of raw Americans
and fanatical women. Feminine criticism on the one hand, with
its lack of artistic nerve, and Americanism on the other hand,
with its lack of spiritual delicacy, have declared war to the knife
against Shakespeare's personality, and have within the last few
years found a considerable number of adherents. We have here
another proof, if any were needed, that the judgment of the multi
tude, in questions of art, is a negligible quantity.1

Before the middle of this century, it had occurred to no human
being to doubt that — trifling exceptions apart — the works attri
buted to Shakespeare were actually written by him. It has been

1 According to W. H. Wyman's Bibliography of the Bacon- Shakespeare Contro
versy (Cincinnati, 1884), there had been published up to that date 255 books, pam
phlets, and essays as to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. In America 161 treatises
of considerable bulk had been devoted to the question, and in England 69. Of these,
73 were decidedly opposed to Shakespeare's authorship, while 65 left the question
undetermined. In other words, out of 161 books, only 23 were in favour of Shake
speare. And since then the proportion has no doubt remained much the same.

104

ATTACKS UPON SHAKESPEARE 105

reserved for the last forty years to see an ever-increasing stream
of obloquy and contempt directed against what had hitherto been
the most honoured name in modern literature.

At first the attack upon Shakespeare's memory was not so
dogmatic as it has since become. In 1848 an American, Hart by
name, gave utterance to some general doubts as to the origin of
the plays. Then, in August 1852, there appeared in Chambers?*
Edinburgh Journal an anonymous article, the author of which
declared his conviction that William Shakespeare, uneducated as
he was, must have hired a poet, some penniless famished Chatter-
ton, who was willing to sell him his genius, and let him take to
himself the credit for its creations. We see, he says, that his
plays steadily improve as the series proceeds, until suddenly
Shakespeare leaves London with a fortune, and the series comes
to an abrupt end. In the case of so strenuously progressive a
genius, can we account for this otherwise than by supposing that
the poet had died, while his employer survived him ?

This is the first definite expression of the fancy that Shake
speare was only a man of straw who had arrogated to himself the
renown of an unknown immortal.

In 1856 a Mr. William Smith issued a privately-printed letter
to Lord Ellesmere, in which he puts forth the opinion that William
Shakespeare was, by reason of his birth, his upbringing, and his
lack of culture, incapable of writing the plays attributed to him.
They must have been the work of a man educated to the highest
point by study, travel, knowledge of books and men — a man like
Francis Bacon, the greatest Englishman of his time. Bacon had
kept his authorship secret, because to have avowed it would have
been to sacrifice his position both in his profession and in Parlia
ment ; but he saw in these plays a means of strengthening his
economic position, and he used the actor Shakespeare as a man
of straw. Smith maintains that it was Bacon who, after having
fallen into disgrace in 1621, published the First Folio edition of
the plays in 1623.

If there were no other objection to this far-fetched theory, we
cannot but remark that Bacon was scrupulously careful as to the
form in which his works appeared, rewrote them over and over
again, and corrected them so carefully that scarcely a single error
of the press is to be found in his books. Can he have been re
sponsible for the publication of these thirty- six plays, which

io6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

swarm with misreadings and contain about twenty thousand errors
of the press !

The delusion did not take serious shape until, in the same
year, a Miss Delia Bacon put forward the same theory in Ameri
can magazines : her namesake Bacon, and not Shakespeare, was
the author of the renowned dramas. In the following year she
published a quite unreadable book on the subject, of nearly 600
pages. And close upon her heels followed her disciple, Judge
Nathaniel Holmes, also an American, with a book of no fewer
than 696 pages, full of denunciations of the ignorant vagabond
William Shakespeare, who, though he could scarcely write his
own name and knew no other ambition than that of money-
grubbing, had appropriated half the renown of the great
Bacon.

The assumption is always the same : Shakespeare, born in a
provincial town, of illiterate parents, his father being, among other
things, a butcher, was an ignorant boor, a low fellow, a " butcher-
boy," as his assailants currently call him. In Holmes, as in later
writers, the main method of proving Bacon's authorship of the
Shakespearian plays is to bring together passages of somewhat
similar import in Bacon and Shakespeare, in total disregard of
context, form, or spirit.

Miss Delia Bacon literally dedicated her life to her attack upon
Shakespeare. She saw in his works, not poetry, but a great
philosophico-political system, and maintained that the proof of her
doctrine would be found deposited in Shakespeare's grave. She
had discovered in Bacon's letters the key to a cipher which would
clear up everything ; but unfortunately she became insane before
she had imparted this key to the world.1 She went to Stratford,
obtained permission to have the grave opened, hovered about it
day and night, but at last left it undisturbed, as it did not appear
to her large enough to contain the posthumous papers of the
Elizabeth Club. She did not, however, expect to find in the

1 One of her many followers, an American lawyer, Ignatius Donnelly, formerly
Member of Congress and Senator from Minnesota, claims to have found the key.
His crazy book is called 7^he Great Cryptogram : Francis Bacon's Cipher in the
so-called Shakespeare Plays. It sets forth how Bacon embodied in the First Folio
a cipher-confession of his authorship. Apart from the general madness of such a
proceeding, Bacon must thus have made the editors, Heminge and Condell, his
accomplices in his meaningless deception, and must even have induced Ben Jonson to
confirm it by his enthusiastic introductory poem.

THE BACONIAN THEORY 107

grave the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays. No!
she exclaims in her article on "William Shakespeare and his
Plays" (Putnam1 s Magazine, January 1856), Lord Leicester's
groom, of course, cared nothing for them, but only for the profit
to be made out of them. What was to prevent him from lighting
the fire with them ? " He had those manuscripts ! . . . He had
the original Hamlet with its last finish ; he had the original Lear
with his own final readings ; he had them all, as they came from
the gods. . . . And he left us to wear out our youth and squander
our lifetime in poring over and setting right the old garbled copies
of the playhouse ! . . . Traitor and miscreant ! what did you do
with them ? You have skulked this question long enough. You
will have to account for them. . . . The awakening ages will put
you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the
question, ' What did you do with them ? ' "

It is hard to be the greatest dramatic genius in the world's
history, and then, two centuries and a half after your death, to
be called to account in such a tone as this for the fact that your
manuscripts have disappeared. As regards purely external evi
dence, it is worth mentioning that the greatest student of Bacon's
works, his editor and biographer, James Spedding, being chal
lenged by Holmes to give his opinion, made a statement which
begins thus : — " I have read your book on the authorship of
Shakespeare faithfully to the end, and ... I must declare myself
not only unconvinced but undisturbed. To ask me to believe
that ' Bacon was the author of these dramas ' is like asking me to
believe that Lord Brougham was the author not only of Dickens'
novels, but of Thackeray's also, and of Tennyson's poems be
sides. I deny," he concludes, " that a primd facie case is made
out for questioning Shakespeare's title. But if there were any
reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author, I
think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not
Bacon" (Reviews and Discussions, 1879, pp. 369-374).

What most amazes a critical reader of the Baconian imperti
nences is the fact that all the different arguments for the impossi
bility of attributing these plays to Shakespeare are founded upon
the universality of knowledge and insight displayed in them,
which must have been unattainable, it is urged, to a man of
Shakespeare's imperfect scholastic training. Thus all that these
detractors bring forward to Shakespeare's dishonour serves,

io8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

rightly considered, to show in a clearer light the wealth of his
genius.

On the other hand, the arguments adduced in support of
Bacon's authorship are so ridiculous as almost to elude criticism.
Opponents of the doctrine have dwelt upon such details as the
Philistinism of Bacon's essays "Of Love," "Of Marriage and
Single Life," contrasted with the depth and the wit of Shakesperian
utterances on these subjects; or they have cited certain lines
from the miserable translations of seven Hebrew psalms which
Bacon produced in the last years of his life, contrasting them
with passages from Richard III. and Hamlet, in which Shake
speare has dealt with exactly similar ideas — the harvest that
follows from a seed-time of tears, and the leaping to light of
secret crimes. But it is a waste of time to go into details. Any
one who has read even a few of Bacon's essays or a stanza or
two of his verse translations, and who can discover in them any
trace of Shakespeare's style in prose or verse, is no more fitted to
have a voice on such questions than an inland bumpkin is fitted
to lay down the law upon navigation.

Even putting aside the conjecture with regard to Bacon, and
looking merely at the theory that Shakespeare did not write the
plays, we cannot but find it unrivalled in its ineptitude. How
can we conceive that not only contemporaries in general, but
those with whom Shakespeare was in daily intercourse — the
players to whom he gave these dramas for production, who
received his instructions about them, who saw his manuscripts
and have described them to us (in the foreword to the First
Folio) ; the dramatists who were constantly with him, his rivals
and afterwards his comrades, like Drayton and Ben Jonson ; the
people who discussed his works with him in the theatre, or, over
the evening glass, debated with him concerning his art; and,
finally, the young noblemen whom his genius attracted and who
became his patrons and afterwards his friends — how can we con
ceive that none of these, no single one, should ever have observed
that he was not the man he pretended to be, and that he did not
even understand the works he fraudulently declared to be his !
How can we conceive that none of all this intelligent and critical
circle should ever have discovered the yawning gulf which sepa
rated his ordinary thought and speech from the thought and style
of his alleged works !

SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE 109

In sum, then, the only evidence against Shakespeare lies in
the fact that his works give proof of a too many-sided knowledge
and insight !

The knowledge of English law which Shakespeare displays is
so surprising as to have led to the belief that he must for some
time in his youth have been a clerk in an attorney's office — a
theory which was thought to be supported by the belief, now dis
credited, that an attack by the satirist Thomas Nash upon lawyers
who had deserted the law for poetry was directed against him.1

Shakespeare shows a quite unusual fondness for the use of
legal expressions. He knows to a nicety the technicalities of the
bar, the formulas of the bench. While most English writers
of his period are guilty of frequent blunders as to the laws of
marriage and inheritance, lawyers of a later date have not suc
ceeded in finding in Shakespeare's references to the law a single
error or deficiency. Lord Campbell, an eminent lawyer, has written
a book on Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements. And it was not
through the lawsuits of Shakespeare's riper years that he attained
this knowledge. It is to be found even in his earliest works. It
appears, quaintly enough, in the mouth of the goddess in Venus
and Adonis (verse 86, &c.), and it obtrudes itself in Sonnet xlvi.,
with its somewhat tasteless and wire-drawn description of a formal
lawsuit between the eye and the heart. It is characteristic that
his knowledge does not extend to the laws of foreign countries ;
otherwise we should scarcely find Measure for Measure founded
upoft such an impossible state of the law as that which is described
as obtaining in Vienna. Shakespeare's accurate knowledge begins
and ends with what comes within the sphere of his personal
observation.

He seems equally at home in all departments of human life.
If we might conclude from his knowledge of law that he had been

* * The passage runs thus : "It is a common practice now- a days among a sort of
shifting companions that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade
of noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavours of art,
that could scarcely latinize their neck -verse if they should have need ; yet English
Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar, and so
forth ; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole
Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches." Although this passage seems
at first sight an evident gibe at Shakespeare, it has in reality no reference to him,
since An Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities, by Thomas Nash,
although not printed till 1589, can be proved to have been written as early as 1587,
many years before Shakespeare so much as thought of Hamlet.

no WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

a lawyer, we might no less confidently infer from his knowledge
of typography that he had been a printer's devil. An English
printer named Blades has written an instructive book, Shakespeare
and Typography, to show that if the poet had passed his whole
life in a printing-office he could not have been more familiar with
the many peculiarities of nomenclature belonging to the handicraft.
Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a highly esteemed, very
pious, but, I regret to say, quite unreadable work, Shakespeare ^s
Knowledge and Use of the Bible, in which he makes out that the
poet was impregnated with the Biblical spirit, and possessed a
unique acquaintance with Biblical forms of expression.

Shakespeare's knowledge of nature is not simply such as can
be acquired by any one who passes his childhood and youth in
the open air and in the country. But even of this sort of know
ledge he has an astonishing store. Whole books have been written
as to his familiarity with insect life alone (R. Patterson : The
Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare; London,
1841), and his knowledge of the characteristics of the larger
animals and birds seems to be inexhaustible. Appleton Morgan,
one of the champions of the Baconian theory, adduces in The
Shakespearean Myth a whole series of examples.

In Mitch Ado (v. 2) Benedick says to Margaret —

" Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth ; it catches."

The greyhound alone among dogs can seize its prey while in
full career.

In As You Like It (i. 2) Celia says —

" Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.

Rosalind. With his mouth full of news.

Celia. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young."

Pigeons have a way, peculiar to themselves, of passing food
down the throats of their young.

In Twelfth Night (iii. i) the Clown says to Viola —

" Fools are as like husbands, as pilchards are to herrings, — the
husband's the bigger."

The pilchard is a fish of the herring family, which is caught in
the Channel ; it is longer and has larger scales.

SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE in

In the same play (ii. 5) Maria says of Malvolio —
"Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling."

When a trout is tickled on the sides or the belly it becomes
so stupefied that it lets itself be caught in the hand.
In Much Ado (iii. i) Hero says —

" For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference."

The lapwing, which runs very swiftly, bends its neck towards
the ground in running, in order to escape observation.
In King Lear (i. 4) the Fool says —

" The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it had its head bit off by its young."

In England, it is in the hedge-sparrow's nest that the cuckoo
lays its eggs.

In All's Well that Ends Well (ii. 5) Lafeu says—

" I took this lark for a bunting."

The English bunting is a bird of the same colour and appear
ance as the lark, but it does not sing so well.

It would be easy to show that Shakespeare was as familiar
with the characteristics of plants as with those of animals.
Strangely enough, people have thought this knowledge of nature
so improbable in a great poet, that in order to explain it they have
jumped at the conclusion that the author must have been a man
of science as well.

More comprehensible is the astonishment which has been
awakened by Shakespeare's insight in other domains of nature
not lying so open to immediate observation. His medical know
ledge early attracted attention. In 1 860 a Doctor Bucknill devoted
a whole book to the subject, in which he goes so far as to attribute
to the poet the most advanced knowledge of our own time, or,
at any rate, of the 'sixties, in this department. Shakespeare's
representations of madness surpass all those of other poets.
Alienists are full of admiration for the accuracy of the symptoms
in Lear and Ophelia. Nay, more, Shakespeare appears to have
divined the more intelligent modern treatment of the insane, as
opposed to the cruelty prevalent in his own time and long after.

H2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

He even had some notions of what we in our days call medical
jurisprudence ; he was familiar with the symptoms of violent death
in contradistinction to death from natural causes. Warwick says
in the second part of Henry VI. (iii. 2) : —

" See, how the blood is settled in his face.
Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart."

These lines occur in the oldest text. In the later text, un
doubtedly the result of Shakespeare's revision, we read : —

" But see, his face is black, and full of blood ;
His eye-balls further out than when he liv'd,
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man :
His hair uprear'd, his nostrils stretch'd with struggling ;
His hands abroad display'd, as one that grasp'd
And tugg'd for life, and was by strength subdued.
Look, on the sheets, his hair, you see, is sticking ;
His well-proportion'd beard made rough and rugged,
Like to the summer's corn by tempest lodg'd.
It cannot be but he was murder'd here ;
The least of all these signs were probable."

Shakespeare seems, in certain instances, to be not only abreast
of the natural science of his time, but in advance of it. People
have had recourse to the Baconian theory in order to explain the
surprising fact that although Harvey, who is commonly repre
sented as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, did not
announce his discovery until 1619, and published his book upon it
so late as 1628, yet Shakespeare, who, as we know, died in 1616,
in many passages of his plays alludes to the blood as circulating
through the body. Thus, for example, in Julius Ccesar (ii. i),
Brutus says to Portia —

" You are my true and honourable wife ;
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart."

Again, in Coriolanus (i. i) Menenius makes the belly say of
its food —

" I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain ;

SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE 113

And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live."

But apart from the fact that the highly gifted and unhappy
Servetus, whom Calvin burned, had, between 1530 and 1540, made
the discovery and lectured upon it, all men of culture in England
knew very well before Harvey's time that the blood flowed, even
that it circulated, and, more particularly, that it was driven from
the heart to the different limbs and organs ; only, it was generally
conceived that the blood passed from the heart through the veinsr
and not, as is actually the case, through the arteries. And there
is nothing in the seventy-odd places in Shakespeare where the
circulation of the blood is mentioned to show that he possessed
this ultimate insight, although his general understanding of these
questions bears witness to his high culture.

Another point which some people have held inexplicable, ex
cept by the Baconian theory, may be stated thus : Although the
law of gravitation was first discovered by Newton, who was born
in 1642, or fully twenty-six years after Shakespeare's death, and
although the general conception of gravitation towards the centre
of the earth had been unknown before Kepler, who discovered his
third law of the mechanism of the heavenly bodies two years after
Shakespeare's death, nevertheless in Troilus and Cressida (iv. 2)
the heroine thus expresses herself: —

" Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can,
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it."

So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordi
nary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling
Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary
than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries ; for Goethe
had enjoyed a very different education from his, and had, more
over, all desirable leisure for scientific research. But Newton
cannot rightly be said to have discovered the law of gravitation ;
he only applied it to the movements of the heavenly bodies..
Even Aristotle had defined weight as " the striving of heavy
VOL. i. H

114 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

bodies towards the centre of the earth." Among men of clas
sical culture in England in Shakespeare's time, the knowledge
that the centre point of the earth attracts everything to it was
quite common. The passage cited only affords an additional
proof that several of the men whose society Shakespeare fre
quented were among the most highly-developed intellects of the
period. That his astronomical knowledge was not, on the whole,
in advance of his time is proved by the expression, "the glorious
planet Sol " in Troilus and Cressida (i. 3). He never got beyond
the Ptolemaic system.

Another confirmation of the theory that Bacon must have
written Shakespeare's plays has been found in the fact that the
poet clearly had some conception of geology ; whereas geology,
as a science, owes its origin to Niels Steno, who was born in
1638, twenty-two years after Shakespeare's death. In the second
part of Henry IV. (iii. i), King Henry says : —

" O God ! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea ! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors ' "

The purport of this passage is simply to show that in nature,
as in human life, the law of transformation reigns ; but no doubt
it is implied that the history of the earth can be read in the earth
itself, and that changes occur through upheavals and depressions.
It looks like a forecast of the doctrine of Neptunism.

Here, again, people have gone to extremities in order artifici
ally to enhance the impression made by the poet's brilliant divina
tion. It was Steno who first systematised geological conceptions ;
but he was by no means the first to hold that the earth had been
formed little by little, and that it was therefore possible to trace
in the record of the rocks the course of the earth's development.
His chief service lay in directing attention to stratification, as
affording the best evidence of the processes which have fashioned
the crust of the globe.

SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE 115

It is, no doubt, a sign of Shakespeare's many-sided genius
that here, too, he anticipates the scientific vision of later times ;
but there is nothing in these lines that presupposes any special
or technical knowledge. Here is an analogous case: In Michael
Angelo's picture of the creation of Adam, where God wakens the
first man to life by touching the figure's outstretched finger-tip
with his own, we seem to see a clear divination of the electric
spark. Yet the induction of electricity was not known until the
eighteenth century, and Michael Angelo could not possibly have
any scientific understanding of its nature.

Shakespeare's knowledge was not of a scientific cast. He
learned from men and from books with the rapidity of genius.
Not, we may be sure, without energetic effort, for nothing can be
had for nothing ; but the effort of acquisition must have come easy
to him, and must have escaped the observation of all around him.
There was no time in his life for patient research ; he had to devote
the best part of his days to the theatre, to uneducated and uncon-
sidered players, to entertainments, to the tavern. We may fancy
that he must have had himself in mind when, in the introductory
scene to Henry V., he makes the Archbishop of Canterbury thus
describe his hero, the young king : —

" Hear him but reason in divinity,
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish
You would desire the king were made a prelate :
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
You would say, it hath been all-in-all his study :
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render'd you in music :
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter ; that, when he speaks,
The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears,
To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences ;
So that the art and practic part of life
Must be the mistress to this theoric :
Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain ;
His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow ;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports ;
And never noted in him any study,

n6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity."

To this the Bishop of Ely answers very sagely, " The straw
berry grows underneath the nettle." We cannot but conceive,
however, that, by a beneficent provision of destiny, Shakespeare's
genius found in the highest culture of his day precisely the nour
ishment it required.

XV

THE THEATRES— THEIR SITUATION AND ARRANGEMENTS—
THE PLAYERS— THE POETS— POPULAR AUDIENCES— THE
ARISTOCRATIC PUBLIC— SHAKESPEARE'S ARISTOCRATIC
PRINCIPLES

ON swampy ground beside the Thames lay the theatres, of which
the largest were wooden sheds, only half thatched with rushes,
with a trench around them and a flagstaff on the roof. After
the middle of the fifteen-seventies, when the first was built, they
shot up rapidly, and in the early years of the new century
theatre-building took such a start that, as we learn from Prynne's
HijstriomastiXi there were in 1633 no fewer than nineteen per
manent theatres in London, a number which no modern town of
300,000 inhabitants can equal. These figures show how keen
and how widespread was the interest in the drama.

More than a hundred years before the first theatre was built
there had been professional actors in England. Their calling had
developed from that of the travelling jugglers, who varied their
acrobatic performances with " plays." The earliest scenic repre
sentations had been given by the Church, and the Guilds had
inherited the tradition. Priests and choir-boys were the first
actors of the Middle Ages, and after them came the mummers of
the Guilds. But none of these performers acted except at peri
odical festivals; none of them were professional actors. From
the days of Henry the Sixth onwards, however, members of the
nobility began to entertain companies of actors, and Henry VII.
and Henry VIII. had their own private comedians. A " Master of
the Revels" was appointed to superintend the musical and dramatic
entertainments at court. About the middle of the sixteenth cen
tury, Parliament begins to keep an eye upon theatrical representa
tions. It forbids the performance of anything conflicting with the

doctrines of the Church, and prohibits miracle-plays, but does

117

nS WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

not object to songs or plays designed to attack vice and represent
virtue. In other words, dramatic art escapes condemnation when
it is emphatically moral, and thrives best when it keeps to purely
secular matters.

Under Mary, religious plays once more came into honour.
Elizabeth began by strictly prohibiting all dramatic representa
tions, but sanctioned them again in 1560, subjecting them, how
ever, to a censorship. This measure was dictated at least as
much by political as by religious motives. The censorship must,
however, have been exercised somewhat loosely, since a statute
of 1572 declared that all actors who were not attached to the
service of a nobleman should be treated as "rogues and vaga
bonds," or, in other words, might be whipped out of any town in
which they appeared. This decree, of course, compelled all actors
to enter the service of one or other great man, and we see that
the aristocracy felt bound to protect their art. A large number
of the first men in the kingdom, during Elizabeth's reign, had
each his company of actors. The player received from the noble
man whose " servant " he was a cloak bearing the arms of the
family. On the other hand, he received no salary, but was simply
paid for each performance given before his patron. We must
thus conceive Shakespeare as bearing on his cloak the arms of
Leicester, and afterwards of the Lord Chamberlain, until about
his fortieth year. From 1604 onwards, when the company was
promoted by James I. to be " His Majesty's Servants," it was the
Royal arms that he wore. One is tempted to say that he ex
changed a livery for a uniform.

In 15/4 Elizabeth had given permission to Lord Leicester's
Servants to give scenic representations of all sorts for the delecta
tion of herself and her lieges, both in London and anywhere else
in England. But neither in London nor in other towns did the
local authorities recognise this patent, and the hostile attitude
of the Corporation of London forced the players to erect their
theatres outside its jurisdiction. For if they played in the City
itself, as had been the custom, either in the great halls of the
Guilds or in the open inn-yards, they had to obtain the Lord
Mayor's sanction for each individual performance, and to hand
over half their receipts to the City treasury.

It was with anything but satisfaction that the peaceable bur
gesses of London saw a playhouse rise in the neighbourhood of

THE THEATRES 119

their homes. The theatre brought in its train a loose, frivolous,
and rowdy population. Around the playhouses, at the hours of
performance, the narrow streets of that period became so crowded
that business suffered in the shops, processions and funerals were
obstructed, and perpetual causes of complaint arose. Houses
of ill-fame, moreover, always clustered round a theatre ; and,
although the performances took place by day, there was always
the danger of fire inseparable from theatres, and especially from
wooden erections with thatched roofs.

But the chief opposition to the theatres did not come from
the mere Philistinism of the industrious middle-class, but from
the fanatical Puritanism which was now rearing its head. It is
the Puritans who have killed the old Merry England, abolishing
its May-games, its popular dances, its numerous rustic sports.
They could not look on with equanimity, and see the drama,
which had once been a spiritual institution, become a platform
for mere worldliness.

Their chief accusation against the dramatic poets was that
they lied. For intelligences of this order, there was no difference
between a fiction and a falsehood. The players they attacked on
the ground that when they played female parts they appeared
in women's attire, which was expressly forbidden in the Bible
(Deut. xxii. 5) as an abomination to the Lord. They saw in this
masquerading in the guise of the other sex a symptom of un
natural and degrading vices. They not only despised the actors
as jugglers and loathed them as persons living beyond the pale
of respectability, but they further accused them of cultivating in
private all the vices which they were in the habit of portraying
on the stage.

There can be no doubt that from a very early period the
influence of Puritanism made itself felt in the attitude of the City
authorities.

It can easily be understood, then, that the leaders of the new
theatrical industry tried to escape from their jurisdiction ; and
this they did by choosing sites outside the City, and yet as near
its boundaries as possible. To the south of the Thames lay a
stretch of land not belonging to the City but to the Bishop of
Winchester, a spiritual magnate who tried to make his territory
as profitable as he could without inquiring too closely as to the
uses to which it was put. Here lay the Bear Garden; here

120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

were numerous houses of ill-fame; and here arose the different
theatres, the "Hope," the " Swan," the "Rose," &c. When
James Burbage's successors, in the year 1598, found themselves
compelled, after a lawsuit, to pull down the building known as
the Theatre (in Bishopsgate Street), they employed the material
to erect on this artistic no-man's-land the celebrated Globe
Theatre, which was opened in 1599.

The theatres were of two classes, one known as private, the
other as public, a distinction which was at one time rather
obscure, since the difference was clearly not that admission to
the private theatres took place by invitation, and to the public
ones by payment. A nobleman could hire any theatre, whether
private or public, and engage the company to give a performance
for him and his invited guests. The real distinction was, that the
private theatres were designed on the model of the Guildhalls or
Town Halls, in which, before the period of special buildings,
representations had been given; while the public theatres were
constructed on the lines of the inn-yard. The private theatres,
then, were fully roofed, and, being the more fashionable, had
seats in every part of the house, including the parterre, here
known as the pit. Being roofed, they could be used not only
in the daytime, but by artificial light. In the public theatres,
on the other hand, as in ancient Greece and to this day in the
Tyrol, only the stage was roofed, the auditorium being open to
the sky, so that performances could be given only by daylight.
But in Greece the air is pure, the climate mild ; in the Tyrol
performances take place only on a few summer days. Here
plays were acted while rain and snow fell upon the spectators,
fogs enwrapped them, and the wind plucked at their garments.
As the prototype of these theatres was the old inn-yard, in which
some of the spectators stood, while others were seated in the
open galleries running all round it, the parterre, which re
tained the name of yard, was here devoted to the poorest
and roughest of the public, who stood throughout the per
formance, while the galleries (scaffolds}, running along the walls
in two or three tiers, offered seats to wealthier playgoers of
both sexes.

The days of performance at these theatres were announced
by the hoisting of a flag on the roof. The time of beginning was
three o'clock punctually, and the performance went straight on,

THE THEATRES: THEIR ARRANGEMENTS 121

uninterrupted by entr'actes. It lasted, as a rule, for only two
hours or two hours and a half.

Close to the Globe Theatre lay the Bear Garden, the rank
smell from which greeted the nostrils, even before it came in
sight. The famous bear Sackerson, who is mentioned in The
Merry Wives of Windsor, now and then broke his chain and
put female theatre-goers shrieking to flight.

Tickets there were none. A penny was the price of admission
to standing-room in the yard ; and those who wanted better places
put their money in a box held out to them for that purpose, the
amount varying from a penny to half-a-crown, in accordance with
the places required. When we remember that one shilling of
Queen Elizabeth's was equivalent to five of Queen Victoria's, the
price of the dearer places seems very considerable in comparison
with those current to-day. The wealthiest spectators gave more
than twelve shillings (in modern money) for their places in the
proscenium-boxes on each side of the stage. At the Globe Theatre
the orchestra was placed in the upper proscenium-box on the
right ; it was the largest in London, consisting of ten performers,
all distinguished in their several lines, playing lutes, oboes,
trumpets, and drums.

The most fashionable seats were on the stage itself, approached,
not by the ordinary entrances, but through the players' tiring-room.
There sat the amateurs, the noble patrons of the theatre, Essex,
Southampton, Pembroke, Rutland ; there snobs, upstarts, and fops
took their places on chairs or stools ; if there were not seats enough,
they spread their cloaks upon the pine-sprigs that strewed the
boards, and (like Bracchiano in Webster's Vittoria Corombond)
lay upon them. There, too, sat the author's rivals, the dramatic
poets, who had free admissions ; and there, lastly, sat the short
hand writers, commissioned by piratical booksellers, who, under
pretence of making critical notes, secretly took down the dialogue
— men who were a nuisance to the players and, as a rule, a thorn
in the side to the poets, but to whom posterity no doubt owes the
preservation of many plays which would otherwise have been lost.

All these notabilities on the stage carry on half-audible conver
sations, and make the servitors of the theatre bring them drinks
and light their pipes, while the actors can with difficulty thread their
way among them — arrangements which cannot have heightened the
illusion, but perhaps did less to mar it than we might imagine.

122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

For the audience is not easily disturbed, and does not demand
any of the illusion which is supplied by modern mechanism.
Movable scenery was unknown before 1660. The walls of the
stage were either hung with loose tapestries or quite uncovered,
so that the wooden doors which led to the players' tiring-rooms
at the back were clearly visible. In battle-scenes, whole armies
entered triumphant, or were driven off in confusion and defeat,
through a single door. When a tragedy was acted the stage was
usually hung with black ; for a comedy the hangings were blue.

As in the theatre of antiquity, rude machines were employed
to raise or lower actors through the stage ; trap-doors were cer
tainly in use, and probably " bridges," or small platforms, which
could be elevated into the upper regions. In somewhat earlier
times still ruder appliances had been in vogue. For example, in
the religious and allegorical plays, Hell-mouth was represented
by a huge face of painted canvas with shining eyes, a large red
nose, and movable jaws set with tusks. When the jaws opened,
they seemed to shoot out flames, torches being no doubt waved
behind them. The theatrical property-room of that time was in
complete without a " rybbe colleryd red " for the mystery of the
Creation. But in Shakespeare's day scarcely anything of this
sort was required. It was Inigo Jones who first introduced
movable scenery and decorations at the court entertainments.
They were certainly not in use at the popular playhouses at any
time during Shakespeare's connection with the stage.

Audiences felt no need for such aids to illusion ; their imagina
tion instantly supplied the want. They saw whatever the poet
required them to see — as a child sees whatever is suggested to its
fancy, as little girls see real-life dramas in their games with their
dolls. For the spectators were children alike in the freshness
and in the force of their imagination. If only a placard were
hung on one of the doors of the stage bearing in large letters the
name of Paris or of Venice, the spectators were at once trans
ported to France or Italy. Sometimes the Prologue informed
them where the scene was placed. Men of classical culture, who
insisted on unity of place in the drama, were offended by the
continual changes of scene and the pitiful appliances by which
they were indicated. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of 'Poesy -,
published in 1583, ridicules the plays in which "You shall have
Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other

THE THEATRES: THEIR ARRANGEMENTS 123

under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever
begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be
conceived."

This alacrity of imagination on the part of popular audiences
was unquestionably an advantage to the English stage in its
youth. If an actor made a movement as though he were plucking
a flower, the scene was at once understood to be a garden ; as in
Henry VI., where the adoption of the red rose and white rose as
party badges is represented. If an actor spoke as though he
were standing on a ship's deck in a heavy sea, the convention
was at once accepted ; as in the famous scene in Pericles (iii. 2).
Shakespeare, though he did not hesitate to take advantage of this
accommodating humour on the part of his public, and made no
attempt at illusive decoration, nevertheless ridiculed, as we have
seen, in A Midsummer Nights Dream, the meagre scenic appa
ratus of his time (especially, we may suppose, on the provin
cial stage) ; while in the Prologue to his Henry V. he deplores
and apologises for the narrowness of his stage and the poverty
of his resources : —

" Pardon, gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that have dar'd

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object : can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques,

That did affright the air at Agincourt ?

O, pardon ! since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million ;

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose, within the girdle of these walls

Are now confin'd two mighty monarchies."

These monarchies, then, were mounted in a frame formed of
young noblemen, critics and stage-struck gallants, who bantered
the boy-heroines, fingered the embroideries on the costumes,
smoked their clay pipes, and otherwise made themselves entirely
at their ease.

A curtain, which did not rise, but parted in the middle, sepa
rated the stage from the auditorium.

The only extant drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan

124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

theatre was recently discovered by Karl Gaedertz in the University
Library at Utrecht. It is a sketch of the Swan Theatre, executed in
1596 by the Dutch scholar, Jan de Witt. The stage, resting upon
strong posts, has no other furniture than a single bench, on which
one of the performers is seated. The background is formed by
the tiring-house, into which two doors lead. Over it is a roofed
balcony, which could be used, no doubt, both by the players and
by the audience. Above the roof of the tiring-house rises a second
story, crowned by a sort of hutch, over which waves a flag bear
ing the image of a swan. At an open door of the hutch is seen a
trumpeter giving a signal of some sort. The theatre is oval in
shape, and has three tiers of seats, while the pit is left open for
the standing " groundlings."

The balcony over the tiring-house answers in this case to the
inner stage of other and better-equipped theatres.

This smaller raised platform at the back of the principal stage
was exceedingly useful, and, in a certain measure, supplied the
place of the scenic apparatus of later times. Tieck, who probably
went further than any other critic in his dislike for modern
mechanism and his enthusiasm for the primitive arrangements of
Shakespeare's day, has elaborately reconstructed it in his novel,
Der junge Tischlermeister.

In the middle of the deep stage, according to him, rose two
wooden pillars, eight or ten feet high, which supported a sort
of balcony. Three broad steps led from the front stage to
the inner alcove under the balcony, which was sometimes open,
sometimes curtained off. It represented, according to circum
stances, a cave, a room, a summer-house, a family vault, and so
forth. It was here that, in Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo appeared
seated at the table. Here stood the bed on which Desdemona
was smothered. Here, in Hamlet, the play within a play was
acted. Here Gloucester's eyes were put out. On the balcony
above, Juliet waited for her Romeo, and Sly took his place to see
The Taming of the S/irew. When the siege of a town had to be
represented, the defenders of the walls stood and parleyed on this
balcony, while the assailants were grouped in the foreground.

It is probable that at each side a pretty broad flight of steps
led up to this balcony. Here sat senates, councils, and princes
with their courts. It needed but few figures to fill the inner
stage, so narrow were its dimensions. Macbeth mounted these

THE THEATRES: THE COSTUMES 125

stairs, and so did Falstaff in the Merry Wives. Melancholy or
contemplative personages leaned against the pillars. The struc
ture offered a certain facility for effective groupings, somewhat
like that in Raffaelle's " School of Athens." Figures in front did
not obstruct the view of those behind, and groups gathered to the
right and left of the main stage could, without an overstrain of
make-believe, be supposed not to see each other.

The only department of decoration which involved any con
siderable expense was the costumes of the actors. On these
such large sums were lavished that the Puritans made this extra
vagance one of their chief points of attack upon theatres. In
Henslowe's Diary we find such entries as ^"4, 145. for a pair of
breeches, and £16 for a velvet cloak. It is even on record that
a famous actor once gave £20, los. for a mantle. In an inven
tory of the property belonging to the Lord Admiral's Company in
the year 1598, we find many splendid dresses enumerated: for
example, " I payr of carnatyon satten Venesyons [breeches] layd
with gold lace," and " I orenge taney [tawny] satten dublet, layd
thycke with gowld lace."1 The sums paid for these costumes are
glaringly out of keeping with the paltry fees allotted to the author.
Up to the year 1600 the ordinary price of a play was from five to
six pounds — scarcely more than the cost of a pair of breeches to
be worn by the actor who played the Prince or King.

In the boxes (" rooms ") sat the better sort of spectators,
officers, City merchants, sometimes with their wives ; but ladies
always wore a mask of silk or velvet, partly for protection against
sun and air, partly in order to blush (or not to blush) unseen, at
the frivolous and often licentious things that were said upon the
stage. The mask was then as common an article of female attire
as is the veil in our days. But the front rows of what we should
now call the first tier were occupied by beauties who had no
desire whatever to conceal their countenances, though they might
use the mask (as in later times the fan) for purposes of coquetry,.
These were the kept mistresses of men of quality, and other
gorgeously decked ladies, who resorted to the playhouse in order
to make acquaintances. Behind them sat the respectable citizens.
But in the gallery above a rougher public assembled — sailors,
artisans, soldiers, and loose women of the lowest class.

No women ever appeared upon the stage.

1 See Appendix to Diary of Philip Henslowe (Shakspere Society's Publications).

126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The frequenters of the pit, with their coarse boisterousness,
were the terror of the actors. They all had to stand — coal-
heavers and bricklayers, dock-labourers, serving-men, and idlers.
Refreshment-sellers moved about among them, supplying them
with sausages and ale, with apples and nuts. They ate and
drank, drew corks, smoked tobacco, fought with each other, and
often, when they were out of humour, threw fragments of food,
and even stones, at the actors. Now and then they would come
to loggerheads with the fine gentlemen on the stage, so that the
performance had to be interrupted and the theatre closed. The
sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive description, and
the groundlings resisted all attempts at reform on the part of the
management. When the evil smells became intolerable, juniper-
berries were burnt by way of freshening the atmosphere.

The theatrical public made and executed its own laws. There
was no police in the theatre. Now and then a pickpocket would
be caught in the act, and tied to a post at the corner of the stage
beside the railing which divided it from the auditorium.

The beginning of the performance was announced by three
trumpet-blasts. The actor who spoke the Prologue appeared in a
long cloak, with a laurel-wreath on his head, probably because
this duty was originally performed by the poet himself. After the
play, the Clown danced a jig, at the same time singing some comic
jingle and accompanying himself on a small drum and flute. The
Epilogue consisted of, or ended in, a prayer for the Queen, in
which all the actors took part, kneeling. '

Elizabeth herself and her court did not visit these theatres.
There was no Royal box, and the public was too mixed. On the
other hand, the Queen could, without derogating from her state,
summon the players to court, and the Lord Chamberlain's Com
pany, to which Shakespeare belonged, was very often commanded
to perform before her, especially upon festivals such as Christmas
Day, Twelfth Night, and so forth. Thus Shakespeare is known
to have acted before the Queen in two comedies presented at
Greenwich Palace at Christmas 1594. He is mentioned along
with the leading actors, Burbage and Kemp.

Elizabeth paid for such performances a fee of twenty nobles,
and a further gratuity of ten nobles — in all, £10. '

As the Queen, however, was not content with thus witnessing
plays at rare intervals, she formed companies of her own, the so-

THE THEATRES: THE PLAYERS 127

called Children's Companies, recruited from the choir-boys of the
Chapels-Royal, whose music-schools thus developed, as it were,
into nurseries for the stage. These half-grown boys, who were,
of course, specially fitted to represent female characters, won no
small favour, both at court and with the public ; and we see that
one such troupe, consisting of the choir-boys of St. Paul's, for
some time competed, at the Blackfriars Theatre, with Shake
speare's company. We may gather from the bitter complaint in
Hamlet (ii. 2) how serious was this competition : —

" Hamlet. Do they [the players] hold the same estimation they did
when I was in the city ? Are they so followed ?

" Rosencrantz. No, indeed, they are not.

"Ham. How comes it? Do they grow rusty?

" Ros. 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 question,
and are most tyrannically clapped for 't : these are now the fashion ;
and so berattle the common stages (so they call them), that many
wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither.

" Ham. Do the boys carry it away?

" Ros. Ay, that they do, my lord ; Hercules and his load too." J

The number of players in a company was not great — not
more, as a rule, than eight or ten ; never, probably, above twelve.
The players were of different grades. The lowest were the so-
called hirelings, who received wages from the others and were in
some sense their servants. They appeared as supernumeraries
or in small speaking parts, and had nothing to do with the man
agement of the theatre. The actors, properly so called, differed
in standing according as they shared in the receipts only as actors,
or were entitled to a further share as part-proprietors of the
theatre. There was no manager. The actors themselves decided
what plays should be performed, distributed the parts, and divided
the receipts according to an established scale. The most advan
tageous position, of course, was that of a shareholder in the
theatre ; for half of the gross receipts went to the shareholders,
who provided the costumes and paid the wages of the hirelings.

Shakespeare's comparatively early rise to affluence can be

1 A figure of Hercules with the globe on his shoulders served as sign to the
Globe Theatre.

128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

accounted for only by assuming that, in his dual capacity as
poet and player, he must quickly have become a shareholder in
the theatre.

As an actor he does not seem to have attained the highest
eminence — fortunately, for if he had, he would probably have
found very little time for writing. The parts he played appear to
have been dignified characters of the second order ; for there is
no evidence that he was anything of a comedian. We know that
he played the Ghost in Hamlet — a part of no great length, it is
true, but of the first importance. It is probable, too, that he
played old Adam in As You Like It, and pretty certain that
he played old Knowell in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His
Humour. It may possibly be in the costume of Knowell that he
is represented in the well-known Droeshout portrait at the begin
ning of the First Folio. Tradition relates that he once played
his own Henry IV. at court, and that the Queen, in passing over
the stage, dropped her glove as a token of her favour, whereupon
Shakespeare handed it back to her with the words : —

"And though now bent on this high embassy,
Yet stoop we to take up our cousin's glove."

In all lists of the players belonging to his company he is named
among the first and most important.

Not least among the marvels connected with his genius is
the fact that, with all his other occupations, he found time to
write so much. His mornings would be given to rehearsals, his
afternoons to the performances; he would have to read, revise,
accept or reject a great number of plays; and he often passed
his evenings either at the Mermaid Club or at some tavern ; yet
for eighteen years on end he managed to write, on an average,
two plays a year — and such plays !

In order to understand this we have to recollect that although
between 1557 and 1616 there were forty noteworthy and two
hundred and thirty-three inferior English poets, who issued
works in epic or lyric form, yet the characteristic of the period
was the immense rush of productivity in the direction of dramatic
art. Every Englishman of talent in Elizabeth's time could write
a tolerable play, just as every second Greek in the age of Pericles
could model a tolerable statue, or as every European of to-day
can write a passable newspaper article. The Englishmen of that

THE THEATRES: THEIR AUDIENCES 129

time were born dramatists, as the Greeks were born sculptors,
and as we hapless moderns are born journalists. The Greek,
with an inborn sense of form, had constant opportunities for
observing the nude human body and admiring its beauty. If he
saw a man ploughing a field, he received a hundred impressions
and ideas as to the play of the muscles in the naked leg. The
modern European possesses a certain command of language, is
practised in argument, has a knack of putting thoughts and events
into words, and is, finally, a confirmed newspaper-reader — all
characteristics which make for the multiplication of newspaper
articles. The Englishman of that day was keenly observant of
human destinies, and of the passions which, after the fall of Catho
licism and before the triumph of Puritanism, revelled in the brief
freedom of the Renaissance. He was accustomed to see men
following their instincts to the last extremity — which was not
infrequently the block. The high culture of the age did not
exclude violence, and this violence led to dramatic vicissitudes of
fortune. It was but a short way from the palace to the scaffold
— witness the fate of Henry VIIl.'s wives, of Mary Stuart, of
Elizabeth's great lovers, Essex and Raleigh. The Englishman
of that age had always before his eyes pictures of extreme
prosperity followed by sudden ruin and violent death. Life
itself was dramatic, as in Greece it was plastic, as in our
days it is journalistic, photographic — that is to say, striving in
vain to give permanence to formless and everyday events and
thoughts.

A dramatic poet in those days, no less than a journalist in
ours, had to study his public closely. All the intellectual conflicts
of the period were for sixty years fought out in the theatre, as
they are nowadays in the press. Passionate controversies be
tween one poet and another were cast in dramatic form. Rosen-
crantz says to Hamlet, "There was, for a while, no money bid
for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the
question." The efflorescence of the drama on British soil was of
short duration — as short as that of painting in Holland. But
while it lasted the drama was the dominant art-form and medium
of intellectual expression, and it was consequently supported by a
large public.

Shakespeare never wrote a play " for the study," nor could he
have imagined himself doing anything of the sort. As playwright
VOL. I. I

130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and player in one, he had the stage always in his eye, and what
he wrote had never long to wait for performance, but took
scenic shape forthwith. Although, like all productive spirits, he
thought first of satisfying himself in what he wrote, yet he must
necessarily have borne in mind the public to whom the play
appealed. He could by no means avoid considering the tastes of
the average playgoer. The average playgoer, indeed, made no
bad audience, but an audience which had to be amused, and which
could not, for too long at a stretch, endure unrelieved seriousness
or lofty flights of thought. For the sake of the common people,
then, scenes of grandeur and refinement were interspersed with
passages of burlesque. To please the many-headed, the Clown
was brought on at every pause in the action, much as he is in the
circus of to-day. The points of rest which are now marked by
the fall of the curtain between the acts were then indicated by
conversations such as that between Peter and the musicians in
Romeo and Juliet (iv. 5); it merely implies that the act is over.

For the rest, Shakespeare did not write for the average spec
tator. He did not value his judgment. Hamlet says to the First
Player (ii. 2) : —

" I heard thee speak me a speech once, — but it was never acted ;
or, if it was, not above once ; for the play, I remember, pleased not the
million ; 'twas caviare to the general : but it was (as I received it, and
others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an
excellent play."

All Shakespeare lies in the words, " It pleased not the
million."

The English drama as it took shape under Shakespeare's
hand addressed itself primarily to the best elements in the
public. But " the best " were the noble young patrons of the
theatre, to whom he personally owed a great deal of his culture,
almost all his repute, and, moreover, the insight he had attained
into the aristocratic habit of mind.

A young English nobleman of that period must have been one
of the finest products of humanity, a combination of the Belvedere
Apollo with a prize racehorse; he must have felt himself at once
a man of action and an artist.

We have seen how early Shakespeare must have made the
acquaintance of Essex, before his fall the mightiest of the mighty.
He wrote A Midsummer Nighfs Dream for his marriage, and

SHAKESPEARE'S ARISTOCRATIC PRINCIPLES 131

he introduced a compliment to him into the Prologue to the fifth
act of Henry V. England received her victorious King, he says —

" As, by a lower but loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious empress
(As, in good time, he may) from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him ! "

We have seen, moreover, how early and how intimate was his
connection with the young Earl of Southampton, to whom he
dedicated the only two books which he himself gave to the press.

It must have been from young aristocrats such as these that
Shakespeare acquired his aristocratic method of regarding the
course of history. How else could he regard it ? A large part
of the middle class was hostile to him, despised his calling, and
treated him as one outside the pale ; the clergy condemned and
persecuted him ; the common people were in his eyes devoid of
judgment. The ordinary life of his day did not, on the whole,
appeal to him. We find him totally opposed to the realistic
dramatisation of everyday scenes and characters, to which many
contemporary poets devoted themselves. This sort of truth to
nature was foreign to him, so foreign that he suffered for lack of
it. Towards the close of his artistic career he was outstripped
in popularity by the realists of the day.

His heroes are princes and noblemen, the kings and barons
of England. It is always they, in his eyes, who make history, of
which he shows throughout a naively heroic conception. In the
wars which he presents, it is always an individual leader and hero
on whom everything depends. It is Henry V. who wins the day
at Agincourt, just as in Homer it is Achilles who conquers before
Troy. Yet the whole issue of these wars depended upon the
foot-soldiers. It was the English archers, 14,000 in number, who
at Agincourt defeated the French army of 50,000 men, with a loss
of only 1600, as against 10,000 on the other side. Shakespeare
certainly did not divine that it was the rise of the middle classes
and their spirit of enterprise that constituted the strength of
England under Elizabeth. He regarded his age from the point
of view of the man who was accustomed to see in richly endowed
and princely young noblemen the very crown of humanity, the

132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

patrons of all lofty effort, and the originators of all great achieve
ments. And, with his necessarily scanty historic culture, he saw
bygone periods, of Roman as well as of English history, in the
same light as his own times.

This tendency appears already in the second part of Henry VI.
Note the picture of Jack Cade's rebellion (iv. 2), which contains
some inimitable touches : —

" Cade. Be brave then ; for your captain is brave, and vows reforma
tion. There shall be in England seven halfpenny 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. And, when I am king (as king
I will be),—

"All. God save your majesty !

" Cade. I thank you, good people : — there shall be no money ; all
shall eat and drink on my score ; and I will apparel them all in one
livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

"Dick. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

" Cade. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing,
that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment ? that
parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man ?

"Enter some, bringing in the Clerk of Chatham.

" Smith. The clerk of Chatham : he can write and read, and cast
accompt.

•' Cade. O monstrous !

" Smith. We took him setting of boys' copies.

" Cade. Here's a villain !

" Smith. Has a book in his pocket, with red letters in 't.

" Cade. Let me alone. — Dost thou use to write thy name, or hast
thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing man ?

" Clerk. Sir, I thank God, I have been, so well brought up, that I
can write my name.

" All. He hath confessed : away with him ! he's a villain and a
traitor.

" Cade. Away with him, I say : hang him with his pen and ink-horn
about his neck."

What is so remarkable and instructive in these brilliant scenes
is that Shakespeare here, quite against his custom, departs from
his authority. In Holinshed, Jack Cade and his followers do not

SHAKESPEARE'S ARISTOCRATIC PRINCIPLES 133

appear at all as the crazy Calibans whom Shakespeare depicts.
The chief of their grievances, in fact, was that the King alienated
the crown revenues and lived on the taxes ; and, moreover, they
complained of abuses of all sorts in the execution of the laws and
the raising of revenue. The third article of their memorial stands
in striking contrast to their action in the play ; for it points out
that nobles of royal blood (probably meaning York) are excluded
from the King's "dailie presence," while he gives advancement to
" other meane persons of lower nature," who close the King's ears
to the complaints of the country, and distribute favours, not ac
cording to law, but for gifts and bribes. Moreover, they complain
of interferences with freedom of election, and, in short, express
themselves quite temperately and constitutionally. Finally, in
more than one passage of the complaint, they give utterance to
a thoroughly English and patriotic resentment of the loss of
Normandy, Gascony, Aquitaine, Anjou, and Maine.

But it did not at all suit Shakespeare to show a Jack Cade at
the head of a popular movement of this sort. He took no interest
in anything constitutional or parliamentary. In order to find the
colours he wanted for the rebellion, he hunts up in Stow's Sum-
marie of the Chronicles of 'England the picture of Wat Tyler's and
Jack Straw's risings under Richard II., two outbursts of wild
communistic enthusiasm, reinforced by religious fanaticism. From
this source he borrows, almost word for word, some of the rebels'
speeches. In these risings, as a matter of fact, all "men of law,
justices, and jurors " who fell into the hands of the leaders were
beheaded, and all records and muniments burnt, so that owners
of property might not in future have the means of establishing
their rights.

This contempt for the judgment of the masses, this anti
democratic conviction, having early taken possession of Shake
speare's mind, he keeps on instinctively seeking out new evidences
in its favour, new testimonies to its truth ; and therefore he trans
forms facts, where they do not suit his view, on the model of other
facts which do.

XVI

THE THEATRES CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE-
DID SHAKESPEARE VISIT ITALY ?— PASSAGES WHICH
FAVOUR THIS CONJECTURE

FROM the autumn of 1592 until the summer of 1593 all the
London theatres were closed. That frightful scourge, the plague,
from which England had so long been free, was raging in the
capital. Even the sittings of the Law Courts had to be suspended.
At Christmas 1592 the Queen refrained from ordering any plays
at court, and the Privy Council had at an earlier date issued a
proclamation forbidding all public theatrical performances, on the
reasonable ground that convalescents, weary of their long confine
ment, made haste to resort to such entertainments before they
were properly out of quarantine, and thus spread the contagion.

The matter has a particular bearing upon the biography of
Shakespeare, since, if he ever travelled on the continent of
Europe, it was probably at this period, while the theatres were
closed.

That it must have been now, if ever, there can be no great
doubt. But it remains exceedingly difficult to determine whether
Shakespeare ever crossed the Channel.

We have noticed what an attraction Italy possessed for him,
even from the beginning of his career. To this The Two Gentle
men of Verona and Romeo and Juliet bear witness. But in these
plays we as yet find nothing which points definitely to the con
clusion that the poet had seen with his own eyes the country in
which his action is placed. It is different with the dramas of
Italian scene which Shakespeare produces about the year 1596 —
the adaptation of the old Taming of a Shrew and The Merchant
of Venice; it is different, too, with Othello, which comes much later.

Here we find definite local colour, with such an abundance of

134

DID SHAKESPEARE VISIT ITALY 135

details pointing to actual vision that it is hard to account for them
otherwise than by assuming a visit on the poet's part to such
cities as Verona, Venice, and Pisa.

It is on the face of it highly probable that Shakespeare should
wish to see Italy as soon as he could find an opportunity. To
the Englishman of that day Italy was the goal of every longing.
It was the great home of culture. Men studied its literature and
imitated its poetry. It was the beautiful land where dwelt the joy
of life. Venice in especial exercised a fascination stronger than that
of Paris. It needed no great wealth to make a pilgrimage to Italy.
One could travel inexpensively, perhaps on foot, like that Coryat
who discovered the use of the fork ; one could pass the night at
cheap hostelries. Many of the distinguished men of the time are
known to have visited Italy — men of science, like Bacon, and
afterwards Harvey ; authors and poets like Lyly, Munday, Nash,
Greene, and Daniel, the form of whose sonnets determined that
of Shakespeare's. Among the artists of Shakespeare's time, the
widely-travelled Inigo Jones had made a stay in Italy. Most of
these men have themselves given us some account of their travels ;
but as Shakespeare has left us no biographical records whatever,
the absence of any direct mention of such a journey on his part
is of little moment, if other significant facts can be adduced in its
favour.

And such facts are not wanting.

There were in Shakespeare's time no guide-books for the use
of travellers. What he knows, then, of foreign lands and their
customs he cannot have gathered from such sources. Of Venice,
which Shakespeare has so livingly depicted, no description was
published in England until after he had written his Merchant of
Venice. Lewkenor's description of the city (itself a mere com
pilation at second hand) dates from 1598, Coryat's from 1611,
Moryson's from 1617.

In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, we notice with sur
prise not only the correctness of the Italian names, but the
remarkable way in which, at the very beginning of the play,
several Italian cities and districts are characterised in a single
phrase. Lombardy is "the pleasant garden of great Italy;"
Pisa is " renowned for grave citizens ; " and here the epithet
" grave " is especially noteworthy, since many testimonies concur
to show that it was particularly characteristic of the inhabitants

136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of Pisa. C. A. Brown, in Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems,
has pointed out the remarkable form of the betrothal of Petruchio
and Katherine (namely, that her father joins their hands in the
presence of two witnesses), and observes that this form was not
English, but peculiarly Italian. It is not to be found in the
older play, the scene of which, however, is laid in Athens.

Special attention was long ago directed to the following speech
at the end of the second act, where Gremio reckons up all the
goods and gear with which his house is stocked : —

" First, as you know, my house within the city
Is richly furnished with plate and gold :
Basins, and ewers, to lave her dainty hands ;
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry ;
In ivory coffers I have stuff'd my crowns ;
In cypress chests my arras, counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl,
.Valance of Venice gold in needlework,
Pewter and brass, and all things that belong
To house, or housekeeping."

Lady Morgan long ago remarked that she had seen literally all
of these articles of luxury in the palaces of Venice, Genoa, and
Florence. Miss Martineau, in ignorance alike of Brown's theory
and Lady Morgan's observation, expressed to Shakespeare's biog
rapher, Charles Knight, her feeling that the local colour of The
Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice displays such an
intimate acquaintance, not only with the manners and. customs of
Italy, but with the minutest details of domestic life, that it cannot
possibly have been gleaned from books or from mere conversa
tions with this man or that who happened to have floated in a
gondola.

On such a question as this, the decided impressions of feminine
readers are not without a certain weight.

Brown has pointed out as specifically Italian such small traits
as lago's scoffing at the Florentine Cassio as " a great arithme
tician," "a counter-caster," the Florentines being noted as masters
of arithmetic and bookkeeping. Another such trait is the present
of a dish of pigeons which Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice,
brings to his son's master.

DID SHAKESPEARE VISIT ITALY 137

Karl Elze, who has strongly insisted upon the probability of
Shakespeare's having travelled Italy in the year 1593, dwells
particularly upon his apparent familiarity with Venice. The name
of Gobbo is a genuine Venetian name, and suggests, moreover,
the kneeling stone figure, " II Gobbo di Rialto," that forms the
base of the granite pillar to which, in former days, the decrees of
the Republic were affixed. Shakespeare knew that the Exchange
was held on the Rialto island. An especially weighty argument
lies in the fact that the study of the Jewish nature, to which his
Shylock bears witness, would have been impossible in England,
where no Jews were permitted by law to reside since their expul
sion, begun in the time of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and completed
in 1290. Not until Cromwell's time was the embargo removed in
a few cases. On the other hand, there were in Venice more than
eleven hundred Jews (according to Coryat, as many as from five
to six thousand).1

One of the most striking details as regards The Merchant of
Venice is this: Portia sends her servant Balthasar with an im
portant message to Padua, and orders him to ride quickly and
meet her at " the common ferry which trades to Venice." Now
Portia's palace at Belmont may be conceived as one of the
summer residences, rich in art treasures, which the merchant
princes of Venice at that time possessed on the banks of the
Brenta. From Dolo, on the Brenta, it is twenty miles to Venice
— just the distance which Portia says that she must " measure "
in order to reach the city. If we conceive Belmont as situated at
Dolo, it would be just possible for the servant to ride rapidly to
Padua, and on the way back to overtake Portia, who would travel
more slowly, at the ferry, which was then at Fusina, at the mouth
of the Brenta. How exactly Shakespeare knew this, and how
uncommon the knowledge was in his day, is shown in the expres
sions he uses, and in the misunderstanding of these expressions
on the part of his printers and editors. The lines in the fourth
scene of the third act, as they appear in all the Quartos and Folios,
are these : — .

" Bring them, I pray thee, with imagined speed
Unto the tranect, to the common ferry,
Which trades to Venice."

1 A very few Jews were, indeed, tolerated in England in spite of the prohibition,
but it is not probable that Shakespeare knew any of them.

138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" Tranect," which means nothing, is, of course, a misprint for
" traject," an uncommon expression which the printers clearly
did not understand. This, as Elze has pointed out, is simply the
Venetian word traghetto (Italian tragittd). How should Shake
speare have known either of the word or the thing if he had not
been on the spot ?

Other details in the second of these plays, written immediately
after his conjectured return, strengthen this impression. In the
Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, where the nobleman
proposes to show Sly his pictures, there occur the lines : —

" We '11 show thee lo as she was a maid,
And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,
As lively painted as the deed was done."

These lines, as Elze has justly urged, convey the impression that
Shakespeare had seen Correggio's famous picture of Jupiter
and lo. This is quite possible if he travelled in North Italy
at the time suggested, for from 1585 to 1600 the picture was
in the palace of the sculptor Leoni at Milan, and was con
stantly visited by travellers. If we add that Shakespeare's
numerous references to sea-voyages, storms at sea, the agonies
of sea-sickness, &c., together with his illustrations and metaphors
borrowed from provisions and dress at sea,1 point to his hav
ing made a sea-passage of some length,2 we cannot but regard
it as highly probable that he possessed a closer knowledge of
Italy than could be gained from oral descriptions and from
books.

It is impossible, however, to arrive at any certainty on the
point. His pictures of Italy are sometimes notably lacking in
traits which could scarcely have been overlooked by one who
knew the places. And the reader cannot but feel a certain
scepticism when he observes how scholars have converted every
seeming piece of ignorance on Shakespeare's part into a proof
of his miraculous knowledge.

In virtue of this determination to make every apparent blot
in Shakespeare redound to his advantage, it could be shown

1 See Pericles, The Tempest, Cymbeline (i. 7), As You Like It (ii. 7), Hamlet

(V. 2).

2 It must be remembered that the sea route to Italy was practically closed by
Spanish cruisers.

DID SHAKESPEARE VISIT ITALY 139

that he had been in Italy before he began to write plays at
all. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona it is said that Valentine
takes ship at Verona to go to Milan. This seems to betray a
gross ignorance of the geography of Italy. Karl Elze, however,
has discovered that in the sixteenth century Verona and Milan
were actually connected by a canal. In Romeo and Juliet the
heroine says to Friar Laurence, " Shall I come again at evening
mass ? " This sounds strange, as the Catholic Church knows
nothing of evening masses; but R. Simpson has discovered that
they were actually in use at that time, and especially in Verona.
Shakespeare probably knew no more of these details than he did
of the fact that, about 1270, Bohemia possessed provinces on the
Adriatic, so that he could with an easy conscience accept from
Greene the voyage to the coast of Bohemia in The Winter's
Tale.

On the whole, scholars have been far too eager to find con
firmation of every trivial detail in Shakespeare's allusions to
Italian localities. Knight, for instance, declared that " the Sagit-
tary," mentioned in Othello, " was the residence at the arsenal of
the commanding officers of the navy and army of the Republic,"
and that Shakespeare had " probably looked upon " the figure of
an archer over the gates ; whereas it now appears that the com
manding officer never had any residence in the arsenal, and that
no figure of an archer ever existed there. Elze, again, has gone
into most uncritical raptures over Shakespeare's marvellously
exact characterisation of Giulio Romano ( The Winter's Tale, v. 2)
as that "rare Italian master who, had he himself eternity, and
could put breath into his works, would beguile Nature of her
custom, so perfectly he is her ape." As a matter of fact, Shake
speare has simply attributed to an artist whose fame had reached
his ears that characteristic which, as we have seen above, he
regarded as the highest in pictorial art. Giulio Romano, with
his crude superficiality, could not possibly have aroused his
admiration had he known his "work. That he did not know
it is sufficiently evident from the fact that he has made him
a sculptor, and praised him in that capacity, and not as a
painter.

Elze, confronted with this fact, takes refuge in a Latin epitaph
on Romano, quoted by Vasari, which speaks of " Corpora sculpta
pictaque" by him, and here again finds a testimony to Shake-

140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

speare's omniscience, since he knew of works of sculpture by
Romano which no one else has seen or heard of. We can only
see in this a new proof of the fact that critical idolatry of departed
greatness can now and then lead the student as far astray as
uncritical prejudice.

XVII

SHAKESPEARE TURNS TO HISTORIC DRAMA— HIS RICHARD
II. AND MARLOWE'S EDWARD II.— LACK OF HUMOUR AND
OF CONSISTENCY OF STYLE— ENGLISH NATIONAL PRIDE

ABOUT the age of thirty, even men of an introspective disposi
tion are apt to turn their gaze outwards. When Shakespeare
approaches his thirtieth year, he begins to occupy himself in
earnest with history, to read the chronicles, to project and work
out a whole series of historical plays. Several years had now
passed since he had revised and furbished up the old dramas on
the subject of Henry VI. This task had whetted his appetite,
and had cultivated his sense for historic character and historic
nemesis. Having now given expression to the high spirits, the
lyrism, and the passion of youth, in lyrical and dramatic produc
tions of scintillant diversity, he once more turned his attention to
the history of England. In so doing he obeyed a dual vocation,
both as a poet and as a patriot.

Shakespeare's plays founded on English history number ten
in all, four dealing with the House of Lancaster (Richard //., the
two parts of Henry IV. and Henry F.), four devoted to the House
of York (the three parts of Henry VI. and Richard ///.), and two
which stand apart from the main series, King John , of an earlier
historic period, and Henry VIII., of a later.

The order of production of these plays is, however, totally
unconnected with their historical order, which does not, therefore,
concern us. At the same time it is worthy of remark that all
these plays (with the single exception of Henry VIII.) were
produced in the course of one decade, the decade in which
England's national sentiment burst into flower and her pride
was at its highest. These English " histories" are, however,
of very unequal value, and can by no means be treated as stand
ing on one plane.

141

142 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Henry VI. was a first attempt and a mere adaptation. Now,
in the year 1594, Shakespeare attacks the theme of Richard II. ;
and in this, his first independent historical drama, we see his
originality still struggling with the tendency to imitation.

There were older plays on the subject of Richard II., but
Shakespeare does not seem to have made any use of them. The
model he had in his mind's eye was Marlowe's finest tragedy, his
Edward II. Shakespeare's play is, however, much more than a
clever imitation of Marlowe's ; it is not only better composed, with
a more concentrated action, but has also a great advantage in the
full-blooded vitality of its style. Marlowe's style is here mono
tonously dry and sombre. Swinburne, moreover, has done Shake
speare an injustice in preferring Marlowe's character-drawing to
that of Richard II.

The first half of Marlowe's drama is entirely taken up with the
King's morbid and unnatural passion for his favourite Gaveston ;
Edward's every speech either expresses his grief at Gaveston's
banishment and his longing for his return, or consists of glowing
outbursts of joy on seeing him again. This passion makes
Edward dislike his Queen and loathe the Barons, who, in their
aristocratic pride, contemn the low-born favourite. He will risk
everything rather than part from one who is so dear to himself
and so obnoxious to his surroundings. The half-erotic fervour
of his partiality renders the King's character distasteful, and
deprives him of the sympathy which the poet demands for him
at the end of the play.

For in the fourth and fifth acts, weak and unstable though
he be, Edward has all Marlowe's sympathies. There is, indeed,
something moving in his loneliness, his grief, and his brooding
self-reproach. " The griefs," he says,

" of private men are soon allay'd ;
But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,
Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds :
But when the imperial lion's flesh is gor'd,
He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw."

The simile is not true to nature, like Shakespeare's, but it
forcibly expresses the meaning of Marlowe's personage. Now
and then he reminds us of Henry VI. The Queen's relation to
Mortimer recalls that of Margaret to Suffolk. The abdication-

SHAKESPEARE AND MARLOWE 143

scene, in which the King first vehemently refuses to lay down
the crown, and is then forced to consent, gave Shakespeare the
model for Richard the Second's abdication. In the murder-scene,
on the other hand, Marlowe displays a reckless naturalism in the
description and representation of the torture inflicted on the King,
an unabashed effect-hunting in the contrast between the King's
magnanimity, dread, and gratitude on the one side, and the
murderers' hypocritical cruelty on the other, which Shakespeare,
with his gentler nature and his almost modern tact, has rejected
It is true that we find in Shakespeare several cases in which the
severed head of a person whom we have seen alive a moment
before is brought upon the stage. But he would never place
before the eyes of the public such a murder-scene as this, in
which the King is thrown down upon a feather-bed, a table is
overturned upon him, and the murderers trample upon it until
he is crushed.

Marlowe's more callous nature betrays itself in such details,
while something of his own wild and passionate temperament
has passed into the minor characters of the play — the violent
Barons, with the younger Mortimer at their head — who are drawn
with a firm hand. The time had scarcely passed when a murder
was reckoned an absolute necessity in a drama. In 1581, Wilson,
one of Lord Leicester's men, received an order for a play which
should not only be original and entertaining, but should also
include " all sorts of murders, immorality, and robberies."

Richard II. is one of those plays of Shakespeare's which
have never taken firm hold of the stage. Its exclusively political
action and its lack of female characters are mainly to blame for
this. But it is exceedingly interesting as his first attempt at in
dependent treatment of a historical theme, and it rises far above
the play which served as its model.

The action follows pretty faithfully the course of history as
the poet found it in Holinshed's Chronicle. The character of the
Queen, however, is quite unhistorical, being evidently invented
by Shakespeare for the sake of having a woman in his play.
He wanted to gain sympathy for Richard through his wife's
devotion to him, and saw an opportunity for pathos in her
parting from him when he is thrown into prison. In 1398,
when the play opens, Isabella of France was not yet ten years
old, though she had nominally been married to Richard in 1396.

144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Finally, the King's end, fighting bravely, sword in hand, is not
historical : he was starved to death in prison, in order that his
body might be exhibited without any wound.

Shakespeare has vouchsafed no indication to facilitate the
spectators' understanding of the characters in this play. Their
action often takes us by surprise. But Swinburne has done
Shakespeare a great wrong in making this a reason for praising
Marlowe at his expense, and exalting the subordinate characters
in Edward II. as consistent pieces of character-drawing, while
he represents as inconsistent and obscure such a personage as
Shakespeare's York. We may admit that in the opening scene
Norfolk's figure is not quite clear, but here all obscurity ends.
York is self-contradictory, unprincipled, vacillating, composite,
and incoherent, but in no sense obscure. He in the first place
upbraids the King with his faults, then accepts at his hands an
office of the highest confidence, then betrays the King's trust,
while he at the same time overwhelms the rebel Bolingbroke
with reproaches, then admires the King's greatness in his fall,
then hastens his dethronement, and finally, in virtuous indigna
tion over Aumerle's plots against the new King, rushes to him to
assure him of his fidelity and to clamour for the blood of his own
son. There lies at the root of this conception a profound political
bitterness and an early-acquired experience. Shakespeare must
have studied attentively that portion of English history which
lay nearest to him, the shufflings and vacillations that went on
under Mary and Elizabeth, in order to have received so deep an
impression of the pitifulness of political instability.

The character of old John of Gaunt, loyal to his King, but still
more to his country, gives Shakespeare his first opportunity for
expressing his exultation over England's greatness and his pride
in being an Englishman. He places in the mouth of the dying
Gaunt a superbly lyrical outburst of patriotism, deploring Richard's
reckless and tyrannical policy. All comparison with Marlowe is
here at an end. Shakespeare's own voice makes itself clearly heard
in the rhetoric of this speech, which, with its self-controlled vehe
mence, its equipoise in unrest, soars high above Marlowe's wild
magniloquence. In the thunderous tones of old Gaunt's invective
against the King who has mortgaged his English realm, we can
hear all the patriotic enthusiasm of young England in the days of
Elizabeth : —

"RICHARD II." 145

" This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress, built by Nature for herself,
Against infection, and the hand of war ;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands ;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement, or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds :
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah ! would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death ! " (ii. i).

Here we have indeed the roar of the young lion, the vibration
of Shakespeare's own voice.

But it is upon the leading character of the play that the poet
has centred all his strength ; and he has succeeded in giving a
vivid and many-sided picture of the Black Prince's degenerate but
interesting son. As the protagonist of a tragedy, however, Richard
has exactly the same defects as Marlowe's Edward. In the first
half of the play he so repels the spectator that nothing he can
do in the second half suffices to obliterate the unfavourable im
pression. Not only has he, before the opening of the piece, com
mitted such thoughtless and politically indefensible acts as have
proved him unworthy of the great position he holds, but he behaves
with such insolence to the dying Gaunt, and, after his uncle's
death, displays such a low and despicable rapacity, that he can
no longer appeal, as he does, to his personal right. It is true that
VOL. I. K

I46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the right of which he holds himself an embodiment is very diffe
rent from the common earthly rights which he has overridden. He
is religiously, dogmatically convinced of his inviolability as a king
by the grace of God. But since this conviction, in his days of
prosperity, has brought with it no sense of correlative duties to
the crown he wears, it cannot touch the reader's sympathies as it
ought to for the sake of the general effect.

We see the hand of the beginner in the way in which the poet
here leaves characters and events to speak for themselves without
any attempt to range them in a general scheme of perspective.
He conceals himself too entirely behind his work. As there is
no gleam of humour in the play, so, too, there is no guiding and
harmonising sense of style.

It is from the moment that the tide begins to turn against
Richard that he becomes interesting as a psychological study.
After the manner of weak characters, he is alternately downcast
and overweening. Very characteristically, he at one place an
swers Bolingbroke's question whether he is content to resign
the crown: "Ay, no; — no, ay." In these syllables we see the
whole man. But his temperament was highly poetical, and mis
fortune reveals in him a vein of reverie. He is sometimes pro
found to the point of paradox, sometimes fantastically overwrought
to the verge of superstitious insanity (see, for instance, Act iii. 3).
His brooding melancholy sometimes reminds us of Hamlet's —

" Of comfort no man speak :
Let 's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs ;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let 's choose executors, and talk of wills :

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings : —

How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd.

Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kilFd,

All murder 'd : — for within the hollow crown,

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp ;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be fear'd, and kill with looks " (iii. 2).

"RICHARD II." 147

In these moods of depression, in which Richard gives his wit
and intellect free play, he knows very well that a king is only a
human being like any one else : —

" For you have but mistook me all this while :
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?" (iii. 2).

But at other times, when his sense of majesty and his mon
archical fanaticism master him, he speaks in a quite different
tone : —

" Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king ;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd,
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel " (iii. 2).

Thus, too, at their first meeting (iii. 3) he addresses the vic
torious Henry of Hereford, to whom he immediately after " de
bases himself" : —

" My master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence ; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn, and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head,
And threat the glory of my precious crown."

Many centuries after Richard, King Frederick William IV. of
Prussia displayed just the same mingling of intellectuality, super
stition, despondency, monarchical arrogance, and fondness for
declamation.

In the fourth and fifth acts, the character of Richard and the
poet's art rise to their highest point. The scene in which the
groom, who alone has remained faithful to the fallen King, visits
him in his dungeon, is one of penetrating beauty. What can be
more touching than his description of how the " roan Barbary,"
which had been Richard's favourite horse, carried Henry of Lan
caster on his entry into London, " so proudly as if he had dis
dained the ground." The Arab steed here symbolises with fine

148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

simplicity the attitude of all those who had sunned themselves in
the prosperity of the now fallen King.

The scene of the abdication (iv. i) is admirable by reason of
the delicacy of feeling and imagination which Richard displays.
His speech when he and Henry have each one hand upon the
crown is one of the most beautiful Shakespeare has ever written: —

" Now is this golden crown like a deep well,
That owes two buckets filling one another ;
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water :
That bucket down, and full of tears, am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high."

This scene is, however, a downright imitation of the abdica
tion-scene in Marlowe. When Northumberland in Shakespeare
addresses the dethroned King with the word "lord," the King
answers, "No lord of thine." In Marlowe the speech is almost
identical : " Call me not lord ! "

The Shakespearian scene, it should be mentioned, has its his
tory. The censorship under Elizabeth would not suffer it to be
printed, and it first appears in the Fourth Quarto, of I6O8.1 The
reason of this veto was that Elizabeth, strange as it may appear,
was often compared with Richard II. The action of the censor
ship renders it probable that it was Shakespeare's Richard II.
(and not one of the earlier plays on the same theme) which, as
appears in the trial of Essex, was acted by the Lord Chamber
lain's Company before the conspirators, at their leaders' command,
on the evening before the outbreak of the rebellion (February 7,
1601). There is nothing inconsistent with this theory in the fact
that the players then called it an old play, which was already /'out
of use ; " for the interval between 1593-94 and 1601 was sufficient,
according to the ideas of that time, to render a play antiquated.
Nor does it conflict with this view that in the last scenes of the
play the King is sympathetically treated. On the very points on
which he was comparable with Elizabeth there could be no doubt
that he was in the wrong; while Henry of Hereford figures in

1 Its title runs, " The Tragedie of King Richard the Second : with new additions
of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard, As it hath been lately
acted by the Kinges Maiesties Seruantes, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare.
At London. Printed by W. W. For Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in
PaUles Church-yard, at the Signe of the Foxe. 1608."

"RICHARD II." 149

the end as the bearer of England's future, and, for the not over
sensitive nerves of the period, that was sufficient. He, who was
soon to play a leading part in two other Shakespearian dramas,
is here endowed with all the qualities of the successful usurper
and ruler : cunning and insight, power of dissimulation, ingrati
ating manners, and promptitude in action.

In a single speech (v. 3) the new-made Henry IV. sketches
the character of his " unthrifty son," Shakespeare's hero: he
passes his time in the taverns of London with riotous boon-com
panions, who now and then even rob travellers on the highway ;
but, being no less daring than dissolute, he gives certain "sparks
of hope " for a nobler future.

XVIII

RICHARD III. PSYCHOLOGY AND MONOLOGUES — SHAKE
SPEARE'S POWER OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION — CON
TEMPT FOR WOMEN — THE PRINCIPAL SCENES — THE
CLASSIC TENDENCY OF THE TRAGEDY

IN the year 1594-95 Shakespeare returns to the material which
passed through his hands during his revision of the Second and
Third Parts of Henry VI. He once more takes up the character
of Richard of York, there so firmly outlined ; and, as in Richard II.
he had followed in Marlowe's footsteps, so he now sets to work
with all his might upon a Marlowesque figure, but only to execute
it with his own vigour, and around it to construct his first historic
tragedy with well-knit dramatic action. The earlier " histories "
were still half epical ; this is a true drama. It quickly became
one of the most effective and popular pieces on the stage, and has
imprinted itself on the memory of all the world in virtue of the
monumental character of its protagonist.

The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's taking up this theme
was probably the fact that in the year 1594 an old and worthless
play on the subject was published under the title of The True
Tragedy of Richard III. The publication of this play may have
been due to the renewed interest in its hero awakened by the
performances of Henry VI.

It is impossible to assign a precise date to Shakespeare's play.
The first Quarto of Richard II. was entered in the Stationers'
Register on the 29th August 1597, and the first edition of
Richard III. was entered on the 2Oth October of the same year.
But there is no doubt that its earliest form is of much older date.
The diversities in its style indicate that Shakespeare worked over
the text even before it was first printed ; and the difference be
tween the text of the first Quarto and that of the first Folio
bears witness to a radical revision having taken place in the

interval between the two editions. It is certainly to this play that

150

"RICHARD III." 151

John Weever alludes when, in his poem, Ad Gulielmum Shake
speare, written as early as 1595, he mentions Richard among the
poet's creations.

From the old play of Richard III. Shakespeare took nothing
at all, or, to be precise, possibly one or two lines in the first scene
of the second act. He throughout followed Holinshed, whose
Chronicle is here copied word for word from Hall, who, in his
turn, merely translated Sir Thomas More's history of Richard III.
We can even tell what edition of Holinshed Shakespeare used,
for he has copied a slip of the pen or error of the press which
appears in that edition alone. In Act v. scene 3, line 324, he
writes : —

" Long kept in Bretagne at our mother's cost,"

instead of brother's.

The text of Richard III. presents no slight difficulties to the
editors of Shakespeare. Neither the first Quarto nor the greatly
amended Folio is free from gross and baffling errors. The editors
of the Cambridge Edition have attempted to show that both the
texts are taken from bad copies of the original manuscripts. It
would not surprise us, indeed, that the poet's own manuscript,
being perpetually handled by the prompter and stage-manager,
should quickly become so ragged that now one page and now
another would have to be replaced by a copy. But the Cambridge
editors have certainly undervalued the augmented and amended
text of the First Folio. James Spedding has shown in an excel
lent essay (TJie New Shakspere Society1 s Transactions, 1875—76,
pp. 1—119) that the changes which some have thought accidental
and arbitrary, and therefore not the work of the poet himself, are
due to his desire, sometimes to improve the form of the verse,
sometimes to avoid the repetition of a word, sometimes to get rid
of antiquated words and turns of phrase.

Every one who has been nurtured upon Shakespeare has from
his youth dwelt wonderingly upon the figure of Richard, that
fiend in human shape, striding, with savage impetuosity, from
murder to murder, wading through falsehood and hypocrisy to
ever-new atrocities, becoming in turn regicide, fratricide, tyrant,
murderer of his wife and of his comrades, until, besmirched
with treachery and slaughter, he faces his foes with invincible
greatness.

152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When J. L. Heiberg refused to produce Richard III. at the
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, he expressed a doubt whether
" we could ever accustom ourselves to seeing Melpomene's dagger
converted into a butcher's knife." Like many other critics before
and after him, he took exception to the line in Richard's opening
soliloquy, " I am determined to prove a villain." He doubted,
justly enough, the psychological possibility of this phrase ; but
the monologue, as a whole, is a non-realistic unfolding of secret
thoughts in words, and, with a very slight change in the form of
expression, the idea is by no means indefensible. Richard does
not mean that he is determined to be what he himself regards as
criminal, but merely declares with bitter irony that, since he can
not " prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days," he
will play the part of a villain, and give the rein to his hatred for
the " idle pleasures" of the time.

There is in the whole utterance a straightforwardness, as of a
programme, that takes us aback. Richard comes forward nai'vely
in the character of Prologue, and foreshadows the matter of the
tragedy. It seems almost as though Shakespeare had determined
to guard himself at the outset against the accusation of obscurity
which had possibly been brought against his Richard II. But
we must remember that ambitious men in his day were less com
posite than in our times, and, moreover, that he was not here
depicting even one of his own contemporaries, but a character
which appeared to his imagination in the light of a historical
monster, from whom his own age was separated by more than a
century. His Richard is like an old portrait, dating from the
time when the physiognomy of dangerous, no less than of noble,
characters was simpler, and when even intellectual eminence was
still accompanied by a bull-necked vigour of physique such as in
later times we find only in the savage chieftains of distant corners
of the world.

It is against such figures as this of Richard that the critics
who contest Shakespeare's rank as a psychologist are fondest
of directing their attacks. But Shakespeare was no miniature-
painter. Minutely detailed psychological painting, such as in
our days Dostoyevsky has given us, was not his affair; though,
as he proved in Hamlet, he could on occasion grapple with
complex characters. Even here, however, he gets his effect of
complexity, not by unravelling a tangle of motives, but by pro-

" RICHARD III." 153

ducing the impression of an inward infinity in the character. It
is clear that, in his age, he had not often the chance of observing
how circumstances, experience, and changing conditions cut and
polish a personality into shimmering facets. With the exception
of Hamlet, who in some respects stands alone, his characters have
sides indeed, but not facets.

Take, for instance, this Richard. Shakespeare builds him up
from a few simple characteristics : deformity, the potent conscious
ness of intellectual superiority, and the lust for power. His whole
personality can be traced back to these simple elements.

He is courageous out of self-esteem; he plays the lover out
of ambition ; he is cunning and false, a comedian and a blood
hound, as cruel as he is hypocritical — and all in order to attain
to that despotism on which he has set his heart.

Shakespeare found in Holinshed's Chronicle certain funda
mental traits : Richard was born with teeth, and could bite before
he could smile ; he was ugly ; he had one shoulder higher than
another ; he was malicious and witty ; he was a daring and open-
handed general ; he loved secrecy ; he was false and hypocritical
out of ambition, cruel out of policy.

All this Shakespeare simplifies and exaggerates, as every
artist must. Delacroix has finely said, " LJart, J est P exaggeration
a propos"

The Richard of the tragedy is deformed; he is undersized
and crooked, has a hump on his back and a withered arm.

He is not, like so many other hunchbacks, under any illusion
as to his appearance. He does not think himself handsome, nor
is he loved by the daughters of Eve, in whom deformity is so apt
to awaken that instinct of pity which is akin to love.

No, Richard feels himself maltreated by Nature; from his
birth upwards he has suffered wrong at her hands, and in spite
of his high and strenuous spirit, he has grown up an outcast.
He has from the first had to do without his mother's love, and to
listen to the gibes of his enemies. Men have pointed at his
shadow and laughed. The dogs have barked at him as he halted
by. But in this luckless frame dwells an ambitious soul. Other
people's paths to happiness and enjoyment are closed to him.
But he will rule ; for that he was born. Power is everything to
him, his fixed idea. Power alone can give him his revenge upon
the people around him, whom he hates, or despises, or both. The

154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

glory of the diadem shall rest upon the head that crowns this
misshapen body. He sees its golden splendour afar off. Many
lives stand between him and his goal ; but he will shrink from no
falsehood, no treachery, no bloodshed, if only he can reach it.

Into this character Shakespeare transforms himself in ima
gination. It is the mark of the dramatic poet to be always able
to get out of his own skin and into another's. But in later times
some of the greatest dramatists have shrunk shuddering from
the out-and-out criminal, as being too remote from them. For
example, Goethe. His wrong-doers are only weaklings, like
Weislingen or Clavigo ; even his Mephistopheles is not really
evil. Shakespeare, on the other hand, made the effort to feel
like Richard. How did he set about it ? Exactly as we do when
we strive to understand another personality ; for example, Shake
speare himself. He imagines himself into him ; that is to say, he
projects his mind into the other's body-and lives in it for the time
being. The question the poet has to answer is always this : How
should I feel and act if I were a prince, a woman, a conqueror,
an outcast, and so forth ?

Shakespeare takes, as his point of departure, the ignominy
inflicted by Nature ; Richard is one of Nature's victims. How can
Shakespeare feel with him here — Shakespeare, to whom deformity
of body was unknown, and who had been immoderately favoured
by Nature ? But he, too, had long endured humiliation, and had
lived under mean conditions which afforded no scope either to
his will or to his talents. Poverty is itself a deformity ; and the
condition of an actor was a blemish like a hump on his back.
Thus he is in a position to enter with ease into the feelings ol
one of Nature's victims. He has simply to give free course to
all the moods in his own mind which have been evoked by
personal humiliation, and to let them ferment and run riot.

Next comes the consciousness of superiority in Richard, and
the lust of power which springs from it. Shakespeare cannot
have lacked the consciousness of his personal superiority, and,
like every man of genius, he must have had the lust of power in
his soul, at least as a rudimentary organ. Ambitious he must
assuredly have been, though not after the fashion of the actors and
dramatists of our day. Their mere jugglery passes for art, while^
his art was regarded by the great majority as mere jugglery.
His artistic self-esteem received a check in its growth ; but none

I

" RICHARD III." 155

the less there was ambition behind the tenacity of purpose which
in a few years raised him from a servitor in the theatre to
a shareholder and director, and which led him to develop the
greatest productive talent of his country, till he outshone all
rivals in his calling, and won the appreciation of the leaders of
fashion and taste. He now transposed into another sphere of
life, that of temporal rule, a habit of mind which was his own.
The instinct of his soul, which never suffered him to stop or
pause, but forced him from one great intellectual achievement to
another, restlessly onward from masterpiece to masterpiece — the
fierce instinct, with its inevitable egoism, which led him in his
youth to desert his family, in his maturity to amass property
without any tenderness for his debtors, and (per fas et nefas) to
attain his modest patent of gentility — this instinct enables him
to understand and feel that passion for power which defies and
tramples upon every scruple. And all the other characteristics
(for example, the hypocrisy, which in the Chronicle holds the
foremost place) he uses as mere instruments in the service of
ambition.

Note how he has succeeded in individualising this passion. It
is hereditary. In the Second Part of Henry VI. (iii. i) Richard's
father, the Duke of York, says —

" Let pale-fac'd fear keep with the mean-born man,
And find no harbour in a royal heart.

Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought,
And not a thought but thinks on dignity.

Well, nobles, well ; 't is politicly done,

To send me packing with an host of men :

I fear me, you but warm the starved snake,

Who, cherish'd in your breasts, will sting your hearts."

In the Third Part of Henry VI. , Richard shows himself the
true son of his father. His brother runs after the smiles of
women ; he dreams only of might and sovereignty. If there was
no crown to^be attained, the world would have no joy to offer
him. He says himself (iii. 2) —

" Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb :
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub ;
To make an envious mountain on my back.

To disproportion me in every part ;
Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp,
That carries no impression like the dam.
And am I then a man to be belov'd ?

0 monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought !
Then, since this earth affords no joy to me
But to command, to check, to o'erbear such
As are of better person than myself,

1 '11 make my heaven to dream upon the crown."

The lust of power is an inward agony to him. He compares
himself to a man " lost in a thorny wood, That rends the thorns
and is rent by the thorns ; " and he sees no way of deliverance
except to " hew his way out with a bloody axe." Thus is he
tormented by his desire for the crown of England ; and to achieve
it he will "drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; . . .
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could ; . . . add colours to the
chameleon; . . . And send the murd'rous Machiavel to school."
(The last touch is an anachronism, for Richard died fifty years
before The Prince was published.)

If this is to be a villain, then a villain he is. And for the
sake of the artistic effect, Shakespeare has piled upon Richard's
head far more crimes than the real Richard can be historically
proved to have committed. This he did, because he had no
doubt of the existence of such characters as rose before his
imagination while he read in Holinshed of Richard's misdeeds.
He believed in the existence of villains — a belief largely under
mined in our days by a scepticism which greatly facilitates the
villains' operations. He has drawn more villains than one :
Edmund in Lear, who is influenced by his illegitimacy as Richard
is by his deformity, and the grand master of all evil, I ago in
Othello.

But let us get rid of the empty by-word villain, which Richard
applies to himself. Shakespeare no doubt believed theoretically
in ^the free-will which can choose any course it pleases, and
villainy among the rest ; but none the less does he in practice
assign a cause to every effect.

On three scenes in this play Shakespeare evidently expended

"RICHARD III." 157

particular care — the three which imprint themselves on the
memory after even a single attentive reading.

The first of these scenes is that in which Richard wins over
the Lady Anne, widow of one of his victims, Prince Edward,
and daughter-in-law of another, Henry VI. Shakespeare has
here carried the situation to its utmost extremity. It is while
Anne is accompanying the bier of the murdered Henry VI. that
the murderer confronts her, stops the funeral procession with
drawn sword, calmly endures all the outbursts of hatred, loathing,
and contempt with which Anne overwhelms him, and, having
shaken off her invectives like water from a duck's back, advances
his suit, plays his comedy of love, and there and then so turns
the current of her will that she allows him to hope, and even
accepts his ring.

The scene is historically impossible, since Queen Margaret
took Anne with her in her flight after the battle of Tewkesbury,
and Clarence kept her in concealment until two years after the
death of Henry VI., when Richard discovered her in London.
It has, moreover, something astonishing, or rather bewildering,
about it at the first reading, appearing as though written for a
wager or to outdo some predecessor. Nevertheless it is by no
means unnatural. What may with justice be objected to it is
that it is unprepared. The mistake is, that we are first intro
duced to Anne in the scene itself, and can consequently form
no judgment as to whether her action does or does not accord
with her character. The art of dramatic writing consists almost
entirely in preparing for what is to come, and then, in spite of,
nay, in virtue of the preparation, taking the audience by surprise.
Surprise without preparation loses half its effect.

But this is only a technical flaw which so great a master
would in riper years have remedied with ease. The essential
feature of the scene is its tremendous daring and strength, or,
psychologically speaking, the depth of early-developed contempt
for womankind into which it affords us a glimpse. For the very
reason that the poet has not given any individual characteristics
to this woman, it seems as though he would say : Such is feminine
human nature. It is quite evident that in his younger years he
was not so much alive to the beauties of the womanly character
as he became at a later period of his life. He is fond of draw
ing unamiable women like Adriana in The Comedy of Errors,

158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

violent and corrupt women like Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and
Margaret in Henry VI., or scolding women like Katherine in
The Taming of the Shrew. Here he gives us a picture of
peculiarly feminine weakness, and personifies in Richard his
own contempt for it.

Exasperate a woman against you (he seems to say), do her
all the evil you can think of, kill her husband, deprive her thereby
of the succession to a crown, fill her to overflowing with hatred
and execration — then if you can only cajole her into believing that
in all you have done, crimes and everything, you have been
actuated simply and solely by burning passion for her, by the
hope of approaching her and winning her hand — why, then the
game is yours, and sooner or later she will give in. Her vanity
cannot hold out. If it is proof against ten measures of flattery,
it will succumb to a hundred ; and if even that is not enough, then
pile on more. Every woman has a price at which her vanity is
for sale; you have only to dare greatly and bid high enough.
So Shakespeare makes this crookbacked assassin accept Anne's
insults without winking and retort upon them his declaration of
love — he at once seems less hideous in her eyes from the fact
that his crimes were committed for her sake. Shakespeare makes
him hand her his drawn sword, to pierce him to the heart if she
will ; he is sure enough that she will do nothing of the sort.
She cannot withstand the intense volition in his glance ; he
hypnotises her hatred ; the exaltation with which his lust of
power inspires him bewilders and overpowers her, and he
becomes almost beautiful in her eyes when he bares his breast
to her revenge. She yields to him under the influence of an
attraction in which are mingled dizziness, terror, and perverted
sensuality. His very hideousness becomes a stimulus the more.
There is a sort of fearful billing-and-cooing in the stichomythy
in the style of the antique tragedy, which begins : —

" Anne. I would I knew thy heart.
Gloucester. 'Tis figured in my tongue.
Anne. I fear me both are false.
Gloucester. Then never man was true."

But triumph seethes in his veins —

"Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won ? "

"RICHARD III." 159

— triumph that he, the hunchback, the monster, has needed but
to show himself and use his polished tongue in order to stay the
curses on her lips, dry the tears in her eyes, and awaken desire
in her soul. This courtship has procured him the intoxicating
sensation of irresistibility.

The fact of the marriage Shakespeare found in the Chronicle ;
and he led up to it in this brilliant fashion because his poetic
instinct told him to make Richard great, and thereby possible
as a tragic hero. In reality, he was by no means so daemonic.
His motive for paying court to Anne was sheer cupidity. Both
Clarence and Gloucester had schemed to possess themselves of
the vast fortune left by the Earl of Warwick, although the
Countess was still alive and legally entitled to the greater part
of it. Clarence, who had married the elder daughter, was
certain of his part in the inheritance, but Richard thought that
by marrying the younger daughter, Prince Edward's widow,
he would secure the right to go halves. By aid of an Act of
Parliament, the matter was arranged so that each of the brothers
received his share in the booty. For this low rapacity in Richard,
Shakespeare has substituted the hunchback's personal exultation
on finding himself a successful wooer.

Nevertheless, it was not his intention to represent Richard as
superior to all feminine wiles. This opening scene has its counter
part in the passage (iv. 4) where the King, after having rid himself
by poison of the wife he has thus won, proposes to Elizabeth, the
widow of Edward IV., for the hand of her daughter.

The scene has the air of a repetition. Richard has made away
with Edward's two sons in order to clear his path to the throne.
Here again, then, the murderer woos the nearest kinswoman of
his victims, and, in this case, through the intermediary of their
mother. Shakespeare has lavished his whole art on this passage.
Elizabeth, too, expresses the deepest loathing for him. Richard
answers that, if he has deprived her sons of the throne, he will
now mak« amends by raising her daughter to it. Here also the
dialogue takes the form of a stichomythy, which clearly enough indi
cates that these passages belong to the earliest form of the play : —

" King Richard. Infer fair England's peace by this alliance.
Queen Elizabeth. Which she shall purchase with still lasting war.
K. Rich. Tell her, the king, that may command, entreats.
Q. Eliz. That at her hands, which the kings' King forbids."

160 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Richard not only asserts the purity and strength of his feelings,
but insists that by this marriage alone can he be prevented from
bringing misery and destruction upon thousands in the kingdom.
Elizabeth pretends to yield, and Richard bursts forth, just as in
the first act —

" Relenting fool, and shallow changing woman ! "

But it is he himself who is overreached. Elizabeth has only
made a show of acquiescence in order immediately after to offer
her daughter to his mortal foe.

The second unforgetable passage is the Baynard's Castle
scene in the third act. Richard has cleared away all obstacles on
his path to the throne. His elder brother Clarence is murdered
— drowned in a butt of wine. Edward's young sons are presently
to be strangled in prison. Hastings has just been hurried to the
scaffold without trial or form of law. The thing is now to avoid
all appearance of complicity in these crimes, and to seem austerely
disinterested with regard to the crown. To this end he makes his
rascally henchman, Buckingham, persuade the simple-minded and
panic-stricken Lord Mayor of London, with other citizens of re
pute, to implore him, in spite of his seeming reluctance, to mount
the throne. Buckingham prepares Richard for their approach

(iii. 7):-

" Intend some fear ;

Be not you spoke with but by mighty suit :
And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,
And stand between two churchmen, good my lord :
For on that ground I'll make a holy descant :
And be not easily won to our requests ;
Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take it."

Then come the citizens. Catesby bids them return another time.
His grace is closeted with two right reverend fathers ; he is
" divinely bent to meditation," and must not be disturbed in his
devotions by any " worldly suits." They renew their entreaties
to his messenger, and implore the favour of an audience with his
grace " in matter of great moment."

Not till then does Gloucester show himself upon the balcony
between two bishops.

When, at the election of 1868, which turned upon the Irish
Church question, Disraeli, a very different man from Richard, was

''RICHARD III." 161

relying on the co-operation of both English and Irish prelates,
Punch depicted him in fifteenth-century attire, standing on a
balcony, prayer-book in hand, with an indescribable expression of
sly humility, while two bishops, representing the English and the
Irish Church, supported him on either hand. The legend ran, in
the words of the Lord Mayor : " See where his grace stands 'tween
two clergymen ! " — whereupon Buckingham remarks —

" Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity ;
And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,
True ornament to know a holy man."

The deputation is sternly repulsed, until Richard at last lets
mercy stand for justice, and recalling the envoys of the City,
yields to their insistence.

The third master-scene is that in Richard's tent on Bosworth
Field (v. 3). It seems as though his hitherto immovable self-
confidence had been shaken ; he feels himself weak ; he will not
sup. " Is my beaver easier than it was ? . . . Fill me a bowl of
wine. . . . Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy."
Again : " Give me a bowl of wine."

" I have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have."

Then, in a vision, as he lies sleeping on his couch, with his
armour on and his sword-hilt grasped in his hand, he sees, one
by one, the spectres of all those he has done to death. He wakens
in terror. His conscience has a thousand tongues, and every
tongue condemns him as a perjurer and assassin : —

" I shall despair. — There is no creature loves me;
And if I die no soul shall pity me."

These are such pangs of conscience as would sometimes beset
even the strongest and most resolute in those days when faith
and superstition were still powerful, and when even one who
scoffed at religion and made a tool of it had no assurance in his
heart of hearts. There is in these words, too, a purely human
sense of loneliness and of craving for affection, which is valid for
all time.

Most admirable is the way in which Richard summons up his
VOL. I. L

1 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

manhood and restores the courage of those around him. These
are the accents of one who will give despair no footing in his
soul : —

" Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
. Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe ; "

and there is in his harangue to the soldiers an irresistible roll
of fierce and spirit-stirring martial music; it is constructed like
strophes of the Marseillaise : —

"Remember whom you are to cope withal; —

A sort of vagabonds, rascals, runaways.
(Que veut cette horde d'csclavesf)

You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives,

They would restrain the one, distain the other.
(Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes.)

Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again."

But there is a ferocity, a scorn, a popular eloquence in
Richard's words, in comparison with which the rhetoric of
the Marseillaise seems declamatory, even academic. His last
speeches are nothing less than superb : —

"Shall these enjoy our lands? lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters? — \_Drum afar off.} Hark; I hear their

drum.

Fight, gentlemen of England ! fight, bold yeomen !
Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head !
Spur your prou^d horses hard, and ride in blood :
Amaze the welkin with your broken staves !

Enter a Messenger.

What says Lord Stanley ? will he bring his power ?

Mess. My lord, he doth deny to come.

K. Rich. Off with his son George's head !

Norfolk. My lord, the enemy is pass'd the marsh :
After the battle let George Stanley die.

K. Rich. A thousand hearts are great within my bosom.
Advance our standards ! set upon our foes !
Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons !
Upon them ! Victory sits on our helms.

K. Rich. A horse ! a horse ! my kingdom for a horse !
Catesby. Withdraw, my lord ; I'll help you to a horse.

"RICHARD III." 163

K. Rich. Slave ! I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field ;
Five have I slain to-day, instead of him. —
A horse ! a horse ! my kingdom for a horse ! "

In no other play of Shakespeare's, we may surely say, is the
leading character so absolutely predominant as here. He absorbs
almost the whole of the interest, and it is a triumph of Shake
speare's art that he makes us, in spite of everything, follow him
with sympathy. This is partly because several of his victims
are so worthless that their fate seems well deserved. Anne's
weakness deprives her of our sympathy, and Richard's crime
loses something of its horror when we see how lightly it is
forgiven by the one who ought to take it most to heart. In
spite of all his iniquities, he has wit and courage on his side
— ra wit which sometimes rises to Mephistophelean humour, a
courage which does not fail him even in the moment of disaster,
but sheds a glory over his fall which is lacking to the triumph
of his coldly correct opponent. However false and hypocritical
he may be towards others, he is no hypocrite to himself. He
is chemically free from self-delusion, even applying to himself
the most derogatory terms ; and this candour in the depths of
his nature appeals to us. It must be said for him, too, that
threats and curses recoil from him innocuous, that neither hatred
nor violence nor superior force can dash his courage. Strength
of character is such a rare quality that it arouses sympathy even
in a criminal. If Richard's reign had lasted longer, he would
perhaps have figured in history as a ruler of the type of Louis XL :
crafty, always wearing his religion on his sleeve, but far-seeing
and resolute. As a matter of fact, in history as in the drama,
his whole time was occupied in defending himself in the position
to which he had fought his way, like a bloodthirsty beast of prey.
His figure stands before us as his contemporaries have drawn
it: small and wiry, the right shoulder higher than the left,
wearing his rich brown hair long in order to conceal this mal
formation, biting his under-lip, always restless, always with his
hand on his dagger-hilt, sliding it up and down in its sheath,
without entirely drawing it. Shakespeare has succeeded in
throwing a halo of poetry around this tiger in human shape.

The figures of the two boy princes, Edward's sons, stand in

1 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the strongest contrast to Richard. The eldest child already
shows greatness of soul, a kingly spirit, with a deep feeling for
the import of historic achievement. The fact that Julius Caesar
built the Tower, he says, even were it not registered, ought to
live from age to age. He is full of the thought that while Caesar's
" valour did enrich his wit," yet it was his wit " that made his
valour live," and he exclaims with enthusiasm, " Death makes no
conquest of this conqueror." The younger brother is childishly
witty, imaginative, full of boyish mockery for his uncle's grim-
ness, and eager to play with his dagger and sword. In a very
few touches Shakespeare has endowed these young brothers with
the most exquisite grace. The murderers " weep like to children
in their death's sad story " : —

" Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
And, in their summer beauty, kiss'd each other."

Finally, the whole tragedy of Richard's life and death is
enveloped, as it were, in the mourning of women, permeated with
their lamentations. In its internal structure, it bears no slight
resemblance to a Greek tragedy, being indeed the concluding
portion of a tetralogy.

Nowhere else does Shakespeare approach so nearly to the
classicism on the model of Seneca which had found some ad
herents in England.

The whole tragedy springs from the curse which York, in
the Third Part of Henry VI. (i. 4), hurls at Margaret of Anjou.
She has insulted her captive enemy, and given him in mockery a
napkin soaked in the blood of his son, the young Rutland, stabbed
to the heart by Clifford.

Therefore she loses her crown and her son, the Prince of
Wales. Her lover, Suffolk, she has already lost. Nothing re
mains to attach her to life.

But now it is her turn to be revenged.

The poet has sought to incarnate in her the antique Nemesis,
has given her supernatural proportions and set her free from the
conditions of real life. Though exiled, she has returned un
questioned to England, haunts the palace of Edward IV., and
gives free vent to her rage and hatred in his presence and that
of his kinsfolk and his courtiers. So, too, she wanders around
under Richard's rule, simply and solely to curse her enemies —

"RICHARD III." 165

and even Richard himself is seized with a superstitious shudder
at these anathemas.

Never again did Shakespeare so depart from the possible in
order to attain a scenic effect. And yet it is doubtful whether
the effect is really attained. In reading, it is true, these curses
strike us with extraordinary force; but on the stage, where she
only disturbs and retards the action, and takes no effective part
in it, Margaret cannot but prove wearisome.

Yet, though she herself remains inactive, her curses are
effectual enough. Death overtakes all those on whom they fall
— the King and his children, Rivers and Dorset, Lord Hastings
and the rest.

She encounters the Duchess of York, the mother of Edward
IV., Queen Elizabeth, his widow, and finally Anne, Richard's
daringly-won and quickly-repudiated wife. And all these women,
like a Greek chorus, give utterance in rhymed verse to impreca
tions and lamentations of high lyric fervour. In two passages in
particular (ii. 2 and iv. i) they chant positive choral odes in
dialogue form. Take as an example of the lyric tone of the
diction these lines (iv. i): —

'•'•Duchess of York [To Dorset.] Go thou to Richmond, and good

fortune guide thee ! —

[To Anne.'] Go thou to Richard, and good angels tend thee ! —
[To Q. Elizabeth.] Go thou to sanctuary, and good thoughts

possess thee ! —

I to my grave, where peace and rest lie with me !
Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen,
And each hour's joy wrack'd with a week of teen."

Such is this work of Shakespeare's youth, firm, massive, and
masterful throughout, even though of very unequal merit. Every
thing is here worked out upon the surface ; the characters them
selves tell us what sort of people they are, and proclaim themselves
evil or good, as the case may be. They are all transparent, all
self-conscious to excess. They expound themselves in soliloquies,
and each of them is judged in a sort of choral ode. The time is
yet to come when Shakespeare no longer dreams of making his
characters formally hand over to the spectators the key to their
mystery — when, on the contrary, with his sense of the secrets
and inward contradictions of the spiritual life, he sedulously hides
that key in the depths of personality.

XIX

SHAKESPEARE LOSES HIS SON— TRACES OF HIS GRIEF IN
KING JOHN— THE OLD PLAY OF THE SAME NAME-
DISPLACEMENT OF ITS CENTRE OF GRAVITY— ELIMINA
TION OF RELIGIOUS POLEMICS— RETENTION OF THE
NATIONAL BASIS— PATRIOTIC SPIRIT— SHAKESPEARE
KNOWS NOTHING OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
NORMANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS, AND IGNORES THE
MAGNA CHART A

IN the Parish Register of Stratford-on-Avon for 1596, under the
heading of burials, we find this entry, in a clear and elegant
handwriting : —

"August n, Hamnetfilius William Shakespeare."

Shakespeare's only son was born on the 2nd of February
1585 ; he was thus only eleven and a half when he died.

We cannot doubt that this loss was a grievous one to a man
of Shakespeare's deep feeling ; doubly grievous, it would seem,
because it was his constant ambition to restore the fallen fortunes
of his family, and he was now left without an heir to his name.

Traces of what his heart must have suffered appear in the
work he now undertakes, King John, which seems to date from
1596-97.

One of the main themes of this play is the relation between
John Lackland, who has usurped the English crown, and the
rightful heir, Arthur, son of John's elder brother, in reality a
boy of about fourteen at the date of the action, but whom
Shakespeare, for the sake of poetic effect, and influenced, per
haps, by his private preoccupations of the moment, has made
considerably younger, and consequently more childlike and
touching.

The King has got Arthur into his power. The most famous
scene in the play is that (iv. i) in which Hubert de Burgh, the

166

"KING JOHN" 167

King's chamberlain, who has received orders to sear out the eyes
of the little captive, enters Arthur's prison with the irons, and
accompanied by the two servants who are to bind the child to
a chair and hold him fast while the atrocity is being committed.
The little prince, who has no mistrust of Hubert, but only a
general dread of his uncle's malice, as yet divines no danger,
and is full of sympathy and childlike tenderness. The passage
is one of extraordinery grace : —

"Arthur. You are sad.

Hubert. Indeed, I have been merrier.
Arth. Mercy on me !

Methinks, nobody should be sad but I :

I would to Heaven,
I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.

Hub. [Aside.'] If I talk to him, with his innocent prate
He will awake my mercy, which lies dead :
Therefore I will be sudden, and despatch.

Arth. Are you sick, Hubert ? you look pale to-day.
In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
That I might sit all night, .and watch with you :
I warrant, I love you more than you do me."

Hubert gives him the royal mandate to read : —

" Hubert. Can you not read it ? is it not fair writ ?

Arthur. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect.
Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes ?

Hub. Young boy, I must.

Arth. And will you ?

Hub. And I will.

Arth. Have you the heart ? When your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me,)
And I did never ask it you again j
And with my hand at midnight held your head."

Hubert summons the executioners, and the child promises to
sit still and offer no resistance if only he will send these " bloody
men " away. One of the servants as he goes out speaks a word
of pity, and Arthur is in despair at having " chid away his friend."
In heart-breaking accents he begs mercy of Hubert until the iron
has grown cold, and Hubert has not the heart to heat it afresh.

1 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Arthur's entreaties to the rugged Hubert to spare his eyes,
must have represented in Shakespeare's thought the prayers of
his little Hamnet to be suffered still to see the light of day, or
rather Shakespeare's own appeal to Death to spare the child —
prayers and appeals which were all in vain.

It is, however, in the lamentations of Arthur's mother,
Constance, when the child is carried away to prison (iii. 4), that
we most clearly recognise the accents of Shakespeare's sorrow : —

" Pandulph. Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.
Constance. I am not mad : this hair I tear is mine.

If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think, a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad : too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity."

She pours forth her anguish at the thought of his sufferings
in prison : —

" Now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,
And so he'll die.

Pandulph. You hold too heinous a respect of grief.

Constance. He talks to me, that never had a son.

K. Philip. You are as fond of grief as of your child.

Const. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form."

It seems as though Shakespeare's great heart had found an
outlet for its own sorrows in transfusing them into the heart of
Constance.

Shakespeare used as the basis of his King John an old play
on the same subject published in I59I.1 This play is quite

1 The full title runs thus : " The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England,
with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named The
Bastard Fawconbridge) : also the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey. As it
was (sundry times) publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honor
able Citie of London."

"KING JOHN" 169

artless and spiritless, but contains the whole action, outlines
all the characters, and suggests almost all the principal scenes.
The poet did not require to trouble himself with the invention
of external traits. He could concentrate his whole effort upon
vitalising, spiritualising, and deepening everything. Thus it
happens that this play, though never one of his most popular
(it seems to have been but seldom performed during his lifetime,
and remained in manuscript until the appearance of the First
Folio), nevertheless contains some of his finest character-studies
and a multitude of pregnant, imaginative, and exquisitely worded
speeches.

The old play was a mere Protestant tendency-drama directed
against Catholic aggression, and full of the crude hatred and
coarse ridicule of monks and nuns characteristic of the Reforma
tion period. Shakespeare, with his usual tact, has suppressed
the religious element, and retained only the national and political
attack upon Roman Catholicism, so that the play had no slight
actuality for the Elizabethan public. But he has also displaced
the centre of gravity of the old play. Everything in Shakespeare
turns upon John's defective right to the throne : therein lies the
motive for the atrocity he plans, which leads (although it is not
carried out as he intended) to the barons' desertion of his cause.

Despite its great dramatic advantages over Richard II., the
play suffers from the same radical weakness, and in an even
greater degree: the figure of the King is too unsympathetic to
serve as the centre-point of a drama. His despicable infirmity
of purpose, which makes him kneel to receive his crown at the
hands of the same Papal legate whom he has shortly before
defied in blusterous terms ; his infamous scheme to assassinate
an innocent child, and his repentance when he sees that its
supposed execution has alienated the chief supporters of his
throne — all this hideous baseness, unredeemed by any higher
characteristics, leads the spectator rather to attach his interest
to the subordinate characters, and thus the action is frittered
away before his eyes. It lacks unity, because the King is power
less to hold it together.

He himself is depicted for all time in the masterly scene
(iii. 3) where he seeks, without putting his thought into plain
words, to make Hubert understand that he would fain have
Arthur murdered : —

1 70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words :
Then, in despite of brooded-watchful day, —
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts.
But, ah ! I will not : — yet I love thee well."

Hubert protests his fidelity and devotion. Even if he were to
die for the deed, he would execute it for the King's sake. Then
John's manner becomes hearty, almost affectionate. " Good
Hubert, Hubert ! " he says caressingly. He points to Arthur,
bidding Hubert " throw his eye on yon young boy ; " and then
follows this masterly dialogue : —

" I'll tell thee what, my friend,
He is a very serpent in my way ;
And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread,
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me ?
Thou art his keeper.

Hub. And I'll keep him so,

That he shall not offend your majesty.

K.John. Death.

Hub. My Lord.

K. John. A grave.

Hub. He shall not live.

K. John. Enough.

/ could be merry now. Hubert, I love thee ;
Well, I'll not say what I intend for thee :
Remember. — Madam, fare you well :
I'll send those powers o'er to your majesty.

Elinor. My blessing go with thee ! "

The character that bears the weight of the piece, as an acting
play, is the illegitimate son of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Philip
Faulconbridge. He is John Bull himself in the guise of a
mediaeval knight, equipped with great strength and a racy
English humour, not the wit of a Mercutio, a gay Italianising
cavalier, but the irrepressible ebullitions of rude health and blunt
gaiety befitting an English Hercules. The scene in the first act,
in which he appears along with his brother, who seeks to deprive
him of his inheritance as a Faulconbridge on the ground of his
alleged illegitimacy, and the subsequent scene with his mother,

"KING JOHN" 171

from whom he tries to wring the secret of his paternity, both
appear in the old play ; but in it everything that the Bastard says
is in grim earnest — the embroidery of wit belongs to Shakespeare
alone. It is he who has placed in Faulconbridge's mouth such
sayings as this : —

" Madam, I was not old Sir Robert's son :
Sir Robert might have eat his part in me
Upon Good Friday, and ne'er broke his fast."

And it is quite in Shakespeare's spirit when the son, after her
confession, thus consoles his mother : —

" Madam, I would not wish a better father.
Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
And so doth yours."

In later years, at a time when his outlook upon life was darkened,
Shakespeare accounted for the villainy of Edmund, in King Lear,
and for his aloofness from anything like normal humanity, on the
ground of his irregular birth ; in the Bastard of this play, on
the contrary, his aim was to present a picture of all that health,
vigour, and full-blooded vitality which popular belief attributes to
a " love-child."

The antithesis to this national hero is Limoges, Archduke of
Austria, in whom Shakespeare, following the old play, has mixed
up two entirely distinct personalities : Vidomar, Viscount of
Limoges, at the siege of one of whose castles Richard Coeur-
de-Lion was killed, in 1199, and Leopold V., Archduke of
Austria, who had kept Cceur-de-Lion in prison. Though the
latter, in fact, died five years before Richard, we here find him
figuring as the dastardly murderer of the heroic monarch. In
memory of this deed he wears a lion's skin on his shoulders, and
thus brings down upon himself the indignant scorn of Constance
and Faulconbridge's taunting insults : —

" Constance. Thou wear a lion's hide ! doff it for shame,
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

Austria. O, that a man should speak those words to me !
Bastard. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
Aust. Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life.
Bast. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs."

Every time the Archduke tries to get in a word of warning or
counsel, Faulconbridge silences him with this coarse sarcasm.

i;2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Faulconbridge is at first full of youthful insolence, the true
mediaeval nobleman, who despises the burgess class simply as
such. When the inhabitants of Angiers refuse to open their
gates either to King John or to King Philip of France, who has
espoused the cause of Arthur, the Bastard is so indignant at this
peace-loving circumspection that he urges the kings to join their
forces against the unlucky town, and cry truce to their feud
until the ramparts are levelled to the earth. But in the course
of the action he ripens more and more, and displays ever greater
and more estimable qualities — humanity, right-mindedness, and a
fidelity to the King which does not interfere with generous freedom
of speech towards him.

His method of expression is always highly imaginative, more
so than that of the other male characters in the play. Even the
most abstract ideas he personifies. Thus he talks (iii. i) of —

" Old Time^ the -clock-setter, that bald sexton Time."

In the old play whole scenes are devoted to his execution of the
task here allotted him of visiting the monasteries of England and
lightening the abbots' bursting money-bags. Shakespeare has
suppressed these ebullitions of an anti-Catholic fervour, which he
did not share. On the other hand, he has endowed Faulconbridge
with genuine moral superiority. At first he is only a cheery,
fresh-natured, robust personality, who tramples upon all social
conventions, phrases, and affectations ; and indeed he preserves
to the last something of that contempt for " cockered silken
wantons " which Shakespeare afterwards elaborates so magnifi
cently in Henry Percy. But there is real greatness in his attitude
when, at the close of the play, he addresses the vacillating John
in this manly strain (v. i) : —

" Let not the world see fear, and sad distrust,
Govern the motion of a kingly eye :
Be stirring as the time ; be fire with fire ;
Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow
Of bragging horror : so shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviours from the great,
Grow great by your example, and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution."

Faulconbridge is in this play the spokesman of the patriotic
spirit. But we realise how strong was Shakespeare's determina-

"KING JOHN" 173

tion to make this string sound at all hazards, when we find that
the first eulogy of England is placed in the mouth of England's
enemy, Limoges, the slayer of Coeur -de-Lion, who speaks
(ii. i) of—

" that pale, that white-fac'd shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders,
. . . that England, hedg'd in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes."

How slight is the difference between the eulogistic style of the
two mortal enemies, when Faulconbridge, who has in the mean
time killed Limoges, ends the play with a speech, which is, how
ever, only slightly adapted from the older text : —

" This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true."

Next to Faulconbridge, Constance is the character who bears
the weight of the play ; and its weakness arises in great part from
the fact that Shakespeare has killed her at the end of the third
act. So lightly is her death treated, that it is merely announced
in passing by the mouth of a messenger. She does not appear
at all after her son Arthur is put out of the way, possibly because
Shakespeare feared to lengthen the list of sorrowing and vengeful
mothers already presented in his earlier histories.

He has treated this figure with a marked predilection, such
as he usually manifests for those characters which, in one way or
another, forcibly oppose every compromise with lax worldliness
and euphemistic conventionality. He has not only endowed her
with the most passionate and enthusiastic motherly love, but with
a wealth of feeling and of imagination which gives her words a cer
tain poetic magnificence. She wishes that " her tongue were in the
thunder's mouth, Then with a passion would she shake the world "
(iii. 4). She is sublime in her grief for the loss of her son : —

" I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop.

174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

To me, and to the state of my great grief,
Let kings assemble ;

Here I and sorrows sit ;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.

[Seats herself on the ground"

Yet Shakespeare is already preparing us, in the overstrained
violence of these expressions, for her madness and death.

The third figure which fascinates the reader of King John is
that of Arthur. All the scenes in which the child appears are
contained in the old play of the same name, and, among the rest,
the first scene of the second act, which seems to dispose of Fleay's
conjecture that the first two hundred lines of the act were hastily
inserted after Shakespeare had lost his son. Nevertheless almost
all that is gracious and touching in the figure is due to the great
reviser. The old text is at its best in the scene where Arthur
meets his death by jumping from the walls of the castle. Shake
speare has here confined himself for the most part to free curtail
ment; in the old King John, his fatal fall does not prevent Arthur
from pouring forth copious lamentations to his absent mother and
prayers to "sweete lesu." Shakespeare gives him only two lines
to speak after his fall.

In this play, as in almost all the works of Shakespeare's
younger years, the reader is perpetually amazed to find the finest
poetical and rhetorical passages side by side with the most in
tolerable euphuistic affectations. And we cannot allege the excuse
that these are legacies from the older play. On the contrary, there
is nothing of the kind to be found in it ; they are added by Shake
speare, evidently with the express purpose of displaying delicacy
and profundity of thought. In the scenes before the walls of
Angiers, he has on the whole kept close to the old drama, and
has even followed faithfully the sense of all the more important
speeches. For example, it is a citizen on the ramparts, who,
in the old play, suggests the marriage between Blanch and the
Dauphin ; Shakespeare merely re-writes his speech, introducing
into it these beautiful lines (ii. 2) :• —

" If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch ?
If zealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch ?

"KING JOHN" 175

If love ambitious sought a match of birth,

Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanch ? "

The surprising thing is that the same hand which has just written
these verses should forthwith lose itself in a tasteless tangle of
affectations like this : —

" Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth,
Is the young Dauphin every way complete :
If not complete of, say, he is not she ;
And she again wants nothing, to name want,
If want it be not, that she is not he : "

and this profound thought is further spun out with a profusion of
images. Can we wonder that Voltaire and the French critics of
the eighteenth century were offended by a style like this, even to
the point of letting it blind them to the wealth of genius elsewhere
manifested ?

Even the touching scene between Arthur and Hubert is dis
figured by false cleverness of this sort. The little boy, kneeling
to the man who threatens to sear out his eyes, introduces, in the
midst of the most moving appeals, such far-fetched and contorted
phrases as this (iv. i): —

" The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears,
And quench this fiery indignation
Even in the matter of mine innocence ;
Nay, after that, consume away in rust,
But for containing fire to harm mine eye."

And again, when Hubert proposes to reheat the iron : —

" An if you do, you will but make it blush,
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert."

The taste of the age must indeed have pressed strongly upon
Shakespeare's spirit to prevent him from feeling the impossibility
of these quibbles upon the lips of a child imploring in deadly fear
that his eyes may be spared to him.

As regards their ethical point of view, there is no essential
difference between the old play and Shakespeare's. The King's
defeat and painful death is in both a punishment for his wrong
doing. There has only been, as already mentioned, a certain
displacement of the centre of gravity. In the old play, the dying

176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

John stammers out an explicit confession that from the moment
he surrendered to the Roman priest he has had no more happiness
on earth ; for the Pope's curse is a blessing, and his blessing a
curse. In Shakespeare the emphasis is laid, not upon the King's
weakness in the religio-political struggle, but upon the wrong to
Arthur. Faulconbridge gives utterance to the fundamental idea
of the play when he says (iv. 3) : —

" From forth this morsel of dead royalty,
The life, the right, and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven."

Shakespeare's political standpoint is precisely that of the
earlier writer, and indeed, we may add, of his whole age.

The most important contrasts and events of the period he
seeks to represent do not exist for him. He naively accepts the
first kings of the House of Plantagenet, and the Norman princes
in general, as English national heroes, and has evidently no
suspicion of the deep gulf that separated the Normans from the
Anglo-Saxons down to this very reign, when the two hostile
races, equally oppressed by the King's tyranny, began to fuse
into one people. What would Shakespeare have thought had he
known that Richard Coeur-de-Lion's favourite formula of denial
was " Do you take me for an Englishman ? " while his pet oath,
and that of his Norman followers, was " May I become an Eng
lishman if ,"&c. ?

Nor does a single phrase, a single syllable, in the whole play,
refer to the event which, for all after-times, is inseparably asso
ciated with the memory of King John — the signing of the Magna
Charta. The reason of this is evidently, in the first place,
that Shakespeare kept close to the earlier drama, and, in the
second place, that he did not attribute to the event the impor
tance it really possessed, did not understand that the Magna
Charta laid the foundation of popular liberty, by calling into exist
ence a middle class which supported even the House of Tudor
in its struggle with an overweening oligarchy. But the chief
reason why the Magna Charta is not mentioned was, no doubt,
that Elizabeth did not care to be reminded of it. She was not
fond of any limitations of her royal prerogative, and did not care
to recall the defeats suffered by her predecessors in their struggles
with warlike and independent vassals. And the nation was willing

"KING JOHN" 177

enough to humour her in this respect. People felt that they had
to thank her government for a great national revival, and there
fore showed no eagerness either to vindicate popular rights against
her, or to see them vindicated in stage-history. It was not until
long after, under the Stuarts, that the English people began to
cultivate its constitution. The chronicle-writers of the period
touch very lightly upon the barons' victory over King John in the
struggle for the Great Charter; and Shakespeare thus followed
at once his own personal bias with regard to history, and the
current of his age.

VOL. i. M

XX

"THE TAMING OF THE SHREW" AND "THE MERCHANT OF
VENICE " — SHA KESPEA RE'S PREOCCUPA TION WITH
THOUGHTS OF PROPERTY AND GAIN— HIS GROWING
PROSPERITY— HIS ADMISSION TO THE RANKS OF THE
"GENTRY"— HIS PURCHASE OF HOUSES AND LAND-
MONEY TRANSACTIONS AND LAWSUITS

THE first plays in which we seem to find traces of Italian travel
are The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, the
former written at latest in 1596, the latter almost certainly in that
or the following year.

Enough has already been said of The Taming of the Shrew.
It is only a free and spirited reconstruction of an old piece of
scenic architecture, which Shakespeare demolished in order to
erect from its materials a spacious and airy hall. The old play
itself had been highly popular on the stage ; it took new life under
Shakespeare's hands. His play is not much more than a farce,
but it possesses movement and fire, and the leading male charac
ter, the somewhat coarsely masculine Petruchio, stands in amusing
and typical contrast to the spoilt, headstrong, and passionate little
woman whom he masters.

The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's first important comedy,
is a piece of work of a very different order, and is elaborated to a
very different degree. There is far more of his own inmost nature
in it than in the light and facile farce.

No doubt he found in Marlowe's Jew of Ma! fa the first, purely
literary, impulse towards The Merchant of Venice. In Marlowe's
play the curtain rises upon the chief character, Barabas, sitting in
his counting-house, with piles of gold before him, and revelling
in the thought of the treasures which it takes a soliloquy of
nearly fifty lines to enumerate — pearls like pebble-stones, opals,
sapphires, amethysts, jacinths, topazes, grass-green emeralds, beau
teous rubies and sparkling diamonds. At the beginning of the play,

178

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 179

he is possessed of all the riches wherewith the Genie of the Lamp
endowed Aladdin, which have at one time or another sparkled in
the dreams of all poor poets.

Barabas is a Jew and usurer, like Shylock. Like Shylock, he
has a daughter who is in love with a poor Christian ; and, like
him, he thirsts for revenge. But he is a monster, not a man.
When he has been misused by the Christians, and robbed of his
whole fortune, he becomes a criminal fit only for a fairy-tale or
for a madhouse : he uses his own daughter as an instrument for
his revenge, and then poisons her along with all the nuns in
whose cloister she has taken refuge. Shakespeare was attracted
by the idea of making a real man and a real Jew out of this
intolerable demon in a Jew's skin.

But this slight impulse would scarcely have set Shakespeare's
genius in motion had it found him engrossed in thoughts and
images of an incongruous nature. It took effect upon his mind
because it was at that moment preoccupied with the ideas of
acquisition, property, money -making, wealth. He did not, like
the Jew, who was in all countries legally incapable of acquiring
real estate, dream of gold and jewels ; but, like the genuine
country-born Englishman he was, he longed for land and houses,
meadows and gardens, money that yielded sound yearly interest,
and, finally, a corresponding advancement in rank and position.

We have seen with what indifference he treated his plays, how
little he thought of winning fame by their publication. All the
editions of them which appeared in his lifetime were issued with
out his co-operation, and no doubt against his will, since the sale
of the books did not bring him in a farthing, but, on the contrary,
diminished his profits by diminishing the attendance at the theatre
on which his livelihood depended. Furthermore, when >we see in
his Sonnets how discontented he was with his position as an actor,
and how humiliated he felt at the contempt in which the stage was
held, we cannot doubt that the calling into which he had drifted
in his needy youth was in his eyes simply and solely a means of
making money. It is true that actors like himself and Burbage
were, in certain circles, welcomed and respected as men who rose
above their calling; but they were admitted on sufferance, they
had not full rights of. citizenship, they were not " gentlemen."
There is extant a copy of verses by John Davies of Hereford,
beginning, " Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie" with a mar-

i8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

ginal note citing as examples " W. S., R. B." [William Shake
speare, Richard Burbage] ; but they are clearly looked upon as
exceptions : —

"And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud,
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode"

The calling of an actor, however, was a lucrative one. Most
of the leading players became well-to-do, and it seems clear that
this was one of the reasons why they were evilly regarded. In
The Return from Parnassus (1606), Kemp assures two Cam
bridge students who apply to him and Burbage for instruction
in acting, that there is no better calling in the world, from a
financial point of view, than that of the player. In a pamphlet
of the same year, Ratsey's Ghost, the executed thief, with a
satirical allusion to Shakespeare, advises a strolling player to
buy property in the country when he is tired of play-acting,
and by that means attain honour and dignity. In an epigram
entitled Theatrum Licentia (in Laquei Ridiculosi, 1616), we read
of the actor's calling :—

" For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gains."

The primary object of Shakespeare's aspirations was neither
renown as a poet nor popularity as an actor, but worldly pros
perity, and prosperity regarded specially as a means of social
advancement. He had taken greatly to heart his father's decline
in property and civic esteem ; from youth upwards he had been
passionately bent on restoring the sunken name and fame of his"
family. He had now, at the age of only thirty-two, amassed a
small capital, which he began to invest in the most advantageous
way for the end he had in view — that of elevating himself above
his calling.

His father had been afraid to cross the street test he should
be arrested for debt. He himself, as a youth, had been whipped
and consigned to the lock-up at the command of the lord of the
manor. The little town which had witnessed this disgrace
should also witness the rehabilitation. The townspeople, who
had heard of his equivocal fame as an actor and playwright,
should see him in the character of a respected householder and
landowner. At Stratford and elsewhere, those who had classed

SHAKESPEARE'S GROWING PROSPERITY 181

him with the proletariat should recognise in him a gentleman.
According to a tradition which Rowe reports on the authority of
Sir William Davenant, Lord Southampton is said to have laid
the foundation of Shakespeare's prosperity by a gift of ;£iooo.
Though Bacon received more than this from Essex, the magni
tude of the sum discredits the tradition — it is equivalent to some
thing like ,£5000 in modern money. No doubt the young Earl
gave the poet a present in acknowledgment of the dedication
of his two poems ; for the poets of that time did not live on
royalties, but on their dedications.1 But as the ordinary acknow
ledgment of a dedication was only £5, a gift of even £$o would
have been reckoned princely. What is practically certain is, that
Shakespeare was early in a position to become a shareholder in
the theatre ; and he evidently had a special talent for putting the
money he earned to profitable use. His firm determination to
work his way up in the world, combined with the Englishman's
inborn practicality, made him an excellent man of business ; and
he soon develops such a decided talent for finance as only two
other great national writers, probably, have ever possessed — to
wit, Holberg and Voltaire.

It is from the year 1596 onwards that we find evidences of his
growing prosperity. In this year his father, no doubt prompted
and supplied with means by Shakespeare himself, makes appli
cation to the Heralds' College for a coat-of-arms, the sketch of
which is preserved, dated October 1596. The conferring of a
coat-of-arms implied formal admittance into the ranks of "the
gentry." It was necessary before either father or son could
append the word "gentleman " (armiger) to his name, as we find
Shakespeare doing in legal documents after this date, and in his
will. But Shakespeare himself was not in a position to apply for
a coat-of-arms. That was out of the question — a player was far
too mean a person to come within the cognisance of heraldry.
He therefore adopted the shrewd device of furnishing his father
with means for making the application on his own behalf.

According to the ideas and regulations of the time, indeed, not
even Shakespeare senior had any real right to a coat-of-arms.
But the Garter-King-at-Arms for the time being, Sir William
Dethick, was an exceedingly compliant personage, probably not
inaccessible to pecuniary arguments. He was sharply criticised
in his own day, and indeed at last superseded, on account of the

1 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

facility with which he provided applicants with armorial bearings,
and we possess his defence in this very matter of the Shakespeare
coat-of-arms. All sorts of small falsehoods were alleged; for
instance, that John Shakespeare had, twenty years before, had
" his auncient cote of arms assigned to him," and that he was
then " Her Majestie's officer and baylefe," whereas his office had
in fact been merely municipal. Nevertheless, there must have
been some hitch in the negotiations, for in 1597 John Shake
speare is still described as yeoman, and not until 1599 did the
definite assignment of the coat-of-arms take place, along with the
permission (of which the son, however, did not avail himself) to
impale the Shakespeare arms with those of the Arden family.
The coat-of-arms is thus described : — " Gould on a bend sable
a speare of the first, the poynt steeled, proper, and for creast
or cognizance, a faulcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing
on a wreathe of his coullors, supporting a speare gould steled
as aforesaid." The motto runs (with a suspicion of irony), Non
sans droict. Yet to what insignia had not he the right !

In the spring of 1597, William Shakespeare bought the man
sion of New Place, the largest, and at one time the handsomest,
house in Stratford, which had now fallen somewhat out of repair,
and was therefore sold at the comparatively low price of £60.
He thoroughly restored the house, attached two gardens to it,
and soon extended his domain by new purchases of land, some
of it arable; for we see that during the corn -famine of 1598
(February), he appears on the register as owner of ten quarters
of corn and malt — that is to say, the third largest stock in the
town. The house stood opposite the Guild Chapel, the sound of
whose bells must have been among his earliest memories.

At the same time he gives his father money to revive the law
suit against John Lambert concerning the property of Asbies,
mortgaged nineteen years before — that lawsuit whose unfavourable
issue young Shakespeare had taken so much to heart, as we have
seen, that he introduced a gibe at the Lambert family into the
Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, now just completed.

A letter of January 24, 1597-8, written by a certain
Abraham Sturley in Stratford to his brother-in-law, Richard
Quiney, whose son afterwards married Shakespeare's youngest
daughter, shows that the poet already passed for a man of sub
stance, since one of his fellow-townsmen sends him a message

MONEY TRANSACTIONS 183

recommending him, instead of buying land at Shottery, to lease
part of the Stratford tithes. This would be advantageous both to
him and to the town, for the purchase of tithes was generally
a good investment, and the character of the purchaser was of
importance to the town, since a portion of the sum raised went
into the municipal treasury.1

It appears, however, that the purchase-money required was
still beyond Shakespeare's means, for not until seven years later,
in 1605, does he buy, for the considerable sum of ^"440, a moiety
of the lease of the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton,
and Welcombe. These tithes originally belonged to the Church,
but passed to the town in 1554, and from 1580 onwards were
farmed by private persons. As might have been expected, the
purchase of them involved Shakespeare in several lawsuits.

In a letter of 1598 or 1599, Adrian Quiney, of Stratford,
writes to his son Richard, who looked after the interests of his
fellow-townsmen in the capital: "Yff yow bargen with Wm. Sha.
or receve money therfor, brynge youre money homme that yow
maye." This Richard Quiney is the writer of the only extant
letter addressed to Shakespeare (probably never despatched), in
which he begs his "loveinge contreyman," in moving and pious
terms, for a loan of £30, promising security and interest. An
other letter from Sturley, dated November 4, 1598, mentions
the news " that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure
us monei, which I will like of as I shall heare when, and wheare,
and howe."

All these documents render it sufficiently apparent that Shake
speare did not share the loathing of interest which it was the
fashion of his day to affect, and which Antonio, in The Merchant
of Venice, flaunts in the face of Shylock. The taking of interest
was at that time regarded as forbidden to a Christian, but was
usual nevertheless ; and Shakespeare seems to. have charged the
current rate, namely, ten per cent.

During the following years he continued to acquire still more

1 Sturley writes: — "This is one speciall remembrance from ur fathers motion.
Itt semeth bi him that our countriman, Mr. Shaksper, is willinge to disburse some
monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shotterie or neare about us ; he thinketh
it a veri fitt patterne to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes. Bi the in-
struccions u can geve him theareof, and bi the frendes he can make therefore,«we
thinke it a faire marke for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to hitt. It obtained
would advance him in deede, and would do us muche good."

1 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

land. In 1602 he buys, at Stratford, arable land of the value of
no less than ^320, and pays £60 for a house and a piece of
ground. In 1610 he adds twenty acres to his property. In 1612,
in partnership with three others, he buys a house and garden in
London for ^140.

And Shakespeare was a strict man of business. We find him
proceeding by attorney against a poor devil named Philip Rogers
of Stratford, who in the years 1603-4 nad bought small quantities
of malt from him to the total value of £i, 195. iod., and who had
besides borrowed two shillings of him. Six shillings he had re
paid ; and Shakespeare now sets the law in motion to recover the
balance of £i, 155. iod. In 1608-9 he again brings an action
against a Stratford debtor. This time he gets a verdict for £6,
with £it 45. of costs; and as the debtor has absconded, Shake
speare proceeds against his security.

All these details show, in the first place, how closely Shake
speare kept up his connection with Stratford during his residence
in London. By the year 1599 he has succeeded in restoring the
credit of his family. He has made his poor, debt-burdened father
a gentleman with a coat-of-arms, and has himself become one of
the largest and richest landowners in his native place. He con
tinues steadily to increase his capital and his property at Strat
ford ; and it is obviously a mere corollary to this whole course of
action that he should, while still in the full vigour of manhood,
leave London, the theatre, and literature behind him, to return to
Stratford and pass his last years as a prosperous landowner.

We next observe Shakespeare's eagerness to rise above his
calling as a player. From 1599 onwards, he had the satisfaction
of being able to write himself down : Wm. Shakespeare of Strat-
ford-upon-Avon in the County of Warwick, gentleman. But it
must not, of course, be understood that he was now in a position
of equality with men of genuinely noble birth. So little was this
the case, that even in the "Epistle Dedicatorie" to the Folio of
1623, the two actors, his comrades, who issue the book, describe
him as the "servant" of the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery,
whose "dignity" they know to be "greater than to descend to
the reading of these trifles." They nevertheless inscribe the
" trifles" to the "incomparable paire of brethren " out of gratitude
for the great "indulgence" and "favour" which they had "used"
to the deceased poet.

MONEY TRANSACTIONS

185

The chief interest, however, of these old contracts and busi
ness letters lies in the insight they give us into a region of Shake
speare's soul, the existence of which, in their absence, we should
never have divined. We see that he may very well have been
thinking of himself when he makes Hamlet (v. i) say beside
Ophelia's open grave : " This fellow might be in 's time a great
buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his
double vouchers, his recoveries : is this the fine of his fines, and
the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine
dirt ? "

And — to return to our point of departure — we see that when
Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, makes the whole play
turn upon the different relations of different men to property,
position, and wealth, the problem was one with which he was at
the moment personally preoccupied.

XXI

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE — ITS SOURCES — ITS CHAR
ACTERS, ANTONIO, PORTIA, SHYLOCK— MOONLIGHT AND
MUSIC— SHAKESPEARE'S RELATION TO MUSIC

WE learn from Ben Jonson's Volpone (iv. i) that the traveller
who arrived in Venice first rented apartments, and then applied
to a Jew dealer for the furniture. If the traveller happened to be
a poet, he would thus have an opportunity, which he lacked in
England, of studying the Jewish character and manner of expres
sion. Shakespeare seems to have availed himself of it. The
names of the Jews and Jewesses who appear in The Merchant of
Venice he has taken from the Old Testament. We find in Genesis
(x. 24) the name Salah (Hebrew Schelach ; at that time appearing
as the name of a Maronite from Lebanon : Scialac) out of which
Shakespeare has made Shylock ; and in Genesis (xi. 29) there
occurs the name Iscah (she who looks out, who spies), spelt
"Jeska" in the English translations of 1549 and 1551, out of
which he made his Jessica, the girl whom Shylock accuses of a
fondness for " clambering up to casements " and " thrusting her
head into the public street " to see the masquers pass.

Shakespeare's audiences were familiar with several versions
of the story of the Jew who relentlessly demanded the pound of
flesh pledged to him by his Christian debtor, and was at last sent
empty and baffled away, and even forced to become a Christian.
The story has been found in Buddhist legends (along with the
adventure of the Three Caskets, here interwoven with it), and
many believe that it came to Europe from India. It may, how
ever, have migrated in just the opposite direction. Certain it is,
as one of Shakespeare's authorities points out, that the right to
take payment in the flesh of the insolvent debtor was admitted in
the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome. As a matter of fact, this
antique trait was quite international, and Shakespeare has only

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 187

transferred it from old and semi-barbarous times to the Venice of
his own day.

The story illustrates the transition from the unconditional en
forcement of strict law to the more modern principle of equity.
Thus it afforded an opening for Portia's eloquent contrast between
justice and mercy, which the public understood as an assertion of
the superiority of Christian ethics to the Jewish insistence on the
letter of the law.

One of the sources on which Shakespeare drew for the figure
of Shylock, and especially for his speeches in the trial scene, is
The Orator of Alexander Silvayn. The 95th Declamation of this
work bears the title : " Of a Jew who would for his debt have a
pound of the flesh of a Christian." Since an English translation
of Silvayn's book by Anthony Munday appeared in 1596, and
The Merchant of Venice is mentioned by Meres in 1598 as one
of Shakespeare's works, there can scarcely be any doubt that the
play was produced between these dates.

In The Orator both the Merchant and the Jew make speeches,
and the invective against the Jew is interesting in so far as it
gives a lively impression of the current accusations of the period
against the Israelitish race : —

" But it is no marvaile if this race be so obstinat and cruell against
us, for they doe it of set purpose to offend our God whom they have
crucified : and wherefore ? Because he was holie, as he is yet so re
puted of this worthy Turkish nation : but what shall I say ? Their own
bible is full of their rebellion against God, against their Priests, Judges,
and leaders. What did not the verie Patriarks themselves, from whom
they have their beginning ? They sold their brother. ..." &c.

Shakespeare's chief authority, however, for the whole play
was obviously the story of Gianetto, which occurs in the collec
tion entitled // Pecorone, by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, published
in Milan in 1558.

A young merchant named Gianetto comes with a richly laden
ship to a harbour near the castle of Belmonte, where dwells a
lovely young widow. She has many suitors, and is, indeed, pre
pared to surrender her hand and her fortune, but only on one
condition, which no one has hitherto succeeded in fulfilling, and
which is stated with mediaeval simplicity and directness. She chal
lenges the aspirant, at nightfall, to share her bed and make her

1 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

his own ; but at the same time she gives him a sleeping-draught
which plunges him in profound unconsciousness from the moment
his head touches the pillow, so that at daybreak he has forfeited
his ship and its cargo to the fair lady, and is sent on his Ivay,
despoiled and put to shame.

This misfortune happens to Gianetto ; but he is so deeply in
love that he returns to Venice and induces his kind foster-father,
Ansaldo, to fit out another ship for him. But his second visit to
Belmonte ends no less disastrously, and in order to enable him
to make a third attempt his foster-father is forced to borrow 10,000
ducats from a Jew, upon the conditions which we know. By
following the advice of a kindly -disposed waiting- woman, the
young man this time escapes the danger, becomes a happy bride
groom, and in his rapture forgets Ansaldo's obligation to the Jew.
He is not reminded of it until the very day when it falls due, and
then his wife insists that he shall instantly start for Venice, taking
with him a sum of 100,000 ducats. She herself presently follows,
dressed as an advocate, and appears in Venice as a young lawyer of
great reputation, from Bologna. The Jew rejects every proposition
for the deliverance of Ansaldo, even the 100,000 ducats. Then
the trial-scene proceeds, just as in Shakespeare ; Gianetto's young
wife delivers judgment, like Portia ; the Jew receives not a stiver,
and dares not shed a drop of Ansaldo's blood. When Gianetto,
in his gratitude, offers the young advocate the whole 100,000
ducats, she, as in the play, demands nothing but the ring which
Gianetto has received from his wife ; and the tale ends with the
same gay unravelling of the sportive complication, which gives
Shakespeare the matter for his fifth act.

Being unable to make use of the condition imposed by the
fair lady of Belmonte in // Pecorone, Shakespeare cast about for
another, and found it in the Gesta Romanorum, in the tale of the
three caskets, of gold, silver, and lead. Here it is a young girl
who makes the choice in order to win the Emperor's son. The
inscription on the golden casket promises that whoever chooses
that shall find what he deserves. The girl rejects this out of
humility, and rightly, since it proves to contain dead men's
bones. The inscription on the silver casket promises to whoever
chooses it what his nature craves. The girl rejects that also ; for,
as she says nai'vely, " My nature craves for fleshly delights."
Finally, the leaden casket promises that whoever chooses it shall

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 189

find what God has decreed for him ; and it proves to be full of
jewels.

In Shakespeare, Portia, in accordance with her father's will,
makes her suitors choose between the three caskets (here furnished
with other legends), of which the humblest contains her portrait.

It is not probable that Shakespeare made any use of an older
play, now lost, of which Stephen Gosson, in his School of Abuse
(1579), says that it represented "the greedinesse of worldly
chusers, and the bloody mindes of usurers."

The great value of The Merchant of Venice lies in the depth
and seriousness which Shakespeare has imparted to the vague
outlines of character presented by the old stories, and in the
ravishing moonlight melodies which bring the drama to a close.

In Antonio, the royal merchant, who, amid all his fortune and
splendour, is a victim to melancholy and spleen induced by fore
bodings of coming disaster, Shakespeare has certainly expressed
something of his own nature. Antonio's melancholy is closely
related to that which, in the years immediately following, we
shall find in Jaques in As You Like It, in the Duke in Twelfth
Nightt and in Hamlet. It forms a sort of mournful undercurrent
to the joy of life which at this period is still dominant in Shake
speare's soul. It leads, after a certain time, to the substitution of
dreaming and brooding heroes for those men of action and resolu
tion who, in the poet's brighter youth, had played the leading
parts in his dramas. For the rest, despite the princely elevation
of his nature, Antonio is by no means faultless. He has insulted
and baited Shylock in the most brutal fashion on account of his
faith and his blood. We realise the ferocity and violence of the
mediaeval prejudice against the Jews when we find a man of
Antonio's magnanimity so entirely a slave to it. And when, with
a little more show of justice, he parades his loathing and con
tempt for Shylock's money-dealings, he strangely (as it seems to
us) overlooks the fact that the Jews have been carefully excluded
from all other means of livelihood, and have been systematically
allowed to scrape together gold in order that their hoards may
always be at hand when circumstances render it convenient to
plunder them. Antonio's attitude towards Shylock cannot pos
sibly be Shakespeare's own. Shylock cannot understand Antonio,
and characterises him (iii. 3) in the words —

"This is the fool that lent out money gratis."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

But Shakespeare himself did not belong to this class of fools.
He has endowed Antonio with an ideality which he had neither
the resolution nor the desire to emulate. Such a man's conduct
towards Shylock explains the outcast's hatred and thirst for
revenge.

Shakespeare has lavished peculiar and loving care upon the
figure of Portia. Both in the circumstances in which she is
placed at the outset, and in the conjuncture to which Shylock's
bond gives rise, there is a touch of the fairy tale. In so far, the
two sides of the action harmonise well with each other. Now-a-
days, indeed, we are apt to find rather too much of the nursery
story in the preposterous will by which Portia is bound to marry
whoever divines the very simple answer to a riddle — to the effect
that a showy outside is not always to be trusted. The fable of
the three caskets pleased Shakespeare so much as a means of
expressing and enforcing his hatred of all empty show that he
ignored the grotesque improbability of the method of selecting a
bridegroom.

His thought seems to have been : Portia is not only nobly
born ; she is thoroughly genuine, and can therefore be won only
by a suitor who rejects the show for the substance. This is sug
gested in Bassanio's long speech before making his choice (iii. 2).
If there is anything that Shakespeare hated with a hatred some
what disproportionate to the triviality of the matter, a hatred
which finds expression in every stage of his career, it is the use
of rouge and false hair. Therefore he insists upon the fact that
Portia's beauty owes nothing to art ; with others the case is
different : —

" Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchas'd by the weight ;

So are those crisped snaky golden locks,

Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,

Upon supposed fairness, often known

To be the dowry of a second head,

The skull that bred them, in the sepulchre."

And he deduces the moral : —

" Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea."

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 191

Before the choice, Portia dares not openly avow her feelings
towards Bassanio, but does so nevertheless by means of a grace
ful and sportive slip of the tongue : —

" Beshrew your eyes,

They have o'erlook'd me, and divided me :
One half of me is yours, the other half yours,—
Mine own, I would say ; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours ! "

Bassanio answers by begging permission to make instant choice
between the caskets, since he lives upon the rack until his fate is
sealed ; whereupon Portia makes some remarks as to confessions
on the rack, which seem to allude to an occurrence of a few years
earlier, the barbarous execution of Elizabeth's Spanish doctor,
Don Roderigo Lopez, in 1594, after two ruffians had been racked
into making confessions which, no doubt falsely, incriminated
him. Portia says jestingly —

" Ay, but I fear, you speak upon the rack,
Where men, enforced, do speak anything ; "

and Bassanio answers —

" Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth/'

When the choice has been made and has fallen as she hoped
and desired, her attitude clearly expresses Shakespeare's ideal of
womanhood at this period of his life. It is not Juliet's passionate
self-abandonment, but the perfect surrender in tenderness of the
wise and delicate woman. For her own sake she does not wish
herself better than she is, but for him " she would be trebled
twenty times herself." She knows that she —

" Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd :
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn ; happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn ;
Happiest of all is, that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king."

In such humility does she love this weak spendthrift, whose sole

motive in seeking her out was originally that of clearing off the

' debts in which his frivolity had involved him. It thus happens,

192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

quaintly enough, that what her father thought to prevent by his
strange device, namely, that Portia should be won by a mercenary
suitor, is the very thing that happens — though it is true that her
personal charms throw his original motive into the background.

In spite of Portia's womanly self-surrender in love, there is
something independent, almost masculine, in her character. She
has the orphan heiress's habit and power of looking after herself,
directing others, and acting on her own responsibility without seek
ing advice or taking account of convention. The poet has borrowed
traits from the Italian novel in order to make her as prompt in
counsel as she is magnanimous. How much money does Antonio
owe ? she asks. Three thousand ducats ? Give the Jew six
thousand, and tear up the bond.

Shakespeare has equipped her with the bright and victorious
temperament with which he henceforth, for a certain time, endows
nearly all the heroines of his comedies. To another of these
ladies it is said, " Without question, you were born in a merrj*
hour." She answers, " No, sure, my lord, my mother cried ; ft -^
then there was a star danced, and under that I was born." U
these young women were born under a star that danced. F
the most subdued of them overflows with the rapture of exist

Portia's nature is health, its utterance joy. Radiant hi
ness is her element. She is descended from happiness, she
grown up in happiness, she is surrounded with all the means ai4
conditions of happiness, and she distributes happiness with botit
hands. She is noble to the heart's core. She is no swan born in
the duck-yard, but is in complete harmony with her surroundings
and with herself.

Shylock's riches consist of gold and jewels, easy to conceal
or to transport at a moment's notice, but also inviting to robbery
and rapine. Antonio's riches consist in cargoes tossed on many
seas, and exposed to danger from storms and from pirates. What
Portia owns she owns in security : estates and palaces inherited
from her fathers. There has needed, perhaps, as much as a cen
tury of direct preparation for the birth of such a creature. Her
noble forefathers for generations back must have led free am:'
stainless lives, favoured by destiny, prosperous and happy, i
order to amass the riches which are her pedestal, to gain the.;
respect which is her throne, to gather the household which forms
her retinue, to decorate the palace in which she rules as a princess,

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 193

and to endow her mind with the high faculty and culture befitting
a reigning sovereign. She is healthy, though she is delicate; she
is gay, although she is mentally a head taller than any of those
around her ; and she is young, although she is wise. She is of a
fresher stock than the nervous women of to-day. She is borne
aloft by an unfailing serenity of nature, which has never suffered
any rude disturbance. It manifests itself in her gaiety under
-ircumstances of painful uncertainty, in her self-control in over
whelming joy, and in her promptitude of action in an unforeseen
and threatening conjuncture. She has inexhaustible resources in
her soul, a profusion of ideas and inspirations, as great a super
abundance of wit as of wealth. In contradistinction to her lover,
she never makes a display of what is not her own to command.
Hence her equilibrium and queenly repose. If we do not realise
this radiant joy of life in the inmost chambers of her soul, we are
apt, even from her first scene with Nerissa, to think her jesting
Vced and her wit far-fetched, and are almost ready to make the
'ticism that only a poor intelligence plays tricks with speech
fantasticates in words. But when we have looked into the
'is of this well-spring of health, we understand how her
'hts gush forth, flashing and plashing, as freely and inevi-
- as the jets of a fountain rise into the air. She evokes and
| cards image after image, as one plucks and throws away flowers
a luxuriant garden. She delights to wreath and plait her words,
.s she wreaths and plaits her hair.

It harmonises with her whole nature when she says (i. 2) :
" The brain may devise laws for the blood ; but a hot temper
leaps o'er a cold decree : such a hare is madness, the youth, to
skip o'er the meshes of good counsel, the cripple." Such phrases
must be conceived as springing from a delight in laughter and
sport for the sport's sake; otherwise they would be stiff and
cumbrous. In the same way, such a sally as this (iv. i) —

" Your wife would give you little thanks for that,
If she were by to hear you make the offer,"

aust be taken as springing from a gleeful assurance of victory,

se it might seem to show callous indifference to Antonio's

pparently hopeless plight. There is an innate harmony in

Portia's soul ; but it is full-toned, complex, and woven of strongly

contrasted elements, so that it requires some imagination to re-

VOL. I. N

194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

present it to ourselves. There is something in the harmonious
subtlety of her physiognomy which reminds us of Lionardo's
female heads. Dignity and tenderness, the power to command
and to obey, acuteness such as thrives in courts, and simple
womanliness, an almost inflexible seriousness and an almost
mischievous gaiety, are here cunningly commingled and com
bined.

How Shakespeare himself would have us regard her may
be gathered from the enthusiasm with which he makes Jessica
describe her to her lover (iii. 5). When one young woman so
warmly eulogises another, we may safely assume that her merits
are unimpeachable. " It is very meet," she says,

" The Lord Bassanio live an upright life,
For, having such a blessing in his lady,
He finds the joys of heaven here on earth ;
And, if on earth he do not mean it, then
In reason he should never come to heaven.
Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match,
And on the wager lay two earthly women,
And Portia one, there must be something else
Pawn'd with the other, for the poor rude world
Hath not her fellow."

The central figure of the play, however, in the eyes of modern
readers and spectators, is of course Shy lock, though there can
be no doubt that he appeared to Shakespeare's contemporaries a
comic personage, and, since he makes his final exit before the last
act, by no means the protagonist. In the humaner view of a later
age, Shylock appears as a half-pathetic creation, a scapegoat,
a victim ; to the Elizabethan public, with his rapacity and his
miserliness, his usury and his eagerness to dig for another the
pit into which he himself falls, he seemed, not terrible, but ludi
crous. They did not even take him seriously enough to feel any
real uneasiness as to Antonio's fate, since they all knew before
hand the issue of the adventure. They laughed when he went
to Bassanio's feast " in hate, to feed upon the prodigal Christian ; "
they laughed when, in the scene with Tubal, he suffered himself
to be bandied about between exultation over Antonio's misfortunes
and rage over the prodigality of his runaway daughter ; and they
found him odious when he exclaimed, " I would my daughter
were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear!" He was,

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 195

simply as a Jew, a despised creature ; he belonged to the race
which had crucified God himself; and he was doubly despised
as an extortionate usurer. For the rest, the English public —
like the Norwegian public so lately as the first half of this century
— had no acquaintance with Jews except in books and on the
stage. From 1290 until the middle of the seventeenth century
the Jews were entirely excluded from England. Every prejudice
against them was free to flourish unchecked.

Did Shakespeare in a certain measure share these religious
prejudices, as he seems to have shared the patriotic prejudices
against the Maid of Orleans, if, indeed, he is responsible for the
part she plays in Henry VI. ? We may be sure that he was
very slightly affected by them, if at all. Had he made a more
undisguised effort to place himself at Shylock's standpoint, the
censorship, on the one hand, would have intervened, while, on
the other hand, the public would have been bewildered and
alienated. It is quite in the spirit of the age that Shylock should
suffer the punishment which befalls him. To pay him out for his
stiff-necked vengefulness, he is mulcted not only of the sum he
lent Antonio, but of half his fortune, and is finally, like Marlowe's
Jew of Malta, compelled to change his religion. The latter
detail gives something of a shock to the modern reader. But
the respect for personal conviction, when it conflicted with ortho
doxy, did not exist in Shakespeare's time. It was not very long
since Jews had been forced to choose between kissing the crucifix
and mounting the faggots; and in Strasburg, in 1349, nine hun
dred of them had in one day chosen the latter alternative. It is
strange to reflect, too, that just at the time when, on the English
stage, one Mediterranean Jew was poisoning his daughter, and
another whetting his knife to cut his debtor's flesh, thousands of
heroic and enthusiastic Hebrews in Spain and Portugal, who,
after the expulsion of the 300,000 at the beginning of the century,
had secretly remained faithful to Judaism, were suffering them
selves to be tortured, flayed, and burnt alive by the Inquisition,
rather than forswear the religion of their race.

It is the high-minded Antonio himself who proposes that
Shylock shall be forced to become a Christian. This is done
for his good ; for baptism opens to him the possibility of salva
tion after death ; and his Christian antagonists, who, by dint of
the most childish sophisms, have despoiled him of his goods and

196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

forced him to forswear his God, can still pose as representing the
Christian principle of mercy, in opposition to one who has taken
his stand upon the Jewish basis of formal law.

That Shakespeare himself, however, in nowise shared the
fanatical belief that a Jew was of necessity damned, or could be
saved by compulsory conversion, is rendered clear enough for the
modern reader in the scene between Launcelot and Jessica (iii. 5),
where Launcelot jestingly avers that Jessica is damned. There
is only one hope for her, and that is, that her father may not be
her father : —

"Jessica. That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed : so the sins of
my mother should be visited upon me.

" Launcelot. Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and
mother : thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis,
your mother. Well, you are gone both ways.

"Jes. I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a
Christian.

" Laun. Truly, the more to blame he : we were Christians enow
before ; e'en as many as could well live one by another. This making
of Christians will raise the price of hogs : if we grow all to be pork-
eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money."

And Jessica repeats Launcelot's saying to Lorenzo : —

" He tells me flatly, there is no mercy for me in heaven, because I
am a Jew's daughter : and he says, you are no good member of the
commonwealth, for, in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the
price of pork."

No believer would ever speak in this jesting tone of matters that
must seem to him so momentous.

It is none the less astounding how much right in wrong, how
much humanity in inhumanity, Shakespeare has succeeded in im
parting to Shylock. The spectator sees clearly that, with the
treatment he has suffered, he could not but become what he is.
Shakespeare has rejected the notion of the atheistically-minded
Marlowe, that the Jew hates Christianity and despises Christians
as fiercer money-grubbers than himself. With his calm humanity,
Shakespeare makes Shylock's hardness and cruelty result at once
from his passionate nature and his abnormal position ; so that, in
spite of everything, he has come to appear in the eyes of later
times as a sort of tragic symbol of the degradation and vengeful-
ness of an oppressed race.

y

"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" 197

There is not in all Shakespeare a greater example of trenchant
and incontrovertible eloquence than Shylock's famous speech
(iii. i):-

" I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a
Christian is ? If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we
not laugh ? if you poison us, do we not die ? and if you wrong us, shall
we not revenge ? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in
that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility ? revenge. If
a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian
example? why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute;
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

But what is most surprising, doubtless, is the instinct of genius
with which Shakespeare has seized upon and reproduced racial
characteristics, and emphasised what is peculiarly Jewish in Shy-
lock's culture. While Marlowe, according to his custom, made
his Barabas revel in mythological similes, Shakespeare indicates
that Shylock's culture is founded entirely upon the Old Testa
ment, and makes commerce his only point of contact with the
civilisation of later times. All his parallels are drawn from the
Patriarchs and the Prophets. With what unction he speaks when
he justifies himself by the example of Jacob ! His own race is
always " our sacred nation," and he feels that " the curse has
never fallen upon it " until his daughter fled with his treasures.
Jewish, too, is Shylock's respect for, and obstinate insistence on,
the letter of the law, his reliance upon statutory rights, which are,
indeed, the only rights society allows him, and the partly instinc
tive, partly defiant restriction of his moral ideas to the principle
of retribution. He is no wild animal; he is no heathen who
simply gives the rein to his natural instincts ; his hatred is not
ungoverned ; he restrains it within its legal rights, like a tiger in
its cage. He is entirely lacking, indeed, in the freedom and
serenity, the easy-going, light-hearted carelessness which charac
terises a ruling caste in its virtues and its vices, in its charities
as in its prodigalities ; but he has not a single twinge of conscience
about anything that he does ; his actions are in perfect harmony
with his ideals.

Sundered from the regions, the social forms, the language, in

198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

which his spirit is at home, he has yet retained his Oriental
character. Passion is the kernel of his nature. It is his passion
that has enriched him ; he is passionate in action, in calculation,
in sensation, in hatred, in revenge, in everything. His vengeful-
ness is many times greater than his rapacity. Avaricious though
he be, money is nothing to him in comparison with revenge. It is
not until he is exasperated by his daughter's robbery and flight
that he takes such hard measures against Antonio, and refuses to
accept three times the amount of the loan. His conception of
honour may be unchivalrous enough, but, such as it is, his honour
is not to be bought for money. His hatred of Antonio is far more
intense than his love for his jewels; and it is this passionate
hatred, not avarice, that makes him the monster he becomes.

From this Hebrew passionateness, which can be traced even
in details of diction, arises, among other things, his loathing of
sloth and idleness. To realise how essentially Jewish is this
trait we need only refer to the so-called Proverbs of Solomon.
Shylock dismisses Launcelot with the words, " Drones hive not
with me." Oriental, rather than specially Jewish, are the images
in which he gives his passion utterance, approaching, as they so
often do, to the parable form. (See, for example, his appeal to
Jacob's cunning, or the speech in vindication of his claim, which
begins, " You have among you many a purchased slave.") Spe
cially Jewish, on the other hand, is the way in which this ardent
passion throughout employs its images and parables in the service
of a curiously sober rationalism, so that a sharp and biting logic,
which retorts every accusation with interest, is always the con
trolling force. This sober logic, moreover, never lacks dramatic
impetus. Shylock's course of thought perpetually takes the form
of question and answer, a subordinate but characteristic trait
which appears in the style of the Old Testament, and reappears
to this day in representations of primitive Jews. One can feel
through his words that there is a chanting quality in his voice ;
his movements are rapid, his gestures large. Externally and
internally, to the inmost fibre of his being, he is a type of his race
in its degradation.

Shylock disappears with the end of the fourth act in order that
no discord may mar the harmony of the concluding scenes. By
means of his fifth act, Shakespeare dissipates any preponderance
of pain and gloom in the general impression of the play.

MOONLIGHT AND MUSIC 199

This act is a moonlit landscape thrilled with music. It is
altogether given over to music and moonshine. It is an image of
Shakespeare's soul at that point of time. Everything is here re
conciled, assuaged, silvered over, and borne aloft upon the wings
of music.

The speeches melt into each other like voices in part-singing: —

" Lorenzo. The moon shines bright. — In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night,
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.

Jessica. In such a night

Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew ;

Lor. In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand ; "

and so on for four more speeches — the very poetry of moonlight
arranged in antiphonies.

The conclusion of The Merchant of Venice brings us to the
threshold of a term in Shakespeare's life instinct with high-
pitched gaiety and gladness. In this, his brightest period, he
fervently celebrates strength and wisdom in man, intellect and wit
in woman ; and these most brilliant years of his life are also the
most musical. His poetry, his whole existence, seem now to be
given over to music, to harmony.

He had been early familiar with the art of music, and must
have heard much music in his youth.1 Even in his earliest plays,
such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find a considerable
insight into musical technique, as in the conversation between
Julia and Lucetta (i. 2). He must often have heard the Queen's
choir, and the choirs maintained by noble lords and ladies, like
that which Portia has in her palace. An$ he no doubt heard
much music performed in private. The English were in his day,
what they have never been since, a musical people. It was the
Puritans who cast out music from the daily life of England. The
spinet was the favourite instrument of the time. Spinets stood
in the barbers' shops, for the use of customers waiting their turn.

1 Forster : Shakespeare und die Tonkunst> Shakespeare - Jahrbuch, ii. 155; Karl
Elze: William Shakespeare^ p. 474 ; Henrik SchUck : William Shakespere^ p. 313.

200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Elizabeth herself played on the spinet and the lute. In his
Sonnet cxxviii., addressed to the lady whom he caressingly
calls " my music/' Shakespeare has described himself as standing
beside his mistress's spinet and envying the keys which could
kiss her fingers. In all probability he was personally acquainted
with John Dowland, the chief English musician of the time,
although the poem in which he is named, published as Shake
speare's in The Passionate Pilgrim, is not by him, but by Richard
Barnfield.

In The Taming of the Shrew (iii. i), written just before The
Merchant of Venice, he had utilised his knowledge of singing and
lute-playing in a scene of gay comedy. " The cause why music
was ordained," says Lucentio —

" Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies, or his usual pain ? "

Its influence upon mental disease was also known to Shakespeare,
and noted both in King Lear and in The Tempest. But here, in
The Merchant of Venice, where music is wedded to moonlight, his
praise of it takes a higher flight :—

" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank !
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears : soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony."

And Shakespeare, who never mentions church music, which seems
to have had no message for his soul, here makes the usually
unimpassioned Lorenzo launch out ' into genuine Renaissance
rhapsodies upon the music of the spheres : —

" Sit, Jessica : look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There 's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins ;
Such harmony is in immortal souls ;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Sphere-harmony and soul-harmony, not bell-ringing or psalm-
singing, are for him the highest music.

Shakespeare's love of music, so incomparably expressed in

RELATION TO MUSIC 201

the last scenes of The Merchant of Venice, appears at other points
in the play. Thus Portia says, when Bassanio is about to make
his choice between the caskets (iii. 2) : —

" Let music sound, while he doth make his choice ;
Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music.

He may win ;

And what is music then ? then music is
Even as the flourish when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch."

It seems as though Shakespeare, in this play, had set himself
to reveal for the first time how deeply his whole nature was
penetrated with musical feeling. He places in the mouth of the
frivolous Jessica these profound words, " I am never merry when
I hear sweet music." And he makes Lorenzo answer, " The
reason is, your spirits are attentive." The note of the trumpet,
he says, will calm a wanton herd of " unhandled colts ; " and
Orpheus, as poets feign, drew trees and stones and floods to
follow him : —

" Since nought so stockist), hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. — Mark the music."

This must not, of course, be taken too literally. But note the
characters whom Shakespeare makes specially unmusical : in this
play, Shylock, who loathes "the vile squeaking of the wry-necked
fife ; " then Hotspur, the hero-barbarian ; Benedick, the would-
be woman-hater; Cassius, the fanatic politician; Othello, the
half-civilised African ; and finally creatures like Caliban, who are
nevertheless enthralled by music as though by a wizard's spell.

On the other hand, all his more delicate creations are musical.
In the First Part of Henry IV. (iii. i) we have Mortimer and his
Welsh wife, who do not understand each other's speech : —

202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

" But I will never be a truant, love,
Till I have learn'd thy language ; for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's Sower,
With ravishing division, to her lute."

Musical, too, are the pathetic heroines, such as Ophelia and
Desdemona, and characters like Jaques in As You Like It, and
the Duke and Viola in Twelfth Night. The last-named comedy,
indeed, is entirely interpenetrated with music. The keynote of
musical passion is struck in the opening speech : —

" If music be the food of love, play on ;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die. —
That strain again ! it had a dying fall :
O ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

Here, too, Shakespeare's love of the folk-song finds expression,
when he makes the Duke say (ii. 4) : —

" Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song, we heard last night ;
Methought, it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs, and recollected terms,
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times :
Come ; but one verse."

No less sensitive and devoted to music than the Duke in
Twelfth Night or Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice must
their creator himself have been in the short and happy interval
in which, as yet unmastered by the melancholy latent in his as
in all deep natures, he felt his talents strengthening and un
folding, his life every day growing fuller and more significant,
his inmost soul quickening with creative impulse and instinct
with harmony. The rich concords which bring The Merchant
of Venice to a close symbolise, as it were, the feeling of inward
wealth and equipoise to which he had now attained.

XXII

"EDWARD III." AND "ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM"— SHAKE
SPEARE'S DICTION— THE FIRST PART OF "HENRY IV."
—FIRST INTRODUCTION OF HIS OWN EXPERIENCES OF
LIFE IN THE HISTORIC DRAMA — WHY THE SUBJECT
APPEALED TO HIM— TAVERN LIFE— SHAKESPEARE'S
CIRCLE— SIR JOHN FALSTAFF—FALSTAFF AND THE
GRACIOSO OF THE SPANISH DRAMA— RABELAIS AND
SHAKESPEARE— PANURGE AND FALSTAFF

THERE is extant a historical play, dating from 1596, entitled
The Raigne of King Edward third. As it hath bin sundrie
times plaied about the Citie of London, which several English
students and critics, among them Halliwell-Phillips, have attri
buted in part to Shakespeare, arguing that the better scenes, at
least, must have been carefully retouched by him. Although
the drama, as a whole, is not much more Shakespearean in style
than many other Elizabethan plays, and although Swinburne, the
highest of all English authorities, has declared the piece to be
the work of an imitator of Marlowe, yet there is a good deal to
be said in favour of the hypothesis that Shakespeare had some
hand in Edward III. His touch may be recognised in several
passages ; and especially noteworthy are the following lines from
a speech of Warwick's : —

" A spacious field of reasons could I urge
Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame :
That poison shows worst in a golden cup ;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash ;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,
And every glory that inclines to sin,
The shame is treble by the opposite."

The italicised verse reappears as the last line of Shakespeare's

Sonnet xciv. ; and as this Sonnet seems to refer (as we shall

203

204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

afterwards 'see) to circumstances in Shakespeare's life which did
not arise until 1600, we cannot suppose that it was one of those
written at an earlier date and circulated in manuscript. The
probability is that Shakespeare simply reclaimed this line from a
speech contributed by him to another man's play.

It is natural that a foreign student should shrink from oppos
ing his judgment to that of English critics, where English diction
and style are in question. Nevertheless he is sometimes driven
into dissent with regard to the many Elizabethan plays which
now one critic, and now another, has attributed wholly or in
part to Shakespeare. Take, for instance, A rden of Fever sham,
certainly one of the most admirable plays of that rich period,
whose merit impresses one even when one reads it for the first
time in uncritical youth. Swinburne writes of it (Study of
Shakespeare, p. 141): —

" I cannot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all
external or traditional testimony,"" that it seems to me not pardonable
merely nor permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down
this poem, a young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work
of no man's youthful hand but Shakespeare's."

However small my ^authority in comparison with Swinburne's
upon such a question as this, I find it impossible to share his
view. Highly as I esteem Arden of Fever sham, I cannot believe
that Shakespeare wrote a single line of it. It was not like him to
choose such a subject, and still less to treat it in such a fashion.
The play is a domestic tragedy, in which a wife, after repeated
attempts, murders her kind and forbearing husband, in order
freely to indulge her passion for a worthless paramour. It is
a dramatisation of an actual case, the facts of which are closely
followed, but at the same time animated with great psychological
insight. That Shakespeare had a distaste for such subjects is
proved by his consistent avoidance of them, except in this prob
lematical instance; whereas if he had once succeeded so well
with such a theme, he would surely have repeated the experiment.
The chief point is, however, that only in a few places, in the
soliloquies, do we find the peculiar note of Shakespeare's style —
that wealth of imagination, that luxuriant lyrism, which plays
like sunlight over his speeches. In Arden of Feversham the
style is a uniform drab.

SHAKESPEARE'S DICTION 205

Shakespeare's great characteristic is precisely the resilience
which he gives to every word and to every speech. We take one
step on earth, and at the next we are soaring in air. His verse
always tends towards a rich and stately melody, is never flat or
commonplace. In the English historical plays, his diction some
times verges upon the style of the ballad or romance. There is
a continual undercurrent of emotion, of enthusiasm, or of pure
fantasy, which carries us away with it. We are always far remote
from the humdrum monotony of everyday speech. For everyday
speech is devoid of fantasy, and all Shakespeare's characters,
with the exception of those whose humour lies in their stupidity,
have a highly-coloured imagination.

We could find no better proof of this than the diction of the
great work which he undertakes immediately after The Merchant
of Venice — the First Part of Henry I V.

Harry Percy in this play is placed in opposition to the mag
niloquent, visionary, thaumaturgic Glendower, as the man of
sober intelligence, who keeps to the common earth, and believes
only in what his senses aver and his reason accepts. But
there is nevertheless a spring within him which need only be
touched in order to send him soaring into almost dithyrambic
poetry. The King (i. 3) has called Mortimer a traitor ; where
upon Percy protests that it was no sham warfare that Mortimer
waged against Glendower : —

" To prove that true,

Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,
Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took,
When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank,
In single opposition, hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower.
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood,
Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants."

Thus Homer sings of the Scamander.

Worcester broaches to Percy an enterprise

" As full of peril and adventurous spirit,

206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

As to o'er-walk a current, roaring loud,
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear ; "

whereon Percy bursts forth : —

" Send danger from the east unto the west,
So honour cross it from the north to south,
And let them grapple : — O ! the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion than to start a hare."

Northumberland then says of him that " Imagination of some
great exploit Drives him beyond the bounds of patience," and
Percy answers : —

" By Heaven, methinks, it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks."

What a profusion of imagery is placed in the mouth of this
despiser of rhetoric and music! From the comparatively weak
metaphor of the speaking wounds up to actual myth-making! The
river, affrighted by the bloody looks of the combatants, hides its
crisp head in the reeds — a naiad fantasy in classic style. Danger,
rushing from east to west, hurtles against Honour, crossing it
from north to south — two northern Valkyries in full career. The
wreath of honour is hung on the crescent moon — a metaphor from
the tilting-yard, expressed in terms of fairy romance. Drowned
Honour is to be plucked up by the locks from the bottom of the
deep — having now become, by a daring personification, a damsel
who has fallen into the sea and must be rescued. And all this in
three short speeches !

Where this irrepressible vivacity of fancy is lacking, as in
Arden of Feversham, Shakespeare's sign-manual is lacking along
with it. Even when his style appears sober and measured, it is
saturated with what may be called latent fantasy (as we speak of
latent electricity), which at the smallest opportunity bursts its
bounds, explodes, flashes forth before our eyes like the figures in
a pyrotechnic set-piece, and fills our ears as with the music of a
rushing, leaping waterfall.1

1 It was this characteristic of Shakespeare's style, at the period we are now con
sidering, that so deeply influenced Goethe and the contemporaries of his youth, Lenz
and Klinger (and, in Denmark, Hauch and Bredahl), determining the diction of their
%tragic dramas. Bjornson shows traces of the same influence in his Maria Stuart and
Sigurd Slembe.

"HENRY IV." 207

In 1598 appeared a Quarto with the following title: The
History of Henrie the Fovrth ; With the battell at Shrew sburie,
betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henriv
Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir
John Falstaffe. At London. Printed by P. S. for Andrew
Wise, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the
Angell. 1598. This was the First Part of Shakespeare's
Henry IV., which must have been written in 1597 — the play
in which Shakespeare first attains his great and overwhelming
individuality. At the age of thirty-three, he stands for the first
time at the summit of his artistic greatness. In wealth of charac
ter, of wit, of genius, this play has never been surpassed. Its
dramatic structure is somewhat loose, though closer knit and
technically stronger than that of the Second Part. But, as a
poetical creation, it is one of the great masterpieces of the world's
literature, at once heroic and burlesque, thrilling and side-split
ting. And these contrasted elements are not, as in Victor Hugo's
dramas, brought into hard-and-fast rhetorical antithesis, but move
and mingle with all the freedom of life.

When it was written, the sixteenth century, that great period
in the history of the human spirit, was drawing to its close ; but
no one had then conceived the cowardly idea of making the end
of a century a sort of symbol of decadence in energy and vitality.
Never had the waves of healthy self-confidence and productive
power run higher in the English people or in Shakespeare's own
mind. Henry IV., and its sequel Henry V., are written through
out in a major key which we have not hitherto heard in Shake
speare, and which we shall not hear again.

Shakespeare finds the matter for these plays in Holinshed's
Chronicle, and in an old, quite puerile play, The Famous Victories
of Henry the fifth, conteining the Honorable Battell of A gin-court,
in which the young Prince is represented as frequenting the com
pany of roisterers and highway robbers. It was this, no doubt,
that suggested to him the novel and daring idea of transferring
direct to the stage, in historical guise, a series of scenes from the
everyday life of the streets and taverns around him, and blending
them with the dramatised chronicle of the Prince whom he re
garded as the national hero of England. To this blending we
owe the matchless freshness of the whole picture.

For the rest, Shakespeare found scarcely anything in the

208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

foolish old play, acted between 1580 and 1588, which could in
any way serve his purpose. He took from it only the anecdote
of the box on the ear given by the Prince of Wales to the -Lord
Chief-Justice, and a few names — the tavern in Eastcheap, Gads-
hill, Ned, and the name, not the character, of Sir John Oldcastle,
as Falstaff was originally called.

Shakespeare felt himself attracted to the hero, the young
Prince, by some of the most deep-rooted sympathies of his
nature. We have seen how vividly and persistently the con
trast between appearance and reality preoccupied him ; we saw
it last in The Merchant of Venice. In proportion as he was
irritated and repelled by people who try to pass for more than
they are, by creatures of affectation and show, even by women
who resort to artificial colours and false hair in quest of a beauty
not their own, so his heart beat warmly for any one who had ap
pearances against him, and concealed great qualities behind an
unassuming and misinterpreted exterior. His whole life, indeed,
was just such a paradox — his soul was replete with the greatest
treasures, with rich humanity and inexhaustible genius, while
externally he was little better than a light-minded mountebank,
touting, with quips and quiddities, for the ha'pence of the mob.
Now and then, as his Sonnets show, the pressure of this out
ward prejudice so weighed upon him that he came near to being
ashamed of his position in life, and of the tinsel world in which
his days were passed; and then he felt with double force the
inward need to assure himself how great may be the gulf between
the apparent and the real worth of human character.

Moreover, this view of his material gave him an occasion,
before tuning the heroic string of his lyre, to put in a word for the
right of high-spirited youth to have its fling, and indirectly to pro
test against the hasty judgments of narrow-minded moralists and
Puritans. He would here show that great ambitions and heroic
energy could pass unscathed through the dangers even of exceed
ingly questionable diversions. This Prince of Wales was "merry
England " and " martial England " in one and the same person.

For the young noblemen among the audience, again, nothing
could be more attractive than to see this great King, in his youth,
haunting such resorts as they themselves frequented, and yet, as
the best of them also tried to do, preserving the consciousness of
his high dignity, the hope of a great future, and the determination

SHAKESPEARE'S TAVERN LIFE 209

to achieve renown, even while associating with Falstaff and
Bardolph, Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet.

These young English aristocrats, who in Shakespeare appear
under the names of Mercutio and Benedick, Gratiano and Lorenzo,
made pleasure their pursuit through the whole of the London day.
Dressed in silk or ash-coloured velvet, and with gold lace on his
cloak, the young man of fashion began by riding to St. Paul's and
promenading half-a-dozen times up and down its middle aisle.
He then " repaired to the Exchange, and talked pretty Euphuisms
to the citizens' daughters," or looked in at the bookseller's to in
spect the latest play-book or pamphlet against tobacco. Next he
rode to the ordinary where he had appointed to meet his friends
and dine. At dinner he discussed Drake's expedition to Portugal,
or Essex's exploits at Cadiz, or told how he had yesterday broken
a lance with Raleigh himself at the Tilt-yard. He would mingle
snatches of Italian and Spanish with his talk, and let himself
be persuaded, after dinner, to recite a sonnet of his own composi
tion. At three he betook himself to the theatre, saw Burbage as
Richard III., and applauded Kemp in his new jig; after which he
would spend an hour at the bear-garden. Then to the barber's, to
have his hair and beard trimmed, in preparation for the carouse of
the evening at whichever tavern he and his friends had selected —
the " Mitre," the " Falcon," the '< Apollo," the "Boar's Head," the
"Devil," or (most famous of all) the "Mermaid," where the
literary club, the Syren, founded by none other than Sir Walter
Raleigh himself, held its meetings.1 In these places the young
aristocrat rubbed shoulders with the leading players, such as
Burbage and Kemp, and with the best-known men of letters,
such as John Lyly, George Chapman, John Florio, Michael
Drayton, Samuel Daniel, John Marston, Thomas Nash, Ben
Jonson, William Shakespeare.

Thornbury has aptly remarked that the characteristic of the
Elizabethan age was its sociability. People were always meeting
at St. Paul's, the theatre, or the tavern. Family intercourse, on
the other hand, was almost unknown; women, as in ancient
Greece, played no prominent part in society. The men gathered
at the tavern club to drink, talk, and enjoy themselves. The
festive bowl circulated freely, even more so than in Denmark,
which nevertheless passed for the toper's paradise. (Compare

1 Thornbury : Shakspercs England \ i. 104, et seq.
VOL. I. O

210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the utterances on this subject in Hamlet, i. 4, and Othello, ii. 3.)
The taverns were, moreover, favourite places for the rendezvous
of court gallants with citizens' wives ; fast young men would bring
their mistresses with them, and here, after supper, gambling went
on merrily.

At the taverns, writers and poets met in good fellowship, and
carried on wordy wars, battles of wit, sparkling with mirth and
fantasy. They were like tennis-rallies of words, in which the
great thing was to tire out your adversary ; they were skirmishes
in which the combatants poured into each other whole volleys of
conceits. Beaumont has celebrated them in some verses to Ben
Jonson, who, both as a great drinker and as an entertaining magis-
ter bibendi, was much admired and feted : —

" What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtile flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest
And had resolv'd to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."

In his comedy Every Man out of His Humour (v. 4), Ben
Jonson has introduced either himself or Marston, under the name
of Carlo Buffone, waiting alone for his friends at the " Mitre," and
has placed these words in Carlo's mouth when the waiter, George,
has brought him the wine he had ordered :—

" Carlo (drinks}. Ay, marry, sir, here's purity ; O George — I could
bite off his nose for this now, sweet rogue, he has drawn nectar, the
very soul of the grape ! I'll wash my temples with some on't presently,
and drink some half a score draughts ; 'twill heat the brain, kindle my
imagination, I shall talk nothing but crackers and fireworks to-night.
So, sir ! please you to be here, sir, and I here : so. (Sets the tivo cups
asunder •, drinks with the one, and pledges with the other ; speaking for each
of the cups, and drinking alternately.}"

Well known and often quoted is the passage in Fuller's
Worthies as to the many wit-combats between Shakespeare and
the learned Ben : —

" Which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion and an English
man of War : Waster Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in

SHAKESPEARE'S CIRCLE 211

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."

Although Fuller was not himself present at these symposia,
yet his account of them bears the stamp of complete authenticity.

Among the members of the circle which Shakespeare in his
youth frequented, there must, of course, have been types of every
kind, from the genius down to the grotesque ; and there were
some, no doubt, in whom the genius and the grotesque, the wit
and the butt, must have quaintly intermingled. As every
great household had at that time its jester, so every convivial
circle had its clown or buffoon. The jester was the terror of the
kitchen — for he would steal a pudding the moment the cook's back
was turned — and the delight of the dinner-table, where he would
mimic voices, crack jokes> play pranks, and dissipate the spleen
of the noble company. The comic man of the tavern circle
was both witty himself and the cause of wit in others. He
was always the butt of the others' merriment, yet he always
held his own in the contest, and ended by getting the best of
his tormentors.

To Shakespeare's circle Chettle must doubtless have belonged,
that Chettle who in bygone days had published Greene's Groats-
worth of Wit, and afterwards made amends to Shakespeare for
Greene's coarse attack upon him* In Dekker's tract, A Knights
Conjuring, dating from 1607, he figures among the poets in
Elysium, where he is introduced in the following terms : — " In
comes Chettle sweating and blowing, by reason of his fatnes ; to
welcome whom, because hee was of olde acquaintance, all rose vp,
and fell presentlie on their knees, to drinck a health to all the
louers of Hellicon." Elze has conjectured, possibly with justice,
that in this puffing and sweating old tun of flesh, who is so
whimsically greeted with mock reverence by the whole gay com
pany, we have the Very model from whom Shakespeare drew his
demigod, the immortal Sir John Falstaff, beyond comparison the
jayest, most concrete, and most entertaining figure in European
>medy.

In his close-woven and unflagging mirthfulness, in the inex-
laustible wealth of drollery concentrated in his person, FalstafT
surpasses all that antiquity and the Middle Ages have produced in

212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the way of comic character, and all that the stage of later times
can show.

There is in him something of the old Greek Silenus, swag-
bellied and infinitely jovial, and something of the Vidushakas of
the old Indian drama, half court-fool, half friend and comrade to
the hero. He unites in himself the two comic types of the old
Roman comedy, Artotrogus and Pyrgopolinices, the parasite and
the boastful soldier. Like the Roman scurry he leaves his patron
to pay the reckoning, and in return entertains him with his jests,
and, like the Miles Gloriosus, he is a braggart above all braggarts,
a liar above all liars. Yet he is in his single person richer and
more entertaining than all the ancient SUenuses and court-fools
and braggarts and parasites put together.

In the century after he came into existence, Spain and France
each developed its own theatre. In France there is only one
quaint and amusing person, Moron in Moliere's La Princesse
d'Elide, who bears some faint resemblance to Falstaff. In Spain,
where the great and delightful character of Sancho Panza affords
the starting-point for the whole series of comic figures in the
works of Calderon, the Gracioso stands in perpetual contrast to
the hero, and here and there reminds us for a moment of Falstaff,
but always only as an abstraction of one side or another of his
nature, or because of some external similarity of situation. In
La Dama Ditende he is a drunkard and coward ; in La Gran
Cenobia he boasts fantastically, and, like Falstaff, becomes en
tangled in his lies. In La Puente de Mantible he actually becomes
(as it appears from the scenes with the Chief Justice and Colevile
that Falstaff also was) renowned and dreaded for his military
valour ; yet he is, like Falstaff, extremely ill at ease when there is
any fighting to be done, often creeping into cover, hiding himself
behind a bush, or climbing a tree. In La Hija del Ayre and El
Principe Constante he uses precisely the device adopted by Fal
staff and certain lower animals, of lying down and shamming
death. Hernando in Los Empenos de un Acaso (like Moliere's
Moron) expresses sentiments very similar to those of Falstaff in
his celebrated discourse upon honour. Falstaff s airs of protec
tion, his bland fatherliness, we find in Fabio in El Secreto a Voces.
Thus single characteristics, detached sides of FalstafFs character,
have to do duty as complete personages. Calderon as a rule looks
with fatherly benevolence upon his Gracioso. Yet he sometimes

RABELAIS. AND SHAKESPEARE 213

loses patience, as it were, with his buffoon's epicurean, unchris
tian, and unchivalrous view of life. In La Vida es Suefio, for
instance, a cannon-ball kills poor Clarin, who has crept behind a
bush during the battle ; the moral being that the coward does not
escape danger any more than the brave man. Calderon bestows
on him a very solemn funeral speech, almost as moral as King
Henry's parting words to Falstaff.

It is certain, of course, that neither Calderon nor Moliere knew
anything of Shakespeare or of Falstaff; and Shakespeare, for his
part, was equally uninfluenced by any of his predecessors on the
comic stage, when he conceived his fat knight.

Nevertheless there is among Shakespeare's predecessors a
great writer, one of the greatest, with whom we cannot but com
pare him ; to wit, Rabelais, the master spirit of the early Renais
sance in France. He is, moreover, one of the few great writers
with whom Shakespeare is known to have been acquainted. He
alludes to him in As You Like It (iii. 2), where Celia says, when
Rosalind asks her a dozen questions and bids her answer in one
word : " You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first : 'tis a
word too great for any mouth of this age's size."

If we compare Falstaff with Panurge, we see that Rabelais
stands to Shakespeare in the relation of a Titan to an Olympian
god. Rabelais is gigantic, disproportioned, potent, but formless.
Shakespeare is smaller and less excessive, poorer in ideas, though
richer in fancies, and moulded with the utmost firmness of outline.

Rabelais died at the age of seventy, ten years before Shake
speare was born ; there is between them all the difference be
tween the morning and the noon of the Renaissance. Rabelais
is a poet, philosopher, polemist, reformer, "even to the very fire
"exclusively," but always threatened with the stake. Shakespeare's
coarseness compared with Rabelais's is as a manure-bed com
pared with the Cloaca Maxima. Burlesque uncleanness pours in
floods from the Frenchman's pen.

His Panurge is larger than Falstaff, as Utgard-Loki is larger
than Asa-Loki. Panurge, like Falstaff, is loquacious, witty,
crafty, and utterly unscrupulous, a humorist who stops the
mouths of all around him by unblushing effrontery. In war,
Panurge is no more of a hero than Falstaff, but, like Falstaff, he
stabs the foemen who have already fallen. He is superstitious,
yet his buffoonery holds nothing sacred, and he steals from the

214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

church-plate. He is thoroughly selfish, sensual, and slothful,
shameless, revengeful, and light-fingered, and as time goes on
becomes ever a greater poltroon and braggart.

Pantagruel is the noble knight, a king's son, like Prince Henry.
Like the Prince, he has one foible : he cannot resist the attractions
of low company. When Panurge is witty, Pantagruel cannot deny
himself the pleasure of laughing at his side-splitting drolleries.

But Panurge, unlike Falstaff, is a satire on the largest
scale. In representing him as a notable economist or master
of finance, who calls borrowing credit-creating, and has 63
methods of raising money and 214 methods of spending
it, Rabelais made him an abstract and brief chronicle of the
French court of his day. In giving him a yearly revenue from
his barony of " 6,789, 1 06,789 royaulx en deniers certain," to say
nothing of the fluctuating revenue of the locusts and periwinkles,
"montant bon an mal an de 2,435,768 a 2,435,769 moutons a la
grande laine," Rabelais was aiming his satire direct at the un
blushing extortion which was at that time the glory and delight
of the French feudal nobility.

Shakespeare does not venture so far in the direction of satire.
He is only a poet, and as a poet stands simply on the defensive.
The only power he can be said to attack is Puritanism (Twelfth
Night, Measure for Measure, &c.), and that only in self-defence.
His attacks, too, are exceedingly mild in comparison with those
of the cavalier poets before the victory of Puritanism and after
the reopening of the theatres. But Shakespeare was what
Rabelais was not, an artist; and as an artist he was a very
Prometheus in his power of creating human beings.

As an artist he has also the exuberant fertility which we find
in Rabelais, even surpassing him in some respects. Max Mtiller
has long ago remarked upon the wealth of his vocabulary. In
this he seems to surpass all other writers. An Italian opera-
libretto seldom contains more than 600 or 700 words. A well-
educated modern Englishman, in social intercourse, will rarely
use more than 3000 or 4000. It has been calculated that acute
thinkers and great orators in England are masters of as many as
10,000 words. The Old Testament contains only 5642 words.
Shakespeare has employed more than 15,000 words in his poems
and plays ; and in few of the latter do we find such overflowing
fulness of expression as in Henry I V.

SIR JOHN FALSTAFF 215

In the original form of the play, Falstaffs name, as already
mentioned, was Sir John Oldcastle. A trace of this remains in
the second scene of the first act (Part I.), where the Prince calls
the fat knight " my old lad of the castle." In the second scene
of the second act the line, " Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to
death," is short of a syllable, because the dissyllable Falstaff has
been substituted for the trisyllable Oldcastle. In the earliest
Quarto of the Second Part, the contraction Old. has been left
before one of Falstaff 's speeches ; and in Act ii. Sc. 2 of the
same play, it is said of Falstaff that he was page to Thomas
Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a position which the historic Oldcastle
actually held. Oldcastle, however, was so far from being the boon
companion depicted by Shakespeare that he was, at the instance
of Henry V. himself, handed over to the Ecclesiastical Courts as
an adherent of Wicklif's heresies, and roasted over a slow fire
outside the walls of London on Christmas morning 1417. His
descendants having protested against the degradation to which
the name of their ancestor was subjected in the play, the fat
knight was rechristened. Therefore, too, it is stated in the
Epilogue to the Second Part that the author intends to produce
a further continuation of the story, " where, for anything I know,
Falstaff shall die of a sweat . . . for Oldcastle died a martyr,
and this is not the man"

Under the name of Falstaff he became, after the lapse of half
a century, the most popular of Shakespeare's creations. Between
1642 and 1694 he is more frequently mentioned than any other of
Shakespeare's characters. But it is noteworthy that in his own
time, although popular enough, he was not alluded to nearly so
often as Hamlet, who, up to 1642, is mentioned forty-five times
to Falstaff 's twenty; even Venus and Adonis and Romeo and
Juliet are mentioned oftener than he, and Lucrece quite as often.1
The element of low comedy in his figure made it, according to
the notions of the day, obviously less distinguished, and people
stood too near to Falstaff to appreciate him fully.

He was, as it were, the wine-god of merry England at the
meeting of the centuries. Never before or since has England
enjoyed so many sorts of beverages. There was ale, and all other
kinds of strong and small beer, and apple-drink, and honey-drink,
and strawberry-drink, and three sorts of mead (meath, metheglin,

1 Fresh Allusions to Shakespeare, p. 372.

216 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

hydromel), and every drink was fragrant of flowers and spiced
with herbs. In white meath alone there was infused rosemary
and thyme, sweet-briar, pennyroyal, bays, water-cresses, agri
mony, marsh-mallow, liverwort, maiden-hair, betony, eye-bright,
scabious, ash-leaves, eringo roots, wild angelica, rib- wort, sennicle,
Roman wormwood, tamarisk, mother thyme, saxifrage, philipen-
dula; and strawberries and violet-leaves were often added.
Cherry-wine and sack were mixed with gillyflower syrup.1

There were fifty-six varieties of French wine in use, and
thirty-six of Spanish and Italian, to 'say nothing of the many
home-made kinds. But among the foreign wines none was so
famous as Falstaff's favourite sherris-sack. It took its name from
Xeres in Spain, but differed from the modern sherry in being a
sweet wine. It was the best of its kind, possessing a much finer
bouquet than sack from Malaga or the Canary Islands (Jeppe paa
Bjergets, " Canari-Saek "),2 although these were stronger and
sweeter. Sweet as it was too, people were in the habit of putting
sugar into it. The English taste has never been very delicate.
Falstaff always put sugar into his wine. Hence his words when
he is playing the Prince while the Prince impersonates the king
(Pt. First, ii. 4): — "If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the
wicked." He puts not only sugar but toast in his wine : " Go
fetch me a quart of sack, put a toast in it " (Merry Wives, iii. 5).
On the other hand, he does not like (as others did) to have it mulled
with eggs': "Brew me a pottle of sack . . . simple of itself; I'll
no pullet-sperm in my brewage " (Merry Wives, iii. 5). And no
less did he resent its sophistication with lime, an ingredient which
the vintners used to increase its strength and make it keep : " You
rogue, here's lime in this sack, too. ... A coward is worse than
a cup of sack with lime in it " (I. Henry IV., ii. 4). Falstaff is as
great a wine-knower and wine-lover as Silenus himself. But he is
infinitely more than that.

He is one of the brightest and wittiest spirits England has
ever produced. He is one of the most glorious creations that
ever sprang from a poet's brain. There is much rascality and
much genius in him, but there is no trace of mediocrity. He is

1 Thornbury : Shaksperds England, i. 227 ; Nathan Drake, Shakespeare and His
Times, ii. 131.

2 Jeppe paa Bjerget, a Danish Abou Hassan or Christopher Sly, is the hero of
one of Holberg's most admirable comedies.

SIR JOHN FALSTAFF 217

always superior to his surroundings, always resourceful, always
witty, always at his ease, often put to shame, but, thanks to his
inventive effrontery, never put out of countenance. He has fallen
below his social position ; he lives in the worst (though also in
the best) society; he has neither soul, nor honour, nor moral
sense; but he sins, robs, lies, and boasts, with such splendid
exuberance, and is so far above any serious attempt at hypocrisy,
that he seems unfailingly amiable whatever he may choose to do.
Therefore he charms every one, although he is a butt for the wit
of all. He perpetually surprises us by the wealth of his nature.
He is old and youthful, corrupt and harmless, cowardly and
daring, "a knave without malice, a liar without deceit; and a
knight, a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency,
or honour." 1 The young Prince shows good taste in always and
in spite of everything seeking out his company.

How witty he is in the brilliant scene where Shakespeare is
daring enough to let him parody in advance the meeting between
Prince Henry and his offended father ! And with what sly humour
does Shakespeare, through his mouth, poke fun at Lyly and
Greene and the old play of King Cambyses ! How delightful is
FalstafFs unabashed self-mockery when he thus apostrophises
the hapless merchants whom he is plundering : —

" Ah ! whoreson caterpillars ! bacon^fed knaves ! they hate us
youth: down with them ; fleece them. . . . Hang ye, gorbellied knaves.
Are ye undone ? No, ye fat chuffs ; I would your store were here !
On, bacons, on ! What ! ye knaves, young men must live."

And what humour there is in his habit of self-pitying regret that
his youth and inexperience should have been led astray : —

" I'll be damned for never a king's son in Christendom. ... I
have forsworn his company hourly any time this two-and-twenty years,
and yet I am bewitched with the rogue's company. . . . Company,
villainous company, hath been the spoil of me."

But if he has not been led astray, neither is he the " abomin
able misleader of youth " whom Prince Henry, impersonating the
King, makes him out to be. For to this character there belongs

1 Maurice Morgann : An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff,
p. ISO.

2 IS WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

malicious intent, of which Falstaff is innocent enough. It is un
mistakable, however, that while in the First Part of Henry IV.
Shakespeare keeps Falstaff a purely comic figure, and dissipates
in the ether of laughter whatever is base and unclean in his nature,
the longer he works upon the character, and the more he feels the
necessity of contrasting the moral strength of the Prince's nature
with the worthlessness of his early surroundings, the more is he
tempted to let Falstaff deteriorate. In the Second Part his wit
becomes coarser, his conduct more indefensible, his cynicism less
genial; while his relation to the hostess, whom he cozens and
plunders, is wholly base. In the First Part of the play he
takes a whole-hearted delight in himself, in his jollifications, his
drolleries, his exploits on the highway, and his almost purposeless
mendacity; in the Second Part he falls more and more under the
suspicion of making capital out of the Prince, while he is found in
ever worse and worse company. The scheme of the whole, in
deed, demands that there shall come a moment when the Prince,
who has succeeded to the throne and its attendant responsibilities,
shall put on a serious countenance and brandish the thunderbolts
of retribution.

But here, in the First Part, Falstaff is still a demi-god, supreme
alike in intellect and in wit. With this figure the popular drama
which Shakespeare represented won its first decisive battle over
the literary drama which followed in the footsteps of Seneca. We
can actually hear the laughter of the " yard " and the gallery
surging around his speeches like waves around a boat at sea. It
was the old sketch of Parolles in Love's Labour's Won (see above,
p. 59), which had here taken on a new amplitude of flesh and
blood. There was much to delight the groundlings — Falstaff is
so fat and yet so mercurial, so old and yet so youthful in all his
tastes and vices. But there was far more to delight the spectators
of higher culture, in his marvellous quickness of fence, which can
parry every thrust, and in the readiness which never leaves him
tongue-tied, or allows him to confess himself beaten. Yes, there
was something for every class of spectators in this mountain of
flesh, exuding wit at every pore, in this hero without shame or
conscience, in this robber, poltroon, and liar, whose mendacity is
quite poetic, Miinchausenesque, in this cynic with the brazen
forehead and a tongue as supple as a Toledo blade. His talk is
like Bellman's after him : —

SIR JOHN FALSTAFF 219

" A dance of all the gods upon Olympus,
With fauns and graces and the muses twined." l

The men of the Renaissance revelled in his wit, much as the men
of the Middle Ages had enjoyed the popular legends of Reinecke
Fuchs and his rogueries.

Falstaff reaches his highest point of wit and drollery in that
typical soliloquy on honour, in which he indulges on the battle
field of Shrewsbury (I. Henry IV.y v. i), a soliloquy which almost
categorically sums him up, in contradistinction to the other leading
personages. For all the characters here stand in a certain relation
to the idea of honour — the King, to whom honour means dignity ;
Hotspur, to whom it means the halo of renown ; the Prince, who
loves it as the opposite of outward show ; and Falstaff, who, in his
passionate appetite for the material good things of life, rises en
tirely superior to it and shows its nothingness : —

" Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when
I come on ? how then ? Can honour set to a leg ? No. Or an arm ?
No. Or take away the grief of a wound ? No. Honour hath no skill
in surgery then ? No. What is honour ? A word. What is that word
honour ? Air. A trim reckoning ! — Who hath it ? He that died o'
Wednesday. Doth he feel it ? No. Doth he hear it ? No. Is it in
sensible then ? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living ?
No. Why ? Detraction will not suffer it. — Therefore, I'll none of it :
honour is a mere scutcheon ; and so ends my catechism."

Falstaff will be no slave to honour; he will rather do without
it altogether. He demonstrates in practice how a man can live
without it, and we do not miss it in him, so perfect is he in his
way.

1 From a poem by Tegner on Bellman, the Swedish convivial lyrist.

XXIII

HENRY PERCY— THE MASTERY OF THE CHARACTER-
DRAWING—HOTSPUR AND ACHILLES

IN contrast to Falstaff, Shakespeare has placed the man whom
his ally Douglas expressly calls " the king of honour " — a figure
as firmly moulded and as great as the Achilles of the Greeks or
Donatello's Italian St. George — " the Hotspur of the North/' an
English national hero quite as much as the young Prince.

The chronicle and the ballad of Douglas and Percy gave
Shakespeare no more than the name and the dates of a couple of
battles. He seized upon the name Harry Percy, and although
its bearer was not historically of the same age as Prince Henry,
but as old as his father, the King, he docked him of a score of
years, with the poetical design of opposing to the hero of the
play a rival who should be his peer, and should at first seem to
outshine him.

Percy is above everything and every one avid of honour. It
is he who would have found it easy to pluck down honour from
the moon or drag it up from the depths of the sea. But he is of
an open, confiding, simple nature, with nothing of the diplomatist
about him. He is hasty and impetuous ; his spur is never cold
until he is dead. Under the mistaken impression that women
cannot keep their counsel, he is reticent towards his wife, in whom
he might quite well confide, since she adores him, and calls him
" the miracle of men." On the other hand, he suffers himself to
be driven by the King's sour suspiciousness into foolhardy rebel
lion, and he is so simple-minded as to trust to his father and his
uncle Worcester, one of whom deserts him in the hour of need,
while the other plays a double game with him.

Shakespeare has thrown himself so passionately into the crea
tion of this character that he has actually painted for us Hotspur's
exterior, giving him a peculiar walk and manner of speech. The
warmth of the poet's sympathy has rendered his hero irresistibly

HOTSPUR 221

attractive, and made him, in his manliness, a pattern for the youth
of the whole country.

Henry Percy enters (ii. 3) with a letter in his hand, and
reads : —

" — ' But, for mine own part, my lord, I could be well contented to
be there, in respect of the love I bear your house.' — He could be con
tented, — why is he not then? In respect of the love he bears our
house : — he shows in this, he loves his own barn better than he loves
our house. Let me see some more. * The purpose you undertake is
dangerous ; ' — why, that's certain : 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to
sleep, to drink ; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger,
we pluck this flower, safety. ' The purpose you undertake, is dangerous ;
the friends you have named, uncertain ; the time itself unsorted, and
your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition.'
— Say you so, say you so ? / say unto you again, you are a shallow,
cowardly hind, and you lie. What a lack-brain is this ! By the Lord,
our plot is as good a plot as ever was laid ; our friends true and con
stant : a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation ; an excellent
plot, very good friends. . ... O ! I could divide myself and go to
buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk with so honourable
an action. Hang him ! let him tell the King ; we are prepared. I
will set forward to-night."

We can see him before our eyes, and hear his voice. He
strides up and down the room as he reads, and we can hear in
the rhythm of his speech that he has a peculiar gait of his own.
Not for nothing is Henry Percy called Hotspur ; whether on foot
or on horseback, his movements are equally impetuous. There
fore his wife says of him after his death (II. Henry 7F., ii. 3) : —

" He was, indeed, the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs, that practised not his gait."

Everything is here consistent, the bodily movements and the
tone "of speech. We can hear in Hotspur's soliloquy how his
sentences stumble over each other ; how, without giving himself
time to articulate his words, he stammers from sheer impatience,
and utters no phrase that does not bear the stamp of his choleric
temperament : —

" And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant ;

222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

For those that could speak low, and tardily,

Would turn their own perfection to abuse,

To seem like him : so that, in speech, in gait,

In diet, in affections of delight,

In military rules, humours of blood,

He was the mark and glass, copy and book,

That fashion'd others."

Shakespeare found no hint of these external traits in the
chronicle. He bodied forth Hotspur's idiosyncrasy with such
ardour that everything, down to his outward habit, shaped
itself accordantly. Hotspur speaks in impatient ejaculations ;
he is absent and forgetful out of sheer passionateness. His
characteristic impetuousness shows itself in such little traits
as his inability to remember the names he wants to cite. When
the rebels are portioning out the country between them, he starts
up with an oath because he has forgotten his map. When he
has something to relate, he is so absorbed in the gist of his matter,
and so impatient to get at it, that the intermediate steps escape his
memory (i. 3) : —

" Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods,
Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear
Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.
In Richard's time, — what do ye call the place ? —
A plague upon V — // is in Glostershire : —
' T was where the madcap Duke his uncle kept,
His uncle York, — where I first bow'd my knee
Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke."

When another person speaks to him, he listens for a moment,
but presently his thoughts are away on their own affairs; he
forgets where he is and what is said to him; and when Lady
Percy has finished her long and moving appeal (ii. 3) with the
words —

" Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not,"

all the reply vouchsafed her is : —
" Hotspur. What, ho !

Enter Servant.

Is Gilliams with the packet gone ?

HOTSPUR 223

Serv. He is, my lord, an hour ago.

Hot, Hath Butler brought those horses from the sheriff? " &c.

Perpetually baulked of an answer, she at last cannot help
coming out with this caressing menace, which gives us in one
touch the whole relation between the pair of married lovers : —

" In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,
An if thou wilt not tell me all things true."

And this absence of mind of Percy's is so far from being accidental
or momentary that it is the very trait which Prince Henry seizes
upon to characterise him (ii. 4) : —

" I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North ; he that kills
me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands,
and says to his wife, — * Fie upon this quiet life ! I want work.' ' O my
sweet Harry/ says she, ' how many hast thou killed to-day ? ' ' Give my
roan horse a drench,' says he, and answers, 'Some fourteen,' an hour
after; 'a trifle, a trifle.' "

Shakespeare has put forth all his poetic strength in giving
to Percy's speeches, and especially to his descriptions, the most
graphic definiteness of detail, and a naturalness which raises into
a higher sphere the racy audacity of Faulconbridge. Hotspur
sets about explaining (i. 3) how it happened that he refused to
hand over his prisoners to the King, and begins his defence by
describing the courtier who demanded them of him: —

" When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dress'd,
Fresh as a bridegroom ; and his chin, new reap'd,
Show'd like a stubble-land at harvest-home.
He was perfumed like a milliner."

But he is not content with a general outline, or with relating
what this personage said with regard to the prisoners ; he gives
an example even of his talk : —

" He made me mad,

To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman
Of guns,, and drums, and wounds, God save the mark !

224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And telling me, the sovereign'st thing on earth
Was parmacity for an inward bruise ;
And that it was great pity, so it was,
That villainous saltpetre should be digg'd
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth."

Why this spermaceti ? Why this dwelling upon so trivial and
ludicrous a detail ? Because it is a touch of reality and begets
illusion. Precisely because we cannot at first see the reason why
Percy should recall so trifling a circumstance, it seems impos
sible that the thing should be a mere invention. And from this
insignificant word all the rest of the speech hangs as by a chain.
If this be real, then all the rest is real, and Henry Percy stands
before our eyes, covered with dust and blood, as on the field of
Holmedon. We see the courtier at his side holding his nose as
the bodies are carried past, and we hear him giving the young
commander his medical advice and irritating him to the verge of
frenzy.

With such solicitude, with such minute attention to tricks,
flaws, whims, humours, and habits, all deduced from his tempera
ment, from the rapid flow of his blood, from his build of body,
and from his life on horseback and in the field, has Shakespeare
executed this heroic character. Restless gait, stammering speech,
forgetfulness, absence of mind, he overlooks nothing as being
too trivial. Hotspur portrays himself in every phrase he utters,
without ever saying a word directly about himself; and behind
his outward, superficial peculiarities, we see into the deeper and
more significant characteristics from which they spring. These,
too, are closely interwoven ; these, too, reveal themselves in his
lightest words. We hear this same hero whom pride, sense of
honour, spirit of independence, and intrepidity inspire with the
sublimest utterances, at other times chatting, jesting, and even
talking nonsense. The jests and nonsense are an integral part
of the real human being; in them, too, one side of his nature
reveals itself (iii. l): —

" Hotspur. Come, Kate, I'll have your song too.

Lady Percy. Not mine, in good sooth.

Hot. Not yours, in good sooth ! 'Heart ! you swear like a comfit-
maker's wife. * Not you, in good sooth ; ' and, ' As true as I live ; '
and, ' As God shall mend me ; ' and, ' As sure as day : '

HOTSPUR 225

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,

A good mouth-filling oath ; and leave ' in sooth.'

And such protest of pepper-gingerbread,

To velvet-guards, and Sunday-citizens."

In a classical tragedy, French, German, or Danish, the hero is
too solemn to talk nonsense and too lifeless to jest.

In spite of his soaring energy and ambition, Hotspur is sober,
rationalistic, sceptical. He scoffs at Glendower's belief in spirits
and pretended power of conjuring them up (iii. i). His is to
the inmost fibre a truth-loving nature : —

" Glend. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hot. Why, so can I, or so can any man ;
But will they come, when you do call for them ?

Glend. Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil.

Hot. And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil,
By telling truth : tell truth, and shame the devil."

There is a militant rationalism in these words which was rare,
very rare, in Shakespeare's time, to say nothing of Hotspur's own.

He has also, no doubt, the defects of his qualities. He is
contentious, quarrels the moment he is thwarted over the division
of booty that has yet to be won, and then, having gained his
point, gives up his share in the spoils. He is jealous in his
ambition, cannot bear to hear any one else praised, and would
like to see Harry of Monmouth poisoned with a pot of ale, so
tired is he of hearing him spoken of. He judges hastily, accord
ing to appearances; he has the profoundest contempt for the
Prince of Wales on account of the levity of his life, and does
not divine what lies behind it. He of course lacks all aesthetic
faculty. He is a bad speaker, and sentiment is as foreign to him
as eloquence. He prefers his dog's howling to music, and declares
that the turning of brass candlesticks does not set his teeth on
edge so much as the rhyming of balladmongers.

Yet, with all his faults, he is the greatest figure of his time.
Even the King, his enemy, becomes a poet when he speaks of
him (iii. 2). : —

" Thrice hath this Hotspur, Mars in swathing-clothes,
This infant warrior, in his enterprises
Discomfited great Douglas : ta'en him once,
Enlarged him, and made a friend of him."
VOL. I. p

226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The King longs daily that he could exchange his son for
Northumberland's; Hotspur is worthier than Prince Henry to
be heir to the throne of England.

From first to last, from top to toe, Hotspur is the hero of
the feudal ages, indifferent to culture and polish, faithful to his
brother-in-arms to the point of risking everything for his sake,
caring neither for state, king, nor commons ; a rebel, not for the
sake of any political idea, but because independence is all in all
to him ; a proud, self-reliant, unscrupulous vassal, who, himself a
sort of sub-king, has deposed one king, and wants to depose the
usurper he has exalted, because he has not kept his promises.
Clothed in renown, and ever more insatiate of military honour,
he is proud from independence of spirit and truthful out of pride.
He is a marvellous figure as Shakespeare has projected him,
stammering, absent, turbulent, witty, now simple, now magnilo
quent. His hauberk clatters on his breast, his spurs jingle at his
heel, wit flashes from his lips, while he moves and has his being
in a golden nimbus of renown.

Individual as he is, Shakespeare has embodied in him the
national type. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
Hotspur is an Englishman. He unites the national impetuosity
and bravery with sound understanding ; he is English in his
ungallant but cordial relation to his wife ; in the form of his
chivalry, which is Northern, not Romanesque ; in his Viking-like
love of battle for battle's and honour's sake, apart from any
sentimental desire for a fair lady's applause.

But Shakespeare's especial design was to present in him a
master-type of manliness. He is so profoundly, so thoroughly a
man that he forms the one counterpart in modern poetry to the
Achilles of the Greeks. Achilles is the hero of antiquity, Henry
Percy of the Middle Ages. The ambition of both is entirely
personal and regardless of the common weal. For the rest, they
are equally noble and high-spirited. The one point on which
Hotspur is inferior to the Greek demigod is that of free natural
ness. His soul has been cramped and hardened by being strapped
into the harness of the feudal ages. Hero as he is, he is at the
same time a soldier, obliged and accustomed to be over-bold,
forced to restrict his whole activity to feuds and fights. He
cannot weep like Achilles, and he would be ashamed of himself
if he could. He cannot play the lyre like Achilles, and he would

HOTSPUR AND ACHILLES 227

think himself bewitched if he could be brought to admit that
music sounded sweeter in his ears than the baying of a dog or
the mewing of a cat.1 He compensates for these deficiencies by
the unyielding, restless, untiring energy of his character, by the
spirit of enterprise in his manly soul, and by his healthy and
amply justified pride. It is in virtue of these qualities that he
pan, without shrinking, sustain comparison with a demigod.

So deep are the roots of Hotspur's character. Eccentric in
externals, he is at bottom typical. The untamed and violent
spirit of feudal nobility, the reckless and adventurous activity of
the English race, the masculine nature itself in its uncompromising
genuineness, all those vast and infinite forces which lie deep
under the surface and determine the life of a whole period, a
whole people, and one half of humanity, are at work in this
character. Elaborated to infinitesimal detail, it yet includes the
immensities into which thought must plunge if it would seek for
the conditions and ideals of a historic epoch.

But in spite of all this, Henry Percy is by no means the hero
of the play. He is only the foil to the hero, throwing into relief
the young Prince's unpretentious nature, his careless sporting
with rank and dignity, his light-hearted contempt for all con
ventional honour, all show and appearance. Every garland with
which Hotspur wreathes his helm is destined in the end to deck
the brows of Henry of Wales. The answer to Hotspur's question

1 " And Achilles at last

Brake suddenly forth into weeping, and turned from his comrades aside,
And sat by the cold grey sea, looking forth o'er the harvestless tide."

Iliad, i. 348.

" So when to the tents and the ships of the Myrmidon host they had won,
They found him delighting his soul as rang to the sweep of his hand
His beautiful rich-wrought lyre with a silver cross-bar spanned,
Which he chose from the spoils of the war when he smote Eetion's town.
Sweetly it rang as he sang old deeds of hero-renown."

Iliad, ix. 185.

So Greek and so musical is he who can yet give this answer to the dying Hector's
appeal : —

" ' Knee me no knees, thou dog, neither prate of my parents to me !
Would God my spirit within me would leave my fury free
To carve the flesh of thee raw, and devour, for the deeds thou hast done.' "

Iliad, xxii. 345.

(Translated by Arthur S. Way.)

228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

as to what has become of the madcap Prince of Wales and his
comrades, shows what colours Shakespeare has held in reserve
for the portraiture of his true hero. Even Vernon, an enemy of
the Prince, thus depicts his setting forth on the campaign (iv. i) :

"All furnished, all in arms,
All plum'd like estridges that wing the wind ;
Bated like eagles having lately bath'd ;
Glittering in golden coats, like images ;
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer ;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship."

XXIV

PRINCE HENRY— THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR
SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGINATION— A TYPICAL ENGLISH
NATIONAL HERO — THE FRESHNESS AND PERFEC
TION OF THE PL A Y

HENRY V. was, in the popular conception, the national hero of
England. He was the man whose glorious victories had brought
France under English rule. His name had a ring like that of
Valdemar in Denmark, bringing with it memories of a time of
widespread dominion, which the weakness of his successors
had suffered to shrink again. As a matter of history, Henry had
been a soldier almost from his boyhood, had been stationed on
the Welsh borders from his sixteenth to his one-and-twentieth
year, and had afterwards, in London, enjoyed the full confidence
of his father and of the Parliament. But there was some hint
in the old chronicles of his having, in his youth, frequented bad
company and led a wild life which gave no foretaste of his coming
greatness. This hint had been elaborated in the old and worth
less play, The Famous Victories ; and no more was needed to
set Shakespeare's imagination to work, and render it productive.
He revelled in the idea of representing the young Prince of Wales
roistering among drunkards and demireps, only to rise all the
more brilliantly and superbly into the irreproachable sovereign,
the greatest soldier among England's kings, the humiliator of
France, the victor of Agincourt.

No doubt Shakespeare's imagination here started from a basis
of personal experience. As a young player and poet, he in all
probability lived a Bohemian life in London, not, indeed, of de
bauchery, but full of such passions and dissipations as his vigorous
temperament, his overflowing vitality, and his position beyond
the pale of staid and respectable citizenship, would tend to throw
in his way. The Sonnets, which speak so plainly of vehement

229

230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

and fateful emotions on his part, also hint at temptations which
he did not resist. We read, for instance, in Sonnet cxix. : —

" 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 !
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never !
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever 1 "

And again in Sonnet cxxix. : —

" The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action ; and till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust ;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight ;
Past reason hunted ; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad :

All this the world well knows ; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

This is the philosophy of the morrow, of the reaction. But
Shakespeare had also, no doubt, his hours of light-hearted enjoy
ment, when such moralising reflections were far enough from his
mind. We have evidence of this in more than one anecdote. In
the diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple, the follow
ing entry occurs, under the date March 13, 1602 : —

" Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3, there was a Citizen
grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play
shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Ri: the 3.
Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, [and] was inter-
tained . . . ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that
Rich, the 3d was at the dore, Shakespeare caused return e to be made
that William the Conquerour was before Rich, the 3. Shakespere's name
was William."

Aubrey, who, however, did not write until 1680, is the autho
rity, supported by several others (Pope, Oldys, &c.), for the legend

PRINCE HENRY 231

that Shakespeare, on his yearly journeys from London to Strat-
ford-on-Avon and back, by way of Oxford and Woodstock, used
to alight at the " Crown " tavern, kept by one Davenant in
Oxford, and there won the heart of his hostess, the buxom and
merry Mrs. Davenant, who " used much to delight in his pleasant
company." According to this tradition, the young William
Davenant, afterwards a poet of note, commonly passed in Ox
ford for Shakespeare's son, and was said to bear some resem
blance to him. Sir William himself was not .unwilling to have
it believed that he was "more than a poetic child only" of
Shakespeare's.1

Be this as it may, Shakespeare had certainly sufficient per
sonal experience to enable him to sympathise with this princely
youth, who, despite the consciousness of his high aims, revels in
his freedom, shuns the court life and ceremonial which await him,
throws his dignity to the winds, riots in reckless high spirits,
boxes the ears of the Lord Chief-Justice, and has yet self-
command enough to suffer arrest without resistance, takes part
in a tourney with a common wench's glove in his helm — in
short, does everything that most conflicts with his people's sense
of propriety and his father's doctrines of prudence, but does it
without coarseness, with a certain innocence, and without ever
having to reproach himself with any actual self - degradation.
Henry IV. misunderstands his son as completely as Frederick
William of Prussia misunderstood the young Frederick the Great.

We see him, indeed, plunging into the most boyish and
thoughtless diversions, in company with topers, tavern-wenches,
and pot-boys ; but we see, also, that he is magnanimous, and full
of profound admiration for Harry Percy, that admiration for a
rival of which Percy himself was incapable. And he rises, ere
long, above this world of triviality and make-believe to the true
height of his nature. His alert self-esteem, his immovable self-
confidence, can early be traced in minor touches. When FalstafT
asks him if " his blood does not thrill " to think of the alliance

1 This tradition seems in no way improbable, and its probability is not diminished
by the fact that an anecdote connected with it has been shown by Halliwell-Phillips
to be an old Joe Miller, merely adapted to the case in point. " One day an old
townsman, observing the boy running homeward almost out of breath, asked him
whither he was posting in that heat and hurry. He answered to see his ^y^/father
Shakespeare. ' There is a good boy,' said the other ; ' but have a care that you don't
take God's name in vain ' " (Oldys}.

232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

between three such formidable foes as Percy, Douglas, and Glen-
dower, he dismisses with a smile all idea of fear. A little later, he
plays upon his truncheon of command as upon a fife. He has the
great carelessness of the great natures ; he does not even lose it
when he feels himself unjustly suspected. At bottom he is a good
brother, a good son, a great patriot ; and he has the makings of
a great ruler. He lacks Hotspur's optimism (which sees some
advantage even in his father's desertion), nor has he his impetuous
pugnacity ; yet we see outlined in him the daring, typically Eng
lish conqueror, adventurer, and politician, unscrupulous, and, on
occasion, cruel, undismayed though the enemy outnumber him
tenfold — the prototype of the men who, a century and a half after
Shakespeare's death, achieved the conquest of India.

It is a pity that Shakespeare could find no other way of dis
playing his military superiority to Percy than simply to make him
a better swordsman and let him kill his rival in single combat.
This is a return to the Homeric conception of martial prowess.
It was by such traits as this that Shakespeare repelled Napoleon.
These things appeared to him childish. He found more " politics "
in Corneille.

With complete magnanimity, Prince Henry leaves to Falstaff
the honour of having slain Hotspur, that honour whose true
nature forms the central theme of the whole play, although
the idea is nowhere formulated in any individual speech. But
after Henry Percy's death, Shakespeare, strangely enough, some
times actually transfers to Henry Plantagenet his fallen rival's
characteristics. He says, for example (Henry V., iv. 3), " If it be
a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive." He
declares that he understands neither rhyme nor metre. He woos
his bride as ungallantly as Hotspur talks to his Kate, and he
answers the challenges of the French with a boastfulness that
throws Hotspur's into the shade. In Henry V. Shakespeare
strikes the key of pure panegyric. The play is a National Anthem
in five acts.

We must remember that Shakespeare from the first could not
treat this character with perfect freedom. There is a touch of
reverence, of patriotic religion in his tone, even where he shows
the Prince given over to wild and wanton frolics. At the close of
the Second Part of Henry IV. he is already transformed by his
sense of responsibility ; and he develops, as Henry V., a sincerely

PRINCE HENRY 233

religious frame of mind, based on personal humility and on the con
sciousness of his father's defective right to the throne, which no
one could ever have divined in the light-hearted Prince Hal.

These later plays, however, are not to be compared with this
First Part of Henry IV., which in its day made so great and well-
deserved a success. It presented life itself in all its fulness and
variety, great typical creations and figures of racy reality, which,
without standing in symmetrical antithesis or parallelism to each
other, moved freely over the boards where a never-to-be-forgotten
history was enacted. Here no fundamental idea held tyrannical
sway, forcing every word that was spoken into formal relation to
the whole ; here nothing was abstract. No sooner has the rebel
lion been hatched in the royal palace than the second act opens
with a scene in an inn-yard on the Dover road. It is just day
break; some carriers cross the yard with their lanterns, going to
the stable to saddle their horses; they hail each other, gossip,
and tell each other how they have passed the night. Not a word
do they say about Prince Henry or Falstaff ; they talk of the price
of oats, and of how " this house is turned upside down since Robin
ostler died." Their speeches have nothing to do with the action ;
they merely sketch its locality and put the audience in tune for it ;
but seldom in poetry has so much been effected in so few words.
The night sky, with Charles's Wain " over the new chimney," the
flickering gleam of the lanterns in the dirty yard, the fresh air of
the early dawn, the misty atmosphere, the mingled odour of damp
peas and beans, of bacon and ginger, all comes straight home to
our senses. The situation takes hold of us with all the irresistible
force of reality.

Shakespeare must have written this drama with a feeling of
almost infallible inspiration and triumphant ease. We under
stand in reading it what his contemporaries say of his manu
scripts : he did not blot a single line.

The political developments arising from Henry IV.'s wrongful
seizure of the throne of Richard II. afford the groundwork of the
play.

The King, situated partly like Louis Philippe, partly like
Napoleon III., does all he can to obliterate the memory of his
usurpation. But he does not succeed. Why not ? Shake-

kspeare gives a twofold answer. First there is the natural,
human reason : the relation of characters and circumstances.

234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The King has risen by the "fell working" of his friends; he
is afraid of falling again before their power. His position forces
him to be mistrustful, and his mistrust repels every one from
him, first Mortimer, then Percy, then, as nearly as possible,
his own son. Secondly, we have the prescribed religious
reason : that wrong avenges itself, that punishment follows upon
the heels of guilt — in a word, the so-called principle of "poetic
justice." If only to propitiate the censorship and the police,
Shakespeare could not but do homage to this principle. It was
bad enough that the theatres should be suffered to exist at all ;
if they so far forgot themselves as to show vice unpunished and
virtue unrewarded, the playwright would have to be sternly
brought to his senses.

The character of the King is a masterpiece. He is the
shrewd, mistrustful, circumspect ruler, who has made his way
to the throne by dint of smiles and pressures of the hand,
has employed every artifice for making an impression, has first
ingratiated himself with the populace by his affability, and has
then been sparing of his personal presence. Hence those words
of his which so deeply impressed Soren Kierkegaard,1 who
despised and acted in direct opposition to the principle they
formulated (Pt. i. iii. 2) :—

" Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession,
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir,
But like a comet I was wonder'd at."

He thus illustrates, from the point of view of an old diplomatist,
the injury his son does himself by flaunting it among his dis
reputable associates.

Yet the son is not so unlike the father as the father believes.
Shakespeare has made him, in his own way, adopt a scarcely
less diplomatic policy : that of establishing a false opinion about

1 A Danish ethical and theological thinker, a Northern Pascal, said to have in
some measure suggested to Ibsen the character of Brand.

PRINCE HENRY 235

himself, letting himself pass for a frivolous debauchee, in order
to make all the deeper impression by his firmness and energy as
soon as an opportunity offers of showing what is in him. Even
in his first soliloquy (i. 2) he lays down this line of policy with
a definiteness which is psychologically feeble : —

" I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyok'd humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at."

This self-consciousness on Henry's part was to some extent
imposed upon Shakespeare. Without it, he could scarcely have
brought upon the stage, in such questionable company, a prince
who had become a national hero. Yet if the Prince had acted
with the cut-and-dried deliberation of purpose which he here
attributes to himself, we should have to write him down an
unmitigated charlatan.

Here, as in a former instance of psychological crudity —
Richard III.'s description of himself as a villain — we must allow
for Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy. He frequently regards
it as an indispensable stage-convention, which does not really
reveal the inmost thoughts of the speaker, but only serves to
place the hearer at a certain point of view, and to give him
information which he needs. Furthermore, such a soliloquy as
this ought to be spoken with a good deal of sophistical self-
justification on the Prince's part, or else, as the German actor,
Josef Kainz, treats it, in a tone of gay raillery. Finally, it is
to be regarded as a first hint — rather a broad one, it must be
admitted — which Shakespeare gives us thus early in order to get
rid of the improbability he found in the Chronicle, where the
Prince is instantaneously and miraculously transformed through
a single resolve. The soliloquy is introduced at this point to
ensure the coherence of his character, lest the spectator should
feel that the Prince's conversion to a totally different manner of
life was mechanically tacked on and had no root in his inner
nature. And it must have been one of the chief attractions of
the theme for Shakespeare to show precisely this conversion.

236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

No doubt he enjoyed depicting his hero's gay and thoughtless
life, at war with all the morality which is founded on mere social
convention ; but at least as great must have been the pleasure
he took, as a man of ripe experience, in vindicating that morality
which he now felt to be the determining factor in human life —
the morality of voluntary self-reform and self-control, without
which there can be no concentration of purpose or systematic
activity. When the new-crowned king will no longer recognise
Falstaff, when he repulses him with the words : —

" How ill white hairs become a fool and jester. . . .
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest ;
Presume not that I am the thing I was,"

he speaks out of Shakespeare's own soul. Behind the words
there glows a new-born warmth of feeling. The calm sense of
justice of the island king makes haste to express itself, and
to refuse all further dallying with evil. He grants Falstaff a
maintenance and banishes him from his presence. Shakespeare's
hero is at this point a living embodiment of that earnestness
and sense of responsibility which the poet, whom one of his
greatest and ablest admirers (Taine) has represented as being
devoid of moral feeling, held to be the indispensable condition
of all high endeavour.

XXV

"KING HENRY IV.? SECOND PART— OLD AND NEW CHAR
ACTERS IN IT— DETAILS— "HENRY F.," A NATIONAL
DRAMA— PATRIOTISM AND CHAUVINISM— THE VISION
OF A GREATER ENGLAND

THE Second Part of Henry IV., which must have been written
in 1598, since Justice Silence is mentioned in Ben Jonson's
Every Man out of his Humour, acted in 1599, abounds, no less
than the First Part, in poetic power, but is only a drama
tised chronicle, not a drama. In its serious scenes, the play
is more faithful to history than the First Part, and it is not
Shakespeare's fault that the historical characters are here of
less interest. In the comic scenes, which are very amply de
veloped, Shakespeare has achieved the feat of bringing Falstaft
a second time upon the stage without giving us the least sense
of anticlimax. He is incomparable as ever in his scenes with
the Lord Chief-Justice and with the women of the tavern ; and
when he goes down into Gloucestershire in his character of
recruiting-officer, he is still at the height of his genius. As
new comrades and foils to him, Shakespeare has here created
the two contemptible country Justices, Shallow and Silence.
Shallow is a masterpiece, a compact of mere stupidity, foolish
ness, boastfulness, rascality, and senility; yet he appears a
genius in comparison with the ineffable Silence. Here, as in
the First Part, the poet evidently drew his comic types from the
life of his own day. Another very amusing new personage, who,
like Falstaff, was much imitated by the minor dramatists of the
time, is Falstaff's Ancient, the braggart Pistol, whose talk is an
anthology of playhouse bombast. This inept affectation not only
makes him a highly comic personage, but gives Shakespeare

an opportunity of girding at the robustious style of the earlier

237

238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

tragic poets, which had become repulsive to him. He parodies
Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Pistol's outburst (ii. 4) : —

" Shall packhorses,
And hollow pamper'd jades of Asia,
Which cannot go but thirty miles a- day,
Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals,
And Trojan Greeks?"

The passage in Tamburlaine (Second Part, ii. 4) rims thus : —

" Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia,
What? can ye draw but twenty miles a day? "

He makes fun of Peele's Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the
fair Greek, when Pistol, alluding to his sword, exclaims, " Have
we not Hiren here ? " And again it is George Peele who is
aimed at when Pistol says to the hostess : —

" Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis ;
Come, give's some sack."

In The Battle of Alcazar (see above, p. 39), Muley Mahomet
brings his wife some flesh on the point of his sword and says —

" Hold thee, Calipolis, feed and faint no more ! "

But Falstaff himself is, and must ever remain, the chief
attraction of the comic scenes. Never was the Fat Knight
wittier than when he answers the Lord Chief-Justice, who
has told him that his figure bears "all the characters of age"
0.2):-

" My Lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon,
with a white head, and something a round belly. For my voice, I
have lost it with hollaing and singing of anthems. To approve my
youth further, I will not : the truth is, I am only old in judgment
and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand
marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him."

The play is a mere bundle of individual passages, but each
of these passages is admirable. A great example is King
Henry's soliloquy which opens the third act, the profoundly
imaginative apostrophe to sleep: —

" O thou dull god ! why liest thou with the vile,
In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch,
A watch-case, or a common 'larum bell ?

THE SECOND PART OF "HENRY IV." 239

Wilt thou upon.the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deaf ning clamours in the slippery clouds,

That with the hurly death itself awakes ?

Canst thou, O partial sleep ! give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude ; •

And in the calmest and most stillest night,

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king ? Then, happy low, lie down !

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

Throughout this Second Part, the King, besieged by cares
and living in the shadow of death, is richer in thought and
wisdom than ever before. What he says, and what is said
to him, seems drawn by the poet from the very depths of his
own experience, and addressed to men of the like experience and
thought. Every word of that first scene of the third act is in
the highest degree significant and admirable. It is here that
the King turns to what we now call geology (see above, p. 114)
for an image of the historical mutability of all things. When he
mournfully reminds his attendants that Richard II., whom he
displaced, prophesied a Nemesis to come from those who had
helped him to the throne, and that this Nemesis has now over
taken him, Warwick answers with the profound and astonishingly
modern reflection that history is apparently governed by laws,
and that each man's life —

" Figures the nature of the times deceas'd ;
The which observ'd, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life."

To this the King returns the no less philosophical answer :—

"Are these things, then, necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities."

But it is at the close of the fourth act, where news of the total
defeat of the rebels is brought to the dying King, that he utters

240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

what is perhaps his most profoundly pessimistic speech, complain
ing that Fortune never comes with both hands full, but "writes
her fair words still in foulest letters," so that life is like a feast at
which either the food or the appetite [or the guests] are always
lacking.

From the moment of King Henry's death, Shakespeare con
centrates all his poetical strength upon the task of presenting in
his great son the pattern and ideal of English kingship. In all
the earlier Histories the King had grave defects ; Shakespeare now
applies himself, with warm and undisguised enthusiasm, to the
portrayal of a king without a flaw.

His Henry V. is a glorification of this national ideal. The
five choruses which introduce the acts are patriotic paeans, Shake
speare's finest heroic lyrics ; and the play itself is an epic in
dialogue, without any sort of dramatic structure, development, or
conflict. It is an English e7/c&>/uoz/, a dramatic monument, as
was the Perscz of ^Eschylus for ancient Athens. As a work
of creative art, it cannot be compared with the two preceding
Histories, to which it forms a supplement. Its theme is
English patriotism, and its appeal is to England rather than to
the world.

The allusion to Essex's command in Ireland in the prologue
to the fifth act gives us beyond a doubt the date of its first per
formance. Essex was in Ireland from the I5th of April 1599 to
the 28th of September in the following year. As we find the
play alluded to by other poets in 1600, it must in all probability
have been produced in 1599-

How strongly Shakespeare was impressed by the greatness
of his theme appears in his reiterated expressions of humility in
approaching it. He begins, like the epic poets of antiquity, with
an invocation of the Muse ; he implores forgiveness, not only for
the imperfection of his scenic apparatus, but for the " flat unraised
spirits " in which he treats so mighty a theme. And in the pro
logue to the fourth act he returns to the subject of his unworthi-
ness and the pitiful limitations of the stage. Throughout the
choruses, he has done his utmost, by dint of vivid imagery and
lyric impetus and splendour, to make up for the sacrifice of unity
and cohesion involved in his faithfulness to history. Shakespeare
was evidently unconscious of the na'fvete of the lecture on the
Salic law, establishing Henry's claim to the crown of France,

"HENRY V." 241

with which the Archbishop opens the play ; no doubt he thought
it absolutely imposed upon him.

For he here strives to make Henry an epitome of all the
virtues he himself most highly values. Even in the last act of
the Second Part of Henry IV. he had endowed him with traits
of irreproachable kingly magnanimity. Henry confirms in his
office the Chief-Justice, who,»in the execution of his duty, had
arrested the Prince of Wales, addresses him with the deepest
respect, and even calls him "father." In reality this Chief-
Justice was dismissed at the King's accession. Henry V. com
pletes the evolution of the royal butterfly from the larva and
chrysalis stages of the earlier plays. Henry is at once the
monarch who always thinks royally, and never forgets his pride
as the representative of the English people; the man with no
pose or arrogance, who bears himself simply, talks modestly, acts
energetically, and thinks piously ; the soldier who endures priva
tions like the meanest of his followers, is downright in his jesting
and his wooing, and enforces discipline with uncompromising
strictness, even as against his own old comrades ; and finally,
the citizen who is accessible alike to small and great, and in
whom the youthful frolicsomeness of earlier days has become
the humourist's relish for a practical joke, like that which he
plays off upon Williams and Fluellen. Shakespeare shows him,
like a military Haroun Al Raschid, seeking personally to in
sinuate himself into the thoughts and feelings of his followers ;
and — what is very unlike him — he manifests no disapproval
where the King sinks far below the ideal, as when he orders
the frightful massacre of all the French prisoners taken at
Agincourt. Shakespeare tries to pass the deed off as a measure
of necessity.

The reason of this is that the spirit which here prevails is not
pure patriotism, but in many points a narrow Chauvinism. King
Henry's two speeches before Harfleur (iii. i and iii. 3) are bom
bastic, savage, and threatening to the point of frothy bluster ; and
wherever Frenchmen and Englishmen are brought into contrast,
the French, even if they at that time showed themselves inferior
soldiers, are treated with obvious injustice. With his sharp eye
for national, as for personal peculiarities, Shakespeare has of
course seized upon certain weaknesses of the French character ;
but for the most part his Frenchmen are mere caricatures for the
VOL. I. Q

242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

diversion of the gallery. Quite childish is the way in which he
makes the Frenchmen mix fragments of French in their speeches.
But it is consistent enough with the national and popular design
of the play that not a little of it should seem to be addressed to
the common, uneducated public — for instance, the scene in which
the miserable blusterer Pistol makes prisoner a French nobleman
whom he has succeeded in overawing, and that in which the
young Princess Katherine of France takes lessons in English
from one of her ladies-in-waiting. This passage (iii. 4) and
the wooing scene between King Henry and the Princess (v. 2)
are incidentally interesting as giving us a good idea of Shake
speare's acquaintance with French. No doubt he could read
French, but he must have spoken it very imperfectly. He is per
haps not to blame for such blunders as le possession and a les anges.
On the other hand, it was doubtless he who placed in the mouth
of the Princess such comically impossible expressions as these
when Henry has kissed her hand : —

"Je ne veux point que vous abbaissez vostre grandeur, en baisant k
main d'une vostre indigne serviteur"

And this : —

"Les dames, et damoiselles, pour estre baisees devant leur nopces, il
n'est pas le costume de France"

According to his custom, and in order to preserve continuity
of style with the foregoing plays, Shakespeare has interspersed
Henry V. with comic figures and scenes. Falstaff himself does
not appear, his death being announced at the beginning of the
play ; but the members of his gang wander around, as living and
ludicrous mementos of him, until they disappear one by one by
way of the gallows, so that nothing may survive to recall the
great king's frivolous youth. To console us for their loss, we are
here introduced to a new circle of comic figures — soldiers from
the different English-speaking countries which make up what we
now call the United Kingdom. Each of them speaks his own
dialect, in which resides much of the comic effect for English
ears. We have a Welshman, a Scot, and an Irishman. The
Welshman is intrepid, phlegmatic, somewhat pedantic, but all
fire and flame for discipline and righteousness ; the Scot is im
movable in his equilibrium, even-tempered, sturdy, and trust-

"HENRY V." 243

worthy ; the Irishman is a true Celt, fiery, passionate, quarrelsome
and apt at misunderstanding. Fluellen, the Welshman, with
his comic phlegm and manly severity, is the most elaborate of
these figures.

But in placing on the stage these representatives of the
different English-speaking peoples, Shakespeare had another and
deeper purpose than that of merely amusing his public with a
medley of dialects. At that time the Scots were still the heredi
tary enemies of England, who always attacked her in the rear
whenever she went to war, and the Irish were actually in open
rebellion. Shakespeare evidently dreamed of a Greater England,
as we nowadays speak of a Greater Britain. When he wrote
this play, King James of Scotland was busily courting the favour
of the English, and the question of the succession to the throne,
when the old Queen should die, was not definitely settled. Shake
speare clearly desired that, with the coming of James, the old
national hatred between the Scotch and the English should cease.
Essex, in Ireland, was at this very time carrying out the policy
which was to lead to his destruction — that, namely, of smoothing
away hatred by means of leniency, and trying to come to an
arrangement with the leader of the Catholic rebellion. South
ampton was with him in Ireland as his Master of the Horse, and
we cannot doubt that Shakespeare's heart was in the campaign.
Bates in this play (iv. i) probably expresses Shakespeare's own
political ideas when he says —

" Be friends, you English fools, be friends : we have French
[Spanish] quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon."

Henry V. is not one of Shakespeare's best plays, but it is
one of his most amiable. He here shows himself not as the
almost superhuman genius, but as the English patriot, whose
enthusiasm is as beautiful as it is simple, and whose prejudices,
even, are not unbecoming. The play not only points backward
to the greatest period of England's past, but forward to King
James, who, as the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary Stuart,
was to put an end to religious persecutions, and who, as a
Scotchman and a supporter of the Irish policy of Essex, was for
the first time to show the world not only a sturdy England, but
a powerful Great Britain.

XXVI

ELIZABETH AND FALSTAFF — THE MERRY WIVES OF
WINDSOR — THE PROSAIC AND BOURGEOIS TONE OF
THE PIECE— THE FAIRY SCENES

SHAKESPEARE must have written The Merry Wives of Windsor
immediately after Henry V., probably about Christmas 1599; for
Sir Thomas Lucy, on whom the poet here takes his revenge,
died in 1600, and it is improbable that Shakespeare would have
cared to gird at him after his death. He almost certainly did not
write the piece of his own motive, but at the suggestion of one
whose wish was a command. There is the strongest internal
evidence for the truth of the tradition which states that the play
was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth. The first Quarto
of 1602 has on its title-page the words, " As it hath been divers
times acted by the right honourable my Lord Chamberlain's
servants. Both before Her Majesty, and elsewhere." A century
later (1702), John Dennis, who published an adaptation of the
play, writes, " I know very well that it had pleased 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." A few years later (1709) Rowe writes, " She
was so well pleased with that admirable character of FalstafF
in the two parts of Henry IV., that she commanded him to con
tinue it for one play more and show him in love. This is said
to be the occasion of his writing The Merry Wives. How well
she was obeyed, the play itself is an admirable proof."

Old Queen Bess can scarcely have been a great judge of
art, or she would not have conceived the extravagant notion of
wanting to see FalstafF in love ; she would have understood that
if there was anything impossible to him it was this. She would

also have realised that his figure was already a rounded whole

244

"THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 245

and could not be reproduced. It is true that in the Epilogue
to Henry IV. (which, however, is probably not by Shakespeare)
a continuation of the history is promised, in which, " for anything
I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already he be killed
with your hard opinions ; " but no such continuation is to be
found in Henry V., evidently because Shakespeare felt that
Falstaff had played out his part. Neither is The Merry Wives
the promised continuation, for Falstaff does not die, and the
action is conceived as an earlier episode in his life, though it is
entirely removed from its historical setting and brought forward
into the poet's own time, so unequivocally that there is even in
the fifth act a direct mention of " our radiant queen " in Windsor
Castle.

The poet must have set himself unwillingly to the fulfilment of
the "radiant queen's" barbarous wish, and tried to make the best of
a bad business. He was compelled entirely to ruin his inimitable
Falstaff, and degrade the fat knight into an ordinary avaricious,
wine-bibbing, amatory old fool. Along with him, he resuscitated
the whole merry company from Henry V.y who had all come to
an unpleasant end — Bardolph, Pistol, Nym, and Dame Quickly —
making the men repeat themselves with a difference, endowing
Pistol with the splendid phrase " The world's mine oyster, which
I with sword will open," and giving to Dame Quickly softened
and more commonplace lineaments. From the Second Part of
Henry IV., too, he introduces Justice Shallow, placing him in a
less friendly relation to Falstaff, and giving him a highly comic
nephew, Slender, who, in his vanity and pitifulness, is like a first
sketch for Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night.

His task was now to entertain a queen and a court "with
their hatred of ideas, their insensibility to beauty, their hard,
-efficient manners, and their demand for impropriety." 1 As it
amused the London populace to see kings and princes upon the
stage, so it entertained the Queen and her court to have a glimpse
into the daily life of the middle classes, so remote from their own,
to look into their rooms, and hear their chat with the doctor and
the parson, to see a picture of the prosperity and contentment
which flourished at Windsor right under the windows of the
Queen's summer residence, and to witness the downright virtue
and merry humour of the red-cheeked, buxom townswomen.

1 Dowden : Shakspere — his Mind and Art, p. 370.

246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Thus was the keynote of the piece determined. Thus it became
more prosaic and bourgeois than any other play of Shakespeare's.
The Merry Wives is indeed the only one of his works which is
almost entirely written in prose, and the only one of his comedies
in which, the scene being laid in England, he has taken as
his subject the contemporary life of the English middle classes.
It is not quite unlike the more farcical of Moliere's comedies,
which also were often written with an eye to royal and courtly
audiences. All the more significant is the fact that Shake
speare has found it impossible to content himself with thus
dwelling on the common earth, and has introduced at the close
a fairy-dance and fairy-song, as though from the Midsummer
Nighfs Dream itself, executed, it is true, by children and young
girls dressed up as elves, but preserving throughout the air and
style of genuine fairy scenes.

Shakespeare had just been trying his hand in Henry V. at
writing the broken English spoken by a Welshman and by a
Frenchman. He knew that at court, where people prided them
selves on the purest pronunciation of their mother-tongue, he
would find an audience exceedingly alive to the comic effects thus
obtained, and he therefore, while he was in the vein, introduced
into this hasty and occasional production two not unkindly carica
tures — the Welsh priest, Sir Hugh Evans, in whom he perhaps
immortalised one of his Stratford schoolmasters, and the French
Doctor Caius, a thoroughly farcical eccentric, who pronounces
everything awry.

The hurry with which Shakespeare wrote this comedy has led
him into some confusion as to the process of time. In Act iii. 4,
when Dame Quickly is sent to Falstaff to make a second appoint
ment with him, it is the afternoon of the second day ; in the
following scene, when she comes to him, it is the morning of
the third day. But this haste has also given the play an unusually
dramatic swing and impetus; it is quite free from the episodes
in which the poet is at other times apt to loiter.

Nevertheless Shakespeare has here woven together no fewer
than three different actions — FalstafFs advances to the two Merry
Wives, Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, and all the consequences of his
ill-timed rendezvous ; the rivalry between the foolish doctor, the
imbecile Slender, and young Fenton for the hand of fair Anne
Page ; and finally, the burlesque duel between the Welsh priest

"THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR" 247

and the French doctor, which is devised and set afoot by the
jovial Windsor innkeeper.

Shakespeare has himself invented much more than usual of
the complicated intrigue. But Falstaff s concealment in the buck-
basket was suggested by a similar incident in Fiorentino's //
Pecorone, from which Shakespeare had already borrowed in the
Merchant of Venice ; and the idea of making Falstaff incessantly
confide his designs and his rendezvous to the husband of the
lady in question came from another Italian story by Straparola,
which had been published some ten years earlier, under the title
of Two Lovers of Pisa} in Tarlton's News of Purgatory.

The invention is not always very happy. For instance, it is
a highly unpleasing and improbable touch that Ford, as Master
Brook, should bribe Falstaff to procure him possession of the
woman (his own wife) whom he affects to desire, and whom Falstaff
also is pursuing. Ford's jealousy, moreover, is altogether too
stupid and crude in its manifestations. But we have especially
to deplore that the nature of the intrigue and the moral tendency
to be impressed on the play should have made Falstaff, who used
to be quickness and ingenuity personified, so preternaturally
dense that his incessant defeats afford his opponents a very
poor triumph.

He is ignorant of everything it would have been his interest
to know, and he is perpetually committing afresh the same in
conceivable blunders. It is foolish enough, in the first place, to
write two identical love-letters to two women in the same little
town, who, as he ought to know, are bosom friends. It is incre
dibly stupid of him to walk three times in succession straight into
the coarse trap which they set for him ; in doing so he betrays
such a monstrous vanity that we find it impossible to recognise
in him the ironical Falstaff of the Histories. It is inexpres
sibly guileless of him never to conceive the slightest suspicion
of " Master Brook," who, being his only confidant, is therefore
the only man who can have betrayed him to the husband. And
finally, it is not only childish, but utterly inconsistent with the
keen understanding of the earlier Falstaff, that he should believe
in the supernatural nature of the beings who pinch him and burn
him by night in the park.

On the other hand, the old high spirits and the old wit now and
again flame forth in him, and a few of his speeches to Shallow,

248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

to Pistol, to Bardolph and others are exceedingly amusing. He
shows a touch of his old self when, after having been soused in
the water along with the foul linen, he protests that drowning is
" a death that I abhor, for the water swells a man, and what a
thing should I have been when I had been swelled ! " And he
has a highly humorous outburst in the last act (v. 5) when he
declares, " I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil
that is in me should set hell on fire." But what are these little
flashes in comparison with the inexhaustible whimsicality of the
true Falstaff!

The play is more consistently farcical than any earlier comedy
of Shakespeare's, The Taming of the Shrew not excepted. The
graceful and poetical passages are few. We have in Mr. and
Mrs. Page a pleasant English middle-class couple; and though
the young lovers, Fenton and Anne Page, have only one short
scene together, they display in it some attractive qualities.
Anne Page is an amiable middle-class girl of Shakespeare's
day, one of the healthy and natural young women whom Words
worth has celebrated in the nineteenth century. Fenton, who is
said (though we cannot believe it) to have been at one time a
comrade of Prince Hal and Poins, is certainly attached to her ;
but it is very characteristic that Shakespeare, with his keen sense
for the value of money, sees nothing to object to in the fact that
Fenton, as he frankly confesses, was first attracted to Anne by
her wealth. This is the same trait which we found in another
wooer, Bassanio, of a few years earlier.

Finally, there is real poetry in the short fairy scene of the last
act. The poet here takes his revenge for the prose to which he
has so long been condemned. It is full of the aromatic wood-
scents of Windsor Park by night. What is altogether most
valuable in The Merry Wives is its strong smack of the English
soil. The play appeals to us, in spite of the drawbacks inse
parable from a work hastily written to order, because the poet
has here for once remained faithful to his own age and his own
country, and has given us a picture of the contemporary middle-
class, in its sturdy and honest worth, which even the atmosphere
of farce cannot quite obscure.

XXVII

SHAKESPEARE'S MOST BRILLIANT PERIOD— THE FEMININE
TYPES BELONGING TO 7T— WITTY AND HIGHBORN
YOUNG WOMEN— MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING— SLA VISH
FAITHFULNESS TO HIS SOURCES^ BENEDICK AND BEA
TRICE—SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT^THE LOW-COMEDY
FIGURES

SHAKESPEARE now enters upon the stage in his career in which
his wit and brilliancy of spirit reach a perfection hitherto un-
attained. It seems as though these years of his life had been
bathed in sunshine. They certainly cannot have been years of
struggle, and still less of sorrow ; there must have been a sort
of lull in his existence— a tranquil zone, as it were, in the troubled
waters of life. He seems for a short time to have revelled in his
own genius with a sort of pensive happiness, to have drunk
exhilarating draughts of his own inspiration. He heard the
nightingales warbling in the sacred grove of his spirit. His
whole nature burst into flower.

In the Republican Calendar one of the months was named
Floreal. There is such a flower-month in almost every human
life ; and this is Shakespeare's.

He was doubtless in love at this time — as he had probably
been all his life through — but his love was not an overmastering
passion like Romeo's, nor did it depress him with that half-
despairing feeling of the unworthiness of its object which he
betrays in his Sonnets ; nor, again, was it the airy ecstasy of
youthful imagination that ran riot in A Midsummer Night's
Dream. No, it was a happy love, which filled his head as well
as his heart, accompanied with joyous admiration for the wit and
vivacity of the beloved one, for her graciousness and distinction.
Her coquetry is gay, her heart is excellent, and her intelligence
so quick that she seems to be wit incarnate in the form of a
woman.

*49

250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

In his early years he had presented not a few unamiable,
mannish women in his comedies, and not a few ambitious, blood
thirsty, or corrupt women in his serious plays — figures such as
Adriana and the shrewish Katharine on the one hand, Tamora
and Margaret of Anjou on the other hand, who have all a stiff-
necked will, and a certain violence of manners. In the later years
of his ripe manhood he displays a preference for young women
who are nothing but soul and tenderness, silent natures without
wit or sparkle, figures such as Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia.

Between these two strongly-marked groups we come upon a
bevy of beautiful young women, who all have their heart in the
right place, but whose chief attraction lies in their sparkling
quickness of wit. They are often as lovable as the most faithful
friend can be, and witty as Heinrich Heine himself, though with
another sort of wit. We feel that Shakespeare must have admired
with all his heart the models from whom he drew these women,
and must have rejoiced in them as one brilliant mind rejoices in
another. These types of delicate and aristocratic womanhood
cannot possibly have had plebeian models.

In his first years in London, Shakespeare, as an underling in a
company of players, can have had no opportunity of associating
with other women than, firstly, those who sat for his Mistress
Quickly and Doll Tearsheet ; secondly, those passionate and daring
women who make the first advances to actors and poets ; and,
thirdly, those who served as models for his " Merry Wives," with
their sound bourgeois sense and not over delicate gaiety. But
the ordinary citizen's wife or daughter of that day offered the
poet no sort of spiritual sustenance. They were, as a rule, quite
illiterate. Shakespeare's younger daughter could not even write
her own name.

But he was presently discovered by men like Southampton and
Pembroke, cordially received into their refined and thoroughly
cultivated circle, and in all probability presented to the ladies of
these noble families. Can we doubt that the tone of conversation
among these aristocratic ladies must have enchanted him, that he
must have rejoiced in the nobility and elegance of their manners,
and that their playful freedom of speech must have afforded him
an object for imitation and idealisation ?

The great ladies of that date were exceedingly accomplished.
They had been educated as highly as the men, spoke Italian, French,

HIS HAPPIEST TIME 251

and Spanish fluently, and were not infrequently acquainted with
Latin and Greek. Lady Pembroke, Sidney's sister, the mother of
Shakespeare's patron, was regarded as the most intellectual woman
of her time, and was equally celebrated as an author and as a
patroness of authors. And these ladies were not oppressed by
their knowledge or affected in their speech, but natural, rich in
ideas as in acquirements, free in their wit, and sometimes in their
morals ; so that we can easily understand how a daring, high-bred,
womanly intelligence should have been, for a series of years, the
object which it most delighted Shakespeare to portray. He sup
plements this intellectual superiority, in varying measures, with
independence, goodness of heart, pride, humility, tenderness, the
joy of life; so that from the central conception there radiates a
fan -like semicircle of different personalities. It was of such
women that he had dreamt when he sketched his Rosaline in
Loves Labour s Lost. Now he knew them, as he had already
shown in Portia, the first of the group.

In spite of his latent melancholy, he is now highly-favoured
and happy, this young man of thirty-five ; the sun of his career is
in the sign of the Lion ; he feels himself strong enough to sport with
the powers of life, and he now writes nothing but comedies. He
' does not take the trouble to invent them; he employs his old method
of carving a play out of this or that mediocre romantic novel, or he
revises inferior old pieces. As a rule, he goes thus to work : he
retains without a qualm those traits in his fable which are fan
tastic, improbable, even repulsive to a more delicate taste — such
points are always astonishingly unimportant in his eyes ; he some
times transfers to his play undigested masses of the material
before him, with no care for psychological plausibility; but he
seizes upon some leading situation in the novel, or upon some
single character in the earlier play, and he animates this situation
or this character, or (it may be) added characters of his own inven
tion, with the whole fervour of his soul, until the speeches shine
forth as in letters of fire, and sparkle with wit or glow with passion.

Thus, in Much Ado about Nothing, he retains a fable which
offers almost insuperable difficulties to satisfactory poetical treat
ment, and nevertheless produces, partly outside of its framework,
poetical values of the first order.

The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on the 4th
of August 1600, and appeared in the same year under the title:

252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Much Ado* about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times
publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine
his Servants. Written by William Shakespeare. It must thus
have been written in 1599 or 1600; and we find, too, in- its
opening scene, certain allusions that accord with this date. Thus
Leonato's speech, "A victory is twice itself when the achiever
brings home full numbers," and Beatrice's "You had musty
victual," are both thought to point to Essex's campaign in
Ireland.

Shakespeare has taken the details of his plot from several
Italian sources. From the first book of Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso (the story of Ariodante and Genevra), which was trans
lated in 1591, and had already provided the material for a play
performed before the Queen in 1582, he borrowed the idea of a
malevolent nobleman persuading a youthful lover that his lady
is untrue to him, and suborning a waiting-woman to dress like
her mistress, and receive a nocturnal visit by means of a ladder
placed against her lady's window, so that the bridegroom, watch
ing the scene from a distance, may accept it as proof of the
calumny, and so break off the match. All the other details he
took from a novel of Bandello's, the story of Timbreo of Cardona.
Timbreo is represented by Claudio ; through the medium of a
friend, he woos the daughter of Leonato, a nobleman of Messina.
The intrigue which separates the young pair is woven by Girondo
(in Shakespeare, Don John) just as in the play, but with a more
adequate motive, since Girondo himself is in love with the lady.
She faints when she is accused, is given out to be dead, and
there is a sham funeral, as in the play. But in the story it is
represented that the whole of Messina espouses her cause and
believes in her innocence, -while in the play Beatrice alone remains
true to her young kinswoman. The truth is discovered and the
engagement renewed, just as in Shakespeare.

Only for a much cruder habit of mind than that which prevails
among people of culture in our days can this story provide the
motive for a comedy. The very title indicates a point of view
quite foreign to us. The implication is that since Hero was
innocent, and the accusation a mere slander; since she was not
really dead, and the sorrow for her loss was therefore ground
less; and since she and Claudio are at last married, as they might
have been at first — therefore the whole thing has been much ado

"MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING" 253

about nothing, and resolves itself in a harmony which leaves no
discord behind.

The ear of the modern reader is otherwise attuned. He recog
nises, indeed, that Shakespeare has taken no small pains to make
this fable dramatically acceptable. He appreciates the fact that
here again, in the person of Don John, the poet has depicted mere
unmixed evil, and has disdained to supply a motive for his vile
action in any single injury received, or desire unsatisfied. Don
John is one of the sour, envious natures which suck poison from
all sources, because they suffer from the perpetual sense of being
unvalued and despised. He is, for the moment, constrained by
the forbearance with which his victorious brother has treated him,
but " if he had his mouth he would bite." And he does bite, like
the cur and coward he is, and makes himself scarce when his
villainy is about to be discovered. He is an ill-conditioned, base,
and tiresome scoundrel ; and, although he conscientiously does
evil for evil's sake, we miss in him all the defiant and brilliantly
sinister qualities which appear later on in lago and in Edmund.
There is little to object to in Don John's repulsive scoundrelism ;
at most we may say that it is a strange motive-power for a
comedy. But to Claudio we cannot reconcile ourselves. He
allows himself to be convinced, by the clumsiest stratagem, that
his young bride, in reality as pure and tender as a flower, is a
faithless creature, who deceives him the very day before her
marriage. Instead of withdrawing in silence, he prefers, like the
blockhead he is, to confront her in the church, before the altar, and
in the hearing of every one overwhelm her with coarse speeches
and low accusations ; and he induces his patron, the Prince Don
Pedro, and even the lady's own father, Leonato, to join him in
heaping upon the unhappy bride their idiotic accusations. When,
by the advice of the priest, her relatives have given her out as
dead, and the worthy old Leonato has lied up hill and down dale
about her hapless end, Claudio, who now learns too late that he
has been duped, is at once taken into favour again. Leonato only
demands of him — in accordance with the mediaeval fable — that
he shall declare himself willing to marry whatever woman he
(Leonato) shall assign to him. This he promises, without a word
or thought about Hero ; whereupon she is placed in his arms.
The original spectators, no doubt, found this solution satisfactory ;
a modern audience is exasperated by it, very much as Nora, in

254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

A Doll's House, is exasperated on finding that Helmer, after the
danger has passed away, regards all that has happened in their
souls as though it had never been, merely because the sky is
clear again. If ever man was unworthy a woman's love, that
man is Claudio. If ever marriage was odious and ill-omened,
this is it. The old taleteller's invention has been too much even
for Shakespeare's art.

When we moderns, however, think of Much Ado about Nothing,
it is not this distasteful story that rises before our mind's eye. It
is Benedick and Beatrice, and the intrigue in which they are in
volved. The light from these figures, and especially from that of
Beatrice, irradiates the play, and we understand that Shakespeare
was forced to make Claudio so contemptible, because by that
means alone could the enchanting personality of Beatrice shine
forth in its fullest splendour.

Beatrice is a great lady of the Renaissance in her early youth,
overflowing with spirits and energy, brightly, defiantly virginal,
inclined, in the wealth of her daring wit, to a somewhat aggressive
raillery, and capable of unabashed freedom of speech, astounding
to our modern taste, but permitted by their education to the fore
most women of that age. Her behaviour to Benedick, whom she
cannot help perpetually twitting and teasing, is as headstrong and
refractory as Katharine's treatment of Petruchio.

Her diction is marvellous, glittering with unrestrained fantasy.
For instance, after she has assured her uncle (ii. i) that she
" is on her knees every morning and evening" to be spared the
infliction of a husband, since a man with a beard and a man with
out one would be equally intolerable to her, she proceeds —

" Beatrice. . . . Therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of
the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell.

" Leonato. Well, then, go you into hell ?

" Beat. No ; but to the gate ; and there will the devil meet me,
like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say, ' Get you to
heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven ; here's no place for you maids : '
so deliver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter for the heavens ; he
shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the
day is long."

She holds that —

" Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure,
and a cinque-pace : the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and

"MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING" 255

full as fantastical ; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure^full

of state and ancientry ; and then comes repentance, and with hisbsWL v/

legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his ^>/^

grave.

Therefore she exclaims with roguish irony —

" Good Lord, for alliance ! — Thus goes every one to the world but
I, and I am sun-burnt. I may sit in a corner, and cry heigh-ho for a
husband ! "

In her battles with Benedick she outdoes hinr in fantasy, both
congruous and incongruous, or burlesque. Here, again, Shake
speare has evidently taken Lyly as his model, and has tried to
reproduce the polished facets of his dialogue, while at the same
time correcting its unnaturalness, and giving it fresh life. And
Beatrice follows up her victory over Benedick, even when he is
ho longer her interlocutor, with a freedom which is now-a-days
unthinkable in a young girl : —

" D. Pedro. You have put him down, lady ; you have put him
down.

" Beat. So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should
prove the mother of fools."

But this unbridled whimsicality conceals the energetic virtues of
a firm and noble character. When her poor cousin is falsely
accused and cruelly put to shame ; when those who should have
been her natural protectors fall away from her, and even outside
spectators like Benedick waver and lean to the accuser's side;
then it is Beatrice alone who, unaffected even for an instant by
the slander, indignantly and passionately takes up her cause,
and shows herself faithful, high-minded, right-thinking, far-seeing,
superior to them all — a pearl of a woman.

By her side Shakespeare has placed Benedick, a Mercutio
redivivus ; a youth who is the reverse of amatory, opposed to a
maiden who is the reverse of tender. He abhors betrothal and
marriage quite as vehemently as she, and is, from the man's
point of view, no less scornful of all sentimentality than she,
from the woman's; so that he and she, from the first, stand on
a warlike footing with each other. In virtue of a profound and
masterly psychological observation, Shakespeare presently makes
these two fall suddenly in love with each other, over head and

256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

ears, for no better reason than that their friends persuade
Benedick that Beatrice is secretly pining for love of him, and
Beatrice that Benedick is mortally enamoured of her, accompany
ing this information with high-flown eulogies of both. Their
thoughts were already occupied with each other ; and now the"
amatory fancy flames forth in both of them all the more strongly,
because it has so long been banked down. And here, where
everything was of his own invention and he could move quite
freely, Shakespeare has with delicate ingenuity brought the pair
together, not by means of empty words, but in a common cause,
Beatrice's first advance to Benedick taking place in the form of
an appeal to him for chivalrous intervention in behalf of her
innocent cousin.

The reversal in the mutual relations of Benedick and Beatrice
is, moreover, highly interesting in so far as it is probably the
first instance of anything like careful character - development
which we have as yet encountered in any single play of Shake
speare's. In the earlier comedies there was nothing of the kind,
and the chronicle-plays afforded no opportunity for it. The
characters had simply to be brought into harmony with the given
historical events, and in every case Shakespeare held firmly to
the character-scheme once laid down. Neither Richard III. nor
Henry V. presents any spiritual history ; both kings, in the plays
which take their names from them, are one and the same from
first to last. Enough has already been said of Henry's change
of front with respect to Falstaff in Henry IV.; we need only
remark further that here the old play of The Famous Victories l
unmistakably pointed the way to Shakespeare. But this melt
ing of all that is hard and frozen in the natures of Benedick and
Beatrice is without a parallel in any earlier work, and is quite

1 In this play the king says : —

" Ah, Tom, your former life greeves me,

And makes me to abandon and abolish your company for ever,
And therefore not upon pain of death to approach my presence
By ten miles' space, then if I heare well of you,
It may be I will do somewhat for you."

In Shakespeare : —

' ' Till then I banish thee on pain of death
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you."

"MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING" 257

plainly executed con amore. And the real substance of the play
lies not in the plot from which it takes its name, but in the
relation between these two characters, freely invented by Shake-
^speare.

Some other characters Shakespeare has added, and they are
among the most admirable of his comic creations : the peace-
officer Dogberry, and his subordinate Verges. Dogberry is a
country constable, simple as a child, and vain as a peacock — a
well-meaning, timid, honest, good-natured blockhead. To show
that, in those days, such functionaries were almost as helpless
in real life as they are here represented, Henrik Schiick has
cited a letter from Elizabeth's Prime Minister, Lord Burghley,
in which he relates how, in 1586, on a journey from London
into the country, he found at the gate of every town ten or
twelve persons armed with long poles. On inquiring, he learned
that they were stationed there to seize three young men, un
known. Asked what description they had received of the male
factors, they replied that one of them was said to have a crooked
nose. "And have you no other mark to recognise them by?"
" No," was the answer. Moreover, they always stood so openly
in a body, that no criminal could fail to give them a wide berth.

Dogberry is still less formidable than this detective force.
Here are the wise and wary instructions which he gives to his
watchmen : —

" Dogberry. If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by virtue of
your office, to be no true man ; and, for such kind of men, the less you
meddle or make with them, why, the more is for your honesty.

" 2 Watch. If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on
him?

" Dogb. Truly, by your office you may ; but, I think, they that touch
pitch will be defiled. The most peaceable way for you, if you do take
a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your
company."

VOL. I. R

XXVIII

THE INTERVAL OF SERENITY — AS YOU LIKE IT — THE
ROVING SPIRIT— THE LONGING FOR NATURE— JAQUES
AND SHAKESPEARE— THE PLAY A FEAST OF WIT

NEVER had Shakespeare produced with such rapidity and ease
as in this bright and happy interval of two or three years. It is
positively astounding to note all that he accomplished in the year
1600, when he stood, not exactly at the height of his poetical
power, for that steadily increased, but at the height of his poetical
serenity. Among the exquisite comedies he now writes, As You
Like It is one of the most exquisite.

The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, along with
Much Ado About Nothing, on the 4th of August 1600, and must
in all probability have been written in that year. Meres does not
mention it, in 1598, in his list of Shakespeare's plays; it contains
(as already noted, page 36) a quotation from Marlowe's Hero and
Leander, published in 1598—

" Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ? "

a quotation, by the way, which sums up the matter of the comedy ;
and we find in Celia's words (i. 2), " Since the little wit that fools
have was silenced," an allusion to the public and judicial burning
of satirical publications which took place on the 1st of June 1599.
As there does not seem to be room in the year 1599 for more
works than we have already assigned to it, As You Like It must
be taken as dating from the first half of the following year.

As usual, Shakespeare took from another poet the whole
material of this enchanting comedy. His contemporary, Thomas
Lodge (who, after leaving Oxford, became first a player and play
wright in London, then a lawyer, then a doctor and writer on
medical subjects, until he died of the plague in the year 1625),

had in 1590 published a pastoral romance, with many poems

258

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 259

interspersed, entitled Euphues golden Legacze, found after his
death in his Cell at Silexedra?- which he had written, as he sets
forth in his Dedication to Lord Hunsdon, " to beguile the time "
on a voyage to the Canary Islands. The style is laboured and
exceedingly diffuse, a true pastoral style; but Lodge had that
gift of mere external invention in which Shakespeare, with all his
powers, was so deficient. All the different stories which the play
contains or touches upon are found in Lodge, and likewise all the
characters, with the exception of Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey.
Very remarkable to the attentive reader is Shakespeare's uniform
passivity with regard to what he found in his sources, and his
unwillingness to reject or alter anything, combined as it is with
the most intense intellectual activity at the points upon which he
concentrates his strength.

We find in A s You Like It, as in Lodge, a wicked Duke who has
expelled his virtuous brother, the lawful ruler, from his domains.
The banished Duke, with his adherents, has taken refuge in the
Forest of Arden, where they live as free a life as Robin Hood and
his merry men, and where they are presently sought out by the
Duke's daughter Rosalind and her cousin Celia, the daughter of the
usurper, who will not let her banished friend wander forth alone.
In the circle of nobility subordinate to the princes, there is also a
wicked brother, Oliver, who seeks the life of his virtuous younger
brother, Orlando, a hero as modest and amiable as he is brave.
He and Rosalind fall in love with each other the moment they
meet, and she makes sport with him throughout the play, disguised
as a boy. These scenes should probably be acted as though he
half recognised her. At last all ends happily. The wicked Duke
most conveniently repents ; the wicked brother is all of a sudden
converted (quite without rhyme or reason) when Orlando, whom
he has persecuted, kills a lioness — a lioness in the Forest of Arden !
— which is about to spring upon him as he lies asleep. And the
caitiff is rewarded (no less unreasonably), either for his villainy or
for his conversion, with the hand of the lovely Celia.

This whole story is perfectly unimportant ; Shakespeare, that
is to say, evidently cared very little about it. We have here no
attempt at a reproduction of reality, but one long festival of gaiety
and wit, a soulful wit that vibrates into feeling.

First and foremost, the play typifies Shakespeare's longing,
1 Reprinted in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, ed. 1875, part i. vol. ii.

26o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the longing of this great spirit, to get away from the unnatural
city life, away from the false and ungrateful city folk, intent on
business and on gain, away from flattery and falsehood and deceit,
out into the country, where simple manners still endure, where it
is easier to realise the dream of full freedom, and where the scent
of the woods is so sweet. There the babble of the brooks has
a subtler eloquence than any that is heard in cities ; there the
trees and even the stones say more to the wanderer's heart than
the houses and streets of the capital ; there he finds " good in
everything."

The roving spirit has reawakened in his breast — the spirit
which in bygone days sent him wandering with his gun through
Charlcote Park — and out yonder in the lap of Nature, but in a
remoter, richer Nature than that which he has known, he dreams
of a communion between the best and ablest men, the fairest and
most delicate women, in ideal fantastic surroundings, far from the
ugly clamours of a public career, and the oppression of everyday
cares. A life of hunting and song, and simple repasts in the
open air, accompanied with witty talk; and at the same time a
life full to the brim with the dreamy happiness of love. And
with this life, the creation of his roving spirit, his gaiety and
his longing for Nature, he animates a fantastic Forest of Arden.

But with this he is not content. He dreams out the dream,
and feels that even such an ideal and untrammelled life could not
satisfy that strange and unaccountable spirit lurking in the inmost
depths of his nature, which turns everything into food for melan
choly and satire. From this rib, then, taken from his own side,
he creates the figure of Jaques, unknown to the romance, and sets
him wandering through his pastoral comedy, lonely, retiring, self-
absorbed, a misanthrope from excess of tenderness, sensitiveness,
and imagination.

Jaques is like the first light and brilliant pencil-sketch for
Hamlet. Taine, and others after him, have tried to draw a
parallel between Jaques and Alceste — of all Moliere's creations,
no doubt, the one who contains most of his own nature. But
there is no real analogy between them. In Jaques everything
wears the shimmering hues of wit and fantasy, in Alceste every
thing is bitter earnest. Indignation is the mainspring of Alceste's
misanthropy. He is disgusted at the falsehood around him, and
outraged to see that the scoundrel with whom he is at law,

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 261

although despised by every one, is nevertheless everywhere
received with open arms. He declines to remain in bad company,
even in the hearts of his friends; therefore he withdraws from
them. He loathes two classes of people :

" Les uns parcequ'ils sont mechants et malfaisants,
Et les autres pour etre aux mechants complaisants."

These are the accents of Timon of Athens, who hated the
wicked for their wickedness, and other men for not hating the
wicked.

It is, then, in Shakespeare's Timon, of many years later, that
we can alone find an instructive parallel to Alceste. Alceste's
nature is keenly logical, classically French ; it consists of sheer
uncompromising sincerity and pride, without sensibility and
without melancholy.

The melancholy of Jaques is a poetic dreaminess. He is
described to us (ii. i) before we see him. The banished Duke
has just been blessing the adversity which drove him out into the
forest, where he is exempt from the dangers of the envious court.
He is on the point of setting forth to hunt, when he learns that
the melancholy Jaques repines at the cruelty of the chase, and
calls him in that respect as great a usurper as the brother who
drove him from his dukedom. The courtiers have found him
stretched beneath an oak, and dissolved in pity for a poor
wounded stag which stood beside the brook, and " heaved forth
such groans That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting." Jaques, they continue, " moralised this
spectacle into a thousand similes : " —

"Then, being there alone,
Left and abandon'd of his velvet friends ;

* 'Tis right,' quoth he ; ' thus misery doth part
The flux of company.' Anon, a careless herd,
Full of the pasture, jumps along by him,

And never stays to greet him. * Ay,' quoth Jaques,

* Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ;
'Tis just the fashion : wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?"

His bitterness springs from a too tender sensibility, a sensibility
like that of Sakya Mouni before him, who made tenderness to

262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

animals part of his religion, and like that of Shelley after him,
who, in his pantheism, realised the kinship between his own soul
and that of the brute creation.

Thus we are prepared for his entrance. He introduces himself
into the Duke's circle (ii. 7) with a glorification of the fool's
motley. He has encountered Touchstone in the forest, and is
enraptured with him. The motley fool lay basking in the
sun, and when Jaques said to him, " Good morrow, fool ! " he
answered, "Call me not fool till heaven have sent me fortune."
Then this sapient fool drew a dial from his pocket, and said
very wisely —

" ' It is ten o'clock :

Thus may we see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags :

'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,

And after one hour more 'twill be eleven ;

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,

And thereby hangs a tale.' "

" O noble fool ! " Jaques exclaims with enthusiasm. " A worthy
fool ! Motley's the only wear."

In moods of humorous melancholy, it must have seemed to
Shakespeare as though he himself were one of these jesters, who
had the privilege of uttering truths to great people and on the
stage, if only they did not blurt them out directly, but disguised
them under a mask of folly. It was in a similar mood that
Heinrich Heine, centuries later, addressed to the German people
these words : " Ich bin dein Kunz von der Rosen, dein Narr."

Therefore it is that Shakespeare makes Jaques exclaim —

" O, that I were a fool !
I am ambitious for a motley coat."

When the Duke answers, " Thou shalt have one," he declares
that it is the one thing he wants, and that the others must "weed
their judgments" of the opinion that he is wise: —

" I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please ; for so fools have :
And they that are most galled with my folly,
They most must laugh.

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 263

Invest me in my motley : give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,

If they will patiently receive my medicine."

It is Shakespeare's own mood that we hear in these words.
The voice is his. The utterance is far too large for Jaques :
he is only a mouthpiece for the poet. Or let us say that his
figure dilates in such passages as this, and we see in him a
Hamlet avant la lettre.

When the Duke, in answer to this outburst, denies Jaques'
right to chide and satirise others, since he has himself been
"a libertine, As sensual as the brutish sting itself," the poet
evidently defends himself in the reply which he places in the
mouth of the melancholy philosopher : —

" Why, who cries out on pride,
That can therein tax any private party ?
Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea,
Till that the weary very means do ebb ?
What woman in the city do I name,
When that I say, the city-woman bears
The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders ?
Who can come in, and say that I mean her,
When such a one as she, such is her neighbour ? "

This exactly anticipates Holberg's self-defence in the character
of Philemon in The Fortunate Shipwreck. The poet is evidently
rebutting a common prejudice against his art. And as he makes
Jaques an advocate for the freedom which poetry must claim,
so also he employs him as a champion of the actor's mis
judged calling, in placing in his mouth the magnificent speech
on the Seven Ages of Man. Alluding, no doubt, to the motto
of Totus Mundus Agit Histrwnem, inscribed under the Hercules
as Atlas, which was the sign of the Globe Theatre, this speech
opens with the words : —

" All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players ;

They have their exits and their entrances ;

And one man in his time plays many parts."

Ben Jonson is said to have inquired, in an epigram against
the motto of the Globe Theatre, where the spectators were to

264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

be found if all the men and women were players ? And an
epigram attributed to Shakespeare gives the simple answer that
all are players and audience at one and the same time. Jaques'
survey of the life of man is admirably concise and impressive.
The last line —

" Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything "—

with its half French equivalent for " without," is imitated from
the Henriade of the French poet Gamier, which was not trans
lated, and which Shakespeare must consequently have read in
the original.

This same Jaques, who gives evidence of so wide an outlook
over human life, is in daily intercourse, as we have said, ner
vously misanthropic and formidably witty. He is sick of polite
society, pines for solitude, takes leave of a pleasant companion
with the words : " I thank you for your company ; but, good
faith, I had as lief have been myself alone." Yet we must not.
take his melancholy and his misanthropy too seriously. His
melancholy is a comedy-melancholy, his misanthropy is only the
humourist's craving to give free vent to his satirical inspirations.

And there is, as aforesaid, only a certain part of Shakespeare's
inmost nature in this Jaques, a Shakespeare of the future, a
Hamlet in germ, but not that Shakespeare who now bathes in
the sunlight and lives in uninterrupted prosperity, in growing
favour with the many, and borne aloft by the admiration and
goodwill of the few. We must seek for this Shakespeare in the
interspersed songs, in the drollery of the fool, in the lovers'
rhapsodies, in the enchanting babble of the ladies. He is, like
Providence, everywhere and nowhere.

When Celia says (i. 2), " Let us sit and mock the good house
wife, Fortune, from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be
bestowed equally," she strikes, as though with a tuning-fork, the
keynote of the comedy. The sluice is opened for that torrent of
jocund wit, shimmering with all the rainbows of fancy, which is
now to rush seething and swirling along.

The Fool is essential to the scheme : for the Fool's stupidity
is the grindstone of wit, and the Fool's wit is the touchstone of
character. Hence his name.

The ways of the real world, however, are not forgotten. The
good make enemies by their very goodness, and the words of the

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 265

old servant Adam (Shakespeare's own part) to his young master
Orlando (ii. 3), sound sadly enough : —

<; Your praise is come too swiftly home before you.
Know you not, master, to some kind of men
Their graces serve them but as enemies ?
No more do yours : your virtues, gentle master,
Are sanctified, and holy traitors to you.
O, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it ! "

But soon the poet's eye is opened to a more consolatory life-
philosophy, combined with an unequivocal contempt for school-
philosophy. There seems to be a scoffing allusion to a book of
the time, which was full of the platitudes of celebrated philosophers,
in Touchstone's speech to William (v. i), "The heathen philo
sopher, when he had desire to eat a grape, would open his lips
when he put it into his mouth, meaning thereby that grapes were
made to eat and lips to open ; " but no doubt there also lurks in
this speech a certain lack of respect for even the much-belauded
wisdom of tradition. The relativity of all things, at that time a
new idea, is expounded with lofty humour by the Fool in his answer
to the question what he thinks of this pastoral life (iii. 2) : —

" Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself it is a good life, but in respect
that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I
like it very well ; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life.
Now, in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well ; but in respect it
is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits
my humour well ; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much
against my stomach. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd ? "

The shepherd's answer makes direct sport of philosophy, in
the style of Moliere's gibe, when he accounts for the narcotic
effect of opium by explaining that the drug possesses a certain
facnltas dormitativa : —

" Corin. No more, but that I know, the more one sickens, the worse
at ease he is ; and that he that wants money, means, and content, is
without three good friends ; that the property of rain is to wet, and fire
to burn ; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and that a great cause of
the night is lack of the sun. . . .

" Touchstone. Such a one is a natural philosopher."

266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This sort of philosophy leads up, as it were, to Rosalind's sweet
gaiety and heavenly kindness.

The two cousins, Rosalind and Celia, seem at first glance like
variations of the two cousins, Beatrice and Hero, in the play
Shakespeare has just finished. Rosalind and Beatrice in parti
cular are akin in their victorious wit. Yet the difference between
them is very great ; Shakespeare never repeats himself. The wit
of Beatrice is aggressive and challenging ; we see, as it were, the
gleam of a rapier in it. Rosalind's wit is gaiety without a sting ;
the gleam in it is of " that sweet radiance " which Oehlenschlager
attributed to Freia ; her sportive nature masks the depth of her
love. Beatrice can be brought to love because she is a woman,
and stands in no respect apart from her sex; but she is not of
an amatory nature. Rosalind is seized with a passion for Orlando
the instant she sets eyes on him. From the moment of Beatrice's
first appearance she is defiant and combative, in the highest of
spirits. We are introduced to Rosalind as a poor bird with a
drooping wing ; her father is banished, she is bereft of her birth
right, and is living on sufferance as companion to the usurper's
daughter, being, indeed, half a prisoner in the palace, where till
lately she reigned as princess. It is not until she has donned the
doublet and hose, appears in the likeness of a page, and wanders
at her own sweet will in the open air and the greenwood, that she
recovers her radiant humour, and roguish merriment flows from
her lips like the trilling of a bird.

Nor is the man she loves, like Benedick, an overweening
gallant with a sharp tongue and an unabashed bearing. This
youth, though brave as a hero and strong as an athlete, is a
child in inexperience, and so bashful in the presence of the
woman who instantly captivates him, that it is she who is the
first to betray her sympathy for him, and has even to take the
chain from her own neck and hang it around his before he can
so much as muster up courage to hope for her love. So, too,
we find him passing his time in hanging poems to her upon
the trees, and carving the name of Rosalind in their bark. She
amuses herself, in her page's attire, by making herself his con
fidant, and pretending, as it were in jest, to be his Rosalind.
She cannot bring herself to confess her passion, although she can
think and talk (to Celia) of no one but him, and although his
delay of a few minutes in keeping tryst with her sets her beside

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 267

herself with impatience. She is as sensitive as she is intelligent,
in this differing from Portia, to whom, in other respects, she bears
some resemblance, though she lacks her persuasive eloquence,
and is, on the whole, more tender, more virginal. She faints
when Oliver, to excuse Orlando's delay, brings her a handker
chief stained with his blood ; yet has sufficient self-mastery to
say with a smile the moment she recovers, " I pray you tell your
brother how well I counterfeited." She is quite at her ease in
her male attire, like Viola and Imogen after her. The fact that
female parts were played by youths had, of course, something to
do with the frequency of these disguises.

Here is a specimen of her wit (iii. 2). Orlando has evaded the
page's question what o'clock it is, alleging that there are no clocks
in the forest.

" Rosalind. Then, there is no true lover in the forest ; else sighing
every minute, and groaning every hour, would detect the lazy foot of
Time as well as a clock.

" Orlando. And why not the swift foot of Time ? had not that been
as proper ?

" It os. By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces with divers
persons. I'll tell you, who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal,
who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.

" Orl. I pr'ythee, who doth he trot withal ?

" Ros. Marry, he trots hard with a young maid, between the contract
of her marriage, and the clay it is solemnised : if the interim be but a
se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven
years.

" Orl. Who ambles Time withal ?

" Ros. With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not
the gout ; for the one sleeps easily, because he cannot study ; and the
other lives merrily, because he feels no pain. . . .

" Orl. Who doth he gallop withal ?

" Ros. With a thief to the gallows ; for though he go as softly as foot
can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.

" Orl. Who stays it still withal?

" Ros. With lawyers in the vacation ; for they sleep between term
and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves."

She is unrivalled in vivacity and inventiveness. In every
answer she discovers gunpowder anew, and she knows how to
use it to boot. She explains that she had an old uncle who

268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

warned her against love and women, and, from the vantage-
ground of her doublet and hose, she declares —

" I thank God, I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy
offences, as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.

" Orl. Can you remember any of the principal evils that he laid to
the charge of women ?

" Ros. There were none principal : they were all like one another, as
half-pence are ; every one fault seeming monstrous, till its fellow fault
came to match it.

'*' Orl. I pr'ythee, recount some of them.

" Ros. No ; I will not cast away my physic but on those that are sick.
There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with
carving Rosalind on their barks ; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and
elegies on brambles ; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind : if I
could meet that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel,
for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him."

Orlando admits that he is the culprit, and they are to meet
daily that she may exorcise his passion. She bids him woo
her in jest, as though she were indeed Rosalind, and answers
(iv. I):-

" Ros. Well, in her person, I say — I will not have you.

" Orl. Then, in mine own person, I die.

" Ros. No, 'faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six
thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died
in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains
dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die
before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have
lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been
for a hot midsummer night ; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash
him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned,
and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was — Hero of Sestos.
But these are all lies : men have died from time to time, and worms
have eaten them, but not for love."

What Rosalind says of women in general applies to herself in
particular : you will never find her without an answer until you
find her without a tongue. And there is always a bright and
merry fantasy in her answers. She is literally radiant with
youth, imagination, and the joy of loving so passionately and
being so passionately beloved. And it is marvellous how

"AS YOU LIKE IT" 269

thoroughly feminine is her wit. Too many of the witty women
in books written by men have a man's intelligence. Rosalind's
wit is tempered by feeling.

She has no monopoly of wit in this Arcadia of Arden. Every
one in the play is witty, even the so-called simpletons. It is a
festival of wit. At some points Shakespeare seems to have fol
lowed no stricter principle than the simple one of making each
interlocutor outbid the other in wit (see, for example, the con
versation between Touchstone and the country wench whom he
befools). The result is that the piece is bathed in a sunshiny
humour. And amid all the gay and airy wit-skirmishes, amid
the cooing love-duets of all the happy youths and maidens, the
poet intersperses the melancholy solos of his Jaques : —

" I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation ; nor
the musician's, which is fantastical ; nor the courtier's, which is proud ;
nor the soldier's, which is ambitious ; nor the lawyer's, which is politic ;
nor the lady's, which is nice ; nor the lover's, which is all these ; but it
is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted
from many objects."

This is the melancholy which haunts the thinker and the great
creative artist ; but in Shakespeare it as yet modulated with ease
into the most engaging and delightful merriment.

XXIX

CONSUMMATE SPIRITUAL HARMONY— TWELFTH NIGHT-
JIBES AT PURITANISM— THE LANGUISHING CHARAC
TERS—VIOLA'S INSINUATING GRACE— FAREWELL TO '
MIRTH

IF the reader would picture to himself Shakespeare's mood during
this short space of time at the end of the old century and begin
ning of the new, let him recall some morning when he has awakened
with the sensation of complete physical well-being, not only
feeling no definite or indefinite pain or uneasiness, but with a
positive consciousness of happy activity in all his organs : when
he drew his breath lightly, his head was clear and free, his heart
beat peacefully : when the mere act of living was a delight : when
the soul dwelt on happy moments in the past and dreamed of joys
to come. Recall such a moment, and then conceive it intensified
an hundredfold — conceive your memory, imagination, observation,
acuteness, and power of expression a hundred times multiplied —
and you may divine Shakespeare's prevailing mood in those days,
when the brighter and happier sides of his nature were turned to
the sun.

There are days when the sun seems to have put on a new
and festal splendour, when the air is like a caress to the cheek,
and when the glamour of the moonlight seems doubly sweet ;
days when men appear manlier and wittier, women fairer and
more delicate than usual, and when those who are disagreeable
and even odious to us appear, not formidable, but ludicrous — so
that we feel ourselves exalted above the level of our daily life,
emancipated and happy. Such days Shakespeare was now passing
through.

It is at this period, too, that he makes sport of his adversaries
the Puritans without bitterness, with exquisite humour. Even
in As You Like It (iii. 2), we find a little allusion to them, where

Rosalind says, u O most gentle Jupiter! — what tedious homily of

270

"TWELFTH NIGHT" 271

love have you wearied your parishioners withal, and never cried,
1 Have patience, good people ! ' ' In his next play, the typical,
solemn, and self-righteous Puritan is held up to ridicule in the
Don-Quixote-like personage of the moralising and pompous Mal-
volio, who is launched upon a billowy sea of burlesque situations.
Of course the poet goes to work with the greatest circumspection.
Sir Toby has made some inquiry about Malvolio, to which Maria
answers (ii. 3) : —

"Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan.

" Sir Andrew. O ! if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.

" Sir Toby. What, for being a Puritan ? thy exquisite reason, dear
knight ?

" Sir And. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good
enough.

" Mar. The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly but
a time-pleaser ; an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and
utters it by great swarths."

Not otherwise does Moliere expressly insist that TartufTe is not
a clergyman, and Holberg that Jacob von Tyboe is not an officer.

A forged letter, purporting to be written by his noble mistress,
is made to fall into Malvolio' s hands, in which she begs for his
love, and instructs him, as a sign of his affection towards her,
always to smile, and to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings.
He " smiles his face into more lines than are in the new map
[of 1598] with the augmentation of the Indies;" he wears his
preposterous garters in the most preposterous fashion. The con
spirators pretend to think him mad, and treat him accordingly.
The Clown comes to visit him disguised in the cassock of Sir Topas
the curate. "Well," says the mock priest (not without intention
on the poet's part), when Maria gives him the gown, " I'll put it
on, and I will dissemble myself in't; and I would I were the first
that ever dissembled in such a gown."

It is to Malvolio, too, that the merry and mellow Sir Toby,
amid the applause of the Clown, addresses the taunt : —

" Sir Toby. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall
be no more cakes and ale ?

" Cloivn. Yes, by Saint Anne ; and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth
too."

In these words, which were one day to serve as a motto to
Byron's Don Juan, there lies a gay and daring declaration of rights.

272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Twelfth Night } or What you Will, must have been written in
1 60 1, for in the above-mentioned diary kept by John Manningham,
of the Middle Temple, we find this entry, under the date Feb
ruary 2, 1602: "At our feast wee had a play called Twelve
Night, or what you will, much like the commedy of errores, or
Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian
called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the steward be-
leeve his lady widdowe was in love with him," &c. That the play
cannot have been written much earlier is proved by the fact that
the song, " Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone,"
which is sung by Sir Toby and the Clown (ii. 3), first appeared
in a song-book (The Booke of Ay res) published by Robert Jones,
London, 1601. Shakespeare has altered its wording very slightly.
In all probability Twelfth Night was one of the four plays which
were performed before the court at Whitehall by the Lord Cham
berlain's company at Christmastide, 1601-2, and no doubt it was
acted for the first time on the evening from which it takes its name.

Among several Italian plays which bore the name of GT
Inganni there is one by Curzio Gonzaga, published in Venice in
1 592, in which a sister dresses herself as her brother and takes
the name of Cesare — in Shakespeare, Cesario — and another, pub
lished in Venice in 1537, the action of which bears a general
resemblance to that of Twelfth Night. In this play, too, passing
mention is made of one " Malevolti," who may have suggested to
Shakespeare the name Malvolio.

The matter of the play is found in a novel of Bandello's,
translated in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques ; and also in
Barnabe Rich's translation of Cinthio's Hecatomithi, published
in 1581, which Shakespeare appears to have used. The whole
comic part of the action, and the characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby,
Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the Clown, are of Shakespeare's own
invention.

There occurs in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour
a speech which seems very like an allusion to Twelfth Night ;
but as Jonson's play is of earlier date, the speech, if the allusion
be not fanciful, must have been inserted later.1

1 There is some (ironic) discussion of a possible criticism that might be brought
against a playwright : " That the argument of his comedy might have been of some
other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in
love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady' s waiting-maid ; some such
cross wooing, with a clown to their servingman. ..."

"TWELFTH NIGHT" 273

As was to be expected, Twelfth Night became exceed
ingly popular. The learned Leonard Digges, the translator of
Claudian, enumerating in his verses, " Upon Master William
Shakespeare " (1640), the poet's most popular characters, mentions
only three from the comedies, and these from Much Ado and
Twelfth Night. He says : —

" Let but Beatrice

And Benedicke be scene, loe in a trice
The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full
To hear Malvoglio, that crosse garter'd Gull."

Twelfth Night is perhaps the most graceful and harmonious
comedy Shakespeare ever wrote. It is certainly that in which all
the notes the poet strikes, the note of seriousness and of raillery,
of passion, of tenderness, and of laughter, blend in the richest
and fullest concord. It is like a symphony in which no strain can
be dispensed with, or like a picture veiled in a golden haze, into
which all the colours resolve themselves. The play does not
overflow with wit and gaiety like its predecessor; we feel that
Shakespeare's joy of life has culminated and is about to pass over
into melancholy; but there is far more unity in it than in As You
Like It, and it is a great^deal more dramatic.

A. W. Schlegel long ago made the penetrating observation that,
in the opening speech of the comedy, Shakespeare reminds us
how the same word, " fancy," was applied in his day both to love
and to fancy in the modern sense of the term ; whence the critic
argued, not without ingenuity, that love, regarded as an affair of
the imagination rather than of the heart, is the fundamental theme
running through all the variations of the play. Others have since
sought to prove that capricious fantasy is the fundamental trait in
the physiognomy of all the characters. Tieck has compared the
play to a great iridescent butterfly, fluttering through pure blue
air, and soaring in its golden glory from the many-coloured flowers
into the sunshine.

Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare's time, brought the Christmas
festivities of the upper classes to an end ; among the common people
they usually lasted until Candlemas. On Twelfth Night all sorts
of sports took place. The one who chanced to find a bean baked
into a cake was hailed as the Bean King, chose himself a Bean
Queen, introduced a reign of unbridled frivolity, and issued whim
sical commands, which had to be punctually obeyed. Ulrici has

VOL. I. S

274 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

sought to discover in this an indication that the play represents a
sort of lottery, in which Sebastian, the Duke, and Maria chance
to win the great prize. The bibulous Sir Toby, however, can
scarcely be regarded as a particularly desirable prize for Maria ;
and the second title of the play, What you Will, indicates that
Shakespeare did not lay any stress upon the Twelfth Night.

This comedy is connected by certain filaments with its pre
decessor, As You Like It. The passion which Viola, in her male
attire, awakens in Olivia, reminds us of that with which Rosalind
inspires Phebe. But the motive is quite differently handled.
While Rosalind gaily and unfeelingly repudiates Phebe's burning
love, Viola is full of tender compassion for the lady whom her
disguise has led astray. In the admirably worked-up confusion
between Viola and her twin brother Sebastian, an effect from the
Comedy of Errors is repeated ; but the different circumstances
and method of treatment make this motive also practically new.

With a careful and even affectionate hand, Shakespeare has
elaborated each one of the many characters in the play.

The amiable and gentle Duke languishes, sentimental and
fancy-sick, in hopeless enamourment. He is devoted to the fair
Countess Olivia, who will have nothing to say to him, and whom
he none the less besieges with his suit. An ardent lover of
music, he turns to it for consolation ; and among the songs sung
to him by the Clown and others, there occurs the delicate little
poem, of wonderful rhythmic beauty, "Come away, come away,
death." It exactly expresses the soft and melting mood in which
his days pass, lapped in a nerveless melancholy. To the melody
abiding in it we may apply the lovely words spoken by Viola of
the melody which preludes it : —

" It gives a very echo to the seat
Where love is throned."

In his fruitless passion, the Duke has become nervous and ex
citable, inclined to violent self-contradictions. In one and the
same scene (ii. 4) he first says that man's love is

" More giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn "

than" 'woman's; and then, a little further on, he says of his own
love —

"TWELFTH NIGHT" 275

" There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart ; no woman's heart
So big to hold so much : they lack retention."

The Countess Olivia forms a pendant to the Duke ; she, like
him, is full of yearning melancholy. With an ostentatious exag
geration of sisterly love, she has vowed to pass seven whole years
veiled like a nun, consecrating her whole life to sorrow for her
dead brother. Yet we find in her speeches no trace of this de
vouring sorrow ; she jests with her household, and rules it ably
and well, until, at the first sight of the disguised Viola, she
flames out into passion, and, careless of the traditional reserve of
her sex, takes the most daring steps to win the supposed youth.
She is conceived as an unbalanced character, who passes at a
bound from exaggerated hatred for all worldly things to total
forgetfulness of her never-to-be-forgotten sorrow. Yet she is
not comic like Phebe; for Shakespeare has indicated that it is
the Sebastian type, foreshadowed in the disguised Viola, which is
irresistible to her; and Sebastian, we see, at once requites the
love which his sister had to reject. Her utterance of her passion,
moreover, is always poetically beautiful.

Yet while she is sighing in vain for Viola, she necessarily
appears as though seized with a mild erotic madness, similar to
that of the Duke : and the folly of each is parodied in a witty and
delightful fashion by Malvolio's entirely ludicrous love for his
mistress, and vain confidence that she returns it. Olivia feels
and says this herself, where she exclaims (iii. 4) —

" Go call him hither. — I am as mad as he
If sad and merry madness equal be."

Malvolio's figure is drawn in very few strokes, but with in
comparable certainty of touch. He is unforgetable in his turkey-
like pomposity, and the heartless practical joke which is played
off upon him is developed with the richest comic effect. The
inimitable love-letter, which Maria indites to him in a handwriting
like that of the Countess, brings to light all the lurking vanity in
his nature, and makes his self-esteem, which was patent enough
before, assume the most extravagant forms. The scene in which
he approaches Olivia, and triumphantly quotes the expressions in

276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the letter, " yellow stockings," and " cross-gartered," while every
word confirms her in the belief that he is mad, is one of the most
effective on the comic stage. Still more irresistible is the scene
(iv. 2) in which Malvolio is imprisoned as a madman in a dark
room, while the Clown outside now assumes the voice of the
Curate, and seeks to exorcise the devil in him, and again, in his
own voice, converses with the supposed Curate, sings songs, and
promises Malvolio to carry messages for him. We have here
a comic jeu de theatre of the first order.

In harmony with the general tone of the play, the Clown is less
witty and more musical than Touchstone in As You Like It.
He is keenly alive to the dignity of his calling : " Foolery, sir,
does walk about the orb like the sun: it shines everywhere."
He has many delightful sayings, as for example, " Many a good
hanging prevents a bad marriage," or the following demonstration
(v. i) that one is the better for one's foes, and the worse for one's
friends : —

" Marry, sir, my friends praise me, and make an ass of me ; now, my
foes tell me plainly I am an ass : so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the
knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused : so that, con
clusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirma
tives, why then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes."

Shakespeare even departs from his usual practice, and, as
though to guard against any misunderstanding on the part of his
public, makes Viola expound quite dogmatically that it " craves a
kind of wit" to play the fool (iii. i): —

" He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man's art."

The Clown forms a sort of connecting-link between the serious
characters and the exclusively comic figures of the play — the
pair of knights, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who
are entirely of Shakespeare's own invention. They are sharply
contrasted. Sir Toby, sanguine, red-nosed, burly, a practical
joker, always ready for " a hair of the dog that bit him," a figure

"TWELFTH NIGHT" 277

after the style of Bellman ; l Sir Andrew, pale as though with the
ague, with thin, smooth, straw-coloured hair, a wretched little
nincompoop, who values himself on his dancing and fencing,
quarrelsome and chicken-hearted, boastful and timid in the same
breath, and grotesque in his every movement. He is a mere
echo and shadow of the heroes of his admiration, born to be
the sport of his associates, their puppet, and their butt; and
while he is so brainless as to think it possible he may win the
love of the beautiful Olivia, he has at the same time an inward
suspicion of his own stupidity which now and then comes in
refreshingly : " Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a
Christian or an ordinary man has ; but I am a great eater of beef,
and, I believe, that does harm to my wit " (i. 3). He does not
understand the simplest phrase he hears, and is such a mere
reflex and parrot that " I too " is, as it were, the watchword of
his existence. Shakespeare has immortalised him once for all
in his reply when Sir Toby boasts that Maria adores him (ii. 3),
" I was adored once too." Sir Toby sums him up in the phrase :

" For Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his
liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy."

The central character in Twelfth Night is Viola, of whom her
brother does not say a word too much when, thinking that she
has been drowned, he exclaims, "She bore a mind that envy
could not but call fair."

Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, her first wish is to enter
the service of the young Countess ; but learning that Olivia is
inaccessible, she determines to dress as a page (a eunuch) and
approach the young unmarried Duke, of whom she has heard her
father speak with warmth. He at once makes the deepest im
pression upon her heart, but being ignorant of her sex, does not
dream of what is passing within her ; so that she is perpetually
placed in the painful position of being employed as a messenger
from the man she loves to another woman. She gives utterance
to her love in carefully disguised and touching words (ii. 4) : —

" My father had a daughter lov'd a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.

1 See ante, p. 219.

278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Duke. And what's her history ?

Vio. A blank, my lord. She never told her love, —
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek : she pin'd in thought :
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief."

But the passion which possesses her makes her a more
eloquent messenger of love than she designs to be. To Olivia's
question as to what she would do if she loved her as her master
does, she answers (i. 5) : —

" Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house ;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night ;
Holla your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, Olivia ! O ! you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me."

In short, if she were a man, she would display all the energy
which the Duke lacks. No wonder that, against her own will,
she awakens Olivia's love. She herself, as a woman, is con
demned to passivity; her love is wordless, deep, and patient.
In spite of her sound understanding, she is a creature of emotion.
It is a very characteristic touch when, in the scene (iii. 5) where
Antonio, taking her for Sebastian, recalls the services he has
rendered, and begs for assistance in his need, she exclaims that
there is nothing, not even " lying vainness, babbling drunken
ness, or any taint of vice," that she hates so much as ingratitude.
However bright her intelligence, her soul from first to last out
shines it. Her incognito, which does not bring her joy as it does
to Rosalind, but only trouble and sorrow, conceals the most
delicate womanliness. She never, like Rosalind or Beatrice,
utters an audacious or wanton word. Her heart-winning charm
more than makes up for the high spirits and sparkling humour
of the earlier heroines. She is healthful and beautiful, like these
her somewhat elder sisters; and she has also their humorous
eloquence, as she proves in her first scene with Olivia. Yet

"TWELFTH NIGHT" 279

there rests upon her lovely figure a tinge of melancholy. She
is an impersonation of that " farewell to mirth " which an able
English critic discerns in this last comedy of Shakespeare's
brightest years.1

1 " It is in some sort a farewell to mirth, and the mirth is of the finest quality, an
incomparable ending. Shakespeare has done greater things, but he has never done
anything more delightful." — Arthur Symons.

XXX

THE REVOLUTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S SOUL— THE GROW
ING MELANCHOLY OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD —
PESSIMISM, MISANTHROPY

FOR the time is now approaching when mirth, and even the
joy of life, are extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds have
massed themselves on his mental horizon — their nature we can
only divine — and gnawing sorrows and disappointments have
beset him. We see his melancholy growing and extending ; we
observe its changing expressions, without knowing its causes.
This only we know, that the stage which he contemplates with
his mind's eye, like the material stage on which he works, is
now hung with black. A veil of melancholy descends over both.

He no longer writes comedies, but sends a train of gloomy
tragedies across the boards which so lately echoed to the laughter
of Beatrice and Rosalind.

From this point, for a certain period, all his impressions of
life and humanity become ever more and more painful. We can
see in his Sonnets how even in earlier and happier years a restless
passionateness had been constantly at war with the serenity of his
soul, and we can note how, at this time also, he was subject to
accesses of stormy and vehement unrest. As time goes on, we
can discern in the series of his dramas how -not only what he
saw in public and political life, but also his private experience,
began to inspire him, partly with a burning compassion for
humanity, partly with a horror of mankind as a breed of noxious
wild animals, partly, too, with loathing for the stupidity, falsity,
and baseness of his fellow-creatures. These feelings gradually
crystallise into a large and lofty contempt for humanity, until,
after a space of eight years, another revolution occurs in his
prevailing mood. The extinguished sun glows forth afresh, the
black heaven has become blue again, and the kindly interest in
everything human has returned. He attains peace at last in a

INCREASING MELANCHOLY 281

sublime and melancholy clearness of vision. Bright moods,
sunny dreams from the days of his youth, return upon him,
bringing with them, if not laughter, at least smiles. High-
spirited gaiety has for ever vanished ; but his imagination, feel
ing itself less constrained than of old by the laws of reality,
moves lightly and at ease, though a deep earnestness now under
lies it, and much experience of life.

But this inward emancipation from the burthen of earthly life
does not occur, as we have said, until about eight years after the
point which we have now reached.

For a little time longer the strong and genial joy of life is still
dominant in his mind. Then it begins to darken, and, after a
short tropical twilight, there is night in his soul and in all his
works.

In the tragedy of Julius Cczsar there still reigns only a manly
seriousness. The theme seems to have attracted him on account
of the analogy between the conspiracy against Caesar and the
conspiracy against Elizabeth. Despite the foolish precipitancy
of their action, the leaders of this conspiracy, men like Essex
and his comrade Southampton, had Shakespeare's full personal
sympathy ; and he transferred some of that sympathy to Brutus
and Cassius. He created Brutus under the deeply-imprinted con
viction that unpractical magnanimity, like that of his noble friends,
is unfitted to play an effective part in the drama of history, and
that errors of policy revenge themselves at least as sternly as
moral delinquencies.

In Hamlet Shakespeare's growing melancholy and bitterness
take the upper hand. For the hero, as for the poet, youth's bright
outlook upon life has been overclouded. Hamlet's belief and trust
in mankind have-gone to wreck. Under the disguise of apparent
madness, the melancholy life-lore which Shakespeare, at his fortieth
year, had stored up within him, here finds expression in words of
spiritual profundity such as had not yet been thought or uttered
in Northern Europe.

We catch a glimpse at this point of one of the subsidiary causes
of Shakespeare's melancholy. As actor and playwright he stands
in a more and more strained relation to the continually growing
Free Church movement of the age, to Puritanism, which he comes
to regard as nothing but narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It
was the deadly enemy of his calling ; it secured, even in his life-

28-2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

time, the prohibition of theatrical performances in the provinces,
a prohibition which after his death was extended to the capital.
From Twelfth Night onwards, an unremitting war against Puri
tanism, conceived as hypocrisy, is carried on through Hamlet ',
through the revised version of All's Well that Ends Well, and
through Measure for Measure, in which his wrath rises to a
tempestuous pitch, and creates a figure to which Moliere's Tar-
tufife can alone supply a parallel.

What struck him so forcibly in these years was the pitifulness
of earthly life, exposed as it is to disasters, not allotted by destiny,
but brought about by a conjunction of stupidity with malevolence.

It is especially the power of malevolence that now looms large
before his eyes. We see this in Hamlet's astonishment that it is
possible for a man "'to smile and smile and be a villain." Still
more strongly is it apparent in Measure for Measure (v. i) : —

" Make not impossible

That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible,
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo ; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,
Be an arch-villain."

It is this line of thought that leads to the conception of
lago, Goneril, and Regan, and to the wild outbursts of Timon
of Athens.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's first attempt, after Hamlet, to ex
plain the tragedy of life as a product of brutality and wickedness
in conjunction — that is, of brutality multiplied and raised to the
highest power by wickedness. Lady Macbeth poisons her hus
band's mind. Wickedness instils drops of venom into brutality,
which, in its inward essence, may be either weakness, or brave
savagery, or stupidity of manifold kinds. Whereupon brutality
falls a-raving, and becomes terrible to itself and others.

The same formula expresses the relation between Othello
and lago.

Othello was a monograph. Lear is a world-picture. Shakes
peare turns from Othello to Lear in virtue of the artist's need to
supplement himself, to follow up every creation with its counter
part or foil.

PESSIMISM AND MISANTHROPY

283

Lear is the greatest problem Shakespeare had yet proposed to
himself, all the agonies and horrors of the world compressed into
five short acts. The impression of Lear may be summed up in
the words: a world -catastrophe. Shakespeare is no longer
minded to depict anything else. What is echoing in his ears,
what is filling his mind, is the crash of a ruining world.

This becomes even clearer in his next play, Antony and Cleo
patra. This subject enabled him to set new words to the music
within him. In the history of Mark Antony he saw the deep
downfall of the old world-republic — the might of Rome, austere
and rigorous, collapsing at the touch of Eastern luxury.

By the time Shakespeare had written Antony and Cleopatra,
his melancholy had deepened into pessimism. Contempt becomes
his abiding mood, an all-embracing scorn for mankind, which
impregnates every drop of blood in his veins, but a potent and
creative scorn, which hurls forth thunderbolt after thunderbolt.
Troilus and Cressida strikes at the relation of the sexes, Coriolanus
at political life; until all that, in these years, Shakespeare has
endured and experienced, thought and suffered, is concentrated
into the one great despairing figure of Timon of Athens, " mis
anthropes," whose savage rhetoric is like a dark secretion of
clotted blood and gall, drawn off to assuage pain.

BOOK SECOND

I

INTRODUCTION— THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH
IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH

EVERYTHING had flourished in the England of Elizabeth while
Shakespeare was young. The sense of belonging to a people
which, with great memories and achievements behind it, was
now making a decisive and irresistible new departure — the
consciousness of living in an age when the glorious culture of
antiquity was being resuscitated, and when great personalities
were vindicating for England a lofty and assured position, alike
in the practical and in the intellectual departments of life — these
feelings mingled in his breast with the vernal glow of youth itself.
He saw the star of his fatherland ascending, with his own star in
its train.

It seemed to him as though men and women had in that
day richer abilities, a more daring spirit, and fuller powers of
enjoyment than they had possessed in former times. They had
more fire in their blood, more insatiable longings, a keener
appetite for adventure, than the men and women of the past.
They knew how to rule with courage and wisdom, like the Queen
and Lord Burghley; how to live nobly and fight gloriously, to
love with passion and sing with enthusiasm, like the beautiful
hero of the younger generation, Sir Philip Sidney, who found an
early Achilles-death. They were bent on enjoying existence
with all their senses, comprehending it with all their powers,
revelling in wealth and splendour, in beauty and wit; or they
set forth to voyage round the world, to see its marvels, conquer
its treasures, give their names to new countries, and display the
flag of England on unknown seas.

ENGLAND IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH 285

Statesmanship and generalship were represented among them
by the men who, in these years, had humbled Spain, rescued
Holland, held Scotland in awe. They were sound and vigorous
natures. Although they all had the literary proclivities of the
Renaissance, they were before everything practical men, keen
observers of the signs of the times, firm and wary in adversity,
in prosperity prudent and temperate.

Shakespeare had seen Spenser's faithful friend, Sir Walter
Raleigh, next to himself and Francis Bacon the most brilliant and
interesting Englishman of his day, after covering himself with
renown as a soldier, a viking, and a discoverer, win the favour of
Elizabeth as a courtier, and the admiration of the people as a
hero and poet. Shakespeare no doubt laid to heart these lines in
his elegy on Sidney : —

" England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same ;
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried ;
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died :
Thy friends thy want ; the world thy virtues' fame."

For Raleigh, too, was a poet, as well as an orator and historian.
"We picture him to ourselves," says Macaulay, " sometimes re
viewing the Queen's guard, sometimes giving chase to a Spanish
galleon, then answering the chiefs of the country party in the
House of Commons, then again murmuring one of his sweet love-
songs too near the ears of her Highness's maids of honour, and
soon after poring over the Talmud, or collating Polybius with
Livy."1

And Shakespeare had seen the young Robert Devereux, Earl
of Essex, who in 1577, when only ten years old, had made a
sensation at court by wearing his hat in the Queen's presence
and denying her request for a kiss ; at the age of eighteen win
renown for himself as a cavalry general under Leicester in the
Netherlands, and at the age of twenty depose Raleigh from the
highest place in Elizabeth's favour. He played " cards or one
game or another with her . . . till birds' sing in the morning."
She shut herself up with him in the daytime, while the Venetian
and French ambassadors, who had already learnt to wait at locked
doors in the time of his step-father, Leicester, jested with each
other in the anteroom as to whether mounting guard in this

1 Macaulay, Essays — " Burleigh and his Times."

286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

fashion ought to be called tener la mula or tenir la chandelle.
And Essex demanded that Raleigh should be sacrificed to his
youthful devotion. As captain of the guard, Raleigh had to
stand at the door with a drawn sword, in his brown and orange
uniform, while the handsome youth whispered to the spinster
Queen of fifty-four things which set her heart beating. He
made all the mischief he could between her and Raleigh. She
assured him that he had no reason to " disdain " a man like that.
But Essex asked her — so he himself writes — "Whether he could
have comfort to give himself over to the service of a mistress that
was in awe of such a man ; " " and," he continues, " I think he,
standing at the door, might very well hear the worst I spoke of
him."

This impetuosity characterised Essex throughout his career ;
but he soon developed great qualities, of which his first appear
ances gave no promise ; and when Shakespeare made his acquaint
ance, probably in the year 1590, his personality must have been
extremely winning. Himself a poet, he no doubt knew how
to value A Midsummer Night's Dream, and its author. In all
probability, Shakespeare even at this time found a protector in
the young nobleman, and afterwards made acquaintance through
him with his kinsman Southampton, six years younger than
himself. Essex had already distinguished himself as a soldier.
In May 1589 he had been the first Englishman to wade ashore
upon the coast of Portugal, and in the lines before Lisbon he
had challenged any of the Spanish garrison to single combat
in honour of his queen and mistress. In July 1591 he joined
the standard of Henry of Navarre with an auxiliary force of
4000 men ; he shared all the hardships of the common soldiers ;
during the siege of Rouen he challenged the leader of the enemy's
forces to single combat ; and then by his incapacity he dissipated
all the results of the campaign. His army melted away to
almost nothing.

He was at home during the following years, when Shake
speare probably came to know him well, and to appreciate
his chivalrous nature, his courage and talent, his love of poetry
and science, and his helpfulness towards men of ability, such
as Francis Bacon and others. He therefore, no doubt, followed
with more than the ordinary patriotic interest the expedition
of the English fleet to Cadiz in 1596, in which the two old

ENGLAND IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH 287

antagonists, Raleigh and Essex, were to fight side by side.
Raleigh here won a brilliant victory over the great galleons of
the Spanish fleet, burning them all except two, which he captured ;
while on the following day, when a severe wound in the leg
prevented Raleigh from taking part in the action, Essex, at the
head of his troops, stormed and sacked the town of Cadiz. In
his despatches to Elizabeth, Raleigh praised Essex for this
exploit. He became the hero of the day; his name was in
every mouth, and he was even eulogised from the pulpit of
St. Paul's.

It was indeed a great age. England's world-wide power
was founded at the expense of defeated and humiliated Spain ;
England's world-wide commerce and industry came into exist
ence. Before Elizabeth came to the throne, Antwerp had been
the metropolis of commerce ; during her reign, London took
that position. The London Exchange was opened in 1571 ; and
twenty years later, English merchants all the world over had appro
priated to themselves the commerce which had formerly been
almost entirely in the hands of the Hanseatic Towns. London
urchins hung about the wharves of the Thames, listening to
the marvels related by seamen who had made the voyage round
the Cape of Good Hope to Hindostan. Sunburnt, scarred, and
bearded men haunted the taverns ; they had crossed the ocean,
lived in the Bermuda Islands, and brought negroes and Red
Indians and great monkeys home with them. They told tales
of the golden Eldorado, and of real and imaginary perils in
distant quarters of the globe.

This peaceful development of commerce and industry had
taken place simultaneously with the development of naval and
military power. And the scientific and poetical culture of England
advanced with equal strides. While mariners had brought home
tidings of many an unknown shore, scholars also had made
voyages of discovery in Greek and Roman letters; and while
they praised and translated authors unheard of before, dilettanti
brought forward and interpreted Italian and Spanish poets who
served as models of invention and delicacy. The world, which
had hitherto been a little place, had suddenly grown vast; the
horizon, which had been narrow, widened out all of a sudden,
and every mind was filled with hopes for the days to come.

It had been a vernal season, and it was a vernal mood that

288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

had uttered itself in the songs of the many poets. In our days,
when the English language is read by hundreds of millions, the
poets of England may be quickly_counted. In those days the
country possessed something like three hundred lyric and dramatic
poets, who, with potent productivity, wrote for a reading public
no larger than that of Denmark to-day; for of the six millions
of the population, four millions could not read. But the talent
for writing verses was as widespread among the Englishmen of
that time as the talent for playing the piano among German ladies
of to-day. The power of action and the gift of song did not
exclude each other.

But the blossoming springtide had been short, as springtide
always is.

II

ELIZABETH'S OLD AGE

AT the dawn of the new century the national mood had already
altered.

Elizabeth herself was no longer the same. There had always
been a dark side to her nature, but it had passed almost unnoticed
in the splendour which national prosperity, distinguished men,
great achievements and fortunate events had shed around her
person. Now things were changed.

She had always been excessively vain ; but her coquettish
pretences to youth and beauty reached their height after her
sixtietii year. We have seen how, when she was sixty, Raleigh,
from his prison, addressed a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, intended
for her eyes, in which he sought to regain her favour by com
paring her to Venus and Diana. When she was sixty-seven,
Essex's sister, in a supplication for her brother's life, wrote of
that brother's devotion to " her beauties," which did not merit so
hard a punishment, and of her " excellent beauties and perfections,"
rhich "ought to feel more compassion." In the same year the
)ueen took part, masked, in a dance at Lord Herbert's marriage ;
and she always looked for expressions of flattering astonishment
at the youthfulness of her appearance.

When she was sixty-eight, Lord Mountjoy wrote to her of
her " faire eyes," and begged permission to " fill his eyes with
their onely deere and desired object." This was the style which
every one had to adopt who should have the least prospect of
gaining, preserving, or regaining her favour.

In 1 60 1 Lord Pembroke, then twenty-one years old, writes to
"ecil (or, in other words, to Elizabeth, in her sixty-eighth year)
imploring permission once more to approach the Queen, " whose
incomparable beauty was the onely sonne of my little world."

When Sir Roger Aston, about this time, was despatched with
VOL. I. zB9 T

290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

letters from James of Scotland to the Queen, he was not allowed
to deliver them in person, but was introduced into an ante-chamber
from which, through open door-curtains, he could see Elizabeth
dancing alone to the music of a little violin, — the object being
that he should tell his master how youthful she still was, and
how small the likelihood of his succeeding to her crown for many
a long day.1 One can readily understand, then, how she stormed
with wrath when Bishop Rudd, so early as 1596, quoted in a
sermon Kohelet's verses as to the pains of age, with unmistak
able reference to her.

She was bent on being flattered without ceasing and obeyed
without demur. In her lust of rule, she knew no greater pleasure
than when one of her favourites made a suggestion opposed to
one of hers, and then abandoned it. Leicester had employed
this means of confirming himself in her favour, and had bequeathed
it to his successors. So strong was her craving to enjoy inces
santly the sensation of her autocracy, that she would intrigue to
set her courtiers up in arms against each other, and would favour
first one group and then the other, taking pleasure in their feuds
and cabals. In her later years her court was one of the most
corrupt in the world. The only means of prospering in it were
those set forth in Roger Ascham's distich :

" Cog, lie, flatter and face
Four ways in court, to win men grace."

The two main parties were those of Cecil and Essex. Who
ever gained the favour of one of these great lords, be his merits
what they might, was opposed by the other party with every
weapon in their power.

In some respects, however, Elizabeth in her later years had
made progress in the art of government. So weak had been her
faith in the warlike capabilities of her country, and so potent,
on the other hand, her avarice, that she had neglected to make
preparation for the war with Spain, and had left her gallant
seamen inadequately equipped; but after the victory over the
Spanish Armada she ungrudgingly devoted all the resources of
her treasury to the war, which survived her and extended well

1 Arthur Weldon : The Court and Character of King James, 1650; quoted by
Drake, ii. 149.

ATTITUDE OF ELIZABETH TO RELIGION 291

into the following century. This war had forced Elizabeth to
take a side in the internal religious dissensions of the country.
She was the head of the Church, regarded ecclesiastical affairs
as subject to her personal control, and, so far as she was able,
would suffer no discussion of religious questions in the House of
Commons. Like her contemporary Henri Quatre of France, she
was in her heart entirely indifferent to religion, had a certain
general belief in God, but thought all dogmas mere cobwebs
of the brain, and held one rite neither better nor worse than
another. They both regarded religious differences exclusively
from the political point of view. Henry ended by becoming a
Catholic and assuring his former co-religionists freedom of con
science. Elizabeth was of necessity a Protestant, but tolerance
was an unknown doctrine in England. It was an established
principle that every subject must accept the religion of the
State.

Authoritarian to her inmost fibre, Elizabeth had a strong bent
towards Catholicism. The circumstances of her life had placed
her in opposition to the Papal power, but she was fond of
describing herself to foreign ambassadors as a Catholic in all
points except subjection to the Pope. She did not even make
any secret of her contempt for Protestantism, whose head she
was, and whose support she could not for a moment dispense
with. She felt it a humiliation to be regarded as a co-religionist
of the French, Scotch, or Dutch heretics. She looked down upon
the Anglican Bishops whom she had herself appointed, and they,
in their worldliness, deserved her scorn. But still deeper was
her detestation of all sectarianism within the limits of her Church,
and especially of Puritanism in all its forms. If she did not in
the first years of her reign indulge in open persecution of the
Puritans, it was only because she was as yet dependent on their
support; but as soon as she felt herself firmly seated on her
throne, she established, in spite of the stiff-necked opposition
of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Bishops on all matters of
ecclesiastical politics, and suffered Puritan writers to be con
demned to death or life-long imprisonment for free but quite
innocent expressions of opinion regarding the relation of the
State to religion.

Her greatness had mainly reposed upon the insight she had
shown in the choice of her counsellors and commanders. But

292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the most distinguished of those who had shed glory on her
throne died one after the other in the last decade of the century.
The first to die was Walsingham, one of her most disinterested
servants, whom she had repaid with black ingratitude. He had
done her great and loyal services, and had saved her life at the
time of the last conspiracy, which led to the execution of Mary
Stuart. Then she lost such notable members of her Council as
Lord Hunsdon and Sir Francis Knowles; then Lord Burghley
himself, the true ruler of England during her reign ; and finally,
Sir Francis Drake, the great naval hero of the war with Spain.
She felt herself lonely and deserted. She no longer took any
pleasure in the position of power to which England had attained
under her rule. In spite of all she could do to conceal it, she
began to feel the oppression of age, and to see how little real
affection those men felt for her who were always posing in the
light of adorers. She was the last of her line, and the thought
of her successor was so intolerable to her, that she deferred his
final nomination until she lay on her death-bed. But it availed
her nothing ; she knew very well that her ministers and courtiers,
during the last years of her life, were in constant and secret com
munication with James of Scotland. They would kneel in the
dust as she passed with exclamations of enchantment at her
youthful appearance, and then rise, brush the dust from their
knees, and write to James that the Queen looked ghastly and
could not possibly last long. They did all they possibly could
to conceal from her their Scotch intrigues ; but she divined what
went on behind her back, even if she did not realise the extent
to which it was carried, or know definitely which of her most
trusted servants were shrinking from nothing that could assure
them the favour of James. For example, she did not suspect
Robert Cecil of the double game he was carrying on, at the very
time when he was doing his best to drive Essex to desperation
and secure his punishment for an act of disobedience scarcely
more heinous in the Queen's eyes than his own underhand
dealings. But she felt herself isolated in the midst of a crowd
of courtiers impatiently awaiting the new era that was to dawn
after her death. She realised that the men who still flattered
her had never been attached to her for her own sake, and she
specially resented the fact that they no longer seemed even to
fear her.

ELIZABETH AND SOUTHAMPTON 293

One result of this deep dejection was that she gave her
tyrannical tendencies a freer course than before, and became
less and less inclined to forbearance or mercy towards those
who had once been dear to her but had fallen into disgrace.

She had always taken it very ill when one of her favourites
showed any inclination towards matrimony, and they had
therefore always been forced to marry secretly, though that
did not in the end save them from her displeasure. Now her
despotism rose to such a pitch that she wanted to control the
marriages even of those courtiers who had never enjoyed her
favour.

One of the things which Shakespeare doubtless took most
to heart at the end of the old century and beginning of the new
was the hard fate which overtook his distinguished and highly
valued patron Southampton. This nobleman had fallen in love
with Essex's cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Vernon. The Queen
forbade him to marry her, but he would not relinquish his bride.
He was hot-headed and high-spirited. Young as he was, he had
boarded and taken a Spanish ship of war in the course of the
expedition commanded by his friend Essex. Once, in the palace
itself, when Southampton, Raleigh, and another courtier had
been laughing and making a noise over a game of primero, the
captain of the guard, Ambrose Willoughby, called them to order
because the Queen had gone early to bed ; whereupon Southampton
struck this high official in the face and actually had a bout of
fisticuffs with him. Such being his character, we cannot wonder
that he contracted a private marriage in spite of the prohibition
(August 1598). Elizabeth sent him to pass his honeymoon in
the Tower, and thenceforth viewed him with high disfavour.

His close relationship to Essex led to a new outburst of the
Queen's displeasure. When Essex took command of the army
in Ireland in 1599, he appointed Southampton his General of
Horse ; but simply out of resentment for Southampton's dis
obedience in the matter of his marriage, the Queen forced Essex
to rescind the appointment.

One must bear in mind, among other things, this attitude
of the Queen towards Shakespeare's first patron in order to
understand the evident coolness of his feeling towards Eliza
beth. He did not, for example, join in the threnodies of the
other English poets on her death, and even after Chettle had

294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

expressly urged him,1 refrained from writing a single line in
her praise. He probably read her character much as Froude
did in our own day.

Froude admits that she was " supremely brave," and was
turned aside from her purposes by no care for her own life, though
she was " perpetually a mark for assassination." He admits, too,
that she lived simply, worked hard, and ruled her household with
economy. " But her vanity was as insatiable as it was common
place. . . . Her entire nature was saturated with artifice. Except
when speaking some round untruths, Elizabeth never could be
simple. Her letters and her speeches were as fantastic as her
dress, and her meaning as involved as her policy. She was un
natural even in her prayers, and she carried her affectations into
the presence of the Almighty. . . . Obligations of honour were
not only occasionally forgotten by her, but she did not seem to
understand what honour meant." 2

At the point we have now reached in Shakespeare's life, the
event occurred which, of all external circumstances of his time,
seems to have made the deepest impression upon his mind : the
ill-starred rebellion of Essex and Southampton, the execution of
the former, and the latter's condemnation to imprisonment for
life.

1 "Nor doth the silver-tongued Melicert

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare
To mourne her death that graced his desert,
And to his laies opend her Royall eare.
Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death."

2 Froude: History of England, vol. xii. Conclusion.

Ill

ELIZABETH, ESSEX, AND BACON

IN order rightly to understand these events a short retrospect is
necessary.

We have seen how Essex in 1587 ousted Raleigh from the
Queen's favour. From the very first he united with the in
sinuating tone of the adorer the domineering attitude of the
established favourite. This was new to her, and for a consider
able time obviously impressed more than it irritated her.

Here is an instance, from the early days of their relationship.
Essex's sister, Penelope, had, against her will, been married to
Lord Rich. She was adored by Sir Philip Sidney, who sang of
her as his Stella, and their mutual passion was an open secret.
The Maiden Queen, who was always very strict as to the moral
purity of those around her, during a visit which she paid with
Essex to the Earl of Warwick at North Hall in 1587, took
offence at the presence of Lady Rich, and insisted that she
should leave the house. Essex declared that the Queen sub
jected him and his sister to this insult "only to please that
knave Raleigh," and left the house at midnight along with Lady
Rich. He wanted to join the army in the Netherlands, but the
Queen, finding that she could not do without him, had him
brought back again.

At the time of the Armada, therefore, the Queen kept him
at court, much against his own will. Nor would he have been
allowed to take part in the war of 1589 if he had not secretly
made his escape from England, leaving behind him a letter to the
Queen and Council to the effect that " he would return alive at no
one's bidding." An angry letter from Elizabeth forced him, how
ever, to come back after he had distinguished himself before
Lisbon. They were then reconciled, but the practical-minded

Queen immediately demanded of him the repayment of a sum

295

296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

°f ;£3°oo which she had lent him, so that he was forced to
sell his mansion of Keyston. He received in return "the farm
of sweet wines," a very lucrative monopoly, the withdrawal
of which many years afterwards led to the boiling over of his
discontent.

We have seen how his secret marriage in 1590 enraged the
(Jueen, who at once vented her wrath upon his bride. Presently,
however, he was once more in favour, and in the middle of the
French campaign of 1591, Elizabeth recalled him to England for
a week, which was passed in all sorts of festivities. She wept
when he returned to the army, and laid upon him an injunction,
to which he paid very little heed, that he must on no account
incur any personal danger.

During the subsequent four years which Essex passed in
England, occupied with his plans of ambition, it became clear
to him that Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil, was the chief
obstacle to his advancement. All of those, therefore, who for
one reason or another hated the house of Cecil, cast in their
lot with Essex. Thus it happened that Cecil's cousin, Francis
Bacon, who had in vain besought first the father and then the
son for some profitable office, became a close personal adherent
of Essex. It was necessary to make choice of one party or the
other if you were to hope for any, preferment. In the years
1593 and I594> accordingly, we find Essex again and again
importuning Elizabeth for offices for Bacon. She had no very
great confidence in Bacon, and bore him a grudge, moreover,
because he had incautiously spoken in Parliament against a
Government measure; so that Essex, to his great annoyance
and disgust, met with a refusal to all his applications. As a
consolation to his client, he made him a present of land to the
value of not less than ;£i8oo. That w'as the price for which
Bacon sold the property; Essex had believed it to be worth
more.1/. This gift, we see, was nearly twice as large as that
which Southampton is reported to have made to Shakespeare
(see above, p. 181).

Henceforward Bacon is to be regarded as an attentive and
officious adherent of Essex, while Essex makes it a point of
honour to obtain for him every recognition, preferment, and
advantage. Again and again Bacon places his pen at the dis-

1 James Spedding : Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, i. 371.

BACON AND ESSEX 297

posal of Essex. There are extant three long letters from Essex
to his young cousin Lord Rutland, dated 1596, giving him
excellent advice as to how to reap most profit from his first
Continental tour, on which he was then setting out. In many
passages of these letters we recognise Bacon's ideas, and in
some his style, his acknowledged writings containing almost
identical parallels. The probability is that in these, as in many
subsequent instances, Bacon supplied Essex with the ideas and
the first draft of the letters. Well knowing that the Queen's
dissatisfaction with Essex arose chiefly from his desire for
military glory and the popularity which follows in its train —
well knowing, too, that Essex's enemies at court were always
representing this ambition to the Queen as a hindrance to the
peace with Spain, which nevertheless must one day be concluded
— Bacon thought it a good move for his protector to display un
equivocally his care for the occupations of peace, the acquisition
of useful knowledge, and other unmilitary advantages, in letters
which, although private, were likely enough to come into her
Majesty's hands.

Francis Bacon's brother, Anthony, about the same time attached
himself closely (and more faithfully) to Essex. Through him the
Earl established communications with all the foreign courts, so
that for a time his knowledge of European affairs rivalled that
of the Foreign Ministry itself.

The zeal which Essex had displayed in unravelling Doctor
Roderigo Lopez's suspected plot against Elizabeth (see above,
p. 191) had placed him very high in her renewed favour. His
heroic exploits at Cadiz ought to have strengthened his position ;
but his adversary, Robert Cecil, had during his absence acquired
new power, and the rapacious Elizabeth complained of the small-
ness of the booty (it arftounted to £13,000). As a matter of fact,
Essex alone had wanted to follow up the advantage gained, and
to seize the Indian fleet, which was allowed to escape : -,he had
been out-voted in the council of war.

In order to overcome this new resentment on the Queen's
part, Bacon, who regarded his fate as bound up in that of the
Earl, wrote a letter to Essex (dated October 4, 1596), full of
good advice with respect to the attitude he ought to adopt
towards Elizabeth, especially in order to disabuse her mind
of the idea that his disposition was ungovernable — advice which

298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Bacon himself, with his courtier temperament, might easily enough
have followed, but which was too hard for the downright Essex,
who had no sooner made humble submission than his pride again
brought arrogant expressions to his lips.

At the close of the year 1596 Bacon's protector was accused
by his client's mother, Lady Bacon, of misconduct with one of
the ladies of the court. He denied the charge, but confessed to
" similar errors."

In 1597 Essex, who had been longing for a new command,
undertook an expedition to the Azores with twenty ships and
6000 men — an enterprise which, largely owing to his inexperience
and unfortunate leadership, was entirely unsuccessful. On his
return he was very coldly received by the Queen, especially on
the ground that towards the end of the expedition he had
behaved ill to Raleigh, his colleague in command. In order to
make his peace with Elizabeth, he sent her insinuating letters;
but he was mortally offended when the eminent services of the
old Lord Howard were rewarded by the appointment of Lord
High Admiral. As the victor of Cadiz, he regarded himself as
the one possible man for this distinction, which gave Howard
precedence over him. He bemoaned his fate, however, to such
purpose that he soon after secured the appointment of Earl
Marshal of England, which in turn gave him precedence over
Howard. He received a very valuable present — worth £7000 —
and for the first and last time induced the Queen to grant an
audience to his mother, Lady Lettice, whose marriage with
Leicester, twenty-three years before, was not yet forgiven,
although in 1589, at the age of forty-nine, she had married a
third husband, Sir Christopher Blount.

But Essex was not long at peace with the Queen and Court.
In 1598 he was accused of illicit relations with no fewer than
four ladies of the court (Elizabeth Southwell, Elizabeth Brydges,
Mrs. Russell, and Lady Mary Howard), and the charge seems to
have been well founded. At the same time violent dissensions
broke out as to whether an attempt should or should not be made
to bring the war with Spain to a close. Essex carried the day,
and it was continued. It was at this time that he wrote a
pamphlet defending himself warmly from the charge of desiring
war at any price. It was not published until 1602, under the
title: An apology of the Earle of Essex against those which

ESSEX AND ELIZABETH 299

jealously and maliciously tax him to be the hinderer of the peace
and quiet of his country.

To the Queen's birthday of this year (November 17, 1598)
belongs an anecdote which shows what ingenuity Essex displayed
in annoying his rival. As was the custom of the day, the leading
courtiers tilted at the ring in honour of her Majesty, and each
knight was required to appear in some disguise. It was known,
however, that Sir Walter Raleigh would ride in his own uniform
of orange-tawny medley, trimmed with black budge of lamb's
wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists with a body-guard
of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange-tawny, so that
Raleigh and his men seemed only an insignificant division of
Essex's splendid retinue.1

No later than June or July 1598 there occurred a new
scene between Essex and the Queen in the Council, the most
unpleasant and grotesque passage which had yet taken place
between them. The occasion was trifling, being nothing more
than the choice of an official to be despatched to Ireland. Essex
was in the habit of permitting himself every liberty towards
Elizabeth ; and it was now, or soon after, that, as Raleigh
relates, he told her "that her conditions were as crooked as
her carcase." Certain it is that, on this occasion, he turned
his back to her with an expression of contempt. She retorted
by giving him a box on the ear and bidding him " Go and be
hanged." He laid his hand upon his sword-hilt, declared that
he would not have suffered such an insult from Henry the Eighth
himself, and held aloof from the court for months.

Not till October was Essex forgiven, and even then with no
heartiness or sincerity. The Irish rebellion, however, had to be
put down, so a truce was called to all trivial quarrels. O'Neil,
Earl of Tyrone, had got together an army, as he had often done
before, and the whole island was in revolt. Public opinion,
for no sufficient reason, pointed to Essex as the only man who
could deal with the rebels. He, on his part, was by no means
eager to accept the mission. It was of the utmost importance for
every courtier, and especially for the head of a party, not to be
out of the Queen's sight more than was imperatively necessary.
There was every reason to fear that his enemies of the opposite
party would avail themselves of his absence in order so to blacken
1 Gosse : Raleigh, p. 113.

300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

him in the eyes of his omnipotent mistress that he would never
regain her favour. Elizabeth, at this juncture, like Louis XIV.
in the following century, was monarch and constitution in one.
Her displeasure meant ruin, her favour was the only source of
prosperity. Therefore Essex did all he could to secure permis
sion to return from the front whenever he pleased, in order to
report personally to the Queen ; and it was therefore that, in
the following year, when he was forbidden to leave his post,
he threw caution to the winds, and defied the prohibition. He
knew that he was lost unless he could speak to Elizabeth face
to face.

In March 1599 Essex took the command of the English
troops ; he was to suppress the rebellion and grant Tyrone his
life only on condition of his complete surrender. But instead of
carrying out his orders, which were to attack the rebels in their
stronghold, Ulster, Essex remained for long inactive, and at last
marched into Munster. One of his subordinate officers, Sir
Henry Harington, suffered a disgraceful defeat, partly through
his own incompetence, partly through the cowardice of his
officers and men. He was tried by court-martial in Dublin, and
he himself, and every tenth man of his command, were shot. The
summer slipped away, and in its course the 16,000 men with
whom Essex had come to Ireland were reduced by sickness and
desertion to a quarter of their original number. Under these
circumstances, Essex again deferred his march upon Ulster, so
that the Queen, who was excessively displeased, expressly forbade
him to return from Ireland without her permission.

When at last, in the beginning of September 1599, he con
fronted with his shrunken forces Tyrone's unbreathed army,
which had taken up a strong position to await the coming of
the English, he abandoned his plan of attack, invited Tyrone
to a parley, had half an hour's conversation with him on the
6th of September, and concluded a fourteen weeks' armistice,
to be renewed every six weeks until the 1st of May. According
to his own account, he promised Tyrone that this treaty should
not be placed in writing, lest it should fall into the hands of the
Spaniards and be used against him.

This was certainly not what Elizabeth had expected of the
Irish campaign, which had opened with such a flourish of
trumpets, and we cannot wonder that her anger was fierce

FALL OF ESSEX 301

and deep-seated. No sooner had she received the intelligence,
than she forbade the conclusion of any treaty whatsoever.

Convinced that his enemies now had the entire ear of the
Queen, Essex sought safety in once more disobeying Elizabeth's
express command. With a train of only six followers, which
in the indictment against him afterwards grew into a body of
200 picked men, he crossed to England to attempt his own
justification, rode direct to Nonsuch Palace, where Elizabeth
then was, forced all the doors, and, travel-stained as he was,
threw himself on his knees before the Queen, whom he surprised
in her bed-chamber, with her hair undressed, at ten o'clock in the
morning of the 28th of September.

It is a strong proof of the power which his personality still
retained over Elizabeth, that at the first moment she felt nothing
but pleasure in seeing him. As soon as he had changed his
clothes, he was admitted to an audience, which lasted an hour
and a half. As yet all seemed well. He dined at the Queen's
table and told her about Ireland and its people. But in the
evening he was " commanded to keep his chamber" until the
lords of the Council should have spoken with him ; and a few
days later he was confined to York House, with his friend the
Lord Keeper, however, for his gaoler.

He presently fell ill, when it appeared that the Queen had
by no means forgotten her former tenderness for him. In the
middle of December she sent eight physicians to consult as to
his case. They despaired of his life, but he recovered.

While matters thus looked very black for Essex, his nearest
friends also were, of course, in disgrace. In a letter from Rowland
Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney (dated October 1 1, 1599), we find the
following significant statement : " My Lord Southhampton, and
Lord Rutland come not to the court; the one doth but very
seldome; they pass away the Tyme in London merely in going
to Plaies euery day." x Southampton had married a cousin of
Essex, and Rutland a daughter of Lady Essex by her first
marriage with Sir Philip Sidney; so that both were in the same
boat with their more distinguished kinsman.

On the 5th of June 1600, Essex was brought to trial — not
before the Star Chamber, but, by particular favour, before a

1 A. Collins: Letters and Memorials of State, ii. 132.

302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

special court, consisting of four earls, two barons, and four
judges, which assembled at the Lord Keeper's residence, York
House, the general public being excluded. The procedure was
mainly dictated by the Queen's wish to justify the arrest of Essex
in the face of public opinion, which idolised him and regarded him
as a martyr.

IV

THE FATE OF ESSEX AND SOUTHAMPTON

THE indictment did not press too severely upon Essex, did not
as yet seek to discover treasonable motives for his inactivity in
Ireland, but simply dwelt upon his disobedience to the Queen's
commands, and the dangerous and dishonourable agreement with
Tyrone. Francis Bacon had not been allotted any part in the
proceedings ; but on his writing to the Queen and expressing his
desire to serve her in this conjuncture, he was assigned the quite
subordinate task of calling Essex to account for his indiscretion
in accepting the dedication, in unbefitting terms, of a political
pamphlet written by a certain Dr. Hayward. Bacon exceeded
his instructions by dwelling at length on certain passionate ex
pressions in a letter from Essex to the Lord Keeper, in which
he had spoken of the hardness of the Queen's heart and compared
her princely wrath to a tempest. A man who was less nervously
anxious to retain the Queen's favour would have declined this
commission on the ground of his close relations with Essex ;
Bacon begged for it, went farther than it required him to go, and
is scarcely to be believed when he afterwards, in his Apology,
represents himself as actuated by the wish ultimately to be of
service to Essex with the Queen. Still, he evidently had not
ceased to regard a reconciliation between Elizabeth and Essex
as the most probable result, and he may perhaps have done his
best in private conversations to soften the Queen's resentment.

The sentence passed by the Lord Keeper was the not very
severe one that Essex should, in the meantime, be deprived of
all his offices, and remain a prisoner in Essex House "till it
shall please her Majesty to release both this and all the rest."

Bacon, who still did not think Essex irretrievably lost, now
tried, in a carefully worded letter to him, to explain his attitude,
and at once received from his magnanimous friend a forgiveness

303

304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

which was scarcely deserved. Bacon declared that, next to the
interests of the Queen and the country, those of Essex always
lay nearest his heart ; and he now composed two documents :
first, a very judicious letter, which Essex was partly to re-write
and then to send to the Queen, and next a fictitious letter, a
masterpiece of diplomacy, purporting to have been written by
his brother, Anthony Bacon, Essex's faithful adherent, to Essex
himself. This letter, and Essex's reply to it, which prove to
admiration Bacon's talent for reproducing the styles of two such
different men, were to be copied by them respectively, and to be
brought to the knowledge of the Queen, on whom they would
no doubt produce the desired impression. With Machiavellian
subtlety, these letters are carefully framed so as to place Francis
Bacon himself in the light which should most appeal to the
Queen : Essex is represented as regarding him as entirely won
over to her side, and Anthony expresses the hope that she will
show him the favour he has deserved " for that he hath done and
suffered."

Bacon did not succeed in inducing Elizabeth to restore Essex
to his former position in her favour. In August, a couple of
months after the date of the sentence, he was placed at full
liberty; but access to Elizabeth's person was denied him, and
he was bidden to regard himself as still in disgrace. The con
sequence was that few now came about him except the members
of his own family. Add to this, that he was over head and ears
in debt, and that his monopoly of sweet wines, which had been
his chief source of income, and on the renewal of which his
financial rescue depended, fan out in the following month.

He wavered between fear and hope, and was forever "shifting
from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly,
as well proveth him devoid of good reason as of right mind." At
one moment he is appealing to the Queen with the deepest
humility in flattering letters, and at the next he is speaking of
her — so his friend Sir John Harington reports — as " became no
man who had mens sana in corpore sano."

Then came the catastrophe. His sources of income were cut
off, and his hope of the Queen's relenting was broken. He was
convinced — without reason, as it appears — that his enemies at
court, who had deprived him of his wealth, had now laid a plot
to deprive him of his life as well. He imagined, too, that Sir

ESSEX'S REBELLION 305

Robert Cecil was weaving intrigues to bring about the nomi
nation of the Infanta of Spain as Elizabeth's successor; and in
his desperation he began to nurse the illusion that it was as
necessary for the welfare of the state as for his own that he
should gain forcible access to the Queen and secure the banish
ment from court of her present advisers. In his dread of being
once more placed under arrest, and this time sent to the Tower,
he determined, in February 1601, to carry out a plan he had
been hatching, for taking the court by storm.

Southampton had at this time allowed the malcontents to make
his residence, Drury House, their meeting-place for discussing the
situation. Here the general plan was laid that they should seize
upon Whitehall and that Essex should force his way into the
Queen's presence ; the time was to depend upon the arrival of the
Scotch envoy. On the 5th of February, four or five of the Earl's
friends presented themselves at the Globe Theatre, and promised
the players eleven shillings more than they usually received if,
on the /th, they would perform the play of the deposition and
death of King Richard II. (see above, p. 148). In the mean
time, Essex had, in the beginning of February, assembled his
adherents in his own residence, Essex House, and this induced
the Government, which had heard with uneasiness of so large a
concourse of people, to summon Essex before the Council. He
received the summons on the 7th of February 1601, excused
himself on the ground of indisposition, and at once called his
friends together. On the same evening three hundred men were
gathered at his house, although no real plan had as yet been
determined upon. He informed them that his life was threatened
by Cobham and Raleigh. On the morning of the 8th of Feb
ruary, the Lord Keeper with three other noblemen, commissioned
by the Queen to inquire into what was going on, appeared at
Essex House, and demanded to see the Earl. They told him
that any complaints he might have to make to the Queen should
receive attention, but that in the first place he must order his
adherents to disperse.

Essex made only confused replies : his life was threatened, he
was to be murdered in his bed, he had been treacherously dealt
with, and so forth. In the meantime shouts arose from the crowd
of his retainers, " Away, my lord ; they abuse you, they betray
yon, they undo you ; you lose time ! " Essex led the noblemen
VOL. I. U

306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

into his house amid cries from his armed friends of " Kill them,
kill them ! " and " Shut them up ! Keep them as pledges, cast
the great seal out at the window ! " He had them locked up in
his library as prisoners or hostages. Then he came out again,
and, amid cries of " To Court ! to Court ! " his party rushed through
the gates. At the last moment, Essex learned that the Court was
prepared, the watch was doubled, and every access to Whitehall
was barred. They were therefore forced to attempt, in the first
place, to stir up an insurrection in the city. But in order to pass
through the streets horses were needed ; they were sent for, but
there was delay in procuring them. So impatient was every
one by this time, that instead of awaiting their arrival, several
hundred men, headed by Essex, Southampton, Rutland, Blount,
and other gentlemen, but without any real leader or effective
plan of action, set off for the city. Essex nowhere made any
speech to the populace, but merely shouted, as though beside him
self, that an attempt had been made to murder him. A good many
people, indeed, appeared to join him, but hone of them were
armed, and they were in reality no more than onlookers. In the
meantime, the Government despatched high officials on horse
back to different quarters of the town to proclaim Essex a traitor ;
whereupon many of his following deserted him. Troops, too,
were despatched against him, so that he, with the remainder of
his band, with difficulty made their way by water back to Essex
House, which was immediately besieged and fired upon. In the
evening Essex and Southampton opened negotiations, and about
ten o'clock surrendered with their little force, on the under
standing that they should be courteously treated and accorded an
honourable trial. The prisoners were taken to the Tower.

Francis Bacon now again plays a part, and this time a decisive
one, in Essex's history. There was no need for him to take any
share in the trial ; and even if his office had imposed it upon him,
he ought in common decency to have refrained. He was neither
Attorney-General nor Solicitor, but only one of the " Learned
Counsel." The very fact of his close friendship with Essex,
however, made the Government anxious that he should appear
in the case. He was at once advocate and witness, and was not
.summoned as one of the learned counsel, but expressly as " friend
to the accused."

On the 1 9th February, Essex and Southampton were brought

TRIAL OF ESSEX 307

before a court consisting of twenty-five peers and nine judges.
Already, on the 1 7th, Thomas Leigh, a captain in Essex's Irish
army, for trying to gain access to the palace on the 8th February,
had been beheaded in the Tower. Now that Essex's cause was
irreparably lost, Bacon had no other thought than to make him
self useful to the party in power and prove his devotion to the
Queen. The purport of his first speech against Essex was to
prove that the plan of exciting an insurrection in the city, which
was in reality an inspiration of the moment, had been the result
of three months' deliberation. He represented as false and hypo
critical Essex's assurance that he was driven to action by dread
of the machinations of powerful enemies. He compared Essex
to Cain, the first murderer, who also sought excuses for his deed,
and to Pisistratus, who wounded himself and ran through the
streets of Athens, crying that an attempt had been made upon
his life. The Earl of Essex, he said, in reality had no enemies.

Essex rejoined that he could " call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr.
Bacon." Bacon, " being a daily courtier," had promised to plead
his cause with the Queen. He had with great address composed
a letter to her, to be signed by Essex. He had also written
another letter in his brother Anthony's name, and an answer to
it from Essex, both of which he was to show to the Queen ; and
in these " he laid down the grounds of my discontent, and the
reasons I pretend against mine enemies, pleading as orderly for
me as I could do myself."

This rejoinder told sensibly against Bacon, and drove him in
his reply to launch against his benefactor a new and much more
malignant and dangerous comparison. He likened him to a re
nowned contemporary, also a nobleman and a rebel, the Duke of
Guise : " It was not the company you carried with you, but the
assistance you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto.
The Duke of Guise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the
day of the Barricados in his doublet and hose, attended only
with eight gentlemen, and found that help in the city which
(thanks be to God) you failed of here. And what followed ? The
King was forced to put himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that
disguise to steal away to scape their fury."

In view of Essex's persistent denial that he had aspired to
the throne or sought to d9 the Queen any injury, this parallel
was a terrible one for him.

308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Both he and Southampton were found guilty and condemned
to death.

The trial of Shakespeare's protector, Southampton, and his
signed confession, have a special interest for us. In a private
letter from John Chamberlain, dated the 24th February, we read :
"The Earl of Southampton spake very well (but methought
somewhat too much, as well as the other), and as a man that
would fain live, pleaded hard to acquit himself; but all in vain,
for it could not be : whereupon he descended to entreaty and
moved great commiseration, and though he were generally well
liked, yet methought he- was somewhat too low and submiss,
and seemed too loath to die before a proud enemy."

Southampton, in his own confession, admits that immediately
after his arrival in Ireland, he became aware of Essex's letter
to King James of Scotland, urging that, for his own sake, he
ought not to permit the government of England to remain in
the hands of his and Essex's common enemies, proposing that he
should, at a fitting opportunity, assemble an army, and promising
that Essex, in so far as his duty to her Majesty permitted, should
support the King with his Irish troops. James replied evasively,
and nothing came of the plan, in which Southampton soon re
gretted that he had taken share. After losing his post in Ire
land, he went to the Netherlands, and had no other desire than
to regain the favour of the Queen, when Essex, his kinsman and
friend, summoned him to London and requested his support in
the plan he had formed for seeking access to her Majesty.
With a heavy heart, he had consented, and engaged in the
enterprise, not from any treachery or disrespect towards her
Majesty, but solely on account of his affection for Essex. He
repents and abhors his action, and promises on his knees to
consecrate to the Queen's service every day that remains to him,
if she will but spare his life.

Southampton impresses us as a man of fiery but yielding
character, entirely under the influence of a stronger personality ;
but he is never betrayed into a single unworthy word with respect
to his kinsman and friend, whose cause he of course knew to
be hopeless. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment for
life.

Essex himself, at the end, endured with less resolution the
cruel ordeal to which he was subjected. Finding himself con-

DEATH OF ESSEX 309

demned to death, and knowing that many of his closest friends
had confessed to the Drury House discussions and designs, he
lost all balance during the last days of his life, entirely forgot
his dignity, and overwhelmed those around him, his sister, his
friends, his secretary, and himself, with a torrent of reproaches.

In the meantime his enemies were not idle. Even Raleigh,
on whose proud nature one is sorry to find such a stain, impelled,
of course, not only by their old enmity, but by Essex's recent
assertions that he was plotting against his life, wrote to Cecil,
in his uneasiness lest Essex should be pardoned, and urged
him "not to relent," but to see that the sentence was carried
out.

Elizabeth had first signed the death-warrant, and then recalled
it. On the 24th February she signed it a second time, and on
the 25th February 1601, Essex's head was severed by three
blows of the axe.

The populace could not be persuaded of their favourite's guilt.
They loathed his executioner, and detested those men who, like
Bacon and Raleigh, had, by their malice, contributed to his
downfall.

In order to justify itself, the Government issued an official
Declaration touching the Treasons of the late Earl of Essex and
his complices, in the composition of which Bacon bore a large
part. It is very untrustworthy. James Spedding, indeed, one
of Bacon's best biographers, has tried to reconcile it with the
facts ; but he has not succeeded in explaining away the damnatory
circumstance that everything is omitted which tended at the trial
to establish Essex's intention to use no violence, and to prove how
entirely unpremeditated was the attempt to raise an insurrection
in the city. Where passages of this nature occur in the records,
all of which are preserved, we find the letters om. (meaning, of
course, "to be omitted") written in the margin, sometimes in
Bacon's hand, sometimes in that of the Attorney-General, Coke.1

Bacon, with his brilliant intellectual equipment and his con
sciousness of his great powers, is not to be set down as simply
a bad man. But his heart was cold, and he had no greatness of
soul. He was absorbed, to a quite unworthy degree, in the pursuit

1 Compare Dictionary of National Biography ', Robert Devereux ; Spedding,
Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ii. 190-374 ; Edwin Abbott, Francis Bacon, an
Account of his Life and Works, pp. 53-82 ; Macaulay, Lord Bacon ; Gosse, Raleigh.

310 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of worldly prosperity. Always deeply in debt, he coveted above
everything fine houses and gardens, massive plate, great revenues,
and, as essential preliminaries, high offices and employments, titles
and distinctions, which he might well have left to men of meaner
worth. He passed half his life in the character of an office-
seeker, met with one humiliating refusal after another, and
returned humble thanks for the gracious denial. Once and once
only, in his early days in Parliament, did he display some in
dependence and rectitude ; but when he saw that it gave offence
in the highest places, he repented as bitterly as though he had
been guilty of a sin against all political morality, and besought
her Majesty's forgiveness in terms that might have befitted a
detected thief. With the like baseness and pusillanimity he now
turned against Essex. He had often cited the maxim, which even
Cicero criticised in the De Amicitia : u Love as if you should here
after hate, and hate as if you should hereafter love." He had
never loved Essex otherwise. His excuse, if there can be any,
for seeking advancement at all costs, must be found in the fact
that he had the highest conception of his own value to science,
and thought that it would be to the honour and advantage ot
learning that he, its high-priest, should be highly placed.

If we examine Essex's portrait, with its regular beauty, its air
of distinction and gentleness, the high forehead, the curly hair,
and the carefully combed long light beard, we can readily under
stand that such a man, surrounded by a halo of adventurous
renown, must become the idol of the populace, and that the
military incompetence which he had twice displayed should not
greatly affect the high esteem in which the people held him. He
was in reality as little of a statesman as of a general; he was
simply a free-speaking, passionate man, innocent of diplomacy, a
brave soldier without an idea of tactics. He misunderstood his
influence over Elizabeth, and did not realise that the Queen,
while she felt the charm of his personality, contemned his political
counsels. There was a good deal of the poet in his composition ;
he wrote pretty sonnets, was a patron of writers no less than of
fighters, showed himself generous to profusion towards his friends
and clients, and found, perhaps, his sincerest and most convinced
admirers among the authors and poets of the day. Innumerable
are the books which are dedicated to him.

There is no doubt that after his melancholy death, a marked

CONDUCT OF BACON 311

decline was apparent in the Queen's courage and spirits. The
legend, however, that it was the fact of his execution which
she took so much to heart, is scarcely to be believed, and the
story about Essex's ring, which was conveyed to her too late,
is unquestionably a fable. It is certain, on the other hand —
for the Due de Biron, the envoy of Henri IV., had no motive
for telling a falsehood — that on the I2th September 1601, after
a conversation about Essex in which she jested over her departed
favourite, Elizabeth opened a box and took out of it Essex's
skull, which she showed to Biron. Ten months later, this
favourite of the French king — whose name Shakespeare had
borrowed for the hero of his first comedy — met with the very
fate of Essex, and for a similar crime.

Bacon, no doubt, mourned Essex's disappearance even less
than did the Queen. After Elizabeth's death, however, when the
friends of Essex stood in the highest favour with the new King,
he was shameless enough to send a letter to Southampton (who,
though not yet released from the Tower, was already regarded
as a power in the land), in which, after having expressed his
fear of being met with distrust, he concludes thus : " It is as
true as a thing that God knoweth, that this great change hath
wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than
this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before."

The circumstances of Essex's condemnation were of course
not known in the London of those days so minutely as we now
know them. But we see, as already indicated, that public opinion
turned vehemently against Bacon, regarding and despising him
as the traitor to his lord who, more than any one else, had
brought about his unhappy end. We see that Raleigh, in spite
of his greatness, now became one of the most unpopular men
in England ; and we observe that, notwithstanding all that was
done to disparage him in the general regard, Essex's memory
continued to be idolised by the great mass of the people.

If we now inquire in what relation Shakespeare stood to
these events which so absorbed the English people, it seems
more than probable that he, who had so recently been so
intimately associated with Southampton, and cannot therefore
have been very far from Essex, followed the accused with his
sympathy, felt a lively resentment towards their enemies, and
took their fate much to heart. And when we observe that just

312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

at this juncture a revolution occurs in Shakespeare's hitherto
cheerful habit of mind, and that he begins to take ever gloomier
views of human nature and of life, we cannot but recognise the
probability that grief for the fate which had overtaken Essex,
Southampton, and their fellows, was one of the sources of his
growing melancholy.

V

THE YEAR i6oi—THE SONNETS AND PEMBROKE

THE turning-point in Shakespeare's prevailing mood must be
placed in or about the year 1601. We naturally looked for one
source of his henceforth deepening melancholy in outward events,
in the political drama which in that year reached its crisis and
catastrophe ; but it is still more imperative that we should look
into his private and personal experiences for the ultimate cause
of the revolution in his soul. We must therefore inquire what
light his works throw upon his private circumstances and state of
mind during this fateful year.

Now, we find among Shakespeare's works one which, more
than any other, enables us to look into his inmost soul; and
this work, as the latest and most penetrating of his students and
critics have established, must date from about 1601 — I mean his
Sonnets. It is to these remarkable poems that we must mainly
address ourselves for the information we require. Public events
may, indeed, cast a certain measure of light or shadow over a
man's inward world of thought and feeling ; but they are never
the efficient factors in determining the happiness or melancholy
of his fundamental mood. If he has personal reasons for feeling
that fate is against him, the utmost serenity in the political atmos
phere will not dissipate his gloom ; and, conversely, if a deep joy
abides within him, and he has personal reasons for feeling himself
favoured by fortune, then public discontent will be powerless to
disturb the harmony in his soul. But his depression will, of
course, be doubly severe if public events and private experiences
combine to cast a gloom over his mind.

Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets" are first mentioned in the
well-known passage in Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598), where
they are spoken of as passing from hand to hand " among his

private friends." In the following year the two important Sonnets

313

314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

now numbered cxxxviii. and cxliv. were printed (with readings
subsequently revised) in a collection of poems named The Pas
sionate Pilgrim, dishonestly published, and falsely attributed to
Shakespeare, by a bookseller named Jaggard. For the next ten
years we find no mention of Sonnets by Shakespeare, until, in
1609, a bookseller named Thomas Thorpe issued a quarto book
entitled Shakespeares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted — an
edition which the poet himself certainly cannot have revised for
the press, but which may possibly have been printed from an
authentic manuscript.

To this first edition is prefixed a dedication, written by the
bookseller in the most contorted style, which has given rise to
theories and conjectures without number. It runs as follows : —

TO . THE . ONLTE . BEGETTER . OF

THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .

MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE .

AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .

PROMISED .

BY .
OVR . EVER-LIVING . POET .

WISHETH .

THE . WELL-WISHING .

ADVENTVRER . IN .

SETTING .

FORTH .

T . T .

The meaning of the signature is clear enough, since " A booke
called Shakespeare's Sonnets" was entered in the Stationers'
Register on May 20, 1609, under the name of Thomas Thorpe. On
the other hand, throughout this century and the last, there has been
no end to the discussion as to what is meant by " onlie begetter "
(only producer, or only procurer, or only inspirer ?) ; and num
berless have been the attempts to identify the " Mr. W. H." who
is so designated. While the far-fetched expression " begetter"
has been subjected to equally far-fetched interpretations, the most
impossible guesses have been nazarded as to the initials W. H.,
and the most incredible conjectures put forward as to the person
to whom the Sonnets are addressed.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact, that during
the first eighty years of the eighteenth century the Sonnets were
taken as being all addressed to one woman, all written in honour
of Shakespeare's mistress. * It was not till 1780 that Malone and

THE "ONLIE BEGETTER" 315

his friends declared that more than one hundred of the poems were
addressed to a man. This view of the matter, however, did not
even then command general assent, and so late as 1797 Chalmers
seriously maintained that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen
Elizabeth, who was also, he believed, the inspirer of Spenser's
famous Amoretti, in reality addressed to the lady who afterwards
became his wife. Not until the beginning of this century did
people in general understand, what Shakespeare's contemporaries
can certainly never have doubted, that the first hundred and
twenty-six Sonnets are directed to a young man.

It now followed almost of necessity that this young man
should be identified with the " Mr. W. H." who is described as
the "onlie begetter" of the poems. The second group, indeed,
is addressed to a woman ; but the first group is much the larger,
and follows immediately upon the dedication.

. Some have taken the word " begetter " to signify the man who
procured the manuscript for the bookseller, and have conjectured
that the initials are those of William Hathaway, a brother-in-
law of Shakespeare's (Neil, Elze). Dr. Farmer last century ad
vanced the claims of William Hart, the poet's nephew, who, as
was afterwards discovered, was not born until 1600. The mere
fact that, by a whim or oversight of which there are many other
examples in the first edition, the word "hues," in Sonnet xx., is
printed in italics with a capital and spelt Hews, led Tyrwhitt to
assume the existence of an otherwise unknown Mr. William
Hughes, to whom he supposed the Sonnets to have been ad
dressed. People have even been found to maintain that <( Mr.
W. H." referred to Shakespeare himself, some taking the " H." to
be a mere misprint for " S.," others holding that the initials meant
" Mr. William Himself" (Barnstorff).

Serious and competent critics for a long time inclined to the
opinion that the "W. H." was a transposition of " H. W.," and
represented none other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of South
ampton, whose close relation to the poet had long been known,
and to whom his two narrative poems had been dedicated. This
theory was held by Drake and Gervinus. But so early as 1832,
Boaden advanced some strong objections to this view, which in
our days has become quite untenable. There can be no doubt
that the poet's friend whom the Sonnets celebrate bore the
Christian name of William (see Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi., cxliii.),

316 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

whereas Southampton's Christian name was Henry. South
ampton, moreover, never possessed the personal beauty in
cessantly dwelt upon in these poems. Finally, the Sonnets fit
neither his age, nor his character, nor his history, full of move
ment, activity, and adverse fortune, to which no smallest allusion
appears.

In the year 1601, when, as we shall presently see, Sonnets c.
to cxxvi. must have been written, Southampton was twenty-eight
years old, and consequently could not be the " lovely boy" ad
dressed in Sonnet cxxvi., and compared in Sonnet cxiv. to a
"cherubin."

There is only one person whose name, age, history, appear
ance, virtues, and vices accord in every respect with those of the
" Mr. W. H." to whom the Sonnets are dedicated and addressed,
and that is the young William Herbert, who in 1601 became Earl
of Pembroke. Born on April 8, 1580, he came to London in the
autumn of 1597 or spring of 1598, and very soon, in all proba
bility, made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, with whom he
doubtless remained on terms of friendship until the poet's death.
The first folio of 1623 is dedicated by the editors to him and his
brother, on the ground that they have " prosequuted " both the
plays, "and their Authour liuing, with so much fauour." We see,
too, that since Bright in 1819, and Boaden in 1832, had independ
ently of each other put forward the theory that Pembroke was the
hero of the Sonnets, this view has gradually made its way, and is
now shared by the best critics (such as Dowden), while it has
received, as it were, its final confirmation in the acute and often
convincing critical observations contained in Mr. Thomas Tyler's
book on the Sonnets, published in 1890.

The way by which we arrive at William Herbert is this :
Shakespeare's Sonnets are not isolated poems. We very soon
discern that they stand in an intimate relation to each other, a
thought or motive suggested in one being developed more at
length in the next or one of the subsequent Sonnets. The group
ing proves to be by no means arbitrary, as was once thought to
be the case ; on the contrary, it is so careful that all attempts to
alter it have only rendered the poems more obscure. The first
seventeen Sonnets, for example, form a closely interwoven group ;
in all of them the friend is exhorted not to die unmarried, but to
leave the world an heir to his beauty, which must otherwise fade

THE DARK LADY 317

and perish with him. Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which are inseparably
connected, turn on the reunion of the two friends after a cold
ness or misunderstanding has for a time severed them. Finally,
Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are all addressed, not to the friend, but to a
mistress, the Dark Lady whose relation to the two friends has
already formed the subject of earlier Sonnets.

Sonnet cxliv. — one of the most interesting, inasmuch it depicts
in straightforward terms the poet's situation between friend and
mistress — had already appeared, as above mentioned, in The
Passionate Pilgrim (1599). It characterises the friend as the
poet's " better angel," the mistress as his " worser spirit," and
expresses the painful suspicion that the friend is entangled in the
Dark Lady's toils —

" I guess one angel in another's hell ; "

so that both at once are lost to him, he through her and she
through him.

But precisely the same theme is treated in Sonnet xl., which
turns on the fact that the friend has robbed Shakespeare of his
"love." These two Sonnets must thus be of the same date ; and
from Sonnet xxxiii., which relates to the same circumstances, we
see that the friendship had existed only a very short time when
it was overshadowed by the intrigue between the friend and the
mistress : —

" But out, alack ! he was but one hour mine."

At what time, then, did the friendship begin ? The date may
be determined with some confidence, even apart from the ques
tion as to who the friend was! We know that Shakespeare must
have written sonnets before 1598, since Meres published in that
year his often-quoted words about the " sugred Sonnets " ; but we
cannot possibly determine which Sonnets these were, or whether we
possess them at all, since those which passed from hand to hand
" among his private friends " may very possibly have disappeared.
If they are included in our collection, we may take them to be
those in which we find frequent parallels to lines in Venus and
Adonis and the early comedies, though these coincidences are
by no means sufficient, as Hermann Conrad : would have us

1 Hermann Conrad in Preussische Jahrbiicher, February 1895. Under the
pseudonym of Hermann Isaac in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare- Gesellschaft,
vol. xix. p. 176.

318 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

believe, finally to establish the date of the Sonnets in which they
occur. On the other hand, Thomas Tyler has conclusively de
monstrated that the passage in Meres's book influenced the con
ception and expression of one of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It
cannot reasonably be doubted that Shakespeare saw Palladis
Tamia ; the author perhaps sent him a copy; and in any case
he could not but read with interest the warm and sincere com
mendation there bestowed upon him. Now there occurs in
Meres's book a passage in which, after quoting Ovid's

" Jamque opus exegi, quod nee Jovis ira, nee ignis,
Nee poterit ferrum, nee edax abolere vetustas,"

and Horace's

" Exegi momentum acre perennius,"

the critic goes on to apply these words to his contemporaries
Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and
Warner, and then winds up with a Latin eulogy of the same
writers, composed by himself, partly in prose and partly in verse.
But on reading attentively Shakespeare's Sonnet lv., whose
resemblance to the well-known lines of Horace must have struck
every reader, we find several expressions from this passage in
Palladis Tainia, and even from the lines written by Meres him
self, reappearing in it. The Sonnet must thus have been written
at earliest in the end of 1598 — Meres's book was entered in the
Stationers' Register in September — and possibly not till the
beginning of 1599. Since, then, the following Sonnet (Ivi.), which
must date from about the same time, speaks of the friendship as
newly formed —

" Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shores, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks " —

we may confidently assign to the year 1598 the first contract of
amity between the poet and his friend.

The historical allusions in Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which form a
continuous poem, are not, indeed, by any means clear or easy
to interpret; but Sonnet civ. dates the whole group definitely
enough, in the statement that three years have elapsed since the
first meeting of the friends : —

DATE OF THE SONNETS 319

" Three winters cold

Have from the forests shook three summers' pride ;
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd
In process of the seasons have I seen ;
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green."

Thus we must assign this important group to the year 1601; and
this being so, it must also appear probable that the line —

" The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured " —

alludes to the fact that Elizabeth (for whom, in the mode of the
day, the moon was the accepted symbol) had come unharmed
through the dangers of Essex's rebellion — the more so as the
beautiful lines —

" Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh "—

show that the poem was written in the spring. It would be
unreasonable to infer from this allusion any ill-will on the poet's
part towards Essex and his comrades. Still less can we follow
Tyler, when, by the aid of a complex scaffolding of hypotheses
built up, in German rather than in English fashion, around
Sonnets cxxiv. and cxxv., he laboriously works up to the air-
drawn conjecture that Shakespeare is here expressing himself
offensively towards his former patron Southampton, now a
prisoner in the Tower, and even that Southampton is aimed at
in the line about those "who have lived for crime." Equally
baseless, of course, is the corollary which would find in Sonnet
cxxv. Shakespeare's defence against an accusation of faithless
ness towards the man to whom he had written, seven years
earlier, in the dedication of Lucrece, "The love I dedicate Your
Lordship is without end." Nor do we need all this fantastic and
unpleasing romance, constructed on the basis of a single obscure
phrase, in order to make us accept the theory of which it is sup
posed to supply further confirmation — namely, that these Sonnets
date from 1601.

Turning now from the poems to the person to whom they are
believed to have been addressed, this is what we learn of him : —

William Herbert, son of Henry Herbert and his third wife,
the celebrated Mary Sidney, had for his tutor as a boy the poet

320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Samuel Daniel; entered at Oxford in 1593, where he remained
for two years; received permission in April 1597, when he was
seventeen years old, to live in London, but, as we gather from
letters of the period, does not seem to have come up to town
until the spring of 1598.

In August 1597, negotiations were conducted by letter between
his parents and Lord Burghley with a view to his marriage with
Burghley's grand-daughter Bridget Vere, a daughter of the Earl
of Oxford. It is true that she was only thirteen, but William
Herbert was quite prepared to enter upon the engagement. He
was to travel abroad before the marriage. Although his mother,
the Countess of Pembroke, perhaps divining her son's too in
flammable nature, and therefore wanting to see him married
betimes, was much in favour of this project, and although the
Earl of Oxford was pleased with the young man and praised his
"many good partes," difficulties arose of which we have no
record, and the plan came to nothing.

In London, young Herbert lived at Baynard's Castle, close
to the Blackfriars Theatre, and may thus have been brought in
contact with the players. It is more probable, however, that
so brilliant a woman as " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother,"
should have aroused his interest in Shakespeare; and in that
case the poet, in all probability, made the acquaintance of this
distinguished and discerning patroness of art and artists as early
as 1598. Herbert's father, who died soon afterwards, was already
an invalid.

It appears that in August 1599 Herbert "followed the camp"
at the annual musters, attending her Majesty with two hundred
horse, and " swaggering it among the men of war."

He is from the first described as a bad courtier. Rowland
Whyte writes of him at this time : " He was much blamed for his
cold and weeke Maner of pursuing her Majesties favour, having
had soe good steps to lead him unto it. There is want of Spirit
and Courage laid to his charge, and that he is a melancholy young
man." We may gather from this what fiery devotion every hand
some and well-born young man was expected to pay to the elderly
Queen. Soon after, however, it appears from a letter from his
father to Elizabeth that she must have expressed herself highly
satisfied with the young man, and we also learn that he was
" exceedingly beloued at Court of all Men." He appears to have

WILLIAM HERBERT 321

been very handsome, and to have possessed all the fascination
which so often belongs to an amiable mauvais sujet. Clarendon
says of him, in the first book of his History of the Rebellion,
that " he was immoderately given up to women/' and that " he
indulged himself in pleasures of all kind, almost in all excesses."
Clarendon remarks, however, what is of particular interest for us,
that the young Pembroke possessed a good deal of self-control :
44 He retained such a power and jurisdiction over his very appetite,
that he was not so much transported with beauty and outward
allurements as with those advantages of the mind as manifested
an extraordinary wit, and spirit, and knowledge, and administered
great pleasure in the conversation. To these he sacrificed him
self, his precious time, and much of his fortune."

In November 1599, Herbert had an hour's private audience
with Elizabeth. Whyte, who relates this, remarks that he now
stands high in the Queen's favour, "but he greatly wants advise."
He passed the rest of the winter in the country, suffering from an
illness which seems to have taken the form of ague, with incessant
headaches.

Tyler is inclined, not without reason, to assign Sonnets xc.-
xcvi. to this period. Shakespeare's complaints of his friend's
44 desertion " may refer to his life at Court ; the expressions in
Sonnet xci. as to horses, hawks, and hounds, perhaps point to the
young man's absorption in sport. The following Sonnets dwell
unequivocally upon discreditable rumours as to the friend's life
and conduct. Here appears the above-quoted (p. 203) line : —

" Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
Here occurs the couplet : —

" How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show ! "

And, in spite of all the loving forbearance which the poet manifests
towards his friend, he seems to imply that the ugly rumours were
not unfounded : —

" How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name !
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose !
VOL. I. X

322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
(Making lascivious comments on thy sport,)
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise ;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report."

There was an improvement in the health of Herbert's father
during the year 1600, yet Lord and Lady Pembroke were absent
from London all summer, remaining at their country seat, Wilton.
In the month of May, Herbert, accompanied by Sir Charles
Danvers, went to Gravesend to pay his respects to Lady Rich
and Lady Southampton. This visit proves clearly that there was
not, as Tyler's above-mentioned interpretation of certain Sonnets
would lead us to assume, any coolness between Herbert and the
houses of Essex and Southampton. It is also worth noting that
his companion on this excursion was so intimately associated with
the chiefs of the malcontent party, that in the following year he
had to pay with his life for his share in the rebellion.

In the accounts of a splendid and very much talked-of wedding,
between a Lord Herbert and one^etf the Queen's ladies, which
took place at Blackfriars in June 1600, we for the first time come
upon William Herbert's name in company with that of the lady
who seems to be the heroine of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The bride,
Mrs. Ann Russell, was conducted to church by William Herbert
and Lord Cobham. After supper there was a masque, in which
eight splendidly dressed ladies executed a new and unusual dance.
Among these are mentioned Mrs. Fitton, and two of the ladies-in-
waiting whose names had shortly before been coupled with that
of Essex (Mrs. Southwell and Mrs. Bess Russell). Each had
11 a skirt of Cloth of Siluer, a Mantell of Carnacion Taffete cast
vnder the Arme, and their Haire loose about their Shoulders,
curiously knotted and interlaced." The leader of this double
quadrille was Mrs. Fitton. She approached the Queen and
"woed her to dawnce; her Majestic asked what she was;
4 Affection] she said. ' Affection ! ' said the Queen, ' affection is
false.' Yet her Majestie rose and dawnced."

Later in the year Whyte remarks in his letters that Herbert
shows no " disposition to marry " ; and we find him in September
and October 1600 vigorously training at Greenwich for a Court
tournament.

On January 19, 1601, his father's death made William Herbert
Earl of Pembroke. Very soon afterwards (the matter is men-

PEMBROKE AND MARY FITTON 323

tioned in a letter from Robert Cecil so early as February 5) he
got into deep disgrace over a love affair — evidently that which
forms the subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He had for some
time carried on a secret intrigue with the aforesaid Mary Fitton,
a maid-of-honour who stood high in the Queen's good graces ;
and the secret now came to light. " Mistress Fitton," writes
Cecil, "is proved with child, and the Earl of Pembroke, being
examined, confesseth a fact, but utterly renounceth all marriage.
I fear they will both dwell in the Tower awhile, for the Queen
hath vowed to send them thither." In another contemporary
letter it is stated that "in that tyme when that Mres Fytton
was in great fauor . . . and duringe the time yt the Earle of
Pembrooke fauord her, she would put off her head tire and tucke
vp her clothes and take a large white cloake, and march as though
she had bene a man to meete the said Earle out of the Courte."

Mary Fitton gave birth to a still-born son ; Pembroke lay for
a month in the Fleet Prison, and was banished from Court. He
shortly afterwards applied through Cecil for leave to travel abroad.
The Queen's displeasure, he says, is " a hell " to him ; he hopes
the Queen will not carry her resentment so far as to bind him to
the country which has now become " hateful to him of all others."
The permission to travel seems to have been given and then
revoked. In the middle of June he writes that imploring letter to
Cecil in which the reference to "her whose Incomparable beauty
was the onely sonne of my little world," was designed to touch
Elizabeth's hard heart ; for Pembroke, it is plain, had now realised
that what had offended her Majesty was not so much his intrigue
with Mary Fitton as the fact of his having overlooked her own
much higher perfections. But the compliments came too late.
Elizabeth, as we have already seen in the case of Essex, knew
how to make the objects of her resentment suffer in that most
sensitive point — the pocket. The " patent of the Forest of Dean,"
which had been held by the late Lord Pembroke, expired with
him, and the son expected, according to use and wont, to have it
renewed in his favour ; but it was assigned to Pembroke's rival,
Sir Edward Winter, and not until seven years later, under James,
did Pembroke recover it.

Pembroke continued in disgrace, his renewed applications for
permission to travel were persistently refused, and he was ordered
to regard himself as banished from Court, and to " keep house in

324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

the country." It is this overshadowing of Pembroke's fortunes
in 1 60 1 which explains the temporary breaking-off of his rela
tions with Shakespeare in London, indicated by the " Envoy "
with which Sonnet cxxvi. ends the series addressed to the
Friend.

The close and affectionate relation between them was no doubt
revived under James. This appears clearly enough from the
Dedication of the First Folio. Let us now cast a rapid glance
over the remainder of Pembroke's career.

His father's death placed him in possession of a large fortune,
but the irregularity of his life left him seldom free from money
embarrassments. In 1604 ne married Lady Mary, the seventh
daughter of Lord Talbot, and the marriage was celebrated with
a tournament. His wife brought him a large property, but it was
thought at the time that he paid very dear for it in having to take
her into the bargain. The marriage was far from happy.

Pembroke shared the love of literature which had distin
guished his mother and his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. According
to Aubrey, he was "the greatest Maecenas to learned men of any
peer of his time or since." Among his " learned " friends were
the poets Donne, and Daniel, and Massinger, who was the son of
his father's steward. Ben Jonson composed a eulogistic epigram
in his honour, as well he might, for every New Year Pembroke sent
Ben £20 to buy books with. Inigo Jones is said to have visited
Italy at his expense, and was frequently employed by him.
Davison's Poetical Rhapsody and numerous other books are
dedicated to him. Chapman, who was among his intimates,
inscribed a sonnet to him at the close of his translation of the
Iliad. This fact is of particular interest to us, because Chapman
(as Professor Minto succeeded in establishing) is clearly the
rival poet who paid court to Pembroke, won his goodwill and
admiration, and thereby aroused jealousy and melancholy self-
criticism in Shakespeare's breast, as we read in Sonnets Ixxviii.-
Ixxxvi.1

It is especially on Sonnet Ixxxvi. that Minto bases his identifi
cation of the rival poet with Chapman. The very opening line,
referring to the "proud full sail of his great verse," suggests at
once the fourteen-syllable measure in which Chapman translated

1 I do not find that Mr. G. A. Leigh has succeeded in identifying the rival poet
with Tasso (Westminster Re-view, February 1897).

PEMBROKE'S LATER YEARS 325

the Iliad. Chapman was full of a passionate enthusiasm for the
art of poetry, which he lost no opportunity of glorifying ; and he
laid claim to supernatural inspiration. In the Dedication to his
poem The Shadow of the Night (1594), he speaks with severe
contempt of the presumption of those who " think Skill so mightily
pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show them
her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon by others but
with invocation, fasting, watching — yea, not without having drops
of their souls, like a heavenly familiar" Hence Shakespeare's
lines —

"Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead ? "

and the expression —

" He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence."

After the accession of James, Pembroke immediately took a high
position at the new Court. Before the year 1603 was out, he was
a Knight of the Garter, and had entertained the King at Wilton.
He rose from one high post to another, until in 1615 he became
Lord Chamberlain ; but he continued to the last the dissipated life
of his youth. He devoted large sums of money to the exploration
and colonisation of America. Places were named after him in the
Bermudas and Virginia. In 1614, moreover, he became a member
of the East India Company.

He opposed the Spanish Alliance, and was no friend to the
King's foreign policy. He is thought to have instigated in some
measure the attack on the Mexico fleet for which Raleigh paid
so dear. He was an opponent of Bacon as Lord Chancellor, and
in 1621 advocated an inquiry into the charges of corruption which
were brought against him ; but afterwards, like Southampton, dis
played great moderation, and spoke strongly against the proposal
to deprive Bacon of his peerage.

He stood by the King's deathbed in March 1625, had a serious
illness in 1626, and died in April 1630 "of an apoplexy after a
full and cheerful supper." Donne in 1660 published some poems
of his among a collection by several other hands. Here is a
specimen of his work : —

" Yet when unto our Eyes
Abscense denyes

326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Each others sight

And makes to us a constant night

When others change to light ;

O give no waye to griefe,

But let beliefe

Of mutuall loue

This wonder to the vulgar proue,

Our bodies, not we, moue.

Let not thy wit beweepe

Wounds but sense deepe,

For while we misse,

By distance, our lipp-ioyning blisse,

Even then our soules shall kisse."

Tyler has pointed out certain resemblances of thought and
expression between this poem and several of Shakespeare's
Sonnets (xxii., Ixii., xliii., xxvii.). No wonder that Pembroke as
a poet should have shown himself a pupil of Shakespeare's.

**» i^Tx^W-C,, <t'V«-'**1-'^-— -^ ^"~~*"K->

VI

THE "DARK LADY" OF THE SONNETS-
MARY FITTON

IN speaking of Love 's Labours Lost, I remarked that it was not
difficult to distinguish the original text of the comedy from the
portions added and altered during the revision of 1598; and I
cited (p. 47) several instances in which the distinction was clear.
Especial emphasis was laid on the fact that Biron's (or, as the
context shows, Biron-Shakespeare's) rapturous panegyrics of
love in the fourth act belong to the later date.

At another place (p. 100) it was pointed out that the two
Rosalines of Love's Labour's Lost (end of the third act) and of
Romeo and Juliet (ii. 4) were in all probability drawn from the
same model, since she is in both places described as a blonde
with black eyes. In the original text of Love s Labour's Lost
(Act iii.) she is expressly called —

" A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes."

All the more surprising must it seem that during the revision the
poet quite obviously had before his eyes another model, repeatedly
described as " black," whose dark complexion indeed, so uncommon
and un-English that it was apt to be thought ugly, is insisted
upon as strongly as that of the "Dark Lady" in the Sonnets.
Immediately before Biron bursts forth into his great hymn to
Eros, in which Shakespeare so clearly makes him his mouthpiece,
the King banters him as to the murky hue of the object of his
adoration : —

" King. . By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
Biron. Is ebony like her ? O wood divine !

A wife of such wood were felicity.
327

328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

O ! who can give an oath ? where is a book ?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
If that she learn not of her eye to look :
No face is fair, that is not full so black.

King. O paradox ! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons, and the scowl of night ;
And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

Biron's answer to this is highly remarkable; for it is exactly
what Shakespeare himself says, in Sonnet cxxvii., to the ad
vantage of his dark beauty : —

" Biron. Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
O ! if in black my lady's brows be deck'd,
It mour.ns, that painting, and usurping hair,
Should ravish doters with a false aspect ;
And therefore is she born to make black fair.
Her favour turns the fashion of the days ;
For native blood is counted painting now,
And therefore red, that would avoid dispraise,
Paints itself black, to imitate her brow.';

The Sonnet runs thus : —

" In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name ;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame ;
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such, who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem :
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says, beauty should look so."

It appears, then, that the dark beauty in Loves Labour s Lost
must also have had a living model ; and when we observe that the
revision, as the title-page tells us, took place when the comedy
was to be presented before her Highness at Christmas 1597, and
further, that the dark Rosaline in the play is maid-of-honour to a
princess who is called, in words strongly suggesting a passing

THE DARK LADY 329

compliment to the Queen, " a gracious moon " — we can scarcely
avoid the conclusion that the beautiful brunette must have been
one of the Queen's ladies, and that the whole end of the fourth
act was addressed to her over the heads of the uninitiated spec
tators. Who she was, moreover, we can now conjecture with
tolerable security. We know quite well which of the Queen's
ladies brought Pembroke into disgrace, and we are no less certain
that the lady who enthralled Pembroke was the black-eyed brunette
whom Shakespeare, in his own words, loved to " distraction " and
to "madding fever."

There still exists on the monument of Mary Fitton's mother
in Gawsworth Church, in Cheshire, a highly coloured bust of
Mary Fitton herself.1 The colours are so well preserved that
it is clear she must have been a marked brunette. It is true
that the bust cannot give us a very accurate idea of her appear
ance in the year 1600, since it was executed in 1626, when she
was forty-eight; but so much is certain, that the complexion was
dark, the high-piled hair and the large eyes black, the features
not beautiful, but the whole form and expression of the face such
as might quite well have been highly attractive, and might even
have exercised a certain sensual-spiritual fascination. Shake
speare has made it abundantly clear in his Sonnets that the lady
was no beauty. He says in Sonnet cxxx., which seems, however,
to be mainly a satire upon the conventional similes employed by
bad poets : —

" My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red ;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks ;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound :
I grant I never saw a goddess go ;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground :

And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare."

1 Reproduced in Tyler's Shakespeare's Sonnets.

330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Still more interesting is Sonnet cxli., where the poet, oddly
enough, declares himself dissatisfied with her voice, which, in the
last-quoted Sonnet, he " loved to hear : " —

" In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note ;

But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,

Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote.

Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted ;

Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,

Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited

To any sensual feast with thee alone :

But my five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,

Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,

Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to be :
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain." .

The Rev. W. A. Harrison has discovered a family tree from
which it appears that Mary Fitton, born June 24, 1578, became a
maid-of-honour to Elizabeth in 1595, at the age of seventeen.
Thus she was nineteen years old when, at the Court festivities of
1597, Shakespeare's company acted Loves Labour's Lost, with
the panegyric of the dark beauty, Rosaline. She must have made
the acquaintance of the poet and player, then thirty-three years
old, at earlier Court entertainments. Who can doubt that it was
she, with her high position and daring spirit, who made the first
advances ?

That the Dark Lady did not live with Shakespeare appears
clearly enough in the Sonnets — for instance, in Sonnet cxliv.
(<l but being both from me "). It may be gathered from Sonnet
cli., with the expressions " triumphant prize," " proud of this
pride," that she was greatly his superior in rank and station, so
that her conquest for some time filled him with a sense of triumph.
Tyler even holds, no doubt rightly, that there is an actual allusion
to her name in Sonnet cli., which, as a whole, abounds in such
daring equivoques as would be impossible in modern poetry.
Puns upon names were much in vogue among the verse-writers
of that period — Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi., and cxliii., for example,
are for ever playing on "Will" and "will." The similarity of
sound between the name Fitton and fit one was thought so inter-

THE DARK LADY 331

esting and taken so seriously that it was emphasised even in
the inscription on the family monument, which ends with the
lines : —

" Whose sovle's and body's beavties sentence them,
Fittons, to weare a heavenly Diadem."

Shakespeare seems to have had the same word-play in his mind,
though to less pious purpose, when he wrote in Sonnet cli. : —

" Flesh stays no farther reason ;
But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize."

Similarly, in one of his Sonnets to Stella (Lady Penelope Rich),
Sir Philip Sidney had made use of a pun upon the word rich in
order to express his contempt for her husband.

It has been thought surprising that in Sonnet clii., in which
Shakespeare calls himself forsworn because he loves his lady
although married to another, he also states expressly that she too is
married, calling her " twice forsworn/' since she has not only broken
her " bed-vow," but broken her " new faith " to Shakespeare himself.
It seemed difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Mrs. Fitton
(" Mistress " in those days being applicable to unmarried no less
than to married women) was always called by her father's name.
From a letter, however, addressed by her father to Sir Robert
Cecil on January 29, 1599 (Tyler, p. 86), it is inferred that she
had already been married at the age of sixteen. Performed,
perhaps, by some accommodating cleric, and without the parents'
consent, the ceremony would not be entirely valid, and measures
would be taken as quickly as possible to have it annulled. Thus,
although she figured at Court as a maid-of-honour, and did not
bear her husband's name, she was no inexperienced girl at the
time when she made Shakespeare's acquaintance.

From the genealogical tree preserved in the Fitton family it
appears that her first husband was a Captain Lougher ; and from
this document, confirmed by the will of her grand-uncle, Sir
Francis Fitton, we learn that (probably in 1607) she was married
a second time to a Captain Polwheele. It is further noted in the
genealogical table that she "had one bastard by Wm. E. of
Pembroke, and two bastards by Sir Richard Leveson, Kt." The
picture suggested by these curt data cannot be said to conflict in

332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

any way with the portrait painted in the Sonnets. As, however,
another version of the pedigree makes Captain Polwheele her first
husband, the question of her different marriages remains somewhat
obscure.

The Dark Lady must have been a woman in the extremest
sense of the word, a daughter of Eve, alluring, ensnaring, greedy
of conquest, mendacious and faithless, born to deal out rapture
and torment with both hands, the very woman to set in vibration
every chord in a poet's soul.

There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of
his relation with the young maid-of-honour, Shakespeare felt him
self a favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness,
exalted above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at
first have been to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural
daughter of a king, was to Boccaccio. She must have brought a
breath from a higher world, an aroma of aristocratic womanhood,
into his life. He must have admired her wit, her presence of
mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and her quickness of
retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in her — and
that in the closest intimacy — the well-bred ease, the sportive
coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated
lady. Who can tell how much of her personality has been trans
ferred to his brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds ?

First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of
feeling his vitality intensified — a main element in the happiness
which, in the first years of their communion, finds expression in
the sparkling love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be
objected that the Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The
Sonnets date from the period of storm and stress, when he had
ascertained what at first, no doubt, he had but vaguely suspected,
that his mistress had ensnared his friend ; and in composing them
he no doubt antedated many of the passionate and distracted
moods which overwhelmed him at the crisis, when he not only
realised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it dragged to the light
of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed, he had irrevo
cably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress drawn in
the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier years,
but as he saw her during this later period.

Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole
nature must have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The

THE DARK LADY 333

scene, for instance, so melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii.
is steeped in an atmosphere of happy love — the scene in which,
seated at the virginals, the lady, whom the poet addresses as "my
music," lets her delicate aristocratic fingers wander over the keys,
enchanting with their concord the listener who longs to press her
fingers and her lips to his. He envies the keys that " kiss the
tender inward of her hand," and concludes : —

" Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."

It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate,
complaining, and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority.

Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of
conduct. In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as " anchored
in the bay where all men ride." Sonnet cxxxviii. begins : —

" When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."

And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a
host of false oaths in swearing to her good qualities : —

" But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjur'd most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost :
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy ;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see."

In Sonnet cxxxix. he depicts her as carrying her thirst for
admiration to such a pitch of wantonness that even in his presence
she could not refrain from coquetting on every hand : —

"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside :
What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o'erpress'd defence can 'bide ? "

She cruelly abuses her witchery over him. She is as tyran
nical, he says in Sonnet cxxxi., " as those whose beauties proudly
make them cruel/' well-knowing that to his " dear-doting heart "

334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

she is "the finest and most precious jewel." There is actual
magic in the power she exerts over him. He does not understand
it himself, and exclaims in Sonnet cl. : —

" Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds ? "

No French poet of the eighteen-thirties, not even Musset him
self, has given more passionate utterance than Shakespeare to
the fever and agony and distraction of love. See, for instance,
Sonnet cxlvii. : —

" My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease :
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain-sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest :
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd ;

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

He depicts himself as a lover frenzied with passion. His eyes
are dimmed with vigils and with tears. He no longer understands
either himself or the world : " If that is fair whereon his false eyes
dote, What means the world to say it is not so ? " If it is not
fair, then his love proves that a lover's eye is less trustworthy
than that of the indifferent world (Sonnet cxlviii.).

And yet he well knows the seat of the witchery by which she
holds him in thrall. It lies in the glow and expression of her ex
quisite " raven black " eyes (Sonnets cxxvii. and cxxxix.). He
loves her soulful eyes, which, knowing the torments her disdain
inflicts upon him —

" Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain."

— Sonnet cxxxii.

THE DARK LADY 335

Young as she is, her nature is all compounded of passion and
will ; she is ungovernable in her caprices, born for conquest and
for self-surrender.

While we can guess that towards Shakespeare she made the
first advances, we know that she did so in the case of his friend.
In more than one sonnet she is expressly spoken of as "wooing
him."1 In Sonnet cxliii. Shakespeare uses an image which, in
all its homeliness, is exceedingly graphic : —

" Lo ! as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feather'd creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift despatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay ;
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant's discontent :
So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind ;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind :
So will I pray that thou may'st have thy Will,
If thou turn back, and my loud crying still."

The tenderness of feeling here apparent is characteristic of
the poet's whole attitude of mind in this- dual relation. Even
when he cannot acquit his friend of all guilt, even when he mourn
fully upbraids him with having robbed the poor man of his one
lamb, his chief concern is always lest any estrangement should
arise between his friend and himself. See, for instance, the ex
quisitely melodious Sonnet xl. : —

" Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all :
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before ?
No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call :
All mine was thine before thou had'st this more.

I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty."

Shakespeare seems to have remembered, from time to Jimer
that it was he himself who had brought these two together.

1 "And when a woman woos, what woman's son will sourly leave her?" (Sonnet
xli.). " Wooing his purity with her foul pride " (Sonnet cxliv.).

336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Sonnet cxxxiv. indicates, perhaps, that Pembroke first made the
acquaintance of the dangerous fair one while acting as an emissary
on the poet's behalf.1 It is quite clear that Shakespeare consented
to - share her favour with his friend ; his main anxiety was for
the preservation of their friendship. Therefore we read (Sonnet
cxxxiv.) : —

" So, now I have confess'd that he is thine,
And I myself am mortgag'd to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still."

Noteworthy in this respect is Sonnet cxxxv., which plays upon
the identity of Shakespeare's Christian name with Pembroke's : —

" Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus :
More than enough am I, that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus."

He proceeds in a strain of affectionate humility : —

" The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store ;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more."

He tries, by the aid of a sort of sophistry or word-juggling, to
console himself with the reflection that when she speaks his name
she includes both persons in one word : —

"Think all but one, and me in that one Will.11

The same tone of sentiment runs through the moving Sonnet xlii.,
which begins : —

" That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said, I loved her dearly ;
That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly."

1 " Thou usurer, that put'st forth all to use

And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake ;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse."

THE DARK LADY 337

It closes with this somewhat vapid conceit : —

" But here's the joy : my friend and I are one ;
Sweet flattery ! then she loves but me alone."

All these expressions, taken together, point not only to the
enormous value which Shakespeare attached to the young Pem
broke's friendship, but also to the sensual and spiritual attraction
which, in spite of everything, his fickle mistress continued to
possess for him.

It is not impossible that a passage in Ben Jonson's Bartholo-
mew Fair (1614) may contain a satirical allusion to the relation
portrayed in the Sonnets (published in 1609). In act v. sc. 3
there is presented a puppet-show setting forth "The ancient
modern history of Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touch
stone of true Love, with as true a trial of Friendship between
Damon and Pythias, two faithful friends o' the Bankside." Hero
is "a wench o' the Bankside," and Leander swims across the
Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodging, and
abuse each other most violently when they find that they
have but one love, only to finish up as the best friends in
the world.1

It has thus been established, as clearly as anything of this
kind can be established without the direct evidence of contem
poraries, that Mrs. Mary Fitton and the Dark Lady were one and
the same person. Some readers, perhaps, may still doubt the
possibility of conceiving that an actor like Shakespeare could
form any close intimacy with a woman of such high position
as a maid-of-honour to the Queen. This objection is practically
removed by a piece of evidence which pretty clearly brings her
into connection with Shakespeare's company. A little book by
the clown of the company, William Kemp, published in 1600

1 ' ' Damon. Whore-master in thy face ;
Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place.

" Leatherhead. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's a plain case.

" Pythias. Thou lie like a rogue.

" Leatherhead. Do I lie like a rogue?

" Pythias. A pimp and a scab.

'•''Leatherhead. A pimp and a scab !
I say, between you you have both btit one drab.

" Pythias and Damon. Come, now we'll go together to breakfast to Hero.

'•''Leatherhead. Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial
'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial."

VOL. I. Y

338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

under the title of " Nine Daies Wonder," was, as Mr. W. A.
Harrison has shown, almost certainly dedicated to her. The
actual wording of the dedication is to " Mistris Anne Fitton,
Mayde of Honour to the most sacred Mayde, Royal Queene Elisa
beth." But it is absolutely certain that neither in 1600 nor in
the previous year was there any Anne Fitton among Elizabeth's
maids-of-honour. Kemp must, therefore, have been mistaken as
to the Christian name of his patroness, or the printer must have
misread the name Marie and converted it into Anne, an error to
which the handwriting of the period might easily give rise.

This little book gives us a most interesting glimpse into the
English life of that age.

The most important duty of the clown was not to appear in
the play itself, but to sing and dance his jig at the end of it, even
after a tragedy, in order to soften the painful impression. The
common spectator never went home without having seen this
afterpiece, which must have resembled the comic " turns " of our
variety-shows. Kemp's jig of The Kitchen- Stuff Woman, for
instance, was a screaming farrago of rude verses, some spoken,
others sung, of good and bad witticisms, of extravagant acting
and dancing. It is of such a performance that Hamlet is thinking
when he says of Polonius : " He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry,
or he sleeps."

As the acknowledged master of his time in the art of comic
dancing, Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid
professional visits to all the German and Italian courts, and was
even summoned to dance his Morrice Dance before the Emperor
Rudolf himself at Augsburg. It was in his youth that he under
took the nine days' dance from London to Norwich which he
describes in his book.

He started at seven o'clock in the morning from in front of the
Lord Mayor's house, and half London was astir to see the begin
ning of the great exploit. His suite consisted of his " taberer," his
servant, and an " overseer " or umpire to see that everything was
performed according to promise. The journey was almost as try
ing to the " taberer " as to Kemp, for he had his drum hanging
over his left arm and held his flageolet in his left hand while he
beat the drum with his right. Kemp himself, on this occasion,
contributed nothing to the music except the sound of the bells
which were attached to his gaiters.

THE DARK LADY 339

He reached Romford on the first day, but was so exhausted
that he had to rest for two days. The people of Stratford-
Langton, between London and Romford, had got up a bear-
baiting show in his honour, knowing "how well he loved the
sport"; but the crowd which had gathered to see him was so
great that he himself only succeeded in hearing the bear roar and
the dogs howl. On the second day he strained his hip, but cured
the strain by dancing. At Burntwood such a crowd had gathered
to see him that he could scarcely make his way to the tavern.
There, as he relates, two cut-purses were caught in the act, who
had followed with the crowd from London. They declared that
they had laid a wager upon the dance, but Kemp recognised one
of them as a noted thief whom he had seen tied to a post in the
theatre. Next day he reached Chelmsford, but here the crowd
which had accompanied him from London had dwindled away to
a couple of hundred people.

In Norwich the city waits received him in the open market
place with an official concert in the presence of thousands. He
was the guest of the town and entertained at its expense, re
ceived handsome presents from the mayor, and was admitted to
the Guild of Merchant Venturers, being thereby assured a share
in their yearly income, to the amount of forty shillings. The very
buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to
the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual
memory of the exploit.

So popular an artist as this must of course have felt himself
at least Shakespeare's equal. He certainly assumed the right
to address one of her Majesty's Maids-of-Honour with no slight
familiarity. The tone in which he dedicates this catchpenny
performance to Mrs. Fitton offers a remarkable contrast to the
profoundly respectful tone in which professional authors couch
their dedications to their noble patrons or patronesses : —

" In the waine of my little wit I am forst to desire your protection,
else every Ballad-singer will proclaime me bankrupt of honesty. . . .
To shew my duety to your honourable selfe, whose favours (among
other bountifull friends) make me (dispight this sad world) iudge my
hert Corke and my heeles feathers, so that me thinkes I could fly to
Rome (at least hop to Rome, as the old Prouerb is) with a Morter on
my head."

340 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The free and confidential style of this dedication not only
proves that one of the actor caste could approach a great lady
like Mrs. Fitton without a too strict observance of the distance
between them, but also affords conclusive proof that that emanci
pated young lady was intimately acquainted with members of the
very company to which Shakespeare belonged.

VII

PLATONISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S AND MICHAEL
ANGELO'S SONNETS— THE TECHNIQUE OF THE
SONNETS

THE fact that the person to whom Shakespeare's Sonnets are
dedicated is simply entitled " Mr. W. H." long served to divert
attention from William Herbert, as it was thought that it would
have been an impossible impertinence thus to address, without
his title, a nobleman like the Earl of Pembroke. To us it is
clear that this form of address was adopted precisely in order
that Pembroke might not be exhibited to the great public as the
hero of the conflict darkly adumbrated in the Sonnets. They
were not, indeed, written quite without an eye to publication, as
is proved by the poet's promises that they are to immortalise the
memory of his friend's beauty. But it was not Shakespeare him
self who gave them to the press, and bookseller Thorpe must
have known very well that Lord Pembroke would not care to see
himself unequivocally designated as the lover of the Dark Lady
and the poet's favoured rival, especially as that dramatic episode
of his youth ended in a manner which it can scarcely have been
pleasant to recall.

The modern reader who takes up the Sonnets with no special
knowledge of the Renaissance, its tone of feeling, its relation to
Greek antiquity, its conventions and its poetic style, finds nothing
in them more surprising than the language of love in which the
poet addresses his young friend, the positively erotic passion for
a masculine personality which here finds utterance. The friend is
currently addressed as " my love." Sometimes it is stated in so
many words that in the eyes of his admirer the friend combines
the charms of man and woman ; for instance, in Sonnet xx. : —

"A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion."

341

342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This Sonnet ends with a playful lament that the friend had not
been born of the opposite sex; yet such is the warmth of ex
pression in other Sonnets that one very well understands how
the critics of last century supposed them to be addressed to a
woman.1

This tone, however, is so characteristic a fashion of the age,
that a number of writers, and especially those who have gone
most deeply into contemporary English and Italian literature,2
have found in it, and in other traits of mere convention, an
argument for holding the circumstances set forth to be in the
main imaginary, and denying to the Sonnets all direct autobio
graphical value.

It has been insisted that love for a beautiful youth, which the
study of Plato had presented to the men of the Renaissance in its
most attractive light, was a standing theme among English poets
of that age, who, moreover, as in Shakespeare's case, were wont
to praise the beauty of their friend above that of their mistress.
The woman, too, as in this case, often enters as a disturbing
element into the relation. It was an accepted part of the con
vention that the poet should represent himself as withered and
wrinkled, whatever his real age might be ; Shakespeare does so
again and again, though he was at most thirty-seven. Finally, it
was quite in accordance with use and wont that the fair youth
should be exhorted to marry, so that his beauty might not die
with him. Shakespeare had already placed such exhortations in
the mouth of the Goddess of Love in Venus and Adonis.

Dr. Adolf Hansen, in his Danish translation of the Sonnets, has
pointed out several other impersonal traits. Some of the weaker
Sonnets, with their " wire-drawn and complicated imagery "
(Sonnets xxiv., xlvi., xlvii.), so clearly bear the stamp of the age
that they cannot be regarded as personally characteristic of
Shakespeare ; while others are such .evident imitations that it is

1 For instance, in Sonnet xxiii. : —

" O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense."

And in Sonnet xxvi. : —

" Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath rny duty strongly knit."

2 Such as Delius and Elze in Germany and Schiick in Sweden.

PLATONISM 343

impossible to accept them as individual utterances. Thus the
theme of Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. is precisely that of Watson's
twentieth Sonnet in The Tears of Fancie ; Sonnets xviii. and xix.
lead up to the same thought as that of Sonnet xxxix. in Daniel's
Delia; and Sonnets Iv. and Ixxxi. treat of precisely the same
matter as Sonnet Ixix. of Spenser's Amoretti. Finally, the story
of the two friends, one of whom robs the other of his mistress,
had already appeared in Lyly's Euphues.

All this is true, and yet there is no reasonable ground for
doubting that the Sonnets stand in pretty close relation to actual
facts.

The age, indeed, determines the tone, the colouring, of the
expressions in which friendship clothes itself. In Germany and
Denmark, at the end of the eighteenth century, friendship was a
sentimental enthusiasm, just as in England and Italy during the
sixteenth century it took the form of platonic love. We can
clearly discern, however, that the different methods of expression
answered to corresponding shades of difference in the emotion
itself. The men of the Renaissance gave themselves up to an
adoration of friendship and of their friend which is now unknown,
f except in circles where a perverted sexuality prevails. Mon
taigne's friendship for Estienne de la Boetie, and Languet's
passionate tenderness for the youthful Philip Sidney, are cases
in point. Sir Thomas Browne writes in his Religio Medici
(1642): "I never yet cast a true affection on a woman; but I
have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my God. . . .
I love my friend before myself, and yet, methinks, I do not
love him enough : some few months hence my multiplied affection
will make me believe I have not loved him at all. When I am
from him, I am dead till I be with him ; when I am with him,
I am not satisfied, but would still be nearer him." But the most
remarkable example of a frenzied friendship in Renaissance cul
ture and poetry is undoubtedly to be found in Michael Angelo's
letters and sonnets.

Michael Angelo's relation to Messer Tommaso de' Cavalieri
presents the most interesting parallel to the attitude which
Shakespeare adopted towards William Herbert. We find the
same expressions of passionate love from the older to the younger
man ; but here it is still more unquestionably certain that we
have not to do with mere poetical figures of speech, since the

344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

letters are not a whit less ardent and enthusiastic than the
sonnets. The expressions in the sonnets are sometimes so warm
that Michael Angelo's nephew, in his edition of them, altered the
word Signiore into Signora, and these poems, like Shakespeare's,
were for some time supposed to have been addressed to a
woman.1

On January I, 1533, Michael Angelo, then fifty-seven years
old, writes from Florence to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a youth of
noble Roman family, who afterwards became his favourite pupil :
" If I do not possess the art of navigating the sea of your potent
genius, that genius will nevertheless excuse me, and neither de
spise my inequality, nor demand of me that which I have it not in
me to give; since that which stands alone in everything can in
nothing find its counterpart. Wherefore your lordship, the only
light in our age vouchsafed to this world, having no equal or peer,
cannot find satisfaction in the work of any other hand. If, there
fore, this or that in the works which I hope and promise to execute
should happen to please you, I should call that work, not good,
but fortunate. And if I should ever feel assured that — as has
been reported to me — I have given your lordship satisfaction in
one thing or another, I will make a gift to you of my present and
of all that the future may bring me ; and it will be a great pain to
rne to be unable to recall the past, in order to serve you so much
the longer, instead of having only the future, which cannot be
long, since I am all too old. There is nothing more left for me
to say. Read my heart and not my letter, for my pen cannot
approach the expression of my good will." 2

Cavalieri writes to Michael Angelo that he regards himself as
born anew since he has come to know the Master ; who replies,
" I for my part should regard myself as not born, born dead, or
deserted by heaven and earth, if your letters had not brought me
the persuasion that your lordship accepts with favour certain of
my works." And in a letter of the following summer to Sebastian
del Piombo, he sends a greeting to Messer Tommaso, with the

1 Ludwig von Scheffler : Michel Angelo. Eine Renaissancestudie, 1892.

2 " E se io non ar6 1'arte del navicare per 1'onde del mare del vostro valoroso
ingegno, quello mi scusera, ne si sdegniera del mio disaguagliarsigli, ne desiderra da
me quello che in me non e : perche chi e solo in ogni cosa, in cosa alcuna non puo
aver compagni. Pero la vostra Signoria, luce del secol nostro unica al mondo, non
puo sodisfarsi di opera d'alcuno altro, non avendo pari ne simile a se," &c.

MICHAEL ANGELO AND SHAKESPEARE 345

words : " I believe / should instantly fall down dead if he were A
no longer in my thoughts." x

Michael Angelo plays upon his friend's surname as Shake
speare plays upon his friend's Christian name. These are the
last lines of the thirty-first sonnet : —

" Se vint' e pres' i' debb' esser beato,
Meraviglia non e se, nud' e solo,
Resto prigion d'un Cavalier armato."

"If only chains and bands can make me blest,
No marvel if alone and bare I go
An armed knight's captive and slave confessed."

(/. A. Symonds.)

In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shake
speare's — take, for example, the twenty-second : —

" More tenderly perchance than is my due,
Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise.
The flames of holy worship, nor denies
The grace reserved for those who humbly sue.
Oh blessed day when you at last are mine !
Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay ;
Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven !
That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine —
Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye
My heart's loved lord to me desertless given." 2

(J. A. Symonds.)

In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with
justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have
seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time
when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and
unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the
term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was
in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his ex-

1 "E io non nato, o vero nato morto mi reputerei, e direi in disgrazia del cielo
e della terra, se per la vostra non avessi visto e creduto vostra Signoria accettare
volentieri alcune delle opere mie." " Avete data la copia de' sopradetti Madrigali
a messer Tomaso . . . che se m'uscissi della mente, credo che subito cascherei morto."
2 " Accio ch' i' abbi, e non gia per mie merto,
II desiato mio dolce signiore
Per sempre nell' indegnie e pronte braccia."

346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

perience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets Ixiii.
and Ixxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached
the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contempo
raries) Drayton in his Idea dwells quite in the same spirit upon the
wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly
pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about him
self which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-
third Sonnet. Shakespeare says : —

" 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."

Byron thus expresses himself: —

" My days are in the yellow leaf,1

The flowers and fruits of love are gone,
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone."

In Shakespeare we read :—

"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,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."

Byron's words are : —

" The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle ;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile"

Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early
age, to the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without
blossom, fruit, or the song of birds ; and both compare the fire
which still glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds
no nourishment from without. The ashes of my youth become
its death-bed, says Shakespeare. They are a funeral pile, says
Byron.

1 This line, however, is obviously suggested by the famous passage in Macbeth
(Actv.)—

" My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf."

PERSONAL FEELING IN THE SONNETS 347

Nor is it possible to conclude, as Schiick does, from the con
ventional style of the first seventeen Sonnets — for instance, from
their almost verbal identity with a passage in Sidney's Arcadia —
that they are quite devoid of relation to the poet's own life. We
have seen that Pembroke's youth, which has been thought to render
it improbable that these exhortations to marriage should have been
addressed to him, in reality proves nothing to the purpose, since
we have direct evidence of the fact that when he was only seven
teen his parents were negotiating a marriage between him and
Bridget Vere. Subsequently, when Pembroke had made the
acquaintance of Mary Fitton, not only his mother but Shakespeare
himself had a direct interest in seeing him married.

In short, the elements of temporary fashion and convention
which appear in the Sonnets in no way prove that they were not
genuine expressions of the poet's actual feelings.

They lay bare to us a side of his character which does not
appear in the plays. We see in him an emotional nature with
a passionate bent towards self-surrender in love and idolatry,
and with a corresponding, though less excessive, yearning to
be loved.

We learn from the Sonnets to what a degree Shakespeare was
oppressed and tormented by his sense of the contempt in which
the actor's calling was held. The scorn of ancient Rome for the
mountebank, the horror of ancient Judea for whoever disguised
himself in the garments of the other sex, and finally the age-old
hatred of Christianity for theatres and all the temptations that
follow in their train — all these habits of thought had been handed
down from generation to generation, and, as Puritanism grew in
strength and gained the upper hand, had begotten a contemptuous
tone of public opinion under which so sensitive a nature as
Shakespeare's could not but suffer keenly. He was not regarded
as a poet who now and then acted, but as an actor who now and
then wrote plays. It was a pain to him to feel that he belonged
to a caste which had no civic status. Hence his complaint, in
Sonnet xxix., of being "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes."
Hence, in Sonnet xxxvi., his assurance to his friend that he will
not obtrude on others the fact of their friendship : —

" I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame :

348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name :
But do not so ; I love thee in such sort.
As, thou being mine, mine is thy- good report."

The bitter complaint in Sonnet Ixxii. seems rather to refer to the
writer's situation as a dramatist : —

"For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth."

The melancholy which fills Sonnet ex. is occasioned by the
writer's profession and his nature as a poet and artist : —

"Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view ;
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new :
Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely ; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love."

Hence, finally, his reproach to Fortune, in Sonnet cxi., that she
did not ''better for his life provide Than public means which
public manners breeds " : —

" Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ;
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

We must bear in mind this continual writhing under the
prejudice against his calling and his art, and this indignation
at the injustice of the attitude adopted towards them by a great
part of the middle classes, if we would understand the high
pressure of Shakespeare's feelings towards the noble youth who
had approached him full of the art-loving traditions of the aris
tocracy, and the burning enthusiasm of the young for intellectual
superiority. William Herbert, with his beauty and his personal
charm, must have come to him like a very angel of light, a
messenger from a higher world than that in which his lot was
cast. He was a living witness to the fact that Shakespeare was
not condemned to seek the applause of the multitude alone, but
could win the favour of the noblest in the land, and was not

IDOLATRY IN FRIENDSHIP 349

excluded from a deep and almost passionate friendship which
placed him on an equal footing with the bearer of an ancient
name. Pembroke's great beauty no doubt made a deep im
pression upon the beauty-lover in Shakespeare's soul. It is
very probable, too, that the young aristocrat, according to the
fashion of the times, made the poet his debtor for solider bene
factions than mere friendship; and Shakespeare must thus have
felt doubly painful the situation in which he was placed by the
intrigue between his mistress and his friend.1

In any case, the affection with which Pembroke inspired
Shakespeare — the passionate attachment, leading even to jealousy
of other poets admired by the young nobleman — had not only a
vividness, but an erotic fervour such as we never find in our cen
tury manifested between man and man. Note such an expression
as this in Sonnet ex. : —

"Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast."

This exactly corresponds to Michael Angelo's recently-quoted
desire to " clasp in his yearning arms his heart's loved lord." Or
observe such a line as this in Sonnet Ixxv. : —

" So are you to my thoughts as food to life."

We have here an exact counterpart to the following expressions
in a letter from Michael Angelo to Cavalieri, dated July 1533 : "I
would far rather forget the food on which I live, which wretchedly
sustains the body alone, than your name, which sustains both
body and soul, filling both with such happiness that I can feel
neither care nor fear of death while I have it in my memory."2

The passionate fervour of this friendship on the Platonic model
is accompanied in Shakespeare, as in Michael Angelo, by a sub-
missiveness on the part of the elder friend towards the younger,
which, in these two supreme geniuses, affects the modern reader

1 Several passages in the Sonnets suggest that Pembroke must have conferred
substantial gilts upon Shakespeare— for example, that expression "wealth" in
Sonnet xxxvii., "your bounty" in Sonnet liii., and "your own dear-purchased
right " in Sonnet cxvii.

2 " Anzi posso prima dimenticare il cibo di ch'io vivo, che nutrisce solo il corpo
infelicemente, che il nome vostro, che nutrisce il corpo e I'anima, riempiendo 1'uno
e 1'altro di tanta dolcezza, che ne noia ne timor di morte, mentre la memoria mi vi
serba, posso sentire."

350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

painfully. Each had put off every shred of pride in relation to
his idolised young friend. How strange it seems to find Shake
speare calling himself young Herbert's "slave," and assuring him
that his time, more precious than that of any other man then
living, is of no value, so that his friend may let him wait or summon
him to his side as his caprice and fancy dictate. In Sonnet Iviii. he
speaks of " that God who made me first your slave." Sonnet Ivii.
runs thus : —

" Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire ?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu ;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought,
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose ;
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those."

Just as Michael Angelo spoke to Cavalieri of his works as
though they were scarcely worth his friend's notice, so does
Shakespeare sometimes speak of his verses. In Sonnet xxxii. he
begs his friends to " re-survey" them when he is dead : —

" And though they be outstripp'd by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men."

This humility becomes quite despicable when a breach is
threatened between the friends. Shakespeare then repeatedly
promises so to blacken himself that his friend shall reap, not
shame, but honour, from his faithlessness. In Sonnet Ixxxviii. : —

" With mine own weakness being best acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults concealed wherein I am attainted,
That thou, in losing me, shalt win much glory."

Sonnet Ixxxix. is still more strongly worded : —

" Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,

IDOLATRY IN FRIENDSHIP 351

As I'll myself disgrace : knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange ;
Be absent from thy walks ; and in my tongue
Thy sweet-beloved name no more shall dwell,
Lest I (too much profane) should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee, against myself I'll vow debate,
For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate."

We are positively surprised when, in a single passage, in
Sonnet Ixii., we come upon a forcible expression of self-love ; but it
does not extend beyond the first half of the Sonnet ; in the second
half this self-love is already regarded as a sin, and Shakespeare
humbly effaces himself before his friend. All the more gladly
does the reader welcome the few Sonnets (Iv. and Ixxxi.) in which
the poet confidently predicts the immortality of these his utter
ances. It is true that Shakespeare is here greatly influenced by
antiquity and by the fashion of his age ; and it is simply as records
of his friend's beauty and amiability that his verses are to be pre
served through all ages to come. But no poet without a sound
and vigorous self-confidence could have written either these lines
in Sonnet Iv. : —

" Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme " —

or these others in Sonnet Ixxxi. : —

" Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread ;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead."

Yet, as we see, the first and last thought is always that of the
friend, his beauty, worth, and fame. And as he will live in the
future, so he has lived in the past. Shakespeare cannot conceive
existence without him. In Sonnets which have no direct con
nection with each other (lix., cvi., cxxiii.) he returns again and
again to that strange thought of a perpetual cycle or recurrence
of events, which runs through the whole of the world's history,
from the Pythagoreans and Kohelet to Friedrich Nietzsche. In
view of such high-pitched idolatry, we can well understand that
the friend's faithlessness, or, if you will, the mistress's conquest

352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of the friend, and the sudden severance of the bond in 1601, must
have made a deep impression upon Shakespeare's sensitive soul.
The catastrophe left its mark upon him for many a long day.

And at the same time another and purely personal mortification
was added to his troubles. Shakespeare's name was just then
involved in a degrading scandal of one sort or another. He says
so expressly in Sonnet cxii. : —

" Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow."

He here avers that he cares very little uto know his shames or
praises " from the tongues of others, and that his friend's judg
ment is all in all to him ; but in Sonnet cxxi., where he goes more
closely into the matter, he confesses that some " frailty" in him
has given rise to these malignant rumours, and we see that for
this frailty his " sportive blood " was to blame. He does not deny
the accusation, but asks —

" Why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood ?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies.
Which in their wills count bad what I think good ? "

The details of this scandal are unknown to us. We can only
conclude that it referred to Shakespeare's alleged relation to some
woman, or implication in some amorous adventure. In discussing
this point, Tyler has aptly cited two passages in contemporary
writings, though of course without absolutely proving that they
have any bearing on the matter. The first is the above-quoted
anecdote in John Manningham's Diary for March 13, 1601 (New
Style, 1602), as to Shakespeare's forestalling Burbadge in the
graces of a citizen's wife, and announcing himself as " William
the Conqueror " — an anecdote which seems to have been widely
current at the time, and no doubt arose from more or less recent
events. The second passage occurs in The Returne from Per-
nassus, dating from December 1601, in which (iv. 3) Burbadge
and Kemp are introduced, and these words are placed in the
mouth of Kemp : " O that Ben lonson is a pestilent fellow, he
brought vp Horace giuing the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shake
speare hath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit."
The allusion is evidently to the feud between Ben Jonson on the

FORM OF THE SONNETS 353

one hand and Marston and Dekker on the other, which culminated
in 1 60 1 with the appearance of Ben Jonson's Poetaster, in which
Horace serves as the poet's mouthpiece. Dekker and Marston
retorted in the >"same year with Satiromastix^ or the Untrussing
of the Humorous Poet. As Shakespeare took no direct part in
this quarrel, we can only conjecture what is meant by the above
allusion. Mr. Richard Simpson has suggested that King William
Rufus, in whose reign the action of Satiromastix takes place, and
who " presides over the untrussing of the humorous poet/' may
be intended for William Shakespeare. Rufus, in the play, is by
no means a model of chastity, and carries off Walter Ten-ill's
bride very much as " William the Conqueror " in Manningham's
anecdote carries off " Richard the Third's " mistress. Simpson
thinks it probable that the spectators would have little difficulty
in recognising the William the Conqueror of the anecdote in the
William Rufus of the play, whose nickname, indeed, might be taken
as referring to Shakespeare's complexion. If we accept this
interpretation, we find in Satiromastix a further proof of the
notoriety of the anecdote. Whether it be this scandal or another
of the same kind to which the Sonnets refer, Shakespeare seems
to have taken greatly to heart the besmirching of his name.

It remains that we should glance at the form of the Sonnets
and say a word as to their poetic value.

As regards the form, the first and most obvious remark is
that, in spite of their name, these poems are not in reality sonnets
at all, and have, indeed, nothing in common with the sonnet except
their fourteen lines. In the structure of his so-called Sonnets
Shakespeare simply followed the tradition and convention of his
country.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, the leading figure in the earlier English
school of lyrists, travelled in Italy in the year 1527, familiarised
himself with the forms and style of Italian poetry, and introduced
the sonnet into English literature. A somewhat younger poet,
Henry, Earl of Surrey, soon followed in his footsteps; he, too,
travelled in Italy, and cultivated the same poetic models. Not
until after the death of both poets were their sonnets published
in the collection known as TotteVs Miscellany (1557). Neither
of the poets succeeded in keeping to the Petrarchan model — an
octave and a sestett. Wyatt, it is true, usually preserves the
cctave, but breaks up the sestett and finishes with a couplet.
VOL. I. Z

354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Surrey departs still more widely from his model's strict and
difficult form : his " Sonnet " consists, like Shakespeare's after
him, of three quatrains and a couplet, the rhymes of which are
in nowise interwoven. Sidney, again, preserved the octave, but
broke up the sestett. Spenser attempted a new rhyme-scheme,
interweaving the second and third quatrain, but keeping to the
final couplet. Daniel, who is Shakespeare's immediate predecessor
and master, returns to Surrey's really formless form. The chief
defect in Shakespeare's Sonnets as a metrical whole consists in
the appended couplet, which hardly ever keeps up to the level of
the beginning, hardly ever presents any picture to the eye, but
is, as a rule, merely reflective, and often brings the burst of
feeling which animates the poem to a feeble, or at any rate more
rhetorical than poetic, issue.

In actual poetic value the Sonnets are extremely uneven. The
first group undoubtedly stands lowest in the scale, with its seven
teen times repeated and varied exhortation to the friend to leave
the world a living reproduction of his beauty. They necessarily
express but little of the poet's personal feeling ; and though, as we
have shown, there is no reason why they should not have been
addressed to William Herbert in 1598, it is also quite possible,
as their many resemblances in thought and expression to Venus
and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, and others of the poet's early
works would indicate, that they may have been written at a con
siderably earlier date.

The last two Sonnets in the collection (cliii. and cliv.), dealing
with a conventional theme borrowed from the antique, are like
wise entirely impersonal. W. Hertzberg, having been put on the
track by Herr von Friesen, in 1878 discovered the Greek original
of these two Sonnets in the ninth book of the Palatine Anthology.1
The poem which Shakespeare has adapted, and in Sonnet cliv.
almost translated, was written by the Byzantine scholar Marianus,
probably in the fifth century after Christ; it was published in
Latin, among other epigrams, at Basle in 1529, was retranslated
several times before the end of the sixteenth century, and must
have become known to Shakespeare in one or other of these
different forms.

Next in order stand the Sonnets of merely conventional in
spiration, those in which the eye and heart go to law with each

1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare- Gesdlschaft, Band xiii. S. 158.

POETIC VALUE OF THE SONNETS 355

other, or in which the poet plays upon his own name and his
friend's. These cannot possibly claim any high poetic value.

But the poems thus set apart form but a small minority of the
collection. In all the others the waves of feeling run high, and
it may be said in general that the deeper the sentiment and the
stronger the emotion they express, the more admirable is their
force of diction and their marvellous melody. There are Sonnets
whose musical quality is unsurpassed by any of the songs intro
duced into the plays, or even by the most famous and beautiful
speeches in the plays themselves. The free and lax form he had
adopted was of evident advantage to Shakespeare. The triple and
quadruple rhymes, which in Italian involve scarcely any difficulty
or constraint, would have proved very hampering in English. As
a matter of fact, Shakespeare has been able to follow out every
inspiration unimpeded by the shackles of an elaborate rhyme-
scheme, and has achieved a rare combination of terseness and
harmony in the expression of sorrow, melancholy, anguish, and
resignation. Nothing can be more melodious than the opening
of Sonnet xl., quoted above, or these lines from Sonnet Ixxxvi. : —

" Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew ? "

And how moving is the earnestness of Sonnet cxvi., on faith in
love : —

" 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 :
O, 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."

Shakespeare's Sonnets are for the general reader the most
inaccessible of his works, but they are also the most difficult to
tear oneself away from. " With this key Shakespeare unlocked
his heart," says Wordsworth ; and some people are repelled from
them by the Menschliches, or, as they think, Allzumenschliches,

356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

which is there revealed. They at any rate hold Shakespeare
diminished by his openness. Browning, for example, thus retorts
upon Wordsworth : —

" ' With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart ' once more !
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he."

The reader who can reconcile himself to the fact that great
geniuses are not necessarily models of correctness will pass a
very different judgment. He will follow with eager interest the
experiences which rent and harrowed Shakespeare's soul. He
will rejoice in the insight afforded by these poems, which the
crowd ignores, into the tempestuous emotional life of one of the
greatest of men. Here, and here alone, we see Shakespeare
himself, as distinct from his poetical creations, loving, admiring,
longing, yearning, adoring, disappointed, humiliated, tortured.
Here alone does he enter the confessional. Here more than
anywhere else can we, who at a distance of three centuries do
homage to the poet's art, feel ourselves in intimate communion,
not only with the poet, but with the man.

VIII

JULIUS CAESAR—ITS FUNDAMENTAL DEFECT

IT is afternoon, a little before three o'clock. Whole fleets of
wherries are crossing the Thames, picking their way among the
swans and the other boats, to land their passengers on the south
bank of the river. Skiff after skiff puts forth from the Black-
friars stair, full of theatre-goers- who have delayed a little too long
over their dinner and are afraid of being too late ; for the flag
waving over the Globe Theatre announces that there is a play
to-day. The bills upon the street-posts have informed the public
that Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar is to be presented, and the play
draws a full house. People pay their sixpences and enter; the
balconies and the pit are filled. Distinguished and specially
favoured spectators take their seats on the stage behind the
curtain. Then sound the first, the second, and the third trum
pet-blasts, the curtain parts in the middle, and reveals a stage
entirely hung with black.

Enter the tribunes Flavius and Marullus ; they scold the
rabble and drive them home because they are loafing about on
a week-day without their working-clothes and tools — in contra
vention of a London police regulation which the public finds so
natural that they (and the poet) can conceive it as in force in
ancient Rome. At first the audience is somewhat restless. The
groundlings talk in undertones as they light their pipes. But
the Second Citizen speaks the name of Caesar. There are cries
of " Hush ! hush ! " and the progress of the play is followed with
eager attention.

It was received with applause, and soon became very popular.
Of this we have contemporary evidence. Leonard Digges, in the
poem quoted above (p. 273), vaunts its scenic attractiveness at the
expense of Ben Jonson's Roman plays : —

" So have I scene, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were

357

358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Brutus and Cassius : oh how the Audience
Were ravish'd, with what new wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline"

The learned rejoiced in the breath of air from ancient Rome
which met them in these scenes, and the populace was entertained
and fascinated by the striking events and heroic characters of the
drama. A quatrain in John Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, or The
Life and Death of Sir lohn Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham,
tells how

" The many-headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus speech, that Ccesar was ambitious,
When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious ? "

There were, indeed, numerous plays on the subject of Julius
Caesar — they are mentioned in Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, 1579,
in The Third Blast of Retraite from Plates, 1580, in Henslowe's
Diary, 1594 and 1602, in The Mirrour of Policie, 1598, &c. —
but Weever's words do not apply to any of those which have
come down to us. It can therefore scarcely be doubted that
they refer to Shakespeare's drama; and as the poem appeared
in 1 60 1, it affords us almost decisive evidence as to the date
of Julius Ccesar. In all probability, it was in the same year
that the play was written and produced. Weever, indeed, says
in his dedication that his poem was " some two yeares agoe made
fit for print ; " but even if this be true, the lines above quoted
may quite well have been inserted later. There are several
reasons for believing that Julius Ccesar can scarcely have been
produced earlier than 1601. The years 1599 and 1600 are
already so full of work that we can scarcely assign to them this
great tragedy as well; and internal evidence indicates that the
play must have been written about the same time as Hamlet,
to which its style offers so many striking resemblances.

The immediate success of the play is proved by this fact,
among others, that it at once called forth a rival production
on the same theme. Henslow notes in his diary that in May
1602, on behalf of Lord Nottingham's company, he paid five
pounds for a drama called Ccesar 's Fall to the poets Munday,

"JULIUS CESAR" 359

Dray ton, Webster, Middleton, and another. It was evidently
written to order. And as Julius Ccesar, in its novelty, was
unusually successful, so, too, we find it still reckoned one of
Shakespeare's greatest and profoundest plays, unlike the English
" Histories " in standing alone and self-sufficient, characteristically
composed, forming a rounded whole in spite of its apparent
scission at the death of Caesar, and exhibiting a remarkable
insight into Roman character and the life of antiquity.

What attracted Shakespeare to this theme ? And, first and
foremost, what is the theme ? The play is called Julius Ccesar,
but it was obviously not Caesar himself that attracted Shakespeare.
The true hero of the piece is Brutus ; he it is who has aroused
the poet's fullest interest. We must explain to ourselves the
.why and wherefore.

The answer is to be found in the point of time at which the
play was written. It was that eventful year when Shakespeare's
earliest friends among the great, Essex and Southampton, had
set on foot their foolhardy conspiracy against Elizabeth, and
when their attempted insurrection had ended in the death of the
one, the imprisonment of the other. He had seen how proud and
nobly-disposed characters might easily be seduced into political
error, and tempted to rebellion, on the plea of independence. It
is true that there was little enough resemblance of detail between
the mere palace-revolution designed by Essex, which should free
him from his subjection to the Queen's incalculable caprices,
and the attempt of the Roman patricians to liberate an aristo
cratic republic, by assassination, from the yoke of a newly-
founded despotism. The point of resemblance lay in the mere
fact of the imprudent and ill-starred attempt to effect a subversion
of public order.

Add to this the fact that Shakespeare, in the present stage
of his career, displays a certain preference for characters who,
in spite of noble qualities, have fortune against them and are
unable to bring their projects to a successful issue. While he
himself was still fighting for his position, Henry V., the man of
practical genius, the born victor and conqueror, had been his
ideal ; now that he stood on firm ground, and was soon to reach
the height of his reputation, he seems to have turned with a sort
of melancholy predilection to characters like Brutus and Hamlet,
who, in spite of the -highest endowments, proved unequal to the

360 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

tasks proposed to them.1 They appealed to him as profound
dreamers and high-minded idealists. He found something of
their nature, too, in his own.

A good score of years earlier, in 1579, North's version of
Plutarch's parallel biographies had been published, not translated
from the original, but from the French translation of Amyot. In
this book Shakespeare found his material.

His method of using this material differs considerably from
his treatment of his other authorities. From a chronicler like
Holinshed he, as a rule, takes nothing but the course of events,
the outline of the leading personages and such anecdotes as suit
his purpose. From novelists like Bandello or Cinthio he takes
the main lines of the action, but relies almost entirely on his own
invention for the characters and the dialogue. From the earlier
plays, which he adapts or re-casts, such as The Taming of a
Shrew, King John, The Famous Victories of Henry V., and King
Leir (the original Hamlet is unfortunately not preserved), he
transfers into his own work every scene and speech that is worth
anything ; but in the cases in which we can make the comparison,
there is little enough that he finds available. Here, on the other
hand, we find a curious and instructive example of his method of
work when he most faithfully followed his original. We realise
that the more developed the art and the more competent the
psychology of the writer before him, the more closely did Shake
speare tread in his footsteps.

Here for the first time he found himself in touch with a wholly
civilised spirit — not seldom childlike in his antique simplicity, but
still no mean artist. Jean Paul, with some exaggeration, yet not
quite extravagantly, has called Plutarch the biographical Shake
speare of world-history.

The whole drama of Julius C&sar may be read in Plutarch.
Shakespeare had before him three Lives — those of Caesar, Brutus,
and Mark Antony. Read them consecutively, and you find in
them every detail of Julius Cczsar.

Let us take some examples from the first act of the play. It
begins with the tribunes' jealousy of the favour in which Caesar
stands with the common people; and everything down to the
minutest trait is taken from Plutarch. The same with what fol
lows : Mark Antony's repeated offer of the crown to Caesar at the
1 Compare Dowden, Shakspere, p. 280.

SHAKESPEARE AND PLUTARCH 361

feast of the Lupercal, and his unwilling refusal of it. So too with
Caesar's suspicions of Cassius ; Caesar's speech on his second
entrance —

" Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights :
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ;
He thinks too much ; such men are dangerous,"-

occurs word for word in Plutarch ; the anecdote, indeed, made
such an impression on him that he has repeated it three times in
different Lives. We find, furthermore, in the Greek historian,
how Cassius gradually involves Brutus in the conspiracy; how
papers exhorting Brutus to action are thrown into his house ; the
deliberations as to whether Antony is to die along with Caesar,
and Brutus's mistaken judgment of Antony's character ; Portia's
complaint at being excluded from her husband's confidence ; the
proof of courage which she gives by plunging a knife into her
thigh ; all the omens and prodigies that precede the murder ; the
sacrificial ox without a heart ; the fiery warriors fighting in the
clouds ; Calphurnia's warning dream ; Caesar's determination not
to go to the Senate on the Ides of March ; Decius [Decimus]
Brutus's endeavour to change his purpose ; the fruitless efforts of
Artemidorus to restrain him from facing the danger, &c., &c. It
is all in Plutarch, point for point.

Here and there we find small and subtle divergences from the
original, which may be traced now to Shakespeare's temperament,
now to his view of life, and again to his design in the play.
Plutarch, for example, has not Shakespeare's contempt for the
populace, and does not make them so senselessly fickle. Then,
again, he gives no hint for Brutus's soliloquy before taking the
final resolution (II. i). For the rest, wherever it is possible,
Shakespeare employs the very words of North's translation. Nay,
more, he accepts the characters, such as Brutus, Portia, Cassius,
just as they stand in Plutarch. His Brutus is absolutely the same
as Plutarch's ; his Cassius is a man of somewhat deeper character.

In dealing with the great figure of Caesar, which gives the
play its name, Shakespeare follows faithfully the detached, anec
dotic indications of Plutarch; but he, strangely enough, seems
altogether to miss the remarkable impression we receive from
Plutarch of Caesar's character, which, for the rest, the Greek his
torian himself was not in a position fully to understand. We

362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

must not forget the fact, of which Shakespeare of course knew
nothing, that Plutarch, who was born a century after Caesar's
death, at a time when the independence of Greece was only a
memory, and the once glorious Hellas was part of a Roman
province, wrote his comparative biographies to remind haughty
Rome that Greece had a great man to oppose to each of her
greatest sons. Plutarch was saturated with the thought that
conquered Greece was Rome's lord and master in every depart
ment of the intellectual life. He delivered Greek lectures in Rome
and could not speak Latin, while every Roman spoke Greek to
him and understood it as well as his native tongue. Significantly
enough, Roman literature and poetry do not exist for Plutarch,
though he incessantly cites Greek authors and poets. He never
mentions Virgil or Ovid. He wrote about his great Romans as
an enlightened and unprejudiced Pole might in our days write
about great Russians. He, in whose eyes the old republics
shone transfigured, was not specially fitted to appreciate Caesar's
greatness.

Shakespeare, having so arranged his drama that Brutus should
be its tragic hero, had to concentrate his art on placing him in the
foreground, and making him fill the scene. The difficulty was
not to let his lack of political insight (in the case of Antony), or
of practical sense (in his quarrel with Cassius), detract from the
impression of his superiority. He had to be the. centre and pivot
of everything, and therefore Caesar was 'diminished and belittled
to such a degree, unfortunately, that this matchless genius in war
and statesmanship has become a miserable caricature.

We find in other places clear indications that Shakespeare
knew very well what this man was and was worth. Edward's
young son, in Richard III., speaks with enthusiasm of Caesar as
that conqueror whom death has not conquered ; Horatio, in the
almost contemporary Hamlet, speaks of " mightiest Julius " and
his death; and Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra, is proud of
having been the mistress of Caesar. It is true that in As You
Like It the playful Rosalind uses the expression, " Caesar's
thrasonical brag," with reference to the- famous Veni, vidi, vici,
but in an entirely jocose context and acceptation.

But here ! here Caesar has become in effect no little of a
braggart, and is compounded, on the whole, of anything but
attractive characteristics. He produces the impression of an

CHARACTER OF CESAR 363

invalid. His liability to the "falling sickness" is emphasised.
He is deaf of one ear. He has no longer his old strength. He
faints when the crown is offered to him. He envies Cassius
because he is a stronger swimmer. He is as superstitious as
an old woman. He rejoices in flattery, talks pompously and
arrogantly, boasts of his firmness and is for ever wavering. He
acts incautiously and unintelligently, and does not realise what
threatens him, while every one else sees it clearly.

Shakespeare dared not, says Gervinus, arouse too great interest
in Caesar; he had to throw into relief everything about him that
could account for the conspiracy ; and, moreover, he had Plutarch's
distinct statement that Caesar's character had greatly deteriorated
shortly before his death. Hudson practically agrees with this,
holding that Shakespeare wished to present Caesar as he appeared
in the eyes of the conspirators, so that "they too might have fair
and equal judgment at our hands ; " admitting, for the rest, that
"Caesar was literally too great to be seen by them," and that
" Caesar is far from being himself in these scenes ; hardly one of
the speeches put in his mouth can be regarded as historically
characteristic." Thus Hudson arrives at the astonishing result
that " there is an undertone of irony at work in the ordering and
tempering of this composition," explaining that, " when such a
shallow idealist as Brutus is made to overtop and outshine the
greatest practical genius the world ever saw," we are bound to
assume that the intention is ironical.

This is the emptiest cobweb-spinning. • There is no trace of
irony in the representation of Brutus. Nor can we fall back upon
the argument that Caesar, after his death, becomes the chief
personage of the drama, and as a corpse, as a memory, as a
spirit, strikes down his murderers. How can so small a man cast
so great a shadow ! Shakespeare, of course, intended to show
Caesar as triumphing after his death. He has changed Brutus's
evil genius, which appears to him in the camp and at Philippi, into
Caesar's ghost ; but this ghost is not sufficient to rehabilitate Caesar
in our estimation.

Nor is it true that Caesar's greatness would have impaired the
unity of the piece. Its poetic value, on the contrary, suffers from
his pettiness. The play might have been immeasurably richer
and deeper than it is, had Shakespeare been inspired by a feeling
of Caesar's greatness.

364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Elsewhere in Shakespeare one marvels at what he has made
out of poor and meagre material. Here, history was so enor
mously rich, that his poetry has become poor and meagre in
comparison with it.

Just as Shakespeare (if the portions of the first part of
Henry VI. which deal with La Pucelle are by him) represented
Jeanne d'Arc with no sense for the lofty and simple poetry that
breathed around her figure — national prejudice and old supersti
tion blinding him — so he approached the characterisation of Caesar
with far too light a heart, and with imperfect knowledge and care.
As he had made Jeanne d'Arc a witch, so he makes Caesar a
braggart. Caesar !

If, like the schoolboys of later generations, he had been given
Caesar's Gallic War to read in his childhood, this would not
have been possible to him. Is it conceivable that, in what he had
heard about the Commentaries, he had nai'vely seized upon and
misinterpreted the fact that Caesar always speaks of himself in the
third person, and calls himself by his name ?

Let us compare for a moment this posing self-worshipper of
Shakespeare's with the picture of Caesar which the poet might
easily have formed from his Plutarch alone, thus explaining
Caesar's rise to the height of autocracy on which he stands at the
beginning of the play, and at the same time the gradual piling up
of the hatred to which he succumbed. On the very second page
of the life of Caesar he must have read the anecdote of how Caesar,
when quite a young man, on his way back from Bithynia, was
taken prisoner by Cilician pirates. They demanded a ransom of
twenty talents (about ^4000). He answered that they clearly did
not know who their prisoner was, promised them fifty talents, sent
his attendants to different towns to raise this sum, and remained
with only a friend and two servants among these notoriously
bloodthirsty bandits. He displayed the greatest contempt for
them, and freely ordered them about; he made them keep per
fectly quiet when he wanted to sleep ; for the thirty-eight days
he remained among them he treated them as a prince might his
bodyguard. He went through his gymnastic exercises, and wrote
poems and orations in the fullest security. He often assured them
that he would certainly have them hanged, or rather crucified.
When the ransom arrived from Miletus, the first use he made of
his liberty was to fit out some ships, attack the pirates, take them

CHARACTER OF OESAR 365

all prisoners, and seize upon their booty. Then he carried them
before the Praetor of Asia, Junius, whose business it was to
punish them. Junius, out of avarice, replied that he would take
time to reflect what should be done with the prisoners ; whereupon
Caesar returned to Pergamos, where he had left them in prison,
and kept his word by having them all crucified.

What has become of this masterfulness, this grace, and this
iron will, in Shakespeare's Caesar ?

" I fear him not :

Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.

I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd
Than what I fear, for always I am Caesar."

It is well that he himself makes haste to say so, otherwise one
would scarcely believe it. And does one believe it, after all ?

As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which
Caesar overthrew might have continued to exist but for him, and
it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.

But the old aristocratic Republic had already fallen to pieces
when Caesar welded its fragments into a new monarchy. Sheer
lawlessness reigned in Rome. The populace was such as even
the rabble of our own great cities can give no conception of: not
the brainless mob, for the most part tame, only now and then
going wild through mere stupidity, which in Shakespeare listens to
the orations over Caesar's body and tears Cinna to pieces ; but a
populace whose innumerable hordes consisted mainly of slaves,
together with the thousands of foreigners from all the three conti
nents, Phrygians from Asia, Negroes from Africa, Iberians and
Celts from Spain and France, who flocked together in the capital
of the world. To the immense bands of house-slaves and field-
slaves, there were added thousands of runaway slaves who had
committed theft or murder at home, lived by robbery on the way,
and now lay hid in the purlieus of the city. But besides foreigners
with no means of support and slaves without bread, there were
swarms of freedmen, entirely corrupted by their servile condition,
for whom freedom, whether combined with helpless poverty or
with new-made riches, meant only the freedom to do harm. Then

366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

there were troops of gladiators, as indifferent to the lives of others
as to their own, and entirely at the beck and call of whoever
would pay them. It was from ruffians of this class that a man
like Clodius had recruited the armed gangs who surrounded him,
divided like regular soldiers into decuries and centuries under
duly appointed commanders. These bands fought battles in the
Forum with other bands of gladiators or of herdsmen from the
wild regions of Picenum or Lombardy, whom the Senate im
ported for its own protection. There was practically no street
police or fire-brigade. When public disasters happened, such
as floods or conflagrations, people regarded them as portents
and consulted the augurs. The magistrates were no longer
obeyed ; consuls and tribunes were attacked, and sometimes even
killed. In the Senate the orators covered each other with abuse,
in the Forum they spat in each other's faces. Regular battles
took place on the Campus Martins at every election, and no man
of position ever appeared in the streets without a bodyguard of
gladiators and slaves. " If we try to conceive to ourselves,"
wrote Mommsen in 1857, "a London with the slave population
of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the
non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and agitated by
politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire
an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of
which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore." l

Compare with this picture Shakespeare's conception of an
ambitious Caesar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-
ordered republican state !

What enchanted every one, even his enemies, who came in
contact with Caesar, was his good-breeding, his politeness, the
charm of his personality. These characteristics made a doubly
strong impression upon those who, like Cicero, were accustomed
to the arrogance and coarseness of Pompey, so-called the Great.
However busy he might be, Caesar had always time to think of his
friends and to jest with them. His letters are gay and amiable. '
In Shakespeare, when he is not familiar, he is pompous.

For the space of twenty-five years, Caesar, as a politician,
had by every means in his power opposed the aristocratic party
in Rome. He had early resolved to make himself, without the

1 Mommsen, History of Rome, translated by W. P. Dickson, ed. 1894, vol. v.
p. 371. Gaston Boissier, Ciceron et ses Amis, p. 224.

CHARACTER OF C^SAR 367

employment of force, the master of the then known world,
assured as he was that the Republic would fall to pieces of its
own accord. Not until his praetorship in Spain had he displayed
ability as a soldier and administrator outside the every-day round
of political life. Then suddenly, when everything seems to be
prospering with him, he breaks away from it all, leaves Rome,
and passes into Gaul. At the age of forty-four, he enters upon
his military career, and becomes perhaps the greatest commander
known to history, an unrivalled conqueror and organiser, re
vealing, in middle life, a whole host of unsuspected and admirable
qualities. Shakespeare conveys no idea of the wealth and many-
sidedness of his gifts. He makes him belaud himself with un
ceasing solemnity (II. 2) : —

" Csesar shall forth : the things that threaten'd me
Ne'er look'd but on my back ; when they shall see
The face of Csesar, they are vanished."

Caesar had nothing of the stolid pomposity and severity which
Shakespeare attributes to him. He united the rapid decision of
the general with the man of the world's elegance and lofty in
difference to trifles. He liked his soldiers to wear glittering
weapons and to adorn themselves. "What does it matter," he
said, " though they use perfumes ? They fight none the worse
for that." And soldiers who under other leaders did not surpass
the average became invincible under him.

He, who in Rome had been the glass of fashion, was so
careless of his comfort in the field that he often slept under the
open sky, and ate rancid oil without so much as a grimace ; but
richly-decked tables always stood in his tents, and all the golden
youth, for whom Gaul was at that time what America became in
the days of the first discoverers, made their way from Rome to
his camp. It was the most wonderful camp ever seen, crowded
with men of elegance and learning, young writers and poets, wits
and thinkers, who, in the midst of the greatest and most imminent
dangers, busied themselves with literature, and sent regular re
ports of their meetings and conversations to Cicero, the acknow
ledged arbiter of the literary world of Rome. During the brief
space of Caesar's expedition into Britain, he writes two letters
to Cicero. Their relation, in its different phases, in some ways
reminds us of the relation between Frederick the Great and

368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Voltaire. What a paltry picture does Shakespeare draw of
Cicero as a mere pedant ! —

" Cassius. Did Cicero say anything ?

" Casca. Ay, he spoke Greek.

" Cassius. To what effect ?

" Casca. Nay, an I tell you that, I'll ne'er look you in the face again :
but those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their
heads ; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me."

Amid labours of every sort, his life always in danger, in
cessantly righting with warlike enemies, whom he beats in battle
after battle, Caesar writes his grammatical works and his Com
mentaries. His dedication to Cicero of his work De Analogia
is a homage to literature no less than to him: "You have dis
covered all the treasures of eloquence and been the first to employ
them. . . . You have achieved the crown of all honours, a triumph
the greatest generals may envy ; for it is a nobler thing to remove
the barriers of the intellectual life than to extend the boundaries
of the Empire." These are the words of the man who has just
beaten the Helvetii, conquered France and Belgium, made the
first expedition into Britain, and so effectually repelled the German
hordes that they were for long innocuous to the Rome which they
had threatened with destruction.

How little does this Caesar resemble the pompous and high-
flown puppet of Shakespeare : —

" Danger knows full well
That Cassar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions litter'd in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible."

Caesar could be cruel at times. In his wars, he never shrank
from taking such revenges as should strike terror into his enemies.
He had the whole senate of the Veneti beheaded. He cut the
right hand off every one who had borne arms against him at
Uxellodunum. He kept the gallant Vercingetorix five years in
prison, only to exhibit him in chains at his triumph and then
to have him executed.

Yet, where severity was unnecessary, he was tolerance and
mildness itself. Cicero, during the civil war, went over to the
camp of Pompey, and after the defeat of that party sought and

CHARACTER OF CESAR 369

received forgiveness. When he afterwards wrote a book in
honour of Caesar's mortal enemy Cato, who killed himself so as
not to have to obey the dictator, and thereby became the hero
of all the republicans, Caesar wrote to Cicero : " In reading your
book, I feel as though I myself had become more eloquent."
And yet in his eyes Cato was only an uncultured personage
and a fanatic for an obsolete order of things. When a slave,
out of tenderness for his master, refused to hand Cato his
sword wherewith to kill himself, Cato gave him such a furious
blow in the face that his hand was dyed with blood. Such
a trait must have spoiled for Caesar the impressiveness of this
suicide.

Caesar was not content with forgiving almost all who had
borne arms against him at Pharsalia ; he gave many of them,
and among the rest Brutus and Cassius, an ample share of
his power. He tried to protect Brutus before the battle and
heaped honours upon him after it. Again and again Brutus
came forward in opposition to Caesar, and even, in his con
scientious quixotism, took part against him with Pompey, although
Pompey had had his father assassinated. Caesar forgave him
this and everything else ; he was never tired of forgiving him.
He had, it appears, transferred to Brutus the love of his youth
for Brutus's mother Servilia, Cato's sister, who had been passion
ately and faithfully devoted to Caesar. Voltaire, in his Mort de
Cesar, makes Caesar hand to Brutus a letter just received from
the dying Servilia, in which she begs Caesar to watch well over
their son. Plutarch relates that on one occasion, at the time
of Catiline's conspiracy, a letter was brought to Caesar in the
Senate. Cato, seeing him rise and go apart to read it, gave
open utterance to the suspicion that it was a missive from the
conspirators. Caesar laughingly handed him the letter, which
contained declarations of love from his sister; whereupon Cato,
enraged, burst out with the epithet " Drunkard ! " — the direst term
of abuse a Roman could employ. (Ben Jonson has introduced
this anecdote in his Catiline, v. 6.)

Brutus inherited his uncle Cato's hatred for Caesar. A certain
brutality was united with a noble stoicism in these two last
Roman republicans of the time of the Republic's downfall. The
rawness of antique Rome survived in Cato's nature, and Brutus,
in his conduct towards the towns of the Asiatic provinces, was
VOL. I. 2 \

370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

nothing but a bloodthirsty usurer, who, in the name of a man
of straw (Scaptius) extorted from them his exorbitant interests
with threats of fire and sword. He had lent to the inhabitants
of the town of Salamis a sum of money at 48 per cent. On
their failure to pay, he kept their Senate so closely besieged by
a squadron of cavalry that five senators died of starvation.
Shakespeare, in his ignorance, attributes no such vices to Brutus,
but makes him simple and great, at Caesar's expense.

Caesar as opposed to Cato — and afterwards as opposed to
Brutus — is the many-sided genius who loves life and action and
power, in contradistinction to the narrow Puritan who hates such
emancipated spirits, partly on principle, partly from instinct.

What a strange misunderstanding that Shakespeare — himself
a lover of beauty, intent on a life of activity, enjoyment, and
satisfied ambition, who always stood to Puritanism in the same
hostile relation in which Caesar stood — should out of ignorance
take the side of Puritanism in this case, and so disqualify him
self from extracting from the rich mine of Csesar's character
all the gold contained in it. In Shakespeare's Caesar we find
nothing of the magnanimity and sincerity of the real man. He
never assumed a hypocritical reverence towards the past, not
even on questions of grammar. He grasped at power and
seized it, but did not, as in Shakespeare, pretend to reject it.
Shakespeare has let him keep the pride which he in fact displayed,
but has made it unbeautiful, and eked it out with hypocrisy.

This further trait, too, in Caesar's character Shakespeare has
failed to understand. When at last, after having conquered on
every side, in Africa as in Asia, in Spain as in Egypt, he held
in his hands the sovereign power which had been the object of
his twenty years' struggle, it had lost its attraction for him.
Knowing that he was misunderstood and hated by those whose
respect he prized the most, he found himself compelled to make
use of men whom he despised, and contempt for humanity took
possession of his mind. He saw nothing around him but greed
and treachery. Power had lost all its sweetness for him, life
itself was no longer worth living, worth preserving. Hence his
answer when he was besought to take measures against his
would-be assassins: " Rather die once than tremble always!"
and he went to the Senate on the I5ti of Ma~ -V without arms
and without a guard. In the tragedy, the motives which ulti-

CHARACTER OF OESAR 371

mately lure him thither are the hope of a title and a crown,
and the fear of being esteemed a coward.

Those foolish persons who attribute Shakespeare's works to
Francis Bacon argue, amongst other things, that such an insight
into Roman antiquity as is manifested in Julius Ccesar could be
attained by no one who did not possess Bacon's learning. On
the contrary, this play is obviously written by a man whose
learning was in no sense on a level with his genius, so that its
faults, no less than its merits, afford a proof, however superfluous,
that Shakespeare himself was the author of Shakespeare's works.
Bunglers in criticism never realise to what an extent genius can
supply the place of book-learning, and how vastly greater is its
importance. But, on the other hand, one is bound to declare
unequivocally that there are certain domains in which no amount
of genius can compensate for reconstructive insight and study
of recorded fact, and where even the greatest genius falls short
when it tries to create out of its own head, or upon a scanty basis
of knowledge.

Such a domain is that of historical drama, when it deals with
periods and personalities in regard to which recorded fact sur
passes all possible imagination. Where history is stranger and
more poetic than any poetry, more tragic than any antique tragedy,
there the poet requires many-sided insight in order to rise to the
occasion. It was because of Shakespeare's lack of historical and
classical culture that the incomparable grandeur of the figure of
Caesar left him unmoved. He depressed and debased that figure
to make room for the development of the central character in his
drama — to wit, Marcus Brutus, whom, following Plutarch's ideal
ising example, he depicted as a stoic of almost flawless nobility.

IX

THE MERITS OF JULIUS CAESAR— BRUTUS

NONE but a nai've republican like Swinburne can believe that it
was by reason of any republican enthusiasm in Shakespeare's
soul that Brutus became the leading character. He had assuredly
no systematic political conviction, and manifests at other times the
most loyal and monarchical habit of mind.

Brutus was already in Plutarch the protagonist of the Caesar
tragedy, and Shakespeare followed the course of history as repre
sented by Plutarch, under the deep impression that an impolitic
revolt, like that of Essex and his companions, can by no means
stem the current of the time, and that practical errors revenge
themselves quite as severely as moral sins — nay, much more
so. The psychologist was now awakened in him, and he found
it a fascinating task to analyse and present a man who finds a
mission imposed upon him for which he is by nature unfitted.
It is no longer outward conflicts like that in Romeo and Juliet
between the lovers and their surroundings, or in Richard III.,
between Richard and the world at large, that fascinate him in this
new stage of his development, but the inner processes and crises
of the spiritual life.

Brutus has lived among his books and fed his mind upon
Platonic philosophy ; therefore he is more occupied with the
abstract political idea of republican freedom, and the abstract
moral conception of the shame of enduring a despotism, than with
the actual political facts before his eyes, or the meaning of the
changes which are going on around him. This man is vehemently
urged by Cassius to place himself at the head of a conspiracy
against his fatherly benefactor and friend. The demand throws
his whole nature into a ferment, disturbs its harmony, and brings
it for ever out of equilibrium.

On Hamlet also, who is at the same time springing to life in

372

CHARACTER OF BRUTUS 373

Shakespeare's mind, the spirit of his murdered father imposes the
duty of becoming an assassin, and the claim acts as a stimulus, a
spur to his intellectual faculties, but as a solvent to his character ;
so close is the resemblance between the situation of Brutus, with
his conflicting duties, and the inward strife which we are soon to
find in Hamlet.

Brutus is at war with himself, and therefore forgets to show
others attention and the outward signs of friendship. His com
rades summon him to action, but he hears no answering summons
from within. As Hamlet breaks out into the well known words : —

" The time is out of joint : — O, cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right ! "

so also Brutus shrinks with horror from his task. He says (I. 2) : —

" Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us."

His noble nature is racked by these doubts and uncertainties.

From the moment Cassius has spoken to him, he is sleepless.
The rugged Macbeth becomes sleepless after he has killed the
King — " Macbeth has murdered sleep." Brutus, with his delicate,
reflective nature, bent on obeying only the dictates of duty, is
calm after the murder, but sleepless before it. His preoccupation
with the idea has altered his whole manner of being; his wife
does not know him again. She tells how he can neither converse
nor sleep, but strides up and down with his arms folded, sighing
and lost in thought, does not answer her questions, and, when she
repeats them, waves her off with rough impatience.

It is not only his gratitude to Caesar that keeps Brutus in
torment ; it is especially his uncertainty as to what Caesar's
intentions really are. Brutus sees him, indeed, idolised by the
people and endowed with supreme power ; but as yet Caesar has
never abused it. He concurs with Cassius's view that when
Caesar declined the crown he in reality hankered after it; but,
after all, they have nothing to go upon but his supposed desire : —

" To speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder."

374 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

If Caesar is to be slain, then, it is not for what he has done,
but for what he may do in the future. Is it permissible to commit
a murder upon such grounds ?

In Hamlet we find this variant of the difficulty : Is it certain
that the king murdered Hamlet's father ? May not the ghost have
been a hallucination, or the devil himself?

Brutus feels the weakness of his basis of action the more
clearly the more he leans towards the murder as a political duty.
And Shakespeare has not hesitated to attribute to him, high-
minded as he is, that doctrine of expediency, so questionable in
the eyes of many, which declares that a necessary end sanctifies
impure means. Two separate times, once when he is by himself,
and once in addressing the conspirators, he recommends political
hypocrisy as judicious and serviceable. In the soliloquy he says
(II. i):-

" And, since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus : that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities."

To the conspirators his words are : —

" And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em."

That is to say, the murder is to be carried out with as much
decency as possible, and the murderers are afterwards to pretend
that they deplore it.

As soon as the murder is resolved upon, however, Brutus,
assured of the purity of his motives, stands proud and almost
unconcerned in the midst of the conspirators. Far too uncon
cerned, indeed ; for though he has not shrunk in principle from
the doctrine that one cannot will the end without willing the
means, he yet shrinks, upright and unpractical as he is, from
employing means which seem to him either too base or too
unscrupulous. He will not even suffer the conspirators to be
bound by oath : " Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous."
They are to trust each other without the assurance of an oath,
and to keep their secret unsworn. And when it is proposed that
Antony shall be killed along with Caesar, a necessary step, to
which, as a politician, he was bound to consent, he rejects it, in

CHARACTER OF BRUTUS 375

Shakespeare as in Plutarch, out of humanity : " Our course will
seem too bloody, Caius Cassius." He feels that his will is as clear
as day, and suffers at the thought of employing the methods of
night and darkness :

" O Conspiracy !

Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free ? O, then, by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage ? "

Brutus is anxious that a cause which is to be furthered by
assassination should achieve success without secrecy and without
violence. Goethe has said: "Only the man of reflection has a
conscience." The man of action cannot have one while he is
acting. To plunge into action is to place oneself at the mercy of
one's nature and of external powers. One acts rightly or wrongly,
but always upon instinct — often stupidly, sometimes, it may be,
brilliantly, never with full consciousness. Action implies the in-
considerateness of instinct, or egoism, or genius ; Brutus, on the
other hand, is bent on acting with every consideration.

Kreyssig, and after him Dowden, have called Brutus a
Girondin, in opposition to his brother-in-law, Cassius, a sort of
Jacobin in antique dress. The comparison is just only in regard
to the lesser or greater inclination to the employment of violent
means ; it halts when we reflect that Brutus lives in the rarefied
air of abstractions, face to face with ideas and principles, while
Cassius lives in the world of facts ; for the Jacobins were quite
as stiff-necked theorists as any Girondin. Brutus, in Shakespeare,
is a strict moralist, excessively cautious lest any stain should mar
the purity of his character, while Cassius does not in the least
aspire to moral flawlessness. He is frankly envious of Caesar,
and openly avows that he hates him; yet he is not base; for
envy and hatred are in his case swallowed up by political pas
sion, strenuous and consistent. And, unlike Brutus, he is a good
observer, looking right through men's words and actions into
their souls. But as Brutus is the man whose name, birth, and
position as Caesar's intimate friend, point him out to be the
head of the conspiracy, he is always able to enforce his impolitic
and short-sighted will.

When we find that Hamlet, who is so full of doubts, never
for a moment doubts his right to kill the king, we must remember

376 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

that Shakespeare had just exhausted this theme in his characterisa
tion of Brutus.

Brutus is the ideal whom Shakespeare, like all men of the
better sort, cherished in his soul — the man whose pride it is
before everything to keep his hands clean and his mind high and
free, even at the cost of failure in his undertakings and the wreck
of his tranquillity and of his fortunes.

He does not care to impose an oath upon the others ; he
is too proud. If they want to betray him, let them ! These
others, it is true, may be moved by their hatred of the great
man, and eager to quench their malice in his blood ; he, for
his part, admires him, and will sacrifice, not butcher him. The
others fear the consequences of suffering Antony to address the
people ; but Brutus has explained to the people his reasons for
the murder, so Antony may now eulogise Caesar as much as he
pleases. Did not Caesar deserve eulogy ? Does not he himself
desire that Caesar shall lie honoured, though punished, in his
grave ? He is too proud to keep a watch upon Antony, who
has approached him in friendly fashion, though at the same time
in the character of Caesar's friend ; therefore he leaves the Forum
before Antony begins his speech. Such moods are familiar to
many. Many another has acted in this apparently unwise way,
proudly reckless of consequences, moved by the dislike of the
magnanimous man for all that savours of base cautiousness.
Many a one, for example, has told the truth where it was stupid
to do so, or has let slip an opportunity of revenge because he
despised his enemy too much to seek compensation for his in
juries, though he thereby neglected to render him innocuous for
the future. An intense realisation of the necessity for confidence,
or, on the other hand, of the untrustworthiness of friends and
the contemptibleness of enemies, may easily lead one to despise
every measure of prudence.

It was upon the basis of an intense feeling of this nature
that Shakespeare created Brutus. With the addition of humour
and a touch of genius he would be Hamlet, and he becomes
Hamlet. With the addition of despairing bitterness and misan
thropy he would be Timon, and he becomes Timon. Here he
is the man of uncompromising character and principle, who is
too proud to be prudent and too bad an observer to be practical ;
and this man is so situated that not only the life and death of

CHARACTER OF PORTIA 377

another and of himself, but the welfare of the State, and even,
as it appears, that of the whole civilised world, depend upon
the resolution at which he arrives.

At Brutus's side Shakespeare places the figure which forms
his female counterpart, the kindred spirit who has become one
with him, his cousin and wife, Cato's daughter married to Cato's
disciple. He has here, and here alone, given us a picture of
the ideal marriage as he conceived it.

In the scene between Brutus and Portia the poet takes up
afresh a motive which he has handled once before — the anxious
wife beseeching her husband to initiate her into his great designs.
It first appears in Henry IV.} Part I., where Lady Percy implores
her Harry to let her share his counsels. (See above, p. 222.)
The description which she gives of Hotspur's manner and con
duct exactly corresponds to Portia's description of the trans
formation which has taken place in Brutus. Both husbands,
indeed, are nursing a similar project. But Lady Percy learns
nothing. Her Harry no doubt loves her, loves her now and
then, between two skirmishes, briskly and gaily ; but there is
no sentiment in his love for her, and he never dreams of any
spiritual communion between them.

When Portia, in this case, begs her husband to tell her what
is weighing on his mind, he at first, indeed, replies with evasions
about his health ; but on her vehemently declaring that she feels
herself degraded by this lack of confidence (Shakespeare has
but slightly softened the antique frankness of the words which
Plutarch places in her mouth), Brutus answers her with warmth
and beauty. And when (again as in Plutarch) she tells of the
proof she has given of her steadfastness by thrusting a knife
into her thigh and never complaining of the " voluntary wound,"
he bursts forth with the words which Plutarch places in his
mouth : —

" O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife,"

and promises to tell her everything.

Neither Shakespeare nor Plutarch, however, regards his facile
communicativeness as a mark of prudence. For it is not Portia's
fault that it does not betray everything. When it comes to the
point, she can neither hold her tongue nor control herself. She

378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

betrays her anxiety and uneasiness to the boy Lucius, and
herself exclaims : —

" I have a man's mind, but a woman's might.
How hard it is for women to keep counsel ! "

This reflection is obviously not Portia's, but an utterance of
Shakespeare's own philosophy of life, which he has not cared to
keep to himself. In Plutarch she even falls down as though dead,
and the news of her death surprises Brutus just before the time
appointed for the murder of Caesar, so that he needs all his self-
control to save himself from breaking down.

From the character with which Shakespeare has thus endowed
Brutus spring the two great scenes which carry the play.

The first is the marvellously-constructed scene, the turning-
point of the tragedy, in which Antony, speaking with Brutus's
consent over the body of Caesar, stirs up the Romans against the
murderers of the great imperator.

Even Brutus's own speech Shakespeare has moulded with the
rarest art. Plutarch relates that when Brutus wrote Greek he
cultivated a " compendious " and laconic style, of which the his
torian adduces a string of examples. He wrote to the Samians :
"Your councels be long, your doings be slow; consider the end."
And in another epistle : " The Xanthians, despising my good
wil, haue made a graue of dispaire ; and the Patareians, that put
themselves into my protection, have lost no iot of their liberty :
and therefore whilst you haue libertie, either chuse the iudgement
of the Patareians or the fortune of the Xanthians." See now,
what Shakespeare has made out of these indications : —

"Romans, countrymen, and lovers ! hear me for my cause, and be
silent, that you may hear : believe me for mine honour, and have
respect to mine honour, that you may believe. ... If there be any
in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say, that Brutus'
love to Caesar was no less than his. If, then, that friend demand, why
Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer : — Not that I loved Caesar
less, but that I loved Rome more."

And so on, in this style of laconic antithesis. Shakespeare has
made a deliberate effort to assign to Brutus the diction he had
cultivated, and, with his inspired faculty of divination, has, as it
were, reanimated it : —

ANTONY'S ORATION 379

" As Caesar loved me, I weep for him ; as he was fortunate, I
rejoice at it ; as he was valiant, I honour him : but, as he was ambitious,
I slew him."

With ingenious and yet noble art the speech culminates in
the question, " Who is here so vile that will not love his country !
If any, speak; for him have I offended." And when the crowd
answers, " None, Brutus, none," he chimes in with the serene
assurance, " Then none have I offended."

The still more admirable oration of Antony is in the first
place remarkable for the calculated difference of style which it
displays. Here we have no antitheses, no literary eloquence;
but a vernacular eloquence of the most powerful demagogic type.
Antony takes up the thread just where Brutus has dropped it,
expressly assures his hearers at the outset that this is to be a
speech over Caesar's bier, but not to his glory, and emphasises
to the point of monotony the fact that Brutus and the other
conspirators are all, all honourable men. Then the eloquence
gradually works up, subtle and potent, in its adroit crescendo,
and yet in truth exalted by something which is not subtlety:
glowing enthusiasm for Caesar, scathing indignation against his
assassins. The contempt and anger are at first masked, out of
consideration for the mood of the populace, which has for the
moment been won over by Brutus; then the mask is raised a
little, then a little more and a little more, until, with a wild
gesture, it is torn off and thrown aside.

Here again Shakespeare has utilised in a masterly fashion
the hints he found in Plutarch, scanty as they were : —

" Afterwards, when Caesar's body was brought into the market-place,
Antonius, making his funeral oration in praise of the dead, according
to the auncient custome of Rome, and perceiuing that his words moued
the common people to compassion : he framed his eloquence to make
their harts yerne the more."

Mark what Shakespeare has made of this :- —

" Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears :
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones ;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you, Caesar was ambitious :

380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man,
So are they all, all honourable men),
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me :
But Brutus says he was ambitious ;
And Brutus is an honourable man."

Then Antony goes on to insinuate doubts as to Caesar's
ambition, and tells how he rejected the kingly diadem, rejected
it three times. Was this ambition ? Thereupon he suggests
that Caesar, after all, was once beloved, and that there is no
reason why he should not be mourned. Then with a sudden
outburst : —

" O judgment ! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason ! — Bear with me ;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me."

Next comes an appeal to their pity for this greatest of men,
whose word but yesterday might have stood against the world,
and who now lies so low that the poorest will not do him reve
rence. It would be wrong to make his speech inflammatory,
a wrong towards Brutus and Cassius " who — as you know — are
honourable men " (mark the jibe in the parenthetic phrase) ; no,
he will rather do wrong to the dead and to himself. But here he
holds a parchment — he assuredly will not read it — but if the
people came to know its contents they would kiss dead Caesar's
wounds, and dip their handkerchiefs in his sacred blood. And
then, when cries for the reading of the will mingle with curses
upon the murderers, he stubbornly refuses to read it. Instead
of doing so, he displays to them Caesar's cloak with all the rents
in it.

What Plutarch says here is : —

" To conclude his Oration, he unfolded before the whole assembly
the bloudy garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with
their swords, and called the malefactors cruell and cursed murtherers."

Out of these few words Shakespeare has made this miracle
of invective : —

ANTONY'S ORATION 381

" 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 followed it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolv'd
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd. or no ;
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar lov'd him !
This was the most unkindest cut of all ;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquish'd him : then burst his mighty heart ;
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.
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen !
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us.
O ! now you weep ; and, I perceive, you feel
The dint of pity : these are gracious drops.
Kind souls ! what, weep you, when you but behold
Our Caesar's vesture wounded ? Look you here,
Here is himself, marr'd, as you see, with traitors."

He uncovers Caesar's body; and not till then does he read
the will, overwhelming the populace with gifts and benefactions.
This climax is of Shakespeare's own invention.

No wonder that even Voltaire was so struck with the beauty
of this scene, that for its sake he translated the first three acts
of the play. At the end of his own Mort de Cesar, too, he
introduced a feeble imitation of the scene ; and he had it in his
mind when, in his Discours sur la Tragedie, dedicated to Boling-
broke, he expressed so much enthusiasm and envy for the freedom
of the English stage.

In the last two acts, Brutus is overtaken by the recoil of his
deed. He consented to the murder out of noble, disinterested
and patriotic motives ; nevertheless he is struck down by its

382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

consequences, and pays for it with his happiness and his life.
The declining action of the last two acts is — as is usual with
Shakespeare — less effective and fascinating than the rising action
which fills the first three ; but it has one significant, profound,
and brilliantly constructed and executed scene — the quarrel and
reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius in the fourth act,
which leads up to the appearance of Caesar's ghost.

This scene is significant because it gives a many-sided picture
of the two leading characters — the sternly upright Brutus, who
is shocked at the means employed by Cassius to raise the money
without which their campaign cannot be carried on, and Cassius,
a politician entirely indifferent to moral scruples, but equally
unconcerned as to his own personal advantage. The scene is
profound because it presents to us the necessary consequences
of the law-defying, rebellious act : cruelty, unscrupulous policy,
and lax tolerance of dishonourable conduct in subordinates, when
the bonds of authority and discipline have once been burst.
The scene is brilliantly constructed because, with its quick play
of passion and its rising discord, which at last passes over into
a cordial and even tender reconciliation, it is dramatic in the
highest sense of the word.

The fact that Brutus was in Shakespeare's own mind the
true hero of the tragedy appears in the clearest light when we
find him ending the play with the eulogy which Plutarch, in
his life of Brutus, places in the mouth of Antony; I mean the
famous words : —

" This was the noblest Roman of them all :
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar ;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle ; and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, ' This was a man ! ' "

The resemblance between these words and a celebrated speech
of Hamlet's is unmistakable. Everywhere in Julius Ccesar we
feel the proximity of Hamlet. The fact that Hamlet hesitates
so long before attacking the King, finds so many reasons to hold
his hand, is torn with doubts as to the act and its consequences,

TRANSITION FROM BRUTUS TO HAMLET 383

and insists on considering everything even while he upbraids
himself for considering so long — all this is partly due, no doubt,
to the circumstance that Shakespeare comes to him directly from
Brutus. His Hamlet has, so to speak, just seen what happened
to Brutus, and the example is not encouraging, either with respect
to action in general, or with respect to the murder of a step
father in particular.

It is not difficult to conceive that Shakespeare may at this
period have been subject to moments of scepticism, in which
he could scarcely understand how any one could make up his
mind to act, to assume responsibility, to set in motion the roll
ing stone which is the type of every action. If we once begin
to brood over the incalculable consequences of an action and
all that circumstance may make of it, all action on a great scale
becomes impossible. Therefore it is that very few old men under
stand their youth ; they dare not and could not act again as, in
their recklessness of consequences, they acted then. Brutus
forms the transition to Hamlet, and Hamlet no doubt grew up
in Shakespeare's mind during the working out of Julius Ccesar.

The stages of transition are perhaps these : the conspirators,
vin egging Brutus on to the murder, are always reminding him
of the elder Brutus, who pretended madness and drove out the
Tarquins. This may have led Shakespeare to dwell upon his
character as drawn by Livy, which had always been exceedingly
popular. But Brutus the elder is an antique Hamlet; and the
very name of Hamlet, as he found it in the older play and in
Saxo, seems always to have haunted Shakespeare. It was the
name he had given to the little boy whom he lost so early.

X

BEN JONSON AND HIS ROMAN PLAYS

IN precisely the same year as Shakespeare, his famous brother-
poet, Ben Jonson, made his first attempt at a dramatic presenta
tion of Roman antiquity. His play, The Poetaster, was written
and acted in 1601. Its purpose is the literary annihilation of
two playwrights, Marston and Dekker, with whom the author
was at feud; but its action takes place in the time of Augustus;
and Jonson, in spite of his satire on contemporaries, no doubt
wanted to utilise his thorough knowledge of ancient literature
in giving a true picture of Roman manners. As Shakespeare's
Julius Ccesar was followed by two other tragedies of antique
Rome, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, so Ben Jonson
also wrote two other plays on Roman themes, the tragedies of
Sejanus and Catiline. It is instructive to compare his method
of treatment with Shakespeare's ; but a general comparison of the
two creative spirits must precede this comparison of artistic pro
cesses in a single limited field.

Ben Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare, born
in 1573, a month after the death of his father, the son of a clergy
man whose forefathers had belonged to " the gentry." He was a
child of the town, while Shakespeare was a child of the country ;
and the fact is not without significance, though town and country
were not then so clearly opposed to each other as they are now.
When Ben was two years old, his mother married a worthy master-
bricklayer, who did what he could to procure his stepson a good
education, so that, after passing some years at a small private
school, he was sent to Westminster. Here the learned William
Camden, his teacher, introduced him to the two classical literatures,
and seems, moreover, to have exercised a not altogether fortunate
influence upon his subsequent literary habits ; for it was Camden

who taught him first to write out in prose whatever he wanted to

384

JONSON'S EARLY DAYS 385

express in verse. Thus the foundation was laid at school, not
only of his double ambition to shine as a scholar and a poet, or
rather as a scholar-poet, but also of his heavy and rhetorically
emphatic verse.

In spite of his worship of learning, his dislike to all handi
craft, and his unfitness for practical work, he was forced by
poverty to break off his studies in order to enter the employment
of his bricklayer stepfather — a fact which, in his subsequent
literary feuds, always procured him the nickname of " the brick
layer." He could not long endure this occupation, went as a
soldier to the Netherlands, killed one of the enemy in single
combat, under the eyes of both camps, returned to London and
married — almost as early as Shakespeare — at the age of only
nineteen. Twenty-six years later, in his conversations with
Drummond, he called his wife " a shrew, yet honest." He
seems to have been an affectionate father, but had the misfortune
to survive his children.

He was strong and massive in body, racy and coarse, full of
self-esteem and combative instincts, saturated with the conviction
of the scholar's high rank and the poet's exalted vocation, full of
contempt for ignorance, frivolity, and lowness, classic in his tastes,
with a bent towards careful structure and leisurely development
of thought in all that he wrote, and yet a true poet in so far as
he was not only irregular in his life and quite incapable of saving
any of the money he now and then earned, but was, moreover,
subject to hallucinations : once saw Carthaginians and Romans
fighting on his great toe, and, on another occasion, had a vision
of his son with a bloody cross on his brow, which was supposed to
forbode his death.

Like Shakespeare, he sought to make his bread by entering
the theatre and appearing as an actor. To him, as to Shake
speare, old pieces of the repertory were entrusted to be rewritten,
expanded, and furbished up. Thus as late as 1601-2 he made a
number of very able additions, in the style of the old play, to that
Spanish Tragedy of Kyd's, which must in many ways have been
in Shakespeare's mind during the composition of Hamlet.

He did this work on the commission of Henslow, for whose

company, which competed with Shakespeare's, he worked regularly

from 1597 onwards. He collaborated with Dekker in a tragedy,

and had a hand in other plays ; in short, he made himself useful

VOL. I. 2 B

386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

to the theatre as best he could, but did not, like Shakespeare,
acquire a share in the enterprise, and thus never became a man of
substance. He was to the end of his life forced to rely for his
income upon the liberality of royal and noble patrons.

The end of 1598 is doubly significant in Ben Jonson's life.
In September he killed in a duel another of Henslow's actors, a
certain Gabriel Spencer (who seems to have challenged him), and
was therefore branded on the thumb with the letter T (Tyburn).
A couple of months later, this occurrence having evidently led
to a break in his connection with Henslow's company, his first
original play, Every Man in his Humour, was acted by the Lord
Chamberlain's men. According to a tradition preserved by Rowe,
and apparently trustworthy, the play had already been refused,
when Shakespeare happened to see it and procured its acceptance.
It met with the success it deserved, and henceforward the author's
name was famous.

Even in the first edition of this play he makes Young
Knowell speak with warm enthusiasm of poetry, of the dignity
of the sacred art of invention, and express that hatred for
every profanation of the Muses which appears so frequently
in later works, finding, perhaps, its most vehement utterance
in The Poetaster, where the young Ovid eulogises his art in
opposition to the scorn of his father and others. From the
first, too, he made no concealment of his strong sense of being
at once a high-priest of art, and, in virtue of his learning, an
Aristarchus of taste. He not only scorned all attempts to tickle
the public ear, but, with the firm and superior attitude of a
teacher, he again and again imprinted on spectators and readers
what Goethe has expressed in the well-known words : " Ich
schreibe nicht, Euch zu gefallen ; Ihr sollt was lernen." Again
and again he claimed for his own person the sanctity and in
violability of art, and attacked his inferior rivals unsparingly,
with ferocious rather than witty satire. His prologues and
epilogues are devoted to a self-acclamation which was entirely
foreign to Shakespeare's nature. Asper in Every Man out of
his Humour (1599), Crites in Cynthia s Revels (1600), and
Horace in The Poetaster (1601), are so many pieces of self-
idolising self-portraiture.

All who, in his judgment, degrade art are made to pay the
penalty in scathing caricatures. In The Poetaster, for example,

JONSON AND "EASTWARD HO!" 387

his taskmaster, Henslow, is presented under the name of Histrio
as a depraved slave-dealer, and his colleagues Marston and
Dekker are held up to ridicule uffder Roman names, as in
trusive and despicable scribblers. Their attacks upon the
admirable poet Horace, whose name and personality the ex
tremely dissimilar Ben Jonson has arrogated to himself, spring
from contemptible motives, and receive a disgraceful punishment.

This whole warfare must not be taken too seriously. The
worthy Ben could be at the same time an indignant moralist
and a genial boon-companion. We presently find him taking
service afresh with the very Henslow whom he has just treated
with such withering contempt; and though his attack of 1601
had been met by a most malicious retort in Marston and
Dekker's Satiromastix, he, three years afterwards, accepts the
dedication of Marston's Malcontent, and in 1605 collaborates with
this lately-lampooned colleague and with Chapman in the comedy
of Eastward Ho! One could not but think of the German
proverb, " Pack schlagt sich, Pack vertragt sich," were it not that
Jonson's action at this juncture reveals him in anything but
a vulgar light. Marston and Chapman having been thrown into
prison for certain gibes at the Scotch in this play, which had
come to the notice of the King, and being reported to be in
danger of having their noses and ears cut off, Ben Jonson, of
his own free will, claimed his share in the responsibility and
joined them in prison. At a supper which, after their libera
tion, he gave to all his friends, his mother clinked glasses with
him, and at the same time showed him a paper, the contents
of which she had intended to mix with his drink in prison if
he had been sentenced to mutilation. She added that she her
self would not have survived him, but would have taken her
share of the poison. She must have been a mother worthy of
such a son.

While Ben lay in durance on account of his duel, he had
been converted to Catholicism by a priest who attended him —
a conversion at which his adversaries did not fail to jeer. He
does not seem, however, to have embraced the Catholic dogma
with any great fervour, for twelve years later he once more
changes his religion and returns to the Protestant Church.
Equally characteristic of Ben and of the Renaissance is his own
statement, preserved for us by Drummond, that at his first com-

388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

munion after his reconciliation with Protestantism, in token of
his sincere return to the doctrine which gave laymen .as well
as priests access to the chalice, he drained at one draught the
whole of the consecrated wine.

Not without humour, moreover — to use Jonson's own favourite
word — is his story of the way in which Raleigh's son, to whom
he acted as governor during a tour in France (while Raleigh
himself was in the Tower), took a malicious pleasure in making
his mentor dead drunk, having him wheeled in a wheelbarrow
through the streets of Paris, and showing him off to the mob
at every street corner. Ben's strong insistence on his spiritual
dignity was not infrequently counterbalanced by an extreme care
lessness of his personal dignity.

With all his weaknesses, however, he was a sturdy, energetic,
and high-minded man, a commanding, independent, and very
comprehensive intelligence; and from 1598, when he makes his
first appearance on Shakespeare's horizon, throughout the rest
of his life, he was, so far as we can see, the man of all his
contemporaries whose name was oftenest mentioned along with
Shakespeare's. In after days, especially outside England, the
name of Ben Jonson has come to sound small enough in com
parison with the name of solitary greatness with which it was
once bracketed ; but at that time, although Jonson was never so
popular as Shakespeare, they were commonly regarded in literary
circles as the dramatic twin-brethren of the age. For us it is
still more interesting to remember that Ben Jonson was one of
the few with whom we know that Shakespeare was on terms of
constant familiarity, and, moreover, that he brought to this inter
course a set of definite artistic principles, widely different from.
Shakespeare's own. Though his society may have been some
what fatiguing, it must nevertheless have been both instructive
and stimulating to Shakespeare, since Ben was greatly his
superior in historical and linguistic knowledge, while as a poet
he pursued a totally different ideal.

Ben Jonson was a great dramatic intelligence. He never,
like the other poets of his time, took this or that novel and
dramatised it as it stood, regardless of its more or less in
coherent structure, its more or less flagrant defiance of topo
graphical, geographical, or historical reality. With architectural
solidity — was he not the step-son of a master-builder ? — he

JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 389

built up his dramatic plan out of his own head, arid, being a man
of great learning, he did his best to avoid all incongruities of
local colour. If he is now and then negligent in this respect
— if the characters in Volpone now and then talk as if they were
in London, not in Venice, and those in The Poetaster as if they
were in England, not in Rome — it is because of his satiric pur
pose, and not at all by reason of the indifference- to *such con
siderations which characterises all other dramatists^of the time,
Shakespeare not the least.

The fundamental contrast between them can be most shortly
expressed in trie statement that Ben Jonson accepted the view
of human nature set forth in the classic comedies and the Latin
tragedies. He does not represent it as many-sided, with inward
developments and inconsistencies, but fixes character in typical
forms, with one dominant trait thrown into high relief. He
portrays, for example, the crafty parasite, or the eccentric who
cannot endure noise, or the braggart captain, or the depraved
anarchist (Catiline), or the stern man of honour (Cato) — and all
these personalities are neither more nor less than the labels imply,
and act up to their description always and in all circumstances.
The pencil with which he draws is hard, but he wields it with
such power that his best outlines subsist through the centuries,
unforgettable, despite their occasional oddity of design, in virtue
of the indignation with which wickedness and meanness are
branded, and the racy merriment with which the caricatures are
sketched, the farces worked out.

Some of Moliere's farces may now and then remind us of
Jonson's, but, as regards the pitiless intensity of the satire, we
shall find no counterpart to his Volpone until we come in our own
times to Gogol's Revisor.

The Graces stood by Shakespeare's cradle, not by Jonson's ;
and yet this heavy-armed warrior has now and then attained to
grace as well — has now and then given a holiday to his sound
systematic intelligence and his solidly-constructed logic, and, like
a true poet of the Renaissance, soared into the rarer atmosphere
of pure fantasy.

He shows himself very much at home in the allegorical
masques which were performed at court festivals; and in the
pastoral play The Sad Shepherd, which seems to have been
written upon his cjeath-bed, he proved that even in the purely

390 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

romantic style he could challenge comparison with the best
writers of his day. Yet it is not in this sphere that he dis
plays his true originality. It is in his keen and faithful observa
tion of the conditions and manners of his time, which Shake
speare left on one side, or depicted only incidentally and indirectly.
The London of Elizabeth lives again in Jonson's plays ; both the
lower and higher circles, but especially the lower : the haunters
of taverns and theatres, the men of the riverside and the markets,
rogues and vagabonds, poets and players, watermen and jugglers,
bear-leaders and hucksters, rich city dames, Puritan fanatics and
country squires, English oddities of every class and kind, each
speaking his own language, dialect, or jargon. Shakespeare
never kept so close to the life of the day.

It is especially Johnson's scholarship that must have made
his society full of instruction for Shakespeare. Ben's acquire
ments were encyclopaedic, and his acquaintance with the authors
of antiquity was singularly complete and accurate. It has often
been remarked that he was not content with an exhaustive know
ledge of the leading writers of Greece and Rome. He knows not
only the great historians, poets, and orators, such as Tacitus and
Sallust, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero, but sophists, gram
marians, and scholiasts, men like Athenaeus, Libanius, Philo-
stratus, Strabo, Photius. He is familiar with fragments of ^Eolic
lyrists and Roman epic poets, of 'Greek tragedies and Roman
inscriptions ; and, what is still more remarkable, he manages to
make use of all his knowledge. Whatever in the ancients he
found beautiful or profound or stimulating, that he wove into
his work. Dryden says of him in his " Essay of Dramatic
Poesy " :-

" The greatest man of the last age (Ben Jonson) was willing to give
place to the ancients in all things : he was not only a professed imita
tor of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track
him everywhere in their snow. If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter,
Seneca, and Juvenal had their own from him, there are few serious
thoughts which are new in him. . . . But he has done his robberies so
openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He
invades authors like a monarch ; and what would be theft in other
poets is only victory in him."

Certain it is that an uncommon learning and an extraordinary
memory supplied him with an immense store of small touches,

LEARNING OF JONSON 391

poetical and rhetorical details, which he could not refrain from
incorporating in his plays.

Yet his mass of learning was not of a merely verbal or rhe
torical nature ; he knew things as well as words. Whatever
subject he treats of, be it alchemy, or witchcraft, or cosmetics in
the time of Tiberius, he handles it with competence and has its
whole literature at his fingers' ends. He thus becomes universal
like Shakespeare, but in a different way. Shakespeare knows,
firstly, all that cannot be learnt from books, and in the second
place, whatever can be gleaned by genius from a casual utterance,
an intelligent hint, a conversation with a man of high acquire
ments. Besides this, he knows the literature which was at that
time within the reach of a quick-witted and studious man without
special scholarship. Ben Jonson, on the other hand, is a scholar
by profession. He has learnt from books all that the books of
his day — for the most part, of course, the not too numerous sur
vivals of the classic literatures — could teach a man who made
scholarship his glory. He not only possesses knowledge, but he
knows whence he has acquired it ; he can cite his authorities by
chapter and paragraph, and he sometimes garnishes his plays
with so many learned references that they bristle with notes like
an academic thesis.

Colossal, coarse-grained, vigorous, and always ready for the
fray, with his gigantic burden of learning, he has been compared
by Taine to one of those war-elephants of antiquity which bore
on their backs a whole fortress, with garrison, armoury, and
munitions, and under the weight of this panoply could yet move
as quickly as a fleet-footed horse.

It must have been intensely interesting for their comrades
at the Mermaid to listen to the discussions between Jonson and
Shakespeare, to follow two such remarkable minds, so differently
organised and equipped, when they debated, in jest or earnest,
this or that historic problem, this or that moot point in aesthetics ;
and no less interesting is it for us, in our days, to compare their
almost contemporaneous dramatic treatment of Roman antiquity.
We might here expect Shakespeare to have the worst of it, since
he, according to Jonson's well-known phrase, had "small Latine
and less Greek ; " while Ben was as much at home in ancient
Rome as in the London of his day, and, with his altogether mascu
line talent, could claim a certain kinship with the Roman spirit.

392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And yet even here Shakespeare stands high above Jonson,
who, with all his learning and industry, lacks his great contem
porary's sense for the fundamental element in human nature, to
which the terms good and bad do not apply, and has, besides,
very few of those unforeseen inspirations of genius which con
stitute Shakespeare's strength, and make up for all the gaps in
his knowledge. Jonson, moreover, could not modulate into the
minor key, and is thus unable to depict the inmost subtleties of
feminine character.

None the less would it be unjust to make Jonson, as the
Germans are apt to do, nothing but a foil to Shakespeare. We
must, in mere equity, bring out the points at which he attains to
real greatness.

Although the scene of The Poetaster is laid in Rome in the
days of Augustus, the play eludes comparison with Shakespeare's
Roman dramas in so far as its costume is partly a mere travesty
under which Ben Jonson defends himself against his contem
poraries Marston and Dekker, who also figure, of course, in a
Roman disguise. Even here, however, he has done his best to
give an accurate picture of antique Roman manners, and has
applied to the task all his learning, with rather too little aid,
perhaps, from his fancy. His comic figures, for instance, the
intrusive Crispinus and the foolish singer Hermogenes, are taken
bodily from Horace's Satires (Book i. Satires 3 and 9) ; but both
these pleasant caricatures are executed with vigour and life.

Ben Jonson has in this play woven together three different
actions, one only of which has a symbolic meaning outside the
frame of the picture. In the first place, he presents Ovid's
struggle for leave to follow his poetic vocation, his suspected
love-affair with Augustus's daughter, Julia, and his banishment
from the court when Augustus discovers the intrigue between
the young poet and his child. In the second place, he introduces
us into the house of the rich bourgeois Albius, who has been ill-
advised enough to marry one of the emancipated great ladies of
the period, Chloe by name, and who, by her help, obtains admis
sion to court society. Chloe's house is a meeting-place for all
the love-poets of the period, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Cornelius
Gallus, and the ladies who favour them ; and Jonson has succeeded
very fairly in suggesting the free tone of conversation prevalent
in those circles, which was doubtless reproduced in many circles

JONSON'S "POETASTER11 393

of London life during the Renaissance. Finally, we have a repre
sentation — Jonson's chief object in writing the play — of the
conspiracy of the bad and envious poets against Horace, which
culminates in a formal impeachment. The Emperor himself, and
the famous poets of his court, form a sort of tribunal before
which the case is tried. Horace is acquitted on every count,
and the accusers are sentenced to a punishment entirely in the
spirit of the Aristophanic comedy — so foreign to Shakespeare —
Crispinus being forced to take a pill of hellebore, which makes
him vomit up all the affected or merely novel words he has used,
which appear to Ben Jonson ridiculous. Some of them — for
example the first two, "retrograde" and "reciprocal" — have
nevertheless survived in modern English. In spite of its allego
rical character, the episode is not deficient in an almost too pungent
realism.

The most Roman of all these scenes are doubtless those in
which the gallantry between the young men and the ladies, and
the snobbery which forces its way into Augustus's court, are
freely represented. Less Roman, by reason of their too palpable
tendency, are the scenes in which Augustus appears in the circle
of his court poets. No serious attempt is made to portray the
Emperor's character, and the speeches placed in the mouths of
the poets are very clearly designed simply for the glorification
of poetry in general, and Ben Jonson in particular.

The sins of which his enemies were always accusing him were
" self-love, arrogancy, impudence, and railing," together with
" filching by translation." As he explains in the defensive dia
logue which he appended to his play, it was his purpose —

" To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest
Of those great master-spirits, did not want
Detractors then, or practisers against them."

He makes foolish persons find injurious allusions to themselves,
and even insults to the Emperor, in entirely innocent poems of
Horace's, and shows how the Emperor orders them to be whipped
as backbiters. Horace's literary relation to the Greeks, be it
noted, was not unlike that of Ben Jonson himself to the Latin
writers.

394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

A special interest attaches for us to the passage in the fifth
act, where, immediately before Virgil's entrance, the different
poets, at the suggestion of the Emperor, express their judgment
of his genius, and where Horace, after warmly protesting against
the common belief that one poet is necessarily envious of another,
joins in the general eulogy of his great rival. There is this re
markable circumstance about the encomiums on Virgil, here
placed in the mouths of Callus, Tibullus, and Horace, that while
some of them are appropriate enough to the real Virgil (else all
verisimilitude would have been sacrificed), others seem unmis
takably to point away from Virgil towards one or other famous
contemporary of Jonson's own. Look for a moment at these
speeches (v. i) : —

" Tibullus. That which he hath writ

Is with such judgment labour'd, and distill'd
Through all the needful uses of our lives,
That could a man remember but his lines,
He should not touch at any serious point,
But he might breathe his spirit out of him.

Augustus. You mean, he might repeat part of his works
As fit for any conference he can use ?

Tibullus. True, royal Caesar.

h'orace. His learning savours not the school-like gloss
That most consists in 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 generalties of arts,
But a direct and analytic sum
Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
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."

Can we conceive that Ben Jonson had not Shakespeare in his
eye as he wrote these speeches, which apply better to him than
to any one else ? It is true that a Shakespeare scholar of such
authority as the late C. M. Ingleby, the compiler of Shakespeare's
Centurie of Pray se, has declared against this theory, together with
Nicholson and Furnivall. But none of them has brought forward

JONSON'S "SEJANUS" 395

any conclusive argument to prevent us from following Ben Jon-
son's admirer, Gifford, and his impartial critic, John Addington
Symonds, in accepting these speeches as allusions to Shakespeare.
It is useless to be for ever citing the passage in The Return from
Parnassus, as to the " purge " Shakespeare has given Ben Jonson,
in proof that there was an open feud between them, when, in fact,
there is no evidence whatever of any hostility on Shakespeare's
part ; and the very stress laid on the assertion that Horace, as a
poet, is innocent of envy towards a famous and popular colleague,
makes it unreasonable to take the eulogies as applying solely to
the real Virgil, whom they fit so imperfectly. Of course it by no
means follows that we are to conceive every word of these eulogies
as unreservedly applied to Shakespeare ; the speeches seem to
have been purposely left somewhat vague, so that they might at
once point to the ancient poet and suggest the modern. But out
of the mists of the characterisation certain definite contours stand
forth ; and the physiognomy which they form, the picture of the
great teacher in all earthly affairs, rich, not in book-learning, but
in the wisdom of life, whose poetry is so vital that it will live
through the ages with an ever-intenser life — this portrait we
know and recognise as that of the genius with the great, calm
eyes under the lofty brow.

Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which dates from 1603, only two years
after TJie Poetaster, is a historical tragedy of the time of Tiberius,
in which the poet, without any reference to contemporary per
sonalities, sets forth to depict the life and customs of the imperial
court. It is as an archaeologist and moralist, however, that he
depicts them, and his method is thus very different from Shake
speare's. He not only displays a close acquaintance with the life
of the period, but penetrates through the outward forms to its
spirit. He is animated, indeed, by a purely moral indignation
against the turbulent and corrupt protagonist of his tragedy, but
his wrath does not prevent him from giving a careful delinea
tion of the figure of Sejanus in relation to its surroundings, by
means of thoughtfully-designed and even imaginative individual
scenes. Jonson does not, like Shakespeare, display from within
the character of this unscrupulous and audacious man, but he
shows the circumstances which have produced it, and its modes
of action.

396 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The difference between Jonson's and Shakespeare's method is
not that Jonson pedantically avoids the anachronisms which swarm
in Julius Ccesar. In both plays, for instance, watches are spoken
of.1 But Ben, on occasion, can paint a scene of Roman life with as
much accuracy as we find in a picture by Alma Tadema or a novel
by Flaubert. For example, when he depicts an act of worship
and sacrifice in the Sacellum or private chapel of Sejanus's house
(v. 4), every detail of the ceremonial is correct. After the Herald
(Praeco) has uttered the formula, " Be all profane far hence," and
horn and flute players have performed their liturgical music, the
priest (Flamen) exhorts all to appear with "pure hands, pure
vestments, and pure minds;" his acolytes intone the complemen
tary responses ; and while the trumpets are again sounded, he
takes honey from the altar with his finger, tastes it, and gives it
to the others to taste; goes through the same process with the
milk in an earthen vessel ; and then sprinkles milk over the altar,
" kindleth his gums," and goes with the censer round the altar,
upon which he ultimately places it, dropping " branches of poppy"
upon the smouldering incense. In justification of these traits,
Jonson gives no fewer than thirteen footnotes, in which passages
are cited from a very wide range of Latin authors. Kalisch has
counted the notes appended to this play, and finds 291 in all.
The ceremonial is here employed to introduce a scene in which
" great Mother Fortune," to whom the libation is made, averts her
face from Sejanus, and thereby portends his fall ; whereupon, in
an access of fury, he overturns her statue and altar.

Another scene, constructed with quite as much learning, and
far more able and remarkable, is that which opens the second Act.
Livia's physician, Eudemus, has been suborned by Sejanus to
procure him a meeting with the princess, and, moreover, to con
coct a potent poison for her husband. In the act of assisting his
mistress to rouge her cheek, and recommending her an effective
"dentrifice" and a " prepared pomatum to smooth the skin," he
answers her casual questions as to who is to present the poisoned
cup to Drusus and induce him to drink it. Here, again, Ben
Jonson's mastery of detail displays itself. Eudemus's remark, for
example, that the " ceruse " on Livia's cheeks has faded in the sun,
is supported by a reference to an epigram of Martial, from which

1 " Observe him as his watch observes his clock."— Sejanus, i. I.

JONSON'S "SEJANUS" 397

it appears that this cosmetic was injured by heat. But here all
these details are merged in the potent general impression pro
duced by the dispassionate and business-like calmness with which
the impending murder is arranged in the intervals of a disquisi
tion upon those devices of the toilet which are to enchain the con
triver of the crime.

Ben Jonson possesses the undaunted insight arid the vigorous
pessimism which render it possible to represent Roman depravity
and wild-beast-like ferocity under the first Emperors without ex
tenuation and without declamation. He cannot, indeed, dispense
with a sort of chorus of honourable Romans, but they express
themselves, as a rule, pithily and without prolixity ; and he has
enough sense of art and of history never to let his ruffians and
courtesans repent.

Now and then he even attains to a Shakespearian level. The
scene in which Sejanus approaches Eudemus first with jesting
talk, and then, with wily insinuations, worms himself into his
acquaintance and makes him his creature, while Eudemus, with
crafty servility, shows that he can take a half-spoken hint, and,
without for a moment committing himself, offers his services as
pander and assassin — this passage is in no way inferior to the
scene in Shakespeare's King John in which the King suggests
to Hubert the murder of Arthur.

The most remarkable scene, however, is that (v. 10) in which
the Senate is assembled in the Temple of Apollo to hear messages
from Tiberius in his retreat at Capri. The first letter confers
upon Sejanus "the tribunitial dignity and power," with expres
sions of esteem, and the Senate loudly acclaims the favourite.
Then the second letter is read. It is expressed in a strangely
contorted style, begins with some general remarks on public
policy, hypocritical in tone, then turns, like the first, to Sejanus,
and, to the astonishment of all, dwells with emphasis upon his
low origin and the rare honours to which he has been preferred.
Already the hearers are alarmed ; but the impression is obliterated
by new sentences of flattery. Then unfavourable opinions and
judgments regarding the favourite are cited and dwelt upon with
a certain complacency; then they are refuted with some vehe
mence ; finally, they are brought forward again, and this time in a
manner unmistakably hostile to Sejanus. Immediately the sena-

398 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

tors who have swarmed around him withdraw from his neighbour
hood, leaving him in the centre of an empty space ; and the reading
continues until Laco enters with the guards who are to arrest the
hitherto all-powerful favourite and lead him away. We can find
no parallel to this reading of the letter and the vacillations it pro
duces among the cringing senators, save in Antony's speech over
the body of Caesar and the consequent revulsion in the attitude
and temper of the Roman mob. Shakespeare's scene is more
vividly projected, and shines with the poet's humour; Jonson's
scene is elaborated with grim energy, and worked out with the
moralist's bitterness. But in the dramatic movement of the
moralist's scene, no less than of the poet's, antique Rome lives
again.

Jonson's Catiline, written some time later, appeared in 1611,
and was dedicated to Pembroke. Although executed on the
same principles, it is on the whole inferior to Sejanus ; but it
is better fitted for comparison with Julius Ccesar in so far as its
action belongs to the same period, and Caesar himself appears in
it. The second act of the tragedy is in its way a masterpiece.
As soon as Jonson enters upon the political action proper, he
transcribes endless speeches from Cicero, and becomes intolerably
tedious; but so long as he keeps to the representation of manners,
and seeks, as in his comedies, to paint a quite unemotional picture
of the period, he shows himself at his best.

This second act takes place at the house of Fulvia, the lady
who, according to Sallust, betrayed to Cicero the conspirators'
secret. The whole picture produces an entirely convincing effect.
She first repels with unfeeling coldness an intrusive friend and
protector, Catiline's fellow-conspirator, Curius ; but when he at
last turns away in anger, telling her that she will repent her
conduct when she finds herself excluded from participation in
an immense booty which will fall to the share of others, she
calls him back, full of curiosity and interest, becomes suddenly
friendly, and even caressing, and wrings from him his secret,
instantly recognising, however, that Cicero will pay for it without
stint, and that this money is considerably safer than the sum
which might fall to her share in a general revolution. Her visit
to Cicero, with his craftily friendly interrogatory, first of her, and
then of her lover Curius, whom he summons and converts into

JONSON'S "CATILINE" 399

one of his spies, deserves the highest praise. These scenes
contain the concentrated essence of Sallust's Catiline and of
Cicero's Orations and Letters. The Cicero of this play rises
high above the Cicero to whom Shakespeare has assigned a
few speeches. Caesar, on the other hand, comes off no better
at Ben Jonson's hands than at Shakespeare's. The poet was
obviously determined to show a certain independence of judgment
in the way in which he has treated Sallust's representation both
of Caesar and of Cicero. Sallust, whom Jonson nevertheless
follows in the main, is hostile to Cicero and defends Caesar.
The worthy Ben, on the other hand, was, as a man of letters,
a sworn admirer of Cicero, while in Caesar he sees only a cold,
crafty personage, who sought to make use of Catiline for his
own ends, and therefore joined forces with him, but repudiated
him when things went wrong, and was so influential that Cicero
dared not attack him when he rooted out the conspiracy. Thus
the great Caius Julius did not touch Jonson's manly heart any
more than Shakespeare's. He appears throughout in an extremely
unsympathetic light, and no speech, no word of his, portends his
coming greatness.

Of this greatness Jonson had probably no deep realisation.
It is surprising enough to note that the scholars and poets of
the Renaissance, in so far as they took sides in the old strife
between Caesar and Pompey, were all on Pompey's side. Even
in the seventeenth century, in France, under a despotism more
absolute than Caesar's, the men who were familiar with antique
history, and who, for the rest, vied with each other in loyalty
and king-worship, were unanimously opposed to Caesar. Strange
as it may seem, it is not until our century, with its hostility to
despotism and its continuous advance in the direction of demo
cracy, that Caesar's genius has been fully appreciated, and the
benefits his life conferred on humanity have been thoroughly
understood.

The personal relation between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare
is not to this day quite clearly ascertained. It was for long
regarded as distinctly hostile, no one doubting that Jonson,
during his great rival's lifetime, cherished an obstinate jealousy
towards him. More recently, Jonson's admirers have argued
with warmth that cruel injustice has been done him in this

400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

respect. So far as we can now judge, it appears that Jonson
honestly recognised and admired Shakespeare's great qualities,
but at the same time felt a displeasure he never could quite
conquer at seeing him so much more popular as a dramatist,
and — as was only natural — regarded his own tendencies in art
as truer and better justified.

In the preface to Sejanus (edition of 1605) Jonson uses an
expression which, as the piece was acted by Shakespeare's
company, and Shakespeare himself appeared in it, was long
interpreted as referring to him. Jonson writes : —

" Lastly, I would inform you that this book, in all numbers, is not
the same with that which was acted on the public stage, wherein a
second pen had good share ; in place of which, I have rather chosen to
put weaker, and, no doubt, less pleasing, of mine own, than to defraud
so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation."

The words " so happy a genius," in particular, together with the
other circumstances, have directed the thoughts of commenta
tors to Shakespeare. Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, however (in the
Academy, Nov. Hth, 1874), has shown it to be far more pro
bable that the person alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very
inferior poet, Samuel Sheppard. The marked politeness of
Jonson's expressions may be due to his having inflicted on his
collaborator a considerable disappointment, almost an insult, by
omitting his portion of the work, and at the same time excluding
his name from the title-page. It seems, at any rate, that Samuel
Sheppard felt wounded by this proceeding, since, more than forty
years later, he claimed for himself the honour of having collaborated
in Sejanus, in a verse which is ostensibly a panegyric on Jonson.1
Symonds, so late as 1888, nevertheless maintains in his Ben Jonson
that the preface most probably refers to Shakespeare ; but he

1 He says of Jonson in The Times Displayed in Six Sestyads : —

" So His, that Divine Plautus equalled,
Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit,
Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read
By after ages, for unto his wit
My selfe gave personal ayd, / dictated
To him when as Sejanus fall he writ,
And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee
That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree."

JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 401

does not refute or even mention Nicholson's carefully-marshalled
argument.

It is not, however, of great importance to decide whether a
compliment in one of Jonson's prefaces is or is not addressed
to Shakespeare, since we have ample evidence in the warm
eulogy and mild criticism in his Discoveries, and in the en
thusiastic poem prefixed to the First Folio, that the crusty
Ben (who, moreover, is said to have been Shakespeare's boon
companion on his last convivial evening) regarded him with the
warmest feelings, at least towards the close of his life and after
his death.

This does not exclude the probability that Jonson's radically
different literary ideals may have led him to make incidental and
sometimes rather tart allusions to what appeared to him weak or
mistaken in Shakespeare's work.

There is no foundation for the theory which has sometimes
been advanced, that the passage in The Poetaster ridiculing
Crispinus's coat of arms is an allusion to Shakespeare. It is
beyond all doubt that the figure of Crispinus was exclusively
intended for Marston ; he himself, at any rate, did not for a
moment doubt it. For the rest, Jonson's ascertained or con
jectured side-glances at Shakespeare are these : —

In the prologue to Every Man in his Humour, which can
scarcely have been spoken when the play was performed by the
Lord Chamberlain's company, not only is realistic art proclaimed
the true art, in opposition to the romanticism which prevailed on
the Shakespearian stage, but a quite definite attack is made on
those who

" With three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars."

And this is followed by a really biting criticism of the works of
other playwrights, concluding —

"There's hope left then,
You, that have so graced monsters, may like men."

The possible jibe at Twelfth Night in Every Man out of his
Humour (iii. i) has already been mentioned (ante} p. 272). That,
too, must be of late insertion, and is at worst extremely innocent.
VOL. I. 2 C

402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Much has been made of the passage in Volpone (iii. 2) where
Lady Politick Would-be, speaking of Guarini's Pastor Fido,
says : —

" All our English writers
Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly :
Almost as much as from Montagnie."

This has been interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism, some
pointing it at the well-known passage in The Tempest, where
Shakespeare has annexed some lines, from Montaigne's Essays ;
others at Hamlet, which has throughout many points of contact
with the French philosopher. But The Tempest was undoubtedly
written long after Volpone, and the relation of Hamlet to Montaigne
is such as to render it scarcely conceivable that an accusation of
plagiarism could be founded upon it. Here again Jonson seems
to have been groundlessly suspected of malice.

Jacob Feis {Shakespeare and Montaigne, p. 183) would fain
see in Nano's song about the hermaphrodite Androgyne a shame
less attack upon Shakespeare, simply because the names Pythagoras
and Euphorbus appear in it ( Volpone, i. i), as they do in the well-
known passage in Meres ; but this accusation is entirely fantastic.
Equally unreasonable is it of Feis to discover an obscene besmirch
ing of the figure of Ophelia in that passage of Jonson, Marston, and
Chapman's Eastward Ho ! (iii. 2) where there occur some passing
allusions to Hamlet.

There remain, then, in reality, only one or two passages in
Bartholomew Fair, dating from 1614. We have already seen
(ante, p. 337) that there may possibly be a satirical allusion to
the Sonnets in the introduced puppet-play, The Touchstone of
True Love. The Induction contains an unquestionable jibe,
both at The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, whose airy poetry
the downright Ben was unable to appreciate.1 Neither Caliban
nor the element of enchantment in The Tempest appealed to
him, and in The Winters Tale, as in Pericles, it offended his
classic taste and his Aristotelian theories that the action should

1 "If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a
nest of antiques ? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget
tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries."

JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 403

extend over a score of years, so that we see infants in one act
reappear in the next as grown-up young women.

But these trifling intolerances and impertinences must not
tempt us to forget that it was Ben Jonson who wrote of Shake
speare those great and passionate lines : —

" Triumph, my Britain ! thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time ! "

END OF VOL. I.

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